It's laughable how creators in Japan eventually get kicked out of the kingdom they built due to politicking suits, or as I like to call them "Generic Salaryman Takahashi". I used to believe that Yuji Hori was safe from this, but even a living legend such as himself is treated as a mere underling by the Square suits who are running their own company to the ground.
Hironobu Sakaguchi was the first of the Jrpg innovators to be forced to fall on his own sword due to a combined failure
of Final Fantasy 9 (which sold 5 million copies but was still labeled as a failure anyway) and The Spirits Within movie.
The irony about that shitty movie he made, is that modern gaming is just as boring as that movie was, but at least Aki is attractive. Modern females in vidya games look like Gollum with a wig.
Square was never able to repeat the success of Final Fantasy 7 and Sakaguchi was never able to cling back to relevancy despite that he still makes good games, but we live in an era where video games only exist to sell you a never ending stream of cosmetic dlc. Even Grand Theft Auto is like that.
at least he saved IV from being a hot mess like V.
I put about 116 hours into that game until I finally threw in the towel because the plot never goes anywhere.
SMT V Vengeance is the game that showed to me, that it doesn't matter how good a turn based system's combat is.
If it has a shit non-existent story with even shittier & non-existent characters, I just can't gain enough interest to complete the game. I dropped it when I got to Shinjuku and had to travel back to Bethel-Japan.
There's so much that I could say about SMTv's shit writing, but a comment I made earlier says all that needs to be said.
It's amusing because the Megaten games themselves were never really that deep but they do reference a lot of deeper subjects that increases your enjoyment of the games once you've finally understood what those references meant.
Modern SMT games are garbage on the occult front, it just looks like they name things at random.
It's funny to me how a figure like Sophia could be used for such irrelevant purposes as just summoning your demons & angels.
It's like hiring Jesus to mow your lawn.
SMT V succeeded at one thing though. It managed to create an even more unlikable cast than SMT Nocturne.
At least Nocturne's crew were meant to be unlikable. In Hikawa's case he is very unrelatable due to his extreme Buddhism but the other two are just spoiled brats. SMT V's characters actually are meant to be likable or admirable but it's written by a bunch of antisocial people who don't understand how to relate with the common man.
It's probably why Yoko Hiromine is the least shit, but still extremely shitty.
SMT's writers probably already relate with her mindset so she's the one who felt the most human while the other two dorks are just bland popular kids that we're told are popular but we never see a reason why.
Tao is supposed to be this captivating beauty, but all I see is a sickly looking girl with a hunchback.
Yuzuru is held up as a paragon of virtue, but he never does anything worthy of his reputation. He just acts like an annoying dickhead through out the entire game
Yuzuru sure as hell ain't no Aki from Chainsaw Man.
Aki had an interesting story. I actually cried during most of Aki's story, especially the part where nearly his whole crew was assassinated. (Even worse when you find out that it could've easily been prevented.) Many of them were characters who you didn't expect to die so early and or so easily.
SMTV's writing is like an Antisocial version of Bioware's writing.
I recall in Mass Effect & Dragon Age Origins, there would always be that one comic relief character who is meant to be a lovable witty rogue type, but they just came off as nerdy. You could smell the nerd from all of their dialogue. A lot of Western rpgs have that problem where you can tell a nerd is trying their hardest to write a 'cool' person, but Japanese rpgs have the opposite problem where a lot of their characters are even more unlikable than Squall Leonhart.
At least Squall actually does have a story, and eventually received some character development.
He went from unlikable to being insane, because Rinoa is who changed him?
