On western RPGs and user satisfaction, compared to JRPGs

[HarveyBirdman]

Half of those slashers action games with sone small rpg element's.

But what is an RPG?

 

[TemplarGR]

Yes, CRPGs and strategy games have many similarities. What is the difference between Baldur's Gate and Starcraft from a gameplay perspective? Just that you control a small party of specialized units instead of random mobs of generic units and you configure their equipment... That's it...

I think that most people don't fundamentally understand what RPGs are. The term is flawed and has been abused by the gaming industry for decades so in the end most people just define RPGs as the games that resemble what they got used to the most when they first heard the term RPG...

To be fair, true, genuine, roleplay, is something that cannot be done properly in a single player video game environment, period. You need other people to roleplay WITH, because a computer cannot replicate the experience. You need other people to be the targets of your roleplay. A computer is too artificial and not matter how much things advance in gaming technology, will never be able to adapt 100% to every player choice in a believable fashion in a 60$ single player game... That is why MMORPGs are better roleplay games than any single player game, assuming people are provided the tools to roleplay and are not just grind-a-thons for Koreans.

Most people on the Codex are so fixated to the minutiae of classic crpgs, and in the end confuse roleplaying with excel spreadsheets and number porn. That is where the autism and sperg accusations are derived from... That is why i enjoy making fun of them so much, it is hillarious to me how retarded some people on this forum are, and they have the audacity to put labels on ME...

It is especially ironic when some people call games like Skyrim "dumbed down in role play", while in fact, Skyrim (especially with the assistance of mods) is probably the closest any single player game has managed to be to proper roleplaying (another more codex-approved example could be Vampire Bloodlines)... They criticise Skyrim for lacking STRATEGY/TACTICS elements, yet they claim it is a lesser RPG for it...

I think the term RPG is useless at this point for video games. It applies to many different things and typically is a misnomer for most games it is used for. I prefer calling games like Skyrim "sandboxes", not because they are not role playing but because ultimately calling them sandboxes is differentiating them from strategy games.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

To be fair, true, genuine, roleplay, is something that cannot be done properly in a single player video game environment, period. You need other people to roleplay WITH, because a computer cannot replicate the experience. You need other people to be the targets of your roleplay.

Aw, homie...

 

[rusty_shackleford]

most jrgs are less of an rpg than modern western action-adventure games

 

[HarveyBirdman]

most jrgs are less of an rpg than modern western action-adventure games

Not if you exclusively roleplay as Kirito.

 

[Neanderthal]

most rpgs are action-adventure games

FTFY.

 

[Raghar]

Roleplay is not starting with movies. It start first with stories when some old grizzled veterans tell at campfires with the teller maybe act it out and listeners immerse themselves in that. If the whippersnappers want to change details like the correct skills of main character, or change the dialog between MC and other char, either the teller or other listeners will snarl him down~

Then it advanced with stories on writing materials. Then movies.

Like it or not, jRPG follow the oldest definition of ropleplay, fun or not.

The fun thing about oral history is that details are often different between different groups of storytellers. We can see the proof of that in the ancient myths that have been written down, be it Sumerian and Akkadian, Greek, or Norse. There are several versions of the same myths, written down by different people in different locations, and the details are slightly different. Gilgamesh is a great example: there are many stories about this great hero, and even when archaeologists find tablets containing a story that is already known from other sources, it will have minor details that differ from the already known versions.

Why? Because oral storytelling lends itself perfectly to putting your own spin on a story. Heck, often it was even politically motivated - your own village gets a larger role in the tale than it originally had, but everyone cheers you on as you tell the story because they like that new detail.

So no, when a storyteller changed the story, he wasn't snarled down by the listeners. He was cheered on because the listeners got to hear a version of the story they hadn't heard before, which made it much more exciting to listen to

Considering EUROPEANS didn't changed important parts of story. And some people were so pissed when they heard two different version, they forced these two people who told them stuff differently to tell which version is right... No matter how brutal the investigation was. Well, you might be claiming that morons in central europe were different. But nobody likes when someone is pulling his leg.

I'm pretty sure some bard organizations had quite stringent requirements.

 

[hexer]

Most JRPGs are developed in the same restrictive yet very dev-friendy game engines.
Don't expect much difference between titles but do expect lots of titles to plague the market.

