By the way. Somebody said Fusion is weaker than pins. This is not fully true. A Lv1 fusion is indeed not worth the fuzz except in the first week ( Shiki can only have Lv1 not more ). Lv2 though is already a large hit ( Beat can only do lv2 ). Lv3 on the other hand blasts an entire boss away in one shot ( Joshua can get this: max level ). It's though scarce. Lv1 requires 4 starts, Lv2 8 and Lv3 whoopie 16 stars. Usually battles are over ( 4-chain ) before you get 16 stars but once you get them enjoy the finishing move.

Otherwise Ben is spot on. he didn't mentioned some points I did in my review especially about the useless game mechanics but otherwise it's similar. As I found out too, a difficult game to judge since it depends a lot on your taste.

Haha loved the review as always. All very good points about J-RPG's. I mean, they really are only going to appeal to certain people and can be just like an interactive anime(aka, Xenosaga) It truly is a cultural difference in terms of what a Japanese consider a good game compared to a western game. After all, the Japanese romanticize the samurai and the sword, while Americans do the same with the cowboy and gun. Of course that's not completely true and I don't speak for everyone, but it basically comes down to whether you like slashing your sword or going on a rampage with your BFG. In all honesty some Japanese developers could probably care less if their games do well outside of Japan but some have, which is why they still market them outside of Japan, and I can't think of many "rest of the world" developers that localize their games in Japan.

I haven't truly played many J-RPG's because of time and they really didn't catch my attention and/or are really long, but I want to mention some of the few J-RPG's that really caught my attention and perhaps give Yahtzee a good idea of what is good in a J-RPG.

Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Loved the story lines and the combat.
Super Mario RPG. Only true Mario RPG to me.
Have not play Final Fantasy 6, but I hear good things about it.
The last two are a maybe: Eternal Sonada and Final Fantasy 7

I just started playing Eternal Sonada and I'm finding I really enjoy it, because you actually have to think fast and have good reaction time in the battles, though it can get annoying here and there. I have played through FF7 but haven't beaten it, haha. FF7 is one of those "ground breaking" games for many people. I can't really say I liked it since I never played it when it came out and I find Chrono Trigger and Cross to be more of my favorite ones. I like the ones that I do because I like the story, the pacing, the characters and the simplicity or perhaps bizarre combat systems that make everything more interesting for me.

I think it's basically what you think is more fun and how much thinking you want to do
1) pure reading, with which you'll go for a book or visual novel (which is essentially a novel with voices for the characters and pictures for every page), and you'll be thinking throughout.
2) lots of reading but just enough flashy stuff and gameplay to keep you from thinking most of the time, with which you'll turn to JRPG or Anime.
3) not so much reading but a good (sort of) story none-the-less and lots of gameplay to keep your mind occupied, in which case RPG. And last but not least
4) as little reading as possible, which then becomes any other genre.

In short, how much of a novel do you want it to be.

I find it weird (though it is his opinion) that Yahtzee call gaming an art form while so heavily criticizing JRPG. I personally think the writers of GOOD JRPG stories are making more of an artistic expression than any other game except good writers of visual novels. For the amount of art present in a game I say it's ranked #1 visual novels, since they are put under games and not novels for some reason #2 JRPG #3 WRPG and then advanture games and then everything else.
The good ones of course. The bad ones are either Hollywood Flicks or, in the case of visual novels, porn.

Though of course it's been a while since I played JRPG.

welcome to the magical land of mid-twenties! Long have we awaited your arrival and greet you now with mad +stats, bonus weapons and puppies! actually... just a virtual pat on the back and a "hey... do you remember Teddy ruxpin?"

Parallel Pain:
I find it weird (though it is his opinion) that Yahtzee call gaming an art form while so heavily criticizing JRPG. I personally think the writers of GOOD JRPG stories are making more of an artistic expression than any other game except good writers of visual novels. For the amount of art present in a game I say it's ranked #1 visual novels, since they are put under games and not novels for some reason #2 JRPG #3 WRPG and then advanture games and then everything else.
The good ones of course. The bad ones are either Hollywood Flicks or, in the case of visual novels, porn.

