what's in a peg?

[siobhan]

Discuss what makes a jrpg work for you.

I’ve kind of always been obsessed with jrpgs and the idea of making my own but I find it really easy to bounce off most of them. I’ve been on my own litle jrpg quest inspired by our own @dogs and been slowly building my personal checklist for being A Good One and thought i’d share. It sounds instructive because it is (for me) but obviously this is all preference.

• I want to walk places but i dont want it to be tedious
  – Do not give me fast travel without limitation I will use it too much
  – Wild Arms’ little game-within-the-game running system where you need to time your turning carefully or bump into stuff is just magic.

• Don’t make me dread exploring with a high ass random encounter rate
  – I feel my skin crawling exploring a dungeon and knowing that every suboptimal step i take is gonna waste time.

• You know what, just don’t have a high encounter rate in general?
  – People tell me about Chrono Trigger “its good because it has no random encounters” and like yeah sure but it does have scripted encounters every five steps. Not an improvement!!! I really liked Parasite Eve’s approach to this, with a reasonable number of scripted encounters that occasionally repeat when you backtrack

• You need writing
  – It can be charming character silly stuff or serious thematic political stuff, whatever, but a game where you read a lot of text needs to have good text, holy shit. RPGs made by folks who are mainly interested in mechanics tend to suck in this way imo

• Novelty goes a long way
  – Throwaway setpieces! Little bits of worldbuilding! Breaking your format for drama or comedy! It’s the small stuff, especially stuff that gives you a little power over the environment (Wild Arms gets another W here) that really gets me going. Obviously an unreasonable ask to say “add more content” but these games tend to be made by delusionals like me who do it anyway

• Don’t make me fucking grind
  – Probably aren’t any shortage of people here who’d go to bat for grinding but I’m sorry I just dont want to sign up for busywork

• Don’t make me guess how things work OR give me room to experiment
  – If you give me 6 elemental damage types and strong resource attrition I am not going to stray beyond something that works RIGHT NOW. Let me know what’s effective and when, or give me low stakes environments to figure it out

• Give me a weird enemy
  – Give me a weird enemy! Especially early on. Tatzelbelm

• Don’t make me guess about numbers
  – I like when RPGS try to avoid or abstract numbers in ways that feel texturally right… i.e. “minor” “moderate” “severe” damage in SMT games. Please don’t make me guess what the numbers are though. I feel this a lot with things like damage buffs/debuffs.

• Fuckin status effects. Figure your shit out
  – There are SO many games where regular encounters are too simple and numerous to be worth trying to poison or blind etc your enemies, but bosses are completely immune to status effects. Fuck you! Commit or don’t give me the option to waste my time.

• If you add crafting and its lame i will shoot you into space
  – Kind of a complaint about every game released after 2012 i guess but also I dont want to go back to Vagrant Story because of its ridiculous shite

• Battle music Battle Music BATTLE MUSIC
  – I want a bunch of different battle tracks and please don’t save your most boring track for the most frequent fights. The new Knuckle Sandwich has two fucking awesome regular encounter themes

Handsome Humanoids | Knuckle Sandwich OST

Knuckle Sandwich OST - Fearsome Freaks (battle theme #2)

[captainlove]

There’s an intangible quality I seek in JRPGs I’d call ‘journey’ which is about scale and narrative to an extent but it’s that sense of continuity over distance and time. Same kinda feeling you get in long-running TTRPG campaigns. Hugely important especially when considering the cast and world.

[siobhan]

mmmm! for sure, that’s a huge part of the appeal for me too, and a big reason why I want to be forced to walk places lol

[geist]

yeah, that’s really it. the game has to feel coherent, not just a bunch of towns with their own color palette and a series of problems that involve the local dungeon fuck you dragon quest.

and cool battle themes

I like when your party members actually engage with each other in meaningful ways

i guess I just don’t like dragon quest, it fails all of these.

idk i’ve played a lot of jrpgs and I can’t really tell you what I like about the ones I like

[Tulpa]

let me collect a million characters, Suikoden is one of my favs because meeting characters, doing quests for them, and having them join me in some sort of base is one of my favorite cycles in a jrpg

I love seeing an empty space slowly fill up from the adventures I have (not just collecting npcs but keepsakes, mementos, and trophies do so much to make the adventures these characters go on feel “real”)

[spinnylights]

@siobhan

Don’t make me dread exploring with a high ass random encounter rate

@siobhan

You know what, just don’t have a high encounter rate in general?

