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[I'm trying to make an attempt to actually come back here, so I'm starting by actually contributing again. Anyway, without further ado, let's get to the topic at hand:]

A friend of mine recently played Final Fantasy Tactics for the first time, and over the two or so weeks it took him to play through the game, I had occasion to take notice of a few of his reactions to the game.

He felt--as I do--that the first chapter of Final Fantasy Tactics is among the finest sequences in a video game that I have ever seen. It has an exceptional mix of difficulty levels and character-driven plot movement. Algus is driven at all costs by his desire to prove himself; Delita is driven (at first) by his honor and by his desire to see why the world must--if it must--be stratified. And all the while Ramza does what he's supposed to do (coming eventually to his own sense of honor and justice). (And, frankly, who among us wasn't clamoring for Algus's head by the end?)

I could gush endlessly about how much I love and admire the game--and I will gladly proclaim that I'm still anticipating a sequel (for which I would be to volunteer my time and not inconsiderable talents)--but my friend also reacted less than enthusiastically to the supernatural elements and the expansion in scale the game undergoes. He felt--and as much as I love the game, I'm tempted to agree--that the introduction of the Lucavi actually cheapens the game. It seems so natural to have a looming supernatural evil that I hadn't considered what the game would have been had it continued being an excellent character-driven political backstab-fest.

I guess, after all that, I'm asking a number of questions here:

1. How would you have kept the scale of Final Fantasy Tactics on the personal level while eschewing the Lucavi arc and still maintaining the Durai-as-iconoclast frame story? (I know that the two are nearly inextricably connected, but I do so love the frame story that I'd love to see it retained.)

2. And now that I've gotten my pathological need to talk specifically about FFT out of the way, I want to ask you why it is there aren't more RPGs that focus on the small-scale adventures of a single band. If you ask me, I imagine that it's in part a natural outgrowth of its origin in Dungeons & Dragons--where the individual band is meant to have a world-shaking effect (or was meant to; the scope of D&D campaigns is surely a topic for another time though). As for the other part, I'm not 100% sure. Do developers feel that gamers would reject an RPG that focused solely on the personal stories and local experiences of its characters? Do we demand that our characters change even the fate of the world? Feel free to respond loosely to these prompts. I'm looking to start a discussion here.

3. I admit that it has been some time since I have played any RPGs (or any video game, for that matter, despite how much I respect them as an artistic medium), so would anyone care to offer up games that might fit the bill of being character-driven and concerned with more small-scale matters (without losing a sense of exploration, adventure, and revelation of character)?

4. [freebie comments and questions I may have neglected at this late hour]

Quote (Kane @ 2nd May 2013 20:57)

2. And now that I've gotten my pathological need to talk specifically about FFT out of the way, I want to ask you why it is there aren't more RPGs that focus on the small-scale adventures of a single band. If you ask me, I imagine that it's in part a natural outgrowth of its origin in Dungeons & Dragons--where the individual band is meant to have a world-shaking effect (or was meant to; the scope of D&D campaigns is surely a topic for another time though). As for the other part, I'm not 100% sure. Do developers feel that gamers would reject an RPG that focused solely on the personal stories and local experiences of its characters? Do we demand that our characters change even the fate of the world? Feel free to respond loosely to these prompts. I'm looking to start a discussion here.

In short because it's too much work. There's a lot of facets to consider here when pointing out how this is actually, a pretty legitimate excuse.

When it comes right down to it the priority of any sensible game developer will be as follows:

1 - Make the game stable and functional.

2 - Make the mechanics engaging.

3 - Make it look good.

I say sensible because remember, this is a videogame. It's a system of interactions that must be developed, designed and polished for the enjoyment of the intended audience. That takes a significant amount of time all on it's own and must take precedence over all else since this is how the audience will experience the content and when there's only so many hours in the day, you have to pick and choose what you want to focus on and as I said, how a game plays is more important than the story it tells.

