I heard that in the late 2000s the western gaming press had a very strong dislike for JRPGs, which led to Japanese developers treating the term as derogatory. And while I still think that ideally we’d have better terminology that would try to capture the differences between the games rather than their place of origin (the most famous distinction being that “western RPGs” usually let you create your character and treat them as a blank slate in the story, whereas “JRPGs” usually put you in control of a predefined character with their own motivations and actions in the storyline), I think it’s nice that nowadays there are developers who are actually proud of the term “JRPG”.
There was a strong dislike of JRPGs and Japanese games in the 2000s.
Development struggles
From what I heard is, during the shift to HD development in early PS3 360 era, many western devs switched to use Unreal engine, while Japanese devs were sticking to their in house engines. But, in house engines were not cheap nor easy to build / maintain, so they struggled to recoup their expenses.
One of their strategies is to make their games more appealing to the west, but they were kinda doing it from the lens of what they think American games are appealing, so we get games that weren’t universally loved, like
It didn’t help when we got bangers like Mass Effect trilogy, Skyrim, Fallout 3. So Square definitely disliked the JRPG term. However if you were to ask smaller Japanese devs at the time, e.g. ATLUS or Nihon Falcom, they’d probably prefer the term, because their ‘niche’ games (at the time), sold quite well while Square struggled.
Not a really descriptive term anymore
But you’re right, JRPG is non-descriptive when it comes to reviews. I’d prefer that reviewers have a small box that lists out the mechanics of the game, e.g. turn-based, random loot drops, predesignated character, linear dungeons, etc. But even nowadays reviewers are recommending games like Jedi Survivor, while the game is still a broken mess, which made me wonder what’s the point of reviews anymore?
It’s great when the devs like the term, but it barely helps anyone when reviewers use it. Not to mention the political tension when they use the term JRPG for games developed by Chinese or Korean devs.
Of course I haven’t mentioned that some reviewers were just racists fucks. Also it’s the period when Famitsu will just give any games 40/40 if the publishers bought enough advertisements from them, FF13 got 39/40, and Square was probably wondering why the games were not well received outside Japan
I think it doesn’t truly mean “Japanese RPG’s”, even today. There are lots of Japanese games that don’t get called JRPG’s even though they are RPG’s or have those elements (there is ambiguitiy in what an RPG is too, admittedly), like Resident Evil games and Dark Souls games and Zelda games and Pokemon. Dark Souls especially, since they have the character building and stats as well as the roleplaying.
People don’t call Elden Ring a JRPG because JRPG is supposed to mean one thing but really it carries a lot connotations about mechanics, graphics, and the derogatory connotations about quality.
And Pokemon! Pokemon is very clearly a JRPG in the mechnical and graphics sense, but it doesn’t typically get called a JRPG. I think this is because of the negative connotations of JRPG, personally.
And on the other hand we have things like Chained Echoes, which is in all mechanical and graphical ways is a textbook JRPG, except it’s not made in Japan at all, but rather inspired by Japanese games.
I agree this is complicated, but I found Jimquisition’s video on the topic really persuasive. I recommend that one even for people normally don’t jive with Jimquisition’s style.
Within any group, there will always be some who don’t find a term offensive even while others do, but I think probably the best outcome in this case is for the general populace to move away from the term, while leaving space for Japanese video game devs to reclaim it and use it themselves if they wish to.
Maybe it will truly lose the negative connotations with time, but I don’t think we’re there yet, when people are only just starting to sometimes acknowledge it ever had those connotations in the first place.
Granted, most genre words are vague and confusing as hell - JRPG isn’t special in that sense - but most don’t have the racist history/implications or negative connotations. And when I try to think of another genre label that is used as an insult, the first that comes to mind is Visual Novel, which is another one that is heavily associated with Japan.
The gaming press had a pretty strong dislike for Japanese games all together for a bit bar Nintendo titles. Thats why we ended up with that rough era where companies like Capcom were trying to make more western styled titles.
J action sounds right for metal gear rising and Bayonetta. It’s a lot better then trying to call it camera style common verb like fps, TPS. Our genres should really start focusing on player experience rather than basic mechanics.
This is why the last Nintendo I used was a Nintendo GameCube. The last Playstation I used was a PS2. I just started to game on a PC. Console gaming might become a thing of the past if people get tired of this type of thing. You can hook a laptop or PC up to a TV now if you want.
