This man is right!

[Kudistos Megistos]

The JRPG is Dead: 5 Reasons Why (found on Sancom)

Well, except for the last point. It's nice to have comic relief.

And lol at all the stupid responses. It's obvious that half of them didn't even read the article and only left messages because they read a forum post or something telling them that someone was criticising JRPGs. Most of the angry responses seem to come from people under the impression that the blogger hates JRPGs, which is obviously wrong to anyone who even bothered to read the first few sentences.

[Furzball]

I actually tended to agree with most of what was said. All besides the FF7 hate. FF7/8 are probably the last two real RPG's of the series before it starts going into the annoyances he described. Heck with FF8 I never upgraded my weapons lol.

Glad some (bioware) in this day and age are contributing to making good RPGs. I also think it's awesome that they allow editing to the game to be done so that fans can come up with their own material. I believe we should also get something that is a mix of UDK and Bioware Development stuff so people can make their own full RPG games.

[ScottMcTony]

FF8 is terrible you fken. I will insist on this every time someone says otherwise.
FF7 was great in itself but it sort of was the game that killed JRPG's.

[pyrozen]

pretty good read, though some of his complaints are definitely the words of an old timer. I don't find the materia system in FF7 to be cumbersome, it is(was) fun finding optimal combinations. Swapping weapons and equiment is a plus for me as well. I like LOOT!  As far as star ocean, i thought it was fun as well. Turn-based combat is fun, but for me it removes the urgency from the battle, and the excitement factor goes in the toilet. Well paced RTC gives the best of both worlds. And what the hell is up with hating on the chocobos? I fail to see how they do not fit in with the FF7 world. People don't own cars, and horses don't exist. Does he expect everyone to hoof it on foot? A little suspension of belief is required to play any of these games, and i don't understand how one thing is okay(uhhh monsters?magic?), but other things apparently are not(gun-swords?).

But i agree that the stories are entirely forgettable in nearly every RPG I've played in the last 5 years.

A true 3d RPG creator would be a very cool program. The old one is very dated, and good luck finding others who own it to share with. The UDK "could" be made to do an RPG, but it would require some very heavy scripting. You'd be better off going with an Elder Scrolls engine, or even Source.

[Furzball]

FF8 is terrible you fken. I will insist on this every time someone says otherwise.
FF7 was great in itself but it sort of was the game that killed JRPG's.

Woah, suddenly calling me a name while saying something is terrible sounds like something a 3rd grader would do. So Scotty, you must be under 13 so you should have your account deleted  oh, but if you're not then at least act like an adult on the board. There is a line of showing your opinion, being rude, and just being plan childish.

So you don't like FF8, ok. Doesnt make it a terrible game for the rest of us. In fact FF8 is my favorite final fantasy. Don't want to hear your arguments about it nor am I trying to convince you to like it. Just saying, respect the rest of us by just shutting up or polite criticism.

What would you call a good JRPG? FF4/FF6? Dragon Quests. It's all the same style stuff as other RPG's and Fantasy genre stuff. Sorry but I just can't have bread and butter 24/7.  I gotta have different stories then "hey a warrior wizard and priest set out to save the worlds crystals from the evil king and his demon overlord." unfortunantly it does end up being a similar situation 90% of the time. Even applied to FF7, Evil king-Sephiroth, Demon overlord-Jenova Crystals-Black/White materia Warrior-Cloud,,,Etc. so on so forth. Final Fantasy 8 Evil Queen-Edea Demon overlord-Ultramecia Crystal- Time Warrior-Squall, Etc. Oh by the way there always seems to be the sacrificial priestess so Aerith for FF7, Rinoa for FF8 (though she was saved), Yuna from FFX (lost her lover till FFX 2 and it's only the medium ending) So yeah, unfortunantly the older you're so called original stuff, follows the same hidden formula. Biscuits taste bland after awhile no matter what you cover them with.

[pyrozen]

Biscuits taste bland after awhile no matter what you cover them with.

I sir, resent that statement.

Hardee's/Carl's Jr cinnamon raisin biscuits never get old. EVER! NOW TAKE IT BACK!

lee

[Kudistos Megistos]

Looks like nobody read the article the whole way through

I want to love JRPGs again. I want to spend hours and hours sending my brave friends into combat, like I did in Final Fantasy VII  (a beautiful example of what a true JRPG should be, even if it suffers from the repetitive-boss syndrome).

