Although it’s worth noting that the Berlin interpretation dates from an attempt to characterise what makes a roguelike by the standards of two and a half decades ago, at which point I think it probably was the case that everyone labelling a game a “roguelike” was aware of the lineage of the term (which makes it seem like an incredibly pedantic and exclusionary definition nowadays in a world where most people using the term “roguelike” have probably never even encountered a game with ASCII graphics).
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A lot of categories we use day-to-day are vague and informal. Did you know there’s no such thing as a fish, scientifically speaking? Or that in California bees are classified as fish?
To me the term JRPG mainly names an aesthetic based on big colorful sprites and clean, menu-driven user interfaces: both adaptations to low-resolution screens and game controllers. You could also add a certain flavor of game rules pioneered by the Dragon Quest series, and carried over to RPG Maker along with the aforementioned aesthetics.
I found myself liking games of this flavor much better than those with “blobber” or Infinity Engine-style aesthetics and controls usually associated with the western flavor of RPG, and tried to incorporate some borrowed elements into my own games. It does make a difference.
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Yeah, a quick check of Wikipedia yesterday showed as much. I do remember seeing (but never getting a chance to play) AD&D for Intellivision. Dragonstomper is new to me. Adventure for the Atari VCS is my all-time favorite though. (It annoys me that searching Atari VCS leads mostly to a console made in 2021 and not the original. I always think of 2600 as the “new” name.)
Yeah, I definitely agree with that so apologies for misconstruing! I thought you were responding to to @EJoyce’s much more modest claim which was basically that there’s not nothing to the taxonomy and there are some places where a JRPG to Western-RPG spectrum has some analytic power. And I’d agree with your subtext that I think it has the least power when looking at RPG development within Japan rather than in the Anglophone world (though that’s not especially surprising - “American movie” isn’t a very useful concept to US film buffs but definitely feels more distinct if you live someplace else that also has a robust film industry), and that to the extent people use the term to refer to any RPG made by a Japanese developer that’s reductive and dumb (I’m not sure how many people really do that, though - does anyone non-facetiously call Elden Ring a JRPG?)
But it definitely is used and I’d argue, at least somewhat useful, in these more limited contexts, including by developers — like, Steam is awash in games touting their JRPG style stories, visuals, and combat. My sense is these very much are primarily games made by non-Japanese devs harkening back to that same subset of massively-commercially-and-critically-successful-games-translated-into-English that we’ve been talking about — but as we’ve been saying those games in turn were primarily made by Japanese folks who played Wizardry but not Dunjonquest or Eamon or Telengard or…
Anyway, all of which is to say that I’m definitely sympathetic to the critiques that the JRPG/Western RPG binary is reductive, potentially patronizing, and not broadly useful, but I think efforts to discard or amend it will probably be most successful by engaging with the areas where people do appear to find it of use, rather than arguing that there aren’t any.
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Heres to hoping that Disco Elysium marks the beginning of the era of the ERPG (Estonian role playing game.)
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In interesting sidenotes, the CRPGAddict suggested roguelikes could have been called BAMlikes, referring to Beneath Apple Manor (Apple II, 1978) which he says is the first commercial CRPG (with an asterisk for one other contender) and also the first roguelike, though predating Rogue by two years.
-Wade
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The defining work in a genre, that codifies the formula and makes it famous, is often not the first, or even the second. Plus, you can’t beat a catchy name.
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And not only is the codifier not necessarily the first, the codifier and the namer are not necessarily the same either. I believe TVTropes uses the terms Ur Example for the earliest known use of a trope, Trope Namer for the example the trope takes its name from, and Trope Codifier for the example that popularizes the standard form.
Of course, for things like video/computer/television games where there is a history of the US, Europe, and Japan having their own distinct scenes where different platforms where dominant and games being region exclusive was common, it’s quite possible different titles established the core identity of some genres in different regions and when there was cross regional bleed over in those early days, it colored perceptions because for every game that got exported, there were several that didn’t.
