Narrative Texture and Modern Warfare

I know we all hate Call of Duty (or are we too busy hating Mass Effect now?) and that it’s going to ruin games for us all with its un-gameness (un-gaminess? un-gamification?) but let’s set that aside for a moment and look at something it does pretty well.  Each of the Modern Warfare titles is structured as a series of levels all around the world.  They follow two parallel series of events: a macro-plot as well as a micro-plot.  On the small scale the player will follow Soap and Captain Price on missions both personal and professional in nature and on the larger scale the player jumps from the perspective of any number of people that are caught up in the series’ fictional war.  On its face it can seem like those larger scale missions are thinly veiled excuses to blow stuff up around the world and partake in digital war tourism.   However, it’s a structure worth emulating in other titles though as it plays to the strength of the medium in a way that movies cannot.  While a movie-goer’s experience is almost inexorably tied to the character arc of the protagonist(s) and the plot, games like Modern Warfare can have the player stop and take detours to absorb the surrounding texture of the world and story.  Modern Warfare’s micro and macro plots will occasionally cross paths but Soap and Price’s objectives are clearly separated from the broader conflict by the series finale.

With a series such as Gears of War, the player is locked into the plot of Marcus and Dom in a manner that’s more consistent with film, but requiring a couple dozen hours to complete.  (As a note, I have only played through Gears 3, and have otherwise read up on and spoiled Gear 1 and 2 for myself.)  All of the broader events are filtered through their perspective and only made meaningful where they acknowledge meaning.  There’s plenty of spectacle to see in the world of Gears but by the end of the series it’s exhausting and narrow.  What Modern Warfare does is have you follow along with the protagonists for periods of time and then turns  around and tells you to “go over here and do this for a while.”  What this accomplishes is it allows the player to better absorb the context of the scenario.  Rather than relying on flashbacks to fill the player in on the protagonist’s motivations, the game exposes the player to experiences that are similar in nature to what the protagonist(s) has/have experienced.  So when the player ultimately returns to the protagonist’s perspective, what unfolds in the micro-plot becomes something that’s not only meaningful through the eyes of the protagonist but in regards to the player’s own experience as well.

Spoilers ensue: This is what made the series finale so dramatic.  After spending hours and hours in the macro-plot evaluating the battle field and gauging when to charge or hold back (or being caught off guard by an enemy that you missed) Yuri and Price don bomb suits and take on an army of Makarov’s body guards.  After the broader war has subsided the player is forced to take on one of the most intense missions of the series against an enemy whose wrath you’ve been able to witness up close (No Russian) and from far away (the invasion of the United States.)  It would not have been the same if, as a game, Modern Warfare didn’t have the liberty to send the player to participate in events unrelated to the main plot.  And games can afford to do this since the audience is a participant rather than just a consumer of the story, even if only following other character’s AI.  An audience only has so much patience to have a story told to them, but if they are occupied with game play that’s consistent between multiple plots then there is a great deal more leeway to explore the world surrounding the story and that colors the character’s personalities and motivations.  It doesn’t have involve war, guns, and explosions, it’s just a different approach to storytelling that lives well in games and that Modern Warfare executed very well.

What happened to the jRPG?

Surveying the ruins of the jRPG genre has been a small hobby of mine over the last few years.  I’ve been revisiting much of the Final Fantasy series and following how it’s tried to fit in to the modern gaming landscape.  It’s fairly clear that even jRPG juggernauts have had difficulty doing that.  In any case, these games are anything but prolific compared to 10-15 years ago.  They occupied a space in the collective gaming consciousness that games like Modern Warfare occupy today: we couldn’t get enough of it.  It was clear though, then and now, that the genre has its flaws which Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 have sought to address.  Turn-based combat, random encounters, melodramatic plots, and linear gameplay are pointed to as reasons for the decline of the genre.  It’s also been pointed out that developing an HD jRPG of the same size and scale of those of previous generations would take a disproportionate amount of time and resources compared to other genres.

