I'm Mature Now, Why Aren't My Video Games?

by Jeff Peoples

   I don't want to get off on a rant here, but Dennis Miller doesn't deal with video games. For about a decade of my life I have woken up to RPGs and Adventure games like cereal, and for, lets say, the past two years I have become more sensitive to the mere pea-size amount of mature story lines in the gaming industry. "What!?," you might say, "the gaming industry, especially the computer gaming industry, survives off the sale of blood and gore." Yes, yes they do survive off the sale of blood and gore, in games like Unreal, Alice and Quake, but they do not survive off the blood and gore of mature storylines. The keyword there is storylines; my blood has an enthralling-storyline deficiency.

   Do these games ring a bell: Gabriel Knight, Quest For Glory, Police Quest, Space Quest, and even Leisure Suit Larry? What do these games have in common? They all have a complex story, three-dimensional characters and, most of all, mature themes. Selling in the same period of time (those mentioned above were all series) were Final Fantasy 1-3, Dragon Warrior 1-4, Lufia, Breath of Fire, and one could perhaps even include Chrono Trigger. I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy all the hours I put into the latter games, I'm just saying that a lot of the enjoyment I got from them may have stemmed from my age, being around 9-12 years of age. Now exiting my teenage years, I sometimes find it difficult to sit through the 30+ hours of RPGs being released today. The banality of the plots forces me to read through the dialogue with speed-reading technique, and at times I'm tempted to drop the controller in favor of a good book.

   You might be wondering, what in Sephiroth's lineage do I mean by complex story, three-dimensional characters and mature themes. And if you're not, you are now. When I say complex story I mean a story that intrigues me, a story that is original, or has an original twist. If I can predict every plot turn, or the world is not presented in a believable fashion, either through bad dialogue or just bad concept, the story is then not complex. For example, consider Legend of Dragoon. A six year-old child could have stencilled out a more original plot than what Sony tried to throw at us, with pretty graphics. Not only was the plot contrived, the writers created dialogue so generic that for a moment, when I first saw a Dragoon (when you defend that town at the beginning of the game) and the heroes decided to save the world, I thought I was listening to the cardboard replica of the first stock hero ever envisioned. If I hadn't sold the game to Funcoland in order to help pay for Chrono Cross, I would have included the exact, shameful quote related to the scene I described before.

   I suppose that the three-dimensional characters tie in with the complex plot. When I think of three-dimensional, I think of character development: enough exploration of a character through dialogue, events and description to make a character appear unique. This is one of the greatest pitfalls of RPG stories. Often (I'll use the extreme case of Dragon Warrior for my example), a story will give a lung full of wind about how valorous a character is in battle, or how devoted he is to his king and country, but not even a breath of air to how he treats his wife or brother or sister or daughter or the countless other relations we have in life. So, consequently, we get a one-dimensional character. What this ends up making me feel is not a damned thing. I do not have feelings about the character, and so therefore I would care less about what he does in battle.

   Console RPG companies seem almost reticent to introduce mature themes into their stories. The classic example of this is Xenogears, arguably the most mature RPG to grace a console and, sadly, almost the most mature RPG never to grace a console. Anyone who visited RPGamer before Xenogears' release would know of Square's concern that American gamers would find Xenogears' plot inappropriate or too mature. There was also a petition, which I am proud to have signed, urging the release of Xenogears on American shelves. When I talk about mature themes I presume that a story has some sort of developed social criticism, and when I say criticism I do not mean an expression of dissatisfaction, I mean that the story has some analysis of the basic institutions of our society, such as religion, family, justice, education and economics. Nor does the criticism have to be necessarily "bad" or "good", it could simply have an insightful representation. Xenogears, for example, gave an intriguing twist on the dangers of faith and the abuse of power that might develop. Dragon Warrior, on the other hand, gave a glimpse of the possibilities of RPGs, if anything. Xenogears, by the way, explored many ideas including soul mates, human origin and intolerance. Even though it may have explored them in a bizarre fashion, it provides a standard for a quality of storytelling that the makers of future RPGs can start from.

   So, what will the future of console RPGs and computer RPGs look like, for that matter? Will we ever see a game's dialogue written well, by professional authors, and spoken articulately, by professional actors, like in Gabriel Knight? Will my dreams be haunted by the same dreams the characters have in Gabriel Knight? Or will the characters' dialogue and depth consist of a few phrases repeated consistently and redundantly in the same tone of voice, like in Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, or have a plot so ordinary, like Legend of Dragoon, that I have the impulse to hang myself with the controller chord? If video games, and RPGs in particular, ever wish to enter the same artistic league as literature and film, the former possible future must be reached.