The Grind: 1UP's RPG Blog

I stumbled upon 2009's Demon's Souls a bit late; since I didn't end up grabbing a PS3 until last summer, From Software's hardcore RPG had been filed away in the back of my mind under the category of "things I should probably try one day." That "one day" arrived sooner than later, as a 9-month stint localizing MMORPGs for Atlus gave me access to a few of the company's games at a generous employee discount. A 15-dollar price tag provided enough motivation to pick up this mysterious RPG I'd heard so much about; unbeknownst to me, this devious little game would end up devouring dozens of hours of my time over the course of ten months. And what a long, strange trip it's been.

Demon's Souls has its fans as well as its detractors, and I'd probably agree a little with both sides. Yes, Demon's Souls is frustrating. And, at times, it's just a little unfair (I've had my share of accidental deaths due to the game's unfriendly controls). The fact that it's taken me most of a year just to reach the near-end should tell you that Demon's Souls isn't like most other games. Though, to be fair, my time with Demon's Souls didn't amount to week after week of bashing my head against the many overwhelming challenges within; I'd dip back into the game every month or so, make a touch of progress, then some horrible, repeated death would cause me to shelve it temporarily. Games have a habit of breaking me, and Demon's Souls broke me several times.

But my victories with Demon's Souls -- while brief -- have been some of the most memorable gaming experiences of my life. Though the game doesn't feature the same sort of reactive AI found in Left 4 Dead, Demon's Souls has a habit of only letting you win by the skin of your teeth (when it actually lets you win). Boss battles inevitably end with sweaty palms, a thumping heart, and, most importantly, an endorphin rush that few other games can produce. To call Demon's Souls rewarding is a bit of an understatement; after besting one of the game's many colossal beasties, you can feel confident that your success came from careful planning, wise decisions, and sometimes a secluded location to snipe your foes from a distance (hey, when Demon's Souls fights unfair, sometimes you've gotta use the same tactics).

Demon's Souls is not a game for the careless or brave. Anyone who enters its hostile world without shield constantly at the ready will inevitably be undone by their own hubris. And if you miss the days of survival horror, give Demon's Souls a try; few games I've played have been more frightening. Most levels force you to wander through poorly lit, decaying architecture riddled with creatures who can and will destroy you with just a few hits. Should you risk potential death to trek out to that glowing treasure in the distance, or play it safe and stick to the main path? Regardless of your choice, you'll probably die -- but you'll learn something from the experience (note: that lesson isn't "don't play Demon's Souls").

As I type this blog post, I have one area of the game to finish, and it's hardly a favorite of Demon's Souls fans. Last weekend, I made my way through the first section of the Valley of Defilement, leaving a large open swamp in front of me, ready to be invaded and plundered of its many marshy riches. Not an easy task, since most of the level is flooded with mucky water that poisons and restricts movement -- not the enemies', of course. But I vow to you, 1UP readers, that this will be the weekend I can finally put Demon's Souls away for good. It has to happen soon, since Atlus isn't far from shutting down the game's servers; and with Dark Souls coming this October, I can't possibly bear playing victim to two From Software RPGs at once. Though Demon's Souls is purposely designed for multiple run-throughs, I can only take so much abuse.

And when the final credit rolls, is it too much to ask that From Software send me some sort of badge to commemorate the event? Or a sash? Is it possible to be made King of Video Games for the day? Whatever the case, I will forever carry the mental scars gained from Demon's Souls -- and proudly. It's not often that so many hours invested in a video game end up being this meaningful.

First things first. No, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 is not the recently released Professional version of the game, which contains roughly 100 monsters more than the vanilla version being localized for the U.S. (including, alarmingly, Dragon Quest IX's Scary Spice-like faerie companion Sandy). Nintendo's official line is that we're getting the older version of Joker 2 because Professional has a steeper difficulty level and is meant for gamers who enjoy a longer, more obsessive relationship with the series than most Americans have.

