WHY JRPGS SUCK

JRPGs always gave me a sneaking suspicion that the Japanese are capable of a certain kind of combinatorial playfulness, what Coleridge called fancy as opposed to imagination (true creative synthesis), but that they are mostly stuck in a kind of pre-modern "mythic" consciousness that can't take anything seriously enough to do more than "play." They are like pagans of a kind different from classical pagans, but still pagans fundamentally. They don't mind endlessly playing with myths and myth-fragments, or even taking things from other cultures and breaking them down into fragments to play with. The play process itself is like a cultural ouija board, with pseudo-random farragos and pseudo-infinite complexity to occupy their leisure time effectively forever. But that isn't art in the western sense, which has been an acceleration of formal innovation and internal development, leading to a crisis of formal and semantic nihilism in art. The Japanese doesn't develop but he also doesn't have the terminal crisis.

Behind this lack of creative direction, they also have a pre-modern guild mentality of artisanal craftsmanship. The "creatives" guide the ouija process from the top, and then different technical parts of the process are handled by different "masters" who are admirably, autistically devoted to their craft, but not capable of true innovation. They can produce the equivalent of beautiful Swiss clocks in whatever sub-domain of animation or whatever it is they're doing, but they can't really create because the pagan mind doesn't create, it recapitulates chthonian ideas and myths and at most embellishes them with baroque detail.

No modern psychology or sociology can study this because it involves thinking about too many painful things, like racial or "völkisch" characteristics possibly being innate. And the old racial and Völkerpsychologie is too dogmatic and pre-critical to be of any help.

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I wish something with the boldness of early Völkerpsychologie but the criticality and skepticism of more recent social science would emerge, with a declared desire to grasp the essential but an awareness that it's going to be very difficult and ultimately everybody has to be satisfied by the proofs given, even the critics, if it's to be called science.

I wonder if Mishima talks about this anywhere since I get the sense he must have been aware of it. He was Western-educated and effectively "Western" in his "race" or "essence," but how does that relate to his Japaneseness? What does that mean about the innateness of the Japanese character? It's almost like a Christology problem, where you have to figure out the relationship between the God-essence (analogous to root-Japaneseness) and the man-essence (analogous to the Western or Modern essence mingling with, or subordinated to, the root-Japaneseness). Did Mishima feel cut off from Japaneseness? Or did he feel the two essences conflicting, or synthesizing, or what?

I think Japanese stuff like JRPGs and Miyazaki animes are nice because they're sort of like dreaming while awake in the mythic pre-modern unconscious of another culture, but at least one that is still capable of dreaming. That's why I also think more modern anime is dog shit because it has squeezed the charming rough and unreduced aspects of the Japanese (pagan?) collective unconscious into commodity forms that aren't even mythic anymore, they're not tapping into the deep collective unconscious anymore, they've become like the Western collective unconscious as it manifests in culture, which is all surface and neuroses. Modern anime is to older anime/JRPGs as Marvel movies are to Tolkien, it's a loss of connection with the real depths of the unconscious, with a diluted surface-level assumption that it's still the same thing.

And just like how the Western pseudo-mythic in pop culture is transparently a stage for playing out neuroses (like puritanical Madonna-whore complexes and puerile obsession with sex), modern Japanese anime is the same shallow diseased pool of demi-conscious libidinal aspects, which in the Japanese case means their own bizarre simultaneous hypersexuality/asexuality and desire to remain adolescents (because becoming an adult means becoming a faceless lifeless salaryman slave and effectively "dying" in Japanese culture). Modern anime and manga are more like a "bogged down" version of modern society's neurotic pathologies, the same way that Western classical painting (Dürer, Cézanne, Matisse, de Kooning, Pollock, Warhol) was a sort of transparent allegorical stage-set for the psychological and cultural crises of modernity.

The Western pop surrealist unconscious was more interesting than the Japanese because it was a more interesting and richer source to tap into, and even if some surrealists or a few painters and sculptors started to do Western anime style "dreamy" stuff, it was always derivative, more so than the Japanese style, which was more of an expression of the Japanese unconscious, which is to say mythic and inchoate. The Western surrealist stuff was always an emasculation and expression of the loss of the European collective unconscious, the very "mythic" part of its history of the last two millennia, and the Western unconscious in this "crisis of representation" was more modern than the Japanese, in that it was more like a loss of unconscious as the Western collective unconscious was understood, in favor of a neurotic postmodern culture. So the modern Japanese anime was less like a "crisis of representation" in that it was already a more modern form of the Western postmodern-cultural problem, the problem of modernity in a negative sense.

(Of course, the difference between a pure fantasy and a postmodern style that is actually just a modern style being played with and not actually being in touch with the unconscious was always a problem that Japanese artists or people with Orientalist tastes were always trying to solve by either pretending to be "pure fantasy" (because of an anxiety about being in touch with the "collective unconscious" as it was in other cultures) or being so derivative as to end up on the same level as the "serious" artists. One of the major modern art styles in the West is Postmodern, and it's not just postmodern, it's postmodernism, which is a crisis of representation (a loss of connection with the unconscious) and it was basically brought back to the West by postmodern Japanese artists who were also in touch with the unconscious, and thus Japanese culture and tradition. That's how you get a postmodern version of postmodernism in the West called postmodern Orientalism or modern Japanese anime.)

