I Don't Want to Save the World Anymore | Extra Punctuation
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- čas přidán 6. 06. 2024
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I remember Red from OSP talking about how villains trying to destroy the world is ironically considered more child friendly than a murderer trying to kill a single person.
She asserts that because the human mind technically isn’t equipped to grasp the true size of the world, the audience will subconsciously give up and check out emotionally and therefore won’t feel like that’s as awful as pointing a gun at a single person.
Same deal as “If ten people die it’s a tragedy, but if 300,000 people die it’s a statistic.”
That's probably is why writers like to default to “save the world “. It comes with less emotional baggage to navigate than having to save people the protagonist personally cares about because that would require delving into a character’s actual feelings such as anger, love, grief and fear which is far more difficult to write well.
I'd argue if a story did its job correctly in making you care about the people that live in that world then destroying the world is a bad thing
I agree if we aren't invested a villian saying they will destroy the world is no different than finding a crazy person on the street saying the world is ending, but I dont believe just the scope of the world ending is enough for people to check out, we tend to not care about things that don't affect us and only care about others if we have some kind of attachment to them, Persona 4 does a good job at making you care about Inaba because the town is so small and you spent 7 months there before the whole town gets enveloped in fog
"Nobody panics when things go 'according to plan.' Even if the plan is horrifying!"
-- Joker
I guess that the charm behind Invader Zim. Almost every human is a dumbass.
I remember Wolfenstein: The New Order managed to almost completely alienate me very early on by giving me the choice of telling one of the villains to kill one of my buddies, or another of my buddies, or just have him kill us all if I choose not to choose. It wasn't even that I was particularly invested in those characters, I just _hated_ that they thought I as a player would enjoy feeling really powerless like that and then getting indirect payback. Like the shrinking bits in Duke Forever, it does not belong.
It's also a good justification for why the player might be slaughtering hundreds of enemies. If they didn't, the world would end, so it's not worth contemplating any ethical quandaries about whether it's justified or not to kill this enemy or that enemy.
Mr. Socky is such a breakout character.
Is he going to be extra punctuation's version of reasonable horse, I wonder
Makes me wonder if Yahtzee voiced the undead merchant from ds1 🧐
I absolutely love how he sounds genuinely upset at Mr. Socky at the end.
3 cheers for Mister Socky!
I'm sure some version of Mr.Socky Will feature in Yathzee's next book, or STARSTRUCK VAGABOND, if he ever gets around to finishing it
still one the best parts of disco elysium: you're just trying to figure out what's going on, who are these people, why are they talking so much, why is everything so loud and bright, and good god could i use a drink
Also, with what's going on with The Pale (in the church etc.), there are a few hints that there actually *might* be some sort of supernatural world-ending threat at large... but you're invited to just sort of not give a shit. Can't you see I've got karaoke to sing?
Well, you get to use the power of rave techno to at the very least delay the entropic end of all things as brought forth by human despair
Of course, DE's setting involves the physical manifestation of entropy slowly eating all of reality, but none of that has any direct bearing on the main plot, which is either a murder mystery or the protagonist's attempt to reconstruct his personality, depending on your point of view. (It is implied that the protagonist's amnesia may have been caused by the Pale, but that's not quite the same thing.)
Also, there's no point at which you defeat the Pale with the Power of Friendship, unless holding it back with very loud music counts.
sounds like SOMEBODY hasn't taken it upon themselves to start building communism
@@jwmcq Also a clear stand-in for similar existential threats in our own world. The threat is looming, growing, and you are largely powerless as an individual to combat it. This kind of threat serves the world of DE and doesn't take away from more pressing concerns for our protagonist. If it felt like Harry could save the world - his inability to reconcile a past love that didn't work out would feel wrong. But Harry is grounded, and seriously - Harry's past and current pain resonates far more than any grandiose plot.
Don't forget the trope of the villain of JRPGs wanting to destroy the world in order rebuild or reset it like some kind of malfunctioning router.
It was a trope in real life history before it was a trope in jrpgs
dude I just beat persona 5 last night and when that game presented me with the first phase of its final boss I was like "well this can't be the actual end, it's not in the sky and we haven't had a scene where every side character cheers on the main characters from afar to power them up" and lo and behold 20 minutes in the future we are indeed in the sky being cheered on by not only all the side characters but the entire actual world's population. one of those moments where I was kind of disappointed to be proven right
Wait a min the original p5 release or the Royal version? Cuz you might've missed a whole other palace after December if you didn't unlock it properly
EDIT: lmao well Yahtzee spoiled the Royal stuff anyway so idk if that really matters anymore
Hello fruit man
The mold eater himself!
Greyt to see you here
Persona 2 has you fight your dads and Hitler, at least.
I actually liked p4 because it felt like you were protecting not the world, but the small town you grew to love filled with the people you met along the way. It still falls into the "killing god with the power of friendship" thing but feels a bit more personal (pun not intended)
Well, that's exactly it. Usually the characters don't save the world for the sake of saving the world, they do it because they want to protect their friends, families, ideals, etc.
That's literally every JRPG though. They're saving the world because of the people in it that they care about.
@@LordVader1094 nah, a LOT of JRPGs are way more shallow than that
Exactly
Persona 4 would've been far better had they decided to cut things off after you catch the killer. The final boss came out of nowhere and didn't contribute anything to the game.
In Japan, the "Power of Friendship" special attack that always happens in these games is called 'genkidama', after the Dragon Ball Z attack. It's a classic trope and I think a shorthand for a cultural more of acknowledging the people that got you there vs. the 'Western' individualistic trope of the final showdown being only the main protagonist and the antagonist.
“I couldn’t have done it on my own.”
vs.
“The power was within me all along.”
The latter is a theme I’ve started seeing increasingly in Western media. 🤔
@@realperson69"power within me" is just typical chosen one stuff
There is in my opinion one pretty weird individualistic trope that pops up in a lot of animes and from what it sounds jrpgs and that is that the power to defeat the villain who has done some ritual sacrificing people or trained for way longer or they are a genius at everything, gets defeated in a one on one fight versus the hero a lot, sometimes the genki dama doesn't work and teamwork is apparently useless. That to me is annoying, I don't want the genki dama style attack to fail ever, except for there simply not being enough help around. But also teamwork being deemed useless also annoys me. I guess the reason is that the protagonist, who gets the power up or is just so good at whatever avenue they fight at, is a symbol of whatever value the narrative is trying to convey. So the protag has the value of building friendships and being a good person to others valuing everyone, but none of those people can do anything at the final fight because we want to show that good will triumph even in one person. Even though evil is kind of obsessed with getting power they just never realised the good path would hand it to them easily.
This rant didn't have a coherent ending because I was interrupted by something else and forgot the specific point but remembered the subject. Hope someone gets something out of this comment.
"I Don't Want To Save The World Anymore" sounds like a great title for a book or song.
Something from some jaded millennial/gen z being tired of constantly being blasted with how the world is screwed and we need to fix it by buying the right product instead of the wrong one.
@@AHungryHunky "My personality and lifestyle is being an activist."
I was thinking a Animal Crossing/Stardew like where the PC is a protagonist from a (potentially fictional) much more high octane game who decides to hang up their boots. I think there can be really cool story and gameplay elements which come from that.
@@Wewin42 A letter arrives. "Greetings, Hero. It is I, the Great King Maximus the Third, and I call you and your blade to serve for the whole kingdom, as there is a looming threat quicky rising from the shadows..." The hero stops reading, raises his eyebrow, looks at his old, trusty blade... And tosses the letter with the envelope into the trashbin.
Days after, the town is filled with goblins and other malicious creatures, and the hero is like "damn, now I gotta sell my crops to the goblins too I guess".
@@Wewin42joja route is similiar to that. screw the community and towns business even the town didnt care of (lewis says it was 50/50 support on joja) instead use money to instantly fix your problems
Yhatz is a rare breed of video game enthusiasts that actually care about how the media can be used to enhance the narrative experience
I also love Raycevick for this reason. He always advocates for games pushing their limits and using the methods and mechanics they developed for the maximum.
i mean a lot of the points he makes were addressed back in the 90s by planescape torment, so this isn't anything new or refreshing at all. not to mention the whole save the world thing isnt something i see in rpgs as much as i used to. hell, dragon quarter came out in 2002 and takes place after the end of the world with the protagonist living underground his whole life. there's not much of a save the world vibe especially with how fundamentally broken everything is
I mean, I agree with most of his points, but I don't think JRPG party members really count as NPCs. They're not the Sole/Primary Playable Character, but they're still Playable Characters, y'know? Secondary Playable Characters, but still playable characters. In Persona 5, the only Phantom Thief I WOULD call an NPC is RNG Helper Girl Futaba. (Note: As someone who thinks Secondary Playable Characters are where most of the most interesting acting work in the medium goes down? I'd want The Game Awards to, at least, give Secondary Playable Characters ONE category entirely to themselves. I'd PREFER 6 full categories (Sole/Primary Playable Characters, Secondary Playable Characters and NPCs, all with gender split), but even a split of Best Secondary Playable Character Performance and Best Other Performance, with no gender split, would still be a MASSIVE improvement.)
