Is 2024 Already The BEST Year for JRPGs EVER?

2024 has been absolutely insane for jrpg so far if you're like me and have been trying to keep up with them all in vain then you know exactly what I mean they've not only been great but releasing back to back to back like no time to breathe at all so in this video I want to talk about all the jrpgs that I've been playing in 2024 that I haven't talked about in a video yet and give us a quick look ahead at what's in store for the rest of the year and uh spoilers it's insane before we continue the video let me tell you about today's sponsor AFK journey in this all new Twist on the vast World RPG you'll journey across an enchanted land as Merlin to recruit heroes from six factions to build the ultimate Army what's starting to grab you right away as it did for me is its breathtaking canvas art inspired World each zone is brimming with life as each Zone has a day night cycle weather effects and more to bring this stunning world to life but this is not an idol game completely different from AFK Arena AFK journey is an ethereal RPG where you'll explore massive diverse Maps solve fun puzzles and indulge in AFK Journey's allnew combat system with its grid-based maps and dynamic enemy Encounters this is unlike any RPG you've ever played and for fans of AFK Arena you can reunite with your favorite Heroes and meet new ones and here's the best part it's available now for free on iOS Android and PC from the AFK Journey's official website during the game's launch you can receive over 40 Heroes for free including epics to build your ultimate team you can also receive 200 plus free draws from various events with a 7-Day log so what are you waiting for check out my link in the description to start playing today and use my CD key AFK Journey 88 to redeem a ton of in-game giveaways now while it's not a jrpg itself the conversation around pal world was one of the biggest of the year and it's obviously concerning another big jrpg franchise in Pokemon I mean po world had 25 plus million copies sold clearly Pokemon fans want more and better from Game Freak so this was a really interesting Twist on the monster collecting genre and I had a lot of fun with it now I will say going in I knew what it was it wasn't a game that kind of came by surprise I knew everybody was calling it Pokémon with guns but what I did not expect was that it was a survival game with monster catching elements so you start off and you're just on this island and it doesn't really tell you much you kind of have to figure it out on your own you have to build up your base you have to get something to heat you up so you don't freeze at night and then slowly you can start catching these monsters building up a better base and then you use the monsters to build stuff for you so you know they can be like your supply line of growing food building materials things like that and before I get too into this I just do want to give a shout out to pocket pair the Developers for sending me a review code I really really appreciate that I will say I played about 13 hours so far and like I said it was a lot of fun now let's get to some of the concerns is it janky absolutely does it rip off some designs most likely but is it fun yeah it really is fun there's something about just going into a big open world finding all these different a guest review for me on the channel so if you haven't watched it I'll leave a card somewhere on the screen right now that you can click so you can go watch it right now now I already talked about Grand blue fantasy relink in my review I absolutely loved it I had an amazing time with it I love the visuals the combat it was just really really fun and I'm so glad that so many other people enjoyed it and that the game is selling relatively well well over a million copies at this point but another amazing jrpg released literally the day after that and that was Persona 3 reload now it's funny because a few months back I did a video ranking the 10 best jrpg remakes and ironically I feel like I need to remake that video already Persona 3 reload is one of the best video game remakes I've ever played and I know I know there's no female main character we have to pay for the answer DLC but let's just put that aside for now and just talk about how amazing this game is first of all it's visually stunning that grabs you right away the game looks incredible trying to be on par with Persona 5 everything from just how the momentto moment gameplay looks obviously to the menus when the character dies down it kind of looks like they're diving into water it looks really cool obviously a huge push to improve the visuals but to me it was all about improving the gamep playay so we can finally control the party and I know in Persona 3 Portable we could finally control our party but you had to compromise by not being able to explore the environment so to be able to have both in one game is really nice and then they added some mechanics from previous Persona games obviously one of them was The Paton pass they're calling it shifting here where if you hit an enemy's weakness instead of having the same character go again again you can pass your turn to another character and they can kind of just keep the weakness train going so it's easier to knock down all the enemies and as you're exploring Tardis and maybe I'm just misremembering the original game but it feels like there's way more opportunities to get items like there's these little statues and things that you can break to get items and get money there's chests everywhere so I feel like I was always in