I'm surprised that Golden Sun didn't appear on Yahtzee's list. I don't know if it is because it was a hand held game but Golden Sun is the best RPG anything game I've ever played.

SavingPrincess:
*snip*

But it's been somewhere around ten years since a JRPG has produced anything remotely resembling a cohesive story.

Sir John The Net Knight:
Kefka having absolutely no motivation makes him a poor villain in my book. One that I can't relate to, or possibly care about.

Since when is insanity not motivation enough? Can you relate to serial killers? Are they not good serial killers in your book if you can't understand why they murder numerous victims? Do you walk up to them and go... "Sir... I believe that you are a poorly crafted person, for you seem to have no relatable motivation for why you are murdering these people." No, you do everything you can to stop them, regardless of their motivations.

I'm so freaking sick with the idea that bad guys have to be good guys that had something bad happen to them. Sometimes bad guys are just B-A-D G-U-Y-S. Kefka is the BEST villain, because he's a jerk, he's insane, he's constantly in your face rather than some omniscient evil, and he actually DOES WHAT HE SETS OUT TO DO.

SavingPrincess:

Which is better than the "your character seems to have no background whatsoever and has been born into existence at ripe adventuring age and is somehow the chosen one by the king/god to save the world but said person not going to tell you how because odds are something that you could do with that information could end the game within the first five minutes if you'd just happened to kill/take/use someone/something you happen to be right next to at the very start" or the "choose your own background from one of these three stereotypes" game mechanics.

Give me a protagonist with a rich history over a blank/faceless/nameless slate any day. The way I see it, jRPG's tell you a story, wRPG's trick you into thinking there's a story to be told in the first place, but it's actually just a start point and some sort of end point with a bunch of running around doing things that logically would facilitate the antagonists victory if for nothing than time progression alone.

"Hey look, we made a seemingly persistent world where you can run around and do a whole bunch of stuff that is unrelated to your reason for existence. Don't you feel in control? Don't you feel like a real person? Don't you feel free? Awesome... wait... what? You want a cohesive storyline with rich character development and intriguing plot twists? What do you think this is, Japan?"

Freedom is inversely proportional to narrative and always will be until someone can come along and reinvent the way our neural synapses process information. It's just the reality... either you want a story or you want to run around in a virtual "outside" and play with things. You will always sacrifice freedom for narrative and vice versa.

Knights of the Old Republic is linear... Mass Effect is linear. Sure you might be able to visit some different pre-determined plot progression points in the order of your choosing... but regardless, it's linear in story. You could do the same choose your own order of progressing the plot in games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, but the games are linear. Yes, the characters around you know more than you because they are not you... nor should they be.

When did people assume that "Role Playing Game" meant "You, Mr./Ms. player, are the hero." To me it always meant you were playing the "role" of a character in a predetermined story, as if you were playing the part of the character in a play, but a play that you were also watching at the same time.

EDIT: ... and it's entirely frightening to me that Yahtzee picked my absolute three favorite RPG's as his example of the genre done right. We agree on something... *checks outside for further signs of the apocalypse*

A role-playing game (RPG) is a broad family of games in which players assume the roles of characters, or take control of one or more avatars, in a fictional setting. Actions taken within the game succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines.

From Wikipedia, the free enyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Roleplaying since its 'formal' inception in the original edition of Dungeons and Dragons has always been about creating an avatar or persona that you shape and mould. You assume that persona and you develop that character over the course of their adventures.

If "roleplaying game" means simply "taking on the role of a character" then that becomes a pretty broad brush which you could also apply to first-person shooters, third-person shooters, adventure games, real-time strategy games, turn-based strategy games, many mindless browser games, candlestick makers and perhaps even partridges in a pear tree.

I'm not sure, though, why I'm making this post since, you clearly don't have much of a grasp on what the genre is supposed to encapsulate. I feel like someone just tried to tell me that Linkin Park is heavy metal, except I'm not overcome by uproarious laughter.

i wouldnt really class the ff series ar JRPG's now. no matter what from what ive heard (i havnt played one of the ff games in around 8 years) ur always playing as an already established character like cloud, or in this case lightning or whatever. ok you can custmise there attacks to an extent but your not really roleplaying, your always the same character with the same flaws and the same powers as last time. if your roleplaying you should make the character, you should choose thier attacks, you should choose thier alignmnet. its the same thing with most other JRPGs though, your always some skinny, crazy haired, scandily clad teenager with some kind of angst because your dads dead or your an orphan. or even because they cant kiss that girl from across the road.