Even outside the context of videogames, telling a personal story takes a lot of work and is extremely difficult to do well. It requires a writer who knows how to convey very individualistic behavior and make it relatable to a wide audience because people need to relate to characters in order to be engaged by them. The more personal the behavior, the greater the chance that behavior will alienate the audience. This problem gets exponentially worse when the audience can control the characters actions. There are endless stories already about how frustrated players get when they have a character they've been controlling do something 'stupid' in a cutscene. Imagine how much more frustrating it will be if you're emotionally invested in the character? This leads to the final problem:

By their very nature, a personal story is...well, personal. It's a very internal form of narrative, revolving around a character's emotional journey more so than a physical one. How do you translate that into game mechanics? It's easy to take a narrative about space aliens coming to conquer the world and turn it into an engaging game experience because that's a physical threat that can be transferred easily into gameplay mechanics. How do you transfer character growth into gameplay mechanics? It's not like you can put 'grow as a person' in a quest log and have it make sense and even if you did, would it not cheapen the experience to take such a complex emotional concept and reduce it to a win/lose state?

As it stands now, there is very little you can accomplish with a controller that will match the complexity and infinite permutations that make up the human psyche, so a game with deep character growth as it's main narrative really wouldn't offer a different play experience than a game about a president being kidnapped and determining whether or not you're a bad enough dude to rescue him.

I'd recommend you check out this vid for a better explanation of what I'm grabbing at from a smarter (and badder) dude.

This post has been edited by Narratorway on 3rd May 2013 05:05

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For what it's worth, some people I know over at It Just Bugs Me! had this to say about "epicness" being a frequent component of RPGs.

Personally, I try to focus on the individual stories and their setting details. I know that "saving the world" is a very common thing for RPGs to do, and while it can get old after a while, I try to keep it from getting too trite by minimizing the mental comparisons.

That said, I definitely wouldn't mind a story that gets really into the fray when it comes to political issues. And not just grey-and-grey-morality politics, such as in FFT (as I've heard; I still haven't gotten around to playing it myself). I mean actual political positions. For example, I've seen an animé series where the main character rather clearly held social justice ideals. People have been interpreting plots with a filter for this sort of content anyway (there's some video online that claims that the FF series is anti-religion, I think), so given how videogames (and especially JRPGs) are storytelling media... Of course, this applies to games that actually have good plots, and just happen to have political content in them as well. Not ham-handed opinion-pushing games. (You know the kind I'm talking about.)

That said, this sort of content is not actually mutually exclusive (or inclusive) with epic scope, so I've just gone on an irrelevant rant for a paragraph.

I wonder if a smaller, non-epic scope for the story is either (1) considered too small-scale because everyone else is doing epic plots, and thus risks being seen as a cop-out by genre fans (i.e. customers), or (2) conflated with the realm of visual novels?

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 3rd May 2013 13:48

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Would an interactive visual novel be a bad thing? I see it as an incredibly complex piece of programming if one was to create an interactive story that was genuinely interactive and allowed for growth of the player's character. It would likely appeal to a much more limited audience, but if it was created for the sake of creating it, rather than for profits, that's probably a non-issue.

Personally, I love the story of Final Fantasy Tactics, but nowadays I play it for the gameplay mechanics and the challenges more than anything else. I love the flexibility of the system, and I'm enjoying how the fan-made 1.3 patch has taken a system I'm so familiar with and made it new again. It's basically what I dreamed of doing myself when I started messing around with the game's abilities using utilities that generated Gameshark codes. I'm getting off topic, though.

The story of Tactics, demons and all, still seems like Ramza's personal development to me. He still chose, in the end, to let the world believe he was dead rather than try to convince them of his achievements. While one could argue that that was an extension of personality traits and development we'd already seen from him, as I see it it took until that point for him to actually decide to accept the role rather than seek to clear his name. Of course, it's been forever since I've played the game all the way through, so I may be forgetting the course of events to some degree.

