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stephenthinkpad posted:I never consider "JRPG" a bad word in the gaming world, much less so than the word "anime" or "animu" in the regular american vernacular. It's already part of the "Gacha Games" subcategory which is generally called a "Lootbox Game" when made in the west.
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Mar 28, 2023 15:25
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Tesseraction posted:It's already part of the "Gacha Games" subcategory which is generally called a "Lootbox Game" when made in the west. I have some friends call it a "waifu game".
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Mar 28, 2023 15:34
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I think you could make a reasonable case for "JRPG" being defined as: - A turn-based RPG - Multiple playable characters, usually a party of 4 for combat (and consequently 3rd-person perspective) - Both equipment and level-based progression - party roles usually along the fighter/rogue/cleric/wizard vein, with hybrids and gimmick characters to flesh out the cast Some other typical characteristics are a physical/magic split, either a complex job tree or a skill mastery system, and the linear story with potentially multiple endings. I think the multiple party members bit is really at the core of a lot of the distinctions - for a lot of other RPGs you are following the story of the singular main character, often someone who every part of the plot hinges upon. In a JRPG, you may still have one main character, but you are always going through something that is bigger than the individual, and often the rest of the main cast gets an equal amount of characterization. In that sense, it ends up closer to how an actual game of D&D would work - multiple people getting a similar amount of screentime, each with their own motivations and goals, sometimes leaving the party of dying and being replaced by a different character at key junctures. Something like Fallout is different not just in the direct mechanics, but in the stories that are told through the mechanics and the limitations that having or not having a Point of View character puts on certain genre tropes or methods of characterization. The real issue is that the majority of the games that fit this description aren't actually made in Japan, so you either have to say "JRPG-style" or "JRPG-inspired" and at that point you may as well just give a nod to the particular games like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy, or just say SquareEnix directly I think the other thing that was a traditional distinguisher was JRPGs were the console ones as opposed to the diablo-style or rogue-style PC RPGs of the same era with a single player character, but the console distinction is entirely gone now that steam is such an easy way for indie studios to publish, and neither the switch nor the PS5 really has any more coming out, since most anything will also get a PC release these days While the mainline FF games are the main flagship for this sort of thing, there are still plenty of others - Octopath Traveler, Bravely Default, the Mana games, Ys, Dragon Quest, or any of the phone spinoffs with ancillary gacha mechanics - Final Fantasy Record Keeper, Octopath Traveler: CotC, Another Eden, which are very distinct from a Genshin-type open-world game with real-time combat. In a lot of cases these games are getting made by some of the same people as the old-days JRPGs - Another Eden has people from the Chrono Trigger team IIRC, and they had a crossover event with Chrono Cross when CC got a rerelease last year. I'd also argue that Pokemon and Yokai Watch are JRPGs, even though you'd probably put them in a monster-catching own subcategory - the key traits are still there though, and IIRC the genre originator was a DQ mechanic. Also in this vein are the Persona and SMT games, which have a pretty substantial following themselves. Fire Emblem and related also-rans are also in this header even though you could argue for tactics RPGs being their own thing entirely It definitely is true that "JRPG" is a bad term at present since by volume it isn't really uniquely Japanese, but the market leaders for that style of game are definitely still Japanese, even if the indie imitators are international. I'm not really sure what you would use as a replacement term tho - basically every option involves using a brand name (whether it be SquareEnix or D&D), and ultimately ends up being a bit reductive because not all games with Final Fantasy in the title even really fit the bill - FF14 is a more distant relative to the genre than many games that lack the brand name, for example, or the various Pathfinder and D&D branded games that actually don't play that much like JRPGs Maybe "class-based RPG" would be the closest, or maybe "turn-based RPG" adequately covers it, but I don't know if there is any term that sufficiently captures the full range of characteristics that are clustered around the existing usage. The term probably should die tho, there are plenty of RPG made in Japan that aren't "JRPGs" in this sense, so it does sort of alienate those creators to declare them not-Japanese for the sake of this shorthand just because they'd rather make something outside of this mold I think the point above about "anime" and "manga" having specific meanings is also relevant - categorically, every type of Japanese media has been classified in a way that separates it from other things that are similar but from other countries, and that leads to the weird "Otaku culture" phenomenon in the US where you have consumers that only consume Japanese media, and it is definitely tied up in the nationalist sentiments of both Japan and the US where country