The Video Game Revue

The Sorry State of JRPGs

Having noticed the price cut that The Last Remnant has gotten both on Amazon and GameStop / EB Games, I went to my local EB Games yesterday with the intention of picking up a copy. In addition to there being $40 copies of The Last Remnant available, there were $40 copies of Infinite Undiscovery and $45 used copies of Lost Odyssey as well. I already have Blue Dragon, but for those paying attention here who don't, it's under $20 for a new copy. Finally, I did notice a used copy of Eternal Sonata, but I didn't check the price.

As I approached the counter and handed the copy of The Last Remnant that I was holding to him, I asked the EB Games employee if he recommended it. He had been talking about Final Fantasy XIII's release date and obviously cared about JRPGs. In response to my query, the clerk made a minor production of throwing The Last Remnant to the floor in disgust, announcing that it had utterly wasted valuable hours of his life. He then handed me Infinite Undiscovery, saying that it wasn't great either, but it was certainly better than The Last Remnant.

I haven't been keeping up on JRPGs as I ought to have. For the last couple of years, I've been strangely resistant to their lures--with the one big exception of PSP and NDS games. Even then, while I've collected a few portable JRPG titles, I haven't spent much time with them. Yesterday I found myself wondering how things got this way.

World of Warcraft has been a factor, no doubt. As I've mentioned in previous posts--and as my friend Ace-High commented on--Blizzard RPGs really are great productions. I've never been able to really stomach BioWare RPGs en-masse; I can only appreciate them in doses. Blizzard is really the only North American RPG company whose games I find genuinely enthralling, and that wasn't even until a few years ago. But I only really turned to Blizzard games in the first place because the JRPGs of recent times weren't able to properly hook me.

A couple of bizarre and potentially disturbing trends emerge if you look at the major console JRPG releases of the past two years: this includes Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata from 2007, and Lost Odyssey, Infinite Undiscovery, and The Last Remnant from 2008. I've been neglectful of these games and have only played Blue Dragon and (as of yesterday) Infinite Undiscovery, but there are still two clear trends that haven't slipped my attention:

The first trend is that all of these games, with the sole exception of Eternal Sonata, have been Xbox 360 exclusives. It seems to me that the majority of JRPG fans on both sides of the Pacific would naturally be Sony fanboys, since the Playstation brand has dominated the JRPG market ever since the last days of the SNES, starting with Wild Arms and Suikoden, with the release of Final Fantasy VII as its grand coronation. I have been well aware these past two years that Sony is largely losing the console war, but if the PS3 is a viable platform for anything, it ought to be viable for JRPGs, right? This line of reasoning is consistent with the profiles of the various PS3 owners that I personally know.

The second trend is that all of these games have Metacritic scores in the 70s (except that the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata, for whatever reason, scores an 80). My own experience having watched video reviews of these games and played a couple of them is that they're all fairly lukewarm, with some of them (The Last Remnant, for instance) clearly being more tepid than others (Blue Dragon). I think it's fair to say that none of these games has really lit a fire under the fan base out there. How can it be that for two long years we haven't seen any JRPG excellence?

I'm planning to pick up Lost Odyssey in the not too distant future, and The Last Remnant at some point much later--the line of reasoning here being that this early price drop on The Last Remnant is possibly the first of several price drops, and that I'll eventually be able to snag it for $20. I'll probably have to get Eternal Sonata eventually as well, but as much as I'm able to handle anime-style artwork, that one looks so kiddie and cartoonish that I'm afraid to merely touch it. It is supposed to be good, somehow...

In the meanwhile, I'll quickly compare my Blue Dragon experience (roughly 12 hours of playtime) with my Infinite Undiscovery experience (roughly 2 hours playtime). In a nutshell, Blue Dragon is like a weak-sauce version of Dragon Quest VIII, and Infinite Undiscovery is like a weak-sauce version of Final Fantasy XII. Each one clearly benefits from being a next-gen title and is capable of producing some gorgeous screenshots, but at times they don't look much better than their PS2 counterparts.

Blue Dragon's biggest failing to me is its generic characters and uninteresting plot. When I play Blue Dragon, it's as an RPG combat game with an Akira Toriyama art style. Over the course of 12 hours, what little plot and character development I was treated to in the beginning has rapidly atrophied into nothing important. Even given this major failing, there's enough appeal left to make Blue Dragon a decent JRPG. It's just a shame that it doesn't truly excel at much, apart from some of the visuals.

Infinite Undiscovery's biggest failing is the awkward gameplay. The are certain design decisions here that I can't reconcile at all, like spacing out save points too far apart and not providing the player with an opportunity to save before some boss battles. Much of the game is clearly FF XII in style, yet FF XII's excellent combat system has been replaced with fairly weak action combat that strips out a lot of the RPG appeal. Fritzkrieg had a look at the game, and he commented that action combat systems are a hallmark of Tri-Ace games (Tri-Ace being the developers of Infinite Undiscovery). It's too early to tell whether or not there's enough appeal in Infinite Undiscovery that I'll be able to muddle through the game in spite of its mediocrity, but early signs are promising.

In the meanwhile, I continue to pour hours a week into World of Warcraft. I hardly played at all over the Christmas break, so my character is still only level 75, but I should hit level 76 today. I still haven't rolled a Death Knight yet, so there's plenty left to do in Northrend.

posted by Parappa @ 12:04 PM