Fans of Japanese and Western RPGs have been at each others’ throats for ages.
JRPGs are currently the whipping boy of gaming culture, and admittedly, after Final Fantasy XIII, an unrestrained testimony to genre excess, it’s hard not to see the criticisms. Linearity of gameplay and storyline and a cast of largely predefined characters are the most common targets. Many Western RPG fans claim they can’t even really be categorized as RPGs at all.
But there’s one thing that Japanese RPGs seem to have learned long ago that Western RPGs are still stumbling over: basic cinematography. They understand such fundamental elements of visual storytelling as pacing and camera work, while such juggernauts as the Fallout series remain evidently stumped. If JRPGs are the classic Star Wars of the gaming world – melodramatic, flashy, compelling despite flaws in writing and execution – then far too many Western RPGs are closer to Shakespeare portrayed by a cast of first-year drama students in an empty warehouse.
Why do the supposed epitomes of the role-playing game experience fail so utterly at visual storytelling?
	Most Western role-playing video games ultimately trace their heritage back to Dungeons and Dragons, that venerable monolith of nerd culture. The first entries in the genre were often literal attempts to transcribe the core of the D&D experience to computer. Naturally, since these were text-heavy affairs back in the days of rather sparse graphics, a great deal of imagination was required to translate the two sprites flailing awkwardly at each other into an epic struggle, or to invest a line of text dialogue with pathos.
	We’re obviously not stuck in the days of mandatory text-based interfaces anymore. You can’t go for a walk without tripping over high-res 3D graphics, bruising your shin on customizable protagonist appearances and then knocking yourself unconscious on fully voice-acted characters.