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Not Every Game is a Sequel
Earth Wind and Metal writes "In response to a recent article from the Guardian about the lack of original games, Siliconera selected ten brand new titles set for release in 2006 to keep your eyes on. Five of the games are new to the USA and the other five are making their world debut. The list includes the robot house sim Chibi Robo, sandbox mecha RPG Steambot Chronicles, Taito's DS cooking game Cooking Mama and of course Okami." I am *really* looking forward to Okami.
It's important to note that there's a spectrum between linear and open-ended, and the term "non-linear" covers a wide area in between the two. While I personally enjoy the open-ended RPGs that the parent poster described, I also tend to never beat them (after spending days looking under every rock and carting every piece of trash back to a shop, I eventually get distracted by some other game). On the other hand, Linear RPGs - which covers the vast majority of Japanese console RPGs - are something that I invariably get tired of because they start to feel like watching a (bad, really long) movie except that I have to hit the A button to keep going.
There's a balance, and I really *really* enjoy the exploration aspect of good RPGs, especially when it's mixed in with the right amount of story to keep me from feeling lost on my way to the end. In contrast, I *detest* being hand-held through a sigh-seeing show while being bombarded with boring dialogue and cliche story.
I also find the "getting lost" argument a little weak when I compare open-ended RPGs to platformers and such, although I suppose you could claim the latter to be harder to get lost in due to the subdivision of content created by having levels.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Some good points there, but I'm not with you on all of them.
First off, there are two genres that really, in my opinion, don't leave much room for originality...FPS's and sports. Sports more so, because once you have emulated the real-life sport, how much more is there really to do? You can adjust control schemes, improve graphics, make an even MORE in-depth "team management" engine (which many players actually don't like...some of us just want to play some hockey), and update rosters. I mean, what are you chances of actually successfully re-inventing the football game?
FPS's aren't quite as bad, but really you're still going to run into a bit of a wall as far as original ideas. You can change the weapons around a bit, add vehicles, have distinct character classes, or have some sort of levelling system for single-player mode. All of these have been done. Go much farther than that and you run a strong risk of departing from what fans of the genre actually enjoy.
Really, games just aren't much different than other forms of entertainment like movies or music: you have the occasional gem surrounded by a lot of derivitive crap. However, sequels specifically aren't really a bad thing by their nature. I really don't mind when a developer takes a game and refines it in the form of a sequel. It serves two purposes:
First, it gives gamers who did not play the previous games a chance to enjoy the experience in a "modern" form. As a newcomer to the series, I have a much greater chance of enjoying Simcity 4 or Civilization 4 than I would playing the originals...in both cases -I- have played every game in the series, and looking back each iteration, especially the first ones, while amazing at the time, are much too simplistic for my current tastes, as well as -badly- graphically outdated.
Second, it gives fans of previous games a chance to enjoy the core experience again, often with added/improved features...sometimes with drastically different gameplay. Again I'll fall back on Simcity 4, Civ 4. In each of these series, elements were added that drastically changed the gameplay. The addition of cultural victories in Civilization, for instance, or the use of a region in Simcity 4 which allows a player to create large "metro areas." No, if you didn't like the originals these features are far from guaranteed to interest you, but for a current fan of the series these features are more than worth the money for the new game.
And let's not forget "sequels" like Metroid Prime, which manage to fundamentally change the genre/gameplay, while simply keeping some of the core ideas of the franchise. And sequels in name/gameplay type only like the aforementioned Final Fantasy series.
And with all these sequels, let's not forget that at one point every one of them was an "original" game. At one point there was no Devil May Cry 2, or Gran Turismo 3, or Burnout 3, or Project Gotham Racing 3, or Halo 2. Just because a sequel was made afterwards does not retroactively make the orignal less...well, original.
Combine everything I said above with the number of original non-franchises that come out every year (which, while not a majority, is also a non-trivial number), and the whole problem of sequels seems to be a bit overstated to me.