Art + heart + math

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For roughly 20 years – call it 1986 to 2006 – a sub-sub-genre of video game emerged out of Japan, quietly redefined what was possible for the medium as a whole, and hooked a generation on a frankly bizarre and fractured form of storytelling.

Console-style Japanese role-playing games – JRPGs, like Final Fantasy, or Dragon Quest – combine pop entertainment, cutting-edge technological artistry, and gentle statistical manipulation as a form of gameplay. Catch me in the right mood, and I’ll admit to you that, at their finest, I believe they’re the pinnacle of human expression.

I’ve been thinking about what JRPGs mean to me, in light of comments made recently by Naoki Yoshida, producer of the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI, about how many veteran Japanese game developers bristle at the term “JRPG.” In the past, it’s been considered discriminatory when used by non-Japanese critics and journalists. A term of belittlement.

I get where Yoshida and those other developers are coming from. I doubt anyone at Square, Enix, Atlus, or any of the other studios responsible for the genre’s classics ever set out to “make a JRPG.” In retrospect, it’s become a catch-all label used to describe a diverse and eclectic array of games with really only one thing in common­—their country of origin. I can see how that would be perceived as discriminatory.

What exactly is a JRPG? What do they feel like? What power do they have, to inspire, and enchant, and evoke? Those are questions I have strong opinions on. I played the original Final Fantasy when I was so young that I believed the party selection screen at the beginning was the entire point of the game.

In elementary school, I visited my best friend’s house almost daily, where we would do two things: shoot hoops in the driveway and play Super Nintendo games. I’m so thankful that my friend had such good taste, because while I wasted time with NFL Football 94 and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on my Sega Genesis, he introduced me to epics of the imagination like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, and EarthBound. I could barely make sense of what I saw on the screen of his woodgrain floor model TV, and I suspect that neither could he. But we knew beyond any doubt that what we experienced in those games was the nearest we’d ever come to real magic. I still feel that way.

In 1998, I somehow convinced my grandmother to buy me a copy of Final Fantasy VII. I didn’t even own a PlayStation at the time. But I knew those three discs would transport me to someplace I needed to be. I’d figure out the hardware issue later.

Choosing between Grandia and Xenogears as my big Christmas present in 1998 was a landmark decision in my life (I chose Grandia, for better and for worse).

Most JRPGs take longer to complete than binging every season of your favourite prestige TV show in succession, and I’ve completed many of them. I remember my time spent inside those games the way people remember summers spent at camp, or trips abroad.

More than anything else, what fascinates me about JRPGs is the possibility space they create. Their specific combination of elements make them adept at simultaneously pulling the heartstrings, delighting the senses, and gently engaging the problem-solving regions of the brain. If that weren’t enough, they’re also good at burrowing into the subconscious, and emerging years or decades later in the form of hot bath and hazy daydream nostalgia. Powerful shit, JRPGs.

In the 80s, Afrika Bambaataa codified the five elements of hip-hop: MCing, DJing, breakdancing, graffiti, and knowledge of self. What is hip-hop? All five of those elements in combination.

Similarly, my personal definition of a JRPG is any game that skillfully combines the following five elements.

Spectacular visual design

This doesn’t necessarily mean the best or the most graphics (though sometimes it has meant that, historically). But JRPGs are home to iconic characters and monsters parading around against a backdrop of lavish dreamscapes and non-Euclidean nightmares.

Floating continents, crystal caves, and subterranean civilizations are all commonplace. So are fifteen-foot-long swords and rainbow-coloured hairstyles that defy gravity and sunsets that never end.

Beautiful music

How are you going to provide audio accompaniment for a 40-70 hour journey that looks like what I described in the paragraph above and features no voice acting? With sweeping orchestral scores, melodic chamber music, and virtuosic prog rock, just for starters.

Composers like Yasunori Mitsuda, Motoi Sakuraba, Yoko Shimomura, and Nobuo Uematsu bring true musical scholarship to these games, exploring a wide range of styles that the average listener might never otherwise encounter.

I’m going to link to Mitsuda’s Dream of the Shore Near Another World because it’s always been my favourite. I find it haunting and gorgeous. But I could have chosen from hundreds of other pieces.

