Pylon Wrote:I am uneducated simpleton when it comes to JRPG's. Grew up solely on Western kino from the late 90's and early 2000's. Would welcome any recommendations you care to share.
I said I'd write about a little about JRPGs here, just remembered again now. Let's see.
If you really want to appreciate JRPGs I wouldn't say it's necessary to play anything extremely old, or any of the even older western works that inspired them. Before the first real JRPGs there were western games like the Wizardry series, which did get played in Japan. Nothing too essential in any of that, it's stuff you'd already intuit just by looking around. The forms of "HP", "Mana", rolling dice, critical hits, this all came from western "RPG" conventions. Tabletop to early PC dungeon crawlers which largely function on the same adapted rules.
The early JRPGs, even the ones with famous names, are probably not really worth playing beyond understanding this. If you want to see how they handle that's something. Final Fantasy 1, Phantasy Star, these games are perfectly playable. I even almost finished Phantasy Star, but they are games which undeniably were bumping up against limitations at least as much as they were working with them. So no real recommendations here. Go looking yourself if you're really curious.
But I would say already by the Super Nintendo they had enough power, skill, and historic convention to lean upon that JRPGs were an established art-form which could define itself by deliberate choices rather than the limits of what they could plausibly do, and from here onwards I can start giving recommendations for things that are still interesting even now. Great examples of work which are defined by and contribute to this ongoing tradition of work.
Final Fantasy 6, even if you don't play the whole thing, or much of it, just look at this intro and look at how much ambition is on display. This is 1994. By here the simple rules are little sprite people, little video game music tracks, constant "battles" which run on old RPG logic of turns, HP, Mana, different "attacks", items, you travel around "towns" following a line of tasks and story beats (mostly delivered via characters speaking to you in text) on a quest to stop a wizard or something. Final Fantasy's parts are all very
stock, this is a game that is shamelessly built on tradition. But look how much they get out of this premise.
"Story" is not confined to "dialogue" windows you get when you walk up to a townperson and push a button in their face. By this point we already have cutscenes. This game is built on the foundational logic of something like Wizardry, but the rest isn't incidental junk. It's not John Carmack's much-quoted "plot in porn". It's closer to, but not, the other way around. It would be most accurate to say that in these games they're obviously trying to make
everything matter. The plot is as important here as it is in something like an anime. I've said before that JRPGs could be considered "multimedia anime", and while I wouldn't reject that now I'd say it doesn't go far enough.
Final Fantasy 6 exists for its "story", how it looks, how it sounds, but the "game" parts are not mere utilitarian vehicles for presenting these. They are another star of the show. The "RPG" battles are a tradition already by this point. They do still serve a function (giving the game length, an ongoing potential mental challenge, something to work at and optimise), but there's also the fact that someone familiar with the history of the use of this element will be able to appreciate how the developers have constantly worked it into and around the greater picture. This game deliberately embraces the logic and limitations of a "JRPG", which creates as many opportunities as it closes off, and allows for novel scenarios to emerge which couldn't otherwise.
Since nobody here is likely to play it let me just post an entire highlight sequence.
This whole sequence could be delivered fairly straight via a VN or an anime, but the tools and logic of a SNES JRPG allow (or cause) it to play out in such a unique and charming way. The beauty and surprise of an opera rendered on the SNES' sound capabilities, the humour in the artifice of the opera layered on top of the artifice of the JRPG, the absurdity of switching back and forth between maximum effort opera presentation and this extremely rigid and stiff JRPG battle form, for better or worse this is something that could only have happened in a SNES JRPG.
On one hand I want to show off how much these games do within their forms, on the other I want to show how hard they have tried to push it while still staying fundamentally the same. To demonstrate without saying a lot, here are two boss battle clips from Chrono Trigger, another great game on the same machine.
Look at them go. Cinematic moves, extremely novel and refined visual designs, real-time flow of actions, each encounter being a puzzle based on new logic for each "boss" (but still running on the same fundamental rules of the game). You can do a lot with this stuff.
