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Despite the fact that much of the media attention and popular
success for Nintendo's DS handheld has been driven by its Touch
Generations (included titles such as Nintendogs and Brain Training)
line of games, with its emphasis and appeal to casual and lapsed
gamers, it almost seems as though the hardware designers back in
Kyoto designed their latest handheld device specifically for the
exact needs of another, much older and much more traditional genre
-- strategy RPGs. Indeed, while there are still precious few of the
games either on the system or announced for development on it (the
flagship game at present is Hironobu Sakaguchi's Archaic Sealed
Heat, but it has little competition), in many respects the system
has the potential to become the best hardware for strategy RPGs ever
designed.
Certainly it's not a perfect system by any means. It's true that
the NDS is graphically underpowered compared to its handheld
competitor, the PSP. However, if one looks at the history of the
strategy RPG genre, these games have rarely, if ever, been
graphically reliant -- even following the advent of cinematic RPGs
on the PlayStation and Saturn, SRPGs have eschewed the more advanced
production values and technically powerful graphics that have become
hallmarks of traditional and even many action RPGs. Final Fantasy
Tactics, still the most acclaimed and popular game in the genre,
followed Final Fantasy VII with small isometric battlefields and
even smaller sprites (almost unthinkable in the midst of the Polygon
Revolution). Ogre Battle 64 was, graphically speaking, a joke
compared to the rest of the N64's library. Vandal Hearts I & II,
Tactics Ogre, Kartia, Breath of Fire V, Fire Emblem, Disgaea,
Shining Force I & II -- it's hard to see how these games have
ever been graphical powerhouses and, as such, how they would suffer
from the decreased potential graphical output of the NDS.
Meanwhile, in every other mechanical regard, the system is
custom-made to fit the needs of these games. Think about it.
What's one of the biggest needs in an SRPG? Answer: information
management. Success in an SRPG is driven by knowing the necessary
information and properly managing it. Which unit has its turn next,
and which unit has its turn five turns after that one? What are my
unit's statistics, and what are the statistics of the unit I'm
considering attacking? If I move my unit here, what impact will the
height or terrain have on his ability to attack, defend, or use a
special ability? What items are the various units on the field
carrying, and what special abilities are they capable of performing?
It's the successful combatant that comes prepared to every challenge
with a willingness to find out all this information and keep track
of it throughout the ebb and flow of the conflict. Unfortunately,
managing this steady flood of information is often a tedious,
disruptive process that involves interrupting the flow of gameplay.
Pause the game, toggle out of the action into a menu to check a
unit's status or aces the help file on a terrain or ability.
But as Advance Wars: Dual Strike successfully demonstrated, the
DS can simplify and streamline this process by putting a display of
unit, competitive, and terrain information right before the player's
eyes at all times. The top screen of the DS is perfect for
presenting all of this information and more on the fly, without the
annoying need to toggle out of the gameplay to access it. And while
this may seem like little more than a minor convenience, it's hard
to overstate just how much it can add to the cohesion and flow of a
game.
Look right below the informative top screen and you'll see the
second gift of the DS to SRPGs: the touch screen. While gamers can
look at those titles which seek to emulate sword slashing through a
stylus and cry gimmickry all the little day long, in a stylus and
touch screen, the DS offers SRPGs a natural and genuinely intuitive
control method. The stylus, with its close approximation of the play
method of the mouse-based PC strategy games from which SRPGs
ultimately descended, is both efficient and speedy, giving gamers a
much more direct form of control over what they're trying to
accomplish. What's the standard flow of battle in an SRPG? Select a
unit (or have a unit preselected based on comparative unit speed),
and then gradually, using the d-pad, move a courser to the point of
movement. But the touch screen simplifies this, allowing you to much
more directly select the unit and then immediately touch the
destination to complete the action. Advance Wars, Age of Empires,
and Battles of Prince of Persia all amply demonstrated just how
intuitive, simple, and silky smooth this control interface is.
What's more, it works just as well when one is buried in menus
outside of the battlefield -- say, for arranging units, items, or
abilities. In this case, think of it as a kind of drag-and-drop
functionality -- see a huge list of equipment, touch the desired
one, and then simply touch the appropriate character or location.
It's efficient, it's direct, and it's fast enough to speed up the
enormous amount of time typically spent in customization menus
tweaking the battle party to just the right parameters.
