Kamruz Moslemi’s 2011 Game Developer essay makes an argument that has aged remarkably well: the JRPG has been frozen since the 1980s, and the genre’s escape route was already built, shipped, and then ignored. His diagnosis is a coupled defect — random encounters exist only because the grind needs them, and the grind exists only because designers want a longer playtime number. Remove one and the other loses its justification.
The counter-example is Vagrant Story, and the list of what it discarded is the essay’s real content:
- No random encounters — enemies are visible in the world and can be walked past
- No towns, no overworld map, no shops — one continuous connected location
- No reliance on character level; power comes from weapon crafting and ability selection
- No filler fights — normal enemies can kill an inattentive player, so encounters demand attention
- Roughly 40 hours to complete, against a genre standard of 70-100
The sharpest point is not about pacing but about values. Exploration — satisfying curiosity, wandering off the beaten path — is roughly half of what makes an RPG fun. Random encounters punish exactly that behaviour, so players learn to stop exploring and make a beeline for the next town. The mechanic is hostile to the game’s own best feature.
Moslemi also lands an honest counterpoint on the open-world side: Fallout 3’s seamless connected world is praised, then criticised in the same breath for unrewarding exploration. Removing friction is not enough if there is nothing worth finding. And he makes the case that buying a better sword in the next town is worse than building one from enemy drops — not on flavour grounds, but because the shop requires no decisions and the crafting system does.
The coda is the part worth sitting with. The design held up as the genre’s future was a commercial failure, and the genre went the other way. Fourteen years later, the 30-40 hour target he proposed as a minority position reads close to consensus.