Yeah, Final Fantasy VII bloated the JRPG and made combat and cutscenes way too damn long and every JRPG after followed suit and destroyed the genre. Idiots.
Incidentally after FFVII I switched to CRPGs and never looked back. Perfect timing too. Fallout, Baldur’s Gate…
True. When people talk about long cutscenes and fights in older JRPG they misremember. As I’ve said, FF7 feels qiuck and dynamic compared to FF7 Remake but it all started there. I love FF8 but it went deep into cinematic combat with 1.5 minute cutscenes for summons at the same time as making summons the integral part of gameplay.
One of the good things about Persona (at least 4) is that outside of (sometimes) necessary grind it feels like it respects your time. Combat animations are quick. Cutscenes - even voiced ones - are short and allow you to quickly skip messages and then check log if you’ve skipped something. In town you can quickly travel with a menu from anywhere. Even in dungeons when you’ve explored the whole level you can quickly jump to the next or previous level.
@Rich_Evans, thanks for the thread (hope you don’t mind that I added a bit more detail to your thread title), and especially thanks for articulating something I’m not sure I realized about JRPGs, or at least the ones I’ve tried to play. I fuss a lot about pushback and difficulty levels in other games, especially strategy games, so I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to feel the same about JRPGs. Because I think my experience is similar to yours.
I threw myself at Persona 5 last year for a very long time, diligently paying attention as if it were a novel, even taking notes and working up a dramatis personae to follow the characters. I played that game far longer than I normally would have, convinced I was going to discover some cool gameplay systems down the line, convinced that something would “click” soon, or that I’d get invested in the story. But I wonder how much of my “frustration” with it – I was frustrated that it wasn’t engaging me! – was just the sheer inevitability of everything, so much so that my presence felt optional. Frictionless progress. Very nearly automatic. What am I even doing but unfolding something that’s going to happen no matter what?
I think that was my biggest obstacle with Persona 5, a game whose energetic presentation, humor, and worldbuilding should have kept me going longer. I might have been pushing the buttons, but the game was doing the playing.
And I feel it applies to many (most? all?) of the other JRPGs I’ve played, even when I’ve stuck with them. For instance, I don’t recall any of the the Xenoblade Chronicles ever being difficult, even if there were some tough battles. But the result is a lot of combat, dialogue, character choices, and loot sorting that…feel like they don’t matter in the end.
When you need to cast Knights of the Round 50 times to kill a mega boss…do you have a few hours?
I looked back at this boing boing piece which also resonates. Written during probably the zenith of “Japanese games are dead!” period and the same year FromSoft quietly released Demon’s Soul to hot buzz in secluded and secretive gaming circles. The Sony people definitely had no clue!
Probably the closest thing to what you’re describing is some of the (non-Persona) Shin Megami Tensei games. In general, because of the way that elemental weaknesses work in those games, it’s possible to get a party wipe from pretty much any random encounter, so you do need to be careful almost all the time. Also, SMT set-piece boss battles can be extremely difficult, requiring you to have a very specific party composition in order to win in many cases. If you don’t have the right party, you might need to backtrack to find components and figure out how to get what you need, which turns into its own kind of “equipment” or money grind rather than a level grind.
To an extent, the “game” in SMT (and this includes Persona to a lesser degree) is the demon fusion. The JRPG bits are just the skill check to ensure that your farming is coming along appropriately.
Although, if you’re looking for charming stories and fun tone in addition to the difficulty, mainline SMT isn’t going to do much for you there.
I have a copy of Resonance of Fate that I’ve never gotten around to open, but the discussion around it suggests that it might fit some of the bill for what you describe.
Try one of my favorite RPGs in recent times. So it starts off as a difficult dungeon crawler - like Wizardry or Might and Magic II. Each area has different monsters that really punish you until you can develop a build/skillset/etc to deal with the attacks. The areas are handmade and well-crafted.
It is hard, I looked up maps so I could finish it.
One more thing, it has a really touching story that really sneaks up on you.
Coven of Dusk:
There is a sequel, Labyrinth of Galleria that will finally have an English release this year
I don’t know why steam link is not resolving right now
If IV is worse then it should be fired from a cannon into the sun because IMO VI is unplayable levels of random encounters. And yes, Chrono Trigger is one of vanishingly few exceptions for that very reason.
Those are JRPGs, in a nutshell. Also adventure games, ARPGs, VNs, action games, etc., i.e., most video games.
Like with films, for me a video game can work as “the sum of it’s parts” forming a satisfying whole or one or two components that work well, but for the most part with JRPGs it’s usually the latter. One or two things will appeal to me with the rest being a bunch of annoyances I just tolerate. One of those annoyances has been the absence of challenging gameplay, so I can relate to the OP.
While this was once something I could forgive if a game had a good story*, likeable characters, interesting setting or mechanics, or fun gameplay (yes, I think even gameplay that isn’t that challenging can still be somewhat fun; it depends), the ridiculously epic lengths of most modern JRPGs just makes this annoyance much less tolerable.
