The answer is NO Kitase.

Yoshinori Kitase, the current producer of the Final Fantasy series posed a question.

““I’d like to know, would you want to see a turn-based command style return?”

He elaborated. “Here’s a hypothetical question—and this is just hypothetical, so don’t read too much into this. What if we were to take a game like, say, Final Fantasy VI that does have the ATB system but is basically command-based—what if we were to take that game and breathe new life into it, make it into a current-gen game? Would users be OK with it in that turn-based style?””

Was FF6 successful in the US? No. Final Fantasy didn’t get popular with turn based combat. Infact, NONE of it’s combat systems were popular with people prior to full motion video. Now all of a sudden people pretend to care about Final Fantasy’s combat system. They’re weak, they’ve always been weak, FF’s main selling point is it’s convoluted animu shit stain storylines, and that’s it. Turn-based gameplay needs a gimmick just to be accepted. Pokemon has customizable parties, Mario has… Mario, and Final Fantasy has Tifa’s big ass titties. And… apparently high school pretty boys.

Though he does look kinda bad ass in this shot.

How about this? Instead of some fancy, silly and contrived combat system, just keep it simple and make it a standard action RPG with no ATB  bullshit and random luck job changing in the middle of battle!? Last Story is basically what the franchise should be shooting for instead of making up new shit just for the hell of it.

But wanting turn-based combat? For the grace of Amma and all that is Zuri, do NOT bring that shit back! We’re pretty much in the age of Cranky Gamer Syndrome and the one thing that pisses people off nowadays is having little to no control over their destinies in RPGs. Pokemon and Xenoblade are only a few RPGs that do grant the players great amount of freedom in experimentation and strategy formations, but as well as exploration and pacing.

Why are more people satisfied with Pokemon and Xenoblade than they are with Final Fantasy’s latest? It’s more than just a combat system, but I can assure you that everyone who is not an obsessive internet nerd is completely DONE with turn-based combat with nothing else to compensate for how slow and tedious the process is.

The RPG genre should be abandoned.

…….With the exception of Pokemon and Phantasy Star. 😛

Yeah, I would NEVER suggest getting rid of Phantasy Star, you know that, right? Right? Those eyes say “MURDER LIZA!” Are you alright?

Sometime ago, I had gotten a PM from someone off of youtube about the Shining Series take downs coming to a halt. Sega fans rejoice! ….no. Not because I like the idea of Shining force videos getting people banned, nor was it an event relevant to my interests.

I don’t care about Shining Force. Sega should’ve ended that series early instead of letting Tony Taka turn it into his own personal hentai practice session.

And the Shining games all have happy endings.

Allow me to elaborate. RPGs have no business being on console. The purpose of a console was to bring the arcade experience to your living room. Arcade games are extremely fast paced games that require reflexes and execution to be able to dominate. You had this thing called “practice” where you were required to learn the ins and outs of a game to kick some ass.

RPGs are not arcade experiences. They are simply games designed for the laziest of people to get in, grind on a few enemies, and then get a free win by killing bosses based on your exp. points. There’s no skill required. Skill is replaced with time. And time varies on factors other than self-input. In a real game, you are rewarded based on your level of skill. In RPGs, you are rewarded with spending hours killing the same enemies over and over again. This is not a proper game for consoles. A proper game for a console would be Super Monkey Ball. Metal Slug. Virtua Fighter. Sonic WildFire. NSMB. Mega Man X. Shit that involves reflexes and actual skill. True Arcade style games. What enjoyment would I get from something like Fire Emblem or Shining Force? 2 RPG games that rarely get released stateside. Or sell?

