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When did JRPGs start to suck so bad or am I just old?

Posted by Krispy Demon On May - 19 - 2009

JRPGs suck

So, the other day I get a game from Gamefly in the mail.  As usual, this is a pretty happy event for me as it means I will have something at least mildly entertaining to brighten my otherwise dreary and miserable day to day activities.  What I did not expect, however, was the sheer amount of just plain jrpg suckage that would be flying out of my television set when I started up the game.  I was not prepared for it and it nearly cost me my life.  Hopefully you will heed this warning and go into things with a firmer grasp of what things are like on the dark side of the JRPG.

    Star Ocean looked like a pretty neat game from the commercials and articles and stuff I’ve read on it, but truthfully, I was weary as I hadn’t played a good JRPG since… what Final Fantasy 3?  I’ve played some since then, but none of them have really held my interest at all and for the most part, in my humble but correct opinion, the genre has been in a downward spiral of death ever since they made the leap to 3D graphics.  No, correct that.  Not a spiral.  They’re on a straight shot of kamikaze flaming murder ever since the tech budget started outpacing the story budget by a margin of at least a hundred to one, but maybe that’s just me.

      Anyhoo… back on topic.  Star Ocean at least looked good in that it wasn’t all fantasy and elvish.  I can handle a certain amount of fantasy, but enough is enough!  Isn’t there anyone out there who wants to shoot shit with lazur gunz or slice motherfuckers up with lazur swurdz or travel to distant planets on the lazur Trane?  Being that Star Ocean was all spacey and shit I though it had at least that going for it.

        And, well, it did.  It is in space and stuff, but oh my god I was so not prepared for the saturday morning cartoonishness of the characters or the acting.  I thought this was going to be at least a little serious.  I mean, even the opening cinematic was cool enough to make me want to play the game.  It had decent enough music and really brought home the point that Earth was all fucked up because of nuclear war.   I was prepared for some serious issues being tackled.

          Not so, my friends.  The first time I get to see the main character, he’s getting yelled at by some japanime schoolgirl from space Pokemon or something.  It was just that perfectly lame and stereotypical girly cartoon acting you see in kids shows like that.  It was just bad.  HORRIBLE.  I’m already frustrated enough that something I was looking forward to has such shitty acting but also such crappy and cartoonish animation when more characters are introduced.

            The Supreme Commander of Suckalot is some big fat Japanese guy name Tokugawa or something, and he’s also a lame cardboard cutout from the likes of Voltron or Gigantor, only, and this you’ll just have to trust me on, the acting was worse.  I couldn’t take it.  Halfway through the cutscene and before I even got a chance to go out into space, the game was being packaged up and put back in my mailbox for it’s return journey to Gamefly.  Hopefully I will get something better, like a left over unibomber bomb that leaves me with short term memory loss so I can forget I experienced that craptacular ass bandit of a game.

              It did make me wonder though, is it just me?  Am I just getting old?  I remember I used to love jrpgs back in the day, but now I can’t stand them.  They have these annoying characters and the stories just aren’t any good.  Is it just me?  Were they always the same and I just didn’t know it because I was a stupid fucking kid, or has a lifetime of GTA, GoW, and Halo melted my brain so I can’t stand the slower pace of a good JRPG anymore?

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