[magus113]

I think the golden age of RPGs ended somewhere in the PS2 era, maybe more towards the end but I'm not sure. Aside from Final Fantasy XII there weren't many PS2 RPGs I've played. I know there's Valkyrie Profile 2, and Rogue Galaxy to name as few as well as Atlus's Shin Megami Tensei games. I plan to get Persona 4 at some point in the future so we'll see how that goes.

I had read in an unrelated article about how there was a lot of creativity when there were limitations on what you could do. That isn't to say that you're able to do anything you want on current consoles, but it definitely feels like they've set the bar much higher for limitations now. The SNES was a great way to give people nice graphics (although dated by today's standards, but yet we still see games utilizing sprites in the style of 16-bit games) and still give them limitations. The PSX era was definitely an improvement but there's things like space limitations with CDs as far as FMVs and audio goes, although I think FMVs are where things started to go wrong. It started a trend of making things flashier so that people could maintain (I guess) more of an interest in what was going on in the game thanks to portions of the game that may have had more dialog than others.

It's hard to market RPGs now in an American market that's catering more to first person shooters thanks to the ideas of hardcore and casual gamers and more people in general moving into gaming as a hobby or lifestyle.