THESE GUY ARE SICK, or how I learned to stop worrying and love JRPGS
by lele || 05/12/24
I was once a JRPG hater. Well, to be fair, I was a hater of any turn based RPG. Today they are my favorite genre. Believe it or not there was once a time where I thought SKYRIM to be a better game than, say, Earthbound. There were of course reasons for this, most of them are unrelated to JRPG's themselves. Most of them are related to the fact that I was an insecure and influenceable queer kid growing up in extremely toxic social environments around the time where the modern cringe culture was starting to take the shape we recognize today. This post is about those experiences, but more importantly is about how I learned to love the genre.
This is a long one, if you get through it I'd love to hear other's experiences with getting into the JRPG genre. Post in chat or shoot me an email at hellodisctwo@gmail.com, I'd really love to hear about it!!
At 10 years old I was already proud of being the most knowledgeable person about video games among my peers. This was at a point where other kids still thought that was cool. Of course the extent of my knowledge wasn't obtained from any reputable sources, it was obtained from videos titled things like "100 facts you didn't know about X". My library of "Did you know that in Japan SMB2 is actually called Doki Doki Panic and it wasn't abou't Mario" type facts was only overshadowed by my vast knowledge of straight up false myths, rumors and creepypastas. This is of course very common for a child with unsupervised internet access but it did lead me to getting a bit cocky about the depth of the video game encyclopedia within my brain. However I had one glaring blind spot. A blind spot that would greatly embarrass me once I met my first friend who was also really into video games.
First, a bit of context: I'm a latinoamerican woman. I started learning english through osmosis at an early age, but at ten years old I just had vocabulary knowledge (I learned English watching AVGN but that's a story for another day). At this point the internet video game discussion space in spanish was dominated by people who: 1) were trying to do AVGN/Nostalgia Critic in spanish, or, 2) the aforementioned fun facts channels. Same as their English speaking counterparts, these were people who grew up mostly with the 4th generation of consoles. During this time in videogame history spanish translations were RARE. This caused this culture in which 'retro' games were pretty much just platformers and arcade games. The games you could understand without being able to read the text. JRPG's were an unknown world to me. All I knew about the genre was this vague idea about the one game everyone talked about. We'll talk about that game in a bit.
Of course this is all from the perspective of a little girl navigating the internet in a third world country where access to at the time current videogames was for rich kids. There was discussion in Spanish about the JRPG genre, in fact there was a ton of it. It just didn't reach me. Video games were Nintendo and the PS2. I was really, really into anime at this age, so trust me IF that part of the internet had reached me I would've been all over JRPG's, but it didn't. It did however reach one kid who I met at ten years old, a kid who would kinda-sorta become my best friend until he became a transphobic asshole and changed schools. He was the first person who ever told me Pokemon was not only an anime. He was the first person to show me Pokemon Fire Red.
To not make this post too long, this started an instant Pokemon obsession. I played every game in the series in order. I got up to B&W 2.. My school library got regular issues of Club Nintendo, the latinoamerican equivalent of Nintendo Power. Me and my friend would spend hours and hours of recess reading every issue available again and again. There it was where we first learned about Pokemon X and Y. We had access to the internet, but we were still too dumb to do proper research, so we just made up an idyllic version of those games and hyped ourselves up about it. It would have every PokeGod in it, and it would have like three regions and a 'dark mature story' or whatever. We also fell for the Google proto-Pokemon Go prank. We weren't the brightest kids. My computer couldn't fathom 3DS emulation, which at the time was not even that great so I asked my family for a 3DS for christmas but it was too expensive. I remember talking about it in the car with my mom, grandma and cousin.
"What's that?" Asked my grandma.
"A console." A quick reply by my cousin.
"A consolador?" In Spanish, consolador means dildo.
Everyone laughed, but I can't deny I was very embarrassed by the whole thing. I felt that my extreme fixation on videogames was childish. I was 10 years old. Everything I did was childish. After that my mom said we couldn't afford it and I was bummed out but wasn't about to insist. To this day I haven't played any Pokemon games after B&W 2 despite still loving the franchise immensely.
Like many people, Pokemon was my first JRPG, but I didn't exactly know it was a JRPG. To me at first, Pokemon games were its own thing. They still kinda feel that way years after. That friend also introduced me to Golden Sun, which I never completed, and I started first learning about games like Earthbound. These discoveries, however, weren't enough to fully introduce me into the world of JRPGS. My gaming diet still consisted mostly of platformers, action games, FPS's and RTS's... also World of Warcraft but that is a story for another day. And there is a reason why I never delved into those genres. I was really into youtube and there was this one youtuber who made a video on how Pokemon was stagnating and how the games didn't change and how Turn Based Combat sucked. I don't really remember the arguments my impressionable mind instantly took as gospel and proceeded to bring up in any conversation about RPG's. Something about Turn Based Combat not being 'active' enough, and that in all games you could just mash A, and how it was bad, outdated game design.
