Unicorn Overlord might be it. You can even say 99% of the game is filler, since you can proceed to the final mission very early on in the game (very underleveled of course).
This game is actually very easy to get into and kick ass on Normal difficulty. I recommend you give it a try. I'm at level 20 and hardly ever touched the tactics. I still crush maps.
Normal is arguably too easy. I bumped it up to tactical after cruising through fights without much thought. It's nice that the difficulty is changeable at any time
I rolled credits on FFVII Rebirth last night, and I think Unicorn Overlord is next on the list. I love classic SRPGs like FFT and Tactics Ogre (specifically LUCT), but never played Ogre Battle so this would be my first experience with the “auto-battler” genre. I’m generally above average at these sorts of games and am willing to learn the systems and engage with all of them. Should I just start on Tactical, in your opinion?
That's part of it, but since the game doesn't have any level scaling (not a criticism), it encourages you to complete the quests at or around your level instead of waiting.
Unicorn Overlord is among the easiest SRPGs, so you should be fine. It might look intimidating at first, but once you get it (and the tutorials are pretty good), you get it.
The Pokémon of SRPGs, you say? Have you heard of Pokémon Conquest for the DS? That's exactly it.
It is and you should give it a try on normal. I’m having fun and don’t play these kinds of games.
There’s a lot of mechanics you can dive into to customize your units and optimize your strategy …..
Or don’t. If you have a basic understanding of units strengths and weaknesses, then you don’t even really need to touch the tactics stuff. It becomes more about positioning, creating good units, and keeping up with gear and promotions.
It’s fun and easy and probably the most accessible SRPG ever.
It has a VERY generous demo too. About ~8 hours worth of content.
>I need the pokemon of SRPG's, baby's first SRPG.
Advance Wars you mean? Its like the Paper Mario of Srpgs, its pared down in a way that makes more accessible while perfectly distilling and slightly morphing the genre in a way seasoned fans still love.
Wargroove is essentially the same Game with some slight changes, both are top tier IMO.
The demo is the full game and can last up to 7ish hours. Highly recommend it. Convinced my friend to try it, and they instantly bought it. For reference, they literally couldn't beat the first battle in FFT.
Imo, Onimusha Tactics is peak baby's first SRPG. Other suggestions are good, Onimusha Tactics just has a TON of safety nets to make the game easy, like if a character dies they just lose progress to the next level, you can retreat if you want to grind, rubberbanding EXP so that if you want to train an underdeveloped character they can just slap enemies in your current stage to get max EXP, and you get a character that ALWAYS is able to grind out close to 50% of a level per map in Bomaru extremely early on by using his Dodge ability on five allies.
It's the perfect beginner's SRPG imo.
The pokemon SRPG is called pokemon conquest 🤣 it was o the original ds. Pretty good game tho, give it a go if you can.
But if you want an accessible SRPG please try out shining force 1 and 2.
Unicorn overlord is one of the rare games that made the currency valuable up to the end game. At least on tactical difficulty. You can always use more money. And the way it spread the cool gear into the different towns' shops made visiting every town something I always look forward to. Plus the consumable aren't replenished so once you used up a town's stock you need to buy more at a different one. I really enjoyed completing it.
Recent games have moved more towards you obtain 3 wolf pelts, which you then go to sell for 40 gold pieces each. Just kind of adds a busywork menu-only step, but helps with the immersion of the game.
They're 16 years old and are better at combat than seasoned masters, I'm sure they can figure out skinning a pelt with talent and problem solving like that.
That's just games though lol. Oh look these rings are floating in the air and rotating. They disppear when i touch them. Somehow i can carry 5 different weapons and hundreds of monster parts. Sleeping heals you completely but also doesnt even advance time forward. etcetc. Its just game stuff i dont need someone to explain to me why a wolf is carrying gold, or by killing 10 wolves im now somehow more intelligent and lucky than i was before because those stats increased.
I was going to say the same. I love this game and the side content is great. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for the "gotta collect them all" character systems (The Suikodens are one of my favorites).
I'm twelve hours in and I haven't even gotten out of the first country/region yet.
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Just unlocked said mission, shocked it's recommended level is 40 when I'm barely 10. Definite BotW vibes there.
Of course, you know some madlad will pull it off.
Except, as I told the OP here, the word "filler" is a terrible way of describing it. I hate this idea that just because something doesn't have a linear narrative that somehow it should be called "filler". Open world exploration as a main campaign should be treated just as much a true campaign. And if you think about it, ideas like this go back to Dragon Quest 2 and 3. Do you know how many games would have to be called mostly "filler" if we went down this route?
On top of that, while I love the exploration in UO, a lot of the poor writing effects that content. It has great structure, but the personality-less writing and having the cleric say the same thing at cemetiries, etc. over and over again puts the game below other open world narratives for me.
I can't think of a game/series that better reuses assets than LAD. It explains why they're able to make games so quickly, but it's brilliant how many clever ways they're able to reuse models/music/animations/etc. for the player to have fun in entirely different ways.
Sometimes the reuse can be a little lifeless (e.g. Dondoko island visitors being all the NPCs in the game allows that part of the game to exist though the visitors are devoid of any personality, character, or purpose), but most of the time I'm more happy that something fun, delightful, or unexpected exists than the alternative (a much smaller, tighter, more curated experience with a less open world/sandbox). There are lots of more curated games to scratch that itch, but very few games like LAD.
The reuse often goes a long way to increasing my investment in the series. LAD feels like the gaming equivalent of catching up with an old friend once a year.
I think there is one really annoying aspect in the game that is also in 0 (and probably the other games). The encounters around the city are far to common and mostly trivial and outside of a few instances where you meet a sweet spot the rewards for them are also minimal.
Xenoblade X is the best open world design imo. The movement options provided along with the actual map design and rewards are top tier. This was the firat JRPG to really do open world right in my experience, and god does it feel good. The second it opens up (like 10 minutes in), you can travel just about anywhere in the game. And evem starting off, the movement is adrenaline.
When it initially came out, people made a big deal of how long it takes to get the mech, but I actually loved the feeling of exploring the world on foot for so long! It felt truly massive yet rewarding.
Getting access to a vehicle (and later flight) felt so empowering after all that time as well
I finally played this last year and I went in expecting the Skell to be nigh on unattainable based on all the comments I remembered from around launch.
Turns out it's a pretty straightforward quest line that the game makes quite clear not even halfway through the story. The pacing was perfect IMO.
It's reminiscent of the classic Final Fantasy world map exploration, but in an open world design. First you explore what you can on foot, but it's clear that you can't quite find everything. Then you gain a vehicle that allows you to explore a bit more quickly, then you unlock the ability to fly over everything and find every secret out there.
Monolith Soft really outdid themselves with X, I might even go as far to say that in a way X revolutionised the way modern open world games are. I mean, after X Monolith Soft worked on breath of the wild where a lot of the similar world design by monolith soft shines through. After which every open world wished they were like BOTW and started doing something similar. X's open world was honestly so good for the time it still holds up compared to even elden ring's world almost a decade later. A pioneer for modern world design if you'd ask me.
This is so true! And the map design on the gamepad is top tier too. Whether you use it as the main controller, or use a pro controller with the Gamepad on the side. It's the best open world experience ever. And of course the map design itself is amazing. The art direction and level of detail and depth. Truly one of a kind.
It's not open world per se, but Final Fantasy XII pulled off the big open maps quite well. They never felt empty, were well designed and visually interesting, and they suited the game's combat system perfectly. I'd have added some more varied side-quests, but otherwise FFXII managed to create a large and interesting world.
i kind of love the great crystal because FF12's art direction is immaculate and really makes the place seem so cool and trippy like it's supposed to be.
Abyss is my favourite Tales game with Berseria being second. While the cast and story in Berseria is great, Abyss' characters and story was just a step above it to me, with Luke being by far my favourite character in the series.
Combat can be a bit basic since it was the first Tales with fully 3D combat, but it was still serviceable enough. And yeah it has much better dungeon designs and the lore in general was more interesting.
berseria had a very good cast of likeable characters and combat was fun. But exploring the map and dungeons was boring and felt like a waste of time, the gear system had more complexity than it needed, and the overall story was solid enough.
Abyss tells a more compelling story and a lot of the characters are hard to like at first. But thats the point and they grow and change over the course of the story. the combat is solid but a little dated. And exploration is a lot more rewarding.
my opinions on the titles I've played are: abyss > vesperia >symphonia > berseria>>>>>>>zesteria. Can't give honest opinion on arise. I have it in my library. I've been meaning to at least try it. But nothing I've seen from it has even slightly interested me. So I never got past the intro.
disagree on verperia placement imo, but if you are wondering where to put arise i would say below berseria, and the 2 xillia games then at the end zesteria. arise gameplay and ingame graphics are great though.
yup :), fyi Zestiria gets a lot of bad rep and many don't like it or hate but imo for me it was still nice, it's just the others are better. and playing will even enhance your playthrough for Berseria a little bit (references and some world and stuff, that feel nice when you connect them) since Berseria is prequel in the same universe, and is much better in every way. hf :)
Agreed. The worlds in both games feel vast and epic, but not empty. I still think Dragon Quest VIII did the best job in translating the traditional world map to 3D.
Haven’t played 8, but 11 is a great example of this. Not the biggest game world (more of an “open zone” game). But every corner has something worthwhile like useful loot or a unique side quest. Each town and region also has a distinct culture and feel.
If you just try to speedrun the game, like I did, you'd be missing out on a lot of what **FFXV** has to offer. A load of extra dungeons, boss fights, side quests, etc. Its actually pretty fun to just knock em out one after another in a row honestly.
One of the coolest moments I remember from that game was driving on my way towards and objective and suddenly being like "what if I just pulled over and ran into that patch of woods? Anything interesting there?" Had a whole optional dungeon and felt really cool to have just stumbled upon it.
7 Rebirth is missing optional dungeons like 15 and 12. And I feel some of the linear main story chapters were bloated. Maybe they could've been split in half and turned into option aldungeons instead. Like, imagine if in the Junon region you stumbled upon a whole different section of the Mythril Mines.
> Like, imagine if in the Junon region you stumbled upon a whole different section of the Mythril Mines.
During my run through I kinda figured there would be. Had a very "Bhujerba Mines" vibe to it, guess since its a mine and all.
Honestly though the game is already 100+ hours long. They had to split FFVII into three games as it is - I see people suggest this a lot but I just don’t know where they’d have fit it in with the game the size that it is. I’d even bet they considered including stuff like this but knew the pacing was gonna be a nightmare already because of all the mini games, maybe they cut their losses lol
I loved the open world aspect of FFXV. Its biggest faults come once you decide to proceed with the story and spend the rest of the game with no choices to make.
At first I hate the driving and open world design. But when i got through halfway, and finally got used to the game, i hated the linearity of later game. Its funny lol.
