December 18 Update
Added 2022-12-18 18:02:04 +0000 UTCLustmas continues as we see Santa's elves hard at work! With a bonus frame, like a Christmas card, so that you can send this one to your grandparents. I hope everyone has been enjoying Lustmas and looks forward to the Christmas finale next week. ^-^
Meanwhile, I'm going to continue the unplanned season of long text posts by rambling on a subject that's been on my mind. I don't only think about whether some game concepts are unworkable in the context of adult games; it comes up in other sub-genres too as I try to think about narrative on a fundamental level.
Of course, creators can do whatever they want, but I'm not considering that simple answer. There are also questions of whether you can do something well, or in such a way that you actually reach an audience. This leads me to think about certain narrative "problems" and wonder if they're truly solvable. Almost like a chess composition.
In this case, I'm thinking about JRPGs with a certain tone and whether or not it would be possible to do a subversion twist without losing your audience. If you play the subgenre, you probably know what I'm talking about: the main character is idealistic without having put too much thought into their ideals, refuses to give up in the face of adversity, and may reference the power of friendship. I think in this company it's safe to say these stories are often naive and uncomplicated. What I'd like to do is take this character and slowly turn them into the villain: not in a corrupted sense, but doing increasingly terrible things for justice with their friends.
A lot of people might hear that and go "haha" but executing it is the tricky part. I'd want to play the initial tropes straight, which means you have a potential problem of splitting your audience: the people who like the earnest part will hate the twist, and the people who would have liked the twist won't play long enough to see it. I worried about this with TLS, with people bouncing off the prologue, and this hypothetical game would need a much longer prologue than ten minutes.
There are hypothetical solutions, of course:
1) Hint about the twist early on. Unfortunately, JRPGs are usually filled enough with mysterious figures and MacGuffins that I think all but the most heavy-handed hints wouldn't register until later, which would defeat the purpose.
2) Heavily satirize the tropes played straight, potentially via other characters/elements that contradict that arc. I think this is theoretically viable, but would be hard to execute. There's no such thing as perfect balance, so you'd definitely lose some people in both directions.
3) Reduce the problem by having the first scenario be a microcosm of the whole plot. This would limit the confusion to TLS levels, but runs the risk of blunting the slow arc toward villainy.
4) Play this character arc as a subplot within a larger story. This one reduces the impact but it's much stronger conceptually; I actually tried it in an unpublished pre-TLS story.
5) One tricky option I'm surprised I didn't include at first would be to start in medias res, making clear certain negative outcomes but not how the story gets there. While this potentially ruins any surprise, if done properly it might set expectations while still letting the descent play out properly.
Many of these could in theory work, but I don't know if they'd land in a memorable way. I play a decent number of games, but I'm not sure if any have already taken a shot at similar concepts. Another problem, specific to me, might be that this concept would be too similar to work I've already done, since I do like twisting heroic tropes. I think it's a well worth returning to, but only so often.
Ultimately I don't have a real story idea here, much less something I'd pursue; this is just some abstract thinking I engage in while watching particularly earnest JRPG cutscenes. Hopefully it has entertained someone. ^-^
Comments
Agreed, that would be great.
Lord Forte
2022-12-29 08:21:39 +0000 UTCThanks for reminding me of those games. I hope they get a remaster someday. Though I would hope that the remaster has a light touch and only works on QoL stuff.
DuckTogo
2022-12-29 08:18:38 +0000 UTCPretty braindead suggestion on my part: But having the party initially confront or cooperate with a party that is already essentially villainous despite their lofty ideals might successfully communicate that you are aware of the tropes. If the story then slowly veers towards this conclusion for the protagonists, then hopefully people tired of the trope will pick up on these signs and others might be surprised or realize that the party they met in the beginning was foreshadowing. I guess my suggestion is just: use foreshadowing.
