Why i hate jrpgs

This is a perfect example of a character I can believe would be part of a campaign to save the world:. By far the worst development in JRPGs is the recent advent of voice acted characters.

For some reason JRPGs have a propensity to make their characters overly emotive. They voice every sigh, moan, groan, and noise of wonderment. The thousandth time Vanille made a "oh? Not really, but I definitely had daydreams about doing that. The melodramatic emoting just destroys any tension in the scene and all investment in the characters.

Characters in a JRPG emote like characters in a daytime soap, as opposed to good entertainment like Breaking Bad, in which the characters react and emote to the current situation in surprising and realistic ways. Instead of letting the player get invested in the characters and think about their emotions and motives, the JRPG writer basically takes every scene and turns it into a reddit "explain this to me like I am a 5 year old" post.

The last point I will make about characters in JRPGs is less about characters and more about differences in storytelling between east and west. In a JRPG, the idea of comic relief is most often embodied by ridiculous characters or enemies like karaoke robots in Chrono Trigger or cactrots in Final Fantasy games. JRPGs depend on their characters breaking out into stupid dances, saying something out of character, or breaking the fourth wall for a little bit of comedy.

Again, this immediately breaks immersion for me. Comic relief in a game was perfectly done in Portal 2. It should be built into the story, and not shoe-horned in with some ridiculous moment that breaks immersion in the story. There's so much more I could cover about the characters, their personalities, and character designs, but this post is already tl;dr so I will just end it by saying this: Japanese character design seems to be like someone wildly throwing darts at a board as hard as they can.

That person hopes that they hit a bullseye, and every once in a while buries that dart so far in the center of the board that he will have a story to tell for years, but most often it ends with the dart hitting the wall, bouncing off, and hitting an innocent bystander in the eye. I will be covering many other reasons that I hate these games in the future. This is my first ever blog post, and really my first ever piece of writing that has nothing to do with a school assignment.

I would like to eventually break into the world of game coverage, whether it be in writing or other forms. I welcome any and all criticism. Please tell me why I'm wrong, stupid, boring, an idiot, and whatever else you think of my writing. I'm just trying to refine my writing style here to the point where I am at least interesting.

Rip me to shreds, I can take it. All your points are as old as the sun and have been written down a hundred times before you, but your writing is solid and and you come off as able to defend your position. I'm interested in what else you have to say.

I completely agree with your points. I don't know if the story faults are due to horrible translation or lazy writing, but as someone who was once a hardcore JRPG fanatic and casual anime fan, I've grown tired of cliches and lazy writing. So much as I've been shying away from the genre more and more. The only problem is that you sound horrifically bias towards Western games, to the point where it makes your essay unreadable.

No he doesn't. And even if you do think he is biased, he has provided well written arguments for all his points, so it's not like he's pulling it out of his ass. Now I warn you, there are a lot of idiots who will defend anything Japanese to the death on these forums, and they will probably show up here, so just ignore them, and keep writing more stuff.

I gotta say, you picked a flawed game to criticise the whole genre. It seems to me like a whole bunch of Western games are just power fantasies. Hyper muscular angry men who kill everything with chainsaws, and so on. So I guess the character critique can go both ways. And you did mention that, so I don't get why you decided to leave that critique in. You could make an argument that this happens in JRPGs more often than in western games.

However, you could also make an argument, that the Japanese protagonists evolve and develop, while someone like Shepard doesn't, because he has no character. He's the player. And we could go deeper insert inception joke , why do the Japanese focus on children? Is it because for them, the emotionaly unstable teenagers are more interesting, and can develop more than grizzled old men who in their culture are often portraied as wise and all knowing? Is it because they lack experience they are the focus of the story?

Next, the translation. Translation is a funny thing. It's really hard to do, and requires a lot of spell checking and multiple revisions. Even recent games had some hiccups in that field, like The Witcher. And, again, you provide examples from , when the process of translating games was regarded as barely worth the translator's time.

Hell, even Deadly Premonition was okay, sans a few typos. As for the story telling, again, you picked a bad game. Hell, previous Final Fantasy stories were better that that. VII had a convoluted story, but it was neat. Same goes for IX and VI. You picked a game that made me laugh at the very end. It didn't make a lick of sense. Not one bit. You could compare Western to Eastern game design and storytelling concepts, its narrative and how they try to merge it with gameplay.

I think we need to go deeper if we want to understand what happened with JRPGs, why they haven't evolved, why they're stuck in a rut. That would be a far more interesting study. If you want to use imagery to drive your point home, don't use go for the all-out-crazy exaggerations smashing PS3, etc because it becomes hard to take your seriously.

