I was looking around on YouTube, and I noticed that on FFIV (DS) there were 5 party members in combat. If I'm not mistaken the SNES/GBA versions only allowed 4 party members during battle (it's been awhile since I've played though).

If they did raise the number of people you can battle with in the remake, did it affect the game's difficulty at all?

BTW, I know I'm double posting here, but whatever

In theory, JRPGs from back then should be definitively worse than JRPGs nowadays but something about SNES JRPGs are just really great. And no nostalgia bias as I played none of those games until after 2005. I'm not entiely sure what but I have some ideas. The stories often follow K.I.S.S. and anything more complicated either felt like a natural progression of events or just goofy instead of frustrating and annoying. The writing was not something that the writers couldn't make credible. Voice acting can either help or hurt a game. If it hurts a game, it hurts the often cutscene heavy modern day JRPGs for much of the game and for an absurd amount of time. And I tend to find something being said in text that is dumb to be less annoying than hearing the idiotic statements. The gameplay worked because it was simple and repeditive yet addicting. How enjoyable certain RPG Maker games can be really highlights this.

Granted, I think any dislike for modern JRPGs are just people basing it on Final Fantasy becoming more of a parody of itself than Final Fallacy could have ever hoped to do and people getting bored with samey sequels and whatnot. And I do tend to hate people being so obsessed with nostalgia. The problem is really that the best JRPGs rarely get the spotlight. Even Xenoblade, which is one of the only Wii releases in a year and half in America that any "hardcore gamer" cares about, and thanks to an online campaign was lucky enough to be the focus of gaming Nintendo news for AN ENTIRE SUMMER, while also being universally praised as one of the best JRPGs since the 90s, has sold...ok. And even that's taking into account NOA being smart enough to not spend money on new voice actors and thus spent less money on it. And for as much praise as the Persona games have gotten, I'm pretty certain your average mediocre Pokemon sidegame easily outsells it, at least outside of Japan.

Considering the DS remake is probably the most difficult version of FFIV... Maybe they just added the extra party member to help balance it out some.

FFIV has always had 5 party members.

I knew that. Yeah.

^Thanks for the answers guys. It's been awhile since I've played it on GBA, so I couldn't remember

And the DS remake is harder!? That's actually a bit surprising, IMO.

Actually, I think it has more to so with us, well, not getting many good RPGs in general that aren't ports, remakes, or direct homages. The DS gets a lot of praise for its RPGs, but once you cut those out, you're not left with much, just Solatorobo, Radiant Historia, Devil Survivor, the Mario RPGs, and I guess TWEWY. The PS3, 360, Wii, and PSP all have about 2-4 games each that fit the bill. Unless they own all the systems, most RPGFans could probably get through their supply pretty quick and just be left with nostalgia games.

I can count 10 great PS3 JRPGs off the top of my head that are not just 'ports, remakes or homages.'

Whether you personally like them or not is rather irrelevant to their existence and the fact that I like them (and entire communities have been set up around them) demonstrates that they're not objectively bad.

This whole 'the JRPG is dead' is a fabrication by the same people who get butthurt because developers have discovered there are other ways to make games look good that don't involve pixel art. And have realised that it's impossible to make a game that is innovative but not too different, that does away with turn based combat and random encounters but still lasts for over 100 hours and has deep character customisation, and that has a great story but doesn't bore people with story sequences.

JRPG fans, as a collective, want a mass of contradictive things in their games now. It's impossible, so developers are taking sides and creating games for small groups of JRPG fans at a time, and as a result, the people who game X wasn't made for get this silly idea in their head that game X is 'not as good as the good old days.'

Meanwhile I'm more than happy with game X thankyouverymuch.

I know people who like Star Ocean 3 and Valkyrie Profile, too. That's not gonna stop me from calling them ****** games, either. Just because some people choose to ignore the problems of a game doesn't mean that those problems don't exist.

I think people need to both
1. Stop pretending certain modern day JRPGs (a lot of them even) aren't horrible because of god awful writing. I don't mind that people like those games with the horrible writing, I just hate how they pretend that isn't abundantly clear that it has horrible writing.
2. Stop pretending most JRPGs of the past were anything above simple stories done right with often mind-numbingly repeditive gameplay (especially NES JRPGs which I don't know how anyone can still tolerate). Again, I love some of those games (SNES at least) but I don't pretend they are some flawless work of art.

@Mickey I can pick holes arbitarially in your favourite 'old school' games, too. Your ability to criticise some modern JRPGs is not proof that games back then were better than they are now.

I more-or-less agree with kkslider (twice in one week, this is getting scary). The difference being that I'm probably more lenient on the stories of modern games - I do think there are some genuinely good ones out there.

I'll just leave this here... A humbling read, if not the answer to many of the questions proposed in this thread.

That's a good piece and certainly applies to the more traditional Final Fantasy games and the like, but it completely ignores massive sub-genres within the JRPG space.

The otaku JRPG (Ar tonelico, Atelier, Hyperdimension Neptunia, Record of Agarest War) are comedy games designed specifically for adult audiences; most of the humour would fly right over the heads of younger people.

The "dark" JRPG (Souls, Nier) explores far deeper themes than the typical "teen" media.

He said there were exceptions and specifically mentioned the Souls series as one of those exceptions. And you're deluding yourself if you honestly think those other series are anything besides childish "comedies" aimed at 12 year olds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reference

You're deluding yourself if you think a 12-year-old would get that. Hell, most game critics on proper wages don't understand what self reference means.

Not every game's complexity starts and stops at the story.

Could you please tell me? thanks.

Nier
Demon's Souls
Hyperdimension Neptunia
Atelier Rorona
Enchanted Arms
Valkyria Chronicles
Resonance of Fate
Rainbow Moon
White Knight Chronicles
Record of Agarest War Zero

I made it hard on myself too, by not including the sequels to some of these games (often better, but you're looking for originality here, right, even though you never said 'sequel' in your post)? I also didn't include games that were direct sequels of games that were on the PS2 - such as the Star Ocean game.

Star Ocean 4 was far from a great game, anyways. A good game, sure, but a game with a story and dialogue that abysmal could never be considered great.

Well, I don't understand where you're going with it, that's for sure. If self-reference is supposed to be funny, then the joke went well over my head, and in my opinion, a joke that needs to be explained is never a good joke at all.

That's a very good point i've been thinking of recently. Ignoring problems in games. Some of my favourite games have tons of problems that dont matter to me. (Brink) As for the golden age of rpgs, Snes clearly had the best rpgs.

Well, I don't understand where you're going with it, that's for sure. If self-reference is supposed to be funny, then the joke went well over my head, and in my opinion, a joke that needs to be explained is never a good joke at all.

I don't "get" physical or stoner humor, or most Americian comedies, actually. My wife doesn't "get" British comedy because stuff like Monty Python is filled with wordplay humour that is difficult for anyone who isn't a native English speaker.

Something can still be a comedy or self-referential criticism without every single person on the planet "getting it." It's possible to write academic essays on the sociological existence and psychology behind otaku games like the Atelier series. Calling them juvenile entertainment is doing them a deep disservice.