These forums have some serious issues with JRPGs. And it's time to address them.

[Baron Pedro]

Apologies for being a spoilsport, but how can you form an opinion on story after only watching a few cutscenes and skipping the rest? That's like reading the first fifteen pages of a book, skipping the next 300, reading the last page and judging it on that.

To be fair, I did watch the last few when I got near the end.
It was a run-on monologue of the girl talking about life and death with elementary school philosophy that was very pretentious. Yeah little girl, you know all about life because of that walk with your mom when you were young and you talked about puddles. Great.

Terrible dialog. Terrible story. Fun gameplay.

I had forgotten about all that, but I would say it was more ostentatious than anything. My point still stands that you've missed out the entire middle section of the story, which is, arguably, the "meat" of any tale.

The voice acting in that game is atrocious though. Absolutely, one hundred percent, atrocious.

 

[Kevvers]

I think what really gets people's goats is the lame-ass attempts they make at choice where after basically OK, a series of dialog boxes for about 10 minutes they suddenly ask you a question like: Do you think we should help the Squiddles of Aquatopia fight off the Emperor of Calamari?
And you are give two options:
> Yeah, OK.
> No way!
And if you select no way you are basically chided by the game and given the exact same choice again and again until you say yes. How hard would it be to have a little flavour to some of the optional dialog, to allow the player to have a few conversations which are actually remembered later on and have an effect on what your team-mates think of you? It doesn't have to change the whole story to have a consequence...

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

These posts are concerning Eternal Sonata.

Apologies for being a spoilsport, but how can you form an opinion on story after only watching a few cutscenes and skipping the rest? That's like reading the first fifteen pages of a book, skipping the next 300, reading the last page and judging it on that.

To be fair, I did watch the last few when I got near the end.
It was a run-on monologue of the girl talking about life and death with elementary school philosophy that was very pretentious. Yeah little girl, you know all about life because of that walk with your mom when you were young and you talked about puddles. Great.

Terrible dialog. Terrible story. Fun gameplay.

It also was gorgeous. And with fantastic music. Shame characters opened their mouths. I beat it, with the GOOD ENDING. Meaning that I spent about 10 hours in a huge dungeon that I needed to print out maps for. And even that ending made we just want to skip it. But I didn't.

 

[Axeli]

Well I do agree that blind hatred of JRPGs, or anything for that matter, needs to stop.
I'm not a JRPG fan myself, but if people like 'em then who cares?

I will touch on two points you made, though, based on my own experience:

3. Story's lame:

You're kidding, right? JRPGs are known for their sweeping stories. You just don't have any choice over it.

I have never seen a good story in a JRPG.
Sorry, maybe I've played the wrong ones, but choice has nothing to do with it. It's just cliche after cliche and always with the bad dialog. The JRPG I liked the most in terms of gameplay, Eternal Sonata, had the worst story. It was so pretentious, and so flat out awful that I skipped every cutscene after watching the first few, hoping it would turn out better.
It didn't.

That proves a lot. I mean a hater disliker of JRPG coming to tell how he hasn't seen any good JRPG. Well obviously you haven't, that's why you are a hater disliker.

4. Not really Role-Playing if you can't make choices

I thought that RPGs were about leveling up, not moral choices.

Example: When they say a game has "RPG elements", that doesn't mean moral choices have been added to the game. That means they've added a leveling system of some sort. Like the stat bars in GTA: San Andreas.

RPGs are about choices, not always moral choices.
Take 'moral' out of the equation. That has nothing to do with it. It's about choices, or, at the least, the illusion of choice. Give me multiple ways to play my role! Because that's what you're doing: Playing a role. Playing a role with no way to choose how to play it is just like any game. Then Half-life is an RPG because I'm playing the role of Gordon Freeman.

Please read my post above and get your facts straight. Video game and tabletop RPGs are defined completely differently. The former borrows the gameplay mechanic from the latter, nothing else.

But once you factor in the choices, from how you level up, to how you respond to people, to which quests you take, to what weapons you wield! An RPG is putting a player within a role and letting them play it as they wish. JRPGs, in my experience, don't really do that. Your attributes all go up automatically, you are limited in what class of weapon you can use (Usually), and you can never choose dialog.