of origin is an important aspect to be considered when deciding what you buy. There isn't anything inherently polarizing about "anime" as an art style (certainly not any more than "Disney" or "Cubist"), so we have to surmise that the rancor is the result of cultural signaling, if not directly anti- and pro-Japanese than at least anti- and pro-internet culture or anti- and pro-non-English media That said, the patterns of behavior that Americans are aping are themselves nationalist in a pro-Japanese way, so you can't treat Japan as innocent in all of this - the fact that they have their own internal ecosystem for media that by and large rejects foreign content is not coincidental to Americans getting exposed to an all-Japanese media diet. It isn't like Shonen Jump is going to start including American or European artists, and the proliferation of JRPGs was mostly because Japan made single-purpose game consoles and then created games for them almost entirely in-country for many years. They had system exclusives that could have been published as PC games if the licensing allowed it, and they only had that media grip loosened in the 2000s after XBox and Steam got big enough to stop the anti-competitive behavior by presenting sufficient alternatives for publishing and purchasing. Obviously the US is no better and Microsoft is a huge lovely monopoly, but there is a certain degree of tit-for-tat there TLDR - We know what we mean when we say JRPG, but assigning a certain type of gameplay and narrative to a nationality is kind of weird and if the term just starting being used in 2023 I think people would generally object to it. It is definitely orientalist to some degree, especially since the term "western RPG" gets used unironically as a contrast, but there's not an obvious successor term and genre labels are driven by convenience and convention, so until or unless the heat map of games by characteristics leads to a different sensible tag to apply I'm not sure what can be done about it BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 17:28
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I always felt that what set "JRPGs" (I guess using the scare quotes feels apt if we want to move away from the term for something more inclusive) apart from "Western-style" RPGs like the gold box AD&D games and Ultima etc. in their heyday in the 1990s was the focus on the unfolding plot and story-driven adventuring as a group of characters, with less emphasis on just wandering around as an individual and the very involved map, stat and inventory management which often were the main thing the player spent their time on. In that I felt they resemble point-and-click adventure games in that the main hook was the very involved storylines (at least in Square/Enix games), so, uh, Adventure RPGs? Story RPGs? I also feel that the somewhat culturally insular nature of Japanese pop culture at the time had a large role to play in the formation of the genre, just as back in the day it was also very easy to tell British games apart from French ones, for example. Internet, globalization and the resulting citational styles of heavy borrowing from different cultural milieus have changed all of that irreversibly, so I guess we could stop also holding on to the idea that Japanese RPGs work like this while US RPGs work like this.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:37
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stephenthinkpad posted:I have some friends call it a "waifu game". As someone who’s observed Genshin from the outside, isn’t that literally the appeal? It always looked like fans are in it for the anime girls and boys.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:42
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From what I've seen the current best JRPG series is the Yakuza franchise which is still going strong. Also Persona.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:47
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Goons will take any thread, even one about old men loving each other, and talk about their favorite video games instead.
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Mar 28, 2023 19:22
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To be fair, all my favourite video games are about old men loving each other.
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Mar 28, 2023 19:23
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CottonWolf posted:To be fair, all my favourite video games are about old men loving each other. I also love the Yakuza series. And doesn't seem like the thread was getting much use outside twitter embeds so at least the video games discussion is old men loving -adjacent, I guess.
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Mar 28, 2023 19:33
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stephenthinkpad posted:However I just want to point out there aren't many JPRG around in the last 2 console cycles.
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Mar 28, 2023 20:03
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stephenthinkpad posted:I have some friends call it a "waifu game". Nah, a "waifu game" is something you play on a mobile phone and revolves around collecting jpegs of cute characters. Also throw me on the pile with the rest of the people who thought JRPG simply meant an RPG game that was made in Japan.
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Mar 29, 2023 00:25
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Well, obviously the overwhelming majority of JRPG's have come from Japan. It's only somewhat recently that you've started to see prominent western examples of JRPG's from the indie scene, like Undertale, Lisa, Cosmic Star Heroine, CrossCode, Chained Echoes, etc.
