JRPG or RPG didn’t matter when creativity was at the forefront of the industry.
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For some people, talking about this is fun. Let them have it. For some people who are interested in this it’s not annoying at all.
I don’t click on articles I don’t care about and find pointless. I let the people who care about [insert interest I find boring here] talk about it without telling them they’re showcasing the most annoying parts of autistic people, or conversely showcasing the worst shallow impulses of humanity instead of caring about something really important. People are allowed to have interests that aren’t historymaking and activism, and interests that many others do not share.
I have autism and admittedly feel kind of on the defense because of your comment. I don’t go around talking about the most annoying aspects of neurotypicals or any other demographic, I thought that was kind of a jerkish and (sometimes low-key) discriminatory thing to do. Also, one social rule I learned is to live and let live and I tend not to handle the whole “it’s basically nothing, can’t believe someone cares about this” kind of comment well. Kind of disappointed your comment has this many upvotes.
We do like our japanese things
I somewhat agree with the sentiment behind the article, but…
And when you actually pick up the controller and play one of them, you begin to feel like you’ve been through the same gameplay loop as many other games this generation: Tales Of Arise, Scarlet Nexus, Nier Automata, Valkyrie Elysium, YS 8 and 9; they’re all essentially the same action game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
Games like Tales and NieR (both long-running franchises) have never tried to be anything but action RPGs—not to mention NieR, which I’d honestly just call a straight up Platinum action game. I’d actually call NieR closer to Elden Ring than it is to Tales, and yet the author isn’t out here calling Elden Ring a JRPG. What more does NieR have in common with Tales or Ys than it does with Elden Ring besides country of origin? Does JRPG mean “game with anime-ish art style”? Maybe it’s the art style, but even that’s a bit of a stretch to me.
Which I think strikes at the heart of the matter: what defines a JRPG? Is it the country it came from? Obviously not. There’s a very specific style of game that “JRPG” refers to, and it’s a style that was very popular in the 90s and 00s. Obviously games are still made in that style: I could just as easily show a JRPG renaissance by namedropping Dragon Quest XI, Xenoblade, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Persona 5, all the Trails games, etc. But the author is basing his notions of what a JRPG is solely on trends from 20+ years ago. Trends change. People change. Maybe in 20 years, people will be whining about whatever Japan is putting out then and saying “WHY CAN’T JAPAN GO BACK TO WHAT THEY DID RIGHT AND MAKE ANOTHER TALES GAME LIKE TALES OF ARISE?”.
Yes, I think developers, studios, and even industries should take pride in where they’ve been creatively, and that’s where I agree with the author. That said, why can’t we let new games be new games? People are still making plenty of traditional JRPGs whether they’re made in Japan or not (hi chained echoes and edge of eternity), so why bother the developers who don’t wanna make those games and essentially tell them “you need to get over your internalized xenophobia”? It’s possible they don’t have internalized xenophobia like this article is suggesting, maybe they’re just tired of people putting them in a box.
And when you actually pick up the controller and play one of them, you begin to feel like you’ve been through the same gameplay loop as many other games this generation: Tales Of Arise, Scarlet Nexus, Nier Automata, Valkyrie Elysium, YS 8 and 9; they’re all essentially the same action game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
I’d quote the same fragment as you, and I’ll add:
It’s the same for western RPGs
All action RPG games feel “samey” (think Gothic, The Elder Scrolls, Elex, Two Worlds…) they’re all essentially the same game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
All dungeon crawlers (Diablo, Torchlight, Path of Exile, Titan Quest, Sacred) they’re all essentially the same game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
All DnD games are exactly the same (Baldurgs Gate, Neverwinter Night, Icewind Dale, PlaneEscape, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Dragon Age…) they’re all essentially the same game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.Anyways, the article is about JRPGs, but the author for some reason only focuses on action games that are not JRPGs (Scarlet Nexus, Nier, Valkyrie Elisum, Ys 8, etc…)
It’s like writing an article about chess, but complain about checkers
Seeing Nier Automata on this list makes me think the author hasn’t finished it. I’m not sure how you finish a full playthrough and come away with “2B’s combat was kind of basic” while ignoring everything else it was doing.
“2B’s combat was kind of basic”
I haven’t played Nier, but I’d say that defines perfectly Platinum games’ games (or at least the ones I played)
Final Fantasy doesn’t “look Japanese”, according to this guy. If that’s a joke, I’m not getting it, and if it isn’t… wat?
I can only assume that their point is that Final Fantasy is heavily inspired by western mythology and fantasy.
I am not sure how one gets that far into an analysis of RPGs, J or otherwise, without even once mentioning characters, stories or themes.
Those games have never really been about mechanics to me. Sure, since they’re usually so long, they’d better try to keep things entertaining enough, but there’s a lot more to them (good ones, anyway).
I honestly don’t care much about the J, and even “RPG” seems so broad to me, because many, many games have blurred the line. Starting around end of the 90s when “RPG elements” became a thing. I don’t think it matters much.
The author sounds like they just dislike action games and are judging the games solely based on that. The fact that they call an attack timing minigame in a turn based rpg “one of the most unique gameplay systems in the market” says enough.
The fuss seems to be mostly just the Japanese developers getting butthurt that people in the west got bored of their simplistic combat systems and random encounters, and came up with a term to differentiate the games that, at the time were entirely developed in Japan, that fit this style.
It’s not the Japanese part that made them disliked more. It was the style of gameplay they offered. If you played one, you played them all, basically. They are barely RPGs, taking a more linear, choiceless approach to not only character creation, but dialogue options if even offered, are generally “yes/no” responses to questions that don’t have any real impact.
It took the big developers of these games way too long to actually listen to fans’ very valid criticisms and make changes to these systems, and they still very much keep so many more traditions that the term endures.
