I still feel Final Fantasy 6 was the best JRPG of the retro era. At the time it had heavy themes you wouldn’t expect a child to grapple with: the ideas that the good guys can just straight up lose and having to live with the consequences, characters whose arcs may never truly be redeemed (because they can fucking die), and even complex issues like the passing of loved ones, committing suicide when all hope is lost, gambling addictions, slitting your own mothers throat for some money, rape and genocide, interspecies relationships, racism, speciesism, the rise of fascism and the use of technology to enslave the masses. It should be a required play through for a young child, and a seasoned adult should provoke conversations about events in the game.
I love Chrono Trigger; it's also what got me into emulation. I wasn't allowed to have an SNES but my 486 could just manage to run an emulator (esnes I think it was called?) that could do SNES with no sound or translucency (there were keyboard shortcuts to toggle the layers so e.g. you could hide fog that would otherwise make the whole screen gray).
zsnes is an older SNES emulator that definitely in its earlier days had some issues with transparent/translucent layers and had keys to turn each layer off. I think I remember needing to use those toggles for the same fog layers in Chrono Trigger that you're talking about (though I definitely wasn't on a 486). I think esnes may be a little bit older?
When I was about 9/10, my grandfather put ZSNES on my computer, along with ROMs for most SNES games ever made.
ZSNES gave me some of the best memories of my childhood.
The coolest bit was that he had soldered a real SNES controller so that it worked with those old-school trapezoid 9-pin keyboard input things. I still think that is pure magic, to this day.
I remember playing Chrono Trigger on a emulator and it took me a while to realize that the fog in the future era was not suppose to be completely opaque.
Bizarrely enough, the framing of these concepts is family-friendly.
These events happen, and kids do need to know about them in order to prepare for them. But there's enough abstraction to make it not be gratuitious or traumatic. It's like having Fred Rogers teach kids about this stuff versus George R.R. Martin.
"Family-friendly" doesn't mean avoiding difficult subjects altogether. Even the Bible freely explores all of these topics. Going to church is literally a family event.
> Why should a young child grapple with rape, slitting mothers throat for money, suicide, gambling addiction, rape, genicide, etc?
Have you read most faerie tales, or Bible stories for that matter? Or watched children's television? Or grown up in a less than perfect household?
These are simply the themes of real life, and only rare privilege allows one to reach adolescence blissfully ignorant of life's sharp edges. Better to have the lessons delivered by a compelling narrative that gives children agency then by real life which offers them none.
Mass ecological devastation in the name of profit, complete with displacement of animals and the explicit suggestion that they might die as a result (The Lorax)
A sensitive individual takes seriously pleas for help from a vulnerable population at risk of being wiped out, while others mock the individual’s concerns as fake, and actively endanger the same population, echoing Western reactions to persecution of Jews and eventually the Holocaust in the lead-up to and during much of WWII (Horton Hears a Who)
I'm pretty sure most parents (nowadays) will reach the exact opposite conclusion after reading your comment: the game should be rated as ESRB 17+ and banned for a young child.
As a parent to young children I did not reach this conclusion and would love for my son to play this masterpiece. None of the parents I know are like this either.
I actually feel like this mindset was much more prevalent in the 90s than it is nowadays.
I genuinely agree, especially for gamers of my particular demographic who knew Final Fantasy VI as "Final Fantasy III".
I would like to point out, though, that there are plenty of games that the English-speaking world didn't get, at least not on their initial release, and there is one in particular that I want to highlight here as I don't see it get the fanfare I think its owed.
That game is Dragon Quest V, which takes a sampling of the mature themes you highlighted from Final Fantasy VI (and then some), but has coated them in a layer of whimsy that gives the whole experience the feeling of an oddly compelling fairy tale. I highly recommend it if you still have the time and patience for JRPGs. (And if you don't, the movie Dragon Quest Your Story is available in English on Netflix and is based on Dragon Quest V, albeit with a bit of a controversial addition towards the end.)
I'd also like to highlight Earthbound as a curiously mature JRPG for the time. I like to cite it as an example of a game that is more about the journey than the destination. It's not about saving the world, it's about painting cows blue and the third strongest mole and bubble monkeys. But it's also about accepting the world as it is, facing things that you might not be ready to face, the impermanence of everything, and making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then.
> Earthbound as a curiously mature JRPG for the time. I like to cite it as an example of a game that is more about the journey than the destination.
I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling. The "Yakuza: Like a Dragon" game had a similar vibe. The working title for it might as well have been "Friendship is Magic."
> making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then
The lesson you were supposed to take away from it was to stop and call your dad every now and then.
> The lesson you were supposed to take away from it was to stop and call your dad every now and then.
That's a good catch, thanks!
I also think the dad was intended to be a commentary on Japanese salaryman culture, and now that I'm older, from the dad's perspective I see another lesson about all the things you might miss if you spend all your time working.
> dad was intended to be a commentary on Japanese salaryman culture, [...] lesson about all the things you might miss if you spend all your time working.
Totally. Check out a few episodes of the "Old Enough" show on Netflix and you'll see the same; dad/mom is stuck running the restaurant while the kid goes on the epic errand. Adults have responsibilities and it was touching that the game respected that instead of vilifying him as an "absentee" parent. Childhood is your journey; your parents are just there to provide air support.