The dude has only played 4 JRPGs and proceeded to make really cold old takes about the plots of said RGPs. I don't even really agree with his conclusion. He avoids mentioning Thousand Year Door because it's the one that pulled off the "Kill God" plot the best. Ironically by being the one that takes itself the least seriously, the game explicitly for children is able to do the whole power of friendship thing more sincerely than all the rest. It's a common plot point not just because it's functional but because it's EFFECTIVE. Everyone loves a Spirit Bomb ending and the moment where all the homies you've made over the course of several hours come back to help you out feels genuinely cathartic.
Persona 4 also works as a “teenagers unlock a secret power to defeat a god” plot, but it helps that you really made friends to the point of knowing their flaws as well. At that point, you know your friends inside and out. You saved Inaba once and are ready to save it again. Yu Narukami has helped all his friends with the problems and even the town’s problems. Of course your friends would be willing to spiritually lend you their strength because you have grown to be true friends. They also upgrade your Persona as Persona upgrade by upgrading relationships. It is probably competitive with TTYD at that point.
Persona 5 also works, but far less well, because while the point is for people not to trust authority and thus Arsene to Satanael should be as powerful, it does not hit as hard even given every single Palace person is evocative of a problem in Japanese society and therefore should be just as interesting as knowing Inaba and saving Inaba.
I think that Moon Channel's "Why Do You Always Kill Gods in JRPGs?" is a really interesting look at why these themes are more present in Japanese games from both a deep historical (how the culture treats Gods and Godhood) and modern view
I think trends like that can explain why the _defining examples_ fit a certain cultural pattern, those examples usually being at least above-average, and sometimes truly great, works in their respective media. I think the explanation for why _so many_ works default to those themes are a lot more mundane and cynical. It's less work for a grab at the brass ring if you half-heartedly copy someone else's work. Low risk, mid reward.
Yeah thats a fantastic video any fan of jrpgs should watch
Yeah, it's a great video and some really interesting insight into why this could be the case. I would highly recommend it anyone who find video game essays interesting. Especially if the themes actually interest them.
@@MegaZeta It's really not that complicated. JRPG's have awesome bosses, and with the bosses continuously getting tougher as the game goes on in a long RPG the only place left for them to go is basically a godly entity.
@@Vaquix000Interestingly, the Moon Channel video touches on that. Western games sometimes use gods as a final obstacle specifically as an escalation of stakes/challenge, but he argues that, in Japanese works, it’s much much more than that.
That final point also brings to mind those games where the plot wants to instill some sense of urgency in you, while the world is constantly inviting you to ignore the Big Problem (not always the end of the world, but at the very least the end of your character) and wander around caring about others and/or engaging in hobbies or whatever.
Always hated this. The most recent example of this is Final Fantasy 16. The game has a phenomenal sense of urgency to make you care for its main story quest but all of this is shattered and it becomes demoralizing when you do a really cool main story quest eager to see more but then you see 10 side quests pop up that urge to pull you away from that story. This happens MULTIPLE times throughout that entire game to the point of laughable predictabilty. Not only that but the quests themselves sometimes (not all the time. Some of them are actually really good) are completely inconsequential and add nothing to the story and game.
So it's like what's the point about pulling me away from this baddass well written story to go and talk to Joe Shmoe about their little problems they are having when none of that is either compelling or necessary? It just seems like content for the sake of it.
It's like the game's narrative and the game itself is constantly at odds with another and it's just one of those things where I can't stand to see in games and RPGs especially.
@@guthetanuki256 I still think the funniest version of this is cyberpunk 2077 where you as V have a brain eating parasite in your head that talks to you in the form of keanu reeves/johnny silverhand basically but there's so much shit you can do that you might have the issue i have when playing Oblivion. doing all the side shit
@@guthetanuki256 It's because FF16 struggles to weave together multiple narratives the way a game like FF6 could. Rather than being a part of the whole that leads up to the final resolution, side quests feel disconnected from the main plot in any way and don't contribute to developing the characters, which was what FF6 did so well.
It is essentially mimicking the side quests that are so prominent in earlier FF games without understanding why they worked and what they contributed to the story.
If Persona taught me anything
Its that the thing I like most in video games, is doing anything else besides the objective
just dicking around in the world living the highschool life I never had was way more engaging than beating the final boss, but shooting god in the face to save christmas was pretty hype not gonna lie
I’d like to think having the final battle take place on Christmas was, ironically, perhaps a hint of internal defiance to the “kill god” JRPG trope.
Like the developers were forced to do it so they went “ok, how do we make this as silly as possible so our players can make fun of it.
Yakuza series pretty much.
Yeah sure there's a plot, but you can have a ton of fun dicking around and doing some side activities.
I loved the beggining of Persona 5.
Getting lost in the subway system on my first day of school was such a lovely mundane experience to have in a videogame.
It was so fun how part of the game was managing the logistics of school live and super heroing.
But then I got stressed out over the fucking stats system and I had to cheat the game to play comfortably.
Persona 4 is my personal favorite and honestly out of the modern trilogy, it probably ignores this rule the most because the high school part is pretty much fully ingrained with the supernatural side. It’s a murder mystery and you’re saving people from your high school, after you save them you become friends with them and they join the party. It makes each dungeon (with a few exceptions that don’t give a new party member) feel more meaningful because you’re helping a person you’ll get to know inside and out over the next however many hours. When it comes to fighting the murderer it honestly feels more memorable than the finale god showdown because it’s a much more personal fight. With the other games, P3’s Tartarus is barely tied into the plot until the last few months and party members joining isn’t tied to Tartarus, and P5 you may get a party member each dungeon from pretty much start to finish but they aren’t the focus of each Palace, the Palace ruler is the focus with the exception of 3rd semester in Royal which rightfully gives Kasumi the spotlight. As well fleshed out as some of the Palace rulers are like Kamoshida, Futaba and the 3rd semester antagonist are, generally you don’t see each Palace ruler again after you finish their Palace with Futaba and the casino being the main exceptions (and third semester but I’m really trying to avoid spoilers).
Tldr, P4’s recurring characters are much more well implemented into the supernatural side of the story and with how each character’s arc happens both in their own dungeon and Social Link, each dungeon feels more personal and ties into the high school life side of the game.
I mean, in one shin megami tensei game, the characters literally *used the power of friendship* to literally kill *god* (His name is YHWH in the games btw, so not kidding.)
The other important point about "save the world" plots, is that it isn't really a credible threat. Especially if you aren't at the end yet, it's structurally inconceivable to actually fail to save the world; and even if you do, it won't last very long. You can't end the story without...well, ending the story.
But you *can* kill individual characters. Or have their dreams crushed. Those threats are very credible, and thus carry considerably more narrative weight with the audience.
It can actually make for an interesting subversion though.
I feel like "failing to save the world" just isn't used enough. They did it back in Final Fantasy 3 (but actually 6) and it was great. The gen 4 Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games also threw the player into the destroyed world for a while ...but because time travel they were able to undo it, so I don't know if that would count.
On the other hand, it may be hard to hide a big twist like that in the internet age...
@@probablynotbatman4613 not gonna lie, I didn’t give a damn about saving the world in PMD Explorers. What I gave a damn about was kicking Dialga’s ass for causing so much suffering to Grovyle and Celebi who just wanted to be unbearably cute together. They wrote a compelling character story that overrode the save the world bs.
@@probablynotbatman4613 As I get older, I invest less emotion into the impact of having an expectation subversion, and more into how connected it is to the story and its theme.
If you just fail to save the world because the developers want a big twist at the end, there's no real emotion to that. But if you look at a game like NieR: Automata, where there's very clear objective failure, they still manage to communicate thematic success despite the objective failure because the themes aren't about succeeding or failing; it's about what it means to be human, and how despite going on about pain being inexplicably unbearable for humans, the bits of joy seem to be enough that we'd go through everything all over again.
Which would be evidenced by anyone who played through the fucking game TWICE.
So for me, I appreciate a good twist as much as the next person, but it needs to be the kind of twist that supports a theme, or at least reinforces the tone of the world. Arthur's fate at the end of RDR2 is consistent with the tone of the world, which I suppose doesn't make it much of a twist, but it's not normal for a protagonist to suffer a fate such as his.
@@thesquishedelf1301 I absolutely agree, that game worked because of the great characters, saving the world was more of a "duty" than something you actually wanted to do as a player, and "failing to save the world" was part of the backstory, rather than something you actually did. I just didn't have a lot of other examples.
@@JesseLeeHumphry
I also agree that if it's part of the plot no matter what, it's not going to have that much of an impact. "There's nothing I - as the player - could have actually done to stop it", but that doesn't mean that it can't be done well.
