The downfall of RPGs

Alright readers, this post might be a bit controversial. I'm probably older than a good portion of the Steemit community, and when it comes to videogames (particularly RPGs), I might ruffle a few feathers with my viewpoints. If so, let me hear it in the comments section.

RPGs are near and dear to my heart, and the hearts of many gamers across the world. Truly, some of the moments in stories told through this genre have changed the lives of those who played them.

I'll never forget looking out over the Midgar slums and feeling hopeless about defeating Shinra. I'll never forget grabbing Rinoa in space, just as the oxygen meter ran out. I'll never forget the feeling I got from Meia's dream, the cliffhanger ending of FFT, or recovering Ashley Riot's memories in Vagrant Story.

I'll also never forget this:

( also available in its original Japanese )

Over the years, with increasing sales numbers and exposure to a wider audience, RPGs changed for me.

They changed for the worse.

Here's why:

Working Designs: they don't make them like this anymore

I really started getting into RPGs with Albert Odyssey: Legend of Eldeon, for the Sega Saturn. Sure, I may have dabbled in RPGs for the NES/SNES, like Secret of Evermore, but it wasn't until the late 90s that I really got into them.

Albert Odyssey: LoE was localized by Working Designs. You may be familiar with them if you played Lunar, Popful Mail (Sega CD), Vanguard Bandits, Arc the Lad, or Alundra in the US. The games themselves were great, but the translation provided by Working Designs was fantastic. For the light hearted games released in the 90s, the Working Designs team was able to implant pop culture references that really made the game feel localized. Their writers had fun with it, and not in a way that watered down the source material.

Working Designs was everything a gaming company should be. They cared about their customers. When I was much younger, my Saturn kept deleting saved games. Any RPG fan knows how decimating this could be. After spending hours trying to figure out if I just didn't save the game right, I went to the Working Designs website, found their contact info, and emailed them.

They emailed back (what gaming company does that anymore?) and helped me replace the damned battery inside of my Sega Saturn - (it didn't even relate to the game!). I was blown away!

But this wouldn't last.

Years later, as Working Designs was going under, I sent them another email to let them know how fondly I looked back on the games they made.

I got an automated response back. Clearly, they were in the process of replacing their people with robots, or whatever-the-hell comes right before a company gets shut down. I never heard from them again. They went out of business. They were a company that wasn't afraid to push off a release until the product was great, but they were eventually outmaneuvered by soulless industry standards.

Squaresoft (Square) merged with Enix as many companies began jumping in on the gold rush. The genre as a whole got more "sophisticated". More people started buying into RPGs, and then, over a period of some years, we got voice acting.

Voice acting: a nail in the coffin

I have nothing against voice actors, but voice acting takes away from the genre. It feels like hand-holding to me.

Firstly, listening to people talk takes much longer than reading. When you can't skip spoken dialogue, fast readers (just about everyone that binge-played RPGs for years before voice acting came into the picture) will re-read the captioned text over and over, with a little voice droning on and on in their ear: "ok, I get it, I get it, next please."

Voice acting will also extend playtime. Albert Odyssey's main criticism was that it was too short. With voice actors and unskippable dialogue, AO's playtime would have been extended drastically. The script itself, however, would still have been the same.

RPGs are about character development, and a "bad" voice actor (or one that just sounds different to how you'd imagine the character) can really take you out of the immersion. Final Fantasy X was the first time that voice acting in a game rubbed me the wrong way. I liked the story, but I absolutely hated how Tidus sounded. That's a shame, too, because James Taylor (his US voice actor) seems like a really great guy, and is an excellent voice actor. Tidus simply sounded different in my head, before I heard him talk, so I mentally stacked the cards against him. Since I had to listen to his voice throughout the entire game, it really made it hard for me to buy into it like I could with older RPGs.

Voice actors don't just take you out of the immersion of the game and increase production costs, they change the way that the game itself is shaped.

We also learn how things are pronounced. In a series like Final Fantasy, which originally didn't have voice actors, many of the old terms finally had some closure to how they were said. This might not be a good thing.

Gill or jill? Choco-bow or choc-oh-boo? Bahamoot or baha-mutt? Tiff-a or tee-fa? With voice acting, these decisions are made and forced on the audience. It's like finding out how Ryu is pronounced for the first time (I was young - I used to call him "Roo." I know, I know - please forgive me for my sins). One could argue that it's good to get everyone on the same page, but in a longstanding series, finding out how these words are pronounced (especially for audiences that aren't from the same country the game is developed in) can get people as angry as the gif/jif controversy.

Target audience: you age out

RPGs have a target audience, and as I've grown older, I realize that I'm no longer part of it.

I loved the brooding, sullen Squall Leonhart back when I was a teenager playing the game, but now I would think of that archetype as an insufferable little brat. This is because the game makers know who they need to target: teenagers/kids. Squaresoft (now Square Enix) wasn't sitting around a table, thinking about how they could market their games to 40 year old fathers of 2, who come home fresh from their shitty 9-5 jobs with enough time and energy to play the next great RPGs, maybe because it helps them avoid thinking about their bills, growing debt, or how they're staying in their marriages "for the kids." No, they were thinking of how they could sell digital crack to pre-teens and "young adults," to get them hooked and have them harass their parents for MOAR GAMES.

But you know, it's not all that bad. As we get older, we become a bit detached from youth culture. Music on the radio starts sounding odd. Music we grew up listening to starts appearing on the classic stations. This is life, and it's not the end of the world if you fall out of touch with popular culture.

So what if FFXIII's Snow gets on your nerves because he yells "Serah!" over and over again, like some star-crossed lover trope? It might not be my cup of tea, but I bet a lot of people can identify with him (seriously though, screw that guy). So what if, as you age, you grow increasingly skeptical of the number and type of belts worn by many characters in your favorite gaming series? No big deal. Neck belts, forearm belts, dresses made of belts: that's hip, now. That's what gets younger people going.

What is bad, though, is the way that certain RPGs are starting to run into DLC territory. This, more than anything above, is what can ruin RPGs for everyone, not just comparatively older folks like myself.

DLC: burn it. Burn it with fire.

You may have noticed DLC infecting FFXIII's offshoots, or in Mass Effect 3's endings. DLC is a plague on gaming. It effects not only RPGs, but the entire industry as a whole. In game transactions. Plot points behind a paywall. Hidden bosses. Entire endings. All of this waters down excellent games in a mad cash grab by increasingly greedy companies. Gone are the days of Working Designs.

I want to play RPGs for the full story. If you sell me a game at full price without the full story, I'm going to be pissed off. This has started to happen a lot more, recently, and all RPG fans, young and old, need to stop supporting it so that it can die before it destroys the entire genre. There's nothing wrong with releasing sequels. There is something wrong with releasing short, episodic content that is part of a story that can and should be able to fit on one disk (or the equivalent digital download size). But mark my words: if DLC isn't stopped, our beloved genre will become a shadow of its former self.

Just like Kenneth.

If you're an RPG fan, even if the more modern games don't appeal to you, I urge you to fight for their future. Write to your gaming companies (or tweet them - whatever) whenever you see DLC taking over. Leave thoughtful reviews on Steam. Maybe develop a game yourself. Whatever you do, though, don't ignore the growing problem, or it will just get worse, and lead to the downfall of RPGs as we know them.