Isn't every game an RPG?
I have been playing video games my entire life. This is not hyperbole. From a forgone Christmas in which I tore open the shiny wrapping of my very first Nintendo Entertainment system until today, I have spent far too many hours, dollars, and tears on video games...and I've loved every minute of it. This may not come as a surprise to any of you given my general source material for this blog, but my favorite genre of games is the majestic RPG (roleplaying game for those of you who are uninitiated into the video game lifestyle). However, over the years I have had my definition of this oft-misunderstood genre challenged time and time again. And here's why:
Back in the day, the pivotal, quintessential RPG was Final Fantasy (or Phantasy Star, depending on which system you patronized, Nintendo or Sega...I enjoyed both games, though I only owned a Nintendo). In Final Fantasy you had a staggering level of character customization: you chose your name and your character class. After that, you followed the journey of your highly customized, personalized avatars (each with four-letter names only...luckily Reid fit) as they traveled through the nameless world, fighting four elemental fiends (how exactly is a lich related to "earth"?) and recovering the four elemental crystals to save the world from Garland and his pimp, Chaos. Final Fantasy was meant to be the last game developed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who believed that if it did not sell well, it would be his final game. Of course, it sold like hot cakes...as did its 13 sequels and multiple spinoffs, each less final than the one before.
It's safe to say that Final Fantasy is, in a way, one of the (though not the only) forbearers of the modern RPG and I have enjoyed most of them immensely. Even given the criticism I will level against them shortly, bear in mind that there has never been a Final Fantasy game that I did not enjoy on some level. I have not /loved/ them all, but I still believe the series is solid and has a lot to do with the early life of the RPG.
However, in continuing along with this series, after the first game (and possibly the second...I never played Final Fantasy 2, that is, Japan's Final Fantasy 2), you no longer had any sort of option in who you controlled in your game. That is to say, you were playing a pre-defined protagonist. In many of the game's sequels, you could rename your character, but you were always the same person following the same quest along the same rails. The stories were always engaging, but there was really no choice in how the story progressed--with the possible exception of how long you told the cosmic horror threatening to destroy the entire universe to wait while you played mindless, inane mini games and followed pointless sidequests for better weapons--most of which you didn't need. It was only recently that I started to wonder, then. When faced with this entry into the genre (and just about every JRPG, or Japanese Roleplaying Game, ever made, in fact), how exactly do we define what a roleplaying game is? What about Final Fantasy makes it an RPG?
As with any lexical dilemma, we should probably start with actually looking at the words we're trying to define: role playing game. In essence, this simply means that we are playing a role, controlling some entity and guiding them along their journey. Let's try it out and see how it gels with three RPGs on the market today:
* In Final Fantasy 10, you are "playing the role" of Tidus, a bratty sports star with daddy issues.
* In Mass Effect, you are "playing the role" of Shepherd, a commander in the military who is considered for and eventually admitted into an elite interstellar police force.
* In Fallout, you are "playing the role" of a refugee from a vault designed to save people inside from the nuclear holocaust.
So far, so good. All three of those games are, technically, roleplaying games by just about every website, magazine, or video game store who categorizes them. However, how about this:
* In Super Mario Brothers, you are "playing the role" of either Mario or Luigi as you venture through eight (or more) colorful worlds chasing after King Bowser to rescue the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom.
* In Halo, you are "playing the role" of a space marine called Master Chief in an epic conflict between humans and aliens called the Covenant.
* In Madden 2011, you are "playing the role" of the Minnesota Vikings (or any other football team) through an NFL season in an attempt to win the Super Bowl.
See what I did there? In just about every video game (with the possible exception of puzzle games like Tetris), you are technically "playing a role." In that way, roleplaying game is possibly the least informative and most unspecific genre title anyone could have thought of. If Final Fantasy is a roleplaying game because you are controlling a certain individual, or group of individuals, through an epic storyline--then almost every game out there is a roleplaying game, from Super Mario Brothers to Halo to Madden 2011. And I'm pretty sure no one, from the die hard roleplaying game fanatic to the frothing Halo fanatic, would agree to such a broad definition of "roleplaying game."
