Honest Question. WRPGs and JRPGs.

In my opinion SMT, at least the first one (and thus the second by extension) and Nocturne, aren't JRPGs.

Anyone agree?

 

No.

 

Mind arguing for that position other than "it's japanese and thus JRPG"?

In my opinion, it lacks almost every element traditionally associated with JRPGs.

 

Argue what? You yourself didn't even come up with any argument in the first place so there's nothing to counter. You're just appropriating them for no reason.

Like? SMT is one of the oldest jRPG series there are, before most of the tropes even took off. So is that why it's not a jRPG?

 

Well, The attribute system in old M&M games (I don't remember how they work in M&M 6 or later) can certainly get very silly. But it is still more of a numbers problem than anything else. In order to go from a bonus of +3 in an attribute (which happens when your stat is 17) to +4, you need two attribute points (getting to 19). However, to go from +10 to +11, you need to raise your attribute from 50 to 75 (25 points in total). I think the reason they did that was so they could have a lot of stat enhancing items around without completely breaking the game. However, the description of the attribute (weak, very good, fantastic, astounding) helps at least ground the attribute in reality, and the game has several attribute checks strewn around dungeons and whatnot, which again helps making the attribute seem something real and not just a bunch of numbers. Also, now that I look at the descriptions they use for attributes, I think the whole thing may have been inspired by the Marvel Super Heroes RPG game by TSR. That game used large attribute ranges as well, where each range was named for an adjective.

 

I can enjoy a jrpg-type with known encounters. One day, I'll finish Anachronox, and maybe I'll try Septerra Core. The only Nipponese jrpgs I've enjoyed enough to replay were the Trigger games.

 

Septerra Core, haven't thought about that in years, pretty good for what it is. A unique twist for a Final Fantasy clone. Never beat it, got bored after about 20 hours each time I tried, but I liked the premise. Cool setting. A for effort.

 

Already did. Categories are supposed to be useful. If you start to get specific to the point that even the art style of the portraits is enough to put it in another category, it becomes pointless. You end up with this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rock_genres

A 500 in Strength, which will be used to calculate damage against Chad Thundercock's defense of 700, because the devs guessed that this would make Chad adequately challenging for the average player at that point of the game. It's not meant to be a simple extension of the "1 is cripple, 10 is strongman" measurement, or used to invoke a "Whoa, that guy's power level is 1000000!" moment, because the characters can't see the numbers.

The only issue here is that this can be lead to grinding if the dev is unable/unwilling to maintain a smooth curve and you're suddenly dealing little damage to monsters in the next area for no discernible reason, but that's a design issue and not an inherent problem with using a bigger range of numbers.

 

And that is exactly the point. The numbers are all senseless garbage. In AD&D, you know that a strength of 18/00 is the pinnacle of human achievement. You know that a strength of 19 is equivalent to that of a hill giant and enough to launch boulders as missiles. Probably more than enough to rip a tree from the ground with your bare hands. Attack 500 in a JRPG is usually something completely abstract. You will probably find enemies that look weaker than what you killed when you attack was 50 that will give you trouble when it is 5000.

 

...in other words, having no meaning beyond being an ingame variable. Which is exactly what I stated.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cock_rock

 

JRPGs are designed for children.

 

Because it doesn't have an enforced party system like traditional JRPGs, because it doesn't have a railroaded storyline like traditional JRPGs, because it's story is for the most part "mature" unlike that of traditional JRPGs, because it is much more focused on dungeon crawling than exploring towns and cities, unlike traditional JRPGs...

Among others. So no, I don't consider it to be a JRPG, unless we start calling every japanese RPG a "JRPG".

 

While the whole point of the games is to be a monster collectathon, there are forced party members.

It's entirely railroaded until you get to alignment check where the game checks if you fight off against Chaos, Law or Chaos and Law. The amount of content that doesn't get railroaded is quite small compared to what is. Even Chrono Trigger, a very by the books jRPG, is far, far less railroaded than your typical SMT game.

Nothing like a nice mature story about a sexually frustrated nerd who accidentally summons Loki who rapes his teacher and then said teacher gets obsessed over Loki and wants to have his babies. SMT is pulpy fun, but I wouldn't call it mature. Most of the deeper themes in Atlus games tend to be paper thin and only serve as excuses to introduce cool titty demons for you to subjugate.

