First off, this is their soapbox you are watching. People sent them a question, and they answered why from their perspective as game developers. If you disagree with their opinion, or mine, that's fine. Don't watch the videos if they make you this upset?
I'm not upset, I'm merely correcting people and pointing out all the fallacies and misinformation on the subject.
Whereas the latest FF titles have been more about flash and spectacle than telling a meaningful or coherent story
Funny, I thought FFXIII had too much story from what haters said. Not enough freedom, too much story and narrative.
Just remember, it's not a personal attack on you the JRPG enthusiast. It's a diagnosis of a common problem that is slowly causing the games we love to be shgelved for more popular genres like dance/family games and FPS titles.
That might have more validity if the comparison actually was to FPS and Dance games, and not WRPGs which suffer from the said problem even more than JRPGs do. If it really is about 'narrative' and 'coherent story' then the fact you have no main character in a game like Fallout and can miss tons of stuff should be even worse than 'pretty graphics'. In Fallout 3 you can go straight from exiting the vault to your dad in 3 minutes; bypassing hours of junk quests in Megaton and Rivet City since all you need is to know to go to the vault he's in. Some narrative if you can skip all that, let alone the ending people hated so much and they needed Broken Steel to fix.
Did you watch the video? Their whole argument for games under the "WRPG" label is that they aren't about narratives at their core, while JRPGS are. The core engagement is different (for WRPGs the engagement is discovery, sandbox, personal fantasy, etc). And I don't think anyone said that all WRPGs are great, just that as a genre they are getting more successful currently, probably because the sales numbers are trending higher.
You seem to be taking this a lot more personally than you might want to. It's not about "haters" or tearing apart your personal preferences, it's about the reasons sales figures for the genre as a whole are in decline while WRPGs seem to be trending upwards and stealing he former JRPG market share, and diagnosing the causes to hopefully reverse this. You don't have to like it, I know I don't, but it's true. Look at the sales numbers. Look at the amount of games getting international localizations versus the amount of games no longer being ported. The numbers don't lie.
ME2 sold some odd 5m on 3 platforms. give or take.
FFXIII sold some odd 6.6m on two platforms. Give or take.
ME2 is Gears of War with conversations.
FFXIII is... well, a story based RPG with a combat system that is unlike anything before it.
Oddly, the problem with jrpgs is just what these people suggest. An attempt to pander to western tastes.
Best selling jrpg franchise? Dragon Quest. a game that has stalwartly refused to be anything but Dragon Quest. Even in other countries it makes big bucks. For a dying genre using a system 'no one' wants, its oddly popular. Same with Atlus titles in the SMT franchise. Same with a lot of NIS titles that constantly sell out.
It is, in fact, in the non-standard titles that a lot of japanese publishers and developers seem to lose money. Or should I say, titles they try to westernize. Oddly, most fans of the genre want to play them because they aren't made to western sensibilities. They continually sabotage themselves thinking otherwise.
A prime example is Yakuza 3, wherein they tried to cut things out because they thought the western audience didnt want it or wouldn't understand. That sure backfired on Sega in a massive way. (Consequently, Yakuza 4 had nothing cut except a little quiz game that'd be impossible for anyone not a japanese native.)
So again, I guess without a better metric for 'success' outside of, 'what we think is cool', its pretty hard to judge. I mean genre against genre, Japanese games tend to sell just fine compared to their western counterparts. There are also a lot of genres the west doesn't even touch (Hello hex/grid based strategy RPGs, roguelikes or dungeon crawlers.) except in an indie fashion.
It always annoys me when people talk about turn based menu combat as if it was an inherently bad thing. I recently played Persona 4 and Skyrim. The former had combat that was about a million times better.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Well, anyone who plays Skyrim for the combat is missing the point....and EC was making the point that, as a genre, WRPG's are making more money than JRPG's. Knowing EC like I do, they very likely did research to back this up, though I'd love for them to cite it better.
Just because Final Fantasy XIII made a boat load of cash doesn't mean the genre as a whole is doing well. Shit, it took almost two years of begging, borrowing, and stealing to get NoA to release Xenoblade Chronicles here, a game many people consider to be the best JRPG in a very very long time.
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
FFXIII may have made a boat load of money, but it also had an astonishing return rate over in Japan (as in, people returned their copies to the store).
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
It had an astonishing return rate in a lot of places. Yeah, they may have sold 6.6m copies...and 3m of them were in the used games bin post haste*. I know I had my copy for about a week before I turned it in for store credit at GameStop (and I NEVER turn games in for store credit, ever).
