The Top 10 JRPG Fish

(Originally published Mar 31, 2016 at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

Fish are an essential part of the JRPG genre, and while recent entries may have lacked some of the sparkle of the JRPG golden age in the mid to late 90s, there are still some great fish out there. Here's a look at 10 of the best.

10. Marinebasher (Xenogears)

Of course, a game about mechs and ships ought to have some underwater mechs. Marinebasher is... not one of them. This battle takes place half-way up the Tower of Babel, because of course a mechadolphin can fly in Tetsuya Takahashi's sprawling, absurd world.

9. Strong Glory (Eternal Sonata)

I guess this is technically some sort of swordfish? This guy is to regular swordfish as the average JRPG sword is to actually plausible bladed weapons. Peak anime (fish).

8. Cutlass Fish (Blue Dragon) 

Look at this magnificent, swashbuckling bastard. JUST LOOK AT HIM.

7. Forest Whale (Hyperdimension Neptunia ReBirth 1)

A brief moment of glorious light in an ocean of garbage.

Not a literal ocean, of course. You didn't think JRPG fish would actually appear in water, did you?

6. Lord Iwama (Live-a-Live)

Ode Iou's castle is a vast, complex dungeon with dozens intricate subplots. The politics and spiritual turmoil of feudal Japan are brought beautifully to life through a horde of characters and mythical encounters. It's a masterpiece of environmental design.

There's also this fucking carp God lurking in the moat. You don't actually need to go for a swim unless you're doing the challenge where you kill every human in the chapter, but if you do, Lord Iwama will be waiting...

5. The Nebra River King (Final Fantasy XII)

What a beautiful fish. I love the contrast of blue and pink on its irregular scales. It wouldn't be a list of great JRPGs without a Final Fantasy or two. I have to confess a little person investment here, as well. I owe the Nebra River King quite a lot for finally teaching me the Dualshock button layout after years as a Nintendo gamer. He also yields the only component of the Wyrmhero Blade ultimate weapon that I've managed to acquire more than once.

4. fish (Xenogears)

You're stranded on a raft with your lover-to-be, your mechs trapped underneath it. Finally alone. You're trying to work together with him to secure escape, or rescue.

All he can think of is catching this one fish. You don't even have a way to cook it, but he insists it's essential. You think he might try eating it raw. His efforts to catch it dissolve into slapstick.

No intimate moments for you. Just fish.

3. Sushie (Paper Mario)

We can all agree Sushie's great, right? She's a better boat than Mario could ever be, even with Gamecube power in The Thousand-Year Door, and despite being a land-dwelling fish in a swamp she manages to be a great mom to a pack of rowdy baby yoshis. She's great.

2. Fastitocalon-f (Final Fantasy VIII)

Oh, man. One of the most notorious break-points in all of video games. On the beach near Balamb Garden before the game's first dungeon, Fastitocalon-fs drop fish fins when killed. These can be refined for large quantities of ice magic, which can then be used to boost your stats well beyond the range of the early-game encounters. Seldom has a single random encounter distilled so much of what is distinctive of its host game.

And finally, the number one, the best fish in all of JRPGs

JRPGs

JRPGs are the best JRPG fish, because there's no such thing as a fish.

Okay, let me explain.

When Stephen Jay Gould opined that there is no such thing as a fish [(possible) content warning: upper-class British comedy], what he meant was that 'fish' is not a coherent biological category. We call a huge range of ocean-dwelling creatures 'fish', without much respect for physiological similarity or genetic links among them. Life began in the oceans; all land-dwelling (and airborne) creatures fall within a single branch of the tree of life, and every other branch gets labelled 'fish'.

Why bring this up in reference to JRPGs? Because even if the concept of a genre has a use outside of marketing (and that's not clear, though it probably has some sociological utility), JRPGs aren't a genre of video game even by the wonky standards of the field. Trying to explain what unites all the games that get labelled JRPGs is futile.

