Ooohhh, EarthBound is a good one! I do sometimes like JRPGs on the shorter side, especially since there's just so god damn many to get through! Great video, Shinky 🌵
@Shinky Oh right, you compiled such a good list that I thought perhaps it just didn't make the cut! Well, in that case, I hope you enjoy them they are absolutely two of the best pixel jrpgs ever made especially suikoden 2.
Great list! I'm currently playing Persona 5 Royal for the first time. I've put in 70 hours, and while I'm enjoying it, I definitely think I prefer slightly more compact experiences... at least for a while, haha. So this list is perfect for me. 25 hours sounds just right. From the list, I think I'll go for Lufia II-I've had it on my backlog for a couple of decades now. xD
Haven't made it to end of video yet, but my favorite short RPG is Illusion of Gaia. It's an action RPG with great music. As for better music than Lufia, FF7 & FF6 boss music, Atma Weapon FF6, Knight of Fire boss music Xenogears, Dancing Mad FF6, One Who Bares Fangs at God Xenogears, FF7 & FF6 battle theme, and if you count Illusion of Gaia many of it's songs rock. The Guardian song is amazing for a fight.
I really want to play the entire heaven and earth trilogy, illusion of Gaia looks fantastic but so does soul blazer and Terranigma. Those are all very positive soundtracks
About the Golden Sun conundrum: I used to have a REAL problem with this. So many of my favorites for decades I didn't finish until the last few years. If you're anything like me, it's that you get caught in this mix of wanting your playthrough to be "just right" since you love the game so much and you don't want it to be over. I overcame this my completely changing my mentality: I always come back to my favorite games to play them over again, so I adjusted my thinking; this isn't THE definitive playthrough of this game, this is just my first playthrough. There's no limit to how many times I can come back to it, and once you get to the end, you'll understand the total scope of the game and you can goof around and explore more on later runs!
Eternal sonata would fit in this category, i beat the game 100% in like 23 hours. That includes optional dungeons and bosses, i heard some speedrunners beat the game in 2 hours haha
Also, yes, the Lufia II boss theme is amazing. I loved it so much, that I taught myself how to play it on the guitar. 😅 The Final Fantasy Mystic Quest final boss theme is close though.
Trials of mana is so good! I recommend you play with the original voices (japanese), Charlotte sounds like a fun little girl. Some of short rpg I can remember, is I am Setsuna and Oninaki, both developed by a sub Division or something like that from SquareEnix called Tokyo RPG factory
Suikoden or Witcher 3 Hearts of Stone are both in the 10-20 hour range - granted, Hearts of Stone is best played after The Wild Hunt, but it can be played independently. (Sorry, I never really separated RPGs based on country or get why people do this, particularly for Japan)
@@Shinky I'd say different styles exist in all different countries. Japan probably has the highest diversity. As for Suikoden, the remaster of 1 and 2 is coming out in a few months. Witcher 3 is like a series of novels and short stories in a game, so you can kind of think of it as a series where your character carries over - there are three main parts: The Wild Hunt, Hearts of Stone, and Blood and Wine - the latter two being more polished than The Wild Hunt... but, The Wild Hunt can be split into several smaller parts: 1. White Orchard (if you're playing Hearts of Stone and not the rest of The Wild Hunt, I'd recommend doing this part first, since it teaches you the game). 2. Velen 3. Novigrad 4. Skellige 5. Kaer Morhen and the "main story" across the world (and beyond). While all of The Wild Hunt still centres around the same narrative - think of them like books in a fantasy series like Wheel of Time - Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are two independent stories. Hearts of Stone takes place in Redania, has the famous wedding story. Blood and Wine is in a whole new region with another massive city that is a lot prettier than the rest of the game. It focuses on the late medieval/renaissance era wine industry along with a vampire story, also, knights and fairy-tale like stories. While Witcher is an action game, the systems have similarities to Final Fantasy games - there are systems like Xenoblade FF7, FF8, and FF Tactics (so you know it's difficult to explain) - there's a streamlined version of the junction system where AP/Magic for functioning are somewhat combined and you equip these to unlock abilities (rather than unlocking abilities with AP and equipping them). Like FF8 as well, there's crafting. Like FF7's material system, you can fit your weapons and armour with gems to grant bonuses - but spells are more like Xenoblade, except you have them from the start, but you can upgrade them through the ability system. Also, like Xenoblade, you get your inventory flooded with drops - best selling most of it.