Yeah, notice how I used “might” in my comment. That’s a modal verb of “maybe maybe not.” PC Gaming is just as easy to use as a console. PC Gaming, however, looks expensive. It isn’t, if you math geek yourself out and realize that instead of buying consoles multiple times, you can pretty much stick with the same PC in the same time period. With my gaming PC, all my stuff connects to it by Bluetooth. It’s ready to go when I switch it on. I can play most of the games on it that are available on whatever console, except the few that are exclusives tied to a particular console. Even better, I can play games to my heart’s content. I have a library to choke a horse and it will be viable probably until I’m dead. The problem is when we talk about money. To have a nice gaming PC or gaming laptop, you have to shell out double what a console costs. What a lot of people can’t think about is: You shell out more on the gaming PC, but it is viable longer because it is not subject to the whims of console makers. Sure, you can just shell out 400 bucks or whatever on a Nintendo Switch instead of shelling out 1000 or so on a gaming PC or laptop (some of them are 2000 or more). However, the computer, if you know how to take good care of it, is viable twice or three times as long as the console, so in the end, you’ve made a good investment and you don’t have to worry about changing consoles when the company that makes the console decides to produce a new product. This is what I was talking about. People don’t understand it perhaps because they don’t think about it, but they really should because it’s a money saver in the end. Plus: You can play your old games just fine for as long as you want.
Except when the console maker decides to make a new console and decides what games will no longer work on the new console and what will. Or, perhaps the console maker decides that you can play some of your old games on the new console, but decides that to do so you have to buy a subscription, or you have to buy the games again because they had to make a new version of the old games that work with the new console. A PC will outlast that. You can buy two or three consoles, or buy one PC. Doesn’t look cheaper to me. Then, I’ll add to my comment: When it’s finally time to buy a new PC, which for whatever reason you have decided on your own because nobody cancelled your PC, you take your whole collection of games to the new PC and they work just fine on the new PC, plus you can have the new games that your new PC can run.
I agree that PC gaming has a lot of benefits, and it’s also my preference, but if you want to keep a rig that plays current games at their best its not cheaper.
That’s the trade off. If you think you have to have the latest, greatest, fastest hardware you are going to have to shell out the big bucks. More often than not, a game looks the same to me whether its played on this year’s graphics card or last year’s graphics card or even the year before last’s graphics card. At some point speed and memory size are numbers that don’t need to go beyond a certain point to give you decent software performance. People will disagree with this and I think that’s fine. Maybe my eyes are wonky. Who knows? My wonky eyes save me money. The graphics look about the same to me using this or that graphics card.
You don’t need to buy a state of the art PC though. You can play most indies on a ten year old laptop, and you can build a good enough PC for the same price as a console and all its peripherals. The real savings are in the software though, you don’t need to pay full whack for games when you have steam sales, free giveaways, and the ability to play anything that anyone has made for the last few decades!
Yes. It’s a money grab more than anything else, designed to make people buy new stuff. In this case, a new console, new games, new peripherals, subscriptions, etc. I like my PC because of the freedom from this type of stuff it affords me, it is in fact cheaper to use a PC if you’re a careful shopper. If you’re the type of shopper that buys things as soon as they come out or you’re impulsive, well then, yes, PC gaming can get very expensive. But it’s like anything else in this capitalist world of consumption. Jeans can be affordable or outrageously expensive. So can hamburgers. I’m the type of shopper that never pays full price for ANYTHING and I never buy things on a whim. I study stuff, think about it, and wait. I do my own upgrades on hardware, too. Opening a PC tower and sticking things into slots is not exactly complicated.
I’m fully well aware of the benefits of PC gaming (I’ve not bought a console for a decade and I run a community for free PC game giveaways!), but you can’t really get mad at a console company releasing a new version. The point of a console is to be a fixed, known piece of hardware that children can use without needing to tinker with settings, and obviously they’re going to want to up the version of things every few years as technology progresses!
