I love RPGs!

Here I am, sitting in my living room and it feels like it should be closer to midnight but its only 10 PM. Also this morning I woke up way too late.

Anyway, I digress!

Last week I picked up my copy of Final Fantasy XIII and have been playing pretty steadily. My computer is sitting in it's corner like an ignored stuffed animal while I wait for a new video card, so the PS3 has been my source of gaming since it went kaput.

So far I'm enjoying it, much more so than White Knight Chronicles (wanna talk about cliche? That story is so much more cliched than FFXIII! But then again, whats ever original nowadays?) while others hate on it day and night. Its to be expected really. I mean, when VIII came out and was not like VII heads rolled and there was blood in the e-street.

I don't quite get it, I mean, the two words in the game title says it all: Final. Fantasy.

Its the final fantasy...for your heroes...which you play....and stuff.

Its the one and only story! No spin-offs except for fan made stuff...oh wait, there was FFX-2. And there were lots of VII spin-offs because the fanbois demanded, and wept, and hugged their little Sephiroth plushies.

Oh don't mind me, I like VII, it was a great game, just like I like the other games in the series. Its just fanboism across the board bothers me to no end.

Anyway! So the game is too 'linear'. The game has no 'towns' to explore. The game has a battle system that 'plays itself' and therefore is meaningless. The game has 'too much grind'.

I love MMOs, and my first MMO was not Ultima Online (it was my husbands!) but World of Warcraft. I played that game for years before I stopped for good. I also played other MMOs out there like Guild Wars, City of Villains, and even the most recently released AION. I'm no stranger to "grinding". I mean, how else am I expected to level up? How else do I expect to move up in the virtual world the game gives me, or bring down bigger monsters, or get better gear? And even before I played MMOs I was strictly console and loved playing RPGs like the Final Fantasies, Legend of Legaia, Legend of Dragoon and many others on the Playstation and PS2 systems.

I played my first Western-styled RPG this year with Dragon Age Origins. I didn't like Oblivion, didn't get too far in Fable, and much preferred to have my friend call me into the living room when she was coming onto new storyline in Fallout 3. DA:O had me hook, line, and sinker with the story premise. Maybe I'm a sucker for dragons, swords, and magic but I liked it a lot. And I was totally going to get Alistair in my tent! I enjoyed the heck out of it and even took the game around the second time, with a different racial character to do it all over again.

RPGs are RPGs: Role-Playing Games. You play a role, whether one you make, or one made for you. You play with other chracters that fight along side you, some which simply join you because you choose to have them, or because the story makes it that way. Others you have to go out and recruit (like in Star Ocean Second Story, where depending on who you play, certain characters are not attainable to you at all).

Why does it matter whether I place a "j" or a "w" in front of "RPG"? Probably because this is the internets and it doesn't really matter what my opinion is, because clearly your e-peen is bigger than mine.

Thats what it usually boils down to anyway.

And this whole thing about FFXIII being too 'linear'. Well, the way the story begins, and then continues in, is that you are suddenly branded and an enemy of the place you call home. Now the Government is out to get you and all you can do is fight and try to figure out how to remedy the situation while constantly running for you life. If I'm a branded traitor, why would I go back to visit that one place (note: swarming by soldiers and other people with weapons) that I'm sure I forgot to check for lewt? The one time you can actually take a break from being on the run is more towards the end of the game, as you can feel it start to wind down, and by that time I'm totally okay with it.

Sure, there are cliches in the game too. I guess you can even also argue the linearity of character design in RPGs. You always got your 'types' in the story, and that rubs people the wrong way too. But come on! Sephiroth has mom issues and runs around with a huge sword! Ridiculous. But people would say he's bad ass, and awesome, and so on and so forth.

In the beginning you have soldier-girl Lightning acting all tough and jumping about like a ninja. Afro Sazh cracking jokes, Hope cries like a baby, Snow wants to save everyone because he's the hero, and Vanille is way too happy-go-lucky to bear.



Of course they would be typical, annoying, jarring characters with their hang ups and cliches. They're not going to be fully developed. Lightning had to be tough for her sister and she can't help but be upset at Snow who goes around talking about how he's got the answer and he's ready to set everything straight to make everyone happy. Hope was extremely clingy to his mom, and when she dies (it happens in the beginning, don't cry at me "spoiler") he doesn't know what to do. He's a young kid who depended on his mom, and she was inspired to take up arms and follow Snow. Can you blame the kid- even if it does become silly an melodramatic more into the game-?

I thought the point of characters becoming these great figures depended on their development, not just the fact that the game makes them great. For example: I love George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, and I love Daenerys Targaryen. Not because she's the last of a pretty much dead blood line, but because of that one moment (okay, this is a total SPOILER ALERT) when she took on the naysayers and became Khaleesi- when she transformed from scared Dany, to Queen-don't-mess-with-me-I-have-dragons Daenerys. It was her development that made me appreciate and love her all the more.


Is this game perfect? No, it has a lot of things I found lacking. Please use new character models! I loved FFVIII but I don't want to see Seifer/Zell in Snow, nor reuse Selphie's weapon for Fang, or the fact that Lightning is obviously Squall only without all the soliloquies. New character designs!
Also, perhaps the story could be fleshed out more? I didn't like how Cid came across the way he did. It seemed he had a pretty interesting back story, only to be shattered to pieces. The battle system is not as easy as it seems. Sure, it does seem to play itself sometimes, but if you don't pay attention and shift on time, you will die. A lot. My husband can attest to that... I wanted to smack him after he looked at me with an exasperated look as he asked "You died. Again?"

I love my RPGs, and there is still much in the genre that will mold and transform it. It doesn't always have to lie in flashy graphics (Legend of Legaia anyone?) but I stand behind the genre. We don't need less RPGs, we need more. We should be able to compare new RPGs to themselves, all while celebrating those RPGs in past times that made us love them.

And no, I will not be PC and say JRPG or WRPG. What do I look like? Elitist?