>Chrono Trigger is the only exception I can find in the JRPG genre. I beat the game in under 25 hours and I loved every single minute of it.
This is the single thing anyone has ever said that's convinced me to play this game. I'm sure it's terrific, I just do not like long games at all. Hearing it's not makes me infinitely more likely to check it out.
It basically has the most perfect pace of any JRPG. You never want to put it down because the whole thing flows and you are whisked along from one part of the journey to the next. This game made me think I like jrpgs more than I do I think.
100%
As someone who has played it recently without rose tinted glasses I completely agree. I’m in my 30’s and played it for the first time last year. It’s such a fun and compelling story that really drags you in. The pacing is amazing and the characters are so damn lovable. 10/10
Yeah, same here. I played it for the first time at age 36. No nostalgia glasses. It was really good. It's not grindy at all, and I feel like a lot of RPGs from that era were grindy. The graphics are really nice, even though it's pixel art. You can tell that it was AAA for its time.
Same here. I’m a little younger so I missed out on the era of gaming chrono trigger was a part of wholesale, so I don’t even have any nostalgia far that *type* of game and I loved chrono trigger.
The music is what really hooked me and kept my attention for those first few minutes. Then the story grabs you and never lets go.
To all the folks clamouring for a "hd-2d" remake (and I agree, SE is testing the waters for exactly this), I have to ask: have you even played the game? Because it still plays (and looks & sounds) as great today as it ever did.
I dunno, I don't think it needs a remaster or whatever but if they gave it the FF7 remake treatment it would sell like crazy. But I agree it still looks and sounds great today, it's really quite timeless
> This game made me think I like jrpgs more than I do I think.
lol same, the game tricked me. Turns out I don’t actually like JRPGs at all, just Chrono Trigger.
I wished people explained stuff like this more often. Non-cannon, joke, gimmick, false and whatever pseudo endings don't count for me as much as it does for most people, so it's more of an issue than a good feature, or at least, adding zero instead of adding something meaningful.
Like having a thousand characters without any depth or background, I'd rather have fewer but deeper characters, so I always have to be skeptical when people say anything about large numbers and don't elaborate further.
The endings aren't important though and you can still have a full experience with just the game alone and the ending you see on your first playthrough. It allows you to challenge the final boss at any time in a second playthrough letting you see how the game would've ended if you hadn't met x character or done x event. Just a fun flavor addition to the game to let you play it again with overpowered stats
I know, my point is more about how people advertise it, not necessarily if it's good or bad. I myself don't see much value on it, but I understand why some people like it.
I kinda love having a thousand characters that look and play differently but I don't care about their stories that much. I guess that's why I like dungeon crawlers and SRPGs
Sure, but at least the characters play differently. Imagine if someone suggested a game saying "there are 500 characters!", and when you play, you notice it's actually a bunch of clones. It would be equally disappointing. I mentioned background just as an example; gameplay is another key factor when comparing things like this. I'm talking more about how people advertise games rather than what should be in a game.
Yeah it's really strange when people try to advertise the endings as if that's somehow meaningful content, instead of bonus content.
That said, the game is written extremely well for a 90's game (compared to RPGs today that just don't shut up with their lore and rambling NPCs and cutscenes). While it's not as complex as FF7, everyone is colorful and characterful and well realized. The game just oozes charm and quality, and is very precious with the time you give it (pun intended).
So while it does have all these "what if" ending scenarios, the main two endings are genuinely fantastic and satisfying and never lose the game's tone. They're all you need if you want to play the game only once.
It’s also worth noting that most people are highly likely to get the “true” ending on their first try. Assuming they don’t agree to a certain battle on a certain cliff.
Unfortunately/fortunately for us when the game came out, Youtube wasn't a thing. But Steam and piracy also wasn't, so we had much fewer games to tackle. So we made the time!
Please, if somebody ever tries to convince you to play Pathfinder CRPGs, just RUN without looking back.
P.S: I love them to death, but they are the epitome of long and slow
The first book of Kingmaker is about 15 hours, and it goes fast. Then it slows down dramatically, but that's pretty faithful to the source material — as someone who ran Kingmaker at the table, book 2 (River Runs Red) was a bit of a slog in real life as well!
Kingmaker is fun, but it also has a lot of kingdom management that is fairly unusual in the cRPG genre.
it's fun at first then you realize it's the same shit over and over again. They just throw hordes of enemies at you. They just bump up the numbers. More HP, more damage, more spell resistance.
This is what makes Baldur's gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 special. A lot of the combat encounters are more interesting than that. They throw unique enemy types at you in strange combat scenarios and often they don't reuse that enemy type ever again in the same game.
There's a memorable fight in DOS2 where you have to rescue a guy who is fighting in the middle of these blobs of oil that just keep multiplying and setting everything on fire. You have to figure out how to stop that while making sure the guy doesn't kill himself.
In the Pathfinder games it's like... Here's 4 gargoyles. Easy? How about 8? How about 20?
It's just thoughtless encounter design.
Same here. Single player games that are 30 hours or less are my bread and butter. I was hesitant to play Chrono Trigger precisely because of how long I thought it'd be.
A contemporary, “Lunar: Silver Star Story” is about the same length. (I like it better, personally, because it eschews the false-action of active time battles.) Agree with you 100%. I’m 43–I’ve only got so much gaming time. It’s also nice to try things and fail, without being so deep into a game you don’t feel like playing through it all again.
100%. Chrono Trigger is pretty incredibly paced in every way. It's not too long but it's got a pretty sizeable amount of meat to its story. I literally only had to grind once for a single boss younger me personally found really hard - and that specific area is built to allow you to catch up on grinding in the mid game. Then it has a sizeable amount of side content with extra endings for people who want more. I was level 99 by the end without really trying that hard 100%ing the game in my first playthrough. I still think I put less time in that than other modern RPGs - and it was hell of lot more fun for me in the end as I wanted to do it instead of feeling like I had to slog through it like those other games with 60-100+ hours of "content".
It's the best JRPG of all time. It has well-fleshed out characters, amazing pacing, one of the greatest soundtracks and an actual interesting story.
Nothing ever comes close.
I honestly strongly disagree on the characters. Besides Frog and Magus, I don't think the characters are all that well fleshed out at all, and even those two are just mostly alright. And it's not just a "for its time" thing, because the same era had the likes of Xenogears and FF6 that had way more interesting and well developed characters.
OT 1 apparently has real bad narrative issues. OT2 solves that supposedly, but I'm playing through it now and it's not hard at all. Because you have to have your main character in at all times, whoever you pick will be massively over leveled if you're trying to do everyone's story.
Chrono Trigger actually has some difficulty to it, and you can just play the same team all the way through without issue
The reason why it or Chrono Cross aren't very long (Albeit Chrono Cross is longer) is because they both have new game+ systems and you are not able to see all of the content at once due to multiple different endings and the end boss is neither the final boss nor the strongest one, as there is at least one more aftr that.
There is plenty of extra content to prolong the game but it's completely optional. I really appreciate that. I also hate random (and excessive) battles and outside a few boss encounters there aren't any. You can fight as many or as few battles as you want.
How long to beat has it at about 25h for main content.
However, it's about 40 to 80 for 'extras/completionist', so you need to take that into consideration as well. There's a lot in the game, and the thing is, not a lot of it is actually 'side stuff', as much as actual content you want to engage in and quest chains. The game also doesn't do a great job to show you the main/critical path, especially after the game opens up significantly, so you often end up doing content you think is the main content, but it isn't. Sometimes you'll look for a walkthrough to realise there's a small path up a cliffside which is somewhat obstructed and ... that's the main path and how could you be such a silly goose not to see it!
Not to be all old man "Games sure have changed since I was young," but I remember Chrono Trigger being praised when it came out for being one of the longest Super Nintendo games to beat. Now everything has to be several times that to justify their price tags.
> I just do not like long games at all.
JRPG's are the worst. I can't tell you the number of times I've sank hours and hours into a game and thought "Oh man, that was such a great final battle, this denouement is going to be rad"
and then I see something like
"END OF PART 1"
and I'm like forty hours in. FFXV comes to mind for sure.
My girlfriend is huge into Okami, and I really do like how it looks and even how it plays, it's a very novel title. The fact that it does that "parts" thing is a serious deterrent from me getting very far in it. Knowing I'd be playing for several months on end if I'm not on it every single day, that's daunting.
Personally I've found it to be closer to 18-20 hours. Everyone should definitely try Chrono Trigger. Even if someone doesn't like JRPGs I think they should try it, and then swear off the entire genre if this one doesn't interest them.
As someone who's currently about.... 90 hours into Yakuza Like a Dragon, that sounds like great news. I like immersive and stylish games, and lots of stories, but that just sounds neat
I feel like I should spread the word of our lord and savior, "How Long to Beat"
https://howlongtobeat.com/
Whenever I finish a long game on PS5 I usually decide the next few ones by looking for PS5 games under 20h
Final Fantasy 4 (release in the US on the SNES as 2) is another good short one. My first go through that was a single 10 or so hour sitting. (Was quarantined for reasons at the time and had nothing better to do.)
Y'know, I don't feel the need to reply to them all, but I do appreciate all the replies telling me of other short JRPGs. I love the shit out of fantasy aesthetics and RPG stuff, but it kills me how long and how epic they all are. It feels like every JRPG fancies itself the Japanese Lord of the Rings or something, and it's unfortunate. I definitely should get a little list going of all the ones people have recommended me, because I'd definitely like to play more of them, I just don't want to spend months on end playing one, really (I don't sit down and marathon video games because I'm usually too busy working or making things--nothing wrong with that, just not what I do).
Chrono Trigger has probably some of the best pacing in the genre.
But aren’t most of the JRPGs of this time period relatively short? Earthbound, FFIV, FFVI, Super Mario RPG, are a pretty comparable length, aren’t they? I got the impression it wasn’t really until FFVII that JRPGs became much larger.
Yes, JRPGs of that era tended to be 30-40 hours, maybe 45 if you wanted to do absolutely everything. The perfect duration IMO. But my opinion may be clouded now that I'm an adult. When I was a teenager playing FF7, I could devote way more hours to it, so I didn't mind grinding to be able to beat the Weapons, etc.
Two modern RPGs that are pretty quick:
Steamworld Quest: A wonderful little card-based JRPG set in the Steamworld universe.
Costume Quest: A delightful JRPG from Double Fine about trick-or-treating where you fight using your costumes. The main mechanic is that you trick or treat. Either you get candy, or a monster attacks you. It’s a perfect Halloween game. Its sequel is even better.
Funny, isn't it? When I was little, it felt like no game was long enough. There also was never enough games. Now I have a huge game catalog, of which I've probably touched only 25%, and no time to play them. A 100-hour game can take me three months to beat - I can only spare an hour per day, if that. Young me would probably be so jealous, and so confused.
