xeneth.design

If I'm going to write about my experience starting Grimstone , I should probably explain why I'll be referring to it as a " Narrative Party Role Playing Game ," (or NaPa RPG ) and not a " Japanese Role Playing Game ," (or JRPG ). The whole impetus to come up with something like that and stick to it for as long as I have is certainly worthy of its own standalone article down the road, but for now... In video game circles, when we say "JRPG" these days, we don't really intend the "J" to stand for "Japanese" most of the time. Except when we do! It bears thinking about, because while these subgenre descriptors are useful for talking about the medium, they're usually design coded, not culturally coded.     Long story short, way back around 2016 I read an interview with a Japanese developer describing why the term "JRPG" didn't makes sense from their perspective and felt a little hurtful and limiting (it may have...

    A  common refrain you tend to hear from Final Fantasy VIII 's detractors, (a group I certainly belong to, despite my devil's advocacy) is that its reviled Junction System is "too complicated." That's a bit reductive, and putting stock in stories of forlorn players pushing deep into the game without ever engaging with the system is difficult, given how exhaustively they teach and over-explain it. You can tell your 18 y/o teacher is into you if she slow blinks Heck, given her age and status as a pump-fake love interest, I suspect the only narrative reason Quistis Trepe was written as an instructor and not just an upper-classmate boils down to naturalizing her unhinged level of tutorialization on the topic! Individual spell casts get sucked out of enemies and act like consumables, and Guardian Forces buff you by equipping stacks of spells to your stats; that's about it! Core player understanding of FFVIII 's Junction System wasn't really one of its ...