You are listing differences, not reasons for why the other is inferior.

It's a Rail-RPG, really.
At least, in my experience it is.

Now, remember, I don't like JRPGs, but don't 'hate' them. If people like 'em: fine.
But they just aren't for me.

Fair enough, let's edit that sentence above.

 

[Rolling Thunder]

Well I do agree that blind hatred of JRPGs, or anything for that matter, needs to stop.
I'm not a JRPG fan myself, but if people like 'em then who cares?

I will touch on two points you made, though, based on my own experience:

3. Story's lame:

You're kidding, right? JRPGs are known for their sweeping stories. You just don't have any choice over it.

I have never seen a good story in a JRPG.
Sorry, maybe I've played the wrong ones, but choice has nothing to do with it. It's just cliche after cliche and always with the bad dialog. The JRPG I liked the most in terms of gameplay, Eternal Sonata, had the worst story. It was so pretentious, and so flat out awful that I skipped every cutscene after watching the first few, hoping it would turn out better.
It didn't.

4. Not really Role-Playing if you can't make choices

I thought that RPGs were about leveling up, not moral choices.

Example: When they say a game has "RPG elements", that doesn't mean moral choices have been added to the game. That means they've added a leveling system of some sort. Like the stat bars in GTA: San Andreas.

RPGs are about choices, not always moral choices.
Take 'moral' out of the equation. That has nothing to do with it. It's about choices, or, at the least, the illusion of choice. Give me multiple ways to play my role! Because that's what you're doing: Playing a role. Playing a role with no way to choose how to play it is just like any game. Then Half-life is an RPG because I'm playing the role of Gordon Freeman.

But once you factor in the choices, from how you level up, to how you respond to people, to which quests you take, to what weapons you wield! An RPG is putting a player within a role and letting them play it as they wish. JRPGs, in my experience, don't really do that. Your attributes all go up automatically, you are limited in what class of weapon you can use (Usually), and you can never choose dialog.

It's a Rail-RPG, really.
At least, in my experience it is.

Frankly, 'Tea, most of these criticisms can be levelled at most RPG's, role plays and indeed video games as a whole. Cliché's turn up in everything that has even a modicum of a story (Call of Duty 4 - Evil Russians, terrorists, gung-ho, sociopathic Americans and cunning, morally questionable Brits). Hell, even Baldur's Gate has the most cliché storyline of all - and that's a Western RPG classic.

Spoiler

Your adopted parent is killed by your psychotic half-brother, who wants to kill you so he can become...okay, fair enough, the Lord of Death, but so far, so Star Wars.

Knights of the Old Republic....again... cliché! Storyline is still cliché - you play 'The Mysterious Stranger[sup]TM[/sup]' yet again, with an identitkit set of abilities and appearance. You don't play a role - you play yourself, with blasters and vibroblades.

Fallout? You have to save your society....and the world has burned to the ground in the fires of nucleonic Armageddon?

Fact of the matter is that, well, all stories are, to some degree or another, cliché. Sure, it may be nauseating, absurd, pretentious cliché, but your conception that the all JRPG's will share this flaw, or indeed that this will make them all bad, is not accurate.

[sub] This post was made by a person who's last JRPG was Final Fantasy XII, which made him swear to never buy another. That being said, he's looking at Dragon Age: Origins, so don't take his swearing too seriously...[/sub]

 

[VinnyKhan]

I dislike JRPGS and the term RPG being included in the title, Roleplay =/= stats

 

[Bobzer77]

On the contrary, RPGs are supposed to be about role playing. Calling a level up system an ''RPG element'' is ignorance. Common ignorance, but ignorance none the less.

But the problem with that is that most people have decided that by "Role Playing" it means "Being whoever you want to be, in this world" rather than "playing a role assigned to you".

I blame Bioware for popularizing this idea. WRPGs didn't always have moral choice. They used to be purely about leveling and stats.

Purely leveling and stats aren't what an RPG is. You could compare that to getting better weapons in a FPS, its not a roleplaying element but it shows some progression and allows you to do more damage. The idea of roleplaying is becoming the character you are either told to be or have created, it does not have to include moral choices but that helps immerse you in the story and your character.

