'Sup sirs, this is Lynxara from OMG Nintendo. I'll be waxing philosophical about RPGs on a semi-weekly basis around here.
When I'm not moonlighting as a blogger, I do quite a bit of work writing strategy guides for DoubleJump Books. I just wrapped up work on the Operation Darkness strategy guide, and it has left me all philosophical about RPGs.
Way back during the grim dark ages of omgRPGs, I finished up the Mana Khemia strategy guide and was inspired by it to write a list of things I never wanted to see again in RPGs. Operation Darkness has put me in more of a positive mood, because while it's a flawed game on the whole it does a few things that I just really like to see in an RPG.
So heres a list of seven things I love in my RPGs and that I want more of. They may not be the things you love, but hey, give 'em a thought the next time you're chatting about your favorite games on Ye Olde Internets. You may already love games that do this kind of stuff without even realizing it.
1. Challenge
Nothing pisses me off more than a game you can sleepwalk your way through. Even if the game's story or character design is otherwise pretty good, I can promise that I won't make as strong an emotional connection with an easy game that I would with a challenging game.
When a game resists your efforts to proceed and fights back, then every single line of story you squeeze out of it by beating down stubborn monsters feels like an achievement. It's special, not just something that anyone can pull off without patient and intelligent play. Once a game has made you lose once or twice, you can respect it and take pleasure in making progress.
Note that by challenge I don't necessarily mean a game has to be full of merciless meat-grinders like Fay's Final Puzzle from Shiren the Wanderer DS, or multi-million hit point monstrosities that populate Disgaea's endgame (although that doesn't hurt). I just mean moments where it's possible to lose with the wrong equipment, bad reflexes, or poor preparation. Even a few sidequests that are difficult to pull off can add some much-needed spice to a game, like how Richter mode and the challenge of 200%+ castle completion keep Symphony of the Night interesting in spite of terribly easy bosses.
Most console RPGs that come out now are way too easy to complete, and as a result I find myself not caring about them at all. The genre needs more games that make you fight for every inch of ground and can make you proud of seeing the game through to the end, stuff like Etrian Odyssey and Persona 3. Otherwise, why bother spending time on it? If you just want to consume story without exerting effort, you can go read a book or watch a movie that probably gives you more to think about and eats up less of your time.
2. Interesting Settings
Few RPG gamers, whether they were all J-RPG or all W-RPG, all console or all MMO, could deny that the thrill of exploring a new world is one of the most rewarding parts of playing these games. For that thrill to happen, the game's world must be& well, actually new. It needs to feel like a place you legitimately haven't been before, maybe a place you couldn't even imagine. There needs to be a sense of wonder and mystery to make finding the next dungeon worth your while.
Despite this slightly obvious fact of what it's like to play RPGs, a lot of games completely fail when it comes to presenting players with interesting worlds. Instead you get a lot of Generic Fantasy World #4763-A, which may be Tolkienesque if it's Western or slightly big-eyed and anime-like if it's Japanese. There will be elves and beastmen of sort perhaps and some kind of epic evil you're supposed to stab, and some lame variant of rats or slimes or perhaps slime rats you kill endlessly in the first dungeon.
There's no need for this. Even within the well-trod territory of fantasy worlds, you can give players memorably distinct settings like Hyrule and Ivalice that just get progressively more memorable with every game they appear in. World of Warcraft offers plenty of twists on high fantasy expectations. But even better, you can step outside the fantasy genre and find all sorts of adequate settings for RPG fun. Operation Darkness uses a B-horror flavored version of World War II, which means you get to have a highly memorable boss battle with Hitler as a black wizard with 100,000 HP, self-heals, and the ability to summon Godzilla-like dragons. Hell yes.
Persona 3 lets you experience the challenging world of high school in gothic horror RPG terms, complete with stat gains from good grades and relationships. Earthbound takes place in a demented parody of 80's America where you beat enemies with baseball bats and get health back from hamburgers. Valkyrie Profile gives you a world based strictly on an inventive interpretation of Norse mythology. Mass Effect gives you an epic sci-fi galaxy to explore. These are all more memorable than yet another Land of Peace Rent Asunder by Vague Diagetic Evil.
