Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - If 'JRPG' is a Dirty Word, It's America's Fault
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1064 |
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There is something I think some people are missing when thinking in the reason for the design change in Final Fantasy:
Think for a second in the design philosophy behind FFXII-XV and think in its natural evolution and improvement... you get Xenoblade's Battle System. That's the main problem if you ask me, I have been playing X3 for the last 3 months and I legit feel I have been playin an hypothetical FFXVI. Squeenix slept on its laurels, took them 10 years to make FFXV and during that time Monolith stole their battle system before they even had time to create it. So now if they made FFXVI with the proper evolution taking the best parts of XII, XIII and XV people would say that they are copying Monolith and they can't go back to the traditional style because Megaten and 1000 indies have that market covered too. Thus, they took the easy way out and made a Character Action Game which has to be the easiest game to develop nowadays, kinda disappointing. |
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Siegfriedl88
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pretty much this for me, a lot easier to say than having to describe it as "i like rpgs developed in japan" only wrpg i enjoyed was mass effect, otherwise im sticking with describing the games i like to other people as JRPGs 
if FF 16 is anything like 15, im dropping that franchise and simply playing any remakes and remasters they release then. |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2233 |
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Er, stylish action games are NOT easy to develop. There is a ton of nuance that goes into balancing and implementing movesets. You need to make those games fun to play and the movesets satisfying and dynamic to use even after hundreds of repetitions. A lot goes into a character punching a monster which is why it's really just Devil May Cry and Bayonetta as the twin standard bearers nowadays Last edited by AiddonValentine on Fri Mar 03, 2023 2:34 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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LadonTree
Posts: 24 |
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Thank you for having the guts to call this out directly, instead of tiptoeing around it. Industry professionals and media in the west have been making thinly veiled racist remarks regarding Japanese productions for decades without repercussions. |
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Kicksville
 Posts: 1197 |
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This has been a tricky thing because I swear I pretty much never heard the term "JRPG" before the late 00's - they were just called "RPGs". Maybe there were people who used it, but I sure don't recall it being a dominant term. I felt like the division of terms like JRPG and WRPG was rather console-centric (specifically to separate "all those Japanese RPGs" away from Bioware, Bethesda, etc), and yes, it was definitely meant in a derogatory manner by many at the time. (Although I do understand most people don't mean it that way these days) It's sort of unwieldy to boot. Someone in Canada, Germany, etc, can make a "JRPG", but a Japanese made RPG of any kind gets judged harshly based around that "JRPG" stereotype - whether because it "qualifies" as a "JRPG", or because it doesn't, and that makes certain fans mad because Japanese devs are "supposed" to make JRPGs. Last edited by Kicksville on Fri Mar 03, 2023 2:43 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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whiskeyii
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Eh, given what I assume most people mean by “JRPG” these days—an RPG with a narrative filtered through a distinctively Japanese cultural lens—I think “RPG made in Japan” is more accurate. After all, even in “the West”, European sensibilities are markedly different from American ones, so Mass Effect, as an RPG made primarily in the US, feels very different from, say, the Witcher, an RPG made in Poland. If all you’re trying to do is indicate cultural sensibilities, I think being more precise in your language is more useful anyways.
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Gamen
Posts: 227 |
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I feel like I did differentiate JRPGs from RPGs, but the distinction was nothing more or less than "in JRPGs you follow a character, in RPGs you play a character". I'd use it like "open-world vs corridor simulator" or "turn-based vs real-time". But I definitely had (and still have) a dismissive tone of "they're not real RPGs because you're not really role-playing, you're just playing through a story" and "just having stats and inventory doesn't make an RPG". (Oh, the irony)
But since basically every video game categorized as an RPG is missing the collaborative storytelling aspect of a tabletop RPG, it was a bit weird of me to go along with singling out whether the GM's leading NPC was a fully formed character or a blank slate for the player to project onto while leading it through the pre-programmed campaign as the difference between "Japanese" RPGs and "real" RPGs. Even while my other distinction was "Bioware (ignoring ARPGs like Mass Effect) vs Bethesda", I'm not sure I noticed my "Bioware" was not all that different from my "JRPG". |
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gsilver
Posts: 620 |
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I've always wondered what "role playing" even means in videogame terms. I still don't really know.
