I would like to share my personal experience, which is a bit different than usual (I think). Please indulge me (and my abysmal english. I am not an english speaker by the way)
I never played any JRPGs up until recently. When I was young I played only western games during what I think is the apex of western PC gaming: the Ultima games, Ultima Underworld, Fallout 1&2, Baldur's Gate 1&2, Planescape Torment, Gothic 1&2, Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock 1&2, Bloodlines, Arcanum, Morrowind, etc...
I think the first JRPG that I played was in 2015, that is, well beyond my youth... I never possessed a console, and in 2015 I realized there were many good emulators for a lot of Japanese console systems. Emuparadise an similar sites were still open, and I found literally an universe to explore. I was very curious about all these games I never touched.
I had to decide where to start. I documented myself a bit, and tried to identify the best entry point to this huge uncharted (at least by me) universe. The choice for the entry point was Persona 4 for the PS2. I decided to play the last entry of the Persona series (Persona 5 still didn't exist) assuming that the latest one should be the one with more QoL improvements: there was still a possibility that I will not like these games at all, and I wanted to facilitate and lubricate the experience as much as possible...
It was an authentic revelation.
But to understand this I need first to do some another bits of contextualisation. After having experienced the Apex of PC gaming during my youth, I then experienced its continuous decline. I have seen the decline of RPG in various aspects, the abandon of turn based combat for the RTwP abomination, the advent of ARPGs like Diablo et al. that redefined the western panorama as a desolated compulsive clickfest with micro-transactions, the involution of RPG franchises, such as Fallout or Mass Effect, into mind-numbing shooters, etc... It was truly the dark age of western gaming. The only fresh air arrived from the eastern Europe, in a game titled "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." By the way, that game was (is) so different from the rest of the western clichès and tropes that maybe it is not correct to identify it as a "westerns game" at all. Maybe when we criticize western gaming or WRPG we need to discriminate also between U.S. and other western countries. However S.T.A.L.K.E.R was only a single exception to the general desolation. By the end of 2015 I was almost quitting gaming.
As I said, for me Persona 4 was a true revelation, in particular when compared with the rest of WRPGs. It had:
- Completely original setting: a little CONTEMPORARY rural town!
- The main characters are not superheroes with bodybuilding bodies (and big boobs in case of females) and with square jaws (for both males and females), but just ordinary teenagers with a slender and normal aspect!
- The story is actually interesting, with a real mystery that keep you guessing to the end.
- The "powers" that allows the main characters to fight the monsters are not standard bombastic superpowers, they are subtle and pertain to the acceptance of the self.
- The monsters... Their design is anything than trivial. So different and novel when compared with western games.
- Interesting NPCs everywhere (Ok, this is thanks to the implementation of the date sim aspects of the game).
- TURN BASED COMBAT!!!! Read that again. I didn't believe my eyes when I realized that. Keep in mind that Persona 4 is a "modern" game. it was published in 2012 I think, that is in the years in which the common statement of western game developers and critics was that turn based was something prehistoric, very very "old" and not fun, and that all the new games should be more and more action oriented to be "modern".
- For the first time I had a vision of what a modern turn based combat system could have been evolved into, if it wasn't for the word of the God of the west that totally banished it from AAA RPGs. The combats in Persona 4 were very intense, strategic, dynamic. Even from the presentation point of view they were more dynamic and beautifully choreographed than any action WRPGs I have played so far.
Other JRPGs soon followed in my esplorative playing list: the other Persona games (emulating the PS1, PSP, PS2 and also the PS3 for Persona 5), then I switched to play the even more interesting original SMT games and all the available spin-off (Nocturne, Digital Devil Saga, 1&2, Raidou Kuzunoha 1&2 for the PS2, Devil Surivor 1&2, Strange Journey for the DS, SMT 4 & Apocalypse, Persona Q for the 3DS, etc..., etc....). The I added to the list many, many, many other JRPGs from other franchises/developers (although SMT and Atlus remain my favorite). I think I played almost all the most famous and/or the best translated JRPGs, the only exception is Final Fantasy, for the moment I was able to play only the 7, 8 and 9. I don't like the chibi style of the early SNES games, and I tried FFX and FFXII several times but abandoned early in the play due to boredom.
It's incredible how many games I was able to play in so few years (more than an hundred in four year) and now, understandably I feel a bit of fatigue... and I am not compelled to play them as before. But this is what in the end I found good in JRPGs: while I recognize now that too many of them have a lot of problems and their share of insufferable tropes and clichès, at that time in my life (2015-), they were my most needed antidote to the stagnant western gaming culture that nauseated me.
