The Archetypal Resonance of Classic JRPGs

The Archetypal Resonance of Classic JRPGs(hyperindexed.com)

105 points by hyperindexed 7 years ago | 62 comments

angarg12 7 years ago |

Sometimes I play retro games, and I feel like nostalgia makes us excuse what is plain bad design. I have that feeling every time I play an old JRPG. Many of them feel slow, clunky, with painful mechanics... as opposed to current games, which had the experience from decades to get refined. The argument in favour of this is that the bad and boring parts make the good bits even better, in a sort of stoic way, they feel like a reward for the suffering. I leave as an exercise to the reader to draw their own conclusion.

badsectoracula 7 years ago | |

What sort of conclusion is there to be drawn when you have already labeled the older games as slow, clunky with painful mechanics and newer games as refined? :-P

I've seen many people say (about games in general) that older games often have more depth in contrast of newer more "casualized" games that cater to the lowest common denominator as often as people say what you wrote. At the end is really about personal taste and if there is one objective thing that older games often do worse (apart from technical limitations, although with the popularity of retro-styled games nowadays often these limitations are seen through a stylistic prism) is their user interfaces. But even that divides people in how much they can endure it (and as Dwarf Fortress shows, a lot of people will endure the most obnoxious of UIs to get something they like).

As an example, there are many people who like grinding in JRPGs and some even consider it as a defining element of JRPGs (in that a JRPG is not real JRPG if it doesn't have grinding) whereas others are perplexed by the idea of anyone liking grinding and not seeing it as a cheap way to pad the game's length and something that developers should strive towards eliminating.

phowon 7 years ago | | |

>As an example, there are many people who like grinding in JRPGs and some even consider it as a defining element of JRPGs (in that a JRPG is not real JRPG if it doesn't have grinding)

I am one such person who is happy to argue for the fact that ability to grind is one of the (maybe two?) defining traits of a JRPG. The option to meaningfully strengthen your player avatar that is not tied to story/game progression is the heart of JRPGs.

gryson 7 years ago | | |

To add to this last comment, I would say that the entire point of early JRPGs was grinding. It was a simple formula:

Go to new area -> grind -> level up, buy gear -> defeat boss -> go to new area

Even in later 8-bit JRPGs such as Dragon Quest IV, that's pretty much all there was. Very minimal story/dialogue, rare puzzles ("get item A to proceed" type). Story was necessarily limited by the small ROM size.

I find that grinding has an almost calming, meditative quality that sets JRPGs apart from action-based games that require a lot of focus.

With recent JRPGs, the shift has been to lessen grinding and include a much larger emphasis on story and dialogue. The downside here for traditionalists is that more of the game is spent reading dialogue than fighting random battles.

Does any of this reflect bad game design? I doubt it. I would say that the gameplay of DQIV is highly polished for its time. But you must approach it knowing what it is (a game of turn-based random battles) and what it is not (a game of rich story and dialogue).

Izkata 7 years ago | | |

> > as opposed to current games, which had the experience from decades to get refined.

> in contrast of newer more "casualized" games that cater to the lowest common denominator as often as people say what you wrote.

If I had to summarize it, I'd say that the decades of refinement have led to them being streamlined at the expense of creativity.

lubujackson 7 years ago | | |

I've given some thought to the grinding/no grinding issue and I think the true purpose of grinding is to allow systems learning of the game's economy and battle system. There is the more obvious reason of giving more weight (and a bigger dopamine hit) on every advancement, like when you save gold to buy a new weapon and suddenly start one-hitting enemies instead of needing 3 hits. But that also relies on learning, by feel, the underlying cost and value of each hit point as well as the tendencies and weaknesses from fighting the same enemies over and over.

Some people enjoy aggregating all of that information in their brain and getting mastery over it. Even mechanically dumb games can have interesting higher level tactics. People will make spreadsheets and argue over the best weapon or best combination of items or spells to fight certain bosses, even if the base game is mashing the A button to sword hit the enemy 5000 times in a row.

angarg12 7 years ago | | |

Some of them, not all. And of course it's just my opinion. You can rephrase it like this:

Slow, boring and clunky is actually good design that serves a purpose.

anyfoo 7 years ago | |

That resonates well with me. Unlike in my childhood, playing and replaying JRPGs in my late 20s felt like such a chore, and the often pastiche storytelling felt so distant, that I actually thought that I outgrew games in general up into my early 30s. In reality, it was just JRPGs that I outgrew, but me erroneously thinking that they would be "reference points" of good games led to wrong conclusions.

I got over it with newer games, and nowadays my Switch gets a lot of use.

