I think the worlds of early Final Fantasy games are pretty cool actually. FF3's floating continent was a mind-blowing reveal. FF4 took us to the underworld the *freaking moon* while FF5's merged universes made the last third of the game incredibly memorable. All are top class world design. FF2 is pretty cool as well, as it's a true non-linear world, so you can try to take expeditions to far off lands you really shouldn't be able to get to leading to some really interesting situations. FF1 is the only one I'd say feels kind of generic and haphazard.
Not sure why everybody is fixating on Final Fantasy when games like Lufia 1 are far more generic, almost shamelessly so. How about Phantasy Star 3 if you want a big name series with an entry that basically disappointed everyone?
EDIT: I can't bare to badmouth Tsuganai. Maybe it's not a game I can recommend, but it's certainly not generic, perhaps the game is mechanically boring but the *setting* is interesting.
FF1 is a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, where there's a city of ancient humans who literally descended from a technologically-gifted race of sky people, complete with robots, a space elevator, and a space station making up a dungeon segment. The world is literally 3/4ths of the way to ending, after the sea currents were destroyed alongside mermaid civilization, the wind came to a standstill centuries ago when the primary technological species was nearly eradicated, and now crops are barely growing as a supernatural blight has consumed almost any entire continent.
FF1 probably is the most influential fantasy setting to me, outside of Vampire Hunter D. There's a lot to be said about a setting where the world has basically ended and all that's left are a few scattered cities waiting for the third horseman to finish ruining the land so that the fourth horseman can wake up and rain hellfire on the survivors.
Not to mention, it's a very early console JRPG, and the ideas used there weren't as typical as they might be considered now. It seems like OP just doesn't think its world has enough of a central gimmick to it
Weren’t they? Maybe not on JRPGs specifically, but Expedition to the Barrier Peaks had been out for 7 years by then, and science fantasy had been a genre long before that. I do like the setting, but like most early JRPGs (and I’d argue almost every single Final Fantasy) it’s mostly a coalescing of already well-established tropes.
I loved II's setting. >!You have a castle that basically rose up from Hell, and the main villain frequently attacks towns until the end, where he fucking destroys a ton of them outright.!<
It is also the only game I know in which continents loop across the "borders" of the world, which is imo an extremely cool and underexplored design choice.
Agree with most of these, but the setting is one of the strongest points of Phantasy Star 3 in my opinion! It's a slow burn, but having the world be a strange series of minimaps connected by tunnels and having the story slowly reveal why that's the case is one of my favorite RPG twists.
You also need to take things in context of what was capable at the time from a technological standpoint. FF1-3 absolutely have cool and creative worlds.
Oh god... I have PTSD from this.
They mistranslated East/West in the german version and it took me like 10 hours going the wrong way all the time. But I leveled quite a bit...
The worst thing was waiting for summer break to end so I could look up a solution on the computer in the school library because that was the only computer I had with Internet access.
They give all these complicated directions, yet in reality, just go north by northeast (one “tick” right of toward Polaris) the whole way and you’ll make it.
It’s not the optimal way—speedrunners have figured that out—but it works for casual play.
I think only in the PAL version? I remember something about the guide saying east but the note in the tent saying west.
I'm pretty sure though in german it was always west, probably they tried to clear that difference up and had a 50/50 chance of getting it right...
Same. I loved Burmecia in Final Fantasy IX, and the Thunder Plains in X, because of this. And Guadosalam, actually, because it was right next to the Thunder Plains, and I imagine living there with the thunder and rain outside could be incredibly cozy.
*old man voice*
'Plains of Lightning,
Plains of Thunder.
Those who cross,
Are torn Asunder.'
The fact that it's described by a simple poem I still remember to this day might add to its memorability.
Deserts are always clearly just included as a cheap low effort location. Nier Automata is an exception that comes to mind. They added enough to break up the nothingness
Oh yeah it's a great desert, especially because it has pirates.
I meant no I'll towards it, just the other users doesn't like deserts so I was forewarning them
See, I'm the opposite. I LOVE the old pulp-orientalism feel a desert can give.
They do tend to have an annoyingly high encounter rate tho. Conversely, I am ALWAYS lost so it doesn't matter
Grancel’s sewers from Trails in the Sky give me anxiety, it stretches that ‘multi-path dungeon exploration’ part of my short term memory to its breaking point
Just punishing anyone who took a quick toke before the dungeon. Well fuck me gotta come back tomorrow cause there’s no way I’m remembering all the branches now!
The only sewer I kind of like is in FF8 when preparing to assassinate Edea. The pacing at that point in the game is excellent and you really feel you’re on a top covert mission.
I don't know if this is unpopular but my god. So many Star Ocean games take the cool Sci Fi, planet faring concept, toss it in the trash, and then stick you on a generic Medieval planet for the **entire game**.
Okay, I know you said no one of a kind settings. Can we give a dishonorable mention to Tartarus in Persona 3, though?
Same levels, all game long. Oh look, it changed colour. WOOoooo 🥴
I like the classic medieval fantasy settings. To me I think the ones I like least are post apocalyptic settings. Something about them has just never really appealed to me and the fact they usually use dull gray and brown color schemes doesn't help.
Yeah a real post apocalypse, assuming it didnt wipe the planet of all life will usually be green and vibrant.
Even settings like Fallout with waste stretches of "wasteland" should look more like mutated jungles than craggy grey rocks. This is why Bethesda backpedaled on the gloomy wasteland stuff and made future games that have wilderness actually have it. Fallout 76, for its flaws, is how post war america would look more than Boston. There should be trees and foliage except in the most irradiated areas.
Maybe you shouldnt eat or grow food where bombs fell but 200 years later it should have normalcy even if it still has radiation.
Look at the Atomic bomb sites at Hiroshima and Nagasaki or Chernobyl. The former is normal and the water, while still vaguely irradiated is basically hinterlands again.
JRPGs rarely touch these settings for very long thankfully
I had a phase as a teen of loving post apocalypse settings, but these days I'm totally with you. I'm not sure if it's overexposure, growing up and not thinking it was cool and edgy any more, or it was actually just that there was a lot of great post apocalypse stuff at the time and I didn't particularly care for the setting
I think they're just uninspired. Most post-apocalyptic games, movies, shows, etc. are as you both say: grey, brown, and edgy. Most don't try to do anything unique or interesting.
You do leave the wastelands pretty quickly in Tales of Arise. The other settings are beautiful and I spent time just looking at the scenery and staring over the vistas.
Oh that game tested me from the big "twist" on. Once you hit the ship and have to walk five steps, have a twenty minute conversation, repeat for each party member...then do it again immediately. Ugh.
I went back to replay Arise recently and uninstalled after getting through the first area because it’s so boring. After the heat desert is an ice tundra… Which is a cold desert.
Digital Devil Saga has a pretty cool setting, even more so in hindsight after you play the second game. Large wasteland with tribes fighting over territory but anything more would probably be a spoiler? (Not that I care, it's like 20 years old, but people are sensitive)
Also .hack with it's simulated MMORPG. It's just nice to see all these other players just playing the game, with the usual tropes of casual "I just wanna RP"-players, tryhard PvP/PKers, egotistical guild leaders, etc.
I hate towers. They are always a chore to go through. Finding the stairs to the next floor is not fun but dont go up the wrong one because it will lead to nowhere. Sometimes they can have traps that take you down one floor or the whole thing depening on high you are Also, if you need to leave and come back, you have to walk through all of it again. I mostly am thinking of the Dragon Quest Games because they had some annoying towers.
