Your standard wRPGS often seem unlikeable to gamers that are used to playing games, while gamers that have been growing up with PCs find nothing wrong with them... it's often hard for either side to say what exactly seems right or irks them, so this is an attempt of mine to find some of the points.
I'll just go into the main one, since most games revolve around combat...
Generic concept of "Health" and combat.
Combat in most wRPGs is plainly boring. You're walking along in a dungeon, and you're fighting enemies in either first person perspective with a gun with horrendous character models, first person perspective combat with horrendous character models, or in third person perspective with generic mouse clicking and key tapping. First Person Combat or First Person Combat ("RPG" battle my ass, it's just a shitty FPS with "RPG elements" attached), you and the enemy wail on each other, reducing some sort of number until you faint or die. There's three main problems with this setup compared to the way most other games work.
The enemies show up out of nowhere in an otherwise-empty area. The whole "Shoot or mash one button at your enemies in first person perspective" aspect, as it were... it's just lazy nowadays. In the old PC days yeah, the systems couldn't handle brown and bloom graphics, but it's 2011 now...
Games continue to have the "Shoot or mash one button at your enemies in first person perspective" system because it takes less effort, and they get away with it because it's what wRPG players are used to.
The horrible AI will just stand there and let you knife them in the face. What is up with that? "Well I just stabbed you in the chest, I guess it's your turn to stab me now so I'll stand still and let you do it." This is almost a polar opposite to how many Eastern games work, where a main focus is not getting hit in the first place.
There's many alternative combat types to counter this, though... and games have been dealing with them for years.
Characters have this magical Health bar that probably makes the screen flash in red until it's reduced to 0, where it causes death/fainting. This is an issue inherent to many games across the spectrum, but it's most jarring in wRPGs because characters can seem to stand up to tons of incredible abuse (like having an elephant dropped on them), but then getting poked by a fluffy bunny causes instant death or something like that.
There have been plenty of games that use more realistic combat, but the down side to these games is that combat tends to be a lot riskier and troublesome. Perhaps some middle ground could be reached to account for continued gameplay with the same character, but as usual the generic Health bar system is the easiest to implement so it's what most wRPGs stick to.
Now, there's a lot else that wRPGs do that used to be done due to processing/storage limits (but is still done because it's shorter/cheaper/less work and they get away with it), but going into all of them would take too much time.
I mean I could write an entire article about the ugly-as-shit female character models and the guns/generic sword they get.. Okay yeah the characters in borderlands are supposed to have a unique weapon, and you can't find normal weapons? Issues like this get into the issue of overdesigning characters putting limits on or otherwise altering the world while still keeping gameplay mechanics functional, and sometimes weird compromises have to be made that simply take believability away from the world.
I'll just go into the main one, since most games revolve around combat...
Generic concept of "Health" and combat.
Combat in most wRPGs is plainly boring. You're walking along in a dungeon, and you're fighting enemies in either first person perspective with a gun with horrendous character models, first person perspective combat with horrendous character models, or in third person perspective with generic mouse clicking and key tapping. First Person Combat or First Person Combat ("RPG" battle my ass, it's just a shitty FPS with "RPG elements" attached), you and the enemy wail on each other, reducing some sort of number until you faint or die. There's three main problems with this setup compared to the way most other games work.
The enemies show up out of nowhere in an otherwise-empty area. The whole "Shoot or mash one button at your enemies in first person perspective" aspect, as it were... it's just lazy nowadays. In the old PC days yeah, the systems couldn't handle brown and bloom graphics, but it's 2011 now...
Games continue to have the "Shoot or mash one button at your enemies in first person perspective" system because it takes less effort, and they get away with it because it's what wRPG players are used to.
The horrible AI will just stand there and let you knife them in the face. What is up with that? "Well I just stabbed you in the chest, I guess it's your turn to stab me now so I'll stand still and let you do it." This is almost a polar opposite to how many Eastern games work, where a main focus is not getting hit in the first place.
There's many alternative combat types to counter this, though... and games have been dealing with them for years.
Characters have this magical Health bar that probably makes the screen flash in red until it's reduced to 0, where it causes death/fainting. This is an issue inherent to many games across the spectrum, but it's most jarring in wRPGs because characters can seem to stand up to tons of incredible abuse (like having an elephant dropped on them), but then getting poked by a fluffy bunny causes instant death or something like that.
