Teodomo

There's a lot to writing in JRPGs (story, plot, pacing, characters, narration, worldbuilding, etc.) and some games excel at some of those aspects and not so much at others. It's also a subjective topic.

So, I'd like to know. How do you rank JRPGs looking foremost at writing over other aspects like gameplay, visuals, music and so on? You can talk about your top JRPGs, or maybe highlight some high and low points writing-wise or hell if you want to rank every single JRPG you have played in regards to its writing I'll read ya! I did find this massive JRPG Tiermaker for those of you that want to rank a couple (or hundreds) of JRPGs in a more graphic form.

Or if you don't care about ranking but want to share some insights about this topic I'm all ears.

The way I used Twitter was by aggresively muting, blocking & managing the interests functionality through the years until I pruned my home page to mostly show me meaningful discussion about videogames (and a bit of other media), some relevant news, including a good balance of AAA and indie stuff as well as a a balance of mainstream (mostly from US and Japan videogame industries) and diverse stuff (ie from other countries). I had industry people, interesting youtubers (more essay-types than gameplay-types), socially progressive viewpoints, diversity, a bit of art, a bit of lore, etc.

Are there good instances focused on that? I know I can see stuff from any instance but AFAIK some are better to set up camp because of their admins, their defederations and also because it's a bit easier to find new interesting accounts to follow from within the instance.

Which do you recommend?

EDIT: I do know there's no algorithm in Mastodon like in Twitter so I'll only see whoever I follow. Just wanted to clarify before someone took the work to explain all that. I just want to replicate the kind of feed I had on Twitter, just that this time it'll be 100% from following accounts rather than a mix.

What I mean is... sometimes people are very loyal to a videogame franchise or a company because they loved a game they released years ago (Silent Hill/Konami with Silent Hill 2, Blizzard/Bethesda with their respective golden eras, some could argue this happens too with Pokémon and Final Fantasy, etc). Ethical/consumer reasons aside to stop supporting certain companies, sometimes some franchises/companies aren't necessarily creating the best examples of games of those specific genres anymore, yet many fans are loyal to them (and a chunk of them also seem to suffer/complain with every new release).

Meanwhile some people that explore less known titles and different niches occasionally pop-up and say stuff like "the last Pokémon games are formulaic and uninspired, there's actually this and that incredible examples of somewhat recent monster collecting games" or "the last FF wasn't actually bad but if you want turn-based RPGs that'll remind you of your old favorite FFs then check Chained Echoes or whatever" or "don't look for something like Silent Hill 2 with Konami, instead I recommend these survival horror games".

So the idea of this thread is for people to recommend alternatives to franchises. Especially if they're standalone instead of other alternative franchises and especially if they're indie (since most of my enjoyment these last few years has been from indies like Roadwarden, Citizen Sleeper, Darkest Dungeon, Celeste, Slay the Spire, Tacoma, Hellblade).

In my life I've seen interesting discussions about which JRPGs have the best protagonists and which ones have the best non-protagonist party members but I don't think I've seen this one.

Since "best" can mean anything subjective let us know what it means in your case! i.e some might choose a party based on the writing+design of the characters, others might focus on their character arcs and themes, or on the overall diversity of the party (full human teens party vs diverse ages or diverse species vs whatever Chrono Cross has going on, etc).