The Entire History of Japanese RPGs

Few genres have produced as many games that mean as much to players as JRPGs. I mean, it's not a competition or anything, but if it were, I'm not sure there is any other genre responsible for as much nostalgia as the endless supply of remakes and the enduring legacy of so many classic titles attest to.

But Japanese role-playing games have more to offer than this, and their history is surprisingly turbulent. From years and years of struggling to gain a foothold in the West, with even hugely successful titles not even being localized, to rapidly ascending to the pinnacle of critical and commercial success while seeming to represent gaming's future, to then later crashing back down to reality amidst high-profile failures and a broader identity crisis, and finally to where we are today, where the situation looks vastly different to just 10 years ago. Basically, there's a lot to cover, and this video will cover all of it, or at least as much as can be reasonably crammed into 2 and 3/4 hours, which is a lot.

But before that, it only makes sense to start with the definition and origins. And hey, at least defining what a JRPG is will be easy and not at all controversial. I mean, I have previously defined what an RPG is, which, if you missed that or don't remember, are games that combine playing the role of a player character or small group of characters with statistical gameplay systems, as well as games which were inspired by and descended from the first RPG, Dungeons and Dragons. Meaning, as the abbreviation implies, JRPGs are simply Japanese role-playing games, i.e., any RPG made in Japan. Right, okay, okay, maybe there's going to be a little controversy, so let's just get it over with. Dark Souls is an RPG. Dark Souls is made in Japan. So, is Dark Souls a JRPG? No.

Of course, opinions over this vary, and it has been heavily discussed. Generally, people seem to be trending towards yes early on and have gravitated more towards no with time. And even Sony has weighed in on the debate on their official PlayStation JRPG page where they said, "No, of course Dark Souls isn't a JRPG. What the are you talking about?" I might be paraphrasing a bit there, that might not have been Sony's exact words, but given that they do take a surprisingly clear stance on the issue, I feel it's what they wanted to say. Still, the controversy over this question does challenge the simple definition of JRPGs being any RPG made in Japan. And that's often the case with simple definitions. They might be useful, but they're not always the most accurate.

In reality, genres are imperfect labels we use to more easily describe things, and defining a genre strictly through geography can lead to confusion. Not only are there RPGs made in Japan many do not consider to be JRPGs, and games many consider to be JRPGs that were made outside Japan. But even this geographical rule has gray areas. For example, much of the development of Final Fantasy 2 and 3 took place in Sacramento, California, and according to my in-depth research, California is not in Japan. So, does that mean Final Fantasy 2 and 3, and also Final Fantasy 9, by the way, are Western RPGs rather than JRPGs?

But maybe you'd argue it's not about where the game is physically made, but where the company is based. But then you have examples like Mistwalker, an American-Japanese studio from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, which is based in Hawaii, meaning the likes of Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey wouldn't be JRPGs. But maybe you'd argue it's not about the nationality of the company, but instead the people who worked on the game. Except one of the most important JRPGs of all time was made by a Dutch man, and Japanese developers have worked on Western games, and non-Japanese developers have worked on Japanese games. So, how many Japanese developers do you need to turn an RPG into a JRPG? And who is checking the nationality of everyone involved? And should this really be what defines the entire genre?

RPGs made in Japan is a good, simple definition, but the true defining quality of any genre is its essence. And while this essence might be connected to geography, it's not solely based on geography. Therefore, Dark Souls is not a JRPG. Sorry, JRPG fans. Stop trying to claim Dark Souls. I get it. Dark Souls is good. It would add to JRPG street cred, and JRPGs don't have the best street cred. Years of being made fun of by Video Game Dunkey has left scars. But JRPGs don't need Dark Souls or Video Game Dunkey. No other genre has produced so many games that mean so much to players.

Still, this does raise the question of what is the essence of JRPGs. For role-playing games more broadly, their essence is tied to their progenitor in aesthetics, mechanics, and most of all, design philosophy. But that's not true for JRPGs. Dungeons and Dragons still played a role, but it was never the genre's holy bible. And yet, there was something else which ended up taking D&D's place, something I will get to shortly. I'm just dragging it out a bit because what better way is there to understand any genre than through its history? So, let's begin.

This is where I'd love to say, "Let's begin at the beginning with the first JRPG," but there is a slight problem with that, though. [Music] No one knows. Yes, just like with RPGs more broadly, no one knows what the first JRPG actually was. It would have been in the early '80s, likely 1982 or maybe '3, and it would have been on one of the early 8-bit Japanese personal computers of the era, like NEC's PC-8000 series. But the precise release dates of these earliest games have often been lost to time, and even if they hadn't, there's still the problem of defining which of these games actually count as RPGs.

So, this question is difficult to answer, and even Japanese sources seem to be stumped by it. Part of this confusion stems from the fact that few people in Japan used or even knew the term RPG at the time. The genre was emerging. Instead, these early examples were known as simulation games for the way in which they use statistics and dice rolls to simulate various things, things that could be pretty far from the Dungeons and Dragons people were more familiar with in the West. For instance, in one of the most famous examples, Koei's Seduction of the Condominium Wives, players were tasked with playing the role of a door-to-door condom salesman who had to sell condoms, and maybe do a little more, to various women in an apartment building while avoiding your typical apartment building hazards, you know, wandering Yakuza and ghosts.

There were other erotic-focused examples as well, but even the non-erotic games could seem atypical by Western RPG standards, like Koei's Underground Exploration, where players control a group of soldiers and do battle with various Kaiju monsters like Godzilla, or Pony Canyon's Spy Daisakusen, which was just a loose adaptation of the Mission Impossible TV series. Much of our original awareness of these titles is thanks to Hardcore Gaming 101's Dark Age of JRPG series, which is well worth checking out if you want to know more about the very earliest games of this era.

Still, for our purposes, there are two important pieces of information to take away from this period. The first is that one single developer was far more prevalent than any other, being described by Hardcore Gamer as the RPG company in Japan at this time and responsible for around half of all titles released by the end of 1983. And they are a company that has been mentioned twice already. Yes, long before they were best known for their many games where you killed many enemies in exaggerated melee combat, Koei were the undisputed king of early Japanese RPGs, and as such, it is quite likely that whatever the first Japanese RPG was, it had Koei's name attached to it. Whether that be a game like 1982's The Princess, which some consider to be too close to a text adventure game to count as an RPG, or a more obviously RPG-like title like 1983's Dungeon, which bears a striking resemblance to foundational Western RPG Ultima, alongside some enemy designs taking straight out of the official D&D rulebook. In fact, Dungeon was originally created by Koei in an attempt to copy another upcoming RPG and beat it to market, supposedly due to a personal feud between Koei co-founder Koo Era and Black Onyx creator Hank Rogers.

This leads us to the second important thing to know about this era, which is that Dungeons and Dragons, Ultima, and Wizardry were all really influential, despite the fact that none of these three had even released in Japan yet. If you need a reminder on the origins of RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons was created in 1974 and established the tabletop RPG, which soon led pioneering game developers to try to recreate this experience in video game format, first on mainframe computers in the late '70s and then on personal computers at the start of the '80s, with Origin Systems' Ultima and Sir-Tech's Wizardry both emerging in 1981 to lay the foundations that so many future computer RPGs would be built on. If you need more than a reminder, watch my previous video where it's covered in detail. But the cliff notes is that together, Ultima and Wizardry had a massive impact on gaming, and clearly, that impact was big enough to reach Japan even before they officially released, as many early Japanese RPG developers cite them as inspirations, and many of these earliest games show elements of each. In particular, the overworld exploration of Ultima, the menu-based combat of Wizardry, and the dungeon-crawling focus design of both games.

And it was through this inspiration that Japanese RPGs would see their first major commercial success. Hank Rogers is best known for bringing Tetris to Nintendo. Tetris, Tetris, Tetris, Tetris, Tetris. But before this, he was an avid Dungeons and Dragons player who moved to Japan despite not speaking the language to, quote, "chase a girl." Where he found both a distinct lack of D&D and a potential gap in the video game market from the lack of D&D-inspired games. And so, he decided to learn to code to make his own game, drawing on Ultima and particularly Wizardry to create The Black Onyx in 1984.

In The Black Onyx, players create a party of five characters to explore a dungeon in first person. But unlike in its inspiration, in The Black Onyx, the player's party was represented on screen with models that changed based on equipment and new features like visible health bars, providing more visual clarity and helping create a more accessible experience than Wizardry itself. This wasn't enough, however, because The Black Onyx bombed, apparently selling just five copies in its first two months due to Japanese consumers not understanding what the game actually was. In desperation, Rogers hired a translator and visited every computer magazine in Japan to provide them each with a firsthand demo of the game, leading to extensive review coverage in the following months, and sales soon followed.

In time, The Black Onyx would go from selling five copies to over 150,000, which reportedly made it the best-selling video game in Japan at that time. It was also voted Game of the Year by readers of the biggest Japanese gaming magazine, and so, The Black Onyx made a significant step towards making RPGs mainstream in Japan, and others soon followed, like Crystal Soft's Heart of Fantasy, which released just a few months after The Black Onyx, but instead seemed to use Ultima as its primary inspiration alongside the turn-based combat seen in Wizardry. This combination means it's often best known as having many similarities to Dragon Quest's core formula, despite releasing more than 2 years earlier. The story focuses on a warrior that is defeated in battle and subsequently banished to a dark world of monsters where they must find something called the Heart of Fantasy to return to their own world before an in-game timer runs out. Heart of Fantasy would see multiple successful sequels, making it an important early RPG series and again showing the clear influence of Ultima and Wizardry in these early games.

Still, not every RPG followed Western RPGs so closely. In 1984, arcade powerhouse Namco would release The Tower of Druaga, which tasked players with ascending a maze-like tower alongside rudimentary combat and obscure puzzles and secrets designed to encourage discussion between players. Druaga is an arcade and action game more than an RPG and was designed by the creator of Xevious, Masanobu Endo. Yet, it was inspired by Endo buying a copy of Dungeons and Dragons on a business trip to America and wanting to incorporate RPG elements into arcade design. Yet, despite not being an RPG itself, The Tower of Druaga did go on to inspire a number of other games that bridge the divide between action and RPG more completely, like Nihon Falcom's Dragon Slayer, from important JRPG pioneer Yuzo Koshiro. This wasn't Falcom's first attempt at an action RPG, with first JRPG ever made contender, Panorama Toe, releasing a year earlier. Still, Dragon Slayer went on to be more important and marked the start of a long series of somewhat similar titles, which was also the same series that would eventually create the Legend of Heroes franchise that modern JRPG players might be more familiar with.

This first entry, however, was basic, featuring a top-down perspective with bump combat and being set entirely in a single large dungeon where the player must level up to eventually slay a dragon. Just 1 month later, Toei would release Hydlide, starting another important action RPG series and spawning a deep rivalry between the two. Hydlide's gameplay has much in common with the earlier Dragon Slayer, yet the maze-like dungeon is replaced by a vibrant open world for players to explore alongside rarely seen features like quick saves and regenerating health. Both of these games cite The Tower of Druaga as their primary inspiration, and both games would get sequels within a year that would expand their scope while adding numerous improvements. Together, these games saw considerable commercial success, even more so than The Black Onyx, and established the action RPG genre not just as something distinct from Ultima and Wizardry, but also as something that bridged the gap between action-focused arcade games and simulation-focused PC games, an approach that would soon be seen in several major console hits and was important for being more accessible and familiar to Japanese players than traditional RPGs were.

And so, at the birth of a Japanese role-playing genre, RPGs broadly came in two varieties: games descended from Ultima and Wizardry, which would often take inspiration from both, yet still followed their core formula quite closely, and action RPGs descended from The Tower of Druaga, Dragon Slayer, and Hydlide, where the action was still basic, but the design was comparatively more accessible. Still, it's worth being aware of just how many different early Japanese PC RPGs there were in this period, the vast majority of which this video is not mentioning, and some of which can't be so neatly categorized into these two groups. For example, it was on this early gaming frontier that two rather well-known Japanese companies would make their RPG debuts, and this didn't happen via Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. Enix's first RPG was actually Earth Fighter Raiza, a sci-fi and mecha-focused RPG set in the year 2300, where humanity has begun colonizing space, only to encounter a hostile alien species, with the player taking the role of a soldier in this new space war. Meanwhile, Square's first RPG was Crusher Z of the Blasty, which coincidentally was also sci-fi and mecha-focused, this time centering on a war between an oppressive space government and a group of rebels, and with some really striking visuals, particularly in its turn-based combat. This was 1986, back when most RPGs didn't even include attack animations, and then Square was out here showing giant mechs blast the out of each other. And by the way, if those mechs are giving you Gundam vibes, it's probably because the designs were done by Nippon Sunrise, the studio that made Mobile Suit Gundam. Yes, early Japanese PC games were weird and wonderful, with visuals often well ahead of their time, thanks to the higher resolution of Japanese computers, a feature that arose due to the need to display the more complicated Japanese language characters and was used to great effect by early developers. If you want to know more about some of the lesser-known games from this era, I would recommend the book "A Guide to Japanese Roleplaying Games," which goes game by game with detailed descriptions of each one.

Yet, when it comes to JRPGs, these aren't really the games most people think of, and PCs aren't usually the [Music] platform. Early personal computers might have been where Japanese RPGs began, but it was on Nintendo's Family Computer that they became what we know them as today. By the mid-'80s, the Nintendo Entertainment System had just released in America and was already dominating the Japanese market, thanks to new popular hits like Super Mario Bros. Yet, for Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto's next industry-changing success, he would instead look to the world of RPGs. In fact, in a 2003 interview, Miyamoto stated, "The Black Onyx and Ultima were the primary inspirations in creating The Legend of Zelda." And so, Zelda continued the lineage of Dragon Slayer and Hydlide, taking their open worlds, exploration, and puzzle-solving, while adding an attack button, allowing actual sword swings to replace bumping into enemies as the primary form of combat. And yet, most people wouldn't consider this game to be an RPG due to its lack of statistical gameplay elements. And so, Zelda continued the action RPG evolution by evolving from RPGs into what has come to be known as the action-adventure genre.

However, the 8-bit era was a time when genres were still emerging and rules were still being written. And so, RPG influence can be seen in all sorts of different games. In fact, while the first Zelda isn't usually considered an RPG, its sequel, Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, is, as it brings back several RPG systems, such as experience points and leveling up. And the exact same thing happened with Castlevania and Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest, and with Renegade and its follow-up, River City Ransom, and there are other examples of this too, where side-scrolling or action games introduced basic RPG systems. This might be because console games hadn't really established their own identity at this point, and so developers looked to and combined aspects of the two parts of gaming that were already established: action from arcades and simulation elements from PC games, just like Dragon Slayer and Hydlide did a few years earlier.

