So we know how I feel about console roleplaying games, but how does everyone else feel? If you were to ask someone at random, you’d probably get two answers: “What?” and “Hate ‘em.” There are some traits about console roleplaying games specifically that people cannot goddamn stand, and it will be the first thing out of their mouth, even though most JRPGs today eschew the majority of these elements. But let’s talk about them, why they are there, and why the hell people hate them.
“Psh, the combat is so dumb. People just stand around waiting for their turn to hit each other? So unrealistic.”
Okay, this is just calling a fork a fork. Of course the combat is unrealistic, it was not designed to be a fair representation of how mortal dealings actually would happen. It’s all an approximation, meant to break down the conflict into easily digestible pieces that the player can observe and modify. It turns the fight into a test of wits, rather than a reflexive battle that you find in other genres.
The general format also frees up space for other stuff. For one thing, a RPG fight is easier for a processor to handle to a FPS fight. When you don’t have to worry about physics and placement and such, there’s a lot of room on the disc for other stuff, like a long, long story and a ton of different types of enemies. The format also allows for the combat to be even more varied, as the player can more readily digest what’s happening with the slow and deliberate pace, and can handle more variables. A typical roleplaying game combat is just the right environment for one who wants to approach the game as a puzzle with a lot to give.
And frankly, this complaint doesn’t make sense anymore. The “line up against each other and wait your turn” combat is no longer the norm. JRPGs on modern consoles either feature an active combat system, in which your attention and reflexes begin to matter, or employ more tactical combat, in which positioning becomes important. Only games that specifically call back to this style of play even use this mode exclusively anymore; the last modern example I can think of is Lost Odyssey. Even still, games started to move away from this way back in the SNES era, with games like Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG adding reflexive actions to vary things up. It’s an assumption about JRPGs that just isn’t true, a stereotype that just keeps getting retold without any basis.
“It is so dumb that you can’t walk down a hallway without having to fight like twenty guys! Random encounters are stupid.”
I agree! That’s why most roleplaying games don’t do them anymore. They have gone way out of fashion, a mere staple of the limitations of the hardware way back in the NES days and an imperfect emulation of being given challenges by a human gamemaster. But this is another stereotype that just doesn’t flight, and I don’t want to hear it.
It does bring up a secondary concern, for while most games do actually show you enemies on the exploration screen and let you choose or at least know when you’re going to enter a combat, it’s still pretty commonplace to not know exactly what you’re going to fight. Once you get to the battle screen, you might be greeted with more guys than you would expect. One mook becomes five, a small slime was apparently being accompanied by a minotaur, the goblin might have a hidden rocket launcher, etc. It’s silly and a bit obnoxious, and some games even try to eschew this, having all battle happen on the exploration screen, with everything you see being what you get.
I don’t think this is that bad though. A bit of surprise is vital to keeping things interesting. It may seem stupid that there was apparently a great wyrm hiding behind the dire rabbit or whatever, but the shock of a startling enemy appearance and the satisfaction of surviving a tougher than expected combat more than makes up for suspending some belief. If all elements were laid completely bare, there would be no emotion in the game, just cold analytic thought, and monsters suddenly falling from the rafters lets you know that the game is taking you for an unknown ride. It’s the same reason critical hits happen, a variable you can’t control that lets you know that while you can try to think your way out of this, you’re still playing the game by its rules.
“Why are these games so loooooong?”
Yeah, I get it. It’s a standard bullet point for more roleplaying games, and considered a dark mark if the game doesn’t take at least 50 hours of your life to get through. But who has the time, one would say? We’re all busy people, and only an anti-social nerd would have time for that. And so many of those hours are just padding! Pointless sidequests, plot cul-de-sacs, endless level grinding. They are just wasting our time, and they know it!
There are times when I can’t argue with this. I remember watching a friend play Lost Odyssey, in which he had run around with one character to pick up 10 objects, then when he completed that, he had to take another character to pick up 10 different objects. It was so pointless, and should have been cut. There are sidequests that require you to perform a certain boring action 500 times in a row, which is nonsense, and every game is guilty of long dumb hallways full of monsters for no reason whatsoever.
