Re: BK1 character build
@6: BK1 is trickier to get use to, but once you get the hang of it, it's not so bad (disclaimer: I never actually got past Kisenon). It's also much less complex (it doesn't use a weapons menu, because there are few enough weapons to fit on the number row). Having said that, though, there are a few bits which can be frustrating (lots of stunning to watch out for). Oh, and the story takes itself way less seriously (it starts out feeling like a Shounen parody, gets ever-so-slightly more serious in BK2, then BK3 turns it up to 11. I'm sure I have a draft of a Tvtropes article around here somewhere...).
BK2 is a lot like BK3, but the bosses are much simpler, and tend to have their difficulty enhanced by shere numbers of mooks and generators. Other than the absence of platforming, and the loss of the stats like stamina and attack/defense from 1 and 3, the fighting at least is fairly similar to 3. I'm still not sure how pits are supposed to work (ok, I kinda get it—two steps of warning, then jump and hold forward and hope there's not another pit on the other side... but I fail at it hard enough that I wind up using the flying cheat too often ).
Oh, and comparing BK1 to Paladin/Manamon is a little misleading, given that the combat and navigation work rather differently. They're all top-down RPGs with random encounter etc, but BK1 lacks any wall indicators (when it first came out, we were lost for, like, a week, because nobody realized you could go left from the second room's entrance). And there's also a weird step puzzle halfway through, and I don't even remember how you're supposed to solve it (is there a note somewhere and I overlooked / forgot it?).
I'd go ahead and give all of them a try, if you can handle the language barrier. It is a bit more troublesome in BK1, since there are loads of things to do other than fight, and the instant translate addons can only do so much to get the idea across. I do like some of Translate's takes on BK2's dialog, though ("By the way, I am not a bastard." / "I AM ADMINISTRATOR OF THE WORLD!", though it makes some of the more dramatic scenes hard to follow.)
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