General RPG Theory: Developer Large Battleship Studios's Games as a Collective Meta-Story

Major spoilers for Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle and Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA in this rant, and I’ll also be speaking with the assumption of knowledge of Quantum Entanglement and A Dragon’s ReQuest, so, y’know, be warned.  You should probably play the games before reading this.  On the other hand, reading this rant might pique your interest in them, and they're tragically deprived of attention and recognition, so hell, if it means the possibility of more people checking Large Battleship Studios's works out, maybe the price of a few spoilers isn't too high.  I'll leave the choice to you, I suppose.

Also, thank you to Saint Bomber for letting me question him about the following observations and theories I've made, and for permission to share this rant that may (or may not; I'm no stranger to my ideas being totally off) be somewhat personal.



Back when I was in high school, my English teacher had my class read J.D. Salinger’s 9 Stories, a collection whose last story (Teddy) incorporates concepts from Hinduism like enlightenment and reincarnation, which, having only just read Hesse’s Siddhartha the previous year, I latched onto with fascination.  We were, of course, eventually tested on our 9 Stories unit, and I remember that I was in the middle of the essay component when a stroke of insight hit me--it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps all of the 9 Stories were also tied to the same Hinduist concepts that Teddy more overtly displayed, and that the collection as a whole actually represented a single soul’s journey across lives to reach the enlightenment that would allow it to escape the cycle of reincarnation, with each life being more self-actualized and closer to true understanding until it finally achieved enlightenment with Teddy.

How valid an interpretation of the collection this may be, I couldn’t say--although my teacher really liked it, and I’ve heard that Teddy was chosen as the end of the collection specifically to balance out the brutal and hopeless A Perfect Day for Bananafish that begins the collection, so there may be something to it.  But what mattered to me was that it was a genuinely marvelous moment in which a new level of understanding and capacity for me clicked into place, and I suddenly comprehended an entirely new level of meaning that stories could hold.  A story could be more than the sum of its parts, could exist on a level beyond a self-contained universe of plot and purpose--it could also be a part of a greater whole of its fellows, a cog in a grander machine.  A tale formed only when stringing smaller stories together by their greatest themes and concepts; a universe that could only come into clarity by the joint light of smaller universes in sequence.

Yes: I had had my eyes opened to the fact that individual narrative entities can transcendently amalgamate, and achieve a Yo Dawg of storytelling.

What’s the point of all this jawing and patting myself on the back for getting a good grade on an essay over 20 years ago, you ask?  Well, to entertain myself, for starters, but more importantly, to establish the concept that sometimes a creators’ works, taken together, can tell their own collaborative story above their confines rather than within them.  And also to establish that I really, really like the idea and am always eager to find examples of a meta-level story of this sort.  And we’ve done all this preamble to establish this, because I think I may have recognized something of this sort in the works to date of Large Battleship Studios.

I’ve yapped about LBS and its titles several times now, but as a quick refresher, Large Battleship Studios is an extremely obscure RPG developer headed up mostly by 1 fellow, who goes by Saint Bomber.  Its games are generally very indulgent, but highly intelligent and emotionally complex RPGs, and while each is very much its own entity, they all share some significant commonalities.  You can depend on an LBS title to be packed with amusing banter and referential humor, and a huge focus on romance, nearly always between women--they’re made for huge yuri fans by a huge yuri fan.  Their lore is intricate and unfolds with the elegance of a well-written mystery, the casts are ferociously well- and constantly-developed, and each narrative masterfully knows when to use comedy to lower your guard for an emotionally killing blow, then use comedy again to help you recover from what it just did to you.

But 1 of the most noteworthy and standout shared traits of the LBS canon is a very significant, recurring theme and examination of trauma.  Lingering trauma from the past, trauma created by the events in-game, PTSD, emotional wounds that still weep, the trauma of loss, of rejection, of suffering, of imprisonment, of despair, of terror; coping mechanisms, those who have found ways to live with the scars in their hearts, those who can’t...the enduring pain that shapes us, and whether we carry it or it carries us, is an ever-present and huge part of Large Battleship Studios titles, perhaps to a greater degree than any other RPG can equal.  These are the stories of a creator who has gone through hurt and carried it with him, and channeled it into art and creation, while observing the similar anguishes of others and incorporating them into his stories, as well.

And that’s interesting, and valuable to analyze and comprehend, with each story that Saint Bomber creates.  As I’ve mentioned each time, I have an enormous fascination with and respect for every RPG that Large Battleship Studios releases, and this relentless exploration of trauma within its casts and stories is a major part of that.  But as I was playing the newest LBS release, Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA, and experiencing the ways that trauma is portrayed through its protagonist Simone and her fellow cast members, the ways in which lasting damage is made evident, explored, and handled in AAAVXA made me look back at how the previous LBS titles approached this major theme, and I realized something:

Saint Bomber’s games don’t just individually tell stories about trauma.  Each one’s approach and use of it also, when all taken together in sequence, represent a progressing path to recovery from it.  The games are not just by themselves about the battle to overcome trauma, they are collectively showing that journey, too.

It starts with Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle.  This RPG represents the first step to healing one’s heart and mind, and that is the realization that one is affected by trauma to begin with, that it has a hold over one.  Duchess Catherine comports herself for much of the game quite lightly, and without seeming to think overmuch on the darker things within her and her past, and while after a point it's an unavoidable conclusion that she's carrying a lot of pain and brokenness, it's something she can't seem to touch yet without it overwhelming her.  To let herself really square up to it reduces her to the helpless child she was while going through her torment.  The game involves a discovery (if only for the player) of this hurt, but it's too raw to directly confront or put names to--it can only be salved, with what joys of love her life can be filled with. Catherine is, in the real world, still trapped and unable to escape from that which is hurting and breaking her.

But the game also contains the earliest hope for someone who is harmed and trapped: that there's at least the possibility that life will be able to be good and fulfilling someday. There is the hope that this situation is something that can one day be in the past, rather than the present (as evidenced by the fact that the entire fulfilling and joyous potential life that the game displays is actually a prophecy Catherine has dreamt for herself).  Before any action to bring resolution can be taken, the first step to healing is to know that there is something to heal from, and to believe that recovery is possible.  With its light but insistently assessing touch at Catherine’s still-tender psyche, and the game’s nature as a promise to herself of what can someday be, Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle represents this first step aptly.

