Kopikatsu said:
It's a JRPG. It was primarily developed for the Japanese market. It was EXTREMELY popular in Japan. Just because most Westerners don't like it doesn't mean it's a bad game.
Was it? Because I've heard quite the opposite.
I love jRPGs, but I'm not sure I would consider one of the better jRPGs.
But I hate to say this because I think XIII deserves someone defending it sometime. Which it doesn't often enough get, and is at least a playable game if the characters and their plight grips you. It can feel rather claustrophobic, though. And while the battle system doesn't come down to just pressing the same button, there are certainly better battle systems than the one present in the game. And it feels much like a rhythm game where the key to winning is hitting the right chord(battle formation) at the right time and knowing just when to heal, just when you use more magic, and just when to use more physical attacks(which is simple, because most of the time you want to start a battle with a mixture of physical and magical, in order to push it's "limit" or whatever you call it, then switch to all physical while it's in the air and do much greater damage. And heal a little or heal a lot depending on how much the opponent does damage to you). Honestly, after getting past all the claustrophobia and getting attached to the characters, I found myself actually finally putting the game down once the game became non-linear and you could hunt monsters, because there was no longer any tension and after all of that squeeze-box of running away and running toward all of the time, the big open monster fields relaxes all my tension and I couldn't get up the effort to do all of these side quests. I still mean to go back, and finish the game. But it definitely has it's flaws that many previous Final Fantasy games, did not.
But again, I do respect y'all for defending the game for once. It deserves it.
As for what a jRPG is, people who often bash it and don't know what it is, often do so on these sorts of grounds: that jRPGs are about grinding and other such. A commonly made statement by ignorant wRPG fans that don't realize that grinding isn't the point of jRPG like it is a MMORPG, it's about strategy. Grinding in a jRPG is merely a crutch for those who want to be powerful or see the story instead of work on their strategy. In general I see a lot more battle strategy in jRPGs than wRPGs. Battle strategy based upon the Dungeons and Dragons stat system is a hallmark of the jRPG. So when judging a jRPG, one of the things one should heavily judge it upon, is the intelligence of the battle system. Whether there is any strategy involved. There's a reason why the sRPG or tRPG, similar to the RTS, is a jRPG genre. jRPGs are more heavily rooted in the tactical RPG than the Western RPG. While because of this, the norm of WRPGs now, the Action-RPG, has been considered a fusion genre in Japan. And is very long and wealthy RPG tradition that deserves respect, a hallmark of all old-school RPGs, but doesn't get enough respect today because jRPGs have lost face in the Western world and a common joke among people who don't get them, and don't like old video games or strategic video games.
If jRPGs weren't about strategy instead of grinding, you wouldn't be able to beat most jRPGs at the beginning level, but you are. There are a plethora of handicap jRPG plays out there if you search them, many of them avoiding leveling altogether.
I could name some of the other misunderstandings, but we're getting off topic and I shouldn't feed it more.
Anyway, I'm more interested in how well Skyrim is selling in Japan.