This was combined with the fact of me making new friends who in retrospect weren't good friends to me at all, and who convinced me anime was dumb and bad and that I was gay for liking it. I have to clarify now: I was a really dumb and influenceable kid. It's okay that I was a dumbass kid because I was a kid AND I like to think I have matured a lot since. There is much to be said about extending empathy to one's past self, especially when that past self is a confused kid, but I'm getting too deep into a tangent here. This is a topic to be talked about by a woman who is not suffering from intense sleep deprivation like I am right now.
Despite these anti-JRPG factors, I couldn't deny my nature. I was a gay bitch who liked anime and would love JRPG's if given the opportunity. I deeply yearned for any kind of Roleplaying Games in my life. I got really into Fallout and Skyrim, and trying to run TTRPG campaigns, but nothing satiated that interest for JRPG's that was killed at infancy. I downloaded the PC port for Final Fantasy VI. I don't remember what caused me to choose VI. I think it may have been a deep contrarianism telling me to not go for /that one/. I got really, really into it. The characters, the music, the style, it made me feel like that time in childhood when I discovered there were more anime shows than Dragon Ball. I posted on Facebook about how it was the first JRPG I'd gotten into since Pokemon. One of my friends commented on my post:
"No one cares XD"
I felt really embarrassed again. At this point my Pokemon friend had already started to show asshole-ish tendencies so I had mostly cut him off. I had no real friends IRL or online. I didn't have anyone to talk about this deep passion for games, and when I tried I got a "No one cares XD". So I just continued playing and decided to keep this aspect of myself to myself. I got up to the point where the split paths converge (ifykyk) and then... I opened my computer the next day to find out a Windows Update had somehow erased a ton of files, including my FFVI savefile. I don't know how I didn't quit Windows forever right then and there.
It would be a year until I tried a JRPG again. This time it was /that game/. This time it was Final Fantasy VII. A game I had heard countless time described as the best game of all time, a game that had earned a monolithic nature in my brain. FFVII with its iconic characters, fantastic graphic design, groundbreaking 3D graphics and a soundtrack that scored thousands of Youtube videos, was more of a cultural touchstone than a videogame to me. Today I'm no stranger to the idea of video games as cultural artifacts of importance, but also I look back at how I thought of FF VII and realize that was the first time I thought a videogame could be as important to me and 'gamers' as the classics were to 'grown ups'. I played Final Fantasy VII's Midgar section around 5 times. Each time I was a bit more in love with the game, but each time I got distracted by something else. My last time with it was ended abruptly.
I was home alone and my mom had left a pre made pizza for me to microwave. I let the pizza on the microwave and got to my room to play FF VII (Yes. I was a dumb kid)... suddenly, and I will never forget this, as Barret's iconic 'it's cuz of that &^#$# 'pizza' that people underneath are sufferin'!' message flashed on screen; I started to sense a strange smell. I got downstairs to find my kitchen FILLED with smoke. I turned the microwave off just to find the &^#$# pizza turned into a coal-like saucer. My microwave was unusable after and the kitchen smelt like burnt cheese for two days after. To this day my family makes fun of me about it.
After this I mostly gave up on JRPG's. I stuck to other genres of video games. My hate of JRPG's was less of an active thing and just more of a 'idc bout them' thing. I got into music, writing, films and literature. I started to discover writers who opened my eyes about what video games and art could mean. I started to shape the way I currently think about video games as a medium. As I started to realize I was queer I cut off those bad friends of mine, but even then, maybe as a remnant of that shame I felt.. I kept thinking anime and videogames were dumb, and I was dumb for liking them. JRPG's which in my eyes were basically anime videogames, were then the dumbest thing, and liking them would make me the dumbest girl alive.
But let's stop with the sad stories of my childhood. I eventually fell in love with JRPG's somehow. It started with the pandemic and subsequent lockdown. I won't delve too deep into the details but a few months into the pandemic I had ended up in a situation that left me extremely lonely. I didn't really talk to anyone. I played so many video games... so many. Also MGS2 made me transgender but that is a story for another time. It was in this period of extreme loneliness when the PC port for Persona 4 Golden dropped. I had for years heard all kinds of good things about the Persona series, especially its fifth entry that was playstation exclusive. Renowned JRPG haters the world wide had proclaimed it 'one of the good ones'. I had tried to play P3 once and I loved my time with the game, but I got distracted by other stuff. For some reason Persona 4 was the game that most intrigued me amidst the series catalogue, I think it was the preeminent use of yellow in the graphic design. I love yellow, it's an extremely good color and whoever says otherwise is blind to the truth. (yes, my choices of which video games to play depends a lot on if it has the funny colors I enjoy) I /allegedly/ pirated /in minecraft/ a copy of P4G. I was very broke at the time. What happened next was something I would come to consider cringe a bit later... but now I look back to it fondly.
