I feel like there's been a massive focus on visual fidelity and production quality over the substance of a game. Which is gameplay that's interesting.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Almost every game that I consider incredibly memorable has low fidelity graphics by today's standards. Too much money goes into shit that you look at once when you boot up the game, and then it fades into the background when you're actually playing.
Maybe its actually good and normal that children aren't forming life long exploitable emotional attachments to commercial media franchises.
May their development be less arrested than my cohort when they get to our age.
I don't think it's fair to call the attachment to fiction and whimsy arrested development. It's a normal human thing, it's not the peoples fault that all our entertainment is under the boot of exploitative business practices.
Also worth mentioning that unfortunately young people are still very much attached and exploited by commercialism. Roblox and Gacha games come into mind.
I really dislike how games re-use so little from each other. Rember the lithtech days were ever game had most of the same assets? I really feel like we should bring that back. Zelda does this and we love it every time.
If you work in tech reinventing the wheel is the unwritten rule and trying to be pragmatic literally makes you a pariah. Redo everything every time for some reason always but dont redo things that actually need to be redone because its backwards logic upsidedown office land where business analysts and burndown charts rule and creativity is dead
I like how sometimes you can only tell which Yakuza game is which based on the differences in the healthbar
Have any Final Fantasy titles had any kind of social caché since FFXII? Like most nerds can recognize the characters? I don't think that's a dev cycle problem.
I think most people can identify the protagonist girl with pink hair (Lightning?) from thirteen but that's about it.
She does look familiar but I legit didn't know she was from FF.
I'm not forming an attachment to chess because the development cycle is longer than my lifespan. Yeah, that's it.
A kid in the 90s or the early 2000s would've had one or several new Final Fantasy titles coming out every year or every few years on different platforms. Makes it much easier to stay engaged with a property and to become a long time fan
You were getting new games as a kid? I had a handed down console that smelt of cigarettes and demo disks, bargain bucket games and whatever my mum could check out from the library. Or if i was lucky a blockbuster voucher for the rare new rental treat i would hammer through
That's why your dad gave like 20 bucks to some guy he knew to put a modchip in your PS1 
All of our PS1 Squaresoft games were burned CDs with the name of the scribbled on them. Good thing too because those bastards wouldn't release all of their coolest games in Europe because they didn't want to figure out how to also fit a Dutch translation or whatever onto the discs
it makes sense if you think about it like a corporation, in the same vein as disney. all the nostalgia milking that happens today in final fantasy or disney world is only possible because kids were seeded with those IPs a generation ago. if that isn't happening today, these media companies will be in dire straits 5, 10 or 20 years from now.
That's why Nintendo is pushing hard for movies and amusement parks rn
Chess 2 is kinda lit though
That seems like a good point honestly. FF7, 8, 9, 10, 10-2 all came out in my childhood and were a major component in my younger years. With that said it was grid style turnbased strategy games that were my earlier rpgs.
I first played xcom when I was 6 which must've been my introduction to turn based content.
Remember when most big non-sports gaming franchises with some kind of narrative seemed to go for trilogies coming out over a period of 4-6 years during the PS2 and PS3 eras? I think it was largely the influence of movies, namely Lord of the Rings.
I think what happened was
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games became too fucking huge in the PS4 era and 4-6 years was no longer enough for one game, let alone three for one team to manage
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some publishers decided that they wanted to turn their popular story-driven single player IPs into yearly sports game-like releases and not limit themselves to a trilogy structure (see COD and AssCreed) and/or into live services
I haven't been a DQ person, but Final Fantasy has definitely diverged release-by-release since ~FF12 to the point that the modern entries don't really have a lot of resemblance to what FF used to be (particularly when you compare to Atlus' JRPG franchises).
Oh no the young gamers arent enjoying the same stuff as 90s kids did we might all die. I dont see how this is a real problem
Oh no the young gamers arent enjoying the same stuff as 90s kids did we might all die.
Not entirely true since the article mentions younger generations liking Pokemon still lol. It's just the elder millennial JRPGs that are dying
So the conclusion is DQ and FF lost cultural relevance and making Clive based sequels every year wont fix that.
The fans and shareholders were begging for Episode Prompto 
I was as a big FF hater i only like 13, 15 and 16. I will single handedly keep square alive so they can invest in more NFT games
Yeah sure, the solution is to crank out more slop faster with shitty crunch. I'm sure that will make them popular.
I lost interest in these series because the games are just too long and full of uninteresting bloat. The writing just isn't good.
PS2 games were typically made in a few years and not all of them were slop. They also didn't need as much resources, effort and manpower as building a fucking pyramid
Also true. I guess maybe they should prioritize different things in their games to make them more appealing? IDK, I'm not a marketer maybe I should shut up lol
Well presumably if they were on a shorter dev cycle the games would be shorter by necessity, thereby cutting down on the bloat and length.
There is no saving JRPG writing, sadly.
Honestly the writing often felt a lot better when it was simpler combined with no voice acting. The convolution combined with the voice acting really makes a lot of modern jrpgs just impossible to bear.
I honestly think RPGs should by default have no voice acting. That should be the standard. Voice acting just so heavily constrains the writing, and bogs down the development. Writers can't just write as much bullshit as they want because every single line has to take up time in a fucking studio.
The massive success of Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur Expedition 33 has me worried about this lol
Animal crossing/star fox system is the way to go. The character gets a handful of chirps and one or two unique ones to really sell a big scene.
Pre-BOTW Zelda has my favourite implementation. You get a few soundbites that give a good impression what their voice would sound like and little more.
Another thing soiled by half the population being only semi-literate.
There's so much more your brain fills in when playing the older DQ titles. There's maybe 100 lines of dialog in the first Monsters game, but holy shit did my imagination run wild.
Heeeeey come on some jrpgs have great stories!
OK maybe FF7s writing is... Rough in some places but the story? It's good.
Mother 3? Fabulous story. Inspired one of the most popular current indie RPGs
Persona 5? Problematic in some areas but the overall story was good!
Persona 5? Problematic in some areas but the overall story was good!
Quick, who was the main villain and what did he want to actually do?
ummm umm can I say Yaldabaoth? Do I have to say Maruki?
Aaaa OK you win -_- The ending of Royal stinks
You could say Yaldabaoth, though I was more thinking of the politician guy because Yaldi is kind of an asspull who IIRC only shows up about 5 minutes before the boss fight.
Anyway, my point is that while I think Persona has some decent writing (the pyramid dungeon is probably the best?), the overall story is actually pretty lackluster and it feels a lot more like 5 different things stitched together.
I mean the fact that AAA developers are still scared to release anything under a new franchise despite the overwhelming success of indie franchises is basically saying "Look we know our games suck and we keep trying to make things too complicated instead of using tried and true mechanics and updating our art style and depth of story, but like you hated Starfield (because it was essentially unplayable on release and had an extremely shallow storyline), so we are justified to be scared of new things. Nostalgia is all we have."