I like what you’ve said but I do think we are making different points. What I was trying to say is that I think there is some JRPG writing that’s just good, full stop, no qualifiers. I would say it’s more exception than the rule, but it exists and I think it’s lame for people to dismiss the whole genre entirely
Ooh! My first time! Exciting!
I wrote: “On the whole, I agree about JRPG writing being lackluster, in part because it often seems eager to be cinematic, where it just falls short.”
Which is imprecise and deserves to be elaborated on.
I will say I stand by the adjective “lackluster” rather than good or bad. I think I often arrive at the end of a JRPG feeling a little disappointed. A lot of “Machiavellian” villains (e.g Xenoblade, FFXV, FFXVI) feel too simple (an example of setup and payoff like you brought up). Or, like we talked about earlier on this thread, Persona 5 Royal walks right up to the line of exploring its own themes and then just turns around and walks away, leaving it feeling a bit muddled by the end. With the scope of these games, the reliance on cutscenes, and the influence of various movies, I feel like a lot of these games aspire to rival movie storytelling. I can’t tell if the issue is that the writing is only ~80% of the way there or if that’s just a bad thought to have in general (essentially trying to mold your story to another medium instead of playing to the strengths of your own medium)
This is where I start defending JRPGs and their writing, because I think the outright dismissal of the genre is bad. There are moments and story arcs and entire games I think are well-written, full stop, no qualifiers. I remember playing Nier: Automata around the same time I was reading Never Let Me Go, both of which explore similar themes. I loved both but one of the things that occurred to me was that Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature - shouldn’t his writing be so much better that Nier: Automata’s? And, well, not really… Both were excellent to me.
And ofc I could talk about the things Final Fantasy X does ad infinitum. One of the best bildungsromans I’ve ever experienced.
Basically, I think there’s some really great stories here too, so the flattening of the criticism (“writing = bad”) I don’t like. I think that way of thinking stifles the curiosity to dig through the genre and find the stories you do like, and I think it doesn’t leave space for future entries in the genre to succeed either
This is something I was thinking about too. I essentially made this point about P5R earlier in the thread. But even with Persona 3, which I think has pretty bad social links across the board, has an excellent one in the Sun Social Link. So the notion of “JRPG writing is bad” doesn’t really allow for that nuance, or the thought experiment of “well, what if all of the social links were as good as the Sun one? How does that change your opinion on if this is a well-written or poorly-written game?”