DuckTogo
2022-12-29 08:16:41 +0000 UTCSo I see this going one of 3 ways. 1 The Syndrome path where the villain wants to be a hero so he does good things but puts everyone in danger doing it. 2 the Overly Cautious Hero path where the hero is so determined to stop evil that he nukes the town he was hired to protect. 3 The Rance path where the hero does terrible things all the time but nobody calls him out on it so he just thinks he is a good guy. In all three cases it basically works as a sarcastic humor to keep the plot interesting. The only warning I would give is dont do the Overlord thing where the "hero" thinks "geee I just did a bad thing but I don't feel bad about it" because that's just an annoying hand-wave of an excuse.
Nathan Phoenix
2022-12-22 19:34:59 +0000 UTCTo add. The first 1 and 1/2 games are very light hearted (with the exception of boobs). So when in the 3rd game, your character turns around to find his friend's brains leaking out of an aliens mouth its effectively shocking. Also he spends the next chapter suffering ptsd and unable to fight.
Nathan Phoenix
2022-12-22 19:27:49 +0000 UTCOh cool XD Yeah, lack of QoL on old games is sadly quite a bit of a barrier to (re)playing them. Definitely had some of the best rpg puzzle design I've encountered, though. I was sad that Dark Dawn wasn't as good as the GBA two and seems to have been the end of the franchise.
Lord Forte
2022-12-21 02:06:21 +0000 UTCI played both Golden Suns as a kid actually! All that's kept me from going back to them at some point is the fact that you can't change the text speed or noise.
Sierra Lee
2022-12-21 00:58:32 +0000 UTCOh, one other thought on this topic. One of my favorite rpg series from the GBA era actually edged surprisingly close to the topic, albeit in a somewhat more serious than satirical way. Just thought I'd mention it since you might enjoy the series in general, and it is one of the closer things to this idea I've seen done. The series is called Golden Sun. In the first game, the initial protagonist is from Vale, one of the few places in the world left that can use magic in a world mostly without it. Vale stands before Sol Sanctum, which is basically a vault for great treasures called the Elemental Stars. Vale gets attacked by a group of magic users who steal the elemental stars and kidnap several people from the village, intending to use them to light four Elemental Lighthouses across the world. However, you end up being able to grab one of the four stars during the attack and keep it. The Wise One, Sol Sanctum's guardian, tells you that the lighthouses being lit will destroy the world and sends you off to stop them. -Spoilers Below- At the end of the first game, you succeed in killing the two leaders of the group that attacked Vale, though not before they light a second lighthouse. However... the people they kidnapped, plus several others they picked up along the way, escape instead of allowing themselves to be saved. Then, the second game picks up with that group, revealing that, though they used harsh methods, the antagonists from the first game are actually the ones trying to save the world. Without magic, the world is literally eroding away from the edges (which have almost reached the home of the fire clan that attacked Vale), and the Wise One would rather see that happen than the dangers of magic restored. Having decided to take up the quest to light the remaining two lighthouses, the part of kidnapped people ends up in opposition to the party of the first game. They do eventually reconcile and all decide to -actually- save the world, but it was still, in my opinion, an excellently done twist and a very good case of blindly trying to be heroic unwittingly leading you to have been playing the villain.
Lord Forte
2022-12-20 20:13:09 +0000 UTCNot sure if this will be applicable, but we have a very old folk story that might be of some use. Not JRPG, but not completely different idea altogether. A man who was captured by an enemy state as a young man, partially brainwashed and after some years in captivity, cut loose with a group of cutthroats to terrorize his homeland. To cut the long story short, the man goes through very lengthy path of trying to figure out what and who he is. The whole story is rather grey on morality, very heavy on trying to find peace with captor's god and the old gods of the past (basically trying to marry up the present with the past (remembered and rediscovered) and stay at least somewhat sane) and culture clash of very different moralities - what is a heroic deed, who decides and can a hero do something downright horrible and still be a hero. I am oversimplifying of course, but this is the gist of it. Hope this helps.