But the length is still a feature for many, and frankly it depends on how well it is handled. While some games, mostly FPS’s, plays themselves off like a movie, roleplaying games play themselves off as a novel or a TV series. For roleplayers, they want the game to last a long time. They want a long build-up towards an ultimate goal, the swings in victory and failure, the new information coming late in the game. If the game has a well designed narrative, you could pretty evenly slice each dungeon into specific episodes or chapters. Heck, one of my favorite RPGs (Persona 4) did just that, the game’s story being converted into an anime on air now.
It’s a matter of preference. Some people want to spend weeks being taken through a complex story over weeks, and some people want a quick one-two punchy story that will take a few hours. It’s just easier to make roleplaying games really long, so that’s what they do.
“Why do the stories have so much weeaboo anime bullshit?”
This is just a cultural thing, really. They’re called Japanese roleplaying games for a reason; most are developed in Japan, and a vast majority of them don’t come this way. There are a lot of things they do differently there, things that just don’t make sense to the Western world, and I’m not going to try to explain them, because frankly I don’t know that much.
I will agree that some plot points are superdumb, and sometimes the voice acting or production is really poor. But frankly that’s just due to constraints on the medium. They have a lot of material that needs to be written and recording, twice if it’s being ported, and there might just not be enough money or time to get it right, because these things aren’t that popular. If the fanbase was much larger, the quality would be better. If the parts you are there for are engaging enough, you tend to look past those things. And hell, if you are there for the wacky bits, more power to you, I guess.
All in all, the Complaint comes down to just a general misunderstanding of why people play roleplaying games in the first place. People who like roleplaying games like them because they are long, engrossing stories with gameplay that rewards those who think through their options and utilize their resources; an experience that rewards perseverance. The rewarding feeling of getting through all those hours, handling every boss fight, putting up with every failure, enduring each obnoxious cutscene, is what we’re reaching for. If it is one thing that roleplaying games never seem to do is go out with a shrug. It is always huge, and it is always hard, and it just feels so much better when it takes you 80 damn hours to get there.
So they can complain all they want. I’m sorry to hear they have their misconceptions, but they aren't going to change how I approach these games. With gritted teeth and an engaged mind.
“Psh, the combat is so dumb. People just stand around waiting for their turn to hit each other? So unrealistic.”
Okay, this is just calling a fork a fork. Of course the combat is unrealistic, it was not designed to be a fair representation of how mortal dealings actually would happen. It’s all an approximation, meant to break down the conflict into easily digestible pieces that the player can observe and modify. It turns the fight into a test of wits, rather than a reflexive battle that you find in other genres.
The general format also frees up space for other stuff. For one thing, a RPG fight is easier for a processor to handle to a FPS fight. When you don’t have to worry about physics and placement and such, there’s a lot of room on the disc for other stuff, like a long, long story and a ton of different types of enemies. The format also allows for the combat to be even more varied, as the player can more readily digest what’s happening with the slow and deliberate pace, and can handle more variables. A typical roleplaying game combat is just the right environment for one who wants to approach the game as a puzzle with a lot to give.
And frankly, this complaint doesn’t make sense anymore. The “line up against each other and wait your turn” combat is no longer the norm. JRPGs on modern consoles either feature an active combat system, in which your attention and reflexes begin to matter, or employ more tactical combat, in which positioning becomes important. Only games that specifically call back to this style of play even use this mode exclusively anymore; the last modern example I can think of is Lost Odyssey. Even still, games started to move away from this way back in the SNES era, with games like Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG adding reflexive actions to vary things up. It’s an assumption about JRPGs that just isn’t true, a stereotype that just keeps getting retold without any basis.
“It is so dumb that you can’t walk down a hallway without having to fight like twenty guys! Random encounters are stupid.”
I agree! That’s why most roleplaying games don’t do them anymore. They have gone way out of fashion, a mere staple of the limitations of the hardware way back in the NES days and an imperfect emulation of being given challenges by a human gamemaster. But this is another stereotype that just doesn’t flight, and I don’t want to hear it.
It does bring up a secondary concern, for while most games do actually show you enemies on the exploration screen and let you choose or at least know when you’re going to enter a combat, it’s still pretty commonplace to not know exactly what you’re going to fight. Once you get to the battle screen, you might be greeted with more guys than you would expect. One mook becomes five, a small slime was apparently being accompanied by a minotaur, the goblin might have a hidden rocket launcher, etc. It’s silly and a bit obnoxious, and some games even try to eschew this, having all battle happen on the exploration screen, with everything you see being what you get.
