It’s important to say from the jump what Fight. Magic. Items is not. It’s not The JRPG Book. It’s not trying to be a comprehensive overview of the history of JRPGs. It’s not even really a general overview of the global history of the JRPG. Instead, it provides a sort of overview of the evolution of the genre, with a general focus on three companies – Square, Enix, and Sega – and a particular focus on the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Phantasy Star series, as viewed through the author’s experiences with the genre.
What this means, as a reader, is if you’re a fan of the series that have come to the forefront in the West beyond Final Fantasy, like the Trails series or Persona, you’re going to be frustrated. Nihon Falcom barely appears in this book. The Megami Tensei series gets some brief mention at the beginning, and is left behind until we get some brief mentions once we get to the PS2. Star Ocean and Tales are mentioned, but not how those games are interrelated, in terms of their development history, the same way that Vulcans and Romulans are related.
Instead, we get some pretty solid profiles and career retrospectives of the people who made Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Phantasy Star, and to a lesser degree, Kingdom Hearts and Xenogears. We also get some fairly in-depth discussions of those 3 series, how they changed over time, and the influences that went into their design. We even get some discussion of how the fandom has evolved over time in the US.
It still makes for a really good story, told well, but it’s one with holes. While Phantasy Star was the top JRPG franchise on the Genesis, Falcom (for example) has always been present in English, across multiple platforms, multiple series, and multiple publishers. The general absence made me kinda wish the arc of the book has been, for each span of time, rather than focusing on Square and Enix, it had been “Here’s Square, here’s Enix, (sotto voce while gesturing to the beaded curtain) and here’s the stuff for the real Sickos.”
All of that said, it bears repeating that this book isn’t bad. Quite the opposite – it’s really good and you should read it. It’s even got an audiobook. It’s that this really makes it clear that there’s room for more than this and The JRPG Book, the same way that there’s room for more than Shannon Appelcline’s Designers and Dragons (and This Is Free Trader Beowulf) and myriad biographies and profiles of Gary Gygax and Dungeons & Dragons in histories of tabletop RPGs. I’m not in the best position to do this scholarship myself, but I hope someone is and can write those additional books.
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