Visual culture has been influenced by Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPGs) for 40 years; the design community is now beginning to recognize their impact. JRPGs have created a graphic language that has been integrated into graphic design, web design and architectural visualization via such things as color, positioning and the user interface.
The pixel art era established a set of foundational principles that are still relevant today. The artists who created these games worked under extreme technical constraints (16-color limitations, small sprite sheets, limited animation frames); they learned to communicate character, emotion and story using a minimal amount of form and a large amount of meaning from each pixel. Each color selected served multiple purposes at once.
Once JRPGs transitioned to 3D graphics, they faced new challenges and developed new innovations. The hybrid visual style of anime-like character design with photorealistic environments, seen in games like Final Fantasy X or Kingdom Hearts, created a unique contrast between the stylized and realistic realms. This method of juxtaposing different types of visual styles has become the basis for illustration, advertising, motion graphics and fashion photography.
Menu design within JRPGs also represents an creative field of design. The JRPG genre introduced intricate information hierarchies that maintain their basic structures when presenting vast amounts of data—character statistics, equipment comparison, skill trees, party set-ups, inventory management, crafting systems etc. Today’s dashboard designers and app developers use principles established by JRPG interface designers decades ago, often without realizing the source of those conventions.
Kingbet89 and other digital entertainment platforms exemplify how visual principles from gaming have migrated to digital design in a wider perspective. The use of progression indicators, reward animations, and layering of information—all of these things trace their heritage to the interface patterns that designers of JRPGs developed through years of trial and error and user testing via their games.
Color theory used in JRPGs is founded upon a logic that designers and students of design would benefit greatly from studying. Elemental magic systems use colors to code and categorize spells—red for fire, blue for water, green for wind—creating immediate readability, regardless of what language the player speaks. Status effects communicate with color changes in ways that people instantly understand. The color palettes chosen for the visual design of an environment establish the mood of that environment and allow the player to figure out how to feel, without having to read a single word of dialogue or any explanation.
The environmental design philosophy found within JRPGs have shaped the way designers think about space and atmosphere in digital forms. JRPGs are designed to tell stories through architectural design, landscaping, lighting and spatial relationships. When you encounter a corrupted forest, there’s no need for a text box to indicate that something is wrong; the visual language of poiting twisted trees, using desaturated colors and providing unsettling ambient design communicate the story directly to you through visual representation.
Character design in JRPGs has established itself as a respected form of fine art—this has brought established conventions, masters and evolution. Designers such as Tetsuya Nomura, Akihiko Yoshida and Shigenori Soejima have created visual vocabularies that identify distinct personality types, backgrounds and narrative development within their designs via the silhouette of the character, the colors used, and the level of detail given in costume designs. The influence of such designers continues to manifest itself beyond the industry, influencing trends in fashion, cosplay culture and character design across animation and film.
Typography within JRPGs should be included in discussions around design methodology and demonstrates a very strong understanding of how to maximize readability in very difficult situations. In designing dialogue boxes, designers at JRPGs have had to ensure that text will be readable on whatever background color presented; at every screen size that exists; and under time constraints while in combat. The solutions devised for these issues anticipated challenges that web designers wouldn’t face for another decade.
As the scene of digital design continues to transform, the contributions made by former game artists to adjacent industries will bring with them a design sense developed from one of the most visually demanding environments found in any artistic medium. The visual language of JRPGs no longer exists only within games; these elements have become an integral part of a greater design conversation. Therefore, to neglect the contribution of JRPGs is to ignore some of the greatest examples of creative visual problem solving developed over the last four decades.
JRPGs’ way of thinking about shape and atmosphere in digital contexts has changed the way designers view space and atmosphere design. JRPG worlds are developed in a way that allows the world to tell a story through its use of architecture, plants, lighting, and used space. A ruined forest does not require a textual warning that something is wrong; the broken trees, drained colors, and terrible planetary design indicate/illustrate the story without any other vocal aid.
JRPG character design has now matured to become a respected art form with conventions, masters, and evolutionary paths of development. Designers such as Tetsuya Nomura, Akihiko Yoshida, and Shigenori Soejima, all have individual visual language that indicate character characteristics, backgrounds, and story lines by the use of shape or outline, color choices, and degree of detail associated with clothes or costumes. Their effect or influence goes beyond the realm of video games and into the realms of fashion and clothing, cosplay culture, and other types of character design associated with animation and film.
Typography is a visual element often not considered in designer conversations about game development, but JRPGs show a sophisticated understanding of how to read text in difficult visual conditions. The developer of JRPG text boxes is required to ensure that the written text is readable over different background colors, textures, and display sizes. Therefore, the solutions JRPG developers produced to meet these challenges predate the problems encountered by web developers due to establishing standards of different contrasting elements, spacing elements, and presentation of a hierarchy of elements in present-day digital media through JRPG texts.
The principles of animation established for sprite-based JRPGs affect the practice of motion design in ways that most motion designer do not consciously acknowledge. The economical use of sprite movement to show emotion through 16-pixel sprites, such as: a head that tilts slightly downwards to show sadness, or the character has an idle bouncing animation to represent the character being excited, translate directly into the microinteractions of present-day user experience design.
Sprite-based JRPGs are the foundation for today’s digital animation motion design principles. The economy of motion used to express emotion using a small character sprite has translated into modern-day microinteraction design. Small bounces for excitement and slow fades for sadness were originally created for use in video games, but they are now used in many digital products and web animations.