Big Supply of money and items and was just well stocked at all times and then they got rid of that stamina SL tiredness meter I don't know why they ever had that I get it that they had it for like maybe thematic reasons but it was just not fun to play so I'm glad that they got rid of that and overall this is just a much easier in streamlined experience I remember Persona 3 being pretty tough on the PlayStation 2 version even on PlayStation Portable so the fact that they really streamlined it made it more approachable especially from people that had never played it and they were coming from Persona 5 I love that they did that but then most of all I think I love that they just kept true to the darker tone and the story like they haven't really changed much that I can remember again it's probably been like 10 years since I've played the original Persona 3 on PlayStation 2 but from what I remember this is very very faithful all the big moments that I remember are there in even more fun ways so I really appreciated that and I've been playing it not only on PC but on Steam deck and for me this is just such a great way to experience this game to kind of just knock out days in bed or sometimes I'll take it out with me when I'm on the train or whatever so it's just awesome to be able to have my steam deck to play this and it runs pretty well for the most part I had to make some adjustments and I I think valve themselves even put out some kind of patch to make it run smoother there are sometimes where the frame rate just takes a total nose dive but for the most part it's been running really great on my steam deck and I've been really really enjoying it I got about halfway but I had to stop playing because another incredible jrpg remake came out and that is Final Fantasy 7 rebirth now I'm going to do my best here but it's really hard to articulate in words just how impressive this game is now a common thought I kept seeing online was how is this game real and that was something I kept saying to myself as well when I was playing this game I was like how is this real how is it so big how is it so dense how have they so perfectly recreated this game in so many ways so to begin we're obviously not constrained to midgar anymore we're out in the open world it's huge there's like five massive open world zones and each zone is just dense with content so many side content objectives to do there's just so many side missions to do that have really interesting stories and the story itself in each zone is just so incredible like the way they compose the cutcenes the way you get to know different characters the way different characters get more screen time than they did previously even ways that like characters that were like a little goofy Side characters like the guy in Carell prison who kind of runs the prison before he was just a guy but now he's this big flamboyant character he's got this Hideout he's got all these henchmen there was just so much more to this game and once again they have Faithfully recreated iconic moments from the original in better ways than I could have ever imagined for example like the gold saucer everything that happens in the gold saucer that was the part of the game I was most looking forward to more than anything else and that part absolutely blew me away I mean I remember when I got there I literally cried as I just sat there in Gold saucer and it was just in awe of what they did with it I was like they get it and they did it perfectly I just can't believe it and the thing that really blows me away is they only made this game in 4 years that's not a lot of time considering how big big and how dense this game is I mean if you follow the gaming industry you'll know that games these days are taking 5 6 7 8 9 10 years to make games and the fact that they made this in only four is ridiculous I still don't know how they did that and the other thing that I kept thinking while playing this game was it's so extra and what I mean by that is every time you get to a new area or there's a moment they just go above and beyond like coasted L soul for example you go there in the original game it's sort of a pit stop you just get off H maybe you go to the beach you see and then you leave but you go there and now there's like all these extra little mini games like there was a part in coost Del Soul where red 13 is playing soccer with some kids and you can kick the ball right at Red 13 ah it's funny now there's like this whole soccer mini game with red 13 where he's playing soccer it's ridiculous and there's like Segways you can ride around town there's like a shooting mini game there is so much stuff in Costa Del Soul they went like way above and beyond there and I loved it and then speaking of gold saucer think about meeting Dio you you get there and it's not just like oh wel welcome to the gold saucer there's this giant dance number yui gets a new outfit you do the 3D fighting game which is incredible to me I feel like they took the lesson from remake it was like okay wall Market was hands down the best part of the game that should be the blueprint going forward and it absolutely was the developers clearly get what makes the original game special and they're just putting everything they have into this game and speaking of mini games man I just lost count of how many there were I mean every town you go to there some unique miname that the game has set out now of course there's the ones that you'd expect but even sometimes like they add even more to it like when I got to junon it's like okay we're going to have to ride the Dolphins somehow