Earlier this year the folks at CollegeHumor created a video that summarized the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica in 16-bit Japanese RPG style. According to commenter Shinta, they weren't too far off.
I've been rewatching Battlestar Galactica recently and I came to realize that this show is a live action JRPG series. Considering how heavily this series gets praised as being the elite in sci-fi television shows, particularly praised for its maturity and writing - this leads me to believe that in reality, everyone loves JRPG style stories. They're not overly complex and silly, and they have mainstream appeal. Allow me to demonstrate.
This contains spoilers for the series, so don't read if you haven't watched it all.
Battlestar Galactica is a story about humanity interacting with a race of robots, only the robots look like humans. Also, the robots are clones and all the clones are totally different, but yet they share certain personality characteristics and memories. One of the clones isn't even real, and only exists in someone's mind and it's up to you to keep track of how all of these identical looking human-robots are different, and which storylines they are a part of. Oh, and the robots are really religious, and they spend most of the show talking about extremely esoteric spiritual philosophy. And the secret of the universe can be revealed through a Jimmy Hendrix song sent by god in a time loop that repeats over and over throughout history - foretold through prophecies that a drug-influenced cancer patient sees in visions. And at the end of the story, you realize that millions of years later, the robot clones that only exist in people's minds are actually immortal angels, watching over humans in present day Earth as the cycle begins to repeat again.
Keep in mind, this series is constantly held up as the pinnacle of mature fiction storytelling. Sounds like it was written by Toriyama right? But it's a western TV show, so I guess it's amazing.
The characters, and the dialogue are different. The storylines however are just as complicated, if not more complicated than JRPGs.
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