Lol, to be honest I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic or not by the way you worded the first reply, but by the sounds of it you agree with me as well (I think). One aspect of turn based RPGs I've always liked is that they have a less frenetic pace than action based RPGs, they're more about using your brain to come up with strategies to beat enemies and bosses and utilizing each of your party members to the best of their abilities as opposed to a lot of the action based RPGs where your party members (if you have them) are entirely controlled by the computer and you have little input into what they do beyond "do this pre-set strategy" and the action often boils down to mashing buttons. Having a more relaxed pace to certain games isn't necessarily a bad thing, games that are constant action, explosions and loud noises can get tiring after a while in my opinion and sometimes you want to play a game to relax, which is usually when I pick up a turn based, story drive RPG. I get that newer demographics want more instant gratification and action rather than slower paced stuff that involves thinking, but to me the whole purpose of an RPG is to think, that's why they often have deep stories, advanced combat systems and a lot of other stuff like exploring, creating items, interacting, ect, and there should be at least something decent to appeal to the old school JRPG gamers like myself who grew up with Final Fantasy 6 and 7, Phantasy Star and Breath of Fire III, the fact that there's basically nothing when not that long ago it seems they were a staple game genre is baffling.
No that's how I actually think. I really love how before the ats system in FF, when it's truly turn-based without any real-time element, you could just sit there and have your characters stare at the enemy, who would stare back, for as long as you like. (Same with not advancing text in cutscenes.) It's this hilarious aspect that's unlike any other medium where any crucial event, no matter how plot-important, will happily wait hours, frozen in a diorama-like state of permanently looping time, if you want it to.
I totally agree w/r/t baffling how the style just spontaneously died like everyone got distracted. (hurrrrnrnnggghh, it weas 2006 when the Dark Game Men came for our rpgs........) It's like, we spent years developing our RPG Maker technologies, and now all that shit is just getting consigned backwards, right when it's easier and quicker than ever to make and play games exactly how you want to, in whatever veins you enjoy. I really really really want to talk with kids growing up today who are super into video games and see how they're experiencing things. Like, rationally there must be a big echelon of kids growing up with only newer stuff who are going to have bizarre perspectives about pre-[3d, or whatever other milestone] game design. Would they generally hate the slow abstract weirdness of old rpgs? Or would it seem even cooler, not being used to all the really out-there video game shit. I imagine it's on a person-to-person basis. I wish we could just skip 20 years ahead and bring it all back now. Sick of engines spinning / lame-ass companies making increasingly feeble shadows trying to capture whatever zeitgeist to which devs today are less privy. Like, Jesus, Mighty No. 9. That is going to be remembered as an extremely pathetic and dumb part of 2016. Or maybe forgotten as uninterestingly mediocre.
There's a great mod for FF7 that turns it into a much harder game with a lot of surprising moments that trip out people used to the game (e.g. right off the bat when you fight the reactor boss spider and the timer's going down, unlike in the base game, when you go to rescue jessie a few screens apart it jumps at you AGAIN outta nowhere and now the time is way tighter). But honestly, I'm not going to get my mind blown that hard playing FF7 again. I can learn new things from entering the particular world of FF7 so I will replay it but on the whole I want some new ones. It's not particularly hard to scribble some shit on a paper and scan it into rpg maker so there's really no explanation for there not being 1,000,000,000,000 games about whatever besides the laziness and uncreativity of the gamer. And my laziness, too lazy to trawl the web seeking out the ones that I know are there.
The last and most important time an RPG BLEW my MIND was space funeral, at many points, but the one I most remember was the dracula convo. That was one of the simplest things in the world and it was funnier than probably every joke in entire years of gaming put together. Maybe 86 or 96. I know I can't expect every dev to come up with brilliant shit like that with any frequency, but I can dream.
