General RPGs' Save Points' Ease of Use

The use of Save Points in an RPG should be convenient, straightforward, and fast.

RPGs as a whole are characterized by long, sprawling narratives, and while shorter, 3 - 10 hour ventures exist, the bread-and-butter of this genre is the 20 - 60 hour game.  And since most of us don’t just sit down in front of the newest Tales of series title on Monday with the intention of next standing back up on Friday--and since most of us don’t really want to take a chance of losing hours’ worth of progress thanks to 1 unfair quirk of the trickster gods in charge of RNG--that means there’s gonna be a lot of saving happening over the course of playing through any given RPG.

And that’s just assuming a regular player who’s not a neurotic mess, which is probably the least common of we RPG enthusiasts.  More often than not, you’re also gonna be adding instances of making a new save 10 seconds after having already made one, because you forgot the first time that you wanted to equip a different accessory on 1 character, or you decided after the fact that you wanted to change someone’s job class, or you needed to swap the order of party members in battle to better reflect your ever-changing shipping whims.  And then there’s those of us who save, exit out of the screen, check to make sure we’re ready for the next hurdle, suddenly realize that we’re pretty sure but not quite 100% certain that we saved, bring up the save menu again just to be sure, save, exit out, think for a moment about smores, refocus on the game, can’t quite remember whether the smores thing happened before or after we’d finished saving, bring up the save menu again because better save than sorry (lolz), save, exit out, then realize that it’s been a few minutes since we arrived at the save point, decide that we’d better save again so we don’t lose all the progress we’ve made here, and make 1 last save before finally stepping off the save point.

...Only to realize that we forgot to also make a second save file because the trauma of Velius* will never truly leave us, and immediately return to our self-imposed save point prison.

Look, my point is, if the number of saves I make for an RPG numbers less than the triple digits, I consider it a pretty solid step forward for my mental health.  So it’s a really, really important quality-of-life feature for an RPG’s save points to be simple, fast, and straightforward.  I mean, the ideal scenario is that of most western RPGs where you just save whenever you want, instead of having to backtrack or push forward to find some arbitrarily-placed cluster of sparkles, rainbow prism, tamed parrot, open diary sitting on the ground, payphone, etc.  And I really, really don’t understand, in this day and age, how that isn’t just how it is for ALL games now--particularly when a functional version of the “save anywhere” system was present all the way back in the first Legend of Zelda on the NES.  Jesus Christ, Atlus, are you seriously telling me that by 2021 you STILL hadn’t figured out the technology necessary to let the player save wherever they pleased in Shin Megami Tensei 5?  How hard could it have been to program that intuitive alternative to a system of glowy blue leyline save points?  You can’t possibly convince me you were too busy to manage it; the script for SMT5’s entire story could fit onto the napkins from the single McDonalds lunch that your team wrote it over.

But barring a developer having enough sense and wherewithal to give the player the option to save anywhere and anytime they choose, it’s important to make using a save point as convenient as possible.  It is, in fact, probably as important as a feature can be without being connected to the story or other elements of writing.

And most RPG creators seem to be on board with this idea, thankfully, and have been since the early days of gaming.  You want to save in good old Final Fantasy 6, you just go on up to a save point, open the menu, and select the Save function.  It’s even easier in games like Chrono Trigger and Terranigma--you just walk up to the thing, hit the action button, and it automatically takes you to the save file screen.  No muss, no fuss, the process is streamlined and only takes as long as it takes you to actually press the buttons.  

But sadly, this is not always the case.  Some RPGs decide to get cutesy with the whole process.  Dragon Quest 1, for example, is a huge pain in the ass.  Every time you want to save, you have to go all the way back to the king and talk to him, because there is not a single other save point or save NPC in the entire game!  And it’s not just a quick, to-the-point conversation, either.  The king doesn’t just give a nod and go “Yo, you saving?  Cool, done, gtfo.”  No, you have to have the doddering old tyrant run through a greeting line of dialogue so long it takes up 3 scrolling lines of the text box, and once your transaction should be finished, he then extends it by “helpfully” asking you whether or not you want to continue the adventure.  Goddammit, YES, OBVIOUSLY!  If I want to stop playing, I don’t need your precious royal leave to do so, you senile self-important superfluous social sinkhole, I’ll just reach forward and turn my fucking console OFF.  The fact that I’m wasting my breath talking to you, the most useless member of human society, automatically carries with it the implication that I’ve resisted both my better judgment and my gag reflex, and chosen to continue playing Dragon Quest!  Stop tempting me with a better time, already!  It’s a stupid question to ask at ALL, but you really have to make it a part of the process of saving the game EVERY time?

But Dragon Quest 1 goes all the way back to the late 1980s, 1 of the earliest console RPGs from the very first days of video games, so you can make some excuse for its failings.  I mean, okay, you actually can't, really, because even contemporary peers like The Legend of Zelda 1 and Phantasy Star 1 had far better save-anywhere systems in place.  But still, it was early enough that inconvenient and inelegant user interface and systems were par for the course; there was still plenty of streamlining to be done in the industry at all levels.  Although this annoying time-wasting attachment of “do u want 2 embrace the sweet silent darkness of the void y/n” to save interactions persisted in the DQ series past the first installment, and even infected some other RPGs, too.

