Posted by Strider on 7/16/2009, 12:42 pm, in reply to "Re: Dragon Quest IX"
--Previous Message--
: I remember feeling, for the longest time,
: that we got the shaft regarding a lot of
: games not being released here... then I
: started *playing* them. Amazingly enough, I
: discovered we... really weren't missing
: anything at all. Very few Japan-only RPGs
: actually impressed me, with a number of the
: better ones being released here in some form
: eventually anyhow (FF5, DW5, Front Mission).
Well, I mean, there are a number of reasons an RPG might be "Japan-only"- especially in the SNES days, when the zeitgeist in Japan seemed to be that RPGs simply wouldn't sell in the US... Note the very sharp uptick in the number of RPGs released here in the wake of the high-profile success of Final Fantasy 7. I've played good Japan-only RPGs (Bahamut Lagoon was fun, SD3 was too even if I've never managed to get all the way through it, I personally really enjoyed Romancing SaGa 3, I burned out on SMT but I can see the attraction...) and a lot of really mind-blowingly mediocre ones (the Dual Orb games come to mind offhand, there was a translation of a game called Emerald Dragon that was pretty mediocre, etc).
What I was really responding to in the grandparent post was the great-grandparent's "OMG my favorite series isn't popular enough, Americans are so dumb"-ness and "JAPAN IS SUPERIOR" undercurrent, particularly the swipe about "Americans liking anything corporate media tells them to"- the thing is, most Japanese media is in fact way more corporate-driven than many American consumers realize. The tropes and cliches are different and the cost of localization in the US provides a lot of generic stuff from filtering over the Pacific, but when you get right down to it, it's still largely made by big media conglomerates looking to make a profit.
: Two big examples of this can be found in FF4
: Hardtype and Lennus 2. As a kid, I was
: totally intrigued by all the content cut out
: of the game I knew as FF2. All those items,
: extra commands, and even a few spells. Then,
: not long ago, I played FF4 Advance, which
: had all the cut content restored... and
: found that most of it was completely
: useless. *All* the extra commands were
: garbage (Dark Wave was all right early on;
: the rest, nope.), most of the items
: (everything except Apples, Soma Drops, and
: Alarms) were useless, and the extra spells
: were just kinda "there", and made
: no difference whatsoever. As for being
: "harder"... I didn't really even
: see much of *that*. Many of the changes for
: Easytype were to make the game less
: cumbersome, as I would discover.
: Remedies/Heal Potions "replacing"
: the individual stat items in Easytype/FF2
: US, for instance, made a lot more sense, due
: to the limited inventory; you could carry a
: stack of Remedies easily enough, but it
: didn't make sense to waste so much space
: carrying around a bunch of items to cure
: individual status ailments you may not even
: get inflicted with. Mercifully, later FF
: games removed the limited inventory, making
: such items actually *useful*.
I've gotta say for the record that I don't feel Hardtype is a very good example of this, simply because Hardtype was- for a long time- steeped in internet mythology about all sorts of crazy new content that the game had. Essentially, I think that those of us who were around the internet in the days before emulation when all sorts of crazy rumors were flying around about content that was cut ffrom the US release of FF2 were expecting there to be way more new stuff in Hardtype than there actualy was.
(I feel I should say for the record that personally, having also played Hardtype most of the way through, I was kind of disappointed in it as well... Most of the 'additional items' were indeed pointless, and I think Square made good choices in what commands to cut. I will add on the other hand that I found Dark Wave very useful and that I was rather fond of Edward's heal-everyone-with-two-potions command, which made him a viable healer for most of the time he was in the party.)
- HC
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