Just turned 21 a month ago. Sweet – I'm an adult now! Funny thing is, my tastes in gaming have receded in the process. Suddenly, I'm no longer instinctively opposed to games featuring magic, teenage angst and androgyny. You know, JRPGs.
Around the time Grand Theft Auto IV came out, reviewers consistently cited its fleshed-out cast of characters as one of its strongest points – characters that the player would develop relationships with, to the point of giving a damn about the fates of these characters in the game world. I love it when games have these sorts of characters. But GTA4's cast never stuck with me this way, and I'm only just now realizing why: I'm still just a teenager! Like, I can appreciate how characters like Niko and Roman are grounded in reality (along with the rest of Liberty City), but they're still just adults, doing adult things and using adult mannerisms. Maybe I'll be into adult-oriented dramas like GTA4 down the road, but for now, I'm here to have stupid fun, especially with my video games. I ended up having my fair share of stupid fun with GTA4, but only for those "classic GTA" moments of reckless killing sprees and cop chases.
Up until last year, I had only played two JRPGs in my life:
- Paper Mario 64
- Xenosaga: Episode I
Being only 14 or 16 at the time, respectively, I was way into both of these games, but for totally different reasons. Paper Mario had just enough clas
sic Mario platforming mechanics ingrained into its combat that it still felt like a good-ol' Mario game to me. So I guess it was a gateway drug for introducing me to the simple satisfaction of leveling up party members. Truth be told, I got suckered into buying Xenosaga from the commercials (which had me believe it would be some sort of kick-ass space combat action game), but I ate up all of those over-half-hour-long cutscenes. I don't even remember anything about the combat system, but the unforgettable cast of characters and universe stick with me to this very day, which ultimately compensates for its forgettable gameplay.
Then… that was it. By the time I hit 18, I was ready to fucking shoot stuff! No more of these cute-and-cuddly fantasy adventures. The Super Smash Bros. series helped me bridge this gap, probably because it put my favorite "kid-friendly" Nintendo characters into a context of brutality. These years of mine were defined by such favorites as the Tekken series, the Burnout series, Gears of War 1 & 2, Guitar Hero/Rock Band, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 (which, if you asked me on any given day, would probably be my pick for most favoritest game ever). Guns, blood and swearing weren't necessarily pre-requisites for games I would choose to spend time with, but they were definitely recurring themes.
In September 2008, I took a huge gamble by choosing to review Infinite Undiscovery (and pay full price for it!). A 360-exclusive RPG published by Square: should be a big deal, right? It started off mind-numbingly boring, like I expected from a JRPG. The main character was a whiny boy with amnesia, the dialogue has those awkward pauses of silence that I hate, and it hit me with seemingly endless amounts of tutorials in an attempt to beat its unnecessarily complex gameplay mechanics into my head. Had I not committed to reviewing it, I would have given up after the first ten hours.
While powering through to the end, however, IU genuinely surprised me in many ways. The main character's personality swerved from one end of the "likeable" spectrum to the other, its approach to dungeon-crawling was felt unique and fun (multi-party dungeons!), and the combat wasn't nearly as intimidating as I first made it out to be. Sarah Kelly already has a great blog post explaining why this game is worth some attention, so I won't go too far into detail. After seeing a glut of average scores from other reviews, I expected nothing but disappointment, but I had to begrudgingly admit that I enjoyed the experience. But maybe all of those average scores indicated that I just missed playing JRPGs, and there were plenty of better options out there.
Which brings me to The World Ends With You. At first glance, it's another game full of JRPG clichés: the aspirational fantasy of an emo kid's monster-slaying journey to discover the true value of friendship. Oh joy. In fact, having played it to death already, I can still describe the plot this way with such snarky distaste. I appreciate some aspects of the story, like it being grounded in the real-world Shibuya and the emo kid becoming "less emo" over time, but plot development almost never kept me coming back to TWEWY.
I looked forward to playing The World Ends With You every day, though, because its core combat gameplay was actually fun and exciting. This is where I became a believer. TWEWY, and to a lesser extent, Infinite Undiscovery, showed me that JRPGs can have fun and dynamic combat systems that have semblances of an action game, but without losing their inherent "JRPG-ness." Straight-up turned-based combat never appealed to me, but these sorts of games are right up my alley. Every consecutive day spent with TWEWY yielded new combat styles to learn thanks to its wild diversity of abilities you can equip you character with. It's not just that the attacks had different properties or visual effects; the actual stylus motions to unleash these attacks always kept me on my toes. Slashing empty space, pressing and holding empty space, drawing a circle on empty space, tapping empty space, tapping enemies, tapping yourself, dragging across yourself, scratching enemies, scratching empty space… the permutations for "action performed" on "area of the screen" get pretty complex.
More importantly, it encouraged me to constantly switch out pins (abilities) since they max out after certain EXP thresholds, so my experience never grew stale or boring. Combined with the real-time combat, the enjoyment I got out of fighting enemies in TWEWY rivaled that of traditional action games. And yeah, there are stupid amounts of layers of depth to everything that encourage micro-managing, but I felt that I had a firm grasp on everything within six hours, including the dual-screen combat. I could feel all of the synapses in my brain firing off simultaneously with each battle, and it felt great.
As much as I bemoaned the plot of TWEWY earlier, it still featured a cast of unique characters that stuck with me after the game's conclusion. I can actually remember most of their names, something I can't say for some of my favorite action games. I guess it's only fitting that my favorite action game to date, Team Fortress 2, has the most memorable and funny characters of any multiplayer shooter I've ever seen.
I'm ready for more of these character-driven games. Hell, I just spent (wasted?) most of yesterday perusing YouTube to spoil Persona 4 for myself after being exposed to its plot from Giant Bomb's Endurance Run series, knowing full well that I'd never play the game. But it was a testament to the game's endearing characters, expressive voice acting, and quality writing that I wanted to see more from a story that I genuinely found intriguing. And hey, even the turn-based (gasp!) battles looked fun and strategic, so if Persona 5 ever comes around, I'm confident enough in those guys' storywriting abilities that I'll be there to support it on day one.
So where do I go from here? Well I haven't abandoned action games (at this rate, I'll be playing Team Fortress 2 until the day I die), but three years ago, you wouldn't have gotten an ounce of enthusiasm out of me for Final Fantasy XIII, and now its one of my most anticipated games. I get it now. There's a level of sophistication to the fictions that these developers craft that's hard not to appreciate. Plus, I probably won't feel the same way about a game like Persona 4 when I'm 35, so I have to enjoy these teenage-oriented stories while I still can.