"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.
What the fuck nonsense is this anyway. This brain genious clearly has Something In Mind for "JRPG combat" and I'm pretty sure it's just Dragon Warrior. Lightning Returns is my favorite RPG combat system of all time, it's unbelievably technical and like... you don't get much more middle of the road JRPG than "full-budget mainline Final Fantasy". I would defy this person to justify literally anything in those tweets.
The closest I can come to fathoming this argument is that the JRPG traditions are arguably even more explicitly based on strucutre developed out of tabletop (i.e., DnD) gaming sessions than the average western RPG, and in a tabletop RPG the focus isn't really on the combat in the first place but about finding a compelling way to engage in social, collaborative storytelling.
The point of house rules on tabletop games, which are about as common as tabletop gaming sessions are in the first place, is not to beat players over the head with a new system but to find something that allows the players to engage in that act of storytelling more comfortably. Facilitating that means making a setting where players are capable of doing more than just bonking a goblin on the head with a club.
It is a feature, not a bug.
If The Witcher is an RPG, all these FromSoft games are definitely RPGs
