Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the RPG Reload, the regular feature where all good things must come to an end. 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 finishing our look at the history of the JRPG sub-genre. In the last part, we looked at a decade which could charitably be referred to as a hangover from the massive success of the genre in the 1990s. Square, the biggest name in JRPGs, over-extended itself in spectacular fashion and ended up merging with their rival, Enix. The Japanese market lost its taste for home consoles, focusing instead on the convenience that handheld consoles brought to the table. Development on two of the three most popular JRPG series had slowed down considerably, and as the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, you didn't have to look far to find people proclaiming the death of the JRPG genre had come.
As in most cases of such proclamations, there was quite a bit of exaggeration going on. Still, it's safe to say that the JRPG genre as it was traditionally known went through a pretty rough patch for several years. A lot of that was tied in with the many problems Square Enix was having. One of the reasons why I've put such a heavy focus on the two-giants-that-became-one is that for a very long time, Square, Enix, and their associated IPs might as well have been the JRPG genre as far as ...