Another thing that I realized, maybe related through my acceptance of not liking JRPGs very much anymore, was that I also actually just don't enjoy NES era games. I think I did at the time, but nowadays they are just too simple in structure, and too "arcade-y" in gameplay. Even allowing for the fact that I'm probably getting too old to be any good at that kind of "twitchy" games, I'm pretty sure that even if I was any good, the payout would still be disappointing. I think it's around the SNES-era that games get potentially interesting for me.

There are some exceptions like Link's Awakening on the Game Boy, but that always felt much more like an SNES-era game, and in fact it came out a year after SNES's A Link to the Past, and shares the almost same gameplay. I'm looking forward to the Switch remake coming out this year.

jamesgeck0 7 years ago | |

> I have that feeling every time I play an old JRPG. Many of them feel slow, clunky, with painful mechanics... as opposed to current games, which had the experience from decades to get refined.

It definitely depends a lot on what you're playing. Chrono Trigger has tighter, punchier pacing than practically any modern RPG. IIRC in the first couple hours you've visited two or three different areas, seen consequences of your choices, escaped a dungeon, had a cinematic fight against a boss with unique mechanics, and discovered a secret about one of the main characters.

It's not perfect; there are a number of "uh, wait, what am I supposed to do now?" moments, but it still feels fresh otherwise.

Final Fantasy VI and Phantasy Star IV similarly have brisk pacing and great presentation. Early 3D RPGs slowed everything way down, for whatever reason.

labster 7 years ago | | |

I agree on all of the above points, and your excellent choices in classic JRPGs.

Specifically on slowing things down in 3D RPGs, Final Fantasy VII was pretty fun, even if a little grindy, up until the endgame. But by this point, effective grinding consisted of summon spells, which meant watching the same 90 seconds of an unskippable cut scene over and over again. Like, I get how mind-blowing 3D was in that era, but it killed the pacing so much for me that I never bothered to finish the game. I hear some cool stuff happens with Sephiroth, or whatever.

porknubbins 7 years ago |

JRPGs look like yet another piece in the puzzle that so many things in contemporary Japanese popular culture seem to peak around the same time in the 90s (anime, fashion, popular music, industrial design etc). I’d guess this too is related to what Masachi Osawa calls the “fictional era” when the national psyche kind of turned inward to escapism and fantasy. I don’t see this talked about much in English or even Japanese for that matter but would be interesting to try to figure out why a cultural output peaked and the stagnated.

phlakaton 7 years ago |

Seeing the callout to Xenoblade's music drew me back to listening to that soundtrack again... whence I stumbled upon 8-bit Music Theory's channel, and analysis of Chrono Trigger's and FFVI's music... and that's to say nothing of Secret of Mana or a half-dozen other incredible JRPG soundtracks.

I'm probably weird, but the music, more than just about anything, is what brings me back to these JRPG games again and again. The mechanics may be clunky, the sound systems primitive, but those peculiar fusions of Western and Japanese musical sensibilities, played out over fantasy after fantasy, are timeless.

jstewartmobile 7 years ago | |

Google "City Pop"

I stumbled on to it a year or so ago, and it's pretty obvious how hard most classic video game music cribbed from it.

richardjdare 7 years ago | | |

Reminds me a bit of how when I was a teen, Amiga demoscene and game music sounded like nothing else and contributed to my sense that the "computer world" was something apart. Then years later I found out about Italo Disco and Tangerine Dream.

Madmallard 7 years ago |

I played Lufia 2 recently and it felt really tedious at times but the characters, dialogue and ending felt realistic and wholesome that it kept me engaged and sad when it was all over. Maybe nostalgia helps us single out older games when surely there's many like it nowadays hidden among the oversaturated mess.

bstamour 7 years ago | |

Lufia 2 is one of my absolute favourite SNES-era RPG's. I try to replay it every few years.

probably_wrong 7 years ago |

> I now feel compelled to work through the other great RPGs of the era. In addition to the mainstays (e.g., Final Fantasy 7-9), I’m especially keen to play through the other titles that have been forgotten or underrated, like Chrono Cross and Terranigma.

Interesting that he's going to barely miss Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger.

default-kramer 7 years ago |

I love almost all the Xeno- games, but I think the first Xenoblade Chronicles is my favorite. You travel through a huge world one step at a time (no overworld map). Due the way the game was structured, I never used fast travel (I can't remember if it was even available). So at the end of the game, I had this amazing feeling of having actually taken every single step of the journey, a feeling no other RPG has given me.

b_tterc_p 7 years ago | |

Agreed. The sequel, Xenoblade X arguably did this even better by having everything be one continuous map which, after painstakingly exploring it by foot, you can eventually hop in a flying mech and suddenly have immensely satisfying freedom that you deeply desired before.

Xenoblade 2 went in the completely wrong direction. Lots of linear maps, completely separated worlds, some sort of weird tidal mechanic that supposedly blocked things off sometimes but was way too obscure to notice...

smaili 7 years ago |

> Suffice to say, the average PS1 JRPG contains a very archetypal story.

