Why end 80s/earlier 90s JRPG's so different than modern ones?

[lightbane]

Those have a large western fanbase tho. And I never heard that the weebs are particularily fond of them.

Weebs have terrible taste indeed, and got worse actually, which explains why there are so many damn lolies running around in every Japanese work lately.

 

[Cryomancer]

. The story (cutscenes) and the gameplay where your buttons actually do shit. There is zero overlap between gameplay and story.

To be honest, western RPG's are becoming more and more akin to JRPG's in that aspect. See for example, "I don't need a staff do be deadly" dialog in inquisition followed by every attack scaling with your weapon if you are a mage on inquisition. Or you able to use blood magic in front of templars on Origins.

The same scene with the guards, if was on VtMB for eg, I would be able to use intimidation, seduction, subterfuge, use my supernatural disciplines to dominate the guard, be arrested and then lockpick the cell, would have dozens of ways to do it. Gothic 2 for eg, one of the earlier quests is to get access to the city. There are 7 ways to get access to the city. Other thing which I personally hated is that summons are just another attack. Cool, I've defeated the Ifrit and now I can summon him. But he is just an attack. Would be cool to have him as a actual summon or as a party member.

Now I an on the world 2 and have no clue about what to do, there are a castle with shield dragons, fought a tyrannosaurus skeleton boss(which took damage from my "bio" spell which should't work in non living) and found the Moogle village. Can be seem as I an complaining, but the game is quite fun, despite all things that I an complaining. The dungeon design in particular, is amazing. I can't wait till I unlock the necromancer class. Sadly is a end game class...

 

[Nutmeg]

where once you get Surf for example you can traverse any body of water, or how Strength allows you to move a certain type of boulder

The latter is literally a key. For the former, imagine everywhere the blue tiles hit the non-blue tiles is a door.

There really isn't anything more to it.

 

[Nutmeg]

would have dozens of ways to do it

I actually hate this kind of design.

Everyone's a winner! It doesn't matter what you do! Every approach is equal!

Product of Western education system.

 

[Cryomancer]

Everyone's a winner! It doesn't matter what you do! Every approach is equal!

Product of Western education system.

Not truth. If you for eg, decide to bribe the guards on G2, you will lose a lot of money and money is scarce on early game. If you accepted a "favor" of a merchant, he will ask for another favor and refusing will have consequences. This "everyone is equal" is the reason which the west is becoming worse. Equality cult ruins countries like balance cult ruins video games. Giving player agency is actually the opposite of making everyone equal.

 

[Nutmeg]

Yes

Now consider the following

1. If not everything is equal, then there is necessarily one best way of doing something

2. If your choices are like "bribe" "lockpick" "seduce" etc. the best way of doing something is basically a matter of

A) knowing it already or,
B) trial and error where you're guessing the developer's mind.​

3. Neither A nor B above make for very interesting gameplay so you might as well just throw it away and make it press A to go through the dialogue, as the Japanese do.

It takes a bit of gaming maturity to understand this, and for some reason people get stuck in the simulationist mindset "but I have teleport magic! I should be able to teleport out of the prison!" without thinking through the effect this kind of approach has on the game.

 

[Cryomancer]

It takes a bit of gaming maturity to understand this, and for some reason people get stuck in the simulationist mindset "but I have teleport magic! I should be able to teleport out of the prison!" without thinking through the effect this kind of approach has on the game.

And ... RPG's was always "simulationist" types of games. The fantasy RPG grow up from war tabletop gaming "what if we use this rules to simulate how things would be in a world with magic and dragons?" If you wanna throw a magician who can teleport in jail, you need to have some anti magical measures. Throw a antimagical field for eg. On Morrowind, slaves are forced to wear bracelets which drain their magicka.

2. If your choices are like "bribe" "lockpick" "seduce" etc. the best way of doing something is basically a matter of
A) knowing it already or,

First, we don't have "best choices IRL?" Second. The "best outcome" is subjective.