@@Shinky btw i havent finished your vid yet but im already listing games that interest me like live a live. So thank you for your hard work Cause a short game should be nice, im about to finish a korean rpg called troubleshooter:abandoned children and that took me 140hrs cause devs kept updating the game with new story for free for years
ys origin's music is usually half the reason i play it !! gameplay simple but super fun too. plus each of the 3 mcs (one is unlocked after 2 playthroughs) has their own story. so one hero's story is perfect if u want sth short and just hack n slash and vibe. playing visions of mana rn and am absolutely in love (its longer though).
Highly recommend people try out the original Seiken Densetsu 3, especially fans of classic pixel art, because it absolutely has some of the best and most beautiful pixel art of the era. If you like this kind of art, rhe game doesn't really seem dated at all. It was one of the first major action RPGs to have a day and night cycle, it improves on the gameplay of the original Secret of Mana, and the music is just absolutely gorgeous. One of my favorite SNES/SFC games of all time.
You know, I wonder if auto-retargeting was ever a matter of processing speed in the first place. I kind of doubt it, honestly. It's comparatively trivial to implement and probably wouldn't have strained the NES any more than pretty much anything else in the game. Now, I have never coded for the NES or any system of that ilk, so I don't know the particulars of that "development kit," and I certainly have never written in assembly, which is what what those old console games ran on, but the underlying logic is very simple. Before the player character hits their target enemy, you'd need to check if the target enemy is still up. This can be done a few different ways, depending on preference and how the combat system itself is set up. Then you'd either proceed as directed, if the answer is true, or repeat the process for the next enemy in line, if the answer is false. Once the answer comes back as true again, the enemy in question gets the damage applied to it. The game already has to keep track of enemy status and encounter status (otherwise, it wouldn't have a way to know that a battle has been won or lost), so the framework to do all of this is likely already in place, and with only about a handful of enemies in most encounters, it's hardly going to tax the processor. If it can handle Mario's "physics," or more than two goombas on screen at any given time, it can handle the equivalent of a for loop with maybe between two and seven iterations on average, right? Either way, it wouldn't ever be more than a few lines of code in a "higher level" programming language. In assembly, I suspect it'd take a bit more doing, since assembly is just ... WAY less user friendly to work with by a big stretch, but, again, I personally doubt it would break the bank on the hardware front. It's still just a simple conditional. So if there's a external limitation responsible for this choice, it probably has more to do with the programmer just not feeling up to it than anything else. My own first experience with that kind of combat was the very first Final Fantasy, which I played, in its original NES format, waaaay after getting into the series with the newer games, and it was, indeed SUPER jarring. I also don't think it's a great design choice. Not exactly a huge fan of it. However, my own personal theory is that it WAS indeed, a conscious design choice, and not a byproduct of a technical limitation. I could be wrong of course, but it's important to note that, despite following up on games like Wizardry and Ultima in the west, and Dragon Quest on the homefront, Final Fantasy, as one example, was such an early example of the genre that hard and fast established conventions were basically nonexistent. Again, I wouldn't defend it to the end of the earth by any stretch, but I also suspect that it may have been a choice made in service of intentionally complicating the random battles and adding a layer of strategy to what was otherwise a relatively simplistic system. It forces you to carefully consider each command, and to think differently about your action economy and the way your party's potential damage is spread, since auto-retargeting does risk trivializing many encounters by letting you hold down the confirm button and naturally drawing out an almost optimal damage cascade each time. This way, you had to actually make choices - do you double or even triple up on this particularly tricky enemy to ensure that it goes down, at the risk of potentially wasting one of your characters' actions, or do you spread the damage out evenly in the early stages of an encounter to better maximize your overall damage output at the expense of potentially leaving more enemies, or certain hardier enemies, standing and able to retaliate. In the end, I wouldn't necessarily begrudge even a modern indie from trying to implement this, but there is no denying that it FEELS extremely frustrating at points, much more so than something like the SMT Press Turn system, which often has similar moments of risk-reward-punishment, but somehow frames in a more palatable way. I think it's because it doesn't seem to naturally "make sense" to us, even if the entire system is already a massive abstraction, so it probably feels more unfair and unintuitive than a system that couches a similar strategic element in a more "logical" alibi or explanation. All just a theory, though. Don't mind me. Sometimes, when I have a thought or question, I just have to write it out in basically essay form in order to shake it out of my very, very neuroatypical brain.