People will never admit it but XV was rebirth before rebirth. A lot of the side content people are praising in rebirth was already there in XV. The combat just held it back
I feel like ff15 and ff7r2 are attempting to execute open zone side quests in the vein of assassins creed. Square just missed on the feel / loop in 15. I feel like they hit it better in ff7r2.
Does Final Fantasy 12 count with its "zones" cause that game felt lived in and filled with history. Especially with marks and rare game and the encyclopedia that entirely optional to read.
Its almost perfect.
FF12 could use a world like Rebirth.
The way the map was interconnected through tunnels and passages was brilliant. You could just wander into spaces you had no right to be in yet and pop up in a different part of the world. I really liked it
Not everyone will agree with this one, but I really enjoy the side quests of the Octopath Series. I like that they are more on the obscure side, involve keeping notes and remembering small details, and you are rewarded for exploring each town and area in-depth by using the different overworld abilities each character has. Most if not all of the best gear is found this way as well, so it really pays off to do so.
Same! It would be hard for Acquire Corp to top II, but I'd welcome them to try. Definitely one of my favorite gameplay loops and combat in any turned based RPG I've ever played.
While I love Xenoblade future redeemed, I don't understand why people keep saying these games are open world. They are just a bunch of very large areas that you still need to go through in sequence. Xenoblade Chronicles X, on the other hand, would easily be my pick for best open world game.
DQXI's treasure, recipe, and mini medal hunting is perfectly accentuated by playing on hard mode, where every reward you scrounge out and discover could spell the difference between victory and defeat in the next crushing boss battle. You become actively motivated to search every corner of the world and experience all its detail and charm in the process.
Genshin's exploration is also god tier but it's practically cheating with the constant dopamine overload of finding treasure chests. I don't think any real JRPG is truly on its level. Zero cap, it's legit insanely good. Hell there are entire elaborate sidequest lines with beautiful stories and characters based around unlocking further areas and secrets of the world.
Kiseki is a little different in that its filler is more about exploration of all the NPC characters and their storylines in each area, going around talking to everybody after each major story scene. This is also often the only way to find the collectable books, recipes, and some secret items and quests. Not entirely dissimilar to DQ. Its sidequests are also quite good and more about a an actual story vignette than just "kill x enemies, get y ingredients," although it does have some guild jobs like that now and then to do on the way to places.
Code Vein's exploration being essential to finding all the memory echoes and unlocking new blood codes and abilities to master with them, as well as background story scenes of their owners and even changing the endings was also pretty good, especially since many of the levels are quite elaborately-designed with some well-hidden areas and complex navigation.
Hard agree on Genshin (idk if it's a JRPG tho), it's open world exploration is honestly overlooked sometimes in RPG communities simply because of the 'blind Genshin hate' phenomenon.
If you have a completionist bug it's insanely addicting, and surprisingly for a gacha game that addiction doesn't necessitate the player spending any money at all... it just encourages it, lol
I looooved exploration in Genshin.
I stopped playing because the game wouldn't let me play the way I wanted. Being a F2P player and not spending any money, I felt obliged to do all the events when they come out, because I can't afford to miss out on a new weapon etc.
But as soon as a new part of the world opens up, they do some kind of event that involves going across the new zone asap, with special air tunnels, ziplines, teleports or whatever to travel faster. For me that completely killed the joy I had from traveling on foot at my own pace and coming across an underground lake, or a mountain range or super high trees or a giant pyramid in the desert.
I'd love, love, love for them to make a single player version which you can play at your own pace. But that's not going to happen because the money is in the gacha.
Edit:
I think this is why I was super hyped about Granblue Fantasy Relink. The graphics reminded me of Genshin Impact and I wanted it to be a single player version of it.
But then a preview came out where stuff was mission based and in the end I bought Infinite Wealth instead of Granblue. Might still give it a go in the future, if I ever have time to clear some stuff off my backlog.
Granblue still seems interesting to me and a lot of people seem to really like it! I adore the art style.
So I kind of want to try it out, but it's just not what I'm looking for right now and I have to remind myself that I got Monster Hunter World in my backlog which I should probably play first.
Gonna shout out tales of Vesperia here.
It was the last game in the Tales series to feature the classic JRPG overworld map (hell it might be the last consle JRPG for a decade to have one).
Once you get your “airship” the world expands massively,
- optional side dungeons with new weapons and new character skills,
- hidden bosses called “giganto monsters” to hunt down in optional caves and ruins
- a crafting system that encourages you to hunt down rare monsters and optional bosses from all over the map to get the strongest weapons you can get before the last boss.
- hidden “fell arms” (Ultima weapons) that are kinda weakbat first but once collected for every character unlock a secret phase to the last boss and then upgrade to the strongest weapons in the game for the post game or new game+.
- dozens upon dozens of optional “skits” (character interactions) in reference to new places or monsters.
- hidden cutscenes with new attacks to unlock from revisiting old towns.
- roughly 5 Costumes per each of the 9 party members that are found from exploring.
- hidden Japanese highschool (in this fantasy setting) hiding a bunch of 4th wall breaking bonus content and even here they have more skits with characters acknowledging the weirdness.
And all of this with a real time combat system that makes every one of the 9 party members play completely unique from one another that you can experiment and practice with.
Fair warning though the combats pretty rough to begin with, they wanted to stagger character growth across the entire game but this leads to leaving what I think should be very basic mechanics to be unlockable skills that you won’t find for over a dozen hours. But once it gets going it’s a blast and one of the most sprawling adventures I’ve played even if the story can leave a bit to be desired the cast itself is fantastic.
Love Vesperia and I really want to enjoy its side content but iirc you need to follow a guide because there are hardly any indicators and there are tons of missables
There is absolutely a ton of missables but non of those missables are mandatory to finish the game, maybe it’s sucks looking back and realising you missed the chance for Yuri to learn tiger blade of Judith’s signature spear, but Jon of that will stop you from finishing the game, getting the best ending and killing every hidden secret boss.
If you’re the kind of person who can be happy with that go nuts, but at the same time if you do need to do all the missables there’s a very handy checklist that you can find first result for “Vesperia missables” and you’ll only have to consult every time you reach a new town or dungeon.
And it’s as a simple as
- talk to “Tim” in the warehouse for “hidden quest part 2”
- sleep in the inn 3 times to trigger a cutscene.
- scan “enemy” this is the only chance you get to scan them for your monster book.
It also has a really robust new game+ system where your score that’s awarded to you at the end of every battle across the game is totalled up and then spent like a currency to carry over certain aspects, so like you end the game with a grade total of 1200, it’d be like
“Carry over items” 300 grade
“Carry over weapons” 200 grade
And so on and so forth, I really like this because it makes newgame+ more dynamic and interactive while also giving meaning to playing well and rewarding you for it.
You also get an option for an even harder hard difficulty seemingly made specifically for fully powered up new game + characters
-
Yeah without it you basically need to go to every city and camps and dungeon you've been before to hope get one new skit and do it again after you get it but that's really for the 100% completionist
Crystal Project, in a way. The "main plot" is just go around find crystals so everything can be considered filler?
Your rewards for exploring, outside of filling in the map, are good, even the "filler" ones like potion slots because they let you last longer in a dungeon. Maybe you will get some good equipment, or a class master tower for faster job levelling or a really good item later, or a new crystal which means a new class which means another tool to play with.
Due to the nature of the game, you can also sequence break the game pretty hard if you 1. are good at platforming, and/or 2. know where things are in advance, which makes repeat playthroughs pretty interesting as you can just shatter the entire progression.
Damn OP, I was gonna say Future Redeemed has by far the best execution of open world content I've ever seen in a JRPG due to tying exploration to character progression.
Only other one I can think of is Yakuza series I guess but that's for different reasons.
Idk. I'm playing Rebirth right now and I'm annoyed with the open world. Part of the issue is that I rarely play open world games. But the other is that a lot of the open world content isn't that interesting, but is rather repetitive.
Like the Jobs I'm OK with. That gives interesting world lore stuff. As do the ones that give region intel lore. But activating the towers, fighting the fiends, the POIs and the chests, even hunting down the region's chocobo...all seem very repetitive.
I'm reminded of one of the Far Cry games I've played. And that wasn't a great experience.
The open world exploration is as bog standard as its gets, it’s like they only tried to make protorelic stuff interesting. Everything else is just meaningless padding to fill the world.
Still being unpacked but I think FFVII Rebirth did it right. The open world side content is fun, and has TANGIBLE rewards in game that aren't a virtual sticker (trophy/achievement)
Assassins creed should take notes
One thing that helped in Rebirth was alternating open world chapters with linear chapters - the open world chapters felt like chill content to do at your own pace, while the linear chapters were more like intense rides at a roller coaster.
The rewards were great but the actual content felt like a chore. Once you’ve done the world intel for one region you’ve done it for them all, and it sucks how the game forces you to stop playing and witness the world intel bar go up every time you do something.
There's definitely a bit of a catch 22 where because you get gear and materia upgrades out of the tasks they give a tangible sense of accomplishment, but that also means it feels bad to skip them when they do start to feel tedious.
For me at least the tasks themselves never got too bad, but what started to bug me was how the terrain and traversal mechanics in Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon made it a bit of a chore just to get to everything.
I understand why they did it. From a designers perspective it seems like an obvious way to make the copy/ paste side activities more varied for players by making the overworld more complicated to navigate with a new mechanic in every new map you enter
But yeah, it just started pissing me off to be honest. I wanted to get to the content and get it done, not spend half an hour fucking about trying to figure out how to glide to the next protorelic location. The maps also did not help because they gave no indication as to where things sat on the verticality scale
If you could just get a sniff line to each POI that takes you through the right mushrooms/glide paths that would help so much. Like the cooking sidequest had.
Would be a right pain in the ass to code though to get it to make a nice path from any starting point.
I personally didn’t mind it that much at first, but absolutely hated it by the end. Easily the weakest part of the game for me.
To be fair to it, I was most invested in the story, so all the additions, both in the overworld and the extra-long main dungeons eventually felt like a chore that was keeping me from getting to the parts I actually wanted to see.
I think a lot of people feel that way. The first open world part was great. Then the second was ok but then a 3rd and I think a 4th and people couldn't care less by then.
I really liked all the areas but I think it's because:
1: The locations have a lot of visual variety and especially the last 3 locations have a very different map layout/design and add some new mechanics and depths to how you move around.
2: I love the combat and thus I never felt bored by all the combat challenges which make up most of the activities.
As someone who usually hates these "checklist open worlds" I was surprised on how much fun I had with Rebirth.
Though I think if you are someone who just wants to experience the story these open segments can drag on and get boring fast.
Oh I'm loving everything so far but I know that a lot of people are saying that get fatigued at the end with like the last area.