A story worth telling

The old joke about JRPGs holds that they all have essentially the same story, which begins with an amnesiac boy waking up in a pastoral village, and ends 60 hours later with said boy and a ragtag group of powerful friends literally battling and dethroning god. Like all generalizations, there’s some truth to this. But also, as a plot conceit, that kind of rules. So even if it’s not true of every JRPG, it’s a pretty great starting point to riff on.

JRPG stories do veer toward the fantastic, with oversized emotions and legendary, named weapons and good-vs-evil conflicts. But they tend to be expansive enough to include lovely little character vignettes.

More than the plot points themselves, though, it’s the uniquely Japanese concept of nakama within these stories that resonates for me. Nakama is more than friendship, and more than camaraderie. It’s a deep sense of connectedness that arises among a group of people who have endured something together. Think of Frodo and his buddies at the end of The Lord of the Rings, or Luffy and his pirate crew in One Piece.

Nakama is the reason why the amnesiac village boy teaming up with the battle-hardened war veteran, the plucky robo-mechanic girl, and the magical talking cat not only makes sense in context but makes you fall in love with and root for these characters.

Party mechanics

In most JRPGs, the group of characters you control is going to have to fight many battles. Many, many battles. Each of these characters will bring something unique to the proceedings. Maybe one deals heavy damage, one is responsible for healing, one can steal items from the enemy, and one performs dances that invigorate their allies.

The reason this is fascinating is the same reason basketball starting fives or jazz ensembles are. You’ve only got a fixed number of slots available on your team, and depending on which characters you choose, the dynamic and capabilities of the group can change dramatically. One combination might thrive in a given situation, but be completely inadequate in another. When the right synergy is found, it’s a joy to behold.

Numbers going up and down

This is what really sets JRPGs apart. The simple pleasure of monitoring sets of data, and finding inefficiencies to exploit. If you’ve ever been interested in tracking the stats of a baseball team over a season, or comparing the GDP of various nations at different points in history, or shopping for the best possible deal online, you may get the appeal.

At their core, JRPGs are lusciously and artfully decorated clusters of numbers. For each battle fought and won, experience points are awarded—progress depicted in the form of numbers increasing. Within each battle, every character’s remaining stamina is depicted in the form of numbers going down—each blow landed by a combatant subtracts a certain number from that total score. New items can be found – or purchased – and equipped, and with each such transaction, a numerical value representing wealth, strength, speed, or some other attribute will be affected.

Like Bertrand Russell said, “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere”.

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I chose the period between 1986 and 2006 as the golden age of JRPGs because it begins with the first Dragon Quest, which set the example for all others to follow, and ends with both Final Fantasy XII, which broke from convention to such an extent that it signaled to everyone interested that the party was over, and Mother 3, which may be not only the single best JRPG ever made but is in the discussion for best video game, period. Notably, Mother 3 was released on the Game Boy Advance, a handheld console which was already effectively dead at the time, and it has, to this day, never received an official release in any language other than Japanese. That tells you everything you need to know about where golden-age JRPGs were at in 2006.

JRPGs in the classic mould are still being made, though interestingly, often by tiny teams of people in places other than Japan. So the “J” part maybe doesn’t quite fit. But there’s really no other apt descriptor. And while golden age JRPGs were the big-budget blockbuster releases of their era, their conventions are no longer in vogue. Japanese developers continue to be at the vanguard of the medium, but as always, those blessed with both the budget and the talent to do incredible things are more concerned with pushing the medium beyond its current limits than adhering to tradition.

Still, once in a while, JRPG nerds like me do get thrown a bone. There are enough of us out here that it still makes business sense to craft originals for people with our sensibilities. Octopath Traveler II, which came out in February of this year, is the Rolls-Royce Phantom VIII or the Patek Philippe 5270G of JRPGs. Made with loving craftsmanship and sold at a premium for connoisseurs.

At some point in the recent past, some people may have used the term “JRPG” to disparage. Maybe some people still do. But to me, those four letters have only ever conjured up wonder, respect, admiration, and gratitude.

The more time that elapses between their heyday and the present day, the more quaint and precious the JRPGs from those decades appear. A product of the limitations of their time, they’re an unlikely amalgam of elements that could only have been dreamed up and then assembled by teams of people with both the obsessive attention to detail of a precision engineer and the romantic ambition and heart of a true artist. That we ever got more than a handful of them is a miracle.