And yet, it was in the other half of the Japanese role-playing genre where the real breakthrough would come. Yuji Horii was a writer for manga magazine Shonen Jump who joined the newly created Enix in 1982 after winning a game design competition they organized. Enix were a video game publisher but didn't have enough games to publish yet, and so the competitions were a way to find and sometimes poach talented developers. And the ethics behind them is somewhat questionable, as the prize money often came out of each developer's future royalties. Still, at least they gave the industry Yuji Horii. Horii's second game at Enix, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, released in 1983 and helped create the visual novel genre. It also inspired some guy called Hideo Kojima to get into game development. In that same year, Horii would take a business trip to America where he would stumble upon Wizardry at a Macworld Expo. Horii was quickly hooked, and soon after, so were his colleagues. And it was through playing Wizardry and Ultima that they started to want to make their own RPG. And so, they did.

During its development, an experienced anime and movie composer named Koichi Sugiyama just so happened to return a questionnaire providing feedback on another Enix game. And upon noticing the famous name, Enix decided to try their luck at contacting Sugiyama to ask if he wanted to compose the music for a video game, and to their surprise, he said yes. It was also around this time that Horii would use his old connections at Shonen Jump to get into contact with Akira Toriyama, an already well-established manga artist who had recently started a new series called Dragon Ball, who was also somehow convinced to provide the art for this new game. And so, this brand new, unproven RPG wound up with some pretty big names attached to it. The only problem was how to actually make a game like Wizardry or Ultima on a console where memory was limited, the controls could only use a four-button controller, and saving wasn't even possible, as these early NES cartridges had yet to introduce battery-powered RAM for games to be saved onto.

The answer to these problems was to make something simple and more accessible. And the result ended up being the perfect game to bring RPGs to inexperienced console audiences. Dragon Quest, released in May 1986, and combined the overworld exploration and towns of Ultima with the menu-based combat and random encounters of Wizardry, alongside bright, colorful visuals and simple yet intuitive controls to help get around memory limits. Combat was 1v1, and the overall length was short. To translate the experience for a controller, menus were kept simple and made as easy to navigate as possible, and to allow saving, the game used the clever password system triggered by the game's resurrection spell. Dragon Quest also relaxed the difficulty, as while likely considered grindy by today's standards, for its time, it was highly forgiving, with players able to respawn after death back in town with no loss of experience points.

And yet, despite this, it still didn't sell. Yes, just like The Black Onyx 2 years earlier, consumers unfamiliar with RPGs showed little initial interest, leading Enix to believe the game would lose money. But again, as with The Black Onyx, intervention from its creator turned things around. Yuji Horii produced a series of articles for Weekly Shonen Jump introducing readers to the concept of an RPG and promoting Dragon Quest while teasing its sequel. And in time, sales increased and then kept increasing, eventually reaching 1.5 million for the Famicom alone, making it one of the highest-selling games on the system not published by Nintendo themselves. For the series, those numbers would only increase as Dragon Quest soon became a countrywide phenomenon, with the third entry breaking sales records and selling 3 million copies in a week.

For JRPGs more broadly, however, Dragon Quest 1 was the symbolic start of a genre. It might not have been the first RPG made in Japan, but it was the game that would define JRPGs forever more. And no other game in this video is as important to the genre's history. In fact, for a time, Dragon Quest was the genre, just like how the release of Doom in 1993 was so momentous that it led all first-person shooters to be referred to as Doom clones for several years. So too were JRPGs that followed called "DQs," literally a shortening of Dragon Quest game. And given Dragon Quest's success, many DQs soon followed, some that were mechanically similar enough that they could be considered Dragon Quest clones, but some of which created important series of their own, like Atlus's Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, which released in September 1987 and was based on a trilogy of science fantasy books by the same name.

Digital Devil Story took heavy inspiration from Wizardry to create a challenging party-based dungeon crawler, yet its story focuses on a modern-day high school student who accidentally unleashed a horde of demons and then teams up with his girlfriend to venture into the Demon World and defeat Lucifer, you know, as you do. To make the game feel distinct from Wizardry, the team decided they needed to add some completely new feature of their own, which ended up being the demon negotiation and fusion system, through which players could gain demon companions to fight in their party. A direct sequel would be released 3 years later, which was set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and involved a conflict between the forces of Lucifer and the forces of the One True God, with many other sequels and spin-offs soon to follow in the future.

Another series that followed Dragon Quest was Final Fantasy. When creator Hironobu Sakaguchi used the proven commercial success of Dragon Quest to persuade Square to greenlight an RPG of their own, the end result released in 1987 and showcased impressive visuals, particularly in its battles, which used a side-on rather than first-person perspective, with the player's four Heroes of Light each having their own animated sprites. Final Fantasy also placed a greater emphasis on story, which begins by players defeating the main villain and rescuing the princess, events that would usually mark the ending of such adventures, and then ends with time loop paradoxes and sci-fi space-based fortresses.

And speaking of sci-fi, the Phantasy Star series would also begin in December that year, developed by Sega for the Master System. Phantasy Star was again directly influenced by Dragon Quest, which Sega had seen the success of, leading them to feel they needed to make an RPG of their own to allow the Master System to compete with the NES. To do this, they turned to designer Katsuhiro Hayashi and programmer Yuji Naka, the man who would go on to create Sonic. Phantasy Star again stood out for its fantastic visuals, where this time battles are still first-person but feature detailed animated enemies alongside striking use of color, true 3D dungeon exploration, and even animated story cutscenes. The result is described by A Guide to Japanese Roleplaying Games as not only one of the best-looking 8-bit RPGs but one of the most visually incredible titles of the '80s. The sci-fi setting came from a team wanting the game to stand out from other RPGs and took inspiration from Star Wars while mixing this with medieval fantasy and Japanese history to make something wholly distinct. And again, like Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star is also remembered for its, for the time, heavy focus on story, which unusually revolved around a female main character named Alis on a quest to avenge her murdered brother and overthrow an oppressive king.

Meanwhile, on the PC, 1987 would be the year that Falcom's other major RPG series debuted. Ys, similar to the early Dragon Slayer games, but with some slight changes, like the fast-paced bump combat being expanded not by adding an attack button, but instead by rewarding players for bumping into enemies at an angle rather than head-on to create more mechanical depth. Ys also focused more on overworld exploration and the sense of adventure, making it almost seem like Dragon Slayer's answer to Hydlide. The story would focus on a wandering red-haired swordsman named Adol, who would be the protagonist of all future Ys games. Dragon Slayer itself was also still going strong in this period, with its fourth entry, Legacy of the Wizard, continuing to develop the side-scrolling dungeon crawling of Xanadu while finding success on the NES and even getting a rare North American release. The fifth entry, Sorcerian, would return to more Western RPG inspiration with a fully player-created party of heroes, and the sixth entry, Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes, marks the official start of the Legend of Heroes series and changed things completely by instead using more traditional turn-based combat, making it more like Falcom's answer to Dragon Quest.

And so, by the end of 1987, the big five of the JRPG world had arrived. Nihon Falcom, Enix, Atlus, Square, and Sega were responsible for most of the biggest JRPGs and JRPG series, and most other important series tended to be created by people who had once worked at one of these five companies. There are some exceptions, like Wolf Team (later owners Namco), Taito Studios, or several key Nintendo franchises, but a lot of the JRPG genre really would originate from these five companies. That said, there were still other important developments of this era, like Mother, later known as EarthBound Beginnings outside Japan, which was created by Ape Inc. and Nintendo and released in 1989. Mother was an idiosyncratic parody of small-town America, making it stand out from other games in the genre. Its creator, Shigesato Itoi, had been inspired by playing Dragon Quest and wanted to make an RPG that lacked the swords, magic, and other conventions that were usually so common. And so, instead of creating a brave hero for the main character, he created a young boy with asthma and an absentee father.

1989 also saw the release of Sweet Home from Capcom, which tells the story of five filmmakers exploring an abandoned mansion. They soon become trapped in, forcing them to do battle with supernatural monsters found within. Sweet Home is often credited as the first ever survival horror game, although it's worth keeping in mind that this wasn't even the first horror RPG. Games like L'Enfer des Poètes released several years before it with almost the same premise, and horror-focused adventure games had released even earlier, and 1981's Nostromo was even earlier still. Still, Sweet Home is notable for being the primary inspiration for Capcom's Resident Evil, which actually started as a remake of Sweet Home and featured several of the same developers. Despite this, Sweet Home's gameplay is basically Dragon Quest-style combat with simple party-based puzzle solving.

Not every RPG followed in Dragon Quest's footsteps, though. 1990's Fire Emblem, from Intelligent Systems, instead followed the lineage of early tactical RPGs like Bokosuka Wars to help establish the simulation RPG or strategy RPG subgenre. Fire Emblem used grid-based maps with turn-based combat that placed heavy emphasis on careful positioning of units and an awareness of strengths and weaknesses. Its most famous feature came to be its use of permadeath, where many important story characters could fall in battle, impacting future story events and heightening the sense of tension. This did lead to criticism from reviewers, though, and this is the NES era we're talking about. You know, a game isn't messing around when the NES reviewers start saying it's too difficult. Still, over time, Fire Emblem's hardcore tactical formula created a cult following, and it would go on to influence many future games of the SRPG genre.

And there are other games that could be mentioned here too. This was still an era where most Japanese RPGs never released outside Japan, and as such, entire popular series can be completely unknown, like Metal Max, a pioneering open-world JRPG still ongoing that wouldn't see a game with a worldwide release until 2018, or Glory of Heracles, a Greek mythology-inspired series that would receive four main entries across the NES and Super Nintendo, or Tengai Makyou: Far East of Eden, which began on the PC Engine before coming to other platforms and once laid claim to being one of the most expensive games ever made, or Momotaro Densetsu, famous for Momotaro, or Peach Boy, a popular hero from Japanese folklore given numerous RPG adventures.

Yet, despite this, the West would see some JRPGs in this period. Dragon Quest, renamed as Dragon Warrior, arrived in mid-1989 and would be followed by its first three sequels. Phantasy Star released even earlier in late 1988. Ys arrived in 1989 on the Master System, and Final Fantasy released in mid-1990. Outside of Final Fantasy, however, the success these games saw in their home market wasn't replicated. Dragon Quest famously flopped despite being published by Nintendo themselves, who heavily promoted the game in Nintendo Power. Yet, it still underperformed so much that it led Nintendo to include free copies of the game with all Nintendo Power subscriptions as a way to unload unsold inventory. The reason for this is probably because, much like in Japan years earlier, Western gamers weren't used to the concept of console RPGs, and so interest was low.

Unlike Japan, however, JRPGs in the West had the additional problem of localization itself. Translating a book or movie is difficult; it takes skill to convert one language into another, but games presented a far greater challenge. Not only did translation involve lots of additional programming due to the medium, but the text being translated was also nonlinear, with translators often being unsure of a piece of dialogue's context, something vital to accurate translations. Still, this was just the beginning. Japanese text also involves fewer characters, meaning localizers had limited space to fit translations into both physically (sometimes in text boxes and character allocations for individual words) but also in terms of memory, one of the most limiting factors for old console games. This meant text had to be significantly shortened, and instead of this problem getting better with time, it actually only became worse in the 16-bit era, when Japanese developers started to use Kanji, the most complicated Japanese language characters, that were displayed with memory-intensive double-byte integers, which when converted to English took up massive amounts of wasted memory. Unlike English, Japanese is also monospaced, meaning either more complicated coding or awkwardly stretched English fonts. And Japanese RPGs also featured a lot of Japanese cultural references and wordplay, something Dragon Quest in particular made heavy use of. This all meant that localization was difficult, costly, and perhaps worst of all, slow.

Which brings us to the final problem that crippled JRPGs in the West. Dragon Quest 3 was a really impressive game when it released in early 1988, but its North American release wouldn't be until 1992, over 4 years later. This was a time when games were improving every single year, particularly in graphics, meaning four years made a world of difference and dated these games massively. For some perspective, Dragon Quest 3 was one of the best-selling NES games of all time, with 3.895 million copies sold, and 3.8 million of those were in Japan. In North America, the game many consider to be the greatest 8-bit RPG ever made, a game so successful it led to a widely believed rumor that the Japanese government had created a law banning Dragon Quest from being released on school days, sold less than 100,000 copies. For the biggest games and companies, localization was a significant challenge that only sometimes paid off, and for everyone else, it just didn't happen. And so, the JRPG conquest of the West would take time.

But in Japan, the genre was flourishing. By the end of the 8-bit era, JRPGs were starting to resemble the genre people know today. Final Fantasy 3, for example, took inspiration from Dragon Quest 3's class system to create the job system, where characters can swap each party member's class freely. It also shifted the series's focus away from challenging, drawn-out dungeon crawling to a faster-paced, more linear, and more story-focused adventure. And now that we've reached the time where JRPGs start to resemble JRPGs, we can return to what makes the genre what it is. What gives JRPGs their essence? Western RPGs were derived from Dungeons and Dragons, with many early games attempting to be direct adaptations, and with most early Western RPG developers being Dungeons and Dragons nerds. But this wasn't true in Japan, where D&D wasn't even released when the genre was emerging. And so, while these games initially followed in the footsteps of Western RPGs, in time, they soon took their inspiration from other sources, namely manga.

Before creating Dragon Quest, Yuji Horii was a writer at Weekly Shonen Jump. Dragon Quest's composer was famous for his work on anime. Dragon Quest's artist was the creator of one of the most famous manga of all time. And where Western RPG developers were pretty much all D&D nerds, early JRPG developers tended to all be otaku, particularly early PC developers, where PCs were part of an otaku subculture. And so, almost every early Japanese PC RPG used their impressive resolutions to replicate anime and manga aesthetics. Both Enix's and Square's first RPGs were based on mechs, with one game even using designs from Gundam. Of the 8-bit JRPGs that never released in the West, there are plenty of direct anime adaptations. Meanwhile, manga adaptations of JRPGs started to appear as early as 1987 with an adaptation of Xanadu, and anime soon followed until eventually, an entire genre of anime and light novels, isekai, started to be about characters getting transported into JRPG-inspired worlds. Even some of the clichés famously associated with JRPGs in the West are simply copied from anime and manga. I mean, spiky-haired teenagers saving the world was a Shonen manga trope long before it was a JRPG trope.

