Dead dove: DO NOT EAT

I appreciate a compelling story. For this reason, I enjoy watching movies, and I enjoy playing video-games. However, just because they are both story telling mediums does not mean that you can, or should, tell a story in a video-game that could have been told in a movie. The way I judge how much I liked a story is by how much it makes me feel, by how many different emotions I feel throughout the story. However, the way you would do this is very different in a movie, where you have a captive audience that sees exactly what you show them, than from in a video-game, where the player has more control about how they experience the game's events. In some ways, this makes telling a compelling story in a video-game more difficult. If a player chooses to do events out of order, it may defuse dramatic tensions in events that were intended to be completed earlier, because the player already knows too much about their outcomes. Even in more linear games, simply forbidding the player from travelling to certain places or performing certain actions may give them clues about future events that the game's designers would rather were not revealed. At the same time, giving the player freedom to play through the game (rather than watch it as a movie) gives the designers other tools that they can use to make the player feel different ways.

In the Arrested Development episode "Top Banana" there is a scene in which Michael is in his kitchen, and walks up to his fridge. He is hungry. Upon opening the fridge, he finds a brown paper bag marked "Dead dove: DO NOT EAT." He is curious. He opens the bag, finding a dead dove inside of it, and he recoils immediately. He is disgusted. He says to himself, "I don't know what I expected." He is disappointed. Not disappointed with whoever left the dove in the fridge, but disappointed with himself, because he should have known better. These kinds of events are not out of the ordinary in his house. Fewer than ten seconds have passed, and Michael has felt four different emotions, but for the viewer, it's just one joke.

Consider Mother 3, the sequel to Earthbound. The tagline for Mother 3 is "Strange, Funny, and Heartrending." Often, the game switches quickly between these three modes. In some cases, it accomplishes this using the technique described above, the 'Dead Dove Bag,' where the player is Michael, opening bags of dead doves left out by the game's designers. One relatively spoiler-free example of this technique being used in Mother 3 comes at a time when the player's party washes up on the shore of a tropical island. Injured and exhausted, the monsters on the island will kill you easily unless you can find some way to restore your party's health, but the only food you can find is a large pile of mushrooms. Your party eats them, which does restore their health, but they turned out to be hallucinogenic mushrooms. What follows is one of the most stressful sections of the game. Periodically as you walk around, you will hallucinate a person you met before, or a person one of your party members knows personally, including dead parents and lost siblings. The hallucinations often tell you they miss you, that you should abandon your quest and come home, but at the end of the conversation they usually say something very personal, very hurtful to one of your party members. Adding injury to insult, the hallucination then initiates combat with you. You then have to fight off several real monsters, but since you're hallucinating, you don't know what they are. They all appear as random people or monsters. This makes it really hard to choose the proper combat tactics, since you can only infer the identity of the monsters based on how they attack you.

About halfway through this island adventure, you come across a hot spring, your first rest in a long time. In Mother 3, there are no monsters at hot springs, and you can bathe in them to heal your party. Once you've healed up, you have nowhere to go further into the island, battling insult-hurling hallucinations as you go. When you reach the other end of the island, you meet a fairy who restores you to sobriety. Once you've come to your senses, the fairy reminds your party of their epic quest, and urges them onward. After leaving the island, the player never has any reason to return there. Given the choice, I imagine many players would never come back, in large part because it was such a stressful part of the game. However, now that your party is no longer hallucinating, combat on the island will be much simpler, and you can see what the island actually looked like, if you're curious. Much of it will be what you'd expect from a tropical island, but one notable exception is the hot spring. If you took the time to backtrack, if you disregarded the fairy urging you to complete your quest, you'll find that the hot spring you thought you were bathing in is actually a pool of toxic sludge. The sign that you thought read "Hot Spring" actually says " <-- Hot Spring." If you walk one screen to the left, there is an area, which did not exist the first time the player goes through the island, containing a real hot spring.