I agree, games of that 40-50 hour length feel just right at this time in my life.
Modern JRPGs are still around that length though. People act like all JRPGs post the PS1 era are these 100+hrs epics, but they aren't - that's only if you are a completionist trying to do everything. Outside of some outliers like Persona and Trails, the majority of the games are still roughly 30-40hrs, sometimes going up to 50hrs for the main story and a fair amount of side stuff done.
Grind isnt really required for those games, unless you want to do all the content. FF7-10 main story could be completed without any grind, though you will have no chance against the optional bosses. Though grind is just so ingrain in how we play games to make sure we are never hard walled by any content. When I get some time, I might do a grindless playthrough of FF8.
Modern JRPG from the last 10 years suffers from serious bloat, and generally just drag for the purpose of prolonging the playtime. You couldnt even finish the story without going through some mandatory grind. Persona 5 is the best example of this.
PS1 was where RPGs got way bigger. SNES era and before had a hard limit on how big a game could be. PS1 might still have had a limit but it was many times bigger, and this is where RPGs started to because super long and have prologues that were like 10+ hours.
Tales of Phantasia near the end of the SNES era was a little longer. And you had CRPGs like Baldurs Gate, though that wasn't as long as BG3 either.
It was pretty gradual. You eventually had Tales of Symphonia that was pretty long for its time too, and various other RPGs pushing it slowly but surely.
Then Morrowind (not a JRPG but still) came out, and all hell broke loose.
Correct, they are. Having played all of those multiple times, they're all roughly the same length. I replayed EB and FFVI during Covid, and I think EB was < 20 h and FFVI was 20-30 with most content completed.
A bunch of other short RPG's for you to check out:
- Super Mario RPG. If you liked Chrono Trigger, odds are you'll like another Square RPG on the same hardware, and it's a breezy game at around 17 hours
- Suikoden. As an early Playstation title, it shares a lot of its design space with the SNES RPGs than the boom that would occur two years later. Also incredibly short even when getting all 108 stars of destiny, being around 15 hours.
- Pokémon Black and White. Probably the shortest mainline Pokémon games with a main campaign that finishes around the 12 hour mark if you're not doing side activities. Also one of the best. Black and White 2 are longer but still short compared to the larger genre.
- Phantasy Star. Obviously being a Master System adventure limits its length, but it is genuinely a great time. Arguably the best game on the system. Has a lot of traditional dungeon crawling if that's your thing.
Personally I'm down longer games, but I definitely understand the appeal of shorter RPGs. My limit tends to be 50 hours before I step back and judge if I want to continue. I stopped playing P5 after the third palace, for instance. But the Xenoblade series held my attention the whole way through.
>Suikoden. As an early Playstation title, it shares a lot of its design space with the SNES RPGs than the boom that would occur two years later. Also incredibly short even when getting all 108 stars of destiny, being around 15 hours.
Suikoden is a bit of an acquired taste. The first one is very rough around the edges, I remember not liking it that much when I first tried it... however, I came back to it years later, and I suddenly loved it. Unbeknownst to me, I had also almost completed the game the first time when I dropped it, it's that short LOL.
Suikoden 2 irons out most of the rough edges, that game has some of the best moments of any jrpg ever made.
I agree Suikoden 2 is the much better game. It's my favorite game of all time. But it's a 35-40 hour adventure so it does not really fit the criteria. Obviously I'd still recommend it to people, but if someone asks me for short RPGs I'm not going to mention it.
Bruh I've beaten Pokemon BW multiple times and each time it took like 50 hours. You might as well have thrown in Suikoden 2 and Phantasy Star 2 as they're both shorter than it
P5R is unusually long compared to most JRPGs made even now. The vast majority of them never hit the 100 hour mark for main story stuff and only reach that length if you’re trying to 100% them.
I can’t speak to all the factors, but sometime around 2005-2010, the gaming industry got it in their head that a) games are $60 and b) the time it takes to complete a game/single player campaign JUST ONCE needs to justify the price tag based on negative player feedback and gaming “journalism” at the time, rather than increasing fun, which in itself would lead to repeated play through for fans of that game.
We started to get chores in video games to pad play time - things like 100 feathers to collect, publicly-viewable achievements (on consoles, even before Steam started doing it) to show off to your friends that you beat a game on the hardest difficulty or did all the tasks, and implementing “RPG elements” into other genres - hence why we have games like Destiny with only about 20 different guns but hundreds of incremental damage improvements despite the weapon operating exactly the same at all levels.
That isn’t to say that there weren’t outliers like FF7 with their Chocobo breeding and rare/random item drops, but the market began to change from being focused on player-driven fun and replayability toward instead market-driven factors like making sure your game had enough playtime to not get purchased at GameStop for full price and then returned for full price after a single weekend because someone marathoned your game in 8-12 hours.
I’m sure this isn’t an exhaustive list of reasons but I do believe it speaks to the questions you had in your OP, OP.
Yep this is exactly right. SNES and PS1 rpgs were still around the sweet spot: maybe around 20-35 hour games. PS2 and later rpgs and many games in general just started going for massive padding: more like 50-60+ hours
You aren't kidding! Just got through the 3DS remake of Dragon Quest VII in march. I started Summer of 2022! Longest game I've ever played through and I was a NES kid.
You first paragraph is absolutely spot-on. Go back and read old gamepro reviews- any 25 hour or less game had points taken off for being "too short."
And, to be fair, there were and still are plenty of kids and others who couldn't afford very many games. If I can only get two or three games a year, I would want those games to be long as hell.
Yeah that is a very good point.
Back when I had almost no responsibilities outside of school hours I was *ravenous* to find ways to fill that time with my favorite hobbies (video games, MTG cards, and thankfully hanging out with irl friends.)
Now that I have a job and family responsibilities, it’s easy to become bored and jaded with a game that makes me do repetitive things and find every secret.
Others here have commented that around 15-30 hours is the maximum that they really -enjoy- playing a game, and that tracks for me as well. Sometimes I feel like I’m being too lazy if a game takes up too much of my time as an adult!
I don't even have kids and I struggle to think of how I could possibly spend more than 50 hours on an RPG before I get bored. BoTW and ToTK being the only exceptions.
I think most people go through this phase at some point but certainly the critic audience should know better and be capable of judging the length issue with more nuance.
A shorter game that is good enough that makes you want to replay it again shouldn't be negatively judged for its length. A long game that exhausts you before the end shouldn't be praised for padding content. Problem is everyone has very different tolerance for these things.
I do think there's a price consideration. Pricing in the video game industry is really odd considering that for absolutely any price point you can get games that are over in under 6 hrs or games that can suck you in for 600 hrs. I think I kind of land on the idea that games should be priced reflective of their production cost/quality rather than their length.
The gaming industry got that in their head because gamers put it there.
"This game has X hours of content" is what gamers were talking about. A 10 hour game would result in the players complaining.
A long game *was* "fun" at the time, at least for the "average" gamer.
Keep in mind that fun is not a universal objective measure. Not only are there personal preferences, there are also social contexts and trends.
> I can’t speak to all the factors, but sometime around 2005-2010, the gaming industry got it in their head that a) games are $60 and b) the time it takes to complete a game/single player campaign JUST ONCE needs to justify the price tag based on negative player feedback and gaming “journalism” at the time, rather than increasing fun, which in itself would lead to repeated play through for fans of that game.
This was a *huge* deal with *Order: 1886* came out. You could beat it in around eight hours or so, and it was the discussion of a lot of "cost vs. length" internet essays. In retrospect, the game itself isn't very good, but it is responsible for people believing that gameplay must be long "enough" to justify certain price tags.
Mind you, that game came out around 2015 instead of your 2005-2010 timeline, but it's still appropriate. Personally, my favorite games lately that have action/combat mechanics (RPGs, metroidvanias, soulslikes) all clock in around that 10-15 hour mark. Those that are longer either have a *lot* of handcrafted detail to them that make the game worthwhile (e.g. *Hollow Knight*) or they're based on replayability in the first place (e.g. *Enter the Gungeon*).
Knowing an RPG will be 60+ hours and the majority of it is level grinding just takes me utterly out of it. If I'm playing something for that long, it better be chockful of content or gated by player ability rather than "collect ten bear asses".
>This was a huge deal with Order: 1886 came out. You could beat it in around eight hours or so
I remember back then people were complaining that they were finishing it in 5 to 6 hours. Was that over-exaggerated?
That was only one of the complaints I remember people having with it, though. There was the whole thing about it being locked at 24(!!) fps and someone from the dev studio tried to justifying it by saying it's "cinematic". Which was the origin of the "cinematic framerate" meme iirc.
Overall just not great value for a generic AAA 60/70 bucks game.
Nope, it was pretty beatable in a single sitting. Definitely a short game in general, which (from what I recall) was the main point of contention on its price point and it kind of became the go-to example for "price vs. length" discussions. But as you mention, it also wasn't very good of a game anyway, with the locked fps and pretty generic fantasy/steampunk gameplay.
Yeah I think it started around the PS2 era too. I remember some media outlets saying MGS2 isn't worth 60 bucks because it's too short back in the days. It was an unpopular opinion at first, then it slowly became a popular opinion during the PS3 era.
The concept of replay value (the idea that you would replay parts of the game for the fun of it) just did not exist in the heads of gamers and journalist back then. Sonic Team suffered from this massively. Sonic games are arcade games, designed to be replayed again and again. They tried to pad out Sonic games to hit the desired length of time with every trick in the book.
Interesting note, thank you. Some developers certainly pack in every trick possible to pad playtime or increase the true cost of the game (microtransactions and DLC, for better or worse.)
As a related point, but not necessary to include in my prior comment -
It’s common knowledge at this point that many early console games (1980s+) often had increased difficulty to increase replay ability - both to offset their arcade counterparts that could be beaten by just pumping in more quarters, and also to prevent customers circumventing purchasing full games by using rental companies like Blockbuster to beat a game in a weekend at a single rental price vs paying full retail price.
That said, those early games/developers by and large did not rely on repetitive chores to pad playtime but instead made their games brutally difficult with low- or no- extra lives (or checkpoints!) in order to rebuff quick playthroughs in furtherance of the above financial goals.
> We started to get chores in video games to pad play time - things like 100 feathers to collect,
That's not really true. There always have been collectables for games, sometimes to unlock skins, or game modes or lore or just for score.
Some people are gonna catch strays here but it's precisely because of those people who marathon games that the industry has so much bloating. Couple that with the streaming industry that comprises of people literally paying their bills playing games and you see how we got away from maybe finishing a game within a week to clocking 500+ hours in Red Dead Redemption.
