East Meets West: The RPG

I have a problem with RPGs. A Western RPG and a Japanese RPG do two very different things and both suffer from poor design choices that prevent me from completely enjoying them. To cover for what the other one lacks, I need to awkwardly jump between two different games in order to get the experience I'm after. I don't have this problem with other genres. An action game from any country satisfies everything I look for in the genre – explosions, intensity, violence – everything is accounted for. A WRPG and JRPG, though, have become so distinct from one another that they've typically been called entirely different genres, despite my insistence that a RPG is a RPG and nationality segregation is dangerous. In their differences, a WRPG and a JRPG have very distinct qualities that feel essential to the RPG genre, and the historical devision between each of them has left me endlessly frustrated. There's a middle ground that can – and should – be reached between each other that would enrich the genre as a whole if the internet bickering settled down.

WRPGs are, technically speaking, a mess. In their pursuit of wide open spaces, enormous dialogue permutations, storyline branches, and open-ended feel their technical difficulties are a severe and noticeable problem. While others can look past this and see the bigger picture, I cannot. Broken quest lines, graphical glitches, and unexplainable occurrences don't enhance the experience of living in a real world – they break it. On top of that, their incorporation of quest design in such a massive space often leads to gameplay that frequently feels like you're simply running to different checkpoints and, in worst case scenarios, can leave you horrendously lost and unsure how to progress. Looking beyond the negatives, WRPGs excel in dialogue (when it isn't endless lore exposition in favour of natural dialogue) and narrative, creating scenarios that feel important and challenge you with moral quandaries. There's a lot of player agency and that feels good. Unfortunately, the execution of these narrative elements leave me wanting. For all the money that Bioware and Bethesda pour into world building, they seemingly pay no attention to animation or character movement. Having a conversation is a painful process of watching an awkward looking NPC stand stock still, look directly into eyes (your soul), and occasionally move through one or two different arm waving animations. It feels like you're conversing with a puppet than a living creature and it's difficult to emphasise with these... things. They speak and sound like humans but move nothing like them. Even my own character, who you think would be blessed with wonderful animation, resembles an inanimate doll. I can't relate to these people no matter how real they sound when they move so unnaturally.

Inanimate puppet.

Emotive, expressive characters.

Where WRPGs meander without direction, JRPGs are intensely focused. There is the central storyline and... not much else. Side quests and distractions pop up here and there but their design feels so divorced from the central gameplay that they never take centre stage. You'll never find yourself lost in a JRPG, the narrative is consistently knocked over your head to ensure you know where you're going at all times. More often that not, you're playing a fully-formed character rather than being one yourself. There's very little leeway in determining the arc of your playable character and their comrades; they will be someone very different by game's end no matter what you think. This character focus over inhabiting a world also permeates the cutscenes and character animation. Watch a cutscene from any modern Final Fantasy game and you'll see characters walking around a space, their faces and body language visibly changing to reflect their emotional state, and actively touching and interacting with the people around them. Art style preferences aside, you can see what a character is feeling rather than merely hearing it from their voice actors. Lightning and friends sound and look like they truly believe what they're saying... even if half of the time it doesn't make any sense at all. Yes, JRPGs are still very much “Anime: The Video Game” with all the frustrating tropes and cultural awkwardness that implies. That didn't matter for a time, back when games were text only and the earnest platitudes of JRPG folk felt less forced and easier to digest. More importantly, Neon Genesis: Evangelion didn't exist and had yet to infect Japanese game development with all the wrong lessons about narrative. It's difficult to find a JRPG that has a coherent storyline nowadays and this – more than unnatural dialogue or bizarre character archetypes – is much harder to swallow. Final Fantasy IV was a simple tale, with characters whose motivations could be summed up in a sentence, but the narrative made sense from beginning to end and has stood the test of time.

Outside of narrative differences, WRPGs and JRPGs differ in user interfaces. JRPGs have copped a lot of flack for their lack of evolution in terms of mechanics, often sticking to a tried and true turn-based battle system with little flourishes and measured innovations. Their menu systems too have remained relatively the same. While this can be criticised, its led to very refined, simple, and easy to read menu tinkering from the years and years of playtesting its gone through. The same can't be said of WRPGs who, in their pursuit of meshing the artificial nature of menus with the realistic world inside of video games, have resorted to form over function. Skyrim's user interface is a pain to work with and leads to more time spent dilly-dallying inside of menus than playing the actual game. Mass Effect tripped over itself with item dumps and an obtuse weapon modification system that most didn't even see and Mass Effect 2 decided to simply remove all menu shuffling altogether (almost all, anyway). This isn't a hard feature or a forgotten art of game design. Diablo II has a perfectly functional menu system, hell, even Dragon Age: Origins got it right. People don't mind artificial as long as it's readable and simple to use. We've turned pages in books for years and it hasn't broken the “immersion” yet.

Simple to use.

Nightmarish to use.

I don't think I'm asking for much. I'm merely asking for restraint on both sides and less hesitance to see what individual developers brings to RPGs. WRPGs offer great writing and wondrous world building but in their vastness lies problematic bugs that take away from the experience. Their “Quest” design mentality leads to a to-do list that prevents me from inhabiting the world and WRPGs lack of expressive animation prevents me from forming any emotional connection with the characters in the story. On the other side of the pond, JRPGs are practically bug free and are ravished with little details that complement the experience. Characters move realistically and behave like real people... when they're not spouting out platitudes and awkwardly translated dialogue. JRPGs are focused and easy to follow and you barely ever lost... unless it's in the confusing narrative being told. I want both JRPGs and WRPGs to improve and, at the moment, each one has what the other one doesn't. If they weren't so deathly afraid of each other, I can't help but think that the RPG genre would improve as a whole from their intermingling.