Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4's Use of Its Setting

Major thanks, as is often the case, to good Ecclesiastes for his help with both the brainstorming for this rant, and for looking it over to make sure it’s vaguely coherent.  You’re a right proper gent, sir.



Hey, here’s a question for the universe: Why did Atlus decide to make Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 set in rural Japan?

I mean, don’t misunderstand me, here.  I’m not against the idea of setting a Persona title somewhere other than the big city.  In fact, I fully respect the idea.  The Persona subseries (at least, from 3 onward) has a major interest in showing and reveling in the life, culture, mentality, and rebellion of late adolescence, and while it’s easy and obvious to match Persona’s fast-paced, cutting-edge aesthetic style to an urban environment, the singular experience of those years spent on the brink of adulthood is no less felt and grappled with by teens in small communities, too.  The youth of pastoral Japan are just as deserving of a Persona highlighting and immersing itself within their experience and the culture that surrounds them as the youths of the city.

But that’s...not really what they got with SMT Persona 4, is it?  At least, I don’t think so.  Because when I step back and look at the game, it seems to me that Persona 4 hasn’t the slightest idea of what to do with its setting, how to make life in Inaba authentic and how to highlight the kind of lifestyle and aspirations of the kids who live in tiny towns like it.

Let’s look at the main cast, for a start.  Have you ever noticed that half of the Investigation Team are effectively outsiders to Inaba?  We won’t count Teddie for obvious reasons, but Yu, Yosuke, and Naoto are all newcomers to Inaba who have lived their lives elsewhere until roughly the time of the game’s events.*  And if we’re being reasonable, we really have to count Rise as an outsider, too.  Inaba may be her hometown, but she’s lived away from it for long enough, in an influential enough capacity, that the primary components of Rise’s character and personality make her functionally more of an urbanite than any of them.  Not to mention that after the game’s end, Rise’s gonna go back to the idol biz, so this stint in Inaba really is just a mega-star taking a small mental health vacation, and nothing more.

And as a bonus, 1 of the remaining cast who are actually authentic, born-and-raised inhabitants of Inaba, is Yukiko.  Yukiko, whose initial personal crisis, and a good chunk of whose character development from that point on, revolves around her wanting to get the hell out of this podunk little town, and eventually coming to accept her future in Inaba.  She’s not even the first character to use this as an opener to her character development; Yosuke’s conflict with his shadow was also largely based on the fact that he dislikes being stuck in a small backwoods town!  There is, thankfully, a lot more to Yosuke’s character than just that, and a little more to Yukiko’s as well, but that still doesn’t change the fact that of the 7 human characters in this game, 4 are complete outsiders to the setting, and of the remaining 3 honest townies, 1’s most memorable and defining character trait is the desire to get the hell out!

If Persona 4 is so fucking hot for rustic Japan, why does it need to import half of the main characters to get the team it wants?  Why does it need to have multiple residents of the town regard it as a prison?  You know how many characters in Persona 5 are newcomers who just moved to the city from a smaller community?  0 to 1, depending on where Ren comes from--and that's me being very generous, because our momentary glimpse into his past sure makes it look like he's from a developed area himself.  And it's pretty much a flat 0 for Persona 3; there's close to no chance Minato and Kotone aren't city slickers .  You know how many times I can recall a party member from either game talk about how sick they were of living in the city and how much they wanted to get out of the concrete jungle and live in the beauty of the country?  Another big fat 0.

It’s not even like they HAD to do this for most of the characters.  I mean, why imply that Yu comes from a larger, busier community?  He could have functioned just as well as the newcomer to town if he’d moved to Inaba from a similar sleepy little town--making the lateral shift from 1 city environment to another certainly doesn’t get in the way of Ren being an outside oddity of note in SMTP5’s community.  Naoto could just as easily have been a local kid detective hero getting more and more involved in the cases as the game progresses; her history and all significant parts of her personality would have remained comfortably intact.

And why have Yosuke be a former city kid at all?  His greatest role in the story is as Yu’s best buddy, confidant, and initial guide to Inaba as a whole.  Yosuke could’ve done all that just as well had he just BEEN a kid from Inaba, particularly the part where he’s Yu’s guide to the community early on.  It’s not like you’d have to change the Junes angle at all--there’s no reason Yosuke’s dad couldn’t just have been a local man chosen to run the new superstore.  That even would have opened up new avenues of character development for him, as he wrestles with the guilt that his family is benefiting from the destruction of his community’s economy, and it would have made the dichotomy between him and Saki Konishi, and his tormented after-the-fact feelings regarding her, so much more interesting.  Yosuke could have been an even better character without the insulating layer of being an outsider that allows him to keep the community around him at arm’s length!

And since we’re on the subject, can we also talk about the major issues that characterize Inaba as a whole?  The main story of the game is about the murder spree, and that’s fine.  But the other major issue facing Inaba as a whole is its local economy struggling to compete with the invasion of a retail titan’s superstore.  The Junes situation is essentially the only real characterization we get of the town’s happenings and conflicts beyond the mandated-by-plot murder spree.  Which means that the biggest thing that characterizes the rural setting of Persona 4 is its reaction to the intrusion of a major urban influence.

