Oh, the noble JRPG.

So, while I'm currently in the throes of unbridled Skyrim addiction, I've been made aware that the RPG gods have deigned to deliver to us a new chapter in the enigmatic Xeno series, titled Xenoblade Chronicles (née Xenoblade in Japan). I approach this news with a bittersweet apprehension, somewhat akin to hearing that an old flame is in town, and she wants to meet up and have coffee. It seems like everything would be cool, and you want to see her, but there's a sting from the past that just won't go away.

Anyone who's played a JRPG in the last five years knows what I mean. The meaning is particularly relevant if you've played a JRPG in the last five years (hell, ten), and you previously loved the genre. In the 90s, I must have played or contemporaneously perceived (see law school, terms integrated from) every major JRPG that was released. I can still remember a time when a Final Fantasy release was like the turning of a century, ushering in a new era, almost like the realization of a spiritual movement into actual being. Sound hyperbolic? Good. In the land of the JRPG, hyperbole represents the natural state.

A full history of the JRPG would be fun to chronicle, but I lack the time or the sufficient interest to sustain such an undertaking. Instead, let's just focus on what the JRPG used to be, and what it became. There were certainly a lot of good JRPGs in the late 80s and early 90s (I've encountered some people who still swear that Final Fantasy IV is the best the series ever offered; I think of these people the same way I think of people who think Kill 'Em All was Metallica's best album, but I digress), but the genre truly flowered in the mid to late 90s. The time period from 1994 to 1998 saw the release of Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Breath of Fire II, Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy VII, Suikoden, Vandal Hearts, Xenogears, Wild Arms, Suikoden II, and Final Fantasy VIII. Of course, there were others, but those stick out as the most important, and were mostly brought to us by the RPG monolith, Squaresoft (now Square Enix).

There was something powerful about these games. Looking back, I find it difficult to remember how I was able to ignore terrible localization, childish plot contrivances, and paper thin characters, but I know that I still look back fondly on them, and the nostalgia for some of the more iconic events and characters remains palpable. I think the reasons the JRPG worked so well in the 90s include (1) comfort and inticement developed by linearity of storyline, (2) maximization of hardware limitations through diminution of player choice, resulting in polished, accessible gameplay, and (3) blank slate main characters onto whom the player could easily project intagible personality traits in the absence of actual customization. The third point is particularly prevalent in Chrono Trigger (Crono was taciturn) and Final Fantasy VII (Cloud's nature was so vague that the game's ending was rendered incomprehensible, and he has inspired something akin to hero worship among the game's hardcore fans).

Things were good. Xenogears pushed the envelope in terms of how deep a story could get, exploited religious zealotry in a very Japanese way, and, though the second half collapsed in what can only be attributed to programmer burnout or a Neon Genesis Evangelion styled response to running out of money, it delivered a solid 70 hours of somewhat adult gameplay. It seems hard to believe now, looking back, but at that time it seemed Square could do no wrong. Its imprimatur immediately denoted excellence to a legion of fans, myself included. I played 40 hours of SaGa Frontier because I was convinced that it was a good game and something was wrong with me. But then something happened. Not all at once, mind you. It was a slow happening, and we all missed it as we burned through hundreds of hours of gameplay in successively unimpressive JRPGs.

I have often attributed the genesis of the collapse to Final Fantasy VIII, a bombastic and garishly empty game that was so focused on looking good that it forgot to tell a proper story. Where FFVII's Cloud was as blank as his name suggests, FFVIII's aptly named Squall was an unrelenting jerk surrounded by an impossibly unlikable cast of companions. The game showed flashes of brilliance in its Garden War sequence, and had a few genuinely memorable moments, but the whole is not greater than the sum of parts in a game where the primary antagonist can't be accurately identified at any point until the end, and even at that point defies all logical description. At the time, as I began to understand the game's crippling shortcomings, I thought it would be an outlier, that the next Final Fantasy would reverse the overreach. I was right, to a point, but I was wrong in assuming that the trajectory of the genre would return to the sanity of the early days.

I would love to see the office memos at Square from between 1998 and 2000, just to get a sense of the tension between the camps vying for the future of the Final Fantasy franchise. Final Fantasy IX, with its muted advertising campaign, its unfinished feel, and its promise to hearken back to the spirit of earlier games, felt like a final capitulation to the traditionalist element at the company. Even that didn't really address the underlying issues. FFIX claimed to be an old-school 8-bit reboot, but it wasn't anything of the sort; the antagonist was sexually ambiguous to the point of true Crying Game confusion, the token inclusions of 8-bit nostalgia (the squat characters, Vivi, the ostensibly tweaked difficulty) seemed half-hearted, and, Christ, the main character had a tail.

