Why are JRPGs so much longer than WRPGs?

[endtherapture]

JRPGs just seem like huge, long games taking up many hours of your time. WRPGs are also pretty long but I feel like due to the increased emphasis on choice, you get less content in a single linear playthrough, they seem a lot shorter.

But a standard JRPG like FF or Valkaryia Chronicles will easily stretch past the 50 hour mark, but most WRPGs are around the 20-30 hour mark but you might get the odd outlier (50 for Dragon Age Origins, about 90 for Skyrim)

Why is this, and why do JRPGs have tons of cinematics, whilst WRPGs find it more difficuly to incorporate as many cinematics without cutting down on game length?

 

[w9496]

I was under the assumption that JRPGs had more grinding and things of that nature. Filler content so you can become strong enough to defeat the next enemy. WRPGs usually level that part of the game to you, so your tactics play a large part in how well your team does since your enemies aren't way above or way below you.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Jrpgs are entirely story-driven and have more things occurring which develops the characters. While "some" games (like Disgaea) have pointless grinding just for grinding, most of them actually are long due to the many many turns and twists the story takes and how long each of those are.


You can grind in all of them to get the super duper ultimate stuff but doing that will put it to like 100 hours while even if you don't it's already minimum 40 hours long so even if you don't grind it's still nearly twice as long. Therefore the reason can't be the grind.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Positive answer: JRPGs have more/longer dungeons and more characters around to talk to.
Negative answer: JRPGs have more padding, such as the aforementioned cutscenes and endless random encounters.

Some such as the Tales games do this thing where after any significant event you will have to go around whatever town you're staying at and talk to your party members to learn how they feel about recent developments, which can alienate more action-hungry players. Broad strokes of course, since I've heard all the Elder Scrolls games have impressive length to them. Same for Dragon Age.

 

[Jason Rayes]

Yeah I would have to say this is not necessarily true, I just finished Divinity: Original Sin on PC and it took me 120 hours to fully explore. Fallout 3 GOTY was around 200 hours. Ive put 175 into Skyrim and still have not finished it. With each Mass Effect game I got 50-70 hours on each title. It really depends on the game and how completionist you are about it, though as other have pointed out there is often a lot of grinding in JRPG's. I just finished Tales of Graces F with 100 hours playtime and I figure a good 20 hours of that was grinding for titles and crafting drops.

Edit: Other long WRPG's off the top of my head Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape Torment, Ultima 7....all of these games clock in well over the 50 hour mark.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

JRPGs just seem like huge, long games taking up many hours of your time. WRPGs are also pretty long but I feel like due to the increased emphasis on choice, you get less content in a single linear playthrough, they seem a lot shorter.

But a standard JRPG like FF or Valkaryia Chronicles will easily stretch past the 50 hour mark, but most WRPGs are around the 20-30 hour mark but you might get the odd outlier (50 for Dragon Age Origins, about 90 for Skyrim)

Why is this, and why do JRPGs have tons of cinematics, whilst WRPGs find it more difficuly to incorporate as many cinematics without cutting down on game length?

What western RPGs only last 20 hours?
I'd probably feel pretty ripped off if I got a game that short

Most of them. You have to do sidequests to make them longer. For games like Skyrim, sidequests are the point to the game. In Jrpgs it's all main quest all the time with a few minor side-quests which when done well feel like part of the main story and not sidequests at all.

A great example to this is the first Fable game. It was hyped to hell and I was excited for it as it promised literally an entire life's worth of playtime. Then...I beat it in a day in barely over 12 hours and I didn't rush through it or anything at all. Compared to my FFX save which had something like 120 hours of playtime (and the first time I beat it was something like 40 hours in) it was just...short.


Basically, in Jrpgs, the side-content is held for end-game and is more grindy but with some cool story in it too. It's more of a reward. In Wrpgs, sidequests are a core part of the experience and tend to be more detailed but due to this the main story loses out on the importance some while in the Jrpgs the main story is always as good as it can be. This can make the main story events feel comparatively unimportant since once you beat Skyrim the world...is just as it was and you're free to go questing some more while when you beat FFX, huge big events which shape the entire world have occurred. Usually the cut-off point to visiting most of the rest of the map comes quite a bit before the end cutscene in Jrpgs due to other such cosmogenic events which are super awesome but kinda hard to pull off in a game where you want the player to be able to have the power to just fast-travel off at any time and do any one of 40 sidequests at their whim in the middle of a story mission.

