JRPGs Are My Therapist: A Mixed-Race Artist’s 2019 Chronicle

By William Quant

Trigger Warning: Race

Allow me to take you down a very personal path, involving not only fantasy worlds and nerdy lifetime achievements, but also mental health and race relations in the USA.

Coming of age in the 90s and 2000s was a crazy time, especially once someone plopped your impressionable putty of a brain in front Mario Kart 64 and you became hooked onto the video game phenomenon. The video game environment was also sort of coming-of-age, maturing into what would become a billion dollar industry. But at the time, it was fumbling around and crashing into crazy idea after crazy idea to see what worked.

This gave us a zany, untamed, Wild West-style era of gaming. And while the internet has become an integral, nay, vital part of video games and gaming culture, at that time, it was something incredibly untested that only a few people had real access to. In addition, things like data-mining and mods were years away from being commonplace with the skills to do them being nearly nonexistent. That lack of tools to find verifiable information gave rise to video game urban legends that no one could really test, confirm, or deny, giving so many games a sort of mythological feel to them. But one category of games had a feel above all the others; an ethereal siren of an acronym that pulled as many unsuspecting victims into the wormhole as it did terrify others into never setting foot in the genre:

J. R. P. G. The Japanese role-playing game.

Four letters that, even now, make even the most hot-blooded gamer curdle. An intimidating genre, it always seemed to me as much a mistake to start a JRPG as it did to never even play one. They are games with a reputation for being undisputedly beautiful and charming, but horrifically difficult to master, often complete with mechanics that betray expectations and wonderful, vibrant characters who are accompanied by overwhelmingly emotional stories. I finally got the gumption to commit myself to that siren's call over the past year. Unfortunately for me, this past year has also been the single most crippling year in terms of my mental health. And yet, there hasn't been anything that has helped me through it more than those four unforgiving and unbelievably rewarding letters.

To begin the year, I decided to take Octopath Traveler for a spin. It is perhaps one of the most charming games I’ve ever played in terms of art style. Now, I am no stranger to JRPGs and how they function, but it wasn’t until I played Octopath that I realized how cathartic and zen JRPG grinding is. Believe me, I needed it. As I was getting into the finishing stages of my first playthrough, I actually received word from a small comics publisher that they wanted to publish one of my comics for their anthology. I don’t write about this often, but for virtually my entire life I’ve been making comics and one finally went somewhere. But just because I’d been working towards that my entire existence doesn’t mean I thought I deserved it.

Whether it was another symptom of depression or an ailment on its own, a bout of “imposter syndrome” really hit me with the publishing confirmation. My brain didn’t let me be happy about any of it. To add insult to artistic injury, once I started working on my short comic, I saw some of the other artists’ works - their rough sketches were better than anything I’d ever drawn. Suffice to say, my anxiety - artistic anxiety? - shot to levels it had never been before. My brain didn’t think I deserved the opportunity, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and everyone around me was confirming all these horrible thoughts. Despite my publishers FaceTiming me from Amsterdam and giving me a pep talk and letting me know that my simple, cartoonish style was something they admired and what they wanted to publish, my nerves were absolutely devouring me. Sure, Octopath’s classic-style JRPG monster hunting helped calm those nerves every now and then, but it was what the game was about that really helped me settle into myself.

For those unaware, Octopath Traveler, somewhat implied by the name, is a game where eight different characters travel around a fantasy world and try to settle their own arcs with help from the others. Every one of them is the main character of their own quest, regardless of who you decide to start with and each of them has their own job or role, like Scholar or Cleric. The comic I was making was not a long, solo piece - it was part of an anthology, with every single artist and writer contributing being the main characters of their own career. Everyone had something different to offer; every story and art style was a different flavor. And maybe I was the Merchant or Apothecary, someone who was there for plucky comic relief, but dammit, someone wanted me on their team to help them see a journey through. I just had to maybe focus on my contributions to shush my nerves.