Again, I think FF6 is a great example. The game uses themes of absurdism vs existentialism.
Kefka wants to become a god because - if nothing matters - then why should he be subservient to anyone, even God?
On the other hand, even in the ruined, post-apocalyptic world, people will struggle to do good.
The world has to fall during the story to set up those themes in the first place. What the player characters do throughout the plot seem like the "right" things to do - saving people from the seemingly "evil" empire, and protecting cities from monsters and whatnot - but ultimately those are what lead to Kefka seizing power. Like you said, that leads the player to question whether their actions actually meant anything because, no matter how many times you play the game, the outcome would be the same.
But that's the point. The point of the game's plot is that a person's actions only have as much meaning as we give them.
there was a video from "Moon Channel" on this topic, which I saw recently, that explores the historical and cultural origins of this trope. I highly reccomend it because it is extremely interesting, and also proposes some compelling justifications for the trope's usage in some specific cases.
A fantastic watch, and something I'm glad you recommended. I was going to do it if no one else had.
I also highly recommend this, even though it's about 70 minutes of backstory and 20 minutes of coming back to the thesis. A short tl;dr: is: (1) For historical religious reasons, 'God'/god in Japan and other asian countries isn't the omnipotent creator of the universe but instead represents a being of great power and influence. Gods can be slain, and humans can become gods through achievement. (2) Historically, Japan has repeatedly been invaded by foreign influences of great power (i.e. gods) who promise the holy land but never deliver; (3) The latest god to breech its promises is capitalism, and Japan is now closing in on half a century of economic stagnation.
This adds up to the 'God' and their entourage in JRPGs representing alien forces that have invaded your homeland with promises of power and when they reveal their true face you fight to eliminate them.
Escapist intern/employee, please pin this comment
I was thinking if that too. Haven’t had a chance to watch, but it’s on my watch list.
Speaking of Moon Channel and Earthbound, he also put together what I consider the most compelling argument for why Nintendo has never (and will never) bring Mother 3 to the west, so it's worth checking out his video on that as well.
(TL;DR: Mother 3 has too much music and samples which are fair use in Japan but would be copyright hell in the US.)
The more I hear about Yahtzee’s likes and dislikes in the medium of video games the more I think he is like that one teacher who has really high expectations and definitely a couple unfair soft spots, but also is so hard on you out of a place of actual wanting you to be better. The “you” in this context is of course the gaming medium as a whole.
Also Yahtz you should play Devil Survivor if you want a fun new way of experiencing an “End of the World” game where it’s fleshed out much more then before.
However, I would say play DevilSurvivor1 for Story/Characters and plays DS2 for Gameplay because DS2’s characters are a bit weaker and it’s plot is basically Evengeligan(Can’t Spell) but with demons instead of mechas.
You're absolutely right. Yahtzee sincerely believes that videogames can have just as much artistic value as literature or theatre and, despite all the swearing and dead baby jokes, has made it a big part of his life's work to get them there.
Also, he tends to go MUCH easier on flawed games that were genuinely trying to do something new/interesting/artistic/etc. The ones he really hates are the boilerplate AAA tentpole titles.
DEVIL SURVIVOR MENTIONED
ANOTHER WIN
i know hes shown his face a few times but i cant help but picture this man as Hank Deveroux in Straight man
The final point about the story rightly bulldozing everyone's problems is mainly why I liked Morrigan from Dragon Age Origins so much. She's always giving you shit for going out of your way to help people, and if you complain about it she'll point out that stopping forward progress to save or help any individual person is stupid because you're on a time sensitive mission and if you fail that person will die anyways.
Unfortunately Morrigan doesn't realize we're in a videogame lol.
Until you romance her and spend countless hours helping her sort out her mommy issues lol
@studentt6064 Agreed, although even in-universe Morrigan's complaints don't always make sense. She really lost me when she griped about defending Redcliffe. You'd prefer that we assault the castle full of undead alone then, Morrigan?
It did get a big piss-takey though when she scolded me for helping demonically possessed children. i like having a party comprised of people with different ideologies and beliefs, but i do wish there was a way to convince them that sometimes you need to do good or evil, rather than have a insert "lawful stupid" character scold me for killing a man who cannibalizes children or an "awful evil" character scold me for not cannibalizing children.
"Aha! We have arrived at the Circle of Magi, and can now try to recruit them." "But what if we let them all die?" "That would make recruitment difficult."
I've had an issue with drama being just "someone dies".
When folks warn of spoilers, it's usually just someone dies.
Drama can be much more. Disappointment, uncertainty, faith, lying, mistakes, failure despite odds in one's favor, even "simply" love/the FEELING of joy.
You can do a lot with a little. Small scale doesn't mean small stakes. Personal stakes are often lost in big adventures, and personal stakes are what, we the probably average humans playing, can better identify with.
I find it always more impactful when something more....'human' happens than just death. One of the biggest for me is betrayals. It always hits me harder. Unexpected failure is another good one.
SO i agree. If a character dies, sure it's sad especially if we spent a lot of time with the character and like them, or they had a big impact on the other characters we like...but it has to be meaningful if we are expected to feel the Big Sad. Like, all the deaths in GoT for example, become so meaningless that it's like 'yeah, whatever. another one? who cares?'
Have been thinking about this earlier today when thinking about a story I'm trying to write, actually.
This reminds me that the writer of Babylon 5 once said something along the lines of "you generally weren't afraid that a character would die, rather that a part of them would" which I kinda like. Although B5 does involve defeating GODS PLURAL to save the GALAXY so yeah.
I feel like using spoilers as an argument here doesn't really make much sense. "Susan lies" isn't really as significant or as clear-cut as "Susan dies", it's hardly even a spoiler.
And failure and betrayal are pretty common spoilers anyhow. Ik that wasn't really the point of your comment tho I'm just being pedantic 😅
Right. I think big part of Final Fantasy VII's staying power is that the "BIG SPOILER" isn't actually the big twist/hook in the story. The actual twist/hook is compelling, personal, and complex in such a way that isn't really easy to spoil in a single word or sentence. And that's what really stuck with people.
The sad thing about the Silent Hill 1 example is that the story didn't need to escalate to "God wanting to destroy the world." Harry had enough motivation to explore Silent Hill because he was just looking for his daughter. The final boss being the last obstacle of reuniting with his daughter would have been enough.
And yet...
Well, I didn't care much for any of the four games, but 1 and 3 were marginally better than 2 and 4. Could be because there was something to explain why freaky stuff was happening (no, the idea of depression-induced delusions or a dead serial killer thinking a literal apartment room was his mother don't quite fit that bill), could be that I played them in order (and thus the first was the least stale while the third had actual continuity with the first)... not sure.
I've mentioned this on elsewhere, but the plot of the first game spans over a miniscule episode over the whole history of the town, as the story picks up in medias res. While it's true that Harry's search could've been brought about as an entirely self-contained narrative, the bigger issue of having deities and black magic that all precedes Alessa would be left unexplored and not even hinted at, and that plot is the backbone for 2/3 of the series (or at least the game that followed SH1).
Sure, if you rip out the entire plot and basically every single story beat, this might work.
The Ink Spots: "I don't want to set the world on fire"
Yahtzee: "I don't want to put out the world that is on fire"
I was just thinking of that tune!
@@SeaWasp fallout fan?
@@j.j.maverick9252 Friends have told me I'd love it. I'm not much of a gamer these days, though haha! Heard of the Ink Spots through a busker almost fifteen years ago
Funny, your description of JRPG’s almost fully describes mainline SMT games, except the fact that you typically have to murder your friends and/or they start to murder each other
I really like when save the world plots focus on how the stress of that monstrous task wears down on the main character. Mass Effect 3 is a good example of this.
100% agree. Shepard slowly cracking was what kept me so invested in the story. In all other games I’d played prior to Mass Effect 3, I knew everything would be okay and I knew the protagonist would win, because they never lost their cool. Mass Effect showing a vulnerable Shepard made me care about his character and worry for whay would happen to him, and I think that needs to be something that other games of this nature strive to achieve. It’s become a small gripe with me when I don’t see it in other games now.
Probably the exact reason why Yakuza 7 (like a dragon) is one of my favorite jrpgs. It's conflict is so much more smaller in scale, yet Ichiban's imagination lifts it up to be just like the world's end plots and he drags us along with it, but now you actually give a shit instead of indifference to unimaginable scales.
I dunno if it's that small in scale. Yeah it's not a world-ending threat, but the bad guys still want to take over all of Japan.
@@Spacebattler And Ichi does rely on the power of his friends.
@@SpacebattlerWhile this is part of the conspiracy, Ichiban is mainly involved because of Ryo Aoki, whom he saw as his brother, and he wanted to bond with him again after all the years that passed since he was in prison
I just love that he conveyed the metaphor of drawing lines in the sand both literally and entirely visually 😂
Hearing Yhatzee describing shounen tropes in the context of JRPGs is entertaining as hell
To be fair most of the good jrpgs like p4 and others work well because they start the scale super small. P4 didn't need to add the extra god thing but i believe it uses the ideals of its narrative to make strong characters that have something worth fighting over thing wimds up with them saving the world.
