Why do you hate JRPGs?

Click here and disable ads!

Facts: America killed the video game market, and Japan revived it.

In the long run, I'm not sure if these events helped or hurt PC gaming.

Regardless of how their society works, it would be folly to claim that the Japanese are incabable of creativeness or imagination. Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Kanno, Akira Toriyama, and Yoshitaka Amano are a few examples of the most artistic people in the world. I don't give a shit what you like, this is also fact.

I played a ton of JRPGs in the PS1 era, but kind of drifted away from them over the years.

Earlier this year, I tried a couple (Eternal Sonate and Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 FES).

Eternal Sonata ended up boring me after eight hours or so (it sure looked pretty, though).

Persona 3, on the other hand, held my attention for almost all of my 80 hour play through (although, I could have done without the 90 minute final boss fight).

Persona 3 is just so damn quirky, it's hard not to like. The monsters are bizarre, the girls are cute (and plentiful), the "high school simulator" aspects are well-done (and kind of addicting), and the combat is complex enough to be continually interesting.

So, I do think that there are some good JRPGs out there. Heck, if nothing else, they're nice to play every once in awhile because they're so very different than western RPGs. And it is nice that many of them still feature full adventuring parties and turn-based combat.

I do wish that more were available with the original Japanese dialogue, though. The English dubs are invariably grating.

Hate the cast, the retarded RPG system and the abstract-feeling, illogical combat. The story is horrible when it's bad, but not necessarily worse then in CRPGs when good. I kind of like the graphics design though. Why doesn't anyone ever wrap it around a good CRPG?

So you like repetitive cute angsty emo stuff?

So most JRPG's have a simple binary ethic system and a character creation? Why do you lie?

I would say if you wanted to know why the Codex in general "hates JRPGs" (I personally don't but whatever) I'd say it's a mix of jealously, misplaced criticism, and bandwagon "Japan is weird" generic Internet bullshit.

Jealous because of how many of them there are compared to what they want to play. Imagine if there were 12 Fallouts all similar in gameplay style with the first one. The Codex would just be skyway doing a one man show.

A lot of the hate thrown their way is useless for several reasons. For one the vast majority are console only titles and many Codexers claim they are PC only elitists so they wouldn't play a console game on "principle" (even though many of those are lying their fucking asses off). Secondly they come from Japan so how much of Codex criticism is being heard? It's different when it's some Western game because devs either come here or at least are aware of the site's existence. How many Japanese devs are aware of the RPG Codex and give a shit? Third, the comparisons themselves are weak since Codexers are comparing mainstreamy Japanese games to their treasured titles. How many Western games pass this test? Not many. A lot the "cultural" criticisms...are well flat out wrong. If Alaska and Texas have different cultures you may be surprised to know that Japan also has multiple parts even Tokyo's districts themselves have their own cultures. As far as "they are the same game" goes how many Western RPGs buttrape Tolkien for their materials? Or "have to" use a known PnP ruleset? As far as the style goes I remember seeing an interview not long ago with a guy who owns a game imports business and he said a lot of quirky games that Japanese think are retarded and won't buy will be bought up like hotcakes by Westerne gamers meaning that Western weeaboos may be driving the "spikey hair" style as much if not more than anybody. Supposedly Final Fantasy 12 was going to have a more realistic and "European" look centered around the grizzled veteran guy but was changed and Vaan was shoved in there just for that reason.

The last one is self-explantory. Too much posturing and fakers on the Codex.

I don't see how quoting opinion as fact will help anything. Ignoring the rest of the preposterous post (always convenient for me), claiming that Hideo Kojima is one of the most artistic people in the world is just bollocks: Fact.

LMAO. What would you call kobolds and goblins if not repetitive cute emo and angsty?

I don't know but I think its because we hate japanese gamers just like they hate us. They don't like our games so we decide not to like theirs. Not long ago some jap developer said he didn't know their RPGs were called jrpgs and didn't know there were different type of RPGs.

Personally I think the most telling thing is that they can be categorised as JRPGS. You dont see this happen for any other nation, and it speaks volumes about the lack of originality involved. That said, I quite like some of them.

