Part one in a series.

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Returning home is a comfort we all deserve, but what if home is long behind us? The grand adventures of RPGs can wear on even the most intrepid explorer or boneheaded, shonen-esque protagonist. For moments of safety and comfort when far away from our original homes, we have the town.

After a foray in the wilderness or a dungeon delve, we return to a cozy town nestled in a wheat field or bordering the edge of a vast woodland — a haven of rest in a dangerous, exciting world. I find it comforting to know that whatever the game, I can go to a town and usually find the inn, some stores, NPCs with charming dialogue, and often some of the best music in a game. These are sites of rest and contemplation. Many a time I’ve put down the controller in my favourite towns and simply watched virtual life pass by.

Equally compelling is entering a bustling city after a long trek. The party has braved dangers and digressions, with the reward now a huge, new city brimming with possibility. There is always a rush exploring every nook and finding a torrent of equipment, quests, and sights.

Whether by dint of game length or tradition, RPGs (especially JRPGs) are often rich in atmosphere. And towns1 have atmosphere in spades.

This is the start of a short series on what makes a good RPG town. I’ve read enough praise of the town to know the appeal is common, but why do we love wandering these streets?

Why Have Towns?

The original towns, back in the days of dungeon crawlers like Angband, were singular settlements that functioned as a point of return. The dungeon crawler is a distinct subgenre of RPG nowadays, but as one of the genre’s murky ancestors we can see how the town in those games functioned as a refuge from the (usually lone) dungeon of each title.

The town in a game like Diablo is practically the only safe place where the hero can catch a breath. Especially in games where monsters are free to act when the player does — such as in Diablo when opening the inventory doesn’t pause the game, or in turn-based roguelikes where changing equipment ticks the timer — the town’s role as a refuge is cemented. The point of such dungeon crawlers is to push into the labyrinth a little farther each time, then return to the town as a place of safety.

In the broader genre of RPGs, towns maintained that role of a refuge as part of a classic loop: town → overworld (or wilderness) → dungeon, then back again. This is not a gameplay loop as such, but a broader structure that defines player goals and attitudes more than their verbs. A typical RPG experience is the player character receiving a quest in a town, such as defeating a monster or nabbing some treasure, traversing the overworld to find the quest location, then navigating a perilous dungeon to complete the quest. Afterwards, it’s back to the town for a reward and some recuperation. Then we receive another quest and the game progresses.

One can find this pattern in older games like Eye of the Beholder or the first Dragon Quest all the way to more recent titles like Clair Obscur or Final Fantasy XV2. It persists and works well because the three elements clearly represent different parts of an adventure.

The dungeon is danger: monsters, traps, and puzzles, with the reward of treasure for those who can best it. The overworld is exploration: stunning vistas, hidden nooks, the promise of excitement over the next ridge.

What then, are towns? As places of both comfort and novelty, they contrast the adventurous with the domestic. The unfamiliarity of a new town is exciting, but in a different manner than that of the overworld. It’s a space to explore, yes, but that exploration is about finding interesting NPCs or new equipment rather than points of interest on the map. They are slower and safer than the other two parts of the loop, providing a crucial point of rest.

Space as Structure

What I find interesting is how often towns, especially in JRPGs, are used as a key structural element beyond this loop. Often JPRGs layer an additional plot element on top of towns as a return point: structuring the journey as moving from town to town. This is a very common structure in many JRPGs, including almost every entry in long running franchises like Final Fantasy, Tales of…, and Dragon Quest, along with many titles in the 16 and 32 bit eras.

For example, after leaving Midgar in FF VII, the rest of the game is largely about travelling between different towns. First stop is the Chocobo Farm, then a trek to Junon before crossing the sea to Costa del Sol, then Corel, then the Gold Saucer and so forth. There is plenty of overworld (and a few dungeons) between each location, but by and large the plot of FF VII — along with a huge number of RPGs — is a travelogue.

A new town acts as a physical and story destination in an RPG. Often arriving at one signals a shift in the story. The party is travelling from place to place or sometimes cycling between the wilderness and a main hub(s), like in FF XII or Baldur’s Gate II. Arriving at a new town provides the player with story content, new quests, and often a new destination in the form of the next town.

Thus, for many RPGs instead of chapters we have towns. In the case of a cycle, returning to a town (especially multiple times) provides an anchor point that contrasts the changes in the rest of the game world, while journeying to a new town provides both a destination and a useful jumping off point for the next part of the story.

A Study in Contrast

Now we’ve examined the function of towns in RPGs, we can start to think about what defines a good one. Before going into detail on that (which will actually be in the next article), I would like to start with two examples of towns I dislike. I find both instructive for different reasons.

The first example is pretty much any city in a current AAA, open-world game. The cities of Assassin’s Creed or the settlements in the Horizon games are a good example3. These aren’t RPG towns, obviously, and as such they have different priorities and functions. It’s not so much as that the London of AC Syndicate is unsuccessful, but rather how it differs from RPG towns is illuminating.

These locations often have similar gameplay functions as RPG towns: vendors for equipment, NPCs, quests, etc. Especially since many games of this type incorporate systems from RPGs nowadays, this isn’t surprising. But the chief difference in comparison to RPG towns is how busy such cities are. They are drowning in detail and milling bodies. I salute the AC franchise’s commitment to historical tourism, and it along with similar titles pore a staggering amount of work and money into realistic, busy, detail-heavy cities.

However, I think this realism strips such cities of any charm. While the dense streets and crowds are technically impressive, they don’t inspire the same feelings in me that a smaller town of named NPCs with interactions and dialogue does4. This isn’t strictly a matter of scope, as there are several RPG cities that present a similar impression of a gigantic city while still retaining the appeal I’m trying to define — often while being much smaller in actual size, interestingly enough.

The RPG town possesses an intimacy, charm, and invitation to explore that to me the AAA city lacks. To put it another way, I’d be happy to visit the Victorian London of AC Syndicate, but I want to live in Rolent or Gondolia.

The Second Contrast

The second example of what doesn’t work is an unambiguous RPG town that, frankly, just kind of sucks: Neverwinter from Neverwinter Nights 2.

Neverwinter, especially the Docks district, is a bland, miserable space. The town is held hostage by the game’s awkward 3D models and grim colour palette, but there are plenty of other sins. The locations are spread a little too far apart, giving it an eerie feeling similar to the large hallways of MMOs. The buildings are too similar without feeling like it’s deliberate due to architectural trends. There are few NPCs, and those that do exist stand stock still without having much of anything to say. It’s a ghost town rather than a curated collection of interesting characters. It neither looks nor navigates like a town built for people or players.

Neverwinter Nights 2 released in 2006, so it has no excuse of early 3D growing pains to explain its bland city environment and awkward layout. For contrast, 2006 also saw the release of titles like Baten Kaitos: Origins, Suikoden V, and FF XII, all featuring stunning locations5.

In fairness, The Sunken Flagon is a bright spot: a tavern in the Docks district that acts as a home base for the player, including a space for companions to relax when not in the adventuring party. It’s a cheery place full of named NPCs, light, and space that’s both easy to navigate and recognizable as stemming from its function. But the town itself is just painful to exist in.

Neverwinter does provide a classic RPG town structural function: a large chunk of the early game is about the player leaving their sleepy village to travel to Neverwinter, finding adventure along the way. Yet upon arrival, we find a town that feels grim and lifeless, all while the story is trying to convince the player it’s full of possibility and bustle. That contrast more than anything killed a recent playthrough for me.

Neverwinter reminds me of a boarded-up main street in a fading town. Not dangerous or exciting. Not even interesting in how it explores darker themes. Just dull and dead. I’m not sure why I would want to hang around there voluntarily.

So what does Neverwinter lack, and what are RPG towns doing differently than AAA cities? If we now know why towns are important, and have two examples of contrasts, the next step is to examine what elements go into a good RPG town. Which is exactly what I’ll do in the next part of this series. So tune in next time: same bat time, same bat channel.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous continues to dominate my time and mind. One bold feature, which I always love in RPGs, is how it displays choices that a player is unable to take on their current run, especially as they relate to the mythic paths. At one point, I killed a powerful but tragic enemy, and an underling asked “What do you want to do with the body?” Among the usual choices of bury him with honours, string up the body as a warning, etc. etc., there was a locked, hidden choice that read “Requires Lich Mythic Path.” Nothing makes me want to replay a game more than seeing things like that.

• Evelyn Waugh is an interesting writer. In the 20s and 30s he wrote several hilarious novels poking fun at the British upper classes. Decline and Fall is a personal favourite, which received a great BBC adaptation about ten years ago starring Jack Whitehall. But after trouble in his personal life and a conversion to Catholicism, he started writing more serious (even dour), conservative novels. His best of these is probably Brideshead Revisited, and while I don’t share Waugh’s rosy picture of the sacred, the novel itself is beautiful, sensitive, and full of stunning prose.

• The Video Game Storyteller beat me to press a few weeks ago with an article of their own called JRPG Towns Are Cool. Give it a read, then give that charming substack a follow if you don’t already.

• Dismal towns and bland art direction aside, there is a lot to love in Neverwinter Nights 2. It’s a fairly faithful reproduction of the D&D 3.5 rules, and after a bit a slow start the main campaign develops a pulpy charm. The real appeal is in the expansions, particularly Mask of the Betrayer, which features some wonderfully rich writing.

Next Time

I’ll continue this series by breaking down what makes an RPG town work.

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I’m going to agree with a legion of worried suburban parents: video games are violent1.

More precisely, video games have a disproportionate amount of action2 in them compared to other stories. Any given Final Fantasy title has far more instances of stabbing and slashing than an ostensibly violent tv show like Game of Thrones. On the one hand, this is to be expected in a medium driven by verbs. Some video games also contain disproportionate amount of jumping compared to other mediums. On the other hand, even with that in mind RPGs generally have an enormous amount of fights, to the point where some games are just aimlessly killing monsters until a cutscene happens.

I’ve written about the narrative function of battle systems several times before (specifically in Final Fantasy Rebirth, on their abstract nature, and trying to like real-time with pause), so I’m going to take for granted that they have storytelling value. The question I’m interested in today is why there are so many battles in RPGs. Does their preponderance undercut their service to the plot?

One Battle After Another

Battles in RPGs both take up a lot of time in already long games and tend to be very frequent. The stereotypical JRPG dungeon is a series of many short fights, with that being the primary gameplay element besides cutscenes or wandering around a town.

Now, I’m not discussing the individual interest level of battles. Some RPGs have very involved battles, while some tend to have battles that aren’t particularly interesting individually, but present a continual drain on resources that shift the decision making to the dungeon crawl as a whole. Either approach is fine. What I’m curious about is the sheer number of fights in an RPG, and if that affects our perception of the use of action as a storytelling device.

This seems to me like a larger problem for RPGs than other genres. As I said before, games are very verb-driven by virtue of the medium. A player will shoot as often in Halo (at least proportionate to the length of the game) as they choose the attack command in Dragon Quest. But battles in RPGs, at least to me, seem to stick out a little more.

I think there are a few factors that bring this to light in RPGs. First, the sectioned-off nature of most RPGs battles — moving to a separate screen, or at least separate interface — frame them as a distinct element from other parts of a game. Second, the sheer length of RPGs make any frequently used element stand out3. Finally, I think the story-driven nature of RPGs — especially the frequent reliance of more traditional styles of storytelling in JRPGs — cause any gaminess, so to speak, to stand out in starker contrast.

To put it another way, shooting a thousand aliens in Halo feels to me like a more natural plot element that a thousand random battles on a separate screen in a JRPG. If my impression is justified, then we’ll have to look at RPG battles a little differently to see if they can hold storytelling value.

Different Systems, Different Results

Interestingly, this trend seems to cross subgenres. JRPG, CRPG, WRPG — choose whatever prefix takes your fancy and we’ll find an abundance of fighting. We can point to the tabletop and dungeon-crawling roots of the genre as whole as a reason why battles are so prevalent, though that doesn’t justify why the trend should continue.

And continue it does. We take for granted that, as the protagonist, we’re entitled to slaughter indiscriminately without it affecting (or even warranting a mention in) the rest of a game’s plot. Some titles, such as Xenoblade 2, are even silly4 enough to have characters refuse to kill their opponents in cutscenes despite carving through an army of underpaid soldiers to get to the boss.

A few games note the strange dichotomy between heroism and constant battling. Knights of the Old Republic 2 has a character criticize the protagonist for such unrepentant violence when they are supposed to be following the Jedi path of peace. Baldur’s Gate, another Bioware title, contextualizes all the fighting with the reveal that the hero is a Bhaalspawn, child of the Lord of Murder himself. It’s in the genes.

I’m trying my best not to use the tired term “ludonarrative dissonance,” but we’re certainly in that realm. The plot as told through dialogue often ignores (or clashes) with a major element of the plot as told through mechanics. This is worsened by the frequency of fighting as a mechanical plot element.

Careful Deployment

The more a piece of media deploys a dramatic element, especially the more intense ones (e.g., a fight, a shouting match, a shocking revelation), it diminishes the effect of any one instance. Plot elements are diluted by repetition, and I think this truer the more pronounced or unusual they are.

For example, one of the many delights of the fantastic movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three5 is the restraint the film has in deploying action. The tension of the hostage situation builds and builds, and the fact the hijackers rarely deploy violence make them paradoxically seem more dangerous. When someone does fire a gun, it’s a shocking, almost cathartic event.

Compare that to the dreadful 2009 remake of the film, which can be summed up by the casting of Robert Shaw’s villain with a late-2000s John Travolta. Among its many sins, there is far too much running around and shooting in the remake. Since the villains are blithely killing hostages and firing guns from the jump, viewers aren’t left to wonder and worry about what could happen. It lacks any tension because the violence isn’t treated with respect.

However, there is a flipside to this. While individual instances of a plot element find diminishing returns when repeated, they can instead be subsumed into the overall impression of a scene or work. A single gunshot in the original Pelham is an important moment, but any given gunshot in Terminator 2 serves its purpose alongside dozens of its siblings to create an exciting action scene. Another example is how a single joke in a drama is a moment of lightening tension through contrast, while lots of jokes turns a piece of work into a comedy that creates expectations in the audience of laughing and light moods throughout.

Thus, if if I were feeling generous (and overly wedded to genre), I could say the remake of Pelham is less a terrible thriller and more a mediocre action movie. Still not good, but by taking the act of firing a gun and using it more then the original film, we can see how the same dramatic (in both sense of the word) element can be used for different purposes, depending on how frequently it’s used.

Journey or a Slog?

Given that, I think there is something similar to be said about RPGs. A heroic journey through a fantastical world is, after all, rather different than a claustrophobic crime thriller, thus requiring different framing and use of plot points. Even setting the question of genre aside, I think it’s fair to say that the constant battling in RPGs shouldn’t be analyzed as individual instances that overstay their welcome but as contributions to a whole.

This is also, as I said above, how many RPGs work on a strictly mechanical level — with the challenge resting not in individual fights but rather the long-term resource management that comes with many battles in a row.

The obvious question, then, is what impression such constant battling leaves. Many small, easier battles grants us the steady walking pace of a long journey. A grind session mimics the mindset of characters as they journey from place to place. As the battles get tougher or the locales more dangerous, the exhaustion from fight after fight also allows us to test our nerves in the same way the party is. In the latter case, a death from a thousand cuts via many short battles is likely more effective at communicating this than a few climatic ones.

While that explanation covers most RPGs, I think there are some issues with it. First, it pigeonholes the “battles as plot” to one genre: long adventure stories. Battles as a stand-in for the perils of the journey in general only work if the characters are going on a journey. Luckily, that covers a huge number of RPGs, but not all of them. Second, the metaphor is pretty stale by this point. It gets stale in a particular title if there are too many battles6 or just because we as players have seen said metaphor a thousand times. I understand that a hundred battles on the world map serves as an emotional connection to the character’s journey. I’ve just done that so many times in so many games that I sometimes want to skip to the damn destination.

RPGs are a conservative genre, and we can in some sense accept they feature lots of battles because other titles in the genre do as well. While a little defeatist for a critic, at some point I may have to shrug and accept that lots of battles is a primarily mechanical feature, and any storytelling value stems largely from accepting such a well-worn metaphor at face value.

The Summit of a Mountain

But wait! There is a crucial element missing from this analysis: I keep coming back to these games. I can’t think of any major plot/metaphorical element that I will happily sit through again and again like I will with “many battles as a journey” in RPGs. It’s certainly not because that the mechanics are compelling enough to get me to ignore their storytelling implications. Even in games I quite like, most battles are so simple they don’t require more than occasionally casting ice magic on the monster that’s weak to ice.

I argued previously that the abstracted nature of battle systems (especially in JRPGs) can serve emotional or metaphorical purposes. In other words, the over the top attacks and animations of many battles are not literally happening in the fiction of the game world but can communicate the mindset of the characters. That point, along with the typical separate screen/interface approach of RPGs and the relative simplicity of many battles, is key to understanding how their preponderance contributes to the plot.

I think by grasping — either instinctively or upon reflection — that the battles are not happening as depicted in fiction we open ourselves to being affected by them in ways that the other storytelling elements like dialogue cannot. Since we’re not getting short-term mechanical engagement (since they’re usually simple) or obvious storytelling benefit, what we’re left with is the flow state.