"But who knows?" a company representative told me. "Maybe if you write great articles about the game, lots of people will play it and we'll bring over the others." Right. Theoretically, it's also possible that if I spit in the ocean long enough, I'll cause the ocean levels to rise and civilization will collapse.

Futility aside, I think Nintendo is perfectly content to serve up Joker 2 as a niche product. As an RPG on the aging DS hardware, it's unlikely to set any sales records on this side of the ocean, even if the marketing message plays up the similarities of the game to Pokémon. The Monsters sub-series has an interesting back-and-forth relationship with Pokémon. Dragon Quest V brought monster-collecting to the series back in 1992. Pokémon launched in 1995 with a Dragon Quest-inspired combat system focused entirely around building teams of monsters. Enix retorted with Dragon Quest Monsters three years later, which brought the whole thing back home by casting players as a trainer in charge of a troupe of traditional Dragon Quest beasties. The two series aren't carbon copies, but they have a lot in common... not least of which being the way they don't change much from installment to installment.

This means that if you played the original Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker in 2007, you have a pretty solid grip on how Joker 2 will play. You control a different hero (he has dark hair instead of white, and he thankfully doesn't wear a chain wallet), and the story set-up has changed (your quest is based around escaping a shipwreck on an island rather than winning a tournament). For the most part, however, the mechanics are largely the same as before: You recruit creatures by impressing them with a show of force, while the most advanced monsters (roughly 50 of them, including the final boss-tier beasts) can only be acquired through complicated acts of fusion.

Monster fusion is what it sounds like; it's basically the Dragon Quest alchemy pot applied to living creatures. The moral ramifications might sounds questionable, but they're never really addressed. In fact, Nintendo has gone the extra step by wallpapering over any questionable moral issues with a localization decision that amusingly hearkens back to the olden days of NES censorship. In the Japanese version of the game, players had to combine male and female monsters to make fusion work; in the U.S. edition, they went with magnetic "plus" and "minus" attributes over the intimation that your grinning slime might be having sex with a drackee. Or with a dragon. Or boss troll.

Come to think of it, this is probably a change for the best.

Despite Nintendo's decision to go with the older version of Joker 2, there's still a ridiculous amount of content to experience here. The intricacy of the game's monster collecting and fusion systems should appeal to the same folks who obsess over creating perfect Pokémon teams... although the truly OCD will find Joker 2 maddening. Players can collect more than 300 monsters, but their monster pen is limited to 100 creatures at a time. Hard choices are in store for the completists among you.

Fans may bemoan that the golden age of RPGs left us long ago, but few have done anything substantial to combat this problem. Sure, we can always resort to Internet petitions in the hopes that our cries of injustice will reach certain corporate overlords, but these kinds of grassroots efforts -- while admirable -- don't have a history of panning out. Robert Boyd and Bill Stiernberg of Zeboyd games decided to address our current JRPG drought by creating two of their very own for Xbox Live Indie Games; and since these titles hit the online marketplace Steam two weeks ago, they received a warm welcome from old-school gamers looking for a fix. To find out how these two clever and creative RPGs came into being, I threw a few questions to Robert and Bill in the hopes of enlightenment.

1UP: What inspired the creation of your parody RPGs?

RB: I've wanted to make a full blown RPG ever since I first heard about Dragon Warrior as a child, but I think the real catalyst from wanting to make a game to actually making one was Guadia Quest in Retro Game Challenge. I played it and thought, "I could totally do this!"

I had long thought that an undead-themed RPG would be really fun to make and to play. The original plan was to make it into a serious game, but when we were trying to come up with a name, "Breath of Death" came up. The name was too awesome in its awfulness and so we decided to go the opposite direction and make it into a full blown parody.

Cthulhu Saves the World's inspiration was very similar. I wanted to make a Lovecraft RPG, but I'm better at comedy and eventually the two concepts (Lovecraft + comedy) came together.