@siobhan

Don’t make me fucking grind

Until maybe like…idk…5 years ago or something I had felt unsure since childhood if turn-based RPG combat was actually good for anything. Like, all the classic SNES-era Square/Enix games and such I always felt like I played for the writing and the atmosphere and things and I kind of felt like the combat was purely a chore. I would ask myself questions like, “Would these games be better if they had no combat at all?” I would always worry that they would then be too short…but that doesn’t exactly excuse the combat.

Then I played Wizardry, FF8, and Dragon Quest, and together they totally changed my mind. I think the real problem is that most RPGs have boring combat. In many of them, the encounters are just too simple and too repetitive! For a given pool of enemies, it takes little time to figure out a good strategy, and then you’re made to fight the same pool of enemies over and over and you don’t really have to think about it at all while you do it, so it really does feel like manual labor or something. Some people do like this kind of gameplay, I guess 'cause it can be kind of meditative or the like, but personally I really want something more out of RPG combat. (I’m sure some people will read this and be like “Dragon Quest? Wha? Isn’t that exactly the kind of game you’re talking about?” but I’ll explain. :P)

Wizardry’s approach, which I’m surprised hasn’t been emulated more widely, is to have a low encounter rate but very dangerous and thought-provoking encounters. Especially in the lower depths, every fight is rather knuckle-biting and requires at least a few moments of serious thought. This isn’t only because the fights themselves are quite hazardous, but also because they compel you to use up limited resources (mainly spell slots) that you have to retreat back to town to restore. You have to make a bit of a trek to get back to town in the first place, so you don’t want to wait too long to leave or you’ll wipe while you’re trying to get out. That adds an element of larger-scale resource management strategy to the combat which I think increases its interest. Even though this game has almost no plot at all, I enjoyed it very much (I also thought mapping out the dungeon was great fun too—at least the top and bottom floors.)

Dragon Quest did try to emulate this atmosphere, in a kind of cute bite-size package that could play well on the Famicom, and I think it really succeeded in that regard. I’ve heard a lot of people describe it as grindy, and I know that the individual encounters in it are fairly simple, but still I never felt like it was a slog, and I don’t know that I ever truly “grinded” (as in just walking back and forth fighting stuff trying to gain levels). To me that game was all about the resource management aspect of Wizardry—since you have limited MP and you really need your spells on hand, you have to be careful how long you spend away from town and decide when it’s right to return, and you have to pick your moves in battle with some extra thought and caution sometimes, just like in Wizardry. A lot of that game for me was trying to see how far I could make it across the map; every time I would make it a little further, a little further, and it was fun that way. ^^ I do admit, though, I don’t know if I would have liked it quite as much without turbo.

FF8 takes a different approach: it gives you a very flexible combat system, with a huge variety of different ways to build your characters and set up their role in combat and so on, and it doesn’t really mind at all if you totally break the game in half this way. I think that’s a fun approach too: make the combat a kind of playground where the player can make their own fun and go at it the way they want, and just give them a really wide variety of scenarios and ways to adjust the encounters to their liking. I think that game is pretty easy to just make it all the way through, but it give you a lot of room to make up wacky challenges for yourself and little sub-games of your own invention and things you can play in the combat system (and often you’ll even end up with rare items and such from explorings its corners like this, which is a fun bonus).

As a side note on the “do they even need combat” question, I did no random encounters basically at all in FF8 until the late game, because someone told me that I should keep my party at low level until then. I thought that was actually really fun, to just do all the boss fights and such—those are generally the most interesting ones anyway (well, maybe until you get Tonberry, then if you’ve kept your party low-level you can go have some fun with the random encounters tee hee ). If I wasn’t so entertained by that game’s outrageous setting and plot though, I don’t know if I would have liked playing that way as much. By the late game I was really ready to go do a lot of crazy combat even with that being the case (luckily that turned out to be a good time to feel that way).

