The Archetypal Resonance of Classic JRPGs
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I've seen many people say (about games in general) that older games often have more depth in contrast of newer more "casualized" games that cater to the lowest common denominator as often as people say what you wrote. At the end is really about personal taste and if there is one objective thing that older games often do worse (apart from technical limitations, although with the popularity of retro-styled games nowadays often these limitations are seen through a stylistic prism) is their user interfaces. But even that divides people in how much they can endure it (and as Dwarf Fortress shows, a lot of people will endure the most obnoxious of UIs to get something they like).
As an example, there are many people who like grinding in JRPGs and some even consider it as a defining element of JRPGs (in that a JRPG is not real JRPG if it doesn't have grinding) whereas others are perplexed by the idea of anyone liking grinding and not seeing it as a cheap way to pad the game's length and something that developers should strive towards eliminating.
I am one such person who is happy to argue for the fact that ability to grind is one of the (maybe two?) defining traits of a JRPG. The option to meaningfully strengthen your player avatar that is not tied to story/game progression is the heart of JRPGs.
Go to new area -> grind -> level up, buy gear -> defeat boss -> go to new area
Even in later 8-bit JRPGs such as Dragon Quest IV, that's pretty much all there was. Very minimal story/dialogue, rare puzzles ("get item A to proceed" type). Story was necessarily limited by the small ROM size.
I find that grinding has an almost calming, meditative quality that sets JRPGs apart from action-based games that require a lot of focus.
With recent JRPGs, the shift has been to lessen grinding and include a much larger emphasis on story and dialogue. The downside here for traditionalists is that more of the game is spent reading dialogue than fighting random battles.
Does any of this reflect bad game design? I doubt it. I would say that the gameplay of DQIV is highly polished for its time. But you must approach it knowing what it is (a game of turn-based random battles) and what it is not (a game of rich story and dialogue).
> in contrast of newer more "casualized" games that cater to the lowest common denominator as often as people say what you wrote.
If I had to summarize it, I'd say that the decades of refinement have led to them being streamlined at the expense of creativity.
Some people enjoy aggregating all of that information in their brain and getting mastery over it. Even mechanically dumb games can have interesting higher level tactics. People will make spreadsheets and argue over the best weapon or best combination of items or spells to fight certain bosses, even if the base game is mashing the A button to sword hit the enemy 5000 times in a row.
Slow, boring and clunky is actually good design that serves a purpose.
I got over it with newer games, and nowadays my Switch gets a lot of use.
Another thing that I realized, maybe related through my acceptance of not liking JRPGs very much anymore, was that I also actually just don't enjoy NES era games. I think I did at the time, but nowadays they are just too simple in structure, and too "arcade-y" in gameplay. Even allowing for the fact that I'm probably getting too old to be any good at that kind of "twitchy" games, I'm pretty sure that even if I was any good, the payout would still be disappointing. I think it's around the SNES-era that games get potentially interesting for me.
There are some exceptions like Link's Awakening on the Game Boy, but that always felt much more like an SNES-era game, and in fact it came out a year after SNES's A Link to the Past, and shares the almost same gameplay. I'm looking forward to the Switch remake coming out this year.
It definitely depends a lot on what you're playing. Chrono Trigger has tighter, punchier pacing than practically any modern RPG. IIRC in the first couple hours you've visited two or three different areas, seen consequences of your choices, escaped a dungeon, had a cinematic fight against a boss with unique mechanics, and discovered a secret about one of the main characters.
It's not perfect; there are a number of "uh, wait, what am I supposed to do now?" moments, but it still feels fresh otherwise.
Final Fantasy VI and Phantasy Star IV similarly have brisk pacing and great presentation. Early 3D RPGs slowed everything way down, for whatever reason.
Specifically on slowing things down in 3D RPGs, Final Fantasy VII was pretty fun, even if a little grindy, up until the endgame. But by this point, effective grinding consisted of summon spells, which meant watching the same 90 seconds of an unskippable cut scene over and over again. Like, I get how mind-blowing 3D was in that era, but it killed the pacing so much for me that I never bothered to finish the game. I hear some cool stuff happens with Sephiroth, or whatever.