First things first: I don't even like JRPGs (outside of DragonQuest Monsters/Pokemon) and I still have some issues with this series of episodes. Of course, I disagreed with the initial thesis, i.e. "game mechanics are irrelevant, what really defines game is their ESSENCE" so I'm not so much bothered by this episode on its own. I wanted to wait until their full argument was presented, though.
Now then. I'll start my argument by delineating my problem with the first video: even if we accept that 'genre' is something more than the result of strong marketing, to claim that game mechanics are not relevant to the core play aesthetics and therefore shouldn't be involved with how we describe games (i.e. by genre, or whatever new system we invent)... it's simply absurd. If a film has a shaky 'handheld camera' set-up it will innately be different than one that is a single, fixed camera set-up- and to claim that film editing makes no difference in the core aesthetic of the film is incredibly contentious and liable to piss off a large variety of film buffs. Game mechanics are the framing device for the entire narrative of a game. By narrative, I'm not saying 'the words on the screen/spoken by people' but the story and message conveyed by the experience. The game mechanics are effectively the narrator, telling you what is good (read: gives you rewards), what is bad (read: gives you punishments), and constructing a sequence out of those elements. When a game has long rambling blocks of text and cinematic conversations that are separate from the core game mechanics, it uses other more readily recognized narrative devices as crutches- this is where we get the attitude that games cannot be art/don't have meaningful stories/blah blah blah. An important fact has yet to enter the larger mainstream conscious; that gameplay IS in fact narrative, and you do not need to rely on cutscenes and immersion-breaking info-dumps to provide a story. If you disagree, I'd like to hear why- I've always been fascinated by the kind of people claiming Limbo lacks a strong story.
I didn't really have a problem with the second video per se. Making a long argument founded on genre is a bit futile though, considering my above hint that genre as we currently understand it isn't really a... thing. It's only widely accepted due to our natural need to categorize things. This is where we get the same problem in music, where you can argue all day about the semantics of whether something is 'punk' or not but the end upthrust is that these categories are largely subjective and more likely to hurt understanding than to promote it. If you are told "this movie is an X movie" before watching it, you are automatically predisposed to judge it as X and lump it in to your mind's X slot, which is a lazy and unstimulating way to process information. Unfortunately, people by and large like things that let them be lazy and so we have our modern mass-media concept of genre. There's a rather deep rabbit hole here that leads to linguistics and philosophy and semantics and it's for smarter and more qualified people- not going to be resolved on some forum like this. I'm just pointing this out to say that using genre to discuss the philosophical cores of games or media in general is essentially an uphill battle on a sand dune. The elements of the media cause us to interpret what genre the media is in; the genre the media is in colors our interpretation of what elements are at play. Is something a grocery list because it lists groceries, or is it just that one person said it was a grocery list and thus we recognize all the items on the list to be groceries? It's a circular argument and hopefully it shows the core weakness of genre. It's helpful for practical use, extremely problematic when discussing things on an academic level.
The third video is actually probably the best of the three considering it actually seems to understand the effect game mechanics have on the core aesthetics and the importance they have. I am not quite so sure of its core assertion (that JRPGs are really doing terribly compared to WRPGs) but I definitely agree that games that stray from the core engagement are doomed to failure or at least lackluster results. The real reason WRPGs like Skyrim et al might be doing better isn't 'focus on graphics'- that's close, but just off enough to give the wrong impression. It's because they aren't breaking immersion and narrative flow with long cinematics- in fact, even the cinematics that they do have are becoming more interactive. Using Mass Effect as an example, you can sometimes interrupt even the non-dialogue scenes with "paragon/renegade" actions- which are a continuation of the leveling mechanic and thus the overall narrative. That is a pretty effective way to keep in line with your core engagement. That is also the core engagement problem we have with JRPGs. They have increasingly started to lack immersion and narrative flow. Originally, the gameplay for JRPGs contained mainly text and some art as backdrop. The core mechanic was turn-based menu selection- navigating text, effectively. When the info-dumps happened, when conversations happened, well, it was just more text navigation. That's not as immersion breaking as spending a large amount of time stuck in menus and then suddenly CINEMATIC and then back to menus. It would probably do a lot for them if they could keep everything interactive, eliminate the need for menus, and keep the cinematic flow going throughout.
It would be wise to note at this point that the "spend money on flashy graphics, screw waiting on a strong story" ethos is a universal problem for games in general, not just JRPGs. Actually, probably another good reason for WRPGs to be doing better is that they leave a lot of the real narrative work to the user-gameplay experience. Even if they are putting the same quality of 'narrative' out as the JRPGs, the way their game mechanics work supplements that. Even if you thought Skyrim's main plot was hacky, you could make up exciting stories of your blank-slate character's adventures and thus be satisfied. If anything that should be pretty solid proof that game mechanics are integral to good narrative, if not a strong form of narrative on their own.
