By Seann Barbour

On June 4, 2025, video game publisher Square Enix announced a remaster of their classic PlayStation title Final Fantasy Tactics. The new version, titled Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, would update the original game with new graphics, a cleaner user interface, and a number of gameplay tweaks.

To promote the remaster, Square Enix shared messages from three key members of the development team. Of these, the message which drew the most attention came from  the game's writer, Yasumi Matsuno. In it, he talks about the social and economic state of Japan at the time he wrote the original story, and how this state of affairs inspired him to pen a tale about class and inequality. He concludes his message: "And now, in 2025 - a time when inequality and division are still deeply rooted in our society - I offer this story once again. The will to resist is in your hands."

Some might wonder at a representative of a major capitalist corporation sharing a message about social injustice and ending it with a call to action. However, this feels right for Final Fantasy Tactics; not only for the themes expressed in this specific game, but also in the greater context of its genre: the Japanese Role Playing Game.

A Brief History of JRPGs

Before video games, there were tabletop games. Dungeons and Dragons spawned the genre of role playing games (or RPGs), in which players created characters who they took on imaginary adventures. As computing power grew and video games became more sophisticated, the RPG made its way into the digital space.

Early video game RPGs such as Ultima (1981) and Wizardry (1981) were not initially available on home consoles, and instead remained confined to personal computers. Such devices had the processing power necessary to run all the mathematical subsystems these games required, while the simpler, less powerful home consoles simply couldn't handle the load.

Many believed that the RPG would be stay confined to gaming computers such as the Atari 8-bit and the Commodore 64. But that changed on May 27, 1986, when game developer Enix released Dragon Quest on the Nintendo Famicom.

Dragon Quest managed to fit an RPG adventure onto consoles by simplifying the stat systems, stripping down character customization, and keeping the world narrowly defined. Its success inspired Squaresoft to develop the original Final Fantasy a year later, which in many ways played and felt like an unlicensed Dungeons and Dragons adaptation with similarly streamlined and stripped-down systems. While Dragon Quest dominated Japanese sales, Final Fantasy made it across the Pacific to the American market, where it proved there was a global interest in these sorts of games.

From there, the JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) developed as a distinct genre. Where western RPGs utilized the power of personal computers to explore deeper customization options and branching storylines, JRPGs focused on crafting intricate and complex narratives delivered through a more linear experience.

These two styles became so distinct that they remained even after consoles began to catch up to the power of PCs in the early 21st century. As western RPGs made the jump to consoles, the two styles clashed, and as the American industry grew to eclipse Japanese gaming, western games media began disparaging JRPGs, often deriding the genre as old-fashioned and "weird," with an undercurrent of xenophobia that could barely even be called subtext. Just look at X-Play's official review of Baten Kaitos Origins as an example.

This mass derision, combined with the sharp rise in game development costs as high-definition graphics became the norm, saw the JRPG largely relegated to cheaper handheld titles for about a decade. The genre is now in something of a renaissance, with some arguing we are now in a new JRPG golden age with the success of widely celebrated titles like Metaphor Re:Fantazio (2024), Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (2022), and the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy (2020). Still, the stigma has had enough staying power that a number of Japanese developers are still wary of the JRPG label, seeing it as a term of discrimination.

But even during those years of drought, the genre had its fans. Players who grew up playing JRPGs now look to the classics with nostalgia and new titles with fondness. Western games like Sea of Stars (2023) and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025) pay deliberate homage to the genre, positioning themselves as JRPGs in style and spirit if not in nationality.

I was one of those kids who grew up playing JRPGs. For me, a sheltered and lonely Catholic schoolboy, the narratives these games presented to me were grand, novel, and thought-provoking. I fell in love with the genre in my early teens, and it remains my favorite style of game even now in my 30's.

And what truly made them stand out, what blew my adolescent mind more than anything else, was how the genre approached the themes of power, hierarchy, and human connection.

The One Where You Kill God at the End

Spend any time at all around discussions of JRPGs, and you will hear the claim that games in the genre tend to have the player kill God at the end. Often it's said in jest, but it tends to feel like the sort of joke that's funny because of how true it is. In the West, deicide has practically become synonymous with JRPG storytelling. As game critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw quipped back in 2014, "a JRPG just isn't a JRPG unless it ends with teenagers using the power of friendship to kill God."

