Just kidding. I left my girlfriend because of her infidelity and drug habit. I had to say that to get your attention because people these days think picking on JRPG's is trendy and passe. I think that's fucking stupid. Just because a genre is legitimately broken doesn't mean you have to label me a trendster and piss all over me whenever I open my mouth. The problem is that JRPG's DO have serious issues with the the way they are written, designed, and presented, and if they fix those issues I'll stop my bitching, walk down to BestBuy and slap down 60 bucks for the next good JRPG that comes out. It's not the usual things that people typically rag on, like the ambiguously gendered characters. In fact, I'm a semi-professional drag queen in my off time who owns more than one several hundred dollar corset, so the fact that these games repulsed me in SPITE of the prospect of fabulous gender bending is especially heinous. (This sort of introduction is both unnecessary, and dismissive to your audience. You should be able to maintain artistic merit without having resort to silly tricks or passing jokes. Remove it entirely.)
Now to say I don't like any JRPGs ever would be silly and close-minded, after all I'm not close-minded, just an elitist with an Art Degree. and While that does make my opinion more valid than yours, those are two very separate things. I love Final Fantasy VII as much as the next guy, and if you think that Grandia is a bad game you should have all your fingers cut of and your mouth sewn together so that the world no longer has to be exposed to your idiotic "opinions." That being said, Those games were made in the 90's, and the fact that its been over a decade since I played a JRPG that filled me that unmistakable sense of childlike glee and wonderment that FFVII and Grandia did, means that something is very very wrong. (In your opinion, which is proving to be the biggest flaw with this rant.)
Problem One: The RPG is a woefully outdated system of storytelling.
You heard me. On a fundamental level, the RPG is a broken system for conveying an adventure to its users. Now understand that I'm not just saying this. I have an Art Degree, passed down to me by the Odin, wisest of the Aesir, who saw fit to bequeath me with it only on council of the wisest muses of the land. That means I know a thing or two about how stories work, or in the case of RPGs, how they don't work. Understand that the RPG is a older concept. older than most of the people screaming at me or calling me worse than Hitler. As an art form, RPGs date back to the 70's, a dark and horrible time when people thought that bell bottoms and aluminum tanks were a good idea. and We didn't have advance 3D graphics to convey to sweaty and unlovable nerds exactly what the fuck was happening to their beloved made up characters. Now we have bump mapping and phong (Phong?) shading, as well as full 3D movement and physics. They to give us an idea of what was going on, and let us respond freely and without constriction to it. but Back in Olde Tymes, we had to compensate for a lack of procedurally-generated visuals with our imagination, and (more importantly) with elaborate math statistics and dice rolls to simulate the idea of a persistent and reactive functioning universe. Things like hit points, status effects, turn-based combat, and most importantly boring and elaborate charts were ideas implemented to compensate. Specifically for things like being unable to visually acknowledge your attack, simulating injury, translating spoken words into performed actions, and a lack of boring and nonsensical shit too look at respectively. (You need to pick whether or not you want to use the Oxford comma. You keep switching.) When computers came into the fore, the RPG migrated there so that basement dwelling losers could keep on fighting dragons, but without having to deal with other basement dwelling fucktards who might judge them for wanting to pretend to be a female narwhal or whatever. (You're dismissing important information in order to make a joke.) All these complex things migrated with them, because graphics were not yet advanced enough to realistically simulate a believable world that changes and reacts to you.
American RPGs were smart enough to ditch most of that boring stuff, or at least make it handled entirely behind the scenes once graphics and gameplay advanced to a point where they were no longer overtly necessary. Deus Ex and Mass Effect are fantastic games, because they keep the feeling of exploration and wonderment that RPGs have become famous for, but without all the boring story cliches and oppressive stat keeping to keep me from just tearing ass around a unique and interesting universe. JRPGs conversely, hit a high point in the 90's, and decided to keep to that success by NEVER EVER LEAVING THAT ERA. (Do not use all-caps en lieu of formatting or stronger language.) Simply put, American RPGs fixed what was broken with RPGs and kept what worked.
Protip for movies, games, whatever. If your audience is every sitting they're asking "WHY?" as a normal, frequent occurrence in game, something is badly wrong. Why am I taking turns trading blows that do damage in arbitrary numbers. Why am I randomly encountering enemies? What the fuck are these monsters and where did they come from? Why are these assholes from this area so much stronger than these assholes in this area? These are all frequent questions I ask myself whenever I play a JRPG. Whenever I play a JRPG, the combat always feels arbitrary and forced. I feel like I'm being forced to contend with a conflict system that hasn't matured in decades, and I get pissed off.
A good game should envelop you in its universe and its characters. When I'm having to look over an immense spreadsheet of statistics, and spend fifteen minutes min-maxing my characters' item load out, I get pissed off and bored. This stuff all added character and depth back when everything I did was laid out on graph paper and decided by a dice. It is totally out of place in a piece of media that is supposed to immerse you.
