Japan has a rather unique relationship with role-playing games. Game development studios located there sometimes seem to pump them out by the dozen — garish, weird titles that all seem to share a similar core of mechanics and themes. And quite frankly… a lot of them are not that good. Indeed, the issues with these games are very much rooted in the same causes that give them their recognisable feel.
But before we can get to that, let’s talk cargo cults!
If you are not familiar with the term, in a historical context, it refers to a behaviour observed in indigenous populations and having to do with the imitation of cultural and technological elements found in first world visitors (usually of the military persuasion). The exact nature of this behaviour is disputed, possibly making the term “cargo cult” a bit of a misnomer. But it’s also not the context of this term that I am referring to here. Cargo cult has a broader meaning, referring to a specific behavioural pattern that can be observed pretty much everywhere in the world. It’s indeed something children sometimes engage.
In essence, it could be summed up like this:
- A person observes an effect and uses induction to infer the cause-effect model.
- The induction is not performed correctly, however, and the model does not pass experimental verification.
- The cause for the failure is misattributed to outside sources.
Basically, it’s being wrong about how something works and despite all evidence present suggesting you might be wrong keeping to your original belief.
And the formula for jRPGs is very much something akin to this thinking.
But why exactly would I say that? Well… that has a lot to do with the history of RPGs in Japan and the broader scope of the world.
1) The history of RPGs
To begin with, RPGs are not native to Japan. In fact, they are a very western form of entertainment, taxonomically classified among the vast collection of what we call traditional games. That’s the true form of the RPG, the pen and paper game — the one commonly associated with dice, miniatures, maps and all that. While that might not be a correct vision of the modern tabletop RPG, which is a diverse medium, it has a lot to do with where RPGs came from.
Role-playing games are, in essence, an extrapolation of wargames into a smaller scale. This origin is also why a lot of classic RPGs have very pronounced combat mechanics while out of combat mechanics take a more supplementary role. While Japan managed into wargames (well, let’s be honest, humanity has been into wargames at large for a very long time) they never made the transition towards RPGs. Thus, this type of game was something of a foreign import.
Meanwhile, in the west, nerds decided they will employ the mighty electron brains (computers) to play RPGs. Of course, this is somewhat of folly as these games really do not work without a human element. And the only thing that you can get out of a computer in this regard is something of a facsimile. And that’s fine. Computer RPGs have their place along real RPGs, it’s a different but similar enough point of interest, and some people prefer one or the other… and of course a lot of people who engage in both or none of them.
Queue Dragon Quest (a.k.a. Dragon Warrior), the ur-jRPG. The very title that kicked off the genre and is more or less directly copied by many games to come after it.
Where did Dragon Quest come from though? Unlike the west, where cRPGs were patterned off of true RPGs, this game took western cRPGs and used them as its basis. And due to the limitations of what it ran on it had to make… sacrifices. Yeah, a lot of sacrifices. Consoles of that time were very limited machines. They were good at some things, optimised for certain types of games. And in those fields, they surpassed the PC. But what they were not very good at was something PC’s very much handled well and incidentally rather paramount to proper RPG design – juggling data.
Let’s be honest here, due to their roots in wargames, RPGs tend to be a form of entertainment-spreadsheet. Lots of data. Lots of mechanics. Lots of words. Not things consoles of the time were good at. So I don’t actually blame Dragon Warrior for what it did. Inspired by cRPG series that were already fairly established in the west (niche, sure, but still) like Ultima and Wizardry, it took the observed game model and proceeded to strip it down until it could work on a console.
In the process, it sacrificed much of the underlying core nuance of RPGs while at the same time focusing on the superficial and ultimately not even doing that particularly well.
So to sum up. jRPGs are games that use a formula developed as a way to simplify imported foreign games that in themselves were developed as a simplification of a completely different form of entertainment. No wonder jRPGs are (objectively) not role-playing games. But that wouldn’t really be the problem. Western cRPGs tend to wibble-wobble towards and away from their roots, looking for things that do and don’t work when applied to a computer.
2) The jRPG autopsy
So that’s the historical context. Now, where did it take us? Though not every jRPG is the same, there are certain typical features and design patterns they exhibit that can be directly traced back to their first noted occurrence. These features can be divided into mechanical and narrative, as the games share similarities in both how they play and how they try to tell their stories. Up first, let’s take a look at typical mechanics found in the role-playing computer games of Japan.
Number driven
jRPGs love numbers. They love making the numbers grow big. While in a typical western RPG going into any values above hundreds is rare, Japan loves to take things towards higher and higher degrees of absurdity. The more digits, the better – it means you are powerful, right? Games of this sort tend towards super-linear progression*. They tend towards high numbers and a big numeric gap between the early and late game.
*) It’s often stated that jRPGs use exponential scaling but that’s a particular type of scaling, and it does not exactly work out with the models present in actual games.
Limited mechanical agency
jRPGs tend not to offer much in terms of mechanical strategies. Often you are stuck with predefined characters proceeding down preset level based progressions. Choices are rare, if ever present. These games also tend to lack side-grade type equipment or skill choices. What additionally compounds the issue is that even the application of mechanics does not offer much in terms of agency. Combat systems are often bare bones with little more than Elemental RPS as a mechanic. Variants and derivatives of ATB style combat still remain the norm. In essence, there’s little you can do and even less of what you can do matters.
