Okay, let's take this one step at a time.
Well, if we're going by "popularity," then the PSP Legend of Heroes games aren't that popular. The first one sold over 100k, but the Japanese gaming public was apparently so reviled that the second barely cracked five digits and the third game did even worse.
So if that's your gauge here, that doesn't really come out in these games' favor. But you are the one that brought popularity up.
They weren't "ported" to the PSP, they were remade for the PSP by Bandai. Legend of Heroes VI: Sora no Kiseki FC and SC are ports, and they're being handled directly by Falcom.
So yeah, I guess it's fair to say that if you take some quality games and put them in Bandai's hands they end up sucking. Because that's what happened here.
Not true at all. You've tried this old canard out before, and it's awfully wrong. Identical gameplay to the old SNES games? Bull. There's far more gameplay depth in the most praised ones -- FFV, FFVI, Dragon Quest VI, Chrono Trigger, Lufia 2, the Romancing SaGa trilogy, Tales of Phantasia, Super Mario RPG, Star Ocean, and on and on. Even if you look strictly at purely "classical" gameplay like, say, DQV, there's a lot more depth there because, A) you get a huge party of characters to manage and control, and B) there's genuine challenge in the gameplay.
Bare-bones traditional gameplay doesn't work when the game is so easy a monkey could play it successfully.
A lot of the old translations were pretty good. Even with the bad translations, though, most of the praised SNES RPGs had far, far better characters and characterizations than what are present in the Bandai Legend of Heroes remakes.
You're right that the basic narrative arc of Moonlight Witch contains, on paper, evidence of more originality than the plot in A Tear of Vermillion. However, in practice, it doesn't go much further than that -- while that narrative arc has potential, it doesn't realize anything beyond bland cliches in the actual execution (IE, the meat of the story), or in the characters.
A Tear of Vermillion doesn't even have that pretense of a saving grace.
Sure, keep blaming things on bias. It's all The Liberal Media's fault.
No, there is (and should be) an expectation for the RPGs of any system to live up to objective measures of quality regardless of the platform they're on. A consumer shouldn't sacrifice minimum standards of quality simply because a game isn't on the PS2 -- that's no excuse for below average gameplay, narrative presentation, or any of the other primary factors in determining a game's quality.
Or people that also enjoy RPGs from Konami, Atlus, Capcom, Namco, Sega...? And "cutscenes," incidentally, have nothing to do with it. I don't think a single person has lodged a complaint against The Legend of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Tactics, Astonishia Story, or Generation of Chaos that "there aren't enough cutscenes." If you can find an example of such, I'd welcome seeing it.
Yes. Then we can read trancejeremy's
10/10 Legend of Heroes review, which is certainly the most fair account we'll find.
