9 JRPGs that Deserve Anime Adaptations

1 week ago 4

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

JRPGs, being from Japan and all, naturally share a lot of cultural DNA with anime. You see a lot of anime tropes in JRPG stories, and a lot of JRPG mechanics and terminology have, in turn, influenced the direction of certain anime genres. You would think that this would lead to consistent, widespread anime adaptations of JRPGs, but surprisingly, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d expect.

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Only a handful of major JRPGs get the anime treatment, and whether they’re actually any good tends to be a complete toss-up, largely depending on whether the studio is trying to do the game in question justice or just cash in on its image. I think we all want a good adaptation of our favorite JRPGs, but more than that, I think there are plenty of JRPGs that have more than earned at least an attempt at realizing their stories in a different medium.

9 Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale

Perfect for Slice-of-Life

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, is something of an old indie game hero, having been developed by a dojin circle in Japan and released in 2007, then localized for the west by another indie company in 2010. It was the very first independent Japanese game to be sold on Steam, and is still warmly remembered for its hybrid JRPG and business sim game design. It may be a small name compared to some of the other games on this list, but I think it’s more than earned its shot at an anime.

Recettear’s story framework, that being of a young girl in a fantasy town who has to turn her home into a shop to keep it from getting foreclosed on, has a perfect setup for a serialized story. We could go through her learning the ins and outs of store management, getting acquainted with local guilds and adventurers, and gradually paying off her debt installments. It wouldn’t be too dissimilar to a lot of original fantasy anime that air every season.

I think it would also be a nice headline to see such a classic indie game getting another chance in the spotlight. Prolific indie games have been making ins on multimedia endeavors recently, such as the anime adaptation of Needy Streamer Overload, so it wouldn’t be particularly unreasonable.

8 Live A Live

A Multi-Genre Anthology

Live A Live is one of those JRPGs that you’ve either never heard of, or you’re absolutely obsessed with. It was the directorial debut of Takashi Tokita, who would go on to direct slam dunks like Chrono Trigger and Parasite Eve, and its music was a formative component for Undertale and Deltarune creator Toby Fox. This is a game with some serious pedigree, and its unique multi-story format makes it uniquely qualified for a particular kind of anime: an anthology.

In the same vein as something like Star Wars Visions, a Live A Live anime could feature different staff and art styles for each of its eight scenarios, each emphasizing a particular scenario’s tone and strong points. The Near-Future scenario, for example, is an overt tribute to old-school anime, mecha stuff in particular, so that’s already locked and loaded for an adaptation. The Wild West scenario, on the other hand, is much more quiet and subdued, and would probably benefit from a more rugged, dusty art style.

The only potential hiccup I could think of for this hypothetical production is the episode count. Assuming every scenario gets at least two episodes, plus at least one more episode for the final scenario, that’s a total of seventeen episodes, too long for one season, but too short for a split-cour. I guess we could compromise and keep each scenario to just one episode, or maybe make each of them double-length.

7 Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth

A More Nuanced Take on Digimon

Digimon has had an enduring presence in anime for nearly as long as its unofficial rival, Pokémon. However, much like Pokémon, the various Digimon anime series have been mostly based on the franchise in general or the digital pet toys rather than any particular game. It feels like a wasted opportunity, especially when we have the likes of Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth making things interesting.

Rather than the usual small kids in the digital world story, Cyber Sleuth is specifically about young adults traversing cyberspace in the near future with virtual tech, coming into contact with Digimon as semi-known digital creatures. The mystery surrounding EDEN Syndrome and the mysterious Eaters that cause it help to create more immediate stakes and a need for investigation, which would lend well to a serialized series.

Thinking about it, a Cyber Sleuth anime wouldn’t be dissimilar to the most recent Digimon anime, Beatbreak, which has a comparable emphasis on humanity's relationship with tech and an overarching, people-harming mystery. Maybe adapting Cyber Sleuth would be mildly redundant, then, but if that’s off the table, there’s always Time Stranger.

Can’t be Any Worse than the Manga

At the time of writing, Metaphor: ReFantazio has a very, very loose manga adaptation running in V Jump, and it isn’t very good. Major character and story events have been diced up and rearranged to the point of being unrecognizable, though admittedly, there are some fun character-building bits for Will and company. It’s a shame, because Metaphor is one of Atlus’ best original JRPGs in a hot minute, and if anything deserves a proper adaptation, it’s that.

In the same vein as the Persona 4 anime, it is certainly a given that a hypothetical Metaphor anime would need to be cut down a bit from the game. What the Persona 4 anime understood, though, is that you can alter or rearrange story events without sacrificing the timing and impact of key moments. All it takes is a bit of creative, lateral thinking. Whoever worked on that anime, we definitely need to get them back on deck for a Metaphor anime, all to ensure the major moments like the Human battles and Archetype awakenings still hit as hard as they did in the game.

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Speaking of Humans and Archetypes, seeing both rendered in either elaborate 2D or 3D animation beyond static standbys would be a real treat. Though, if we opt for the latter, we have to commit to it and really make that 3D good. We don’t want this to end up like the 2016 Berserk anime.