@siobhan

You need writing

This I feel like can help or hurt a game…a game with writing I enjoy can get me to put up with lackluster combat with only mild grousing, but if the writing drives me up the wall it can make me totally lose interest in the game even if I like the combat. Many, many RPGs have almost identical characters, setting, and plot once you kind of distill them down a bit, and I feel like that never does a game any favors. I feel too I guess that like, compared to my favorite novels or plays or whatever, the existing crop of RPGs sets kind of a low bar to me as far as writing goes. I don’t want to be a Negative Nancy but I really feel like people could go so much further on average with a little daring and imagination. It’s probably the pressures of commercialism making everyone too scared…Not to say I never like them writing-wise, sometimes they are really good (FF8 kept me in stitches the whole time until the stuff in the late game with Squall+Rinoa which I could not possibly take seriously ).

[drastic_bb]

reasons smt nocturne is my fav rpg:

at basically any moment in the game any random encounter enemy could cast a spell named some shit like mahamaon or mamudoon or just petrify u and instantly kill the protagonost the hitoshura leading to an instant game over. sometimes you get back attacked, which has an even higher chance to kill the protag before you can even act

obviously i think this is pretty funny but i also think its cool how much this is the product of several interlocking systems to produce this result:

you first must encounter an enemy capable of instantly killing you, back attacks have a low chance to happen, instakill spells have a low chance to hit… sometimes the enemy only has a single-target spell so there’s also the chance they wont even target hitoshura

i think of it a little like a survival-horror game (imagine a survival-horror where a series of luck-based systems worked together to instantly kill you with no chance to escape i think this would freak people out even if it happened 1 time per playthru or less)

(dragon quarter is another rpg that def feels like survival-horror)

every rpg is certainly based around interlocking systems of rpg mechanics to some extemt… smt nocturne and final fantasy tactics remain enduring for me in part bc theyre fun to replay! lots of latitude with their party-building systems, the games arent terrified youre going to knock them off balance (they wont stop you from doing this, somewhat famously), the interlocking systems of rpg mechanics produce new results every playthru… (i recently watched my roommate get “a new enemy appeared!” in nocturne literally 10 times in a row in a single encounter, and ive never seen that before lol)

there’s maybe a parallel to the armored core series for me, where if you look at armored core 3, battles can take place across virtual kilometers (sometimes your enemy is a dot on the horizon in a 480i screen) , there’s a series of mechanics like recoil, lock-on, projectile speed etc. that contribute to if youre going to be hitting sniper rifle shots or w/e. armored core vi decided that they wanted battles to happen way closer to you, maybe a little more like a souls game, so they did this by adding a ricochet mechanic that makes bullets tickle if you’re a step too far backwards

when it comes to rpgs, i like games that are a little more armored core 3 than armored core vi in that regard if that makes sense, i.e. games that produce results out of layers of interlocking rpg systems rather than individual systems, if that makes sense

(i also think it’s worth noting how much shared dna i think there is between armored core, dark souls, survival horror games, fft, smt, and role-playing games in general)

i obviously think like… cool character designs are important too. maybe even the most important. and soundtracks and style and vibes

shin megami tensei v is another example of a game which feels a bit idk, overdesigned compared to its predecessor (i dont think boss fights should have elemental weaknesses for example) but it does have amazing music

[vodselbt]

@drastic_bb

imagine a survival-horror where a series of luck-based systems worked together to instantly kill you with no chance to escape i think this would freak people out even if it happened 1 time per playthru or less

This is sort of a foundational concept in the JRPG survival horror adventure game Fear & Hunger.

[Tulpa]

not a jrpg so much but if you are interested in the weird intersection of rpg and survival horror, I think Dark Earth is up your alley. Like Dragon Quarter, it also has a scenario where the thing empowering the character is constantly pushing them towards a game over, but Dark Earth is a eurojank pc game from the mid 90s so it is absolutely ruthless about the time limit whereas Dragon Quarter was quite forgiving of mistakes.

