I know I've brought this up to you before, but I just want to contextualize it a little bit with this episode. I personally play RPGs for exploration of characters, story, and world, which is why FF XIII had no appeal to me what so ever, and Etrian Odyssey has kept me glued to my 3DS for almost a month now.
I think a lot of people are confusing exploration with linearity when they talk about FF XIII. Most reviewers talk about "holding forward and pressing A." Truth be told, a lot of Final Fantasy games are played mostly by spamming the attack option. I recall FF VII actually told players to do that in the tutorial. This issue with XIII is you are dropped on a map, after a chapter break, and given one direction to run in. That's it. Nothing to explore. Even character development is mostly void of exploration. The Crystarium has, quite literally, one path per job class per character, and even that is broken up by 'chapters' of sorts. That's not a skill tree, and it's not exploring a character.
Random tangent, Final Fantasy VII came so close to addressing character customization in a way I would have loved. The materia system's pros and cons to character stats could have been something great had it actually changed the stats enough to really matter, and they really dropped the ball when it came to making the characters individuals. Aeris was the only one who had anything to set her apart. She did no damage with her weapon, but stick her in the back row and load her up with damage spell materia and she became absolutely nuclear. No other character in that game had such diversified stats, and it wounded the game in my opinion.
Anyway, I think a lot of the reason the games we love are vanishing has to do with the AAA problem Jesse talked about and mass market appeal. God forbid the game become even remotely complicated and scare off potential customers. At least I can appreciate them still in low budget releases like the EO series, and it seems Dragon Quest is alive and well in most respects, although it seems to be relegated to SquareEnix's "Other" RPG status, the primary focus being the FF series. While FF sees multiplatform, high budget releases, DQ gets dropped on the Wii and the DS. Oh well. At least it's still around I guess.
