- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
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- Somewhere
The term is not useless, it has simply diverged from its original meaning. As long as people understand what is meant when the term is used, it isn't useless.
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- Russia
By that logic, XCOM 2 is a JRPG
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
I call PoE an isometric RPG and Persona 3-5 time management RPGs.
- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
But that's the whole point of the argument, it got started when someone said they'd stop using the term when it stopped being applicable, and then people including myself pointed out that the theoretical definition is more of an "I know it when I see it" thing as opposed to an actual definition of genre or gameplay or vibe or whatever.
It's not possible to simultaneously say that the term is valuable because Japan makes a whole bunch of JRPGs and then say that what defines a JRPG is whether or not the observer decides it is one. It was invented essentially as a pejorative and it's so broad as to be basically useless.
- Location
- Bloomington, IN
This is how all but the broadest, most descriptive genres work. Once you go beyond the self-explanatory categories like "First-Person Shooter" and "Platformer," vibes are pretty much entirely what you work off of. And, frankly, what the actual letters in the term originally stood for doesn't mean much, it's basically a proper noun at this point—much like how CRPG is used to refer to games with a specific vibe and cluster of common mechanics to them rather than any RPG that is played on a computer or, as mentioned earlier in the thread, how Roguelike is a term applied to many games that bear only the most passing of resemblances to the game the genre is named after.
I'd also say that the term being invented as a pejorative doesn't really matter, since basically everyone who wasn't around during that era doesn't use it as such and, more likely than not, never even knew that it was used as such.
I wonder what proportion of boardgames developed in Europe (vs outside) are Eurogames?
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- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
But the argument made was specifically that "JRPG" is a narrow design space. That cannot simultaneously be true if "I know what a JRPG is when I see it" is also the foundational determinant of what a JRPG is. If it is narrow, it should be possible to define it in a way that doesn't exclude vast swathes of role playing games developed in Japan.
Just say "turn-based RPG" or "strategy RPG" or "action RPG" or whatever.
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- Somewhere!
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- She/Her
while we're at it, role playing game is also pretty meaningless. Like at minimum it stretches from elden ring to stardew valley in some senses, or at least rune factory.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
I disagree. RPG clearly references video games that follow in the tradition of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons.
I guess you could argue Tetris is an RPG because we take control of the player but that's just silly. That's like saying every game is an action game because it requires us to push a button to perform an action.
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- Somewhere!
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- She/Her
Well like, life sim games still have rpg "elements" - stats, sometimes equipment and outfits, etc. You run around and talk to npcs and all that. You could model this with a tabletop game reasonably well! Sometimes they don't have combat, sometimes they do.
Of course action game is also kind of indistinct on the face of it, since many rpgs also have action sequences? Like you could get fully reductionist but you don't have to go that far to wonder where the line between God of War etc (action game) and Elden Ring (rpg) is.
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- He/Him
If expressed in terms of evolutionary trees:
1: Dungeon Crawlers
2: Blobbers
3: JRPGs
4: CRPGs
In particular there are tons of games which are not from the above evolutionary tree, but happened to have incorporated RPG subgenre elements over time. Dark Souls has more in common genetically with something like Metroid or Prince of Persia than it does Final Fantasy or D&D. Kind of like how the term roguelike has evolved from "actually like Rogue" to just games with Rogue's campaign-level gameplay loop.
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Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
While I get where you're coming from with this comparison, I think saying that Dark Souls doesn't have (edit: as much) common genes with D&D, when your PC is an adventurer that fights dragons and raid dungeons, by mainly utilising swords and sorcery, is a bit off.
Yeah sure, but when I think of D&D lineage, I also think of said dungeons and dragons. I'm sure everyone has played a session of D&D where people just walk around and talk sure, but it's in the name. That's a core identity of D&D. Early sessions with Dave Arneson had players stop acting as feudal lords and go dungeon diving, neglecting to care for their realm.
Sure some life sims like Stardew Valley has dungeon diving but I don't think adding it automatically makes it an RPG. San Andreas quite literally has a character sheet with stats like weapon skill and sex appeal, but I won't call that an RPG.
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Evidently this must be controversial to a contingent of Hollow Knight fans, but if you're still waiting on anything about Silksong in any capacity (news of delays, release date announcements, cancellation) that's on you. As far as I'm concerned Team Cherry is missing, presumed dead.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
As I understand it, some of the HK fans waiting for Silksong are people who backed an expansion/DLC for Hornett before Team Cherry decided to expand that into a full game.
