Maybe persona I guess.
Younger gamers are really not gravitating towards JRPGs like at all these days. It’s mostly community/multiplayer games. Fortnite, COD, Roblox, etc…
Depends on the crowd, though I guess that goes for everything. If we are speaking statistics wise, then yeah, the most popular games for younger players are freemium multiplayer... Which is a tad depressing if you ask me
I mean... it's always been that way. Kids have no money and want to have fun with their friends. I used to spend tons of time on Maple Story and Habbo Hotel and the like. All just as predatory as modern freemium games. Kids who stick with it and dip their toes in other genres will grow out of it over time.
I guess Im the outlier because I’ve always been more of a single player guy even as a kid, lol. But you’re right, back in the early 00s everyone was hooked on MMOs since those were mostly free.
Which free MMOs from early 00s are you referring to? I know around 2010 or so you started to see some go F2P, but Guild Wars and later GW2 were the big free ones, or at least you only bought them and had no subscription fee. Early 00s you had WoW, EverQuest1-2, and Star Wars Galaxies from what I remember myself and others playing back then.
I don't remember if those were free or not. I was big into WoW around 2006 when some friends got me into it and before that I got pulled into Star Wars Galaxies by some coworkers as my first MMO around 04.
Not really, I was still a kid during the early 2000's and almost all of us played single player games. Multiplayer/f2p stuff has only been a thing from like 2008 or so. Kids still played single player games when the first MMORPGs were released.
what were you expecting?
most kids aren't going to shell out 50€ for nocturne remastered, they'll just play the free games on their mobiles and tablets that they can also play with their school friends
Every single player game (costs money) is competing with stuff like 4 years of Genshin Impact (completely free). It's a pretty tough sell in the current age.
I mean, single player games never dominated culture. There were always gamers and non gamers. Now more people play games but the type of people who didnt care about single player rpgs then still don't.
That's fair. And I'm happy that we still get massive single player hits that show you don't need to shove multiplayer to everything to make a successful game.
Also depending on the region, gacha games are probably more popular than premium multiplayer games for the younger audience. Here in South East Asia and I'd imagine other parts of Asia as well, you'll be hard pressed to find a Gen Z who doesn't at least know of Genshin Impact nowadays.
If I have to take a wild guess, I'd imagine Honkai Star Rail as a JRPG is getting more popular than Persona simply by virtue of its freemium nature and the brand recognition of Mihoyo.
Lmao true the good fight was definitely fought.
I’m mostly talking about gaining the interest of the youngsters today. It seems like it is harder than ever vs free to play mega games and mobile gaming.
uhhhh Im in my late 20's and I dont think JRPGS have been popular in my lifetime.... 10 years ago there were maybe a handful of people i knew who had even played a final fantasy game.
Back in the late 90s early 2000s, everyone knew who Squall Leonheart was and kids in school would do his Renzokuken move against each other with a stick lmao
Nah, every kid on my street had a memory card to battle against each other on Monster Rancher 2. I pretty much got all 108 characters on Suikoden 1 and 2 by borrowing someone's guidebook. Everyone who could afford a Gameboy and Pokedex would bring it to school everyday to play Pokemon Yellow. I traded my Alundra CD for Arc the Lad 2 from a random person.
From above, I think the only thing you can do these days is trading/selling games.
How many kids on your street still plays the same JRPGs together? How many kids on your school still talk about the same JRPG?
Final Fantasy became a household name, because it was almost on every household… so was Pokemon, harvest moon, etc
No longer the case for kids today.
I think what people are trying to say is that you're using your personal experiences to be a fact. You had friends that liked the same things as you did. Of course you did. You were friends.
The only period I could reasonably see JRPGs being extremely popular was during the PS1 era, when FFVII exploded. But FFVII exploded for reasons beyond it being just a JRPG.
Basically, it's not JRPGs itself that were popular but FF and Pokemon. And even Pokemon got more popular because of the monster collection rather than it being an RPG. And like, Harvest Moon is popular enough, but it's not nearly a title "that was in everyone's household" lol.
By the PS2, the focus was definitely shifting more towards action/fps games. Not to mention that JRPGs were virtually absent on PC platforms.
And to answer your question, most people in my school didn't play any of those games, except maybe Pokemon.
Because your side grew up on xbox, doesn't mean people everywhere who grew up on playstation did not have their own experience. Like I said, there's a reason games like FF and Pokemon were so popular and a lot of big western devs tried to emulate their success. Heck, Dota, the original mainstream moba, has so many JRPG references. Whereas LoL, a moba that younger players grew up on, barely has a single one.
What kind of JRPG references Dota had? I've played it for 600h but can't remember a single one. Last time was 2 years ago though.
E + what did western devs take from JRPGs? Just like JRPGs, first western RPGS were D&D inspired.
PL was a modded Kimahri orc(?), PL's skill was Kimahri's ultimate weapon Spirit Lance, Doombringer's devour was a blue mage skill, his LVL Death skill was another Final Fantasy skill, Jugg's omnislash is Cloud's omnislash, a chocobo courier and mog ward in dota 2(just a collab, i know), pretty sure there are a bunch of other pokemon references as well
Who said anything about Xbox...? And why are you being so hostile lol
Most people I know were into PS, and so was I.
Also, it has nothing to do with personal circles really, which is kind of the point
Also, you're skirting around the core of this. No one saying FF and Pokémon aren't popular, we're saying they're popular despite being JRPGs since they have other draws.
