JRoguePG

Fantastic game! Easy recommendation!

Enjoying the game, but I do wish it would allow me to save when I want to save and not when the game tells me to save.

It cool!

jRoguePG is a remarkable achievement.

That's not to say it's good. Oh no it's absolutely not good. But it's still remarkable.

It's incredible in that it has an absurd list of unforced errors that make it a bad game, most of which would be somewhat trivial to fix and one of which is a gamebreaking bug that the dev left in after it being reported because "it's funny."

The concept is simple: what if roguelike but with jRPG mechanics. This is a good idea. I like it. It has classes and stuff like Final Fantasy 5. I should love everything about this.

Unfortunately the execution is marred by... everything.

The classes and skills are wildly unbalanced(Lancers or someone equipping Double Jump are the only good physical attack option), magic drops off incredibly in power past the midgame unless you pick up Nuke and even then it's so mana-expensive it's not really worth it. So the only worthwhile build is "two or three Lancers with support casters."

The randomness is unfun and uninteresting, since enemies aren't... sidegrades to each other, some are just trivial free XP and others are massive bad times. Some gear is great, other gear is useless. Some gear your current party can't equip, some they can. So it's binary good or bad rolls all the way through. Like, you can either intentionally proc, with a consumable, or accidentally stumble upon, a fight where one enemy is "Ferocious," i.e. stronger and gives extra levels when killed.

But you cannot pick which enemy it is. So in a fight with one mega midboss and three adds that die to one hit, it might boost the mega midboss or one of the trivial adds. And you have no idea what you're heading into before, so you cannot make an informed choice in any way.

Then you've got all the equippable abilities after you unlock them, much like in Final Fantasy 5 but... once again you've got such limited spaces for equippable abilities that there are only two or three you'll pick. Especially once you realize what the local God Stat is.

Agility. If your Agility is high, you will get to act first in fights. If it's low, enemies will act first. Too low Agility in the endgame, once again determined entirely by random power pickups and gear pickups, will mean you just die at the start of encounters. High Agility meanwhile means you can delete many encounters before they can even meaningfully act.

Oh and in the final battle if you use the Lancer's Jump ability your characters just fly into the ceiling and never come down, which means congrats an ability that was perfectly cromulent the rest of the game is now an unrecoverable instakill to use in a game where you cannot save and reload because it's roguelike. The dev even says this is so because "it makes [them] laugh" to leave the bug in there.

And don't get me started on how the game has 10 magic elements and 6 physical elements and all that means is you largely have no idea what a given enemy is going to be weak to because the theming is all over the place, and you'll never really use the physical resistances anyway since for just about any physical attacker you'll use weapon skills instead which are largely untyped.

Conditions? Tons of them! But bosses are more or less 100% immune to all of them except for a couple minor ones that are hardcoded to always succeed, with minibosses 90% immune or so. Once again, a ton of content but much of it isn't worth using.

For me, much of the fun of a jRPG was always exploration. Finding the Elixir in a hidden clock. Going on to the overworld and locating the little island with a bonus dungeon or a funny encounter or something. Acquiring weird rare gear and blue magic spells. jRoguePG has you progressing through... 50-ish rooms, each of which has a single combat encounter and a random number of chests. And that's it. Oh and sometimes the chests let you screw yourself over by going "congratulations now some of your characters will start dead in the next encounter, have an Ether in exchange, lol, or you can have a massive passive boost of some kind" or some similar awful choice that no one would ever actually pick.

So it's just... not good. If you want a good jRPG play Crystal Project instead.

Or play Final Fantasy 5, which rules.

As long as you know what you're getting, this game is a great buy. I'll explain what the game is, what's great about it, and what could be improved.

The name is slightly misleading. If you want something like a JRPG, go elsewhere. The only part of JRPG that this game borrows is the concept of turn based party battles. Everything else is roguelite. I knew that going in, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Form your party of 4 characters. You start with 3 classes unlocked, and as you play, you'll unlock more character classes. You'll go through a series of 6 biomes with different enemies and increasing difficulty. There is a big difficulty jump after the first biome, so be prepared! Each biome consists of a series of "maps". The only purpose of the map is to allow you to find treasure chests and enter a battle. At the end of the last map in the biome, you get a boss battle. Do this 6 times and win (which is very difficult, don't get discouraged!).

In battle, you have HP, MP (for magic users), and RP (rage points). This is initially confusing, because sometimes your attacks are disabled. Why? Because not only do Skills cost RP (which makes sense), attacks cost RP too!!! You gain RP by using weak attacks or by getting hit by enemies. There's a lot of strategy involved with managing RP. Unlock stronger attacks by using that class of attack multiple times, but they will cost more RP.

You don't know upfront what your enemies resist and are weak to. You have to try different attacks to find out. Weaknesses are recorded for you as icons below the enemy, which is very nice. Resistances are not recorded so you have to remember them, or get frustrated haha. There are also some rare-type or no-type weaknesses that don't get recorded which I found weird.

The other major "mechanic" is the meta progression. As you go through the biomes, you earn fragments and souls. Fragments are like silver, souls are like gold, 10->1. You can use mostly souls to unlock major upgrades to your current run as well as future runs (maybe only on that save file?). This GREATLY helps you, so losing isn't bad!

You choose who to level up after you get level-up gems or win battles. More strategy here.

Best parts:
* There are a lot of classes and biomes, so it doesn't get old. Always new things to play around with and discover.
* You can choose male or female characters and it only affects the art. Nice.
* The tutorial explanations are relatively clear.
* There was an interesting story in the endgame cutscenes.
* Unlocking retries through meta-currency is a game saver.
* The names of some of the monsters are really funny. :)

Areas for improvement:
* There's a lot you have to learn by playing. Some of it I explained above (like the RP thing). Other things, like active/passive skills, and class equipment types, you have to figure out by playing a lot.
* There are some minor bugs. For example, I accidentally backed out of getting a mythic equipment and had to reload because it wouldn't let me try again. And one time I opened a chest and got a message, "You found .", so I had to figure out what I got by going through my inventory. Oh, and please learn how to spell "cleanse". >_<
* Saving is confusing. You have the current run, which autosaves but doesn't tell you (please just add a saving indicator), and you have manual saves which you can't do whenever you want.
* When I first launched the game, it told me I needed a controller, which wasn't true. Keyboard controls are arrow keys, enter, and escape.
* The runs are LONG. Autosave indicator please!
* A lot of time is spent on creating characters. And when you're done with it, you have to equip your class active and passive skills before starting the run, so it feels like a lot of menu time upfront.

In summary, while it's not perfect, it gets fun when you learn the game. If you are a fan of roguelites and want a (long) series of turn-based party battles, this is your game. Definitely worth the price!