How to Stop Whining and Enjoy the Grinding: A Loving Rant About RPGs...According to Kori
So what’s with this idea that RPGs are inherently terrible?
And before you say “Pshaww, no one says that! They just could be better!”...Give me three minutes of your time, and I’ll send you to a retard.
The Role Playing Game genre.
T’is a genre of game that gets an odd amount of flack for “not updating to the times” or “being too weird”. RPGs are a genre with a rather unique history, as they started as adaptions of the tabletop RPG. This plays into their oddness, as TTRPGs aren’t about playing some überhuman motherfucker right out of the box. They are about putting a random Joe into the shoes of another random schmoe, maybe with a special birthright or a longstanding grudge or two. You don’t start as some champion, you gotta earn your place in the world. Compare this with many platformers or shooters or even sports games, you play as someone with quite a lot of experience. It’s mostly a matter of when you, the player, will catch up to the hero.
This is why RPGs have a lot of ‘tedious bullshit”. Learning how to overcome and even ascend the mundane and tedium is the starting point for many RPGs, even the tabletop ones. That’s where that “Antidote Problem” described in the video above is something that really only a problem in the first hour of the game: it’s a skill gate. Healing the poison shows that you are not only invested in the world to know where it shows up and what to do, it shows you learned how to overcome every status effect that will appear in the game. It’s the same as that staircase antepiece from World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros., an easy to overcome challenge that gives you the tools to be able to adapt to a harder challenge in the future.
In fact, lemme run down a lot of common complaints and how retarded they tend to really be:
RANDOM ENCOUNTERS ARE BAD
The dreaded random encounter. You know no one has actually played a game where random encounters are really bad when they start complaining about the random encounters as a whole. Random encounters exist and are foundation of the genre for two reasons:
A) Trying to stuff multiple enemies, especially in order to match or exceed the average party size, creates an insane amount of visual clutter, especially in the tiny ass dungeons you run through. This is why on-field encounters can be really intimidating and way more aggravating than random encounters. Plus it’s a lot of cash and development time to make a lot of field sprites or models. That’s why you see a lot of GREY BLOBS OF DOOM you see in budget RPGs or RPG Maker games, even though they are non indicative of what you will be facing and just aren’t pretty to look at...
B) This lets the player set or control the experience-to-time curve better. With on-field encounters, you have to design the dungeon around how the enemies will respawn and where they need to be to litter enough EXP from where the dungeon begins, major events, and where the dungeon ends. With random encounters, the player can gain some control over the time curve without having to leave the room or dungeon. When you end up grinding, you want to stay close to the safest areas of the dungeon to minimize the time or damage. But with on-field encounters, you have either waste time waiting for a monster to respawn -hopefully not on top of you- or chase and clear out the entire floor of the dungeon. Random encounters, while they can easily be bullshit if the step counter or RNG hates you, end saving more time on average then they do waste it.
It’s not to say they can’t be done poorly, or that a lot of RPGs haven’t done it right. But that doesn’t mean the mechanic is worthless or we have outgrown it. It just means that it can be done better.
THE BACKTRACKING
Welcome to what happens when you ask for a globetrotting plot and side quests: you are gonna be going back to older locations for some reason or another. This isn’t really much of a valid complaint nowadays considering the number of escape systems and fast travel, but let’s humor the peanut gallery and say this is mostly something you can blame on tabletops. Many of these games, especially those focused on simulating, have mechanics for traveling to-and-fro long distances, so RPGs carried that over as part of the resource and health management systems. RPGs aren’t designed to be linear levels, you gonna need backtracking if you also want exploration.
THE STATS AND EQUIPMENT
Why is this a complaint?? I don’t think I have ever played a game where Machine Gun A plays totally different from Machine Gun B cause that’s not how machine guns function. There’s been plenty of games where different types of equipment function differently, but a sword is gonna be a sword, even if you do dress it up in different stats. That’s how life works, you don’t expect a pencil to function completely different just because it doesn’t have a No. 2 on it.
Stat inflation is kinda a valid complaint, but it still ties into that feeling of ascension. You superseded event the functional abstractions of the game. And I’m pretty sure the good RPGs make sure that every stat functions differently yet remain equally important.
TURN BASED COMBAT IS BORING AND SLOW
Okay, this one is the most retarded, since it’s a matter of preference, not some critical design flaw of the genre. Not every game has to be some ADHD-fueled mess of constant action to be entertaining and in-depth. In fact, constant action can be just as repetitive people blame turn-based combat.
Really, what people complain about is lacking visual feedback and effects. A good battle system entertains the user through good visuals. It is the hook that leads you into the depth of the combat, for the deeper you dive into it, the bigger and flashier attacks. A good battle system balances style AND substance together.
And as for the speed, it’s a matter of how much the system handles loading all of the effects along with parsing the text, data, and math. So this is a matter of the game instead of the genre. A good UI, text parser, and visual effects will massively improve the speed of the game.
IT’S OKAY WHEN NINTENDO DOES IT
This one is personal and something I want to get off my back before I end up going completely /v/ but I think it needs to be said.
A weird constant is that among people that hate RPGs is that Nintendo makes RPGs better than any RPG out there. Games like Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi, Pokemon, etc., etc. have found a place in their hearts that no other RPG will fit. But I feel like these people have grossly misunderstood the appeals of these games.
These games are supposed to be gateways into core titles.
People say how each of these games are strictly superior to any RPG thanks to their unique mechanics and charm, and question why aren’t RPGs following in their footsteps. The problem is these games are designed around their systems so heavily, trying to mimic them is a futile effort. You’ll end up creating a clone of these games instead of something that advances the genre. Their simplistic natures wouldn’t allow that much depth to be added anyway. Not to mention that these games are just as guilty of the above cardinal sins of the genre and only get away with it because of the C H A R M. See: Chapter 4 of Paper Mario: TTYD, Twoson of EarthBound,
This is why I don’t really respect charm or the fanbases of these titles. You aren’t supposed to latch on to them like that. These aren’t bad games, but they certainly aren’t above the genre you “hate”.
I hope that this long rant of mines, if doesn’t make you like the genre, it makes you understand the oddities of the genre just a little bit better. No one should say that you should or need to like the genre. As long as you understand why they are like this, and why people put up with it, you can avoid sounding like a moron whenever the topic comes to light. You don’t have to repeat the tired, cliché talking points like a parrot, you don’t add anything to the conversation like that. Nor does trying to boil down the entire genre into some strawman generalization, especially when it is incredibly easy to do it to the genre you like or fallen in love with.
Else you just end up like Dunkey.