Narcissus and the Super Nintendo

[negative chill]

I would think it'd be more embarrassing to have to admit to liking Kirby. At least you can play as a raccoon in Pocky & Rocky, instead of an inflating pink marshmallow.

Not liking Kirby should be punishable by death

[spiffyone]

On the SNES side it tends to be the worst with the Square fans. Those games blew their mind when they were kids because they weren't used to video games with large narratives so they hold them up as the best games ever.

See...this is where I doubt that these were actually SNES era kids, though, and not PS1 era latecomers. Either that, or they are a vocal minority.

JRPGs weren't big sellers during the 16-bit era, at least not the non-FF titles anyway. The big sellers that gen, even on SNES, were action, sports, fighters, etc. Not RPGs.

The "love" for RPGs on that system, so vocal as is, always seemed odd to me in light of that. Not saying those aren't good games (IMO, they are), but they weren't what SNES was known for back then for the most part...at least not in the Western markets.

So, yeah, it does speak to contemporary sequels on modern systems being one of the reasons behind the "nostalgia" for those games. FFVII was a big release, mainly due to Sony's marketing efforts at the time. There came to be many new fans for those games in the West, very vocal fans, who stayed with the series even after the post-FFVII games fell right back down as far as sales were concerned in the West. And those fans introduced themselves to the older games in the series, the originals on SNES and NES, either through PS1 compilations or through the classic hardware themselves.

I think that's why something like Gunstar Heroes found a mini-revival in knowledge when Gunstar Super Heroes was released on GBA, and same for some of the older Shinobi games when the PS2 games were released. That's why older Mario, Donkey Kong, Kirby, etc. games get love, why folks had their interest in Metroid rekindled when Samus had her appearance in the first Smash Bros. and new fans had interest in her games kindled in the first place due to that. Keeping IP alive with sequels is one of the ways to create nostalgia even for games that pre-date the person who is holding the nostalgic feelings. It's something that Nintendo was always better at, IMO, than Sega. Sega was always about new experiences with each new console, each new gen, but that lost sight of the very real probability of having hit moneymakers gen after gen with a ready built in audience for those experiences.

Not that the new stuff wasn't nice, of course. That's always something Sega did better than Nintendo.

[Obviously]

You have a good point there about the SNES RPG love being retrospective. The RPGs really weren't system sellers in their day. The genre wasn't mainstream in the west until the PlayStation era.

Though I did grow up watching my friends play Chrono Trigger (and eventually "steal" it from the rental store by way of "losing" it and paying for a replacement) and Final Fantasy VI I'm willing to bet your hunch is probably the case for a lot of people, because it's impossible for it to be everyone. Those games really weren't popular or super easy to find in their day (which is why they stole Chrono Trigger from the rental store).

Whose to say how opinions will change in the next ten or twenty years though. The JRPG genre is growing increasingly niche.

[j_factor]

I don't know what sales have to do with anything. We're talking about a relatively small number of people, there's no reason to project that they should be a representative sample of people who owned an SNES.

[Dragonmaster Lou]

Whose to say how opinions will change in the next ten or twenty years though. The JRPG genre is growing increasingly niche.

Quite true... Plus it seems like JRPGs these days are missing some of the "charm" (for lack of a better term) that the older ones did. Sure, the production values are way up there, but the stories and characters just somehow seem lacking... Either that or I'm just getting old and like the old ones mostly out of nostalgia. :P

[tim333]

I don't think I played a single RPG between Dragon Warrior in 1990 and Final Fantasy VII in 1997. As a grade school kid, this stuff was not even remotely on my radar. Hell, I didn't even know that Phantasy Star existed (too bad, I would have been all over it if you'd put it in front of me). When I played FF7, in fact, I don't think it even clicked with me that I was playing the same kind of game as Dragon Warrior.

[KitsuneNight]

Quite true... Plus it seems like JRPGs these days are missing some of the "charm" (for lack of a better term) that the older ones did. Sure, the production values are way up there, but the stories and characters just somehow seem lacking... Either that or I'm just getting old and like the old ones mostly out of nostalgia. :P

jrpg are just stuck in a rut they look increasingly prettier
but tend to favor increasingly over long cutscenes to tell an melodramatic over wrought but paper thin story with z grade voice actors over actual game play

and the game play it self tends to be nothing more then grinding with game play mechanics from the 8 bit and 16 bit era that have not moved forward an inch

jrpg's look pretty but play abysmal and tend to be boring

[Dragonmaster Lou]

jrpg are just stuck in a rut they look increasingly prettier
but tend to favor increasingly over long cutscenes to tell an melodramatic over wrought but paper thin story with z grade voice actors over actual game play

and the game play it self tends to be nothing more then grinding with game play mechanics from the 8 bit and 16 bit era that have not moved forward an inch

jrpg's look pretty but play abysmal and tend to be boring

I think you hit it on the nose with the overly long cutscenes and melodramatic story. I don't mind lovely cutscenes, if done right and used appropriately, but some of the more recent JRPGs do abuse the hell out of them. Oh, and the stories, yeah, they are way over the top. Sure, the 8 and 16 bit RPGs may have had equally paper thin stories, but at least they weren't so melodramatic and filled with dime store pop psychology or whatnot.

The modern action-oriented play also seems to be part of the problem. Most of them really don't work well as an action game, and I'd much prefer a solid turn-based (or active-time turn based a la Grandia or earlier FF games) interface over some half baked action interface that's clunky to play.

[spiffyone]

I don't know what sales have to do with anything. We're talking about a relatively small number of people, there's no reason to project that they should be a representative sample of people who owned an SNES.

Well, that was part of my point. It's a vocal minority of SNES owners (if they were actual SNES owners back then) that pushes the JRPGs as part of the SNES "legacy" or the reason folks picked it over Genesis back then. For most folks, those JRPGs simply weren't the cause of their affinity for SNES over Genesis at that time outside of Japan. IIRC, sales of games like Mana and FFIII hit 500k, which was nothing to sneeze at, but other RPGs with less extensive marketing campaigns outside of those two managed to sell but a tiny fraction of that. Stuff like NBA Jam, however, and SFII were selling hand over fist, as were the licensed platformers. That's why I brought up sales. To hear it from the vocal minority, folks picked up SNES due to Breath of Fire II or something.

[KitsuneNight]

^ i got a snes for secret of mana
but that was in 97-98 and i am probably in the minority