I'm not sure how others feel but to me I've definitely noticed a much stronger emphasis on wowing visual effects in today's RPG's and a much weaker focus on the story and plot lines as was the case in past games.

andrepd 7 years ago |

Very interesting reflexions. JRPGs, there's just something about them.

Nr7 7 years ago |

I've noticed a formulaic approach in Japanese video game development, where most games within a genre seem to have very similar mechanics as opposed to western made games. The RPG genre seems to be the most obvious example. If you take a modern JRPG (like one of the new Pokemon games for example) and compare it to an old Final Fantasy game from the NES there are a lot of similarities in the mechanics, like random encounters & combat, the way NPC dialogue is implemented, inventory management etc.

Now I'm not saying that they are identical games or that there hasn't been no innovation but to me it seems that for different Japanese games within a genre, there's usually one or two features that are done differently to stand out from the mass and everything else is done "like it's always been done". It seems like the thought process is something like: "RPGs consist of these features so we must have these features in the game for it to be an RPG".

Also I'm not saying that western games can't be or aren't formulaic, but if you take an old Ultima game from the 80's and compare that to modern western RPGs like Skyrim or Witcher or Diablo it seems very different, mechanics wise. Or if you take the Mass Effect trilogy and look at just the inventory management in them it is very different in each game. It seems to me like western developers are more eager to (sometimes unsuccessfully) improve, replace and/or reinvent gaming mechanics and they also are not afraid to blur the lines between genres. Many games from different genres seem to have, for example, at least some RPG elements in them these days.

I'm not implying that one way is better than another, that's a matter of taste. It's just an interesting point that I personally have noticed. It's especially interesting when you think that when not "chained" to a specific genre, Japanese developers can come up with something completely unheard of like Katamari Damacy for example.

Has anyone else noticed this or am I just imagining things?

zeckalpha 7 years ago |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Eden was recently released in English, from the same creator of Xenogears / Chrono Cross / Chrono Trigger.

jamesgeck0 7 years ago | |

I'd give it a skip unless you've already played his other stuff. What I saw of the plot seemed rather derivative of Chrono Trigger, with a much simpler battle system and long, meandering cutscenes.

anp 7 years ago |

This resonates quite strongly with me, and I would recommend Suikoden 1/2 for the same reasons.

haolez 7 years ago | |

Suikoden 2 is a master piece. It manages to include 108 party characters (most aren’t allowed to participate in combat), and you feel that you know every single one of them and that all of them have an impact in the story.

Also, it has aged well :)

a-afterglow 7 years ago |

I just started playing Xenogears last Friday and do agree with the first few paragraphs of the article.

Stopped reading before halfway through when I realized it was getting spoilerish, though.

Playing this and Kingdom Hearts 3 back to back makes me realize that the charm some of the classics have is not pure nostalgia, but I still can't put my finger on it. Saying that, Persona 5 is a recent JRPG that I thoroughly enjoyed like those I played as a kid.

szatkus 7 years ago | |

Can I play Persona 5 without playing earlier games?

a-afterglow 7 years ago | | |

Yeah, there's almost zero connection between the games besides some background lore or easter eggs that are not important for the main story of each entry.

pier25 7 years ago |

Every couple of years I replay Front Mission 3. It's not exactly a JRPG but it shares a lot of similarities with the genre. Every time it surprises me how such an outdated and simple game (by today's standards) can hook me.

Many times I've fantasized about making a modern clone...

headsoup 7 years ago | |

There seems to be constant repetition of the idea that simple == outdated and complex == modern.

Many of those classic games may not have depth in complex mechanics or breadth of story narratives, but that does not mean they do not contain deep or significant meaning or underlying narrative constructs. At a minimum it does not mean that they lack strong and compelling game design.

I tend to view those (sorry, generalising a little) that dismiss 'classic' games by declaring them 'out of date' as projecting how clever they are by defining complexity == intelligent, regardless of the quality of design, depth of meaning or coherence in narrative.

pier25 7 years ago | | |

I've never thought of it this way.

My biggest problem with older games is how clunky the controls can be. This is not the case with all games, but it is a very common one. Specially when video games started to move from 2D to 3D.

For example, the first Mario Kart for SNES is still an amazing game. Nintendo got everything right, specially the kart handling. I still play it from time to time and it is great fun. In contrast the first Wipeout game for PSX has terrible handling compared to the newer ones which are amazing in this respect (Wipeout HD, Fury, 2048).

muzani 7 years ago |

I don't think this is just JRPGs. I feel no such connection with JRPGs, but I do I feel that way with idle games. There's a kind of meditative comfort with gradual, guaranteed progression, but where there's still a spark of discovery as well.