If Only The Genre Had Built On The Lessons This Game Taught Us In 1998
PDS is a "grail" game, going for ridiculous prices on eBay and spoken of in hushed whispers by people in odd corners of the internet. That interested me, especially since I missed the Saturn back in the day. I’d been playing games since the Genesis and, until 2005, was quite fond of your average JRPG.
Around that time however, whether it was a higher level of maturity or greater demands on my time (or both), I began to be hugely exasperated with JRPGs as a genre. They wasted enormous amounts of my time, and were laden with tired tropes. Over the next decade or so I tried a majority of the supposedly innovative JRPGs that were touted as the saviors of the genre, and rapidly became fed up with all of them, as they all contained mostly the same tired tropes, trash encounters, grinding, and massively-padded 40+ hour playtimes. Even the JRPGs I used to love were hard to go back to. The rose-colored glasses were throughly shattered.
So 2017 rolls around, and I import a Japanese Saturn to try and experience a catalog of games I missed. I’m not expecting much from PDS because A) It’s from 1998 and it can’t have aged much better than most JRPGs from that era and B) It’s been so overhyped in the intervening decades that it simply can’t live up to those expectations.
And it kinda blew me away. Even with the crappy 3D of the Saturn, the alien and imaginative art direction manages to shine through. The game is 15-20 hours long max, with virtually no fluff or filler. The plot isn’t original or extremely baroque, but it successfully lands the same story beats that take most JRPGs 2-3x as much time to deliver. It has a shockingly low number of random encounters and junk fights ballooning the playtime. It has no grinding. It has a clever and (from what I can tell) mostly un-imitated battle system that looks deceptively simple but makes the vast majority of combat interesting due to its subtle reliance on enemy tells, positioning, and timing. There are so few annoying battles, bosses, dungeons, or sequences. It’s a masterwork of game design that feels shockingly fresh and playable in 2017, which is a feat for any game, doubly so for a classical JRPG.
JRPGs as a genre are as trope-laden, tedious and overlong today as they were back in the 90s. Sega showed us the path forward from that, and they showed it to us in 1998. If the JRPG genre as a whole had learned from this game’s lessons, it might have grown into something much more diverse, creative, and interesting than it is today.