Random Roar: Why I Play

 

I’ve been thinking lately on RPGs and why I play them as opposed to other genres of video games.  My first thought was that other games are harder to play than RPGs, since you can usually just grind experience points in an RPG and overpower your obstacles through sheer numbers, but that doesn’t explain why I had such a good time with games like Alan Wake, which don’t let you get away with that.  If you can’t get past a level in that game, you legitimately need to get better, and I did.  Final Fantasy XIII, meanwhile, is programmed so that you can’t overpower your obstacles with sheer numbers, you also need to get better.

So what is it about the RPG genre that I like, if it’s not the ease with which they can be played?

The numbers are indeed a part of it.  There’s something satisfying about being able to watch them gradually increase over time.  If you gain a level and now you can do an extra few points of damage, that feels like progress.  When you equip a new weapon to your character and they now have ten more points of strength, that’s progress.  Then when you go into battle and you see higher numbers than before, that’s progress.  There’s a sense that you’re getting better if you see larger numbers pop up in your next battle.

That’s how come the early stages of a game are programmed like they are.  When you start out in a Dragon Quest game, you’re usually only capable of single digit damage against enemies.  A slime takes three points of damage from you and now the slime hits back for three points.  Kill enough of them and maybe you’ll begin doing five points of damage to them and they only do two to you.  Save up enough gold from these fights to buy the Copper Sword and now you can defeat them in one hit.  There’s a significant sense of progress since slimes have so little HP, you can quickly overcome them after maybe ten minutes of play.  Eventually, you’ll be dealing a few hundred points of damage to the evil king who is spreading his darkness in the land.

Final Fantasy opts for larger damage numbers than Dragon Quest, but even then, Final Fantasy V starts with very low double digit numbers and then at the end, if you use the right abilities, you might deal 9999 points of damage in one hit.

Still, it feels great when you can deal more damage now than you could a half an hour ago.  This is why, even though as a Black Mage I’m capable of tens of thousands of damage per Fire spell, the sheer joy that Twitch streamer Asmongold took from dealing a 90 point critical hit during his first dungeon run in Final Fantasy XIV is so infectious.  It’s been great watching highlights of his streams and seeing how in love with the game he is.  That 90 point hit is exactly why I play RPGs.

RPGs also typically have a pretty good story to them, or at least the story is worth playing through, even if it’s not as deep as others.  Even if the overall package wasn’t the best, Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest was clearly doing something with its story.  The tale of a legendary hero who finds out that the prophecies driving him forward were “just a prank, bro,” that’s a legitimately brilliant subversion for 1992.  These days, there’ve been so many RPGs that it’s harder to find any with stories that really stand out, but it’s still possible, as 2019’s Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers proved (Asmongold is in for quite a ride when he gets that far).

RPGs aren’t the only with great stories.  Okami comes to mind, for example.  If you haven’t played that game, it’s available on a lot of consoles by now, which is amazing since it had such limited success during its original PlayStation 2 release.

That said, you could have the best story in the world, but if your game is not visually well designed, you’ll have a hard time keeping my attention.  That’s not to say that the graphics have to be 4K, you could have the sharpest graphics ever but if they’re not well designed or are mostly grey and more grey with brown on top, they’re not going to look very appealing to me.  The video game medium in general has a lot of potential for imaginative visuals, and making excellent use of colour is but one aspect of this.  Take a look at the following screen shot and tell me what you see.

There’s a well worn path on the ground, not that the main character of the game is planning on using it.  There’s a lush field of grass, there are plenty of colourful and distinctively designed enemies on the map.  This is basically what a visually appealing game is supposed to look like.  The sky is properly blue, there’s a tree visible in the shot, and many more nearby but which didn’t make it into the shot.  Even the user interface is designed well to stand out against the environment without looking out of place.  This is a good looking game without requiring everything look one hundred percent realistic and true to life, and if the game was designed this way but with PlayStation 2 graphics, it would look just as good.

That’s the biggest thing.  Because it wasn’t designed to look true to life, it feels more alive than if I were to look at a photo-realistic game.  It’s the imaginative worlds that RPGs are capable of that I like the most.  Even if I don’t like the rest of the game, like with Eternal Sonata, I’ll readily admit when a world looks well realized.

I love being able to journey around a world like this and figure out how to rid it of evil.  If someone wants to send everything into the void or cause a flood of darkness to swallow everything, maybe he just wants revenge for his dead lover, I love being the one who defends those who can’t defend themselves, who does the right thing for everyone who lives in the world, and then when I’m powerful enough to defeat the ultimate villain and the world is at peace again, I can look back on my adventure and bask in the glory of victory while end credits roll.

And then I look at my pile of games and know that my next adventure is just around the corner.