I don't like JRPGs anymore

The Core Video Games Forum
1

Hear me out on this.

My first RPGs were classics like Dragon Quest (which I detested even before this happened to me) and the original Final Fantasy. When I discovered emulation, I became hooked on games like Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and the like. Years later, when I got my PS2, I immediately went about grabbing every RPG I could find, including such classics as ToDII, Final Fantasy 7-10, Chrono Cross, Xenosaga, etc. I was fully enthralled in these classic Asian masterpieces (well, except for Xenosaga), and felt fully convinced that Squaresoft was the greatest RPG-producing company to have ever existed.

Then I got an XBox in 2005, and with it came Knights of the Old Republic. Suddenly, everything changed. I fell in love with BioWare, and quickly snatched up a copy of the Baldur’s Gate II collection. That lead me to Black Isle, and compelled me to hunt down Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and the original Baldur’s Gate. From there, I played Fable, KoToR II, Neverwinter Nights, and…well, somewhere in my heart, I reevaluated my entire outlook on the genre.

Two months ago, I bought Blue Dragon, expecting to enjoy an old-school RPG experience. The problem was, I quickly began to get frustrated with the entire experience, finding the story horribly generic, the characters zero dimensional, the graphics too cutesy, and the gameplay good but unoriginal. Horrified by my reaction, I quickly fired up Chrono Trigger, one of my all-time favorites. I quit after only five minutes, citing some of the above complaints. I wince whenever I look at Wild Arms 5. I cringe in pain at the mere mention of Final Fantasy.

My question is: what the fuck happened to me? Have I really changed so much that I can’t possibly enjoy the genre I once adored? Did the American XBox pollute my mind so much that I can’t look at a Japanese game the same way again?

Oh well, there’s always the arsenic.

2

This happens all the time. You start out hooked on fantasy novels, gradually move on to sci-fi novels, then go back to fantasy and put it down in disgust, wondering how people can just cast fireball when a heat condensation accelerator beam mounted on the USS Enterprise would have done the same

So don’t bother playing RPGs with linear storylines if you’re currently into branching interaction and case-by-case dialogues. JRPGs are only fun if you can suspend disbelief and use your imagination a bit, whereas WRPGs (Western) avoid that step by usually having a more realistic feel to them.

3

J-RPGs tend to be repetitive so maybe you’ve just gotten tired of them. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. If you’re tired of turn based battle systems and same old storylines, try different rpgs. Well, I guess you’ve done that by getting into BioWare stuff.

4

Replace Blue Dragon with FF12 (no 360 :[) and i feel the EXACT same way. I was even thinking about making a thread like this. I still find the types of stories told by games like FF6, Xenogears, and other classics fine, but the more western RPGs (and non-rpg games too) i play, the less able i find myself to tolerate the typical jRPG “gameplay”. I get the same story by reading the wikipedia article, and the gameplay i’m missing out on is actually pretty well emulated by wikipedia…less menus, sure, but they’re still there!

The only jRPG i have even the slightest bit of interest in at the moment is Persona 3, and i think thats more because of the setting than anything. I get real excited for it, then watch a gameplay video of some player wading through menus and i find my hope fading. Hopefully i pick it up eventually and make my final decision on the genre.

Its really weird for me too, because i was one of those people who would buy a game just because it was made by Square (that ended with Radiata Stories)

5

I played FFXII and I couldn’t play BoF 3 after. I played and greatly enjoyed kotor years ago. I got it a couple months ago with my 360 and I couldn’t stand it anymore. And I agree, WA5 is horrifying.

Some things simply don’t age well.

6

I’m in the same boat, my playing of JRPGs has dwindled a lot in the past year. The last one I really got into was Tales of the Abyss. I haven’t even looked at FFXII or WA5, and I’m honestly not interested in them. If this were a couple of years ago, though, I would’ve been all over the two of them.