This is compounded by what I’ve written above, the scaling causing choices to be deprecated only to be replaced by functionally identical “on the curve” variants. For example, equipment must be replaced by functionally similar items with higher numbers at a steady pace, lest the player falls behind on the progression and hit a roadblock.
Complicated, not deep
Additionally, despite not offering much in terms of agency, jRPG systems often tend to overload on quantity over quality of the content present. That is to say, they tend to introduce a lot of systems, mechanics, terms and instances of specific things (items, skills, whatever else it might be) that all together amount to very little. A system that is complicated but not deep exhibits superficial complexity. At first, it might seem it offers a lot, but as the game progresses the systems either explicitly or implicitly steer the player’s choices.
It doesn’t matter if a game has 9001 different swords if they all do the same thing.
There’s also a few articles in which I explore these topics in a bit more detail:
- Mechanics: Systemic Games And Balance
- Mechanics: Tactical Combat – Part I – Attrition
- Mechanics: Tactical Combat – Part II – Progression
- Mechanics: Tactical Combat – Extra – The Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make
- RPG vs RPG Element
Together, these three issues tend to make jRPG combat a chore. There are many games that I could see myself liking a lot more if it wasn’t for the combat system, the Persona (SMT in general) games being an excellent example of this. Games that narratively manage to break away from many jRPG conventions yet remain slaved to the mechanical failings typical to the genre. Speaking of which… time to move on to the narrative side of things!
No worldbuilding
Most jRPG worlds are empty places, existing only as a vessel within which the plot may take place. Western RPGs often exists as a realisation of someone’s vision of a world. The narrative exists within the scope of a world, which can be much, much larger than the scope of the story. Games coming from Japan rarely have the privilege of having such a world backing them; instead, whatever setting is constructed fits only within the confines of the story. And while sometimes token worldbuilding efforts are taken, they do not stand up to scrutiny. Worse still, is that the construction of jRPG settings is often eclectic and convoluted, often making references to a large number of real-life mythical beings and occult concepts, but rarely making the borrowed material meaningful. Instead, you are confronted with a myriad of things taken from a multitude of contexts – none of which serve the game’s setting at large. When a game refers to, say, Arthurian myth, it raises questions – does king Arthur exist in this setting? Was he a real person or just a story? What relation does this have with the Arthur of fable from our world?
Ludanarrative dissonance
But it’s not just that jRPGs often struggle to string together enough material to form a world around their plot. There is also the issue of how the mechanics interact with the plot. Or rather… how they do not. If you are not familiar with the term I used up there, it refers to a case where a game’s mechanics and narrative conflict, often to a devastating degree. Options you have during combat suddenly disappearing when they could have out-of-combat use. Healing magic is the most common issue, but other examples come to mind too. Why is a great hero, who can cleave a dragon with a single swipe of their ancestral katana, stopped by a fence high wall? Or a dinky little door? Even when the narrative and systems don’t clash directly, there is rarely anything that ties them together, anything that would tell me what it even means to deal 999999 damage or what the actual effect of casting Megadragon Obliteration Inferno is, apart from the numbers it causes to appear on the screen.
Lack of narrative agency
With the mechanics, you have at least some wiggle room. With the narrative, you often get precisely fuck all. You get straddled with pre-made characters playing out their pre-written teenage dramas (even if they are a 3000-year-old half-elf, quarter-dragon, orange-lemon). Sometimes you have a chance to ask a question. And sometimes you can change the course of the plot to a near-identical course but with a minor difference, of course, achieved by completing a convoluted and nonsensical side-quest. The main issue, however, is the character presented as the player’s avatar in the world, assuming such a character even exists or can be discerned.
In western RPGs, and especially in true RPGs, a core concept is the idea of coauthoring. The narrative is a dialogue between the game developers and the player. We understand that ultimately its scope is limited; after all, there is only so much a limited number of writers can do in a set amount of time. But still, there is an expectation of at least a token effort being made. Like the creation of an avatar and the expression of that avatar within the game world. Do not mistake this for me saying that there is an expectation for the player to insert themselves into the narrative. The player’s character can be just as constructed as the narrative they occupy. The difference is that they are built by the player, through the tools provided by the game developers, both mechanically and narratively.
It’s not that jRPGs lack these tools… I’m not exactly sure they even understand that such things exist.
I could link to more articles in which I get into these issues, but you are already on my blog, and I’m not going to create some kind of fucked up recursive matrioszka rabbit hellhole here.
3) Conclusions
These commonly present elements are why I call jRPGs a cargo cult design. They lack the fundamentals to make their formula work, yet re-create it nearly infinitely, with minimal variations each time. They are a genre of games that are RPGs in nothing but name alone, the defining characteristics of role-playing games long diluted to nearly homoeopathic degrees. They are a form of video game spawned from third-hand concepts, distilled down through the lens of technical limitations, not interested in breaking out of the created mould. Even if those limitations do not exist anymore, and access to source materials becoming trivial, jRPGs just don’t want to change. Is it because the formula is so good? Eh, I’d find that very debatable. More likely, it just became a meme, repeated from observation with little thought given to where it originated.
And with tools like RPG Maker, you can even make your own!
But should you? Eh, I don’t know. It’s up to you. If you are reading this, I’d assume you are an adult and capable of making your own decisions.
I’m just, personally, very unlikely to be impressed by your game.
Esoteric Musings... 