Why does SE believe that people don't like JPRGs?

[Vyk]

Saw a similar opinion in another thread, and had a brain fart, and replied as if it was a discussion in this thread. So... I'll just paste that response here..

I realize certain styles of anime aesthetic are acquired tastes, but most of them are par for the course. Is this meant to illustrate the idea that people are growing out of the whole aspect of JRPGs? This would lead one to believe if games like FFVI and Xenogears were released today, people would roll their eyes and sigh at the art direction and not give it another thought? Even the earliest Dragon Warrior games looked like anime. And damn near every JRPG after that. I don't see how that alone is a deciding factor. At least it's not super-deformed (chibi) anime style anymore like it was in those days

[Loony BoB]

WK's post is a really interesting one and raises a lot of good points. I feel that the biggest problem with the console JRPG industry at the moment is the lack of competition. It reminds me of when WWF bought out WCW. The competition fell apart and suddenly things got stale fast. Square and Enix merging probably worked out the same way to some extent.

Another thing WK touched on is "what is the difference?" for, say, Dragon Age vs. JRPGs. It's really hard for me to say as I can barely remember Dragon Age... here are things that could be different, going by memory alone, so please bare with me.

- Art direction. It is not a world full of wonder and beauty so much as a world full of stone buildings and dark woods.
- Camera angle / battle system - If I recall, the battle system is more akin to Diablo, and the loot is in a similar vein.
- Characters vs. Story - In almost all FF games, characters make the story, and they are fixed characters with their own stories that are 99% of the time set in stone, too. We are being told a story rather than writing it. In Dragon Age, I feel that while the characters have a background, it is us that develops their story from that point and it is us that controls how they turn out. I don't recall much about how tied they are to the overall storyline.
- Time spent in 'safe' areas. I felt like DA was a game that furthered the story to allow you to visit a dungeon (basically a dungeon crawler), while I feel like FFs are games where you visited the occasional dungeon in order to further the story.

[Dr Unne]

If, in FFXIII...
- Sahz actually killed himself
- Hope actually succumbed and turned into a Cie'th, thus having to be killed
- Jihl ended up joining the good guys at some point, after seeing the enemy for his true colours
- The final boss was Barthy
- Barthy was more prevelant and his reasoning for doing what he was doing was better explained, and his "co-conspirators" were better fleshed out
- There were better minigames with good comic relief
- You could unlock additional characters
- A non-humanoid character of Pulse joined the party

...it might have been received a lot better. Especially the first parts. I mean, seriously, they would have blown some people's minds (excuse the pun).

AAA games on PS/XB take too much money to produce. To make that money back they have to sell as many copies as possible, so the game often ends up generic and bland by necessity so they can appeal to as many people as possible. I think that was possibly one of FF13's problems. It looked very nice and had lots of voice acting and hit all the AAA marks, but it was a forgettable game. The ideal would be creative game developers taking big chances and pumping out new ideas and new games, until lightning strikes (pun unintended) and some guy's like "Listen, everyone! Time-travelling frogs! Hold on, hear me out..." and we get the next Chrono Trigger. That's pretty hard to do when taking a chance costs 5-10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

The solution is find a way to make games quickly and more cheaply. For that reason I think maybe PS/XB are the wrong platform for JRPGs, and they're becoming wronger over time. Which is why I love my 3DS and Vita where I can play tons of niche games, and I love my PC where I can play tons of indie games. (http://www.anodynegame.com/ - A 2D vaguely FF-like RPG made by two people, where your weapon is a broom. A lot more fun than FF13.) The things AAA-ness brings to the table are not the things that make a game good. AAA RPGs could go away and I wouldn't care. I'd rather SE split up the small army of people probably working on FFXV into 10 smaller teams and told them each to go nuts, you have one year to make a a brand new RPG, no voice acting, no motion-capture, no fully orchestrated soundtrack, no 30-minute FMVs, hop to it.

