JRPG vs. WRPG

"While JRPGs generally involve a bunch of angsty 20-year olds with stupid hairdos following a strictly linear storyline when they aren't standing in a row in front of dancing goblins arguing about who's on potion duty, Western RPGs tend to feature more variety and less skinny, underdressed girls claiming to be men."

-Yahtzee, Zero Punctuation

While I'd say the Role-Playing-Game is my favorite genre of video gaming, I tend to only refer to Japanese RPGs. Games like Pokemon, Persona, Fire Emblem, and Disgaea rank high on the "List of games I would recommend to nerds". RPGs are very difficult to sell to a more mainstream audience, due to how much they rely on stat building and character development. They're much slower paced than Halo, God of War, Rock Band, etc. and require a significantly longer time investment from start to finish. They're much less "pick up and play" and more "Spend an hour learning how the damn game works before you actually start to play it." Hell, even if you have learned the game and you "get" it, that's still no guarantee that you'll enjoy it, as this article discusses.

Yet those of us who do enjoy RPGs feel a sense of accomplishment in the mundane. Level grinding in Disgaea to beat the next big overpowered bonus boss, hatching Pokemon eggs in order to breed the one that best completes your team, and oftentimes we finish sidequests not necessarily for the rewards, but just for the sake of knowing you've completed another of the game's tasks.

However, the people in that group may still have very different tastes in games. Hence the differences between the J and the W. I hadn't even played a Western RPG until this year, and I knew going into them that the experience would be different than what I was used to. Fallout 3 involved me for a long time, Mass Effect really sucked me in (once I figured out how the friggin' menus worked), and Fable 2 randomly decided that it didn't want the 'A' button to work for me anymore, but I wasn't enjoying the game in the first place, so no loss there.

The main difference between the two genres is indeed the linearity. JRPGs tend to always point you towards the next objective up until the end of the game, where you're randomly forced to explore the world to find party members or gods or crystals, and THEN you fight the final boss. Conversely, Western RPGs tend to set the player loose to go do whatever after the opening parts of the game. Neither approach to game design is "bad", they're just different ways of going about business. Then there's Fable, that tries to tell you it's a big open world to explore, but really, all you're doing is going from objective to objective up until you're told you aren't famous enough to continue the storyline, so go do some sidequests to kill time.

The interesting part is comparing how well certain mechanics work between the two genres. Fallout 3's world map is gigantic, and if you just follow the storyline, you'll barely see any of it. The whole point of the game is to go on a sighting tour across the entire wasteland and see what you find. It's a lot of fun. But pick a random Final Fantasy game and chances are there's no good reason to do exploring on the world map at all. Most paths are dead ends, wasting your time and draining your supplies as you fight the endless random encounters. Not to mention, in Final Fantasy VII if you strayed too far off the beaten path, you might end up with all your Materia stolen and your party underleveled in a sidequest that wasn't meant to be found by the player until much later in the game. Thankfully Final Fantasy X kicked the whole concept and just kept the player on the right track the whole time. Fable 2's interpretation was to give the player the name of a town, but not actually tell them where it was on the map. Guess you'll just have to follow the glitchy magic trail!

Another comparison between the two genres is how they handle stat-building. Western RPGs make a big deal out of leveling up, and you get experience from doing just about anything. Talking to people, completing quests, ...looking at stuff. And once you actually get to the level up, it's big and dramatic. Who knows where you could spend those points? You could spend them to become a stronger fighter, a better speaker, become sneakier, all sorts of things come from leveling up. However, JRPGs tend to build your stats in separate ways; you level up from killing monsters, and typically those games find other ways to build stats as well. The Persona games have you building up relationships with NPCs in order to strengthen the monsters you use in battle. FFVII has materia that you can redistributed to party members at any time in order to gain magic spells or boost specific stats. Things like that.

However, I think the most noticeable difference between the two genres is how they tell their stories. Another common theme between the WRPGs I've played is that the player has a large part in how the story plays out. Different dialogue options will get you different reactions from people, and some decisions can drastically affect how the story plays out. There's also a strong good/evil system going on in all the WRPGs I've played, which barely plays out at all in most JRPGs. Also worth mentioning is the open-world aspect, where a lot of the story doesn't have much to do with the main story at all. Fallout lets you wander around and do quests for random people, while Mass Effect is constantly giving you extra sidequests to do at your own leisure.

Sadly, all this freedom comes with a few drawbacks when trying to tell a good story, which is dealt with better in JRPGs. For one, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect try to make the story sound urgent "You must go catch him!" "You must go find your dad right now!" In reality? No. Don't. In fact, take your time. Do whatever you please. Don't worry, the plot will wait for you to catch up. It really takes away from the urgency of it all. JRPGs keep you on a strict path, so the story moves at a brisk and interesting pace, and you don't really get the impression of "Wait, what was I doing again?" And as far as influencing the plot goes, it's just much easier to tell a story when you don't have to write 4 versions of it.

However, the main thing that kind of bored me about games like Fallout and Mass Effect, yet enjoyed about Persona and Disgaea is simply that the characters feel more...alive. WRPGs are much more photorealistic, and they try to tell a serious storyline with believable characters...that just come across as boring. I had several party members in Mass Effect, but I really couldn't care for any of them, simply because their influence in the storyline is downplayed and only expanded on if you go out of your way to talk to them. Even if you do, it pretty much amounts to "Okay, here is my backstory". They're always talking about solving the problem at hand, and...that's it. The game is as far as the story extends. And of course, characters really don't do much except stand there and give you orders in Fallout 3. They might attack you if you don't something wrong, but they just don't feel...alive. In comparison, let's look at the cast in Persona 4. Sure, there's a great evil at hand that they want to share, and sometimes they act stupid in order for the story to move along the way the developers intended, but for all that, they just...feel more real. Mainly because they show more relatable human emotions. The characters is Mass Effect are so dry and serious, but in Persona 4, they're just...happy. They laugh together. They tease each other and play tricks. They feel much more like a team because they're actually friends, as opposed to just party members. There are sections of the game that have nothing to do with the plot; they're just there to let the characters goof off a bit and show their true selves. It's what really drew me to the game; I just had fun watching everybody interact.

I may not be trying to change any developer's opinion here; after all, both kinds of RPGs have their strengths and weaknesses, and neither is "better" than the other by definition. It's just interesting to sit down and compare them like this, and as I delve further into WRPG territory it'll be interesting to see what I find.