IGN: Top 10 Ways to fix JRPG's

[ZarakiKujata]

ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU SPEAK IT?

[MF Perm tha Fineass]

and the payoff, bravo gentlmen

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x.../golfclap1.gif

[ZarakiKujata]

and the payoff, bravo gentlmen

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x.../golfclap1.gif

I think this thread has taught us an important lesson.


JRPGS should add more samuel l jackson saying motherfucker if they want to be fixed.

[Beckwin]

Why do you think that? In playing through fallout did you completely gloss over the absurdist take on McCarthyism, neo-conservatism, and americana? Or the exploration of cultural pluralism in Mass Effect? Torment's existentialism? KOTOR 2's commentary on the absurdity of moral absolutes? Baldur's Gate flashes a quote from Nietzche at you in the opening cinema and then fails to explore serious themes? Don't be ridiculous.

Did you miss Valkyria Chronicles' take on individual human tragedy in war and abuses of military power? Did you gloss over FF7's take on a corporate-ruled world? FF10's existentialism? Xenogears and religion? FFT's class conflict and Machiavellian story? Front Mission 4's take on military-industrial-economic relations? FFXI and racism?

And if a Nietzche quote is all it takes, the Xenosaga series all had Nietzchean bylines on the titles.

I think the point here is that only a few titles manage to tackle serious issues seriously; both genres take simplified or satirical looks in fairly large numbers, and then there's numerous titles in both that don't even bother.

[BRP]

I think the point here is that only a few titles manage to tackle serious issues seriously;

I would say no title does. All videogames can do is portray them, never tackle them. (And on the matter, never portray them "seriously" as they are all fiction.) This is really a question of which group of games have a more intellectually entertaining setting or plot or dialogue or etc - the make-up of atmosphere. To that question I am not really decided, at least I can't make the choice off the top of my head.

[Beckwin]

umm, fiction can be a vehicle for a serious look at some issues. serious doesn't have to be a non-fiction, historical account.

but I do agree it's highly rare/virtually nonexistent for games to approach serious issues seriously. that list of mine (and Cadsuane's list) pretty much all fit your assessment of portraying, rather than tackling.

[Cadsuane]

JRPGs do alright sometimes, saying otherwise would be bigoted. I think most of your examples are rubbish though.

Did you miss Valkyria Chronicles' take on individual human tragedy in war and abuses of military power?

Never played it.

Did you gloss over FF7's take on a corporate-ruled world?

Yes, through the lens of sophomoric environmentalism and a cartoonish dystopia.

FF10's existentialism?

You're going to have to explain what FFX has to do with existentialism to me.

Xenogears and religion?

Xenogears/saga has plenty of religious symbolism and utterly nothing to say about religion. Xenosaga is right up there with MGS on the spectrum of meaningless horseshit desperately pretending to be otherwise.

FFT's class conflict and Machiavellian story?

Good example, but comes close to jumping the shark towards the end.

Front Mission 4's take on military-industrial-economic relations?

Never played it.

FFXI and racism?

Seriously? Seriously.

I think the point here is that only a few titles manage to tackle serious issues seriously; both genres take simplified or satirical looks in fairly large numbers, and then there's numerous titles in both that don't even bother.

Your point was specifically that WRPGs approach serious themes less often than JRPGs do, and I think JRPGs almost never do, and when they try it usually doesn't go very well.

[Araelus]

I would say no title [manages to tackle serious issues seriously]. All videogames can do is portray them, never tackle them. And on the matter, never portray them "seriously" as they are all fiction.

umm, fiction can be a vehicle for a serious look at some issues. serious doesn't have to be a non-fiction, historical account.

I think Terry Pratchett's work settles this question heavily in Beckwin's favor, then again those are novels. In terms of a recent JRPG actually tackling issues - instead of just portraying a situation where the issues occur and no-one discusses them or deals with it overtly - how about Persona 4? There are a few anvilicious arc words, I admit, but that's a frame to the interesting topics including how mass media influences today's youth, the value of social conformity, the possibility of moral absolutes, and not least of all the question of free will and the potential goals of a strong will to power. Notably it looks at these topics from a Japanese cultural perspective while questioning that perspective's assumed validity.

FFXI and racism?

Seriously? Seriously.

Really really. See: Galka, especially the Gumbah Bastok missions.

You're going to have to explain what FFX has to do with existentialism to me.

Existentialism as a movement splits off into a few diametrically opposed factions - for simplicity's sake let's say the plot of FFX can be described as (people who discover the lack of actuality but respond by refusing to give in to the destroyed metaphysical landscape through imposing a false representational schema causing an endless cycle of misplaced trust) opposing (people who, upon discovering the promulgated groundwork of reality is false, become authentic individuals in order to reaffirm trust in something greater than the temporal and achieve eternal success) with bits of (death as awakening to purpose) as an overarching theme.