And indeed, this is a stereotype that is rooted in quite a bit of truth. While there are plenty of JRPGs (perhaps even a majority) that don't conclude with a god being killed, it is a common enough trend to be noticeable. Sometimes, the final foe is a mortal who has ascended to godhood (as in Final Fantasy VI) or some manner of false god (Final Fantasy X). Occasionally, the game presents or implies a pantheon, with the final boss simply being one deity of many (Persona 4), or possibly being a god of evil or destruction (Dragon Quest II) or a traitor to the other gods (Valkyrie Profile). More rarely, the final boss will be some form of Gnostic Demiurge (Shadow Hearts) or, even rarer still, the literal God of Abraham (Shin Megami Tensei II).

I could sit here and speculate about why this is so common, but I'm less interested in the "why" of this trope than I am in the thematic throughline it creates. Godhood, regardless of how you define or portray it, is a source of power, and by opposing and destroying that power, the heroes are overthrowing the very order of their world and bringing about a restructuring of their societies and cultures. In some games, this is acknowledged openly and given appropriate narrative weight, while in others it is simply an unintentional implication brought about by the choice to use a deity as the antagonist.

To attack and dethrone God is an inherently political act, and there is one particular political ideology that has centered the rejection of gods and other overlords as central to its conception of freedom. "No gods, no masters" is a well-known slogan for Anarchism.

The Circled A

Anarchism is a broad ideology that can take many forms, but every variation shares the same core idea: the rejection of political hierarchies, leadership, and the state. It is in many ways a deeply humanist ideology, as anarchists believe strongly in the inherent goodness of humanity and our capacity to care for and cooperate with each other, arguing that the hierarchies and structures of our current economic and political models present artificial barriers to that cooperation.

The ideology flourished from the 19th century into the 20th. Writers, philosophers, and activists such as Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon shared and refined their ideas, codifying anarchism into a global movement. Though its power as a political force was never particularly impressive compared to others, anarchism continues to influence culture at large through the punk scene and activist practices such as decentralized and horizontal organizing. Black Anarchism in particular has had a strong influence on the history of American Civil Rights.

Despite the common image of Japanese society as strictly regimented (or perhaps because of it), anarchism as an ideology has a strong history in Japan as well. Western anarchist texts were first translated to Japanese in the early 20th century, and the Japanese Anarchist Federation was founded shortly after the end of World War II in 1946. The Federation would eventually suffer a schism over the question of what role, if any, labor unions would have in anarchist liberation (to use the proper political jargon, it was a schism between Anarcho-Communists and Anarcho-Syndicalists).

In the 1960's, the Student Movement broke out in Japan. As Japanese youths rejected the old traditionalist politics of their elders and seized power in education, they found allies in the anarchists. While the Student Movement never embraced anarchism, it did incorporate anarchist ideas into itself, and the JAF disbanded in 1968 to make way for these new student organizations.

I want to be clear: it is not my intention to argue that JRPG developers are anarchists, or even that they are intentionally promoting anarchist ideas. In many ways, this is a "Death of the Author" situation. One could just as easily argue that JRPGs are inherently conservative (being heavily fantasy-based, many fall into the classic fantasy trap of pro-monarchist themes, for example). But the power of art lies in how we experience and interpret it, and for me, JRPGs, alongside other influences like Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels and the general experience of growing up in post-9/11 America, helped instill in me a belief in self-determination, an admiration for the human spirit, and a deep distrust of power and those who wield it.

To put it pithily: JRPGs made me an Anarchist.

Those Violent Video Games

Partway through 2005 JRPG Tales of the Abyss, protagonist Luke fon Fabre learns that he is a prophesized hero, and he is sent to save the people of a city called Akzeriuth. The Order of Lorelai, his world's chief religious institution, has long promoted a series of prophecies known as the Score, which all of society has now become centered around. But when Luke follows the instructions of his mentor, a knight in the service of the Order of Lorelai, he does not save Akzeriuth, but instead destroys it. It is revealed that, because the Score of Lorelai promises an eternal paradise at the end of its prophecy, the church has been secretly engineering multiple prophesied disasters, simply to keep the prophecy accurate and ensure that paradise comes.

It is a shocking twist that deconstructs the common fantasy tropes of prophecies and chosen ones. If you are familiar with American Evangelical Protestantism, however, then the Order of Lorelai's actions may sound disturbingly similar to Dispensationalism, a theology tied up heavily with Christian Nationalism. Dispensationalists interpret the books of the Bible as having prophecies of the end times, and many see it as their duty to help those prophecies come true. It is also an ideology with an outsized influence on American politics, and forms the basis of the Christian Zionist movement.

