PixlBit

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.

Just got a chance to listen to this and it seems the article in question is just down on Final Fantasy XIII. I find the intense frustration around that game kind of amusing. I loved it as I felt it distilled RPGs down to their core essence, stripping away all of the extraneous nonsense that typically loses me.

It's not a game for everyone and I think the fact that they did something so bold with Final Fantasy mainline rubbed most people the wrong way. However, if nothing more, I think people need to recognize that it's an interesting experiment and an effort to shake up JRPGs, which are constantly complained about for not changing much.

In response to Angelo regarding Dragon Quest, I think the arrangement there is a bit different. For one, Dragon Quest is pretty niche here and after it failed for Square Enix with the DS release of DQ V, they wanted a safer route to bring these games to the west. Nintendo must've struck up some publishing agreement to get these titles as exclusives to their systems. Regardless, I feel like that series works pretty well on Nintendo consoles. Their main fan base supports games like that whereas those of the PS3 and 360 have moved on to western RPGs.

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.