Silent Hill 2,3 producer says America ahead of Japan in terms of game dev

[rocketpig]

naznatips said:

rocketpig said:
While I dug Eternal Sonata and Kingdom Hearts, I only thought Eternal Sonata brought something new to the table. It reminded me of an updated Parasite Eve (WTF Square, where is this game) and I thought it was cool, though absurdly linear. It wasn't even the story... There was literally only one way through that game.

I put Kingdom Hearts in more of the Zelda realm with a bit of RPG twist... If we start including games like that in this discussion, I may as well throw Ratchet & Clank in there, too. Explore/upgrade/wander/fight/repeat ad nauseum. Not bad games by any means, but other than a story and weapon/level upgrades, not a lot of "RPG" going on there, even by the Japanese definition of the genre.

Okay but you are still ignoring the completely unique things like Valkyria Chronicles, Baten Kaitos, The World Ends With You, King's Story, and Odin Sphere. Kingdom Hearts certainly is not like Zelda or Ratchet. For a few examples it has a leveling system, menu combat, and a party system that neither of those games do. Trust me, I'm not even touching on the outskirts of the JRPG genre. That just gets ridiciulously large. You have to start including games like Harvest Moon and Pikmin and Okami...

There is no argument for more gameplay diversity in WRPGs, and your argument seems to have boiled down to nothing but complaints on linearity, which is just a property of the genre. If you don't like linearity, don't play JRPGs, but that doesn't give you the right to criticize them all as unoriginal. They are far more diverse in almost every way (plot, characters, gameplay, setting) than WRPGs are.

I think the gameplay diversity comes more from the bulk of what is considered "JRPG" while WRPG is a pretty narrowly targeted genre. If you include games with elements of role-playing in them, the list balloons.

In your opinion, what defines "JRPG"? Because some of the games you're listing are so completely different from one another that I'm not seeing anything that links them other than the genre they're lumped into. Is it story? If so, why aren't we including other story-heavy games like BioShock or Dues Ex that include some role-playing? While you're including card-based games, why aren't we talking about Puzzle Quest? If we're including action games, what about quasi-platformers with exploration like Ratchet & Clank or San Andreas (which actually had quite a few RPG elements in it)? There are loads of RTS & sim games with RPG elements, too. It just seems that in the west, "RPG" is more uniformly defined and many games are just thrown into another genre because they cross over quite a bit.

I think this argument is really boiling down to semantics over a term. The term JRPG seems to include many other games that simply don't qualify as RPG in the western world.