JRPG designers don’t respect our time - I think they’re just still designing games for younger people who have the time to spend 100 hours on a game. JRPGs haven’t fully grown up. They occasionally deal with more adult themes, but the way those themes are related, the gameplay elements and the long-ass cut-scenes with a whole lot being said about a whole little, is still aimed at the kids.
I still have a soft spot for JRPGs, so much so that I still play most that are released, and occasionally I find one that is engaging, but only to a certain point; I always seem to run out of enthusiasm somewhere around the 15 to 20 hour mark which is not even half the way with many JRPGs.
(* Not to be mistaken with “well-written”. Early JRPGs had fun, engaging stories, but they were rather simplistic and sometimes poorly written due to lack of proper localization or lack of writing talent. But the bones of a decent story were there, and some held a certain charm as did many early video games)
I’ve not played many JRPGs until last year (I couldn’t name even one) when I decided there were quite a few out getting talked about a lot here so figured I’d give it a go.
Played Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children, Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre: Reborn and Persona 5.
So I feel like I gave it an honest try.
My conclusion about this genre is aptly summed up in the quote above. Only I’d put it in all caps. All of these were simply WAY too long.
It’ll be a really long time before I pick up another one.
Release is in 14 hours! :)
Not saying your conclusion is wrong (I agree with it for the most part), but if your goal was to give a fair shake to the JRPG genre… you kind of didn’t. Three of the four of those (all but Persona) are tactical RPGs, which is generally considered its own separate thing. And at least three of them (I’m not sure about Troubleshooter) have reputations for being particularly slow and long-winded, even among people who like them.
Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV (Pixel Remaster version), and Mario & Luigi are fairly snappily paced sub-20-hour journeys. I’ll let someone else speak to which of the modern series suffers from the least bloat.
I got my TRPG mixed into my JRPG a bit then I guess?! Thanks for pointing that out. I’ve got some choices for the list to give a try (assuming these made it to the PC).
More broadly I just need to pay some attention to game length discussions on games, especially when I venture out of my wheelhouse of strategy. Once upon a time I didn’t care how long a game was, these days I really do.
Yeah, Troubleshooter is by a Korean dev… though some would say JRPGs are a genre that can even be created by Americans or, for instance, Germans (Chained Echoes), purists might call anything made outside Japan “JRPG-style.” And regardless, Troubleshooter isn’t a JRPG by genre, from what I can tell, but a weird RPG/Xcommy thing (that looks kind of cool, but not JRPG)
The categories are murky at best for me. But personally I would separate two things being said about the titles mentioned above that I know.
Too long, and low agency.
Too long does not bother me at all. I like a game that lasts.
But only as long as what I am doing matters. And yes, some of these games, I have had the feeling that I was just along for the ride, and it was a long detailed ride. I remember one about world exploration where it started with 2-3 hours of tedium on-rails, do exactly what we tell you garbage. It was meant to be a tutorial I guess, but it made me want to kill someone, and I do not mean an in-game character.
I’ve also played games, far beyond these sorts of games, where you have a few hours of struggle to become powerful, followed by many, many hours of mopping up. Which strikes me as another flavor of spending a lot of time doing things that do not matter.
However, I have been playing Tactics Ogre Reborn constantly since it came out in early November, and sure it’s long, long, long. But it’s still filled with high tension decisions. Maybe that’s only good for kids and retirees?
The first two are on Steam. The latter is locked to Nintendo platforms unless you emulate.
Yeah, like I said, you may well end up with a similar view of the genre at the end of the day, as most wind up in the 40-70 hour range (P5R is an outlier at 100+).
Not much of a horse in the race, anything recent is in the same ridiculous pile of games I never got around to as most of them, but… gamers are weird.
JRPGs don’t respect your time, unlike the grindy masochism simulators that force you to replay the same thing over and over until you memorize it, or restarting strategy games over and over until you optimize the rules to make it boring.
But the story is tropy and bad, unlike… actually, I don’t know, are we still praising ubiclones and mess effects these days?
You don’t even get a sense of pride and accomplishment, you only cheat yourself!
Or… it’s not about you, and it’s okay. People like different things, it’s not like fans don’t complain a lot about them and agree about what they want out of them. Just like anything else.
It’s a grim world where you can either play JRPGs or “ubiclones”.
Then again, I consider some of the latest ubisoft games to be the best games in the genre, so my answer is “yes”.
Horrible flashbacks to FFVIII summoning cutscenes.
Others have mentioned the best of the SNES era. I am quite fond of one from that era - Lufia 2 - that is very overlooked, and this is a real shame. It’s got non-random encounters, endearing characters, Zelda-like puzzle dungeons, interesting equipment. The original Lufia (which this is a prequel to) is more traditional JRPG fare, and doesn’t need to be played first (though there’s a bit more emotional resonance if you do, I wouldn’t recommend it).
That’s not the point. Western action-adventure-RPGS are also full of tropes and prolonged drivel, and also repeat the same issues in every frequent sequel. Which ones you bear and which ones you don’t, in general (and maybe there’s less JRPGS exceptions), it appears from the outside to be mostly due to preference and taste, not some inherent unquestionable quality.