9 ms·

Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue

94 points by doppp 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xwdv 3y ago
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.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Chrono Trigger’s easily #1 for me in the 16-bit era, but FF VI is damn good.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    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).
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Oh man, no sound on Chrono Trigger is a shame. The music’s great.
      - fbdab103 3y ago
        I also vaguely recall a few of the puzzles used sound ques to note there was a hidden button.
    - zerocrates 3y ago
      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?
      - aidenn0 3y ago
        Just a tiny bit older: https://archive.org/details/ESNESv012a https://archive.org/details/ESNESv012a
      - gavinray 3y ago
        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.
        zerocrates 3y ago
        Probably the old "game port." That's cool. My experience was definitely more in the "use the A, S, Z, and X keys for the face buttons" realm.
        hotnfresh 3y ago
        Serial was my guess, if it was in fact 9-pin. I don’t think I ever had a serial-port keyboard, but I did used to have a serial-port mouse. Game port had more pins.
    - isk517 3y ago
      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.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  I feel the same way about Chrono Trigger, right down to (almost) all of those complex issues!
- DontchaKnowit 3y ago
  Why should a young child grapple with rape, slitting mothers throat for money, suicide, gambling addiction, rape, genicide, etc? You arent majing a very good pitch for this being a family fruendly game...
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    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.
  - krapp 3y ago
    > 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.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      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)
    - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
      I mean fair enough, I have never played final fantasy VI, so maybe if I had it would make more sense, but that post read to me like : Its full of rape and murder! great for kids!
- raincole 3y ago
  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.
  - coolbreezetft22 3y ago
    This type of comment has become such a cliche. 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.
- VyseofArcadia 3y ago
  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.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > 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.
    - VyseofArcadia 3y ago
      > 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.
- spinningD20 3y ago
  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?
  - jamie_ca 3y ago
    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.
    - spinningD20 3y ago
      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.
      - jstarfish 3y ago
        > 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.
- andruc 3y ago
  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.
- dfxm12 3y ago
  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. source: played both at ~10-11 years of age.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  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.
- gavinray 3y ago
  Mmm, I would say Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia were also up there.
  - xwdv 3y ago
    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.
- astrange 3y ago
  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. And the villain is a magical clown.
Tiktaalik 3y ago
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!
- sketchquartet 3y ago
  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.
krapp 3y ago
Counterpoint: "The JRPG label has always been othering[0]," by Kazuma Hashimoto[1] [0]https://www.polygon.com/23677598/jrpg-label-history-othering-discrimination-japanese-role-playing-game https://www.polygon.com/23677598/jrpg-label-history-othering... [1]https://twitter.com/JusticeKazzy_ https://twitter.com/JusticeKazzy_
- RHSeeger 3y ago
  > 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.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    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.
    - krapp 3y ago
      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."
      - mjr00 3y ago
        > 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.
jdlyga 3y ago
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.
- entropicdrifter 3y ago
  Those are some especially confusing labels since the classic subgenre called "CRPG" correlates to "pc style rpg" as opposed to "console style rpg"
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Additionally, the C in CRPG stands for computer, which technically would also apply to consoles, yet "computer" again stands only for PC.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Took over? Weren't they always called RPGs, at least since Ultima 1?
- deaddodo 3y ago
  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.
haunter 3y ago
>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. I, II, III are on Switch.
k__ 3y ago
Step 1: ADD MORE OBSCURE MENUS!!!
- djur 3y ago
  There are some people who complain that JRPGs take away too many obscure menus.
  - k__ 3y ago
    But that was the best part
hebdoacier 3y ago
[flagged]
kmeisthax 3y ago
>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'.
anthk 3y ago
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.
- mjr00 3y ago
  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.
  - astrange 3y ago
    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.
    - anthk 3y ago
      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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus_(card_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus_(card_game)
      - astrange 3y ago
        Well, talk to him about it. https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-16-producer-naoki-yoshida-sparks-debate-the-term-jrpg-as-discriminatory https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-16-producer-naoki-yo...
User23 3y ago
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.
- bdowling 3y ago
  Here’s the section you’re referencing: 17 USC 117. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
> 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.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
> 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.
- cubefox 3y ago
  I thought it was commonly accepted that Chrono Trigger (another SNES JRPG) was better than FF6.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    I guess it turns out I'm a rebel then.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    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!
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      yep, same here. It doesn't take away from the other games, chrono trigger is absolutely an amazing game, then and now. But FFVI was special.
default-kramer 3y ago
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).
- djur 3y ago
  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.
latexr 3y ago
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.

