Quote Originally Posted by Wulf
I actually didn't get terribly far in DQVIII before Persona (PS1) and Dissidia came out and dropped the game into my bottom list. I have issues with the DQ series so this is sort of normal for me. Believe me, I have a ton more including Suikoden Tactics, God Hand, Front Mission IV, Sky Gunner, and not to mention I picked up my own copies of Sly Cooper and the Onimusha games. I took advantage of some great sales and literally doubled my PS2 collection in a few months and got some even weirder titles to boot.
That's a loooot of games, but I know what you mean, it's a good thing to expand your library, especially with weird games, I'm sure it's only going to get easier here on out for the PS2.

As far as real radical change, I don't know if I would even go that far. But we went through the golden age of PSOne RPG's without any radical changes and that was fine with us... there's more of that going around and it seems your list of current and soon purchases cover a lot of that. I actually need to consider Disgaea myself...
I feel RPGs are also starting to evolve a bit. WRPG's are starting to use some forms of turn based combat hidden in their action oriented gameplay and story and character are starting to become more and more prevalent so it seems to me that what's been making the genre thrive recently has been them taking elements from JRPGs.

The few really good JRPGs I've played in the last ten years are either unique to themselves (Suikoden) or are starting to blend elements from other genres into themselves (Persona 3 and 4). If Nier and Persona 3/4 are any indication of things to come, I would imagine that this is what may happen to the JRPG in the future. They are going to start blending into other genres and they may also go the FFXII route and start utilizing more WRPG traits such as empowering the player more to affect the story. They just need to strike a fine balance so they don't feel too much like WRPGs and stick to a strong story. It will be a balancing act for awhile.

I also do recommend the Disgaea series, its a great SRPG series but what really sets it apart is just its wacky humor and wonderful cast of misfits. Its really hard to hate the casts of these games unless you are just one of those super serious types that can't stand a little wackiness and humor in your games. Even the combat takes part of the sheer absurdness factor of these games and its beautiful. Pick up a copy when you get the chance. I mean come on! Exploding Demon Penguins dood! (which reminds me, I need to pick up the Prinny game for the PSP)[/QUOTE]

I actually don't know about the WRPG thing. Many fans of the original Fallout games complained about how Bethesda was taking a franchise they didn't originally work on and basically turn it into a shooter to sell to the console crowd. You can still melee the whole game (I think), and the auto-targeting system is more useful than actually trying to play it like a shooter, but still. Also, Mass Effect 2 nearly purged its RPG elements like it was a disease to the extent that it's mostly a shooter with dialogue trees. The Escapist actually has a funny ENN episode about it, I know you watch ZPunctuation, maybe you could check that out for FFVIII reference. It's just a phenomenon I see lately with First Person Shooters, Third Person Shooters, that companies have been making Western RPG's that look and play like First and Third Person Shooters.

I see what you're saying thought about JRPG's, Valkyria Chronicles kinda does that but I don't want to say anything because a) it's hard to explain and b) i don't want to augment your expectations.

I'm gonna give the Disgaea games a try hopefully sooner rather than later, the first two games are cheap digital on the Playstation Store for the PSP and I could always use new games on that. I wish the third one would go digital as well as they've done that with other PS3 games like Warhawk, SOCOM, and GT5Prologue, seems likt it would be a good candidate for that.