Way back in 1987, when even I was just a wee little thing just learning to wrap my hands around a NES controller, a man named Hironobu Sakaguchi was developing a project for a company that was staring bankruptcy in the face. In a last-ditch effort to save his company and avoid total ruin, Sakaguchi pushed forward with a new RPG title. However, hope seemed slim and for all intents and purposes, this was to be Sakaguchi's last game. That's why he decided to call it Final Fantasy.
Of course Square didn't go bankrupt in '87. In fact, quite the opposite; Square has over the past 20 years become synonymous with the RPG genre, with Final Fantasy 2 (or 4, or whatever) making waves on the SNES and Final Fantasy VII being considered among some people to be the most important Playstation game ever in any universe to date (I'll reserve judgement though). Square has cultivated their empire of turn-based random battles and spiky hair, and their fanbase has stayed steady and true, and it's been that way for 20 years running.
And that's sort of the problem - it's been that way for 20 years. Square sits atop the RPG throne based on a series of games that, graphical updates each gen aside, are all basically the same. You run your spiky-haired little protagonist around a fantasy realm triggering random battles that progress turn by turn until you are victorious. It's not that this necessarily bad since it seemed to work great in '87, but after all this time it's predictable and stale in a way that tends to really hurt games. I played Final Fantasy XIII, a game less than 6 months old, and before that Lost Odyssey (admittedly not a Square game but a prime example of a JRPG), and in both cases I caught myself wondering after the 6th or 7th hour why this needed to be on the Xbox 360. Aside from the graphics engine and some impressive looking cutscenes, these games offered nothing in terms of gameplay that was terribly different from Final Fantasy 1 on NES - the turn-based random battles, the grinding, even the story is told largely through PAGES AND PAGES OF TEXT in both cases! I felt, with these games more than any other, like I was being taken advantage of by a developer who would prefer to go the safe route and release a product that they know will be eaten up by a 20 year fanbase rather than try exciting new ideas.
Enter the Western developers, like Bioware and Bethesda. These are the guys who have given me hope for the future of a genre that seemed to be more of a nostalgic memory at best, or gruelling tedium at worst, by breathing new life into these games. All it takes is one look at an Elder Scrolls or Knights of the Old Republic game to see that the developers really and truly love these games enough to take chances on them. Because they see the potential, they see what they could be. They recognize that you can have a story-driven experience without reading page after page of dialogue next to an anime-style portrait. They've recognized our beloved turn-based combat system for what it really is: a relic of the technical limitations of the '80s that are no longer relevant. We now have the tech to manage battles in real-time (without sacrificing that element of strategy that RPGers, myself included, love so much), so why the heck are we still selecting our battle options from a menu? They're bold enough to admit that nobody (and I mean NOBODY) likes grinding, so they built a more natural level progression into the games themselves to give the players a feeling that they're still building a powerful character without having to put yourself through the agony of 3 straight days of goblin killing. To put it frankly, the Western developers have broken us free of the spell that the Final Fantasy series had us under that we actually enjoy these archaic gameplay mechanics. The beautiful thing is that these devs are actually learning from their old games too. In playing KOTOR II (as I've recently started doing again), I could see elements that were kept, adapted, and improved to be added into Dragon Age, 4 years later.
I politely challenge any diehard Final Fantasy gamer to sit down and play through Dragon Age: Origins, or one of my personal favorites, Knights of the Old Republic, and HONESTLY tell me that they don't prefer it to Square's offering. The fact is that these games do everything that Final Fantasy does, but they do it cleaner, tighter, and better. I'm not saying that Square is a bad company or that they make bad games because that's simply not true. In fact it's the Square games that these Western devs are looking to and learning from. There would be no Oblivion of it wasn't for Final Fantasy. But the difference is, where Square seems happy to rest on their laurels, Bioware, Bethesda, etc, are taking these great games and making them greater. This is the key point that puts them head and shoulders above the standard JRPGs of old: they adapt. They evolve the games creatively and in such an organic way that you can practically smell the sweat that they poured into these games.
I of course recognize the integral part that Square played in almost singlehandedly developing the RPG genre. However, the time has come for them to step aside, and pass the mantle to the newer developers, with wide eyes and fresh ideas for the genre that they so clearly love and can make so great.
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