What is your JRPG journey
By this I mean share with us your story relevant to JRPGs.
How did you come to the genre? What game was your first? Which became your favorites over the years? Did you have any hiatuses? Any noteable experiences?
Do your best to keep it the abridged version but if you got to go long, it's all good.
Here's mine:
I'm a 90s kid but I didn't have a lot going up. I had a Genesis was a handful of your typical Sega games, the sonics, mortal Kombat, NFL QB club.. but no RPGs. I can't remember exactly what was the first JRPG I tried out because we had an old home PC that could run a snes emulator (a potato could run snes) and I remember getting a big dump of roms and trying them all out, this included Chrono trigger, a couple of the old final fantasy's, DQ 6 but I didn't really play them seriously.. it was Super Mario RPG, A Link to the past and illusion of Gaia that I played to completion.
It was Suikoden that was the first game where I was like.. okay this is a genre that I'm into, I have to search out more. PS1 is my era. Everything I owned is my life long favorites to this day.. Chrono Cross, Suikoden 2, Star Ocean 2nd Story, Xenogears, FF Tactics, Valkyrie Profile, Tales of Eternia..
The PS2/Gamecube era is where I fell off, The Only exception being Tales of Symphonia, I remember buying Star Ocean 3 and I really didn't get into it I didn't come back to jrpgs for well over a decade. This is mainly because I started going to college and I had three jobs at the same time, even after graduation it was work work work, and when I did gaming I was in the FPS genre, the Halos, the half-lifes, the elder scrolls and the fallouts. For a while there the feeling was that JRPG genre was dead.
I didn't play a modern JRPG again till Dragon Quest 11. I fell in love all over again. I was particularly surprised of modern quality of life improvements, like simply pushing a button to let dialogue and cutscenes go forward for you and how much the VO have improved. Since then some notable favorites are Persona 5R, Persona 3 reload, Tales of vesperia, Yakuza: like a dragon, elden ring.. there's more but I've written enough.. I've since also joined a few different communities for specific games, this sub and a jrpg "book club" community, I dedicatedly listen to a couple RPG focused podcasts and I go to PAX East every year. I'm a fully dug in sicko now.
It's pretty amazing seeing how much the fandom has grown for this genre, this past year in particular with many of our favorites selling millions of copies.. I think we're going to see the effects of the RPG genre having a greater influence on the gaming industry.