1/3/05 1:08 AM
"My Childhood is Over"
Most people wouldn't be very surprised if I told them that I spent my entire life playing video games. What most people don't know is that my poison of choice was RPG's. I spent my entire childhood sitting in front of them, worrying about stats and plot lines. Little did I notice that everything was soon to disappear.
Tracking it back, I can blame everything on Square. They brought me into this world of Hit Points and Magic, and they are the ones that fouled up the water for everyone else. You heard me. Square is going to be the death of the RPG.
It all started right after Final Fantasy IV was released in America. Lackluster sales and Americans generally missing the entire point of a game that you don't shoot something every five seconds made Square Soft rethink their entire stance on the genre. So they started melding in other elements from other games. First came the action game, then racing side quests, then another, and another. Now when you play a Final Fantasy you don't know what you could call that genre.
The next step to the doom of RPG's was that gaming stopped something that you only did in your parents basement in between wroting fan fiction about Zelda. There is literally a game out there for everyone, Halo. We all play it, we all love it, we all feel special when we get the e-mail from MicroSoft telling us that Yellow Card and Paris Hilton are going to be playing on X-Box Live this Friday and Saturday and that we could get our chances to play with them if we are in looking for a team between 9 PM and 1 AM Pacific Time. I guess that is the new symbol of who made it this week, who is playing in the X-Box Player vs. Celebrity match ups.
Now that gaming is all pop-culture, you have to start laying the dead along the trail of tears. No one is more upset about this then I am, but when you have games like Magna Carta, Final Fantasy 12, and Star Ocean you can't really call these RPG's anymore. These are action games that have a distinctly RPG feel to them.
They shouldn't have been called RPG's in the first place. You take on the role of any character when you start playing a game. They were first called that because of the distinct way that you interacted and had total control over the characters. They probably should have been called Turn Based Adventures, but no one would really want to pick up on that kind of shit. Also I think that was already being used for something else... Leveling Up Adventure could have worked, but no one would have gone with that either.
What is happening is that you are getting a taste of RPG in every game that you eat. Pick up a sports game. You will be damned if that game doesn't have the ability to upgrade your players as you work your way through a game. Shooters even allow you to become more accurate or run farther based on how you play now. The math works the same with any other game too, all filled with "Leveling up".
What we are slowly looking at is tons and tons of games like Grand Theft Auto coming out. The reason that this is a terrible idea is because there is yet to be a good GTA clone. Video game companies can hardly make a straight up genre game without messing it up, what makes them think that they can attempt every single type of game at once and not end up making it play like the time I had my wisdom teeth out, only fun with the strongest drugs cash can buy.
Needless to say I am sucking the life out of Dragon Warrior 8, probably the last RPG to be released this decade.