What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[Man_Over_Game]

I'd argue that in RPGs, especially JRPGs, the story is often the centerpiece of the game, equal to or even sometimes above the gameplay. Heck, that's a defining enough feature of much of the genre that it's a large part of why I'm personally incapable of thinking of games like Pokémon or Dark Souls as RPGs - too little story to them.

I could dig that, but I have to question why that's not where the player's interaction lies.

Similarly to a Visual Novel, a JRPG could very well be centered around the story elements. But if that were the case, why do JRPGs not emphasize that? It gives off a bad expectation, as a lot of them give off the impression that what's more important is the strategy element to the game.

PS:T is an example of the reverse of what I mean. The combat sucks, the plot rocks, and the best part is that the combat gameplay is only like 30% of the game. The best way to play the game is through conversation, interacting with the story, and being a part of the world to solve your problems, even though you can usually brute-force most of your problems away.

You can even defeat the final boss through negotiating with him into giving up.


Not saying JRPGs need to have the same kind of versatile writing that Planescape has, but they could do a better job of emphasizing what the important elements are to the player.



I was listening to a video of the developers of the Batman Arkham games, and one of them said that they originally planned for the combat system to be very complex with a lot of mechanics...and then they realized that they didn't want that. It puts too much emphasis on that aspect of the game, when the core of those games are about Batman planning and investigating to solve his problems than just being a good martial artist. So they dumbed down the combat to something that feels intuitive and simple, while rewarding those that master it through its escalating combo system, and now you don't have to be good at combat to be good at the game.

JRPGs have this weird dilemma where they can't tell if they're a novel or a turn-based strategy. And if they don't want to choose, then don't make them mutually exclusive, like how Battlechasers: Nightwar keeps most of the exposition brief and includes character-building conversations midcombat, or Transistor having the narrator give comments on the environment and enemies as you take hits and pull off big combos.

50/50 doesn't have to mean "Half the time you're world-building, and the other half you're playing", and it's that inability to learn that's made me kinda frustrated at the development of JRPGs. We've had almost 40 years of JRPGs at this point, yet Supergiant Games managed to deal with this problem in the 3 out of 4 games they've released in the last 10 (Pyre did run into this issue, which they resolved by making the plot catered to your experiences, so it's always relevant and current to the player at that exact moment in the plot).

Don't get me wrong, I'm also frustrated with the Pokemon series basically being the RPG equivalent of FIFA/Madden, but JRPGs aren't really all that much better, as the biggest thing accounting for the differences is that JRPGs have different developers (where Pokemon/FIFA/Madden/Dynasty Warriors generally do not).

Even the leading series of most well-known JRPGs, Final Fantasy, has grown up from those original trends 40 years ago (even if they happened to grow out of JRPGs entirely).


On that note, Final Fantasy 16 trailer is out. Looks like Witcher + Kingdom Hearts. One thing I noticed is that it's a lot darker than most FF games (a guy gets his head exploded all over a kid in the trailer), and all of the showcased combat scenes are 1v1 duels, although that could just be a limitation of the system that they jury rigged to show off the game. Lord knows how many changes FF7R and Final Fantasy 15 went through before the finished products.