Why do people hate JRPGs?

[frago roc]

I love classic jRPGs like final fantasies before 7, and squaresoft games from that era. However, the new dominant direction that seems to taken hold is the over-the-top effects, copy/pasted character design, androgeny, linearness, and generally terrible stories. Also every character gasps like they're having orgasms and tbh it's fucking annoying.

 

[Rack]

Evolution of the JRPG.

1987 Square release Final Fantasy
2010 Present Day.

That's a slightly flippant way of describing how I feel about the genre and it ignores steps like Demon Souls or Final Fantasy Tactics which are pretty much in a different genre. But it's largely down to the stagnation and shallowness of the genre.

 

[The Journey]

You don't like FPS. Apply the reasons you don't like them to JRPGs.

Normal reasons including: character archetypes, plot conventions, gameplay tropes, etc. You don't like shooting things, I don't like turn-based combat. It's really rather simple.

This, mostly. I find the characters to generally be split between whiny/angsty/brooding teenagers and utter douchebag adults (with pairs of breasts thrown in to give the illusion of gender equality in the heroes). The stories, gameplay, and just about everything standard to a JRPG just feels mediocre at best to me.

Also, a gaming magazine recently summarized just about every JRPG plot trope in a flowchart. Something is wrong with your genre when that happens.

Gameinformer here in Australia did that. Unless someone else did it too.

Yes, when the flowchart is actually an accurate representation of about 90% of the JRPG plotlines out there, you know for sure there is no innovation at all there.

For me, I've played and enjoyed Final Fantasy's 7 and 8, but the rest bore me and the characters were never good.

The Plot always seems to be hackneyed and badly thought out and the characters are always either moody teens (give me a break) or complete wankers. The Characters also rarely have any significant development throughout the game.

Wait don't tell me, the silent-douche who your controlling actually opens up to someone halfway through the game and *gasp* isn't really such a wanker as he appears to be but is just hurt or confused or something utterly bloody ridiculous? God save me I want to kill them.

Let me finish off with the catch all disclaimer that these are my opinions based upon my experiences with these types of games.

It comes down to the fact of it being personal taste and opinion and you have every right to like these games even if I hate some of the stupidity present in them like what I ranted about above.

Some people like JRPG's, some don't...... then again, some people like Uwe Boll movies.

 

[Lt. Vinciti]

1. Characters
2. Emo
3. Grind (MMO Grind w/o other folks)
4. Story making about as much sense as a toaster
5. Annoying character
6. Standard Anime Rule - My Gun > Your Gun is how you win
7. That stupid dance prebattle
8. 12min cast animation on a spell that uses the sun and doesnt kill someone

Exceptions to these so far to date:
Pokemon
Legend of the Dragoon (was a PSX game...)

 

[Testsubject909]

*smacks imself upside the head*
I can't believe I forgot about the Lunar series... Gonna go edit my huge-ass post to be one line longer now...

And I somehow get the impression that, unsurprisingly, a lot of people are simply stating their disdain or dislike of JRPGs without reading through the thread. Not that I blame them, for one part, my huge wall-o-text don't help and there's no real way to convey the message in a TL;DR version as accurately as one could explain how FPS or racing games aren't all the same.

 

[AyreonMaiden]

I'll speak only for myself...


But the reason why I'm extremely hesitant (HESITANT, not HATEFUL) of JRPGs is because the older I get, the more feeble my suspension of disbelief becomes whenever I DO run into the usual JRPG tropes (haven't read the thread but so many people must have posted them by now.)

The only JRPGs I truly adore with no inhibitions anymore are the Persona 3/4 games. They hit SUCH a sweet spot with me when I first played them and I'm irrevocably in love with them.

That's not to say that I think JRPGs are childish, because I keep Tales of Symphonia near for whenever I DO get into the mood for a drippy, predictable anime JRPG.

It's a lot like why I can't stand musicals unless they're intentionally humorous. The moment people open their mouths to sing, or start to dance, or start to do both in a most superfluous way, I lose my suspension of disbelief, and I simply will not get it back. (If anyone saw The Lion King on Broadway, was that "Morning Report" song necessary at all???)

 

[boholikeu]

I guess people think of the stereotypes?
They also think off the unchanging combat mechanics.
To which I say:
Buffed up chest pumping space marines
and
You wouldn't ask a FPS to completely change the combat now, would you?
And most JRPGs do change the combat drasticly, I mean compare FFI to FFXIII hell compare FFXII to FFXIII. The combat is completely different, is it not?
Back to stereotypes allot of that only exists in FF. In the words of Extra Credits, when the FF series has a bad name people assume the whole genre is in decline. And well, my personal favorite game of all time is a JRPG with none of those stereotypes.
It's dark cloud 2/chronicles.

