File under: Gaming Ground Zero. And thanks again to author David V. Stewart for sliding this item across my desk.
We’ve covered the descent of JRPGs from their peak in the 90s.
Recently, legendary Final Fantasy director Hironobu Sakaguchi explained how Western RPGs dethroned Japanese game devs from their place atop the industry in the aughts.
I think that one of the main reasons for that is the fact that consoles like the NES and PlayStation were very specific hardware. This made it easier for Japanese developers to master the hardware, as we could ask Nintendo or Sony directly in Japanese. This is why – I realize it might be impolite to say this – Japanese games were of a higher quality at the time. As a result, Japanese games were regarded as more fun, but when hardware became easier to develop for, things quickly changed.
Sakaguchi is being modest. JRPGs dominated the 80s and 90s, not because people regarded them as more fun than Western offerings. They were more fun.
This video brings the receipts. Check it out:
Enter Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi:
Japanese developers had been developing skills specifically for console games, but in North America and Europe, there was a long history of PC culture. By the time there was no longer a big difference between developing for console and for PC, Japanese developers could no longer rely on their specialty as console developers, and had to master PC development.
We’re now so far removed from a time when gaming consoles boasted significantly different hardware that remembering it qualifies as a GenY touchstone.
Ys can still tell a SNES game from a Genesis game solely by sound.
People who grew up before Ground Zero remember game devs squeezing impressive performance from end-of-life-cycle hardware they’d had years to master.
A lot of those late NES and Sega games are now cherished as rare gems that fell by the wayside at release.
Now that we’re on our third decade of consoles just being prefab PCs, whole dimensions of fun have vanished from the hobby.
Back to Sakaguchi …
Many Western gamers grew up playing Japanese games. When games by Western studios started to improve, they felt new and fresh when compared with the Japanese games those players were more familiar with. I believe that in entertainment, freshness is extremely important.
It’s refreshing to see him drop the false modesty.
Dude made the best video games of all time.
He earned the right to flex.
The torch-passing dynamic he brings up comes with its own problems, though.
It’s the same crisis we see in the movie industry, where big brand IPs are falling into the hands of film makers who consumed them as kids. But they’ve rejected the cultural patrimony that inspired and provide needed context for those IPs. So they’re churning out licensed fanfic.
Just look at the output from BioWare and Bethesda since the late aughts.
They don’t deserve your time or your money.
Learn how to stop giving both to them here:
The strange anti-Japanese sentiment in the first HD generation was a reaction against any force against not making movie games. Before that it was 2D games and before even that it was arcade design. All of this was due to infiltrators who want their button press d-level movies over anything that made the medium what it was.
Back in the day, when you bought a game for a system, you had expectations based on both the platform it was on and who was making it. On top of that was the distinction between console, handheld, and PC gaming as different experiences with different strengths. There were many different preferences and choice one could indulge in. By the end of the first HD generation, all that was left was “movie game” at the expense of anything else. AAA was poison for the medium.
An honest look at where we are now and how we got here shows that it resulted from a series of butterfly effect decisions. If the industry had taken a different direction at any of those crossroads, it would be a whole different scene today.
The example I like to bring up is the Saturn almost getting Silicon Graphics’ RISC chip. Kalinske went to SI, deal in hand, and they were ready to sign. But Sega of Japan overturned the applecart, so SI went with Nintendo.
Had SOJ not interfered (again), we’d have had a 64-bit Saturn with a library weighted toward Sega’s arcade pedigree. Nintendo’s most likely move would’ve been to fall back on their CD-based system, which might have kept Sony from entering the console market altogether. A good argument can be made that Sony’s absence would have kept Microsoft out. And a Nintendo PlayStation with no XBox rewrites the books on the last 5 hardware generations.
There’s a funny irony in that the most “movie game” of movie game genres, stuff like Dragon’s Lair and Time Gal, have virtually disappeared. And even remakes of games with lots of quick time events are cutting down or reimagining those parts of the games (see the new Resident Evil IV remake).
Fun fact: Dragon’s Lair ran off a laserdisc.
Of the differences between consoles and PC in the ’90s, I’d say none were as stark as the online capabilitiy of PC. I recall it most vividly with Blizzard’s Battlenet and Diablo, and there’s our old pal, The Year of Our Lord 1997. Even though Diablo only supported four players, we were already “clanning up”. It was ersatz social interaction before social media. This brings up the issue of Digital Surrogacy (see YouTuber Headstacker’s “Digital Surrogates are Destroying Us”..) This peaks in 2005 with WoW and poof! We’re all enslaved in the matrix by, well, Diablo.
Speaking of Bethesda, while I haven’t actually played Fallout 4, I’ve spent a rather unhealthy amount of time listening to people complain about it. What I’ve heard doesn’t seem flattering. The problems they list are way too numerous to list, but a lot of it seems to boil down to not giving a single toss about the world and characters that they’ve inherited and simply treating it like a big theme park. Super Mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel have to be here because they’re classic and revered series elements, even though their presence in this part of the setting requires extreme contrivance and takes up space that could have been used for newer, different concepts.