I’d like to suggest another contributing reason to why the market for jRPGs has atrophied: the value of the jRPG has declined as the internet has expanded.  It might be hard to believe, but there was once a time when we connected to the internet using “modems” and you couldn’t talk on the phone while you did it.  You might be able to download a few MP3s in an evening, and if you were lucky they really were the tracks that the internet said they were.   Around this time, gamers were impressed when a game was going to be released that was three or four discs long.  It was an incredible deal, you got enough music to fill four CDs, 50+ hours of gameplay, hours of movie quality cut scenes, and an entire world to live in while you waited for stuff to download.  I think of jRPGs as a more passive experience when compared to western RPGs or other games.  The player mostly sat back and took in the world, doing what they wanted when they wanted rather than being about the player expressing themselves in and impacting that world.  jRPG designers were determined to douse/smother you in content while the real world was still dependent on narrow-band or meat-pace content delivery systems.  Your options for entertainment were limited, expensive, and required you to be seated in front of a low-res screens.  jRPGs, for receptive audiences, thrived in a moment in time when people were hungry for more.

It didn’t matter if their anime-style plots were ridiculous and melodramatic, or that the game followed a strictly linear plot, or if the core gameplay was selecting menu options and taking turns hurting each other; jRPGs were a refuge from a world suffering from a dearth of content.   Eventually we got Youtube, Wikipedia, Google, Netflix, Facebook, and other sites along with 24/7 access to the internet that’s available on your phone, where you are mere moments away at any given time from being able to access libraries of movies and music.  The floodgates of commercial, and user-generated content were opened, and the advantage that the jRPG genre once held evaporated.  The cracks in the formula became more apparent.  Quantity over quality was far less attractive, and the things that made a jRPG fun to play quickly became things that made them annoying.  Why should I bother to sit down in front of a TV for 50 hours to access a game world’s content when I can just watch Youtube on my phone while simultaneously doing something else?  The ratio of time to quality entertainment was diminished compared to what we could find on the internet on the whole.

Obviously there are still games that people are willing to sink inordinate amounts of time into enjoying.  But these are games that put the player in a more active role or offer a deeper social element.  Shoveling heaps of content onto the player in the form of towns, movies, monsters, and music isn’t as easy to justify now when it must be in HD or be fully orchestrated.  The value of the genre has gone down, while the costs of producing these games has gone up.  They succeeded in a narrow-band world and there are still qualities of the genre that remain strong today, but they can’t hope to succeed the same way that they once did and so now they flounder.  They don’t need to be re-invented – developers and publishers need to figure out how to build one that fits in as part of someone’s life and not something that demands a great deal of undivided attention.  They’ve found moderate success on mobile platforms, and that should be a good indicator that there are yet good opportunities to push the genre forward.  But while there are even better opportunities to build Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Mass Effect I won’t hold my breath waiting for a HD remake of Final Fantasy VII.  The moment for jRPGs has passed unless developers find a clever way to re-interpret their past value.

I didn’t see the forest for the trees

I really enjoyed my first play though of Red Dead Redemption. I thought it was a beautifully crafted sandbox that was as close to being a time machine to the early 20th century as I would ever see.  It bugged me how John Marston felt incomplete as a character though. He was a broken record that constantly repeated “I used to ride in a gang.” and “Where’s my family?” As far as he was portrayed in the game’s story, Marston was a one-dimensional character in a narrative that hit one note over and over and over again.  None the less, I loved playing RDR in spite of that.

As more time passes I look more and more fondly back on the experience and wonder if I should hold the weak narrative against it. Sure, trudging around Mexico was dull, but I was free to do what I wanted and play through the game’s narrative at will. Perhaps it’s not fair to hold video game narratives to the same standard as for films or novels. After all, in those mediums the characters and narrative are really all you have. If those aren’t crafted well then you better be providing good prose or interesting imagery. However, with games in general, and Red Dead Redemption in particular, characters and narrative can simply serve as a means to encourage the player to engage the game’s world and its verbs.