Not all HK fans are those backers but it's completely valid for some to be mad at them for taking this long to release Silksong. After all, they quite literally paid for it.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If you think about it Doom is also a JRPG. There is after all no friendship closer and more intimate between the Doom Slayer and his shotgun
Doomguy's only friend is his bunny and the Demons killed her.If you think about it Doom is also a JRPG. There is after all no friendship closer and more intimate between the Doom Slayer and his shotgun
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- He/Him
They're suffering from GRRM Syndrome. Creators that work for corpos work for corpo deadlines. Creators that work for themselves only have their savings as a deadline. If their savings are millions of dollars due to their last work being a megahit, the only deadline is "when its finished" which for any typical creator is literally infinity.
Just from my personal reference from Steam games I've had my eyes on:
*Polter Pals dropped a fun demo I played in 2020.
*Playerless: One Button Adventure dropped a demo in 2019 which I missed sadly.
*Taro the Sneaky Ninja has been around since at least 2017.
*Leilani's Island has been around since at least 2015 and was having devlogs as recently as 2022.
Now its easy to say they're vaporware, and perhaps they are. Taro is the only one of the above that shows clear signs of life. However for comparison Tactical Breach Wizards was first announced 2/2/18 and released on 8/22/24. Silksong was announced on 2/19/19, which means it could release in early September and still have had a shorter announcement to publish than TBR did. Granted Silksong announced with an actual trailer showing crisp polished ingame footage implying it was much further along the production pipeline than TBR.
Of course Silksong has a lot of work to do before it can match Duke Nukem's 14 year production cycle.
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- Pronouns
- Any
While I don't think hollow knight is a bad game persay, it has some cool shit and it a massive map… but maybe too massive for it own good. Like I basically killed my run because I stopped playing for a while and I fear having to figure out what the hell I was doing. Not to mention Ihate that better endings were reserved for extreme hardcore challenges that bery few would be able to do… I really hate content that appeals to the super hardcore gamers who can beat megaman games without getting hit which is why most rom hacks and fangames don't appeal to me
Only two endings, Embrace the Void and another ending that's basically the same thing but with a slightly different cutscene so really it's more like one-and-a-half endings, are gated behind Godhome, the challenge content in question, and I'm not sure I'd quantify those as 'better' than the base game ones.
The other three endings are just 'finish the main game without doing enough optional content to get the Voidheart,' 'get the Voidheart but don't follow through on the mid-fight trigger that opens up the associated true final boss,' and 'get the Voidheart, then use the Dream Nail during the mid-fight event.'
The Path of Pain, the base game's only thing that's hard enough to fit that description, is as far as I can recall optional for any of these, including the Godhome ending-and-a-half, as the half of the Kingsoul in the White Palace is in the throne room rather than behind the Path and the requirements for the Voidheart are to get that and take it to the Abyss, which I think you need to go through to get like half the game's later content anyway thanks to the Void barriers you need to get Shade Shift from down there for.
- Location
- Russia
I feel like I'm the only person on the internet who thinks that Silksong's development time is honestly rather fair.
Have you seen the fucking spritesheets in the first game? Have you seen just how much hand-drawn animation the three people at Team Cherry have to do, with basically no tweening involved, literally drawing every single possibility in the game frame by frame and sticking them into a nightmare non-grid that I still don't quite understand how the hell they're separating at the code level? And with Hornet having an actual personality, unlike Little Ghost, they probably have to do a bunch more for her story beats.
No wonder it's taking so bloody long.
Have you seen the fucking spritesheets in the first game? Have you seen just how much hand-drawn animation the three people at Team Cherry have to do, with basically no tweening involved, literally drawing every single possibility in the game frame by frame and sticking them into a nightmare non-grid that I still don't quite understand how the hell they're separating at the code level? And with Hornet having an actual personality, unlike Little Ghost, they probably have to do a bunch more for her story beats.
No wonder it's taking so bloody long.
Can you elaborate on the difficulty you perceive about this? Non-grid positioning is, as far as I'm aware, pretty standard- you can run into complications like floating-point precision issues, but almost certainly not at the size of any given HK area.
- Location
- Russia
Here's an example spritesheet. And all of them are like this, for every character, every entity. As far as I know, this is how it's actually stored in the game rather than just being someone throwing it together in a weird way, considering those are the sheets that people use when modding the game to change character sprites.
In addition, this isn't the only spritesheet Little Ghost has. He has an entire folder with at least several dozen sheets.
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