LucasTheDrgn

Legendary Creature — Dragon Wizard

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gee-man
@gee-man

"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.


LucasTheDrgn
@LucasTheDrgn

I would still play Paper Mario if it didn't have the minigames for attacks (they basically become superfluous after a short while of practice anyway) because the small numbers+no* rng aspect of damage and the badge system for choosing which attacks you have available at any given time and what partner with their abilities to choose to go into a situation with make for an interesting and strategic experience that's easy to grasp but difficult to push to its limits. THAT'S why I disliked every paper mario game to come after TTYD, because it fucked up that system in one way or another.


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in reply to @gee-man's post:

I notice a lot of people who have this weird contempt for JRPGs love the various Mario RPGs that have been made over the years, as if they're "one of the good ones." I don't know if it's cognitive dissonance or if the Mario branding is just so powerful that they don't realize what they're playing.

People who make these kinds of broad sweeping generalizations frequently make exceptions for the things they like or find a way to reclassify what they're talking about to exclude them. You see this a lot with (topically speaking!) "turn-based combat is inherently bad" takes too.

this basically falls into the Gamer Liberterian mindset of definitional exclusions, like, these are simple and sensible rules that show my expertise, and all the exceptions don't count because they're exceptions

Remembering the Smash community complaining loudly whenever an RPG character was added to the Smash Ultimate roster, but shut up immediately when it was Sora. As others have said, people mark out exceptions for games they genuinely tried while bashing others they haven't touched, or otherwise engaged with, because their corner of the internet loves to hate on the genre.

I've seen the original post quoted with someone saying that western reviewers say "jRPG" like they're saying a slur (and also someone in a RPS interview saying how "I Am Setsuna" is following a jRPG tradition of having weird names), but you got the whole hate-fascination that some folks have with japanese media right.

Its not that there isn't issues with it, but there's this constant train of thought that a lot of creators go through that is "We're going to make anime/BL/Visual Novels/etc. but we will make it right" and its never specified exactly how, but its always just "not made by japanese people".

I agree, I think that's always been the sticking point about this type of discourse that bothers me. There's an air of colonial-adjacent mindset that it's up to Westerners to "fix" JRPGs/VNs/anime/etc. And it's not even as if those mediums couldn't be potentially enriched by an outsider perspective, but it always has such a patronizing tone.

Yeah, the proliferation of FF XIII's Break system across a bunch of games dissolves his notion. Feels like he didn't play a JRPG in a while.

In terms of cool shit I played, I really like Touhou Artifical Dream In Arcadia's system. It's a simple SMT sorta clone, got your elements and -akaja spells, but there's a universal SP bar that's gained by hitting Weaknessess.

Spend SP on cool unique abilities from your little 2hus, like Orin getting a little phys + poison, or Miko getting a massive stat buff if she's outnumbered and overlevels the enemy.

Oh, of course yeah.

Armored Core got it right cause it doesn't take you like 4 rotations to break something. Just slap their shit twice.

I remember feeling like I was somehow playing the game wrong with how long fights took in Lightning Returns.

Exactly! Just say you don't like them, it's totally fine! Even if you think JRPGs suck, we like the way it (supposedly) sucks. The need to dress it up in fancier rhetoric than that is a big part of what annoys me.

McMillen is still kinda pal with Tyrone Rodriguez, and people still buy his game published by Nicalis, so I think his reputation working with Tyler is fine :'D Ed probably has more controversial takes too.

"I won't name names", but in this case Tyler Glaiel is a moron? :3

Where does this comes from? From the games, actually?
It's not like the most popular series in the genre aren't associated with random encounters being mostly filler, where you can spam x / auto attack to get through mostly everything, with "grinding" being part of the loops. Right?

This isn't someone saying a whole genre is uninteresting, it's a game designer that's usually trying to play different kind of games abstracting a genre to some tropes. And I'm pretty sure he's specifically talking about the classic turn based battles (looking at responses he's mentioning the limits of one action per character per turn). Of course there are different games, but the idea that random encounters in JRPGs aren't "interesting" isn't coming out of xenophobia, no.

Also he's talking about games being inspired by JRPG here, not just JRPG as a whole, hence the Paper Mario thing. So like probably Sea of Stars being an influence here, since it's a pretty high profile JRPG (as in genre not country of origin) from this year.

ALSO I don't think not interesting in a design sense necessarily means bad. Like, for example in the small amount of FFXII I played (20h...) I really liked the battle system and the idea of programming the team. It meant that most battles weren't interesting in themselves (as in no big decisions and "story" per battle) but the meta game was.