but then it turns into like this little racing mini game so again it goes above and beyond but I think the one that people like the most is Queens blood a new card game and I absolutely got lost in that I went all the way with it to the final boss or whatever you want to call it all the way got all the ranks all the cards it was so much fun building out my own deck and coming up with new strategies now at times with the mini games though I felt like they went a little overboard like not totally I love that they were in there and they did as much as they did but there's this one and I don't think I have footage of it but there's one where you're like picking mushrooms and you have to pick the mushroom in a very specific way or it doesn't like pull out right it's like all right guys we're picking mushrooms you don't need to have a miname for picking mushrooms but to me they nailed the most important aspects and those were the characters and the story I was blown away by the performances of all the different characters and was constantly on the edge of my seat waiting to see what twist the stories would take now of course A lot of it is exactly the same as we would remember but then there's all the stuff going on with Zach and when they explained mysteries from the first game it blew my mind like I literally had my jaw like just gaping open I was like that's what that was that's what that was so connecting all the dots from the original game was just so mind-blowing it's very clear that the developers have planned this out from the beginning they're not just making it up as they go along and when those reveals happen is just incredible and as I went through the game I went through like every emotion I found myself laughing out loud so many times like this game is genuinely really funny I was cheering I was crying and I it was just everything in between like this game brought out every emotion in me and that's rare now I want to say that I think the character that stole the show for me was yui Susie young absolutely killed it she's just totally perfect in this role and yui in this game is so cute so quirky just the absolute best not only the character story-wise personality-wise but she was my favorite character to play as she's just totally op and broken I absolutely loved playing as Yi and she just always had some funny remark or exaggerated movement and maybe my favorite yui moment in the whole game is when you go to gungaga there's this part where she's just like lying on a couch and she's bored and she's singing this song about being bored but it's in The Melody of her own theme here I just got to play a little clip of it for you right here I am so so bored bored right out of my brain if I don't die first bet you go insane all in all Final Fantasy 7 rebirth is an incredibly special game and games of this quality just don't come around very often so if you're playing it or you're about to play it savor it absolutely just soak in every little piece of it because like I said games like this don't come around very often and I'm not going to say this lightly but I genuinely think that final Fant F 7 rebirth is one of the very best games I've ever played it's easily in my top five of all time now and you got to play it if you love RPGs all right next the current hotness right now I want to talk about unicorn Overlord now I wasn't initially planning on buying and playing this game but thank God for the demo I don't know about you guys but whenever I looked at this game in trailers or in gameplay videos it looked really confusing and intimidating and I just feel like they did a poor job marketing this game like whenever I looked at it it was just a lot of menus you're doing Town management like is this like Civilization and then they said it's auto combat and I just didn't understand what this game was but then I played the demo and I immediately understood it it's a sort of combination of traditional strategy RPGs like Fire Emblem mixed with realtime strategy RPGs like ogre battle and Deo field Chronicle if you play that one so basically you have this map and when you come up to a town or a character it will initiate a battle and it's sort of like this instanced battle so you have like your starting base and you can deploy yourit units from this base and then your troops are in these units or in these groups up to five characters when you start the game it's very small I think you can only have like two in a unit at a time but as the game goes on you can upgrade that you can have up to five and each class has its own strength and weaknesses kind of like the rock paper scissors system from Fire Emblem so how you build your units based on the troops you're about to fight is super important and when you initiate combat it quote unquote Auto battles the same way Fire Emblem would Auto Battle but I feel like saying it auto battles is kind of a disservice because in implies a lot of different things I feel like when you bump into enemies just based on how your units are put together that's just going to determine the damage you do throughout the battles you're capturing different points you're beating different characters and usually the ultimate goal is to beat the captain or some boss of a stage and usually the battles are very quick you will typically recruit a new character especially early on this cycle got very addictive I just wanted to do absolutely every little Mission I could get all the different characters and also you can interact with these different points throughout the map like these different buildings will give you items