Fans of Japanese and Western RPGs have been at each others’ throats for ages.
JRPGs are currently the whipping boy of gaming culture, and admittedly, after Final Fantasy XIII, an unrestrained testimony to genre excess, it’s hard not to see the criticisms. Linearity of gameplay and storyline and a cast of largely predefined characters are the most common targets. Many Western RPG fans claim they can’t even really be categorized as RPGs at all.
But there’s one feature that Japanese RPGs seem to have learned long ago that Western RPGs are still stumbling over: video games are a visual medium, not a textual one. They understand such fundamental elements of visual storytelling as pacing and using the camera to create drama, while such juggernauts as the Fallout series remain evidently stumped by basic cinematography. If JRPGs are the classic Star Wars of the gaming world — melodramatic, flashy, and compelling despite flaws in writing and execution — then far too many Western RPGs are closer to Shakespeare portrayed by a cast of first-year drama students in an empty warehouse.
Most Western role-playing video games ultimately trace their heritage back to Dungeons and Dragons, that venerable monolith of nerd culture. The first entries in the genre were often literal attempts to transcribe the core of the D&D experience to computer. Naturally, since these were text-heavy affairs back in the days of rather sparse graphics, a great deal of imagination was required; fitting, since D&D itself is all about abstract visualization and imagination.
We’re obviously not stuck in the days of mandatory text-based interfaces anymore. You can’t go for a walk without tripping over high-res 3D graphics, bruising your shin on customizable protagonist appearances and then knocking yourself unconscious on fully voice-acted characters.
The tools to tell a good story are well within developers’ grasps. The obstacle is largely one of design mentality, not technical limitations.
Take Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian really outdid themselves on this post-apocalyptic tale of nation-building on the frontiers of society. The player takes on the role of the Courier, a common messenger boy left for dead after a rival steals his latest delivery. Ultimately, the Courier’s efforts tip the balance of power in the region and lead to the ascendancy of one of three major factions, each with its own pros and cons, while simultaneously touching the lives of many smaller communities in significant ways.
But for all its intricacies of plotting and multifaceted characterization, the Mojave Wasteland never becomes a living, breathing place. It’s a desert, sure, but deserts have life — New Vegas’ Mojave is a barren wasteland, seemingly populated solely by vicious predators and dead-eyed humans. This vast expanse’s sheer size and lack of clear direction fragment the story into little bite-sized chunks. And New Vegas‘ insistence on a first-person perspective makes it very difficult to stage a scene. Sure, there’s a third-person mode, but the character model has the typical stiffness of FPS protagonists, making it fairly obvious that it’s not intended to be the prime mode of play.
These aren’t problems unique to New Vegas. Such juggernauts as Dragon Age: Origins shared the stilted camera direction, meandering pacing, and somewhat empty “open-world” setting. Other problems arise as well, such as rather pedestrian combat systems that nonetheless get an enormous amount of play. (It’s probably a good time to ask if traditional RPG-style combat is even necessary anymore.) But there’s a bigger issue than this that relates to the core of the RPG experience: talking head syndrome.
Role-playing games ultimately come down to dialogue and character interaction. Unfortunately, it is here where many western RPGs’ roots in tabletop and text-based gaming are most clearly apparent. With the notable exception of the Mass Effect series, dialogue-heavy plot sequences in such games frequently display minimal understanding of cinematography or how to stage a scene. Far too often, they rely on a huge, clunky menu of possible responses displayed over a close-up of the character being spoken to, with the ubiquitous player-defined and curiously silent protagonist not even in the shot.
Talking head syndrome is problematic because it takes the player out of the world around them during the very dialogue sequences that are supposed to give it life. Real people communicate with more than the words they’re using. Body language, the surrounding area, and tones of voice are all ever-present signs of mode and intention. None of these are convincingly utilized by talking-head scenes of menu after menu of dialogue, uninterrupted by movement or surrounding events. When the entire rest of the world seems to pause so a character can converse directly with the player, the illusion of a dynamic world can’t be maintained.
For all their supposed supremacy over JRPGs in writing, concept, and role-playing possibilities, too many western RPGs fail to make the experience on screen actually match the story being told. They remain trapped in abstract representations, still relying on imagination over representation.
Video games are, as the name implies, a visual and auditory medium. A wholly linear with fantastic plotting but poor visual and auditory integration isn’t a game; it’s a game trying to be a novel. And the real novels are generally better at it.