Gwen

I guess I'll have to force myself to have fun on social media in other places somehow. Idk, social media just hasn't felt fun for awhile. Things felt fun here and I wish it felt like that's an energy it's possible to keep going.

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.

This is brought up in the comments too, but it's also just stereotyping by writers and designers who didn't like anime-looking console RPGs and/or didn't want to think that hard about them. The whole second half of FF6 is nonlinear, and Chrono Trigger has a big nonlinear section, and these games have been knocking around the anglosphere for 30 years. A lot of ostensibly linear JRPGs open up toward the end of their main plot--the open and optional parts of console RPGs with overworld maps had a big influence on my own preferences. Anyone who cared knew these games were mechanically diverse, we had evidence of that even if we didn't have all the evidence that existed, but the English-language media narrative around them was basically make-believe to begin with.