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Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

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Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#61

Post by aidenn0 »

knodi123 wrote: post #52
kmeisthax wrote: post #43

>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.

According to TFA, they gave it away free because it sold poorly and they had to do something with all the cartridges they made.

Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#62

Post by astrange »

mjr00 wrote: post #59
anthk wrote: post #51

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.

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.

The games of course don't call themselves JRPGs; game series in Japan tend to make up their own genre names, and each individual Tales Of game actually claims to be a different one they invented for it.

Some of the developers are very sensitive about this term. Recently for FFXVI the director went on a press tour talking about he made it Western by making the dev team watch Game of Thrones and in one interview essentially said JRPG is a slur invented by Western games journalists. Some of whom definitely spent the 2000s saying all Japanese games were impenetrably wacky anime bullshit.

Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#63

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

> In 2012, critic Nick Simberg wondered at “how willing we were to sit down on the couch and fight the same ten enemies over and over for hours, just building up gold and experience points”; he compared Dragon Quest to “a child’s first crayon drawing, stuck with a magnet to the fridge.”

Because the draw is the challenge and the decision making. One could certainly describe bowling as "throwing a ball down the same lane repeatedly", but that's missing the point.

Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#64

Post by astrange »

xwdv wrote: post #3

I 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,…

I think saying FF6 is just a dark mature adult work does it a disservice; it makes it sound like prestige TV or something.

FF6 is specifically designed like an opera. It's European, fast paced, has a lot of classical music, comic moments, romance, gore, etc. That's not quite the same thing as an art film or Earthbound-inspired indie game about depression.

And the villain is a magical clown.

Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#65

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

> Before that scene in Final Fantasy VII, Hironobu Sakaguchi served up a shocker of equal magnitude in Final Fantasy VI. Halfway through the game, the bad guys win despite your best efforts and the world effectively ends, leaving your party wandering through a post-apocalyptic World of Ruin like the characters in a Harlan Ellison story. The effect this had on some players’ emotions could verge on traumatizing — heady stuff for a videogame on a console still best known worldwide as the cuddly home of Super Mario. For many of its young players, Final Fantasy VI was their first close encounter with the sort of literature that attempts to move beyond tropes to truly, thoughtfully engage with the human condition.

I do believe FF6 is probably the greatest JRPG ever made, but I also think the most emotionally charged moment in the FF franchise happened in FF4. Palom and Porom.

Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#66

Post by cubefox »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #65

> Before that scene in Final Fantasy VII, Hironobu Sakaguchi served up a shocker of equal magnitude in Final Fantasy VI. Halfway through the game, the bad guys win despite your best efforts and the world effectively ends, leaving your party wandering through a post-apocalyptic World of Ruin like the characters in a Harlan Ellison story. The effect this had on some players’ emotions could verge on traumatizing — heady…

I thought it was commonly accepted that Chrono Trigger (another SNES JRPG) was better than FF6.

Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#67

Post by cubefox »

jdlyga wrote: post #25

I remember when it was "console style rpg" and "pc style rpg". It just so happens that "pc style rpg" games started getting released on consoles too, and somehow took over the RPG label.

Took over? Weren't they always called RPGs, at least since Ultima 1?

Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#68

Post by cubefox »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #39
jdlyga wrote: post #25

I remember when it was "console style rpg" and "pc style rpg". It just so happens that "pc style rpg" games started getting released on consoles too, and somehow took over the RPG label.

Those are some especially confusing labels since the classic subgenre called "CRPG" correlates to "pc style rpg" as opposed to "console style rpg"

Additionally, the C in CRPG stands for computer, which technically would also apply to consoles, yet "computer" again stands only for PC.

Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#69

Post by hotnfresh »

zerocrates wrote: post #56
gavinray wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Serial was my guess, if it was in fact 9-pin. I don’t think I ever had a serial-port keyboard, but I did used to have a serial-port mouse.

Game port had more pins.

Re: Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

#70

Post by djur »

smoldesu wrote: post #54
dfxm12 wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

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-de…

I agree with this except for one detail: EarthBound and Mother 3 especially are better written than any Final Fantasy game. (And I love Final Fantasy.)
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