OPINION: RPGs Aren’t What They Used to Be

I pretty much share your sentiment for the most part. The overall quality and focus of JRPGs seems to have shifted but I still enjoy the genre though. I will say that the Final Fantasy series has been something of a mixed bag for me. While I loved Final Fantasy VII, I found VIII and IX to be disappointing. It wasn’t until Final Fantasy X came around that my faith in the franchise came back at least until they released Final Fantasy X-2 although it came back again with Final Fantasy XII. As for Final Fantasy XIII I guess I’m just odd because I actually like it. I was a bit surprised to see you not mention the Megami Tensei series. If you ask me it’s the best JRPG series going now a days. 

I think the problem with JRPGs now is pretty much what you said, they focus too much on presentation and not enough on story. So what you end up with is a good looking game with boring and uninteresting characters. JRPGs now play more like bad anime, you know the type of stuff you’d probably rate a 5 or 6 on myanimelist.net yeah those kind, and that’s not a good thing. One of the reasons I liked Lunar, or Grandia, or Persona 2 was that the characters were likable you cared about Alex and his adventure to become a dragonmaster like his hero, or Justin and his comical naivete yet heart of gold, or Tatsuya and his quest to understand himself and his forgotten past. JRPGs now don’t have that. Even the music has gone down hill. Am the only person who use to headbang to Hunting Betrayal from Digital Devil Saga 2? So yeah I agree with pretty everything you said.

I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but Dragon Quest IS changing to keep up with technology, did you know that they made Dragon Quest X and MMORPG? Not even Dragon Quest is pure anymore in this new dark age of RPGs.

I agree with you on most counts, especially the voice acting part.  Now, don’t get me wrong, it is nice to have good voice acting, but the difference between a game being voice acted as apposed to just being read is the difference between a game sparking your imagination and involving you in the story and a game that just wants you to watch it like a movie.  There are exceptions, and I find The Last Story to be a good mix.  But overall, JPRGs have lost a certain touch ever since their characters started speaking ‘aloud.’

Wow everybody is talking about Chrono Trigger no love for Chrono Cross?  

Excellent points. While preferences like yours and, for the most part, mine are now somewhat of a niche market, it’s great to see a few developers staying true to the roots of RPG and other game genres. I may only be 30, but I’d much rather play and replay A Link to the Past, Crystalis, Super Mario RPG (top 3 on my list), and Goldeneye than anything post 2000. That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed flashier (Monster Hunter Tri) and more massive (Skyrim) games immensely. It’s just that there is something I can’t recapture with newer games that draws me back to my old consoles, time and again. However, I did purchase The Last Story and can’t wait to set some time aside to dive into this masterpiece.

By the way, did anyone mention (or happen to play) Soma Bringer? An action-rpg, to be sure, but one of the finest games I have ever experienced, console or handheld.

Again, kudos on the article. Glad to hear I’m not alone.

I have the same thoughts about almost everything you said, but the dungeons, I hate grinding, and I hate expend too much time on dungeons or backtracking in any form. My main objective while playing is to enjoy a good story, only a few games which didn’t had excellent stories but great gameplay, like FFTA2, had me too much into a game. In the RPG side I still uphold my top 3 being Mother 3> Xenoblade> Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door, games that tell good stories and the three have nothing in common.

Of course they aren’t what they used to be. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  The genre has evolved a lot, and in a lot of different ways over the years.  The problem is that there are also a lot of people that were introduced to the genre with, say, Final Fantasy VII, and have been using that game as the mark of what a JRPG is ever since.  No matter how much the genre has evolved, there are people stuck in the past. They think of JRPGs and they think amnesiacs with spikey hair and huge swords.

Which is still true in some cases, of course, but that line of thinking completely ignores games like Xenoblade Chronicles, or for that matter the Xenosaga series, Atlus’s Megami Tensei franchise in its entirety, numerous Final Fantasy games, smaller games like Eternal Sonata, Valkyrie Profile, and on and on.

And it’s telling, too, that the press still has this problem.  Earlier this year, on the Giant Bomb podcast, writer Patrick Klepek went on a rant about Tetsuya Nomura and how he needs to stop being involved in Final Fantasy.  His interpretation of reality was one in which Nomura was the character designer on every game since FFVII.

Regardless of one’s thoughts of Final Fantasy and Nomura’s involvement in it, the fact of the matter is that Patrick came off as completely ignorant.  Nomura was not involved in all of the post-VII entries, and in some was only responsible for the main characters.  He’s hardly an ever-present figure in the franchise, and yet to some members of the press, that’s exactly what he is.

There are areas where the genre could improve, of course, but that improvement does not lie in trying to be like western games, as some want.  You don’t improve upon something by just turning it into something completely different.  The western press as a whole needs to be more cognizant of what it is JRPGs are, where they came from, what they strive to be, and how games in the genre can be just as innovative or endearing as the games that came fifteen years ago.

I’ve never liked WRPGs, they just don’t  feel like how RPGs should be, the 32bit era for me was when RPGs were truly great.

Xenoblade Chronicles is more similar to the later era of JRPGs than the earlier. It is much, much more similar to Final Fantasy XII than IX for example. I feel nostalgic about the older games, but at the same time cannot disregard the great work since then. By the way, the internet is aware of “people who thought IX was the last great Final Fantasy”… your opinion is not original or new and more people should not adopt this opinion. What would bet the point? If games stayed the same we would be complaining about that instead. Finally, The Last Story and Xenoblade cannot be used as examples of old school JRPGs making a comeback because they are modern examples of the genre through and through.