I loved the original Rune Factory and that’s been the driving force in wanting to get a 3DS.
Great picks, mouselock. In my opinion, the Ace Attorney and Layton games make the DS/3DS worth the investment by themselves. I’m not really a JRPG guy, but I have heard good things about the Dragon Quest and Bravely Default games. I haven’t had any difficulty with my 3DSXL’s shoulder buttons yet, but I’ve only had it a few months and haven’t worked them too hard. I like the feel though, they’re slightly raised from the edge of the device, makes them easy to find with your fingers.
Obviously your mileage will vary depending on tastes. If you have a PS3 and Vita already, my vote is seemingly against the grain as I vote PS4 over 3DS.
True the PS4 is mostly a later rather than the 3DS now argument, but I have all of the above and while every now and then a big title comes along that I care about on 3DS, day to day or week to week it collects dust. The PS4 though gives me a trickle of fun indy entertainment that I tinker with every month. Said content can be enjoyed at bed time via the Vita as well not to mention the triple dip value on PS+. I also feel the game stream viewing on the PS4 is very understated as a new form of living room entertainment. However, I can see the desire to go the other way if there is a built up itch for Nintendo titles.
It’s kinda weird how if you’re an old-school JRPG fan, you’re better off picking up a 3DS than any of the home consoles. There’s also Fire Emblem, Etrian Odyssey, Conception II (any good?), Code of Princess, Harvest Moon, and probably a bunch more I’m forgetting.
Frankly, if it weren’t for Persona 5 (which is a PS3 title), I dunno what there is to look forward to on consoles.
It’s not actually weird at all! For the most part, JRPGs underwent a mass migration to handhelds last generation, as the rising dev costs for HD platforms made it rather difficult to sustain the kind of console JRPG development we saw on PS2; while a handful of JRPGs (mostly from Square Enix and Namco Bandai) still showed up on 360 and/or PS3, the majority of JRPG releases over the past six years or so were exclusive to DS or PSP, and that’s continuing now with 3DS and Vita. Over the past few years, we’ve started to see the low- and mid-budget JRPG devs like Compile Heart, Gust, and Nippon Ichi move back to PS3, and of course there’s Persona 5 coming, but many of these games (Neptune, Atelier, Disgaea) get ports/remakes on Vita, and considering Atlus, I’d be very surprised if we don’t see Persona 5 Unchained or whatever they call it on Vita in a few years.
How are the shoulder buttons on the 3DS/XL? I adored my DS Lites, but the shoulder buttons on both crapped out pretty early, and it seems I read that it was a design flaw. Super, super annoying when critical actions are mapped to them.
They (3DS) feel a lot sturdier than the DS Lite buttons, but I can’t say I’ve put it through rigorous testing. My DS Lite’s hinge broke after a while, but I never had any issues with the shoulder buttons.
What is Rune Hunter 4 like? It looks like parts of it would appeal to me (Harvest Moon-esque mechanics, ARPG elements, neat looking graphics) but then I look on Youtube and I see… lots of anime girl weddings. I mean, going by Youtube the entire game might as well be about marrying anime girls. Kind of a put off.
Just tried Ouendan 1 in my 3DSXL, works fine. This game alone justified my DS purchase and DSXL re-purchase. Truly unique.
A fair assessment, however the Indy stuff on PS4 doesn’t appeal so much to me because it’s always available on Steam first it seems, and I can play it there.
I’m pretty stoked about the 3DS. Part of it is that for a while now my nightly routine has been to come home, get the kid through dinner, and then my wife will sit in her chair and play her casual PC games on her laptop and watch TV, and I either can surf on my MacBook and watch with her, or go downstairs and play the games I want to play, since the MacBook doesn’t play my computer games, and the console is either downstairs on the other TV or out of use because my wife is watching TV. So I’m looking forward to being able to do some real couch-side gaming with the 3DS alongside my wife. And I’m really looking forward to some good quality 3D platformers. (I’ve been a platformer fan since the original SMB days, but they all but dried up last gen. There were a few Crash games early on, then… nothing… so hopefully I find they’re still alive and kicking on the 3DS.)
On the flip side, got an unexpected bonus today so there may be a PS4 in the future anyway. But I probably should get a quote on house repairs before I get too excited about that.
And while you’re answering this question, anyone want to help me de-convolute the plethora of SMT games out there? I do have Persona 4 Golden on the Vita, but I’ve not played it. (Bought it last May for a trip to Ireland, didn’t have any time to play there, and, err… lost my charging cord somehow on the way back and haven’t replaced it.)