Allow me to make a rather controversial statement that has gotten me flamed somewhat in the past: Final Fantasy, and indeed most JRPGs, should not be called RPGs. Now, it seems to me like this isn't a particularly inflammatory statement. It isn't making a value judgment about the games (most of which, as I already said, I tend to enjoy)...it's simply calling for a better classification system for games of this nature. Just like how any difficult-to-classify game like Psychonauts (SHAMELESS PLUG: buy this game, it is amazing) becomes an Adventure game by virtue of being difficult to classify, it seems like any game with a modicum of choice (whether real or imagined) becomes immediately lumped together as an RPG. But there is a world of difference between a game like Final Fantasy (pick one...particularly relevant if you pick one of the latter ones) and a game like Dragons Age. Both have a sweeping, arcing story. Both have a system of character growth in which characters become stronger as they progress through the game. But these two things alone are not particularly rare in games today. Heck, Bioshock had an experience system in which characters grew as they progressed through the game. Borderlands had an experience system in which characters grew as they progressed through the game. How come these games are “first person shooters with RPG elements” and not RPGs? It seems like they'd classify as much as Final Fantasy and many of its JRPG ilk.
Perhaps I need to step back and allow for a redefinition of “roleplaying”. After all, if every game is a roleplaying game by virtue of the fact that you are, in fact, playing a role, then this is no classification system at all. Just call them all video games and be done with it. No, perhaps there is something significant to the role that must be defined.
Note: Everything from here on out is my opinion and is likely to be viewed as inflammatory to diehard Final Fantasy apologists. Let me again remind you that while I have fundamental problems with some of the design decisions made in recent Final Fantasy games, I cannot recall a single one, with the possible exception of Final Fantasy 8, that I disliked on any level. So this is not an argument made out of bias. It is simply me reflecting on an issue that has bothered me for some time.
Allow me to turn away from Final Fantasy for a moment and examine a game that I know, seemingly instinctively, to be a roleplaying game: Dragons Age: Origins. Now, I choose this game over its sequel, Dragons Age 2, because A) I have not played the sequel and B) I am somewhat opposed to some of the decisions they made in its design (I may elaborate on these later). Now, what sets Dragons Age apart from Final Fantasy is that you define the role you will be playing. By doing this, the game gives you direct control (in a way that is limited by the nature of video games, of course) over not only your character, but also key points in the narrative that truly allows you to customize, indeed personalize, the story. In Dragons Age, your character's origin defines certain aspects of how the action unfolds. Your decisions throughout the game continually change the direction the story goes. Of course, as I mentioned before, this is all constrained by it being a medium is controlled by the possible (unlike Dungeons and Dragons in which an actual human being is controlling the action—allowing just about anything to be possible). You can't, for instance, kill any major characters in the story (unless it's mandated by the plot), or take a break on the beach for a year and let the story unfold without you. But you can, within the confines of what has been defined by the programmers, choose your own path.
Now, compare this to Final Fantasy—any Final Fantasy, even my personal favorite, Final Fantasy 6, or my least favorite, Final Fantasy 8. In Final Fantasy, you are given the role of the protagonist, a character defined for you before the game starts. You are set along a pre-determined path, fight pre-determined battles, and watch as the character makes pre-determined decisions for you without any input from you. This makes for an interesting narrative, of course, but there is no choice. In this way—and I believe this is, it must be, key in defining a roleplaying game—you are not so much playing a role as you are controlling the action and watching the role, in the most fundamental ways, be played for you. This “controlling the action” is not the same kind of control you will find in Dragons Age, of course. Just like every game has you “playing a role” in the most fundamental way, every game also gives you control of the action. In Super Mario Brothers, Mario jumps when you push the A button (or whatever crazy way we make Mario jump on the Wii these days). In Halo, Master Chief fires his gun when you push a button (I don't even know which button it is, I'm proud to say). In Final Fantasy and Dragons Age, you make tactical decisions during combat in order to see the protagonists through the conflict safely. This is the actual gameplay and every game has it. What Final Fantasy and its ilk lack is the true thing that defines our ability to play a role: choice.
It seems, by this observation, that there are two things that truly define a roleplaying game, then: customization and choice. The less controversial of these two is choice. In a roleplaying game, you are given choice over how the game progresses in some way or another. This may range from minute aspects like your actions determining which paths open up later in the game, or may be substantial and profound like which characters live and die. The more controversial of these two aspects of roleplaying games is customization. In a roleplaying game, you are not just /given/ a role to play. You define the role. I hesitate to throw this out there because I know it is the vast minority of so-called RPGs that allow you to customize your character...but for reasons I mentioned above, I believe we must be a bit more picky and specific about games that wear this moniker, and a game that you have no control over the protagonists seems, in many ways, to be as much a “roleplaying game” as Halo and Super Mario Brothers. On the other hand, a game in which your definition of your character, which in some way significantly affects the storyline of the game, seems to be several steps closer to something significantly different...different in such a way that it wouldn't necessarily share a classification with aforementioned non-RPGs.
