Dead Genre Chronicles was a podcast I did with Valori Carter
and LeeRoy Lewin from August 2015 to September 2018. In it, we developed what
we think is a pretty robust critical method and genealogy for studying JRPGs,
but in the process we recorded well over fifty hours of podcasts, so what
follows is a sort of introductory outline.
We recorded an end-of-year roundup at the end of each of our
three years, which provide a brief summary of our responses to each game and
each year as a whole:
The Model
These are the episodes in which (in my opinion) we did the
bulk of the work establishing our method and genealogy. Given the format, it
comes together a bit haphazardly, but I think it does come together in the end.
There probably couldn't have been a better place to start
the podcast than Live-a-Live, a 1994 Squaresoft game for the SNES which
was never localised. It's an incredible exercise in exploring the possibility
space of JRPGs, and we referred back to it constantly throughout the rest of
the podcast. Because this was our first episode, it's technically and
structurally a bit ropey, but well worth persevering through.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is a brilliant
but idiosyncratic game, and what we discovered was that its idiosyncrasies were
born of a deep understanding, on the part of its designers, of the JRPG design
traditions they stand in contrast with.
Every year, we forced Leeroy to nominate at least one game
for us to cover, and Breath of Fire II was his first pick. It turned out
to be a great choice, as the ways in which it draws from and builds on the Dragon
Quest franchise pushed us to pay more attention to that franchise's role in
the development of the genre (of which more in a moment).
There are lessons to be learned from bad games as well as
good ones. Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a tedious slog
because its designers failed to understand why certain typical JRPG mechanics
took the forms they did. NNK nods at all the tropes, but none of them
fit together well.
The Dragon Quest franchise is the spine of the JRPG
genre; what we learned this episode, playing Dragon Quest V, was that the
influence of DQ spreads much more widely through the genre than western
commenters usually recognise. Lots of design decisions, especially in the 21st
century, make a lot more sense when related back to DQ than just to Final
Fantasy.
My first encounter with LeeRoy's critical work was an argument
of his about the relationship between Earthbound and Dragon Quest,
and we explore that link in more detail here. Earthbound is a funhouse
mirror to the ur-JRPG, but far from a thoughtless one, and its many subversions
again illuminate that history in further important ways.
The Top Three
These are, to my mind, our best episodes – the episodes
where we brought our best critical skills to games that most richly rewarded
them.
Nier has a much higher profile now than it did when
we recorded this, thanks to its less-interesting, more polished sequel, but it
stands on its own as one of the most inventive games of its generation. It also
has some of the best peripheral and side-quest writing ever in a commercial
game, making it excellent grist to a JRPG scholar's mill.
Final Fantasy XII arguably marks the start of the
period characterised as the 'death of the JRPG'. Certainly, its complicated
critical reception and the persistent rumours about its troubled development
have done its legacy no favours, though the recent Zodiac Age remaster
has prompted something of a reevaluation. In this episode we set the game in
its contemporary context, noting its attempt to comment on American imperialism
in Iraq, nuclear disarmament, and the role of 'freedom' in gamer rhetoric.
The final showdown. If FFXII can be used to mark the start
of the death of the JRPG, FFXIII is its peak. I hope that in this episode we
were able to give a clear critical response to the game itself as well as
unpacking why it became such a genrepocalypse.
The Trash Bin
Over the years, we covered a number of games which we really
don't recommend anybody spend time on, but these three stand out as the most
irredeemable.
Suikoden II is sometimes held up as the best JRPG of
all time, but this was unrecognisable to us. After a faintly promising
introduction, it spirals off into incompetent, genre-illiterate tedium, with a
plot that borders on reifying fascist propaganda.
I used to like Skies of Arcadia, and it was
instrumental in the formation of my interest in JRPGs, but it is super
racist. Like, really super duper amazingly racist. There are ways to do
steampunky/golden-age-of-piracy-styled games without drowning yourself in
colonialism, but Skies doesn't try any of them, and its formulaic plotting
and plodding encounter design turn it into a horrible slog to boot.
Suikoden 2 only flirts with fascist propaganda; Treasure
of the Rudras openly embraces it, and none of its attempts at experiment
(themselves weaker than Live-a-Live's from two years prior) can overturn
that fundamental fact.
The Cult of Square
In the late 90s, following the release of Final Fantasy
VII, Squaresoft became one of the most important development companies in
gaming. In addition to their trio of PS1 Final Fantasy games, they put
out a second, less structured trio on the same platform, each of which in its
way has achieved cult status. We tackled all three of these in our first year,
and while we weren't impressed, taken together they're an interesting window on
how the history of the JRPG took shape.
Chrono Cross is a beautiful game, perhaps the most
beautiful ever made in the PS1 paradigm of 3D-animated models on prerendered
backgrounds. It's a potent mood piece but burdened by the incomprehensible lore
linking it to its insufferably-overrated predecessor, Chrono Trigger
Look, I'm a total sucker for Tetsuya Takahashi's wild
loremongering, but this game is fifty hours of hollow overambition with ten
minutes of interesting cutscene (from which I developed a forty-minute lecture in
this episode) at the end. It's a great example of how easy it is to trick
gamers into thinking you're being profound by mumbling some references to
psychoanalysis and existentialism.
Final Fantasy Tactics wants so much to be the kind of
sophisticated political storytelling that Yasumi Matsuno would eventually
accomplish with Final Fantasy XII, but wastes far too much of the
goodwill earned by its first chapter on a simplistic supernatural conspiracy
story that can't even stick its landing.
The full list of episodes, including our two spin-off
podcasts, Myth and Kin (on the Witcher franchise, featuring Val
and Samuel Howitt) and World Revolution (on indie and underground RPGs,
featuring LeeRoy and John Thyer) is here, and here's a Youtube
playlist with all the DGC episodes.
