Riachu on 13 June 2009
| deadt0m said: A lot of things are wrong with JRPGs today. #1 - They are hardly ever turn based. And yes, I know that this is a matter of opinion. I just vastly prefer turn based jrpgs to "action" RPGs. Western developers, especially Bioware, are so far ahead of the curve in terms of action RPGs that the Japanese attempts fall flat for me. #2 - Graphics, although I guess that isn't really a new issue. When consoles moved to CDs, graphics became a huge selling point, not just for RPGs but for consoles as a whole. It had a particular effect on the RPG market, though. RPG developers started spending a large amount of their dev time and budgets on sweeping, visually impressive cinematics in order to capture the graphics-hungry new consumers. Unfortunately, it came at the expense of gameplay and especially story writing. When characters were sprites, they had to be extremely compelling for a gamer to really relate to the story. Now, though, you can just have a party of spiky-haired androgynous white people, give them big swords, and sprinkle the game with cutscenes of them swinging said swords, and it's a lot easier way to get a game out. They are trying to sell games on visual appeal instead of actual meaningful content. As technology has improved, this has become more and more pronounced. #3 - Enix :P |
Visuals did not cause the storylines to drop in quality, the writers themselves did. FFX had amazing graphics(and even now, are still pretty decent) but it also had a great story and a fast paced yet strategic battle system. Kazushige Nojima knows how to write a compelling story. Ok, I'm not really sure who writes FF's stories. Unfortunately, the writers at companies like Tri-Ace don't seem to know what it takes to make an amazing story. I'm only in high school and I think I can write a better story than Tri-Ace and any other JRPG developer that sucks at writing stories.
