The JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) has been around since the early 8bit days of gaming and seems bigger than ever with the likes of Persona drawing huge numbers and even going so far as to help move consoles. But for every Persona and Final Fantasy there are dozens and dozens of other JRPG’s that get lost in the shuffle for one reason or another.
Maybe you’ve spent hundreds of hours on your favorite Dragon Quest or Star Ocean game and are looking for something new and maybe a little different. The following JRPG titles should fill the void in your gaming schedule while giving you some examples of where the genre came from and what more modern titles can learn from.
- . Destiny of an Emperor
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Released in 1990 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Destiny of an Emperor is loosely based on the famed Romance of the Three Kingdoms legend. What makes this release unique, especially when compared to other games of the time genre (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc.) is how it handles standard battles. Instead of only having random battles against generic enemies you also encounter Warlord characters. If you defeat these characters you’ll have the chance of recruiting most of them into your party through a bribe system and thus removing them from the random battle pool the game pulls from.
This allows Destiny of an Emperor to have one of the largest casts of playable characters with 150 characters to add to your party. What limits the possibilities is that you can only ever have a maximum of 70 characters in your party at one given time and many of the Warlords not capable of leveling up. This means that certain characters that you can recruit will only be effective for a short period of time. But if you do choose to remove a character to make room for some new that removed character will be added once again to the enemy pool and can potentially be encountered again in battle.
- . Faria: A World of Mystery and Danger!
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Inspired by Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda, the game features a similar hero who visits various towns, talks to NPC’s, and uses a magic sword to save the kingdom. Where the game really comes into its own is in the wild story presented. You play as a knight tasked with saving a princess and earning her hand in marriage in the process. Saving her reveals that you are a actually a female knight and thus unable to marry. The King and town are then poisoned at a party and you then quest to find a cure. When you return with the cure the King has been turned to stone and you are then tasked with destroying the wizard behind it.
Killing him turns you into a man and its revealed that all the men of your people were transformed into women by the same wizard. But if that wasn’t enough for you the Wizard’s fallen spirit casts the world into darkness and takes over the body of a dragon. You then slay the dragon wizard after finding a legendary sword. The world is saved and you once again earn the princesses hand in marriage but decline in order to return home to your freed people. The princess requests to join you and the game ends. Phew…
- . Beyond the Beyond
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There have been a great many turn-based RPGs over the years, and most of them tend to follow the same basic format. So, when one comes around to mix things up players tend to take notice. Such is the case for Beyond the Beyond, released for the original PlayStation back in 1996. What allows the game stand out is what Camelot Software called their “Active Playing System” that allows the player some input during battle. In most turn-based RPGs the player takes a turn and then waits while the enemy takes a turn.
Beyond the Beyond does it a little differently by allowing the player to increase their chances of avoiding an attack or powering up their next attack while the enemy is taking their own turn. This is done mashing a button on the controller at a very specific moment during a given encounter. The game itself is pretty standard RPG fare otherwise, with many players and critics calling the title “derivative” and highlighting that visually it didn’t look all that impressive on the then new PlayStation hardware. One notable thing about Beyond the Beyond is that the game was the very first JRPG to hit the PlayStation in the West.
- . The Granstream Saga
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This often overlooked JRPG released on the PlayStation in 1998 holds the distinction of being one of the first JRPG’s to fully incorporate polygons in all aspects of the game. Prior to this titles like Final Fantasy VII used polygons to represent characters and relied on pre-rendered graphics for their environments.
One apparent limitation to this is that everyone you encounter is faceless giving the entire experience a very creepy vibe. I expect this has to do with the graphical limitations of the PlayStation and thankfully to mitigate this and to take advantage of the CD format, famed anime studio Production I.G. is on hand to handle all the cut-scenes for the game.
- . Time Stalkers
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A unique JRPG that was released for the Sega Dreamcast in 2000 that looks to have taken inspiration from Nintendo’s Smash Bros. series. Climax had this wild idea to create an RPG and fill it out with characters and worlds from a number of the games that it created in a massive crossover experience. This all happens because you open a magic book while investigating a curse and get transported to a world that’s been mashed together from several game worlds.
Aside from the crossover story Time Stalkers incorporates a collection system that allows you to collect and train enemies to add to your group to help you in battle. If you can get past the generic visuals and the fact that the game resets XP at the start of every dungeon you have a fun JRPG that Climax fans will especially love.
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