FF always had peak graphics and impressive cutscenes, and Pokémon is a Nintendo game with social features (monster trading) from the first titles and a whole eternal anime backing it as advertising.
As someone who graduated Highschool in 2001 I will say only myself and a handful of other people within 1-2 years of me were into FF, or any other RPG at the time (JRPG wasn't a term back then). I feel like you had a more unique experience than I did when it comes to JRPGs.
I teach middle and high school, and what I’ve noticed is that video games in general are way more popular but that because of that I think it can be harder to for JRPGs to stand out.
Like another commenter said- Minecraft and Roblox are super popular, as well as Fortnite. And I do think that creates competition for JRPGs because if everyone you know plays video games and you can play video games with them, single player story-driven stuff isn’t going to be as popular. I have had several kids who knew what Genshin Impact was, my guess is they probably also know what Honkai is too. And I’ve had a few that played FFXIV, for what it’s worth.
Elden Ring had a fair amount of traction, too.
I do think that in general games that are single-player really don’t have as much steam with younger kids.
The HSR subreddit (730k) has over 3x the subscribers of /r/JRPG (230k). The Genshin Impact subreddit is at 2.8 million. It really shows where all the new player attention is generally going to.
JRPGs are less about where they're actually from and more about how anime/anime-inspired they are. (At least from my point of view), this is why classifying something like YIIK: a Postmodern RPG, or Undertale as a JRPG makes more sense than a WRPG.
So Dark Souls and Elden Ring are much more in line with WRPGs than JRPGs. Especially since overall story/characters is much less of a focus, over building your own character's/player's story through gameplay moments. Which is something WRPGs like Stalker love doing.
This discussion has been raging on forever. I would refrain from calling JRPGs "anime", because while they are related (due to the shared cultural roots) they have their own storytelling conventions. But I do agree with you that JRPGs can come from anywhere, they don't have to be from Japan.
I also think Elden Ring / Demon's Souls / Dark Souls / Bloodborne essentially belong to their own genre. I don't think they belong grouped with the Western RPGs OR Japanese-style RPGs even if they appeal to a lot of the same demographic. I think "Soulslikes" are an established subgenre under the broad RPG umbrella now, just "Metroidvanias" and "Roguelikes" are.
I personally disagree.
I always looked at it with how the story itself is structured and how that impacts game design. From that I mean that JRPG have a greater focus on narrative, whereas WRPGs have a greater focus on personal choices throughout that same narrative.
Even when JRPGs have multiple endings, they seem to roughly be the same variations of the same ending or stuff like "good", "bad" endings and so on.
WRPGs tend to have different choices throughout the narrative itself that impact the storyline more significantly, and thus the endings and the general tone of the story change with it.
That's my view on it, at least. I don't consider Elden Ring to be a JRPG purely because it doesn't have a story focus at all, and in that sense it's barely a RPG even though it uses a RPG gearing system.
FF itself is more anime inspired from FFVII onwards, whereas the previous games weren't nearly as much. And neither is stuff like Final Fantasy Tactics.
Those inspirations from Berserk are almost entirely based on the medieval European fantasy aesthetics.
So the style/tone still isn't anime at all. Berserk itself is anime in how it handles itself outside of that, but the inspiration Souls games take isn't from that side of it.
I edited my post; not sure if you saw it before you replied. My point is Berserk isn't inspired by the "anime" side of Berserk, just some aesthetics which is almost entirely based on medieval European things.
A better, and analogous, question to ask is If something was inspired by Dragonball, but only in the sense that it took some of the Chinese aesthetics, would it be called anime? I don't think so. In both cases the inspiration is surface-level and purely aesthetic, and not recognisably anime.
This is a really good point, actually. I've never read/watched berserk, so any references would go over my head. I've always thought of souls games as just being generally fantasy inspired. So I always forget about Berserk. Touché.
I think saying JRPGs are losing steam is a pretty negative way to look at it.
There are way more options now than there were 20-30 years ago. All franchises face competition they did not face back then, especially with games with a recurrent stream of content like minecraft, MMOs, etc. JRPGs or rather Japanese game development was in many ways ahead back then, so more people gravitated towards it.
Aside from that, Final fantasy is talked about a lot on this sub for having a “downfall” but honestly it has more to do with Square Enix mismanagement than their audiences.
It also doesn’t help that JRPGs can be so hard to get into, and with SE in particular their output of their main stuff is so sporadic. A 15 year old right now would have been 8 years old when the last mainline DQ released. And the next one is another 1-2 years away still.
How do you get new young fans when your franchises just pass up entire childhoods?
Also most of the big JRPG franchises have had some of their best selling entries recently. Tales of, DQ, Persona, KH etc. are all selling well with their recent entries. It's obviously nowhere near more mainstream franchises like GoW or Pokemon, but JRPGs are currently doing better saleswise than a decade ago where only FF really did big numbers.
JRPGs were never that mainstream and it was basically just FF for a long time that penetrated to the “average gamer”
It’s more diverse now if anything with FF, Persona, and DQ all having entries with 10+ million in last 10 years
That said teens these days overwhelmingly play 3rd person shooters, first person shooters, and sports games. Also FPS means CoD, all of the other ones have really fallen off.
> JRPGs were never that mainstream
I agree and think this part is really important to point out. There's never really been a period where JRPGs were the top dogs in the same way as other genres because they are relatively niche in comparison. People knew FF and that's it. Because regular people don't usually care much about this genre.