The longer that FFXV takes, the more worried I become. Is it going to wipe out SE if it flops? Is some board of directors telling the dev team "The main character does WHAT? Take that out of the game, it'll hurt sales!" What are the chances that FFXV is going to be an amazing game? I'm sure it'll be an OK, playable game, but what are the chances we get a game that people still love in 20 years? Chrono Trigger is turning 20 next year, FYI.

[Loony BoB]

While I get what you mean, Unne, I do feel we already have those kind of 'small scale' RPGs in abundance and they don't capture me to the same level as the AAA games do. I think people are quick to make excuses for all this stuff (eg. "But the cost of making the character!") when other games seem to be able to do it perfectly fine and are considered a success with fewer sales than an FF 'failure' gets. Perhaps with FF in particular, they spend too much time on the pretty, but I don't think that means we should jump all the way back to FFVI/VII levels. I think, in four years, SE should be able to make a FFX-quality game, graphic-wise and gameplay-wise. The story shouldn't change the development time or cost, just the gameplay mechanics, the world and the art. So I wouldn't mind if SE stopped trying to make new engines each time and settled on one for a full generation, just like other major series do in other genres.

The longer that FFXV takes, the more worried I become. Is it going to wipe out SE if it flops? Is some board of directors telling the dev team "The main character does WHAT? Take that out of the game, it'll hurt sales!" What are the chances that FFXV is going to be an amazing game? I'm sure it'll be an OK, playable game, but what are the chances we get a game that people still love in 20 years? Chrono Trigger is turning 20 next year, FYI.

To answer your worry about FFXV bombing causing SE to be wiped out: This won't happen while FFXIV is around. FFXIV is a huge success, already even more so than FFXI was, and FFXI out-earned every other FF. SE could literally fund the production of future FFs on FFXIV's earnings alone, at least one or two of them. I expect FFXV will sell very well, though.

I think we'll only know if the game is still loved 20 years on in 20 years. People have slated FFVIII, FFIX, FFX, FFXI, FFXII and FFXIII when they came out. Almost all of these games are looked back on fondly by those who favoured them, while the haters move on to other things. In the long run, I feel that most (if not all) of these games will be looked on fondly after 20 years from their launch.

[Bolivar]

Saw a similar opinion in another thread, and had a brain fart, and replied as if it was a discussion in this thread. So... I'll just paste that response here..

I realize certain styles of anime aesthetic are acquired tastes, but most of them are par for the course. Is this meant to illustrate the idea that people are growing out of the whole aspect of JRPGs? This would lead one to believe if games like FFVI and Xenogears were released today, people would roll their eyes and sigh at the art direction and not give it another thought? Even the earliest Dragon Warrior games looked like anime. And damn near every JRPG after that. I don't see how that alone is a deciding factor. At least it's not super-deformed (chibi) anime style anymore like it was in those days

I still see a line between influence and imitation, then and now. Sprites and pixel art exists on its own apart from chibi art and I would even say Akira Toriyana's drawings take on a different life in Dragon Quest than they do in his anime.

[Sephiroth]

Saw a similar opinion in another thread, and had a brain fart, and replied as if it was a discussion in this thread. So... I'll just paste that response here..

I realize certain styles of anime aesthetic are acquired tastes, but most of them are par for the course. Is this meant to illustrate the idea that people are growing out of the whole aspect of JRPGs? This would lead one to believe if games like FFVI and Xenogears were released today, people would roll their eyes and sigh at the art direction and not give it another thought? Even the earliest Dragon Warrior games looked like anime. And damn near every JRPG after that. I don't see how that alone is a deciding factor. At least it's not super-deformed (chibi) anime style anymore like it was in those days

I still see a line between influence and imitation, then and now. Sprites and pixel art exists on its own apart from chibi art and I would even say Akira Toriyana's drawings take on a different life in Dragon Quest than they do in his anime.

The anime is also pretty much not drawn by him. There are various people working for Toei to adapt the Manga panels and give them anime life.

[Wolf Kanno]

WK's post is a really interesting one and raises a lot of good points. I feel that the biggest problem with the console JRPG industry at the moment is the lack of competition. It reminds me of when WWF bought out WCW. The competition fell apart and suddenly things got stale fast. Square and Enix merging probably worked out the same way to some extent.