Ehhhhhhh......not so much, no. JRPGs can only be considered to make an artistic expression if that expression is one of three pretty well universal themes among the genre and the statement is made entirely in a lost Egyptian dialect and then translated to English by a Puritan prude. In short, not so much. JRPGs generally have a more interesting art style than some of their more action-oriented brethren (woo - brown!), but their stories are equally generally derivative tripe recycled from the eight thousand practically identical games that come before them. It's nice to find ones that are interesting for a while - I'm currently deeply immersed in Persona 3 - but as soon as you try to dig deeper into the genre you're sure to find a whole pile of clones, followers, and hangers-on whose stale stories are matched only by their equally stale play mechanics. If you accept the conjecture that games are art (I place some preconditions on that - namely, that you have to change the definition of art), then a "very artistic" game would be one that makes the most of its medium, and JRPGs seem to do the very best to irritate the living hell out of anybody that enjoys actually playing games. The prose is typically awful once it gets to English - though for all I know this is hot stuff in its original language - and the prose delivery system is, almost universally, repetitive and grating.

Let's take Persona as an example. The game is really, really original - for me, at least. In Japan, where social and dating sims are a little more prevalent and the other two titles in the franchise history probably took some of the shine off, this might be an old hat, but from where I'm sitting, combining the fundamentally boring grind of a Diablo/Rogue style dungeon crawl with the constant procession and pressures of a year of high school is perfectly brilliant, and if they'd left it at that, that would have been great. Unfortunately, the developers seem to be doing everything in their power to squander that opportunity with a whole laundry list of very typical JRPG crimes:

1. Fundamentally Unbalanced Combat - I see this a lot in the "hardcore" JRPG scene, mostly because Square seems to have learned by now how to balance elemental and status effects in a fight. Persona doesn't. Shadow Hearts didn't either. Far too often, the combat boils down to ridiculously easy win vs. horrifying demise, based entirely on what and which elemental or status effects you are equipped to throw out. It might seem balanced at first, but it's only balanced in the way that the nuclear deterrent effect between the United States and North Korea is balanced - we can each blow the living crap out of each other, and basically the guy who acts first is going to get the most chuckles out of the situation.

2. Grinding. JRPGs freaking invented grinding, or, if not, they certainly perfected it. Most notable problem - your party members and your party size not being equal. I've encountered exactly one series that didn't have this problem (Grandia), though I'm sure there's more if I look. In all of these games, you end up with maybe eight available party members to fill three or four slots, with the ones you carry along with you receiving lots of experience and growing and becoming real and useful individuals and the ones you leave back at camp sticking berries up their noses turning into tiny atrophied useless decaying lumps of flesh that WILL destroy you if you are so foolish as to bring them with you anywhere for any reason. The result is that if you don't have the handy walkthrough sitting next to you to tell you if, when, and how you will need to use all of these lazy, unmotivated meat sacks, you have to take them ALL out with you, essentially requiring you to repeat your level grinding over and over and over again so that whole new batches of useless morons can reach a level of skill they may or may not need to have. What makes this sort of idiocy truly criminal is the fact that Western RPGs have figured this tiny, glaringly obvious problem out and fixed it. In Mass Effect, everybody's your level. Problem solved. Now I can do more of the story adventuring and less killing boars. I don't even like killing boars.

3. Saving the World. This is a problem that stretches beyond the JRPG genre, but honestly it seems to be the worst here. No matter who you are and no matter what you start out doing, you can be effectively guaranteed that at some point in the course of the game you're going to find your own particular variation of the Invisible Time Wizard floating around in the space between dimensions and plotting to destroy the world because his neighbor's dog told him to or some other such foolishness. You will then stop this person. All RPGs manage to get bogged down in this sort of wrote pattern, it seems, but it doesn't really have to, and in JRPGs sometimes the reasoning is just truly, fundamentally stupid. Here's an idea - maybe instead of trying to save the world, my motivation is that I'm sick of having to run up two hundred flights of stairs every night and risk my life in combat with these weird things that look like hands and tables and curiously agile ink blots and live my life as a normal freaking human being. Maybe my motivation for adventuring around the world in my multi-part ship with my immortal friends is because I just want to freaking die already. Why does there always have to be a villain tenting his fingers and lining out his plan to crack the Earth in half so he can host a family reunion with his grandfather?