Can we all just take a moment to appreciate this man's turn a phrase, I mean, who else could have come up with gregarious fueled deicide?
Irvine Welsh.
It's gregariousNESS-fuelled deicide.😉 It's "fuelled by friendship" , not "fuelled in a friendly way".
Turn of phrase
Anyone with a thesaurus. That was hardly him at his wittiest, Christ.
Holy shit, sorry I mentioned liking something on the internet!
I stand corrected.
Persona does the power of friendship in an always entertaining and fun way, so I never get tired of it especially since you end up truly loving the characters.
Tbh, full disagree. It's as cookie cutter as the rest of the games employing the trope
I seriously recommend Moon Channel's recent video "Why Do You Always kill Gods in JRPGs?" alongside Adam Millard's recent video "RPGs Were Never About Roleplaying" to really dig in to the precise observations that Yahtzee is getting at in this Extra Punctuation - the first covers the kill-God trope in scholarly depth, and the second speaks to the ways and places that Yahtzee feels that JRPGs (and RPGs in genrral) get it right. I'd be doing a diservice to those videos by giving a further synopsis - just check them out if you're interested in the topic of this video!
I would argue that Persona 5 Royal's final semester changes from "using the power of friendship to kill god" to "using the power of self-actualization to tell Jesus that he doesn't need to sacrifice himself for us and the whole concept of heaven is kinda dumb and creepy anyway."
Oh absolutely, nothing's more satisfying than the Uno-reverse card of "hey man do you need to like..... talk it out?" to the guy determined to be everyone's saviour-therapist-eldritch-deity.
The stakes of phases 1 and 2 are still pretty high so I guess it still counts as a world-altering threat, but bringing it down to a simple fistfight does help lower the drama to its most personal aspects.
It is funny how Maruki is like “everybody has pains in their life and they can’t overcome it, so I will let my hangups over how I could not overcome the loss of my loved one drive me to ensure no one can feel that pain again”. It is a very strangely presumptuous and compassionate and selfish mindset and it is also funny how his endgame is suffering in silence as an unknown god since he obviously needs help but he really keeps pushing it aside. It also presents the nice twist of becoming god or becoming powerful as a weird coping mechanism people do when they wish to regain control, no matter how compassionate and moral the reasoning is.
"General cultural osmosis" is the first time I have heard a perfect term for the phenomenon of just knowing random things from the internet, even though you don't necessarily seek them out.
I could apply this term to so much random, mostly useless knowledge.
Thanks for making me feel as old as that phrase
I think it's also worth noting that "save the world" plots express an influence of Power Creep, as does "killing god" plots.
When the core game loop consists of: Kill Monsters, Get Stronger, Repeat until final boss
... you kind of make power creep not only unavoidable, but pretty much the goal of the game.
The real issue with power creep is relativity. As the protagonists fight monsters and grow exponentially more powerful with each conflict, the world they live in isn't changing to match them. Sooner or later, you end up with stories about battles between characters so powerful that The World is as fragile as an eggshell by comparison and it becomes the last remaining vestige of stakes that the storyteller can implement against the audience or the protagonists. Enter the Superman problem, where nothing can actually hurt Superman (or else he was never all that Super) and he actually has to hold back most of his power because punching with all his strength might ingite our atmosphere and create a shockwave that levels Metropolis.
Throwing The World in front of the metaphorical Trolley is just about the only reasonable link back to the godlike protagonist's own connection to Humanity
... except it isn't at all, which is Yachtzee's point. A focus on power in a power fantasy tends to obscure the true interpersonal drama of characters by making normal human experiences feel insignificant by comparison, but it's actually an illusion.
I would argue that select installments of the MCU actually handled this problem really well. Civil War didn't really have a threat to the world and it was one of the most compelling stories the film saga has, because it simply focused on the flaws and virtues of the avengers themselves and how those differences brought the characters into direct conflict, both to defend their ideals and also from ways they couldn't overcome some of their darker, more selfish impulses.
Save the world plots usually are a crutch, and power creep is usually the problem that crutch is trying to solve. It's a case of taking the first obvious answer and running with it, rather than doing the work of asking how to end the story with a confrontation more directly relevant to the protagonist's goals and motivations.
Also simple evil humans just don't work great as a main boss without something to elevate them into something stronger or untouchable, once you get past all their henchmen, cultists, organisations, societal control and web of lies over others, standing face to face with them they are simply a soft squishy human, easy to physically destroy, a very boring final boss in a videogame where you want all your gameplay skills tested. The real irony should be that their ideas which is the true manifestation of their evil, has now propagated out to so many people, it can potentially now live on without them. But ofcourse nobody wants anything that complex.
@@cattysplata a bullet sponge human or human like enemy is definitely more frustrating than an equally bullet spongy giant robot, god, or abomination of hell, if not for the smaller hitbox than because we know what other humans are supposed to act like and them having the connstitution of a titanium bollard just doesn't sit right. (protagonist notwithstanding of course)
I mean power creep generally isn't an issue in games as much as it is in other mediums because we earned every bit of that power, and generally don't see previous villians in combat after they lose
@@Sarah12471 it can be design wise especially when you're fighting things we have real world context for how impressive winning a fight against something is, like other people, wolves, or trains.
@@RAFMnBgaming Wait trains? Why trains specifically?
And i suppose i get it from a design stand point but i disagree on a story level
Come now, Yahtzee, you know full well the world-ending threat doesn't *completely* sweep away Attractive Female Party Member #2's daddy issues - you have to resolve those to unlock her ultimate weapon, which is part of the requirements for getting her final special ability at level 69, which makes the final dungeon really just a lot more fun.
soul hackers 2 moment.
Also maxing out their social stats to get the chance to romance an anime hottie.
@@four_the_fourth9095Well, that aged poorly now that they just allow you to sprint if you feel like it
What’s funny is how persona 3 is almost entirely a “save the world” type plot, yet I still feel it handles the concept the best. The interesting factor of it is how the characters respond to such overwhelming adversity in comparison to most jprgs where the squad defeats god with the power of friendship like it was an ordinary Wednesday.
Yea it's built well
Agreed, I played it after 5 and 4 and despite how fed up I was with this trope by then and aside from the less than subtle way it handled the literal “ you used the power of friendship” in the very last fight, the atmosphere of hopelessness and dread the party characters experienced in those final months after you had been watching their relationships with each other grow in a natural way over the course of the game (unlike p4 and 5 as much as I love them where everybodys besties like straight away) and of course the incredible ending really made for what I’d probably consider the best use of the killing god trope in the genre so far
What also helps with the whole save the world plot is that the P3 cast factually won the battle but literally came a hairs breath away from losing the war.
They might have beaten Nyx in a 1v4 fight sure, but the end of the world still was gonna happen anyway and would have happened were it not for the main character sacrificing their very soul and afterlife to do so. Which, By default, already would subvert a lot of expectations of the trope because that’s not how it works, usually you save the day and everyone walks home happy except maybe a secondary character who gave their life away.
Which by default would hit the player pretty hard, especially seeing how the cast follows up and reacts to it in the Answer.
Except the characters are the worst of the modern trilogy and the god is the least interesting of them all
@@thatitalianlameguy2235bruh what 💀
How is nyx is less interesting than the izanamid or yaldamid 💀
If I had a bunch of super talented artists on a team coming up with crazy monster designs 24/7 I don't think I would be capable of stopping them from adding a Statue of the Gods or God Kefka at the end of the game.
Can you imagine if FF6 didn't end up with that awesome boss and some sort of lame boss that this guy apparently likes? With the type of Regular bosses Final Fantasy games have, a godlike being is basically required at the end.
@@Vaquix000 Yeah, but then FF7 ends with you just fighting Sephiroth. First the bizarro Sephiroth fight where he is monstrous, but then after that a final fight where it's just Cloud fighting plain old Sephiroth alone.
Though I would argue that the final fight just being against a dude or against some giant monster is irrelevant to the point being made in the video. It's not about how big or crazy looking the enemy is. It's about the stakes of the encounter and how that affects things like character relations or story pacing.
Even more interestingly, Sephiroth had to be stopped four times. Bizzaro Sephiroth was the battle to stop Sephiroth from becoming a god, and that failed. They had to do the next best thing, which is to kill the godly Sefer Sephiroth. That succeeds. Then, they need to make sure Sephiroth can’t control Cloud, which succeeds because Cloud is over his hangups for now until the Geostigma incident, but even before that Cloud did very badly and was the JRPG equivalent to a shell-shocked veteran. Finally, even though Sephiroth is gone at that point Meteor was still summoned, so Aerith had to stop that and she succeeded but barely. Sephiroth may have lost, but it took coordination.