 

[endtherapture]

Yeah I would have to say this is not necessarily true, I just finished Divinity: Original Sin on PC and it took me 120 hours to fully explore. Fallout 3 GOTY was around 200 hours. Ive put 175 into Skyrim and still have not finished it. With each Mass Effect game I got 50-70 hours on each title. It really depends on the game and how completionist you are about it, though as other have pointed out there is often a lot of grinding in JRPG's. I just finished Tales of Graces F with 100 hours playtime and I figure a good 20 hours of that was grinding for titles and crafting drops.

Edit: Other long WRPG's off the top of my head Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape Torment, Ultima 7....all of these games clock in well over the 50 hour mark.

I think BG, NWN2 is an example of a fairly long main quest, similar to JRPGs. It's got a chapter based narrative and almost all the content (even sidequests for the most part) are related to the main story. Meanwhile Fallout and Skyrim are big open world games and you could probably breeze through the main story in 15 hours, because most of the content is in the side quests.

I still don't know how you got so much time out of Mass Effect though, I got maybe 30 hours out of each game doing all the major side quests I could fine.

 

[Rozalia1]

Cutscenes. JRPGs prioritise main story, WRPGs side quests. JRPG villains are set up differently as they are usually a bigger threat in battle, JRPG combat systems usually lend themselves to longer battles in general, and many more reasons I'm sure.

I was under the assumption that JRPGs had more grinding and things of that nature. Filler content so you can become strong enough to defeat the next enemy. WRPGs usually level that part of the game to you, so your tactics play a large part in how well your team does since your enemies aren't way above or way below you.

Misconception as grinding is not needed (what is needed is to beat every encounter as you're going through an area, and that is grinding as much as facing Skeleton X, Y, and Z when going through a dungeon in WRPG B, C, and D). Hard bosses in JRPGs don't require grinding, merely some knowledge on how to fight.
The likes of Matador in SMT3 doesn't require grinding, he is just there to separate the jobbers from the main event talent.

 

[The White Hunter]

Depends to be honest, games like Persona 3 can squeeze 70+ hours out of a single play-through, but much of that is grinding and exploration (a concurrent NG+ play-through took me about half that time) and I have gotten more time out of games like Skyrim, my longest file was about 130 hours and I have a good few characters.

Generally the main story of a JRPG is longer, with a few sidequests in between, with many WRPG's being the opposite, with vast amounts of side quests and a relatively short main story, depends on the game of course.

Does FFXIV count as a JRPG? Cuz I think thats had a few thousand by now.

OT: Western RPG's generally have more random bullshit you do optionally, whereas what most would define as a jrpg has you do random bullshit as part of the main story.

 

[Smooth Operator]

That's a real tough one... but I'm guessing the bosses being so far out of your league as to force you running around in circles for those random encounters and grind up the levels for hours on end might extend the games just a little.

 

[ExtraDebit]

Baldur's gate 1 & 2, Fallout series, Elderscroll series are all western rpgs and all pretty long. Most of the short ones came from the poop company EA and even their rpgs are quite lengthy.

 

[GabeZhul]

Yes, JRPGs are generally longer, but that doesn't say much since there are such incredible time-ranges for both genres, as there are 20 hour JRPGs and 100 hour WRPGs out there.

In fact I think the entire comparison is a little silly, as I never considered JRPGs and WRPGs on the same scale; one is a genre focused on narrative, narrative agency and character progression while the other is a genre focused on gameplay agency, world-building and exploration. The only similarity between the two is that you have stats and that your character has some degree of narrative agency (read: you can make choices that have some kind of effect on the story). Aside of that the two are completely different genres that got entangled a good two decades ago when both were still in their infancy and thus were much more similar. To make an analogy, it's like asking why action adventure games are longer than beat 'em ups when they are both games where you move from place to place beating up opponents.

In short, JRPGs and WRPGs are hardly comparable, and when you bring open world games into the equation to boot, the entire basis of comparison just breaks down into a big pile of pointlessness.

 

[TheGamerElite33]

Quality > Quantity.

im not a big WRPG fan but atleast they are much better than Anime style JRPGs. and Witcher 3 will be one of the best RPG ever.

