This thread is the perfect example of why I don't care about genre definitions. OP shows evidence of Zelda being considered an RPG in Japan in the 90s but people just go "my definition is different". They're all correct. There's no global, atemporal & pancultural definition — it's all contextual. - ThreadSky

felipepepe.bsky.social • 112 days ago

This thread is the perfect example of why I don't care about genre definitions. OP shows evidence of Zelda being considered an RPG in Japan in the 90s but people just go "my definition is different".

They're all correct. There's no global, atemporal & pancultural definition — it's all contextual.

Reposted from NESbot

When did people stop seeing Zelda as an RPG?
www.resetera.com/threads/11...

Comments

samderboo.com•112 days ago

Exactly. It's all just vibes, and the poor OP simply wants to find out when the vibes shifted. (As they've tried to explain multiple times.)

katewillaert.bsky.social•112 days ago

The problem is that there wasn’t a vibe shift. The question “is Zelda an RPG or not?” was being asked by players in Japan the very first year of release, because Miyamoto said it was an adventure not an RPG and players who were going off vibes rather than looking at mechanics were like “??!”

samderboo.com•112 days ago

The vibe shift I mean is from the series widely being grouped in with RPGs by audience and press alike, to (seemingly) most people finding the very notion that this could have ever been a thing preposterous. (Moreso in the West than Japan, dunno how players today would describe it over there.)

felipepepe.bsky.social•112 days ago

I don't understand your point. In the mid-80s in Japan, Zelda would fit the vibes of RPGs like Xanadu, Hydlide and Ys, so it makes sense Horii and others see it as an RPG as well.

Those aren't the icons of RPGs nowadays, the general image & vibes shifted, so less people would call Zelda an RPG.

katewillaert.bsky.social•112 days ago

I think my point is ultimately that vibes are irrelevant, beyond a study of “when did people who were wrong or misinformed become fewer in number.” Which, to be fair, can be an interesting topic. But I’ve always hated “I know it when I see it” for a variety of reasons.

katewillaert.bsky.social•112 days ago

But I was too tired to read the forum thread last night, so I see that this is more about looking into that interesting topic and I guess the shift would be more about when did the “RPG” side go from being a majority to a minority.

katewillaert.bsky.social•112 days ago

The problem there is that I don’t think they were ever a majority in the US, and while they were likely a majority in Japan I’m not sure how to measure the shift there, if it shifted at all.

historyofhyrule.com•112 days ago

Yes! This. A 1000x this. It absolutely got called an RPG a lot & as someone who was scanning Japanese Zelda media as early as 2001, people in Japan & the US both called it that. But since we didn't have a robust internet, & there were so few media scanners, we went with how terms/games felt to us

historyofhyrule.com•112 days ago

Like I literally just uploaded this guide and it there on the cover 😆

But I also... don't care?

It's so interesting to talk about cultural perceptions of a term/game & I don't believe there's many hard truths in Zelda. However people see it, if it's something they loved, then that was the goal

dogfacedgamer.bsky.social•112 days ago

Now I’m upset that the original Zelda didn’t let me ride around on a giant lizard monster…😭

historyofhyrule.com•112 days ago

Tell me about it. I thought it was a perfect game but my illusions have been ruined.

dogfacedgamer.bsky.social•112 days ago

Now I’m wondering if someone at Nintendo wasn’t like…” hey remember that Zelda cover from awhile back? Well what if Mario rode something like that in the next game but cuter?”

And Yoshi was born… lol

ludmiwal.bsky.social•112 days ago

Yeah context/vibe is everything. I mean if a game has swords, shields, monsters, usable items and character growth it's a shoe in for RPG classification.

RPG is both a mechanics and aesthetics genre. Sports? All aesthetic, no idea what the mechanics could be. FPS? All mechanics.

ludmiwal.bsky.social•112 days ago

Anyway whenever I wanna derail a thread I throw in a "what is a RPG anyway" for 12 pages of unfettered off topic discussion.

grauken.bsky.social•112 days ago

the OP in that thread doesn't show any evidence, he just remembers how he perceived the discussion

as for RPGs and no global definition, we know where RPGs came from, we can trace it back to P&P RPGs, how those impacted plato RPGs, then to computer RPGs and how those influenced console RPGs

grauken.bsky.social•112 days ago

how people in their own little corner define RPGs is really not relevant when we look at how RPGs as real things developed, and there we can see clear traditions, both western stuff, then jRPG who were influenced, then split off and did their own thing, and Zelda who is neither of those

felipepepe.bsky.social•112 days ago

Zelda has A LOT of Hydlide and Xanadu in it, both very popular & influential RPGs in Japan. Regardless if you consider Zelda an RPG or not, it definetly comes from mid-80s Japanese RPGs (like Ys would also do a year later).

grauken.bsky.social•112 days ago

Both Hydlide and Xanadu were edge-cases as well, similar to how Deus Ex is both an FPS as well as an RPG, and few would argue with Deus Ex as being a core RPG, which neither Hydlide and Xanadu were, a better comparison is either Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest compared to Zelda

felipepepe.bsky.social•112 days ago

I think that's anochronistic. We're talking about 1985-1986, Japan had been doing RPGs for less than 5 years, there was no "core RPG" image.

DQ and FF didn't even exist yet, but there were already many other experiments with Action-RPGs, like Tritorn, Mirai, Deadly Towers, Riglas...

grauken.bsky.social•112 days ago

At the beginning of every field there's an experimental phase, but once staff falls into place categorizations take hold. Once DQ and FF were released they basically defined what RPG for Japanese games meant and those early action RPGs were relegated to become oddities or plain forgotten

acwraith.bsky.social•112 days ago

I'm an '80s kid. The NES label I saw on many games (including Zelda) was "action adventure". It remains my favorite genre. The thread's OP makes me suspect y'all changed it when I was focusing on music and doomed the language! Could it have to do with the formerly shunned p&c adventure genre?

historyofhyrule.com•112 days ago

Hi! It's me, a person who had been a dork about all this since, idk, 1988?

