Video Games → Create Your Own Japanese RPG – Episode 2: With No Further Obligation on Your Part
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.
The Name of the Game
Hitting Stuff
The first thing that comes to mind when I play games like Hydlide isn’t “What a horrible game this is.” or even “What the heck is this piece of crap doing with a Nintendo Seal of Quality on it?” in fact, it isn’t even “I’d like to burn this game in the flames of Hades where it was forged.” Usually, my first thought is simply “Who thought this would be a good idea?”. Who thought that there was a serious deficiency of Nintendo games with purple elves running around attacking different colored blobs with white nightsticks? These questions then usually result in the second thought that comes into my mind “How much acid would you have to drop to make this game seem fun?”** and of course the logical third thought “Is there that much acid in the universe?”.
The game opens with some purple stuff that looks like a dragon shooting a girl and turning her into three fairies. At first I thought it was a pretty neat menu animation, but its not. That 4 seconds of uninformative mind-blistering back-story is the entire intro and plot for the game. Who is the dragon? What does he want? What is my characters name? Why did he turn the girl into fairies? Why am I asking you? After giving the game far too much credit by attempting to define philosophical dimensions to the dragon as just a metaphor for modern man and the fairies merely representing his struggle against an over-abundance of information in an ever-changing technology-driven world I gave up and decided to do what I do best. I called a few of my friends and we just pulled something out of our collective asses.
Movie: An Aggregation of Death (3.2 MB)
Apparently Gilgamar, with his multitude of butt-plugs and fairies, wants to make the world a lot gayer than it was, but unfortunately the developers beat him to it. First of all, the interface is purple. And we’re not talking an ambiguous deep-blue-couldbe-maroon purple, this is a vibrant eye-burning Barney purple. Plus, your main character who isn’t ever really named (I called him Rastafar the Fabulous)* is an elf that dons purple armor, runs around and pokes things with an Old Spice Deodorant bar until he (usually) dies.
Usually you’ll die because of the way you fight, or don’t rather. Similar to Fatal Labyrinth, you run up to an enemy and slam into them until one of you wins. The only twist is that in Hydlide you have to press the A button to attack and the B button to use magic/defend. This is about as complex as the game can get since most battles only last a few seconds. After you engage an enemy hold the button and press towards them until one of you dies. You have to make sure that you are directly in front of and facing the enemy that you wish to fight. If you are even slightly off you will take damage but be unable to deal damage. This interesting feature makes the battle system a little less fun than sticking your genitals in a juicer.
The sound effects are stellar as well, in the same way that cow s*** is stellar fertilizer. There are about seven sound effects six of which are the same ones either played backwards or at a different pitch. Every time you interact with one of the game’s amorphous blobs be prepared to be assaulted by a “boop” a “beep” or a “Doodley-do”. Because as everyone knows, that’s the sound that swords make.
I normally start out these articles with “Heroes of the Lance” is a game about _____.” But unfortunately I don’t have much to put in that blank. Heroes of the Lance (Hereafter referred to as Hot-L) isn’t really about anything. If however, by some chance I’m wrong (and honestly what are the chances of THAT?) and it does have a story, then it’s a thrilling narrative about eight warriors wandering around dungeons getting kicked in the knees by blue-underweared midgets.
You start the game with 8 warriors including: Flint, a dwarf who has the superpower of being too short for any attacks to hit him; Goldmoon, a human fighter who runs like she stuck a curling iron up her butt and plugged it in; Strum, your average D&D, long haired, I-don’t-care-how -stupid-this-hat- makes-me- look-it-gives- me-plus-one- protection-from- Normal-Meatballs human fighter; Riverwind, an elf (I guess) who looks like the bastard child of Hercules and Aquaman; Tanis, an archer of some sort who was rejected from ZZ Top; Tasslehoff seems to be a human wizard who is expertly skilled at being unable to hit anything smaller than the Moon; Caramon another human fighter who looks just like Strum, seriously, this guy is totally cramping Strum’s style; and finally Raistlin another absolutely worthless wizard, except he has blue cuffs and a magic broom. And when their powers combine they form a team worthy of the Special Olympics.
You’ll die almost always due to the combat system or lack thereof. The battle “system” involves running up to an enemy and pressing the B button till either you or your opponent dies. Usually you’ll be the one to die since every fight is based entirely on chance. Meaning that if in some other dimensional plane you manage to play the game exactly as it’s meant to be played getting every spell, potion and weapon there’s still a 50% chance that a dwarf is going to shin-kick you to death.