What does Fire Emblem have in common with Nier? Do Live-a-Live and Kingdom Hearts share any formal properties that actually matter to the overall experiences they create? How do Xenogears and Etrian Odyssey come to be regarded as part of the same tradition?

There are answers to these questions, of course. But they're mostly in terms of the people and organisations involved in producing and distributing the software, or the people playing and writing about it. The games themselves may be action games or strictly turn-based, virtual spaces to explore or digital chessboards, deep stories or near-pure mathematical systems.

And there are reasons to take them all together, because they come from a specific culture that isn't ours, and because all these games labour under this unified expectation we have placed on them. But those expectations can only limit our ability to enjoy and make meaning out of the games themselves. There is no such thing as the JRPG you're expecting.

What a Wonderful Genre

I sometimes wonder whether there’s a value in genre-based critique, particularly for a genre as diverse and nebulous as JRPGs. Looking at Tales of Vesperia means addressing the genre at large as well as its contemporaneous western perception, but I’m wary of falling into the trap of fanboyism. I’m not even sure what might constitute a ‘genre crisis’, never mind whether one actually occurred.

The perception of a genre crisis persists, though. I think it’s probably been there for a long time – some of the things that bring it about are inescapable consequences of an international games industry – but the phenomenon of games being proclaimed ‘the saviour of the JRPG’ is newer, I think. The World Ends With You is the first such game I was aware of.

To quote the almost inevitable arch-villain of any extended defence of the JRPG, Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, from his 2008 review of TWEWY:

“I had heard that The World Ends With You does things differently to most JRPGs, and while I took that with mountainous piles of salt … I thought if the release dates are from bizarro world, maybe the entire game is, too, and will turn out to be the first good JRPG.”[1]

And that’s very much the perception I remember having of TWEWY. That it does things differently. Maybe it’s just what this genre needs. TWEWY certainly positions itself as modern and exciting, not always successfully. Its contemporary setting, punk aesthetic and action combat were all trumpeted as much-needed progress; even Yahtzee found a positive word for the game’s look.

But the actual extent to which the game innovates is unclear. Modern settings weren’t new; the Persona franchise was a decade old by TWEWY’s release, and more obscure modern-set games go back much further (the original Mother, for example, came out in 1989). Action combat in Japanese RPGs goes right back to the SNES (Secret of Mana, Tales of Phantasia). Even the ‘punk fashion’ doesn’t actually look so very different from the outfits on display in any number of earlier titles.

The game’s treatment of its female characters is sadly predictable. Shiki, Neku’s first partner, gets damseled at the end of the first act to provide motivation for acts two and three. One of the female villains is an ‘ice queen’ archetype, the other emotionally erratic and constantly being told to calm down. Rhyme gets fridged in act one, then turns out later to have already been in a different fridge all along[2].

On the mechanical/structural side, the game really isn’t that innovative at all. The plot progresses as the search for cutscene triggers, along with the completion of occasional arbitrary challenges and a steady supply of boss fights. You can overlook it at first, but about half-way through the second week there’s a day where all you do is go to a new area, find out what the next challenge is, backtrack to grind it to completion, and repeat.

There are genuine innovations here – the gender-neutral but not gender-ignorant clothing/bravery mechanic is one that I wish had taken off – but the game’s biggest strength lies in its dialogue writing. When not burdened with the demands of exposition, the dialogue is incredible. But TWEWY isn’t the first well-written game, and good writing predates digital games by a few years at least.

In fact, I’d argue, one of the things that got the game touted as forward-looking, the non-turn-based combat, is a real weak spot thematically. For a game trying to engage with the modern, digital era, where combat serves among other things as a metaphor for brand advertising, I feel like turn-based combat would have been quite at home. It could have been built around the frantic exchange of text messages or emails – discrete bursts of activity followed by an anxious wait for the potentially disastrous response.

