Greedfall is a well known, good wrpg.
There’re plenty of examples of wrpg variety, from Mega Drive and SNES through recent times. Starting with Shadowrun.
Greedfall looked interesting but too intricate for my tastes. C'mon, nobody talks about SNES WRPGs because they're ass.
Jrpgs are very samey. Unless you cherry-pick the likes of Valkyrie Profile, Vagrant Story or Shadow Hearts. Most of them involve lots of screen swirling, pressing one button for a few minutes and listening to a painful midi loop. That and a massive script about angst, gods, corruption and a childhood drama. They have absolutely terrible writing, they nag about generic pseudo intellectual bs for dozens of hours, they present everything via walls of text.
Like I said, even literal Dragon Quest clones can feel unique because of how they're made. WRPGs typically feel clunky, overbearing, needlessly complex, and often have messy, unintuitive UIs. JRPGs are more simplistic on average, but that's not a bad thing.
The approach to writing is probably more preference than anything, but the only WRPG to ever impressed me with its writing was DA
, and even then it mainly the character interactions rather than the story (Alister and Morrigan are funny and interesting). WRPGs can't write characters for shit usually. I can't even imagine caring about a character in Fable, but Robo, Frog, and Magus? Absolutely.
Parasite Eve was a very exceptional game, most people know it from sexy Aya ads..
I only vaguely remember the TV commercial which was very action heavy.
Consoles back then had specialized hardware for moving tiles around the screen. PC display adapters did not. It's not unlike how the PS1 had specialized hardware for transforming and displaying 3D objects, so if you had a PC with a 33 MHz 486 and a VGA adapter, you weren't playing any 3D games nearly as good-looking.
That's interesting, so it was a display issue, not a hardware one? I'm technologically illiterate but that's what I think you're saying anyway.
As for the walls of text, both CRPGs and JRPGs had that in common, especially in the earlier days when graphics weren't that good. The latter still looked better, and it wasn't until 2003's KOTOR did you get a WRPG that could compete with the JRPGs in the visual department. And that game looked great because of the Lucasarts money getting pumped into Bioware's little SW project.
It probably helped that it was an Xbox exclusive too.
Chrono Trigger is mid.
It‘s a story and gameplay you‘ve seen 1000x before.
95% of all SNES RPGs play the same.
They all have the same fantasy theme and premise.
Show me a few time travel stories we've seen 1000x before CT. The gameplay was ATB with positioning elements, where was that done before in JRPGs exactly? It was praised because it was unique and had the best art/music of any JRPG basically ever.
Earthbound is very mid.
Bad pacing.
A lot of backtracking.
Needlessly hard and unfair at times.
No clear direction where to go.
Sloooooooow.
Dialogue is „Adam Sandler movie“ funny.
You‘re just blinded by nostalgia.
Pacing is average, but there is backtracking (once you get teleportation it's trivialized). It's not hard if you don't horde your items, a tendency of many in the genre (guilty of this myself).
It's objectively false that there's no clear direction where to go because you're literally told where to go at all times by the hint guy, but you can figure it out with a little exploration by yourself.
It is quite slow though. I'll also say the story and characters are lacking, what's there is good but there's just not much of it.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a ultra shitty game.
The game is 60 hours long.
And the first 10 hours are a tutorial.
Why do these kind of games get a 8/10?
They only deserve a 1/10 for wasting the players time.
I only ever played the first one but it's like Minecraft with a story and good music/art. Not for me but it's good for what it is. I imagine that's true of the 2nd too, unless they fucked it up.