Well, it's three fights.
Bizarro. (Left, front and right flanks, up to three characters each.)
One-Winged Angel. (Your main three)
Perfect. (This is just you and Cloud)
I’m more fine with the “defeat god with the power of friendship” thing in P4 and 5 in part because friendship is a major gameplay mechanic.
Edit: if anything I wish they would lean more into it, like including a fail-state if you didn’t level up your confidants enough. But I can also easily understand why Atlus didn’t think it was a good idea to include a fail-state that would require you to replay a 70-100 hour game to overcome.
To be more accurate, Persona 3 tried this with reversed arcanas in terms of relationships and it is genuinely infuriating.
@@iantaakalla8180 to be fair, someone would have to be remarkably terrible at the game to ever trigger the reverse arcanas.
You pretty much have to deliberately / intentionally work to get em.
Across 5 full playthroughs totalling well over 400 hours at least, I only ever had It happen to me once.
@@iantaakalla8180true but I still think its BS how having a harem wont even affect your links in the last two games
@@willmiddle1604 I do find it funny that in Persona 5 they were very close to implying that Joker prefers a harem where he dates all of the people he helps. That would have been a hell of a message to send, especially given that you can, in Royal, date Sumire who is loyal to you because you help her when she very literally needs to be Persona-brainwashed into functioning. There is also Futaba, who is next worst-off but at least after her arc she eventually is very proactive in doing stuff, but then you have Kawakami and her maid job.
It reminds me of Discworld. Early novels were so desperate to have a world-threatening villain. Then later one's got a bit more relaxed about it, and it made the books so much better.
One reason I loved Yakuza Like a Dragon is because of how it goes against the standard JRPG formula. The last boss is just an ex-boxer.
God could be an ex-boxer.
he uses god's warning and god's right hand as moves so therefore he is god. (this is a joke.)
You loved it because the final boss was underwhelming? Unusual reason for loving something. There's so many ways to make a super godlike entity look visually interesting and unique, with great music. But fighting an ex-boxer...? At the end of a JRPG? Are you sure that even IS a JRPG? HARD pass on that one. If that's the final boss the regular bosses must be insanely lame.
@Vaquix000 yakuza like a dragon isn't your typical jrpg. it is from the perspective of an ex-yakuza that imagines how he fights as akin to dragon quest. it still takes place in a realistic world so fighting an ex-boxer is very cool in context. especially since he has a cool dragon tattoo. yakuza is typically a beat em up with light jrpg mechanics, but the developers though it would be cool to turn the seventh and eight entry into a full on turn-based jrpg.
@@Vaquix000In context, it is actually very cool, since it is in a more realistic setting, and Tendo is considered to be at the top of his game as an ex-boxer, like, he is absolutely no slouch
The idea we as a species can’t care about as much about the entire world as we can a single person because our brains aren’t physically capable of comprehending the idea a place as large as the world exists is genuinely kind of terrifying.
Actually I've had dreams about the end of the world and felt a sense of extreme sadness for everyone. So I don't really get this point that some people are making.
@@Vaquix000 I guess there is a point where some people are exceptions, but the main gist is that we as a species can't really comprehend the concept of an entire world ending because that would include thinking about the people, animals, plants, entire societies, buildings, etc being absolutely destroyed by... something. We can think of a murder in detail since there's a lot less variables (I mean it's still a lot but a lot less than the entire world), but when it's about the world... well that could mean anything.
How we perceive "the world" could be as big as the planet itself or just the town you grew up in, basically... a world view. Surprisingly, a lot of old stories made by humans basically frame their home land as "the world" even tho it's really not in a literal sense. There is a feeling of dread obviously, the concept of everything around you melting away is just sad and I'm sure that's what you felt. The reason why we can process the world dying is because it's a slow death, like getting old, we don't exactly know how to process the immideate disintegration of the world and everything in it as we know it.
@@Vaquix000 I think part of that might just be that the world ending is a lot easier to grasp with after it has happened.
It's just like how deer cannot comprehend that a speeding car is a dangerous thing.
@@ArifRWinandar I think they can understand they're dangerous, just not what they're capable of.
The 3 main Xenoblades are excellent subversions of "Teens save the world through the power of friendship". Probably helped by Shulk, Rex, and Noah being characters of their own as opposed to blank representations for the player to fill in
Spoilers:
Yeah, two of examples here wind up putting the protagonists on the side of destroying the world with the villains being the ones preserving it.
Now if only Xenoblade was good
@@wesnohathas1993 And the heroes in the other game effectively dismantle how their world works meaning they all but destroy their world (and the villains also want to destroy the world too. It is very Tales of the Abyss in that manner)
@@Haverlockit is good, it's amazing. The fuck are you smoking?
🧢
The point on saving the world being an excuse for lazy writing made really hit home for me, and made me realize that pretty much exactly that is one of my main gripes with the Secret Invasion Marvel show - so many interesting ways they could've taken the premise with subteruge and spy-narratives, yet they went with preventing the end of the world and the potential for a nuclear apocalypse.
Omg they've built up to world ending threats for decades. There is no reason to spend another ten years showing the specificity of the Skrull invasion, as we all wonder if the heroes are actually the heroes. Secret Invasion was perfectly fine and to the point, which I much prefer to the overly drawn out bullshit that seems to rule the day.
Secret Invasion wasn't about stopping the end of the world. It was about preventing a war. It didn't even come close to being about the end of the world.
You expected interesting plot from something about aliens that look like silly goblin men? Seriously?
HE WASNT EVEN OLD ENOUGH TO SHAVE, BUT HE COULD USE THE FORCE, THEY SAY!
Finished Suikoden 1 and 2 recently. It was refreshing that those games whilst having godly themes in its deeplore and that it mainly pushes the plot. Theyre really just games about trying to end a massive war enveloping the continents they take place in. No dropping all the story threads near the end to kill god in a central universe tornado. Just, you've taken down an empire, brought peace at last, but look at all it cost to do so.
I want to save the world if only games would give me a world worth saving.
I feel _Final Fantasy VI_ did a good job with this by making the surviving world at the game's end so small and close to collapse that it seemed insane _not_ to want to save it. Then again, it was one of the last Final Fantasy games not to fit perfectly into the mold Yahtzee describes. It didn't sell great in the U.S., it wasn't beloved in Japan and the only time the series really tried to break the mold again was _Final Fantasy IX,_ while shielding itself with self-conscious retro nostalgia.
@@MegaZeta To be fair, the ending of FFVI has you hovering in the sky defeating a god to save the world. I'm not sure what part of this didn't fit perfectly into the mold Yahtzee describes.
@@LoonyBoBThe fact that the world is already fucked and that you didn't save it, you're saving what is left of it.
@@lazaroskarmaniolas7410 True - but that's pretty par for JRPGs too, especially in the Final Fantasy series. Half of the worlds get really bad before you save them.
The xenoblade games do a great job of this.
Even in the Persona 5 example you have the big denouement with the evil politician, and it could've ended there and been totally satisfying. He didn't need to be taking orders from anyone else or be the puppet of some larger entity. But they felt the need to pay off Mementos and turn it into another god killer.
Unfortunately you've massively missed the point. The final boss is Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge. Western audiences (especially British and American) have always struggled to grasp that MegaTen games are reinterpretations of religious mythology because of the linear, dogmatic view of God and religion that they're indoctrinated with from childhood. Shin Megami Tensei II has you fight the literal, actual God (YHWH) of the Old Testament; SMT III has you physically punch out the divine spark and collective consciousness of the entire universe, stopping entropic processes. From a storytelling perspective it requires a bit more contextual understanding than something like Dragon Quest or Chrono - and from a gameplay perspective of course they feature human antagonists at first lol. What would you do for the first half of the game otherwise? Fight Jesus Christ?
@@antlkth0nI can smell the body odor from this comment. How does anything you said change the fact that it always ends the same. You talk as if they HAVE to follow the same story beats every time
@@kin-3877 reading comprehension isn't your strong suit is it mate? Don't worry - I don't judge you. Slow down and try again, word by word 😊
@@antlkth0n explaining why something exists doesn't make its constant use suddenly fine. Your comments don't address the point of the video
@@antlkth0n you do know that stories aren't real, right?
Amusing how you feature an image of TTYD in the thumbnail where saving the world is more of a roundabout way to the goal of saving the princess. The whole game it's about saving the princess (oh and stopping the bad guys) but it also happens to stop an enormous entity of evil from coming to rule the world in Darkness. I like a plot that may have grand consequences but really it's more of a side effect of the personal goals.
Both the Persona games he mentioned are the same. Saving the world is only a goal during the final climactic dungeons when previously it was more grounded. Earthbound is the only one of the 4 shown that is explicitly a "save the world" plot right from the get-go
And Earthbound is a parody of those simple plots, furthermore, so not even Earthbound is that straight of an example especially given Earthbound is also a metaphor about growing up in a confusing world.