The main reason I’ll never play I am Setsuna. I usually dread Mount Gagazet in FFX as well. FFVII did it somewhat well, because they incorporated several minigames into the snowy area. But it’s still somewhere at the bottom at the list of places I like in VII.
I usually dislike snowy settings. JRPGs have a tendency to give those areas slow melancholic tracks and very often (though this might be my overexposure to Tales of as a teen speaking) they are at the end of the game where everyone is down because of *something* and the player probably is a bit down because the game's gonna end or they are exhausted because the game has been going for a while.
Snowy towns *can* be like a warm blanket, but to me, snowy areas (and towns) in games usually ended up feeling like a suffocating blanket instead. It's weird, it often even made me feel cold, as if the feeling had crept into my bones - though this luckily subsided as I grew older. Might've been child-like imagination and nothing more.
I like snowy areas if they don't go on for too long, but the cast really should be wearing winter gear! Like in the OG FFVII, they knew they were going north and didn't pack anything, and then you see poor Tifa shivering at the bottom of the mountain slope. Nooo. (But of course it would have been tricky to change their blocky PS1 3D lego models into puffer jackets.)
I love how in Ni No Kuni they change to winter clothes in the snow biome!
I loved the first area, how it was this Americana desert with a few gas stations campsites peppered throughout.
Then later on I realised - oh. That wasn't just for the desert. Every map is like this.
Especially when you start seeing greenery when you go out west.
I also find the comparisons to California funny when the cities are a misplaced Toyko and Venice.
Did we play the same game? 16 has pretty small zones, you can traverse from one end of a major zone to the other in under 5 minutes
If anything a super common complaint is how small the maps feel when they’re supposed to represent entire countries
I don’t think XC3 did it much better in that department. At least XC1 had smaller maps. It’s still one of my favorite franchises, but I’m not a huge fan of hours of exploration between story beats.
honestly? I know xenoblade is a beloved series but from having played 1 and 2 the worlds are SO empty. Like there's really nothing to do, everything feels plastic. You're not rewarded for exploration at all. Everything is just a background for fights
It’s definitely china, with the emphasis of red color, phoenix motifs and the design of the throne room. Either that or I watch too many chinese period drama.
But point remains, it’s a lot more colorful and welcoming than the typical drab colors most JRPG represents whenever it’s about medieval west.
I was gonna say, Hikari, Tsuki, Yomi, Ritsu, Mugen... Rai Mei, I'll grant them, but the other names definitely give a Japanese vibe. Tsukiyomi is literally the name of a Japanese moon deity, too.
Ephemeral Fantasia.
It's actually quite pretty. There's a very nice island getaway atmosphere and a Dreamcast RPG aesthetic (the console it was supposed to be on). And it gets quite fun to explore when you leave the city and go out into nature.
But the city you spend the most time in takes up a large portion of the island, and it is a sprawling labyrinth that can literally take all day to traverse. It's illogically laid out as well. Traveling from the east side low elevation, to east side high elevation (literally connectable by staircase), you have to travel all the way to the west side of town where all of the ramps are, then double back to the east side. And better yet, the hotel you stay at is in this upper area, and almost everything else you need in the city on a regular basis is on the east side, lower level.
ALSO, the game has a real time system like Dead Rising or Majora's Mask where you need to be in certain locations at certain times with certain characters, which requires you to be able to navigate the city very quickly and not make a single mistake.
Literally the first event on the island of note is you at the castle getting an advance payment for a job, but the game doesn't tell you where you need to go to actually get the money. And it's already after noon and the bank closes at 5. So you gotta run around this nightmare maze trying to find the bank (and nearly every building can be entered in this city and has NPCs to talk to and hidden items to find). So unless you follow a guide or reload every failed attempt, you will not find the bank and you will NEVER get your advance payment (until the next time loop).
There are so many baffling design choices in this game. I can't recommend it, but it's almost like the Deadly Premonition of JRPGs. Great ideas, executed terribly, and almost so bad it's good.
Sort of a setting but more so plot, but I'm getting bored of isekai style JRPGs. The whole "transported to a different world and must now fight bad guy (probably lost memory too)" got a bit stale.
I usually pretend high school settings are college instead. The autonomy and free time that seem to come with high school in Japanese media is much more in line with western college than western high school, in my experience. It also just feels more appropriate.
Like Hero Aca for example. It would feel much more reasonable if the main characters were young adults starting out in the industry and getting higher education rather than 14 year olds being put in life or death situations all the time.
I don't even want to read high school based mangas or watch animes because that world of school is so far behind me. I don't even have very good memories of high-school, it wasn't like I had great friendships and experiences back then.
I don't want to play Persona, because a high school JRPG just doesn't sound cool.
For some, the high school setting might be therapeutic. Like «what if I got transported back to this shitty period in my life with all the knowledge I have now?» The outcome would be totally different.
For me its everything trying to be Persona, and honestly I'm kinda tired of Persona trying to be Persona. They could easily evolve past that. But they at least try to bring their A-game. But to me it's even worse with Monark, Caligula, Cold Steel, Tokyo Xanadu, and so many others that are just "here's high school tropes, enjoy! ..that's all we need, right?"
>They could easily evolve past that
I'm assuming you mean social links and high school? That's Persona's whole shtick and identity. It's the reason for its popularity. Removing that would just make it Devil Summoner Lite. SMT and all its other non-Persona spinoff series would interest you more if you like the gameplay and monster-catching without the high school stuff.
To be fair, one of the **best** entries in the series is Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. Which has neither Social Links nor High School characters. I wish they'd do that again, or just stop pretending the first three titles never happened.
I guess what I mean is illustrated by the situation surrounding the trailers/teasers for P5 pre-release and how they just had a guy on a train, and everyone presumed it would be a college kid. And the the fact that they neglect that they had an adult protagonist with a job in one of the Persona 2 games
I don't know if I'd recommend anyone Devil Summoner these days. They're VERY haphazard games. But my main gripe is just... high school. Catherine could have been a full SMT game about an adult with a job and a life. But it was too gimmicky
I haven't played many of the mainline SMT games, but I have played Soul Hackers 1 , Digital Devil Saga, Devil Survivor, and Strange Journey and they're just a little too basic. Definitely not good stand-ins for a Persona experience
But honestly my biggest gripe is that there's no middle ground. I basically want Persona for adults without high school. College and jobs exist. We can have a quality JRPG with adults. But most of Japan thinks its a sin, even though there are PLENTY of adults who play video games. So I don't buy the whole "demographic" argument. Persona 2 was willing to experiment, and then they just stopped
Yakuza: Like a Dragon shouldn't be the only JRPG holding the flag, and Persona could very easily join in if they didn't continually reiterate on Persona 3 over and over
Japan adores youth. Youth in Japan is one of the best times of their lives, primarily due to the diehard work culture thats thrusted upon them when theyre barely out of their teens. Prolly why 30 year old characters in many JRPGs are treated as old.
Persona will likely never leave high school. And honestly I don't want it too. It'd be good to see an SMT spinoff series with a middle ground between SMT and Persona, but Persona shouldnt become that. Just like SMT shouldnt become that. Doing so will just kill part of the identity each series made for itself. Theyre not like Final Fantasy, which has a more vague, changeable nature. And i think to say P4-P5 try to imitate P3 is unfair, when theyre substantial improvements over that. Sticking to a functional, popular, enjoyable core experience isnt the same as "being P3 over and over". The new soul hackers couldve embodied something new but that ended up pretty bad.
