Was out of town the past week, so I tried multiple SRPG's on PPSSPP to see what appealed most. Mainly between Jeanne D'Arc, FFT:WotL and Tactics Ogre: LUCT.
Jeanne D'Arc - I love the presentation, music and the historical euro tone it's inspired by. Also really like the simplicity of it... Reminds me of The OG Shining games. However, some of the characters are just straight goofy and weird. The art direction is hit/miss. But finally this game runs practically flawless at 2x resolution. Looks fantastic. Will dabble more with it.
FFT:WotL - Gonna be quite honest, there's a lot to like, but there's some awful design choices too. Of course it's a matter of taste, but the character designer/artist for this fucking sucks... at least for such a game with a serious tone and dialogue. Granted, the sprite work is tolerable, but the portraits and so forth... Could they have not made the main character so questionable looking? That is a male, right? WTF. This artist's style works for the other games they've done, but I hate it here. Also, the navigation around the field is clunky as hell. It's such a chore to pier around obstacles when compared to say Jeanne D'Arc. Other than that, I do like the way they handle classes/jobs. The balance between simplicity and being overly complicated is just right…. But the two issues I have above, not sure if I can tolerate it further.
Tactics Ogre: LUCT – I restarted my game on this one from when I last tried it back in 2018. This game also runs so much better now on PPSSPP as well. Off the bat, the art direction is light years better than FFT. I absolutely love this artist. It captures the more serious tone of warfare and drama between characters. I also really enjoy how sprawled out the maps are and the ease of navigating around it. However, there are some questionable aspects of it like the class upgrading system. And some of the level/height/distance advantages have a bit of a learning curve. I am a little intimidated by how long this game can take to play through, but we’ll see how long this SRPG phase will go. So far, TO has been the most appealing of the 3 I tried.
Oh, and I tried Persona 3 Portable yet again… These Persona/SMT games just do not do anything for me at all. I just don’t get the appeal for this series.