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Fun Club JRPGs are RPGs developed in Japan

Heron said:
Because apportioning stats and doing side quests do not make a game an RPG. Those are just video game systems, that appear in games as diverse as action games (like Dark Souls) to baseball sims. Stats are just part of video games.

RPGs are where your character makes meaningful decisions that impact the story. The idea is that you "role play" (ie play make believe) as your character to make consistent decisions. See Divinity Original Sin; Elder Scrolls etc. You embody a character - mentally - and are given scenarios in which to let that play out.

Dark Souls has more in common with character action games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta than it does the two RPG series I mentioned.
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Lord Azrael said:
You do roleplay though. The Souls franchise has plenty of permanent branching consequences, far more than many JRPGs in fact. And you have huge control over build customization, another aspect of roleplaying. Story agency isn't the only aspect, otherwise plenty of visual novels/adventure games would be classified as RPGs under such a definition.
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Yeah Dark Souls has more meaningful decisions than most JRPGs, and honestly even some WRPGs

And that's ignoring the fact that it has leveling, different equipment, side quests, the works. It fits every definition of an RPG besides the combat being it's own thing (and even then, it's not systemically that different from any other action RPGs)
 
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What do you think of that time when Tim Rogers said The Witcher games were JRPGs in spirit and that's the reason why a lot of Japanese developers like Hori loved the third game?
 
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Lord Azrael said:
That feels like an arbitrary distinction to me though. It's no different than RPGs that let you respec your character builds. Any job-based RPG for example. The more I think about it, I can no longer deny that Monster Hunter is an RPG!!! (though I would call it an ARPG personally, not a JRPG :p)
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Haha it probably is an arbitrary distinction but the line has to be drawn somewhere with many systems and mechanics crossing genres.

Like Horizon is a bit of an RPG lite compared to proper WRPGs does it still count as an RPG? If yes, what about Spider-Man? It and Horizon share a whole lot of their gameplay loop and mechanics.

Hint: Horizon is an option world action adventure, I don’t consider it an RPG.

The alternative is a lawless world where everything is an RPG.
 
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Lord Azrael said:
You do roleplay though. The Souls franchise has plenty of permanent branching consequences, far more than many JRPGs in fact. And you have huge control over build customization, another aspect of roleplaying. Story agency isn't the only aspect, otherwise plenty of visual novels/adventure games would be classified as RPGs under such a definition.
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My whole point is that I'd consider a visual novel / adventure with high levels of story agency game an RPG long before I'd consider I'd consider an action game with "build agency" one. And I've never seen a JRPG I actually consider a real RPG. I fundamentally disagree with the modern consensus on what makes an RPG.

I've also beaten every Fromsoft game multiple times and can barely recall a meaningful decision I had to make beyond pushes patches down a hole, lol
They are narratively linear games that lead to endings where you're given a choice or two as to what ending sequence you want to see.
 
My g/f just said all games are role playing games as you play the role of someone... Or something... 😅

Yeah, I'm not buying Tetris as an RPG my love...

And neither is Dark Souls... 😅
 
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Heron said:
Because apportioning stats and doing side quests do not make a game an RPG. Those are just video game systems, that appear in games as diverse as action games (like Dark Souls) to baseball sims. Stats are just part of video games.

RPGs are where your character makes meaningful decisions that impact the story. The idea is that you "role play" (ie play make believe) as your character to make consistent decisions. See Divinity Original Sin; Elder Scrolls etc. You embody a character - mentally - and are given scenarios in which to let that play out.

Dark Souls has more in common with character action games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta than it does the two RPG series I mentioned.
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A lot of RPGs like Final Fantasy though have pretty set storylines with defined characters, that you don't change very much.
 
Scrawnton said:
Dark Souls isn’t a JRPG, it’s a Metroidvania. If Dark Souls is a JRPG, so are Castlevania games.
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I mean, leveling up does help you. You can do more damage and have more hp depending on how you level which will make the game easier. Not sure if its a jrpg. Id probably just call it an action rpg since you can level to make it easier but you can get through the game without leveling if your smart about it and know what your doing
 
Heron said:
There isn't a single final fantasy game that is an RPG.
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So by this definition, JRPGs basically don't exist, so arguing what is or isn't a JRPG is basically pointless.