To answer the questions:
1) I would have had the game follow Delita instead of Ramza after the first chapter. I'm not sure how the hand off would take place, exactly, and I feel that his story is far more on the political intrigue and personal development side, if one's trying to avoid the Lucavi plot. I think, as an added bonus, focusing on Delita would allow the original plot to remain mostly or entirely intact - his involvement in that is extremely limited.

2) I think the lack of such personal stories stems from the fact that video games, especially RPGs, tend to be associated with trying to escape reality. One of the best ways to encourage someone to play a game is to make them feel like they're accomplishing something when playing it, and the easiest, if most stereotypical, way to do that is to put them in the shoes of someone destined to save the world. It gives the players a sense of power and of importance right off the bat.

That's not to say that I don't think a character-development-driven game couldn't work, just that it's extremely difficult to do while still having the sense of accomplishment people seek from that sort of entertainment. It may work better if the game is the first in a series, and players know that it's ramping up to something bigger. It's something I'd like to see attempted (or, for that matter, would like to contribute to).

3) I can't offer any specific suggestions here, unfortunately. The next version of Dwarf Fortress promises the ability in Adventure Mode to lead a rebellion against occupying forces and potentially free a city, or long term, a nation. You can also potentially rescue kidnapped children and reunite them with their families... Ultimately, though, it relies on narratives you invent for yourself, rather than presenting you with any real character development.

Quote (Kane @ 2nd May 2013 23:57)

...Do developers feel that gamers would reject an RPG that focused solely on the personal stories and local experiences of its characters? Do we demand that our characters change even the fate of the world?

Why not just have both and play Majoras Mask? Yet another way in which that game is so very full of win.

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If you've been mod-o-fied,
It's an illusion, and you're in-between.
Don't you be tarot-fied,
It's just alot of nothing, so what can it mean?
~Frank Zappa

Sins exist only for people who are on the Way or approaching the Way

Quote (Narratorway @ 2nd May 2013 21:00)

When it comes right down to it the priority of any sensible game developer will be as follows:

1 - Make the game stable and functional.

2 - Make the mechanics engaging.

3 - Make it look good.

I say sensible because remember, this is a videogame. It's a system of interactions that must be developed, designed and polished for the enjoyment of the intended audience. That takes a significant amount of time all on it's own and must take precedence over all else since this is how the audience will experience the content and when there's only so many hours in the day, you have to pick and choose what you want to focus on and as I said, how a game plays is more important than the story it tells.

Even outside the context of videogames, telling a personal story takes a lot of work and is extremely difficult to do well. It requires a writer who knows how to convey very individualistic behavior and make it relatable to a wide audience because people need to relate to characters in order to be engaged by them. The more personal the behavior, the greater the chance that behavior will alienate the audience. This problem gets exponentially worse when the audience can control the characters actions. There are endless stories already about how frustrated players get when they have a character they've been controlling do something 'stupid' in a cutscene. Imagine how much more frustrating it will be if you're emotionally invested in the character? This leads to the final problem:

By their very nature, a personal story is...well, personal. It's a very internal form of narrative, revolving around a character's emotional journey more so than a physical one. How do you translate that into game mechanics? It's easy to take a narrative about space aliens coming to conquer the world and turn it into an engaging game experience because that's a physical threat that can be transferred easily into gameplay mechanics. How do you transfer character growth into gameplay mechanics? It's not like you can put 'grow as a person' in a quest log and have it make sense and even if you did, would it not cheapen the experience to take such a complex emotional concept and reduce it to a win/lose state?

As it stands now, there is very little you can accomplish with a controller that will match the complexity and infinite permutations that make up the human psyche, so a game with deep character growth as it's main narrative really wouldn't offer a different play experience than a game about a president being kidnapped and determining whether or not you're a bad enough dude to rescue him.

First off, thanks for the link. I thoroughly enjoyed the video, and it did explain quite well why mainstream developers haven't created (m)any deep games: lack of incentive, it seems.