The half-mindless, relaxed flow induced by many battles in a row is a valuable mindset. Similar states in exist in other games, in some cases to even greater degrees7, but the dipping in and out of such a state throughout the game is a particular feature of RPGs.

RPGs are long, and even when not explicitly about a character’s journey require a significant time and emotional investment on the part of the player that is a journey in itself. I do think my journey metaphor above is still the strongest reading, and inducing a flow state to complement storytelling is itself a storytelling device that strengthens the metaphor. This dramatic element is simultaneously the means of making us be more open to it.

Media teaches us how to read it, and this is a prime example. The cynical view is that we are being manipulated into loving a time-wasting cliche. The other is that the flow state of the grind primes us to adopt a mindset in which we are willing to take things a little slower, spend a few months with a 100 hour RPG and enjoy the space between towns or points of interest.

My favourite part of RPGs, especially JRPGs, is the sense of boundless adventure they inspire. They often contain a sense of expansive horizons and another compelling stop on the journey just over the next hill. The constant battles are interruptions, yes, but they are also both perils and a journey of their own. We learn to appreciate the sense of adventure by the open-minded flow state caused by battle after battle. The horizon is always just out reach, after all. What matters is each step taken to get there.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• I’m in the middle of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, an early example of the mystery novel from the 1860s. It’s full of wonderful twists and breathless pace despite its length, but a delightful surprise was how funny it is. Collins loves to make fun of his own characters, which makes for a great read.

• While I haven’t properly dug into the latest big Stellaris update (4.3), the one full game I did play was fantastic. I dip into Stellaris every few months for a few playthroughs, and have been unsatisfied with the extreme power creep prior to this update. 4.3 solves this. The devs have revamped the economy and shrank navies, making every decision feel more interesting and vital. A good lesson in why games should have smaller integers.

• Outrun 2006: Coast to Coast is a fantastic racing game that encourages a pick up and play mentality. It preserves the Outrun format (one long race through multiple stages) with a few twists and breezy vibes. Almost every car is a convertible, and the player’s driver character sometimes casually leans an elbow on his car door during the race. There’s also an entire mode about driving in various wacky ways to impress the cute girl in the passenger seat. Very mid-2000s, no notes.

• I’ve only just started with Pathfinder: WOTR, so I can’t comment in any detail on it. I will say that, while real-time with pause still sucks, so far it’s the exact sort of game for a genre sicko like me. I loved Baldur’s Gate 3, but the systems were in some ways a little too streamlined for my tastes. I admit this opinion means there is probably something wrong with me. Fortunately, the developers at Owlcat are ready to cater to this particular brand of brain disease.

• Retrograde Amnesia is one of my favourite podcasts, and introduced me to the term “genre sicko” that I just nicked above. I’m normally not a fan of recap podcasts, but these hosts are so funny and the content so in-depth that I can’t help but love this one.

Next Time

In what will likely end up being a two-parter, I’ll tackle my most hard-hitting question yet: what makes a good RPG town?

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I love complicated games, particularly RPGs. I love poring over detailed stats or ability descriptions. I adore in-depth battle systems that require positioning and coordination. I quite dislike — especially nowadays as my beard greys — when combat is too simple or repetitive. As a connoisseur of complicated battles, I enjoy sampling the variety of interesting systems that the gaming landscape has to offer.

All that being said, I hate real-time with pause.

The type of battle system common to older, isometric cRPGs like Planescape: Torment or the Baldur’s Gate series has always rankled me. While I adore those style of games,1 it’s always been in spite of the moment-to-moment combat.

But in the spirit of generous criticism, I’m going to see the good in RTWP. After some defining (and complaining), I’ll consider the context of why RTWP emerges, and see how it can contribute to that nebulous intersection of mechanics and story that interests me.

Let’s Get Real (Time)

It’s always a good idea to define one’s terms2, so let’s start with figuring out what I mean by RTWP. Popularized by Baldur’s Gate and appearing frequently in Bioware, Black Isle, and Obsidian titles, RTWP is a form of RPG battle system where combat occurs in real-time but allows the player to pause at will to issue commands.

It would be easy to define this too broadly and start including titles like Paradox games or action RPGs that are influenced by the legacy of RTWP, such as Mass Effect. However, this would dilute the conversation to the point where we start saying any game which allows pausing for actions in a real-time setting counts. Eating food in Tears of the Kingdom is not the sort of thing I’m interested in.

What defines RTWP games (as opposed to real-time games that allow pausing) is that they occur in rounds. When playing Baldur’s Gate or Pillars of Eternity, the combat is occurring in rounds exactly like a tabletop RPG. Movement tends to be a little more freeform, but generally speaking characters are restricted to a certain number of actions per round, and everyone on the battlefield acts before the round ends. The difference is that characters are acting simultaneously and the rounds seamlessly flow into each other. Under the hood, however, the computer is GMing a turn-based battle system.

This is a crucial part of the definition, as it not only highlights my issues with the format but why it came into existence. RTWP was developed in a very particular context, which is where we’re going to find the means to appreciate it.

Solutions in Search of a Problem

RTWP has always felt both chaotic and fiddly to me. Since it’s hard to tell when rounds end — and thus when characters can act again — one can either trust in the AI to look after itself or micromanage with frequent pausing. Either approach is unsatisfying.

Positioning has always been a particular headache for RTWP. Characters never quite get out of the way of AOE attacks, or the games don’t provide sufficient information for decision making. For instance, both Tactics Ogre3 and the first Pillars of Eternity have class abilities that prevent enemies from moving past the party’s tank to the backline. Tactics Ogre’s movement grid and turn structure allows me to position my knight at chokepoints to take advantage of that ability. PoE’s messy battlefields usually has Edér standing alone, picking his nose while goblins sail past to attack the party’s spellcasters.

What I dislike about RTWP is that it often undermines what should be interesting about the battles. Given the games under discussion often have a variety of actions to choose, a host of monster types with many different abilities, and frequent need to place characters precisely, I should think a considered, careful approach is best. But RTWP instead presents hectic, fast-paced battles that don’t gel with the actual tactical layer. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to play a game of chess in the middle of a Dynasty Warriors level. RTWP often feels like the worst aspects of action and turn-based systems.

Despite my griping, though, I think RTWP has value, and said value starts with why it exists.

Seamless Murder

The title that popularized RTWP4 was the first Baldur’s Gate, which was not only based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules, but was part of an legacy of replicating the tabletop experience in computer form.

There’s a subtle but important difference between adapting the rules or setting of a D&D adventure5 and trying to make a game that feels like playing a tabletop RPG on the computer. Baldur’s Gate has a fanatical devotion to the rules and assumptions of AD&D. By necessity of interpreting through the cold logic of computers, it tends to a stricter interpretation of the rules than the average DM. And the rules of AD&D (or any edition of D&D, for that matter), by and large exist to facilitate combat encounters.

There are several pillars of design that cross from AD&D to Baldur’s Gate,6 but there are two of importance here.

First, there is a lot of combat. Early RTWP titles have so many combat encounters it’s almost rude by today’s standards. The player can’t take three steps without meeting another group of homicidal gnolls. What’s more, that combat often involves many more characters — both in terms of player characters and monsters — than is typical of turn-based battles. Many run-of-the-mill fights in Icewind Dale or Baldur’s Gate II get as crowded as Fire Emblem maps. Combat encounters in RTWP games are usually swarming with weak monsters.

Second, during those frequent combat encounters, characters often are just attacking. Many classes — such as fighters — won’t do much besides attack for the entire game, only getting better at hitting and attacking more frequently. But even spellcasters don’t have the spell slots under the AD&D ruleset to cast very often, especially if the player can’t (or won’t) abuse resting. Even at the mid-level range in the earlier parts of Baldur’s Gate II, mages like Aerie are going to spend more turns chucking rocks than magic missiles.

These design pillars are expressed most sharply in the early wilderness areas of Baldur’s Gate. Here is the true experience low-level AD&D, faithfully recreated in all its late-90s isometric glory: missing attack rolls. A lot.

To put it another way, translating the assumptions and design goals of a combat-heavy, tabletop experience like AD&D to a video game creates combat that, frankly, kind of sucks much of the time. It’s too frequent and is full of solely attacking. RTWP addresses these problems by taking away much of the repetitive clicking.

Now, the uncharitable take on this would be that such problems are not inherent to cRPGs or video games in general. Designers could, instead, create combat encounters that are interesting and involve lots of neat abilities. I’m generally of this view, and prefer it when a game has fewer, more involved combat encounters. I was pleasantly surprised in my recent playthrough of Rogue Trader how well-spread the combat encounters are, and how they take a longer than the average cPRG fight7.

However, another perspective is that the combat is only subpar if approached with certain assumptions. The tabletop RPG experience tends toward tactical combat, and the fact that RTWP games tend to come with huge spell lists and deep monster rosters adds to that impression. The non-combat systems and legacy of adaption causes us (or perhaps just me) to assume that combat ought to be a slow, tactical affair. From that perspective, RTWP is a fiddly mess. But RTWP might not be about tactics, but rather strategy.

The Appeal of the Crawl

As I’ve mentioned in a previous essay, the deep, gnarled roots of RPGS is the dungeon crawl. The experience of clearing a dungeon room by room is crucial to the history of video game RPGs, with many design habits coming over from the wargaming tradition that birthed early tabletop RPGs like Chainmail. Early RPGs — both tabletop and video game — were often nothing but navigating mazes and bashing monsters.

At the risk of repeating myself, the base assumption of the crawl is a long-term drain on resources. Each individual battle in an old-school JRPG or dungeon crawler like Diablo or Wizardry is not meant to be a serious test of skill. Instead they chip away at mana and health, with the decision-making focused on long-term planning: the player judging the best time to use a healing potion or powerful spell with the knowledge there are many more dark corridors to explore before the day is done.

This model is present in most RTWP cPRGS, and helps make sense of its strengths. If most of the combat encounters aren’t challenging by design and the faithful adaptation of tabletop rulesets means they’re a little sloggy to play through, it makes sense to just automate the slightly boring bits, allowing the player to focus on the wider view.

However, the problems of RTWP still rear their head when battles are complex. The average JRPG will have players choosing the basic attack command almost as often as they would in a RTWP. However, during something like a boss battle, the presentation format and turn-based systems of JRPGs and other such subgenres are able to more comfortably allow players to switch into tactical thinking.

Yet perhaps that lack of comfort is exactly where RTWP can thrive.

Controlled Chaos

When properly implemented, RTWP never allows us to leave the wider view of conquering the dungeon as a whole, even during harder or more complicated combat encounters. RTWP commits fully to the long-term strategic thinking of the dungeon crawl by always denying the player a certain amount of control.

My dislike of RTWP is that it doesn’t allow me to control my characters with sufficient ease. That introduces a certain amount of chaos, but instead of the reactive chaos of an action game, it’s the chaos of plans that are never fully reliable.

By automating much of combat, RTWP allows the computer-controlled characters to make mistakes. Perhaps the appeal of RTWP is that the fighter won’t move out of the way of an AOE attack all the time, thus introducing a different sort of complication and risk assessment, along with an additional drain on resources in the long-term.

Tabletop RPGs, and the systems underlying the combat of RTWP heavy-hitters, live and die on the dice roll. That thinking has simply extended to the combat presentation. If a designer tried to do this for something like Tactics Ogre, which is almost nothing but combat and story, I would lead a riot. RTWP cRPGs, however, are crawl-based. They have heavy strategic considerations linking the combat encounters. A bit of wobbliness, while distracting from the tactics, can make the strategy more interesting.

In light of this, my two favourite iterations of RTWP are Dragon Age: Origins and Final Fantasy XII. The simple reason is the robust AI controls.

A good AI toolset puts the strategy firmly in the hands of the player, allowing them to think like a general. I can develop a plan of attack for battles, putting more long-term decisions in my hands. This is not perfect, nor — as I’ve come to realize — should it be. Things won’t always work out, and a player’s ability to react and adjust through pausing can only accomplish so much.

Thus, the strength of RTWP is part of why I dislike it. It takes the control out my hands. In doing so, I still maintain, it makes combat encounters less interesting. At the same time, it reflavours the longer-term thinking by introducing complications and greater risks.

And what is a dungeon crawl if not but a series of risks? As I said, the key to understanding RTWP is where it came from. The first source is sitting around a table with a group of friends, never fully able to rely on your slightly drunk roommate who never reads his character sheet. The second is a party of adventurers trapped in a lightless cave network, battling exhaustion and frayed nerves as much as the next group of monsters. Such a place would wear even the mightiest hero down, and force them to adapt and improvise as the next unforeseen complication arises.

What right do I have to demand total control under either of those circumstances? There are no perfect plans when stuck in a dank hallway infested with goblins. For all its frustrations, RTWP forces me to reckon with the truth of that.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• I’m doing a “bangers only” rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation and couldn’t recommend it more. While I’ve watched the whole series a few times, the episodic nature means it’s viable to pick the best 5-10 episodes from each season and have a great time without missing a beat. I also think TNG, cheesy as it is, is fairly unique television with its heavy emphasis on problem solving. While there are character-driven episodes, the bulk of them involve the crew working together to address a crisis, which makes for a satisfying watch. But take my advice and skip the first season.

• The City and The City is China Miéville at his most Borgesian: he invents an impossible city, then has the brilliance (or gall) to set a murder mystery inside of it. While it lagged at the end, the book is well worth a read for the descriptions of the stranger, interlocking city alone.

• Speaking of Borges, he’s one of my favourite writers. My recommended stories to start with would be “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Library of Babel,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and “Death and the Compass.”

• I mentioned it in passing, but seriously, play Final Fantasy XII. It’s one of my favourite mainline FF titles, and has some of the richest environments and worldbuilding in any game I’ve played.

Next Time

I’m going to follow this essay with a more general look at RPG combat. What makes a good battle systems from an adventuring and storytelling perspective?

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Spoilers for Dragon Quest XI ahead.

And now for something completely different: instead of a more general essay, I’ll be honing in on one part of the brilliant Dragon Quest XI, examining how its plot structure works in detail.

I love this game: it’s easily one of my top five of all time. One particularly masterful aspect is the use of structure. I’ll admit it’s a little odd toward the end1, but on the whole it relishes in the the DQ series’ tradition of vignette storytelling. While there is an overarching plot, each location the party arrives at features some kind of smaller problem that will have a clear escalation and resolution before it’s time to continue. It’s a lovely way to structure a JRPG, giving it a well-paced sense of a long, adventurous journey.

That journey is leading the party to climbing Yggdrasil for a confrontation with the game’s villain Mordegon. As we claim the macguffins and our Sword of Light, all ready to travel up the world tree, a genre-savvy player might be thinking about how short this game feels in comparison to most traditional JRPGs.

That’s because we’re only at the midpoint, and the story is about to pivot on a failure. Mordegon is prepared for the party, and their efforts are useless. He claims the power at the heart of Yggdrasil, corrupts the Sword of Light, and begins the project of taking over the world. The party is scattered to the four corners of the map, left to their own fates while the world suffers under this dark lord. It’s a low point, one we’ll spend the latter half of the story surmounting.

Before that, however, is a series of interludes: in the definitive edition of the game we check in on each member of the party before regaining control of the main hero. While their inclusion does take away some of the mystery when exploring as the hero2, the interludes offer a way to see how the world has changed and how each character is reacting to failure. What I’m interested in today is how their pace and arrangement develops and creates expectations that lead to one of the game’s largest twists.

Broken Rhythm

In his unfinished magnum opus Game of Death3, Bruce Lee has a fight scene with the legendary martial artist (and terrible actor) Dan Inosanto.

Each floor in Game of Death’s pagoda was intended to reflect Lee’s ideas about martial arts, and this one is how Inosanto’s character is too inflexible and wedded to patterns to fight properly. As he whips Inosanto with a piece of bamboo, Lee says “It’s difficult to have a rehearsed routine to fit in with broken rhythm.”

This idea of broken rhythm is fairly common in fighting: you’ll see it in many UFC or boxing matches, albeit with fewer yellow jumpsuits. In this scene (just like a real match), Lee lulls his opponent into a pattern by repeatedly striking low. Once Inosanto gets comfortable with that pattern, Lee breaks it by kicking high instead.

How this applies to DQ — besides an excuse to talk about Bruce Lee — is stories do this as well. They train us how to read them by setting up patterns or playing into tropes, then change at the right moment. DQ XI’s midpoint does this with panache. Each character switch develops a rhythm, teaching us the pattern of what to expect with each successive character switch, only to break it to send us reeling.

The Rhythm Starts

Often a work will underscore the importance of a plot point with some kind of change in structure. The most common one is a chapter or act break. A character will provide some dramatic reveal, then the chapter will end or the show will cut to commercial. It provides breathing room and highlights the importance of what happened. Stories can go further by changing the structure further on truly important moments, such as switching point of view.

