Although I’m a big fan of their western equivalents, Japanese Role-Playing Games (JRPGs) have always seemed utterly impenetrable to me. My attempts to break into the genre are invariably met with poorly translated Japanese memes, repetitive battles, translucent character design, and many other irksome traits that die-hard fans seem to revel in.

There is a section on my games shelf that I have dubbed the ‘JRPG graveyard’. That’s where Final Fantasy III, Phantasy Stars I and IV, Earthbound and Eternal Sonata are interred, all unfinished, abandoned after ten or so hours of play each.

I have clocked up hundreds of hours in Ivalice thanks to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and have helped thousands of rappies meet their doom in Phantasy Star Online, though sticklers amongst you will discount them as JRPGs. They are certainly very Japanese, and you spend all game playing a role. However, for some arbitrary reason (perhaps because they are fun) they do not fit snuggly into the JRPG stable.

I tried Earthbound on a recommendation from a friend. “This is a bit different,” he suggested. Different, it is not. Basically, it’s a Dragon Quest clone re-branded for Nick Jr. My friend assures me that, “there are some really clever parodies of the big hitters,” but asking me to enjoy Earthbound is a bit like asking someone who doesn’t get on with shooters to bask in the hilarity and clever pastiche of Parodius – it’s never going to work. Just as Parodius is a shooter as much as it is a shooter parody, Earthbound is just as much a JRPG as a JRPG parody.

Never one to write off a whole genre, I get a niggly feeling every time someone discusses how much of a kick they get out of Final Fantasy this, or Shining Force that. I feel that I’ve missed out. For my next (and, if unsuccessful, almost certainly last) attempt at breaking into the world of the JRPG, I needed the next game to be a cracker, something special.

While trawling through countless on-line lists and YouTube compilation videos, one name kept cropping up, almost invariably near the top of said lists: Chrono Trigger. I thought I would give the DS version a try; it received glowing reviews and the extra accessibility would be conducive to me completing it.

Chrono Trigger‘s first half-an-hour or so almost put the nail in the JRPG coffin. The game’s introduction amounts to a series of boring and badly implemented mini games decorated by poorly written attempts at whimsy that revolve around the local town’s Millennial fayre. You place bets on foot races, take part in drinking competitions and duff up a robot, all in the name of three zeros. During this tedium, you will meet the two main companions that will join you on your sojourn through time. Both are spectacularly ham-fisted stereotypes, though each is of a different nature. The first you bump into (literally, she crashes into you in the first of many ‘hilarious’ ditzy moments) is Marle, the air-head blonde. The second is Lucca, the speccy nerd who invents the machine that accidently zaps Marle into the past, kick-starting your time-travelling caper.

Luckily, some of the other characters you meet along the way are very endearing (I won’t go into detail for fear of spoilers), thanks to some excellent sprite design and more than a dab of imagination from the player. This combined with the screw-ball time-travelling story make Chrono Trigger very compelling indeed. The drive to see what happens next kept me going even through the game’s more repetitive sections. This is where Chrono Trigger succeeds where other JRPGs have failed (for me, at least): I play for the sake of progress. This would usually be the mark of a bad game, to want to keep playing just to get through the damned thing, but when story is so central to the game’s appeal, perhaps it is justified.

I am beginning to think of JRPGs as adventure games more than RPGs. This helps me to cope with their repetitive gameplay, pushing me on to experience the whole story, enjoy the game as just that – a story. The problem is that the stalwarts of the genre can not possibly hold a candle to the brilliance of the best adventure games on those terms (I’m thinking Broken Sword, Monkey Island, Beneath A Steel Sky). Maybe I just need to find more JRPGs with strong enough plot-lines and good enough translations to hold my interest. Maybe I need to stop playing JRPGs.