The Critic:
Granted, I still play Pokemon games, for some inexplicable reason (see my avatar). Probably nostalgia, but I could be missing something.

Probably because that Pokémon is one of the few (maybe only even, I don't know) JRPGs that actually allows for customization. Sure, you're always the same kid doing the same thing every time if you keep restarting the game... But you have 493 different monsters to choose from to be on your team (AKA party to those who aren't familar with Pokémon), and of the many various moves they can learn, you can only get 4 per monster. There are so many different combination to come up with there, it's frightening. And that's even BEFORE you toss that EV stuff into the mix!

So, yeah. Pokémon isn't just another ho-hum watch a lot of boring cutscenes of people with stupid outfits like a lot of other JRPGs are.

Saying you don't like RPGs because they aren't as good as FF6 or Chrono Trigger is kind of like saying you don't like movies because they all went downhill after Citizen Kane and Shawshank Redemption.

When it comes down to it JRPGs tend to be vastly more complicated than their western counterparts. A typical JRPG contains character customization mechanics and/or item crafting systems which would make the typical Oblivion player's eyes bleed. Just look at the sprawling skill system of Tales of Vesperia or the funky crafting mechanics in Star Ocean 4 and you'll see what I mean. There simply doesn't exist a western-made game with the kind of depth afforded by Final Fantasy Tactic's Job system.

As an aside: in Yahtzee-speak turn-based combat is boring and unrealistic but real-time combat is non-interactive, pointless button mashing. Hmm.

People can't complain that the games are too hard or too complex because that makes them seem stupid, so instead you end up with boilerplate rants copy-pasted from Something Awful; i.e. "dur dur emo fags dur dur cutscenes derp derp derp."

JEBWrench:

SavingPrincess:
*snip*

But it's been somewhere around ten years since a JRPG has produced anything remotely resembling a cohesive story.

If by jRPG you mean Final Fantasy that's fine... though the most cohesive story in recent series history was Final Fantasy XII and people loathed that game because it was a political story (much like Final Fantasy Tactics) rather than a Cloud/Squall/Tidus story. Have you played any of the Mistwalker games? Have you played any Monolith Soft games? Any of the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei series? Shadow Hearts? Jeanne D'arc? What are you basing that on?

SavingPrincess:

JEBWrench:

SavingPrincess:
*snip*

But it's been somewhere around ten years since a JRPG has produced anything remotely resembling a cohesive story.

If by jRPG you mean Final Fantasy that's fine... though the most cohesive story in recent series history was Final Fantasy XII and people loathed that game because it was a political story (much like Final Fantasy Tactics) rather than a Cloud/Squall/Tidus story. Have you played any of the Mistwalker games? Have you played any Monolith Soft games? Any of the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei series? Shadow Hearts? Jeanne D'arc? What are you basing that on?

What, there's gameplay to Shadow Hearts? I must have missed something in the four hours that lasted me before I fired the CD into the sun.

Well, I still love 13. But, I cannot disagree with what was Dias, you are more watching a film at times rather than a game.

However, it's story, and characters were intresting enough to make it really enjoyable for me at least

I'm quite surprised here. I didn't expect Yahtzee would go and actually admit to liking certain JRPGs... And I certainly didn't expect to agree with his choices. Now I just wonder if he played the Soul Blazer series and what thought of it. Somehow I think he could enjoy that line of action-RPGs.

SavingPrincess:

If by jRPG you mean Final Fantasy that's fine... though the most cohesive story in recent series history was Final Fantasy XII and people loathed that game because it was a political story (much like Final Fantasy Tactics) rather than a Cloud/Squall/Tidus story. Have you played any of the Mistwalker games? Have you played any Monolith Soft games? Any of the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei series? Shadow Hearts? Jeanne D'arc? What are you basing that on?

Shadow Hearts, just the original. Final Fantasy X turned me off the genre so much that I stopped playing after having realized I hadn't really enjoyed a JRPG's story since Suikoden II.