Y’know, it occurs to me the problem might be I’m just not much of a gamer any longer. Oh well, I guess we’ll see if the 3DS will help there. If not, it’s only a few years til the little guy is old enough to need his first handheld, and none could be better at that age than a Nintendo one!
Rune Factory is actually a Harvest Moon spinoff, so it includes many of the mechanics of those games, including farming and, yes, marriage. It’s not all about marrying anime girls, though; you can play as a girl and marry anime guys instead!
More seriously: I’ve got over a hundred hours in Rune Factory 4, am still working on the final part of the main storyline, and haven’t gotten married yet. There’s a hell of a lot more to it than marrying anime girls.
If you like this, you should definitely pick up Bowser’s Inside Story (DS). Loved that game, but still need to pick up Dream Team.
Damnit, WarpRattler, I was trying to avoid picking up Rune Factory 4, but now I might have to put it on the list! Not that it wasn’t there already, but I wasn’t completely sure yet.
Rune Factory 4 is pretty good. I ran out of steam on it, because it seemed like I was blowing through almost all of the dungeon part of the game in the first farming year. Apparently, 100%ing that is only like 1/4 of the actual content in the game, not just in a completion-ist craft everything way, but in a SOTN 200% castle kind of way. So, I’ll need to dip back in sometime.
I am in a similar boat, and as a Vita owner, I think it is one of the PS4’s killer features to be able to pipe anything through to a Vita.
Still, some games are 3ds only and very solid experiences. Etrian Odyssey and Bravely Default are outstanding choices. Also, for couch game time with the wife, Monster Hunter is a great coop experience as well (but then you need a second 3ds to make that work).
Does Nintendo (or anyone else) provide any sort of 3DS to 3DSXL embiggen program? My wife bought a 3ds a few years back for our son, but I always regret not having the XL model :(
Firefox just ate my first reply, so now you get the “tl;dr” summary: go read the MegaTen wiki page, then go play Persona 4 G since it’s basically a stand-alone. If you like it (and buy a 3DS), I suggest checking out SMT IV next. Hope you have fun! :)
Nope, unfortunately it’s just wait for a sale or a price drop. I bought the original 3DS, but it was totally outclassed by the 3DSXL, I needed the extra screen real estate and the hardware feels more solid and well-designed, so I threw another $150 at Nintendo last Christmas.
Well now I feel even worse - I knew the screen was bigger, of course, but didn’t realize it had other design improvements as well. Bah!
Let me help tl;dr that wiki page…
With the Vita, you can play Persona 1, Persona 2 part 1 (innocent sin) and part 2 (eternal punishment), persona 3 FES and Portable, persona 4 Golden.
With the DS, you can play SMT Devil Survivor, SMT Devil Survivor 2, SMT Strange Journey.
With the 3DS, you can play SMT Devil Survivor Overclock (remake of 1), SMT IV, SMT Soul Hackers, and all DS games.
With the PS3 and PS2, you can play the mainline SMT 3 Nocturne [dungeon crawl], the Personas (3, 3 FES, 4) [dungeon crawl + relationship sim], the 2 Devil Summoners with Raidou Kuzunoha [adventure, action combat instead of turn based], and the Digital Devil Saga 1+2 (JRPG).
With PSX, you can play Persona 1 and Persona 2 part 2.
The other games are not available in English and/or US.
So I got a nice box with the DS and 6 of my 7 games inside (Elite Beat Agents won’t ship for a while, but that’s a price worth paying since I got it for $5.88.). I haven’t actually had time to get past more than 10 minutes on even the included game (I had to setup, then I had to check out the store and the other stuff in the OS…) I’d forgotten the 3D in 3DS was because of the godawful 3D effect stuff. I must say I’m no more sold on it now than I was when the system first came out. Luckily I can more or less turn it off completely and it seems as if all the games are made in a way that they’re still perfectly playable without it.
I am impressed by the 3DS’s graphics. The system is a lot more capable than I recall thinking it was to start with (I’m guessing this has to do with the fact that the last time I saw it was a demo version with Pilotwings 3D or whatever). So far the Mario/Luigi dream team game looks nice.
I recall there being something annoying about buying games in the E-Shop… does someone care to summarize for me?
Also, is there a generic list of what’s playable from the E-Shop on what systems? I noticed that the E-Shop has Super Metroid, for example, which I’d happily rebuy to play on the 3DS, but it shows it on the Wii-U’s controller pad thingy, so I take this to mean it won’t run on the 3DS? All I see for the 3DS stuff on the E-Shop seem to be NES/Gameboy games… I can’t really believe that it doesn’t have the power to emulate an SNES all this time later, but maybe it doesn’t. And I can’t actually figure out if there are -any- GameBoy advance games on the E-Shop?