I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling.
The game's director and writer, Shigesato Itoi, is a creative writer by trade, so he brought a fresh perspective, and frankly, is a better writer than most who work on videogames. Being an outsider, he also wasn't bogged down by common video game tropes.
In fact he brilliantly used his outsider's perspective to lampoon and tweak them.
My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a self-admitted arbitrary obstacle, and the rolling HP counters, which cleverly introduced an element of real-time to an otherwise entirely turn-based battle system.
I would also like to once again shout out the third strongest mole as the most brilliant ludo-narrative joke in all of gaming.
> My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a self-admitted arbitrary obstacle
IIRC, the solution was equally silly-- a literal pencil eraser.
I remember the game having a lot of cheeky David Bowie references too. Starman is an obvious one as a recurrent character, and correctly figured that the fight with Carbon Dog wasn't going to end so easily.
Mother 3 is totally worth playing too, for those who never got around to it. I played the English fan-translation a few years ago and it really floored me how well it developed the themes of Earthbound. It feels equal parts dire and slapstick, illustrated by cartoonish characters that live in truly trying times.
While I'm still a sucker for FFVI and FFVII, Mother 3 kinda achieves the impossible in many ways. It re-develops the themes from it's predecessor into a more accessible, more nuanced and funnier story. Characters get hurt, die, yell curse-words and contend with progressively more horrifying environments. Tonally it almost feels like Stand By Me, elevated to cartoonishly-evil stakes from the start. Best of all, the morals are immediately accessible to the player instead of being hidden as lore like most RPGs are want to do. For younger audiences, there should be no confusion about who is right and wrong and why they are that way. While Final Fantasy is written better overall, I feel like younger players would take so much more away from Mother 3. It really captures the "coming of age" storytelling that has been developed since Mother 1.
After getting to the end of that game, you kinda understand why Itoi doesn't want another game like that. The bar is simply too high, even by the standards of modern consoles.
I agree with this except for one detail: EarthBound and Mother 3 especially are better written than any Final Fantasy game. (And I love Final Fantasy.)
Playing FF VI for the first time right now having wanted to play it for past two decade and loving it. Also played Earthbound for the first time earlier this year and agree with this sentiment. The music was also amazing
Good to know I'm not the only one who just cannot let go of his 'to be played' list (though I'm only ~15 years behind wanting to play Earthbound). Recently finished SNES Chrono Trigger...
There even was a time I was under the illusion that I could experience all 'major' games in a reasonable timeframe after they came out.
And then the video games market blew up for good during the 10s and now there's so ludicrously many of them...
Your mentioning of "rape" here sent me on a google journey... I don't remember anything like that happening or even being hinted at in FF6, what are you referring to?
I assume they mean the first scene with Celes in South Figaro where she's being tortured. Rape isn't mentioned or even implied, in either Japanese or English, though.
On the one hand there's Setzer "Let me swoop in on my airship to kidnap a beautiful opera singer" that was not likely to end in just a coffee date.
On the other hand, no way in hell does someone like Kefka invent something called a Slave Crown and then just use it to force someone to pilot a magic mecha.
This is not explicitly stating that it is rape by any means, and I don't interpret it that way. It seemed to me that Maria and Setzer had a history already and he was stealing her away from her opera life, which she may or may not have wanted, we are not told whether or not she even wanted to work at the opera house, or what those conditions were. Casting characters in these negative lights without explicit proof is just silly. Especially after you get the backstory on Setzer and his love interest - nothing else in the game paints him as character that would do something awful like that.
The grounds for "FF6 has rape in it!" seems super super shaky. It feels like the sort of thing where people are decided that Satsuki & Mae from Totoro are really "dead and ghosts" during the entirety of the movie. It's silly.
Don't scare people away from a classic for things that aren't true.
> Especially after you get the backstory on Setzer and his love interest - nothing else in the game paints him as character that would do something awful like that.
Did we play the same game? However you define "rape," Setzer was an amoral gambler and rogue whose idea of romance was kidnapping and forced marriage. His relationship with Darril was mostly one of sport. He planned to kidnap the opera singer, was duped into kidnapping Celes instead, and was only willing to help them save the world or whatever if Celes married him. She only got out of that by challenging him and literally beating him at his own game (gambling).
Setzer was misogyny incarnate...Darril, someone he had an actual "relationship" with, was only ever his girlfriend. The opera singer, he wanted to marry on sight. Dude's priorities were seriously fucked.
Let me rephrase... Regardless of the interpretation of intent, this was not "rape in ff6" or "discussing rape", and "rape" is not in ff6.
If I heard as a parent that a game has rape in it, I am thinking "there is a scene in which a character is raped", and there is no way I would let my kids play that game, regardless of the rating, until I felt they were mentally or emotionally ready to be exposed to such an awful scene.
This is not rape in a game or anything like that. Speculation or interpretation of events or intent is FAR different than a scene literally displaying such an act.
So, my commentary in this thread has been to clarify, there is no such scene in this game, and any interpretation or speculation is just that. It does not explicitly actually occur in the game.