On the other hand, western RPGs also follow the same formula for quite some time now:
make the world grim and depressing, throw in some emotional story about coming of age or getting grips about adult responsibilities,
have an "already seen it somewhere" combat system and very flashy graphics so you can claim your GOTY award later.

What I personally want to see more from both sides is experimentation in order to bring back that excitement again because you picked up a new game and have no clue where it will take you.

 

[Karellen]

The whole reason I did my break down was to emphasis what makes JRPGs enjoyable more precisely: tactical combat + cinematic story telling. They're not "roleplaying" games in the sense of either "roleplaying" another character, or "roleplaying yourself," both of which would require them to offer opportunities for player expression to a much larger degree than they do. Rather, you should think of JRPGs as being more like Western action games, but with a turn-based combat system. Your Resident Evil analogy is spot on, in this respect.

Is Call of Duty a "roleplaying" game? People have argued that it is, because it puts you in the shoes of a World War 2 soldier, so technically you are playing a role. But that's missing the forest for the trees. Call of Duty isn't "roleplaying" because you're not being evaluated on - nor does the game respond to - any form of player expression other than shooting people. Calling such a game "roleplaying" would be obsessing over a technicality, rather than looking at the larger experience that it represents. On the other hand, should Call of Duty start inserting other forms of player expressions, like talking with squad mates, dealing with shell shock, and making moral decisions on the field, then it will become, more and more, a "roleplaying" game.

The key to all this, however, is that the player has to be able to influence these expressions, to be an agent in the world. Otherwise, it becomes just a movie, and watching movies is not "roleplaying" any more than reading books is.

I feel like I'm starting to get unnecessarily obstinate about this, but it seems to me that if you were right, you could just take any JRPG and remove everything that isn't watching cutscenes and fighting battles, and people would like it just fine. It so happens that the experiment has been done, since that's basically what Final Fantasy XIII's pared down take on the JRPG formula was. It turned out that JRPG fans were extremely unhappy; you could even say that they considered the game to be "decline". It seems that all the other stuff, like exploring dungeons, walking around on the world map, occasionally making a dialogue choice and traipsing about in towns talking to strangers is somehow an essential component of what makes a good JRPG, even though in most dialogues you don't select one out of four phrases to say. The thing is, I'm not entirely sure why that is, but my guess is that it's roleplaying or "player expression" of some sort.

Of course, it also turns out that having basically nothing except tactical combat and cinematic storytelling is a viable combination, because that's actually a fairly good description of Valkyria Chronicles and several other perfectly fine games in the tactical RPG subgenre (though the "cinematic storytelling" is more of a side dish, there). That said, even a game like Valkyria Chronicles has something of an RPG in it. In Chess, most games that are considered especially interesting or beautiful involve the winner sacrificing a lot of pieces to produce a forced mate. But people generally don't play tactical RPGs like this even if there is no tactical or long-term strategic disadvantage to having characters die (permanently or otherwise), because the the player is invested in the characters and wants them to survive.

There is no singular player action that is explicitly roleplaying; otherwise, Call of Duty could probably press F to Pay Respects to RPG-dom. Whether something is roleplaying or not is ultimately down to why the player decided to do that thing. Plenty of games that aren't explicitly RPGs have room for that; if anything, my desire to affect a "role" probably has a bigger bearing on how I play strategy games than RPGs. One can play FTL perfectly well as an abstract strategy game to increase one's high score without roleplaying at all, and the more you play, the more your playstyle will probably necessarily gravitate towards that. It's a lot more fun, though, when crewmembers dying isn't just a strategic inconvenience and when you care about whether you help out a passing freighter or kill a jerkass Mantis pirate.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

JRPG fans are like the dudes who have decided to accept their limitations and date landwhales. Once they do this, they become a lot happier than someone like warpig, who still wants to date a supermodel. Or someone who wants an actually good RPG.

 

[Raghar]

The sheer linearity and the frequency with which control over your characters is taken away from you is a defining feature of the experience. Even a good JRPG like Chrono Trigger often takes control away from you,

Spoiler

By killing main character.

(And it's not like you were not informed about that before that happened.) In IWD2 you need to do certain task before someone tells you what is likely to happen, and finish sentence: but if you would tell him you'd get yourself KILLED for sure.