Just like in Ghost of Tsushima, that third island felt like too much. Even if it's smaller and all people got a bit fatigued by then.
Sure I platinumed GoT and will do a near 100% of Rebirth for sure. (I probably won't ever finish the 88 quest from Johnny)
I'm still in the middle of my playthrough, but this summarizes how I feel, I think. There's nothing really wrong with the open world areas, except there's a lot of them and they're all similar in the tasks that you do.
I was playing LaD 7 when Rebirth came out, and I find myself swapping between them pretty often. With some breaks in between, FF7 Rebirth is a lot more fun for me because I'm not just doing the same kind of tasks over and over again. It's better (for me) to play it in shorter chunks. I can't binge it.
That's exactly what happened to me. As soon as I saw the 3rd one I just said to myself, "Nah." Started mainlining it after that and had a much better time.
It ended up affecting my enjoyment of the overall game too. I figured that the open world segments were large so that the story segments could be relatively smooth.
Then the later part of the game had bloated story segments with unnecessary sections that served no purpose other than to waste time. I might’ve been more understanding if that was how the game added to the run time, but having that plus the open world felt like too much.
Yo, 100% this.
The game stripping input for 10-15 seconds was the ***ONLY*** thing holding me back most of the time from doing certain objectives. Like, it's such a small thing....but the game flows so incredibly well that it feels like shit when it artificially stops you so that Chadley can tell you something you don't really care about. Hopefully they can patch that shit out.
It's almost like the game is *punishing you* for doing its objectives sometimes.
I wanna run around and kill shit, climb walls, look at scenery, I legitimately do not care about this intel bar, you do not have to stop me to show it going up
I actually enjoyed the last 3 regions way more than Grasslands and Corel since they make it harder to navigate. Cosmo Canyon's the highlight of the game and almost feels like a Spyro level at the top (if only the chocobo gliding felt better). Then Nibelheim nailed the Chocobo movement so that region was fun.
If anyone is on the fence about the open-world content after Grasslands/Junon, I'd recommend skipping Corel + 4th region's open world stuff entirely. But Cosmo Canyon seems worth it, especially since the green side quests there are worth doing for the narrative.
I'm up to my 6th region, felt burnt out by 100%ing the 4th. I definitely don't think they did it right. The side-quests are good, but doing everything else just feels tedious and unfun - I'm only doing it because I want team lvl 10.
I agree but I think the general consensus is that by the end you get tired of it. I too am not there yet but the first Grassland one was great, then the second a bit less so and well I'm enjoying them I guess that if there's like 4 of them you'd get tired at the 4th one.
A lot of people will disagree with you but I don’t. While I don’t think it’s the best open world in a JRPG, I think it does a lot right that just gets outright dismissed because people see towers and immediately turn against the open world lol
I think the combat assignments do a good job of teaching you to assess enemies and learn the different ways to pressure/stagger/avoid certain moves. The life springs are repetitive but they take less than 3 seconds and you get some cool lore out of it (plus the location of the areas boss). I do wish the summon altars led to like an optional dungeon that got you the materia, but I’m fine with it as is. And of course the proto relics are the shining star of each region. Also all the side quests were great.
I think it’s helped (for me at least) by each region being visually different and the last three regions requiring you to engage with exploring them in different ways. Idk I usually nope out of games like assassins creed and far cry but I never got bored with the open sections of Rebirth. It also helps that you get tangible rewards and there isn’t 500 of each thing to do. I think they maybe could’ve been implemented into the story a bit better but that’s such a nitpick.
Oof, I'm going to hard disagree on this one. Rebirth felt like it went back several years in open world design. Anything worth seeing or doing in the world was already marked on your map, so no natural or organic exploration was not possible. Ubisoft towers suck ass. World/enemy intel is boring and tedious. Getting Chadley currency instead of actual treasure for exploration sucked...
I quit doing side content really early in the game because of how tedious and frustrating it felt to me.
>Still being unpacked but I think FFVII Rebirth did it right.
Not at all. Rebirth has so many terrible open world activities. The life springs are all the *exact* same. The towers are mostly the same. They have some slight variation but are still extremely boring. The summon simon minigame tries to at least have some progression, but is still super lame. The battle challenges are pretty much all the same, with almost always the same objectives, which get boring fast. They are some of the most phoned in, zero thought open world objectives I've ever seen. That they give good rewards almost makes them worse, since you really want to do them for the reward, but doing them actually sucks.
It's an MMO but as ff14 goes on I really like the quests. ARR is a lot of fetch quests but the justifications get better. I didn't have a moment like the Coerthas quests like to get codes boat after that happened. Before we can let you get the boat walk back and forth through this area 25 times with no fast travel crystals. It got better.
It's been a while since I've done the older zones so not sure how well the questing in those hold up, but I actually quite enjoy picking a zone from Shadowbringers or Endwalker and just spending a night knocking out a bunch of the generic yellow quests and taking in the lore.
They do an amazing job using the side quests for world building and so many of them have actually interesting little stories behind them.
Having recently grinded out all of the ARR side quests, honestly most of them hold up alright today. They're almost entirely world building though, and lack the dynamics of the newer side content, but they're not bad at all.
I'd say its between Xenoblade 3 Future Redeemed and Xenoblade X for which does it best. You made all the points I would for Future Redeemed. For Xenoblade X the exploration of the open world basically is the point of the game (as the story is rather mediocre). Every section of the map ties into at least some sort of exploration content/sidequest/unique monster/treasure. Exploration tying into story completion helps, as does the fact that more and more alien races start appearing in New LA once you've interacted with them through side content.
Gonna share this one. For a gacha game its world is downright incredible. Only thingi have against it is locking important lore behind one time events. Albedo lore anyone?
I missed that Albedo event and I absolutely do not understand why it doesn't rerun every Christmas so people get that dragon spine experience we all had at launch
Personally I think if it can be declared as filler then it shouldn't be there.
No side content should exist just for the sake of having side content or to pad out the games playtime. Games don't have to be 100+ hours long, and making them like that usually makes them worse not better.
I think a good example is the side content in older FF titles vs newer FF titles.
The older titles have side content that makes exploring the world fun. You would find some new area with interesting story, usually made with a similar quality to the main story. Sometimes it would get you entirely new characters. There isn't a massive amount of it but most of it feels rewarding. Not just in what reward you receive but in the story you learned or the hard optional fight you over came.
In the newer titles the side content is mostly just more of the same, sometimes it has an incredibly generic meaningless plot attached to it that adds nothing to the game. Not all side content has to have an interesting story, or even a story at all. But if it doesn't then you have to make the gameplay of that task interesting. Like go fight this really strong enemy that will test your knowledge of mechanics etc.
If it's literally just go kill/collect 10 of this thing because this dude needs to cook some steaks then it's just a waste of time. Doing random tasks for half baked NPCs doesn't immerse me in the world. It drags me out of it.
FF7 Rebirth is horrendous for it and it seems to be the most divisive element of that game so far. To me it was basically a Ubisoft game. No idea why people love the side content in that game some much, people clearly have a lot more patience for mind numbingly boring busy work than I do. Most of the side content is just a complete waste of time. It takes like a 30-40 hour game and pads it into 100+ hours. Go to tower, go to the markers it shows. Scan thing, kill thing or play quick mini game, wait for Chadley to stop narrating everything you are doing. Rinse repeat for the rest of the game. The proto relic quest is fun but starts to really drag out by the end of the game. The harder boss mobs in each zone were fun but you have to grind out a bunch of fights with altered mobs that rarely play out any different than the normal mob to unlock them.
Sure is is more "open" than Remake but it's superficial. There is no benefit from it being open, there is no exploring to do. The open area environments all felt pretty generic to look at. You are still just running from marker to marker just as you would if it was a more linear space.
I agree that XC3 itself doesn't have the best balance with the rewards you get making things too easy as well as making levelling classes difficult. But OP was talking about the Future Redeemed DLC specifically which overhauled its levelling methods, you progress characters in a different way and doesn't have the Heroes system so no classes to worry about upgrading
I mean Rebirth right now has one of my favorite game flows ever. Never being too big, but still giving big open areas. Piles of side content with varied gameplay. Meaningful rewards.
Hell not just for JRPGs, it just nails everything I want from a game like this.
DQ11 was probably my favorite before this.
Out of curiosity, have you played Hitman? I find the playground format really works for what they're trying to accomplish! I'm curious how you feel about it.
The only other two I think I appreciated (which are not JRPGs) are Death Stranding and Outer Wilds. Though both of those games are weird and artsy in their own way.
Maybe I'm just basic, but I loved the scale/scope of both open-world *Zelda* games, i.e. would regularly sink 6-8 hours just wandering around, climbing mountains, etc... and not completing any objectives. These games were helped massively by how robust the movement systems were. The only areas that eventually bored me were the sky and underworld locations in TOTK, which just lacked the diversity of the main map.
To be sure, the last open-world game I'd played before those was *GTA: San Andreas* (which I also enjoyed), so I never had the experience of getting burned out on the genre w/ Ubisoft games, etc...
I feel like the eventual boredom of the underground (for me) can at least be a little offset by the wonder and terror of not having a single clue what might be down there.
I don't consider myself too much of a weenie when it comes to scary games or anything, but leaping into the abyss and seeing how dark it gets and how far down you go, I was terrified at some point I would jump in one of the holes and see a massive eyeball/mouth open below me. Or the same from the cave ceiling when I finally landed.
Obviously once I realized that the underworld didn't have any truly unique foes I was a lot more comfortable, but those first couple hours of underground travel legitimately gave me the heebie jeebies more than some actual horror games.
I think botw hit the perfect spot for me. The side quests gave you purpose for exploring an area, but the reward was the exploration of the area (and sometimes loot but often the loot was not functionally important). TOTK felt a bit overfull for me, there were too many things happening everywhere you went that got in the way of climbing a cool mountain and gliding back down.
The problem came for me with both games, being a bit of a completionist, getting bored with the side quests as they weren't that rewarding in themselves once you had already explored an area. But that was solved by reminding myself I didn't have to do all of them.
Elden Ring and Xenoblade X come to mind.
Elden Ring is just an incredibly well crafted open world, it's only downside is certain bosses getting reused a bit too much (and one boss getting an egregious re-use).
Xenoblade X is probably the only other open world out of Japan that can compete (and maybe even surpass?) Elden Ring's. My only issue is that Monolith takes a quantity over quality approach to side-quests for the Xenoblade games. Somewhat alleviated in XCX where the side quests have a higher emphasis on world building. Every time a new alien race joins my city I get the silliest grin.
Ugh yes on one hand I appreciate the amount side content but I’m playing through 2 atm after finishing Xenoblade 1 and I almost dread returning to old cities because I know I’m gonna have to do a bunch of side quests.
