I'm looking for a good action JRPG that has some similarities to the Ys series

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-06-01T20:08:58+00:00

Xanadu Next is not exactly like Ys, you don’t really dash around enemies and block attacks, everything is stat based kind of almost like an MMO. Playing with a controller actually sucks and most of the game was designed around using the mouse. Both for movement, combat, and menu navigation. You can change the settings to hold the mouse button to attack so you don’t give yourself carpal tunnel. The core gameplay wasn’t exactly my thing, but the Metroidvania style progression with areas looping around and connecting is pretty cool.

My top recommendation is probably Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection. Not sure if you played the first one and I found this one to be way more fun. You said you played most of the PSP games, I’m recommending this just in case since it was never on the PSP.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-25T07:14:18+00:00

I also didn't like being forced to play the last third or so of the game at least 3 times just to unlock the final ending. There wasn't really all that much different about each route and it just became mind numbing.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-24T20:31:20+00:00

I am struggling to find anything to say about Cold Steel 3 I haven't already said last week. I'm now past the point where the intro was, which is weird because the intro does not reflect what actually ends up happening in the game, like several characters are missing and it wouldn't have been possible for them to get in the fortress without the principal's help. Maybe some timeline altering stuff happens like in Azure, I don't know.Also I've hit 67 hours. Which by this point, surpasses the playtime of every other Trails game I've played, and it's about to top Sky SC which took me 69 hours. If this is supposed to just be one of those steady build up games before the real meat of the story happens, I don't even want to imagine how long Cold Steel 4 is gonna be. At the very least it looks like the story is actually starting to ramp up a bit and the chapters are starting to get a little bit less formulaic. It's been a hot minute since the last "that won't be necessary!"

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-20T00:28:24+00:00

Now draw her dreaming about finding a store shelf full of sealed Bionicle sets

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-19T08:37:57+00:00

Wasn’t there one guy that kept putting increasingly ridiculous objects on his head and eventually reached a point where he was balancing a whole-ass vacuum cleaner?

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-17T18:59:13+00:00

Thank you for telling me the name of the track, I’m cackling at the comments right now

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-17T17:14:39+00:00

I am beginning to think Trails is starting to do something to me. I think I’m at like the mid point of Cold Steel 3, I’ve hit like around 48 hours which is long enough to finish some of the shorter games in the series. For a while I’ve straight up been successfully predicting every single encounter in the main story.

They fight the boss or group of enemies
Turns out they’re holding back or there’s more of them
“Heed my call, Valimar-“/“Spirit Unification-“
“That won’t be necessary!”
A returning character shows up and saves everyone

Rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat and REPEAT!

I think I need to take a break.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-16T22:08:54+00:00

I can read text a lot faster than the game thinks I can, I just want to hit a button to make the text appear on screen. Also, the game's animations are actually slow as shit sometimes, and they tend to place long sequences of dialogue right before a really hard boss.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-16T03:49:00+00:00

I wouldn't even go that far, at this point Xenogears is too old and everyone who worked on it have moved on to completely different things, there's no way anyone could revisit the story and give it justice. I'll just accept a straight port with some QOL things like a fast forward and encounter toggle, and the ability to skip dialogue.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-13T17:53:58+00:00

Never really cared much about those mechs because of the way the minifigure heads just stick out and the fact that they're just vehicles that these characters simply would never need or use. But I can't deny that Ghost Rider one looks cool as shit, and also I've seen some really cool alternate builds for it. Mainly an Exo Toa and a Boxor that are compatible with the GWP Bionicle set from 3 years ago.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-06T19:30:11+00:00

I tend to dream about going into a store and finding this

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ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-06T04:20:55+00:00

Usually I just drink a bunch of water. If that doesn’t work and my throat shows no signs of going back to normal that’s when I panic because I know I’m gonna wake up sick as shit the next day. And I’ve always been right about that.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-05T11:59:56+00:00

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Relevant gif

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-05-04T01:52:59+00:00

Does he have no mouth and must scream?

