A common refrain I hear is “I have no clue what is happening, but the game is fun”. Did Japanese game writers just drink massive amounts and throw shit at the wall? :D

I don’t think there’s a single JRPG that I can remember the actual plot except the general gist.

Or is there some strange cultural reason these games had labyrinthe writing and just strange plots?

Maybe a JRPG historian can shed some light on this?

  • h0ll0w5p4c3 [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    6 days ago

    Writing is more constrained in simple fact that, well, they’re video games!

    I would say System Shock and the original Marathon trilogy prove you could have better writing but they do cheat making heavy use of logs. It in itself a clever way of working around the constraints.

    I think in a lot of cases this is down to non-writers writing stuff. Can non professional writers write good stuff? Yes! Can professional writers write utter crap? Yes!

    True, deadlines for translators also factor into the mix.