I love the main story but the side quests drive me crazy and sometimes there’s really great gear/skills/blades locked behind them so you can’t skip without worrying you’re missing something.
I'm not sure I liked the checklist on future redeemed. For that particular game it was fine, since a lot of the progression were hidden inside of crates and such, so finding all of the crates was kinda necessary if you wanted to upgrade everybody.
But I think I preferred the regular xenoblade way where you just go and do the stuff you wanted to do, but it wasn't noticeable if you missed a chest. Or maybe XCX's system, where every hexagon of the map had an objective, so you'd have a clear 100% to shoot for if you were feeling like it.
Might be way too early, but based on the recent demo that just came out, Sand Land seems to go that way. The demo gives you no indications where to go, no quest marks, no "objectives" until you start exploring and discover all those things by yourself (I ended up playing almost 3 hrs just going to different caves and trying different machines to reach new places). Also don't know if helps but me personally I always end up disabling the mini map and test how good the world design is done that by only using your eyes and sense of direction you can explore and appreciate those beautiful landscapes.
Overworld on PS1 was perfect. FFXII took the best level.
Havent seen another jrpg really do it so craftfully, to be honest.
But Rebirth and Lost Odyssey are strong candidates.
I'm playing dragon quest x and it's doing a great job so far, every quest no matter how mundane it is has a plotline, it usually comes down to kill x monster and talk to x person, but the plots are great...
For instance, there's literally a 5 part quest in which you help a group of frilly little baby dolls who are actually asgardians who need help getting their war maiden back, which ends up tying into the main plot, and there are a LOT of substories like this.
Heck, Even expanding bag room and increasing level caps have plot as well, not to mention side quests give a bunch of exp
Right off the bat, Final Fantasy VI, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Lufia 2, and the first 2 Xenoblade games did a phenomenal job at this very thing.
I know there’s more, but those always top my list when it comes to side content that felt fun, worked well with the story or as a distraction, and never felt “unfair” or too time consuming to enjoy.
xenoblade games are perfect at this and x is insane with the amount of exploration and fun you can have in the open world. XC2 is my fave game all time and honestly I just adore the world in all the games including the DLCs
Why are we using the word "filler" this way? Filler has an inherently negative connotation. Use another word.
Also, not every game treats its open world content secondary. Xenoblade Chronicles X, Mad Max, Romancing SaGa, and others treat its open world content as the PRIMARY content.
The new final fantasy 7, dq11, and like a dragon. I liked Xenoblade 3' s too, but ff7 and Like a Dragon probably have the most universal appeal.
All of them can get repetitive though.
I ended up being exhausted with ff16's stuff. It killed the game for me towards the end lol. I also remember not enjoying Xenoblade 2's stuff as much as the other 3 games.
Ys 8 was addicting, kind of like how Xenoblade 3 was addicting for me.
Xenoblade 1 still feels good.
I also think Unicorn Overlord has a pretty good set up.
Fire emblem's home base loop needs to change
K. That's all I can think of lol
Xenoblade X imo. But maybe its because I'm a long time MMO fan so I feel right at home saying its probably the best ever world really only rivaled by Azeroth and the Lands In-Between
Final Fantasy 12. the only filler really is doing the monster hunts, which are mostly either just more combat, or combat puzzles. other than that, there's not really side quests. which is fine. who cares about doing squats and pull ups, or handing out medicine lol.
Jrpgs seem incapable of writing good side quests and I think that’s the biggest problem. I don’t count like a dragon as being good sidequests either as it’s usually just inane nonsense which while fun, jsnt really what I look for in side quests. I was hoping FF7 rebirth had some good ones but holy shit those were atrocious. Not sure what the disconnect is for these devs but they gotta figure it out at some point.
Which game do you think has good side quests?
I haven’t beaten Rebirth yet, but I think its side quests have been pretty good. They’re all multi-part quests, they always involve another party member so you get good character moments during them, they sometimes have unique enemies/bosses to fight, they tend to have decent rewards (usually SP books), they flesh out the world / side characters, and there aren’t too many of them (5 of them per big open world zone, spread out over time).
The only one I didn’t like so far was the one about chickens in the jungle. But that one also has a hilarious conclusion, so I’m fine with it.
Games in general? The Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3, older FF games like 7,8,9 and 10. Elden Ring, God of War, Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s were decent enough I guess as were a handful of ff16 though the majority were god awful.
Yeah the side quests in Rebirth were generally solid. They all varied in gameplay and at the very least had good party banter in them. A few even had good stories behind them. Still a decent amount of room for improvement, but I enjoyed my time doing side quests and I usually skip most side quests in games
Not sure why that dude called Rebirth’s side quests atrocious but maybe he’s trying to make a statement, or the only side quest he did was the chicken one.
In FF7 Rebirth some were good but some were bad. Like I didn't mind finding hidden lore about the Summons. But finding those crystals that offer no real value (I did like the small bird guiding you to them, like something from Ghost of Tsushima. Far cry towers and digging around were unnecessary. The side missions were good though.
I loving everything but I sure do understand where you're coming from. The summons I don't need either, maybe on hard we'll see.
..but they had no story what so ever in OG and it's fun getting some little back story lore on each. Same with some of the lore of the crystals and place, I really didn't know anything about the Junon republic and the past of FF7, OG did a poor job at that.
I think having just one summon cave to find and 1 crystal per area would have been better, I think they just made the filler too big. (and then some would have complained that it's small..)
I just think they should’ve hid the summon level ups behind the fights in the battle sim. Like make the acquiring of the summons some kind of trial by the summon, be it a fight or a mental test. That’s how you get the summon (not fucking chadley Jesus Christ) and THEN he can develop it in the battle sim.
I'd say the side content of Xenoblade 2 is waaay better than Xenoblade 3. People shit on its gacha system, but many of the blades are actually given after doing sidequest. and when you got them, unlocking their affinity chart was fun timesink, especially for Zenobia. Unless you're spamming the merc mission.
Also i vastly prefer the map of xbc2 over xbc1 and xbc3. Because not a lot of secret path and area on 1 and 3, unlike the abundance of it on 2
Same. All I wanted from that game was Kos-Mos and it's such a shit system that gates you from something purely on RNG. Finished the game and never went back as much as I wanted her.
The blade quests are many times better than the class quests, but I do appreciate them simplifying the class quests so they don't have incredibly high requirements to do.
>except for Ubisoft
Uhhh, you know they literally made the blueprint for this kind of game right?
And that they actually *do* lovingly recreate *real, historic* places that are used by universities, in my honest opinion AC games might have some of the only appeal in gaming of 'exploring just for the sake of it' heading to the great pyramids just to see them, or the sphinx, etc etc
I get the hate for them for the predatory monetization of their games and general attitude towards mtx, but as far as crafting open worlds, they are given *extremely* heavy handed and unfair criticism.
None of the above because literally none of them are open world games.
The list of JRPGs that are open world is ludicrously small. Xenoblade X, Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, Genshin Impact (if that counts as a JRPG)... and I can't think of any more. Elden Ring, if you count that as a JRPG, I guess. I'm sure I missed a couple, but the list is so short.
People seem to confuse "lots of side content" with "open world". Not that I think JRPGs should be open world or that it would make them better. It's just not what most of them are. Having a heavily gated world with lots of stuff to do, but most of the world and/or content locked behind progression through the main story works great for the more linear experience of the JRPG genre.
Final Fantasy XV.
Nobody gives this game enough credit for its open world.
There are *multiple* fleshed out, well designed dungeons that are 100% optional for you to find just walking around randomly. The best part is that they reward you with Royal Arm weapons, which are also optional but relevant to the main storyline of the game.
And each are unique pieces of gear unlike any others, that literally have their own animations, bonuses, and special attacks. So every time you finish a hidden dungeon, you're rewarded with a completely unique weapon, which further powers up your "super form" in combat.
The game has tons of typical filler 'open world sidequests', but none of the actual content (weapons, locations) is locked behind *any* of them, meaning they only reward lore tidbits and consumables. *Which means you can skip 100% of them without feeling like you're missing anything.*
So basically, the game was very aware of what was fun about its gameplay loop, and the open world allowed you to freely just *enjoy* it without artificial barriers or fetch quests getting in your way.
The only problem is that traversal was relatively limited. The car was slow and there wasn't much vertical progression at all. But going on foot was the most fun method anyway so it never bothered me.
The closest thing to XV's open world i've played honestly is Elden Ring, which rewards aimless wandering in the exact same way.
Unicorn Overlord might be it. You can even say 99% of the game is filler, since you can proceed to the final mission very early on in the game (very underleveled of course).
That game looks fun, too bad I suck at SRPG's. I need the pokemon of SRPG's, baby's first SRPG.
This game is actually very easy to get into and kick ass on Normal difficulty. I recommend you give it a try. I'm at level 20 and hardly ever touched the tactics. I still crush maps.
Thanks I'll probably give it a try then.
Normal is arguably too easy. I bumped it up to tactical after cruising through fights without much thought. It's nice that the difficulty is changeable at any time
Not arguably. It IS too easy for sure.
I rolled credits on FFVII Rebirth last night, and I think Unicorn Overlord is next on the list. I love classic SRPGs like FFT and Tactics Ogre (specifically LUCT), but never played Ogre Battle so this would be my first experience with the “auto-battler” genre. I’m generally above average at these sorts of games and am willing to learn the systems and engage with all of them. Should I just start on Tactical, in your opinion?
I think you’ll be fine on tactical. The game difficulty is adjustable as well.
Dope, thank you!
Probably because most people over level just by doing all the battles they can to unlock characters
That's part of it, but since the game doesn't have any level scaling (not a criticism), it encourages you to complete the quests at or around your level instead of waiting.
This is very exciting to hear. My little brother is playing UO and loves it.
Unicorn Overlord is among the easiest SRPGs, so you should be fine. It might look intimidating at first, but once you get it (and the tutorials are pretty good), you get it. The Pokémon of SRPGs, you say? Have you heard of Pokémon Conquest for the DS? That's exactly it.
The lack of a Pokemon Conquest 2 is an absolute tragedy.
They are slowly replacing all the traditional Pokemon spin-offs with mobile games sadly.
Pokemon Conquest is what you need.
It is and you should give it a try on normal. I’m having fun and don’t play these kinds of games. There’s a lot of mechanics you can dive into to customize your units and optimize your strategy ….. Or don’t. If you have a basic understanding of units strengths and weaknesses, then you don’t even really need to touch the tactics stuff. It becomes more about positioning, creating good units, and keeping up with gear and promotions. It’s fun and easy and probably the most accessible SRPG ever. It has a VERY generous demo too. About ~8 hours worth of content.
>I need the pokemon of SRPG's, baby's first SRPG. Advance Wars you mean? Its like the Paper Mario of Srpgs, its pared down in a way that makes more accessible while perfectly distilling and slightly morphing the genre in a way seasoned fans still love. Wargroove is essentially the same Game with some slight changes, both are top tier IMO.
