My love affair with JRPGs started with the purchase of my Playstation and a copy of Final Fantasy VII. It was the first disc-based epic in a series that I’d largely ignored to that point. I bought it because it came highly recommended by the owner of the video game shop where I purchased my system. I hadn’t been an RPG fan previously (at all) but I trusted the man’s opinion and decided to give it a chance. Well, it goes without saying that I was incredibly impressed at the game and the ball just started rolling from there.

But looking at the current generation consoles, it seems that the Japanese RPG is becoming an endangered species. The Wii library has very little in JRPGs, though based on the mass exodus of third-party RPG developers from Nintendo after the jump from SNES to N64 — to say nothing of the jump from N64 to Gamecube — that was to be expected. While the PS2′s library is filled with many JRPGs, the genre has much less representation in the PS3 library. There are a few notable titles (which is more than I can say for the Wii) but in particular Final Fantasy XIII has left a rather sour taste in my mouth. The Xbox 360 is not even on my radar largely due to my seething hatred of almost everything Microsoft but also due to the fact that I see the library as basically an extension of PC games, which I’ve had little to do with. Apparently improvements have been made here, but I wouldn’t be able to say for certain.

(If you’d like to prove me wrong, I would love to see an annotated list of your favourite Japanese-developed RPGs for each of these systems, but I think the point still stands that none of the current generation systems have as plentiful a selection as the PS2. And for the record I’m willing to admit the Strategy RPG genre, too.)

So what was happened to this fan-celebrated genre?

The video gaming market has shifted significantly. The Japanese used to rule the industry with an iron fist but looking at some of the best titles of the current generation, more and more of them are being produced by Western studios. Nintendo has had a great deal of success handing some of their franchise titles over to a Western studio but the one they developed in tandem with a Japanese studio got some terrible reviews over the pond. Some of the best titles in PS3′s library are developed by Western studios. There has been a shift and Japanese developers are finding themselves scrambling to catch up on the world stage.

Why the sudden shift? Co-worker and best friend @maplealmond offered a very interesting theory: while Japanese developers have definitely ruled in the console market (which they also largely created), Western developers have always done better in PC gaming. As gaming consoles are now very close to PCs, those PC game sensibilities translate over to console gaming much better. Consoles have incredibly powerful graphics and processing power, Internet connectivity, and even hard drive storage. While Fallout 1 and 2 couldn’t have possibly been ported to the NES or SNES due to the large amount of storage needed just to save, Fallout 3 stands as one of the very best titles in the PS3 library and has won a number of “Game of the Year” awards, leading to a special “Game of the Year” edition with all of the downloadable content bundled in. The games are now being made on Western turf, so to speak.

Also, it is possible that the tastes of the market have changed, too. While I do love Valkyria Chronicles and the Disgaea series, I haven’t finished any of those games yet. Why? They all take way too long to get through, and it’s not even all the fun stuff. Japanese RPGs suffer from a “grinding” problem, sometimes requiring a great deal of repetition and administration to train your uber squad of heroes to own that boss who keeps on handing you your spleens on a silver platter. That might’ve been quite acceptable to me when I was young but as I’ve accumulated more responsibilities and obligations, it has become harder and harder to justify allocating precious leisure time to killing the same group of monsters over and over again to farm experience points.

(Valkyria Chronicles 1 suffers from a different problem: it won’t give me enough game to play, so I get inclined to switch to something else for shorter gaming sessions. If I’ve got an hour to spend gaming, I’m sure as hell not spending 30 minutes of it watching cut-scenes.)

Grinding is so endemic to the Japanese RPG experience that Disgaea’s main selling point is that it places almost no limits on how much you can grind to create the ultimate killing machine. Level 99? Try level 9999! Much of the “fun” of playing Disgaea is finding new and interesting ways of “cheating” the system (i.e. exploiting loop holes that developers purposefully left in the game) so that you can achieve your ultimate killing machine in 70 hours instead of 100. Really? I’m lucky if I can squeeze an hour or two of gaming into my day now. Games I want to play are released at a rate much higher than I can actually finish them and that means I’m inclined to play games that give me much more for my commitment. Is it possible that has the audience has grown up, they’ve also grown tired of the grind?

There are probably many more factors at play here. What do you think has affected the success of the JRPG in North America?

The Fall 2010 anime season has come with a couple of very odd shows and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt might prove to be the weirdest of the bunch. It is also not entirely what you might think it is.

Panty and Stocking are angels who have been kicked out of Heaven for behaving badly. They are put to work in Daten City, a city on the fault line between Heaven and Hell, by Reverend Garterbelt. Their job? To exorcize the “Ghosts” that occasionally terrorize the city and collect the “Heaven” coins that they drop to gain readmission to Heaven. They are joined by a small green, Invader-Zim-esque dog Chuck and get around the city in their pink Humvee, “See-Through”.

Panty is a sexy blonde with an insatiable hunger for sex. True to her name, her panties become a pistol named “Backless” (wait, what?) that fires ordinance which is very effective on Ghosts. She can get rather rude and violent when crossed, loves spicy things, and hates sweet things.