I really really really really.. really loved Persona 4 Golden for the PC. I was a lonely teenager connecting with the idea of this socially awkward group of shoddily written teenagers becoming a found family. I cried at the ending, every story beat got me in ways few video game stories had at the time. I finished it in easy, because I still thought turn based combat wasn't for me. After I finished it I bought it and played it AGAIN, back to back. I spent 80 hours on this second playthrough and finished all social links, maxed my stats, and did every optional boss in normal. I was completely in love with the combat and Persona collecting/building. I looked at wikis, FAQs, even had a little notebook to take notes. I finally got Turn Based Combat because I was actually engaging with the systems. I didn't just mash A, I tried to be strategic, tried to predict my enemies and plan turns ahead. Persona's combat system is not the hardest or offers the most depth (I still have to play mainline SMT) but it had the exact combination of intuitive design, fun and game-feel that rewired my brain to enjoy turn-based combat.
I learned that you can even find joy in the monotonous and hypnotic rhythms of grinding levels away. My first playthrough in easy was relatively short, so in my second one I tried to squeeze as much time out of the game as possible. I learned that you can take these big games in little chunks, there is no racing to the end. An RPG is an adventure. Much like the characters in Persona and their social links, an RPG is a friend you hang out with.
This experience opened my eyes, and my heart. I was alone, and that was a problem, but loneliness gave me the space to free myself of shackles that had slowed my pace for a long, long time. This manifested itself in changes that are too personal to discuss now, but also in things like this. I accepted that I was a dumb gay bitch who loves anime and JRPGS. With time the problems with Persona 4's writing became more and more apparent as I matured and distanced myself from those lonely days in my room pretending I had a cool anime friend group with stands. I started to cringe myself a bit for liking it, maybe remnants of that past shame. I don't feel that shame any more. I will never feel ashamed of having a moment of sincere connection with art, despite the quality of it. You don't control the way art makes you feel. I moved on from P4G, to find cooler JRPGS.
I played Earthbound and discovered one of my favorite games of all time. I played Dragon Quest's I,II and V which was how I started the journey into what may be now my 2nd favorite video game series. I played Persona 5 Royal and had mixed feelings about it even though it's one of the best games of all time. I bonded with the girl who would become my girlfriend through playing the Xenoblade series (which are actually good. Every one of them, but that is a whole another post.) and many other games that I prefer to not mention for I may write about them in the future.
I even finally played through Final Fantasy VI. FF VI is one of the best games ever made. FF VI made me cry because it was exactly what I needed when I first lost that save that made me quit the game. Maybe I'm fantasizing and my problems wouldn't have been solved by merely finishing a game but.. I just saw in FF VI's message something that little girl lele would've appreciated, made her feel seen. I love FF VI to death. Everyone should play it, because I won't spoil what that thing I wish my past self had seen is.
Last year I played through Final Fantasy VII. FF VII is one of the best games ever made. FF VII is maybe my favorite cast of characters of all time. I don't know why people 27 YEARS after release keep talking /just/ about its cultural status. Yes, FF VII is important. Yes, we already have heard the 'why' a thousand times. Let's talk more about the character arcs, the mixed media graphics, the music, the themes, pace, combat system. FF VII is a game made of experiments. FF VII often feels like if they just had added or subtracted one to a number in the game's systems the whole thing would fall apart. It is miraculous and while you're playing it, it makes you forget it's FF VII. I mean it. The world and characters are so charming, so full of soul, that you forget you're playing the most important JRPG of all time.
And this is where I am now. JRPG's are my favorite genre. I'm in love with the sense of adventure they provide, for their hangoutitude, their tropes, rhythms and flows... they came into my life just in a moment where I was finally figuring out who I am, and who I aspire to be.. I still haven't figured those things out but I have figured out a few places that feel like mine.
When I was a little girl I had a DISC for my PS2 that contained an SNES Emulator. Shout out if this song makes you cry. In it there was this game that was in japanese. I often played because it felt mysterious, but I didn't get anywhere with it. I just opened it, walked around for a few and called it quits. For years this game lived in the back of my mind, I often remembered it but never looked into it. In 2022 I played Dragon Quest I&II for the SNES. In 2022 I found that the mysterious game in the back of my mind was one of the most influential and popular JRPG's of all time, and that I just had the bad luck of encountering a japanese ROM as a child.
When I fell in love with JRPG's, it just felt right. I'm so passionate about them because when I felt the most lost I have ever felt in my life, they gave me a space I felt I belonged to. I found friends through JRPG's, I found the love of my life and started this project because of how much JRPG's reignited the burning passion for video games I have had since literally my earliest memories.