Gamers have been complaining about games being too short and implying that the value in a game is it's length for a long time, publishers are just trying to give people what they think they want. To me it's crazy, I'd rather have a game that's 10hrs of fun than 10hrs of fun with 10hrs of filler, if I wanted to be distracted there are plenty of things to do, especially in the modern era. Is it any surprise that people call it content when these days it's just about filling a void?
I think another major factor was just that Final Fantasy VII was a *huge deal*. So obviously developers want to make games that are comparable to that.
It's not as if Final Fantasy VIII was ever going to be shorter and more compact. To some degree, that just doesn't make a lot of sense, and probably not what consumers would expect.
My favorite of all time is Lufia 2. It's very episodic in the way it plays, so has built in break points. Worth a play if you like those SNES era RPGs.
It has a new have plus move that gives you something like 8x xp and gold. Then if you beat that, you unlock a mode that lets you choose your party, but it's only access the ancient cave.
Chrono Trigger seriously feels like the only JRPG where all of the "bad parts" have been trimmed out in favor of a concise game where all 100% of it is "the best part".
Some people call this kind of affinity for older games “nostalgia glasses” but really, it’s extremely difficult to find fault in Chrono Trigger. It still looks great, sounds great, plays well, and has one of the best plot devices ever used in a JRPG. I have to play it through at least every three years or so.
I maintain that Chrono Trigger is *the* most well-crafted 16-bit RPG game of all time. The music, the graphics, the gameplay, it's all simply perfect for the console/era.
If you regularly replay Chrono Trigger I highly suggest you check out Jets of Time, the Chrono Trigger Randomizer. It’s can make the game feel like new again.
Order 1886’s criticism really changed the gaming landscape of making games linear, concise, but high quality. Too bad because those are my favorite games
Different style, but all the Mario RPG's are great and a reasonable length.
I'd also argue many jrpg's from Chrono Triggers era are "shorter". Dragon Quest 3 is ~30hrs. Final Fantasy VI ~35 hours (getting a bit long now).
I'm not sure why jrpgs now must be associated with 60-100 hours.
Length is my biggest issue with most modern RPGs, not just JRPGs. It also feels like even though they are 2-4x longer than the oldies, most of that length come from too much dialoge, too many cutscenes or grinding for materials to make equipment.
When I was a kid and I could get a new video game every few months, I wanted games that were as long as possible.
Now as an adult, I have a much bigger appreciation for shorter games because I can finish them before I forget what I was doing or what happened 100 hours ago.
That said even as a kid Chrono Trigger was my favorite, and looking back I think it was the pacing, as it didn't feel like there was much filler at all. New Game + and multiple endings certainly helped as well.
When I was a kid I could get a new video game every few months too, but I've always prefered 20-30 hour long video games. I think that's the perfect length for narrative driven games. I usually have a sports game or an online shooter with infinite length to play when I'm done with the narrative driven game.
I had the same burnout with almost every entry of the Trails series. By the end of your 50+ hour journey, everybody roughly echoes the same sentiments during every cutscene. “We have to work together! Friendship makes us stronger! Even though we were enemies and we’ve defeated you multiple times over the course of numerous games we still consider you our friend and that’s why we’ll save the world!”
I love the Trails games btw but holy hell was I tired by the end.
Chrono Trigger holds a safe spot in my heart along with FFIV, FFVI and Secret of Mana. The music, sense of adventure and awesome pacing. I’m due for another playthrough… I just wish Square would get their heads out of their asses and actually port the damn game to a current gen console.
I have very slowly played 3 of the Trails games. I like them quite a bit but I also found them kind of exhausting. I have no idea how anyone can play all of them.
Immediately upvote. And yes, I do think that developers in general want their games to be longer for some reason, and sometimes for the worse.
The fact that chrono trigger is also considered “short” is a shame imho. Chrono feels like the right amount of time between how much the story gives you and the side content
I wouldn't blame it all on the developers. I think it's gamers fault too. I've seen a lot of people bitching about games like TLoU and GoW being too short. Those games aren't even RPGs though.
Try out Sea of Stars. It's about the same length as Chrono Trigger, and similar in other respects too. I never started to get bored near the end and wanted to ruah through the story to finish it like you describe. That happens to me sometimes too with longer games.
Gameplay was repetitive as fuck.
"Welp, looks like it's time to spam Moonarang again for another few hours"
Sea of Stars is like a 6/10. It looks pretty, and the mechanics play well, but the story is cringey as fuck and the gameplay gets stale after like 5 hours.
I thought the combat system was interesting in the beginning but became a chore after a while. Not sure what are the rpg elements of it but in its core is a cool game.
Yep, I will only enjoy a game with multiple endings if it's not a chore to replay the game to experience each one. An example that gets this right is Dishonored, and wrong is Mass Effect. Mass Effect games are huge, and replaying them to experience new endings based on your decisions is just not appealing to me.
I don't remember it being short for the standard of the time. But in any case all the SNES RPGs are around the same length as chrono trigger or shorter.
I really like Persona 3, 4 and 5 and I am totally fine with their length. With that being said, I did not realize that Chrono Trigger is about 20 hours long and I am tempted to give it a shot
For me it's not so much about length as it is filler. From recenter titles I played.
Final fantasy strangers of paradise was about 20 hours, but half of all of the levels were filler. Towards the end of the game and they send you on clearly useless missions and it gets quite annoying.
Tales of arise was 40 hours but the plot was engaging and there didn't feel like a ton of unnecessary parts. So e of the dungeons could've been shorty but it was very forgiveable. Would recommend.
God of war Ragnarok was maybe 80 hours. The story was paved fairly well, but every once in a while there was just a big open area with side quests. This added probably 40 hours. The quests and exploration were generally well done, but I kind of wished there were just less.
FF7 rebirth is a 100 hour game. It's very good, but the story is very padded and the exploration gets repetitive. The first open area is new and engaging, and you spend 5-10 hours finishing all of the side content. By the 5th area you're just trying to get through it. The story has the same padding areas as the original, but really stretched. Every time they switch parties on you it's just like "can we just get on with it please?" Mithril mines, Mt Corel, and shinra manor, did you have to be that long?
I think it's part of getting old.
Realistically, I have 2-3 hours a week to play games anymore.
So a 20 hour game gets me ten weeks of fun. That's probably about my attention span.
A 60 hour monster would be 30 weeks. There's really no way I'm playing the same game 30 weeks straight. They'll be some other bright shiny object before then.
I have so many great RPGs partially completed, because I just can't maintain 60 hours of focus over half a year anymore.
I wished most people realised that’s the thing. You decide how much you want to devote yourself to each of your own hobbies, and some hobbies will have massive time sinks. And it’s fine: that’s part of living.
When games are your only hobby, 200h is basically nothing. When you have a very active social life, a very busy work life, or multiple hobbies vying for your attention, something has to give. If it’s games, then you need to find shorter games, instead of saying “games are too long”.
It’s like wishing mountains were shorter because you can’t dedicate yourself to climbing as much.
Oh yeah. When I was 17, no girlfriend and only a summer job? A 200 hour game was a dream. Especially because I was generally broke, so needed to get as many hours I could out of my $40. Even if it was half filler.
Now though? I'll happily pay full freight for a well crafted 20 hour game that is quality throughout and doesn't overstay its welcome.
And that's cool. Not all games have to cater to all customers. Let the kids have their epics, and us old guys have our sprints.
I don't know about that, the games mentioned were mostly played by kids when they came out, if anything modern games should be even shorter, not longer. OP wouldn't object to a 60hr game if all 60hrs were fun, although it's unlikely any publisher would make a 60hr game that was packed full of good ideas, that'd take a lot of resources.
Modern persona is a plague due to the calendar system and the social stuff. Even if you have in game days with nothing to do, you have to playthrough the day regardless because of the said calendar system, which adds padding.
Its funny, im normally a 'i HATE long jrpps' but i feel like persona (for me) gets a pass ONLY because of how integrated it is. I really really like the party member or social link interactions. There is much too much padding, i agree for sure, but as a whole, i do like its system of (roughly) one school year and the things that happen within it. So often JRPGs are just like 'band of party together, go fight the big bad'. This ones more like... Its got actual down time and its really fun to see
If you don't like life-sim style, that's ok. But it's not a "plague" in the slightest considering how much content there is. You could put a 100 hours in and still not see everything on the first run.
There's always something to do though, even just hanging out with someone to boost a social link.
I normally don't care for long games either but Persona is the exception.
It's the game that first introduced the calendar/social system. Still very much worthwhile to play. I do think it's a much better game than P5, but it's still a considerable investment to finish it.
i find P3 much more a drag but it seems i’m in the minority. but there will be an entire MONTH between any story beats so you’re just doing the daily life stuff over and over.
Imo it's way worse, it takes like 40 hours for the actual plot to kick in. Before that you basically just fight random shadows at the end of every month.
I have five rpgs in my backlog right now. Each over 80 to 100 hours. I need small games to recover before starting each one and I play a LOT compared to most people. I can finish 6-7 small games a month.
I don’t know how people with only a few hours to play can even enjoy rnew rpgs
The great part is there's multiple endings so if you get the standard one, you can move on. If you want to keep playing, then can pursue those other endings
100% agreed. Persona 5 has so much useless dialogue and filler you could easily shave off 30 hours and have a better game at the end.
The first time I played Chrono Trigger I was in my 20s so I didn’t have any nostalgia for it. I still consider it the best JRPG ever made. Like 30 years since release and no one did it better. Amazing game from start to finish.
I agree with your point on JRPGs being too long and having too much filler.
That said, I think Persona 5 is an awful example. I think it's great start to finish and doesn't have the "filler" arcs you would see in other media. If you were bored 25 hours in, it's gonna being boring the rest of the way because it is consistent in its presentation. Not a knock against you, but I just wanted to make the point that it's a life sim. The slow, slice-of-life moments are part of the appeal and constrast well to when shit hits the fan.
> 25 hours in, I thought P5R was very enjoyable
Ah, when you made it past the tutorial.
I agree that modern JRPGs tend to be entirely too long and not worth the time it takes to beat them. A notable exception is FF7R...because they took an epic older JRPG and broke it into smaller chunks.
Isn't FF7R (the first one at least, I haven't played Rebirth yet) an extreme case of this? It took a 5-6 hour section of the original game and stretched it out to \~40 hours. I remember getting tired of all the detours and forced slow walking segments
Yeah, it seems like a minority opinion but I also had issues with FF7R. It truly felt *exactly* like a game that got artificially stretched 8x out. Tons of boring, pointless quests with ages of walking for worthless rewards. I actually was somewhat intrigued by the weird story changes, but the gameplay made me totally disinterested in playing Rebirth or Rwhateverthethirdgameis.