I don't think it's silly of you to bring this up. In fact I think it's crucial to reexamine nonconsensual stuff in fiction, even kids' fiction. But I don't think I agree with your conclusion here.
It's true: in the real world a forced marriage is more or less explicitly rapey.
But at some point we as a society decided that in light works of fantasy we don't need to really need to follow every single thing to its logical real-world conclusion.
I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.
> I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.
I was surprised to see they only now re-released Super Mario RPG. There's a forced-marriage story arc in that one too, and Mario Odyssey also had an abort-the-wedding mission.
I'm in a weird position where you don't agree with me, but I actually agree with you. Yeah, wedding implies an unwanted consummation, but there's already kidnapping and unwanted bondage (marriage), which are themselves serious crimes and boundary violations. What may or may not happen next isn't really the point since we're already in not-ok territory.
I don't have a dog in this fight, I was mainly arguing against the Setzer-wouldn't-do-that line of thought. He's a wildcard who lives for himself, not a saint. Celes leveraged his own ego against him to challenge him to a game-- and cheat at it to guarantee her success. She didn't need no man to save her. Even then she ended up having to babysit him later.
Take another look at the cast of FF6 and you’ll realize a lot of them aren’t really good people… Locke is a thief, Shadow is a straight up killer for hire, Setzer a degenerate gambler and rapist, Edgar a creepy womanizer, and Celes was gleefully killing people for the empire before changing sides (imagine a Nazi general just deciding she’ll join the Allies instead).
If we extrapolate what Setzer might do "in reality" then yeah, it's hard to argue he wouldn't do that. I don't know we can argue that he definitely would do that, but we can't say he wouldn't.
But in fiction, especially fantastical works like FF6, we can't make claims about the original work (ala "there is rape in FF6") based on those kinds of extrapolations.
I don’t recall anything like that in FF6 either. They even removed part of a scene in a rerelease where Celes is chained up and gets punched by a guard.
There are still plenty of other horrifying things in FF6 though.
You should try the Brave New World mod for FF6, if you ever feel like revisiting it. Vast QoL improvements, among many other welcome and interesting changes.
It's a coin flip with Earthbound, IMO. If we're talking specifically about kids playing through a game, Earthbound would be more relatable though. I think this goes even more so for kids in NA considering Earthbound's cheeky localization and western references.
Celes is tortured, not raped (and its a shame they edited this in subsequent releases to be honest. The empire in the first half of the game loses alot of teeth in these "minor" edits).
I have played through FFVI more than a dozen times, including currently, right now, on my phone, I'm half way through yet another run, and I can't think of anything that invokes rape.
I'm also not really sure where gambling addiction comes in. Yes, Setzer ran a flying gambling airship, but its never really explored in any meaningful way.
This isn't meant to chastise so much as to set expectations aligned with the game.
The rest is true though. It does deal with passing of loved ones, attempted suicide, interspecies relationships (espers, Maduin / Madeline specifically), emotionless killers (Shadow AKA Realms dad, the entire personality of Kefka), abandonment, being able to love after trauma (The Terra story arc), fascism, prejudice (how the Magi are treated), genocide / mass murder for political gain (how the espers are treated), the dark side of technology, free will, the meaning of life, toxic masculinity (Edgar and women...oh boy I see it alot different now) and most importantly, never giving up no matter how hard things are or hopeless they seem.
Honestly, all of that stuff is there, and presented in what is (mostly) a pre-teen / early teen friendly way. If used appropriately, could be a spring board to discuss heavier things in life.
Chrono trigger is a great game, but I don’t think the story actually holds up that well. For one the time travel mechanic is fairly juvenile, and from what I remember the game is missing one of the most important elements of a good time travel story: when you see effects happen before the cause (which presumably is the work of future versions of characters traveling back in time), so you never reach that satisfying loop back where you meet the past version of yourself and realize it was actually yourself that you saw at that point in time. Instead you just do stuff in the past and it results in some changes in the future, but those changes should have actually always been there in the first place if you would have been successful. It employs an alternate timeline type of time travel which is easy to understand but not particularly accurate or mentally stimulating.
I think saying FF6 is just a dark mature adult work does it a disservice; it makes it sound like prestige TV or something.
FF6 is specifically designed like an opera. It's European, fast paced, has a lot of classical music, comic moments, romance, gore, etc. That's not quite the same thing as an art film or Earthbound-inspired indie game about depression.
On a recent trip to Japan, poking about Akihabara, was very cool to see all the various Wizardry boxes for all sorts of different platform versions in glass cases. Abundantly clear that there's a deep love of the franchise!
I've lived in Tokyo for a decade now, and this is indeed a small benefit that I don't see talked about much. If you're the type who wants to get a hold of old games, it's much less prohibitive to do so. I recently bought Mother 2 with box and manual at a local shop for 4490円. DQ games are plentiful, too, and very cheap.
> For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,
I'm curious when that was because, having played RPGs on various systems since they first existed, I don't recall ever having it been considered negative; just another style. I don't mean to discount his feelings about the term/issue at all; he (and those he associated with) clearly felt that way. I just find it interesting that there's such a disconnect there.
