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On Role-playing Games

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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Nov 2012 08:29

This is a good summing-up of my article:

http://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/161839825/#161844583

Anonymous wrote:>>161843807

whoever wrote this is my nigga

>likes WRPGs but acknowledges that they are not lifechanging experiences and don't come close to true tabletop RPGs
>hates generic JRPGs but likes Japanese SRPGs
>knows the potential of MMOs but hates where the genre has gone

my own clone


This, however (from the same thread), is bullshit:

http://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/161839825/#161845774

Anonymous wrote:>>161844583
However he also thinks Japan didn't have tabletop RPGs which means he is kind of fucktarded.


The dude made this up because I never said nor implied anything of the kind. And of course the Japanese EVENTUALLY made their own tabletop RPGs, but:

1. It took them AGES to do so (no idea which was the first, but I reckon it must have been at least a decade or two after Chainmail...), so it has nothing to do with the invention of the JRPG, which is why I didn't talk about it in the article, and

2. Even when they WERE made, they were an extremely niche type of game, hence Japanese VIDEOGAME developers seem unaware of them (and hence of what the term RPG means) even today.

Some of the replies that guy got actually point all this out, which is refreshing:

http://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/161839825/#161846687

Anonymous wrote:>>161845774
he said:
>role-playing took ages to arrive in Japan
so there are rpgs in japan but it took to long to appear in Japanese market


http://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/161839825/#161847015

Anonymous wrote:>>161846687
And they still are far from being known to the mainstream.

In Japan they call them "TRPG" (http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRPG).

I've watched a Japanese "Let's play"-style video on Nico Nico Douga about Bloodlines and the guy mentioned that the character sheet was quite akin to a TRPG, and the many of the comments said "What the hell is a TRPG?".
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Unread postby icycalm » 08 Mar 2014 15:45

https://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/234540453/#234548117

Anonymous wrote:>>234547331
In the good old days Japanese were not at the edge of technology, they were making cheap knockoffs of American designs (like Taiwan does now).

One such case is Dragon Quest and subsequently ALL JRPGs. In 1983 Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura attended a computer show in San Francisco, where they first play Wizardry. They love it, so when they go back to Japan they buy it and decide to create a game like it.

Now, the way most people tell the story paints them under a positive light. This is absolute bollocks. Basically, they ripped off Wizardry’s system, but they dumbed it down (some people claim this to be a stroke of genius, FFS) and Ultima’s overhead view. They pretty much ripped everything off Wizardry and Ultima III (especially that): combat system, random encounters, maps, you name it. The difference was the graphics style, which was created by Akira-the cliché of Anime crapness-Toriyama. All in all a substandard, cheap, knockoff.

All JRPGs since then cloned a clone. But computer RPGs moved significantly since 1983 (a date the Japanese are still stuck too). Garriott introduced morality and a keyword based conversation system in the next Ultima instalment and removed random encounters. Computer RPGs moved away from the usual dungeon crawl hack’n’slash towards the attempt to allow players to role play. They were given moral choices, freedom to explore and act as they pleased, etc. Combat systems evolved as well, with some games moving towards real time combat. Other games introduced NPCs who were acting independently through the game world (like Wizardry VII).

All these developments were lost to the Japanese, who continue to make Wizardry III and Ultima III clones to this day.


https://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/234540453/#234548285

Anonymous wrote:>>234548117
In other words, you stopped playing JRPGs in the early 90s.

Oh wait, that's a copypasta from insomnia.ac, a site that gave Diablo III 5/5 stars and hasn't played a JRPG in 15 years.


The second guy can't see that the first guy is right because he can't separate aesthetics from mechanics in his head.
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Re: On Role-playing Games

Unread postby icycalm » 27 May 2021 16:07

https://arch.b4k.co/vrpg/thread/1714723/#1719224

Really nice how one paragraph from Icycalm's article from 2008 can spark a lot of discussion.


At this rate they’ll get around to discussing my 2021 essays in 2041. By that point I may not be around to correct their bullshit interpretations, which may well be their intention.
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Re: On Role-playing Games

Unread postby icycalm » 18 Sep 2021 13:46

He links my essay (it’s in the image he attaches): https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/571243406/#571249223

Anonymous wrote:This is a good piece that explains the absolute state of JRPG. Basically, the Japs has no clue what RPG really means and think selecting Fireball from the menu and spamming it on a row of Slimes that they randomly encountered every 5 steps is RPG. Their audience is fine with this too, after all they don't care about the gameplay too much. What important to them are waifufaggotry, famous seiyuu, fanservices, cinematic experience animated cutscenes, orchestral soundtracks, and other non-gameplay stuff. BoF:Dragon Quarter for example implemented tactical combat system instead of the usual simple menu turn based combat system and guess what, it fucking bombed and was reviled by the fanbase because they got filtered.


