Ever since FF4 whipped everyone into shape in the early 90s, RPGs have followed a pretty simple formula of “gameplay/story/gameplay/story”. Typically the story is told through cutscenes, and then you play the game some more, and then you get to the next cutscene. In such a story-heavy genre it just seems perfectly natural. The only major paradigm shift has been the shift to voice acting over onscreen text with the coming of the PS2.
Other genres have made a lot of strides in making the storytelling a function of the gameplay. Metal Gear Solid has a few choice moments where it works really well. (Surrounded by 35 hours where it doesn’t.) Half-Life set the standard in first-person games by letting the player run around hopping on boxes or punching NPCs while the dialogue is going down. The last level of Braid is a level of brilliance that makes up for the sloppy drivel that comes before.
And yet, here I am playing Lost Odyssey, arguably one of the better RPGs I’ve played in a while, and it’s the same cutscene/game/cutscene/game formula. And really, I’m not knocking the game here. The writing, while nothing spectacular, is still several notches above the tripe most modern RPGs are clogged with. I have no beef with the quality of the writing or the direction of the story, I’m just wondering if the delivery could be a little smoother.
Hasn’t anyone figured out something better since 1991?
The problem, I guess, is that most of an RPG’s gameplay is centered around its combat system. Yes, yes, you have dungeons to explore and characters to develop and menus to navigate, but at the end of the day all of those things serve to make your characters stronger, and the only reflection of that is in battle. The endgame FMV doesn’t care what level the hero is or whether he has the Ubersword +1.
And there are some fantastic battle systems out there. The genre has evolved a great deal since the turn-based systems we knew in the 80s. Modern RPGs incorporate everything from strategic thinking to quick reflexes to minigames to logic programming in their battle systems. That side of the genre is doing well. It’s just… you fight 100 things and then wham! — wall of cutscene. Just like in 1991. You know?
The solution would be to convey part of the story during battle, and since these are typically battles where Side A lines up in one spot and Side B lines up in another that can be pretty difficult. Some games have tried. In Beyond the Beyond, a superhero joins your party and one-shots everything, but then gets cursed by a witch and brought down to the power level of the rest of your group. The status ailment is permanent until it’s lifted by the story, complete with his name and HP being printed in purple text. The fact that the character is cursed comes across in every combat the character participates in.
Legend of Legaia 2 has the bog-standard magical girl that joins the group… except she’s mute. She participates in combat, but can’t cast any spells, so she might as well not really be there. When she gets her voice back she gains access to her magic spells. Princess Garnet goes through a very similar trial in FF9 where she’s so shell-shocked she will occassionally forget to execute her commands in battle.
FF10 took it a step further and tried to incorporate the cutscenes into the battle system. Sometimes, during plot-critical battles, your characters would get extra commands in addition to Fight/Item/Magic. Select these commands and there would be an exchange of dialogue followed by an immediate development in the actual battle. It’s an interesting idea, but once you won the battle you still had to watch whatever FMV followed.
What’s the happy medium, here? Maybe instead of having the traditional group-banter cutscene upon arriving at a new area, we can have the group banter in real time for the first minute or two we’re running around. Maybe choreograph bosses in such a way that the whole conflict plays out during the battle, including whatever fantastic deathblow the party strikes and whatever horrific last words the villain has to spew. Maybe we can have more passive character development, like the thought bubbles in FF4DS or subtle changes in a character’s combat sound bytes and animation as they progress through the game.
I don’t think I’ll ever completely lose interest in RPGs as a genre, at least the ones that try to keep the gameplay advancements coming. It says something, though, that the pinnacles of other genres have all solved this story segregation problem and most RPGs haven’t even really tried.
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I seem to recall that you ended up not finishing Persona 3, but that was probably one of the things I liked best about it, during battles your characters would encourage the others, and after certain events, they would start to have different victory quotes, that reflected whatever event affected the character. Come to think of it, Persona 1 and 2 managed to convey character interactions in each dungeon, since in certain rooms your party would just stand around, and you’d have the opportunity to talk to them.
Riviera for the GBA/PSP did the battle/cutscene/battle/cutscene thing for the most part, but it made the cutscenes relatively short, and your party would just talk as you explored the dungeons, which gave it a different feel from most RPGs where you typically forget that your party members are people for most of the game.
Overall though, I agree, this is something that RPGs could be doing a lot better.
I keep hoping that JRPG developers will try their hand at making another movie like FF7 Advent Children, or better yet, a TV series made of modern game graphics. This way, they could bring their great visual design, music and storytelling to a much wider audience without having to think about pesky things like gameplay-story integration, or even gameplay at all.