Look at many mmo's with RP servers, there isn't a story or choice to be seen in most of those games but players still roleplay by creating a persona for their character and immersing themselves in it.

I remember RPG's where you would just be put on a rickety rope bridge across a mountain range and told "somewhere in those peaks there is a princess in distress, go rescue her.". You could of course kill monsters in those games and for that you needed stats but you could also go through the entire game without killing a single thing just by the choices you made in conversations and the places you had explored. Those were true RPG.

It is a disaster that apparently some people believe that the main idea of an RPG is grinding and leveling because it is not and I thank God Bioware came around an showed us this again.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

I blame Bioware for popularizing this idea. WRPGs didn't always have moral choices up the arse (sorry, been playing The Saboteur a lot). They used to be purely about leveling and stats.

I don't know if it is all Bioware's fault. I believe that table top RPGs had gone through at least one phase of trying to broaden their appeal by making them seem more like amateur dramatics for fantasy fans than table top games (omg need to trick some skirt into playing with us). Fallout was also an attempt to capture at least some of this.

 

[THAC0]

I love turn based combat.

not a fan of JRPGs though.

 

[Angerwing]

But the problem with that is that most people have decided that by "Role Playing" it means "Being whoever you want to be, in this world" rather than "playing a role assigned to you".

As was mentioned before by Baby Tea, almost any game could be classified as an RPG by that logic. You have to have some choice in an RPG, or else it is not an RPG. The choices in JRPGs I've played boil down to what weapon you'll wield (and often it's a retardedly obvious choice) and when you'll use your healing items. You're given a very defined character, set in a linear, defined story.

I have nothing against that; a linear game is perfectly fine. But don't call it an RPG.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

I blame Bioware for popularizing this idea. WRPGs didn't always have moral choice. They used to be purely about leveling and stats.

Purely leveling and stats aren't what an RPG is.

See Diablo.

 

[Xaryn Mar]

I blame Bioware for popularizing this idea. WRPGs didn't always have moral choice. They used to be purely about leveling and stats.

Purely leveling and stats aren't what an RPG is.

See Diablo.

Diablo is not an RPG. It is an action adventure game.

 

[Bobzer77]

I blame Bioware for popularizing this idea. WRPGs didn't always have moral choice. They used to be purely about leveling and stats.

Purely leveling and stats aren't what an RPG is.

See Diablo.

See Gothic

Like you said earlier a Tony Hawks game apparently had "RPG elements" but I don't think either of us would call it an RPG. Like that Tony Hawks game Diablo had RPG elements but like games such as Dungeon Runners it now has its own "Hack and Slash" genre.

 

[ostro-whiskey]

JRPG's suck ass. They (the Japs) should stick to horror and tactical espionage action games.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

I blame Bioware for popularizing this idea. WRPGs didn't always have moral choice. They used to be purely about leveling and stats.

Purely leveling and stats aren't what an RPG is.

See Diablo.

Diablo is not an RPG. It is an action adventure game.

Hmm...interesting. Most people would call it an RPG, but that actually is more correct. Minus the adventure part. Adventuring involves exploring and puzzles, and Diablo's random dungeon layout can't really be "explored" since its all random.

 

[Vanguard_Ex]

JRPGs eh? Allow me to express my feelings towards them...

<youtube=Epkrs7XhvzU>

 

[Kajt]

1. Female looking men.

I, honestly, can't see what people have against this.

 

[Baby Tea]

Please read my post above and get your facts straight. Video game and tabletop RPGs are defined completely differently. The former borrows the gameplay mechanic from the latter, nothing else.

Pardon me if I disagree with Wikipedia.
They are different in how they are presented, certainly, but I think the fundamental ideas are the same: You're given a role, one which you may or may not choose, and are free to play it as you wish. Baldur's Gate, for example, had a pretty linear story. You were a child of Bhaal, no matter what, and the story went one way only, changing cosmetically if you were of good, neutral, or evil alignments. But: You chose your dialog, your quests, your companions! You defined your character. And even though the story was linear in how it played out, and many many of the choices were merely cosmetic, it was your story because you chose how you reacted to everything. You played your role.
That is a role playing game.

And I have yet to see that in a JRPG.
If it's out there, point the way.
Otherwise, these rail-RPGs aren't for me.