I played a few RPG maker games a little over a decade ago but I haven't been keeping up with them since. I was unaware there was still an active community making them! I might make a video dedicated to RPG maker games in the future so tell me some of your favorites!
Ironicaly, most of my favorite RPG Maker games aren't actually RPGs. ^^; Omori (this one is actually a JRPG) To the Moon (and other games developed by Freebird Games) OneShot Ib Rakuen Are probably my favorites "The Witch's House" and "Star Stealing Prince" are also pretty cool And I've heard great things about "OFF" and "Lisa: the Painful", but I've yet to play them
I dunno man, the RPG maker community is gigantic and has been since it released. And isn't all hobbyist projects, omori lisa and one shot were all made in RPGmaker and are fantastic and were very popular by indie game standards. The nice thing about developing a JRPG is that the genre is so dependent on its tropes it is very easy to use pre-built tools so even amateurs can make them. The main draw of the genre is usually the story so RPG maker allows writers to work on projects on their own and craft really amazing stories with little help from experienced developers. Putting a twist on it to make it more interesting and less generic is hard sure, but 90% of indies don't do that regardless of genre anyway lol. I think the JRPG genre in general just isn't very popular these days outside of the niche fanbase so we don't hear about as many of them. I can't think of a single AAA JRPG released in the last ten years that isn't part of an existing franchise from the 90s. Those sell because of the franchise, probably in SPITE of the genre. Even masterpieces like crosscode tend to fly under the radar.
the rpg maker is a genre in itseld. due to its' limitations and specifically art limitations, it stands out from other rpgs in general. granted there are some true gems there, but it's far different compared to say Edge of Eternity or Eternal Radiance
Omori took its developers a bunch of work. They had to go through a lot in order to do so. It was really hard. So yes, that's a masterpiece, but it took a lot of effort from its creator. That's kinda the point. How tough and hard these are, yet how amazing the results are. Only through sheer will can you finish them
Can a card battler be considered JRPG? If so, I once tried this adult game named False Myth without much care. Surprisingly, the narrative, music, and gameplay kept me interested until the very end, and I tend to abandon games quite easily. Even the adult scenes had some psychological and/or world-building reason to be there. It was a game made with care.
It feels like you're explaining a non-existent phenomenon. Indie Jrpgs are extremely common. With tools like RPGMaker, it's feasible to make one completely alone. I've even made one. (I borrowed assets, so I can't share, sadly). Two genres that are definitely rarer than Jrpgs are MMOs and simulators
it's not about the existence of them, it's the existence of GOOD ones. I think that's the point of the video. RPG's are also insanely difficult to balance, action or otherwise. A metric shit-ton of math is involved, and getting it wrong means your game is a boring mess not worth playing if someone finds it easy to exploit.
@@nekoluxuria7721 It makes a lot of sense though. MMO's are super expensive and has had a dwindling fan base that is slow yet steady as the years gone by. Jumping into the MMO market is almost suicide at this point for basically anyone, indie or AAA, with how strong competitions are and how little to gain a studio can get. Although, I can give one example of an indie MMO that is both new and successful which is Foxhole. Whether the game is fun or not really depends on you though since it is the closest thing to a WW1 simulator and we all know how much fun WW1 is. /s
@@robbieaulia6462 I would say that being able to host a stable server is the biggest problem as well since that isn't exactly cheap either. Hosting an mmoesque server in Minecraft is massively different than hosting a straight up MMO.
As a hobbyist game dev, I think indie devs just make games that they would want to play, part of the reason that procedural content is so common in indie games is because its fun to program and makes playtesting more enjoyable.
Same boat. Whether it's an "open world" style or a level-based game, one of the things I do very early in almost every game I work on is come up with a way to effectively randomize the play area. That way even if the reason I'm testing it is to make sure some very uninteresting thing is working right, I can at least also take a moment to look around and be like "oh neat, look at the weird way the map generated this time"
Its also easy in comparison to other things. This is why We Happy Few, for example, went this direction. You can make a full fledged game in less time, with less skill when using procedural content. Its why i will always call it lazy game design when the game revolves entirely around this. Its major flaws are also why i dont like these types of games
You are not wrong; even simple things like different enemy encounters are fun. For a Pokémon-like RPG I'm making an insane amount of versatility in how or what your able to encounter for creatures.
@@DaMoniableprocedural content is way harder to make then manual content, it’s just faster. Calling lazy is objectively incorrect. Neither approach is lazy.
They may be common, but seeing them at a decent level is rarer. It's like talking about indie FPS games- technically, one could easily argue that every Doom WAD (other than Hexen, Heretic, and maybe Evilution and Plutonia) are indie games in of themselves, but people rightfully do not treat them as games independent of their type in the genre.
yeah. real whiplash hearing him genuinely say that indie jrpgs are uncommon, then describe parameters where, obviously those indie games wouldn't be able to match. most jrpgs arent even 70 hours long. lots of hyperbole in this vid
@@Gamecubegal Whiplash is the word I'm lookin for. I'm pretty sure I did recoil when he mentioned JRPGs, lol. Correct though, I think most are in the 30-40 hours range. Everlong might be 70+ hours, but I don't remember vividly.
Shoutouts to Cassette Bests, an indie monster collecting RPG that was made in about three years by a hilariously small team. It just came out a couple of months ago, and after playing it for twelve hours, I can say that it both completely blows past pokemon Scarlet and Violet in terms of quality and is a fantastic and wholly unique experience all on its own.
I highly recommend not just checking it out. I recommend getting it now while it is still on sale on Steam for 20% off. I actually first bought it on Steam after hearing about some performance issues on the Switch that caused massive lag in parts. Though, since the 1.2 update released at the end of June those have been majorly improved upon and I have since gotten it on the Switch as well so I can play it portable. Not gonna say that there is zero lag in Cassette Beasts on the Switch, but I only really notice what is still there when I am looking for it in the 100+ hours I have put into multiple playthroughs on my Switch over two 100% playthroughs. In case you are wondering, this was palatable because of the randomizer/playthrough customizer options you unlock once you beat the game for the first time. In my opinion Cassette Beasts has beaten out even Tears of The Kingdom and Hogwarts' Legacy both for my favorite game of 2023 so far.
I've been playing rn, it's really good, even if there are some bugs here and there (and the physics is kinda janky lol). But the battle system is really hecking good and the spritwork is phenomenal (every Monster can fuse so there are like a TON of fusion sprites). so yeah, get it while you can
Huh! That was definitely not the genre I was expecting you to choose. I used to run a website specifically covering indie RPGs, and by far the most common subgenre of RPG indies would write to me about was the JRPG. There are probably more RPG Maker titles alone than every other indie RPG combined. First-person dungeon crawlers would probably be the second most common type, followed by Action RPGs, with Strategy RPGs and Western RPGs being the rarest kinds. (SRPG Studio is partly responsible for a recent glut of SRPGs, but those games are otherwise very, very hard to make.) I have experience with making pretty much all of these genres of RPG, and for my money, I'd say that WRPGs are the hardest to make: they demand everything that JRPGs do and more: more systems, more dialogue branches, and more alternate quest outcomes to support differing play styles, non-linearity, and role-playing choices, all of them hugely labor intensive and prone to introducing unexpected bugs.
@@megasoniczxx Ohhhhh, good question. It would probably be something like Telepath RPG: Servants of God with the combat, inventory, and proc gen capabilities of Together in Battle!
@@danielgrezda3339 RUclips keeps removing my answer to this question--it's probably triggering its anti-spam filters 😂 Let's, uh, just say that it's a URL with "IndieRPGs" as the body
Fantastic game, and still my benchmark for how to implement an adjustable difficulty system. Set the default bar really high and let the player gradually lower it whenever they want, so that it always feels challenging but not too challenging.
@@sheercold26 Just watch some videos about it ;-) Basically: story, gameplay, interactions. It feels like some old classic but with new gameplay mechanics! It's weird!
CROSSCODE IS SO GOOOOOOOOOD. In terms of inspiration, I think it reminds me a lot of Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana, but at a much faster pace and with its own unique twists that it stands out as just loosely inspired by those I mentioned. It really is a very unique game with a rock-solid aesthetic and design.
i dunno mate, i just finish it and the history is meh, the characters dont really fit and the combat is spam attack button. the end is really dissapointing
@@vicio19995 by any chance did you only made the main history and misions or decided to roam around and do side misions too ? because a lot of the game comes from there, or maybe you just wherent the target audience, which to be sincere even i cant tell exactly ho they aimed for
@@agustinmelar5496 i did a few side missions but were too grindi. Go to point A to B and then come back 3 times, or go to this area and keep looking for a thing, or wait a tower defense minigame, I stop doing side missions after they made me go back and forth 4 times to the same Tree
@@vicio19995I feel like you’re lying, there are monsters in the game that are deliberately anti-spam attack button, especially in Vermillion Wasteland. Those fights would take you like 10+ minutes if you just spammed attack button. And the break mechanic is anti-spam too. It sounds to me like you played the game poorly with all due respect
The team behind CrossCode is so talented, it feels unreal. The main character CAN'T talk, and yet, she's more expressive than fully voiced characters in AAA 100 million-budget games...
If you want an actual genre that indies will mostly avoid, it's MMOs. The sheer amount of manpower and budget to maintain servers is enormous and having a large active playerbase is integral to the experience (indies cannot outdo AAAs at mass appeal, they need to aim for specific niches). Writing schlocky dialogue, making oversized maps with slow and repetitive battles using RPG Maker is hardly a tall order. There's certainly great RPG Maker titles out there, but also a lot of junk.
You make a lot of good points about development cycles, the resources that go into them, the time investment, and all that. And while there are absolutely always going to be insanely long RPGs (which is not a bad thing), I really hope there end up being more short RPGs. 10-20 hours is about the sweet spot for me personally. Games that cut down on giant dungeons, fetch quests, etc. and that focus on quality more quantity for their characters and character writing could definitely shoot for that range. It could cut down on development time and such, and it would be more approachable for more audiences. That being said, my favorite JRPG is either Persona 4 Golden or Final Fantasy X, neither of which I could complete in under 20 hours, lol.
Chrono Trigger was only about 25 hours long and it's one of the all time classics of the genre. There is no reason a jrpg needs to be super long to be good.
I am 100% Behind Short RPGs. You can dump most of the padding in an RPG and get a wonderfully condensed experience that shows off the story and ideas a developer wants to share, and if it's a hit, they can make a sequel. ;P We used to get sequels that were just more of the same, but still fun. There's no reason we can't do that again. I would definitely play a Chrono Trigger 2 with the same underlying game system with a new storyline and a new gameplay wrinkle or two (Look at Pokemon for example...), and I'd feel the same way about an indie game that I enjoyed.
Came down here to say the same thing. I honestly do want to get more into jrpgs, but the 50 hour minimum that a lot of them seem to require wears on me, and having more shorter burst jrpgs would honestly be perfect for me. On that note, does anyone have recommends for already existing shorter jrpgs? I see chrono trigger and suikoden mentioned so I may give those a look. Anything around or under 20-25 hours would be golden (persona joke not intended).
As far as I can tell, it's not that JRPGs are underrepresented among indie games, but rather that most of them are made in Japan. And JRPGs are among the most expensive games to localize due to the sheer amount of writing that would need to be translated, so the vast majority of Japanese indie JRPG games never leave Japan. It's no coincidence that multiple engines for making JRPGs, like RPG Maker and Wolf RPG Editor, were developed first in Japan and only translated to English much later.
I refuse the idea that JRPG is a separate genre. It is an ill defined mixture of turn based tactics games (like jagged alliance or fire emblem), narrative adventure games (like heavy rain, or final fantasy XIII), hack and slash action adventure games (like kingdom hearts or darksiders), action RPGs (like monster hunter or diablo), and traditional character RPGs (these are what you would normally consider an RPG, like fallout, baldurs gate, mass effect 1 or Skyrim, but I cant think of many japanese examples, maybe Yakuza at a stretch)
oh right, in japan theres this "Kuso Game" wich translated as "Trash Game" but the meaning now faded into Small Indie made games(Mostly RPGs and Visual Novel) made by couple of person and then theres also this "Doujin Cricle" wich basically an indie Publisher and "H+ Rated Games" wich is basically Porn games made by small indie team unleashing their desires lol
I wouldn't say that a large part of game design is knowing how to program. It is helpful if the game designer knows the limitations of the engine or the complexity involved in implementing certain features, but I'd say their main job is choosing the core mechanics of the game and how they are used by the player. In a general sense they define the identity of the game in terms of how it plays. You can do this without knowing how to write a single line of code.