The idea that the Tales developers at Namco Bandai would have been aware of Dispensationalism seems unlikely, given that even many Americans are unaware of the theology. However, the parallels are clear, right down to how closely intertwined the Order of Lorelai is with the governments of the world.

Other games seem to be much more blatant and intentional in their political theming. Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020) tells the story of a ragtag group of criminals, homeless people, and sex workers fighting to protect their community from a right-wing political party. The protagonist of Final Fantasy XVI (2023) purposely and violently dismantles the basis of his world's (called "Valisthea") social and economic order, knowingly bringing about an age of chaos, all in the desperate hope that a better and more equitable world might arise from the ashes. The game never portrays him as anything less than heroic for this.

Much digital ink has been spilled on the topic of video game violence. For many games and many genres of game, violence and killing are the default methods of conflict resolution and a core part of gameplay. This can often lead to a strange sort of dissonance when, for example, a protagonist chooses not to kill a named villain in a cutscene right after mowing down hordes of that villain's followers. Some developers choose to shrug their shoulders at this disconnect and ignore it. Others, like Yoko Taro, director of 2017's Nier Automata, have crafted their games' narratives around exploring the role of violence and our relationship to it. Indeed, Nier Automata itself tells the story of human-made androids and alien-made machines, two sides in an endless forever war fought on behalf of their long-extinct creators. The game's android protagonists struggle to find meaning in their lives as they grapple with the pointlessness of the self-perpetuating system of violence they've been trapped in.

An anarchist might point out that there are certain power dynamics inherent to how violence is conducted. In sociology and political science, there exists a concept known as the State Monopoly on Violence. It holds that modern states derive their power from an ability to determine what violence is or is not legitimate.

For example, a federal agent, sanctioned by the state, opening fire on a fleeing suspect would be treated by the state as legitimate violence. If, however, that suspect were to then turn around and fire back, that display of violence would be treated as illegitimate and therefore deserving of punishment. In the same vein, if a group of people get together to beat a member of their community to death, the legitimacy of this violent act might be determined by local police, acting as representatives of the state. Should the police arrest the killers, then their violence was illegitimate. But if the police simply look the other way, then the state has condoned the violence, and thus declared it legitimate.

This is a state of affairs that many anarchists recognize as real, but take a moral or ideological issue with. It is an act of hypocrisy on the part of the state, and moreover it is absurd not to expect those with violence visited upon them not to respond in kind; as an act of self-defense at the very least.

In a 1917 address to an American jury (she was on trial for aiding draft dodgers at the time), Emma Goldman put it thusly:

It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice which drives the political offender to his act. To condemn him means to be blind to the causes which make him. I can no more do it, nor have I the right to, than the physician who were to condemn the patient for his disease.

When the Order of Lorelai manipulates nations and their leaders in order to arrange a genocide, when the kingdoms of Valisthea brand magic Bearers with poisoned tattoos and sell them into slavery, when Bleach Japan marches to intimidate sex workers and entrap them so they can be forcibly deported, they are all using the apparatus of the state to commit violence.

With that in mind, when Luke fon Fabre raises his sword against the knights of the Order, when Clive Rossfield carves a path through a military unit to free the enslaved Bearers they were guarding, when Ichiban Kasuga brawls in the street with members of Bleach Japan, these men are committing justified violence against violent oppressors. Their actions may be argued as radical, but sometimes justice demands radical acts.

The constant fighting that is endemic to the JRPG genre, the gameplay loop of entering battle repeatedly in order to grow stronger, ends up modeling the struggle for liberation against an oppressive state.

The Spirit of Rebellion

Again, I stress that I am not arguing that developers of JRPGs are intentionally inserting anarchist themes or ideas into their games. Rather, I would argue that the common themes of JRPGs just happen to align well with anarchist philosophy, and that the common sources of inspiration for these games match up decently well with an anarchist worldview. It's time to talk about Gnosticism.

In the early days of Christianity, various sects sprouted up across the world that each offered their own interpretation of Jesus' teachings. As the Catholic Church took form and canonized a specific dogma and interpretation, it condemned certain ideas promoted by some of these sects as heretical. Among these newly labeled heretics were the Gnostics, a broad term describing a number of sects which held Jesus as a wholly divine being and yet rejected the authority of God.

