[HN Gopher] Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
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Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue
Author : doppp
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-11-17 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.filfre.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.filfre.net)
| xwdv wrote:
| I still feel Final Fantasy 6 was the best JRPG of the retro era.
| At the time it had heavy themes you wouldn't expect a child to
| grapple with: the ideas that the good guys can just straight up
| lose and having to live with the consequences, characters whose
| arcs may never truly be redeemed (because they can fucking _die_
| ), and even complex issues like the passing of loved ones,
| committing suicide when all hope is lost, gambling addictions,
| slitting your own mothers throat for some money, rape and
| genocide, interspecies relationships, racism, speciesism, the
| rise of fascism and the use of technology to enslave the masses.
| It should be a required play through for a young child, and a
| seasoned adult should provoke conversations about events in the
| game.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I feel the same way about Chrono Trigger, right down to
| (almost) all of those complex issues!
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Chrono Trigger's easily #1 for me in the 16-bit era, but FF VI
| is damn good.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I love Chrono Trigger; it's also what got me into emulation.
| I wasn't allowed to have an SNES but my 486 could just manage
| to run an emulator (esnes I think it was called?) that could
| do SNES with no sound or translucency (there were keyboard
| shortcuts to toggle the layers so e.g. you could hide fog
| that would otherwise make the whole screen gray).
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Oh man, no sound on Chrono Trigger is a shame. The music's
| great.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I also vaguely recall a few of the puzzles used sound
| ques to note there was a hidden button.
| zerocrates wrote:
| zsnes is an older SNES emulator that definitely in its
| earlier days had some issues with transparent/translucent
| layers and had keys to turn each layer off. I think I
| remember needing to use those toggles for the same fog
| layers in Chrono Trigger that you're talking about (though
| I definitely wasn't on a 486). I think esnes may be a
| little bit older?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Just a tiny bit older:
| https://archive.org/details/ESNESv012a
| gavinray wrote:
| When I was about 9/10, my grandfather put ZSNES on my
| computer, along with ROMs for most SNES games ever made.
|
| 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.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Probably the old "game port." That's cool. My experience
| was definitely more in the "use the A, S, Z, and X keys
| for the face buttons" realm.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Serial was my guess, if it was in fact 9-pin. I don't
| think I ever had a serial-port keyboard, but I did used
| to have a serial-port mouse.
|
| Game port had more pins.
| isk517 wrote:
| I remember playing Chrono Trigger on a emulator and it took
| me a while to realize that the fog in the future era was
| not suppose to be completely opaque.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Why should a young child grapple with rape, slitting mothers
| throat for money, suicide, gambling addiction, rape, genicide,
| etc?
|
| You arent majing a very good pitch for this being a family
| fruendly game...
| jstarfish wrote:
| Bizarrely enough, the framing of these concepts _is_ family-
| friendly.
|
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| > Why should a young child grapple with rape, slitting
| mothers throat for money, suicide, gambling addiction, rape,
| genicide, etc?
|
| 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.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Mass ecological devastation in the name of profit, complete
| with displacement of animals and the explicit suggestion
| that they might die as a result (The Lorax)
|
| 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)
| raincole wrote:
| I'm pretty sure most parents (nowadays) will reach the exact
| opposite conclusion after reading your comment: the game should
| be rated as ESRB 17+ and banned for a young child.
| coolbreezetft22 wrote:
| This type of comment has become such a cliche.
|
| 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.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I genuinely agree, especially for gamers of my particular
| demographic who knew Final Fantasy VI as "Final Fantasy III".
|
| 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.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > 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.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > dad was intended to be a commentary on Japanese
| salaryman culture, [...] 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _I could never put my finger on what made that game so
| compelling._
|
| 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.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| In fact he brilliantly used his outsider's perspective to
| lampoon and tweak them.
|
| 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.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun
| of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a
| self-admitted arbitrary obstacle
|
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| _Mother 3_ is totally worth playing too, for those who
| never got around to it. I played the English fan-
| translation a few years ago and it really floored me how
| well it developed the themes of Earthbound. It feels
| equal parts dire and slapstick, illustrated by cartoonish
| characters that live in truly trying times.
|
| 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.
| djur wrote:
| I agree with this except for one detail: EarthBound and
| Mother 3 especially are better written than any Final
| Fantasy game. (And I love Final Fantasy.)
| coolbreezetft22 wrote:
| Playing FF VI for the first time right now having wanted to
| play it for past two decade and loving it. Also played
| Earthbound for the first time earlier this year and agree
| with this sentiment. The music was also amazing
| RGamma wrote:
| Good to know I'm not the only one who just cannot let go of
| his 'to be played' list (though I'm only ~15 years behind
| wanting to play Earthbound). Recently finished SNES Chrono
| Trigger...
|
| 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...
| spinningD20 wrote:
| Your mentioning of "rape" here sent me on a google journey... I
| don't remember anything like that happening or even being
| hinted at in FF6, what are you referring to?
