"Hero's Journey" Ancient stories and current RPGs

by Xerdo Pwerko

I first learned about the "hero's journey" in a "Topics for Comparison of Cultures" class I took a while ago in my last year of high school. This "journey", as many other commonplace items among old myths, was generally directed to educate young boys to become men; a literary rite of passage. According to my professor, several old tales and epics can be described with the same structure:

First, a young man either VERY not expected, or obligated to be a hero finds a reason to leave his home into battle (generally pushed by imitation of a legendary hero who might or might not be a parent. Some are banished, also a commonplace plot-starter.)

Second, young man grows in power during his journey, meeting friends and foes, and, eventually, reaching a certain goal that will make him become a hero.

Third, young man comes back home as a hero, against all odds.

Does the structure sound familiar? Let me know if i'm out of line here, but the same storyline definitely applies to massive quantities of today's RPGs. Of course, nobody was an RPGamer in my "topics" class, and they wrote down and forgot the information just like they'd forget derivatives taught in a 7 A.M. Calculus period. But I didn't. Why? Well, wasn't my professor talking about RPGs? Definitely.

Before we know about the "real" FF7 story, we learn that Cloud leaves Nibelheim in "the past" and comes back to Tifa years later, after "completing his childhood dream", for which he left in the first place. In Xenogears, Fei is forced to leave into a journey of self-discovery (so is Rudy in Wild Arms, I hear). In Grandia, Justin, the boy everybody knew, but nobody really took seriously, Takes off on a long, perilous journey, and comes back married, after a tremendous adventure, awaited by his childhood friend Sue for over 10 years. Even FF8 has a little of the hero's journey, with Squall coming back to his past and meeting himself and Matron, after an epic adventure.

And I could keep rambling on forever, but I think it's clear how present the hero's journey, my professor's theoretical backbone of epic tales, applies to current RPGs. Think about it, look for parallelism in every RPG you play, and I guarantee you'll find it. With this, we could conclude that the "hero's journey" structure, supposedly found all over ancient epics is also a not only commonplace, but practically obligatory resource in a vast majority of today's RPG storylines.