Counter-hot-take: modern RPGs tend to be built with the assumption that players are using a walkthrough, and thus they don’t need to worry about how easy it is to get stuck, make something unwinnable, or just end up lost and unable to find their way forward!
Which I’m not a fan of. If you want your players to have a walkthrough in hand, then give them one in the game!
I think if you started IF with Raaka-Tu you definitely count as part of the “sacred circle”!
Really? I would not have guessed that they were built this way or that players would be doing it to that extent!
I’m not sure how widespread it is, since I don’t play a lot of (non-IF) RPGs, but it’s definitely a complaint I’ve seen from players! One that comes to mind is Vampire the Masquerade: Swansong, which people say is practically unplayable without a walkthrough, because the criteria to succeed are so obscure and unclued that you’re likely to make it unwinnable by accident without one. But it’s also been an issue with various Bethesda games, I’ve heard.
And if I’m going to be following a walkthrough all the way through, well…I’d rather just watch a lets-play for free, y’know?
That’s weird, my experience with (and one that I’ve heard repeated) is actually the opposite. Bethesda games hold your hand a lot! Ever since Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you have a magic quest marker on your map telling you exactly where to go, all the time. Also since then any NPC vital to the primary quest is literally unkillable. I’m not sure how you can get stuck in one of their modern games except through one of their many infamous bugs. It was different with Morrowind because you had to read to know what to do, but that was over 20 years ago.
I was going to ask which ones you meant. Modern RPGs (from my observations) tend to be console, and “branch and bottleneck” instead of exploratory, where you get a cutscenes and perhaps romance with your chosen love interest between action RPG levels.
I imagine true RPGs aren’t following the same “cruelty” rules that we tend to favor for adventure games. Your load out is important and if you run out of provisions in the desert or wander into an area you’re not leveled up for that’s on you - similar to survival-horror mechanics.
I got stuck in unwinnable situations so many times in Fallout3 - or at least places where I wasn’t clear how to proceed. I quit that game for a year because I first ran across Megaton in the middle of the night when it was closed and I had no source of light so I kept running around the janky city wall in the dark unable to find where the entrance was.
I didn’t know there was a Masquerade sequel, but if it was built by a small studio I can envision stuff like “you can only get through this door with the floobyjoo potion, which there is only one of in a locked chest a mile away with no cluing” which would just be bad design.
It seems I was mistaken about that—I’m afraid I haven’t played a lot of RPGs, but it sounds like the experience of people who have doesn’t line up with mine.
I think in a good RPG that’s fully fleshed out and balanced there should be multiple emergent ways of solving problems that needn’t be authored (reason with the guard, climb over the wall with dexterity, kill everyone in sight, bribe your way in, etc) so there’s less chance of getting dead-ended by a minor thing like missing inventory macguffin or broken content. I reckon that’s what RPG fans like.
I remember the first Vampire/Masquerade game was a little like that - it was open world in a modern city where Vampires are maintaining the masquerade and cannot just battle-grind for resources anywhere. From what I recall if you didn’t remain within plot-relevant areas there wasn’t much going on. I think it was built by a smaller design team so the map was nothing like the true fully open-world buildout you find in crown jewel RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout.
I remember when the first Alan Wake game was initially supposed to be open world and the environment is built for that, but I suppose they found they couldn’t make the plot work correctly without hard navigating the player around like it was The Amazing Race, so it was much more linear when released. I think Remedy learned what they were doing with CONTROL which is a fully-realized open-world RPG-shooter inside an endless building with a main quest and side quests and lots of grinding you can do aside from advancing the plot. My only gripe with that game is the customization/loot gathering is almost so extensive it’s bland and forgettable. (Do you want +3.5 to accuracy, or +3.7?)
One must understand the fundamental difference between the two major strands of computer/console RPG: the JRPG and WRPG.
Japanese RPG has their roots in early IF, so the story is basically linear, with many dead(ly) ends here and there, aside the inevitable set of sub and side quests, but generally what to do along the main story is often clearly pointed out. and is true that often the main dead(ly) end is being underleveled/underequipped, hence the phenomena called “grinding and leveling up” (the Suikoden series is a case in point, and has also a major side quest, recruiting the companions (108 companions…); I always tackle the main quest after grinding up to ~lv. 10-12)
OTOH, Western RPG, descends from the tabletop one, and the story is often shorter if compared with the side and sub quests, in some cases arcing along all the main quest. (I have a sizable collection of strategy guides, the satisfaction in glossing and putting marginalia about better solving is far superior to the actual solving the quest/puzzle… but I’m digressing, the real point being that the ones, for example, for Elder Scrolls/Fallout or Dragon Age has ~100 pages on the main quest and ~400-600 pages for the side/sub quests, and this alone speaks for itself) so is easy to lose sight of main quest in WRPG (side note, I’m officially hopelessly lost in Baldur’s Gate III, but again, is a digression…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I think a lot of those sorts of distinctions are more relevant to the SNES era than currently.
