What looked mid-tier PS2 in terms of game design to you? Smaller areas? No real open world 'feature creep', repetitive quests, DLCs, or multiplayer options or mobile-style hooks? Gameplay looks pretty tight from the videos I've seen, though the fact it's a much smaller and much less epic adventure disappoints me somewhat.
I mean, to an extent yes. I'll cover this in a lot more detail soon, but first let me address the other part of the question.
Honest question though, Nirolak... do you like any non-mobile games?
So, here's the campaign based games I beat in 2015 and 2016 so far, in approximate order of completion. I've pulled out all mobile games, MMOs, and things like Hearthstone campaigns since I assume none of those count as real games.
I left in a couple of "non-games" like Her Story, and smaller puzzle games like Hexcells, though feel free to discount those if you prefer.
I also excluded games I didn't finish.
Captain Toad
Hexcells
Gauntlet
Metal Gear Rising
Watch_Dogs
Hotline Miami 2
Fire Emblem: Awakening
Hatsune Miku F 2nd
Grant Theft Auto V
Castle In The Darkness
Crypt of the Necrodancer
Terraria 1.3 Update/Expansion
Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
Battleblock Theater
Metal Gear Solid V
Undertale
TIS-100
Broforce
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Saints Row: The Third
Zelda: Wind Waker HD
Her Story
Hyrule Warriors
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Dr. Langeskov
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel + DLC
Contraption Maker
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
Tales From The Borderlands
The Division
Card Hunter
Hand of Fate
Axiom Verge
If I had to box myself into a category, I'd consider myself to primarily be a multiplayer oriented PC gamer (the multiplayer, non-campaign based game list would be 50+ titles itself), so there's only ~40-ish titles here for the 18 month period, which I realize is probably a lot lower than many people in this thread.
However, let's wheel back around to Star Ocean using some of the things above.
Undertale is a game similar to Earthbound. On Steam, it has 1,466,419 ± 29,634 owners.
Citizens of Earth is also a game similar to Earthbound. On Steam, it has 90,961 ± 7,397 owners.
Undertale was self published.
Citizens of Earth was published by ATLUS, who has quite a few hits on Steam like Rock of Ages (443,930 ±16,332), Text Murphy: Tesla Effect (330,583 ±14,096), and Abyss Odyssey (271,623 ±12,779).
If these were both retail titles by major publishers, I think people would see the gap between Undertale and Citizens of Earth and start yelling to the roof about how clearly Citizens of Earth didn't have enough marketing.
However, in this scenario, we see that the game that *did* have a successful publisher and marketing was actually the one that did vastly worse, because the core issue is with the appeal of the products themselves.
Here is the first review that comes up for Citizens of Earth on Steam. It gives it a thumbs down:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/aurumlamina/recommended/258910/
For some players, Citizens of Earth may be exactly what they've been looking for to scratch their nostalgia itch. For me, it started off strong but rapidly deteriorated into the opposite.
The vast majority of characters are extraordinarily one-dimensional and never evolve in any narrative way. The combat is old school, but in the way that it emphasizes everything that has been improved over the years as opposed to appealing to our rose colored glasses. The story itself, in my humble opinion, couldn't even begin to compete with the classic games that Citizens of Earth was inspired by and involved far too much grinding to progress.
It was enjoyable to collect characters, for the most part, and leveling them was exciting as far as abilities are concerned as each new ability tended to add something new role-wise that the character hadn't previously had access to.
I can't recommend this game for the Earthbound fans who are looking for an exciting modern version, but as an RPG-lite this may appeal to some who are looking for something that has the simple RPG feel of years long lost.
This doesn't address that the art style is also really ugly.
