JRPGs And The Struggle For Japanese Games In The Late 2000s

This article on ‘JRPGs And The Struggle For Japanese Games In The 7th Generation’ was available a week earlier through the Gamerbraves Newsletter. Sign up for free to gain access to more articles about news and trends in the gaming industry and community.

Original Article

Final Fantasy XVI Producer Naoki Yoshida sparked controversy last week when he said that he didn’t want his upcoming game to be known as a “JRPG” as he thought it was just an RPG. When speaking more about the term he said the following:

“This is going to depend on who you ask but there was a time when this term first appeared 15 years ago, and for us as developers the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term. As though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past”.

This has sparked a debate over the term JRPG. Many people who use it today did not think of it as a negative term. It is mainly seen as a way to distinguish between different types of RPGs.

With that being said, Yoshida and other Japanese developers are valid in their comments because while I also never saw the term “JRPG” as a negative, I do remember how games in the genre were treated 15 years ago during the 7th console generation (the late 2000s to early 2010s). At the time Japanese games were looked down upon by many journalists, YouTubers, and the general gaming community as outdated, childish, and poor quality, and it’s only in the last ten years or so that they’ve started to be praised more outside Japan.

For today let’s talk about why Japanese games were treated so badly during this period and why the term JRPG was coined in the first place.

Western Media and Japanese Games

So to give a quick taste of what Japanese Video game coverage was like in the late 2000s here’s a snippet from the Game TV Program X-Play’s review of the RPG Baten Kaitos Origins:

The video isn’t exactly flattering, not only to the game but to Japanese culture as a whole. It wasn’t just them, however. Many gaming personalities at the time featured a very condescending approach to JRPGs. In 2010 IGN released a list of features that would “Fix” JRPGs stating that most of them still played like SNES games because they didn’t have online play or used too many anime cliches. Meanwhile, Bioware Co-Founder Greg Zeschuk said that Japanese RPGs had “fallen” due to “a lack of evolution, a lack of progression.” Criticizing the genre is one thing but many of these comments had an underlying notion that JRPGs were bad simply because they weren’t like Western RPGs.

The most notable incident, however, was when Fez developer Phil Fish, was asked at a convention what Japanese games could learn from his work and he simply replied “Japanese games just suck”. This was later followed by former Capcom Producer Keiji Inafune who said that “Japan is Dead”, and that they were making nothing but bad games and their industry paled in comparison to The West.

Now, this may sound bad, but keep in mind that while both Fish and Inafune aren’t as prominent in the gaming industry nowadays, back then people agreed, praised, and defended, them for saying this. For many, they were punk auteurs simply telling the hard truth that everyone knew but wouldn’t say.

I emphasize this because it wasn’t just a group of mean Western insiders saying these things, it was a trend at the time. International audiences just didn’t like Japanese games and they wanted to let everyone know. So what was the issue that led to this?

The 7th Console Generation

This Japanese discourse mainly happened during the 7th Generation of consoles from 2005-2012. Here the main consoles were the PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and PSP. Now I can’t say for sure what issues Japanese developers were going through at the time but I can tell you the perspective of a consumer who saw the general gaming discourse of the era.

One of the biggest innovations of the 7th Generation was the introduction of HD Gaming. For the first time in history, we had new games where human models could look like actual human beings (for the time). These higher graphical capabilities also allowed for greater open-world gameplay, faster action combat, and the ability to tell “darker” and “more mature” stories. That’s what people not only wanted but expected out of a AAA game at the time: a gritty setting with realistic graphics. Unreal Engine 3’s washed-out brown color aesthetic has basically become the symbol of the 7th gen.

One genre in particular that took great advantage of these new innovations was Western RPGs. Games like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Mass Effect saw great successes in part because they took inspiration from the shooter genre, made popular by Call of Duty. Mass Effect in particular was pretty much a shooter with RPG elements by the third game. WRPGs traded out their classic point-and-click style gameplay for fast first/third-person shooter combat in highly detailed open worlds. Japanese games on the other hand weren’t the best at following these ideas.

Japanese games At The Time

JRPGs and Japanese games in general had trouble keeping up with these trends. They still went with more stylized “anime” art direction that was seen as “kiddy” or just “too strange”. They also tended to be more linear in design or used turn-based combat, both of which were seen as outdated in a time of action games and open worlds. A lot of it also really just came down to culture. Japan in general at the time was framed as a funny land of cartoon animals and cringe over-the-top media.

The best example of this is probably Final Fantasy XIII, often considered one of the worst games in the mainline series for having annoying anime characters, focusing too much on style over substance, and being too linear. FFXIII in many ways isn’t even that bad but because of the time it came out, it tarnished the image of Final Fantasy, the most well-known JRPG franchise in the west.

