My contrarian take is that the only writing that is bad is one that is reprehensible.
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Not seeing the masterwork of Final Fantasy VIIās āthis guy are sickā writing is a skill issue, sorry.
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Suikoden 2ās multiple spellings of Jowy/Jowey/Joey is a literary masterstroke.
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I think I might enjoy seeing poor (but good enough) translations more than good ones tbh.
I feel like it makes me think more about words as abstract concepts as opposed to just inherently understanding the meaning, if that makes sense.
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The original translations of FFIV, FFVI, and Chrono Trigger were all better than their āmore faithfulā re-translations for the handheld ports.
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Itās not actually "bad ass " when johnathan guilty gear throws coins on the ground. Littering should not be encouragesd. What if an animal tries to eat it
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Aeris > Aerith
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I like what youāve 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 thatās just good, full stop, no qualifiers. I would say itās more exception than the rule, but it exists and I think itās lame for people to dismiss the whole genre entirely
Ooh! My first time! Exciting!
I wrote: āOn the whole, I agree about JRPG writing being lackluster, in part because it often seems eager to be cinematic, where it just falls short.ā
Which is imprecise and deserves to be elaborated on.
I will say I stand by the adjective ālacklusterā rather than good or bad. I think I often arrive at the end of a JRPG feeling a little disappointed. A lot of āMachiavellianā 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 canāt tell if the issue is that the writing is only ~80% of the way there or if thatās 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 - shouldnāt his writing be so much better that Nier: Automataās? And, well, not reallyā¦ Both were excellent to me.
And ofc I could talk about the things Final Fantasy X does ad infinitum. One of the best bildungsromans Iāve ever experienced.
Basically, I think thereās some really great stories here too, so the flattening of the criticism (āwriting = badā) I donāt 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 doesnāt 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 āJRPG writing is badā doesnāt really allow for that nuance, or the thought experiment of āwell, 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?ā
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For the record I co-sign
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To be honest I was thinking of that exact question as I wrote that comment. Thinking on it I donāt believe I have the language to properly describe what I think of as āgood writingā and it is more of a āI know it when I see itā kind of thing. Also, for clarification, when I use the word writing I referring to dialogue unless I specify otherwise. I get that writing is a pretty general term, that is on me.
It would probably be better to clarify further and say I think the dialogue of almost every JRPG is bad. Like I said before I understand that the dialogue of JRPGs could be victim to translation. Maybe if I ever learn enough Japanese to be able to play JRPGs without subtitles my mind would be changed.
As for what it means for a game to have good or bad writing it will obviously be down to personal preference and tolerances for some things. When it comes to the medium of television I think that Mad Men is one of, if not the, best written shows ā as in dialogue ā I have watched. So many lines are layered deliciously. I also think it excels in the other concepts underneath the word āwritingā but I canāt put that thought into words at this time. When it comes to JRPG writing I think that Japanese writers have the same sort of problem that American writers, for example, have. I too am exhausted by quippy Marvel-style dialogue. It doesnāt sound natural to my ears and it really only works in Marvel movies or games based on comic characters. It doesnāt bother me in the Spider-Man games, for example. However, Marvel movies have been insanely popular for the past 15+ years and writers are influenced by them. Over in Japan much of the power of friendship, uwu, āplease stop trying to look at your female friends breastsā type of dialogue is all over Shonen.
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It is a nitpick but with the exception of like one, maybe two, characters in Persona 4 none of them willingly go in to the TV. They are put in there against their will. The confronting of the other self is thematic and I totally get you, itās just that they donāt seek that out.
Though, funnily, the confronting of the other self is actually a good example of how awkward Persona 4 can be in pushing the plot forward. Each confrontation goes with the Shadow self saying āIām the real ___ā then the character saying āno youāre notā and then the Shadow gets upset. You fight for a bit and then after defeating the Shadow the character is like āyou know what? Weāre both me.ā You can of course say that the boss fight is also a metaphor for the internal conflict in the character. I think that the original Persona 4 anime did a better job at portraying this though.
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Iād say a lot of ābadā video game writing comes down to the latter, yeah. You canāt necessarily follow the same forms and methods as cinema in games, with a principle reason for this being that game pacing versus moving pacing is entirely different because of gameplay sections. This tends to make game stories ālongerā than movies, even if a particular game might have (say) about a movieās worth of cutscenes, and that can rather throw off how the writing / narrative āfeelsā because the cutscenes are working in a mode that isnāt entirely suited to the rest of the medium. This is especially true of a lot of games because the story is sort of bolted on after much of the game itself is already complete
In this respect I actually think game-writing could stand to look to literary fiction more often than it does. Novels also tend to be longer than movies like games are, and they operate with more elasticity when it comes to both narrative digressions and whether or not anything is happening in a given paragraph or not. Gameplay segments between cutscenes can function not unlike chapters that are more about setting, description, or exposition in a book
I almost brought up the outright dismissal myself, as it begs for elaboration (and often suggests in my experience that the criticism has more to do with taste than any good or bad qualities of the work in question), so Iām glad you pulled on that thread a bit! In some ways (and in my experience, of course), I think Japanese games are often better at making gameplay and narrative cohere than Western ones are, and some of that probably comes from the differences in inspiration. Japanese games often draw on the structures and tropes (tropes are just building blocks, so donāt think any derogatory intent is meant here) of manga and anime, whose episodic nature lends itself better to necessities of mixing gameplay and story moments in a way that the cinematic inspirations of many Western AAA games doesnāt
I have a great fondness for the bildungsroman and Iād love to hear your thoughts on Final Fantasy X as one (though probably not in this thread, lol)
This is the sort of specificity I was looking for!
