Gurkog
Erudite
meh, can't blame me for trying. I just really want kick ass tactics game.
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Decline The decline of JRPGS
- Thread starter Whisky
- Start date
deuxhero
Arcane
Then play Gladius.
Yesterday (or two days ago now) I was disgusted to see no one played it. It's got some flaws, but it's a great tRPG.
Gurkog
Erudite
No wonder I never played it, I haven't owned any consoles past the PS1 generation. Oh well.
Machocruz
Arcane
The best JRPGs, imo, are the ones where you don't spend a lot of time in combat, or can avoid it. Suikoden was a real pleasant one, didn't have encounters every 10 steps. So was Lunar Silver Star Story Complete, for the most part, until the last castle. Some of the Final Fantasies were irritating in this regard, and Phantasy Star was one of the worst IIRC.
felicity
Scholar
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2008
- Messages
- 339
Gungnir is pretty good.
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2012
- Messages
- 5,169
Really? As far as I remember Suikoden had quite an annoying encounter rate, but random battles themselves were amazingly fast because of how combat system worked and you could basically dismiss enemies that were below your level with "Let go" command so as not to bother with them at all. Lunar got it right, though. Avoidable enemies are the best, but don't limit my dashing capabilities.
Hobo Elf
Arcane
FF1 went really over board with that. Random encounters up the ass and failure to run away can sometimes result in a party wipe, depending on what kind of mind raping creatures you are up against. But I guess it was one way of making fake longevity for a NES RPG. These days I apprieciate seeing monster encounters on the field map wandering around rather than just random encounters.
Dreaad
Arcane
Lets be honest guys, the decline of Jrpg's starts and ends with the FF series. A brand name that massively popularized the genre leading other companies to attempt copying the $$$ formula. Final fantasy itself was slowly dumbed down into an action rpg series with cutesy cutscenes and completely forgettable characters. Who always work through their "tragic" past to some inner revelation and become super heroes. The only thing carrying their entire brand is the FF tag, their games have nothing in common with real Jrpg's anymore.
Gozma
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,951
Just don't play it with the golf swing meter thing on. The balancing is pretty tight without it.
DragoFireheart
all caps, rainbow colors, SOMETHING.
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2007
- Messages
- 23,731
Necroscope
Arcane
I think that FF7 was like "Symphony of the Night" for the Castlevania series; great but something else, that many old fans meet with mixed feelings. Plus, both of these games started the decline (vide all the next FF/CV games).
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2012
- Messages
- 5,169
Necroscope
Arcane
I believe you can do the same with many, many games. For me it's always the execution that matters the most, not the silly scheme you can reduce the story to. There's obviously more to FF7 plot than this.
Dreaad
Arcane
This is true, you can reduce the story or gameplay of any game into a couple of derivative sentences. The point is that in FF7 the execution is also terrible and repetitive, the story such a ridiculous rehash that you can't help but feel it hit you over the head.
FF7's story for me fell apart the moment they left Midgar and it became about chasing after Sephiroth. The outside world was bland as shit.
Necroscope
Arcane
A rehash of what?
It was the world map actually. The world itself was just as bland as any other Square game back in the day (beside Chrono Cross, which had some really awesome variety and design of locations). You should check what's behind the chocobo farms before passing a sentence. IMO there are many interesting places to visit.
Dreaad
Arcane
A rehash of FF VI... Its essentially the exact same story, with only mildly different personalities involved.
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2008
- Messages
- 2,812
Again with the FF7 bashing. Haven't you people gotten tired of beating the dust of what used to be a horse by now? Everyone gets it. It wasn't the best game ever. But saying that it is the sole reason that JRPGs have declined in quality is silly. Like I've pointed out before, most of the 
in video games across all genres can be attributed to the rapidly shifting focus on graphics and cinematics over gameplay, story, content, length, pacing, etc.
So instead of getting games that are longer, fuller, more satisfying and more fun to play, with increasingly advanced stories, you get games that have to cut content, pull people from gameplay to work on the graphics, design decisions begin to favor cinematic style over narrative style, etc. etc. etc.
And nowadays most video games spend 9/10ths of their budget on the graphics and marketing over programming or design or, hell, ANYTHING more conducive towards the quality of a game!
What if FFXIII had the same budget, but with most of the time, money, and effort invested into making the game just solid in gameplay and design? If it had PSX or hell, even PS2 quality graphics, SO MUCH of the budget and manpower and time would be freed up to work on more important things, like making sure the story is actually compelling and not banal as fuck! Or making the combat system less retarded! Or making more monster models so you're not looking at the same fucking models throughout the entire fucking game, just with different colors and textures slapped on them!