Stocking is a goth loli with long, dark hair and a pair of striped stockings that turn into two swords, named “Stripes I & II”, that slice through Ghosts like a knife through warm butter. She tends to be the more moderate, intelligent, and responsible one. She loves sweet things and hates spicy stuff.

I think this transformation sequence (WARNING: NSFW!) says pretty much all else that could be said of these sister angels. But odder still, that’s actually not typical of the animation style at all.

Panty & Stocking is what would happen if a whole bunch of people at Gainax watched the entire line-up of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim and said “we could do that.” The series borrows and parodies a lot of clichés from Western animation and mashes them all together with Gainax’s trademark kookiness to create a unique and edgy comedy blend.

What I like about it

Just about everything. Panty & Stocking is brilliant in its execution. Gainax has basically beaten Western animation at its own game, creating an incredibly dark comedy with some racy scenes and all sorts of oddities and touches that will never fail to surprise and delight.

I refuse to say more for fear of spoiling this show. Just watch it. Really.

What I don’t like about it

It’s pretty much brain candy. There’s almost no depth to the episodic story-telling whatsoever. If you were looking for something to really make you think or evoke deep emotions, Panty & Stocking isn’t it. Look elsewhere.

Also, it does get pretty racy, which makes it somewhat difficult to show to friends whose sense of humour isn’t as dark as my own. It really isn’t for everybody, but I think that can be said of everything Gainax has ever done.

In summary

See it if only for the experience of having your mind blown in a very unique way. While not the most ridiculous thing Gainax has ever done, it’s up there.

In my other blog (which at some point was a podcast), I wrote about a particular moment in a very recent anime series that made me really appreciate that I’d taken up learning Japanese. I mentioned there that I’d be writing about the shows in the new season that I like… and then forgot about it. Well, I’ve finally seen enough of the new season that I can start writing about some of the stuff that I’ve been following.

I actually explained the premise of the show pretty well on The Japanese Learner, so I’m just going to quote it here:

The premise is that a demon in Hell lures a young boy who dubs himself “The God of Conquest” into a contract to help her exorcise “loose souls”, souls which have come up from Hell to the surface world to continue doing ill deeds by hiding in the hearts of humans. Particularly, girls.

His job is to take the place of the loose soul in their hearts by making them fall in love with him, driving the soul out so that the demon can capture it. Conveniently, the girl forgets that it happened afterward, avoiding a lot of awkwardness. (You know, because dating sims never deal with all of that icky “relationship” junk.)

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the boy has really only mastered the art of winning the hearts of girls in dating sims and his claim to notoriety is that he has played through 10,000 dating sim endings. He spends most of his days either playing dating sims on his PFP (heh), or posting advice to others on forums and by e-mail as “The God of Conquest”. He has not even so much as held a real girl’s hand in his life!

But the contract between them has already been arranged and neither can back out now; a collar on each of their necks threatens to remove their heads if they do! So to make the best of a bad situation, the boy applies what he has learned from dating sims to real love, with a little help from his demon partner.

The demon is, of course, a really cute girl with a skull accessory in her hair, a rather odd straw broom that she carries everywhere, and a fluffy ribbon that floats around her and which affords her some special powers.

What I like about it

After reading the premise, you might wonder why there has never been an anime like this before. After all, dating sim games have been a staple of Japanese video gaming for a long time. But thinking back over all of the series that I know of, I can say with confidence that this particular concept has never been done before. KamiNozo (short form of the title based on the Japanese title) scores serious points for novelty in an industry currently dominated by “moeblob” and “me-too” shows.

Not only is the premise novel but the way it is executed makes it delightfully funny. Otaku may identify slightly with the hero’s obsession with dating sim games and their various clichés and tropes, as well as a few parody references to real games thrown in for good measure (for example, a sign and poster for “LoveMinus” displayed in the background). Non-otaku can cringe and laugh at the hero’s awkwardness in being forced to apply those principles of dating sim games to real life.

It’s cute, romantic, awkward, well-animated, and makes a subtle statement about Japanese society (in particular, otaku). In short, it’s a combination of many things that I like in other series.

What I don’t like about it

The pacing confused me a bit. In the first episode, the basic elements are put in place and the hero even manages to draw out one loose soul for capture. The second episode spends half of its time on developing the relationship between the hero and demon girl and then starts a hunt for a second loose soul that isn’t completed until the end of the third episode. The fourth episode is entirely spent on an unrelated story about the hero’s obsessive quest to finish a game that everyone else has given on because of the hundreds of bugs that cause the game to glitch out and go into infinite loops.

I realized later that there are only five (?) girls excluding the demon in the credits, so it looks like they’ll all be spread out throughout the episodes.

Sometimes, watching the hero pull a rather dramatic gesture right out of a dating sim and the girl actually falling for it seems like it’s making a statement that girls are rather simplistic and shallow. In short, this series suffers from the usual subtle sexism that pervades anime aimed at a largely male demographic. However, there is considerably less fan service than a lot of shows out there, so KamiNozo manages to remain tasteful, in my opinion.

In summary

Novel concept, pretty funny, can appeal to a wide audience, but is sometimes ever-so-slightly sexist. Still, definitely a must-see for the Fall 2010 season.