Dated gameplay, of course[/b] is forgivable. There are still old games I play that, despite their rigidity and age, have stood the test of time well. Outmoded gameplay doesn't necessitate a bad game, which brings me to my next problem with JRPGs.
Problem Two: The plots are flat and formulaic, the characters are generic and unlovable, the story progresses like your morbidly obese mother without her Power Chair. (Stop insulting your audience. It's not funny, it's annoying.)
I'm going to ahead and go on record here saying that Final Fantasy VII had the greatest opening to any RPG ever. and if you disagree with me you should give up civilization and flee into wilderness like the idiotic savage you are, living off of squirrels and the occasional camper because obviously you are unprepared for artistic complexities of Modern Civilization and you should be kept away from art at all costs so as not to pollute it with your literal nega-taste. Final Fantasy VII is bar none the best example of how to pull off a story in a JRPG. I have an Art Degree. I know this.
Everything about it, from the fade in to Cloud and companies assault of the power reactor and beyond is sleek, simple, powerful, and effective. It immediately answers your innate questions as players (Where are we? When are we? What kind of world is this? What is this aesthetic?), as well as raising new ones (Who is this Flower Girl? Why is she important enough to be the first person we see? What role will she play later? Why are these people beating up these guards, what are their objectives?) The game makes sure so that at any given point, there is tension raised and a question asked by the players. From then on in the game moves pretty quickly, but doesn't fail to set up later elements of the story as it goes along. Thus by the time game answers all those questions (albeit in a clever, piecemeal fashion), you are hooked, invested, and willing to go anywhere. (Line Break.)
That one pivotal moment where all those questions about Aeris are answered, and we find out what she is and what her heritage is, she is immediately kidnapped. Not only does that raise new questions and new tensions, but it's genius pacing. We've gone through all this work to discover the secret of this one sweet, endearing character, and now she's been snatched from us. Fuck, when Shinra captured Aeris, I was immediatly prepared to kill every single mother fucker that looked it me crossways in my path to get her back. People always talk about how Aeris' death is one of the most powerful moments in video gaming. But it wouldn't be had it not been for the games masterful story work and pacing. Had Aeris just been a character who happened to be stab by some fuckwit with a sword, but we would have yawned. But no, go back and play that game. Almost every single moment in that story up until her death is quietly building up and preparing for it, even though you never see that, and that's just genius.
Too bad most JRPG's are literally the exact and total opposite of this. They treat story as an excuse to further their bullshit spectacle. See, Japanese RPGs seem to draw on the artistic heritage of Kabuki. This is a fucking problem. Kabuki, like opera, is entertaining not because of story and character, but because of performance and spectacle. That works fine for an Opera or a concert, but is skull fuckingly boring for an interactive medium. I'm not entirely sure this is true, but it is literally the only explanation I can have to this absolutely fucking bizzare trend I've noticed in Japanese video games; namely this weird tendency in JRPGs to just assume that the audience cares. Like, every time I play a JRPG I get a bunch of boring, generic "people" that the game just goes "See! You care about them!" No. No I fucking don't. I am going to be sitting with these motherfuckers for every single minute of the next twenty hours. That's plenty of time for character development. MAKE me like them. You have a full DAY of my time to create a functioning story, invest some thought and effort. It's not hard. But no. Most JRPGs just toss me in front of a bunch of fucking unbearable human beings and go "okay here's a quest you should complete it I guess." That's goddamn unacceptable.
Case in point: a couple years ago, before I had my Art Degree, which allows me to say this with every degree of rightness, my friend bought a copy of Chrono Cross, came home to my dorm, held the thing up and said "Check it out guys, I got Chrono Cross!" Everyone ooed and aah'd. I've heard the fanboys wank and wax over Chrono Cross. So I figured "What the shit, I'll give it a try." Wow, what a stupid fucking decision. I guess for that one brief moment I forgot that fanboys are tasteless fuckheads with a total black hole of reason or artistic appreciation who find one good thing, latch onto it, and scream like harpies anytime anyone tries to inject actual criticism into whatever nerd treasure they hold dearest.
Chrono Cross bored the shit out of me. I didn't get past the first hour of gameplay because I had no idea what the fuck was happening and didn't care. Okay yeah sure, maybe it's a fucking classic. I didn't realize playing a "classic" was supposed to be like rubbing your face up against a belt sander until the pain no longer matters. I turned the game on, was plunged into a fucking flashback scenario with some random fighting. Forty minutes later I was in some fucking past or alternate timeline or whatever with no idea what the fuck had just happened. Then I was asked to go find something outside of whatever idyllic little beach town I was in. No explanation. Just railroaded into doing this thing. I then walked through the wilderness for another thirty fucking minutes before I turned off the console. What the fuck. Do JRPG fans have a torrid love affair with abject boredom? I know I'm going to get screamed at by all the 300lbs weeabo anime nerds for being a Euro-centric philistine or whatever, but if there was quality storytelling or gameplay in there, I sure as hell didn't fucking find it after a full hour of gameplay. And as someone with an Art Degree, I can say to you that if you failed to interest me at all within the first hour of game play, you have produced objectivley subjectively bad art. (Let me say this once. Just because you have pursued a single four-year degree at a single university with just a handful of art professors does not make you able to say for better or worse whether or not something works as art. More than any other subject, art is so steeped in aesthetic value that blanket statements like these are horrendously false, and completely tactless.) This has been the experience I have had with every single JRPG I have played since then. The only JRPG That has come out within the last ten years that I was even remotely excited for was Eternal Sonata. Guess what, that game fucked up too in spite of everything it had going for it. JRPG writers, by and large, don't know how to tell a good story or make endearing characters. And their designers don't know how not to make combat that doesn't make me want to scream in agony.
