I started just cciting people that i agreed with, but ill add more to it:
Similar to yours (sense of adventure) but mainly I miss world maps and airships. World maps really help convey a sense of scale and travel, and NOTHING beat the moment when you first were able to explore the whole map after getting an airship.
The adventure feel, a world to explore. Jep.
I miss the days when most JRPGs weren't filled to the brim with otaku pandering fanservice
Old JRPGs fellt like Shonen. Newer ones...more, like you said, otaku pandering. The Fanservice is really bad, especially when you consider, even back then women had not the best representation in games.
Another thing: Hidden party members. Nowadays making a character (fully fleshed with animation and dialogue) is expensive enough it makes no financial sense to just hide it from your players.
Or side content, optional bosses/dungeons, etc. Post game, with lore. Not that its completly gone. But a "endless dungeon" or recolored boss fights dont count. More:
Abyssion in ToS, or the Weapons in FF. Generally "Superbosses"
They felt more magical and felt more of a real journey than the new ones. Also better music too, and no, it's just not the nostalgia kicking in.
More magical, thats kinda hard to discribe, but i would put it as "adventure". Newer ones feel like youre geting send from place to place. Not that it did not happen (FF7 is the best example), but it didnt FEEL that way.
Honestly, probably new IPs. We still get a lot of great JRPGs, but they're all part of long running franchises.
Also, bring back SRPGs.
A+. I kinda felt that Radiant Historia was overhyped. Looking back: its a really great game, and was fresh, with a fresh setting, that only lacked in the diversity of locations, since you replayed a lot of them so ofthen.
Yeah. A more focused scale, but at the same time the feel of a huge world. Midgar , Estar, Lindblum, all of those places felt huge... but had only maybe 10 screens each.
With Prerendered backgrounds you can imply way more than you could realistically make in an interactive town.
I think experimentations with combat systems are one of the better things happening with the genre. I know, old turn-based combat has a lot of fans, but the vast majority of games tended to get repetitive fairly quickly because there was a lot of encounters and not much depth to combat.
Good Turn Based Combat has the potential to be a puzzle, and to have strategy. Old JRPGs to fast became "just moping the floor" with the same view strong attacks, and ofthen underused elements (sstatus effects on enemies? useless in most cases. FF8 had a solid use, but if you can expect attacks to miss 2/3 times, why even waste it. Octopath was greath, sometimes poison did make a bigger difference than atacking normally, and buffs/debuffs where essential to not need to overgrind)
Im more pissed about bad action rpgs. I know, not every ARPG can be kingdome hearts, but coming from KH and Spectacle Fighters (DMC, Bayonetta, Tales of in parts (Symphonia felt like a Beat M up in places) most Action RPGs just dont have a good feel when fighting, and after a while im thinking i would prefere to chose attacks rather have janky action. Exception: normal attacks. Looking @ Dragon Quest and the free roam mode: being able to attack normally would be nice, and doing other stuff in the menu.
Towns are the big thing for me. I get why it's more challenging to pull off nowadays, but it really ruins the sense of adventure not being able to go into buildings or having settlements that are a straight line.
Side content. Again, it's become more common, but it's still a far cry off from entire characters being optional. I get why that isn't the case (you ain't gonna spend millions on mocap and voicing for a character some players might not even meet) but with smaller scale JRPGs they should bring it back.
Yeah, the feel of towns is gone. They where smaler, they needed to show you what makes them distinct in a clear way.
I think what I miss the most is the tone.
It had a kind of naiveté back in the day which was pretty nice.
Nowadays it's all pretty grim stories with ton of otaku pandering "fanservice" on top 🤷♀️
A few games still manage to instill that "feeling of adventure" and stuff, but they're few and far between and are arguably rarer than they were 20 years ago.
You had dark elements, but its less "edgy", and was more optimistic than now. Even FF6, with its End of the world second half.
- often it feels like the proportion of cutscenes and gameplay is way off, to many cutscenes.
- Dungeons. I want dungeons with maps and different ways and stuff to do outside of battling.
- Less bombastic music, more melodic.
- <50h games. Maybe even <30h. Not interested to have to invest 100h in a game, most of it is filler
- LESS FILLER. At least in the main path.
- Less of those convoluted systems. I feel like every new RPG has 3-5 systems aditional to the core ones, and for every one you get a tutorial in the first view hours.
With all that said: the genre is far from dead. Octopath had exploring, had a good map, ahd a great battle system, a God tire soundtrack. And a Battle system that has so much potential in the future. Just the structure would need a rethinking.
Dragon Quest 11: im not a fan, because a) music (i find it grading for more than an hour, even the orchestral stuff), character design(just not a fan of Toriyama in this context), story (kinda oldschoolier than i like), but it has a lot to explore, a world(map) of some kind, a lot of options, has a great feel in the first city, etc etc...its made for fans of oldschool RPGs, you can feel it.
Nino Kuni (1, 2) had a worldmap, dont know if the games where good.
Xenoblade did some of this stuff right. Im just really really not a fan of the huge amount of pandering and the Battle Systems that remind me more of MMO RPGS (not really turn based, not really action, and a lot of "cooldown" mechanics and meters)