Can someone summarize to me the appeal of JRPGs?

[Louis_Cypher]

Who painted these?

Frank Frazetta for the first one at least. The second looks familiar but I can't place it right now. Joe Jusko?

 

[Vic]

JRPGs are better than modern WRPGs.

If you don't agree, go suck some tranny dick, faggot.

 

[ind33d]

JRPGs are better than modern WRPGs.

If you don't agree, go suck some tranny dick, faggot.

AA games are also probably better than diversity-consulted AAA games. Is there a list of AA RPGs that were considered mediocre at the time but probably still better than all the garbage coming out now?

 

[Dark Souls II]

Little girl cute and funny.

/thread

 

[KeAShizuku]

Oh I agree degeneracy is what makes life worth living.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

It isn't just J-rpgs.....



Based on that thumbnail; clearly, that cow-cop likes certain objects too much.



Hmmm.... the company is named after a hobbit. Didn't we have a thread on how people hate hobbits. This might be a reason. Hobbits lead to furries.





Yep, watch out for J-furrry gaming.

 

[Darth Canoli]

JRPGs are better than modern WRPGs.

If you don't agree, go suck some tranny dick, faggot.

And yet, Kotc 1, 2, Colony Ship and AoD exist...

 

[Reinhardt]

kotc2 is a jrpg. animu tokens ftw.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

KOTC reminded me a little of WOTES.



And that is the comvat U7 & SI should have used imho. 3D FPS-like dungeons might be a bit overboard though. Eh! I would have played other titles like that. A full WOTES construction set which imho is like DARKSUN+EOB+shooter would have been great.


Number 2 animu? Eh? Maybe I be blind.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

JRPGs are better than modern WRPGs.

If you don't agree, go suck some tranny dick, faggot.

And yet, Kotc 1, 2, Colony Ship and AoD exist...

and ur AND UR

 

[Cat Dude]

Idk why western devs are so obsessed of making everything looks dull, ugly and souless. It feels like the devs are living in war torn countries. One of the worst offenders is Gothic series. May be it is a cultural thing.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

So you don't like Dark Dungeons either I guess? There surely are some jrpgs that look dark and soulless? I know I saw at least one anime or manga that depicted such.

 

[Cat Dude]

You have some jrpg games set in modern setting. Something 'creatives' from the west are never able to make where 99% of their games are either Gothic, Star Trek or BG clones.

 

[Machocruz]

France has the only good aesthetic sense in the west still. They are a respite from ugliness and anime.

 

[pakoito]

France has the only good aesthetic sense in the west still. They are a respite from ugliness and anime.

They prefer One Piece to Dragon Ball and Naruto, your point is invalid.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

France has the only good aesthetic sense in the west still. They are a respite from ugliness and anime.

Solasta agrees!

 

[Reinhardt]

western games are full of retards who ashamed they has to work on games. they want to make movies or write books or some other ART. games are for kids and chuds, world will notice my overwhelming talent any day now!
japan was lagging behind and had some people still passionate about their hobby until recently but now when they started working with west more closely or even taking orders from california office directly they quickly catching up.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

western games are full of retards who ashamed they has to work on games.

The same could be said for several popular Japanese game and anime creators like Mamoru Oshii and Nobuo Uematsu, who originally wanted to make live action film but had to "settle" for anime and video games, but wound up loving that instead.

 

[GamerCat_]

A strength of Japanese games has always been that they can embrace limitations as form and tradition and work them towards clever and charming ends. Elements of crpgs that stick always seem to be arbitrary, and sometimes defended on schizophrenic grounds like "realism", or "depth"/"strategy". Product of tech and computer culture designers who see themselves as progressing towards some kind of more perfect realisation of whatever they're into at any time, rather than embracing the state of things as a convention.

JRPG game systems and tools utilised tend to feel very complete, even if novel. CRPG game systems to me always feel incomplete, like I'm meant to be enjoying what they're working towards, and what this system is ideally meant to be doing. "Bro every NPC has an inventory it's so deep and realistic" [proceeds to practice save-scum pickpocketing to become a billionaire, can kill every boss by save-scumming a grenade up their ass].
Atelier Iris is entirely made out of old established conventions and complete, simple systems. The introduction of Atelier's item combination rules and mechanics into a more stock Final Fantasyish frame doesn't really mess with anything. Just a simple gimmick. The presentation is what really grabbed me. Lots of 2D and sprites, feels like a Japanese PC game.

Isometric world, sprite characters, matte painting style illustrated backgrounds, VN style high detail portraits for dialogue scenes. And of course the amazing opening sequence is also an old established form. It's an anime OP.



