Greetings everyone! Welcome to the first edition of my exclusive column, where I delve into the captivating realm of JRPGs from my perspective and personal lens.
I was inspired by the insightful Emma Oakman and her treasure trove of indie knowledge (seriously, check out her indie recommendations at your leisure). However, I found myself contemplating the theme for this inaugural issue.
Obscure JRPG recommendations? Nah, everyone knows pretty much every JRPG game at this point. My own philosophy when reviewing JRPGs? Even that changes depending on my next JRPG fixation (Metaphor: Refantazio, don’t let me down). While pondering potential topics, I stumbled upon an intriguing article titled “Culture is Stuck.”
As the name suggests, the author makes a point that culture has stagnated in creativity in recent years largely because of the consolidation and centralization of power and culture. We see remakes and sequels and too many things that try to look like other things so that the consumer would feel more secure and safe when picking things instead of taking risks as consumers, investors, and creators.
Feels relevant? It’s a truth that resonates in today’s gaming climate. JRPGs have been caught up in this problem for some time now.
The Desire To Conform
Despite the genre’s breadth and variety, JRPGs experienced a form of centralization over the years, albeit a bit more invisible and socially driven.
First, the way some common elements propagated over time was too obvious to ignore. The developers of games like Grandia 3, Rogue Galaxy, and Wild Arms wanted you to explore their worlds in a plane similar to Final Fantasy 7’s High Wind. And when Final Fantasy 8 tried to incorporate a trading card mini-game like Triple Triad, it was unsurprising to see games like Digimon World 3 and Trails following suit with their own made-up “Yugioh-ish” designs. Even Persona 5’s HUD that pops out of the characters in battle is no stranger to other games now that Trails of Cold Steel and Little Town Hero have it.
Other recurring and more obvious macro-decisions became prevalent in many JRPGs as the years went by: rehashed story tropes, elemental dungeons, bosses that rely heavily on buffs and debuffs, or identical skill systems as in Digital Devil Saga copying FFX’s sphere grid. Once a game–mostly a square game–decided to do something in the past, it immediately got added to the checklist of what a JRPG should implement.
I am not sure where it started, but somewhere down the road, it felt like JRPGs got lost in wanting to look like something else and reusing what worked for someone else instead of expressing their own unique identity and implementing what’s best for their stories; a certain pervasive tendency toward conformity or conventionality.
What’s even more peculiar to me is how fans perpetuate the centralization and sameness of these games. For an Egyptian outsider like me, who used to get games randomly ten years after they were released, depending on what was imported here, I never had a rose-colored “gaming childhood” that I wanted every new game to worship and obey. Despite not knowing their roots, I appreciated games for their own sake and fell in love with those who tried to break the ‘normal’ mold of classic Japanese RPG games or gaming in general.
Still, I kept seeing discussions on various Western message boards about the need for JRPGs to preserve certain elements. For example, there’s a strange and extreme aversion to Chrono Cross’s element system, Final Fantasy X-2’s Dress-Sphering, and the fact that Final Fantasy 13 exists at all simply because they don’t fit into the mold created by previously established games.
Don’t mistake my words for a bias towards the current JRPG ecosystem. In fact, I dislike JRPGs that try to normalize themselves and fall into the comfort zone of “action RPGs” and whatever suits the flow of modern gamers. Names like Valkyrie Elysium, Neo: The World Ends With You, and even the Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Final Fantasy 16 come to mind as series entries that went in that conventional direction. But that doesn’t mean I want JRPGs to stay in the past forever or that I think that “golden age JRPGs” were without flaws or caveats.
I simply dislike conformity. I admired JRPGs even without knowing what was normal or appropriate for them, just because they could take me to cool new worlds and offer mythical and transcendent experiences that didn’t seem to exist anywhere else, on top of new takes on the usual turn-based combat like Baten-Kaitos’s card battles or Shadow Hearts’ criminally overlooked Judgement Ring.
The stories and locations and case-by-case innovations of these games were enough to break the mold of my mundane everyday life, and so breaking the mold became my calling when seeking out JRPGs, not revering the existence of a mold.
The Name Wanderlust
Disliking the boring and mundane is why I chose the term Wanderlust for my column. Coming from the German words wandern (“to wander”) and lust (“desire”), Wanderlust simply refers to a strong desire for adventure or travel. It is usually associated with a longing for new experiences and cultures and a desire to explore beyond one’s comfort zone. In other words, it’s the complete opposite of sticking to one’s roots.
Even if I came across a new game with a system or story that I really liked, I wouldn’t want to replay that experience because it would lose what made it precious and valuable in the first place. An example of what I mean is Chrono Cross. Scriptwriter Masato Kato had everything set up for success if he had just copied Trigger’s formula, but he decided to throw it all away to try something different.
“But, like I mentioned earlier, since then, a fair amount of time has passed, and the hardware we work with is also different. We’re not so weak nor cheap as to try to make something exactly the same as Trigger. What we were aiming for was a new kind of fun for a new console, while still maintaining the feel and atmosphere of Trigger…” said Masato in an interview with PROCYON Studio, a music production company headed by composer Yasunori Mitsuda of the Chrono and Xeno series fame.
Others may disagree, but I completely agree with his opinion. In fact, since reading his opinion, I have started ordering different drinks every time I go out with friends, just for that “new kind of fun” or “Wanderlust” feeling. It was never about a formula or a system that makes a JRPG what it is, at least for me.
The Five Seasons of Kirite
To drive my point home, I present an unconventional but compelling recommendation: Yasunori Mitsuda’s “Kirite.” Released in 2005, this music album, accompanied by a story written by Masato Kato in the official Vinyl booklet, immerses you in a magical world that only exists in the imagination of the listener.
The way to experience this work is to select a track from the album, such as “Forest of Lapis Lazuli,” and then play the soundtrack alongside the text you are reading. When the ambient sounds and characteristic Celtic approach to the music composition seep into your mind, you will feel the story unfolding alongside the text, and the image of the forest will get more vivid the more you keep listening.
Both the written material and the lyrics in the song enhance the reader’s understanding of the characters who are at the center of this work and their surroundings, as this translated excerpt from the story shows:
“I wonder how long I will wander in this beautiful, lonely, ephemeral labyrinth of seven shimmering colors.” says the character narrating the story text. He also says, “There was a tiny glimpse of midsummer blue shining brightly through the trees, like a treasure that would never be reached. From beyond, I felt as if the beautiful song of birds was flowing. It was like a mother’s gentle lullaby that I heard as a child, lost forever.”
The translation was done in Japanese by the author of this article.
This is exactly what I felt when I visited Eruyt Village in Final Fantasy 12 and Halure in Tales of Vesperia. It’s a feeling that’s hard to put into words, but when I touched Masato’s words in Kirite, I thought those were indeed my feelings about the song. The words rang very true to my experiences when playing JRPGs. Heck, I could only relate to these words and melodies because I’ve played JRPGs. In a way, Kirite was not a JRPG, but at the same time, it was.
Because it had Wanderlust.
The fact that Masato and Mitsuda were able to convey these feelings even without the “normal” components that define a JRPG and even without tapping into the gaming medium itself made any discussion of what defines a JRPG pale in comparison. The only thing I hope for in the future is not to see more JRPGs using cheap molds to regurgitate previous popular experiences but a Wanderlust of their own making. If they do, I definitely will be writing about them here in my own little corner.