| mjr00 wrote:
| I assume they mean the first scene with Celes in South Figaro
| where she's being tortured. Rape isn't mentioned or even
| implied, in either Japanese or English, though.
| jamie_ca wrote:
| On the one hand there's Setzer "Let me swoop in on my airship
| to kidnap a beautiful opera singer" that was not likely to
| end in just a coffee date.
|
| 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.
| spinningD20 wrote:
| This is not explicitly stating that it is rape by any
| means, and I don't interpret it that way. It seemed to me
| that Maria and Setzer had a history already and he was
| stealing her away from her opera life, which she may or may
| not have wanted, we are not told whether or not she even
| wanted to work at the opera house, or what those conditions
| were. Casting characters in these negative lights without
| explicit proof is just silly. Especially after you get the
| backstory on Setzer and his love interest - nothing else in
| the game paints him as character that would do something
| awful like that.
|
| 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.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > Especially after you get the backstory on Setzer and
| his love interest - nothing else in the game paints him
| as character that would do something awful like that.
|
| 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.
| spinningD20 wrote:
| Let me rephrase... Regardless of the interpretation of
| intent, this was not "rape in ff6" or "discussing rape",
| and "rape" is not in ff6.
|
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I don't think it's silly of you to bring this up. In fact
| I think it's crucial to reexamine nonconsensual stuff in
| fiction, even kids' fiction. But I don't think I agree
| with your conclusion here.
|
| 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.
| Match451 wrote:
| I don't recall anything like that in FF6 either. They even
| removed part of a scene in a rerelease where Celes is chained
| up and gets punched by a guard.
|
| There are still plenty of other horrifying things in FF6
| though.
| andruc wrote:
| You should try the Brave New World mod for FF6, if you ever
| feel like revisiting it. Vast QoL improvements, among many
| other welcome and interesting changes.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It's a coin flip with Earthbound, IMO. If we're talking
| specifically about kids playing through a game, Earthbound
| would be more relatable though. I think this goes even more so
| for kids in NA considering Earthbound's cheeky localization and
| western references.
|
| source: played both at ~10-11 years of age.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Celes is tortured, not raped (and its a shame they edited this
| in subsequent releases to be honest. The empire in the first
| half of the game loses alot of teeth in these "minor" edits).
|
| 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.
| gavinray wrote:
| Mmm, I would say Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia were
| also up there.
| xwdv wrote:
| Chrono trigger is a great game, but I don't think the story
| actually holds up that well. For one the time travel mechanic
| is fairly juvenile, and from what I remember the game is
| missing one of the most important elements of a good time
| travel story: when you see effects happen before the cause
| (which presumably is the work of future versions of
| characters traveling back in time), so you never reach that
| satisfying loop back where you meet the past version of
| yourself and realize it was actually yourself that you saw at
| that point in time. Instead you just do stuff in the past and
| it results in some changes in the future, but those changes
| should have actually always been there in the first place if
| you would have been successful. It employs an alternate
| timeline type of time travel which is easy to understand but
| not particularly accurate or mentally stimulating.
| astrange wrote:
| I think saying FF6 is just a dark mature adult work does it a
| disservice; it makes it sound like prestige TV or something.
|
| 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.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| On a recent trip to Japan, poking about Akihabara, was very cool
| to see all the various Wizardry boxes for all sorts of different
| platform versions in glass cases. Abundantly clear that there's a
| deep love of the franchise!
| sketchquartet wrote:
| I've lived in Tokyo for a decade now, and this is indeed a
| small benefit that I don't see talked about much. If you're the
| type who _wants_ to get a hold of old games, it 's much less
| prohibitive to do so. I recently bought Mother 2 with box and
| manual at a local shop for 4490Yuan . DQ games are plentiful,
| too, and very cheap.
| krapp wrote:
| Counterpoint: "The JRPG label has always been othering[0]," by
| Kazuma Hashimoto[1]
|
| [0]https://www.polygon.com/23677598/jrpg-label-history-
| othering...
|
| [1]https://twitter.com/JusticeKazzy_
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > For us as Japanese 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 can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings
| because of what it was in the past,
|
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Agreed. I have always used it to simply refer to the
| different style of RPG which developed in Japan. It's not a
| discriminatory term (at least, not in the pejorative sense)
| at all IMO. In fact, I _prefer_ JRPGs.
| krapp wrote:
| It isn't really a style specific to Japan though, which is
| the point. Undertale is aesthetically more of a JRPG than
| Dark Souls. We should just be calling RPGs made in Japan
| "RPGs."