Strangely, though, there’s some bizarre disconnect between the main writers and the smaller sub-writers. An easily-missed example is a raider tribe that has an extensive and rather interesting little culture centred around metalworking, forging, and ritualistic branding, putting recruits through horrifying training/hazing processes to “forge” them into stronger warriors. Absolutely none of this matters at all – all of this information is relegated to optional terminals that you can only access after you’ve blown them to pieces just like the dozen nondescript Raider Tribes you already killed. None of them have any dialogue or quests, and none of this character written about can be observed in their actual dialogue or behaviour. They’re literally just a regular bunch of Raiders with flame-themed weapons. Seems like a huge waste, doesn’t it?
Between 1998-2002, what JRPG could contend with Deus Ex, Morrowind, Thief I and II, System Shock 2, or Fallout 2?
There were unique games like Kagero: Deception 2, Brave Fencer Musashi, Jade Cocoon 1 and 2, Langrisser V, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Parasite Eve, Star Ocean 2, Suikoden I & II, Thousand Arms, Vanguard Bandits, Xenogears, Chrono Cross, Elemental Gimmick Gear, Final Fantasy VIII and IX, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, Front Mission 3, Growlanser, Ogre Battle 64, Persona 2 (both games), SaGa Frontier II, Shadow Madness, Threads of Fate, Valkyrie Profile, Legend of Legaia 1 and 2, Breath of Fire IV, Paper Mario, Phantasy Star Online, Skies of Arcadia, Vagrant Story, Golden Sun, King’s Field IV, Mega Man Battle Network, Okage: Shadow King, Segagaga, Shadow Hearts, most Sakura Wars games, and Zwei: The Arges Adventure. I would be several of those on par with the best of the WRPGs as gaming experiences from the time period.
The genre only really started to stall during the PS2 era. There is a reason it was so popular for over three gaming generations.
When I saw “Ys” it took me a minute to realize that you were talking about the generation, not the Falcom game series.
Same.
You can take it either way.
Something that’s always impressed me about Japanese games is that they never forget they’re games above all. They come up with a central mechanic and they build everything around that one thing, including the story and characters, and they coax as much out of that mechanic as they can, so the gameplay stays fresh throughout the whole game. A lot of modern western design is fixated on simulation or surface elements like the art/story/characters (i.e., they want to be movies).
Japanese games are usually about systems/level design to master and western games are usually more concerned with open spaces, secrets, and exploring with what little you have at your disposal. At least, that is what they typically excel at. Movie games do not encourage either to be the best.
Cultural Ground Zero even hit the granddaddy of JRPGs, Dragon Quest. After VI for the SNES at the end of 1995, Japan had to wait 5 years for VII on the PlayStation–and assuming the NA version didn’t do major damage to the localization, it was one of the weakest in the series, IMO, with more grim, sad, and depressing moments than was the norm for the series. It was also tremendously tedious and prone to letting players make damaging mistakes, and it even dabbled in 32-bit JRPG cynicism. (It remains the only DQ game where you’ve fought God, although it’s more a friendly sparring match than anything.) Fortunately, VIII was a return to form.
When you say “32-bit JRPG cynicism” can I assume you’re talking about Shin Megami Tensei? I’ve heard it described as “the thing Conservative Christian Moms *thought* Pokémon was”.
I was actually thinking more Xenogears, since that was the one I watched my best friend play in college. Plus a touch of Chrono Cross, which has some decidedly anti-human subtext.
DQ is my favorite game series and I actually think VII is an excellent game, and it was honestly a bold move by the developers to eschew modern en vogue 3D blocky technology in favor of a barely-3D game, I don’t think it really fits in to the trends of JRPGs circa 2000. It’s a massive, ponderous game, but I like it more than VI – which had a pretty dull, aimless plot, though the post-game content was good. But I agree VIII was an excellent entry, which sort of put together all the best parts of the different “types” of preceding games. I also think it has one of the best soundtracks ever.
I think DQ XI is a great game as well, though part of me feels like it’s just VIII revisited, with modernized graphics and polished gameplay.
VI is one of the weaker games plotwise, but it’s not as overstuffed and (especially in the early game) relentlessly depressing as VII, IMO. Now, I’ve only played VI in its DS remake, whereas I’ve played VII in both PSX and 3DS iterations, so that may be influencing my judgment a bit.
As long as we’re doing this, my DQ Tier List:
S-Tier: III, IV, V
A-Tier: VIII, XI
B-Tier: VI, IX
C-Tier: VII, I, II
But even a C-Tier DQ is a good game that I don’t at all regret playing, and I can say that I’ve finished every DQ I’ve started–something I can’t say about Final Fantasy.
“It’s the same crisis we see in the movie industry, where big brand IPs are falling into the hands of film makers who consumed them as kids. But they’ve rejected the cultural patrimony that inspired and provide needed context for those IPs. So they’re churning out licensed fanfic.”
Sounds like post-Bungie Halo in a nutshell.
I will say that at least with Halo 4 you can tell that the people responsible love the series and wanted to make a worthy continuation (however unnecessary it actually is). I can’t same say the same with the rest.
Halo 5 was an absolute train-wreck, no defending it. Halo Infinite started out well but it turned out to be an ongoing train-wreck as we speak (hooray for free-to-play games!).