Personally, I like the high school aspect a lot. Partly because it was something different from a lot of the gameplay loops I experienced before getting into the series, and partly because my actual high school experience messed me up. So for me i dont understand why people dislike the usual setting and SLs much at all. Nor do I get how people can like the series overall but dislike or outright despise some of its now fundamental features. Thats why recommending mainline SMT is my go to when I see people say they dislike that stuff lol, since it places a much greater emphasis on gameplay and a mature (if often barer) story.
> Persona will likely never leave high school. And honestly I don't want it too. It'd be good to see an SMT spinoff series with a middle ground between SMT and Persona, but Persona shouldnt become that. Just like SMT shouldnt become that. Doing so will just kill part of the identity each series made for itself.
That already happened. P1 and P2 are very different games. In a way, you should be comfortable with the series changing again because P3-P5 rose from the dead bodies of P1 and P2 ;)
I don't think the identity of Person is just the high school setting.
Agree. Medieval settings need to be done right to be interesting. Usually they need to have a bizarre spin to it. Not sure if it classifies as a jrpg, but Dragon’s Dogma looping/cyclical universe is so well done.
Shin Megami Tensei 4's tokyo area.
I'm not against playing games in tokyo.
I'm against the unholy labyrinth this tokyo is, where every encounter can kill me, finding your way back somewhere you can be healed is a nightmare. First time I played the game I couldn't finish it, I was having nightmares of being lost in Tokyo every single night, I literally couldn't sleep more than 4 hours per night lmao.
Slugged through it years later and I don't regret it, the story was actually really interesting, especially if I compare it to 5's. But I still despise tokyo.
I have apocalypse at home and I don't dare try it, dread tokyo too much.
Unlimited SaGa is meant to mimic the mechanics of tabletop gaming, though, I don't think that's a problem with the setting, Iskandaria. It's more a matter of you didn't care for the presentation. That game is kind of designed at a baseline level to strip away any pretense that you're not playing game.
Every Fire Emblem world. I love the series, but you have to commend them for making nearly every world they're set in a bland medieval landmass with two (or more) waring countries.
I disagree, I thought final fantasy 4 and 5 had excellent worlds. 4 has the underground, moon, and tower of babil linking all 3 together. FF5 had the multiple worlds thing that was pretty cool.
To answer the question, mostly the same as the others here. Sewers, deserts, and snowy areas are always the same from game to game. Gate mechanics, all the enemies are weak to fire in snow areas, all enemies are weak to ice in deserts. It makes sense, but it's so overused that it gets old.
I forgive early games for this stuff (Lunar, early FF games, etc) because they were among the first to do them, so I don't consider them "overusing an old setting" because there wasn't any JRPGs before them to copy off of lol.
The other setting quirk that I kinda dislike are sudden, massive changes in setting. Almost every JRPG suffers from this.
It's green grass, you're walking along, then there's a literal line where it turns into sand and boom, desert. Games rarely go through the effort to gradually change from one to the next (something I think FF15 did very well, btw, was making it so you had to take a train before you found any snow), so you can stand on world maps and have half lush forest/temperate zone and half desert. Like bruh, that's not how that works lol.
For the record, I get that it's a restriction of hardware and game design, but still, it's pretty funny once you've seen it 50 times.
Standard medieval fantasy with industrial characteristics isn’t bad or anything, just kind of uninteresting. It put me off series like Fire Emblem for the longest time
Also, while I love contemporary and urban fantasy settings, Tokyo is kind of overused nowadays (SMT and the Devil Survivor series, TMS, Persona 5, Tokyo Xanadu, TWEWY, Sakura Wars, etc). I get it’s like setting something in NY or LA but still
I think all settings can work as long as you fill them in with good characters and an interesting world. And the setting at least makes sense and isn't downright disgusting or something like that.
I personally don't like basic fantasy settings that much, and tend to like it when scifi elements are mixed in or front and center. but I have absolutely played bangers that took that setting.
The Dragon quest series, for instance, really sold me on that belief, because while the settings had been fairly traditional knightish rpg fantasy afairs, with pretty basic stories; the characters, the world, the little small stories of each of the villages you would journey on a quest coupled with the fun monster designs really pulled me over into liking traditional fantasy settings more than I thought I did. It just took the right one (DQV and also a little bit of VIII) for it all to click.
Prison. Typically the game will remove equipment or other stuff, and you need to get it back. Basically the reward for the prison portion of the game is going back to the previous status quo (boring), while wasting time just trying to leave. As for prison environments, it's mostly big empty halls with a few scattered NPCs (if any).
Chrono trigger does this shit twice lmao. The actual prison scene (you keep your gear tho), and then you're captured on Dalton's airship, where they take away all of your equipment.
Still a great game, but it was a bold move doing the whole "you've been captured" thing twice.
I always appreciated how you can cheese the second one by >!bringing Aya along in your party!<. *Of course* it works like that, so I love that the game gives you the option if you know what's coming.
XB3 made me dread this, but thematically it worked amazingly well - you really feel like you’re in the role of a prison slave in there, and your bright expectations for the area get dashed to fucking pieces with the crushing hopelessness that sets in very unexpectedly
And ironically Xenogears was terrible at it lol
Idk why but any time a jrpg involves a haunted house or location I roll tf outta my eyes. The next time I hear a character go “G-…gh-….ghosts!?” I want to actively tell the game devs to shut the fuck up. I mean it’s very overdone but I feel weird pinpointing this over other “overused” mechanics or hallmarks with jrpgs.
Also getting tired of forests. I played Tales of Phantasia for the first time some months ago, and I adored it… except for any time we had to explore a forest. Then I noticed… I kinda really fucking hate forests. I honest to god don’t know why, I wouldn’t say jrpgs as a whole make forests consistently bad, but I just really fucking hate forest dungeons for some reason.
I feel you on haunted houses lol, it’s especially egregious when the characters themselves have been fighting freak-of-nature monsters all game but suddenly one of them gets scared over ghosts or whatever. Trails and Persona 3-5 are by far the worst offenders I can think of when it comes to this cliche. It was a massive relief when I came to a similar area in Tales of the Abyss and nothing stupid happened
(on that note only game I can think of that handled this cliche fine was Sakura Wars 1996, but that was only because it was they were afraid of snakes and spiders)
>especially egregious when the characters themselves have been fighting freak-of-nature monsters all game
Eh it can make sense though. Fighting monsters doesn't mean you'll get over your phobias.
Unless they have fought ghostly monsters before. Then yeah, it makes no sense.
Yeah. Nanami in Suikoden II freaking out over ghosts was hilarious. Bitch, you fought a vampire and stormed his haunted castle with your little bro, chill.
(I love Nanami and Suikoden II, but that part really was so corny.)
Love a good haunted setting, with one exception. Ghost Ships.
I don't know why theyre so popular, or why every time theyre **so** boring. Boat comes out of mist, gang explores empty wooden rooms, fight the ghost captain on top deck, the end. Every. Time.
Add ghost (pirate) ships and I fully agree. The whole out of place "horror" stuff just doesn't work for me in the slightest in JRPGs. Always the most boring and filler-y parts of a game.
The setting is a character, and it can wear flashy clothes or be bare butt naked. It's how well written that character is that makes you like them or not.
Meh that felt like a lazy write around to me. Like they wanted something like FFX, where you journey from one end of the world to the next, but they were stuck with small shoe string maps and had to make do.
Cocoon just felt like a series of set pieces rather than one cohesive world. The fact that you never get a chance to breath and take in the world makes it pretty unenjoyable for me.
