On the Problem of Japanese RPGs

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On the Problem of Japanese RPGs

Mon, Mar 3, 2008

A few recent articles have gotten me thinking about the nature of narrative in video games and about video games as a medium. The popular distillation of Marshall McLuhan's research of media is the dictate that "the medium is the message," and if we entertain that notion for the sake of argument, it does allow an analysis of video games that is somewhat different than the usual "can it be art" argument.

Perhaps it is more appropriate to use the current favored phrase for video games and describe them as "interactive entertainment" since that gets to the heart of what video games are as a medium. The medium is not simply "video" since it incorporates that interactive element. Without that interactive element, a video game would cease to be a game at all, and it would simply be a movie or a television show. The intrinsic characteristic of video games that separates it as a medium from any other medium is the twinning of the interaction with video elements. The message carried by such a medium is one of agency. The player, within the constraints of the game environment, determines the outcome of the game. For it to be a true video game, that agency must be true agency and not just imagined agency.

Allow me to elaborate. I place in front of you a DVD player. In that DVD player, I place a copy of Casablanca. If you were able to press play and then watch Casablanca, there would be no question in your mind that you were watching a movie, right? Let's say the DVD player is broken. Every two minutes, you have to press the play button again to continue watching the movie. Aside from being annoyed at the inconvenience, would that change your perception of the type of media in front of you? Almost certainly not. You would still consider it to be a movie.

The simple addition of a binary decision to continue or not to continue the entertainment does not transform a movie into a video game. Such agency is false agency. Or, rather, it is the agency that one possesses whenever dealing with any medium. This brings me to the title of the post, a genre near and dear to my own hear, Japanese RPGs.

As one might expect with any indictment of a particular genre (or sub-genre), I am going to be somewhat reductive in my arguments. There are exceptions these statements within Japanese RPGs, but most adhere to a few well-known cliches. My real issue with Japanese RPGs (or console RPGs, depending on your perspective), is not the abundance of cliches but the lack of true agency. I don't require that every game I play have multiple endings or open sandbox environments, but the gameplay in many of those RPGs has been so streamlined, so simplified that they lack any real challenge. Designers are trying to adjust the gameplay to address this concern, but there are still RPGs out there where, aside from updating equipment, the player essentially just mashes a single button through combat (and through dialogue sequences). Either the player is forced to repeat the same action again and again to advance the story (one source of entertainment) or mash another button to skip the narrative and get back to the combat (an equally valid source of entertainment).

The fact that many such RPGs present the same stories over and over again, ad infinitum, really is not the issue. The fundamental issue is that Japanese RPGs tell relatively static stories and make those stories interactive by tacking on genre conventional gameplay. A game can only have so much of its story presented primarily through full motion videos before it loses its very game-ness. The narrative or the character development must arise out of the gameplay.

In virtually every RPG I play, I am obsessive about power-leveling and completing every side quest and side plot. In Final Fantasy XII, I was able to take power-leveling to an entirely different level. As the the combat in the game is mostly automated based on certain macros you put into place (gambits), a savvy player is able to set up a team with macros that will require virtually no intervention from the player. I pressed the analog stick to move into combat, my characters fought, and then I pressed the stick again to move to the next encounter. The open environment of the game allowed players to reach the maximum level and possess the greatest weapons before even a third of the narrative was complete. I did that. By no means would I say that such... insanity is typical. But I still did have a team of unstoppable characters before the narrative had really begun. So, between story elements, I essentially solved top down mazes like those you would find in a copy of Highlights and my over-powered characters took care of all the work. The video game became a movie with a faulty play button.

Not all Japanese RPGs can provide such extreme examples, and it's worth noting that the two of the games I consistently cite as my favorite of all time are console RPGs (Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III). Nostalgia makes experiences seem more deep and meaningful, and everything looks better in the sepia-tones of the past, but I think my steady descent into disappoint with this genre has been at its lack of evolution compared with other genres. It used to be that I could depend on better, if cliched, characterization coming from a console RPG than from a platformer or action game, but that has changed with games like Portal and Shadows of the Colossus. In many ways, these RPGs are becoming nothing more than iterative games like a sports franchise.

Unlike Madden, however, Japanese RPGs can only expect a certain level of success without the Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior monikers attached. We gamers have already lived through a fallow period of adventure games until the advent of episodic gaming brought the genre back with Sam & Max and the imminent arrival of the Penny-Arcade game. How long before the Japanese RPGs fall by the wayside as well?