Also, appropriate examples would be good when you say localizations are still bad after 30 years, don't include a screenshot from the most famously bad translations from the mid 90s. I personally haven't seen or can't remember any modern localizations fails ports of old games without new translations excluded. Extra credit for not using "Why I hate XYZ" headlines but instead coming up with something similarly poignant that happens to be a bit more elegant.

On a side note, I'm currently playing Xenoblade Chronicles and I can happily say that none of the criticisms apply to that game so far! Oh, fuck you man! I want to play that game so bad, but I don't have a Wii Are you enjoying it so far? I enjoyed the game for the most part although I can kinda see where SOME of the insane criticism it gets is coming from.

Hope was certainly the most annoying character early on, seconded by Snow yelling out Serahs name left and right. I was happy to see that the characters all evolved over time and Hope got over his little fit while Snow stopped lamenting his crystal girlfriend every second. What didn't change was talking about your destiny, constantly. The game jumped around between "we need to fulfill our destiny!

I really think that Japanese people have some weird hangups with fate in their society because aside from child heroes this is by far the other most overused JRPG trope. It's pretty fantastic. It takes a lot of cues from western games in some regards quest system and also looks pretty fantastic aside from the character models.

The fact that you can collect quest items before you get the quest and they count! The world and story are quite interesting as well. This game and from what I've read about it The Last Story should justify the purchase of a Wii all on their own even if you only scoop up a cheap used one on eBay.

I just want to say that the child hero is one of the things that I absolutely love about Earthbound. Beyond the fact that the story in Earthbound is actually pretty good and the child thing still somehow works getting money wired to you from your dad, getting home sick and having to call your mom, things like that there is one very specific reason that I love that the main character is a child.

I get this imagine in my head of what's actually going on in the beginning of the game. There's this kid, right, and he's got this baseball bat, and he's wander around town "taming" all of these wild animals by beating them with his baseball bat. Over and over and over again. And I start to realize "Oh fuck! This kid isn't saving the world, he's a fucking sociopath! It all just reaffirms that this kid is actually just sick in the head!

Ok, so, that's reading into the story way too much, but, I love thinking of it that way because it makes the story even funnier to me. Though I spend plenty of time on these boards bashing certain JRPGs, these criticisms are largely unfair.

The translation examples you give are ancient, and even if it were still a big deal, it would be unfair to hold that against an entire genre. Your point about characters though.. At first I agreed that western RPGs are very well developed stories based mainly around interaction with other characters and a comparatively simpler goal with much less pomp and circumstance, but WRPGs kind of just cheat in that regard by basically having main characters with zero personality whatsoever.

Say what you want about main characters of JRPGs, at least I have a greater chance of being interested in my main character because he or she is actually a character. Who is Shepard, exactly? He's a total whitebread space marine with a cliche gravelly voice. Total blank slates. Hell; Skyrim brings that level of unrealistic character development or total lack thereof to a whole new level. An earlier poster had it right. WRPGs are essentially dull power fantasies. What's the difference at some point in how people bash on the anime-loving crowd of the JRPGs against the macho dudebro tendencies of parts of the Western crowd that loves Mass Effect?

That specific trope extends to basically ever major western franchise ever. Lots of guns, lots of machismo. Who are any of us to declare the "teen power" tendencies of the JRPG crowd that fantasize about being, or knowing, anime characters, as inferior? There is no functional difference. This is the videogame equivalent of having really great sushi. Sidenote: the HD version comes out this week for PS3. And finally, we have Fire Emblem. The difference is that each of the characters you meet has a story and a real life.

They have realistic needs and motives and deal with the problems of war and racism. Plus, every person in your squad matters. Yes, this game has perma-death. Some of the people in your team are great at support and healing. Others are over-powered and are best used to train up the weak ones. While the strongest are usually the ones who have the greatest emotional burden for others.

Plus, it all plays out on the battlefield like a real battle would. If somebody dies. The rest of the team grieves. JRPGs are getting a lot of heat for a lot of reasons. I say giddyup! Skip to content. This was one of the more exciting events in Dragon Warrior.

Then I played the game. All my hopes were dashed. I once thought this was great storytelling. Grandia 2 for Dreamcast changed all of that. Waking up feeling drugged I fell hard. I was really in danger of becoming a fanboy. Fortunately, I finally came to my senses. Conclusion JRPGs are getting a lot of heat for a lot of reasons. Please follow and like us:.

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