I actually don’t mind soo many JRPG stories ending in “Kill God” but honestly I think for most of those stories it’s a bit too easy, as in There’s not enough death. Fighting god shouldn’t come without sacrifice and even if characters do “die” they always come back. I’d love to see more games just say fuck it, half your friends are dead now live with it.
Funnily enough, while DDS 2 DOES revive the characters, it only does so for the final dungeon, and they're basically ghosts (solar data) by that point anyway, save for Seraph, who was the only one left
Outside of videogames, Mistborn: The Final Empire is my favorite book where a group of friends band together to kill a god, but then that's just the first book in the trilogy, and the series itself is now up to 7 books.
I mean they KINDA kill God, KINDA make a new one
@@NovaKorpov Sssshhhhhhhh
I think it's more of a story of god using the power of other people's friendships to kill god, then the power of another guy's friendships to make a better god.
I remember getting to the third act of that book and being like "wait... they're gonna face the big baddie in THIS book?... What is the REST of this trilogy about?"
Love that trilogy.
@@7Comic7mischief7 One of the few writers that can put a good twist at the end that makes sense, is satisfying, and I somehow don't see coming.
'This is real darkness. It's not death, or war... Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart, Harry.'
- Disco Elysium
Planescape: Torment was so compelling for this reason. The central question--what can change the nature of a man--is all you're trying to explore. Levelling up and fighting and travelling and exploring are all just ways for you to examine the question from many sides. What a remarkable game that was.
Planescape: Torment is mostly just trying to answer a simple question. "Who the fuck am I?"
I mean you kinda do kill god at the end depending on your choices, but god's not necessarily a universe ending threat and it's power of friendship in the sense that your connections to others will inform your choices.
Both Takuto Maruki and Izanami have pretty much similar goals in fact to an alarming degree. They don't want to destroy the world but destroy reality because humanity would rather live in the ideal world they each want to live in. I guess they ran out of ideas in the idea bucket. But the final bosses of not just persona but megami tensei as a whole is meant to be a representation of an abstract concept. It makes sense for the boss to be god or god-like. Despair, Chaos, Sins of the Past, Suicide, Mass Media, a stolen future from the youth. It requires a bit of meta analysis to actually understand why some JRPGs fall back on this trope and what JRPGs are doing with the trope and are they actually using it to present a story or idea. A trope is a trope because it works. But a trope done badly is not the fault of the trope but the execution.
With knowledge about the intentions of the authors for the story of Persona 5, I very much prefer Yaldabaoth as an ending boss over Maruki. The reason being is that Persona 5 after the Great Eastern Earthquake was made to be a social commentary on Japanese society. If anything Yaldabaoth as much as he is a false god lore wise to his real world gnostic counterpart, he is also meant as a representation of the Japanese mindset of just letting things happen and hoping for the best. Once viewed with the knowledge of Japanese society, all of the bosses become less cartoonish and more real and downright terrifying that the things shown in game are happening to real people to the point that the youth are beaten to submission and have no hope for the future as they transition into adulthood.
@@BoostedMonkey05 jaldabaoth is a mad creator god who created a world of suffering for humanity to exist in because he was a bastard created by the aeon Sophia who was jealous that the other aeons were getting together and having kids, so she created one without the consent of a bonded partner
Jaldabaoths whole thing is control over the world and is meant to mirror the mythical aspects of the christian testaments account of Jesus Christ as a divine authority and ruler over all humankind.
It doesn't require a unique perspective to read the bible and say "hey this god fella is kinda a dick who died and made him king?"
Re: discourse about the use of JRPG, Jim Stephanie Sterling has a thorough video explaining the topic. The term isn’t inherently racist but it has been used as a derogatory term in the industry. Phil Fish used it in a pretty racist way saying roughly “JRPGs are bad, *you people* just make bad games” for example.
Overall it has shifted in sentiment to be more positive in recent years but it’s also less descriptive as a genre name now, so it’s a mixed bag.
This is why I love Ys. Adol doesn't save the world. Dude just gets lost on an adventure.
This is why the scouring of the shire is so important in lord of the rings, yes we’ve saved the world, but now we need to fix what we actually care about, even if we’ve grown and no longer fit cleanly into our old lives.
If you can make it through Final Fantasy 6, I think that's an example of a "using the power of friendship to kill god" done really well. It really earns the friendship, and fleshes out the god as a legitimate threat you actually care about stopping. The final boss has a legitimate and _very obvious_ impact on you, your characters, and the entire world. Seeing it through to the end is more about the catharsis than "saving" the world.
It's so weird how in Pokémon the first generations often had their "gods" legendary pokemon as secrets with close to no story and then they became central to the villains' plot in gen 3. Often used as weapons to destroy and reshape the world.
Yes. And as a result, the plots became significantly more stupid.
At least the first game that involves this harnessing involves legitimately stupid people thinking they can provide environmentalism for free with Groudon/Kyogre, so the Hoenn games are less about unleashing destruction moreso they are about “we wish to pursue our worthy goal but we did not do our research”.
One of my favorite JRPGs where you don’t fight god can be summed up as high schooler gets into morally grey conflict with PETA in NYC
what game is that?
@@caivondavenez3854pokemon
@@caivondavenez3854I'm gonna guess Pokemon Black and White?
@@butterlove1605 but reshiram/zekrom tho I mean they're not arceus but at least god adjacent
@@caivondavenez3854 Pokémon Black and White
I love the 'villain' of Persona 5 Royal for this reason, as you touched on here. What he wants is literally to make the world a better place and to make everyone happy and not have to suffer. Not even in a authoritarian way, he comes at it from his own pain and is sincere in his goals. The reason he fights so hard is because of that. You could just as easily argue he is actually the good guy and trying to stop him is evil and it would mostly work.
The reason you have to fight him is because you disagree about the free will of the matter, also what people can actually gain from painful experiences. He even agrees with your arguments during the fight. He just points out that his concern is for those who are not able to overcome things due to no fault of their own, his own love interest was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in a coma. His downfall is more about a conflict of interest, his own ego and perspective, and the inherent corruption that level of power threatens.
I know I'm not adding anything but a lengthy amen, I just wanted to expand on that specific example because it is such a good one. So many stories I experience stick with me a month at most. His story I will likely remember until I die.
yeah, fantastic antagonist ("villain" is not really the right word for him) because his motives are very reasonable and understandable.
@@Triceratopping yeah, saying villain is more like calling someone "evil" and an antagonist is just someone who opposes the protagonist, it doesn't have anything to do with how evil they are.
There is some indication that the "perfect" world he's trying to build is - at least currently - falling short of expectations, though. IIRC, there are some cases in mementos or someplace of parents just sort of abandoning, neglecting or forgetting about their children. Like, they weren't ready to be parents, and so in this new fantasy where they can just live whatever lie they like, they stop parenting. Stop caring for their kids. Which is all kinds of "wait this is suddenly feeling extremely evil"... and not a good sign for the next generation of people growing up in this world, with only the overarching delusion to guide and comfort them.
He's not a bad guy, but there is some indication that his plan is going very wrong in places. It could perhaps be argued that these are "acceptable sacrifices", that the system "mostly works", that people overall are happier... but as all of that is built on them misinterpreting reality in a more pleasing way than what's actually there, this would be overlooking "minor" evils for the sake of a temporary, illusory "good". A strong and complex argument against the all-too-common modern evil that is self-deception.
tbh though the "Antagonist takes hedonics to logical extremes" is a trope that I'm also kinda sick of at this point though. Not saying hes a bad villain but there are so many other villains that are just like him but its much more fleshed out.
For anyone wondering about the JRPG thing, it comes from a recent interview from Naoki Yoshida. He works for Square, mainly as the director and producer of FF14 and its expansions, but he also worked on FF16 which is why he was being interviewed. This is what he said:
"this is going to depend on who you ask, but there was a time when this term first appeared 15 years ago, and for us as developers the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term. As though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past."
And, yeah. I don't know how many of you remember, but I do remember in the early 2000s when JRPG was like a punchline for a bad joke. So I absolutely see where he's coming from, even if I use JRPG the same way Yahtzee does here 0:47
Personally, I don't think I get to decide if it's racist or not, as I am not one of these Japanese developers. But I absolutely get where they're coming from and I will say, for my part, it's worth thinking about and while I probably will still use the term for now, I don't mind replacing it with something better if that comes along.
Is this a niche insult term back them among RPG communities? I've never really played such games and never heard of the term until the late 2010s. Why was it a punchline?
@@sse_weston4138 A lot of the forgotten JRPGs (and there were a LOT of them!) had very archaic game design, like enforced grinding instead of testing your strategic skill (for an extreme example, the first Ys game is basically a Zelda clone, but you don't have an attack button: you need to walk into enemies to attack them, which damages both you and them, and unless you're appropriately leveled this hurts you more than it hurts them - so you NEED to grind levels to be able to progress)
In one way the rigid story focus feels like what the divider between JRPG and WRPG (Western RPG) is, a JRPG is a game where set characters (often with very limited customization - everyone has a dedicated role and cannot change it) experience a very railroaded story, a WRPG often have a blank slate character and more focus on player expression and multiple endings.