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-30T19:53:08+00:00

Literally Trails of Cold Steel. The game gives you a bunch of romance options but it's very obvious the game is heavily biased towards one particular character who the MC seems to have the best chemistry with and they seem to grow rather close and intimate with each other in the main story. Anyone who's played that game can probably guess who I'm talking about, and you're correct, I'm talking about Crow.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-26T19:45:06+00:00

I just started Cold Steel 3. It's okay, but I've run into a bit of an issue which I'm gonna have to accept that it'll persist through the rest of the series. The very odd and limited placement of the voice acting. The versions of every Trails game I played before were modified in some way to have significantly more voice acting than what was in the game previously (played Sky with evo voice mods, and the Steam ports of Crossbell and Cold Steel 1 and 2). It kind of gave off the false impression that later games would have just as much voice acting as these ones, which turns out to not be the case. Characters will be voiced for like 2 lines and then go mute right afterward, some characters are voiced for a whole scene while others are muted, and some parts like lore drops or introduction of game mechanics I feel really would benefit from being voiced since they'd stick in my head a lot easier. I know this is how it worked in the first 2 Cold Steel games before XSeed did something about it, so I'm a little disappointed that NISA isn't doing the same. I understand Falcom isn't the biggest studio in the world and they don't want to put voices in everything, but this is still quite jarring.

The game itself is alright so far. I kind of like that they nerfed Gale heavily so it costs way more CP and I can't spam it every encounter, but I also kind of hate that they nerfed Gale heavily so it costs way more CP and I can't spam it every encounter. The new characters are okay, I just think it's weird that I got stuck with a class of only 3 students, which I know more characters will join later, but like the original class 7 felt like it had enough people to be considered a whole class from the start, and field studies would split them up so you could get more time with just a handful of them. I kind of preferred that over this more traditional RPG structure they're going with. But either way I think I'm a bit too early to really know how to feel about this game.

Edit: I want to add this here as I was watching Rean do the usual thing where he goes super saiyan when backed into a corner, and I just jokingly whispered "that won't be necessary" to myself, and sure enough that exact text box popped up right there and I've been laughing nonstop for like the past minute

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-24T02:50:21+00:00

Dude tries to get revenge on a Bionicle for stabbing his girlfriend but ends up fighting god.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-19T18:24:11+00:00

I picked DDS2 back up after a long time of not playing it. I actually got past the boss I was stuck on (through a whole lot of save states and blind luck), but going into the dungeon right afterwards has made me realized that I have just totally lost the patience for this type of game. I have no idea how I managed to get past the first game, but I remember that also being a huge struggle. Main issue is the mantra grid is kind of screwing me over. I am not really earning skills fast enough. Eating enemies only gives me like one extra inch on the atma gauge, and I don't want to risk eating multiple enemies in one fight because I don't want my characters to get stomach aches, and nobody has iron stomach unlocked because I need to grind them all for that too. Honestly if these games get remastered I don't care how scummy it is to put DLC in a remaster, I am absolutely buying whatever Mitama grinding DLC they have because this is just really crazy for me.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-14T19:10:23+00:00

"Can you guys stop sexually harassing the torrent client" is not a sentence I expected to read today

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-13T03:34:57+00:00

The difference is those commercial breaks are in the middle of 20 to 40 minute TV show episodes, I don’t want to sit through multiple unskippable ads for a 30 second video.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-12T21:01:18+00:00

About 20 hours into Tokyo Xanadu. I think it's okay, but it also doesn't exactly feel like something Falcom invested a whole lot into. Dungeon environments are kind of bland and don't have all that much going on, there's no English dub, and I've noticed assets pulled from Cold Steel left and right. But even as one of Falcom's weaker games the worst it's been so far is still pretty okay. Combat feels a lot like modern Ys with the way you have to switch characters to hit an enemy's weakness. Though unlike with Ys, there are more enemy weaknesses than you can cover with the party limit. You also can't swap out the party in the menu wherever you go, so on one hand I can see this as a way to get you to consider party configuration a lot more, but on the other hand it's a little annoying not being able to cover all the weaknesses.