Upon reaching the fairy the first time, most players probably expect they'll remember the island as one of the most stressful parts of the game. However, if you were curious and chose to backtrack to the hot spring after you came to your senses, that memory will be tainted with a bit of silliness. And then you might be upset for a short while because the mood of the game was ruined. And when you're done being upset, if you have a good sense of humor, you might chuckle again, knowing that whatever you felt at finding toxic sludge, you brought that feeling on yourself. The game gives you a bag to open, but it is clearly marked, 'DO NOT OPEN.' If you don't like what you find inside of it, you've really only got yourself to blame.

Predicting how players will treat their freedom to instill emotions can be very effective, but it is also difficult. Other games use simpler devices to make players feel for the characters and events in a game. Consider Final Fantasy 7. Halfway through the game, Aeris, one of your party members, dies. She is slain by the main antagonist, Sephiroth. Many gamers will openly admit to weeping at this moment in the game, since they had become so attached to Aeris. In my opinion, were Final Fantasy 7 a movie, people would have a harder time caring about Aeris. Some people might not find her very interesting, some might not find her very attractive (her body contains around 20 polygons, half of which are in her hair), and most people probably don't think she's very cool. Every other person in your party is way more bad ass than Aeris (except maybe cait sith). The reason why players still feel attached to Aeris is because you have to depend on her for so long. In the beginning of the game, Cloud, the protagonist, travels alone. Battles can be difficult, since cloud has to heal himself in battle, giving enemies more time to attack him. Eventually, Aeris joins cloud, and while she isn't nearly as strong, simply having a second member of your party is extremely helpful. She can heal while Cloud attacks, finish off weakened enemies so Cloud can attack stronger ones, etc. Players definitely appreciate her presence because for a long stretch of the game hers is the only friendly face you see. Were this game a movie, the situation would not seem so stressful, since you know that the movie has to proceed, and all you need to do is watch it. As a video game, however, even if players don't particularly like Aeris at first, they have to respect her, since without her help, the game could possibly not progress, unlike a movie, since you might not be able to defeat your enemies without her. If she joined your party at a later time, when you had other characters to choose from, I doubt that players would have reacted so strongly to her death.

Another instance in which Final Fantasy 7 instills emotions in the player occurs later on in the game, where Cloud is reminiscing about his days in SOLDIER, an elite military force that he served in with Sephiroth. You play through the flashback, fighting a monster alongside Sephiroth, escorted by two generic soldiers. Normally in RPGs, when combat starts, the plot is paused, but this flashback works differently. The premise of the story was "hey guys, remember how cool I was?" but when you get into the flashback, Cloud has very little health, doesn't deal much damage, and doesn't know many spells. Sephiroth, on the other hand, has tons of health, deals tons of damage, and knows almost every spell in the game. If you attack the monster, it will do very little damage. The monster then attacks Cloud, killing him in one blow. Sephiroth revives Cloud, and then before either Cloud or the monster has time to act, he also slays the monster in one blow. Then the flashback ends. Cloud continues telling the party how awesome he was, but as the player, having just played through that, something felt wrong. Sephiroth was clearly babysitting Cloud, they were not equals in combat, like Cloud likes to remember. Perhaps there is something wrong with Cloud's memory? The player's suspicion of Cloud's memory foreshadows events later on in the game, where it is revealed that Cloud is all kinds of crazy. Cloud was not fighting next to Sephiroth in the event you flash back to, it was Zach, a member of SOLDIER who Cloud apparently had a huge man-crush on, so in time, Cloud came to believe that everything he saw Zach do, he had done himself. Cloud only remembers that event at all because he was one of the generic soldiers escorting Sephiroth and Zach. Cloud was never actually an elite member of SOLDIER.

If the player paid careful attention to the flashback scene and was suspicious of Cloud's memory, they'll probably feel clever when the full extent of Cloud's psychological issues is revealed. Of course, if that player thinks too hard about the flashback scene, they'll probably be confused or disappointed, because it doesn't entirely make sense if you look at it too hard. But still. Points for trying.

Earth, Wind, and Fire

Elemental damage is extremely common in RPG's, particularly turn based and Japanese RPG's. Rather than have damage be damage, many attacks do damage of a specific type, and many enemies (and often the player characters as well) take more or less damage from certain types of damage. Potentially, a well implemented system of elemental damage can add a dynamic strategic element to an RPG, but these systems are pretty much always poorly implemented.

