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Seeing a lot of people kinda write off this genre in the wake of E33 sweeping the game awards. Sayin...
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Literally nobody has ever said JRPGs aren’t RPGs. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that claim.
That said, E33 was winning in categories it probably shouldn’t have. I’ve played it, it was good, I’d recommend it as an 8/10 game, but there were games I thought it swept the rug under in several categories where it frankly didn’t deserve awards against games it competed against.
But you’re right, there are more to RPGs than just choices. A lot of it comes down to mechanics. A lot of RPGs use stat checks to design encounter because it forces the player to manage tempo and timing in fights, like when to heal, how you can manipulate damage thresholds before forcing the enemy to use certain actions, etc. Numbers matter because it changes the way encounters (especially boss fights) play out. Then you have itemization, exploration, and the tropes that come along with the genre that don’t TECHNICALLY need to be there but are part of the historical culture.
E33 feels like a JRPG, it just didn’t feel like it deserved to sweep the awards like it did IMO.
There are at least 2 people in this very post saying that lol.
Here's another one - https://www.reddit.com/r/2westerneurope4u/s/WhWIJ1CLsZ
I get this guys reaction because I was in shock myself. But yeah, there’s apparently many people who believe Final Fantasy 7 isn’t an RPG. They don’t seem to even know the history of where Japanese RPGs came from or the ways in which each genre of video game RPG has accentuated different aspects of what you experience in a tabletop RPG. They also seem to have a very limited scope on what a tabletop RPG can even be (ie not just D&D).
I mean the one argument I really see in this thread isn’t that JRPGs solely aren’t RPGs, it’s more like modern games aren’t RPGs in the way the term was originally used. It IS true that RPGs were emulations of tabletop games and was in fact used as the term FOR tabletop games. Later it was used for text-based RPGs which were more akin the tabletop experience on PCs in the 80s and became attached to Japanese games in the same decade.
It’s similar to how “shooters” used to be used exclusively for what are now called SHMUPs and now SHMUPs is a term derived from its own displacement in common-use gamer jargon, at least in the West.
And it’s actually topical to bring up SHMUPs because within that genre there’s a term called Euroshmup, which in itself is kind of akin to how JRPG is used, as a sub-genre.
These people aren’t TECHNICALLY wrong, it’s just that the way they frame what an RPG is to them doesn’t currently reflect how the term is used and JRPG is under that umbrella. Most RPGs as we know then don’t really try to emulate a tabletop experience and is a misnomer because they are generally not roleplaying experiences at all. When I’m playing FFX or FFIV, there is basically nothing I can do as a player to sway the events involving any of the cast. Meanwhile those games specifically and like-games (such as The Legend of Dragoon) have gameplay elements shared with games like Nier: Automata that do give players agency. Then you have evolutions like the Trails series complete with entire systems of eugenics.
The closest things we have to tabletop RPGs (which, like SHMUPS, is a term displaced from its own origination), are immersive sims.