[quote=“seven, post:35, topic:421, full:true”]
master of the wind (eventually someone else will play this)[/quote]
[quote=“seven”]
Most RPGs, despite their focus on story, feel
impersonal and soul-deadening to me: you slaughter waves of generic
creatures to make numbers go up, and the characters are often incidental
to that. Every other RPG I’ve played choose to leave their characters
shallow and one-dimensional despite their length, even the games whose
writing I love, like Earthbound. Master of the Wind
is the only RPG I’ve played that I felt took full advantage of its
length: like a long-running TV show, the game’s length gives the
characters time to become familiar, reflect and develop.[/quote]
Making numbers go up is at least something you have an influence on. It is the only way to express yourself, your personality, inside the game. Characters developed through story are always not your characters. They’re imposed. I play games first and foremost because of the choices they give me, and story in JRPGs has nothing to do with choice. Why would I want to click away text boxes, when I could be making decisions instead? Why would I ever want to play a JRPG that focuses on telling a story and letting its characters develop (on their own, without my input)? Why would I want to spend time in a dialogue tree, instead of in an infinitely more complex battle SYSTEM?
Those are the questions I asked when I joined my first forum a decade ago. It was an RPG Maker forum. And sometimes I am able to convince myself that I got smarter since then and grew out of that judgmental mindset. I mean, I still don’t much care for Mother 3 right now, but I can see why people care, and why video games that don’t appeal to me don’t have to be bad games. Because I have shitty taste. I play too many racing games. Maybe because they’re such “choice in the moment” games, going somewhere as fast as I can, wrestling with my physical self 60 times a second. But it is not my physical self. It is just an image on a screen. And I can forget that. But when I take a moment, I realize that making machines go in circles all the time can be deadening to my soul. And while JRPGs can’t mask their “loneliness”, because not being alone means interacting with another sentient being*, and all these “beings” in JRPGs are just uninteractive facades, they’re better at hiding it than the cars in my racing games (disregarding Choro Qs). Maybe I let my copy of Mother 3 sit on top of my GBA games stash for a while longer. Maybe there will be a time when I can find pleasure in it, after going around in circles for so long.
: The moment I start playing a video game RPG for the characters instead of the battle system is when they manage to include convincingly intricate NPCs. Which requires human-like AI. At which point ethical concerns will make playing video game RPGs more uncanny than any graphical depiction ever could. Actually sentient beings coming to life and dying at my hands, I am god. Prepare for the terrifying future of arrpeegees! When’s the singularity again? The Elder Scrolls* 8?
**: I still regard Morrowind as the most draining video game experience of my life. A meticulously crafted facade becoming transparent, revealing its shallowness right before my eyes. And I guess JRPGs don’t try as hard to make their world seem like a living, breathing system. They haven’t entered the uncanny valley of WRPG open world simulations. Maybe just being told a nice story isn’t so bad.