It might surprise people to know that I didn't grow up with a PC. I never knew about games like Ultima, Might & Magic or the Wizardry series until much, much later in life. No my introduction to the role playing genre of video games came from consoles. Now many people think of the Legend of Zelda as a role playing game, but to be honest it has never really felt like one to me. It has always felt like more of an action fantasy game. Just a personal opinion but there it is. No the game I consider my first jrpg was Dragon Warrior for the NES.
What is there to be said about that game? The story was pretty simple, as most game stories were back then. You were the descendent of the hero Erdrick, on a quest to defeat the evil Dragon Lord. It was long, and grindy and you had to be careful to not go to far before you were leveled up because the higher level monsters would kill you and it was wonderful.
I never had a huge library of games growing up, my family just never had the money to keep buying them. So I had to make sure that I liked what I had, which is why I stuck to the Final Fantasy series. In fact Final Fantasy IV (first played as II on my SNES), is one of my favorite games of all time. Most of the time I found the characters compelling and I generally liked the main protagonists.
Cecil's story, for example, was really good. A Dark Knight that finds redemption to become a Paladin and then go on to save the world. As a kid that spoke to me. I was powerless in my everyday life and here I got to play the hero, get the girl and save the world.
Now there are certainly problems with jrpgs. One is the ever expanding cast with the limited party space. Final Fantasy VI, while a good game, had too many characters for me to care about. Final Fantasy VII did the same, while also having a bunch of thoroughly unlikable people too. Suikoden is very guilty of this, though the huge number of characters is, minimally, linked to the games plot. The best games have a core group of characters that you grow with. Final Fantasy IV has a large number of characters but Edward, Tellah, Cid, Pallom, Porrum and Yang are all temporary characters and tend to sacrifice themselves when they leave your party for good, leaving a final party of five. With Final Fantasy IX and X, again, you had a large cast of characters and incentive to use all of them, with very few party slots. I didn't play much of VIII because I thought it was terrible so I can't comment on that one but I believe it had a large cast of playable characters too.
Another problem can be the villain. The most memorable villains are the ones with the best laid plans, or the best personalities. Kefka, for example, is widely regarded as the best Final Fantasy villain. He's utterly crazy, wants to destroy all life and seeks to become a god to do so. Now, yes Kefka is a memorable villain, but his goals are kinda generic. In a way he's the Joker without the punchlines. They let you know he's utterly without honor when he poison's one castle's water supply killing everyone within, except Cyan. We get that he's crazy and he is memorable, whether he's the best villain is debatable. Then we come to Sephiroth. Ugh I think this guy is as overrated as Cloud. The whole tone of FFVII is just too dour for me and Sephiroth's goals are just pretty substandard. Now the villain I remember the most is Luca Blight from Suikoden II. He's not just crazy, he's also evil and he loves it. He revels in killing people and the times you see him it builds up to the final showdown, and he's not even the last boss of the game.
I learned a lot about story progression by playing jrpgs and the older one's tended to be better in my opinion. Especially the ones that were sprite based. I know there's this move toward a more realistic art style and 3D graphics but I just like the old school look.
I'll go into a list of my favorite games another time. I just wanted to write about my experiences and what I thought about things today.
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