Decreasing Quality of RPGs

Playing through recent RPG's has become tedious to me for some reason, and the more I think about it, the more I can pinpoint the reasons. I never want to be wherever I am. "Puzzle"-ridden castles/dungeons that have me going in circles fighting the same enemies for 3 hours straight with a battle system that requires me to press the action button until the battle ends is just unimaginative. And by puzzles I mean don't get lost looking for all four buttons that open the door at the end. RPG's have become less and less worthy of my dollar over the years. Battle systems that require no effort to win battles, or are just time consuming to use are also a considerable issue. The attack button shouldn't be the only button you press during a battle. Attack, attack, attack, heal, repeat doesn't exactly cut it either.

     Final Fantasy X, as I'm sure Bosco will agree with me, was one of the most, if not the most, amazing RPG of all time. It didn't waste your time with god-awful excuses for puzzle, and the environments in Final Fantasy gave every single place a meaning. You never run in circles trying to flip some switches. The only comparable puzzles in Final Fantasy X would be the temples. And those were honest puzzles, and even then, there were no monsters in the temples, so if you were in there for 3 days, it's because you were working on an actual puzzle, not because you were lost, or you had to take a break from the battles every 5 seconds. When you traveled through the forest, it pointed you in the right direction, there was no maze that annoyed the hell out of you so you wouldn't enjoy the experience. Every aspect of that game was amazing in it's own right. The graphics, the story, the battle system, the environment and the characters, you always wanted more.

     Even after some poorly done RPG's, I optimistically looked forward to Final Fantasy XIII, being part of the Final Fantasy series, I could only hope that it would bring back the joy I had in RPG's. And it was supposed to. Before the game had come out, there was talk of how fluid the battle system would be, which was supposed to be revolutionary in it's methods. It turned out to be a watered down version of Final Fantasy XII's, where you just wait for your action bar to get high enough for the move you want to perform, and it activates when it gets high enough. What's worse is the auto-battle feature, which literally made the game a matter of holding down the forward button and pressing A. The incredibly sappy storyline didn't help it's cause either. I paused every time someone came out into the living room and pretended I was doing something else whenever there was a cinematic up so no one else had to see how cheesy that game was.

     Of all the games, I still enjoy newly made retro games, ones with polished battle-systems, and good storylines, even if they are 16 bit games worthy of the Super Nintendo. Maybe sometime in the future we can rely on game developers making quality RPG's again.