For the past two months, a Reddit user by the name of Silly-Milly-420 has been hosting a “Best JRPG” of the year poll on the subreddit r/JRPG. As of this writing, they’ve covered the years between 1986 and 1998. To little surprise, the winners tended to be the most popular games—the ones which had received official English releases and had reviewed well. Yet more than just simply stage a popularity contest, Silly-Milly-420 provided historical context for each year, going over the games which were released and their impact. These posts were appended with a collage of the games in question, and at a glance, one could see that games which were never localized in English were also included in the running. In short, the polls were an attempt to be as inclusive as possible, taking in a global rather than North American perspective on the genre.
Now, when it came to the year 1997, it’s rather obvious that Final Fantasy VII (Squaresoft) would win. After all, it’s the game which ushered the JRPG into the global mainstream. In anticipation, Silly-Milly-420 stipulated that posters must choose a game besides Final Fantasy VII. Consequently, Final Fantasy Tactics (Squaresoft) was voted as the best JRPG of the year. Runner-ups included Grandia (Game Arts) and Symphonia of the Night (Konami). Anyone who browses Reddit and expects a bastion of counterculture will have only themselves to blame. I’m not writing this article to decry the results. Rather, it’s an excuse to write about the state of the JRPG in 1997.
Eschewing the mainstream sensibilities of Final Fantasy VII, a handful of games from the year embraced a more experimental approach, borrowing elements from the RPG genre rather than adopting their entire structure wholesale. As one reader put it in a letter to the Japanese video game magazine, Nice Games, these games were “RPG-like” (RPG モドキ). They included Moon: Remix RPG Adventure (Love-de-Lic); Velldeselba Senki: Tsubasa no Kunshou (Tenky); and Kowloon’s Gate (Zeque). To this we may add Princess Crown (Vanillaware); World Neverland: Olerud Oukoku Monogatari (Riverhill Soft); Vantage Master (Nihon Falcom); Daikoukai Jidai 2 (Koei); Kunoichi Torimoncho (Polestar); and Milandra (Tomcat System).
As I’ve touched upon in my articles “Clair Obscur and Genre Trouble” and “A Response to Polygon,” as a genre descriptor that emerged from the Anglosphere, the cultural memory of what we call “JRPGs” is shaped by the games which were localized, hence, even if we were to exclude Final Fantasy VII, as the Reddit thread proves, the next popular titles would only just be Tactics, Grandia, and Symphony of the Night, the latter which invited at least one reaction that it wasn’t a JRPG—one can only imagine the response if they were aware of even more radical RPG-like games.
Speaking from the perspective of North America, our understanding of the JRPG is skewed. To clarify, this doesn’t mean that Final Fantasy VII is only considered the best JRPG of the year because it was localized. Even a game such as Moon, which has now become a highly regarded cult-hit, earned an average score of 63/100 in Dengeki PlayStation, and so I doubt its fortunes would have fared better in North America circa 1997. The putdown from critics would have been more brutal than their treatment of SaGa Frontier (Squaresoft, 1997). Yet, I do think the work of fan-translators can also be understood as attempts to disrupt the canon by expanding the availability of more games. Hilltop, for example, translated the “phantom masterpiece” Linda³ Again (Alfa System, Mars, 1997) and have just recently announced that a translation for Kowloon’s Gate is slated for a June 9th release—coincidentally, two games from 1997! But to repeat this point for the third time, if we’re to consider that not one poster mentioned Linda³ Again—although it was explicitly listed in the running—I don’t think fan translations shift the larger perception of the genre, perhaps save for titles which were already popular, such as Final Fantasy V (Square, 1992) and Mother 3 (Bonnie Brown and HAL Laboratory, 2006). Still, as the anime scholar Thomas LaMarre argues, fans possess a labor power that runs counter and coterminous to official industries.1
In short, this is all to say that I think these series of polls are a good demonstration of the limits of knowledge production when it comes to the JRPG, and that these discourses developed differently throughout the world as they were based on what was available. Note that in my writing I don’t discuss how Europe perceives the JRPG if only because the localization of the genre developed differently than it did in North America.
As a compliment to this article, I’ve translated a brief article from Nice Games wherein a reader sent their top 5 RPG-like games. Three titles are from 1997 and two are from 1998. I believe that list makes a nice contrast. For a limited time, the article will be available to read for free on the Ogre Run patreon page, located here. Finally, links to every poll held by Silly-Milly-420 can be found on the bottom of this page.
Silly-Milly-420’s Best JRPG of the Year Poll
1998: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1tnnyf6/day_14_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1998/
1997: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1tk4fam/day_13_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1997_besides/
1996: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1th4fji/day_12_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1996/
1995: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1tdbad7/day_11_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1995/
1994: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1taibtg/day_10_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1994/
1993: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1t6qf7i/day_9_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1993/
1992: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1t40os6/day_8_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1992/
1991: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1t0b2cd/day_7_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1991/
1990: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1sxanqc/day_6_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1990/
1989: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1stwsmq/day_5_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1989/
1988: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1sqyt7b/day_4_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1988/
1987: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1snjtja/day_3_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1987/
1986: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1ske0kk/day_2_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_1986/
1982 – 1985: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1sgdwyo/day_1_what_is_the_best_jrpg_of_19821985/
- Thomas LaMarre, “Otaku Movement,” in Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 361. ↩︎
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LaMarre, Thomas. “Otaku Movement.” In Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, edited by Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian, 358–394. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.