John Marston could have purposefully been kept vague in his personality. The traits the game offers only have to be detailed enough to evoke the images of cowboys and outlaws in the player’s mind and then letting him or her project the rest of the picture in their mind. The game merely starts telling a story until the player is excited enough about it to finish telling it themselves. There doesn’t need to be a “Citizen Kane” with a story to ties up neatly with a bow. I would have been interested to learn more about John Marston but I’m realizing that it didn’t really matter while reflecting on how much I enjoyed playing the game.  Having a well told story in a game is a great way to make it engaging, but its not the only way.

Destructoid CBlog: Aaamaazing: The Otherworld

This month, over at Destructoid’s community blogs the theme is aaamaazing games and thrown my two cents into the mix with Silent Hill, a game that to this day still creeps me out.  A lot.  You can check out the post at Destructoid, or click through to read it here.

So what if games aren’t art?

Are you upset that Roger Ebert said that games aren’t art?  So what?  They might not be, and it’s not worth getting hung up over.  Debating over the perceived artfulness of video games only distracts the gaming community from having more meaningful discussions of what the medium can offer.  It feels like gamers are ready to retaliate against the Eberts of the world at the drop of a hat.  We’ve got lots of speeches of how games get us all choked up, change our lives, and how digital interactivity is the future.  So what?  Would it really be so bad if games aren’t art?  Do we really need to spin our wheels assuming that if we can’t compare video games to great art, then they are just a waste of time?

It’s true, games are expensive and time consuming, and it’s difficult to put into words why grown adults would choose to invest so much into what’s widely seen as children’s entertainment.  Gamers have grown up and they want their games to grow up with them.  Art is about as far removed from juvenile amusement as can be.  If games are art then we can talk to each other without having to feel like there are probably better things we can be doing with our time.  Personally, after several years of this debate, I feel that many of the arguments in favor of games-are-art are crafted out of fear rather than of love for the medium.  But so what?  Art is one narrow aspect of culture, and we’re trying to pigeonhole games to fit the definition of art.  One recurring theme I’ve seen in these discussions is that games can be beautiful, and if something can be beautiful then it can also be art.  Art and art history isn’t exactly my field of study, but I think it’s reasonable to point out that while most art is “beautiful” in some way, all things that are beautiful are not necessarily art.

A mountain can be beautiful.  A city skyline can be beautiful as well.  But they aren’t art.  Beauty can emerge from nature and circumstance.  This is what games can more closely resemble than art.  A team of designers, artists, and developers may work toward their collective idea of what the game should become.  But there is not a singular vision of what the end product will be that the game’s “artist” can act on or express.  The “beauty” of a game depends on the sum of the team’s skill and directing the beauty that emerges from it.

You will still find people who respect and appreciate things like mountains and city skylines as fervently as others do of art.  Similarly, games can be more than toys without achieving the status of high art.  I still believe that some games may be art, or that games can eventually become art, but gamers shouldn’t let people like Roger Ebert dictate the parameters of the discussion.  Trying to fit games into a definition of art is biting off more than can be chewed.  It leads people to believe that we need to try too hard and makes them ashamed of games that don’t meet that standard.  So, while core gamers are too busy trying to force the square peg through the round hole, games like Angry Birds and Farmville may just pull the rug out from underneath the core gaming industry.  While we’re asking the world to be more open-minded about games, we may also end up being more close-minded about them ourselves.

Info Dumps and The Fresh Prince

There was one thing in particular that I loved about Metro 2033.  And that was the lack of info dumps: protracted scenes that the writer/director/android feels that the audience has to know before continuing the game.  Metro presents a world that could have spawned hours and hours of non-interactive cut sequences that provide answers to questions like…

A) How has the world ended?
B) What was Artyom’s life like growing up underground, surrounded by monsters?
C) How have the mutants and “dark ones” come into being?
D) Why can Artyom communicate with the “Dark Ones” through his mind?
E) Who are the rangers?
F) So on.
G) And so forth.

