Go play Star Ocean, Chrono Trigger, FFVI, Earthbound, G.O.D. Mezame yo
and Pokémon Crystal (an enhanced one), or some good Pokémon Red/Firered romhack.
With these you played most of the tropes of the genre.
Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
51–60 of 92 posts
Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
#52>To be sure, there were Americans who found all of the barriers to entry into these deeply foreign worlds to be more bracing than intimidating, who took on the challenge of meeting the games on their own terms, often emerging with a lifelong passion for all things Japanese. At this stage, though, they were the distinct minority. In Japan and the United States alike, the conventional wisdom through the mid-1990s was t…
A decade before Pokemon existed, I went to see the movie The Wizard, a Fred Savage vehicle that was basically a 2 hour Nintendo commercial. And in the lobby of the theater as I was leaving, there was a booth selling subscriptions for the brand-new Nintendo Power magazine. The first issue came with a free copy of Dragon Warrior for the NES.
So Nintendo was willing to bet big on JRPGs long before Pokemon came out.
Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I have always used it to simply refer to the different style of RPG which developed in Japan. It's not a discriminatory term (at least, not in the pejorative sense) at all IMO. In fact, I prefer JRPGs.
It isn't really a style specific to Japan though, which is the point. Undertale is aesthetically more of a JRPG than Dark Souls. We should just be calling RPGs made in Japan "RPGs."
> Undertale is aesthetically more of a JRPG than Dark Souls.
... and that's exactly why most people consider Undertale a JRPG and basically nobody considers Dark Souls a JRPG?
JRPG has not meant "RPG made in Japan" for a long time; it now means "RPG similar to the ones popularized by Japanese developers in the late 80s to mid 90s." Or "Japanese-style Role Playing Games" for short.
Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Earthbound as a curiously mature JRPG for the time. I like to cite it as an example of a game that is more about the journey than the destination. I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling. The "Yakuza: Like a Dragon" game had a similar vibe. The working title for it might as well have been "Friendship is Magic." > making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then The lesson you…
I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling. The game's director and writer, Shigesato Itoi, is a creative writer by trade, so he brought a fresh perspective, and frankly, is a better writer than most who work on videogames. Being an outsider, he also wasn't bogged down by common video game tropes.
Mother 3 is totally worth playing too, for those who never got around to it. I played the English fan-translation a few years ago and it really floored me how well it developed the themes of Earthbound. It feels equal parts dire and slapstick, illustrated by cartoonish characters that live in truly trying times.
While I'm still a sucker for FFVI and FFVII, Mother 3 kinda achieves the impossible in many ways. It re-develops the themes from it's predecessor into a more accessible, more nuanced and funnier story. Characters get hurt, die, yell curse-words and contend with progressively more horrifying environments. Tonally it almost feels like Stand By Me, elevated to cartoonishly-evil stakes from the start. Best of all, the morals are immediately accessible to the player instead of being hidden as lore like most RPGs are want to do. For younger audiences, there should be no confusion about who is right and wrong and why they are that way. While Final Fantasy is written better overall, I feel like younger players would take so much more away from Mother 3. It really captures the "coming of age" storytelling that has been developed since Mother 1.
After getting to the end of that game, you kinda understand why Itoi doesn't want another game like that. The bar is simply too high, even by the standards of modern consoles.
Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
#55I still feel Final Fantasy 6 was the best JRPG of the retro era. At the time it had heavy themes you wouldn’t expect a child to grapple with: the ideas that the good guys can just straight up lose and having to live with the consequences, characters whose arcs may never truly be redeemed (because they can fucking die ), and even complex issues like the passing of loved ones, committing suicide when all hope is lost,…
Mmm, I would say Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia were also up there.
Chrono trigger is a great game, but I don’t think the story actually holds up that well. For one the time travel mechanic is fairly juvenile, and from what I remember the game is missing one of the most important elements of a good time travel story: when you see effects happen before the cause (which presumably is the work of future versions of characters traveling back in time), so you never reach that satisfying loop back where you meet the past version of yourself and realize it was actually yourself that you saw at that point in time. Instead you just do stuff in the past and it results in some changes in the future, but those changes should have actually always been there in the first place if you would have been successful. It employs an alternate timeline type of time travel which is easy to understand but not particularly accurate or mentally stimulating.
Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
zsnes is an older SNES emulator that definitely in its earlier days had some issues with transparent/translucent layers and had keys to turn each layer off. I think I remember needing to use those toggles for the same fog layers in Chrono Trigger that you're talking about (though I definitely wasn't on a 486). I think esnes may be a little bit older?
When I was about 9/10, my grandfather put ZSNES on my computer, along with ROMs for most SNES games ever made. ZSNES gave me some of the best memories of my childhood. The coolest bit was that he had soldered a real SNES controller so that it worked with those old-school trapezoid 9-pin keyboard input things. I still think that is pure magic, to this day.
Probably the old "game port." That's cool. My experience was definitely more in the "use the A, S, Z, and X keys for the face buttons" realm.
Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
#57Emulation is legal in the USA and the copyright act allows those in US jurisdiction to make copies needed to run software, which includes dumping a ROM from a cartridge.
Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling. The game's director and writer, Shigesato Itoi, is a creative writer by trade, so he brought a fresh perspective, and frankly, is a better writer than most who work on videogames. Being an outsider, he also wasn't bogged down by common video game tropes.
In fact he brilliantly used his outsider's perspective to lampoon and tweak them. My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a self-admitted arbitrary obstacle, and the rolling HP counters, which cleverly introduced an element of real-time to an otherwise entirely turn-based battle system. I would also like to once again shout out the third stronges…
> My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a self-admitted arbitrary obstacle
IIRC, the solution was equally silly-- a literal pencil eraser.
I remember the game having a lot of cheeky David Bowie references too. Starman is an obvious one as a recurrent character, and correctly figured that the fight with Carbon Dog wasn't going to end so easily.
Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
#59Go play Star Ocean, Chrono Trigger, FFVI, Earthbound, G.O.D. Mezame yo and Pokémon Crystal (an enhanced one), or some good Pokémon Red/Firered romhack. With these you played most of the tropes of the genre.
And yet there's still so much more... tactics rpgs like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea, dungeon rpgs like Etrian Odyssey or Labyrinth of Touhou, or action rpgs like Seiken Densetsu 3 or Nier Automata.
Always debatable where "JRPG" ends and some other genre begins, of course, but the great part of the genre is how widely varied things can be.
Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
#60On a recent trip to Japan, poking about Akihabara, was very cool to see all the various Wizardry boxes for all sorts of different platform versions in glass cases. Abundantly clear that there's a deep love of the franchise!
I've lived in Tokyo for a decade now, and this is indeed a small benefit that I don't see talked about much. If you're the type who wants to get a hold of old games, it's much less prohibitive to do so. I recently bought Mother 2 with box and manual at a local shop for 4490円. DQ games are plentiful, too, and very cheap.