Consider Final Fantasy X. The black mage of your party, Lulu, for the majority of the game, has only as many as 12 useful spells: a damage dealing spell in each of the four elements (fire, thunder, water, blizzard), each with three tiers of strength. Her other spells and basic attack are useless, and using items is rarely the right choice in combat, so whenever Lulu's turn comes up, the only questions you need to ask yourself are "How many magic points can I afford to spend?", "Which enemy is my highest priority to kill?", and "What spell will do the most damage?". The first two questions are sometimes a little tricky, but the last one never is. Spells of different elements within the same tier of power differ only in what type of damage they do. They cost the same amount of magic points and do the same base damage, so the best spell to use is always the one that does the most damage, which is rarely difficult to figure out. For example, if you're climbing an icy peak in the middle of the frigid Northlands, chances are pretty good that everything is weak against fire. Some bosses try to be tricky and change what element they're weak to, but they're never very sneaky about it. You generally don't even need to spend a turn to find out what the boss's new weakness is. All this does is make sure that the player isn't falling asleep. Towards the end of the game, you get access to spells that deal non-elemental damage, so they deal full damage regardless of the enemy's type. This should make things much simpler, but it really doesn't detract from the strategic elements of the game since choosing which spell to use is basically a non-choice to begin with. Part of the problem is that the spells differ only in the type of damage you do, and you almost always have equal access to spells of all four elements. If you didn't have equal access to different types of attacks, and there was a less arbitrary reason why different attacks did more or less damage to different enemies, you might have to make some more interesting choices.

Consider Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. Damage is damage. You don't have to check if your enemies are weak against fire or ice damage, crushing or piercing damage. Damage is damage. But that doesn't mean that all attacks are equally effective against all enemies. Whenever you attack an enemy, the damage you deal is reduced by their defense. Let's say you deal 8 damage, they have 2 defense, 8-2=6, so you deal 6 damage. However, if you have an attack that hits multiple times, your opponent's defense is applied for each hit. For example, if you have an attack that hits 2 times for 4 damage each, and your enemy still has 2 defense, you deal (4-2)+(4-2)=4 damage. So multi-hit attacks don't do so well against enemies with high defense. However, if you have a bonus to your attack, from an item or from your equipment, it's applied to all of your attacks. So, let's say you get +3 to your attacks, and your enemies still have 2 defense, your 2-hit attacks (assuming you still have 4 base damage) will deal (4+3-2)+(4+3-2)=10 damage. In paper Mario 2, you almost always have the choice between using 1-hit attacks or 2-hit attacks (or sometimes attacks with more hits), but depending on what gear you equip Mario with, you will be more capable of doing one over the other. The moral of the story here is that if you have more bonus damage than your opponent has defense, you are better off with multi-hit attacks. Otherwise, you should stick with 1-hit attacks. Therefore, in every area you adventure through, an important question you must ask yourself is "Am I capable of boosting my attack bonus higher than my enemies' defense, and what will I have to compromise to get my attack bonus that high?"

I'm not trying to say that any battle system using elemental damage is bad, just that there are a lot of wrong ways to do it. For an example of a game that handles elemental damage pretty well, consider Final Fantasy: Chaos Rings. In that game, there are only 3 elements, which, for clarity, I'm going to call rock, paper, and scissors. Square has a problem with giving unfamiliar names to intuitive concepts. Enemies come in all three flavors, and are weak or strong to other elements exactly how you'd expect them to be. A rock elemental attack will deal more damage to a scissors elemental monster, and less damage to a paper elemental monster. You do have the option to equip yourself with spells of each type at the same time, but the total number of skills and abilities you can have equipped at once is strictly limited, so in order to get that extra bit of versatility, you might need to compromise your character in other ways. What makes things really interesting though, is that after you cast an elemental spell in battle, your character gains an affinity for that element until the end of the battle, or until you cast another elemental spell. So if you cast a rock spell, that character's physical attacks will deal extra damage to scissors monsters, and reduced damage to paper monsters. That character will also take extra damage from paper monsters, and reduced damage from scissors monsters. If all of the monsters you're fighting against are of the same type, it's pretty easy to brace yourself with the right element, but battles are rarely so simple. It is more often the case that you will be fighting a rock monster and two scissors monsters. You could use paper magic to kill the rock monster quickly, but then the two scissors monsters will tear through your party. It would probably be better to use rock magic to kill the scissors monsters, leaving you on even footing with the rock monster. However, if the rock monster was 4 times more dangerous than the scissors monsters, then you might still be better off using paper magic to kill the rock monster before dealing with the scissors monsters.