[parker]

I’ve come around to thinking jrpgs are God’s Genre. but I also have never been able to get over how random battles are like nails on chalkboard to my brain. the feeling of being interrupted constantly, taken out of the thing I like doing, it’s never been appealing. I remember somewhere in the train graveyard like a couple hours into ff7 thinking “okay this is getting kind of old now” and that never really got better. but also killing people in realtime, that’s not an improvement, it just leads to feeling like an unstoppable ridiculous mass murderer, it doesn’t work either. the ff7 remake is a million times more tedious. the action needs to be abstracted somehow. I think really they just need to make one with about as many combat encounters as like la noire had if you ignored the side missions, but the encounters are all fft battles.

it’s still always been worth putting up with them though (and emulation can make it more tolerable for me now) cause these are the games where you get to go on a long journey with a group of people and see interesting places in an interesting setting, hopefully. I mean that’s what adventuring is supposed to all be about isn’t it. I keep trying to come back to ffx over the years even though I never exactly enjoyed it all that much and it was where I originally fell off from jrpgs because it really has the feeling of being on a long continuous a to b pilgramage. no time for random world map wanderings. I always liked that part at least. king graham is always just around wandering by himself in king’s quest, actual adventure games are kind of lonely feeling games usually, which is fine, but it’s weird this other thing is almost entirely stuck in the format of jrpgs. in an fps your basically playing as the gun. crpgs: I can’t stand making a blank slate character from nothing, especially when you don’t even know the world of the game. I want to play as a pre-existing person who isn’t me. I don’t give a shit about choices. I’d rather just have the best story. I usually just look up the endings in these and try to play towards the most fitting or interesting sounding one anyway. I just want to exist in a world for a while

[VastleCania]

cool as hell monsters. cute monsters. goofy monsters. evil monsters. so many monsters.

[wourme]

If you haven’t yet tried Chained Echoes, that game is worth a look. It streamlines some of the tedious parts of JRPGs while still feeling like it belongs in the genre. The writing won’t surprise you too much but it’s decent and tolerable and that’s unfortunately somewhat rare these days. None of the bad anime humor, pop culture references, or weak fourth wall stuff that plague some games.

A single dev with a day job worked on it at night for years before trying to get Kickstarter funding.

I completely agree on the appeal of a game that makes a journey really feel like a journey. Dragon’s Dogma did this well, making you cross distances on foot with a real threat if you get caught outside after dark. I think I remember hearing that they added more fast travel after I’d already played the game, but hopefully they didn’t ruin that aspect and they capture it again in the sequel.

[parker]

I should make a jrpg remake of the searchers

[drastic_bb]

i think themes such as overthrowing oppressive strcutures in society and attacking and dethroning god are important in rpgs

[extrabastardformula]

@siobhan

mmmm! for sure, that’s a huge part of the appeal for me too, and a big reason why I want to be forced to walk places lol

Yes! Fast travel needs to be a mid to late game thing at most, not the option you can turn toward at the very start. Especially don’t make it teleportation unless you need it to get around some problems

[sleepysmiles]

LOL i assumed this would be a peggle thread
yesyesyes ive toyed around with making games in RPG Maker for years and thought a lot about what i’d want my own console RPG to look like this thread is my jam. RPG Maker at its most basic is specifically a Dragon Quest maker and imo it’s a fools errand for an amateur hobbyist game dev to try some massive deviation from that, so i try to think in terms of “what are mechanics Dragon Quest could do, but wouldn’t”

specific stuff i would want in my game (in addition to cosigning what people have said so far itt)

-some means of avoiding or controlling encounters. my preference is for symbol encounters but if they’re random, you need easy access to spells that lower or raise encounters, reliably. SMT Nocturne is best in class at this

-for symbol encounters its gotta be “Earthbound or better”, you should be able to ambush (or be ambushed) and plausibly avoid fights or lure enemies away from each other. I would love to implement rudimentary stealth just so it’s a valid approach

-and honestly why not both? ive thought using random encounters in environments where your visibility is meant to be poor (making sense of enemies appearing from thin air) might be an interesting pace changer, especially if theyre very dangerous and the encounter rate is very low. Make that tension of wondering whether the next step will doom you, y’know – tense!!!