However, I'll admit that it is a little odd that he picks FF7 as an example for so many of his criticisms and then praises it. Maybe He thinks that FF7 did these things well. Or had other good aspects that compensated for the flaws. or maybe he thought FF7 was OK because, at the time, the things it did were not yet boring tropes: they became boring tropes because everyone tried to copy FF7. Who knows?

[DarkFang]

I hate active time battles. I liked the battle style from Final Fantasy X. There was no time bar and one person did one action at one time. You didn't have like 20 million different things going on at once like Final Fantasy XIII.

[Kudistos Megistos]

The idea of real time fighting in RPGs with more than one character in a party seems fatally flawed, and I have no idea why people can't see what is wrong with it; one person can't control three different characters in real time. It seems obvious but apparently people can't seem to get their heads around this concept. The reason why turn based fighting is good is that it allows you to control the whole party on your own. Having real time battles with several characters means either using stupid nonsense like gambits or giving up control over all but one. Are people really so impatient or obsessed with realism that they are prepared to lose control over their party? The mind boggles....

[Furzball]

The idea of real time fighting in RPGs with more than one character in a party seems fatally flawed, and I have no idea why people can't see what is wrong with it; one person can't control three different characters in real time. It seems obvious but apparently people can't seem to get their heads around this concept. The reason why turn based fighting is good is that it allows you to control the whole party on your own. Having real time battles with several characters means either using stupid nonsense like gambits or giving up control over all but one. Are people really so impatient or obsessed with realism that they are prepared to lose control over their party? The mind boggles....

This is the one reason games like the DotHack series failed for me. I loved the storyline of that series but the battle system was a nightmare. I also liked the commodity of fictional email. Lol

[yoshi314]

Having real time battles with several characters means either using stupid nonsense like gambits or giving up control over all but one.

gambits are stupid but not nonsense. they are stupid in their simplicity. but this is what makes them work well.

having realtime battles without gambits sucks. tried star ocean 3?

The aforementioned game mechanics aren’t just window dressing; the player must master the crystal-junctioning system if s/he wants to defeat the final bosses. If you don’t use precisely the right ring at precisely the right time with precisely the right weapon and precisely the right magic spell, you will get stomped and smashed like Hyde United in the 1887 FA Cup.

personally, i think it's a good thing.

every rpg should have a extremely challenging boss that requires you to really know the game and use all the possible tricks to beat him. it doesn't have to be the final boss, though (and usually isn't).

i liked that in vagrant story, star ocean series, ff series, grandia2, and a few more games i cannot remember right now.

[ScottMcTony]

FF8 is terrible you fken. I will insist on this every time someone says otherwise.
FF7 was great in itself but it sort of was the game that killed JRPG's.

Woah, suddenly calling me a name while saying something is terrible sounds like something a 3rd grader would do. So Scotty, you must be under 13 so you should have your account deleted  oh, but if you're not then at least act like an adult on the board. There is a line of showing your opinion, being rude, and just being plan childish.

So you don't like FF8, ok. Doesnt make it a terrible game for the rest of us. In fact FF8 is my favorite final fantasy. Don't want to hear your arguments about it nor am I trying to convince you to like it. Just saying, respect the rest of us by just shutting up or polite criticism.

What would you call a good JRPG? FF4/FF6? Dragon Quests. It's all the same style stuff as other RPG's and Fantasy genre stuff. Sorry but I just can't have bread and butter 24/7.  I gotta have different stories then "hey a warrior wizard and priest set out to save the worlds crystals from the evil king and his demon overlord." unfortunantly it does end up being a similar situation 90% of the time. Even applied to FF7, Evil king-Sephiroth, Demon overlord-Jenova Crystals-Black/White materia Warrior-Cloud,,,Etc. so on so forth. Final Fantasy 8 Evil Queen-Edea Demon overlord-Ultramecia Crystal- Time Warrior-Squall, Etc. Oh by the way there always seems to be the sacrificial priestess so Aerith for FF7, Rinoa for FF8 (though she was saved), Yuna from FFX (lost her lover till FFX 2 and it's only the medium ending) So yeah, unfortunantly the older you're so called original stuff, follows the same hidden formula. Biscuits taste bland after awhile no matter what you cover them with.