I couldn't agree more & omg yes please: people should just enjoy Zelda & argue less. There's so much room for everyone in this series; it spans so many decades/versions/devs & the goal was just for the player to feel emersed

16bitmanfred.bsky.social•112 days ago

I think it makes sense to have genre definitions per se, since it allows us to easier describe what we like or how a game plays, even though people sometimes disagree on the minor differences.
I consider Zelda (and Terranigma) an Action RPG or Action Adventure, but I wouldn't ever fight over it.

16bitmanfred.bsky.social•112 days ago

People should just live and let live. After all, even if we managed to establish official genre definitions, some games just would not adhere to them, and a good game will always stay a good game no matter what we call it.

zenorogue.bsky.social•112 days ago

But it is just that RPG always was defined extremely poorly... I do not seem to find people confused about what platformer or first-person shooter means, for example. Or very rarely.

nzeus.bsky.social•112 days ago

I get more comfortable treating genre as inherently fuzzy as time goes on.

The only time we’ll all agree on a specific definition is when that particular thing stops moving or is dead.

dogfacedgamer.bsky.social•112 days ago

Yep, that’s true with many things in gaming. The term retro for example, some people define it as a set time period while others refer to a certain aesthetic of games. Both are true because there is no actual set definition.

mercurycdx.bsky.social•112 days ago

I posted about how Mega Drive-centric Japanese publications at the time of the release of the 32X port of Doom classified it as an STG, and it makes sense in the context of other games they labeled with that genre (Space Harrier for instance)

danatheelf.bsky.social•112 days ago

I wonder if this is why minutia-driven descriptive and comparative genre naming has taken favour.
"Action Game" is nebulous, but "Third Person Narrative Driven Treasure Hunting Pirate Adventure" creates a much clearer image of what it might be.

felipepepe.bsky.social•112 days ago

I feel that's more due to SEO optimization than actual human beings using those...

capecodder.bsky.social•112 days ago

Honestly I was always a bit sad that RPG lost its meaning, especially after 2014~ when levels and equipment got big in every other genre so now everything is an RPG, but ultimately lack the "role play" element

Hope with how popular BG3 is we'll see a comeback of slay/steal/sway RPGs

felipepepe.bsky.social•112 days ago

That complain is as old as RPGs themselves... You had Scorpia in the 80s saying CRPGs don't support real roleplay, and by 1997 Richard Garriott was already saying "RPG games" and "roleplaying games" had become different things https://youtu.be/4-TlwwwJGH0?t=165&si=0a8wqiRmL0C9r5vP

capecodder.bsky.social•112 days ago

To be fair what Garriott talks about kinda stopped being a thing by the next year and even more so in 2000. With more big RPGs releasing, games like Fallout were more separated from games like Diablo. It's just we did a full circle after some time, which I guess bound to happen.

rodneylives.bsky.social•112 days ago

Right. Zelda is a game. At the time of its release in the US it would have been considered an "action-adventure," because there's no stats, XP or statistical underpinning, but that's pretty meaningless.

hokutoandy.bsky.social•112 days ago

"When The Legend of Zelda burst upon the scene in fall of 1988, it hit like a nova. Although it still had many action-adventure features, it was definitely a CRPG"
-Roe Adams III, writer (and sometimes designer) of foundational western RPG franchises including Wizardry, Ultima and Bard's Tail

rodneylives.bsky.social•112 days ago

He is entitled to his opinion, but it's not what I observed or remember hearing around at the time.

felipepepe.bsky.social•112 days ago

This is why academic work starts with like 10 pages on definitions, theories, context and frameworks...

This is not to say that you should do the same when arguing definitions with randos online, the point is that you shouldn't argue definitions with randos online :P

sam.rpgbook.club•112 days ago

I recently played a Tabletop game called “lasers and feelings” where your character stat is a number between 1 and 6 declaring at what point in the spectrum from lazers to feelings they belong.

And it got me to rethink game genre in those terms.

sam.rpgbook.club•112 days ago

So if something like Asteroids is a 1, for being extremely Lasers, and Higurashi is a 6 for being entirely feelings, I would say anything that hits a 4+ on that scale would be RPGish.

sam.rpgbook.club•112 days ago

And if we then make The Legend of Zelda NES as a 1 out of all Zelda games with Skyward Sword as a 6, you can drill down your number further.

sam.rpgbook.club•112 days ago

So I would say that most Zelda’s are a 4 overall, their hardcore-ness is usually a 3, their stories are often 4s, but their mechanical depth is a 5 or so usually.

sam.rpgbook.club•112 days ago

To compare, I think something like wizardry is a 3, because their hardcore-ness is like a 1 or 2, it’s story is definitely a 2-3, and it’s mechanical depth is probs a 3-4.

importuno.bsky.social•111 days ago

My graduation thesis on how the tagging system on steam is basically pointless as a database because the very definition of the terms don't exist and rely on just "vibes" of the community.

pj101.bsky.social•112 days ago

A problem with gaming history, definitions, internet discussion in general. It's all about justifying a world view to the point of ignoring the questions asked.

Like we can't even get to the squabbling over semantics stage cause we're stuck explaining other world views exist.

joltzz.bsky.social•111 days ago

This is exactly it: contextual.

Horizon: Forbidden West is defined broadly as an RPG, but many of the things I love about the genre are not in this game. I don't know what it is really, but I still love it lol.

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