The journey continues with Quantum Entanglement.  A survival-horror in which protagonist Marine and her girlfriend Gabby rely on one another not only to survive, but to hold themselves together and keep going in the face of extreme fear, stress, and horror over the death they’re constantly confronted with along the way, QE is a confrontation of trauma by (re)living it in real time.  As such, it represents an advancement from Catherine’s situation of only being able to very slightly touch the wound in her psyche before recoiling in pain--the terror and revulsion are here, unavoidably acknowledged and struggled with, and thus in QE trauma is defined, which allows one the courage and fortitude to fight it.

Additionally, methods for responding to and handling emotional injury now make their first real appearance in LBS titles.  Marine and Gabby, and ODSA, are a warring dichotomy between facing the trauma for what it is, and defense mechanisms that bury or otherwise avoid it in some way--memory wipes, branching timelines more like the end of a frayed rope than an expanding tree, different and sometimes mentally concurrent selves, these are good analogies for things like repression and compartmentalization. Up to this point in Marine and Gabby's life, the procedures (akin to avoidance strategies) of ODSA have been working, but now the traumatic situation will be avoided no longer, and they have to confront it, accept what it’s doing to them, and fight through it.

As terrible and overwhelming as the disaster that Marine and Gabby must survive is, nothing can be handled and defeated before it is known, and both the mental tools which begin the process of dealing with trauma, and the unavoidable necessity of undergoing that process, make themselves known.  The deep-rooted pain that was recognized in Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is now defined in Quantum Entanglement, and the process to reach the dreamt-of point beyond it has now begun.

The game that follows is A Dragon’s ReQuest.  Although they're painful and she doesn't often, protagonist Hinoki seems far more able to acknowledge the agonizing incidents in her past in more frank and whole detail than Catherine was, and not just understand that they do affect her in the present, but also consciously recognize at least some of how they do so. She represents having progressed, through Quantum Entanglement's frank facing of the darkness and fear, to the point that one can carry the weight of one's damage--even as it still harms!--and still accomplish great things in spite of its hold. Her trauma still colors her ability to see and process the world and other people, like how she almost spontaneously grasped at the straw of Payola perhaps secretly being her mother.  It’s an impulse thought of want and pain that comes to her seemingly out of nowhere in the conversation which shows that her traumas are still influencing her, but ultimately, Hinoki can function in her life, and even function well enough to do great things (in this case, undertake a world-saving RPG quest).  Great a heroine though Marine really is, what she accomplished in Quantum Entanglement was all in reaction to, and triumphing against, the traumatic incident thrust upon her.  And being able to fight back against one’s trauma, and see landmarks of victory in their quest to overcome it, is important.  Hinoki’s achievements and triumphs, on the other hand, are outwards; she works toward and achieves goals unrelated to the burdens of her own pains.  She is living a functional life that, if still colored by her trauma, is not defined or halted by it.

As such, A Dragon’s ReQuest represents a stage in the ongoing voyage of recovery at which one has progressed enough to be able to look at, and contemplate, one’s trauma without having it overtake one, and while it still weighs upon the sufferer in inescapable ways which may, unwanted, make themselves known, it no longer defines all that one is and does.  It’s an important milestone in the journey of healing that ADRQ displays, to be at a point where one knows that one can live a functional life and accomplish goals that exist independent of the scars within one.

Finally, we arrive at Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA.  Although there are moments when they overcome her, Simone not only knows about many of her points of trauma and their triggers, she can openly address them and relay them to others, and speak of trauma as a subject with some knowledge and candor. Simone has accepted that she carries lasting pain, and that that's not going to change, but she's also taking steps to not just live with it, but to move forward with her life in ways that don't need to specifically account for it.  Her living a late adolescence now, for example, is a way of building psychological foundations that she didn't have a chance to do back during that actual period.

If A Dragon’s ReQuest showed us a point in the journey of recovery in which one functions and succeeds in spite of their trauma, Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA strides forward still to display a moment at which one is beginning to function and succeed simply on one’s own terms, without the trauma always having its hand upon one’s life.  In ADRQ, Hinoki managed to function and achieve while she carried the weight of her damage on her back, but in AAAVXA, Simone is at a point in which her harm and hurt are forced to walk on their own--still there, sometimes even getting in her way, but the rest of the time forced to merely stand beside or even behind her as she lives her life.  It’s a point in which the effort, time, and work that have gone into the healing process are demonstrable--even if there are still some parts of it that are blackouts for her, Simone knows her trauma in the qualified way that comes with things like research, therapy, social support structures, etc.  The tools and methods she’s using to deal with her pain are not just basic coping mechanisms, they’re ones specifically suited to her.

The journey to healing is not over by the time we reach Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA--it may, in fact, never truly be finished--but this game does show us a healthier, more positive place on that journey in which real progress has been made and one has been armed with tools and knowledge that allow one to meaningfully handle one’s trauma.  The creation of a true and free Alouette in the game is a symbol of a renewal of the self and a real step forward in which the past is finally just that: an element that happened, that will never not be a relevant part of one, but doesn't have to be something that derails the present and future.

It may even, in fact, be that the game is meant at times to look at the person who comes out of a bad experience and rebuilds herself as potentially greater than she could otherwise have been.  Saint Bomber posed a question to me after reading my initial rant on AAAVXA of whether the game was, as I said, a celebration of anime and an exploration of trauma, or whether it might instead be a celebration of trauma and an exploration of anime?  Which of course could just be him yanking my easily distracted chain, but as I'm loathe to disregard any bone he tosses my way about his intentions or thoughts in making these games, I've reflected and come up with multiple instances in AAAVXA in which Simone is better suited to be a heroine and a healer because of her traumatic past than she possibly could have been otherwise.  So while I don't know whether the game as a whole truly represents a celebration of trauma per say, there's definitely a case to be made that AAAVXA is, in addition to a reassuring triumph that there can be a time when the past is truly the past, a dipping of toes into the idea that there can be genuine good that comes of it, and celebrating that fact.

And that’s it, for the moment.  There’s more to come from Large Battleship Studios, but for now, this is the general impression I’ve gotten of a gradual journey of recovery that Saint Bomber’s titles could describe when taken as a collective whole.  I’ll be interested to see what the next title’s overall nature will contribute to this meta-story!

