Are JRPGs Dead?

Just last year Final Fantasy 15 was released, and for the first time, the series that was synonymous with Japanese role-playing games moved away from the traditional turn-based gameplay and became an action RPG. Although the game had a lukewarm reception, almost none of it was because the game had moved away from its roots and had adopted more active gameplay mechanics. Does this the canary in the coalmine for JRPG games? Are we going to see them eventually get phased out of the market? We’ll tackle these questions in this article. 

The History of JRPGs 

JRPG as a genre is very old – role-playing games have been a staple in Japan for more than 4 decades. When our consoles had only 32 kilobytes of storage and 8 kilobytes of RAM, Japanese developers were busy developing complex and compelling stories using these game mechanics. 

Obviously, the main reason it was so popular at the beginning where the technical limitations of the consoles – JRPGs can play just as well whether they are 2D or 3D, whether the game is in full HD or 240p – obviously, this isn’t true for all gaming genres. Doom is a relatively recent game, and it is considered revolutionary for being able to craft a first-person shooter. Most of the computers and consoles back in the day simply didn’t have the capacity to handle a lot of gaming genres. 

Now, JRPGs rose up in that era, but it wasn’t only because of technological limitations, but because they offer some real advantages that games are having trouble replicating even now: 

They are a great vehicle for storytelling: thinking back to the last 40 years, most of the memorable stories we’ve got from gaming were JRPGs. From Final Fantasy VII to Suikoden and Chrono Trigger, almost everyone that was a gamer in that era remembers playing one of these games and loving it. The way the games are developed and structured naturally gives way to excellent storytelling. Some genres like platformers and first-person shooters were never able to replicate the success of this genre. 

While JRPGs are rather simplistic, they can also be highly customizable: you have a basic set of techniques that define a JRPG, and you can build on top of it and introduce a lot of variation. You can introduce monsters like Pokemon, you can introduce job systems like some final fantasies, etc. the potential is endless, and this is what has kept JRPGs fresh for decades. 

What’s Causing the Decline? 

Well, there are two main things that have caused a decline in pure JRPG games: 

Technological advances: we touched on this a little bit above, but there should be more clarification. One thing that has completely changed the face of gaming is the development of so many videogame engines. Each year, our game engines become more versatile and powerful, and with each iteration, development time gets shorter and tasks become more automated. Most of the time spend on a game now is modeling the characters, coming up with concept art, writing the story, etc. Gameplay development is becoming extremely easy and automated, and this has allowed other kinds of games to be able to compete with JRPGs in terms of size and scope. 

The rise of mixed games: most games now have some (J)RPG elements backed into them. The new God of War was praised for adopting those elements successfully, and Nier Automate was universally acclaimed as a hybrid game. These new hybrid games are more fastpaced and modern yet incorporate some of the elements we loved in JRPGs, and they seem to be the future of the genre.