That’s the major problem with how Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 goes about utilizing its setting: the writers only seem to know or care about pastoral Japan in the context of its relationship to urban Japan.  They can barely manage to write a major character who’s not a displaced urbanite, itching to get out of the sticks, or both.  The only way they know how to characterize the town itself is in relation to the encroachment of institutions from more developed areas.  The creators of SMTP4 just can’t seem to conceive of rural Japan as a place in its own right.

Even the approach to the player’s interaction with the country town environment isn’t handled well.  Why is there so little free exploration of Inaba available?  The idea of being restricted to certain smaller areas connected by map points feels at home in SMTP3 and 5, games set in city environments where space is a premium and movement from 1 area of the burg to another is usually characterized by public transportation with specific stops.  But with the surrounding countryside and freer amount of space for public use in a small town like Inaba, it would have made way more sense to allow the player a freer method of exploring the environs than the same select-which-place-you-want-to-go method that works in SMTP3 and 5.  Inaba never feels like a place where you can stretch your legs and take in the surroundings, and that seems counterproductive for utilizing the setting’s potential to me.

You know what seems like the most telling thing about all this, to me?  The thing that best shows this mindset the game has, where it perpetually sees a small town environment like Inaba as something foreign and hasn’t the slightest idea of what it should do with the place?  The fact that the Velvet Room of SMTP4 is set inside of a limousine.  A vehicle specifically designed to separate the rider from the people and places he’s driven past.  Frankly, the fact that Igor frames this whole venture in Inaba as an obstruction to a journey feels exactly on point to the way the writers approach this setting as a whole.**

Look.  It’s not like I’m asking that every major character in SMTP4 don a straw hat, stick a stalk of grass between their teeth, and end every sentence with “a-yup.”  But you don’t have to pigeonhole townies to tell a story about them and their community.  The anime Non Non Biyori manages to create stories about the kids of a rural community--way smaller than even Inaba, I’d like to add--for multiple seasons, and not once does it feel like it’s having trouble finding authentic material for its small-town slice-of-life adventures.  The countryside of Japan and its inhabitants are duly respected and celebrated in Non Non Biyori, instead of treated as an obstacle or annoyance as they are in Persona 4.

But then, the creative force behind Non Non Biyori has, from what I understand, actual experience with living in the countryside that the show depicts.  Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, on the other hand, I can only assume was created by a writing team whose origins were uniformly of the urban sprawl.  That’s purely speculation, of course, but honestly, I really can’t see any other rational possibility for the way the game handles small-town life.

As my good reader and better friend Ecclesiastes put it, “Inaba is a theme park more than a place.”

















* Admittedly, that’s the standard for modern Persona protagonists; Ren and Minato are also both outsiders to the setting of their games, but each are implied to simply have transferred from 1 urban environment to a new one.  Yu is likewise implied to be a city boy, though, which makes him more than just the newcomer that Minato and Ren are--it makes him an actual outsider to the setting.


** And even the limo Velvet Room feels like a place you want to leave as soon as possible.  It’s so uncomfortably claustrophobic and secluded!  How is it possible that an elevator and a prison cell have felt more spacious and inviting as Velvet Rooms than the interior of what’s supposed to be a luxury vehicle?

Fire Emblem 15's Downloadable Content

Ugh.  Is it even worth it to write an intro?  Let’s just make it quick, because we all know how this is gonna go down.  We’re looking at the add-ons for Fire Emblem Heroes: Shadows of Valentia today, DLC packages are bad wastes of money like 70% of the time in general, and if the Fire Emblems immediately preceding and proceding this one are anything to go by, this series’s add-ons are especially terrible.  And given that FE15 is kinda bad to begin with, I’m not exactly expecting great things, here.

Well, let’s get this over with. I can’t wait to see what halfhearted, careless money-grabs that Nintendo’s got on the roster.



Cipher Legends 1: Alright, so we’re gonna start here, because the 4 packages that come before Cipher Legends 1 are a linked set of stories that we’ll get into below, and the first crowd of add-ons that came before those are just a bunch of straightforward, trite little battle/dungeon things that have effectively no story components.  Either you have or somehow have not tired of this game’s repetitive Fire Emblem battles and cookie-cutter dungeons, and you can figure out for yourself whether you want to bother engaging further with them.

Anyway, Cipher Legends 1.  This DLC, which adds 2 characters from a small off-shoot installment of Fire Emblem, is an odd one to judge.  The inclusion of Emma and Randall feels extremely random, and I’m generally not big on introducing new characters for no reason beyond marketing--it’s bad enough that undeserving Fire Emblem schmucks like Byleth and Ike invade Smash like an ever growing number raccoons finding a way into your attic, but not EVERY Fire Emblem needs other Fire Emblem characters shoved into it! You’re not Nippon Ichi, Nintendo, people don’t give a crap about hamfistedly cramming your titles into a shared multiverse for shits and giggles!

On the other hand...Emma and Randall are reasonably amusing, and let’s be honest, there’s not all that many particularly fun characters to be found in Fire Emblem 15.  So...I can’t really say they’re unwelcome.