JRPGs are all about this economy of media. CRPGs manage to be boringly the same to me, but also never give off the sense of being an established form. Instead it's the same folly repeated over and over again. Trying to create the world on a wire and getting about as far as is plausible with the resources of a game production, and the next guy is going to start again at zero using that as a template. I see that people make entirely new games on the Fallout engine, which is kind of nice. I really like total conversions. But to me it begs the question of "why?" I've never seen the Fallout engine or core mechanics as being particularly good vehicles for any particular general thing. I suppose if you really like brown dirt, square buildings full of people who look like shifting brown dirtpiles, and the world's shittiest "combat" and character builder. Yeah I think there's a reason not many people do this. LORD Todd Howard's engine has always been a more justified modding platform. Because looking at three dimensional stuff is inherently kind of interesting. You can make an idea you have more interesting by rendering it in 3D. Rendering something into Fallout 2 though... well it will eventually be rendered into a Warlockcracy video. So if your final goal is to have your shitty stock genre fiction plot rendered into a bedtime creepypasta for mexican 13 year olds, yeah making your thing in Fallout 2, that's the go.

JRPG makes perfect sense as a kind of stock way to make a game about anything. Basically interesting and non-intrusive refined game-element surrounded by presentation-oriented stuff that's all about acting as a vehicle for your anime thing. JRPGs are like an evolution of tv-anime. While CRPGs are of course an evolution of RPG game/worldbooks and tabletop. But the latter is a very confused tradition in which the vehicle form becomes the point and isn't even very good on its own. People like Fallout 1+2 for the parts that could be reworked into a novel or a scenario book. I read about the games on the old wiki (it used to be excellent) before I played them and enjoyed that more. Maybe that's kind of true for JRPGs too, but far less so. A JRPG is a lot to play through today, can get a big bogged down in all the stuff. But I'll still play one now and then. I don't think you could get me to play a classic CRPG at gunpoint.

 

[Reinhardt]

people keep saying "oy vey, you play as boy who fights against demon kang!" as if it's something bad. fuck you. i already play as grown up man in a shitty brown world with gray morale and retarded choices and consequences every day. wanting to do it in games too is like that german meme where hans relaxing after work by playing forklift simulator.
i don't need to prove anything to anyone. i just want to play game i can enjoy. i want to see good kicking ebul's phat ass. that's all.

 

[GamerCat_]

people keep saying "oy vey, you play as boy who fights against demon kang!" as if it's something bad. fuck you. i already play as grown up man in a shitty brown world with gray morale and retarded choices and consequences every day. wanting to do it in games too is like that german meme where hans relaxing after work by playing forklift simulator.
i don't need to prove anything to anyone. i just want to play game i can enjoy. i want to see good kicking ebul's phat ass. that's all.

I wrote a thread on another site about 'Gray Morality' framed by an account of my playing through the first town in 'Age of Decadence'.

What I found really obnoxious about that game was that it seemed very impressed with itself for forcing hard choices on me. But those hard choices were very much forced by contrived framing and mechanical options, and the circumstances that brought them about kept striking me as very silly. Killing 1/3 of the local population centre in a day over the course of odd jobs and contrived hostile encounters to farm xp from the task complete milestones behind their corpses is not a gritty view of the human condition. It's just a CRPG. And the dialogue and insight into hard life reminds me of how criminals are written in capeshit. 'The Punisher: Year One', Brubaker's 'Criminal'. The way guys announce like one big cynical thing they're doing at a time as a kind of expository initiation to feel like you're now in it (this is The Wire's trick by the way).

I have never encountered a CRPG player who struck me as uniquely interested in people in a uniquely grounded or amorally clearsighted way. It's a form of barely verbose capeshit. Something I've never seen anybody else point out, but people have always agreed with me when I brought it up. There are a lot of Second Worlders who make their identity being CRPG Guys, and they lean into the morally gray thing by playing up the accents and the corruption and misery of their homelands with stupid countryball national memes to sell the idea that they themselves are more initiated insiders better suited to appraise this kind of thing. Slightly accented soyjaks pretending to be cool chill guys who could totally hang with the homeless schizophrenic black people who scare you on public transit.

Now trying to frame the typical CRPG thing of killing half of the population any place you wash up and resorting to extraordinary violence to solve deadlocked problems constantly as somehow novel, trying to get cute about that, that kind of low metafaggotry is present to an extent in Age of Decadence. To some extent it is aware that it is playing into convention, or its defenders tell me so at least. But then that begs the question, "why?"

The JRPG standard is justified by being pleasant, beautiful, and actually stabbing deeper towards truths of the human condition than endless taverns full of thugs who do under the table work for the local corrupt merchant boss. I think "demon king" is more of a filler light novel concept, while the JRPG meme specifically is "kill God". And for good reason, you actually do that a lot. And Killing God is actually meant as a gesture of radical self-assertion and total egoism. It means something. Something fitting for how beautiful and indulgent these games tend to be. While in Age of Decadence you can also kill a God. But he's basically just a particularly powerful corrupt guild boss. Awesome.

 

[Machocruz]

They prefer One Piece to Dragon Ball and Naruto, your point is invalid.

I meant their artists, not Joe Public who has mid taste in every nation. But....

Solasta agrees!

...guess it only applies to their comic artists

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

...guess it only applies to their comic artists

In fairness to Tactical Adventures, they seem to have responded to criticism of the character graphics when developing the sequel:

 

[Cat Dude]

What game?

Well you can see women nipples and sex scenes in wrpg. That makes it even.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I think I tried that "upskirting" in Hellgate London as well. We know I did a bit in Aion & Perfect World International. Ah! the KKK (Killer Klown Krew) and the maidens seduced on line.