That, right there, is three areas of significant difficulty that JRPGs have yet to resolve, despite the fact that the resolution for the issues are completely obvious. Celebrating these games for their prose is like praising your three year old because he took a crap in the toilet for a change. As a person who actually, honestly loves this genre and grew up consuming these things, even I can stand back and say that most of these games aren't even making the most of what little portion of the medium they actually use. I mean, Phoenix Wright can tell a story just as easily as a forty five minute cutscene, and he's going to make me think about it a little bit more than some asinine nihilist philosophy about why The Monolith from 2001 got a spray tan and will somehow destroy the Earth (a fact which I have assumed from almost finishing the first game in that series), if only because it requires more cognitive exercise to communicate a coherent theory of a crime to a squad of caricatures and loonies than it does to register and immediately dismiss the pseudo-intellectual semi-Eastern Philosophical claptrap at the root of most of these games' "deeper meanings." For crying out loud - the short stories in Lost Odyssey were theoretically written by some of the greatest writers in Japan, but what I saw up on the screen wasn't even up to Stephen King standards, and that's just sad.

They may tell the biggest story (over and over and over again), but I definitely don't think that JRPGs have any ground to assert themselves as "most artistic genre."

WTF is wrong with the movie player? It keeps stuttering. It plays a few seconds fine, and then gets stuck and jumps forward 3-6 seconds =/. The audio keeps playing too.

Well, stop touching yourself at night, then.

Also, try updating Flash.

As much as I disagree with the hate of JRPGs and so on, I find that this review was great. Of course Yahtzee has many valid points, though I wonder if he looked at Another Day. It practically makes fun of itself right there, since the whole chapter is a huge satire. In any case, I looked at the review merely for Entertainment purposes, since I've already beaten it and developed my own opinions. Still...I find it odd that every time I think of a good game for Yahtzee to review, I doubt it initially, then, next thing I know, it's the latest review (see No More Heroes). I doubted that TWEWY would be reviewed because it was a JRPG, but I was wrong again. Next thing you know, he'll review something like Phoenix Wright just for kicks...I wish...

In a more positive note, Happy Birthday fellow Fedora-wearing comrade! If I knew you better, I'd actually send you the latest Fedora I picked up while I was at New York City.

cool_moe_dee_345:

Ehhhhhhh......not so much, no. JRPGs can only be considered to make an artistic expression if that expression is one of three pretty well universal themes among the genre and the statement is made entirely in a lost Egyptian dialect and then translated to English by a Puritan prude. In short, not so much. JRPGs generally have a more interesting art style than some of their more action-oriented brethren (woo - brown!), but their stories are equally generally derivative tripe recycled from the eight thousand practically identical games that come before them. It's nice to find ones that are interesting for a while - I'm currently deeply immersed in Persona 3 - but as soon as you try to dig deeper into the genre you're sure to find a whole pile of clones, followers, and hangers-on whose stale stories are matched only by their equally stale play mechanics. If you accept the conjecture that games are art (I place some preconditions on that - namely, that you have to change the definition of art), then a "very artistic" game would be one that makes the most of its medium, and JRPGs seem to do the very best to irritate the living hell out of anybody that enjoys actually playing games. The prose is typically awful once it gets to English - though for all I know this is hot stuff in its original language - and the prose delivery system is, almost universally, repetitive and grating.

Let's take Persona as an example. The game is really, really original - for me, at least. In Japan, where social and dating sims are a little more prevalent and the other two titles in the franchise history probably took some of the shine off, this might be an old hat, but from where I'm sitting, combining the fundamentally boring grind of a Diablo/Rogue style dungeon crawl with the constant procession and pressures of a year of high school is perfectly brilliant, and if they'd left it at that, that would have been great. Unfortunately, the developers seem to be doing everything in their power to squander that opportunity with a whole laundry list of very typical JRPG crimes:

1. Fundamentally Unbalanced Combat - I see this a lot in the "hardcore" JRPG scene, mostly because Square seems to have learned by now how to balance elemental and status effects in a fight. Persona doesn't. Shadow Hearts didn't either. Far too often, the combat boils down to ridiculously easy win vs. horrifying demise, based entirely on what and which elemental or status effects you are equipped to throw out. It might seem balanced at first, but it's only balanced in the way that the nuclear deterrent effect between the United States and North Korea is balanced - we can each blow the living crap out of each other, and basically the guy who acts first is going to get the most chuckles out of the situation.