 

[Nutmeg]

you need to have some anti magical measures

No you don't lol. Hence JRPGs.

RPG's was always "simulationist" types of games.

It's a dead end and leads to shit and boring games.

The "best outcome" is subjective.

Ah yes here it is. Everyone's a winner! What matters is how you feel about your actions!

 

[Cryomancer]

No you don't lol. Hence JRPGs.

Which started to disregard the consistency of game mechanics and lore decades before was common among WRPG's...

It's a dead end and leads to shit and boring games.

Name one. Just one.

Fallout 1 and 2 are heavily inspired by GURPS which is the most detailed ruleset ever and ... Is a amazing game. Mount & Blade is another amazing game and very consistent in gameplay and lore. I honestly an becoming bored with FF5. I mean, the problem is not that the game lore and gameplay is completely disconnected. Is that the game fells extremely repetitive. And when I say that the game and lore is disconnected, since I an stopping with the game, decided to use cheat engine to unlock the necromancer class only to test the "dark arts". Necromancers are considered undead, so healing magic damages you? Depends. In combat, yes. In menu, nope.

Before "but M&B doesn't have magic" -> Mods has and in a lot of then, enemies uses the same spells that the player uses... On Phantasy Calradia, shades and undeads are far weaker while exposed to daylight(mainly shades), lightning deals increased damage to metal based armor instead of gamberson armor and so on. And is a pretty dan good mod.

Ah yes here it is. Everyone's a winner! What matters is how you feel about your actions!

Wrong. If you force everyone to take a single "choice", then everyone is a winner. JRPG's are far more impacted by equalitarism cultism than WRPG's. Look to Cloud, Cloud is Cloud regardless of the player actions. In VtMB, two male Tremere vampires can end up being completely different. If "you can't make a bad decision or a decision which is extremely unlikely to work" is not the "everyone is a winner mindset, IDK what is.

 

[Nutmeg]

Look to Cloud, Cloud is Cloud regardless of the player actions.

Except the menu choices he has in combat are completely determined by which materia the player equips him with.

He looks the same, he ends up in the same places, and gets out of the same situations in the same way but these things are not part of the game. They are part of the disconnected adventure. This is because there is very little game to be had in CYOA (as I explained above), so they avoided it and made the game about the combat, of which the player has a lot of meaningful control over (crappy encounter design in FF7 aside)

Which started to disregard the consistency of game mechanics and lore decades before was common among WRPG's...

And it's a good thing.

Necromancers are considered undead, so healing magic damages you? Depends. In combat, yes. In menu, nope.

And that's a good thing too.

Fallout 1 and 2 are heavily inspired by GURPS which is the most detailed ruleset ever and ... Is a amazing game. Mount & Blade

Well, we just have very different tastes. I find Fallout 1 (which you can beat in 5 minutes once you know what you're doing) horribly uninteresting. Worse yet in all those 5 minutes you can never screw up, it's just a matter of clicking the right places on the screen at your leisure. You just have to invent crazier and crazier handicaps to get any fun out of it. Oh look if I limit my STR to this number and INT to that number now it takes 10 minutes instead of 5! How fun!

Mount and Blade is the kind of pointless economy world simulation game that is the logical conclusion of simulationist approach. Others I mentioned are Chris Roberts' Star Citizen and Garriot's Shroud of the Avatar.

When computing power was limited, I guess the Western simulationist school was forced to make good games. Hence why all the best cRPGs are from the 80s - Wizardry, Might and Magic, Pools series, Krynn series etc. The Japanese took the gameplay loops from these games and specialized and refined them into some of the great titles I mentioned earlier.

What did the great Western RPG designers from the 80s end up doing? Well they forgot about games altogether now that they are free to go all-ham on the VR. If you like this sort of thing all the power to you, they're probably great second realities. Me? I enjoy games in this reality.

