Help O-chan find more RPGs like Persona, Dragon Age, etc.

[Hoshikawa-kun]

On the Nintendo DS I would recommend Contact. It's the story of you the player making contact with the Professor, an alien(from your perspective) searching for other aliens(from his perspective), through your Nintendo DS. You don't exist except through talking to the Professor through the game screen, but you can control and influence a third alien, Terry, and change his character class through clothes that increase his power and make him more fun to be around. It eschews traditional magic user/fighter/red mage classes in favor of things like Flyboy(fighter pilot with no airplane) and Chef(food!)
I haven't personally finished the game yet. It has really snazzy music and is all about the connection between the Professor, the player, and Terry, and it does give that feeling of adventure. The areas you go to are also...really unconventional.

You said you liked Persona, so I would recommend playing the original Shin Megami Tensei on the SNES. It's not like the JRPGs most people are familiar with, as it's a Wizardry-style dungeon crawler with better graphics. It is more than pure combat, as it's probably the first JRPG to have multiple endings(1991, four years before Chrono Trigger made it cool) and it's a lot about different ideas of morality as much as it is cyberpunk dungeon crawling.

Since scarmullet mentioned Shenmue, I'll go ahead and throw in Segagaga on the Dreamcast. It's a JRPG+life sim that really needs more love. The premise is that Sega has lost control of all but 3% of the world market in gaming to the Dogma corporation(Sony) and enacts plan SGGG to resuscitate itself. This involves taking two random kids and making them company executives, and one of those kids is you. You travel into Sega's development studios, dark places where no one has gone in or out of for 25 years, and battle the rogue programmers, directors, and other developers until they run out of HP and can be recruited for hopefully-low salaries.
The high stress of game development has turned the developers into subhumans that have to be caged, and combat consists of yelling at them to get back to work in creative ways. Staff members consist of giant robots, blobs of alcohol, submarines, karate guys pasted onto robots, octopi...basically everything but a human being is working for Sega.
Once you've defeated and recruited enough developers, you can start on the sim portion of it, where you assemble teams to create particular kinds of games. The results vary--The Oilan King, Chopin III, Acewombat 2, Otalu Gear Solid, and so on. Actual Sega characters appear in Segagaga, like Sonic the Hedgehog, Alex Kidd, and various Phantasy Star characters. The game comes with a caveat though; it's only in Japanese.
...well, and we know what happened to Sega in real life.

[oOoOoOo]

I want to thank everyone for humouring me. There's a lot to think about here and reading through this thread I keep on noticing stuff I missed on the previous read through.

This probably says something about my attention span this week.

sexbot named Fisto

That's a beautiful name.

... Thousand Arms ... pervert ... powers up his swords ... power of love ...

I'm going to have to look into this.

EarthBound

I played Earthbound back when it came out, along with every other JRPG I could get my hands on. While somewhat humourous, it is basically just like Final Fantasy in terms of structure. That's the kind of JRPG I'm trying to avoid, because that used to be my bread and butter. ^^;

A lot of the JRPGs mentioned are ones I've played before. Apparently I'm more of a geekanoid than I realized.

For instance, despite Final Fantasy XIII being simply fucking gorgeous under the influence of fearsome cannabinoids, I couldn't deal with the fact that it was basically puzzles, fights, cutscenes. No actual character relationships. After doing Persona I just can't go back.

And it isn't that fighting is the problem. I don't care if there's fuckloads of fighting. Persona 3 and 4 have loads of fighting, as does Dragon Age (and yeah, I've played all the expansions).

Wow, I'm really looking forward to Dragon Age II.

The Path

I don't have a video card. My computer really is feeble. And your description sounded so tasty.

I've also recommended Ookami to you before.

And thank you for reminding me! Pretty~ pretty~ I'm pretty sure I saw some copies of this at the local used games place, so... hrmmm...

THREE REALLY INTERESTING SUGGESTIONS

For all my Persona love, it'd probably be foolhardy to ignore the rest of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, no? ^^;

And Contact seems quirky, and I have a DS so...

SHENMUE!

I've never played this. It sounds pretty intriguing. Now I have to weave an elaborate scheme to manage playing it. Emulation? Hmmm... because I do know a place that has Dreamcast games.

Vampires: The Masquerade: Bloodlines ... Planescape:Torment

Seems some of you people are big into White Wolf and D&D, hmm? ^_~ I played both systems tabletop in the past, so I guess I have some nostalgia towards this stuff. And being an Anne Rice fangirl... vampires... hrmmm... these games may be old enough for me to run.

For the record, my computer's so shit I have to watch pornography via my PS3.

[Great Genius Shinji-Sama]

Fable 3 just came out. Not sure how you feel about Fable in general? But I personally like it. Hope to get a copy of 3 before too long.

[oOoOoOo]

Please ship complementary Xbox 360s care of my public relations firm, thanky~

(I played Fable II at a friend's and it was fun, with the marriage and whatnot, so maybe I need to have a manic-level shopping spree.)

[Great Genius Shinji-Sama]

Oopsies. didn't realize you didn't have one.

[scarmullet]

I've never played this. It sounds pretty intriguing. Now I have to weave an elaborate scheme to manage playing it. Emulation? Hmmm... because I do know a place that has Dreamcast games.

If you are going to buy the game disc, just buy the system too. You cant emulate a dreamcast game using the game disc, you have to download it....from some where. Whats great is that Dreamcasts can be bought on the cheap now. If you have a 360 and a hard drive, the xbox version of Shenmue II is playable on 360, and it comes with a DVD movie of the first game....