1UP: How do you balance humor and game play? Do you feel that the two are ever at odds with one another?

RB: When you ask people to name funny RPGs, generally the first game that comes to mind is Earthbound. Why Earthbound and not Okage: Shadow King(which in my opinion is the funnier game)? Because if you took out all the humor, Earthbound would still be a good RPG; Okage would not.

In making a game, my first priority is to make the game fun. Making the game funny is a useful step towards making the game fun, but humor is not the ultimate goal. I love getting emails from people that say "I bought your game thinking it would just be a throwaway game with a lot of jokes, but I was surprised to find out that the game itself was actually really enjoyable.

I do think it's very important that game play and theme should match though. In Cthulhu Saves the World, we tried to make the game play fit the theme better by adding the idea of turning enemies insane. Or to give another example, let's consider a zombie apocalypse RPG. A problem with making a zombie RPG work would have to be the concept of XP. You would want the player to fear the zombies and try to avoid them at all costs, but the traditional concept of XP encourages the player to seek out fights so as to become more powerful. In order to make the game play match the theme, you would have to change the XP system drastically -- maybe instead of getting XP from killing enemies, the player would gain XP by achieving various accomplishments (like passing a large group of zombies without using any ammo or reaching various points on the map).

However, I don't see any problem with making comedy work with good game play. I guess you could make a game that's intentionally bad as a kind of joke, but that generally doesn't go over very well - just look at Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard.

BS: What you have to watch out for when poking fun at certain genre tropes is that your game doesn't fall into or rely on those tropes too much itself. At the same time, when you're aiming to make a game with a certain specific style in the genre, you don't want to go completely overboard with new design. So the balance there is trying to make the game feel like the old classics of the genre, while also providing something fresh. The other issue with humorous games is that humor is pretty subjective - not everyone is going to think the jokes are funny, so you still want to provide a game with fun mechanics so that even those who don't find it fun still find it enjoyable.

1UP: How do you feel about the current state of JRPGs? Do you have any response to the claims made in an article we've recently published on the subject?

RB: It's a good article, but the timing made me laugh -- the article came out soon after our games were released on Steam to great sales. Now admittedly, great sales for a small indie team are drastically different than great sales for a game that cost millions of dollars to make, but I think the principle is basically the same - if a small team with no marketing budget can release a JRPG-style game and make a profit, I don't see why a big company with a reputation and a huge budget can't do the same.

With the SNES, PS1, and PS2, Square-Enix had a Final Fantasy ready within a year or two of the system's launch that inevitably sold well and encouraged other publishers that there was a market for JRPGs on that system. However, this generation has been different -- when Final Fantasy XIII came out, the XBox 360 was already over four years old.

There had been a few decent successes like Lost Odyssey and Demon's Souls, each of which have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but with the absence of a big flagship game early on to convince decision makers that there is still a market for JRPGs and with the growing popularity of the portable systems in Japan, the number and quality of JRPGs on the home consoles has been dwindling.

What I really don't get is why Nintendo of all people fail to see the potential. One of their best-selling series is Pokemon, which is about as traditional of a JRPG as you can get, complete with turn-based battles and lots of grinding. If each new Pokemon installment can manage to sell millions of copies, then surely a couple of Wii RPGs that are already being translated for the European market can make enough money to justify their release in the US.

However, with that said, I think a new golden age of JRPGs is upon us -- the indie age. Besides Zeboyd Games, you also have Carpe Fulgur (translated Recettear), Watermelon Development (Pier Solar), SRRN Games (Ash), and more, along with indie developers doing other forms of RPGs like Gaslamp Games (Dungeons of Dredmor) and Spiderweb Software (Avadon). If the big companies want to believe the market for JRPGs is dead, then so be it -- that will just make it easier for us to reap the rewards from the audience that they have abandoned.