Anyway, the plot of this one is just that Emma and Randall get in a bind, the heroes show up to bail them out, and in gratitude the 2 join up with the army, because in Fire Emblem, there’s just no such thing as thank-you notes.  The add-on’s not much altogether, and Emma and Randall only have a single Support, with each other.  I really don’t know why a couple couldn’t have been made with the regular cast members--why in the world does Emma not at least have supports with the Whitewing sisters?  She’s all about the Triangle Attack, and it’s almost their signature move in the franchise!  Sadly, although I think these 2 add some far too uncommon likability to the cast, there’s just not enough content here to justify the price of $4 by a long shot, nor the price of $3 when considering the package deal of both Ciphers for $6.


Cipher Legends 2: Unsurprisingly, this one’s very similar to the first Cipher Legends package.  Shade and Yuzu’s inclusion feels forced, but conversely, they’re pretty likable as characters, once again more so than most of FE15’s main cast.  The plot of this one does actually relate to the main quest’s evil cultists, rather than just being the bread-and-butter bandit-beating that Fire Emblem is so incredibly fond of, and to its credit, there’s a good bit of extra dialogue available if you’ve already got Emma and Randall from the first DLC.  Still, while I do like Shade and Yuzu better than the FE15 average, one has to consider how much content there actually is in this DLC (which is very little), and once again, this add-on all boils down to a single battle, some dialogue before, during, and after it, a few more bits of character text in town, and only a single support chain for the new characters (Yuzu and Shade don’t even have supports with their own friends Emma and Randall!  How stupid is that?).  As with the first, there just isn’t enough content here to justify even a measly $4.


Battle of Zofia Harbor: Oh holy crap, ACTUAL story in a DLC?  I’d almost forgotten what it looked like.  This package provides a little bit of backstory as you take Fernand and Clive through a mission before the game’s events in which they have to reluctantly save that worm Slayde from the “finding out” phase of his fucking around.  Having to do an escort mission for fucking Slayde of all people is not exactly the most enticing prospect in the world, and he certainly goes to no great lengths during this DLC to make the matter any easier to swallow, but I suppose that 9S did warn me that existence was nothing but suffering.

Opening this DLC by having the entire lead-up to its events summarized unnaturally as Fernand goes into a grumpy tirade is fairly clumsy, but as a whole, this little side story does a halfway decent job humanizing Fernand, which is good, because the game proper wanted him to die a much more sympathetic villain than he did.  Although I’d prefer competent writing from the start, I can always appreciate it when a developer uses its DLC as a chance to correct its narrative mistakes.  I also appreciate that the DLC is used to establish the general unrest of the citizens, and the poor leadership of the Zofian king--it’s a pretty direct and simple affair, mind you, but at least it actually relates to the damn game and attempts to embellish a prior tell-don’t-show error of the game proper.  Otherwise, it’s a pretty cut-and-dry mini-plot, but the purpose of this DLC is obviously less about the events than the insight into its cast and lore, so that’s fine.

The Memory Prisms you get from completing the mission are also decent for developing Fernand, through depicting his relationship with Clair.  Although the conversation is mostly about how everyone in-game wants to de-legitimize Clair as a warrior by throwing her at the first eligible bachelor they can find just as much as the writers themselves want to.  Oh, and also, Clair describes her ideal man, who is the exact opposite of the dingbat she winds up stuck with by the game's end, because someone important on the staff for this game just really, really does not like women.  And as if the reassurance that Clair’s romantic future is shitty isn’t already frustrating enough, Fernand has to go and point out that the ideal mate that she’s describing is essentially her brother.  Jesus Christ Fire Emblem could you JUST stop toying and teasing at sibling incest for ONE FUCKING GAME?  And then it turns around and Clair talks about how Fernand likes his ladies the way he likes his oranges, full and ripe, and it’s like, could we PLEASE MOVE ON.  

...Where was I?  Well, whatever.  The DLC’s got ups and downs, but it does actually attempt to accomplish something of worth to the game as a whole by filling in a few of its narrative deficits.  It’s still overpriced at $4, as you’re gonna get maybe close to an hour of content out of it, max, so I can’t recommend it, but Battle of Zofia Harbor is at least of pretty decent quality.


Outpost Rescue: This little piece of backstory is about Lukas, Forsythe, and Python rescuing some comrades before Alm joined the Deliverance.  It’s...pretty bland, just like its stars.  I mean, I like the moment in which Lukas has some self-reflection and acknowledges that if the Deliverance fails because of Desaix’s ire at losing a match to him, then it is Lukas himself who will have doomed them all for indulging in his pride and not throwing the fight.  But honestly, that’s really about the only moment that stands out here for the DLC’s main story, and the extra Support conversations that come from its completion don’t stand out, either.  I mean, Forsythe and Lukas’s talk about each wanting what the other had as a child leading each to better value what he DID have is a decent set of interactions, but not amazing, and Lukas and Python’s Supports are kinda boring.

Is this a bad DLC?  Not really.  But it’s not an interesting one.  You could justify playing it if it came free with the game, but it’s certainly not worth paying for.


