JRPGs

I was just reading a very interesting article on gamespy (http://www.gamespy.com/articles/977/977228p1.html) and reading the comments section I found myself nodding. Wada said "Japanese games makers excel at complex role-playing adventure games" and... I disagree.

I feel that they did excel in that field, once upon a time, but not anymore. I look in at modern RPGs, both western and Japanese and the JRPGs are just unplayable. They tell a story but offer no freedom to the player. It could be argued that they offer less freedom to maintain the storyline but I don't think that it's at all necessary. KOTOR is the perfect example of a very strong story driven game that still gave the player choices, still let them make the storyline thier own. From character appearance to dialog. You just can't do that in a JRPG. Thus I find myself staring at a character I just don't like half the time. I won't sink 40 hours on a character I don't like and his story, I have better things to do.

The most recent JRPGs to my mind, Lost Odyssey and the Last Remnant were both... unplayable. Part of that is the art design which I have always critized in japenese games. Frankly most everything looks fucking rediculious and impractical as hell. it's offensive to me. But... the gameplay. It doesn't seem to have evolved any. You still have the invisible party on one screen that all suddenly appear for the turn based combat sequences. I have nothing against turn based combat but... it feels tired to me these days. There's no dynamic to it, no enivorment, combat happens in a vaccum basically and that annoys me. Hell, Last Remnant combat wasn't as annoying as say, the main character (who annoyed the shit out of me within 10 minutes. Honestly, I could not hate him more) started combat, every combat, by saying "Let's kick some A" because gods know you can't say "ass." Where is the option for him to shut the fuck up?

I don't identify with the character or even like him. His dialog just makes me angry. Most western RPGs these days give you dialog options. KOTOR, Mass Effect, Fallout 3. I vividly recall the start of Last Remnant where the main character acted like a disrespectful prole to a local Prince who just saved his ass. It made me angry. I slogged through it and found out about the lack of an autosave and bugs with the save game system the hard way and haven't put the game near my console since. I felt abused. Those same bugs wouldn't have been so bad if I didn't already hate the main character. (Let's kick some A!)

But these games are complex... I'll give him that. The options menu, the stupid fucking inventory and upgrade systems, the convoluted classes and just stupid numbers. Ugh. The truth of the matter is that when a player's level is capped at over 100 then there is something wrong to my mind. Like Disgea... wanna grind up to level 99999? Or whatever the stupidly large number is? FUCK NO! Nor do I want to see an enemy with several million HP. Shit, you can have challenge and feel like you've built up a strong character without breaking into the tens of thousands for damage numbers or HP, or any other bloody number (other than the in-game currency). At a certain point the math involved in it just disgusts me. I don't want to deal with a 10 million HP boss enemy regularly, it's just stupid. Just throwing numbers around isn't a challenge. ... Although I suppose that *is* the only way to challenge a player in a JRPG.

In Fallout 3, in the latest piece of DLC (Downloadable content) they managed to challenge (briefly) even my high level character. They did it by taking away all my hard earned weapons for some time and throwing me into a hostile enviroment. It left me feeling exposed and made for a great bit of gameplay. Sure, I killed everything and eventually found enough equipment that the loss of my old gear didn't matter. Although that was close to the time I was going to get my own gear back anyway. heh. The point is that they were looking for a way to make the game challenging without just throwing stupid numbers of enemies or enemies so strong that it's silly at the player and I feel that succeeded to a degree. Not so much an option in your average JRPG. Nor is stealth usually... nor a social focused character. It's disappointing.

Innovation has passed by the RPG industry in Japan. I couldn't be happier honestly, more and more good games are coming out of western studios. Maybe the japs will look at these innovations and add some freedom and choice to their games... but... I doubt it. Ah well.