I don't know where this assumption that good graphics are required for a game to make money came from, because it's been one of the largest and most disgusting problems with the industry since the xbox was first released.
in video games across all genres can be attributed to the rapidly shifting focus on graphics and cinematics over gameplay, story, content, length, pacing, etc.So instead of getting games that are longer, fuller, more satisfying and more fun to play, with increasingly advanced stories, you get games that have to cut content, pull people from gameplay to work on the graphics, design decisions begin to favor cinematic style over narrative style, etc. etc. etc.
And nowadays most video games spend 9/10ths of their budget on the graphics and marketing over programming or design or, hell, ANYTHING more conducive towards the quality of a game!
What if FFXIII had the same budget, but with most of the time, money, and effort invested into making the game just solid in gameplay and design? If it had PSX or hell, even PS2 quality graphics, SO MUCH of the budget and manpower and time would be freed up to work on more important things, like making sure the story is actually compelling and not banal as fuck! Or making the combat system less retarded! Or making more monster models so you're not looking at the same fucking models throughout the entire fucking game, just with different colors and textures slapped on them!
I don't know where this assumption that good graphics are required for a game to make money came from, because it's been one of the largest and most disgusting problems with the industry since the xbox was first released.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Played FF3 and FF7 in high school -- freshman and junior year, respectively -- and haven't replayed either since. At the time, I adored FF3 and was fairly negative about FF7. A decent aspect of that may be simply a matter of age when I played them. While FF3 has some nice plot moments, and some decent lines of dialogue (although the best is both lampshading and anachronistic "You sound like chapters from a self-help book!"), I don't think its story or characters are amazing, and I don't think the problem with FF7's plot is that it is too much like FF3's (indeed, they never seemed similar to me, making me think that the parallels drawn earlier in the thread are simply achieved by abstraction and fudged equivalence). While I would say that the music and even the graphics of FF3 made more of an impact on me, I suspect that that is also driven largely by the age I played them.
That said, I do think there is one way in which FF7 is objectively bad, and led to objectively bad design decisions in other games, and that was the super-long spell effects. The combination of loading delays, transition delays, longer combat animations, longer victory animations, and -- especially -- longer spell effects just meant that the whole experience was unreasonably slow and staccato. As far as I know, console RPGs never really dragged themselves back to the faster, smoother gameplay of the SNES-era games.
I also think FF7 started a trend toward a very different kind of jRPG story, one that I like less (but which is probably a matter of taste). Wholly aside from which is the better story, FF3 is much more grounded in physical acts. While the internal states of the characters matter (at least somewhat) to the plot, those inner states are revealed almost exclusively through outer behavior. To be sure, occasionally the characters will say something about how sad they are or how lonely, but most of it is actually externalized. And, in any event, the struggle involved in the story is essentially an external one: beat these armies, defend such and such castle, kill such and such villain. There's some esoterica about the Espers, but that's not integral. Moreover, while the heroes act rather like adolescent power fantasies, they are at least supposed to be adults, and in fact their character arcs rely upon their adulthood (Locke needs to be old enough to have cared for a slowly dying paramour, lost her, and become jaded about it; Edgar has to have been old enough to be king for long enough for the coin flip to have started to weigh on him; Celes is a general; Terra needs to be old enough to have maternal instincts that aren't kid-playing-with-a-doll; Shadow has to be old enough to have fathered a child, lost a wife, and moved on; Cyan looks to be at least in his 40s, though with the young son, who can say? FF3 was probably the most extreme example of this, but it wasn't exceptional: the heroes of FF2 were adults, too, and so were the Phantasy Star heroes (though they were younger).
FF7, by contrast, is all about teenagers. Regardless of what age Cloud is supposed to be, he, Tifa, and Yuffie all look and act like teenagers. Aeris seems a little older, but only a little. Perhaps consequently, the story is ultimately as much about doing as it is about feeling, and rather than the force of the story coming from things happening, it comes from philosophical speculation and convoluted pseudo-spiritual backstory. I can imagine that if you hit FF7 at the right age, its rather ham-handed handling of these things might be really fantastic. But while it's possible at any age to enjoy a pulp action story (which is basically what FF6 is), I'm not sure a teenage angst story with teenage-level philosophy and spiritualism is properly enjoyed at any age other than, like, 14.