Now that that wall of text is done with, I'd also like to add a few more bricks and say that I agree that 'JRPG' and 'WRPG' are stupid names, and actually promote a large amount of cultural prejudice. Since the categories are pretty much entirely based on cultural prejudice I'd rather break up the two than just rename them. Also, it can't have escaped everyone's attention that almost all video games are 'RPGs'- you are in control of a role and play out the role, whether the gameplay is linear or not. We should just do away with the term entirely, since most 'RPGs' have long since strayed from their origins in pen and paper anyway and the name wasn't even terribly accurate back then. Not only that but distinguishing certain games as 'RPGs' further reinforces the concept that the only form of narrative is when people talk or text is on the screen- that's not good. I have had great stories come out of shooters, out of fighting games, out of racing games, and in each I felt like I was playing a role. So let's just do away with that, for both practical and academic purposes. I could go into depth on my ideas for which games would be named what but really, I'm not interested in the actual messy balkanization of the terms. I simply think it's important that we stop using them in real, intellectual discussions and start discussing the games based on their actual elements rather than the social construct popularly created around them. You don't see a lot of English teachers talking about 'horror vs. romance', do you?
It always annoys me when people talk about turn based menu combat as if it was an inherently bad thing. I recently played Persona 4 and Skyrim. The former had combat that was about a million times better.
This. I think Japanese secs took the 'olol stupid turn based combat systems' ahit too literally - the people who hate the basic feature of your genre aren't your customers, who gives a ahit of they don't like it? Create interesting, strategic turn based combat systems and your actual customers will not your games.
First things first: I don't even like JRPGs (outside of DragonQuest Monsters/Pokemon, and those are hardly JRPGS)
Story aside, Dragon Quest Monsters & Pokemon are textboox examples of the JRPG.
True enough. I'll edit to reflect that. I'm not sure why I added that bit about them being hardly JRPGs, I just grew up with 'em so I feel like they're special or something? Silly me.
Just because Final Fantasy XIII made a boat load of cash doesn't mean the genre as a whole is doing well. Shit, it took almost two years of begging, borrowing, and stealing to get NoA to release Xenoblade Chronicles here, a game many people consider to be the best JRPG in a very very long time.
Xenoblade is more Reggie and Nintendo being adamant in their business practices. For all intents and purposes, they consider the Wii dead outside first party titles and don't really feel like supporting it in the US, while obviously Nintendo EU and Japan feel differently.
It's sort of like Sony's BS practices on how a game must be English dubbed to be release here, which is why a lot of Japanese games don't come over (how Yakuza gets away with this is beyond me), or we get stuck with no-budget dubs like Chaos Wars (lead guy just hired his friends and family to dub voices). It's also why we never got Tales of Eternia, Breath of Fire 3, Suikoden I + 2 and other games on the PSP. They have a policy that says a port of an old game must have X% of new content to be released in the US on an optical disk format. It's also probably why Resident Evil 4 and Code Veronica HD were released on PSN only, but in Japan they got an actual disk release.
It's not about money and sales so much as it's about stupid business practices. Xenoblade had no problem being released in the EU, after all. Nor did Breath of Fire 3, Tales of Eternia, and etcetera. These are just more examples of Sony and Nintendo being dumb and political crap getting in the way of games. I'm hoping Sony's new president will redo some of these asinine laws, but I doubt it.
The real reason WRPGs like Skyrim et al might be doing better isn't 'focus on graphics'- that's close, but just off enough to give the wrong impression. It's because they aren't breaking immersion and narrative flow with long cinematics
If you're playing JRPG for immersion you're doing it wrong. They're for story, and gameplay. You don't play Final Fantasy to picture yourself as Cloud or Lightning, or at least I hope not. It's why a lot of JRPGs make for great anime like Persona 4, Rockman.EXE, Ryuusei no Rockman, and so forth. Something like Skyrim or Dungeon Siege or whatever is not really suited to be made into a series or show. I know Bioware is hiring some Japanese companies to "make an anime movie" but given the track record of these "American anime" it'll be mediocre at best. It's probably why it's not even about Shepard or the actual plot, just some random side story.
If you're playing JRPG for immersion you're doing it wrong. They're for story, and gameplay. You don't play Final Fantasy to picture yourself as Cloud or Lightning, or at least I hope not.