And so, where Western RPG developers were trying to recreate Dungeons and Dragons in both aesthetics and mechanics, Dragon Quest was instead trying to recreate a Shonen manga adventure, something that shows in every part of its design. And for a time, that was JRPGs. Still, it wasn't just manga. Megami Tensei began as an adaptation of a Japanese book series, Sweet Home was based on a Japanese movie, and future games would often take inspiration from the countless JRPGs that came before them, even as they started to be made outside Japan. And so, the best way to understand JRPGs is not to understand the "J" as standing for "made in Japan," but rather as "Japanese media." JRPGs are RPGs inspired by and derived from Japanese media. And while in time, the original RPGs that helped create the genre, Ultima and Wizardry, were left far behind, the influence of Japanese media is still just as evident today as it was at the genre's inception. As for what piece of Japanese media had the biggest impact, it would be hard to overstate the role played by Shonen manga, where the focus on groups of characters, power fantasies, idealism, overcoming great adversity, a sense of adventure, whimsical humor, a younger target audience, and anime aesthetics would all become core features that set JRPGs apart from their Western counterparts. So, this is the essence of JRPGs. It is a genre that formed its identity through different inspirations, leading to its own set of recognizable traits. And with that, it's time to move on to the next generation of consoles. [Music]

One of the greatest challenges early console games faced was memory limitations, both on actual game cartridges and from older console CPUs. This was particularly true for a genre focused on story, as it limited the amount of text each game could include. But a new generation meant more memory, which benefited game length, script size, and graphical quality. Features that would continue to grow over time. In fact, changes can even be seen within each generation, as later cartridges on the same systems allowed for more data. For JRPGs, increasing data limits led to more in-depth stories with more interactions between characters and the start of more cinematic storytelling with greater emphasis placed on cutscenes and action set pieces. With this evolution, JRPGs would move even further from their dungeon-crawling origins, with freedom in exploration and character creation often being sacrificed for more linear and controlled experiences. Through this, the 16-bit era would produce several of the most acclaimed JRPGs of all time, most of which could be found on the SNES.

But before there was the Super Nintendo, there was the Sega Mega Drive, or Genesis in America, where one classic series continued strong. Phantasy Star 2 released in early 1989 and was the first RPG on the Mega Drive, having originally been in development for the Master System. As such, its graphics weren't quite the dramatic leap forward seen in certain other 16-bit RPGs. For example, battles now included multiple enemies on screen at a time, but this came at the cost of having battle backgrounds. Yet, where Phantasy Star 2 really stood out was its story, which was set 1,000 years after the first game and featured more depth and more drama, with important characters dying and whole planets being destroyed as the player's party seeks to uncover the truth behind a malfunctioning supercomputer called Mother Brain. Phantasy Star 3 released one year later and marked more of a departure for the series, with changes poorly received by some fans, but it did introduce an innovative generation system where the story spans three generations of characters, with the player having a choice of who to marry, which in turn determined who they played as in future sections. Phantasy Star 4 took longer to arrive, releasing in 1993, but brought numerous improvements with more detailed graphics, impressive and frequent cutscenes, and a number of gameplay refinements. It did still feature the turn-based battles and random encounters of previous titles, but with a new combo system and a faster overall pace that didn't sacrifice the great battle visuals. The story also received praise and acts as a culmination of the events of the rest of the series, leaving Phantasy Star 4 as one of the most iconic and enduring RPGs to appear on a Sega console.

But there was more to the Mega Drive than Phantasy Star. Another long-running series to appear in this era was Shining, which began as a first-person dungeon crawler in 1991's Shining in the Darkness before finding great success with the SRPG-focused Shining Force series, before ending its life with several lesser-known action RPG titles. Of all these, it's the Shining Force games which are the most fondly remembered, with Shining Force 1 debuting in 1992 to give Nintendo's Fire Emblem some real competition. Compared to Fire Emblem, Shining Force offered a more accessible take on the genre that removed the focus on permadeath while retaining a similar fantasy setting and turn-based gameplay on grid-based maps. Shining Force boasted impressive visuals and included towns and an overworld, making for a more expansive experience, which its sequel, Shining Force 2, expanded even further. Another SRPG series, Langrisser, originally titled War Song in America, would also start on the Mega Drive in 1991.

Other Mega Drive hits included a number of action RPGs like Landstalker, which is often compared to The Legend of Zelda but with an isometric 45-degree camera. Beyond Oasis, also known as The Story of Thor, for its striking visuals and an Arabian-inspired setting, and Crusader of Centy, which is also compared to Zelda but does actually look and play like a 2D Zelda. Unlike on the Super Nintendo, Mega Drive RPGs of this era nearly all received American and EU releases, which might also explain why action RPGs seemed better represented than turn-based, as part of Sega's broader console strategy in this time was appealing to international audiences.

And yet, despite this, it was still the Super Nintendo that had most of the best-known RPGs of the era. Dragon Quest saw its fifth entry in 1992, which would employ a similar generation system to Phantasy Star 3, with the player's character beginning the adventure as a child before continuing as them as an adult with a choice of who to marry and later having children, but then joined the party. Also, the game also featured a monster-catching system similar to Megami Tensei, where defeated monsters had a chance to join your party. Still, Dragon Quest 5's greatest achievement might have been how it combined the series' whimsical charm and childlike sense of adventure with a much more personal and moving storyline, helping to make this one of the series' most acclaimed entries. Dragon Quest 6 released 3 years later and expanded the class system of Dragon Quest 3 while offering a longer runtime and eventually a more open-ended design that included two distinct overworlds.

Meanwhile, Square would release Final Fantasy 4, originally titled 2 in America, in 1991. Final Fantasy's 4th entry abandons the player-created characters of the previous games to instead feature fleshed-out, predefined characters. Its story focused on the Dark Knight Cecil, who turns his back on his kingdom after witnessing their atrocities to become a Paladin and seek redemption. Final Fantasy 4 seemed like the first entry in the series where story was a main priority and featured more set pieces and fewer dungeons. It's also known for introducing the Active Time Battle system, where inputs in battle needed to be selected in real time, making the experience more active. Final Fantasy 5 released a year later and would see the return of a job system from Final Fantasy 3, now greatly expanded to allow characters to retain some of their skills from previously selected jobs, which added far greater customization and has come to be seen as one of the best progression systems in the series. Finally, Final Fantasy 6 released in 1994 and gave a glimpse at the genre's future, following on from Final Fantasy 4 by placing even more emphasis on story. Final Fantasy 6 was the first entry which genuinely felt cinematic, featuring even more set pieces, a greater variety of out-of-combat sprite animations, and more mature and involving storytelling that added greater depth to the world lore and characters. The story itself featured a group of rebels opposing a militaristic empire in a world undergoing an industrial revolution and is notable for its dark tone and how events in the story impact and change the in-game world, particularly in its second half. It's also regarded as one of the best stories of the era, with Final Fantasy 6 still remaining as one of the most highly acclaimed games in the genre.

Atlus's Megami Tensei franchise would also continue on the Super Nintendo with 1992's Shin Megami Tensei, another first-person dungeon crawler with demon recruitment and fusing. Shin Megami Tensei's story involved a portal to the demon realm opening in near-future Tokyo and featured branching paths based on Law, Chaos, and Neutral alignments that coincided with the game's main factions. A direct sequel set in the futuristic city of Tokyo, Millennium, would release 2 years later, alongside side story Shin Megami Tensei: If. Meanwhile, Nintendo's best-known SRPG series, Fire Emblem, would receive three entries, beginning in 1994 with Mystery of the Emblem and ending with Thracia 776 in the distant year of 1999, over 3 years after the arrival of Nintendo's next home console. Thracia 776 would be the final time series creator Shouzou Kaga would work on the series, and it, and the connected previous entry, Genealogy of the Holy War, are usually considered to be the pinnacle of classic Fire Emblem.

The Super Nintendo would also see the start of many new series. Developer Quintet were formed out of former Falcom and Ys veterans and would create some of the Super Nintendo's most memorable action RPGs in the not directly connected Heaven and Earth Trilogy. The first, Soul Blazer, released in 1992 and cast the player as a Heavenly Warrior sent to restore a ravaged world by defeating the monsters that had enslaved it. It was followed by Illusion of Gaia in '93, where you instead play as a normal boy named Will that is guided by the goddess Gaia and must visit the ancient ruins.

of real-world civilizations like the Great Wall of China or the pyramids to save Earth from an impending disaster. The final game, Terranigma, released in 1995 and featured a boy named Ark who must gradually revive a Fallen Earth, taking life from its earlier stages of evolution all the way to present day. All three games feature themes of life, death, rebirth, and acceptance, often handled with a sense of understated melancholy that contrasts with the typical large of and life heroism of the rest of the genre.

Another series that began in this period was Quest's SRPG series, Ogre Battle, which began with The March of the Black Queen in 1993. Ogre Battle was distinct from many SRPGs that came before it due to its use of groups instead of individual characters in combat, and for its use of real-time battles that had units moving around simultaneously to engage other units and capture territory. In 1995, it was followed up by Tactics Ogre, which was a more typical SRPG title with turn-based battles on grid-based maps, yet was also one of the best iterations of its concept, offering tactical and mechanical depth alongside a surprisingly mature and tragic war story with branching paths and multiple endings based on players' choices.

Also in '93 was the first entry in Capcom's flagship RPG series, Breath of Fire, known for always featuring a blue-haired protagonist named Ryu and dragons, something Ryu can transform into. Breath of Fire took time to reach the same heights as its main rivals, with the first entry being a rather traditional fantasy JRPG whose best feature might be its strong sprite work that's displayed in battles with an atypical isometric perspective. Yet, the 1994 sequel improved on this foundation in almost every way, with even better visuals, refinements to gameplay, and a much more memorable story, albeit one that is hurt by an infamously poor English translation. Still, in other ways, Breath of Fire 2 shows off the level of polish you'd expect from '90s era Capcom.

And speaking of series that didn't hit their stride until their second entry, 1993 also saw the release of Lufia, another quite typical fantasy JRPG about four powerful beings called Sinistrals who are resurrected every 100 years and must be defeated by the party of four Heroes. Lufia didn't have the most impressive graphics, particularly in battles, but it did lead to the much improved Lufia 2, which released in '95 and continued its story via a prequel, explaining how mankind's conflict with the Sinistrals began and featuring the heroes from the first game's prologue. Lufia was most notable for its dungeon design, which featured a heavy emphasis on puzzles and interactivity, making them more like something from a Zelda game than a JRPG.

1993 also brought Square's iconic action RPG, Secret of Mana. The Mana series began in 1991 as a Game Boy Final Fantasy spin-off, Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden (or Final Fantasy Adventure in America). This title has little obvious connection to the Final Fantasy games and is instead more of a Zelda-inspired action RPG. Its sequel, Secret of Mana, would bring this action RPG formula to consoles alongside colorful art design and detailed sprite work that did a great job at depicting its whimsical fantasy setting. The combat would also be upgraded and featured a pausable ring command menu system, but could also be seen as unrefined compared to later action RPGs, with poor hit detection, questionable AI, and disjointed action owing to the need to stand still to charge attacks and spells. Secret of Mana is notable for its inclusion of co-op, however, and it's still remembered in the West as one of the best RPGs on the system. Its 1995 Japan-only sequel, Trials of Mana, would see numerous improvements, particularly to combat, which removed the power meter to reduce downtime, as well as to the already impressive visuals, making Trials one of the best-looking games on the system.

In 1994, Mother would receive a sequel in Mother 2, better known by its English title, EarthBound, which returned to its strange, modern-day Americana setting. Lessons were learned from the original, however, which was sometimes criticized for being heavy on grinding and random encounters. And so, encounter rates were reduced, random encounters were removed entirely, with enemies appearing on screen during exploration, and weaker enemies even ran away. Now, with assists added where easy battles could be resolved in an instant victory. The result was a better-paced adventure that had more time for its witty writing and oddball humor to shine through and felt utterly distinct from any other game of the era.

A bit like Super Mario RPG, which released in 1996 and was the result of a collaboration between JRPG powerhouse Square and gaming powerhouse Nintendo. Super Mario RPG used neither the side-scrolling perspective of a Mario game nor the top-down look of older Square RPGs, but instead opted for an in-between isometric perspective with 3D environments where Mario retains the ability to run and jump. The combat was traditionally turn-based, but enemies were visible rather than random, and a simple yet engaging timing element was added to attacks to make battles more active. The story began with the familiar premise of Bowser kidnapping Princess Peach, but quickly resolved this setup to instead explore entirely new territory that included memorable original characters and an unusual, deeper look into the workings of the Mushroom Kingdom. Ultimately, despite releasing late on the system, Super Mario RPG was very successful and paved the way for many more Mario RPGs in the future.

Still, this wouldn't be Square's most famous collaboration, as Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, would also team up with Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest, and Akira Toriyama, Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball artist, in what was referred to at the time and since as the "Dream Team." The result was Chrono Trigger, which released in 1995 and took full advantage of the later 32-megabit Super Nintendo cartridges. Chrono Trigger looked phenomenal, with colorful sprites, detailed backgrounds, and seamless transitions into battles, which were no longer random and instead occurred during exploration. Combat featured the ATB system of Final Fantasy with an added focus on combo attacks and enemy positions. The story was about silent protagonist Crono, who is accidentally sucked into a time portal, kicking off an epic time-traveling adventure across multiple periods from prehistoric to post-apocalyptic. Time travel was one of the game's most defining features, with players able to explore the same overworld in multiple different periods where players' actions in one era could have drastic impacts on the future. But Chrono Trigger was also fast-paced, highly polished, and full of personality, meaning this dream collaboration between the two biggest names in JRPGs was largely successful at combining the best aspects of each series while still doing enough to create an identity all of its own. As such, it's hard not to see Chrono Trigger as the culmination of the entire genre up until this point. So many games had been directly inspired by Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, with each series doing so much to define what JRPGs were and popularize the concept in both Japan and the West, and Chrono Trigger was able to represent the best of both all in a single game that stood as a testament to everything the genre could be. So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that this game would go on to be considered by many as the greatest JRPG ever made.

And so, by the end of the 16-bit era, JRPGs were thriving, and unlike in the previous generation, now this was finally starting to be true outside Japan as well. Yet, when it came to localization, things weren't exactly perfect. Not only did most of the problems mentioned earlier still persist, but even after games like Final Fantasy IV or VI had produced respectable sales in America, most games were still not considered worth the cost to localize. In fact, Final Fantasy V's English translation ended up being cancelled, with the game not getting an English release until a PlayStation port in 1999. And Final Fantasy was one of the series that fared best in the West. For Dragon Quest, poor sales on the NES led Enix to close their North American branch and forgo localizing 16-bit era Dragon Quest entirely, meaning Dragon Quest V and VI didn't release in English until 2009 and 2011. Other prominent series like Fire Emblem and Megami Tensei were also AWOL, and even proven successes didn't guarantee future releases, as was shown by Mana, where Secret of Mana released with little marketing in America, yet still became a top seller. But that still wasn't enough to ensure its follow-up, Trials of Mana, would be brought over, too.

And if the situation in America was still bad, in Europe, it was frankly terrible. Despite being translated to English and being successful in the US, neither Final Fantasy IV or VI released in Europe. In fact, the only console Final Fantasy title that did release prior to the PlayStation was Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, a simplified RPG designed for entry-level players that Square created specifically for Western audiences. Europe would also miss out on titles like EarthBound, Super Mario RPG, and even Chrono Trigger. Some series fared slightly better, and Quintet's crowning achievement, Terranigma, was actually a rare example of a game that released in Europe but not in North America. Square's North American-developed Secret of Evermore also ensured there was at least one JRPG that released everywhere except Japan. But overall, despite their strong critical accomplishments, this was an era where JRPGs were still struggling in the West.