Another thing WK touched on is "what is the difference?" for, say, Dragon Age vs. JRPGs. It's really hard for me to say as I can barely remember Dragon Age... here are things that could be different, going by memory alone, so please bare with me.

- Art direction. It is not a world full of wonder and beauty so much as a world full of stone buildings and dark woods.
- Camera angle / battle system - If I recall, the battle system is more akin to Diablo, and the loot is in a similar vein.
- Characters vs. Story - In almost all FF games, characters make the story, and they are fixed characters with their own stories that are 99% of the time set in stone, too. We are being told a story rather than writing it. In Dragon Age, I feel that while the characters have a background, it is us that develops their story from that point and it is us that controls how they turn out. I don't recall much about how tied they are to the overall storyline.
- Time spent in 'safe' areas. I felt like DA was a game that furthered the story to allow you to visit a dungeon (basically a dungeon crawler), while I feel like FFs are games where you visited the occasional dungeon in order to further the story.

You're missing a bit of my point, though your breakdown is valid between JRPG vs. High profile WRPG, my question is what does FFXIII offer as an experience in relation to Uncharted, The Walking Dead, MGS4, or Heavy Rain? It's easy to criticize the more player-centric design of WRPGs but if you want strong plot and characters with nice art direction and less repetitive gameplay, then why not drop JRPGs altogether and check out the other AAA cinematic games offered on consoles/PC? What does a future FF offer as a complete package that you can't find in any other genre?

Square made bank back in the day for being a cinematic experience but it was easy to do so because quite frankly they didn't have competition in both their own genre but also didn't have to worry about other genres. When your selling point is simply well written stories and characters, and now you find yourself seeing this in FPS, Action games, Adventure games, and so forth, what does a JRPG have left to make it standout? We could argue a different flavor but there are plenty of other Japanese games with strong characters and plot that are not JRPGs and if its only just flavor then we're basically resigning it to niche status anyway, which in turn means that the medium and platform wouldn't matter from a business perspective.

What makes Bravery Default an interesting case and why I feel SE is surprised by its success is not because they wrote a great plot and characters, its the fact the game returns to the fundamentals of the genre from a game design stance, updated it a bit with a new spin, and people actually liked it. For two whole console generations, SE has been moving as far away as they can from the idea of four people standing on one side vs. monsters on the others and each taking turns hitting the other since the series explosion into mainstream, because fans and the design team wanted to move away from that; and yet here we have a game that still keeps this fundamental principle and people actually bought it, not just Japanese fans who grew up and appreciated this style of game, but those damn filthy Westerners whose majority of games they design involving action, explosions, and aimless wandering to find new things to kill and make them explode. Their reaction is about the same as game designer's who are dumbstruck to find out girls like playing their games as well despite their belief it lacks any quality they erroneously assume they like.

So we should really try to imagine what the JRPG can actually bring to gaming that isn't already covered by other genres or assume what is wrong with the design that needs to be improved to garner larger appeal.

[Bolivar]

Those other games are short.

Your premise is also flawed in that games don't need to do something different to co-exist, they need only do something well. A FFX today would be just as well received as 2001.

[Wolf Kanno]

Those other games are short.

Your premise is also flawed in that games don't need to do something different to co-exist, they need only do something well. A FFX today would be just as well received as 2001.

Why would length matter? A good story doesn't require it to be a door stopper. I could enjoy the entire Uncharted Trilogy in the time it would take to play FFXIII.

As for co-existence, if they could do so as the genre is now, we wouldn't have so many topics about the fall of the genre. The issue I'm pointing out is that people only like JRPGs for their stories and characters and my question is then why does it matter if its a JRPG when other games can provide great story and characters? You mention length but a long story has just as much chance as being a lgood as a short one and vice versa. Are you saying Uncharted 2's story and characters would be better if they stretched the game out another 30 hours? Are you saying a 20 hour RPG can't make it in today's market even if the story is well written because its just not long enough? The flaw in your argument is that you're placing too much importance on a quality of writing that other forms of medium have proven is just not the case as many short films can often be more successful and compelling than some 3 hour Hollywood blockbuster or writers being better known for their short-stories than their novels, so I fail to see how a game transcends this fact. The Last Story is a game that shows an RPG can be 20 hours long in scope and still be enjoyable experience with a compelling plot. The major flaw in its story is the poor writing of the two leads of the game but I don't believe an extra 20 hours could have fixed that as much as just getting a better writer would.