If "you can't make a bad decision or a decision which is extremely unlikely to work" is not the "everyone is a winner mindset, IDK what is.

We agree here. I guess you seem to think "guess what the developer was thinking" makes for fun decisions. Me? I prefer to work with builds, tactics, resource allocation etc.

Also of note is you have the whole VN sub genre if you're into CYOA, but they don't often combine it with dungeon crawling AFAIK. There's Devil Survivor 2 on the DS which combined it with SRPG. Maybe you would enjoy this game? Probably not because you'd get all butt hurt why you can't use some demon ability in the VN sections or something stupid like that, because the game is still made using Japanese game design sensibilities where disparate types of games in the one product interact in very strict protocols.

Is that the game fells extremely repetitive

Dude, you don't even know how to play the game. You thought one of the top tier classes was useless. Maybe learn how to play it first and approach it in the right way and you'd have fun. These aren't everyone's a winner Western RPGs.

 

[Cryomancer]

Remember : You still din't showed an actual example.

Except the menu choices he has in combat are completely determined by which materia the player equips him with.

WOW. So much choice, Diablo 3 and CoD level of choices, two different characters, with same name, same attribute, same backstory, same choices make during dozens of hours of gameplay, but are completely different characters cuz their ridiculous oversized sword has different "gems" on it /sarcasm

Now seriously. Even FC3 offers more freedom and character building choices and is a shooter.

. You thought one of the top tier classes was useless. Maybe learn how to play it first and approach it in the right way and you'd have fun. These aren't everyone's a winner Western RPGs.

I din't tested the class enough, but whatever. I said that the game is too repetitive. And it is, if I an good or not, doesn't change this critiqu.

You just have to invent crazier and crazier handicaps to get any fun out of it. Oh look if I limit my STR to this number and INT to that number now it takes 10 minutes instead of 5! How fun!

You can use "meta" game knowledge to cheese FL1, FL1 has suboptimal builds but the game is fun with low INT builds regardless of it being suboptimal. And the reactions of being such a brainlet makes sense.

If is not to have gameplay and lore/story in line, why have both in the first place?

As for our tastes, the game which I spended most of my free time in this and last year was Gothic 2 - RETURNING. Gothic is already very immersive, returning cranks the immersion to eleven, brings fatigue, thirsty and food, and lets say that you wanna play as a necromancer. How do you procede? You don't click on menu and play as one. First you need to ask Xardas for apprenticeship. Xardas will require time to think and warn you about the risks of the dark magic. After 3 days, you talk to him again, and you are a necromancer? No. Only a novice of darkness. Now you need to train your mind and spirit, raising paying mages for spiritual tuitition and doing intellectual stuff like reading books, alchemy, runemaking, learning new languages and only when your spirit and intellect is powerful enough, you can be a necromancer? No, do the initiation into the circle of darkness. You need to kill a "sheep of Innos" in a monastery full of powerful fire magicians with circle 3/4/5/6 magic while you can only use magic from expensive scrolls. The weakest of then can OHK you multiple times. You need to scout the area, plan a strategy to take the target in the monastery or lure him outside, after it, your spirit is fully initialized into the circle of darkness. Now you need to buy the books which teaches how to make spells and pay Xardas to teach the circle 1 of dark magic and the most basic spell of the circle of darkness. Took 14 hours for me to do that.

The main appeal of RPG's is that we can forgive our frustrations IRL and immerse ourselves into a fictional world. This is why I play RPG's. I don't care about min maximizing and stuff like that. There are storyfags, combatfags here, but I an a immersionfag.

 

[Thac0]

Other thing which I personally hated is that summons are just another attack. Cool, I've defeated the Ifrit and now I can summon him. But he is just an attack. Would be cool to have him as a actual summon or as a party member.

I think this is technical actually. In later games (VIII, X, X-2) you can actually summon to the board, but the summon replaces your team. Basically it becomes a timeout in which you can do some damage with the summon without being in danger of a game over.

