Bethesda: Japanese RPGs “Not Realistic”

Well... it's not like the weaboo people aren't saying the WRPGs aren't "real" RPGs.

In other words... you need to shut up... you hater hatin' hater.

Whatever the hell happened to people who plays both JRPGs and WRPGs?

WRPG = Realistic (Most of the games has characters with too much muscle)

I like some of their games, coz of the story.. The prob is that most of them has muscle bound characters..

I thought (unrealistic-ness)is the whole point of the game ?

Wow! He prefers the games that makes him money! I've never heard of such an opinion!

That wasn't very surprising to hear. I expect all video game developers to praise their products over the creations of others.

Although he does have a point about the 3DS and the Wii. The wii is half a generation behind, and the 3DS is current gen, but a few years late.

What do you mean too much muscles? My Commander Shepherd has muscles as expected from military men.

Post-apocalyptic. Science Fiction. Dungeons and Dragons.

Realistic.

dont forget demon forge , you can pull arrows out of your ass apparently .
but yeah j-rpgs should bother with SERIOUS improvements .

You see, bloody massacres with heavy guns are much more appealing. Not that I don't like some God-of-War-like slaughtering. O wait, God of War is ancient mythic Greece. Not realistic enough.

Ironies apart, what he says is true. But seriously, the Japanese have issues with reality but why the best tech comes from Japan's unrealistic minds? (sorry, I just had to add oil to the fire 8D)

i played mass effect just 4 days ago and beat it. i have been playing arc rise fantasia for the last couple hours, so i can see what he is saying.
i would go so far as to say he is "dissin'" jrpg's, but i see his point. for example, i just met up with the cecile character. she claims to be a very experienced warrior, and that she is very strong. she upper-cuts the character "niko" (with one arm) lifts him off his feet with the punch and he lands on his head.
according to the manual she is 12 years old, 4'11", and weighs 86 pounds(39kg). am i expected to believe that she has gained the right to say she is "very experienced" in combat? if she started training at 5, that's 7 years of total battle experience up until the present. also an 86lb girl hitting a ~150lb guy so hard to knock him 10 feet into the air?
how many times have i heard this before? momo, presea, cecile, meru, anise....

jrpg's of the past were great because they were good stories, but now it's hard for me to find one that i genuinely like. the tales franchise has never let me down until they decided not to localize.
maybe people play rpg's for different reasons today, but the guys who played the good ones from japan in the old days are designing the games in american branches today. in game design school over here, every single student in my class said that classic jrpg's were at least half their inspiration for wanting to be game designers.

sorry guys, i didn't mean to ramble.

Presea is older than both of us. She just has a loli body. *drools*

But really, if you think carefully, hard, experienced fighters have hard skin and marks from training. A female fighter would never have soft skin and be all cute. It'd be scary =((

the most important thing in a game is enjoyability.. those who have problems with 12 year old girls knocking out a 50 ton beast with a kick can go blow themselves..

as long as the story isnt linear or the gameplay isnt depressing, the games good!

that too hard to understand?

and Japanese story tellers clearly outclass American story tellers.. character designers make americans look like theyve broken child labour rules and employed kindergardeners for their art..

I think its evident as to whats good and whats better here, whatsay?

a sensible point, i agree. why dose it matter which one is better, or who said what about xRPGS, in the end, its what you enjoy and your own opinion. though, i think he could have been nicer, and it kinda sounds like he is talking out of his ass... "If you compare the sci-fi in Mass Effect to the science fiction in a million Japanese games, it just gets really, really out there." i mean, c'mon... if your gonna compare and contrast, at least have a good example of the competition, not just "a million Japanese games". in the end, i think this guy is just trying to promote his own games, not surprising, however

It's not that you can't just play your own games, but the debate is cycle of hate, one bashes the other and henceforth, BOTH sides need to shut the fuck up, and recently the WRPGS are doing all the talking so maybe they should learn to stop hatin'.

it'll be just like working, only without the pay

And so Fallout 3, and Oblivion are? However unlike Bioware they actually approach it pretty well, and admit they did enjoy them. (Even if by the looks)

Well Fallout 3 and Oblivion are way more realistic than your average JRPG tbh.

For what its worth:

When he says "realistic" he's not referring to the content being realistic, as absolute0 said: life is boring. The perceived realism comes from taking events/theories/pieces of history which have/could happen (MAD scenario -> Fallout) and warping them to form a story, as opposed to (what seems like) creating a world from scratch.

That said, I don't claim to know anything about JRPGs or Japanese culture, it may very well be that the opposite or something else entirely is "realistic" depending on personal history.

i agree with him, and all in all it depends on wat you like. i love the more "fantastical" type so i guess jrpgs is for me. gameplay is more important anyway. im mad no one mentioned that in the interview

If by 'realism', he means CSI, then it would be totally awesome.