This is such a nice read. Talking about the auto-retarget that was just a theory. I’m not a software programmer and have no idea about what’s needed for auto-retargetting. I’m not gonna hate on a game for it but it just feels a bit annoying, though it does make you think a little deeper as opposed to spamming one attack. So I guess it adds to the interactivity of the game, I still don’t care for it though
BUT the DS Chrono trigger took me AROUND 25 to 30 hours I only got 20 out of the SNES/PS1 version. Golden Sun BOTH GBA games are doable in under 25 as long as you don't bother to lv up to lv 99 in either one.
Gotta put my um actually glasses and push them up. Golden sun isn't part of a 2 game series, it's 1 game split to two cartridges because it won't fit on one, the ending is bad of you play it stand alone, it isn't meant to be experienced stand alone. It and lost world are 1 game just had to split due to gba cart limits
@Shinky I disagree, trails, ys, and atelier all have planned multipart series across a franchise. Golden sun wasn't meant to be two parts it was split in the middle of production because it was too big
Ooohhh, EarthBound is a good one! I do sometimes like JRPGs on the shorter side, especially since there's just so god damn many to get through! Great video, Shinky 🌵
I’m getting more and more accustom to shorter games with limited time
@Shinky Absolutely 💯
Great list! I seriously have to play Golden Sun!!!
Time to boot up that switch!
How did suikoden 1 not make the list, probably the single greatest short jrpg of all time, (apart from chrono trigger of course)
I haven’t played Suikoden yet, I never got to experience it growing up. I will be playing it when the remaster comes out though
@Shinky Oh right, you compiled such a good list that I thought perhaps it just didn't make the cut! Well, in that case, I hope you enjoy them they are absolutely two of the best pixel jrpgs ever made especially suikoden 2.
Pretty good list and topic! I would also include Super Mario RPG that can take you approx 12 hours or more.
That one was going to be on the list but ultimately I decided to replace it
Let's Go Awesome Video brother have a great day
@8:05 SMT IV - Battle B2 would like a word
Hey Shinky, great list! Yeah I really need to play Trial of mana, someday!
Great list! I'm currently playing Persona 5 Royal for the first time. I've put in 70 hours, and while I'm enjoying it, I definitely think I prefer slightly more compact experiences... at least for a while, haha. So this list is perfect for me. 25 hours sounds just right. From the list, I think I'll go for Lufia II-I've had it on my backlog for a couple of decades now. xD
Oh please play Lufia 2, it’s so amazing! Keep in mind it might last you up to 40 hours if you decide to do everything. Still a worthwhile play
@@Shinky 40 hours sounds like a lot, but definitely short compared to Persona 5, so it's added to my backlog! Thanks for the recommendation, haha
I just snagged the original Live a Live translation on my FXPAK Pro. Thanks for the tip dude; can't wait to check it out when I get a minute
It’s really fun. The distant future timeline is basically a horror game done to the tune of aliens. I hope you enjoy it
Haven't made it to end of video yet, but my favorite short RPG is Illusion of Gaia. It's an action RPG with great music.
As for better music than Lufia, FF7 & FF6 boss music, Atma Weapon FF6, Knight of Fire boss music Xenogears, Dancing Mad FF6, One Who Bares Fangs at God Xenogears, FF7 & FF6 battle theme, and if you count Illusion of Gaia many of it's songs rock. The Guardian song is amazing for a fight.
I really want to play the entire heaven and earth trilogy, illusion of Gaia looks fantastic but so does soul blazer and Terranigma.
Those are all very positive soundtracks
About the Golden Sun conundrum: I used to have a REAL problem with this. So many of my favorites for decades I didn't finish until the last few years.
If you're anything like me, it's that you get caught in this mix of wanting your playthrough to be "just right" since you love the game so much and you don't want it to be over.
I overcame this my completely changing my mentality: I always come back to my favorite games to play them over again, so I adjusted my thinking; this isn't THE definitive playthrough of this game, this is just my first playthrough. There's no limit to how many times I can come back to it, and once you get to the end, you'll understand the total scope of the game and you can goof around and explore more on later runs!
Eternal sonata would fit in this category, i beat the game 100% in like 23 hours. That includes optional dungeons and bosses, i heard some speedrunners beat the game in 2 hours haha
THREADS OF FATE WOOO! My favorite short RPG is just Final Fantasy on NES a fun four hours.
That’s impressive, I play through that in about 10-12 hours
Also, yes, the Lufia II boss theme is amazing. I loved it so much, that I taught myself how to play it on the guitar. 😅 The Final Fantasy Mystic Quest final boss theme is close though.
