Been thinking about game design again and navel gazing a bit about what it is I like about games in different genres. I’ve always had some games I latched onto to kill time, but there was actually a period of time where I kind of lost interest in gaming. Pause to let the reader finish gasping or fainting like a Southern belle. This phase came about from the first steps the industry started taking into 3D- awkward low poly models with low res textures, most devs not really having a base line of how controls should work in a 3D environment, and the awkward steps taken toward making games feel more cinematic. It honestly turned me off and even though I had a N64, there wasn’t a hell of a lot that really caught my eye as a must own. Even to this day I’d rather see nice hand drawn or pixelated sprite art over hyper realistic muddy shootmans and zombie games, but now I have the power to “hey man, that’s just your opinion” myself. Truly a great and terrifying power I use for good and also undermining my confidence and sense of self if left unchecked.
What brought me back into the hobby was the humble GBA. It was basically a portable SNES and since I get into basically everything late, it was an SP with the snazzy flip open lid. Black version because obviously, that was the coolest one. And the first game I picked out? Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. In itself, it was probably a weird choice since I wasn’t super into RPGs, for a variety of dumb reasons from short attention span to thinking it was kinda stupid for people in a fight to just stand in lines taking turns hitting each other politely. I loved Chrono Trigger and liked FF7 (on PC!) but tended to bounce off of others. But I’d seen the original FFT at a friend’s house and thought, “hey, you can actually do things like backstabs or take advantage of heights and obstacles? This is a GAME CHANGER.” So I dug in and I freaking loved it. Once I was in the post game I made it my mission to raise up an all Viera team, because I’ve always been like this. It was really the first time I realized how cool RPGs could be when freed from the TV or computer room and the whole idea of having an explorable world full of little dudes I collected and trained was also very, very cool.
(Never was much of a Pokemon kid, by the way. Picked Game Gear over Game Boy as a kid and looking back regret it a little, but I still loved the thing.)
The way the portable form lead to changes in game design and philosophy is pretty interesting too. Since battery life could still be a problem, some games added “suspend” modes I could never bring myself to trust and others started focusing on allowing more bite size sessions with generous save points or just letting you save whenever. Even getting away from RPGs, I gotta say Peace Walker is still probably my favorite MGS experience since it broke everything into mini stages instead of giving me a giant map to get lost in while resources dwindle. Then there started to be games made more simple, abstracted even more to focus on the core… RPG…ness.
SURPRISE I’M GOING TO GUSH ABOUT STING AGAIN
When my SO of the time and I went shopping on a trip, we each grabbed a GBA game to mess with on the trip; she went with Riviera: the Promised Land and I picked Sigma Star Saga since I’d been waiting on it and hoped it would be a worthy successor to The Guardian Legend. It wasn’t, really! But I checked out Riviera over her shoulder and started thinking “this looks cool but also kind of different.” Later, I got my own copy and was super into it. They stripped away free roaming and broke dungeons down room by room, littered with event triggers you spend points earned from performing well in battle to use. In exchange, they focused on story and presentation, with lots of splash art to really sell special events. It was basically heavily boiled down RPG concentrate and was both perfect for handheld and just plain interesting in itself.
I would keep up with Nintendo hand held systems over the years, eventually getting a PSP too to break things up a bit. As much as I love action stuff, I just couldn’t get enough oddball portable RPGs and tactics games. One of the standouts was Half Minute Hero, and something just grabbed me about the design of it- it’s almost more of a puzzle game challenging you to find the most efficient routes through a quest, unlock all the endings, and all done pretty tongue in cheek. The world is going to end in 30 seconds, so get going, hero! The Time Goddess can rewind things for you but charges increasing amounts per reset. Eventually, after completing multiple entire other game modes, the ultimate final stage appears: the heroes of each time period rush to the finish to save the day in five minutes while time itself unravels the world around them, and for something that’s basically a gag game, it’s a genuinely epic conclusion.
Now this might be surprising to you if this is the first thing you’ve read here but I’m kinda into mobile games lately. A lot of it is because cheapo gacha RPGs and strategy games do a pretty good job of capturing that “vibe” of the random RPGs I kept collecting. Maybe not so much your FFTAs as your Luminous Arcs and Wild Arms XFs. Second and third stringer franchises just always appealed to me, I guess. It’s part getting to explore something nobody else is really talking about and part getting to relay my experiences to my friends so they can go “hey, that sounds cool” then not play them later. Even if they do exist as a front for nickel and diming susceptible players to death and funneling money to China, they check a lot of my boxes for “actually good stuff,” the bite size sessions, interesting game mechanics (well, sometimes) and most importantly getting to carry lots of cool little imaginary people around in your pocket. To train and dress up and poke at and sometimes enter multiple surprisingly non binding marriages with.
On a level sometimes it feels like I’m drawn to RPG things in Not RPGs. The aesthetics, theming, the character building, taken away from the normal format. Like say, Caladrius Blaze, the top down bullet hell shooter where you gather XP items from destroyed enemies and redeem them to increase your stats for each skill (read weapon) between stages. Or World Flipper, the surprisingly neat Pinball RPG where the heroes hop between themed worlds, solving their problems and making all sorts of friends. Bite sized. It’s got leveling and team building. There are Lots Of Dudes in it, and they all fit in your pocket. I love it.
I think another angle to all of this is how to take advantage of the language of tropes. Tropes aren’t necessarily a bad thing for you to click a Cinema Sins dinger at. They’re a writing shorthand and can be useful for saving time or grabbing attention. Anime does this a lot. Especially lately. But that’s a rabbit hole for another day. (Maybe.) There’s a quest in Half Minute Hero where Hero meets, befriends, then has to kill a girl which, like everything else in the game, happens in the course of a couple minutes tops, and it’s genuinely pretty emotional. with minimal dialogue or even screen time. Your mind is filling in blanks and thinking back to other times you’ve seen a scene like this, but it’s being presented in a new and interesting way. That is to say, very fast.
Most of the pen and paper game designs I’ve attempted over the years have come from a similar place. I like designing characters and want people to enjoy them on a level past going “hey that looks neat” and scrolling along to the next. Irrgarten was a dungeon crawler card game that more or less came about because I wanted a simple game that gave people a little fantasy gaming “fix” with minimal setup and the early concepts of Critical Heaven were to basically combine the interesting battle gimmicks from Rondo of Swords and Yggdra Union. I kind of wanted to keep them as card gamey as possible but they keep turning out more and more like board games. What can I say, I just really like the idea of having a whole deck of planegirls or adventurers y’know…
In your pocket.