2. Grinding. JRPGs freaking invented grinding, or, if not, they certainly perfected it. Most notable problem - your party members and your party size not being equal. I've encountered exactly one series that didn't have this problem (Grandia), though I'm sure there's more if I look. In all of these games, you end up with maybe eight available party members to fill three or four slots, with the ones you carry along with you receiving lots of experience and growing and becoming real and useful individuals and the ones you leave back at camp sticking berries up their noses turning into tiny atrophied useless decaying lumps of flesh that WILL destroy you if you are so foolish as to bring them with you anywhere for any reason. The result is that if you don't have the handy walkthrough sitting next to you to tell you if, when, and how you will need to use all of these lazy, unmotivated meat sacks, you have to take them ALL out with you, essentially requiring you to repeat your level grinding over and over and over again so that whole new batches of useless morons can reach a level of skill they may or may not need to have. What makes this sort of idiocy truly criminal is the fact that Western RPGs have figured this tiny, glaringly obvious problem out and fixed it. In Mass Effect, everybody's your level. Problem solved. Now I can do more of the story adventuring and less killing boars. I don't even like killing boars.

3. Saving the World. This is a problem that stretches beyond the JRPG genre, but honestly it seems to be the worst here. No matter who you are and no matter what you start out doing, you can be effectively guaranteed that at some point in the course of the game you're going to find your own particular variation of the Invisible Time Wizard floating around in the space between dimensions and plotting to destroy the world because his neighbor's dog told him to or some other such foolishness. You will then stop this person. All RPGs manage to get bogged down in this sort of wrote pattern, it seems, but it doesn't really have to, and in JRPGs sometimes the reasoning is just truly, fundamentally stupid. Here's an idea - maybe instead of trying to save the world, my motivation is that I'm sick of having to run up two hundred flights of stairs every night and risk my life in combat with these weird things that look like hands and tables and curiously agile ink blots and live my life as a normal freaking human being. Maybe my motivation for adventuring around the world in my multi-part ship with my immortal friends is because I just want to freaking die already. Why does there always have to be a villain tenting his fingers and lining out his plan to crack the Earth in half so he can host a family reunion with his grandfather?

That, right there, is three areas of significant difficulty that JRPGs have yet to resolve, despite the fact that the resolution for the issues are completely obvious. Celebrating these games for their prose is like praising your three year old because he took a crap in the toilet for a change. As a person who actually, honestly loves this genre and grew up consuming these things, even I can stand back and say that most of these games aren't even making the most of what little portion of the medium they actually use. I mean, Phoenix Wright can tell a story just as easily as a forty five minute cutscene, and he's going to make me think about it a little bit more than some asinine nihilist philosophy about why The Monolith from 2001 got a spray tan and will somehow destroy the Earth (a fact which I have assumed from almost finishing the first game in that series), if only because it requires more cognitive exercise to communicate a coherent theory of a crime to a squad of caricatures and loonies than it does to register and immediately dismiss the pseudo-intellectual semi-Eastern Philosophical claptrap at the root of most of these games' "deeper meanings." For crying out loud - the short stories in Lost Odyssey were theoretically written by some of the greatest writers in Japan, but what I saw up on the screen wasn't even up to Stephen King standards, and that's just sad.

They may tell the biggest story (over and over and over again), but I definitely don't think that JRPGs have any ground to assert themselves as "most artistic genre."

