After playing The Last Remnant I realized something, I wasn't immersed like I thought I was going to be. While a pretty good game in its own right, the play though made me realize that I hadn't been immersed into an RPG game for years. Elders Scrolls IV is amazing and throws you into an amazing world but the story doesn't complete grab you. The same can be said for Fallout 3, Fable II, Eternal Sonata and Tales of Vesperia despite those all being good games (although not all may be everyone's tastes). Then there are other games like Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey and Infinite Undiscovery that aren't amazing enough to tap you on the shoulder. With that being said, out of playing games for both the PS3 and 360 the only game that managed to really get me was Mass Effect. Before that everything goes back to the PS2, Xbox and PS1, as I'm sure may be the case with a lot of people.

We live in a time we console systems are highly unreliable, and it seems that great RPG games may be following suit. A lot of us look to Square-Enix for their core franchises in Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts (and if you like anything Chrono, a possible 3rd Chrono game). Yet all we get from them are delays, push backs and trailers. Let's not forget that Final Fantasy XII, the game the probably had the most marketing for any RPG game ever came out 3 years past it's original release date only to have many of us disappointed because of the overall feel of it. We look to Bio-Ware who with Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect amidst others, have a great reputation. However they usually only release one major game at a time a year and their recent acquisition by EA makes me nervous for that timeline. Bethesda seems to be the same way in terms of how long it takes. Besides that, we don't really have anyone major which leaves us all waiting for the very few games that RPG fans crave.

I'm wondering if Square is going to pull another FFXII on us. They've been talking about FFXIII for almost a few years now and still there's no release date. Only promises of more FF games and Kingdom Hearts as well, which too, has no release date. While I'm sure these games won't disappoint my question is what happened to the good ol' days? The times of KOTOR and FFX, and even years before with FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX, Chrono Cross, Vagrant Story, Threads of Fate. What happened to quality games with quality stories for everyone to enjoy? It seems like developers are making RPG stories as complicated as possible in order to guarantee sequels so they can milk franchises or half ass-ing them to get them out to make as much money as possible. Don't get me wrong, Kingdom Hearts is an excellent franchise but they have a handful of games all with different stories set to come out for all different systems. I know people who have bought systems just for one or two games and the KH situation seems like a strong milking to me of those kinds of people to me.

Maybe I'm by myself here. I started with PS1 and enjoyed many quality RPG's on that system and had lots of fun on the PS2 and Xbox as well. I'm all for making an RPG the best that it can be, but with the current situations that us RPG fans face, I'm afraid we may only have our memories for a while.   

-Near-