I rarely like them anymore because they're usually loaded up to the gills with typical CRPG "gameplay", meaning little systems where you completionist-obsessively collect and record things, figure out obfuscated systems, and generally do all the shit I got sick of in '92 or so in Western CRPGs. They even take it up a level because there's an expectation that you're playing the game with a glossy strategy guide in your lap.

Then on top of that there's very little of the semi-legit roleplaying or sandbox worlds that kept me getting re-hooked on the better Western CRPGs from the mid '90s to the present. It's possible that if the big bust in western CRPGs in the mid-'90s hadn't happened, they'd have evolved to look a lot more like JRPGs did from the late '90s to the present.

I can't take such a game seriously, not possible. Bikinimail is far, far better.

Anime sucks.

If you ask me - the only artistic ability Kojima has - is the ability to rip off Steven Seagal movies.
Seriously, though, first time you play MG games you are left in awe, but if you look closer...all the ridiculosness comes out to shine.

What about crappy mini-games, with some of them unskippable ?
Relative linearity, reduction of loot and generally item importance, short and linear levels, emphasis on storyline, combat requires minimum user input, and btw, FFXII has the same kind of combat except with actually having more options to use. 3 person party with people having skeletons in their closets you learn about after visiting their homes ? Check. Typical JRPG-style puzzles ? Check.
Is it really that hard to see the console past of the game ? Jade Empire has gone even further on that road. I suppose Bioware's next game will finally feature characters with anime design.

They are books disguised as games. As with watching plays disguised as films, I feel (somehow) cheated.

Or maybe they are operas disguised as games.

Anyway, there is something seriously grotesque in them. Maybe it's not the confusion of mediums, but the content itself (which tends to be teenaged transvestite).

I don't hate JRPG's. I just don't like bad games, and I haven't played any good JRPG's.

LMAO. What would you call kobolds and goblins if not repetitive cute emo and angsty?[/quote]
Since when are kobolds and goblins cute, emo, and angsty?

http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&q= ... ages&gbv=2

Right. I was just confused by the fact that they're proportioned like children and constantly trying to fight for no reason whatsoever.

Obviously THIS is the definition of cute http://teknogazm.googlepages.com/person ... ;init:.jpg

"Deekin cuts himself just so Deekin can feel something."

The problem with jRPGs is that they do the same thing most shitty RPGs do and have the majority of the player's time consumed by something the game doesn't do well. jRPGs and their advocates always seem to say story is paramount and the main focus, but endless encounters in rather stale combat systems are what the player is engaged in most of the time. And by most of the time, I mean something close to 70-80% of the time. And that's just shitty design right there. You should make what your game is good at, what the player will likely be experiencing the most in your game. Torment's strength was dialogue and thus when you play it, 70-80% of your time is dialogue and character interaction. Ninja Gaiden's strength is an amazing combat experience, that's why it is 95% of the game. It's just plain dumb to have your player go through something you don't do well as the majority of the game. It's why jRPGs, Bethesda games, NWN2 OC, and the like are so shitty.

Not to mention, the stories which are supposed to pull you in are cliche, and poorly written. Oh, and it's sad when a game, a medium that focuses on interactivity, focuses on it's non-interactive elements and shafts the interactive ones to do so.

Sometimes, the hardest thing for a person to do is to give credit to things they don't necessarily like. For instance, I really can't stand the band Nickelback, but I have to admit, that they're good at what they do...

On the other hand, one of my favorite games of all time is Ephemeral Fantasia. And yet, I can totally understand why most people rip it a new asshole.

When I see a JPG, I feel like I came to the cinema, and instead of the movie I am offered to watch a few retarded midgets with buckets of paint and feces drawing on the screen while buttfucking one another.

When I see a JPG, I feel like I picked up a chick on a disco, put my hand into her pants and found a dick there. Small mutated dick with two heads and one ball.

When I see a JPG, I feel like whatever platform it plays itself on is infected with a trojan which takes over user's controls with remote commands.

They are just... so... *wrong*! I can find a spot of understanding towards a player of any kind of crappy shit games, even of The Sims, Pacman or Madden 2077. But someone who can stomach *those*... they must belong to some vastly different species which only masquerade as human beings but are completely alien inside. It's either us or them.