Casual Shinji said:
Fans don't want Final Fantasy to change.
Just look at the community's reaction to FF12.
At first I had the same reaction. My thought was "this is NOT Final Fantasy." Then I noticed how vastly improved it was over the traditional turn-based combat of the previous games in the series. Of course, then I played through to almost the end and I realized how tedious the gameplay was. Once I discovered that you could simply choose one character to act as both damage mitigator and damage dealer and have the others just hang back and buff/heal him the game just became way too easy. Also, it was basically an offline MMORPG, complete with lots of grinding.
I do feel that JRPGs lock the player into a linear story. Sometimes I feel more like I'm watching an interactive movie than playing a game. Xenosaga was particularly guilty of this. That was the big trend in JRPGs for a while, and they don't seem to have gotten past it yet. Great storytelling is fine, but it should be a part of the gameplay experience, not a substitute for it. I feel like Square Enix is not interested in making innovative games. They want to make safe games.
Although I do agree with some of the posters that argue that the western RPGs aren't necessarily all that open. In Dragon Age I was pretty disappointed when I realized that the gameplay experience is virtually the same no matter how you choose to "role play" except that you stand to lose allies or items if you don't play the role of the nice guy.
Dragon Age is, however, open-ended in that you're given the task of recruiting each of the four factions to help you conquer the blight and are given some freedom with respect to the order in which you do so, but the challenge curve prevents the player from completing the game in any order other than mages, elves, Redcliffe, Dwarves.