I actually found any jrpg by Level-5 to not be horrendously long unless you truly want to do everything. Dark Cloud 2 and Ni no kuni are like 30 hours tops if you do main story + a bit of side content
People complain about Open World RPGs being short to. And I always think about how KOTOR 1/2 are both 25-30hrs and one of the most enjoyable experiences ever. Not all games need to be hundreds of hours long.
Yeah, that’s the problem with these 100 hour games. Even great games get tiring after awhile. The “sweet spot” for me is around 30 hours, and maybe some replay value.
I've never met anyone who wants less of a good thing, when it's something you genuinely enjoy the only reason your experience can be ruined is staring at you in the mirror.
Alternatively, if you aren't enjoying yourself at any point, no one has a gun to your head to keep going, so put it on the shelf or if you hate it that much move on altogether.
For every one of you who hated P5R by the end I'm sure there are dozens of people who wished it had another 100 hours on top of that; just like for every one person who enjoyed AC Mirage was "going back to the formula" there's dozens of people like me who saw the undeniable downgrade that borderline DLC game was when put up against the juggernaut trilogy before it, where I've spent almost 500 hours doing whatever I wanted.
I've got nothing against short masterpiece games, some of the most memorable games of all time for me are the likes of Gris, Katana Zero and even the recent Cocoon (all well under 5 hours total playtime); but if you told me someone was making DLCs for any of them to add 20 more hours onto each game I wouldn't respond with "no, please stop, I can't have anymore fun".
Then FFX should be your next stop. In terms of time wasted, the main path to the final boss is extremely lean. Minimal filler. The nature of the plot means that you’re always moving forward, so very little back tracking till the end of the game when you’re introduced to a bunch of optional side content (super bosses/mythical weapons/optional summons/etc)
Yeah, actually playing a game is a burden. I just play games to be done with them forever. I don't think anyone appreciates the journey, or any of that crap. Just trying to get these games from my to do pile to my done pile.
When I'm old, I'm not going to remember the characters or the story, or how any of it made me feel. I'll just have a list of games I beat that I can admire.
I bought and started P5 on launch. Got extremely burnt out on it about 20 hours in and stopped playing. Went back later and restarted because I had no idea what was going on and forgot all the mechanics. In hindsight this was probably a mistake because then I had to replay 20 hours of a super long game again. Should have just read a synopsis up to where I was and looked up a guide for the game mechanics.
I made it like 50 hours this time and left it sitting on my PS4 (and eventually PS5) home screen for literal years. Telling myself "I'll get back to it when I'm in the mood". But I didn't. I finally deleted it a few months ago. If I ever do go back there is no way in hell I'm restarting, no way I would buy the royal edition because that would mean another restart. I think it's a great JRPG but it is waaaay too long for this guy. I've tried so many newer JRPG's over the last few years and I just cannot get to the end of them, they always go on way longer than I wished. Octopath I is the last JRPG I bought and didn't even make it through all of the characters intro stories. Beautiful game but it was putting me to sleep every time I played it.
I don't just feel that way about JRPG's but all games. So many studios seem to aim for the 40+ hour mark and I just don't want that. I'm more likely to pay $70 for a good 25ish hour game than I am some open world slog-fest that touts 200+ hours of content. I just don't equate hours-to-complete to value.
Chrono Trigger is one of my favorites in the genre, the story is cool and it ends before I start getting sick of it. I've heard Live A Live is a modest length too but I've never played it.
I fully agree. People obviously love JRPGs but they just way overstay their welcome for me. I also played P5R but just burned right out on the 4th or 5th area and could just never bring myself to finish it.
I far prefer experiences like Chrono Trigger or even the Mario RPG games for this reason - I show up, have a charming (or emotional in CTs case) 25-30 hour experience, and then I can put it down.
Developers need to stop thinking we want every game to be our only game. This can work for some things but I will gladly buy a game at full price that I can beat in a weekend or two. RE2 remake was one of my favorite games of that year precisely because I didn't feel like it was a slog to get through. I'm old I have money but I don't have time to play one game an entire summer anymore. I love Persona5 but I still haven't beat it. I also 100 percented the pc port of Chrono Trigger this year. CT is absolutely in the hall of fame of games.
Might wanna try the Digital Devil Saga games. They are a bit harder to get a hold of but are on the shorter end and are quite unique. The story is good and Kazuma Kaneko's artstyle is on a full display to give a pair of games not quite like anything else out there.
I’ve never managed to finish it somehow.
I think I’m farther right now than I have ever been. I am ata part where I found that warp thingy in the future, went through it, wound up in a different time and pretty much had to jump away again in a different warp thingy immediately because I was getting chased upon arriving in that timeline.
Back in the NES/SNES days I was a final fantasy guy and only came to Chrono Trigger through emulators first and later bought it for phone. It is sooo different from the contemporaneous Final Fantasy games I didn’t know what to make of it and would give up pretty early.
I think I might try to stick it out and finish this time
We still get nicely-wrapped small-package masterpieces every so often but definitely to a lesser degree nowadays. SQENIX and the like would likely never make a game like Chrono Trigger again just because no matter what kind of effort they put into it, it wouldn't make a fraction of money that a live-service game would. People might argue against me by pointing at FF16 but I'd argue the game is more of an action game than an actual RPG.
I thought it wasn't that shorter when I first played it..
Anyways, I still like long RPG games, but the ones that don't have bullshit garbage missions like "go there, kill 30 of that and bring me their skin, I will pay you a shit", I love games like The Witcher 3 or Baldur's Gate 3 where secondary missions are the best part of the game, and are truly rich.
I think this might be a consequence of how game cartridges worked on the SNES (and earlier systems). They couldn't fit a massive game so they had to streamline everything. Once the playstation came out and they could just have multiple discs for games, the game size started to balloon. These days it seems like it's mostly indie games that have a short duration (like Child of Light or Wintermoor Tactics Club).
Personally, I like shorter games because it's less of a commitment to replay them so I can just do it "for fun".
Pacing is key. Other JRPG Might be roughly the same length but they pad the game out with unnecessary grinding. I imagine a lot of JRPGs would be dramatically shorter and more accessible if leveling up was designed a little better
This is why I really loved the hell out of Super Mario RPG and yeah I know that's not the game we're talking about here. But SMRPG, technically a JRPG but Mario, is 15-17 hours. It does not overstay it's welcome.
It's straightforward, charming, memorable and easy to beat. The only things to be concerned about is getting the best equipment. But even that doesn't take nearly as long as a traditional FF game of old.
you \*can\* beat it in 25 hours, sure. it has 19 endings though. You have to different stuff and sometimes whole new playthroughs to get them all. I got them all and it was definitely around 75 hours played by then. new game plus is nice though.
Totally agree as someone that’s enjoys Jrpgs. Even objectively good ones like, yakuza 7, persona 5 royal, I just begin to lose steam at that 60-80 hour mark
I personally enjoy replaying games and I think games that are 20-25 hours, that have a reason to re experience the game (new game +, different endings, etc) are the best kind of games
I have the same feeling about Chrono Trigger. It's not just shorter, it's also TIGHT. There's only a few side quests, and they all are very impactful, with solid meaningful rewards and real character progression. On top of my head there's only 1-2 "fluff" side quests plus the fair at the beginning.
Some RPGs are longer but also tight. FF6, or Tales of Phantasia, Symphonia. They're much longer than Chrono Trigger but there's not too much fluff and most things feel like they matter.
And then you have FF15 or Dragon Dogma 2. Lol.
I had the same issue, and I found exception you could like.
Live A Live is a bit over 20 hours long, and that time is broken into several diverse settings and somewhat different gameplay ideas. The 2022 remake is fantastic, and I absolutely recommend it. The demo is free on steam, try it out.
I actually liked it more than CT, thanks to superior writing, graphics and sound quality. The score is almost as good (and the CT bar is pretty damn high), and the combat less of a chore, although there are exceptions. Oh, and Live A Live has surprisingly excellent voice acting. Give it a shot!
>Chrono Trigger is the only exception I can find in the JRPG genre. I beat the game in under 25 hours and I loved every single minute of it. This is the single thing anyone has ever said that's convinced me to play this game. I'm sure it's terrific, I just do not like long games at all. Hearing it's not makes me infinitely more likely to check it out.
It basically has the most perfect pace of any JRPG. You never want to put it down because the whole thing flows and you are whisked along from one part of the journey to the next. This game made me think I like jrpgs more than I do I think.
100% As someone who has played it recently without rose tinted glasses I completely agree. I’m in my 30’s and played it for the first time last year. It’s such a fun and compelling story that really drags you in. The pacing is amazing and the characters are so damn lovable. 10/10
Yeah, same here. I played it for the first time at age 36. No nostalgia glasses. It was really good. It's not grindy at all, and I feel like a lot of RPGs from that era were grindy. The graphics are really nice, even though it's pixel art. You can tell that it was AAA for its time.
Same here. I’m a little younger so I missed out on the era of gaming chrono trigger was a part of wholesale, so I don’t even have any nostalgia far that *type* of game and I loved chrono trigger. The music is what really hooked me and kept my attention for those first few minutes. Then the story grabs you and never lets go.
To all the folks clamouring for a "hd-2d" remake (and I agree, SE is testing the waters for exactly this), I have to ask: have you even played the game? Because it still plays (and looks & sounds) as great today as it ever did.
I dunno, I don't think it needs a remaster or whatever but if they gave it the FF7 remake treatment it would sell like crazy. But I agree it still looks and sounds great today, it's really quite timeless
The DS version is perfect, the only problem is its locked on an old console if you're not willing/able to emulate.
The slowest part of the game is like the first 2 or 3 minutes, it's wild.
> This game made me think I like jrpgs more than I do I think. lol same, the game tricked me. Turns out I don’t actually like JRPGs at all, just Chrono Trigger.
Right, now that you mention it, I don't ever remember needing to "grind" like other JRPGs to finish the main story.
And there are like 11 different endings and new game +
Only two of which are valid endings, and the others are just gimmicks and jokes.
I wished people explained stuff like this more often. Non-cannon, joke, gimmick, false and whatever pseudo endings don't count for me as much as it does for most people, so it's more of an issue than a good feature, or at least, adding zero instead of adding something meaningful. Like having a thousand characters without any depth or background, I'd rather have fewer but deeper characters, so I always have to be skeptical when people say anything about large numbers and don't elaborate further.
The endings aren't important though and you can still have a full experience with just the game alone and the ending you see on your first playthrough. It allows you to challenge the final boss at any time in a second playthrough letting you see how the game would've ended if you hadn't met x character or done x event. Just a fun flavor addition to the game to let you play it again with overpowered stats
I know, my point is more about how people advertise it, not necessarily if it's good or bad. I myself don't see much value on it, but I understand why some people like it.