I take issue with the concept that one can enjoy a game "wrong" but more to the point: immersion for games does not and should not mean "you are the protagonist" any more than getting immersed in a really good book means that. It just means that you feel the experience cohesively and strongly, whatever that experience is. If the experience is "you are this person" then the game should keep you immersed in that and not cause any huge drops in the suspension of disbelief. If the experience is that you are following along with another person's adventures, then it should do the same there. That's actually a pretty good explanation for why Mass Effect is so much different than Skyrim- the player is not intended to feel like he actually is Shepard. He just needs to feel like Shepard is real enough to get emotionally invested in. There's a reason why Skyrim is capable of being played in first person and Mass Effect isn't. Anyway, to sum up: As long as the game sufficiently suspends your disbelief to its conceits (i.e. "why is Shepard doing what I say? Wait a second, THIS HAS ALL BEEN A GAME OH GOD") and keeps that going it provides immersion and, more importantly, a smooth narrative flow.
I mean, sure, there's going to be games that deliberately deconstruct this- Eternal Darkness broke immersion liberally, essentially treating the fourth wall like a shower curtain at times- but that's true of all media and can be done with a very clever flair. However, when you're stopping midgame to watch a completely out of place 10 minute cutscene or sommat, that's when the game designers have either dropped the ball or as you suggest should just start doing machinima. The reason why Persona et al make for good anime is because that third-person voyeur form is the narrative focus- the gameplay is not exactly seamlessly connected to the story. Which is a fine form of entertainment but can be problematic as it continues to demean and distract from the narrative value of gameplay itself. Mass Effect is closer to Persona in that sense (in comparison to Skyrim) so potentially it could result in a good movie. The only mark against it in the movie arena is that they actually tried to make the gameplay narrative and the 'cinematic' narrative pretty close to one and the same, so unless you play Mass Effect with someone else predetermining all the non-combat interaction it won't quite feel right. We'll see.
If you want to see what I mean, take Final Fantasy VII and compare it to Doom. I know, crazy talk, but while FFVII had you in third person and emotionally invested in the protagonist, Doom had you in first person AS the protagonist. One focused on third person voyeur-style narrative and the other focused on first person thrill. Advent Children was a commercial success because it was more in keeping with the core engagement of the game. Doom the movie, in both regards, wasn't. That's pretty much a lesson in narrative mode right there. Sure, FFVII's cinematics could be described as overly long, especially during battle, and the gameplay narrative is not seamless whatsoever, but they made strides to connect gameplay with narrative just by having the characters rendered the same in combat as in the cinematics- probably one of the many underlying reasons for the game's success. Looking back now (if you take off your nostalgia goggles) one might feel the story to be muddled and the graphics to be lacking, but at the time it made an image for itself by taking some strong steps towards gameplay/cinematic narrative marriage and sticking to a disciplined narrative mode. That same narrative mode and core aesthetic lead naturally to Advent Children being as well received as it was. Also, the ever-nefarious aforementioned nostalgia goggles, but we can just ignore those.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
For what it's worth, most(if not all) Shin Megami Tensei games feature a protagonist that's supposed to embody the player, as well as differing outcomes based on alignment and siding with different factions. They're kind of WRPGish in that sense.
And I love turn-based combat, and wouldn't do away with it for the world. You all do realize it was inspired from a WRPG, right? (Wizardry.)
Japanese devs love Wizardry, and continue to not only make games inspired by it, but games in the same universe.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I was about to say, "But we DID get Breath of Fire 3!" and then I realized AE Hope meant "we in Europe." At least I have some understanding as to why the EU gets the shaft on some things now.
I find this discourse invigorating and want to mention that there are a substantial number of games like Scarface:The World is Yours that had good and entertaining mechanics whose implementation was marred by their essence. Or games like X-COM whose mechanics weren't perfect but whose effects made it worthwhile to play.
I find that abnegation isn't essential for a fun game but if I'm going to control characters in a story, the writing or the story telling need to make it worth while and any cutscenes involved need to have decent style as apposed to crazy graphics.
I was about to say, "But we DID get Breath of Fire 3!" and then I realized AE Hope meant "we in Europe." At least I have some understanding as to why the EU gets the shaft on some things now.
It always annoys me when people talk about turn based menu combat as if it was an inherently bad thing. I recently played Persona 4 and Skyrim. The former had combat that was about a million times better.
This. I think Japanese secs took the 'olol stupid turn based combat systems' ahit too literally - the people who hate the basic feature of your genre aren't your customers, who gives a ahit of they don't like it? Create interesting, strategic turn based combat systems and your actual customers will not your games.
This is so correct. Reminds me of the debates I've had where PC RPGs did half assed hybrid systems (like Arcanum) that neither made a satisfying real time or turn based combat option. Just pick something and do it well: Don't try to pander.
It always annoys me when people talk about turn based menu combat as if it was an inherently bad thing. I recently played Persona 4 and Skyrim. The former had combat that was about a million times better.
This. I think Japanese secs took the 'olol stupid turn based combat systems' ahit too literally - the people who hate the basic feature of your genre aren't your customers, who gives a ahit of they don't like it? Create interesting, strategic turn based combat systems and your actual customers will not your games.