Apart from some notable gems like Vagrant Story and Brave Fencer Musashi, the empire of Square, like the Roman Empire, was collapsing at the moment of its apparent height of strength. I'm not going to say that Final Fantasy VIII poisoned the pudding, but it did drop the gauntlet at the feet of any other company wanting to cash in on the newly mainstream genre. In short, it upped the ante, and thumbed its nose at the industry, essentially daring anyone else to go so dizzingly high over the top. SCEA answered with the dismally ostentatious Legend of Dragoon, a game that famously claimed to be "the Final Fantasy killer." It wasn't, but it sold well, and was so daring in its awful presentation that it goaded the higher ups at Square into doing two fatal things: (1) It jettisoned the teams responsible for Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, and Xenogears, and (2) it elected to entertain delusions of grandeur that Square could morph into a hybrid video game company / movie studio.

The results were immediately successful beyond Square's wildest dreams. Final Fantasy X was a blockbuster smash on the PS2. It was also an awful game that I spent over 100 hours convincing myself was the greatest achievement ever committed to pixels. How obsessed was I with this game? I paid my brother $5 an hour to play blitzball for me while I was at work. I beat every boss in the Arena. I blithely ignored that Tidus was the most unbearable main character ever foisted upon an RPG audience (worse than Dragoon's Dart; there, I said it), that Wakka was a borderline offensive character that was unambiguously high for the entire game, that the plot was intangible while being harshly linear, and that the music was surprisingly unimpressive (Nobuo Uematsu has been on auto-pilot for more than a decade). FFX was a watershed for the JRPG. It marked the new standard: style over substance.

If you'll look back to my three elements of early JRPG success, you can see how each element has been diminished over time. With the release of the Xbox and the PS2, hardware limitations were beginning to allow for expansions of possibility. The first element, that the linearity of plot secured a player against ambiguity of purpose, still ruled the day, but was implemented for reasons beyond the needs of cohesion, lending credence to a sense that the developers were becoming lazy, and simply did not want to deal with peripheral events. Second, the diminution of player choice began to become a clear choice rather than a necessity. JRPG developers focused on creating inert but beautifully painted backgrounds rather than employing the hardware to expand the interactivity of the player experience. More on that in a minute.

As to the third point, the main characters were no longer blank slates. Tidus was an oblivious time-displaced-surfer-phantom that was so shrill and lighthearted (apparently the establishment's reaction to the complaints about Squall) that he defied any attempt at vicariism. I hesitate to offer other examples from the time period because Final Fantasy, especially at that time, was so enormous that any other game attempting similarity was dwarfed and pulled into the FF series' gargantuan orbit. If you yearn for specificity, see Grandia (any of them), Star Ocean (any of them), and Xenosaga (Lord have mercy). In fact, shortly thereafter, Square opened its gaping jaws and swallowed its only feasible competitor, Enix. This union produced the genuinely fantastic Dragon Quest VIII, but nothing else of note. 

The result, especially with Xenosaga, was the sense that games were being played in a yawning vacuum. They were very pretty affairs, and dressed up in overheated dialogue (still terribly localized, but now with equally terrible voice acting), but there was no there there. Meanwhile, at the edges of the genre, something else was happening.

Bethesda Softworks splashed onto the RPG scene with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in 2002, and broke every rule of the console RPG experience. What PC gamers had been experiencing since the days of Return to Zork (that is, open-ended gameplay, a deep, detailed world, and encyclopedias worth of lore) suddenly became available to a whole new audience. It's hard to explain the effect this had. True, it wasn't very pretty, but the freedom of action and choice made for an intensely personal experience. This is an example of taking the three elements of old-school RPG success and effectively throwing them out the window. The erasure of barriers (wanna eat that? okay, it's your funeral) presented a stark contrast with the beautiful, but tightly controlled worlds being mass produced in Japan. A year later, Bioware released Knights of the Old Republic, riding the coattails of the Star Wars universe to create a semi-linear experience with the focus on the character. It can be said that where Bethesda has liberated the RPG world, Bioware has liberated the RPG character, allowing for customization of behavior in a story-driven manner (where Bethesda's efforts have created a truly blank slate main character, allowing the player to slip into the character's skin within a highly interactive world).

The point is, while Square was tilting at windmills and breaking the bank producing Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the revolution had taken place, and it took them years to recognize that they had lost their audience. One would think that the JRPG developers would have adapted, rather than continue to produce derivative nonsense. While Bioware and Bethesda released KOTOR II, Oblivion, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Dragon Age, the JRPG titans persisted in pushing the envelope of embarrassing excess. Square shocked fans by releasing a sequel to Final Fantasy X, apparently inspired by a Destiny's Child music video, trotted out a parade of unimpressive peripheral titles, and continued to milk old classics on re-release. Final Fantasy XII was refreshing, and a good game, owing largely to the removal of Hironobu Sakaguchi as director. However, Final Fantasy XIII looked so bad that I never even thought to rent it. And, would you look at that? In the wake of Skyrim, Square is planning another sequel game, this time for FFXIII. Why revisit the worst of the lot?

So, that's my extended rant. Xenoblade looks promising, and that's my trouble. I look at the trailer, and I can't seem to shake the feeling that I'm about to be hoodwinked. So, I'll tell you what. I'll get back to you in April. For now, I'm going to work on my smithing in Skyrim.