Yea same. Idk if this guy ever completed a game, but the design process vs programming are very distinct skill sets. Yes indies usually do both, but that's mostly because they have to, not because one is super related to the other.
Fun fact: The code of Undertale is really really really bad. We're talking Yandere Simulator level bad. All of undertale’s dialogue is handled in one massive switch statement that takes thousands of lines. Needless to say, game is a masterpiece and made milions of dollars
I've been loving this push for indie jrpgs, I still have to play crosscode and chained echoes, but they look very good and like a modernized version of classic rpgs, not as beautiful as the octopath engine or the new star ocean second story R engine, but I mean, I love that blend of pixel art and 3d environments, but still they look very good and have their charm, sea of stars looks specially good among these indie rpgs and I can't wait to experience it But yeah, it's nice to see the big overworlds back, I remember when the tales of series had them as well back in symphonia, abyss and vesperia and then they started to slowly change to an interconnected world, which it's alright, but I prefer the big overworld as a vehicle to get to new towns and dungeons to a mesh of interconnected hallways that don't present the true scope of the game's world
Maybe it's lack of popularity is for similar reasons as Kingdom Rush? Like obviously turn based is less dexterity/physically demanding than a Barracks-Style TD, but it's also a lot more complicated. IMO the difficulty of TB RPGs comes from actually thinking and planning ahead; I played Octopath Traveler 2 with a friend so they could sit back and watch the stories, but they seemed to get bored and start reading fanfics whenever a boss fight got going, but on my end, these fights were intense half-hours of strategizing, getting ready to deal a burst of damage before Breaking the bosses, and trying not to get anyone killed on the fly. Perhaps there's something about Fantasy that people are tired of due to it's oversaturation in books/games/movies? But there's the odd thing - unlike most RPGs and Fantasy games, EBF5's roster looks...Atypical, but detailed and expressive! Wouldn't crazy stuff like the Offbrand Blue Shell be bound to draw in more players by word of mouth? Why is it that quality games like CrossCode, OT2, and KR go under the radar? ...Eh, my rant's gone on long enough; I need to go to sleep but wanted to leave a more fleshed out comment than "oh hi shyguymask!1!1!!1!"
I didn’t really have a guess as to what genre would turn out to be the subject of this video. Every genre I thought of, a few genre-matching indie titles came to mind. I thought of RPGs. Not only could I think of a few big indie games, I also thought of RPG Maker, which has had tons of major releases; I think 8 just on PC. Of course that couldn’t be the genre you were going to talk about! Well, I was surprised! For the record, I have no idea how common any one indie genre is over any other. All I have is an impression based on what little I see.
@@egoalter1276 After 7 months, now divorced from the context of the video, I barely even understand my own comment… but if you’re referring to my count of ‘8 just on PC,’ I meant RPG Maker; not games that are RPGs, nor even games made in RPG Maker. Just numbered entries in the ‘RPG Maker’ series that are available on PC. Just for a simple comment, I didn’t think it was worth researching very deeply into the complexities of what versions of RPG Maker are available on which platform, what counts as a full release vs just a minor version difference, etc. I think my count of 8 was probably from searching ‘RPG Maker’ on Steam. If you’re just looking for indie RPGs to play on PC, Undertale comes to mind immediately. I haven’t played or seen much from Sea of Stars, but what I’ve seen looks fantastic. Similarly, I’ve heard only good things about CrossCode.
I'd argue that fighting games are harder than making a jrpg for an indie and definitely more rare for that same reason (the only successful one that comes to mind is maybe Skull Girls and they got lucky with funding and aren't quite indie anymore ever since the huge success, Brawlhalla is Ubisoft so not quite sure how indie that is, Nidhog has some fighting game elements but isnt a fighting game really). Fighting games are extremely timing based and your speed and performance needs to be top notch, not to mention the tons of animations and the timing that goes into that, then you need combo and special move systems for multiple characters on top of a bunch of detailed arenas, a bunch of different effects, sounds, voices, cool UI elements. Then when you take into account that everyone is gonna expect local and online multiplayer the effort increases even more. A jrpg can be simple sprite graphics and text with a cool stat and turn based battle system (just a lot of it)
@@whyareyoulookingatthislol Yomi hustle looks pretty dope, although it's not a traditional fighting game, going turn based is a very awesome twist and def makes it easier to manage for an indie.
@@sheercold26 Fantasy Strike looks like a valiant indie effort to make a fighting game, but as you can see in the reviews, the fighting game community is not very forgiving and in order to make a fighting game successful the core fundamentals need to be spot on and on point. I think that's another reason why indie fighting games are so rare.
I actually wasn’t expecting this videi to be about rpgs, it’s one of the first genres I think about when I think Indies after platformers & metroidvanias but to be fair that might just be due to my personal taste- while it seems common to me because I seek them out I guess they don’t tend to get the same amount of mainstream hype, sans Undertale (holy shit I just walked into a pun on accident).
JRPGs don't NEED to be 60+ hours long. Some of the best games in the genre are 30 hours or so and even then, I think a lot of us would prefer a 10-hour masterpiece rather than a 70+ hour game filled with unnecessary bloat. The party doesn't have to be huge either I mean Secret of Mana only had 3 characters and is a classic. I see the points you're making but like any form of media the execution is the most important thing and you could skirt around a lot of the points you made and still make a great JRPG.
I would generally describe CrossCode as taking a significant amount of inspiration, at least visually and somewhat in terms of gameplay loop, from Phantasy Star Online. Granted it's not quite as loot-based as PSO, but only in that you get materials to make weapons and armor rather than having them drop from defeated monsters.
yeah I was getting Phantasy Star vibes from it, not just PSO, but the original quadrilogy. The town on the water reminds me of a similar town in 1 (although I am sure the one in CrossCode is more interesting to visit lol).
I also remember someone saying that rpgs are hard to make because you need to use a lot of "one off" assets, from one time cutscenes, to one time enemies that you'll never see again to also music. You can say that for a lot of linear games, but things like celeste, shovel knight, roguelikes/roguelites, they all reuse assets in one way or another and can be more stream lined to be finished. RPG and JRPGs tend to get flak if they reuse enemies and recolor them, so its also one of the most scrutinized genres. RPG maker kind of make them more assessible for people to make but at the same time a game might get bashed because "it looks like an rpg maker game", even if some of them are really good. but for every 2-3 rpg maker games you see there is 1 regular jrpg and for every 4-5 bad jrpgs there is one good one (or at the very least one that will keep my interest for longer then a few hours). >_>
One big issue that you didn't mention in developing a JRPG is balancing a leveling system. You're dealing with a cast of multiple characters, often with their own unique skills and stats, that need to progress across the entirety of a multi-hour game without the player feeling too weak as to be frustrating or too strong as to be boring. This requires a TON of not just development hours, but play testing hours, to get the balance just right. I plan on making a JRPG in the future (after I get a few more games under my belt), but I won't be using a traditional leveling model because that aspect alone at least doubles the scope of the project.
CrossCode is basically the child of one of the most successful german RPG Maker creator Lachsen. He made one game/demo that really blew everyones mind on a technical level back then before he went and created CrossCode. And here in Germany "Indie" RPG Maker games were so big, that Trailers and games were featured on magazines, garnering as much hype as commercial products. At least in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I know this, because I was there. I bought the magazines, I saw the trailers, I created my own stuff (which sadly released after those games not being put on magazines anymore). So I am not really thinking of an RPG as an "Indie-No Go". Their sheer length only reduces the amoung of games released in the genre. But there are PLENTY.
@@GouFPS Then there is I am Setsuna. On paper it is neat, but they made it a safe, yet repetitive slog of a JRPG. I did not know I could get so annoyed by piano music. Constant piano music for everything. Piano is a beautiful instrument. They somehow made me get annoyed by the sound of it. It's not a bad JRPG, but it is so painfully mediocre I would rather play a bad JRPG.
I think the genre you're looking for is anything Multiplayer. Not only do you need a programmer that knows how to do it and they have to be pretty advanced at that. Even when you do, its extremely difficult to get the game to sync from client and server. On top of that balancing and testing bugs for 2 or more players on a single machine when its made for multiple people. Also on top of that the game has to be designed from the ground up to work with multiplayer, if you do it half way you're gonna have a hell of a time. And that is just the technical issues. Add Game Design to the mix and you're in for a sh*t show. The dynamic has to be on point, not just for one player, but for two or more players. And if cheating is an issue, yep thats several hundreds more hours of dev time dedicated to handling that. That is why even if Multiplayer indie games are extremely popular right now, there aren't too many out there because of the scale and difficulty it is to make these.
I've actually got an indie JRPG on Steam I built and programmed by myself in Early Access right now. It's called Sea of Choices and it took me 5 years to develop. It's also in 3D, and I really had a ton of fun composing music and making a world that reacts to your choices you make all while keeping the turn based combat I grew up loving. But it hasn't been easy, and I still gotta fix a lot of bugs haha.
If my PC can run it(having issues with my GPU) I'll check it out. I just nuked an RPG MAKER project for about the third time a few weeks ago so I know your struggle💀
@jammiemc4447 I had a lot of times where I almost gave up and the software I use (which is basically RPG maker but 3D) had data corruption so I had to rebuild the project twice 😤
@@BlueWindSama bruhhh I remember when I was younger, we had a cracked version of VX Ace, I think it was, every other month that shit was crashing and corrupting😭
Other people have talked about how indie JRPGs are incredibly common, but I just want to point out that If a genre being difficult to develop meant it'd be rare to see from indie devs the metroidvania boom we're still feeling the aftershocks from wouldn't have happened. Metroidvanias are ridiculously difficult to make, because unlike other genres, how much QA you have to do increases exponentially rather than linearly. If you were making a new Mario game and wanted to add a new power up, all you'd have to do after designing it is make sure it works properly in all the levels you add it to and doesn't cause any bugs. If you were making a new Metroidvania, every time you added a new ability, you'd not only have to test it out in every area of the game, you'd also have to test how it works in tandem with other abilities in every part of the game. Can the player softlock the game using ability 1 to get to room A early? What if they have ability 1 and 2? What if they have ability 1 and 3 but not 2? The same applies in reverse; adding new areas means you have to test every ability you've already added in every combination to make sure you haven't accidentally broken the game. That's already incredibly complicated without going into additional features on top of that like story. The metroidvania boom led to a lot of devs choosing to make a metroidvania as their first project and completely burning out after one game, if that, because of how absurdly complicated they are.
Giving more attention to Chained echoes, (which you showed in the video), A really really good jrpg made by ONE PERSON. It's battle system is really good, it has a good story and there are a lot of qol improvements (like not having to heal with items after every battle, like Xenoblade).
JRPG has to be one of the most oversaturated indie genres of modern times. Also as someone who does game development it has to be one of the easiest genres to create games for (that and shmups are the one's I find easiest to work on). Yeah they are lengthy, but 99% of those hours is grinding, walking, and dialog. Action games take way longer, because the whole game revolves around player movement which can result in all kinds of bugs or exploits not to mention fine tuning everything to feel right. Anyone that can write well can make a really great JRPG with very limited developer skills. A lot of JRPG art is just static images, which makes the art side easy for development too. Realistically you could make a Dragon Quest 1 style game and if you can write a great story and characters you are good to go. But making a great action game, even just on the level of Super Mario Bros 1 is time consuming and takes skill. Sure there a lot of crappy Mario clones, but ones that feel good that people want to play, takes time. And yeah you might end up with a 45 minute game for skilled players, but game time doesn't equal dev time. I can easily make a 3 hour JRPG in a week, but a 30 minute platformer could take me 6 months.
You should definitely play the Trails series considering how much you love Xenoblade, and the mentioned indie JRPGs in this video. Very quickly they became my favorite series of all time by a huge margin, before it being Yakuza, and I had found myself in a position where JRPGs just stopping scratching that itch for me. But Trails revived it, revived my entire gaming experience. I was falling out of games due to motivation and whatnot but Trails has brought me back doubled down and loving the hobby more than I ever did. For that and many other me specific things, Trails kind of saved me to put it as corny as possible. Opened my eyes back up and now all walks of life are easier to navigate because I mentally refreshed myself. It's everything I've loved about all my favorite JRPGs such as Final Fantasy, Xenoblade, Chrono, and so many more all wrapped up into one huge story that just keeps on hitting. Easiest part is you just play in release order and now all the games are in English in order since some middle ones weren't translated for the longest time. Sky FC, Sky SC, Sky 3rd, Zero, Azure, Cold Steel 1-4, and as of today Reverie. An entire saga/the 1st half of the series now concluded as of today, and it is worth every second. All 10/10 to me, genuinely.
