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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

>I also think that while the cinematic scope and melodrama would eventually be copied by “Western” rpgs like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Witcher, there is a degree of vulnerability to Cloud and his Final Fantasy successors that still isn’t quite allowed to exist among most of the gruff dudes and sad dads of ‘western’ games.

JRPGs are just much more open about feelings. It's really hard to describe. I'd actually even say that you can see that across all japanese games really regardless of the genre.

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The thing that bothered me about the later Final Fantasys is that as the series went on, the protagonists got younger and more like pop stars than original characters. At some point it seems like they forgot they were making fantasy games and just started aping pop musicians (both in fashion and appearance/age) and Hollywood.

This happens to a lot of game companies though. Turnover leads to teams with no connection to previous games in the series and with that a loss of connection to what made the games so special.

I mean, they were always aping something though? Replaying FF7 I realized, at its core, it is just a mismash of 80s horror movies.

Still love it, but its interesting to notice in retrospect.

Before FF7 they were aping fantasy tropes. This is fine if you're making a fantasy game! Though my favourite game in the series is 6 which adds steampunk to the mix but without being overly self-conscious about it.

Totally.

And FF7 was new (to me at least) in what it aped so it's all fine and cool.

With a heavy dose of Blade Runner too. Sephiroth is pretty much gaming's Roy Batty. The dynamic between him and Cloud is even very close to that of Batty and Deckard.

It's ok though, in the 90s, homaging Blade Runner in Japanese media was a total belt onion -- something people did because "it was the style at the time".

Gimme five bees for a quarter, they’d say.

> Turnover leads to teams with no connection to previous games in the series

It's even weirder and more fascinating than that. Turnover eventually leads to teams made of people who were fans of the original series, and the risk there is that their own interpretation of the series can become a navel-gazing love letter to the superficial stuff that floats on top of their memories (e.g. references, callbacks, tie-ins, inside jokes, and memes) while neglecting the underlying qualities that made them fall in love with the series in the first place.

Oh yeah! But this is a problem with a lot of game designers, not just those who join the teams of their childhood heroes. There are quite a few games out there that lean so heavily into navel-gazing love letter territory and what's even more depressing is that they seem to have an audience.

Well, I have good news for you: the most recent Final Fantasy has the oldest protagonist in the series (after the prologue), at a grizzled and careworn 28. Prior to that the oldest protagonists were Cloud and Lightning, both 21. (Zidane is the youngest post-Famicom protagonist at 16.)

I don't consume japanese media too often. But from what I've been sensing, there is a real class tension in japan'a young population now. It's not like in america where we villify the powerful. It's quite the opposite. The lower class gets villified and portrayed with a certain malice that i find quite distasteful. There is a presaure to be in communion with the so called 'elites'. And this partly drives the change of theme and feeling in their media.

I wonder if there's any connection between theater and video games in Japan, since theater is another medium where emotion has to be exaggerated to get across to the audience. And some JRPGs (e.g. Final Fantasy or Octopath Traveler) are not just open with emotion but pull out all the stops to get across the emotion they're going for.

Interesting thought - I wouldn't say there's a strong connection, but it feels a bit less distant than in the west, e.g. stage show adaptations of videogames are relatively common.

That's Kabuki theatre, but they are that way also thanks to the immense popularity of shōnen manga, aimed at young boys, where the main storytelling device is "tell, don't show".

As someone that wanted to get into anime and Japanese media in their 30s, this characteristic has majorly turned me off from the most anime, manga-derived games and JRPGs. I just cannot stand their lack of subtlety and nuance in writing.

It is a major and understated expression of the Western-Eastern cultural divide. In the Western world adults tend to appreciate sophisticated stories, maybe too much so, while, from what I understand, the traumatic break from happy school life to overly-rigid business Japanese culture is the reason why even grown adults tend to find refuge in late teen/school-age drama. Most Japanese animated media is made of, but not strictly for, 17 year olds in their senior year of high school fighting the universe and God himself.

Happy high school life is a myth, everyone studies hard for university or training due to increasing competition.

Manga got its style from shitty printing presses. They were not reliable enough to draw small detail faces realistically so they started drawing huge, super emotive faces instead with giant eyes and what not. I would guess it’s the root of it

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