Yahtzee Croshaw:
Final Fantasy VI
...The story, crucially, was easy to follow. None of that 'dream of the fayth' or 'smashing together past and future like pillowy breasts in a granite wonderbra' bullshit - just a rag-tag group of assorted heroes up against a demented villain who wants to blow up the world because he feels like it...

And yet Kefka's still 20 times more competent than Sephiroth, Ultimecia, Kuja and whoever the big bad of Final Fantasy X is (because by the end it's such a gordian knot pretzel of confusion you may as well just say Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Game is the big bad) because he actually DOES make that big apocalypse moment in the middle of the game. Plus, let's not forget likeable cast that all has some element of tragedy in their backgrounds (Cyan, Locke, Celes, Shadow and Terra) and "the scene," you know which ones I mean. That one scene that every Final Fantasy has been desperately trying to re-capture and failing horribly at it every time (killing Aeris, the whole of Squall In Space, spontaneous romance involving Tidus and Yuna, all pale in comparison to the scene in question).

Yahtzee Croshaw:
Extra Punctuation: Yahtzee vs. the JRPG

What JRPGs does Yahtzee actually like?

Read Full Article

i bet he has terrible penman ship
but omg on computer hes the best

This might sound like me hyperbolically overstating things for comic effect again, but if you claim to have enjoyed playing Final Fantasy XIII, then you are wrong. Because I don't think you can use the word 'playing' in this context. Final Fantasy XIII is more like something you 'watch', or 'are subjected to'. For the lion's share of the game the only real input the player has is during battles (and even that's a loose and uninvolving input)

Yes, it sounds like you hyperbolically overstating things for controversy effect.
Or more because you're bent over so many people calling you on the fact that your "review" of FFXIII was misinformative on so many levels, that I'd define it more of a disjointed rant than anything else.

So be it, i will cave in and respond to your plea for attention.

I enjoyed and Enjoy Final Fantasy XIII, at the moment i'm savoring the open endedness that's chapter 11 fully, on my 117th hour of gameplay. And mind you, you're no one to say that I'm "wrong".

I never once felt, during the game, as I wasn't in control. Maybe because I wasn't so biased against it and I actually took the few minutes necessary to read the tutorials (you look like you didn't) and master the Paradigm Shift system, that is very complex, tactical, and requires a good deal of tactic and forward-thinking to use to it's full extent.

You say you're not in control? Really? What is "being in control" like? In games it normally means that the game puts a problem in front of you, and you have to solve such problem through input.
Even during the most linear parts, Final Fantasy XIII puts enemies in front of you, and you have to decide how to kill them. That's the very definition of being "in control".

And by the way, God forbid a game not forcing the gamer to mindlessly mash buttons randomly over and over! Tactical approach is the devil! I seriously wonder what you thought of Battle Chess...

Funny, though, that you continue to rant about the alleged "fashion sense" of Final Fantasy characters, given that not counting Vanille's skirt, the characters in Final Fantasy XIII all wear some fairly normal and practical outfits. Makes me wonder if you paid actually paid attention during those meager 5 hours.
To be further honest, I've been wonder if you DID play those 5 hours, or simply mashed together a few misiformed opinions read somewhere.

Seriously, do yourself a favor, Yatzhee, don't defend your "review" further. You're just digging yourself in deeper.
Your personal fanboys will like you anyway, though, don't worry. Now that you're feeling reassured and validated again you can move on to the next game you'll bash.

Speaking of a degenerating franchise, why not talk of Zero Punctuation.

Not only do you submit a review of a game having only played it for five hours; but feel you can assess the entirety of the game based on this period of time and write another article on it.

To use one of your contrived metaphors, this would be akin to taking one nibble of a jam doughnut and complaining you tasted no jam.

It is fortunate that most of your viewers are habitual watchers now, much how soap operas continue to thrive when the quality that attracted the crowd has shrivelled and died.

And yes, I expect I shall be labelled fanboy because I attack you and defend FFXIII - however I agree FFXIII is the worst Final Fantasy to date, but at least have played it enough to form actual based reasoning.

SavingPrincess:
Any of the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei series? What are you basing that on?

I've also wanted to see a few reviews to some of the older jrpgs. Mostly, all the Shin Megami Tensei ones. They're all essentially the same gameplay, with a special element to them. Like cupcakes with different frosting. But, if we had to pick one that's more current, I'd like to see a review on Strange Journey which I'm still playing at the moment.