Idk, i really hated trails in the sky FC played 6 hours until i even reached the second proper town and the dialouge was just atrocious, characters needed ten sentences to explain something that would have required 10 words at max, and that Joshua dude had to mention how much of a tomboy Estelle is in every conversation. Had to skip dialouge after just 2 hours because it was clear what they said rather fast but they still had to keep talking, i don't think i played something with that much pointless dialouge before, felt like playing a rather uninteresting visual novel. Traveling is a time waster as well, hard to dodge enemies and the uninteresting level design didn't helped, everything was essentially just a corridor. The battle system was functional but quite a bit to easy overall glad you could skip animations there with the turbo mode. Maybe my expectations where to high though since i heard everyone acting like it is peak rpg, well afterwards i think i understand why it is more of niche franchise.
@@brotbrotsen1100the main flaw of trails (not to me) is that the first games in each Arc are really slow and have a lot of world building, but it really pays off later The battle system is amazing, and really good, it opens up by the time you get to the 2nd time and get a full party of 4 people
Not to toot my own horn, but I'd also like to mention fighting games as another immensely resource and time intensive genre. The solution most AAA studios have found is to just... not make them, and the ones that do make them throw insane amounts of time, money, talent, and brute force only for the fanbase to tear them apart. The bar for quality in the fighting game space is raised incredibly high, and even the best examples become dead games really quickly
This is inaccurate. The genre most indies won't tackle is mmo. There are a few but they don't happen because they are expensive to make and difficult to make a profit on.
Nah , truly the hardest genre is grand strategy. There's only one game of this genre made by indie developer - Guilded Destiny , and a big chunk of their mechanics are copypasted from Victoria 2
Full-length, full-featured JRPGs like CrossCode and Chained Echoes, yes. But Undertale is actually a great example of the types of indie JRPGs that *do* get more commonly made - ones that don't take length as an important factor and just tell a relatively concise, tight story with relatively few characters and relatively simple systems. Undertale is only like 10 hours even to get the True Pacifist ending, there's only 1 character in the party and like a single-digit number of characters in the whole game with substantial dialogue or development, and outside of the battle system the game is pretty barebones mechanically. Like any game it wasn't *easy* to make by any means, especially not for 1-2 people, but it's wayyyyy more toned down in scale than something like a FF or Xeno game.
RPG maker games is like MOST common indie rpg subgenre. Maybe behind JRPGs. Now CLASSIC aka REAL RPGs is actually pretty rare, especially of good quality. Most of the RPG games seem to be AA games with 1-2 AAA games. Immersive sims aka what I'd call gameplay rpg/dnd is probably even rarer. It's so hard to make good immersive sim game since it requires tons of mechanics and physics coded in
Have you followed many indie JRPG? They have massive library, from bad to awesomely good (even though it was made using RPG Maker). Sure, it's not as epic as AAA JRPG... but everything is there, multiple interesting characters (though in some games, you only control the main character), 30-50 gameplay hours, addictive combat (again, still RPG Maker-ish, but with creative touch), GOOD story, etc. Also, interestingly, lots of them are eroge ;)
This was really fun to watch as I am learning to become a Gamedesigner/Artist myself and this video pretty much perfectly sums up the reason why I could never convince my friends at school to make an rpg for our next project XD. I'd personally be more than willing to go broke and live under a bridge if it meant releasing the greatest hidden gem RPG banger ever made however I suffer from a severe lack of coding skill issue so the technical part and required time are holding me back at the moment. However once I either get good or find other fellow lunatics who are willing to go down with me I will proceed to make the absolute fever dream of a game I have concocted in my head a reality.
This vid got me wondering why do so many indie jrpgs skimp on the non-human party members. CT which is a huge inspiration to a lot of devs had a frog guy and a robot. Breath of Fire has plenty of anthro party members. Final Fantasy has had plenty of non-conventional party members (Cait Sith, mog, red xiii, Quina, Kimahri, Fran...) The best old school Jrpgs rarely had a cast of fully human characters.
Its really interesting that Deck13 especially likes publishing Indie JRPGs. CrossCode, Chained Echoes. They will eventually also publish Drova - Forsaken Kin which is an Euro RPG, but it will also be like a 40+ hour game. Maybe they are onto something
1:06 sorry to break it to you but game design and programming actually have zero overlap in terms of what skills are involved. It's just that a lot of game designers are also proficient in coding (like me :p)
I might be the odd man out on this one but my favorite JRPG is Final Fantasy 12. It was so different for the time but I really enjoyed what it had to offer in its gameplay and leveling system. A close second would be The Last Story since it was also unique and we have never seen anything like it since but it felt more action strategy than jrpg to me. With that being said, I should really get into the Xenoblade series and play more Cross Code. Your previous video on it pushed me to finally pick it up on Switch. Chained Echoes has also been on the list for awhile too.
Always good to see more people that played The Last Story. Really good game that feels like it got a bum deal by being launched at the tail end of the Wii's lifespan, i'm still crossing my fingers for a modern port.
Someone's clearly never worked in RPGMaker and it shows. Building JRPGs is actually pretty easy, and there are indeed tons of them out there if you know where to look. There are hundreds if not thousands of full-length JRPGs out there jammed out by RPGMaker users over the decades. With the right system and a few borrowed tilesets, that engine saves a lot of time doing much of the balancing work for you.
Im currently playing chained echos and am completly sunken deep into this game. So far its basically perfect and im 14 hours in. If you are looking for an RPG to completly caputre and satisfy your thirst for this genre, this is the one, go play it.
There also isn't any indie MMO But JRPGs (or at least games inspired by them) are extremely common among indie games. Not every game, not even JRPGs has to be 100+ hours. There are a lot of great games with less runtime. And we had tools to make JRPG development super easy for over 20 years. That ease of use means that everyone can develop one, even if they lack the skills and probably shouldn't.
When you mention Crosscode while saying how those games are made with deep love, it honestly brought a tear to my eyes :') i sincerely love this game with all my heart
Really solid points!! I'm glad you mentioned Sea of Stars cause in my opinion, it think it might be a huge hit. Sabotage already has a proven track record of success with The Messenger so I'd expect them to nail it with this. It's such a good time for indies right now!
MY GOD MAN EVERY VIDEO I WATCH FROM YOU IS JUST BANGER ONE AFTER ANOTHER. UR FAV JRPG IS XENOBLADE 3 HELLA RESPECT MAN (mine is actally xenoblade 2 but xeno 3 is really close). Man just the recognititon of cross code and xenoblade makes me really happy and thanks to your video a long time ago i finally started playing chained echos and am loving it so far. I really like ur editing and the things u cover, sorry just really really happy to see crosscode especially get more recognition and i cannot wait for sea of stars been waiting for that game for a super long time now. great vid
When I first saw this video, I thought it was gonna be some dumb rant about it, but I was curious what genre you would say. I was surprised that you actually had a lot of solid reasoning backing it up. And you know, making solid RPGs of any sort definitely takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you want actually good writing. I'd say if you stick to basics, mechanics would be easy enough, but all that writing would exhaust most people. Personally, from browsing around, I'd say the reason we don't hear about much in that range is because a lot of the ones that do get made aren't stellar, a lot of indie groups do other things, and well... RPGs just aren't that flaunted or loudly popular. They certainly have a fanbase, but that fanbase is fairly quiet, generally. (Except possibly about Final Fantasy, for some reason. I hear a lot about _that_ particular franchise.) I think there's also the fact that pure writers tend to go into visual novels a decent chunk of the time. Easy, very story. As for favorites, probably the Tales of series, and CrossCode (despite that I have yet to actually beat it, I suck at playing games consistently). Both are really good, with fun mechanics, good worlds, and good stories. Favorite overall indie game... might also be Celeste over here. The platforming is great, and it just generally feels really good to play. But there's also the story. Madeline's story resonated with me in way a lot of stories don't, and has stuck with me because of that. It's also the first thing that gave me the basis for viewing my anxiety as something besides the monster other media has always portrayed it as. That game will always hold an extra special place in my heart.
I thought you were gonna say, MMO, and then all I could add was well of course, but RPG? What the fuck man, have you been living under a rock? RPGs were the first indie games. Spiderweb Sofware, Troika Games, Gothic, Riven, All the neverwinter Knights Modules, the DIvinity series, all the traditional roguelikes, Torchlight, Shadowrun, Pathfindr, Tyranny, Age of Dexadence, Kenshi, Underrail, Unrealworld, the X series, Hylics, Brutal Orchestra, hell, the original Witcher was an independent title. Role playing games have been significantly more succesful in the indie scne than from big devs, and were the cause of numerous triple A breakouts by originally small independent studios, with Larian, CD Projekt and Obsidian just being the obvious examples.
Yeah idk man I have seen a lot of indie projects focus on becoming jrpgs or at least inspired by them. How many are successful is another thing but, it is far from rare lol
I mean, saying indie devs avoid making JRPG’s is like saying Americans avoid making K-pop; the letter at the start requires a country of origin. A whopping 98.4% of the world’s population fail to meet the first requirement to make a JRPG: Be Japanese. And if it’s only RPG’s and not JRPG’s, I’d argue that’s a popular genre of indie game. Most big indie games (like shovel knight or hollow knight) tend to have RPG elements, and I’d argue that the most famous indie game in the world is Undertale, an RPG. But not a JRPG because Toby Fox is not Japanese.
Other than maybe platformers or metroidvanias 10 years ago, JRPGs might be the most common kind of indie game there is thanks to RPG Maker. Even in terms of financially successful indie games there's Undertale, LiSa, Chained Echoes, Cassette Beasts, Crosscode, Omori, Sea of Stars... it's VERY common. There are plenty of genres you don't often see tackled by Indie Devs because they are difficult to develop and the market for them is small. Real Time Strategy, MMO's, Stealth games...
I can never finish Crosscode. I want to finish it for the story, but not the gameplay or puzzles... they simply don't click with me, and they annoy me.
I feel like the limitations of indie games make my favorite Rpg's. Like omori, lisa the painfull and games like hylics an Off, are the reason why i can enjoy the genre. When i try to pick up a game like Skyrim my mind gets overwelmed and i cannot enjoy it becase of the 100's of side quest
I would say FF6, Chrono Cross, Valkyrie Profile. But that's only accounting for turn-based and-or jrpg made by actual japanese studio. If i include action rpg and indies, the list would be something else lol Looking forward for Sea of Stars!
The whole "Japanese RPG is a genre" thing aside...I can't help but feel this entire argument somewhat falls apart since small-scale RPGs do exist. There are plenty that sit at the more reasonable 20-30 hour range, some even closer to just 10-ish hours though those are obviously rarer. They don't need to be colossal 50-70+ hour endeavors Something like "Parasite Eve" can be finished in about 10 hours. Even something like "Chrono Trigger", which many indie RPGs are directly inspired by, can be finished in around a brisk 20 hours. And both of those are from Square, who were and still are one of the biggest Japanese RPG developers out there. Even then, there are plenty of smaller developers as well that make relatively shorter RPGs. I'm currently playing a game called "Trinity Trigger", by FuRyu, which is an estimated 20-25 hours. Another game from them, "Lost Dimension", can be finished in under 20 hours. My favorite developer, NIS, has made multiple like "Destiny Connect" which is roughly 20 hours, "Void Terrarium" which is closer to 30 hours, "Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure" at 10 hours, etc. Stepping away from strictly Japanese developers, there's stuff like "Cris Tales" at 20-25 hours or "Child of Light" at 10-15 hours. And, as I see others bringing up, there are plenty of terrific RPG Maker projects that are on that shorter end as well. Heck, I've recently been going through both of the "Fear and Hunger" games and...uh...just don't go looking those up. They are great, don't play them. I know this probably just sounds like I'm cherry picking, and there is the factor of replay value which alone can multiply playtime, but saying indies stay away from making RPGs due to long length is kind of off base as far as my experiences go. I do want to agree that RPGs tend to be rarer among indies due to other factors, like proper gameplay balancing and writing...just not so much length itself.
