' Wrote:In my honest opinion, JRPGs fail at the RPG part.
The Star Ocean series was good for that part- even the first game had multiple endings. Whereas final fantasy has always had one ending. Too bad it's officially ending on the fourth one, they could've beat Final Fantasy with a good MMORPG.
I think that this magazine's reviewer could be right in regards to what is expected of Final Fantasy games.
The thing is, the Final Fantasy game series has been trying to get away from the old systems since after X. A spokesperson from Square-Enix said that FFXIII was going to be the last FF of this RPG "type" as they wish to innovate into something different. Dunno what to make of that but I can hope they wont screw it up. Also by this reviewers candour, I can sense he expected and wanted...grind. Over there, grind isn't seen as a bad thing, in fact its encouraged in a lot of games. The more purer of Jap RPGs like the earlier FFs and Dragon Quests were all top scorers and they required a great deal of grind in order to keep ahead of the increasing degrees of monster difficulty. I think that this game tried to be linear and more cinematic in its presentation with very little required grind. (As in integrated cinematics). This I don't mind, I enjoy it when a game does this. It may be Linear for the first half, but in my opinion that isn't necessarily bad. Its different to be sure, but until I get a western viewpoint I'm not going to make any hasty judgements.