TCW 011 - The Genesis of JRPGs

Welcome to They Create Worlds. I'm Jeff and I'm going by my cohost, Alex.

And certainly Dragon Quest. Is the RPG that defined the shape that Japanese role playing games would take pretty much thereafter with little innovations here and there, but kind of that basic structure.

And so that was the point where the Japanese Diet. I'm not sure they actually passed a law, but the, they might have, but at the very least, Japanese Diet requested, let's not do this on a weekday anymore. Kay, thanks, bye.

It was huge in Japan, and it was the bestselling PlayStation game. Final Fantasy VII did very well in Japan as well, but that is a game that actually did much better in the United States than it ever did in Japan. Because it kind of was in the right place at the right time. Anime and manga culture was finally starting. To become a little bit more mainstream amongst teenagers at that time.

Of course, Final Fantasy had these greatly updated graphics. Final Fantasy VII did over earlier RPGs had had this very Anime style with characters like Sephiroth and Cloud, and so it was kind of a confluence of where the technology, and the culture came together at the exact right time to really blow up in the United States. And it did well in Japan too, but it actually sold even better in the U S which was unprecedented for an RPG. So I think that's a large part of the reason why there's this natural inclination to think that Final Fantasy is the big thing.

The other thing is Final Fantasy changes all the time. I mean, they are constantly innovating. They'll try new leveling systems. They'll try new magic systems. They'll-

And so that makes Final Fantasy in some ways a more impressive thing because it keeps evolving. It's like Dragon Quest. Like, didn't, isn't that the same it's always been? I mean, it's still turn-based combat and random encounters and you know, it just doesn't change as much. And I think that's another reason-

In Dragon Quest IV, they actually started to evolve it a little bit and they did the chapter system where they started doing the AI. For the other player that you could control...

Whereas Final Fantasy has always been this. Slightly edgier world. There's always this little bit of technological element that creeps in. This little bit of idea of fallen civilizations creeping in. You of course have Yoshitaka Amano's art, which is very mystical and faded and dark, and dreamlike almost. I mean, he did the Sandman comics of course-

Where it really diverges is when you get to the PlayStation and Final Fantasy VII just took a completely different track on presentation in JRPGs. Whereas Dragon Quest VII on the play station remained very traditionally Dragon Quest. And I think that's kind of the point where you get a big break in how the two series operate.

And of course the way Final Fantasy VII did it far more cinematic, far more movie like far more action packed. Is kind of what appealed to an American audience. And so that's why Final Fantasy-

So then they created Final Fantasy, Mystic Quest-

[Jeffrey laughs]

-specifically because they thought they needed something easier and more accessible for an American audience, and so they graded a little baby RPG.

One of the cases is where you have Cecil becoming a Paladain from a Dark Knight. And in that battle sequence, the thing you fight shoots this wave of darkness at you that hurts you decently. But eventually, if you just like sit there and take it it, he'll die. The reason for that, you find that in the actual game is using that ability actually damages you. So he's actually giving up some of his life points in order to use that sbility.

And they also used a skills system instead of a character class system. One of the very early games to do that. So SPI had hard times. And TSR bought them in 1983 and got all of their copyrights and trademarks on their back catalog. So they kept the game going a little longer. TSR even released a third edition in 1987 and it was because of this Dragon Quest roleplaying game in the pen and paper world that ENIX could not call Dragon Quest Dragon Quest in the United States.

So as the U S absorbs more cultures, the U S culture becomes more diverse because. It gives a little bit of itself to each new culture that comes in. Japan is kind of the opposite. Japan is not diverse. Japan stays very monolithic and it's hard to immigrate to Japan and hard to stay immigrated longterm to Japan, and so it stays very Japanese, but every so often they'll find something in another culture that they like and then they will transform it.

And you know? This goes back to during the Meiji restoration when the shogunate was taken apart and Japan started modernizing in the late 19th century. They went out and they knew they needed the westernized, and so they looked at every Western culture and they picked and chose the pieces they liked.

They based their military on the German model because the Germans had the best military. They base their schools system on the French school system because. They thought the French had the best school system and they kind of did this and every area they picked and chose, but then they blended in together, put a whole Japanese layer on top of it and came away with something completely different that was Japanese, but that had this base and various Western cultures.

It will vaguely look like that structure, but it's going to be distinctly different because we're not just going to slap a new coat of paint on here. We are going to give it our own artistic, flair.

Obviously in the United States, all role playing games are really descended at their base from Dungeons and Dragons.

