My love-hate relationship with RPGs


I love role-playing games. They are definitely my favorite type of video game. I love that you can visit villages, do side quests and work along with some crazy people.

Unfortunately, there are some elements that I just hate including level grinding, hard bosses and un-skippable cut scenes, just to name a few.

Here's a look at some of the best and worst aspects that both feed and frustrate my enjoyment of role-playing games.

The Love

Visiting Villages
One of my favorite parts or RPGs is visiting the various towns in the game. This is your chance to shop and mingle and just take a break from all the fighting and dungeon crawling. It’s great talking to these random strolling villagers who are chock full of information that most village people shouldn’t know (like what buttons to push for battle commands). Plus they don’t mind you raiding their treasure chests and furniture. Not only that but villagers often have side quests for you.

Side Quests
Nothing is better then taking a break from the grueling main quest to help out an old man who lost his cow. Side quests are fun, usually short and always bank you with awesome items and rare things. Sometimes they are just for getting hard-to-find items, other times they can be used for character development or sometimes they can lead to alternate endings in the game. A RPG without side quests is just not complete in my opinion.

Multiple Endings
Now I don’t mean “good ending/bad ending”, I mean getting completely different endings to a game depending on the choices you make or possible side quests you do. Chrono Trigger for the DS and SNES is a great example of this. Once you beat the game the first time, you can play again on new game and get more than 10 different endings depending on what you do in the game. This adds great replay value to the game and it gives you the feeling of additional control over the game.

Extra Party Characters
Now this one could be good or bad really. It’s always nice to be able to choose who is in your party, especially when you can choose from quirky or unusual characters. On the other hand, sometimes there are too many choices and, if you pick the wrong guy, you miss your chance at a better one. This could happen to you in Radiata Stories, Persona 1, and Chrono Cross (among others). When you pick a character, you void the option of picking certain other ones, so you better hope you picked the right one.

The Hate

Bosses
It seems like in most RPGs the bosses will be easy, or not a problem as long as you level up accordingly but then the last boss will be insanely hard. Atelier Iris, Earthbound and most of the Final Fantasy games (especially 6) are like that. So here you end up at the end of the game and you can’t beat it without reloading a hundred times or, sometimes, you will have an enemy that is harder than any of the bosses. This happens a lot in the older games especially those for the NES and Genesis.

Voice Acting
My main problem with this is, especially in Japanese RPGs, the developers always seem to hire these whiny people with high pitched voices to read the parts. I would much rather just read the dialogue and imagine how their voices sound.

Arrogant Main Characters:
Square Enix, I am looking in your direction. First of all, I am suppose to be the main character. I make their decisions and movements and I don’t want to be a jerk. Why would you want to be an unlikable character? Yes, I know that the character eventually sees the error of their ways becomes likable as the game goes on (for the most part) but that still means I have to be a jerk through most of the game. They should just stick to the classic silent protagonist.

Level Grinding:
Oh, how I hate level grinding. It’s boring, redundant and can take up most of the game. A lot of the time, you can get away with just fighting every enemy you come across and have no problem with the boss but that is not always the case, especially in games like Final Fantasy where they have random battles. It’s nice when there is more of an incentive to grinding (other than to level up), like in the Persona series, you can get rare items or new personas every time you fight, especially at higher levels. At least this way I feel like I am making good use of the wasted time.

Un-Skippable Cutscenes:
Tell me, what is the reasoning behind creating long cut scenes that you can’t skip ? Maybe you don’t have time to watch them, maybe you already played the game and don’t want to watch them again or maybe you just don’t care about them. We should always have the option to skip over them.

Read [IGN] Also Read [NoBSGamers]