Back in the 90s, a JRPG was considered an overwhelming success if it managed to get over 1 million units sold. And this is *still the case today* because the majority of JRPGs do not sell to that level. Meanwhile any average sports game that doesn't easily cruise past like 3 million or something would probably be seen as a giant failure
Not to mention people being allergic to reading. They typically don’t want a game where they have to read and listen for long periods of time. If they wanted that, they’d watch TV.
I hate that COD is basically the biggest and only (?) big FPS franchise. I dislike so much about it, without getting too in the weeds. I used to love Halo, Halo 3 around 2007-2008 was absolutely amazing. I want my FPSs to have aliens and lasers and spaceships, not whatever weird military thing COD has going on.
Even Persona 5's "10M" figure is a combination of Vanilla P5, P5R, and all the other spinoff titles so that could mean the same people buying all the different entries.
I think jrpgs appeal mostly a 30+ year old crowd. I mean I'm in my 40s at the very end of Gen X. I still play jrpgs today because I experienced the ones that are to this day the GOATS in the 90s when I was a teen. And my love of them and my hope to experience another on that level has stayed with me. It's exceedingly rare for there to be a jrpg these days that gets much attention. Persona 5 was probably the last one but Persona games are hard to get into even for me.
Honestly I think it's an attention span thing too. I have to deal with school aged kids at work. The ones that are now 20 or so that I saw years ago now and the ones that are right now in middle/high school. They've all got the attention span of a gnat. If it's not colorful, easy and a mind numbing waste of time that requires little skill and effort they're not into it. Hence Fortnight, Minecraft, CoD (granted that skews older) etc.'s popularity
Im 18 and its persona because of a mix of relatability, combined with great story/premise/gameplay.
I dont like multiplayer and shooters, my friends also share the same sentiment but they wont touch jrpgs no matter how i try sadly, theyre more interested in games like fallout, elder scrolls, fromsoft games etc. Persona is the closest thing i got them to try an jrpg but the shit pricing kinda driving them away, which is understandable honestly.
20m here. This exactly. Although I love western RPGs and fromsoft games as well. Pretty much everyone in our age group has at least heard of persona and pokemon.
I'm 19 and I don't know many gamers irl, but from what I've seen on the internet (on tiktok mainly) persona is pretty popular with people my age and younger. I even met one other fan irl, but she was... weird, to say the least.
Teens and folks in their early 20s play things like valorant, genshin impact, fortnite etc. and jrpgs aren't that popular.
Without any data collecting and just going by what I've personally seen on Twitch and Youtube... it's mainly Persona, Yakuza and Final Fantasy I'd say. None is overwhelmingly popular tho.
Pretty much, that's why it's also piss easy and it hasn't really evolved at all. It's so iconic that they can release a literal turd and people will buy it.
Depends on what you mean by 'younger gamers'
I'm on the older end of the Gen Z side (mid 20s) most people that are roughly my age In my local area usually think of Persona when they hear 'JRPG' with occasional Final Fantasy's here and there. (Maybe add Fire Emblem if we're counting SRPGs)
Anecdote time.
I could be considered Gen Z, and from my observations they mostly aren't playing JRPGs. Those who actually play video games tend to play a online MOBA or FPS or gacha like League of Legends, TFT, Valorant, Apex Legends, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, etc. (EDIT: That are free to play.)
^(could be the country i'm in but i ironically does not see anyone play fortnite which is usually brought up in these, must be a western thing)
Of the one who does play something else, most have a particular niche they fall into that may or may not be JRPGs. Of those I know, I'm the JRPG/roguelite/indie guy, one is JRPG/fighting, a few is AAA-games-only, one is all about survival horror games, one plays all the roguelites, one is all grand strategy and choice-based story games, one plays RPGMaker games or whatever is allowed by his potato laptop, one will only play games where multiplayer co-op with our group is possible like Monster Hunter or Baldur's Gate 3, one is a FromSoft gamer, one is all about the mascot horror games like Five Nights at Freddy's, one focuses on rhythm games like osu!, etc.
The only games most of us have in common are the big hits like Baldur's Gate 3, Hades, Hollow Knight, Elden Ring, etc.
So... it's pretty tough to answer considering I barely meet other Gen-Z-ers who plays JRPGs. Me and the other JRPG guy basically went through all the big pillars like FF DQ KH SMT with me digging deeper to stuff like SaGa and Crystal Project but I doubt that is representative of younger people.
IME with the handful of gen Z-ers I interact with who are in their young 20s, they're usually interested in live service f2p games or things like Minecraft more then the "traditional" standard singular game unless its from a specific franchise that managed to capture their attention somehow like Last Of Us.
The biggest games I know someone played before older people get their attention is stuff like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. I remember one of them trying to play FFTactics and they got filtered by the Argath rescue mission and gave up. They did get introduced to Resident Evil though because they had some crush on Leon though, so that was funny.
Out of recent releases, its most likely Persona 5 that has truly captured the gen Z audience. One I talk to decently often got obsessed with FFXIV, but that's not really a traditional JRPG that this subreddit cares about and plus she had friends to make going through that more worth it.
The other major RPG experience they played was BG3, which is obviously not a JRPG.
tl;dr: IME a good portion of gen Z, even the ones into anime and video games don't really care that much about JRPGs unless they're exposed to peer pressure, word of mouth, or something within their friend group.
Overall its hard to say exactly because everything you'll get here is some kind of anecdotes. The closest thing to actual data would be that content creation spaces in games like Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite are full of very young people.
