My Journey to Loving JRPGs

For nearly my entire life, I’ve treated JRPGs like I treat daytime soap operas: totally unworthy of my time. I had no interest in the slow pace of turn-based combat, the cringe-inducing anime aesthetics, or the cheesy melodrama of its bloated storylines replete with endless walls of text. Yuck. They were everything I DIDN’T play video games for, or so my younger, naïve self conditioned me to believe.

Cut to the present, and I’ve now played and finished a mountain of JRPGs such as Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest XI, Final Fantasy VII (original and remake), Final Fantasy X, and am currently working my way through the first Octopath Traveler after hearing nothing but great things about it and its sequel. So what the hell happened? How did I go from being an abject hater of the genre, to falling completely head over heels?

Let me start by saying the games I was into as a kid were far more action-oriented, and sure, I would dabble in the occasional Pokémon, but that was only because it’s what my older brother and his friends were into. No, I’d take a Metroid Prime or Super Mario Sunshine any day of the week over a Baten Kaitos, thank you very much. Can you tell I grew up with a GameCube? As such, it was slim pickings for me in the RPG category. I was so much more accustomed to the real-time action gameplay of Super Smash Bros. Melee and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.

So, when my brother sat me down in front of this esoteric Japanese game (the aforementioned Baten Kaitos) with horrible English voice acting and a befuddling card-based battle system, I pushed through as much as I possibly could to see this so-called incredible story he couldn’t stop raving about through to the end. Long story short, I quickly dropped the game after the combat and general confusion as to where to go next wore my patience thin, sort of a running theme in my experience with JRPGs going forward.

It just didn’t make sense to me on a fundamental level. Aren’t video games supposed to be about pressing a button and immediately seeing your character swing a big sword or jump over a treacherous pit? Why am I giving commands to the cool spiky-haired dude and his anthropomorphic animal friends instead of controlling them directly? Why are they just standing there in a line waiting for each other to attack?

This was more or less my impression of the genre for the next 15 years, only occasionally dipping my foot back in for what critics and audiences alike touted as the Next Big Thing. Games like Persona 5, Undertale, Ni No Kuni and Xenoblade Chronicles would be discussed ad nauseam by my favorite games media personalities, which would admittedly pique my interest, but only for so long.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I love RPGs. Dark Souls is literally my favorite game of all time and I can’t get enough of Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim or The Witcher 3. However, those titles all appealed to my Western sensibilities far more than anime-styled, turn-based combat could ever hope to. Growing up in the midwest in the mid 2000s/early 2010s, there was a palpable stigma around Japanese media, at least among the people I hung out with. I wouldn’t be caught dead watching anime lest I get labeled a dork, or worse: a weeb. Middle schoolers can be cruel! Thankfully, that stigma eventually wore off, and the opinions of those around me regarding my media consumption habits started to matter less and less.

One of my favorite games media personalities, Greg Miller (Kinda Funny, formerly of IGN) would rant and rave about Persona 4 Golden on the PlayStation Vita for dozens of hours across several podcasts for years on end. I had heard of the Persona series before at this point, but knew virtually nothing about it other than the fact that it's a JRPG, and thus I likely wouldn’t care about it. However, the way Miller would gush about its jazzy soundtrack, excellent character relationships and its unique blend of life sim/dungeon crawling mechanics was infectious to say the least. So much so that it convinced me to save up money, run out to GameStop and buy Sony’s doomed handheld for myself alongside one game and one game only: Persona 4 Golden…

…Aaaaand after about 6 hours with the game, I stopped playing, put the Vita in a drawer in my bedroom and practically never touched it again. Yeah, not my proudest moment. Look, I tried giving it an earnest shot, but I couldn’t help the fact that every time I played it, it put me right to sleep. I did end up using my Vita for a few more games (mostly free PS+ titles), but damn, P4 Golden burned me good.

After that irritatingly expensive last-ditch effort to finally get into JRPGs left me >$300 poorer with nothing to show for it, I essentially swore off the genre for good. For the next 6 years, I would look at JRPGs with disdain, rolling my eyes at every new preposterously named Square Enix title (looking at you, Various Daylife) announced at the yearly Nintendo Directs and Summer Games Fests, etc.

