Role Playing Games following a style popularized by Japanese developers. These games can be differentiated from
Western RPGs by having many of the following points:
- Created in Japan (or, more recently, China, Taiwan, or South Korea).
- Generally found on consoles (and more recently, handhelds) rather than a PC.
- Tend to follow linear plots, with less of a Wide Open Sandbox setting.
- The player usually controls a party of predesigned characters. The player is sometimes offered a choice of what characters to use, but not the option of designing his own protagonists.
- The party members are usually written into the plot, rather than blank slates.
- A linear plot and lack of character creation that, hopefully, allows a more cinematic and tightly-scripted story.
- Later games tend to have one or more elaborate, minigame-like "systems" (such as the License Grid in Final Fantasy XII) that allow skill and ability customization.
- Random Encounters are a common gameplay element, specially in older games.
- Turn-based combat is also prominent.
- A degree of Level Grinding is strongly encouraged, if not outright required, to proceed through the game.
- Most encounters are resolved through combat or cutscenes. Most quests and abilities are combat-oriented.
- Dice rolls are always hidden and stats are given as arbitrary numbers.
- Often contain a few Mini Games.
In the past, the Eastern format was arguably more prolific and hence more popular than the Western format, with even some Western games mimicking Eastern ones. Lately, however, the Western format is becoming more popular in the West, rivaling (and occasionally trumping) the Eastern format in popularity, partly due to progresses in technology making arguably more immersive games, which in turn has led to rising budgets. As a result, many Eastern development teams nowadays focus more on handhelds due to lower budgets.
The Eastern RPG genre has been building on the classic
Dragon Quest /
Final Fantasy formula (ironically inspired by the Western RPG
Wizardry) for a long time. With later generations, the gameplay has been mixing up with other genres (including
Action Games,
Adventure Games,
Simulation Games and
Strategy Games) though the general "explore / get into battles / some variation on turn-based combat" is still going strong for many games within the genre.
A subset of this genre is the
Action RPG, which mixes this type of gameplay with the
Action Adventure, so that while it keeps the strongly plotted story, anime characters, experience and statistics, the turn-based battle system is done away with in favor of a more real-time method of attack resembling
Action Games. Also, many
Turn Based Strategy games are done in "JRPG style" and are often referred to as "Strategy RPGs" or "
Tactical RPGs", though more recent examples of the subgenre have also incorporated
Real Time Strategy elements. Another subset is the
Dungeon Crawler, a subgenre that can include both Eastern and Western games, though this subgenre has become more popular in the East than it is in the West.
See also
How to Play a Console RPG.
Games in this genre:
