 There are generally four kinds of questions we can ask when trying to analyze a genre. In this case, the JRPG. First is the question of history. For JRPG is a history where Dragon Quest crystallized a lot of the first set of mechanics, gets prefaced with the claim that there were games like the Black Onyx in 1984 that preceded it, which in turn was influenced by Ultima and was adored in the West. If we are being picky though, these games were inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, which was itself based on fantasy novels and war games. The second kind of question is with regards to design. How has design evolved over time, and what should one do to make a good RPG, Quest Design, Power Scaling, etc? For example, let's take combat systems. In JRPGs we have traditional turn-based systems, where you can take as much time as you want between turns. ATB systems, like in Chrono Trigger, where there is a timer that forces you to wait for a bar to fill before you can take your next action. Tactical RPGs, like Final Fantasy Tactics, that adds movement and positional play on top of turn-based systems, and then of course real-time combat. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and heuristics for how we ought to design these systems. Third we have questions of genre classification. What is and isn't a JRPG? Are JRPGs a specific design aesthetic, or are they role-playing games literally from Japan? Is the term outdated? At what point does an RPG no longer an RPG? How have the parameters of the genre evolved? In Chris Bateman's essay, The Essence of RPGs, he traces RPGs to any game that derives from the design of Dungeons and Dragons, which focus on role-play, or character advancement through stats and procedures, and role-play on the fantasy of being someone else, combining mechanics and fiction. Finally there are close reads or analyses of individual RPGs. For example, a Jungian analysis of Persona 5 and how the characters have to integrate with their shadow to find themselves, or like in the book Respawn, an ecological and cybernetic analysis of Final Fantasy 7, and how its text supports a reading where we as the players are complicit in the systems that prey on the planet, we are supposedly trying to save. Or Simon Ferrari's analysis of Final Fantasy 13 called Hills and Lions, where he contrasts the linear first 20 hours of the game with when it opens up, arguing this actually speaks to the duality between control and freedom in the themes of the story. These are all fascinating questions, and a comprehensive account of any genre obviously involves blending all these kinds of analyses. There's also a vast amount of literature on RPG design, precisely because they connect to fantasy and war games. Books like role-playing game studies documents much of the technical characteristics of the genre, and shared fantasy and the function of role-playing games, look at the phenomena of role-play from the perspective of the player, and then extend this to communities as well. Interestingly, most of these focus on RPGs in general, which probably makes sense from a general perspective when you understand the origins of the JRPG itself. However, a book by John Peterson called The Elusive Shift talks about a fundamental divide that happened early on in RPGs, what he calls the two cultures, which are the narrative and gameplay parts. The fantasy fiction aficionados and people who wanted to play war games. He traces an extensive history of both, which I won't reproduce in full, but the point is that these audiences don't necessarily always overlap. In fact, it was the friction between these two cultures that informed Dungeons and Dragons from the very start. In any case, one can extend this schism to the divide between JRPGs and Western RPGs more generally. Western RPGs are said to be rooted in the simulation aspects of storytelling, whereas JRPGs eventually took on a more narrative tone with defined characters. In Western RPGs you create a character, in Japanese RPGs you get a character with a set of inherited traits. There are many exceptions, of course, but what's interesting is that the hardware these games were on might also affect their trajectory. Some argue that JRPGs, being on the console predominantly, could not focus on the war game side of the divide, complex systems and variables, and so instead focused more on their narrative elements, whereas computer video games in the West predominantly maintain these aspects of simulation from war games. Ironically, after having been inspired by Western games, JRPGs became extremely popular in the West with a game like Final Fantasy VII, perhaps owing to its tone and themes and cinematic qualities that the console environment put it on a path towards. In another twist of fate, RPGs in the 2000s declined in popularity. According to some, it was because of the advent of 3D and how the turn-based abstraction of JRPGs