Agreed. I have always used it to simply refer to the different style of RPG which developed in Japan. It's not a discriminatory term (at least, not in the pejorative sense) at all IMO. In fact, I prefer JRPGs.
It isn't really a style specific to Japan though, which is the point. Undertale is aesthetically more of a JRPG than Dark Souls. We should just be calling RPGs made in Japan "RPGs."
> Undertale is aesthetically more of a JRPG than Dark Souls.
... and that's exactly why most people consider Undertale a JRPG and basically nobody considers Dark Souls a JRPG?
JRPG has not meant "RPG made in Japan" for a long time; it now means "RPG similar to the ones popularized by Japanese developers in the late 80s to mid 90s." Or "Japanese-style Role Playing Games" for short.
The style originated in (or was at least popularized by) Japan. That's why it's called JRPG. To address your examples: Undertale is a JRPG, Dark Souls is not (it's a WRPG). It's a genre, not a country of origin stamp.
I think it is easier to say it is "just another style" when you're not part of the "other" group & when your identity isn't being boiled down to a particular style of menu systems and combat.
Also important is that WWII brought a lot of discrimination on Japanese people from the West & US in particular. This was an era where movies, like Back to the Future Part II and Robocop 3 kind of went out of their way to portray Japanese people as evil. Today, it might seem like jumping at shadows, but for someone in their 50s who was developing games in the early 90s, this kind of discrimination would be more fresh in their mind, so getting that label from the US media could seem bad.
Today, two way communication is easier, thanks to the Internet, so these confusion points are largely cleared up, and if you watch the video where that quote comes from, Yoshida pretty much goes on to say as much. This isn't brought up in the parent poster's linked article though.
I remember when it was "console style rpg" and "pc style rpg". It just so happens that "pc style rpg" games started getting released on consoles too, and somehow took over the RPG label.
I've never heard these terms. You had either "western RPG" or "computer RPG" for technical/system-focused games like Ultima, Baldur's Gate, Diablo, Fallout, etc or "Japanese RPG" for story-focused games like Final Fantasy, Dragon's Quest, Terranigma, Star Ocean, etc.
RPG originally referred to the former, as they came first. JRPG was an offshoot of it, from Japanese developers influenced by the genre but putting their own spin on it. So there is no "take over"; just the offshoot fading.
>Unfortunately, I don’t know of a similarly easy and legal way to play the Dragon Quest games today.
As far as english releases goes:
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VIII have been released for Android and iOS. There is no landscape mode and no controller support but they are still very much playable. Apart from VIII which is a 3D game and the portrait mode is very iffy, serviceable but not great at all. But as far as legality goes that's the only english digital release.
>To be sure, there were Americans who found all of the barriers to entry into these deeply foreign worlds to be more bracing than intimidating, who took on the challenge of meeting the games on their own terms, often emerging with a lifelong passion for all things Japanese. At this stage, though, they were the distinct minority. In Japan and the United States alike, the conventional wisdom through the mid-1990s was that JRPGs didn’t and couldn’t sell well overseas; this was regarded as a fact of life as fundamental as the vagaries of climate. (Thanks to this belief, none of the Final Fantasy games to date had been released in Europe at all.) It would take Final Fantasy VII and a dramatic, controversial switch of platforms on the part of Square to change that. But once those things happened… look out. The JRPG would conquer the world yet.
That, and a weird indie project Nintendo had published focused around multiplayer battling and trading called... Pocket Monsters. You may know it as Pokemon.
Pokemon itself was co-developed by two different companies: Game Freak (an indie videogame 'zine turned game developer) and Creatures, a company created from the smoldering ashes of APE, Shigesato Itoi's game development firm that had made a little game called EarthBound. EarthBound was lovingly[0] translated by Nintendo, because it had already taken Japan by storm, it was very well written, and most notably, it was hilariously American[1].
Unfortunately it sold horribly, because Nintendo had made some pretty terrible marketing decisions. First off, the tagline for the game in the US was "This game stinks", because someone at Nintendo wanted to ride the wave of early 90s Nickelodeon gross-out cartoons. EarthBound is not at all like Ren and Stimpy[2]. Second, Nintendo decided to sell the game alongside a strategy guide, which while cool, increased the cost of the game. To make matters even worse, this wasn't even the first time Nintendo had considered doing this. EarthBound is actually a sequel to a game on the NES that Nintendo had fully translated, and then cancelled at the last minute due to worries about production cost. Why? The NES version of EarthBound[3] would have also shipped with a strategy guide, because Nintendo was hellbent on patronizing American players.
Possibly because of this, Nintendo held back on releasing Pokemon for like three years. It didn't even sell well in Japan initially, but some rumors about unobtainable Pokemon that you could glitch the game to get[4] and an animated cartoon based on the game helped it out. The cartoon got licensed to 4Kids in America before the games even got released here, and it did wonders to sell people on the game[5]. What really helped is that the cartoon would actually teach you some of the more obtuse mechanics of Pokemon. No need to give someone the strategy guide if they already know that Eevee plus fire stone equals Flareon.
[0] Minus a handful of annoying content edits for the US market which don't really impact the story
[1] As in, the game was written from the perspective of American kids in a modern-day suburban environment. Also, it was hilarious.