Damn, this dude just pointed the faults out pretty well! Only thing I can argue is the difficulty. This game gives you Personas/Weapons against these monsters. Of course, if you are going into battle with a boss soon you ALWAYS know to bring a variety. It's common sense to make sure your equipped for things and situations. Now you don't know exactly what kind of situation it will be, but they give plenty of variety for you to be able to take on what's coming. Difficulty is based on how smart a person is really. The only fight I found difficult(nuclear death charge difficult as you put it) was the final boss... as should all final bosses be. They are meant to be challenging. And half the fun of beating a boss is getting the feeling you conquered something. And as long as you know how to use the AI commands for your partners, they do their job very well. Sometimes I'd find myself on the verge of death, and then my partner casts a spell that instantly heals all my health, despite the fact she only had 1 hit point. And yes, saving the world has been done OVER AND OVER again, but this is another place where they make things interesting. Never before have I had to save the world quite like this. It's original, and aren't ALL games usually based on saving the world? Halo, your saving the world/universe. Painkiller your saving the world from HELL pretty much, and in Resident Evil 4, your saving the world from parasitic monsters. But what I do agree with you about was the grinding.... why can't they all just stay the same level as you? I'm not wasting hours training each person.

I watched this and then the old manhunt review from way back and i reckon you are back at your best yahtzee. top notch reviewing.

Happy birthday yahtzee

Meh. I liked the game a lot.

Yahtzee was pretty fair as usual, though it slightly irks me that JRGs get all the ragging on for being the same junk over and over again, when I could definilty point out at least 15 FPS or Strategy games for being the same juink over and over agian.

But whatever, as Yahtzee can do whatever he likes, and trying to change somebody's opinion on the internet is idiotic. Then again, everybody's entitled to their own opinion.

Although I would like to see a little diversity in his reviews. Itt seems we're usually stuck in FPS town. I don't care if its JPRG's necessarily, just as long as something else besides guns are invovled.

egoraptor:
I've just discovered Zero Punctuation.

You are very intelligent, Yahtzee. The metaphors, parallels, and jokes you make are all very funny. The problem is I have no time to laugh. What's the point of comedy if I can't enjoy it and laugh at it? I don't think this pacing does anything for your content. Oftentimes I'll miss really good, complex lines or jokes because it went by at the speed of light. I know it's your gimmick but it's still just a gimmick and honestly I think it's numbing your creativity.

I think some people can get jokes faster than others. Or don't mind laughing, and then rewinding to see what they missed while laughing.

Also, I personally felt Yahtzee was too slow this time. I hate it when I have time to telegraph jokes.

Happy birthday Yahtzee

Ambition:

TheDarkPrince:

Ambition:

I say "Meh".

Unless Escapist is handing him these games to review, he needs to just stop reviewing them and do something he's not already going to dislike in it's entirety - which leads to, in my opinion, a less than stellar job (go watch SimCities review to get what I mean.)

What we know about Yahtzee:

1.) He hates JRPGS
2.) He hates People.
3.) He hates JRPGS.

It's called a genre for a reason, and I haven't seen anything change in it since Chronotrigger (the last good one).

Yahtzee, next week, just pre-review every JRPG to come out in the next ten years and tell us it's really going to suck - you won't be telling us anything new, and ten years from now you can say 'I told you so'.

It's not called a genre though, the genre in this case would be RPG.

Saying it's a genre would be like saying "Action Movies By Steven Speilberg" is a genre (or quake maps for that matter if you're going to complain that there are enough JRPGs for it to be a legitimate genre, I guarantee there are more Quake maps than JRPGs out there).

I always love reading people telling Yahtzee what to do. He has pulled in however many million viewers and single handedly popularised this site, but he clearly needs advice from someone as knowledgeable and important as you.

He puts out a consumer product, I'm a consumer saying the product sucks - there is no more important feedback, fanboy. But then, you probably already knew that I had hidden my criticism deep within a suggestion - cause your supernatural mental prowess clearly would miss nothing like that.

Also, to characterize Oblivion and World of Warcraft as the same type of game would be folly. Just as you wouldn't put Billy Madison in the same area of the movie store as a Patton Oswalt stand-up. Each of those are a different genre. The word genre is as small or large as a person wants to make it - Yahtzee clearly makes a distinction between western and JRPGS, which is precisely what I'm commenting on.

Now please, go find some other internet fad to defend witlessly.

Wow. How incredibly stupid can one person be? If you can say whatever YOU want, he can say whatever he wants.