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.

General RPGs' Shelter Items

You know those items in RPGs like Shelters, Tents, Cottages, etc.?  The ones that fully restore your entire party so long as you’re at a save point?  When you get down to it, they’re kind of a dumb waste of time.

Oh, sure, your knee-jerk reaction is that I’m being an idiot.  The utility of these items seems obvious!  After you’ve been slogging through a dungeon full of random encounters, wearing down your characters’ health and magic, you absolutely want to be able to restore your weary adventurers to their peak fighting capacity before the next boss, or even just a new branch of the dungeon.  And who the heck wants to take the time to use a dozen or more curative potions to achieve that?  Not to mention that those things can be needed in difficult battles, so you may not want to waste them.  A save point restorative seems the perfect tool for extended, thorough, and safe dungeon exploration.

And sure, that all makes sense.  While some RPGs are designed without such options, presumably either with the intent of creating an economy of careful resource budgeting or just because they were created before the feature had even been invented (or, in a few cases like Live-A-Live and the Loathing and Romancing SaGa series, because the party’s HP is fully restored after combat anyway), generally speaking, the capacity to fully heal up at significant intermissions and turning points in a dungeon is a pretty important feature.  Knowing you’ll be able to do so at a certain point during your exploration means that you feel comfortable with using at least some of your special abilities during regular battles, which makes combat substantially less boring than it has to be, you don’t have to grind money to afford an ocean of jarred elixir before you feel comfortable about your chances of making it through the next combat zone alive, and having your fighters at full capacity means you can go all-out against bosses.  Without the ability to heal up at save points, you’re looking at an RPG where 90% of your battles may just be using Attack over and over, and you’re either starving for every coin to fill your inventory with mana potions, or your crew can only ever give a fraction of their all to boss encounters, lowering what dramatic weight the conflicts have.  Save point healing is definitely a positive and important function of the average RPG.

But ever since I first played Grandia 1 and enjoyed the benefits of those delightful little rainbow cone save points, I’ve wondered: what is the damn point of Shelter items when you can just have the save point itself heal the heroes?

I mean, think about it.  If the developers wanted the option to fully restore the party while in a dungeon to be on the table at all, then why add the extra steps of having to purchase a Tent, and then open up the item menu and use it?  Sure, it’s not some great inconvenience, but it’s still a step that’s entirely unnecessary when games like Grandia, Undertale, and Final Fantasy 10 prove that the save point can just do the healing itself.  Hell, Ys, 1 of the oldest RPG series in existence, proved this before Shelter-type items even existed!  You’re just adding the extra steps of purchasing and then using an item to do what could just be included in the save point’s function.  It may only be a very tiny inconvenience, but it IS a tiny inconvenience that doesn’t have to be there at all.

I suppose you could try to make the point that budgeting for healing is a part of the overall economy of RPG gameplay, and thus having to purchase/find Shelter-type items contributes to that.  But that argument doesn’t really hold much water--it’s pretty rare that such items have a high enough price tag at a merchant that they affect the economy of playing the game at all.  About the only time in an RPG where your buying choices might be affected by the cost of having a Tent or 2 on hand would be right at the beginning, when you have the smallest capital flow, and that, ironically, is the time in the game where you usually will need such an item the least, since you don’t have much HP and MP to restore to begin with (making basic potions an easy option), and have fewer MP-draining skills and spells to utilize in combat anyway.  By the point at which you’ve got enough HP, MP, and battle options that the Shelter family is indispensable, you’ll also have enough money that keeping a tidy 10 of the things in your inventory at all times won’t have any noticeable effect on your wallet.  If the developers’ aim was to make 1 of money’s uses in their game the capacity for save point healing, then a system like what you often find in Shin Megami Tensei would be a better method, in which the cost of the healing increases according to just how much HP and MP need to be recovered.  This kind of system is still generally outpaced pretty easily by adventuring income even as the costs get more substantial, but it’s at least a way better attempt at creating a heals-for-cash economy than just charging 150G for a Shelter in a game where you can be making more than that in a single battle less than a quarter of the way through the adventure.

And I know that these items ain’t there for the sake of immersion.  Exactly how realistic is it that in the middle of a military facility within the enemy capitol, one filled with enemy soldiers, hostile robots, guard dogs, and violent mutants, the heroes can just pitch a tent in the middle of a random room, crawl inside, and every single foe will politely tiptoe around them so they can get a healthy, recommended 8 undisturbed hours of rest?  Are you going to make the case that it’s believable for an other-dimensional horror of teeth and claws and teeth with claws floating in the midst of a temple built to worship a god of torment and destruction to happen across the 4 heroes trying to kill its boss as they’ve snuggled up for a nap, and choose to let them be simply because it’s too shy to unzip the tent flap?  Lemme tell you, the giant, hulking, vicious razor-horned Behemoths of Final Fantasy became a hell of a lot less intimidating when I realized that they were powerless before a Do Not Disturb sign!

Not to mention cases where the overnight stay that a Tent item implies should actually just outright kill the heroes in and of itself.  I’m pretty sure that if you decided to conk out for the night in the heart of an active volcano next to a pool of magma, snoring in 1 lungful of volcanic aerosols and ash after another, you’d be waking considerably less healthy than when you went to sleep.

Also, exactly how realistic is it that these things are consumable, single-use items?  Look, I don’t know which Dick’s Sporting Goods the developers of Cris Tales have been shopping at, but tents are not tissue papers; you’re supposed to be able to pitch it up more than once before you pitch it out.  Who is the absolute madman in the party of Final Fantasy 4 who is purchasing and then throwing entire COTTAGES in the trash after a single nap!?

If these games wanted to realistically employ the idea of a Shelter item, they’d do it like Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.  In those games, you can bunker down for the night in an active danger zone with the camping equipment that your party carries and doesn’t throw out, so long as you have the space to set it up, and there’s an entire game mechanic devoted to determining whether the sentries you post to watch over the camp will be able to keep the rest of the party safe from the enemies in the area as they sleep.  It still requires a good bit of suspension of disbelief to accept that’d be enough to allow for a decent night’s sleep in the middle of the war zone of a demon invasion, but they’re at least trying a hell of a lot harder than the developer who thought it’d be totally reasonable for a Shelter to guarantee complete, unbroken safety for over half a dozen hours in the middle of Magus’s Lair.

