Week 10 - JRPGs: National Game Genres and Transnational Circulation

     

     The 1990s were a fantastic period for Japanese video game developers. Amongst the successful array of genres that came out of Japan to Western shores was the Japanese RPG, a form of computer role playing games heavily influenced by the early Ultima and Wizardry series on PC.  Fueled by gripping narrative and easy command schemes, RPG made in Japan represented for many how console gaming could be used to tell fascinating long-running stories that could almost compare to literature. Until the mid-2000s, Japanese role playing games were all that gamers would want to play on consoles and North American RPG were shunned upon for not being able to keep track with the qualities of titles coming from overseas. JRPG represented quality and respectability.

Imageepoch's JRPG brand reveal video - Japan addressing the concerns of Western consumers

 
     

     Along the way, however, things went astray. Western studios now dominates the market in term of computer RPGs and Japan has been struggling to justify localizing their games to an audience that now find them either bizarre or juvenile. In recent years, the fall of grace of JRPG has led several studios to question the tradition of JRPG and to see how it could be rejuvenated to its former glory. Studios like Imageepoch and Compile Heart has led this initiative by producing brand names like JRPG and Galapagos RPG, trying to design games with the tradition of JRPG in mind first and foremost.

Tales of Fantasia - Anguish, identity crisis and self-reflection in the world of JRPG

     Those initiatives might lead us to take a more critical view on the notion of JRPG itself. Considering that the concept of JRPG itself is never used in Japan except in recent cases involving Imageepoch and Galapagos RPG, it is worthwhile to look at JRPG as a ontological video game category that is more determined by patterns of translational circulation that a real collection of formal qualities. ¨JRPG¨ have not really stopped selling in Japan, so the new efforts to redefine JRPG and re-introduce them to the gaming culture has more to do with marketization of the Western audience than a formal reexamination. At the very least, we can see that the former is motivating the later.

Galapagos RPG - ¨RPGs made for customers of the Japanese taste¨

   

     Another consequence of the discourse separating RPG and JRPGs is that it creates a binary opposition based on country of origin of those games. Not only is this not a very productive starting point for the analysis of what those games represent, but it also leaves no space for alternatives. What if a development studio creates a RPG on tablet that makes obvious use of the anime aesthetic? Should we call it a JRPG and ignore the fact that it does not come from Japan at all? This sort of question really put emphasis on the major issue that comes up when the discourse of video game culture is tainted by a game genre vocabulary based on national origin.