| Never said: I'll opt for jrpgs. I used to be more about western ones but I'm getting a bit jaded by them. A lot of grinding and repetitive combat... Something I used to accuse JRPGs of. Many like elder scrolls seem to opt for quantity over quality and that no longer impresses me like it used to. Obviously both are big genres and there are many games but typically I expect JRPG's have better stories, gameplay and game design. Both are frequently contaminated with too much grinding and boring gameplay. If I had to give favourite RPG right now (ignoring nostalgia goggles) I might actually opt for fire emblem: awakened. I'm feeling a little jaded by both western and Japanese rpg's right now, to be honest. |
@bolded: it depends on devs, if they're lazy, all that grinding will look extraneous to the game, if they put some more efforts into main and subplots, they can make it look as a necessary character growth to front a very powerful evil, or, in free roaming games, naturally blend it in the exploration of a vast world, or even both things, if they tie some of the subquests to the main one. But it needs work by authors and devs, so more resources. I find that, for example, Morrowind partially succeeds at this, some subquests are well tied to the plot, others, despite not connected at all with the main plot, blend well in the exploration, but many smaller ones are just like you say, they're simply thrown in: Morrowind has quite a vast world for a game, but' it's still a small island, maybe between ~10 and ~20km² (it's difficult to exactly calculate how vast it is, the best way I could devise is to try and roughly determine the size of Vivec City buildings and use them as a scale on the map, far from accurate), it looks quite unnatural to find an infested cave or ruin almost each time you turn around a corner and it makes a lot of them look just added for quantity. Anyway it's not a strict rule that ties world size and the number of quests it can contain, even games with more crammed worlds, like Gothic I and II, can look like all those quests, or almost, are better integrated in the game than Morrowind.
