Top Reasons to Hate JRPGs

In this week’s Top 5 Tuesday video, we here at PlayStation LifeStyle tackle one of the oldest sub-genres of gaming, the JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game). While JRPGs were the “big” system movers way back during the PSONe’s generation, the genre has fallen into its own trappings and are mostly seen as its own sub-genre today.

And this is where we come in. For this top five video, we countdown the five top reasons to hate JRPGs! Most of these are present in any JRPG and we admit, these are the stuff that drive us batty up to this day.

After watching the video, do you agree with our list? What are your top five JRPG annoyances? Share ’em in the comments below.

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Essential Reading:

Trophy Torture: RPG Edition

Final Fantasy XIII - Treasure Hunter

This little gem requires you to collect and construct every single weapon and accessory in the game. Not only does that require you to contend with Final Fantasy XIII’s dull-as-dishwater crafting system, but it also means you risk being a victim of its infamously linear structure. Sell an item you got in an unrevisitable location? Have fun playing the entire game again!
Final Fantasy X-2 - Sweet Perfection

Getting this trophy — particularly if you’re trying to do it in one playthrough — is not recommended for those who’d like to keep a firm grip on their sanity. Final Fantasy X-2 is so picky about how you play, and so utterly maddening in its lack of intuitive design, that simply skipping cutscenes will ensure you miss out on this trophy until your next playthrough. Painful? Oh, yes. Very.
Mugen Souls - Take Your Pick!

There’s no need to even bother picking a single trophy out of the terribad bunch in this JRPG nightmare: just about all of them require dull, stab-your-eyes out grindfests that essentially require you to temporarily zombify yourself. Just how much grinding is this? Well, considering it has taken fairly skilled players upwards of 400 hours to get the Platinum, I’d say… a fair bit!
Star Ocean: The Last Hope - World's Biggest Welch Fan

Nothing is worse than a trophy that makes you get ALL THE THINGS without allowing you to keep track of what THINGS you have gotten. Such is the case with Star Ocean: The Last Hope’s goofily-named challenge, which requires you to gather every single item in the game with no way to keep track of what you’ve had. Guess you’d better not use any items, then.
Dark Souls II - Master of Miracles

Souls is a series known for its brutal difficulty, and getting all the Miracles in Dark Souls II is definitely one of the franchise’s more trying challenges. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could just buy them all outright, as you can with some, but there are plenty that need annoying conditions met to unlock — you’ll have to forgive me if I’d rather not collect 30 Sunlight Medals or win 1000 PvP matches, friend.
Bloodborne - Hunter's Essence

Oh look, another “collect everything” trophy. Who’d have guessed there’d be so many on the list? Bloodborne has you scour every corner of Yharnam’s Lovecraftian-inspired streets for every single weapon in the game, which — given how obsessed people tend to become with From Software’s outings — may be all but inevitable as you’re sucked into the hunt.
White Knight Chronicles - Gold Coin Purse

This is just below Mugen Souls as one of the most bitterly grind-heavy games on PlayStation, so we’ll actually pick one trophy out as obnoxious and boring this time: oh yeah, the one that requires you to collect 10 million units of the game’s currency. Sure, this might not be a challenge in a game more generous with its cash, but that ain’t White Knight Chronicles — hope you enjoy your tenth playthrough, buddy.
Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited - Emperor!

Trophy hunters may not agree on the difficulty of certain challenges, but they’re probably in agreement on this little fact: leaderboard trophies need to die. Elder Scrolls Online requires you to ascend to the top of your respective PvP leaderboard in order to nab this puppy, which has led some players to bitterly dub Tamriel Unlimited as an “impossible Platinum.”
Final Fantasy X - Lightning Dancer

People fall into two camps on this trophy: those that can do it and say it’s easy, and those who would rather chew through their own hands than even think of attempting this seemingly ceaseless challenge in the Thunder Plains. I was unlikely to Platinum Final Fantasy X anyway because of the blitzball trophies, but this one all but ensured I wouldn’t even bother trying.
The Guided Fate Paradox - Defeated Prince Yamato!

This is one of those JRPGs that thinks big numbers (wow, level 9,999!) are going to intimidate and impress us. Well, maybe this time it actually works. Try these stats on for size: in order to even stand a chance of beating Prince Yamato, you’ve got to get to floor 120 of the Martial Arts Advanced dungeon, travel to floor 200 of the EX-Advanced dungeon, max out all your star items to +99 and make sure you can exceed 100 million damage. Wow. It was painful just typing that out.
Trophy Torture: RPG Edition