Yes. It’s quite seamless. You can even plug your Steam Deck into your TV and play with a game pad! It’s nice and versatile. It’s not quite as Plug and play as the Switch but if you’re comfortable with setting up a PC, it’s just as easy.
Yup!
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I’m not really sure what I would classify as a short JRPG. I guess people consider Chrono Trigger a short JRPG, since one play through is only about 20-25 hours. However, playing through all endings will take a bit longer. But I’ll go with Chrono Trigger.
For long it’s probably between FFXIII and Xenoblade Chronicles for me. FFXIII because it’s conceivably my favourite JRPG after Chrono Trigger, and completionist is over 100 hours. Xenoblade Chronicles if we are talking a longer game, given it can take 150 hours for a completionist run.
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I’d classify the first Golden Sun and Paper Mario as shorter JRPGs. Maybe throw Mother 3 in there with them. Although, like with any game, there’s room in there to spend more time achieving 100% completion.
The longest I’ve spent with any JRPG in a single playthrough is definitely Xenoblade Chronicles 2. That game took me more than 80 hours to finish.
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I think my favorite “short” jrpg is Final Fantasy IV. You can plow through the main story in about 25ish hours. If you want to go and do a lot of side stuff, it might add 10 hours to it.
My favorite long JRPG is probably Persona 4 Golden. It has some issues for sure, but the gameplay loop is just amazing for me. I imagine a speed run of Persona 4 or 5 is like 80 hours.
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I feel similarly. I often prefer playing 2D pixel art based games handheld. I would say handheld is where I play most 2D platforms and the like for certain.
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I like playing JRPGs handheld because that’s a long time to monopolize the living room! 
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What about when playing other RPGs? Mass Effect can be over 60 hours if you I want in all the side content and exploration. Do you feel the same way?
I know exactly how you feel, but then I play something like Dragon Age: Inquisition for 120hrs or recent Assassin’s Creed Games for 150hrs, and I can’t imaging enjoying them handheld.
I feel very arbitrary about the games I like handheld to a degree. 2D platformers make sense, but then I liked playing Breath of the Wild the second time in handheld mode quite a bit. Yet I don’t know if I’d like that for other games. Xenoblade Chronicles was very enjoyable in both handheld and docked mode but a part of me feels like docked mode was ultimately essential to my enjoyment because the small screen didn’t do that game justice, even if it was still pretty. Handheld mode just let me continue my obsession with the game on the go. But a game like Hollow Knight feels married to the handheld screen, I find no enjoyment in playing on my TV. I want it in my hands, and I don’t know if there’s a rational explanation.
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It depends!
When my wife and I moved to our current place, I decided not to carry over the sort of “mini living room” I’d set up in my home office… it always felt weird because the consoles and stuff were divided between my office and the living room, I would often move consoles back and forth. I wanted to invest in one great entertainment area instead of two okay ones.
I’m really happy with that decision, but it did mean that, for console gaming, I have to consider whether or not someone else would like to use the TV.
For something like Mass Effect, I tended to play its main story beats in the living room, but I’d often stream the side content to my PC (can’t remember if I had the Steam Deck already when I was playing that). Same with the FF7 Remake: It felt high enough in production and cinematic enough that I wanted to make sure I saw the main beats in all their glory, but not everything in the game necessarily meets that same standard of presentation, so it felt all right streaming those bits.
Then there are certain retro RPGs that I’d just rather play on actual hardware. I own a physical copy of Grandia II, I own a Dreamcast, it seems a shame not to play the real thing on the real console, y’know?
But otherwise, I tend to find RPGs just feel a bit cozier on a handheld, and far less intimidating to start when I know I can just put the console to sleep and pick it up again later. I have so many good memories of just disappearing into my Game Boy Color or my DS or my Switch with an RPG that I can just fall into, y’know?
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My experience with handheld sis a bit different because I had a GameBoy, then GameBoy Color, then GBA, and then skipped directly to the Vita. So for the vast majority of my life the games I played on handheld were platformers. I’d say at least eighty percent of the time I was playing some sort of 2D platformer or indie. Even when I got my Vita, and I played a healthy amount of RPGs, including older PS era games, I still played far more platformers or short indie games. So there’s a part of my brain that developed a mental association between handheld and platformer. As a result I gravitate toward playing most RPGs on console attached to my TV unless it’s an old 2D RPG like Chrono Trigger, FFVI, or something like FF Tactics. other than Persona 4 Golden, which was only on Vita at the time, I think Xenoblade Chronicles is the only JRPG that I’ve played on a handheld, and I still docked it a lot of my play-through.
