Who freakin' cares how it started, lets get down to which one is better!
The big argument around jRPGs right now is that they offer no choice when progressing through the plot. Playing through them turns out to be one straight path to a boss battle, then off again on another straight path. First off, jRPGs have had a choice system in place for a long time. Final Fantasy 7 allowed you to go on one of four possible dating scenarios, Final Fantasy X-2 let you choose either the Youth League or New Yevon, Chrono Cross allowed you to save Kid or leave her to die, Persona 3 and 4 allow you strengthen social links for characters you wanted and Final Fantasy 13 allowed you to choose to play another game. Sure they didn't impact the plot too much, but it still allowed you to play through different scenarios of the same plot.
Maybe these choices aren't thrown at you at every conversation, but to deny that they're there is a flat out misconception. And besides, what's so great about choosing your own adventure. Sure, I can see the appeal: picking options that reflect who you are instead of how the writer chose to make the character, spending hours customizing the facial proportions of a character that will turn out hideous anyways, and seeing different angles to the same plot, but that doesn't mean having little or no choice is something that's bad. If a story is solid and the characters are well done, it doesn't matter. Having choice in a story doesn't automatically make a game better, it means you have to be forced to make a decision between the nice answer, the marginally nice answer, the douchebag answer, or the John Dimaggio (look him up) answer every other sentence. Is anyone really ready to make the claim that a choice-your-own-adventure book can hold ground with the likes of Lord of the Rings or Tarzan of the Apes?
Western RPGs are so chocked full of game play goodness that you have to let the game load every time you pretty much move anywhere. Dragon Age: Origins is a big offender of this (one for PS3 and I assume 360, I can't make any claim against the PC version), and I managed to clock several load times at 30 seconds. Go ahead, do nothing but stare at a static screen for 30 whole seconds. Now do that every 5 minutes for about 30 hours. I'm not sure what makes wRPGs have to load so much, but I'm not convinced that any of them are worth the constant waiting. Is it the big areas? Nope, Final Fantasy 13 had huge areas too that were much more detailed. Is it the dialog trees? Perhaps. Is that a good enough reason? For me, no. Nothing from the game play has convinced me that western RPGs are superior. They certainly don't push the graphics to their respective consoles limits.
Dragon Age, Oblivion and Fallout 3 don't look that good. I've seen characters pop in and out, textures glitch and flaws throughout all 3 games. Final Fantasy 13 sucked in many regards, but one thing it has done better than most any other current generation RPG is let the player be immersed in the game. There was nothing technically jarring about that game that distracted me. The flaws of the game were purely from the designers' vision and not the technical details. How can I get into a game that makes me look at a loading screen for so long? It's like having a giant, neon sign that flashes 'YOU ARE PLAYING A GAME' in front of you. A great game like Silent Hill 2 will draw you in from start to finish and making you feel like you're involved with the world and its characters. Wait, involved like you matter in the game? Yeah, that's right. Games have been giving players that sensation without an encyclopedia's worth of choices for years now. True involvement comes from well-executed atmosphere and brilliant story telling. (Yeah Silent Hill did have some choices that brought you to different endings, but it wasn't executed via dialog trees). That's not to say Fallout 3 or Dragon Age didn't have great stories, they did, especially Fallout 3. I was impressed. But it's the loading that kills it for me.
On the flip side, a bad story can turn a game into something painful. Star Ocean: First Departure has been brought up in a court of law for causing insanity and driving murder motivations. I'm like 99% sure of that. I can go through an entire game and bear loading times to a point, but if the story sucks, you might as well have made a first person shooter.
But penning a work comparable to that of Shakespeare won't save you if your voice acting is terrible. wRPGs and jRPGs share a common ground that, for the most part, none of my main examples really lack in this department. Fallout 3's voice actors all seemed very into their characters and helped the immersion, same with Tales of Symphonia or Final Fantasy 13 (except for Vanille who is a huge cluster of terrible all by herself). Terrible voice acting, a la Resident Evil for the PS1, feels like someone verbally punching you in the face or serving you a helping of a suck sandwich, or was it a Jill sandwich? And there are some terrible voice acting jobs in some lesser-known jRPGs as well as old wRPGs.
The best thing about Final Fantasy 13 was the game over system, as in, there were no game overs. You were never thrown out of the game for more than a few seconds when being defeated. In which case, you'd be brought right back to where you were before the battle started. That was in the back of my head each time I died in Dragon Age each time I was slaughtered by a group of mages. All I could think about was how long ago the auto-save decided to kick in, which sometimes turned out to be over an hour ago and why couldn't I just start before the battle commenced? Western RPGs for all their claims of evolving over the years really hasn't broke away from different interpretations of save points, which is an aging game design (yes, both sub-genres have used save points, but FF13 was the first to try something else that I'm aware of).