(honourable mention I can't find concise footage on, by this point Fire Emblem was a solved formula and was presenting very ambitious anime style character driven war-epics on similar fundamentals of "JRPG Logic", only with multiple characters collaborating over the course of scenarios presented as "battles" rather than "fights" or something. So they get labelled "Strategy Games", which I don't believe means too much. They exist in this tradition of JRPGs, obviously.)
Next big jump 3D graphics. The games look a lot different from here, but there's a fundamental core that I believe is still intact even to today.
If you watch the FF6 intro then this I hope the continuity is clear. Again the idea is to go from a massive production value
cinematic intro to a transition to
gameplay. They show you the peak of what you can do and segue into you taking control in a way that tries to keep continuity clear. FF7 is a future game and there's minimal separation between the coolest parts and your own input-driven experience. Amazing cutscene to still pretty amazing 3D live-graphics. You have the same rigid fights as FF6, but now you're controlling a 3D guy who can both move around physically through this highly detailed world, and moves and animates like a person (or now especially, more like a little 3D doll) in fights like he's actually doing stuff and really hitting the other guy. Awesome.
This one I think it might be particularly good to play. At least the first act (all I've played honestly), the first 6-10 hours or so is said to be where the production values and ideas are most heavily weighted. This whole opening act is so dense with ideas they want to show off to you. Every different possible thing they could do
within a JRPG. You're doing a lot, but the experience doesn't lose focus. It's quite linear, there's only so much you're doing at a time, but memes and stereotypes might have you thinking JRPGs were nothing but dungeons and line battles. Play or watch the first act of this game and look at how little time is actually devoted to that. FF7 could be said to almost be an adventure game for much of its runtime, as what you're doing is so contextual to what's happening. Your actions are still mostly fundamental, you move, talk to people, collect stuff, go to places, but there's always a novel spin keeping things feeling exciting and new. For example, this game has a CPR minigame that as far as I know you only perform once to rescue someone during a scene at a beach. That's very funny, that's very
multimedia (put in a new original minigame to add novelty to one scene), but it still feels formal. These moments are always very simple, always feel like they take place within the same rules and logic of the greater game even when new rules and inputs are briefly introduced. This is hard to explain, maybe if someone else likes (or dislikes) this kind of thing they can weigh in.
All right let me move along. Final Fantasy continues to get prettier, the PS2 and then 3 allow for things to start looking increasingly pretty and detailed. But I believe that the Japanese wisely limit themselves to form, allowing them to create complete and vision-driven games while the west starts to unravel.
Mladorossi88 Wrote: Valkyria Chronicles is a good JRPG, if you haven't played it already.
Great example of what I mean. Most big and open strategy games piss me off because their logic eventually comes up against limits of what they could execute and I find myself thinking "that's bullshit" or "why can't I..?". Valkyria Chronicles is a game that takes a lot from JRPG convention, most importantly, the idea of binding itself to formal limits rather than trying to build a simulation of reality as far as possible before hitting a bust in their capabilities. The limits to the logic of VC's battles are very hard, perhaps somewhat arbitrary, strange, "video gamey" and gameable, but once you know the rather simple rules, you know exactly what you're getting. And they're perfectly happy with you messing with these rules. They have lots of weird intricate depth you don't
have to mess with, but if you want to optimise that's a game in itself.
But the game isn't built for optimisation. Like a JRPG, it's a formal platform for an idiosyncratic vision. It's a WW2 anime, presented as a JRPG. It's "battles" are built largely around creating moments where soldiers have to make daring, heroic moves that will have some kind of decisive outcome, and little media elements like a quote (every character has their own VA, model, face, etc) and cut to them speaking before particular actions reinforce this character driven angle in a way that's alien to "strategy games", but feels very JRPG. Also, like the opera scene in FF6, there's a meta-element of artifice to VC. The game is presented as a book about historic events, so the game has a neat canvas filter over its picture to create a strange analogue feel to the visuals like you're looking at moving rough-printed photographs of anime people. And your menus between levels are book pages. The game is all about artifice and constrained presentation to show off a very high effort idea and narrative.
