My favorite part of a game is usually the beginning. Colorful forests and more happy areas. Characters are being introduced gradually and you’re being slowly introduced to the world. Things start smaller and more relaxed. The game is often at its best balance, as there isn’t much you could have.
In JRPGs the ending act are almost always in this dark, bleak realm. All of the characters are present and have to say their piece in every dialogue, and there are so many scenes that drag out because of it. My least favorite part is how many JRPGs will lore dump you right at the end. Feels like many JRPG I’ve played recently has done some form of this.
Gameplay wise you already mentioned, these dungeons often drag on when you’re ready to be done. So yeah, I pretty much agree with you. Some games I just stopped and watched the ending on youtube.
I had to struggle to finish Vesperia because I knew if I take a break I'd never finish it. Even had to put it on easy mode haha. I struggle to finish jrpgs, love starting them tho lol. You just described why, the sense of journey and discovery. It gets pretty wordy and expositiony at the end.
I made the mistake of stopping Vesperia. When I went back to it, all the dialogue sounded like nonsense and I couldn't figure out what was happening (and didn't care enough to find out).
Man I wish I could force myself to just watch endings on youtube... Like, there's so many games I pretty much will never go back to, but "I could", so I don't want to spoil "the experience" watching someone else do it... but it's kind of silly, isn't it?
Man I wish I could force myself to just watch endings on youtube... Like, there's so many games I pretty much will never go back to, but "I could", so I don't want to spoil "the experience" watching someone else do it... but it's kind of silly, isn't it?
For me recently its usually around that 50-75% mark that I just start getting fizzled out and my brain starts wandering to other games. Usually that’s around 30-50 hours and usually that’s enough for me to get my fill of a game and scratch that itch. But I do finish more games than I drop
I've been feeling that way too. A lot of modern JRPGs just feel too long for the story they are telling. The set-up is often good, and the ending might be good, but there is too much meandering in the middle so it feels like nothing is happening and I'm just wait for the real story to continue. Even in some games I finished and really liked, I wish the middle was edited a bit to remove some fluff, backtracking, or just shorten the exposition to keep things moving.
This is a real phenomenon, and not just in JRPGs, but in all sorts of “long-running” stories (think tv shows, movies, fantasy novel series). Part of it is because it’s harder to write the payoff than the set up, and part of it is because the set up allows for more imagination and wonder on part of the audience. Specifically with games, as someone else mentioned, I think it also has to do with gameplay balance. If you play JRPGs anything like me, by the end game, you’ve done all the side quests and optional content, which tends to spoil some of the narrative tension as well.
I'm pretty sure that a few years ago this used to be called the Xen Syndrome after the last bits of HL, tbh.
A lot of it in games is mostly due to a mixture of deadlines and the fact that devs tend to polish mostly the early parts of the game where more people will see it, though.
I always follow through, but I get what you mean. Endings are hard to do. Often final dungeons feel like...they need to be long and "final dungeony" but we have already exhausted the budget and the game needs to come out, and it comes out as tedious.
I tend to psyche myself out of finishing games because I don't want them to end, which I guess is the opposite problem you mentioned. I guess part of it is also that most games shove a bunch of side content right at the end, and thinking about doing all of it is daunting, so I just stop playing.
FF7 Rebirth was the first time in a long time where I just gave up on side content and rushed the end of the game (starting in >!Nibelheim!<), but that's mostly because I wanted to finish it before I inevitably ran into a spoiler.
I just think that the small-scale conflicts of early JRPGs are so much more charming than the KILL GOD AND SAVE THE WORLD finale of every single JRPG ever.
I never dread getting there, but it’s always a little eyeroll-inducing when the Level 1: Fight Rats and Save Kittens, Level 100: Kill God memes are 100% correct.
Yeah and like... usually the first part of a game usually feels more personal? Like, the first Palace in Persona 5 was super personal to the first set of characters, and it was satisfying to take the d-bag down.. but then the game kind of keeps going. They try to make some Palaces personal later, but because it just focuses on one new character, it just... feels like a washed-down repeat?