Things get even more complicated during boss fights, since bosses generally have access to all 3 elements, which makes them very good at exploiting the player's weaknesses. Unfortunately, by midway through the game I had learned a few abilities which, when used together, enabled me to deal enormous amounts of non-elemental damage without gaining any elemental affinity, entirely sidestepping the game's elemental damage. Not only was this a much simpler way of beating bosses, but it was also much, much faster. I suppose I have only myself to blame for choosing to exploit such tactics, but I still think that Square should think a little harder about how they want people to play their games. But still. Points for trying.

Synergy

Synergy is when the end result of multiple efforts applied together is greater than the sum of those efforts individually. For example, if you have a few Valium or a few drinks, it'll help you relax, but if you take them together, you won't know what's what until you wake up dead. That's synergy.

To use a less grim example, cooking. Certain combinations of foods will taste better together than they will individually (i.e., B+L+T). Likewise, certain combinations of otherwise delicious food may taste wretched together (use your imagination). In part, this is what makes cooking interesting, that you can't just roll up all the best ingredients into a ball of 'win' and marinade it in awesome sauce, but you have to be mindful of how each ingredient interacts with the others. This also makes cooking a decent meal more complicated than equipping your party in nearly all RPG's.

Consider Final Fantasy IX. The game features an interesting system of passive abilities. Each character in your party can learn dozens of passive abilities, and can have several of them be in effect simultaneously at any given time. With that many choices, there is a staggering number of different combinations of abilities for even one character. Unfortunately, none of the abilities interact with each other synergistically, so choosing a set of passive abilities is often pretty simple; you're free to just choose your best abilities without worrying about how they interact with each other.

To be fair, there is one notable exception to this. "Auto potion" allows a character to use a potion (or high potion) out of turn after each time they are damaged, but even high potions heal too little health by midway through the game for this ability to be worthwhile. "Chemist" doubles the efficacy of certain items used by a character, but it still doesn't make those items good enough to warrant spending a turn to use them. Individually, these abilities aren't the greatest, but they complement each other such that they're viable when used together.

A game that uses a similar system much more effectively is Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. The player can equip Mario with both combat techniques and passive abilities, though in Thousand Year Door this done by equipping badges because Nintendo refuses to just call things what they are. Rather, they would have you believe that Mario simply wears his boyscout sash everywhere so he can constantly rearrange dozens of badges without poking too many holes in his overalls.

But the point is, many of these badges interact with each other in exciting ways. Finding one new badge in that games doesn't necessarily just give you access to one more effect, but may give you access to multiple new strategies, depending on what other badges you can combine it with. Some sets of badges may significantly change Mario's combat role, completely changing the basic battle tactics the player uses, or sometimes a group of 2 or 3 badges can make a badge combo where they have a powerful effect together that is qualitatively different from what they would do alone. In some cases, badges have subtle anti-synergy. A badge that helps you dodge attacks doesn't really play well with one that increases your defense, since every attack you dodge was an attack where your defense wasn't relevant.

The most notable badge synergy in Thousand Year Door is the 'Danger Mario' build. The game has many 'danger' badges, which have powerful effects that only trigger when Mario is almost dead. Individually, these badges are trash, since being 'almost dead' rarely lasts very long, as you'll generally either heal yourself or just die within the next turn. However, if Mario has all of the 'danger' badges equipped at the same time, then once you become almost dead, you become nearly unstoppable. The most important of the danger badges is 'Power Rush,' which increases your attack power by 2 (which is a huge boost in this game) when you're almost dead. The unfortunate thing is that with a little patience, you can buy as many Power Rush badges as you want, turning Mario into the Glassiest Cannon that ever there was and making the rest of the game comically easy. Like, kill-the-final-boss-in-one-turn easy.