As a result, there were still plenty of popular titles that never received official English translations and so were initially doomed to obscurity, like Live A Live, a creative title from Square that released in 1994. Live A Live featured multiple protagonists whose vastly different stories encompassed a diverse range of genres, including Western, modern-day, martial arts, and futuristic space warfare, and these could be played in any order. Gradually, connections between each story could be uncovered, leading to a surprise finale that brings everything together. Live A Live would eventually get an English release by way of a remake in 2022, but other games would be less fortunate, like Square's cult classic SRPG Bahamut Lagoon, which set itself apart with strong visuals, destructible environments, and lots of dragons; or Rudra No Hihō, or Treasures of the Rudras, which was notable for its highly unique and heavily customizable magic system and its intertwined character paths that tell a story focused on the cyclical destruction and rebirth of the world; or Treasure Hunter G, which was the result of another Square collaboration, this time with developer Sting, and featured a unique tactical combat system while also being the final Square game on the system. All three of these games were highly praised, yet have never been released outside of Japan, even to this day.

Other Japan-only games would come to be known thanks to the series they would go on to create, like Mystery Dungeon, a roguelike RPG that featured randomly generated levels and began as a Dragon Quest spin-off named Torneko's Great Adventure in 1993 before continuing with the original character Shiren the Wanderer in 1995, before going Final Fantasy with Chocobo's Dungeon and eventually also Pokémon in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games. The best-known examples of this long-running series. Square's once premier mech SRPG series, Front Mission, also began on the Super Nintendo in 1995, as did Wolf Team and Namco's enduring Tales of series with Tales of Phantasia. Phantasia featured a familiar fantasy setting with heavily anime-inspired aesthetics, right down to including an anime-style opening complete with a vocal track. The PlayStation 1 version looked rather more anime, but the inclusion of vocals on the Super Nintendo version itself was pretty remarkable. Phantasia featured random encounters, yet with action combat, something that would go on to be a staple of the series, but here battles were from a 2D side-on perspective in something the developers called the Linear Motion Battle System. The addition of multiple AI-controlled party members could make this combat system pretty chaotic, but this was still a novel approach for the time.

This disagreement during the development of Tales of Phantasia led some members of Wolf Team to leave to form their own studio named tri-Ace, whose first game, Star Ocean, in 1996, would create another enduring JRPG series with action combat and anime aesthetics. Star Ocean featured a unique setting that combined advanced sci-fi elements with more medieval backwater planets and featured side-on action combat that occurred on a three-dimensional battlefield. The first entry is also known for its nonlinearity, its multiple endings derived from optional character scenes, something designed to encourage replayability, and its strong visuals, which took advantage of the rare 48-megabit cartridge, meaning this game, make sure you know that it released at the twilight of the Super Nintendo.

Other important developments would also occur on other consoles in this era. The Game Boy was first launched in 1989 and saw numerous JRPGs, often with quite basic design relative to their console counterparts. One exception was the Final Fantasy Legend games, which weren't connected to Final Fantasy outside of their name, and that was only in the West, as in Japan, they were called SaGa. These games would feature turn-based combat with a unique progression system derived from Final Fantasy II, which series creator Akitoshi Kawazu had previously worked on. SaGa became known for its mechanical complexity and its more Western RPG inspiration, with games often featuring open-world designs, an emphasis on side quests over main stories, character creation systems, and activity-based progression where skills grew stronger on repeated use. The series would continue on the Super Nintendo in the Romancing SaGa sub-series with three games that released between 1992 and 1995. SaGa enjoyed much popularity in Japan, likely due to the way these games stood out compared to so many other more linear or simplistic games in the genre.

Still, the most important Game Boy JRPG is easily Pocket Monsters Red and Green, which released in 1996 and went on to create a worldwide phenomenon, the likes of which has rarely been seen before or since. Pokémon began what is still the biggest media franchise in the world, having earned more than double the revenue of Star Wars. And the impact of these games was so momentous that it's easy to think of them as their own unique thing, distinct from the rest of the JRPG genre. Yet, really, they were JRPGs through and through, with the inspiration of monster catching surely being influenced by the earlier system in Dragon Quest V and with series creator Satoshi Tajiri citing Final Fantasy Legend, or SaGa 1, as a primary inspiration for creating an RPG on the Game Boy. Ultimately, Pokémon's monster-catching formula resonated with players, and its simplified RPG mechanics acted as a perfect introduction to the genre, and probably were millions of players' first experience with JRPGs outside of the Game Boy.

Nihon Falcom would continue to release games for Japanese PCs, while the Ys series lost most of its original developers to Quintet and then got weird with two completely different versions of Ys IV being created, neither actually by Falcom, with one releasing exclusively on the Super Nintendo and the other exclusively on the TurboGrafx-16, also known as the PC Engine in America. NEC's ambitious attempt at breaking into the console market, the PC Engine itself wasn't a strong console for JRPGs, with most of the titles it did see being ports of earlier PC games. Ys V then continued on the Super Nintendo, but for the most part, Falcom stuck with the PC-88 and 98 until eventually reluctantly moving to Windows.

Finally, Sega's mid-generation CD-based add-on, the Sega CD, or Mega CD, would be largely unsuccessful, but it did receive two fondly remembered RPGs in Lunar: The Silver Star in 1992 and Lunar: Eternal Blue in '94. Even though most likely remember them from later consoles, Lunar is a fairly traditional fantasy JRPG, but the new digital frontier of CDs meant it would no longer be held back by strict space constraints, and so could include features rarely seen in the genre, like high-quality audio, a real opening animation, and in some scenes, voice acting, including in English. In fact, Lunar is famous for its localization, as while the company responsible, Working Designs, did take many liberties with the translation, including adding several American pop culture references that aged poorly for the time, this was still an unusually high-effort and professional attempt in a period where JRPGs were still struggling to find their footing in the West. The sequel, Eternal Blue, made numerous improvements and was set 1,000 years later, showing how the world had changed since the events of the first game. Still, the real impact of CDs wouldn't be seen until the next generation.

For JRPGs, the 16-bit era is one of the most fondly remembered periods and produced countless classic titles, but it was still a time when the genre struggled in the West, and many great JRPGs weren't even localized. It was also a time of evolution. In the 8-bit era, JRPGs were still tied to their dungeon-crawling origins, but in this generation, long, challenging dungeon crawling was on its way out, and greater story and set-piece focus was making its way in, with games starting to push these consoles to their storytelling limits by taking advantage of all available cartridge space and experimenting with more cinematic approaches. This is something which would only continue from here.

But as the fifth generation of consoles arrived, there was one thing that changed completely. So, since the genre's inception, Nintendo consoles were synonymous with JRPGs, but in the fifth generation, Nintendo's reign came to a spectacular end, as Sony's new PlayStation came to dominate much of the console market. The reason for this is largely because of CD-ROMs, something the Nintendo 64 opted to forgo in favor of traditional cartridges. The PlayStation was also an easy-to-develop-for system that hit the market before the N64, while being significantly cheaper than the Sega Saturn. But JRPG developers were making the decision to leave Nintendo behind long before the winner of this console war had been decided, and CDs were the main reason why. Which is understandable. JRPGs were often massive games, and since the genre began, developers had been held back by strict memory limitations and forced to sacrifice their vision. CDs, on the other hand, boasted over 10 times the capacity of cartridges, meaning old limitations were a thing of the past, and new technologies like full-motion video were now a possibility. It also likely helped that CDs were significantly cheaper to manufacture, introducing the possibility of multi-disk games to give even more space.

The other technological change that defined this era would be the move to 3D polygons, something which had already been popular in arcades and would now increasingly become the norm for console games, including for many of the biggest 2D series around. For JRPGs, this move to 3D led to a lot of experimentation, as developers blended old and new to produce a great range of visual styles. Before the PlayStation domination truly began, though, the Sega Saturn was trying to make a mark of its own. There would be no new Fantasy Star this generation, and its absence was surely felt. With what RPGs the Saturn did see, often taking several years to arrive. The Shining series would continue, however, first with the top-down, somewhat Zelda-like, and probably not an RPG Shining Wisdom in 1995, followed by the definitely an RPG first-person dungeon crawler Shining the Holy Ark in 1996, and finally the third main entry in the popular SRPG series, Shining Force III, which moved the series to the world of misshapen polygons, yet was just as well-received as early entries. The critical success of Shining Force III was somewhat diminished by poor sales, though, which led to its follow-ups, Scenarios 2 and 3, not being released outside Japan.

But the Saturn would get a new tactical RPG by way of Dragon Force in 1996, which opted for technically impressive, large-scale real-time battles alongside a strategic overview mode. This made Dragon Force more like a real-time strategy RPG hybrid that felt wholly unique and is more reminiscent of the later Total War series than most other games in this genre. Another interesting hybrid was 1998's Panzer Dragoon Saga, the third game in the Panzer Dragoon series, but the first to combine its iconic rail shooter gameplay with substantial RPG elements, including random encounters and on-foot exploration. Panzer Dragoon Saga was designed by Sega to compete directly with PlayStation and Final Fantasy, and the result was a technically impressive game that made great use of early 3D graphics. This didn't stop it from falling well short of sales expectations, however, but it did still develop a cult following and is regularly considered one of the Saturn's best games.

Other Saturn JRPGs were few and far between. Albert Odyssey: Legend of Elan released in 1996 and provided a more traditional turn-based JRPG, despite actually being a follow-up to an unlocalized SRPG series. Action RPG Magic Knight Rayearth released in 1995 before taking an impressively long time to be localized and was based on an anime of the same name by manga group CLAMP. And another Japan-only action RPG called Princess Crown released in 1997 and is notable for its gorgeous sprites and animations and for laying the foundations for Vanillaware, a company Princess Crown's director, George Kamitani, would soon go on to found with the express goal of creating the successor to Princess Crown that the industry never allowed him to. Spoilers: he would go on to create that successor more than once.

One of the Saturn's best RPGs was Grandia, which released in Japan only in late 1997, although it would come to PlayStation and international audiences 2 years later and even included some English voice acting. Developed by Game Arts, making it somewhat of a spiritual successor to the Lunar series, Grandia tells a spirited coming-of-age story set in a recently industrializing fantasy world. Grandia's best accomplishment is its combat system, however, which borrows the active time system popularized by Final Fantasy alongside a turn-order gauge that shows when each combatant will act and delays for most skills. This allows both the players' and enemies' actions to be interrupted, meaning each action carries a sense of risk versus reward, and effective tactics can drastically impact battles. In a time when many games seemed to be experimenting with classic turn-based combat by adding their own unique additions, Grandia's experiment was easily one of the most successful.

So, the Saturn did have some RPGs, but there was no question which console was the place to be for JRPGs this era. The PlayStation can be divided into two: before and after. So, before getting to the main event, let's look at what was happening on the system in its early years. Its first RPG was actually FromSoftware's King's Field, which released in Japan only all the way back in December 1994. King's Field was a first-person dungeon crawler with action combat, dark visuals, and a dark setting. Several years later, its spiritual successor, Demon's Souls, would be a pretty big deal, and plenty of the elements of that game can be seen here, including the stamina meter tied to attacks and the punishing difficulty. Before that, however, King's Field would receive many sequels of its own, most of which would be localized, but as King's Field is pretty far removed from the rest of the JRPG genre, it won't be covered here further.

The PlayStation's next RPG was more like what players might expect. Beyond the Beyond released in 1995 with an American release one year later. It was developed by Camelot, who had previously worked on Shining Force, but Beyond the Beyond is a more traditional JRPG featuring a fantasy setting, turn-based battles, and random encounters. The graphics still somewhat resemble previous-gen titles, although in a time of early 3D, that might have helped them age more gracefully. Still, Beyond the Beyond failed to impress reviewers, who largely saw the game as derivative.

Later RPGs would fare better, like Suikoden, Konami's attempt at a JRPG franchise, which debuted just one month after Beyond the Beyond. Suikoden was loosely based on the classic Chinese novel Water Margin, which tells the story of 108 outlaws rebelling against an unfair government. It's from this that Suikoden borrows its best-known feature: its large cast of 108 recruitable characters, who the player slowly brings together over the course of each game. Suikoden would also feature stronghold building, an alternative strategic gameplay mode that simulated larger battles, and a more grounded setting with a story heavily focused on war and politics. These helped give the series its own identity, and while the turn-based gameplay was unremarkable and the dungeons were bland, it still remains an impressively well-paced and accessible title, making it a good entry point for newcomers to the genre, as many PS1 players surely were. That said, the marketing did leave something to be desired. For some reason, Konami changed the perfectly acceptable box art into something far worse, yet kept the near-unpronounceable name that should have obviously been changed. To this day, the English-speaking internet still has no idea how to pronounce this game. I blame Psycho Mantis. I can see into your [Applause] mind. So you like Suikoden? I want to say "Team Suikoden" is the definitively correct side of the debate, given as that's how it's pronounced in Japanese commercials, but after so many years of people saying "Swee-co-den," I feel surprisingly unsure about this still unpronounceable or not. A sequel released 3 years later and improved on just about everything, focusing on a different part of the world but retaining the basic premise of uniting a large cast of characters amidst the backdrop of war. It was in its story that Suikoden 2 shined brightest, with one of gaming's most memorable and straightforwardly evil villains, a complicated rivalry between the player's character and their childhood friend, and a cast of supporting characters who benefited from the sequel's longer runtime and how the first game already introduced many of them. Suikoden 2 was able to hold its own against the biggest names of the era, and it likely did this on a fraction of their budget, as the still fairly basic 2D graphics suggest.

Another series to begin in this period was the Western-inspired Wild Arms, which debuted in 1996 alongside an impressive anime opening from prolific studio Madhouse and its distinctive setting. Wild Arms' best feature was likely its creative use of puzzles and environmental hazards in dungeons. Its visuals were still basic, though, with battles showing off some rather early and rather unimpressive 3D. Wild Arms would also get a sequel 3 years later, although it didn't represent quite the leap forward as Suikoden.

One final game to release in this era was Atlus's Revelations: Persona, a spin-off of the Megami Tensei franchise. Persona was inspired by the positive reception to Shin Megami Tensei If's high school setting, with the If Guardian system acting as a forerunner to the new Persona system, which takes the place of demon recruitment and allows players to summon different demon-like personas in battle to cast abilities. Persona still shows signs of its hardcore dungeon crawler origins, but despite this, it was designed to be a relatively more accessible title that could be enjoyed by people new to the series. This might explain why Persona became the first Megami Tensei RPG to be released outside Japan. In fact, all of the games mentioned here were released in America, despite each coming from unproven series, marking a stark difference to the reign of the Super Nintendo. Some early games, notably Arc the Lad, did take rather a long time to make it to Western shores, but this still represented a very different situation to just a couple years earlier. And this was all before the arrival of that one game. In fact, several of these games were published by Sony Computer Entertainment themselves, who clearly were willing to support Japanese RPGs even early in the console's life. This is somewhat surprising, as the then Sony Computer Entertainment of America vice president, Bernie Stolar, once created a strict "no RPG" policy in the first years of the PlayStation's life. This was because Stolar didn't believe these games would sell or demonstrate the PlayStation's technical capabilities. In time, though, this rule was changed, and Sony did a 180, becoming an avid supporter and even creator of JRPGs. But for a time, their future on the platform was uncertain.