BS: JRPGs are difficult to develop in the current generation. During the 16-bit, 32-bit, and last generations, you either had at least one console that had a large install base and reasonable costs to develop for. Today, many gamers are highly focused on the HD consoles, where development costs tend to be high and the installed bases are split between the 360 and the PS3. This scenario provides a far more risky proposition than in previous generations, and it seems like the niche JRPG development studios held off. The Wii provides a large installed base with relatively low development costs, but it was never heavily supported by traditional JRPG companies much early on either.

At this point, most of these developers and publishers focused their efforts on the largest existing market for these types of games -- the handhelds. With low costs of development and larger installed bases than the consoles in Japan, it became very practical to release JRPGs on the handhelds. With a bare few major attempts at bringing JRPGs to the West, many of us are left with our last impressions of games like Final Fantasy XIII in our minds and not much else, and perhaps that lends to the notion that JRPGs are now less popular or dying. The genre never got much support early on (despite MS's costly attempts in publishing deals), and thanks to the less risky PSP/NDS markets, the JRPG genre tended towards handhelds where it has done pretty well this generation. I would love for more JRPGs to get localized over here, but I can see the business reasons not to do so. I would hope that in forthcoming console generations that digital distribution becomes an option that more developers/publishers take, both on the consoles and the PC, since at the very least it mitigates much of the risk associated with retail publishing.

1UP: Your games have recently been made available on Steam, and, from what I've been reading, both of you seem to be very happy with how they're doing. Can you comment on your relationship with Steam and the implications of having your games available to a much wider audience?

RB: Steam has been great, both in helping to market our games and in helping us with any technical issues that may arise. And we're thrilled that more people are buying our games now than ever before.

Not just because the extra money means that we might actually be able to afford to buy and play other people's games, but also because we have many ideas that we think would make for great games that we haven't been able to work on before now due to a lack of resources and funds.

BS: Regarding Steam: we can't speak in too much detail about the subject, but Valve is a great company to work with. They are very organized with their platform, and they are incredibly supportive of independent games, which is fantastic. Once we started working with Valve, they have been very responsive in helping us get our games up and running on their service, and it has been a great experience working with them.

The implications of having our games on a wider audience have been pretty important. When we were solely releasing on the XBLIG platform, our business was on sort of shaky grounds. Our games did well for the XBLIG market, but whether that market was large enough to provide viable long term revenue for our company was up in the air. Having released our games on the PC, it became very quickly apparent that we were going to be able to healthily sustain our business. As a result, we are now able to move forward with our next game with confidence and without that sort of lingering anxiety over the necessary, minimum funding to do so that we had while only releasing on the XBLIG platform. It's going to allow us to make our next games better, and help us plan for the future. We are still extremely appreciative of those who ventured into the Xbox Indie market to give our games a chance as well as those who bought our games on the PC platform.

Dragon Age II is not the game that you think it is. It never was, and no matter what most people say about the fundamental differences between it and it’s [admittedly] superior predecessor – the singular voice of a main character, the lack of choices between origins and race, the “Mass Effecting” of combat and even menu navigation – it never would have been. Yet beyond DAII’s shifts in character design and conversation trees, it seems that it was ultimately made to do one thing: Break the world apart.

Alright, let me explain for a second (and if you haven’t finished DAII, now would be a good time to click on one of our swank sponsors, because you’ll absolutely see SPOILERS). Lead designers at BioWare have been stating that not only is the Dragon Age franchise a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate (and their roots in hard core RPGs), but it is also more about the world that the player inhabits more so than the characters that they play. DAII personifies this by taking the player out of control of the Warden from the first game and into the identity of Hawk, love him/her or not. You knew that already.