Caiti Voltaire:
From Wikipedia, the free enyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Roleplaying since its 'formal' inception in the original edition of Dungeons and Dragons has always been about creating an avatar or persona that you shape and mould. You assume that persona and you develop that character over the course of their adventures.

If "roleplaying game" means simply "taking on the role of a character" then that becomes a pretty broad brush which you could also apply to first-person shooters, third-person shooters, adventure games, real-time strategy games, turn-based strategy games, many mindless browser games, candlestick makers and perhaps even partridges in a pear tree.

I'm not sure, though, why I'm making this post since, you clearly don't have much of a grasp on what the genre is supposed to encapsulate. I feel like someone just tried to tell me that Linkin Park is heavy metal, except I'm not overcome by uproarious laughter.

So in that definition, the only RPG's in your mind are table top. I'm talking about video game RPG's. You can't have a sense of a "Game Master" in a video game unless you spend your time on the online Neverwinter Nights community. So table-top definitions don't apply; and yes, the idea that "role playing games" have encapsulated any game where you assume the role of a character in a story has been covered in game journalism over and over again.

Name one VIDEO game besides Neverwinter Nights (because it actually has the ability to be a "game master") that even comes close to your aforementioned definition of what an RPG is. The fact of the matter is the definitions are contextual. Video game RPG's are different than Dungeons & Dragons... sorry. "You," as in the first person, can't create a rich and fully developed character in a game with pre-determined plot and dialogue options... the most you can hope for are choices in how you want your character to say the predetermined dialogue that moves the narrative along. Do you sit around and play Oblivion while muttering to yourself about your own backstory? Do you play World of Warcraft and do the exact same quests as everyone else while pretending that somehow you are different? While I'm all for imagination, video games are interactive entertainment... they are the product of someone else's imagination coupled with your own reasonable suspension of disbelief. So, since I "clearly" don't know what the genre of a "video game RPG" is supposed to encapsulate, why don't you enlighten me with a few examples of it done right?

fantastic adventure through time and space and saving the world from cosmic horrors

A fantastic adventure indeed, Chrono Trigger was incredibly awesome. The best thing about it was probably that due to the time travel you actually saw the world-shaping events you caused or prevented have effect. Or maybe the best thing was how the very simple combat mechanics still caused an incredible amount of strategic depth.

666Chaos:

dreadedcandiru99:
Personally, I gave up on FF13 just as I got to Pulse (you know, the "BUT IT GETS GOOD TWENTY HOURS IN!!1!" part that the fanboys keep bellowing about).

I like the it gets good 20 hours in because they are admiting that the first 20 hours are complete crap.

Exactly. Is it really so unreasonable to insist that games should be good from the very beginning? Why make us wait for it? You would never voluntarily go to a restaurant that only gives you a slice of delicious chocolate cake after you chow down on a bucket of dogshit, would you?

On an unrelated note: did anyone else notice that the Eidolons were completely unnecessary? I know I never used them.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was the last FF game I played. The customizing was a lot of fun to fool around with, and the way the environment affected combat made each battle engaging. The story wasn't half bad, either. Very meta.

ImBigBob:
I still say Yahtzee needs to try some of the less overblown JRPGs. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is a good candidate for that review, and I'd be curious to see what he thinks of the Pokemon series.

He's mentioned that he used to watch the show, but given how the bulk of the game's enjoyment comes from the social aspect (and we all know Yahtzee's stance on multiplayer), combined with the micro-managing that goes with certain aspects like EV training, I'd bet that he's not a fan.

dreadedcandiru99:
Personally, I gave up on FF13 just as I got to Pulse (you know, the "BUT IT GETS GOOD TWENTY HOURS IN!!1!" part that the fanboys keep bellowing about). Besides the fact that I'd had an increasingly difficult time giving a shit about any of the characters already, I realized that the ending would probably come along after I was done doing whatever the game wanted me to do in its one and only non-hallway section, that FF games tend to have massive difficulty spikes at the end, and that to have any hope of winning, I was probably going to have to start grinding here--and I hate goddamned grinding. So yeah, one day I went to turn the game back on, and I realized that I just didn't want to.