I don’t think this is that bad though. A bit of surprise is vital to keeping things interesting. It may seem stupid that there was apparently a great wyrm hiding behind the dire rabbit or whatever, but the shock of a startling enemy appearance and the satisfaction of surviving a tougher than expected combat more than makes up for suspending some belief. If all elements were laid completely bare, there would be no emotion in the game, just cold analytic thought, and monsters suddenly falling from the rafters lets you know that the game is taking you for an unknown ride. It’s the same reason critical hits happen, a variable you can’t control that lets you know that while you can try to think your way out of this, you’re still playing the game by its rules.
“Why are these games so loooooong?”
Yeah, I get it. It’s a standard bullet point for more roleplaying games, and considered a dark mark if the game doesn’t take at least 50 hours of your life to get through. But who has the time, one would say? We’re all busy people, and only an anti-social nerd would have time for that. And so many of those hours are just padding! Pointless sidequests, plot cul-de-sacs, endless level grinding. They are just wasting our time, and they know it!
There are times when I can’t argue with this. I remember watching a friend play Lost Odyssey, in which he had run around with one character to pick up 10 objects, then when he completed that, he had to take another character to pick up 10 different objects. It was so pointless, and should have been cut. There are sidequests that require you to perform a certain boring action 500 times in a row, which is nonsense, and every game is guilty of long dumb hallways full of monsters for no reason whatsoever.
But the length is still a feature for many, and frankly it depends on how well it is handled. While some games, mostly FPS’s, plays themselves off like a movie, roleplaying games play themselves off as a novel or a TV series. For roleplayers, they want the game to last a long time. They want a long build-up towards an ultimate goal, the swings in victory and failure, the new information coming late in the game. If the game has a well designed narrative, you could pretty evenly slice each dungeon into specific episodes or chapters. Heck, one of my favorite RPGs (Persona 4) did just that, the game’s story being converted into an anime on air now.
It’s a matter of preference. Some people want to spend weeks being taken through a complex story over weeks, and some people want a quick one-two punchy story that will take a few hours. It’s just easier to make roleplaying games really long, so that’s what they do.
“Why do the stories have so much weeaboo anime bullshit?”
This is just a cultural thing, really. They’re called Japanese roleplaying games for a reason; most are developed in Japan, and a vast majority of them don’t come this way. There are a lot of things they do differently there, things that just don’t make sense to the Western world, and I’m not going to try to explain them, because frankly I don’t know that much.
I will agree that some plot points are superdumb, and sometimes the voice acting or production is really poor. But frankly that’s just due to constraints on the medium. They have a lot of material that needs to be written and recording, twice if it’s being ported, and there might just not be enough money or time to get it right, because these things aren’t that popular. If the fanbase was much larger, the quality would be better. If the parts you are there for are engaging enough, you tend to look past those things. And hell, if you are there for the wacky bits, more power to you, I guess.
All in all, the Complaint comes down to just a general misunderstanding of why people play roleplaying games in the first place. People who like roleplaying games like them because they are long, engrossing stories with gameplay that rewards those who think through their options and utilize their resources; an experience that rewards perseverance. The rewarding feeling of getting through all those hours, handling every boss fight, putting up with every failure, enduring each obnoxious cutscene, is what we’re reaching for. If it is one thing that roleplaying games never seem to do is go out with a shrug. It is always huge, and it is always hard, and it just feels so much better when it takes you 80 damn hours to get there.
So they can complain all they want. I’m sorry to hear they have their misconceptions, but they aren't going to change how I approach these games. With gritted teeth and an engaged mind.
I just don't find enough fun to put up with the parts I don't find fun. I tried Final Fantasy VII, since many people tell me that's one of the high points, and, well, I got some way in, and was starting to get the hang of it, when a bad translation in a boss fight caused the game to tell me to commit suicide. I tried again, and got to a point where all of a sudden it went into adventure-game logic. At that point, I hadn't really had any fun, and I decided that JRPGs just didn't match my tastes.
ReplyDelete