Sometimes I play retro games, and I feel like nostalgia makes us excuse what is plain bad design.
I have that feeling every time I play an old JRPG. Many of them feel slow, clunky, with painful mechanics... as opposed to current games, which had the experience from decades to get refined.
The argument in favour of this is that the bad and boring parts make the good bits even better, in a sort of stoic way, they feel like a reward for the suffering. I leave as an exercise to the reader to draw their own conclusion.
What sort of conclusion is there to be drawn when you have already labeled the older games as slow, clunky with painful mechanics and newer games as refined? :-P
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.
That resonates well with me. Unlike in my childhood, playing and replaying JRPGs in my late 20s felt like such a chore, and the often pastiche storytelling felt so distant, that I actually thought that I outgrew games in general up into my early 30s. In reality, it was just JRPGs that I outgrew, but me erroneously thinking that they would be "reference points" of good games led to wrong conclusions.
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.
> I have that feeling every time I play an old JRPG. Many of them feel slow, clunky, with painful mechanics... as opposed to current games, which had the experience from decades to get refined.
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.
JRPGs look like yet another piece in the puzzle that so many things in contemporary Japanese popular culture seem to peak around the same time in the 90s (anime, fashion, popular music, industrial design etc). I’d guess this too is related to what Masachi Osawa calls the “fictional era” when the national psyche kind of turned inward to escapism and fantasy. I don’t see this talked about much in English or even Japanese for that matter but would be interesting to try to figure out why a cultural output peaked and the stagnated.
Despite the financial collapse in the early 90s, throughout the decade Japanese youths still had one of the highest levels of disposable income in the world so that probably had an effect. You could be making the most obscure music, film, or fashion and you still had an audience willing to pay for it.
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...
It's probably not talked about much because I don't think many people agree that all those things peaked in the 90s, outside of some sense of nostalgia. Objectively, all of the cultural outputs you mentioned have continued to grow, so any sense of peaking is probably based mainly on subjective taste.
Seeing the callout to Xenoblade's music drew me back to listening to that soundtrack again... whence I stumbled upon 8-bit Music Theory's channel, and analysis of Chrono Trigger's and FFVI's music... and that's to say nothing of Secret of Mana or a half-dozen other incredible JRPG soundtracks.
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.
> and that's to say nothing of Secret of Mana or a half-dozen other incredible JRPG soundtracks.
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 :(
I share the sentiment about the amazing scores that many JRPGs come with. They really do help with the immersion.
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.
As a child, I would often play the FFVI OST on loudspeakers, adjust it to a medium-low volume, and go to sleep on it. It happened so many times that I would know what is the next track of the whole OST.
I played Lufia 2 recently and it felt really tedious at times but the characters, dialogue and ending felt realistic and wholesome that it kept me engaged and sad when it was all over. Maybe nostalgia helps us single out older games when surely there's many like it nowadays hidden among the oversaturated mess.
> I now feel compelled to work through the other great RPGs of the era. In addition to the mainstays (e.g., Final Fantasy 7-9), I’m especially keen to play through the other titles that have been forgotten or underrated, like Chrono Cross and Terranigma.
Interesting that he's going to barely miss Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger.
I love almost all the Xeno- games, but I think the first Xenoblade Chronicles is my favorite. You travel through a huge world one step at a time (no overworld map). Due the way the game was structured, I never used fast travel (I can't remember if it was even available). So at the end of the game, I had this amazing feeling of having actually taken every single step of the journey, a feeling no other RPG has given me.
Agreed. The sequel, Xenoblade X arguably did this even better by having everything be one continuous map which, after painstakingly exploring it by foot, you can eventually hop in a flying mech and suddenly have immensely satisfying freedom that you deeply desired before.
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...
> Suffice to say, the average PS1 JRPG contains a very archetypal story.
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.
>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.
That seems just nostalgia / survival bias. There was plenty of garbage licensed trash through the history and you only remember the good ones.
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?
I've noticed a formulaic approach in Japanese video game development, where most games within a genre seem to have very similar mechanics as opposed to western made games. The RPG genre seems to be the most obvious example. If you take a modern JRPG (like one of the new Pokemon games for example) and compare it to an old Final Fantasy game from the NES there are a lot of similarities in the mechanics, like random encounters & combat, the way NPC dialogue is implemented, inventory management etc.
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?
I'd give it a skip unless you've already played his other stuff. What I saw of the plot seemed rather derivative of Chrono Trigger, with a much simpler battle system and long, meandering cutscenes.
Suikoden 2 is a master piece. It manages to include 108 party characters (most aren’t allowed to participate in combat), and you feel that you know every single one of them and that all of them have an impact in the story.
I just started playing Xenogears last Friday and do agree with the first few paragraphs of the article.
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.
Every couple of years I replay Front Mission 3. It's not exactly a JRPG but it shares a lot of similarities with the genre. Every time it surprises me how such an outdated and simple game (by today's standards) can hook me.
Many times I've fantasized about making a modern clone...
There seems to be constant repetition of the idea that simple == outdated and complex == modern.
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.
I don't think this is just JRPGs. I feel no such connection with JRPGs, but I do I feel that way with idle games. There's a kind of meditative comfort with gradual, guaranteed progression, but where there's still a spark of discovery as well.
[+] [-] angarg12|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badsectoracula|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anyfoo|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jamesgeck0|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] porknubbins|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottishcow|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] level3|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsukikage|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phlakaton|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jstewartmobile|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hyperindexed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electricslpnsld|7 years ago|reply
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 :(
[+] [-] miqkt|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] profalseidol|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSbGaLxNjdM&list=PLEDB3E00B9...
[+] [-] rntksi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Madmallard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bstamour|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] probably_wrong|7 years ago|reply
Interesting that he's going to barely miss Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger.
[+] [-] default-kramer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b_tterc_p|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] smaili|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] phowon|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] izacus|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] yaseer|7 years ago|reply
The latest one is just garbage, story-wise despite being absolutely beautiful.
[+] [-] andrepd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nr7|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] zeckalpha|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesgeck0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haolez|7 years ago|reply
Also, it has aged well :)
[+] [-] a-afterglow|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] szatkus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|7 years ago|reply
Many times I've fantasized about making a modern clone...
[+] [-] headsoup|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] muzani|7 years ago|reply