The "see the party's backs" one is such a no-brainer(but then again how long did it take for
Dragon Quest to break out of that view).
I mean the difference between this:
and this:
is pretty substantial to me. There is nothing less involving than having a whole party attack and it is just a couple of vague slashes across the enemy. At the very least we should be getting something like
Shining the Holy Ark where your party members step forward to do their attacks(
link).
Being on the other side of this discussion [I love drpgs], this line of reasoning just baffles me. It would be like people complaining about immersion in an FPS because they don't see the back of the player's head. In a traditional dRPG, you're seeing what your party sees. There's absolutely no reason to include the back of the heads of your party.
I think it's also important to remember that dRPGs tend to appeal to a very certain kind of person. I'd be just as happy with ascii graphics in a good drpg as modern graphics. 'Gameplay' is king. I want solid combat/survival mechanics, and rarely care about presentation.
lots of people don't play RPGs for the combat. Combat is often something that happens in-between the interesting bits
that said, the Diablo games are highly successful dungeon crawlers. Modern presentation, fast-paced real time combat. The Wizardry-style first person turn-based crawlers feel extremely dated to me, there's nothing about these games that interests me
Diablo is a modern evolution of the traditional roguelike, not dRPG.
As a big player of WRPGs, JRPGS, and SRPGs, DRPGs are a genre I don't really care for. The reasons for this, justified or unjustified (it's irrelevant when asking about popularity) are:
1. Combat is actually fairly boring, which is a problem when combat and progression are your main selling points. Granted, I'm no expert in the dungeon crawler department, but I've played a few and they still just plain aren't fun compared to something like Tactics Ogre, or Shadow Hearts: Covenant, or Persona 5. There are rarely hooks, or something unique about the battle system that would make something memorable the way the Judgment Wheel makes Shadow Hearts combat memorable.
Additionally, in this same category of "combat is boring" - and I see this has been mentioned in the thread - the extremely lazy presentation in which attacks are represented by a slash at the enemy or a small static firework for a spell, in which characters aren't even shown on the screen or animated for the battle, in which dungeon crawling is first person...it all adds up to the experience just not being engaging. When you remove all of these aspects of battle, then the only fun you'll have is min-maxing. And min-maxers are, almost by definition, niche.
2. The story usually sucks. Coupled with an over-reliance on fan service (at least lately) and you have something I'm fairly embarrassed to play. Demon Gaze was a celebrated dungeon crawler a few years back, and I remember having to tilt the screen away from other people at the airport or on the plane whenever a characters came on the screen.
See, to me, combat isn't boring at all. Combat is boring when I know I'll win, which is the case in most modern gaming, especially in traditional jrpgs and srpgs.
Also, most dRPGs have more of a 'campaign' feeling to each battle. That is, in many games you completely heal between battles. But in many dRPGs, it's not just about surviving a single battle, it's about surviving enough battles to get deep enough to find usable lewt, and then make your way back out without getting [possibly lost and] party wiped. The battles are interconnected, and there's always the risk that taking one more step w/o turning around could be the death of your entire party.
Combat itself is often similar to any other turn based party combat system, so I'm not sure how it's any more boring than most jrpgs.
As for 'story'... yes, there's often less story in dRPGs. Thankfully. That's a huge plus in my book, a lot less trash text I need to click through. dRPGs are, as has been said here, about the dungeon. Great dungeon design, great traps, great risk/reward structures.
I play games for their combat systems, and pretty much never care about their stories. I like the fact that I can get lost in a good dRPG dungeon, something that can't be said for most rpgs that have dungeons that are either 'one way', or tiny, or 'one way with side rooms' dungeons. Most jrpgs leave me feeling like I'm just pushing forward, easily killling things w/o any real danger. But I want to feel like I'm entering a labyrinth [well, a dungeon] that is built to stump me, and the only genre that really does that for me is a well designed dRPG [and sometimes traditional roguelikes].
Not surprisingly, my favorite jrpgs are the ones that have the closest similarities to dRPGs, games like Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga 1/2.
