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The story
A post claiming “story-focused RPGs are outdated” sparked a wide-ranging debate on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (Geha) board. The thread started with an assessment of Pokémon’s storytelling, then spiraled into a circular argument over sales figures for “Manosaba” (a game that let everyone stream it in full and still sold well), a debate over whether Japanese RPGs should lean on celebrity voice actors, and the observation that storytelling has stayed fresh over time by adopting new tools and settings. Posters never agreed on whether “sold well” should be judged by units alone or by factoring in development costs, and the thread never reached a conclusion.
What people said
Isn't the real problem just that the story sucks?
No matter how good the story is, if you can't even follow it, of course it's going to feel boring.
If anything, Pokémon Scarlet/Violet put more effort into story than any other game in the series. ZA got a lot of buzz too for how it handled Lysandre, so the story is clearly taking up a bigger share of the conversation than it used to.
Pokémon doesn't need a story. The early games were fun precisely because the "story" was so throwaway it basically didn't exist.
If anything, I want something with a dense, heavy story.
Maybe it could work if it's "Powered by AI."
https://youtu.be/A7I-C_7a4K4
and it's honestly impressive we still haven't run dry.
Story patterns themselves haven't changed all that much, but each new era brings new tools that open up new settings, and that's what makes them feel fresh.
Talking with friends face-to-face → talking on the phone → pager messages → email → LINE messages — as that kind of progress happens, you can build stories that play to each medium's quirks.
That theory got blown apart by Manosaba, though. It's a 100%-story game that allowed full streaming of the entire thing and still sold that well.
> Because of video streaming and stuff, it's struggling along at only 2-3 million copies
Who actually said that? Doesn't look like it was Re: #23, at least. Or did some developer of a 2-3-million-seller actually state that themselves?
It didn't sell…
If you're going to insist that hard, then spell out exactly where you personally draw the line between "sold well" and "didn't sell."
All I see is someone who wants to call it a flop just to justify their own argument.
Sure, keep raising the bar for what counts as "selling well" forever.
There won't be anything left standing by the time you're done.
Look, whether it's Persona 6, Dragon Quest 12, Banshisenkou, whatever — think about whether you'd actually turn a profit on 700,000 copies (and that's released at a third of full price, too).
Huh?
Development costs differ from game to game, so you can't just generalize like that.
Well, back at Re: #25, "sold well" wasn't meant to be anything more than "a lot of units moved." Then Re: #32 brought profitability into it as the yardstick, so the obvious point had to be made that you then need to factor in the difference in development costs.
If you can't generalize about it, then why are you flatly declaring it "sold well"?
Apparently the Persona staff don't even watch anime and don't know voice actors from a hole in the ground — there's a story that they rented anime DVDs and just matched whichever voice fit the character's image.
A developer who doesn't pander like that earns real respect from me.
I seriously hate the kind of promo that's all "Voiced by [big-name seiyuu]!"
As long as the voice fits the character, it doesn't matter who it is.
It's reassuring that no weird sound director got their hands in it.
Outsource that stuff and you get people going "I can pull some strings," and suddenly they're demanding their name in the trailer.
And the anime-otaku devs happily go along with it.
How many years ago was that game, though?
Not happening — he's over at Hakusensha now.
Is he actually doing anything interesting at Hakusensha?
Seinen and shonen magazines are losing steam, and now even the josei magazines are running out of gas.
Seriously don't need that.
If the story's actually good, hyping up the voice actors shouldn't matter either way.
But the fact that the official promo bothers pushing the voice actors at all suggests they're not confident in the content itself.
At best, 700,000 copies is only impressive on the level of "pretty good for an indie game."
Can't you dig a little deeper than that?
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The biggest sticking point in the thread was what standard to use for “sold well.” One camp looked purely at unit sales, while the other factored in development costs and the break-even line relative to price (the game released at a third of full price), and the two sides never saw eye to eye — the argument went in circles without any concrete profit-and-loss figures ever surfacing. The theory that fully allowing video streaming cuts into sales for story-heavy games is a long-standing industry worry tied to the spread of let’s-play culture, and the Manosaba example was raised as a counterargument — though it’s easy for readers to miss that the comparison involves titles on wildly different sales scales. Meanwhile, the practice of deliberately spotlighting famous voice actors in Japanese RPG promotion is an established industry convention where casting announcements themselves function as marketing — and the thread’s criticism is largely frustration with that specific tactic. All of this is 5ch speculation and personal opinion; none of the actual sales figures or production costs for these titles are backed by publicly available data.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “Story-focused RPGs are outdated now.”
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