"devs AND fans of the genre have ceded that JRPG combat isn't really interesting"

Seriously, what is it about Japanese media that just brings out a specific kind of self assured dipshittery from (mostly) white voices in the industry? I see this shit all the time, both from the press side of things as well as within the industry itself. I won't name names, but I've met animators who hate anime, game designers who hate Japanese games, hell I once met a graphic designer who had a weird fixation on the "structural failings" of Japanese graphic design (whatever the hell that means).

Where does it come from? It happens too often to just be the occasional bad take.

_{To be clear, this isn't to imply Japanese media is exempt from criticism, but it's weird how much is in bizarrely racialized bad faith. I wouldn't go as far as call it racist, but definitely bordering on xenophobic.}

Also god imagine criticizing JRPG combat (which is an insanely broad genre with so many different interpretations and styles) and then presenting deckbuilding as your solution.

Fuck it, tell me about some cool and interesting JRPG battle systems that you've enjoyed.

I'll start. Resonance of Fate is one of the messiest games I've ever played, but goddamn if I wish they had made like 2 more of them and refined the "Tri-Attack Battle system." It's a mix of real time and turn based where you decide your character's movement and shooting targets independently of each other. The key is to optimize your movement paths to synergize with your other party members to build up resources that you then cash in to do sick Equilibrium style gun-fu maneuvers. The tl;dr is the more sick jumps you do, the more resources and healing you get back in the process. Quite frankly it's an easy system to break after a certain point but it never gets boring watching your JRPG heroes decked out in primo mid 00s Japanese fashion do jumping 360 spins in the air while blasting hot lead in every direction.

Bethesda-style first-person hack/slash/shoot is way less interesting to me than your average JRPG combat system... whatever an "average" JRPG combat system is. But I guess to an outside observer, it's just pushing the A button over and over and over? I assume their thought process is, "what if, when you pushed the A button, they simply swung their sword immediately like Link?", that ordering your magic spells from a menu like you're at McDonald's is boring because you aren't doing anything.

I dunno, let's say, as a really surface-level case study, Final Fantasy IV? With the Active-Time Battle system, you can't just sit there and take stock of each individual turn because the enemies will keep attacking you. You have to manage the speeds of your party members to try and make things happen when you want them to happen, delaying turns as needed. You have to keep spell casting times in mind for big heals or to hit a boss when they're in their vulnerable phase, making sure you have enough MP. You have to decide who you do or don't want in the front or back rows.

Hell, the most "just attack repeatedly" section of Final Fantasy IV has its own weird tactical foibles. When you're entering the Magnetic Cave, your party is Cecil, Yang, Cid, and Tellah... so three physical attackers, one of whom has basic healing capabilities, and one wizard with both types of spells but extremely limited MP.

The twist is that the Magnetic Cave has a field effect that incapacitates any party member with metal equipment. So Cecil is now suddenly a crappy white mage with piddly arrow attacks and the entire party is weirdly fragile without access to the good armor. You have to constantly babysit Tellah's teeny tiny MP pool balanced between the nuke spells and the clutch heals, swap around Yang's claws to hit elemental weaknesses, have Cecil heal or shoot as needed, and let Cid swing away with his worst weapon because it's all you got. You do have to think a little, and this is (probably, as far as I remember) the most braindead dungeon outside of the tutorial zone!

Or, I mean - and this is the other crime oft levied against JRPGs - you could simply grind past any need to think about it.

In Tim Rogers' review of Dragon Quest XI, he says,

Western critics aim two common complains toward Dragon Quest games: that they are "too easy", and that "you have to grind too much". I say: why not neither? Clearly anyone executing this variety of criticism toward Dragon Quest has never experienced the joy of playing the games under-leveled. [...] I hate to break it to you: you don't have to grind. You just have to think a lot more.
[...]
It's good that the games are easy. It means that everyone gets to play through the whole game without ever hitting a wall they can't climb by grinding.

Says it all right there. Yeah, I'm a serial grinder, but that's because I have ADHD and number go up make me feel good. Some of my most precious JRPG memories are squeaking a win against a boss that I had no right defeating in my party's current state.

