![]() You expect to be introduced to memorable characters and monsters, and to have to wrestle with a morally ambiguous choice. In The Witcher, each time Geralt of Rivia takes on one of these missions you expect adventure. This latter shortcoming is best exemplified by those notice board quests. On every count, The Witcher shows up its Eastern rival both for a poverty of imagination (the numbing clichés of storytelling which centre on the mystery of an amnesiac child who wields extraordinary powers) and, seemingly, its strained development budget. You spend most of the game travelling between the same handful of major towns. And both games offer a core storyline that is supplemented with freelance missions posted to notice boards in local towns. Both games heavily feature item crafting and alchemy. Both games dispense of the genre's turn-based foundations, instead featuring real time combat that mixes sword-fighting, magic and item tossing. Both aspire to present a lavish and geographically diverse world, from snow-burdened mountains to Sound of Music-esque green plains, each scene filled with a hotchpotch of monsters and bisected by a grandiose storyline. For one, tri-Ace's game mixes the mediaeval fantasy with spaceships and sci-fi (an unusual but not entirely unworkable brew). It may seem unfair to compare Star Ocean, the prog opera of the JRPG line-up, to The Witcher 3, CD Projekt's HBO epic. Now, in a shift that would have been unimaginable back in 1996, the Polish have usurped the Japanese as masters of the American role-playing game. Then production costs rose and sales fell. New and lavish JRPGs arrived every month. The following year Final Fantasy 7 broke the genre from its niche and, with the processing power of PlayStation, or, more precisely, the storage power of CD-Rom discs, steered the video game blockbuster forever away from Nintendo's pristine platformers toward high-production cinema. The previous year Chrono Trigger had brought together Final Fantasy's Hironobu Sakaguchi and Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii, a muscular collaboration that squared each respective team's talents to deliver a masterpiece. When Star Ocean debuted on the Super Famicom 20 years ago the RPG, an American import that Japan made its own with pinch of Shintoism and a dollop of anime, was poised to change video games. A painfully undercooked Japanese RPG that shows how far the genre has fallen behind its western rivals.
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