I think part of the problem is that the single greatest influence on computer RPGs in Japan was, and to some extent is, the Wizardry franchise. There were eight mainline Wizardry games released originally in English. There are literally dozens in Japanese, of which only two or three ever got official English translations.
And I wouldn’t want to try to rank all the other influences, but Record of Lodoss War has to be way up there and it started out as a very specific literary subgenre devoted to “replaying” tabletop RPG gaming sessions, in this case a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It eventually became its own tabletop roleplaying game, computer games, and so on. And its shadow can be seen in, for example, FromSoftware’s Souls games. But only a sliver of the huge body of Record of Lodoss War material is available in English (or anything besides Japanese).
Not trying to do a dissertation here, just making the case that I think the divide between “Japanese” and “Western” RPGs is greatly exaggerated, and filtered through a lens of what’s available in translation (which is of course a minority of what’s produced).
And it’s probably worth mentioning that the whole notion of “JRPGs” being a separate thing is something some Japanese game developers find mildly offensive. Final Fantasy XVI’s producer (Yoshi-P, a.k.a. Naoki Yoshida) for example taking exception when an interviewer used the term, saying that he doesn’t make “JRPGs”, he makes “RPGs”, and talks about the history of the term (and specifically about how it was used as a sort of asterisk on the popularity of Final Fantasy VII).
Now that you mention it, I’m not sure I’ve ever played an RPG that wasn’t developed by a Japanese company, or if it was made outside of Japan, it’s an outsourced title from a franchise whose parent company is Japanese, so if there is or was genuine differences between RPGs made in Japan and those made in Europe or North America, I don’t have the first hand experience with the latter.
My RPG experience is also heavily biased towards handheld systems, with GBA, DS, and PSP probably being the systems I’ve done the most RPGing on… Heck, aside from playing Pokemon Red and Blue on Super Gameboy and occassionally playing Pokemon Gold on Super Gameboy instead of my GBC, I’m not sure I’ve ever beaten an RPG on a television.
The main point in Lodoss is that establish a peculiar chardes detail for elves 
which is still a major issue in porting into english (and italian…) words, but I digress; here perhaps a pair of pictures is worth thousands of words:
In my opinion, japanese chardes in RPG remain different to the western chardes; on Yoshida and FF, I note (with pride…) that the chardes is mainly done by an Italian since XV. but this debate is on mechanism & cruelty, so onward
The influence of Wizardry’s franchise in JRPG is evident in the need of grinding of JRPG, esp. early game; on the narrative mechanism, indeed even the later wizardries (VI and VII are those I know better) has few, if any, sidequests and subquest and my point is about linearity vs. sidequesting, here Japan and West still differs; but I reckon that there’s a good reciprocal influence in narrative, and that cruelty is generally declining, albeit mainly thru altering the mechanics itself (the difficulty level is becoming a standard in RPG). The narrative remain distinct, and is what is most interesting in an IF context: keeping track of what the player has done is not easy to code, so more “open world” means more coding effort, (I managed to put two different starting point for a major, story advancing, puzzle, which alters some props)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
The Japanese created video-game RPGs, and then dominated global awareness of the concept, to the point that it’s now necessary to specify tabletop (TT) roleplaying games, otherwise the acronym is taken to mean the video game.
Huh? I was playing RPG computer games before the first Japanese RPG’s existed - or do you mean specifically console-based games?
Again, this feels like an analysis that stops at the SNES era or the PS2 era at the latest.
RGG Studio’s Yakuza/Like a Dragon games are RPGs and wear their “Japanese-ness” on their sleeves. And they typically have a “main game” you could breeze through in under 20 hours and literally hundreds of hours of side-content.
Atlus’ big franchise Shin Megami Tensei, which started out as first-person dungeon crawls on the SNES (technically a remake of Megami Tensei, their NES port of Telenet’s MSX/PC-8000 game) is now more “side quest” than “main game”. Same with the Persona spin-off franchise. And their newest IP, Metaphor: ReFantazio.
The Ys franchise, which started out as minimalistic action RPGs with bump-to-attack combat (as in all you did was steer the protagonist, there’s no attack button) has been open-world side-quest fests at very least since 2016’s Ys VIII (and earlier depending on how you want to define things).
One of the biggest video games of all time, and therefore necessarily one of the biggest RPGs, is Elden Ring. It is an open world game consisting almost exclusively of optional content. There are over a hundred bosses, eleven of which are nominally “required” as part of the normal plot progression (although I think speedrunners willing to use a teleport glitch to sequence break can get to an endgame in three bosses).
I could go on.
Console RPGs predate the first Japanese titles as well. Depending on how much you want to squeeze the defintion you probably have 1981’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons on Intellivision or certainly 1982’s Dragonstomper for the Atari 2600.
Eh, I do think there are some differences in trends in Japanese and Western RPGs, mostly around character customization and main plot events changing (however superficially/cosmetically) based on player choices, neither of which Japanese RPGs are quite as big on as Western RPGs in my experience. I might describe it as Western RPGs striving for an ideal of being “tabletop-like” in the sense of “you can do Anything You Want and the game will respond to it” in a way that the Japanese industry seems a little less concerned with. (Which personally I tend to prefer—CRPGs don’t do a good job of emulating what I like about TTRPGs so I’d rather play a game that’s not even trying to do that.)
