Biowin

Ever since I played Mass Effect 2, I've been hopping all over any news pertaining to Bioware. I stumbled across this nugget while I was over at strategyinformer.com. Daniel Erickson, Writing Director for Bioware was asked about how the core component of Star Wars: The Old Republic is its story, and whether or not the story alone could support it without good gameplay, which they then pointed to Final Fantasy XIII as an example. Daniel Erickson fired back:

"Well, before I address the main point I just want to take a slightly more controversial route: You can put a 'J' in front of it, but it's not an RPG. You don't make any choices, you don't create a character, you don't live your character... I don't know what those are - adventure games maybe? But they're not RPG's."

Woah. Someone finally manned up and told Squenix that they aren't the only ones making RPG's, and they're certainly not the best at it, even though they've been in the business pretty long.

Personally, I support Daniel Erickson on this one. Role-Playing games are usually categorized by the ability to make choices, to play out the role of the character you have created, or have been handed. In most JRPG's you're handed the role of the character, and you're sometimes forced to make decisions for the characters (though that's pretty rare, seeing as for the most part in the last 8 years it's like playing an on-rails shooter while replacing the shooting with random battles).

Personally, I think that Mass Effect 2 is very similar to what an RPG should be like. You should be given a lot of dialog choices for how you interact with characters, and that should lead you to different outcomes and reactions. Games like Final Fantasy XIII stick you in the shoes of a character, and tell you to play through their story for 50 hours.

Mass Effect 2 was a wake up call for me. If I'm going to commit 50 hours of playtime to any game, I'd prefer it is one where I can get invested in a character and their universe. Hell, I liked Mass Effect 2 so much that I went back and played through the retrospective mess that was Mass Effect 1 (not that it was a bad game, when it first came out, just that Mass Effect 2 improved it so much...) just so that I could personally affect the universe on my next play through of Mass Effect 2 (beat a few more so far, so now I've got about 58 left).

I really hope that the next Final Fantasy game that comes out is not just cinematic. I'd like to see a lot more game play, as well as a lot more action. I loved, 4,7,8, and 10, but from the first 8 hours of FFXIII (which I'd like to remind everyone I was looking forward to), I can't honestly say that I would want to finish it in one sitting (like I tried to do with ME2).

In case you're wondering, the image at the top is my rendition of Lightning from FFXIII, only now she's the main character in a good game.