Mystic Quest might not have much, but its OST is top tier.
Trials of mana is so good! I recommend you play with the original voices (japanese), Charlotte sounds like a fun little girl.
Some of short rpg I can remember, is I am Setsuna and Oninaki, both developed by a sub Division or something like that from SquareEnix called Tokyo RPG factory
I adore I am setsuna, I still need to play Lost Sphear and Oninaki though.
The shinkinator
That’s me!
Suikoden or Witcher 3 Hearts of Stone are both in the 10-20 hour range - granted, Hearts of Stone is best played after The Wild Hunt, but it can be played independently.
(Sorry, I never really separated RPGs based on country or get why people do this, particularly for Japan)
It’s more to differentiate as a style. But I actually haven’t played either of those.
@@Shinky I'd say different styles exist in all different countries. Japan probably has the highest diversity.
As for Suikoden, the remaster of 1 and 2 is coming out in a few months.
Witcher 3 is like a series of novels and short stories in a game, so you can kind of think of it as a series where your character carries over - there are three main parts: The Wild Hunt, Hearts of Stone, and Blood and Wine - the latter two being more polished than The Wild Hunt... but, The Wild Hunt can be split into several smaller parts:
1. White Orchard (if you're playing Hearts of Stone and not the rest of The Wild Hunt, I'd recommend doing this part first, since it teaches you the game).
2. Velen
3. Novigrad
4. Skellige
5. Kaer Morhen and the "main story" across the world (and beyond).
While all of The Wild Hunt still centres around the same narrative - think of them like books in a fantasy series like Wheel of Time - Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are two independent stories.
Hearts of Stone takes place in Redania, has the famous wedding story.
Blood and Wine is in a whole new region with another massive city that is a lot prettier than the rest of the game. It focuses on the late medieval/renaissance era wine industry along with a vampire story, also, knights and fairy-tale like stories.
While Witcher is an action game, the systems have similarities to Final Fantasy games - there are systems like Xenoblade FF7, FF8, and FF Tactics (so you know it's difficult to explain) - there's a streamlined version of the junction system where AP/Magic for functioning are somewhat combined and you equip these to unlock abilities (rather than unlocking abilities with AP and equipping them). Like FF8 as well, there's crafting. Like FF7's material system, you can fit your weapons and armour with gems to grant bonuses - but spells are more like Xenoblade, except you have them from the start, but you can upgrade them through the ability system.
Also, like Xenoblade, you get your inventory flooded with drops - best selling most of it.
The algorithm is so funny this video got recommended after i just watched a guy ranting that jrpgs are too long
Was that person just the gems?
@Shinky yup
Great channel!
@@Shinky btw i havent finished your vid yet but im already listing games that interest me like live a live. So thank you for your hard work
Cause a short game should be nice, im about to finish a korean rpg called troubleshooter:abandoned children and that took me 140hrs cause devs kept updating the game with new story for free for years
ys origin's music is usually half the reason i play it !! gameplay simple but super fun too. plus each of the 3 mcs (one is unlocked after 2 playthroughs) has their own story. so one hero's story is perfect if u want sth short and just hack n slash and vibe. playing visions of mana rn and am absolutely in love (its longer though).
It’s so good!
Highly recommend people try out the original Seiken Densetsu 3, especially fans of classic pixel art, because it absolutely has some of the best and most beautiful pixel art of the era. If you like this kind of art, rhe game doesn't really seem dated at all. It was one of the first major action RPGs to have a day and night cycle, it improves on the gameplay of the original Secret of Mana, and the music is just absolutely gorgeous. One of my favorite SNES/SFC games of all time.
I played that this summer, I really liked it
I know I talked about it on your hidden gems video, but Child of light is about 10 or so hours lol
Also a good choice!
You know, I wonder if auto-retargeting was ever a matter of processing speed in the first place. I kind of doubt it, honestly. It's comparatively trivial to implement and probably wouldn't have strained the NES any more than pretty much anything else in the game.
Now, I have never coded for the NES or any system of that ilk, so I don't know the particulars of that "development kit," and I certainly have never written in assembly, which is what what those old console games ran on, but the underlying logic is very simple.
