I'm not sure if I'll get a chance to record tonight, it depends on if weather will cause a noise factor or not, so I thought I'd reply to both of you now, rather than waiting.
A lot of what I'm talking about is epitomized by Final Fantasy XIII. It's just about an example of everything I just don't enjoy in an RPG. A lack of towns, a lack of a real sense of exploration, and a complicated battle system that really does take a very long time to understand, with lessons about said battle system delivered at a slower pace. More than that, in my five-ten hours or so with the game, I really didn't like the world, the vocabulary, and the events that were underway.
But the point more is that I don't feel like the battle system was innovative. Rather, the more I played, and the more I saw Chris play, I thought it was pretty much simplified. Instead of weighing choices about which characters/skillsets to use, and which gear to equip, you selected six sets of things, and then let the game do most of the rest for you, based on a handful of things. More than that, you had to let the game make most of the choices for you: If you didn't, you'd never stagger something while you take the time to find your choices in a menu. I'm all for the ATB as an attempt to encourage players to make choices in some kind of gameplay manner, but here, it wasn't that. It was a tool to discourage players from thinking about their actions. They might as well have removed pretty much all ability to control the lead character, and just let players manage paradigms. It wouldn't have required nearly as much of a tutorial, but would have gotten the main points of the battle system across.
I also like being able to make meaningful choices with the builds of different characters, but with XIII, that option wasn't really very prominent. Yes, as the game starts out, characters are limited to a handful of classes, and you have to play your cards right, but pretty soon, Hope looks like Snow looks like Fang, looks like Lightning, etc, etc. Sure, some might be developed a little one way more than the other, yeah, but I knew they all converged, which took the fun out of it. Compare that to, say FInal Fantasy V, or even Dragon Quest VI, where the players do have nearly the same potential, but you can make each one vastly different from the other for more long-term purposes. In the end, the difference is this: In FF XIII, each random battle lets you gear yourself up just about whatever way you like. In the two more traditional RPGs, you're stuck with a set of tools you chose, and now it's up to you to make those tools work as you travel through a dungeon and possibly defeat a boss. If you choose poor tools, you'll fail, and you'll have to rethink your ways. In FFXIII, if your tools are poor, you can swap them out without consequence at any time before battle, so another level of thinking, planning, and preparation is stripped from the game. Even if you don't have the right paradigms equipped, you can lose the battle, restart it, but tinker with the menu and chosen paradigms, allowing players to make haphazard choices without consequence.
Anyway, that's some of the point I was attempting to make. Angelo's reasons for enjoying RPGs meshes in with this. In most other JRPGs, you can choose to explore, gather more resources, and learn more about your characters and the people you're guiding. In Final Fantasy XIII, there's none of that fluff. There's not really an adventure to undertake. Other RPGs might be something like a bicycle or a segway, where you can go where you want and do what you want, where FFXIII was more a subway or a train, which only goes where the track takes it.
