Boss Battles

Ok, detail it is.

I mean you literally couldn't tell they were there!
meaning those magazines were usually found in the background, hidden is more like it. Unlike the Resident Evil series were you would see that little spark or whatever indicating an item was there, Final Fantasy, no hint whatsoever

The Magic Draw system
Having to draw magic out of enemies, sorta like the steal command.

the retarded "oh we knew each other when we were kids!" story
storyline of course

not knowing where to go, literally after finishing a town there were hardly any hints of where to go next
After being in a town, most rpgs hint at where to go next, or downright tell you by speaking to NPC's, not FF8

Zell and Selphie
Zell=a male version of Tifa, she was manlier than him.
Selphie=Rikku from FFX done wrong.
 
Was that defending the plot or not at the end?

The thing with hidding magazines in the background so you can't see them means that the game has gone past rewarding exploration and started rewarding exploration while randomly tapping the interact button. Doesn't sound fun.

The draw system was broken. The only worth while esper that needed to be drawn out was the one from the first boss encounter, and I believe the game hadn't even explained the draw system at that point let alone that it functioned on a boss. If you missed it it made the game much more difficult, but if you got it it was very easy to exploit to the point of breaking the game. It had the skill to convert items into magic (IE 1 tent to 33 curga), which you then equiped to your character (curga to hp) and they became end game powerful 2 hours into the game.
 
I found all the magazines the typical way you find things in an RPG: you press X at everything.

But the Draw system was quite broken. You could near-instantly have absolutely monstrous soldiers that you could probably end up winning the game without touching again. All the espers were worth getting, though. Eden was the strongest spell in the game. Guaranteed 10k+ damage to all enemies. Pandemona was...well...the only good wind spell in the game. Same with Leviathan, the only good water spell. Same with Alexander, the only good Holy spell in the game (since you were undoubtedly junctioning Holy to your STR or HP). Carbuncle was good for its skills. Siren...was probably the least-useful. The converting items to magic was trumped by the converting magic into stronger magic (I forget who had that...I want to say the Brothers or Ifrit...), since magic is free.

The plot...back when I was young, it was great. In retrospect it was pretty lame.
 
True and either you played the card game and won all the rare character based cards *especially the Laguna card* or the game would be harder since you didn't convert those cards to items. Suikoden II didn't sell because of the release of this game, a damn shame.
 
Oh man, Triple Triad was the greatest game ever. I actually played Triple Triad online back in the day. But Suikoden II didn't sell because they only released like 30 copies of the game.
 
It didn't sell for a lot of reasons. The main reason being that Americans normally don't play RPG's. The other being that most people don't buy games that they don't understand the title of. Shin Megiumi Tensia almost never sells "well".
 
gillman said:
It didn't sell for a lot of reasons. The main reason being that Americans normally don't play RPG's. The other being that most people don't buy games that they don't understand the title of. Shin Megiumi Tensia almost never sells "well".
Click to expand...
No, a whole lot of it has to do with the simple fact that they released the game in extremely limited quantities. Seriously, they only released something like 50,000 units in America. That in itself doomed the game to sell no more than...well...50000 units. Obviously, it wouldn't have sold FFVII numbers. But I'd have to say that alot of the reason that the game was considered a crappy-selling game was because they released so few copies of the game. This has happened with many PS1/2 games. Just like with the Shin Megami series (before DDS) and MvC2 on the PS2 and Xbox, you don't really know how well the game would've sold since there wasn't enough to go around in the first place.
 
I love the fact that this forum seems to be dominated by the fact that we agree with most things, but argue about the details.

MegaTen (Shin Megami for those geeky enough to call it that) has only ever had one "big seller", with Digital Devil (which you did point out). Too bad that Digital Devil 2 didn't sell well at all. Devil Summoner (the newest one) sold like crap coated with rats.

I don't disagree with the low first shipment of Suikoden, but you have to remember that most companies stance on games they think aren't going to sell well is to ship out amazingly small first shipments and then reship based on the sales. Suikoden sat on shelves for months when it first came out which is why it only shipped that low number. (Classically, though, only two games have ever really gone beyond the first small shipment to sell vast amounts more, Katamari and Disgaea 1).
 
No, really. Suikoden 2 was shipped in extremely limited quantities. I am yet to find a copy in stores. And I always look.

FFT falls under that category with Katamari and Disgaea. I got it on Amazon for $80, only to see it come out on the PS1 Greatest Hits thing weeks later.
 
ff8 and suikoden 2 were both released on september of 99, one week apart. Now if bioshock and halo 3 were released a week apart do you think bioshock would have done the numbers it did?
 
But back then you only had word of mouth to tell you about games. Sure some people (me) had the internet and could go to gamespot or something and figure out the game looked great, but most people needed their friends to clue them into what games to buy.

Also gaming now is much different than then. The age bracket for a gamer has moved up from 12 - 25 to 18-35. That is just the hardcore gamers. Back then most of the people who gamed only got three or four games a year, and what were you going ot pick up for Christmas, a Final Fantasy game from a series that you knew and loved, or a sequal to a game that you remember one of your friends saying was pretty cool? This is also back when RPG was still considered a dirty word to most people.
 
So...just throwing it out there again...but there were such a slim number of copies of Suikoden 2 that yada yada yada.
 
Yes Suikoden II had a limited print run, when these games do that they usually range from 20,000 to 50,000, but copies did not exactly fly of the shelves, which is why there was never another print of the game. Disgaea originally only had a release of 50,000 but those copies sold like crazy due to good reviews and word of mouth. Suikoden II had good reviews, but one week earlier Final Fantasy VIII had been released, gee I wonder who took one over the other.

As far as the age demographic is concerned, hell jrpg players usually range from late teens to anywhere else, thus they could afford it. Hell I buy a new game every paycheck which is why I literally have a crapload of sealed games I have yet to open and play. I'll get around to that copy of stella deus and soul nomad someday.

One more thing, yes word of mouth was one of the ways to find out about games, hell thats how I found out about Chrono Trigger, but come on what hardcore gamer didn't read game mags? Hell I used to buy Gamepro every month and the first thing I flipped to was to the "Roleplayers Realm" section. Then I graduated to EGM and gameinformer. Once again who do you think was in the cover in the september 99 edition and previous months back?
 
If you still have a sealed copy of Stella deus that means that you can still bring it back and get money for it. It isn't bad, but it is so middle of the road that it hurts.

I would say that Pre-2001ish word of mouth was more important than gaming mags. Sure I learned about Chrono Trigger from Nintendo Power with the promise that "it would spoil me for every other game", but that game was also from Square. I was going to buy it even if it was called "Cancer: The bad kind, not the zodiac".

As for magazines I can remember reading reviews and just getting angry at the reviewers. Before FF7 Final Fantasy's used to get terrible reviews. I can remember reading a review for Breath of Fire 2 in EGM were the editor wrote something along of lines of saying that that since the game was too long he had trouble getting all of the reviews he had left done for that month, and was going to take off a point and a half for that. Even now reviewers constantly say that before they started reviewing RPGs were their favorite game type, now that they review it is their least favorite because it eats up so much of their time. That isn't what I really wanted to hear.
 
Final Fantasy Tactics, I'll remind you, wasn't a successful game in any way until they reprinted it.

Though really, Konami put out ALL their RPGs in limited quantities.
 
Final Fantasy Tactics sold well enough to justify it being reprinted. That is usually how it works. After selling a couple of hundred thousand copies a game recieves a greatest hits label. Xenogears took forever to be reprinted, I am clueless as to why.
 
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