Because besides graphics they haven't changed since the PSX era.

And last breakthrough in FPS's was Quake and Chess has been in stagnation for centuries so obviously they must also be bad.

Well, there's Q3 (online arena fighting), Goldeneye (4 player multiplayer), Halo (co-op, console based FPS), Far Cry 2 (ultra-realism), CoD: MW (political), Half Life 2 (revolutionary, innovative physics (apparently, not played it myself)), Portal (small time FPS makes serious killing).

But you're still pointing at something and shooting. Also, Quake had online multiplayer and Duke Nukem had co-op.

Anyway, JRPGs have gone multiplayer (Eternal Sonata, Tales of Vesperia), Political (FFXII), futuristic (Star Ocean), Real time battles (Magna Carta 2, Tales series) so saying they haven't changed is an illusion. The only thing that hasn't changed is that each one has a cast of characters and a liniar story and this is a good thing considering one of the strong points JRPGs have over WRPGs is (in my opinion anyway) a better story.

Funny how often people bring up FPS games in this argument.

I would actually argue that the FPS genre has seen much more evolution than the JRPG genre, especially in the storytelling department. FPS games have figured out numerous ways to tell their stories without limiting interactivity, whereas most JRPGs still seem content to just dump it on the player in a cutscene. Doesn't it strike anyone else as being a bit odd that FPS games now use more storytelling methods than JRPGs when the latter are supposed to be more story-centric?

So really, I think that this is what people are referring to when they say JRPGs haven't changed since FF7. True, they might have different combat mechanics, stories, etc, but you still see the same story-gameplay separation that other genres (yes even FPS games) have moved on from over the last 10 years.

 

[Folio]

JRPG's are forced but don't get me wrong. I don't need an Oblivion sandbox game where leveling doesn't matter at all.

Grinding is somewhat inevitable in RPG's, I accept it. But don't let it be the main quest. Don't give me over 9000 of the SAME creatures and just give me something new once in a while.

The plot may be good, but JRPG is like an American Hollywood movie:
JRPG has love, hope and friendship!
Hollywoods have explosions like MICHAEL BAY!
JRPG's start off with a punk or schmuck who makes up for him/herself.
Hollywoods have a happy ending.

Or perhaps people hate RPG's in general and never played a Western RPG.

Or they're used to Dungeons & Dragons.

 

[Kurenaino]

1. You cannot generalise based on the lower 80% of trashy content, or all WRPGs would be dreary DnD nonsense with busty barmaids and heroes called 'th'tharigan the mighty, slayer of the warg'lathran'

2. The upper 20% does NOT fall into this category. Even the much hated Final Fantasy 13 *deliberately* attempted to subvert this by including an emo-teen as the most useless party member of all, and incluing a stoic, absolutely non-bubbly female and an unshaven muscleman as the leads. Yet somehow, the fog of bias cannot look beyond two minor party members. Even the token bubbly girl turned out to have a completely original role as far as those tropes go.

The point is, since the tide has turned against anime and japanese stuff in general, they stand no chance against the screaming horde baying for J-developer blood. Even the gaming press is on this bandwagon right now. My advice to them is to re-align their priorities and work on the domestic market.... the west has nothing but hate for them now

1. Um, yes, yes you can. When admittedly 80% of your genre is crap, you're going to get these kind of generalizations, this is just something that happens. Maybe it's not true for some, but for the majority, it is, and that's the point. And do people generalize every other game genre as well? Yeah, of course they do, it's because that's how people easily find the sort of game they'd like in the first place. And every genre's going to have it's own conventions that take successful ideas from other games. Look at the action genre right now, it could easily be said that all action games are blatant God of War ripoffs. And they're be mostly right. Since it was so successful, that old tired convention and gameplay mechanics are going to be used time and time again. So can you generalize? Absolutely, because regardless of what you do, there's going to be similarities across games in a genre.

2. No, of course they don't. That's why they're the upper 20%, because they defy the conventions. But if we're going to talk FFXIII here, there are other reasons that game was absolute garbage. I'd still like to point to the extremely long cutscenes, which tend to be deal breakers for me personally, because I don't think anybody wants to feel like their only purpose is to take a character from cutscene to cutscene. If you're only playing the game for ten minutes out of every hour the game's on, you've got a problem, and a lot of JRPGs fall into this.

