Kit's Rant #4

It's been awhile since I've ranted, so I thought why not? As always I was reading OPM and it made me think. Today though I wasn't thinking about how angry the stupid reviewers were being, not that they are always stupid just occasionally. I was reading the review for Xenosaga 3. I'm not particularly interested in this game, as I have not played 2 and am only partially through 1. The thing I noticed most about the review was that they were exclaiming how amazing it was that the main plotline of the story took a good 40 hours to complete.

Perhaps it's just me, but does anyone else remember a time when RPGs were expected to be at least 40 hours long? Back in the day of FF4, FF6, Chrono Trigger ( oh sure I've heard of people doing speed runs of about 5 hours, but really people that's not playing the game, that's racing it) games took time to beat. It was patience that got you through the large dungeons and castles and towns. And good plotlines pushed you forward so much that you never even noticed how much time you spent playing the game.

Let's take for example the game I've currently got in my PS2. It's a great game from 2001 called Dragon Warrior 7. I highly highly recommend it for RPGers. My point is however, that I am currently clocking in at 30 hours and I know that I am barely at halfway. Sure, I might have spent some time wandering around leveling unnecessarily, but that does not account for all 30 hours. This is a game with so many missions, as it were, that you have to devote a good amount of time to each one. Yet, like any great game, you don't feel like you've been in a time drain.

Well, now that I've praised DW7 (oh sure if you're a die hard you could call it DQ7, but I'm only diehard with the FFs :D) I'll conclude with my little rant/praise/waste of space. I haven't been as pleased with the most recent waves of RPGs, and this moment of thought might be a clue. People aren't spending the time necessary to build a great game. They throw in pretty visuals, an either unique story or generic plot, and enough side quests to last you a few extra hours. When you are done with it all, you have maybe 25 hours of very pretty, standardized RPG.

Let's take a moment folks and appreciate the game that took time. There is a name for game that take 15 hour to kill monsters and finish the plot: survival horrors (and no I'm not saying survival horrors suck, I love watching them myself, and occasionally pick up a camera and hunting ghosts). An RPG is supposed to be a game where you immerse yourself into the lives of the characters and feel like you are part of the story (story is essential in an RPG). While I suppose this is possible in 15-25 hours of gameplay, I think that a good game should take more than this. It takes more than 20 hours to get to know a person, one would assume it's the same for a game.