Pick a Pile: SNES Vs. PlayStation JRPGs
When was the true Japanese RPG Golden Age?
I’ve recently been listening to USGamer’s Console RPG Quest, a podcast series from Kat Bailey and Nadia Oxford that chronicles the history of Roleplaying Games across many of gaming’s most popular (and not so popular) consoles. Kat and Nadia are both huge Japanese RPG fans (like your intrepid writer here), and, as all things do when JRPGs are involved, their overarching narrative comes down to the ever-asked, never-answered question: Was the JRPG Golden Age during the SNES or PlayStation era?
Wanting to play along, I raided my gaming collection and pulled out two JRPG piles: SNES and PlayStation. I’m going to go through these piles game by game, discussing what I think they say about the JRPG Golden Age along the way, and why I think it’s tricky, if not impossible, to ascribe the Golden Age to a particular console.
Pile 1: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
The Super Nintendo was an absolute JRPG juggernaut. While the genre hadn’t yet reached mainstream appeal, it was laying the groundwork for a revolution and evolution that would arrive only a few years later. Playing through Final Fantasy VI nowadays, it’s easy to see the first strides toward the more cinematic storytelling the series would embrace…