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Undertale is aesthetically more of a JRPG than Dark
| Souls.
|
| ... 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I think it is easier to say it is "just another style" when
| you're not part of the "other" group & when your identity
| isn't being boiled down to a particular style of menu systems
| and combat.
|
| 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.
| jdlyga wrote:
| I remember when it was "console style rpg" and "pc style rpg". It
| just so happens that "pc style rpg" games started getting
| released on consoles too, and somehow took over the RPG label.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Those are some especially confusing labels since the classic
| subgenre called "CRPG" correlates to "pc style rpg" as opposed
| to "console style rpg"
| cubefox wrote:
| Additionally, the C in CRPG stands for computer, which
| technically would also apply to consoles, yet "computer"
| again stands only for PC.
| cubefox wrote:
| Took over? Weren't they always called RPGs, at least since
| Ultima 1?
| haunter wrote:
| >Unfortunately, I don't know of a similarly easy and legal way to
| play the Dragon Quest games today.
|
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| Step 1: ADD MORE OBSCURE MENUS!!!
| djur wrote:
| There are some people who complain that JRPGs take away too
| many obscure menus.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >To be sure, there were Americans who found all of the barriers
| to entry into these deeply foreign worlds to be more bracing than
| intimidating, who took on the challenge of meeting the games on
| their own terms, often emerging with a lifelong passion for all
| things Japanese. At this stage, though, they were the distinct
| minority. In Japan and the United States alike, the conventional
| wisdom through the mid-1990s was that JRPGs didn't and couldn't
| sell well overseas; this was regarded as a fact of life as
| fundamental as the vagaries of climate. (Thanks to this belief,
| none of the Final Fantasy games to date had been released in
| Europe at all.) It would take Final Fantasy VII and a dramatic,
| controversial switch of platforms on the part of Square to change
| that. But once those things happened... look out. The JRPG would
| conquer the world yet.
|
| 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'.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Does that make Pokemon an ARG?
| knodi123 wrote:
| A decade before Pokemon existed, I went to see the movie The
| Wizard, a Fred Savage vehicle that was basically a 2 hour
| Nintendo commercial. And in the lobby of the theater as I was
| leaving, there was a booth selling subscriptions for the brand-
| new Nintendo Power magazine. The first issue came with a free
| copy of Dragon Warrior for the NES.
|
| So Nintendo was willing to bet big on JRPGs long before Pokemon
| came out.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| According to TFA, they gave it away free because it sold
| poorly and they had to do _something_ with all the cartridges
| they made.
| djur wrote:
| Nintendo also dedicated an issue of Nintendo Power to a full
| strategy guide for Final Fantasy, including a surprising
| amount of new (heavily Westernized) art depicting various
| scenes in the game. I read that issue front to back many
| times before I ever had a chance to play the actual game. (In
| retrospect it gave some bad advice, because the authors were
| unaware that the game had numerous bugs that made equipment
| and spells work differently than intended. But the maps were
| very) useful!
| anthk wrote:
| Go play Star Ocean, Chrono Trigger, FFVI, Earthbound, G.O.D.
| Mezame yo and Pokemon Crystal (an enhanced one), or some good
| Pokemon Red/Firered romhack.
|
| With these you played most of the tropes of the genre.
| mjr00 wrote:
| And yet there's still so much more... tactics rpgs like Final
| Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea, dungeon rpgs like Etrian Odyssey or
| Labyrinth of Touhou, or action rpgs like Seiken Densetsu 3 or
| Nier Automata.
|
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| The games of course don't call themselves JRPGs; game series
| in Japan tend to make up their own genre names, and each
| individual Tales Of game actually claims to be a different
| one they invented for it.
|
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'd add Phantasy Star III
| User23 wrote:
| Emulation is legal in the USA and the copyright act allows those
| in US jurisdiction to make copies needed to run software, which
| includes dumping a ROM from a cartridge.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| > In 2012, critic Nick Simberg wondered at "how willing we were
| to sit down on the couch and fight the same ten enemies over and
| over for hours, just building up gold and experience points"; he
| compared Dragon Quest to "a child's first crayon drawing, stuck
| with a magnet to the fridge."
|
| 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.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| > Before that scene in Final Fantasy VII, Hironobu Sakaguchi
| served up a shocker of equal magnitude in Final Fantasy VI.
| Halfway through the game, the bad guys win despite your best
| efforts and the world effectively ends, leaving your party
| wandering through a post-apocalyptic World of Ruin like the
| characters in a Harlan Ellison story. The effect this had on some
| players' emotions could verge on traumatizing -- heady stuff for
| a videogame on a console still best known worldwide as the cuddly
| home of Super Mario. For many of its young players, Final Fantasy
| VI was their first close encounter with the sort of literature
| that attempts to move beyond tropes to truly, thoughtfully engage
| with the human condition.
|
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| I thought it was commonly accepted that Chrono Trigger (another
| SNES JRPG) was better than FF6.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| I guess it turns out I'm a rebel then.
| default-kramer wrote:
| Of course I enjoy leveling up and choosing skills and exploring
| dungeons, but plenty of games implement those same mechanics at
| least as well as DQ. For me, the distinguishing feature of the
| Dragon Quest franchise (today*) is its charm: The charismatic
| cast of endearing enemies. The regional accents of the NPCs. The
| wordplay, the art, the music. Even the venerable hanging leather
| sack is enough to make me smile.
|
| *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).
| djur wrote:
| I thought the NES translations were fine. They were a little
| more formal than the tone of more recent translations, but they
| felt very friendly and literate compared to the terse messages
| you got from the contemporary Final Fantasy games.
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