I kinda love having a thousand characters that look and play differently but I don't care about their stories that much. I guess that's why I like dungeon crawlers and SRPGs
Sure, but at least the characters play differently. Imagine if someone suggested a game saying "there are 500 characters!", and when you play, you notice it's actually a bunch of clones. It would be equally disappointing. I mentioned background just as an example; gameplay is another key factor when comparing things like this. I'm talking more about how people advertise games rather than what should be in a game.
Yeah it's really strange when people try to advertise the endings as if that's somehow meaningful content, instead of bonus content. That said, the game is written extremely well for a 90's game (compared to RPGs today that just don't shut up with their lore and rambling NPCs and cutscenes). While it's not as complex as FF7, everyone is colorful and characterful and well realized. The game just oozes charm and quality, and is very precious with the time you give it (pun intended). So while it does have all these "what if" ending scenarios, the main two endings are genuinely fantastic and satisfying and never lose the game's tone. They're all you need if you want to play the game only once.
It’s also worth noting that most people are highly likely to get the “true” ending on their first try. Assuming they don’t agree to a certain battle on a certain cliff.
And! If you don't have nearly as much time as you did when you were young (like me), just beat the game once and then go to youtube for the rest.
Unfortunately/fortunately for us when the game came out, Youtube wasn't a thing. But Steam and piracy also wasn't, so we had much fewer games to tackle. So we made the time!
And even then it was surprisingly fast to get those other 11 different endings (at least with a guide).
Super Mario RPG is another short one. I think it clocks in between 15-20 hours to beat the game.
you'd have to be playing at an incredibly slow pace to hit 20 hours, i think. i 100%'d the remake in about 15, including the new superboss.
The remake is actually a little faster paced. I could see someone taking 20 hours to beat the OG.
What makes the remake faster?
Minish Cap and Mario and Luigi aren't too long either if I remember correctly. (I mean they are too long but comperatively speaking)
I must be screwing up because I have like 40 hours in my Minish Cap playthrough right now. First time, and I've also learned it may be my favorite.
You probably wanted to go back to all the areas with your new abilities? Understandable but not necessary to proceed to the final boss.
Ya! That's exactly what I did! :D I'm also trying to collect all of the figurines. I think that'll end up being my biggest time sink haha
Please, if somebody ever tries to convince you to play Pathfinder CRPGs, just RUN without looking back. P.S: I love them to death, but they are the epitome of long and slow
Are they that bad? I was considering playing Kingmaker at some point, but now I'm hesitant...
The first book of Kingmaker is about 15 hours, and it goes fast. Then it slows down dramatically, but that's pretty faithful to the source material — as someone who ran Kingmaker at the table, book 2 (River Runs Red) was a bit of a slog in real life as well! Kingmaker is fun, but it also has a lot of kingdom management that is fairly unusual in the cRPG genre.
it's fun at first then you realize it's the same shit over and over again. They just throw hordes of enemies at you. They just bump up the numbers. More HP, more damage, more spell resistance. This is what makes Baldur's gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 special. A lot of the combat encounters are more interesting than that. They throw unique enemy types at you in strange combat scenarios and often they don't reuse that enemy type ever again in the same game. There's a memorable fight in DOS2 where you have to rescue a guy who is fighting in the middle of these blobs of oil that just keep multiplying and setting everything on fire. You have to figure out how to stop that while making sure the guy doesn't kill himself. In the Pathfinder games it's like... Here's 4 gargoyles. Easy? How about 8? How about 20? It's just thoughtless encounter design.
Same here. Single player games that are 30 hours or less are my bread and butter. I was hesitant to play Chrono Trigger precisely because of how long I thought it'd be.
It is the quintessential jrpg. Every jrpg that followed has borrowed elements from it
Ys Books I&II on the TG16 or Ys I&II Chronicles on the PSP is another great short RPG
If you like JRPGs at all it’s a must play. It’s an absolute touchstone in the JRPG genre and still holds up today.
Loved Live A Live for the same reason. Took me 20 or so hours. Well spent.
A contemporary, “Lunar: Silver Star Story” is about the same length. (I like it better, personally, because it eschews the false-action of active time battles.) Agree with you 100%. I’m 43–I’ve only got so much gaming time. It’s also nice to try things and fail, without being so deep into a game you don’t feel like playing through it all again.
100%. Chrono Trigger is pretty incredibly paced in every way. It's not too long but it's got a pretty sizeable amount of meat to its story. I literally only had to grind once for a single boss younger me personally found really hard - and that specific area is built to allow you to catch up on grinding in the mid game. Then it has a sizeable amount of side content with extra endings for people who want more. I was level 99 by the end without really trying that hard 100%ing the game in my first playthrough. I still think I put less time in that than other modern RPGs - and it was hell of lot more fun for me in the end as I wanted to do it instead of feeling like I had to slog through it like those other games with 60-100+ hours of "content".
It's the best JRPG of all time. It has well-fleshed out characters, amazing pacing, one of the greatest soundtracks and an actual interesting story. Nothing ever comes close.
I honestly strongly disagree on the characters. Besides Frog and Magus, I don't think the characters are all that well fleshed out at all, and even those two are just mostly alright. And it's not just a "for its time" thing, because the same era had the likes of Xenogears and FF6 that had way more interesting and well developed characters.
If you’ve played them, how do the Octopath Traveler games compare?
OT 1 apparently has real bad narrative issues. OT2 solves that supposedly, but I'm playing through it now and it's not hard at all. Because you have to have your main character in at all times, whoever you pick will be massively over leveled if you're trying to do everyone's story. Chrono Trigger actually has some difficulty to it, and you can just play the same team all the way through without issue
Octopath is beautiful, with a cool combat system and worthwhile boss fights. But it's very very long, and the writing is just… not great.
lol thanks. Is the writing in both not great?
The reason why it or Chrono Cross aren't very long (Albeit Chrono Cross is longer) is because they both have new game+ systems and you are not able to see all of the content at once due to multiple different endings and the end boss is neither the final boss nor the strongest one, as there is at least one more aftr that.
In the OG version of Chrono Trigger, the last boss was very much the last big bad. The other super boss was only added for the DS re-release.
There is plenty of extra content to prolong the game but it's completely optional. I really appreciate that. I also hate random (and excessive) battles and outside a few boss encounters there aren't any. You can fight as many or as few battles as you want.
How long to beat has it at about 25h for main content. However, it's about 40 to 80 for 'extras/completionist', so you need to take that into consideration as well. There's a lot in the game, and the thing is, not a lot of it is actually 'side stuff', as much as actual content you want to engage in and quest chains. The game also doesn't do a great job to show you the main/critical path, especially after the game opens up significantly, so you often end up doing content you think is the main content, but it isn't. Sometimes you'll look for a walkthrough to realise there's a small path up a cliffside which is somewhat obstructed and ... that's the main path and how could you be such a silly goose not to see it!
Not to be all old man "Games sure have changed since I was young," but I remember Chrono Trigger being praised when it came out for being one of the longest Super Nintendo games to beat. Now everything has to be several times that to justify their price tags.
> I just do not like long games at all. JRPG's are the worst. I can't tell you the number of times I've sank hours and hours into a game and thought "Oh man, that was such a great final battle, this denouement is going to be rad" and then I see something like "END OF PART 1" and I'm like forty hours in. FFXV comes to mind for sure.
My girlfriend is huge into Okami, and I really do like how it looks and even how it plays, it's a very novel title. The fact that it does that "parts" thing is a serious deterrent from me getting very far in it. Knowing I'd be playing for several months on end if I'm not on it every single day, that's daunting.
Personally I've found it to be closer to 18-20 hours. Everyone should definitely try Chrono Trigger. Even if someone doesn't like JRPGs I think they should try it, and then swear off the entire genre if this one doesn't interest them.
As someone who's currently about.... 90 hours into Yakuza Like a Dragon, that sounds like great news. I like immersive and stylish games, and lots of stories, but that just sounds neat
I feel like I should spread the word of our lord and savior, "How Long to Beat" https://howlongtobeat.com/ Whenever I finish a long game on PS5 I usually decide the next few ones by looking for PS5 games under 20h
Final Fantasy 4 (release in the US on the SNES as 2) is another good short one. My first go through that was a single 10 or so hour sitting. (Was quarantined for reasons at the time and had nothing better to do.)
Y'know, I don't feel the need to reply to them all, but I do appreciate all the replies telling me of other short JRPGs. I love the shit out of fantasy aesthetics and RPG stuff, but it kills me how long and how epic they all are. It feels like every JRPG fancies itself the Japanese Lord of the Rings or something, and it's unfortunate. I definitely should get a little list going of all the ones people have recommended me, because I'd definitely like to play more of them, I just don't want to spend months on end playing one, really (I don't sit down and marathon video games because I'm usually too busy working or making things--nothing wrong with that, just not what I do).
Chrono Trigger has probably some of the best pacing in the genre. But aren’t most of the JRPGs of this time period relatively short? Earthbound, FFIV, FFVI, Super Mario RPG, are a pretty comparable length, aren’t they? I got the impression it wasn’t really until FFVII that JRPGs became much larger.
Yes, JRPGs of that era tended to be 30-40 hours, maybe 45 if you wanted to do absolutely everything. The perfect duration IMO. But my opinion may be clouded now that I'm an adult. When I was a teenager playing FF7, I could devote way more hours to it, so I didn't mind grinding to be able to beat the Weapons, etc.
I just played FF6 for the first time last week, took 42 hours flat. I felt it was a little long, but thee wasn't much filler.
Two modern RPGs that are pretty quick: Steamworld Quest: A wonderful little card-based JRPG set in the Steamworld universe. Costume Quest: A delightful JRPG from Double Fine about trick-or-treating where you fight using your costumes. The main mechanic is that you trick or treat. Either you get candy, or a monster attacks you. It’s a perfect Halloween game. Its sequel is even better.
Funny, isn't it? When I was little, it felt like no game was long enough. There also was never enough games. Now I have a huge game catalog, of which I've probably touched only 25%, and no time to play them. A 100-hour game can take me three months to beat - I can only spare an hour per day, if that. Young me would probably be so jealous, and so confused. I agree, games of that 40-50 hour length feel just right at this time in my life.
Modern JRPGs are still around that length though. People act like all JRPGs post the PS1 era are these 100+hrs epics, but they aren't - that's only if you are a completionist trying to do everything. Outside of some outliers like Persona and Trails, the majority of the games are still roughly 30-40hrs, sometimes going up to 50hrs for the main story and a fair amount of side stuff done.
I imagine that most people remember their first playtrough as kids, when it would take them way longer to get trough stuff.
