First and foremost, I'd like to point out this part of my post:
Common (ranging from slight majority to nigh ubiquitous) tropes/features
As in, not every single jRPG, or even a huge majority, share these. Just lots and lots of them.
j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
It's called storytelling. Generally, when you introduce players into a new setting with new characters that they've never seen before, you allow them to get familiar with the way the world works before hitting them over the head with an apocalyptic threat.
Most of the characters I've seen tend to be flawed individuals who combine both neurotic dysfunction with redeeming virtues such as optimism, courage and some degree of warmth. Without redeeming qualities would suggest they completely fail as any form of functioning human being.
I'm combining these two since the reason that they are done by jRPG's is essentially the same.
I can name a dozen Western RPG's off the top of my head that introduce a new setting with relative ease that
don't take three or four hours for the story and gameplay to actually get going.
And what I meant by no redeeming qualities not that they are terrible people, just that they have no traits
they start the game with that make them likable as characters, the most infamous example being Hope from FFXIII, or my personal favorite Neku from The World Ends With You (A jRPG that does NOT muck about for a couple hours laying down the groundwork for storytelling, mind you). Now, as I stated earlier, this is usually done deliberately by the developers because the game is essentially the story of these characters growing as people in their own right, and their importance in the world. The simplicity and slowness of the beginning is meant to contrast with the excitement at the end, and the characters growth from having mostly bad qualities into good is meant for the same thing.
The problem is that everyone has different levels of tolerance for how much they're willing to watch laying the groundwork for a story instead of seeing the real action. Some people think a few hours is easily tolerable if it means 50+ hours of fun times later, whereas others would like some interesting beats spaced more evenly through the story.
People talk about turn-based combat as if there's only one template that every games follows, when this simply isn't true.
That's one of those majority-ish tropes that is continually declining every year. It has been a problem historically for jRPGs but recently not so much. Withdrawn.
Because Western RPGs like Oblivion are renowned for their superlative voice acting.
C'mon. Don't BS a BSer. I'll name 5 terrible dubs to any of your western examples, and you know I can do it with ease. C'mon.
6. Lack of actually choosing what role you play, either gameplay wise or story. Rare is a jRPG that lets you decide how the characters actually play, and rarer still is the jRPG that lets you choose a protagonist's actions, even if those choices have little to no consequence. That's a big part of the reason why many people play wRPG's, which do those far more often that not.
Again, completely not true. The myth that JRPGs all force you into using set character templates is based off nothing more than a few examples held up as indicative of the genre at large.
COMPLETELY not true? You better check yoself.
ALL jRPG's force you? Who said that? Before you wreck yoself.
Same with Bad Voice acting, you know perfectly well for any one jRPG we could name where you have more than a paltry level of control over character development, we could easily think of five where that is not the case. Similar to the point on Turn Based, this is steadily declining in the past few years, but unlike TB combat, I would not say is close to gaining a majority.
As for choices that have consequences, all I'm going to say is- the Chrono series. Chrono Trigger pretty much invented the multiple choice system that has since been adopted by the likes of Mass Effect. There was not a single game comparable to Chrono Trigger in the way it allowed you to manipulate the story. The game had fourteen different endings.
Manipulating story and lots of endings was pretty much the schtick of early adventure games (text ones especially), which of course wildly predate RPG's made anywhere.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, it has been a loooong time since I played them, one of the draws of the Ultima series was its story branches and multiple endings, and that RPG series predates Chrono Trigger as well. Once more, like turn based combat and character leveling, this is steadily increasing presence in jRPGs (as you name a few excellent examples), but they are sadly pretty much the
only examples, and it will be quite some time before they can shake off the perception.
Funny, the way people say this, you'd think that there only existed one visual style in anime, and all JRPGs cling to this one art-style unyieldingly. It's not like anime such as Kemonozume, Kaiba, or Gankutsuou exist, and it's not like JRPGs such as Dark Souls or Super Mario RPG exhibit their own visual styles away from influences such as Bleach or Naruto.
I said "styles" myself, and of course you know the
one anime style I'm referring to, that is again, MOST (more than 50%) of jRPG's being released.
