Japanese roleplaying games and anime share a symbiotic relationship. And that symbiosis transformed global entertainment.
While anime gave Japanese media the potential to capture international audiences, JRPGs provided the crucial delivery system for popularizing anime aesthetics and storytelling conventions in the West. Together, they established a cross-cultural phenomenon that continues to thrive today. Let’s take a look at how JRPGs made anime mainstream in the West.
Unlike Western RPGs, which were overwhelmingly inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, JRPGs evolved with inspiration from Japanese manga and anime. Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest, was a writer for Weekly Shonen Jump. The game’s character designs were created by Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama, and its composer, Koichi Sugiyama, was a celebrated anime soundtrack artist.
This trend was not unique to Dragon Quest. Early Japanese RPG developers often drew from manga and anime for their art, stories, and mechanics. Even as the genre expanded, JRPGs maintained an anime-inspired style that distinguished them from their Western counterparts. Games like Wild Arms showcased richly animated sequences created by prominent studios such as Madhouse, reinforcing their connection to anime culture.
Related: Beloved Cartoonist Akira Toriyama Dead at 68
The pivotal moment for JRPGs—and anime aesthetics—in the West came with the release of Final Fantasy VII. While earlier titles like FF VI and Super Mario RPG had seen modest success, FF VII was a juggernaut. It sold over 10 million copies worldwide, including a staggering 2 million in the United States during the PlayStation 1 era.
This success was not just about the game itself. Final Fantasy VII was heavily marketed with anime style visuals, cinematic cutscenes, and an epic storyline featuring spiky-haired protagonists and larger-than-life antagonists: all hallmarks of shonen manga. These elements drew a new audience to the genre, many of whom unknowingly discovered anime through itws visuals and themes.
JRPGs served as an anime gateway drug for countless Western players, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s. Many iconic JRPGs included anime-style opening sequences, cutscenes, and character designs that mirrored the shonen and shojo genres.
As JRPGs gained popularity, so did their anime counterparts. Titles like Dragon Quest inspired manga and anime adaptations, and the crossover between media became seamless. This synergy laid the groundwork for the explosion of isekai, a genre of anime and light novels that often involves protagonists transported to worlds inspired by JRPGs.
Related: The Rise and Fall of the Western Anime Scene
The ascendancy of JRPGs coincided with anime’s increasing global reach, as seen with shows like Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, and Pokémon. These franchises were deeply tied to gaming, with each spawning RPGs, among other game genres, that reinforced their popularity. By the early 2000s, the once-niche appeal of anime had turned mainstream, thanks in no small part to JRPGs introducing millions of players to its art style and tropes.
For a deep, deep, deep dive into JRPG history, check out this video by NeverKnowsBest, which provided much of the historical data for this post:
Today, JRPGs maintain their anime inspiration. That is a mixed blessing, since it has subjected Japanese media to the lowest-common-demoninator focus of Cultural Ground Zero. In one of life’s great ironies, it seems that the quality of an art form must decrease as mainstream exposure increases. Skim any list of the best video games–not just RPGs, but games as a whole–and you’ll find a striking preponderance of SNES-era JRPGs. Chrono Trigger in particular, which earns several mentions in the video above, is widely considered the single best video game of all time. Similarly, Toriyama’s work on Dragon Quest gets its rightful credit. Now compare genre-defining 90s anime like Dragon Ball Z with post-Ground Zero fare like Dragon Ball Super. See what I mean?
Still. JRPGs did more than popularize a genre of games. They served as cultural ambassadors, bringing anime aesthetics and storytelling to the forefront of Western entertainment. As the global appetite for Japanese media grows, it’s worth remembering that the worlds of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and many others were instrumental in making anime a household name.
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Dark fantasy minus the grim plus heroes you can relate to battling vs overwhelming odds
The overlap flows in both directions: Ultima and Wizardry were big hits in Japan, with Wizardry even getting its own anime adaptation, and they drove things like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. Indeed, about 90% of Final Fantasy 1’s monster list is a direct life from the AD&D Monster Manual.
And as time went on, the two streams began to cross in multiple ways, such as a Japanese translation of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia with some very DQ-esque artwork … https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/appendix-j/rules-cyclopedia/
A lot of the misunderstanding of anime in the West (at least, over the pond) comes from the fact that we’ve never taken either animation or comics anywhere near as seriously as the East (and Europe) has. To this day a large chunk of the mainstream still sees them as kids fare or meant to placate manchildren who can’t go without owning every Spiderman book no matter how terrible it is.
