arigomi said:
I disagree with the idea that an RPG's greatest strength is the story. Almost every video game genre these days at least attempts to provide a compelling story. Many have even appropriated RPG elements such levelinuig up. If every other game on the shelf promises to provide a great narrative, RPGs need to stand out with their unique mechanics.
Whether or not certain changes are considered innovative or gimmicky can be very subjective. Some didn't like the motion controls of Skyward Sword while other did.
Using ideas established in other games can be risky. A game can get lost in "me too" syndrome and become forgettable.
That really got to me. I mean, the reason JRPGs were story-driven had more to do with the way the Japanese language was structured, meaning that those games could get away with having more text in them than a western game, and the menu-driven combat was mimicking table-top roleplaying conventions.
However, as the technology marched on, the western games could start telling more complicated stories. Meaning that these games would be capable of being as narrative-driven as a JRPG. Couple this with the basic fact that menu-driven combat was never fun in the first place, and now the JRPG genre is having some growing pains.
Especially sense there is a lot of people complaining that if they simply want a story they would read a book or watch a movie, and not want to simply mash the A button ad nauseous and tolerate encounters that pop up a bunch of times to get more of the story (that, frankly, especially in later installments of FF games, were not worth that level of effort).
Because of this problem, JRPG developers had to innovate to save the genre. Now, I would like to know how FFXIII fucked up their combat engine when I remember seeing a similar one in Tales of Symphonia that actually worked. Alas, some of the innovations involved swapping the menu screens with something else (like in Tales of Symphonia using beat-em-up brawler mechanics in place of menu-screens), while others simply dressed up the menus and tweaked them so they were less annoying (like in Chrono Trigger). There is a plethora of ways to do this, and some of them will fail, in which case it was not innovative - it was a failed experiment.
However, it is not innovation for the sake of innovation.