[2] To be fair, there is one section of the game that has you literally fighting a giant pile of vomit. All the marketing focused around just that.
[3] Nintendo now calls this EarthBound Beginnings in the US, because they released their translated ROM on Wii U Virtual Console and later Nintendo Switch Online. It is quite possibly the only NES RPG worth playing today.
[4] Mew
[5] And also gave 4Kids false confidence that they could license any cartoon made for young adults, edit it down for small children, and make bank. This would later bury the company in production cost as they spent way too much money photoshopping out all the guns and text from Yu-Gi-Oh! and One Piece to make it 'kid friendly'.
> What really helped is that the cartoon would actually teach you some of the more obtuse mechanics of Pokemon. No need to give someone the strategy guide if they already know that Eevee plus fire stone equals Flareon.
A decade before Pokemon existed, I went to see the movie The Wizard, a Fred Savage vehicle that was basically a 2 hour Nintendo commercial. And in the lobby of the theater as I was leaving, there was a booth selling subscriptions for the brand-new Nintendo Power magazine. The first issue came with a free copy of Dragon Warrior for the NES.
So Nintendo was willing to bet big on JRPGs long before Pokemon came out.
Nintendo also dedicated an issue of Nintendo Power to a full strategy guide for Final Fantasy, including a surprising amount of new (heavily Westernized) art depicting various scenes in the game. I read that issue front to back many times before I ever had a chance to play the actual game. (In retrospect it gave some bad advice, because the authors were unaware that the game had numerous bugs that made equipment and spells work differently than intended. But the maps were very) useful!
Go play Star Ocean, Chrono Trigger, FFVI, Earthbound, G.O.D. Mezame yo
and Pokémon Crystal (an enhanced one), or some good Pokémon Red/Firered romhack.
With these you played most of the tropes of the genre.
And yet there's still so much more... tactics rpgs like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea, dungeon rpgs like Etrian Odyssey or Labyrinth of Touhou, or action rpgs like Seiken Densetsu 3 or Nier Automata.
Always debatable where "JRPG" ends and some other genre begins, of course, but the great part of the genre is how widely varied things can be.
The games of course don't call themselves JRPGs; game series in Japan tend to make up their own genre names, and each individual Tales Of game actually claims to be a different one they invented for it.
Some of the developers are very sensitive about this term. Recently for FFXVI the director went on a press tour talking about he made it Western by making the dev team watch Game of Thrones and in one interview essentially said JRPG is a slur invented by Western games journalists. Some of whom definitely spent the 2000s saying all Japanese games were impenetrably wacky anime bullshit.
Slur? I doubt it. Series like the Shin Megami Tensei ones were pretty different to AD&D based Western RPG's. And Chrono Trigger it's a mix between Toriyama artwork with Square's design.
It's like Poker and 'Mus'. Both are card games, but the mechanics are pretty different.
JRPG's were born in Japan and thus they are called JRPG because they are built on that design/aesthetics. Is not derogatory. For instance, my country, Spain, has lots of comics and books based on slapstick and the society being built on roguery (picaresca) with crude/sneaking hacks to solve issues and backstabbings eveywhere. That's a trope since the 16th Century. And nobody would say Spanish 'picaresca' it's xenophobic even if a Southern French or an Italian writes a novel around that genre. Easier on the Italian because of the obvious reasons.
Emulation is legal in the USA and the copyright act allows those in US jurisdiction to make copies needed to run software, which includes dumping a ROM from a cartridge.
> In 2012, critic Nick Simberg wondered at “how willing we were to sit down on the couch and fight the same ten enemies over and over for hours, just building up gold and experience points”; he compared Dragon Quest to “a child’s first crayon drawing, stuck with a magnet to the fridge.”
Because the draw is the challenge and the decision making. One could certainly describe bowling as "throwing a ball down the same lane repeatedly", but that's missing the point.
> Before that scene in Final Fantasy VII, Hironobu Sakaguchi served up a shocker of equal magnitude in Final Fantasy VI. Halfway through the game, the bad guys win despite your best efforts and the world effectively ends, leaving your party wandering through a post-apocalyptic World of Ruin like the characters in a Harlan Ellison story. The effect this had on some players’ emotions could verge on traumatizing — heady stuff for a videogame on a console still best known worldwide as the cuddly home of Super Mario. For many of its young players, Final Fantasy VI was their first close encounter with the sort of literature that attempts to move beyond tropes to truly, thoughtfully engage with the human condition.
I do believe FF6 is probably the greatest JRPG ever made, but I also think the most emotionally charged moment in the FF franchise happened in FF4. Palom and Porom.
Live A Live, Super Mario RPG and Seiken Densetsu are also solid contenders. It really depends on what you wanted out of an RPG at the time - pretty much all of SquareSoft's output on SNES was magnificent.
For my money, FFVI is the best game of the lot. It's a very close call but I just prefer the story it tells and the way it does it. You'll certainly find people out there who disagree, though!