So it's basically a post-nihilistic-Nietzsche vs. no-Christianity-in-Spira-Kierkegaard with pieces of didn't-really-study-Sartre because EXISTENTIALISM SELLS GAMES YEAH

[Beckwin]

I intentionally listed a few that don't come too close to taking a serious look at things because I saw things on your list that didn't seem too serious. I mean, don't get me wrong I love Fallout 1 and 2, but the lens through which they take on 1950s cold war culture is one of satire, sarcasm, and camp, with the end result as humorous rather than serious.

In an unfair dig at WRPGs, I just it hard to take a serious issue tossed into a sandbox world very seriously when the most fun you'll have/time you'll spend is running around killing people and taking over their houses or trying to fight the whole town guard at once. Similarly though, serious pills can be tough to swallow when you're watching a spiky headed teen stumble through an embarassing romance while trying to save teh world with his cast of archetypes.

[Araelus]

In an unfair dig at WRPGs, I just it hard to take a serious issue tossed into a sandbox world very seriously when the most fun you'll have/time you'll spend is running around killing people and taking over their houses or trying to fight the whole town guard at once.

That does raise the point of Video Game Caring Potential and Cruelty Potential. Although not every designer has that kind of analysis in mind it had to be a conscious decision in games such as Fallout 1, 2.

As for JRPGs that seem to fixate on "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down" when doling out the serious pills, it certainly got in the way with Valkyria Chronicles. Thus the push for a grimdark 40k version...

[Cadsuane]

Really really. See: Galka, especially the Gumbah Bastok missions.

I knew what the reference was, I just didn't think it was a very credible one.

Existentialism as a movement splits off into a few diametrically opposed factions - for simplicity's sake let's say the plot of FFX can be described as (people who discover the lack of actuality but respond by refusing to give in to the destroyed metaphysical landscape through imposing a false representational schema causing an endless cycle of misplaced trust) opposing (people who, upon discovering the promulgated groundwork of reality is false, become authentic individuals in order to reaffirm trust in something greater than the temporal and achieve eternal success) with bits of (death as awakening to purpose) as an overarching theme.

So it's basically a post-nihilistic-Nietzsche vs. no-Christianity-in-Spira-Kierkegaard with pieces of didn't-really-study-Sartre because EXISTENTIALISM SELLS GAMES YEAH

Oh. Yeah fair enough. It was still a silly soap opera and I didn't like it so there.

I intentionally listed a few that don't come too close to taking a serious look at things because I saw things on your list that didn't seem too serious. I mean, don't get me wrong I love Fallout 1 and 2, but the lens through which they take on 1950s cold war culture is one of satire, sarcasm, and camp, with the end result as humorous rather than serious.

In an unfair dig at WRPGs, I just it hard to take a serious issue tossed into a sandbox world very seriously when the most fun you'll have/time you'll spend is running around killing people and taking over their houses or trying to fight the whole town guard at once. Similarly though, serious pills can be tough to swallow when you're watching a spiky headed teen stumble through an embarassing romance while trying to save teh world with his cast of archetypes.

Of course Fallout was humourous but that's exactly why it was serious. In the context of RPG criticism I suppose I should clarify my use of "serious" to mean that these games had some artistic legitimacy, not that they're somber or that they all need to read like Schindler's List. I lambasted the RPGs you picked because I felt they really didn't do anything like that well, not just because they didn't do it straight faced enough.

[Cadsuane]

So what if Xenogears only made references to religion and religious imagery without actually making a comment on it? It didn't need to. The story was about the journey of the characters involved, and ultimately more about psychology than religion. Religion was just one aspect of the world they were in.

At least in the first disc/last 10% of the second disc.

It can kind of ruin the experience if it ends up being unbearably pretentious and incoherent, but from my limited recollection of Xenogears the religion claptrap wasn't that egregious, so what you're saying is probably fair. Xenogears was definitely guilty of other foibles though, one of which you mentioned. At any rate, Xenogears definitely failed to play the religion theme well (or even at all) which is all I was trying to establish. It was (almost) a good game in other ways or so I seem to recall.

Edit: Oh, whoops. When I said:

Xenogears is right up there with MGS on the spectrum of meaningless horseshit desperately pretending to be otherwise.

I meant Xenosaga. My bad. Xenogears probably doesn't deserve that as much.

What did you guys think of the Grandia series?

[Kuya]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...-Playing-Games

Here's yahtzee's opinion on the subject, and the gist of it seems to be that video game categories are really bad.

