[QUOTE="PBSnipes"]It's not just JRPGs though. I remember "defending" Mass Effect from the hardcore WRPG fans who were ripping it (and your review didn't help j/k). In and of itself Mass Effect is a great game, but when you compare it to c.lassic games like KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Fallout etc. it doesn't stack up. It's short by RPG standards, the combat isn't particularly deep and the story isn't as involving. I remember fighting the final boss, trapping him with singularity and tagging him with my shotgun and thinking "this is it?" Trying to find balance between the tried-and-true RPG mechanics and innovation is an interesting problem. Kevin-V
Well, there is a difference between doing something new and different, and failing to live up to genre standards. It's a fine line, mind you, but in JRPG's, the standards are so well grounded that it's pretty clear when a game fails to meet them, as opposed to when it's just trying something new. For example, pacing of turn-based battles, cutscene camera angles, proper balance between weapon damage and its cost, enemy design, dialogue--all these things can be said to have a standard when those elements exist in a game. If a game doesn't have turn-based battles, the standard for that aspect no longer applies, and is replaced by a different one. When something is incredibly new, you have to use the knowledge you have of similar mechanics, a little intuition, and then there is the most important part of all: are you having fun?
In the case of Mass Effect, the implementation of its shooting mechanics was different and interesting, but by very nature, it will be held to standards created by third-person shooters. This is balanced, of course, by the fact that Mass Effect isn't really a shooter at all, and I actually liked the combat, because I viewed it from the BioWare perspective; that is, this is meant to be paused while you make a decision, just like with other BioWare RPGs like Baldur's Gate. That said, certain universal standards hold true, whenever a mechanic exists. If you put in a cover mechanic, it'll be compared to other games that offer the same thing, for example.
It isn't so cut and dried, obviously, since every game is its own package, and sometimes when a game is so special and unique, small flaws seem incredibly insignificant. In the case of Mass Effect, when the game's own developer set a standard they haven't met in the last few outings (I don't feel that Mass Effect nor Jade Empire are close to KOTOR or even Neverwinter Nights in terms of quality), it's noticeable. It's a trap of a developer's own making. You set the standard with one game--and then you have to live up to it every time you make a similar game.
For what it's worth, this is how I view the whole GT5 Prologue issue; $40 is a tough price to swallow when the standard for the franchise has already been established, and the game is simply a small fraction of what the franchise is expected to offer. This isn't a case of a developer trying something new and making older standards obsolete or inapplicable. Of course, that's a discussion for another thread. I think it is too late for me to be making any sense though. Was this all just rambling, or did any of it make sense?
Makes sense to me. When a developer makes a game in a genre, there are certain standards that they have to live up to. If they don't fulfill the standards of the genre properly, the game feels worse, because it's inevitably compared to other titles in the genre that do those mechanics better.
This seems to come up more in Japanese RPGs, because in most cases, they're always working from the same template that they've been working from since the 2D era. Not sure why that is, but there's a definite trend in the style of turn-based battles, in the systems of character advancement, and even in the kinds of settings that are being used and the stories that are being told. At this point, there's a very definite baseline standard for all of that stuff, and if those standards are passed, it's a good JRPG.
In this respect, I really do have to applaud Square, because they are always on the forefront of innovation with their main Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy XII took a lot of risks, and while I didn't see it through to the end (story reasons more than anything, or just my general trend of losing motivation to complete JRPGs when I'm halfway through them), I appreciated that they were willing to scrap random battles, and I liked how the gambit system automated a part of the game that really had always been simple drudgery. They made an RPG that couldn't have really been made in the 2D era, and that's almost unique.
Great RPGs tend to age very well, and I think a large reason behind that is that the standards haven't shifted all that much over time. In both Western and Japanese RPGs, titles like Baldur's Gate 2 or Chrono Trigger hold up as well as they do because there are still many games that don't perform the basics as well as those titles. I'm not sure if this is entirely accurate, but other genres made the jump to 3D and really separated themselves from earlier generations, and there's steady progress as we go forward. Goldeneye was revolutionary for its time, but it doesn't hold up well on the console shooter market, because Halo did the basics so much better. I don't feel like that ever really happened with RPGs. Even when 3D became the standard, all the interactions were occurring in the same way as before.
The reason that portables might become the center of a RPG resurgence is because experimentation is practically a requirement in order to make something good. A portable game is a differnent beast from a console game, and shoehorning a console style onto a portable can only go so far. Portables are cheaper to develop for, and the restrictions they create force developers to be more creative and take chances. I don't think you'd even get a game like Crisis Core if it was developed exclusively for consoles.
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