TheJRPGgenre is known to experiment from time to time, stretching the meaning of what it actually means to be a JRPG. Some series, like Final Fantasy, have taken this as a personal challenge, innovating and iterating with every new game, to the point where comparing gameplay elements between them is almost pointless.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are game series like Dragon Quest that have only slightly iterated with each new game, where you’re able to tell at a glance that they’re all part of the same franchise. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the JRPG series that have changed the most over the years.
The underlying core and themes of the Yakuza series have remained the same since its inception on the PS2, but the series has done something that not many other long-running JRPGs have done, which is switch from action combat to turn-based. Usually, like with Final Fantasy, it’s the other way around.
However, the shift to turn-based combat in Like A Dragon has been received incredibly well, and this style of combat will likely be the norm, at least for Ichiban’s games, going forward. Spin-offs like Majima’s adventures in Hawaii have retained the series' beat-em'-up roots.
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At its core, the title Monster Hunter tells you everything you need to know about this action RPG series. You are a hunter, and you need to kill monsters. While this hasn’t, and will never, change, the series has become more and more approachable with each new entry.
The changes have been largely incremental for Monster Hunter, with each new release streamlining various systems, making others more fluid, or adding new ones that make the game more accessible for newcomers. For some, this means the newer games in the series, like Rise and Wilds, are too easy, it also means that Monster Hunter has more players than ever before.
It’s only natural that a series with over 30 years' worth of games would change throughout its lifetime, but the differences within each Megami Tensei and Shin Megami Tensei game are staggering. The games all share the common thread of humans interacting with the world of demons, but nearly every game goes about this concept differently.
Spin-offs like Persona also completely change the formula, introducing a more casual, slice-of-life approach to the series. If it weren’t for the demon designs that have stayed relatively consistent throughout the years, it would be difficult to tell that some Megami Tensei games were even part of the same franchise.
This tactical RPG series has had its own fair share of changes over the years, most of which can be pinpointed back to Fire Emblem Awakening, due to its inclusion of the Casual difficulty mode. Before then, any time your units would fall in battle, they would permanently die, so you couldn’t use them for the rest of the playthrough.
This sometimes punishing difficulty put a lot of people off from the series, but Awakening’s more casual approach, as well as its marketing in the West, made the game a lot more appealing for new players. These trends have continued since Awakening, so the series owes a lot of its current success to that game.
For better or worse, Pokemon has changed a lot over the years. The first major change came with Pokemon X and Y in the form of a shift to 3D graphics. Then, Sword and Shield introduced the Wild Area, where you could see Pokemon roaming around in the overworld, rather than only finding them through random encounters.
These are fairly natural progressions for any series that has been around since 1996, but it’s still interesting to look back at the first generation of Pokemon games and see how they’ve evolved since then. There are over a thousand Pokemon now, and there’s no sign of the franchise stopping anytime soon.
The Ys series follows the adventuring swordsman Adol Christin on his journey across the world. Each game follows a different arc of his story, and they are mostly told achronologically, with the most recent entry in the series, Nordics, being one of Adol’s earliest adventures, set before almost every other game.
The first two games in the series used a unique form of combat, called the ‘bump’ system. Essentially, by bumping into an enemy at the right angle, you would deal damage to them. The series has retained its action combat in every entry, but the depth of each system has only improved with every new game, alongside its technological advancements in graphics.
Without a doubt, the Final Fantasy series has changed more than any other JRPG series in the world. For a long time, the games were heralded as some of the best turn-based RPGs on the market, but the series has largely abandoned true turn-based combat since Final Fantasy 10, which was released in 2001.
Even before that, many titles used the ATB system, which kind of hybridized turn-based and action. Now, the last two main games are fully action RPGs, and both Final Fantasy 7 Remakes use a similar action combat system.
Outside of combat, Final Fantasy has always been the most experimental JRPG series, trying new things with every new game, spin-offs more so. No two games are the same, so you can always expect to get something new with Final Fantasy.
