As Adam (the one you don't like as much as me) explained very well last week (albeit with some slightly 'off' vocabulary), over the next few weeks we'll be crafting together the 'perfect' games from our favourite genres, and if you haven't already guessed, for me it's the JRPG.
JRPG stands for Japanese Role-Playing Game, and for those of you who are wondering how these are different from a regular RPG... Well it's difficult to explain, basically a JRPG will feature characters you'll either love or hate because of their exaggerated personalities; their hair is usually not a natural style or colour and will generally feature an issue with relationships at least once in the story, kinda like the Soap Opera of video games I suppose, except with monsters and swords and much more awesome. For the record, as a general rule, Soap Operas are shit whereas JRPGs are not.
 |
| You won't find characters like these outside a JRPG, which is a shame, because those outfits should be top fashions |
So today for my perfect JRPG creation I'm going to talk about the most important parts of a JRPG: The story and combat. Story-wise you have to think clearly and think well, I'm fed up of JRPGs with the same sort of tacky ending (i.e: Summoning up all your strength because of other people, shouting RRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH and withstanding 9,999 damage hits when your HP maxes out at 500) and pointlessly overused/confusing concepts, like getting rejected from your town because you've been infected by some species of monster that everybody hates, and you can't even pronounce the name of it properly until you've heard it because the l'C in the middle of it makes a whole lot of sence. So for my JRPG, I want to do something a little different, you are the underling of the big evil Lord, sent to scout out a small town for people who can be turned into monsters, but after someone in the town befriends you, even after finding out you're a minion for the dark Lord, you begin to question what you're doing and join forces with them, revolting against your former master, the only issue is that with your soul bound to the Evil Lord, he still has some control over you.
 |
| If this doesn't spell doom, I don't know what does |
In terms of combat, JRPGs are split into 3 categories: Turn-based, Turn-based-real-time, and Real-time, with respective examples of these being Persona, Final Fantasy (The more recent ones such as XII and XIII) and the Tales games (yeah, you knew this would come up at one point didn't you). The thing is, there's really only one perfect type - Real-Time. The problem with turn-based is the slowness of it, I'm not saying don't do turn-based because so many JRPG's are, what I'm saying is for a turn-based to be good it needs to be quicker, with simpler menus and maybe a system where you can preset moves, and have them all be used with the press of a button, instead of cycling through the same menus over and over to get the same moves. Turn-based-real-time is just silly, you only really find it in Final Fantasy, but it feels slower than normal turn-based combat, and you don't get any freedom of movement so you just end up standing there waiting until the muscle you pulled in your last extravagant sword swing heals, or you get whacked by some jelly blob. That's why real time is the way to go, for a game where you are the main character, you have complete control over everything you do, from where you move, when to block or dodge, what combos you perform, and, you don't have to sit and wait to get hit before you can perform another attack. Or you know, maybe JRPG characters just stand around in combat because they don't know any better, they sure as hell make some bad decisions when you don't have a say in it.
 |
| Etrian Odyssey, trust me, this game has no setting below 'HARDCORE+' difficulty |
(I'm going to say this every now and again because I need to, SpicyChickenBites does NOT own any of the images used in our posts, we've found them on google and all credit for the images goes to the sites they were taken from (although the sketches in the First Spicy Idea Specials are actually ours, so don't you dare rip them off or you'll be hearing from our lawyers)