I have a feeling that the long, cinematic epic nature of modern jrpgs has a lot to do with how jaded I've become with the genre. I was playing Rhapsody A Musical Adventure (PS1 jrpg), known for its short-length and quirkiness the other day for a couple hours and I couldn't stop laughing my ass off. The characters made that game. No cinematics, no soap opera, no overly-inflated main quests with lots of filler. The game designers focused on telling a character-driven story and it seems like a fun quirky little ride. The feeling I get from that game is similar to the feeling I get when playing a Phoenix Wright game. There is a certain soul and charm to games like these that that you won't find in many of these modern cinematic soap opera jrpgs. There is more soul in these 2D sprites than in all the cinematic soap operas that Square-Enix can throw at us.
Game designers shouldn't be saying, "alright, we gotta make the main quest 60+ hours to please our hardcore fans. We gotta put boatloads of cutscenes in our game to make it look like a blockbuster hollywood movie J-style" No, they should be saying, "we should do what we need to do to make our audience feel a human connection to our characters. Because that is the soul of a jrpg. Not how many dungeons we make you go through and not how many cutscenes we make you watch before you get to the big bad."
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