I will stream games from my co sole to another device if I want to play away from the TV but there’s something in me that gravitates toward playing non 2D games on my TV and 2D games on handheld.
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That makes sense! The first RPGs I remember actually enjoying were Pokémon Blue and Biomotor Unitron, so maybe there’s some handheld bias there for me.
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Well this first poll has been up 3 days or so, has 13 votes, and is almost split 50/50! Interesting, though not too surprising. (I’ll leave it open a bit longer.)
For me, I think I was like 95/5 console/handheld, mostly b/c the scourge of joy-con drift all but killed any chance of handheld enjoyment. Then I discovered the Hori Split Pad Pro! Saved! Now with those plus my new OLED screen, I’m more like, uh, 66/33.
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@BMO
I’ve never played FFXIII but have heard it was widely disliked for its linearity. So I’m intrigued that it’s maybe your favorite long JRPG after Chrono!
I generally only make time for main quest+some sides; never a completionist.
And though my first ever JRPG was FFVI on SNES circa 1994, I have never played the beloved Chrono Trigger (it’s on my backlog), which I thought was closer to 40 hours, but “short” either way.
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@lingsdook
Ohh, I did play Golden Sun: The Lost Age for a bit on Gameboy Advance SP, but DNF. Despite it being “short.”
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@peter
Nice. I only scratched the surface of FFIV (it was on mobile).
Persona…I’ve heard so much good about this franchise…yet have never played one!
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Pretty much all my same sentiments too. Big, lush, photo-real, open-world games look tailor made for the big screen, while simple pixel stuff is great handheld. To date, one of the best Switch games I’ve played handheld is Link’s Awakening.
And I get it on long vs short JRPGs. I’ve committed to Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in the near future and expect to sink like 120 hours into it. It’s said to be a great JRPG, but instead I could enjoy 3 good “short” 40-hr JRPGs. Trade-offs.
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Yep, that pretty much matches my exp. too. I “had” to play XC over Christmas break at my in-laws on hand-held; it was only option. And it wasn’t bad, I enjoyed it more than I expected. Yet back home on the big screen is better.
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All,
What makes a JRPG a JRPG?
You can only choose up to five (5) options! Pick the ones that most clearly define/describe a JRPG to you. The poll will be open for one week.
There’s no right/wrong answer here; it’s a conversation starter. Have fun! 
What makes a JRPG a JRPG?
- Made in Japan.
- Overworld/traversable world map.
- Random encounters.
- Grinding. Lots of grinding.
- Story heavy.
- Anime cut-scenes.
- Menu-based battles.
- Items. Lots of items. Inventory management.
- Magics!
- EXP/AP/SP/TP/BP and all the points. Stats galore.
- Turn-based combat.
- Summons.
- Monsters/Creatures/Supernaturals
- Character progression
- Multiple playable characters in a party.
- Dungeons.
- Towns.
- NPCs that talk too much yet say little.
- Medieval setting.
- Sci-Fi setting.
0 voters
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I find that there should have been “soundtrack/Music plays a huge role” too. It adds to the cut scenes/story heavy/in the feels/character tropes and some JRPGs have the best music I have ever heard in a video game and the music adds a lot to this genre, more than in most others genres. Imagine a JRPG with a relly bad soundtrack … nah, impossible. 
Also I choose “Anime Cutscenes” more in the sense of how important they are and the often excessive use of cutscenes just to show a face impression/feelings/cool one liner and not much more, but they don’t have to be anime style.
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I have never heard of this before! The screenshot on the Switch store page of the Neo Geo game looks just slightly like Pokemon I started to ask you how you even had this game, but then I just started looking through the game list of the Neo Geo Pocket Color and saw Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure. I think that may be the answer right there.
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I was head over heels for the Dreamcast, and the Neo Geo Pocket Color was heavily marketed as the system’s portable companion at the time. It helped that it was also not very expensive!
At the time, the core concept of Biomotor Unitron… dungeon-crawling for resources to upgrade and improve a robot and “evolving” certain parts through combinations… seemed really cool. These days it’s difficult to return to because the game is so wordy, but at the time my brother and I loved it.
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