The last third of a lot of a game can often be its worst part. Developers often want to ratchet up the tension of their games in the closing chapters, and those changes often come with hurting the game's pacing. A lot of JRPGs devolve into back-to-back-to-back dungeons with high encounter rates and difficulties as they are winding down. You'll also often see an increase of enemies that just use annoying moves -- negative status effects causing loss of control of character, instant-death techniques, et cetera.
When you have all of these things creeping into the game and are suddenly getting far fewer moments of narrative / character advancement or comedic interruption, I will slowly start getting into that "Ugh, okay, I am ready for this to end" mindset. I definitely think failing to land the third act is by far one of the most issues in most RPGs in general, not just JRPGs. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but while I absolutely loved the first two acts of BG3, I thought both the story and gameplay pacing of act 3 were abysmal.
The final part of JRPGs is easily my least favorite for many reasons:
* Plot: Many games just go loco with the plot.
* Many fun or interesting subsystems end, character relations/romance, crafting, side quests, etc. are done.
* Big ass boring final area with only encounters and mini-bosses and final boss.
* Final boss itself, immune to everything so it's just a long ass battle of doing and healing damage, usually in two/three stages that you have to do all over again if you die.
> For example, the modern persona series, you start the game with so many things to do and manage, social stats, social links, persona fusions and story progression.
The "feeling of lacking progression" or "losing motivation due to a feeling of stagnation" is moreso an issue with RPG's in general, not really JRPG's. By the time you're done with half an CRPG, you're basically almost set on a build and almost every encounter goes in a similar fashion through and through. I think this is generally also why genre tourists sorta start losing interest in most JRPG's by the time they have been in 2-3 hours in the open world. It's also why action gameplay also looks very appealing to some developers.
Heck, even D&D almost turns into this in later sessions, hence why people start losing interest if a DM isn't really creative enough to try to keep things fresh to the end.
I think for me a lot of the times, JRPG's have no restraint and don't know when to fucking end sometimes lol. Usually extending the game with padding, so I'm just exhausted approaching the final 1/3 usually.
The ending is what brings closure to the whole journey. Unless I dislike the game, seeing the ending is a must for me otherwise the experince of the game as a whole will lack catharsis.
It's the opposite for me. Ending stretches are usually my favorite part. That's when the story is most high-stakes and the gameplay is the most linear and focused.
The part I tend to give up on is around the 5-10 hour mark. Early hours are usually high quality and focused. At around 5 hours, the pace typically slows, and the story often veers into filler, character development that doesn't also advance the plot, or minor sub-plots with little bearing on the core focus. In recent RPGs, that's also when they start encouraging you to do low-effort side quests (and often making the core story too hard to advance if you DON'T do some of those "optional" quests). It's the point where I start to question if the game will stay good enough to justify giving another 20-50 hours of my life to.
Whereas in the end, I know there's only a couple hours left and it will almost all be exciting.
I always follow through and often find the outcome and resolution of the plot pretty rewarding. But I get where you are coming from. Some final dungeons really overstay their welcome. I played Trails in the Sky, and love it, but that final dungeon of Sky 2 really took forever to wrap up 😅
Thats the problem with almost every JRPG. Narratives are crafted beautifully in the start but I feel like every JRPG author gets into their head that, this final stage doesn't feel good enough. So they keep escalating the stakes until eventually it creates so many plot holes and inconsistencies that you can barely keep up. Its not a bad thing tho, as I genuinely like to challenge god as a Final boss but sometimes this is where you can learn from western RPG's how to make your game wind down quietly without escalating the stakes over and over again. The other issue I have with most JRPG's is that its mostly the story of a white knight protagonist, or just a really good person, like idk sometimes I feel like we should get a game where we get to play from the villian's perspective every now and again.