DQ XI does just that. Starting with Sylvando, we now control four different characters through small, individual adventures. We’ve spent the entire game controlling the hero, but now at this point of failure we instead control the members of the party in individual scenes. This not only emphasizes how much the world has changed, it reinforces the game’s themes of friendship and the bonds of the adventuring party. Until this moment, we have only experienced the characters as part of a group. Now at the game demonstrates the importance of that group by showing each character struggling as individuals.

So what is this pattern or rhythm the game creates? Let’s go through the vignettes in turn to discover how DQ XI teaches us to think about the story, then exploits that for emotional gain.

Sylvando

Sylvando is a fan favourite for a reason. Charming, brave, steadfast, and effortlessly camp, Sylvando is a knight who ran away to join the circus. He calls everyone “darling,” is mechanically queer4, and forms the backbone of the party. When he awakens on a beach for the first character interlude, Sylvando’s reaction to his failure is characteristic. While at first despondent, he eventually vows that if unable to save the world, he can at least bring joy and comfort to those around him. He sets out solving smaller problems, gathering a parade of followers focused on lighting up the world.

Structurally, Sylvando’s section teaches us that we’re in a different phase of the game and how these interludes are going to work. The stakes are lower than the others, affording an opportunity to understand the new structure without the distractions of a faster pace or immediate danger. It also presents the first step of the rhythm in that it ends ambiguously. Sylvando and his new friends parade off without a clear resolution, leaving it open to how we are going to meet up with him once we are back in control of the hero.

Jade

Jade has a hilariously straightforward approach to the problem of the dark world. She is simply fighting her way through it, killing every monster she sees until she runs into one of her friends and they can think of a better plan. Upon visiting Octagonia5 and finding it overtaken by monsters, Jade continues to kick ass until their leader casts a brainwashing spell on her, binding her to his service.

I have mixed feelings on the details of Jade’s section. The endpoint of her peril (i.e., when we later meet her) is as a brainwashed, bunny suit-wearing vamp. This choice and how it’s presented is undoubtably sexist, and highlights the odd dichotomy of forcing Jade to be both a stoic fighter and saucy flirt. I think Jessica in DQ VIII was much more successful as the comedically sexy character, and while many of Jade’s powers are a callback to that, I don’t think they fit her personality as well.

On the other hand, I do like that the story is presenting Jade with a problem she can’t solve with her fists. She’s the purest fighter in the game, with most of her abilities focused on dealing damage. A brawler like Jade would rail at any physical danger, so the brainwashing is a nice reminder that she needs her friends and provides a sort of stasis peril. It’s not a cliffhanger in the sense that she’s not in any immediate danger, so we don’t have to worry about timing issues while we change interludes and eventually travel the world as the hero. Sylvando’s chapter taught us that the characters are going to change and await our reunion. Jade’s chapter is a second part of the pattern: those changes might be for the worse.

Erik

Erik also ends his interlude in a stasis peril, but his is emotional rather than the more traditional danger of Jade. Faced down with a horde of monsters, the mysterious Seer provides Erik with the power to survive his predicament at the cost of his memories.

Erik’s section is fast-paced and dungeon heavy, staving off any fatigue the interludes might cause by changing up the gameplay slightly. What’s more, it again presents a changed (for the worse!) character we’ll have to rescue, but one in a different sort of trouble than Jade. Jade’s situation has a clear problem and solution, while Erik’s trouble will present a different, murkier problem for the characters to solve.

This is an important point of plot structure: variations within the pattern reinforce the pattern. At first glance this might seem like a twist, but Erik’s predicament is still one that ends in a way we know we’ll see later and solve. It’s fresh enough to keep the formula from growing stale but still within the bounds of the expectations formed by the previous sections. The rhythm is fully established now, and Erik is helping us tap our toes along.

Rab

Rab’s section features an extensive flashback along with some plot revelations. At the end, he travels to the a place beyond the living and dead to find his old master to undergo more training.

Again, we end somewhat ambiguously to reinforce the pattern. We know that Rab is going to gain power in some way — which will actually be reflected mechanically — but we don’t know the details. Again, there is that pleasurable thrill of anticipation, as the plot thread is left dangling with the implication we’ll going to pick it up again as we return controlling the hero.6

Getting the Band Back Together

After the four interludes, we find ourselves back in control of the hero. Except now he’s a fish. Don’t worry, it’s temporary.

After shedding the gills and regaining his human form, the hero will travel around the new world, seeing how Mordegon’s triumph has affected it while gathering his companions again. This Blues Brothers meets Adult Link in Ocarina of Time conceit, seen also in Final Fantasy VI, is an excellent little trick in how it provides a semi-open structure and motive to revisit old areas. Not only are we curious about how they’ve changed, the interludes provide us with clues about where the party members are located, immediately giving us several destinations.

But wait, aren’t we forgetting someone? Or two someones, as it were.

Veronica and Serena lack interludes. Either individually or as a pair. Either by realizing it right away or having it dawn on a player as they travel as the hero, this absence makes us wonder: where are the sisters?

The Rhythm Breaks

The character interludes developed a rhythm. They taught us how to experience and think about them during the experience. We grow to understand that all the characters have changed, and are in one way or another waiting for the hero. These changes are different, but all four interludes show us how each character got into a situation, be it danger or some kind of growth. By ending how they did — not quite a cliffhanger, but with unfinished business — once the player is let loose in the world the first order of business is to sort those situations out.

Again, a structural change has accompanied a plot shift: by taking control of the hero, we are expecting to take control of the story back. Now is the time for us to claw our way back from the low point of the story, and the obvious hooks for that are resolving theses dangling plot threads left by the interludes.

But just like one of Bruce Lee’s hapless opponents, we’ve gotten too comfortable.

The ambiguous ends of the four interludes builds anticipation of meeting them again. At the same time, the void left by the sisters is where that rhythm breaks and trips us up. Instead of anticipation, we have dread.

Such dread is well-founded. In her hometown of Abordia, tucked away in a quiet garden, Veronica lies dead. This bossy, irascible mage sacrificed herself to save the rest of the party during the battle with Mordegon.

Serena is also present, half-mad with grief but willing to soldier on for the sake of her sister’s memory. It’s a heartbreaking moment, made all the more potent by the gnawing anxiety we experienced leading up to it. We rescue Jade, see Sylvando’s parade, worry over Erik’s new state, and enjoy Rab’s upgraded powers. We get a satisfying sense of closure four times over, completing the pattern we were taught to expect. But each time, the dread grows about the sisters. Their absence from the pattern is what builds a different type of anticipation.

Without the broken rhythm of the interludes, Veronica’s death would be a shock. But with the interludes, it becomes a growing awareness of tragedy. Stories teach us how to experience them, but they are capable of tricks and deceit while doing so. While I’ve never been kicked in the face by Bruce Lee, I can imagine it feels very similar to finding Veronica’s frail, small body slumped against a tree.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• Since I mentioned that DQ XI is in my top five games, here they are in rough order: Xenogears, Final Fantasy Tactics, Fallout: New Vegas, DQ XI, and Deus Ex. Judge away, internet!

• If you’re still not convinced about DQ XI, Tim Rogers’ famous review is a love letter to the game and series as a whole. Rogers not only gets to the heart of the game’s appeal in this video, he touches on the appeal of JRPGS in general.

• I’ve been on a quest to find novels that reflect the feeling or vibe of X-Files or Twin Peaks: quasi-supernatural or conspiratorial mysteries lurking beneath the facade of everyday life. It’s been somewhat fruitless (at least in terms of finding well-written books), so please send me your recommendations. But one book that fits the bill is Robert Jackson Bennet’s American Elsewhere. An ex-cop inherits a house from her mother, but in a town that doesn’t feature on any map. Once she arrives, things quickly turn bizarre in this white-picket fence town. While a little overlong, I appreciate how Bennet allows his imagination to run rampant in some sections, blending sci fi and horror with great results.

• You’re lucky this essay came out at all, because my life has been consumed by Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader lately. This is my first foray in Owlcat’s catalogue, and I’ve loved every minute so far. The battle system is top notch with a great variety of builds and emphasis on party skills, and the writing generally good, albeit overwrought and stiff in a way that suits the setting. One of the delightful parts about the 40k setting is the companions are all completely nuts. The adventuring party is composed of zealots, mutants, death cultists, half-crazed psykers, and a nun-coded Sister of Battle who sings hymns about the love of the Emperor while blasting everything in sight with a bolter rifle.

Next Time

I’m going to give my least favourite battle system — real time with pause — a fair shake, putting in the context of its design paradigms and see how it can bring value to storytelling in games.

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There’s a moment in the beautifully animated, generally solid PSX game Breath of Fire IV where the party is searching for a magic flute (not the Mozart one, a different magic flute). In the castle of Wyndia, the king tells Ryu and friends that the Oracle of Wind in some nearby woods knows where the flute is. So it’s off to the woods to navigate a dungeon. Once the party finds the Oracle, she reveals that that the flute is actually underneath the castle of Wyndia…where the party just was. So it’s back to the castle for a trek through another dungeon to nab the dang macguffin.

After griping about such obvious padding, what occurred to me was how happily I had enjoyed similar structures many a time in JRPGs: traverse a dungeon, find some information, traverse another dungeon, nab a treasure (or more information), and continue on until either the game ends or I die of old age. But in this case it didn’t work. Breath of Fire IV didn’t hook me into exploring the dungeons, however enjoyable that experience would be.

My experience reflects what I take to be a fairly typical view of how mechanics and plot interact in JRPGs, with games having distinct modes or sections of the game: plot and gameplay. The distinct modes will ideally reinforce each other, but in some sense remain separate. Under this view, the plot of Breath of Fire IV is the flute, the Oracle, and so forth, while the gameplay is the dungeon crawling, menus, and random battles.

However, wasn’t the dungeon as much a part of the experience as talking to the Oracle, for both the characters and the player? Ryu walked through that dungeon, and I was there right alongside him. I don’t think plot and mechanics are so easily separated, as I’ve argued many times before. But if I’m right, what is the plot of a JRPG, and how can we talk about with the usual tools of literary analysis?

Plot Versus Story

While the terminology might change, an important concept when discussion fiction is to distinguish between the plot and the story. The story is the events of the fictional world as they proceed in time. The plot is what is presented in the actual work.

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster (who was top of the list in my best books of 2025) distinguished between the story as events proceeding because of time versus the plot as events proceeding because of cause and effect. Another way of looking at it is the plot is the parts of the story that the writer wants to show us, and in a format best suited to their purposes. While fairly obvious, it’s important to keep this in mind while thinking about narrative structure.

Like most things related to fiction, George Eliot is a master of this. In Middlemarch, Rosamond and Lydgate are discussing their upcoming wedding and future life. When we check in a few chapters later, they’re already married. Eliot skips the wedding scene because it’s not important to her book. Another good example is a movie like Memento, in which the plot presents scenes out of order in the chronology of the story. The flow of the plot doesn’t need to follow the timeline of the story, but can be chopped up and rearranged to suit the purposes of the work.

In adventure stories — which is my needlessly broad, unscientific category of fiction where people go on journeys, fight dragons, etc. etc. — often the actual adventuring of the story is skimmed or glossed over in the plot. While there is plenty of walking and eating in Lord of the Rings, there are also many moments that are summarized or skipped over. Even long-form, serialized formats like manga — probably the closest structural and historical cousin to JRPGs — feature montages or glossing over the bits not suited to the medium.

Dungeon Versus Plot

Games, by contrast, revel in the moments that would be boring or pointless to include in other mediums. I doubt that the upcoming live action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda will involve 45 minutes of Link fruitlessly hitting switches in the Water Temple. However, mechanical engagement allows us to experience and enjoy the adventure firsthand. All the wandering through temples or fighting monsters becomes fun when we’re the one swinging the sword.

This is all fine and good if we wall off the narrative and gameplay. Even in genres like JRPGs that embrace more traditional storytelling, the typical town —> overworld —> dungeon loop reinforces this disconnect between the plot and the mechanical sections.

However, that’s a matter of convention and framing. Players are reading dialogue and pushing a button during so-called “plot bits” and simple pushing different buttons during the more gameplay-focused sections. There’s no principled reason to consider dialogue as more representative of plot than any given random battle.

If we start to think of the mechanical journey of a JRPG — the dungeon crawling, the random battles, etc. — as part of the plot, we see that they’re in an unusual state. It’s a complete marriage of story and plot. JRPGs rarely gloss over anything, and certainly show in painstaking detail the parts of adventures that narratives in other mediums skim over. While there are often flashbacks and summaries in JRPGs, they are still presenting huge chunks of the story that wouldn’t be present if it were told in other mediums. Even One Piece skips over traversal once in a while, but we sail alongside the crew to every island in Dragon Quest VII.

In this case, E.M. Forster’s definition doesn’t seem to totally hold for JRPGs. While their is plenty of cause and effect in their narratives — Ryu goes to the woods to speak to the Oracle in order to find the flute — the sequence of the plot is guided as much by chronology and mechanical stresses. A detour down a side path to find a treasure chest is now part of the plot.

But if so, we’re ill-equipped to talk about it critically. The nice thing about a clean break of plot and gameplay is allows us to approach each with its own language, which is what games criticism usually does. Once we mix them up, how to think and discuss games becomes a little murky. It’s harder to criticize my Breath of Fire IV example because the dungeons may now be considered part of the pacing, regardless of our motivations to go there. If a boss fight is a climax, does that mean each dungeon can (or should) have a structure and rhythms that mimic other types of fiction?

New Building Blocks

It’s easy to see how traditional literary analysis breaks down in the face of choice and reactivity. It’s hard to chart a plot in terms of rising and falling action when it features major branching paths. Those two aspects of games are touted as their major defining features versus other mediums, for good reason. If you twisted my arm (or put a few drinks in me) I would wax about how the artistic merit of a game’s writing often rests on its ability to take advantage of its medium. Heck, I’ve even co-written a game that attempted to take the branching nature of RPGs to their limit.

What I find interesting about JRPGs is how they can still stress and warp our typical views of fiction when presenting narratives that wouldn’t be out of place in other mediums. JRPGs are linear and heavy on dialogue. Yet there are many other aspects of games, which at first blush seem purely mechanical, that can provide different experiences of a narrative when combined with more traditional storytelling.

While a touch cliche to say this, when we think of the plot of a JRPG as the whole game, we see how well the genre invites us to truly experience an adventure.

The journey of a game, especially JRPGs, is just as special to the medium as reactivity or branching paths. Mechanical interactivity underscores what the adventure of an adventure story actually is. Long journeys and countless battles allow us to emphasize with the characters. That meditative, repetitive climb to power is a reflection of the travails and triumphs our heroes are going through, and providing the experience of it is a powerful way to present a narrative. The grand journey is always stirring when described using the right words in a novel, but it is earned in a different way when we take each step alongside the characters.

The downside of thinking of plot in this way is, as I’ve said, that the existing critical language we’ve borrowed from other mediums isn’t well equipped to deal with it. We have a robust way of talking about pure mechanics, and often about plot structures unique to games (like branching paths), but the plot/story marriage of JRPGs complicates how we often discuss and think about narrative. While I don’t think we need to reinvent the wheel, conventions of fiction like the plot/story distinction or the typical “rising action” plot diagram either fall apart or aren’t very useful when discussing the plot of games. What’s more, I think relying on those conventional tools can distract from the beauty and appeal that games can provide.

I have nothing more to end this essay than a vague gesture toward a more holistic view and way of thinking about plot in games. But I think it’s important to take a work as a gestalt and also think about why it’s a game rather than a novel or comic. I’m still annoyed about trekking between the woods and castle just to grab a flute. But perhaps that was the point. Journeys are not always linear, nor are they convenient. I’m sure the backtracking was annoying to the characters, so why shouldn’t I be afforded the opportunity to actually experience that?

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• The entire Breath of Fire franchise is well worth checking out. A rare Capcom-developed JRPG series, the PSX entries (III and IV) feature truly stunning 2d animation, and a plethora of minigames. Being a sicko, I loved Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. That game has “cult classic” written all over it: a quasi-roguelike JRPG with an incredible, murky atmosphere.

• Last week I had an unexpected day to myself, so I walked into a used bookstore, took a punt on a book, then read it next door eating lunch in a pub. I was lucky enough to grab the Starchild Trilogy by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. While not as good as Pohl’s Gateway, the novels are classic 60s sci fi, with each entry broadening the scope of the plot and universe. The final novel especially breezes past huge, interesting ideas that merit an entire trilogy to themselves.

• I’m having a fantastic time at the moment playing A Link Between Worlds. While this 3DS outing is a little too easy, the open structure, breezy tone and inventive powers more than make up for that. It’s a delight, particularly for those familiar with A Link to the Past.

• A few years ago my wife introduced me to the crime writer Ruth Rendell, and I’ve since devoured most of her catalogue. While I don’t love her more conventional Inspector Wrexford novels, her standalone titles — some of which are written under the name Barbara Vine — are cruel, expertly plotted thrillers written with penetrating insight.

Next Time

Something a little different for next essay: instead of a general topic, we’ll do a deep dive into a specific aspect of Dragon Quest XI. I’ll be examining how the mid-game vignettes set up, then demolish, some structural expectations.

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The long-running Yakuza series made two significant changes with its seventh entry Like A Dragon: a new protagonist in the form of easygoing Ichiban Kasuga, and switching the battle system from a real-time brawler to turn-based combat.