This is so correct. Reminds me of the debates I've had where PC RPGs did half assed hybrid systems (like Arcanum) that neither made a satisfying real time or turn based combat option. Just pick something and do it well: Don't try to pander.
Well, there's pandering and then there's experimenting.
I think that the jrpg is having a harder time for a few reasons -1st is that the ones that have been brought over =several are bad-FF 13 it wasn't that good, second there have been a lot of western rpgs that can appeal to the broader fan base of FPSs like fallout and mass effect. the third and most important issue though is that we frequently don't see some of the best RPG games because they simply don't bring them over. Xenoblades, the ps3 version of tales of vesperia and many other games simply never make it here -and several jrpgs ive seen have been kinda bland and dull i haven't been that interested in them. As such i think the problem is that developers need to bring over some more interesting titles and or make some jrpgs that more people might be interested in.
I think that the jrpg is having a harder time for a few reasons -1st is that the ones that have been brought over =several are bad-FF 13 it wasn't that good, second there have been a lot of western rpgs that can appeal to the broader fan base of FPSs like fallout and mass effect. the third and most important issue though is that we frequently don't see some of the best RPG games because they simply don't bring them over. Xenoblades, the ps3 version of tales of vesperia and many other games simply never make it here -and several jrpgs ive seen have been kinda bland and dull i haven't been that interested in them. As such i think the problem is that developers need to bring over some more interesting titles and or make some jrpgs that more people might be interested in.
Developers don't make those decisions, publishers do.
Video games are, first and foremost, a money making venture. The companies that produce them are trying to make money, and the studios, even the best and most artistic ones, are trying to support their artists. You can wish this wasn't true, and wish Video Games worked like other art mediums, but the fact is they don't. It's ultimately about selling a product.
Anything a person does professionally is in some way about money. Video games are in no way different or unique amongst the nations. Other artists do not magically get money for doing whatever the fuck they want. Everyone from painters to musicians to, indeed, video game designers are trying to sell something.
Like most economic theories, however, you fail to account for the human factor: artists are not purely rational actors interested in maximizing profits above all else. Aside from the desire to satisfy their own well-being artists create because they wish to express themselves. When you do a drama about autistic children, you are not expecting to rake in as much money as an action movie. Likewise, when you are making a game of a niche genre, like the new turn-based X-COM, you are making it while knowing fully that you won't earn as much as Call of Duty.
If you look at the industry you will see thousands of various niche titles, none of which I think the creators of truly believe will become the most popular thing since sliced bread. Were the case as you suggest it is, every game would look alike and try to contend for the same target audience instead of settling for smaller niches they know to be not as profitable.
Were everyone to truly take the lesson to heart and try to appeal to the broadest audience you wouldn't see Bastion or Minecraft or indie movies or musical subgenres or modern art or theatre. Everyone would try for Call of Duty (or their field's equivalent) because that'd earn more money and thus be more successful according to this metric. Heck, why stick to the video game industry? I bet you can make more money in other fields.
There is nothing wrong with trying to make money, but at a certain point every artist has to draw the line between expressing themselves and appealing to as many people as possible. 'Always try to appeal to as many people as possible' is a broken model. To stay true to the concept you must, at a certain point, say 'I will go no further'. Otherwise all diversity would be lost.
Grey Paladin on
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
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Did you watch the video? Their whole argument for games under the "WRPG" label is that they aren't about narratives at their core, while JRPGS are. The core engagement is different (for WRPGs the engagement is discovery, sandbox, personal fantasy, etc). And I don't think anyone said that all WRPGs are great, just that as a genre they are getting more successful currently, probably because the sales numbers are trending higher.
You seem to be taking this a lot more personally than you might want to. It's not about "haters" or tearing apart your personal preferences, it's about the reasons sales figures for the genre as a whole are in decline while WRPGs seem to be trending upwards and stealing he former JRPG market share, and diagnosing the causes to hopefully reverse this. You don't have to like it, I know I don't, but it's true. Look at the sales numbers. Look at the amount of games getting international localizations versus the amount of games no longer being ported. The numbers don't lie.
FFXIII sold some odd 6.6m on two platforms. Give or take.
ME2 is Gears of War with conversations.
FFXIII is... well, a story based RPG with a combat system that is unlike anything before it.
Oddly, the problem with jrpgs is just what these people suggest. An attempt to pander to western tastes.
Best selling jrpg franchise? Dragon Quest. a game that has stalwartly refused to be anything but Dragon Quest. Even in other countries it makes big bucks. For a dying genre using a system 'no one' wants, its oddly popular. Same with Atlus titles in the SMT franchise. Same with a lot of NIS titles that constantly sell out.