Of course I enjoy leveling up and choosing skills and exploring dungeons, but plenty of games implement those same mechanics at least as well as DQ. For me, the distinguishing feature of the Dragon Quest franchise (today*) is its charm: The charismatic cast of endearing enemies. The regional accents of the NPCs. The wordplay, the art, the music. Even the venerable hanging leather sack is enough to make me smile.
*I say "today" because earlier translations were not very good, as the article mentions. As I recall, even DQ7 on PS1 was pretty rough. But the English localization of DQ8 in 2005 was a masterpiece, and I think this is the one that set the bar for the future of the franchise (including remakes of earlier entries).
I thought the NES translations were fine. They were a little more formal than the tone of more recent translations, but they felt very friendly and literate compared to the terse messages you got from the contemporary Final Fantasy games.
Not mentioned in the article is that Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball, is the character designer for Dragon Quest. This is a big part of the appeal for many and I’m certain there are people who today pick up the games for that alone. The weaker enemies in particular have a kind of whimsical endearing appeal that makes them distinct from other franchises; you can imagine the personality of a dinosaur or demon by looking at the sprite. Which, if you’re familiar with Toriyama’s other work, gives it a sort of levity to the early portions of the story when you’re just a bight-eyed kid going on an adventure.
91 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadZSNES gave me some of the best memories of my childhood.
The coolest bit was that he had soldered a real SNES controller so that it worked with those old-school trapezoid 9-pin keyboard input things. I still think that is pure magic, to this day.
Game port had more pins.
You arent majing a very good pitch for this being a family fruendly game...
These events happen, and kids do need to know about them in order to prepare for them. But there's enough abstraction to make it not be gratuitious or traumatic. It's like having Fred Rogers teach kids about this stuff versus George R.R. Martin.
"Family-friendly" doesn't mean avoiding difficult subjects altogether. Even the Bible freely explores all of these topics. Going to church is literally a family event.
Have you read most faerie tales, or Bible stories for that matter? Or watched children's television? Or grown up in a less than perfect household?
These are simply the themes of real life, and only rare privilege allows one to reach adolescence blissfully ignorant of life's sharp edges. Better to have the lessons delivered by a compelling narrative that gives children agency then by real life which offers them none.
A sensitive individual takes seriously pleas for help from a vulnerable population at risk of being wiped out, while others mock the individual’s concerns as fake, and actively endanger the same population, echoing Western reactions to persecution of Jews and eventually the Holocaust in the lead-up to and during much of WWII (Horton Hears a Who)
Its full of rape and murder! great for kids!
As a parent to young children I did not reach this conclusion and would love for my son to play this masterpiece. None of the parents I know are like this either.
I actually feel like this mindset was much more prevalent in the 90s than it is nowadays.
I would like to point out, though, that there are plenty of games that the English-speaking world didn't get, at least not on their initial release, and there is one in particular that I want to highlight here as I don't see it get the fanfare I think its owed.
That game is Dragon Quest V, which takes a sampling of the mature themes you highlighted from Final Fantasy VI (and then some), but has coated them in a layer of whimsy that gives the whole experience the feeling of an oddly compelling fairy tale. I highly recommend it if you still have the time and patience for JRPGs. (And if you don't, the movie Dragon Quest Your Story is available in English on Netflix and is based on Dragon Quest V, albeit with a bit of a controversial addition towards the end.)
I'd also like to highlight Earthbound as a curiously mature JRPG for the time. I like to cite it as an example of a game that is more about the journey than the destination. It's not about saving the world, it's about painting cows blue and the third strongest mole and bubble monkeys. But it's also about accepting the world as it is, facing things that you might not be ready to face, the impermanence of everything, and making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then.
I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling. The "Yakuza: Like a Dragon" game had a similar vibe. The working title for it might as well have been "Friendship is Magic."
> making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then
The lesson you were supposed to take away from it was to stop and call your dad every now and then.
That's a good catch, thanks!
I also think the dad was intended to be a commentary on Japanese salaryman culture, and now that I'm older, from the dad's perspective I see another lesson about all the things you might miss if you spend all your time working.
Totally. Check out a few episodes of the "Old Enough" show on Netflix and you'll see the same; dad/mom is stuck running the restaurant while the kid goes on the epic errand. Adults have responsibilities and it was touching that the game respected that instead of vilifying him as an "absentee" parent. Childhood is your journey; your parents are just there to provide air support.
The game's director and writer, Shigesato Itoi, is a creative writer by trade, so he brought a fresh perspective, and frankly, is a better writer than most who work on videogames. Being an outsider, he also wasn't bogged down by common video game tropes.
My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a self-admitted arbitrary obstacle, and the rolling HP counters, which cleverly introduced an element of real-time to an otherwise entirely turn-based battle system.
I would also like to once again shout out the third strongest mole as the most brilliant ludo-narrative joke in all of gaming.
IIRC, the solution was equally silly-- a literal pencil eraser.
I remember the game having a lot of cheeky David Bowie references too. Starman is an obvious one as a recurrent character, and correctly figured that the fight with Carbon Dog wasn't going to end so easily.