[Beckwin]

That article is pretty fuckin' dumb, tbh.

If you took Yahtzee's argument to another creative medium with genres, it'd stand out crystal clear why it's a shitty argument. But videogames are still in that place where they haven't been intellectualized enough/properly and there's no consensus on what they really are. basically, this predicament is the fault of gameplay-as-zen sort of crowd, who try to boil things down to the most basic of interaction/input the player has with the game- chief example is yahtzee's hopefully sarcastic comment about Torchlight and Minesweeper being the same genre because they revolve most basically around using a mouse to click things on a screen.

Might as well put all figure paintings in the same genre and all fiction books in the same genre.... oh wait, you see, we already do. Part of the problem here is the refusal of sorts of hierarchy among genres, and the allowance for multiple classifications. You see this all the time in visual art and literature, but in videogames you have morons (like yahtzee, in this case) complaining that genres aren't named right... basically to stoke their own ego about knowing "how things really are."

[Cadsuane]

Seems to be at odds with Yahtzee's whole videogames-as-art schtick too.

[Kaelan?]

Considering how Yahtzee hates anything that comes remotely close to being categorized as a JRPG (and hence, wouldn't have played or cared about any of the great ones), any opinion he'd have on the topic is already kind of invalid by definition.

At any rate, Xenogears definitely failed to play the religion theme well (or even at all)

Are you kidding?
Did you miss the exploration of what things are like when human beings exist only as tools of an uncaring absolute authority ?
Or the process of the formation (and subsequent end) of religions?
The depictions of how easily people are willing to believe the unbelievable?
The inevitable consequences of tying religion to government and how people behave when they believe they have God on their side?
The depiction of very worldly concerns being inevitably tied to large religious organizations which strive to appear only interested in the hereafter? (Nisan's Vatican, the process of becoming Mother, its involvement with other governments, etc)
Babel Tower? Deus (whose whole objective, incidentally, is "resurrection" after a period of being "dead")?

Xenogears' main theme and strongest point isn't religion (I'd say the science, psychology and social aspects of Xenogears are far more interesting), but it's far from "not playing it well or at all" on the subject.

edit: Mildly relevant to topic at hand, if only for the lulz - http://kotaku.com/5450647/japans-2ch...rpg-complaints (the 3rd & 4th comments are gold)

[Cadsuane]

Are you kidding?
Did you miss the exploration of what things are like when human beings exist only as tools of an uncaring absolute authority ?
Or the process of the formation (and subsequent end) of religions?
The depictions of how easily people are willing to believe the unbelievable?
The inevitable consequences of tying religion to government and how people behave when they believe they have God on their side?
The depiction of very worldly concerns being inevitably tied to large religious organizations which strive to appear only interested in the hereafter? (Nisan's Vatican, the process of becoming Mother, its involvement with other governments, etc)
Babel Tower? Deus (whose whole objective, incidentally, is "resurrection" after a period of being "dead")?

Most of what I remember about xenogears is limited to being disgusted at a soul crushingly fucking awful second disc, a haphazard utterly dog standard ending that resolved nothing, and an annoying as fuck frail chick archetype that you see some infuriating variation of in every JRPG I can think of, but since that might not be an entirely fair assessment I'm going to be honest with you and admit that I'm not entirely qualified to agree or disagree. For example, I'd love to say things like this:

"Xenogears exploration of despotism was limited to saying 'it's bad mmkay?'. It's too bad tvtropes wasn't around back then or they might have read 'The Empire' article and realized that shit had been done a million fucking times before and often to greater effect."

or this

"It's not entirely clear to me exactly what the fuck they were trying to say about religion when they spend the first half of the game propping it up as an illusion and the second half having one of your characters become some contrived version of the virgin fucking marie"

But I won't, because that'd be somewhat dishonest of me and I don't remember enough about the game to qualify my smug hate-speech.

[Zilong]

Emeralda makes everything okay~

[Kaelan?]

I'm not quite sure how exactly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryHAuLx0YS4

is the behavior of a stereotypical frail chick (unless you're talking about margie), but ok. This is the game that gave us Miang, probably one of the best female video game characters ever made (and about as far away from frail as you can conceivably get).

Did you miss the exploration of what things are like when human beings exist only as tools of an uncaring absolute authority ?

"Xenogears exploration of despotism was limited to saying 'it's bad mmkay?'

I was talking about the relationship between humans and Deus in the game as a parallel of humans and a theist God in real life. It's the furthest I've ever seen any game take religious commentary, in any case (not that that's a particularly high bar).

[Beckwin]

I really want to play Xenogears. maybe I need to cross over to the dark side and emulate it