All I got out of this is "Hello, I have no imagination".
You're like that kid that plays D&D for the dice rolling combat portions, and complains when anything else is happening.
'WHO CARES ABOUT THIS STUPID NPC LETS JUST KILL SHIT IVE GOT AN AXE LETS GO"
What's wrong with the gameplay? You're adventuring around, piecing together a great story. Would you rather it cut to a Marioesque style game every time you walk out of a town? lol
I am not that kid that plays D&D, period. I am that kid that plays video games because of that medium’s rules and mechanics based nature. I certainly take no interest in video games for the sake of alien, unwelcome and tumorous concepts like narrative being ham fistedly forced into them by people who would rather write novels or direct movies but are too untalented to ever succeed in those fields. The very same people who then proceed to view this medium as ripe for sullying in a misguided attempt to realize their unfulfilled ambitions by proxy.
It certainly doesn't help that a bunch of kids and man-children who don't know any better actually praise these subpar efforts and hold them in high esteem, usually while being high on a powerful cocktail of nostalgia and ignorance.
Of course this only prompts esteemed critics of the mediums being ever so poorly imitated to then proceed to misunderstand what this medium is actually really about at the core thus claiming that games can never attain the lofty status of being regarded as an equal peer to the much more noble blue blooded mediums of film and literature, no sir.
The deuce you say mister critic, of course games wont ever be able do that, that is and never was their purpose, the comparison alone is farcical. This medium has a set of completely different goals and success criteria than those other narrative based mediums and these goals are all related to the origin of the medium’s name, “game”, something that you play.
But then let us take a shallow gander at the so called game mechanics behind a large subset of the RPG genre. Rip open the thin veneer and therein lies exposed the ugly hunchbacked form of the problem itself. There at the core is a tabletop game inside and at the core of almost every video game RPG.
When you exercise your sole interactive privilege within the combat system of Phantasy Star and games of its ilk by picking that "Fight" option over and over again, what you are actually doing is participating in a virtual abstraction of a tabletop dice roll.
You choose a menu command to roll a dice and see how much damage you did. That is just about as engaging as pushing the play button on a slot machine to see how much money you won.
It is this chicken brained, straight faced translation of mechanics made purposefully simple so as to be a playable tabletop activity for a group of humans using pen and paper over to the powerful computer with its infinite more possibilities that is at the rotten heart of this genre. That very same rotten heart which would give me infinite pleasure to rip out and shit upon.
RPG’s were off to a lobotomized brain dead start and lo, thirty odd years later I struggle to count on one hand the number of computer RPG's that actually take the philosophical concept of the tabletop experience, the concept of adventuring, the sole element that actually made it fun, and try to implement this divorced of its simple tabletop derived implementation in order to instead take full advantage of the starkly different competencies of the video game medium as opposed to the limitations of the tabletop medium.
RPG’s like Demon's and Dark Souls are true video game takes on the concept of fantasy adventuring in this medium.
Unfortunately such titles count for sub 1% of the genre. The rest is a miasma of nostalgic tabletop derived wank material that I do not deem fit for wiping my ass with let alone play.
What would you get if you hacked the program of most menu based RPGs to realize the following rule:
When an encounter is about to be triggered, run a sequence of quick simulations of the current party fighting these enemies by just picking the “Fight” option for a few rounds. If one average the fight can easily be won by doing this then skip the fight and instead add the experience that would have been won to the party. What you would get is many an hour of walking around without anything happening. Is this really good game design? No, it is a farce, a farce that should have ended over 30 years ago.
They can keep their ham fisted narrative too. In my decades long attempt to dissect this decadent medium I've played dozens of its offerings and not even under pain of torture could I recall a single morsel of the many cliched trite plots being forced down my throat by way of dense, unnecessary and utterly clumsy forced exposition.
Upon completion all memory of it is all gone like the intolerable stench of passed flatulence. Which is funny because I can recall in detail the plots of any favored novel that I've read, even years after having completed them.
So why do I keep coming back to genre? Because of its potential, the potential for passively established atmosphere, large worlds to explore at whim and deep, deep, deep rewarding mechanics that will take tens, hundreds of hours to master fully and offers fun, fun, fun.
After decades of all that potential being wasted on moving forward on tabletop grid like maze of corridors underground and pressing X to roll dices there finally was two people in the game design world that got it and realized the potential.
Yasumi Matsuno and Hidetaka Miyazaki, I wish I could carve your likeness upon a mountain side and worship you, you gods of gaming.
