Don’t take this to mean that I’m upset by anything as superficial as similar gameplay. Take Super Mario for instance – the game has formulaically been the same since Super Mario Brothers on the NES. You run around, explore some stuff, jump on some things, and eventually end the level. However, there’s a vast difference in immersion and artistic expression between Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Galaxy, largely due to less limiting hardware. Galaxy boasts motion controls, improved animation, and a level of creativity so sweet it hurts my teeth. Such artistic enthusiasm could not be reproduced as faithfully by older hardware. While the game plays the same, its expression and artistic resolution has evolved with the times to constantly deliver a new experience.
Super Mario Galaxy – way more than jumping on Goombas (tm)
Similarly speaking, the one eastern game that stands out in this generation is Mistwalker’s excellent Lost Odyssey. The game is, without question, old-school Final Fantasy reborn under the sheen of modern hardware, but done properly. All of the settings in the game bristle with detail and the characters are more expressive. Every aspect of the game is clearer when the artist is given less limitation in conveying his or her vision.
Maybe the folks at Tri-Ace have lost their hunger, or merely run out of ideas. In the past, when I’d see a room full of boxes in a game, I’d assume that they didn’t have the memory or texture space to do something really cool with that room. Seeing those same rooms in Star Ocean reveals that that room full of crates, once full of promise and unfulfilled potential, is really just a room of crates after all. Boring old crates probably filled with something boring like stacks of Highlights magazines with all the puzzles finished already.