It’s now the summer of 2022, and I’m still living with my parents in the suburbs of Chicago after having graduated college 2 years prior. I had just been hired full-time at a PR agency downtown, so my commute back and forth was about an hour, give or take. These long days left me so drained that by the time I got home, there was little else I wanted to do besides crawl into bed and nap. Even the games I was playing at the time weren’t hitting, having just wrapped up a 120 hour playthrough of Elden Ring and the prospect of dumping another 100 hours into some other massive open-world game sounded totally unappealing.

It was then that I turned to my ol’ reliable Switch to check back in with Nintendo Switch Online’s NES and SNES catalogs. Nothing like revisiting an old favorite to get me out of a funk. Instead of starting up my 842nd (give or take) play through of Super Metroid, however, I unexpectedly opted to check out the game with the bodacious 90s cover with the words Breath of Fire strewn across the panel in big bold letters fittingly engulfed in flames. I had no clue what I was in for when booting it up, but I was down to try something new, and I could just as easily back out to try something else that caught my fancy.

It didn’t take long before I realized what I was getting myself into. Admittedly, the intro did grab my attention. I guess something about a dragon telling me that “disaster has struck” before waking up to the entire village burning down throwing everyone into a panic really struck a chord. In typical JRPG fashion, you’re given an exposition dump, meet the initial cast of characters and come face to face with the main villain before the village sends the hero off on his quest. “Oh boy, here we go,” I snarkily thought as I embarked on to the world map.

As anyone who's played Breath of Fire can attest, this game is about as old-school a JRPG one can get without calling itself Dragon Quest. It’s rife with random encounters where the player must grind a few levels, move on to the next town where they’ll buy marginally better gear, talk to some NPCs who spout one or two lines of dialogue hinting at what to do next, and then leave town to repeat the process all while assembling a motley crew of companions to ultimately defeat the big bad.

And yet, despite all my cynicism and the years of conditioning myself to hate this genre, I actually found myself having… fun??

For whatever reason, the loop of random encounters, leveling up, acquiring better gear, dungeon crawling, meeting new party members (shoutout to my anthropomorphic fish homie, Gobi)–it suddenly just *clicked* with me. Against all odds, I looked forward to the monotonous random encounters because seeing numbers get higher nourishes the brain–that’s just science! Even the much-maligned turn-based combat became an absolute joy due in part to the auto-battle function that made grinding even the trashiest mobs a breeze while the more complex battles tickled that tactical part of my brain that I didn’t know I’d been missing out on.

Call me impatient, but I had to use a guide for practically my entire playthrough, though it didn’t take away from the experience like I thought it might. In fact, using a guide made the game far more enjoyable as I could focus all my attention on the parts I actually liked, rather than dwelling on some obscure puzzle solution requiring absurd amounts of backtracking.

After around 30 hours, Capcom’s 1993 classic Breath of Fire became the very first JRPG I ever finished. It was as if a part of my brain unlocked. My third eye opened. I was Danny DeVito in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: “Oh my god, I get it.” I immediately craved more, and I figured the next logical step in my journey would naturally have to be the genre-defining classic, Chrono Trigger. Needless to say, that game more than lives up to its legendary status, and its characters, music and story will stay with me forever.

I could go on and on in gratuitous detail about the myriad games in this genre I have played and beaten in the couple years since (as mentioned at the start of this essay), but this thing is already longer than a cutscene directed by Tetsuya Nomura.

If there’s one thing I hope you take away from all this rambling, however, it’s to go outside your comfort zone, try something that challenges your preconceived notion of a thing–be it a video game, a book, movie, tv show, whatever–and give it another chance. We’re all constantly changing, maturing and gaining new perspectives over the course of our lives, and by stubbornly clinging to experiences you already know you’ll like, you’ll forever close yourself off from experiences that could change your life for the better. Some things you'll simply never click with, and that's okay! But you never know what might become your new favorite obsession.

TLDR: Used to hate JRPGs–now I love ‘em! Have since completed a whole host of classics. Be open to trying things at multiple points throughout your life, even if they don’t click the first time. You might just end up finding a new passion