Current Events > Microsoft almost destroyed the jrpg back in the 360 era...

(+) Yeah! (+)

Due to making a bunch of exclusive deals for jrpgs. Games that naturally wouldve made their way to the PS3 and find decent success were sucked up and jailed behind exclusivity for the xbox 360. Results? Most of them sold like crap and jrpgs became the least popular since FF7 brought them out into the mainstream...and I dont think they fully recovered from this since wrpgs took the lead with games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect taking their place.

Games like:

Lost Odyssey
Tales of Vesperia
Blue Dragon
Star Ocean The Last Hope
Resonance of Fate
Infinite Undiscovery
The Last Remnant
Magna Carta 2
Enchanted Arms

Were fully exclusive or timed exclusives and any did not see a Playstation release until recently. My point with all this is that Im scared by the acquisitions by MS. Its all fun to have your favorite brand have shiny exclusives until they milk these studios for all their worth and then dissolve them. They do not care about our gaming experience...they just want to fill up a catalogue of games and become the netflix of video games and Im afraid they'll succeed.


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Or jrpgs are just super dated and the flagships have been pretty terrible for decades

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How many of those were even good though?

I also think you forgot how bad PS3 games sold those first few years as well. Japan were already moving onto handhelds.

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Darmik posted...

How many of those were even good though?

Blue Dragon is super great, in spite of the plot and characters being fucking awful.

Jrpgs just are not as popular anymore, we live in an age where online games are king, and if Sony had a gamepass type thing and xbox didnt the sony fanboys would be mocking xbox owners about it, gamepass is a really good service and the fact next gen stuff will be available on it also is really nice.

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Solid Snake07 posted...

Or jrpgs are just super dated and the flagships have been pretty terrible for decades

A lot of the mainstream JRPGs are terrible since most of them seem to care about how good the game looks over everything else now. The niche ones are damn good though.

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Vesperia is one of the best in that Gen

Also, the PS3 was a unpopular console around that time. A 600 dollar console that apparently was difficult to program for had JRPGs looking for new blood.

I think I heard Sony had a policy that any game that was gonna be ported to PS3 had to come with additional features

Solid Snake07 posted...

Or jrpgs are just super dated and the flagships have been pretty terrible for decades

Holy_Cloud105 posted...

A lot of the mainstream JRPGs are terrible since most of them seem to care about how good the game looks over everything else now. The niche ones are damn good though.

So much this. I remember when Final Fantasy 13 was coming out and I thought I'd give it a shot. Then I played it and it reminded me why I stopped playing JRPGs. I'm sorry but JRPGs are dated to me. The music is god awful to mediocre. The characters are all over the top and strike me as the kind of things 10 year olds think of as cool. I'm also not a fan of the high fantasy settings most of them have.

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That generation in general was really tough on Japanese developers. Most of them floundered with their transition to HD.

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Microsoft never cared about games, which is why they don't have a celebrated history of making them. They buy, buy, buy. They just wanted in on the console market share.

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Kolibri X posted...

Microsoft never cared about games, which is why they don't have a celebrated history of making them. They buy, buy, buy. They just wanted in on the console market share.

What? Microsoft has been both making and publishing games since the late 70s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_Game_Studios_video_games

Xbox Game Studios (formerly Microsoft Games, Microsoft Game Studios and Microsoft Studios) is an American video game publisher that acts as a division of technology company Microsoft. The division was created in March 2000 and replaced Microsoft's internal Games Group. This is a list of games that were published by Microsoft through the Games Group and, later, through Xbox Game Studios.

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Vesperia was supposed to be really good. But because I only had the ps3, I couldn't play it. Its on pc now but its too late, the game feels dated and I couldn't get into it.

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Darmik posted...

How many of those were even good though?

I also think you forgot how bad PS3 games sold those first few years as well. Japan were already moving onto handhelds.

I have Lost Odyssey, managed about a half hour before getting bored.

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Cobra1010 posted...

Vesperia was supposed to be really good. But because I only had the ps3, I couldn't play it. Its on pc now but its too late, the game feels dated and I couldn't get into it.

It was never as good as people made it out to be and I played through the game nearly 10 times to completion. Its just good for a Tales games.

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DrizztLink posted...

I have Lost Odyssey, managed about a half hour before getting bored.

Funny thing is that its best game on that list.....yeah, most of them are mediocre. Japanese studios did face a rocky transition into the HD world.

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Lol i hope Microsoft buys even more publishers tbh

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This topic is such bullshit lmao, PS3 had more and varied exclusive jRPGs.

