Survey by Gaming?

by John Rogalski

I know that many of the readers that frequent RPGamer are familiar with the "extra" characters that Square placed into FF6. A normal individual might speculate that the characters Gogo and Umaro were placed in there as filler to the game, or just for the designer's sheer pleasure. In a way I would tend to agree, but I also have another twist to throw into that thinking. Is it at all possible that those kooky characters could have served a purpose for research and development?

My basic premise is that those characters were put into the game to test out how the consumers would respond to new abilities and ways of attacking. I don’t have any real proof to back up my little hypothesis, but take a look at the facts in the game and then in subsequent games. Gogo was hands down a fun character to play around with. You could have him do anything that anyone else could, and at times that was very handy. Gogo’s ability to mime attacks and to use other characters skills was well worth being eaten by the Zone Eater and the maze that followed. Now, with his mime skills in mind, we saw the dawn of the "Mime" material skill in FF7. Because of this I feel that he was a success to Square when they saw how much the character had actually caught on with the consumers.

Umaro on the other hand I felt was more of a failure. He wasn’t hard to find at all, and he would control his own actions. Most gamers out there know however that if you gave him the Blizzard Orb, or his other personal relic, the gamer could then control what he did. Even then, his attacks were limited. I think the real test behind Umaro was to see what consumers thought of a character in your party that basically ran himself. I personally thought of him as a big furry oaf, like Chewbacca, but I always dragged him into the final battle with Kefka just to see him do his thing in style. It is possible that Umaro did help Square develop a technique. Umaro’s moves, especially the picking up Mog and throwing him as an attack, made a cameo in the SNES Square hit Super Mario RPG. Bowser would pick up Mario, or the Mario doll, and wing him at the enemy.

Square has always done and still continues to do excellent work on all of their games, but I feel like the quality of the game is being sold out to higher resolution graphics. I enjoy viewing these changes, but I don’t walk away from the game with exact same feeling that I had grown up loving. Maybe FF10 will be more enjoyable for me than the others have.