Post-FF7, I didn't play a lot of console games, but that's in part because the ones I did play all seemed to fall into the same vein: portentous, pretentious half-baked philosophy and spiritualism, long-windedly expounded by a bunch of ephebes. (FF8, Vandal Hearts, Xenogears, and even FFT -- which were the most well-regarded games of that era -- all fall into that type.) From what I can tell, the genre really never looked back; if anything (FF9 excepted) it seems like Square's characters got even more teenager-y as time went on.
I think it's fair to blame FF7 for this phenomenon because it was such a watershed game in terms of the commercial success of jRPGs that it would inevitably spawn imitators.
Bah. That's the most I've written about a jRPG in, like, 15 years.
--EDIT--
In for a dime, in for a dollar. Here are a few more thoughts.
(1) FF6 introduced, but FF7 centralized, another significant mechanical change, which was that power up went from being a purely passive experience (get enough EXP, go up a level, stats go up; buy new gear, stats go up) to one that relied on an active micromanage-y mechanic (Espers, then materia, then whatever other nonsense followed). In some respects, that might have made jRPGs better, but in my experience it made things worse because there wasn't anything hugely rewarding, except in a Pavlovian grind way, in the micromanage-y mechanics, and they tended to significantly homogenize the characters.
(2) I wonder whether Chrono Trigger, with its effectively all-teenage cast of heroes and ultimately ponderous nonsense regarding Lavos and the time portals, is really to blame rather than FF7, and I'm just not willing to blame it because I liked CT so much?
(3) Amazingly, I still have no idea WTF the plot of FF7 really was, despite having played it more recently than FF6 or CT -- I vaguely recall something about a virus (alien? alien virus?) named Jenova, but beyond that, I can't be bothered to understand the whole third act.
That said, I do think there is one way in which FF7 is objectively bad, and led to objectively bad design decisions in other games, and that was the super-long spell effects. The combination of loading delays, transition delays, longer combat animations, longer victory animations, and -- especially -- longer spell effects just meant that the whole experience was unreasonably slow and staccato. As far as I know, console RPGs never really dragged themselves back to the faster, smoother gameplay of the SNES-era games.
I also think FF7 started a trend toward a very different kind of jRPG story, one that I like less (but which is probably a matter of taste). Wholly aside from which is the better story, FF3 is much more grounded in physical acts. While the internal states of the characters matter (at least somewhat) to the plot, those inner states are revealed almost exclusively through outer behavior. To be sure, occasionally the characters will say something about how sad they are or how lonely, but most of it is actually externalized. And, in any event, the struggle involved in the story is essentially an external one: beat these armies, defend such and such castle, kill such and such villain. There's some esoterica about the Espers, but that's not integral. Moreover, while the heroes act rather like adolescent power fantasies, they are at least supposed to be adults, and in fact their character arcs rely upon their adulthood (Locke needs to be old enough to have cared for a slowly dying paramour, lost her, and become jaded about it; Edgar has to have been old enough to be king for long enough for the coin flip to have started to weigh on him; Celes is a general; Terra needs to be old enough to have maternal instincts that aren't kid-playing-with-a-doll; Shadow has to be old enough to have fathered a child, lost a wife, and moved on; Cyan looks to be at least in his 40s, though with the young son, who can say? FF3 was probably the most extreme example of this, but it wasn't exceptional: the heroes of FF2 were adults, too, and so were the Phantasy Star heroes (though they were younger).
FF7, by contrast, is all about teenagers. Regardless of what age Cloud is supposed to be, he, Tifa, and Yuffie all look and act like teenagers. Aeris seems a little older, but only a little. Perhaps consequently, the story is ultimately as much about doing as it is about feeling, and rather than the force of the story coming from things happening, it comes from philosophical speculation and convoluted pseudo-spiritual backstory. I can imagine that if you hit FF7 at the right age, its rather ham-handed handling of these things might be really fantastic. But while it's possible at any age to enjoy a pulp action story (which is basically what FF6 is), I'm not sure a teenage angst story with teenage-level philosophy and spiritualism is properly enjoyed at any age other than, like, 14.
Post-FF7, I didn't play a lot of console games, but that's in part because the ones I did play all seemed to fall into the same vein: portentous, pretentious half-baked philosophy and spiritualism, long-windedly expounded by a bunch of ephebes. (FF8, Vandal Hearts, Xenogears, and even FFT -- which were the most well-regarded games of that era -- all fall into that type.) From what I can tell, the genre really never looked back; if anything (FF9 excepted) it seems like Square's characters got even more teenager-y as time went on.
