Valkyria Chronicles 2 is, to my surprise, really capturing lots of my free time these days. It’s silly, and cheesy, and definitely aimed at a much younger audience than myself. But, I like a game with a horde of well-defined playable NPCs, the sense of a strong setting (the academy), squad-based tactics (not realistic but, meh, it’s a JRPG and they never really have done realistic), and so on.
So for a squad or party-based games, they can be RPGs or JRPGs of any kind, on the PSP what would you recommend? Just toss out any suggestions, explain why you like them, and then I can go do homework on them myself. See what might work for me.
I’m not sure if this falls under squad/party based, but I really enjoyed Ys Seven.
Up to the ~midpoint of the game your party switches around, after that you choose 3 active characters for the battlefield.
The thing is you only control one of them, but you can instantly switch at the press of a button to cycle between all three characters without any delay. The soundtrack is one of the best I’ve heard this year, the story is a bit cliché, but minimal enough that it does not matter, and the combat system is highly paced and refreshing.
The Final Fantasy Tactics remake is pretty good, though I think it’s still missing from the PSN store so you have to track down a physical copy on UMD.
Either of the 2 Disgaea games that are available on PSN would probably do you quite nicely. They have everything your asking for and are horrendous time sinks.
It has no RPG elements at all (characters do not persist from stage to stage) but it’s a fun tactical wargame, if a bit short. Multiplayer online was fun, but don’t ever play on small maps (whoever goes first can kill most of your team on the first turn).
Thanks for the suggestions. For now I’m going with Jeanne D’Arc (looks like a nice fluffy story with sharp graphics and decent tactical gameplay which is good enough for portable RPGing) and D&D Tactics because I never did play D&D after AD&D and 3.5/D20 has influenced other RPG sets I own (Mongoose’s Conan and Green Ronin’s True20). Shortcomings are there, especially in the UI from what I’ve read, but the rules are supposedly by the book and that could be educational.
I’ve already got Disgaea for the PS2 and Persona 3 FES. I’ll mess around with the two games I haven’t tried before and then come back to revisit these. I enjoyed them both for a while but never got through either. The same was true of Valkyria Chronicles. Oddly, for some reason, I enjoy playing its sequel much more on a handheld. It’s a bit like curling up with a book. When I’m in couch gaming mode I think I go more for exciting actiony type stuff.
Pros: it’s got a solid implementation of the 3.0 (or is it 3.5?) rules (although no multiclassing and base classes only IIRC); it’s turn-based; it’s got psionics; classic roll-yer-own-party dungeon crawl.
Cons: almost everything else. The interface is a real clunker (inv mgmt is such a PITA it makes ME1 look streamlined); graphics are f’ugly as well as too dark & murky to see $#!t most of the time; no plot to speak of (maybe that’s a pro?); encounters are fixed and don’t scale with level, IIRC, so it’s pretty easy to outlevel content and make it a dull cakewalk (again, could be a pro depending on tastes).
Basically, I would only hunt it down if you’re seriously jonesin’ for some old-school D&D dungeon crawling.
Newegg did have it for $10, but it’s sold out now. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it comes back in stock, though? Not like you’ve got anything to lose by adding yourself to the auto-notify queue.