The other thing these early PlayStation RPGs show is that in the new age of 3D, JRPGs were somewhat lagging behind and still heavily relying on 2D elements, similar to what was seen in previous-gen titles. Enter Final Fantasy VII. There is a lot that can be said about this game. At the time of its release, it was likely the most expensive game ever made. It was created by a team of 150 to 200 developers, a huge number, far above previous games in the series or other games of the time. It received a three-month-long advertising campaign that saw commercials being run alongside prime-time shows on American TV. No other JRPG even had television commercials in America before this. It came on three discs, a rarity in itself, and it packed those discs with almost an hour's worth of computer-generated cutscenes at a time when the only major film to use such animation was Pixar's Toy Story. In a previous video, I said Final Fantasy VII should probably be considered as the starting point of AAA. I also said that in this video, just now. For Square, putting so much money into a single game was a gamble, and marketing that game so heavily in a region that still showed little interest in JRPGs was an even bigger one. Final Fantasy VI had sold 400,000 copies in America, a number Square found disappointing at the time, and so for Final Fantasy VII, Square set an internal goal of selling 1 million in the US. But in the end, Final Fantasy VII didn't sell 1 million copies; it sold multiple, going on to reach 10 million worldwide by the end of the PlayStation 1's lifespan, which made it the second-bestselling title on the console, and it has continued to sell since. To my knowledge, the best-selling JRPG outside Japan before this was still either Final Fantasy VI or possibly Super Mario RPG. Final Fantasy VII, meanwhile, outsold each of these games by a magnitude of more than 10. And so, JRPGs became mainstream. In the end, all it took was one game. Of course, it helped that Final Fantasy VII was a great JRPG. Its alternative, modern-day setting was a bold departure for the series, and while its once cutting-edge graphics now show their age, for the time, they allowed for a cinematic quality not previously seen in the genre that complemented the game's heavy focus on story. And it turned out that bold departures and cutting-edge cinematics would both become the new norm for Final Fantasy, as did selling millions of copies in the West.

Final Fantasy VIII released 2 years later, featuring another modern-day-inspired setting but changing almost everything else. Its visuals marked a drastic improvement and showed just how rapidly graphics were advancing at the time, with character models now being realistically proportioned, fantastically detailed pre-rendered backgrounds, and CG cutscenes that looked better than just about anything else in gaming back then. The changes to the story and gameplay were less unanimously praised and marked the beginning of each mainline Final Fantasy being divisive to some pre-existing fans. That said, Final Fantasy VIII still received rave reviews and would come respectably close to matching Final Fantasy VII sales.

Final Fantasy IX released late in the PlayStation 1's life and would see slightly more modest sales than its predecessors, but still wowed players and critics, taking the series back to its medieval fantasy roots in a nostalgic celebration of all that had come before, as well as being one of the best-looking games of its generation. Final Fantasy IX also marked the final time series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi would be heavily involved with a Final Fantasy game, with Sakaguchi later saying Nine was his favorite in the series and the closest to his ideal view of what Final Fantasy should be.

In 1997, Square would also release Final Fantasy Tactics, an SRPG spin-off from Ogre Battle director Yasumi Matsuno. Final Fantasy Tactics greatly resembled the earlier Tactics Ogre but was designed to be an accessible take on the genre that could appeal to the wider Final Fantasy audience. The result is a more distilled game featuring smaller maps with fewer units, which actually ended up making each choice in battle feel more impactful. The story would also resemble Matsuno's previous game more than Final Fantasy and featured a War of the Roses-inspired conflict that emphasized class struggles and the rewriting of history by the victors. Tactics was a hit and is still often considered to be the best spin-off Final Fantasy has produced, which just further cemented the series' dominant position within the genre at the time.

And Final Fantasy was dominating the genre. Final Fantasy VII had done what no JRPG had before it by selling big in the West, and it was even the first entry in the series to outsell rival Dragon Quest in its home nation. In the wake of this success, more and more JRPGs seemed to be localized, and this might even have caused some entire games to be greenlit there. There's sometimes an idea that the success of PlayStation 1 Final Fantasy was so big that it stole the spotlight away from many other high-quality games that became overlooked. But in the West, before Final Fantasy VII, there was no spotlight for JRPGs. Final Fantasy VII didn't steal the spotlight; it created it, and the situation that followed seems more like a rising tide lifting all boats. Regardless, for the first time in the West, there actually were plenty of other boats.

In 1997, Capcom continued their Breath of Fire series with a third entry. Breath of Fire III had much in common with its predecessors and still featured Capcom's signature high-quality sprite work, but the perspective was now isometric rather than top-down, with a camera that could be slightly panned and no more transitions between battles, as enemies now appeared as you moved about. Like Chrono Trigger, this made Breath of Fire III more of a measured evolution of the series rather than the radical departure that some other JRPGs were making this era, but it's still remembered for its strong story. A fourth Breath of Fire would also arrive for the PlayStation in 2000, featuring some of the best visuals on the entire system. Breath of Fire IV would retain the 2D sprites on a 3D world, but those sprites had a rather different design, using a pastel color palette that provided an impressive sense of visual cohesion with the world, alongside a now fully rotatable camera and some of the best sprite animations you will ever see in a JRPG.

1997 would also bring Tales of Destiny, a follow-up to Phantasia and the first Tales game released outside Japan. Tales of Destiny would take place in a new world and feature a similar visual style and side-on action combat, paving the way for many more Tales games in the future.

1998 would see the release of Square's hugely ambitious Xenogears, a mech-focused RPG from director Tetsuya Takahashi that drew on religion, philosophy, and psychology to create one of the JRPG's most unique and densely packed narratives. Ambitious, really, is the best way Xenogears can be described. Even with a massive runtime, it still wasn't enough to fit in all of the game's content, with the second disc seeming unfinished and often resorting to lengthy visual novel-style segments to communicate events. This was once believed to be the result of budget cuts from Square, but director Takahashi later said the real reason was an inexperienced team and a development that went over its deadline, leading Takahashi to make the decision to compromise the second disc's content in order to tell the finished story in a single game. And yet, compromised or not, Xenogears' dark, mature, and thematically rich narrative is still often considered one of the genre's best, and its ambitious story is initially matched by equally ambitious storytelling, with strong use of in-engine cutscenes that feel far more cohesive than the switching to FMV seen in certain other RPGs of this era. Outside of a certain disc 2, though, this was a time where Square seemed like it could do no wrong.

1998 would also bring the much more light-hearted action RPG Brave Fencer Musashi, a fully 3D game big on personality that would incorporate platforming elements and, for the first time in a Square title, voice acting. "Sounds cool, thanks, pal. It'll come in handy." Also that year was the second entry in the Star Ocean series, which was the first to be released outside Japan and expanded on the original with a more in-depth story, more developed characters, and the use of pre-rendered backgrounds to go alongside its familiar 2D sprites. Star Ocean: The Second Story also retained the nonlinearity and action combat of the first game and is generally considered to be the best entry in the series. Legend of Legaia also arrived that year, making for another RPG published by Sony themselves. Legaia featured fully 3D graphics and an innovative combo-based battle system that combined turn-based gameplay with fighting game-inspired sequences of inputs, although its story was somewhat less innovative.

1999 then brought the long-awaited and mostly unrelated follow-up to Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross. That said, this was still one of Square's bigger budget projects of the era and one of their best-reviewed, but its radical departure from its predecessor left it with a divisive legacy amongst fans of the first game. Another big-budget title was The Legend of Dragoon, which was developed in-house by Sony Computer Entertainment and was described by many as Sony's "Final Fantasy killer." With a development team of over a hundred and a budget of $16 million, this was one of the few games of the era that could compete with Final Fantasy in terms of resources, and it would also stick closely to Final Fantasy's approach, using 3D character models on pre-rendered backgrounds alongside high-quality CGI cutscenes. Its combat did add one unique feature with the addition of the Addition system, which added lengthy QuickTime event sequences to each attack that some players seemed to enjoy more than others. Its story was somewhat less unique and ultimately let down by a poor translation, but The Legend of Dragoon did still see strong sales in North America, which helped to cement its cult status.

Star Ocean developer tri-Ace would also release Valkyrie Profile that year, a Norse mythology-inspired RPG that follows a Valkyrie traveling Midgard to collect the souls of slain heroes to fight for Valhalla in the impending Ragnarok, which the game counts down to as you play, creating an unusually stressful and somber atmosphere for the genre. The gameplay would also be unusual, featuring a 2D side-scrolling perspective and a combo-based battle system that involved elements of timing.

In 2000, Square would release Vagrant Story, another title from Final Fantasy Tactics director Matsuno that would be set in the same Ivalice setting. Vagrant Story is a strange game, described as an action dungeon crawler. It would be most famous for its cinematic storytelling that made great use of in-engine cutscenes alongside some of the genre's best writing. The result almost feels like JRPG's answer to Metal Gear Solid, and Vagrant Story stands as a technical marvel with its use of 2D textures mapped onto 3D polygonal character models, looking years ahead of most other 3D games of the time. Unfortunately, the gameplay can be slow and impenetrable, with much time spent in menus, but Vagrant Story still stands as one of the most acclaimed RPGs on the PlayStation 1.

Finally, after numerous delays, 2000 also saw the long-awaited release of the seventh Dragon Quest. In a time when JRPGs were often changing, Dragon Quest VII was a celebration of tradition, with many mechanics remaining untouched, and it was still just as popular in its home market. It was also still just as unpopular outside Japan, but at least it released outside Japan, making it the first title to do so since the NES. Dragon Quest VII is also known for being long. JRPGs had been gradually increasing in length since their inception, but Dragon Quest's seventh entry took that even further, offering a 90-hour adventure that was more than twice the length of any previous entry. Outside of Dragon Quest, this was also a time when JRPGs seemed to be more experimental, mixing elements of other genres and creating unique standalone systems. This produced some strange genre mashups, some of which were more popular than others, like Square's 1998 horror RPG Parasite Eve, which was described by PlayStation Magazine as "Final Fantasy VII meets Resident Evil." Its sequel was even more parts Resident Evil, and there were other genres being combined too, like in Square's Japanese-only racing RPG, Racing Lagoon. Most of all, this was a time when JRPGs were finally releasing en masse outside Japan, or at least they were in America. The situation in Europe was vastly better than it was on the Super Nintendo, but it still lagged behind and so missed out on several major games, including Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears, and Dragon Quest VII. Still, overall, the West fared much better, with even quite obscure JRPGs starting to make it to America now, like SaGa's latest experimental offerings of SaGa Frontier 1 and 2, or the dating sim JRPG hybrid Thousand Arms, or the Ghibli-inspired existential monster-catching RPG Jade Cocoon.

So, when it comes to Japanese-only titles, the list is much shorter than it once was, with few notable omissions. One of which is developer Gust's Atelier Marie, the first entry in the long-running Atelier series, a light-hearted, alchemy-focused RPG that didn't receive an English release until its sixth entry on the PlayStation 2. Another game that was missed was Persona 2: Innocent Sin, with Atlus deciding to focus its limited localization resources on the sequel, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, instead, in part because Innocent Sin had elements deemed controversial, like Nazis, swastikas, and uh, Hitler. Don't worry, he wasn't a party member or anything. You fight him. He was a boss with a banging battle theme. The PSP port would later solve this controversial inclusion by cleverly hiding his identity through the addition of sunglasses. "If you want ances, you must defeat me." Yep, good job, guys. He's literally unrecognizable.

Meanwhile, on Nintendo's new console, the situation was dire. Quest 64, or Holy Magic Century, gave the system one of its few pure RPGs, and it did feature full 3D graphics, something the N64 generally excelled at, but it was also crippled by poor design choices, with a story aimed at a very young audience. The N64 would also receive the much better Paper Mario in 2000, which saw the concept of a Mario RPG continue, this time with a new two-dimensional paper cutout aesthetic and in the hands of Fire Emblem creator Intelligent Systems rather than Square. There was also Ogre Battle 64, a faithful follow-up to the Super Nintendo title and the final mainline game in the series, but this was pretty much it, making for a remarkable change to the situation just one generation previous. 50,000 JRPGs used to live here. Now it's a ghost town. Or maybe that was Prat in Call of Duty 4. Similar though it seems, Nintendo needed JRPGs more than JRPGs needed Nintendo, as the genre reached ever greater heights without them, while Nintendo fell to a distant second place in the console war.

The Game Boy Color would also arrive in this era and start to establish handhelds as the place to be for JRPG spin-offs, with the likes of Dragon Quest Monsters, Tales of Phantasia, GBC, Grandia: Parallel Trippers, Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, and Lufia: The Legend Returns. There would also be a growing trend of porting older games to new systems in this period, particularly on the Japanese-only Wonderswan, with notable examples including Dragon Quest I and II, and Dragon Quest III for the Game Boy Color, and Final Fantasy Anthology, Final Fantasy Chronicles, and Final Fantasy Origins for the PlayStation, which would be the first time Final Fantasy I, II, IV, V, and VI would release in Europe.

And so, the fifth generation was the era where JRPGs broke through in the West, and they did this in dramatic fashion. To put Final Fantasy's success into perspective, Western RPGs were also seeing a resurgence in this period after struggling earlier in the decade, with the two biggest RPGs of the era, Baldur's Gate and Diablo, breaking sales records by passing 2 million copies sold. In the early 2000s, other Western RPGs, though, sold considerably less, with Fallout being considered a major success for selling 120,000 units in its first year. For JRPGs, on the other hand, passing the million mark was starting to look easy, and even the very best-selling Western RPGs weren't even coming close to matching their Japanese counterparts. Simply put, in just one generation, JRPGs had become one of the biggest genres in gaming. In fact, even Western developers started to copy them. Games like Septerra Core or Shadow Madness show clear JRPG influence, as did Ion Storm's 2001 Anachronox, which cites Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy as inspirations. And unlike those earlier games I mentioned, Anachronox was actually good. As time went on, some Western-inspired JRPGs became even more blatant, like EA's The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, which was a quite literal copy of Final Fantasy X with Supermarket brand Lord of the Rings characters along the way.

The JRPG genre continued to evolve, with story and graphics becoming even larger selling points, and the increased space afforded by CDs leading to bigger and bigger games. Dragon Quest VII is the most obvious example, but this trend could be seen across other series too. In time, this period would often be known as the golden age for the genre due to the critical and commercial success many games saw in this period and the continued relevance so many classics from this era enjoy today. But the fifth generation wasn't just the period where JRPGs went mainstream; it was also a time when the genre knew what it wanted to be but was still willing to experiment and innovate. The result was a mixture of quality and diversity that I'm not sure has been seen in the genre before or since. Take just visuals: this was a time when JRPGs could be 2D with top-down perspectives, 2D with side-scrolling perspectives, 2D sprites with isometric perspectives, 2D sprites in fully 3D backgrounds, 2D sprites with pre-rendered backgrounds, 2D sprites with hand-drawn backgrounds, full 3D, 3D models with pre-rendered backgrounds, full 3D with 2D texture mapping, weird amalgamations of 2D and 3D, and so on. Not all of these styles worked as well as others, but it's the diversity itself that feels like the.