The genres aren't tied to the regions anymore either. For instance, Etrian Odyssey is a very anime-esque series made in Japan but gameplaywise they're all western-style (except the Untold games which feature set named characters), Jimmy And The Pulsating Mass is made by western devs but is a japanese-style RPG.
To be fair, qualifying the differences between an RPG, ARPG and JRPG is an important cultural practice because they all play very differently from each other.
It's like genres of music. To me, Rap music is basically some dude talking to himself while music plays to as little synchrony to the talker as possible.
I don't listen to those songs, just as I wouldn't pick up a game genre that's cheery to a fault. We're talking wearing helmets to a funeral because nobody animated a frown.
Or you know, stop living in the past and live in the present where JRPG is renowned and loved by all and they should hold it like a badge of honor like how Kamiya, the dev of Bayonetta said that japanese developers should be proud with the term JRPG because of how far they have gotten.
Nice to see a cameo by Victor Casin in the ZP universe.
Funny, I just watched a video essay that explains the god thing in JRPGs and other japanese games. There's a whole spiel on how deification or real life figures and their fall out of favour when the system changes influences the trope: basically the "god" isn't God in the western/middle eastern sense but more like "the man", be it tradition or an external corrupting force that took over.
It's why LISA is so fantastic. While it may not be a JRPG, it's heavily influenced by one and yet, LISA is all about a man who's more than WILLING to let the post apocalyptic world he lives in die out, because he selfishly (and selflessly) secretly takes in the last living girl on the planet as his own daughter as a second chance for him, to redeem himself of his dark past and denies the world it's second chance by doing so.
I will have to defend Chrono Trigger because all the plot revolves around a powerful menace living through all the ages you visit that affects your present and the future. It enhances the typical time travel history. But in P4 and P5 they just pull the God figure on the last minute.
Or Final Fantasy 9, where they had a perfectly valid villain in Kuja, but they had to go and whip out Necron at the last second, a character you never even knew existed 'till that final boss fight.
@@HeyEverybodyJesseHere That is the only reason I dont like FF9 as much as others. It's an amazing game and I love it, but that surprise last second villain twist takes it down below 6,7,8, and 10 in my list of favorites.
Ya lavos is this parasite that stuck his tendrils in the earth throughout the ages influencing evolution in order to enable him to gain more resources to achieve more power and eventually reproduce after destroying the earth.
Persona is kind of weird in that, while yes the figure itself is revealed at the last minute, the games are heavily infused with symbolism and mythology that foreshadow the specific "god" figure you're fighting, especially when Izanami and Yaldabaoth are intrinsic icons that correlate with their themes. Not saying they have no room for criticism or anything however, which is why I believe P4G added Marie and extra scenes to foreshadow Izanami more directly and why P5R found a way to continue the story after seemingly defeating the collective desire for authority by reinterpreting the same idea in a new manner with a more human antagonist
@@HeyEverybodyJesseHere From my understanding, Necron isn't the villain behind Kuja or anything. He's suppose to be basically the planet's self-defense system, like an antibody, testing the party. Now I will admit, fighting him seems odd, as it should be some other sort of testing, but JRPGs.
I love that the voice of the sock puppet is also the voice of Malcolm Sturb
Sir, you do good work and make nice videos.
This right here is my same issue with super hero movies lately. A lot of em seem to think for a super hero to be super they must be doing something on the level of saving the world or universe. I would love lesser stories that focuses on characters more.
It kinda does feel like we've been trapped in a cycle of high numbers rather than high concepts.
That's part of what made Guardian's Vol 3 so good, it was all just about saving rocket
This is also why I loved Wandavision. The story and plot are literally Wanda unpacking her trauma, but I’m the midst of that they otherwise live normal sitcom lives
Really just wanna say how glad I am that P4/5 is a recurring thing in the Yahtzeeverse after he played both
"Sad man gets more sad" is probably the most hilariously appropriate summation of SH2's major plotline movement I've ever come across. Brilliant.
Funnily enough, “sad man gets more sad” is also Dr. Maruki’s arc before he is stripped of his godly powers.
@@iantaakalla8180Figue is basically Maruki Redux
Excellent insight into story stakes.
That feeling when you realise that one of your favourite stories follows the classic jrpg pattern
I was not expecting a Malcolm Sturb cameo at 3:01.
Hahah, he gets some good mileage out of his repertoire of voices
We got a fellow Yahtzee audio book enthusiast high five
🙏
A fellow enthusiast eagerly awaiting the next installment to quite an unhealthy degree that he expects every ZP episode to begin with "my latest audio book is out now".
I forget who talked about it, maybe Overly Sarcastic Productions or The Gamemaker's Toolkit or Extra Credit, but there's a lot of good stories that *aren't* about saving the world. They're about some small community and small, highly personal goals held by the main character or other people they meet. Low stakes has a totally different emotional range from "save the world", but it tends to feel even more important. Save the world is so big and bombastic that it can't make room for the nuance and deeply personal motivations of someone who just wants to build a nice house, or pass their classes with their friends, or explore an cool environment. If the world isn't in danger, then the plot has permission to be about something else.
"Using the power of acquaintanceship to assassinate Jehovah" really tickled me 🤣🤣🤣
Smaller scale stories are usually what I prefer over larger ones. My favorite game and jrpg is The World Ends With You, where the conflict is about the protagonist and his partner trying to survive in an uncaring afterlife and return to life. There’s plenty of great jrpgs that don’t end in killing god though, Yahtzee just doesn’t explore the genre due to lack of interest + being a reviewer tied largely having to play mainstream new games.
Except twewy ends with you fighting the god of the rg
@@thatitalianlameguy2235 Nope. You fight the god's subservient; and then the god challenges Neku to a duel, in which Neku loses on purpose.
@@thatitalianlameguy2235
The conductor isn't a god, he's just a middleman for an angel who is also a middleman for a bunch of powerful assholes.
Not even Neo TWEWY follows this because the point is to learn to fix the mistakes you make by leaning too hard on crutches and the final boss is the mess made by relying on a rewind feature after eliminating what would typically be the final boss in a JRPG that is basically the god of Shinjuku who succeeded in killing Shinjuku by doing his job too well.
One of my favorite old reddit posts about great other video game plots, was the story of a protag with braces in any sort of post apocalyptic situation and their doing anything to try and find a dentist to take them off. 10/10 would story write and dev this game
You basically just need some vices and a fine hook to get most of it off. The wrap around bands would be most difficult though
I love how the sock puppet has the same voice as Malcom Sturb
"You can't destory Earth! That's where I keep all my Stuff!" - The Tick.
Maruki is a damn good antagonist, certainly, in that he's not even a villain. he's just doing what the protagonists were doing but on a grander scale, and with good intentions. he is a hero by his own right, and the conflict doesn't come from good vs evil, but philosophical differences on what happiness should be and where it should come from. hell, i agree with him. if it was me and not joker making the decision, i'd allow maruki to alter reality.
🤝
You definitely shouldn't, part of the point is that the heroes did NOT want their lives magically perfected by him and that he doesn't have the right to choose that for everyone. He's not evil because he really does want to help people, but it's conceited to think you know best for everyone. People have the right to find meaning in their hardships and not have them taken away, which is why to me I feel like stopping Maruki was the only option here.
I do enjoy that the endgame of Royal is the clarification of what the Phantom Thieves do, and not the typical plot of taking down a god.
@@ElectricBarrier The moment the thieves started changing the hearts of the palace holders and mementos shadows, they lost that argument. If maruki had no right to choose what's best for everyone, then the thieves had no right to choose what's best for the palace holders, the shadows, and their victims.
@@bottomlefto Yeah but that's something the game already addressed in it's base version, essentially they realized they weren't really doing the right thing despite their intentions and the fact they were saving people. The Maruki storyline is further expanding on that dilemma and asking you to think about it more. Regardless it doesn't really matter if they're hypocritical, I never agreed with their methods I just thought it was an interesting story idea and they were interesting characters whose reasoning I understood(the bosses ARE objectively horrible, after all), which doesn't change the fact you shouldn't let Maruki go through with it if you were in that position and that stopping him is the correct choice.
It would be nice to play more jrpgs with lower stakes. Breath of Fire 3 ends with a fight against "God" but their goal is more of a Dr. Maruki situation where the world will be fine whether or not they win.
I would even make an argument that the Breath of Fire series as a whole does the whole "fight god" concept better than most JRPGs. In BoF 2 you see from the very beginning of the game the corrupting effects of the church, and it's even presented as fairly innocuous at times, the things the bad guy does are extremely tangible and woven into the world very well. When I went to fight the final boss I was thinking about Ray, Ryu's Dad, and the numerous followers of the faith. It wasn't an asspull, it was a very organic build up to the final encounter.