I guess Baldur's Gate, Bloodlines, Arcanum and Fallout are jRPGs now. Glad we have that settled then.

We should. We'd avoid nonsense posts like yours.

 

If you were using your old account people would pay attention.

 

Short Answer:

- Around half of the posters on the Codex grew up not with a NES or SNES (or whatever the fuck), and instead grew up with Zed Spectrums, Apple IIs, etc. Frankly speaking:

- Approx. (give or take, r00fles) 50% of Codex posters' "first RPG" was either DQ or FF. Again, give or take, as I am continually surprised at the amount of less-than-20 year old posters of late (hmm); so their "first one" might well have been Halo or whatever.


- Around 40% or so, probably even less, of the other posters on the Codex grew up playing Western-developed RPGs available only (or mostly) on home computers such as: Apple II, IBM-compatible cloned-spec PCs, Amigas, etc. You get the picture. For them not only were their "first RPGs" the direct inspirations for aforementioned DW/FF (BOTH of those jRPGs are made with the specific purpose of intentionally "dumbing down" mechanics from the lead designers fave two series, Ultima and Wizardry, cherry-pick their favored aspects from both of those (which by the this time, i.e. FF1/DQ1 times, the year was mid-eighties), and make something palatable for Japanese audiences where, REMEMBER:

- There was no 1970s/1980s "fantasy" culture penetration by the likes of D&D (and their like) or even something like the Tolkien books.

What I'm saying, basically, is that western RPGs (beginning with the wireframe games made by Uni. students in the mid-1970s in PLATO machines); western RPGs are almost universally, and more importantly... specifically developed by those early designers are literal attempts at computerizing the D&D experience.

...meanwhile, "jRPGs", beginning with DRAGON SLAYER for the NEC PCs and the MSX later on (a doujin game, btw; that means "indie"), were all directly inspired (in the most noble of senses) by already-developed Western RPGs (such as the aforementioned Ultima/Wizardry series).

Now, I would gamble on all of this being the main impetus behind a more "choice-and-consequence" approach to the way their (Western) RPGs were shaping up, and please keep in mind I do not mean the colloquial Codexian "meaning" of c-and-c. I mean real c-and-c, i.e. the type of which is both related and simultaenously made only possible by interaction with the game's basic mechanical layers.

Meanwhile those jRPGs coming out in the late-1980s were, from the very beginning, products which their designers wanted intentionally to be easy-to-access by japanese "normies", and although this is mostly conjecture I also venture to guess the predilection for menu-based turn-based gameplay was made specifically because all of the pre-existing games in that mid-1980s game market were almost all SHMUPS, beat-'em-ups, proto-"Fighting Games", and/or basically all of them were twitch-reflexes based.

Er, I don't really have anything further to add only that: after the 1980s, Western-developed RPGs began cannibalizing aspects from the dying ADVENTURE GAME GENRE and this all can almost be traced directly the impact Quest For Glory made with western devs at the time.

This is why if you go and look up a PC gaming-oriented magazine from the early-to-mid 1990s you will find that most "PC RPGs" tended to be labled alternatively as "an Adventure Game Hybrid".

Jap RPGs, on the other hand, have always been slavishly committing suppuku over and over in order to sell more units since only until recently (literally only until past 5 years or so) japanese people do not/did not "game" on a Personal Computer, and this means that the majority (for real) of jap "gamers" used home consoles...


....and what this means has nothing to do with the complexity of a game but rather on the fact that from the very start of "jRPGs" they needed to sell and were always in competition with other genres. In the NES era you will find I dare say more examples of jap-RPGs that feature Vancian spell-casting, first-person view combat conducted in a Wizardry-lite style, an emphasis on creating dungeons, most of them top-down but in a rather decently-sized part of the pie quite a few straight Wizardry-lite "clones".

However by the time the SNES rolled around jap devs found out people liked "stories" more than overly-complex mechanics (or simply put, overly demanding, which is not the same as complex); and this characterizes the SNES era of jRPGs as you'll be hard pressed to find one, even inside the DQ series, one that features any sort of real progression in mechanics but meanwhile all show insane progression on "telling stories".

