What I learnt from a Year of Playing JRPG Games - Year of the JRPG Review
72023 was the Year of the JRPG on A Friend Remembers!
A brief channel update and a round out review of 2023 - the Year of the JRPG on AFR!
From Wikipedia:
While the early history and distinctive traits of role-playing video games (RPGs) in East Asia have come from Japan, many video games have also arisen in China, developed in South Korea, and Taiwan.
While the Japanese video game industry has long been viewed as console-centric in the Western world, due to the worldwide success of Japanese consoles beginning with the NES, the country had in fact produced thousands of commercial PC games from the late 1970s up until the mid-1990s. The country's computer market was very fragmented at first; Lode Runner, for example, reportedly required 34 conversions to different hardware platforms. The market eventually became dominated by the NEC PC-8801 and PC-9801, though with some competition from the Sharp X1 and X68000; FM-7 and FM Towns; and MSX and MSX2. A key difference between Western and Japanese systems at the time was the latter's higher display resolutions (640x400) in order to accommodate Japanese text which in turn influenced game design. Japanese computers also employed Yamaha FM synthesis sound boards since the early 1980s, allowing video game music composers such as Yuzo Koshiro to produce highly regarded chiptune music for RPG companies such as Nihon Falcom. Due to hardware differences, only a small portion of Japanese computer games were released in North America, as ports to either consoles (like the NES or Genesis) or American PC platforms (like MS-DOS). The Wizardry series (translated by ASCII Entertainment) became popular and influential in Japan. Early Japanese RPGs were also influenced by visual novel adventure games, which were developed by companies such as Enix, Square, Nihon Falcom and Koei before they moved onto developing RPGs. In the 1980s, Japanese developers produced a diverse array of creative, experimental computer RPGs, prior to mainstream titles such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy eventually cementing genre tropes by the 1990s.
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In the 2010s, Japanese RPGs have been experiencing a resurgence on PC, with a significant increase in the number of Japanese RPGs releasing for the Steam platform. This began with the 2010 release of doujin/indie game Recettear (2007) for Steam, selling over 500,000 units on the platform. This led to many Japanese doujin/indie games releasing on Steam in subsequent years. The early part of the decade also saw the debut of Nihon Falcom's Ys series on PC as well as FromSoftware's Dark Souls, which sold millions on the platform. Other Japanese RPGs were subsequently ported to the platform, such as the previously niche Valkyria Chronicles and The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, as well as ports of several Final Fantasy games.
By 2015, Japan had become the world's fourth largest PC game market, behind only China, the United States, and South Korea. The Japanese game development engine RPG Maker has also gained popularity, with hundreds of games being created with it and released on Steam by the late 2010s.
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