It's a tactical but I also spent way too much time in meaningless item dungeons in the first Disgaea because I really liked the puzzles of making chain reactions with the geo-pyramids-things.

I guess the one specific game where I remember thinking about individual battles (at least against bosses) rather than the whole progression is Golden Sun, with the djinns system it felt like you constantly had to balance actions and what to prepare, etc. But yeah for most other JRPGs I've played, it's mostly a blur. The same way random battles in most action games (Japanese or not!) are.

Anyways yeah, I don't think it's either fair nor constructive to see this as a ethnic debate/hot take. It's a designer thinking about ways games are designed, he's not a gamer inventing stuff to make a point and debate people to know which game is the best or who has the best tastes. None of this would be an issue if the games were called TBRPG instead of JRPG.

And I think it's coming from a modern indie point of view where "elegant" design with small numbers and no filler actions is the goal. Like the difference between the classic tactical games, from FFT to Fire Emblem or Advance Wars, where it's not rare to have turns of just getting into place, and a game like Into the Breach where everything happens on a small scale and where ever turn has a big impact. This is basically what "interesting" means here.

I'm going to try my best to take you on good faith but I think using such a narrow definition of JRPG as common parlance is a fundamentally flawed premise. If he has an issue with turn based combat, he should have said that from the start. JRPG is already a loaded term and in 2023, when that spans the spectrum from DQ11 to Kingdom Hearts to Tales of Arise, it isn't just simple misclassification, it's outright ignorance toward a genre that has been evolving for decades. I legitimately don't think you can just use JRPG to imply "turn based combat with menu selection." It's certainly not the definition many of us are operating on.

Additionally, to make declarative statements that devs and fans secretly hate JRPG combat also speaks to a certain type of myopia that I find irritating. It's okay to find the games grindy, even tedious at times. I know I have my own personal tolerance for grinding in video games. But some people like it! Maybe it's not fair of me but who does he think he is to claim to speak for an entire genre he clearly has no familiarity with? It's patronizing at best, I have even harsher words I won't resort to.

I understand twitter's character length precludes nuance but even some simple changes in wording would have made me far more generous toward the statements he made. As is, it's 2023. Japanese game developers have literally made public statements about their uncomfortable feelings around the terminology used to describe their games. This individual is part of the games industry, it's not unfair of me to expect he do the minimum due diligence of paying attention to what his peers are saying, especially if he's going to make such claims about their work.

I guess it's an opinion thing, and it's not rare for genres to have vague definitions depending on who you ask or where you live (for example here ARPGs are stuff like Dark Souls and Kingdom Hearts, while ARPGs in the US are stuff like Diablo, which we call Hack & Slash...). Or maybe it's a generation thing, idk.

But JRPG meaning "RPG from Japan" is way less useful as a definition than "RPG made in a specific way", imo. Like you said, RPGs made in Japan cover such a different range of games, that their only common feature is being made in Japan. I personally don't see how that kind of definition could not end up with the occasional toxic debate, like with people recently trying to decide if the Netflix Scott Pilgrim show is anime or not...
The same exact game could be called an RPG or a JRPG depending on who made it, and I personally don't understand both defending the use of JRPG to say "made in Japan" and the fact that some Japanese devs are uncomfortable with the term at the same time. Like of course that's the consequence! "This one is different, it's made by Japanese devs" is not something I'd ever want to hear, it doesn't matter if it's positive or negative!
But historically, JRPGs were different because the design sensibilities were different, the same way CRPGs were their own thing but can now also exist on consoles. And because of that you can use some characteristics to define a genre in a way that, imo, makes at least some sense, even if it's not corresponding to the historical origins of the term. Hope I'm clear enough that I'm saying all this in good faith!

While he could have worded things differently, he's also on twitter and no one has obligations to be as clear as possible to an audience who's not familiar with the author (or to be aware of drama tied to specific games). Like in this case he's a fan of From Soft's games, so it makes it more obvious that he's not considering those games. Also he's making a turn based game. But the fact that he's talking about Paper Mario's QTEs as an option people tend to use makes it obvious to me that anything real time isn't the target here (on top of saying "turn based").
Like in lot of cases I think this comes down to misunderstandings. It's very easy to say something without thinking of how an audience you're not considering will see it. The recent Mike Rose thread about SpiritTea is a similar story, that could have been avoided with a slightly different choice of words.