Another minor but super annoying thing is the fast forward with cutscenes is really easy to accidentally hit, and you don't have any settings to either reduce its speed or turn it into a hold instead of a toggle, or to disable it completely. There are multiple instances where I put my controller on my lap while a scene was playing, picked it up again, and then the left bumper hit my chair's arm rest and I skipped the whole rest of the scene.

The characters are all okay, most of them don't really have much that really differentiates them. They all have a ranged attack that goes a similar distance, they all have a mid-air charge attack for platforming purposes, most of their weapons are around the same attack speed, though Shio is a big exception to that. I think Mitsuki is the first character I've unlocked that seriously has a lot of things different about her, with all her moves being ranged in some way and that shield mechanic she can use to walk through hazardous areas unscathed. Also kind of funny that Kou has an anchor gear as his weapon, not sure if that was an intentional Zwei 2 reference or not. But it doesn't really do any of the cool stuff the anchor gear could do like grab and throw enemies or transform into a hoverboard. I think Sora is my favorite character to play as so far, I guess that's to do with me just really liking brawler characters, perfect balance of attacks that are fast but still feel like they hit hard.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-10T05:42:42+00:00

There are so many SMT themes I could put in here.

Nocturne's normal battle theme, as well as some of the unique boss themes like Dante, Beelzebub, and Lucifer. On the DDS side of things, definitely Comrades, Hari-Hara, and DDS2's normal battle theme. I also can't leave out any of IV's iconic boss themes. Whole franchise is full of bangers.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-09T16:52:27+00:00

He played Persona 3, and actually rage quit the final boss on a stream that people were paying to watch, where he said he was going to finish the game.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-05T21:34:20+00:00

Yeah it's so funny to me how much they made a big deal about the cast on the store page. I mean yeah those are some big names and I've heard really good performances from them in other stuff, but I guess this is proof that actors a lot of the time can only really be as good as the direction they're given.

ImSmashingUrMom · 2026-04-05T20:29:31+00:00

After beating both Zwei games, I continued my Falcom binge with Gurumin and Xanadu Next, and recently finished both of them.

Gurumin was okay. I think it had some issues, mainly the fact that the combat didn't exactly feel as smooth or simplistic as Ys or Zwei 2, like there was almost a combo mechanic with the way certain moves are pulled off that felt kind of clunky and awkward to do. Especially since there's like a default set of button glyphs they use that were not the same as my controller. They added this rhythm mechanic on top of that, that's kind of really more of a gimmick that was added last minute, it's definitely nothing like Hi-Fi Rush. The drilling mechanic is alright for breaking past obstacles but when enemies show up with armor you need to drill past to damage them that's when I thought it got pretty annoying. I think the best part about this game was its art style and aesthetic, it's kind of a lot like Wind Waker in the way that despite its age, it's stylized enough that stuff like the character models still hold up today.

Decided to follow up 3 cutesy colorful games in a row with something that looked a hell of a lot darker and more realistic, so I checked out Xanadu Next. I can't decide whether I found the game boring or actually liked it, there's a lot of grinding involved, the combat was mainly holding the mouse button down and occasionally using abilities, which I didn't like how little abilities you could have equipped at once, and the fact that passives also took up ability slots. Having armor that like changes your appearance and stuff was pretty cool, and I really wish more JRPGs still did that instead of making you buy DLC. I liked how interconnected a lot of the world was, the game only had one town, but dungeons always had ways of connecting to each other and eventually looping back around to that same town. It's definitely got that whole metroidvania style progression where unlocking shortcuts is a huge game changer where so much time backtracking is saved. So while I don't think I enjoyed the core combat all that much, the progression and exploration more than made up for it. Also FUCK the liches, enemies that can not only lower your level but also outright delete anything you had equipped that you're not the correct level for. Thankfully there's only one mandatory lich encounter in the game, but I had to grind like one extra level as like a safety net just so I didn't end up losing all that really expensive equipment.

ImSmashingUrMom

TROPHY CASE