EyeReaper said:
Okay, here is something i haven't been able to understand: what is up with no one liking JRPGs? it seems that everywhere i look on the internet, there is someone bashing this genre, including Keiji Inafune himself! Obviously every genre has a bad egg, but it seems to me that everyone thinks JRPGs are a horrible conglomeration of hitler and Mass Effect 3's ending.
in my opinion, i find them extremely underrated, for example, i would much rather play Persona 4 over say, Halo or The Elder Scrolls.So what is the reason behind all this hate? or is it just a bunch of FPS "hardcore" gamers acting as the voice of the community?
JRPGs are incredibly popular with a large niche audience, which used to actually be part of the backbone (if not THE backbone) of the gaming community. What your seeing now is the influx of casuals and the actual mainstream into gaming. In general JRPG players tend to be "serious" and "hardcore" gamers, where shooter players and those attracted to games on that level exclusively are actually casuals, after very shallow, immediate gratification. Shooters being the equivilent of say "Farmville" just for a differant kind of audience. Your typical shooter being something than an 8 year old with ADHD can play, and play successfully, leading to the quintessential problem of "kids annoying me playing CoD on XBL" and it's ilk.
JRPGs in comparison provide less in the way of immediate gratification, being more of an intellectual exercise, where satisfaction comes from watching slowly increasing piles of numbers representing effectiveness. Your casual gamer wants to jump right into a game, be the baddest dude on the planet, and be rewarded with towering explosions and constant barrages of awesome, instead of having to work for things, or seeing it represented abstractly while engaged in indirect control. Your typical mainstream gamer doesn't really get the satisfaction of stats and an intellectual exercise. There is also the matter of time involved, a slow creep of a story that could take a hundred hours to properly climax does not feed the need for instant gratification. The mainstream gamer doesn't want to say see the hero start as some weedy peasant in a small town, who grows into the guy who is going to kill some unstoppable universe munching divine force (or whatever).
The hatred is largely because gamers tend to get annoyed at the idea of time being wasted developing games they don't like, and them having a time in the limelight. To your mainstream gamer, the time used to develop an RPG could be used fot say produce another big shooter game. Or at least that's the way the perception goes (there are a lot of flaws with it). Despite what most people might say, that tends to be the bottom line, and even most arguements come down to "OMG, haven't we moved away from this archaic stuff yet?" (followed by whatever action-centric experience the speaker likes as a counterpoint).
A lot of it could also be karma balancing to be fair, because the JRPG (and players of RPGs in general) did dominate the market for a long time. Those numbers never decreased, they are just no longer the biggest group. They are viewed the same way RPG gamers viewed those who played a lot of other generes of games once upon a time.
That said the JRPG is never likely to entirely go away, as the demand will always be there, and there will be money to be made. The same can be said of WRPGs. The worst that can happen is such games being reduced to the fringes (like they are now) with frequent droughts.
To be honest I expect RPGs to be about to make a big comeback despite a general lack of them in this generation. There is already a noticible reduction in the so called "mainstream gamer" which the industry itself has noticed, a lot of which has to do with a lot of those mainstream gamers "growing up" and becoming more demanding. I do not think that it's a mistake that we're starting to see a push for old school RPGs with new technology, it's just started but the fact that guys like Brian Fargo have picked right now as the time to try and re-launch "Wasteland" says a lot, as does some indie developers like "Almost Human" developing games like "Grimrock" and the latest "Avernum" game appearing on STEAM. It's a minor phenomenon so far, but one that I think carries some meaning with it if you look at the big picture and trends within the gaming audience. None of those products are nessicarly successful or going to be successes, the thing is the attempts all around the same period.
