Mar 23 2009
Reason for Few RPGs Falls on First-Person Shooters?
My stack of RPGs to play and finish is quite tall, but sad to say, none of them were released in 2009. I have a couple of RPG wishlists that came out earlier this year — Tales of Vesperia and Avalon Code — but that is it. Not much is on the RPG horizon for 2009 either. Final Fantasy XIII was pushed back (for the US) to 2010, Star Ocean: The Last Hope just came out but I’m not that interested, and Arc Rise Fantasia comes out later this year. The DS has plenty of other RPGs on the calendar, but I’m looking for non-handheld games to satisfy my needs.
A gaming friend of mine pointed out recently that first-person shooters have become the new IN genre. That suddenly brought everything into perspective. What has been out recently of critical acclaim? Let’s see… Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, Gears of War 2, Killzone 2, Chronicles of Riddick, FEAR 2, Halo 3, Resident Evil 5, HAWX, and Wanted: Weapons of Fate. That’s quite the laundry list. Just look at the PS3’s and Xbox 360’s list of RPGs v. FPSes. Xbox’s catalogue is 15 pages for FPSes, and 3 pages for RPGs. For the PS3, it’s 2 pages to 1.
So this could be good for me, in that it will give me plenty of time to catch up on my long list, but at the same time, when I do catch up, I’ll be watching my husband play on the big screen TV and I’ll be wondering if FF13 will actually be released. It also means I’ll have less to write about in the future, except for DS RPGs. Apparently I can count on Nintendo for that, if nothing else.
