games

It's easy to look back on JRPG classics today, but 95-05 was also the dark ages of localization. So many titles got mangled that the mainstream perception of JRPGs was very similar to bad cult movies, especially during the trend chasing rush after Final Fantasy VII's success.

Even those that avoided translation butchery were still highly divisive outside of it's niche fanbase. The "western" RPG and JRPG divide was largely defined by people arguing over them in the 00s after western RPGs made their shift towards being narrative focused. The primary need for distinction, for the "western" RPG set at least, was that JRPG writing was seen as pretty poor. Ironic given some of the absolute slop "western" RPGs had put out that was being conveniently ignored in this argument, but I digress.

But that aside, yeah my anecdote was made with western RPGs in mind. There was a heavy emphasis on dungeon crawling and questing as a barebones narrative excuse to adventure. Kill monsters, get treasure. It's very much like the history of D&D in that way (not by accident). It's not until the late 90s, with games like Fallout and Baldur's Gate, that a shift occurred.

Even then, that shift was hardly over night. What defined something as an RPG was a big debate among that crowd. The systems crowd argued it was the mechanical structures brought over from TTRPGs, while the new wave of fans argued it was the narrative elements that made it unique. This hit it's peak as the genre hybridized with 'action' games and started to shed many of the TTRPG structures.

But that's all kind of irrelevant history. The video, and my response, is talking about broad popular trends and conceptions at the time. There were always exceptions, but the era the video mostly fawns over still hadn't even settled the "can games be art?" debate. The medium was still seen as very low-brow as a whole.