The strongest point and this would be lost as gaming moved into the fully 3D era. Similarly, this was a time when many stories showed familiar tropes, but it was a time before those tropes had grown so familiar. The anime aesthetics that the genre was regularly modeling itself after were also still fresh and exciting in an era before anime itself had gone mainstream yet. And while many combat systems were still turn-based with random encounters, many of these games would experiment with their own unique additions and progression systems.

Basically, this was a time when JRPGs were both diverse and plentiful. And alongside their clear commercial success, it makes it very hard to disagree that it was indeed a golden age for the genre. But the thing about golden ages is that they end. It's just the question of when.

At the start of a new millennium, JRPGs were at the pinnacle of the genre's success, meaning the only way to go from here would be downwards. But their decline happened gradually, and the reasons why are complicated. Initially, though, they continued into the sixth console generation exactly where it left off, with many of the same trends continuing as before.

New hardware would mean vastly improved 3D, meaning JRPGs would largely leave the 2D backgrounds and sprites of the last generation behind. More disc space also meant voice acting in video games becoming the norm, meaning even lengthy JRPGs were forced to now include it, leading to mixed results. Localization efforts of Japanese games also became even more common, including in Europe, now with localizations themselves also often becoming more professional. The trend towards JRPGs as a medium for cinematic storytelling also persisted, eventually leading to the start of an identity crisis.

And just like with each generation before, one console came to dominate the genre. And again, it wasn't the first to arrive. The Dreamcast actually released in late 1998, long before its rivals, but it did not launch with any JRPGs. In fact, Sega's short-lived console would have few RPGs in general, but some of the few are worth remembering, like Grandia 2, which released in 2000, featuring the same highly praised battle system, full 3D graphics, even more voice acting, and an entirely new story and setting. That story was much darker, however, with the developer intending to capture a more mature tone and audience, possibly due to the success of Final Fantasy.

The Dreamcast's best-known RPG also released that year and was developed internally by Sega with staff who had worked on the Phantasy Star and Panzer Dragoon series. Despite this, Skies of Arcadia is very much its own thing, focusing on sky pirate vice and a world of floating continents. Unlike most JRPGs of the time, Skies of Arcadia places a heavy emphasis on exploration, with the player able to fly their airship in 3D space and journey to many diverse locations. It would also feature impressive presentation, helping it to truly feel like a next-gen title. Ultimately, despite great reviews, its sales were hampered by its failing platform, yet it remains a cult classic and the most quintessential sky pirate RPG by far ever produced.

The Dreamcast also saw the return of Phantasy Star, just not in the way most would have expected. Phantasy Star Online released in late 2000 and is a hugely important game in the history of MMOs, but as I have covered MMOs in their own video, I'm going to mostly ignore the genre here. That said, it is interesting how this fate befell each classic JRPG series. Once upon a time, there were five big JRPG companies with five big flagship series, and all five ended up being converted to online RPGs. Phantasy Star was the first, followed by Final Fantasy XI in 2002, with Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine releasing in 2007, as did EverQuest Online Adventures, The Chronicles of Spellborn, and finally, Dragon Quest X joined in in 2012. I don't have much more to say about this, mostly because I want to stay on topic, but it does seem noteworthy that this happened to each of these series. Hey, better to die as an MMO than live long enough to become a free-to-play phone game, I guess.

Still, even the groundbreaking Phantasy Star Online wasn't enough to save the Dreamcast, and soon the real JRPG machine arrived: the PlayStation 2. Released in the year 2000, it benefited from the strong momentum of its predecessor. In time, it became the best-selling console in history, and so it shouldn't come as a surprise that many JRPG developers decided to stick with Sony.

Its first major RPG was Level-5's Dark Cloud, which combined action combat, dungeon crawling, and town building. For some reason, it was often compared to Zelda, maybe because the protagonist had a green hat. But while not really like Zelda at all, it was fairly unique and successful enough to receive a sequel 2 years later, but it developed its mixed gameplay formula further.

2001 brought Shadow Hearts, a horror-themed RPG set just before World War I that acts as a sequel to the 1999, even more horror-focused RPG Koudelka. Shadow Hearts stands out thanks to its unusual setting, dark tone, and slightly edgy sense of humor. Weak voice acting and basic presentation do somewhat date it as an early PS2 title, but its 2004 sequel is much better in this regard. Shadow Hearts: Covenant would also bring several improvements to the turn-based with timing elements combat and had a much stronger story. The greater focus on humor does move the series even further from its horror origins, but Covenant is still probably one of the most underrated RPGs of the era.

The biggest RPG in 2001, however, would once more come from Square. Final Fantasy X made several changes from its PlayStation 1 predecessors, although it's still considered the last traditional entry in the series by some, likely because it was the last game to use turn-based combat and random encounters. Final Fantasy X does remove the long-running Active Time Battle system, though, to instead opt for a true turn-based system where the turn order is displayed on screen to allow players to plan their actions better. It would also allow all party members to be swapped in and out mid-combat, which helped to make it one of the better battle systems in the series and had a simple yet enjoyable progression system in the Sphere Grid, which would go on to influence several future titles.

Still, Final Fantasy X's greatest achievement was its presentation. Some early PS2 games still struggled with 3D, featuring environments that were bland and characters that looked rather deformed, but Final Fantasy X was not one of these. The environments were detailed and varied, the character models looked lifelike with really impressive facial animations, and the voice acting for a game from this period that was this long and this made in Japan was honestly fantastic. And don't let one deliberately awkward laughing scene fool you into thinking otherwise. If Final Fantasy VII cemented its place in history with its cutting-edge presentation, Final Fantasy X kept this legacy alive on the next generation. The sales, as you might expect, were high.

Not every game had the budget of Final Fantasy, however. 2002 saw the start of Xenosaga, a spiritual successor to Xenogears from Tetsuya Takahashi's recently formed studio, Monolith Soft. Xenosaga was just as ambitious as its predecessor and almost just as unfinished. Originally intended to be a six-episode story, Xenosaga was instead concluded with Episode III in 2006. As you might expect from a follow-up to Xenogears, Saga is a narrative-heavy and thematically heavy game with a sci-fi setting, let down slightly by poor pacing and a budget that once more couldn't keep up with its creator's ambitions.

2002 would also bring the biggest new series of the generation: Kingdom Hearts. It was a collaboration between Square and Disney that was directed by then-Final Fantasy character designer Tetsuya Nomura and owed much of its creation to the fact that Square and Disney once shared an office, which allowed one of Final Fantasy's producers to pitch the game to a Disney employee in the office elevator one day. Surprisingly, this seemed to work, and Square were given very few restrictions by Disney. And so they created an original character who would travel to various Disney Worlds, occasionally meeting up with Final Fantasy characters while fighting the forces of darkness. This combination of Disney and Final Fantasy, alongside distinctly modern-feeling action combat and Square's high level of presentation, proved to be a big hit. Kingdom Hearts was one of the best-selling games on the PS2, almost reaching mainline Final Fantasy numbers, and it would get an equally well-received sequel 3 years later. Kingdom Hearts II improved the combat, adding more depth and addressing one of the few big complaints of the original by moving the camera controls from the shoulder buttons to the right analog stick. Its story would add more complexity and more original characters, which became somewhat of a trend for the series that some might say got a little out of control.

And at the opposite end of the JRPG spectrum, 2003 saw the next installment of the Shin Megami Tensei series that, for the first time, would release outside Japan. Known as Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne in America and Lucifer's Call in Europe, SMT3 saw a return to demon-infested post-apocalyptic Tokyo and a return to the brutally difficult dungeon crawling the series was known for. One important addition it did make was the Press Turn system, where players could exploit enemy weaknesses to gain additional actions in combat, potentially allowing attacks to be chained together to devastating effect. In true SMT fashion, however, this system could also be used by enemies against players, creating a greater sense of danger and a combat system where things could go very wrong, very quickly. More Megami Tensei games would follow, including Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2, and the action RPG Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha versus The Soulless Army.

In 2004, Dragon Quest VIII released, now published by Square Enix after the two companies had merged in the year prior. Dragon Quest VIII was the first fully 3D game in the series, the first game to feature voice acting, the first game to be called Dragon Quest rather than Dragon Warrior in America, and the first game released in Europe at all. The visuals, in particular, would see a major upgrade thanks to the use of cell-shading, which gave a timeless look that fit perfectly with the manga-inspired art design. Dragon Quest VIII would also feature a vast open world, and while you're still often limited in where you can go early on, this still offered a genuine sense of exploration and felt immersive at a time when many games in the genre felt increasingly restrictive and linear. In other ways, Dragon Quest VIII would continue to be conservative, but its presentation and well-designed gameplay was still more than enough to make it one of the best RPGs on the PS2.

On other consoles, JRPGs were somewhat less common. Nintendo's GameCube fared better than its predecessor but still provided much less choice than its main rival. One of the system's more unusual RPGs was Baten Kaitos, which released in 2003 and featured a card-based battle system. In the world of Baten Kaitos, the essence of various things can be stored in magical cards, including consumables and equipment for players to use, but also battle moves to use in combat. Each party member must create their own deck out of these moves, with battles then playing out via a turn-based card game where you choose actions based on the cards in your hand. Baten Kaitos also stands out thanks to its continued use of pre-rendered backgrounds, which had become rare by this point and still hold up very well years later.

Perhaps the biggest RPG for the system was Tales of Symphonia. While not the first Tales game to release in English, it was arguably the most important. Previous games in the series had sold poorly in America, but as the first 3D entry and as a rare exclusive for the GameCube, Symphonia was heavily pushed by Nintendo. And with a new fully 3D action combat system, a bright cell-shaded aesthetic, and a very character-focused yet well-regarded story, it felt like the right game to capture JRPG audiences of the era. Tales of Symphonia ended up being the best-selling game in the series until earlier this year, when the most recent entry finally overtook it.

The Xbox also existed in this period, but the only thing it was known for when it came to JRPGs was not having any, which wasn't quite true. There was Metal Dungeon. In the world of handhelds, the Game Boy Advance also arrived in 2001 and continued the trend of being the place for spin-offs and ports of older games. One trend that did emerge in this period was the migration of SRPGs to handhelds, with Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, and Fire Emblem all continuing on the Game Boy Advance. This was how Fire Emblem would first arrive in the West after years of Smash Bros. Melee-fueled hype. Not every SRPG would be pushed off of consoles, and some important new series even began on the PS2, but handhelds did seem to become the main home for the subgenre, owing to the genre's more niche appeal in a world of growing game budgets and the suitability of handheld systems for turn-based combat.

The Game Boy Advance would see at least a few notable original RPGs, however, like Golden Sun, which released in 2001 by Beyond the Beyond developer Camelot and was followed by a direct sequel in 2002. Golden Sun began development for the N64, and it somewhat shows, with the game not only being one of the most graphically ambitious titles on the GBA but also being a traditional and expansive RPG. A lot of handheld games would be broken down to fit bite-sized play sessions or just dumbed down to appeal to younger players, but Golden Sun did neither, and this helped it to stand out.

The Game Boy Advance would also receive one of the few Japan-only RPGs of this era in Mother 3, which released in 2006 after a long and complicated development. Mother 3 has received much praise since then and may well be the most requested game to have never been released in English. I would say it probably won't take too much longer, but there are news articles talking about how a Western release is all but confirmed dating back almost 10 years ago now, so maybe the wait might still be a while.

Still, generally, this was the first era where JRPGs were all but guaranteed worldwide releases and a time when the genre enjoyed much popularity. And yet, there were signs that this might not last. For one thing, JRPGs seemed to be struggling to modernize. The widespread move to full 3D saw graphics technically advance, but this sometimes seemed to come at the cost of art direction and visual diversity. Meanwhile, the expectation of voice acting was much more challenging and costly for long, dialogue-heavy games like JRPGs, and the once-defining features of the genre like overworlds, turn-based battles, and random encounters were increasingly being criticized by fans and critics as seeming dated. In a world of more and more realistic graphics, battle transitions and characters standing around in a line waiting for their turn to act were simply not realistic, and this threatened JRPGs' new defining feature of being about cinematic storytelling at the cutting edge of gaming.

The games which best met the challenges brought by modernization tended to be those with the biggest budgets. Final Fantasy X was still a graphically stunning game, Kingdom Hearts had great voice acting and distinctly modern-feeling combat, and Dragon Quest VIII replaced the old zoomed-out overworld with an even better zoomed-in one. But not every game fared so well, and by the end of the generation, a lot of series seemed to be failing to reach their past heights. Some series alienated fans by making changes, as can be seen with Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, Wild Arms 4, or Dawn of Mana. Other series just seemed to get worse with time, though, like in the case of Unlimited Saga, Grandia III, and Shadow Hearts: From the New World. But some series didn't even do this, and yet their reputation still seemed diminished. Suikoden never again reached the level of its second entry, and the fourth game was widely seen as disappointing, but many consider its fifth entry to be a return to form, with many people often going as far as to say it's the second best game in the series. And yet, while Suikoden II and III received much critical praise at the start of this generation, Suikoden V would receive a Metacritic score 10 points lower at the end of the generation, largely because reviewers saw its similar formula as dated. By this point, this is just one example, but a broader trend of gradual decline in review scores can be clearly seen across the genre.

And it was in this period that the biggest series of them all made its biggest changes yet. Final Fantasy XII released in 2006 and was the first offline entry to remove turn-based battles and random encounters. Instead, battles were now seamless, with combat that occurred in real time, with the player controlling a single character at a time and able to issue commands via a menu. Overall party members' actions would be mostly left to AI, but Final Fantasy XII also introduced a Gambit system through which this AI could be customized for a variety of if-then style commands. This customization became an important part of the gameplay, with players incentivized to regularly tweak these Gambits to get the best results. But this was still a battle system that could involve long periods of relative inaction that was very different than what came before.

In other ways, Final Fantasy XII could be quite familiar, as it was actually the first game in the series to revisit a past setting, that being Ivalice, the same world of Final Fantasy Tactics. Final Fantasy XII would also maintain the series's groundbreaking level of presentation, with some of the best voice acting and writing on the PlayStation 2 alongside realistic character models and a fully controllable camera. But it does a great job at showing off the much more open and expansive game world. Ultimately, different or not, Final Fantasy XII was still a big critical and commercial hit, although it was an especially divisive entry within the Final Fantasy fandom, with some seeing the changes it brought as a betrayal that made XII more like an offline MMO than a Final Fantasy game.

