Summary
JRPGsare known for their stories. For decades, these character-focused stories have given players grand narratives in sprawling fantasy worlds, and companies like Square Enix and Atlus have staked a high reputation on the quality of their role-playing games.
While JRPGs come ina variety of sub-genres, they’re often known for the large amount of expository dialogue that fills in the player on some new terminology and world concepts. Some JRPGs have had iconic villainous monologs or a novella’s worth of narration, but for people looking to take in a narrative from a more visual perspective, these JRPGs have mastered the art of showing, not telling.
Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronologybrought one of the best and most widely celebrated DS JRPGs to the handheld’s successor, the 3DS. This story balances a splitting timeline based upon themajor decisions of the protagonist, Stocke, and splits further into smaller branches based on other decisions. This is a game where choices divide the narrative, but don’t necessarily determine it, as Stocke usually has the chance to go back and explore another route.
Listening to slightly skewed expository dialogue every time Stocke makes a new decision to let the player know who they’ve upset would be exhausting, soPerfect Chronologyinstead opts to have characters' body language, expression, or even subtle differences in their reaction between timelines communicate how they feel towards the player.
NieR: Automatais a brilliant example of the kind of storytelling not just JRPGs, but video games as a medium are capable of.This post-apocalyptic JRPGbecomes quite philosophical very quickly, and involves a lot of meta-narratives that shift how the player views the protagonists, especially on a second play-through, which is essential to getting the best ending.
2B and 9S trek through an utterly ruined landscape, and visual storytelling is used to a fantastic extent in letting players understand the past of this world through context, environments, and even through more mechanical techniques like enemy placements. The visual storytelling inNier: Automatais just one of the many reasons players should immerse themselves in this story.
Chrono Triggerstands tall as one of the best JRPGs of the 20th Century, and retains its status as an incredibly venerated title coming into the 21st. There is such an incredible breadth of characters and plot beats that are all tied so neatly together inChrono Trigger.The narrative is one of the main draws to pull people into this game, even if they’re not typically a JRPG fan. The expansive world is also fleshed out furtherwith some incredible side quests.
Even with all of this narrative to exposit,Chrono Triggerdoes a masterful job at letting subtle implications in character’s dialogue or the nature of the game’s settings across different timelines do the heavy story lifting at certain points, letting the player intuit their own thoughts about each era they visit.
Shin Megami Tenseiis a series rooted in visual storytelling. Every demon, from the low level sludges and pixies, all the way up to the archangels themselves, or the first of the demons who lurk in the abyss, all have a level of visual storytelling applied to them that changes how the player thinks about them. Demons lack any real kind of consistency in their designs, and this is actually what draws them all together as arbiters of chaos. Angels, meanwhile, are all very rigid and robotic, very rarely conveying emotions, and especially not emotions like empathy, pity, or vulnerability.
SMT3especially focuses on a visual means of telling the narrative. Likeother magic protagonists, Demi-Fiend has an incredibly iconic design that showcases his powers. Throughout the story, the player watches as the protagonist walks the line between demonic and human natures.
Triangle Strategyis perhaps more overlooked than some of its contemporaries,but among strategy RPGs, players will be hard-pressed to find a more engaging and compelling narrative, not to mention the fantastic HD-2D graphical style and intuitive gameplay. Part of what makes this game hold such a legacy is the way that the narrative has no problem subverting the tropes of the JRPG genre, with the main character, Serenoa, and the House he commands, forced to make increasingly perilous decisions about where their allegiance lies in a world with no blacks or whites.
The Saltiron War that takes place before Serenoa’s birth is a huge, foundational part of how the narrative unfolds, and with Serenoa obviously not present for it, it’s up to the player to sift through the skewed reactions and retellings of other characters to see what truly occurred during that time. So much about the nature of character relationships that extend beyond Serenoa’s perception is left up to interpretation through subtext, making for a masterfully told story.
