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Message: [QUOTE="vitad00d, post: 23495, member: 73711"] Excessive and/or banal dialogue and plotting. As primarily an JRPG fan, this is frustrating and limiting. If not for dungeon crawlers, strategy RPGs, and roguelikes, I probably would have quit on the genre completely. When I was younger, I could tolerate––albeit with extreme boredom––the bad dialogue/exposition most games I'd otherwise like are weighted down by, but I've hit a wall in recent years and have to find other stuff to play. I don't need thematic motivation to get back to gameplay––to me, the gameplay is the meaning of playing the game––plus most of these games are delivering plotting that is closer to the Saturday morning cartoons I watched as a kid than the kinds of books and writing I have any interest in as an adult. Though the overall arc of a game narrative may be interesting, an ethos of storytelling "compression" on a moment-to-moment basis never really seemed to penetrate Japanese game development––like, how can we deliver the essential information in the fewest clicks and minutes for the player? Playing most JRPGS is like listening to someone go "Uhh...uhh..." for an interminable period, only, in the end, to tell you something totally uninteresting. Recently quit on Valkyrie Profile and Star Ocean 2 for this reason, and which felt disappointing, because I could tell there was much to like about those games. I attribute much of the success of the Souls games to finding a way out of the bad story and bad exposition trap at the same time, delivering a more richly realized sense of "story" with zero wasted moments. The Mother series and SMT 1-3 are noble exceptions to the problem of plot-heavy RPGs by telling interesting stories that can only be told through the videogame medium (unlike most JRPGs, which feel like bad manga trapped in the body of a videogame). [/QUOTE]

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