What JRPGs will you be playing in August? What games did you finish in July?

I finished Fire Emblem Engage in July, again. I played flier only so it feels like cheating all stage hazards and i was supprised how easy it is to dodge archers, they not that many. I rushed it a bit, so haven't read much of the story again, i only do some kind of (easy) challange runs or ironmans in engage.

And i played the Trails into Reverie, i'm on act 3 so far and it's good. Haven't expect something else. Like the story, the battle system good, but not much different than the game before. And there are way to much characters i like. But ehh the game feels a bit like playing a gacha game. With the Reverie Garden and everything you able to do there. They could have made a gacha game like this not like the gacha slop they have done, but good they haven't.

The good news is that it feels less gacha as you go, since there's a limited pool of stuff to draw from for the goodies you want (like the Daydreams and the characters).

You'll likely appreciate Sky 3rd more as you go on. If you happened to miss Star Doors 8, 14, or 15, I strongly recommend pulling them up on Youtube or something. They are all quite important.

Does Fabula Ultima count? 😅

Fabula Ultima
What is a Table Top JRPG? That shouldn't work together. And JRPGs are inspired from table top games, or it's predecessor. No clue if it counts to be honest, but tell us about it
- It is a ttrpg that wonderfully captures the "vibes" of a JRPG, imho. Everything from its art to its narrative building is strongly influenced by jrpgs, which it doesn't hide, and it shines really well. Even its name is obviously a nod to Final Fantasy.

For July, I only played Star Ocean Second Story R.

To summarize the game, it does start off strong but gets worse over time.

The story is fun. You start off with a central mystery to solve and some fun things happen along the way. Then, the second half begins and it's all fetch quests from there with some barely characterized antagonist group.

You have sheer endless options to mess with. Based on how you skill your characters, there are many different crafting methods, passive boosts or new overworld abilities. However, while it is fun to break the game, in the later parts, I had it broken to the point of being boring. A very common thing, as I'v learned.

There's a free flowing character recruitment system, where you can get up to 6 additional characters out of a larger pool in addition to your starting 2. Depending on which of these 2 main characters you chose as the main one, there are different options and dialogues. However, that also means you have to plan out recruitments if you want to get the most out of your playthroughs or even to get late game recruits, since you'll likely be full by then. I kinda messed up and would have to do 2 more playthroughs to get most of the interesting stuff - which I'm not up to.

Overall, I can still recommend the game, just for how strong it did start off.

For the next month(s), I'm playing through the Baten Kaitos Collection.

Too busy to finish stuff lately, but I did do some of Fire Emblem Engage (I think I'm almost halfway?). I also started Breath of Fire IV, I've got a bunch of big positives and big negatives with this one. For example, the spritework is gorgeous, along with dynamic character portraits in the text boxes. Feels like it'd be another one of my pet "lost sprite generation" games for fifth-gen games, except they sprinkled in a bunch of 3D models in for some reason. That hasn't aged well. The control scheme is also bizarre. Everything's at a diagonal for some reason, and Triangle to cancel? Oookay.

That said, for not-JRPGs, I also finished Kaizen: A Factory Story, which I really enjoyed even though I'm not normally into puzzle games. If you're looking for something different that's set in real-world Japan, it might be worth a look.

August doesn't have any big releases for me so I'll likely be continuing on with FE and BoF4. Not the case in September though, stuff's coming!