While Iām no student of Japanese, Iāve interacted with enough folks who are (or who are fluent) and part of my degree focused on translation (from Greek), so my general sense is that at least some of this comes down to matters of localization and translation. What feels natural to an American ear is quite different from what would feel natural to a Japanese one, and whatās more, plenty of culturally Japanese character archetypes donāt really ātranslateā well to American audiences. How localizers and translators approach these things can have a huge impact on whether dialogue works
A rather common choice is to āover-Americanizeā dialogue (which can often lead toward Marvel-style quippiness that isnāt really present in the original text). This can make the work more palatable to an American audience, but often something of the intent and tone ends up lost
As someone who studied translation (and might have at one point made a career of it), this is admittedly something of a personal bugbear, though
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Speaking of TLOU2: you can turn gyro aiming on in that game, throw the sensitivity all the way up, and now suddenly you are playing Splatoon matches where everyone is on team red.
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ābadā writing can be good in video games as in all things. One way this happens distinct to games though is that mysterious and epigrammatic quality the ābadā writing in like Soul Blazer or Earthbound. From has got this dialed in, and now that theyāre popular you can see where imitators go wrong (9999999999 hour ālore explainersā
Anyway for people wondering what good writing can look like fully elicited in a video game, meaning cool at the sentence level, the overall structure, how it feeds into and responds to the gameplay experience then maybe you can guess what game I would recommend (hint: itās Russian)
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Iāve cancelled Patreon subscriptions in part because they started making Silksong jokes and Iām not afraid to do it again.
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Iām sure thereās some logical path I could take to figure out the game you mean.
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Clearly Tetris.
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oh wow, I really thought itād be the Heiankyo Alien take that fired up the weekend discourse. Time to answer to the Angel of Elaboration
re: my trite, almost Seanbabian take. Iād never dismiss the genre ā I love JRPGs. Not sure where that one came from, as I did say āmost JRPG writing.ā But in any case, they are what I play the most of, and what I think a whole lot about; there is never a time where I donāt have at least one going, but usually closer to three (I always need a simple small-numbers JRPG and a robust JRPG going, usually alongside one thatās just a whim). To me, the JRPG genre is good. But, as usual, āgoodā is the word that gets us in trouble. I use it here in a thread that asks us to be contrarian (with the contrarian bit being that itās one of the most pound-for-pound narrative-heavy genres and often held up as the āones with the stories,ā but the writing of those stories so very rarely nails it). Like @sapphicvalkyrja asks:
The more layered, less-abrasive take would be something like this: in the JRPG genre, I have experienced very, very few examples of an overall narrative work that has left me wholly satisfied.
This is true of most games, from reasons ranging from āthis is Hopping Mappyā to the fact that longform games are just really difficult narrative containers (like sapphic also said, maybe we should look more to books than movies, which reminds me that I need to finish my draft of a thread where we can talk about games based on books). But itās weird that āthe ones with the storiesā have such a high miss rate; itās not that thereās a lack of goodness there, itās that youād think thereād be more crystalline examples of top-to-bottom excellent JRPG scripts than there are.
They are often āgoodā as in āI like them and find them interestingā (i.e. what counts). But academically (i.e. who cares), I struggle to think of examples that fully hit on dialogue, structure, characterization, pace, thematic intent, all of it ā those that leave me feeling like a full-bodied text has been delivered. Usually, your āTop 20 Best JRPG Narrativesā excel at one or a few of those things, and the other written elements at the very least come with some big caveats. I think of Metaphor recently, which I loved and which had an overall excellent English script and characters that it genuinely made you adore spending time with, and dozens of lovely little human stories, and some non-cringing examples of how racism is both systemic and emotionally driven; and yet a thematic payoff, after 80 hours of being very interested in ideas, that had me reaching for much more than āhope is good and itās good when we honor the will of the people.ā
Speaking really broadly, a lot of what I put into the āI canāt categorically call this goodā bucket likely stems from the Western Fantasy vis a vis Japanese storytelling tension (again, @sapphicvalkyrja mentioned this) that also makes JRPGs interesting, in lots of ways. Post Final Fantasy, youāve got this thing that wants the super-archetypical heroās journey of your Tolkienized Euro fantasy and the three-act structure and beats (to be reductive) of American popcorn films (the ācinematicā stuff that @Hunter alluded to). Itās as influenced by popular western storytelling as it is by anime; those narrative structures and the longform game format are often at odds with each other.
