The JRPG is a troubled genre in a wild and unpredictable medium. Not one generation ago, the PlayStation 2 was host to everything from obscure one-shots (Ephemeral Fantasia, Tsugunai: Atonement) to celebrated series (Suikoden, Final Fantasy) and just about everything in between. Looking over Sony's RPG offerings for PS3 is a much more dismal enterprise. Most of the notable titles seem to be American-developed actioners with RPG elements, while the Japanese games are uninspired, halfhearted, or DLC packs for Hyperdimension Neptunia. Nearly every new IP released this generation was met with relative indifference, but the franchises have been hit just as hard. Suikoden is MIA, Tales has never been worse than the dismal Graces f, Star Ocean has lost its way completely, and Final Fantasy XIII is Square-Enix's signed confession that they've forgotten what made the series so great.
When Mass Effect 3 came out, I took the successes of the game to mean that the JRPG was obsolete. The genre was born with Dragon Quest to textually represent concepts that were too graphically complicated for the NES's eight bits, but twenty-seven years later we don't exactly have that problem anymore. (On that note, menu-based RPGs are still finding some popularity on handheld devices, which remain partially bound by these limitations.) ME3 revises the systems of its Japanese antecedents with a highly effective show-don't-tell attitude, streamlining combat and character development elegantly. Do you miss combat menus? They're there, but only when you need them to be. Bummed at the presence of skill trees instead of vital statistics? They fulfill very similar functions when you think about it. This quickened approach is in line with what the populace has come to expect from video gaming, but there are few titles that have managed to combine this satisfying sense of speed and immersion with the robust micromanagement that made these games so appealing in the first place. That's the sweet spot Ni no Kuni hits.
