Michael-5 said:
Clearly your a JRPG fan, but have you played the older Final Fantasies? FFXIII doesn't light a match compared to Final Fantasy V and VI, and a lot of people love VII and VIII.
You should give Lost Odyssey a try, it's somewhat better then FFXIII, more original, less linear, and just better. I'm going to boot up Infinite Undiscovery and Tales of Vesperia over the summer. I have a lot of JRPG's to catch up on.
Still, just because you're not a fan of WRPG's doesn't mean they suck this gen. The JRPG genre has been on a downward spiral since the SNES and arguably the PS1 days. You jsut don't see as many good JRPG's as you did back then, and NONE to the level of quality Chrono Trigger, FFVI, and Super Mario RPG were at.
This gen, WRPG's are kicking JRPG's butts. FFXIII won GOTY on 1 website, well Mass Effect 2 won it on most websites. Even then FFXIII is one JRPG, what else has there been thats been good and sold well lately? Demon Souls, Lost Odyssey, Tales of Vesperia, Star Ocean, Valkeria Chonicles, those are all 2008/2009 games, they are old. There are a few good ones coming this fall, but not many (Dark Souls, XenoBlade). In the last 2 years the WRPG genre has seen Mass Effect 2, Fallout NV, and Dragon Age 2 to name a few, and this fall were going to see Mass Effect 3 and Elder Scrolls 5.
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I have played every single FF so far, and my favourites are FF XIII, FF X and FF VII, although I liked all of them very much. But to be honest I liked FF 4 the most of the SNES-FFs (although they were not released in the EU initially). Especially FF6 is the only FF that I stopped halfway through (the loading times of the PS1 were horrible, but I finished the GBA version...It had too much characters in my opinion which dragged the story down a bit). I started gaming with the NES, but I have to admit that gaming evolved and the PS2 Era had absolutely amazing games.
The one thing that I really like about JRPGs is that they focus on the story. The story is not pure entertainment but wants you to think about moral dilemmas. It feels more like watching a theatre play than watching a movie. FF 7 wants to make you think about the environment, FF X about blind believe, FF XIII about propaganda and the Holocaust. And there are more themes in every games... you get the impression that the stories are really meaningful... Oblivion lacked every single bit of meaningfulness for me... as every other WRPG I have played so far. That does not mean that they "suck"per se. Just that the JRPGS have set the bar for my expectations regarding storytelling so high that the WRPG feels so lacking that ultimately they felt like I was wasting my time... I just can enjoy nonlinear gameplay, moral systems (they just feel like an excuse to behave like an a**hole) , first person view or these decision systems...
There was a general lack of japanese games this generation. Konami only had 1 Metal Gear Solid, Square-Enix only FF 13 and Star Ocean 4 (and some externally developed western trash like Front Mission Evolved, Kane & Lynch and Just Cause 2) and Capcom .... why have they started to "westernize" their games....
FF XIII still sold more than any WRPG this gen on consoles...