Structurally, though, DAII is a black sheep even as far as other BioWare games are concerned, and specifically for the story alone. Take Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, and even Dragon Age: Origins for example: The player is given a hub of some kind (a ship or a campsite, maybe) and three to four tasks to complete. Essentially, they’re the Western RPG equivalent of a grocery shopping list; go grab these specific things and then do the work at the checkout. Dragon Age II bucks this trend by presenting a more linear approach to not only the life of Hawk and his sidekicks, but also the world that the player Hawk inhabits. Tensions are mounting between the mages of the world and the Chantry, and the Qunari aren’t really in the mood for screwing around with politics. But it takes years of Hawks life (and tens of hours of the player’s time) to come to these conclusions and deal with them, no matter what decisions are made in coping with it all. It’s a straight line: Hawk will begin the game as a refugee and end it as the Champion of Kirkwall, and there’s nothing the player can do to change this save of turning off the console.

In comparison, few other RPGs from Japan or otherwise have done this “singular track” design conceit as well as perhaps Final Fantasy X. What many people fail to express, much as they love to gush over the PlayStation 2 RPG, is that it is one of the best marriages of design and plot that most games even try to achieve. Think about it: Yuna is on a pilgrimage, it’s Tidus’ (your) job to defend her, the pilgrimage ends in Zanarkand, then you deal with your endgame tasks. Final Fantasy X is a straight line for the vast majority of the game, but the plot is structured so that the game path was on equal terms; there’s an end point, and we’re going to get there (endgame tasks aside). Dragon Age II largely unwinds in a similar fashion, though maybe less intimately. As a framed narrative told by Varric, we know that the players’ Hawk will go from refugee to savior of Kirkwall, so (like Final Fantasy X) we know that the course of our actions are charted out for us, no matter how mean or nice we are – a now-standard BioWare design system – to the people that we meet along the way.

After this week’s Legacy DLC campaign, though, this all goes out the window.

To be fair, Legacy is a pretty good (though maybe not great) chunk of downloadable content from a company that seems to really get how to make their games’ last. The first Dragon Age, after all, had seven downloadable add-ons (including the free ones packaged in new copies of the game) that did its best to expand the world. Mass Effect 2 is in a similar boat. Legacy, on the other hand, is the first batch of DLC that DAII has seen since its release in March, which is slow for BioWare standards. From a design perspective, a few things have been said for how it plays, addressing DAII’s chief criticisms, but not enough has been said about how it ends that should make fans of the series take notice.

In fact, I would go so far to say that Legacy does its best to divorce story and gameplay more than other BioWare games and DLC thus far. Ultimately, very little has changed from how you hold that controller; the player still hits the X or A button to deliver regular attacks while using the leftover face buttons to issue other varieties of enemy stomping. The environment is certainly a spin on DAII’s major flaws, though, in that the dungeons that your Hawk and companions’ traverse is expansive to the extent of one of the main campaign objectives in the Dragon Age: Origins. But the stronghold that the player’s Hawk explores is still a very linear battlement, and it is meant to get you to the final confrontation.

But this is where things go a little batshit as far as linear RPGs go. When finally meeting that last boss, you find that it is one of the original Tevinter magisters that became corrupt and devolved into what the series’ lore calls “darkspawn.” He is one of the first, and he doesn’t want to cuddle no matter how much your smarmy rogue wants to crack wise. If none of this makes any sense, you’ve just proved my point: The Dragon Age II: Legacy expansion is meant for fans of the game’s lore more than its gameplay. By not playing Dragon Age: Origins at all (because this was all explained in the opening cinematic) (yes, for real), one wouldn’t have any idea how much weight this DLC may carry from a world-building perspective. For all we know, the other Tevinter magisters that fell upon the Black City are still alive and atoning for their sins, and they may be the key for ending the cycle of Blights when the series finally decides to put a period on itself. Maybe we’ll never know that, though. But that’s all part of the fun.

Dragon Age, now in its second entry proper, has just made it abundantly clear that its world is just as important – if not more so – than the individual characters that you and I roll up at the beginning of a new game. Sorry to break your (and your Grey Warden’s) hea