Hello all, I have made a small survey on SPRG's and would like some folks to participate!

 

Survey here

 

If you do fill it out I will greatly appreciate it!!

 

Thank you for your time.

I don't think I can answer the questions as presented in the survey itself, but the notion itself is worth discussing here. Do I like SRPGs? Well, yes and no. I like some games that can be given that label, but I think the term itself is contradictory and that if a game was made with that literal goal in mind, it would be a bad game. A strategy game thrives on challenge and having the smarts to beat the metagame, it's about optimising your play to have the best chance of winning. An RPG neither needs nor wants any of those things. The player's actions are determined by what's interesting and what's in character, and those actions are sometimes, or indeed almost always, not the optimal one.

 

So yeah, the good titles are good not because they're SRPGs, but because they're not RPGs. They're just strategy games, being about as much of an RPG as Civilization, or Starcraft. Being kind, I'd say the only distinguishing feature is the notion of unit persistence such that one redshirt isn't the same as the next, but that's not so much RPG as plain old common sense design.

Soviet RPG?