no longer felt as emulative of other prestige art, cinema specifically, and so they declined. Now, JRPGs employ more action and cinematic flair. Take Final Fantasy XVI, which has real-time combat, cinematic bombast, and designers who don't like the label JRPG itself. Many ask if Final Fantasy XVI has the essence of a JRPG. It's an RPG made in Japan, with Western sensibilities, classified still as a JRPG by some, whereas games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring are not just RPGs made in Japan, but their own subgenre of Souls games. This idea of essence, I suspect, might be difficult to quantify in any real sense. Part of the reason is the history we just explored. RPGs of all types intertwine with one another's histories in unexpected ways, creating schisms and divides when none previously existed. However, there is still a JRPG genre. Labels are descriptive, not prescriptive. People know what they mean by JRPG, and it is still used to describe and sell and analyze games. How do we reconcile this, then? How do we ask essential questions about essence without being essentialist or inessential? Perhaps much like how Dungeons & Dragons had to reconcile its gameplay and storytelling across two cultures, we need to reconcile modes of critique that integrate the questions people have asked before into a unified analysis. For example, take Patrick Holloman's writing on Chrono Trigger. He splits the game into two parts, or two games, the tragedy of the entity and the comedy of the sages. The first half has us on a linear path to an inevitable defeat. The second half grants us agency to intervene in the affairs of the world, to ensure a happier resolution. The structure of the gameplay, linearity and freedom, tying into the narrative themes about time. He examines individual quests across these arcs and maps how they fit into the emotional arcs of the story, its themes and its structure. For example, here is a graph showing the relationship between difficulty, intensity, pacing and narrative arcs. Chrono Trigger is a very deliberately designed game that leverages interactivity to tell its story. Everything from its combat systems to its quest design, its linearity, its openness, everything is there to reinforce its themes. To understand what the game is saying requires we synthesize gameplay and story. Two cultures need to become one. There are quests later on where you can go to the past to affect the future, but these are difficult, require effort. They aren't spoon-fed to you by the hand of the designer. Players are telling their own story, fulfilling the promise of role-play and role-play at the heart of the genre. In some sense every JRPG can tell us something about the genre. You can perhaps exclusively do a close read of the game, but the J in JRPG is not dispensable. The cultural context of Japan matters. Many themes in JRPGs are rooted in ecology and Shintoism, anti-nuclear themes post World War II, absentee parents, escalation towards killing gods of some kind, and metrophes that are abound in many games. These are common motifs in Japanese media that can't be dismissed as extraneous. Again, more literature on this topic is being published. Another question that has been asked about JRPGs' path dependence have incidents in the past fixed the genre on a certain trajectory. For example, the fact that they derive from war games means there are always abstractions of conflict built into these games. We do get RPGs that focus more on narrative elements, dialogue trees, moral decision-making, but when people talk about core gameplay, combat usually pops up. Take Persona 4. It weaves a high school and relationship manager into a typical JRPG structure. The friendships you cultivate enhance their abilities on the battlefield. The critic might say, doesn't this reduce friendship at a mechanical level to instrumentalism, as in you are doing these things based on what you gain from them. In some sense we can separate the fiction from the mechanics here, but that is difficult. These things are intertwined. To play a JRPG is to be enmeshed in decisions where narrative bleeds into gameplay, and gameplay bleeds into narrative. When certain characters die or leave your party temporarily, you are made to feel that loss at a mechanical level. The difficulty of certain bosses can heighten the stakes, the conflict, the urgency, the futility. Narrative and gameplay are mutually reinforcing. Let's get back to classification though, in a somewhat facetious but also somehow serious video, Yoko Taro divided JRPGs into four quadrants, an X-axis with realistic versus pop, and a Y-axis with fantasy versus modern. Final Fantasy being realistic and fantasy, Dragon Quest being fantasy and pop. In the bottom right, with realistic and modern he put Persona and Yakuza, and Danganronpa in modern and pop. He does this to situate his own game, near, right in the middle, anime but also