MS didn't do anything to the genre, it simply got overplayed.
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DrizztLink posted...

I have Lost Odyssey, managed about a half hour before getting bored.

Lost Odyssey sucked and was too grindy. And then you had those annoyingly long read through cutscenes.

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The JRPG genre was having quality issues in the PS2 era. The 360 didnt kill it

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Microsoft wanted the 360 to feature games for all gamers. When MS cancelled Cry On they made an often-repeated mistake: they sent the wrong message to gamers.

A few months after SE announced [in 2008; a pivotal year] that Final Fantasy XIII was releasing on the Xbox 360, Microsoft announced that [Mistwalker Studios'] Cry On was canceled. MS said that they cancelled Cry On because of economic downturn and because gamers were no longer interested in JRPGs. However, in truth, MS was not interested in promoting new IP JRPGs from obscure MS-backed game studios in Japan, they were interested in getting more AAA studios in Japan to release their JRPGs on the 360. MS didn't want to lose any more money because too few gamers in Japan were buying 360s, and the 360 games made for those gamers, but MS was willing to "make more space" for JRPGs to be featured on the 360.

[ Fun Fact: FF XIII was given it's own 360 SKU, with a custom artwork faceplate and HDD, while Splinter Cell: Conviction was given a standard Elite 360 SKU. ] :|

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Honestly think JRPGs would have a better chance on Microsoft than Sony these days

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Resonance of Fate was released in 2010. I would know since it was the second game I purchased for my PS3 after FFXIII

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Darmik posted...

That generation in general was really tough on Japanese developers. Most of them floundered with their transition to HD.

Yep. But once they got there they started kicking ass again

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Enchanted Arms was practically a PS3 launch title. It was one of the first PS3 games I got period, and definitely the first jrpg I got for the system.

PS3 definitely had a weak launch in general though. tbh, we mainly used it in place of our broken PS2 for a long while.
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Sensual_T_Rex posted...

So much this. I remember when Final Fantasy 13 was coming out and I thought I'd give it a shot. Then I played it and it reminded me why I stopped playing JRPGs. I'm sorry but JRPGs are dated to me. The music is god awful to mediocre. The characters are all over the top and strike me as the kind of things 10 year olds think of as cool. I'm also not a fan of the high fantasy settings most of them have.

FFXIII was just a terrible game all around. If you found it bad, that actually means you like jrpgs, since it's the anti-thesis of the genre...or maybe it's more like all the bad parts of the jrpg genre combined together and magnified a hundredfold.
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Maybe the FF XIII trilogy was SE trying to get ahead of the curve and finalize the changes to the series that it started with FF X (2001).

FF XIII certainly isn't what many gamers consider a traditional JRPG. It has more monster hunt/harvest elements in it and fewer NPCs than any other FF game I've played.

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andri_g posted...

Maybe the FF XIII trilogy was SE trying to get ahead of the curve and finalize the changes to the series that it started with FF X (2001).

The "hallway simulator" concept began with FF4 (1991), though.

The problem with modern JRPGs is that there's too much extras and side stuff crammed into them that affects the flow and presentation of the game, and hampers the ability to focus on the mood and story telling aspects. So there are so many little details that need adjusting to make the experiencr great again.

my problem with jrpgs these days is that they're just long af. I'm in the "games these days are too long" camp though.

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YellowMustard69 posted...

The problem with modern JRPGs

...is still essentially the same problem with "classic" JRPGs - they tend to get up their own asses with obnoxious characters and terrible "you are having EMOTION now!!" writing, when all I want to do is murder things and make the numbers bigger.

Crazyman93 posted...

Lost Odyssey sucked and was too grindy. And then you had those annoyingly long read through cutscenes.

The dreams are some of the best parts. The only game to ever make me cry. A few times from those dreams

What the fuck, good on you microsoft. First they buy bethesda, now i'm hearing about this. Some more great news and they'll be in my good graces

Questionmarktarius posted...

The "hallway simulator" concept began with FF4 (1991), though.

That's why I said trilogy. The hallway part is only the first ~20 hours (ymmv) of the first game; the trilogy, if you do everything, has hundreds of open-ended gameplay hours.

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YellowMustard69 posted...

The problem with modern JRPGs is that there's too much extras and side stuff crammed into them that affects the flow and presentation of the game, and hampers the ability to focus on the mood and story telling aspects. So there are so many little details that need adjusting to make the experiencr great again.

And yet my absolute favorite jrpg is pretty much all extras, side quests, and crafting, with the story and the mood it sets being more of a backdrop.

Pity they seem stray further and further from Second Story with each new game in the series.
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