Hey
I’ve heard this argument advanced a number of times and it always seems almost belligerent to me
like, I understand the point being made about random encounters and overworlds and quest progression and so on but so many jRPGs have absolute garbage writing and pacing and seem to be designed to deliver the most repetitive retrograde standards to a very specific audience that I’m not really sure that whatever constructive points are made by this comparison (not everyone likes brawler combat? sure, fine) actually justify it being made in those terms
like I pretty much didn’t want to play any jRPGs being made over almost the entire time yakuza has been popular up to now because they were mostly very bad anime stereotypes that took too long to do anything interesting. I’m not sure if the goal of calling yakuza a jRPG is to contest that?
I guess maybe Yakuza shares some lineage with Sword of Vermilion and Rent A Hero, since Vermilion is also a typical RPG but with hectic action hack-n-slash random encounters and constant switches in game style. I dunno if Toshihiro Nagoshi was with AM2 at that time though
my goal was to get you to talk about what you don’t like about jrpgs as opposed to painting the whole genre as something that needs to go away like a gamefaqs poster in 2006 by pointing out that yakuza is an excellent example of the genre already
theres always tons of shit in every genre though. saying yakuza is a jrpg is mostly to shake up peoples thoughts on what they do and dont like about a genre beyond ‘the writing is bad/theyre slow/too anime’
which is something i dont like about ALL games. thats not exclusive to jrpgs
the goal of calling yakuza a jrpg is to show that the mechanics (OF MY FAVORITE FLAWED GENRE) go past repetitive anime combat for 100 hours
it’s an rpg and it was made in japan
I’ve always found the need to even have that argument on those terms to presume a way too Japanese-or-western-AAA-console-game-centric view of popular genres in the first place
this is basically a hobby horse of mine at this point though
and to say that yakuza is a jRPG still doesn’t distinguish it much from the window dressing RPG mechanics that all of those western AAA games have adopted – whatever you might say about minigames etc. is really all there – and I can’t see it as anything other than a discussion about Japanese games that do or don’t leverage their own tone effectively
the discourse around jrpgs in the West as being Too Boring and Too Anime and Not Respectful Of Your Time is kind of ridiculous and has been for years. Yakuza is a jrpg that avoids the typical pitfalls everyone likes to mention and I think the hesitancy to classify it as such is just more of the “lol jrpgs” bullshit that’s been on the internet forever which is why I like to press the issue
i dont like calling games by their genres because it doesn’t actually describe anything and leads to these conversations constantly if you think about what words mean for more than three seconda
but i also think jrpgs get shit on even though they’ve literally infected all game mechanics at this point
i feel like i say this kind of thing a lot, and seemingly always in conversations involving felix, but have the the people saying this stuff played any big western-developed games?
this is a very ‘i have children and a job’ end of the year list. its charmingly normal
the state of AAA games this decade makes the weird hardline stance a lot of people have on jrpgs really bizarre and ironic in a way it couldve never been 20 years ago. crazy to me that genre: jrpg is such a poison pill for a lot of people but they play like every assassins creed which at this point is just 300 hour long montreal anime
yeah all big games are 80+ hours, they all have leveling up mechanics, they all have small battles you don’t HAVE to do, they all have minigames/sidequests, they all have big maps you wander around, they all have equipment that you rotate, they all have towns, and youre the most important in the world in all of them
in fact saying a game ISNT a jrpg at this point is kinda hard
right see my point is you’re defending cynical, tedious games by exclusively holding them up against other cynical, tedious games on the basis that foreign tropes are at least less upsetting [to you] and I have no idea why we have to pretend the rest of the universe is assassins creed to talk about jRPGs
of course I would never accuse felix of being contrarian,
for the record i am only defending good jrpgs hmph
like all AAA games (and a huge amount of non aaa) have jrpg mechanics so the genre is less tedious than people give it credit. ass creed comes up a lot for the same reason final fantasy or mario come up a lot. its a quick reference to define an undefinable genre. its how people process information.
i think turn based RPG mechanics are more than the battles, even though a battle system draws me.
these other systems are found in all games! look at all the western developers trying their hands at the formula! its interesting to play with (space funeral! get in the car loser! undertale!)
like i hate 90 percent of all movies but i consider myself a person who loves movies. its fine to have a bunch of shit in every genre because thats how mediums work. its reductive and weird to say ‘tedious anime’ to a genre that is as big as like, cluttervanias or shoot mans. maybe not in the sheer amount of money they make, but they way theyve inserted their ideas into almost all games
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to point out that the most popular games in the west are as tedious and boring as the worst jrpgs and that the amount of criticism one gets over the other is very disproportionate. I’m sure we could get very obscure here but I’m trying to quickly illustrate my point using a popular example. The average jrpg is not as good as Kane & Lynch 2 though so there goes my argument!
yeah I just don’t understand this context where eg watch dogs sucks all the air out of a room that would be better off discussing something thoroughly mediocre like xenoblade x. I’ve been talking about videogames here and almost nowhere else for 15 years, setting up the stakes that way is very strange to me