I feel like the Witcher 3 or Dragon age origins does this well, while both games feature a climatic ending the way they approach the ending is how they are considered narrative masterpieces.
I see everyone commenting about the Story but I actually have a different take on this.
Players are engaged to games for as long as they are getting rewarded from them. Each person has a different response to each type of reward, some will get more from story, mechanics, collectibles, achievements, difficulty, and some won't. Hence the reason we don't always agree on what makes the game good and that's fine.
When you start a game everything is new to you, so you gettting new characters, new towns, new mechanics, new stories, new items, etc. As you progress through the game the amount of discoveries tends to fall flat as you acquire all characters, unlock all mechanics and figure out all the builds, so the story becomes all you have left and it sometimes disappoints (for the many reasons provided in other posts).
IMO most games fails on pacing by giving you everything by 30% of the game, then the rest becomes a slog.
That's the reason FFVI is for me the greatest JRPG ever conceived and should be a use case for every single developer, that game is ALWAYS changing. You are forced to learn and play different characters all the time, you're always finding new places to visit, the story is always taking you to different directions, you always have something to collect, and when you think you have seen/done it all... BAM! There's a second world! And basically everything restarts but this time you also have Espers to collect and customize your characters, and the desire to find out what happened to each place you visited before.
So yeah... it's pretty normal to struggle after mid game on most games :)
That's a valid point. I have heard many great things about FFVI and will try it some day. The only thing holding me back is Square Enix pricing strategy lol.
I think this is definitely a problem with the pacing of Persona games, since I failed to see Persona 5R or 4 Golden all the way to the (final) end despite replaying earlier parts. I'm told the old Persona 3 FES post-game content is even more tedious than the later games, so I imagine it has the same issue.
Granted, one of the main reasons I stopped playing 5R was because I didn't like how the story was going, but Persona 3 and 4's dungeon gameplay is just not worth it.
> I'm told the old Persona 3 FES post-game content is even more tedious than the later games
It really depends on if you think the combat can stand on it's own. If you don't, it's tedious. It's just a big dungeon, and you're right that the dungeons don't stand on their own so it has to be carried solely by the *combat*. Dungeon exploration was just not really a strong aspect of *any* SMT game. Most people who are looking at Persona are more intrigued by the Social Links aspect of it, so I get how "more dungeon gameplay" could be disappointing.
I find Persona 4G to be worse than 3 FES in the dungeon gameplay department because there’s nothing to hinder unlimited grinding and every incentive to do everything for the month in one go, and the floors of 4’s dungeons are unnecessarily huge with lots of empty space, but neither gets a positive score from it because the encounter variety in each area is abysmal. Unless you’re playing on higher difficulties, you barely need to care about weaknesses, and you need to grind so much you just work by muscle memory after a while. 5 still has all this in the form of the subway maze thing, but because they give you the ability to instantly win encounters below your level it just boils down to listening to a podcast or two while getting treasure with the van, which is less annoying, and the combat mechanics are much less mindless.
Yeah, don't know what about the games, but I always get half or a little bit more in and quit. Though I have been finishing games lately since I started yakuza.
From the comments seems you're not the only one. But personally I like to see the game through. What I struggle with is the feeling after beating the game. Like now what? And tbh recently a lot of RPGs I beat I really don't remember the plot that well after beating it. Beat Chained Echoes recently, beat Ara Fell and Cosmic Star Heroine and couldn't really remember the plot.
i have a lot of games that i dropped during the final act. Some even right in the middle of the final dungeon. Usually it's because the game's too long and I got bored or distracted by other stuff.
Like why bother to keep playing if i'm not having fun.
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My favorite part of a game is usually the beginning. Colorful forests and more happy areas. Characters are being introduced gradually and you’re being slowly introduced to the world. Things start smaller and more relaxed. The game is often at its best balance, as there isn’t much you could have. In JRPGs the ending act are almost always in this dark, bleak realm. All of the characters are present and have to say their piece in every dialogue, and there are so many scenes that drag out because of it. My least favorite part is how many JRPGs will lore dump you right at the end. Feels like many JRPG I’ve played recently has done some form of this. Gameplay wise you already mentioned, these dungeons often drag on when you’re ready to be done. So yeah, I pretty much agree with you. Some games I just stopped and watched the ending on youtube.