Turn-based combat was a favourite punching bag of JRPG haters, though, and probably still is. Certainly Yahtzee went after it with knives drawn – reviewing Super Paper Mario, he crowed that “The stupid, effeminate, blouse-wearing turn-based combat is replaced with wholesome, traditional, masculine head-stomping,” which is a perfect distillation of the insecurity that underpins a lot of JRPG criticism.

But attempts to get away from turn-based combat have had mixed results. TWEWY’s system at least produces some sense of rhythm and party interaction. Eternal Sonata and other games that adapted Paper Mario’s action command system tended to end up with blind guesswork and repetition. More drastic experiments like the gunplay in Resonance of Fate could be bewildering, not to mention difficult to balance because of a lack of precedent to learn from.

Meanwhile, games that stuck to a known formula for combat tended to draw less notice, but be more consistent. Tales of Vesperia adds only tweaks to a system polished through Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss. Blue Dragon worked wonders with a modified version of Final Fantasy X’s completely turn-based battles.

I’m not complaining about innovation per se. My problem with all these examples is that they’re innovation at gun-point, innovation not driven by the needs of the work but the demands of a hostile audience. If there is a genre crisis at all, it resides in this tension. Certainly that’s what Vesperia engages with at every level of its design.

What I’m not sure of is whether there’s any great value to my pointing this out, which is a bad thing to say at the end of a thousand-word blog post. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people, and I don’t really want to try. I’m certainly not qualified to approach this as a design textbook, or even as a way of advocating a design principle. I do want to capture what Vesperia expresses, though, and that involves at least a little of both those other things.







[1] Yes, I watched that video carefully enough to transcribe it. Don’t say I never suffer for my work. (The note about release dates refers to the fact that TWEWY – like more recent ‘genre-saviour’ Xenoblade Chronicles – came out in Europe before America).

[2] Okay, yes, I’m indulging my love of tortured metaphors here. Bigger-than-average-spoilers for explanation: having been killed off in act one to get Neku angry at the Reapers, Rhyme turns out to have come into the Reapers’ game as a result of a death whose function in the story is to motivate Beat.

Random Encounters

Spring 2008, Skies of Arcadia Legends. Discovering that when you're flying about the eponymous skies, the D-pad fixes the camera in a range of positions that must have been carefully chosen to bring out the best in the Delphinus. Seriously, it's the sexiest airship you will ever see.

Summer 2008, Final Fantasy XII. Arriving at Mt. Bur-Omisace to learn that Vayne has murdered Larsa's father and usurped the throne of Archades. Somehow the politics of the situation mean the arduous journey I've just completed is now irrelevant. I share Vaan's confusion – not so much getting sucked into the character as his mental state jumping out to run around my synapses for a moment.

Winter 2008, The Internet. Every week a new thread on The Escapist's forums complaining about 'emo protagonists', 'linear plots' or 'turn-based combat' (that last always with an exception, of course, for X-Com and no mention of Disgaea). The code by which Halo and Yahtzee fanboys scorn the JRPG.

Spring 2009, Eternal Sonata. The game's pathological fixation with absurd gamewalls peaks with a wide-open meadow where some invisible force constrains me to the middle third.

Summer 2009, Blue Dragon. I kick every rock and search every poop left behind by a defeated monster, collecting endless items I barely have any use for. Is there a comprehensive guide to this game? And if so, how small is the print on the maps?

Winter 2009, Athera. Finally catching up on Janny Wurts' Wars of Light and Shadow with the storming of volume 8's titular Stormed Fortress. The close of a tale whose arc has encompassed a life from infant to manhood and the decades of history that go along with it.

Spring 2010, Final Fantasy XIII. Splitting the cost with a similarly hard-up student friend so we can get it on release day. Spending the next three weeks arguing about whether it's any good, squeezing every drop of value we can from the wasted characters and incoherent world.