Few of these questions are answered directly.  Metro 2033 leaves you to either speculate on the answers to these questions through short pre-level narratives or through environmental dialogue, such as in the example below:

The story of Metro’s world emerges naturally.  In the previous scene, it just happened that you come across someone who was retelling their own story of how the world came crashing down around him.  You might miss a scene like that entirely, but that moment of discovery is something special in a game, where the player can feel that they’ve uncovered something important for themselves rather than having it thrust upon them.  Finding details like that becomes a game in and of itself.  But yet, sometimes, the answers are simply left to the audience’s imagination, which has the ability to be far more vivid than any number of polygons can hope to be.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that the entire story should be emergent in a game, but when info dumps reach the scale of Metal Gear Solid 4′s, or Final Fantasy XIII’s, playing the game feels more like having a having a mediocre bed time story read to you by an android (who also happened to write it.)   Nothing is left for the player to think over that’s immediately relevant to the plot at hand; only abstract subjects like fate and war.  It’s exhausting, disengaging, and leaves little more for the player to look for outside what is thrown in their way.

When so much content is fed directly to the audience then it stands to reason that perhaps the writer doesn’t trust the audience to collect that information on their own.  Undoubtedly because there is just too much information the consume and digest, or it’s too confusing to arrange the details in a meaningful way.  So it is pre-packaged and dumped on regular intervals.  It ought to be an indication that the scope of content being presented should be narrowed or revised.  Or it’s a warning sign that the underlying plot is floundering.

So I’d like to propose a rule of thumb when considering if an info dump is just going to be too much: if it takes longer to convey the required information than it does to play the intro for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, then you’re probably doing it wrong.  If the idea you want to present using an info dump takes that much time then either break it apart, boil it down, or leave it in the environment for the player to find on their own. Otherwise, you’re making a movie, and it needs to be written and edited like one (which generally isn’t the case.)  And that still won’t make the game intrinsically any better.  Consider the following comparisons; which one keeps your attention?

Example #1: Final Fantasy XIII

Example #2: Metal Gear Solid 4

The rule isn’t meant to suggest that players have a limited attention span, but info dumps conflict with the natural appeal of games.  The intro to Fresh Prince conveys to the audience all the critical details that they need to know to enjoy the show, which is exactly what info dumps should accomplish in games: telling you what you need to know to enjoy the game (not its story.)  You can substitute The Fresh Prince intro with anything else that’s brief and to the point, but I think it does a good job of putting things into perspective.  It cuts down overwrought scenes in games that believe that their epic posturing gives them license to overwhelm the audience with nonsense.  It doesn’t.  The Fresh Prince has a better story and all it’s about is a 90′s goof ball going to live with rich people.  Either narrow the focus of the content being presented, or cut it out.  Too much time and effort gets wasted in trying to make games into movies.

Bonus Track

It’s over, Dr. Fetus. You win.

I give up.  I’m not even going to try to beat the last level anymore. I might be able to do it eventually if I put enough time into it, and if I weren’t a baby. But I’ve got other games I want to play, and I’m afraid that in trying to force myself to complete that last level, I will just grow to hate the game (see image above.)  The question has become: do I ruin my fun with a game for the sake of completion, or do I give up and say it was fun while it lasted?  But after I put it like that, the answer felt obvious.  Why should I drive the game straight into the ground if I’ve already had enough fun.

Most of the games I played (and loved) when I was younger I never actually finished, and I never particularly felt like I was missing out on something. I’ve never actually completed Super Mario Bros., but I don’t hold that against it.  I reached a point where I couldn’t progress any further in Little Nemo: Dream Master, but I still love that game to death.  And during my first go around in Final Fantasy VI (spoiler alert) I just quit after your party fails to save the world, you wake up isolate on an island, the only other inhabitant dies, and your character attempts to kill herself out of despair.  (End Spoilers) It was an exceptionally depressing twist after investing 20+ hours, though it was an acceptable way for the game to end in my mind, and that’s how I left it for a number of years.

