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Create Your Own Japanese RPG
Episode 2 : With No Further Obligation on Your Part

In the previous article I introduced you to the main elements of a battle system (Sparkles and Numbers) and helped you name your game. But unfortunately there’s more to an RPG than that. You have to have, among other things, some characters, a world and a story.. People to do stuff, a place to do that stuff in, and a reason that they’re doing that stuff. It’s an exact science.

White Guys with Swords

Creating characters for an RPG is easy if you just follow the patterns. There are certain “classes” that you have to fill, and then once you fill that class you’ll assign one of the few personalities as well as a name. Really, its that easy. I couldn’t make this hard if I tried.

Types of Characters:

Guy with the Sword – We’ll refer to him as GWS. He is absolutely required. His weapon must be a sword so large that there is no way, due to the laws of gravity and leverage, he could spin it in his hand or swing it any better than your average human could swing a motorcycle. But hey, we’re making a game here, not writing a physics book.

Hot Girl – We’ll refer to her as HG. This is another character class that is absolutely required. Her means of attack will either be unbelievably cool (like puling a dragon out of the sky), or dumb as hell (she throws a really sharp plate at them). There can be no middle ground. She’ll start out as mad or uninterested in the GWS but 20-60 hours later will be madly in love with him for no discernable reason.

Big Dumb Guy – Or the BDG. This is the kind of guy who could probably tear a phonebook in half but thinks that Latte means “a bunch”. This character must either wield a gun or be some sort of kick-boxing champion. He can be black, white, or bright green as long as the fundamentals stay the same: Must be strong as hell and have the IQ of a bag of gravel.

Comic Relief – The CR is an incredibly annoying character designed to make the player want to drag its ass out of the TV and beat it to death with a steel baseball bat. The weapon of choice for most CRs is some object that could never hurt someone no matter how much you hit them with it (such as a Megaphone or an empty DVD case). The characters in the game must be completely oblivious to how incredibly aggravating said character is.

There Are Some Who Call Me… Tim?

Acceptable names for main characters have to be either some every day word (Squall, Link, Cloud), or a string of letters that follow the Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel formula (Tidus, Evan, Zidane). As for the secondary characters it’s really anything that you can work out. One way is to take a game of scrabble and throw it on a homeless person. The hobo will then pick up a hand full of the letters and toss them back at you. Use these letters in any order you feel like to create your secondary characters.

But for some people, getting a hold of an angry homeless person isn’t possible, sometimes you’ll get a mildly annoyed hobo who will just swear at you and sit back down. Scrabble is expensive, so another tried-and-true formula is to take a common word and replace a few letters in it.
Examples:
Bell -B +Z = Zell
Muumuu -U +O = Momo

Note: Always make sure that you have at least one character with a Latin/Spanish name like Vincent, Cid or Rosa.

Personalities:

You can assign these in any order that you want, as long as at least 4 of them are present

A) Young and Idealistic
B) Quiet and Rough
C) Dead
D) Undead
E) Egocentric
F) A kid
G) A Robot
H) F***ing Annoying (Required for the CR)

Note: Usually A leads to C, but more on that later.

For my example RPG, here are my picks:

GWS: “Steel” – Fights with a ten foot blue sword. – Quiet and Rough.
HG: “Yantie” (from “Panties”) – Human that fights with differing sizes of lampshades. – Young and Idealistic
BDG: “Mokon” (from “Moron”) – A Human that fights with a rifle. – Egocentric
CR: “Stotip” (from “Shut up”) – Half-cat Half-Turnip that survives on marsh mellows and uses a snow cone as a weapon – F***ing Annoying

Secondary Character (Created with the Scrabble Hobo method): Xipoz

I skipped the other alternates due to space, but I think you can see how the system works. Now that you’ve completed this you should have your merry band of adventurers ready to venture out into the world and knock the sparkles out of things.

The Things That Need to Happen

Congratulations! You’ve made your characters and given them names and personalities. Now what are they going to do? If you just have your characters run around and fight people for no particular reason other than to level, that’s called Pokemon. In order to avoid that we’ll need a world and a story, and a decided lack of badges.

The most important thing in the game world are save points. You forget these and you might as well throw yourself out of a window (For the BDGs out there, make sure you get one 5 stories up or better).

Also, place them in areas that don’t make any damn sense. Why any self respecting bad guy would allow someone to put a save point on the front porch of their evil fortress is beyond me. That’s practically begging for trouble. The salesperson for “Save Point Distributions Inc” must be a millionaire. Not only is he getting them in every bad guy’s fortress, he’s sold one to every inn keeper and priest on the planet. Good job buddy, but now its time to take your sales trophy and go home.

“Save Point Distributions Inc” has a proven method to creating save points for games. First pick any random object that has nothing to do with saving, make it float and add a lighting element to it, like a glowing ball or a shiny question mark.

I picked a blinking Eat at Joe’s sign. It was on sale.

What They Say and Where They Say It

Next you’ll actually need to develop an atmosphere for your world. If you’re running short on time then the easiest way to do this is to take two time periods at least a century apart and mash them together. You could take the 1920′s and combine it with the year 2200, creating a society that has floating cities but still uses coal powered trains. Also, to complete the image of “another world” make your characters wear overly-complicated clothing like hoods with no shirts or shorts with an excessive number of straps. If you’re feeling particularly evil remember that someone somewhere is going to Cosplay your characters at some point, so feel free to have all of your characters walk around naked with their underwear on their heads sporting a purple jockstrap that reads “I’m with Stupid.”

The last thing that you need to do is to write your story and dialogue. The story must have a world-shattering human-obliterating force taking the guise of some long forgotten evil that resurrects itself just about the time that our hero ventures out into the world. The evil force will be presented in a way that allows insight into the human spirit, the nature of love, or some other mushy crap that will lead players to wish that you had taken less time reading philosophy and more time learning how to write coherent sentences.

Dialogue is the easy part. As long as you have a subject, a verb and punctuation its up to the player to decide what the hell you’re talking about. Then, have the game translated from English to Japanese and then back to English by a dope fiend who SWEARS he knows Japanese. In fact if you’re on a budget just let him write the story for a few hundred bucks. The more convoluted the story the more of a chance that you’re going to get reviewers to say things like “Deep” and “intricate” in their articles. This is because they don’t have the balls to admit they don’t understand what’s going on either.

There! You’re almost done! Now that we have the game all together all we have to do is package it and sell it.

-cjdaweasel

For those of you wondering Xipoz is worth 23 points.