They got pretty much all the PS2 ones via Midas Interactive Entertainment, Agetec or 505 GameStreet. I swear I’ve seen a good list with the Japanese/English titles, but I can’t seem to find it.
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I played through the Japanese version of this. It is not EDF quality but I’d put it in the upper tier of Simple games. It is short so you can blast through it, making big things explode.
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Turns out my Steam Deck will come today, so I have to figure out what to play on it out the fair number of Steam games that don’t have a Mac version. I was kinda thinking I might try Void Stranger since I feel like I’m the last living human to play it, but then I also remembered that the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy is also available? It’s probably too much to start with, just like Metaphor (and for that one, after dropping a lot of money on the Steam Deck it’s probably better to avoid buying a game that retails for $93.49CAD, yikes!)
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Void Stranger made for a great Steam Deck game for me. Anytime I was stuck, it was easy to just close the game for a bit and think on it. Taking notes and screenshots on device is pretty good too.
On the other hand, there’s something real cool about breaking out a big fancy 3D console game on a new portable.
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I’d recommend a quick go on Aperture Desk Job
It takes about 30 minutes but it’s the best tutorial game ever. Get you used to the position of all the buttons and it’s pretty funny as well. And it’s free!
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Oh dang, I had no idea this existed! Thank you for letting me know-- I’ll definitely play it (I already love a good tutorial so it’s a no brainer)!
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When I got mine I didn’t, it was a friend who recommened it to me - so glad to share the knowledge! Hope you enjoy it!
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I’m finishing up my first play-through of Bauldur’s Gate 3. I’ve enjoyed this game quite a bit and I’m hungry for more CRPGs, but want to make sure I’m hopping on to the right one as they seem like big time investments. Help me decide what to pick up next!
What I liked about BG3:
- I didn’t feel like I mastered it but moments where my character progressions paid off were great, especially in combat scenarios where my four “builds” played off each other nicely. I want more of that kind of strategy.
- Branching story parts/tough decisions based on personal moral positions is also what I liked from Disco Elysium, and I got that in spades here.
- Sense of scale of certain acts: each map felt quite full of stuff to do and the world felt dense with life. I enjoyed this aspect of the first act immensely as the journey from the Nautiloid to the Goblin Camp felt long, despite it really being a shorter distance that what you traverse in a normal RPG.
What I thought was lacking:
- More party interactions. Felt a bit awkward just having my companions just sit at camp and not really engage with the story in the same way as those I picked to be in my party. I don’t know what the way around that would be, but I think that I don’t need to have a vast options of companions as long as they all felt developed by the story on its own instead of depending on my picking them, if that makes sense.
- Related to the above, more chances to bond with the group as a whole, not just one companion. Felt like I only got 1:1 time with these characters and I would have loved to see them interact a bit more.
- Dice roll implementation was okay, it worked really well at times but the game I think didnt respect it enough imo, because you could just retry a certain checks if you exited the dialogue and such, don’t know if this was a glitch or something but imo if there will be checks like this I’d rather they commit to shutting me out of things. Might be a glitch/nickpick on my end.
- I didn’t find BG3 to be visually interesting, it has some great views and I liked the environment design but I do appreciate Disco Elysiums more stylized look if you get what I mean. More personality is one way to put it.
Also I’m a complete beginner as to DnD mechanics, if that changes anything.
Preferably the game would be playable on PS5 but its not a dealbreaker.
Games I’ve been looking at that might or might not fit the bill:
- Divinity Original Sin I or II
- Disco Elysium (would be a second playthrough, I actually never beat the game)
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
- Dragon Age (not sure which one, I played Inquisition and actually liked it, but never beat it)
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I saw a video of the minish cap and just realized maybe there’s a zelda I want to play. does anyone have any extra copies of the minish cap to sell lol
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I think Dragon Age: Origins would be a good fit. The last true CRPG Bioware did so it should hopefully still scratch the itch you have combat wise. Though it’s not a tactics approach to combat, as it’s doing real-time with pause.
More importantly, I think Bioware has long done a terrific job of handling relationships between your companions. Something I also found lacking in BG3. Like BG3 though, the cast does feel like it has more of its own agency as opposed to how Bioware designs companions in Mass Effect.