I get that in 99% of games the story is secondary (even tertiary, etc.) to gameplay, but it seems to me that people do play RPGs (particularly JRPGs) for the story. So, most of what I have to say from here on out will apply to JRPGs. Granted, an unplayable game is an unplayable game--no matter the genre--but, speaking idealistically for a moment, why wouldn't the developers do everything in their powers to offer a compelling story. Do they shy away from character-centered, small-scope (one kingdom rather than the world) because the Epic is somehow easier to create? Because if they're equally easy to create, then there's no reason for them to avoid the former. I guess I should ask who developers are hiring as writers? are there no writers in the game industry who can write compelling stories? Though it has been some time since I sat down to play a video game, the existence of stories like FFT alone tell me that such writers exist, so I don't think that's really the problem. (I do agree that creating relatable characters is more than difficult, and that depicting realistic growth for those characters is even more difficult.)

You do bring up an excellent point about the possibility of alienating potential players, as well as the issue of dealing with player-controlled actions. Of the former, I have this to say: I think that if done right (true to the established character), there's actually little chance of alienating the player, especially since there are (in JRPGs) still a number of characters with whom you can continue to identify and cheer for. As for player-controlled actions, that's a bit harder (or much easier, depending on whom you ask): on the one hand, the decision trees required to flesh out an RPG story where each and every (or just many) player choices directly altered the story itself would be astronomically numerous; but, on the other hand, some of us view JRPGs as similar to a movie. I'm guessing I'm in the minority on that front, but I would much rather see what thematic resonance and character growth and development the creators have come up with for the characters than I would have the option to replay and see all the different options they've come up with to make sure there are different outcomes. (And maybe that's a little naive considering that we've just talked about the capitalist realities of the video game industry.) In the end, I guess I still think of these games (or want to think of these games) as vehicles for the artistic expression of its creator(s).

When I created this topic, I was thinking specifically of Ramza and Delita. I'm not saying that we shouldn't a physical threat. However, I am wondering why we couldn't keep the story revolving around the political machinations of the individual nobles--since they too have character motivations (greed, lust for power) we can understand, since they too experience some measure of growth. The Lucavi themselves are nigh-inscrutable: we want to destroy the world--for some unknown reason. I guess I'm looking for a greater narrative coherence throughout the game (yes, we do understand that much of the plotting was set in motion by the Lucavi, but they're generic characters in our dance--which had previously been populated by fascinating characters of both the beloved and despised kind).

You mention that you can't put "grow as a person" in a quest log, and you're absolutely right about that. (In fact, the only way I can see that happening is by way of a joke.) I think you're looking at games in general (which is absolutely and completely fine--since I myself opened the question up to the industry at large), but if you look at (J)RPGs specifically, would that change your commentary? I mean, we already see the growth of characters in games--whether or not we directly effected that growth--don't we? (Again, I'm thinking more along the lines of RPGs, but I'm sure all games show us at least cursory growth in how the game prods you to respond to the various plot points. I'll bring Aristotle and note that Action is the principle mode of character revelation anyway, so it shouldn't be difficult at all in that sense.)

Quote

Personally, I try to focus on the individual stories and their setting details. I know that "saving the world" is a very common thing for RPGs to do, and while it can get old after a while, I try to keep it from getting too trite by minimizing the mental comparisons.

That said, I definitely wouldn't mind a story that gets really into the fray when it comes to political issues. And not just grey-and-grey-morality politics, such as in FFT (as I've heard; I still haven't gotten around to playing it myself). I mean actual political positions. For example, I've seen an animé series where the main character rather clearly held social justice ideals. People have been interpreting plots with a filter for this sort of content anyway (there's some video online that claims that the FF series is anti-religion, I think), so given how videogames (and especially JRPGs) are storytelling media... Of course, this applies to games that actually have good plots, and just happen to have political content in them as well. Not ham-handed opinion-pushing games. (You know the kind I'm talking about.)

That said, this sort of content is not actually mutually exclusive (or inclusive) with epic scope, so I've just gone on an irrelevant rant for a paragraph.