My point is that if the writing is good, length wouldn't matter. I also disagree that an FFX design clone would do well in today's market considering how its design kind of killed interest in the genre during the PS2 era because the cinematic story telling interfered too much with gameplay, and RPGs began to be seen as more film than game. XIII did well because it was an overdue game from a famous franchise, not because its core design philosophy was embraced by the fanbase, XIII-2 and LR would not have had to go so far in in the opposite direction in terms of game focus if fans truly wanted the FFX experience of 80% plot 20% game. FFX sold 8 million units, 1.4 million of it was pre-ordered. The HD remake has barely reached half a million in the three months of its release so I feel you are speaking too much from personal preference in saying fans love that style of game since even the originator can't be greeted with the same fan fare when its re-released. Its design is flawed for the genre but other genres have utilized it better.

[VeloZer0]

I think WK is hitting the nail on the head with the decline of JPRG market share correlating with other games adopting powerful story telling. The question is what do traditional JPRGs offer uniquely?

1) Turn-ish based battles. I say turn-ish to include the broader spectrum of things such as ATB.

2) Pacing control. In something like an FPS you don't have much options in terms of pacing, as you can't introduce elements like towns and puzzles. In a more open world WRPG you also loose a lot of your pacing control, as players are screwing around on their own. This is obviously a trade-off. By linearizing the experience (and yes, even older JRPGs are linear by WRPG standards) you take away gameplay elements. So the narrative you use it to weave better damn well be worth it.

So if you make a game that fails to make battles fun instead of dungeon-time-filler and don't use good pacing control to tell the story then you have basically failed at what can make a JRPG good.

[Bolivar]

Those other games are short.

Your premise is also flawed in that games don't need to do something different to co-exist, they need only do something well. A FFX today would be just as well received as 2001.

Why would length matter? A good story doesn't require it to be a door stopper. I could enjoy the entire Uncharted Trilogy in the time it would take to play FFXIII.

As for co-existence, if they could do so as the genre is now, we wouldn't have so many topics about the fall of the genre. The issue I'm pointing out is that people only like JRPGs for their stories and characters and my question is then why does it matter if its a JRPG when other games can provide great story and characters? You mention length but a long story has just as much chance as being a lgood as a short one and vice versa. Are you saying Uncharted 2's story and characters would be better if they stretched the game out another 30 hours? Are you saying a 20 hour RPG can't make it in today's market even if the story is well written because its just not long enough? The flaw in your argument is that you're placing too much importance on a quality of writing that other forms of medium have proven is just not the case as many short films can often be more successful and compelling than some 3 hour Hollywood blockbuster or writers being better known for their short-stories than their novels, so I fail to see how a game transcends this fact. The Last Story is a game that shows an RPG can be 20 hours long in scope and still be enjoyable experience with a compelling plot. The major flaw in its story is the poor writing of the two leads of the game but I don't believe an extra 20 hours could have fixed that as much as just getting a better writer would.

My point is that if the writing is good, length wouldn't matter. I also disagree that an FFX design clone would do well in today's market considering how its design kind of killed interest in the genre during the PS2 era because the cinematic story telling interfered too much with gameplay, and RPGs began to be seen as more film than game. XIII did well because it was an overdue game from a famous franchise, not because its core design philosophy was embraced by the fanbase, XIII-2 and LR would not have had to go so far in in the opposite direction in terms of game focus if fans truly wanted the FFX experience of 80% plot 20% game. FFX sold 8 million units, 1.4 million of it was pre-ordered. The HD remake has barely reached half a million in the three months of its release so I feel you are speaking too much from personal preference in saying fans love that style of game since even the originator can't be greeted with the same fan fare when its re-released. Its design is flawed for the genre but other genres have utilized it better.