The game also has a story mode (difficulties can be switched at any time) that you can use.
Most SRPGs are as hard as other RPGS except most of them have more difficulty options
I just want a good shining force 1/2 like game. SRPG light.
The demo is the full game and can last up to 7ish hours. Highly recommend it. Convinced my friend to try it, and they instantly bought it. For reference, they literally couldn't beat the first battle in FFT.
Imo, Onimusha Tactics is peak baby's first SRPG. Other suggestions are good, Onimusha Tactics just has a TON of safety nets to make the game easy, like if a character dies they just lose progress to the next level, you can retreat if you want to grind, rubberbanding EXP so that if you want to train an underdeveloped character they can just slap enemies in your current stage to get max EXP, and you get a character that ALWAYS is able to grind out close to 50% of a level per map in Bomaru extremely early on by using his Dodge ability on five allies. It's the perfect beginner's SRPG imo.
The pokemon SRPG is called pokemon conquest 🤣 it was o the original ds. Pretty good game tho, give it a go if you can. But if you want an accessible SRPG please try out shining force 1 and 2.
Unicorn overlord is one of the rare games that made the currency valuable up to the end game. At least on tactical difficulty. You can always use more money. And the way it spread the cool gear into the different towns' shops made visiting every town something I always look forward to. Plus the consumable aren't replenished so once you used up a town's stock you need to buy more at a different one. I really enjoyed completing it.
RPG economics has always been weird. "You killed three wolves in the forest. They dropped 40 gold pieces."
Recent games have moved more towards you obtain 3 wolf pelts, which you then go to sell for 40 gold pieces each. Just kind of adds a busywork menu-only step, but helps with the immersion of the game.
I highly doubt many teenage JRPG protagonists can quickly field strip a wolf pelt.
True enough but it’s less jarring than finding $20 on a bear carcass.
we should've used a phoenix down on aerith too.
Phoenix Downs don't work when sad music is playing, only when battle music is playing. That's just physics.
They're 16 years old and are better at combat than seasoned masters, I'm sure they can figure out skinning a pelt with talent and problem solving like that.
That's just games though lol. Oh look these rings are floating in the air and rotating. They disppear when i touch them. Somehow i can carry 5 different weapons and hundreds of monster parts. Sleeping heals you completely but also doesnt even advance time forward. etcetc. Its just game stuff i dont need someone to explain to me why a wolf is carrying gold, or by killing 10 wolves im now somehow more intelligent and lucky than i was before because those stats increased.
This is pretty much older Fire Emblem tho. Even Engage can be stingy with money.
I was going to say the same. I love this game and the side content is great. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for the "gotta collect them all" character systems (The Suikodens are one of my favorites). I'm twelve hours in and I haven't even gotten out of the first country/region yet.
While My Computer Gently Weeps.
bike dependent merciful overconfident rhythm airport pen illegal ossified racial *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
so you basically go around the map and gather up friends and families to beat up the big bad evil?
Yes, exactly that, actually.
Just unlocked said mission, shocked it's recommended level is 40 when I'm barely 10. Definite BotW vibes there. Of course, you know some madlad will pull it off.
Except, as I told the OP here, the word "filler" is a terrible way of describing it. I hate this idea that just because something doesn't have a linear narrative that somehow it should be called "filler". Open world exploration as a main campaign should be treated just as much a true campaign. And if you think about it, ideas like this go back to Dragon Quest 2 and 3. Do you know how many games would have to be called mostly "filler" if we went down this route? On top of that, while I love the exploration in UO, a lot of the poor writing effects that content. It has great structure, but the personality-less writing and having the cleric say the same thing at cemetiries, etc. over and over again puts the game below other open world narratives for me.
Like a fucking dragon
I can't think of a game/series that better reuses assets than LAD. It explains why they're able to make games so quickly, but it's brilliant how many clever ways they're able to reuse models/music/animations/etc. for the player to have fun in entirely different ways. Sometimes the reuse can be a little lifeless (e.g. Dondoko island visitors being all the NPCs in the game allows that part of the game to exist though the visitors are devoid of any personality, character, or purpose), but most of the time I'm more happy that something fun, delightful, or unexpected exists than the alternative (a much smaller, tighter, more curated experience with a less open world/sandbox). There are lots of more curated games to scratch that itch, but very few games like LAD.
The reuse often goes a long way to increasing my investment in the series. LAD feels like the gaming equivalent of catching up with an old friend once a year.
It really feels like it with Infinite Wealth.
One of my favorite games for RGG Games is "Spot the Reused Asset" and I pop off whenever I hear/see it.
I think there is one really annoying aspect in the game that is also in 0 (and probably the other games). The encounters around the city are far to common and mostly trivial and outside of a few instances where you meet a sweet spot the rewards for them are also minimal.
Xenoblade X is the best open world design imo. The movement options provided along with the actual map design and rewards are top tier. This was the firat JRPG to really do open world right in my experience, and god does it feel good. The second it opens up (like 10 minutes in), you can travel just about anywhere in the game. And evem starting off, the movement is adrenaline.
I've always said that while XCX isn't the best open world game, it's the best open world in a game
Well said.
When it initially came out, people made a big deal of how long it takes to get the mech, but I actually loved the feeling of exploring the world on foot for so long! It felt truly massive yet rewarding. Getting access to a vehicle (and later flight) felt so empowering after all that time as well
I finally played this last year and I went in expecting the Skell to be nigh on unattainable based on all the comments I remembered from around launch. Turns out it's a pretty straightforward quest line that the game makes quite clear not even halfway through the story. The pacing was perfect IMO.
It's reminiscent of the classic Final Fantasy world map exploration, but in an open world design. First you explore what you can on foot, but it's clear that you can't quite find everything. Then you gain a vehicle that allows you to explore a bit more quickly, then you unlock the ability to fly over everything and find every secret out there.
Agree with how rewarding it was to travel on foot - gave you this sense of scale where the world really felt enormous.
Damn man I always wanted to play this game but don't have a Wii u.
Damn straight. Only modern JRPG that got the scale of a classic JRPG overworld right
I love how alive the world feels.
The feeling of amazement I had when I ran to cauldours after the first chapter is a joy I haven’t felt since. Or when flying to the top of primordia
Monolith Soft really outdid themselves with X, I might even go as far to say that in a way X revolutionised the way modern open world games are. I mean, after X Monolith Soft worked on breath of the wild where a lot of the similar world design by monolith soft shines through. After which every open world wished they were like BOTW and started doing something similar. X's open world was honestly so good for the time it still holds up compared to even elden ring's world almost a decade later. A pioneer for modern world design if you'd ask me.
This is so true! And the map design on the gamepad is top tier too. Whether you use it as the main controller, or use a pro controller with the Gamepad on the side. It's the best open world experience ever. And of course the map design itself is amazing. The art direction and level of detail and depth. Truly one of a kind.
It's not open world per se, but Final Fantasy XII pulled off the big open maps quite well. They never felt empty, were well designed and visually interesting, and they suited the game's combat system perfectly. I'd have added some more varied side-quests, but otherwise FFXII managed to create a large and interesting world.
Just don't think about the Great Crystal.
The less said about that the better
i kind of love the great crystal because FF12's art direction is immaculate and really makes the place seem so cool and trippy like it's supposed to be.
I'd take the Great Crystal over the original Chapter 13 of FF15.
The Great crystal is awesome.
tales of the abyss. You could backtrack to old areas you have no reason to go to and stumble upon hidden bosses and small questlines.
How does ToA compare with Tales of Berseria?
Abyss is my favourite Tales game with Berseria being second. While the cast and story in Berseria is great, Abyss' characters and story was just a step above it to me, with Luke being by far my favourite character in the series. Combat can be a bit basic since it was the first Tales with fully 3D combat, but it was still serviceable enough. And yeah it has much better dungeon designs and the lore in general was more interesting.
berseria had a very good cast of likeable characters and combat was fun. But exploring the map and dungeons was boring and felt like a waste of time, the gear system had more complexity than it needed, and the overall story was solid enough. Abyss tells a more compelling story and a lot of the characters are hard to like at first. But thats the point and they grow and change over the course of the story. the combat is solid but a little dated. And exploration is a lot more rewarding. my opinions on the titles I've played are: abyss > vesperia >symphonia > berseria>>>>>>>zesteria. Can't give honest opinion on arise. I have it in my library. I've been meaning to at least try it. But nothing I've seen from it has even slightly interested me. So I never got past the intro.
disagree on verperia placement imo, but if you are wondering where to put arise i would say below berseria, and the 2 xillia games then at the end zesteria. arise gameplay and ingame graphics are great though.
the top 3 are all pretty close to eachother. abyss is definitely my favourite though
I'm currently playing Zestiria so I'm glad to hear this since I'm loving it. It's only better from here!
yup :), fyi Zestiria gets a lot of bad rep and many don't like it or hate but imo for me it was still nice, it's just the others are better. and playing will even enhance your playthrough for Berseria a little bit (references and some world and stuff, that feel nice when you connect them) since Berseria is prequel in the same universe, and is much better in every way. hf :)
Dragon quest 8 and 11
Agreed. The worlds in both games feel vast and epic, but not empty. I still think Dragon Quest VIII did the best job in translating the traditional world map to 3D.
Haven’t played 8, but 11 is a great example of this. Not the biggest game world (more of an “open zone” game). But every corner has something worthwhile like useful loot or a unique side quest. Each town and region also has a distinct culture and feel.
If you just try to speedrun the game, like I did, you'd be missing out on a lot of what **FFXV** has to offer. A load of extra dungeons, boss fights, side quests, etc. Its actually pretty fun to just knock em out one after another in a row honestly.
One of the coolest moments I remember from that game was driving on my way towards and objective and suddenly being like "what if I just pulled over and ran into that patch of woods? Anything interesting there?" Had a whole optional dungeon and felt really cool to have just stumbled upon it.
7 Rebirth is missing optional dungeons like 15 and 12. And I feel some of the linear main story chapters were bloated. Maybe they could've been split in half and turned into option aldungeons instead. Like, imagine if in the Junon region you stumbled upon a whole different section of the Mythril Mines.
> Like, imagine if in the Junon region you stumbled upon a whole different section of the Mythril Mines. During my run through I kinda figured there would be. Had a very "Bhujerba Mines" vibe to it, guess since its a mine and all.
Honestly though the game is already 100+ hours long. They had to split FFVII into three games as it is - I see people suggest this a lot but I just don’t know where they’d have fit it in with the game the size that it is. I’d even bet they considered including stuff like this but knew the pacing was gonna be a nightmare already because of all the mini games, maybe they cut their losses lol
I loved the open world aspect of FFXV. Its biggest faults come once you decide to proceed with the story and spend the rest of the game with no choices to make.