So maybe Thousand Year Door takes synergy a little too far. But still. Points for trying.

Inventory

Inventory in RPG's is handled in many different ways. Some of the more traditional methods include 'infinite of anything,' as in most Final Fantasy games, where there is practically no limit on how much your party can hold. Similarly, some games, such as the Tales of Whatever games, use a 'little bit of everything' system, in which the party can hold any number of different items, but there is a limit to how many of the same item you can have. The last one I want to mention, and my personal favorite, is the system used in a handful of RPG's, such as the Mother games, in which you have a limit on the total number of items you can carry, and none of them stack. For example, lets say you're playing Mother 3, which has an inventory limit of 30 (I believe) for a party of one. Say you were traveling by yourself and harvested 30 pieces of dung, you would not have space in your inventory for even one loaf of bread, as may be the case.

In my opinion, the most important criterion on which one should judge an RPG is the rate at which the game forces the player to make difficult decisions. A game using an 'infinite of anything' inventory system doesn't really force the player to make any interesting decisions while she's standing behind the counter in the item store; the answer to the question "what do I buy here?" is almost always "more than enough of everything." Consumable items are usually inexpensive, and money is easy to come by in games where you can just grind for a few minutes outside of town till you have what you need (which is most RPG's). Games using a 'little bit of everything' model are little better. In this case, the answer to "what do I buy here?" is always "as much as the game will let me." Item shop decisions get much more interesting in games that impose harsh limits on your inventory.

Consider the game Evolution, an RPG for the Dreamcast. Your inventory space is severely limited, and to make things even trickier, money in the game is semi-finite. When you browse the item shop in Evolution, you have to ask yourself a lot of questions about the dungeon you're about to go into.

What status effects will I have to deal with here, and how frequently will I be inflicted with them? If one of my characters does get a negative status effect that I'm prepared to cure, is fighting with that status affect worse than spending a turn to cure it? Am I more concerned about healing light damage in multiple characters, or heavy damage in one character at a time? This depends on what monsters you are going to be fighting, as well as how you've chosen to set up your party. The answer to all of these questions will affect which items you buy, and in what proportions. Instead of being an errand you have to run before diving into the dungeon, the item shop is a meaningful part of the game.

But what about items that you don't buy in stores, those super rare consumable items that you save for a rainy day because they're just too awesome to use? Evolution has those too, but they don't usually invite you to make interesting decisions in the same way. One such item is the green moss, an item that you'd be lucky to find five of over the course of the game. Being that rare, most players would be compelled to save them for a potentially difficult battle in the unspecified future. It works out well enough in this case, since the only place where they're particularly necessary is against the final boss of the game. If you have around four or five of them, you can use a tactic that ends the fight in a few rounds when it would otherwise be a difficult battle. Until then, the player can just keep them in the storage locker in the protagonist's house, as not to waste precious inventory space on an item she probably won't be using any time soon. I imagine most players appreciate the storage locker, but as I see it, the storage locker robs the player of a chance to make an interesting decision.

Consider Super Mario RPG, Legend of the Seven Stars, the quirky offspring of Nintendo and Square. Many consider it a Beginner's RPG designed to initiate eleven year olds, but it has one of the most unforgiving inventory systems I've ever seen in a game. Your inventory can hold a grand total of 29 items, nothing stacks, and you have no storage. This makes things complicated right from the start. Ten minutes into the game, you are practically handed a Kerokerocola, a rare, powerful healing item which is also too awesome to use. It fully heals all members of your party, but at this point, your party consists of only Mario, so there obviously must be a better time to use it. Problem is, since there is no storage, as long as you are holding on to that cola, saving it for who knows what, you have effectively reduced your inventory to 28. It only gets worse from there, since this game is full of super unique items: a membership card to a top secret casino, a magical money bag that has infinite coins in it, etc. They all take up space in your already tiny inventory. For each of these rare or unique items in your inventory, you have to choose between long term security, knowing that you have a very useful item in case the situation should demand it, and the immediate benefit of extra inventory space that you get from discarding the item, never to be seen again.

Unfortunately, the game just generally isn't difficult enough that you'd ever need the extra inventory space. But still. Points for trying.