I feel he hits on a lot of the types of issues that can cause a throwback game to run aground instead of have notable success. The core gameplay hasn't evolved enough for modern times. The execution of other elements people loved about this type of game (the plot and characters for this example) was not very good. The pacing isn't great, which is something that can generate a lot of burnout among the initial buyers, causing word of mouth to stagnate. He actually even says that he thinks there's an audience for this product even though he doesn't personally recommend it. All of this is compounded by there being a much more notable game in the market around the same time that targets a similar audience, plus a plethora of other options to choose from.
Despite having an 83% positive rating on Steam, the core product wasn't strong enough to carry the title to high heights, even with a significantly more favorable publishing and marketing situation, since it couldn't generate the word of mouth for it to take off.
When I watched the Star Ocean V footage, I saw a game where you walk down a variety of connected hallways on a relatively simplistic map, run into some monster groups along the way, and slash at them for a while before moving on. You could also walk up next to glowing trees and press a button to grab some crafting materials. There was also a mix of traditional cutscenes and dialog that happened while you walked around. There was some amount of town walking, and of course you could make some modifications to your party's ability sets. There didn't seem to be much else in the game, even when the video skipped about halfway through the game. It's worth noting that things seemed pretty smooth in terms of saving the game or seamless battles or transitioning between areas. Maybe there's a lot more to the game I never saw, but barring someone showing me that, I'll go ahead with that assumption for the rest of the post.
So at this point, we're looking at the type of setup we saw with a traditional PS2 JRPG that wasn't on the scale of Final Fantasy XII, thus why I dubbed it a mid-tier title. There were a few modern conveniences poured on top of that, but not really much in terms of modern gameplay changes.
That's not to say this type of product can't succeed, but it needs to really nail the execution if it's not selling itself on interesting new features and ideas. Given the impressions people had of the game, it doesn't sound like they really did that. People didn't seem to be gushing about how great the gameplay or visuals or production values or plotline was, and most of the chatter I heard seemed to be about people being disappointed at how short the game was.
Now, let me compare this to Bravely Default. That game offered a new-ish feeling combat system (both in terms of how the turn system worked and the class blending) that people seemed to really like, some great boss design, a bunch of modern amenities like changing encounter rates and difficulties, voice acting for a lot of the content, and as far as the platform was concerned, the production values and visuals were very nice. There were also integrated social systems like the town building and summon aspect that helped generate additional word of mouth. People obviously got very upset about the later content in the game, but the initial appeal worked, and the game sold very well for what it was.
My opinion on Star Ocean 5 is that it was ultimately a product that didn't offer enough to really win over a mass of new customers. It gave people a more traditional game, but it wasn't the more traditional game they wanted, and it didn't seem to surprise them in new and exciting ways either. I suspect that, like Citizens of Earth, it will actually have an audience that as a whole rates it well and buys a non-trivial number of copies. However, I don't think it's the type of product geared for any breakout success even with its Western release, and it doesn't surprise me that it didn't do especially well in Japan where a lot of the series' old audience has grown too old to play console games given the constraints and tendencies of the local culture and lifestyle. The producer is totally right in that they need to appeal to younger audiences to thrive, but as far as I can tell they didn't really do anything to appeal to them outside of making the game shorter, which is a dubious modification toward that goal in the first place. I don't think that marketing (namely promotion and advertising) had any real impact on why the game had humble sales as opposed to the nature of the core product.
As for why I tend to talk about mobile in these threads given the games I play and that I can do long write-ups like these, frankly I just think the business side of the mobile industry is a lot more interesting than dedicated devices in Japan. On the dedicated device side, we see a bunch of publishers flailing around trying to figure out how to decline less quickly with a bunch of safe bets and low budget new (and sometimes old) ideas, with only a few standout products going against the curve. Over in mobile land, there's tons of investment and publishers (both new and old) are flooding the market with ideas trying to find paths to success and figure out where the quickly growing and evolving market is going. I think there's a lot more exciting (business) ideas to be seen on a frequent basis there as opposed to the dedicated industry where everything is ramping down and publishers are leaving (or at least culling down their domestic targeted investment).