Fallout 3 tidbits

Brother None

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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Going with peripheral news here. First, Final Fantasy dev Yusuke Naora expresses his bafflement at Fallout 3's success and the existence of the term jRPG (thanks Ausir).<blockquote>The tremendous success of Fallout 3 seems to have made a particularly profound impact on Naora. "When we make a game that sells two million copies, that's always seemed like a tremendous success for us," he says. "But now we hear about Fallout 3 selling four million in just a few weeks, and it really surprises us. This is a game that doesn't even look like what we in Japan consider an 'RPG,' yet it's incredibly popular."

"Until about a year ago, we'd never even heard the term 'J-RPG' to distinguish our RPGs from Western games," he admits. Now he seems determined to sort out the defining differences between the two schools of RPG design. Does it mean stronger female characters? A first-person perspective? More realism? </blockquote>With all due respect to an industry veteran, one can only speculate on how touch he is with non-Asian markets if he does not even know the term jRPG.

Back in comic-land, Shamus Young, known for his commentaries, comedic brilliance and seasickness while reading NMA has made Fallout 3 a featured game for his screenshot-cap webcomic Stolen Pixels, highlighting on such things as dialogue and the tendency to "dumb down" PC franchises for console (and the "special" nature of the Fallout "debate").
 
I was findind those comics rather silly... until I read the one about the perks, I LOLed there! then I started cryin' though...
 
So the japanese game developers are only now finding out that the term jprg exist ?! :(

Wait until they find out the jrpgs aren't rpgs and wrpgs/crpgs are only lite rpgs, meaning rpg elements in what what are essentially
action-adventure-micromanagement/TBS-adventure-micromanagement games.

The shock will be something.
 
Excuse me, I call bullshit. You have to be really, really dense to not see the difference between WRPGs and JRPGs. And they've heard about it just a year ago? Bullshit, I don't even believe Japanese gamers don't see the difference.

In most JRPGs you play a pre-defined character with very little customization and few choices that have consequences at best. Dialogue is often non-existent.
How is that even remotely similar to WRPGs?
I'm not saying that "lol jrpgs suk" because I'm replaying Breath of Fire 4 now and it's still good (better than FFs at least) but you really have to be an idiot if you can't tell the difference between FF7 and Arcanum.
YES YOU DUMBASSES, ARCANUM DIFFERS FROM FF7 BECAUSE IT IS IN FPP AND HAS STRONGER FEMALE CHARACTERS
 
Black said:
ARCANUM DIFFERS FROM FF7 BECAUSE IT IS IN FPP AND HAS STRONGER FEMALE CHARACTERS
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No shit Sherlock, Arcanum is way better than FF7. My female Elf wizard sucks the life out of anyone she met. (quench life...that is. :ugly:)
And what the fuck is with all the animation in JRPG game!? 5 minutes, a cut scene. 5 minutes later, another cut scene...if this is the trend of 'gaming is like watching a movie', those game developers should head to the silver screen and stay the fuck out of game industry. People don't buy games to watch it, they play it.
 
*ahrrrm*

Western gamers buy games to play them. Japanese games are typically very much about the story more than anything else, you only have to look at the proliferation of VNs to see that. Japanese games are stories with intermittent cases of gameplay, or they're SHMUPS with lengthy dialogue between bouts of shooting millions of enemies and weaving through attack patterns.

I just happen to enjoy both Japanese and Western games.
 
Now I feel inclined to make a first-person jRPG about a spike-haired strong woman who is chosen to wield the sacred sword of whatever and defeat the ancient evil god. It will be linear as shit and riddled with those yes/yes choices.

Do these people really design games for a living yet can't tell the difference between the "play your own character" and "play this story of a guy we already made up for you" approaches?

Black said:
And they've heard about it just a year ago? Bullshit, I don't even believe Japanese gamers don't see the difference.
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It's possible they never got to see most wRPGs out there in the first place. Japan is pretty insular (ba-dum, pish) when it comes to gaming, western-made consoles and franchises usually have a hard time selling there, let alone becoming popular.

That said, it's probably not the consumers' fault, but the suits'. Just like we have companies catering to what they believe sells more (dumbed down, aimed at casual gamers, FPSs galore, etc), I'd guess Japan suffers from the same myopic sort of businessmen that always bet on the winning horse.
 
Would it be JRPG? Or NRPG?

It's not hard to believe Takai doesn't know the difference. Why should he care? They make games the way they like them over in Japan and haven't cared too deeply about changing them for western tastes. They think about their own market first when designing games so there isn't much desire to look outside their own borders. In fact, we're lucky to get the few JRPG's that get localised for western markets as is.

One can only hope that they don't examine Bethesda's "successes" too closely. I, for one, happen to enjoy Japanese style role playing games. The last thing we need to have happen is for them to ditch what makes their brand of RPGs special and unique in order to try and cash in on the type of games Bethesda makes.

The less Hiroshi Takai learns about the crap that gets churned out over here the better. If it means he stays out of touch with western markets, I'm all for it.
 
Do these people really design games for a living yet can't tell the difference between the "play your own character" and "play this story of a guy we already made up for you" approaches?
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Well, The Witcher and Planescape: Torment have predefined characters, but are still western RPGs.
 
