You need to tap into universal, mythic themes, I think. Characters as archetypes a player can quickly cast themselves in; Passage embodies this.
Or we look at microfiction techniques, which…I leave it to others whose knowledge extends beyond Hemingway (who of course preferred abstract characters for this reason)
I think there’s something to this.
For Final Fantasy.
And probably other RPGs.
But–
Games can have many different kinds of large-sized impacts and I don’t think they’re always correlated to length. They’re definitely not always correlated to length.
An issue with some short games–like some short indie RPGs–is they are stuck in the narrative and systemic confines of the epic scope of, say, a Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, but don’t have the resources or skill to pull of something that matches that. They haven’t appropriately recalibrated their aesthetics (mechanical, visual, narrative, whatever) of the form they aspire to (a lot of small games languish in mimicry of larger games). A boss who you face after a game’s one dungeon and five cakewalk mini-goon fights acknowledging your skill because you’ve made it “so far” after your quest began just 8 minutes ago is ridiculous. If the game properly contextualizes such a fight by using the myriad tools for emotional engagement available to the game-maker (including judicious uses of generic and intertextual formalistic references), perhaps they can make it feel earned though.
And then, the mere form of RPGs are structured as such to deliver their emotional impact as a result of struggle with the same party of characters against the same foe. Games that set their sights elsewhere can and should have an entirely different valence. Struggle might not enter into it at all.
(I just posted about Ghosts in the Shortwave in the itch thread, a game that takes <10 minutes to “beat” and is entirely absent of challenge, but I think is going to stick with me as an impactful emotional experience for longer than games I’ve spent weeks with (and is 100% bound up in its form as a game).)
Asking whether “a game that ends in 5 minutes with the same sort of impact as a Final Fantasy?” feels to me like asking whether a short story can land with the same kind of impact as a novel. Or a series of novels. Or whether a short film can deliver the same kind of emotional experience as a feature. Maybe not, but, actually also absolutely yes.
Barkley and Space Funeral have emotionally affected me more than any other jrpg short of maybe the Mother series.
It’s not about length.
Oh, yeah, in case it sounds like I was trying to say RPGs have to be epic in length and scope to be affecting, I didn’t mean that. But that the network of texts in the genre tend toward people producing small RPGs that don’t properly cope with their smallness. But Space Funeral and Barkley absolutely do.
Me too and I feel like this has helped me develop a healthier relationship to finding games that I actually want to spend time with and playing them and engaging with them to the level that I want.
There are a handful of big games I’ll pick up the year they’re released (Nier Automata or Sekiro), but, Idk, I kind of didn’t play games much between 2003 and 2008 and only bought a PS2 in 2008 and there’s SO MANY cool and interesting games I never played to catch up on.
A follow-up for this topic:
I “beat” TIS-100 today in that I finished the final puzzle and got what the game considers to be an ending. The thing is that the game allows you to skip a few puzzles and still be able to take the final challenge; I never make use of this. That said, the second to last puzzle looks like a cruel joke and checking online the impression is that it is the one “main quest” puzzle that takes things a bit too far (apparently creating a sorting algorithm in such a limited toolset is considered by some to be more work than fun, I don’t even know what a sorting algorithm is). I spent some time pondering how I’d even start to tackle it, said fuck it and just did the final one instead.
The creator of the game thinks this is fine as he put in the ability to skip some puzzles and still have things unlock as long as you don’t skip too many. Even most of the fans of the game are in the “it’s a game, skip any that seem like too much or no fun” camp.
Me? It leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. What I learned from The Witness, a game I loved until I forced myself to play through the final few hours I spent with it that I hated, is that one has to know when to step away. And yet…
So I spent about an hour afterwards working on that skipped puzzle, my personal rule being that if I ever stop making real progress or hit a point where my rough idea isn’t gonna work or would require a major rewrite then I say “oh well” and leave it be. I stopped earlier today at a point where I missed something in accounting for a second loop that I think I can fix by making use of a nearby empty node (don’t ask), but the fact that it even worked a little bit so far is almost a kind of bad news.
Meanwhile I played through the first season of Hitman, beat each mission only once (well I did one a second time as I wanted to try something) and am doing the Sarajevo Six extras that came with it. When they are done I will put the game down despite not seeing most of what it can do without a second thought.
My brain is weird.
That sorting puzzle was a doozy for me (and for my non-programming buddy); I had to rewrite twice because I kept running out of space. I think my buddy had to rewrite once. Hope you get it easier than that!