Ah yes
@Antoine , I'd much rather have some cardboard cutout cutesy anime girl riding my dick over the flimsiest of circumstances than some characters that were less than completely unambiguously catered to my ideals of absolute good.
My point is that neither feels human. The
gritty stock characters are equally inhuman and equally a form of pandering. The latter are simply catered towards ideals of absolute
grit. It's a lazy form of flattery. Your intelligence is flattered by all of the obvious REALISM flags planted through the work.
"Ah yes, mature media consumer I am, I play games with CONFLICT. This is REAL and DOWN TO EARTH. Not like those Japanese SPOILT BABY GAMES that LOOK NICE and have INTERESTING THINGS HAPPEN. In the real world you have to do chores for awful people if you want the key to the goblin dungeon."
Also, JRPGS are surely absent of fetch quests, right? This shit is a cancer that permeates both eastern and western civilizations, so don't sit there and try to say that JRPGS are devoid of this mess. The more fucked up an initial companion is at the beginning, the more their arc can evolve. And they do, in this game, in some circumstances. I'm not going to say this is a perfect game, it's not, but I much prefer flawed characters that evolve than static characters that sit to fit some kind of simplistic expectations. This is something more common in JRPGS, in my experience, at least.
I find
arcs and
growth terribly overrated. They get played up because they're something we can quantify. Makes them easier to talk about. Easier to feel like we've successfully recognised some kind of craft or quality. Again, it's a form of intellectual flattery. Average RPG never really pings as human to me or meaningfully
grows. The
Growth arc is typically just one of a handful of stock tropes that plays out according to expectations and doesn't mean anything or reflect any kind of real experience or perspective of an authorial voice. It's just something you do. Kill goblins, get key, experience
growth. These games are modular junk made out of interchangeable and meaningless parts. These games can be said to be made up of
content in the truest sense of the word.
I don't actually play many JRPGs, especially the
big ones. But I use the term very loosely. I think that they actually did a great job of evolving beyond superfluous and stock elements and only a few stayed in that particular old place as a matter of form. We could call it a sort of classical JRPG tradition that keeps the old elements to play off of them, and to some extent indulge people in the comfort of familiarity. That seems to be what Dragon Quest does lately. But even back on the NES people were trying to spin the base elements in far more ambitious directions. Look at Fire Emblem for example. Linear. Heavily structured. Every moment is of extreme consequence. These things have all occurred to Japan. Sometimes they use that, sometimes they use the old form. Depends what you're trying to do.
And because Japanese pop-media tends to be so auteur and vision driven, I can plausibly say that creative intention exists behind most projects in a way I really can't about most western works. The average western CRPG exists because someone wanted to make "A CRPG". And then they take pretty much every stock part of the endeavour for granted and one is left wondering why the thing even exists. Might as well spend your time and money in front of a damn slot machine.
"Simplistic expectations" are entirely my problem with these games.
The last JRPG I played to completion was Resonance of Fate. It's a game that started on the level of character design and grew out from there. They had ideas of beautiful characters they wanted to show off doing cool things. The game
has fetch quests and goblins. But it's not about that. It's about spending money on designer clothes and guns and staring at the beautiful people.
The way that this game looks in motion is absolutely beautiful and insane. That is my fundamental point that I want to make about JRPGs. They are not defined by particularities of the form. The form is a platform for unique auteur visions. The form sticks because it works quite well for a variety of visions. The default template is just a great baseline for making multimedia anime epics. But it's very pliable, and the Japanese generally understand very well that you shouldn't take things as sacred or for granted in art. There are things Resonance of Fate does that every other JRPG does. Numbers and fetching. Whatever. But that's just framing. The entire game exists for the moment in this image below. It's all a frame for beautiful people in designer clothes flying through the air firing guns. This justifies everything. The game is advertised as a 'JRPG'. But it's really a multimedia work with utterly unique intentions. Can you enjoy it as a "JRPG" person? Maybe. But in reviews they sound a bit disappointed to me. The biggest fans of this game I know are artfags like me who love novelty, nice things, and weird auteur stuff. And that's why I still sometimes pay a bit of attention to JRPGs, and why I pretty much completely disregard CRPGs. There is stuff of broad human and artistic interest in one tradition, and not in the other.
Everyone play this game. It's goddamn beautiful. It's insane and retarded if you try to think about the plot or the finer points of how gunfights work, but it's not about that. It's like the Miami Vice movie but even more Miami Vice. Treat it like an interactive mood-picture.
As for Tolkeiny 'buttfantasy' shit, you're implying that JRPGS don't have the same tired ass tropes. They're there, they're just different from western CRPG style ones. Whether that's more amenable to your tastes or not is a matter of your individual preferences.
JRPGs share some tropes, the early creators liked stuff like
Wizardry, but it's well and truly its own tradition. Far less is taken for granted. They might still use Goblins and wizards, but they aren't the point. They're stock characters who fill stock roles in a tradition far larger than themselves. Wherever tropes emerge in JRPGs they tend to feel alive. The evidence to me seems obvious. JRPGs are capable of generating their own new stock characters and ideas which then successfully embed themselves in popular culture, and become more material taken for granted to be played off of.
What is the western Moogle? What is the western DQ Slime? As I said in the Fairy Tale thread, the foundations of so much of this are western. But specifically old western works. The culture we
were, not the one we
are. We are no longer capable of generating anything of interest. Also, I haven't finished it yet, but the last JRPG I actually played is Final Fantasy 7. The original
1997 work. 26 years ago they were done riffing off of old high fantasy shifted gears to science fiction magical realism.
This is not a tired tradition. When it came out this was one of the most alive things in the world. It succeeded globally for a reason. No, Fallout is not comparable. It sucks and is only remembered now because of Todd Howard.
There's a kernel of truth in your statement though... EVERY established genre is fucking tired in some way. Bring us something new, something different, even if it potentially risks the LACK OF MAXIMUM PROFIT. I've played thousands of games in my life. Most studios forge the safe path, BG3 is definitely in this realm. I do feel like it's the best we've gotten so far in the CRPG realm but that's not saying a ton... people that say it's a 'revolution' are just... well... young. Give me something new, something different. I will give you money for it.
I am very depressed to see the Japanese putting so much effort into remaking existing games now. I blame tasteless dirt-eating westerners, as in all things. Still, the source of true novelty remains empowered auteurs working within established but lenient conventions.
This is why I loved Disco Elysium.... maybe a post for another time. One could say it's a revision of Planescape: Torment, but, it's beyond that, IMHO.
Disco Elysium was fine for a playthrough. Didn't rock my world like Death Stranding. Also I despise Planet Escape: Torrent.
