With San Diego Comic Con starting tomorrow, it's time for us RPG fans to pack up our E3 hype and set it aside for next year, when hopefully we'll see another E3 where more major RPG publishers are actually allowed to show up. Seriously, no Atlus, NIS America, or Activision? The best thing I ever did at an E3 was interview Kazuma Kanako about Shin Megami Tensei 3. Sure, it's easier to get work done at the new E3, but for god's sake make the show bigger and get more companies involved.
Kvetching aside, this year's show was interesting, and made me realize a few things about our beloved genre. So for the 2008 E3 wrap-up, here's the five things I think I learned about RPGs from this year's show. Some of them I suspected before, the others are pretty new ideas. Check behind the cut for screens, rambling, and game impressions.
5. A Game Only Looks As Good As Its Demo
Square-Enix wasn't taking booth appointments this year, or so I heard. Despite that, they had a terribly crowded upstairs booth where people clearly had appointments of some sort! I'm going to charitably assume they were exclusive interview appointments and stuff for the massive foreign press representation at this year's E3, and not that, say, Square-Enix just didn't want to bother with any of us ground-level journalists.
So, I decided to play Square-Enix's games on the floor instead. Hey, it worked out great last year, where Revenant Wings had a demo so good it completely turned my opinion of the game around. This year the line-up was Chrono Trigger DS, Final Fantasy IV DS (already in stores), Dragon Quest IV DS, and Infinite Undiscovery. Pretty rad, right? I was convinced I'd come back from the show floor with all kinds of stuff to tell you guys about these games.
Well, I didn't, because the actual demo quality from Square-Enix this year was the most absolutely half-assed I've ever seen it. Chrono Trigger, FFIV, and DQIV didn't have proper demos versions, instead savefiles set up at various points in the game. Granted, most of these games are already out in Japan, but that didn't stop Square-Enix from having a proper E3 demo for Radiata Stories back in the day. FFIV and Chrono Trigger were toward the beginning, while DQIV was... man, I don't even know. There was no one hanging around these games to answer questions, and without actual demo versions going, it was pretty hard to glean much more than "Hey, CT is almost totally the same", "FFIV has new story stuff!!", and "I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to be doing in DQIV but I am really powerful."
The coup de grace for half-assedness was the Infinite Undiscovery demo, though. Like the other games, it was sort of a random savefile, and I have no idea what point in the game I was at. You were running around in a jungle-like environment, fighting monsters with a combat system that felt very much like FFXII with more options and fewer restrictions. I clearly had all kinds of options for commanding my party members, all magic-users, or using my sword-skills against monsters. But, guess what? There was no card sitting around to let you know what the controls were, so I wasted five minutes trying to draw my protagonist's sword. Trying to ask questions about the game system from the few attendants I found on-hand resulted in being told "I don't know", sometimes from multiple people, often in response to basic questions like "So why are some of my guys regenerating MP when my main guy isn't?"
I'm not convinced any of the games Square-Enix had on the floor this year were bad, but the company did absolutely nothing to convince me the games were good, either. There was no real attempt to get more information about playing the games out there, no real enthusiasm for the titles, and utter indifference toward helping out anyone who needed it. I am really left wondering why Square-Enix even bothered to show up, if they're going to be that lazy about showing off the titles. I mean, the Infinite Undiscovery demo was so bad I almost think I retroactively know less about it than I did before I got my hands-on time.
4. Great Gameplay Often Comes From Low-End Hardware
If I'll take Square-Enix to task for putting no effort into their demos, I'm also going to talk about a couple games where really detailed, passionate demos given by the guys who created the games left a strong impression on me. These were also, interestingly, both games for what you might consider "low end" console hardware. Lock's Quest is an RTS/RPG hybrid for the Nintendo DS with simple sprite graphics produced by 5th Cell (developers of Drawn to Life), and Monster Lab is a Wii monster training RPG produced by a Backbone Entertainment (who previously made a bunch of Xbox Live Arcade titles and the Sonic Rivals games on PSP). Neither game holds a candle in terms of graphics output even to a relatively old MMO like World of Warcraft, but both games were also ridiculously fun to play, and I left the show feeling like I knew a lot about how these games would work and how people could enjoy them.
The Lock's Quest demo was just awesome out of nowhere. I had no THQ appointments for the show, and instead just wandered up to it after playing stuff like All-Star Cheer Squad. There were immediately two demo attendants introducing themselves and swapping cards with me, and one of them was Matt Cox, the game's lead designer. He spoke with pride about Drawn to Life and seemed absolutely delighted to get to show Lock's Quest to someone. He walked me through a well-chosen demo level, a basic battle where you're defending a castle against some encroaching goblins. You go through a "build phase" before the battle begins, letting your engineer protagonist Lock build walls and turrets with the money available to try and slow down the enemy.
