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Anime JRPG combat vs western blobber style combat - Why all the hate?

What do you think of the classic JRPG combat system?

  • I love it, it is the best system ever

  • There were a few JRPGs with good combat, but they are mostly shit

  • The basic concept is good, it depends on how the devs use it

  • Kill all weeboo fans (Kingcomrade)


Results are only viewable after voting.

Renevent

Cipher
Joined
Feb 22, 2013
Messages
925
I don't like Dragon Age either, but that is true. Either way, I think it's more prevalent in jRPG's. If you don't like weebo over dramatic nonsense your choice in jRPG's is probably pretty slim. Whereas if you don't want to see metro sexual SJW's sleeping with demon men you really only have one or two wRPG's you would have to avoid.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,983
Elona doesn't just have rat diplomacy, you can marry the fuckers and have children.
I've spent 15 minutes in their wiki and I'm still trying to understand WTF is the game about. Is it like a living world roguelike with randomised quests?
If you're trying to understand WTF it's about you're doing it wrong. It's a jumble of whatever random ideas the creator wanted to throw in. It's got what you said, it also has goods trading, (beware of bandits and weather), karma, farming, a giant world spanning scavenger hunt for medals, crafting, home decoration, competing adventurers, an actual main story line, gods (whom can be summoned and fought with predictable results) the big daddies from Bioshock (you can choose to kill the little girl and eat her corpse for a stat bonus or bring her to a scientist to complete a quest), cooking, followers... the list goes on. It's beyond insane.
 

Karellen

Arcane
Joined
Jan 3, 2012
Messages
327
The main reason why JRPG combat is frequently bad is, oddly enough, the same reason why WRPG combat is frequently bad. On the whole, it has less to do with the style of combat or the mechanics in general - you can have excellent in blobber style, with grid movement and even real-time action - but rather, the issue is with how the combat is integrated with the game as a whole.

There's a pretty good article about this, mostly dealing with what happened to JRPGs, but basically the problem is that the shift towards more narrative-based design upended the structure of early JRPGs, in which the key thing was resource management and acquisition of gear together with exploration - which you might or might not like, but the key thing is that in that framework, all the game elements fit together well. It turns out that once you take out genuine attrition, resource management, decent itemisation and meaningful exploration out of an RPG, you're simply not left with a complete game but speedbumps that you go through. This sort of vestigial combat takes place in a lot of post-FFVII JRPGs, but it's pretty much the case with Planescape: Torment, too, and a lot of the more narrative-based WRPGs suffer from this to some degree. There might not even be anything really wrong with the actual battle mechanics in and of themselves in isolation, but it doesn't really matter because without a kind of strategic layer in the high level design tying everything together, the combat has to be not just good, but exceptional to remain engaging on its own merits.
 

DragoFireheart

all caps, rainbow colors, SOMETHING.
Joined
Jun 16, 2007
Messages
23,731
The main reason why JRPG combat is frequently bad is, oddly enough, the same reason why WRPG combat is frequently bad. On the whole, it has less to do with the style of combat or the mechanics in general - you can have excellent in blobber style, with grid movement and even real-time action - but rather, the issue is with how the combat is integrated with the game as a whole.

There's a pretty good article about this, mostly dealing with what happened to JRPGs, but basically the problem is that the shift towards more narrative-based design upended the structure of early JRPGs, in which the key thing was resource management and acquisition of gear together with exploration - which you might or might not like, but the key thing is that in that framework, all the game elements fit together well. It turns out that once you take out genuine attrition, resource management, decent itemisation and meaningful exploration out of an RPG, you're simply not left with a complete game but speedbumps that you go through. This sort of vestigial combat takes place in a lot of post-FFVII JRPGs, but it's pretty much the case with Planescape: Torment, too, and a lot of the more narrative-based WRPGs suffer from this to some degree. There might not even be anything really wrong with the actual battle mechanics in and of themselves in isolation, but it doesn't really matter because without a kind of strategic layer in the high level design tying everything together, the combat has to be not just good, but exceptional to remain engaging on its own merits.

So quite literally the narrative takes precedence over gameplay.
 

Athelas

Arcane
Joined
Jun 24, 2013
Messages
4,502
This sort of vestigial combat takes place in a lot of post-FFVII JRPGs
Wnat do you mean 'post-FFVII jRPG's'? It's not as if most jRPG's before that were hard, or weren't narrative-driven (apart from a couple of the earliest NES jRPG's, I suppose, although there the difficulty was probably derived from the need to grind more than any actual difficulty). The formula of these games has largely stayed the same - if anything, it has been somewhat improved through the years.
 
