Tag Archives: JRPG

Role playing games without borders

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A funny thing happened in Japan: the year’s biggest and brightest Japanese RPG turned into a Western RPG. The moment this crystallized for me came towards the beginning of Monolith’s Xenoblade Chroncles. The main character and his love interest Fiora stand on a hillside, talking about the past. A question comes up, with two choices. I picked the positive one, because I thought Xenoblade was a Japanese RPG, and Fiora got mad at me. A relationship meter straight out of Dragon Age declined. That’s when I realized something truly strange had happened here: I was playing an RPG without a modifier.

The Tetsuya Takahashi directed Xenoblade Chronicles looks like a Japanese RPG, but it quacks like The Witcher and expands outward like the most sprawling MMO. A game we fans had pinned as the great hope for the Japanese RPG has proven to be something different: it advocates for a unified genre, the role playing game. In fact, the thing Xenoblade Chronicles resembles most is the purely hypothetical Obsidian Entertainment sequel to Chrono Trigger.

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Hope for tomorrow in Ys: The Oath in Felghana

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“Historically, we see a lot of really hopeful, almost twee fantasy in times of economic hardship. And boy, are we ever in a time of economic hardship “ -Rae Carson

Seven years ago, when the game was first made, unleashing a title like Ys: Oath in Felghana on Western PC audiences would have been commercial suicide for Xseed Games. The company, which releases primarily Japanese imports, wouldn’t even have considered it. The Japanese RPG was dying, already dead, or in a slow decomposition, depending on your perspective, and outside of two awkward ports of Final Fantasy titles and some off-beat Western homages the platform had never shown a lot of support to the genre.

And yet we’re barely a month removed from a successful launch of one of Japan’s most popular RPG franchises (behind only Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest) on the PC marketplace. We PC gamers will offer dozens of reasons why this is so: that the PC is superior to console toys, that we love supporting different kinds of games, that’s we’re connoisseurs compared to other platform’s plebeian status.

There’s a different reason, though, one I find more convincing: we’re starved for heroism. We’re starved for nostalgia.

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The zoology of Dragon Quest IX

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I have a confession to make: I have an undying love for the palette-swapped monsters in Dragon Quest IX.

The monsters are cute, for starters, devoid of the baroque stylings of their Final Fantasy brethren, and they’ve made a consistent appearance in every game since the original – to the point where they’re now mandatory for a true Dragon Quest experience. A lot of the monsters’ charm comes from Akira Toriyama’s exuberant, happy-go-lucky art style, but their silly, pun-based names (Meowgician, a magical cat; Hell Niño, a violent cloud) shouldn’t be discredited, either. Looking beyond the superficial though, the simple variations of each monster’s color palette, the addition of prefixes and suffixes to some of their names, and their location in different environments across the world creates the most believable ecosystem I’ve seen in a game

Starting knowledge: Monsters in Dragon Quest IX are categorised into families, similar to the type differences found in Pokémon without the rock, paper, scissors mechanic in place. Slime, Beast, Dragon, Bug, Bird, Plant, Material, Machine, and Zombie all house distinct monsters with various strengths and weaknesses that determine not only what they’ll look like, but how they’ll behave when they spot you out on the field. …

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.Hack: Falling through the happily ever after

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(Warning: .Hack games series spoilers)

You started off as a newbie player. Just as it happened, the character you created happened to be special, and with that you were given this fate to be a saviour. You formed your band of heroes, you learned the ropes, you collected your obligatory magical items,  you fought, and you won. Congratulations, kid. Both the world and The Worldare safer places because of you.  Now it’s time to go and leave this twilight, knowing that there will be happily ever after and it’s all because of you.

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After pressing start: Mother 3′s saddest day

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I’ve written about the first chapter of Mother 3 before, back when this was a proto-blog gasping for air in the cold vacuum of the internet. Quite frankly, the game stands as one of the greatest achievements in video games. As I plan to spoil it in its entirety, I would recommend you play it first, not just because it’s such a wonderful game full of video games’ best moments but because it’s an enthralling title.

Mother 3 is a comedy in the classic sense of the word. It shares absolutely nothing in common with comedic films like Anchorman, however; it’s more like one of Shakespeare’s comedies, where the humor is merely a vehicle for delivering emotion to the player’s heart. Comedy for comedy’s sake can be funny, but it will not try to do anything more. Mother 3 uses comedy to make the utter bleakness of its narrative palatable.

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We won: On The Last Story and American release

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A scant two days before its European release, us Western RPG players got the best news we could hope for: The Last Story is getting an American release. The forces of good have prevailed.