Flight From the Ruins: This DLC involves Clair and Mathilda trying to find an anti-magic ring and getting mixed up in fighting zombies or whatever.  There’s nothing wrong with it, but after Battle of Zofia Harbor, which gave some appreciated and much-needed development to Clive and especially Fernand, this is disappointing.  The fact that Outpost Rescue didn’t really do much with Lukas was less disappointing than it was simply expected, because Lukas is freakin’ boring and both Forsythe and Python are basically just in the game to pad out the cast a bit...but Mathilda and especially Clair actually have personalities and a little depth, so it’s too bad their DLC mini-adventure just doesn’t really do much of anything with them.  Aside, of course, from having Clair start getting uncomfortably territorial over her brother with Mathilda, Clive’s actual girlfriend, because apparently Nintendo felt that 1 of the biggest priorities of FE15’s DLCs was to make up for lost time with Fire Emblem’s traditional, cowardly noncommittal but undeniably ever-present fetish for incest.

The Supports that come with the DLC are far better, at least.  We get a bit of character history between Mathilda and Fernand, which is welcome, and a conversation chain between Mathilda and Clair about growing up--what good is gained from it, but also what good is lost in the process, too.  This actually feels like real, genuine interpersonal growth and character writing with a purpose, and is easily the best part of the FE15 DLCs thus far.  Sadly, though, even if this package’s Memory Prism Support Conversations are far better, there still just isn’t enough good stuff to justify the $4 price tag it released for.  You’re simply not gonna get more than about an hour from it, and only a bit of that hour is going to be earnestly good.


Siege of Zofia Castle: ...Huh.  Okay.  So...this add-on, which shows us how Zofia Castle was lost to the Deliverance before Alm’s arrival during the game proper’s events, is actually good.  Really good, even.  And I don’t mean that it’s got a couple really good moments that stand out while the rest of it is passable at best.  I mean Siege of Zofia Castle is actually, genuinely good in essentially its entirety!

This add-on, which is a culmination of the previous 3, actually does a very nice job of further characterizing Fernand, utilizing what we’ve seen of him in the previous packages as a foundation for continuing to flesh him out, and gives some backstory and reason as to why he’s such a douchebag in the main game.  Honestly, these DLCs, this one in particular, have managed to turn Fernand around from being an easily-dismissed, dime-a-dozen disingenuous antagonist into an actually sympathetic character.  That’s not an easy thing to believably, naturally pull off, especially after the fact, so I give full kudos to the writers on this one.  Seriously, whoever it was in the writer’s room that buckled the fuck down and hammered Fernand into an asset to the game instead of 1 of its flaws, my hat’s off to you, and considering how bad my haircut is as of the time of writing this, that means something.*

This DLC’s not just the Fernand show, either. I like Python and Forsythe’s exchange about whether what they’re doing is even worth it, as the murdered king was ruling Zofia poorly, and the common citizens care more about living decent and peaceful lives than about which noble jackass has the “right” to be on the throne.  It’s an unexpectedly thoughtful self-assessment of the heroes’ cause, particularly for a Fire Emblem game; this series is generally very fixated on the perspective of the nobles and knights and rights of succession and such.  The extra Support Conversation between Clive and Python that you get at the add-on’s end is really good, too.

And this time, it’s not JUST the character bits that shine in the DLC.  The actual plot, small though it is, is quite engaging and interesting.  The tension as the Deliverance fights its losing battle and especially the way that the Deliverance secures its safe retreat once there’s no other option is genuinely interesting and fun to witness.  The aftermath is just plain great--the demoralized and angry discussions between the members of the Deliverance after their defeat and retreat, the fact that you can see Fernand deciding that this dishonorable tactic of Lukas’s must be a result of his non-noble origins, Clive’s despair over the loss, the great development this ordeal provides for Lukas...

I am earnestly shocked at how good this DLC is.  The story is good, the character development is solid for every member of its cast as it shows us a rare perspective of these characters at their lowest moment, it gives us a far better understanding of how they got to where they are by the time we encounter them in the game, and it fully turns Fernand into a narrative strength rather than a weakness.  Siege of Zofia Castle is easily the best Fire Emblem add-on I’ve encountered, and for that matter, the best JRPG add-on I’ve played.  When I someday expand my Greatest Add-Ons list, you can almost surely expect to see this one upon it.  $4?  It won’t give you 4 hours of content, but fuck it, this one’s worth 4 bucks and more.  Solidly recommended.**



Well...that was a pleasant surprise.  I went into this game’s DLC sour, but I came out happy.  Granted, most of Fire Emblem 15’s add-ons are only passable with a few highlights, and not worth their cost, but they’re certainly still an improvement as a whole over the DLC situations of Fire Emblems 14 and 16.  And the fact that Siege of Zofia Castle is an unequivocally and fully high quality piece of writing is a terrific surprise!  This is the kind of offering that restores a bit of my enthusiasm for the add-on scene.  Thanks to Siege of Zofia Castle, I’m gonna go into the DLCs of the next game I play with some actual optimism!

We’ll see how long it lasts.












* It's a pineapple, if you're wondering.  My coworker shaved and dyed my head into a pineapple.  It's a very impressive piece of work, actually.


** I don’t really have anywhere else to put this observation, so I’m just throwing it here.  I can’t help but notice that all the major story DLCs are focused around a very specific handful of characters from Alm’s side of the story, and not Celica’s.  Just 1 more example of the imbalance between these 2 protagonists that I’ve spoken of before.

