what's in a peg?

King of Posters
62

I feel like JRPG is such a broad genre with so many different ways to approach it that any list I write will make me feel like hypocrite as there’ll always be some beloved counter example that goes against all my ‘must haves’. But as a general rule I think I gravitate more towards this sort of thing:

  • A pre-defined cast of colourful characters, as opposed to a player defined party. Bonus points if they get constantly cycled in and out or permanently killed off as the story dictates.

  • A good sense of things changing or progressing, either through the narrative or through the RPG mechanics. I like to feel that 20 / 30 hours later that I am in a completely different place to where I was at the start. If the game tries to keep all enemies auto-leveled to keep the difficulty consistent it just feels stagnant.

  • A good sense of adventure and a world that engages with my imagination. I think this is mostly just a vibes thing. I think sometimes when a game is vague about certain aspects of it’s narrative or world building, but has weird little unexplained quirks, I find it more mentally stimulating than something with a rich and deep lore codex. Examples might be Phantasy Star with its giant talking spiders in prison cells or just everything about the worlds of SaGa games.

  • I like weird esoteric systems that don’t get explained very well but are well integrated into the game’s world or lore. Having said that, I think I also tend to prefer straight forward weapon progression (ie where each new weapon is just a straight upgrade over the previous one) and minimal party customisation. Also I am not a fan of randomised loot with rarity and other modifiers.

  • Not too many side activities, I’d rather there be like max 5 little optional un-marked stories or side dungeons than an endless list of boring material hunting chores and crafting systems to pad things out.

  • tonnes of well hidden secrets. If I am playing your game for the nth time and stumble upon a secret character I didn’t know existed,

  • Good music, bonus points if it’s not constantly restarting the same tunes whenever you go in and out of battle etc.

  • a battle system that I won’t just button mash or sleepwalk through 90% of the time, and an encounter rate that doesn’t make me want to put a drill through my brain. Fewer encounters that require a bit of thinking. There needs to be a fast and snappy pace to it though, none of this Pokemon bullshit where you have to watch little status effect animations or read ‘it was super effective!’ every single time.

  • status effects and buffs/debuffs that are actually useful, especially against bosses. Like what is even the point of these spells if you can’t use them against bosses.

  • A good art style that doesn’t lean too heavily on the generic modern Falcom / Tales Of anime style.

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63

Thinking about the above, I reckon my expectations change depending on the subgenre, so like if I’m playing a standard FF or DQ style RPG, then I prefer to be pulled along by the story without having to deal with too much micromanaging or side distractions.
But if it’s a first person dungeon crawler, then I want to be lost in a sprawling, dank maze with minimal plot distraction and more character customisation.
If it’s an action RPG / Zeldalike I wanna be running through the green fields and sunshine with cool tunes, not cooped up inside.

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Awww well thank you, I appreciate that ^^ I wrote a long rambling thing about Pokèmon’s combat mechanics but I stopped halfway through and started working on a game based on the thoughts I was having. :stuck_out_tongue: If I actually manage to corral myself into staying focused on it for long enough I’ll post it here.

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ooh i love this thread. i have wanted to post in it since the beginning but haven’t had time to write a good response yet. i have like practical things that i prefer in games like this, and daydreamy things that i don’t know that any game in the genre has actually accomplished in a way that satisfies me but which i think should theoretically be possible

in the first category, like a lot of people i really enjoy these games the most when there is a real sense of some kind of journey taking place. i’m not that obsessive about character development so party chat style things don’t really mean that much to me, but i do like it when they take the time to show everyone around a campfire or something like that. for some reason i always really liked it in final fantasy games when you stay in an inn and everyone would go off to sleep in their own little bed. i don’t know it’s just cute.

another even more practical thing that i appreciate is when the characters’ abilities are in synch with their personalities or character design in a way that feels interesting. nothing turns me off about an rpg more than when all of the characters are just interchangeable ciphers that you can program in whatever way is most useful for you. but i also don’t really love it when everything about the characters is totally fixed and linear like in chrono trigger. it’s nice if they can find the right balance between customizability and uniqueness. it’s why i think the espers are more interesting than materia, even though the difference is not really that big.

but the one thing that i wish more jrpgs would attempt to do is to reinvent the purpose of the town. i even made a whole thread about this a few years ago. the more of these i play, the weirder it feels that the way you ‘play’ the city parts of the games is just to run around like a maniac ransacking people’s houses and stuffing your hands into random cupboards and barrels and shit. i think having towns is a hugely important part of getting the vibe of the game right and contributing to that feeling of going on a journey.

the contrast between the war of attrition of exploring the world map/dungeon areas and reaching a town as an oasis where you spend all your money to prepare for the next stage of the journey feels super important. then atmospherically and aesthetically of course you also want to have some details that contribute to that contrast.

this is what i wrote in that other thread:

i think it’s also cool when games occasionally drop in some kind of subversion of this pattern by having the party encounter a town that has been overrun by monsters or whatever.

