Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
filfre.net
filfre.net
As far as english releases goes:
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VIII have been released for Android and iOS. There is no landscape mode and no controller support but they are still very much playable. Apart from VIII which is a 3D game and the portrait mode is very iffy, serviceable but not great at all. But as far as legality goes that's the only english digital release.
I, II, III are on Switch.
I do believe FF6 is probably the greatest JRPG ever made, but I also think the most emotionally charged moment in the FF franchise happened in FF4. Palom and Porom.
For my money, FFVI is the best game of the lot. It's a very close call but I just prefer the story it tells and the way it does it. You'll certainly find people out there who disagree, though!
But FFVI was special.
*I say "today" because earlier translations were not very good, as the article mentions. As I recall, even DQ7 on PS1 was pretty rough. But the English localization of DQ8 in 2005 was a masterpiece, and I think this is the one that set the bar for the future of the franchise (including remakes of earlier entries).
RPG originally referred to the former, as they came first. JRPG was an offshoot of it, from Japanese developers influenced by the genre but putting their own spin on it. So there is no "take over"; just the offshoot fading.
ZSNES gave me some of the best memories of my childhood.
The coolest bit was that he had soldered a real SNES controller so that it worked with those old-school trapezoid 9-pin keyboard input things. I still think that is pure magic, to this day.
Game port had more pins.
You arent majing a very good pitch for this being a family fruendly game...
These events happen, and kids do need to know about them in order to prepare for them. But there's enough abstraction to make it not be gratuitious or traumatic. It's like having Fred Rogers teach kids about this stuff versus George R.R. Martin.
"Family-friendly" doesn't mean avoiding difficult subjects altogether. Even the Bible freely explores all of these topics. Going to church is literally a family event.
Have you read most faerie tales, or Bible stories for that matter? Or watched children's television? Or grown up in a less than perfect household?
These are simply the themes of real life, and only rare privilege allows one to reach adolescence blissfully ignorant of life's sharp edges. Better to have the lessons delivered by a compelling narrative that gives children agency then by real life which offers them none.
A sensitive individual takes seriously pleas for help from a vulnerable population at risk of being wiped out, while others mock the individual’s concerns as fake, and actively endanger the same population, echoing Western reactions to persecution of Jews and eventually the Holocaust in the lead-up to and during much of WWII (Horton Hears a Who)
Its full of rape and murder! great for kids!
As a parent to young children I did not reach this conclusion and would love for my son to play this masterpiece. None of the parents I know are like this either.
I actually feel like this mindset was much more prevalent in the 90s than it is nowadays.
I would like to point out, though, that there are plenty of games that the English-speaking world didn't get, at least not on their initial release, and there is one in particular that I want to highlight here as I don't see it get the fanfare I think its owed.
That game is Dragon Quest V, which takes a sampling of the mature themes you highlighted from Final Fantasy VI (and then some), but has coated them in a layer of whimsy that gives the whole experience the feeling of an oddly compelling fairy tale. I highly recommend it if you still have the time and patience for JRPGs. (And if you don't, the movie Dragon Quest Your Story is available in English on Netflix and is based on Dragon Quest V, albeit with a bit of a controversial addition towards the end.)
I'd also like to highlight Earthbound as a curiously mature JRPG for the time. I like to cite it as an example of a game that is more about the journey than the destination. It's not about saving the world, it's about painting cows blue and the third strongest mole and bubble monkeys. But it's also about accepting the world as it is, facing things that you might not be ready to face, the impermanence of everything, and making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then.
I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling. The "Yakuza: Like a Dragon" game had a similar vibe. The working title for it might as well have been "Friendship is Magic."
> making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then
The lesson you were supposed to take away from it was to stop and call your dad every now and then.
That's a good catch, thanks!
I also think the dad was intended to be a commentary on Japanese salaryman culture, and now that I'm older, from the dad's perspective I see another lesson about all the things you might miss if you spend all your time working.
Totally. Check out a few episodes of the "Old Enough" show on Netflix and you'll see the same; dad/mom is stuck running the restaurant while the kid goes on the epic errand. Adults have responsibilities and it was touching that the game respected that instead of vilifying him as an "absentee" parent. Childhood is your journey; your parents are just there to provide air support.
The game's director and writer, Shigesato Itoi, is a creative writer by trade, so he brought a fresh perspective, and frankly, is a better writer than most who work on videogames. Being an outsider, he also wasn't bogged down by common video game tropes.
My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a self-admitted arbitrary obstacle, and the rolling HP counters, which cleverly introduced an element of real-time to an otherwise entirely turn-based battle system.
I would also like to once again shout out the third strongest mole as the most brilliant ludo-narrative joke in all of gaming.
IIRC, the solution was equally silly-- a literal pencil eraser.