I don't love the game, but it does a lot of really interesting stuff. Great example of how embracing limits (strict artistic forms) doesn't actually close that many doors for what you can do. This game is a great success as a narrative "strategy game" compared to any western peer I can think of. The JRPG connection wasn't really talked about by many critics. Most tried to classify it as an Xcomvaniabornelike, which interests me a lot since I love X-Com (UFO, the original not the remake) so much.
They
are similar in final form, but I believe this similarity is incidental. X-Com
is a strategy game, Valkyria Chronicles is a
JRPG. What does that mean? Simple. VC embraced limits which were largely set before its own production started, while X-Com tried to simulate reality as far as was practical. In practice both are fine approaches, but the up and downsides of each form came out in attempts at sequels.
Valkyria Chronicles got PSP sequels, which scaled down and simplified a touch but could otherwise cope with the strict and simple logic of the game just fine. Just couldn't render as much at once. Eventually there was a main console and PC sequel which could reuse the original's engine. No problem. Not much was changed, but why would it change? VC was always a work defined by deliberate decisions about where to draw lines and limits. So there wasn't much complaining about this (beyond the usual suspects). Point is, VC could successfully get sequels. The fact it didn't get a lot more I put down to the fact the writing is just kind of B-tier. Oh well.
But X-Com, my beloved X-Com. It got one sequel that was fine because it was new assets dropped into the same engine (terror from the deep, a water themed clone-game/asset-flip). And then all attempts at
onwards and upwards sequels to this great
strategy game failed. Why? I think it's obvious why.
Strategy game is not a defined form. What does this mean?
There is no agreed upon spot at which to stop building. This meant that all attempts at succeeding X-Com ran into the problem of chaotically overlapping systems and elements and mechanics which did not come together into any kind of cohesive experience and instead just sprawled outwards until they eventually hit a
bust and had to scramble to pull it all together. From this process we got X-Com: Apocalypse, which made nobody happy and messed up the creator's career (along with some other misfortune). He tried to revive X-Com again via a spiritual successor
Phoenix Point but this ran into the same problem. Not knowing where to draw a line, so instead working until a bust.
Two points to make from there.
One. X-Com got a highly successful successor which built itself around hard limits rather than simulating reality until a bust. The lack of tradition behind this settled upon form and the sterility of the game's general direction and style left me bored, but they made something that
worked. In strategy games that's always refreshing (due to most games hitting the bust problem).
Two. X-Com eventually got open-sourced, opening it up to modders. People have built enormously successful and popular mods (several of which feel like new games at this point)
on almost the exact same fundamental bones of the original game. The lesson to take from here is that Julian Gollop (the original creator) saw himself as the creator of an iterative step towards a superior emulation of reality, rather than an artist who had created a complete and sufficient form, fun exactly as it is. Which could then be iterated upon. He was undone by the dissatisfaction innate in the Strategy Game development process.
X-Com, was a brilliantly satisfying and complete feeling game. But I believe that this was largely a happy accident. Gollop stopped his work at a near perfect place apparently largely by chance. In this particular case he thought this was as far as he could go. But he didn't consider it an all together satisfactory place for a game to stop. To his credit he did do a fairly nice simple GBA game that was like a formal Fire Emblem/X-Com hybrid for the GBA and wanted to remake X-Com in 3D in the early 2000s, but it never came together as it should have. If enough people had the foresight, Gollop's original game would have just become a genre and tradition.
The game's currently running space-pirate, X-Files and 40k themed mods, if released as complete games in the late 90s or early 2000s, would probably all be beloved classics by now and have sold brilliantly in their own time. But that's not the world we live in. Still, better late than never.
Sorry. Where was I?
If you want to see JRPGs accelerating off in awesome directions while retaining the DNA of their Wizardry inspired ancestors, check out Resonance of Fate. My go-to recommendation for an advanced and interesting JRPG that has loads of new ideas but still feels like one. If you want a more
stock JRPG recommendation from me, I don't really have many. I find these games more interesting conceptually than as things to actually sink long hours into. Just look at this.
Maybe this should have been two posts, but hopefully someone has fun reading this.