In something like a tabletop role playing game, you create a character and their personality. That's a bit harder to do in a video game. You can't really go much deeper than choose a class and pick from one of half-a-dozen (if you're lucky) choices on a dialog tree. The only era were that many options were commonplace seemed to be the Baldur's Gate / Fallout 1-2 era, after the CD-Rom became common, but before full voice acting made it cost-prohibitive for that many choices to be available. |
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tintor2
 Posts: 1886 |
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I don't mind Final Fantasy changing but Yoshida was also toxic as heck when talking about the system. He is downright avoiding minigames because he claims they ruin the themes of the narrative. For example, Noctis can't go fishing cos it contrast his clashing story about revenge for Regis or Tidus can't play a minigame cos he gotta bodyguard around the world. XVI already showed the idea of angrydriven Clive petting a dog so that's another minigame that clashes the main character's nature. This is basically the opposite of what Sega did to Yakuza with its third release as they added several minigames in order to make Kiryu come across as more fun that just serious.
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6025 |
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The 2nd game let you manage a hostess club which kinda clashes with the narrative so it didn’t start with the 3rd game.
Your game being complex or simple to develop doesn’t automatically mean your game will be fun to play or good.
That’s the worst? Not being forgettable like most of the games Microids has published or just plain bad like their remake of XIII? Last edited by BadNewsBlues on Fri Mar 03, 2023 9:27 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2233 |
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Ya mean the quote that conveniently left out a lot of context with Yoshida also mentioning how the game is still going to have a lot of side stuff? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FqFYhpNXoAARIzd.png |
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garfield15
 Posts: 1521 |
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I don't want to go against the grain on calling the gaming culture's view on JRPGs back then as Xenophobia (remember X-Play? Shitting on JRPGs was their bread and butter even during the PS2 era) but I feel like rushing to that conclusion devalues Japanese devs who spoke out about how there were issues adjusting to the HD era. There were still good games and good JRPGs. But many of the games that were coming out were still heavily flawed on console and a lot of franchises had to move to handheld only or just straight up died upon the rise of the PS360. This time period was very hard for many Japanese studios and not in a "well they needed to change their ways" way but that the gaming landscape was changing rapidly and it was hard for them to adapt way. Heck I'll be honest, to this day I'm still not feeling FFXIII
I recommend everybody should watch this great documentary that has multiple video game devs talking specifically about "the resurgance of Japanese gaming" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j6ZHkg5BtE You'll get a real feel for the challenges that Japanese gaming development, how it affected them, and how it led to this new rise of appreciation for Japan's games. There are lines in there where they acknowledge some of the games weren't in a great place back then. It is interesting though that Yoshi-P's comments put Capcom's weird phase of trying to appeal more to the West in a wider context. The view of Japanese games back then must have just been very demoralizing |
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DRWii
 Posts: 636 |
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I've personally always used "JRPG" to simply mean any RPG made in Japan, much like how I only use "anime" to refer to animation from Japan (to the annoyance of many Avatar and RWBY fans, I'm sure). But I've also been lurking in forums and comment sections since the mid 00's, so I had to roll my eyes at people asking "wait, when has 'JRPG' ever been used as a derogatory term?" I guess their next question would be "why do some people object to being called a 'weeb?'"
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garfield15
Posts: 1521 |
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Yo, not related this thread but the turnaround on "weeb" is like a 180 for me. It's like one day I woke up and suddenly that word was just being used everywhere, sometimes even positively! It was like "what the heck happened?" |
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Xavon
Posts: 370 Location: Minnesota |
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Street Fighter Duel is... okay. It's got a decent opening roster. And except for a moderately different battle system, it is AFK Arena. Literally 90% of the modes and character development are straight out of AFK Arena, just with a Street Fighter skin.
I'm mildly enjoying it, but we'll see how it goes. |
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