Dark Art
2022-12-20 19:54:46 +0000 UTCAppreciate the info!
Sierra Lee
2022-12-20 01:27:37 +0000 UTCSort of reminds me of our Call of Cthulu rpg, you start off as fearless and upright monster hunters, and slowly turn into insane monsters through the shattering of the characters sanity by fighting against these eldritch horrors.
Darthjake
2022-12-20 01:13:15 +0000 UTCMuvLuv is a VN series. The first game, MuvLuv Extra, is a somewhat over-the-top typical high school dating sim type with two main routes plus some side routes. The protagonist is especially good at a mecha game. Spoilers below: The second volume, MuvLuv Unlimited, the protagonist finds himself pulled into a parallel universe where earth has been invaded by relentless aliens called the BETA. The version of him in that universe died years ago, and his closest friend (one of the main heroines from the first game) doesn't seem to have ever existed. The other heroines are in-training mecha pilots. The second game basically covers their training and is also more of a dating sim than anything, because regardless of who you go with, you never actually reach the war (instead, humanity gives up and leaves earth). The third one, MuvLuv Alternative, is the pretty "famous one" since in this version he somehow arrives at the starting point of the second game again, with full knowledge of the second game (except seemingly having chosen none of the heroines. This time, the goal is actually defeat the BETA, so it goes from dating sim to pretty grimdark war story full of character death. You can read its steam page if you want to see how highly it thinks of itself :X That being said, it's not a bad story, and I think it can be worth playing, but I found it was just above average, not nearly as great as it sells itself as being.
Lord Forte
2022-12-20 00:25:55 +0000 UTCI think this problem is pretty difficult to solve. I personally would never have made it past the prologue had I not been explicitly warned beforehand that the prologue was a joke. Far too many gaymes take those tropes seriously for me to have suspected otherwise. Ultimately of all of your ideas, I think in media res is likely the one that would have the highest likelihood of a potential me not bouncing immediately assuming it made clear there is definitely more than meets the eye. I personally would prefer blunting of the arc to villainy through communicating to me that it is not played straight over never playing a game with clever subversion.
Dmitry F
2022-12-19 20:02:06 +0000 UTCI had played another game with a major plot twist before, the manly main protagonist was stripped by a certain power and had to realize that the protagonist was a born female. This gender change episode was the last to ever be released... unfortunate, the writing was really cool and the battle system entertaining enough. I can can see the difficulty to walk, making a twist which still targets a similar audience. That's what made early game industry so unique, since the concept of "target audience" did not exist. They made a game which they considered would be great, and everyone had to judge by themselves, though major twists would kinda have been mentioned in some review in a magazine. But then you'd have to release a considerable large game at once. Just my thoughts after reading your thoughts. ^-^
Markus S.
2022-12-19 19:34:25 +0000 UTCAh, haven't thought about Jade Empire in a while. That was a good time and it's too bad we never got a sequel.
Sierra Lee
2022-12-19 14:37:52 +0000 UTCCurse of Strahd in D&D. It's pretty much the entire premise.
Runcible Technician
2022-12-19 08:06:57 +0000 UTCThat slow fall into villiany would be soooo easy for a jrpg hero to do. All you need are companions that have a reasonable argument, a fervent belief, and suddenly he's protecting an evil cult because of the power of friendship. Fluffy sidekick? evil demon under an illusion spell. Wise mentor? not so wise after all, also racist. Nevermind that moment that always happens in these games were someone dies and the hero goes all out for revenge. My recommendation? If you are doing a long arc villian plot, make that shit as funny as you can possibly make it. Go full Evil Dead and Army of Darkness. If the hero is going be stupid enough to swallow an argument like 'you gotta burn the town down to stop the disease' he should also be greedy and sort of an asshole so he fills that 'rogue' archetype instead of the 'insufferable idiot' archetype. Personal example in gaming: Jade Empire. The Open Palm 'good' way through the game is bog standard wuxia, i.e. protect the spirit world, defeat the evil emperor, ect. but the Closed Fist 'evil' way through the game is fucking hilarious in more than a few areas (make a deal with evil cannibals and tell the lord that sent you to find out what was happening in the woods that the staff of the inn would love to have him for dinner; make a bunch of evil choices so that when a propaganda crier is reading off your 'crimes' in the capital, they are all, in fact, actual crimes you did commit) Edit: In fact, the evil path in most every bioware game is good measure of how to do a 'villian' plot in a game. Edit 2: Unfortunately they have measured metrics of those games and its bedrock that only 20% of people play the evil route. 1/5 audience is a bummer statistic.