There is no technology or gameplay excuse for setting your game in a crappy, boring world. People found ways to get around it back when PCs rarely had sound cards and consoles were 8-bit at best. Use some creativity and give players really memorable worlds to explore, or all you've done is made a crappy, boring game.
3. Novel-Like Plots
At some point, probably during the PS2's reign as king of consoles, someone got the idea into his or her head that games should be more like movies, and especially should have plots like movies. For action games, this makes sense. They tend to be short and even when they're not, require only simple narratives to drive the gameplay's action forward. Movies--well, the kinds of movies people want to make games like, anyway--tend to use simple, straightforward three-act structures that let the action of the plot move along at a steady clip.
The problem is that somebody also decided every type of game that had a narrative as an element of its basic gameplay should also have a simple, three-act movie-style plot. After years of working toward bigger and more epic plots throughout the PlayStation era, RPGs suddenly contracted upon themselves. Story got simpler, more predictable, and more focused on graphics. Plots became linear and multiple-ending games became rare.
Most problematically: games, especially Japanese console RPGs, started getting a whole lot more boring than they were previously. Three-act structure works best for plays, movies, and television--generally short-form mediums that mostly need to get through a plot without eating up too much of their audience's time. This adapts decently well to your average 10-hour action game, but it leaves your 40-hour RPG with time to kill and, usually, loads of filler characters and dungeons.
A truly exceptional RPG needs to be able to support 100-plus hours of gameplay, and it needs enough story to hold your attention for that long. Three-act structure doesn't cut it. RPGs need to have stories structured like novels, with room for sweeping changes of scenery, winding plots full of twists and turns, and plenty of characters who get to be truly relevant to the proceedings. Probably the most novel-like of RPGs is Final Fantasy Tactics, but you can also see novel-caliber storytelling at work in Phantasy Star II and the best of the Ultima games. This design philosophy crops up from time to time in modern games, like the surprisingly good Lost Odyssey. Games need to be like that, not simple-minded disappointments like, say, Grandia III.
4. Multiplayer Options
Operation Darkness has a multiplayer co-op mode. Of course it does, it's a 360 game, right? Yet it's otherwise a strictly single-player experience. What Operation Darkness does for its multiplayer is pretty ingenious: you get to play bonus missions you've unlocked in your single-player games with up to three other friends over Xbox Live.
Everybody gets to bring in their single-player characters, and enemy strength is scaled to the rough average level of all twelve characters. What you get is something like the online equivalent of playing a tactical RPG with three friends, and everybody gets to take turns for certain characters. It's shockingly fun, and if it was more full-featured (say, a full co-op campaign) I'd say it was the best part of the game.
What baffles me here is: why don't other single-player games do tThe closest I can think of are the annoyingly local-only co-op missions in Final Fantasy Tactics, and how you can have a second player control a character in Tales of Symphonia. (And even that little touch makes the game 5000% better.) Yes, there are games like Marvel Ultimate Alliance, but those simple dungeon crawlers are so repetitive I don't think they count. Square-Enix has given this a go with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, but only the DS game is worth a damn and it's also irritatingly local-only.
I know that it's assumed that if you want to get your multiplayer RPG on, you'll really just invest in an MMO, but this isn't for everybody. Sometimes you want a game you can also play offline, and even the best MMOs have always struck me as boring as snot to play solo online. MMOs also require lots of time, more so than FPS-style casual online sessions that Operation Darkness makes possible. Please, RPG designers, more like this.
5. Artful Graphics
Look, I don't demand bleeding-edge graphics from my games. I don't think a game made using 2D sprites is somehow automatically crappier-looking than one using complex 3D models, and in fact I'd rather play a 2D game where everything is beautiful than a 3D game where everything is at best utilitarian. Basically, if you set two games with broadly similar gameplay before me--say, I dunno, Odin Sphere for the PS2 and that Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom thing for the 360--I am going to want to play Odin Sphere a whole hell of a lot more.