Problem Three: It's exploration, not exposition. you assholes.
Morrowind was one of my favorite games ever, and I have no idea what the fucking plot was. Seriously. I did not give literally a single fuck about what as going on. I was more than happy to explore the lush and detailed surroundings I had been dumped in and make my fortune tomb raiding and completing side quests. A good RPG makes you feel like the world is your oyster. Part of the immersion you get with an RPG comes from that feeling of freedom and adventure that comes with the ability to tear ass around a brand new universe going "Ooh, what's that? And what's that?" JRPGs hold your hand like a recalcitrant child with ADD whose parents are too tired and weary from being bad care takers to indulge your wish to turn everything into an adventure. (You got this backwards. The recalcitrant child wouldn't hold your hand, an overzealous parent would. Bad metaphor.) Every time I play a JRPG, I feel trapped and yanked along by the games clunky and awful narration. I have no sense of freedom and whatever sense of "adventure" I posses is being shoved down my throat like new medication.
Problem Four: Japanese game philosophy is clunky and ancient but refuses to advance.
Wow? The Japanese refusing to change or advance? What a shock. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period] But no really, JRPGs these days bank all of their chips on art direction and "cinematic action", just like they did when they were all drawn by hand. This is something that was fine fifteen years ago but now it's just horseshit. When you're not fighting a nonsensical battle or trying to figure out what a certain characters fucking gender is. Everything is just long, unwatchable, poorly directed cutscenes. The 90's were awesome because CGI was difficult and expensive, so they filled that time instead with CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. Ever noticed how in American games there are almost never cutscenes, or if their are like in Halo, they're short and serve a simple purpose? That's because overt narrative takes us out of the gameplay experience and ruins our immersion. We figured out in 1999 with Half-Life that a good narrative is never broken and that cutscenes actually detract from an experience. Japanese games in the 90's had an edge because they had a better emphasis on story than their Western counterparts. (LB)
But we've had it figured out for 11 years how to run an interesting and immersive narrative in a video games. Japanese games still have that ancient delineation between combat, plot, and cutscene. Japanese games switch gears with the same noise that my car makes when it's fucking dying because someone stuck a screaming cat in the timing belt. The game holds my hand and tells me "Okay you're going to learn about the characters now. Okay here's some dialogue now. Alright here's a cutscene now." One of the most important parts of getting my Art Degree, apart from learning to skin a Cow, was learning that feeling like we're being narrated to and reminded that something isn't actually happening strips a story of all its magic. That's what shitty cutscenes do. They remind us of the barrier between us and this story. So I guess too bad that 50% of most JRPGs are a system for taking all of the good out of a story. Wow. No wonder they suck.
When I watched the opening to Final Fantasy XII, I spent my entire time asking myself what the fuck happened on two different levels. Firstly, how the fuck did the artistic man-gods who made FF VII turn into these assholes, and secondly, what the fuck was going on? Why were people riding giant chickens and waving swords, when they also had fucking space ships with laser guns? Why the FUCK do we care about these characters? It felt like they were doing this all because they could, not because it was interesting or serving a purpose. And it's been like this since after Final Fantasy X. It's like Japan pretends they live in some alternate bizarro-land where they're not beholden to forward thinking or decent art. They can just sit there doing everything like they fucking did in the 90's. If you think I sound like an asshole, take a step back for a moment and remember that I have an Art Degree. You know how the Pope never makes a mistake? It's like that except I don't have to wear a bullshit hat and I can fuck bitches. (Uh... Put it away.)
In conclusion, I would say that JRPGs are only for people who love pain but that's not even true. My roommate is a masochist, and likes it when her boyfriend beats her to within an inch of her life with a ratan cane and clamps her nipples with clothes pins for hours on end, and she told me she finds JRPGs too tediously boring. So the only real target audience for JRPGs I can think of is negated right there. I guess if I had to sum all this up it would go like this:
TL;DR JRPGs are subjectively bad art for the reasons I described, and your reasons for liking them are utterly beyond me and my Art Degree. They are an idiotic, poorly made genre and if they ever have their problems addressed I will play them again.
Thanks.
