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I am writing this while listening to Slayers Try: Treasury Vox (A Slayers Try vocal song collection) and having just dropped by RPGOne Translations, all in the hopes that the Slayers RPG translation patch was done. You might wonder what that has to do with anything, but give me a moment. Have you ever thought about just why we’ve seen so few RPGs that are truly comedic? Not childishly cute, or more light-hearted than normal, but witty, zany, rolling on the floor funny. It amazes me that, for all the talk of video games being on par with movies and literature as an art form, we have almost never seen a true-blue attempt at making the audience giggle from start to finish in a game (or at least from a game released in the United States).
This brings me back to Slayers. Anyone who’s ever seen the anime, either its three television seasons published here by Software Sculptors or the OVAs released here by ADV Films, can attest to the series’ almost non-stop parody of the swords & sorcery setting so common in RPGs. Huge dragons, evil mages, and brave swordsmen are routinely poked fun of in the adventures of Lina Inverse, a sorceress whose power is only matched by her smartass attitude and ravenous appetite. Watching the series, it’s plainly apparent that it is happily and shamelessly poking fun at everything the RPG player holds dear. It’s also plainly apparent, looking back at the area of entertainment Slayers gets much of its material from, that RPG designers are too paralyzed by the fear of fan retaliation that I discussed in my previous editorial to risk a game equally zany. It’s a crying shame that I need to wait for a fan translation of an anime game to get a funny RPG (with no guarantee even then). But why is this? The answer is simple.
With Square leading the way, RPGs have become ever more dramatic and epic in nature. In almost every RPG released in the US, you’re bombarded with helpless damsels and brooding heroes saving various fantasy worlds from immanent destruction, with heavy doses of tragedy, backstabbing and preachy moralizing along the way. And the fans eat it up, begging for more, rejecting anything that isn’t some grand epic that questions the very meaning of our existence. And given the RPG player’s Kevlar-like resistance to anything different, other story possibilities are almost summarily shoved aside in favor of the path of least resistance.
Of course, the problem isn’t limited to RPGs. We’re not exactly seeing attempts in action or platform adventure games to make us laugh out loud. However, the reason I single out the RPG (aside from this website being dedicated to them) is that, more than any other game type, the RPG needs a story to motivate the player to sludge through the endless leveling up, item/spell/equipment management and mind numbing menu-driven battles that make up the game play experience. I don’t know about anyone else, but the stories nowadays aren’t motivating me much anymore. As with the game play, the story of the RPG needs a lift, and some willingness to have fun can’t possibly hurt.
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