I’ve given the newer Xeno series a few looks over the years, but I just don’t think I’m the target audience. I feel really strongly JRPG’s declined in quality after (and in part during) the PS1 era. Not to say this didn’t exist previously, because it certainly did, but the genre began to include more traditional anime-tropes; and I feel the stories within them suffered greatly as a result.

Chrono Trigger (as an admittedly superb standout even amongst other 90’s offerings) is a captivating story filled with interesting characters and world building first. Characters are more than a one-note trope, or an archetype that can be boiled down to a Shonen protagonist and their motley crew of companions (the irony is not lost on me that Akira Toriyama, the creator of DragonBall which is ostensibly the model most other Shonen Manga and anime are still emulating, was a character designer for the game).

This feels rather difficult to put into words without dismissing an entire medium of animation and art, which is NOT my intention, but I don’t that nk it is controversial that the average quality of animation and Manga out of Japan began to decline around the early 2000’s, with obvious exceptions of course. The weird, Otaku culture began to be catered to and I believe in some respects actively cultivated; and the end result was a large swathe of media that communicated in rather immature and shallow methods. Again, totally cool if you’re into that, not trying to take anyone’s favorites away from them, but with the establishment of both a fanatical customer base and a sucessful formulaic plot structure JRPG writing began to follow in suit. In some ways the had to, as gaming technology advanced and allowed for a wider array of dynamic moment to moment gameplay the perception of the genre as somehow lesser or worthwhile became more prevalent; forcing it to cater to the markets that were interested more heavily. Which, of course, leads to dumbing down of the storytelling, and the adherence to the aforementioned stereotypical structure of the market at large.

It’s also worth mentioning that games as a whole become tremendously more difficult to produce, but this rant is already pretty lengthly. I concede I could be wrong about Xenogears, and if that’s your jam then live your best life man, but I don’t know if I’d consider it to be a direct jump from Golden Age of Squaresoft.