So. The two kind of big series were Ultima and Wizardry, and they were complimentary in some ways, but very different than other ways. Just kind of like the whole Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy dichotomy. The big thing about Wizardry is that it was very tactical. You had multiple party members and you had multiple classes and you could mix and match them and you'd go into a dungeon, and it was all about the combat with the monsters in a dungeon.

A nd Ultima also, as it got more sophisticated, started introducing NPCs and the idea that an NPC might impart a crucial piece of information to you when you talk to them. The the first Ultima, not so much, start developing a little bit in the second Ultima is really the third Ultima, that that really got going. And so this idea of having these castles in towns where you buy and sell equipment, gather information, et cetera, and then go out onto this overworld and navigate this overworld to get to Dungeons.

That's a very Ultima thing. The idea of let's have a party of characters that have sophisticated attributes and sophisticated equipment, because that stuff was in Ultima, but those systems weren't as sophisticated in the early Ultimas as they were in the early Wizardrys.

Ohhhh

with all of these little fiddly bits everywhere...

So the NES,

Then PlayStation comes along and of course PlayStation CD.

And so it was in this environment that, a lot of the uh RPG mechanics were also born-

But you know, these early games haven't been patched. So-

So it takes place in a very colorful world. You know, the shooters before that basically mostly took place in space because. Generating a black background is a lot easier and a lot less processor intensive than a full color background.

And so it was a very vibrant, very colorful game. Uh, the enemies had some interesting AI quirks to them. Some of them did that previous games had, and we're still talking pretty primitive AI at this point, but-

And then on top of that, there are treasures on each level. So you don't level up like in an RPG, but you do improve your character by finding equipment. And so that's kind of the proto RPG stuff going on in this arcade game. It's not an RPG, it's, it's kind of RPG light. But then, you had some of these people in the PC scene being like, that Tower of Druaga was really cool, but if I'm going to do that on a computer, as opposed to in an action-ny arcade game, I need to add more RPG elements.

He's sitting on a Kiya interview that will theoretically be in his third book, which he's been kind of. Wishy washy on when it's going to come out or if it's going to come out. Because he went through a ridiculous ordeal both psychologically and financially, getting these books done that I won't go into cause that's his story. But the point is, I hope we get that Kiya interview at some point because he's sitting on it.

The Metroid people will talk about how much Alien influenced the aesthetic for Metroid .Or Miyamoto, will talk about how Bowzer was based on this Ox King character in Japanese kind of mythology. Or how Donkey Kong, started out as a Popeye game. And so the basic dynamic between Mario Donkey Kong and Pauline was based on Bluto and Popeye and Olive Oyl that they'll talk about that-

And people would drop in and out. You know, someone would play for a few hours, they leave. Someone else would come in and like they'd be running this game all weekend with just different people. And we're talking-

And he kind of looks at the Japanese market that's out there at the time, and what he sees is that it's a lot of arcade clones. It's a lot of shooters. It's a lot of that kind of thing. Not really RPGs. Now the way he tells the story, usually he says there are no RPGs. Well, we know now that that's-

So he decides that this is kind of funny. And just like we're talking about how the Japanese didn't know what to do with an American audience when it came to JRPGs, right? So they did Mysitc Quest.

The Final Fantasy teams and the teams that work on other traditional Square products are all in house people that work for Square-ENIX.

So what he did is he put together a magazine that would kind of collect all of this information one place, and it did very well. So you see, he was always trying new things, and he also spent some time in the United States. And based on his experiences in the United States with some of the fast food and automated food preparation equipment he encountered there, he decided that he would try to do low cost sushi in Japan, like using machines for sushi.

Now what they don't say, what they never said is that 300,000 in prize

He wanted statistics. He wanted, battle screens with menus and options and things to do. All of that kind of thing. And this was kind of the fight between them, Ultima is superior, no, Wizardry, superior, no Ultima is superior, no Wizardry superior. And so what do they do?

So he gets them together, he gets them together. It's like Horii, you gotta meet or Toriyama you gotta meet this guy and see what he's doing!

And then it kind of all fell apart. And so it's kind of a interesting rise and fall story. And why don't we do the history of Acclaim Entertainment next time?

Check out our show notes. at tcwpodcast.podbean.com where we have links to some of the things that we discuss in this and other episodes.

You can check out Alex's blog at videogame, historian.wordpress.com. Email us at tcwpodcast@gmail.com and follow us on Twitter @tcwpodcast.

Intro music is "Airplane Mode" by Josh Woodward found at joshwoodward.com forward slash airplane mode used under Creative commons. Attribution license. Outro music is "Bacterial Love" by Rolem music. Found at freemusic. archive.org used under a Creative Common Attribution license.