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The story
On 5ch’s “Hardware/Industry (Geha)” board, a poster’s self-made “RPG tier list” sparked controversy. The ranking didn’t include a single Dragon Quest title, prompting doubts in the original thread about whether the poster lacked experience or just had narrow tastes. Commenters also pointed out that Pokémon was missing, leading many to suspect the poster mainly played Final Fantasy and the SaGa series. The list was also said to exclude storytelling as an evaluation criterion, splitting the thread between those who think RPGs should be judged on narrative and those who think gameplay alone should decide — turning it into a full-blown debate.
What people said
>Wow, it's rare to see someone with tastes this different from mine.
I've barely played any of these — seriously, why isn't there a single Dragon Quest game on here? Isn't that way too little experience to be making an RPG tier list?
Dude's just a Final Fantasy fanboy.
SaGa fans are an even more niche crowd than Dragon Quest or FF fans.
stuff he dislikes or hasn't played just doesn't make the cut.
In that case he wouldn't have been able to play Dragon Quest.
That's like making a beef-bowl tier list and ranking it purely on how good the rice tastes lol
Nah, story isn't really what people look for in RPGs.
Good proof of that: the best-selling RPG in the world is Pokémon.
That's not proof of anything at all, lol😂
Pokémon's story focus has actually been increasing more and more, though.
Stuff like this wouldn't blow up if he didn't blow it up into some grand statement about RPGs as a whole.
I don't even think he's a true Square loyalist.
Even just within FF and SaGa the ranking is way too bonkers — he probably just padded it with titles he's never actually played ('air-play,' 5ch slang for faking experience with a game) to pad the numbers.
That said, even granting that, you still have to wonder about ranking Seiken Densetsu as S-tier, or rating FF10 high while FF12/13 are low.
But there are games like Grandia that get praised specifically for their characters and story,
so with that mindset, you have to wonder what he's even playing these games for.
I don't really get what counts as 'normal' here.
I'm also the type who doesn't care much about story —
if you want quality storytelling, you can just get it from some other medium.
What you evaluate just depends on the game.
Don't judge gameplay fun and story/characters all by the same yardstick.
For Dragon Quest III, for instance, it's the fun of replaying it over and over;
for Glory of Heracles III, it's the quality of the story.
The point is you look at what's actually good about each specific game, not judge everything on the same scale.
Then 'normal' isn't the right word to use there.
Why not?
If you play a lot of different games,
you'd normally realize that some of them do treat story as important.
This is just a simple point that different games have different selling points — but you keep using a loaded word like 'normal,' which is why it's turning into an argument. If you don't get that, there's no point continuing, so forget it.
I don't get what you mean.
I only said that OP leaving story out of the evaluation seemed off,
since normally, if you've also played RPGs with good stories, you wouldn't exclude it from the evaluation —
is that really so weird to say?
It is kind of surprising Dragon Quest didn't make the cut there.
That's exactly why — he might be deliberately snubbing Dragon Quest without even trying it, just to be contrarian.
Same deal as Monster Hunter not being an RPG —
say that in Japan and people will just laugh at you.
Novels or visual novels (ADV) deliver way richer, higher-quality narrative.
Multiple endings are something only games can really do, though.
That's really just down to personal taste at that point.
Lately there are YouTubers who go 'this sucks, that sucks' as if it's some universal consensus,
and then people jump on the bandwagon, which makes it worse.
Ranking the early FF titles above FF12 or 13 — what criteria is that even based on?
Maybe he just prefers the harder ones?
King's Field was an RPG, and Oblivion was released as an RPG too — the 'open world' genre label only caught on afterward, didn't it?
That's a take you hear a lot, but it doesn't explain the popularity of 'Ante' (apparent shorthand for a specific title) if that's the case.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
“Tier lists” are a format popularized on YouTube and social media for ranking games by personal preference — by design, they reflect the poster’s own play history rather than aiming for comprehensive coverage. This particular list appears to be based on titles the poster actually played, which is likely why Dragon Quest and Pokémon — both among Japan’s best-selling franchises — ended up left out. The thread split over whether an RPG’s evaluation should factor in storytelling at all, with support on both the story-focused and gameplay-focused sides. The debate also branched into a broader argument over “what even counts as an RPG,” with disagreement over whether to count Dark Souls, The Elder Scrolls, or Monster Hunter as RPGs — reflecting a divide between the Japanese (“JRPG”) conception of the genre and the Western one. The fact that the list itself mixes different evaluation criteria (combat, story, freedom) from game to game was also a major source of criticism.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch “Hardware/Industry (Geha)” thread “Made an RPG tier list! ←No Dragon Quest?! Thread erupts lol“.
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