Killua125 wrote:
KaneKitty wrote:
IKickYoDog wrote:
I don't believe RPG's will ever have that kind of presence in the gaming market, due to the "nerd stigma" attached to them. fact that, every now and again, the player might have to think about something.
I personally don't feel that many JRPGs are very complex or demand a whole lot of thought. I think "Japanese" stuff becomes increasingly unrelatable for everyone else each year.
Going to have to echo this; so will a number of studies. There was one in particular a few years back that found that turn-based RPGs were worse than first person shooters at promoting tactical decision making.
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You know what I'm talking about... those horrible Japanese anime characters like Vanille. I know not every Japanese game has stuff like this, but the fact that most do does create a stigma when buying Japanese games/JRPGs. I guess JRPGs are kind of a joke to people when the major localizations are stuff like Hyperdimension Neptunia and Atelier with little girls and rainbows on the box.
This too. I used to be able to ask for a JRPG as a Xmas present without even thinking about it--a couple of years ago I asked for Atelier something or other on recommendation, and it was all around awkward even opening it.
Personally I understand that Japanese story-telling tends to not be very compelling; the personalities and sentiments are shallow out of a reverence for simplicity. It's not always trying to create human-like characters in a real human drama--sometimes it's just hedonic "wouldn't it be nice if life were like this" with a splash of low-threat conflicts to move the narrative forward.
But even I find that to wear old at times.
I likewise am not familiar with all of these MMOs that promote class-changing. In fact it seems like more and more of the upcoming AAA MMOs are falling back more on multiple characters, oddly.
KaneKitty wrote:
Certainly there are stigmas for every genre, which is why it's really up to the individual to be smart enough not to judge each new game through the lens of some other, unrelated product. We must consider that stigmas go both ways, though, and there are plenty of reasons to shy away from Western titles as well.
Essentially all I'm saying is that, for every game-ruining loli present in a JRPG, there's a beef-necked military moron leading another Western FPS.
Essentially all I'm saying is that, for every game-ruining loli present in a JRPG, there's a beef-necked military moron leading another Western FPS.
I echo the sentiment about Western games, but I have to agree with Kill that the tropes of Japanese RPGs are increasingly alienating western audiences. Most of the people here grew up in the 8 bit era where we actually had to use our imaginations while playing the RPG--we could impose our own conceptions of what characters talked and looked like to a significant degree. Otherwise we might have all found the Final Fantasy franchise off-putting for it's grating voice acting and questionable art direction.
The generation of kids that grew up on Pokemon have a certain level of induction that allows them to be receptive to Japanese entertainment, but opportunities for younger generations to develop a fondness for it have been waning significantly for a while now. For example, shortly after the Pokemon generation there was the time when Cartoon Network was regularly airing anime, and constantly pointing out that it wasn't getting the ratings that Western shows like Family Guy and Futurama were getting. Then they changed the line up. You see quite a bit less anime on television now than you used to in favor of western shows.