The battle system in LAD (and sequel Infinite Wealth) is JRPG to the core, packed with references to Dragon Quest and other fun touches, such as returning lead Kiryu able to temporarily break the turn-based combat. What’s more, while previous Yakuza games stuck mostly to various thugs as enemies, LAD introduces a variety of wacky foe designs that compliment the lighter tone.

This change in mechanics is explained in-universe: Ichiban’s imagination. The turn-based battles are simply how Ichiban sees what are otherwise more mundane, real-time fights — a result of him playing too much Dragon Quest and other JRPGs at an impressionable age. The new enemy designs are also a product of his imagination, explicitly called out in dialogue as not corresponding to the world of the fiction.

It’s a charming way to lampshade the change in mechanics and enemy design. This jokey explanation fades into the background until near the end of Infinite Wealth where, as above, Ichiban and crew battle a giant squid. While some long-time fans decried this fight as jumping the shark (well, either this or the actual fight against a shark that occurs right before), the sequence caused me to wonder about the battle system versus the world of Infinite Wealth.

If what we’re seeing is a non-representational version of fights from Ichiban’s point of view, what’s actually happening? Maybe the squid is there, but it’s not so much a fight as dodging around an angry animal. Maybe it is a fight with a giant squid, but with a tone that leans more toward animal cruelty than boss battle. Maybe Ichiban is actually ruthlessly beating a man in a squid costume.

While a little pedantic to worry about this, the uncertainty about Ichiban versus the squid nicely demonstrates a larger point: are JRPG battles actually happening in the fiction? The presentation seems to preclude this. Everyone is taking turns, there’s a menu for the player’s choices, and the battle is often happening on a separate screen with a background that resembles, but doesn’t exactly match where the characters were just standing.

I’ve always thought of a JRPG battle as an abstraction of a fight in the world of the story — the mechanics simply presenting a comprehensible lens of a chaotic fight, similar to how tabletop RPGs and wargames work. This simple explanation, though, starts to unravel when we think about if that abstraction is in service of the story.

Diegesis as Structure

Non-diegetic elements are prominent in games. We understand that the health bars and inventory screens don’t exist in the fiction of the world. When the Chosen Undead is rummaging around in their bag, it’s obvious what they’re seeing is a jumble of swords and torches instead of the inventory grid that we as the player are looking at. It’s a helpful abstraction that that presents the information in a different way than it exists in the fiction — usually for the sake of comprehensibility or in service of another mechanic.

However, all mediums are awash in non-diegetic elements. Mediums shape the stories they tell, often by using non-diegetic elements to provide structure and a path into the world for the reader/viewer/player. We’re just so inured to their presence in other mediums we often overlook them when compared to games. Novels have narrators of various forms, along with typeface choices and quotation marks to help the reader understand what’s happening. Movies have lighting, a soundtrack, narration, editing — all aspects which are more or less essential for the viewer, but just as artificial as an inventory screen.

Are Mechanics Diegetic?

With this in mind, we can easily accept the same for a a typical turn-based JRPG battle, right? They’re just another non-diegetic element like an inventory screen or soundtrack. I’m not so sure about that, with the difference being degree of abstraction. Battles are events that are explicitly either not happening as presented or may not be happening at all, as the case with our squid.

This isn’t wholly unprecedented. There are examples of other mediums presenting events in a skewed way, maybe due to an unreliable narrator (Lolita or Rashomon spring to mind) or to enforce a certain point of view or theme, such as much of Jacob’s Ladder or the restarts in Run, Lola, Run. But none of these stylistic choices are quite so common as JRPG battles. They’re a non-diegetic element so ubiquitous we forget how artificial they are. But battle systems operate at a higher pitch of abstraction and artificiality than a voiceover or soundtrack. It’s a complete break with the logic of the fiction, layering an entirely sort of event on top of the character’s experiences.

This gets to the point where some events of battle systems have no clear connection to the events of the fiction. The inventory screen is a more comprehensible representation of what’s in the world of the game: stuff in a bag. That logic works for most of JPRG battles. The “attack” command and subsequent animation aren’t occurring in the fictional world exactly as depicted, but we understand them as tracking in some sense the events of the fiction: a character hitting a monster with a sword. This breaks down when the non-diegetic presentation no longer tracks the fiction. Summons are the obvious example. When a Final Fantasy character summons Bahamut to blast a chunk out of the planet, how are we supposed to interpret it?

At the risk of sounding grandiose, the thesis of my substack (besides “Graham has slow days at work”) is that mechanics are as much a part of storytelling in games as the dialogue or scene composition. I think the non-diegetic presentation of most mechanics gels with how other non-diegetic elements are in service of a story. Those of us who sat through the poorly lit nighttime battles in the later seasons of Game of Thrones know that it’s hard to enjoy the events of a show when one can’t see what’s happening.

The thorny question, though, is how JRPG battles are supposed to serve the story, especially when they begin to drift from the fiction. Such an extreme layer of abstraction, even if it is taken for granted, seems to detract from the experience by causing these moments of friction. A good story requires trust from that reader, and undermining that trust well requires a clear purpose, such as an unreliable narrator. But the risk of JRPG battles is that they are undermining that trust in the narrative —since what we’re seeing isn’t corresponding to what’s happening to the characters — merely for the sake of looking cool.

Calamari Time

Back to the squid. Giant squids have appeared as bosses in JRPGs many times before Infinite Wealth, likely due to the drama of the scene and the appeal of using the tentacles as minions that come and go during the fight. A notable example is Dragon Quest XI, the latest entry in a series that had a significant influence on LAD/Infinite Wealth.

What strikes me about this squid fight is how much more seamless and (for lack of a better term) plausible it feels compared to Infinite Wealth. It’s in part due to a combination of setting and art style — DQ’s fantasy versus Infinite Wealth’s more grounded, modern setting — but also trying to explain the battle system in terms of Ichiban’s imagination does the abstraction a disservice. Calling attention to the battle system through a narrative conceit seems to harm its role as a presentational element, which is admittedly shaky to begin with.

However, it pays to put the scene in context. Ichiban and company have been through the wringer at this point, both physically and emotionally. The island they are travelling to looms in their minds as the end of the journey — the source of pain and evil. A threshold to the underworld needs a guardian, and here the guardian represents the otherworldly quality of the setting’s cult and the damage it has caused. The characters’ struggles are true, and that might be best represented by things not possible in the world of the fiction. Thus I come bearing bad news, but news that will set you free: the squid is a metaphor.

Being too literal-minded about how the non-diegetic battle systems correspond with the fictional world ignores that there are many aspects of the story these battles can represent. There are emotional experiences and truths that a literal depiction of events doesn’t capture. Fiction uses non-diegetic elements for this purpose: a swelling soundtrack or clever bit of narration to get us inside the minds of the characters. The abstracted elements of battle systems allows games to represent these emotional moments using the mechanics. I’ve certainly had times in my life that felt like being hit by a beam from Bahamut. JRPG battles help tell a story because the freedom of abstraction allows games to present such moments in a way that feels true, to both the audience and the characters.

So does Ichiban “really” fight a squid? Probably not, but he overcame an obstacle. He defeated the guardian to cross into the villain’s lair. Ichiban’s emotional journey is about wanting to be a hero, and every hero needs to slay a monster or two along the way.

Recommended Reads, etc.

• Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics provides a thoroughly readable exploration of how a medium shapes its story. A comic about how comics work, it’s an enjoyable read in and of itself, along with an informative breakdown of the language of one particular medium.

• The second season of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End just started, and I heartily recommend the series for everyone, especially as a gateway title for those who aren’t familiar or particularly interested in anime. Melancholy and beautifully animated, this fantasy tale is very smart about how it engages with genre conventions.

• Fire N’ Ice (released as Solomon’s Key 2 in Japan and PAL regions) is a delightful puzzler for the NES. Pushing ice blocks onto fires starts out soothing, then eventually becomes a true head-scratcher. The creativity of the puzzles built from such simple elements is on par with Stephen’s Sausage Roll, albeit thankfully not as hard.

• I periodically embrace my identity as a middle-aged dad, and recently that meant reading Allen Guelzo’s Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. This is a clear, readable work, highlighting some historical debates and placing the battle in the larger context of the American Civil War. It also features some fantastic 19th-century names and personalities, my favourite being the muttonchop-sporting artillery officer Freeman McGilvery.

• For more of an overview, Guelzo also wrote Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, a fantastic one-volume history of the war. What I especially enjoyed about it was that Guelzo paid more attention to the politics and negotiations (especially the internal politics of the Union) than most military histories, and he includes a long section on Reconstruction.

• After praising Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance in my top games of the year article, it popped up in the Nintendo Switch Online service. My influence knows no bounds, apparently. It’s nice that such a great game is now more accessible, though of course easy enough to emulate these days.

Next Time

I intend to continue this discussion, but zoom it out a little. I was considering in this essay how the battle system of a JRPG contributes to the plot. That leads to my next question: what exactly is the plot of a JRPG?

In my last article I waxed poetic about the value of reflecting on what we’ve read, played, etc. through the year. So instead of retreading that ground for this article, I thought I might mention something new I did this year: judo!

I’ve trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu for several years, and after getting my purple belt this fall I wanted to round out my skills as a grappler by working on my stand up. I found a great judo club and have been training it alongside BJJ. Here’s what I learned so far: judo is hard. Getting thrown around at 38 is hard. I’ve tried to empty my cup and embrace the experience of being a beginner again, which can be a difficult thing to do as a tired dad with some comfortable ruts just waiting for me to fall back into. While I’m not going to patronize and encourage you to try something new, I will say venturing out of my comfort zone in 2025 was an immensely rewarding experience.

What was this supposed to be about? Right, books. Reading is also wonderful. Here’s the best books I read this year as I let my tired, sore body recover.

The rules again: this is books I read in 2025 (not just published then) it’s in no particular order, and doesn’t include rereads.

This Sporting Life

My wife and I went for dinner at an upscale restaurant earlier this year, when our server (who happened to be a good friend) said “I think a player from our hockey team just walked in, as half the men in this room are now openly staring at him.” What a strange existence a moderately successful athlete must have: a local king but unrecognized elsewhere, lauded when the team is doing well, hissed at when they’re not. All for the sake of a game.

At least this hockey player has millions of dollars and nice restaurants to console him. David Storey’s (some real nominative determinism right here) grimy novel looks at the life of a rugby player in a post-WWII Yorkshire mining town. Just as lauded as our hockey star, but without the salary or lavish lifestyle to compensate for his strange existence or brutal job on the pitch. He may have money for a new car, but his birthplace has narrowed his options and opinions, keeping him trapped in the suffocating confines of his class.

Gritty realism is so common these days it’s hard to appreciate how brave a book like this was in 1960. What’s immediately apparent even today is how well handled its realism is: both unsparing and sympathetic. It’s a quiet novel about a moderately talented man, bewildered by his success, yearning for more but unable to articulate what exactly he wants.

There is a heartbreaking moment late in the novel where our protagonist is hit by an opposing player during a game. He’s dazed, bleeding, but most of all emotionally numb. He recognizes in the past he would’ve been angry, or at least fired up by the thrill of the match. But that’s all passed, so he feels nothing — going through the motions on the pitch because he has nowhere else to go.

Independence Day

No, not the novelization of the Will Smith movie. This novel instead follows Richard Ford’s longtime protagonist Frank Bascombe through a single Fourth of July weekend, as he works as a real estate agent, has dinner with his girlfriend, then goes to pick up his son for a trip to the baseball hall of fame.

Out of these ordinary events Ford creates a moving, subdued meditation on middle age, failure, and ordinary life. Bascombe is a failed writer, divorced, and struggling to connect with his children. In general he never quite finds the right things to say — more because of embarrassment than any false stoicism. What I think distinguishes Ford from many of his contemporaries in 80s and 90s American literature is the quiet kindness his work shows for his characters. He’s willing to take people as they are, warts and all, and Independence Day is a shining example of that.

The Leopard

While Independence Day masterfully charted a single weekend, this Italian classic takes the long view, following a Sicilian noble family during the latter half of the 19th century. They witness many changes, from Garibaldi and his redshirts landing on the island to the decline of the class system they depend on.

It’s a rich portrait, and certainly one of the most confident historical novels I’ve ever read. Lampedusa does a incredible job of choosing the right details and scenes to flesh out the novel. As our protagonists age and die we see the society of their childhoods wither away, all depicted through small gestures in dining rooms or offhand comments at parties.

Slow Horses

My experience reading spy fiction is usually disappointment that whatever book I’m reading isn’t written by either John le Carre or Len Deighton. Those two authors perfected the two moods most suited to the spy novel: le Carre’s melancholy humanism and Deighton’s meticulous, noir-ish cynicism. While there are plenty of excellent writers in the genre (like Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Joseph Kahn, or Charles McCarry), most authors either fall well short of imitating the two greats or just use espionage as a backdrop for a more conventional thriller. It’s rare to read something fresh in such a well-trod genre. Happily, Mick Herron has provided us with a new direction and mood for spy fiction: bureaucratic hell.

Most good spy fiction is deeply skeptical of institutional power and the value of espionage itself. Le Carre has a character famously describe his fellow spies as “a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” But Herron takes us even further with that skepticism, deftly adopting the spy story for the modern world by spotlighting the careerism and obsession with optics that infests the halls of his MI5. To the rejects populating Slough House, the enemies are not other states or terrorists, but their bosses in shiny offices angling to look good for the press.

A Passage to India

While I said it was in no particular order, this list does have a number one, and it’s E.M. Forester’s soulful, heartbreaking novel set in 1920s colonial India. An English woman visiting India meets a local doctor, who is skeptical of British rule while also enthusiastic about many aspects of Western life. During a tourist outing to some famous caves, something (it’s never quite clear what) happens and she later accuses him of assault. Predictably, all hell breaks loose.

Make no mistake, this novel is morally complicated in the way that the best fiction often is. It portrays a messy situation in a stark light, and I’m still sorting out my feelings on the plot. But each character is so well drawn — full of ambivalent attitudes and internal compromises — they’ll stay with me for ages. It’s a truly beautiful, courageous novel, and we’re all richer for its existence.

Honourable Mentions

This list was much tougher to narrow down than my games one, as I was on a streak of reading — to quote my old roommate Chad — total bangers. So here are a few others I thoroughly enjoyed: My Brilliant Friend (an Italian bildungsroman), Barchester Towers (19th century, small-town English gossip), Flashman (historical fiction, equal parts hilarious and problematic), An Army At Dawn (WWII history about the Allied invasion of North Africa), Orbital (set on the ISS, it’s a love letter to Earth itself), Snow Country (tragic love story set in rural Japan), Inverted World (science fiction), Stations of the Tide (very strange science fiction), The Witchwood Crown (slow-burn fantasy), and Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (small-town Canadian humour).

I mentioned my least favourite games in my last essay, but I would feel bad doing so for books. It’s a double standard, but I find it easier to rag on Resident Evil 6, which had hundreds of people working on it, versus a novel with a single name on the cover bearing responsibility. But rest assured I slogged through a few clunkers this year.

Next Time

Does it matter if Cloud really summons Bahamut? Did Ichiban really fight a giant squid? I’ll start the near year by examining how JRPG battle systems are abstractions of what’s happening in-fiction, and how far they can go before breaking our suspension of disbelief.

I keep a running log of all the games I play and books I read. I’ve been doing so for about a decade now, and it’s a delight to occasionally look back, using that list as a way to remember where I was when I was reading or playing these titles. We live our lives in various ways, so it’s nice to have a year reflected through my experience of art.

Organizing those games and books into an internet-friendly list is one of the ways I like to sew up the year: seeing how I spent my time, weighing if my opinion of a work has shifted after my experience of it, and using the restricted format of only five titles to force myself to commit to a firm opinion.

A few rules: this is for games that I played in 2025 (not just ones published this year), it’s in no particular order, and it doesn’t include replays.

This year’s list is a little unusual in that it’s very up to date. At least half of my playing time is spent on games from the 90s or 2000s, but both in 2024 and 2025 there were just too many excellent new releases to tempt me.

And with that, on we go!

Blue Prince

Blue Prince caused me to fill a notebook with crazed scribbles that looked like a serial killer’s confession in a bad movie. It’s a game that demands ones full attention. The quiet atmosphere, the lived-in rooms, the odd details that come together ten hours later. They all create an ever-expanding mystery that oozes quiet confidence and style.

The brilliance of Blue Prince is not the roguelite aspect — though I think it’s the smartest entry in that subgenre in a while — but how it allows the player to solve two different types of puzzles as once. There is the drafting puzzle of how to fit rooms together, while also featuring more traditional puzzles in (or across) said rooms. Trying to think three steps ahead while also wondering why there was a chess piece in every room caused my brain to light up like a Christmas tree.

I’ll admit deeper mysteries can get a little irritating, as they require drawing the right cards to build a floorplan that enables solving a particular puzzle. This reliance on luck led to a few runs of (literal) dead ends. But that’s a small quibble about the post game, and I stopped playing when I reached a satisfying point. So I implore you: play this game, read no guides, and keep a notebook.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

In a true “boo-urns” moment, I’ve been saying Clair Obscura up until writing this sentence. Likely because of the phrase “camera obscura.”