realistic. Now with all that said, he was worried about the other games encroaching on this space. These large franchises do occupy slightly different design spaces. We also see interesting evolutions within games, Dragon Quest has remained turn based, Final Fantasy has shifted to its action oriented mechanics, and with Like a Dragon, Yakuza has in fact gone to turn based from an action system. Of course what he was more worried about was theme, tone, the fantasy. The gameplay didn't seem as relevant. The idea that gameplay might not be as relevant to consumers is shared by western designers as well. In a GDC talk, Josh Sawyer suggested people will often say things like the mechanics were good for a JRPG, or for an RPG, suggesting it wasn't the focus, which in turn makes developers less likely to focus on them. However, this is indispensable in the RPG. He goes on to outline gameplay design lessons, how randomness can be frustrating, how unperceivable effects are redundant, how player vs characters a false dichotomy. But ultimately, good gameplay is better than whatever your ideas or whatever the player's expectations are. The point here isn't to agree or disagree with these claims, but that the idea of designer intent, player expectations, and gameplay vs story are constantly a part of these discussions. Again, we see the idea of two cultures popping up. Perhaps it's unfair to compare a troll post to a GDC talk, but the point isn't that they are distinct, they are talking about perceptions of the genre and player expectations. It is the consumers that bring this baggage to genre classification. An often-sided framework in RPG design theory is G&S, or Game-ism, Narrativism, and Simulationism, a way to analyze the game's design through the prism of player's perceptions and motivations. A game is to make decisions to satisfy predefined goals in the face of adversity, to win. Narrativism relies on outlining character motives, placing characters into situations where these motives conflict and making their decisions the driving force. Simulationism is a playing style of recreating or inspired by a genre or source. In essence, understanding player preferences and designing with that in mind is an important consideration. Of course, this has been subjected to much critique. Why are we separating these? Is it really just three types? Is player typing like this really useful? Suggest mastery, fantasy, and narrative in different camps. Tactical RPG is about mastery. JRPG is about narrative, and Western RPG is about fantasy, supposedly, with obvious overlap. Tactical RPGs more likely attract players with a mastery bent, because their gameplay affords a more robust state space of depth, owing to positional play and movement. It also relies more on abstraction, simulating war and conflict at large scale. But abstraction is true of all JRPGs, and perhaps therein lies an answer to how all these systems unify. The technical limitations of early JRPGs force things like menu-driven turn-based systems, but these don't necessarily conflict with storytelling. The world map, for example, where it pulls avatars to a different resolution, can sell scale perhaps even better than a fully rendered map filled with nothing to do. It's about selling the fantasy to the player. Also, constraints and hardware forced inventive means of storytelling that relied on more sophisticated symbolic storytelling and literary devices, often expressed through gameplay. That fantasy can now turn into reality, though, with more advanced graphics and physics simulations. Stories can be made more cinematic and urgent, as opposed to being more literary and drawn out, gameplay systems with more immediacy than with strategic systems that require planning and foresight. The evolution of the genre intertwines with the culture that surrounds it, our expectations, the audience's response, technological developments, prestige, and what that entails. In any case, this leads us back to the four questions we posed at the beginning of this inquiry. Essential questions about genre always get segmented into history, design, classification, and analysis, but this is often quite reductive. The history and origin of the JRPG has informed its design trajectory, which creates political divisions around classification and how we go about analyzing. JRPGs were inspired by Western RPGs and literature and war games, but also inspired them in turn, exporting aspects of Japan to the West, RPG mechanics permeating all kinds of games now. Analyzing an individual game can't be divorced from the context that game exists in, whether mechanical or cultural, and JRPGs reconcile the mechanical and fictional aspects through abstraction that makes an integrated analysis necessary to fully understand their text and subtext. A JRPG theory needs to understand this, that the essence of the JRPG is one that has always lived at the bridge between two cultures.