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Mar 29, 2023 03:11
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I mean one dude said he believed the term JRPG was offensive and in the context of decades ago when Japanese games were having a hard time getting into the US market, not now. I guess that is worth mentioning.
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Mar 29, 2023 04:11
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:From what I've seen the current best JRPG series is the Yakuza franchise which is still going strong. There's exactly one Yakuza game which is actually a JRPG in any sense right now. (And ironically it's quite influenced by, and even shares several voice actors in both English and Japanese with, Persona 5) Shammypants posted:I mean one dude said he believed the term JRPG was offensive and in the context of decades ago when Japanese games were having a hard time getting into the US market, not now. I guess that is worth mentioning. Yeah, a lot of people are missing it's specifically from the perspective of Japanese developers in the PS3/360 era in particular, that is post-9/11 era where you had people in the industry outright going 'Japanese games suck, you need to make them more like Western games' and hence we got poo poo like DmC and Castlevania reboots, as well as post-9/11 xenophobia going into overdrive- and both conservatives AND liberals calling Japanese games foreign degeneracy that's corrupting our children.
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Mar 29, 2023 04:52
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Yeah, a lot of people are missing it's specifically from the perspective of Japanese developers in the PS3/360 era in particular, that is post-9/11 era where you had people in the industry outright going 'Japanese games suck, you need to make them more like Western games' and hence we got poo poo like DmC and Castlevania reboots, as well as post-9/11 xenophobia going into overdrive- and both conservatives AND liberals calling Japanese games foreign degeneracy that's corrupting our children. I remember some poo poo on JRPGs in the late 2000s but I have no memory of this supposed xenophobia directed at Japanese games corrupting children. Not only was the 2000s the Anime Boom. games like Metal Gear Solid 3, Resident Evil 4, Final Fantasy X - these and so many others were some of the most beloved games of that entire decade. All I remember was a short-lived period in the late 2000s when JRPGs got a lot of poo poo. JRPG is by no means an offensive/abusive term outside those short few years. I've always used it as a way to designate my favorite type of video game.
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Mar 29, 2023 05:10
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Japan xenophobia was certainly what I remember about post-911.
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Mar 29, 2023 05:26
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I don't think one person's opinion about what JRPG means and how people should feel about it is really that important. If you take it to literally mean "Japanese RPG" as in "an RPG made in Japan" then technically all Souls games and Elden Ring are JRPGs, but no one use the term in that sense. It's a genre term, and people use it both as a term of endearment or of disparagement depending on how they feel about that genre. I happen to enjoy dethroning god in insane, contrived scenarios using turn-based combat, so I see it as a positive descriptive term. A developer who is specifically trying to get away from some of those tropes is going to feel differently, but that doesn't mean he's right.
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Mar 29, 2023 23:22
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If you felt not particularly charitable you could even say he was just refusing to own up to his part of the industry releasing some not very good stuff at the time. He might have addressed that, though. I refuse to read any games journalism about this
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Mar 29, 2023 23:56
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He literally said that a lot of developers specifically have bad experiences with the term used as a perjorative in a particular period, and we literally have clear examples of games journalism being racist even for the time. Even all of that 'lol look at those wacky Japanese' stuff is a bit sketch in retrospect given basically any game that was slightly unusual in style or presentation or had attractive people in it had westerners going on and on about how craaaazy they are.
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Mar 30, 2023 04:25
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PT6A posted:I don't think one person's opinion about what JRPG means and how people should feel about it is really that important. I dunno, maybe being a Japanese developer at a major studio making said games gives different perspective? That’s the entire reason people are taking a pause and assessing the term. Also good lord I guess it takes either a PM assassination or a video game derail to get action in this thread. Yikes.
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Mar 30, 2023 06:55
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Trying to define a genre is like trying to exert control over language as a single person. It’s a waste of time. Genre boundaries are extremely fluid and arbitrary and the fact that people DON’T call the Soulslike games JRPGs is proof of that. The only purpose of specific genre titles like JRPG is so that you can allude to what kinds of games a given game might be similar to.