And speaking of genres named for certain games, anyone have any idea when/how Metroidvania made the transition from referring specifically to Castlevania games with large, interconnected maps of the kind 2-d Metroid is famous for as a short hand to distinguish them from the discreet levels of classicvania installments to referring to an entire genre of games with the massively interconnected approach to level design?
And for that matter, has any genre label from the 80s or 90s survived the intervening decades without significant alteration due to changes in technology and the impact they’ve had on presentation of games?
Yeah. And I think it’s worth being careful about that sort of thing. I think what developers from Japan, like Yoshi-P, are sensitive to is the implied diminishment that comes with a qualifier—winning an Oscar for “Best Picture” is inherently seen as being a stronger statement than winning “Best Foreign Picture” and that kind of thing.
But I think there’s also a sort of formal fallacy here, a kind of reification. To run with the same basic metaphor: back in the early 2000s I’d go into a physical video store on a regular basis. It would have shelves for “New Releases”, “Comedy”, “Drama”, “Science Fiction”, “Horror”, and so on. And then a shelf for “Foreign”. Now, that “Foreign” as a category is perfectly comprehensible to me. I actually have a pretty good idea of what you would or would not find there, and given a specific movie I’d have a very high chance of correctly guessing what shelf it would end up on. But “Foreign” here is kinda terrible as an attempt at formal taxonomy. It doesn’t really tell you much about the actual stuff that’s being grouped together—I’d expect to find a copy of Seven Samurai and Seventh Seal there, but their proximity on the shelf isn’t actually representative of some deeper underlying connection between the two. We can absolutely enumerate commonalities between them (in black and white, in languages other than English, and so on). But if we try to explain the films in terms of the category (or vice versa for that matter) we don’t really end up with anything useful. Because the category tells us more about the framing than it does about the things being categorized.
Or approached from a slightly different angle. Consider a list of games with similar gameplay elements: the original Wizardry; a made-in-Japan licensed Wizardry sequel like one of the Wizardry XTH games; a made-in-Japan first-person dungeon crawl that is very obviously derived from Wizardry like The Dark Spire with an dark art style that’s “Western” coded; a made-in-Japan first-person dungeon crawl that’s very obviously a descendent of Wizardry like the Etrian Odyssey games with a bright art style that’s “Japanese” coded; and a made-in-Japan first person dungeon crawl that’s a spinoff of a franchise that’s traditionally called a “JRPG” in the US like the Persona Q games. Then we have at least one game that I think most people would absolutely accept is not a JRPG (the original Wizardry) and one or more that I think would be nearly universally accepted as being JRPGs. And my point is that I think what we’d end up with is a decision schema that actually breaks down into something like “the probability of a game being identified as a JRPG varies directly with the number of cartoon catgirls in it”. Or something similar that has nothing at all to do with core mechanics, whether or not it’s inspired by tabletop gaming, or anything like that.
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And now I wonder how people would classify an Egypt-themed RPG with an abundance of cute Sphinxes and Bastet as the player’s patron goddess.
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I looked this up. Apparently the term “Metroidvania” wasn’t coined until 2001.
So if what you’re getting at is that the earliest Castlevania games don’t fit into the genre … the term didn’t change — it was coined after the games changed.
If I remember right, “Metroidvania” started as a derogatory term for the Castlevania games that were too much like Metroid and not enough like the original Castlevania (in certain fans’ eyes). I think that’s what Jeffery is asking about—how the term went from that to a neutral or even positive description of a genre.
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I didn’t know it was once used negatively… Granted, I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about Symphony of the Night, the first and most highly praised of the Metroid-like Castlevanias. Then again, I’ve never hung out in Castlevania focused online communities, so maybe it had already drifted to being a neutral shorthand to distinguish the two styles of Castlevania side-scrollers by the time it reached other gaming communities. It being coined in the 00s makes sense though, since I believe Circle of the Moon for GBA is when that style went from being SotN doing its own thing to being the franchise’s dominant format for new games
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I think part of the issue here is my distinction between combat mazes and systems that require some amount of roleplaying. But then, tabletop itself hasn’t always made a good distinction…