Panzer Dragoon Saga is only 12-17 hours I believe and it's an amazing JRPG. You can have short JRPGs. That's a AAA game that was for the sega saturn, but it's a good example of JRPGs not needing to be longer than they need be and still be great.
@@senritsujumpsuit6021 Depends on the game. FF7's end game for instance felt like an absolute slog. Having to fight the same damned enemy in the crater because that's the only enemy that gives you any EXP worth a damn was grueling, but I did do EVERYTHING in that game and got to level 99 for all characters. Did I feel like some of the things were worth doing? Hell NO. I wouldn't ever do them again more than likely, but Tales of Symphonia on the other hand, did an AMAZING job continually staying fresh and interesting the whole way though. I definitely wouldn't have a problem doing everything in that game again. So as you can see, it all depends. Did the developers do a good job on making that content in the game fun, interesting and worth doing? I'd much rather have a shorter game with less grind attached to it, with more focus on fun and challenging activities than depending of tedious, repetitive actions.
@@kukukachu so you hate MMOs since half the fun of those is grinding in some form an grinding is pretty chill I remember spending a couple hours with a friend just spear fishing hehe
@@senritsujumpsuit6021 Yea, MMOs SUCK. I wouldn't ever pay for a subscription to play a game, that's just dumb. On top of that, that awkward action turn based battle system is definitely not for me. I won't ever be getting into WOW, Xenoblade Chronicles, FFXII etc. Now, action in a turn based game however, is cool, like Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga. I also really like the battle system in Panzer Dragoon Saga and it looks like FF7R copied that system. I won't be playing FF7R however because that game is a giant middle finger and slap in the face to the original fans. I won't support that, but it is pretty cool seeing the system from Panzer Dragoon Saga being used in another game.
@@kukukachu wait so you just hate all turn based stuff in general you know Final Fantasy 7 is turn based originally that remake is not the same game also xenoblade is not turn based neither is WOW
Wow. That mere mention of undertale made me feel overflown by nostalgia. I was basically raised by that game and it really was one of the best games I’ve played. I hope it doesn’t get lost among all the other jrpgs that may not be as good as it. I think it’ll be around for a while though due to its unique soundtrack, but I’m rambling now so simply put thanks for mentioning undertale lol
the hardest genre is without question mobas, not jrpg. Mobas absolutely require professional netcode with fast servers, and they have the multiplayer bootstrapping problem. MMOs are often cited as the hardest, but they don't require professional netcode since they can be fairly laggy TCP and still be enjoyable.
JRPGs are not as deep as you make it seem like. A lot of the complexity mentioned often stems from artificial lengthening and difficulty that's the standard from Japanese developers. When you take an objective look at most JRPGs and remove all the crud, they're fairly simple and quite linear.
i feel like one of the reasons why a lot of indie games are cool in the first place is because they don't adhere to the limitations of certain genres. my favorite game of all time is spiritfarer, and if you asked me to describe it, i quite honestly couldn't without sounding insane. it has platforming, it has farming, it has minigames, it has exploration, it has upgrades and everything in between. but it's all glued together by an amazing story, and it just works. while aaa games seem to rely on one upping themselves within the genre, indie games rely on a vision, an idea of a game that can't be defined by anything. amazing video, i need to play sea of stars lmao
There are a decent number of open world games in the indie scene, actually. You have games like Subnautica, Outer Wilds, No Man's Sky, Minecraft, Terraria, Satisfactory, and the list goes on. You don't see them as often as roguelikes and metroidvanias, but they're much more common than JRPGs.
@@Lazzil I'd argue that the indie open worlds are all better than the AAA open worlds, too. I rather play Outer Wilds. AAA is still trying to become half as good as minecraft. Nobody managed to get close to Terraria. Etc.
@@fy8798 Yeah, only one I'm genuinely impressed with is TW3. And maybe Morrowind? Depends on if that one's considered AAA or AA. But yeah, that is true for the majority of open world games. Most of them are just chasing trends set by Skyrim, and even that game wasn't particularly great.
This was pretty good video but it was way too short and needed way more elaboration on alot of points and is probably why most of the comments are looking at what this video says literally, in the year 2023 yeah their right, 2d games from hollow/shovel knight all the way down to undertale, several game engines are out there that can easy make undertale easily and show just how one person can make them, rpg maker is said alot in the comments but tbh 2d is nearly mastered, game engines like Gdevelop are pretty nearly universal 2d engines, meaning anything 2d they can do it, rpgmaker can do anything top down or even side scroller but Gdevelop is finally taping into 2.5d mean og doom and 3d backgrounds for our top downs. I do like how you talk about how long it takes tho, as a younger lad just making a simple rpg maker game took several weekends but the enjoyment of building is whats keeps most devs going I'd assume and with unreal engine and their blue prints style of coding 3d games might become just as easy to make which prob means that dev talent might not real be a thing anymore and more animation, writing and voice acting become the things people look into to tell if the game has quality and over time game devs work might just trun into something as simple as cutting a log, but with a heavy hand saw, not impossible just time consuming and frustrating
RPGs are absolutely the hardest to make. A lot of the common genres are simple in design. They utilize fewer systems than full RPGs and those systems are generally more scalable. Plus RPGs usually don't use procedural generation which is the biggest effort to playability-size reward. Even some rogue-like/rogue-lites that use turn-based or rpg-element combat tend to be some degree simpler than full-scale rpgs. On top of that, most tutorials or guides as well as amount of marketplace resources/assets lean towards action, platforming, and real-time gameplay so learning how to do rpgs is harder and requires far more effort and talent. It's funny because people think turn-based is easier to design/code than action games but it's the opposite by far.
Yeah... NO. There isn't a lack of indie JRPGs... I can name at least 10 before we get into RPG Maker titles... which are downright oversaturated. Mechanically they aren't that complicated, & in fact are in some ways easy mode because you can avoid a lot of realtime processing like you have to deal with in any kind of action game. If you're not trying to innovate on mechanics (& most don't), the primary bottleneck is narrative development. It should also be noted that a JRPG isn't any different in this respect than a 'CRPG'... the distinction between the 2 being a bit nebulous & increasingly fading (eg. Lords of Xulima has combat reminiscent of classic JRPGs, but a narrative aesthetic more in line with CRPGs; any wizardry style game is hard to classify as CRPG vs JRPG because both sides of the pacific took heavy inspiration from wizardry). The real avoided indie genres IMHO are 4x/grand strategy, which requires huge amounts of expensive playtesting (same reason those games are difficult to review/1st-impression), & sandbox open-world action games, which are both asset & narrative intensive, & plus the AAA studios are obviously doing them to death. 10 non-RPG maker indie JRPGs: * artifact adventure * Siralim * Virgo vs the Zodiac * knights of tartarus * earthlock * voidspire tactics * another star * Pier Solar * shadows of adam * jack move Being very conservative re: indie & traditional JRPG formula, while also not listing anything already in the video. If we expand that criteria (eg. small 'AA' quality studios working with larger publishers like PLAYISM, or action hybrid titles ala Cross-Code, or rouge-likes ala mystery dungeons or Slay the Spire clones) lots more would qualify.
Great vídeo and a lot of Food for thougth. But saying coding is the main part of game design in a wrong assumption, game design has nothing tô do with coding, The GD is responsible for the structure of The game, The Flow, The rules, how it is player. The programmer is responsible for coding. A lot of programmers do Game Design, because anyone can do it, its more of a soft skill then a technical one, but that is some of The main reasons why we got só many bad indie games, The lack of a good game design.
Not me! :D i'm gonna do my best to thrive as a 3d indie dev. My journey started one year ago and is still so far from good enough so i understand why one would avoid it.
I'm sorry but watching this video felt like listening to a person that does not know much about the JRPG indie space. They are tons of JRPG indie games, an amount that almost rivals the amount of platformers that exist. But it makes sense that you would not know of them because you only list the massive successes as examles.
Huh? There's a flood of them on DLSite though, and it's not just RPG Maker either, but also RPG Maker and... I forgot what engine RGSS is the runtime to. DemonsRoots was outright topping the Japanese EGS chart even if it's mainly because it was a weak year for JRPG and VNs that qualifies for EGS. Even outside of Japan, there are still a lot of great projects making RPGM games, like The Last Sovereign, Fear and Hunger, Roundscape Adorevia... so many great RPG. Now, I admit a lot of them are either horror or ero, but there are still a LOT of new RPGM games all the time.
Of the two bigger games that I'm working on(90%+ is just on paper. I'm good at the writing/worldbuilding), one is a mmojrpg, and the other's working title is "Scrying Sigil: JRPG Simulator". Though the latter is not actually a jrpg, but a city builder similar to Social Empiers/Clash Of Clans, just with more procedural and voxel; basically, it's a way for me to turn worldbuilding an elaborate world for my dream game into a game of itsself, so I'm not waiting 30 years to perfect the worldbuilding, and can get feedback quickly.
As someone who's played the bulk of Cross Code and has greatly enjoyed it, it's very heartening to see how indie developers have managed to nail the JRPG genre and its relatives, and I'm absolutely looking forward to see what gems they manage to wow us with in the future.
![ARGENTINA vs. PERÚ [1-0] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 12](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xtI25ENDDSY/mqdefault.jpg)
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I played a few RPG maker games a little over a decade ago but I haven't been keeping up with them since. I was unaware there was still an active community making them! I might make a video dedicated to RPG maker games in the future so tell me some of your favorites!
eish there's tons of game genres yer bound to miss a few
Ironicaly, most of my favorite RPG Maker games aren't actually RPGs. ^^;
Omori (this one is actually a JRPG)
To the Moon (and other games developed by Freebird Games)
OneShot
Ib
Rakuen
Are probably my favorites
"The Witch's House" and "Star Stealing Prince" are also pretty cool
And I've heard great things about "OFF" and "Lisa: the Painful", but I've yet to play them
RPG maker needs an action combat option
To be fair, most RPGM games these days are hentai games. Which, hey, you like them... You like them. Me? I live them. How did you think I knew that?
@@johnfake548 hell yeah
I dunno man, the RPG maker community is gigantic and has been since it released. And isn't all hobbyist projects, omori lisa and one shot were all made in RPGmaker and are fantastic and were very popular by indie game standards. The nice thing about developing a JRPG is that the genre is so dependent on its tropes it is very easy to use pre-built tools so even amateurs can make them. The main draw of the genre is usually the story so RPG maker allows writers to work on projects on their own and craft really amazing stories with little help from experienced developers. Putting a twist on it to make it more interesting and less generic is hard sure, but 90% of indies don't do that regardless of genre anyway lol. I think the JRPG genre in general just isn't very popular these days outside of the niche fanbase so we don't hear about as many of them. I can't think of a single AAA JRPG released in the last ten years that isn't part of an existing franchise from the 90s. Those sell because of the franchise, probably in SPITE of the genre. Even masterpieces like crosscode tend to fly under the radar.
the rpg maker is a genre in itseld. due to its' limitations and specifically art limitations, it stands out from other rpgs in general. granted there are some true gems there, but it's far different compared to say Edge of Eternity or Eternal Radiance
Omori took its developers a bunch of work. They had to go through a lot in order to do so. It was really hard. So yes, that's a masterpiece, but it took a lot of effort from its creator. That's kinda the point. How tough and hard these are, yet how amazing the results are. Only through sheer will can you finish them
Two games to add to those three: yume Nikki, and fear and hunger .
Octopath Traveler was a new franchise made by Square Enix in the last ten years
Can a card battler be considered JRPG?
If so, I once tried this adult game named False Myth without much care. Surprisingly, the narrative, music, and gameplay kept me interested until the very end, and I tend to abandon games quite easily.
Even the adult scenes had some psychological and/or world-building reason to be there.
It was a game made with care.
It feels like you're explaining a non-existent phenomenon. Indie Jrpgs are extremely common. With tools like RPGMaker, it's feasible to make one completely alone. I've even made one. (I borrowed assets, so I can't share, sadly).
Two genres that are definitely rarer than Jrpgs are MMOs and simulators
indie MMOs just outright don't exist anymore in this era.
it's not about the existence of them, it's the existence of GOOD ones. I think that's the point of the video.
RPG's are also insanely difficult to balance, action or otherwise. A metric shit-ton of math is involved, and getting it wrong means your game is a boring mess not worth playing if someone finds it easy to exploit.
@@RPGgrenade I mean sure, but he specified jrpgs which isn't actually a genre let's be honest and noted the difficulty in making them.
