When the average gamer thinks of JRPG, certain tropes appear in their minds. These include leveling up with lots of stats to micromanage, or random encounters with a large variety of monsters. Characters often don’t look as old as they say they are, and people have wildly different accents despite supposedly being from the same place.
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However, as the genre has expanded and become more mainstream among western audiences, many developers have pondered about how to better appeal to these markets. This has resulted in JRPGs breaking off into their own sub-genres. These games now boast wildly different types of combat, stories, and stat management.
10The World Ends With You – Dual Screen Battling
One of the most innovative titles for the Nintendo DS,The World Ends With Youtook JRPGs in a brand new direction. Utilizing both screens of the DS, players would essentially manage two battles at once and have to quickly react to twists in the combat situations.
A large part of the appeal in this system was lost in the mobile & Switch releases. Yet, the non-traditional vibe of the game still sticks. Originally a cult-hit of a title, with the Switch release it has become more well-known in the gaming fanbase and now has an anime series based on it.
9Miitopia – A Beginner-Friendly JRPG
JRPGs can be an intimidating genre to play for the first time. While most systems in the genre aren’t too complex, the big screen of numbers that need to be managed can be very off-putting to newer players.
That makesMiitopiaa perfect first-time JRPG. It has a light-hearted atmosphere, but still takes players on an epic quest. It still has mechanics like stat management andrelationship-building, but in simplified forms. Instead of fully breaking away from classic tropes, it instead tones them down for newer players and creates a morewelcoming experience for beginnersthat regular JRPG fans can still enjoy.
8Fire Emblem: Three Houses – Rock, Paper, Scissors No Longer
For classic JRPG franchises,Fire Emblemis likely one of the first that comes to mind. Its tactical gameplay and quirky cast of characters scream “JRPG” even to a casual observer. As such, the tropesFire Emblem: Three Housesbreaks are less about the genre as a whole and more about the series.
Up untilThree Houses, combat inFire Emblemhad a simple triangle of strength. Axe beats Lance, Lance beats Sword, Sword beats Axe. Later installments would add to this system and create exceptions, but the core triangle remained largely intact. However,Three Housesdid away with it. Instead, it favored the Gambit system and focused more on the unit types themselves (flying, armored, etc.) to determine strengths and weaknesses.
7Paper Mario: The Origami King – Going Round In Circles
The Mario franchise has always strived to do things differently. Every game in the franchise looks to bring something new to whatever genre it fits into.Paper Mariois no exception, as a franchise that changes up its combat system from game to game.
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The most unique of these systems is that ofPaper Mario: The Origami King.This game uses an interesting style of turn-based battling that brings in puzzle elements to clear the board of enemies. The gimmick of rotating the board to place the enemies in the best spots is an interesting one, and each battle feels carefully crafted to create an interesting puzzle.
6Final Fantasy VII Remake – Changing The Game
What makesFinal Fantasy VII Remakesuch a break-away from JRPG tradition is that it truly is a complete remake from the ground up. It usesthe same world & charactersas the original and similar story elements, but every other aspect of the game has been overhauled.
This is extremely non-traditional for the genre. JRPG remakes normally consist of the same base game with some polished graphics, and maybe a few extra story beats. Never before has a JRPG been completely rebuilt from ground zero to fit the modern market.
5Monster Hunter: Rise – Preparation Over Reaction
WhileMonster Hunterhas become somewhat of a classic series in the world of JRPGs, its gameplay is anything but. While there is always some level of preparation in JRPGs, it’s rarely the key determinant between success and failure.
MonsterHunterlaughs at this idea and trains players to go into fights,knowing as much as possible about their opponents. Players have to study where it resides, how it behaves when threatened, and where to strike it to bring it down. Not to mention, hunters must prepare their own resources to keep themselves going when the battle begins.
4Pokemon Let’s Go! Pikachu/Eevee – GO Catch ‘Em All
Pokemongames may seem about as traditional as JRPGs get. However, theLet’s Gogames in the series looked to take a different approach to the formula, in a similar way thatPokemon Legends: Arceuslooks to be doing.
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Attempting to appeal more to casual fans of the franchise,Pokemon Let’s Go!brought in several features from the ever-popular mobile gamePokemon GO. The traditional system for catching Pokemon was gone, now replaced with a system like that ofGO,requiring motion controls to use.
3Final Fantasy XV – Completely Open, Mostly
Final Fantasy XVis such a non-traditional game for the franchise due to how incredibly open it is. The full game world of a kind which fans never truly expected from the series in its modern iteration.
It also abandons tropes of the modernFinal Fantasygames like instanced battles and managing gear for better stats.Final Fantasy XVstripped that away, making battles a much more fluid experience. They now took place in the open world, which in itself offered side-quests aplenty. Even when the game does get more linear in the latter half, that fluidity in the design sticks around.
2NieR: Automata – Hack-and-Slashing Those Emotions
TheNieRseries has always felt very different to standard JRPGs. This feeling comes through not only in the gameplay, butthe overall tone of the narrative. The majority of traditional JRPGs feature the player character and some unlikely allies banding together to save the world.NieR, however, features a much more downbeat tone.
NieR: Automatapushed that tone to its limits. The story looks to interrogate not only what it means to be human (and what can even class as human), but what it’s like to feel. It isn’t afraid to give depressing moments and conclusions to stories, or to to make the player reconsider what they believe they want or need out of life.
1Dark Souls – A New Genre
While it seems baffling to refer to it as such today, whenDark Soulsfirst came out into the world, it had all the makings of a JRPG. It offered stat & gear management, as well asa world of deep lorethat slowly grows and expands throughout the game. The markings were there.
However, with theSoulsgames and its successors, FromSoftware and a select few indie developers turned that formula into something so unique that it broke out of the “sub-genre” bindings.The Soulslike genreis now one most players recognize, even if they don’t know its name.
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