Something Ultra realistic, like work but without the pay - it sounds like second life, which obviously sucks but still milions of people play it.

i'm on the side of "If you need to sacrifice some realism for my fun. Go for it".

Seriously. Developpers are so bogged down with the mentality of "let's make it as realistic as possible" that they sometime forget the core idea... Fun.

Mind you, the japanese developpers are a bit lazy with their rehash or their cop out story... I mean seriously. Star Ocean was a nice series, but the fourth installment... My god that was a stupid needless plot-twist that only emo-fied the main character...

Anon 16:27
Mind you, the japanese developpers are a bit lazy with their rehash or their cop out story...

Or with their habit of blatantly ripping of Star Wars,in case of Final Fantasy...

realism can suck.

for example romances in Dragon Age...

i mean, i'm a damn warrior prince on a mission to save civilization with help from a deadly arrow tossing red head... and we have the same conversations i had with my ex-girlfriend?

DEATH incarnate is ravaging the land and it's like:
"hey, what's up with you guys?"
"uh, oh yea, we're goin out"

Well, in my opinion both western and eastern rpgs are fantasy, but the westners base their rpgs on their culture, while japanese take just inspiration from various cultures at once. If japanese made their games in the same way as westerners we would only get samurai games from them.

So, regardless of your preference, the japanese way is clearly superior by far. This is because the number of jrpgs in a given year is vastly superior to the number of wrpgs, with great competition between japanese game companies. Add to this the enormous and wildly creative culture of anime and manga and you get scenario writers trying to outwit each other in making the most colorful, wild and appealing setting possible. At the same time though, the gameplay and general outlook becomes heavily dependent on formulas that "sell", just like recent anime. It's as if they were trying to sell the same game with a different "mask" on it every time. This seems rather a problem of japanese marketing ways rather than their ability to create quality content.

What about wrpgs? They're just drawing on the same medieval-ish scenario over and over, but that doesn't affect the final product because the number of such rpgs is comparatively low. Now that with Dragon Age we got the ultimate wrpg, though, things will hardly remain the same. There really isn't that much left to do with the wrpg genre other than rehashing, therefore i think in the future westerners will start exploring with a wilder style of fantasy anyway, unless all competition dies out at some point.

While japanese developers do indeed create more colorful and unusual settings than the western ones, there is, in my opinion, a major flaw in their thinking - or rather, their lack thereof. The settings in JRPGs are always nothing more than stages for the story to unfold and the characters to act on. They don't waste a single thought why the world they created works the way it does. Why do people still use swords and other ancient melee weapons in a futuristic scenario? Why does nobody use their improbable physical prowess or insane jumping skills in normal life? What about the ability to create flames or ice or cause an earthquake? Did nobody ever think of using this stuff for something different than beating the shit out of equally poorly explained monsters?
While WRPGs slowly grow out of that mentality and offer, if not realistic, than at least plausible settings, JRPGs... don't. And I suppose that is one one reason why Howard calls them unrealistic.

Wow have never heard of gameplay and story segregation? "If X character can do X, why doesn't he just do X" I don't know because it would end the game in 5 minutes? It would break the game of all challenge? Really, if character X can jump high why doesn't he just catapult himself past all the obstacles, if your as fucking charismatic as your stat says, why can't you send everyone to thier doom? Why should I and my team go on every fucking misson when I could easily send someone else, why can't I just carpet bomb people from my space ship? Because it would be BORING, and swords of guns is a matter of preference.

so if a hawaiian company made an RPG, would it be called western RPG, or JRPG?

We don't take kindly to paradoxes here, Anon.

Anyway i don't think Hawaii has a native team of game developers.
At the same time it's not the geographical location that matters, but rather the cultural movement they were most influenced by. Whether japanese or "western", as game developers and professional reviewers themselves defined them through the years.

no. we dont have native teams of devs here in hawaii. (that I know of) most move to the mainland and work for the companies there. as Overt said it would be more about influence. So to answer the question, if a Hawaii co. were to make an RPG, it would probably be a WRPG w/ influences of JRPGs mixed in.

I wanna piss on you!♪

Yes I do, I pee on you ♪

Oh so you want a VIDEO GAME to be REAL? Stop playing games and participate in REAL LIFE... frankly that's all the real I need...

grow up you cunt , witcher is more realistic . Weapons look like like what they looked like they had in the past , architecture , movement and fighting more accurate portrait of what it was back in the day .
there are very few jrpgs that trend a road of real time , might and magic road . Like just watched trailer for some jrpgs guy cooks meat in giant cauldron and then eats to bust his damage while fighting white, floating whale . WFT ?!

Yes, killing radiactive cockraches with a particle gun is pretty real to me

So, the Elder Scrolls series was based on the real world and it makes sense? Fallout was originally created by an entirely different company, so the story and the world's not even created by Bethesda, so I don't see how it's counted as their own "realistic" creation as well.