I'm not sure if that is bad. For example early part of GANTZ was gritty and lethal because every character could explode in a GRUESOME way. BTW these fuckers didn't helped only character who could tell them what's happening, some did it for inactivity, other because they seen him as a murderer who got what he sow.
One of funny exposition is an accident which shows they could kick enemies out alive, without killing them in gruesome way.
Of course nobody told them anything, and main characters got into GANTZ because they were morons who jumped into a railroad track to help person who fell down by an accident, then they discovered the arriving train is an express.

If some games were more gritty, it would help some stories. ME2 felt safe like kindergarden.

An RPG can be a proper RPG and a good game with barely any story at all. Just give me a decent dungeon crawler and I'm happy with that. Japs are pretty good at delivering that experience, and I enjoy their games focused on the combat and exploration experience, be it classic crawlers or modern action RPGs like Dark Souls. But whenever a stronger element of story is added, it just devolves into "read dialogues where you don't get to choose your responses, and watch cutscenes where you don't get to make any decisions". It's just completely static and hands-off, and it takes me out of the experience. The fact that these are often unskippable and excruciatingly slow (god, the way text in JRPGs tends to be typed out rather than appearing instantly... urgh) makes it even worse.

How do you like books? Stories in books are static.

BTW have you tried to press x? Or was it square?

And a game that regularly and with a high frequency takes away control of my character from me is not a good RPG.

Actually I don't remember many games that FREQUENTLY takes control of main character.

I hate retarded scripted sequences where your party walks into an ambush and gets captured for story reasons, too. Interestingly enough, Dragon Age did that kind of scene well, it's been a long time since I played it but I remember a hard as fuck battle at the end, after which you're supposed to be taken prisoner. You're supposed to lose it, and it's designed in a way to be almost impossible to win, but you get to fight it and you CAN even win it if you play it well, skipping the imprisonment entirely. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Wait that was because you were supposed to be captured? I thought the combat was hard because I used mage with sword, and roleplayed thus I didn't have optimal spell selection. It ended by room littered by bodies only two standing were my main character, and Ser. No more lyrium potions. Both nearly dead. Last attack with sword from main character happened before Ser could finish main character, and killed Ser.

(I actually saved that, reloaded earlier save and tried also prison break version, get that horned person with you if you do that, he has funny comment. I looked at forum after that fight just curious how hard it was for others, and found there is also an alternative path. Then I reloaded the original version and finished blind ironman.)

When you think about story, killing Ser should have BAD consequence in DA3. There were not many capable, honest, and selfless officials in DA. The power vacuum caused by defeating Ser should send DA government into repeating cycle of bad government decisions caused by less capable replacements.

In your standard JRPG, you get lots and lots and lots of scenes where your characters act without your input, and the story just progresses without you having any say over it. So many story beats happen because of things your characters do while you have no control over them, and that is simply inacceptable in an RPG. This didn't happen in the early RPGs like Ultima, Wizardry, Might and Magic. They barely had any story, sure, but once they started introducing stories and more complex quests, control over your character or party was never taken away from you.

Vampire tM:B you can have this conversation:
1 I do that.
2 I do that.
3 I do that.

You definitely always have a choice. But sometimes all opinions sucks.

In DM, you start captured escaping from prison. The story element that took control from your character, happened before start of the RPG.
In BG2, your party starts captured, and you lose one member before end of first act. Can you avoid that?
In ELEX. You flied in the sky like a bird, at high position, with henchmen. Then you hit the ground. And it's not only time the main character is screwed before end.

No cutscene-induced incompetence, no decisions your party would make without your input. When it comes to handling conversations, most early RPGs would employ a keyword system where you, the player, actively typed in keywords you wanted to talk about, or chose them from a list.

Are you sure about that? I remember about games that said one thing in options, then the character said something completely different. Don't remember if it was Mass Effect, or Alpha Protocol.

It's all these hands-off, input-less elements that make many JRPGs feel not like RPGs at all to me, so far as to have nothing in common with western RPGs anymore, not even with the 80s RPGs they were inspired by. This is a major, major difference between western and Japanese RPGs, and this is precisely why many JRPG players can't get into western RPGs, and why many western RPG players are put off by JRPGs. Putting them into the same genre when their very design principles are so fundamentally different is confusing to those expecting roughly similar experiences when they see the label "RPG".

