Hi! I’ve been working on a list of RPGs (mostly japanese or j-influenced somewhat) in which the cast is mostly adults. The list is hosted on backloggd.
Leaving it here both in case it may be useful to anyone, but also in case you spot any missing titles that you believe should be added :) cheers!
P.S: the only reason for not taking western RPGs into consideration is because… well, most of them already feature adult casts. Think series such as Divinity, Shadowrun, Baldur’s Gate, etc. However, those usually play dramatically different when compared to the JRPG-style turn-based combat.
Great list thanks for compiling!
Dragon’s Dogma
Looking through the JRPGs I own, most of them with adult cast are western made. Depending on how far you go with j-influenced some might fit on your list. Zeboyd games is a western studio making JRPG like games with their own twist on them. Cosmic Star Heroine have a completely adult cast. Been years since I played through the Cthulhu games, but I remember the cast being mostly adults in them.
CrossCode from Radical Fish Games stretches what I consider a JRPG to be, but it still comes up in my library when searching for the tag. I think most of the cast were young adults rather than children.
Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark by 6 Eyes Studio is pretty much a Final Fantasy Tactics.
Parasite Eve and Persona 2: EP were always a bit striking to me in this regard especially because they are in modern-day settings. Also, they both don’t have a young child joining the party at any point, which is a thing in a lot of the games in this list.
I enjoyed The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, in large part because most of the party members are adults. Exceptions are the two protagonists, a princess (whose station more or less demands she act above her age), and a pre-teen girl whose main character trait is being an engineering assistant to an inventor in a factory town.
Meanwhile, the fun bits of the adult party members included seeing them get drunk at inopportune times, attempt to impart their adult wisdom on the two leads, hit on random strangers or each other, and occasionally be even more childish than the kids they’re accompanying. It felt like a good group.
I played some of the games that came afterward, starting with the Crossbell games and continuing with Trails of Cold Steel, and a significant reason I stopped was that the WHOLE cast was school-age kids, to the point that it really started feeling like modern anime, and not in a good way.
Thank you! Indeed, Trails in the Sky has been on my backlog for a while and for good reason, from what I hear. I remember looking at screenshots for the subsequent series like Trails of Cold Steel and generally it was a turnoff starting from the art/design direction.
In this regard, I think that Persona 5’s success is both a blessing and a curse: blessing, because it showed how JRPGs don’t have to be action oriented to be beautiful; curse because Atlus surely realized, already back with Persona 4, that the high school setting somehow seemed successful, thus somehow suggesting to the industry that it is a good model to follow.
Oh, I just looked at a wiki for the upcoming game (already out in JP) Trails Through Daybreak and it seems like the cast is at least balanced between teenagers and adults! I’m more than okay with this if written nicely and without creepy/disturbing tropes.
I haven’t followed that one so much; seeing a blue-haired male lead using a sword, and no sign they were moving away from dedicated “relationship events”, overall didn’t seem like the direction I wanted. I’m not quite sure the age of characters was my only issue with the series.