To the Gnostics, the god of Abraham worshiped by other Christian sects was a tyrannical false god, a semi-divine being they labeled as "Demiurge," also often called some variation of the name "Ialdabaoth." The Demiurge created the material world and imprisoned the souls of humanity there, and it is only by accumulating knowledge ("gnosis") that humanity can hope to transcend the bounds of this world and achieve freedom with the true divinity ("pleroma").

The ascendancy of the Catholic Church led to the destruction and suppression of the Gnostic cults, and for much of history our only sources on the Gnostics have been in records from the Church itself. In the twentieth century, however, a library of Gnostic texts was uncovered in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, leading to a new age of scholarly research on this forgotten group. One particular scholar of Gnosticism who rose to prominence in the 70's and 80's was the Japanese Doctor of Theology, Sasagu Arai.

Arai's body of work likely brought Gnosticism into the Japanese popular consciousness. It's easy to see why Gnostic teachings might resonate in the country, because many Gnostic ideas appear noticeably similar to ideas seen in Eastern religions; particularly Buddhism, which teaches that we can transcend the bounds of this world by gaining wisdom and achieving Nirvana. Gnosticism has gone on to inspire many popular works of Japanese media, including JRPGs. Tetsuya Takahashi's Xeno games (consisting of Xenogears, the Xenosaga trilogy, and the Xenoblade series) are all directly and explicitly inspired by Gnosticism, and contain many overt references to the theology.

As a religion, Gnosticism in some ways was like an early version of anarchism. Both were decentralized movements that promoted worldviews based in a rejection of authority, and both dream of something better than the world as it is. Modern writers have portrayed the Gnostics as subtextually similar to modern anarchist and punk movements, and some anarchists regard the Gnostics with a sense of spiritual kinship. The Gnostics' desire for freedom has echoed throughout history, and has resonated deeply with the anarchist.

The influence that Gnosticism has had on the JRPG genre can easily manifest as themes of rebellion and liberation. One of the best and most obvious recent examples of this can be found in the 2016 game Persona 5.

As a series, Persona began as a spin-off of Atlus' Shin Megami Tensei series, itself heavily influenced by Gnostic ideas. But whereas SMT drew from Christian theology to craft a world of demons and angels locked in an all-consuming struggle, Persona drew from the works of psychologist Karl Jung to craft worlds in which the human psyche can alter the very nature of reality. Starting with Persona 3 in 2006, the series has utilized a "Social Link" mechanic, in which the player-controlled protagonist forges close bonds of friendship with various non-player characters, who in turn boost the protagonist's combat ability in various ways.

With Persona 5, Atlus desired to capture the dissatisfaction and frustration felt by modern teenagers just entering higher education and the workforce. The game's heroes are all social outcasts who have a problem with authority, and the adult world they are in the process of entering is portrayed as hopelessly corrupt. To fight back, the heroes become phantom thieves, their inner strength represented by summoned entities called Personas that take the forms of famed trickster and outlaw figures from history and folklore. The supernaturally-empowered Phantom Thieves then infiltrate the twisted minds of corrupt authority figures to "steal their hearts" so that they will grow a conscience, confess their crimes, and seek to make amends.

The heroes begin with an abusive and predatory high school gym teacher who sees the school as his own personal castle, and progress from there to more prominent and powerful figures. Eventually, they face their greatest mark: the frontrunner in the election for Prime Minister, who sees Japan's very government as a cruise ship which he will personally steer to greatness.

But when they steal the politician's heart, a strange thing happens: the world does not change. People do not wake up to the injustices around them. Everyone just keeps going on with their lives. So the heroes travel deep into humanity's collective unconscious for a final heist: the theft of humanity's "Holy Grail," which is revealed to be a being born from mankind's submission to authority and bias toward the status quo, a being who introduces himself as Yaldabaoth, the God of Control.

That this self-styled god is named for the Gnostic Demiurge is no coincidence, nor is it a coincidence that the main character defeats Yaldabaoth by manifesting the "Ultimate Trickster" Satanael, a representation of the angel who rebelled against God and was cast into Hell for his transgression.

Persona 5 is a story about raging against the status quo, about fighting an unjust system and opposing even the ultimate authority. It is a story about finding freedom through rebellion.

