General News - Western vs Japanese RPGs @ GameDaily

A silly article at GameDaily compares western and Japanese RPGs across a handful of categories to determine a winner. Here's a dodgy history lesson to start:

Before people started rolling the dice in Dungeons and Dragons, role-playing games got their start in the early 80s on the Atari 2600. Adventure and Dragonstomper laid the foundation for RPGs to come, despite their simplicity. When the Nintendo Entertainment System arrived three years later, Japanese developers took over and began incorporating storylines, characters and battle systems. Some players were overwhelmed by the complexity, but top-notch efforts such as Dragon Warrior, The Legend of Zelda (it's more of an action RPG, but it counts) and the original Final Fantasy attracted players by the thousands. Outside of specific developments around the U.S. (including Origin's Ultima games), Japan dominated the genre.

More information.

Wow, I've never felt I had to write to any of these forum/articles before, but I feel I must about this article. It was poorly written, way way way too under researched and horribly biased. Where are the Ultimas, Might and Magics, the Ishars, the Gold Box games etc etc etc. ? I've been RPGing since the 80's, *cough* played the original Wizardry *cough*, and been a huge fan since. I only recently came to the console's(face palm) take on JRPG's and have been enjoying them for the most part. No mention as well of the influence, so clearly written by various (see: research!!) Japanese rpg's authors, on western rpg's.

Outside of specific developments around the U.S. (including Origin's Ultima games), Japan dominated the genre.

Yeah - on the console system Workman's parents bought him, anyway.

Ah ha, check this quote out…

There were some produced on our shores, but they were released on PC rather than consoles, including Freedom Force, Jagged Alliance and X-Com.

So the PC games don't count for this article. Except they do count for MMORPGs. Huh??

That article is laughably bad. I get the impression that he has very little experience with crpgs to begin with.

*Edit* Ok I mistakingly thought the article ended earlier than it did. I just read the rest of it, and it seems he does know his crpgs to a degree. Still, like Dhruin said, it's a silly article.

Were these people high when they wrote it since they got the history of the rpg totally wrong. These people have no clue what they are talking about and anyways all early console rpgs were based directly off of crpgs like Ultima and Wizardry.

Just too many wannabe article writers in the internet. This one propably has a secure second job.

How can you NOT love JRPGs? Where the games revolve around navigating through endless menu trees? Where your end-game reward is watching the credits? Where these two features have been the underpinning paradigm for nearly 2 decades without change? I ask again, how can you not love JRPGs.

/sarcasm off

Honestly, I concurrently played both crpgs(ie mostly western)and jrpgs(ie console rpgs) and enjoyed both.
Still, it is obvious without even the tiny bit of research(hate on wikipedia all you want, it still has actual info)
to realize all jrpgs are essentially built on the western style. It was only the early 90's that the big divide
between them really started. Anyways, sillyarticle but at least it gets ppl talking.

I remember reading an article where a big Japanese RPG designer said that he wasn't even aware that there is such a thing as "Western" RPGs and "Japanese" RPGs. To him, there were just RPGs… the Japanese kind. He was probably a bit blind to not have know about them, but it does show how the market over there is way different.

hmm… "Before people started rolling the dice in Dungeons and Dragons, role-playing games got their start in the early 80s on the Atari 2600"? D&D officially started in 1977 (though people were playing it as early as 75). Adventure was made in 1979. Article total failure.

Wow, that was spectacularly bad.

Wow, just wow, I rarely saw somebody talk about a subject that they obviously have no clue about in my time. I smell a future in politics for this guy.

Originally Posted by GameDaily
Before people started rolling the dice in Dungeons and Dragons, role-playing games got their start in the early 80s on the Atari 2600.

What country is this guy from? It's true that in some places in the world P&P RPGs like D&D where not translated into the local language by the early 1980s but they where available in English in the form of imports as early as 1978 if not even earlier.

Originally Posted by GameDaily
The Legend of Zelda (it's more of an action RPG, but it counts)

No. All games in The Legend of Zelda-series are Action Adventures (darn good Action Adventures) due to their fixed characters and a linear storyline that is set in a fantasy world. None of them even qualifies as an Action RPG (Zelda II - The Adventure of Link, a Action Adventure with RPG elemets, is the closest that series ever got to be an RPG).

Originally Posted by wolfing
hmm… "Before people started rolling the dice in Dungeons and Dragons, role-playing games got their start in the early 80s on the Atari 2600"? D&D officially started in 1977 (though people were playing it as early as 75). Adventure was made in 1979. Article total failure.

The first edition of D&D was released in a box in 1974 (small print run, note that Roleplaying was around in the Lake Geneva Wargame Community as early as 1970). The first computer game based on it was a unlicensed game named dnd later known as The Game of Dungeons that was traded by hobbyist as early as 1974 and was enhanced until 1985. It is considered the earliest "surving" CRPG (two even eariler CRPGs were suppostly called pedit5 und m199h but no copy of either of them is known to have survived until today).