94 points by doppp 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

xwdv 3y ago

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.

hotnfresh 3y ago
Chrono Trigger’s easily #1 for me in the 16-bit era, but FF VI is damn good.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  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).
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Oh man, no sound on Chrono Trigger is a shame. The music’s great.
    - fbdab103 3y ago
      I also vaguely recall a few of the puzzles used sound ques to note there was a hidden button.
  - zerocrates 3y ago
    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?
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      Just a tiny bit older: https://archive.org/details/ESNESv012a https://archive.org/details/ESNESv012a
    - gavinray 3y ago
      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.
      - zerocrates 3y ago
        Probably the old "game port." That's cool. My experience was definitely more in the "use the A, S, Z, and X keys for the face buttons" realm.
        hotnfresh 3y ago
        Serial was my guess, if it was in fact 9-pin. I don’t think I ever had a serial-port keyboard, but I did used to have a serial-port mouse. Game port had more pins.
  - isk517 3y ago
    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.
mitthrowaway2 3y ago
I feel the same way about Chrono Trigger, right down to (almost) all of those complex issues!
DontchaKnowit 3y ago
Why should a young child grapple with rape, slitting mothers throat for money, suicide, gambling addiction, rape, genicide, etc? You arent majing a very good pitch for this being a family fruendly game...
- jstarfish 3y ago
  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.
- krapp 3y ago
  > 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.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    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)
  - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
    I mean fair enough, I have never played final fantasy VI, so maybe if I had it would make more sense, but that post read to me like : Its full of rape and murder! great for kids!
raincole 3y ago
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.
- coolbreezetft22 3y ago
  This type of comment has become such a cliche. 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.
VyseofArcadia 3y ago
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.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > 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.
  - VyseofArcadia 3y ago
    > 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.
spinningD20 3y ago
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?
- jamie_ca 3y ago
  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.
  - spinningD20 3y ago
    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.
    - jstarfish 3y ago
      > 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.
andruc 3y ago
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.
dfxm12 3y ago
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. source: played both at ~10-11 years of age.
no_wizard 3y ago
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.
gavinray 3y ago
Mmm, I would say Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia were also up there.
- xwdv 3y ago
  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.
astrange 3y ago
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. And the villain is a magical clown.

Tiktaalik 3y ago

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!

sketchquartet 3y ago
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.

krapp 3y ago

Counterpoint: "The JRPG label has always been othering[0]," by Kazuma Hashimoto[1] [0]https://www.polygon.com/23677598/jrpg-label-history-othering-discrimination-japanese-role-playing-game https://www.polygon.com/23677598/jrpg-label-history-othering... [1]https://twitter.com/JusticeKazzy_ https://twitter.com/JusticeKazzy_

RHSeeger 3y ago
> 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.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  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.
  - krapp 3y ago
    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."
    - mjr00 3y ago
      > 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.

jdlyga 3y ago

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.

entropicdrifter 3y ago
Those are some especially confusing labels since the classic subgenre called "CRPG" correlates to "pc style rpg" as opposed to "console style rpg"
- cubefox 3y ago
  Additionally, the C in CRPG stands for computer, which technically would also apply to consoles, yet "computer" again stands only for PC.
cubefox 3y ago
Took over? Weren't they always called RPGs, at least since Ultima 1?
deaddodo 3y ago
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.

haunter 3y ago

>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. I, II, III are on Switch.

k__ 3y ago

Step 1: ADD MORE OBSCURE MENUS!!!

djur 3y ago
There are some people who complain that JRPGs take away too many obscure menus.
- k__ 3y ago
  But that was the best part

hebdoacier 3y ago

[flagged]

kmeisthax 3y ago

>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'.

anthk 3y ago

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.

mjr00 3y ago
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.
- astrange 3y ago
  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.
  - anthk 3y ago
    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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus_(card_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus_(card_game)
    - astrange 3y ago
      Well, talk to him about it. https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-16-producer-naoki-yoshida-sparks-debate-the-term-jrpg-as-discriminatory https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-16-producer-naoki-yo...

User23 3y ago

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.

bdowling 3y ago
Here’s the section you’re referencing: 17 USC 117. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

> 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.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

> 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.

cubefox 3y ago
I thought it was commonly accepted that Chrono Trigger (another SNES JRPG) was better than FF6.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I guess it turns out I'm a rebel then.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  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!
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    yep, same here. It doesn't take away from the other games, chrono trigger is absolutely an amazing game, then and now. But FFVI was special.

default-kramer 3y ago

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).

djur 3y ago
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.

latexr 3y ago

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.