General RPGs' Preferable Non-Realism 3

That’s right, it’s back, by popular demand!*  Yes, today we’re going to look at another handful of common RPG tropes in which it’s far better to just grit your teeth and suspend that disbelief, because making them more realistic is only gonna get in the way of a positive experience with the game.



Interior Lighting: They may get a bit dim in places, there might be a few shadows in the corners here and there, and of course there’ll be just enough shade in the final room that some self-important wanker will be able to hide his identity as he delivers sinister foreshadowing at the protagonist, but on the whole?  Caves, dungeons, whale stomachs, extra-dimensional crystal fortresses, they’re all remarkably well-lit in RPGs.  Like, you wouldn’t expect to be able to go spelunking in a cavern and still have better visibility a full mile deep into the planet than some people keep in their own homes, but apparently whoever explored these caverns last was a trigger-happy electrician who set the entire cave network’s ceilings up with a thorough suite of halogens.  When it comes to RPGs, the very heart of a labyrinthine ruin that hasn’t entertained visitors in over a millennium has a better-than-average chance of somehow being better illuminated than a path along the outskirts of a forest in broad noon daylight, with nary a torch, light bulb, or sparkling personality anywhere.

But that is absolutely 100% okay, because--better sit down for this one--audiences like to see things.  Yeah, I know, shocking revelation that flies in the face of everything that House of the Dragon has taught us, but it’s true, and every time an RPG decides to get cute and try to impose realistic dungeon darkness on us, it just winds up being an inconvenience that wastes time and nothing more.  Early Pokemon games deciding to make 1 random dungeon** pitch black does nothing more than inconvenience the player into hauling a Pokemon who knows the otherwise useless Flash around with them, while a small handful** of dark rooms in Startropics 1 and The Legend of Zelda 1 just boil down to forcing you to go into the menu and use a candle.  All that the dark means in Dragon Quest 1, or a Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder game, is that you have to take a moment to equip a torch or cast a spell, and then just continue along as you were.  Boy howdy, a momentary setback that’s immediately dispelled by 3 seconds of menu navigation!  I’m blown away; it’s like I’m really there!

Yes, okay, there are a couple examples where this idea is kind of okay.  Very dim lighting does help set a lot of the mood for settings in the Fallout series, and atmosphere is very important to Fallout, so I guess there are some occasions where a tiny bit of lighting realism can be warranted.  But overall, I’m just content to accept that RPG sunbeams can penetrate solid rock and walls of steel, and call it a day.  Look, I don’t deny that in real life, I, like anyone else, occasionally enjoy pretending I’m God by rapidly flipping the light switch in my room on and off to confuse and impress my pet gecko.***  But I don’t want to make that hobby into a damn chore as I’m forced to use a lantern item every time the protagonist enters a new room lest I risk bringing Grues back into the popular consciousness.


Weapon Vendors’ Technological Prowess: Is it particularly realistic that there is, in Chrono Trigger, a caveman vendor in the prehistoric age who not only has a real, actual handgun available for trade, but the firearm that this literal neanderthal has put together prior to his society having discovered gunpowder, trigger mechanisms, iron-working, or basic physics, is actually of better quality than the one that Lucca picked up in 2300 AD that was created with incomprehensibly advanced future-tech?  And let’s not even get started on the fact that this same ooga-booga artisan just happens to have an inventory of detachable robot limbs lying around for Robo to trade for and equip, which are, again, better than the parts he was manufactured with.  My Nintendo Switch can’t even function if it’s not hooked up to the exact right charge cord, but somehow this hut-dwelling missing-link MacGyver has hand-crafted perfectly-fitted attachments for a specific model of automaton that won’t exist for another 65 million years.

Still, if we had to do all our RPG shopping based on who believably has the means to create what weapon, it’d get tedious pretty fast.  Does it make sense that the weapon vendor in a village of talking cats sells bows and arrows that his entire thumb-less species lacks the capacity to both craft and operate?  Is it rational that the weapon shop in an underwater city of merpeople sells swords with metal blades made from alloys they can’t forge and wooden handles made from trees they can’t access?  Maybe not, but there’s no way I’m gonna have my protagonist go without an upgrade for 4 new towns in a row while that smug jackass mage in the party gets a shiny new toy every time just because he decided his armament of choice was going to be a literal fucking stick that any fool could make/find.

Also look if there was no unrealistic trope of weapon vendors’ means of manufacturing then there would be no reason to lampshade it in Shin Megami Tensei Persona Q2, and Theo using his popcorn maker to create all manner of instruments of war is eternally amusing to me.  We’re keeping this one.


Warrior Needs Food Badly: Last time, I mentioned just how nutritionally poor the adventurer’s fare generally is in RPGs, whether it be the Secret of Mana kids eating literally nothing but items you can find in a candy store over the course of months or Fallout 4’s Nora regularly chowing down on raw steaks made from postapocalyptic dogs or indulging in a hunk of giant radioactive mutant housefly meat on her cheat day.  But to add to that, have you ever thought about just how little of that nutritionally-stunted diet heroes are consuming?