The dungeon design in particular, is amazing.

Old FF in particular has had pretty good dungeon design. I am extremely butthurt that it became the poster series for awfulll JRPG dungeon design with FFXIII.

2. If your choices are like "bribe" "lockpick" "seduce" etc. the best way of doing something is basically a matter of
A) knowing it already or,
B) trial and error where you're guessing the developer's mind.

Have you played Gothic 2?
Doesn't really sound like it.
The choices are all more complex than that. You can as an example do some busywork for the local farm owner next to the town, until he gives you peasants clothes as a reward. The guards let peasants in. However there is also a Pirate who wants entrance in the city, and you can give him your peasant clothes to advance a quest line which pays off later, but then you need to effectively own 2 entrances into the city.
The actual strongest way to enter the city is probably to break in, which requires either a very adventurous mindset or the knowledge where the wall is lowest and some platforming, since it is not telegraphed as a possibility at all. It rewards a lot of xp tho.

 

[Black]

you could play as a ***** demon

What the f*uck?

 

[Nutmeg]

Have you played Gothic 2?

I haven't. From your description, it sounds like once you know you should break in with the platforming, you should always do so. Out of all those options platforming sounds the most fun (the rest are just clicking some dialogue options?) so that's nice I guess.

I guess I should play Gothic at some point. It's probably the most beloved game here I haven't played. And VtMB. But tbh, non 80s Western RPGs don't interest me that much, after I played Planescape, Fallout, ToEE and Arcanum, I learned that I just don't have remotely the same tastes as most codexers. I also tried more modern stuff like Dragon Age 1 and Witcher 1 (both near release). They all sucked IMO. BG2 and IWD sustained my interest the longest, cause I really like the encounters in those games but I lost interest after my characters out leveled the content.

I dunno? If it's anything like those games I'm not really interested. Hence why I mostly hang out on the JRPG forum.

 

[Thac0]

I haven't. From your description, it sounds like once you know you should break in with the platforming, you should always do so. Out of all those options platforming sounds the most fun (the rest are just clicking some dialogue options?) so that's nice I guess.

Gothic has no stats which are checked in dialogue, all the options are open to every character.

Quite a bit of info about that very first mini quest:

Spoiler

Technically the optimal solution is to do a little bit of everything, maybe work for the clothes, get the receipt from the corrupt merchant, fence both away, then climb over the wall or something like that. But that takes a lot of time, and you are squeezing the game dry for every marginal advantage at that point. The nice thing is that pretty much every option has a different outcome with a hardly comparable value. One gives you more gold, one lets you stick with the worker clothes which are stronger than your starting armor (which is none), one already entangles you with the rougeish side of things making entrance to either the thieves guild or the paladins easier etc. etc.

It is just that sneaking in is general the strongest option since a lot of the other rewards quickly lose their value in the next 1-2 hours as you progress as a hero, while the XP is usefull for a while longer. Gothic's XP doesn't inflate very hard.
I personally always work for the peasant's clothes, since I find those early missions of plucking roots on a field quite humbling as a beginning of the journey of the great nameless hero. You have to literally walk across the field and interact with every fucking tuber and pull it out with a small animation. Doesn't take long, but adds a lot of flavor. It comes down to taste.

That is overall a lot of Gothic. There is quite a bit of simulation, and a lot of freedom. There are some easy solutions to things, but sometimes the easiest way isn't the most fun one. And often it is not that easy to say what the optimal way is, since all ways offer some definitive advantages and disadvantages which are hard to compare.
How to get into the cloister:

Spoiler

As an example I never take the easy idol fakeout route that NOTR adds for getting into the cloister. Instead I take the original mission where you have to donate a sheep and a ludicrous sum of 1000 gold pieces to the wardens to be able to be trained as a mage. Gathering that makes a very nice early game goal and is just much more authentic than finding a shitty idol worth 50 gp and exhancing it for an entrance worth 1100 gp.