The idea behind most traditional RPGs (or turn-based BS, whichever you prefer) is one I could never get behind. Or make sense of the why behind making them. The idea that you have to allow the enemies to have a chance at destroying you before you could make up a strategy to pull a victory out of your ass. They’ve always looked and felt silly and contrived. For one, the idea of using a turn so you can heal seems like a wasted effort seeing as an enemy can simply deplete your life force directly after it. Amma help you if you are alone in fighting multiple enemies as you would face an onslaught of several hits at once. The idea behind this is strategy. If you put yourself into these situations where you are unfit to fight, fuck you, that’s your loss. Most RPGs give you the option to escape from battles you cannot possibly hope to win, extending your life until you drag your sorry ass back to town to heal. But here’s the problem with that idea. RPGs are based entirely on luck. You have to literally pray that the fucking game will allow you to escape from certain doom. And that’s what I despise the most. RPGs usually remove more control from you than they give. The idea of an RPG is to make you feel as if you have no real control over your destiny. It’s all based on chance. So you can waste a turn trying to perform a damn spell. And I know many of you will agree that spell-casting is the biggest “fuck you” that RPGs can deliver. 9/10, spells will just never work. The games give you options that have a “chance” of working or not. You are provided with options that the game arbitrarily decides whether or not you get to use them. This is terrible game design. Removing player control is the worst form of game design ever conceived. And it’s supposed to be thought of as a game of “tactics”. The only time I should the game is if the enemy has a better strategy/formation. Not when the game tells me I can’t use this fucking move for no reason other than “it failed!”. If my character is a mage with several years of training in the arts of spells or whatever, why the hell is he or she failing to cast them properly!? No reason. The game just up and decided to call and say “You’re MY bitch!”.

I’ve noticed that recent RPGs are starting to embrace the idea of real-time battle systems in which you are not constrained to different sides of the field, shifting through endless menus just to program your characters to do something. Mainly because developers have started to realize that gamers don’t want to sit down and play a game that is about endless programming. They want to sit down and literally beat the shit out of something! But I’ve noticed this isn’t enough either. Action RPGs suffer from the same issues Turn-based BS does. Rewarding time over skill. You can just grind yourself up to the necessary levels to take down a boss with ease. Xenoblade removes all challenge by giving you mindless quests to do that will inevitably turn you into a fucking super saiyan before your 5th boss fight. And by the time you get to the end, you’d have spent at least 2 months becoming overpowered enough that you don’t even need to give a shit about the final boss’s piddly attacks. Even if an Action RPG required some actual skill, the bosses would have some preset boss patterns that would make them a cinch to kill. So there’s no real point to them besides wasting time and shelf-space for a game that you only play through again to experience the story and shallow characters.

Then you have those funky battle-systems that try to combine both action and turn-base into something of a nasty little concoction that puts RTB to shame and begs you to ask the question of “why in the gray fuck would you not bother to make a regular RPG who’s gameplay simply leaned to one side or the other?”. Like Mystery dungeon series. Good lord, I have never seen a battle system so trite and disorientating in my life. It seems like RPGs are cheap to make (nix production values), but hard to enjoy.

And for the life of me, I don’t understand why Japanese game developers continue to make shallow animu RPGs when it is clear that (at least everywhere else in the world) real-time RPGs have the capabilities of holding your attention for a much longer period of time despite their obvious flaws. I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with Japan’s incredibly fucked up culture. I recall Hiroshi Yamauchi (former president of Nintendo) saying that RPGs were games that were tailor-made for depressed people who like slow games. Hmm. Depressed people. That would explain Japanese people in general considering the high rate of suicides on average. And I’m not being racist. If I was, I’d say the Japanese were depressed because most of the males couldn’t get pussy if they tried.

Then again, there is an ongoing baby crisis in Japan. Perhaps that’s not far from the truth.

I thought something was suspicious when games like Persona 4 were getting dating sim. elements. Good lord, if your RPG needs to have that attached to sell and make teenage boys feel better about their lack of tang, I feel sorry for the world. I guess you need something to motivate you to go through a vainglorious storyline that’s nothing more than an overblown high school drama pumped with the old “POWER OF FRIENDSHIP” cliches, and gay ass teddy bear monsters.

Failing a Robotnik cosplay.

I guess Atlus thought the game was terrible to the point that they had to turn it into a fighting game or something. Sadly, it’s too animu to be successful anywhere besides moonville. Man I can’t stand most Animu fighting games. They have to be the most pointless fighters on the face of the earth. So many characters that have no actual appeal or personality outside of grossly exaggerated designs, silly and unoriginal movesets, particle based maelstroms of fighting action, awful animations reminiscent of low budget anime, etc.

Exhibit A

I mean look how slow that shit is!

Goddamn, I’m off topic.

Anywho, the primary reason that Japanese devs (and to some extent, American devs as well) continue to pump RPGs onto consoles is either 1 of 2 things.

1. PCs are not popular for gaming in Japan

2. They want to copy off the success of FF7

I’m leaning toward the latter because after that shit fest, the content of all RPGs are no longer about real heroes out to save the world, it’s about emos teens and several more layers of anime cliches. How xenoblade and Last Story escaped that nonsense, I have no idea. But the majority of JRPGs in general cannot seem to go beyond the realms of mindless animes. I mean look at this mess.

