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This is The Devil's Advocate, where I do my ranting in articles for your viewing pleasure. If you would like to submit a rant to the RPGC, please e-mail me and I will put it on. By Esthar Ever since I was four or five years old, I've been playing RPGs, whether on the NES or Genesis or whatever console. I've grown to be (in my opinion) a very good judge of RPGs. With the recent outbreak of such eye candy as Final Fantasy VII, many gamers have become interested in the genre, having been drawn by the good graphics and heightened publicity. I am very troubled by this. I, having experienced the older Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, have learned to see past the terrible graphics and find the more important qualities of RPGs: gameplay, story, and music. Several people I have run into on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) have bombarded me with comments such as "FF8 is the best game ever!!", simply because the game is more realistic. Most people who praise FF8 so very much have never played the older games, and therefore have nothing else to base their opinions on. Fortunately, Square has released the classics Final Fantasy 5 and 6 for the Playstation through Final Fantasy Anthology, even though the ports are plagued by bad translations (FF5) and choppy battles (FF6). Some people might find the transition to 16-bit graphics a little hard to adjust to, since they are so used to the improved graphics of the newer games. Judging RPGs is much like judging people: the outside isn't important, it's the inside that counts. |