and you can feed those items into the town and you can get more upgrade resources and things like that there's also bonding events between different characters so if they're grouped together in a unit they get to know each other better and that will also give you more resources and different things to help build up your team to me this was just the ultimate dopamine game like there's always something to do always something to upgrade and of course it's vanillaware so the art is incredible from George kamatani very distinct very gorgeous not only the beautiful environments and the cut scenes but all the characters have have really cool designs as far as the story goes to me it's just sort of whatever the kingdom gets overtaken when you're a kid and when you're grown up you kind of have to take it back but I will say that there's individual character moments that are much more interesting than the main story overall it's really really good if you like strategy RPGs I would definitely give it a try right now I'm about 23 hours in and I'm really enjoying it but I'm starting to feel a little bit burnt out it's starting to get to the point where I can kind of just face roll the bosses or the characters or the missions and not really think about it and so it's getting a little bit boring but I still want to see it through to the end just because I'm really enjoying it and if you were like me and you looked at the game and went man this game is really confusing I don't understand what it is try the demo it's very very meaty it explains itself very well and I think it'll give you a good sense of what the game is and then if you're like well I played for like 7 hours and uh I don't want to keep playing or I do want to keep playing I definitely would recommend checking out the demo if you have any questions about the game so now that's everything that I've played so far this year but I do want to quickly look ahead for 2024 and talk about what's ahead because let me tell you as much as we've been talking about these amazing games so far the uh train is not slowing down anytime soon now these aren't jrpgs in the traditional sense they're more western style RPGs but Dragons Dogma 2 and Rise of the Ronin just came out my Discord is full of people playing both of those games and speaking of which if you uh want to get in on the conversation with me and other cool people in the community I'll leave a link to the Discord below for you to join now for me I really want to try both of these but they each have their own funny quirks like Dragon zonga doesn't have fast travel or it's very limited it's kind of difficult napus and Rise of the Ronin also is kind of difficult with its parrying system and I don't know if I'm into that right now but people seem to be enjoying those and then recently out of nowhere gungho decides to release the grandia collection for grandia 1 and 2 on PlayStation and Xbox very cool both excellent retro jrpg so if you've never played those or if you are waiting for those to come to either Xbox or Playstation those are now available to check out and I believe limited run is also doing a physical version so if you want to wait 2 years or however long it takes for them to make those that's also available to purchase all right and then coming out in April we have uden Chronicle 100 Heroes and it's coming to basically everything this is that spiritual successor to the sing games it looks incredible there were some previews that came out in fact my buddy David Vin I don't know how we got it so early I think he was a Kickstarter backer but he's got a review up right now if you want to watch it it looks incredible I definitely want to try it out and it's particularly heartbreaking because one of the creators Yoshi taka maryama passed away very recently really sad that he wasn't around to see the game release and see how much people were going to enjoy the game but I think this game will hit especially hard with him passing away so recently it will be coming to pretty much everything on April 23rd and coming out shortly after that we have sandland releasing on April 26th for PC PS4 PS5 and Xbox series X and what's cool about that it does have a demo that came out and and this seems to be kind of a I don't even know how to describe it kind of like a future Punk or like post-apocalyptic sand world where you get into a lot of different vehicles and there's lots of action combat the reception of the demo was kind of mixed from what I saw but hey if you want to try it for yourself there is a demo and speaking of great artists that passed away this was one of the last things that Akira Toyama worked on and of course Akira Toyama is the creator of Dragon Ball character designer for the Dragon Quest series for a very very long time and to get something relatively new I know sandland is kind of an old franchise from a manga and I think they're doing a movie or something but in terms of games this is a first sandland game so I'll be Keen to try that out next month and we talked about a lot of remakes and another remake that's coming out this may for Nintendo switch is Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door this is a game that I never played like I had a GameCube and I think I literally only played one game on it but this is a game I really really want to try people speak very highly of it definitely the most beloved of the Paper Mario games from what I can understand so I would love to play this game when it comes out it's really cool that for as much love as it's gotten over the years and it's never really been properly