by Saskia Zhang
For over a hundred years now, cinema has been the dominant art form that tells stories. This is because cinema has innovated technically, artistically pushed boundaries, and has been able to create an experience that deeply immerses the audience into the story and engages their emotions. However, there is now an actual threat to cinema’s dominance as the main art form to tell stories. The threat comes from a remarkable source – JRPG (Japanese Role Play Games).
The difference between these two forms is not financial – Hollywood makes much more money than the JRPG video game industry. Instead, the threat posed to cinema comes in the form of artistry and the overall experience that the audience has while consuming these two types of media. JRPG video games have found ways to tell stories from a structure that cinema cannot match, and the audience is responding to those methods with much more energy than the film industry can ignore.
The primary reason for this challenge is that JRPG video games consist of much more time spent telling the stories. The average length of a feature film is between two to three hours. A typical JRPG MA game typically lasts between sixty to one hundred and twenty hours playtime. This is not to say that a JRPG game is padded — this is the way JRPG games are built — the game uses forty hours of gameplay to develop the character’s personalities, build strong emotional connections to the characters, and establish character growth and development. In addition, the emotional impact of an event occurring after developing a character, based on forty hours spent developing that character, will likely have a much larger emotional impact than a film that develops a character for two to three hours.
The mathematical advantage in creating strong emotional connections with a character are very simple — the amount of time the audience has with a character dictates how deeply the audience will connect to a character. When a character dies in a film, it is merely a plot point; when a character dies in a JRPG after investing fifty hours of gameplay with that character, the audience actually feels the loss.
Another major difference between films and JRPG video games is the level of agency that the audience has while experiencing each medium. In the film medium, the audience only watches a story unfold based upon the decisions of the filmmaker(s). In JRPG video games, the audience has agency to participate in the decisions made by the protagonist(s). The way you choose to interact with the world around you, such as forming friendships and completing quests, affects the narrative that is created based on your choices. Because of the influence you have on shaping the development of your characters through their creation and evolution, each time they reach a key moment, there is an emotional response in you at a much higher level than if you were simply an observer.
Game developers have recognised this impact through various engagement techniques that originate from Role-Playing Games (RPGs). In addition, it has become apparent to them that active participation creates a greater emotional connection than passive forms of media or entertainment. This same lesson applies to all forms of entertainment — when people have the power to control their own experiences and to make choices, they are emotionally invested at a much deeper level.
When looking at the character development within Persona 5 Royal, one can see how the developers developed relationships with the in-game characters via a social simulation system that occurred during over 100 hours of game play. The result of this system was that the player had developed stronger connections to these fictional characters than they had with most of the people in the actual world. Not only do the emotional connections to these characters exceed those of movies, but there is also a higher degree of emotional investment for a longer period of time due to the active nature of this form of entertainment.
Lastly, musical composition adds a further dimension that most movie scores cannot maintain throughout the length of a film. Music composed for Japanese RPGs is constructed with an extraordinary level of depth and precision and serves as an integral component of the overall experience as opposed to being simply an accompaniment to the action of the game. The evolution of a 40-hour soundtrack creates an enduring emotional connection that even the best movie scores, with a max time of 2 hours, will not have with the same cumulative impact. Western game developers recognise this change. Studios such as BioWare and CD Projekt Red have used JRPGs’ methods of storytelling – social link systems, companion loyalty systems, and branching narratives based on player choices – into their own games. The direction of this influence is unidirectional, going from JRPGs to all other narrative forms of entertainment that are seeking to have a deeper level of audience engagement.
The Kingbet89 platform demonstrates how gaming-oriented engagement based design principles are impacting the way that people view all forms of entertainment. Audiences that have experienced a form of interactive storytelling are finding that passive experiences are not as fulfilling/satisfying as they once were. As such, the bar has been raised for evoking emotional engagement from experiences provided to them by video games.
This change does not signify that film is dying, nor does it take away from the value of cinema. Film is no longer the sole leader in the hierarchy of narrative arts. JRPGs are now standing next to cinema on the rightful place in the hierarchy, and in certain areas of emotional depth and audience investment, above cinema. Those studio/network/critic/audience members that acknowledge this change will be in a better position to appreciate the entire array of narrative arts being created in 2026.
Film critics that have not played a JRPG have failed to be a part of the current conversation about narrative arts in the modern era. The most faceted and well-rounded storytelling currently being made is not only being done on the silver screen or through streaming platforms. A large quantity of this storytelling arrives on your game console and will take you 60 hours to complete, but will reward your time as an experience that can last for many years after you have completed it.
The entertainment industry has many players, including those who have the Kingbet89 gaming portal, and whose validation reinforces the original insight JRPGs had years ago, that emotional engagement is more valuable than the production cost. A well-designed interactive experience can emotionally impact the audience more than a $100 million film simply because the audience participates. Therefore, the 21st Century discussion about narrative arts cannot be completed if one does not acknowledge the contributions of video games.
Interactive storytelling should be preserved, and the film archive community has dealt with these issues for many years. Video games are created with hardware, so as time goes on and the hardware becomes out of date and/or digital game stores go out of business, the original versions of these games will gradually become unavailable. JRPGs that were considered true works of art at their time of release, now face the threat of being impossible to access. As a result, a growing push towards preserving original games via re-releasing, “remastering,” and archiving has surfaced, as more and more people agree that interactive narrative forms should receive the same amount of cultural protection and support from society as cinema and novels do.
