JRPG | Kirk Mckeand's Online Portfolio

JRPG Evolve or Die.

Typical JRPG character design.

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Someone needs to have a stern word with today’s Japanese Role Playing Game makers. The thing is, the people who play traditional Role Playing Games are the same people who played them at the height of their popularity, two generations ago. People like nostalgia, but the haze of time makes us remember things with rose-tinted glasses.I was a big fan of the JRPG in the PlayStation era, and I have been hoping that they could one day be returned to the lofty heights of their glory days. All they need to do is update the old formula for a modern audience, much like the recent Fallout games updated an old series for a new audience.

Some games manage to ape the success of their forebears, the recent Deus Ex is one example, it managed this by building on a strong foundation and updating it for a new generation. Imagine if the Deus Ex prequel stuck rigidly to the mechanics laid out by its predecessors: clunky menus, no checkpoints, sub-par shooting. Instead it managed to keep the bits that made the originals so compelling: sandbox gameplay, multiple choice dialogue, character upgrade choices. The trick is to keep the identity of the brand, but at the same time mutate the parts that feel dated.

In JRPG’s we are still reading text boxes, we still don’t get any say in the outcome and we are still walking in people’s houses (they don’t even care) and stealing meat out of a cupboard where meat has no place. The characters still all look the same, their eyes glassy and soulless, their hair like a bad advert for super-hold hairspray and we are still hitting living lettuces with a giant sword. The stories still tell the same tale, a young boy/girl finds a hidden power and saves the world.

It is a shame then that JRPG’s seem to be stuck in the past, the only innovation in the genre is coming from new Final Fantasy games, and in my opinion even Square Enix has been completely unsuccessful in this regard. Their idea of aping mainstream success seems to be to build a hyper-fast, button-mash happy fighting system, funnel the character down a corridor and restrict side missions to killing a set amount of monsters.