JRPGs and Length

[finalark]

This is something that has been bothering me for a while, and now I'm going to vomit my thoughts out onto a public fourm devoted to video game discussion for all to see.

I'm going to start by saying that I love JRPGs. Sure, I enjoy fighting games, horror games and some platformers (mostly Sonic DK games) but nothing quite does it for me as much as melodramatic overdressed manga archetypes standing in a row taking turns whacking each other. Given that I've been hooked on the genre ever since I discovered Final Fantasy as a kid this should come as no surprise. Truthfully I say unto you that I love JRPGs.

I just really wish these games weren't so damn long.

Now let me get one thing strait, I don't have anything against long games. As a matter of fact, if your game can keep me entertained for 100+ hours then you deserve a round of applause. Unfortunately, most games can't. When I was younger, this really wasn't an issue. I would make an excuse about being an adult and having responsibilities, but I think it has less to do with me not having as much free time and more with me getting significantly less patient as I age.

I have no idea at what point it was decided that JRPGs are "supposed to be" long. I don't think I could ever pinpoint it. The first Dragon Quest is only about ten hours long while the first Final Fantasy is in the neighborhood of fifteen or so. The former is what some research on the net has told me (I never could get into DQ. That's heresy in some circles, I know). The latter is from extensive personal experience. Regardless, play time ramped up significantly for both DQII (around 20 hours) and FFII (around 25). Next thing you know, we're in the SNES era with both DQV and FFIV clocking in at around 30 hours.

So yeah, JRPGs became long. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'd rather pay $60 for a game I know will last me for several weeks rather than one that I'll be done with by the end of the weekend. But this is a double edged sword, it never occurred to me in my childhood but now I'm really starting to notice that most JRPGs are really, really padded out entirely because they're expected to be long. What really brought this to my attention was when my play through of Chrono Cross came to a grinding halt when I suddenly had to go find the six plot devices dragon relics. I really wasn't enjoying the game as it was, and throwing tedious, momentum killing padding at me was enough for me to abort my play through.

Thinking back, I've playing a lot of RPGs that are filled with padding that exists to bump up a thirty hour game to a forty, fifty or even sixty hour game. Let's take Final Fantasy IV for example. There eventually comes a point where you're about to storm the main antagonist's tower and reclaim your lady friend. The entire world map has been explored, most of your party members have died heroic deaths (unless you're Edward) and the stage is set for one final showdown with the traitorous Kain and his evil master Golbez. Suddenly, you find out that you can't win and that there are four more crystals hidden deep underground, opening up a whole new map to explore. When I was eleven, this was a brilliant twist. When I replayed the game in high school, it was pretty apparent that someone at Square said, "****, its too short. Just keep BSing things until we get at least twenty more hours into the game."

At least FFIV is still enjoyable after that point. As mentioned above, Chrono Cross is a case where arbitrary padding made me quit a play through. I actually had a similar issue when revisiting Tales of Symphonia, but at least I liked that game enough to see it through to the end. Even if I verbally said, "Who the hell is Pietro?" when the game railed me into helping out some NPC who had long faded from my memory but my party kept insisting was super important before I could hit the Tower of Salvation. Small rant aside, a JRPG doesn't have to be long to be good. Case and point, Chrono Cross' predecessor: Chrono Trigger.

Chrono Trigger is near universally considered a classic of the genre. And yet it can be finished in fifteen to twenty hours, even on your first play through. The game has virtually no padding, all encounters are preset, the game is tightly written and plotted and it never loses your attention. And all in twenty hours. Making a good JRPG isn't about length, it's about the how the game comes together as a whole. I haven't played Chrono Trigger since I was eleven years old (that's ten years ago, by the by) and yet remember every party member by name, could name my favorite pieces of music in the game and could easily splurge about my favorite parts of the game. Even now I still have a crystal clear memory of storming Magus' castle with Luca and Frog. All of this was accomplished in a brief, twenty hour RPG. Compare this to Star Ocean: The Second Story and Star Ocean: Til the End of Time. The first of which I played around the same time as CT and the latter when I was a bit older. Despite the fact that both of those games took about forty hours to complete I couldn't give you the name of a single character nor could I accurate describe any of the events that transpired in either ones of those titles.

Well, except for the fact that both games never had the courage to be actual sci-fi RPGs and Til the End of Time's purpose-negating ending, but that's besides the point.

In conclusion, I'll restate that JRPGs being long isn't an inherently bad thing. When I beat Persona 4 I was legitimately surprised to see it took my seventy five hours, it genuinely only felt like thirty or forty. You could argue that the game had a lot of padding and cinematics that had little to do with the actual story, but it all came together so perfectly that I never felt like the game was dragging. I really wish JRPG devs would figure that out -- it's okay if your game isn't all that long. If what's there is good then there's no reason to drag it down with needless padding just for the sake of turning a thirty hour game into a fifty hour one.