Oh, I guess my comment looked like I was mad at the console companies? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound angry. I just don’t like using consoles because sometimes it feels like there is a forced obsolescence placed on them like just about everything these days. I feel like investing in a console is submitting myself to the whims of the console maker, who will decide for me when it’s out of date and how I’ll be able to use the games for it in the future. You know, I have an iPad 2 that works just like it did when it was brand new but it’s not useful for very much because software updates on it were stopped a few years ago. Now it’s a digital picture frame. If the iPad was a person, I think it would shout at me and say, “I still work great! If somebody would just let me, I’d show you web sites! Why are you just using me as a silly digital picture frame? I’m way better than this, you fool!” I think if people like using consoles they should feel free to use them. I don’t like them for me because I like to have all my games in one place and usable in the future. I see a PC as a better use of my money (again, for me, not for everyone) and I’m glad I made the decision to stop buying consoles years ago. If I had kids, they would learn how to game on a PC or not play games at all, I guess! Anyway, I was mostly talking about money, but there are other good reasons to use a PC over a console. For example, you can upgrade a PC with newer hardware as needed, so that’s less wasteful, don’t you think? Anyway, no anger from me. Console companies will do what they see fit to make money. That’s how the economy works and that’s just the way it is. That being said, I refuse to participate in that system and I think if somebody reads this and decides not to, well I did something useful and helpful today.
Call it the SuperSwitch to mimic the nes -> supernes era. No new gimmick, just double the specs and ride the wave of portable consoles being “good enough”. Rival the steam deck and all the clones coming, with Nintendo’s amazing first party titles and milk the next 5-7 years
It absolutely needs backwards compatibility. Throwing away the whole Nintendo Switch library would be a waste, and there are some games that would even benefit from improved performance.
If it’s on a new console who says the performance or world would be bad? With hardware that isn’t 10 years old they could actually have a full world without the game chugging at 15FPS.
Also are you seriously gonna pretend like having the game be 3D is no different from Fire Red or Leaf Green? Lol
This is exciting of course, but alas, I haven’t touched my switch since I got a steam deck. There’s a few Nintendo games I would want to play but I’m not sure I’ll buy a new console for them.
Pikmin 4 just dropped. Super fun! I don’t know where else you’d play that. I haven’t even had time to touch LOZ TOTK, but that’s life stuff. There’s plenty to play on Switch. And there’s reason to play on the lighter package as well.
It feels like game development timelines are so long these days that there’s very few games per hardware generation. I look back at the PS2’s library (to be fair, it was enormous even for its own time) and everything on the Switch feels tiny in comparison.
Also, even if the “new Nintendo Switch(i)” or whatever is backwards compatible, the rise of digital sales means I can’t play my switch games on the new console anyway.
If there aren't legit more Nintendo Switch games than there were PS2 games right now, I imagine that the Switch will just trample the PS2 before its end.
Indie games really skew that count, though to be fair they weren't really a thing back then. But speaking of major triple-A and mid-sized double-A studios, they have released games much more slowly compared to previous generations, and that's even easier to see in more powerful consoles like the PS5.
Sure, but why does that matter? Saying “indie games skew the count” implies that you don’t feel that indie games are “real” games. The big devs and publishers may have slowed down, but that’s because the games they wanted to make got bigger with more art, more music, bigger worlds, etc. Nowadays, the biggest “indie” dev teams are about the same size as the mid-size developers in the PS2 days.
Nah, that's definitely not what I meant. It's great that we get so many indie games. But if anything I feel like, other than Nintendo, the large studios are not making the most out of each generation before the next console is released.
From the reddit r/games thread, sounds like a lot of folks aren’t too keen on the idea of another low-quality LCD screen. How would you feel about a Switch successor having basically the same screen?
I go back and forth between playing a lot of handheld and very little handheld. Honestly the screen doesn’t bother me. I’ve had no issues with Nintendo games. I would argue the biggest issue in modern day gaming is the bloody text size of things. I’m trying to play FFXV right now on ps4 and the text is soooo bloody small.
Ugh text size is a pet peeve of mine. I’m mostly PC gaming these days and it’s less of an issue there, but idk how it’s 2023 and text size isn’t as ubiquitous as like, discrete volume sliders.
I’d like there to be an OLED option for people who use handheld mode heavily and want to pay more for a better display. But for the base model, it makes total sense for it to be an LCD display. That’s just prudent, as the average player probably doesn’t care and wants to pay less. Especially parents buying this at Christmas.
I don’t care as long as it’s a decent resolution LCD.
Honestly comparing switch game storage with PS5 storage seems off. They’re completely different beasts with games that aren’t nearly as big or as detailed. If I can upgrade it like the current switch with a microSD or with a nVME like the PS5, it’d all the better.
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