@@nekoluxuria7721 It makes a lot of sense though. MMO's are super expensive and has had a dwindling fan base that is slow yet steady as the years gone by. Jumping into the MMO market is almost suicide at this point for basically anyone, indie or AAA, with how strong competitions are and how little to gain a studio can get.
Although, I can give one example of an indie MMO that is both new and successful which is Foxhole. Whether the game is fun or not really depends on you though since it is the closest thing to a WW1 simulator and we all know how much fun WW1 is. /s
@@robbieaulia6462 I would say that being able to host a stable server is the biggest problem as well since that isn't exactly cheap either. Hosting an mmoesque server in Minecraft is massively different than hosting a straight up MMO.
As a hobbyist game dev, I think indie devs just make games that they would want to play, part of the reason that procedural content is so common in indie games is because its fun to program and makes playtesting more enjoyable.
Same boat. Whether it's an "open world" style or a level-based game, one of the things I do very early in almost every game I work on is come up with a way to effectively randomize the play area. That way even if the reason I'm testing it is to make sure some very uninteresting thing is working right, I can at least also take a moment to look around and be like "oh neat, look at the weird way the map generated this time"
Its also easy in comparison to other things. This is why We Happy Few, for example, went this direction. You can make a full fledged game in less time, with less skill when using procedural content. Its why i will always call it lazy game design when the game revolves entirely around this. Its major flaws are also why i dont like these types of games
@@DaMoniableit's not full lazy six days in flalujia is procedural
You are not wrong; even simple things like different enemy encounters are fun. For a Pokémon-like RPG I'm making an insane amount of versatility in how or what your able to encounter for creatures.
@@DaMoniableprocedural content is way harder to make then manual content, it’s just faster. Calling lazy is objectively incorrect. Neither approach is lazy.
I think Jrpg is the most common indie game genre, it is just rare to see good ones
I am sure is from using the rpg maker template.
What you mean rate to find hood ones I see a lot of nice ones
They may be common, but seeing them at a decent level is rarer. It's like talking about indie FPS games- technically, one could easily argue that every Doom WAD (other than Hexen, Heretic, and maybe Evilution and Plutonia) are indie games in of themselves, but people rightfully do not treat them as games independent of their type in the genre.
yeah. real whiplash hearing him genuinely say that indie jrpgs are uncommon, then describe parameters where, obviously those indie games wouldn't be able to match. most jrpgs arent even 70 hours long. lots of hyperbole in this vid
@@Gamecubegal Whiplash is the word I'm lookin for. I'm pretty sure I did recoil when he mentioned JRPGs, lol.
Correct though, I think most are in the 30-40 hours range. Everlong might be 70+ hours, but I don't remember vividly.
Shoutouts to Cassette Bests, an indie monster collecting RPG that was made in about three years by a hilariously small team. It just came out a couple of months ago, and after playing it for twelve hours, I can say that it both completely blows past pokemon Scarlet and Violet in terms of quality and is a fantastic and wholly unique experience all on its own.
This game looks *very* interesting. I'll check it out!
I don't know how true this is, but I've heard that Cassette Beasts is actually a lot more similar to the Digimon games than any of the Pokemon games.
I mean, blowing past scarlet and violet is kind of a low bar at this point lol
I highly recommend not just checking it out. I recommend getting it now while it is still on sale on Steam for 20% off. I actually first bought it on Steam after hearing about some performance issues on the Switch that caused massive lag in parts. Though, since the 1.2 update released at the end of June those have been majorly improved upon and I have since gotten it on the Switch as well so I can play it portable.
Not gonna say that there is zero lag in Cassette Beasts on the Switch, but I only really notice what is still there when I am looking for it in the 100+ hours I have put into multiple playthroughs on my Switch over two 100% playthroughs. In case you are wondering, this was palatable because of the randomizer/playthrough customizer options you unlock once you beat the game for the first time.
In my opinion Cassette Beasts has beaten out even Tears of The Kingdom and Hogwarts' Legacy both for my favorite game of 2023 so far.
I've been playing rn, it's really good, even if there are some bugs here and there (and the physics is kinda janky lol). But the battle system is really hecking good and the spritwork is phenomenal (every Monster can fuse so there are like a TON of fusion sprites). so yeah, get it while you can
Huh! That was definitely not the genre I was expecting you to choose. I used to run a website specifically covering indie RPGs, and by far the most common subgenre of RPG indies would write to me about was the JRPG. There are probably more RPG Maker titles alone than every other indie RPG combined. First-person dungeon crawlers would probably be the second most common type, followed by Action RPGs, with Strategy RPGs and Western RPGs being the rarest kinds. (SRPG Studio is partly responsible for a recent glut of SRPGs, but those games are otherwise very, very hard to make.)
I have experience with making pretty much all of these genres of RPG, and for my money, I'd say that WRPGs are the hardest to make: they demand everything that JRPGs do and more: more systems, more dialogue branches, and more alternate quest outcomes to support differing play styles, non-linearity, and role-playing choices, all of them hugely labor intensive and prone to introducing unexpected bugs.
You still have that website or do you have websites like it as it's hard to find indie RPG's on steam.
If you were to try making what you'd consider your dream RPG, what kind of RPG do you think you'd make it?
@@megasoniczxx Ohhhhh, good question. It would probably be something like Telepath RPG: Servants of God with the combat, inventory, and proc gen capabilities of Together in Battle!
@@danielgrezda3339 RUclips keeps removing my answer to this question--it's probably triggering its anti-spam filters 😂 Let's, uh, just say that it's a URL with "IndieRPGs" as the body
Thanks! I have had my comments removed due to urls too. They should compare the similarities of comments rather than shadow banning urls.
Thank you so much for showing of Crosscode.
I bought it 4 Times on almost all plattforms and it's one of my favorites Games of all time.
Completely agree, I love that game to bits and it deserves much more recognition
Fantastic game, and still my benchmark for how to implement an adjustable difficulty system. Set the default bar really high and let the player gradually lower it whenever they want, so that it always feels challenging but not too challenging.
CrossCode's strongest soldier
What's so good about it
@@sheercold26 Just watch some videos about it ;-)
Basically: story, gameplay, interactions. It feels like some old classic but with new gameplay mechanics! It's weird!
CROSSCODE IS SO GOOOOOOOOOD.
In terms of inspiration, I think it reminds me a lot of Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana, but at a much faster pace and with its own unique twists that it stands out as just loosely inspired by those I mentioned. It really is a very unique game with a rock-solid aesthetic and design.
i dunno mate, i just finish it and the history is meh, the characters dont really fit and the combat is spam attack button.
the end is really dissapointing
@@vicio19995 by any chance did you only made the main history and misions or decided to roam around and do side misions too ?
because a lot of the game comes from there, or maybe you just wherent the target audience, which to be sincere even i cant tell exactly ho they aimed for
@@agustinmelar5496 i did a few side missions but were too grindi.
Go to point A to B and then come back 3 times, or go to this area and keep looking for a thing, or wait a tower defense minigame,
I stop doing side missions after they made me go back and forth 4 times to the same Tree
@@vicio19995I feel like you’re lying, there are monsters in the game that are deliberately anti-spam attack button, especially in Vermillion Wasteland. Those fights would take you like 10+ minutes if you just spammed attack button. And the break mechanic is anti-spam too. It sounds to me like you played the game poorly with all due respect
@@ClareAmel i used the break mechanic and it was too grindy with that,
if you dont break the enemies they take forevee to kill
CrossCode definitely needs to be talked about more often, its such a fantastic game.
Then talk about it
@@duckers3240yes because everyone will hear what Vacui Aulereum will say
yeah i like the game a lot just i'm stuck on one of the temples
Crosscode: it's Japanese-RPG in style, Action-RPG in execution, Western-RPG in tone. I present to you a perfect specimen as the pinnacal JAW-RPG.
The team behind CrossCode is so talented, it feels unreal.
The main character CAN'T talk, and yet, she's more expressive than fully voiced characters in AAA 100 million-budget games...
🤓
CrossCode in general is an amazing game. Probably my fav indie RPG game out there. The setting they used is amazing.
Except DOOM: ETERNAL
she said "Hi" tho
"Lea(smug)!"
If you want an actual genre that indies will mostly avoid, it's MMOs. The sheer amount of manpower and budget to maintain servers is enormous and having a large active playerbase is integral to the experience (indies cannot outdo AAAs at mass appeal, they need to aim for specific niches).
Writing schlocky dialogue, making oversized maps with slow and repetitive battles using RPG Maker is hardly a tall order. There's certainly great RPG Maker titles out there, but also a lot of junk.
You make a lot of good points about development cycles, the resources that go into them, the time investment, and all that. And while there are absolutely always going to be insanely long RPGs (which is not a bad thing), I really hope there end up being more short RPGs. 10-20 hours is about the sweet spot for me personally. Games that cut down on giant dungeons, fetch quests, etc. and that focus on quality more quantity for their characters and character writing could definitely shoot for that range. It could cut down on development time and such, and it would be more approachable for more audiences.
That being said, my favorite JRPG is either Persona 4 Golden or Final Fantasy X, neither of which I could complete in under 20 hours, lol.
Chrono Trigger was only about 25 hours long and it's one of the all time classics of the genre. There is no reason a jrpg needs to be super long to be good.
I am 100% Behind Short RPGs. You can dump most of the padding in an RPG and get a wonderfully condensed experience that shows off the story and ideas a developer wants to share, and if it's a hit, they can make a sequel. ;P
We used to get sequels that were just more of the same, but still fun. There's no reason we can't do that again. I would definitely play a Chrono Trigger 2 with the same underlying game system with a new storyline and a new gameplay wrinkle or two (Look at Pokemon for example...), and I'd feel the same way about an indie game that I enjoyed.
@@GraskellThe original Suikoden is only 20 hours long too (with the 108 Stars of Destiny recruited).
Came down here to say the same thing. I honestly do want to get more into jrpgs, but the 50 hour minimum that a lot of them seem to require wears on me, and having more shorter burst jrpgs would honestly be perfect for me.
On that note, does anyone have recommends for already existing shorter jrpgs? I see chrono trigger and suikoden mentioned so I may give those a look. Anything around or under 20-25 hours would be golden (persona joke not intended).
@@shadowflash0 Well, in the Indie side, there's Ikenfell and Virgo VS the Zodiac.
Not really a RPG, but Wintermoor Tactics Club is really good too
I think the genre they avoid is 3d action. The only one I can think of is assault spy.
I…have an IDEA
Yeah I didn't expect him to say it but I think 3d fps games are the least common indie game, at least ones that aren't asset flips.
They just avoid 3D in general.
cruelty squad
@@ohboh cruelty squad
As far as I can tell, it's not that JRPGs are underrepresented among indie games, but rather that most of them are made in Japan. And JRPGs are among the most expensive games to localize due to the sheer amount of writing that would need to be translated, so the vast majority of Japanese indie JRPG games never leave Japan.
It's no coincidence that multiple engines for making JRPGs, like RPG Maker and Wolf RPG Editor, were developed first in Japan and only translated to English much later.
I refuse the idea that JRPG is a separate genre. It is an ill defined mixture of turn based tactics games (like jagged alliance or fire emblem), narrative adventure games (like heavy rain, or final fantasy XIII), hack and slash action adventure games (like kingdom hearts or darksiders), action RPGs (like monster hunter or diablo), and traditional character RPGs (these are what you would normally consider an RPG, like fallout, baldurs gate, mass effect 1 or Skyrim, but I cant think of many japanese examples, maybe Yakuza at a stretch)
oh right, in japan theres this "Kuso Game" wich translated as "Trash Game" but the meaning now faded into Small Indie made games(Mostly RPGs and Visual Novel) made by couple of person
and then theres also this "Doujin Cricle" wich basically an indie Publisher and "H+ Rated Games" wich is basically Porn games made by small indie team unleashing their desires lol
I wouldn't say that a large part of game design is knowing how to program. It is helpful if the game designer knows the limitations of the engine or the complexity involved in implementing certain features, but I'd say their main job is choosing the core mechanics of the game and how they are used by the player. In a general sense they define the identity of the game in terms of how it plays. You can do this without knowing how to write a single line of code.
yeah, when he said that it raised a big eyebrow because game design and programming are completely different things lol
Yea same. Idk if this guy ever completed a game, but the design process vs programming are very distinct skill sets. Yes indies usually do both, but that's mostly because they have to, not because one is super related to the other.
