Reporting on something isn't promoting something, dumbass.

Even the meme feels ancient at this point.

I really wanted to like Persona 4 but I couldn't get on with it at all. Same for Persona 5. As soon as the life sim stuff kicks in I just check out.

Second this. It's packed with laugh out loud moments.

Even their on screen design. Even now, nothing has a UI that looks as good as Ridge Racer 4

So in summary I guess, JRPGs seemed to get stuck in a rut, leaning on genre and anime tropes, and I got tired of seeing the same thing in every new game I checked out. Maybe others feel the same? I don't know. But maybe it's the source of a lot of the bad feeling in the west about the JRPG.

End.

I've been playing the demo of the Trails in the Sky remake, and while I'm enjoying it, the voice acting, good as it is, does take away some of the charm of the original for me. But it is better than the games that drove me away from the genre all those years ago.

Then late in 2018 I tried out Trails in the Sky. It was a throwback to the pre-voiced era of old, and I was smitten with it. The characters spoke from my imagination rather than from the screen. Trails in the Sky made me realise why I'd fell out of love with JRPGs and bought me back to the genre.

Very little in the genre piqued any interest in me following FFXIII. It all seemed to be more of the same. I tried Persona 4 upon recommendation from my best friend sometime in 2015 and was incredibly bored by it. I decided that JRPGs weren't for me anymore.

I was growing up, but the games I loved didn't seem to be growing up with me. This reached its nadir with FFXIII. A game so full of anime character tropes that the entire cast was incredibly annoying. I walked away from the game after about 20 hours, and walked away from the genre as a whole.

The move to voice acting bought anime voice acting with it. And I hated it. I was growing up. I had played enough of the genre to start recognising the tropes, and the voice acting only seemed to amplify them. Every game seemed to boil down to four teens kill god with the power of friendship.

The genre started losing its lustre when technology advanced to the point that it allowed games to be extensively voice acted. No longer were JRPGs videogames as novels, they became videogames as TV series. Typically, an anime series.

When I say I like JRPGs, what I mean is I like imperial phase Final Fantasy, with a garnish of Grandia and Chrono Cross. Those games were everything to me back then. Even today, I consider them to be the benchmark of a good videogame story.

Namco's graphic design in that era was peerless.