It is, in fact, in the non-standard titles that a lot of japanese publishers and developers seem to lose money. Or should I say, titles they try to westernize. Oddly, most fans of the genre want to play them because they aren't made to western sensibilities. They continually sabotage themselves thinking otherwise.
A prime example is Yakuza 3, wherein they tried to cut things out because they thought the western audience didnt want it or wouldn't understand. That sure backfired on Sega in a massive way. (Consequently, Yakuza 4 had nothing cut except a little quiz game that'd be impossible for anyone not a japanese native.)
So again, I guess without a better metric for 'success' outside of, 'what we think is cool', its pretty hard to judge. I mean genre against genre, Japanese games tend to sell just fine compared to their western counterparts. There are also a lot of genres the west doesn't even touch (Hello hex/grid based strategy RPGs, roguelikes or dungeon crawlers.) except in an indie fashion.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
Just because Final Fantasy XIII made a boat load of cash doesn't mean the genre as a whole is doing well. Shit, it took almost two years of begging, borrowing, and stealing to get NoA to release Xenoblade Chronicles here, a game many people consider to be the best JRPG in a very very long time.
*3m number pulled completely out of my ass.
Now then. I'll start my argument by delineating my problem with the first video: even if we accept that 'genre' is something more than the result of strong marketing, to claim that game mechanics are not relevant to the core play aesthetics and therefore shouldn't be involved with how we describe games (i.e. by genre, or whatever new system we invent)... it's simply absurd. If a film has a shaky 'handheld camera' set-up it will innately be different than one that is a single, fixed camera set-up- and to claim that film editing makes no difference in the core aesthetic of the film is incredibly contentious and liable to piss off a large variety of film buffs. Game mechanics are the framing device for the entire narrative of a game. By narrative, I'm not saying 'the words on the screen/spoken by people' but the story and message conveyed by the experience. The game mechanics are effectively the narrator, telling you what is good (read: gives you rewards), what is bad (read: gives you punishments), and constructing a sequence out of those elements. When a game has long rambling blocks of text and cinematic conversations that are separate from the core game mechanics, it uses other more readily recognized narrative devices as crutches- this is where we get the attitude that games cannot be art/don't have meaningful stories/blah blah blah. An important fact has yet to enter the larger mainstream conscious; that gameplay IS in fact narrative, and you do not need to rely on cutscenes and immersion-breaking info-dumps to provide a story. If you disagree, I'd like to hear why- I've always been fascinated by the kind of people claiming Limbo lacks a strong story.
I didn't really have a problem with the second video per se. Making a long argument founded on genre is a bit futile though, considering my above hint that genre as we currently understand it isn't really a... thing. It's only widely accepted due to our natural need to categorize things. This is where we get the same problem in music, where you can argue all day about the semantics of whether something is 'punk' or not but the end upthrust is that these categories are largely subjective and more likely to hurt understanding than to promote it. If you are told "this movie is an X movie" before watching it, you are automatically predisposed to judge it as X and lump it in to your mind's X slot, which is a lazy and unstimulating way to process information. Unfortunately, people by and large like things that let them be lazy and so we have our modern mass-media concept of genre. There's a rather deep rabbit hole here that leads to linguistics and philosophy and semantics and it's for smarter and more qualified people- not going to be resolved on some forum like this. I'm just pointing this out to say that using genre to discuss the philosophical cores of games or media in general is essentially an uphill battle on a sand dune. The elements of the media cause us to interpret what genre the media is in; the genre the media is in colors our interpretation of what elements are at play. Is something a grocery list because it lists groceries, or is it just that one person said it was a grocery list and thus we recognize all the items on the list to be groceries? It's a circular argument and hopefully it shows the core weakness of genre. It's helpful for practical use, extremely problematic when discussing things on an academic level.
The third video is actually probably the best of the three considering it actually seems to understand the effect game mechanics have on the core aesthetics and the importance they have. I am not quite so sure of its core assertion (that JRPGs are really doing terribly compared to WRPGs) but I definitely agree that games that stray from the core engagement are doomed to failure or at least lackluster results. The real reason WRPGs like Skyrim et al might be doing better isn't 'focus on graphics'- that's close, but just off enough to give the wrong impression. It's because they aren't breaking immersion and narrative flow with long cinematics- in fact, even the cinematics that they do have are becoming more interactive. Using Mass Effect as an example, you can sometimes interrupt even the non-dialogue scenes with "paragon/renegade" actions- which are a continuation of the leveling mechanic and thus the overall narrative. That is a pretty effective way to keep in line with your core engagement. That is also the core engagement problem we have with JRPGs. They have increasingly started to lack immersion and narrative flow. Originally, the gameplay for JRPGs contained mainly text and some art as backdrop. The core mechanic was turn-based menu selection- navigating text, effectively. When the info-dumps happened, when conversations happened, well, it was just more text navigation. That's not as immersion breaking as spending a large amount of time stuck in menus and then suddenly CINEMATIC and then back to menus. It would probably do a lot for them if they could keep everything interactive, eliminate the need for menus, and keep the cinematic flow going throughout.