And yet, this was a time when JRPGs that didn't change was starting to be seen as dated. And if there was one thing Final Fantasy could never be, it was that. And yet, whether it was successful or not, Final Fantasy XII does suggest the genre was starting to experience an identity crisis. Final Fantasy VII made JRPGs mainstream, and it did this by being more modern and more cinematic than other games of its time. Now, though, just one generation later, the same elements that once seemed cutting edge, like FMV cutscenes, was starting to seem outdated. To maintain their dominant position, JRPGs had to evolve, and games like Final Fantasy XII showed how that could be done. Yet, evolution meant change, and change risked alienating existing fans.

Overall, though, the sixth console generation was still a time when JRPGs continued strong. All-time classics were less common, but there was a good mix of both quantity and quality, with even more series now coming to the West and new titles still able to find success. For JRPGs, however, the problems were only just beginning.

It's well known, but the HD era was a time JRPGs struggled, but it's worth taking a moment to consider the context around this. The seventh console generation was a difficult time for Japan. From 2007 to 2012, the Japanese gaming industry shrank for 5 years in a row. This was a time when popular Japanese series sometimes started being outsourced to Western developers, and popular Japanese developers would acquire Western studios to try to adapt. The reasons for this decline are complicated, but one of the most commonly given is that Japanese game development had a tendency to use in-house engines, often created for each individual game. Meanwhile, Western developers were quicker to embrace third-party tools like Unreal Engine. But as game size and budgets increased, creating a new engine for each game became slow and inefficient, leading to long development times as Japan started to fall behind. And so, a lot of Japanese series and developers struggled in this era, and JRPGs might have been where this decline was most obvious.

Still, the early days were actually promising. The first console to arrive was the Xbox 360 in late 2005, but unlike in previous generations, this time Microsoft would make a major push to establish the console in Japanese markets, leading to collaborations with a number of Japanese developers, including Namco Bandai and Mistwalker, a new studio founded by Hironobu Sakaguchi after his departure from Square. Mistwalker's first project would see Sakaguchi teaming back up with Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama and famed Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu to release Blue Dragon in late 2006. The Toriyama art immediately brings to mind Dragon Quest, and like Dragon Quest, Blue Dragon was a very traditional RPG featuring turn-based battles, a Final Fantasy V-style job system, and timing elements in combat that involved charging up attacks. Its story would also evoke Dragon Quest, but it was also fairly simplistic and, again, like Dragon Quest, failed to win over Western audiences.

Mistwalker's next 360 game was Lost Odyssey one year later, featuring another Uematsu-composed soundtrack, but this time with character designs from famed manga artist Takahiko Inoue. If Blue Dragon was Mistwalker's Dragon Quest, Lost Odyssey's more mature tone and realistic graphics makes it seem like their Final Fantasy. And like older Final Fantasy, battles would once more be turn-based with random encounters and an explorable overworld, leading some to claim the game felt more Final Fantasy than the last Final Fantasy. The story focused on a small group of Immortals and did have interesting things to say about the realities of immortality, but the main narrative fell a little flat, and the game's overall quality never quite reached its inspirations.

2007 also brought Eternal Sonata, the first game from Tri-Crescendo, a developer founded by the sound programmer of Tri-Ace who collaborated on a number of other RPGs. Eternal Sonata was a fantasy RPG set within the fever dream of famed composer Frédéric Chopin as he lay on his deathbed. This strange premise gave way to a colorful, musically themed world that still looks great today. Combat was a turn-based action hybrid where characters have limited time to perform attacks and starts slow but ends quite compelling. Yet, the story fails to deliver much beyond its intriguing premise. Eternal Sonata does boast possibly the best battle theme in the entire genre, however, thanks to its own famed composer, the prolific Motoi Sakuraba.

Perhaps the 360's most popular JRPG was Tales of Vesperia, which released in 2008 and featured many of the elements people had come to expect from the Tales series, although the anime graphical style did look particularly good upgraded to HD. In truth, no early 360 JRPG would usually be considered one of the genre's absolute best, but these four largely positively received games did help the 360 get off to a strong start and contrasted sharply to the situation both on the first Xbox and of Microsoft's main rival.

Unlike in previous generations, the PlayStation 3 arrived late and overpriced, and for a time, there were almost no JRPGs on the system at all. Really, if you wanted a console to play JRPGs on in these years, you'd best be served by sticking with the PlayStation 2, which continued to receive hit titles well into the next generation.

The first notable RPG for the PS3 was Valkyria Chronicles in 2008. Valkyria Chronicles was an SRPG set in an alternative World War II with stylish watercolor visuals. Its gameplay would feature a tactical command map, but once a unit is selected, the game then zooms in to allow them to be controlled in a third-person action mode. In reality, the game is still turn-based, with the similar emphasis on positioning and understanding the strengths of different unit types that is seen in much of the rest of the genre, but seeing the action play out up close and personal gave it a much more modern feeling overall. Valkyria Chronicles certainly was good, but there was little else on the PS3 in its first years.

And alongside these games came a number of less impressive titles. It began with the Xbox 360 launch title Enchanted Arms, which despite being from FromSoftware has little in common with their former or later titles and was criticized by reviewers for feeling like a previous-gen game. In 2008, action RPG Infinite Undiscovery, a promising collaboration between Tri-Ace and Microsoft that was published by Square Enix, arrived to middling reviews for its short runtime, shallow gameplay, and familiar plots. Also in 2008 was Square's The Last Remnant, a game with a unique and mechanically rich combat system that simulated large-scale battles and was anything but shallow, but numerous technical problems, including texture pop-in and frame drops, still dragged reviews down.

In 2008, Sony and Level-5 would also join in on the disappointments with White Knight Chronicles, an RPG with online co-op elements and a setting that featured large fantasy mech-like knights. Unfortunately, the online components were scaled back during development, leaving a mostly single-player focused game with bland MMO-style combat. The Wii would also receive a disappointing follow-up to Tales of Symphonia in Dawn of the New World. Like the PS3, the Wii sorely lacked RPGs in its early years, and Dawn of the New World or the mediocre Arc Rise Fantasia the following year did little to help.

2009 would bring a new entry into the Star Ocean series, which while not quite as poorly received as most of the games here, still fell short of the standards set by previous entries and was an omen of even worse Star Ocean sequels still to come. Tri-Ace's next game, Resonance of Fate, would also show promise, featuring an interesting futuristic setting that sees humanity living in a great tower on an otherwise polluted Earth, alongside unusual gun-based combat. Despite this, critics took issue with the story and graphics.

Still, other games from this era were considerably worse. Nippon Ichi Software's The Last Rebellion was so bad it led the company's president to make a public apology for ever allowing such a cursed game to leave Japan. Meanwhile, the self-aware Hyperdimension Neptunia found an audience and spawned plenty of sequels, but its early titles were still some of the worst-reviewed games of each year they released. And other Compile Heart games of this era like Cross Edge and Mugen Souls somehow fared just as poorly. And finally, there was Time and Eternity, the worst-reviewed JRPG of the generation. And I'm sure this game wasn't good. A review from Gaming Age described it as "less fun than a dentist appointment." But oh my god, for a bad game, it sure had some captivating visuals, mixing hand-drawn 2D animated sprites with 3D environments in a way that it genuinely looks striking. Apparently, it also had very boring and repetitive gameplay, though, so maybe it got those reviews for a reason.

Under normal circumstances, the occasional flop should be expected, but the seventh console generation brought a JRPG drought, bringing more attention to each title. But it did arrive from a fanbase hungry for games and continually disappointed. Where the sixth generation saw quality gradually decrease while quantity stayed strong, this generation instead saw the level of quality fall even further while quantity plummeted alongside it, and no series seemed to be immune.

Enter Final Fantasy, the series that made JRPGs mainstream, which at this point had never had a mainline entry but didn't receive strong critical acclaim. And then, in late 2009, there was Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy's 13th entry brought the series into a new, more sci-fi-inspired setting with a new take on turn-based combat that brought back the Active Time Battle system alongside a new focus on staggering enemies and changing party members' combat roles mid-fight. It would also feature stunning HD graphics, making it one of the best-looking games of its era, but this came at the cost of a much more restrictive and linear world design, with many areas seeming little more than straight lines and towns being removed entirely.

The response to this was mixed. By the standards of the era, Final Fantasy XIII reviewed well. By the standards of the era, Final Fantasy XIII sold well. By the standards of the era, Final Fantasy XIII was a good JRPG. But by the standards fans had come to expect from the series, Final Fantasy XIII was a disaster. It was lambasted for its linearity, criticized for its characters, and questioned over its status as an RPG. The term "hallway simulator" came to be used quite a lot in this discourse. The Final Fantasy series' constant changes had alienated existing fans before, but this time it also raised questions about whether JRPGs should modernize and whether JRPGs even could modernize. Regardless, for a struggling genre, Final Fantasy XIII didn't seem to be the answer. And if even a game with a massive budget from the most experienced company in the business couldn't save JRPGs, it made it seem, for a while, as if JRPGs might never be saved.

To make matters worse, for the first time in over a decade, JRPG localization was no longer guaranteed. Xenoblade Chronicles was announced in 2009, and as a next-gen entry in the Xenogears series, it instantly generated fan interest. What's more, Xenoblade Chronicles looked incredible, showing off diverse open landscapes and interactivity rarely seen in the genre, and it was on a platform with few other RPGs. And yet, while its Japanese release came and went, details of an English version were sparse. Eventually, Nintendo of Europe would localize the game for EU territories, but this didn't include a North American release, leaving a significant chunk of the player base out of luck.

In the same period, two other Wii RPGs were also overlooked for English releases: Mistwalker's The Last Story and action RPG Pandora's Tower. When asked about an English release for The Last Story, a Nintendo spokesman said they instead wanted to focus on more important titles like Kirby's Epic Yarn. Instead, fans were frustrated, which makes sense. Uh, some might argue that there is room in the world for Kirby's Epic Yarn and The Last Story. And so, fans channeled their anger and created Operation Rainfall, a fan-led campaign to promote interest in these three overlooked games to try to force Nintendo to bring them to America. And this actually worked. I guess Nintendo looked at all these people saying, "Please let us buy your games," and said, "Okay, fine, I guess." But you're still never getting Mother 3.

Luckily, unlike many JRPGs from this era, Xenoblade Chronicles was actually worth all this effort, being one of the largest and most expansive games of the era that really allowed players to feel like they were stepping into another world. It also did this on the rather underpowered Wii, making it somewhat of a technical marvel. As a result, it was one of the most highly acclaimed games on the system and one of the most popular JRPGs from this period. Other games were less fortunate, though, and never got English releases, like with Valkyria Chronicles 3, or would just take many, many years, like with The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd, which fans had to wait 10 years for.

There still weren't as many Japan-only games as back on the Super Nintendo, and most JRPGs that stayed in Japan were handheld titles, which were admittedly more popular in Japan than other markets. But after localization had become so common in previous generations, this still came as an unexpected development that only further compounded the genre's woes in this era.

By the end of the generation, some later titles did show promise of a brighter future, like Ni no Kuni, an action RPG from Level-5 that felt one part Dragon Quest and one part Studio Ghibli movie, probably because it featured character designs and animated sequences actually from Studio Ghibli. As the next generation got underway, the PlayStation 3 would see a few more popular titles, but that was still some years away.

And there was one final major development that defined this era: handhelds. If the HD era was a JRPG console dark age, for handhelds, it was as golden a time as there ever was. Countless classics were ported or entirely remade for either the Nintendo DS or the PlayStation Portable, including heavy hitters like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, and Persona. Many existing series would also continue on handhelds, including Suikoden, Valkyrie Profile, Valkyria Chronicles, the Mana series, Wild Arms, Phantasy Star, .hack, Shin Megami Tensei, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy VII, The Shining series, and more.

The DS would also receive the honor of being home to the next mainline Dragon Quest installment with Dragon Quest IX in 2009, which featured character creation and a focus on multiplayer and still managed to break sales records in Japan. Not every game saw this level of success, though. For many of these series, these entries would be their last, and this often came alongside mediocre reviews and little fanfare. Handhelds had long been a place for JRPG spin-offs, and now most JRPG series couldn't do any more than muster one final spin-off before fading into obscurity.

And yet, amongst so many games, there were of course some genuinely great titles, including some that were brand new. In 2007, Atlus would release Etrian Odyssey, kicking off a new series that helped resurrect the first-person dungeon crawler by bringing it to a new generation. Etrian Odyssey took full advantage of the DS's dual touchscreen to combine classic turn-based combat with a novel map-making system where players use the DS's stylus to draw a map of a dungeon as they explore. This hearkened back to the hand-drawn maps players had to create to complete older RPGs and was indicative of Etrian Odyssey's approach of combining old and new in a way that resonated with players. Etrian Odyssey would see many entries on the DS and its successor, and it wasn't the only RPG that used the DS's touchscreen in innovative ways.

2007 would also see the release of The World Ends With You, an action RPG from Square Enix set in modern-day Tokyo. The World Ends With You's battle system involved controlling two characters at once, using touchscreen commands for one and regular button inputs for the other, with action across both DS screens. It's a combat system unlike any other game in the genre that took full advantage of the hardware, which helped The World Ends With You stand out as one of the most innovative and unique RPGs of its era.

The success of Etrian Odyssey also led to a new first-person Shin Megami Tensei dungeon crawler in 2009's Strange Journey, which leaves behind the usual SMT setting of Tokyo to instead head for Antarctica to explore a growing black hole. Strange Journey was strange, featuring the usual SMT elements alongside more sci-fi and horror trappings to create something atmospheric and compelling that was perfect for die-hard SMT fans. Atlus and many of the developers who worked on Strange Journey would also co-develop the acclaimed 2010 RPG Radiant Historia. Radiant Historia would return to the familiar JRPG territory of time travel, but rather than jumping between eras, you instead switch between parallel timelines where the key to progress lies in using skills and information from one timeline in the other. It also featured a grid-based battle system that placed heavy emphasis on enemy positioning and an atypically competent and not at all teenage protagonist.

Finally, the PlayStation Portable would live up to its name by receiving a lot of ports, one of which was The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, which led to its first English release 5 years later in 2011. Trails in the Sky was a fairly traditional JRPG, but the Legend of Heroes series actually began all the way back in the '80s. Many long-running JRPG series feature entirely standalone entries with no connection between games, but with The Legend of Heroes, Falcom decided to take the complete opposite approach by deliberately designing each sub-series to flesh out a different part of the world, as each game gradually built upon the same larger narrative. This has led some to describe these games as having the best lore and world-building in the entire genre, and the Trails, or Kiseki, series has now grown to 13 entries, building a passionate and devoted fanbase along the way.

JRPGs' handheld achievements would continue into the next generation with the Nintendo 3DS, which saw a new mainline Shin Megami Tensei that featured even more dungeon crawling, as well as Fire Emblem's big mainstream breakthrough in Awakening, which added a greater focus on character interactions and character romances, and Bravely Default, a more traditional JRPG from Square Enix that felt reminiscent of the games the company first became famous for. Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light had done something similar on the original DS, but Bravely Default was a more successful attempt at a retro throwback and combined popular past features like the job system with clever new ideas like the Brave system, which allowed players to store up actions to then take multiple within a turn, increasing battle's tactical depth.