The Japanese are not only better than the Europeans at expressing their own unconscious, they're better at it than many Americans because it involves a more thorough, complete, and coherent form of the Jungian collective unconscious, which isn't a matter of a mere psychological neurosis. The Japanese are better at creating a collective unconscious because they can more naturally tap into the unconscious of the past (but only when mythic) and mythic time.

In any case, the Japanese are far from the first culture that could be "sublimated" into pop culture, and in fact, Japanese art and the Japanese unconscious have been used by many Westerners in both Modern and postmodern times.

didn't read

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But unlike European Orientalism (e.g. European Orientalism in "The Tale of Genji," which is to say "The Tale of Genji" by Murasaki Shikibu, which is a modern Japanese book but in terms of its influence on the West, it is more in line with the Classical/Greek/Hebrew/Christian European version of Western Orientalism, with all its art, religion, literature, philosophy, history, and everything), the Japanese aesthetic tradition has largely been about playing with Japanese stuff (e.g. anime and manga) while not really understanding it.
If the Japanese use western culture to express the unconscious, it's mostly a "sublimated" form of the Jungian collective unconscious, like a pseudo-magical form of Christianity, while the "European collective unconscious" means a complete loss of connection with the past, like a total "loss of soul" or something, because European culture has become so divorced from the sacred and collective aspects of its own identity, which has resulted in a complete loss of culture. This is why they always seem so "modern" in terms of pop culture, they're trying to figure out how to tap into something that really isn't modern, which is why I think modern anime is the worst kind of anime because it's not Japanese style but a very Americanized, modernized style, with the European loss of the past. Because modern anime is Japanese stuff, but only a cheap version of Japanese stuff that is a kind of a parody of Japanese stuff or "cute" or "cuter" or whatever, it's not only inauthentic and fake in an obvious way, it's inauthentic and fake in a more insidious, more deep-seated way, in that it's trying to be in touch with the Japanese unconscious, but the subconscious at the level of the American consciousness, which means it's a parody of the Japanese unconscious which has been lost.

The American pop culture is full of postmodernisms like surrealism, pop surrealism, postmodernism, and postmodernity, the same way that the classical music is full of late romanticism and the avant-garde. American society is more neurotic than a Japanese because it's more like modernity in a very negative sense, it's not modern in a good sense, or in the sense of the Modern as Hegel understood it. The postmodern Western art and pop culture tries to represent the loss of the unconscious that the Modern is supposed to express, but by playing with what was once true by pretending to be unconscious, the modernity of the postmodern and what it thinks it's representing has just caused a complete "loss of soul" and the "end of depth" of art and thought, with an overwhelming amount of neuroses and the loss of art.

The Japanese is the ideal (because Japan is mythic, whereas Europe is a postmodern society that has lost the myths and everything), whereas the Europeans/Americans are like a postmodern version of the neurotic American reality. That's why America is the culture of neuroses and Japan is the culture of a past unconscious which is more unconscious because it's more like a mythic underworld, not the "sublimated unconscious" of modern art (which is a loss of connection to the world). But the postmodernists never realize that the Japanese and the Americans and the Europeans are not so different and that Japan has long been associated with modernity, because both the Japanese and America are a postmodern culture, not a neurosis. The Japanese have to go postmodern, which is like a pseudo-modernism that represents the loss of modernity, not unlike modern anime, and the postmodernist aesthetic is a failure to be modern, which was the case with American and European postmodernism as well.

Bro you are fucking BOOOOOOORING.

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I ain't reading all that shit, faggot.

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And yet I would still play a hundred JRPGS than replay the dullest RPG of all time! Each attempt Obsidian makes to create their own universe rather than simply deconstruct a setting made by others, has been more disastrous than the last. Aside from the outdated gameplay and lifeless cities, Pillars of Eternity's only consistency has been its lack of excitement and ineffective use of combat mechanics, all to make magic unmagical, to make action seem inert.

Perhaps the die was cast when Sawyer vetoed the idea of making anything at all innovative or original; he made sure the game would never be mistaken for a work of art that meant anything to anybody, just ridiculously profitable nostalgia pandering to ageing Baldur's Gate fans. Pillars of Eternity might be anti-casual(or not), but it’s certainly the anti-Divinity series in its refusal of spontaneity, fun and excitement.

>a-at least the writing was good though

"No!"

The writing is dreadful; the narrative was terrible. As I played, I noticed that every time I engaged in dialogue with an NPC the game presented me with a Wiki-page style infodump instead of anything resembling actual human conversation.

I began marking on the back of an envelope every time this was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Sawyer's mind is so governed by obsession with pointless minutiae of the lore that he has no other style of writing.

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Pillars of Eternity by the same David Gaider. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kiddies are playing Obsidian games at 17 or 18, then when they get older they will go on to enjoy Dragon Age II." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you play "Pillars of Eternity" you are, in fact, trained to shill for Bioware.

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