It would be wise to note at this point that the "spend money on flashy graphics, screw waiting on a strong story" ethos is a universal problem for games in general, not just JRPGs. Actually, probably another good reason for WRPGs to be doing better is that they leave a lot of the real narrative work to the user-gameplay experience. Even if they are putting the same quality of 'narrative' out as the JRPGs, the way their game mechanics work supplements that. Even if you thought Skyrim's main plot was hacky, you could make up exciting stories of your blank-slate character's adventures and thus be satisfied. If anything that should be pretty solid proof that game mechanics are integral to good narrative, if not a strong form of narrative on their own.
Now that that wall of text is done with, I'd also like to add a few more bricks and say that I agree that 'JRPG' and 'WRPG' are stupid names, and actually promote a large amount of cultural prejudice. Since the categories are pretty much entirely based on cultural prejudice I'd rather break up the two than just rename them. Also, it can't have escaped everyone's attention that almost all video games are 'RPGs'- you are in control of a role and play out the role, whether the gameplay is linear or not. We should just do away with the term entirely, since most 'RPGs' have long since strayed from their origins in pen and paper anyway and the name wasn't even terribly accurate back then. Not only that but distinguishing certain games as 'RPGs' further reinforces the concept that the only form of narrative is when people talk or text is on the screen- that's not good. I have had great stories come out of shooters, out of fighting games, out of racing games, and in each I felt like I was playing a role. So let's just do away with that, for both practical and academic purposes. I could go into depth on my ideas for which games would be named what but really, I'm not interested in the actual messy balkanization of the terms. I simply think it's important that we stop using them in real, intellectual discussions and start discussing the games based on their actual elements rather than the social construct popularly created around them. You don't see a lot of English teachers talking about 'horror vs. romance', do you?
Story aside, Dragon Quest Monsters & Pokemon are textbook examples of the JRPG.
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Or Einhander!
True enough. I'll edit to reflect that. I'm not sure why I added that bit about them being hardly JRPGs, I just grew up with 'em so I feel like they're special or something? Silly me.
Xenoblade is more Reggie and Nintendo being adamant in their business practices. For all intents and purposes, they consider the Wii dead outside first party titles and don't really feel like supporting it in the US, while obviously Nintendo EU and Japan feel differently.
It's sort of like Sony's BS practices on how a game must be English dubbed to be release here, which is why a lot of Japanese games don't come over (how Yakuza gets away with this is beyond me), or we get stuck with no-budget dubs like Chaos Wars (lead guy just hired his friends and family to dub voices). It's also why we never got Tales of Eternia, Breath of Fire 3, Suikoden I + 2 and other games on the PSP. They have a policy that says a port of an old game must have X% of new content to be released in the US on an optical disk format. It's also probably why Resident Evil 4 and Code Veronica HD were released on PSN only, but in Japan they got an actual disk release.
It's not about money and sales so much as it's about stupid business practices. Xenoblade had no problem being released in the EU, after all. Nor did Breath of Fire 3, Tales of Eternia, and etcetera. These are just more examples of Sony and Nintendo being dumb and political crap getting in the way of games. I'm hoping Sony's new president will redo some of these asinine laws, but I doubt it.
If you're playing JRPG for immersion you're doing it wrong. They're for story, and gameplay. You don't play Final Fantasy to picture yourself as Cloud or Lightning, or at least I hope not. It's why a lot of JRPGs make for great anime like Persona 4, Rockman.EXE, Ryuusei no Rockman, and so forth. Something like Skyrim or Dungeon Siege or whatever is not really suited to be made into a series or show. I know Bioware is hiring some Japanese companies to "make an anime movie" but given the track record of these "American anime" it'll be mediocre at best. It's probably why it's not even about Shepard or the actual plot, just some random side story.