Also I remember people's attitudes shifting in some inexplicable ways, suddenly cultural capital seemed to carry much more weight than other forms of capital. For a while it felt like everyone in Tokyo was trying to one-up one another, not financially but through cultural connoisseurship. Strange times but I do miss the general atmosphere, Japan feels like a completely different country now...
I think there's a case to be made that WE changed since then and that it's not purely nostalgia. There weren't the same level of distractions in the pre-internet world (I understand that the Internet existed but it wasn't the attention economy driven behemoth that it is now). People could engage more deeply with things like Video Games and Anime.
People today are conditioned to jump from dopamine-burst to dopamine-burst as they quickly scroll through their social feeds. Those attention alternatives also fill a big part of free time and mental bandwidth, so the time left over that is dedicated to games and other entertainment is limited. Generally our engagement is much more superficial now.
Sure, the internet and social media has contributed heavily to changes in taste and modes of consumption, much like television and motion pictures (and video games!) before that.
The dominance of things like One Piece or AKB48 don't preclude the creation of "cutting edge" stuff, though they might certainly drown those out and make them less visible. I think something similar could be said for the 90s, with the popularity of Dragon Ball and Morning Musume, for example (though to a lesser degree). Still, the Internet has allowed for the creation and popularity of lots of interesting stuff, even if they may not be "mainstream."
One Piece started in 1997, and many argue that it's only gotten better with time.
The Matrix came out in 1999, but so did things like Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. I think there's a major survivor bias in your analysis.
I'm probably weird, but the music, more than just about anything, is what brings me back to these JRPG games again and again. The mechanics may be clunky, the sound systems primitive, but those peculiar fusions of Western and Japanese musical sensibilities, played out over fantasy after fantasy, are timeless.
I stumbled on to it a year or so ago, and it's pretty obvious how hard most classic video game music cribbed from it.
Pieces of Sonic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0g79mTyjE0
Bits of Xenoblade Chronicles (esp gaur plains): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8xfT4l2Gnw
UMN / cities in various Xenosaga installments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cj8yrPSo_Q
Secret of Mana had one of the weirdest soundtracks from the SNES era! So many interesting southeastern Asian influences. The sequels definitely took the music in a more generic direction, unfortunately :(
Of somewhat recent JRPGs, I found NieR:Automata to be a superb masterpiece, both in the musical compositions led by Keichii Okabe and the underlying themes explored within the game itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSbGaLxNjdM&list=PLEDB3E00B9...
Interesting that he's going to barely miss Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger.
Xenoblade 2 went in the completely wrong direction. Lots of linear maps, completely separated worlds, some sort of weird tidal mechanic that supposedly blocked things off sometimes but was way too obscure to notice...
I'm not sure how others feel but to me I've definitely noticed a much stronger emphasis on wowing visual effects in today's RPG's and a much weaker focus on the story and plot lines as was the case in past games.
This basically started in the PS3 era, where it appeared that the casual consumer's bar of visual graphics were raised high enough that pushed up development costs, to the point where developer couldn't cheaply churn out interesting, experimental titles.
Many people will cite the SNES and PS1 era as the golden age of JRPGs, but I think the PS2 era is under-appreciated. The SNES/PS1 era had a lot of classics, but the PS2 era was absolutely flooded with great, 8/10 JRPGs across all manner of series, benefiting from the gameplay/UI/UX refinements learned from the SNES/PS1 era and the improved hardware capabilities of the PS2. You had participation across all manner of series: from your popular Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests, to Tales, Persona, Star Ocean, Suikoden, Wild Arms, Breath of Fire, Arc the Lad and so on. You had a whole generation of new entrants like Radiata Stories, Shadow Hearts, Atelier, Dark Cloud, Rogue Galaxy, Xenosaga, .Hack, and many others. Not all of these were amazing, but most of these were at least very good, and in particular they were diverse while also being streamlined as some of the visual/gameplay "language" JRPGs become more firmly established. To me, this was the last great age of JRPGs.
Same now - we live in the era where games like Witcher 3, Firewatch, Pillars of Eternity, Sunless Sea, Banner Saga, Horizon: ZD, Alien: Isolation, Wolfenstein, Yakuza and many many more exist. Of course you need to actually look beyond the most advertised ones... but then again, you do go looking for the best thought provoking movies in summer blockbuster lists do you?
However, I seem to be the only Baldur’s Gate fan that didn’t like Pillars :)
I feel like the writing, quests and general world building was really quite good - but the overall gameplay was a bit of a let down.