I think it's fair to blame FF7 for this phenomenon because it was such a watershed game in terms of the commercial success of jRPGs that it would inevitably spawn imitators.
Bah. That's the most I've written about a jRPG in, like, 15 years.
--EDIT--
In for a dime, in for a dollar. Here are a few more thoughts.
(1) FF6 introduced, but FF7 centralized, another significant mechanical change, which was that power up went from being a purely passive experience (get enough EXP, go up a level, stats go up; buy new gear, stats go up) to one that relied on an active micromanage-y mechanic (Espers, then materia, then whatever other nonsense followed). In some respects, that might have made jRPGs better, but in my experience it made things worse because there wasn't anything hugely rewarding, except in a Pavlovian grind way, in the micromanage-y mechanics, and they tended to significantly homogenize the characters.
(2) I wonder whether Chrono Trigger, with its effectively all-teenage cast of heroes and ultimately ponderous nonsense regarding Lavos and the time portals, is really to blame rather than FF7, and I'm just not willing to blame it because I liked CT so much?
(3) Amazingly, I still have no idea WTF the plot of FF7 really was, despite having played it more recently than FF6 or CT -- I vaguely recall something about a virus (alien? alien virus?) named Jenova, but beyond that, I can't be bothered to understand the whole third act.
I'd recommend this http://socksmakepeoplesexy.net/index.php?a=patff if you want to read about Final Fantasy's rise and eventual decline, from the perspective of a fan replaying all the games in the series and reviewing them individually. Quite a fascinating read.
deuxhero
Arcane
I went straight to FFV and then dropped it.
Where the hell does he get the idea fans don't like FFV because the plot it completely takes in stride? Every discussion I've seen says it is what the series should go back to, and indeed, when Square made a spiritual successor to the old Final Fantasy games (Bravely Default), the one it hailed back to the MOST was 5.
Where the hell does he get the idea fans don't like FFV because the plot it completely takes in stride? Every discussion I've seen says it is what the series should go back to, and indeed, when Square made a spiritual successor to the old Final Fantasy games (Bravely Default), the one it hailed back to the MOST was 5.
Azrael the cat
Arcane
What I find surprising is how the pseudo-philosophy aspects in many later-era jrpgs seems so derivative of western pseudo-philosophy - it's like they've taken a grab-bag of ideas and put them together with the specific aim of being able to sell the product to both japanese and western markets.
I like pseudo-philosophy in games, perhaps more than I should as a pretentious academic - decline: - and I've mentioned a few times how I like the meme 'philosoraptory' as a term for where sort-of-philosophical concepts are mixed into games (and other media) in a way that doesn't actually say anything profound, but nonetheless adds greatly to the fun/setting/themes/characters. 1995-2001 was the peak of this - PS:T is the obvious all-time champion, but there was a whole host of games that liked to dip their toes in it (Deus Ex, SS2's post-humanism and collectivist-emotive and individualist-emotionless antagonists, Bladerunner, I have no mouth but I must scream...even Fallout had elements of this). It doesn't mean the game has to be a poorly interactive movie (many of these games were also highpoints for emergent gameplay), nor that the game has to take itself particularly seriously - nobody could reasonably accuse Deus Ex of taking itself too seriously, and SS2 used philosoraptory to enrich its antagonists without ever feeling the need to harp on pretentiously. The Many's horrified reaction to the PC massacring 'defenceless children' - i.e. when you gas the breeding chambers - is my favourite part, but the duality of one enemy invading to eliminate individualism for utopian reasons (including their view that what they're doing is in humanity's best interests ala the worst facets of collectivist totalitarianism) and another who wants unchallenged sole power over everything (to the point that it couldn't care less about humanity's interests) is a large part of what made both antagonists so memorable.