Also, you actually think Yahtzee reads these? You poor, deluded soul. There's a reason these are called "comments", not "feedback". Yahtzee used to read his emails, but I'm guessing he's not even going to do that anymore. As long as people watch his videos, he has no vested interest in listening to him.

So, coming to a page on the website of a video you just took the time to watch and complaining about it is just stupid. We can't do anything about it. And, if Yahtzee ever did happen to read it, he's the type of person who would do the opposite just to make you mad.

Also, funny how you think Yahtzee should be able to take criticism, but the same criticism gets you so mad that you start calling people names.

TWEWY! LOL!

All the good JRPG's used to be about gory storylines (gory as in long and complex) and collecting all the kewl moves which had really kewl graphics. Once EA bought all the good JRPG companies this stopped happening. Don't blame the japanese, blame Electronic Arts for everything like i do.

Yahtzee is doing a good job. Even games he doesn't like he still points out any good bits and quite frankly anyone who bags him for doing his job is moronic and childish. He bagged the crap out of GTAIV yet he still pointed out that he was going to spend more time playing it. If you can't understand the point of criticism stop posting, or better yet seal yourself in a crate and post yourself to a country without video games.

Also WOW and Obliv are RPGs and they do go in the same genre as final fantasy etc. Just cos u don't like em don't mean they're not lumped together. Sorry.

P.S. Chronotrigger was awesome, but final fantasy VII was the last good one in my opinion.
P.P.S. Chronotrigger was reviewed in australia by Nintendo magazine and got 93%, an unprecedented rating. they were playing the game in japanese and couldn't even understand what the hell was going on and they still loved it. That is the sign of good RPG.
P.P.P.S. Happy birthday Yahtzee. Mine was on tuesday.

MAZAL TOV!
from here in Israel =D

CodeChrono:
Meh. I liked the game a lot.

Yahtzee was pretty fair as usual, though it slightly irks me that JRGs get all the ragging on for being the same junk over and over again, when I could definilty point out at least 15 FPS or Strategy games for being the same juink over and over agian.

But whatever, as Yahtzee can do whatever he likes, and trying to change somebody's opinion on the internet is idiotic. Then again, everybody's entitled to their own opinion.

Although I would like to see a little diversity in his reviews. Itt seems we're usually stuck in FPS town. I don't care if its JPRG's necessarily, just as long as something else besides guns are invovled.

Haven't you heard? Every genre is recycled crap these days.

Parsec:

Sasha Janre:

Parsec:

otterbeans:

Parsec:
The writing holds up well, but it doesn't really shine until AFTER the game is over. That had me in stitches; it's a shame that level of comedy wasn't dispersed through the whole game.

Dibs on rainbow.

Exactly what I mean.

"No, no, no, I call pink." "(Great, now they are fighting over colors!)"
"His blue strikes me more of a...black and blue." "What do I look like, a bruise?"
"You're like a bruise on the tomato of my heart."

Also, "(Great, not only did he name us after crayons, apparently he's been EATING them too.)"

"You're the one that refuses to call me pink."
"So now it's MY FAULT?"

"I demand you make me a spirit!"
"Why would you wanna be a crayon!?"

I COULD DO THIS ALL DAY. XD;

"Uhh, I'm not good with crowds... Crowds bring out those symbols- the weebers! I can see them everywhere! There! Clinging to that guy's back- WEEBERS!!! Weebie weebie weebie..."

I'll pull the names out for the sake of keeping this spoiler free, but it's nothing major anyway.

1: Hey, wanna play me in---
2: Say, did you know?
2: We all perceive the world around us differently---
2: ---filtered through the lens of our desired reality.
1: Huh!?
1: (thinking) Is this kid high?
2: So if you're wondering why a certain young lady still looks like somebody else...
2: ...it's because you refuse to perceive her as she really is.
1: Young lady?
2: The only thing stopping you from seeing what she really looks like... is you.
2: So you see, it's your fault.
1: I need to look harder?
2: That's right. Let go of your preconceptions.
1: Um... you know...
1: I was just gonna ask if you wanted to play Tin Pin, but, um---
2: Hmm? Tin Pin?
2: We already played.
1: What? We did not!
2: Weren't you listening?
2: Like I said, you only see what you want to see.
2: You didn't want to see yourself lose.
1: (thinking) How come I always pick the crazies to talk to...
2: When you're drowning in a sea of work with not enough time,...
2: ...why pour your soul into assets that get used all of... what, once?
2: Really. Have some compassion.
2: Ta-ta. (leaves)
1: Whew...
1: What was that all about?
1: Kid plays too many video games.

