Briefly: JRPGs and linear narrative.

Epic Spacialities: The Production of Space in Final Fantasy Games, William H. Huber (Third Person)
The Sands of Time: Crafting a Video Game Story, Jordan Mechner (Second Person)

A brief, but poignant article this week to get back into things after break. My concern manifests from this quotation by Huber: “Japanese role-playing games have generally been treated simply as linear stories driven by various role-playing mechanics.” This is related to a rather vocal concern I have that JRPGs and other Japanese games are rarely discussed, or at least have been noticeable absent from game studies scholarship over the past ten years.

My overwhelming response to the above quotation becomes: So, what? Is the point of concern that JRPGs don’t sell? Because that’s hardly the case when Final Fantasy VII is arguably known as “the game that sold the playstation,” and if not that, still sold millions of copies on its own, not to mention the enormous gross profit the entire franchise has accrued worldwide. Apparently something is being done correctly.

Huber’s article is not arguing against JRPGs, however, but rather offering a different method of analysis through ideas of “space” to challenge the traditional disregard often offered towards “linear narrative” in games. Without getting too much into the meat of Huber’s article (which draws heavily on David Harvey’s geographic discussion on space), Huber describes how the Final Fantasy games offer a variety of spatial methods for navigating gameplay that serve to push story, emotion, and act as a way for players to become invested in the experience. Like revisiting the geographical space of a traumatic memory, so can games in this way compel a player to emotionally involve themselves in the game-realm.

An alternate method of dispelling the ambivalence towards “linear narratives” is to discuss cast characters as important storytelling media. While “Story is Not King” is the second rule in Mechner’s point-by-point suggestive list of how to manage storytelling in video games, the bulk of Mechner’s article claims that the storytelling experience is an important one in games, though it must be seamlessly woven with the actual play experience, or it risks eliminating tension, agency, and fun. See the following article for more discussion of this.

So feel the question is begged: If JRPGs can manage a well-woven story-play architecture, why do they continuously seem pushed aside because of this? There have been many criticisms that Final Fantasy X suffered from an overabundance of cutscenes, yet this game, too has sold millions of copies. This does make me wonder how much of this is the franchise, and how much is actual merit towards the game, itself. Did the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time sell gross as much as FFX? It certainly received immense critical acclaim. However, in this field, it seems that critical acclaim does not always equate to gross sales. Regardless, it seems fairly evident that there are a variety of ways to weave story into games, and there doesn’t seem to be a particularly correct way of doing so, thus, why ignore such a large portion of the gaming industry?