I still can't abide by that. I've gotten progressively less interested in JRPGs that intentionally try to hit 60+ hours of game time, whether they be well paced or not. Even Disgaea, which is known as one of the biggest grind timesinks in all of RPG history, has a main story that should last the normal player about 30 hours and a postgame that can clock over a thousand if you're somewhat unlucky. That's perfect for both types of JRPG fans: Those who want a decent length and strategic challenge for the main game and those who want to overpower themselves to cause billions and trillions of damage.eldrasidar wrote:If I play through an rpg game in 25 hours, I usually feel cheated. Suikoden 1 and 4 I could beat in far less than 25 hours, and in both cases I felt like there was a serious amount of material lacking. Most of the really good RPG's tend to involve 40+ hours to play, and I don't mean because you got stuck in cutscenes for hours, or because you were stubbornly grinding to get that one item. I mean time that is spent playing through the game, exploring and progressing through the game at one's own pace. Obviously correctly designing the game so that the pacing is well spread is a challenge, but it's not impossible. I think that is a more appropriate amount of time for the suikoden series, because there is so much going on. 72 hours is probably an extreme, but with any good RPG I have played, I've easily devoted several hundred hours to playing around with them. Besides, if you're going to ask me to pay as much as a dvd box set for the game, I feel I'm entitled to have at least as much content.
I don't mind games that can, overall, grasp my attention and make me play them for hundreds of hours. However, it should be because the game is awesome in the first place, not because it took me an inordinate amount of time to finish. Look at Final Fantasy XII: It took me 80 hours to finish once and I'll *never* touch that game again. Even though it has a ton of super bosses and sidequests, I progressively lost grasp of why I was playing the game and what the story goals of my party were. By the time I finished the game's story, I stopped caring because it was four months later and I had already gotten myself a PS3.