[DJ]

I'm over here like "Wait don't all RPGs do this?" and I'm remembering back to the little side conversations going on in Fallout 2 with the bickering Mutant couple or the assorted NPCs in New Reno or the skooma pipe under Caius Cosades' house in Morrowind or hell pretty much anything in Mass Effect (which I've been playing a lot of recently) which is just one big self-reinforcing lore dump pretty much any time you're not in combat.

Then I went "Oh right, western RPGs."

I guess I'm spoiled now. I would actually rank that example from Chrono Cross pretty low on the NPC dialogue scale just because it's like well yeah they should be talking like that how is this special but I realize this wasn't the norm back in 1999.

I wonder if this is why I'd basically given up on JRPGs by 2002 or so. I'm even finding it hard to go back and play FFVI and (gasp) Chrono Trigger.

I beat Chrono Cross back when it came out and remember quite enjoying it up until the end when it fell apart pretty spectacularly.
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[DJ]

Yeaaah. It's hard for me to go back and consider that kind of stuff I suppose. Viewing it from a modern lens it's unimpressive but it's been so long since I've played a classic JRPG that I don't have much point of comparison. Again, I'm playing Mass Effect right now and just by random way of example, there's a part where you break into an enemy forward command post and they have dossiers open showing on viewscreens on the wall that show two major NPCs and has their full names, retina scans, front and side profiles, and birth planets listed. And it's kinda just some incidental data that's sitting there but hey someone had to make graphics for this, despite the fact that it only shows up once and it's incredibly easy for the player to miss.

By comparison hearing about some NPCs mentioning a thing that's just about to happen to the player seems pretty basic?

Anyway. Not trying to derail this into a Mass Effect analysis or anything (I've already got one of those going), it's just the easiest point of reference I have on hand.

I still really wanna get back to Chrono Cross again at some point. I have it on my phone...
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[DJ]

Cat computer, not cat demon. And it's to stop the race of dragons from resurrecting Lavos by using a city that was stuck in time way back in the past in the original Chrono Trigger that was meant to be a sort of Ark to resurrect Princess McGuffin.

I really liked Chrono Cross but plot coherence is not exactly its strong suit. You can make this argument about most late 90s JRPGs though. The success of Final Fantasy VII essentially meant that every JRPG writer tried wedging Gaia Theory into their games for the next five years.
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[DJ]

For my money the most "huh?" game to come out of that era was SaGa Frontier, but that kinda doesn't count as its plot incoherence was mostly unintentional. Square (before they performed the fusion dance with Enix) is responsible for most of the really nutso JRPGs from that era. A few of them overreached a little more than was necessary (FFIX's random never-before-mentioned final boss springs to mind, also the entirety of Parasite Eve which I love to death but man someone needed to edit that shit) and some of them overreached a LOT more than was necessary and tried to hide poorly-explained worldbuilding behind made-up words and a lot of intentional obfuscation (Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Final Fantasy VIII, handful of others).

The only one I really regret playing all the way through is FFVIII. I was so pissed when I beat that game. Ugh.
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[DJ]

A lot of it has to do with attention span, too. And I don't mean that in the derogatory way of "Oh noes you have a super short attention span", more like "How much bullshit are you willing to put up with". I'm...Prrreeeeetty good about it. I'm willing to sit through a lot of exposition, way more than anyone else my age I know. Virtually every other gamer friend I have in real life (and given where I work, that's most of my friends) have quite a bit less of an attention span they're willing to devote to a game laboriously setting up its plot.

I hate to keep dragging Mass Effect into this but it's the easiest point of reference I have right now, so: I have a coworker who's a huge scifi buff who actually gave up on Mass Effect 1 because the beginning of that game takes for fucking ever to establish itself, and manages to throw in a crappy tutorial for its crappy combat on top of it, plus it's one of the most hamfisted sections in the entire trilogy and he lasted about 30 minutes before figuring this was just how the entire series was going to be and he didn't want to waste time on it.

It's not so much that attention spans have gotten shorter (despite what pretty much everyone over the age of 30 loves to claim), it's that as technology has gotten better and things like voice acting and cinematic sequences have become standard, there's less incentive to trim the fat. The closest you could get to this long, sweeping opening was something like the intro to Final Fantasy VI, with the magitek armor walking in a Mode 7 snowstorm towards Narche while Terra's theme played and the opening credits rolled. And that was enormously technically expensive for an RPG on the SNES. You had 3.2MB of space to work with. That's it! Think about that: That entire game is smaller than some pictures on Wikipedia now. 3.2MB is nothing. And yet, in 1994, that was a fuckton of space to fit on a cartridge. It was expensive both in the tech sense and in the literal economic sense. And for all that time and money and effort and careful programming and advances in graphics and blah blah blah blah the most you were getting out of it was this.

So yes. There's that.

But, I am one of those people who will pretty furiously dig for worldbuilding. It's my Thing. So as intro scenes or exposition or journal entries or what have you have gotten longer, to me it's like "Oh okay here's all this stuff I've actually wanted to be in there this whole time. Cool!" For a lot of (most?) other people it's like "Hey could you let me play the fucking game now thanks."
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[DJ]

I feel bad picking this stuff apart because man I love Super Metroid so much. But it's like trying to put together the plot of Castlevania (Dracula keeps coming back, go kill him in [insert time period here]) or Doom (Demons from hell are invading!) or Zelda (Save the princess by solving a lot of really complicated dungeons!) or Super Mario Bros. (save the princess by jumping your way through someone's bad mushroom trip also you're a plumber) or Kirby (You're in a dream and King Deedee stole a magic wand that does a thing) or etc. etc. etc.

What plot is there is window dressing. It's like the plot to porn. You expect it to be there but it's not the point, and focusing on it just gets you some weird looks because if you're really trying to focus on the deep plot of Super Metroid then you're doing it wrong[. Atmosphere and thematic consistency and the occasional worldbuilding elemental mystery != well-told, deep narrative. The latter has only even been possible in games for maybe 15 years or so because before that the tech simply wasn't there to allow it.
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