The more I play and fall in love with old, nonlinear Japanese RPGs like Linda Cube, Oreshika, and Gunparade March over the past decade, the more I've come to realize that the only reason RPGs from Japan have a reputation abroad for just railroading people from one plot point to the next is because so many of these open-ended, systems-first games that did make a genuine splash in Japan among devs there never got localized. And, as with dating sims and so much else with Japanese games, if it didn't get localized, it might as well not be a part of the genre's history and identify as far as mainstream global discourse is concerned. 🤷
Anyway, your weekly reminder that little, if any, of the commercial localization process is rooted purely on a game's creative merits and if you want a complete picture of the breadth and scope of any genre's evolution, you can't count on translated releases alone to be reliable Cliff Notes. Just because the unlocalized stuff might be invisible abroad doesn't mean it was at all to the people making the stuff lucky enough to make the jump, that's for damn sure.
Reminder that when one of these non-linear JRPGs did get localized (SaGa Frontier) it was absolutely savaged by critics (and a lot of players) who hated that it wasn’t linear progression like FF7. Granted, Frontier in its initial release had Problems, but still!