I can only speculate that the compulsion to beat every game you play came about as the gaming community emerged online in the last decade.  No one wants to admit to being the gaming noob that had met his/her match, only to then have somebody else come along and gloat about their leet gaming skillz.  And now, most games cater to that mindset, leaving no gamer behind.  Flavor is sacrificed for inoffensiveness, or flexible difficulty.  I don’t want to come off sounding like every game should brutalize the audience, but I prefer Super Meat Boy’s aggressive style over a more muted, yet smooth experience.  You shouldn’t have to finish a game for it to have been worth playing at all.

Do you play games because they are fun, or for fun?

Scale size Enterprise D in Minecraft? Probably just for fun.

This might sound like a silly question, but I think it draws an important distinction in determining what games we decide to play and enjoy. A game succeeds when it convinces someone to voluntarily exchange their time to act within the game’s arbitrary set of rules and constraints which are, by design, inconsequential as far as the player’s day-to-day life is concerned. (Though it is possible for incidental consequences as a result of gaming: socialization, anti-social behavior, procrastination, better hand-eye coordination, etc. But none of these are the primary function of the game.) When you think of fun though, what comes to mind? At least for myself, it’s light hearted experiences centering around amusement: blowing people away in an online FPS, making cute avatars do silly things that go beep and boop, building a castle, knocking it over, creeping around a virtual haunted house, or challenging friends to battles of wits and reflex. Games that are fun are amusing ways to spend your time, but is this an adequate definition for the range of reasons that gamers will engross themselves in virtual worlds?

Now, consider some of the things that people do for fun. Chances are that there are many examples of things that are not necessarily amusing in nature. I used to run as part of a cross country team. I was terrible at meets because I had asthma, but at the middle school level, it wasn’t a big deal.  And getting up at 6:30 in the morning and running for miles at a time was something I did at the time for fun. I don’t know what I was thinking. Running wasn’t “fun” in the amusement sense of the word (the asthma made sure of that), but it was enjoyable for reasons I can’t quantify. I can see myself playing games for similarly vague reasons and wrote at length about Silent Hill 2 and how the game was satisfying without being fun or amusing. It’s a game that I played for fun, meaning for no particular reason other than I felt like it. I attempted to rationalize why I played it in the previously linked post, but at the time I had no better idea why than I did when I was half-way killing myself to run for cross country. People are compelled to do many things that aren’t amusing but compelling none the less.

We are used to a video game industry that began by marketing to children, and amusement is a key part of that market.  But amusement is one means to the end of a good game; a means that can be interchanged with any number of design strategies which still can appeal to a gaming audience.  Amusement has been central to gaming’s success, but it’s not paramount.  A game that can entice its audience to engage and interact with it is a successful one.

Making Random Battles Fun?

I know that this is the burning question in everybody’s mind this time of year.  Actually, Entertainment Weekly took care of the real burning question: Is Kirby’s Epic Yarn the worst game of the year?  But now that that’s out of the way, we can settle down and discuss random battles, which even people who love JRPGs will admit, are even worse than Epic Yarn.

It’s not that battles being random is the problem: they aren’t random.  They occur on a semi-consistent interval which the player is aware of.  If being random were the problem, then games like Left 4 Dead, a game that throws hordes of zombies at you at unpredictable intervals, would be terrible.  What’s bad about these battles is that they change the entire game on a dime every couple of minutes, and there’s nothing that you can do about it.   It’s like being the passenger in a car being driven by someone who is constantly jerking the brakes.  In either case, the experiencing is infuriating, and JRPGs are entirely unplayable for some audiences.  As a device in a game, it’s a relic from a time when there was technically no other way to design the transition and relationship between battle and field mode.

