Before the title dismisses me as a Coors Light swilling FPS addict, let me make two things perfectly clear: First, I drink Miller. It's a more refined version of swill, and has a much more appealing label (just LOOK at that blue). Second, I cut my gaming teeth on games like the first Final Fantasy, logged more than 140 hours on Xenogears, and unlocked every Chrono Trigger ending. I've played them all, from Suikoden to Vandal Hearts to Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. In 1997, as a freshman in high school, I fielded a call from a friend who was actually crying when he got to the scene in FFVII in which Sephiroth kills Aeris. This is the kind of world I've come from. I've loved it, lived in it, been fostered to gaming maturity with it as my warm and nurturing base. Allow me now to explain why it has to be torn down, sown with quicklime, and left with fond memory, never to be revived.

Most devoted RPGers can recite the tropes of a proper JRPG with a knowing and almost kitschy delight. The cast will almost always be populated with malnourished androgynes (thanks Yahtzee) whose motivations toward questing for the good of the world split fairly evenly between blind zeal and apathetic whimsy. The genre suffers from a severe deficit of personality. The two archetypes are omnipresent in the standard JRPG story. In fact, they depend upon each other, feed off of each other, and work in concert to effectively destroy any semblance of cohesive theme or narrative. Consider the following example: In Final Fantasy VIII, the JRPG equivilent of first Spiderman movie, main character Squall is juxtaposed by carefree dimbulbs Zell and Irvine, whose attempt at joie de vivre is supposed to cast Squall's brooding in a more acceptable light. What it actually accomplishes is to undermine the potential of character development. By immediately establishing character type in such a contradictory manner, only two evolutions are possible: either Squall's moodiness infects the others, or their cheeriness infects him. Those who have played the game know that the latter is more or less true (he evolves from total dick to kind of a fucker), but, more importantly, his transformation removes the juvenile tension, and relegates the support characters to cardboard cutouts, their personalities having been crafted for the sole purpose of contradicting another, now less severe, personality.

Not all of this is the fault of poor character concept. The most hideously conceived designs of Tetsuya Nomura could, with the proper writing, be saved from the eventual collapse of the FFVIII narrative. Some might claim that the story of that game was doomed to begin with, what with the shared memory loss, time "kompression", and monsters having some sort of party on the moon, but those naysayers would be forgetting the near brilliant first disc, which, played through at a clip unconcerned with stat padding, is among the most engaging in the genre. The energy can't keep up with the writing, though. It's as if the creative team got tired, had a conference call with the big shots in Tokyo, and came up with the unbearable cockdribble we've all had to endure in some form or another since JRPGs decided they had to be dramatic.

This is no more visible than in one of my favorite games, Xenogears. When I think about Xenogears now, with its cultish following, overly dense pseudo-religious backstory (compiled in an inch-thick book that would be incomprehensible even if it were available in English) and three "prequels" (Namco's ill-conceived Xenosaga), I pause to wonder what I thought all the fuss was about. Maybe I was cowed by a game that had the balls to use religious symbolism in such a blatant way, or by the depth of feeling produced by the writing staff. It unfolds like an anime, and not the kind that features skinny Japanese boys not having sex with a bevy of impossibly hot girls with blue hair. It's more like a fantasy driven Neon Genesis Evangelion. Depending on which side of the crazy fence you reside, this can be a good or bad thing. What it means is that Xenogears is an ambitious game, but fails for a number of reasons.

First, it loses steam, collapses under its own weight, and by the beginning of the second disc, the game is more like an aging loved one. It doesn't look the same, sound the same, or behave the same. You know the game you love is in there, but it's just out of reach. Second, it is hampered by an impossibly bad translation. Contractions appear very seldom, and the only colloquialism that rears its head borders on overtly racist. Third, and most importantly, it shoulders all of its weight on two characters that have very little latitude to change. Fei and Elly certainly alter their roles, but are unable to break through and become anything substantive precisely because of the exhaustive work on building a huge backstory. Too much thought is wasted on how to make the gamer aware of the primary characters' destinies and identities. In brief, they begin the game with enormous potential and end it as tiresome symbols of Creationist myth. This pattern of character development heaps too much pressure in too small a place, and further marginalizes an already under-utilized supporting cast. I distinctly remember discussing Rico with one of my friends, who had played the game twice, and only remembered him when I added the modifier, "the guy who looks like Blanca."

So, why all of this caterwauling? Because the JRPG is a hallowed institution which has taken a great deal of heat in the past decade. The buzzword that is most often used to demonize them is "linear." This is a fairly limited term to descibe the basic flow of a game's plot. To call a game linear is to imply that the story limits the freedom of the gamer, and thus creates a less compelling experience. Perhaps the critics are right. After all, the production, conception, and sales of JRPGs have fallen outside the Land of the Rising Sun in drastic numbers (unless the title happens to be in any way called Final Fantasy). The NARPGs that have taken their place have fully embraced a concept of "non-linearity," which translates into a gaming experience that does not rely on a rigid plot structure. The most ready example would be the Elder Scrolls games. In a later essay, I'll discuss why the term "non-linear" is inoperative, and why "linear" is a blanket term for any attempt to tell a story. For the moment, however, the subject remains the necessary immolation of the JRPG story, which I'll wrap up with a final salvo.

Having surveyed the current state of the JRPG world, the only title stirring near the mainstream is Final Fantasy XIII, an elephantine marketing golem constructed to perpetuate the chokehold of Square Enix on the genre. Insofar as I can tell, the following will remain true: The characters will be designed by Tetsuya Nomura. They will wield hilariously unrealistic weapons and wear bandanas. Men and women will be distinguishable only by the presence of very prominent breasts. There will be at least one character who is dark, dangerous, and possibly haunted by a childhood/adolescence related tragedy. The characters will engage in jokey buffoonery with alarming frequency; a very serious character will eventually laugh at this after disapprovingly glaring at it for the first 30 hours. The story will devolve into an incomprehensible mishmash of metaphysical platitudes and end with a mind-blowing apocalyptic battle somewhere in the sky. This is what I know. I'll play it. I might even enjoy myself. But deep inside my literary heart, I'll be sharpening the guillotine blade.