It is far from pure in these themes–Atlus is a capitalist entity, after all. The game occasionally contradicts its own morals in baffling ways, and the ending embraces the liberal idea that a system can be reformed simply by putting the right people in charge of it. And that's to say nothing of the ethical questions of free will the premise raises; questions that the game only occasionally pays lip service to before brushing aside. Yet in the moment of play it sells the fantasy of being a true rebel so well that the game manages to feel truly radical.

Collectivist Action

It has been said that while Western cultures tend to emphasize individualism, Eastern cultures emphasize the community.

Any statement made about an entire culture must by necessity be a generalization. Cultures are made up of people, and people are unique. Cultural mores and values are ultimately just descriptions of general trends among the population. And yet those trends also influence the individuals born within that population and help instill within them their ideas about what is normal and what is good.

If we assume that the overgeneralized claim that Eastern cultures tend to be more community-oriented than Western ones is broadly true, then it is perhaps no surprise that JRPGs tend to have such anarchist themes. Anarchism, like most left-wing ideologies, is inherently collectivist. It puts value in community and seeks what benefits all. And certainly, community is a big part of the JRPG narrative.

But cultures change, and the influence of capitalism is global. There are plenty of Eastern stories with a more individualist bent. The hot trend in Japanese media for the past few years has been "Isekai," stories about people from our world transported to magical fantasy realms. Many of these Isekai stories are inspired specifically by RPGs, to the point that the game systems that originally served as mechanical abstractions are a diegetic part of these fantasy worlds. The term in the West for this emergent genre is "LitRPG."

When you make the mechanics of experience points, leveling up, and quantifying everyone's abilities with objective numbers into a part of reality, the resulting story must be individualist in some manner. The strong are unambiguously superior to others, and working hard to become more powerful is an undeniable truth of the world.

Strangely, JRPGs themselves have largely not followed this trend, despite the genre's clear influence on it. Instead, JRPGs of the last few years have more and more emphasized mechanics centered around growing the player's relationships with the characters.

The social simulation elements that once defined the Persona games have become common to the genre. You can see this in original IPs like The Caligula Effect (2016) and Metaphor Re:Fantazio (2024) and recent installments of established series, such as Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (2013-2018). And then there's the biggest JRPG franchise of them all, Pokémon, which from its inception emphasized bonds of friendship between trainer and pokémon, but began fully mechanically modeling this friendship with its 3DS era titles.

In each of these games, deepening your relationships with other characters provides you with tangible effects in gameplay. You get new combination attacks, new combat and exploration bonuses, access to better gear… Because you aided these characters in their struggles, they in turn aid you. One might even say that it's an example of "mutual aid."

Mutual Aid is a concept put forth by the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. A biologist, Kropotkin observed animals and took special note of how the survival strategy of social animals depends on their ability to form bonds with one another. Because each animal in a pack or herd aids each other animal in the group, those animals are inevitably aided in turn, and all prosper. He reasoned that humans are no different, and rejected the then-popular principles of Social Darwinism to instead develop "Communist Anarchism," which today is called Anarcho-Communism. He would outline his ideas in books like The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902).

A century after his death, Kropotkin's idea of mutual aid still continues to influence anarchist and leftist spaces. In a capitalist society, wherein selfishness is seen not just as the default, but as a virtue, is not the act of people coming together to lift each other up inherently radical? This is the philosophy of anarchist charities like Food Not Bombs; to help each other is to challenge the system of profit which rules us all.

I will admit that I have struggled with the principles of anarchism, as much as I admire them. Some days, I am too cynical to be a true believer, and I instead see anarchist ideals less as blueprints for society and more as a set of goals a just society should strive for. Other days, I am more optimistic, and I fully believe that an anarchist society is possible.

The world is complicated, and I can't say for certain what will happen in the future. But one thing I am sure of is that our current political paradigm cannot last. As the selfish pursuit of capital continues, as the hoarding behavior of the wealthy leads to economic crisis after economic crisis, as powerful people express open disdain for the concept of empathy, our civilization rejects the very foundations of human society itself, thus hastening our self-destruction. But the people in power will not stop it, because to do so would be to give up their power. The system is our God, and its influence is all-consuming.

Ultimately, the dream of the anarchist is to accomplish that very same feat that so many JRPGs protagonists have achieved:

To kill God with the power of friendship.

Seann Barbour is a writer from southeastern Virginia with a love for fantasy, horror, and RPGs. When he's not authoring fiction or essays about niche subjects people get unreasonably heated about, he works with dogs. His work can be found at https://linktr.ee/seannwritesstuff