Did Game Rentals Stifle JRPGs in the West? A Theory

I’ve had a theory about the history of JRPGs that’s been brewing in my head for a while, and after mentioning it once on Bluesky, I figured it’s as good of a time as any to formally write this up. Bear in mind this is just headcannon made by someone who wasn’t around when much of this was happening, and not some definitive historical article. Either way, I’d love to hear if someone who was around in the video games space around then could shed some light on this.

If you know anything about the history of JRPGs in the west, you’ve probably heard that Final Fantasy VII was the monumental release that broke the genre out of a niche and into the mainstream gaming audience. You’ve also probably heard it attributed to the success of the PS1 and Sony’s marketing of the game as a blockbuster release. I’m not particularly inclined nor have any good reason to dispute this claim, but I wonder if there’s an overlooked feature of 80s and 90s gaming culture and technology that also played a hand: namely, the popularity of game rentals and the medium used to save the player’s progress.

Throughout the 80s and 90s cartridge games were expensive¹, and thus many players in North America² would choose to rent games instead of buying them outright. Game rentals gave players the opportunity to enjoy a more diverse set of titles than they would otherwise have access to, but limiting the time they could spend with any one particular game. While they could always rent the same game again later, there was no guarantee they could continue from where they left off, given that many games lacked save data, and the few that did would save directly to the cartridge which would more than likely be overwritten by the next player. You could probably write a master’s thesis on the other effects that game rental had on the perception of games in the west³, but what’s important to this discussion is the effect on JRPGs. For a genre that would push the limits of cinematic storytelling on consoles, let alone a game’s length, JRPGs were uniquely ill-suited to rentals. If you rented a JRPG on a whim without prior experience with the genre and have a decent romp through the first quarter or so of the game before returning it, only to find that your previous file has been deleted and must begin from scratch, you wouldn’t feel particularly compelled to finish the game without your own (prohibitively expensive⁴) copy.

While these factors may have curtailed the popularity of JRPGs in the west, they didn’t necessarily apply in Japan, where game rental was illegal. The popularity of Dragon Quest (riding on the back of Akira Toriyama’s artwork in his prime) helped create the market for the genre as a whole to dominate sales, in spite of how much cartridges cost⁵.

By the mid-90s, game consoles would start to transition away from solid-state cartridges and instead use compact discs as the medium of choice for delivering games. One often overlooked byproduct of this transition is the change in how save data would be stored. Cartridge games would save progress directly to the cartridge itself (sometimes with SRAM, sometimes with a more modern flash-based approach, etc.), while disc-games would need to pass the burden of saving onto the player themselves, either saving directly to the console’s limited pool of save data, or (as with the PlayStation’s approach) using interchangeable memory cards. Circling back to Final Fantasy VII, releasing the game on disc played large a part in it becoming the breakout hit JRPG in the West, not only because of the gigantic canvas that it afforded the game’s developers, but because the game was both cheaper to manufacture (and therefore sell) and no longer directly tied save data to a specific copy of the game. Put yourself in the shoes of the same hypothetical player from the previous paragraph: You’ve just heard about Final Fantasy VII and have never played a JRPG before. You rent the game from your local store and enjoy it over the course of the weekend, but then need to return it. However, the next time you rent the game (or buy a copy for yourself⁶), you can simply load the save file from your memory card and continue right from where you left off, making it much more likely that you’ll be able to see the game all the way through.

To be clear, none of this is an indictment about the quality of JRPGs before or after the release of Final Fantasy VII, just an observation of a few overlapping trends with the games industry and the technologies used by consoles at the time. It’s all ultimately just a bit of conjecture I’ve had in my mind for a while, and I’d be curious to hear if someone who grew up with JRPGs at the time might have something interesting to add.