Like many people born in the 80s and growing up in the 90s, my first exposure to RPGs was not D&D or any other western-style TTRPGs, or, for that matter, even Western-style computer RPGs like Baldur's Gate.
No, for me, the very idea of an RPG was introduced to me through JRPGs. In the mid-90s, there was this incredible run of amazing JRPGs that came out of SquareSoft (I don't recall when they merged with Enix, which had its own perhaps lesser-known hit, the Illusion of Gaia). Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI (released in America as III,) Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars, all came out one year after the other in '93, '94, '95, and '96, respectively, for the Super Nintendo. (FFVII came out in '97 for the PlayStation, so it's not like this roll stopped there). Now, ironically, the games of these four that I think are probably the more impactful and important projects are the ones I wouldn't play for several years.
Still, at least within my narrow band of social peers (my childhood best friend was a year older than me but in the same grade) there wasn't really the sort of "community continuity" that would introduce us to D&D, and in fact, despite growing up non-religiously in a very secular mixed-faith (or rather, mixed religious heritage) household, the specter of the Satanic Panic did actually linger a bit over that specific property.
I wouldn't actually get into D&D until the end of my 20s (as chronicled on this very blog). But I was kicking Lazy Shells and fighting Dark Liches back when I was in Middle School in the late 90s. And when I got a used PS2 my sophomore year of college, I actually tackled my first legitimate Final Fantasy game (X) and then picked up some PS1 ports that were playable thanks to backwards compatibility, focusing primarily on Chrono Trigger (which I never actually finished, but damn if it's not one of my favorite games of all time).
The structure and I'd say the appeal of JRPGs of this kind as compared with western RPGs are pretty different. Most JRPGs involve playing through a story that is mostly pre-written by the game's creators, with characters they've designed and created. While this can certainly happen as well in western RPGs, often the main appeal of these games is the freedom of choice, especially in creating a character of your own design, and then, depending on the series, you might have a huge array of options for how you want to play the game. In the Elder Scrolls series, for example, you can have a pretty significant and full game even if you ignore the main quest line, perhaps instead treating, say, the Dark Brotherhood quests as your main campaign.
There is a problem that you run into, though, with the freedom to create your own original character, which is that the game doesn't really get to tell much of a story with you. Necessarily, the edges are sanded down a bit - you can't really come up with much of a complex backstory for a character who, from the game's perspective, must ultimately be given the same options regardless of whether you're a shady rogue with a criminal past or a holy knight on a sacred quest or a wizard obsessed with plumbing the depths of reality to seek out some deeper truth.
Even in a game as brilliant as Baldur's Gate 3, which does so much to allow a player to forge a unique identity through their choices and actions, your "Tav" character will never get the full catharsis of seeing their individual story thrown in the spotlight the same way that the pre-written characters like Shadowheart and Astarion do.
It's necessary because ultimately, the creators of a computer game must create something that is more generalized and can work for multiple players.
This, of course, is a limitation we are free of as the game masters of TTRPGs.
However, there is a delicate balance to strike. See, often JRPG characters will learn something they did not know about their character. It's often quite shocking, throwing their whole identity into question. This is usually what happens with the "main" character, because in most cases, JRPGs have a central, main character. Often, these games begin with just that single character even being playable, easing you into the complexity required to make sense of its systems, but even as the party expands and you get more characters, this one will often be a mandatory member of the active party (perhaps with some story-dictated moments where they aren't) for a good chunk of the game, and are typically the character you're controlling outside of combat, and choosing dialogue options for.
But beyond this idea of a "main character" (and to be fair, FFVI's philosophy was that "every character can be the main character," and really makes it an ensemble) the notion of hidden, shocking knowledge is one that can be challenging to run in a TTRPG context.
But before we delve into this, let's talk about the characters in JRPGs.
We're going to be spoiling a whole bunch of games: for sure Final Fantasies VII, X, and XVI.
Spoilers ahead:
We'll start with VII. Having not played the original game, I know this mainly through reading wikis and what I've been able to infer from the experience of playing Remake and Rebirth. When we're introduced to Cloud Strife, both he and we believe him to be a jaded, battle-hardened ex-SOLDIER - this all-caps version of the word referring to people who have undergone special medical treatments to become powerful super-soldiers. After he remembers witnessing the original SOLDIER, Sephiroth, go crazy and massacre his home town, Cloud stepped away from the globe-dominating mega-corp Shinra and has now accepted a job from Avalanche, the militant environmentalist group that needs help sabotaging a reactor in the massive city of Midgar.
What is still only hinted toward in the extant remake trilogy entries, but which is revealed in the original game, is that Cloud isn't actually a SOLDIER - he was a trooper grunt like so many you mow down over the course of the game, but he's under a delusion in which he's incorporated many of the details of the life of his now-forgotten friend Zack - who truly was a SOLDIER, but is dead now - after their shared trauma of being forced into various medical experiments against their will.