I like big games, whereas other genres struggle to make cinematic experiences that last more than a few hours. There's nothing wrong with that but it's something I like that JRPGs can give me.

Your "decline of the genre" is hyperbole; it's always been niche, yet there are more JRPGs (and Western imitations) coming out from more developers on more platforms than ever before.

[Mirage]

I think WK is hitting the nail on the head with the decline of JPRG market share correlating with other games adopting powerful story telling. The question is what do traditional JPRGs offer uniquely?

1) Turn-ish based battles. I say turn-ish to include the broader spectrum of things such as ATB.

2) Pacing control. In something like an FPS you don't have much options in terms of pacing, as you can't introduce elements like towns and puzzles. In a more open world WRPG you also loose a lot of your pacing control, as players are screwing around on their own. This is obviously a trade-off. By linearizing the experience (and yes, even older JRPGs are linear by WRPG standards) you take away gameplay elements. So the narrative you use it to weave better damn well be worth it.

So if you make a game that fails to make battles fun instead of dungeon-time-filler and don't use good pacing control to tell the story then you have basically failed at what can make a JRPG good.

It's no problem to incorporate puzzles and towns in FPS games. Well, there might be a problem in making the average FPS player accept such a design choice, but that doesn't count.

[Loony BoB]

Are we seriously comparing FFXIII to Uncharted 3 now? Are we seriously questioning the reasons one might want to play a JRPG over a TPS/FPS? Are we seriously questioning whether there is any difference between the two experiences that one person might enjoy more than another?

Because xD if that's the case.

You can't ask what makes a JRPG different to a WRPG and then take those differences and say "Then why not play an FPS game?" If I told you the differences between a JRPG and an FPS, you'd come back with "But why not play a WRPG?" and we could go in circles all day. Do you want me to tell you the reasons people might want to play a JRPG over watching a movie, too? And before you go "Well, actually..." - again, seriously...

Every genre has something that you could argue another genre has.

The key point of the genre is that it covers all or most of these varied differences from all the other collective genres.

JRPGs have a story, but that does not make them a Survival Horror.
JRPGs have a leveling process, but that does not make them a TBS.
JRPGs have dungeon areas, but that does not make them a Dungeon Crawler.
JRPGs have characters, but that does not make them a Platformer.
JRPGs can be 3D, but that does not make them a Space Trade & Combat Simulator.
JRPGs generally won't allow you to win every battle by pressing X repeatedly, but that doesn't make them a Fighter (Beat'em Up) game.
JRPGs characters have a personal tie to the overall plot, but that doesn't make them a Point & Click Game.
JRPGs characters generally have a fixed story to them, but that doesn't make them a FPS.
JRPGs generally have varying weapons with upgrade systems, but that doesn't make them a WRPG.
JRPGs can have multiple controllable characters, but that doesn't make them an RTS.
JRPGs generally have puzzles to be solved, but that doesn't make them a Puzzle game.
JRPGs generally have cinematics, but that doesn't make them a movie.
JRPGs can sometimes allow you to move characters around the field, but that doesn't make them a Sports game.
JRPGs generally do not require excellent hand-eye co-ordination with precise timing, but that doesn't make them a City Building Sim.

JRPGs generally have all of these things, or at least most of them.

So, to go back to WK's question of "what does FFXIII offer as an experience in relation to Uncharted, The Walking Dead, MGS4, or Heavy Rain?", I will simply say "it's a JRPG." If you want specific examples of why any one person might want to play FFXIII - a JRPG - instead of another game, you'll have to ask that specific person. I love Uncharted and I love Final Fantasy. I play them both. Honestly, I don't need a reason for this beyond the fact that I enjoy playing video games and they are both video games. But yeah, they're blatantly different kettles of fish.

[Bolivar]

I think it's also telling how FFXIII outsold nearly all the games Wolf mentioned.

[Loony BoB]

I just realised that this thread is actually about Japanese Public Relations Games. Guys, we've been doing this all wrong.