What the hell does the “Lance” part of Heroes of the Lance have to do with anything? No one in the game is named Lance, or even uses a Lance. There is a serious deficiency of lancing going on. If you know the answer feel free to tell me, but don’t expect me to pretend I care. I’m sorry but I’m not going to hunt down and read a novel to understand a crappy-ass game. It isn’t happening.
Blaze and Blade : Eternal Quest is a thrilling epic about some people who go somewhere to do some stuff. I can’t tell who made the games since THQ, Southpeak, T&Esoft, and Conspiracy Entertainment are all listed on the box, and luckily I don’t care. It is a good thing that they worked together on this project, since individually they would have released 4 games of lesser caliber than Blaze and Blade. I don’t think that there’s enough Pepto-Bismol in the universe.
After you’ve talked to everyone, some twelve or thirteen times, you learn that after leaving the hotel you must venture with your friends to a place far away and do some things. The more astute of you will notice that this is the same plot as Yahoo! Maps. There’s a place called the Forbidden Land, to which you must go for no other reason than the intro said so. There’s no real explanation as to what the Forbidden Land is, why you’re going, or who the h*ll is talking, but as any horror film will teach you, it’s usually bad to argue with disembodied voices.
In time, you will give up trying to control the camera and get on with playing the game. This brings up some pretty frustrating problems, not the least of which is the inventory system. Let’s imagine for a bit that you pick up an item. Let’s say it’s a penny, and let’s also imagine that you’re not broke as h*ll and you don’t need a penny. Your friend comes up and says “Hey! I have MASTERY OF PENNIES +9. I could use that!” You would say something to the effect of “Here’s the penny.” or “You’re a freak.” Either way, the other person would get the penny because you don’t need it. Right?
All of this might be forgivable if the AI controlled characters were even a LITTLE smarter than a pile of cucumbers. About a third of the way into your first battle you’ll realize that most, if not all, of the NPCs have the combined tactical genius of a yield sign. Unless an enemy comes up and pokes an AI controlled member of your party, they won’t fight. And if by some miracle they decide to hit back, they won’t cast any spells. Instead, your Wizards, in all of their vast knowledge, will opt to run up and whack the enemy with their stick. If you’ve ever played any RPG for longer than twelve seconds then you know that a Wizard fighting an Orc with a stick is equal to a janitor fighting King Kong with a Road Cone. It isn’t pretty.
Pain-O-Meter: 2 Valium, a shot of morphine, and a tube sock. I’m not sure why they gave me a tube sock, but after the Valium and morphine I didn’t seem to care.
In Fatal Labyrinth, a game made by People Who Hate You(tm), the object is to guide your character, Trykaar, to the end of a maze and defeat a dragon that is terrorizing your hometown. Most of you will recognize this as RPG storyline B-384, substituting an Evil Dragon for an Evil Mage.
If you’ve ever read the Engrish (sic) on the back of a Hong Kong VCD you’ll appreciate the script for Fatal Labyrinth. No two sentences that are put together make any sense. Take for example exhibit A from a villager: “I HEARD THAT A BRAVE SWORDSMAN DEFEATED THE DRAGON A LONG TIME AGO.”, followed immediately by “I WONDER IF I HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL TOMORROW.”
Even if we didn’t have the human sorting ability, this would still put our verbal skills one notch on the Stupid-o-meter above the AI for the enemies in Fatal Labyrinth. In fact if you attempt to get into a brawl with one, there’s a very good chance that you’ll just end up dancing around each other like idiots until you back them into a wall or corner. Bad guys in this game just don’t grasp the concept of walls on two sides of them.
After you’ve backed several baddies into a corner and beaten them into submission with your toy of destruction, you’ll eventually level. The first level you’ll gain will be “Valet” which is, according to my underground sources, a parking attendant. The next level after that is a “Ranger”. That is probably short for “Park Ranger”. It seems clear to me that the leveling system is based on jobs that require little to no training. This can only lead you to the conclusion that level 98 and 99 are probably “Street Sweeper” and “Denny’s Manager” respectively.
You know, I feel kind of bad putting two PS2 RPGs in a row on this list.
Of course boobs are just about as mature as this game gets. The story in Ephemeral Fantasia is just a series of sex related jokes from start to finish. Under normal circumstances I’d be all for a bunch of sex jokes but none of them are funny. Not even slightly. In fact, most of the jokes in EF don’t make any damn sense. If you take the joke part out of a “sex joke” your just left with sex. Sex where no one gets naked. Like a lap dance where the stripper wears a spacesuit. Not any fun, and a waste of a good 50 dollars.