Where is the variety in content?!

The most you get are young boys in a tiny village who is “destined to save the world”, highschool students with “mind fuck” abilities solving mysteries or Japanese interpretation of medieval fantasy. None of which are particularly entertaining, either with story or combat. Not that western RPGs are any better with their overly armored up males and slutty women combined with all the orks, elves, trolls and all other shit that came out of Lord of the Rings. You may get a few surprises, but many of them still fall into the same tired categories where many of the story elements feel like disconnected tv episodes from TvTokyo themselves. The content will bore you the moment you boot up the games, either you get western RPGs with their try-hard epic atmosphere and orchestrated music, or you get cookie-cutter Japanese wank-fests with female singers that do solo soft music that’s supposed to “calm your senses” despite being prepped to go into the game and deliver 8 cans of whoop-hind parts with a side order of a free dick in the ass. Actually, the game may allow you to do that or they may screw you over before you can finish your turn.

And even if the content of many rpgs actually improved, the fun factor is completely non-existent in this genre. RPGs cannot deliver or stimulate the senses. Entertainment is not an RPG’s strong point. Hell, RPGs are so obsolete and undesired, developers are putting RPG elements in other genres like hack and slash or even FPS’s. Developers may like RPGs, but this shows that they can only succeed with RPG elements by shoving them into games that clearly weren’t intended for them because you’ll level up so fast, even the action becomes as simple as a piss take. Or not. Take a look at Samurai Warriors 3, a game so good that RPG elements are damn near invisible to you. You can equip everything all you want to, but skill reigns superior as you fight your way through murasame castle. What’s the point of RPG elements if you can go all the way to level 50 max and still get your ass beat by bosses who can drain your health faster than Daigo can parry-counter Wong’s entire super art? There is none. For the most part, it’s the developers trying so desperately to salvage what’s left of their favorite little genre. Sengoku Basara doesn’t need them, Super Mario doesn’t need them, Sonic doesn’t need them, why bother putting them in? Are the developers depressed too? Considering the state of their job and the industry, I wouldn’t put it past them because believe me, not every damn game in the world needs them.

It’s been clear since day one that RPGs only belong either on pen or pencil, or the Computer. The console is for games that are supposed to deliver that rich arcade experience. You don’t get that in the form of RPGs. Or dating sims to make the teenagers feel happy.

You’re not off the hook in that department, Elena

RPGs need to end prematurely. They cannot sell without gimmicks like FMV or Name Brand immunity (Pikachu). The majority of the world does not like them. Developers know they aren’t very favorable which is why they go through several planning stages to change battle systems per sequel (Square). Games that are fun wouldn’t need to depend on gimmicks to survive, or be revised in every installment, or have their elements shoved into other games just to have them to be accepted by the populace as a shallow rewards system (the more you play, the more abilities you unlock for your character!). Would you play Paper Mario if it didn’t have Mario? Would you play Pokemon if you couldn’t train your own original team of monsters and go head to head with other players? Would you playFF7 if it didn’t have those sweet looking commercials? Of course not. People didn’t demand more Final Fantasy until after the mid 90s. There have been several FF games up until then. Same with Earthbound, no one cared about it until after Smash Bros. RPGs would not have continued worldwide if not for Full motion video. This is not a genre worthy of the console. It must only be excluded to the PC as it is doing nothing but poisoning  what is supposed to be a platform for the Arcade experience.

I think the desire of invoking RPGs and Adventure games onto the console is a big part of what’s killing the industry. PC gaming is PC gaming for a reason. It delivers a different kind of gaming experience from the console. PC gaming is “introverted” gaming. On a “personal computer”. It’s intended for one player to have his privacy from the outside world and “me time”. Arcade gaming is “social” gaming. It’s intended to be loud, brash, party style with 2 or more people surrounding the parlor cabinet or tv. Forcing PC gaming into a different environment has completely fucked up gaming, slowly turning it into an exclusionary process. Hardcore gamers wrongfully believe that they need Online to have a perfect gaming experience, but consoles are intended for social gaming environments. This is because FPS’s (PC genre) have completely taken over the console market, and it is killing it. RPGs, Adventure games, and FPS’s need to remain on the PC, or they will destroy gaming. ET was an “adventure game.”

Let that sink in a little.