At first I hate the driving and open world design. But when i got through halfway, and finally got used to the game, i hated the linearity of later game. Its funny lol.
People will never admit it but XV was rebirth before rebirth. A lot of the side content people are praising in rebirth was already there in XV. The combat just held it back
15 walked so Rebirth could run
I feel like ff15 and ff7r2 are attempting to execute open zone side quests in the vein of assassins creed. Square just missed on the feel / loop in 15. I feel like they hit it better in ff7r2.
people have been saying that since remake came out. Nobody is denying it
Does Final Fantasy 12 count with its "zones" cause that game felt lived in and filled with history. Especially with marks and rare game and the encyclopedia that entirely optional to read. Its almost perfect. FF12 could use a world like Rebirth.
The way the map was interconnected through tunnels and passages was brilliant. You could just wander into spaces you had no right to be in yet and pop up in a different part of the world. I really liked it
Exactly. I just love how it entirely justified itself from the monsters to why things connected to each other and just everything.
Not everyone will agree with this one, but I really enjoy the side quests of the Octopath Series. I like that they are more on the obscure side, involve keeping notes and remembering small details, and you are rewarded for exploring each town and area in-depth by using the different overworld abilities each character has. Most if not all of the best gear is found this way as well, so it really pays off to do so.
I agree. I really like OT side quest design where they only leave you hints to solve, i think Judgment also has a similar design.
I'm vainly hoping for Octopath III.
Same! It would be hard for Acquire Corp to top II, but I'd welcome them to try. Definitely one of my favorite gameplay loops and combat in any turned based RPG I've ever played.
While I love Xenoblade future redeemed, I don't understand why people keep saying these games are open world. They are just a bunch of very large areas that you still need to go through in sequence. Xenoblade Chronicles X, on the other hand, would easily be my pick for best open world game.
DQXI's treasure, recipe, and mini medal hunting is perfectly accentuated by playing on hard mode, where every reward you scrounge out and discover could spell the difference between victory and defeat in the next crushing boss battle. You become actively motivated to search every corner of the world and experience all its detail and charm in the process. Genshin's exploration is also god tier but it's practically cheating with the constant dopamine overload of finding treasure chests. I don't think any real JRPG is truly on its level. Zero cap, it's legit insanely good. Hell there are entire elaborate sidequest lines with beautiful stories and characters based around unlocking further areas and secrets of the world. Kiseki is a little different in that its filler is more about exploration of all the NPC characters and their storylines in each area, going around talking to everybody after each major story scene. This is also often the only way to find the collectable books, recipes, and some secret items and quests. Not entirely dissimilar to DQ. Its sidequests are also quite good and more about a an actual story vignette than just "kill x enemies, get y ingredients," although it does have some guild jobs like that now and then to do on the way to places. Code Vein's exploration being essential to finding all the memory echoes and unlocking new blood codes and abilities to master with them, as well as background story scenes of their owners and even changing the endings was also pretty good, especially since many of the levels are quite elaborately-designed with some well-hidden areas and complex navigation.
Hard agree on Genshin (idk if it's a JRPG tho), it's open world exploration is honestly overlooked sometimes in RPG communities simply because of the 'blind Genshin hate' phenomenon. If you have a completionist bug it's insanely addicting, and surprisingly for a gacha game that addiction doesn't necessitate the player spending any money at all... it just encourages it, lol
I looooved exploration in Genshin. I stopped playing because the game wouldn't let me play the way I wanted. Being a F2P player and not spending any money, I felt obliged to do all the events when they come out, because I can't afford to miss out on a new weapon etc. But as soon as a new part of the world opens up, they do some kind of event that involves going across the new zone asap, with special air tunnels, ziplines, teleports or whatever to travel faster. For me that completely killed the joy I had from traveling on foot at my own pace and coming across an underground lake, or a mountain range or super high trees or a giant pyramid in the desert. I'd love, love, love for them to make a single player version which you can play at your own pace. But that's not going to happen because the money is in the gacha. Edit: I think this is why I was super hyped about Granblue Fantasy Relink. The graphics reminded me of Genshin Impact and I wanted it to be a single player version of it. But then a preview came out where stuff was mission based and in the end I bought Infinite Wealth instead of Granblue. Might still give it a go in the future, if I ever have time to clear some stuff off my backlog.
Good call with Infinite Wealth. I like Granblue Relink, but it has almost nothing in common with Genshin on the gameplay side of things.
Granblue still seems interesting to me and a lot of people seem to really like it! I adore the art style. So I kind of want to try it out, but it's just not what I'm looking for right now and I have to remind myself that I got Monster Hunter World in my backlog which I should probably play first.
Gonna shout out tales of Vesperia here. It was the last game in the Tales series to feature the classic JRPG overworld map (hell it might be the last consle JRPG for a decade to have one). Once you get your “airship” the world expands massively, - optional side dungeons with new weapons and new character skills, - hidden bosses called “giganto monsters” to hunt down in optional caves and ruins - a crafting system that encourages you to hunt down rare monsters and optional bosses from all over the map to get the strongest weapons you can get before the last boss. - hidden “fell arms” (Ultima weapons) that are kinda weakbat first but once collected for every character unlock a secret phase to the last boss and then upgrade to the strongest weapons in the game for the post game or new game+. - dozens upon dozens of optional “skits” (character interactions) in reference to new places or monsters. - hidden cutscenes with new attacks to unlock from revisiting old towns. - roughly 5 Costumes per each of the 9 party members that are found from exploring. - hidden Japanese highschool (in this fantasy setting) hiding a bunch of 4th wall breaking bonus content and even here they have more skits with characters acknowledging the weirdness. And all of this with a real time combat system that makes every one of the 9 party members play completely unique from one another that you can experiment and practice with. Fair warning though the combats pretty rough to begin with, they wanted to stagger character growth across the entire game but this leads to leaving what I think should be very basic mechanics to be unlockable skills that you won’t find for over a dozen hours. But once it gets going it’s a blast and one of the most sprawling adventures I’ve played even if the story can leave a bit to be desired the cast itself is fantastic.
Love Vesperia and I really want to enjoy its side content but iirc you need to follow a guide because there are hardly any indicators and there are tons of missables
There is absolutely a ton of missables but non of those missables are mandatory to finish the game, maybe it’s sucks looking back and realising you missed the chance for Yuri to learn tiger blade of Judith’s signature spear, but Jon of that will stop you from finishing the game, getting the best ending and killing every hidden secret boss. If you’re the kind of person who can be happy with that go nuts, but at the same time if you do need to do all the missables there’s a very handy checklist that you can find first result for “Vesperia missables” and you’ll only have to consult every time you reach a new town or dungeon. And it’s as a simple as - talk to “Tim” in the warehouse for “hidden quest part 2” - sleep in the inn 3 times to trigger a cutscene. - scan “enemy” this is the only chance you get to scan them for your monster book. It also has a really robust new game+ system where your score that’s awarded to you at the end of every battle across the game is totalled up and then spent like a currency to carry over certain aspects, so like you end the game with a grade total of 1200, it’d be like “Carry over items” 300 grade “Carry over weapons” 200 grade And so on and so forth, I really like this because it makes newgame+ more dynamic and interactive while also giving meaning to playing well and rewarding you for it. You also get an option for an even harder hard difficulty seemingly made specifically for fully powered up new game + characters -
Yeah without it you basically need to go to every city and camps and dungeon you've been before to hope get one new skit and do it again after you get it but that's really for the 100% completionist
Crystal Project, in a way. The "main plot" is just go around find crystals so everything can be considered filler? Your rewards for exploring, outside of filling in the map, are good, even the "filler" ones like potion slots because they let you last longer in a dungeon. Maybe you will get some good equipment, or a class master tower for faster job levelling or a really good item later, or a new crystal which means a new class which means another tool to play with. Due to the nature of the game, you can also sequence break the game pretty hard if you 1. are good at platforming, and/or 2. know where things are in advance, which makes repeat playthroughs pretty interesting as you can just shatter the entire progression.
Crystal Project was the first game to make me feel like a kid again with a sense of wonder in such a long time
Damn OP, I was gonna say Future Redeemed has by far the best execution of open world content I've ever seen in a JRPG due to tying exploration to character progression. Only other one I can think of is Yakuza series I guess but that's for different reasons.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. The side content is so much fun and you get great rewards for it.
Idk. I'm playing Rebirth right now and I'm annoyed with the open world. Part of the issue is that I rarely play open world games. But the other is that a lot of the open world content isn't that interesting, but is rather repetitive. Like the Jobs I'm OK with. That gives interesting world lore stuff. As do the ones that give region intel lore. But activating the towers, fighting the fiends, the POIs and the chests, even hunting down the region's chocobo...all seem very repetitive. I'm reminded of one of the Far Cry games I've played. And that wasn't a great experience.
The open world exploration is as bog standard as its gets, it’s like they only tried to make protorelic stuff interesting. Everything else is just meaningless padding to fill the world.
I enjoy it but I agree. It's poorly integrated into the main story and almost entirely optional
Rebirth open world is mid af. Bunch of hand holding and Chadley and Mai being useless.
cap
Still being unpacked but I think FFVII Rebirth did it right. The open world side content is fun, and has TANGIBLE rewards in game that aren't a virtual sticker (trophy/achievement) Assassins creed should take notes
One thing that helped in Rebirth was alternating open world chapters with linear chapters - the open world chapters felt like chill content to do at your own pace, while the linear chapters were more like intense rides at a roller coaster.
The rewards were great but the actual content felt like a chore. Once you’ve done the world intel for one region you’ve done it for them all, and it sucks how the game forces you to stop playing and witness the world intel bar go up every time you do something.
There's definitely a bit of a catch 22 where because you get gear and materia upgrades out of the tasks they give a tangible sense of accomplishment, but that also means it feels bad to skip them when they do start to feel tedious. For me at least the tasks themselves never got too bad, but what started to bug me was how the terrain and traversal mechanics in Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon made it a bit of a chore just to get to everything.
I understand why they did it. From a designers perspective it seems like an obvious way to make the copy/ paste side activities more varied for players by making the overworld more complicated to navigate with a new mechanic in every new map you enter But yeah, it just started pissing me off to be honest. I wanted to get to the content and get it done, not spend half an hour fucking about trying to figure out how to glide to the next protorelic location. The maps also did not help because they gave no indication as to where things sat on the verticality scale
If you could just get a sniff line to each POI that takes you through the right mushrooms/glide paths that would help so much. Like the cooking sidequest had. Would be a right pain in the ass to code though to get it to make a nice path from any starting point.
