Bioware: “Final Fantasy XIII Definitely Not An RPG”
Leading western RPG developer Bioware has said that hit corridor crawler Final Fantasy XIII “isn’t an RPG.”
Commenting on the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic, Bioware’s Writing Director Daniel Erickson launched into an opportunistic salvo against Final Fantasy XIII:
“Well, before I address the main point I just want to take a slightly more controversial route: You can put a ‘J’ in front of it, but it’s not an RPG.
You don’t make any choices, you don’t create a character, you don’t live your character… I don’t know what those are – adventure games maybe? But they’re not RPG’s.”
Bioware has previously criticised JRPGs as being as being “stagnant,” so it is by now no secret that the company has a low opinion of a genre which in fairness has only a tangential connection to the original conception of a “role playing game” – “stats based dungeon crawler” might be a fairer description.