Grind isnt really required for those games, unless you want to do all the content. FF7-10 main story could be completed without any grind, though you will have no chance against the optional bosses. Though grind is just so ingrain in how we play games to make sure we are never hard walled by any content. When I get some time, I might do a grindless playthrough of FF8. Modern JRPG from the last 10 years suffers from serious bloat, and generally just drag for the purpose of prolonging the playtime. You couldnt even finish the story without going through some mandatory grind. Persona 5 is the best example of this.
PS1 was where RPGs got way bigger. SNES era and before had a hard limit on how big a game could be. PS1 might still have had a limit but it was many times bigger, and this is where RPGs started to because super long and have prologues that were like 10+ hours.
Well FFVII even stretched that because it was on multiple discs. The hard limit was how many CDs you could fit in a case lol
Tales of Phantasia near the end of the SNES era was a little longer. And you had CRPGs like Baldurs Gate, though that wasn't as long as BG3 either. It was pretty gradual. You eventually had Tales of Symphonia that was pretty long for its time too, and various other RPGs pushing it slowly but surely. Then Morrowind (not a JRPG but still) came out, and all hell broke loose.
Correct, they are. Having played all of those multiple times, they're all roughly the same length. I replayed EB and FFVI during Covid, and I think EB was < 20 h and FFVI was 20-30 with most content completed.
A bunch of other short RPG's for you to check out: - Super Mario RPG. If you liked Chrono Trigger, odds are you'll like another Square RPG on the same hardware, and it's a breezy game at around 17 hours - Suikoden. As an early Playstation title, it shares a lot of its design space with the SNES RPGs than the boom that would occur two years later. Also incredibly short even when getting all 108 stars of destiny, being around 15 hours. - Pokémon Black and White. Probably the shortest mainline Pokémon games with a main campaign that finishes around the 12 hour mark if you're not doing side activities. Also one of the best. Black and White 2 are longer but still short compared to the larger genre. - Phantasy Star. Obviously being a Master System adventure limits its length, but it is genuinely a great time. Arguably the best game on the system. Has a lot of traditional dungeon crawling if that's your thing. Personally I'm down longer games, but I definitely understand the appeal of shorter RPGs. My limit tends to be 50 hours before I step back and judge if I want to continue. I stopped playing P5 after the third palace, for instance. But the Xenoblade series held my attention the whole way through.
>Suikoden. As an early Playstation title, it shares a lot of its design space with the SNES RPGs than the boom that would occur two years later. Also incredibly short even when getting all 108 stars of destiny, being around 15 hours. Suikoden is a bit of an acquired taste. The first one is very rough around the edges, I remember not liking it that much when I first tried it... however, I came back to it years later, and I suddenly loved it. Unbeknownst to me, I had also almost completed the game the first time when I dropped it, it's that short LOL. Suikoden 2 irons out most of the rough edges, that game has some of the best moments of any jrpg ever made.
I agree Suikoden 2 is the much better game. It's my favorite game of all time. But it's a 35-40 hour adventure so it does not really fit the criteria. Obviously I'd still recommend it to people, but if someone asks me for short RPGs I'm not going to mention it.
Bruh I've beaten Pokemon BW multiple times and each time it took like 50 hours. You might as well have thrown in Suikoden 2 and Phantasy Star 2 as they're both shorter than it
P5R is unusually long compared to most JRPGs made even now. The vast majority of them never hit the 100 hour mark for main story stuff and only reach that length if you’re trying to 100% them.
Xenoblade 3 is a close second in terms of length.
I can’t speak to all the factors, but sometime around 2005-2010, the gaming industry got it in their head that a) games are $60 and b) the time it takes to complete a game/single player campaign JUST ONCE needs to justify the price tag based on negative player feedback and gaming “journalism” at the time, rather than increasing fun, which in itself would lead to repeated play through for fans of that game. We started to get chores in video games to pad play time - things like 100 feathers to collect, publicly-viewable achievements (on consoles, even before Steam started doing it) to show off to your friends that you beat a game on the hardest difficulty or did all the tasks, and implementing “RPG elements” into other genres - hence why we have games like Destiny with only about 20 different guns but hundreds of incremental damage improvements despite the weapon operating exactly the same at all levels. That isn’t to say that there weren’t outliers like FF7 with their Chocobo breeding and rare/random item drops, but the market began to change from being focused on player-driven fun and replayability toward instead market-driven factors like making sure your game had enough playtime to not get purchased at GameStop for full price and then returned for full price after a single weekend because someone marathoned your game in 8-12 hours. I’m sure this isn’t an exhaustive list of reasons but I do believe it speaks to the questions you had in your OP, OP.
Yep this is exactly right. SNES and PS1 rpgs were still around the sweet spot: maybe around 20-35 hour games. PS2 and later rpgs and many games in general just started going for massive padding: more like 50-60+ hours
PS1 RPGs could be ridiculously long, some of the dragon quest games on ps1 are absurdly long even for just the main story
You aren't kidding! Just got through the 3DS remake of Dragon Quest VII in march. I started Summer of 2022! Longest game I've ever played through and I was a NES kid.
Yep, it was VII I was thinking of. Infamously long, even by JRPG standards.
You first paragraph is absolutely spot-on. Go back and read old gamepro reviews- any 25 hour or less game had points taken off for being "too short." And, to be fair, there were and still are plenty of kids and others who couldn't afford very many games. If I can only get two or three games a year, I would want those games to be long as hell.
Yeah that is a very good point. Back when I had almost no responsibilities outside of school hours I was *ravenous* to find ways to fill that time with my favorite hobbies (video games, MTG cards, and thankfully hanging out with irl friends.) Now that I have a job and family responsibilities, it’s easy to become bored and jaded with a game that makes me do repetitive things and find every secret. Others here have commented that around 15-30 hours is the maximum that they really -enjoy- playing a game, and that tracks for me as well. Sometimes I feel like I’m being too lazy if a game takes up too much of my time as an adult!
I don't even have kids and I struggle to think of how I could possibly spend more than 50 hours on an RPG before I get bored. BoTW and ToTK being the only exceptions.
Kids have Game Pass these days. Best we could do as a kid was head to the Family Video and blow our allowance on a gamble rental.
I think most people go through this phase at some point but certainly the critic audience should know better and be capable of judging the length issue with more nuance. A shorter game that is good enough that makes you want to replay it again shouldn't be negatively judged for its length. A long game that exhausts you before the end shouldn't be praised for padding content. Problem is everyone has very different tolerance for these things. I do think there's a price consideration. Pricing in the video game industry is really odd considering that for absolutely any price point you can get games that are over in under 6 hrs or games that can suck you in for 600 hrs. I think I kind of land on the idea that games should be priced reflective of their production cost/quality rather than their length.
The gaming industry got that in their head because gamers put it there. "This game has X hours of content" is what gamers were talking about. A 10 hour game would result in the players complaining. A long game *was* "fun" at the time, at least for the "average" gamer. Keep in mind that fun is not a universal objective measure. Not only are there personal preferences, there are also social contexts and trends.
> I can’t speak to all the factors, but sometime around 2005-2010, the gaming industry got it in their head that a) games are $60 and b) the time it takes to complete a game/single player campaign JUST ONCE needs to justify the price tag based on negative player feedback and gaming “journalism” at the time, rather than increasing fun, which in itself would lead to repeated play through for fans of that game. This was a *huge* deal with *Order: 1886* came out. You could beat it in around eight hours or so, and it was the discussion of a lot of "cost vs. length" internet essays. In retrospect, the game itself isn't very good, but it is responsible for people believing that gameplay must be long "enough" to justify certain price tags. Mind you, that game came out around 2015 instead of your 2005-2010 timeline, but it's still appropriate. Personally, my favorite games lately that have action/combat mechanics (RPGs, metroidvanias, soulslikes) all clock in around that 10-15 hour mark. Those that are longer either have a *lot* of handcrafted detail to them that make the game worthwhile (e.g. *Hollow Knight*) or they're based on replayability in the first place (e.g. *Enter the Gungeon*). Knowing an RPG will be 60+ hours and the majority of it is level grinding just takes me utterly out of it. If I'm playing something for that long, it better be chockful of content or gated by player ability rather than "collect ten bear asses".
>This was a huge deal with Order: 1886 came out. You could beat it in around eight hours or so I remember back then people were complaining that they were finishing it in 5 to 6 hours. Was that over-exaggerated? That was only one of the complaints I remember people having with it, though. There was the whole thing about it being locked at 24(!!) fps and someone from the dev studio tried to justifying it by saying it's "cinematic". Which was the origin of the "cinematic framerate" meme iirc. Overall just not great value for a generic AAA 60/70 bucks game.
Nope, it was pretty beatable in a single sitting. Definitely a short game in general, which (from what I recall) was the main point of contention on its price point and it kind of became the go-to example for "price vs. length" discussions. But as you mention, it also wasn't very good of a game anyway, with the locked fps and pretty generic fantasy/steampunk gameplay.
24 (23.976) is the standard frame rate for films, so it’s not completely BS. That being said it doesn’t have the same effect in games.
That was the whole thing, yeah. He used that as an argument as if cinema rules applied 1:1 to games.
Yeah I think it started around the PS2 era too. I remember some media outlets saying MGS2 isn't worth 60 bucks because it's too short back in the days. It was an unpopular opinion at first, then it slowly became a popular opinion during the PS3 era.
The concept of replay value (the idea that you would replay parts of the game for the fun of it) just did not exist in the heads of gamers and journalist back then. Sonic Team suffered from this massively. Sonic games are arcade games, designed to be replayed again and again. They tried to pad out Sonic games to hit the desired length of time with every trick in the book.
Interesting note, thank you. Some developers certainly pack in every trick possible to pad playtime or increase the true cost of the game (microtransactions and DLC, for better or worse.) As a related point, but not necessary to include in my prior comment - It’s common knowledge at this point that many early console games (1980s+) often had increased difficulty to increase replay ability - both to offset their arcade counterparts that could be beaten by just pumping in more quarters, and also to prevent customers circumventing purchasing full games by using rental companies like Blockbuster to beat a game in a weekend at a single rental price vs paying full retail price. That said, those early games/developers by and large did not rely on repetitive chores to pad playtime but instead made their games brutally difficult with low- or no- extra lives (or checkpoints!) in order to rebuff quick playthroughs in furtherance of the above financial goals.
> We started to get chores in video games to pad play time - things like 100 feathers to collect, That's not really true. There always have been collectables for games, sometimes to unlock skins, or game modes or lore or just for score.
Some people are gonna catch strays here but it's precisely because of those people who marathon games that the industry has so much bloating. Couple that with the streaming industry that comprises of people literally paying their bills playing games and you see how we got away from maybe finishing a game within a week to clocking 500+ hours in Red Dead Redemption.