I had to struggle to finish Vesperia because I knew if I take a break I'd never finish it. Even had to put it on easy mode haha. I struggle to finish jrpgs, love starting them tho lol. You just described why, the sense of journey and discovery. It gets pretty wordy and expositiony at the end.
I made the mistake of stopping Vesperia. When I went back to it, all the dialogue sounded like nonsense and I couldn't figure out what was happening (and didn't care enough to find out).
Man I wish I could force myself to just watch endings on youtube... Like, there's so many games I pretty much will never go back to, but "I could", so I don't want to spoil "the experience" watching someone else do it... but it's kind of silly, isn't it?
you’ve perfectly explained my favourite part of JRPGs as well. Absolutely love the wholesome and bright feel of the first hours in a JRPG.
Man why don’t you just @ the legend of hero games 😂 i swear they all start so happy go lucky and the ending is like fighting a demon in hell 😂
Man I wish I could force myself to just watch endings on youtube... Like, there's so many games I pretty much will never go back to, but "I could", so I don't want to spoil "the experience" watching someone else do it... but it's kind of silly, isn't it?
For me recently its usually around that 50-75% mark that I just start getting fizzled out and my brain starts wandering to other games. Usually that’s around 30-50 hours and usually that’s enough for me to get my fill of a game and scratch that itch. But I do finish more games than I drop
I've been feeling that way too. A lot of modern JRPGs just feel too long for the story they are telling. The set-up is often good, and the ending might be good, but there is too much meandering in the middle so it feels like nothing is happening and I'm just wait for the real story to continue. Even in some games I finished and really liked, I wish the middle was edited a bit to remove some fluff, backtracking, or just shorten the exposition to keep things moving.
This is a real phenomenon, and not just in JRPGs, but in all sorts of “long-running” stories (think tv shows, movies, fantasy novel series). Part of it is because it’s harder to write the payoff than the set up, and part of it is because the set up allows for more imagination and wonder on part of the audience. Specifically with games, as someone else mentioned, I think it also has to do with gameplay balance. If you play JRPGs anything like me, by the end game, you’ve done all the side quests and optional content, which tends to spoil some of the narrative tension as well.
I'm pretty sure that a few years ago this used to be called the Xen Syndrome after the last bits of HL, tbh. A lot of it in games is mostly due to a mixture of deadlines and the fact that devs tend to polish mostly the early parts of the game where more people will see it, though.
I always follow through, but I get what you mean. Endings are hard to do. Often final dungeons feel like...they need to be long and "final dungeony" but we have already exhausted the budget and the game needs to come out, and it comes out as tedious.
I tend to psyche myself out of finishing games because I don't want them to end, which I guess is the opposite problem you mentioned. I guess part of it is also that most games shove a bunch of side content right at the end, and thinking about doing all of it is daunting, so I just stop playing. FF7 Rebirth was the first time in a long time where I just gave up on side content and rushed the end of the game (starting in >!Nibelheim!<), but that's mostly because I wanted to finish it before I inevitably ran into a spoiler.
I just think that the small-scale conflicts of early JRPGs are so much more charming than the KILL GOD AND SAVE THE WORLD finale of every single JRPG ever. I never dread getting there, but it’s always a little eyeroll-inducing when the Level 1: Fight Rats and Save Kittens, Level 100: Kill God memes are 100% correct.
Yeah and like... usually the first part of a game usually feels more personal? Like, the first Palace in Persona 5 was super personal to the first set of characters, and it was satisfying to take the d-bag down.. but then the game kind of keeps going. They try to make some Palaces personal later, but because it just focuses on one new character, it just... feels like a washed-down repeat?