I think your point misses the point entirely. I get that you like JRPGs, but putting on blinders to problems in the genre and simply blaming it on a trend of current Japanese hate is a bit ignorant of the point here. A lot of Japanese developers already don't send their games over there because a lot of them are so specifically Japanese, people in the west simply won't get it. JRPGs aren't like that. We have the ability to get those, and for the most part, we do. Let's not forget that there are some amazing JRPGs out there that have won critical acclaim, and they didn't even need to stop being Japanese to do that. I don't particularly like how a lot of JRPGs are run, but even with that consideration, my favorite game of all time, Tales of Symphonia, is a JRPG, and that game did extremely well over here because it didn't suffer from a lot of problems that a lot of JRPGs suffer from. When a game defies the genre, it's going to be looking at a good write up. Japanese or no has nothing to do with it.

I think the main point here is that big budget JRPGs have this need to pack the game with stunning graphics and cinematics, and so raging is this cinematic boner that they just go overboard and have too much. Of course, like everything, it's the big budget games that get the spotlight, and because of that, they cast other games that might actually not have George Lucas disease under a very nasty shadow. This is about flaws in the genre, not hating the Japanese.

 

[Koroviev]

Well, usually because the gameplay is awful. Don't get me wrong, I love FFIX and FFX and many other JRPGs like Chrono Trigger or Persona 4. But I can't deny that the actual fights in these games are lame, boring and EXTREMELY repetitive. Casting Bufu once on a monster to knock it down is okay. Casting Bufu 500 times on the same monsters is more than a LITTLE ANNOYING. Granted, some fights in JRPGs require strategy, but those are rare and usually don't come up in the main story line of the game.

What saves JRPGs are the story and the artwork and the music. FFIX had a great story and even better music. I loved to play that game for the story. With JRPGs, you can measure how good they are if you can BEAR the random encounters and battles for the story. This is the reason why I couldn't stand FFXIII - the story, to me, was bad, and the characters downright annoying (except for Sazh). And if a JRPG has a bad story, there is literally NOTHING good about it, so when a JRPG fails in the story department, as they have been doing recently, they fail colossally.

I mean think about it - there's really no RPG element in a JRPG, since you don't play a role. You don't really have that much control over your character in battle, and the battles themselves get very repetitive, very quickly. So what is there to a JRPG, EXCEPT story, music and artwork?

And some people don't like the story, or the art work. So for them, a JRPG offers nothing. I mean, absolutely nothing - if you don't like the stories in JRPGs, there's nothing for you - they are supported solely by their characters and some people just don't gel with the typical cast and characters found in JRPGs. I, myself, am becoming increasingly exasperated with the "brooding pretty boy" stereotype found in a lot of JRPGs - probably the reason why I liked FFIX and FFX so much, because in those games the main protagonists were cheerful and optimistic, instead of whiny and sour.

For JRPGs to make a comeback, the designers have to start taking risks. Don't follow the standard anime tropes and cliches. Please don't follow pedestrian story structures and overused themes of "friendship" and "love".

My main point is that what makes a JRPG great is not the graphics or the gameplay. Persona 4 was a great game, despite being on the PS2 and having atrocious gameplay, because it had a pretty good story and a cast of likeable characters and great, stellar art-direction. FFXIII was, in contrast, a bad game, because the story was extremely limited (Almost no NPCs, towns or characterization of the world), and I found the characters, especially Hope, to be incredibly dim-witted and whiny.

Call it Stockholm Syndrome, but I think having the repetitive battles drag on serves as an incentive to upgrade your personas. Casting bufu repeatedly is tiresome. Casting mabufa creates the satisfaction of a one-hit kill and fast experience (mostly). What I also like about the game is that you can avoid the random encounters. Where it deserves fault, however, is in how easy it is to surpass your enemies in terms of skill level, thus turning the game into a dull grind-fest which offers you little reward. Then again, this problem could probably be avoided by selecting a higher difficulty.

 

[LordMarcusX]

Personally, I don't like JRPGs for the reason I don't like most games: Really uninspired storytelling. Virtually all storytelling relies on our willingness to buy into certain tropes and react to them in prescribed ways. Not to say that tropes are inherently bad -- they're unavoidable, common elements of a collection of stories common to a specific culture. But our reaction to them needs to be reconsidered. I think, in terms of JRPGs specifically, the dramatic tropes are used with the expectation that we will react to them in a certain way (ourselves becoming emotionally invested in how a character feels as a result of the events around them) and perhaps it is simply that I am not Japanese, but when I look back over the story of these games, it occurs to me that I can understand why a character feels the particular way they do.

