Discover Top Posts Tagged with #western jrpg

Sudeki

Climax Studios is one of those studios that kind of does everything. You see them crop up all the time, but outside of the Japanese market where these studios can carve out a place for themselves, a lot of western ones tend to be bought up and tossed away. Somehow, Climax has managed to survive, even as a subsidiary, and have had their hands in surprising places. From Silent Hill to Serious Sam, they have a habit of appearing where you’d least expect them. That goes double for one of Microsoft’s attempts to crack the Japanese market, the extremely Japanese-influenced Sudeki.

Omori

Mental health is not a topic all that common in the gaming industry. Sure, you may see it sprinkled here and there, but it’s not actively picked up for gaming stories. Thanks to the work of indie developers, however, this particular issue has become far more prevalent with games like Yume Nikki, Celeste, Lisa: The Painful and more recently, Omori.

Of course, one can’t talk about Omori without mentioning its difficult development hell. Omocat, the creator, initially kickstarted her project in 2014 with its planned release date being May 2015. She intended it to be a video game version of her drawings and comics of a hikikomori character she named “Omori.” However, May 2015 turned to 2016. Then 2016 to 2017… Eventually, 2019 passed, and the game still hadn’t been launched. Then finally, on December 25th, 2020, Omocat released the game as her Christmas gift to all her Kickstarter backers. Now was this wait worth it?

Without going into too much depth, yes, it was.

Stardew Valley

Sometimes, all you need for a direction is to take what you love and find ways to make it better. That sentence by itself grossly simplifies the four years Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone spent building Stardew Valley from the ground up by himself, the first two without publisher Chucklefish’s financial assistance. Yet, it is perhaps the purity of its purpose that best explains why it succeeds. Barone loved the old school pleasures of the early Harvest Moon games, farming RPGs that included the original SNES classic and follow-up tag team Harvest Moon 64 and Back to Nature. He was dissatisfied with the direction the franchise had taken, and his goal was to bottle up the same magic he found with the old games, power it up with the gloss and quality of life improvements of modern technology, and create a brand new title that still retained the simple charms of moving to a quaint village full of mystery, magic, and quirky characters.

Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator

We currently live in a resurgence of the classic style JRPG. Square-Enix has finally realized just what made their beloved classics so beloved in the first place and have been making games pushing their original foundations further. That’s not to mention the indie scene being filled with all sorts of titles paying homage to the greats of Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and many other legends, with many western developers picking up the reigns with the likes of Cosmic Star Heroine and Undertale. That said, western RPG developers paying homage to their Japanese contemporaries is hardly a new phenomenon. In the late 90s and early 2000s, when the JRPG ruled the Playstation, it was inevitable that a few studios would try capturing that magic in their own way. Septerra Core, from the short-lived Valkyrie Studios (staffed by former creators of the Bevis and Butt-Head PC adventure game), is one of those games, and it succeeded at a good portion of what it aimed to do. It’s biggest shortcomings mostly stem from the games it was inspired by.

Anachronox

What if Western devs started to develop JRPGs? Anachronox might be the answer to this question. Along with games from this same time period like Septerra Core (1999), Anachronox is an example of mixing Western and Eastern design philosophies. The result is a very original game with a flavor that mixes comedy, science fiction, cyberpunk, and film noir.

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