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It's an interesting thing this old school-new school debate. I'd love to be able to comment on it more, but I'm afraid that I wouldn't be in a position to. I absolutely fell in love with FF6 as it was my first RPG ever. But... I'm a Nintendo gamer at heart, and although I owned a PSX I didn't buy FF7. I did borrow the game from a friend though, and watched my younger brother play through it... I guess we're both old-school gamers because we didn't call it an enjoyable experience.
But, like I said, I'm a Nintendo gamer, so any comments I make on FF games are sort of illegitimate. But I can try to find old-school new-school parallels in the Nintendo field... hmmm...actually... are there any?
The strange thing about Nintendo is that their games, unlike Squaresoft's, don't involve stylistic presentations of a story or characters. Nintendo games (or should I say, Miyamoto games) primarily revolve around game control and game play. So to begin with, Nintendo games are less associated with the fashionable modes of the era. And of course, since Miyamoto is such a strong force in Nintendo's direction, Nintendo games are even less susceptible to sudden shifts in presentational ideology. From my time trolling Nintendo Fan boards, I can't remember many old-new school debates. And the debates that did exist that could possibly share traits with old-school-new-school were debates principally on Nintendo's public image and their game's graphical interpretations. In a sense, that must make Nintendo fans fairly conservative, and safe in that respect because of the stable nature of Miyamoto game ideals. I guess Nintendo-fans must be inherently old-school.
Other companies don't have a Miyamoto who keeps the companies stylistic values fairly stable over a long term period. And other companies aren't as focused on gameplay as Nintendo is.
Squaresoft has several different teams simultaneously working on FF-branded games, so keeping the same artistic qualities between games is probably harder and done less successfully. And since FF games are so reliant on story and graphics as the thrust of their entertainment value, changing mores as to what art styles are "modern" and what story elements are in the vogue (in both cases, heavily anime inspired...ugh) make these types of games less likely to uphold the same values over a period of time.
And I guess that's probably why old-school vs. new-school debates rise. Older RPGs and Newer RPGs are very much the same in gameplay elements, but can represent vastly different story and artistic interpretations from game to game. And these elements that the FF-style RPG relies upon are highly mutable and don't have someone like Miyamoto to safeguard a standard.
Therefore, unlike the solidarity of Nintendo game styles (Nintendo-developed games almost always feel like Nintendo-developed games), the RPG genre is much more likely to naturally degrade into countless different interpretations and vastly different schools of thought and a variety of styles. Nintendo gamers can look forward to the very values they found appealing in the 16-bit age to prevail and still exist in newer games. Rabid RPGamers, on the other hand, have no such comfort and are instead presented with a plethora of different styles and interpretations and ideologies that are all supposedly under the RPG-moniker, but can be vastly different in experience.
Simply put: Mainstream console RPGs are not a single coherent genre, but by the nature of their story and art-style centricism, many different schools of thought. Players can't possibly be expected to appreciate each different style and interpretation, they have their own subjective preferences about what styles work, and what styles don't. Ideology shifts between each game, and especially between the 16-bit and 32-bit generations, create innate differences by the very nature of the RPG genre and cannot be reconciled since they are differences that make up the very core of what people believe RPGs are.
I know I'm long-winded, but let me try to summarize it better... Between old-school and new-school, changes aren't so much a sign of progress. That's a fallacy to call "new-school" a progression over old-school, even accounting for necessary technology-driven changes. The fact is that some stylistic interpretations of how RPGs should be made dominated before, and different interpretations are in place today. I don't believe the old-school-new-school debate is a result of nostalgia, but a logical and sensible consequence of the mutability and instability of the RPG genre.
Unlike the Nintendo world of videogames, where Miyamoto-developed games always embody his innate understanding of the videogame medium, and are always a new exploration or improvement based on that understanding, RPGs are constantly being reinvented and reinterpreted and repackaged. The old-school-new-school discussion is a subjective debate about a variety of styles that can naturally arise within the RPG genre.
Look at it this way. Movies made in the late 70's and 80's are vastly different from movies made today. There's a certain quality, a certain style, in movies like Flashdance, Saturday Night Fever, or Ferris Bueller's Day Off that simply aren't present in movie's today. And likewise, now we have movies like Chicago, 8 Mile, and Mean Girls that simply represent vastly different movie-making styles. When we argue about comparisons between 80's movies and today's movies, we acknowledge that this is a result of the the social culture at the times when the movies were made. When we argue about old-school and new-school RPGs, we should acknowledge that these are innate consequences of the many different stylistic interpretations in each game and the ever-changing mores of the RPG genre.
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