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.
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.
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.<p>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 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.<p>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.
> Suffice to say, the average PS1 JRPG contains a very archetypal story.<p>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 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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.<p>Has anyone else noticed this or am I just imagining things?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Eden" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Eden</a> was recently released in English, from the same creator of Xenogears / Chrono Cross / Chrono Trigger.
I just started playing Xenogears last Friday and do agree with the first few paragraphs of the article.<p>Stopped reading before halfway through when I realized it was getting spoilerish, though.<p>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.<p>Many times I've fantasized about making a modern clone...
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.