China and Japan both have proud philosophical traditions (China more so, obviously, though sadly it gets a bad name due to new-age westerners stripping out all intellectual rigour in order to turn it into western neo-hippyism), and I'd love to see a game that builds that subtly into its themes and characterisation. I've bitched about how every university I've worked for has systematically stripped the heart out of analytic philosophy by shifting formal logic and language from the centrepiece of undergraduate courses to rarely studied minor electives (most graduates - even most honours students - and more than a few PhD graduates, go their entire degree without touching Betrand Russel, Wittgenstein, Frege etc, and even fewer study their work on logic - fuck, I've known folk who went all the way through from undergrad to PhD to academia without having studied Aristotle for more than a week). But if I was Japanese, with similar interest in philosophy, I'd be fucking ropable to see Japanese culture shit on so many great aspects of their history, and not even old parts of their history - the great Japanese film-makers have been just as badly buried by the disneyfication of Japanese culture as their philosophers and past literary greats. It's really quite sad the way that a nation, that only 40 years ago was able to stare western influence in the face and say with confidence that its own cultural histories were as fascinating as anything the west could come up with, has become so heavily dominated by the 'reverse-weeabo'.
I'm hoping that maybe it's just that we only get the badly written attempts at Japanese philosoraptory - I can't imagine PS:T translating well into Japanese, and maybe it's just that the kind of developers who are likely to draw intelligently from Japan's own cultural and philosophical history are also more likely to make their games for a purely Japanese market, on the basis that translation to English will kill the feel of the game (either making 'light phisoraptory' ala Deus Ex seem overly earnest, or simply failing to carry the same themes when translated).
I like pseudo-philosophy in games, perhaps more than I should as a pretentious academic - decline: - and I've mentioned a few times how I like the meme 'philosoraptory' as a term for where sort-of-philosophical concepts are mixed into games (and other media) in a way that doesn't actually say anything profound, but nonetheless adds greatly to the fun/setting/themes/characters. 1995-2001 was the peak of this - PS:T is the obvious all-time champion, but there was a whole host of games that liked to dip their toes in it (Deus Ex, SS2's post-humanism and collectivist-emotive and individualist-emotionless antagonists, Bladerunner, I have no mouth but I must scream...even Fallout had elements of this). It doesn't mean the game has to be a poorly interactive movie (many of these games were also highpoints for emergent gameplay), nor that the game has to take itself particularly seriously - nobody could reasonably accuse Deus Ex of taking itself too seriously, and SS2 used philosoraptory to enrich its antagonists without ever feeling the need to harp on pretentiously. The Many's horrified reaction to the PC massacring 'defenceless children' - i.e. when you gas the breeding chambers - is my favourite part, but the duality of one enemy invading to eliminate individualism for utopian reasons (including their view that what they're doing is in humanity's best interests ala the worst facets of collectivist totalitarianism) and another who wants unchallenged sole power over everything (to the point that it couldn't care less about humanity's interests) is a large part of what made both antagonists so memorable.
China and Japan both have proud philosophical traditions (China more so, obviously, though sadly it gets a bad name due to new-age westerners stripping out all intellectual rigour in order to turn it into western neo-hippyism), and I'd love to see a game that builds that subtly into its themes and characterisation. I've bitched about how every university I've worked for has systematically stripped the heart out of analytic philosophy by shifting formal logic and language from the centrepiece of undergraduate courses to rarely studied minor electives (most graduates - even most honours students - and more than a few PhD graduates, go their entire degree without touching Betrand Russel, Wittgenstein, Frege etc, and even fewer study their work on logic - fuck, I've known folk who went all the way through from undergrad to PhD to academia without having studied Aristotle for more than a week). But if I was Japanese, with similar interest in philosophy, I'd be fucking ropable to see Japanese culture shit on so many great aspects of their history, and not even old parts of their history - the great Japanese film-makers have been just as badly buried by the disneyfication of Japanese culture as their philosophers and past literary greats. It's really quite sad the way that a nation, that only 40 years ago was able to stare western influence in the face and say with confidence that its own cultural histories were as fascinating as anything the west could come up with, has become so heavily dominated by the 'reverse-weeabo'.
I'm hoping that maybe it's just that we only get the badly written attempts at Japanese philosoraptory - I can't imagine PS:T translating well into Japanese, and maybe it's just that the kind of developers who are likely to draw intelligently from Japan's own cultural and philosophical history are also more likely to make their games for a purely Japanese market, on the basis that translation to English will kill the feel of the game (either making 'light phisoraptory' ala Deus Ex seem overly earnest, or simply failing to carry the same themes when translated).
Ephebhes and teenagers in Vandal Hearts? What did you smoke while playing it?
There is like one, one teenager (kind of) and it's Eleni, all the rest are well in their late twenties and there are at least three middle aged characters, not to mention that they all act and react in very adult way through the story.
YUKIO MISHIMA WAS RIGHT, WHY DIDN'T THEY LISTEN?!
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