It's no secret that I've been a fan of this not-really-roleplaying game thing for a long time. I don't know why. The writing usually isn't that great. The characters all fall into some archetype. There are so few truly great entries in the genre that it is quite discouraging to continue to collect games of this variety to play. But I do. And I keep playing them.
I still enjoy them.
It's an odd thing to consider, why I continue to play games that are technically not that good. I logged eighty hours plus on my run of Final Fantasy XIII-2 and it wasn't amazing. It had potential, but it was so far off the mark that most gamers hated it more than the first. Yes, Mog was awful. But that's not the point is it? I still had a pretty good time with the game, and it was my first time getting every achievement for a 360 game. I have Arc Rise Fantasia for the Wii and the script is terrible. I'm still playing it. Wild Arms 2 gets thrown in my Playstation every once and a while, and it is one of the single most poorly balanced games I've ever played.
I guess I'm digging into this rant to ask why these games still pull me in.
Well, the stories are part of it. Yeah, they are cliche-ridden messes of poor translations and B-rate anime fluff, but they are usually positive and upbeat enough to make trudging through mediocre characterizations worthwhile. Well, worthwhile for me anyway. Even when Final Fantasy VII kicked in and made everyone switch to making games with depressive heroes and dark themes, there was still some fun to be had in the complete absurdity of it all. I mean, how seriously can you take a guy with an eight inch tall blonde spike pointing at you during conversation? And I'm just going to throw in that Squall from Final Fantasy VIII wasn't that much of a whiny twat. He was a socially withdrawn teenager with little understanding of what his aspirations for the future should be. Let's face it: Squaresoft knew their audience pretty well.
And that brings us back to the characters. They don't get my vote. Again, 9/10 times they fit into one of the archetypes that bothers me. I don't like the optimistic hero character. I don't like the cutesy jail bait. I don't like the children. I especially don't like the characters who try to be "cool". Some of these characters are more common since the 32-Bit era, but they still bother me. Let's face it, they are the characters who don't really contribute to the plot. You might be wondering: well, who do you like in these games? Well, that's simple. I liked all of the lead cast of Final Fantasy VI, Kid from Chrono Cross, and I could go on, but this was meant to be concise. So...where are we going next...
Oh yeah, the gameplay. This is where the common role playing gamer, who has actually spent time rollling a D20, breaks away. And I don't blame them. The JRPG isn't a game where you normally roleplay. You jump into the shoes of a heroic lead, and tell them what to do in order to kill the bad guy. But there is very little in the way of roleplaying here. And I don't mind. Technically, these were the games that lead me to eventually sitting down and rolling dice with a group of friends, and later running games of my own. However, the JRPG doesn't need the complexity of a real roleplaying experience for me to have a good time. I liken it to watching a movie. Yes, usually a really bad movie, but a movie nonetheless. Exploring the varied settings, taking down colossal monsters, and reequipping my party usually makes for a good time, that is rewarding to me personally. Yes, even the grinding gives me some level of satisfaction. The ability drop Safer Sephiroth in two rounds at the end of Final Fantasy VII, and the final battle with Jenova without pressing X more than once made for an evil grin or two before the credits ran. Frankly, on paper, JRPGs are dead boring, but there is a charm, a quality of its own, that makes them worth playing to people who decide to indulge. I won't pretend that they are for everyone, but I don't see why anyone should be offended by their existence.
So we come to the year 2013, where the JRPG is all but comatose. The western RPG has taken the spotlight, and the few good JRPG experiences that surface every year have shrugged off some of the major stylistic aspects of these games. Every new Final Fantasy is given the cold shoulder by most gamers. The climate is completely different from 1999, the platinum age of the JRPG. Through the PS2 era, the genre has lost all of its strength, and gamers want more in the style of Bioware's games, or the Elder Scrolls saga. They aren't wrong, and I enjoy those games as well. They are actually RPGs. But there is a shrinking group of us who still like waiting for that time bar to fill, so we can choose our attacks, and drop the beasts drawn from various mythologies, and collect our experience points. We will patiently wait for the next Final Fantasy with hopes that Square Enix will finally get it right, and cross our fingers for a Dream Team reunion, and the announcement of the next Chrono game. We will complain until Nintendo gives us more Earthbound, and play a SaGa game despite its obvious flaws. We won't give up hope that these games will thrive as they have in the past. After all, the success of the Western RPG is a trend just like any other, and with time, the JRPG will have a chance to thrive again.
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