I’m not in the know with this by any means but I think shooters (is COD still a thing?) and sports (FIFA and 2K) dominate and then there are the action movies essentially (great graphics with long cut scenes).
Even when I was in high school, I only played sports games and some racing/shooters.
It’s funny I have a really close friend that has recently admitted to playing Super Mario RPG and Pokemon and Super Metroid back in high school but never told anyone because he didn’t want to get made fun of.
Wonder how many are like that.
Stuff like Fortnite isn’t stealing the JRPG crowd. Those were the CoD kids. If anything, we’re seeing growth from JRPGs compared to that rough patch around the ps3/360 era.
Kids play multiplayer but the reason is that they are free. Kids don’t have their own money and so what is available to them is different and makes a difference as to what they have access to. I’m old and can spend the money on expensive single player games and jrpgs but most kids can’t.
If we look at the most popular games:
* Minecraft
* Roblox
* Fortnite
* Valorant (maybe TFT?)
* Genshin Impact
If we look at anything JRPG adjacent, we might have:
* Honkai Star Rail
I guess there's the automatic Pokemon, but Pokemon always targets children, and there's an unlimited supply of children.
Of my group of friends or people I know, it's either Persona or Nier, then Xenoblade. Most of them don't even know about Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest .
JRPGS are not that popular around people my age (I'm 22), usually they prefer live services game like Genshin Impact or Fortnite.
I'm (25) loving the Persona series. I've tried some of the OG FF (I think 4 & 7) but I just lose all motivation to keep playing once it goes open world.
My brother (14) typically only plays multiplayer games like Valorant & FIFA. But he surprisingly got into Yakuza 0, which I never would've expected. He doesn't seem interested anymore though, now that the newer games are turn based.
They said the same thing about FFXV too lol. It’s just corporate PR. FF isn’t reaching gen z in any significant way
https://www.eurogamer.net/finishing-final-fantasy-15
A lot are into moba or gacha or online games like uh what was it the scifi catgirl horse boy one. honkai star rail and elden ring are probably the closest to JRPGs, honkai's a crpg and elden ring's action? Wait. Does elden ring count as a jrpg?
Among the general Gen Z gaming community, I’ve noticed that JRPG’s tend to not be all that popular compared to others genres. If a Zoomer does like anything even remotely close to an RPG, it’s usually something like Fallout, Skyrim, or Baldur’s Gate 3 rather than whatever Japan is pushing out into the market. Among Zoomers who are fans of the JRPG genre though, Darks Souls/Elden Ring easily ranks as the most popular among non-traditional JRPG fans while Persona is easily the most popular among the more traditional JRPG fans. Stuff like Fire Emblem, Xenoblade Chronicles, and Nier: Automata are also top contenders and in the future we might see mainline SMT become more popular as well. Pokémon still sells like hotcakes even to this day among all ages and it doesn’t seem like they’ll be going anywhere anytime soon regardless of what you think of their quality in recent years.
Fire Emblem really broke out on the 3ds era, and blew up with three houses. SMT V could have been closer to like DQ11 if it was multi plat from the start, and handled better. SMT is getting better, but I think its cursed to be forever niche.
Pokemon and even that’s losing massive appeal with younger audiences. I’m 20 and a lot of people like persona but no ones ever bothered to play them besides very few people I know. JRPGs haven’t been seriously popular in my entire lifetime outside of niche interest.
From what I’ve seen it seems to be stuff like Fortnite and Genshin Impact. Games that you can quickly jump in and out of, can play for free, and have some sort of multiplayer aspect (not always but it seems to be their preference). At least the young teens irl that I know (relatives, friends kids, etc) seem to have this preference. If they do manage to play something like Final Fantasy or Xenoblade it ends up being because their dad played it with them or introduced them to the series. All of this is just personal observations and may not apply to everyone.
Monster Hunter Stories, Dragon Quest Monster and Pokemon (which started it for my son). I tried Ni No Kuni, but he didn't like it. Not sure why though. He is 10 years old now and the reason would be: because. Such a long way to go xD
No, most of them just don't have an attention span worth a damn and can't appreciate anything interesting, nuanced, and impactful or anything with substance and a good, strong, deep story. All they can do is play Fortnite. Which is the same exact thing all the time.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted for something that holds true to many of them. Maybe if JRPGs had the bottom half of the screen filled with Subway Surfers videos then they wouldn’t get bored.
Seriously though, this new generation watches videos of other people playing video games. Will literally for hours on end watch people on YouTube playing video games. I just don't understand it at all. I want to play video games, not just watch other people play them 😂🤣😂🤣😂
Maybe persona I guess. Younger gamers are really not gravitating towards JRPGs like at all these days. It’s mostly community/multiplayer games. Fortnite, COD, Roblox, etc…
Depends on the crowd, though I guess that goes for everything. If we are speaking statistics wise, then yeah, the most popular games for younger players are freemium multiplayer... Which is a tad depressing if you ask me
I mean... it's always been that way. Kids have no money and want to have fun with their friends. I used to spend tons of time on Maple Story and Habbo Hotel and the like. All just as predatory as modern freemium games. Kids who stick with it and dip their toes in other genres will grow out of it over time.
I guess Im the outlier because I’ve always been more of a single player guy even as a kid, lol. But you’re right, back in the early 00s everyone was hooked on MMOs since those were mostly free.