Such an irrelevant intro is possible since we all already know that this game is fantastic. I think it deserves every accolade it’s already accumulating, and it’s no surprise I would fall in love with a project that oozes such passion. The game plays and feels in many ways (both big and small) like a Squaresoft PSX game, and there is no higher praise than that around here.

I did find some of the breathless coverage a little irritating, as there is a tendency for breakout hits (including my next game on the list) to be held up by the larger press/discourse as somehow saving a genre (JRPGs, in this case) that is doing just fine both in terms of industry health and creativity. I think we can just admit that JRPGs are good and we’re allowed to like them, regardless of how gritty or French they are. But that’s no fault of the game or the developers, who clearly love the genre and the act of making games.

Baldur’s Gate 3

This was a game I knew I was going to enjoy, but I kept putting it off waiting for a definitive edition like Larian did with Divinity Original Sin 2. While that didn’t arrive, the so-called “final patch” along with a bit of a gaming slump in the spring convinced me to finally give it a whirl.

I absolutely devoured it and am already itching for a replay. While the tumblr-bait companions wearied me, the game’s commitment to flexibility and roleplaying outside of conversations is second to none. Especially in Act 1, there are an obscene amount of tricks, alternative solutions, and hidden delights that kept me grinning. Did you know that you can poison the liquor in the goblin camp to take some out while they’re partying? Did you know you can do it from a distance using ray of sickness?

The whole game is like this, and by simply following my nose and trying new things, I found something new and delightful around every corner.

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

This was a pretty safe bet, considering I wrote three articles about this game. It’s a stunning achievement, emblematic of the current state of game development in both good and bad ways. It has the exact right amount of open world nonsense, some of the lushest environments I’ve ever walked through, and one of my favourite battle systems of all time.

Sure, the storytelling goes to some fairly bizarre places, but this one managed to charm me. I think what distinguishes Rebirth from the worst excesses of Square Enix’s overstuffed dark age (titles like The 3rd Birthday or The Bouncer) is the grounding in charming, believable characters. Still, I admit it gets wacky. But I like wacky sometimes.

Rebirth feels like a journey in the best of ways, a chance to drink in the world and character dynamics. I can’t separate my love of this game from how important the original FFVII was to me, so this easygoing, character-focused pace appeals to me. The emphasis on Cloud’s fragile mental state — and the party’s awareness of it — drapes a sense of impending tragedy over the whole thing, even during the brightest moments in Costa Del Sol.

Besides spectacle and the dizzying heights, a true demonstration of why I love Rebirth is a small moment in Gongaga Village. The party splits off in Star Ocean fashion, dotted around the village spending time in their own ways. The player can find Yuffie lying on a couch, kicking her leg, singing a song about how bored she is. I didn’t like Yuffie in either FFVII or Remake, but seeing her act like a true hyperactive teenager stuck in a backwards village won me over completely, and brought into focus just how special Rebirth is.

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology

The handheld turn of JRPGs during the late 2000s and 2010s produced a slew of interesting, fun titles. I think the combination of smaller scope and large install base of the PSP, DS, and 3DS allowed developers to experiment without committing to long development cycles. Radiant Historia (and the 3DS port, which is the one I played) from Atlus is a perfect example: a marriage of solid fundamentals and slightly unusual systems.

I had a great time leaping between timelines to solve issues, though I would’ve preferred a little more branching rather than just two timelines that were studded with fail states. Regardless, the story is great, the dungeons are fun, the art is excellent (besides the downgrade in the portraits from DS to 3DS), and the battle system is top notch.

Honourable and Dishonourable Mentions

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is a close 6th place, though it is a replay since I rented it in high school from my rural, knock off version of Blockbuster. Still, it’s probably the most well-balanced Fire Emblem title, with every element being at least pretty good, and some of them — particularly the map design — being great. The objective variety alone makes for a wonderful playthrough, though take my advice and turn off the battle animations.

Der Langrissesr was a game I expected to enjoy more, but it overstayed its welcome with too many battles that went on for too long. Still worth a play if you are curious about the historical roots of strategy RPGs.

YS Nordics was disqualified on a technicality because I played it late December 2024, but to be fair I did so after writing my best of list for that year. Systems-wise it’s fantastic, with fluid, interesting combat, and just enough RPG meatiness to keep me invested. More importantly, it let me sail around on a boat and find adventure on small islands. Along with titles like Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and a certain portion of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I think this might be the ideal video game format.

Games I replayed this year that probably would’ve made the top five: Tactics Ogre, Valkyria Chronicles 4, Doom Eternal, and Picross 3D: Round 2. I’m dead serious about the last title.

The worst game I played this year was definitely Resident Evil 6. I have a high tolerance for b-movie style schlock, but the sheer preposterousness of every moment in that game was mind-numbing. Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet was a close second for that dubious crown, combining terrible gunplay with overcomplicated stats and a story with no stakes at all. The game’s use of the “lucky guy becomes the chosen one” trope is to have the protagonist find a rare item in an MMO. It only gets worse from there.

Next Time

No recommended reads this time, as you’ll get a whole article of that when I list my favourite books of 2025.

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Spoilers for the Mass Effect trilogy ahead.

As I mentioned in my last article, I played through Mass Effect 3 recently via the Legendary Collection. I have fond memories of the trilogy, especially ME 2, but once again found ME 3 to be the weakest entry. I enjoyed it more when it came out thirteen years ago (I’ll pause to let your bones turn to dust at that fact). On this most recent replay the narrative cracks were stark. It’s both rushed and distracted, stuffed with side stories that never fully congeal to support that larger plot. Upon release (which, again, was over a decade ago! Time comes for us all!), there was a significant backlash to the ending.

In retrospect, though, I don’t think ME 3 had a chance. The broader “invasion of the Reapers” plot set up by the first game hangs over the trilogy but cannot be resolved within the mechanical space. There’s a pervasive sense of disconnect through the whole playtime, with the player’s actions supposedly helping with the war effort but never quite feeling like it.

I think this is in large part because the games are trying to tell two different stories at once. Plot-wise, they are drawing from a deep well of science fiction, especially space opera and military sci fi. Mechanics-wise, however, they’re firmly action RPGs, influenced both by Bioware’s own pedigree and Western RPGs up to that point. The Mass Effect games have two genres, and they aren’t playing well together.

It’s Genre All the Way Down

Genre is a slippery, often unhelpful term, but we can satisfy ourselves for the moment by distinguishing between two senses of the word.

Probably the most common way of thinking about genre is classification: sorting books by tropes, plot structures, and so forth. This is useful for people looking for something new to read or for the librarians among us. The fantasy novels go together on this shelf due to common tropes and setting elements, while the romance books go over here because of different tropes, further subdividing as needed.

However, this idea of genre isn’t particularly helpful for creative or critical work. Simply identifying tropes isn’t exactly groundbreaking analysis. Instead, for these purposes it’s better to think of genre as a conversation: looking at what previous titles a work is drawing on, how it’s reacting to established conventions, and if it’s pushing the conversation in new directions. This sense of genre is more alive, something for an individual work to react to and join.

Crucially, genre creates and manages expectations in the audience, regardless of how the creator feels or intends. By joining a particular conversation, readers/players/viewers will bring baggage of the genre’s history to their experience of a work. The conversation (with associated expectations) Mass Effect joins is sci fi, drawing on a rich history and often playing the tropes fairly straight. While it shifts subgenres through the series, going from space opera to a more military sci fi romp, it still places itself firmly in that tradition.

What’s interesting, though, is that it also has a mechanical genre: action RPG. Bioware action RPG, to be precise. That comes with its own conversation and audience expectations. By 2007, ME 1 had a rich vein of mechanical predecessors to draw on. That mechanical genre is much more stable through the trilogy: firing guns, leveling up, and making choices. Playing as Shepard, we spend the majority of all three games solving problems presented by the story with either talking or violence.

But these two conversations are simultaneous, and they are not going to harmonize. The clash comes when the story posits a problem that can’t be solved by the mechanics: the Reapers.

The Reapers Are A’Coming

The Reapers are one of the most firmly sci fi genre elements of Mass Effect. Revealed in the first game, looming in the second, and finally arriving in the third, the Reapers are an overwhelming force that has wiped the galaxy clean of organic life several times before.

Sinister in all the right ways, the Reapers are a classic trope: a reminder of our small place among the stars. Such a reminder could be hostile, awe-inspiring, or mysterious, but the point is a plot element that is somehow bigger than humanity. This trope has been around for a long time and in many forms, summed up nicely as an Outside Context Problem in Iain M. Bank’s brilliant novel Excession, which he describes as “the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”

An Outside Context Problem (and situations like it) is when a community encounters something outside of their capacity to handle or even comprehend. A benign example is the starship from Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, which is so technologically advanced the humans exploring it can’t even deduce the functions of the machines they come across. The Reapers are another example, yet are anything but benign: a hostile invasion force that is supposedly far beyond the capabilities of the galactic community. In the climax of ME 1, fighting a single Reaper to a standstill took the combined might of multiple species’ fleets. The message of the first two games — drawing on this genre convention — is that the Reapers are a problem that can’t be solved by ordinary means.

Therein lies the trouble. The well of sci fi influence Mass Effect draws from ends up presenting a problem beyond the capabilities of the expectations set by its mechanics. The mechanical genre is about shooting and talking, but the storytelling genre is about an alien horror that cannot be shot at and has no interest in diplomacy.

Third Time Unlucky

The first two games approach this problem by more or less ignoring it. This is understandable in ME 1, when the Reapers’ are a late game reveal. As mentioned above, the Citadel fleets fight off a single Reaper (at significant cost), only to discover it was a single ship of a large invasion force. This is a great plot point for a sci fi story, albeit well within genre conventions. The player, besides discovering the information, actually doesn’t fight any Reapers in ME 1. There’s not much chance of that when they’re the size of a starship. Instead we chase after Saren, an agent of the Reapers who is at the end of the day just some guy.

ME 2’s strength lies in pulling the focus away from the galactic threat to the squad. Influenced by the The Dirty Dozen as much as sci fi, ME 2 is about assembling a group of misfits for a hail mary mission against the Collectors, who are a convenient secondary antagonist that are much more accommodating to the needs of a cover-based shooter. ME 2’s mechanical climax is destroying a half-gestated Reaper, but the game emphasizes that the one Shepard kills is the Reaper equivalent of Bambi slipping around on the ice. At the end of ME 2 very little has changed: the real threat still lurks in the blackness of space.

With the can labelled “defeating the Reapers” successfully kicked down the road twice, ME 3 now had the unenviable task of wrapping up story threads set by the first two games while also presenting a solution to the Reaper problem within the expectations of its mechanical genre. What’s more, said story threads are largely irrelevant to the Reapers. Since the first two games delayed the Reaper invasion, we were presented with a galaxy’s worth of other problems, politics, and personalities, which need to be addressed if the trilogy is going to feel satisfying.

ME 3 tackles this in half-measures. The Outside Context Problem of the Reapers turns out to be them having bigger guns. The battles are typical of that universe, both in-game and in-fiction, just against tougher enemies. ME 3 even invents some smaller, weaker Reapers so that we have something to blow up on occasion. It also places an inordinate amount of emphasis on the machinations of Cerberus (along with what seems like an unlimited army), so players can have something with a human face to triumph over. The game is still kicking the can of defeating the Reapers down the road in the game that opens with the Reaper invasion.

The solution in ME 3 to the Reaper problem is the Crucible.

The Crucible is a mysterious artifact that will, we’re assured, do something suitably Reaper-thwarting. No one is quite sure what that will be, but in the absence of other plans the galactic community commits to building it. In terms of gameplay the Crucible is entirely offscreen. It is a meter that we fill up by doing other, more familiar Mass Effect tasks. Pulling the galaxy together and tying up the plot threads from the previous games fills up a “galactic readiness” meter, and every time Shepard tackles a problem that has very little to do with the Reapers, Admiral Hackett calls to reassure us that this, in fact, was essential to building the Crucible for some reason or another.

Shepard in ME 3 becomes a problem solver extraordinaire, the greatest spy, soldier, and diplomat casually rewriting the political status quo every time the Normandy enters a new solar system. Just one of their feats in ME 3 — curing the genophage (or not), ending the geth war (or taking a side), bringing the galactic community together — is a galaxy-shaking feat worthy of its own climax and game. Yet here they zip by as bumps on the road, often presented in ways that undercut the thematic weight these problems previously presented.

It’s as if we’re being distracted from the problems of the plot genre by the game committing to the power fantasy of the mechanical one. Since we can’t solve the Reaper problem via talking and guns, we’re gifted a pile of other problems that call for exactly that.

An Impossible Ending

With all this in place, the ending of ME3 — even with the Extended Cut — lives up to its dismal reputation. Curiously, ME 3 doesn’t even have much of a mechanical climax on the shooting side. The final battle is a chaotic wave defense, with barely legible objectives and insta-kill lasers. The desperate run to the teleporter, with tanks blowing up and soldiers dying, is appropriately thrilling, although undercut by the bizarre Extended Cut inclusion of the Normandy arriving to save Shepard’s squadmates.

The actual mechanical climax is, of course, choice. All along we have solved problems with a dramatic choice, so the expectation for such an ending is clear. The game bends over backwards to accommodate this with the last minute introduction of the Starchild, who hands over the fate of the galaxy to Shepard as a prize for making it so far.

The whole thing feels rushed, confused, and thematically discordant. But with the two genres so out of step by the climax, there wasn’t much hope for any sort of ending that worked. There have been many attempts to fix or rewrite the ending (please don’t send me your fanfiction), but I’m not sure ME 3 can end in way that meets all the expectations set by the conflicting genres. It should be triumphant, but what triumph is there when the Reapers are supposed to be beyond our capabilities? It should be squad-focused, but what use is a squad when the story is about the whole galaxy? It should respect the player’s choices, but how can an individual realistically make such huge choices without the Starchild arbitrarily handing over the powers of a god?

Genre conventions aren’t laws. There is no need to follow them, whether they be plot or mechanical. Mass Effect 3 could’ve been a game about failure, or humanity coming to terms with their place in the galaxy, or about a slow, grinding war where Shepard only plays a small part. The fact that the game is about choice does not necessitate that said choices are monumental.

But genre can be a trap when it sets expectations too rigidly, which is what happened here. Bioware wanted to tell a certain story, but the medium got in the way. This clash made it inevitable that the Reapers were going to be neutered, retconned, and ignored as the story of the setting was unable to mesh with the story implied by the mechanics. Mechanical genres can suggest plot points just as much as conventional ones. Following those plot points too closely, unable or unwilling to look beyond the conventions of the mechanical genre, is how we ended up with ME 3. It’s what got us the Starchild. And nobody wants that.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• I ragged on the games a fair amount (and cut out at least 500 words of more complaining), so I should say that I enjoyed the Mass Effect trilogy on the whole. They have excellent gunplay, wonderful character writing, great pacing, and a gee whiz space opera sensibility. As I said in the article, ME 2 is terrific when taken as a standalone title. The recent Legendary Collection bundles all three with remastered graphics and QOL improvements.

• I used the word “genre” far too many times in this article, so to celebrate that here is a compilation of the great Alex Trebek overpronouncing it.

• Iain M. Banks, mentioned above, is my favourite science fiction writer. His Culture series (including Excession) is consistently inventive and brilliantly written, often invoking that sense of cosmic awe that can only come from good sci fi.

• Here’s a great article by Peter Tieryas about Excession and how the Civilization games shaped not only the book, but Tieryas’ reading of it.

• Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson is a great pop history book about the 18th century South Sea Bubble, and how the near collapse of the English economy helped pave the way for modern finance. I don’t have much interest in economics, but was captivated by the story of how emerging ideas about evidence and science shaped the modern market.

• I’m continuing to stay very relevant by dipping my toes into Genshin Impact for the first time in 2025. I’m having fun despite despite the nauseating gacha aspect, which can’t be separated from its other design choices. Monetization aside, there seems to be two Genshins. The first is the single-player experience: a JRPG-adjacent version of Breath of the Wild with great exploration, stellar production values, corny writing, and fun (albeit simplistic) combat. Then there is second game: the dreadful live-service “forever game” of logging in all the time, grinding characters for no reason, and generally treating it like a job. I’m have a great time with the first game and have no intention of sticking around for the second.

Next Time

Two shorter articles coming out in the next few weeks about my favourite games and books of 2025.

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I recently replayed Mass Effect 3 as part of the Legendary Collection, the first time I’ve touched those games in several years. It was fun to pal around with the old squad, though I confess the game wasn’t quite as good as I remembered. While its storytelling flaws are best left for another day (and another article), one aspect I did appreciate is the game’s pacing.

The action-packed missions are followed by generous amounts of downtime, where Shepard can chat with squadmates, buy new gear, and generally putz around. This is fairly common in RPGs, but handled well in Mass Effect 3, providing peaks and valleys of tension. It’s occasionally mixed up with clever results, as with the Cerberus assault on the Citadel.