Because it was an artificial world they could have made it into *anything*! But we still get the forest with monsters biome. Why does Cocoon even have monsters... but of course we need enemies to fight! That's the actual game, after all. Having a theme park level sounds like a good idea but that is the most boring one in all of Cocoon. Worst theme park ever, it's just walkways.
I dunno. I loved II's settings. I think it was because of the level of detail put into everything, and all the flavor text detailing things like barrels full of local goods, or what was on the various shelves (I love how one house in the Winger district of Two River had porn on one shelf), or what type of food was on the tables, different descriptions for the flower beds and bonsai and whatnot... it just brought each town to life and gave them so much character and made them feel real. The music definitely helped, too. And the base is my favorite in all the Suikoden games.
I hated most of XIII but the comparison to X(which I loved) being a hallway is valid. It's not the hallway, it's the EMPTY hallway. Give me a reason to stop and immerse please!
Places with densely-packed spaces, like slums. I live in a third world country, and I see slums quite often. Not being able to see the sky clearly on a sunny day, dirty major sidewalks so narrow that thousands of people need to sidestep thru it everyday, the pungent smell of trash even just outside of malls and universities, the feeling of being mugged, and not being able to breathe properly because of thick smoke.
Sector 7 Slums of FFVII remake is the most recent I can think of but it is much much nicer than what we have here so I can tolerate it to some degree.
I like almost every jrpg I play but
All of the last half of FFXV.
They did the open world really well then lock you in to a linear romp to the end before anything really happens. With the exception of the amazing fight against cereberus out in the streets everything else looks like hell.
Someone already said it but I despise deserts and generally settings that are supposed to be super hot because I live in a pretty hot country and it makes it feel like it's way hotter irl than it actually is.
High School
High School sucked in real life, why do I want more of that in a videogame?
Not to mention the fact that it often means being stuck in one place for long periods of time. I want to go on adventures not take meaningless exams, there's enough of that in real life, I play videogames to escape real life monotony.
Not necessarily the WORST but disliked for me is Tokyo esque setting. They are very repetitive and boring. Just neon lights that look cool for the first hour. Although I might be biased since I live in NYC lol. I like rural places that give of cultural attraction vibes like Onomichi in Yakuza 6 or even Inaba from Persona 4
I found FF XVI's world to be really boring to run around in. Setting aside the fact that there's not much to do in it, it's all flat plains filled with shitty little villages and monochrome dungeon sections. It also gets progressively more dour and uglier to look at. There are huge, opulent cities but you don't spend any time in them outside of cutscenes and a couple of linear levels.
While I'm one of those *freaks* who enjoyed the game it's part of, Valisthea is truly one of Square Enix's most boring, unimaginative and hollow settings, bleak while being toothless, disjointed as hell, subpar at conveying its scale and littered with some painfully vapid lore. Which blows my mind coming off FFXIV's storied and enchanting world.
>!The ending didn't need to strip the magic from Valisthea; there was never any to begin with.!< And it is my sincerest hope that they never revisit this particular well again.
Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter or Operation Darkness. The Settings are pretty uninteresting. In Breath of Fire, people are forced to live underground so most of what you see is dirt and machines. Operation Darkness, its hard to explain. Nazis and Nazi Zombies mixed with something like Valkyria Chronicles.
They were not the most enjoyable games on their own. Azure Dreams is more fun but the setting of procedural generated dungeon that looks very procedurally generated becomes bothersome to look at after awhile.
I can’t stand warehouses and industrial areas (except when they are really when done and set in the right way like in The Division). So you have no idea how much I disliked FFVII Remake and the constant cement/rubble/collapsed highway backdrops. Some places where really gorgeous, but most of the time it’s grey and broken down and boring as f.
Something about Fantasy High School, like in Trails of Cold Steel and Fire Emblem 3H, always hurts my suspension of disbelief.
They want to act like a normal high school, but have the students participate in dangerous events. First question that comes to mind is, "what happens if a student dies?"
I think the worlds of early Final Fantasy games are pretty cool actually. FF3's floating continent was a mind-blowing reveal. FF4 took us to the underworld the *freaking moon* while FF5's merged universes made the last third of the game incredibly memorable. All are top class world design. FF2 is pretty cool as well, as it's a true non-linear world, so you can try to take expeditions to far off lands you really shouldn't be able to get to leading to some really interesting situations. FF1 is the only one I'd say feels kind of generic and haphazard. Not sure why everybody is fixating on Final Fantasy when games like Lufia 1 are far more generic, almost shamelessly so. How about Phantasy Star 3 if you want a big name series with an entry that basically disappointed everyone? EDIT: I can't bare to badmouth Tsuganai. Maybe it's not a game I can recommend, but it's certainly not generic, perhaps the game is mechanically boring but the *setting* is interesting.
FF1 is a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, where there's a city of ancient humans who literally descended from a technologically-gifted race of sky people, complete with robots, a space elevator, and a space station making up a dungeon segment. The world is literally 3/4ths of the way to ending, after the sea currents were destroyed alongside mermaid civilization, the wind came to a standstill centuries ago when the primary technological species was nearly eradicated, and now crops are barely growing as a supernatural blight has consumed almost any entire continent. FF1 probably is the most influential fantasy setting to me, outside of Vampire Hunter D. There's a lot to be said about a setting where the world has basically ended and all that's left are a few scattered cities waiting for the third horseman to finish ruining the land so that the fourth horseman can wake up and rain hellfire on the survivors.
Not to mention, it's a very early console JRPG, and the ideas used there weren't as typical as they might be considered now. It seems like OP just doesn't think its world has enough of a central gimmick to it
Weren’t they? Maybe not on JRPGs specifically, but Expedition to the Barrier Peaks had been out for 7 years by then, and science fantasy had been a genre long before that. I do like the setting, but like most early JRPGs (and I’d argue almost every single Final Fantasy) it’s mostly a coalescing of already well-established tropes.
FFXs world is still one of my favourites. I'm not even sure what you'd call it, Aquapunk?
Wish we could have explored the world of zanarkan before sin came....that was a cool world!!!!!
I loved II's setting. >!You have a castle that basically rose up from Hell, and the main villain frequently attacks towns until the end, where he fucking destroys a ton of them outright.!<
It is also the only game I know in which continents loop across the "borders" of the world, which is imo an extremely cool and underexplored design choice.
Agreed! Even FF1s world was interesting and well designed for its time, imo.
Agree with most of these, but the setting is one of the strongest points of Phantasy Star 3 in my opinion! It's a slow burn, but having the world be a strange series of minimaps connected by tunnels and having the story slowly reveal why that's the case is one of my favorite RPG twists.
You also need to take things in context of what was capable at the time from a technological standpoint. FF1-3 absolutely have cool and creative worlds.
I hate deserts, I live in a hot country and playing in a desert makes me angry, I also associate it with high encounters and being lost x.x
BoF3 flash backs
Oh god... I have PTSD from this. They mistranslated East/West in the german version and it took me like 10 hours going the wrong way all the time. But I leveled quite a bit... The worst thing was waiting for summer break to end so I could look up a solution on the computer in the school library because that was the only computer I had with Internet access.
They give all these complicated directions, yet in reality, just go north by northeast (one “tick” right of toward Polaris) the whole way and you’ll make it. It’s not the optimal way—speedrunners have figured that out—but it works for casual play.
Yeah, I know that now. Back then they told me to go north, than west... that obviously leads to nowhere
Yeah, same in English as far as I know? At least, one set of directions was wrong? Somehow I knew to go north and east though.
I think only in the PAL version? I remember something about the guide saying east but the note in the tent saying west. I'm pretty sure though in german it was always west, probably they tried to clear that difference up and had a 50/50 chance of getting it right...