I remember the game having a lot of cheeky David Bowie references too. Starman is an obvious one as a recurrent character, and correctly figured that the fight with Carbon Dog wasn't going to end so easily.
While I'm still a sucker for FFVI and FFVII, Mother 3 kinda achieves the impossible in many ways. It re-develops the themes from it's predecessor into a more accessible, more nuanced and funnier story. Characters get hurt, die, yell curse-words and contend with progressively more horrifying environments. Tonally it almost feels like Stand By Me, elevated to cartoonishly-evil stakes from the start. Best of all, the morals are immediately accessible to the player instead of being hidden as lore like most RPGs are want to do. For younger audiences, there should be no confusion about who is right and wrong and why they are that way. While Final Fantasy is written better overall, I feel like younger players would take so much more away from Mother 3. It really captures the "coming of age" storytelling that has been developed since Mother 1.
After getting to the end of that game, you kinda understand why Itoi doesn't want another game like that. The bar is simply too high, even by the standards of modern consoles.
There even was a time I was under the illusion that I could experience all 'major' games in a reasonable timeframe after they came out.
And then the video games market blew up for good during the 10s and now there's so ludicrously many of them...
On the other hand, no way in hell does someone like Kefka invent something called a Slave Crown and then just use it to force someone to pilot a magic mecha.
The grounds for "FF6 has rape in it!" seems super super shaky. It feels like the sort of thing where people are decided that Satsuki & Mae from Totoro are really "dead and ghosts" during the entirety of the movie. It's silly.
Don't scare people away from a classic for things that aren't true.
Did we play the same game? However you define "rape," Setzer was an amoral gambler and rogue whose idea of romance was kidnapping and forced marriage. His relationship with Darril was mostly one of sport. He planned to kidnap the opera singer, was duped into kidnapping Celes instead, and was only willing to help them save the world or whatever if Celes married him. She only got out of that by challenging him and literally beating him at his own game (gambling).
Setzer was misogyny incarnate...Darril, someone he had an actual "relationship" with, was only ever his girlfriend. The opera singer, he wanted to marry on sight. Dude's priorities were seriously fucked.
If I heard as a parent that a game has rape in it, I am thinking "there is a scene in which a character is raped", and there is no way I would let my kids play that game, regardless of the rating, until I felt they were mentally or emotionally ready to be exposed to such an awful scene.
This is not rape in a game or anything like that. Speculation or interpretation of events or intent is FAR different than a scene literally displaying such an act.
So, my commentary in this thread has been to clarify, there is no such scene in this game, and any interpretation or speculation is just that. It does not explicitly actually occur in the game.
It's true: in the real world a forced marriage is more or less explicitly rapey.
But at some point we as a society decided that in light works of fantasy we don't need to really need to follow every single thing to its logical real-world conclusion.
I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.
I was surprised to see they only now re-released Super Mario RPG. There's a forced-marriage story arc in that one too, and Mario Odyssey also had an abort-the-wedding mission.
I'm in a weird position where you don't agree with me, but I actually agree with you. Yeah, wedding implies an unwanted consummation, but there's already kidnapping and unwanted bondage (marriage), which are themselves serious crimes and boundary violations. What may or may not happen next isn't really the point since we're already in not-ok territory.
I don't have a dog in this fight, I was mainly arguing against the Setzer-wouldn't-do-that line of thought. He's a wildcard who lives for himself, not a saint. Celes leveraged his own ego against him to challenge him to a game-- and cheat at it to guarantee her success. She didn't need no man to save her. Even then she ended up having to babysit him later.
But in fiction, especially fantastical works like FF6, we can't make claims about the original work (ala "there is rape in FF6") based on those kinds of extrapolations.
There are still plenty of other horrifying things in FF6 though.
source: played both at ~10-11 years of age.
I have played through FFVI more than a dozen times, including currently, right now, on my phone, I'm half way through yet another run, and I can't think of anything that invokes rape.
I'm also not really sure where gambling addiction comes in. Yes, Setzer ran a flying gambling airship, but its never really explored in any meaningful way.
This isn't meant to chastise so much as to set expectations aligned with the game.
The rest is true though. It does deal with passing of loved ones, attempted suicide, interspecies relationships (espers, Maduin / Madeline specifically), emotionless killers (Shadow AKA Realms dad, the entire personality of Kefka), abandonment, being able to love after trauma (The Terra story arc), fascism, prejudice (how the Magi are treated), genocide / mass murder for political gain (how the espers are treated), the dark side of technology, free will, the meaning of life, toxic masculinity (Edgar and women...oh boy I see it alot different now) and most importantly, never giving up no matter how hard things are or hopeless they seem.
Honestly, all of that stuff is there, and presented in what is (mostly) a pre-teen / early teen friendly way. If used appropriately, could be a spring board to discuss heavier things in life.