I mean, I guess that's consistent (arguably more so since it carries over the spirit of the name "RPG" brought over from tabletop) but then what do we call JRPGs then?
 
NabiscoFelt said:
So by this definition, JRPGs basically don't exist, so arguing what is or isn't a JRPG is basically pointless.

I mean, I guess that's consistent (arguably more so since it carries over the spirit of the name "RPG" brought over from tabletop) but then what do we call JRPGs then?
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Menu battlers
 
I don't know, plenty of obvious JRPGs are not made in Japan, including higher profile ones like Final Fantasy IX.

To me the proper way to categorise them is to see if they have any of the following elements:
- Power of friendship
- Talk about how oooooold the 30 year old characters are
- Elemental types that make you raise an eyebrow like "ghost" and stuff
- Battle music that is pleasant to listen to
- A child with an weapon
- Hot springs
- Easy to navigate menus that don't aren't a soup of numbers, abbreviations, and more menus.
- When you can tell who's important by how cool their hair is
- Nobody has amnesia.

If it's got more than three of these, it's probably a JRPG. If it's got fewer, it's probably a kart racer, I don't know.
 
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Heron said:
My whole point is that I'd consider a visual novel / adventure with high levels of story agency game an RPG long before I'd consider I'd consider an action game with "build agency" one. And I've never seen a JRPG I actually consider a real RPG. I fundamentally disagree with the modern consensus on what makes an RPG.
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But you also disagree with the old consensus of what makes an RPG here. :)

Early games like dnd, moria and so on had little actual in the way of branching narratives. Games like rogue at least had the exploration aspect, as rogie procedurally generated dungeon levels you had to find your way. Still, narratively it was pretty straight-forward. These early games were rapidly produced often by single developers, they concentrated heavily on systems and numbers, not on narration as this was more time consuming.

The big number of commercial RPGs later in the 80s started to dive deeper, like the Gold Box RPGs, Ultima, Might and Magic or Wizardry. But still they retained the heavy focus on statistics and RNG.
 
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For me the term JRPG refer to how the genre had its peculiar evolution in Japan since the '80s so in a sense the meaning of the term became somewhat obsolete and changed with the evolution of videogames (and globalization) over time.
"JRPG" was the japanese take on consoles (not just on consoles, there was a thriving scene on japanese computers too, but mainly on consoles due to the dominant presence of Famicom/NES in the japanese market) on the early western developers attempts to translate role playing board games in videogame form, which were mostly on computers.
Therefore while there were many clones from western computer RPG videogames (think of dungeon crawlers), eventually japanese developers set out with the task to adapt the genre to the peculiarity of the mainstream japanese market which meant to accomodate the user interface to the much simplified Famicom joypad (one d-pad, two action buttons plus select and start buttons) and leveraging the booming manga/anime industry that catered to young players.
The support of Shonen Jump was instrumental for the DraQue boom since the magazine was used to teach the young japanese how to play the new genre and why it was so enticing.
Dragon Quest wasn't an immediate success instead the phenomenon broke out over time.
The other characteristic typical of JRPGs was the addition of an adventure component which makes sense considering the influence fro the manga/anime industry and especially considering that Yuji Horii previous hit was a genre defining adventure game (Portopia whose Famicom version sold 700K in Japan).
What contributed to the insularity of JRPG compared to other RPG productions abroad back then was that the genre became hugely popular in Japan during the late '80s and early '90s while in America and Europe it was a niche and contrary to nowaday Japan's weight on the global scale, in term of software bought on consoles, was very high.

Famicom/NES
HW sold in Japan: 19.35M
SW sold in Japan: 225.86M
HW sold in America (the whole continent): 34.00M
SW sold in America (the whole continent): 230.85M

Super Famicom/SNES
HW sold in Japan: 17.17M
SW sold in Japan: 194.85M
HW sold in America (the whole continent): 23.35M
SW sold in America (the whole continent): 135.00M

In short the World was a very different place from today in the late '80s and early '90s.
 
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