ETC IM TIRED OF TYPING FINAL BIT IS: obviously the lack of what the codex thinks is c-and-c in those early jRPGs comes mostly due to the 2 reasons of: 1) can't risk confusing that japanese salaryman playing the game after his kid fell asleep with overly-demanding "mechanics"; and 2) straight up hardware limitations.

not in terms of graphics but in terms of the amount of text capable of being rendered/displayed in NES/SNES jRPGs; this tidbit alone merits 1 or 2 paragraphs explaining it but super simply put:

- japanese games utilize twice ( 2x ) the bytes to render a character as their alphabet character encoding system (shift-jiss) is by default "double-width", or sometimes referred to as "full-width".

This has tons of ramifications all deserving way more letters than I wanna type right now.

 

I like how you have to strawman this much to negate my point. Particularly when I have made it very clear that JRPGs aren't just "one single aspect", they are many aspects in one single game that it may or may not have, but it's not just one aspect that makes an RPG a "JRPG".

 

the ironical thing is that the current Western-developed RPG also went thru an incredibly length period (i.e. between 1995-2005) where, as the PC market "blew up" or whatever, the games were no required to compete with other genres, just like JRPGs had always / have always had to; and this meant that Western-developed RPGs began shifting emphasis away from mechanics over to:

- graphics / animations / colors
- soundtracks / music / sound FX
- making the games easier-to-play and "easier-to-access" by Westerners who were not neckbearded and/or virginal.

The Rise of Bethesda is the only thing I need to type to drive this point home.

Bethesda, in my opinion, has single-handedly killed off the majority of the mechanically-driven Western RPG.

And, again ironically, it is also in a similar way to the japs (currently finding their footing with this new-fangled home PC game playing / game buying experience); Westerners are also only recently beginning to make mid-budget RPGs again without the need to compete directly with other, higher-profile game genres.

 

As soon as I use your own moronic non-argument against you it becomes a strawman. Nice.

Literally back pedaling and doubling down.

 

Nowhere near the amount JRPGs force on you, or for how much time, or how you are supposed to feel about them: all things very important in traditional JRPGs.

It isn't. You get to make your own choices alongside the story, whether they matter or not is a different thing, but there are choices to be made. In Final Fantasy, I can't even voice my idea of "hey I want to see with this guy instead". In SMT, at least I could choose what kind of world I wanted.

The end of the world, as portrayed in SMT, I would consider extremely mature as opposed to "oh noes evil person wants to take over the world! the power of friendship will stop him!".

I covered this before. Those games are much more closer to not being JRPGs than they are to JRPGs.

Not my fault that you are a moron who thinks "if it is characteristic of JRPGs then all JRPGs must be like that!".

It isn't. I never said it was. Defining a JRPG is pretty much like defining an RPG: not every RPG shares the same elements, but when games share a considerable amount of RPG elements then there's a good chance they are RPGs. Same with JRPGs.

 

I am not very familiar with the series in question, but even if that argument isn't very good (one characteristic in common between two different genres doesn't mean they are the same, and JRPGs and WRPGs don't need to be the only genres you can have), his other arguments sound pretty good.

 

I don't think so. He isn't making any sense, really.

If we can't admit "JRPGs" exist as a label, we also have to admit "RPGs" doesn't exist as a label.

 

I thought that his point was simply that the SMT games are JRPGs.

 

Yeah, it is. He didn't justify why, though. Apparently, they just are. Even if they are radically different to your average JRPG in more ways than one.

 

Neverwinter Nights 2 forces every single party member to join you. It even has "fuck off" as a dialogue option each time you talk to one but then they just go "lol I know you're just joking, let's go". Is it also a jRPG? No. It's not. It's not even an example of what the majority of wRPGs are, because they are pretty diverse. Same as jRPGs. You have narrative focused jRPGs that force characters on you and then you have games that don't do that. Some narrative / character focused games even have unique characters that can die off permanently, like in Fire Emblem.

Of which none of your choices actually change anything until the alignment check. They just add / subtract from a hidden alignment value when you make your choices, and maybe someone will say a line or two differently to react to you (usually they'll call you out for being a dick or back you up for not being a dick). You're over estimating how much C&C and freedom SMT gives. It gives you almost ultimate freedom in its combat gameplay mechanics, but not so much in its story. Nothing particularly mind blowing. There are tons of games that are much, MUCH better examples of having an open ended story, like the SaGa series.

That's literally what happens in some of the endings in SMT. It's like.. like you're talking about things you have no first hand experience in. Whoa, what a revelation.