girl who loves mecha, toku and fighting games!! also big fan of animation. nice to meet you all!


iiotenki
@iiotenki

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.


ondororu
@ondororu
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in reply to @iiotenki's post:

I remember seeing Linda3 for the first time last(?) year, and I was blown away!! If that’s what we’re missing, then the JRPG genre was (and probably still is) much more diverse than western devs/games folks give it credit for

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

That's assuming the genre's reputation has anything to do with its reality. The idea of JRPGs being overly linear emerged was something Western critics and developers propagated in I want to say the early 2000s, because they couldn't make Western games' virtues intelligible without some negative rhetorical construct. Further, said construct wasn't - indeed, isn't - limited to JRPGs specifically or even Japanese video games, but to Japanese media in general. JRPGs are linear because Western games offer their players a wide degree of freedom; JRPGs star whiny, unmasculine protagonists because Western games star REAL men; JRPGs are mired in the past because Western games represent the singular future all gaming must strive toward, etc.

Almost forgot: even where certain JRPGs are linear, they often have good reason to be so: Pokémon modeling a Buddhist pilgrimage, Final Fantasy X modeling a pilgrimage, Final Fantasy XIII following characters who are on the run from the law. Unfortunately, the aforementioned discourse doesn't engage with because linearity itself is treated as undesirable.

This is one of those things where the complaining doesn't hold up to a bit of scrutiny. "Railroading is bad!" "Call of Duty is the ultimate franchise!" Yeah that doesn't work.

i mostly watched a videos of it and unsuccessfully tried to parse the gameplay, read a couple other things describing what it's trying to do with the persistent clock and everyone having a schedule on the submarine or something (this was years ago)

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