Fun fact: The code of Undertale is really really really bad. We're talking Yandere Simulator level bad. All of undertale’s dialogue is handled in one massive switch statement that takes thousands of lines. Needless to say, game is a masterpiece and made milions of dollars
I've been loving this push for indie jrpgs, I still have to play crosscode and chained echoes, but they look very good and like a modernized version of classic rpgs, not as beautiful as the octopath engine or the new star ocean second story R engine, but I mean, I love that blend of pixel art and 3d environments, but still they look very good and have their charm, sea of stars looks specially good among these indie rpgs and I can't wait to experience it
But yeah, it's nice to see the big overworlds back, I remember when the tales of series had them as well back in symphonia, abyss and vesperia and then they started to slowly change to an interconnected world, which it's alright, but I prefer the big overworld as a vehicle to get to new towns and dungeons to a mesh of interconnected hallways that don't present the true scope of the game's world
I've been playing chained echoes recently and it is easily my favourite JRPG in recent memory, easy recommend
play Crystal Project, it has the best JRPG gameplay i've ever seen
Your subscribe callout is always smooth as hell. Lol. Smoother than Linus's segue to his sponsor.
Thanks! I was especially proud of this one lol
Epic Battle Fantasy 5 released in 2018 and is one of the best turn based RPGs around yet the greater population almost completely ignores it online.
Maybe it's lack of popularity is for similar reasons as Kingdom Rush? Like obviously turn based is less dexterity/physically demanding than a Barracks-Style TD, but it's also a lot more complicated. IMO the difficulty of TB RPGs comes from actually thinking and planning ahead; I played Octopath Traveler 2 with a friend so they could sit back and watch the stories, but they seemed to get bored and start reading fanfics whenever a boss fight got going, but on my end, these fights were intense half-hours of strategizing, getting ready to deal a burst of damage before Breaking the bosses, and trying not to get anyone killed on the fly. Perhaps there's something about Fantasy that people are tired of due to it's oversaturation in books/games/movies?
But there's the odd thing - unlike most RPGs and Fantasy games, EBF5's roster looks...Atypical, but detailed and expressive! Wouldn't crazy stuff like the Offbrand Blue Shell be bound to draw in more players by word of mouth? Why is it that quality games like CrossCode, OT2, and KR go under the radar?
...Eh, my rant's gone on long enough; I need to go to sleep but wanted to leave a more fleshed out comment than "oh hi shyguymask!1!1!!1!"
I didn’t really have a guess as to what genre would turn out to be the subject of this video. Every genre I thought of, a few genre-matching indie titles came to mind.
I thought of RPGs. Not only could I think of a few big indie games, I also thought of RPG Maker, which has had tons of major releases; I think 8 just on PC. Of course that couldn’t be the genre you were going to talk about!
Well, I was surprised!
For the record, I have no idea how common any one indie genre is over any other. All I have is an impression based on what little I see.
the ones I know are oneshot, fear and hunger and hylics, whats the other two?
@@egoalter1276 After 7 months, now divorced from the context of the video, I barely even understand my own comment… but if you’re referring to my count of ‘8 just on PC,’ I meant RPG Maker; not games that are RPGs, nor even games made in RPG Maker. Just numbered entries in the ‘RPG Maker’ series that are available on PC.
Just for a simple comment, I didn’t think it was worth researching very deeply into the complexities of what versions of RPG Maker are available on which platform, what counts as a full release vs just a minor version difference, etc. I think my count of 8 was probably from searching ‘RPG Maker’ on Steam.
If you’re just looking for indie RPGs to play on PC, Undertale comes to mind immediately. I haven’t played or seen much from Sea of Stars, but what I’ve seen looks fantastic. Similarly, I’ve heard only good things about CrossCode.
@@Dash123456789Brawl Oh. I thought you meant succesful projects made in RPGMaker.
I'd argue that fighting games are harder than making a jrpg for an indie and definitely more rare for that same reason (the only successful one that comes to mind is maybe Skull Girls and they got lucky with funding and aren't quite indie anymore ever since the huge success, Brawlhalla is Ubisoft so not quite sure how indie that is, Nidhog has some fighting game elements but isnt a fighting game really).
Fighting games are extremely timing based and your speed and performance needs to be top notch, not to mention the tons of animations and the timing that goes into that, then you need combo and special move systems for multiple characters on top of a bunch of detailed arenas, a bunch of different effects, sounds, voices, cool UI elements. Then when you take into account that everyone is gonna expect local and online multiplayer the effort increases even more.
A jrpg can be simple sprite graphics and text with a cool stat and turn based battle system (just a lot of it)
Yomi hustle is rlly cool as well
Fantasy Strike
@@whyareyoulookingatthislol Yomi hustle looks pretty dope, although it's not a traditional fighting game, going turn based is a very awesome twist and def makes it easier to manage for an indie.
@@sheercold26 Fantasy Strike looks like a valiant indie effort to make a fighting game, but as you can see in the reviews, the fighting game community is not very forgiving and in order to make a fighting game successful the core fundamentals need to be spot on and on point. I think that's another reason why indie fighting games are so rare.
Idol showdown
I actually wasn’t expecting this videi to be about rpgs, it’s one of the first genres I think about when I think Indies after platformers & metroidvanias but to be fair that might just be due to my personal taste- while it seems common to me because I seek them out I guess they don’t tend to get the same amount of mainstream hype, sans Undertale (holy shit I just walked into a pun on accident).
JRPGs don't NEED to be 60+ hours long. Some of the best games in the genre are 30 hours or so and even then, I think a lot of us would prefer a 10-hour masterpiece rather than a 70+ hour game filled with unnecessary bloat. The party doesn't have to be huge either I mean Secret of Mana only had 3 characters and is a classic.
I see the points you're making but like any form of media the execution is the most important thing and you could skirt around a lot of the points you made and still make a great JRPG.
I would generally describe CrossCode as taking a significant amount of inspiration, at least visually and somewhat in terms of gameplay loop, from Phantasy Star Online. Granted it's not quite as loot-based as PSO, but only in that you get materials to make weapons and armor rather than having them drop from defeated monsters.
PSO! For the win!
Sounds pretty fun! Might add that to my wishlist.
yeah I was getting Phantasy Star vibes from it, not just PSO, but the original quadrilogy. The town on the water reminds me of a similar town in 1 (although I am sure the one in CrossCode is more interesting to visit lol).
I also remember someone saying that rpgs are hard to make because you need to use a lot of "one off" assets, from one time cutscenes, to one time enemies that you'll never see again to also music. You can say that for a lot of linear games, but things like celeste, shovel knight, roguelikes/roguelites, they all reuse assets in one way or another and can be more stream lined to be finished. RPG and JRPGs tend to get flak if they reuse enemies and recolor them, so its also one of the most scrutinized genres. RPG maker kind of make them more assessible for people to make but at the same time a game might get bashed because "it looks like an rpg maker game", even if some of them are really good. but for every 2-3 rpg maker games you see there is 1 regular jrpg and for every 4-5 bad jrpgs there is one good one (or at the very least one that will keep my interest for longer then a few hours). >_>
One big issue that you didn't mention in developing a JRPG is balancing a leveling system. You're dealing with a cast of multiple characters, often with their own unique skills and stats, that need to progress across the entirety of a multi-hour game without the player feeling too weak as to be frustrating or too strong as to be boring. This requires a TON of not just development hours, but play testing hours, to get the balance just right. I plan on making a JRPG in the future (after I get a few more games under my belt), but I won't be using a traditional leveling model because that aspect alone at least doubles the scope of the project.
CrossCode is definitely one of the best games I've ever played. The talent is through the roof.
CrossCode is basically the child of one of the most successful german RPG Maker creator Lachsen. He made one game/demo that really blew everyones mind on a technical level back then before he went and created CrossCode. And here in Germany "Indie" RPG Maker games were so big, that Trailers and games were featured on magazines, garnering as much hype as commercial products. At least in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I know this, because I was there. I bought the magazines, I saw the trailers, I created my own stuff (which sadly released after those games not being put on magazines anymore).
So I am not really thinking of an RPG as an "Indie-No Go". Their sheer length only reduces the amoung of games released in the genre. But there are PLENTY.
Chrono Trigger was my very first JRPG and i absolutely fell in love with the genre thanks to it
Chrono Trigger was a masterpiece, many use it as a template for good game design.
@@GouFPS Then there is I am Setsuna. On paper it is neat, but they made it a safe, yet repetitive slog of a JRPG. I did not know I could get so annoyed by piano music. Constant piano music for everything. Piano is a beautiful instrument. They somehow made me get annoyed by the sound of it.
It's not a bad JRPG, but it is so painfully mediocre I would rather play a bad JRPG.
I think the genre you're looking for is anything Multiplayer. Not only do you need a programmer that knows how to do it and they have to be pretty advanced at that. Even when you do, its extremely difficult to get the game to sync from client and server. On top of that balancing and testing bugs for 2 or more players on a single machine when its made for multiple people. Also on top of that the game has to be designed from the ground up to work with multiplayer, if you do it half way you're gonna have a hell of a time. And that is just the technical issues. Add Game Design to the mix and you're in for a sh*t show. The dynamic has to be on point, not just for one player, but for two or more players. And if cheating is an issue, yep thats several hundreds more hours of dev time dedicated to handling that.
That is why even if Multiplayer indie games are extremely popular right now, there aren't too many out there because of the scale and difficulty it is to make these.
I've actually got an indie JRPG on Steam I built and programmed by myself in Early Access right now. It's called Sea of Choices and it took me 5 years to develop. It's also in 3D, and I really had a ton of fun composing music and making a world that reacts to your choices you make all while keeping the turn based combat I grew up loving. But it hasn't been easy, and I still gotta fix a lot of bugs haha.
If my PC can run it(having issues with my GPU) I'll check it out. I just nuked an RPG MAKER project for about the third time a few weeks ago so I know your struggle💀
@jammiemc4447 awww thank you so much!!
@jammiemc4447 I had a lot of times where I almost gave up and the software I use (which is basically RPG maker but 3D) had data corruption so I had to rebuild the project twice 😤
@@BlueWindSama bruhhh I remember when I was younger, we had a cracked version of VX Ace, I think it was, every other month that shit was crashing and corrupting😭
Other people have talked about how indie JRPGs are incredibly common, but I just want to point out that If a genre being difficult to develop meant it'd be rare to see from indie devs the metroidvania boom we're still feeling the aftershocks from wouldn't have happened. Metroidvanias are ridiculously difficult to make, because unlike other genres, how much QA you have to do increases exponentially rather than linearly. If you were making a new Mario game and wanted to add a new power up, all you'd have to do after designing it is make sure it works properly in all the levels you add it to and doesn't cause any bugs. If you were making a new Metroidvania, every time you added a new ability, you'd not only have to test it out in every area of the game, you'd also have to test how it works in tandem with other abilities in every part of the game. Can the player softlock the game using ability 1 to get to room A early? What if they have ability 1 and 2? What if they have ability 1 and 3 but not 2? The same applies in reverse; adding new areas means you have to test every ability you've already added in every combination to make sure you haven't accidentally broken the game. That's already incredibly complicated without going into additional features on top of that like story. The metroidvania boom led to a lot of devs choosing to make a metroidvania as their first project and completely burning out after one game, if that, because of how absurdly complicated they are.
Giving more attention to Chained echoes, (which you showed in the video), A really really good jrpg made by ONE PERSON. It's battle system is really good, it has a good story and there are a lot of qol improvements (like not having to heal with items after every battle, like Xenoblade).
I was expecting hom to go on the open world or mmo games. Those are magnificently untouched by indie
JRPG has to be one of the most oversaturated indie genres of modern times. Also as someone who does game development it has to be one of the easiest genres to create games for (that and shmups are the one's I find easiest to work on). Yeah they are lengthy, but 99% of those hours is grinding, walking, and dialog. Action games take way longer, because the whole game revolves around player movement which can result in all kinds of bugs or exploits not to mention fine tuning everything to feel right. Anyone that can write well can make a really great JRPG with very limited developer skills. A lot of JRPG art is just static images, which makes the art side easy for development too. Realistically you could make a Dragon Quest 1 style game and if you can write a great story and characters you are good to go. But making a great action game, even just on the level of Super Mario Bros 1 is time consuming and takes skill. Sure there a lot of crappy Mario clones, but ones that feel good that people want to play, takes time. And yeah you might end up with a 45 minute game for skilled players, but game time doesn't equal dev time. I can easily make a 3 hour JRPG in a week, but a 30 minute platformer could take me 6 months.
