8 PS3 JRPGs You Should Avoid

The PS3 era was not the era for JRPGs to thrive. The magic that the PS1 and PS2 had was just gone, the originality of the art style was gone, and in place was a consistent yet dull and dry type of 3D blah with bad locations, characters that were reduced to a bad looking 3D anime effort that never got beat.

There were a few solid ones for sure, but too many of them felt overdone or undercooked. I think the developers just didn’t care, or didn’t buy into their own idea. Everyone wanted to emerge and catch the trends, but in the process, they left the soul of the brand behind.

We’re going to take a look at some of the best PS3 JRPGs from the past.

8

The White Knight Chronicles

Without Ideas

No, it’s not a game about your Instagram posts in 2018, but instead, White Knight Chronicles is a game that, if you’ve never played a JRPG before, you can imagine that it’s actually something special and different. And that’s because it’s like asking ChatGPT to write a JRPG. That is, it has all the tropes, cool moves, powerful transformations, kingdom attacks, and almost every level of JRPG vision you’ve ever had, it’s here.

So while you could certainly do worse, you get nothing new here. It has familiar characters, familiar villains, and familiar situations, and while the combat has unique real-time-like visuals with a pause system, there’s very little here that you haven’t seen before. It’s just not worth the endless grind involved in the game, and the empty spaces make it a real slog that isn’t worth the time.

7

Time and Eternity

A Waste of Great Art

Time and Eternity is about a man who goes back to stop his murder. It’s a cool idea, and there’s a nice art style here, with nice hand-drawn sprites in combat, which is a style I’ve been looking for in good JRPGs for a long time. But unfortunately, this game wastes that on terrible anime tropes, pervy jokes, and combat that refuses to appear throughout the game.

Time and Eternity will certainly catch your eye, but after you’ve been fooled, you’ll see what it’s all about sadly. Art can only carry so much when every moment is filled with fan service, limited exploration, bad dialogue, and a weird feeling that permeates every moment of the game. It might be a revolution in JRPGs as the art style is so amazing, but everything else is a mess.

6

Cross Edge

All Flash, No Sizzle

Cross Edge has all the elements you need to be a great JRPG. Amazing looking art, cool combat system, lots of characters, and colorful world. But like most of the games on this list, it lacks that secret sauce that has unlocked the keys to the JRPG hit kingdom for so long.

But that’s unfortunately, all the best the game expects. The combat is certainly a highlight, but the grind required to succeed in this game is among the worst I’ve ever experienced in a JRPG, and that’s really saying a lot. Then again, the characters, where there are plenty, all fall into one boring and tired anime trope or another. Finally, segments of the non-conformist fans use characters that appear to be children. It’s a problem with a lot of JRPGs, but here it just shines through with the horror flavor. Good combat can’t save a game that decides to put effort into things no one should put effort into.

5

Legends of Styria

A Legend You Must Forget

Tales of Zestiria has its defenders, but as far as the Tales series goes, this one is pretty forgettable and an experience I wouldn’t say anyone needs to play unless they’ve finished the entire series and want to play every Tales title imaginable. Yes, it’s a sequel to the epic Berseria legends, and to get the full scope of that world, I suppose you could play this one and grit your teeth at the obviousness of it all, but there are a few reasons why you shouldn’t.

The game world is one of the brightest I have ever seen in a game of this budget. Bandai Namco has deep pockets, and it seems like they haven’t tried here. Regardless of the boring towns and cities you’ll explore in dungeons that repeat the same looking rooms over and over again, this is one of the poorest attempts at creating a compelling world I’ve seen in a game.

Then there’s the fighting, which has cool visuals and sounds good enough in action, but the camera is a nightmare, and most of the fighting is indoors, and that makes things difficult to track because of how crowded it all feels. There are many players, but with this camera, we wish you luck to see what is happening even on the screen, since it is as big an enemy as the monsters you will fight in the game. It’s a game that, if you can get merchandise for $5, you could do a lot worse, but there are much greener pastures in the JRPG world to put more time into.

4

Natural Doctrine

A Masochist’s Dream

Natural Doctrine is a game I came across some years ago and thought it looked great. It’s a brutal looking game that seems to defy the usual JRPG look. And that comes with the sophistication of the story and the overall look of the game. It’s a small story about a soldier fighting hordes of goblins, and you’ll be doing a lot of fighting here.

The problem is that the combat is vaguely ambiguous. You need a YouTube tutorial to understand half the mechanics in the game. The combat is pretty good, once you get a feel for what’s going on in the game. There’s the first order, there’s the grid to worry about, and you need to figure out how to open doors, too. It’s just bad.

You can stare at this game’s guides for hours and not really understand what you just read. It’s not a bad game by any means, and if you really want a crazy challenge, you can give it a shot, but I’d avoid it because it’s not worth the ridiculous amount of work you need to do to make it a fun experience.

3

Final Fantasy XIII

You missed the Magic

Some may think this inclusion is heresy, but as a lifelong Final Fantasy fan, with 30 years of experience with the series, I can’t recommend the game enough for a variety of reasons. First, the main character, lightning, is the most boring of the series. Yeah, he’s badass, he’s got a cool design, but he’s incredibly dull, and that kind of overrides any of the other stuff for me. But there are other characters, like Snow, who, despite the appearance of a classic Final Fantasy hero, can’t shut up about being a hero, so he couldn’t care less if he becomes a hero.

Then characters like Hope and Vanille show up with the worst voice acting in the world, and I think many others were begging for poor Sazh to be cast in a better way. Then there’s the fighting, which I’ll say at the end, like 20+ hours, it’s finally good, but those 20 hours open up some of the most uninspired armies the series has ever seen.

You control one character at a time, and even if you can switch to different Paradigms, they all feel very weak. Seriously, go look for magic attacks in this game; they look and feel very sad compared to the rest of the series. Although the story is good, this trilogy should not have happened, and, although there are worse games, I can’t say that this is a game that you should really play.

2

A record of the Agarest War

Record Repetition

Record of Agarest War is a game that had great potential. It has a great premise, where you play characters that spawn many generations of characters to play as. The game is equal parts JRPG and dating sim. Depending on who you fall in love with, that offspring becomes the main character. It’s a really cool idea to, unfortunately, get caught in a wave of trash.

The dialogue is painful to sit through, none of the characters ever have a personality to speak of, so the relationships you build have no impact at all. The combat is decent enough, with a grid-based turn-based system with smooth graphics and high-quality surface movement that looks great, too. However, the battles never end, and nothing interesting ever happens. What starts out as something that sounds cool and fresh quickly becomes so boring that you can’t care less about what’s going on in the story, and the whole experience becomes too bloated to hold your attention all that time.

1

The Last Rebellion

Close to Being a Thing

The Last Rebellion has many very interesting features. Still, it manages to shoot it all down spectacularly over and over until it’s impressive. For example, the story is very interesting, it’s about two people with one soul, but honestly, they don’t do anything in a bright sense. There’s also some solid combat here, but there’s almost nothing else to do, so it feels like the game wants you to get tired of the combat before you’ve played enough to really get into it.

For example, combat takes place in some of the most uninspired areas you’ve ever seen in a game. In fact, room after room feels like one copy and paste property after another. The combat, where most of the game will be, has some cool features like targeting enemies’ body parts, but the combat goes on, on, on. Every enemy is a damage sponge, making bosses feel no different than normal enemies. It also has bad lip-syncing and a terrible voice acting, too. This was 2010, so there is no excuse for low effort in this regard. The Last Rebellion is so lazy that it forgot to put “The” before the title.