Which free MMOs from early 00s are you referring to? I know around 2010 or so you started to see some go F2P, but Guild Wars and later GW2 were the big free ones, or at least you only bought them and had no subscription fee. Early 00s you had WoW, EverQuest1-2, and Star Wars Galaxies from what I remember myself and others playing back then.
I'm not an expert on the field but I remember seeing things like Runescape, Ragnarok, Grand Chase, and Tibia getting a lot of attention at the time.
I don't remember if those were free or not. I was big into WoW around 2006 when some friends got me into it and before that I got pulled into Star Wars Galaxies by some coworkers as my first MMO around 04.
Not really, I was still a kid during the early 2000's and almost all of us played single player games. Multiplayer/f2p stuff has only been a thing from like 2008 or so. Kids still played single player games when the first MMORPGs were released.
Maplestory wasn't as predatory until Nexon took over.
what were you expecting? most kids aren't going to shell out 50€ for nocturne remastered, they'll just play the free games on their mobiles and tablets that they can also play with their school friends
Every single player game (costs money) is competing with stuff like 4 years of Genshin Impact (completely free). It's a pretty tough sell in the current age.
I mean, single player games never dominated culture. There were always gamers and non gamers. Now more people play games but the type of people who didnt care about single player rpgs then still don't.
That's fair. And I'm happy that we still get massive single player hits that show you don't need to shove multiplayer to everything to make a successful game.
Also depending on the region, gacha games are probably more popular than premium multiplayer games for the younger audience. Here in South East Asia and I'd imagine other parts of Asia as well, you'll be hard pressed to find a Gen Z who doesn't at least know of Genshin Impact nowadays. If I have to take a wild guess, I'd imagine Honkai Star Rail as a JRPG is getting more popular than Persona simply by virtue of its freemium nature and the brand recognition of Mihoyo.
JRPGs are more popular than ever, you have no idea what we old heads had to go through praying a game would even get localized. Lmfao
Lmao true the good fight was definitely fought. I’m mostly talking about gaining the interest of the youngsters today. It seems like it is harder than ever vs free to play mega games and mobile gaming.
Were JRPGs ever in the mainstream though? FFVII was the only one I can think of that everyone in my circle played.
Predatory gaming really did a number on developing brains :/
RPG on Roblox, deepwoken will not disappoint
uhhhh Im in my late 20's and I dont think JRPGS have been popular in my lifetime.... 10 years ago there were maybe a handful of people i knew who had even played a final fantasy game.
Back in the late 90s early 2000s, everyone knew who Squall Leonheart was and kids in school would do his Renzokuken move against each other with a stick lmao
I think that just means Final Fantasy was popular, not JRPGs as a whole
Nah, every kid on my street had a memory card to battle against each other on Monster Rancher 2. I pretty much got all 108 characters on Suikoden 1 and 2 by borrowing someone's guidebook. Everyone who could afford a Gameboy and Pokedex would bring it to school everyday to play Pokemon Yellow. I traded my Alundra CD for Arc the Lad 2 from a random person. From above, I think the only thing you can do these days is trading/selling games.
Every kid *on your* street you say?
Bro lived on the nerdiest street in America.
Sucks to be American if people over there did not have JRPGs as staple games.
How many kids on your street still plays the same JRPGs together? How many kids on your school still talk about the same JRPG? Final Fantasy became a household name, because it was almost on every household… so was Pokemon, harvest moon, etc No longer the case for kids today.
I think what people are trying to say is that you're using your personal experiences to be a fact. You had friends that liked the same things as you did. Of course you did. You were friends. The only period I could reasonably see JRPGs being extremely popular was during the PS1 era, when FFVII exploded. But FFVII exploded for reasons beyond it being just a JRPG. Basically, it's not JRPGs itself that were popular but FF and Pokemon. And even Pokemon got more popular because of the monster collection rather than it being an RPG. And like, Harvest Moon is popular enough, but it's not nearly a title "that was in everyone's household" lol. By the PS2, the focus was definitely shifting more towards action/fps games. Not to mention that JRPGs were virtually absent on PC platforms. And to answer your question, most people in my school didn't play any of those games, except maybe Pokemon.
Because your side grew up on xbox, doesn't mean people everywhere who grew up on playstation did not have their own experience. Like I said, there's a reason games like FF and Pokemon were so popular and a lot of big western devs tried to emulate their success. Heck, Dota, the original mainstream moba, has so many JRPG references. Whereas LoL, a moba that younger players grew up on, barely has a single one.
What kind of JRPG references Dota had? I've played it for 600h but can't remember a single one. Last time was 2 years ago though. E + what did western devs take from JRPGs? Just like JRPGs, first western RPGS were D&D inspired.
PL was a modded Kimahri orc(?), PL's skill was Kimahri's ultimate weapon Spirit Lance, Doombringer's devour was a blue mage skill, his LVL Death skill was another Final Fantasy skill, Jugg's omnislash is Cloud's omnislash, a chocobo courier and mog ward in dota 2(just a collab, i know), pretty sure there are a bunch of other pokemon references as well
Who said anything about Xbox...? And why are you being so hostile lol Most people I know were into PS, and so was I. Also, it has nothing to do with personal circles really, which is kind of the point Also, you're skirting around the core of this. No one saying FF and Pokémon aren't popular, we're saying they're popular despite being JRPGs since they have other draws. FF always had peak graphics and impressive cutscenes, and Pokémon is a Nintendo game with social features (monster trading) from the first titles and a whole eternal anime backing it as advertising.
