"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.
speaking of jrpgs, i've actually really liked both yakuza like a dragon and the demo for like a dragon infinite wealth
for the latter in particular, besides expanding the amount of elements like water and status conditions like you'd expect RGG have significantly improved:
- player movement
they still don't want you to be able to move wherever you want and stun lock enemies or whatever, but instead of the game's ai wobbling your active player character around you can move them within the area of a ring surrounding them manually
- enemy targeting
you now have a much better idea of who you're hitting via splash damage along with added holographic pathing for attack trails
- party combos
instead of just being an essence attack that you can spam, combo attacks with friends are now built up via meter and you can either choose to do have two, three, or four party members at a time participate
- environment interactivity
in the previous game when you did regular attacks and your active party member was by like, a bicycle, they were supposed to be able to like, kick the bike at an enemy and then do an additional attack
because of the aforementioned ai control of your active player character's pathfinding, this typically didnt happen very often or effectively
in infinite wealth you now have additional context sensitive attacks when you're by an environmental weapon, and the player's newfound agency in movement during combat aids in that
The main place I see this take come up is discussing menu based, limited option, small-number-of-choices turn-based rpg combat against opponents where you kick each other in the shins until you fall over. and there, I see people consistently ignoring that Pokemon is one of the simplest versions of that system and that combat system is so good and so complex there's been a tournament scene around just that combat for twenty years.
What people consistently seem to mean is 'a bad version of a thing is the representation of that thing, fundamentally.'
I even see the response to this to say 'Pokemon isn't a JRPG' at which point I just check out of the conversation because I don't know what the fuck they even mean by JRPG.
I'd be remiss in my status as an SMT nerd if I didn't bring up Shin Megami Tensei 3's introduction of the press turn system. The rules for this system are laid out as follows:
- Battle occurs in two phases: player phase and enemy phase. Each party gets as many actions as they have party members (with bosses getting an extra action).
- Hitting a weakness, hitting with a critical, or passing your action to the next party member only uses half an action.
- Missing an attack uses two actions.
- Landing an attack that is absorbed or nullified uses ALL of a party's actions.
That's it. Those are the entirety of the rules. This leads to some surprisingly rich encounters with a lot of thought going into a good number of random encounters. Ask anyone who's played SMT 3 about their first experience fighting the early game boss Matador and they'll inevitably tell you that they got steamrolled because they kept on whiffing their attacks and using up all their turns while Matador kept critting with multi-hit skills and wiping their party out. The game demands mastery of this system in really interesting ways that make you think about how best to approach each encounter.
Because I will never shut up about Knights in the Nightmare. Look at it. Look at this fuckin mess. This game has the most systems. It's a tactics RPG where your soldiers' abilities are extremely limited. Most classes can only face two cardinal directions. Only two classes can even MOVE. There's a polarity system that determines the shape and effect of attacks. You clear a map by filling lines on a bingo card where each square corresponds to a monster. Monsters are picked by playing a slot machine. You control the game by moving a cursor around the screen to give orders to your soldiers while the monsters move in real time and ATTACK YOUR CURSOR WITH BULLET HELL PATTERNS. I haven't even scratched the surface. I'm not exaggerating when I say this game has the most systems. It owns.
Live-a-Live has been mentioned already, but one of Square's other missing SFC links is Treasure of the Rudras which lets you CREATE YOUR OWN DAMNED SPELLS. It also got a fan translation by one of the OGs Aeon Genesis who has worked on a myriad of other JRPGs that do cool stuff.
There's in-world phrases you can find and unlock to give you a logical base to work from, but if you wanna slap your own words in there go ahead. Wanna see what effect "kittymeow" does? Stick it in. "Tr00grimkvlt"? Stick it in. Might be good, might be bad, but you can do it either way!
And yeah, that system had to get reworked into English. Absolute mad lads at AE did it anyway.
