I dunno man. I just picked this up for the first time and just finished the first two hours or so. I'm pretty sure all I've needed to do so far is move forward and mash x in fights. I feel like the learning curve is WAY off here. They give me a tutorial showing me how to use autobattle, how to use items, etc...…

So it's like one part Earthbound, one part Where the Wild Things are, and one part sadness.

Eh, I can kinda see that. For all that Zelda is about a dude with a sword and he kills a lot of monsters, it's never been much of an action game. So Nintendo licensed Zelda out to the developers of one of Japans most consistently popular action games.

You know what I saw in those credits? Motion capture actors.

By my count it's Pikachu -> Pichu -> Plusle/Minun -> Pachirisu -> Emolga -> Dedenne. That's the order of creation.

I really love that in both the card game and in the video game there's a Juniors competition category. That's appropriate. Pokemon is and always has been designed for children. A lot of people don't grow out of it which is why this competitive scene even exists, but it's nice that even in the tournament space…

Yes. Old school house of the dead rail shooting, with a cutscene just like this one at the beginning and end of each level.

Nothin' quite like getting the bro high five for laying down some internet comment thread justice eight months after the fact.

I kinda don't think so, no. FF VII wasn't the biggest game Square ever made because of the RPG mechanics. It was marketed as an action movie, as the next great advance in storytelling in video games. It was doing things with cinematics that had not been done before. Even though some of the PS1 FF games were kinda…

Well I had a little bit of a unique perspective on Bravely Default, I played it and FF 3 back to back. And I kinda walked away with the impression "Wow, BD is just FF III but with a bunch of crap piled on".

I was asking about Enix. I'm asking if you're dismissing Enix because you don't like their stuff or just because you don't know so much about it. FF and Mario RPG are SquareSoft joints. Breath of Fire is Capcom.

No! I mean Enix too! Dragon Quest is SO good. So so good.

Is that because you don't like Enix, or because you aren't as familiar with their output? Personally I would put the consistency and high quality of Dragon Quest above the highs and lows and glitz and glam of Final Fantasy any day. But I know DQ is very niche outside Japan.

There really was a time when Square Enix made some of the best games in the world. That just... hasn't been the case for a decade plus now :(

My conclusion as well. No relevance or value to a modern audience.

I was definitely using myself as an example. Tried LoZ 1 and 2 for the first time on the 3DS ambassador program and couldn't get into either of them. In LoZ 1 I wandered around the overworld dying a lot not knowing what to do or why I was doing it. The motivation to keep going back out there just didn't exist. I…

Well, but I do think that some JRPGs from that period still hold some appeal to the modern consumer. Going back I feel like FF IV, Earthbound, and Chrono Trigger still have a lot of value in one way or another. I just didn't get much of anything out of this old JRPG specifically.

Unfortunately FF VI was on the Wii and that's not with me in my current location. What some people have said about how it's a decentralized narrative without following a single "main character" kinda has me interested to give it another shot though. The whole hotheaded teenager who leads a team of anime people to…

Your music analogies make me so happy. Really, I think all video game genres should be analogous to musical genres. JRPGs are definitely Led Zepplin/AC DC style of rock. It used to be the biggest thing around, a lot of it is foreign, but now it's only for enthusiasts while other genres have taken over the…

That isn't even the worst of it. Not only did I not see anything special in FF VI, but I thought that FF XII was the best JRPG ever made. I'm, like, the anti JRPG gamer. Except I really like JRPGs :P