This was really long and I doubt anyone will read it, but it's food for thought.

 

[Minato]

I definitely agree with this. Padding can really ruin a game for me. Complaining about added content sounds silly, but it's really true at times. While not really a standard RPG, Zelda Skyward Sword was really ruined for me because of this. The game tried to add more content by letting you make use of the maps in different ways when you revisit them, it became a little tedious. I got really bored multiple times through because of it. It's unfortunate since Skyward Sword had some really brilliant parts, but the excessive padding and slowness of the game really hurts it for me.

For JRPGs, there's actually quite a bit of irony to it. When we reached the PS2 era, it wasn't unusual to see games longer that were longer than 70 hours at times. This gen we've seen it cut back a bit just because Japanese developers struggled entering the HD era, so we ended up getting short rushed games with little content (FFXIII, Tales of Xillia, etc).

Bringing up FFIV was probably the best example. It's a super popular JRPG that was also known for a lot of twists on the final enemy, which led to a lot of extensions to the plot. A lot of series started following suit after. Unfortunately a lot of JRPGs were just churned out, so these twists weren't really anything special and just added a lot of baggage to completing the game.

Listing off JRPGs that had that problem, Chrono Cross was also indeed one of them. I thought the beginning was cool, but once you got to the Lynx portion, a lot of it dragged on. The only part I liked during it was going to the Sea of Eden. It's a shame since it hurts replaying the game for me since there's so much to do. After the Lynx portion, the parts after that are great.

Tales of the Abyss probably had the worst padding of a Tales game ever. It was backtracking after backtracking. Tales of Vesperia is another one, but for different reasons. It's the best Team Symphonia game for me by far. Might be one of my favorite JRPGs for that gen. The game is split into three parts and unfortunately the third part was the weakest. While the villain was shown throughout the game, it still felt like an added portion sort of like an anime OVA.


As of late, I've been playing the "lesser" known series of JRPGs. A lot of them fit around the 30 hour mark, so I've been liking it. It's true that I've been having less time for JRPGs because of priorities, but my biggest concern is for a game to keep my interest. Too many games I put on hold midway through, causing my backlog to pile up.

 

[finalark]

Yeah, once we hit the HD era Japanese devs, JRPGs devs especially, really started to struggle with ways to keep the genre fresh. Ironically, the two best received JRPGs to come out in the last five years, Dragon Quest IX and Bravely Default, really didn't do a whole lot to radically change the formula.

I'll have to agree with you on the thirty hour mark. Most games that clock in around that time tend to be a satisfying length without feeling overwhelmingly short. Forty hours isn't bad either, but for me anything above that tends to get tiring if its not well executed.

 

[Rutger]

Yes, padding is a very big issue with this genre.

It's funny though, I actually have a pretty high tolerance towards slow sections where little is happening, assuming I enjoy enough of the game already. Following Minato's non-JRPG example with Skyward Sword, I want to talk about LoZ: Twilight Princess. Early TP has some atrocious wolf sections where we need to collect balls of light. It kills the pacing, and for some people, the game itself. I enjoy the game though, I can look past these dull sections knowing that TP also offers some of the best dungeons in the series. Though thanks to those major pacing issues, it's not my favorite in the series either.

Now for me, I enjoy long JRPGs. It's not a requirement for the game to be 80 hours for me to enjoy it, but I don't think Atlus would be my favorite developer in the genre right now if I hated it. I think the biggest problem with padding, is actually that the game itself has issues in it's design, not that it lasts longer. Padding exists as a negative when a game's issues can't go unnoticed.

Typically these are story issues, because JRPGs are such a story heavy genre. Looking at Persona 4, when we are saving our classmates early on, or going through S-links, or the cast is just hanging out, technically these are adding to the length of the game without adding a whole lot to the main story, but this doesn't come off as padding because the results are still meaningful in some way. That is what gets overlooked, when a game tells us to go here, there, and over there, and the first two can be skipped and nothing would change in the story, it doesn't sit right with the player. Tales of the Abyss was really bad with that, but for some reason it shows up all over the place, and I have no idea why developers think it's a good idea..

Of course, it's not always story related, some games(like Pokemon or Etrian Odyssey) usually don't even try to act like the story is worth caring about, but it'd be crazy to say they're nothing but padding. If the gameplay can't hold our interest then things can start to drag regardless of the story, which brings me to Persona 2 Innocent Sin. P2 IS failed to hold my attention not because the story was bad, not because I got a new game before I finished(a big problem for me with all the really long games I play), but because the game is way too easy. No random battle was ever even remotely a threat, and the dungeons, while not randomly generated like P3 & 4's, weren't really any better. This caused an odd thing where every dungeon felt like padding and that the game would be far more enjoyable if it was just the cutscenes, which is a shame really.

