[News] Record of Agarest War 2 is coming to North America

From what I've heard it's set to be released June 27, 2012.

I couldn't get into the first one. I was pissed... I spent 40 dollars and half a day downloading it (yeah, I went for the digital version) and then I kind've hated it immediately. The battle system was just.... ugh. And the story I found to be cliche and uncompeling from the start.

I actually like the idea of the whole dating-sim = new character thing... but I never got that far.

I actually played Record of Agarest War 1 longer than I should. 8 hours, to be exact. I didn't think the gameplay was bad myself, but the pace of the game was so drawn out, it felt like I didn't do anything significant yet. I should've known something was up when one of the first things the game made me fight against was a boulder.

I also actually got enough into the game to finally try to "flirt" with one of the women in my team immediately after she joined. It was actually.... very confusing. The game brought up a subject about the woman that I had no knowledge on, yet the game acted like I was suppose to know this. I decided to quit the game shortly after.

Don't know what Zero is like, but I hope both that and this coming sequel improved things over the original.

The original had some really great ideas (like the dating sim and offspring choices) but it was just way too long. By the beginning of the fourth generation I was just skipping all the dialogue to get to the end. I was committed at that point.

Zero was far better as it only had the two generations and it introduced a few more things that increased the simulation part while cutting down on the battles.

It is kind of unfortunate that you opted for the first one, Zipp. The prequel was in many ways superior and it included a way to actually play the original with most of the battles removed.

See, that in itself is frustrating, though. If a sequel/prequel actually REMOVES many of the battles from the original, then the original was essentially a BETA and never should have been released or hyped up the way it was.

Kind of how the DVD that came with Shenmue 2 proves that the original Shenmue should have just been a two-hour movie!

//Zig

You're not making sense, Zipp. The first game came out, people played it, and they didn't like certain elements. So the developers saw room for improvement and addressed those issues in a prequel (and possibly the sequel, for all we know). That's how things work. There's no point saying "The first was just a beta" because we happen to like elements in the next release better. It's simply iteration, one of the best things in gaming!

What I'm saying, Jason, is that if the update removes THE BATTLE SYSTEM or at least huge chunks of it, maybe some more thought should have gone into the original game. We're not talking about something like Super Smash Brothers Brawl, which added more characters, some new moves, and tightened the balance. We're not even talking a new direction with the game or a sequel. We're talking about a remake of the same game that basically admits that the original was crap... or at least needed a lot of attention.

You can call it what you like, but whatever it is, it doesn't seem like a very solid way to promote your company's ability to make good games. You didn't see Valve release a new version of Half Life a year after it was out that took out all of the shooting. Blizzard didn't rerelease Starcraft with all of the RTS removed.

Sorry, Zipp. My post wasn't very descriptive. Not sure how far you got into the original Agarest but I would imagine you saw the set up for it. In the actual game you would start in a town then travel to another one, but between them were two or three areas where you had to battle before you could move on.

It was virtually the same in Zero except there weren't thousands of them as they had two worlds instead of five. But they also had this other dimension that you could enter in and replay the original game (same story, same choices, same art), except you could move freely from one town to another without those two/three encounters. The only battles were related to the story--not the world map. And the upside was you enter at any time and could battle with the characters from Zero, meaning you could spend time building them up in the original world then go in there and be virtually invincible for a good portion of the game.

Sorry. I know even that's probably confusing but if you were looking to get through Agarest simply for the story I would recommend you do it that way. The original took me months to complete and I blazed through the other dimension in less than a week.

Edit - I do kind of agree with you, though. I wouldn't necessarily call it a Beta but I do think by them adding the game it was a way to give gamers the option for the story but removing everything that bogged them down in the original. Like Zig said, they took what essentially was a 80+ hour game and turned it into a 6 hour movie.

Right, and I'm sort've speaking philosophically as well, since I haven't played the remake. My reactions are only based off of what you've told me, so this isn't like my official stance on the series or anything.

That having been disclaimed, it just sounds like many RPGs these days, unfortunately. Padded beyond belief. In Western RPGs it works out sometimes, because the focus is rarely on story and you sort've set your own time limit for the game by continually not choosing to save the world just yet. But in JRPGs, the genre has really taken a kick to the nuts as the stories (and story has long been the focus of JRPG) being told just aren't worth 80 hours of listening to that story. I think the last JRPG I truly had fun playing was Odin Sphere. Even that was a little monotonous.

Although I'm playing FFVIII again and am literally putting rubber bands on the X button and doing other things in my apartment while the characters draw magic.

Surprisingly, I'm actually enjoying myself this time around. Maybe because I get a lot of homework done while playing. There's something wrong with that statement, though.