phaedruss said:
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Many notable ones that are not Dragon Quest and maybe Final Fantasy. Unless your version of "tired fantasy tropes" is about modern day Japan, because there are a lot of small niche RPGs of that ilk. And there are a number of steampunk JRPGs. Then there are a few of them that do make a lot of use of time honored western fantasy tropes just like western RPGs.
-Xenogears is all about industrialisation, Roman Catholicism, and early 20th century western psychology (Carl Jung, etc.)
-Kingdom Hearts is not at all traditional fantasy. It pulls from classic Disney though.
-Every Mario RPG doesn't really have much at all to do with fantasy cliches.
-The World Ends With You is very nontraditional, though it is pretty Japanese and has an amnesia storyline.
-Shin Megami Tensei's games aren't classic fantasy. Much more dark and modern with some philosophy of politics and ethics, though I don't think its commentary is quite as effective as it could be because it's usually fairly binary. And many games within the series do tread the same themes. Persona would be the accessible ones and maybe the most different, though they are more modern Japanese-y.
-The Mother series isn't classic fantasy or very Japanese fantasy and isn't that full of tropes. It's not exactly realistic but I don't think that's the point here.
-I don't think games like Chrono Trigger fit the fantasy trope any more than most every western fantasy already does.
-Xenoblade Chronicles modernized many things about the "genre".
-Pokemon has a horribly simple storyline but it doesn't really follow fantasy tropes otyher than "young kid goes out on his own to quest". The mechanics are old hat though.
-Eternal Sonata was an exploration of the life and music of Chopin and carried decent social criticism outside of fantasy tropes.
-Valkyria Chronicles is an alternate universe WWII JRPG.
-Even modern Final Fantasy isn't that bad of a culprit. I haven't touched them though. IX I hear isn't so steroetypical fantasy/JRPG-ish in story. FF has built up a lot of cliches of its own but they aren't always traditional fantasy ones. The upcoming FFXV should depart even further.
-Maybe Parasite Eve counts as an RPG, if so I'd count it.
There are some other non-traditional games but you may call those action-adventure instead of JRPGs, because the mechanics are a bit different. Some of those can be pretty generic but there are a few different ones. At a point it bcomes difficult to make these distinctions for you, because many games buck trends in traditional JRPG stories/characters but have traditional combat, and then there are games with SUPER cliche stories that buck the trends with mechanics.