The biggest example of this is the camp which you choose. In every good Piranha Bytes game you choose one out of three factions. These factions HEAVILY change the game, as an example you can't train certain weapons to grand mastery in some camps, or you get entirely different spells. Some do not get spells at all, but only they get the strongest armor etc.
These three factions are usually very well balanced at each other, so every Gothic game can technically be played thrice while experiencing minimal overlap.

Gothic has some similarities to VTMB, but both are not that similar to other western classics.
They do not remotely play like isometric rpgs, Gothic is a third person action game.
It has no real equal in the market overall, so Gothic ends up in a lot of best of all time lists simply for delivering a very intriguing style of game that noone else even tries to make.
And yes, Dragon Age Origins and Witcher 1 suck balls.

 

[Thac0]

I guess I should play Gothic at some point.

Oh and one more thing:
It is completely reasonable to start Gothic with Elex, and then work back from Gothic 1 or 2.
Elex does a lot of thing right that Gothic 1&2 did right, and it is the best PB game since Gothic 2.
Also it has a relatively modern engine, and controls like a normal Eurojank game. As such the barrier to entry is much much easier, since a lot of older crpgs have terribly high entry barriers due to UI and controls straight from baator.

This is also the reason why I generally prefer JRPGs for retro shit, radial menus are a cancer and should have never existed.
Gothic 1&2 controls particularily horrible, with keyboard controls for a third person camera and the need to press two buttons at once to interact, speak or fight (space to get into interact mode, and then arrow buttons for actions)
It is well worth it for a very unique game tho.

 

[Cryomancer]

About Gothic 2, my greatest problem of G2 is that they lock the option to learn magic from Xardas and Saturas, Xardas teaches magic to you on G1 and Saturas teaches on G1 and G3.

However, WRPG's tends to lock SOME player options. Can you imagine playing D&D with a DM which choses your character name, background, story, class, race, attributes, skills(...) and railroad you during the entire session, now allowing any "creative" solution, that you use any skill, spell, tool or whatever outside of combat? Essentially making your char a NPC every time outside of navigation and battle? That is how I fell about most "Final Fantasy", "Xenoblade" and etc games. In therms of freedom, TT RPG's offers dozens of times more freedom than WRPG's which offers dozens of times more freedom than survial games which offers dozens of times more freedom than JRPG's. I know that is near impossible for a "computer DM" to be good as a "human DM" but JRPG's doesn't even try.

I an playing underrail now and to access Depot A, I can

• Lockpick a door(require 85 lockpicking)
• Work for Silas and each quest has a lot of ways to solve
• Work for the Scrappers and same as above.
• Buy the key from Silas
• Kill everyone and get the key
• Pickpocket the key

If was Final Fantasy, I would walk, walk, walk until i "foretell" the specific way which the devs wants me to do in a specific order of things...

And according to someone here, a stealth character having a easy time in a mission A and a STR char in a mission B is "illusion of choice" and "everyone is equal" mindset but everyone playing with the same char is not...

 

[MpuMngwana]

However, WRPG's tends to lock SOME player options. Can you imagine playing D&D with a DM which choses your character name, background, story, class, race, attributes, skills(...) and railroad you during the entire session, now allowing any "creative" solution, that you use any skill, spell, tool or whatever outside of combat? Essentially making your char a NPC every time outside of navigation and battle? That is how I fell about most "Final Fantasy", "Xenoblade" and etc games. In therms of freedom, TT RPG's offers dozens of times more freedom than WRPG's which offers dozens of times more freedom than survial games which offers dozens of times more freedom than JRPG's. I know that is near impossible for a "computer DM" to be good as a "human DM" but JRPG's doesn't even try.

Well that's true, but jRPGs were never meant to emulate tabletop RPG experience and shouldn't be judged as such. They are very much a result of divergent evolution from Ultima and Wizardry, and by early '90s were pretty much doing their own thing.

