this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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To be fair, I don't think JRPGs concern themselves too much with immersion. The story and the gameplay just exist in completely separate bubbles and most of the creatures you fight make no sense at all . You're just supposed to accept that It Is A Video Game and you do Video Game Stuff in it
Semi-related tangent, but it amazes me that there's tons of Japanese media where they take all these weird video game systems, tropes and abstractions and make them explicit parts of the setting and narrative. Like these things were invented to help portray Lord of the Rings or Conan the Barbarian-esque adventures in pen-and-paper game form in the 70s
Is that Wild Arms?
EDIT:
Also
I tried to watch Delicious in Dungeon because everyone talked it up so much and at one point in E1 the guy in plate armor started rambling about they didn't have enough money for food so maybe they could sell their weapons and armor and buy cheaper weapons and armor along with rations and I just immediately bounced hard off of it because of the "all goods including form fitting plate armor are totally fungible and you can get an equitable deal selling this equipment and also there is a shop that carries and sells swords, but not as good as regular swords, and charges less money for them"
I felt like I was watching a direct adaptation of Final Fantasy 1 or something.
Yes it is
I don't recognize those bosses, I assume they're from the first one (I only ever played 2 and 3) but the text box background and font are pretty recognizable.
Loved the science fantasy western setting they had, I don't think I've seen it anywhere else.
It is indeed the first game, but these are all just random monsters you run into in dungeons and the overworld. At least bosses tend to have some kind of story justification. The same criticism about the enemies you fight being kind of silly and random could easily be made of many classic franchises, like Final Fantasy. insert picture of the haunted house enemy from FF7 here
I'm currently playing through the second game but I have to say that at least judging by the first two entries, despite the series' reputation as the "Western" JRPG franchise they're remarkably light on actual Western elements. Sure, there's some spaghetti Western flourishes to the music sometimes, some characters wear duster coats and the landscapes tend to be kind of arid but everything else is just regular JRPG stuff through and through. (Also plenty of JRPGs throw in random Western elements anyway)
Also with regards to your edit to your previous post, I think that's just because modern anime audiences and creators are more familiar with RPGs than they are with fantasy literature or the things that inspired fantasy literature
Yeah but I like the dusters, deserts and Western musical flourishes.
I think the amount of guns in a not-modern setting makes it feel pretty Western to me also.
I also feel like some of the towns look really Western. Big metal windmills and water towers, saloony architecture etc.
This also doesn't apply to 2 obviously but this is the frontwoman for 3
Look at those six-shooters.
So far 2 actually feels somewhat less like a Western than the first game. The first game had Jack:
His jeans and the tassels on his coat contributed like 40% of that game's Western vibes. Funnily enough, he doesn't even use guns despite his special skill being named Fast Draw
I feel like a ton of JRPGs have at least one town that looks like this
I feel like Ashley Winchester in WA2 has the same vibes? He's using a musket, wearing jeans and a Western style button up, etc
He just feels more like a young soldier type than a gunslinger or other strictly Western archetype to me
I kinda think that this a big reason why the "Traditional JRPG" is a more-or-less extinct genre outside of the Persona series, and whatever weird remake, or "narrative experience" experiment SquareEnix is working on right now.
Most JRPG's never really figured out how to actually get their game-worlds & their gameplay to interact with each other in ways that are actually compelling in any way; and consequently they ended up kind of just stagnating & getting overtaken by more dynamic games.
Yes, but you see Conan is not a fucking nerd, and is the furthest possible kind of subject from a Neoliberal Optimization Gremlin; and so his perspective is not relatable, or salient to anybody watching, or working on contemporary fantasy anime.
As a consequence of this, the modern audiences & creators plunder the systems meant to simulate things he would do or encounter, and then interject their own existing neoliberal value-sets on top of it in order to treat those systems & simulations as the "Actually Real" part; and then write shitty spiritually dead characters designed to thrive within that framework.
i agree, only atlus (persona and smt dev/publisher) figured out how to make these games fun in this low attention span era. Theyve been on a roll, even the new franchise looks awesome, they even managed to make Yakuza a turn based jrpg and its awesome.
Yeah. Turn based yakuza was NOT in my life bingo card lol
Was fantastic though.