i realized though when i made that thread i never actually wrote about what i would try to do if i could make a game like this. i think i also wrote about this in the dragon quest thread when i was playing dq11, because in that game when you are in a city you can occasionally encounter other members of your party just hanging out, which i love. conversely, it has always bothered me in RPGS when a party full of multiple people is just like squashed inside the main character’s avatar. for totally superficial reasons i just prefer games where you can see every member of the party following behind you in a little line.

but yeah the ideal version would be that when you enter a town you actually have to delegate different members of your party to complete different tasks, and you would use their various attributes and skills to determine who would be the best at different things. like you would send the person with the highest speech/charisma skills to buy run of the mill items, but would want to send the person with the highest wisdom to go to the high end equipment shops because they’d be better at spotting rare artifacts or whatever. you could sneakily tell the thief of the party to see what they can come up with, and send someone else to gather information, etc. it would be a way of incorporating multi-character party mechanics into the experience of interacting with a city. i just realized i wrote more about this in the old dragon quest thread so if you really want to read my ramblings about how video games could be better you can check it out here

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66

Game Dev Twitter is discoursing about the definition of an RPG and it’s only got me more certain that it’s a counterproductive exercise most of the time lol

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67

That fella is just racist. I don’t know how else to interpret “Japanese rpgs aren’t real rpgs”

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it’s really hilarious to see him completely misunderstand what the role in role playing means and then double down with those are JAPANESE role playing games, a TOTALLY DIFFERENT KIND OF GAME THAT ISNT ROLE PLAYING AT ALL and then to whittle down his definition to mean the 20 western crpgs he likes. Just make a list instead of racistly re defining words sheesh mr squiddy

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69

It’s his confident, swagless wrongness that makes reading his posts so annoying. Perhaps he would have better luck getting a job if he wasn’t such a public douchebag all the time.

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70

hoping somebody in this mess is making the even harder-line argument that the only Real RPGs are TTRPGs

(i have no context for what’s going on besides y’alls posts here)

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71

That is the logical conclusion to the basic argument, but the guys who make it never quite get there because they love Bioware so much. “An rpg is when Xcom lets you fuck the squaddies”

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72

I’m shocked I could tell exactly who this was based only on the context of these last few posts alone. Doc sucks.

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73

His argument, by the numbers, is that Tokimeki Memorial is an RPG and none of the Shadowrun games are, and that Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon is not an RPG but Binary Domain and Yakuza: Dead Souls are.

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Every now and then phil fish is born anew in the soup of public conversation

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75

I just had this thought after going to make a mug of tea after reading this thread, so it’s pretty sketchy and I haven’t really had the time to turn it over in my head, so please excuse its flimsiness and/or rambling; I want to get it down before it floats away on a slight breeze though.

“JRPGs” are games that are defined by a being a branch that was isolated, largely geographically, from their antecedents that they share with “CRPGs”, and the main difference between them is that JRPGs split off before the concept of Dungeons and Dragons in particular and TTRPGs in general, had become canonized in the design space.

All of these games, be they ‘J’ or ‘C’ RPGs, came out of Ultima and Wizardry – there were other games of course; these were the Big Two and while they definitely have aspects of D&D, they’re more of a general “Western Fantasy” bent, especially mechanically, they’re much happier to play fast and loose with whatever the designers felt would work. And this is what both lineages come out of, and I feel like one of the crucial differences is that in the years following, TTRPGs just never hit the cultural saturation level in Japan that they did in the US and the UK.

I think where Doc is getting horribly, terribly confused (in this specific instance) is because he’s making the assumption that ‘RPG’ can be easily defined. I think he’s doing this because he “understands” the qualities that definite an RPG as an RPG, and he’s making the mistake of thinking that these qualities are easily put into a bullet list, instead of being something like the classic anecdotal definition of pornography. As many many people have pointed out, his definitions don’t make sense, and they exclude a number of games that he certainly wantes to include, and include a bunch of games that he certainly wants to exclude. This is because he’s making the classic post-modern blunder of looking at the signifier and saying “this, then, is the signified”. What he thinks of as “RPGs” are games that are interested in indicating their own heritage from the canon of TTRPGs, nothing more complex than that.

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76

I shouldn’t know this but that argument is 100% coming from orientalist racism first, ad-hoc justifications later. That guy uses the same role/role-playing distinction & argument as part of an old tumblr post where he fleshes it out by suggesting Japanese game developers may think in 2D, as opposed to 3D, thus resulting in his preference for Western games. He also suggests that this may be due to Westerners being inherently more empathetic, and therefore, thinking in 3D, instead of abstractly (2D).

Nonsense man not worth engaging with on his terms

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Angling for a job at at the racist theory factory with my online posting resume

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profoundly unserious person

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79

am i just like misinformed when i say that the tactical gameplay of baldur’s gate 3 reminded me a lot of the final fantasy franchise, and the party member dating reminded me a lot of the persona franchise, and that the whole game felt a lot like a jrpg, i dont think theyre the furthest apart 2 kinds of games from 2 diff cultures and industries have ever been

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80

I suppose there is at the very dungeons and dragons (albeit two very different forms) that connects something like Dragon Quest with Baldur’s Gate 3. And that is just at the very least.

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81

i would like to take this entire guys corpus of blog posts and append a huge [citation needed]

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