And FF13 isn't looking too good.

As I mentioned in a blog post earlier this year, Final Fantasy was not received very well in Japan. Its hyper linearity, annoying characters, shallow storyline, and lack of any real item trading/hunting or town/hub adventuring made it one of the poorest selling Square games in recent memory. Which, although still isn't bad considering they made a boatload of cash from it, was nonetheless considered a huge failure in the East. So much so that the game is selling at below 50% off and is clogging bargain bins and resellers all over Japan.

Now, take a look at this:

http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=106344

As I said in my earlier blog post, the JRPG is dead. Gamers, especially amongst the hardcore here in the west, are tired of linearity and lack of choice. Perhaps we've become spoiled in this post-Elder Scrolls CRPG world, but hyper-linear, cheesy, Jpop infused Asian RPGs just don't work here anymore. Unless you're Atlus and cater to adults (Persona, Devil Summoner, Demon's Souls) don't expect to make any money in a country where sandbox gaming is mandatory. This isn't 1992, and we have more to play around with now in terms of technology and storage space. Gaming has advanced, and "Western Gamers" aren't willing to take a gigantic step backwards in terms of gameplay depth.

I don't mean to pick on JRPGs since I grew up loving them (And still do, thanks to Persona), but lately the genre has become nothing more than a long running joke that needs to be put out of its misery. Final Fantasy 13 is the nail in the genre's coffin, and hopefully Square sees the writing on the wall. They are no longer relevant in an industry where Blizzard, Bioware and Bethesda reign supreme. They either need to change, adapt, or get off of the playing field altogether.

What really made me laugh was Squarenix's excuses behind Final Fantasy 13's various design choices.

When asked why there are no towns in FF13, they said "RPG towns are too hard to do".

when asked why the path through the game is so linear and the world so small and closed off they said "You can't tell a story in an open-world game".

When asked why the game was so buggy and unfinished (In Japan, on launch day) they said "Testing costs too much money"

When asked why the review scores were so low on western websites they said "They're looking at the game wrong, it's not a western RPG"

Excuses, excuses, excuses.

Japanese RPGs have become what I like to call "Cardboard games". By that I mean the towns and NPCs all seem to be cardboard cut outs that randomly jog around the screen and bark out the same text replies no matter what you do or where in the game you are. While this was fine in the 80s and 90s where the size of your average game was roughly 32megabytes of data, those days are long gone. When an NPC doesn't acknowledge your deeds, doesn't change their opinion of you due to your "alignment", doesn't attack you if you've angered his faction or doesn't remark about your current standing in the world...the entire game feels "Cardboard". Unmoving, stiff, and ultimately very fake. Japan still hasn't learned this.

The last decent Square game I played was Chrono Cross...and even that is being kind, since I felt it was a vastly inferior sequel to Chrono Trigger and had the most easily exploitable combat syste I had ever seen in a JRPG. Since then, however, Square has churned out nothing but garbage. I always chalked it up to them marketing games to Japano-philes and Cosplay freaks instead of real gamers, but after seeing the backlash the game has been getting from importers, I think they've even lost *that* demographic as well.

The negative reviews should be fun to read. As much as the extremely positive ones where fans try to rationalize the 1980's era gameplay.