So these items don’t provide any real effect on the ebb and flow of money in the game, and they sure as hell don’t add to the immersion.  Well, if Shelters have no secondary meta-function, and their primary function can be accomplished exactly as well by simply programming save points with the ability to heal your party,* then what purpose is served by these items besides just wasting the cumulative time it takes to acquire them and navigate menus to use them?   Save point restoration items are dumb.












* Hell, this actually provides the creators better potential control over how the game is played.  Some RPGs have 2 different kinds of save points, ones that just save your game and others that can both save AND heal you, allowing the developers better options for balancing their dungeons and bosses the way they want to, since they have the option to provide or deny the player full restoration, and thus create situations and dungeons of MP-budgeting and adoption of endurance tactics.

General RPG Creator Large Battleship Studios's Character Writing

Large Battleship Studios is the Indie developer behind Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, Quantum Entanglement, and A Dragon’s ReQuest, all RPGs for which I have a great deal of respect.  Headed by a gentleman going by Saint Bomber, there’s a lot about the studio’s titles to like, such as thoughtful and deceptively layered storytelling, engaging and witty humor, and the masterful way that humor is used to balance, enhance, and constructively work through a recurring and penetrating theme of emotional/psychological trauma.  But by far the strongest virtue Saint Bomber possesses as a creator, in my opinion, is his capacity for writing characters.  He very well may be, in fact, one of the most consistently excellent creators in this field that I’ve come across in my experience of almost 500 RPGs!  And today, I’d like to go over why that is, and pay him some due respect for his efforts, which I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed thrice now, and anticipate savoring again in the future.

So what makes Saint Bomber so great at what he does?  Well, first and foremost, the man puts in the time and does the work, to a degree that few RPG developers can match.  As one would expect, Saint Bomber lays the foundations of his characters’ personal points of depth and development, to give them weight to the audience and provide all that good, meaty drama of the human experience.  And it’s good stuff--stories of love so great that it permeates all possible iterations of a person’s life and reality, survivors of trauma gradually finding peace and purpose in the joy they find with and give to others, devotion so great that time itself bends the knee to it, children rising above the horrors that created them to be great and dignified people...roadmaps of humanity laid out with landmarks of sorrow, joy, pain, purpose, regret, love, fear, and more, are what you can expect of the cast of a Large Battleship Studios venture.  These are well-developed entities with interesting and emotionally gripping stories.

But while the existence of Chrono Cross means that I can’t make the claim that just anyone can write a decent character, certainly it’s not a trait singular to Saint Bomber.  Wild Arms 3, Children of the Zodiarcs, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Final Fantasy 9, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Tales of the Abyss, Final Fantasy 7, Hades 1, Dragon Age 1, and so many more RPGs all have great casts of at least comparable quality to LBS titles in terms of character depth.  I’d match the main characters of Tales of Berseria against Quantum Entanglement’s any day, and much as I enjoy Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle and A Dragon’s ReQuest, the merit of both of their casts put together can’t compete with that of Disco Elysium.  Because basically nothing can.  Suck it, Shakespeare, you had your time.

But what makes Saint Bomber stand out amongst his exceptional peers in terms of character development is that he’s never done with it.  There never seems to be a point in an LBS character’s journey at which point Saint Bomber says to himself, “Okay, that’s a wrap--she’s been characterized as far as she can be.”  There’s always a new and significant facet of his characters’ psyches that can be revealed and explored, which will influence who they are and how they interact with their friends, lovers, and/or nemeses going forward.

Take Aurellia in A Dragon’s ReQuest, for example.  With the issues of her upbringing, her trauma from being a prisoner who suffered great physical and mental torture, and her internal war between the hero she was intended to be and the monster she was crafted to become, Aurellia’s arguably the most deep and nuanced character in the game, and Saint Bomber does plenty with her throughout its course.  By the time that the heroes have arrived at Malphon’s castle, ostensibly the final dungeon of the game, Aurelia’s grown significantly as a person thanks to her experiences and more importantly her companions’ influence, and the player feels that he/she has a solid handle on her.  And yet!  If the player goes forward with the Seal Malphon ending, then he/she must choose between 3 variants of that ending, and in 2 of those, a fact is revealed about Aurellia’s feelings and her past which is massively significant to who she is, substantially rearranging how the player may view and understand Aurellia and retroactively altering how many of her issues and relationships over the game’s course can be interpreted.  Frankly, even if the player is ultimately shooting for the happier endings (which I certainly recommend), these scenes (particularly the one between Hinoki and Aurellia as they clear out monsters) are still so great and poignant that I’d say the ADRQ experience isn’t complete without witnessing them.

That’s a major piece of character development that occurs during 2 of the game’s endings, and not even the true ending,** for that matter.  And it’s not like this is some idiotic attempt to introduce some completely alien, disjointed element to the story right at the last second like those hacks at Bioware foisted on Mass Effect 3, nor is this a case of a too little, too late last ditch effort to salvage a major story entity who’s been grossly undeveloped and shallow up until this ending moment, as with Tales of Phantasia’s Dhaos and Tales of Vesperia’s Duke.  This new light being shed on Aurellia is simply another major component of a character who has been well-explored, and it’s relevant and accurate to both her character and its place in the plot.  Not every LBS character is always developing right to the last second of the game, but each one’s potential never seems to be finished in Saint Bomber’s eyes, and he’s ready and rarin’ to build a new expansion on any of his creations at any time that seems right, even to the very end.  You can’t say that about a lot of RPG writers, even really good ones.  I mean, hell, I’d call the cast of Final Fantasy 9 great, and it’s 1 of the best RPGs I’ve played, but when they finished Freya’s character arc barely a quarter of the way into the game, they were fucking done doing anything with the character.  If Saint Bomber had been on the staff of that game, we would’ve been treated to Freya’s excellent character discovering new truths about herself and staying narratively relevant for just as long as Zidane himself...and she probably would’ve ended the story with a far happier and more fulfilling romantic situation, too.

And since we’re on the subject of love, let’s look at character relationships in Large Battleship Studios games (which mostly evolve into love, hence this segue).  The “putting in the work” angle is also on positive display in terms of the cast’s group dynamics, not just with the characters as individuals.  Saint Bomber treats the relationships each party member has with one another almost like characters in themselves, growing the cast not just on the individual level, but also as an emotional collective.  Even as he develops his creations in a personal capacity, he also advances the ways they interact, who they are to each other, how they change and behave in one another’s presence.