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Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
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Location
Hyperborea
East or West, it's hard to go back to 'regular' crps after playing roguelikes. There are so many things that, on average, they do better, and the level of detail, replay value and meaningful decision making is incomparable.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,983
Individual battles in most old jrpgs might not be super difficult, but in the context of a long dungeon involving dozens of battles in a row, there was certainly a degree of difficulty that is basically absent in all the games that let you save wherever the fuck you want or offer you endless healing supplies. Breath of Fire 1 and 2 are good examples of this. Killing a couple zombies is trivial. Doing it 15 times in a row and having enough resources left over to defeat the giant monster at the end is another story, and requires awareness of enemy behaviour and weaknesses.
 

Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
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Location
Hyperborea
What do you guys think of the combat approach seen in the likes of Tales of, Valkyrie Profile, Star Ocean? I've played a little bit of VP: Silmaria, but other than that I'm not familiar with this kind of battling. This system has its own cadre of elitists who claim that these games require more skill than TB peasant race. I think its an apples and oranges comparison made by those who have a bias towards twitch, arcade play, but that's besides the point. Is it fun, is it interesting, is it skillful?
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,167
I imagine on some japanese forum someone is having a similar conversation regarding omnipresent gay sex in recent western games.

This is a bullshit argument and a false equivalency. We are talking about one western series made in an age of a general decline versus something that is inherent to Japanese RPGs as a whole.

Also, Japanese people don't have forums because they don't know what a PC is and couldn't even recognize a mouse peripheral or a CRT monitor if they saw one lelll (yeah, i still can't get over this).
 
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Karellen

Arcane
Joined
Jan 3, 2012
Messages
327
This sort of vestigial combat takes place in a lot of post-FFVII JRPGs
Wnat do you mean 'post-FFVII jRPG's'? It's not as if most jRPG's before that were hard, or weren't narrative-driven (apart from a couple of the earliest NES jRPG's, I suppose). The formula of these games has largely stayed the same - if anything, it has been somewhat improved through the years.

OK, this is difficult to answer concisely, so wall of text it is. I'll start by saying that I like FFVII - it's a good, if troubled game that admittedly already has a lot of "vestigial" elements, but there's still a proper game there. The way these things go, though, is that a good game comes along that has a new feature that it somehow adequately integrates into the game, and is seen as novel and becomes popular. The inevitable imitators (which are often its sequels) try to have the same feature and don't do a very good job - but, nonetheless, the feature becomes a convention, even though it's actually a poor fit to the genre as a whole. And so, decline has taken place.

Before FFVII, FFIV was the exact same sort of sinister turning point - it was highly linear, narrative-driven and constricting. On the other hand, it is one of the best paced narrative RPGs ever made, the Active Time Battle system that it pioneered actually worked pretty well, and the game's main design feature - altering your party constantly as the plot moves along - actually did its job, because it kept the battles mostly fresh and allowed the game to saddle you with strange parties consisting of characters with very different abilities and power levels, including completely useless characters that you have to train right from the beginning. It's a game about working around your deficiencies - which is what also managed to make the dungeons non-trivial, since you rarely went in with an optimal party for the job. It's one of the FF games I like the most. But what happened then? Many subsequent JRPGs were mired in the linearity and the emphasis narrative, but didn't manage to imitate the pacing or the interesting party compositions, to the effect that you're that much closer to a game in which combat is a liability.

FFVII did a lot of harm to JRPGs as a whole, particularly because it was a good game and so damn popular that it got a genre-defining status. It was, in parts, even more linear than most games before, to the point that you often can't even return to many past areas - but like FFIV, it did that with such flair and good pacing (especially in Midgar) that it ultimately works in context. It had characters that were, indeed, "coathangers for Materia", and a gimmicky magic system - but, the thing is, the Materia system is probably the best gimmicky JRPG magic system ever - it rewards diligent, patient cultivation of your Materia resources and it allows you to essentially respec your characters on the fly as you gain new, interesting Materia and think of new combinations. FFVII already has barely any attrition, but it has a gradually opening world that is pretty fun to explore, largely due to story but also because finding new Materia is actually kind of exciting, so it wasn't a total loss. The game isn't difficult, but it still encourages mastery of the system and is pretty engaging, is what I'm saying. Also, one of its new features was that it had a ton of weird minigames, which... well, I guess the motorcycle chase game was cool? They weren't major enough to actively hurt the game, though.

