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.

Abstraction, Simulation and Narrative Time

This post grew out of a conversation that’s happened between several people over quite an extended period of time, so apologies if I have to send you on a bit of a reading list to catch you up.

It more or less started here with Devon Carter’s Critical Switch guest episode about the role of abstraction in JRPG mechanics (which is basically essential reading if you want to follow anything I write on this blog, so get to it if you haven’t already).

Then Austin C. Howe had some thoughts about JRPGs on generation 7 hardware, which I Storified, where he discussed how more powerful technology had revealed some of the ways in which the classic JRPG form struggles with ‘realism’.

That prompted LeeRoy Lewin to write this excellent piece about how the basic abstractions of JRPG combat – HP, MP and XP – are bad representations of anything ‘real’.

Finally, and possibly independently of all this, Vincent Kinian reviewed Yuuyami Doori Tankentai with a focus on how it actually does address the real successfully.

Got all that? The key point I want to focus on is LeeRoy’s, that the mechanical abstractions in JRPGs don’t directly represent the things we ordinarily take them to. HP are a poor representation of health, or even endurance, because health is not linear or one-dimensional. XP in particular, to quote LeeRoy, models “the purest meritocracy, the most awful gamification, the idea that labor can transfer 1:1 value.”

If MP and equivalents are innocent in this, it’s only because they represent something that makes no claim to reality – magical power. Because it’s entirely up to an author to invent a magic system, we can’t gainsay the device of MP, but we can point out that it’s a formulaic and often uninteresting way of limiting power. To be fair, sometimes it doesn’t need to be interesting and is just an unobtrusive balancing tool, but I feel like there’s often a lot that could be done here that isn’t.

The more complex, player-engaging systems built on top of these stats – materia, GF junctions, sphere grids and so on – may be a little more representationally rich, depending on how they are contextualised[1], but the statistical foundation is poor in this regard. So why are these numbers so ubiquitous?

Convention, and the legacy of tabletop roleplaying games, makes up one major part of it, of course. Things are Done This Way because That’s How They’ve Always Been Done (and in the case of at least HP, the problem isn’t unique to JRPGs or even RPGs in general). But these stats do serve a function, or at least are a crucial pillar of a system that serves a function, and that function, I would argue, can be meaningful and valuable.

What JRPG systems – the stuff we think of as ‘systems’, the numbers bits – do is control the delivery of a story. They may do other things as well, but one persistent function is to determine when the story moves forward. Part of this is just to space things out, so you’re not just playing a novel (and to meet the ever-louder consumer demand for ‘value for money’, as measured in hours of ‘content’), but there’s also a crucial contribution that this makes to JRPG stories.

Pacing is everything. JRPG stories tend towards the epic in style as well as length. They are stories of big deeds, world-shaking changes. Worlds do not change overnight. Many forms of storytelling work just fine over short periods – one can hardly object to the near-real-time duration of Twelve Angry Men, or the one-night framing of Die Hard – but the grander the scale of a story, the slower it needs to feel like it moves.

The games industry is already bankrupting itself and driving employees to exhaustion to deliver games of sufficient length and graphical quality to keep ‘the market’ placated. As graphical standards continue to rise, representing the passage of time non-literally is going to get more and more important for delivering long-form stories.

This is where RPG mechanics, and particularly their JRPG versions, can shine. HP and MP represent the costs of time; the wear and tear of travel, the hazards and labour it involves. XP represents the benefits of that time – as LeeRoy pointed out, often badly, but I think this approach to them at least suggests some ways to complicate them into something more meaningful.

What is represented by these stats – perhaps it would be better to say ‘encoded’, since ‘representation’ implies something more explicit – is not really anything about the software objects to which the variables belong. What is represented is the world, the time and space through which these objects move.

If an encounter, or sequence of encounters, leaves your party on their last legs, you’re given the sense of characters limping into town, propping each other up, maybe dragging a stretcher, bags emptied of supplies. Backtrack over the same ground later in the story, and the easy passage, the image it conjures of marching proudly through the same gates with head held high, represents the sheer length of time it takes to master what was once marginal.

Here is where that stuff from Austin and Vincent becomes important. Taking stats to be directly representative creates misleading indulgences about vast gains in personal power and importance over implausibly narrow stretches of time. Austin’s point that realism is about more than just visual literalism, and Vincent’s that the sense of the real comes from the mundane, the stuff that happens between the fantasies, suggest that the way to get real value from explicit stats is to look at what they imply.

If a magic spell allows you to do ten times as much damage to a target as the strongest physical attack, but costs ten times as much to use, what does that say about the scarcity of that spell, the rarity of this casting? If a character is dying of poison and you’re out of antidotes, can you make it to the next inn or item shop in time? Frequent easy encounters that wear you down slowly suggest a long journey; fewer more potent encounters suggest danger and pain but less time; a surfeit of brutal fights implies that the world must turn a little longer before you can make it through.

The actual games could do a lot more to draw attention to this side of reading them, but that doesn’t mean that existing games shouldn’t or can’t be read in this way. It’s an approach that I’ve found useful particularly when looking at games that focus their narratives on journeys – I'm a broken record, I know, but Final Fantasy XII and Tales of Vesperia are both excellent examples of this[2].