Pacing as an element of structure (both micro for individual scenes and macro for the whole plot) is an obvious ingredient of an enjoyable story. If Mass Effect 3 was only running around and shooting aliens all the time, it would be a very different (and probably worse) experience. The quieter moments allow us to decompress and appreciate the action when it comes. This is true of story structure in any medium. What’s interesting about games, though, is how there can be mechanical pacing as well. Games allow us to engage with different systems to structure an experience, creating rhythms not only out of story beats but gameplay elements too.

Chief among these for RPGs is the menu.

What’s On the Menu?

One of the oddest looks I’ve ever received from my wife is after I told her I enjoyed Unicorn Overlord so much because it had “good menu time.” It seems, from the perspective of a non-RPG enjoyer, that is a pretty wild thing to say. Video game menus are generally seen by the larger population as a means to an end. For my wife the menu in Stardew Valley is just where her stuff is — the actual game is out in the field. But to me (and my fellow sickos), half the fun of an RPG is spending time messing around in the menus. Equipping items, changing classes, and comparing stats are just as appealing as fighting monsters.

One of the delights of the menu is that it’s a place for proactive work, while other elements of the game, like battles, are at least partially reactive. When in a menu I’m progressing at my own pace and according to my own whims. I can fiddle around, try new things, and change my plans without the harsh realities of the wilds pressing in.

RPGs systems, even the simpler ones, are more compelling beyond the base enjoyment of watching numbers go up. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy the numbers going up as much as the next rat in a Skinner box. But RPGs are often satisfying due to steady drip of customization, organization, and planning. That all takes place in the menu.

Ye Can Always Go, Ach, Doontoon

There are, of course, games that are all menu time, all the time. Strategy games like Civilization or Stellaris, while awash in systems, are by and large just a series of menus.

While I love these games (oh boy, do I), I think the “oops, all menus” approach is a different experience than what I’m trying to articulate. Those games tend to have minimal storytelling, their narratives more about emergent play.

RPGs will have both more traditional stories and systems that contrast to help structure its narrative. That mechanical contrast is the heart of the appeal. The RPG menu is the downtime of the mechanics to go along with the downtime of the story. As I said before, stories will often structure their pacing with moments of tension followed by ones of release, or at least calm. Even Shakespeare pauses for scenes of jokes during his tragedies. This respite allows us to process the previous tension and any important revelations, while also building anticipation for the next moment of tension or action.

Games do the same thing with mechanics. A common one in action adventure games like Zelda titles or God of War is to balance combat with puzzles or traversal, but I don’t feel that’s as effective as a good RPG menu. The menu connects us to the game still by presenting systems that are informing future work. As we equip a new sword, we get the pleasurable fizz of anticipation of what a future battle will be like. Plus, the more stark mechanical contrast fits this role better. My downtime in God of War still consists of controlling Kratos. I’m just doing so to push blocks instead of swinging the blades of chaos. But RPG downtime instead consist of menus, with different presentation and controls. Using this as downtimes allows the other systems like puzzles to fill their roles of building tension or rewarding curiosity.

I think it’s telling how games sometimes couple menus with a distinct, safe location. Many games have menus that are only accessible outside of battle or in distinct game phases. But some games reinforce the metaphor of menu as storytelling downtime by having it take place in a physical location. This frames the menu as downtime for the characters. As the player rests their mind by organizing items or leveling up, the characters are resting in story by hanging out in the party camp of Baldur’s Gate 3 or the famous bonfire of Dark Souls.

Menus structure stories by presenting safe zones of planning and mechanical contrast that mimic the pacing of the plot. We rest as our characters do, and thereby are more in tune with the adventure.

Too Much of a Good Thing

But story structure is a delicate balancing act. Some games disrupt this by giving us too much menu time, veering closer the all-menu approach of strategy games that throws off the rhythm of the RPG story. I’ve seen enough episodes of Kitchen Nightmares to know there are serious issues when a menu is too large.

Tactics RPGs can often suffer from this. While they are truly excellent games, the most notable offenders for this are Ogre Battle and Unicorn Overlord. Those games are at the extreme edge of the menu time ratio while still remaining RPGs. The issue isn’t with the autobattler aspects, but rather how unbalanced the menu time is when compared with the rest of the game. When most of the time is downtime, there isn’t a proper rhythm. The story feels slow and sloggy because the gaps between actual events are too long.

Another concern is how too much menu time ends up prioritizing downtime as the site of mastery and play. If there are too many options available outside of the core gameplay (i.e., too much stuff available to fiddle with in the menu), becoming good at moving things around in the menu can trivialize the battles themselves. It’s incredibly fun to plan teams in Ogre Battle, but sufficient skill turns the actual fights into a foregone conclusion.

Batman is always prattling on on about how victory lies in preparation, but there isn’t much fun in experiencing that time and time again. A one sided beatdown can be satisfying on both a mechanical and storytelling level once in a while, but the story of someone who constantly wins without much effort has no tension. When there is no tension, there is nothing to release and no need for contrast. So in these cases, what need do we have of menus for pacing purposes?

Again, I love both these titles, but it’s interesting to see how they fail on this particular point, and how that drags down the storytelling as a whole. While the plot of Unicorn Overlord is without question a bit generic — especially compared to 13 Sentinels, Vanillaware’s previous title — the wonky mechanical rhythm makes the story feel off, for lack of a better term. Its disconnected and discordant, with battle stages becoming purely levels rather than points on a journey. Worse, battles become simply sites of validation for the experimentation found in the menu. While that’s satisfying in its own way, it doesn’t mesh with the plot. The story feels like it’s happening to someone else, rather than the characters we’re controlling, as the real player experience is all menu.

Games, like any medium, enrich as their elements cohere. This doesn’t always have to be in service of story, but a purely mechanical element, like a menu in Stellaris, can be reframed as a storytelling device in another title. It’s not as simple as gameplay elements happening alongside plot, but how the moment-to-moment player experience is the means of taking in a story, and how each part of that experience can connect us with characters and a world.

In the meantime, if you need me I’ll be buried in the menus.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• My lovely wife (read her books substack!) recently bought me a present: Of Ghosts and Goblins by Lafcadio Hearn. Republished in a beautiful little hardcover, Hearn’s collection is essays and translations of Japanese folktales, often interwoven with asides and commentary. There’s much more to this than meets the eye at first. I think the tone of the stories are often more suited to an early winter than Halloween, so it’s still seasonal.

• I was initially disappointed with it, but after nearly a year of updates I’m coming around to Civilization VII. What helped was deciding to meet it on its own terms, and without the weight of expectations I’ve found quite a lot of fun in the different groove it presents. It feels much more like a board game than previous entries, but in doing so it fills a niche, especially compared to grand strategy titles. While it hasn’t reached the highs of Civ V, VII definitely has its strengths.

• I Am Your Beast was too hard for me (I tapped out less than halfway through), but I enjoyed the rollicking mix of low-poly presentation, spy thriller story, and short, chaotic levels. The speedrun-esque flow state of replaying levels (similar to Neon White) isn’t my usual cup of tea, but I definitely saw the appeal with this title.

• Speaking of spy thrillers, Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household is an interesting entry into the genre. Published in 1939, it’s about a man pursued by Nazi agents across the English countryside. Oddly sedate and veering into nature writing at times, it beautifully illustrates the solitude of the fugitive.

• Hazel has a delightful youtube channel that explores the odd and (forgive the overused adjective) cozy corners of older anime and games. I particularly enjoyed her favourite places in Pokemon.

Next Time

I have Mass Effect on the brain, but I promise I won’t be relitigating that decade-old debate about the ending. I’ll instead be examining how the storytelling flaws in that trilogy spring from the clash of two genres: science fiction trappings bumping up against action RPG expectations.

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The final part of a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Previously in this series I discussed how the the FFVII remake trilogy shifted its mechanics from Remake to Rebirth. While both games are thematically and plot-wise about the anxieties of remaking a cultural milestone like FFVII, only Rebirth grapples with the mechanical legacy of FFVII and JRPGs in general.

However, one aspect of both games that is firmly in the RPG sphere is its combat. While it doesn’t appear so at first, the games’ stellar combat system reflects the Final Fantasy series’ tradition of experimentation, yet doing so with something of a bait and switch: layering on a command-interface presentation on top of an action JRPG system.

Button Troubles

The emergence of JRPGs in the mid-80s is significant for many reasons, but a sometimes overlooked aspect is that it was also a shift from computer to console, requiring a radical interface redesign. While there were some console RPGs prior to the watershed Japanese release of Dragon Quest in 1986 — the title most often cited as the earliest being Dragonstomper for the Atari 2600 — most RPGs in the 80s were released for home computers like the Apple II or the PC-88 in Japan.

One of the major differences between computers and consoles is interface. Unlike Super Mario Bros or Contra, which only have running, jumping, and occasionally shooting, games like Wizardry or The Black Onyx were awash in verbs. What’s more, before mouse-driven interfaces each verb often had its own dedicated button on the keyboard. There was no “interact” command, for example: early CRPGs often had separate keybinds for actions like talk, pick up, put down, open, close, and so forth. While necessary to accommodate the range of actions found in RPGs, it’s pretty complicated — especially when different games have different keys for the same commands. I have fond memories of playing titles like Ultima IV with the keyboard guide propped up against the bottom of my monitor.

This style of interface is impossible on a console like the NES, with its grand total of two buttons and one directional pad. To accommodate this, Yuji Horii and his fellow designers at Chunsoft devised — or at least popularized — a menu-based command interface. Building off their work on adventure games like The Portopia Serial Murder Case (and Horii’s reported dislike of text parsers common to the adventure genre), Dragon Quest features a command (aka menu-based) interface: navigating a list of actions with the d-pad and then selecting one. While one person’s “elegant” is another’s “simplified,” I do think this approach has significant advantages, allowing players to make strategic, interesting choices but in a format that is easier to understand and use.

Take Your Time

This change in interface was particularly important for combat. While the major computer RPGs of the time were also turn-based — sometimes due to technical limitations instead of design decisions — the emergence of the command interface locked games with this approach into turn-based combat from here on out.

Simply put, it’s too awkward to have real-time combat paired with a command interface like the one in the Dragon Quest screenshot above. Navigating through menus, while intuitive, is much slower than pushing individual buttons. If the monsters attacked whenever they wanted, the demand on the player would be how fast they could page through the options rather than making intelligent decisions.

The command interface, paired with turn-based combat, allows games to present varied and interesting choices in an easily digestible format, all at a relaxed pace of the player’s choosing. But here’s the rub: what if we want the advantages of the command interface paired with the drama of real-time combat?

Breaking Limits

Final Fantasy’s combat was similar to Dragon Quest and other JRPGs while on the NES, but as it moved into the 16-bit era, the franchise started tweaking its battle systems. While unusual or interesting battle systems would soon become a selling point of many JRPGs, especially in the PSX era (any Legend of Legaia fans reading?), what’s striking about Final Fantasy is that this long history of battle system experimentation has a clear throughline: separating the turn-based from command-based aspects.

The introduction of Active Time Battle with FFIV was a shift in presentation and priorities. Apparently inspired by the (alleged) excitement of Formula One races, ATB introduces a slight real-time element into the battles of FFIV all the way to FFIX. With ATB, turns overlap as the action bar of each character fills. While there was a concession to paging through long item or spell menus with the “Wait” option, the point of ATB is that the characters’ action bars are always filling, and enemies can attack whenever they are able.

This wedge between the command and turn-based sides of combat grew with FFXII going full quasi real-time, having basic attacks becoming automated similar to Xenoblade, and the player providing commands for special attacks or using the excellent gambit system to program the AI. The series went fully into real-time action with FFXV and FFXVI, with the latter hewing closer to games like Devil May Cry than the earlier entries in the franchise.

Since FFIV, the games have pushed against turn-based combat, trying to inject a different sort of tension and drama by adding real-time elements. However, the pendulum can swing too far, as it did with the latest two mainline entries. Embracing full action combat loses out on the appealing parts of the command-based interface. In addition, and crucial to a discussion of legacy, it strays too far from the series identity, with many fans complaining that FFXV and FFXVI didn’t feel like Final Fantasy games.

Combat, Rebirthed

FFVII Rebirth and Remake have inherited this legacy of experimentation, but go even further in driving a wedge between command interface by layering the presentational aspects of traditional JRPG command interfaces onto an action combat system.

What do I mean by this? Well, to start, let me describe the bones of Rebirth’s combat. Battles takes place in an enclosed part of the field with a distinct interface. We control one character (and can switch at will) in real-time combat. We can use basic attacks — often in combos — and by landing those we charge up a meter that allows us to cast spells or do special attacks. Also, each character has some kind of gimmick to keep the combat feeling fresh.

That’s Rebirth, right? Yes, but it’s also the entire Tales franchise, except without everyone constantly shouting the names of their special moves. Rebirth has many of the same rhythms and systems of other action JRPGs like Tales, Ys, or Kingdom Hearts.

How Rebirth differs is in presentation of those systems. Now, I don’t want to downplay the important of presentation, especially because Rebirth is such a masterclass in it. The game is chock full of small, brilliant choices that maintain a breathless pace and sense of tension, all while providing breathing room to plan ahead or play stylishly without superhuman reactions. The slight camera arc and slowdown when switching characters is a genius touch on par with the game feel of Gears of War.

The presentation also provides the aesthetics of traditional, command interfaces of Final Fantasy without most of the actual systems being in place. While the verbs and rhythms are closer to action JRPGs, the presentation uses the nomenclature and familiar symbols of command interfaces and previous Final Fantasy titles. The special bar filled by basic attacks is called “ATB” despite there being no time element to it. There is a shortcut menu for special attacks, but you can also choose from a nested menu (just like the first Dragon Quest) while the game slows to a crawl.

There’s even a “Classic” combat mode option, which prioritizes the aesthetic layer by automating the AI’s basic movements. While this seems to bring it in line with FFXII, there are crucial differences, most notably the dodging and positioning in Rebirth, which are also automated. In “Classic” mode, all the player does is choose commands when the ATB bar fills up.

While fantastic, the combat of Rebirth works to look like a command interface in real-time combat, not feel like it.

Now What?

When I set out to write this article, I intended to present Rebirth as a continuation (or even culmination) of Final Fantasy’s history of placing real-time elements in traditional JRPG combat. I now think, however, the game lands somewhere different. I now think of it as an action JRPG with command interfaces aesthetics. With the mainline series titles embracing character action combat systems (distinct from action JRPG combat), I’m very curious where the series will go from here. Rebirth’s battle system is truly brilliant, but it feels hard to expand upon or fiddle with, as it’s a complete package with a distinct history and aesthetic angle.

Perhaps FFXVII or the next entry in the remake trilogy (my title prediction is FFVII Revelation) will surprise me, but I’m a little skeptical. While Rebirth’s battle system is by no means a culmination of JRPGs, it does feel like an endpoint of the experiment that started way back with ATB: we now have a battle system with the pace and drama of real-time, yet preserving the impressions and some of advantages the command interface brings.

Bringing the combat back to the larger point of this series, it’s as if the weight of legacy was so strong that the developers had to pull a magic trick: misdirecting us with the aesthetics of command interfaces while hiding the real action battle system up their sleeves. If they had leaned into typical presentation of action JRPGs instead of the command aesthetics, I’m willing to bet that many fans would’ve complained it wasn’t Final Fantasy enough.

Final Fantasy VII has cast a long, long shadow. It drastically affected the JRPG genre of the late 90s to early 2000s; was part of the rise of AAA, presentation-heavy games; secured the fortunes of Squaresoft, still one of the largest publishers today in the form of Square Enix; and introduced many young people (including me!) to a different way of telling stories.

It was inevitable that FFVII would get the remake treatment. It’s too important to many people’s childhoods and many prominent designers’ careers to stay in the 90s. But as I’ve thought about the game and written these articles, I’ve discovered just how many different versions of FFVII one can go about remaking. There’s the method of Remake: taking the same story and atmosphere and repackaging with the design trends of today. Then there is the more complicated, messier approach of Rebirth: trying to make a game that’s simultaneously modern but one that acknowledges the effect the original had on the history of games. Rebirth may take somewhat surface-level approaches to this history at times — like with the combat — but what I admire most is how the game recognizes what we all instinctively grasped back when first seeing Cloud through a CRT haze: that the story of FFVII that we found so gripping is inextricably linked to its form. Games are a medium, and like all mediums when done well they form a gestalt, with every element contributing to our experience of the story. Rebirth aims for this, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but always in an interesting way. By engaging with the mechanical legacy of FFVII, Rebirth lets us know that pushing buttons is a vital part of falling in love with its story and characters.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• Mick Herron Slough House novels are a cynical, grounded take on modern spy fiction. Slough House is MI5’s bureaucratic purgatory: a run-down office when agents who screwed up get sent to push paper until they retire or quit. Instead, the denizens manage to get themselves into various scrapes, but never in a cheesy, cliche “the misfits rise to save the day” sort of way. What I especially love is the constant skepticism the novels display toward the intelligence services, as half the problems of the books are caused by inter-service backstabbing and failures. It’s been adapted into a TV show called Slow Horses (the title of the first novel), which I can’t speak to, as I haven’t watched it.

• Masayoshi Takanaka’s music is pretty different from what I typically enjoy, but I defy you to listen to All of Me and not have a good day.

