Fbh
Member
Jrpgs have a special place for me because it's the genre that really got me into gaming .
As most kids I did, of course ,also play and enjoy other types of games but it was Chrono Trigger and Pokémon Red that made me feel truly invested in a game for the first time. And so for many years the new JRPG's were often my most anticipated games of the year.
But in recent years I've found myself playing less and less of them.
Our tastes change over time so it's not weird to lose interest in things that we used to like. But in this particular case it's not that I no longer enjoy the stories or worlds or (most of) the gameplay in these games. It mostly comes down to the fact that they seem to be getting longer and longer just for the sake of length.
In the same way that many open world games boast about the massive size of their map but then when we get to play them we realize there aren't many interesting things to do in them, it feels like a lot of recent JRPG's boast about being very long without taking into consideration that the sacrifices made to reach that length just make the game worse. It's like there's some internal rule in many current japanese studios that a JRPG can't be shorter than 70 or 80 hours, and if it means slowing down the pacing to a crawl or adding a ton of filler content then so be it.
At first I thought that it might just be that as I get older and my free time is reduced I was just now noticing these issues in JRPG that I might have missed as a kid. But then when I headed to howlongtobeat to look at some of my favourite games from the SNES and Ps1 era I saw that they were indeed much shorter.
Chrono Trigger, one of my favourite games ever, takes around 25 hours to beat
Final Fantasy IV also takes around 25 hours (or 30 if you play the DS remake)
Final Fantasy VI around 35
Suikoden 2 around 35
Final Fantasy VII around 40
Vagrant Story around 25
Now I look at some of the standout JRPG's of recent years and:
Persona 5 95 Hours
Xenoblade Chronicles X 70 Hours
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 65 hours
Bravely Default 57
Tales of Berseria 45
Final Fantasy XV 30 Hours (which might be one of the reasons why I really liked it despite being a very flawed game)
And that's all if you simply focus on the main Story. If you want to do some sidequests the number can often go up by as much as 100%.
Now, it's not like I hate or dislike long games. My free time might be less than it used to be but if the game is good I don't mind playing it for 100+ hours even if it takes me months to finish. I loved The Witcher 3 and if you include the DLC I spent close to 200 hours on it and loved every minute. Even this year my game of the year, Breath of the Wild, kept me fully engaged for 80 hours (and I just got the DLC so that number is probably going up).
But the thing I just can't deal with anymore is games that are super long and achieve that length by not respecting my time.
Persona 5 was a bad offender of this and while I did finish it, it's a game that would have been way higher on my personal ranking if it was like 30 or 40 hours shorter. The game is filled with moments when the pacing slows down to a crawl just for the sake of it, with tons upon tons of cutscenes that are little more than the same conversation playing out with slightly different words or several hours spent on some plot point that in the end gets resolved and has literally no impact on the world or story. The Dungeons which at first had a great balance of length and challenge start to drag on and get unnecessarily long towards the end. And they don't get longer by adding interesting new mechanics, it's mostly just more filler hallways, and more forced battles, puzzles that would have been fun if you had to do them once or twice but are instead repeated several times, etc. In one of the later dungeons you'll enter yet another hallways and one of the character will even complain about there being no end to them, I think the writers thought they were being funny but to me it just sounded like the team admitting that 80 hours into the game they were intentionally stretching out the dungeons.
I've been interested in picking up Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for the Switch but after reading through some reviews I think I'll just not bother since it sounds like yet another 40 hours long game that has been packed full of filler and time wasting game mechanics so it takes 80 hours to finish and they can boast about how long it is and how much content there is.
So anyone feeling the same? Any good newer JRPG's you'd recommend that are either shorter or were the length doesn't feel artificial?
