I'd rather not.

I don't think it's fanmade so much as "Chinese bootleg laws? What are those?"

It's apparently just Breath of Fire with the crap modded out of it, and contains mostly ripped sprites and wouldn't really be legal to sell.

Anywy, translation attempts. I'm not very good at russian BTW.

First actual game screen:

Boy: Sister, brother (No idea what t'ma is in this context. Lingvo.ru says it means darkness) also said that this is my subject/goods (Not sure).

Screen four:

If the one who catches glassy tears in the (volshchebkij isn't a word) forest glassy-- <- Not a complete sentence so I have no idea how that was supposed to end.

Menu:

Battle-

Fight    Abbreviation --
Magic   Abbreviation -- No idea.
Item    Run

Anyway, get someone better at this to help I guess.

Russian, dawg.

Title is Final Fantasy: Russian Version. I could translate more for you if I felt like it.

Looks like some fan game I guess. It uses Breath of Fire's interface for some reason.


---edit---

Oh, hey, I googled it. It's a russian translation of something caled Barver Battle Saga.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1rDREgDjyw

It's not so much that they changed Lutz to Noah. In and of itself that doesn't mean much since it's sort of hard to say whether PS2 Noah is in fact PS1 noah. Or Lutz. It's confusing because they actually fiddled with the story some! Or something.

This is why simple storylines aren't *necessarily a bad thing*

I'm mostly familiar with 7 and 8, but the battle there are quite fast and short. Normal battles shouldn't last longer than three turns unless you've got everyone using single hit weapons and aren't really spreading your attacks out for some reason.

Actually, I think I'll prove this with science.

Okay, rough times:

DQ7 - 65 seconds.
FFVII - 45 seconds.

I wanted to use FFVI, because the ATB thing takes *forever* to charge in FFVI, but I'm at the awful bit where you have to fight Kefka on that mountain in Narshe and I'm thinking of just gamesharking past it because the entire bit is horribly designed and unbalanced.

anyway, some things to consider. In the DQ7 battle, each enemy took 3 or 4 hits to kill as they were a few levels above me and I haven't purchased any new equipment lately. In the FFVII battle, each enemy went down in two hits

DQVII battle had four enemies. FFVII battle had three.

So, yes, DQ's battle took longer, but the enemies took more hits and there were more of them, and I was underlevelled in comparison to them. In FFVII, I'm somewhat overlevelled in comparison to the enemies in the battle, and there were less, and they died quicker. Also, speed-wise, the enemines in DQVII, being of a higher level, all went first, so each enemy got about three attacks in, whereas in the FFVII battle, each enemy maybe got a single attack in.

So, proportionally speaking, DQVII's battle took 20 seconds long up against significantly more challenging enemies. I don't really think that's substantially longer, or any more dragged out.

Did they ever make the dialogue not suck? I mean, not the branching or facial animations of whatever. I mean the writing. Every screenshot I've seen with subtitles, or ever video... dreadful, dreadful writing.

wasn't this how panzer dragon saga worked? Mostly normal RPG with a rail shooter battle engine?

FFXII's battle system isn't really a break. Yes, you have a more robust auto-battle feature for the non-controlled characters. Yes, you can move around during combat. Yes, range plays a (small) role (with bows, apparently, but your NPCs never fire their bows outside of an enemy's attack range, so what the hell). However, it's still balanced around the ATB setup of the past games, still based around the same turn order deciding system and, if you turned gambits off, you'd basically be standing still and issuing orders as turns came up. As in the previous games.

I mean, basically, it looks different. It really isn't, though.



First, that's incredibly vague. Second, "traditional RPG" is very, very much what the SD games *haven't* been, unless you mean some broad, "You go to towns and buy equipment and explore dungeons" type thing, thus leaving 'multiplayer of some sort' as the only defining criteria, which I guess has been in a lot of the games, but I'm still really mystified as to why this is considered a keystone element because it's really never been well implemented.

There is no classic formula.

SD1, 2, and 3 all played vastly differently from eachother. The single unifying theme is "real time," but as I said, even this varies, with SD3's slower combat and greater emphasis on throwing skills/magics at the enemy and less on manual dexterity.

Also, consider that SD3 dropped the weapon based puzzles (or puzzles in general, really), that SD1 didn't really have a "party," SD1 and SD2 didn't have classes, etc, etc, etc.

So, what, I call this another gamer mentality quirk, I guess. That if there's a series without any real formula, gamers WILL latch on to some nonexistant formula and complain when new games don't adhere to it. Usually said formula is a particular gimmick of a single game in the series, and said game is... I don't know, the zeitgeist of... something.

so, like, for a gamer coming into final fantasy with FFVII, the series' formula would be massive character customization. Someone coming in with FFIV? No customization at all, and basing your strategies around what you get. FFI? Probably wondering why they can't make their own characters.

I mean, yes, you can break down, say, Sword of Mana and pretty much analyze why the hell it sucked and was broken on several levels, but adhering to the classic formula? You can't say it didn't. I mean, yes, I said there is no classic formula. But if you could construe some mishmash formula based on various traits from the first three games? Sword pretty much DID stick with those.

Then again, that's probably precisely why it sucked on a... ultimate cause sort of level, but I'm not getting into that.

(Another fun aside -- You can change the decorations, texturing, etc. in a level and usually convince a gamer that it's different from another identical level with the same underlying design, but a different appearance. I'm going to call this the Quake effect, or maybe the Sonic affect since that's more what I'm talking about, and Quake's more like, people think Quake has suck levels because they're ugly [including me, although I'm in the rare camp that actually thinks graphics matter. quite a lot]. I have no idea how this relates back to what I'm talking about).



Well, yeah, as I said, I think the developers are pretty much just there in name. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Ishii considered Legend of Mana his favorite game from the series and he felt that he'd done everything he'd needed to do with said series.

why don't you guys like DQ :(

Neither of these are particularly much like DQ8.

Probably because the gamers keep asking for sequels without thinking about whether a sequel is really necessary, or considering that the original devs probably don't even care about the series anymore?

Or because Square pretty much can't do anything but pander to their fans anymore because that's exactly what their fans want them to do, and said fans will still buy every single thing they release even if it does suck?

(It's also not like SD2 and 3 had really amazing characters or stories or balance or hit detection or...

Well, except that SD2 actually did have a pretty good story that used EVIL EMPIRE as a backdrop to something more, I don't know, sinister, whereas SD3 pretty much just had an evil empire and stopped there.)

Also true. Well, maybe not so much balance, but some classes were just sort of boring. Or unbalanced in an unfun way.

(New reply since I feel like bumping this).

Not terribly far in DQM2 since I somehow forgot I had it. Have been playin DQ7 more though!

So I got to the part with the Deja Tribe where



Oh, what else.



So yeah, though, the separate plot threads are coming together and I'm really digging how it's turning out. I like how none of the individual story arcs have any real immediate closure, and you're sort of just left hanging for a few more hours, and when you DO get closure, it's mostly for your party members, and never for the secondary characters involved because they're dead by that point.

So yes, it's a lot less cute and happy than I first expected but then again, DW4 apparently has a poisonous mine full of dead children so I really shouldn't be expecting "happy" here.

(Maribel is a ****ing bitch. And not in a good way like Jessica).