But of course, there are exceptions, and now that easy access to games from different countries has been common for a while, inspiration goes in all sorts of directions and the categories are generally less rigid.
I don’t think that it’s a question of there being exceptions, I think it’s that the analysis only really works if the examples are cherry-picked to support it.
I don’t know what examples you’re imagining for “Western” games where player choices influence events, but I don’t think there’s anything more meaningful about how the Mass Effect games or, say, Knights of the Old Republic handle “alignment” than the average Shin Megami Tensei game was already doing on the SNES decades earlier. Or that the branching pathways in, say, the Witcher games are any more meaningful than the branching pathways in Shin Megami Tensei: if… on the SNES or the original Persona on PS1. Much less the (much more nuanced by any metric) branching in something like the Devil Survivor games (or Tactics Ogre games), if strategy RPGs count here.
And that’s not even getting into stuff like the SaGa games—Romancing SaGa 2’s dynastic inheritence mechanics that are something like what’s used in modern roguelikes like Rogue Legacy, or Romancing SaGa 3’s gimmick where different characters interact with the world in different ways (“normal RPG” for one versus “grand strategy kindom management sim” for another, for example).
To be clear: I’m not saying that you can’t identify games with certain characteristics and group them together. My point is that they don’t even remotely describe the intersection of the sets “Japanese video games” and “RPGs”, and that the actual intesection of those sets doesn’t particularly exhibit the characteristics popularly ascribed to “JRPGs”. Unless you restrict the contents of both sets to the narrow subset of games localized in English prior to a decade or so ago.
I also think that if the people whose work is being described find the terminology offensive, that’s worth taking into consideration as well.
This thread is making me realize just how few RPGs I’ve actually played, but I think this might be a situation similar to the anime versus Western Animation debate wheresome like to reduce the total sum of Western animation down to simply drawn, poorly written, always targetted at kids, episodic comedies that are glorified toy commercials while putting Japanese productions on a pedestal of being artistically detailed, well-written, fully serialized stories that cover a variety of genres and target audiences, when the reality is animation both sides of the pacific run the gamut from simply drawn to highly detailed, stylized versus realistic, comedy versus action versus drama, episodic versus serialized, made for kids versus made for an older audience, etc. and you can’t really draw a neat dividing line between them… Not even geographically when you consider how many American productions have outsourced labor to Japan and Korea over the decades.
I think this is all exactly right, but I don’t think that winds up negating the idea that “JRPG” exists as a set of genre signifiers employed by developers and players alike. It’s certainly helpful from a critical point of view to explore the ways those signifiers collapse a much richer reality, and if the label is functioning as a way to ghettoize certain games, developers, or audiences that’s likewise definitely worth digging into.
But you could write a very similar paragraph about how what people currently call the “roguelike” genre is based on a cherry-picked and heavily decontextualized set of design elements that aren’t really representative of how Rogue and its ilk actually function – this is just sort of how canons and genres work! And that’s especially the case where, as with the “JRPG”, that narrow subset of games localized into English from ~1990-2005 wound up being massively popular and influential.
I think part of the problem is that it isn’t (so far as I know) employed by developers, except as an enumerated grievance when the term is brought up in interviews (like the one I mentioned with Yoshi-P, which prompted some discussion of the subject a couple years ago). It is (again, so far as I know) more or less entirely an invention of the English-speaking gaming world. And, unsurprisingly, because it was coined years ago it reflected perceptions that were informed by what was available in English at the time.
I think that carries its own problems in and of itself, but the specific context in which I expressed my doubts about the subject was as half of a proposed bifurcation of RPGs in general—into “JRPGs” and “Western RPGs”. And my point is that this just doesn’t work as a “serious” taxonomy.
Like just consider the Wizardy franchise. Literally every enumerated element associated with “JRPGs” is more true of the American Wizardry games than the Japanese entries, and vice versa. Suikoden is mentioned as a representative game which, fine, but if we’re considering it we should consider, say, the Inazuma Eleven franchise (an RPG series about association football—or soccer to Americans—which sold roughly as many copies as the Disgaea and Ys games combined, but are less known in America because they never got a North American release). And so on.
If you want to sign up for some psychic damage, google “strict Berlin Interpretation roguelike” which, incredibly, is not something I just made up as a rhetorical device.
To be clear, I was talking about my observations of recent games and not thinking about stuff from the '90s-'00s at all, but certainly I don’t play every single RPG that comes out in a given year so it is possible that my sample is extremely unrepresentative.
I admit that I’m not 100% convinced that there are no valid observations that can be made about different general trends between countries, but I’m also not inclined to go to the mat for that because my knowledge may not be broad enough and because I really would not want to be interpreted as arguing that any particular group of devs lacks range, so I won’t push it.