I didn’t know that BoF5 had tactical movement. Hilarious that the market rejected it.
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Re: On Role-playing Games

Unread postby icycalm » 10 Jan 2022 06:24

This guy links my essay and starts a shitstorm: https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584338440

Anonymous wrote:>>584330320
The Japs cannot innovate. JRPG games really are just VNs with some simple menu turn based slapped on them to avoid being too obvious. Want RPG elements? Go play CRPGs. Want great gameplay and combat system? Go play western isometric or tactical turn based games like XCOM (old and reboot). You won't find either in JRPG. For fuck's sake, the hottest recent JRPGs are DQXI, P5R, and SMTV and they are all babby-tier shit with styles over substance. You want something """""tactical"""""? We have waifufaggy shit like FE3H and Disgaea 6 as the reps.


15 years since I wrote that essay. Still getting linked. Anyone else writing about games who can say this? And is it a stretch to imagine it will still be getting linked 15 years from now?


https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584350323

Anonymous wrote:I don't know what's worse, twitterscum and redditors posting Icycalm's rants to get (You)s or squareniggers and a bunch of other people who don't care about the genre either trying to make some half baked apologies.


https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584340529

Anonymous wrote:I'm legit still waiting for Japanese devs' take on XCom or Divinity OS. I'm tired of every SRPG or tactical RPG from Japan being marching to your enemy's face and stabbing him with sword / axe / spear / etc., instead of getting to do shit like summoning an earthen wall to block a chokepoint or blowing the floor beneath your enemy and see him plunge to his death. Japanese devs are creatively bankrupt and keep churning out clones of 1990's tactics games like FFT or Tactics Ogre. The fact that weebs are getting hyped for Triangle Strategy means Jap devs will continue to play it safe.


https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584346987

Anonymous wrote:>>584346675
Pacing exists, if the only thing you can do in the game is combat and the rest sucks, it eventually gets old. Also why not just make a dungeon crawler if all you want is to walk around and fight endlessly? Sounds like an excuse for how those games are straight tedious and LAZY, because that's what they come across as, fucking lazy. Just throw some mobs around areas, recolor them and whatever and the game almost feels like a soulless mathematical equation shat by a robot.

>"oh no villager was attacked getting water"
people who want their games to be interesting, rather than the town just being a deposit of dull NPCs, and games that feature large worlds to actually feel like worlds inhabit by people and not just "an area where I fight mobs nonstop" which is a way less ambitious proposal, I like dungeon crawlers but when your enormous overworld feels like a basic bitch dungeon it's a waste


https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584347901

Anonymous wrote:>>584347504
That was just one example of the complete lack of detail some JRPGs have in their worlds. You say it is uninteresting to have a NPC encounter, I say the barren overworld, completely devoid of any signal of civilization makes them repetitive and bland. Anywhere you are, be it a desert, a forest, a cave, a field right outside of a town, a riverside field, etc, it all behaves the same exact manner, you walk around, you encounter and have to fight mobs nonstop, how is this not repetitive as fuck and lazy? Because that's what it is, the game follows a very strict formula.

The issue is that they don't feel like worlds with actual people in it, because you don't even encounter anything besides monsters outside of the designated_NPC_areas known as towns/villages. You know in the real world people do travel from place to place, if you entered a cave and could rescue some guy who went there to gather shrooms or whatever, then have a tid bit of dialogue it would break the monotony that those games are with repetitive combat encounters and nothing to be found besides chests with shit loot.


https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584349575

Anonymous wrote:>>584348742
Fiction and a fantasy world still needs to have coherence. A little village with enormous ogres right outside of it is a stupid concept if you think 2 seconds about it. You are making excuses for those games to be lazily designed. The fact nobody can travel right outside of a village would make the village a pretty shitty place to be, don't they engage in trading with the other parts of civilization? Is that small village self sufficient in absolutely everything? The more you think about it, the more stupid it is, don't try to justify it because it defies basic common sense. Are the farmers in that village able to fend off the endless respawning monstrosities that are right outside of the village door?
>the player characters are notoriously exceptions from the norm of people within them
this is just you saying it's okay for shit to be stupid because hey it's a game, it's fantasy!! No it isn't, retarded shit is still retarded and fiction is not supposed to lack logic and coherence

There's also the issue of pacing. You know that purely gameplay driven games still have things to offer the player besides combat, right? Even the action game darling Devil May Cry 1 on the PS2 had some puzzles and shit to break the pace of the combat. Quite some JRPGs miss this detail, and when you venture outside of the safe_zone AKA the towns, be prepared for sameyness always.

Also having a more detailed and more interesting to explore overworld would make for better gameplay. When your entire gameplay is to walk fight walk wight walk fight, it kinda sucks.

A game with large overworld, lots of towns caves and different environments behaving as a dungeon crawler is stupid, it's the issue. A dungeon crawler operates on the logic that the party is in some place far away from civilization therefore you have to fight your way through tons of monsters puzzles etc does make sense. A world where a little village has dangerous mobs right outside doesn't.
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