Granted, this is something seen less in Quantum Entanglement and Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, because of the way those games are structured--EoWC is Catherine’s personal journey and so she’s the center of almost all of the game’s dynamic character relationships, and QE is a game about only 2 people.  But A Dragon’s ReQuest is the more traditional venture of a party of several individuals in close contact for the extended period of a long quest, and in ADRQ, each party member has living, evolving relationships with one another and with the party as a whole.  These are written and labored upon almost as entities of their own, fitting Hinoki and her comrades together as friends and family until they reach a point at which these people who know one another so intimately and have found so much of themselves thanks to each other that the idea that they could do anything but spend the rest of their lives together actually feels wrong, unnatural.

This is, of course, a natural component to RPG casts to some degree, but not a lot of games really take the time to care about every single strand that connects each character to the others in a party’s web of personal connections and treat it as important.  Take Chrono Trigger, for example.  1 of the absolute greatest RPGs of all time, CT has plenty of significant ties between its cast members, but in many cases, “allies joined by a common purpose” is as far as they go.  Crono and Marle, Crono and Lucca, Lucca and Robo, Crono and Marle and Lucca, and Frog and Magus are all relationships that are narratively significant and thus developed, but the rest of the interrelationships don’t get much attention.  And that’s fine, they don’t necessarily need to, because obviously CT is an amazing product as it stands.  But still, if Saint Bomber had been involved, there’s a good chance that you’d see moments set aside wherein Ayla and Marle are isolated and form a unique and poignant emotional bond, and Robo and Frog have a meaningful heart-to-heart one evening which ties into their respective character journeys, and Lucca and Magus find some common ground that the latter can’t find with the others, and so on.  Like I said, there are other RPGs that achieve this sort of group-connections-as-its-own-narrative-entity quality--my favorite part of Tales of Legendia is just how perfectly it creates a found family out of its cast, for example--but it’s certainly a rarity to hit this level, and Saint Bomber puts in the effort to make it happen.

More than anything else, though, the put-in-the-work approach that makes a Large Battleship Studios game’s cast so compelling is exemplified by the banter.  Oh that glorious, glorious banter!  Perhaps even more than the major moments of character development, the excellence of a Saint Bomber cast is formed by the fact that they are all constantly communicating and reacting to their adventure and the world around them.  Catherine, Marine, Hinoki, and their respective companions have thoughts to express on what NPCs say to them, the events unfolding before them, the settings they find themselves in, the objects that they interact with...every party member is constantly involved in what’s happening before them.  LBS games are not the (sadly common) RPG where companions only pipe up now and then to comment on what’s happening, if ever.  The banter between each game’s characters is an ever-present way of establishing and reinforcing their distinctive personalities, and growing their dynamics as allies, friends, and lovers.***  

Having cast input as a steady, continuous part of the game’s narrative and environment is a major key to the creation of characters that the audience remembers, understands, loves, and wants to spend time with.  As vital and powerful as major development scenes are as a tool, as important and compelling as the major points of depth and nuance are in defining a character, it’s the day-to-day dialogue and remarks that cement who a character is, not just what they’re about.  Interactions based simply on the everyday thoughts, feelings, and so on do more to establish and immortalize a character’s personality than their major dramatic moments in the plot.  And it also keeps the cast feeling relevant to the group and adventure as a whole, even past their time.  I may (somewhat often) criticize Final Fantasy 9 for leaving an excellent character by the wayside early on, but Freya at least still regularly engages with the rest of the party, and that makes a world of difference.  You can’t say the same for, say, half of the cast of Xenogears, who, once their small arcs of development are over, become largely mute and feel superfluous as a whole.  Freya’s still having a voice past her significance makes her an unfortunate waste of potential in a great game, while Billy, Maria, Rico, and Chu Chu’s lack of engagement past what’s strictly necessary make them embarrassing symptoms that lessen the game and highlight how terribly it’s written.

Grandia’s dinner conversations, the Tales of series’s skits, Final Fantasy 9’s Active Time Events, Legaia 2’s fireside chats...there are a lot of different tools in the chest for accomplishing this effect, and I appreciate and love them all.  But simple, constant, and direct verbal involvement of the main characters with the myriad facets of their adventure is the most obvious way to do it, if you’ve got the dedication for it.  It’s what makes Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5’s roster feel so much more real and personable than the previous couple Personas, and it’s much of what makes the player feel like he/she truly knows and cares about a Large Battleship Studios cast.

But that banter takes a hell of a lot of work, because as I said, Saint Bomber’s characters trade quips and have conversations about their situation, the people they’re talking to, props...just about anything around them that they could have thoughts about, these characters react to.  And that’s an impressive level of detail to include in even a small, 2-to-3-hour game like Quantum Entanglement, let alone the huge honkin’ standard-length RPG that is A Dragon’s ReQuest, but even right to the end of the latter, Hinoki and company are bantering like ever before.  Also impressive is the fact that Saint Bomber can manage to maintain an appealing humorous energy the whole time--a less genuinely enjoyable cast and a less amusing wit might transform so constant a level of dialogue into an overwhelming slog, but thus far I have yet to feel that way even once.

And you can tell Saint Bomber has a respect for banter as a method of character writing, because as light and fun as it often is, he never hesitates to take an opportunity to use it for a moment of vulnerability, or for two characters to get real about something that’s troubling them or to express heartfelt care for one another.  You never know whether the next flower vase or writing desk that you check out is going to lead to an aside that tickles your heartstrings, or forces upon you a moment of regretful sympathy for the villain.  All you can be sure of is that it’ll probably be in the midst of a diverting digression whose humor made the poignant little moment all the stronger.

The quality (and constancy) of LBS characters’ banter brings us to the other of the 2 most signature, major reasons that Saint Bomber is such a terrific character writer: he treats his creations as real people, and their relationships as real things.  Now look, I’m not inside the man’s head.****  I don’t KNOW what is and isn’t going on in there.  But based on playing his games, I feel like the characters that Saint Bomber creates are very much living entities to him.  It’s a well-known trope that authors claim that their creations take on a life of their own, and that’s surely true to some degree for most creators, but I do think that, in a lot of cases, this idea is somewhat exaggerated by those who make the claim.