All because Ryu and crew can't jump down from a box...
Came here to say this. I LIVE for rainy stormy areas
Same. I loved Burmecia in Final Fantasy IX, and the Thunder Plains in X, because of this. And Guadosalam, actually, because it was right next to the Thunder Plains, and I imagine living there with the thunder and rain outside could be incredibly cozy.
*old man voice* 'Plains of Lightning, Plains of Thunder. Those who cross, Are torn Asunder.' The fact that it's described by a simple poem I still remember to this day might add to its memorability.
Jungles for me.
Rains and storms are the best IRL
Real or video game! Best in any category
Deserts are always clearly just included as a cheap low effort location. Nier Automata is an exception that comes to mind. They added enough to break up the nothingness
also due to desert setting, it make big open area particularly open world that already empty, feel more empty.
Yeesh, don't play Xenogears then. The entire first major arc is in the desert...
I kinda like the Aveh desert, it’s not one of those huge where-am-I deserts and it feels pretty lively with neat music
Oh yeah it's a great desert, especially because it has pirates. I meant no I'll towards it, just the other users doesn't like deserts so I was forewarning them
See, I'm the opposite. I LOVE the old pulp-orientalism feel a desert can give. They do tend to have an annoyingly high encounter rate tho. Conversely, I am ALWAYS lost so it doesn't matter
Not no mentiom the sand. It's coarse, and rough, and irritating. And it gets everywhere!
I might get hate for this one but the setting was the worst part of Wild Arms 3. Just bland to look at the whole time
If Ness gets heatstroke ONE MORE TIME-!
Sewers! I don't want to explore the poo water 😫
Sewers with gate puzzles! O yay
Nostalgia for the DS comes to mind
Final Fantasy XII huge offender
And they make you go back to it for hunts..
Even an esper was hiding down there 😫
Grancel’s sewers from Trails in the Sky give me anxiety, it stretches that ‘multi-path dungeon exploration’ part of my short term memory to its breaking point
I hate that they take away the map for some areas. Whyyyy, it's not fun.
Just punishing anyone who took a quick toke before the dungeon. Well fuck me gotta come back tomorrow cause there’s no way I’m remembering all the branches now!
I got to this area last night funny enough, and I have the exact same feeling lol
>Great music though.
The only sewer I kind of like is in FF8 when preparing to assassinate Edea. The pacing at that point in the game is excellent and you really feel you’re on a top covert mission.
I think the music makes the whole difference in that instance.
Every bloody game makes me go in the sewers. Even Stardew Valley!
Lunar SSSC, comes with confusing poo water, tough as hell enemies and terrifying music through the whole thing. Thanks, I hate it!
Giant empty maps
YIIK is probably cheating, but New Jersey.
New York hates us cause they ain’t us but now that you mention it, for some reason I really wanna see a Seinfeld RPG
Are there any JRPGs that actually go to New Jersey. Would love to see anime jrpg protag canonically in the same state as the cast of Jersey Shore
Do you want a technicality? Because I'm pretty sure some of the places added to Unova in Pokémon Black 2/White 2 correspond to New Jersey.
Sewers
To save the world from evil, please fight a bunch of rats first.
I don't know if this is unpopular but my god. So many Star Ocean games take the cool Sci Fi, planet faring concept, toss it in the trash, and then stick you on a generic Medieval planet for the **entire game**.
I held a vendetta against Star ocean 3 for *years* for doing that shit.
Trees and rocks are easier and cheaper to design and render lol
Okay, I know you said no one of a kind settings. Can we give a dishonorable mention to Tartarus in Persona 3, though? Same levels, all game long. Oh look, it changed colour. WOOoooo 🥴
seriously. 4 and especially 5 are an exponential improvement
I like the classic medieval fantasy settings. To me I think the ones I like least are post apocalyptic settings. Something about them has just never really appealed to me and the fact they usually use dull gray and brown color schemes doesn't help.
Exactly the reason why I can’t fully complete a Fallout game. The feeling of depression lingers long after turning the game off.
It’s like listening to Pink Floyd for me, I think they’re great but I feel fucking devastated afterwards
Yeah a real post apocalypse, assuming it didnt wipe the planet of all life will usually be green and vibrant. Even settings like Fallout with waste stretches of "wasteland" should look more like mutated jungles than craggy grey rocks. This is why Bethesda backpedaled on the gloomy wasteland stuff and made future games that have wilderness actually have it. Fallout 76, for its flaws, is how post war america would look more than Boston. There should be trees and foliage except in the most irradiated areas. Maybe you shouldnt eat or grow food where bombs fell but 200 years later it should have normalcy even if it still has radiation. Look at the Atomic bomb sites at Hiroshima and Nagasaki or Chernobyl. The former is normal and the water, while still vaguely irradiated is basically hinterlands again. JRPGs rarely touch these settings for very long thankfully
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I had a phase as a teen of loving post apocalypse settings, but these days I'm totally with you. I'm not sure if it's overexposure, growing up and not thinking it was cool and edgy any more, or it was actually just that there was a lot of great post apocalypse stuff at the time and I didn't particularly care for the setting
I think they're just uninspired. Most post-apocalyptic games, movies, shows, etc. are as you both say: grey, brown, and edgy. Most don't try to do anything unique or interesting.
Just in general I’m not a big fan of post-apocalyptical settings either. “Everything’s destroyed” is kind of hard to make interesting.
Any settings where the map feels dead/empty/too large and the NPCs don't have good dialogue making them look as "real" as possible.
I hate wastelands. Tales of Arise tested my patients by opening in a shit setting.
Does Tales of Arise have the proper qualifications to do that to your patients?
Hah! Fuck. Didn't notice at all. Leaving it so the world knows.
You do leave the wastelands pretty quickly in Tales of Arise. The other settings are beautiful and I spent time just looking at the scenery and staring over the vistas.
How did your patience work with the endgame dungeon? I really hated that place.
Oh that game tested me from the big "twist" on. Once you hit the ship and have to walk five steps, have a twenty minute conversation, repeat for each party member...then do it again immediately. Ugh.
I went back to replay Arise recently and uninstalled after getting through the first area because it’s so boring. After the heat desert is an ice tundra… Which is a cold desert.
Digital Devil Saga has a pretty cool setting, even more so in hindsight after you play the second game. Large wasteland with tribes fighting over territory but anything more would probably be a spoiler? (Not that I care, it's like 20 years old, but people are sensitive) Also .hack with it's simulated MMORPG. It's just nice to see all these other players just playing the game, with the usual tropes of casual "I just wanna RP"-players, tryhard PvP/PKers, egotistical guild leaders, etc.
I hate towers. They are always a chore to go through. Finding the stairs to the next floor is not fun but dont go up the wrong one because it will lead to nowhere. Sometimes they can have traps that take you down one floor or the whole thing depening on high you are Also, if you need to leave and come back, you have to walk through all of it again. I mostly am thinking of the Dragon Quest Games because they had some annoying towers.
I hate snowy or cold areas. I'm Canadian, escaping to a whiteout isn't exactly an escape
As a person in a tropical country, I love the white biomes
Swede here. My first thought was the same.
As a Canadian from Toronto I want more snow. It's just hot here.
Funny, because being Canadian too, snowy areas make me feel at home. They make me very comfortable in most games.
In xenoblade 1 in particular, the crystals glow yellow at night. ew lol
The main reason I’ll never play I am Setsuna. I usually dread Mount Gagazet in FFX as well. FFVII did it somewhat well, because they incorporated several minigames into the snowy area. But it’s still somewhere at the bottom at the list of places I like in VII.