 

[Nutmeg]

I an playing underrail now and to access Depot A, I can

• Lockpick a door(require 85 lockpicking)
• Work for Silas and each quest has a lot of ways to solve
• Work for the Scrappers and same as above.
• Buy the key from Silas
• Kill everyone and get the key
• Pickpocket the key

And, if it's anything like any other Western RPG I've played, only one of these choices is optimal and you just have to guess which one (that's literally all you can do, there's no numbers to crunch, no series of moves to think about, just guessing what was in the dev's head). Or, alternatively, you shouldn't even be in that situation at all unless you severely handicapped yourself somehow because the game can be beaten in 5 minutes if you don't. How fun!

Anyway, this is called CYOA and if you want the Japanese equivalent you might want to try VNs.

I don't really care for this sort of thing so I can't really compare.

 

[Nutmeg]

divergent evolution from Ultima and Wizardry,

For sure the influence is there, but IMO this it's always overstated. Product of Westerner's needing to feel they invented everything.

Precludes influence of Pacman via Tower of Druaga etc.

 

[Cryomancer]

only one of these choices is optimal and you just have to guess which one

There are no "optimal" solution. There are shorter, medium and longer routes, offering different amounts of XP, demanding different amount of resources and requiring different skills, builds and different resources. You wanna the fastest route? The most experience rewarding route? The cheapest route? A in between? And even if there is a optimal way, not everyone will find it. Just like there are suboptimal choices IRL.

If this section was in a JRPG, I would be walking in the city for hours, talking with each NPC over and over until a lot of triggers are triggered in a specific set by the dev order.

 

[Hyperion]

If this section was in a JRPG, I would be walking in the city for hours, talking with each NPC over and over until a lot of triggers are triggered in a specific set by the dev order.

Sounds more like BG2 than a JRPG to me....

 

[Nutmeg]

"optimal" solution

Optimal is whatever gets you towards the end most efficiently. I assume the game has some kind of "ending" (possibly multiple, with one being preferred over the others).

I know Western RPG players tend to ignore the game's actual goals and make their own like "how powerful can I make my character" or whatever. But again, this kind of "winning is what *you* the player thinks it is, because you're so special!" thinking isn't for me.

And even if there is a optimal way, not everyone will find it. Just like there are suboptimal choices IRL.

That's fine, the issue is in the mechanism. Is it following a logical set of rules and tests of skill? Or is it just playing guess the dev? I prefer the former.

 

[Cryomancer]

Sounds more like BG2 than a JRPG to me....

Name one quest where it happens. Because the most open chapters of BG2 are :
Chapter 2 - Where you just need to get money, doesn't matter how you do that.
Chapter 6 - Where they give clear directions to fight Bohdi and you can ask for help in some orders or not, is up to you.

Optimal is whatever gets you towards the end most efficiently.

OMG... I give up.

RPG's aren't about fictional worlds and characters and rules to simulate this things. Are about winning and maximizing numbers, so forcing the player to deal with consequences for his actions, like losing honor after pillaging a village on M&B is just illusions of choices and making everyone eqqual. Now, if M&B forced you to follow a specific path with specific instructions, now we have a game that respects the player agency and who has emergent gameplay /sarcasm.

 

[Hyperion]

Name one quest where it happens. Because the most open chapters of BG2 are :

It's not an indictment of a particular quest, but the fact you need to talk to every faceless goon who walks by in Athkahtla. In a game where everyone looks the same because of a distant isometric view. I just picked BG2 because it's beloved on the Codex, but I can say the same for every other isometric crpg, be it Pillars, Deadfire, Vogelware, or any other game. Avadon gets special mention because it was made using his old engine and doesn't have a highlight all key, so you get to strain your eyes against everything, and hit G every 12 steps to make sure you don't miss something important on the ground.