Poll: What is your stance on JRPGs?

[HellbirdIV]

I prefer western RPGs if only because usually find a deeper interest in the story as it has the same roots as I do.

Oh and Orcs and Goblins, obviously. I'd only ever play a JRPG if it had Orcs and Goblins.

 

[Unreliable]

-12 year olds somehow competent enough to save the world in situations where trained proffesional adults are clearly a much more logical choice
-It is impossible to tell men an women apart
-Characters do not develop in any way; they are linear emotionally devoid plot devices, and if I were to call them one dimensional, it would be one dimension too many
-Rampant abuse of swords, prophecies, and ancient evils
-Villians with trivial motivations
-A weak animation style that services to dehumanize characters in an attempt to make them 'bad ass' for the moron crowd, rather than giving them genuine personalities and making them real people
-atrocious voice acting by the same 5 or 6 people
-plot lines that are unnecesarily over the top, and not in a fun 'Princess Bride' sort of way, but rather a disturbing, over compensating Uwe Boll sort of way
-direction so bad that it makes Ed Wood look like Tim Burton (mild irony intended)
-the cliches, oh man the cliches!
-a blantant disrespect for the laws of physics (giant robots that move at implausible speeds, jumping physics that make Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon look utterly believable)
-lame bland 'heros' who never face struggle, and utilize a fighting style that retarded losers might describe as stylish, but the rest of us recognize as just plain stupid
-Women characters portrayed as objects, incapable of doing anything but standing around hoping that a dashing hero will come along to rescue them
-The Lead roles are always the two most attractive characters, in some sort of Aryan supremacy thing, where everyone else is clearly lesser in every way

I could go on... In short, Anime is terrible, and the sooner it is destroyed, the sooner geeks can get back to doing useful things, like science, rather than collecting comics.

 

[FinalHeart95]

-12 year olds somehow competent enough to save the world in situations where trained proffesional adults are clearly a much more logical choice
-It is impossible to tell men an women apart
-Characters do not develop in any way; they are linear emotionally devoid plot devices, and if I were to call them one dimensional, it would be one dimension too many
-Rampant abuse of swords, prophecies, and ancient evils
-Villians with trivial motivations
-A weak animation style that services to dehumanize characters in an attempt to make them 'bad ass' for the moron crowd, rather than giving them genuine personalities and making them real people
-atrocious voice acting by the same 5 or 6 people
-plot lines that are unnecesarily over the top, and not in a fun 'Princess Bride' sort of way, but rather a disturbing, over compensating Uwe Boll sort of way
-direction so bad that it makes Ed Wood look like Tim Burton (mild irony intended)
-the cliches, oh man the cliches!
-a blantant disrespect for the laws of physics (giant robots that move at implausible speeds, jumping physics that make Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon look utterly believable)
-lame bland 'heros' who never face struggle, and utilize a fighting style that retarded losers might describe as stylish, but the rest of us recognize as just plain stupid
-Women characters portrayed as objects, incapable of doing anything but standing around hoping that a dashing hero will come along to rescue them
-The Lead roles are always the two most attractive characters, in some sort of Aryan supremacy thing, where everyone else is clearly lesser in every way

I could go on... In short, Anime is terrible, and the sooner it is destroyed, the sooner geeks can get back to doing useful things, like science, rather than collecting comics.

This is an extreme over generalization of a genre. You probably played the worst JRPG ever and decided to use it to say the entire genre is that way.

Play Lost Odyssey. It doesn't fit at least half of those descriptions.

 

[Foolishman1776]

JRPG's have not made any big changes to the basic formula in twenty years. While some might argue that this is because they're perfect, these are the sort of people who would defend to death a game if it was nothing more than a DVD a Nintendo employee had voided his bowels on; so their opinion can, and should be discounted.

The fact of the matter is, except for a few notable exceptions (Star Ocean Second Story being one of them) they aren't even really RPG's. You have no real control over your character's development (other than some contrived, suspension of disbelief killing system for giving your character generic, uninteresting "special" abilities, "special" in this case being the helmet wearing kind), and no control over the direction of the story. In their own way JRPG's are more "artistic" I use the " " because they're artistic in much the same way that a cross in a jar of urine is artistic; it's some guy who's got something to say and doesn't much care what you think about it. WRPG's are not artistic, they are made to be enjoyed (though, I will say that Daggerfall seemed to be about boobs and showing you your desktop a lot... erm... DOS prompt, I guess). That is precisely why I make that case that video games are not art, nor should they be.