• I’ve been enjoying Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series, following the adventures of a British soldier during the Napoleonic wars. I’m a long-time fan of the excellent 90’s TV adaptions starring Sean Bean, but now feel the books are more enjoyable, as they delve a little more into the historical aspects without distracting from all the derring-do. Like with I, Claudius, you probably have an uncle who would love these.

• When looking for a reference image, I stumbled across this excellent essay breaking down the battle system of Kingdom Hearts II. While I’m a dyed-in-the-wool KH hater, even I can appreciate how interesting and innovative the battle system is.

• Since this installment was about JRPG battle systems, I’ll mention a few of my favourites: Grandia’s emphasis on turn order manipulation, Octopath II’s versatility, the controlled chaos of Xenoblade 2, Valkyrie Profile’s presentation, Baten Kaitos’s card-based battles, the positioning in Radiant Historia, the elegance of Dragon Quest XI, and finally the brave/default system of, well, Bravely Default.

Next Time

We all love a good menu in a RPG, but sometimes too much time in the menu can trivialize or undercut other parts a game. We’ll look at the storytelling implications of FFXII, Unicorn Overlord, and games that play themselves.

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Valkyria Chronicles 4 was a delightful surprise. I picked it up on a whim at a deep discount, then found its tactics gameplay ruinously addicting for the entire run.

The premise of the series is more or less “World War II but make it anime.” Set in a heavily fictionalized version of Europe, each installment in the franchise is set during a war between a vaguely tsarist Russia-type empire and a loose coalition of allied nations. The highlights are VC1, about a plucky militia defending their (ostensibly neutral) homeland from an invasion, and VC4, which follows a more elite squadron in the thick of the fighting.

While the storytelling is a little cheesy at times, it’s satisfying enough and does go to some interesting places. Plus, the games’ cel-shading combines with a chunky, slightly steampunk aesthetic layered on top of the bomber jackets and tanks, giving the whole package an incredible look.

The gameplay is the real highlight, featuring tense decisions and a fresh take on tactics RPGs. What most intrigued me, though, was how the game’s systems withhold information from the player to heighten the drama. Battles, even fictional ones, are chaotic affairs. VC use that chaos as part of the gameplay, highlighting the distance between the commander and an ordinary solider.

Lock and Load

VC stands out in the somewhat conservative genre of tactics RPGs (or strategy RPGs, whatever you want you call them). While there are some similar titles — like the mediocre The Bureau: XCOM Declassified or the delightfully bizarre Codename S.T.E.A.M. — the gameplay of VC more or less stands alone.

The hook of VC is that it has two distinct phases during a player’s turn. First is the overhead map. This is typical of tactics RPGs, but VC’s is done up like an actual map a battlefield commander would us: sepia tones, named streets, and abstract dots that represent units. After selecting a unit, the game switches to a third-person action phase. During this phase the battlefield is represented in 3D with much more detail. The player can freely control the unit they selected (with limited movement based on their class) and take one action like firing a gun or administering healing. The action phase is quasi-realtime, with opposing soldiers staying still but taking potshots at the current player avatar as they run around. Once the player is done with that unit, it’s back to the tactical map to choose another soldier (or the same one again, with fewer steps allotted this time) until the player runs out of command points.

Not only does this make the gameplay feel snappy, the delicious challenge of VC is marrying the two views in one’s mind. What’s on the ground isn’t perfectly conveyed by the map: what looks like a building might end up being a great sniper spot once seen in the action phase. It’s easy to look at the map and decide on a plan, only to be confronted by an ugly reality once in control of the boots on the ground.

Pobody’s Nerfect

A useful concept — more common in the boardgame space — is perfect versus hidden information. This is a continuum of how much information is available to a player at any given point, usually during their turn.

Chess is, for example, is a game of perfect information. A glance at the chessboard lets one know where each piece is and how they can act. On white’s turn, they know exactly what black can do. Black isn’t holding some secret token that will allow their pawns to move twice or anything of the sort. Most card games are on the other end of the scale, being games primarily of hidden information. People sitting at a poker table have very little knowledge of other players’ capabilities.

With video games, tactics RPGs tend to be more toward the perfect information side of the scale. Games like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics present a clear map with plenty of information available, even showing movement ranges or previews of how actions will turn out.

I think there is generally an impression that in RPGs (tactics or otherwise) that more information is better. We often gripe about vagueness in descriptions that get in the way of strategic thinking. Not knowing how much more “severe” damage is than “heavy” in Persona 5 means that a player can’t make an informed decision about whether the higher MP cost is worth it. This general player preference for more perfect information is even stronger with tactics RPGS.

But games can hide information to enhance the experience. Dragon Quest games often hide percentage chances for status effects, giving it a gambling feel. The Civilization series hides the map (and thus the other players), encouraging players to go out and explore rather than hunker down to build opera houses and aqueducts until the game ends.

Neither hidden nor perfect information is any more strategic or interesting. They’re different tools for raising stakes and allowing players to make different sorts of choices.

Battlefield Chaos

Valkyria Chronicles are very much games of hidden and obscured information, causing player choices to be tense and risky. Not only is there the disconnect between the map and the action phase that I mentioned above, the prevalence of guns due to the WWII setting — in contrast to the more typical fantasy settings of RPGs with swords and magic — means that sightlines and cover are vital, which are easy to misinterpret when staring at the map.

What’s more, enemies in VC are only visible on the map if they are in sight of one of the player’s units. This is fairly common in RTS games (think fog of war), but its constant presence in a tactics RPG means that every plan has the possibility of going haywire. Previously unknown enemies appear as the player rounds a corner, forcing them to think of a new plan without the luxury of the overall view, bullets whizzing by all the while.

The constant surprises means that adaptability is more valuable asset than sober strategic thinking. Inevitably a scout won’t have enough movement to make it to cover like planned or an enemy lancer doesn’t go down in one shot. The joy of VC is in those moments, especially if the player is keeping the pace up instead of hunkering down like a turtle. The games rewards players who are flexible and willing to push a littler farther than they think they should.

War is Hell

As the famous (mis)quote goes, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. VC embraces this mentality, using its systems to illustrate the chaos of war. The constant hidden information and disconnect between the tactical and action phases acts as metaphors for the messiness of battle and the heavy burden of command.

The protagonists of the games are squad leaders, present on the battlefield as units but also (in story) directing the other characters. The trust the characters show their commander in story is put under stress by the game itself, as the line blurs between the player avatar as commander and the player as an ordinary solider during the action phase. Furthermore, the constant humanization of even minor units through quirks and side stories (similar to Fire Emblem) further reinforces the human cost of the risk. I’m not sending just any soldier into the unknown, it’s someone like Teresa, who dreams of going back to medical school once the war ends.

The characters of the VC series (besides VC2) are a squad in a larger army, therefore caught up in a war beyond their control. They’re sent to places not of their choosing for goals they might think are subpar. In VC4 this goes so far as the squad sometimes being misled by commander about their overall objective. But as soldiers they have to grin and bear it.

This dynamic — familiar territory for war stories — is played out in microcosm through the game’s systems. By hiding and obscuring information, then forcing the player to directly deal with the consequences by controlling the soldier units directly, the games cause us to feel the messy reality of warfare that the characters are going through. We can’t take refuge in the godlike perspective of other tactics RPGs, confident in our knowledge and using our units like pawns. Instead, we are the squad, with the limited perspective and risky choices that implies. In doing so, we get to experience the themes of the story through the gameplay. Characters like Claude and Welkin have to bear the guns and uncertainty of the battlefield, knowing that they’re asking friends to risk their lives based on guesses and hope. By hiding information, VC is making sure we face those challenges right alongside them.

Well, either that or just cheese the game with scout rushing. That also works.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• My wonderful wife (who has an equally wonderful substack about books) is hosting an installments book club, where we read a section of Middlemarch each month. It’s been a fantastic format so far, bringing out what’s so incredible about Eliot’s novel. Humane, hilarious, and full of life, the book makes for the perfect autumnal read. If the length intimidates you, just do what we’re doing and take it 100 pages at a time with some friends.

• I can’t mention Fire Emblem without linking Brian David Gilbert’s video about trying to tell the characters apart.

• It’s October, so spookiness abounds. I love horror, with a real soft spot for the schlockier side of the genre. And what could be schlockier than the wonderful Resident Evil series? This month, having played most of the main series, I’m plumbing the the depths of the spin-offs (like Revelations), though I plan to replay Village and bask in its embrace of classic, Universal monsters-style horror. But those new to the series can’t go wrong with the triumph of design that is the RE 2 Remake, which is equally parts thoughtful and terrifying. If you’d prefer a more action-oriented (and less scary) entry, RE 4 is one of the most important games of all time for a reason, also receiving a truly excellent remake a few years ago.

• Speaking of that series, the previously mentioned Noah Caldwell-Gervais has a Through Look at Resident Evil, which is one of my favourite videos of his.

• Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October isn’t quite a horror novel, but is a wonderfully weird read that’s perfect for the season. It features a mishmash of characters from classic Gothic fiction as they struggle to either complete or prevent a ritual with unknown consequences. As a bonus, it’s narrated by Jack the Ripper’s dog.

Next Time

After that refreshing break, we’re back to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for the final part of my series on that game and legacy. This time I’ll look at how the combat is a culmination of a long trend of experimentation in the Final Fantasy franchise.

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Part Two in a series. Read Part One Here.

Last time I discussed how the Final Fantasy remake trilogy are, both thematically and plot-wise, about the anxiety of remaking something as important as FFVII, and how the original developed a legacy distinct from the franchise as a whole. What’s more, I argued that there is a definite shift in genre and gameplay from Remake to Rebirth, with the middle chapter of the trilogy becoming much more of a JRPG.

But embracing the mechanical side of remake anxiety can lead to some oddities, and oddest of all is the case of benches and cushions.

Take a Load Off, Cloud

Typically JRPGs, especially “classic” ones from the mid-80s to early 2000s (i.e., from the NES to the early days of the PS2), restricted the player’s abilities to save and heal. Someone playing the first Dragon Quest all the way to Final Fantasy X could generally only save at certain designated points and heal with a few expendable resources: items like potions/tents or by casting healing spells, which cost mana points. Alternatively, they could fully replenish health and mana points by sleeping at an inn in a nice, safe town.

In Rebirth, while you can occasionally sleep at an inn, by and large the main source of healing are these beautiful blue benches.

The healing benches are back in Rebirth. They’re at key points in the sort-of dungeons of Rebirth (more on that later) and at safe points in the world like Chocobo Bill’s ranch. In addition, scattered throughout the big open zones are bus stop benches like the one in the header image. These aren’t cool, blue benches. These substandard, non-blue benches don’t offer free healing. Instead, Cloud needs to bring a cushion. His SOLDIER genes are apparently no match for a bad bench, as to receive any healing the player needs to use one of these disposable cushions.

An odd detail is that the cushions are so cheap as to be meaningless. They cost very little in stores or can be crafted (since this is a AAA game from 2025, there has to be crafting) from common materials. It’s so easy to get cushions, they’re practically free. Crucially, though, they’re not entirely free.

More Cushion for the…Healing

Game design is full of compromises. This silly little cushion is the result of about four.

Here’s what I think happened:

• FF Remake was more of a third-person action, prestige title in the vein of God of War (see my last piece for more on that), but still had health and mana like an RPG. Combined with its largely linear levels, it required a regular source of free healing to prevent softlocks (i.e, the player stuck in some part with minimal health/mana or healing items, and no way to obtain more) and avoid killing the momentum. Hence, benches.

• FF Rebirth keeps the benches as a legacy feature, since that’s what players were used to from the previous game. Plus, it features some dungeon sequences that are just as linear as Remake without offering any way to retreat.

• Since benches are free, inns in towns have to be free too. This is to protect a certain sort of player from themselves. If inns weren’t free, this certain sort of player would run all the way from a town to a free bench to save a few lousy pieces of gil. This would be tedious, so the developers streamlined the system to prevent people from, to quote designer Soren Johnston, optimizing the fun out of a game.

• The game also needs healing in the giant zones players can run around in freely. Players are conditioned by the benches to expect healing sources (instead of using their items), but it would be a pain for players to run/warp back to settlements to heal, so there are benches scattered around the map at chocobo stops.

• To once again prevent a certain kind of player from ruining their own fun, benches in the open world need some kind of cost. Otherwise players might fight one enemy, run back to the bench to heal, fight another enemy, run back to the bench, etc. etc. It would be miserable, but a surprising number of people would do it. Hence, cushions. They introduce just enough friction to encourage players to use them when needed.

• But since the game’s combat places more stress on reaction and action skills, sometimes people are going to have a bad run, or get unlucky, or push themselves too far. Cushions therefore can’t be that expensive or people would just run back to towns, thereby negating the purpose of the chocobo stop benches in the first place.

Cushions are therefore a strange little artifact of developers trying to get ahead of players in multiple ways. But their presence also shows how far Rebirth is from other entries of the JRPG genre or its franchise in terms of the rhythm of exploration and dungeon crawling.

Crawling Along

The dungeon is such a ubiquitous feature of RPGs, especially JRPGs, it’s easy to take for granted. By dungeon I mean a distinct zone, usually a bit mazelike, which is full of monsters and treasure. It’s contrasts with towns — save havens usually containing story content — and the overworld, which is whatever connects everything together.

Dungeons are everywhere in JRPGs, but they don’t have to be. The Last of Us doesn’t have dungeons. Heck, the first half of Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t really have dungeons either. But the idea of a specific danger zone is baked into the rhythm of JRPG play.

One of the major distinguishing features of JRPGs in the early days of mid-80s was their appearance on consoles instead of home computers, and the radically different interface that required. But another was the influences and culture they sprung from. This is a pretty reductive, but there’s some fairness in saying that the pioneers of Western RPGs were playing D&D and reading Tolkien (and associated rip offs) in their spare time, while the pioneers of JRPGs were instead reading manga and playing dungeon crawlers like Wizardry or the early Ultima titles. This difference in influence explains many things, including storytelling styles, but the main point here is that the dungeon became a key feature of JRPGs, along with the rhythm of town —> overworld —> dungeon.

Early dungeon crawlers were straightforward, minimal story games that often featured one big dungeon. Besides Wizardry, good examples of this style of play include prominent roguelikes like, well Rogue or Nethack, or when the dungeon crawl went real time in the original Diablo.

Players would explore, fight monsters, and get treasure. Usually the only advantage to levelling up or finding a magic sword was being able to go deeper into the dungeon. The “town” in a game like this is more of a home base, where you can restore health, buy items, and listen to Deckard Cain prattle on. Crucial to its legacy in JRPGs is that the dungeon in these games is about long-term resource management.

Better Save Those Healing Potions

The crux of the dungeon crawl is the phrase I used above: “expendable resources.” Any given encounter in a typical dungeon — be it clicking on one monster in Diablo or a single turn-based battle in Final Fantasy V — isn’t difficult. It’s not a real skill challenge, and most regular monsters aren’t hitting hard enough to be a serious drain on health. Instead, this succession of easier battles steadily drain health and mana over time.

In most games players can only carry a limited number of potions, plus they cost money that could otherwise be spent on a cool new sword. Healing spells drain mana points, which in classic dungeon crawl design are even harder to replenish. So when trudging through a dungeon in an earlier JRPG like the original FFVII, a player is faced with a series of interdependent resources: I need health to survive, I need items or healing spells to replenish health, I need money or mana to continue purchasing items or casting spells, but I also need money or many to buy other stuff or cast attack or utility spells instead. What’s more, generally in a dungeon a player isn’t able to easily spend money (all the shops are back in town) or replenish mana, as items that restore mana tend to be very expensive and/or rare.

Same Dungeons, New Paradigm

While this was the way for much of the genre’s history, most modern JRPGs don’t really feature long-term resource management in dungeons. They still feature dungeons, as much for tradition’s sake as design. But when playing a JRPG made in the past 15 years, while a player might be going through dungeons, they won’t face a serious strain on their resources. The dungeons are still there but they are either easier across the board or present a different sort of challenge. The challenge of a dungeon might be more to do with the complexity of individual battles than as a long-term resource problem. That is to say, individual battles may take more player skill or decision making, so it’s more likely a random monster will seriously injure a party member or take more spells/items to defeat. To compensate, they’ll either be fewer, harder combat encounters in a given dungeon (like with Expedition 33 or Octopath Traveler II), it’ll be easier to regain mana, or healing items will be plentiful. Or hey, the entire party may just be fully healed after every battle, like in Xenoblade Chronicles.

There are exceptions to this, such as old-school dungeons being present the Shin Megami Tensei series or Dragon Quest XI (with harder monsters turned on). Some modern dungeon crawling features twists, including meta-resources like time in the Persona series. In Persona (and Metaphor: Refantazio) you can retreat like a typical dungeon, but that ends the day. You can return the next day to a checkpoint with full health and other resources, but in doing so you’re sacrificing days on the calendar that could be used to progress and explore other aspects of the game, such as developing character attributes or just hanging out with a literal child.

Why Bother With Benches?

Here’s the real question, though: why bother with the benches at all?

