I have had a hankering lately to play a game that does not exist.  Specifically, a Western RPG as they used to be, before Bioware and Bethesda took up the reins of Western RPGdom.  Of course, many of you will say there is nothing wrong with those two being in charge, but I’m afraid that Dragon Age and Fallout 3 just don’t scratch that itch for me.

So, why?  Why am I dissatisfied with the current crop of Western RPGs?  What are they missing, what are they doing wrong?

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The Nintendo DS has proven itself to be quite the repository for “old fashioned” turn-based JRPGs.  From remakes of old Final Fantasies to entirely new creations, a strong library has built up over the years, giving fans plenty to choose from.  With my DS as my trusty companion on my daily commute every day, I have ample time to play through such involved affairs, and I’ve sampled a pretty wide swath of those that are out there.

When I wrapped up Bowser’s Inside Story several weeks back, I sat down to take a look at what to tackle next.  Poking through Amazon’s DS listings, I spotted an upcoming title called Nostalgia.  The game was named such, as the marketing materials told me, both because of its setting and because of its “return” to old-fashioned JRPGs of days gone by.

Unfortunately, the only nostalgia that Nostalgia evokes is for the time before you started playing it.

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My parents were nice enough to let me own video game systems when I was younger, but the trick of the matter was that if I wanted a new game, I pretty much had to buy it myself.  Outside of very rarely getting a game at Christmas or my birthday, any time I wanted a game I had to save up birthday money, chore money, allowance, anything really, and choose carefully what I wanted to purchase.  This, as you might imagine, made me pretty choosy when it came to selecting games; if it was going to take weeks and weeks of saving to be able to afford one, I wanted to make damn sure I was going to get my money’s worth out of it.

For some titles, the choice was easy; A Link to the Past or Final Fantasy III were no-brainers, and my spending was richly rewarded.  Others, like Zombies At My Neighbors or Uniracers, were less familiar, but ultimately proved to be wise decisions.

And then there was Lagoon.

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If there is perhaps any greater compliment I can pay to a game beyond a willingness to pick it up and play it again immediately upon finishing it for the first time, I do not know what it is.  For some games, such as Civilization, this is only natural; every game is different, and each session presents an array of new factors to differentiate it from the last.  In Metroidvania type games, perhaps it is an urge to top my previous time and make my way through the game more efficiently.  In sports games, perhaps it is simply the desire to hear John Madden speak to me again.

RPGs, on the other hand, are usually a different story.  After sinking thirty or forty or more hours into a game, I generally don’t have much of a stomach to start it all over again.  Generally, there is very little need for me to ever do so; the story has been told, and telling it again is going to bring me little in the way increased enjoyment.  For my favorites, I will often pick them up again someday (I play through Chrono Trigger and FFVI every few years, simply for the joy of it), but almost never have I started one over immediately upon completion.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor has broken that trend.

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Before jumping into my full reaction to the game, I have to be honest up front and say that I did not complete it.  When I wrote the Spectacle Rock review policy, the conditions clearly stated that I would not review a game until I completed it, or until I quit it out of frustration.  In this particular case, Rule #2 has come into play.  Despite my best efforts, Star Ocean has forced me to throw down my controller, throw up my hands, and shout plaintive cries to the game design gods as to how they could ever let such a game come into being.  With that made clear, we can take a deeper look into what could cause such hate to fester in my gaming soul…

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“If you love RPGs, as I do, you’ve likely played quite a few of them in your time. Even fans of the genre know that it suffers from a lot of cliche and repetition — finding one with a decent story, characters that you haven’t seen a hundred times before and a truly fun experience to offer can seem really daunting sometimes. For some reason, it didn’t seem that way ten years ago to me. Has the RPG truly evolved thanks to technological advancements, or is it actually just stagnating?”

Colette Bennett at Destructoid takes a quick look at some of the most common problems that seem to crop up with modern JRPGs.  As someone who just purchased Suikoden Tierkreis over the weekend, #4 is painfully relevant.   One very pertinent item she touches on is the over-complication of battle systems in recent JRPGs, and that is something I think deserves some more critical analysis.