I didn't explain why I like jRPGs in my last post and would like to take this chance to. Even if I have done so many times on this site before.
For starters, I grew up with them. The SNES was the biggest part of my childhood in terms of media of any kind. That means the SNES experience I had soared above movies, tv shows, cartoons, books, and other video game systems. Sure, I may have grown up on the Atari 2600 and NES which revived the video game industry itself. But the SNES made it rise to something plush and adorable, wonderful and amazing. Like a kind of rapture, gaming really ascended to "Ninten" with the SNES or 'Super Famicom'. And it do so with games like Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Earthbound, Mario Kart, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, Final Fantasy IV or "II", Final Fantasy VI or "III", Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Street Fighter, Mega Man X, Kirby Super Star, and way more games than I can go into in one sitting. And important titles that would be important to me later in life because fools decided not to localize them, like Tenchi Muyo Game-Hen, Seiken Densetsu 3, Gundam Wing: Endless Duel, and the rest of the Super Famicom exclusive library.
Of course, these weren't all jRPGs. But a lot of them were. And they were also arguable my most memorable experiences. I loved the feeling that my characters were constantly evolving and made me take an interest in the RPG itself. And the games that weren't RPGs themselves, they made me realize at an early age what I liked in life. And set the stage for me becoming an anime fan later in life with their anime aesthetic and often a cute, euphoric dreamlike atmosphere. I think a lot of us were anime fans before Toonami, but it was Toonami that made us realize it, because we were older, and the frequency of which Toonami did this. Thus making me bathe in the SNES soup once again with the Super Famicom library. And again, setting my interests in life, set in stone for years to come. Or at the very least in pop culture. It also didn't hurt that I grew up on My Neighbor Totoro, Carebears, My Little Pony, and Samurai Pizza Cats. I basically grew up on the "moe craze" before it even had a name.
Even with the NES, before the SNES made it even more euphoric, cute and awesome, I like titles like Adventures of Lolo, Kirby, and so forth. It's not so much nostalgia, it's just what I learned I liked at a young age, and my tastes haven't changed. Euphorically cute is not childish, by the way, and at least not immature. And America really needs to learn this like Japan, and really, all of Asia has. Heck, this is probably one of those East/West cultural differences in general. But for me, I like cute or moe or kawaii or whatever.
So in terms of jRPGs and what I like, this may be a little bit superficial, but I like the aesthetic difference you tend to see in Eastern versus Western games, and especially maybe jRPGs. And that is cute, euphoric, colorful, and generally anime designed. Or manga designed, or whatever terrible term we've come up with for the non-realism design common to Japan. I think it's kind of bad that we use a term like "anime" to describe one of the most common and beloved aesthetics in the world, as if to make it seem like this niche thing(that, I dunno, dominates a lot of marketing designs in Asia, and is arguably the dominant style of Deviantart).
Then, for more lovely shallow things, there's androgyny. Maybe I'm this super shallow shallow-pants. But I love androgyny so much, it's not just like, a lot of my sexuality, but like this big perverted hobby of mine. I don't get it either, there's all sorts of terms and communities based around other fetishes. From foot fetishes to everything, and bisexual communities, gay furry communities, bdsm bisexual communities. No androgyny communities, no glorious army of like-minded perverts.
Nope, but we have jRPGs. As everyone talking about the subject can attest to. As in every single subject about them, androgyny is brought up. Yes, yes they do, thank you jRPGs for giving us the glorious ambiguity.
All right, now that I've already written an essay-worth of text on shallow stuff I like and my life story, maybe I can finally write something of substance.
To be honest, I do agree that jRPGs have gone a bit downhill and aren't innovating as much as they once were. For shallow stuff again, I guess I miss the Sword and Sorcery stuff, too. There's a reason Final Fantasy IV is my favourite. I think it was better when they had more Dungeons and Dragon inspired settings, and less "hip" and modern seeming settings.
Oh, wait, I was going to stop talking about shallow stuff. Perhaps the most innovative jRPG of all time was Chrono Trigger. And that was a long time ago. And many of the lessons the game taught, haven't been learned. The innovation of having no random battles, no (battle) screen switches(Chrono Trigger had none, while Chrono Cross carried on the "tradition"), interesting backstory for all characters, complementary combat techniques, and a plethora of other things.
I still think the genre has a lot going for it, and a heck of of a lot of potential, though.
Onto that sort of substance. One of the things I like about the jRPG as opposed to the wRPG, is how lonely they make me feel. One of the things that defines the RPG, whether it be a tabletop or video game, is the presence of a party. Think about one of the things central to dungeons and dragons, it's getting your friends out on the table and eventually making a party. You know, there's lots of discussions about what jRPGs are lacking. And I agree with some of the points. But I have just as many qualms with wRPGs and things I think should be fixed about them. If jRPGs should be more like wRPGs, wRPGs should DEFINITELY become more like jRPGs in many respects.
Like, again, the party. I'm sorry, but something like the Elder Scrolls is one of the loneliest experiences ever. Because, the wRPG lacks the party dynamics of the jRPG. The jRPG does a GREAT job of pulling out the party dynamics out of the tapletop RPG into video games. With many jRPGs, enjoying how the party interacts with each other one of the best parts of the game. Making you hardly feel lonely, and often, allowing you a group of fictional characters you'll remember forever.
As a fan of fictional characters and such, this is a big selling point of the jRPG to me. I like fictional characters. They're just fun. And jRPGs have a lot of character interaction and characterization. wRPGs, don't. wRPGs make me feel lonely. One of the highlights of me playing Oblivion was talking to Sheogorath. Why? Because he's a warm and vibrant personality that they managed to not completely mess up designing the face on. Because he's actually fun to be around in all his nuttiness as opposed to most of the game which has you going "wow, this is a really lonely game".
There's a lot of areas I think that the wRPG suffers in. But I think this is one of the key ones. wRPGs are very heavily inspired by Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, and other notable Sword and Sorcery settings. But they really tend to drop the ball here. In Lord of the Rings, you really get a party dynamic much like in Dungeons and Dragons and jRPGs. But wRPGs don't nearly give you as much of that. wRPGs need more of a focus on friendship bonds and things like that. If Lord of the Rings and things like that are so important to the Westerners in the RPG genre, why do jRPGs resemble Wizardry and other early wRPGs, and have a strong sense of "Fellowship of the Ring" style fellowship? While wRPGs in their "innovation" seem to continually growing farther and farther removed.
Another thing I would like to add about people who harp on how the 'jrpg is dying' or "dead", I think that such communities focus far too much on the PC which doesn't get many, or certainly not the best jRPGs when it does get them. Or TV home console gaming, instead of handheld console gaming. This generation of consoles hasn't gotten too many noteworthy jRPGs. But the handheld systems have. In fact jRPGs are still a dominant genre in the handheld gaming world. And are also likely on their way to taking over the cell phone gaming world. After all, cell phone gaming is as popular in Japan as the West, as cell phones are arguably more popular in Japan than in the West, and many argue, they're the first nation to truly go cell phone crazy. Japanese RPG developers have been interested in breaking this market since the beginning.
I've reason to believe, crazy as it may seem, that jRPGs are going to eventually become a staple of cell phone gaming. Despite the fact that cell phone gaming seems to be on the opposite end of the spectrum, with a culture currently mostly in line with arcade style games rather than time investment games.