You should definitely play the Trails series considering how much you love Xenoblade, and the mentioned indie JRPGs in this video. Very quickly they became my favorite series of all time by a huge margin, before it being Yakuza, and I had found myself in a position where JRPGs just stopping scratching that itch for me. But Trails revived it, revived my entire gaming experience. I was falling out of games due to motivation and whatnot but Trails has brought me back doubled down and loving the hobby more than I ever did. For that and many other me specific things, Trails kind of saved me to put it as corny as possible. Opened my eyes back up and now all walks of life are easier to navigate because I mentally refreshed myself. It's everything I've loved about all my favorite JRPGs such as Final Fantasy, Xenoblade, Chrono, and so many more all wrapped up into one huge story that just keeps on hitting. Easiest part is you just play in release order and now all the games are in English in order since some middle ones weren't translated for the longest time.
Sky FC, Sky SC, Sky 3rd, Zero, Azure, Cold Steel 1-4, and as of today Reverie. An entire saga/the 1st half of the series now concluded as of today, and it is worth every second. All 10/10 to me, genuinely.
Idk, i really hated trails in the sky FC played 6 hours until i even reached the second proper town and the dialouge was just atrocious, characters needed ten sentences to explain something that would have required 10 words at max, and that Joshua dude had to mention how much of a tomboy Estelle is in every conversation. Had to skip dialouge after just 2 hours because it was clear what they said rather fast but they still had to keep talking, i don't think i played something with that much pointless dialouge before, felt like playing a rather uninteresting visual novel. Traveling is a time waster as well, hard to dodge enemies and the uninteresting level design didn't helped, everything was essentially just a corridor. The battle system was functional but quite a bit to easy overall glad you could skip animations there with the turbo mode.
Maybe my expectations where to high though since i heard everyone acting like it is peak rpg, well afterwards i think i understand why it is more of niche franchise.
@@brotbrotsen1100the main flaw of trails (not to me) is that the first games in each Arc are really slow and have a lot of world building, but it really pays off later
The battle system is amazing, and really good, it opens up by the time you get to the 2nd time and get a full party of 4 people
Funny that you showed footage of The Messenger, and the same studio would release another indie JRPG just a month after your video.
Thank you for recomending cross code i bought it thanks to you.
Your channel was a good find, the indie space needs these types of videos.
Keep at it😁
Thank you, will do!
The transition into the subscribe bit was really smooth and hilarious. I was laughing before I realised you were cracking up too
Not to toot my own horn, but I'd also like to mention fighting games as another immensely resource and time intensive genre. The solution most AAA studios have found is to just... not make them, and the ones that do make them throw insane amounts of time, money, talent, and brute force only for the fanbase to tear them apart. The bar for quality in the fighting game space is raised incredibly high, and even the best examples become dead games really quickly
This is inaccurate. The genre most indies won't tackle is mmo. There are a few but they don't happen because they are expensive to make and difficult to make a profit on.
Nah , truly the hardest genre is grand strategy. There's only one game of this genre made by indie developer - Guilded Destiny , and a big chunk of their mechanics are copypasted from Victoria 2
@user-no4fq3dt7d I think most indies are avoiding that genre but rather have no interest in it to begin with. Those games are super niche.
I thought you were going to talk about fighting games, but JRPGs? I feel like there's a new indie jrpg project announced every week
Full-length, full-featured JRPGs like CrossCode and Chained Echoes, yes. But Undertale is actually a great example of the types of indie JRPGs that *do* get more commonly made - ones that don't take length as an important factor and just tell a relatively concise, tight story with relatively few characters and relatively simple systems. Undertale is only like 10 hours even to get the True Pacifist ending, there's only 1 character in the party and like a single-digit number of characters in the whole game with substantial dialogue or development, and outside of the battle system the game is pretty barebones mechanically. Like any game it wasn't *easy* to make by any means, especially not for 1-2 people, but it's wayyyyy more toned down in scale than something like a FF or Xeno game.
My favorite RPG at the moment might be Persona 3, but I have a feeling it'll get replaced as I play later titles in the series.
Shin Megami Tensei 4 on top
RPG maker games is like MOST common indie rpg subgenre. Maybe behind JRPGs.
Now CLASSIC aka REAL RPGs is actually pretty rare, especially of good quality. Most of the RPG games seem to be AA games with 1-2 AAA games.
Immersive sims aka what I'd call gameplay rpg/dnd is probably even rarer. It's so hard to make good immersive sim game since it requires tons of mechanics and physics coded in
Have you followed many indie JRPG? They have massive library, from bad to awesomely good (even though it was made using RPG Maker). Sure, it's not as epic as AAA JRPG... but everything is there, multiple interesting characters (though in some games, you only control the main character), 30-50 gameplay hours, addictive combat (again, still RPG Maker-ish, but with creative touch), GOOD story, etc.
Also, interestingly, lots of them are eroge ;)
This was really fun to watch as I am learning to become a Gamedesigner/Artist myself and this video pretty much perfectly sums up the reason why I could never convince my friends at school to make an rpg for our next project XD. I'd personally be more than willing to go broke and live under a bridge if it meant releasing the greatest hidden gem RPG banger ever made however I suffer from a severe lack of coding skill issue so the technical part and required time are holding me back at the moment. However once I either get good or find other fellow lunatics who are willing to go down with me I will proceed to make the absolute fever dream of a game I have concocted in my head a reality.
This vid got me wondering why do so many indie jrpgs skimp on the non-human party members. CT which is a huge inspiration to a lot of devs had a frog guy and a robot. Breath of Fire has plenty of anthro party members. Final Fantasy has had plenty of non-conventional party members (Cait Sith, mog, red xiii, Quina, Kimahri, Fran...)
The best old school Jrpgs rarely had a cast of fully human characters.
I was waiting for the Undertale mention :flarewheeze;
Its really interesting that Deck13 especially likes publishing Indie JRPGs. CrossCode, Chained Echoes. They will eventually also publish Drova - Forsaken Kin which is an Euro RPG, but it will also be like a 40+ hour game.
Maybe they are onto something
1:06 sorry to break it to you but game design and programming actually have zero overlap in terms of what skills are involved. It's just that a lot of game designers are also proficient in coding (like me :p)
I might be the odd man out on this one but my favorite JRPG is Final Fantasy 12. It was so different for the time but I really enjoyed what it had to offer in its gameplay and leveling system. A close second would be The Last Story since it was also unique and we have never seen anything like it since but it felt more action strategy than jrpg to me.
With that being said, I should really get into the Xenoblade series and play more Cross Code. Your previous video on it pushed me to finally pick it up on Switch. Chained Echoes has also been on the list for awhile too.
Always good to see more people that played The Last Story. Really good game that feels like it got a bum deal by being launched at the tail end of the Wii's lifespan, i'm still crossing my fingers for a modern port.
@@megasoniczxx I'm with you there. Maybe somebody bold enough will create their own Last Story style indie game someday.
Someone's clearly never worked in RPGMaker and it shows. Building JRPGs is actually pretty easy, and there are indeed tons of them out there if you know where to look. There are hundreds if not thousands of full-length JRPGs out there jammed out by RPGMaker users over the decades. With the right system and a few borrowed tilesets, that engine saves a lot of time doing much of the balancing work for you.
Im currently playing chained echos and am completly sunken deep into this game. So far its basically perfect and im 14 hours in. If you are looking for an RPG to completly caputre and satisfy your thirst for this genre, this is the one, go play it.
There also isn't any indie MMO
But JRPGs (or at least games inspired by them) are extremely common among indie games. Not every game, not even JRPGs has to be 100+ hours. There are a lot of great games with less runtime.
And we had tools to make JRPG development super easy for over 20 years. That ease of use means that everyone can develop one, even if they lack the skills and probably shouldn't.
I find it amazing that people actually manage to make big indie games by themselves
When you mention Crosscode while saying how those games are made with deep love, it honestly brought a tear to my eyes :') i sincerely love this game with all my heart
Really solid points!! I'm glad you mentioned Sea of Stars cause in my opinion, it think it might be a huge hit. Sabotage already has a proven track record of success with The Messenger so I'd expect them to nail it with this. It's such a good time for indies right now!
MY GOD MAN EVERY VIDEO I WATCH FROM YOU IS JUST BANGER ONE AFTER ANOTHER. UR FAV JRPG IS XENOBLADE 3 HELLA RESPECT MAN (mine is actally xenoblade 2 but xeno 3 is really close). Man just the recognititon of cross code and xenoblade makes me really happy and thanks to your video a long time ago i finally started playing chained echos and am loving it so far. I really like ur editing and the things u cover, sorry just really really happy to see crosscode especially get more recognition and i cannot wait for sea of stars been waiting for that game for a super long time now. great vid
Thank you so much! I'll do my best to keep making great stuff!
I haven't played many JRPGs but if Crosscode counts it absolutely is my favourite, and I will always sing its praises.
When I first saw this video, I thought it was gonna be some dumb rant about it, but I was curious what genre you would say. I was surprised that you actually had a lot of solid reasoning backing it up. And you know, making solid RPGs of any sort definitely takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you want actually good writing. I'd say if you stick to basics, mechanics would be easy enough, but all that writing would exhaust most people.
Personally, from browsing around, I'd say the reason we don't hear about much in that range is because a lot of the ones that do get made aren't stellar, a lot of indie groups do other things, and well... RPGs just aren't that flaunted or loudly popular. They certainly have a fanbase, but that fanbase is fairly quiet, generally. (Except possibly about Final Fantasy, for some reason. I hear a lot about _that_ particular franchise.) I think there's also the fact that pure writers tend to go into visual novels a decent chunk of the time. Easy, very story.
As for favorites, probably the Tales of series, and CrossCode (despite that I have yet to actually beat it, I suck at playing games consistently). Both are really good, with fun mechanics, good worlds, and good stories. Favorite overall indie game... might also be Celeste over here. The platforming is great, and it just generally feels really good to play. But there's also the story. Madeline's story resonated with me in way a lot of stories don't, and has stuck with me because of that. It's also the first thing that gave me the basis for viewing my anxiety as something besides the monster other media has always portrayed it as. That game will always hold an extra special place in my heart.
I thought you were gonna say, MMO, and then all I could add was well of course, but RPG? What the fuck man, have you been living under a rock? RPGs were the first indie games. Spiderweb Sofware, Troika Games, Gothic, Riven, All the neverwinter Knights Modules, the DIvinity series, all the traditional roguelikes, Torchlight, Shadowrun, Pathfindr, Tyranny, Age of Dexadence, Kenshi, Underrail, Unrealworld, the X series, Hylics, Brutal Orchestra, hell, the original Witcher was an independent title. Role playing games have been significantly more succesful in the indie scne than from big devs, and were the cause of numerous triple A breakouts by originally small independent studios, with Larian, CD Projekt and Obsidian just being the obvious examples.
Yeah idk man I have seen a lot of indie projects focus on becoming jrpgs or at least inspired by them. How many are successful is another thing but, it is far from rare lol
It may take a very long time to make, but its a genre that refuses to die.
Persona 1 an 2 style indie game when am begging
I mean, saying indie devs avoid making JRPG’s is like saying Americans avoid making K-pop; the letter at the start requires a country of origin. A whopping 98.4% of the world’s population fail to meet the first requirement to make a JRPG: Be Japanese.
And if it’s only RPG’s and not JRPG’s, I’d argue that’s a popular genre of indie game. Most big indie games (like shovel knight or hollow knight) tend to have RPG elements, and I’d argue that the most famous indie game in the world is Undertale, an RPG. But not a JRPG because Toby Fox is not Japanese.
I was expecting him to say some extreme thing like indie fully fledged MMORPG
Other than maybe platformers or metroidvanias 10 years ago, JRPGs might be the most common kind of indie game there is thanks to RPG Maker. Even in terms of financially successful indie games there's Undertale, LiSa, Chained Echoes, Cassette Beasts, Crosscode, Omori, Sea of Stars... it's VERY common.
There are plenty of genres you don't often see tackled by Indie Devs because they are difficult to develop and the market for them is small. Real Time Strategy, MMO's, Stealth games...
I can never finish Crosscode. I want to finish it for the story, but not the gameplay or puzzles... they simply don't click with me, and they annoy me.
Every time I see someone talk about crosscode, I jump in the air! I love this game. The devs made a wonderful experience.