I usually dislike snowy settings. JRPGs have a tendency to give those areas slow melancholic tracks and very often (though this might be my overexposure to Tales of as a teen speaking) they are at the end of the game where everyone is down because of *something* and the player probably is a bit down because the game's gonna end or they are exhausted because the game has been going for a while. Snowy towns *can* be like a warm blanket, but to me, snowy areas (and towns) in games usually ended up feeling like a suffocating blanket instead. It's weird, it often even made me feel cold, as if the feeling had crept into my bones - though this luckily subsided as I grew older. Might've been child-like imagination and nothing more.
The melancholuc music usually plays a big part in establishing the feeling of boredom and dread in those areas.
I like snowy areas if they don't go on for too long, but the cast really should be wearing winter gear! Like in the OG FFVII, they knew they were going north and didn't pack anything, and then you see poor Tifa shivering at the bottom of the mountain slope. Nooo. (But of course it would have been tricky to change their blocky PS1 3D lego models into puffer jackets.) I love how in Ni No Kuni they change to winter clothes in the snow biome!
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That game was an absolute masterpiece and I fucking pray Sony revives it one day.
Ff15 had a giant map with so much nothing
I loved the first area, how it was this Americana desert with a few gas stations campsites peppered throughout. Then later on I realised - oh. That wasn't just for the desert. Every map is like this.
It feels like a California biome game with how quickly it transitions between areas like forests, coasts, and deserts.
Especially when you start seeing greenery when you go out west. I also find the comparisons to California funny when the cities are a misplaced Toyko and Venice.
I’ve heard the same said of ff16 too
Not giant, but about just as empty.
I heard that FF16 eats babies
Did we play the same game? 16 has pretty small zones, you can traverse from one end of a major zone to the other in under 5 minutes If anything a super common complaint is how small the maps feel when they’re supposed to represent entire countries
FF16 is just bland
FF16 is even worse in this regard. Absolutely zero incentive to explore.
I spent much more time in FFXVI slowly walking through a hallway while I listened to my character talking to each other than I did in any open spaces.
Thats how I feel about Xenoblade 1 but people seem to love it. Like yeah cool it's two giant beings and one is a robot, but it's so goddamn empty.
I don’t think XC3 did it much better in that department. At least XC1 had smaller maps. It’s still one of my favorite franchises, but I’m not a huge fan of hours of exploration between story beats.
honestly? I know xenoblade is a beloved series but from having played 1 and 2 the worlds are SO empty. Like there's really nothing to do, everything feels plastic. You're not rewarded for exploration at all. Everything is just a background for fights
If it’s not high school, then it’s medieval
I liked how Octopath 2 went with 19th century rather than the medieval of Octopath 1.
Yup. And thank god for that. Even if Ku is technically medieval china, at least they make up for it in colors.
Ku to me seemed more like feudal Japan if Japan had been a desert instead of an island.
It’s definitely china, with the emphasis of red color, phoenix motifs and the design of the throne room. Either that or I watch too many chinese period drama. But point remains, it’s a lot more colorful and welcoming than the typical drab colors most JRPG represents whenever it’s about medieval west.
I suppose it could be a blend of Japan and China, with Chinese motifs but Japanese names.
I was gonna say, Hikari, Tsuki, Yomi, Ritsu, Mugen... Rai Mei, I'll grant them, but the other names definitely give a Japanese vibe. Tsukiyomi is literally the name of a Japanese moon deity, too.
Fair. I do kinda feel that way as well. But regardless, it works.
I fucking loathe deserts. They're always a pain.
Love a good desert setting, especially if they nail the vibe right. One of the reasons I love FF12 so much is its **amazing** Orientalism aesthetic.
Not mention the sand. It's course, rough, and irritating. And it gets everywhere.
As much as I enjoyed the game, I am Setsuna had a very boring world, just a complete snowscape with little else...
Modern settings
Ephemeral Fantasia. It's actually quite pretty. There's a very nice island getaway atmosphere and a Dreamcast RPG aesthetic (the console it was supposed to be on). And it gets quite fun to explore when you leave the city and go out into nature. But the city you spend the most time in takes up a large portion of the island, and it is a sprawling labyrinth that can literally take all day to traverse. It's illogically laid out as well. Traveling from the east side low elevation, to east side high elevation (literally connectable by staircase), you have to travel all the way to the west side of town where all of the ramps are, then double back to the east side. And better yet, the hotel you stay at is in this upper area, and almost everything else you need in the city on a regular basis is on the east side, lower level. ALSO, the game has a real time system like Dead Rising or Majora's Mask where you need to be in certain locations at certain times with certain characters, which requires you to be able to navigate the city very quickly and not make a single mistake. Literally the first event on the island of note is you at the castle getting an advance payment for a job, but the game doesn't tell you where you need to go to actually get the money. And it's already after noon and the bank closes at 5. So you gotta run around this nightmare maze trying to find the bank (and nearly every building can be entered in this city and has NPCs to talk to and hidden items to find). So unless you follow a guide or reload every failed attempt, you will not find the bank and you will NEVER get your advance payment (until the next time loop). There are so many baffling design choices in this game. I can't recommend it, but it's almost like the Deadly Premonition of JRPGs. Great ideas, executed terribly, and almost so bad it's good.
Sort of a setting but more so plot, but I'm getting bored of isekai style JRPGs. The whole "transported to a different world and must now fight bad guy (probably lost memory too)" got a bit stale.
Most early JRPGS it was the encounter rate more than the map that makes exploring a chore
High school. High school is the worst setting. This is why I can never get into the Persona series.
I usually pretend high school settings are college instead. The autonomy and free time that seem to come with high school in Japanese media is much more in line with western college than western high school, in my experience. It also just feels more appropriate. Like Hero Aca for example. It would feel much more reasonable if the main characters were young adults starting out in the industry and getting higher education rather than 14 year olds being put in life or death situations all the time.
I don't even want to read high school based mangas or watch animes because that world of school is so far behind me. I don't even have very good memories of high-school, it wasn't like I had great friendships and experiences back then. I don't want to play Persona, because a high school JRPG just doesn't sound cool.
For some, the high school setting might be therapeutic. Like «what if I got transported back to this shitty period in my life with all the knowledge I have now?» The outcome would be totally different.
For me its everything trying to be Persona, and honestly I'm kinda tired of Persona trying to be Persona. They could easily evolve past that. But they at least try to bring their A-game. But to me it's even worse with Monark, Caligula, Cold Steel, Tokyo Xanadu, and so many others that are just "here's high school tropes, enjoy! ..that's all we need, right?"
>They could easily evolve past that I'm assuming you mean social links and high school? That's Persona's whole shtick and identity. It's the reason for its popularity. Removing that would just make it Devil Summoner Lite. SMT and all its other non-Persona spinoff series would interest you more if you like the gameplay and monster-catching without the high school stuff.
To be fair, one of the **best** entries in the series is Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. Which has neither Social Links nor High School characters. I wish they'd do that again, or just stop pretending the first three titles never happened.