And so, at a time when everything seemed to be going wrong on consoles, on handhelds, JRPGs held strong. But this still came alongside a loss of status and shift in identity. Once upon a time, JRPGs were all about creating epic adventures with some of the highest budgets around that pushed consoles to their technical limits and featured some of the best quality presentation in the medium. Yet now, they had been relegated to a world of spin-offs and retro revivals. JRPGs went from being blockbusters to B-movies. And while for some fans, these lower-budget titles might well have retained the features that mattered the most about the genre, it's hard not to see this as a dramatic fall from grace for a genre that once stood atop gaming's peak.

Once upon a time, Final Fantasy VII outsold the best-selling Western RPGs five times over. Yet since then, Western RPGs grew alongside the growing gaming industry while finding even more success by moving to consoles. And so, during the years that JRPGs struggled the most, Western RPGs were reaching new heights of critical and commercial success. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim matched Final Fantasy VII's 10 million in less than a month and has since gone on to sell over 60 million copies. And Skyrim, Fallout 3, Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition all won countless Game of the Year Awards at a time when JRPGs barely even seemed to be in contention. In short, gaming had changed, and JRPGs failed to change with it. But even in its worst years, the genre was far from dead, and those years didn't last forever.

Initially, the eighth console generation looked like it might just bring more of the same, with JRPGs being few and far between. Even the technological leap represented by the consoles was smaller than it once was, and Japan still seemed to be playing catch-up with Western developers, with even the once-indomitable Nintendo now having to fight to survive after the failure of the Wii U. But in time, all this would change.

As has often been the case, no series better represents this than Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy XIII had left some fans disappointed, but at least it actually released. Originally, XIII was intended to be part of the Fabula Nova Crystallis sub-series and was announced alongside another game, Final Fantasy Versus XIII, in 2006. Yet, while XIII arrived 3 years later, Versus XIII experienced problem after problem. Ultimately, it was pushed to the next generation of consoles and underwent numerous changes, including with many of its lead developers. Versus XIII would eventually be rebranded as Final Fantasy XV in 2013, but news of its development was still sparse, and more and more years dragged by until finally, over 10 years after its first trailer, it released in late 2016.

Final Fantasy XV showed signs of a game that had been stuck in development hell. Its story could feel disjointed, with key characters rarely appearing on screen. It relied heavily on tie-in media to tell parts of its backstory, and parts of its ending sequence felt rather unfinished. But it still received positive reviews and strong sales, making it at least as successful as XIII before it. The game itself would once more be another departure for the series, with the extreme linearity of the last game being replaced with the exact opposite in a vast open world, somewhat typical of AAA gaming at the time, but with an added focus on the bond between the party members and the road trip feeling the game regularly tried to evoke. It would also feature full action combat, but its most important aspect might just be that after so many years of waiting, the game finally arrived to symbolically bring the great JRPG drought to an end.

And within a year, the situation for JRPGs had changed completely. 2017 would be a great year for the Japanese gaming industry, and boy, did the industry need that. By this point, the biggest development would be the launch of the Nintendo Switch, which almost instantly reversed Nintendo's fortunes. But JRPGs would also see their own reversal of fortunes. Platinum Games and Square Enix's action RPG Nier: Automata became a surprise hit and was so good it caused the entire Drakengard series that it was a part of to be critically reassessed. Falcom brought Ys to the PS4 with its eighth entry, leading to the series's most critically and commercially successful entry yet. Xenoblade would see its second mainline entry in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which became Monolith Soft's highest-selling game after the previous Xenoblade was hampered by being stuck on the failing Wii U. The Tales of series saw the English release of Berseria, bringing a return to form after a few weaker entries at the end of the previous generation. And in Japan, Dragon Quest would make its long-awaited return with Dragon Quest XI, the first single-player Dragon Quest to be released on consoles since VIII in 2004. Dragon Quest XI was more Dragon Quest, but polished to near perfection, having taken on board years of lessons alongside careful modernizations. The result was a critical and commercial hit that released outside Japan one year later and, for the first time, was largely successful in the West.

Still, none of these games compare to the impact of Persona 5, which first released in Japan in 2016 before releasing in English in April 2017. Persona 3 and 4 arrived at the very end of the PlayStation 2's life, at a time when most people had moved on to the next generation. Yet, their unusual blend of Shin Megami Tensei-style dungeon crawling and anime-like high school simulation ensured they'd be remembered as cult classics that put almost all next-gen JRPGs to shame. But they were just cult classics, being spin-offs to an already obscure franchise in the West, and with neither game selling enough copies outside Japan for Atlus to even bother announcing what their sales numbers were. Still, with time, their legacy grew. A PSP port of Persona 3 followed by a PlayStation Vita port of 4, alongside strong word-of-mouth support, brought in more and more fans over time until Persona 5 became a highly anticipated release for JRPG fans.

But like many Japanese games of this era, it would see significant delays and then released in Japan long before the West, forcing fans to wait even longer. Yet, when it did arrive, Persona 5 became a huge hit with universal acclaim from critics and a Metacritic score of 93, the highest of any JRPG since Final Fantasy IX on the PlayStation 1. Persona 5 would back this up with great sales, going on to reach the 10 million mark, a number only Pokémon and Final Fantasy had ever reached before it. And as if to really confirm its new status as the king of modern JRPGs, it would also receive far, far too many spin-offs. That being the true price of success, I guess.

But it was a massive success that came out of nowhere for a genre that had experienced years and years of woes, which now finally seemed to be behind it. It should go without saying that Persona 5 was a great game. Its high school sim element still felt fresh, its long runtime provided hours of entertainment, its visual style and soundtrack gave it a lot of personality, and its gameplay took lessons from the more hardcore Shin Megami Tensei, like incorporating basic dungeon crawling elements alongside the staple of persona fusing while making these more accessible for broader audiences. It also made improvements to the dungeons themselves, making each more unique and engaging in what feels like a big step up from previous Persona games.

Still, more than this, Persona 5 felt like the end of JRPGs' identity crisis. For years, this genre seemed to be stuck between a desire to modernize and the need to appeal to fans of traditional JRPGs, with an unspoken assumption that the only way to achieve true mainstream success was by evolving into something new that allowed the genre to stay at the cutting edge of presentation. Persona 5, however, showed that this wasn't true. That a JRPG didn't need the most technically impressive graphics if it had enough style, but turn-based battles could still work if gameplay systems were actually engaging, and that the Japanese roots of a genre were actually its greatest strength in creating experiences that stood out compared to Western games. And so, Persona 5 ensured JRPGs were back, and many more followed.

Octopath Traveler released in 2018 to continue in the footsteps of Bravely Default with an even more successful retro-inspired franchise whose new HD-2D aesthetic would be seen in many more future titles and remakes. Valkyria Chronicles made a return to consoles with a fourth entry as JRPG series started to migrate back from the now disappearing handhelds. In 2019, Kingdom Hearts III would make its long-awaited release after years of development troubles that largely mirror and even intertwine with Final Fantasy XV. Kingdom Hearts III was not exactly a simple or clean conclusion to the series, but it still felt like a triumph after so many years of uncertainty and spin-offs. Fire Emblem would also make a return to consoles with the highly successful Three Houses that year, bringing the series's best-ever sales. In 2020, open-world action RPG beat-'em-up hybrid Yakuza would ditch the action part to adopt a true turn-based battle system.

To create a largely self-aware and atypical take on the JRPG genre, and in 2021, The World Ends With You received a surprise sequel in Neo: The World Ends With You. Which moved on from dual screens and touch controls but still delivered a distinctly unique action RPG.

And this trend only continued. The Tales of series would receive its highest-selling and highest-reviewed title yet in Tales of Arise. Shin Megami Tensei would make a widely successful return to console in its fifth mainline entry. The Trails or Kiseki series would see multiple new entries as the franchise finally carved out its own devoted niche in the West. And really, JRPG success stories have continued ever since, making a clear divide between the past 8 years compared to the dark, distant days of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Alongside new titles, there have also been an endless supply of remakes and remasters, proving the timeless appeal of JRPGs and bringing old classics to new audiences. Amongst these have been remakes that changed the original game so significantly they feel like entirely new entities, like the ambitious, if slightly controversial, Final Fantasy VII Remake in 2020. A game fans have longed for for many years that finally brought the iconic PS1 mega-hit into stunning HD. There have also been a number of successful remakes of Japanese-only games, such as the 2020 3D remake of Trials of Mana or the 2022 HD-2D remake of Live A Live.

The growing prevalence of remakes and remasters in gaming is a trend that does go far beyond JRPGs, and there's a lot that could be said about that topic more broadly. But JRPGs might be the genre that has seen the most re-releases, and this trend doesn't look to be ending anytime soon.

The modern era also brought the emergence of indie JRPGs. In fact, JRPGs were one of the first indie genres to really take off, thanks to the RPG Maker development programs that date all the way back to 1992. Of course, RPG Maker has been used for far more than just RPGs, and many of the games it's produced over its many years of life have a certain amateur quality that can feel low-budget, even by indie standards. But RPG Maker still played an important role in the emergence of indie games as a distinct category, with users' desire to create their own JRPGs being a primary driving force.

Recent years have also seen indie RPGs like Chained Echoes in 2022 and Sea of Stars in 2023 receive significant critical acclaim for their 16-bit inspired adventures, establishing indie RPGs as genuine competitors in a marketplace that seems endlessly hungry for nostalgia. And so, the dark days of the HD era aren't just over, they almost seem forgotten. JRPGs have seen a major resurgence in quality and quantity for critics and consumers, bringing review scores and sales, and there is no sign of any of this changing anytime soon.

In fact, 2023 saw numerous well-received titles, including Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Final Fantasy XVI, Octopath Traveler II, Fire Emblem Engage, and English releases of Trails to Azure and Trails into Reverie. And 2024 has been even more stacked with Yakuza: Infinite Wealth, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Persona 3 Reloaded, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Unicorn Overlord, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, Saga Emerald Beyond, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak, Visions of Mana, and while I have been writing the script for this video, also Metaphor: ReFantazio and Eiyuden Chronicle: Echoes of Creation. With the former receiving a 94 on Metacritic, making it one of the most highly reviewed JRPGs in the genre's history. In fact, now that I'm typing all these games out and seeing just how long this list extends, 2024 seems like it might be one of the best years JRPGs have ever had. The genre isn't just surviving anymore, it's thriving. Oh, almost as if it's on the cusp of a new golden [Music] age.

JRPGs have come a long way. When the genre began, Japan didn't even know what the term RPG meant. It would take many years for any JRPG to find success outside Japan, and even as the genre entered its first golden era on the Super Nintendo, many of the best-selling and most popular titles still didn't even get released in the West. Then, after Final Fantasy VII changed this spectacularly, JRPGs surged like never before. But almost as quickly as this golden era began, it seemed to come to an end. Gaming changed, and JRPGs struggled to change with it, leading to the past successes of the PlayStation 1 not being replicated on the PS2, before the HD era arrived, bringing doom and despair for a genre that seemed a shell of its former self. But in time, a new dawn arrived, and the genre found stability, building new foundations and finally growing again after years of decline, with that growth not showing any signs of slowing.

So the genre has seen its share of ups and downs, so much so that it's easy to forget just how much these games have changed over time. When JRPGs first emerged, they came in two main types: games descended from Ultima and Wizardry, and action RPGs that combined arcade and simulation elements. Dragon Quest then burst onto the console scene to establish the true JRPG formula, with the overworld of Ultima, the combat of Wizardry, the aesthetics of a Japanese manga, and the accessibility that would appeal to inexperienced console players. This is the JRPG we know today. Except it isn't. Dragon Quest had barely any story, with basically no focus on characters. It was short, with a runtime of around 10 hours. It was heavily exploration-based, with a non-linear open world, and outside of exploring that overworld, the main thing you spent your time doing was crawling through dungeons. Sure, anime and accessibility can still be seen today, but otherwise, Dragon Quest doesn't resemble modern JRPGs in any way.

The genre changed. Story became a greater and greater focus. Characters started to talk to each other a lot, until they basically never seemed to shut up. Run times increased massively, and still seemed to be increasing further. Difficulty was usually relaxed, with dungeon crawling usually removed. Overworlds disappeared as well, with exploration being replaced with linearity. Anime became a major inspiration for storytelling, as well as an aesthetic. Gameplay diversified, sub-genres developed, and JRPGs themselves became something quite different from what they once were. The genre evolved, with a significant part of its evolution being fueled by the gradual relaxing of memory limitations. But the end result is a genre that carved out its own niche. JRPGs are not the mainstream powerhouse they once were on the PlayStation 1, or the critical darlings of the Super Nintendo. But for players who like the unique things Bamco has come to offer, this genre offers them more than ever before. So for fans of long stories, regular character interactions, heavy anime inspiration, including many anime tropes, and not always challenging gameplay that can often be sped up or even automated to prevent it getting in the way of a story, JRPGs might be better than ever. While for others, the genre might not have the same universal appeal it once commanded. But JRPGs do know what they want to be now. The genre has struggled, but it did survive, and it now seems as healthy as it's ever been.

And yet, I have to admit, it's hard to think of this current period as a new golden age. So many of the games people are excited for these days are re-releases or remasters or remakes. So many of the series that are doing well are series that have been around for years, with new successes being rare. And so many of those few new successes seemed to only succeed by appealing to nostalgia. The JRPG golden age wasn't just a time of critical and commercial success; it was a time of experimentation, originality, and diversity. And as successful as JRPGs have been in recent years, I don't think they've matched the level of creativity the genre once displayed. But JRPGs have become great at appealing to JRPG fans, and that is all the genre needs to be. These games mean a lot to players. Their stories, their characters, their worlds. These are experiences that leave a lasting mark on those who play them, and that part, at least, has remained the same, even after all these years.

Thank you for watching. These history videos involve quite a lot of research, and if there's one thing that research puts into perspective, it's how much we all owe a surprisingly small number of sources. The book, "A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games" by Kurt Kolas and other contributors, alongside the earlier work on JRPGs found on Hardcore Gaming 101, were both very helpful in making this video. The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers series was also useful, as was the article on the birth of Japanese RPGs by Felipe Pepe, as well as the many interviews by many different people that have been referenced. If anyone watching this wants to know more about this subject in general, I would recommend "A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games." It covers a lot of different and often obscure games, much more than in this video, and it's all done with great presentation, by which I mean there's lots of pictures. I'll include a link below. I also recommend the book "Japan: Soft and Oral History," which is basically a shortened, re-edited version of the Untold History of Japan books and gives a good insight into the early Japanese gaming industry with lots of interesting details that were too specific for me to actually include here. Otherwise, if you want to support me, you can do so on Patreon. As always, it is greatly appreciated, and it does help me out a lot. Anyway, that's it for me. Uh, usually I've been teasing the next video at the end of each video, sort of as a little reward for anyone still watching, even this far into the credits. But I'm not doing that this time because I have no idea what the next video will be. It'll probably be good, though. Pro-probably. I can see into your mind. You enjoy role-playing games.