JRPGS AND WRPGS

I already feel bad for my audience that isn’t fluid in nerd, because this is going to be incredibly nerdy.  Let me start by breaking down the two acronyms in the title: Japanese Role Playing Games and Western Role Playing Games.  These distinctions will matter as it relates to the subject matter I’m about to discuss, and credit to u/JeremiahWuzABullfrog over on r/kettleballs for providing the inspiration for writing on this topic.  I don’t feel like this is even really an intro at this point: me a mea culpa, so let’s actually start talking.

In a few paragraphs, this will be hilarious

 

In the world of video game nerdery, role playing games are constantly divided into 2 categories (which, yes, like heavy metal, there are a million SUBcategories, but we’re not going to talk about them today): Japanese RPGs and Western RPGs. The distinction between these two primarily relates to degree of linearity present in playstyle.  Traditional JRPGs typically provide you with preset characters to play with and a direct path to get there, providing an almost “on rails” experience as you play.  The focus is on making the characters you have strong enough within their own playstyle to be able to get to the end of the game.  WRPGs define themselves through their “open” playstyle, wherein you typically get to build a character/party of characters in whatever style you like, and there are multiple solutions and paths to the end of the game, to the point that you can decide if you want to even be a hero in the first place or play as a villain instead.  WRPGs are like playing a video game coded version of Dungeons and Dragons, while JRPGs feel more like a traditional video game in general, where you’re trying to “beat the game” within its own specific set of rules.  Why even discuss this?  Due to the parallels that exist between this and the world of training.

 

Much like how you can never step into the same river twice, you can never play a JRPG for the first time twice.  The significance of this is that, the first time you play it, you’re discovering it as you go, and the world is magical and incredible (assuming it’s a good game) and the story is full of twists and turns and it’s an epic journey…but the second time you play it, it simply can’t be as magical because you already know what’s coming.  Sadly, in physical transformation, we experience this same phenomenon.  Joel Greene, among others, discuss the premise of how we aren’t able to keep eliciting the same responses to training/nutrition as we get when we first experience them, and how this relates to the necessity of variety in both instances in order to continue growing.  Aside from just newbie gains and the novel training stimulus effect in general, the body is a mechanism built around adaptation, and once it adapts we are no longer forcing it to change.  Super Squats will trigger ridiculous growth the first time you run it, and then pretty decent growth the second time, but if it ALWAYS added “30lbs in 6 weeks”, we’d be 150lbs heavier in just 30 weeks.  The Velocity Diet can trigger rapid fat loss, until our body downregulates metabolism and we’re forced to do some reverse dieting in order to rebuild our caloric runway.  Even my beloved Tactical Barbell necessitates changing the program through periodic training phases to keep growing, as does 5/3/1, as does just general basic periodization.

Change does a body good

So enter the WRPG, wherein we can actually have a NEW experience each and every time we play it BECAUSE it’s on us to make the character that we play and the decisions our character makes as they navigate the world.  You CAN get a new experience with multiple replays of the game, and as you do so you discover more and more about the gameworld.  Games like Fallout New Vegas can have over 100 hours of gameplay tucked away, with various secrets and hidden easter eggs, and hell, I still play the original Fallout released in 1997 and STILL find new things in that game with my replays.  HOWEVER, in order to discover these hidden gems, it necessitates NOT playing these WRPGs like a JRPG: you have to actually be willing to play a different character and do some experimenting.  It’s honestly why I was hesitant to tackle this topic at first: because it was originally proposed from the lens of DnD, wherein, in truth, I’m ALWAYS a barbarian because it’s what I love being, but it is from the branching out and discovering the contents of the game that we learn so much.