But in the case of Saint Bomber, the sentiment that the characters have a life of their own definitely seems to be describing reality, and the banter is what shows this.  Their back-and-forth might be the biggest indication of just how much Saint Bomber truly loves the characters he creates, as real, feeling people, because he gives them every chance he can to express their thoughts, whether silly or soulful, and allows those countless little conversations to progress to a natural conclusion.  Any momentary aside can evolve into a conversation of over a half-dozen text-boxes in an LBS game.  It never feels like padding, never feels forced, as though Saint Bomber is simply doing it for the conscious sake of expanding and cementing his characters.  It instead always gives the indications of a little talk that gets sidetracked because real people are sharing themselves, and that’s how conversations work between people with personalities who are emotionally open and real with each other--the interaction evolves and moves along.

Where most RPG character interactions feel like a conscious effort by the writer to explore her/his creations and expand on the story,**** Saint Bomber’s banter is the kind of natural, flowing back-and-forth that real-life people have.  His characters feel like they speak and evolve on their own, as though he is simply a witness who chronicles these conversations and stories, rather than the one who directs them.  I legitimately could believe that Catherine, Alice, Gabby, Marine, Hinoki, Fluorine, Garnet, Aurellia, Argon, and so many more of the entities in a Large Battleship Studios title are, in fact, benign and fully alive split personalities living within Saint Bomber’s head space, growing into entities as he creates their games until it’s more a matter of his consulting them for their reactions and interactions than his consciously writing them.  I mean, I don’t actually think that’s happening, and certainly I don’t want to take anything away from the great effort he undoubtedly makes to hone his characters’ personalities through such constant application; I’m just saying that they feel real and vivid enough as people that I could believe they essentially were, and certainly Saint Bomber gives every indication of caring about them as such.  And while Large Battleship Studios isn’t the only creator who can manage such a level of realism to his characters’ personalities and a treatment of them that feels empathetic to the degree of treating them as actual people--Toby Fox is a talented peer on this matter--Saint Bomber’s certainly at the forefront of the field.

This notable talent for treating and presenting his creations as real people also affects the extended cast of his games, too.  The lives and relationships of secondary characters and minor villains are compelling, and frequently matter in greater ways than one expects.  Secondary villains Rowdy, Larceny, and Payola all have more personality and depth in ADRQ than half the RPG protagonists I’ve encountered in my time, the barely-seen Greyghast of EoWC is nonetheless a chilling, sobering monster whose presence is constantly felt in the traumatic legacy Catherine carries with her, small NPC love interests like the Nereid and Chelisera that in other games would doubtless be minor, throwaway matters are treated as legitimately valued, adored beloveds whose affections are referenced and important past their little niches in the story...and you never know when the bystander sitting in the corner is going to turn out to be the person upon which all the world hinges.  It reminds me in some regards of Disco Elysium’s approach with its smaller cast members, and any time you’re on the same page as DE, you’re probably doing something very right.  Few are the characters, even minor ones, that truly only matter for a moment in an LBS game; the secondary and minor characters are not merely cogs in a narrative machine, but rather still full people with their own stories that just didn’t happen to be the protagonists of this one.

Now, Saint Bomber has plenty of other good qualities for character writing beyond these 2 characteristics.  He’s got a talent and interest in word play, a very good sense of humor, and an appealing style of writing, among other fine traits as an author.  But I think that the 2 most signature elements to what make Large Battleship Studios characters so vividly personable and deeply memorable, the greatest draw of its games, are Saint Bomber’s ability to love his creations and their relationships as authentic human beings and impress that perspective upon his audience, and his tenacity to never stop working for them.  At the very least, they’re the qualities that make Saint Bomber number among my favorite RPG creators, and I think it’s worth calling some positive attention to them.
















* Well...2-and-a-half, I suppose.  A venture that’s purely created for the sake of comedy is kind of its own thing.


** Although the events of the True Ending also have a very significant moment of self-understanding for Aurellia, too, that resolves and crystallizes a lot of the feelings and growth she’s had during the journey, too.  The character development of a Large Battleship Studio game really is never over until the curtain drops.  And it might not even be finished then--if I understand it, 1 of his games I have yet to play will see a return of some of his previous titles’ casts, and I won’t exactly be shocked if this opportunity to continue to build and refine their characters is exploited to its fullest potential.


*** Not to mention, it also serves, as I’ve mentioned before, an extra narrative purpose in Quantum Entanglement, in which the steady stream of flippant quips and jokes is used by Marine and Gabby as a means of keeping their calm, and resisting the ever-growing anxiety and urge to panic in their situation.  Although you could also make the argument that QE is just a more immediately apparent example of what Saint Bomber does in all his games on this point, as the sense of humor that most of his characters possess is at least partially a coping mechanism for dealing with the sadnesses and traumas they’ve experienced in the past, or even during the events of the game’s plot.  Either way, it’s comedy well-utilized for an interesting purpose.


**** And trust me, I’ve tried to get in there; I’ve never met any human being so infuriatingly committed to non-committal when it comes to revealing his narrative and emotional intentions, and the inner workings of his lore.  The man would not even confirm how Hinoki Jr.’s real name is pronounced when I asked him.  I mean, look, Saint Bomber has stated on more than 1 occasion that it’s largely out of a desire to give his audience the freedom of their own interpretation, and that’s great and I do respect that, but it drives an inquisitive lore-goblin like me crazy.  Particularly when half the reason I’m asking is because I’m self-conscious about whether I’m truly understanding and getting the most out of the works I take in. I just want confirmation that I’m not Stubb from Moby Dick, stuck in that hellish intellectual limbo wherein he can recognize that there are deeper levels to what’s happening around him, but falls just short of being able to understand them, and this man just.  Isn’t.  Helping.  I have never wanted telepathy more than when trying to get a straight answer out of Saint Bomber.

Oh, and why yes, since I’m gonna invite him to read this rant when it’s finished, this IS very passive-aggressive, thanks for noticing.  Look, I think I have sung more than enough of Saint Bomber’s (very well-earned!) praises in this rant to earn the right to vent a little.