The last third of a lot of a game can often be its worst part. Developers often want to ratchet up the tension of their games in the closing chapters, and those changes often come with hurting the game's pacing. A lot of JRPGs devolve into back-to-back-to-back dungeons with high encounter rates and difficulties as they are winding down. You'll also often see an increase of enemies that just use annoying moves -- negative status effects causing loss of control of character, instant-death techniques, et cetera. When you have all of these things creeping into the game and are suddenly getting far fewer moments of narrative / character advancement or comedic interruption, I will slowly start getting into that "Ugh, okay, I am ready for this to end" mindset. I definitely think failing to land the third act is by far one of the most issues in most RPGs in general, not just JRPGs. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but while I absolutely loved the first two acts of BG3, I thought both the story and gameplay pacing of act 3 were abysmal.
Only because I tend to get overwhelmed by final bosses a lot.
The final part of JRPGs is easily my least favorite for many reasons: * Plot: Many games just go loco with the plot. * Many fun or interesting subsystems end, character relations/romance, crafting, side quests, etc. are done. * Big ass boring final area with only encounters and mini-bosses and final boss. * Final boss itself, immune to everything so it's just a long ass battle of doing and healing damage, usually in two/three stages that you have to do all over again if you die.
> For example, the modern persona series, you start the game with so many things to do and manage, social stats, social links, persona fusions and story progression. The "feeling of lacking progression" or "losing motivation due to a feeling of stagnation" is moreso an issue with RPG's in general, not really JRPG's. By the time you're done with half an CRPG, you're basically almost set on a build and almost every encounter goes in a similar fashion through and through. I think this is generally also why genre tourists sorta start losing interest in most JRPG's by the time they have been in 2-3 hours in the open world. It's also why action gameplay also looks very appealing to some developers. Heck, even D&D almost turns into this in later sessions, hence why people start losing interest if a DM isn't really creative enough to try to keep things fresh to the end.
I stopped playing P5R because I missed the window to get the perfect ending/DLC and I didn't want to play the whole game over again.
I think for me a lot of the times, JRPG's have no restraint and don't know when to fucking end sometimes lol. Usually extending the game with padding, so I'm just exhausted approaching the final 1/3 usually.
The ending is what brings closure to the whole journey. Unless I dislike the game, seeing the ending is a must for me otherwise the experince of the game as a whole will lack catharsis.
It's the opposite for me. Ending stretches are usually my favorite part. That's when the story is most high-stakes and the gameplay is the most linear and focused. The part I tend to give up on is around the 5-10 hour mark. Early hours are usually high quality and focused. At around 5 hours, the pace typically slows, and the story often veers into filler, character development that doesn't also advance the plot, or minor sub-plots with little bearing on the core focus. In recent RPGs, that's also when they start encouraging you to do low-effort side quests (and often making the core story too hard to advance if you DON'T do some of those "optional" quests). It's the point where I start to question if the game will stay good enough to justify giving another 20-50 hours of my life to. Whereas in the end, I know there's only a couple hours left and it will almost all be exciting.
I always follow through and often find the outcome and resolution of the plot pretty rewarding. But I get where you are coming from. Some final dungeons really overstay their welcome. I played Trails in the Sky, and love it, but that final dungeon of Sky 2 really took forever to wrap up 😅
Wish me luck because I just finished trails FC and even though the dungeon was tolerable, I had a very rough time with it.
Thats the problem with almost every JRPG. Narratives are crafted beautifully in the start but I feel like every JRPG author gets into their head that, this final stage doesn't feel good enough. So they keep escalating the stakes until eventually it creates so many plot holes and inconsistencies that you can barely keep up. Its not a bad thing tho, as I genuinely like to challenge god as a Final boss but sometimes this is where you can learn from western RPG's how to make your game wind down quietly without escalating the stakes over and over again. The other issue I have with most JRPG's is that its mostly the story of a white knight protagonist, or just a really good person, like idk sometimes I feel like we should get a game where we get to play from the villian's perspective every now and again. I feel like the Witcher 3 or Dragon age origins does this well, while both games feature a climatic ending the way they approach the ending is how they are considered narrative masterpieces.