Hey man chill out, I called you a "fken", that's not even a thing, the statement was silly by design and I figured that was far too obvious for anyone to, well, have that sort of reaction. I don't see it as childish, I saw it as harmless, effectively a non-statement.
Also, I doubt you meant to do this but I dislike the suggestion that I just found myself not enjoying it and then went on to say nobody else would without asking myself why I didn't like it. If I'd been unable to come up with a reason I'd have just figured it was just me and gone on with things, but it seemed to be certain objective elements that, to the best of my critical faculties, I could only deem "terrible flaws". Of course I'm not going to start talking about what those elements were or why I would judge them so, and as you said, you wouldn't want to hear it.
Oh and one last thing, I do feel that I should clarify that I have no problem with disagreement about any such judgments I might make, and also no problem with people enjoying "bad" things, your post just invoked my standing self-orders to insist FF8 sucks when it makes some kind of warped sense to.

[Lion]

he seems overly nostalgic if anything. i'm all for newfangled rpg things and stuff.

I really think that Square can resurrect their FF series. If they can get past the Cliche "the world is ending" thing I really think it would be a lot better. Personally, if FF7 was just Cloud trying to get revenge on Sephiroth it would have been so much better than putting things at such a grand scale. I actually don't find the stories to be that stale at all. FF8 had me pondering for days. How Laguna was Squalls father. How time loops work. How Raine was Squalls mother. Why they had to defeat Ultimecia. Why Ultimecia wanted time kompression. FF8 had a very interesting story, though I just wish it wasn't so forced at times.

i don't know if you guys ever played those old megaman battle network game for GBA, but those were addictive. It was an RPG featuring real-time combat, complicated folder building (to get it just right), and it was still amazing. The story was actually horribly boring and cliche but the game had amazing replay value. Though I have to admit it was a pretty unique game, not a jrpg. the thing is, with the MMBN games there were many ways to beat a boss and there was no best way which kinda ruins Final Fantasy a bit. If I were to face Safer Sephiroth here is how I would play against him. W-Summon KOTR + KOTR then proceed to mime. FF7 is supposed to be strategic not a one way street. I agree no convoluted patterns of defeat are needed. Games should not be trial and error because you know that what happens when you first figure out a boss has a weakness (you start guessing elements --> blizzaga, thundaga, firaga or status ailments). I just wish there was more strategizing and less blind guessing.

[Furzball]

Hey man chill out, I called you a "fken", that's not even a thing, the statement was silly by design and I figured that was far too obvious for anyone to, well, have that sort of reaction. I don't see it as childish, I saw it as harmless, effectively a non-statement.
Also, I doubt you meant to do this but I dislike the suggestion that I just found myself not enjoying it and then went on to say nobody else would without asking myself why I didn't like it. If I'd been unable to come up with a reason I'd have just figured it was just me and gone on with things, but it seemed to be certain objective elements that, to the best of my critical faculties, I could only deem "terrible flaws". Of course I'm not going to start talking about what those elements were or why I would judge them so, and as you said, you wouldn't want to hear it.
Oh and one last thing, I do feel that I should clarify that I have no problem with disagreement about any such judgments I might make, and also no problem with people enjoying "bad" things, your post just invoked my standing self-orders to insist FF8 sucks when it makes some kind of warped sense to.

Misunderstood Fken as Fu.Ck.En. Anyways don't put things that can be misunderstood up so that you would have to explain yourself like this. In the end it never really matters what you see it as, it matters how others see it.

My whole thing about critiquing something is that I at least try to leave a short reason why "it was terrible" or whatever my judgement is. I do agree FF8 has it's flaws but I don't think it was a terrible game. Heck I'm very picky about games and it's one of my favorite.

I'm mostly chill I just don't like people calling me random names and such, petpeeves you know.

I would highly suggest not making it a self appointed mission to say something sucks all over the board. Especially since there are fans of FF8 even going as far as modding it here. If you want to give a critique find an old critique thread and add to it or make a new one. Otherwise you'll just look like you're trollin for some trouble.

I highly suggest that we leave it at that. I apologize for the retort. However as the above says, be careful of what you say and do on message boards. It's all about how the others see it.

[ScottMcTony]

Yeah I didn't actually intend to continue bringing that up constantly that was just a, uh, something. Whatever. Shut up Scott.
I love how FFVII, the game that created the modern JRPG, still has the longest spell animation of any spell from any game ever. Come on devs, you've had 15 years and two generations of new consoles to do something more ridiculous than Super Nova. Just don't make the boss use it every 5 minutes if it's going to be, well, 5 minutes long, next time.

