Gian-Reto: i dont have precise stats, but all of the offline (j)rpg communitys i was aware of, disappeared. i dont know about the asian communitys. i think people are nowdays just fine with facebook, where they can be they own character with real enemies and friends, girlfriends. so no masses are interested to autise on a computer game, when they can have they own real-life Marle and Lucca.

It wasn't just that they were made "magical" - it's that she was generalizing one particular group's belief to all of them and there are negative connotations to depicting "magical Native Americans," and especially Europeans depicting such. From the article I linked:

The first issue, says Leanne Howe, a Choctaw Nation citizen and co-editor of Seeing Red—Hollywood's Pixeled Skins, is that Rowling attributes the tradition of skin walkers to all Native Americans of the pre-Columbian era, as though they were a monolithic group with one set of beliefs.

The second problem is that Native American traditions are equated with magic. This is part of a long history of white Americans and Europeans trivializing native beliefs.

Fantasy is an important part of children’s literature, but problems arise when a race of people is constantly portrayed as magical, and therefore fictional. “We are … fighting everyday for the protection of our sacred sites from being destroyed,” scholar Adrienne Keene writes on her blog Native Appropriations. “If Indigenous spirituality becomes conflated with fantasy ‘magic’—how can we expect lawmakers and the public to be allies in the protection of these spaces?”

I'm not familiar with this particular example having not read JK Rowlings digital stuff, but if many Native Americans are upset by it, then it should be given some thought.

On the other hand, we also live in a nation where some people make a career out of portraying their ethnicity as a victim. Yes, there was terrible injustices in the past, and there are some present day discriminations and stereotypings, but there is also incentives for career-victims to deliberately get offended at even mild infractions as an opportunity to promote themselves or their causes. Even if the causes are good, the exaggeration (and many times outright fabrications) are harmful to society and individuals. The media is also incentived to exaggerate infringements to stir up offense and even exaggerate the amount of people who are already offended.

I thouroughly enjoyed Chrono Cross, but it seems many didn't. Received only middiling ratings. Given I was mostly wowed by the spectacular graphics for its time, the good soundtrack and the sometimes genious environments created, and hardly remember much about the game itself, most probably I was to busy enjoying the environments to notice that the game wasn't that good. Still, that also explains why there was no Chrono Trigger sequel after that.

Chrono Cross was genuinely an incredible game (gameplay was good as well). While I can't say for certain why it wasn't well received, it seemed it's crime was merely that it wasn't more of Chrono Trigger. Deus Ex: Invisible War also suffered from the terrible crime of "Not being Deus Ex".

There's always a balance between changing the game too little ("What, are they just trying to slam together the same game again to print money?"), and changing the game too much ("This is *nothing* like <previous game>!").

Chrono Cross had better music, better art, better characters, and a better story which flowed smoothly from the Chrono Trigger story. I will grant this though: it doesn't "feel" like the same game, because it had a different atmosphere and ambiance to it (which was actually intentional). The environment was different, the game 'felt' different, and so adding onto that not playing the original characters was just one change too far for many Chrono Trigger fans - which is sad, but understandable. It almost should've been marketed as a different game "in the same universe" rather than a sequel... but it was a sequel, plot-wise as well.

Gian-Reto: i dont have precise stats, but all of the offline (j)rpg communitys i was aware of, disappeared. i dont know about the asian communitys. i think people are nowdays just fine with facebook, where they can be they own character with real enemies and friends, girlfriends. so no masses are interested to autise on a computer game, when they can have they own real-life Marle and Lucca.

Well, I also lack precise stats, but given I still see "interest" in JRPGs online, I guess the communities are still there, just have shrunken a lot.

Don't forget, at the time JRPGs were really big, there was no Diablo yet, FPSes weren't a thing yet, and expectations were quite different (Simulators were niche but quite a big niche back then... see how their niche has shrunken!).

See all that hype around Openworld games? This is were most of your JRPG crowd has migrated to (besides MMORPGs)... this is what JRPGs were back in the day, big worlds to explore, a long story driven campaign with plenty of sidequests and leveling up. Back then having a simple round based battlesystem was not standing out... nowadays many people kinda expect realtime combat, direct character control and whatnot.

But just search for RPGMaker games on Steam... see all that mediocre, decent, and sometimes even good stuff produced by newbies and fans? There is your community, right there. If JRPGs would be dead, nobody would produce RPGMaker games anymore. Obviously the formula still connects with some people, even against the competition by Dragon Age, or GTA V.

And no, Facebook is no replacement for computer games. I don't think ANYONE interested in games will waste too much time on facebook. Why waste too much time on the worst game of all (Reallife... awesome graphics, most boring story of all times), when you could spend that time playing a game?

