The PlayStation Vita has become a haven for RPGs, but there is one particular type that has really made itself at home on the system. People who love first-person dungeon-crawlers with turn-based battles and often customizable parties can find tons on the system. Developers like Experience and Compile Heart have taken to the system. This means people who enjoy level grinding and customizing characters have plenty of options to choose from when looking for a new game to play.
There have been jokes that the Nintendo Switch is the successor to the PlayStation Vita. Plenty of visual novels are making their way to the console, and it also has become a haven for RPGs. In fact, it’s even starting to find itself the home for a certain specific sort of RPG, the first-person, party-based dungeon-crawler. There were loads of them on Sony’s handheld and now Nintendo’s system is starting to build up its own library.
VGChartz's Adam Cartwright: "If you ask the average gaming forum user, they’ll probably say that Vita was only a good place to play if you like indie games, visual novels, and of course Japanese RPGs. While I’d hope that readers of my articles have realised that the console offers so much more than this, it’s hard to deny that it built up an amazing ecosystem for role-playing games over the years, mostly spear-headed by the early release of Persona 4 Golden in 2012.
As a result of there being so many RPGs on Vita, I’ve had to split this article up. I’ll be looking at all the turn-based entries in the genre here and I’ll dedicate a separate piece to action-RPGs some time in the future. Please note – while I will be including first-person dungeon crawlers such as Demon Gaze, things like roguelikes (e.g. Shiren the Wanderer) and strategy games (e.g. Disgaea) will be given separate articles of their own further down the line."
VGChartz's Adam Cartwright: "What I aim to examine in this article is the output of each of the major localization companies, in terms of what they released, what they chose not to release (including when they localized titles for other platforms but skipped the Vita version), as well as some brief commentary on the quality of their translations, before providing an overall rating on their support (outstanding -> amazing – > good -> solid -> poor).
A large part of the reason I love Vita so much is thanks to its brilliant selection of Japanese games and that’s really what I want to celebrate here, but also lament some of the missed opportunities we had along the way."