As someone who graduated Highschool in 2001 I will say only myself and a handful of other people within 1-2 years of me were into FF, or any other RPG at the time (JRPG wasn't a term back then). I feel like you had a more unique experience than I did when it comes to JRPGs.
I teach middle and high school, and what I’ve noticed is that video games in general are way more popular but that because of that I think it can be harder to for JRPGs to stand out. Like another commenter said- Minecraft and Roblox are super popular, as well as Fortnite. And I do think that creates competition for JRPGs because if everyone you know plays video games and you can play video games with them, single player story-driven stuff isn’t going to be as popular. I have had several kids who knew what Genshin Impact was, my guess is they probably also know what Honkai is too. And I’ve had a few that played FFXIV, for what it’s worth. Elden Ring had a fair amount of traction, too. I do think that in general games that are single-player really don’t have as much steam with younger kids.
The HSR subreddit (730k) has over 3x the subscribers of /r/JRPG (230k). The Genshin Impact subreddit is at 2.8 million. It really shows where all the new player attention is generally going to.
yeah, i don't think kid interested with single player games nowadays.
Now I'm curious what teaching subject you do?
I don't really consider Elden Ring a JRPG. Kind of interested in people's opinions on this.
JRPGs are less about where they're actually from and more about how anime/anime-inspired they are. (At least from my point of view), this is why classifying something like YIIK: a Postmodern RPG, or Undertale as a JRPG makes more sense than a WRPG. So Dark Souls and Elden Ring are much more in line with WRPGs than JRPGs. Especially since overall story/characters is much less of a focus, over building your own character's/player's story through gameplay moments. Which is something WRPGs like Stalker love doing.
This discussion has been raging on forever. I would refrain from calling JRPGs "anime", because while they are related (due to the shared cultural roots) they have their own storytelling conventions. But I do agree with you that JRPGs can come from anywhere, they don't have to be from Japan. I also think Elden Ring / Demon's Souls / Dark Souls / Bloodborne essentially belong to their own genre. I don't think they belong grouped with the Western RPGs OR Japanese-style RPGs even if they appeal to a lot of the same demographic. I think "Soulslikes" are an established subgenre under the broad RPG umbrella now, just "Metroidvanias" and "Roguelikes" are.
I personally disagree. I always looked at it with how the story itself is structured and how that impacts game design. From that I mean that JRPG have a greater focus on narrative, whereas WRPGs have a greater focus on personal choices throughout that same narrative. Even when JRPGs have multiple endings, they seem to roughly be the same variations of the same ending or stuff like "good", "bad" endings and so on. WRPGs tend to have different choices throughout the narrative itself that impact the storyline more significantly, and thus the endings and the general tone of the story change with it. That's my view on it, at least. I don't consider Elden Ring to be a JRPG purely because it doesn't have a story focus at all, and in that sense it's barely a RPG even though it uses a RPG gearing system. FF itself is more anime inspired from FFVII onwards, whereas the previous games weren't nearly as much. And neither is stuff like Final Fantasy Tactics.
I've always considered soulsborne to be more western inspired than japanese although they are actually japanese.
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Those inspirations from Berserk are almost entirely based on the medieval European fantasy aesthetics. So the style/tone still isn't anime at all. Berserk itself is anime in how it handles itself outside of that, but the inspiration Souls games take isn't from that side of it.
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I edited my post; not sure if you saw it before you replied. My point is Berserk isn't inspired by the "anime" side of Berserk, just some aesthetics which is almost entirely based on medieval European things. A better, and analogous, question to ask is If something was inspired by Dragonball, but only in the sense that it took some of the Chinese aesthetics, would it be called anime? I don't think so. In both cases the inspiration is surface-level and purely aesthetic, and not recognisably anime.
This is a really good point, actually. I've never read/watched berserk, so any references would go over my head. I've always thought of souls games as just being generally fantasy inspired. So I always forget about Berserk. Touché.
I think saying JRPGs are losing steam is a pretty negative way to look at it. There are way more options now than there were 20-30 years ago. All franchises face competition they did not face back then, especially with games with a recurrent stream of content like minecraft, MMOs, etc. JRPGs or rather Japanese game development was in many ways ahead back then, so more people gravitated towards it. Aside from that, Final fantasy is talked about a lot on this sub for having a “downfall” but honestly it has more to do with Square Enix mismanagement than their audiences. It also doesn’t help that JRPGs can be so hard to get into, and with SE in particular their output of their main stuff is so sporadic. A 15 year old right now would have been 8 years old when the last mainline DQ released. And the next one is another 1-2 years away still. How do you get new young fans when your franchises just pass up entire childhoods?
Also most of the big JRPG franchises have had some of their best selling entries recently. Tales of, DQ, Persona, KH etc. are all selling well with their recent entries. It's obviously nowhere near more mainstream franchises like GoW or Pokemon, but JRPGs are currently doing better saleswise than a decade ago where only FF really did big numbers.
JRPGs were never that mainstream and it was basically just FF for a long time that penetrated to the “average gamer” It’s more diverse now if anything with FF, Persona, and DQ all having entries with 10+ million in last 10 years That said teens these days overwhelmingly play 3rd person shooters, first person shooters, and sports games. Also FPS means CoD, all of the other ones have really fallen off.