All in all, it arguably makes Cloud all the more impressive - being enough of a badass to fake being a SOLDIER without realizing that was what he was doing.
Skipping ahead 26 years (and saving X's reveal for last,) we have the case of Clive Rosefeld. In Final Fantasy XVI, the story really zeroes in on Clive, as he's actually the only controllable character (outside of some non-combat moments with his brother Joshua). XVI is truly an epic, spanning over a decade of in-world time. When Clive is a teenager, he's treated horribly by his mother but is otherwise being raised to be the "Shield" to his younger brother Joshua, who stands to inherit their father's ducal throne. We'd learn eventually that this world has two kinds of magically-capable people. Dominants carry one of the god-like Eikons within them, and can transform into these kaiju-sized versions of Final Fantasy's usual summons when needed to defend their nation-state. Joshua is the Dominant of Phoenix, and despite being a somewhat sickly young boy, his status in Rosaria, the archduchy, is one that makes him the heir to the throne and the pride and joy of the nation.
The other kind of magic people, however, are the Bearers, who can call upon some elemental magic, but are not as powerful as the Dominants. And while Dominants often have some position of power and prestige (though not everywhere,) Bearers are almost universally treated as pariahs, usually forced into slavery.
Thus, Clive's mother's disdain for him begins to make a little more sense, as despite Joshua's prestigious magical connection, Clive's magic is a sign that he'd occupy the lowest rung of society if it weren't for his loving father.
The teenager section of the game sees Rosaria mobilizing for a war against their rivals, but it's all a trap, and Clive and Joshua's mother betrays them, hoping to marry into a more powerful family once the archduke is dead. In the chaos, however, something shocking happens: a new Eikon of Fire awakens. While Joshua is the Dominant of Phoenix, and it's thought that there are only one Eikon for each element (Shiva for ice, Gerudah for air, Titan for earth, Ramuh for lightning, Bahamut for light, Odin for darkness, and Leviathan for water) this second, aberrant Eikon emerges, and while Joshua transforms into Phoenix to face down what we'll come to understand is Ifrit, Ifrit defeats Phoenix, and seemingly kills him and the dominant who has transformed into him.
Now, honestly, the twist here isn't that shocking. But even if we have our suspicions (indeed, if memory serves we even face down Gerudah as Ifrit before all of this happens,) the grand character moment that signals the end of the game's first real act is when Clive has an internal mental battle against Ifrit, and comes to terms with the fact that it's always been him: that he's the Dominant of Ifrit, and that he's the one who killed his brother. Hell, the first time you activate this game's version of the Limit Break (which is basically Spartan Rage from the God of War series) the prompt is "press L3 + R3 to accept the truth."
While I have issues with some of the pacing and other storytelling choices in XVI, there is perhaps no more thrilling moment than this internal battle - complete with its own epic music piece, which I believe is never repeated in the rest of the game.
Finally, let's talk about X.
The big twist in Final Fantasy X is honestly so batshit crazy that it's almost hard to remember if I've got it right. There was a great Penny Arcade comic way back when that touched on it. But yes, you discover that the main character, Tidus, is the "dream of a dead civilization's dream of [his] evil monster dad." The futuristic city that the game starts in is actually the magically-created facsimile of a real city that existed in the distant past, and Tidus as well as his deadbeat dad Jecht, aren't denizens of this lost civilization sucked into a post-apocalyptic future, but are actually just essentially magical constructs that were brought into being by the insane being from that ancient civilization who has tried to preserve it by turning successive people into world-destroying eldritch abominations to prevent the world from ever progressing, and has convinced the world that he's god. Oh, and apparently these dream-construct people are real enough that Jecht was a suitable subject for the previous "turn a person into the next incarnation of "Sin," the aforementioned eldritch abomination.
So, why am I going through these examples?
See, ideally, I think, a TTRPG should be able to tell the kind of heightened, melodramatic stories that you get in JRPGs. If I could make my D&D games feel as big and epic as these games, I'd consider myself a very successful DM.
But let's talk about the challenges:
The first is this: when I come up with a character backstory, the usual kind of unspoken contract between the DM and the player is that the DM will respect the facts as presented in that story.
Let's take Cloud for example.
If one of my players wrote a backstory for their Fighter (with Charisma as a dump stat, sorry Cloud - he still has two very viable love interests, despite this fact! Though that might say more about Tifa and Aerith than him) in which he had been part of an experimental super-soldier program, it would feel a little wrong for me to just flat-out say "no, actually, you weren't." Like, sure, I could imagine saying "well, we're starting at level 1, so how super of a soldier are you expecting to be?" Granted, I also think levels are enough of an abstraction that I actually think they're best ignored when talking about backstories. Sometimes we don't want to play a character who's just learned how to cast a spell or swing a sword, and I think people shouldn't get too hung up on how a level 1 character might be some grizzled veteran of the "Dragon Wars."
