Choice VS Narrative: Why Didn’t I Ever Get Into WRPGs?

One question I’ve asked myself a lot, and that some of my fellow gamers have been simply incredulous about, is why I don’t enjoy playing the Western Role Playing Games that have become increasingly popular over the years. And, honestly, I really didn’t have an answer for a while. It’s true that I do enjoy the gameplay style of the Japanese variety, but that’s largely because I grew up playing games like Pokemon and Final Fantasy, and that’s no real reason as to why I couldn’t enjoy this particular type of game. It was while reading about the recent fan backlash against Mass Effect 3 that I started to put together what it is about WRPGs that just doesn’t appeal to me. It got me thinking, and in order to figure it out, I looked back to the first WRPG I ever played: Knights of the Old Republic 2.

JRPGs, dead? Hardly.

Anyone who stumbles across this blog will quickly realize that I am quite fond of console-style role-playing games, or to use their current term, Japanese role-playing games. These ‘JRPG’s have provided some of the greatest moments in gaming for me, filling my world with imaginative characters and a unique kind of gameplay that I grew to love.

‘JRPG’s were once extremely popular in the gaming community. While never expressly un-popular, the genre exploded into the mainstream with the release of Final Fantasy VII.  The Playstation era of RPGs featured many classic games, but thanks to Final Fantasy VII, these games were explosively popular. Games like Final Fantasy VIII and IX, Xenogears, Vagrant Story, Legend of Dragoon, and others provided the cultural definition of video game RPGs. This popularity continued and expanded with the PS2 era, when Final Fantasy X introduced many more into the RPG fold.

Today, however, these wonderful RPGs, once the pinnacle of gaming excellence, are fading- or so we’re told. The rise of the ‘western role-playing game’ has crushed the Japanese variety, with their more involving plotlines and focus on personal freedom- or so we’re told. JRPGs, we are told, are a dying art.

This is wrong. To be even more frank, this is bullshit.