The Extra Credits crew stray into RPG territory

[Infinitron]

I do understand that they want to monkey more established art forms, like literature, and base their classification of games on how it's done over there - the emotions the work tries to evoke. However, games aren't novels or movies, and they do involve interactions and mechanics that govern these interactions. At the very least, you should take these into account when attempting to define a genre. Because if you don't, you end up with a bunch of nonsense, where basically any game with an open world or interactive dialogue is a WRPG, and basically anything can be a JRPG. Hell, Alan Wake is a JRPG according to their classification.

I think what they're saying is, if you take only the set of games already widely considered to be "RPGs", what separates the WRPGs from the JRPGs?

I dunno man. You'd be inclined to assume so (because it makes their argument a lot more reasonable), but they do explicitly state that game genres shouldn't be defined based on mechanics, in this video. And that JRPGs and WRPGs should be regarded as completely separate. They barely reference RPG mechanics (and only when talking about tabletop games, in their first video), and when they do, it's mostly to immediately dismiss them (any and all mechanics, in fact) as "surface elements" - they proceed to compare it to an "editing style" in a novel.

I mean, the notion that core gameplay mechanics are "surface elements", and what defines a genre is the emotional response from a player, is basically a high brow version of ME3's Emotional Engagement. And unsurprisingly, EC loves Mass Effect.

Yes, like I said earlier in this thread, I object to their classification of genre according to emotion-laden buzzwords, although I do agree that classification of genre needs to be elaborated upon further than just descriptions of surface game mechanics.

 

[Gragt]

They also miss the point that great works of art deal more with ideas than mere emotions, so trying to apply that sort of classification to games is sure to fail because their perception of the other art forms is flawed from the beginning.

 

[MMXI]

1) In the first video they implied that JRPGs and WRPGs started off in parallel, even though the early WRPGs made it to Japan. I'm sure there's an element of that in why JRPGs tend to be more story driven, but they completely misrepresent the influence of both Wizardry and Ultima on the genre over there. It seems like they did so just to prove their (incorrect) point that video game genres aren't defined by mechanics.

2) In the second video they seemed to imply that JRPGs are about groups of characters while WRPGs are about individual characters. Are they fans of Bethesda then? I mean, they seem to reference Bethesda games more than any others so I guess that's the case. Why ignore the vast majority of the genre?

3) It seems like they are conveniently ignoring the turn-based mechanics of almost all the old WRPGs in an attempt to prove their point that JRPGs are WRPGs are very different mechanically but similar in terms of the feelings they invoke. It's again an attempt to show that video game genres aren't defined by mechanics. Did you see that part in the second video where they showed a "western made JRPG" and a "Japanese made WRPG"? Yeah. Fucking Septerra Core and Dark Souls. A turn-based game and a single character hack and slash. Well done!

 

[thesoup]

I'd like to remark how retarded it is from them to say that those genres are defined by what we're looking in then, not by their mechanics. Fact is, you're experiencing different things in both genres BECAUSE of the different mechanics they use, not in spite of them. Ffs.

 

[Destroid]

I think the way they define genres is not unreasonable, it's hard to pin down what a genre is explicitly, or to state the specific reasons why a game fits into a particular genre, but most people can intuitively tell what genre a game is if they have had enough experience with videogames.

 

[Weierstraß]

I guess, by Extra Credits's definitions, Mass Effect 3 is a Japanese RPG.

 

[Dim]

Well they got Mental Challenge vs Execution challenge right that one time. But don't play DFO until you have played at least 10 other mmos.

 

[Infinitron]

PART THREE http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/western-japanese-rpgs-part-3

 

[Bruma Hobo]

 

[Quetzacoatl]

I just loved that Missile Command video of their's.

 

[Dim]

Different genera, like cover based, jumpy, and momentum shooters.

Why jrpgs suck ? Combat systems! TRUE !!! Except im pretty sure DAO is very very similar but it does not suck. Why ? The tactics (automation) system!
I remember most of these points from yahtzee's review of FF? . So why does SE keep remaking FF instead of all the rest of its franchises?

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Why jrpgs suck ? Combat systems! TRUE !!!

That's not true, their combat sucks thanks to those boring and repetitive encounters, and movement speed.

 

[J_C]

Different genera, like cover based, jumpy, and momentum shooters.

Why jrpgs suck ? Combat systems! TRUE !!! Except im pretty sure DAO is very very similar but it does not suck. Why ? The tactics (automation) system!

