First off, this word, which I
never used:
innovative
Please explain to me how "innovative" equals "modern," which is what I said.
Yes, Tycho
did refer to innovation when he was speaking of
StarCraft II. Innovation in the genre, and innovation in Blizzard's other works, and how none of it was present in
StarCraft II. Level 5 didn't really introduce anything new to the genre with
Dragon Quest IX either, but what they did do is take some of the innovations others have made and implement them into a
Dragon Quest game.
For another way of looking at it, compare
StarCraft and
StarCraft II, then compare previous main-series
Dragon Quest games and
Dragon Quest IX, and then compare
StarCraft II to other real-time strategy games of the past few years and
Dragon Quest IX to other JRPGs of the past few years.
Second, I didn't compare the game's multiplayer to those other things, aside from to say that it's a legit part of the experience and that like those types of games, ignoring the multiplayer is a shoddy way to write about it. Furthermore:
It's not even like actual co-op. You just become a character in the other person's party, but it helps in no meaningful way because it's still the same turn-based 4-person-max setup. It's like in some of the FFs where you can set certain controllers to control certain characters. Woo! Fun! Or you can go off on your own and not be in the other person's battles. But since the monsters are infinite, that does even less, and you're alone in an area that's probably too hard for you! And the funniest part of all: you can't progress your own "world" while helping someone else so you're going to have to do it all again anyway.
Save for the bits relating to the combat setup, your comparison to another series, and the infinite monsters, you just described
Diablo multiplayer. Which, since
Dragon Quest IX multiplayer is largely the same way (including things like boosted experience gains when you have multiple players in the same world), is pretty apt.
Incidentally, how much of
Dragon Quest IX did you play?
I admittedly haven't had much first-hand experience with
Final Fantasy XIII. But I've experienced more of that game than ShadowBrian did of
Limbo, I'm sure, and you don't exactly have to play through an entire game to see things like characters' personalities, contrived and generic story elements, or
area design, to say nothing of
this sort of thing.