Runcible Technician
2022-12-19 07:54:58 +0000 UTCEh I haven't kept playing long enough to see but my money is on you being right about what happens. The general trend I'm pointing towards is that being an edgy outsider with (fake) moral ambiguity is currently *much* more popular in terms of protagonist in this genre than the default DQ formula. Also it feels like the entire isekai thing is built solely on pointing out this hypocrisy of how the rpg heroes have unfair advantages and are full of themselves with self righteousness. There are at least a 100 such stories which is why I'm not feeling particularly excited by the idea(I think Nier Replicant actually has the exact scene you're describing where Emil doubts if he did the wrong thing by nuking a city full of people alongside the "bad guys" and then gets a rousing speech about friendship to keep going).
Jens Mikli
2022-12-19 03:45:45 +0000 UTCAnother one I haven't played... so many games, so little time. T-T What's the big twist it waits so long to reveal? In my conception of this idea, it's essential that the protagonist never realizes his actions are evil. He might have a moment of doubt where he falls to his knees and cries very dramatically, but his friends would all rally around him and tell him that he needs to believe in himself, then he can go back to genociding the bad guys. The core of this idea for me is that the protagonist has an unshakable moral compass, and that compass is wrong.
Sierra Lee
2022-12-19 03:18:27 +0000 UTCAh, you're referring to Nier: Automata, I believe. I only played the original, not that one. I had thought Automata was a hack and slash with light RPG elements, more akin to Devil May Cry than under the JRPG umbrella. That gets us into fundamental questions of genre and there are no boundaries worth dying over there, I'm just suspecting that we may be partially talking about different pools of games. I think I failed to get across what I'm imagining and the newest DQ may be a good example. What you described could be a nice twist, and it's definitely changing up the formula for DQ, but that doesn't strike me as shocking for a JRPG (getting thrown in prison is practically a rite of passage). Like, I would imagine that the hero only stays in prison a short time before old or new party members break him out, they discover the king is evil/ensorcelled/mistaken, then eventually defeat a Great Evil threatening the world. What I'm talking about is the king having a legitimate reason to suspect the hero, who then breaks out and murders the king as revenge, without any introspection. If the new DQ game does anything comparable to that... I need to go figure out which number is the newest, haha. I guess I haven't played enough gacha games to understand what you mean. I didn't think the format was very compatible with a real story.
Sierra Lee
2022-12-19 03:14:11 +0000 UTCNier is square enix most popular single player game in the past decade so it's pretty mainstream now (this is shocking to everybody so you're not alone in your confusion). The big plot twist of the most recent dragon quest is that the hero gets told his the chosen one, summoned to the king to be given the quest to save the world, buttered up appropriately and promptly thrown in jail to be executed. Xenoblade is actually the other game I thought you might mean (I bounced on it hard because of the moege dialogue and so I guess I'm in the same boat on not being able to claim authority on describing what JRPG really like as a whole). I think what might be causing the confusion is that Xenoblade is pegi 12 and has the same intended audience as pokemon. DQ is Teen and Nier is 18+ but are both seen as more landmark titles in the genre (unfairly perhaps, pokemon sells more and is better known). I think more fertile ground for parody than what if the sanitized violence of JRPGs was treated as real is stuff like gacha games? They have the many of the same dynamics but even more abstracted away due to the cast list being a lottery.