But back to the main issue: Cloud's big twist is that a major part, arguably the central part, of his backstory is revealed to be a falsehood. His personal reason to want to take revenge on Sephiroth is still valid - Sephiroth did massacre his hometown, including his mother - but his inability to stop Sephiroth was even more profound than how he remembers it.
So, if we had a player like this, we'd have to get a solid gauge on how much of their backstory they'd be ok with you rewriting. A game player might take all of this in stride.
But it's not as if a player not wanting such a reveal to happen is just too inflexible. For example, my first D&D character was a Great Old One Warlock, and it's pretty important to his backstory that he is, technically, a Duke, and by rights one of the five most powerful people in his nation. His current situation, of course, means that he can't actually exercise that ducal power (everyone thinks he's dead, and he never even served actively as Duke because when his father died and passed the title on to him, he had gone into something of a catatonic shock) but I'd be pretty annoyed if the DM were to simply tell me "no, actually, this whole thing has been a delusion and you're really just some normal schmuck." And this is a character whose main flaw is, in fact, that he has trouble telling reality from mental illusions - but that detail is something I'd want to be preserved even amidst the uncertainty.
The most recent character I came up with for a campaign (one we've had only a single session of so far) is an Air Genasi Rogue. After playing a couple characters who more or less had pretty stable lives in their backstories and a reasonably regret-free past, I decided to turn the angst way up. So, I've got a character who was sort of tricked into becoming the agent for some kind of archfey when he was a child and has been living as an outlaw, stealing and killing at the orders of "The Ordinary Man." But I left it a little ambiguous whether there wasn't something stranger going on. I intend for him to go Soulknife at level 3, which is a slight stretch (I tend to associate psionics more with aberrations and strange experiments more than the fey, but I'm also sort of flavoring him as a kind of early-20th-century western archetype, with the Ordinary Man being the kind of fey dream version of a mysterious G-man). When it comes to psionics, though, I think it always feels to me that a character involved in such stuff has to have a shaky grasp on reality - if your mind can change the world around you, how do you tell the difference between your imagination and reality? So, in this character's case, I wrote a lot of ambiguity into his backstory - I've given the DM tons of license to upend much of what he believes about himself, aside from his, you know, being an Air Genasi, and what details are shared with another player character who is a childhood friend.
In other words, a reversal like this can be great if you have buy-in from the player. Our Cloud-equivalent Fighter may have written a backstory that involves having been a super-soldier, and we should probably respect that. But if that player has written a backstory in which lots of details about his past don't add up, and how he's maybe noticed that some of the things that are true for other super-soldiers don't really fit with him, then we're getting an invitation to intervene in this way.
Turning to Clive, I think the big twist here is pretty well-telegraphed. I imagine very few players did not immediately guess that Clive was Ifrit the whole time, not only because of the game's marketing, but also because it kind of seemed to require that on the basis of narrative efficiency. Clive very conspicuously disappears in the scene where Ifrit appears, and while we hear him crying out for Ifrit to stop, we never get a shot of teenaged Clive standing off to the side - a conspicuous absence, the most obvious explanation being the one that is later confirmed.
And that brings us to another potential thing in telling a story like this: letting the player know something the character doesn't.
Weirdly, I think this is likely to get a lot of pushback. But I don't really see why. Players often hide bits of information about their characters to reveal to the table, shared only with the DM, who needs to know these facts in order to prevent any contradictory elements in the world from turning up.
And DMs can, of course, have big reveals in the story that will shock the player character.
But there seems to be this assumption in most cases that the character playing a character doesn't have knowledge that the character doesn't. This can lead to accusations of meta-gaming, where a player might know, for example, that a Troll's regeneration can be halted with fire damage, and a player who's an old hand at the game might ask to make an Intelligence check to see if their character knows that information, in order to justify the obviously good strategic choice of tossing some Fire Bolts at it.
When it comes to backstory, though, ambiguities for the character seem to be left to the DM.
For sure, this means that the big reveal won't actually be a surprise for the player, but I think preventing something like this closes off possibilities for a character's story.
Now, when we look at Tidus... I guess this is ultimately just a huge version of the kind of character-reversals that we've explored before. In this case, to have something like this happen, the DM would need to essentially tell one of the players a totally different version of the world's backstory.
Actually, I kind of love that, but it does require session zero to be some what one-on-one.
Anyway, with my affection for JRPGs reignited playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I'm now thinking about how one could import mechanical ideas from the series (and things like Chrono Trigger) into D&D, such as limit breaks and summons. I'm sure many have homebrewed it and there are, I'm given to understand, some TTRPG systems that are built to feel more like JRPGs, but it might be fun just to try something.
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