Mind you, I don't even like Odin Sphere all that much, but it is at least a game full of artistry. Everything about the characters and their settings is fundamentally both expressive and unique. It is worth my time to look at in a way that Kingdom Under Fire can never be, because I refuse to believe for a second that anybody really put thought into making sure that game was attractive and full of unique visuals as opposed to just using a lot of polygons. No, instead Kingdom Under Fire used many polygons to express... uh...
People like to say graphics don't matter in gaming, but these people are liars and knaves. Graphics matter on two fronts: one, you need them to understand what the hell is happening, and two, they announce the game's identity. In video games as in animation, the fact that the characters and worlds could look like anything means that they way developers choose to portray them carries meaning. Visuals that say something interesting and different are for more valuable than high-res versions of designs that convey only a desperate fear of new ideas.
6. Multiple Endings
I have resigned myself to the modern console RPG design notion which dictates that, while playing an RPG, you're really just riding along rails that carry you to a predetermined outcome. If the ending is really good and the gameplay conveys a sense of freedom, then this linearity is bearable. If the overall plot manages to be good, it may even be enjoyable.
What I really want in an RPG is something to concretely convey the idea of role-playing to me, though--outcomes created by the decisions I make while playing the game. This is an illusion easy to achieve in MMOs, where your decisions create your character, which probably explains the genre's explosive popularity. In console games, it doesn't even seem to be considered as a design element most of the time.
This is a sad and ridiculous state of affairs. The role-playing part of a role-playing game isnt possible if players aren't allowed to do things that matter to the plot. I want to be able to make decisions that change the story. In lieu of that, even a variety of endings ranging from bad to good can be satisfying. Optional characters and storylines are a decent compromise, but what RPGs really need is to recommit themselves to the idea of games with multiple endings.
7. Intelligent Characters
You may choose to consider this more of a pet peeve than anything else, but it annoys the hell out of me and few RPG reviewers or critics bother to think about it. I firmly think the ideal way to present the protagonist or, even better, the cast of an RPG is to let the players create those characters themselves. A game can choose to do otherwise and still be good; part of my lasting affection for Final Fantasy IV is how much I liked the cast.
But that's the trouble with a game using what I'll call a pre-generated cast: their actions, not the player's, create the plot and action of the story. This is only acceptable if those actions are by themselves interesting, plausible, and compel interesting situations--the basic requirements for a good story. When a story is ridiculously reliant on characters persistently making bad and foolish decisions, then its storyline is rightfully called an idiot plot , and viewed as poor writing.
The world of console RPGs is bizarrely stuffed with storylines that wouldn't have been possible if only one of the protagonists had been blessed with the common sense of, say, the average rock. Probably the most severe example of this syndrome in action is Enchanted Arms, a troubled and flawed game whose strengths are badly undercut by poor production values and, basically, the worst protagonist ever.
Enchanted Arms's Atsuma is an idiot, and he is always an idiot in service of the plot. He does not understand how ladders work so another character can give him a tutorial on climbing up them. He does not understand how money works so another character can offer a tutorial about buying things. He goes looking for a lost dog and a city explodes. How he survives through the story at all is baffling, as is how he remembers to breathe.
More to the point, playing as this guy isn't any fun. Idiot plots are a waste of the audience's time, since they'd be half as long if the protagonist ever stopped doing stupid things. It's one thing to have a character do dumb things out of misguided obstinance, like FF7's Cloud Strife, especially since he eventually gets over himself and starts doing fairly smart things. This sort of character development is fine. A guy who is rock-stupid from start to finish is not.
If I'm going to take the role of another character in an RPG, I need to believe he or she is doing reasonably intelligent and interesting things in response to dangerous circumstances, or at least trying to. More RPGs need to put this kind of effort into their stories, making sure the actions the characters take would make sense from their point of view. What we don't need are more bombastic idiot plots.