Also, even twenty hours in, I still wasn't completely sure what the fuck the story was about, and no, I wasn't interested in reading the mountain of crap in the "datalog" to find out. Yes, the Mass Effect games have the same thing, but at least they don't force you to read it in order to know what's going on. I never had to; everything I needed to know about the story was actually included in the story.

It's not a fanboy thing. The game is actually pretty good in the second halfish part. Also if did*nt get what the story was about until that point without datalog then you are either really blunt or didn't bother listening to the dialogue at all. However, everybody who has actually bought this game should question if they would enjoy throwing their money into the face of other people for raping their childhood. The last overall good ff was 10 and I hope that either SE changes the way they do things or another company continues the series

What I really miss from the final fantasy series is the exploration of the overworld map. I enjoyed poking around meaninglessly, for hours, searching for small treasures or secrets for the sake of enjoyment. I think this is one of the reason that I cannot enjoy Final Fantasy Thirteen.

It feels stripped down, to me. Every time I pick up the game to continue, I do so begrudgingly, usually opting out after an hour or two of gameplay to pop in White Knight Chronicles.

As it turns out, my favourite installment in the series is number six. Whether this is a matter of actual plot and colourful characters(which I think it is) or the fact that it was this game that introduced me to the RPG video game genre, I seriously enjoy playing it over and over again. I found that seeking out the characters and sidequests in final fantasy six was done brilliantly.

I'm still playing Chrono Trigger, though. I really have to beat that game.

I've not played a Final Fantasy since IX (not having owned a PS2 or been remotely interested in MMOGs) but nothing has come close to VII for me yet. I loved pretty much every aspect - the storyline is big, complex and interesting (and even has room for two completely optional characters). The leveling system is simple - you level up, your stats get better. Some characters are better than others at some stuff. But the real standout for me was the materia system. It scaled really well as the game progressed, you could do interesting things by putting some stuff together, and it was intuitive.

One of my major criticisms of FFXIII would be that it's pretty much impossible to effectively upgrade your weapons without a guide - you'd waste so much in resources if you didn't know how many levels weapons had or how much EXP it took to upgrade them to transform level. Also, the combat _is_ really bland and nonsensical - why should your followers be able to get KO'd and not the leader?

SavingPrincess:

JEBWrench:

SavingPrincess:
*snip*

But it's been somewhere around ten years since a JRPG has produced anything remotely resembling a cohesive story.

If by jRPG you mean Final Fantasy that's fine... though the most cohesive story in recent series history was Final Fantasy XII and people loathed that game because it was a political story (much like Final Fantasy Tactics) rather than a Cloud/Squall/Tidus story. Have you played any of the Mistwalker games? Have you played any Monolith Soft games? Any of the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei series? Shadow Hearts? Jeanne D'arc? What are you basing that on?

I loathed FF12 because it was a boring story. Yasumi Matsuno did such an excellent job with Tactics and Vagrant Story, it must be that the Committee Design screwed FF12. It's no wonder he quit in disgust halfway through the project.

In any case, when someone complains that jRPGs have an incoherent story they're only proving their ignorance. Furthermore, when compared to the laughably sophomoric nonsense contained in Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2, you wonder about their basis for comparison.

SavingPrincess:

So in that definition, the only RPG's in your mind are table top. I'm talking about video game RPG's. You can't have a sense of a "Game Master" in a video game unless you spend your time on the online Neverwinter Nights community. So table-top definitions don't apply; and yes, the idea that "role playing games" have encapsulated any game where you assume the role of a character in a story has been covered in game journalism over and over again.

Name one VIDEO game besides Neverwinter Nights (because it actually has the ability to be a "game master") that even comes close to your aforementioned definition of what an RPG is. The fact of the matter is the definitions are contextual. Video game RPG's are different than Dungeons & Dragons... sorry. "You," as in the first person, can't create a rich and fully developed character in a game with pre-determined plot and dialogue options... the most you can hope for are choices in how you want your character to say the predetermined dialogue that moves the narrative along. Do you sit around and play Oblivion while muttering to yourself about your own backstory? Do you play World of Warcraft and do the exact same quests as everyone else while pretending that somehow you are different? While I'm all for imagination, video games are interactive entertainment... they are the product of someone else's imagination coupled with your own reasonable suspension of disbelief. So, since I "clearly" don't know what the genre of a "video game RPG" is supposed to encapsulate, why don't you enlighten me with a few examples of it done right?