@@ArkThePieKing I never had the chance to play 1 and 2. My brother and I started with 3 and I played 4. Replayed 3 during peak pandemic 2020 and I'll be damned if that game doesn't hold up better than I expected. I suppose I always find of 3 cause it all felt like a very personal journey rather than a ticking clock against doomsday. Honestly my least favorite part of 3 was when they connect it to the events of 1 saying "Ah yes, she was always a malevolent entity!" near the end. I like the villain so much more as simply an overprotective maternal figure who means well but does harm (the road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that).
If you ever get the chance definitely play 2. It's rough around a lot of edges but the story and world building aren't those edges, it just has a little bullshit difficulty and the encounter rate is a bit high. I agree on 3 having an amazing story, I think 3 is the best in the series no contest.@@hanniballahr94
Yahtzee doing an adenoids voice akin to Jeremy Clarkson's is just beautiful
Gods in the JRPG sense normally represent an unfair social system, the creation of which isn't the fault of any one particular villainous person. God killing is basically overthrowing the unfair system. Although I do feel that blaming unfair social constructs on Gods entirely absolves the society of blame and responsibility
I think that the idea of calling a JRPG being racist probably comes from a recent misunderstanding by Americans about British people calling a Chinese takeaway just "a Chinese" and them calling it racist making them think about other things. In this case, it's really not. As you point out there are lots of things that the Japanese bring to their RPGs which mean they are very identifiable, it's like British comedy, you can always tell that it's British comedy
Nobody sensible is calling the term JRPG racist. The idea of chucking the term came from a SkillUp interview with Yoshi P in which he pointed out that the Japanese themselves do not use the term and find it reductive and at least historically derogatory. I recommend Jim Steph Sterling's video on the matter.
Agreed that Jim Stephanie Sterling has a thorough video explaining the topic. And the term isn’t inherently racist but it has been used as a derogatory term in the industry. Phil Fish used it in a pretty racist way saying roughly “JRPGs are bad, *you people* just make bad games” for example.
Overall it has shifted in sentiment to be more positive in recent years but it’s also less descriptive as a genre name, so it’s a mixed bag.
Calling anything racist that doesn't involve actual racism on a Jim Crow/Nuremberg Laws level is just what people who have nothing useful to say default to when they want to feel like they're contributing something Big And Important™ to the discussion.
@@gablanwheel3895 I think that says more about Phil Fish than the term. For example, "German sausages are bad, you people just make bad food" is an equally ridiculous statement.
That's kind of funny considering the US will default to "Asian" as the preferred term for anything to the east of Pakistan.
You hit the nail on the head in your Persona 4 criticisms. The murder mystery storyline is well told, interesting, and keeps you engaged in who the real killer is the whole time, alongside having great characters. Even the Marie 3rd semester storyline, while not my favorite character or dungeon, at least gives you some personal investment because of her involvement in the story and her relationship to the protagonist. It's a shame that the actual ending is just another crappy god you have to kill off.
I tried to rewatch all of P4G in an LP and emotionally and literally tapped out after that eyeball boss fight since we got the guy
And then Persona 5 does the same, but with fighting corrupt officials. Which would at least always be relevant, but then it is posits Yaldabaoth as the source of Joker’s Wild year when the events otherwise were a wild ride on their own.
I dunno what to tell you guys, it's called persona 2345. Killing God's machination through the lense of mortals was always their thing. At this point, might as well just admit that you don't like Persona games.
@@seokkyunhong8812Disliking one trope of a thing isn't the same as disliking the entire thing.
Amusingly, the entire Marie storyline was created so that Izanami was better foreshadowed. Unfortunately, it's still wrapped up in cultural nuance and symbolism.
2:58 Oh, hi Malcolm Stern.
"Hell, even Luke Skywalker isn't old enough to shave." -- LOL! Nice "Weird Al" Yankovic "The Saga Begins" reference! LOLed at the sock puppet thing and the ending! 🤣
I should have bookmarked it to link here but literally just a couple weeks ago I watched a fantastic deep dive into exactly why JRPGs have that very common structure that looked at it through the lens of Japanese historical experience and culture, particularly "leveling up" (a theme that goes back to Confucianism where ascension to divine status is possible through constant self-improvement and testing) and the constant rise and destruction of "false gods" from Emperors to state religions to the US military forcing open the ports, rise of nationalistic fervor bluntly scorched by atomic bombs, and most recently the ascension of technology sideswiped by economic inequality and a corporate environment that results in karoshi. In that context, the "universal theme" of JRPGs makes a ton of sense.
Now THAT'S overthinking things. You "level up" in JRPGs because the genre as a whole was inspired by Wizardry (which was INCREDIBLY popular in Japan), which was itself inspired by Dungeons & Dragons.
Are you thinking of the video by Moon Channel?
That sounds familiar@@realperson69
It’s the same reason why I moved to watching slice of life anime.
I feel like this is a case of "critic brain", where you've had so much experience with a medium, that you start to develop a tolerance to common tropes and ideas that are "merely functional" if you're 40 and have seen them all before, but are mind-blowing and resonant if you're 12 (i.e. the target audience) and have sofar only ever played Mario Kart. Basically everything Socky said was completely correct.
These tropes exist because they are enjoyable with a large majority of the population though. It exists in film and books, although there is more option for a wider range of narratives these days, it took a long time for those medias to get there. We even often impose conservative rules on creativity, believing something cannot or should not be done until somebody inevitably breaks the rules and proves them wrong.
Yes! Thank you!
2:35 “There’s usually some lip service given to it”
Looks like Lucca is giving Robo some lip service in that shot…
(Gently but insistently pushes Mr. Socky's head out of my lap)
Not now, hon. They can hear us.
This why I really like Jack Garland from Stranger of Paradise. He doesn't save the world, but instead ruins the world in order to create the hero who will save the world.
I think "JRPG" as a phrase is mostly seen as offensive by some Japanese game devs specifically, where "JRPG" really does just mean "RPG made in Japan" and not the specific classic format Yahtzee describes. (I almost feel he is slightly *too* specific but that's just me.) Some Japanese devs have said they feel "pigeonholed", as in they aren't "allowed" to just make an RPG, because it has to be a *JRPG* specifically. In that sense, I totally agree about "JRPG" being used far too broadly. Like, no one who isn't high off of whatever they found under the sink could call Final Fantasy XVI a "JRPG" and be serious.
Just imagining that Red Dead Redemption 2 ends with Arthur and the gang riding out one last time to stop the Pinkertons from awakening a slumbering god that will end crime by stripping humans of free will. I can see Dutch doing the power of friendship/freedom speech before they fight God-Milton
I feel the differences between P5 and P5R's endings in terms of how people perceive them prove that "save the world" can work, but is not a "get out of jail free card" for writing. As many have said, the stakes are so inconceivable and unrelatable that the audience couldn't possibly find themselves attached to the consequences, and thus the story can ironically almost feel anticlimactic. The difference between Yaldabaoth and Maruki is that the writers took the time to establish a humanized and understandable connection to Maruki. Despite the fact that you effectively save the world from both antagonists, Maruki is more emotionally powerful and narratively cathartic because his motives are conceivable and the result in the event that you lose is clear to the player. It isn't about a physical threat like the world being destroyed, but rather an ethical and moral threat that the script takes time to build you a stance on, which gives the player, and not just the characters, an actual stake in the plot, and the fictional world becomes more immersive as a result.
The funny thing is that Yaldabaoth is supposed to be the culmination of societal ills that is a trend for villains in Persona 5. In that sense, he is fitting, and therefore even more terrifying. However, even given that it could feel that the Phantom Thieves are just the latest group to attain power. I think Maruki’s semester makes it clear that the Phantom Thieves will never be the source of future societal ills.
The Atelier series is an example of JRPGs on a more local/personal scale, and not about saving the world. I recommend them (if you don't mind anime style games in the first place).
As someone that's played an enormous amount of RPGs and JRPGs, this video rings extremely true. Even in games where the characters aren't a bunch of buddy buddy chucklefucks, the ultimate antagonist is always a Deity level or existential threat. There's a LOT of contexts for how that's played off but my god it's like chewing on the same piece of stale bread for nearly two decades.
Cthulhu Saves The World pokes at this really well
Hi-Fi Rush did the my friends are my power pretty well and it didn't feel like a crutch to complete a young adult story. Dork- I mean chai earned that closure and I hope future games can draw from stories like that to just develop more satisfying endings.
Pretty sure "Defeating God" in JRPGs has more to do with defeating Bad Bosses that keep their terrible societal norms going rather than just defeating a deity.
Jrpgs also usually involved traveling through a massive world, so it makes sense that in the end the Big Bad guy is a force that's threatening said world
I do always like an "underwater basket weaving" joke
Throwback to one of his oldest videos.