While I'm still a sucker for FFVI and FFVII, Mother 3 kinda achieves the impossible in many ways. It re-develops the themes from it's predecessor into a more accessible, more nuanced and funnier story. Characters get hurt, die, yell curse-words and contend with progressively more horrifying environments. Tonally it almost feels like Stand By Me, elevated to cartoonishly-evil stakes from the start. Best of all, the morals are immediately accessible to the player instead of being hidden as lore like most RPGs are want to do. For younger audiences, there should be no confusion about who is right and wrong and why they are that way. While Final Fantasy is written better overall, I feel like younger players would take so much more away from Mother 3. It really captures the "coming of age" storytelling that has been developed since Mother 1.
After getting to the end of that game, you kinda understand why Itoi doesn't want another game like that. The bar is simply too high, even by the standards of modern consoles.
There even was a time I was under the illusion that I could experience all 'major' games in a reasonable timeframe after they came out.
And then the video games market blew up for good during the 10s and now there's so ludicrously many of them...
On the other hand, no way in hell does someone like Kefka invent something called a Slave Crown and then just use it to force someone to pilot a magic mecha.
The grounds for "FF6 has rape in it!" seems super super shaky. It feels like the sort of thing where people are decided that Satsuki & Mae from Totoro are really "dead and ghosts" during the entirety of the movie. It's silly.
Don't scare people away from a classic for things that aren't true.
Did we play the same game? However you define "rape," Setzer was an amoral gambler and rogue whose idea of romance was kidnapping and forced marriage. His relationship with Darril was mostly one of sport. He planned to kidnap the opera singer, was duped into kidnapping Celes instead, and was only willing to help them save the world or whatever if Celes married him. She only got out of that by challenging him and literally beating him at his own game (gambling).
Setzer was misogyny incarnate...Darril, someone he had an actual "relationship" with, was only ever his girlfriend. The opera singer, he wanted to marry on sight. Dude's priorities were seriously fucked.
If I heard as a parent that a game has rape in it, I am thinking "there is a scene in which a character is raped", and there is no way I would let my kids play that game, regardless of the rating, until I felt they were mentally or emotionally ready to be exposed to such an awful scene.
This is not rape in a game or anything like that. Speculation or interpretation of events or intent is FAR different than a scene literally displaying such an act.
So, my commentary in this thread has been to clarify, there is no such scene in this game, and any interpretation or speculation is just that. It does not explicitly actually occur in the game.
It's true: in the real world a forced marriage is more or less explicitly rapey.
But at some point we as a society decided that in light works of fantasy we don't need to really need to follow every single thing to its logical real-world conclusion.
I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.
I was surprised to see they only now re-released Super Mario RPG. There's a forced-marriage story arc in that one too, and Mario Odyssey also had an abort-the-wedding mission.
I'm in a weird position where you don't agree with me, but I actually agree with you. Yeah, wedding implies an unwanted consummation, but there's already kidnapping and unwanted bondage (marriage), which are themselves serious crimes and boundary violations. What may or may not happen next isn't really the point since we're already in not-ok territory.
I don't have a dog in this fight, I was mainly arguing against the Setzer-wouldn't-do-that line of thought. He's a wildcard who lives for himself, not a saint. Celes leveraged his own ego against him to challenge him to a game-- and cheat at it to guarantee her success. She didn't need no man to save her. Even then she ended up having to babysit him later.
But in fiction, especially fantastical works like FF6, we can't make claims about the original work (ala "there is rape in FF6") based on those kinds of extrapolations.
There are still plenty of other horrifying things in FF6 though.
source: played both at ~10-11 years of age.
I have played through FFVI more than a dozen times, including currently, right now, on my phone, I'm half way through yet another run, and I can't think of anything that invokes rape.
I'm also not really sure where gambling addiction comes in. Yes, Setzer ran a flying gambling airship, but its never really explored in any meaningful way.
This isn't meant to chastise so much as to set expectations aligned with the game.
The rest is true though. It does deal with passing of loved ones, attempted suicide, interspecies relationships (espers, Maduin / Madeline specifically), emotionless killers (Shadow AKA Realms dad, the entire personality of Kefka), abandonment, being able to love after trauma (The Terra story arc), fascism, prejudice (how the Magi are treated), genocide / mass murder for political gain (how the espers are treated), the dark side of technology, free will, the meaning of life, toxic masculinity (Edgar and women...oh boy I see it alot different now) and most importantly, never giving up no matter how hard things are or hopeless they seem.
Honestly, all of that stuff is there, and presented in what is (mostly) a pre-teen / early teen friendly way. If used appropriately, could be a spring board to discuss heavier things in life.
FF6 is specifically designed like an opera. It's European, fast paced, has a lot of classical music, comic moments, romance, gore, etc. That's not quite the same thing as an art film or Earthbound-inspired indie game about depression.
And the villain is a magical clown.
[0]https://www.polygon.com/23677598/jrpg-label-history-othering...
[1]https://twitter.com/JusticeKazzy_
I'm curious when that was because, having played RPGs on various systems since they first existed, I don't recall ever having it been considered negative; just another style. I don't mean to discount his feelings about the term/issue at all; he (and those he associated with) clearly felt that way. I just find it interesting that there's such a disconnect there.
... and that's exactly why most people consider Undertale a JRPG and basically nobody considers Dark Souls a JRPG?