What? No. The combat systems are alright, as Unorus Janco said before me, the problem is the constant grinding and filler combat.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

PART THREE http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/western-japanese-rpgs-part-3

Unsurprisingly, they went full retard for their final installment. And nothing illustrates this better, than the fact that they consider Fallout 3's combat system to be good.

 

[Infinitron]

PART THREE http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/western-japanese-rpgs-part-3

Unsurprisingly, they went full retard for their final installment. And nothing illustrates this better, than the fact that they consider Fallout 3's combat system to be good.

Did they say it was good? They basically just said it evoked some kind of an RPG sensibility, as compared with Call of Duty.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

PART THREE http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/western-japanese-rpgs-part-3

Unsurprisingly, they went full retard for their final installment. And nothing illustrates this better, than the fact that they consider Fallout 3's combat system to be good.

Did they say it was good? They basically just said it evoked some kind of an RPG sensibility, as compared with Call of Duty.

They bring up Fallout 3 as an example of "the best WRPGs, using their core mechanics in novel ways to support their core engagement of fantasy and expression". They go on to explain how the first person shootan and VATS reinforce the contrast between different playstyles and make perks much more distinct. From the art accompanying this, I gather that by "different playstyles", they mean "big guns vs small guns". Awesome.

At this point, I'm just writing this off as artfag nonsense. You're free to perpetuate whatever intellectual framework for the classification of games that you've come up with, but the moment it leads you to praise shit (aka F3 and NV's combat system) as something good, I'm going to treat it as the useless, pseudointellectual garbage it is.

And this is all discounting that whole "menu-driven combat" nonsense. How do you rationalize that? Next thing you know, Diablo's going to have "mouse-driven combat", makes about as much sense.

 

[Dim]

What? No. The combat systems are alright, as Unorus Janco said before me, the problem is the constant grinding and filler combat.

And that's why i stopped playing DAO. It was the arena combat in the dwarf campaign that made everything else seem weak.
"bloated unwieldy menu driven combat. select ability, select attack, wait 5 seconds" -yahtzee (on ff???)

 

[Weierstraß]

But I like menu combat. I don't really see what they're trying to say here. The biggest problem Extra Credits has is that they try to be too broad and general, ending up talking about things they don't really know a lot about.

 

[NewFag]

Uninformative and forgettable. Next.

 

[Spockrock]

Extra Credits is forever on my shitlist for saying Fallout 3 has better writing than Fallout New Vegas. fucking outrageous

 

[Johannes]

Their distinction of WRPG/JRPG makes no sense. Is Betrayal at Krondor a JRPG then?

Genres aren't really defined by what the product is about deep down. Genres really are defined by "superficial" elements, basically what the product appears to be on a glance and what other products it is easily compared with, actually it's mostly about tradition.

In movies a setting tends to define the genre, and setting is something really quite superficial - look at something as narrow as westerns for example. There's westerns that are lighthearted adventures, some are serious and grim, there's comedys too. But they're influenced by each other, play with the same tropes and conventions (not always following them but still acknowledging them), so they really are part of the same continuity regardless if they evoke different feelings when watching. Oh and like with RPGs, there IS a subgenre classification defined by its country of origin in western films - they're quite similar in many ways to any western, but Italo-western still is its own scene, so to say.

Then again you might look at how genres are defined in music - it's the instruments, song structures and such very superficial technical elements that define how the music is labeled, not about the feelings it invokes, though there are exceptions, like black metal must be satanic and such... But there's no real single basis on which a piece of music is labeled, you just look at the continuity that spawned it and what can it be easily compared to. Also, J-rock


Games, it's the same shit, you don't have any one rule on which to judge genres by, you just look at the similarities it has with other shit and then slap on labels that hopefully help the game find its target audience. Being an RPG could, at this point, mean a lot of things as we all know but when it just comes down to comparing western and jap stuff, you make the call by whether its influences are more from the western or eastern school of RPG design... And whereas there can be truth to that western games are usually more about creating and acting out your own majestic hero/party, and japs more often give you emotionally engaging storylines, the differences neither start nor end there and cannot be sensibly pointed out without some understanding of the history of both scenes (in character/combat systems, art styles, narrative, etc etc), any easier than you can point the difference between a western made in US or Italy to an uneducated observer. Focusing on the narrative difference is about as superficial as just saying that japanese RPGs are the ones with the animu art style, but it reality it's just a big overgeneralisation and simplification of the genre difference.