ReturnOfDevsman posted...
JRPGs are WRPGs are two separate genres, tbh. And the naming is honestly a slew of misnomers. They both get their DNA from tabletop RPGs, but the two are just built on totally different takeaways.
What it ultimately boils down to is this: a WRPG is about role playing, while a JRPG is about story. Now, that's a gross oversimplification. Obviously each do a lot of both, and that's true of just about any genre. But when you look at the basic appeal and the basic concepts that form these kinds of decisions, this is definitely the distinction.
Take, for example, Tales of Vesperia. This game would not have worked with a character creator. Reason being, our hero Yuri is written as a deconstruction of the genre itself. Notably, his foil Flynn is legitimately who the hero should have been, by genre conventions. And the majority of the story is spent commenting on how Flynn is ineffective in the world of the game because of that strict adherence to dogmatic virtues that simply don't work in this world. And a large part of that is his look, along with Yuri's. If you could make Yuri look like Flynn, I mean, it would work against what they're trying to do here.
But in contrast, you have something like Mass Effect, where Shepard's identity isn't the point. The point is you get to interface with this story the way that you want to, to the point that you can kill off entire civilizations if you want to. If your character is supposed to look the part, then it has to be up to you to decide how they look, since it's up to you what that part is.
This basically, I'd just add a few things.
One of the main reasons for the division in types/emphasis is that adding role-playing elements tends to reduce the depth and coherence of the story. This is why JRPGs focus so heavily on fixed backstories; it allows for much more sophisticated and rich storylines than if the protag is just whatever the player wants them to be. Also, adding more opportunities for choices greatly complicates designing the story, which usually also requires concessions to maintain a viable plot structure. Conversely, setting backstories and even character archetypes in stone obviously limits the player's freedom of choice in how they approach the game.
For example, the Mass Effect trilogy handled this about as well as I've ever seen in a WRPG, but even then there were points where the story was clearly constrained by the player's freedom of choice (for example, numerous plot points in ME3 essentially boil down to either the "intended" character doing something if they're alive, or some random substitute doing it if they're dead for a point/plot penalty; there are also the
Virmire survivors
who are practically identical after ME1).
These design tradeoffs are why the two subgenres exist and also why they've mostly remained separate even to this day. The nomenclature is kind of outdated at this point (Clair Obscur is made by a Western dev but is clearly a JRPG), but it's still true that Japenese devs tend to favor story while Western ones tend to favor role-playing and at this point it's unlikely to change considering how entrenched it is.