I feel like the limitations of indie games make my favorite Rpg's. Like omori, lisa the painfull and games like hylics an Off, are the reason why i can enjoy the genre. When i try to pick up a game like Skyrim my mind gets overwelmed and i cannot enjoy it becase of the 100's of side quest
You could make something like Wizardry with just custom characters, you could save a lot of time.
I would say FF6, Chrono Cross, Valkyrie Profile. But that's only accounting for turn-based and-or jrpg made by actual japanese studio. If i include action rpg and indies, the list would be something else lol
Looking forward for Sea of Stars!
not that big pf jrpg dude cuz they take too long, but chained echoes is my fav, also looking forward to sea of stars
The whole "Japanese RPG is a genre" thing aside...I can't help but feel this entire argument somewhat falls apart since small-scale RPGs do exist. There are plenty that sit at the more reasonable 20-30 hour range, some even closer to just 10-ish hours though those are obviously rarer. They don't need to be colossal 50-70+ hour endeavors
Something like "Parasite Eve" can be finished in about 10 hours. Even something like "Chrono Trigger", which many indie RPGs are directly inspired by, can be finished in around a brisk 20 hours. And both of those are from Square, who were and still are one of the biggest Japanese RPG developers out there.
Even then, there are plenty of smaller developers as well that make relatively shorter RPGs. I'm currently playing a game called "Trinity Trigger", by FuRyu, which is an estimated 20-25 hours. Another game from them, "Lost Dimension", can be finished in under 20 hours. My favorite developer, NIS, has made multiple like "Destiny Connect" which is roughly 20 hours, "Void Terrarium" which is closer to 30 hours, "Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure" at 10 hours, etc. Stepping away from strictly Japanese developers, there's stuff like "Cris Tales" at 20-25 hours or "Child of Light" at 10-15 hours.
And, as I see others bringing up, there are plenty of terrific RPG Maker projects that are on that shorter end as well. Heck, I've recently been going through both of the "Fear and Hunger" games and...uh...just don't go looking those up. They are great, don't play them.
I know this probably just sounds like I'm cherry picking, and there is the factor of replay value which alone can multiply playtime, but saying indies stay away from making RPGs due to long length is kind of off base as far as my experiences go. I do want to agree that RPGs tend to be rarer among indies due to other factors, like proper gameplay balancing and writing...just not so much length itself.
Panzer Dragoon Saga is only 12-17 hours I believe and it's an amazing JRPG. You can have short JRPGs.
That's a AAA game that was for the sega saturn, but it's a good example of JRPGs not needing to be longer than they need be and still be great.
You say that like long ones are bad cause length xd
@@senritsujumpsuit6021 Depends on the game. FF7's end game for instance felt like an absolute slog. Having to fight the same damned enemy in the crater because that's the only enemy that gives you any EXP worth a damn was grueling, but I did do EVERYTHING in that game and got to level 99 for all characters. Did I feel like some of the things were worth doing? Hell NO. I wouldn't ever do them again more than likely, but Tales of Symphonia on the other hand, did an AMAZING job continually staying fresh and interesting the whole way though. I definitely wouldn't have a problem doing everything in that game again. So as you can see, it all depends. Did the developers do a good job on making that content in the game fun, interesting and worth doing? I'd much rather have a shorter game with less grind attached to it, with more focus on fun and challenging activities than depending of tedious, repetitive actions.
@@kukukachu so you hate MMOs since half the fun of those is grinding in some form
an grinding is pretty chill I remember spending a couple hours with a friend just spear fishing hehe
@@senritsujumpsuit6021 Yea, MMOs SUCK. I wouldn't ever pay for a subscription to play a game, that's just dumb. On top of that, that awkward action turn based battle system is definitely not for me. I won't ever be getting into WOW, Xenoblade Chronicles, FFXII etc. Now, action in a turn based game however, is cool, like Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga. I also really like the battle system in Panzer Dragoon Saga and it looks like FF7R copied that system. I won't be playing FF7R however because that game is a giant middle finger and slap in the face to the original fans. I won't support that, but it is pretty cool seeing the system from Panzer Dragoon Saga being used in another game.
@@kukukachu wait so you just hate all turn based stuff in general you know Final Fantasy 7 is turn based originally that remake is not the same game also xenoblade is not turn based neither is WOW
Wow. That mere mention of undertale made me feel overflown by nostalgia. I was basically raised by that game and it really was one of the best games I’ve played. I hope it doesn’t get lost among all the other jrpgs that may not be as good as it. I think it’ll be around for a while though due to its unique soundtrack, but I’m rambling now so simply put thanks for mentioning undertale lol
I don’t make JRPGs because I’m not Japanese
the hardest genre is without question mobas, not jrpg. Mobas absolutely require professional netcode with fast servers, and they have the multiplayer bootstrapping problem. MMOs are often cited as the hardest, but they don't require professional netcode since they can be fairly laggy TCP and still be enjoyable.
Indie JRPG?
I was expecting it to be RTS. When was the last time we saw a new RTS that was actually successful?
You ever seen a 4x indie game?
I don't play JRPG's and that was still a fascinating video, thanks for that.
JRPGs are not as deep as you make it seem like. A lot of the complexity mentioned often stems from artificial lengthening and difficulty that's the standard from Japanese developers. When you take an objective look at most JRPGs and remove all the crud, they're fairly simple and quite linear.
i feel like one of the reasons why a lot of indie games are cool in the first place is because they don't adhere to the limitations of certain genres. my favorite game of all time is spiritfarer, and if you asked me to describe it, i quite honestly couldn't without sounding insane. it has platforming, it has farming, it has minigames, it has exploration, it has upgrades and everything in between. but it's all glued together by an amazing story, and it just works. while aaa games seem to rely on one upping themselves within the genre, indie games rely on a vision, an idea of a game that can't be defined by anything.
amazing video, i need to play sea of stars lmao
I thought for sure you were gonna say open world
There are a decent number of open world games in the indie scene, actually. You have games like Subnautica, Outer Wilds, No Man's Sky, Minecraft, Terraria, Satisfactory, and the list goes on. You don't see them as often as roguelikes and metroidvanias, but they're much more common than JRPGs.
I thought it would be MMO, but that market is surprisingly crowded as well.
@@Lazzil I'd argue that the indie open worlds are all better than the AAA open worlds, too. I rather play Outer Wilds. AAA is still trying to become half as good as minecraft. Nobody managed to get close to Terraria. Etc.
@@fy8798 Yeah, only one I'm genuinely impressed with is TW3. And maybe Morrowind? Depends on if that one's considered AAA or AA.
But yeah, that is true for the majority of open world games. Most of them are just chasing trends set by Skyrim, and even that game wasn't particularly great.
This was pretty good video but it was way too short and needed way more elaboration on alot of points and is probably why most of the comments are looking at what this video says literally, in the year 2023 yeah their right, 2d games from hollow/shovel knight all the way down to undertale, several game engines are out there that can easy make undertale easily and show just how one person can make them, rpg maker is said alot in the comments but tbh 2d is nearly mastered, game engines like Gdevelop are pretty nearly universal 2d engines, meaning anything 2d they can do it, rpgmaker can do anything top down or even side scroller but Gdevelop is finally taping into 2.5d mean og doom and 3d backgrounds for our top downs.
I do like how you talk about how long it takes tho, as a younger lad just making a simple rpg maker game took several weekends but the enjoyment of building is whats keeps most devs going I'd assume and with unreal engine and their blue prints style of coding 3d games might become just as easy to make which prob means that dev talent might not real be a thing anymore and more animation, writing and voice acting become the things people look into to tell if the game has quality and over time game devs work might just trun into something as simple as cutting a log, but with a heavy hand saw, not impossible just time consuming and frustrating
RPGs are absolutely the hardest to make. A lot of the common genres are simple in design. They utilize fewer systems than full RPGs and those systems are generally more scalable. Plus RPGs usually don't use procedural generation which is the biggest effort to playability-size reward. Even some rogue-like/rogue-lites that use turn-based or rpg-element combat tend to be some degree simpler than full-scale rpgs. On top of that, most tutorials or guides as well as amount of marketplace resources/assets lean towards action, platforming, and real-time gameplay so learning how to do rpgs is harder and requires far more effort and talent. It's funny because people think turn-based is easier to design/code than action games but it's the opposite by far.
Yeah... NO. There isn't a lack of indie JRPGs... I can name at least 10 before we get into RPG Maker titles... which are downright oversaturated. Mechanically they aren't that complicated, & in fact are in some ways easy mode because you can avoid a lot of realtime processing like you have to deal with in any kind of action game. If you're not trying to innovate on mechanics (& most don't), the primary bottleneck is narrative development. It should also be noted that a JRPG isn't any different in this respect than a 'CRPG'... the distinction between the 2 being a bit nebulous & increasingly fading (eg. Lords of Xulima has combat reminiscent of classic JRPGs, but a narrative aesthetic more in line with CRPGs; any wizardry style game is hard to classify as CRPG vs JRPG because both sides of the pacific took heavy inspiration from wizardry).
The real avoided indie genres IMHO are 4x/grand strategy, which requires huge amounts of expensive playtesting (same reason those games are difficult to review/1st-impression), & sandbox open-world action games, which are both asset & narrative intensive, & plus the AAA studios are obviously doing them to death.
10 non-RPG maker indie JRPGs:
* artifact adventure
* Siralim
* Virgo vs the Zodiac
* knights of tartarus
* earthlock
* voidspire tactics
* another star
* Pier Solar
* shadows of adam
* jack move
Being very conservative re: indie & traditional JRPG formula, while also not listing anything already in the video. If we expand that criteria (eg. small 'AA' quality studios working with larger publishers like PLAYISM, or action hybrid titles ala Cross-Code, or rouge-likes ala mystery dungeons or Slay the Spire clones) lots more would qualify.
Your claim that a crash with an one hour loss is more acceptable in commercial software than in games is VERY naive and also wrong.
**"Undertale! Undertale!" He shouts in a chant**
there's one type that's even harder, the MMO type. Imagine doing all that a JRPG does, but now have complex multi player systems on top of that
Great vídeo and a lot of Food for thougth.
But saying coding is the main part of game design in a wrong assumption, game design has nothing tô do with coding, The GD is responsible for the structure of The game, The Flow, The rules, how it is player. The programmer is responsible for coding. A lot of programmers do Game Design, because anyone can do it, its more of a soft skill then a technical one, but that is some of The main reasons why we got só many bad indie games, The lack of a good game design.
The genre indies avoid is "3D."
thanks, saved my 6 minutes
@@friedtofus3705this is not what the video said and also a completely terrible take lol
@@a_puntato29 I mean he ain't wrong man
Not me! :D i'm gonna do my best to thrive as a 3d indie dev. My journey started one year ago and is still so far from good enough so i understand why one would avoid it.
The Sea of Stars disappointment was so sad 😞
"The types of games Indies avoid are RPGs."
RPG Maker: Hold my beer.
I'm sorry but watching this video felt like listening to a person that does not know much about the JRPG indie space. They are tons of JRPG indie games, an amount that almost rivals the amount of platformers that exist. But it makes sense that you would not know of them because you only list the massive successes as examles.
Huh? There's a flood of them on DLSite though, and it's not just RPG Maker either, but also RPG Maker and... I forgot what engine RGSS is the runtime to. DemonsRoots was outright topping the Japanese EGS chart even if it's mainly because it was a weak year for JRPG and VNs that qualifies for EGS. Even outside of Japan, there are still a lot of great projects making RPGM games, like The Last Sovereign, Fear and Hunger, Roundscape Adorevia... so many great RPG.
Now, I admit a lot of them are either horror or ero, but there are still a LOT of new RPGM games all the time.
Of the two bigger games that I'm working on(90%+ is just on paper. I'm good at the writing/worldbuilding), one is a mmojrpg, and the other's working title is "Scrying Sigil: JRPG Simulator". Though the latter is not actually a jrpg, but a city builder similar to Social Empiers/Clash Of Clans, just with more procedural and voxel; basically, it's a way for me to turn worldbuilding an elaborate world for my dream game into a game of itsself, so I'm not waiting 30 years to perfect the worldbuilding, and can get feedback quickly.
As someone who's played the bulk of Cross Code and has greatly enjoyed it, it's very heartening to see how indie developers have managed to nail the JRPG genre and its relatives, and I'm absolutely looking forward to see what gems they manage to wow us with in the future.
A good story is what I look for.
(new sub).
I already knew the answer but watched anyways cause Crosscode mentioned