Riachu on 22 November 2008
| flagship said: Being a longtime RPG fan, both Western and Eastern since the NES days I have to say over the last several years I've become more and more disappointed with JRPGs. JRPGs used to have interesting storylines and fun combat systems but over the last half decade the stories have gotten worse and worse to the point where they don't make any sense. All the villains have become cookie cutter copies simply because every game now demands an evil world destroying mastermind whose sole purpose seems to be doing evil things simply to prove how damn evil they are. The heroes are even worse, constantly spouting pointless catchphrases and spend most of the story trying to be as daft and idiomatic as possible. Granted there have been some gems, Nocturne, Lost Odyssey, Radiata Stories. But those games either pride themselves on being extremely difficult or makeup for following the current trend by adding something slightly unique. For me JRPGs peaked during the PS1 era followed by a quick decent as they seemed to target an ever decreasing age group, or maybe it was simply that DVDs allowed developers to add in all that extra useless crap they'd been meaning to put in from the begining. Anyhow this isn't exactly anything new, go back and look at SNES/PS1 RPGs, most of them didn't receive stellar reviews either. |
I think the real problem with the stories is that they might make sense to a Japanese gamer, but due to poor localization, it wouldn't make sense to a Western gamer. Also, Western gamers seem to be tired of the good vs evil stories and instead want gray area characters and villians
