Are Western reviewers becoming biased against JRPGs?

[Zim]

Yes western reviewers are definetly biased against Jrpgs. Reading reviews for blue dragon was tiresome. Half of the reviews basically read like: Why isn't this oblivion? Why is this turn based?

It's funny because wrpgs are still tending to completly ignore story. The only good one I can think of recently is Mass effect. Fallout, oblivion the story may as well not exist.

I mean if you take a comparison of blue dragon and oblivion. Blue dragon is FAR FAR more polished, I don't remember a single glitch in the 65 hours I put into it. Oblivion is glitch heaven, far more loading times etc. Blue dragon has polished graphics, you may not like them but that is just the style. Oblivion has good graphics in screenshots, but when things start moving urg the animation is awful, still pretty good though. Story and characters? While BD may not be amazing it is definetly better than oblivion.

Gameplay I guess it's choice. I would argue BD's gameplay is far better in objective terms. As far as turn based games go it is incredibly well done. Being able to make different monsters fight by using the encounter circle, charging attacks to make the timing/power of them maximum etc. Oblivion has real time combat but it's very poorly executed. Compared to something like Dark messiah of might and magic, oblivions combat is awful. Even fallout the gunplay is awful compared to games like Gears or CoD.

So why the difference in score? Western reviewers simply prefer big open worlds and real time combat, I guess they prefer the atmosphere of it. Games like LO and BD are character/story driven, games like Fallout/oblivion are driven by stat growth and exploring the world.

I also think a big part of it is to do with graphics. In the PS1/PS2 days rpgs often showed what the system could do. FF7/8/9 were all incredible for the time they were released. Likewise FF10/12 looked incredible. They were like the graphical showcases for a system, great in game graphics combined with amazing fmvs. This generation shooters have tended to have the best graphics coupled with more games using in game cutscenes rather than fmv.

Personally I don't really understand how games like Fallout score highly. They aren't polished, graphics are good but not great due to poor animation, gameplay doesn't even come close to other shooters, story is poor, character development is poor. The only thing I can think that drives people is the whole increase XP and fight a bigger monster mentality, nevermind the gameplay will still be poor when im fighting that monster.

Mass effect deserved it's scores though, great game (although once again more polish would have been nice)