The problem is what came after. Already in FFVIII you had a mess of a magic system, a largely broken combat system with awkward level-scaling, basically no worthwhile loot whatsoever, and an optional card game that was actually more strategic and more fun than the actual combat. Not to mention all the cinematic scenes with awkward pacing. Since then, a great many JRPGs were needlessly linear, with pretentious magic systems and awkward subsystems and minigames that only serve to pad the length of the game, and battles that are boring and pointless in context. And somewhere along the line JRPGs became synonomous with 80-hour games that, for the most part, had no business being 80 hours long. The sad thing is that this is what happens when a good game is imitated ineptly.
 

APGunner

Augur
Joined
Jan 4, 2015
Messages
119
Shit like Gold armour beats silver armour beats iron armour. Do RPG makers in general have 0 concept of how metals work in real life, or are they just lazy people who want to drave kiddie-porn? (hint: the latter is true)
What? I've never played anything like that, can you give an example?

All TES games, though they thought they were clever and "circumvented" that by making up their own materials.

Pretty much all Final Fantasy games have this in some way. The later ones just gives us a lot of uninspired weapon designs which randomly/magically have higher ATT-stat.
Common occurence in JRPG's that equipment material go something like Iron -> Steel -> Silver -> Mythril before they start making up random stuff for elemental damage type weapons.
Oh, I misunderstood your original post. I though you meant a situation where a golden weapon would be more effective against silver armor, silver weapon > iron, iron > gold. Yeah, reading is hard.

What you described with material progression is logical to me, I don't see why it's a bad system. Steel IS indeed better than iron AND more expensive, so it is a higher tier material, just like in real life. Or do I have 0 concept of how metals wok in real life?

Also what is so bad with mythril, ebony, glass, daedric gear in TES? If they fit the game world then it's enough for me to not mind it.
 

TheGreatOne

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
1,214
Saw a preview for the new FF game and doesn't seem like anything has changed either, in fact, I think it's getting worse and jRPG game developers are slowly loosing their collective minds.
The problem is that there are 2 kinds of JRPGs (just as there are 2 kinds of CRPGs), yet there's only one word to describe JRPGs. There's the mainstream stuff that's horrible beyond belief and focused on narrative (Final Fantasy, anime shit, pedo shit), and then there are the games with (mostly sparse) stories that are focused on gameplay: tactical RPGs and wizardry inspired stuff that were/are far closer to old CRPGs than any WRPG released during the 2004-2012 dark age, save for KOTC and Vogel's games. Just like Western RPGs can be divided into 2 different categories (CRPGs=early RPGs, golden age games, silver age games, kickstarter RPG revival games and WRPGs=post Xbox era console trash), there should be an unique term to differentiate games like Dark Spire, Tactics Ogre and the Shin Megami Tensei series from the trash that's commonly associated with the term. The design philosophy between the two styles is very different even though the games might look very similar with regular JRPGs (except games like Demon/ Dark Souls, Dark Spire and Parasite Eve that have more dark or realistic art styles). Speaking of which, some of the more graphically advanced CRPGs that were made in the early 90s before the jump to the FMV/pseudo-realisim look (Betrayal at Krondor etc) did look quite cartoony at times

27-DQK_22_16.png

ultima-6-conversation_599x370.gif

dark_sun2_screenshot1.jpg

World%20Of%20Xeen_10.png
wizardry67.png
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So they aren't visually that far off from older JRPGs with more grounded visual styles like LUCT, though the latter is still more anime/cartoony due to the character sprites. Which is the reason why some who like older titles like Phantasy Star and Shining Force can't tolerate newer JRPGs, as they were visually more limited and anime itself was more realistic looking and closer to western animation in the 80s/early 90s (and Japanese developers copied American action movies visually and the country wasn't doing as poorly economically back then, so the culture was more masculine overall which reflected in the art styles of games as well).
Also, Japanese people don't have forums because they don't know what a PC is and couldn't even recognize a mouse peripheral or a CRT monitor if they saw one lelll (yeah, i still can't get over this).
http://www.2chan.net/
Most consoles actually did have a mouse peripheral back in the 90s. Another aspect in which consoles have declined during the 2000s
 

Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
4,318
Location
Hyperborea
What you described with material progression is logical to me, I don't see why it's a bad system. Steel IS indeed better than iron AND more expensive, so it is a higher tier material, just like in real life. Or do I have 0 concept of how metals wok in real life?