You can beat up monsters in Persona 3 the same as you can beat up monsters in random western dungeon crawl. Thought only western dungeon crawl I remember that had monster fusion was Geneforge.

 

[Theldaran]

what would the character want to do in this situation

Indeed, this is called roleplaying.

what would be the advantageous thing for the character to do

Indeed, this is called gaming.

This analogy is pretty interesting for JRPGs, because in a re-enactment the actors don't necessarily have a lot of freedom in their role, yet taking part still feels like, well, being a participant.

Whether the purpose is theater, ritual, training, make pretend, or because you're an attention whore, roleplaying boils down to two processes: interpret and perform. The former is used to understand the role, and the latter is used to act it out. The closest modern profession is probably acting. However, in JRPGs you don't act. The character acts for you. It is therefore dumb fuck to argue that JRPGs are better at roleplaying than Western CRPGs. Neither are particularly great at it, but arguing that JRPGs are closer to the original form of roleplaying because "story telling," is to miss the actor for the audience. Brad Pitt is roleplaying in Fight Club. You, the audience, are not. Thus, JRPGs where all you do is watch a teenage spaz go through a psychological break down on his way to the power of friendship don't actually have any roleplaying. They're just tactical strategy games with a focus on story presentation.

The reason any of this is confusing at all is because even the original Western CRPGs don't feature much roleplaying, and you could easily argue that roleplaying is a poor description of the game component of the genre. Roleplaying games emerged as a special branch of tactical strategy games. Gary Gygax was a tactical strategy games fan. It would not be inaccurate to say that the entire genre of roleplaying games should just be named "tactical strategy games," and that we're not actually roleplaying game fans, but strategy game fans. That would make tremendously more sense, in many respects, because there is a huge amount of overlap between the two genres and, more often than not, people who are attracted to roleplaying games will also be attracted to other strategy games because they have very similar game mechanic appeals. That is certainly the case for me.

However, the term "roleplaying" stuck because there was a belief that Dungeons and Dragons nerds actually dressed up as elves and wizards and pretended they were their characters. This performative aspect was, indeed, roleplaying as defined, and it became associated with roleplaying games, an association that continues to this day. But the digital version of roleplaying games are so devoid of this component that they might as well be treated as tactical strategy games with story, which is especially the case with JRPGs, most of which are so removed from the performative aspect of roleplaying that they don't fit any of the conditions.

You want to see the roleplaying component in its polished form, go watch Critical Role. There's a reason why actors and voice actors are the most suited to the activity - because their entire profession is roleplaying so it's what they're best at. But the game aspect, which is how most people enjoy the genre? That's a different story altogether, and one that we could claim to be experts in.

Are you meaning to say tabletop RPGs are about tactical combat? Well, in my old group, if you couldn't properly RP your character (even if it was an easy persona) you would be frowned upon.

It's as stupid to take away all combat as to take away all RP. Virtue is in the balance. I still give you that a 100% dungeoneering campaign can work better than 100% LARP. Just move the gauge to something in the middle.

As for CRPG, of course, they're a mutilated version of tabletop. Still they should strike the same balance. The hardest thing is for the devs to anticipate what you want to play and say, so most games have fixed dialogues no matter who your character is or what he does, and that's also why JRPGs tell a fixed story. But still, there's not that big a difference between Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy in terms of the story (it's still fixed with fixed events).

 

[JarlFrank]

How do you like books? Stories in books are static.

I love books and read a couple of new ones each year. But they're a different medium to which different standards and styles apply.

Books and movies are both static, but employ vastly different storytelling techniques - heck, even books and comics are very different in how they convey the story (purely text-based vs visual + text vs visual + audio).

I even enjoy the occasional text adventure, preferably parser based but those recently popular CYOA things are also enjoyable. But I would be heavily disappointed to find out that every choice leads to the same result in a CYOA book, for obvious reasons. They're an interactive medium and not supposed to be static.

 

[JarlFrank]

No cutscene-induced incompetence, no decisions your party would make without your input. When it comes to handling conversations, most early RPGs would employ a keyword system where you, the player, actively typed in keywords you wanted to talk about, or chose them from a list.

Are you sure about that? I remember about games that said one thing in options, then the character said something completely different. Don't remember if it was Mass Effect, or Alpha Protocol.