But really, why should anyone give a crap about this sort of thing now.  JRPGs were for people who had a high tolerance for pain.  It takes an obscene amount of time and effort to build an HD JRPG world?  But there are new opportunities.  10 year old+ JRPGs are being re-released and someone still wants to buy them.  (This may just be a sign of how poor the selection at PSN is though.  Never-the-less, people still throw money at these games.)  Dragon Quest has found success and a new home in the portable market.   And there is burgeoning potential for them in the mobile app market as well.   But there’s no reason to still rely on random battles as a staple feature of JRPG style games.  There is still ample interest in the genre, though the audience is weary from awkward game mechanics that should have been left in the past.

Some games have side-stepped the problem altogether (e.g. Chrono Trigger) but maybe designers can take a cue from gamification and turn the drudgery of random battles make the whole scheme feel more like a game, as opposed to a form of hazing.  Here is how I might imagine this happening.

Notebook time!

First off, don’t even load battle mode if the player has decided that they are just going to flee once it commences.  The load/transition time is constant, and when the player isn’t going to even bother with it they will essentially disengage from the game until it has returned to field mode.  The player may not want to be distracted from their task at hand, or may not want to spend a lot of time fighting.  If they should sustain a penalty during escape (characters don’t usually escape immediately in JRPGs and run in place while taking a few hits first) then there’s no reason not to do this is field mode in order to minimize unnecessary transitions.

The game should provide the player with a sense of control.  The risks and rewards of random encounters should be managed as part of the field mode.  I would suggest something along the lines of this model: HUD elements can be seen on one side of the screen indicating the estimated number of enemies in a room.  Another element shown close by will indicate when an enemy is nearing.  If the party is aware of it sooner, they can engage it at will, and even attempt to pre-emptively strike it/them.  A button press will bring up the options to strike, or evade.  In either case, a numeric value is presented alongside the estimated number of enemies in the room.

The player can “roll” dice in an attempt to obtain a value higher than the value for the option that they select. Successfully rolling higher for strike will allow for a pre-emptive strike. Otherwise a normal battle ensues. Successfully rolling higher for evade will allow the party to escape the pursuing enemy entirely. If lower, then the risk for engagement is increased as a penalty, and the enemy will reach the party even more quickly than they would have the player had moved normally.

Eventually, the enemy catches up to the party. The player can then decide to engage immediately or roll to escape. Escape is also presented with a numeric value. Roll higher and the party evades the enemy entirely. Roll short and the battle begins. If the player rolls a one, then the enemy will strike preemptively, leaving the player at a disadvantage. A timer will decrease while the player decides what to do. If they take too long, then the enemy will preemptively strike. Defeating an enemy will gradually reduce the “estimated enemies” in the room. When this reaches zero, the room is clear and no more random battles take place. An option to engage enemies at will might be made available.

By introducing these rules and mechanics, the player can feel less like they are fighting against the game itself, and more like they are actually playing a game.  There’s no reason for these games to tie themselves to the technical limitations of the 8-bit era.  Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between elements of JRPGs that are essential to genre itself, and what ought to be discarded.  It may just be wishful thinking on my part to hope that the entire genre isn’t discarded.  I’ll cross my fingers in any case, and curse random battles as I play through Final Fantasy IX again.

The Past Success of jRPGs

I’ve recently finished replaying Chrono Trigger, and begun playing Final Fantasy IX again.  The last five or so years haven’t been good for jRPGs (I can’t say I’ve played any newer ones, save for Lost Odyssey, or maybe Crisis Core) and they are easy pickings for criticism.  Their flaws have been made very clear by an exasperated community.  And even genre behemoths like Final Fantasy have had to do some serious soul searching to keep up with other more recently popular genres.  But when I’ve picked up older games from the genre (e.g. Chrono Trigger, or Final Fantasy IX) these flaws seem to be besides the point.