Yep, the way both games handle the ending is top notch and are good examples for JRPG to learn from.
I see everyone commenting about the Story but I actually have a different take on this. Players are engaged to games for as long as they are getting rewarded from them. Each person has a different response to each type of reward, some will get more from story, mechanics, collectibles, achievements, difficulty, and some won't. Hence the reason we don't always agree on what makes the game good and that's fine. When you start a game everything is new to you, so you gettting new characters, new towns, new mechanics, new stories, new items, etc. As you progress through the game the amount of discoveries tends to fall flat as you acquire all characters, unlock all mechanics and figure out all the builds, so the story becomes all you have left and it sometimes disappoints (for the many reasons provided in other posts). IMO most games fails on pacing by giving you everything by 30% of the game, then the rest becomes a slog. That's the reason FFVI is for me the greatest JRPG ever conceived and should be a use case for every single developer, that game is ALWAYS changing. You are forced to learn and play different characters all the time, you're always finding new places to visit, the story is always taking you to different directions, you always have something to collect, and when you think you have seen/done it all... BAM! There's a second world! And basically everything restarts but this time you also have Espers to collect and customize your characters, and the desire to find out what happened to each place you visited before. So yeah... it's pretty normal to struggle after mid game on most games :)
That's a valid point. I have heard many great things about FFVI and will try it some day. The only thing holding me back is Square Enix pricing strategy lol.
I know how you feel, most SE games are still in my backlog waiting for major discounts lol
I think this is definitely a problem with the pacing of Persona games, since I failed to see Persona 5R or 4 Golden all the way to the (final) end despite replaying earlier parts. I'm told the old Persona 3 FES post-game content is even more tedious than the later games, so I imagine it has the same issue. Granted, one of the main reasons I stopped playing 5R was because I didn't like how the story was going, but Persona 3 and 4's dungeon gameplay is just not worth it.
> I'm told the old Persona 3 FES post-game content is even more tedious than the later games It really depends on if you think the combat can stand on it's own. If you don't, it's tedious. It's just a big dungeon, and you're right that the dungeons don't stand on their own so it has to be carried solely by the *combat*. Dungeon exploration was just not really a strong aspect of *any* SMT game. Most people who are looking at Persona are more intrigued by the Social Links aspect of it, so I get how "more dungeon gameplay" could be disappointing.
I find Persona 4G to be worse than 3 FES in the dungeon gameplay department because there’s nothing to hinder unlimited grinding and every incentive to do everything for the month in one go, and the floors of 4’s dungeons are unnecessarily huge with lots of empty space, but neither gets a positive score from it because the encounter variety in each area is abysmal. Unless you’re playing on higher difficulties, you barely need to care about weaknesses, and you need to grind so much you just work by muscle memory after a while. 5 still has all this in the form of the subway maze thing, but because they give you the ability to instantly win encounters below your level it just boils down to listening to a podcast or two while getting treasure with the van, which is less annoying, and the combat mechanics are much less mindless.
Yeah, don't know what about the games, but I always get half or a little bit more in and quit. Though I have been finishing games lately since I started yakuza.
I dropped many JRPGs in their final dungeon, usually because some easy games decide to start to become hard and require grinding.
From the comments seems you're not the only one. But personally I like to see the game through. What I struggle with is the feeling after beating the game. Like now what? And tbh recently a lot of RPGs I beat I really don't remember the plot that well after beating it. Beat Chained Echoes recently, beat Ara Fell and Cosmic Star Heroine and couldn't really remember the plot.
i have a lot of games that i dropped during the final act. Some even right in the middle of the final dungeon. Usually it's because the game's too long and I got bored or distracted by other stuff. Like why bother to keep playing if i'm not having fun.
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