However, the touch screen has an even more perfect use for one
SRPG series in particular: the Ogre Battle series, created by
visionary designer Yasumi Matsuno (also of Final Fantasy XII and
Vagrant Story fame). In Ogre Battle, a fairly unique system is used
which integrates elements of real-time strategy games into the
standard SRPG formula. Rather than by, on a turn-by-turn basis,
moving units instantaneously to a particular destination, the
critically-praised series has the player select a point of
destination for a unit and the unit will then traverse across the
terrain in real-time, generally moving in a straight line but
sometimes moving aside impassable obstacles. The touch screen would
allow a huge leap forward in this formula -- rather than allowing
units to navigate from point of origin to a destination on
auto-pilot, the specialized hardware features would enable the
player to literally draw the exact route of movement for each unit.
Want to besiege the capital of Lodis while cutting north to ford
over a river and avoid a range of heavy forestry, and then make a
detour to liberate a temple of earnest monks before reaching the
city? Okay, draw the route, with all the swerves and exacting
specifications you'd care to see. It would allow for a new level of
finesse and precision in this series -- very beneficial, given how
much there is to manage in this series without taking into account
babysitting autopilot movement. The Growlanser series, which also
uses just such a point-to-point movement interface, would also see a
similar boost in gameplay through touch screen controls.
But wait, there's more. One more thing Advance Wars did
wonderfully utilizing the dual screen setup of the DS was multimap
battles -- but AW didn't actually create this idea. The concept had
been used previously, most notably in Camelot's epic Shining Force
III trilogy. Here, the player could engage in battles across
multiple battlefied maps at one time -- for instance, while
progressing toward the map's objective (defeating a general, say), a
small detachment of troops could be sent inside a ruin to combat
thieves and claim the treasures within. The final battle of the
first game in the trilogy was a truly epic affair -- while the
army's main force fought an beatable foe on a bridge, seeking to
occupy and delay him, a smaller division worked to eliminate enemy
soldiers guarding the floodgate that was key to freeing the bridge.
The multimap battle unfolded in turns -- first the bridge force,
then the floodgate force -- but imagine how much grander it would be
if both battles were fought simultaneously across the two maps, with
actions in one having an immediate and noticeably impact in the
other? Advance Wars tried this out, and it worked brilliantly -- but
there's still so much more that can be done with the idea and so
many potential strategic applications that Shining Force III's
innovations must be explored further in this format.
With all the customization of characters and playing strategies
available in SRPGs, they're one of the best gaming genres available
for competitive play. However, due to their longer nature and the
more intimate and focused concentration they typically involve, it's
never been an appropriate genre of gaming for arcades, which have
been the primary mode of development for multiplayer competitive
games -- and so while the competitive promise of fighters, shooters,
and puzzle games was quickly realized in galleries from Osaka to New
York, the potential for SRPGs languished. But go-anywhere portable
systems and the advent of online Wifi finally offers the perfect
opportunity for the competitive promise of these games to come into
the open. Wifi Versus modes could and probably should become a
mandate in every DS SRPG to come down the pike, and it would be
nirvana for the competitive instincts in ever SRPGer tired of the
limitations of computer AI.
Let's face it, SRPG battles are typically quite long affairs.
Some of them have huge maps and evasive enemies, with complex
challenges laid before the player. And so anything that can speed
these games up and allow the player to focus on the gameplay is a
welcome blessing. That's one of the nice perks of a card or
cartridge media -- minimized loading time makes for a much quicker
gaming experience where all the time you're spending on the game is
in the midst of actual play, not black load screens. What's more,
while these battles are long, they're also the perfect type of thing
for quick picking up and playing -- they're easy to stop and then
get right back into without missing a beat. The clamshell sleep mode
of the DS is perfect for this sort of mission-based gameplay --
fight a few short rounds of a larger battle, then snap shut the
system and put it away. Pull it out an hour later, open it up, and
get right back into the midst of the conflict with no loading and
nothing lost.
Despite all the reasons why the DS is so perfect for SRPGs, there
really has been a lag in announcing these games for the system. As
RPG development in general picks up across the board for the DS,
though, there's reason to hope that we'll see a number of new SRPGs
included in the announcements as well. The system simply has too
much to offer the genre, too much potential for gameplay refinements
and innovations, to go so underused. Let's hope that Sakaguchi's ASH
is a critical and commercial success to inspire more developers.
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