Impulsivity said:
Its because WRPGs are BETTER now. It used to be they were different but that ship has sailed. Now they are just flat out better. Games from Bioware are the best RPGs available and have been for years, followed closely by Bethesda and sometimes Obsidian (who picks up Bioware's leftovers). There just aren't any JRPGs from the last 5 years that compete at ALL with games like Fallout 3, Oblivion, the Witcher, Jade Empire, KOTOR ect ect ect. Grind and stats just don't do it any more. What makes WRPGs great is the addition of CHOICE. branching character options, multiple dialogue options, moral choice and repercussions...every game I listed has those things and it is a huge boon. Once you've played KOTOR and games that adopted the light/dark morality dynamic its so hard to go to preset canned dialogue and stories without any real branching choice.
In a game like Eternal Sonata, which I DO like, everything is set and you just follow a path leveling up your character in a pretty set way. In Fallout 3 you arrive at a new town and can either help the sheriff out or take a 500 cap payout from a sleezy character and nuke the town. JRPGs really need to evolve into something more then grind and repetition of what made FF1 a hit in 1988. You'd think over 20 years they would be able to make something better consistently.
I do LIKE JRPGs but I hold no illusions about them being the best thing out there these days. WRPGs are just so good thanks largely to Bioware and Dungeons and Dragons games like Baldurs gate as a trailblazer its really hard to justify JRPGs as anything near the best out there. |
There are more developer studios making WRPGs than it was in the 90's-early 00's - that's the only reason why you can say WRPGs are better today, because many of the big wRPG studios like Bioware and Bethesda are just a shadow of what they were in the past:
- Bioware is worse than when they were developing Baldur's Gate (Kotor and ME are just average compared to BG2's brilliance)
- There's no Black Isle (Obsidian is still great though)
- Bethesda has turned to mediocre with Oblivion, and Fallout 3 is nowhere near the quality of it's predecessors.
On the up side, there's great companies like CDProjekt, ArenaNet, etc... making modern wRPGs.