The problem is when gold and silver equipment have higher damage and defense stats than steel. I think Ys 1 and 2 did this.
 

Athelas

Arcane
Joined
Jun 24, 2013
Messages
4,502
too much to quote
Uh, your account of FF6 strikes me as bizarre. Combat in that game is utterly trivial. Your characters get to hit enemies for hundreds of damage while they deal like 10 damage to you. ATB is also a terrible system and makes it that the optimal strategy is almost always selecting auto-attack as soon as possible.
The idea that jRPG's have declined post-FF7 is absurd. Almost all of the jRPG's with turn-based combat that is actually good (which, admittedly, isn't a whole lot) were released post-FF7. The genre's always been linear, so nothing's changed there either.
 

APGunner

Augur
Joined
Jan 4, 2015
Messages
119
What you described with material progression is logical to me, I don't see why it's a bad system. Steel IS indeed better than iron AND more expensive, so it is a higher tier material, just like in real life. Or do I have 0 concept of how metals wok in real life?

The problem is when gold and silver equipment have higher damage and defense stats than steel. I think Ys 1 and 2 did this.
I see, must be a jRPG thing.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
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Messages
14,983
too much to quote
Uh, your account of FF6 strikes me as bizarre. Combat in that game is utterly trivial. Your characters get to hit enemies for hundreds of damage while they deal like 10 damage to you. ATB is also a terrible system and makes it that the optimal strategy is almost always selecting auto-attack as soon as possible.
The idea that jRPG's have declined post-FF7 is absurd. Almost all of the jRPG's with turn-based combat that is actually good (which, admittedly, isn't a whole lot) were released post-FF7. The genre's always been linear, so nothing's changed there either.
LOL, there is like no part of this post that isn't wrong.

Regarding the gold weapons thing, yeah it's retarded. Though I think at least some of these are the result of translators being ass at their jobs, or the weapons are only supposed to be decorated with gold, and are stronger because they're enchanted.

Also, silver weapons get a free pass, 'cause werewolves. Silver clearly stronk vs monsters.

The dumbest thing about equipment for sale in RPGs though, is the fact that they come in neat packages of similar strength at appropriate times. You never run into awesome shit you can't afford, a shortage of decent weapons lategame, high quality swords next to garbage quality bows. Nope, it's always bronze everything in the first town, iron everything in the second town... Well, fortunately there are exceptions.
 

Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
4,318
Location
Hyperborea
I suggest you guys read the Jeremy Parish article more carefully. It's not about a TB system itself, but the game design that system is couched in. He doesn't claim it started with 7. His mention of 7 is in regards to 3 man parties and how you have party members sitting on the sidelines.

It was during the 16 bit days that items, healing, currency, resource management, and dungeon design started becoming trivial, one element not informing the next. FF7 was a high profile crystallization of an approach to JRPG design that was developing since FF4. Then after FF7, things really started getting silly as they often do when the publishers see dollar signs and the copypasta goes into full swing.. You had the occasional reprieve with the SMT games (hence why so many people here think Nocturne is the bee's knees. Money is scarce, healing is scarce, save points are like an oasis in a hostile desert, enemies are non trivial. Your reserves are ever dwindling and risk/reward is an important consideration. Encounters are dually helpful and harmful because they can reward you with precious items or new demons - and thus abilities- or they can just drain your resources).

A lot, maybe the majority, of game developers do things they see done in other games without accounting for the context in which those things were done. Design is about wholeness, cohesion, symphony, and that's in any field. What they do though is cherry-pick features from various popular games and then kit-bash it all together. Hello Dragon Age: Inquisition. Hello Dying Light. Hello The Evil Within.
 

almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
As has been said, the system itself isn't terrible, it's just that many JRPGs implement it in a terrible way. Tons of the same repetitive mindless trash encounters (you really think that encountering two zombies and a wolf for the fifteenth time is going to be much different than when you encountered them for the third time?), which get particularly bloated with start of battle animations, end of battle animations, excess animations for each attack, and stupid stuff like waiting for an ATB meter to charge. A lot of JRPGs play like MMORPGs - no challenge, but long periods doing the same thing and watching numbers slowly go up.

The odd storytelling and poor world design make things worse. For instance, I tried FF IV and thought the idea of playing as a black night for an evil baron was kind of cool - but then halfway through the game I end up being a white night fighting dwarves on the moon. Too much enemy design is just random stuff thrown together for the hell of it, or encounters that are just a bunch of different enemies thrown together (if Fallout was a JRPG, you'd run across a group of 2 raiders, a super mutant and a deathclaw fighting together).

