Persona 5 Royal Impressions: Oh shit. Here we go again.

[dscross]

I find Jrpgs and Wrpgs are going for completely different experiences. Jrpgs are very narrative focused, they're basically a playable anime series all compressed into a single game. The southpark games were like that where you had basically a southpark season in game form.

Wrpgs are more about freedom and expression and self-inserting and exploration, those types of things.

Jrpgs you almost never self-insert, you just experience a story of a character like reading a book, but more viscerally cause you're actually doing the things that you'd otherwise be reading about or watching in a movie or manga or what have you.

what do you mean by self inserting?

It's the process of coming up with an imaginary personality for your protagonist in order to fill in the blank slate you are given. Instead of viewing this story you're being presented with and being told your motivations and your desires from the way the protagonist behaves in a Jrpg, in wrpgs you're more free to make the protagonist behave however you want them to.

The tradeoff is that you can't create as interesting of a narrative from a game developer standpoint if you can't set in stone the protagonist's personality. The more freedom there is, the more this is an issue, because good luck trying to tell a story about how much this group is bad and must be stopped by all means if your game lets your hero join it. You can't have a consistent theme like that if your game lets the players act in ways not logically consistent with it. So what ends up happening is that wrpgs stories tend to not go for such types of plots with clearly defined boundaries and opt for more open-ended gray situations where there's no right or wrong and everything is ambiguous.


The benefit, of course, comes in the fact that these games have way more replayability because how you play your character can change how things pan out very significantly so you will wanna try different things and see how they end up, and also you get more of an opportunity to play things in your preferred way, which is better or worse depending on your feelings of whatever default protagonist the game you're comparing it to has and how much you like or dislike them.




Ultimately, like I said, it's different experiences, and I do like both kinds, it just depends on what I'm looking for at the moment.

Hang on though, what about Vampyr, Kingdom Come Deliverance, The Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn and the millions of other modern western RPGs that have a main character you play as.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I find Jrpgs and Wrpgs are going for completely different experiences. Jrpgs are very narrative focused, they're basically a playable anime series all compressed into a single game. The southpark games were like that where you had basically a southpark season in game form.

Wrpgs are more about freedom and expression and self-inserting and exploration, those types of things.

Jrpgs you almost never self-insert, you just experience a story of a character like reading a book, but more viscerally cause you're actually doing the things that you'd otherwise be reading about or watching in a movie or manga or what have you.

what do you mean by self inserting?

It's the process of coming up with an imaginary personality for your protagonist in order to fill in the blank slate you are given. Instead of viewing this story you're being presented with and being told your motivations and your desires from the way the protagonist behaves in a Jrpg, in wrpgs you're more free to make the protagonist behave however you want them to.

The tradeoff is that you can't create as interesting of a narrative from a game developer standpoint if you can't set in stone the protagonist's personality. The more freedom there is, the more this is an issue, because good luck trying to tell a story about how much this group is bad and must be stopped by all means if your game lets your hero join it. You can't have a consistent theme like that if your game lets the players act in ways not logically consistent with it. So what ends up happening is that wrpgs stories tend to not go for such types of plots with clearly defined boundaries and opt for more open-ended gray situations where there's no right or wrong and everything is ambiguous.


The benefit, of course, comes in the fact that these games have way more replayability because how you play your character can change how things pan out very significantly so you will wanna try different things and see how they end up, and also you get more of an opportunity to play things in your preferred way, which is better or worse depending on your feelings of whatever default protagonist the game you're comparing it to has and how much you like or dislike them.




Ultimately, like I said, it's different experiences, and I do like both kinds, it just depends on what I'm looking for at the moment.

Hang on though, what about Vampyr, Kingdom Come Deliverance, The Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn and the millions of other modern western RPGs that have a main character you play as.

There's a spectrum and stuff like the Witcher is closer to Jrpgs than something like Skyrim but it still has a lot of freedom in how you go about quests and there's never really a "wrong" way to do something, just a different one. For example, the freedom to basically be a saint who lets every harmless monster go free or a psycho who kills them all cause he just hates monsters, and the capacity to shift between those two mentalities like a bipolar on a trampoline from one quest to the next, is something that overall weakens the narrative of Geralt, whereas in a Jrpg it'd be either one way or the other and it'd be consistently like that throughout the entire game.

 

[dscross]

There's a spectrum and stuff like the Witcher is closer to Jrpgs than something like Skyrim but it still has a lot of freedom in how you go about quests and there's never really a "wrong" way to do something, just a different one. For example, the freedom to basically be a saint who lets every harmless monster go free or a psycho who kills them all cause he just hates monsters, and the capacity to shift between those two mentalities like a bipolar on a trampoline from one quest to the next, is something that overall weakens the narrative of Geralt, whereas in a Jrpg it'd be either one way or the other and it'd be consistently like that throughout the entire game.

You only mentioned one of the games I mentioned and then said it's closer to a jrpg even though it's a wrpg. From what I've seen, there are just as many without 'self inserting' and a story as with. I don't think that's a particular thing for wrpgs.

 

[Hawki]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8aiEsIW9IM

Probably one of the better explanations as to the JRPG/WRPG divide, and also why these terms don't really work.