re-released not just even in a remaster but this seems to be a full-on remake so super excited to check that out on May 23rd this is one I did not necessarily see coming and that's shagam tensei 5 Vengeance coming to basically everything on June 2 so this is a remaster SL re-release Atlas loves to do these of previous games and instead of just being on PC and switch now it's everywhere which is fantastic and I believe the big thing about this game on top of just some quality of life improvements is there's a female character route now so there's like an entire second story that they've added so there's a huge reason to buy and replay this game if you played it previously and now we can finally get it running at a decent frame rate which will be great cuz as fun as it was to play on switch it didn't always run the best so to be able to play it on stronger Hardware will be excellent now next this is a game I've been championing for so long if you've been a longtime subscriber you know I won't shut up about Tokyo xanadoo ex plus and this summer it's coming to Nintendo switch I am so happy that this game just gets another shot at life that people will give it a chance cuz I know it's on PlayStation and PC but feel like it really went under the radar nobody really knew about it but now that Falcom is much more established in the west with the ease and legend of hero series I'm really really hoping that people will give this a try especially because very recently announced a sequel which I'm so so excited for so if you haven't played this game after all these years of me not shutting up about it you can try it on Nintendo switch this summer and speaking of Falcom we've got a new entry in like a new Arc of Legend of Heroes and that is Legend of Heroes Trails through Daybreak and it's coming to Playstation and PC and switch on July 5th this game looks great it's doing this really interesting thing where it's kind of combining action and turnbas combat where I believe believe you can kind of on the Fly switch whatever combat style you want I haven't played it for myself but it's really really interesting what they're doing at least it looks really interesting and I'm so glad that we're done with the class 7even Arc brand new set of characters you don't need to play the previous whatever 11 games you can just come in fresh if you want that backstory it's there but if you don't want to deal with all that nonsense you can just start fresh here so excited for that all the character designs look amazing I've heard nothing but good things about this one so very very excited to play this when it comes out in July and another game coming out this summer maybe one of my most anticipated jrpgs of the year that is visions of Mana now I love what they did with the trials of Mana remake a couple years back it was excellent and it seems like they're taking that and then just cranking up the budget cranking up the scope it looks incredible these huge giant environments like all these mounts that we can ride I don't really know much about the story like we're trying to get to the Mana tree I feel like that's always the story in the Mana games but I'm loving the character designs I love that like really saturated pastel art style it's so cool and it's coming to PC PlayStation and Xbox series consoles this summer I cannot wait to play this game and last but certainly not least the last jrpg I want to talk about today is meta4 ref fantasio or ref fantasio coming to PC PlayStation and Xbox series consoles and this is the brand new Fantasy game from the Persona team so the team that made Persona 345 and Catherine is making this game and it just looks absolutely mindblowing like the visuals on another level they look absolutely insane I don't really know much about the story which is fine cuz this is a game where I'm like I don't need to know anything I'd rather go in blind cuz I know I'm going to love it and much like Trails through Daybreak it seems like it's kind of doing this hybrid like action and turnbas obviously it's going to be very heavily turn-based based on the development team's pedigree but it seems to also have some kind of action elements maybe that's just how you initiate the battles not totally sure again hav't been keeping being up with this game a ton but everything I've seen that they have shown looks incredible I cannot wait to play this game and I know a lot of people are really really excited for it I'm hoping it sells well but that name is just awful metaphor ref Fantasia like GH it just doesn't come out of your mouth right but I'm hoping despite that that people will be really excited for it because it's from the creators of persona cannot wait for it and like I said 2024 might be the greatest year for jrpgs ever I mean look at all these games they're all going to be like 80 90 plus reviewed on Metacritic or open critic but what's been your favorite jrpg so far this year and which ones are you looking forward to for the rest of the year leave a comment and let me know and now this wasn't every jrpg still to come but if you want to see which ones are still to come in a giant list make sure you check out this video right here and special thanks to reset switch Tyler kuzava and the Miyazaki man for supporting me over on patreon to get exclusive videos and other cool perks consider supporting me over on patreon.com thegamingshelf thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: The Gaming Shelf

Views: 31,726

Keywords: jrpg, jrpgs, 2024, 2024 jrpgs, rebirth

Id: v9XRDnCpbGk

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024