My love for JPRGs is around two decades old, tracing its steps to my first contact with Breath of Fire III in my friend’s original Playstation. Since then I have experienced a lot of those games, got into CRPGs, western RPG video games, and every other kind of hybrid that came after. The japanese industry, however, always had that special place in my heart.

Since the Playstation 3 generation, however, a lot of bizarre things began to erupt from the japanese gaming and animation industry overall. Some people would claim we were in the best moment ever with so many Hyperdimensions, Ateliers, and Disgaeas coming forth, others had prefered to think the golden age was years ago, back in the SNES and Playstation 1, and there were even those who didn’t see a damn difference.

Recently, the japanese creators have gotten around their problems, shipping great games such as Dark Souls, Monster Hunter: World, Tales of Berseria, Nier: Automata, Resident Evil 2, and so on. But… JRPGs? Not much. Well, we had the marvelous Berseria, certainly, but those other games were in no way aspiring successors of the ancestral JRPG lineage. Final Fantasy XV is an exception (with a whole lot of its own complex problems), but in general japanese games with a story became arduous tasks for the newcomer to undertake.

The numbers of games went up, that’s a fact. There’s a charming Atelier every year, a Tales every two, and a fuc*n lot of dungeon crawlers and low marketed games. But it seems the japanese authors are somehow stuck in the 90’s at many aspects, one of them playing a gruesome part into turning many of my recent experiences into boring and uninspiring moments. The most prominent aspect? Script.

In the 90’s there was no dubbed dialogue, the graphical limitation forced us to make use of abstraction and imagination to feel and understand the world and the story taking place in it. The best way to immerse us at that time in a RPG world was through text, loads of them. Fans certainly remember speaking to a random NPC in Xenogears and being surprised by how many lines of text popped. Damn, some of those NPCs would argue about existence, explain their lives, give us full monologues about the situation of the world they were inhabiting. It was fun, although a tad boring after a while. Anyway, it was a smart way to feel as if each NPC had some importance, some life, some meaning.

Today we have a completely different situation. Most games have voice-acting and thus the characters have a new medium to unleash their feelings, to scream, to whisper, to speak ironically, and much more. The worlds are big 3D maps, full of detail, ready to immerse you into those vast fields, bustling towns, and so on. The graphics also help to make characters more expressive, further enhancing the emotion their voice-acting can already give us. Sound effects can be tucked in a game freely, musics can be splendid orchestras if they want (and have the budget), etc. NPCs can feel alive by walking around town, speaking with other NPCs, interacting with the scenario, and so on…

But that’s not what happen in JPRGs most of the time. The japanese industry still sticks with a script more similar to the 90’s, dumping loads of text to inform you about the situation. In fact, it is even worse then before, because now they all think we are five-year-old children who must be taught about every single aspect of the game and the world at every turn.

The result is terrible. Whereas conversation should feel natural, like… conversations, they feel like a teacher explaining about the world. When two friends speaking with each other should feel informal and direct, it instead feels like two actors selling their products and explaining the details to an audience, all that with perfectly formal speech and absurd detail. Yeah… this happens a LOT these days.

Tales of Zestiria felt that way already. Comparing to Tales of Symphonia, it feels as if Zestiria had an urge to explain every term and every event as if the other character was a dumb plate that was not part of the world. Sorey won’t say “C’mon Alisha! Let’s beat that guy and get over this quest!”, he says something like “Princess Alisha, we shall now depart through the main gate, use my power as the Shepard and invoke the spirits to fight off the enemies that are invading the next town, then we will fight their commander and defeat him to free the city from their evil clutches!”. F*ck. That’s an example I made up, yes, but that is what happens in these games. Tales of Zestiria, Star Ocean 5, Trails of Cold Steel, Final Fantasy XIV, etc. And this makes every game absurdly boring from time to time.

Pick any other decent western RPG, like say… Dragon Age: Inquisition. That’s a game heavy on dialogue yet… it feels natural. The characters have mannerisms matching their voice-acting, they don’t explain us every detail of what’s happening, they speak like people would speak with each other in real life. That makes dialogue less boring, work in favor of making characters be better overall, and turns the whole experience a lot better. See, Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game that lacks a decent story, a game which wasted so much potential with its background, but it has some of the most interesting cast around.

You don’t even need to seek western examples for that. Pick Final Fantasy VII, a game released twenty years ago, when 3D just first appeared in a video game. Damn, those are awesome dialogues. Quick, fun, direct, like true conversations (despite translation problems). Aside from some metagaming to explain materias and game mechanics, everything else in the story comes naturally. Pick Suikoden II and you will see 108 characters being more natural than just 7 in a recent JRPG. Why? Script. Damn script.

Now, why the hell do japanese games alone suffer form that? It’s because of their culture, perhaps the fact they do love some text dump. Shounen fans are used to that, they see characters trying to explain scientifically how the magic of the fantasy world works, they have dialogues about the reasons to exist in the middle of a fight, and so on. There is even a subgenre that is basically a text dump, and it does have quite a decent audience. You can also throw in the mix the visual novels, games that are basically reading experiences with some beautiful (or not so beautiful) artwork. Zero Escape, Amnesia: Memories, Clannad… they all attack you with characters speaking five paragraphs at a time. It would be as if my text here was a conversation with you! God, imagine starting a conversation with someone and hearing them explain all this text above you right now? Fuc*n boring I would say and not something you are looking for when you want to experience a JRPG with random combats and, more importantly, a decent tale.