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Mar 30, 2023 08:36
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harperdc posted:Also good lord I guess it takes either a PM assassination or a video game derail to get action in this thread. Yikes. It's a shame, but I can appreciate that our Japan-based posters probably don't see Kishida's latest policy proposals as worth updating the thread on. I mostly pick up Japanese news by watching NHK World at lunch time because I'm studiously avoiding hearing about UK politics when I'm trying to eat, and by and large it's just the government tinkering around the edges.
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Mar 30, 2023 11:18
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Tesseraction posted:It's a shame, but I can appreciate that our Japan-based posters probably don't see Kishida's latest policy proposals as worth updating the thread on. I mostly pick up Japanese news by watching NHK World at lunch time because I'm studiously avoiding hearing about UK politics when I'm trying to eat, and by and large it's just the government tinkering around the edges. As one of those posters - it’s funny to see what becomes a political scandal versus the shameless tire fire that is American politics, plus it’s not like there’s even much tug-of-war for power. It’s the LDP and Komeito, and everyone else. There’s interesting stuff around the margins, in prefectural or city level, or internationally…but probably not a huge audience for that (slash that’s what complaining on twitter/mastodon is for  )
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Mar 30, 2023 11:31
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Japanese politics is mostly insane but pointless stuff. Like the new bike helmet law that takes effect next week and requires everyone nationally to "make their best effort" to wear a helmet, but has no punishments other than a scolding by police.
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Mar 30, 2023 11:57
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It's also one of the most staid countries politically speaking. The assassination of a former prime minister and a not-insignificant portion of the country feeling sympathetic for the assassin happened less than a year ago and nothing really came of it in either direction. The government both forgot about the Unification Church and using the assassination as a pretext for curtailing civil liberties. The good stuff is the insane things like the Youtuber legislator who got kicked out for never coming to the Diet or the local politicians who get busted for growing weed, but that's not really enough to keep a thread active.
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Mar 30, 2023 12:10
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This stuff about ガーシー is pretty hilarious. Also, am not completely knowledgable about the term, but it sounds like as part of Kishida birth rate boosting plans they have removed the earns cap on government child support payment. Very happy to hear that as we were just out of range before. Any tips on where I can learn more about that kind of thing?
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Mar 30, 2023 12:13
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harperdc posted:There’s interesting stuff around the margins, in prefectural or city level
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Mar 30, 2023 12:48
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Actually that reminds me, I caught the tail end of an NHK segment about Aum Shinrikyo (now Aleph) still just Being A Thing. I thought they were underground now, but the segment was casually talking about the leader's statement to the press. How the hell are they allowed to still be a thing?
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Mar 30, 2023 13:36
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PT6A posted:I don't think one person's opinion about what JRPG means and how people should feel about it is really that important. If you take it to literally mean "Japanese RPG" as in "an RPG made in Japan" then technically all Souls games and Elden Ring are JRPGs, but no one use the term in that sense. It's a genre term, and people use it both as a term of endearment or of disparagement depending on how they feel about that genre. The original JRPGs made in the early 1980s were all action based RPGs, while the west was making D&D inspired turn based RPGs. It's only been since Dragon Quest 3 where the dynamic flipped. Dr.Radical posted:If you felt not particularly charitable you could even say he was just refusing to own up to his part of the industry releasing some not very good stuff at the time. He might have addressed that, though. I refuse to read any games journalism about this They made plenty of good games. They were just on handhelds because that generation of consoles was a lot more demanding and difficult to work with than they were used to and frankly, the early years of that generation of consoles didn't sell well in Japan anyway. That and most Japanese developers struggled to get actually decent 3D game engines and had to do it themselves, they couldn't use Unreal Engine 3 like most western games at the time did because there was virtually no documentation for Unreal Engine 3 translated into Japanese. There's a reason Unreal Engine 4 got more widespread use in Japanese games over the past 5+ years and that's because Epic bothered to have documentation in Japanese so people could be trained in using it.
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Mar 30, 2023 16:46
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Tesseraction posted:Actually that reminds me, I caught the tail end of an NHK segment about Aum Shinrikyo (now Aleph) still just Being A Thing. I thought they were underground now, but the segment was casually talking about the leader's statement to the press. How the hell are they allowed to still be a thing? "Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attacks" Aum Shinrikyo?