As the early cold gave way to spring, I found myself looking for a game that would help inspire me artistically as I worked towards this extremely nerdy lifelong goal. Should I re-play Spider-Man? Maybe the Batman: Arkham games? The answer would just kind of fall into my lap one day out of happenstance - Persona 5. I had heard of the franchise, but knew virtually nothing of the game until it spiked in popularity again after the game’s protagonist, Joker, was revealed as the first Super Smash Brothers Ultimate DLC fighter. I found a copy on super-duper sale somewhere, popped it in just to install it and play it the next day, and wound up not going to bed until 3 AM. Never had I fallen in love with a game faster.

The music, the story, the art, the freaking anime ice skating cityscape opening - all of it was exactly what I needed to get through making my first professional comic. A stylish story of a group of young people conquering their personal demons to help “take the hearts” of corrupt individuals and make the world a better place - it was easy to see how all of this helped drive me. If nothing else, it allowed me to see at least some validation. When you work on art stuff long enough, it just starts to feel like work and you kind of get numb to the feeling of doing it. But playing this game alongside my craft really helped me look up and truly enjoy the experience of actually getting published, to remember that what we do as creators can be inspiring and magical. I think I was the first person to turn in all their finished pages to the publishers! Maybe, just maybe, I was where I needed to be.

Then, all that newfound confidence crashed into the immovable wall that is my skin color.

Let me explain. As the spring weather faded into summer heat, I was rejuvenated enough to maybe tackle a game I’d always heard was one of the greatest JRPGs of all time - Chrono Trigger. I had nabbed a copy of the DS port as a birthday present for myself that past December. An unbelievably charming story with art and characters made by the Dragon Ball anime god Akira Toriyama himself, I was blown away by the time-traveling puzzle arcs and diverse cast. Not long into my playthrough, however, I was hit with an event I think everyone kind of wishes they had a small time machine for - a car accident. It was a small fender bender; a no-big-deal rear end. That said, I was hit from behind hard enough that I needed to repair the entire trunk of my car. Such an incredibly small event in the grand scale of things sent me spiraling into the worst depression I’ve ever been in. Probably deserves a little elaboration about who I am as an individual.

So a little about me - I’m mixed-race and I grew up in the American South. You know, the same region that rebelled over the idea that black and brown people were people. Mix that with growing up in an ethnic household, it's not hard to see how I am at constant odds with my racial and cultural identities. Despite moving out of the South, bigotry never really seems to go away - this country was built on it. For most of the spring, I was actually in line for a promotion at one of my jobs at a games and collectables store and there was an opening at another location I could have easily slipped into. My boss, who was wonderfully educated and in-tune with world politics, took the time to ask if the area with the opening would be safe for someone who was non-white. That’s not something I had ever really thought about, but when you’re a minority, you never really know when it's going to come up and she knew the area much better than I did. Once confirmed it was not, in fact, a safe place for me, she refused to send me. I can’t thank her enough for that.

Back to my lovely little rear-ending - I’m sure that sidequest didn’t seem that relevant, but it undisputedly weighed heavily on my mind. Nothing makes you more viscerally aware of everything around you than being reminded that your uncontrollable outside appearance was directly affecting your life, even after you thought you’d gotten away from ingrained bigotry. My entire brain went into a terrified spin when it turned out the people who had rear ended me were from the very not-safe area I was just not sent to. Their reaction to the whole thing didn’t calm me about it either, as they proceeded to be rather difficult to reason with. Rattled beyond belief, I didn’t even call the cops - I didn’t want to be the only person of color on-scene in a parking lot with a white family. The whole saga would hit some bumps, but everything eventually worked itself out.

The night of the accident, however, I was a wreck. I cried like I hadn’t since I left home. I knew in my heart of hearts if I didn’t look like this, things would’ve gone differently; I wouldn’t have thought twice about getting police help and things could’ve gone smoother, but because of what I know I looked like, it changed everything about how I approached it all. Despite accepting myself long ago for who I was, It shook me enough to be the second time in my entire life when I felt like I wanted to scrub the brown off my skin. The first? Being forced to break up with my first girlfriend because her family didn’t like my non-whiteness. Everyone’s had that happen before, right?

Needless to say, I was a fucking mess. Not that mental health is the most understood thing in any setting, but mental health in minorities is probably an even less understood phenomena. There wasn’t just one pill I could take to solve it all for me, but the first one I was about to swallow in hopes of help was a doozy - Fire Emblem: Three Houses.