Really, the writing is excellent.

THAT CONVERSATION CONFUSED THE HELL OUT OF ME AT FIRST. Then I realized what was going on.

But Yes, the dialogue is just .. top notch. I didn't mind reading all of it at all. And Minamimoto and his bad math puns ... "You zetta sons of digits!" <3

The translators were very good. I was particularly pleased with the Ouendan reference they snuck in.

wheres the email adress gone

smallharmlesskitten:
wheres the email adress gone

... holidays?

Yathzee's birthday should be a long weekend. I might just want an want another excuse to get on the piss, but hey, its as good a reason as any for a public holiday.

Parallel Pain:
I think it's basically what you think is more fun and how much thinking you want to do
1) pure reading, with which you'll go for a book or visual novel (which is essentially a novel with voices for the characters and pictures for every page), and you'll be thinking throughout.
2) lots of reading but just enough flashy stuff and gameplay to keep you from thinking most of the time, with which you'll turn to JRPG or Anime.
3) not so much reading but a good (sort of) story none-the-less and lots of gameplay to keep your mind occupied, in which case RPG. And last but not least
4) as little reading as possible, which then becomes any other genre.

In short, how much of a novel do you want it to be.

I find it weird (though it is his opinion) that Yahtzee call gaming an art form while so heavily criticizing JRPG. I personally think the writers of GOOD JRPG stories are making more of an artistic expression than any other game except good writers of visual novels. For the amount of art present in a game I say it's ranked #1 visual novels, since they are put under games and not novels for some reason #2 JRPG #3 WRPG and then advanture games and then everything else.
The good ones of course. The bad ones are either Hollywood Flicks or, in the case of visual novels, porn.

Though of course it's been a while since I played JRPG.

If long-winded digital teen pulp fantasy aspires to be more art than real games, it should maybe try getting some real writers (to both write and translate) who actually have a decent command of their art. Which Yahtzee does. Those keyboard-bangers at Square Enix, Bethesda, etc...not so much.

DystopiaSticker:
You demand interactive storytelling...

...by people who know how to tell stories, part of which is knowing how much is too much.

You demand interactive storytelling, yet you HATED Mass Effect.

DURR.

You're right, Lori. I'm sure there's just a small, insignificant amount of people who thought the Mass Effect story was brilliant. It obviously sucked because it had too much to tell. God I hate it when the writers are thorough and make some of the more unnecessary information optional to read.

Dicks.

I've really started to wonder what qualifies Sir Yahtzee de Nada Punctuacion to hate the entire jRPG genre... Has he played FF3j, FF6, FF7, FFX, and Xenogears? Shining Force I & II? From tactics and disgaea? Ogre-battle to suikoden[sic]? Valkery Profile? That newer Arc the Lad (twilight whatever)? I'd love a "retrospective" on one or all of these during this season-of-bugger-all's-coming-out ^^

I am entirely convinced that I hate myself on some extremely fundamental, basic and unhealthy level.

I do not profess to having played many jRPGs, nor being an affici- aficdo- EXPERT on the
genre.
My experience is limited to a misguided run in with Tales of Symphonia, two failed attempts at finishing two Final Fantasy games, one Shadow Hearts game, two Nippon Ichi SRPGs and Persona 3.

THIS IS ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT TO THE POINT OF MY POST.

which is

uh

I think

that one thing

Visual Novels

yeah.

Sure they're like CYOAs

with minimal (read non existent) gameplay
extremely linear progression (OH GOD)
and other things that I'm too bored to explain to the uneducated (THAT WOULD BE OTHER PEOPLE LOL)

But still

Ever17 > Any of your favorite games

Well... I was one of the people that recommended TWEWY for a review, breaking my long-held code of