I take issue with the concept that one can enjoy a game "wrong" but more to the point: immersion for games does not and should not mean "you are the protagonist" any more than getting immersed in a really good book means that. It just means that you feel the experience cohesively and strongly, whatever that experience is. If the experience is "you are this person" then the game should keep you immersed in that and not cause any huge drops in the suspension of disbelief. If the experience is that you are following along with another person's adventures, then it should do the same there. That's actually a pretty good explanation for why Mass Effect is so much different than Skyrim- the player is not intended to feel like he actually is Shepard. He just needs to feel like Shepard is real enough to get emotionally invested in. There's a reason why Skyrim is capable of being played in first person and Mass Effect isn't. Anyway, to sum up: As long as the game sufficiently suspends your disbelief to its conceits (i.e. "why is Shepard doing what I say? Wait a second, THIS HAS ALL BEEN A GAME OH GOD") and keeps that going it provides immersion and, more importantly, a smooth narrative flow.
I mean, sure, there's going to be games that deliberately deconstruct this- Eternal Darkness broke immersion liberally, essentially treating the fourth wall like a shower curtain at times- but that's true of all media and can be done with a very clever flair. However, when you're stopping midgame to watch a completely out of place 10 minute cutscene or sommat, that's when the game designers have either dropped the ball or as you suggest should just start doing machinima. The reason why Persona et al make for good anime is because that third-person voyeur form is the narrative focus- the gameplay is not exactly seamlessly connected to the story. Which is a fine form of entertainment but can be problematic as it continues to demean and distract from the narrative value of gameplay itself. Mass Effect is closer to Persona in that sense (in comparison to Skyrim) so potentially it could result in a good movie. The only mark against it in the movie arena is that they actually tried to make the gameplay narrative and the 'cinematic' narrative pretty close to one and the same, so unless you play Mass Effect with someone else predetermining all the non-combat interaction it won't quite feel right. We'll see.
If you want to see what I mean, take Final Fantasy VII and compare it to Doom. I know, crazy talk, but while FFVII had you in third person and emotionally invested in the protagonist, Doom had you in first person AS the protagonist. One focused on third person voyeur-style narrative and the other focused on first person thrill. Advent Children was a commercial success because it was more in keeping with the core engagement of the game. Doom the movie, in both regards, wasn't. That's pretty much a lesson in narrative mode right there. Sure, FFVII's cinematics could be described as overly long, especially during battle, and the gameplay narrative is not seamless whatsoever, but they made strides to connect gameplay with narrative just by having the characters rendered the same in combat as in the cinematics- probably one of the many underlying reasons for the game's success. Looking back now (if you take off your nostalgia goggles) one might feel the story to be muddled and the graphics to be lacking, but at the time it made an image for itself by taking some strong steps towards gameplay/cinematic narrative marriage and sticking to a disciplined narrative mode. That same narrative mode and core aesthetic lead naturally to Advent Children being as well received as it was. Also, the ever-nefarious aforementioned nostalgia goggles, but we can just ignore those.
And I love turn-based combat, and wouldn't do away with it for the world. You all do realize it was inspired from a WRPG, right? (Wizardry.)
Japanese devs love Wizardry, and continue to not only make games inspired by it, but games in the same universe.
I find that abnegation isn't essential for a fun game but if I'm going to control characters in a story, the writing or the story telling need to make it worth while and any cutscenes involved need to have decent style as apposed to crazy graphics.
At least you aren't in Australia.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
This is so correct. Reminds me of the debates I've had where PC RPGs did half assed hybrid systems (like Arcanum) that neither made a satisfying real time or turn based combat option. Just pick something and do it well: Don't try to pander.
Well, there's pandering and then there's experimenting.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Developers don't make those decisions, publishers do.
The fact that they're bought by people who aren't filthy weeaboos. JRPG went from gaming mainstream to the gaming equivalent of the anime ghetto.
Like most economic theories, however, you fail to account for the human factor: artists are not purely rational actors interested in maximizing profits above all else. Aside from the desire to satisfy their own well-being artists create because they wish to express themselves. When you do a drama about autistic children, you are not expecting to rake in as much money as an action movie. Likewise, when you are making a game of a niche genre, like the new turn-based X-COM, you are making it while knowing fully that you won't earn as much as Call of Duty.
If you look at the industry you will see thousands of various niche titles, none of which I think the creators of truly believe will become the most popular thing since sliced bread. Were the case as you suggest it is, every game would look alike and try to contend for the same target audience instead of settling for smaller niches they know to be not as profitable.
Were everyone to truly take the lesson to heart and try to appeal to the broadest audience you wouldn't see Bastion or Minecraft or indie movies or musical subgenres or modern art or theatre. Everyone would try for Call of Duty (or their field's equivalent) because that'd earn more money and thus be more successful according to this metric. Heck, why stick to the video game industry? I bet you can make more money in other fields.
There is nothing wrong with trying to make money, but at a certain point every artist has to draw the line between expressing themselves and appealing to as many people as possible. 'Always try to appeal to as many people as possible' is a broken model. To stay true to the concept you must, at a certain point, say 'I will go no further'. Otherwise all diversity would be lost.