Why We Need Japanese RPG's

What is home?  Can you find home inside a video game?  If you could, what would it look like to you?  Is it a place where there's always four walls, a warm fire, and a bed waiting for you somewhere?  Or is it a road that winds on, unending?

There's this amazing word I heard recently.  Hiraeth.  It's a Welsh word that, according to Wiktionary, means "homesickness" or "an intense form of longing or nostalgia".  I've also heard it translated as "A longing to go back to a home that may or may not exist".  The fact that the word is difficult to translate properly seems oddly fitting.  Home means something different to all of us, at the end of the day.  We all answer that call differently, too; some of us live in the houses our families have owned for generations, some of us get married and have kids.  Then some of us try to create that home in different ways.

I think I've found a piece of home inside video games.  But how I came to realize that was...well...

It was a gloomy week.  Sometimes waking up late on those depressing days just makes it all worse.  You shamble to the window and see black, gnarled trees reaching up toward a leaden grey sky, like skeletal fingers from a muddy grave.  The weather doesn't have the common courtesy to snow or even get chilly, despite the fact that it's December in the midwest.  It's murky and nasty and warm and all the color you usually associate with the holidays is gone.  It's worse than being inside a Diablo game.  And if you're in a dark place - and I confess that I have been - then it seems that nothing can make it right.

One day, the urge to play a JRPG started to bubble up inside.  On a whim, I started up Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.  That's when things started to change.  Some of the color came back into my world.  Something about the battles and music made me feel...safe, somehow.  I've spent a lot of time hanging around Rolent, the idyllic town in the beginning of the game.  Rolent is the essential JRPG town, a place of simple beauty and comfort.  It's got plenty of stonework, a square layout, peaceful music, flowers in all the window boxes.  Everyone knows everyone and prejudice is nowhere to be found.  I enjoyed playing it so much that I haven't stopped, and that's unusual for someone whose interests - and focus - are as scattered as mine.

Estelle's house in Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. It's reminiscent of other cozy JRPG interiors, like the ones found in Chrono Trigger and Ys: The Oath in Felghana.

It really got me thinking.  Why do I find JRPG's cheerful and comforting and familiar?  Why is that important?  Surely other people have to feel the same way, right?  And does this have anything to do with JRPG's getting a lot more popular recently?

For years now, the trend in game design has been grey, desaturated, almost black-and-white visuals.  Dark Souls.  Skyrim.  Blackguards.  Gritty and dark, this comfortless aesthetic appeals to some but for depressives like me, they're a nightmare.  I actually have a limit to how much I can play games like these before I just can't take it anymore.  It's ugly, and that's the whole point; it was never about creating beauty.  They try to convey a darker, more cynical message, and that cynicism seems to be everywhere in our culture now.  Or it did, until a year or two ago.  What changed?

It seemed like it started when Sega released Valkyria Chronicles on PC.  Western RPG fans praised it to the hilt and reviews and forum discussions were laced with this tone of stunned astonishment.  It seemed like JRPG's were a niche thing, and nobody really expected a successful port.  VC's runaway success seemed to take everyone by surprise.  Why?  Was it that nobody really liked JRPG's?  Did people really think that any console port would be sloppy and indifferent?  The series' newfound fans themselves probably had no idea why they were having so much fun with it.  But more ports came.  In January, the Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth series made its debut on Steam.  It's a sickeningly cute JRPG done in cloying shades of pink and white, full of giggling anime girls with cute hair.  Suddenly, it was everywhere.  You couldn't log into Steam, GOG, or the usual news sites without it turning your entire screen pastel.  And western RPG fans lined up to add it to their collections and write glowing reviews.  Even my friend Fluent found himself hooked, playing the whole game and spending countless hours filming his playthrough for his audience.  Then the whole series came out.  Then original titles, like Tales of Zestiria, got everyone excited.  Now, the latest buzz is Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, a PS3 port which I have every confidence will become a smash hit.  What's going on?

Dragon's Dogma is what happens when Japanese art and design meet the western craving for action and brutality.

Everyone will have an answer, but I'll tell you what I think is happening.  JRPG's - and Japanese games in general - have been a major part of our lives since the NES.  For Millennials like me, those games were our childhoods.  Games like the early Final Fantasy titles were right there in our homes, in our lives, from a tender age.  If you were a console gamer in the early 90's, you had a steady feed of Japanese culture, music, art, and ideas pumped right into your awareness for years and years.  For a child, the impact is huge.  It's not "just nostalgia".  I can't speak for most of you, but for people in my age group, it's everything.  It's part of us.  It's home.  And I think the surge in Japanese games on PC is like the moon, pulling inside us like a tidal wave.  It's hard to resist.

Chrono Trigger, hailed by many as the best RPG ever made.

But what goes into a JRPG?  How are they different from western RPG's?  Why do people love (or hate) them so passionately?

Japanese games tend to be made from the ground up with slightly different sensibilities than, say, American games.  The quintessential Japanese game will be prettier, more colorful, and will have more melodic music than its American counterpart, but it will also suffer from grindy mechanics and will be text-heavy.  JRPG's have one quality in particular that irks me, and that's looong intro movies that you can't skip, forcing you to play the game for some seemingly interminable length of time before you're allowed to save or get into the game's real content.  That's one reason I think Japanese designers have struggled to court western audiences in the past, especially with RPG's; as westerners, we want action, and we want it now.  There's really no ritual or elegance to the way we play games, but in Japanese culture, ritual is important in a lot more ways.  In a lot of Japanese games, the length of introductory features and artistic detail all seem to convey one thing: this is a really big experience, and you should get ready.  We put every ounce of talent, time, and care into making this so you could pour every ounce of yourself into playing it.

The lighting and textures in Final Fantasy XIV are uncommonly realistic.

And maybe that's where things we find annoying - like grinding - come in.  To Japanese audiences, nothing is worth having if you didn't have to work hard to accomplish it, and grinding seems to be one way Japanese designers try to give you that sense of accomplishment.  Let's take Final Fantasy XIV, one of my favorite MMO's, and the absolute image of a Japanese RPG.  It's not grindy, exactly, but in order to have access to much of anything in the game, you have to progress along the main storyline.  That goes for mounts, teleportation, crafting, you name it.  You can't have A unless you do B.  It's classic content block, and it infuriates me.  I play this game to relax, I grumble.  I should have access to a lot more of it than I do without tens of hours of cutscenes and fetch quests.  I personally find that kind of content block - and its older sibling, the infamous grind - to be an antiquated game mechanic that's quickly losing its relevance.  But the designers seem to always be right over your shoulder, every time you get on your mount or take a teleport, saying "This is what separates the lazy players from ones that work hard.  Aren't you glad you put all the effort into playing this?  Don't you feel more accomplished?"  Hmph.  But you know, I keep coming back, especially on dark days like this one, because somehow, these artists have managed to capture exactly what a sunny day looks like, or a forest canopy, or an evening descending into twilight in a cold, snowy place.  And the beauty of it, the detail in every location, leaves me speechless.  And when I switch to an end-game class and get ready to ride off into the coming night, maybe it does feel pretty good.  There's something deeply familiar about the beauty in the art, the music, and in the countless other things you can't pin down.  It's then that I realize that I need to treat home like I treat my family.  In the end, with a certain, select few games, I'll take the bad with the good because it feels so much like home.

Will the current JRPG renaissance continue?  It's hard to say.  But for me, it's easy to say why it's happening.  It's because, inside and out, they're too familiar to resist.
Playing them feels like coming home.