The impact of JapaneseRPGs on pop culture can be overstated. JRPGs have spanned generations, bridged the Japanese and North American markets and delivered critical hits for nearly four decades. If it weren't for the influence of JRPGs, modern gaming wouldn't exist.
In his newest book, Fight, Magic, items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of JapaneseRPGs, Aidan Moher takes a wonderful in-depth look at the history of Japanese role playing games. Moher explores how Pokemon became a multi-billion dollar entertainment phenomenon.
Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of JapaneseRPGs is an excerpt from the book. It was published by Running Press All rights reserved by Aidan Moher. All rights belong to the person.
Genshin Impact is a game that was developed and published by a Chinese developer. After its 2020 release, it took the gaming world by storm thanks to gorgeous visuals, free-to-play accessibility, multi- platform release, and easy-to-pick-up-impossible-to-put-down gacha-based gaming.
Game Boy gave us more access to video games and changed the way we play them. The Game Boy was about the size of a mass-market paperback novel and barely pocketable, but it had a lot of tie-in games for popular television shows and movies.
There is an appeal for kids. There was a private world of adventure where parents couldn't see the action. There is an appeal for adults. There are appealing puzzle games, less back spasms from sitting cross-legged on the floor, and a smaller, quieter way to keep the kids distracted before dinner.
Game Boy had the advantage of being the first on the market. Nintendo had an aggressive strategy of leaning into tech that was older, but also more efficient, and reliable, so they faced an uphill battle against their competitors. My first computer was the Game Boy. When I was a computer game fiend, we would rent a couple of games, but those were ephemeral promises of living room gaming that wouldn't become reality for a long time.
The Game Boy had a lot of puzzle games and character platformers after it's debut, but by 1993 it had grown into a full-fledged adventuring machine thanks to familiar franchises. The new entry in Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda series sold the system's capabilities. Link's Awakening was released in August 1993 and I was already a big fan of the series.
What living room game consoles offered scope, visual pop, and impressive technology, portables matched with their flexibility, bite-sized content, and on- the-go possibilities. Our elementary school was covered in a blanket of Dew every morning. Game Boys clutched in chilled fingers as they sat side by side. The Game Boy enabled Link's Awakening to become a core gaming experience in my life.
Even though A Link to the Past and the entire Legend of Zelda series influenced a lot of JRPGs, its categorization as a JRPG is questionable. I don't consider it a JRPG due to its lack of customizability, but there's enough overlap in mechanics, pacing, story construction, and so on to create an overlap of fans
Imagine being a kid with a whole universe in your pocket, out of sight of parents and siblings, with no need to watch TV. The small screen on the handheld could be considered a flaw, but the reality was that it was a personal portal to another world. There is only one room for one person. The world outside disappeared entirely if you popped in the cheap Nintendo- provided headphones.
A journey into the unknown was what Link's Awakening was about.
Don't sleep, wake up.
It is a dream.
Don't sleep, wake up.
It felt good.
Don't sleep, wake up.
There was a video game called Pokemon.
Austin Eruption looked at Square's failed attempts at catalyzing the Western JRPG market during the early '90s. They said that the entryRPG would be more successful if it was based on Nintendo's popular Pokemon. Kids love playing games, they just need cute and cool monsters to collect.
The Japanese schoolyards were a hive of activity thanks to the Game Boy game. The kids played with Game Boys connected by a cable. The 151 unique, cute, and catchable creatures were too much for the newly trained Pokémon trainers to handle.
Pocket monsters was conceived by its creator as a bug-catching simulation. Tajiri was known to his classmates as Mr. Bug and dreamed of becoming an entomologist. At just twenty-four years old, he came up with the idea for Pocket monsters, despite his professional ambitions shifting to bits, bytes, and programming script.
Game Freak was founded in 1989 by Tajiri, Masuda, and Ken Sugimori, and released their first game, Mendel Palace, the same year. The success of this game encouraged Tajiri and helped solidify Game Freak. Tajiri's idea for a bug-catching simulator sprang to life after seeing two Game Boys tethered by a link cable. He saw an opportunity for players to face off against one another on their Game Boys, as well as the chance for them to share and collect bugs.
After its release in Japan, it took over two years for it to arrive in the west. With its release on the ten-year-old handheld and with the more powerful Game Boy Advance on the horizon, Nintendo released Pokémon on a whim, expecting the series to arrive as a small, but noticeable, oddity before the Game Boy Advance took over. The weird little Japanese phenomenon appealed to kids in the West just as much as it did in Japan. Kids in the United States and Canada were spending a lot of time in the playground.
"Although it was made in Japan, no corner of the world was immune from what came to be called 'Pokémania' at the turn of the 21st Century," wrote culture writer Matt Alt for the British Broadcasting Corporation. In the wake of the unexpected success of the video game, Nintendo quickly made the spinoff available in the US. The movie adaptation was so popular that phone boards were overwhelmed with requests for tickets.
The two-cartridge release of Pokémon was its defining feature. There were a few dozen that were only available in one version of the game. You had to find another player who owned the other piece of the puzzle in order to catch all of them. I started a new game with a set of fully charged AA batteries and chose Bulbasaur as my starter. It was an experience that made Link's Awakening feel like The Lord of the Rings. A cute bird called Pidgey and a caterpillar called Rattata were caught by me for my party. By the end of my first play session, these little creatures became so much more than characters in a game, they became as beloved as my childhood pets, and they tapped into that Tamagotchiesque sense of ownership.
The party was a family.
The players are in the role of a new trainer. They were able to name him within the seven- character limit. My first name is small. The Bulbasaur, Charmander, and the terrapin-like Squirtle are the three starter Pokémon. The Kanto region is a fictional game universe based on Japan's own Kanto area. With the goal of becoming the region's greatest Pokémon trainer, you visit Kanto's eight gyms, where you challenge their leaders, powerful Pokémon trainers who focus on particular types of Pokemon, to earn badges. You can challenge the elite four if you conquer the gym leaders. The title of Pokémon champion will be waiting for them if they defeat them.
The adventure of the JRPG was combined with a narrative focusing on personal conflict and growth. Kanto felt like a utopian utopia where humans had moved beyond their pettiness to destroy their enemies. The inhabitants of Kanto spent their days training the animals to crawl through tall grass, prowling in dark caves, and hiding beneath the waves.
Each player solved the game by following the same steps in roughly the same order, even though Link's Awakening felt like a boundless adventure. It was not the same as Pokemon. It created an experience that was as unique and individualized as it could be for each of its players. Would you like to join your team with Pikachu and Eevees? There is a chance that it is possible. Do you want to destroy your starter Pokémon, grind your way through the game, and defeat the elite four? If you want it, go for it. Is it possible that you're obsessed with Psyduck? Sure. I don't know.
Each kid could play it in their own way, opening the door to a new style of accessibility that wasn't found in similar games. Being able to show off a rare or powerful catch on the playground was a great honor for kids who cared for their Pokemon. The social dynamics that drove other popular schoolyard phenomena were the same that drove Pokémon. It was similar to Tamagotchi. Other JRPGs gave the player some options for their characters, but it was not close to the depth of the game.
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