The argument that has stood the test of time, before all this choice system crap has always been about the characters. All jRPG characters are androgynous 12-year-olds running around in second-hand designer clothes that come with more belts and zippers than there are threads. While their outfits might not be that bad (except for Lulu's as seen in the black outfit above, that outfit has oh-so much wrong, and oh-so much right at the same time... ahem), most usually just commit the crime of being non-functional and asymmetric. While this may be cliche, are wRPGs really any better?
Let's see, you have the heavily armored warrior, the leather-clad rogue and the robed mage. The warrior looks like a tank with arms and legs, the rogue looks like Aragorn and the mage looks like a peasant. Why exactly is exciting about these clothing designs? Nothing really. In fact, they're pretty dull most of the time. The exception being World of Warcraft, a game which dared to have mages look awesome instead of someone who fell out of a renaissance fair. And at least jRRGs outfit each class evenly and fairly (except Final Fantasy 1). How many wRPGs start off with the default armor sets and then just heavily favor the heavy armored classes throughout the rest of the game? Every enemy drop and treasure casket has tons of armor for warriors and the like, but what about my mage? Is there anything that can make them look intimidating or.. you know, magical? I guess these armor choices are more realistic, but I doubt that's something a game with dragons, magic, elves and unicorns really needs to be focused on. No I haven't seen a unicorn in a wRPG, and yes, I count that against them.
Back to the characters themselves, jRPGs have a tendency of making their characters look... pretty. Often times you'll play a game with yourself trying to decide whether the character you're controlling is male or female, and sometimes the voice actor isn't enough to sway you one way or the other. I admit, this does cause some continuity problems when matching up the character to their physical limitations. I doubt a 120lbs. person could walk around with a 5ft sword all the time. Western RPG characters may be brick houses of muscle and masculinity, but at least it makes sense when they lift a 60lbs. great sword. Japanese characters also have the habit of defying physics either by jumping ridiculously high, surviving deadly falls, or having their hair stick straight up constantly. To this I say, the westerns are right here. These traits are ridiculous. I know these are supposed to be fantasy worlds, but it still doesn't make sense or match how the characters are... characterized. Why doesn't everyone in jRPG land jump 50ft in the air? Why is it always just the main characters? What makes them so special? I'd rather have my characters be realistically awesome than improbably awesome.
A minor inconvenience that I've noticed from both sides is the inappropriate use of menus. JRPGs have menus and they're not that fun during combat, but at least they function well when needed for checking your inventory or status of characters. I don't know why wRPGs make this the most complicated part of the game, but I subscribe to the idea that simpler is better. I don't need to be trudging through menus and sub-menus and sub-sub-menus to do what I want to do. JRPGs have no problem getting all aspects of the game down to one main menu with a simple interface. It actually took me about an hour to figure out how to use a health potion in Dragon Age.
Also, who decided that limited inventory space was a good idea? I usually fill up my wRPG inventory in the first 20 minutes of the game. JRPG inventories are unlimited; I don't constantly choose between what items I can carry with me. Oh, that's right, wRPGs love making you choose things. I usually pick up every possible item I can, because, unless I've played through the game, I have no idea what good an item will be later. And, of course, both genres have to include weapon degradation. The difference is, jRPGs did this 20 years ago and realized it was a bad idea (except Fire Emblem, but they made it a core part of the combat, so it doesn't bother me as much), wRPGs are doing it now like it's a good idea. It's not.
Finally, to the battles. The epicness that defines RPGs as... epic. Massively awesome boss monsters and horde armies against your band of misfits. The Japanese take on this is everyone deserves to have a turn, and you must wait that turn while enemies beat the ever-loving piss out of you. I'm not sure what makes jRPGs turn even the most ferocious beasts into perfect gentlemen the moment a battle screen turns up. Suddenly, instead of charging at you at full steam, they calmly wait until your turn is finished before punishing you. While turn-based combat may not be the most exciting form of battle, it does allow one to exercise their brain a bit. Turn-based it all about the strategy, planning out each move to precisely counter your opponent, like a more awesome game of chess. WRPG battles on the other hand... suck. Both Fallout 3 and Oblivion suffered from clunky combat. Instead of calculating moves, they're more about spastic flailing of what ever weapon you're holding. While frantic, which is good for combat, it's also not very satisfying. Battling in Dragon Age was good, unless the auto-save function turned on before the start of the battle, then it became more like a battle between the save feature and the processor. For this, I usually just side with jRPGs since the battle mechanics are usually very refined, wRPGs treat them as an after-thought.
So at the end of the day, which one is better? The answer for me is neither. Both sub-genres offer a great deal to gaming and both have their strong points. I've found that the better RPGs are ones that embrace aspects of both. A game like Demon's Souls (I pronounce it Demon Souls because any English-speaking person will never pronounce that double 's' sound in the middle) which takes the action of western games and the calculating tactics of eastern games and combines them to make something very playable (unless you account for the difficulty level). I don't think western RPGs need to be overly realistic and I don't think eastern RPGs need to be so absurd. Remember, the point of these games is to escape into a fantasy world, not a rip off of Tolkien or an LSD trip. If I had to choose? JRPGs. Why? Two words: Chrono Cross. The greatest game ever.
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