I'm not sure what bee got in your bonnet Bolivar, but honestly, if you're not going to even make an attempt to engage in an honest debate and not simply misunderstand and blow off the points I'm trying to make then I'm going to stop wasting my time with you.Originally Posted by Bolivar
So you're argument is essentially that FFVII was ground breaking because technology improved and the developers implemented some techniques filmmakers had been using for years? This is supposed to be innovative, original, and something which pushed video games forward? Honestly? Sounds like they just made it more like a movie to me, and used a pretty well known film technique to do it.
Anyway, to get to the actual topic again, and go down the same road WK is interested in, to actually explore the things which are unique to JRPG's and sets them apart from WRPG's, I would actually agree with Bolivar that the biggest thing in the early days was telling a more directed story. When JRPG's began they were pretty much the only ones doing this at all. Looking specifically at the NES days for example, games like Mario, Zelda, Battletoads, and just about any other non-RPG genre weren't doing this. Yes, they certainly had plots, but they were fairly divorced from the gameplay. They were often used to set up why you're doing what you're doing, but the where, how and with who never really mattered between the opening title screen and the final boss. They weren't interested in creating a plot with structure and pacing, or characters who you played as or interacted with beyond simply stomping on their heads or whacking them with a sword.
But, the issue here is that this is not something which remained unique to RPG's. Structured plots and character development have been co-opted by pretty much every genre in existence now, and it started literally decades ago. Whereas WRPG's have been able to remain somewhat unique in their focus on player choice in character building and character interactions (few games that aren't WRPG's have made attempts at giving players meaningful dialogue and mission choices on the level of games like the original Fallout titles or Mass Effect, and the same is largely true when it comes to building your character as they level up), but the story is not something JRPG's retain a monopoly on.
So even if that was the most important distinction once, the question we need to ask is, now that it's no longer what sets JRPG's apart from WRPG's and is more a matter of what sets WRPG stories apart from pretty much everything else, what makes JRPG's unique anymore? Does anything at all?
I've been giving it some thought, and I'd love to hear WK's or anyone elses thoughts on it (yes Bolivar, even yours), because I'm having trouble coming up with anything. JRPG's have other things which are quite strongly associated with them such as random encounters, turn based battle systems, more defined character classes, but you know what else has all of those? The new XCom. And I don't think anyone here who's actually played it would be prepared to call it a JRPG. And when I look at Persona 3, probably my favourite JRPG in the last few years and think about what I like about it so much aside from the plot and characters or the turn based battle system, what I come up with is the ability to interact with characters and make choices which determine how the relationship develops which is something often associated more strongly with WRPG's, and exploring Tartarus which is, in many ways, more like a randomly generated WRPG dungeon than your typical JRPG dungeon.
And looking at another example in the form of FFXII (the other JRPG I enjoyed immensely in the last several years), it's combat plays more like an MMO, and it has a massive world to explore which happens to be far more open than any JRPG world I've seen. It seems to take many of it's cues from WRPG and MMO gameplay styles rather than simply being a JRPG.
The point being, I think the conclusion I'm kind of trending towards, and part of why I want to hear other people's thoughts on it, is that JRPG's and WRPG's differentiated along two lines very early on due to their differing cultural influences and technological limitations. On the one hand, JRPG's went more down the route of offering more developed and structured stories than a WRPG could really accomplish in English at the time, and which other genres weren't attempting. WRPG's, on the other hand, differentiated themselves along gameplay lines instead. They focused on allowing the player to make decisions in building their character as the old pen and paper RPG's often allowed, and built worlds to explore instead because they simply couldn't do grandly written, well structured stories due to the hardware limitations when they started to appear. Now what it looks like to me right now is that while there's nothing wrong with either approach, the JRPG approach was far more easily co-opted by other genres as time went on and hardware limitations were less of an issue. Almost any game can tell a well structured and developed story these days, and this has been true for at least 15 years or so. But simply having a more structured story doesn't make an FPS stop being an FPS because from a gameplay standpoint, that's exactly what they are. But it's much harder to completely co-opt WRPG game mechanics without actually feeling like a WRPG, not to mention that implementing those mechanics these days is quite costly and time consuming. Not to say other games don't take on aspects of WRPG's, but since they were defined along gameplay lines instead of story telling very early on, they continue to develop and exist along those same lines now, and you have things like non-linear missions, quests and story telling, player dialogue choices which affect how a story plays out, and player character building which often goes much deeper than other games and has a measurable effect on how the game plays.
What do JRPG's have? Turn based battle systems seems to be the big one, but then the Tales series might have some things to say about that. So I think we need to honestly ask the question of if JRPG's really exist as a unique game genre anymore. I don't think there's anything wrong with arguing that there isn't anything that makes them as a whole unique anymore, but it's an interesting prospect nonetheless. And I'm also not going to argue that they haven't differentiated themselves in terms of game mechanics over time either, but looking at them it's hard to say for sure that there are any that bind them all together besides story.
Obviously they're not all turn based given the Tales series existence. They don't all have random encounters looking at Chrono Trigger, FFXII, or Persona 3. They don't all have defined character development as FFV, VII, VIII, XII, and others prove. Maybe story and the cutscene really is the sole defining characteristic which binds them all together?
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