Is Final Fantasy important anymore?

[Riachu]

Garcian Smith said:

Paul_Warren said:
"Second: Most JRPG stories are terrible, and they're told terribly. Tons and tons... and tons... and tons... of non-interactive text and cutscenes. Your average WRPG can at least tell a story competently - through branching dialogue trees, for example - even if the story itself isn't that great."

Actually it is the other way around branching dialogue trees just take away from the games by giving players too much choice in which direction they go. They don't allow one to experience the unified vision of their creators in the way that the best films and jrpgs do. Romeo and Juliet has simply not been the same play when directors have made the choice of allowing the star-crossed lovers to live at the end of the play.

 

...except games aren't plays. Nor are games movies or books. Games are games. A game can still have the "unified vision of its creators" with branching story paths. In fact, I'd venture to say that it takes a far more visionary developer to create a game with branching dialogue trees and such than it does to create a wordy cutscene-fest. There's a reason why there's so many of the latter and so few of the former.

And a wordy cutscene fest is bad how?  Do the way a story gets told in a video games really affect the quality of the story that much?  MGS series, for example, works better with cutscenes than with dialouge trees. 

 

BTW, aren't most of these cutscene fest games coming from Japan?