 

Which is the lesson we can take to physical transformation: the more we’re willing to get out there and explore, the more we’re able to pick up tips, tricks, hacks and skills that we can apply UNIVERSALLY to the quest of physical transformation.  Aside from the fact that you can avoid stagnation simply through the act of changing the approach, you’ll also learn along the way in order to discover what works best for you AND have a bunch of tools in your toolbox for whenever you encounter a challenging situation.  Much like how various playthroughs of a WRPG can equip you with the necessary background to be able to tackle the problems you encounter from a variety of angles, trying out different programs and nutritional approaches can allow you to personally craft the solutions you need in order to overcome the problems you experience.

I appreciate the irony of this meme being over 20 years old

 

But fascinating enough, we enter into another realm of discovery here: challenges.  Because for avid JPRG fans, this tends to be how one reconciles adding replay value into a game that has preset rules, limits and paths to explore.  In order to make the game “new” again, we impose artificial restrictions on ourselves to see what solutions we overcome.  I’ve played JPRGs where I didn’t allow myself to use magic, where I couldn’t use certain powerful equipment, didn’t allow my characters to level up beyond a certain point, etc.  The game was STILL beatable: but it was up to ME to figure out HOW to come up with the solution in order to succeed.  Since the traditional way “wouldn’t work”, I had to develop new strategies, and in doing so, I once again learned new things about the game that I could apply further.

 

These same challenges allow us to take what is old and make it new again.  Our training doesn’t need to ALWAYS be played like a WRPG: with a completely new take on the game each time. We can replay a game we’ve played before and just implement a new challenge.  I once ran Super Squats where, instead of 1x20 and adding weight each workout, I kept the weight the same and added a REP each workout, until I got to 1x30.  I took Jamie Lewis’ “Famine” workout and ran the whole thing like a circuit, instead of running it linearly.  Running Building the Monolith in under an hour is a challenge many other trainees have taken on.  OR we can take a method that worked for one lift and apply it to others.  I've taken ROM progression from deadlifts and tried applying it to squats and seated pin presses, and I've taken the Zeno squats workout and tried it in combination with deadlifts.  And nutritionally, I’ve run various permutations of the Velocity Diet, the Apex Predator Diet, The Maximum Definition Diet,  and my own “Red Meat and Black Coffee” variant. 

 

How my dietary changes appear to outsiders

Interestingly enough, we’re getting into the area that Dan John describes as “wild, mild and none” in terms of variation, which he originally applied to Easy Strength, but the theme applies universally.  Easy Strength completely captures the JPRG mentality: you’re doing the same workout 5 days a week for 8 weeks for a total of 40 workouts, effectively “level grinding” so you can level up at the end and be stronger than where you started.  Within the workout, there are no forking paths or game changing decisions to be made.  But once those 40 workouts are done, we now have the option to just replay the game again (which, sometimes, for JRPG fans, that’s exactly what we want, just like re-watching a favorite movie or re-reading a favorite book), or we can introduce a “mild” variation (going from flat bench to incline bench) or a WILD variation (going from flat bench to clean and jerk).  And then we have the WILDEST variation possible: we just do a whole new program.  Dan talks about cycling 8 weeks of Easy Strength with 8 weeks of the Armor Building Formula, and we can always throw in a Mass Made Simple block to really shake things up, or the 10k swing challenge…and these are JUST Dan John programs.  If we threw in some 5/3/1 or Super Squats or something else, we’d REALLY be playing something different: like transitioning from Squaresoft (they’ll always be Squaresoft to me, not Squarenix) RPGs to Interplay.  A whole different RULEST to abide by.

 

We’re seeing the lessons we can learn from these games here.  If we’re a JPRG fan and just want to keep running the programs and diet we like over and over again, we simply owe it to ourselves to implement some challenge runs from time to time in order to keep the game fresh.  As much as we may consider Final Fantasy 7 to be the zenith of game design and story, we can only play it so many times in a row before our eyes start to bleed.  And if we’re a WRPG fan, variety is a necessary part of enjoying the experience.  We can’t just keep playing the game the same way over and over again: it’s missing out on the point of the experience.  We must, instead, try new characters and make new decisions and see what we can learn and discover through that process.  We make the most of our games playing them in this way.