Turn based RPG's for xbox 360, wii, or PC

[The J Pizzel]

I've kinda run out of games to play. WoW is getting hella old. Not to mention my wife started playing...yeah...oops!! So she plays all the time now. Meanwhile I'm just sitting thier on my xbox 360 crying myself into self depression while listening to 6-9 year olds insult me cause I didn't spawn and go get the rocket launcher on halo3 and how we're now going to lose this game, which apparently is, in thier minds, a catosrophic event. So at this point I've reached a critical low in my gaming life to the point that I just hope to find some cool war/nature/history/concert documentary on one of my cool HD channels (42' plasma w/ DirecTV HD = work of art) and of course, there's not one on, so now I resort to watching "The Girls Next Door" on E while pondering the idea that those same whinning kids who are obsessed over the rocket launcher fiasco are probably gonna be running the country while I get to retirement. Bottom line: I need a game to fill my spare time.

I like turn-based RPG's. At least, those are my favorites. First person shooters are cool too, but turn-based are the best. Examples of my favorites: KOTOR 1 and 2, LotR: The Third Age, all Final Fantasy's.

I like games that pause, go into attack mode give you all the time in the world to decide your attacks. I have a Wii, xbox 360, and a pretty decently specked computer (2.5 gig RAM, nVidia 7300 graphics card, 2.4 processor, brand new 22inch LG widescreen:smallbiggrin:,). Any advice on a new game is appreciated.

jP

[Rogue 7]

FF 13 comes out reasonably soon, I hear. Mass Effect is basically KOTOR without the Star Wars and with more FPS elements (it's pretty fun). On the Wii's virtual console, Paper Mario (1 and 2) is both fun and hilariously funny.

[factotum]

Find the Fallout games. Turn-based combat married to awesome storytelling and one of the best RPG skill systems ever devised...quite old now, though, so don't apply if gosh-wow graphics are your thing!

[Triaxx]

RE4 on the Wii is fantastic. Pretty slow paced, but that's what you're after. There are some pretty frantic points though.

I don't know much on the 360, but FFT will probably fill your time pretty throughly. (Get the PSX version for the love of all that is holy! *cough*)

On the PC... Fallout 1&2 are FANTASTIC. Like 2 better myself. There's also Fallout Tactics, but that's expensive. Battle for Wesnoth is a Turn-Based Strategy for the PC, and it's FREE. Return to Temple of Elemental Evil is Turn-based, but it's kind of... boring at times. It's almost required to play with the Co8 mod.

[Ranis]

Lost Odyssey on the 360. You'll love it. I promise.

[Mando Knight]

Fire Emblem is good, but it's also Nintendo Hard. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard) Not quite so much an RPG as a tactics/strategy game, but it'll eat up all the hours that your wife's playing WoW... especially if you try to unlock all of the secret characters for the bonus maps in Path of Radiance.

[Eakin]

Are you sure you aren't willing to go portable? The DS has tons of Real Time and Turn Based strategy titles. The Advance wars series, for starters, and soon a port of Disgaea and probably others I cant remember off the top of my head.

Otherwise, you can't go wrong with the civilization series, or Galactic Civilizations. Not really RPGs, though.

[Rogue 7]

Oh god, I'm going to have to glue my brother's DS to my hands for the summer. I need to do a complete Pokemon Diamond run (just the badges and whatnot, I'm not insane), finish my copy of Sapphire, I want to try Advance Wars, there's Phantom Hourglass, apparently some really good Square Enix RPGs coming out, Tales of Phantasia if I can find it, and apparently there's a port of Disgaea coming out for it, which, based on the recommendation of many people on here, I really want to try. Then there's Mass Effect, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, and the inevitable Halo sessions with my brother...It's going to be a busy symmer.

Edit: AND Fire Emblem. Gods, this is insane.

[Dhavaer]

Lost Odyssey on the 360. You'll love it. I promise.

A note, though: the game is about 3/5 cutscenes. Don't buy if this would annoy you.

[Metal Head]

Lost Odyssey on the 360. You'll love it. I promise.

I second that. Also, Oblivion is a great RPG. It's not turn based at all, so it might not fit your tastes, but I still consider it to be a great RPG. Also, if your PC is up to it get The Witcher. It lets you pause and choose your weapon, your fighting style, what spell you're going to use, drink some potions, and other stuff.

[Khalle]

A note, though: the game is about 3/5 cutscenes. Don't buy if this would annoy you.

And supposedly has annoyingly infrequent save points, though I haven't played yet so I don't know how bad they are. If you are anything like me and have a busy life, that sucks. I pretty much refuse to buy any game that doesn't let me save anywhere any more; that's probably the only single thing that will give me a yes or no all by itself.

I'll second a Witcher suggestion. I'm having fun with it right now. Not an outstanding game, but very fun (although chapter 4 so far seems to be nothing but random stuff thrown in to make the game longer, barely relevant to the story at all), and I see good replay value. I think they are going to release a much improved version here soon though, so you might want to wait for that.