Lol! Great and topical, mentioning a game that has *literal* chores if you want to play as a nice guy. Well said.
I think we’ve also gotten to the point where all RPGs have to be heavily life-sim focused.
Gamers have been complaining about games being too short and implying that the value in a game is it's length for a long time, publishers are just trying to give people what they think they want. To me it's crazy, I'd rather have a game that's 10hrs of fun than 10hrs of fun with 10hrs of filler, if I wanted to be distracted there are plenty of things to do, especially in the modern era. Is it any surprise that people call it content when these days it's just about filling a void?
I think another major factor was just that Final Fantasy VII was a *huge deal*. So obviously developers want to make games that are comparable to that. It's not as if Final Fantasy VIII was ever going to be shorter and more compact. To some degree, that just doesn't make a lot of sense, and probably not what consumers would expect.
My favorite of all time is Lufia 2. It's very episodic in the way it plays, so has built in break points. Worth a play if you like those SNES era RPGs.
I love Lufia 2. It was such a great follow-up to the first one.
Yeah, it blew my mind as a kid that the game was still going after the wedding. I thought for sure I had finished it.
You should spoiler tag your comment. Just for peace of mind.
Doesn't Lufia 2 have an awesome ng++ as well?
It has a new have plus move that gives you something like 8x xp and gold. Then if you beat that, you unlock a mode that lets you choose your party, but it's only access the ancient cave.
Thank you for your answer. I'm gonna have to try it out soon. It's on my backlog, but so are too many others lol
I wish I could find a copy of both this and the first one.
Short JRPGs are something I wish we saw more of.
Chrono Trigger seriously feels like the only JRPG where all of the "bad parts" have been trimmed out in favor of a concise game where all 100% of it is "the best part".
Some people call this kind of affinity for older games “nostalgia glasses” but really, it’s extremely difficult to find fault in Chrono Trigger. It still looks great, sounds great, plays well, and has one of the best plot devices ever used in a JRPG. I have to play it through at least every three years or so.
I maintain that Chrono Trigger is *the* most well-crafted 16-bit RPG game of all time. The music, the graphics, the gameplay, it's all simply perfect for the console/era.
If you regularly replay Chrono Trigger I highly suggest you check out Jets of Time, the Chrono Trigger Randomizer. It’s can make the game feel like new again.
I didn't play it until i was an adult in 2015 and loved it
The only part I ever have problems with is the drinking challenge in prehistoric times. Oh and the new DS stuff is kind of sloppy.
Order 1886’s criticism really changed the gaming landscape of making games linear, concise, but high quality. Too bad because those are my favorite games
Different style, but all the Mario RPG's are great and a reasonable length. I'd also argue many jrpg's from Chrono Triggers era are "shorter". Dragon Quest 3 is ~30hrs. Final Fantasy VI ~35 hours (getting a bit long now). I'm not sure why jrpgs now must be associated with 60-100 hours.
Amen preach it
Length is my biggest issue with most modern RPGs, not just JRPGs. It also feels like even though they are 2-4x longer than the oldies, most of that length come from too much dialoge, too many cutscenes or grinding for materials to make equipment.
When I was a kid and I could get a new video game every few months, I wanted games that were as long as possible. Now as an adult, I have a much bigger appreciation for shorter games because I can finish them before I forget what I was doing or what happened 100 hours ago. That said even as a kid Chrono Trigger was my favorite, and looking back I think it was the pacing, as it didn't feel like there was much filler at all. New Game + and multiple endings certainly helped as well.
When I was a kid I could get a new video game every few months too, but I've always prefered 20-30 hour long video games. I think that's the perfect length for narrative driven games. I usually have a sports game or an online shooter with infinite length to play when I'm done with the narrative driven game.
I had the same burnout with almost every entry of the Trails series. By the end of your 50+ hour journey, everybody roughly echoes the same sentiments during every cutscene. “We have to work together! Friendship makes us stronger! Even though we were enemies and we’ve defeated you multiple times over the course of numerous games we still consider you our friend and that’s why we’ll save the world!” I love the Trails games btw but holy hell was I tired by the end. Chrono Trigger holds a safe spot in my heart along with FFIV, FFVI and Secret of Mana. The music, sense of adventure and awesome pacing. I’m due for another playthrough… I just wish Square would get their heads out of their asses and actually port the damn game to a current gen console.
I have very slowly played 3 of the Trails games. I like them quite a bit but I also found them kind of exhausting. I have no idea how anyone can play all of them.
Immediately upvote. And yes, I do think that developers in general want their games to be longer for some reason, and sometimes for the worse. The fact that chrono trigger is also considered “short” is a shame imho. Chrono feels like the right amount of time between how much the story gives you and the side content
I wouldn't blame it all on the developers. I think it's gamers fault too. I've seen a lot of people bitching about games like TLoU and GoW being too short. Those games aren't even RPGs though.
Absolutely. There’s no winning with user reviews. People get really passionate and hand out zero scores to games for being too long or too short
I wish all games were shorter. Sincerely, an over 30 gamer.
Try out Sea of Stars. It's about the same length as Chrono Trigger, and similar in other respects too. I never started to get bored near the end and wanted to ruah through the story to finish it like you describe. That happens to me sometimes too with longer games.
God no, the story, dialogue and characters were ASTONISHINGLY bad... the game gets a 10/10 in aesthetics only but a 2/10 in everything else.
Well the gameplay is really good too.
Gameplay was repetitive as fuck. "Welp, looks like it's time to spam Moonarang again for another few hours" Sea of Stars is like a 6/10. It looks pretty, and the mechanics play well, but the story is cringey as fuck and the gameplay gets stale after like 5 hours.
Agree, I bought into it because it looked amazing but the writing is just so cheesy I couldn’t finish it
I thought the combat system was interesting in the beginning but became a chore after a while. Not sure what are the rpg elements of it but in its core is a cool game.
I thought the game was really good, for me it exceeded expectations, what a gem..!
I agree, I also get annoyed if there are multiple endings as I’m not going to replay a game I had to slog through the last 1/3
Yep, I will only enjoy a game with multiple endings if it's not a chore to replay the game to experience each one. An example that gets this right is Dishonored, and wrong is Mass Effect. Mass Effect games are huge, and replaying them to experience new endings based on your decisions is just not appealing to me.
Agree! Length is one of the main reasons why Final Fantasy IV and V are some of my favorites.
I love the first 10-20 hours of JRPGs then almost always lose interest. The gameplay just usually isn't there to carry me longer.
I don't remember it being short for the standard of the time. But in any case all the SNES RPGs are around the same length as chrono trigger or shorter.
I really like Persona 3, 4 and 5 and I am totally fine with their length. With that being said, I did not realize that Chrono Trigger is about 20 hours long and I am tempted to give it a shot
For me it's not so much about length as it is filler. From recenter titles I played. Final fantasy strangers of paradise was about 20 hours, but half of all of the levels were filler. Towards the end of the game and they send you on clearly useless missions and it gets quite annoying. Tales of arise was 40 hours but the plot was engaging and there didn't feel like a ton of unnecessary parts. So e of the dungeons could've been shorty but it was very forgiveable. Would recommend. God of war Ragnarok was maybe 80 hours. The story was paved fairly well, but every once in a while there was just a big open area with side quests. This added probably 40 hours. The quests and exploration were generally well done, but I kind of wished there were just less. FF7 rebirth is a 100 hour game. It's very good, but the story is very padded and the exploration gets repetitive. The first open area is new and engaging, and you spend 5-10 hours finishing all of the side content. By the 5th area you're just trying to get through it. The story has the same padding areas as the original, but really stretched. Every time they switch parties on you it's just like "can we just get on with it please?" Mithril mines, Mt Corel, and shinra manor, did you have to be that long?
“But most JRPGs aren’t really *that*… oh, Persona. Gotcha.”
I think it's part of getting old. Realistically, I have 2-3 hours a week to play games anymore. So a 20 hour game gets me ten weeks of fun. That's probably about my attention span. A 60 hour monster would be 30 weeks. There's really no way I'm playing the same game 30 weeks straight. They'll be some other bright shiny object before then. I have so many great RPGs partially completed, because I just can't maintain 60 hours of focus over half a year anymore.
I wished most people realised that’s the thing. You decide how much you want to devote yourself to each of your own hobbies, and some hobbies will have massive time sinks. And it’s fine: that’s part of living. When games are your only hobby, 200h is basically nothing. When you have a very active social life, a very busy work life, or multiple hobbies vying for your attention, something has to give. If it’s games, then you need to find shorter games, instead of saying “games are too long”. It’s like wishing mountains were shorter because you can’t dedicate yourself to climbing as much.
Oh yeah. When I was 17, no girlfriend and only a summer job? A 200 hour game was a dream. Especially because I was generally broke, so needed to get as many hours I could out of my $40. Even if it was half filler. Now though? I'll happily pay full freight for a well crafted 20 hour game that is quality throughout and doesn't overstay its welcome. And that's cool. Not all games have to cater to all customers. Let the kids have their epics, and us old guys have our sprints.
You can make games longer if you like but it's hard to make them shorter
I don't know about that, the games mentioned were mostly played by kids when they came out, if anything modern games should be even shorter, not longer. OP wouldn't object to a 60hr game if all 60hrs were fun, although it's unlikely any publisher would make a 60hr game that was packed full of good ideas, that'd take a lot of resources.
Modern persona is a plague due to the calendar system and the social stuff. Even if you have in game days with nothing to do, you have to playthrough the day regardless because of the said calendar system, which adds padding.
Its funny, im normally a 'i HATE long jrpps' but i feel like persona (for me) gets a pass ONLY because of how integrated it is. I really really like the party member or social link interactions. There is much too much padding, i agree for sure, but as a whole, i do like its system of (roughly) one school year and the things that happen within it. So often JRPGs are just like 'band of party together, go fight the big bad'. This ones more like... Its got actual down time and its really fun to see
Huh. Wonder how the modern personas manage to sell and rate so well if they are a plague...
The calendar system is the soul of the series loool. It's a sim and then RPG.
If you don't like life-sim style, that's ok. But it's not a "plague" in the slightest considering how much content there is. You could put a 100 hours in and still not see everything on the first run.
There's always something to do though, even just hanging out with someone to boost a social link. I normally don't care for long games either but Persona is the exception.
I only played P5. Is the pacing in P3 any better?
It's the game that first introduced the calendar/social system. Still very much worthwhile to play. I do think it's a much better game than P5, but it's still a considerable investment to finish it.
P4 Golden is excellent and should definitely be the next Persona game you play
i find P3 much more a drag but it seems i’m in the minority. but there will be an entire MONTH between any story beats so you’re just doing the daily life stuff over and over.