Bonus: Maybe you get into Dragon Age and then can play the whole series, including the very good Dragon Age 2, and when you get to Veilguard you won’t have to wait a decade.
You could also throw Obsidian’s “recent” CRPG outings on the list. Both Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny fit what you are looking for to varying degrees.
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Summoning @sapphicvalkyrja for this one. Personally, I’m interested in Wrath of the Righteous based on her recommendation.
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What’s the going rate on it right now? I have definitely not kept up with the retro game market… heck I don’t even know what people consider retro now vs. 5-10 years ago.
Looks like around 70 for the cart and $110-150 for cib. A bit more than I’d prefer to spend on a game they made a whole lot of!
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For Minish Cap?! Jesus Christ…
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Seeing as I have been summoned, I’ll offer my two cents here, though keep in mind that I have not played any of Larian’s Divinity games or Disco Elysium, so I can’t really offer any insights about the two of them. I can offer lots of thoughts regarding Dragon Age and Wrath of the Righteous, though!
Wrath of the Righteous will do a much better job of this than any Dragon Age game (though Origins will come the closest). Wrath is very focused on “buildcraft,” in the same way that its progenitor system, Pathfinder, is. There’s the potential for lots of party synergies and powerful combinations, but you will likely need a fair bit of systems mastery to uncover many of them
Origins has a little bit of this, with things like shatter combos (freeze an enemy with your mage and your warrior can use particular attacks to deal large amounts of damage, that kind of thing, which has featured in every one of Bioware’s “modern” RPGs), but they’re not particularly core to the experience except perhaps on the highest difficulties
Very few CRPGs pull this off in the manner that Baldur’s Gate 3 did, as those games in Bioware’s lineage tend to have a sharper narrative focus that precludes much of the more free-form “this is a D&D session” nature of BG3. The Dragon Age games are often fond of tough decisions with moral weight (particularly Origins and Dragon Age II), but Bioware tends to keep branching paths a smaller part of the experience (though such things do still exist)
Wrath of the Righteous has shades of this, with each Mythic Path offering its own unique story that weaves into the game’s central narrative, but that central narrative is mostly on rails, with deviations based on your decisions that are more like ripples in a pond than crashing waves
Both Dragon Age and Wrath of the Righteous have world maps with nodes, rather than “open worlds,” though Inquisition’s zones are more open world-y, as you’ll recall from playing it. That can convey its own sense of scale, but it’s a rather different one from the scale you get in Baldur’s Gate 3
Dragon Age and Wrath of the Righteous each do a better job of this in my opinion, with the former getting better at it as the series goes on and the latter having learned from years of Bioware games from the get-go. Baldur’s Gate 3 makes it rather easy to miss a lot of context for your companion’s roles in the story if you don’t take them along. That’s naturally going to happen in any party-based game with more companions than party slots, but these other games take more care to include scenes between characters at your home base, as well as making sure you won’t miss as much of their personal stories by having them come to you more readily about their companion quest lines. There’s also generally more interjections from the party members you do have with you during story events, though you’ll need multiple playthroughs (or mods, I suppose, in the case of Wrath) to see them all
Wrath of the Righteous in particular ensures that most of its characters stories are interwoven with the central plot far more tightly, so even those you don’t use as often will feel like they’re part of things, plus they’ll also feature in your management of the crusade itself as advisors, and whenever you rest at your home base, you’ll get snippets of camp dialogue that can show the ones you don’t use interacting with one another and commenting on various events
Dragon Age doesn’t have much emphasis on dice rolls at all, with most everything being handled under the hood. They’re more a part of Wrath of the Righteous, and while you can retry with save-scumming, you won’t be able to back out of dialogue and retry things like you could sometimes in Baldur’s Gate 3. Neither game really places them front and center the way BG3 does, though
I don’t think any of the Dragon Age games or Wrath of the Righteous will really top Baldur’s Gate 3 here, particularly because of age in the former case and the full commitment to the isometric camera perspective in the latter one. The games can be far more fantastical at times, so you’ll end up in more varied environments than you see in Baldur’s Gate 3, which might carry a lot of weight despite the games’ graphical limitations
This does make Wrath of the Righteous a harder sell, as it’s based on older, more complex versions of Dungeons and Dragons than Baldur’s Gate 3. While you can run the game on lower difficulties to bypass much need for systems mastery, it’s a lot, and it can be overwhelming if you care about doing things “correctly.” The Dragon Age games more or less don’t require any particular systems mastery unless you play on harder difficulties (and don’t have any real D&D left in them, anyway)
