When Square Enix went onto the fuc*ing podium at Sony's PS4 conference. I expected them to show that its different for them this time in this new generation, that this generation they will make good games not repeat the same mistakes as the past. I expected a surprise and I was surprised. But in a bad way. They just showed a tech demo we already saw 1 year ago, it was a joke.
Here's why I think it might be different this gen for JRPG's:
1) People are still interested in JRPG's. There is a market out there. The fact is, there are millions of people out there that still want console JRPG's. Kotaku wrote about this recently and proved it. Check the image of the all time top 5 PSN downloads. All the PS1 games are JRPG's and almost all PSP games are JRPG's.
2) Casual gamers and mobile gamers are now playing a lot of RPG's and JRPG's. Another game called Cthulhu Saves The World sold 300,000 copies on PC alone—and another 100,000 on mobile platforms and the Xbox marketplace. Cthulhu Saves The World is a traditional turn-based RPG and was a big success. It indicated that casual gamers are starting to find JRPGs simplistic and easy, just like how casual gamers in Japan find JRPG's simplistic and easy. It seems this day and age devlopers prefer to go for the safe side and make games for casual gamers. If it is found that casual gamers are once again into JRPG's, just like how they were when FF7 was released, then things just change.
3) In the PS3 generation, it is said by many analysts that Japanese developers fell behind mainly because they didn’t adapt to the new technology and couldn’t grasp it or keep up to date. However the PS4 is said to be more open just like the PS2 and is easier to code for.
I want to believe that it will be different this gen. But if we face the harsh reality there is more to indicate that it wont be different for console JRPG's this gen in terms of quantity and popularity Here's why I think it might not be different for console JRPG's this generation in terms of popularity and quantity:
1) I feel that for casual gamers, for the JRPG genre on consoles to be revived, it needs at the least 1 good game to be released early on to get peoples interest. Like Dark Cloud during the PS2 era. To show that early games are what casuals get hooked to, look at Mario 64 , because of that early game, we saw lots of platform games on N64. Or look at resistance, in my opinion because of resistance, FPS games became popular among casual gamers. In my opinion gamers both casual and hard-core, during the early period of a new console launch, will play games that they normally wouldn’t since there is too few games out there. During this period the JRPG genre could have been revived, but there was nto a single JRPG announced at Sony's conference.
2) There aren’t many JRPG devs which can invest a lot of money into an expensive next gen game other than Square Enix. Whatever they realeased early on is likely to play like sh*t, everything they have done during Sony's PS4 conference indicates they are just continuing there past mistakes. During the Snes, PS1 and PS2 era you could always rely on Squaresoft to make quality JRPG's, no company has filled their gap and purpose yet. I think the main ingredient that’s needed to make things different this generation for JRPG's is just one great JRPG game but early on. What is your opinion.
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I think that the biggest reason why we see more Western games rather than Japanese is because of a lack of toolset experience in the Japanese dev community. They don't use Havok, Unreal, and all the other mmiddleware that the West has used to drastically shorten development time. The amount of money and time that it takes to make a AAA game today is time consuming and expensive, so middle ware makes it a faster and cheaper process.
The problem with Japanese devs is that they often take pride in utilizing their own in-house engines. As noble as that may seem, it takes 3-5 years to make an entire game engine from scratch. The few japanese companies that pump out alot of CURRENT gen games (not talking about mobile/handheld) are Capcom, Atlus, Sega, FromSoftware, and a few others, simply because they've (respectfully) learned to use middle ware like Havok, Unreal, Gamebryo, and Phyrengine. T
The other game companies, big and small, have been making their own engines, which only last them a single generation. Like Squaresoft, Kojima (the MGS 4 engine), and many others.
So I think that is why Square is making Luminous, and Kojima is making Fox Engine. They realize that an important step in Japan's comeback, is having fast-acting tools that let them edit events and levels faster. Because the cost of game production what be going down any time soon.
Because of these new engines, we can now have MORE games coming out from japan. We can get Kingdom Hearts, new Square games, maybe a new Chrono game, etc because now they will have this easy to use toolset which cuts down on time spent making yet another engine PER game.
What are some JRPG's you recommend this current generation? I'm looking for some
I already have Yakuza 3, Folklore, Valkyria chronicles, and games from the persona series. I don't mess with final fantasy
By and large JRPGs are not only little changed from the PS1 era, they kind of slid backwards from SNES titles like ChronoTrigger.
And sadly, going by the Atelier series rather than Ni No Kuni which is coming towards the end of the console, I'm not seeing much hope. Just more of the rule rather than exception.
I'd be excited if FF #? was a turn based. I grew up in the era of 1-3 release (American) on NES. While I am excited about the boots for mobile devices, I want a large scale console to have turn based again. With a twist. It's simple, make it active, and make a button "stop" the battle to identify what the new strategy is. FF13 was way too linear, and I hated the constant running and killing aspect, it was always motive just to get to the third disk (xbox) so I can free roam. While, most of FF 7-9 was free roam. Those are also top sellers in the FF franchise.
I'm excited to hear from square about what things they have cooked up, hoping that FF 15 will be awesome. I have waited for a baller game for quite some time, thought 13 looked amazing, but didn't like the battle and roaming very much. In time, we will have a game that we can be proud of.
FF was terrible this gen