Retro RPGs - The Lost Great Art

Being on the verge of finally completing Final Fantasy for NES, in the midst of Final Fantasy VII for Playstation, and having just finished Mass Effect 3 for PC, I've been thinking recently about how RPGs have developed over time.  Having played RPGs from pretty much every gaming generation, I can safely and adamantly claim that (in my opinion) old RPGs are by far the best.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the exploration involved in Fallout: New Vegas and Mass Effect 2 (yeah, Mass Effect 3, too, but it wasn't nearly as good), but older RPGs are just more...I don't know.  They just feel better to me.  Those in the middle - 5th and 6th generation RPGs - are sort of in that middle area.  Don't get me wrong, I love them and all (who WOULDN'T love Final Fantasy VII?), but they don't quite have that special "something" that old RPGs have and haven't quite developed the epic depth of new RPGs.

I insist that this is one of the greatest RPGs of all time.  It made my Master System great in a way that I never expected.  What makes Phantasy Star stand out from the other greats of the 3rd generation like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior was the way they did dungeons.

Each dungeon in Phantasy Star was a first person labyrinth like that.  For an 8-bit cartridge that could only hold about half of one megabyte, it's incredible, and it gave the dungeons a depth that you really didn't see until the 3D polygon graphic style of the Nintendo 64 and Playstation.  This game, more so than any other that I've ever played, truly showed off how much stronger the Master System's hardware was than that of the NES.  Let's not forget about the giant of that generation that kicked off a series that is still alive and well over a quarter century later.

Final Fantasy - the quintessential fantasy RPG series.  It has seen no rival in popularity, and for good reason.  This game threw you into a world about which you knew almost nothing and gave you nothing.  You had to search and work for every clue as to what to do next and where to go.  I'll admit it up front; I couldn't do it without a strategy guide.  At the time that I'm writing this, I'm still stuck on the last dungeon.  Square really got it right with this game.  There are a lot of bugs in it that showed how desperate the company was at the time, but when push came to shove for Square financially, they shoved back with a force not seen again until the Wii turned around Nintendo's bad luck streak with consoles.

But let's get back to the real topic of this - retro RPGs as a lost art.  I can't put my finger on what it is that made them so much better to me.  Maybe it's because they were so much more brutally difficult than most RPGs today.  They had to be; with such limited cartridge capacity, the only way to make a game last long enough to be worth the $50 you paid for it was to make it brutally difficult, hence the slang difficulty description "Nintendo hard."  But is that really it?  Perhaps is that they left so much up to the imagination.  They only had 8-bit graphics, so you really had to imagine the details of each character and enemy.  What voice capabilities were there were extremely limited and poor quality, so you had to imagine what dialogue would sound like.  Perhaps it's that, because of that limited cartridge size, developers didn't flesh out a story as much as modern games do, again leaving it up to the imagination.  Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic.

Don't get me wrong; modern RPGs deliver a story in a way more beautifully crafted and executed than most movies can.  They give you a way to be whoever you want whenever you want in beautiful HD detail.  I'm sure that there is no small group who would disagree with just about everything I've said, but I really do feel that retro RPGs had a certain magic that newer games have lost.