JRPG has not meant "RPG made in Japan" for a long time; it now means "RPG similar to the ones popularized by Japanese developers in the late 80s to mid 90s." Or "Japanese-style Role Playing Games" for short.
Also important is that WWII brought a lot of discrimination on Japanese people from the West & US in particular. This was an era where movies, like Back to the Future Part II and Robocop 3 kind of went out of their way to portray Japanese people as evil. Today, it might seem like jumping at shadows, but for someone in their 50s who was developing games in the early 90s, this kind of discrimination would be more fresh in their mind, so getting that label from the US media could seem bad.
Today, two way communication is easier, thanks to the Internet, so these confusion points are largely cleared up, and if you watch the video where that quote comes from, Yoshida pretty much goes on to say as much. This isn't brought up in the parent poster's linked article though.
RPG originally referred to the former, as they came first. JRPG was an offshoot of it, from Japanese developers influenced by the genre but putting their own spin on it. So there is no "take over"; just the offshoot fading.
As far as english releases goes:
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VIII have been released for Android and iOS. There is no landscape mode and no controller support but they are still very much playable. Apart from VIII which is a 3D game and the portrait mode is very iffy, serviceable but not great at all. But as far as legality goes that's the only english digital release.
I, II, III are on Switch.
That, and a weird indie project Nintendo had published focused around multiplayer battling and trading called... Pocket Monsters. You may know it as Pokemon.
Pokemon itself was co-developed by two different companies: Game Freak (an indie videogame 'zine turned game developer) and Creatures, a company created from the smoldering ashes of APE, Shigesato Itoi's game development firm that had made a little game called EarthBound. EarthBound was lovingly[0] translated by Nintendo, because it had already taken Japan by storm, it was very well written, and most notably, it was hilariously American[1].
Unfortunately it sold horribly, because Nintendo had made some pretty terrible marketing decisions. First off, the tagline for the game in the US was "This game stinks", because someone at Nintendo wanted to ride the wave of early 90s Nickelodeon gross-out cartoons. EarthBound is not at all like Ren and Stimpy[2]. Second, Nintendo decided to sell the game alongside a strategy guide, which while cool, increased the cost of the game. To make matters even worse, this wasn't even the first time Nintendo had considered doing this. EarthBound is actually a sequel to a game on the NES that Nintendo had fully translated, and then cancelled at the last minute due to worries about production cost. Why? The NES version of EarthBound[3] would have also shipped with a strategy guide, because Nintendo was hellbent on patronizing American players.
Possibly because of this, Nintendo held back on releasing Pokemon for like three years. It didn't even sell well in Japan initially, but some rumors about unobtainable Pokemon that you could glitch the game to get[4] and an animated cartoon based on the game helped it out. The cartoon got licensed to 4Kids in America before the games even got released here, and it did wonders to sell people on the game[5]. What really helped is that the cartoon would actually teach you some of the more obtuse mechanics of Pokemon. No need to give someone the strategy guide if they already know that Eevee plus fire stone equals Flareon.
[0] Minus a handful of annoying content edits for the US market which don't really impact the story
[1] As in, the game was written from the perspective of American kids in a modern-day suburban environment. Also, it was hilarious.
[2] To be fair, there is one section of the game that has you literally fighting a giant pile of vomit. All the marketing focused around just that.
[3] Nintendo now calls this EarthBound Beginnings in the US, because they released their translated ROM on Wii U Virtual Console and later Nintendo Switch Online. It is quite possibly the only NES RPG worth playing today.
[4] Mew
[5] And also gave 4Kids false confidence that they could license any cartoon made for young adults, edit it down for small children, and make bank. This would later bury the company in production cost as they spent way too much money photoshopping out all the guns and text from Yu-Gi-Oh! and One Piece to make it 'kid friendly'.
Does that make Pokemon an ARG?
So Nintendo was willing to bet big on JRPGs long before Pokemon came out.
With these you played most of the tropes of the genre.
Always debatable where "JRPG" ends and some other genre begins, of course, but the great part of the genre is how widely varied things can be.
Some of the developers are very sensitive about this term. Recently for FFXVI the director went on a press tour talking about he made it Western by making the dev team watch Game of Thrones and in one interview essentially said JRPG is a slur invented by Western games journalists. Some of whom definitely spent the 2000s saying all Japanese games were impenetrably wacky anime bullshit.
It's like Poker and 'Mus'. Both are card games, but the mechanics are pretty different.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus_(card_game)
https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-16-producer-naoki-yo...
Because the draw is the challenge and the decision making. One could certainly describe bowling as "throwing a ball down the same lane repeatedly", but that's missing the point.
I do believe FF6 is probably the greatest JRPG ever made, but I also think the most emotionally charged moment in the FF franchise happened in FF4. Palom and Porom.
For my money, FFVI is the best game of the lot. It's a very close call but I just prefer the story it tells and the way it does it. You'll certainly find people out there who disagree, though!
But FFVI was special.
*I say "today" because earlier translations were not very good, as the article mentions. As I recall, even DQ7 on PS1 was pretty rough. But the English localization of DQ8 in 2005 was a masterpiece, and I think this is the one that set the bar for the future of the franchise (including remakes of earlier entries).