If anything, Facebook is a partial substitute to hanging out with friends. But before you can team up with your friends and battle dragons and skeletons, or explore a vast fantasy world (MMORPG anyone), Facebook is not a substitute for games.

I thouroughly enjoyed Chrono Cross, but it seems many didn't. Received only middiling ratings. Given I was mostly wowed by the spectacular graphics for its time, the good soundtrack and the sometimes genious environments created, and hardly remember much about the game itself, most probably I was to busy enjoying the environments to notice that the game wasn't that good. Still, that also explains why there was no Chrono Trigger sequel after that.

Chrono Cross was genuinely an incredible game (gameplay was good as well). While I can't say for certain why it wasn't well received, it seemed it's crime was merely that it wasn't more of Chrono Trigger. Deus Ex: Invisible War also suffered from the terrible crime of "Not being Deus Ex".

There's always a balance between changing the game too little ("What, are they just trying to slam together the same game again to print money?"), and changing the game too much ("This is *nothing* like <previous game>!").

Chrono Cross had better music, better art, better characters, and a better story which flowed smoothly from the Chrono Trigger story. I will grant this though: it doesn't "feel" like the same game, because it had a different atmosphere and ambiance to it (which was actually intentional). The environment was different, the game 'felt' different, and so adding onto that not playing the original characters was just one change too far for many Chrono Trigger fans - which is sad, but understandable. It almost should've been marketed as a different game "in the same universe" rather than a sequel... but it was a sequel, plot-wise as well.

That might be very well true. It was a completly different game for sure. That was why it wasn't called "Chrono Trigger II".... maybe they should have dropped the "Chrono" from the name, didn't mention the link to the chrono trigger story from the start, and let the game sell itself without trying to mesh in with a wellknown ancestor.

People might have noticed the links to the chrono trigger story and would have been positive about that. While seeing the game as what it was... not Chrono Trigger 2.

I do have to say though, many JRPGs had a hard time doing the transition from the 16-bit to the 32-bit and beyond era. FF 7 was not really the same as FF 6. I personally didn't like it as much, and I guess many others that grew up with the 16-bit FF titles did not either. To Squaresofts luck there were enough people that weren't as critical, or haven't been exposed to the older FF titles enough to care.

I think that Capcom did a fabolous job with the PS1 Breath of Fire titles, the PS2 BoF Title sucked though. Again, too many changes, this time also very bad ones.

Its a similar story as to how Castlevania never really worked in 3D.... or how the first few 3D Mario titles had a tough time.

If you would overlook the quite monotonous levels of the PS2 Era Castlevanias, or the QT Event shenigans of thePS3 Era Castlevanias, they are actually quite decent games with very good production values (altough at least the newer Castlevanias seem to have cheapened out on game programming and QA, hence the QT Events)... but they are not really Castlevania games!

The GBA and DS Titles come way closer to filling this "gap", with them being traditional sidescroller Jump and Runs. The PS3 Title "Harmony of Despair" is a trainwreck though, even though being a sidescroller recycling lots of old 16-bit assets. Who ever greenlit that idea should be fired immidiately. Its also not castlevania (with its emphasis on the co-op aspect, and kitbashed levels)... and besides the music its just bad.

My guess is that at least part of it is because it's one of the oldest genres out there, dating back all the way to Dungeons and Dragons. Fantasy RPGs have had 40 years to perfect their formula.

IMO ChronoCross had 2 main problems. The big one was that there were just too many characters for the player to care about most of them. The less important one was that the combat was kind of boring. This was kind of related to the number of characters, because perhaps if there had been fewer playable characters each one could have had more of a strategic variety of abilities and/or equipment. A possible third small problem was that the story was aimed at a fairly young audience, pretty much excluding all the people who had played Chrono Trigger. Audiences of that young age at that time seemed to not have patience for turn-based combat.

As far as Final Fantasy goes, I myself couldn't get into the series until 7, and to me PS 1/2 JRPGs are the good ones, the ones I'd look to when designing one. Which leaves me excluded from the gamemaker community and gamemaker-made games because they're all the generation before that.

IMO ChronoCross had 2 main problems. The big one was that there were just too many characters for the player to care about most of them. The less important one was that the combat was kind of boring. This was kind of related to the number of characters, because perhaps if there had been fewer playable characters each one could have had more of a strategic variety of abilities and/or equipment. A possible third small problem was that the story was aimed at a fairly young audience, pretty much excluding all the people who had played Chrono Trigger. Audiences of that young age at that time seemed to not have patience for turn-based combat.

As far as Final Fantasy goes, I myself couldn't get into the series until 7, and to me PS 1/2 JRPGs are the good ones, the ones I'd look to when designing one. Which leaves me excluded from the gamemaker community and gamemaker-made games because they're all the generation before that.