***** Not that there is ANYTHING wrong with making a conscious effort to do this, by the way.  Please do not mistake my sentiments here--I absolutely want RPG writers to feel an obligation to refine and labor upon their creations in such a way.  Unless you’re just outright terrible at your job to a Wild Arms 4 level, making that effort is only going to be beneficial to the product.  To use an example from before, SMT Persona 5 has a very healthily present level of cast interactions, and each conversation feels like a conscious choice and effort of the writers to think of the topic, how the characters will interact with it, and how they’ll drive it to its intended conclusion.  The result is still a real-feeling discussion that develops the characters’ personalities and identities, and makes them a vibrant cast that the player likes and remembers.

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.

General RPGs' Paternal Relationships' Limited Dimensions

Happy New Year, all!  No better way to start a fresh new year than by immediately souring it with nitpicky complaining, so let's get right down to business!



When you get down to it, even though the relationship/legacy of a character’s father is 1 of the most used--and the most frequently unnecessary--narrative tools in RPGs (and practically all other forms of fiction), there’s a pretty damn limited set of dimensions that this father-child dynamic usually takes on.  

Generally, everything boils down to a question of what the father is, both unto himself and in relation to his child, rather than who.  RPG fathers are important for their legacy, the facts of their existence, their actions in the world, the whats rather than the whos like who they are and who they have been to their son or daughter.  Pop’s significance to a narrative comes in forms of being a motivational figure for the protagonist to avenge (Greil and Ike from Fire Emblem 9), or an impressive icon whose legacy the hero is expected and/or struggling to live up to (James and the Lone Wanderer in Fallout 3), or an antagonist whose legacy the hero is expected to resist and overcome (Jecht and Tidus in Final Fantasy 10)...or hell, sometimes it just boils down to goddamn eugenics, in which Dad’s basically only important for what family line or species he is (Cecil and KluYa in Final Fantasy 4).  And sometimes it’s all of these things crammed together in a confusing, poorly-written, badly-conceived messy jumble, because fucking Xenogears just has to be fucking Xenogears.

It’s a very lazy trend overall in the genre, because it allows the game to shamelessly milk Dad Drama* without having to actually create and write a relationship between father and child that extends at all past this single narrative point.  These fathers can be as distant as you like, have as little physical presence as you like, and you can still get your money’s worth out of them.  Half the time, they don’t have to even really exist as characters, just plot points who can count themselves lucky to have gotten even a few lines in (Suou in Xenosaga, Wazuki in Chrono Cross, the Human Noble father in Dragon Age 1).  At other times, their connection to their kid stays unknown or irrelevant for so long that even if they ARE an actual character, there’s still really no development of a specifically father-child relationship to be found (Hauser in Wild Arms 4, Kratos in Tales of Symphonia, Jeralt in Fire Emblem 16).  You don’t have to know anything more about paternity than a whiptail lizard who briefly glanced at the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s entry for “Father” to more than meet the standards RPGs have set for depicting fatherhood in their stories.

Frankly, it makes me wonder sometimes if there’s anyone writing for RPGs who’s actually especially comfortable with their own relationship with their dad.  This bizarre combination of fixation, and constantly keeping the portrayals of that fixation at emotional arm’s length, doesn’t feel like it comes from someone who’s really secure about the subject.

It’s also a rather distinctly male-oriented perspective on the connection of a father to his child, as far as I can tell.  I mean, obviously every case is different. Still, I think by and large, an obsession with living up to or opposing Dad and/or Dad’s legacy/expectations, and this thought that what Papa is to oneself being the most essential part of the father-child relationship, rather than who he and his kid are to one another and who they have made each other into through their shared love and communication, is far more a signature perspective of sons than daughters.  Unsurprising, of course, given that society is generally much more insistent on questions of a father’s legacy, lineage, and emotionally distant/absent respect applying to sons than daughters.  And stupid societal expectations of men not adequately opening and expressing themselves emotionally to other men doesn’t help the matter any.

Not to say that this father-child dynamic is strictly found in male characters, of course.  Chris and Wyatt in Suikoden 3, Maduin and Terra in Final Fantasy 6, Cassius and Estelle in The Legend of Heroes 6-1, there’s plenty of examples of female characters with plot-relevant fathers in this same narrative mindset.  Some are even really good and well-crafted--Virginia and Werner in Wild Arms 3 are among the finest that video games can offer on the matter, for example.  But even when it’s a daughter, if her relationship with her dad is defined by these what factors that don’t require any real, personal relationship with him, it still feels distinctly like a father-son dynamic.

It’s not that there’s NO deviation from this box that RPGs have placed paternal relationships within, but it has gotten to the point that I actually felt pleasantly shocked to recently witness the relationship between Lita and her father in Ara Fell.  Lita and her dad have an actual, honest-to-Saranrae character story of a father and a daughter with an emotional, normal relationship.  Lita is a young woman whose adventurous and initially brash personality is at odds with her father’s desire for her safety and stability.  Through conversation, conflict, and circumstance, they reach a point at which Lita’s father accepts that he cannot, and shouldn’t even if he could, keep her sheltered from the world.  His acceptance and his encouragement is part of Lita’s journey to come into her own, and helps her to move forward with her adventure.  Her old man isn’t of narrative value for his ability to die dramatically or get horny for other species or be a villain or any of that stuff.  Lita’s father is important to Ara Fell for being a father to her.  Who he is to Lita, how his relationship with her is a part of her character, that’s what matters.  And somehow, this simple, believable, relatable portrayal of a normal relationship where a father is protective of his little girl, then eventually accepts and encourages her independence and ability, feels almost alien to the genre.  Their bond, their love, isn’t just that of family as some obligation-based concept--their bond and love is that of family which has lived as family, and that really stood out to me, and it’s a weird state of affairs that it did.

It’s unfortunate that RPGs are like this.  I’ve felt for a long time that the “Oh my GOD look look look it’s DAD!” card is hugely overplayed in RPGs, but maybe I would feel differently if these games didn’t so drastically limit themselves in what a story-relevant father can be.


















* Dare you to read those last 4 words aloud in a crowded room.

General RPGs' Characters Walking Toward Something They're Shooting At

It is with full sincerity that I tell you that I struggled with myself over whether this rant should just begin and end with the single sentence, “It’s stupid.”

Because why should I elaborate?  You already know why it’s stupid.  And if you don’t, if you cannot already guess everything I am about to say, then the only explanation is that you’re 1 of the goons in the writer’s room who perpetuates this trope, and I know no one on any of those staffs is reading this blog.

