Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the RPG Reload, the regular feature where we sometimes hold down the confirm button because we are lazy. To be specific, welcome to the RPG Reload Glossary, where we get all up in fussy semantics, history, and other things that polite society will shun us for. Having covered social RPGs, tactical RPGs, and action RPGs in previous installments, we now turn our attention to another one of the big dogs of the RPG category: the JRPG. As messy as trying to define action RPGs was, JRPGs are in some way even more difficult to nail down. As with the last couple of Glossary features, you can expect this one to span multiple columns, with roughly one for each decade. In today's installment, we'll be looking at the origins and early years of the genre, loosely covering the 1980s.
One note before we get started: 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 will make it a little different from the previous Glossary features, but it's necessary to avoid going to book-length.
Breaking from the norm, I am not going to include a list of features that define the genre. This genre is simply too wide and messy to even begin doing that. In lieu of a list, let me simply state that my image of JRPGs is the genre that crystallized in the wake of Dragon Quest and its immediate progeny. Note that I'm going with 'JRPG' as in 'the...