-unless either you’re very good at communicating move priority obliquely, or you downplay it altogether and it doesnt matter – unless you can do those please give me a predictive timeline of some sort. Cant believe more games didn’t rip off FFX’s which was lowkey the best part of that combat system

-and consider move economy as well. if you’re going with a small or solo party, make sure they aren’t just getting punching bagged by groups of enemies and trapped in a loop of trying to HEAL a la DQ1. ive specifically wanted to make solo character RPGs and unless you want every fight to be one-on-one implementing something like Action Points to give you multiple actions per round feels necessary

-there should be non-combat systems that play off your character stats (or at least non combat stats) e.g. persuasion in dialogue, lockpicking/hacking, climbing or jumping to circumvent parts of the dungeons. Stuff you expect to see in a computer RPG but never get in a J-style console RPG. An idea that there are alternatives to rigid combat and linear dungeon exploration, or at least a way to get an upper hand in them

-dont just make a dungeon that’s a lot of dead end paths and sometimes they have treasure but only 1 path is right arrrrgh. dont make them a lot of boxes connected by hallways with only art palette to differentiate them. Dungeons need a sense of place and design, and JRPG dungeons so rarely do i feel! even in games i really like!!

-linear equipment progression is soooo boring give me weapons & gear that i can make choices around more complex than “this one makes my defense stat go up more than that one”. have them apply unique resistances and passives, have skillsets linked to them so i have reasons to swap them out. LET me swap them out IN BATTLE! Nocturne’s magatama and the protagonists multi personas in P3/4/5 are the closest ive seen to nailing what i mean here (and i would consider them a nontraditional form of “equipment”)

-some element of risk! Dont let me just save scum everything (or at least disincentivize it). However, dont just rip progress out from under me if i get unlucky either. Ive thought more RPGs should have “extra lives,” some options to either pick up from a checkpoint or restart the battle from scratch – something besides just dumping you back onto the load file screen.

-generally just look outside of “other jrpgs” for inspiration. Ive thought about how RPGs could better emulate the pacing of a beat em up game, scrutinized the terrific open “dungeon design” of DOOM and Deus Ex levels, tried to draw parallels to adventure game progression (puzzles:combat!!) Roleplaying is abstraction! DX can make me feel like im infiltrating a facility, not just clicking on doors until they open or guys heads until they fall over. an RPG inspired by DX should make me feel like im infiltrating a facility, not just getting into a half dozen scripted encounters and a dozen random ones while i hunt for keys in a new tileset

-MYSTERY. have systems that are unexplained. have systems that are inexplicable – that just add flavor and variety. Have red herrings and easter eggs and stuff you left in just because the art asset looked cool. What hooked me on this genre when i was a kid was that kind of ephemera – pink tails and improbable summon drops, lazy shells, arcane fusion mechanics, unique truck sprites you can only see by sequence breaking. Gimme some fuckin wonder

i could think about this for hours and have
this is probably good for now

[isfet]

i don’t want to be annoying but the implications of the thread title have been on my mind since seeing it:

do people actually say “jerpeg”?

[extrabastardformula]

@isfet

do people actually say “jerpeg”?

Jrup-egg

[wourme]

Joint Role-Playing Experts Group

[aislesgrises]

@sleepysmiles

-linear equipment progression is soooo boring give me weapons & gear that i can make choices around more complex than “this one makes my defense stat go up more than that one”. have them apply unique resistances and passives, have skillsets linked to them so i have reasons to swap them out. LET me swap them out IN BATTLE! Nocturne’s magatama and the protagonists multi personas in P3/4/5 are the closest ive seen to nailing what i mean here (and i would consider them a nontraditional form of “equipment”)

@sleepysmiles

-MYSTERY. have systems that are unexplained. have systems that are inexplicable – that just add flavor and variety. Have red herrings and easter eggs and stuff you left in just because the art asset looked cool. What hooked me on this genre when i was a kid was that kind of ephemera – pink tails and improbable summon drops, lazy shells, arcane fusion mechanics, unique truck sprites you can only see by sequence breaking. Gimme some fuckin wonder

so uhhhh… saga games

specifically romancing saga 2 for the equipment point but it’s also a bit of the mystery. the game doesn’t really tell you enough about anything, but equipment come with specific properties that determine what they’ll protect you against and it’s the difference between if you die in one hit or not a lot of times

the weapons also usually don’t come in a lot of varieties for each class. there’s SOME stronger variations i’m sure, but generally your weapon choice is about what skills you want to learn and use, and weapons that are technically the same class still have different skills sometimes (like clubs and axes for example).

i think rs2 is kind of annoying but it sure is designed