[1] Some are much worse, particularly ‘relationship’ systems that reduce social ties between characters to single score variables.

[2] There are a couple of sequences in Vesperia where mechanical representations of the passage of time are directly contrasted with what cutscenes have told you about the time-frame of events, which show both how effectively good stat usage can suggest the passage of time and how quickly bad stat usage can undercut it.

Knight of Ratatosk

(Content note: Dawn of the New World features a character with two personalities. While the game eventually decides this is not a psychological condition, it remains a regressive engagement with dissociative identity disorder. I apologise if this essay causes harm or discomfort by touching on this theme).

About halfway through Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, I characterised its combat as brilliant, but almost completely unplayable. I think I had more game-overs in this game than in any other JRPG I've ever played, so quickly is it possible to go from full health and a full party to four corpses. What makes it brilliant is that every feature of the combat – including the difficulty itself – adds meaning to the experience of play.

Dawn's plot centres on Emil Castagnier, who makes a pact with a spirit of darkness, Ratatosk, to gain the power to protect Marta Lualdi, who (at that point) is a complete stranger to him. The game's engagement with masculinity-as-protection is better than average, I think, but tangential to my topic for today. What I'm interested in now is that subsequent to this Emil, heretofore a timid creature, develops a second nature, one of violence, aggression and cruelty.

The exact metaphysics are unimportant (I'm honestly not sure I ever figured out what was going on). What matters is that the character becomes as divided as his game; Dawn maintains the conventional JRPG separation between exploration and combat gameplay, and Emil's 'Ratatosk mode' is generally reserved for combat. Combat becomes a reflection of Ratatosk's values.

The most obvious element of this is in Emil's fragility. Where other Tales games can be tanked through as slugging matches, in Dawn taking damage is extremely risky. There's little feedback when you take a hit, as if Ratatosk doesn't feel pain. Health bars evaporate in moments.

It's also easy to get combo'd and stun-locked. Stuns last a long time, as do staggers. Get between even a couple of enemies and they can lock you down completely. The game knows this, too. Enemy packs are large, and most bosses come with multiple minions. Attacks generally have huge hurtboxes, so that even enemies attacking nearby friendlies may contribute to a lockdown.

The upshot of which is that unless you keep tight control of the battlefield, your position is always precarious. In many JRPGs, control is just a matter of keeping a safe margin of health, magic and item stocks. In Dawn, it means aggressively breaking up enemy attacks, shutting them down before they can do the same to you.

Mechanics can make meaning in the obvious way, as with the lack of feedback for incoming damage mentioned above, but they can also make meaning by incentivising certain player behaviours. Dawn heavily pushes one particular way to sustain the control needed to survive.

On the ground, Emil's attacks are sluggish, and his combos both short and easy to interrupt. Stagger an enemy and launch it, though, and Emil becomes the vengeful demon the 'Ratatosk mode' personality suggests. His combos are fast, fluid and long, startlingly easy to execute. And, of course, by being airborne with only a staggered enemy (often more than one, thanks to the large hurtboxes) for company, he's out of harm's reach.

There are other little rewards for focussing on aerial play, too. While Emil is slow to develop supplementary skills that improve his ground combat, skills and special moves for aerial use are commonplace, a sharp inversion of the Tales norm. And since TP ('tech points', the MP of Tales games) regeneration is tied to combos, the longer aerial combos mean basically never running short.

The only way to prevail, then, is aerial combat, and aggression. Single out the most dangerous enemy, lift them above the fray where they can do no harm, and repeat until they vanish in a puff of spirit energy. This is a fundamentally proactive violence.

It is also arrogant, a literal rising above Emil's fragility, rising above enemies and allies alike. To play this way is to ignore what happens on the ground, and focus all your attention on the kill. So it is with Ratatosk, who holds Emil in utter contempt. He resents sharing such a weak body, being trapped in it and only kept around for his utility.

Violence, though, is essential in this world. Monsters are everywhere, often in narrow passages that make them unavoidable. The respawn rate is high; some dead-end passages are long enough that if you kill the monster guarding them, collect whatever treasure they hold, and return, you must fight the same encounter again on the way out. Emil needs Ratatosk.

But Ratatosk does little more than kill. He does not protect – while he flies by sheer power of bloodlust, Marta must take care of herself on the ground (to her credit, she's generally more than capable of this). As is revealed later in the plot, he feels no compassion for the humans he aids.

And Ratatosk is isolated, too, literally and symbolically. The story is Emil's and Marta's, and indeed partly concerns their letting go of what meagre vindictiveness they each possess. They grow together as they work to bring peace to a divided and sometimes brutal world. Ratatosk must be isolated, the emotions and policies he stands for restrained.

Ratatosk stands for destruction, Emil and especially Marta for preservation. This creates a problem for resolving the game's story through traditional boss fights, given that combat remains Ratatosk's domain to the last. To cover the finale, I'm actually going to give an extra level of spoiler warning. Nothing I've described so far is game-ruining, but if anything I've said so far makes you interested in playing the game, stop here and go play it (it's worth it).