JRPG or RPG didn’t matter when creativity was at the forefront of the industry.
I somewhat agree with the sentiment behind the article, but…
And when you actually pick up the controller and play one of them, you begin to feel like you’ve been through the same gameplay loop as many other games this generation: Tales Of Arise, Scarlet Nexus, Nier Automata, Valkyrie Elysium, YS 8 and 9; they’re all essentially the same action game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
Games like Tales and NieR (both long-running franchises) have never tried to be anything but action RPGs—not to mention NieR, which I’d honestly just call a straight up Platinum action game. I’d actually call NieR closer to Elden Ring than it is to Tales, and yet the author isn’t out here calling Elden Ring a JRPG. What more does NieR have in common with Tales or Ys than it does with Elden Ring besides country of origin? Does JRPG mean “game with anime-ish art style”? Maybe it’s the art style, but even that’s a bit of a stretch to me.
Which I think strikes at the heart of the matter: what defines a JRPG? Is it the country it came from? Obviously not. There’s a very specific style of game that “JRPG” refers to, and it’s a style that was very popular in the 90s and 00s. Obviously games are still made in that style: I could just as easily show a JRPG renaissance by namedropping Dragon Quest XI, Xenoblade, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Persona 5, all the Trails games, etc. But the author is basing his notions of what a JRPG is solely on trends from 20+ years ago. Trends change. People change. Maybe in 20 years, people will be whining about whatever Japan is putting out then and saying “WHY CAN’T JAPAN GO BACK TO WHAT THEY DID RIGHT AND MAKE ANOTHER TALES GAME LIKE TALES OF ARISE?”.
Yes, I think developers, studios, and even industries should take pride in where they’ve been creatively, and that’s where I agree with the author. That said, why can’t we let new games be new games? People are still making plenty of traditional JRPGs whether they’re made in Japan or not (hi chained echoes and edge of eternity), so why bother the developers who don’t wanna make those games and essentially tell them “you need to get over your internalized xenophobia”? It’s possible they don’t have internalized xenophobia like this article is suggesting, maybe they’re just tired of people putting them in a box.
And when you actually pick up the controller and play one of them, you begin to feel like you’ve been through the same gameplay loop as many other games this generation: Tales Of Arise, Scarlet Nexus, Nier Automata, Valkyrie Elysium, YS 8 and 9; they’re all essentially the same action game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
I’d quote the same fragment as you, and I’ll add:
It’s the same for western RPGs
All action RPG games feel “samey” (think Gothic, The Elder Scrolls, Elex, Two Worlds…) they’re all essentially the same game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
All dungeon crawlers (Diablo, Torchlight, Path of Exile, Titan Quest, Sacred) they’re all essentially the same game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
All DnD games are exactly the same (Baldurgs Gate, Neverwinter Night, Icewind Dale, PlaneEscape, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Dragon Age…) they’re all essentially the same game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
Anyways, the article is about JRPGs, but the author for some reason only focuses on action games that are not JRPGs (Scarlet Nexus, Nier, Valkyrie Elisum, Ys 8, etc…)
It’s like writing an article about chess, but complain about checkers