There have been plenty of games that use more realistic combat, but the down side to these games is that combat tends to be a lot riskier and troublesome. Perhaps some middle ground could be reached to account for continued gameplay with the same character, but as usual the generic Health bar system is the easiest to implement so it's what most wRPGs stick to.
Now, there's a lot else that wRPGs do that used to be done due to processing/storage limits (but is still done because it's shorter/cheaper/less work and they get away with it), but going into all of them would take too much time.
I mean I could write an entire article about the ugly-as-shit female character models and the guns/generic sword they get.. Okay yeah the characters in borderlands are supposed to have a unique weapon, and you can't find normal weapons? Issues like this get into the issue of overdesigning characters putting limits on or otherwise altering the world while still keeping gameplay mechanics functional, and sometimes weird compromises have to be made that simply take believability away from the world.
Rydian's statement about jRPGs are rather ignorant, because he happened to hit every "cliqued" arguments used against jRPGs. No, not every JRPG is a turn-based-random-encounter-fest-borefest. It is quite clear that he hasn't been paying attention to the more recent JRPG market! Such a thing called "Action RPGs" exist too!
The entire jRPG genre has moved away from the "Random encouter" aspect, and more of them are turning into "Action RPGs". It seems that some of the Japanese devs know their games aren't getting sales as they used to in the older days, so they're changing up the gameplay aspect quite drastically. I guess these games just aren't "mainstream" enough for people to notice. Xenoblade? Nier? Eternal Sonata (Sort of)?
I mean, there are series that still kept their roots, like the Dragon Quest games, but even those have moved away from the "random encouters", into a field of monsters where battles begin after you get in a fight with them. Pokemon hasn't changed one bit, but it sells millions, so nothing is changing. The main Final Fantasy games moved away from the "traditional" combat with FF11, and 12. 13 is a mixture of old and new (On a side note, the whole game was highly disappointing, outside combat, graphics, and music). There's games like FFCrystal Chronicles, Crisis Core, Type-0, and so on too. The "modern" SMT games also have turn based combat (Except Kuzunoha games, which are action games), but they don't really use random encounters. Sure, the older smt games used it, but that was quite awhile ago.
The entire JRPG genre is alive and well (Maybe not WELL), but it'll be around for awhile. Looking at the future, there's FF13 Versus, Ys 4 remake, Gravity Daze, more Tales of-, and a whole bunch of others. The only game with Random Encounters is Tales of Innocence R, but other than that, no random encounters here, no sir.
Kingdom Hearts series, Ys franchise, the recent FF entries, Nier, Xenoblade, Tales of- series, Star Ocean series (after 2), Knights in the nightmare, Rune Factory series and Monster Hunter series (If they count), Solatorobo, and many many more. None of them have "random encounters". Did I mention they are action games? Yeah.
jRPGs have been changing, and expect to see more changes in the future.
The entire jRPG genre has moved away from the "Random encouter" aspect, and more of them are turning into "Action RPGs". It seems that some of the Japanese devs know their games aren't getting sales as they used to in the older days, so they're changing up the gameplay aspect quite drastically. I guess these games just aren't "mainstream" enough for people to notice. Xenoblade? Nier? Eternal Sonata (Sort of)?
I mean, there are series that still kept their roots, like the Dragon Quest games, but even those have moved away from the "random encouters", into a field of monsters where battles begin after you get in a fight with them. Pokemon hasn't changed one bit, but it sells millions, so nothing is changing. The main Final Fantasy games moved away from the "traditional" combat with FF11, and 12. 13 is a mixture of old and new (On a side note, the whole game was highly disappointing, outside combat, graphics, and music). There's games like FFCrystal Chronicles, Crisis Core, Type-0, and so on too. The "modern" SMT games also have turn based combat (Except Kuzunoha games, which are action games), but they don't really use random encounters. Sure, the older smt games used it, but that was quite awhile ago.
The entire JRPG genre is alive and well (Maybe not WELL), but it'll be around for awhile. Looking at the future, there's FF13 Versus, Ys 4 remake, Gravity Daze, more Tales of-, and a whole bunch of others. The only game with Random Encounters is Tales of Innocence R, but other than that, no random encounters here, no sir.
Kingdom Hearts series, Ys franchise, the recent FF entries, Nier, Xenoblade, Tales of- series, Star Ocean series (after 2), Knights in the nightmare, Rune Factory series and Monster Hunter series (If they count), Solatorobo, and many many more. None of them have "random encounters". Did I mention they are action games? Yeah.
jRPGs have been changing, and expect to see more changes in the future.