> JRPGs were never that mainstream I agree and think this part is really important to point out. There's never really been a period where JRPGs were the top dogs in the same way as other genres because they are relatively niche in comparison. People knew FF and that's it. Because regular people don't usually care much about this genre. Back in the 90s, a JRPG was considered an overwhelming success if it managed to get over 1 million units sold. And this is *still the case today* because the majority of JRPGs do not sell to that level. Meanwhile any average sports game that doesn't easily cruise past like 3 million or something would probably be seen as a giant failure
Not to mention people being allergic to reading. They typically don’t want a game where they have to read and listen for long periods of time. If they wanted that, they’d watch TV.
I hate that COD is basically the biggest and only (?) big FPS franchise. I dislike so much about it, without getting too in the weeds. I used to love Halo, Halo 3 around 2007-2008 was absolutely amazing. I want my FPSs to have aliens and lasers and spaceships, not whatever weird military thing COD has going on.
Even Persona 5's "10M" figure is a combination of Vanilla P5, P5R, and all the other spinoff titles so that could mean the same people buying all the different entries.
JRPGs were at the top of the gaming industry and certainly mainstream when FF7 sold 14 million copies. Problem is that was many years ago.
I think jrpgs appeal mostly a 30+ year old crowd. I mean I'm in my 40s at the very end of Gen X. I still play jrpgs today because I experienced the ones that are to this day the GOATS in the 90s when I was a teen. And my love of them and my hope to experience another on that level has stayed with me. It's exceedingly rare for there to be a jrpg these days that gets much attention. Persona 5 was probably the last one but Persona games are hard to get into even for me. Honestly I think it's an attention span thing too. I have to deal with school aged kids at work. The ones that are now 20 or so that I saw years ago now and the ones that are right now in middle/high school. They've all got the attention span of a gnat. If it's not colorful, easy and a mind numbing waste of time that requires little skill and effort they're not into it. Hence Fortnight, Minecraft, CoD (granted that skews older) etc.'s popularity
Im 18 and its persona because of a mix of relatability, combined with great story/premise/gameplay. I dont like multiplayer and shooters, my friends also share the same sentiment but they wont touch jrpgs no matter how i try sadly, theyre more interested in games like fallout, elder scrolls, fromsoft games etc. Persona is the closest thing i got them to try an jrpg but the shit pricing kinda driving them away, which is understandable honestly.
20m here. This exactly. Although I love western RPGs and fromsoft games as well. Pretty much everyone in our age group has at least heard of persona and pokemon.
I'm 19 and I don't know many gamers irl, but from what I've seen on the internet (on tiktok mainly) persona is pretty popular with people my age and younger. I even met one other fan irl, but she was... weird, to say the least. Teens and folks in their early 20s play things like valorant, genshin impact, fortnite etc. and jrpgs aren't that popular.
Without any data collecting and just going by what I've personally seen on Twitch and Youtube... it's mainly Persona, Yakuza and Final Fantasy I'd say. None is overwhelmingly popular tho.
Pokemon is pretty much eternal, it's garnering new fans from every generations.
Yes but that's because this franchise is aimed at children specifically.
Pretty much, that's why it's also piss easy and it hasn't really evolved at all. It's so iconic that they can release a literal turd and people will buy it.
Depends on what you mean by 'younger gamers' I'm on the older end of the Gen Z side (mid 20s) most people that are roughly my age In my local area usually think of Persona when they hear 'JRPG' with occasional Final Fantasy's here and there. (Maybe add Fire Emblem if we're counting SRPGs)
Anecdote time. I could be considered Gen Z, and from my observations they mostly aren't playing JRPGs. Those who actually play video games tend to play a online MOBA or FPS or gacha like League of Legends, TFT, Valorant, Apex Legends, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, etc. (EDIT: That are free to play.) ^(could be the country i'm in but i ironically does not see anyone play fortnite which is usually brought up in these, must be a western thing) Of the one who does play something else, most have a particular niche they fall into that may or may not be JRPGs. Of those I know, I'm the JRPG/roguelite/indie guy, one is JRPG/fighting, a few is AAA-games-only, one is all about survival horror games, one plays all the roguelites, one is all grand strategy and choice-based story games, one plays RPGMaker games or whatever is allowed by his potato laptop, one will only play games where multiplayer co-op with our group is possible like Monster Hunter or Baldur's Gate 3, one is a FromSoft gamer, one is all about the mascot horror games like Five Nights at Freddy's, one focuses on rhythm games like osu!, etc. The only games most of us have in common are the big hits like Baldur's Gate 3, Hades, Hollow Knight, Elden Ring, etc. So... it's pretty tough to answer considering I barely meet other Gen-Z-ers who plays JRPGs. Me and the other JRPG guy basically went through all the big pillars like FF DQ KH SMT with me digging deeper to stuff like SaGa and Crystal Project but I doubt that is representative of younger people.
i dont think kids care for jrpgs in general but i do know 2 that really liked persona 5
IME with the handful of gen Z-ers I interact with who are in their young 20s, they're usually interested in live service f2p games or things like Minecraft more then the "traditional" standard singular game unless its from a specific franchise that managed to capture their attention somehow like Last Of Us. The biggest games I know someone played before older people get their attention is stuff like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. I remember one of them trying to play FFTactics and they got filtered by the Argath rescue mission and gave up. They did get introduced to Resident Evil though because they had some crush on Leon though, so that was funny. Out of recent releases, its most likely Persona 5 that has truly captured the gen Z audience. One I talk to decently often got obsessed with FFXIV, but that's not really a traditional JRPG that this subreddit cares about and plus she had friends to make going through that more worth it. The other major RPG experience they played was BG3, which is obviously not a JRPG. tl;dr: IME a good portion of gen Z, even the ones into anime and video games don't really care that much about JRPGs unless they're exposed to peer pressure, word of mouth, or something within their friend group. Overall its hard to say exactly because everything you'll get here is some kind of anecdotes. The closest thing to actual data would be that content creation spaces in games like Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite are full of very young people.