I mean, how often do you see these people actually eat what anyone could call a meal?  Fayt in Star Ocean 3 may spend his entire day fighting from 1 end of an enemy’s medieval fortress to the other, permanently crossing an entire battalion’s worth of knights and guard dogs off the duty roster, and the most snacking he’ll do the entire time is to munch half a dozen healing blueberries, maybe a single blackberry if he’s really feeling decadent.  I don’t care how great antioxidants are for you, there’s no damn way that the man’s replacing the energy and strength he spent on Operation: Level 18 Or Bust from a single muffin’s worth of fruit.  And that’s still more than a lot of other RPG characters eat in a day; at least Star Ocean healing items are actual food.  Most adventuring parties walk from 1 end of a continent to the other on a single leaf of a healing herb.  Even Popeye needs an entire CAN of spinach to bust some heads; we’ve got RPG heroes out here doing cross-country marathons while throwing fists with ogres and entire wolf packs, all powered by a single frond of fennel that they resorted to chewing on to do something about those broken ribs.

Even RPG heroes who DO regularly and demonstrably have actual meals still aren’t getting enough to be realistically adequate.  It’s almost always solely a dinner-before-bed deal in an inn or around a campfire or whatever.  I adore Grandia’s dinner conversations, but if Justin and Ryudo actually want to keep their strength up and be at their best for their world-saving tasks, their parties really ought to consider also chatting it up as they hit a breakfast bar or break out some sandwiches for an impromptu picnic amongst all the corpses they’ve made of the local wildlife.  If a single bar pizza late at night isn’t enough for even just a retail worker who does a third of his job sitting down (as my doctor keeps insisting), you can bet it’s not realistic that a few pork chops and a conversation about local architecture are enough to keep a guy who fights world-ending calamities for his 9-to-5 healthy.

But the alternative is to have a game that keeps nagging you every 20 minutes that your protagonist’s tummy is hurting and he wants to go to McDonalds and do you at least have any mints in your purse he can have?  And look, that’s all fine and great as an optional mode to bring Fallout’s survival element to life, and I’ll accept it in a rare case like The Banner Saga trilogy, which expertly incorporates resource management as a function of its story of a group of refugees fleeing the end of the world.  But overall, I already have a pet whose meal schedule I have to keep track of in real life.  I don’t need another entire party of them.  Get out of here with that nonsense, Lords of Xuilma.


Decaying Weapons: Is this the third time I’ve talked about the detestable realism of RPG weapons that need constant maintenance?  Yes.  Am I bringing this up again for any real, reasonable cause?  No.  Am I revisiting this subject solely because of just how blindingly, totally, furiously, incalculably much I fucking HATE equipment degradation?  Look, you already know the answer, why are you bothering to ask?  I want the person who first came up with the idea of inflicting constant, necessary weapon repair on players to wake up every morning to fire ants nibbling their toes.  I wish for that person to have to be Elon Musk’s Valentine every year.  I hope that whenever they go out to a restaurant, the place is out of every beverage but Diet Mello Yello.

Alright, anyway, look, I’ve thought of a new angle of preferable non-realism to this stupid idea, so don’t get all bent out of shape, I can justify a third round of it.  Let’s say you’re a game developer who’s taken a few blows to the head, and you do, in fact, decide to insert a recurring equipment maintenance mechanic into your game.  Is it particularly realistic for the same whetstone and rag setup that fully repairs the thief’s daggers to also completely restore the hero’s longbow to working order?  Maybe not.  Does it make sense that the same parts in a single toolkit are somehow able to fully service 4 different melee weapons, 2 musical instruments being abusively treated as melee weapons, a crossbow, and a hardcover book (because Dohter the Charitable forbid a mage ever put any serious effort into defending themselves with an actual weapon)?  Er, no.  Should the same repair powder in Dark Cloud 1 that refurbishes a big wooden hammer also work just as well in fixing a goddamn laser gun?  I thought I just told you to stop asking questions you know the answer to.

But the alternative is Fallout forcing you to scrounge weapons and clothing of the same type as the one you’re trying to restore.  Having to constantly keep an eye on your battle axe’s physical and emotional state is already tedious enough; the last thing that needs to be added is ANOTHER layer of inconvenience to the stupid process.  As far as I’m concerned, if I’m gonna be saddled with the responsibility of treating my helmet like a goddamn Tamagotchi for the sake of oppressive realism, the least the developer can do is include a Fix-It-Felix hammer in every toolbox.


Treasure Chest Benefit-Cost Ratio: Consider the resources that go into the creation of an average RPG treasure chest.  Assuming a wooden version, you’ve got the boards and slats necessary to form a reasonably large box (to say nothing of those absolute monsters in Star Ocean 3), the bands of metal to keep them in place and reinforce its security, the metal fasteners to hold it together, the metal hinges to allow the chest to open and shut, the oil to keep those hinges in working order...and these raw materials are not gonna be the cheap ones, either.  This is not a cheap pine-and-tin affair.  RPG treasure chests have to be in it for the long haul, left out on their lonesome in abandoned temples and forgotten forest paths and forbidden crypts and so on for decades, centuries, sometimes even millennia.  These things have to make use of some sturdy-ass wood that’s been weatherproofed to Hell and back, and quality alloy that doesn’t just resist rust, it actively terrifies it.  The materials and preparation for them alone makes a treasure chest worth its weight in the very gold that gets put in it.

