Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the RPG Reload, the regular feature where we always bring a party. To be specific, welcome to the RPG Reload Glossary, where we sift through the piles of historical debris and messy semantics to try to make some sense of it all. This time around, we're continuing our look at the history of the JRPG sub-genre. In the last part, we followed the progress of the genre through the 16-bit period of console gaming. Enix's Dragon Quest series had finally found some competition in Square's Final Fantasy, while continued attempts to help the sub-genre break out in the West were largely rebuffed. Meanwhile, as technology moved forward, JRPGs were starting to attempt more sophisticated stories and characters. By the end of the 1990s, all of this conflict would be settled, one way or the other. To repeat the note from last time: due to the immense size of this particular sub-category, I'm going to be focusing on only the titles that were critical to the development and/or popularization of the genre. This is a necessary move to keep this particular historical retelling from growing to an absurd size.
Thus far, I've mostly focused on video games themselves in this history. But for what's coming next, it's important to talk about one of the more important influences on the JRPG genre from outside of the video game sphere: Japanese comics and animation. A simple glance at the two most popular JRPG franchises shows a clear relation between these two for...