I think specifically on levels of act structure, setup and payoff, the god-in-the-machine stuff thatās a much larger part of Japanese storytelling really sticks out and fails these scripts. Youāll have these Star Wars-ian three-act stories of a scrappy rebellion against an oppressor or your otherwise archetypical Campbell-ian journey, then peppered with lots āwe have stated it, therefore it isā moments that create a sort of unsatisfying dissonance. For a quick contrasting example, I think of the moment near the beginning of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in which the flying village/dog/grandfather that the main character lives on is gunned down and dies, but is reborn as the prerequisite cute JRPG mascot 20 minutes later, at which point he explains for the very first time, āoh yes, that is something I can of course do.ā Up to this point, the game has been presented through the sorts of storytelling lenses where, for a moment like that to work, youād want some form of setup or foreshadowing, some seed or hint placed that Grandpa Dog Houseās people have this reincarnation ability, ideally then left alone long enough for you to say āah!ā when that forgotten setup pays off. The contrast of storytelling styles is interesting enough that Iām writing about it on a forum, but also, very awkward.
On the other hand, Iām currently part of the creative team bringing the anime Bye Bye, Earth, based on Japanese fantasy light novels, into English. The show is understandably super divisive in the states, and I reckon the upcoming English-translated novels will be, too. Itās working for me, though, as itās just a completely lateral take on what weād normally call fantasy; rather than fantasy races and magic that riffs on what we have in human culture, nearly every element of this society operates differently than what we have on earth (wars are orchestral performances, weapons are grown like plants, some social castes are innately Good while others are Bad, mentors impart mentees with a curse, etc.). Like Grandpa Dog House, it constantly refuses to engage with many of the structural things that make post-Shakespeare western literature satisfying to our lizard brains, engaging that more lateral āhey, check out this idea, itās happening right now for the first timeā style of storytelling with a more loosely paced structure, a pace in which things happen as they happen. Without the tension between that and other storytelling styles or rigid video game formats, itās working for me.
Granted, Iām an American (i.e. dumb) and native English-speaker (see previous note) who has worked in film and creative writing before I worked in anime and games writing, so those western structures and subtexts I grew up on are often what I find satisfying; my takes on Japanese storytelling are coming from a mostly experiential place and not an academic one (the differences in structure and what different global audiences find satisfying in a story is something I am constantly fascinated by and curious about). But to be really reductive, youāre dealing with narrative structures that are a lot more lateral being shoved into more lineal containers. And with the more inward-facing, big-idea-oriented stories that JRPGs in particular love, that does often leave you with a whole lot of stuff that spends more time saying thematic keywords and phrases out loud ad nauseum or wearing ethos on its sleeves in a very broad way rather than putting that stuff in the pockets and nooks of that container where they may be better served (i.e. subtext, setup/payoff, metatext, etc.)
But thatās all still interesting. I still like to take it in. I like to think about it. Itās a part of why weāre able to have the amount of discussion going on over something like Persona 4. And honestly if there was one succinct way to describe the sort of loose ethos of this whole communityās lens on media, itād be something like āinteresting is gooder than good.ā I donāt know that Iād call JRPGs outsider art either, but it is that weirdness and maybe dissonance that makes it something that I could very rarely hold up as a fulsome text, but something that is still āgood for me.ā Basically, yeah:
Disclaimer: I have been waiting for the right time to play Lost Odyssey, which I keep perpetually installed because I know sometime it will happen and I donāt want to miss the moment on a download. Maybe that will fix me.
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My truly radical contrarian take is that the original version of KH2 is better than the Final Mix version. Not by a lot mind you. Itās like 5 % better.
The game didnāt need more cutscenes or more trickets to collect. Itās fun on a revisit, but the new additions clash tonally with the rest of the game imo. I know KH is already basically an amusement park ride in game form, but I think all the new stuff takes it too far.
And with the big collections now being the most accessible way to play the game, Final Mix will be the version that most player get to experience.
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I remember having a similar experience the first time I played it (around 2012). After the escape from Midgar the story just seems kinda meandering and aimless. There are these big iconic moments, but itās hard to grasp what theyāre in service of. It feels like a game thatās impressive on a surface, but slippery in the sense that thereās not much to hold on to.
But I donāt think thatās really true. Years later I realized I had become nostalgic for VII, despite not having been around for the height of its popularity. Its characters, its atmosphere. The sound and vibe of it all. Iāve come to love VII for all those parts, and I think that often gets clouded when people talk about events and background details of the plot. I think VII has a lot of narrative qualities, despite its plot being pretty inconsequential. Like the moment-to-moment stuff of āwe need to go over here to do Xā is bland at best and confusing at its worst.
To me VII is not really about that stuff. Like who cares what Sephiroth was actually doing or what Shinra was planning. I think the Nibelheim sequence is emblematic of the game itself, because the concrete timeline of what happened is not that important. Itās about how the characters relate to it, how they experienced it. In that regard the narrative of VII is more akin to poetry than a tight hollywood script to me.
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