Ok, in my last post I said Ogre Tactics was not a good choice for SRPG fans.

I MEANT to say it's not a good choice for NEW SRPG fans. It's quite an advanced game, and out of the gate, your picking stuff that will be important all the way till the ever last battle you fight, 300 hours in the game.

It's a niche in a niche, if you will.

Sorry for the typo. I edited it.

Trying to put an hour count on a Disgaea game is tricky. The story is probably around 30-40 hours for all the endings if you go break neck through it. If you are a completionist though the game never really ends. You can level to 9,999 an infinite number of times on any given character and they will get better every time. Item world means you can spend hundreds of hours just perfecting one characters gear and then find a slightly better sword and do the same all over again. You can easily spend over a thousand hours playing the game and still not hae everything.

This is histerically funny to me. If you are talking about going down and beatting all hundred levels of the best legendary items then, yeah, no game compares to that difficulty really. Just for the story though Disgaea is remarkably easy. It is not even half as hard as a Fire Emblem game.

I don't know. If you ask me there isn't an easier SRPG for beginners then Tactics Ogre or Super Robot Wars.

Super Robot Wars because when you die, you start over again... but with all your expierence and gold intact... so there is absolutely no unnessisary grinding needed. You get stuck on a stage, your characters keep improving and you get more gold to spend on upgrades.

Then when you are feeling ready for more of a challenge you can try to get the "hard' modes by reaching all the optional mission objectives.

Tactics Ogre because it has Training mode. Which greatly cuts down on any sort of grinding what's even better is that you can set training to COM... so it once again cuts out the grinding that tends to be what pisses off early SRPG people.

Also, Tactics Ogre has less equipment and less spells, making it fairly easier to manage, the only hard part is that it's harder to keep everyone alive... even then it's easier to keep them alive then a FE game.

Also, comparing Tactics Ogre vs Final Fantasy Tactics in story is a no contest in my opinion.

Final Fantasy Tactics is just full of 2-D hald hearted copies of the TO cast in my opinion. I'm not sure why you think the story is so great.

SPOILERS

Then you have the not so subtle, ha ha christianity is evil! Subplot. Which is again a ripoff from the Ogre series but the Tactics series is a LOT less subtle about it.

While Tactics Ogre is the story about racial divisions where on an island three ethnic peoples are constantly at war... one of which the Walstanians are on the brink of comeplete cultural domination and eventual extinction until a group of young people free their leader to find out he's as rotten as the other too when you free a camp of your people who refuse to help you... at which point you are ordered to comit genocide on your own people to rally the troops... and the crazy thing is... you can actually choose to comit the mass genocide. Not only can you choose to do it... it's the actual first option. Even if you choose not to you can decdie to "condone" the actions of the duke to work with him. Lans, a cherished character from Ogre Battle and a great honorable guy in this game doesn't die... instead he is tortured to the point of where he needs to be cared for by a nurse for the rest of his life. Then after that your sister may comit suicide, you may get assassanated as king...

END SPOILERS

How you felt emotional in FFT and not in Tactics Ogre I don't know. We are talking about the SNES/PS1 one right?  Not the GBA one with the weaker battle system?

This man speaks the truth as long as you don't feed him after midnight or get him wet.

@Kasz216

You make me ponder an interesting theory.

Fire Emblem is great, but a subgenre, and much less RPG based than most SRPG's, because of this simple fact:

Finite experience points. There is no grinding, you have to make use of the one life of each character(sometimes sacraficing them in desperate 1 hour battles) and you never can just make one character extremely powerful, because of RNG.

I think there is a synergy between the RNG stats, the finite experience, and the perma death, that make each movment of the game more thought out and intricate in design, rather than overpowering your opponents, it turns into an eloquent chess game, and imo, I feel that is what makes people love FE who ordinarily don't bother with JRPG's or anime.

There is importance to each decision and real strategy is employeed, and I feel that in the end, those should be the overall goals of the genre.

Some people would view RNG as prehistoric, however, but looking at it from that point of view it seems very valid and makes much more sense to me as to why FE is designed as it is. It is the opposite of a "casual" game in every sense, but somehow manages to stay simplistic and deep at the same time. I expect nothing less from a franchise with roots in Nintendo.

Do you get my meaning there? What do you think?

SRPG's rule! :)

Well all there other ones are 1-shot games... except for Makai Kingdom.

They all look and mostly play the same... the only difference is you get a new story... which is always great.

Though I think DS wise they just have Disgaea.

As for what I think they will bring to Wii, I'd guess a new NIS game that is just like Disgaea more or less without Laharl, Flonne and Etna playing a major part in the game, though likely making cameos.

They're all good games, basically where they rank depends soley on the story.  Gameplay wise i'm not a big fan... there are too many prevailing balance issues between the classes.  Monsters are NEVER worth it... which is sad.  Cause I like monsters.

Yeah, I agree.  It's what drives me insane some times.  As i'm the guy that likes to have everyone at the same level.  It's hard for me to pick favorites and send then out there.

Though at the same time Fire Emblem is like the Nintendo games of old in that regard... one of the few games left in gaming where you can get to a certain point and realize that you made too many mistakes. 

Whether it be you lost someone important, you raised an unbalanced team or you spread your expierence too thin... then you realize you have no recourse but to just start the game all over again.

I know most peoples first mistake in FE is to have the super powered post-promote character hog all the early exp.

Actually, in Disgaea 2, the best way to get a group of 9999 characters is to use a monster trick to level your characters up.

Any other way takes far too many hours, and I mean FAR TOO MANY HOURS(like 60 per character) to level to 9999 with stats that match the monster you can level to 9999 in 10.

Without using this trick, its nearly impossible to get that first 9999, to match stats with a non monster character.

Basically, what I'm saying, is, end game, the most efficient team for time spent in Disgaea for maxing your team is a group of 9999 monsters, and your leader. 

Yep, lol. Happened to me on my first FE play, but I somehow managed to beat it.

Now check this out. In my first tactics playthrough(I call FFT "tactics" for some reason, lol), I got all the way up to where you fight Wygriff(sp?) the first, time, after the part where Ramza is fighting alone on the inside of the castle gate agains that mercinary guy, you get the option to save your game.

Well, in the next battle, you have Ramza 1v1 with Wygriff and there was NO damn way I could ever hope to beat him.

So, since I overwrote my state, I had to start the whole damn game over again, that's 40 hours nearly.

I learned to save in multiple places after that game, lol.