The Value in JRPGs

I wish that I played more JRPGs. I'm kind of envious of people who can put the time and effort into playing them. They spend so much time in them, that I wish that I could get wrapped up in a story the way they do. However, I've played a few, and they just haven't had the same affect on me as those who are fans of them. Now, I've said my fair share about Final Fantasy, the quintessential JRPG franchise, but that's just one series. There's a lot more JRPGs out there that are well done, and there's a lot of value to the genre on the whole of RPGs that isn't just restricted to the Japanese market.

The special thing about RPGs is that they tell great stories. Players can get really wrapped up in them, as they explore the game, and fight the good fight. You can spend time leveling up your characters, and decking them out with the best gear so that they can overcome any obstacle that comes their way. It may seem like a bit of a stretch, but I feel like this can be somewhat of a life lesson in a way.

In life, we have many different talents, passions, and various other things about ourselves that we can improve upon. As with RPGs, we have our party of characters. A smart player will have a party full of characters that will compliment each other and work well together. Players spend time working on this party of characters, and leveling them up so that they can be as effective as possible. Much like in real life, we have talents that we work on so that we can become better at them. We may be talented at a lot of things, but there are some things that we focus on more than others. Most JRPGs give you a party of about three characters, but give players the option of about twelve or fifteen. Pokemon has over seven hundred Pokemon to choose from, but only allow for six at a time. You have to choose wisely, and create a party that is effective enough to overcome challenges.

We won't always be the best at everything right away, though. We have to work at our talents. Much like in JRPGs, there's a grind. I hate grinding in video games. I want to be the hero, and I want to save the world. There should be a reason why I was chosen to save the world and everyone in it. I don't want to be some average Joe that has to train to be good enough. However, in real life, the world doesn't always need saving from some great evil, but we are the heroes of our own story. So, we have to resort to grinding. We have to work on our skills and abilities to improve ourselves and become better. We can pick up pretty much anything, and with effort become a master of it. It might take longer than we'd like for whatever we pick up to get up to speed with the rest of our talents, but sometimes we just have to accept that we don't know much about whatever it is that we just started. Often times in RPGs we're faced with the scenario of getting a new character who just isn't on the same level as everyone else in our party, but this new character is really cool and interesting, so we do our best to level him up and get him up to speed. This is a long and arduous process. This new character ends up dying a lot, and doesn't gain quite as much as experience, because the other characters are landing more hits, and doing more damage than this new character. Yet, he or she is still gaining experience, and slowly is growing. We have to be patient when we work on our talents. We wont always be able to pick up something and immediately be good at it. There's a lot of work that goes into becoming good at something.

I may not play many JRPGs, or any kind of RPGs for that matter, but there is some real world value to them. We're all very talented people, and we all have something to offer. We just have to grind away the hours at leveling up our special gifts.