Posted by Nightravyn on April 20th, 2011 |
0 commentsDay 20 – Favorite genre.
Well this is an easy one! RPG! No, not a rocket-propelled grenade, but Role-Playing Game. (I will, however, admit that some RPGs use RPGs. Heehee.)
(Sorry, this is what you get when I’m fighting off a sinus infection. Deal with it.)
Back in the 1970s, Dungeons and Dragons came into being. It was a game played around tables where one person lead a group of others through a story, usually involving dungeons and killing things for gold and magical items. Character sheets were developed, stats created, and dice rolled to see who won battles, whether they were of wits or blades. I was in LOVE with this idea of being able to step into a fantasy story and play with others of a like mind. Sadly, that pretty much fizzled out fast for me. A few friends half-heartedly tried it, but were no where near as enamored as I was with the concept. A few guys at school would play, but god forbid a girl attempt to show interest. So much for that interest, so I thought.
Then computers and video games really started to explore what they could do. It wasn’t just about space aliens marching slowly down a screen, or a yellow blob running through a maze eating everything in sight. The technology progressed to where people could actually tell stories with this new medium. Sure the graphics were crude, but it didn’t matter. This was an interactive story telling experience, one that I had some emotional involvement with. This was just what I was looking for!
The only problem that I had with the RPGs that I was coming across was they were a little, hm, shallow? Don’t get me wrong, I love a good dungeon crawl as much as the next girl, but I needed a little more of that emotional connection with my character. Once I got my first Playstation, though, I discovered the world of Japanese RPGs. The graphics were a little more polished, the story lines a little more mature. People DIED in these games, ones that you had gotten attached to for the previous 40 hours you had played the game. And those deaths? No way around them.
Blizzard came along and matured up the dungeon crawl with Diablo, mainly through use of extreme blood (again, don’t get me wrong, cos I love me some Diablo), but there was also an exploration of good versus evil. At the end of the first Diablo, your character is faced with a rather tough choice, that is really no choice at all. You kill Diablo, this great evil, and are left with a shard, a soulstone containing Diablo. You’ve been doing all of this killing to save a village (as well as for the phat lewtz), and now, this shard must be contained or everyone is doomed. So what happens? You shove it into your own skull. Why? To save humanity because you think you’re stronger than the shard’s previous carrier. Hey, wait, that’s not a happy ending!
RPGs get flak sometimes for being “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl reunite to save the world… again.” But there’s a reason for that. It’s stories like that that we read and listen to growing up. People doing heroic things, something they didn’t think they could do, and finding out more about themselves and their friends along the way. It’s the idea of someone being something more than “ordinary”, whether it’s from a spider bite, or just being in a house dropped out of a tornado into a mystical land far from home. That person is forced to do something they didn’t expect to do. They have to grow in a new direction and take on bigger things than they ever thought they’d need to. And in the end, they’re changed by the experience, usually for the better.
And with RPGs, we get to be that character, even for a short amount of time, and in the process learn something about ourselves along the way.
For “best graphics”, in recent memory, I’m going to have to go with Final Fantasy XIII. It’s pretty. It’s shiny. It’s everything that Final Fantasy is known for all wrapped up in a pretty pretty package that makes me want to lick the screen and purr at it.
But for “best art style”, I’m going to have to go with the Katamari Damacy series. The first game, which came out on the Playstation 2, almost felt lo-res when I first started playing it. It’s blocky, it’s almost candy-colored, and it just works. It’s a funky little game and needed a funky style. They’ve kept the same style through the rest of the games, and tweaked it with the latest iteration for the PS3. But it’s always immediately recognizable as “Oh, that’s a Katamari game!” Brand recognition: it’s not just the name, it’s also how it looks, people!