It’s my own opinion that neither gamers, nor developers really understood what made jRPGs popular.  Gamers were so engrossed with these games that they even became fanatically devoted to some of them.  From my own experience in that particular corner of the community, characters and “epic” stories allegedly drove their popularity.  The character’s struggles were adopted as the player’s own, and developers cranked out a ton of jRPGs based on what gamers claimed that they wanted.

Final Fantasy XIII struggled to appear like it followed the same bloated, overwrought formula, that jRPGs had become notorious for, while introducing new action oriented elements to simultaneously modernize it.  It really made me rethink whether my own fondness for earlier jRPGs was warranted.  I was surprised that over the past two years I’ve been able to replay Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy Tactics, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy IX with a renewed sense of engagement.  I was happy to pump 40+ hours into each one.  And for all but Final Fantasy IX, I played for the first time well after their original release dates.  Even if the genre has been flagging for the last decade, it had done something right in the past.  The question in my mind is: what happened?

The genre had a boom and bust from which it might not recover.  It’s still fashionable to pick apart the genre’s flaws after years of jRPG fanatics going on, and on, and on, about how great these games are.  With some time behind the boom and bust though, I’d like to suggest an another idea of what exactly made these games successful.  While described as “role playing” games, I have begun to see them more as a variety of exploration games.  It is true that in most jRPGs you do not actually adopt the role of any particular character, and the game doesn’t respect your choices about how that character should behave (outside of some stat building.)

Earlier jRPGs provided what felt like vast over-worlds with the challenge to the player being to construct a party with the right set of skills to be able to effectively conquer it.  Each town and dungeon represents an explicit challenge to how the party is designed, which ultimately culminates with a confrontation with a villain who is trying to take the world over.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the player is trying to take it over instead.  Each leg of the journey is a puzzle to determine what combination of skills and stats will enable to you proceed forward.  Some of the solutions could be rewarding in and of themselves, but the world’s themselves could be fun to explore as well.

This was certainly one of the technical limitations of the genre.  Building a high-definition world is exponentially more resource-intensive than during the low-fi eras of the previous three generations of gaming consoles.  I am still surprised by how much detailed artwork there is just in the backgrounds of Final Fantasy IX.  Games like IX had a great sense of pacing between the puzzle solving elements of dungeon crawling and the time you’re given to relax and explore towns.  The player can enjoy music, artwork, and sub-stories, while planning how to more effectively take on the next stage of the game.

Final Fantasy VII may have been the best example of how a jRPG can give the player not just a virtual world to explore, but a game play system to explore as well.  One could plow through the game simply beefing up the power of materia stones individually, but there were many opportunities to create inventive and powerful combinations of materia as well.  The acquisition, enhancement, and configuration of materia was an engrossing way to personalize the game to your preferences while still tying back into the world itself, and the story being told.  Taken on its face, the characters and narrative are absurd, but try to put the game down once you begin to tinker with the materia system.  You could care less if Cloud is really a clone of super soldier infused with the DNA of an alien life form.

This is precisely the element that was sacrificed in the design of Final Fantasy XIII.  The pacing was streamlined to eliminate the “town” portions of the game.  Combat was simplified to eliminate details and increase the perceived speed of battles.  The illusion of freedom was eliminated entirely to focus on, and more tightly control, the game’s sub-par narrative.  All of these changes were made to address the complaints with the genre during its “bust” phase. But these complaints were made about jRPGs that were later cargo-cult imitators of more successful entries in the genre, during a time when there was an excess of them.  Final Fantasy XIII was an awkward game play experience that was both ashamed of its predecessors and hopeful that long time fans of the series would still come along for the ride.  It was an insecure game that was awkward to play.

Perhaps in the future, if we see a resurgence in the genre, there will be less emphasis placed on the narrative and role playing aspects of the games, and more emphasis placed on all the ways players can explore an elaborately designed game space.  Or perhaps, we will continue to see other genres adopt the broken pieces of jRPGs and integrate them into their own games.  In any case, I hope the gaming community will remember them fondly, and not just the endless cash-ins of games past.