Jumpin said:
That's largely the nature of games where you have optional items that can be collected at certain story sequences (as someone mentioned, there are many cases of this in Xenoblade - like when colony 6 refugees relocate early on). Although, for the case of FF8, you can draw almost all of the missed Guardian forces later on. It is also possible to use scrolls to customize existing GF abilities so that they can resemble other GFs in that respect - although, although this generally takes some dedication to side-quests and the Triple Triad. I also find this is much more of a problem with the North American RPG industry because there are usually many more opportunities to miss items; in the last few years there's been lots of that "pick choice a or choice b" stuff. Japanese don't use the term "JRPG". I also don't see "JRPGs" as a genre as it only refers to the location of where the game is made - I.e. Ogre Battle, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy, Seiken Densetsu, Xenoblade, Tales of _____, etc... This is not used for criteria in any other genre of video game (ie. No one uses Jfighter, Jplatformer, Jshooter, etc...) despite differences. These are all different RPG sub-genres; and if a person makes one very similar to it in Europe, Continental Asia, or North America, they would also belong to those same sub-genres, they don't become "Japanese" all of the sudden. |
The only reason why I use the term to JRPG is because role playing existed before video games and JRPGs are lacking many of the elements present within role playing. Using RPG to describe games where you don't make any meaningful decisions and therefore don't actually play a role is a bit of a misnomer. I never liked calling Japanese "role playing games" RPGs because as someone who started role playing at about the same time he discovered JRPGs, I never saw many similarities between the two. Me and my friends used to call them "quest games" instead because they always involved some cliche "save the world" quest.
