A Response to an article in Game Player (AU) about RPGs

I was reading various pieces regarding people's opinions regarding JRPGs and WRPGs and stumbled into a gem of a piece that I felt the utmost need to respond to. You can read Chibi's Five Things JRPGs can earn from WRPGs here.As I read, I could not help but wonder if this person had played an RPG from either side of the ocean ever. His premise is, essentially, that JRPGs are stale and should take some notes from WRPGs. Wherever one stands on this debate, Chibi's piece is just so ridiculous that it begs some clarification for most of what it suggests. Let us tackle his points one by one.




Point 1: JRPGs recycle concepts and monsters.

Just a recolor

 He writes "I never want to be fighting the same enemy at level 60 that I was fighting at level 3, even if it has grown horns and changed colour and got a scarier name." This is most certainly a valid point. If one encounters a Pink Slime, for example, early in the game and the final dungeons are filled with recolored Yellow Slimes, that might be a turn off. Ni No Kuni, the critically acclaimed JRPG of 2013, did feature similar types of monsters and their evolutions are "the same monster with horns". However, the game does have enough of a variety for this to be a negligible gripe. Time and Eternity comes to mind as a specially bad offender in this case. The game has roughly 10 - 15 different enemies which they recolor and rotate extensively. However, the recent Final Fantasy: Lightning Returns is an even worse offender. This title contains a total of 30 enemies for the entire game. Square Enix didn't even bother to recolor, rename, or modify them in any way. They are just difficult to defeat from the start of the game.

Look, horns!

Certainly, JRPGs could learn from WRPGs like... Fallout III or The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
The list of enemies for these titles might seem extensive. However, one look at all the different varieties of Ghouls will show them to be nearly the same model with different shiny particles. What differentiates Supermutants from each other are the weapons they carry. The difference between ant workers and queens is the size. And don't even get me started on how everything in the Enclave looks the same. What's that I hear apologists say? Something about uniforms? In Skyrim, in addition to the ferral creatures (yes, all version of animals are indistinguishable from the other, the same bear players fight in the first hours of the game is the same one they encounter 80 hours in) there are 8 types of enemies: Dragon Priests, Vampires, Falmers, Forsworn, Draugr, Dwarven Centurions, Krosis, and Hagravens. All Centurions are the same, all Falmers are the same, and so on.

Chibi writes: "This goes for items as well, if I was picking up +3 daggers in my first few hours of play then the items I’m getting at the end should be like “Wicked Render of Fury” not “Sharp Dagger +7”"I'm not really sure which JRPG Chibi is talking about. I have played pretty much every major JRPG out there, and outside of MMO type ones like Phantasy Star Online (I miss my Lavis + 9) I can't think of a single one where the ending weapon is "Dagger + 9". In the Final Fantasy series the final weapons are things like Ultima Sword (Lightning Returns) and Atma Weapon (FF 6). In Shining Force you have things like the Chaos Breaker (the most bad-ass name for a weapon ever), and in Phantasy Star 4 you have things like Moon Slasher and Elsydeon. The Lunar games have weapons like Althena's Sword, and Lost Odyssey has weapons such as Durandal and Age of the King. Even Ni No Kuni, which partly suffers from recycling monsters ever so slightly, starts the character off with Old Stick and by the end he wields the powerful Astra Wand. I do recall something about weapon levels in the WRPG series Diablo, Elder Scrolls, and Dragon Age.


So, does Chibi have a valid point in the reuse of enemies? Yes. Are WRPGs just as guilty? Absolutely. Does he have a point about the weapons thing? Not at all. If he / she did, would it matter? Given that RPGs are inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, and in D&D players can have + 9 weapons, not at all.

Point 2:A Cleaner UI

WRPG with HUD

He writes: "A clean user interface which makes it easy to find all your spells, items, companions and abilities goes a long way to understanding the game you are playing [...] There is nothing fun about flicking through menus for 20 minutes while your game is paused because you are sure you picked up the key for that gate at some point." I agree. And that's why WRPGs should take note from JRPGs. In JRPGs, a button brings up the main menu. From there, players select the "items" menu. That's it. This is pretty much the traditional approach to most, if not all, JRPGs. Soe add additional elements, like Pokemon where there are menus for Pokedex and Ni No Kuni where there are separate menus to equip creatures and feed creatures, but by and large they are intuitive. Skyrim on the other hand features a menu where players

JRPG no HUD

bring up the main menu, then go into an equipment menu, and from that menu they select if they want weapons, apparel, shields, etc. The Items menu gives yet another sub menu dividing items as consumables, alchemy, etc. Likewise, Fallout III and New Vegas' menu will have players navigate to items then to apparel, weapons, items, and so on. Now, if he's actually talking about a UI display while exploring, he still doesn't have a case. As minimalist as the UI is in WRPGs, JRPGs often have no UI (some have a useful map, just as WRPGs do). Does the author have a point here? Not at all.

Point 3: Less Grinding

Author does have a point here. Some JRPGs require needless amount of grinding. I was just curious about the author's choice of enemy: marauder. The first "marauder" that comes to mind is Marauder Shields from Mass Effect 3, then the generic marauder enemy from WRPGs like Diablo 3 (Skeleton Marauders) and Dragon Age.




Point 4: More linear story

So you get the whole story on one playthrough vs many...

The author, Chibi, writes: "dear god could there be less Japanese RPGs where I have no idea WTF I’m meant to be doing [...] Clear stories which go from one plot point to another in a straight line would be amazing. Skyrim is a great example of this." I'm not sure what Chibi is trying to say. Maybe he was confused and meant "better writing". As he says, a linear story moves from one point to the next. In ni No Kuni, Oliver is transported to another world, where he goes from one Sage to the next learning magic techniques in order to defeat the evil Shadar. It's linear. First teleportation, next the sages, finally Shadar. In Final Fantasy XIII, first Lightning and friends escape pursuit, then arrive at Gran Pulse, and finally defeat Barthandelus. In Skyrim, "you" are the Dragonborn, now go kill dragons. Or join the Stormcloaks. Or join the Legion. Or help someone pick flowers. Or help some Yarl rid his kingdom of monsters. Or just walk around and do whatever "you" want. It's an open world and an open story. It's not linear. One could make the argument that the recent JRPGs have bad WRITING in their stories, and in some cases I am prone to agree (Lightning Returns has terrible writing, but that is in part due to it taking cues from western devs, as I explain partially here), but to say that JRPGs are not linear because "you" don't understand what "you" are supposed to be doing makes you seem both ignorant about narrative structures and lazy for not trying to figure out why it is that, for example, Lightning is fighting God and religion.

Point 5. Shorter conversations

WPGs don't have conversations. They have books.

Chibi writes: "I feel like the hero of most JRPGs has to have a conversation with everyone in his village on the way out, every stranger he stumbles across, every boss he fights and then everyone in the next village just to be safe. And when it isn’t lots of conversations, it’s frequent conversations with your party members which stretch on and on." I'm honestly not sure if the author here was talking about the Tales games which do fit his description closely or Mass Effect which also fits his description closely. Both titles should take cues from Bethesda instead, where one has to talk to every NPC in order to not miss any quests and then check every computer terminal or book if they want to get new information about what happened.

Seriously. Dude.