If video games are art, then we have weirdos like the Goichi Suda making terrible games that people love because they're "edgy" (a fanboy trying to become the world's foremost assassin so he can sleep with the director of the show that he's apparently starring in is about as edgy as a padded watermelon, and it's presentation is awful, but I digress). Not only that but when confronted by the fact that their games are awful, they'll self righteously reply that their games are not for the plebeian masses, but for the discerning, intelligent gamer (who think toilet humor is edgy). In short, I'd rather an evil corporation make my game than some drug addled Japanese man... or something.

 

[McMarbles]

My stance is at the counter, buying them.

 

[modesty]

I prefer them simply due to the art style and COLORS. At the very least JRPGs believe in colors besides shades of brown/grey/green that most western RPGs are cluttered with. I love cartoons...ergo I love bright shiney primary colors...ergo I like the art style of JRPG.

HOWEVER, JRPGs do often come off as pretentious and I have returned games because of this.

The guys don't look threatening and the female characters can have various body shapes. YAY.

Gameplay on the other hand...I think this is where they suffer. Plus long cutscenes with very cheesy dialog.

 

[Unreliable]

RANT

This is an extreme over generalization of a genre. You probably played the worst JRPG ever and decided to use it to say the entire genre is that way.

Play Lost Odyssey. It doesn't fit at least half of those descriptions.

Well, that was more my generalization of anime in general, which I maintain is accurate.

As for JRPGS:

-Random Encounters, walking along in the forest, minding my own business and suddenly I am attacked by rabbits, or bats, or some shit. No, they arent enemies relevant to the plot, just some minor monster out to harass me I guess.
-Akward, low strategy turn based combat. Choose: 'Attack, Item, or Special and occasionally the completely useless option to 'defend''
-Unnecesarily large HP bars and attack damage. I mean, do I really need 3497 hit points. Cant you just divide by 10, and round up? It's all some lame excuse so that the designers can put in a gigantic 999!!! when you get that lame cliche magic sword.
-Art desgin, that is really fancy for the first 10 minutes, but then when you realize that the whole world has been done in the same style (the overly decorative armors, the huge overcompensating swords, the idea that shields and helmets are for pussies, the architecture). I think what is missed here is that when everything is special and magical in the game world, nothing is, so it all blends together in a vanilla bland sauce that I guess the main hero eats every day for breakfast.
-If there is any 'depth' to combat, it is usually some sort of quicktime event
-Grinding.
-Anachronisms in technology: why would a military still use swords when there are guns (and why do they still wear decorative armors, and where the hell are these resources coming from, and trains and cars with horses and chocobos)
-Bosses that are actually LESS interesting than the lame Nintento (hit my glowing vagina shaped weak spot) bosses, by basically being damage sponges
-The "elements," none of which are elements, or even related by anything but some bad science/philosophy by aristotle several thousand years ago (Air (several different molecules), Fire (a chemical reaction), Water (a single molecule), Earth (an umbrella term for the planet, the surface, ground, and dirt), Light (a wave/particle emitted by rapid motion) and Dark (the abscene of light).
-The reuse of enemies: oh ho - you beat all the blue mongbats, but here come the more powerful green mongbats, who look exactly the same, and have the same attacks, but dramatically more health and do more damage!
-Did I mention the cliches! Any JRPG story is interchangable with the next one.


Now, I concede that some of these things are nitpicks, and I can easily forgive one or two of them, but when they all start coming together, it is a gaming nightmare.

You are right, I havent played Lost Odyssey, but only because it looks just like every other JRPG. If it is like Final Fantasy, or Legend of Dragoon, or whatever crap, I will be very disappointed.

 

[ckam]

Then again I would find people like you to complain just about everything that's related to WWII as pure crap. However if you don't, then you're just a hypocrite.

Not really, since the mayority of these games are based on historical facts instead of having a moral ridden anime sauce with chunks of clichéd characters and bad writing poured over them. Ridiculing the whole thing. And the best part is: Its done by a country who we all know whose bratwurst theyve been munching on back then. Talk about hypocracy!