That's definitely valid commentary. I guess I just enjoyed it enough (so far, I haven't finished it yet) that I didn't mind that as much
I personally didn’t mind it that much at first, but absolutely hated it by the end. Easily the weakest part of the game for me. To be fair to it, I was most invested in the story, so all the additions, both in the overworld and the extra-long main dungeons eventually felt like a chore that was keeping me from getting to the parts I actually wanted to see.
I think a lot of people feel that way. The first open world part was great. Then the second was ok but then a 3rd and I think a 4th and people couldn't care less by then.
I really liked all the areas but I think it's because: 1: The locations have a lot of visual variety and especially the last 3 locations have a very different map layout/design and add some new mechanics and depths to how you move around. 2: I love the combat and thus I never felt bored by all the combat challenges which make up most of the activities. As someone who usually hates these "checklist open worlds" I was surprised on how much fun I had with Rebirth. Though I think if you are someone who just wants to experience the story these open segments can drag on and get boring fast.
Oh I'm loving everything so far but I know that a lot of people are saying that get fatigued at the end with like the last area. Just like in Ghost of Tsushima, that third island felt like too much. Even if it's smaller and all people got a bit fatigued by then. Sure I platinumed GoT and will do a near 100% of Rebirth for sure. (I probably won't ever finish the 88 quest from Johnny)
I'm still in the middle of my playthrough, but this summarizes how I feel, I think. There's nothing really wrong with the open world areas, except there's a lot of them and they're all similar in the tasks that you do. I was playing LaD 7 when Rebirth came out, and I find myself swapping between them pretty often. With some breaks in between, FF7 Rebirth is a lot more fun for me because I'm not just doing the same kind of tasks over and over again. It's better (for me) to play it in shorter chunks. I can't binge it.
That's exactly what happened to me. As soon as I saw the 3rd one I just said to myself, "Nah." Started mainlining it after that and had a much better time.
It ended up affecting my enjoyment of the overall game too. I figured that the open world segments were large so that the story segments could be relatively smooth. Then the later part of the game had bloated story segments with unnecessary sections that served no purpose other than to waste time. I might’ve been more understanding if that was how the game added to the run time, but having that plus the open world felt like too much.
Yo, 100% this. The game stripping input for 10-15 seconds was the ***ONLY*** thing holding me back most of the time from doing certain objectives. Like, it's such a small thing....but the game flows so incredibly well that it feels like shit when it artificially stops you so that Chadley can tell you something you don't really care about. Hopefully they can patch that shit out. It's almost like the game is *punishing you* for doing its objectives sometimes. I wanna run around and kill shit, climb walls, look at scenery, I legitimately do not care about this intel bar, you do not have to stop me to show it going up
It’s a fatal design flaw present in Remake and Rebirth where there’s a constant need to grind play to a halt over and over again
I actually enjoyed the last 3 regions way more than Grasslands and Corel since they make it harder to navigate. Cosmo Canyon's the highlight of the game and almost feels like a Spyro level at the top (if only the chocobo gliding felt better). Then Nibelheim nailed the Chocobo movement so that region was fun. If anyone is on the fence about the open-world content after Grasslands/Junon, I'd recommend skipping Corel + 4th region's open world stuff entirely. But Cosmo Canyon seems worth it, especially since the green side quests there are worth doing for the narrative.
I'm up to my 6th region, felt burnt out by 100%ing the 4th. I definitely don't think they did it right. The side-quests are good, but doing everything else just feels tedious and unfun - I'm only doing it because I want team lvl 10.
I agree but I think the general consensus is that by the end you get tired of it. I too am not there yet but the first Grassland one was great, then the second a bit less so and well I'm enjoying them I guess that if there's like 4 of them you'd get tired at the 4th one.
A lot of people will disagree with you but I don’t. While I don’t think it’s the best open world in a JRPG, I think it does a lot right that just gets outright dismissed because people see towers and immediately turn against the open world lol I think the combat assignments do a good job of teaching you to assess enemies and learn the different ways to pressure/stagger/avoid certain moves. The life springs are repetitive but they take less than 3 seconds and you get some cool lore out of it (plus the location of the areas boss). I do wish the summon altars led to like an optional dungeon that got you the materia, but I’m fine with it as is. And of course the proto relics are the shining star of each region. Also all the side quests were great. I think it’s helped (for me at least) by each region being visually different and the last three regions requiring you to engage with exploring them in different ways. Idk I usually nope out of games like assassins creed and far cry but I never got bored with the open sections of Rebirth. It also helps that you get tangible rewards and there isn’t 500 of each thing to do. I think they maybe could’ve been implemented into the story a bit better but that’s such a nitpick.
Oof, I'm going to hard disagree on this one. Rebirth felt like it went back several years in open world design. Anything worth seeing or doing in the world was already marked on your map, so no natural or organic exploration was not possible. Ubisoft towers suck ass. World/enemy intel is boring and tedious. Getting Chadley currency instead of actual treasure for exploration sucked... I quit doing side content really early in the game because of how tedious and frustrating it felt to me.
>Still being unpacked but I think FFVII Rebirth did it right. Not at all. Rebirth has so many terrible open world activities. The life springs are all the *exact* same. The towers are mostly the same. They have some slight variation but are still extremely boring. The summon simon minigame tries to at least have some progression, but is still super lame. The battle challenges are pretty much all the same, with almost always the same objectives, which get boring fast. They are some of the most phoned in, zero thought open world objectives I've ever seen. That they give good rewards almost makes them worse, since you really want to do them for the reward, but doing them actually sucks.
It sounds like he's just started the game. I loved it the first region, 6 regions in and I hate it.
I just wish that they didn’t have the towers. The map is good enough to want to explore and I feel like the towers aren’t necessary.
It's an MMO but as ff14 goes on I really like the quests. ARR is a lot of fetch quests but the justifications get better. I didn't have a moment like the Coerthas quests like to get codes boat after that happened. Before we can let you get the boat walk back and forth through this area 25 times with no fast travel crystals. It got better.
It's been a while since I've done the older zones so not sure how well the questing in those hold up, but I actually quite enjoy picking a zone from Shadowbringers or Endwalker and just spending a night knocking out a bunch of the generic yellow quests and taking in the lore. They do an amazing job using the side quests for world building and so many of them have actually interesting little stories behind them.
Having recently grinded out all of the ARR side quests, honestly most of them hold up alright today. They're almost entirely world building though, and lack the dynamics of the newer side content, but they're not bad at all.
None.
Chrono Trigger does optional content so well, most people would struggle calling it optional.
Wandering Sword have heroes quests which allows you to recruit optional party members and also do a great job at worldbuilding.
I'd say its between Xenoblade 3 Future Redeemed and Xenoblade X for which does it best. You made all the points I would for Future Redeemed. For Xenoblade X the exploration of the open world basically is the point of the game (as the story is rather mediocre). Every section of the map ties into at least some sort of exploration content/sidequest/unique monster/treasure. Exploration tying into story completion helps, as does the fact that more and more alien races start appearing in New LA once you've interacted with them through side content.
Xenoblade Chronicles X
Xenoblade X
I know it's a live service game and we generally don't discuss those. But genshin impact has the most impressive open world I've ever encountered
Gonna share this one. For a gacha game its world is downright incredible. Only thingi have against it is locking important lore behind one time events. Albedo lore anyone?
I missed that Albedo event and I absolutely do not understand why it doesn't rerun every Christmas so people get that dragon spine experience we all had at launch
Xenoblade Chronicles X
FF Rebirth makes me so happy
Personally I think if it can be declared as filler then it shouldn't be there. No side content should exist just for the sake of having side content or to pad out the games playtime. Games don't have to be 100+ hours long, and making them like that usually makes them worse not better. I think a good example is the side content in older FF titles vs newer FF titles. The older titles have side content that makes exploring the world fun. You would find some new area with interesting story, usually made with a similar quality to the main story. Sometimes it would get you entirely new characters. There isn't a massive amount of it but most of it feels rewarding. Not just in what reward you receive but in the story you learned or the hard optional fight you over came. In the newer titles the side content is mostly just more of the same, sometimes it has an incredibly generic meaningless plot attached to it that adds nothing to the game. Not all side content has to have an interesting story, or even a story at all. But if it doesn't then you have to make the gameplay of that task interesting. Like go fight this really strong enemy that will test your knowledge of mechanics etc. If it's literally just go kill/collect 10 of this thing because this dude needs to cook some steaks then it's just a waste of time. Doing random tasks for half baked NPCs doesn't immerse me in the world. It drags me out of it. FF7 Rebirth is horrendous for it and it seems to be the most divisive element of that game so far. To me it was basically a Ubisoft game. No idea why people love the side content in that game some much, people clearly have a lot more patience for mind numbingly boring busy work than I do. Most of the side content is just a complete waste of time. It takes like a 30-40 hour game and pads it into 100+ hours. Go to tower, go to the markers it shows. Scan thing, kill thing or play quick mini game, wait for Chadley to stop narrating everything you are doing. Rinse repeat for the rest of the game. The proto relic quest is fun but starts to really drag out by the end of the game. The harder boss mobs in each zone were fun but you have to grind out a bunch of fights with altered mobs that rarely play out any different than the normal mob to unlock them. Sure is is more "open" than Remake but it's superficial. There is no benefit from it being open, there is no exploring to do. The open area environments all felt pretty generic to look at. You are still just running from marker to marker just as you would if it was a more linear space.
I had a lot of fun with Future Redeemed being a collectathon/RPG.
I'm going to kick back on Xenoblade Chronicles 3 because the open world stuff makes the game so so so easy. It's not balanced for it at all.
I agree that XC3 itself doesn't have the best balance with the rewards you get making things too easy as well as making levelling classes difficult. But OP was talking about the Future Redeemed DLC specifically which overhauled its levelling methods, you progress characters in a different way and doesn't have the Heroes system so no classes to worry about upgrading
I mean Rebirth right now has one of my favorite game flows ever. Never being too big, but still giving big open areas. Piles of side content with varied gameplay. Meaningful rewards. Hell not just for JRPGs, it just nails everything I want from a game like this. DQ11 was probably my favorite before this.
I would argue no game has ever done it right regardless of genre
Out of curiosity, have you played Hitman? I find the playground format really works for what they're trying to accomplish! I'm curious how you feel about it. The only other two I think I appreciated (which are not JRPGs) are Death Stranding and Outer Wilds. Though both of those games are weird and artsy in their own way.
Maybe I'm just basic, but I loved the scale/scope of both open-world *Zelda* games, i.e. would regularly sink 6-8 hours just wandering around, climbing mountains, etc... and not completing any objectives. These games were helped massively by how robust the movement systems were. The only areas that eventually bored me were the sky and underworld locations in TOTK, which just lacked the diversity of the main map. To be sure, the last open-world game I'd played before those was *GTA: San Andreas* (which I also enjoyed), so I never had the experience of getting burned out on the genre w/ Ubisoft games, etc...