And the craftsmanship’s gotta cost a pretty penny, too!  Not a lot of RPG worlds have access to industrial manufacturing (and of those that do, they probably didn’t when the damn chest was made and stuck in the corner of a dungeon 400 years ago), so you’re gonna be hitting up a carpenter and a smith to commission this thing’s construction, and considering how perfectly, identically symmetrical and polished all these chests are in these games, it ain’t amateur artisans making'em.  A locksmith, too, sometimes, although admittedly most treasure chests seem to just be left unsecured, so maybe not.****  A cursory glance at Amazon indicates that in our current, modern age, a basic but reliable storage trunk goes for upwards of $150 - 250, and that’s with modern age technology being used to harvest the resources, modern age technology and workmanship techniques being used to craft it, and modern age vehicles and supply lines to haul the thing to your porch where the chest itself can ironically be the treasure that gets stolen by porch thieves.  So if with all that time- and effort-saving modern convenience a treasure chest is still at least over a hundred bucks, you can imagine the cost of just 1 of these things in most RPG worlds.  To say nothing of the time involved in having it made; the local smithy ain’t gonna 2-day-guarantee that shit no matter how many tips you grease Jeff Bezos’s palms with.

Okay, so now that we’ve established the substantial investment of money, effort, and time that goes into a single treasure chest...exactly how realistic is it, really, that some mook in Hyrule went to the trouble of getting one specifically for the purpose of storing 5 fucking rupees in it?  Did that dude seriously just drop more money  than can fit into the average Hylian wallet on acquiring a treasure chest just so his kid could stash her allowance in a box bigger than she is?*****  Imagine spending weeks seeking out and working with skilled tradesmen just to create a storage device for a single vial of healing potion.  One apple.  A chunk of charcoal.  A lone potato.  A solitary fruit gummy.  If half of these adventurers had any brains, whenever they found a treasure chest holding nothing more than a loaf of bread, they’d just grab the whole box and haul it back to a pawn shop to get some real value out of their find.

But screw it!  So what if the contents of probably more than half of all RPG treasure chests represent almost as bad a payoff for your investment as an NFT?  It’s still fun to find a shiny new treasure chest, open it up, hear that opening sound effect, and see what shiny new toy you just got.  I mean, okay, look, my excitement in Fallout 4 at seeing a promising safe is relatively equal to my excitement at seeing an equally vulnerable desk, locker, tool chest, lunchbox, or putrid body bag of rotten meat.  I will admit that I am perhaps not the pickiest post-apocalyptic pillager; my priority is the plunder more than the package presenting the prize.  Still, it’s undeniably more satisfying to pop open a prominently placed, polished, promising treasure chest to acquire the next step in your journey to 99 healing herbs in your inventory than to just happen across a zip-lock bag with a leaf in it, so by all means, ancient dungeon architects, keep artificially propping up that storage device economy!


Boring Planets: It's a real, actual fact that most of the planets in our universe, from all observable data, are barren and lifeless.  There's not a lot of stuff to see and do on most of the worlds floating in space.  Unfortunately, however, "seeing and doing stuff" is, in fact, something that players of a sci-fi game--hell, any game--want out of their narrative- and exploration-based adventure, so it's generally good to put aside astronomy for a moment if it's going to be a deal-breaker for making a good game.  This might seem obvious, and to most RPGs like The Outer Worlds or Phantasy Star, it is, but there's always at least 1 idiot who would rather something be realistic than worthwhile, and unfortunately, he was the guy calling the shots at Bethesda when they created Starfield.  Thanks for the empty, boring game about empty, boring planets, Todd Howard; your vision of procedurally generated planets in a game about the thrill and wonder of space exploration is exactly the kind of genius I'd expect from the mastermind behind the idea to have a Fallout game without a story or characters.  I feel like Howard is the kind of guy who would love the realism of Penn and Teller's Desert Bus game and see it as an ideal to aspire to.


What’s Mine is Yours and What’s Yours is Mine; Damn Time and Space If It Says Otherwise: RPG inventory bags are already not exactly the most realistic things in terms of how much they can hold, as previously noted, but a less remarked-upon unrealistic quality of theirs is that once this gang of world-saving adolescents has adopted you into their midst, you have access to the communal backpack forever.  You’re on the other side of town doing your own character quest?  The group gets separated into 3 different pairs inside a large dungeon?  You’ve been stranded on a different continent thanks to an incident involving a raft, a talking freshwater octopus, and a really dumb decision to apply martial arts to an underwater environment?  You’ve fallen into another time period altogether?  Did the protagonist get completely and thoroughly disintegrated, including all items on his person, one of which was the inventory bag itself?  Doesn’t fucking matter, the potion sack is still there and you and the rest of the party all still have simultaneous full access to it.

Realistic?  Not in the slightest.  But frankly, not having access to the cheeseburger backpack during Greg, Amethyst, and Pearl’s section of the temple in the second Steven Universe RPG was inconvenient, and truly, what purpose is served by injecting this bit of accessibility realism in?  Let every party member’s purse contain a portal to a shared storage warehouse, it ain’t bothering anyone.