But fuck it, we’ll do this the proper way.  I’m still not over the novelty of seeing words magically appear on a screen that say the thinky-thinky things my head makes inside, after all.  But I’m keeping it short.  Even I have better things to do than dignify something this transparently dumb with a long treatise.  And lest ye forget, I’m the guy who once wrote a critical rant about helmets in RPGs based on Dungeons and Dragons.  So just keep in mind how low that bar is.

There are a lot of advantages to ranged weapons.  Longbows had enough power to penetrate the most advanced, heaviest armor the middle ages could produce--that’s a hell of a lot more than you could say for a guy wielding a sword.  Crossbows are so deadly that the Catholic Church actually banned them in warfare for a little while, on the grounds that they were so unfairly effective killing instruments that God Himself found them hateful--and that’s a quote.*  Spears may dull, axes may rust, clubs may break, and swords do all of those things and more, but as long as you can find some rocks, yes just goddamn rocks, a sling's gonna be a reliable armament, and damned easy to reproduce if it does break.  And of course, the typical star of ranged weapons, firearms?  Handheld ones can be easily concealed, and large-scale stuff like canons can penetrate not just armor, but even vehicles and defensive fortifications.

But the 1 most important advantage to a ranged weapon, the most basic, intrinsic virtue it possesses that even the most slack-jawed drooling dipshit on Earth ought to be able to see, is the fact that they’re, you know...ranged.  You do not have to take the time to approach someone to attack them if you have a bow.  You do not have to deal with whatever close and personal offenses the other guy has available to him when you’re holding a blowgun loaded with a poison dart.  If your opponent has a sword and you’ve got a gun, and he’s more than 7 feet away from you, then congratulations, you win the fight as long as you yourself don’t muck it up by aiming wrong.

Which is why Thane’s death in Mass Effect 3 is utterly idiotic.  Thane, armed with a pistol, is facing off against Kai Leng, who is armed with a katana.  They start off in close quarters as a matter of circumstance, but at a certain point, Thane manages to knock the glee club ninja back about 15 feet or so.  And what does Thane do then?  He fires at Kai Leng, while RUNNING TOWARD HIM.  Completely out of the range of Kai Leng’s outdated wasn’t-even-a-major-weapon-of-warfare-in-its-heyday-so-stop-jizzing-your-pants-about-it-Japan katana, got Kai Leng unobstructed in his sights, possesses a lifetime’s experience of perfect marksmanship as the galaxy’s top assassin, and knows he himself is on death’s door from a terminal illness in his lungs...and Thane intentionally moves toward his enemy.  And oh hey, what a surprise, the man whose lungs are working at 10% capacity and who isn’t armed with a close-quarters weapon gets mortally stabbed immediately thereafter.  It’s almost like throwing away the advantage of range when you have a ranged weapon wasn’t a stroke of tactical genius!

Of course, the situation wasn’t helped by Shepard and company being hit with a heavy dose of Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome during the whole fight.

And speaking of Shepard himself being dumb, this isn’t even the only time Mass Effect 3 pulls this idiotic shit.  As long as you don’t have the good sense to download the real ending to Mass Effect, Shepard will, in the Destroy ending, choose to walk into an explosion.  Yeah, the dumbass is faced with the task of destroying a computer console--that’s an inanimate target, mind you--with his pistol, opens fire as he walks toward it, and keeps advancing AS IT EXPLODES.  Kai Leng at least would have attempted to close the gap himself, but the only way that Shepard could suffer damage in this scenario would be to knowingly place himself within the explosion.  And that is exactly where he chooses to be.  It’s not like he doesn’t know what’s going on and doesn’t have time to turn around--the damn fool actively flinches in his pace as he sees parts shatter and bursts of flame go up from it!  And it ain’t like he could possibly think that his attack isn’t having an effect and thus he needs to get closer for more damage, because, again, he’s REACTING to the explosions from the damage that he is CAUSING to it.

Now, even if I personally love the game besides the horrible ending, a lot of people hate Mass Effect 3, so you may be thinking to yourself that this moronic cliche is only a problem for “bad” RPGs.  Yeah, not so.  I’m fairly sure that almost everyone agrees that Horizon 0 Dawn is a solid title with good writing, and it pulls this exact same stupid shit!  When Rost is squaring off against Helis, this battle starts with Rost being, I dunno, a good 20+ feet away from Helis, with Rost scoring an arrow in Helis’s back while Helis is armed with only a knife.  What’s Rost’s next move?  Why, to hurriedly scramble toward Helis, closing the gap between them so quickly that he only has time to fire off 1 more arrow (which Helis blocks) before he has to engage in hand-to-hand combat with him.  Now Rost ain’t stuck in the last stages of a terminal illness like Thane was, but for Pharasma’s sake, he’s got a chance for several more free shots before Helis can get to him!  Just because the jerk can block 1 arrow (which isn’t relevant since Rost is moving toward him even before that happens so it didn't affect his decision to do so), that doesn’t necessarily mean he could block 2 or 3 more, and even if he can, the worst that comes of that is that Rost still has to take him on with his spear after getting those free shots.  It’s not even like Rost could be worried about hitting Aloy, because Helis stupidly drops her instead of using her as a body shield.  No, he just goes as fast as he can to a distance where his enemy has a chance to kill him, and what do you know, it gives his enemy a chance to kill him.

OOOOOH but it’s so much more dramatic for Rost to rush into close quarters, so much cooler for Thane to do a shooting sprint, so much more cinematic for Shepard to stride headfirst into flaming shrapnel.  Who cares about competent storytelling or character consistency when there’s the chance for extra glittery flare in an action scene, right?

It’s not just an RPG problem.  Oh man is it ever not just an RPG problem.  This dumbass trope rears its empty head practically once a week in other video games and shows and cinema; hell, it might be more reasonable for me to get on my knees and give heartfelt thanks that it’s actually fairly infrequent in this genre.  Nonetheless, it’s a damned stupid cliche, it’s obvious that it’s damned stupid, and creators really need to stop using it.













* I’d kill to see someone crash any given stupid faux-Christian protest rally with all those “God Hates (Insert Marginalized Group Here)” signs and whatnot with his/her own sign proclaiming “God Hates Crossbows.”