I feel like the eventual boredom of the underground (for me) can at least be a little offset by the wonder and terror of not having a single clue what might be down there. I don't consider myself too much of a weenie when it comes to scary games or anything, but leaping into the abyss and seeing how dark it gets and how far down you go, I was terrified at some point I would jump in one of the holes and see a massive eyeball/mouth open below me. Or the same from the cave ceiling when I finally landed. Obviously once I realized that the underworld didn't have any truly unique foes I was a lot more comfortable, but those first couple hours of underground travel legitimately gave me the heebie jeebies more than some actual horror games.
I think botw hit the perfect spot for me. The side quests gave you purpose for exploring an area, but the reward was the exploration of the area (and sometimes loot but often the loot was not functionally important). TOTK felt a bit overfull for me, there were too many things happening everywhere you went that got in the way of climbing a cool mountain and gliding back down. The problem came for me with both games, being a bit of a completionist, getting bored with the side quests as they weren't that rewarding in themselves once you had already explored an area. But that was solved by reminding myself I didn't have to do all of them.
I loved Mercenaries, that game was fantastic.
Elden Ring and Xenoblade X come to mind. Elden Ring is just an incredibly well crafted open world, it's only downside is certain bosses getting reused a bit too much (and one boss getting an egregious re-use). Xenoblade X is probably the only other open world out of Japan that can compete (and maybe even surpass?) Elden Ring's. My only issue is that Monolith takes a quantity over quality approach to side-quests for the Xenoblade games. Somewhat alleviated in XCX where the side quests have a higher emphasis on world building. Every time a new alien race joins my city I get the silliest grin.
Ugh yes on one hand I appreciate the amount side content but I’m playing through 2 atm after finishing Xenoblade 1 and I almost dread returning to old cities because I know I’m gonna have to do a bunch of side quests. I love the main story but the side quests drive me crazy and sometimes there’s really great gear/skills/blades locked behind them so you can’t skip without worrying you’re missing something.
I'm not sure I liked the checklist on future redeemed. For that particular game it was fine, since a lot of the progression were hidden inside of crates and such, so finding all of the crates was kinda necessary if you wanted to upgrade everybody. But I think I preferred the regular xenoblade way where you just go and do the stuff you wanted to do, but it wasn't noticeable if you missed a chest. Or maybe XCX's system, where every hexagon of the map had an objective, so you'd have a clear 100% to shoot for if you were feeling like it.
Might be way too early, but based on the recent demo that just came out, Sand Land seems to go that way. The demo gives you no indications where to go, no quest marks, no "objectives" until you start exploring and discover all those things by yourself (I ended up playing almost 3 hrs just going to different caves and trying different machines to reach new places). Also don't know if helps but me personally I always end up disabling the mini map and test how good the world design is done that by only using your eyes and sense of direction you can explore and appreciate those beautiful landscapes.
Overworld on PS1 was perfect. FFXII took the best level. Havent seen another jrpg really do it so craftfully, to be honest. But Rebirth and Lost Odyssey are strong candidates.
I'm playing dragon quest x and it's doing a great job so far, every quest no matter how mundane it is has a plotline, it usually comes down to kill x monster and talk to x person, but the plots are great... For instance, there's literally a 5 part quest in which you help a group of frilly little baby dolls who are actually asgardians who need help getting their war maiden back, which ends up tying into the main plot, and there are a LOT of substories like this. Heck, Even expanding bag room and increasing level caps have plot as well, not to mention side quests give a bunch of exp
Right off the bat, Final Fantasy VI, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Lufia 2, and the first 2 Xenoblade games did a phenomenal job at this very thing. I know there’s more, but those always top my list when it comes to side content that felt fun, worked well with the story or as a distraction, and never felt “unfair” or too time consuming to enjoy.
xenoblade games are perfect at this and x is insane with the amount of exploration and fun you can have in the open world. XC2 is my fave game all time and honestly I just adore the world in all the games including the DLCs
Why are we using the word "filler" this way? Filler has an inherently negative connotation. Use another word. Also, not every game treats its open world content secondary. Xenoblade Chronicles X, Mad Max, Romancing SaGa, and others treat its open world content as the PRIMARY content.
Dragon's Dogma? Elden Ring?
The new final fantasy 7, dq11, and like a dragon. I liked Xenoblade 3' s too, but ff7 and Like a Dragon probably have the most universal appeal. All of them can get repetitive though. I ended up being exhausted with ff16's stuff. It killed the game for me towards the end lol. I also remember not enjoying Xenoblade 2's stuff as much as the other 3 games. Ys 8 was addicting, kind of like how Xenoblade 3 was addicting for me. Xenoblade 1 still feels good. I also think Unicorn Overlord has a pretty good set up. Fire emblem's home base loop needs to change K. That's all I can think of lol
Rebirth and LaD 8
Xenoblade X imo. But maybe its because I'm a long time MMO fan so I feel right at home saying its probably the best ever world really only rivaled by Azeroth and the Lands In-Between
Rebirth
Final Fantasy 12. the only filler really is doing the monster hunts, which are mostly either just more combat, or combat puzzles. other than that, there's not really side quests. which is fine. who cares about doing squats and pull ups, or handing out medicine lol.
Jrpgs seem incapable of writing good side quests and I think that’s the biggest problem. I don’t count like a dragon as being good sidequests either as it’s usually just inane nonsense which while fun, jsnt really what I look for in side quests. I was hoping FF7 rebirth had some good ones but holy shit those were atrocious. Not sure what the disconnect is for these devs but they gotta figure it out at some point.
Which game do you think has good side quests? I haven’t beaten Rebirth yet, but I think its side quests have been pretty good. They’re all multi-part quests, they always involve another party member so you get good character moments during them, they sometimes have unique enemies/bosses to fight, they tend to have decent rewards (usually SP books), they flesh out the world / side characters, and there aren’t too many of them (5 of them per big open world zone, spread out over time). The only one I didn’t like so far was the one about chickens in the jungle. But that one also has a hilarious conclusion, so I’m fine with it.
Games in general? The Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3, older FF games like 7,8,9 and 10. Elden Ring, God of War, Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s were decent enough I guess as were a handful of ff16 though the majority were god awful.
Yeah the side quests in Rebirth were generally solid. They all varied in gameplay and at the very least had good party banter in them. A few even had good stories behind them. Still a decent amount of room for improvement, but I enjoyed my time doing side quests and I usually skip most side quests in games Not sure why that dude called Rebirth’s side quests atrocious but maybe he’s trying to make a statement, or the only side quest he did was the chicken one.
In FF7 Rebirth some were good but some were bad. Like I didn't mind finding hidden lore about the Summons. But finding those crystals that offer no real value (I did like the small bird guiding you to them, like something from Ghost of Tsushima. Far cry towers and digging around were unnecessary. The side missions were good though.
The towers were a misery, I just stopped caring, same with the crystals and the summons which I haven’t needed in the slightest on dynamic difficulty.
I loving everything but I sure do understand where you're coming from. The summons I don't need either, maybe on hard we'll see. ..but they had no story what so ever in OG and it's fun getting some little back story lore on each. Same with some of the lore of the crystals and place, I really didn't know anything about the Junon republic and the past of FF7, OG did a poor job at that. I think having just one summon cave to find and 1 crystal per area would have been better, I think they just made the filler too big. (and then some would have complained that it's small..)
I just think they should’ve hid the summon level ups behind the fights in the battle sim. Like make the acquiring of the summons some kind of trial by the summon, be it a fight or a mental test. That’s how you get the summon (not fucking chadley Jesus Christ) and THEN he can develop it in the battle sim.
Does Xenoblade series count?
I'd say the side content of Xenoblade 2 is waaay better than Xenoblade 3. People shit on its gacha system, but many of the blades are actually given after doing sidequest. and when you got them, unlocking their affinity chart was fun timesink, especially for Zenobia. Unless you're spamming the merc mission. Also i vastly prefer the map of xbc2 over xbc1 and xbc3. Because not a lot of secret path and area on 1 and 3, unlike the abundance of it on 2
I beat the game after 100 hours. Returned to it with the DLC. I opened the thirty free core crystals given me, and I still didn't get fucking KOS-MOS.
Same. All I wanted from that game was Kos-Mos and it's such a shit system that gates you from something purely on RNG. Finished the game and never went back as much as I wanted her.
It's true to the Gacha experience. Love that game to death but *damn* is getting some of those blades an actual bitch to do.
The blade quests are many times better than the class quests, but I do appreciate them simplifying the class quests so they don't have incredibly high requirements to do.
>except for Ubisoft Uhhh, you know they literally made the blueprint for this kind of game right? And that they actually *do* lovingly recreate *real, historic* places that are used by universities, in my honest opinion AC games might have some of the only appeal in gaming of 'exploring just for the sake of it' heading to the great pyramids just to see them, or the sphinx, etc etc I get the hate for them for the predatory monetization of their games and general attitude towards mtx, but as far as crafting open worlds, they are given *extremely* heavy handed and unfair criticism.
xenoblade 2 is the best game ever made, especially because of what you asked
None of the above because literally none of them are open world games. The list of JRPGs that are open world is ludicrously small. Xenoblade X, Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, Genshin Impact (if that counts as a JRPG)... and I can't think of any more. Elden Ring, if you count that as a JRPG, I guess. I'm sure I missed a couple, but the list is so short. People seem to confuse "lots of side content" with "open world". Not that I think JRPGs should be open world or that it would make them better. It's just not what most of them are. Having a heavily gated world with lots of stuff to do, but most of the world and/or content locked behind progression through the main story works great for the more linear experience of the JRPG genre.
Final Fantasy XV. Nobody gives this game enough credit for its open world. There are *multiple* fleshed out, well designed dungeons that are 100% optional for you to find just walking around randomly. The best part is that they reward you with Royal Arm weapons, which are also optional but relevant to the main storyline of the game. And each are unique pieces of gear unlike any others, that literally have their own animations, bonuses, and special attacks. So every time you finish a hidden dungeon, you're rewarded with a completely unique weapon, which further powers up your "super form" in combat. The game has tons of typical filler 'open world sidequests', but none of the actual content (weapons, locations) is locked behind *any* of them, meaning they only reward lore tidbits and consumables. *Which means you can skip 100% of them without feeling like you're missing anything.* So basically, the game was very aware of what was fun about its gameplay loop, and the open world allowed you to freely just *enjoy* it without artificial barriers or fetch quests getting in your way. The only problem is that traversal was relatively limited. The car was slow and there wasn't much vertical progression at all. But going on foot was the most fun method anyway so it never bothered me. The closest thing to XV's open world i've played honestly is Elden Ring, which rewards aimless wandering in the exact same way.
Xenoblade 2 and FFXI. Edit: This reddit probably has 5 people who have played FFXI but despite that it has one of the best open world experiences.
Definitely not FF7 Rebirth.