CONTINUATION TO: Narrative in RPGs - Characters (Part One of Three)
Welcome to part two of my three-part editorial series about story-telling in RPGs, how it compares to narrative in movies, and how to improve it. In case you missed it, part one can be found via the link above.
Dialogue is one of the most important aspects of both movies and video games, and must be laid out well in order to tell an effective story. Lines have to flow with a certain rhythm and no piece of conversation can be wasted; even if there's plenty of time to tell a story, audiences are easily bored. Why is it, then, that so many games suffer from choppy sentences, spelling/grammatical errors, and yawn-inducing speeches? A lot of RPGs will leave you yawning and smashing the confirm button, ignoring long-winded medieval conversation so you can get to the next fight. Most of the time, characters speak so blandly that you can barely even tell them apart, while even translation errors are widespread and for some reason accepted by mainstream gamers. So what can be done to improve conversations in RPGs?
Take a look at a movie like The Departed. Because its dialogue is so good at both conveying essential elements of the plot and keeping viewers entertained, it succeeds on many levels -- it even won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Every line either progresses the plot or develops a character; nothing is wasted, and lines are crafted so perfectly that they bounce off one another and keep things coherent and moving. Alternatively, let's look at the recent mammoth RPG, Final Fantasy XII; it not only begins with a twenty minute introduction that overloads you with names and details, but drudges through the entire story with dry medieval chatter. Not to say it's a bad game by any means, and great characters like Balthier save the story from devastation, but no movie could get away with the amount of unnecessary information and dull lines thrown at you in FFXII or just about any RPG, for that matter. Even the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, which takes place in one of the most richly-detailed fantasy worlds ever created, manages to infuse the prologue with just enough history so the viewer knows what's going on, then provides the rest of the story through action. There's nothing that disconnects me from the world more than bad dialogue and overwhelming amounts of names and places during cutscenes that have no relevance to my story.
Because most console RPGs are shipped to the states from Japan, dialogue in many English RPGs suffers accordingly; too many sentence meanings are lost in translation. Look at a game like Final Fantasy Tactics; it has such an epic story that it's a real shame how horrible the translation was. Mangled grammar and unintelligible lines make dialogue impossible to get through. Of course, there are exceptions to the majority; the recent Super Paper Mario has hilarious and clever lines and a multitude of great pop culture references. The best example of excellent translation, however, can be seen in the Lunar series (just Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete, not their demon-spawn siblings). Every single character in both of those games has something meaningful and usually hysterical to say, and when playing them you'll find yourself taking the time to talk to everybody in towns. Not only do your party members have brilliant interactions, they all react to what NPCs say, filling them with life and making it feel like they're really people in the game world. Other companies would do well to take after Working Designs (R.I.P.) when it comes to translating games.
Okay, RPG designers - if you want to tell a good story, you need to make dialogue interesting and engaging. I want to see more humor, more realistic interactions between characters, and most importantly a sense of rhythm -- just because an RPG is a video game doesn't mean it's okay for it to have a poor script. Of course, video games are an entirely different form of media than movies, but at the heart of any story there is a protagonist, a desire, and conflict; every single line of dialogue irrelevant to one of those three things should be removed or, at brevity's expense, at least made entertaining.
Still with me? Keep checking Editorials for the conclusion to my essay, "Narrative in RPGs: Part Three of Three – Interaction," coming soon!
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