Unlike Remake, FFVII Rebirth has something of an overworld in its big zones, along with more dungeons and dungeon-like areas. This is one way the game is engaging with the mechanical legacy of FFVII. But it can’t fully go back to the long-term resource management style of play for two reasons. First, the combat, being an action hybrid instead of traditional turn-based, requires more player skill to get through any given battle. Since pushing buttons in the right order at the right time is much harder/unpredictable than selecting “attack” from a menu, any given battle has a wider range of outcomes. Second, it’s much more open in general, so the designers can’t predict or accommodate where a player will be at any given point, how many battles they fought to get there, and so forth. The reason the party heals after every battle in Xenoblade Chronicles is because it takes place in huge, open zones. The player can wander around where they want and face all sorts of enemies, or just skip straight to the story bits. The designers can’t control for the sheer variety of party levels or resources at any point in the map. There’s no point to dungeon resource challenges in an open world or open zone game, since they disrupt the traditional town —> overworld —> dungeon loop. It’s much messier, which is harder to plan around.

Rebirth could have easily done on demand healing or fewer encounters. Instead, it keeps the blue benches in dungeons, which gives the impression of resource strain without actually doing so at all. The free healing at benches means a player will never be three levels deep into a dungeon with no potions. The challenge is one of player skill, and the benches are placed more like checkpoints in an action game. But this is more level design than dungeon design, if you would. It’s more suited to Remake and its style of gameplay rather than the original FFVII.

Rebirth is caught in the middle, then. The game invokes the history and mechanics of the JRPG genre in many ways. In the case of dungeon crawling, though, it’s doing so in an unsuitable mechanical space.

Yet there is one tiny, padded attempt at the resource management of olden days. The broken benches of the lavish open world present a friction to exploration, albeit a small one. A player can’t just run around and rely on free healing. The negligible cost of the cushion is probably due to modern, big-budget gaming’s crusade against friction of this sort. Things are just supposed to work smoothly without much inconvenience. Yet this inconvenience, however small, does exist. So while it is is in part the result of design concessions, I think there is something of a gesture with the cushion. We are meant to think about the dangers of exploration and dungeon crawling every time we expend a cushion to heal. After all, it could be our last. This is a adventure, after all. Sometimes that means you gotta pay to sit.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• I read E. M. Forster’s Passage to India about six months ago and am still thinking about it. It’s an astounding, melancholy work set in the waning days of colonial India. The novel is about how oppressive systems can sabotage human connection, as many characters in the novel can’t bridge the gap of British occupation when interacting across colour lines.

• I can’t do a piece on JRPG dungeons and not mention the Etrian Odyssey series, which is a modern take on straightforward dungeon crawls. The party customization and sense of pushing deeper in the labyrinth are second to none. While some of the earlier ones have been remastered and ported to newer systems, the real joy was playing them on the DS/3DS, as you could use the second screen to draw a map of the dungeon as you were exploring.

• Dredge is a great fishing game with an atmosphere of something wrong lurking beneath the waves. It’s a fairly short but creepy experience. The gameplay loop was satisfying, consisting of fishing minigames, boat upgrades, and exploring the game’s archipelago. But more and more, I was pulling up strange, mutated fish with wonderful descriptions. And, of course, woe be on anyone who is caught outside port after dark.

• Speaking of coastal horror, The Fisherman by John Langan is a fantastic read as we approach Halloween. Haunting and digressive (like all good fishing stories), it’s not scary in a traditional Stephen King sense but made my skin crawl all the same.

• I don’t read or enjoy much modern fantasy, but the exception has been Tad William’s Last King of Osten Ard series. Williams was huge in the 90s and has been steadily writing ever since. These books are quasi-sequels to one of his earlier series, catching up with the same characters 30 years on. However, they don’t require any knowledge of the earlier works — I haven’t read them, and have not experienced any issues following along. A warning: the books a very long and proceed a pace I can only describe as sedate. But if you’re interested in some genuine wonder and descriptions of characters wandering the woods, do I have a book for you.

Next Time

Are you sick of Rebirth? Well, I am. We’re going to take a break from the final part of this series. Instead, next time I’ll look at Valkyria Chronicles, tactics RPGS, and how hidden information can enhance the drama of a war story.

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The first in a three-part series. Also, this is a bit long for a substack article, sorry about that. Alternatively: get over it, social media is destroying our attention spans, you’re a brave soldier for reading something over 2000 words, etc. etc.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second entry in the Remake trilogy, is an incredible game. One reason I love it is how indulgent it is — stuffed to the rafters with side content and long stretches of dialogue. It’s rare for a major studio to spend bucketloads of money on a project that feels like it's trying to please the creators instead of appeal to every human on earth. Also rare is to see a game interrogating its relationship with the history of its genre and the nearly thirty-year-old game it’s ostensibly remaking.

While FFVII Rebirth is a game about riding chocobos and saving the planet from Sephiroth, I think it’s equally as much about the difficulties and qualms that come from remaking a game with such a prominent cultural influence.

A Game About Another Game

The two games we’ve had so far of the planned trilogy (Rebirth and its predecessor, which is just named FFVII Remake) are doing much more than updating the graphics and systems. Part of this can’t be helped: they’re a product of now instead of 1997, and thus are going to reflect design trends and priorities of today. Not to mention that each of those two games are double or triple the length of the original FFVII. All that new stuff has to come from somewhere.

More importantly, though, the significant plot changes in the remakes are reflections of the legacy of FFVII itself. Remake and Rebirth are in large part about the anxieties that come with remaking a game with such a massive cultural impact and enduring legacy within the offices of Square Enix. Without getting too much into spoiler territory, how to remake FFVII isn’t just a theme of Remake and Rebirth, it’s an actual plot point, with “Whispers of Fate” periodically appearing in an attempt to force the characters to follow the same path they did back in the original game.

While the characters are mostly concerned with chasing Sephiroth, they periodically fight against these ghostly representatives of fate, who often prevent characters from, say, taking a left turn when in the original game they took a right. While the Whispers’ presence is deemphasized in Rebirth compared to Remake (rightfully so, because they’re kind of dumb), and tied more of the Sephiroth’s plans, it’s still true that one of the antagonists of Rebirth is the ghostly presence of the original game.

To put it another way, Barrett shoots at the plot of the original FFVII with his big gun arm. FFVII Rebirth is infused with anxiety about coming to terms with most famous entry in an already famous franchise.

What’s So Final About This, Anyway?

A few years ago, the producer of Final Fantasy XVI, the well-regard Yoshi-P (who also directs FFXIV, one of the MMO entries in the franchise), was asked about what defines a Final Fantasy game:

You need to have the best story, you need to have the best graphics, you need to have the best battle system, you need to have a lot of content, you need to have the Chocobos, you need to have Moogles, you need to have great sound, and that makes Final Fantasy. And if you’re missing even one of them, the fans will hate you forever.

While this is mostly PR speak to placate fans’ worries about the changes to the then-upcoming FFXVI — the quote might as well be just “don’t worry about us moving to action combat, I promise the game will be good” — there’s an interesting nugget of circular logic within. Simply put: Final Fantasy is a flagship franchise for Square Enix because…it’s a flagship. It's not defined by characters, tone, or the gameplay, but by the developers declaring it a prestige title. By sheer dint of history and name recognition, they will spend a stack of money and effort on anything in the series. That's what makes it Final Fantasy these days, moogles or no moogles.

Long-running franchises are forced to participate in an extra conversation. Every piece of media is engaging with its place in current culture, such as what’s popular at the moment, or how horror movies often mirror the anxieties of the day. It also joins the storied conversation of its own genre. For instance, if someone were to make a spy movie, it couldn’t help but engage with the genre and predecessors. No matter how the director felt about it, the audience watching would be thinking about James Bond and John le Carre.

But franchise entries have to reckon with their own history as well. Speaking of Bond, this is demonstrated nicely in the film Skyfall. While Daniel Craig was only on his third movie and 44 when it released, the first act revolves around him being over the hill and potentially too old for duty.

Besides a fun nod to the original Fleming novels, which mention that 00 agents have to retire at 45, the reason for this plot point is that the Bond franchise was turning 50 around the release of Skyfall. It was less about Craig’s rebooted Bond being too old to chase bad guys around Eastern Europe, but whether the films themselves were out of date for modern audiences.

Final Fantasy also is forced to confront its history with each entry, but that is complicated by the fact that it often experiments, changing setting, vibe and mechanics from game to game. This anthology approach was more or less within the expected confines of the JRPG genre up until about FFX in 2001. Since then the franchise has drifted away, in spurts and different directions, from its genre and place in the gaming landscape until we end up with FFXVI, which is hard to recognize as a franchise entry in terms of gameplay, story tone, and visual design. It’s only a Final Fantasy game because, as Yoshi-P put it, a lot of people worked really hard on it and then slapped the name on the box.

This self-imposed identity crisis — not quite of the genre it helped pioneer, receiving decent but not stellar critical and audience reception, not quite sure of its own place besides having large budgets — hovers over FFVII Rebirth, which is going back to golden age of Playstation-era Final Fantasy, but doing so in the shadow of what the franchise is today. Make no mistake, while I haven't enjoyed a mainline entry since XII, I don’t think modern Final Fantasy is bad or irredeemable. It’s certainly a little directionless, though, a little grasping. This impression isn’t helped by the fact the franchise has never quite gotten over how stunningly popular FFVII was.

Seventh Time Lucky

While Final Fantasy was a prestige franchise back in the SNES days (with FFVI reportedly being one of, if not the, best selling video game of 1994), the arrival Final Fantasy VII to the Playstation brought with it an expanded cultural awareness and broadening of the audience. As the number of people interested in video games grew in the mid-90s, especially as those who played them as kids became young adults, Final Fantasy rode the momentum it had already established to become a cultural juggernaut with the release of FFVII, conquering both Japan and the increasingly important North America market.

Alongside the confident directorial flair of Metal Gear Solid or the immaculate vibes of Ridge Racer Type 4, FFVII presented an aesthetic that was prefect for the time. Primed by the “cool Japan” export strategy of the late 80s and early 90s that brought fuzzy VHS tapes of anime like Dragon Ball or Ninja Scroll to a certain type of young person, the somewhat niche appeal of turn-based battles and dialogue-heavy games exploded when carried by the (for the time) cutting-edge graphics and the slightly preposterous, yet impossibly cool atmosphere.

How is stormed onto the stage, with an emphasis on presentation and atmosphere (the commercials from the time make a lot of noise about the 3D graphics), meant that the legacy of FFVII is distinct from the franchise as a whole. There are plenty of people who only ever played FFVII. Heck, it was so prominent there was a time back in the day where I thought of JRPGs as “FFlikes” in the same way people use the terms “Doomclone” or “Soulslikes.” The shift in presentation style and marketing emphasis meant FFVII helped invent the AAA, blockbuster game as we know it. In doing so, it developed a reputation distinct from both its genre and franchise.

There never would be a time when a Final Fantasy game would enjoy this same level of broad popularity. And I bet the creative leadership as Square Enix are acutely aware of this. How do I know? Well, look at the numerous spin offs.

Spinning Off

FFVII has its own identity and influence from apart the broader Final Fantasy series. It established a wonky, yet perfect aesthetic, associated with Tetsuya Nomura, that would become something of a Squaresoft (then a Square Enix) house style that would show up again in several FF mainline titles (VIII, XIII, XV, and X if we’re being generous), the Kingdom Hearts series, and major titles in the PS2 and PS3 era like The Bouncer.

Moreover, FFVII spawned a cottage industry of spinoffs and quasi-sequels for that game in particular instead of Final Fantasy as a whole. There were new games (Before Crisis, Dirge of Cerberus, Crisis Core, Ever Crisis), novels, anime, and a big budget movie in Advent Children. Dirge of Cerberus and Crisis Core are noteworthy for being major console releases instead of mobile games, with the higher prestige that comes along with it, especially for the era. This is an unprecedented amount of attention and care for a game at the time. In the late 90s and early 2000s, studios simply did not place their eggs in one basket like this.

Funnily enough, the spin offs are all pretty bad. However, they’re pretty bad in an interesting way that reflects the design and storytelling priorities of the studio from the mid-2000s. They were overdesigned, full of convoluted storytelling, gimmicks and a general sense of unearned confidence. Yet they seem to hold a special place in the heart of Square Enix’s current roster of creative leadership, who worked on many of these games. Mostly the original game, but FFVII series as a whole retains a tight grip on the consciousness of both button pushers and game makers alike.

The remaster of Crisis Core is a telling sign. Released between Remake and Rebirth, Crisis Core was freed from the shackles of the PSP and released for modern systems, so that today’s audiences could bask in its repetitive gameplay and aggravating story.

Beyond trying to capitalize on FFVII being hot property again with the Remake trilogy releasing, I think the Crisis Core remaster is also a deliberate staking out of territory on the part of the studio, hearkening back not just to the 1997 original but that run of 2000s spin offs. This remaster is also saying that Zack’s back, baby! And indeed he is. Zack Fair, former resident only of Cloud’s flashbacks, is both the protagonist of Crisis Core and a major character in Rebirth. Scroll back up: he’s on the box art. Can’t get more central than that.

In light of that, it makes sense of remaster Crisis Core to prime audiences for Zack’s entry in Rebirth, since he’s such a minor character in the original FFVII. But bringing Zack into the limelight embraces the legacy of FFVII as a distinct franchise from Final Fantasy in general. Rebirth is embracing the whole gamut of FFVII media, warts and all, while also making the confused identity of Final Fantasy a central conceit of the remaking process. They’re not remaking FFVII, they’re trying to remake the FFVII that lived on in our heads.

Rebirth As A Course Correction

FFVII Remake, as I said, explicitly engages with the anxiety of remaking the original by incorporating the Whispers in the plot. But its mechanics were very much of a more modern game, and interestingly not a RPG, J- or otherwise.

In everything besides combat (which is its own beast) and cutscene length, Remake feels like a first-party Sony prestige title, such as God of War or The Last of Us. Camera control, puzzle design, encounters, pacing. They all crib from an entirely different set of influences than JRPGs, of which the original FFVII was a shining example.

Rebirth, by contrast, subtly (and not so subtly) changes many of its mechanics to resemble modern JRPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles. While there is certainly a whiff of the previous influences, the open zone, sidequest-heavy approach of Rebirth is much closer to both modern and classic hallmarks of the JRPG genre. It's also much more fun than Remake. How about that!

Even the storytelling gets looser in ways that will be familiar to connoisseurs, and especially reflect the approach the studio used to take with its titles prior to the PS3 days or so. It’s more rambling, which suits a trilogy’s middle chapter, but goes to some wacky places that are both entirely informed by the specter of the original’s legacy and right in line with the storytelling style of the FFVII spin off line. Hence, the remaster of Crisis Core stakes out that territory as well. Zack’s back, baby, in more ways than one.

To put it bluntly: isn’t that weird? It’s not too far to say that Rebirth both switches genres and how it is approaching the idea of a remake mid-trilogy. It can be hard to see, since some things stay the same and genre in games is very murky nowadays, but the fact remains many mechanics have shifted in ways that one wouldn’t expect from a sequel of this type. I think this is, in part, because the new game is meant to be a deeper engagement with the influence and genre of the original.

Remake was addressing the story of FFVII and that legacy. In some ways it was for the people who only played the original and few other JRPGs, because it leaned so heavily on the story and atmosphere while changing the mechanics in detail and tone. Rebirth is now working through the mechanical anxieties of remaking FFVII. It's addressing its place in JRPGs and why the original spawned its own legacy.

So where does that leave us? In the next two entries I’ll examine specific examples of gameplay and how they engage with this legacy I’ve sketched. I hope you’ve enjoyed this (overly long) history lesson and analysis, and can see why Rebirth, while a truly excellent video game, is an odd product because of how FFVII is perceived by the broader public and the people who work on these games. It has left a distinct legacy apart from its huge popularity and the status of its franchise.

Recommended Reads, Etc.

• I’m having a blast playing Blue Prince, an intriguing roguelike puzzle game. It’s a bit like Myst crossed with a deck builder or game of solitaire, and it makes me feel like my brain is being wrung out like a wet towel.

• I, Claudius by Robert Graves, is a historical novel about the Roman Empire, specifically the long reign of Augustus and then his immediate successors. The book has a wonderful, gossipy tone. Graves makes the wise decision to take the most salacious interpretation of any event (many people are poisoned). It’s great fun, especially for those interested in the period. You probably have an uncle who would love it.

• Independence Day by Richard Ford was a beautiful, melancholy novel about a man too observant for his own good. Set over a Fourth of July weekend, a real estate agent wanders through his middle-age that didn’t turn out as he expected. Quite a slow burn, but highly recommended.

• If you’re reading this you’ve probably heard of him, but anyone interested in longform game analysis should check out the youtube channel of Noah Caldwell-Gervais. He’s just about the only person working who justifies the extreme length of his videos, bringing a sharp eye and a broad, well-read mind to his work. I particularly enjoyed his Resident Evil and Fallout retrospectives, where he goes through both series in their entirety.

Next Time

Do you like exploring dungeons? Do you like sitting on benches? Do you like sitting on benches in dungeons?

More Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, getting into the details of its open world and dungeon design in light of JRPG history.