Fight, Magic, Items

Author’s Note

This book is a guided experience following my journey as a Japanese roleplaying game (Japanese RPG or JRPG) fan. It’s my voice and memories, and those of many fine people I met and spoke with along the way. I am an unreliable narrator, and this story reflects that. When I set out to write the history of JRPGs from a Western perspective, I knew that the most compelling narrative I could tell was one steeped in my own story—my personal history with these video games. This medium encourages us to bring ourselves and our experiences into the games just as they leave their mark on us. I hope this book will help you better understand what it was like starting out as a young JRPG fan in the West in the ’90s and watching the genre’s evolution over the next decades, even if there are paths untraveled or corners important to your own experiences, at the time or since, that are unmarked by my footprints.

Broadly, the history covered in this book follows the emergence of JRPGs on Nintendo’s NES in their homeland during the early ’80s and through their golden age as they moved west to great acclaim and fanfare during the 16- and 32-bit eras (the generations of Nintendo’s Super NES and Sony’s PlayStation, respectively). Then we examine the challenges the genre faced during its dark ages at the dawn of the high-definition (HD) era (with the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360), explore its migration to handheld systems, and conclude with a look at its nostalgia-fueled resurgence happening now thanks to popular sequels and new games from young creators inspired by the classics and familiar faces alike.

To tell this story, I referenced my own personal history with some of the important games in the genre, conducted interviews with experts—ranging from game developers and writers to journalists, storytellers, and historians—and conducted detailed research of existing essays, reviews, books, and interviews. A list of referenced material can be found at the back of the book.

Prelude

How I Became a Dragonmaster

As a kid in the ’90s, I fought goblins and demons. I learned new magic spells and traded in old gear for shiny weapons. Raised rebellions, traveled through time, and rode a whale into space. I became the Dragonmaster and the Hero of Light.

Didn’t we all?

Besides being a Dragonmaster, I was an otherwise average Canadian teen. I’d regularly sequester in a dark bedroom with my friends, drenched in the phosphorous glow of a bulky tube TV, punk rock from The Offspring or NOFX drowning out the game’s built-in soundtrack, mutually entranced by the latest video game. We weren’t obsessed with the latest first-person shooter or strategy game. These weren’t Warcraft 2 LAN parties, and we weren’t playing DOOM II deathmatches into the wee hours. We were obsessed with Final Fantasy VI and Xenogears.

The creators of these Japanese roleplaying games (Japanese RPGs or JRPGs) handed me upgraded armor and sharper swords, pitted me against those goblins and dragons, and deemed me Dragonmaster. Like Warcraft 2 fanatics, I’d haul my game console and trusty computer monitor—an already-ancient-at-the-time Commodore 1702—to a friend’s house, where we’d set our tubes back to back (to avoid spoilers, naturally) and play these single-player games for hours. If you’ve got kids or a sibling, you’re familiar with the term “parallel play,” where two young children will play within each other’s vicinity without necessarily acknowledging each other. Gamers do this, too, and those evenings with my friends have become one of my foundational memories.

Our homework neglected, the bus rides to school the following morning were filled with in-depth discussions of our experiences with the JRPG of the month.

“Have you reached that part with Aeris yet?”

“Anyone got tips for the Black Dragon?”

“Hey, dude. Are you done with Xenogears yet? I really want to borrow it.”

As creators of some of the most popular video game franchises of all time in Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii are high on the list of visionaries to have left an immeasurable mark on the world. However, JRPGs like theirs weren’t always popular, and the genre’s rise to mega-popularity in the mid-’90s—as well as their lasting influence on modern games and pop culture—was a long and hard-fought journey.

This book is an exploration of how my experience wasn’t unique, that the special coming-together of Eastern and Western design philosophy, storytelling, history, and pop culture in JRPGs is a shared experience among millions of gamers. Fight, Magic, Items is the story of how JRPGs brought a genre to the masses and reached meteoric success thanks to some of the most brilliant and bold creators in gaming history.

My first exposure to JRPGs was during a visit to my friend’s house. While I chased down Krang in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan on my Nintendo Game Boy, he was moving a squat character around a large, multi-screen map on his in a game called Final Fantasy Legend II. I knew The Legend of Zelda, so the adventure game concept wasn’t strange. And when he let me give it a go, the maps shattered into a double-diamond pattern and were replaced with the static sprite of a cartoonish tiger and a menu with two options: Fight or Run. I was… unimpressed. Who wants to be navigating slow-paced menus when I can be slicing and dicing the Foot Clan with every button press?

Final Fantasy Legend II—from controversial game designer Akitoshi Kawazu—is not the game I’d use to introduce the genre to anyone, especially a platformer-obsessed kid. It was full of opaque gameplay systems, including a complex monster evolution system, that challenged genre newcomers to run before they even knew how to walk.¹ But, at the time, JRPGs were still finding their footing in North America, so there weren’t a lot of JRPGs to choose from on handheld devices—especially the ones I had access to. Sure, it was cool you could take a whole fantasy world on the go, but the moment-to-moment gameplay didn’t fire off any endorphins.

At least, not yet.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later, thanks to one of the most revered JRPGs of all time, that I discovered the beauty of JRPGs, and when the genre finally clicked with me, it became an obsession.