There is another potential aspect of RPGs that I have left out because it confounds the classification somewhat, and that is character growth—the time-tested experience point system. In RPGs, traditionally your character became stronger as you gained experience (and often experience levels). By doing this, they gained more abilities (often defined by their class), more hit points, more attributes, etc, etc. This system is older than video games, of course. Dungeons and Dragons used it in 1974 when it first launched, so it's nothing new. However, I get the feeling that this system of character growth (I call it growth and not customization because I believe that character customization is more an attribute of character creation than any experience level system) is actually what defines an RPG. I find this particular metric lacking in many ways, particularly because many, many games these days are touted as having “RPG elements,” which almost always manifest themselves as some kind of experience level system. Now, I don't have anything wrong with other genres working this sort of element into their game—and, in fact, encourage it because, as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, any sort of customization options we have in our protagonists will inherently personalize the experience for us and draw us into the game—but I feel like if it was the /only/ metric by which we define roleplaying games, then Bioshock, Borderlands, Alpha Protocol, etc, would be considered RPGs. And they're typically not. They are first person shooters “with RPG elements.” This leads me to believe that there /must/ be more to an RPG than this sort of character growth system. And besides that, I instinctively feel like there should be more to it than that. This, I feel, is where many of the Final Fantasy apologists and I will diverge paths and they will feel like this is enough for Final Fantasy and JRPGs to be classified as RPGs, and I feel like, in this, we will have to agree to disagree.
Actually, my problem with the general method of Final Fantasy character growth systems is it generally lacks that sort of personalized growth that I like to see in my RPGs. In fact, to wrangle this meandering pony back on track, it lacks /choice/, that thing I find pivotal to RPGs in general. In Final Fantasy 10, you generally just followed a pre-defined grid of abilities and attribute growth. Final Fantasy 13 did the same thing. It wasn't until very, very late in the game, higher level than most casual players would ever get, that you could start branching out and doing odd things like making Tidus a dedicated healer or tanking with Hope. So even in this, Final Fantasy fails this sort of litmus test of “choice,” which I believe to be an all-important aspect of any true roleplaying game. Indeed, if you're just following a pre-determined path of character growth, you're little better than games where you simply get more skilled as a player, allowing you to pass through more and more challenging sections of gameplay towards the end of the game.
Actually, what I tend to liken the Final Fantasy character growth system to is Mega Man games. In Mega Man, you proceed from level to level, defeating boss robots and taking their power, which takes the form of a special weapon that you can then use to proceed further in the game. In this way, it is very much like leveling a character up in Final Fantasy, gaining new spells to proceed through the plot until its conclusion. In Mega Man, you even have a choice of what powers you gain in which order (as well as when and where to use them, of course). You do not gain experience to make these powers more effective, of course, but you are, in a way, leveling Mega Man up and gaining new abilities—much in the same way as any mage in any fantasy game ever made. And yet, Mega Man is not an RPG.
So, what to do with Final Fantasy. The easiest solution is to make a completely separate classification for them. They are not RPGs by my definition (and probably many other people's as well—I get the feeling they just get a free ride into the genre these days, especially as they become less like games and more like movies in which you must occasionally press buttons to force them to proceed), but they are also not bad games (which is beside the point, but I feel like I have to say it again to avoid getting flamed). They simply need a separate classification—one that would actually be fairly populated when you see games like Eternal Sonata, Infinite Undiscovery, the various “Tales of” games, etc. I suppose we could simply call them JRPGs, but that still leaves “roleplaying game” in the equation. I'm not entirely sure I have an answer for what kind of games they are, and I think my stamina is just about spent for this particular blog—so I will leave it up to my plethora of readers (four, I think, last time I counted) to mull it over themselves. As for me, I think I'll go spend all the sexy experience points I just gained from writing this goliath introspection. Maybe I can get a skill to help me stop wasting time on blogs and start working on my thesis paper...
