Parallel Pain said:
I find it weird (though it is his opinion) that Yahtzee call gaming an art form while so heavily criticizing JRPG. I personally think the writers of GOOD JRPG stories are making more of an artistic expression than any other game except good writers of visual novels. For the amount of art present in a game I say it's ranked #1 visual novels, since they are put under games and not novels for some reason #2 JRPG #3 WRPG and then advanture games and then everything else.
The good ones of course. The bad ones are either Hollywood Flicks or, in the case of visual novels, porn.
Ehhhhhhh......not so much, no. JRPGs can only be considered to make an artistic expression if that expression is one of three pretty well universal themes among the genre and the statement is made entirely in a lost Egyptian dialect and then translated to English by a Puritan prude. In short, not so much. JRPGs generally have a more interesting art style than some of their more action-oriented brethren (woo - brown!), but their stories are equally generally derivative tripe recycled from the eight thousand practically identical games that come before them. It's nice to find ones that are interesting for a while - I'm currently deeply immersed in Persona 3 - but as soon as you try to dig deeper into the genre you're sure to find a whole pile of clones, followers, and hangers-on whose stale stories are matched only by their equally stale play mechanics. If you accept the conjecture that games are art (I place some preconditions on that - namely, that you have to change the definition of art), then a "very artistic" game would be one that makes the most of its medium, and JRPGs seem to do the very best to irritate the living hell out of anybody that enjoys actually playing games. The prose is typically awful once it gets to English - though for all I know this is hot stuff in its original language - and the prose delivery system is, almost universally, repetitive and grating.
Let's take Persona as an example. The game is really, really original - for me, at least. In Japan, where social and dating sims are a little more prevalent and the other two titles in the franchise history probably took some of the shine off, this might be an old hat, but from where I'm sitting, combining the fundamentally boring grind of a Diablo/Rogue style dungeon crawl with the constant procession and pressures of a year of high school is perfectly brilliant, and if they'd left it at that, that would have been great. Unfortunately, the developers seem to be doing everything in their power to squander that opportunity with a whole laundry list of very typical JRPG crimes:
1. Fundamentally Unbalanced Combat - I see this a lot in the "hardcore" JRPG scene, mostly because Square seems to have learned by now how to balance elemental and status effects in a fight. Persona doesn't. Shadow Hearts didn't either. Far too often, the combat boils down to ridiculously easy win vs. horrifying demise, based entirely on what and which elemental or status effects you are equipped to throw out. It might seem balanced at first, but it's only balanced in the way that the nuclear deterrent effect between the United States and North Korea is balanced - we can each blow the living crap out of each other, and basically the guy who acts first is going to get the most chuckles out of the situation.
2. Grinding. JRPGs freaking invented grinding, or, if not, they certainly perfected it. Most notable problem - your party members and your party size not being equal. I've encountered exactly one series that didn't have this problem (Grandia), though I'm sure there's more if I look. In all of these games, you end up with maybe eight available party members to fill three or four slots, with the ones you carry along with you receiving lots of experience and growing and becoming real and useful individuals and the ones you leave back at camp sticking berries up their noses turning into tiny atrophied useless decaying lumps of flesh that WILL destroy you if you are so foolish as to bring them with you anywhere for any reason. The result is that if you don't have the handy walkthrough sitting next to you to tell you if, when, and how you will need to use all of these lazy, unmotivated meat sacks, you have to take them ALL out with you, essentially requiring you to repeat your level grinding over and over and over again so that whole new batches of useless morons can reach a level of skill they may or may not need to have. What makes this sort of idiocy truly criminal is the fact that Western RPGs have figured this tiny, glaringly obvious problem out and fixed it. In Mass Effect, everybody's your level. Problem solved. Now I can do more of the story adventuring and less killing boars. I don't even like killing boars.
3. Saving the World. This is a problem that stretches beyond the JRPG genre, but honestly it seems to be the worst here. No matter who you are and no matter what you start out doing, you can be effectively guaranteed that at some point in the course of the game you're going to find your own particular variation of the Invisible Time Wizard floating around in the space between dimensions and plotting to destroy the world because his neighbor's dog told him to or some other such foolishness. You will then stop this person. All RPGs manage to get bogged down in this sort of wrote pattern, it seems, but it doesn't really have to, and in JRPGs sometimes the reasoning is just truly, fundamentally stupid. Here's an idea - maybe instead of trying to save the world, my motivation is that I'm sick of having to run up two hundred flights of stairs every night and risk my life in combat with these weird things that look like hands and tables and curiously agile ink blots and live my life as a normal freaking human being. Maybe my motivation for adventuring around the world in my multi-part ship with my immortal friends is because I just want to freaking die already. Why does there always have to be a villain tenting his fingers and lining out his plan to crack the Earth in half so he can host a family reunion with his grandfather?
That, right there, is three areas of significant difficulty that JRPGs have yet to resolve, despite the fact that the resolution for the issues are completely obvious. Celebrating these games for their prose is like praising your three year old because he took a crap in the toilet for a change. As a person who actually, honestly loves this genre and grew up consuming these things, even I can stand back and say that most of these games aren't even making the most of what little portion of the medium they actually use. I mean, Phoenix Wright can tell a story just as easily as a forty five minute cutscene, and he's going to make me think about it a little bit more than some asinine nihilist philosophy about why The Monolith from 2001 got a spray tan and will somehow destroy the Earth (a fact which I have assumed from almost finishing the first game in that series), if only because it requires more cognitive exercise to communicate a coherent theory of a crime to a squad of caricatures and loonies than it does to register and immediately dismiss the pseudo-intellectual semi-Eastern Philosophical claptrap at the root of most of these games' "deeper meanings." For crying out loud - the short stories in Lost Odyssey were theoretically written by some of the greatest writers in Japan, but what I saw up on the screen wasn't even up to Stephen King standards, and that's just sad.
They may tell the biggest story (over and over and over again), but I definitely don't think that JRPGs have any ground to assert themselves as "most artistic genre."