Wrath of the Righteous has a console version, though I haven’t played that way to know how well it plays. For Dragon Age, only Inquisition is playable on PS5, and it doesn’t have any visual upgrades or anything of the sort. The older games can be a bit of a pain on PC, too, particularly Origins, which has some memory leak issues that require modding to get around
With all of that said, I’d personally recommend hitting up Dragon Age: Origins. In terms of its systems, its approachable much the way Baldur’s Gate 3 is while still being solidly in the cRPG camp unlike Bioware’s later console/cinematic RPGs are. In many ways, BG3 is more a successor specifically to Origins than it actually is to the original Baldur’s Gate games, so Origins can be interesting from that angle, too
Origins will also get you more acquainted with Bioware’s house style, which is largely what Owlcat emulates in their three cRPGs thus far. If you like the way Bioware handles narrative, you’re more likely to gel with the way Owlcat does. You may end up preferring Larian’s more open-ended approach, but Origins seems like the best starting point for figuring that out to me
As for other cRPGs: Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II are classics for a reason, and if you found yourself enamored with the Forgotten Realms during Baldur’s Gate 3, then perhaps you’ll find a lot to love in them (though they are very different games from BG3)
I have never personally clicked with Obsidian’s writing or their approach to narratives and quest design, so I can’t comment much on the Pillars of Eternity games or Tyranny, as I’ve failed to get into them (one of these days perhaps I will push through the early sequences that turned me off, though…)
Owlcat also has Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which I would recommend playing before Wrath of the Righteous if you have any real interest in it, as it’s both older and jankier than its successor, and then Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, which is not at all a fantasy game but in general far less obtuse in its systems than either of their two Pathfinder games is (though still admittedly pretty obtuse relative to something like Baldur’s Gate 3). All three of their games are good, but Wrath of the Righteous is excellent, so if you’re going to play just one, I would make it that one
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I appreciate your generous response. If I had an xbox I would 100% play Dragon Age: Origins, as it seems that the Steam Deck can struggle with the controls, though there are community layouts people have made that might help. I might wait for a sale and try it out.
I do have Divinity: Original Sin on the steam deck and it runs pretty well, but the difference in combat to BG3 has taken a while getting used to. I also realized for these kinds of game I’d rather sit on a couch and play on a bigger screen.
Honestly, I’m going to go for Baldur’s Gate Ion console after this one. I don’t mind the dated graphics in fact I think it looks cool and it seems the console port is great. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is tempting too though, based on your description it has a lot of what I liked in BG3. I’ll meditate on this after a short rest 
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I played BG I without any prior knowledge of DnD rules. Once I understood what a THAC0 is I had a blast playing through the game as a ranger/archer type character. I can definitely recommend it! With the remastered higher-res assets it holds up pretty well I would say.
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Baldur’s Gate is a fantastic starting point. Bear in mind that it does not have any turn-based options (though you can sort of cludge this with zealous application of the auto-pause options in the Enhanced Editions). It doesn’t have much in the way of buildcraft, so to speak, and its Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule set is both eldritch in its arcane nature and not especially presented well in the interface itself
But, if you can get past that, the game and its (far-better) sequel are important landmarks. The first game doesn’t really have the companion interaction stuff that Bioware would later become known for (this appears more or less fully-fledged in the sequel and they’ve rarely deviated from the way Baldur’s Gate II handles it since), though the Enhanced Editions do include some new companions that are written more in the well-known Bioware style
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Was going to suggest Temple Of Elemental Evil as a good primer on the rules at a granular level, but idk how workable that is on a steam deck
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I am unfortunately an OG Baldur’s Gate hater. Not really, I just think it’s fine-ish and I only find it interesting as a historical object. Too obtuse for no good reason in terms of the D&D bits and narratively it’s tosses out most of its good ideas by the end. I also just have failed to find Forgotten Realms an interesting setting in any form I’ve encountered so far. And of course the companions just aren’t really a thing other than those added in EE and Dragon Spear
But I get it, it was designed to emulate the tabletop experience where the player is bringing so much to the table. The compromises for such are just too much for me.