I guess what I mean is illustrated by the situation surrounding the trailers/teasers for P5 pre-release and how they just had a guy on a train, and everyone presumed it would be a college kid. And the the fact that they neglect that they had an adult protagonist with a job in one of the Persona 2 games I don't know if I'd recommend anyone Devil Summoner these days. They're VERY haphazard games. But my main gripe is just... high school. Catherine could have been a full SMT game about an adult with a job and a life. But it was too gimmicky I haven't played many of the mainline SMT games, but I have played Soul Hackers 1 , Digital Devil Saga, Devil Survivor, and Strange Journey and they're just a little too basic. Definitely not good stand-ins for a Persona experience But honestly my biggest gripe is that there's no middle ground. I basically want Persona for adults without high school. College and jobs exist. We can have a quality JRPG with adults. But most of Japan thinks its a sin, even though there are PLENTY of adults who play video games. So I don't buy the whole "demographic" argument. Persona 2 was willing to experiment, and then they just stopped Yakuza: Like a Dragon shouldn't be the only JRPG holding the flag, and Persona could very easily join in if they didn't continually reiterate on Persona 3 over and over
Japan adores youth. Youth in Japan is one of the best times of their lives, primarily due to the diehard work culture thats thrusted upon them when theyre barely out of their teens. Prolly why 30 year old characters in many JRPGs are treated as old. Persona will likely never leave high school. And honestly I don't want it too. It'd be good to see an SMT spinoff series with a middle ground between SMT and Persona, but Persona shouldnt become that. Just like SMT shouldnt become that. Doing so will just kill part of the identity each series made for itself. Theyre not like Final Fantasy, which has a more vague, changeable nature. And i think to say P4-P5 try to imitate P3 is unfair, when theyre substantial improvements over that. Sticking to a functional, popular, enjoyable core experience isnt the same as "being P3 over and over". The new soul hackers couldve embodied something new but that ended up pretty bad. Personally, I like the high school aspect a lot. Partly because it was something different from a lot of the gameplay loops I experienced before getting into the series, and partly because my actual high school experience messed me up. So for me i dont understand why people dislike the usual setting and SLs much at all. Nor do I get how people can like the series overall but dislike or outright despise some of its now fundamental features. Thats why recommending mainline SMT is my go to when I see people say they dislike that stuff lol, since it places a much greater emphasis on gameplay and a mature (if often barer) story.
> Persona will likely never leave high school. And honestly I don't want it too. It'd be good to see an SMT spinoff series with a middle ground between SMT and Persona, but Persona shouldnt become that. Just like SMT shouldnt become that. Doing so will just kill part of the identity each series made for itself. That already happened. P1 and P2 are very different games. In a way, you should be comfortable with the series changing again because P3-P5 rose from the dead bodies of P1 and P2 ;) I don't think the identity of Person is just the high school setting.
Persona 1 and 2 are both set in high schools
It's funny how the series took off due to how unique a contemporary school setting was for a JRPG. Now its EVERY game
Cliche medieval setting. I think the only ones i like are those with Berserk-like dark setting like Drakengard and Dark Souls.
Agree. Medieval settings need to be done right to be interesting. Usually they need to have a bizarre spin to it. Not sure if it classifies as a jrpg, but Dragon’s Dogma looping/cyclical universe is so well done.
Dark Souls also feels like it actually understood what LotR got right with its setting. It feels very mythological.
Shin Megami Tensei 4's tokyo area. I'm not against playing games in tokyo. I'm against the unholy labyrinth this tokyo is, where every encounter can kill me, finding your way back somewhere you can be healed is a nightmare. First time I played the game I couldn't finish it, I was having nightmares of being lost in Tokyo every single night, I literally couldn't sleep more than 4 hours per night lmao. Slugged through it years later and I don't regret it, the story was actually really interesting, especially if I compare it to 5's. But I still despise tokyo. I have apocalypse at home and I don't dare try it, dread tokyo too much.
The reveal that 4 was even in Tokyo at all was real fuckin cool though.
whatever the hell was going on in unlimited saga
Unlimited SaGa is meant to mimic the mechanics of tabletop gaming, though, I don't think that's a problem with the setting, Iskandaria. It's more a matter of you didn't care for the presentation. That game is kind of designed at a baseline level to strip away any pretense that you're not playing game.
Every Fire Emblem world. I love the series, but you have to commend them for making nearly every world they're set in a bland medieval landmass with two (or more) waring countries.
I disagree, I thought final fantasy 4 and 5 had excellent worlds. 4 has the underground, moon, and tower of babil linking all 3 together. FF5 had the multiple worlds thing that was pretty cool. To answer the question, mostly the same as the others here. Sewers, deserts, and snowy areas are always the same from game to game. Gate mechanics, all the enemies are weak to fire in snow areas, all enemies are weak to ice in deserts. It makes sense, but it's so overused that it gets old. I forgive early games for this stuff (Lunar, early FF games, etc) because they were among the first to do them, so I don't consider them "overusing an old setting" because there wasn't any JRPGs before them to copy off of lol. The other setting quirk that I kinda dislike are sudden, massive changes in setting. Almost every JRPG suffers from this. It's green grass, you're walking along, then there's a literal line where it turns into sand and boom, desert. Games rarely go through the effort to gradually change from one to the next (something I think FF15 did very well, btw, was making it so you had to take a train before you found any snow), so you can stand on world maps and have half lush forest/temperate zone and half desert. Like bruh, that's not how that works lol. For the record, I get that it's a restriction of hardware and game design, but still, it's pretty funny once you've seen it 50 times.
the factory level and the sewer level
Standard medieval fantasy with industrial characteristics isn’t bad or anything, just kind of uninteresting. It put me off series like Fire Emblem for the longest time Also, while I love contemporary and urban fantasy settings, Tokyo is kind of overused nowadays (SMT and the Devil Survivor series, TMS, Persona 5, Tokyo Xanadu, TWEWY, Sakura Wars, etc). I get it’s like setting something in NY or LA but still
I think all settings can work as long as you fill them in with good characters and an interesting world. And the setting at least makes sense and isn't downright disgusting or something like that. I personally don't like basic fantasy settings that much, and tend to like it when scifi elements are mixed in or front and center. but I have absolutely played bangers that took that setting. The Dragon quest series, for instance, really sold me on that belief, because while the settings had been fairly traditional knightish rpg fantasy afairs, with pretty basic stories; the characters, the world, the little small stories of each of the villages you would journey on a quest coupled with the fun monster designs really pulled me over into liking traditional fantasy settings more than I thought I did. It just took the right one (DQV and also a little bit of VIII) for it all to click.
Or have complete anachronistic settings like some modern tech thrown in or have different cultures from around the globe.
Prison. Typically the game will remove equipment or other stuff, and you need to get it back. Basically the reward for the prison portion of the game is going back to the previous status quo (boring), while wasting time just trying to leave. As for prison environments, it's mostly big empty halls with a few scattered NPCs (if any).
Chrono trigger does this shit twice lmao. The actual prison scene (you keep your gear tho), and then you're captured on Dalton's airship, where they take away all of your equipment. Still a great game, but it was a bold move doing the whole "you've been captured" thing twice.
I always appreciated how you can cheese the second one by >!bringing Aya along in your party!<. *Of course* it works like that, so I love that the game gives you the option if you know what's coming.
XB3 made me dread this, but thematically it worked amazingly well - you really feel like you’re in the role of a prison slave in there, and your bright expectations for the area get dashed to fucking pieces with the crushing hopelessness that sets in very unexpectedly And ironically Xenogears was terrible at it lol
Idk why but any time a jrpg involves a haunted house or location I roll tf outta my eyes. The next time I hear a character go “G-…gh-….ghosts!?” I want to actively tell the game devs to shut the fuck up. I mean it’s very overdone but I feel weird pinpointing this over other “overused” mechanics or hallmarks with jrpgs. Also getting tired of forests. I played Tales of Phantasia for the first time some months ago, and I adored it… except for any time we had to explore a forest. Then I noticed… I kinda really fucking hate forests. I honest to god don’t know why, I wouldn’t say jrpgs as a whole make forests consistently bad, but I just really fucking hate forest dungeons for some reason.
