>>3851976
>it's also cringe to see people gushing about the story as if it's some kind of transcendental masterpiece and revolutionary moment in videogame history.
>It's a simple, effective redemption story that provides the structure to a simple, effective game.
But that's exactly what makes it a masterpiece. It's extremely well-done, even if it is simple. It's okay to praise simple things and find beauty in them and revere them as "masterpieces". Stop living your life trying to gauge everything on your cringe-o-meter. They told an interactive story of love, betrayal, sorrow, and redemption using dumpy little-big-head sprites and bleep-bloop music and made it stick. It was something that was pretty rare at the time, and the effectiveness of it makes it highly enjoyable and worthy of praise to this day.
>I just wish the people interested in analysis and criticism actually had better examples on how to do it well.
You can't teach someone how to criticize by giving examples, lol. That's precisely how you end up with cynical cunts. Good criticism just comes from familiarity and context—with both the subject and literally everything else in the world. If you want to criticize JRPGs, you have to play a lot of them. It also helps to be familiar with Japanese culture and to absorb other media from the same cultural pool. I find watching a lot of 80s and early 90s era fantasy anime and OVAs can really help you understand the sort of themes and concepts the developers were aiming for—ideas and references that might offend or alienate Joe Schmoe, but would have been inherent to a 12-year-old Japanese schoolkid in 1991. Understanding the target demographic for a piece of media (and how quickly those demographics shift) is half the battle.