In typing out responses here, I'd come to the same conclusion: they're not actually mutually exclusive (which doesn't actually surprise, and wasn't what I meant to suggest). I think Narratorway was right about an Epic tale (that doesn't necessarily bother fleshing out the characters the developers think you're going to personally identify with anyway) being much easier to create than a literature-worthy exploration of the capital-C Characters of its cast of characters.

I for one would be quite interested to see more realistic political courses in politics, but who knows if any developers will listen to me. (Hint: they won't.)

I suppose it's entirely likely that the small-scope is seen as small potatoes; in fact, if I had to make a wager, that's what I'd go with.

Quote

Would an interactive visual novel be a bad thing? I see it as an incredibly complex piece of programming if one was to create an interactive story that was genuinely interactive and allowed for growth of the player's character. It would likely appeal to a much more limited audience, but if it was created for the sake of creating it, rather than for profits, that's probably a non-issue.

I, for one, would enjoy an interactive visual novel, but I'd just as soon have what FFT gave us: scenes from a movie. Also, Narratorway's right (as is the video he links to): mainstream developers don't (yet?) have the incentive to do that sort of thing.

The game that best encapsulates the "small-scale" vision of yours for me is Persona 4, which I've been obsessed with for the past five months. It's about a group of teenagers, all dealing with serious personal issues (including but not limited to sexuality and sexual identity), stumbling upon a supernatural world that is being used to commit murders. So you try to solve this murder in a small Japanese town and get to know the game's playable cast and NPCs deeply.

Eventually the game descends into "save the world" BS, but I feel it's earned. Anyone that can stomach an 80-hour RPG and enjoys great character-driven stories really ought to give it a shot.

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this is a blog mostly about comics and videogames
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Quote (Kane @ 5th May 2013 21:57)

You mention that you can't put "grow as a person" in a quest log, and you're absolutely right about that. (In fact, the only way I can see that happening is by way of a joke.)

Come to think of it, that was the core of Disgaea 3 - You spend a large portion of the game effectively trying to make the main character "Grow as a person" through various shortcuts. Amusingly, these shortcuts backfiring result in him growing as a person after all.

Quote (Kane @ 5th May 2013 21:57)

I, for one, would enjoy an interactive visual novel, but I'd just as soon have what FFT gave us: scenes from a movie. Also, Narratorway's right (as is the video he links to): mainstream developers don't (yet?) have the incentive to do that sort of thing.

I agree, the incentive isn't there in the mainstream. As I said, though, it's a project I'd love to see and love to contribute to. I think it can be done as long as it's done for the sake of doing it, not for money.

Edit to add: I've always heard good things about the Persona series, and have never actually given it a shot. Your comment, Laszlow, has me thinking that I really should - I've never heard of a game with an 80 hour play time before.

This post has been edited by Suunok on 6th May 2013 04:00

All the Persona games focus on a small cast and a small-scale quest, but Persona 3 and Persona 4 are the ones that use the "dialog grind and dungeon grind" system that created TONS of new fans. I think Persona 4 is better than Persona 3, in large part because it focuses more on its cast and setting, both of which are smaller than those of Persona 3. I've done a bunch of Persona commentary in the "what games are you playing at the moment" thread, so I guess you can check that out if you like.

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this is a blog mostly about comics and videogames
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Quote (Kane @ 5th May 2013 14:57)

You mention that you can't put "grow as a person" in a quest log, and you're absolutely right about that. (In fact, the only way I can see that happening is by way of a joke.) I think you're looking at games in general (which is absolutely and completely fine--since I myself opened the question up to the industry at large), but if you look at (J)RPGs specifically, would that change your commentary? I mean, we already see the growth of characters in games--whether or not we directly effected that growth--don't we?

Which makes it irrelevant in the context of the game. If my actions are of no consequence to the story, might as well just watch a movie instead and save myself the effort. JRPGs are quite well known for making sure their narratives and mechanics are firmly segregated, which is why I'll rarely engage with them on an emotional level since I have no investment in how things play out. Also I'm not a fan of melodrama and that's the only drama JRPGs are aware of, which is yet another reason they tend to stick with 'epic'.

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Arts

Farts

Twarts