R.I.P. J-RPG

I haven't played a Japanese RPG in years. The last one I bought was... Persona 3 for the PSP perhaps? I didn't play it, much to the chagrin of my friends and colleagues who swear by it. Not that I thought it was bad, but... well... traditional J-RPG mechanics are a hard sell for me, and have been fore many years. By "traditional" I mean games with random combat, the sort where enemies pop out of nowhere. This may be why Catherine, which was basically Persona with the combat sections replaced by a surreal block puzzle game, was more appealing to me. I'm at the stage in my life where I'd much rather play Tetris than bonk monsters on the head.

It's a shame because J-RPGs used to be a favorite genre of mine, and did much to form my current taste in video games. It's sad that for the last decade or so they've been a dead genre to me, barely registering on my radar. Sure, you could call Demon's Souls a J-RPG, in that it's A) Japanese, and B) involves many classic RPGs tropes originally borrowed from the West. But it's not a J-RPG in the sense that the term is casually used by Western players. A J-RPG, in this colloquial sense, tends to be a game that features a cast of colorful, usually anime-styled characters whom you guide through a dense, melodramatic narrative, the meat of which involves high amounts of character customization resulting from strategy-based combat.

When I was growing up, this sort of game was the cornerstone of my love of games. Yet in the past 10 years the only J-RPG I've played that really hit me where I lived was Odin Sphere in 2007, a game which I still love. It came right out of left field and made me feel a way I hadn't felt in years... probably not since Final Fantasy VI 13 years earlier. I was 17 when I played FFVI though, and Odin Sphere managed to cut through my adult sensibilities in a way most J-RPGs fail to... which perhaps gets partially at the root of the problem: that J-RPG's are often adolescent in their view of the world, being made mainly for a young Japanese audience. This probably explains why I connected with them so much as a teenager, and why players a decade on either side of me never connected with them. I was 20 in 1997, the year FFVII came out. Cloud, its iconic emo protagonist, was 21. Final Fantasy was my Harry Potter. I had grown up right along side it.

Odin Sphere also had a gaggle of young-ish protagonists, but it cut a much more stately figure, with its primary reference in Norse mythology. It certainly felt Wagnerian, and was unflinching in its dark nexus of political alliances and backstabbings, as its core group of determined and intelligent protagonists moved, like doomed chess pieces, move by bloody move, towards Ragnarok. Now that I think of it most of the JRPGs I've liked past my teenage years have been sober and political, eschewing the emo nonsense of Final Fantasy and teen anime serials in favor of brutal fantasy-realpolitik. Suikoden, Front Mission, Vagrant Story, and Odin Sphere have a sensibility much closer to Game of Thrones than Evangeleon.

This may explain my preference for strategy J-RPGs, the genre variant that omits the tedious dungeon crawling, in which combat involves no strategic thought and feels like a nusance, and replaces it with a rich, chess-like combat system that centers the game. These mechanics also lend themselves to narratives of war and politics, which pushes them into a sensibility closer to the historial war epic than the teen drama. That's probably why I wasn't as taken with Valkyria Chronicles as I wanted to be, in spite of it being a modern successor to games like Front Mission. For all its superb design, its elegant translation of Western third-person shooter conventions into the template of Japanese strategy RPGs, it lacked the harrowing pain, the retched behavior of human beings caught in a morality maze, that a J-RPG inspired by World War II should have had.

I began to check out of J-RPGs way back in the late 90s, when Final Fantasy stopped evolving. Final Fantasy VIII, for all its teen angst, was at least different from the game before it. FFIX, released in 2000, was the first Final Fantasy that featured nothing new at all, and it was downhill from there. Most people criticize J-RPGs for being locked in an outdated set of conventions, and this is somewhat true. The random combat / dungeon-crawl model - which dated back to the original Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest in the mid-80s - wasn't deep. From a game design perspective it was not really a single, cohesive system. It was a group of shallow systems arranged in a way that reinforced each other enough to sustain a narrative. The combat in Final Fantasy would never fly as a stand-alone experience, nor would the exploration. This is why the J-RPG variants mentioned above - which booted this grab bag approach in favor of proper game systems - were superior.