This didn’t actually help when the ’90s edgelords came into the scene to spice it up with their “adult” comics. All they did was inject more weird adults and anti-social weirdos into the space. These mediums were abandoned long ago, and that’s why they’re so far behind everyone else in the world. Look at the mount of people still clueless why Japanese manga absolutely obliterates Marvel and DC. Do the people at this companies learn anything? No, they pump out their subversive slop to ever-dwindling sales and insist that’s success. These people never should have had power in the first place, and they wouldn’t have if we didn’t let these industries be run by weirdos.
What I’m saying is that a good reason RPGs, video games, comics, and animation, are currently lacking over here is because there has never been a concentrated effort to actually expand the market reach to adults. Instead, it’s been invaded by these manchild weirdos who instead want to subvert and pervert the material made for kids and show the world how much of a poison it is, and I guess how evil it has made them as a result. You can’t grow anything from this behavior, and we can see that from the fact that it hasn’t grown anything at all, it has just made everything more divisive and worse.
The fact that to this day you still have a significant concentration of spiritual boomers that see no value in the arts and are fine with them being poisoned and subverted is a good reason why this is a problem. I don’t care if you think a medium is stupid or juvenile: that doesn’t mean it should be okay for it to be swarmed by subversive weirdos who can’t grow anything on their own and destroy the works of those who came before them. We need to have more value in art, period, no matter what the medium for it is.
On an adjacent topic, it was darkly gratifying to see an online Catholic apologist who’s not only dismissed all fiction as silly, but called for artists to be outlawed, facing the fact that the pro-life movement failed for cultural reasons. It turns out the “culture is downstream from politics” bros were wrong after all. You’d think they would learn from the Death Cult conquering entertainment to peddle infanticide via Maude and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, thereby priming the culture for child sacrifice. But sadly, chasing the latest hot take rules all.
The pro-life movement has had a lot more than just ignoring culture issues going against it. In many ways, the culture co-opted the pro-life movement, rather than the other way around. It does not help that it’s primarily led by volunteer Moms, who never make the best organizers.
I appreciated the May Day type events in January . However, to me they were somewhat inappropriate and ineffective medieval parades. If we want to celebrate Mary in giant cheery national parades as American Catholics, we should not need the death of children to do so. It seemed to me that pro-life public events ironically should have been more serious/sober quasi funeral processions.
Anyway, I’d say the overturning of Roe v. Wade is a miracle that belongs to the glory of God. It’s hard to give it over to what’s happened in the last 50 years in terms of a formal, public movement.
France has a comic book industry so vibrant and robust that it’s capable of supporting a large and diverse range of indigenous comics (from Westerns, to Sci-Fi action epics, to Fantasy) as well as one of the world’s largest manga markets. In fact, one of the creators of Asterix and Obelix even went full Boomer on the subject, as one of his later works (Asterix and the Falling Sky) contains villainous aliens that are obvious Kamen Rider parodies, called ‘Nagmas’ (the author in question is outspoken in his dislike for the Japanese art style).
Bande Dessinee (BD) has been recognized in Europe — specifically Belgium and France — as an art form and a cultural staple for decades. It’s not welded to the newsstand model, thus releases when it’s ready, more like books. Very much ‘for grown ups, but kids may like it too’ kind of works.
I can think of no better post in which to submit this excellent meme video – which I guess does show the cultural influence of JRPGs on the West!:
Simpsons Fantasy IV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv9io5J63mQ
Post war Japanese pop culture as off site backup for culture.
As the Moors kept copies of Greek classics lost to the west during the dark ages, to be rediscovered during the rennaisance.
So to every footlocker of Conan and Tarzan and Action Comics left behind in Okinawa inspired the shonen manga that would eventually return to America and remind us what new york publishing had burned and buried and damned.
I also note that the influence of anime on JRPGs is starting to circle back, in the way that an increasing number of fantasy manga and anime explicitly rely on JRPG tropes as plot elements. Even more prominently is the “LitRPG” genre of fiction, usually found online. These are fantasy or science fiction stories that conceive of their fantastical elements in videogame-like fashion; with characters having explicit “classes”, “mana”, “skills” and “levels”. Granted, LitRPG is mostly trash, and I don’t personally understand why you would take the abstractions that TTRPGs and videogames use to represent a person’s skill and then re-insert it as a concrete reality in your story, but clearly some people like it.