For the last 10 years, if you've played one Tales game, you've played them all. You already know how the story is going to progress, how the characters are going to "develop", and how the game is going to play. You have no expectation for something different.This matters more here than in something like Halo or COD because we're talking about an RPG series. You come to RPGs for stories and characters. You don't want to experience the same story with the same themes and characters repeatedly.
Except they're not 'the same story'. The same general types of stories, yes, if we paint them with a broad enough brush. That isn't necessarily a negative, though. For those of us who enjoy those kinds of stories, the games feel different enough to be distinctive, but at the same time comfortably familiar.
Ghost_Protocol said:Unlike Tales, Final Fantasy does make a serious effort to try something new with each new entry, despite remaining an adventure where you recruit party members, fight monsters, and save the world at the end. One game could be a MMO-inspired, real-time, action based medieval drama racked with political strife, the next could be a turn-based cyberpunk romp through an apocalyptic science fiction world, and another could be a modern take on an ROTC/mercenary group trying to stop a sorceress from taking control of the world governments. You're misinterpreting what I mean by "change" if you think I want the Tales series to stop being a JRPG, or if you think I want Tales to adopt something that hasn't been seen anywhere else before. It just needs to try something IT hasn't already done before, and something a new anime series doesn't do every 3 months.
It's funny to read that in light of all the comments I hear about the 'glory days' of Final Fantasy. A lot of people seem to feel the 8- and 16-bit era FF's were superior to later offerings because they weren't so experimental - they all took place in these pseudo-medieval fantasy worlds with light steampunk trappings (airships, etc.), featured heroic fantasy tropes front and center, etc.
People come back to the kinds of things they like. Some of you seem to act like this is a crime, something to be ashamed of. Which to me is really bizarre.