Anyway, point is, certain allowances can theoretically be made for older games that make the process of saving your game less convenient than it could be.  But even in the modern age, some RPGs still slow the process down for no reason!

You take the game Cris Tales, for example.  This earnest little Indie title was released in 2021, so it is, as of the time of writing this, still a pretty recent game.  And every time I see the little patch of dirt that protagonist Crisbelle stabs with her sword to create a save point, I feel a tiny pang of annoyance, because I know that should I use it, it’s gonna take longer than there was any reason for it to.  See, when you use a save point in Cris Tales, what happens is that your companion Matias (or, if he’s absent, party member Zas), asks Crisbell what she wants to do, and you choose between saving, using a tent to restore your party, or nothing.  Crisbell says a line of dialogue to confirm your choice, and you’re on your way.

Which doesn’t sound like a problem, right?  Seems like that’s a pretty direct way of doing things.  Not as direct as Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy just having a save point that doesn’t require a dialogue interaction to use, of course, which is weird considering that Cris Tales actually has easter eggs that reference both, so it obviously was familiar with far more functional save point mechanics, but still, fairly direct, right?  Except that all dialogue and dialogue action choices in Cris Tales are rather clunky.  The line of dialogue starts before the choices appear, and because there’s that tiny little extra moment of hesitation as the game contemplates the fact that you just hit the A button, confirming that you want to save is just long enough to be annoying, when it’s happening in an age 30 years after the age in which you could hit the A button at a save point and have the game instantly respond accordingly without demanding confirmation.

Why does Matias need to ASK what Crisbell wants to do, anyway?  She walked up to a save point and hit the confirm button; what do you THINK she wants to do, you idiot?**  Imagine if every time you drove up to a take-out window, the employee greeted you with, “Welcome to Kentucky Fried Taco King!  Before we proceed, could you please avow in no uncertain terms that you have approached us out of an earnest wish to requisition some form of chicken?”  I don’t think Crisbell’s jamming the A button at a save point because she’s lost, Matias.

But hey, at least the save points in Cris Tales are consistent whether they’re found in a dungeon or in a town.  It’s always been just a little extra layer of save annoyance when a game decides that, instead of just having a nice, simple level of consistency, the process of saving in town is going to require you to go sign the inn’s guestbook, or talk to a priest (which runs the risk of another Chatty Cathy like the DQ1 king), or something like that, rather than simply make a beeline for the object you’re used to utilizing for the purpose.  What’s the reasoning behind that?  What, is it some sort of bid for realism or something?  Yeah, okay, I guess maybe it’s not 100% realistic to just assume that every town on the planet’s gonna have a statue of the goddess just sitting in town square, but the game already kinda threw realism out the window when it made the assertion that some enterprising and exceptionally pious sculptor went to the trouble of carving such a statue in a cave a mile below the surface of the planet where no human being had ever set foot before, inside the depths of an active volcano, and right smack dab in the middle of an extra-dimensional fortress of demons that you can only even reach if you bring together the fabled 7 rainbow crystals of Plot-Gar the Mighty and Convoluted.  For heaven’s sake, developers, save us and yourselves some time and just code 1 type of save point.  Don’t make me have to add an extra screen transition to get into a temple or inn every damn time I want to save in a city.

And man, don’t even get me started on the situation with Wild Arms 3.  Gimel Coins feel like the setup for a new monetization scheme, except that they were created in an age that predates most scummy microtransaction scams, so their inconvenience is bafflingly just for its own sake.

I’m obviously making mountains out of what could only be generously described as molehills--hell, this might not even qualify as an “anthill” kind of problem.  Still, when you’re gonna be doing it 50 times or more for almost any given RPG, it only makes sense to keep the process of saving your game as streamlined and convenient as possible, and it irks me when a game can’t just DO that.  No one needs speeches on the matter, no one needs to confirm their desire to do so, no one needs to be offered permission to stop playing the game, no one needs the additional action of having to squint and make out which sign says “Inn,” and no one needs a finite number of tokens which permit you the privilege of saving at all, seriously, what the fuck Wild Arms 3.  Just lay out your save point (and make it heal the party automatically dammit), and either let the player just go up to it and silently use it from a menu or by pushing a single button, or, at the absolute very most, make interacting with it an instantaneous text box of “Save?  Yes/No”, and BE DONE WITH IT.










* Belias for those who prefer the limp, lifeless retranslation of Final Fantasy Tactics.


** Matias’s perpetually questioning what Crisbell wants to do at the save point has led me to imagine Crisbell giving increasingly dismaying responses, always said in that chipper, goody-two-shoes tone of hers:

“What do you want to do, Crisbell?”

“I want to play with fire!”
“I want to join Scientology!”
“I want to see whether pain can help me feel alive again!”
“I want to run an NFT rug-pull!”
“I want to start collecting fingers!”
“I want to convince an 8-year-old that the world is a terrible place where no one cares for each other!”
“I want to explore recreational cannibalism!”
“I want to set off a series of high-yield explosives across the globe that cause catastrophic death and destruction on every continent!”
“I want to encourage someone to sign on with Nijisanji!”

This loses a lot in print, but if you ever play Cris Tales and imagine encouraging, guileless little Crisbell declaring these things in her forthright “I want to record our progress!” voice, it’ll be quite amusing, I assure you.