You've never played actual RPGs before, have you? Seriously, actual RPGs. You know, the games that come in the boxes, sometimes with CDs, which advertise roleplaying on the covers? Your ignorance is not my problem, its yours, but its becoming increasingly evident you don't know what you're talking about. NO BAD MAYA WE MUST MAKE INTELLECTUAL ARGUEMENTS.

A good RPG is one that allows you the freedom to develop your own persona without shoehorning you into an extremely linear plot that allows for no choice in character development. There are some interesting examples of these in both Japaneese and ... everyone else's ... games, albeit many are dated. If you want an excellent story with good character development than a good example was the Eye of the Beholder series before it started shitting all over itself. It had a very well-written story which you could break from with no penalty other than ... not finishing the game until you came back, and the characters felt like actual characters instead of the bland over-stereotypical set pieces of many JRPGs such as the much-maligned Final Fantasy. My best example of the RPG genre is probably Planescape: Torment. It is basically the game that spawned the moral choice system. You could play some angelic guy out to redeem himself and everyone around him, or some depraved badass who kicked so much innocent's ass he probably needed to find a party member just to wash his feet. The story was probably one of the best examples of writing to come out of any RPG developer ever. Yes even compared to Mass Effect or Final Fantasy, you drooling fanboys you. Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal are also good examples, though they don't quite catch the same flame as PS:T. Disagea is kind of horrible as an example and you're probably wondering why I would then suggest it, but it approaches the whole thing with the same underlying tone of parody that endears itself to me that Resident Evil 4 did.

It's really, really hard not to come off as an elitist snob here, because it really is the difference between night and day here. We have shallow, poorly written set pieces which like some sort of manifestation of the Twilight series somehow capture the imagination of the mindless mainstream, and then we have actual thoughtfully-designed and -written games which have well-designed gameplay and compelling stories.

Yahtzee missed Lufia 2, but otherwise he knows his JRPGs.

In any case, since Vanille is WAY over 16 (and you would have known if you, you know... played the game), will you do what you promised with that miniskirt Yatzhee?

Epic fail is epic.

I think I'm about to give up on this game. It's getting really, really, really intolerable. And I'm finally at the half-way point, too.

I mean, spending up to 20+ minutes at a time with certain enemies and bosses, in addition to repeating the fights upon failure for the same length? Constantly switching between Paradigms, so as to hope I can beat up the enemies quicker? Desperately waiting for that f*cking Stagger meter-bullsh*t to fill up, but never will because it doesn't feel like it? F*ck that noise.

When's FF9 going to come out on the PSN, so I can actually have some fun with a JRPG and become involved in a story that makes more sense because it's simple.

CyricZ:
Bioshock technically starts in media res, doesn't it? I suppose a good difference in this case is that you don't actually KNOW you're starting in media res. It's only after certain revelations that you realize you're in the middle of the story, which I suppose is a really good thing?

Well, to be fair, in Bioshock, you start in a plane doing nothing: Plane crashes, game starts.

In a game like FF VII: You're on the roof of a speeding train, on your way to perform an act of terrorism.

Abriael:
In any case, since Vanille is WAY over 16 (and you would have known if you, you know... played the game), will you do what you promised with that miniskirt Yatzhee?

Epic fail is epic.

I believe his point was that you can say they're over 16 all you want, it doesn't really change the fact that Vanille looks like puberty hasn't quite finished with 'em.

Caiti Voltaire:
A good RPG is one that allows you the freedom to develop your own persona without shoehorning you into an extremely linear plot that allows for no choice in character development

Not necessarily. That's ONE kind of good RPG. The other kind of good RPG is the one that tells you a deep and interesting story, with deep and interesting characters, concentrating in their progression.

It's a tradeoff. The RPG you consider good ends up concentrating a lot on secondary characters, because the main characters can't be characterized in a deep way. Some like that.

The second option I named can afford characterizing the protagonist as much or more than the others. Since there's no need for creative freedom, he can have a clear past, a family, likes, dislikes, a voice, fears... basically he can be more than a flat and dull empty shell. That's quite the boon for good storytelling. Some like that.

Some, like me, happen to like both. They're different games, both RPGs, both good. Being different experience don't necessarily make one better than the other.