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On "mentrification"
Was just thinking the other day that Final Fantasy was THE most prestigious game franchise in late 90s before suddenly becoming uncool in the mid-00s - not because of the quality problems but because it was the first wave of online, and gamers suddenly realised girls liked them
When an FF dropped in 2000 it was wall to wall game mag coverage for months, but by the time they released trailers for FFXIII it was treated as a sidebar, accompanied with jokes about "hey the protagonist is an actual girl instead of just looking like a girl"
This was around the time you also saw the popular narrative that VI was unquestionably the best. There had always been people who liked it better, but it didn't have that fervent stink of guys trying to salvage their childhood reputations from something sullied
(again you can tell VI favouritism was a mentrifying backlash because the constant joke about FFXIII was that the series had degenerated so badly it even started a girl. Both the protagonists of FFVI are girls. It honestly took ten years for these fanboys to notice)
That wave of FFVI revisionism took place mostly on 4chan's /v/ and was largely about Kefka being a chad and Sephiroth being gay. Occasionally it would go into Locke being a masc badass while Cloud is pathetically angsty over his dead girlfriend, which is literally back to front
(Kefka is also not a chad and it is ridiculous to think he is. Sephiroth is gay though)
It's obscured slightly by the obvious quality problems that played into this - like with Twilight, which was also being made fun of by "snarky bitches" (which was what women used to be on the internet at that time). FFVI is high quality; I don't care to reiterate XIII's problems
But it was genuinely a shock to me to unearth Digitiser's review of FFVII which viewed it as an instant classic and proof of what the medium had the power to do - that whole line of analysis, of taking these games seriously, is pretty much gone from mainstream Western crit
The only places people seriously talk about JRPG storytelling now are in sort of alternative games crit which centres women's and LGBT perspectives. The line's fuzzy, Undertale and NieR Automata got raved about in the alt press and became mainstream classics from there, but yeah
Instead the mantle of The Best Written Most Arty Games Ever has been pretty much entirely taken over by all those Western AAA prestige games. Even the alternative games crit seems to be implicitly admitting that even if the reviewer liked FF7 Remake, TLOU2 is more IMPORTANT.