 

[King of Asgaard]

I've never really noticed JRPGs as lengthier. Hell, it's the opposite more often than not. I recently replayed Chrono Trigger to 100% completion, and it took me around 25 hours. I also recently played through Planescape: Torment, which I didn't 100%, and it took me over a month. Any Elder Scrolls game will also debate your claim and probably win, because you can sink thousands of hours into any of the modern ones (Morrowind onwards) without completing all there is to do. The most I've ever sunk into a JRPG was over 100 hours in Final Fantasy X, and that's only because I fucking love that game. Point is, it depends on a game-by-game basis. Some less good JRPGs (glares at FFXIII) extend game time with padding and meaningless drivel rather than worthwhile content.

I suppose the difference comes down to JRPGs are more focussed on the task at hand, with fewer sidequests, while WRPGs have more of a tendency of fucking around/solving everyone's problems, regardless of time wasted. Planescape kinda got around this by having most of the sidequests tie into the overarching lore behind The Nameless One, or directly improving his abilities as a result of completing them. A game like Jade Empire, on the other hand, has a LOT of fucking around, which gets a bit silly when the main quest is on a spoken time limit (that is, not a mechanical one, but one that's implied through dialogue).

 

[Caostotale]

Misconception as grinding is not needed (what is needed is to beat every encounter as you're going through an area, and that is grinding as much as facing Skeleton X, Y, and Z when going through a dungeon in WRPG B, C, and D). Hard bosses in JRPGs don't require grinding, merely some knowledge on how to fight.
The likes of Matador in SMT3 doesn't require grinding, he is just there to separate the jobbers from the main event talent.

That's a good example, as I've actually heard about people quitting that entire game just because of that boss (who I recall is less than five bosses in...). I've similarly seen 'let's play' videos of turn-based RPGs where some kid is just running from all the random battles in a Final Fantasy dungeon and then complaining that the level's boss is 'unfair' or 'impossible.' It's not too dissimilar to watching somebody who doesn't understand shoot-em-ups credit-feeding their way through a game instead of bothering to stop and think about the game's mechanics and score system for a few minutes.

I don't draw too many lines between WRPGs and JRPGs, but have always been drawn to the latter because I like deeper turn-based battle systems, simple stories about fellowship and saving planets, and music that isn't second-rate film scoring. As to the length, a lot of JRPGs seem as if they're meant to be enjoyed like episodic anime series, not binge-played like a Western AAA game. I've been replaying the considerably-lengthy Wild ARMS 3 recently and that game even goes so far as to attach an animated intro and outro to each play session, almost like you're watching a Saturday morning cartoon.

 

[loc978]

I guess I don't play these short WRPGs you do. Fable never appealed to me, and the only other example I can think of was the first campaign of Shadowrun Returns... which was incredibly short and complained about quite vehemently at around 20 hours (thankfully between user content and Dragonfall, there are hundreds more hours of play available). For your other example, I sank easily 60 hours each into Mass Effect 1 and 2... but I'm a completionist. I explored every oddly square section of planet available in the Mako, and my entire team survived the suicide mission, first try (as for ME3, I watched a youtuber. No Origin for me, thank you). For long ones, we've got the Fallout series, the Witcher series, all of the Infinity Engine games, all of the new isometric turn-based games coming out recently from Divinity to Blackguards to Wasteland to Torment to Eternity...

Mind you, the last JRPG I played that was under 50 hours was probably 16-bit (Chrono Trigger springs instantly to mind. Great game. Short, and better for it). I've found the two genres to be fairly comparable in terms of length, though with most open-world WRPGs you can beat it experiencing a reasonable amount of content in around 50 hours (or under 5% of the content in 15-30 hours if you missed the point) or stretch it out to hundreds if you want to do everything. 600 hours into New Vegas and I've still never gone all the way through Caesar's questline.

 

[Scars Unseen]

I think the division is less East vs West and more Story-Focused vs Sandbox. There are story-focused western RPGs, and they tend to be just as long as their Japanese counterparts(if not longer). On the other hand, get a game like Fallout 3, and while there is a lot of content that can occupy you for dozens of hours, the main story itself can be finished rather quickly(and isn't particularly engaging).