[Holammer]

Find the Fallout games. Turn-based combat married to awesome storytelling and one of the best RPG skill systems ever devised...quite old now, though, so don't apply if gosh-wow graphics are your thing!

What good ol' factotum said. Try getting Fallout 1-2 running. Both are great games, the very epitome of turn based RPGs even.
Fallout1 is so well crafted you can actually complete it with a minimum of shots fired simply by going taking a diplomacy route thought out the game. Fallout2 is good as well, but the hardcore fans will go all snobby French because of the New Reno segment and the admittedly excessive use of pop culture references.
You might also want to try Planescape Torment, not a straight turn based RPG but one of the best in the genre.

[Triaxx]

You'll likely need a map slower to play F1/2 properly, otherwise you zip everywhere on foot and never find random encounters, which are where many of the good guns are.

And PS:T, Icewind Dales, and the BG series can all be played mostly turn based if you use the Auto-pause.

[Dhavaer]

And supposedly has annoyingly infrequent save points, though I haven't played yet so I don't know how bad they are. If you are anything like me and have a busy life, that sucks. I pretty much refuse to buy any game that doesn't let me save anywhere any more; that's probably the only single thing that will give me a yes or no all by itself.

This is true, and they are pretty bad, with some times better than others, of course.

[The J Pizzel]

Hey gang:

Allow me some resonses,
Lost Odyssey was great for the turn-based, but I didn't like the story, massive cutscenes, lame save points, and non-action gameplay.

FF's are all good.

Real Time Strategy has never been my cup of tea and I don't know why. I played a lot of the Age of (X) games and liked them, as well as Battle For Middle Earth 2, but the rest just don't do it for me.

Fallout I've heard of but never seen or played. Didn't know it was turn-based, please tell me more!!!

I've heard the angels sing of Oblivion and I infact, do have a copy of it. I've yet to install and play becuase I loathe hacknslash action games. However, I will play it eventually becuase I hear the role-play is phenomenal.

Mass Effect, I've never been more let down. The graphics are amazing, the dialogue options and role-play options are even better than KOTOR. The actions was NOTHING like KOTOR, which was my favorite aspect. If I wanted a "over the shoulder" action game, I'll play Gears of War. I cried when I realized the action was like this. Please understand I'm not saying this action is "uber Gay lame, OMG, who plays this crap"...I'm saying I was very ill informed on it and it was a huge surprise...and I don't like it.

Baldurs Gates (and Neverwinter Night), I've heard a lot about these games yet regretably never played them. I hear they're pretty close to DnD 3.5. Didn't know they were auto-pause. Sounds interesting. When you say auto-pause, do you mean like KOTOR where every round the game pauses and you distribute actions to your team, they execute them, and then it pauses again? If so, :smallbiggrin:

Sorry, handhelds our out.

Hope this shed some light on how tastes. Any other suggestions?

jP

[Holammer]

Check out some fallout screenies, we're talking about 256 colours and 640x480 goodness here. But it's still great.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/fallout/screenshots

[Cainen]

KotOR's system is derived from the system used in BG/NWN, so yes - it's exactly like that. Planescape:Torment uses it too, but you shouldn't care much about its combat. It's more like a book. BG2 uses AD&D 2E rules, so it's not 3.5, and NWN uses 3.0, which is pretty close.

[Drascin]

I've heard the angels sing of Oblivion and I infact, do have a copy of it. I've yet to install and play becuase I loathe hacknslash action games. However, I will play it eventually becuase I hear the role-play is phenomenal.

Whoever told you that is a filthy liar and is going straight to hell :smalltongue:.

Seriously, no. Oblivion is an open, sandbox game. The amount of roleplaying is solely what you want to make of it, because the game surely ain't giving you any. Zero, nada, zilch. And that's not hyperbole. The quests, save for a few honorary exceptions (almost all centered in the Assasin's Guild, so if you wanted to be good-aligned, sucks to be you), all are nothing but "Go here and/or kill X of this thing", and there's not even that many of those. The thing of the game is that you roam and kill stuff at leisure, without pesky things like plot or obligatory quests dragging you down. The point is not roleplaying but exploring and doing whatever the hell you want (except kill guards, of course. Rememeber, the guards are a gestalt mind, and if you kill one patrol in the middle of a forest with no witnesses, every guard alive in the continent will know it was you :smalltongue:).

Or at least exploring and doing whatever you want would be the point if the game weren't so damn uniform: "Wonder what's on the other side of that mountain ridge... oh, gee, another almost exactly identical cave filled with the exact same goblins as the other two this side! Who'd have thought?".

All in all, same advice I give everyone: what you got is a nice baseline engine, now go and download mods to fill it with content before trying to play. For the love of Haruhi, do not play Oblivion out-of-the-box for long amounts of time. It's boring as hell.

[Triaxx]

Yes, BG/Icewind Dale are both auto-pausable on the turn-by-turn level. (Or character death, or enemy sighted.)