I think it’s just that it’s a genre that isn’t evolving at all, we’ve done it all before. Not only in gameplay, but in story. How many JRPGs that have come out in the past three years that have had a story or plot element that you can honestly say you’ve never seen anything like it before? The stories are all either generic rehashes of the same old rescue the princess/save the world cliche, or try too hard to be all deep, but just come off as being pretentious and obnoxious. Not to mention confusing as all hell.

Right now, most of my gaming time is spent on WoW, and other types of games. Mostly action and adventure.

7

Radiata was done by tri-Ace, just published by Square. Not that Squeenix wasn’t already falling over itself at that point, just that tri-Ace has a longstanding tradition of making stuff with pontential and taking a crap on it as soon as possible.

It’s not menus that should trouble you about P3. It’s really extremely simple once you get the hang of it.

8

I still play the occasional JRPG, but my heart isn’t really in it anymore. PS:T and it’s ilk spoiled me storywise and I never really considered gameplay a selling point of RPGs. Even when there are combat systems which interest me I usually get annoyed pretty quickly at the stereotypical classes and whatnot. The only JRPGs that I’m looking forward to right now are Persona 3 and Rogue Galaxy (maybe Soul Nomad), possibly Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey although I don’t have a 360.

I also find myself not wanting to invest 300 hours in each game anymore, I simple have too huge a backlog for that and I feel guilty with every game I buy.

9

Stay the fuck away from Rogue Galaxy. That game is the manifestation of all that’s bad about JRPGs, without a shred of the good.

DO play Soul Nomad on the other hand. It’s got an average but nice story, but it’s pretty fun to play.

10

Well, that simplifies things. Soul Nomad seems pretty rad since it looks like Ogre Battle minus the reputation stat and the NIS conventions that I detest.

11

I have exactly the opposite reaction: I started playing Dungeons and Dragons (yes, the ORIGINAL version. Have I mentioned that I’m Old? :stuck_out_tongue: ) but when I discovered JRPGs about 10 years ago I switched over and today I can’t look at games like Warcraft and feel much interest. But, we all change with time, and often in unpredictable ways. It all depends on our personal experiences… Maybe 10 years from now I’ll go back to Western-style RPGs, and you folks will recall these games with nostalgia. :wink:

12

What’s so bad about Rogue Galaxy? I liked it a lot. Sure it wasn’t the best game in the world, but it was for the most part enjoyable. My main gripe is that it’s another on of these good games that never wants to end, so it seems to drag on and and and doesn’t want to die gracefully. Kinda like Tales of the Abyss.

13

congrats you’re not a 10 year old anymore. now get over anime too.

14

Oh lord where to start…

It’s just… it’s the material crystallization of the concept of “generic”. And it goes NOWHERE.

Let’s start with the plot progression. It kinda starts off interesting with a good chance for fun character interaction and the charm of space travel… until you hit the jungle planet. Then, after a HUGE side-story with very little relevance to the plot and not even much development for the character it’s about, not to mention a very retarded plot hole*, you get to Zerard.

*didn’t it ocurr to them that the kid hunting bugs obviously must have had a ship and could fetch help, or even some minor supplies?

First, there’s zero cultural impact from bringing an amazon into a super-tech world. Okay, this wasn’t even a remotely serious story then. And let me tell you that nothing says BADASS SPACE PIRATE like having to renew a travel visa. The cookie-cutter trend of the story that constrasted completely with the character designs was already rearing it’s ugly head here, but it was suffocated by two MASSIVE sucessive dungeon crawls with barely any plot involved in them, especially the second, though at least C3PO did get SOME development.

After which you hit gangster planet, get through the abominably cliché story with the bull guy, and don’t actually achieve anything at all. But wait, THE EVIL GUYS HAVE BEEN REVALED! AND GOOD LORD DO THEY LOOK RETARDED. The fat guy and the quirky supposedly-sexy secretary? C’mon, Disney could make more intimidating bad guys than that. And so begins the hunt for the legendary mighty artifacts of mighty legendary importance to find the legendary mighty place of legend which just happened to be in the exact planets I was just at because of completely random unrelated reasons, and that was about the point where I couldn’t take more of the bullshit and stopped playing.