I was the oldest of three brothers, and we were… a lot, growing up. My parents did what any tired parents would do: hired the cool babysitter armed with a cache of video games. We spent most nights playing DOOM, but one time he brought something new and not at all like DOOM’s demon-infested fight for survival. Digitized organ music blared through TV speakers like a harbinger, ushering in a logo in with purple clouds and lightning: Final Fantasy III.

That night we explored the mines of Narshe, fled the Empire’s soldiers, and traveled in a moving castle beneath vast deserts. The bright flash when we stepped onto a glimmering save spot filled me with an indescribable sense of safety that I hadn’t encountered in video games. The games I’d played before were focused on gameplay and conflict, always keeping the player on their toes with a new challenge leaping onto the screen, but this was a story—a book I could play.

I was hooked.

From that point forward, I kept tabs on all the JRPGs I could find in the pages of Game Players, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Nintendo Power. I longed for the releases that never made it out of Japan and lusted over the games I couldn’t afford at Toys “R” Us. And there was one game that stood above them all, convincing me JRPGs were definitively my thing and every bit as worthwhile as the massive fantasy novels I was contemporaneously falling in love with. That game was Chrono Trigger.

I have vivid memories of reading and re-reading previews and reviews in gaming magazines. I counted down the days until my birthday, months after its official release, when I knew I’d be able to go with my dad to Toys “R” Us for a copy of my very own. I can see myself walking back to the car with the game in the shrink- wrap—finally mine—and reading the manual cover to cover on the long car ride home by the dim glow of passing streetlights.²

Where Final Fantasy III³ caused sparks in the gaming world of the mid ’90s, Chrono Trigger fanned those flames into wildfire. At around the same time, I was also discovering J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, the trading card game Magic: The Gathering, and Akira Toriyama’s legendary anime Dragon Ball Z. What really caught my attention when I discovered Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI was the way they combined fantasy tropes with science fiction, steampunk, and everything in between in a way that I wasn’t finding in books, but that suited my tastes perfectly. To my younger self, Chrono Trigger was a post-apocalyptic science fiction, a gothic vampire hunt, a tried-and-true medieval fantasy, and an over-the-top shonen anime all at once.

From 1995 on, I lived off epic fantasy novels and JRPGs—immersed in these brilliant worlds that seemed so much more complex and exciting than the real life of a high schooler living in a small island community in British Columbia. My teenage years coincided with what many JRPG fans consider the genre’s golden age—from the mid-’90s emergence of Final Fantasy on the Super NES through the absolute JRPG dominance of Sony’s PlayStation into the early 2000s. It was a heady time to be a JRPG fan with legendary game designers, writers, and artists working at the height of their careers—without a lot of corporate interference and at an absolutely dizzying pace.

When Final Fantasy XV released in 2016, it had been seven years since the previous mainline release in the series, Final Fantasy XIII⁴; however, during the ’90s, fans expected—and received—new entries in the series on a yearly basis. From 1999 to 2001, Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X were all released a year apart, and the seven previous titles were released over the span of a decade—and that was just Final Fantasy! When you started to add all the other high-caliber JRPGs during that period like Game Arts’ Grandia, Working Designs’ Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, and Namco’s Tales of Destiny, it was like drinking from a fire hydrant. Despite the rapid pace of releases and my meager wallet,⁵ I couldn’t get enough.

Some teenagers bonded over games of pickup basketball or late-night Dungeons & Dragons sessions, but for my group of friends, it was these JRPGs that glued us together, even as the combined gravity of high school social politics, dating, and the looming threat of adulthood tried to pull us apart.

“Yeah, dude, I heard you can revive her if you max out all your materia before facing Sephiroth!”

“Did you remember to equip the Dragon Armor before the battle started?”

“I just got to disc two, I think I’m almost done?”

Twenty years later, we still regularly connect over online video games to shoot the breeze from our different corners of the country. Like the PC RPGs that inspired them, JRPGs were (and still are) designed to be a predominantly singular experience, but they proved to be so much more than that—not just for my friend group, but for countless gamers over the years.

Our planet is overwhelmingly huge, and yet the art we create makes it feel like the most tight-knit of communities sometimes. My friends and I couldn’t have been less Japanese if we tried, but something about their cultural approach to video games (along with film and TV) just hit us in the right place at the right time. Before we knew it, fantastical Japanese coming-of-age stories became as foundational to our youth as Tolkien, pickup basketball, and punk rock.

Footnotes

1. I appreciate Final Fantasy Legend II’s quirks now specifically because Kawazu, who was part of Hironobu Sakaguchi’s team on the original Final Fantasy, experimented so much with the genre, even compared to other industry pioneers.

2. Can we pour one out for the game manuals of yore? Huge volumes with dozens of full-color pages, meticulously laying out gameplay systems, characters, and beefy walk-throughs for the game’s opening hours. I grieve for all the kids who don’t know the wonder of cracking open a game manual for the first time. It was glorious.

3. Not all the early games in the series made their way over to North America at first, so the publisher maintained a separate title scheme for each region. This was eventually rectified in 1997 when Final Fantasy VII released, and Square retroactively restored the Japanese title scheme to the older releases. They officially changed the name of this entry to Final Fantasy VI with a 1999 rerelease on the PlayStation. From here on out, I’ll be referring to the games in the series by their Japanese titles.

4. What about Final Fantasy XIV, you ask? Well, it is a massively multiplayer online RPG for the PC, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4—with a climatic development history that deserves more than a footnote.

5. I still owe my friend the fifty bucks he loaned me to buy Final Fantasy IX.