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Mar 30, 2023 16:54
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Tesseraction posted:Actually that reminds me, I caught the tail end of an NHK segment about Aum Shinrikyo (now Aleph) still just Being A Thing. I thought they were underground now, but the segment was casually talking about the leader's statement to the press. How the hell are they allowed to still be a thing?
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Mar 30, 2023 17:01
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captkirk posted:"Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attacks" Aum Shinrikyo? Yes them. Nessus posted:I don’t know about these maniacs in particular but if local cult temples cut the part where they help with terror and rebrand, how do you outlaw them? It is very hard to use secular law to outlaw a church completely (as opposed to outlawing practices or prosecuting individuals). Yeah, I guess, but you'd think they could point to the whole, terrorism thing. They just said "wasn't me" and after prosecuting Shoko and his inner circle the government seem to have mostly shrugged their shoulders and just put the group "under surveillance." I guess it's better than acting like nothing happened but it feels like the kind of thing where you'd disband them on terrorism charges. At least Hikari no Wa could plausibly be the part of the cult that isn't murderous, as they seem to be more about new age poo poo.
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Mar 30, 2023 17:53
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Rochallor posted:It's also one of the most staid countries politically speaking. The assassination of a former prime minister and a not-insignificant portion of the country feeling sympathetic for the assassin happened less than a year ago and nothing really came of it in either direction. The government both forgot about the Unification Church and using the assassination as a pretext for curtailing civil liberties. Last I saw was another investigation in dropping the hammer on the Unification Church, but I doubt that became a “hiding under the rug” thing as well. Maybe my naïveté, but hey. It also resulted in a few elected ministers showing their entire rear end when it came to denying they were at places when photos exist of them enjoying some Unification hospitality. Charles 2 of Spain posted:It's this, politically aware people in Japan tend to focus their efforts locally. And the stories that match Louisiana politics are all local as well.
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Mar 31, 2023 15:01
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Someone just tried to blow up Fumio Kuishida so I guess that itch hasn't entirely been scratched. Sounds like it was probably a pipe bomb that fizzled as no one was injured.
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Apr 15, 2023 08:57
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Updated news suggest it was a smoke bomb and the perpetrator is 24. So either an assassination attempt of scaring an old man into a heart attack or the Anglosphere trend of dickhead pranksters has infected Japan.
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Apr 15, 2023 14:32
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the sushi terrorists are getting bolder
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Apr 15, 2023 14:39
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From what I’ve seen of news over the weekend they’re treating it seriously, including an 8-hour sweep through the accused bombers’ home. The news also showed police acting noticeably stricter with bag checks for Kishida’s other speech afterwards Lord knows the motivation or if anything in there was truly deadly or “just a prank,” I wouldn’t assume anything as of yet. kliras posted:the sushi terrorists are getting bolder If this is how the disaffected young men are acting out then I guess it could be a lot worse
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Apr 17, 2023 03:44
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I guess Japan is having a #metoo moment. It's rather sad that none of this actually surprised me one bit, and that Johnny managed to die before anyone dared to really push the matter instead of just looking the other way for decades. CW: sexual abuse https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/12/ohnny-kitagawa-former-j-pop-idol-kauan-okamoto-alleges-sexual-abuse-japan-music-mogul
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Apr 17, 2023 11:22
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barbecue at the folks posted:I guess Japan is having a #metoo moment. It's rather sad that none of this actually surprised me one bit, and that Johnny managed to die before anyone dared to really push the matter instead of just looking the other way for decades. CW: sexual abuse https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/12/ohnny-kitagawa-former-j-pop-idol-kauan-okamoto-alleges-sexual-abuse-japan-music-mogul It took Johnny being dead and buried and the BBC digging into it for this to gain any traction at all, shockingly. Shukan Bunshun had the story in 1999, but got sued and eventually won - but old man Johnny was never charged with a crime, and nothing really changed. Considering I'm pretty sure Johnny's is owned in part by every different broadcaster in Japan it's not a huge surprise the story never picked up steam in the dailies or TV news.
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Apr 17, 2023 11:49
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Being fair the BBC does have good form for only discussing an entertainer's molestation habits after the fucker dies.
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Apr 17, 2023 12:05
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