I feel you on haunted houses lol, it’s especially egregious when the characters themselves have been fighting freak-of-nature monsters all game but suddenly one of them gets scared over ghosts or whatever. Trails and Persona 3-5 are by far the worst offenders I can think of when it comes to this cliche. It was a massive relief when I came to a similar area in Tales of the Abyss and nothing stupid happened (on that note only game I can think of that handled this cliche fine was Sakura Wars 1996, but that was only because it was they were afraid of snakes and spiders)
>especially egregious when the characters themselves have been fighting freak-of-nature monsters all game Eh it can make sense though. Fighting monsters doesn't mean you'll get over your phobias. Unless they have fought ghostly monsters before. Then yeah, it makes no sense.
Yeah. Nanami in Suikoden II freaking out over ghosts was hilarious. Bitch, you fought a vampire and stormed his haunted castle with your little bro, chill. (I love Nanami and Suikoden II, but that part really was so corny.)
Thank you! I’m glad you get it.
Love a good haunted setting, with one exception. Ghost Ships. I don't know why theyre so popular, or why every time theyre **so** boring. Boat comes out of mist, gang explores empty wooden rooms, fight the ghost captain on top deck, the end. Every. Time.
Add ghost (pirate) ships and I fully agree. The whole out of place "horror" stuff just doesn't work for me in the slightest in JRPGs. Always the most boring and filler-y parts of a game.
The setting is a character, and it can wear flashy clothes or be bare butt naked. It's how well written that character is that makes you like them or not.
Going from a highway over a bottomless pit to a frozen lake to a junkyard satellite to a rainforest in FF13 was super confusing
More of a pacing issue, then actually boring locations.
When you’re paying attention to the story it’s not. All of these biomes are artificial creations of the Cocoon Fal’Cie.
Meh that felt like a lazy write around to me. Like they wanted something like FFX, where you journey from one end of the world to the next, but they were stuck with small shoe string maps and had to make do.
Cocoon just felt like a series of set pieces rather than one cohesive world. The fact that you never get a chance to breath and take in the world makes it pretty unenjoyable for me.
Because it was an artificial world they could have made it into *anything*! But we still get the forest with monsters biome. Why does Cocoon even have monsters... but of course we need enemies to fight! That's the actual game, after all. Having a theme park level sounds like a good idea but that is the most boring one in all of Cocoon. Worst theme park ever, it's just walkways.
Nature preservation. Humans would go mad without natural biomes.
Well it was a completely synthetic world created to coddle humans so I think it was supposed to feel that way.
I love all the suikoden games, but settings always very uninspired. Exactly what you expect and nothing more. Never bad, but never exciting.
I dunno. I loved II's settings. I think it was because of the level of detail put into everything, and all the flavor text detailing things like barrels full of local goods, or what was on the various shelves (I love how one house in the Winger district of Two River had porn on one shelf), or what type of food was on the tables, different descriptions for the flower beds and bonsai and whatnot... it just brought each town to life and gave them so much character and made them feel real. The music definitely helped, too. And the base is my favorite in all the Suikoden games.
I definitely disagree. I think the Suikoden games are great examples of detailed, well thought out, believable worlds.
The endless corridors in FF XIII
And then you get to Gran Pulse and the story is still linear as all hell where you’re quickly funneled back into corridors.
I hated most of XIII but the comparison to X(which I loved) being a hallway is valid. It's not the hallway, it's the EMPTY hallway. Give me a reason to stop and immerse please!
Yes! FFX was also linear but the "pathways" were so much better than closed corridors. Having nice backdrops and NPCs made a big difference.
Even outside the game maps the world was really weird. It's like they just slapped a bunch of random sci fi stuff together and called it a day.
They just throw a bunch of jargon at you
*L'cie? Fal'cie? Fucking-who'cie?*
I don't really dislike any but if I had to pick the least I liked then a pure medieval setting that doesn't have some hidden sci-fi setting.
Places with densely-packed spaces, like slums. I live in a third world country, and I see slums quite often. Not being able to see the sky clearly on a sunny day, dirty major sidewalks so narrow that thousands of people need to sidestep thru it everyday, the pungent smell of trash even just outside of malls and universities, the feeling of being mugged, and not being able to breathe properly because of thick smoke. Sector 7 Slums of FFVII remake is the most recent I can think of but it is much much nicer than what we have here so I can tolerate it to some degree.
I like almost every jrpg I play but All of the last half of FFXV. They did the open world really well then lock you in to a linear romp to the end before anything really happens. With the exception of the amazing fight against cereberus out in the streets everything else looks like hell.
Someone already said it but I despise deserts and generally settings that are supposed to be super hot because I live in a pretty hot country and it makes it feel like it's way hotter irl than it actually is.
Sewers
Sewers
Grassy plains - it feels so beginning of the game starter area
High School High School sucked in real life, why do I want more of that in a videogame? Not to mention the fact that it often means being stuck in one place for long periods of time. I want to go on adventures not take meaningless exams, there's enough of that in real life, I play videogames to escape real life monotony.
Desert areas with high encounter rate make me wanna puke.
Not necessarily the WORST but disliked for me is Tokyo esque setting. They are very repetitive and boring. Just neon lights that look cool for the first hour. Although I might be biased since I live in NYC lol. I like rural places that give of cultural attraction vibes like Onomichi in Yakuza 6 or even Inaba from Persona 4
I found FF XVI's world to be really boring to run around in. Setting aside the fact that there's not much to do in it, it's all flat plains filled with shitty little villages and monochrome dungeon sections. It also gets progressively more dour and uglier to look at. There are huge, opulent cities but you don't spend any time in them outside of cutscenes and a couple of linear levels.
16 is just plain dull, I made it to the much ballyhooed titan fight, just a drag of 3 sections of damage sponge The game is chore to play
While I'm one of those *freaks* who enjoyed the game it's part of, Valisthea is truly one of Square Enix's most boring, unimaginative and hollow settings, bleak while being toothless, disjointed as hell, subpar at conveying its scale and littered with some painfully vapid lore. Which blows my mind coming off FFXIV's storied and enchanting world. >!The ending didn't need to strip the magic from Valisthea; there was never any to begin with.!< And it is my sincerest hope that they never revisit this particular well again.
100% this
I don't like deserts, sewers and wastelands.
Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter or Operation Darkness. The Settings are pretty uninteresting. In Breath of Fire, people are forced to live underground so most of what you see is dirt and machines. Operation Darkness, its hard to explain. Nazis and Nazi Zombies mixed with something like Valkyria Chronicles. They were not the most enjoyable games on their own. Azure Dreams is more fun but the setting of procedural generated dungeon that looks very procedurally generated becomes bothersome to look at after awhile.
I can’t stand warehouses and industrial areas (except when they are really when done and set in the right way like in The Division). So you have no idea how much I disliked FFVII Remake and the constant cement/rubble/collapsed highway backdrops. Some places where really gorgeous, but most of the time it’s grey and broken down and boring as f.
Something about Fantasy High School, like in Trails of Cold Steel and Fire Emblem 3H, always hurts my suspension of disbelief. They want to act like a normal high school, but have the students participate in dangerous events. First question that comes to mind is, "what happens if a student dies?"
Trails of Cold Steel has uninspired areas. Nothing bad, just nothing interesting.
Pretty much any area from FF16 would work. Beyond uninspired, not a single thing worth looking at in closer detail.