This by itself wouldn’t be so bad, except that the hand-drawn style of the text in the bubbles is too much space for the limited real estate provided by the 3DS. How does this happen? The story is told in stills and dialogue bubbles. It is painful to watch developers so quickly squash and thoroughly squander the goodwill of a built-in fanbase it’s even worse to think about how this comes off to someone who has never actually watched the anime. And yet somehow, the story of Romance Dawn - a story that, I remind you, existed long before this game did - comes off as utterly terrible. Most of the audience for Romance Dawn will care, and care deeply, for the game’s characters before a single battle is fought, before even a single button is pushed. This should be a slam dunk. One of the most difficult parts of telling an RPG story is making the players care - truly care - about the characters involved. Romance Dawn takes a good chunk of the existing part of that story and makes it playable. The anime is fairly well-regarded, and the tales of its adventurers are still being told.
It’s a story that’s been told before in the One Piece anime, and it’s a story with a built-in fanbase whose members stretch across the world. Still, if we’re talking about something like a traditional JRPG or even the majority of “western” RPGs, there’s going to be a story involved. Even games more traditionally thought of as RPGs like Skyrim and Dragon Age can have their stories bent and even ignored by the whims of players.
The definition of “role-playing game” can be fuzzy to the point where it could be argued that, say, Minecraft is a role-playing game, and there are certainly no stories to be found there aside from the ones that players create. For a role-playing game to succeed in 2014, it needs to tell a good story.
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