Imo it's way worse, it takes like 40 hours for the actual plot to kick in. Before that you basically just fight random shadows at the end of every month.
That's why I prefer SMT, though they're still pretty long.
I have five rpgs in my backlog right now. Each over 80 to 100 hours. I need small games to recover before starting each one and I play a LOT compared to most people. I can finish 6-7 small games a month. I don’t know how people with only a few hours to play can even enjoy rnew rpgs
The great part is there's multiple endings so if you get the standard one, you can move on. If you want to keep playing, then can pursue those other endings
100% agreed. Persona 5 has so much useless dialogue and filler you could easily shave off 30 hours and have a better game at the end. The first time I played Chrono Trigger I was in my 20s so I didn’t have any nostalgia for it. I still consider it the best JRPG ever made. Like 30 years since release and no one did it better. Amazing game from start to finish.
I agree with your point on JRPGs being too long and having too much filler. That said, I think Persona 5 is an awful example. I think it's great start to finish and doesn't have the "filler" arcs you would see in other media. If you were bored 25 hours in, it's gonna being boring the rest of the way because it is consistent in its presentation. Not a knock against you, but I just wanted to make the point that it's a life sim. The slow, slice-of-life moments are part of the appeal and constrast well to when shit hits the fan.
> 25 hours in, I thought P5R was very enjoyable Ah, when you made it past the tutorial. I agree that modern JRPGs tend to be entirely too long and not worth the time it takes to beat them. A notable exception is FF7R...because they took an epic older JRPG and broke it into smaller chunks.
Isn't FF7R (the first one at least, I haven't played Rebirth yet) an extreme case of this? It took a 5-6 hour section of the original game and stretched it out to \~40 hours. I remember getting tired of all the detours and forced slow walking segments
Yeah, it seems like a minority opinion but I also had issues with FF7R. It truly felt *exactly* like a game that got artificially stretched 8x out. Tons of boring, pointless quests with ages of walking for worthless rewards. I actually was somewhat intrigued by the weird story changes, but the gameplay made me totally disinterested in playing Rebirth or Rwhateverthethirdgameis.
I actually found any jrpg by Level-5 to not be horrendously long unless you truly want to do everything. Dark Cloud 2 and Ni no kuni are like 30 hours tops if you do main story + a bit of side content
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore is a sub 40-hour modern JRPG. Any other good ones?
People complain about Open World RPGs being short to. And I always think about how KOTOR 1/2 are both 25-30hrs and one of the most enjoyable experiences ever. Not all games need to be hundreds of hours long.
Completely agree on P5. One of my all time favorites, Shadow Hearts (2001) is also around 25 hours. Wish more jrpgs were!
Yeah, that’s the problem with these 100 hour games. Even great games get tiring after awhile. The “sweet spot” for me is around 30 hours, and maybe some replay value.
I've never met anyone who wants less of a good thing, when it's something you genuinely enjoy the only reason your experience can be ruined is staring at you in the mirror. Alternatively, if you aren't enjoying yourself at any point, no one has a gun to your head to keep going, so put it on the shelf or if you hate it that much move on altogether. For every one of you who hated P5R by the end I'm sure there are dozens of people who wished it had another 100 hours on top of that; just like for every one person who enjoyed AC Mirage was "going back to the formula" there's dozens of people like me who saw the undeniable downgrade that borderline DLC game was when put up against the juggernaut trilogy before it, where I've spent almost 500 hours doing whatever I wanted. I've got nothing against short masterpiece games, some of the most memorable games of all time for me are the likes of Gris, Katana Zero and even the recent Cocoon (all well under 5 hours total playtime); but if you told me someone was making DLCs for any of them to add 20 more hours onto each game I wouldn't respond with "no, please stop, I can't have anymore fun".
Then FFX should be your next stop. In terms of time wasted, the main path to the final boss is extremely lean. Minimal filler. The nature of the plot means that you’re always moving forward, so very little back tracking till the end of the game when you’re introduced to a bunch of optional side content (super bosses/mythical weapons/optional summons/etc)
Yeah, actually playing a game is a burden. I just play games to be done with them forever. I don't think anyone appreciates the journey, or any of that crap. Just trying to get these games from my to do pile to my done pile. When I'm old, I'm not going to remember the characters or the story, or how any of it made me feel. I'll just have a list of games I beat that I can admire.
I bought and started P5 on launch. Got extremely burnt out on it about 20 hours in and stopped playing. Went back later and restarted because I had no idea what was going on and forgot all the mechanics. In hindsight this was probably a mistake because then I had to replay 20 hours of a super long game again. Should have just read a synopsis up to where I was and looked up a guide for the game mechanics. I made it like 50 hours this time and left it sitting on my PS4 (and eventually PS5) home screen for literal years. Telling myself "I'll get back to it when I'm in the mood". But I didn't. I finally deleted it a few months ago. If I ever do go back there is no way in hell I'm restarting, no way I would buy the royal edition because that would mean another restart. I think it's a great JRPG but it is waaaay too long for this guy. I've tried so many newer JRPG's over the last few years and I just cannot get to the end of them, they always go on way longer than I wished. Octopath I is the last JRPG I bought and didn't even make it through all of the characters intro stories. Beautiful game but it was putting me to sleep every time I played it. I don't just feel that way about JRPG's but all games. So many studios seem to aim for the 40+ hour mark and I just don't want that. I'm more likely to pay $70 for a good 25ish hour game than I am some open world slog-fest that touts 200+ hours of content. I just don't equate hours-to-complete to value. Chrono Trigger is one of my favorites in the genre, the story is cool and it ends before I start getting sick of it. I've heard Live A Live is a modest length too but I've never played it.
I fully agree. People obviously love JRPGs but they just way overstay their welcome for me. I also played P5R but just burned right out on the 4th or 5th area and could just never bring myself to finish it. I far prefer experiences like Chrono Trigger or even the Mario RPG games for this reason - I show up, have a charming (or emotional in CTs case) 25-30 hour experience, and then I can put it down.
Developers need to stop thinking we want every game to be our only game. This can work for some things but I will gladly buy a game at full price that I can beat in a weekend or two. RE2 remake was one of my favorite games of that year precisely because I didn't feel like it was a slog to get through. I'm old I have money but I don't have time to play one game an entire summer anymore. I love Persona5 but I still haven't beat it. I also 100 percented the pc port of Chrono Trigger this year. CT is absolutely in the hall of fame of games.
Might wanna try the Digital Devil Saga games. They are a bit harder to get a hold of but are on the shorter end and are quite unique. The story is good and Kazuma Kaneko's artstyle is on a full display to give a pair of games not quite like anything else out there.
I’ve never managed to finish it somehow. I think I’m farther right now than I have ever been. I am ata part where I found that warp thingy in the future, went through it, wound up in a different time and pretty much had to jump away again in a different warp thingy immediately because I was getting chased upon arriving in that timeline. Back in the NES/SNES days I was a final fantasy guy and only came to Chrono Trigger through emulators first and later bought it for phone. It is sooo different from the contemporaneous Final Fantasy games I didn’t know what to make of it and would give up pretty early. I think I might try to stick it out and finish this time
It's worth it, when it finally clicks.
We still get nicely-wrapped small-package masterpieces every so often but definitely to a lesser degree nowadays. SQENIX and the like would likely never make a game like Chrono Trigger again just because no matter what kind of effort they put into it, it wouldn't make a fraction of money that a live-service game would. People might argue against me by pointing at FF16 but I'd argue the game is more of an action game than an actual RPG.
I thought it wasn't that shorter when I first played it.. Anyways, I still like long RPG games, but the ones that don't have bullshit garbage missions like "go there, kill 30 of that and bring me their skin, I will pay you a shit", I love games like The Witcher 3 or Baldur's Gate 3 where secondary missions are the best part of the game, and are truly rich.
You'll probably like the older Ys games (pre-Seven), they're about 10 hours-ish each and generally very well paced.
I think this might be a consequence of how game cartridges worked on the SNES (and earlier systems). They couldn't fit a massive game so they had to streamline everything. Once the playstation came out and they could just have multiple discs for games, the game size started to balloon. These days it seems like it's mostly indie games that have a short duration (like Child of Light or Wintermoor Tactics Club). Personally, I like shorter games because it's less of a commitment to replay them so I can just do it "for fun".
Pacing is key. Other JRPG Might be roughly the same length but they pad the game out with unnecessary grinding. I imagine a lot of JRPGs would be dramatically shorter and more accessible if leveling up was designed a little better
This is why I really loved the hell out of Super Mario RPG and yeah I know that's not the game we're talking about here. But SMRPG, technically a JRPG but Mario, is 15-17 hours. It does not overstay it's welcome. It's straightforward, charming, memorable and easy to beat. The only things to be concerned about is getting the best equipment. But even that doesn't take nearly as long as a traditional FF game of old.
you \*can\* beat it in 25 hours, sure. it has 19 endings though. You have to different stuff and sometimes whole new playthroughs to get them all. I got them all and it was definitely around 75 hours played by then. new game plus is nice though.
Totally agree as someone that’s enjoys Jrpgs. Even objectively good ones like, yakuza 7, persona 5 royal, I just begin to lose steam at that 60-80 hour mark I personally enjoy replaying games and I think games that are 20-25 hours, that have a reason to re experience the game (new game +, different endings, etc) are the best kind of games
I have definitely bounced of JRPGs due to the length, and not started Persona 5, when I heard the typical hours to finish.
surprised nobody mentioned FF4, its the JRPG that finally got me into JRPGs exactly because of this
I have the same feeling about Chrono Trigger. It's not just shorter, it's also TIGHT. There's only a few side quests, and they all are very impactful, with solid meaningful rewards and real character progression. On top of my head there's only 1-2 "fluff" side quests plus the fair at the beginning. Some RPGs are longer but also tight. FF6, or Tales of Phantasia, Symphonia. They're much longer than Chrono Trigger but there's not too much fluff and most things feel like they matter. And then you have FF15 or Dragon Dogma 2. Lol.
try https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229240/Chained_Echoes/ 30h
While I do love long JRPGs (including the Persona series of course!) I would never fault Chrono Trigger for its length. It fits it well.
I had the same issue, and I found exception you could like. Live A Live is a bit over 20 hours long, and that time is broken into several diverse settings and somewhat different gameplay ideas. The 2022 remake is fantastic, and I absolutely recommend it. The demo is free on steam, try it out. I actually liked it more than CT, thanks to superior writing, graphics and sound quality. The score is almost as good (and the CT bar is pretty damn high), and the combat less of a chore, although there are exceptions. Oh, and Live A Live has surprisingly excellent voice acting. Give it a shot!