Cox gave me some pointers but not too many, instead explaining mistakes I'd made with building once the battle began. The battle itself was tremendous fun-- Lock is one of the few RPG engineers I can think of who actually ever engages in engineering. He could run and directly attack goblins, using super-moves and other techniques that you could power up by playing a stylus-tapping game. He could go to damaged fortifications and repair them, or power-up an offensive turret to try and wail through goblins more quickly. Lock's HP was low (hey, he is basically just a medieval nerd), and he runs through it quickly. Running back to the castle gave him a boost so he could go back out onto the field, which kept the battles from ever getting frustrating. I never would have enjoyed the gameplay as much if Cox hadn't been there to point out every little nuance of what I could do with Lock, so I won the battle after a nice stiff fight. I left feeling really psyched to get to play this game for real, since there was obvious potential there for a great story and interesting growth in Lock's abilities.
Monster Lab was a behind-closed-doors appointment, and one I honestly made only because Monster Lab was Eidos's only Wii game. I didn't know it was an RPG, and actually I didn't know anything about it at all, and was expecting it to be some sort of lame kid's platformer, to be perfectly honest. What I actually saw was a well-designed all-ages monster training RPG with a fantastic sense of macabre humor. It didn't look like anything Eidos would ever put out, yet there it was, getting promoted just as hard as Tomb Raider and everything else it had. Joe Bonar was willing to spend a solid 30 minutes talking to use about the game he'd made with Backbone, fielding every conceivable type of question from who did the art to what high-level play would be like.
The basic premise of Monster Lab is that you are a new Initiate to the Mad Science Alliance. You're going to be trained in the basics of the three schools of mad science (Alchemy, Biology, and Mechanics) by three extremely neurotic tutors , and then sent off to battle Baron Marty, who mastered all three types of mad science and then turned on the Alliance. Each type of Mad Science is also a damage type, with Mechanics trumping Biology which trumps Alchemy which trumps Mechanics. Since Baron Marty's monsters combine all three mad sciences, they could easily overwhelm anything the other, purist members of the Alliance could design. So, they're training you to become Baron Marty's replacement, and the guy who eventually beats the crap out of him by building creatures that combine elements of the different disciplines.
You begin building lousy monsters out of parts you synthesize into spare limbs, torsos, and heads in your lab, and as you get better and more varied parts you can build more and better kinds of monsters. Bosses may drop especially rare synthesis elements or their own body parts for you to use against future enemies. Parts have specific stats you need to balance out in a creature, like durability and energy consumption, and some semi-random factors in the game make sure that even creatures built out of identical top-tier body parts won't be exactly the same. The game's system is fine-tuned for multiplayer battles in Pokemon-style, both face to face and over Wi-Fi. Combat is turn-based, which allows you to build very deliberate strategies around what a particular monster can do. Bonar himself described Monster Lab as a light RPG, but it certainly seems like an interesting one.
Lock's Quest and Monster Lab probably aren't games that are going to get hyped very hard, but they both really seem like games that would be worth a player's while: decently balanced, full of potential depth, and plenty of room for entertaining stories along the way. It's discovering games like this that makes E3 great, and it's only possible when the people who design the games actually care about promoting them. I figure, if these guys are going to put themselves out to show me as much of their games as possible, they must have confidence in their quality. That makes me more confident about them, too.
3. There's an RPG For Everybody
Part of the surprise of Lock's Quest and Monster Lab is that they both looked so good and were so much fun to play despite being all-ages titles. Monster Lab's cartoony art, in fact, would seem designed to appeal to the Cartoon Network crowd. At first I thought that was crazy-great, making good RPGs kids could play, but... hey, wasn't I ten when I got my copy of Dragon Warrior and proceeded to play it non-stop for a year? Sure, my tastes now run a bit more to giggling like a schoolgirl when I get a headshot in Fallout 3, but the idea that RPGs are a Serious Business genre only for the most hardcore teen and adult gamers suddenly seems a little quaint to me.
In fact, if this year's E3 showed me anything about RPGs, it's that they're making them for people of all ages and genders and gameplay styles. When I was growing up, the closest thing to a "girl game" you could play was NES Athena, which sucked horribly, but I was so desperate to play something that felt like it was meant for me and not a hypothetical male me I kept playing it anyway. Modern girls with a taste for RPG are going to get a ton of stuff to enjoy from Natsume's 2009 line-up instead of suffering through obscure crap titles, and I almost hate them for it.