We’ve now gone full circle on the saga of Xenoblade and The Last Story, having moved from full on depression at the idea that Nintendo of America would throw away the most critically acclaimed JRPGs of this generation to cautious, restrained optimism at the idea that Xenoblade would release as a Gamestop exclusive to now, finally, acceptance thanks to Nintendo and XSeed coming together to bring The Last Story to America.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that the JRPG has been at best mediocre across the board, at worst utterly decrepit on modern consoles. Sure, it’s experienced a renaissance on handhelds, with brilliant, top five JRPG of all time caliber games like Radiant Historia, but these games did nothing but reinforce the trope that the JRPG was a relic of the past. The “best” console JRPG of the generation, Mistwalker’s Lost Odyssey, felt like a good title lost at sea trying to find relevance in a market that didn’t desire it. By …

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Wish upon a Starwish

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Flash game Starwish has only the best of intentions. It combines JRPG style advancement and narrative with shmup style combat reminiscent of Gradius, and endeavors to make an entertaining soup out of them. And while it stands as definite proof of concept, Starwish falls into the traditional JRPG traps: poor pacing, a lack of integration, and being too damn long.

Starwish begins with your character, the loveable Deuce, getting shot down on the imaginatively named “Home Planet” and meeting one-third or Starwish’s harem, Ginny, the cute, clumsy one. There’s also the mad scientist, violent one who doesn’t know how to deal with human emotions and the tsundere childhood friend. The first third of the game focuses its energy on which one of these girls Deuce likes.

That may sound utterly terrible, but it’s not a terrible story for the first third. Maybe this comes from optimism, seeing the game marry visual novel with Gradius, but the first third of the game is well-paced. It bounces back and forth between Deuce flying missions on Home Planet, shooting down enemy drones and looking for the resident macguffin, and Deuce flirting with ladies and talking with the strong cast, which also includes a drunken panda, …

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Straight lines: Final Fantasy XIII and inefficiency

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In the end, Final Fantasy XIII will join II, V, and IX as the only Final Fantasy games I’ve never beaten. It’s a title that experienced perhaps the quickest, most profound slingshot between its reviews (largely positive) and its criticism (wholly negative). In the history books it will go down with Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter as a game that changed too much, that tried to innovate too much into previous games’ designs.

I applaud it for what it tried, though. It tried to take a stale formula and make it sparkle; rather than accept its base audience, XIII tried to be a game that would appeal to newcomers. It backfired, of course, and now it’s the black sheep of the family (it’ll sit with II at holiday parties, throwing cake at the walls), but I appreciate what it tried.

We also have to realize that, compared with our impressions of Final Fantasy XIII-2, that the developers completely missed what made this game tank.

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New Devil Survivor 2 trailer reminds us Devil Survivor 2 exists

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The original Devil Survivor is notable because it is the game I own the most copies of (three), and because it was a sparklingly brilliant strategy RPG for the Nintendo DS. A combination of Japanese RPG series Growlanser with Persona and a shockingly diverse and cruel choice system, it’s a game I have played the hell out of.

Devil Survivor 2, meanwhile, is coming out next month. It’s coming out for the Nintendo DS. Really, it is. Trust me. Not the 3DS, the regular old, vanilla DS. Also trust this trailer, which shows us no gameplay (but we really don’t need to see more strategy RPG gameplay) but sells us on the game’s atmospheric plot, which combines ideas from the original game with Persona 4. Cool, right?

Honestly, in a crowded Spring release schedule, at least for JRPG fans, Devil Survivor 2 is the game I’m most pumped for. The original was one of the most creative takes on JRPGs in years, and I’m curious to see whether Atlus keeps pushing the envelope in the new year. At the very least, they will continue pushing it in terms of bust size:

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No more surprises

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Pokemon Blue may in fact be one of the most influential games of my childhood. It is a series that has worked hard to create a massive world of its own inhabited by fascinating creatures known as Pokemon. As a trainer, you are tasked to find and catch as many of them as possible. Why? For research of course! There was always this amazing feeling that came with finding a new Pokemon and figuring them out. Some, like Abra and Magikarp, seemed pretty useless at first, but through evolution showed how much potential they held. I always looked forward to what my pocket monster would evolve into, or if they would evolve at all. That’s just part of the surprise, you just don’t know what’s going to happen.

Like pocket monsters themselves, the series and its fans evolve with time. It is far easier for us to access information on not just Pokemon, but all of our favorite games due to the growing influence of the Internet. With the knowledge it holds we no longer have to buy games based on the best boxart on the shelf. Videos, written reviews, pictures, and several means of research are at our disposal. This …

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