Jens Mikli
2022-12-19 01:08:17 +0000 UTCI have to agree with Sierra here that I think the overly idealistic vibes are still fairly common, although I think it's interesting that Xenoblade is your example when it's from the same writer as Xenosaga, which had a much more complex morality and realpolitik vibe to it. I have a friend who's incredibly bitter that Xenoblade has been so successful when Xenosaga isn't even being considered for remasters when Xenoblade feels so much shallower and childish. <.<; Not the only example I can think of that happening, though. Pokemon Coliseum was the most interesting pokemon game I've played, with a protagonist who was a defector from the local Evil Team... then it was followed up by XD: Gale of Darkness which was back to a boring no-depth kid, I will say, I think that there are a fair number that engage with both idealism and cynicism reasonably. The main thing that comes to mind here is the Legend of Heroes games (my personal favorite rpg series), mainly because I think it strikes an interesting balance of the whole power of bonds on one side and political realities on the other. Despite the combat system literally being based around bonds and friendship in the Trails of Cold Steel subseries, the main character ends up stuck as a politically propped up semi-false hero for a good 25% of the series. There's probably a reason it has the most people crossing the aisle from party members to bosses and back again of any series I know XD But I feel that this level of complexity is definitely the exception, not the rule.
Lord Forte
2022-12-19 00:41:56 +0000 UTCHmmm this is a tricky one to write. The closest thing I can think of would be MuvLuv which spends a full game of the trilogy setting up the fake out. I think to even know how to pull this off you would have to nail down when or even IF the protagonist realizes his actions are evil.
Nathan Phoenix
2022-12-19 00:30:01 +0000 UTCI liked reading your creative thoughts on JRPG, and seeing the picture of two elves sucking santa dick, in equal measure.
WaxerRed
2022-12-19 00:00:19 +0000 UTCIf you're remembering correctly, that sounds like a clear attempt at one of the exact potential methods I laid out. If you ever recall what it was, let me know!
Sierra Lee
2022-12-18 23:35:59 +0000 UTCI may not have articulated myself clearly, because either I don't agree or I am missing out on a lot of games. Drakengard and Nier are both definitely darker than the default I'm describing here, but they're also both Cavia games, and I've always thought of those as being outside the JRPG mainstream. Which Dragon Quest are you describing? I've never played those very consistently. The game I was playing while originally writing this was Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I can't pretend to have played all JRPGs, but I feel like there are quite a few that have this same basic vibe.
Sierra Lee
2022-12-18 23:34:21 +0000 UTCIt's quite possible I'm mixing several butchered memories from different books/games/shows into one. But I feel like I've seen somewhere a similar plot done with a mix of in medias res and "tomato surprise": Start in the present with a team of people doing terrible things Flashback to a team of nice people fighting evil Standard quest progression though with increasingly disturbing incidents The villains are defeated But the story continues And things get worse and worse Realization the characters we've seen at the very start are the ones we're currently playing And possibly an apocalyptic ending were the protagonists willingly unleash Armageddon to "reset" the world as they've lost all hope for this one. As for my own personal feeling on this kind of plot... Conflicted. I'm the first one to be taken aback by something like a "good" D&D party killing tenths of sentient beings (goblins, bandits, etc.) per session without a second though. But on the other hand I'm concerned following a party of (increasingly) horrible people through the full length of a game might be more gloom than fun.
Rachnera
2022-12-18 23:13:46 +0000 UTCI think you're describing most JRPGs nowadays with this plotline. Drakengard and Nier most obviously but by now even Dragon Quest has bitten the bullet on "hero is a political term," Not to mention this being the dominant trend in the fantasy genre that parodied DQ for a decade before that became true. If you're playing a game with an idealistic character who isn't being torn down by the end of the first act you're most likely playing a life sim that's about farming to run your little alchemy shop or pokemon.
Jens Mikli
2022-12-18 22:22:51 +0000 UTC
