What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[Zevox]

Sorry, I was referring to the fact that it's a very aged mentality of games having several blocks of text, followed by the core gameplay, then another block of text, then you get to play some more. And while Final Fantasy isn't really in the same ballpark as "JRPG" anymore, it is still using modern techniques, and that was THE franchise for JRPGs for 10 straight games.

That doesn't clarify anything, I'm afraid. In what possible way is Final Fantasy not a JRPG anymore? I mean, given they're continuing with it in 16 it's probably safe to say it's transitioned into being an action-RPG series at this point, but that's far from unheard of, with things like the Tales series or Kingdom Hearts being longstanding action-JRPG franchises, so all that is is a subgenre shift. And if you're not talking about that, I honestly have no clue what you think you're saying with that remark.

I think there's the potential to gain something by integrating the story with the core gameplay effectively, and it's the fact that 40 years of JRPG experience hasn't really evolved all that much. They almost feel like a niche in video games nowadays, and I think a big part of that is because they're basically just the same 30-year-old games with better graphics.

JRPGs have always been niche games, aside from specifically Final Fantasy, mostly (to my understanding at least) because of how huge FF7 made that series. Or Dragon Quest if you live in Japan, I suppose, but for the rest of us, no, Final Fantasy's the only one that's popular enough to break out of the niche status.

I don't know, maybe Persona's starting to these days, but I don't feel too confident on that front just yet.

Chrono Trigger is 25 years old, you can get it on your phone for $10, almost every gamer who's ever touched a JRPG has played it. Yet hardly anything has come close to its level of design, despite virtually unlimited memory and so many past examples of success. The devs for Chrono Trigger obviously didn't have Chrono Trigger to base ideas off of, so a lot of what they did was really ingenius at the time. What's our excuse?

Okay, Chrono Trigger I have played, and honestly, while it's certainly a good game that I enjoyed, I don't see what you're talking about there at all. There's nothing about it that I'd hold up over many other JRPGs. Certainly I think there's plenty of better ones out there. It was probably one of the best at the time it came out, but now? Not even close, IMO.

Zevox, since you say you've never played Planescape: Torment, you owe it to yourself to rectify that immediately. Everything you've been saying says that you love RPGs for the story, and PS:T is probably the finest RPG storyline ever written. The fact I can still say this more than 20 years after the game was released makes me a bit sad for the development of CRPGs in general!

What he said. It's hard to find a thread where PS:T is talked about objectively, as it's pretty difficult not to fangirl over it. For reference, Witcher 3's writing feels bland and slow in comparison.

Definitely not happening anytime soon - my plan is that after I finish up my War of the Chosen run it's finally time for me to play through Persona 4 Golden, since I didn't want to jump right into that when it dropped just as I was finishing Persona 5 Royal back in June. And... honestly, I don't know. I've seen people praise it on here before, obviously, but aside from the general amount of love it gets like that, when I've seen specifics, they've never made me feel like I wanted to play it. Things like talking about how the combat is the worst part of it and you want to just avoid it don't exactly get me raring to play a game, for example.

(Also, Witcher 3 comparison is another that doesn't work for me, haven't played that. Deliberately chose to skip it since it does the whole open-world thing that I'm just not into.)

PS:T is dark, but it still adds its own color and beauty when doing so, while Witcher 3 and GoT are dark to emphasize how terrible society is. The latter examples can be exhausting to enjoy over long periods of time, where the way PS:T pulls it off really just draws you in like a work of art.

At one point, a man who can't die talks to a man who wants to kill himself. The Undying then breaks his own neck by turning it all the way around, then retells how empty the void was to the suicidal guy, giving him a reason to live. That's Planescape: Torment, in a nutshell.

Kind of another example of what I mean about specifics not making me want to play it there. Maybe there's something to the presentation of it that makes that appealing in some way in context - there's certainly games that can get dark like that and still be appealing to me in the moment - but I don't think just talking about it like that is selling it the way you seem to think it is. It just makes it sound morbid and unpleasant.