Before the player character hits their target enemy, you'd need to check if the target enemy is still up. This can be done a few different ways, depending on preference and how the combat system itself is set up. Then you'd either proceed as directed, if the answer is true, or repeat the process for the next enemy in line, if the answer is false. Once the answer comes back as true again, the enemy in question gets the damage applied to it. The game already has to keep track of enemy status and encounter status (otherwise, it wouldn't have a way to know that a battle has been won or lost), so the framework to do all of this is likely already in place, and with only about a handful of enemies in most encounters, it's hardly going to tax the processor. If it can handle Mario's "physics," or more than two goombas on screen at any given time, it can handle the equivalent of a for loop with maybe between two and seven iterations on average, right?
Either way, it wouldn't ever be more than a few lines of code in a "higher level" programming language. In assembly, I suspect it'd take a bit more doing, since assembly is just ... WAY less user friendly to work with by a big stretch, but, again, I personally doubt it would break the bank on the hardware front. It's still just a simple conditional. So if there's a external limitation responsible for this choice, it probably has more to do with the programmer just not feeling up to it than anything else.
My own first experience with that kind of combat was the very first Final Fantasy, which I played, in its original NES format, waaaay after getting into the series with the newer games, and it was, indeed SUPER jarring. I also don't think it's a great design choice. Not exactly a huge fan of it. However, my own personal theory is that it WAS indeed, a conscious design choice, and not a byproduct of a technical limitation. I could be wrong of course, but it's important to note that, despite following up on games like Wizardry and Ultima in the west, and Dragon Quest on the homefront, Final Fantasy, as one example, was such an early example of the genre that hard and fast established conventions were basically nonexistent.
Again, I wouldn't defend it to the end of the earth by any stretch, but I also suspect that it may have been a choice made in service of intentionally complicating the random battles and adding a layer of strategy to what was otherwise a relatively simplistic system. It forces you to carefully consider each command, and to think differently about your action economy and the way your party's potential damage is spread, since auto-retargeting does risk trivializing many encounters by letting you hold down the confirm button and naturally drawing out an almost optimal damage cascade each time. This way, you had to actually make choices - do you double or even triple up on this particularly tricky enemy to ensure that it goes down, at the risk of potentially wasting one of your characters' actions, or do you spread the damage out evenly in the early stages of an encounter to better maximize your overall damage output at the expense of potentially leaving more enemies, or certain hardier enemies, standing and able to retaliate.
In the end, I wouldn't necessarily begrudge even a modern indie from trying to implement this, but there is no denying that it FEELS extremely frustrating at points, much more so than something like the SMT Press Turn system, which often has similar moments of risk-reward-punishment, but somehow frames in a more palatable way. I think it's because it doesn't seem to naturally "make sense" to us, even if the entire system is already a massive abstraction, so it probably feels more unfair and unintuitive than a system that couches a similar strategic element in a more "logical" alibi or explanation.
All just a theory, though. Don't mind me. Sometimes, when I have a thought or question, I just have to write it out in basically essay form in order to shake it out of my very, very neuroatypical brain.
This is such a nice read. Talking about the auto-retarget that was just a theory. I’m not a software programmer and have no idea about what’s needed for auto-retargetting. I’m not gonna hate on a game for it but it just feels a bit annoying, though it does make you think a little deeper as opposed to spamming one attack. So I guess it adds to the interactivity of the game, I still don’t care for it though
BUT the DS Chrono trigger took me AROUND 25 to 30 hours I only got 20 out of the SNES/PS1 version.
Golden Sun BOTH GBA games are doable in under 25 as long as you don't bother to lv up to lv 99 in either one.
Most gamers DON’T level to 99 in most JRPGs, that’s overkill
Well the FINAL spells in BOTH Golden Sun games top out at lv 54 that alone FOR BOTH would easily make the games 30 or MORE hours long.
Better Battle theme "Silver Will" from Trails in the Sky
Definitely a good one
Is it Trials of Mana or Trials of Monnaw? 😀
Yeah I’m inconsistent with the word mana lol
It’s pronounced live
alive
Gotta put my um actually glasses and push them up. Golden sun isn't part of a 2 game series, it's 1 game split to two cartridges because it won't fit on one, the ending is bad of you play it stand alone, it isn't meant to be experienced stand alone. It and lost world are 1 game just had to split due to gba cart limits
I suppose, but it’s about as much of a multipart series as the trails in the sky games. Or Ys 1 and 2.
@Shinky I disagree, trails, ys, and atelier all have planned multipart series across a franchise. Golden sun wasn't meant to be two parts it was split in the middle of production because it was too big
Love this Shinky. How cool to see the goated Chrono Trigger in this list?
I just love chrono trigger lol