I Need Corrective Lenses Because I’m Bird’s-Eye-View-Sighted: Let’s face it, Hide and Seek as a minigame wouldn’t exist in RPGs if protagonists could actually see the world in front of their faces.  Half the kids that play these games aren’t hiding so much as they are standing out in the open, but because our own perspective as the audience is that of a very nosy pigeon, the fact that some brat is standing 2 paces away directly in the protagonist’s path but behind a tree from our own perspective means that the hero’s gonna be frantically searching the whole town for 20 minutes and considering filing a missing persons report before he finally happens by chance to bump into the tile of space the kid’s occupying.  Man, the amount of stuff “hidden” in Dark Half alone just because it’s out of an aerial drone’s sight but should be clear and visible to the dude who’s supposedly leading the adventure is crazy.

Well, so be it!  I happen to LIKE the overhead view of an adventure.  First-person perspective’s fine and good, too, and certainly far more realistic, but seeing an adventure unfold from a bird’s-eye view is far tidier, and allows the audience to get a full understanding of all that’s happening onstage.  Frankly, I’m not so enamored with the north side of houses, bushes, and statues that I want to give up my seat in the theater in exchange for the realism of a boots-on-the-ground perspective.


This Is What Happens When You Don’t Provide A Good Vision Plan For Your Employees: Well, the heroes may have their ocular quirks, but they’re nothing compared to the guards and goons of these games, good guys and bad alike.  Whether it be a monster’s aggro range, a patrolling sentry who is being paid exactly enough per hour to repeatedly tread a specific 25-foot rectangle of space and no more, or an enemy lookout in a watchtower who somehow will come into your own view from the ground before you’ll come into his, everyone you might want to avoid in an RPG handily only seems to be able to see a fraction as far as you might expect.

Hylia help you if you happen to be inside the 5-foot radius of a monster’s perfect circle of vision, but until you violate social distancing etiquette, you may as well not exist to the average wolf, giant scorpion, or eldritch abomination, the latter of which may ironically be actually made out of eyes.  You may be shit out of luck if you happen to stumble into a guard’s line of sight, but even the conical field of vision on the fancier RPG sentries sure as hell ain’t the standard 120 degrees, so there’s no such thing as seeing-something-out-of-the-corner-of-their-eye.  They've got seeing-something-out-of-the-quadrant-of-their-eye at best.  These assholes would have to swivel their heads and crane their necks just to take in a single lane of traffic.  Hell, even main villains and final bosses can clearly only see as far as 1 screen’s length, because last-minute reinforcements are ALWAYS showing up to bail the heroes out of a jam from off-screen, and as often as not they’re coming from the very direction that the villain is currently facing.  I can see farther than all these schmucks without even wearing my glasses, and I’m relatively sure I’m legally blind.

But obviously, the devastating combination of tunnel-vision and nearsightedness in all RPG denizens is purely positive, and giving monsters and villains and guards real, actual eyesight would be a terrible move.  No one would ever be able to ride to the hero’s rescue again if the bad guy could see them coming up the Dramatic Final Boss Stairs and opted to move his timetable of finishing the protagonist off up a few seconds in response.  If someone had specifically written “with your eyes open” into the employee handbook for Hyrule’s guards, then The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time wouldn’t have needed a 7-year time skip, because Link would still be trying to sneak into the castle courtyard well into his 40s.  And do you have any earthly idea just how far some animals can see in real life?  The aggro range of a realistically-sighted falcon enemy would be so wide that the thing would be attacking you while you were still out on the world map.  I think it’s best we forego the realism on this and stick with the “Don’t aggro until you see the whites of his eyes” approach.



Alright, that’s it for today.  See you again for the next installment of this series in another 4 years or so!













* Protip: If you restrict your polling audience solely to yourself, then popular demand is actually super easy to achieve for just about everything you do.


** What really gets me about this is that this stab at realism is so often selective and arbitrary.  Why is every OTHER cavern in the Pokemon games fully lit despite being exactly as submerged and lacking light sources?  Why THIS room at the heart of a labyrinth in Startropics 1, and not the one next to it?  How come some levels of SMT Persona 5’s Mementos are just pitch dark at random, while the ones above and below them were illuminated?  What, did that level just happen to be the one formed out of the cognition of everyone in Tokyo who’d forgotten to pay their electric bill this month?


*** I accomplish neither of these things, if you’re wondering.  She’s a tough audience.


**** Which you’d think would defeat the point, but I’ve seen how the Secret of Mana kids open their treasure chests.  Clearly RPG heroes are fully capable and ready to just smash a treasure chest against the ground until it relinquishes its goodies 1 way or another, so if you value your investment into the chest itself, I guess it might just be better to make the thing as accessible as possible to whatever greedy yutz happens across it.


***** Full credit to Danny Sexbang for pointing out the ridiculous cost logistics of this particular scenario.  I mean, I’ve already talked about this matter of treasure chest contents to some degree before, so I’ll still count this as mostly my idea, but I can’t deny that his quipping brought the subject back to my mind.