They abandoned the traditional d20 system in favour of a custom model which really didn't feel right. For instance, barbarians needing high intelligence because that was the stat that extended area attacks. Or mages being fine with heavy armour and high strength, whilst your fighters were seriously hindered by armour...
Just felt like a really weird system that they never quite worked out. They were trying to be different just for the sake of it IMO.
The latest one is just garbage, story-wise despite being absolutely beautiful.
(Pretty much the same thing that happened to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, also by Square Enix...)
I'd played most of the NES/SNES/PS1 entries (some all the way through, some partially before getting sidetracked) and while the stories were often convoluted or just poorly localized, they were lengthy and had a lot to do.
The latest FF game looked great and I could deal with the sketchy plot logic but right around when the pacing suggested that I was getting to the "meat" of the game, it went on rails (in some aspects, literally). I was used to the idea of a long setup with a false sense of conclusion, right before it "hits the fan" and the big bad shows up/you end up in the world of ruin/whatever.
When this game went from the peaceful storyline and fun time world exploration with your buddies to "oh crap wtf shit is going down!" it was followed by a series of simpler missions in a few locations, then the end.
I don't even care that the ending itself made little sense unless you had watched some movie or whatever. I was mostly just bummed that the exploration, discovery, dialogue, etc. ended so abruptly so you could fast track to the inevitable showdown with the big bad (who was disappointingly the guy you were led to expect, not the usual fake-out where he was just a pawn of the real ultimate baddie).
Later I read the same thing about how the game was cut short (which also explained all of the locations marked on the map that you couldn't actually visit). Made total sense.
It's a shame they put it out like this. As I said, I only played the PC version which came out two years after the initial release but I would've loved it if they just waited until 2018 and put out the full product. I hadn't played one of these since maybe FFX in 2002 so it was kind of a bummer.
I've played a few since, but none quite sucked me in so much as VII and X.
Now I'm not saying that they are identical games or that there hasn't been no innovation but to me it seems that for different Japanese games within a genre, there's usually one or two features that are done differently to stand out from the mass and everything else is done "like it's always been done". It seems like the thought process is something like: "RPGs consist of these features so we must have these features in the game for it to be an RPG".
Also I'm not saying that western games can't be or aren't formulaic, but if you take an old Ultima game from the 80's and compare that to modern western RPGs like Skyrim or Witcher or Diablo it seems very different, mechanics wise. Or if you take the Mass Effect trilogy and look at just the inventory management in them it is very different in each game. It seems to me like western developers are more eager to (sometimes unsuccessfully) improve, replace and/or reinvent gaming mechanics and they also are not afraid to blur the lines between genres. Many games from different genres seem to have, for example, at least some RPG elements in them these days.
I'm not implying that one way is better than another, that's a matter of taste. It's just an interesting point that I personally have noticed. It's especially interesting when you think that when not "chained" to a specific genre, Japanese developers can come up with something completely unheard of like Katamari Damacy for example.
Has anyone else noticed this or am I just imagining things?
Also, it has aged well :)
Stopped reading before halfway through when I realized it was getting spoilerish, though.
Playing this and Kingdom Hearts 3 back to back makes me realize that the charm some of the classics have is not pure nostalgia, but I still can't put my finger on it. Saying that, Persona 5 is a recent JRPG that I thoroughly enjoyed like those I played as a kid.
Many times I've fantasized about making a modern clone...
Many of those classic games may not have depth in complex mechanics or breadth of story narratives, but that does not mean they do not contain deep or significant meaning or underlying narrative constructs. At a minimum it does not mean that they lack strong and compelling game design.
I tend to view those (sorry, generalising a little) that dismiss 'classic' games by declaring them 'out of date' as projecting how clever they are by defining complexity == intelligent, regardless of the quality of design, depth of meaning or coherence in narrative.
My biggest problem with older games is how clunky the controls can be. This is not the case with all games, but it is a very common one. Specially when video games started to move from 2D to 3D.
For example, the first Mario Kart for SNES is still an amazing game. Nintendo got everything right, specially the kart handling. I still play it from time to time and it is great fun. In contrast the first Wipeout game for PSX has terrible handling compared to the newer ones which are amazing in this respect (Wipeout HD, Fury, 2048).