[Spoiler Alert for 18 year old game .-. ]

Case-in-point, Final Fantasy 4, and the love triangle between Cecil, Kain, and Rosa. Why are Cecil and "Kain" best friends when they should be rivals? Furthermore, why does the ENTIRE party welcome Kain back after he joined up with Golbez (and I don't buy the "mind control" trope here)? Why does Kain, after joining up with Golbez, not endeavour to kill Cecil at the first opportunity? Why does Cecil let Golbez go on living after he tried to destroy the world and in the process killed a countless number of people?

It's all very silly! But most stories are like this. I think, then, perhaps, it is merely that JRPGs are, to my tastes today, far too fantastic. Ridiculous, even.

 

[Swishdude]

JRPGSs have been around for a long time.

Like, really really really long.

There are very few game types that live on for years. It's very rare now (but not impossible, see Diablo 3) to see a top down action adventure in the same style as Fallout 1 & 2. Same thing applies for side scrolling platformers like Mario. You still see them but they are not as popular as something modern like Modern Warfare 2.

Now comes the point.

JRPG games are old. The Japanese game industry (regardless of what anyone might try to argue here today) creates these games in virtually the same way everytime. You have a very dedicated community of players who despise changes or radical evolution in game play. So games made in the JRPG style are almost carbon copies of there predecesors, creating negative reactions to outlanders from Japan.

Now unfortunatly people are throwing around the same ideas about First Person Shooters. If you don't like any FPS but you like JRPGs you can't flip the tables. FPS games radically change, implementing different game types and unique features that change drastically from game to game. Of course you still have a lot of games that are just duplicates or poor attempts to cash in on a popular franchise, but never the less this is a very different genre.

We have First Person Shooters that impliment driving, racing, leveling systems like RPGs, sports and sport like scoring systems, simulation, sandbox and world building, puzzle focus, and even the odd FPS that has no shooting at all. Yes, there do exist JRPG games that attempt more, and achieve it. But these 'better' JRPG games usually don't happen. This is a result of the games being developed for a asian audience, imidiate Japan in most cases. Though it happens on occasion, they are usually not worked around to be more appealing to other audiences. Audiences like North American or Europe.

However, it is all a matter of opinion. When western audiences, ones used to Madden and Halo are subjected to something very different. They tend not to enjoy it because it's not the same kind of game play there used to or understand. Culture shock in a way, try dropping a guy who has only ever played Halo in a room filled with D&D players.

 

[Testsubject909]

Oh yeah... I forgot to include the Yakuza series. It's a sandbox brawler with JRPG elements, such as the random fights (though cleverly scripted in the game to make some semblance of sense), the quests, roaming the world map(area maps) and leveling up. Gonna edit that into my huge-ass post...

 

[Testsubject909]

1. You cannot generalise based on the lower 80% of trashy content, or all WRPGs would be dreary DnD nonsense with busty barmaids and heroes called 'th'tharigan the mighty, slayer of the warg'lathran'

2. The upper 20% does NOT fall into this category. Even the much hated Final Fantasy 13 *deliberately* attempted to subvert this by including an emo-teen as the most useless party member of all, and incluing a stoic, absolutely non-bubbly female and an unshaven muscleman as the leads. Yet somehow, the fog of bias cannot look beyond two minor party members. Even the token bubbly girl turned out to have a completely original role as far as those tropes go.

The point is, since the tide has turned against anime and japanese stuff in general, they stand no chance against the screaming horde baying for J-developer blood. Even the gaming press is on this bandwagon right now. My advice to them is to re-align their priorities and work on the domestic market.... the west has nothing but hate for them now

1. Um, yes, yes you can. When admittedly 80% of your genre is crap, you're going to get these kind of generalizations, this is just something that happens. Maybe it's not true for some, but for the majority, it is, and that's the point. And do people generalize every other game genre as well? Yeah, of course they do, it's because that's how people easily find the sort of game they'd like in the first place. And every genre's going to have it's own conventions that take successful ideas from other games. Look at the action genre right now, it could easily be said that all action games are blatant God of War ripoffs. And they're be mostly right. Since it was so successful, that old tired convention and gameplay mechanics are going to be used time and time again. So can you generalize? Absolutely, because regardless of what you do, there's going to be similarities across games in a genre.

