Checkmate

by Themdegans

In 1997 Squaresoft released Final Fantasy VII, which, as anyone at this site would know, brought the RPG genre of videogames into the mainstream. Not too long after releasing Final Fantasy VII, which had overwhelming success thanks in part to a media blitz, Squaresoft quietly released yet another Final Fantasy. This one didn't have a number, and was unlike any other Final Fantasy before it. This game is of course Final Fantasy Tactics, which can be considered the first truly popular strategy RPG, and while admittedly that prominence capitalized on the Final Fantasy logo and the success of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics was still a great game that enthralled most everyone who bought it. Over 50 hours of quality gameplay lay on that disc, and if you truly wanted to master it, you could quite literally spend over a hundred hours sifting through the finer details of the battle system, with the strategy required on par with chess.

Since the release of Final Fantasy Tactics, the number of strategy games on the market has steadily increased. I won't attempt to bore you with the details of the different franchises and games that were spawned since then, as I'm sure you know all about Tactics Ogre and the such. Instead, I'll focus on the recent deluge of strategy RPGs that have been released or will be released relatively soon. What better proof of the increasing popularity of the strategy RPG genre than the numerous releases of such games? One example is Disgaea, a fine strategy RPG that promises hours of chess-like battling. Another such game is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which proves to be a very in-depth strategy RPG requiring meticulous planning of every move, thanks to the rule system and the basic battle system used for Final Fantasy Tactics, with some minor tweaking of course. And then you have other games that will soon be coming out. A prominent example is Nintendo's Fire Emblem, which will soon be making its stateside debut, long after its Japanese debut. Fire Emblem is the ultimate proof of the strategy RPG's increasing popularity for when Nintendo first decided not to bring the game to North America, it was because they feared that westerners wouldn't want to play a strategy RPG. Now, after the success of games like Advance Wars, Nintendo is actually bringing it over.

Naturally, however, the real question of strategy RPGs is not if they're popular, for I can think of the old adage, "What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right." That seems to have little relevance to videogames, but it really is a relevant issue. Are strategy RPGs good, or right, for the RPG genre? For the most part, it can be said that it is the case, and I would agree. For years now RPGs have prided themselves on gameplay, yet the truth of the matter is random battles get just plain repetitive, and the strategy in battles has gone. There have been attempts to infuse strategy back into regular RPGs, but in the end battles devolve into who has the bigger sword. Numerous times a player can get away with entering into a semi-intellectual slugfest, that little bit of intelligence merely being knowing when to prove that you're smarter than electronic bits of data and actually healing yourself, or deciding not to use attacks that do little to no damage. But really, that's all common sense. In the strategy RPG however, you cannot repeat the same strategy, and entering into a mere slugfest is a viable option for suicide. You might get away with it, but only perhaps one percent of the time. Plus, just like in chess, if you fail to play with every aspect in mind, or repeat the same strategy over, your defeat is almost guaranteed. Also, with elements like the rule system in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the idea of repetitiveness quickly dies as the conditions of battle change.

And yet, just as I openly advocate the furthering of the strategy RPG genre, I will also be the first to admit its faults. One of the most important things is for developers to keep in mind that while gameplay is of utmost importance in the battle-heavy RPG genre, plot and character creation/development are even more important, for RPG does stand for role-playing game. As the player, we step into the shoes of a character. If we don't care what happens to that character, or are not utterly fascinated, or at least slightly interested in, the plot, what's the motivation to continue playing? Unfortunately, the idea of perfecting gameplay has become too important to developers, and the story can suffer greatly. Some games, such as Final Fantasy Tactics, have great plots, albeit poor localization in the instance of Final Fantasy Tactics. Others, such as Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, have plots that are just good enough to keep me from turning off the power, unable to wait for the next battle. However, this is an easily remedied issue, and not too much concern needs to be allotted to it.

The biggest issue comes from the strategy RPG's greatest strength, the battles. Battles can become long-winded struggles in which the dominator of the battle and the dominated of the battle are easily flipped with a few clever moves that not only put you in an advantageous situation, but also cripple your opponent in terms of movement and other such things. The problem with this is, quite naturally, that after a long struggle you can still lose, and without good preparation and decisions right from the start of both the battle and the game itself, you can lose often, which makes for a less-than-enjoyable experience as you struggle for hours just to get past that one tough battle, or in some cases those numerous tough battles. I speak from experience, as after playing Final Fantasy Tactics for over twenty hours I hit a brick wall when I realized even the most airtight strategies I could produce quite simply weren't enough to compensate for poor decisions at the beginning of the game when choosing job classes and the like. Of course, such need for planning straight from the start is basically the very essence of a strategy RPG, so there really is no imaginable solution to such a problem. However, once you do get a hang of things, the experience becomes very rewarding and the battles are fun and even tension-filled.

So, the final fact of the matter when it comes to strategy RPGs is that while it is a genre with flaws and defects, it is overall a fresh change from the normal and repetitive breed of RPGs that are more popular, even high-quality games such as the Final Fantasy series. And just like with the mainstream variant of RPGs, which evolved over the process of more than a decade to become what it is, over the years strategy RPGs will be tweaked, and its problems fixed, we the consumers merely need to continually prove that investing the time to make such tweaks is a profitable investment. If we do, perhaps we can find a hybrid of the mainstream RPGs, to which plot is central, and strategy RPGs, to which gameplay is central, and then, as we all play RPGs at their best, we'll all be winners in this chess game.