This is a game that doesn't even look like what we in Japan consider an 'RPG,'
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Oh god.
MUST. RESIST. CRAPPY. JOKE.

Ausir said:
Well, The Witcher and Planescape: Torment have predefined characters, but are still western RPGs.
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I'd say it makes it wildly different when you're actually given many dialogue choices that can define your character and provides some consequences, rather than listening to predefined conversations with a rare Yes/No option here and there.
 
I don't think he was necessarily saying "I see no difference between Western and Japanese RPGs", I think he was simply saying that he had never heard of the term "JRPG" to distinguish between the two.

Hell, I'm a big fan of JRPGs, and I'd never heard of the term til I ran across it a few years ago on a message board and asked someone WTF a "JRPG" was. I had a hunch it meant Japanese RPG - but I never saw the need to use a specific term to describe them. I always figured it was obvious whether or not you were talking about a Western RPG or a Japanese RPG and I'd never really thought about the differences between the two subgenres.

But yeah, maybe he's a bit out of touch with the Western market if he's surprised at how well Fallout 3 has sold. I knew it would sell like hotcakes before I even knew anything about the game, if for no other reason than this: Oblivion has legions of fans, and those fans will buy whatever Bethesda and the mainstream media tell them they should buy. Fallout 3 has been the "game of the year" since Bethesda first announced it was in development.
 
My only real problem with jRPGs is that they claim they are RPGs in the first place. If they change the name simply to "adventure games" it would be a whole lot better. Because that's what most jRPGs I've played feel like - an adventure game with annoying combat here and there. (and this doesn't count for jRPGS only. Planescape should have been a damn adventure game as well, since at times the RPG elements just slowed down the progress of the story)
 
Jenx said:
My only real problem with jRPGs is that they claim they are RPGs in the first place. If they change the name simply to "adventure games" it would be a whole lot better. Because that's what most jRPGs I've played feel like - an adventure game with annoying combat here and there. (and this doesn't count for jRPGS only. Planescape should have been a damn adventure game as well, since at times the RPG elements just slowed down the progress of the story)
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Yeah, Japanese RPGs are very story-driven. My biggest gripe with JRPGs is that the majority of them tend to lead you from place to place by the nose (some worse than others). Still, I love the old-school, turn-based, random combat that a lot of JRPGs still use, as well as games with job systems so you can get into some fairly deep character customization.

The worst JRPG I've played in recent memory was the first Xenosaga game - it's like watching an anime that lets you play a video game every hour or so, but you only get to play for about 30 minutes. That game SUCKS.
 
I'm sorry, but, my god, some of you can be quite dim sometimes... There is nothing wrong with not using or even knowing the term jRPG. For one, they don't exactly call them "Japanese RPGs" in Japan. They call them "RPGs", just like they call, or at least used to call Fallout and other Western RPG imports back in the 90's. From my personal experience, the term was not at all widespread among European gamers either. Back in the 90's, I knew no more than a handful of people who used "Japanese RPG" and only one or two of them who actually applied the acronym "jRPG" in speech or writing. I'm guessing the term is not exactly that popular in China and the rest of Asia either, which makes it more of a localized jargon than a commonplace international lexicon.

Besides, let's not forget, both wRPG and jRPG are unofficial labels. They are inaccurate and loosely defined, and their overlapping regions can be way too big and way too ambiguous for the terms to be used as entirely discrete subgroups. Mass Effect has places real emphasis on its quite linear storyline and character development. It certainly has more things in common with Final Fantasy XII than it does with Baldur's Gate. Does it make it an jRPG? If you say no because of its Western origins, then what about Septerra Core? It is generally considered an jRPG, yet it was made by a Chicago-based studio with not a single Asian person in the team. Kingdom Hearts is Japanese made RPG that has all the elements of a [non-hardcore] jRPG, yet many people feel uncomfortable calling it a jRPG. The Tales series offer nearly the same action-based gameplay in a different, Asian-looking setting and most people apply the term jRPG without any hesitation. Menu-based battle system and linearity of progression are also not definitive characteristics. There are jRPGs that don't use them and there are plenty wRPGs out there that employ both elements and are still classified as wRPGs.

Moreover, venerable gaming sites like gamefaqs.com, gamespot.com and gamerankings.com don't even use the jRPG/wRPG classification and prefer "Console-style RPG" and "PC-style RPG" (often simply "RPG") instead. Gamespy calls Final Fantasy XII a "Turn-Based RPG". Wikipedia doesn't have a jRPG page. It redirects to a single "CRPGs are often referred to as" usage sentence in "Console RPG". I'm not exactly arguing that jRPG is an entirely inappropriate label (I use the acronym myself all the time), but calling somebody dense for not using or knowing an ambiguously defined, mostly localized neologism? How dense is that?
 
Dense enough for someone to register just to write a rant about it, it seems. Welcome to NMA!
 
Brother None said:
seasickness while reading NMA
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I’ve been taking notes as I play through the game, and going back and reading them later they sound like an argument.
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Ehehe. I lol'd. Pretty good stuff there.

And people should really stop sticking random letters in front of "RPG". It confuses me.
BRPG is better than xRPG!
- Yeah, well, xRPGs aren't even real tRPGs.
What about zRPG?
- Naaaah, c'mon now. That's just silly.
 
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