2. No, of course they don't. That's why they're the upper 20%, because they defy the conventions. But if we're going to talk FFXIII here, there are other reasons that game was absolute garbage. I'd still like to point to the extremely long cutscenes, which tend to be deal breakers for me personally, because I don't think anybody wants to feel like their only purpose is to take a character from cutscene to cutscene. If you're only playing the game for ten minutes out of every hour the game's on, you've got a problem, and a lot of JRPGs fall into this.

I think your point misses the point entirely. I get that you like JRPGs, but putting on blinders to problems in the genre and simply blaming it on a trend of current Japanese hate is a bit ignorant of the point here. A lot of Japanese developers already don't send their games over there because a lot of them are so specifically Japanese, people in the west simply won't get it. JRPGs aren't like that. We have the ability to get those, and for the most part, we do. Let's not forget that there are some amazing JRPGs out there that have won critical acclaim, and they didn't even need to stop being Japanese to do that. I don't particularly like how a lot of JRPGs are run, but even with that consideration, my favorite game of all time, Tales of Symphonia, is a JRPG, and that game did extremely well over here because it didn't suffer from a lot of problems that a lot of JRPGs suffer from. When a game defies the genre, it's going to be looking at a good write up. Japanese or no has nothing to do with it.

I think the main point here is that big budget JRPGs have this need to pack the game with stunning graphics and cinematics, and so raging is this cinematic boner that they just go overboard and have too much. Of course, like everything, it's the big budget games that get the spotlight, and because of that, they cast other games that might actually not have George Lucas disease under a very nasty shadow. This is about flaws in the genre, not hating the Japanese.

Would you care to join me in counting how many JRPGs fall in the same old boring trappings of teenage angsts?

I'd like to refer you back to my list on Page 1. Then, I'd like to remind you, I skipped a few series, and I also skipped quite a many single title RPGs such as Ephemeral Fantasia, a game I do absolutely adore.

And then, we have games which can be argued as to possibly being a JRPG... Zelda for exemple, it can technically be considered a JRPG, it's second iteration certainly was one of the first Action JRPG to exist, as well as Castlevania 2. To an extent, you could argue that Zelda 1, or hell, all zeldas are Action JRPGs... Though that'd need to be heavily pondered and discussed.

I'm ready to believe that the stereotype of the whiny emo kid or teenage drama/angst actually applies to only the minority of JRPGs that exists currently.

 

[WaderiAAA]

One important reason for me to if not hate, then at least not like JRPGs that much is the lack of immersion in the turn-based combat ones. In platformers, FPSes, many sport games and hack and slash you at least walk around, jump and press buttons to attack (or swing a remote if you prefer). That is to me what an entertaining game is about. I'm just not drawn into JRPGs in the same way. I have the same problem with point and click games.

 

[Vetinarii]

The stupidity... Swords and Magic... HEY GUYS LET'S FIGHT A MOTORBIKE!!!
Wow sure FF that makes sense. Most are fine but the art style doesn't appeal to me and I downright hate all Final Fantasy...

I never understood that logic, video games were never meant to be realistic. Agreed with the art style for the most part though.

true video games are not "supposed" to be realistic, but u have to draw the line somewhere, and that line is drawn a couple of paces behind the bloody gun blade

I actually enjoy the juxtaposition of fantasy and sci fi elements...

Edit- also is a gunblade really that unrealistic? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonette

That is a gun with a blade... GUN being the main weapon... who the hell uses a blade as the main weapon then the gun as a back up... oh dear the person I was fighting has gotten away now I can use my gun... use it before he gets in range moron... I quite liked Lost Oddessy but when I fought a tank in an early part Immersion went out of the window... fighting a tank with a sword? Wow really? I used magic but the idea people are still carrying swords when there are tanks is stupid... /rant

EDIT: I notice some people are having a go at the "grind" I don't remember grinding in Lost Oddessy at all... I just rushed through it (until my save went some way into the second disc and I punched a wall because it took so long to get there (because the game is huge not grindy)).

It doesn't take a lot of effort and research to find some absurd western weapon design. Of which the Gunblade is one.

Think of a rapier, now, instead of a hilt, it's a pistol.

You wacky westerners designed that thing... You also designed Axe-guns.

Proud of yourselves for inspiring the easterners to incorporate these completely real existing weapons in real life into their wacky fictional videogames?

We did this? Really? Well forgive me for not liking that idea... this is not a I HATE THE EAST discussion this is I think FF is stupid, if this came from westen designs then whoever came up with that is stupid too.