Support NeoGAF

[Mondriaan]

Kind of agree about the point about useless facts.

If you were to know everything about a console RPG except for where it was developed and who developed it, how useful is the term jRPG if with all that other info if you couldn't say whether the game were a jRPG or not?

 

[demidar]

Kind of agree about the point about useless facts.

If you were to know everything about a console RPG except for where it was developed and who developed it, how useful is the term jRPG if with all that other info if you couldn't say whether the game were a jRPG or not?

Yeah that's why I am so vehemently against that definition. Using that definition, all these games are considered the same genre: Final Fantasy XI, Dragon Quest VIII, Valkyria Chronicles, Star Ocean 4, Fire Emblem (GBA), Dark Souls, Kingdom Hearts II, Resonance of Fate, Ys 1 + 2, Ys Oath in Felghana, Phantasy Online 2.

Yet none of them play remotely the same.

We can apply this to WRPGs too, Witcher 1, Baldur's Gate II, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, Diablo, Mass Effect 1, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 1, Alpha Protocol, Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, Morrowind. All play completely different to each other, saying they're all WRPGs is doing a disservice.

 

[decoyplatypus]

But you see analyzing combat systems is the proper way to classify these games. They are the fundamental and distinctive mechanics at play. What you are left with once you remove that is menus which have lost their purpose, a visual novel (which may or may not have meaningful role-playing), and usually an added walking sim and some mini-games. What I honed on was simply the great difference which creates two sets out of otherwise similar set of games. The greatest difference that existed in the area which put these game where they were before I split them. In other words I've splintered two groups out of "tactics games".

I don't agree that combat mechanics are the way to subdivide a broadly defined RPG genre. They are one way, but in many cases they are not helpful in describing the subgenre. Fallout 2 (subgenre b) has much more in common with The Witcher (subgenre c) than The Witcher does with DotA games (subgenre c). It is actually weird to categorize certain RPGs by combat mechanics when combat mechanics are just about the least important part of their game design (I leave aside whether "cooldowns" are a genre-making distinction when Baldur's Gate and other games in subgenre b also limit ability use by time, just in different ways).

(Btw I purposefully avoided mentioning Valkyrie Profile 2, because I never played it and have no idea what it is like. I've played Covenant of the Plume and that was clearly different from VP1. Now does it matter that these two games in the same franchise may be in different sub-genres? No, of course not. If it does... have fun with Guilty Gear 2 lol)

I agree that it's possible for two games in a franchise to belong to different subgenres. What I was getting at was that it would be very strange for Valkyrie Profile 1 and 2 to belong to different subgenres based on nothing more than the fact that in VP2 there is a phase of combat that involves positioning your characters to attack from the appropriate angles (or to stay out of trouble).

You are correct to assume Counterstrike has "tactics", but what it also has everything else which makes it Counterstrike. So this is the truly wordy part that I'm going to have truncate like crazy or else someone is going to have to start doing my college papers for me. All of gaming sits on a spectrum between "Action" and "Strategy" (which are the two main types of depth). . . .

This spectrum is extremely important in defining genres... initially. Getting away from your question, we come across something I find to be very tricky. Is Starcraft, a game extremely dictated by "micro" reflexive skills, an action game or a strategy game? What of Pikmin, for example? Puzzle games: Tetris requires insane reflexes in the harder games. Do ATB Final Fantasys sit on the opposite side of the genre tree than true turn-based ones? The games I describe in "Genre 3" sound a lot like action games, but their origins make it confusing (I mean DOTA is totally an action game, but it is basically an RTS where you control one unit). Turn-based vs Real-time vs semi-real-time (pausing, etc).

You’ve mentioned a number of hard cases where a “strategy” game contains strong “action” elements, and that is an important problem with making action-strategy the primary axis for classifying videogames, but it’s not the only problem. There are games that are not “action” based, but you wouldn’t say that their departures from action move them toward strategy. Think of Minecraft. While a player may make strategic decisions, the concept of the game hardly requires it unless you define all goal-oriented thinking as strategy, and at that point the strategy-action axis collapses because all videogames entail this kind of thinking.

Um, eventually distinguishing every game from every game sounds like the natural conclusion. I don't see that as defeat, just reaching one end of the model.

We already know that individual games have differences: they come to us in distinct packages after all. When we classify games by genre, the idea is to group games that are sufficiently similar in relevant aspects so that we can refer meaningfully to “sets.” Of course you can start at the trunk and subdivide until each game sits in its own unique category, but that is not the most sensible way to work when the genres we talk about tend to be fairly low-level, or out in the branches: we can get to RTS without moving all that far from our starting point of individual games. Why? Because we already know the relevant features we’re looking for. This is where the prescriptive v. descriptive dichotomy comes in. When the goal is to make sense to each other when we speak of certain sets, it is a great advantage to start from the ways people actually speak and the intuitions they already have about which things go together and which things don’t. You’re far more likely to end up with erroneous or non-meaningful (if perhaps internally valid) categories if you wipe all that information away and try to start from a blank sheet.

 

[Riposte]

Massive post there Riposte, but I disagree with pretty much every point you made. :/

Thanks for sharing?

 

[demidar]

I am thinking of some subgenre definitions but I need some help, is Xenoblade considered open-world? I don't think it is because it's really just open areas sealed off from each other through narrow corridors. Kingdoms of Amalur is sort of the same thing.

 

[Kenaras]

Most people will argue passionately that it's an RPG developed in Japan, plain and simple. I'll never understand this; why should I care what country a game was developed in? That knowledge has very little value. On the other hand, saying that a game is part of the sizable RPG subgenre which traces its lineage to Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy? That statement provides significant information about what to expect from a game. You can call it a "Japanese-style RPG", a "console-style RPG", whatever. It's a subgenre which really deserves to have its own label, and once upon a time JRPG was the accepted label. Now there is no label to use; instead we can concisely tell people that an RPG was developed in Japan, as though there was some reason they should care.