For instance, Natsume's Princess Debut. It's an RPG in which you're trying to level up not as a monster-stomper but as a gracious ballroom dancer and solver of problems. You actually have a princess experience level you're trying to raise by getting nice clothes, practicing your dances, and solving people's problems. The dance sequences can be quite challenging, too. Princess Debut is in all respect an RPG even the girliest of little girls could want to play, and it is in no way an awful game. Hell, I'm looking forward to playing it-- what other RPG lets me dress up like a witch and waltz with a giant rabbit, or gain EXP by helping another character fix his hair?
Variety is fantastic, and I'm pleased to see variety is also the name of the game in Natsume's other 2009 titles. Both Island of Happiness and Tree of Tranquility look great (and let you get your farming power-game on as a hero or heroine). Rune Factory 2 is using the insanely great premise of a game told over two generations-- first an adventure as the main hero, that you then finish in the game's second half by playing the hero's child (who can also be male or female). This is great weird stuff, and most people will probably overlook it in the wake of the Fable 2s and Dragon Ages and Fallout 3s-- hell, maybe I will. But I'm really glad it's out there to make sure anybody who wants to play an RPG suited to their exact personal tastes has the chance.
2. East and West Have Already Met and Begun to Make Out
Sometimes it seems to me that RPG fans can make an excessively big deal over the difference between Japanese and Western-developed games. It's true that on the whole you can point to way too many generic differences you'd expect in mediocre titles based on place of development, there are also way too many exceptions to these rules. When Etrian Odyssey has you creating a customized party for monster-stomping and The Witcher has you collecting bromides, I'm left to think it doesn't really matter where a game comes from. All that matters is that if it's good at the type of experience it's trying to provide, and those experiences are growing more similar.
Let's face it, FFXIII selling on the Xbox 360? Square-Enix developing games using Unreal Engine and Havok physics? Neopets getting a Puzzle-Quest alike problem-solving RPG? BioWare developing a Sonic the Hedgehog game for DS? Japanese and Western games are becoming more similar than ever as creators on both sides of the ocean admire each other's work and start playing a game of one-upsmanship. Western devs will probably always prefer making things nonlinear while Japanese devs may always prefer the big story, but both countries love MMOs and love bringing as much depth as possible to the play experience. In the future, I really hope people stop qualifying their taste in RPGs with "East" or "West", and instead just talk about which games are good. Not all RPGs will be equally good at the same sorts of things, and that's fine. There's room in the world for Fallout 3 and FFXIII both, and for both to be considered equally as RPGs even if they end up emphasizing different features.
1. MMOs Are Still a World Apart, But They Shouldn't Be
What disappointed me about this year's E3-- and really, disappointed me last year, too-- is that the MMO representation in E3's new format is light. They were big talking points at Sony's press conference, but I'm not sure any were on the show floor to be played this year. One of the highlights I used to look forward to with E3 each year was getting to try out a bunch of weird MMOs on the floor for free. Hell, I got into upgrading my PC to gaming-level hardware because I played this NCSoft mecha MMO called Exteel and had a blast running around killing guys in it for half an hour. I dunno what became of Exteel after it came out or if it came out or what, but it left a big impression.
This year, if you saw RPGs at all, chances are they were straight-up console games or console versions of games that would also be available on the PC. You didn't see many MMOs, and I can really only lay the blame for this on the irrational MMO/console-only divide that actually seems to divide RPG fans as of late. A few years ago I visited Paris as part of a big press event for a game called Saga of Ryzom, now dead, and what struck me while I was there is how many of the other journalists were from outlets that only covered MMOs, and how few were from outlets that covered consoles and MMOs. The MMO guys seemed to speak their own language and had very different types of questions and concerns than the people from more of a console-oriented background. The MMO guys were, frankly, better at what they did as a result of their specialization, but often knew nothing about console titles.
It's sort of insane that fans of the two most popular types of RPGs frequently have very little to say to each other, even as Square-Enix is making MMOs and then implementing their mechanics in offline titles like FFXII. Hell, Diablo 3 looks like it's trying to make its graphics appeal to the World of Warcraft crowd, used to bright colors and awe-inspiring natural landscapes. And why not? At the end of the day, they're all RPGs, and all that's different is whether you choose to socialize while you play them or after you play them. MMOs are a bit more time-consuming, at least on the face of it... then again, I know guys who've sunk over 200 hours into Persona 3, so maybe not.
At next year's E3, I really want to see more MMOs on hand, and I really want to see more console jockeys being forced to play them and take them seriously. I don't see an RPG future where it's only MMOs or only single-player stuff, but one where these two genres keep influencing each other by coming up with new ideas to serve their players better. RPG needs to become a common language, one where FFXI fans still know Fallout and Fable, and WoW fans still know Dragon Quest and Shin Megami Tensei. What shouldn't happen is different types of RPGs getting ghettoized, developing too-hardcore fanbases who won't give anything new a chance and mistake influence from another great game as total innovation.
