I'm playing Paper Mario right now. It's a delight. But it's a game designed for children.  The time of my life where I could be classifed as a child has long past.

I occasionally remember when Casey Loe and Nick Des Barres were talking about how they were in Japan once interviewing the director of the Tales series.  They both speak Japanese fluently, so they were able to converse openly with him.  As enthusiasts of the series they had a bunch of questions that cut to the essence of the themes of the game.

As they spoke with him they realized that in his answers he was making it clear that the target audience for the game were pre-teen children.  And here, they were, two grown men, engaging with him as if they were discussing the literary career of Sherwood Anderson.  By their own account they felt a bit sheepish.

Which is how I've started to feel about these games from Japan that are in a zone where they are not children's games as we usually think of them (games based on licences like Dora the Explorer or Barbie) but are not really intended for adults either.  It was when I started to really feel a distance between the JRPGS I was playing.  Yes the stories all suck, why? Because they are simplified for children.

So why am I playing them? (That's rhetorical).