RPG's lack the Franchise it needs....
Okay, this thread is inspired by the Square and Capcom discussion with Wolf and Haste in the SE forum, and in my head I was going 'I need to drop a Breath of Fire referance here'. And then something occurred to me after that thought. Even though my first and most consistant RPG series from the SNES and PS1 era had been Final Fantasy, I feel that if it died right now, or even if the PS2 generation didn't happen, it wouldn't really matter, at least not to me.
Yet I sit here thinking about Breath of Fire. The world of RPG's really seems to be missing something without a new Breath of Fire game. We have the Xeno Crew creating this epic and god scaled stories spanning the galaxies, and Atlus messing around with Lovecraftian style gods and horrors, but Breath of Fire was something esle. It was a more classic struggle against dark and evil gods. And really, as I thought of it, as classic a tale as that sounds, it's not really something you saw in Video games often, not even the RPG Genre where it sounds like it fits most at home.
The fall of Breath of Fire has left a pretty big hole in RPG's, something that wouldn't really be missing these days in the absence of Final Fantasy.
Then I thought more, and Wild Arms is another one like Breath of Fire. A game that, without it, RPG's seem to be lacking. There is no other Wild West RPG out there, at least not any I know of, and for that matter Wild West is a lacking Genre in games, though there is a few up. Even if 4 and 5 added more sci-fi elements, they still had a fun Wild West atmosphere.
Wild Arms got me thinking of Lufia, the RPG that probably had the best puzzles, and solving the maps puzzles actually ended up being a major focus of the game. This and Wild Arms were the only RPG's that had such strong elements of Puzzles to beat the game, and they have faded as well. There is Golden Sun, but with no sign of the final installment, have the heavy puzzle focus's also died out?
Even Earthbound was vastly unique, at least to an American Audience (There were a few Parody style RPG's that never saw stateside releases.) We do have Hyperdimension Neptunia, but even though I enjoy those games, they don't really fill the Earthbound style of cracking jokes at pretty much everything. Neptunia is pretty limited in it's scope of humour, catering almost purely to one very small niche.
I guess you could call this a thread about games that we wish would come back, really this was just me reflecting. I look back and see all these great styles of RPG that I really do feel have a place, yet their existence has faded. While there are still some great RPG's coming out, Atlus and the Xeno Team for example, I can't help but feel they alone don't really make up for the holes left by those other games, nor does it seem anyone at all is interested, at least not on the developers side of things.
Well, there's the ramblings of an old man. :p