I guess all of this could be "look at this person using 'JRPG' in a way I don't agree with", but this discussion already didn't happen with the whole FFXVI story, so I guess it's too late for that :( (and in that sense, JRPG isn't "their games" anymore)

Btw I think the Souls game are another good example of the discussions in those tweets, because like I said, most action games (country of origin irrelevant) have uninteresting basic combat, where you don't necessarily have to pay attention. Different games have different answers to that, Japanese games tend to have scoring, From Soft makes it so that every enemy is dangerous, western AAA games try to focus on spectacle and production value, etc.
You can even see this with platformers, where the indie style of platformer usually makes every jump important, with a specific route and difficult sections one after the other, while something like Mario is more free form and less "interesting" on a moment to moment basis.
In that sense, JRPGs/turn based RPGs really aren't that weird of a genre :D

(For that second paragraph, I think you're reading too much into it. He said "I feel like". And interesting/uninteresting is not the same thing as good/bad, he mentioned "bad" game with interesting combat!)

((Also I'm really sorry, I'm bad at keeping things short. I try to be clear to be less confrontational but then there's a huge oppressive wall of text))

You're running interference for the original tweets in ways they really don't deserve. I think you need to consider that "I am defining JRPG in a way that conveniently excludes any game that doesn't fit the complaint" makes the whole thing a pointless tautology: "Games that have 'bad' turn based combat have 'bad' turn based combat". If that's the case it's a fully vacuous statement with no interesting or useful commentary on any genre of games that could only have been made to annoy people.

I'm not doing that though. He clearly said "turn based", he mentioned Paper Mario as a way to add something on top of the basic system. It's not changing the definition to fit the complaint, it's just reading. The same way OP said "But some people like it!", some people do define JRPGs as a set of mechanics and tropes, idk why that's somehow not valid and such an unacceptable point of view.
You're deciding to see the tweets as provocation the same way you're replacing uninteresting with bad. And I'm pretty sure people have nothing to gain from being piled on by anime pics on twitter.

Not everything is an attack meant to oppress fans of Japanese media.

Grandia II still has my favorite JRPG battle system ever. It's got some broken bits on it (and some mistranslated moves) but basically it makes defending and countering a lot more interesting and deliberate than a lot of other systems do, and you can mess with enemies' position in the turn queue and prevent them from launching attacks if you know what you're doing. ("Critical hits" are something you CHOOSE to do, and they do less damage but they throw whoever you attack to the back of the queue. It's cool!!!) The visuals are fun, everyone's running around and taking shots at each other in the background even if it's not their turn. Also GREAT English voice acting for the time, great animations, and a fantastic soundtrack. I will rarely try to back out of battles in that game, even when low-level goons interrupt me it's fun to be like okay well you wanted this and not let them get a single move in.

Bluntly, I'll say that this is a rather uncomfortably negative response to a rather blandly shit take. Tyler could be criticized directly, in a way that would allow him to defend himself and open up actual possibility to broaden his viewpoint. But instead the response to his blandly shit take is to fall back to a different website and loudly insult him without fear of retaliation. It's taking the vitriolic poisonous nature of Twitter and bringing it to Cohost. The only thing that really serves is strengthening a clique of negativity and I think we can all be better than that.

As for why this sort of overly simplistic viewpoint towards JPRGs is so common, I think the industry is simply racist as hell and the consequences of that make it very difficult for anyone to be exposed to japanese game development without going through their own or someone else's bias.

LIVE-A-LIVE is one of my favorite games, and a lot of it comes from the combat system. Battles take place on a 7x7 grid. You have no mana, all your techniques are limited by 1) the area they target, and 2) the amount of time they take to launch. It's simple enough that you can understand it quickly, but deep enough that you will be rewarded for experimenting and trying to make the best move. The original had a lot of balancing issues, but the remake made more of your options viable.

It also allows them to put in a sidequest that's essentially "Use the tools available to you to win a bunch of fights that seem unfair or downright impossible at first."

Hybrid Heaven on the Nintendo 64 is a JRPG entirely about wrestling aliens - you get new moves by having the aliens hit you enough times with them. It has body part-based damage, which lets you disable an enemy from using kicks by injuring their legs or from using punches by hitting their arms. It's real time but pauses when you attack, and there's an element of trying to time your attacks to stop your opponent from attacking by knocking them over.

in reply to @LucasTheDrgn's post:

yeah, the strategic elements of ttyd are really a lot of what makes it fun, alongside the vibe and characters. also why i've enjoyed what i've played of Bug Fables a lot, especially in the optional hard mode it really pushes those decisions about strategy and battle planning and feels like a natural extension of "what if paper mario combat but More"