General News - Review of A Guide to Japanese Role Playing Games

HiddenX

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Paul Werkema checked out A Guide to Japanese Role Playing Games:

Review of A Guide to Japanese Role Playing Games from Bitmap Books



Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games is a very good book. I have some disagreements with the authors on what is in the book and some of the games they included. It was fun to flip through and read about some games I never got to play or haven't had a chance to finish them yet.

Some of the major series are separated from the other genres of games. From there the reviews are broken up into sub-genres like Action RPG and Strategy RPG. I like how they did this as you can skip to the section you want to read.
More information.
 
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Who's going to be the first to critique the review of the guide of JRPGs? ;)
 
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FYI, bought the book yesterday, and here are some utterly subjective impressions:
As per Bitmap Books standard, the book is expertly crafted: bounding, paper quality and printing is top notch. This is truly a book collector's wet dream.

As for the content: I'm somewhat torn. The historical overview is definitely well done, but the actual presentation of the many many many games therein is somewhat uneven. This book presents games either in an academic manner, or from an obviously biased fanboy's perspective.

Compared to Bitmap Books' eariler cRPG book, I think Felipe Pepe (the editor of that one) did a master stroke: instead of academic analysis, he asked RPG celebrities to write a totally biased note on a given game -- and this approach is wonderful.

The jRPG book tries to be a historical overview (as per Hardcoregaming101.net 's video game preservation notions), AND a passionate love letter to jRPGs -- and seriously, the two angles struggle to find a golden middle road. I suspect this is because many jRPGs are discussed as a series, hence individual titles are mentioned only in a few passionate sentences (e.g. Final Fantasies, Dragon Quests), while many stand-alone games are discussed in a much more objective, academic point of view (e.g. Live-a-Live, etc).

Nevertheless, the book is absolutely essential. The amount of work in here is staggering, and the notions are absolutely admirable. Kudos to the creatos!
( I am nitpicky, because I'm old and jaded, and truly believe that good old-fashioned constructive criticism is a way to push things forward :) )
 
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After reading Duerer's above review, and listening to the first post, I just might have to pick this book up. Thanks for the additional review!
 
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One for my birthday list I think - my wife is always looking for ideas :)
 
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FYI, bought the book yesterday, and here are some utterly subjective impressions:
As per Bitmap Books standard, the book is expertly crafted: bounding, paper quality and printing is top notch. This is truly a book collector's wet dream.

Just curious, but how did you get it already? When I go to the site, it shows a release date of Oct 04, 2021.
 
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Just curious, but how did you get it already? When I go to the site, it shows a release date of Oct 04, 2021.

Immediately preordered as soon as it was announced aeons ago .. . Btw, being a Bitmap Books release, you can buy it right now, as a digital pdf copy is also yours with the purchase.
 
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