But sure, if you want a JRPG battle system that's interesting because it has "a bunch of modular pieces" interacting and "resource management during the course of a single fight" (and fuck it, is also a deck builder!), well, I gotta say:

Mega Man Battle Network came out in TWO THOUSAND AND ONE

_{(granted the first game kinda sucks and is more a proof of concept)}

The battle system in Battle Network is the best thing by far about the series, which has a merely okay story and a bunch of really terrible, tedious dungeons. People weren't excited about the HD remaster package so they could relive the plots of these games (okay we were, but roll with me for the sake of this post about the battle system specifically), they were excited because it meant there could be an actual online scene for multiplayer battles.

For those unaware:

• Battles in MMBN take place on a 6x3 grid split into two 3x3 grids for each side. You cannot enter your opponent's side.
• You have a folder (deck) of 30 battlechips (cards), and each round you draw 5 out at random.
• Battlechips have various effects like close-range sword attacks, placing down cubes, changing the terrain, attacking a specific row, shooting meteors at random panels, or even stealing rows of your opponent's play space.
• All battlechips have a letter code attached, which is important because you can only play a single letter code per hand (or, the same chip but with a different code). There are also asterisk-code chips that act as free spaces.
• If you play specific combinations of chips together, they become a "Program Advance", which has a bespoke powerful effect ranging from "you can use this basic chip an unlimited number of times for 20 seconds" to "the entire stage is going to fucking explode for 1100 damage and the final boss only has 2000 hp" to "this statue shoots out poison gas which will drain everyone's life faster than if they decided to look at twitter".

So you pick your "hand" and hit go, which drops you on the grid field where you can move between squares, fire your pea-shooter megabuster for scratch damage, and deploy your chips at will. A bar at the top of the screen slowly fills, and when it does you can push a button to pause the action and draw a new hand of battlechips.

It's already a solid battle system (enough to directly inspire indie games like One Step From Eden), but it gains a huge amount of depth as later games add elemental affinities, additional forms with bespoke attributes, customizable passive buffs, character-themed temporary boosts, and high-risk-high-reward dark chips.

In MMBN5, I had two go-to folders:

• One based entirely around the tanky Knightman.exe DoubleSoul form, which lets you charge up "Break" element chips for double damage and gives you temporary invincibility if you use a chip in your front row. The strat was to use an AreaGrab chip to push the enemy into their back two rows, and then let loose with the "only hits the two panels in front of you" multi-hit drill chips. With the invincibility frames, you could charge them up in sequence and rip down anything.
• One based on NumberSoul, which simply lets you draw 10 chips instead of five per hand and adds a flat +10 damage to all non-elemental chips. The thing about damage bonuses is that they are added to each hit of a multi-hit attack, and the "Vulcan" series of chips was all about multiple weak hits. But with NumberSoul and some other Damage-Up add-on chips (and the 2x boost to your next attack if you got a perfect counter), you could get some truly obscene damage up on the board.

It's a good battle system! There are a lot of good battle systems out there! When I see these kinds of statements about JRPGs having boring or uninteresting battles, I want to grab these people by the shoulders and ask them for direct, specific examples and their reasoning why, because I just don't see it most of the time.

the original Valkyrie Profile's battle system which mashed up JRPG menu based turns with fighting game style combo sequences has never been beaten in my opinion. Each character being assigned to a button, and based on equip and skill and character selection you can absolutely STYLE on enemies. A character having a move to slip behind the enemy let's you break their guard, hit them with your heavyweight bruisers, launch and juggle them like toys, and finish with as many as FOUR consecutive finishers if you're lightning fast on the trigger, and even on bosses this is just absolutely devastating. And none of it is like, dependant on one killer move or spell to the expense of everything else - you're using all your moves, figuring out how YOU like to fight, and what works well... I almost never felt bored or disengaged from a battle, except when i was so strong that fights literally only slowed me down. It was so deeply satisfying to find the rhythm that let me slap enemies around the field, bunch them up, and then wipe them out in one go without needing to touch the menus beyond "choose a spell" amd "target which enemy first" since I did all of my prep before any combats began.

Radiant Historia is pretty close and it lets you get a lot more granular with how and where the enemy is moved. except in Valkyrie Profile you're strong and capable, in Historia you're weak and fragile and if you aren't killing enemies first round you may be in deep shit.