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When I was home for Christmas last year, my mother pulled out a dozen cardboard boxes containing relics from my childhood. She packed them years ago while I was away at college — an annoying habit she had at the time — and now I was tasked with digging through their mysterious contents and deciding if they were all worth keeping. Anything I threw out inevitably broke her heart. Anything I put back in her garage was inevitably junk in her eyes, and an inexcusable waste of her precious garage space. The job succeeded at wasting my vacation time more than anything else, but I found one gem that held so much sentimental value to me, I rescued it from a frigid fate and brought it back to my apartment: my first RPG
In case you were too lazy to click that link there, it is a picture of the first Choose Your Own Adventure book I ever owned — The Secret Treasure of Tibet. Thanks to another one of my mother's habits, I know that I got it as a gift in September of 1988 when I was six years old, probably in celebration of a new school year as I entered the 1st grade.
And it occurred to me, last winter, that when I call Zelda II: The Adventures of Link or Final Fantasy IV my first RPG, I am wrong. My first RPG was actually a book. Not content to merely be read from front to cover, this book let you interact with it, and your choices altered both the ending and the story as a whole. Whereas choices in RPGs today tend to add or subtract optional cutscenes, the choices in this RPG gave you completely separate plot branches. When I finished a Choose Your Own Adventure book, I always reread it two or three or four times on the spot. When I reached a particularly difficult decision, I would write down the page number and go back to it later to take a different story path.
Although implementing branching paths in a video game is not easy on the design or the development time, it has been done well in a few cases. In Radiata Stories, I was so torn over the game's major, lose-lose decision that I turned off the TV and pondered what selection to make while cooking and eating dinner. Tactics Ogre has one of my favorite video game decisions when you are ordered to murder a group of women and children. The best aspect of both those games' options is that your choice permanently changes the course of the game, including the levels, plot, recruitable characters, and who lives and dies. Nocturne has a series of philosophically charged moral choices, and while I enjoy those sequences, I wish they had a larger impact on the game's events aside from setting the endgame bosses and the short ending cutscene. A big disappointment in Fable 2 for me was that, for all the freedom it gave you, only a couple choices had lasting consequences, and they were not very grand. I prefer how Fallout 3 let me permanently determine the fates of the world's inhabitants.
Customizability and strategy in RPGs are currently limited to statistical growth and the battle system if they are present at all, while the world, character development, and plot are relatively rigid. If a children's book let me affect its characters, setting, and story, surely a video game — a form of entertainment that constantly requires interaction — can manage this as part of a full RPG with towns and dungeons and monsters and whatnot. I enjoy interacting with the plot as much as I enjoy interacting with the combat. Esteemed critic Hassan Stevenson said The Secret Treasure of Tibet "Makes you think thoroughly before making decisions." I want to be able to say that about more RPGs.
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