Development Struggles

Behind the scenes, Japanese games had a hard time keeping up with the greater costs of HD gaming. This led to many bigger companies being more conservative with budget allocations, taking longer to bring products to the next-gen consoles (PS3 and Xbox 360), and relying on more safe IPs and gameplay styles.

Companies like Capcom, Konami, and Square Enix would all attempt to push for more Western-style games by working with Western studios to get that foreign perspective. Most of these projects failed to take off, however. A big issue is that games like Konami’s Castlevania: Lords of Shadow or Capcom’s DmC: Devil May Cry while fine games in their own right felt like they only had a superficial idea of why people liked their Japanese predecessors and often seemed to just be chasing popular trends. DmC in particular was intentionally hostile to what the series used to be. The fact that the developers of the game referred to the original Japanese Dante as a gay cowboy at a GDC Talk probably didn’t help endear them to fans.

We should also note that many Japanese companies attempted to avoid HD gaming altogether. Even two years after the PS3’s release, Atlus was just launching Persona 4 for the PS2 in 2008. Many of the best JRPGs of the time came either to the aging PS2 or for the handheld Nintendo DS and PSP such as The World Ends With You, Valkyria Chronicles II, and Pokemon Gen 4 and 5. The problem here is that many “hardcore” Western gamers tended to not play on these consoles as they primarily focused on the “next-gen” experience of the HD consoles, leading many of these games to fall into cult classic status.

So that does mean we shouldn’t use the term “JRPG” anymore? It’s a difficult topic but there is still some merit to the word.

JRPGs Vs WRPGs

The main purpose of the term JRPG in modern times is to distinguish it as a sub-genre from Western RPGs and there are legitimate reasons to do so.

The RPG genre is unique in that JRPGs and WRPGs tend to have very distinct feel and design philosophies behind them even with a vast variety of different gameplay mechanics. Dragon Quest is a turn-based RPG, while Kingdom Hearts is an action RPG but they are both seen as “JRPGs” and most people would say Kingdom Hearts feels closer in design to Dragon Quest than they would say, modern God of War which is also an action RPG.

It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly defines each genre however the most notable for me is the use of narrative. JRPGs tend to follow a linear story with a set protagonist and fixed main characters that you will meet throughout your journey. While there may be sidequests or customization you’re ultimately going from point A to point B with a need to level up to take on greater challenges. Even FFXVI seems to more or less adhere to this.

Meanwhile, Western RPGs put more emphasis on exploration, immersion, and choice. Games like Elder Scrolls or Fallout drop you into a vast world as an incredibly customizable blank-slate protagonist and encourage you to travel to different towns, make alliances, and take on different quests as you please.

This likely comes from the fact that while RPGs have their origins in D&D and Ultima, both sub-genres evolved fairly separately from one another. JRPGs took inspiration from Dragon Quest and were made for Japanese consoles while WRPGs evolved from Computer RPGs (CRPGs) which pretty much started as D&D in game form. It was only around the 7th gen when they would start appearing more on the same console in the same regions and by that time the tropes and mechanics associated with each of them had been firmly set in place.

An Evolving Term

Many nowadays, including PlayStation’s official website, argue that JRPGs shouldn’t be defined as “RPGs from Japan” but rather games made in the style of Japanese RPGs and the same goes for western RPGs. It’s for this reason that Dark Souls despite being an RPG made in Japan tends not to be considered a JRPG while Undertale or Sea of Stars despite being made in The West are often described as JRPGs.

Ultimately, these two terms exist due to convenience in language, so it’s easier to understand what to expect of games from each sub-genre. It’s sort of like how language is used to talk about cuisine. We have terms like “French food” or “Indian food” because it helps us identify the kind of characteristics associated with them more efficiently.

Closing Thoughts

It can be hard to look back at how Japanese games were treated back in the 7th generation of consoles. It very much felt like various gamers, reviewers, and developers, including those from Japan, weren’t giving these titles a fair shot for just being too different from the popular Western-developed games at the time.

Thankfully things seem to be getting better. Trends change and now Japanese games are some of the most popular titles on the markets around the world. The fact that Persona 5, with its turn-based combat, anime art style, and visual novel-style storytelling was able to win over so many Western fans is a testament to that. You do still get some people complaining that games like Xenoblade or Fire Emblem have become “too anime” (even though they always were) but they’re very much in the minority at this point.

This brings us back to the term JRPG. Once again Yoshida and any other Japanese developer are right to not like the term and the mistreatment their products faced back in the day. Like it or not, the term was used to identify and mock games in the genre for a long time. That being said, language changes over time, and for most gamers in modern times, it’s just another term for a sub-genre of RPGs, one that’s getting more mainstream praise and attention than ever before.

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