With that sentence, I was referring to old games of the 80s and early 90s, not newer ones, should have been clear from the context since I wrote "most early RPGs".

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

I'm not sure if that is bad. For example early part of GANTZ was gritty and lethal because every character could explode in a GRUESOME way. BTW these fuckers didn't helped only character who could tell them what's happening, some did it for inactivity, other because they seen him as a murderer who got what he sow.
One of funny exposition is an accident which shows they could kick enemies out alive, without killing them in gruesome way.
Of course nobody told them anything, and main characters got into GANTZ because they were morons who jumped into a railroad track to help person who fell down by an accident, then they discovered the arriving train is an express.

I just wanna say that I would kill to have a proper Gantz RPG. It's such a fun mixture of violence, sex, and goofiness and would work so well for a squad based RPG.

 

[Machocruz]

Combat and RP are not separate if combat is a character's livelihood and thus part of their identity, which in most RPGs people want to actually play, it is. Typical RPG campaign, whether PnP or digital, you are essentially a group of violent mercs or interlopers of some description. Some like to say "murderhobos" Role-playing isn't just talking to people/social dynamics, which its seems a lot of people think.

 

[Dorateen]

Combat and RP are not separate if combat is a character's livelihood and thus part of their identity.

In other words, the theatre of combat is the greatest platform for role-playing and expression of a character, which is something I've been saying all along. The story clowns have been wrong from the beginning.

 

[Machocruz]

In other words, the theatre of combat is the greatest platform for role-playing and expression of a character, which is something I've been saying all along. The story clowns have been wrong from the beginning.

Potentially. Some people believe that crisis shows you who you really are. Video games do a bad job of connecting humanity and combat.

 

[cvv]

Everybody listen to me ok, if you are over 10 years old and you still find it acceptable, even enjoyable to play with characters like this:

or this:

then you've never went through puberty and the damage is permanent.

And no, it doesn't matter how good the gameplay is.

 

[SecondAmendment]

There is no singular player action that is explicitly roleplaying; otherwise, Call of Duty could probably press F to Pay Respects to RPG-dom.

Got to say that was a nice turn of phrase.

 

[Bohrain]

Most JRPGs are developed in the same restrictive yet very dev-friendy game engines.
Don't expect much difference between titles but do expect lots of titles to plague the market.

I think it's more about sticking to the design formulas some of the older and successful titles had than engine limitations.
The first big JRPG was Draqon Quest which had turn based, first person combat from Wizardry combined with overworld view from Ultima. Those design convention became pretty stable, along with linear numeric character progression. And as an important fact it was a console game.
The 80's and early 90's RPG's were linear combat heavy games in both east and the west. Difference was that since westerners had a large and influental P&P scene there were devs who were familiar with them and customer base who wanted to see some of the mechanics in computer games. On the other hand the domestic Japanese audience was console audience from the start who were unfamiliar with P&P systems. Once the technology got bit better, I think those aforementioned differences explain why the west made Baldur's Gate and Fallout while the east made Final Fantasy 7. Pen and paper influence is pretty evident on the CRPG's, while FF7 was the first massively successful 3D cutscene heavy RPG. The Japanese used the medium to make linear cutscene heavy adventure games with turn based combat and simplistic numerical character progression thrown into it and it stuck.

There are of course plenty JRPG's that derive from these conventions, but the Shin Megami Tenseis, Romancing Sagas and Tactics Ogres were never the big influental hits.

 

[adrix89]

I think what is missing in this discussion is RPGs are about making you feel you are part of the fantasy world, it's escapism. It's the illusion that you are living in a world.
The appeal of cRPGs is the world is reactive to you through your choices.
That's the whole choice and consequence spiel. They are CYOA books with some explicit character progression, some spatial presentation and movement, and some miscilationus stuff like items to deepen your illusion of the world.
JRPGs are more like a traditional linear story that you find in a fantasy book. And just like in the books escapism is still the appeal.
I think that is the Core Root on what has amalgamated on the RPG genre outside of the tactical strategy aspects.
Even PnP RPGs are not exactly theater and still have living in a world as a premise. They aren't exactly acting out a already scripted story, although the GM would certainly want to.

In other words RPGs pretty much are just Adventure Games, just that they followed different evolutionary paths with different tropes and feature sets, especially in the tactical strategy and progression aspects.