Imagine if Dark Souls looked like this. In Dark Souls the storytelling is atmospheric. It has a European medieval fantasy setting.
The characters look realistic and its all grimy. Great, something different! Does it really come down to superficial features like eyes and style of armor? That makes about as much sense as calling Jade Empire a Chinese RPG because Bioware made the premise around kung-fu gameplay and oriental architecture. Maybe it could get away with its dull visual style if the main character was a blindfolded smoking hot android girl.
Because that just feels more Japanese, you know? This leads into insulting territory. Because it has normal looking eyes? Stereotypes can be helpful in casual scenarios when a point needs to be made quickly. But are those two classics and their designs the end all decider for a genre 40 years later? And is the anime style all Japan is allowed to do in order to stay…Japanese?
Backtrack a bit. In the early s there were two groundbreaking American made computer role-playing games: Wizardry and Ultima. They were famous in the West, yes, but rose to even bigger popularity in Japan. These games created a computer RPG boom in Japan. Eventually, clear lines of influence can be traced over to the first Dragon Quest and original Final Fantasy by Japanese developers a few years later.
You can read more about this phenomenon in Japan in this article. It explains how before Wizardry and Ultima, Japan was already doing its own thing with computer games and RPG concepts. Japan already had computer RPGs built around character stats. Like in the title, Seduction of the Condominium Wives , where the main character sold condoms to women. Of course, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy were immensely more popular designs within the Japanese game industry.
A trend so popular that many attribute them as the definers of the JRPG genre. But trends come and go. Final Fantasy today, for example, is unrecognizable compared to its precursors. But let me pick apart my own definition as well. The inevitable issue that will arise with this JRPG meaning is that of ethnicity and geography. What if I have one foot in Japan and the other in the pacific ocean, etc…. It gets silly fast. Or if I ask how much time exactly does it take to become a citizen and be considered part of a culture.
And what is the meaning of life, anyway? But this JRPG meaning can work well by itself because Japan as a country is a very special case study. The problem with genre is that its not often very useful at its broadest, Mario, Mark of the Ninja and Spelunky are all 2D platformers which I'm defining as a 2D game with a jump button and platforms where jumping is necessary but only Mario is thought of predominantly as a platformer, MotN is Stealth action game and Spelunky is a Roguelike.
They're all undeniably platformers but they couldn't be more different and it isn't useful to think of the latter 2 as platformers. Genres also have confusing overlap and separations, what is a horror game? A simple way to think about it is a game that elicits horror, now what is the gameplay of a horror game like? Is it a visual novel Higurashi?
Because any of these tags can describe a game's genre but as soon as its main objective is to elicit horror the main way people think of it is "horror game" regardless of mechanics. There's also games which are Horror secondary, Bioshock is usually thought of as an FPS with a horror tone but one tag describes gameplay the other describes emotions, when does one dominate the other?
A lot of the games that qualify are not thought of as JRPGs they are thought of primarily as something else. One more food for thought, RPGmaker is on the list, which might not even be considered a game, its a software to craft "RPG"s but that is not a game in the same way Unity and Flash are not games, they're tools.
Are the games made using it considered JRPGs? The software has all the tools needed to make an RPG with turns, items, levelling and anything else you could think of to rip off early FF but you don't need to use any of them and you might just make a walking simulator To the Moon which is distinctly not an RPG. Okay now say you remove all combat, levelling and items from an early Final Fantasy rendering it a walking simulator merged with a visual novel is it still a JRPG? A visual novel with "enemies to defeat", "inventory management", and "anime style characters".
Most would still say no, Ace Attorney is generally considered a visual novel or a detective game but it mostly satisfies the requirements of a JRPG, granted, about as much as it counts as a romance game.
Wizardry and Ultima are very direct influences on Dragon Quest, one of the prototypical JRPGs and anything closely inspired by it is considered a JRPG but who's to say a western game with cartoony graphics wasn't also inspired by Ultima rather than Dragon Quest? An example would be the Suzanne Collins controversy when people noted Hunger Games bore a strikingly similar premise to Battle Royale both featuring a death game involving teens tasked to kill each other at the behest of a dystopian government.
Collins claimed to have never heard of Battle Royale and instead gotten the idea from channel surfing between Survivor and news coverage of a war, despite the similarities I'm inclined to believe her without evidence to the contrary. The Running Man was a movie with a loose version of the premise from over a decade before Battle Royale was published and I wouldn't suggest Battle Royale is based on it but rather that a death game run by a dystopian government isn't that far fetched of an idea to independently come up with.
Contrast to A Fistful of Dollars which is a very close retelling of Yojimbo which could not be refuted as a straight rip of the older film. Essentially, inspirations and intent is a tangled web and some games might get pulled into the JRPG genre despite not being directly influenced by a JRPG or being inspired by one. I don't personally consider Dust: An Elysian Tail a JRPG given it's predominately a Metroidvania which falls under platformers usually and neither Metroid nor Castlevania are considered RPGs, the art style is vaguely anime-lite but American cartoons can have a similar art style without being anime inspired but more than anything else because the game is lightly steeped in Korean culture, the game's cover has a Korean subtitle and a few references to Korean culture are mixed in such as Kimbap and the Halmeoni Pendant but I wouldn't fault someone who considers it a JRPG.
And that's the takeaway, similar to questions like "What qualifies as anime? Then it sets trends of how Character Creation works in each type of game, although, by now, they're patterns have stopped repeating, sometimes. And selection of classes doesn't count as stat allocation. I mean like saying directly, 5 in Strength, etc, instead of presets. But that was the past, now we have games that take influence from a wider range of things and each other than before, such that we probably can only define as plain RPG, without W or J prefixes, such as Dark Souls?
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Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 1 year ago. Active 1 year ago. Viewed 9k times. Improve this question. I can swear I've seen exactly same question before on arqade. Was it deleted? Can't find it now, only jrpg vs krpg. Got another good explanation for JRPG? Don't keep it to yourself! Add it HERE! Still can't find the acronym definition you were looking for? Use our Power Search technology to look for more unique definitions from across the web!
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