I look at my favourite Japanese RPG's of recent years (several of which are some of my favourite games ever) and one thing most of them have in common is that they are shorter (Bloodborne is like 35 hours, Dark Souls 3 is like 30, Nier automata is around 40, SMT IV around 50, etc)
As most kids I did, of course ,also play and enjoy other types of games but it was Chrono Trigger and Pokémon Red that made me feel truly invested in a game for the first time. And so for many years the new JRPG's were often my most anticipated games of the year.
But in recent years I've found myself playing less and less of them.
Our tastes change over time so it's not weird to lose interest in things that we used to like. But in this particular case it's not that I no longer enjoy the stories or worlds or (most of) the gameplay in these games. It mostly comes down to the fact that they seem to be getting longer and longer just for the sake of length.
In the same way that many open world games boast about the massive size of their map but then when we get to play them we realize there aren't many interesting things to do in them, it feels like a lot of recent JRPG's boast about being very long without taking into consideration that the sacrifices made to reach that length just make the game worse. It's like there's some internal rule in many current japanese studios that a JRPG can't be shorter than 70 or 80 hours, and if it means slowing down the pacing to a crawl or adding a ton of filler content then so be it.
At first I thought that it might just be that as I get older and my free time is reduced I was just now noticing these issues in JRPG that I might have missed as a kid. But then when I headed to howlongtobeat to look at some of my favourite games from the SNES and Ps1 era I saw that they were indeed much shorter.
Chrono Trigger, one of my favourite games ever, takes around 25 hours to beat
Final Fantasy IV also takes around 25 hours (or 30 if you play the DS remake)
Final Fantasy VI around 35
Suikoden 2 around 35
Final Fantasy VII around 40
Vagrant Story around 25
Now I look at some of the standout JRPG's of recent years and:
Persona 5 95 Hours
Xenoblade Chronicles X 70 Hours
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 65 hours
Bravely Default 57
Tales of Berseria 45
Final Fantasy XV 30 Hours (which might be one of the reasons why I really liked it despite being a very flawed game)
And that's all if you simply focus on the main Story. If you want to do some sidequests the number can often go up by as much as 100%.
Now, it's not like I hate or dislike long games. My free time might be less than it used to be but if the game is good I don't mind playing it for 100+ hours even if it takes me months to finish. I loved The Witcher 3 and if you include the DLC I spent close to 200 hours on it and loved every minute. Even this year my game of the year, Breath of the Wild, kept me fully engaged for 80 hours (and I just got the DLC so that number is probably going up).
But the thing I just can't deal with anymore is games that are super long and achieve that length by not respecting my time.
Persona 5 was a bad offender of this and while I did finish it, it's a game that would have been way higher on my personal ranking if it was like 30 or 40 hours shorter. The game is filled with moments when the pacing slows down to a crawl just for the sake of it, with tons upon tons of cutscenes that are little more than the same conversation playing out with slightly different words or several hours spent on some plot point that in the end gets resolved and has literally no impact on the world or story. The Dungeons which at first had a great balance of length and challenge start to drag on and get unnecessarily long towards the end. And they don't get longer by adding interesting new mechanics, it's mostly just more filler hallways, and more forced battles, puzzles that would have been fun if you had to do them once or twice but are instead repeated several times, etc. In one of the later dungeons you'll enter yet another hallways and one of the character will even complain about there being no end to them, I think the writers thought they were being funny but to me it just sounded like the team admitting that 80 hours into the game they were intentionally stretching out the dungeons.
I've been interested in picking up Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for the Switch but after reading through some reviews I think I'll just not bother since it sounds like yet another 40 hours long game that has been packed full of filler and time wasting game mechanics so it takes 80 hours to finish and they can boast about how long it is and how much content there is.
So anyone feeling the same? Any good newer JRPG's you'd recommend that are either shorter or were the length doesn't feel artificial?
I look at my favourite Japanese RPG's of recent years (several of which are some of my favourite games ever) and one thing most of them have in common is that they are shorter (Bloodborne is like 35 hours, Dark Souls 3 is like 30, Nier automata is around 40, SMT IV around 50, etc)
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