I agree with you, the game has a bad story. And Japan still isn't seeking forgiveness for what they've done, since their country isn't a very nice one...(Oh wait, almost gone on a rant there, anyways) But to me the majority of these games aren't really historically accurate. The only time when I've actually felt they used the facts is when there's a cutscene or a narration of the subsequent events of some random mission that has little relation to what actually happened. Also there are no morals or an actual story at all in these games. You know like Medal of Honor or Call of Duty and what not.

P.S. I hate bratwurst. Ugh.

 

[Foolishman1776]

Hey, anything with the word "-wurst" in it is delicious, scientific fact.

 

[R3dF41c0n]

The first console RPG I played was JRPG, but after a couple of years I found I enjoy western RPGs more. Its a preference.

 

[FightThePower]

I don't like RPGs in general, but I'll put up with them.

 

[MR.Spartacus]

I liked Kingdom Hearts but that's it. Final Fantasy never impressed me and I haven't tried any others.

 

[InProgress]

I like Western RPGs better, though there are some JRPGs that I liked (Pokemon for the GameBoy Advance, most notably).

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I like them on occasion. Of course like everything else being spewed out by the video game industry, there hasn't been many good ones lately.

 

[Nutcase]

Grinding, collecting crap, repetitive combat with little input, poor story (almost a given with videogames) > challenge, interesting mechanics? No, not my kind of deal. Ever. That's why I don't generally like WRPG's either.

It's got nothing to do with anime, I dig anime. Animation can go places and do things that are completely impossible with live action movies and TV series due to budget reasons (plus, if you did those things, the result would be so soaked with SFX it'd still be rightfully called animation).

 

[Awexsome]

It's hard to put JRPGs into a mass definition because they vary for me.

Final Fantasy games are usually pretty good, save the recent XII and X-II
I picked up The Last Remnant and sold it after 5 hours.
And I keep my opinion that the Tales series, although it has it's flaws, is my favorite series ever.

Overall I like em' though. There's a lot more variation in them then sterotyping people realize.

 

[NickCaligo42]

I wish I could cast a vote. I used to eat RPGs of all kinds up, but lately everybody's been pimping the same whore, if you get my drift. It's not like "JRPG" is just a genre, it's like they're all the EXACT SAME GAME being re-done with slight changes to the advancement system but minimal changes to battle, which consists of two sets of characters lining up as if to play a deadly game of Red Rover. The market's become so unbelievably oversaturated with them that it's just gotten tiresome.

It's not like I've outgrown them or grown tired of the concept. Frankly I'm ACHING for something to come along with a bit of visual imagination in the way JRPGs used to deliver it, but even the top dogs who originally were the ONLY ones who made these kinds of games can't cut mustard any more. I swore by Square-Enix until they made FF12, which was horrible. Now I look at the trailers for FF13 and I just sigh and hang my head in shame and sadness as the generic-brand characters sput out dozens upon dozens of action movie cliches and babble about some enemy that they never bother to define. All a lot of their media says to me is "we don't reckon we can do better than FF7--" ANYBODY could do better than FF7, by the way, "-- so we're just going to rip ourselves off. Enjoy a shallow, incomprehensible plot with unlikeably melancholy and vapid characters, incredibly mediocre stock anime voice acting talent, and music that WISHES it were written by Nobuo Uematsu." *shakes head* Sad.

It's a genre that's a shadow of the invention and imagination that USED to be there; the novel has become convention, and they're sticking by convention (as well as some very distasteful contemporary anime trends) to the grave rather than thinking objectively and analytically about the games that they're designing. It's the shallowest and most superficial way to make a game, which unfortunately is common to all parts of the globe.

 

[Good morning blues]

I don't like JRPGs because I don't like the tropes that make up the genre. When I play an RPG, I want to experience an epic, sweeping, well-written story, I want to tweak my character into something unique, and I want to partake in some exciting, engrossing gameplay. The stories in JRPGs are heavily dependent upon well-worn cliches, almost all JRPGs de-emphasize character customization to the point that it is pretty much ignored, and every JRPG I have ever played has been heavily dependent upon grinding and featured a battle system that is, let's face it, excruciatingly boring. JRPGs are simplified to the point that they're not interesting anymore.

This doesn't mean I don't enjoy any JRPGs - Final Fantasy VII still holds a special place in my heart.

 

[Littaly]

I can enjoy one occasionally. Also I refuse to jump on the "JRPGs SUCk and have gay looking leads that look like women" bandwagon.