You’d have to be a retard to begin with just to deal with the in-game timer anyway. The timer does a pretty good job of controlling day and night, what day of the week it is, and also how little fun you’re going to have waiting for things to happen. Plot events, such as getting a new character, or furthering the dumba** plot happen at certain times and only at those times. If you miss something like picking up Granny Olphemire’s Basket of Happiness +2 from the store on Monday at 2PM you’ll have to wait an entire game based week to try again. God help your controller if you miss the deadline a second time.
Pain-O-Meter:
Let’s play pretend. Let’s pretend that you’re 10, and Disney is about to release another one of its blockbuster animated films. Now, let’s pretend that when you go to see this movie you find out that only 1 in 7 sentences are voice acted and that the entire movie was animated in Flash. You’d be pissed, and you’d have a pretty good idea what it felt like to all the people who were hyped over Unlimited Saga, bought it new, and brought it home to play.
Immediately I was taken into a battle with a ninja bug who I had to defeat with kicks, punches, throws and a spinning wheel of peanuts. Since there was no tutorial, and I’m way to lazy to read the manual, I killed the samurai insect by pressing the X button until the game declared me the winner. I truly felt a sense of accomplishment.
Movie: My First Unlimited Saga Battle
Next I was attacked by what was labeled as a Vegeplast. It looks like a tree with an eyeball and a bunch of roses sticking out of the top. When I actually got into battle though, it had morphed into a floating green crab. Fantastic! My first real battle was off to a psychotic start.
When you get hit, you lose HP, LP, and probably seven other stats I can’t figure out how to get to. I have yet to figure out how the HP/LP thing works. HP seems to act as kind of a buffer for LP, but it’s inconsistent. I can do 320 HP damage to an enemy and do no LP damage, yet they can do 80 HP damage to me and 2 LP damage. So from what I gather, the strategy for fighting an enemy seems to be: Hit them. Hit them a lot.
Pain-O-Meter: 1 Valium. The game was just slightly boring up until I had to fight. I use the term fight loosely because battles usually just degraded into me hitting buttons and watching what happened.
Everyone makes mistakes. Like the Hindenburg, Vietnam, or that time that I was so drunk that I sh*t in my girlfriends sink because I thought it was a giant toilet. Since companies are just big groups of people all trying to screw each other, it seems natural that these corporations make mistakes too. Big mistakes. Costly Mistakes. Qwest DSL, When Strangers Call, and Atari Jaguar are all great examples of millions of dollars spent on confusing people, ripping them off, and then ripping them off again, this time for tech support.
In order to do any of this scientifically, I’m going to need a system. So I’ve created the following manner in which I’ll approach the review, or as it will be referred to from now on, the Pain Information System Overview of Facts and Figures or PISOFF.
Timing is everything. And Location. Timing and Location are everything. And boobs. Okay, Timing is most of everything, Boobs and Location run a close second. At the time that Quest 64 was released it was the first true RPG to hit the N64 system and it fought head to head against Sony’s RPG giant FFVII. Go into any game store and ask as many people as you can how many have played Quest 64, and how many have played FFVII. You’ll get a pretty good idea of how Quest 64 fared.
In the first town, you’ll meet a group of children trying to kill wear-rabbits with dild*s. It is clear that there is evil here. I tried to kill them with my brownish turd-stick, but every time I told Brian to do something he shook his head. I figured that this was probably one of those games where your character starts off bad and then becomes good as the story progresses. I’ll be back for those kids later.
Of course to get to any of the uninteresting places to meet the even more uninteresting people do the yet-even-more uninteresting quests, you’ll need to fight at some point. Your first couple of battles will consist of running around getting your ass kicked by rejected Super Mario characters while you vainly try to determine why you keep skipping your turn. Since all the training budget was spent on the fifteen tutorials within the castle, there won’t be any fighting instruction readily available. You’ll pretty much have to figure the clumsy fighting scheme out on your own or use the fantastically useless manual.
Pain-O-Meter: 5 Aspirin. I really didn’t have as much trouble sleeping after this one as I did the other 9, but my dreams were still filled with fanny packs and purple Hell Hounds.![[Click Here for Solution]](http://www.cjdaweasel.com/Stories/GS/10WorstRPGsEver/board/flpuzzlesolution.JPG){kind=link}