Let’s just mention how incredibly BORING the five zillion fights are. I mean, that’s some retarded encounter ratio for guys I can kill with three hits and no recognizable skill. Or the exasperating 2-3 repetitive constant comments from your characters. Or the fact that weapon customizing, while interesting, turns really fucking old and tiring after a while.

And MAN, the characters. I’m not asking for a brand new never-before-seen crew, but at least TRY to make them interesting. I’ll give point to Jaster for not being annoying (Though that’s more because he doesn’t do anything at all), and the C3PO wannabe was cute, but the rest? Generic grizly aloof guy, generic perky chick, generic tough chick with no relevance, generic crazy utterly unimportant hey-was-this-guy-with-us guy and hey, is that Yangus with a mask?

And to top it off: Kisala’s ASS SOCK ATTACK. WHAT THE FLYING FUCK WAS THAT!?

15

Alright, I’ll give you that the game is somewhat repetitive, but a lot of games are like that. Remember the hours of level grinding we did in Disgaea that we love so much?

On the side of plot holes and quirkiness, I don’t let it bother me. It’s just a game, use your imagination a bit. I thought the characters were different enough to make them memorable. Every time I saw Norma I was like, “Why can’t she be on our side?”

As for the sock gag, I has the same “WTF?” reaction as you, but I just laughed it off and it didn’t really bug me.

I guess I’m just more forgiving when it comes to game shortfalls.

16

Apples to Oranges I guess. I began playing both kinds so I always had different expectations from each genre. Part of the problem is probably that you’ve already played plenty of jrpgs and at this point the clichés are banging you with a lead pipe. There is genre saturation for me too (generic jrpg no. ###) but I also can’t stand certain conventions established (see TD’s 300h comment or the trend to make a big part of the content “optional”, requiring grinding to level up and beat hidden bosses or get a 1 in 1000 rare whachamacallit). Actually I think rpgs can go back to being fun. It’s no shame.

On the other hand wrpgs have their clichés too, you just haven’t been bored by them yet. For instance, I wasn’t really moved to play KOTOR; it felt a bit like “been there, done that”. By the way if you have any tolerance for post-apocalyptic games go get Fallout 2. Bee’s knees.

17

Help out.
Help out for money.
Kill guy, take his money.

18

Invariably, option 1 leaves you with more exp and money than the other two. Eat that, Jack Thompson.

Still, it’s better than having no choice.

19

Yeah, in the last couple of years I haven’t cared much for JRPGs. I’ve found western RPGs more fun they they are less linear and let you develop the hero a lot more and give you much mroe freedom. They also tend to be much more action oriented than JPRGs, so it makes them a little more exciting.

20

Yeah, I was thinking about that. Although I have no inclination to do so, if I wrote a game, I believe that it would be a lot more fun to have balanced choices that actually seemed to matter, and more axises than good, evil, law, and chaos. Of course, roleplaying game alignments seem focused on duality. What about a more complex alignment system that isn’t EXACTLY good/evil:

Order ---------------- Chaos
Altruism ---------------- Hedonism
Religious ---------------- Scientific
Conservative ---------------- Liberal

One might see redundancy in my labeling, but I don’t think there is any in there. It’s easy to see groups of people that are both conservative and chaotic, as well as those that are more liberal and ordered. You COULD replace “religious” with “magical,” but if we’re in a world that operates fully with magic, then it’s extremely doubtful that either the religious or the scientific will deny that magic exists. Of course, we could make that a TRICHOTOMY of science/religion/magic… oh, man. I don’t even know what my point is. It’s really late at night, I shouldn’t start rambling at this time.

But anyway, I think that it would be awesome if I could have a conversation with an NPC and be able to choose from several different options and methods that seemed to not only have a different effect on the world around, but that would have a balanced gift for the character as well as a balanced sacrifice. Maybe I’ll post a more coherent reply in the morning.

But yeah, I’m sick of JRPGs.