Yeah, you could be on to something. I never thought about it this way....

I have to be honest though, the combat mechanics is what interests me least with JRPGs... I find most of the turn based combat bores me to death by about the 2nd or third random encounter. I oogle at nice animations (lovely Katt beating up slimes with her big stick, characters pulling out freaking huge dragons or espers to fry the whole enemy army), I sometimes enjoy tense boss battles where you DO have to think and not just hope for crits to get over with the fight quicker.

Most of the time, 90% of JRPG fights are just a roadblock to more exploration, or more story.

Most of the times I got hooked in a JRPG it was the story, sometimes the setting and environment. I did enjoy explorative aspects and sometimes boosting my leveling with clever usage of items and permanent buffs.

Combat usually is just a "yeah, lets get over with this" event. There are exceptions, like the tactical RPGs (Vandal Hearts, FF Tactics) that also got me hooked on combat. But most of the time, I am ready to ignore boring combat mechanics because I find most JRPG combat mechanics boring.

But given there ARE people playing JRPGs for the turnbased combat, the character galore of Chrono Cross might be detrimental (or worse, Suikoden... cool game, but man, were the 108 characters overkill!)

Well, not a ton of JRPG games were REALLY targetted at a mature audience, so I might have glanced over this fact (besides being not so amused by the main characters childish looks). But I might have missed something there... must replay it once I got my US PS2 all cleaned up (stored in the cellar, now the CD Player is making weird noises, nasty) and a cable to connect it to my PAL TV, or find my first generation PS1 again (which was still allowing CD swapping, thus cheap mutli-region cheat).

As for Final Fantasy... see, I really like their storys (most of it, when they go totally overboard they usually loose me... for example with Sephiroth), I totally dislike their character and costume design, as well as some of the environment settings. Its to freaky, to colorful, and to random for me most of the time.

Now, that was all more muted with the SNES Final Fantasys, but more important, when you got not that many pixels to spare, you cannot really go to overboard with the onscreen characters styling.

I totally disliked the new concept artist they hired with FF6... her style was just too... freaky for my liking. But with FF6, I could throw away the booklet, ignore the character portraits in the menus, and enjoy the good ingame graphics with very pixely, chibi characters with sane looking styling.

With FF7 and the Render galore (another pet peeve of mine.... why the render galore of the late 90's, filling CD after CD with badly rendered boring cutscenes when the actual game would have easely fit a single CD), that stopped being possible. You got the freaky character design shoved in your face.

Now, there is more to that as to why I disliked FF7, I also found the story just not as strong as the FF6 story. To bold, to big, with to much going on. While the FF6 Story had kind of a nice focus even though there where sidestorys, never went quite that much overboard even when the big events happened. My only pet peeve was the fixation on kefka in the end and the endboss which I found rather clownish than cool. But then, FF never had that strong a sense for cool antagonists if you ask me, and during the game Kefka certainly was at least a funny interlude, while Sephiroth just seemed to be a childish power fantasy.

I admit that the character styling is why I so toroughly enjoy the Breath of Fire series. Even though I find the heavy copy-pasta going on between games in the series a little bit disturbing (especially when the most copied characters, Ryu and Nina, are actually two of the most boring designs with the dullest character stories), and the stories for most games in the series is rather decent to good, not great (besides BoF IV), Capcom really nailed the character design IMO. Clean, to the point, without to much frills. Oh, and a good dose of antropomorphism without drawing to much attention to it. I like that.

And at least for the GBA remake of BoF 2, they got one of the best japanese character artists I have seen. Wow, just wow (https://www.google.ch/search?q=unity+volumetric+lighting&biw=1049&bih=616&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwja35ay2LvNAhXE2xoKHdZLDY4Q_AUIBigB&dpr=2.61#tbm=isch&q=bof+2+game+boy+character .... the "older looking" character designs mixed in are from the original SNES Game)

Though when comparing BoF and FF from a visual point of view, I have to say they often err on the side of "too clean".... while final fantasy almost always errs on the side of "to baroque". Funny how the same adjectives could also be used to describe the story of those games :)

To me anyways, it seems fantasy RPGs are everywhere. I don't understand why people like them so much. To me, they all seem to share the same basic Tolkien inspired fantasy world. The developers of Pillars of Eternity just announced a sequel is in development, but on the surface how is it any different than Sacred, Dungeon Siege or Neverwinter Nights? The same could be said for other game genres as well. Are developers scared of trying something new? If they do try something new, are they afraid people won't like it/try it?

I guess people like to personify a character that lives in a world usually more interesting and less annoying (and sometimes better) than the crap-world they live in in real life...