My name is Joe, and I am a JRPG streamer on Twitch. I’ve played a lot of JRPGs over the years, from Final Fantasy, to Tales, to Shin Megami Tensei… you name it, I’ve either played it or most likely at least heard of it. I thrive on streaming these games, because they are what I excel at and love most in the vast cosmos of video games.

I’ve witnessed objections to streaming JRPGs before. The most common one is “I don’t have time for them!”. Well, if you have time in your day to do a 3 hour stream, you can do a JRPG over the course of a month easily. I do one at least 9 hours a week until I’m done with it, and then I move onto the next one. The key, I believe, is pacing yourself and switching to other types of games now and then if you sense you’re going to burn out.

Another one is “well, I don’t want to show grinding on screen!” Then don’t! You can certainly grind off screen if you feel like it’s going to take a while and won’t be entertaining to your viewers. Simply put the cast on again when you’re ready to continue the story, and you can explain to your audience what you did and what changes occurred that they didn’t see. Easy. Thankfully, most JRPGs these days don’t even require you to do much grinding at all.

“But what if the viewers complain about the text heavy dialogue?” That’s a legitimate concern, I think, and I’ve played a couple of titles recently that were pretty talky, namely Ar NoSurge and Trails in the Sky. I haven’t yet figured out how to handle this any better than just paging through the text quickly and giving a Cliff’s Notes summary of my thoughts. I tried voicing every line of dialogue but it proved to be too much and my vocal chords were dead within the first hour, so that doesn’t work for me.

However, if you like the game enough that you’re willing to show it to others, I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it compelling and interesting for your viewers. Example: sometimes I would give goofy voices to the side characters in Persona 3/4 just for the hell of it. Just don’t forget to be yourself, too, and have fun.

JRPGs are excellent for streaming for a couple of reasons, I feel. First is that you can stop the action at pretty much any time and keep up with your chat very well. Interacting with your chat is paramount to building and keeping an audience. You’ll have ample time to say hello, acknowledge everyone and talk about whatever’s on your mind for your streaming session.

Second of all, the stories in JRPGs allow you to have book club-ish discussions with your viewers about what’s happening with the plot and the characters, moreso than other games that may not have as deep of a story or any story at all. They don’t have to be serious discussions either, you can just make fun of everything if you want to. What’s important is that everyone involved has a good time.

Please don’t shy away from JRPGs because you feel they’re too long, or too talky, or even too grindy. I think you can make it work if you’re creative about it and you have a genuine love for this type of game.