(I suppose that in my own taxonomy nowadays, they'd be digital fiction games with a strongly directed story and conflict synonymous with combat. Not quite the same ring to it.)
More prosaically: back in the day, there was the Super Nintendo, with Secret of Mana. Final Fantasy 3, Chrono Trigger, and others, and I drowned my young life in them. It was their fault that I found Final Fantasy 7 to be such an intense disappointment.
The success of the NES had permanently embedded certain characters in the zeitgeist. Mario. Megaman. Final Fantasy. Each of these memetic complexes has their own associations and expectations. Mario fights turtles. Megaman is blue. In Final Fantasy, a team of four heroes travels the world in order to save it in some way that involves crystals heavily (it was the 80s, and Japan was still in the practice of taking a decade to digest our cultural leavings).
Final Fantasy 7 was astoundingly popular. It is one of those video games that, like Mario, was played by nearly everyone who was playing video games at the time. This success made it genre-defining: to this day: "JRPG" effectively stands for "it's basically like Final Fantasy 7." Everyone loved the damn thing. I found it very disheartening.
Its first problem was unoriginality: it was exactly like every other game in the series, and completely failed to incorporate what seemed like the obvious innovations of Chrono Trigger, most notably the removing of suddden "Oh! Now We Are Fighting!" random battles and the addition of characters that humans could care about.
Its second problem was the one innovation it could honestly claim: hideous graphics. When I heard that the Playstation represented a new generation of graphics technology, I tried to imagine the next step in the evolution diorama.
Final Fantasy 1|
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Final Fantasy 2|
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GODDAMIT NOI was appalled, disgusted. I had grown to expect character art to be tiny works of art, ever-increasing in complexity, and instead got a series of stiff, pointy, five-color jokes.
The picture above captures a moment which is widely regarded as the most pathos-ridden in the entire game, or even (according to idiots) in all games ever: Spikyhair McFrownyface regards the stiff, lifeless (i.e. normal) form of his realdoll-knockoff lady love, while some goth chick in the background reconnects with their lord and savior.
Not that I played as far as this purportedly-momentous point in the game. You can imagine, if this was supposed to be the pinnacle of Final Fantasy 7's emotive power, just how shitty the rest of it was. You either didn't know what you were looking at, or it was ugly. The characters were either uninteresting or unlikeable. The music was either a fair adaptation of the same songs from the previous games, or not good. Equal parts bland and bad.
I won't do the plot the disservice of calling it "incomprehensible" or "nonsensical" or "complex." Let me assure you that games with a lot of dialogue require a great deal of writing, and when those games are made to take thirty or more hours to finish, they require a stupendous amount of words to read. War and Peace is long, and many things happen to its characters over the course of that length: that makes it well-paced, not "convoluted." On the other hand, if Pierre Bolkonsky had at regular intervals encountered characters entirely unconnnected to his story (yet each, shockingly, tailored to appeal to a specific target demographic) who nonetheless decide to accompany him for the rest of the book for ill-defined reasons...well, we might be briefly confused, but it won't be because we don't understand what is being done. Final Fantasy 7 gave us a sassy underage female ninja, a mysterious emo male ninja, and a big cute cat thing. That this trio added time to your play-through does not magically make the experience more literary.
In short, to repeat, I was disappointed. It wasn't what I had been hoping for.
What had I been hoping for?
I wanted visually interesting fights that got out of the way as soon as I was bored with them. I wanted to be a hero that protected people I liked from people I didn't like. I wanted to go to strange places that were pleasing to the eye and ear. I wanted, on occasion, to be made to laugh and to cry, but in general, to be made interested in seeing what happened next. Seeing. I'm not ashamed to say that, most of all, I wanted to see pretty pictures moving around on the screen.
So it turned out that what I wanted was Suikoden.
-Nick