5 Tales of Berseria

What We Should’ve Gotten Instead of Zestiria

In 2016, an anime adaptation of Tales of Zestiria premiered, Tales of Zestiria the X. Guess what? It wasn’t very good, with a clumsy chop-job of the story and the confusing removal of nearly every bit of levity or character-building. It’s rather telling that the only episodes of that anime I liked were the two dedicated to Tales of Berseria, as part of a setup for Zestiria’s story. This, frankly, should’ve been the whole show.

Putting aside my personal feelings that Berseria has a better story and characters than Zestiria, it’s also a more serious and darker story, which is what The X ended up being anyway. If they wanted to tell a more serious story, they could’ve just adapted Berseria from the start instead of trying to Frankenstein it and Zestiria into something semi-cohesive.

To be honest, it would be nice to have more Tales anime in general. There have been a couple of full series adaptations for games like Tales of Eternia and Tales of the Abyss, but everything else has just been OVAs and one-off specials. I want a full-bodied adaptation of a Tales game, and I want it to be a good one, one that preserves the series’ mixed light and dark tones properly.

4 Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King

The Adventures of Yangus and The Guv

Dragon Quest is a full-on institution in Japan, with many of its established concepts having passed into pop culture via osmosis. All of that hero and Demon Lord stuff you see in fantasy and isekai anime these days? Yeah, Dragon Quest invented that. However, the franchise has dabbled relatively little in the realm of anime, aside from a very loose anime adaptation of Dragon Quest III, a movie based on Dragon Quest V, and the anime based on the standalone Adventure of Dai manga.

If we’re going to make a concentrated effort at turning a Dragon Quest game into a proper anime series, I can think of no better candidate for the job than Dragon Quest VIII. Not only is it one of the most beloved titles in the series, it’s got some of the best, most memorable main characters, not to mention an overarching plot with some hearty twists and turns.

Best of all, if this hypothetical anime were ever to be realized, maybe we could cajole the original English cast to come back on for a fresh dub. It would make me and, I’m certain, many others happy to hear Yangus’ cockney accent calling out to The Guv again. And yes, the protagonist’s name is “The Guv,” and I’ll hear no arguments to the contrary.

3 Chrono Trigger

Complete the Cutscenes

Speaking of the works of Akira Toriyama, if ever there were a JRPG that sincerely deserved an anime adaptation, it would be the legendary Chrono Trigger. This game’s characters and story are the stuff of legends, thanks in no small part to Toriyama’s massive contributions to its creation.

In actuality, there have been some very minor anime-adjacent works made for Chrono Trigger. The PS1 port of the game had full anime cutscenes for a few major plot developments, and a 15-minute OVA about some of the game’s monsters was released in 1996. That’s all nice, sure, but we need a full adaptation with full voice acting. Frankly, it’s a waste to have such a beloved cast, and yet not one of them has ever gotten to speak a line of dialogue.

The only obvious hitch with this concept (and Dragon Quest’s as well) is that Toriyama is no longer with us, so there’s an ever-present risk that a brand-new Chrono Trigger anime might be missing his particular je nais se quois. Still, if Toei can cobble together enough talented artists to make new Dragon Ball stuff happen, a Chrono Trigger anime is hardly impossible.

2 Shin Megami Tensei IV

A Straightforward Story, More or Less

For as much as I love the mainline Shin Megami Tensei games, the prospect of adapting one into an anime feels… uniquely challenging. Shin Megami Tensei III and V, in particular, have very dense, abstract stories, bogged down in philosophical mumbo jumbo. The games can accommodate all of that just fine, but I’m not sure an anime could do the same. If we want an SMT anime, we need a more streamlined game that’s a little less high-concept. Out of all the mainline titles, I think Shin Megami Tensei IV fits the bill.

Shin Megami Tensei IV’s overarching plot of a medieval world built above modern, demon-ravaged Tokyo has a more or less consistent throughline. It’s still got its high concept, order versus chaos themes, but in a much more digestible format better suited for episodic television. We can cut out all the miscellaneous side missions and dungeon-crawling, and focus on the major plot elements of the Mikado Samurai’s journeys and battles without losing the arc of the story.

Shin Megami Tensei IV’s protagonist and major secondary characters, in particular, are also very competent in a fight on their own, so we don’t need to spend too much time on the mechanics of demon fusion and management. Give each of the main quartet a couple of demons, and let them swing their swords around.

1 Final Fantasy IX

The Most Theatrical Story

Despite arguably being the face of the entire JRPG genre, there isn’t much in the way of Final Fantasy anime. Not including standalone films or OVAs, there’s only been one series, Final Fantasy: Unlimited, and as I seem to keep saying in this list, it wasn’t very good. Admittedly, adapting a Final Fantasy game to anime may be a tall order, as the older games are a little bland and the newer games are a bit too high-concept. There is a magic middle to be found, though, and I think it can be found in Final Fantasy IX.

Final Fantasy IX, at least on its surface, has an easily-digestible framing device of a beleaguered princess running away from her corrupt mother with a band of thieves masquerading as a theater troupe. It’s simple enough to be easily adapted into a serialized story, but deep enough to keep you engaged over the usual “four heroes go fight a bad guy” spiel.

Compared to the other games near it in the series, particularly Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and X, Final Fantasy IX is generally a sillier, more lighthearted story, but I think it’s that particular touch of color and whimsy that helps it to really stand out. It’s less like a typical Final Fantasy story, and more like a theatrical production, and that could be what an anime needs.