The last J-RPG of this "grab bag" type I remember liking was Dragon Quest VIII. The Dragon Quest series is an progenetor of all J-RPGs, and it always maintained a better grasp on how to use the conventions it had stolen from Western RPGs. J-RPGs are a snapshot of Western PC RPGs in the early to mid-80s. Dragon Quest I was lifting its conventions from games like Ultima III and IV. The abstractions of combat and exploration in the Ultima series, though, where dropped the moment new technology appeared. Ultima moved to a single-scale world with real-time combat in 1990 with Ultima VI, which has lead us to games like Skyrim and Mass Effect today. Japanese developers, however, liked their multi-scale worlds, their screens that suddenly went WOOOOOSH!!! and dropped you into a different space where you had to hit monsters. They especially loved their victory music. How else would you know you'd won?

J-RPGs held onto these conventions all the way into the mid-2000s, before the emergence of massively multiplayer online RPG conventions began to filter into single-player J-RPGs. By that time, Final Fantasy had lost all semblence of those conventions ever having a purpose, especially as its cinematic ambition pushed load-times to absurd extremes. The same year as Final Fantasy X and the disasterous Final Fantasy movie came out, Dragon Quest VII was released. It sold more copies in Japan than any game in history, but Western audience balked at its low-rez, uncinematic style... even though this is precisely what made Dragon Quest VII a thousand times more charming and less tedious than any of the later Final Fantasys. Load times in DQVII were non-existent, and fights ended as quickly as they began, which kept the whole thing clipping along briskly. And it wasn't trying to be a movie. It had virtually no cut-scenes. Instead it was like curling up with a good book.

And it was a very good book. Dragon Quest, while ostensibly following simple, almost Disney-like fantasy formulas, always had a wonderful sense of anguish and melancholy under the surface, that would slowly erupt as the story progressed. Final Fantasy started out pretty archetypal as well ("heroes slay evil") but as the series progressed it got cocky, contemporary, clever. In FFVI it broke the formula (the badguy wins half way through), but eventually its edginess backfired, as it merely became trapped in its own formula. You never got a sense that Dragon Quest was try to prove anything, though. It took the classic framework of good vs. evil and made it subtle and human in mature, un-showy ways.

Dragon Quest VIII, released a few years later on the PS2, was literally the last time I enjoyed these conventions in a video game. Horrified by DQVII's performance outside Japan, its makers made sure DQVIII was a looker, but not to the point that it would have to sacrifice its snappy pacing and fluid movement between modes. The result was my last memory that involved wandering around a colorful world, with my friends in tow, fitting monsters that popped up for no reason, and enjoying it... of thinking about the game when I wasn't playing it, and wanting to get back to it the way one wants to visit old friends.

J-RPGs as I knew them are gone, but I don't really miss them. Narratively I've gotten what I used to get from J-RPGs in games like Deadly Premonition, Phoenix Wright, and Metal Gear... and I much prefer their game designs over those of traditional J-RPGs. The contemporary J-RPGs that are good tend to be the ones that let go of the grab bag approach and commit to an actual game system. Final Fantasy today, which is like a red giant about to implode, is desperately trying to make itself deeper by scaffolding meaningless complexity onto its grab bag of systems. This can never work, because grab bag designs only work if they are streamlined to the point of zero friction. (See WarioWare.)

None of this, though, trumps good storytelling. I have to credit J-RPGs, all design critique aside, with introducing me to story-driven games. For the longest time they were was nothing like them, at least in terms of games where story was the unapologetic center of the experience. They were comics, novels, or movies you moved forward by interacting here or there, and between story bits they allowed you to dwell in the actual world the story was taking place in, to soak up all its nuance and emotion.

This element should not be discounted, the fact that you inhabited those worlds. That sense of place, more than interactivity, is what makes game narrative immersive... which explains why something as linear as Final Fantasy can feel as compelling as something as non-linear as Fallout. Being "present" in a story, even a linear one, can be a perfectly good experience for some gamers. Hell, Dear Esther is nothing but presence, proving you can rip out gameplay and cinematics and still be left with a lot of what makes game narratives work. And while today I tend to prefer rich game systems to be served up with my good writing, my deep characters, my brutal politics, it's important to remember that good narrative design is so powerful that not even awful game design can kill it.