FF6 is specifically designed like an opera. It's European, fast paced, has a lot of classical music, comic moments, romance, gore, etc. That's not quite the same thing as an art film or Earthbound-inspired indie game about depression.
And the villain is a magical clown.
With these you played most of the tropes of the genre.
Always debatable where "JRPG" ends and some other genre begins, of course, but the great part of the genre is how widely varied things can be.
Some of the developers are very sensitive about this term. Recently for FFXVI the director went on a press tour talking about he made it Western by making the dev team watch Game of Thrones and in one interview essentially said JRPG is a slur invented by Western games journalists. Some of whom definitely spent the 2000s saying all Japanese games were impenetrably wacky anime bullshit.
It's like Poker and 'Mus'. Both are card games, but the mechanics are pretty different.
https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-16-producer-naoki-yo...
Because the draw is the challenge and the decision making. One could certainly describe bowling as "throwing a ball down the same lane repeatedly", but that's missing the point.
That, and a weird indie project Nintendo had published focused around multiplayer battling and trading called... Pocket Monsters. You may know it as Pokemon.
Pokemon itself was co-developed by two different companies: Game Freak (an indie videogame 'zine turned game developer) and Creatures, a company created from the smoldering ashes of APE, Shigesato Itoi's game development firm that had made a little game called EarthBound. EarthBound was lovingly[0] translated by Nintendo, because it had already taken Japan by storm, it was very well written, and most notably, it was hilariously American[1].
Unfortunately it sold horribly, because Nintendo had made some pretty terrible marketing decisions. First off, the tagline for the game in the US was "This game stinks", because someone at Nintendo wanted to ride the wave of early 90s Nickelodeon gross-out cartoons. EarthBound is not at all like Ren and Stimpy[2]. Second, Nintendo decided to sell the game alongside a strategy guide, which while cool, increased the cost of the game. To make matters even worse, this wasn't even the first time Nintendo had considered doing this. EarthBound is actually a sequel to a game on the NES that Nintendo had fully translated, and then cancelled at the last minute due to worries about production cost. Why? The NES version of EarthBound[3] would have also shipped with a strategy guide, because Nintendo was hellbent on patronizing American players.
Possibly because of this, Nintendo held back on releasing Pokemon for like three years. It didn't even sell well in Japan initially, but some rumors about unobtainable Pokemon that you could glitch the game to get[4] and an animated cartoon based on the game helped it out. The cartoon got licensed to 4Kids in America before the games even got released here, and it did wonders to sell people on the game[5]. What really helped is that the cartoon would actually teach you some of the more obtuse mechanics of Pokemon. No need to give someone the strategy guide if they already know that Eevee plus fire stone equals Flareon.
[0] Minus a handful of annoying content edits for the US market which don't really impact the story
[1] As in, the game was written from the perspective of American kids in a modern-day suburban environment. Also, it was hilarious.
[2] To be fair, there is one section of the game that has you literally fighting a giant pile of vomit. All the marketing focused around just that.
[3] Nintendo now calls this EarthBound Beginnings in the US, because they released their translated ROM on Wii U Virtual Console and later Nintendo Switch Online. It is quite possibly the only NES RPG worth playing today.
[4] Mew
[5] And also gave 4Kids false confidence that they could license any cartoon made for young adults, edit it down for small children, and make bank. This would later bury the company in production cost as they spent way too much money photoshopping out all the guns and text from Yu-Gi-Oh! and One Piece to make it 'kid friendly'.
Does that make Pokemon an ARG?
So Nintendo was willing to bet big on JRPGs long before Pokemon came out.
[0]https://www.polygon.com/23677598/jrpg-label-history-othering...
I'm curious when that was because, having played RPGs on various systems since they first existed, I don't recall ever having it been considered negative; just another style. I don't mean to discount his feelings about the term/issue at all; he (and those he associated with) clearly felt that way. I just find it interesting that there's such a disconnect there.
... and that's exactly why most people consider Undertale a JRPG and basically nobody considers Dark Souls a JRPG?
JRPG has not meant "RPG made in Japan" for a long time; it now means "RPG similar to the ones popularized by Japanese developers in the late 80s to mid 90s." Or "Japanese-style Role Playing Games" for short.
Also important is that WWII brought a lot of discrimination on Japanese people from the West & US in particular. This was an era where movies, like Back to the Future Part II and Robocop 3 kind of went out of their way to portray Japanese people as evil. Today, it might seem like jumping at shadows, but for someone in their 50s who was developing games in the early 90s, this kind of discrimination would be more fresh in their mind, so getting that label from the US media could seem bad.
Today, two way communication is easier, thanks to the Internet, so these confusion points are largely cleared up, and if you watch the video where that quote comes from, Yoshida pretty much goes on to say as much. This isn't brought up in the parent poster's linked article though.