The best way around this imo, is optional content. Look at Xenoblade, the quests are a massive time sink that can make an already long game damn near endless, but we can ignore them, and if we do then the game has us constantly moving forward. SMT IV and Etrian Odyssey does this too(but with a far more manageable number of quests) and I hope more developers start using this.

 

[Minato]

The best way around this imo, is optional content. Look at Xenoblade, the quests are a massive time sink that can make an already long game damn near endless, but we can ignore them, and if we do then the game has us constantly moving forward. SMT IV and Etrian Odyssey does this too(but with a far more manageable number of quests) and I hope more developers start using this.

I think Xenoblade did it good and bad. The good was giving players EXP whenever discovering new areas or completing quest. The bad were the quests themselves. A lot of them dealt with just fetching materials. I'm ok with these in games like Netpunia or the Mega Man Battle Network games, because of two things: there was a lot less quests so I didn't mind completing them all, and the quests were all found in one area. Xenoblades had an overwhelming amount (like you said) which can be good, but I think only the enthusiasts of the game will complete a lot of them.

My favorite games that use sidequests for adding to the game's length are Majora's Mask and Chrono Trigger. Each sidequest tells a story so it's pretty memorable. There's a decent amount of them and I feel the need to complete them each time I do a playthrough.

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

I am working on a reply, but this is full of walls lol

Edit: I noticed this sort of annoyance only when I went back to play the game for a second or more times. The game play and story line keep me engrossed. However, after I know the story line and what is to come the padding as you put it becomes hard to bare. JRPGs I think are known for balance between game play and time to tell a story. Therefore, they make great one time play-through and should be revisited after a long period of time. I usually replay Tales of, Star Ocean, Final Fantasy, etc. once every couple of years if I feel like it.

Otherwise, the rest of my time is spent on games which have story you can skip (fire emblem) or no story and is all gameplay (smash/mario kart).

 

[Rutger]

I think Xenoblade did it good and bad. The good was giving players EXP whenever discovering new areas or completing quest. The bad were the quests themselves. A lot of them dealt with just fetching materials. I'm ok with these in games like Netpunia or the Mega Man Battle Network games, because of two things: there was a lot less quests so I didn't mind completing them all, and the quests were all found in one area. Xenoblades had an overwhelming amount (like you said) which can be good, but I think only the enthusiasts of the game will complete a lot of them.

My favorite games that use sidequests for adding to the game's length are Majora's Mask and Chrono Trigger. Each sidequest tells a story so it's pretty memorable. There's a decent amount of them and I feel the need to complete them each time I do a playthrough.

Oh I agree, Xenoblade's quests are poorly designed. I was just praising the fact that the game leaves them off to the side. Once the game gets going it pretty much has us moving from important story point to important story point. The point I wanted to make was the fact that the game's pacing isn't harmed with forced fetch quests, but it still offers us a reward to exploring and fighting extra monsters if we want.

I agree that MM and CT have good sidequests, though since I always complete them, I wouldn't immediately think of them as optional.

 

[finalark]

If the gameplay can't hold our interest then things can start to drag regardless of the story, which brings me to Persona 2 Innocent Sin. P2 IS failed to hold my attention not because the story was bad, not because I got a new game before I finished(a big problem for me with all the really long games I play), but because the game is way too easy. No random battle was ever even remotely a threat, and the dungeons, while not randomly generated like P3 & 4's, weren't really any better. This caused an odd thing where every dungeon felt like padding and that the game would be far more enjoyable if it was just the cutscenes, which is a shame really.

Funny you mention P2, I just started my first play through of the game and I'm having the exact opposite problem. Granted, I'm playing EP first, I never played IS due to not having a PSP. It certainly feels like I'm on part 2 of a bigger story. Let me sum up my experience with the story: You are Maya, reporter (finally, a JRPG where I'm an adult and not a hormone fueled adolescent). Investigate this school, K? BTW, Joker is bad news, something about rumors. WOAH, JOKER IS A DERANGED MASKED GUY I BET ITS GOING TO BE SOME BIG REVEAL NEAR THE END OF THE GAME THAT HE'S ACTUALLY wait, he's some dude with long hair and he's the son of who again? Am I supposed to know who that is? And why did we burn the Seven Sisters High insignia when it was supposed to protect you? This game sure is hammering me with a lot despite being only four hours in.

So yeah, the narrative's pacing is weird but at least I like all the characters. Plus its got that uniquely addictive SMT enemy diplomacy mechanic and dungeon crawling that I really enjoy. Even if the game is much easier than I expected the game play is what's really hooked me.

Anyway, on the subject of Xenoblade. It's good, it's worth playing, but when you get down to it, unique vision mechanic aside, it really is just an offline MMORPG. I really wish they had been a bit more creative with their side quests. I've collected twenty bear asses in everything from World of Warcraft to FFXIV. I really don't want it in my single player games.