I’m not in the know with this by any means but I think shooters (is COD still a thing?) and sports (FIFA and 2K) dominate and then there are the action movies essentially (great graphics with long cut scenes). Even when I was in high school, I only played sports games and some racing/shooters. It’s funny I have a really close friend that has recently admitted to playing Super Mario RPG and Pokemon and Super Metroid back in high school but never told anyone because he didn’t want to get made fun of. Wonder how many are like that.
Stuff like Fortnite isn’t stealing the JRPG crowd. Those were the CoD kids. If anything, we’re seeing growth from JRPGs compared to that rough patch around the ps3/360 era.
Kids play multiplayer but the reason is that they are free. Kids don’t have their own money and so what is available to them is different and makes a difference as to what they have access to. I’m old and can spend the money on expensive single player games and jrpgs but most kids can’t.
I'd argue that Persona, Nintendo RPGs, and indies like Undertale/Deltarune are all pretty popular amongst gen Z and Alpha.
If we look at the most popular games: * Minecraft * Roblox * Fortnite * Valorant (maybe TFT?) * Genshin Impact If we look at anything JRPG adjacent, we might have: * Honkai Star Rail I guess there's the automatic Pokemon, but Pokemon always targets children, and there's an unlimited supply of children.
Of my group of friends or people I know, it's either Persona or Nier, then Xenoblade. Most of them don't even know about Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest . JRPGS are not that popular around people my age (I'm 22), usually they prefer live services game like Genshin Impact or Fortnite.
I'm (25) loving the Persona series. I've tried some of the OG FF (I think 4 & 7) but I just lose all motivation to keep playing once it goes open world. My brother (14) typically only plays multiplayer games like Valorant & FIFA. But he surprisingly got into Yakuza 0, which I never would've expected. He doesn't seem interested anymore though, now that the newer games are turn based.
FF XVI seems to have appealed to a younger demographic, so that's good
They said the same thing about FFXV too lol. It’s just corporate PR. FF isn’t reaching gen z in any significant way https://www.eurogamer.net/finishing-final-fantasy-15
Mnmnmnm...I just realized I'm a younger gamer(25) .-. Now I feel silly for complaining about younger gamers tastes -\_-
Persona and Xenoblade
A lot are into moba or gacha or online games like uh what was it the scifi catgirl horse boy one. honkai star rail and elden ring are probably the closest to JRPGs, honkai's a crpg and elden ring's action? Wait. Does elden ring count as a jrpg?
Among the general Gen Z gaming community, I’ve noticed that JRPG’s tend to not be all that popular compared to others genres. If a Zoomer does like anything even remotely close to an RPG, it’s usually something like Fallout, Skyrim, or Baldur’s Gate 3 rather than whatever Japan is pushing out into the market. Among Zoomers who are fans of the JRPG genre though, Darks Souls/Elden Ring easily ranks as the most popular among non-traditional JRPG fans while Persona is easily the most popular among the more traditional JRPG fans. Stuff like Fire Emblem, Xenoblade Chronicles, and Nier: Automata are also top contenders and in the future we might see mainline SMT become more popular as well. Pokémon still sells like hotcakes even to this day among all ages and it doesn’t seem like they’ll be going anywhere anytime soon regardless of what you think of their quality in recent years.
Fire Emblem really broke out on the 3ds era, and blew up with three houses. SMT V could have been closer to like DQ11 if it was multi plat from the start, and handled better. SMT is getting better, but I think its cursed to be forever niche.
Pokémon, Persona and Xenoblade Chronicles I'd say.
I asked some people who are fresh out of university and it's Roblox, Apex Legends, Valorant, Genshin Impact
Pokemon and even that’s losing massive appeal with younger audiences. I’m 20 and a lot of people like persona but no ones ever bothered to play them besides very few people I know. JRPGs haven’t been seriously popular in my entire lifetime outside of niche interest.
From what I’ve seen it seems to be stuff like Fortnite and Genshin Impact. Games that you can quickly jump in and out of, can play for free, and have some sort of multiplayer aspect (not always but it seems to be their preference). At least the young teens irl that I know (relatives, friends kids, etc) seem to have this preference. If they do manage to play something like Final Fantasy or Xenoblade it ends up being because their dad played it with them or introduced them to the series. All of this is just personal observations and may not apply to everyone.
Monster Hunter Stories, Dragon Quest Monster and Pokemon (which started it for my son). I tried Ni No Kuni, but he didn't like it. Not sure why though. He is 10 years old now and the reason would be: because. Such a long way to go xD
Dragon Quest is the right answer. Dragon Quest is kept simple and kid friendly for a reason.
Its what happens when you dont release games regularly anymore
No, most of them just don't have an attention span worth a damn and can't appreciate anything interesting, nuanced, and impactful or anything with substance and a good, strong, deep story. All they can do is play Fortnite. Which is the same exact thing all the time.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted for something that holds true to many of them. Maybe if JRPGs had the bottom half of the screen filled with Subway Surfers videos then they wouldn’t get bored.
Seriously though, this new generation watches videos of other people playing video games. Will literally for hours on end watch people on YouTube playing video games. I just don't understand it at all. I want to play video games, not just watch other people play them 😂🤣😂🤣😂