Summer 2010, Resonance of Fate. Is this a world map or a puzzle minigame? I struggle to make headway, captivated by the mechanical geography but slowed by the dreary colour scheme. I never finish the game.

Summer 2012, Extra Credits[1]. Normally brief, it takes three episodes and almost twenty minutes for the series to dismantle the genre and render verdict: JRPGs are in trouble. Failure to evolve and a slow decline in core quality mean players can now get everything the JRPG used to specialise in elsewhere, without the steep time costs and stodgy combat.



And yet.



Summer 2012, Tales of Vesperia. The climactic cutscene of act 1 is as potent as I remember from my first brush with the game. Something in how this murder is delivered makes it just that – not a righteous execution, not vengeance, not a desperate but ultimately ennobling act. Murder. The dark side of a certain ideology.

That cutscene – and a second that echoes it a few hours later into the game – floated around in my head as I was starting this blog and rounding up possible topics. Vesperia is one of my favourite games and I really wanted to dig into what made that scene so effective. So I loaded up the game for the first time in a while and started playing.

And the cutscene stands up, don't get me wrong, but I started to notice other things that were also really effective, or at least weird enough to be worth commenting on. By the time I reached the second cutscene I had other things I wanted to look at through the rest of the game. By the end of the game, I had enough questions to justify a second play, then a third.

Long story short, I've put 200 hours into the game in the last six weeks, and produced some 26,000 words of notes. Vesperia, I think, is as concerned as I am by the trend that Extra Credits episode picked up on. This idea that 'the genre has lost its way'.

Thematically, Vesperia deals with journeys and exile, hostile wilderness and troubled homecomings. Formally, it turns back on itself and its franchise, poking at the foundations of the JRPG world with a mix of wry affection and lampshades. And lampshades on lampshades.

And there's a slightly weird technological context, too. I feel like JRPGs were slow to make the jump to 7th generation hardware[2]. Blue Dragon, Eternal 'how the hell did I get made?' Sonata and even later titles like Resonance of Fate feel like a tentative toe in uncertain waters. For a brief period, the majority of new JRPG stories were appearing on a non-Japanese console, the Xbox 360. Vesperia emerged towards the end of this displacement.

What I've found myself working on, ultimately, has three dimensions; in the first place, it's a close reading of Tales of Vesperia. The game deserves it, whatever its relation to its genealogy. More broadly, I'm taking a historical look at the JRPG as a genre. For now, I've fenced that in to the window between Final Fantasy XII and XIII (Q1 2006 to Q4 2009), because Final Fantasy generally does more to shape 'public opinion' than the rest of the genre. Sandwiched between those is a reflection on the Tales franchise, because Vesperia can hardly address its genre without looking at its own peculiar subgenre.

To that end, I'm building a reading list (gaming list? Playing list?). For now, it's here on Backloggery (in my wishlist as well as my actual backlog). I'm looking for key JRPGs – especially on gen 7 home consoles[3] – that ought to feature in any critical look at the genre in that period. This is a starting point only – I'm not expecting to be able to write a thoroughgoing history from such a narrow slice, and I don't have access to every species of hardware I'd need for that either – but suggestions are most welcome.

A lot of what I've discussed here is my own impressions, and really my impressions not of the games themselves but of other people's impressions of them. For my money, the JRPG was never 'in trouble', except possibly commercially. But the idea of a genre crisis is widespread, and that bears some investigation.





[1] EC has a bit of a reputation for appropriating the work of other writers. If anyone can point me to more nuanced writing on which their JRPG episodes are based or build, I'd appreciate it – it'll save me quite a bit of work.

[2] I did a bit of a survey, and as far as I can tell there were 10 new JRPGs on gen 7 hardware between 2006 and 2009, compared to 16 on the PS2 alone.

[3] I specify home consoles partly just to narrow my focus, but also partly because I think they shape perception of the genre a bit more – they're seen as 'more important' by a certain key section of the press and player base.