[pyrozen]

well, by turn based i meant an Active battle system, similar to FF7. You get to instruct your characters but time continues to move, so quick judgement is rewarded by letting you attack faster(due to the fact the time bar starts filling up again). Classical turn based combat is a snooze fest, and reminds me of hex-based wargames...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.... the excitment for me is the execution. While a war game is rewarding for strategist, there are only so many ooptions in an RPG, spell this, attack that, heal them, there is no ambush or surprise attack that makes trun based wargames slightly interesting.

A turn-based fight makes it nearly impossible to lose, for me any way, because i have unlimited time to speculate on if-i-do-x then they-do-z. I need ACTION!

[DLPB_]

The idea of real time fighting in RPGs with more than one character in a party seems fatally flawed, and I have no idea why people can't see what is wrong with it; one person can't control three different characters in real time. It seems obvious but apparently people can't seem to get their heads around this concept. The reason why turn based fighting is good is that it allows you to control the whole party on your own. Having real time battles with several characters means either using stupid nonsense like gambits or giving up control over all but one. Are people really so impatient or obsessed with realism that they are prepared to lose control over their party? The mind boggles....

Totally correct.  As I told someone else.  Turn base isn't inferior, it has just been poorly implemented in the past to cater to poorer gamers.  FF7 would have been better with a  difficulty mode that forced you to think about which spells to use and so forth.  Still turn base allows you to micro manage and CHOOSE.  Having crap gambits or other gimmicks takes gameplay away.

As for ff8. it was a great game with tons to do and had a decent plot with interesting characters.  Apparently because squall wasn't the typical hollywood hero, people didn't like him.  The whole point of the story was showing his transition from sociopath to giving life and love a chance.  It was a good solid story.

[Bosola]

The article interested me, because it echoed many of the thoughts I'd had on, of all things, Final Fantasy VIII. Yeah, that one. The middle child in the PSX FF brethren, doomed to never quite receive the attention of his younger, thicker sibling (VII) or his mightier, more respectable elder (IX).

VIII, like AITD is riddled with bad design decisions, yet each one redeems itself on reflection by being a good, swift kick to the face of convention. The worst issues that plague JRPGs are all swept away by a new and radically different 'Junction' system. Gone is the ability to simply grind your way to victory, mashing attack and intermittently casting some Cure spell (a la VII) - enemies don't just level alongside you, but ahead of you, gaining significantly better stat boosts. Fighting need not be about gaining experience, but there's now a more varied, more interesting incentive to go out and fight, which is to draw spells and obtain a collection of items. GFs shook up a stale and predictable battle system that had stayed virtually unchanged since the days of the very first FF.

Of course, that doesn't stop them from still being bad decisions. Giving any player equipped with more brain power than a cephalopod to junction himself to 9999 HP and max stats in the first few hours of the game was never going to turn out well. Nor was building a junction system that punished magic casting use with stat decay: in essence, players had little incentive to do anything other than junction to Str and spam attack, or, failing that, junction to Mag and spam the GF command command instead, the latter being only marginally more relentlessly uninteresting than the first. Hunting down rare enemies to obtain some obscure item vital to a weapon upgrade became tiring quickly, and the card game was either a pointless distraction or an express route to 99 hero drinks, that then made the game virtually un-losable.

At least the spirit was there, though, and perhaps with better execution and a little more thought, FF as a series could have taken a radically different direction. As happened, though, the cool reaction from fandom prompted the self-consciously conservative IX and may well have seeded the stagnation JRPGs have suffered from (and for) over the last decade.

[Opine]

I like chocobos 

[jeffdamann]

Biscuits taste bland after awhile no matter what you cover them with.

I sir, resent that statement.

Hardee's/Carl's Jr cinnamon raisin biscuits never get old. EVER! NOW TAKE IT BACK!

lee

I was impressed you knew Carl's Jr is also Hardees(Its Hardees Here)

[pyrozen]

beause they're called hardee's here in Saint Louis, but they're Carl's Jr right across the bridge in Illinois. The menus seem slightly different, but all the good stuff is still shared.

[Furzball]

beause they're called hardee's here in Saint Louis, but they're Carl's Jr right across the bridge in Illinois. The menus seem slightly different, but all the good stuff is still shared.

Carls Jr will always be better