There are decent JRPGs - I thought the battle system of Pokemon was decent and it didn't have much transition/animation/ATB bloat. The jobs system of FF V was somewhat interesting, and games like Chrono Trigger that don't have invisible enemies or separate battle screens are decent. Games like Unlimited Saga do interesting things (game's on a board, monsters are moving around the board, you can use skills to try to see if they're on the next board before you move, you can use diplomacy to avoid combat, etc.), but they tend to get trashed for not being the same regurgitated garbage.
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
Ultima's super powerful weapons are Glass Swords, did Richard Garriott even do his research on weapon materials?

Being that this sword shatters after one hit, it is pretty literal play on "glass cannon". Besides, it never says what kind of magic glass it is.

TES would have been better example with its ebony shit (and glass too, IIRC?), but they retconned the terms to mean some very speshul majickal metal alloys.
 

Karellen

Arcane
Joined
Jan 3, 2012
Messages
327
too much to quote
Uh, your account of FF6 strikes me as bizarre. Combat in that game is utterly trivial. Your characters get to hit enemies for hundreds of damage while they deal like 10 damage to you. ATB is also a terrible system and makes it that the optimal strategy is almost always selecting auto-attack as soon as possible.
The idea that jRPG's have declined post-FF7 is absurd. Almost all of the jRPG's with turn-based combat that is actually good (which, admittedly, isn't a whole lot) were released post-FF7. The genre's always been linear, so nothing's changed there either.

Well, I didn't say anything about FFVI. The combat in that game is fairly trivial. FFIV, on the other hand, does have the occasional decent fight, even random encounters are occasionally dangerous. Also, while true open-world JRPGs barely exist, linearity is something that increased gradually, to the point where we get games like FFX and FFXIII. Which is not to say that many quality JRPGs weren't made after FFVII as well (including the best JRPG, which is Vagrant Story), especially since some series stayed old-school and there are neo-oldschool games like Etrian Odyssey. My point, though, is that while the process already started during the SNES era, it's the PSX era in particular when you start to get these wholly story-based "cinematic blockbuster" RPGs like FFVIII (which I didn't like) and Chrono Cross (which I liked, sort of) in which dungeons, exploration, loot and even experience gain have been trivialised to such extreme degree that combat encounters no longer serve any purpose in the overall design - they're just speedbumps between cutscenes.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,983
Design is about wholeness, cohesion, symphony, and that's in any field.
So much this. I'll take a relatively simple game that is well knit together and balanced over complicated messes of systems making each other irrelevant any day. I don't need intimidate and bluff and diplomacy to be separate skills; I need them to work properly with the rest of the game instead of being a tacked on afterthought applicable in a handful of scripted sequences that ultimately change nothing. I don't need battle that let me encircle my enemies and target their eyes with special subtypes of ammunition that have +1 accuracy; I need a game where the difference in my party's status before and after the battle is important instead of something I resolve by spamming my 30% first aid skill over and over again for free xp.
 

Luckra

Educated
Joined
Jan 13, 2015
Messages
64
Location
Montréal
What do you guys think of the combat approach seen in the likes of Tales of, Valkyrie Profile, Star Ocean? I've played a little bit of VP: Silmaria, but other than that I'm not familiar with this kind of battling. This system has its own cadre of elitists who claim that these games require more skill than TB peasant race. I think its an apples and oranges comparison made by those who have a bias towards twitch, arcade play, but that's besides the point. Is it fun, is it interesting, is it skillful?
It is fun and skillful. Like a beat'em all or action-adventure game can be. For the interesting part it depends if you find the combat in this kind of genre interesting in the first place.

Design is about wholeness, cohesion, symphony, and that's in any field.
So much this. I'll take a relatively simple game that is well knit together and balanced over complicated messes of systems making each other irrelevant any day..
Sums it up perfectly.
 

Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
4,318
Location
Hyperborea
So now I have to start up a Tales of Phantasia playthrough as well as Elona and SNES Dragon Quest 3. Fuck this thread. Ain't nobody got time for that!

Speaking of Elona; dat tutorial. It doesn't account for different classes, so I'm derping around trying to kill blobs with my staff, doing no damage, instead of casting my spells. I've become like one of the play testers that didn't go upstairs in Dishonored because a guard said they couldn't.
 

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