I was killing fishmen when you were swimming around in your daddy's balls.

[dusematic]

It started innoccently enough. 





I was telling one of my dudes how incomparably sweet FF6 was and is.  He had never played it.  He was like "Dude, get real, intellivision is where it's at."  "C'mon man, don't be one of those irritating nerds who tries to be different for the sake of being different.  If you cream your jeans trying to out-hardcore people, get a cumrag, just don't tell me that "Yes, Prime Minister" for Commodore 64 is better than FF6."


I finally managed to coax a real response from him. I was unfamiliar with the particular brand of shit he had just squeezed out all over our friendship, but I feigned interest. I never had the SMS, so had only heard about Phantasy Star from my contemporaries "back in the day" and from the new MMO's they've been making lately.

So, the protagonists of this sad tale, made a pact, an oath signed in blood. I agreed to beat his favorite game, and he agreed to beat mine. It played out somewhat differently.  Whereas he fired up FF6 once when I was around, and never made it out of Narshe; I actually did beat Phantasy Star. Without online guides. Also, he tried to lie about beating it on multiple occassions, going on fan sites to get info about the game and characters to try and convince me that he had played it. Talk about the lowest depths of weakness and desperation. Frailer than Stephen Hawking.

Without further ado, my catharsis:


[ http://www.rpgclassics.com/shrines/sms/ps1/images/overworld_palma.png ] Here is a link to a map of the starting planet (there are three).  The big walled off city in the center is where you start, it's called Camineet.  I guess I knew this game was going to be pretty hard when I died inside the city walls.  It's my fault really, I should have realized that the wooded copse inside the city walls had bad news written all over it. 

I stuck to the grassy areas, deciding there might be easier prey to be had.  I Killed my first enemy, it left a chest. Uh-oh. It’s trapped. So sorry, you’re dead.  The trapped chests the monsters leave are unavoidable.  Touche.

Grind.

I walked into the first dungeon and emitted a bloodcurdling scream.  Behold:



The game has many dungeons, and they all look exactly like this. Sometimes they have different colors.  Yellow, red and blue.  There may have been a brown.  I was able to get through the first two dungeons with some difficulty, but by the third dungeon, I began having serious problems. 

Die. Grind.

I hope you like cartography! Break out the fucking graphing paper bitch. What, you thought you could distinguish one thing from another in these primitive 3D dungeons?

Grind.

Spend 10,00 Mesetas on a Landrover you don’t need, but that the game implies you do.

Spend 20,000 Mesetas on an Ice Digger, and innumerable hours figuring out where the hell to use it. Have fun digging through endless screens of white without any clues, desperately searching for a key item in the story progression. Twice. Behold, the planet of Dezoris:




If you'll take a moment to note the dark blue areas, those are where you can operate the Ice Digger.  The problem is, you sort of just have to try your luck randomly burrowing until you find a spot you can break through.  Even when you do find the right spot, you might still never find the object you seek.  The one rather large discoloration is approximately 30 screens in size.  It doesn't help that the inhabitants of this planet are known for their lies.  They weren't very forthcoming as you can imagine. 

Grind your shit to ruin for Diamond Armor.

Good luck in the last 3 dungeons, they’re over 10 levels deep, with numerous unmarked pitfalls, that will drop your ass to an undisclosed location on a separate level. What, you haven’t been making maps that take every single movement square into account? Might be a good idea to start, unless you want to spend 2 hours wending your way through an assrape dungeon only to fall into a pit, not know where you are, and die (more than you have to).

You're at the last boss, I hope you didn’t sell the Laser Gun. OOPS. That’s ok.  It's theoretically possible to beat him without it (I guess).

Grind.

Oh I forgot to tell you, the last boss Lassic really isn’t the last boss, have fun finding him in the Governor's mansion. It seems so obvious in retrospect.







This game is sicker than Magic Johnson and gets one fufu pirate mug, and a C- in Crim Pro.

[Yegolev]

You should do this more often instead of cock-up ongoing threads.  Good job.

[Kail]

Yeah, I actually beat this game, too.  It's one of those kinds of things I really wanted to like (First person dungeons?  Sci-fi/fantasy setting?  I'm there!) but hell, that "story" was OBSCURE.  Some dude in the corner of some village on the ass-end of the world would tell you about some rumor he heard about some item in some cave somewhere.  But you wouldn't be able to go there right NOW, of course, because you have like ten items you need to get before you can get there.  And it doesn't remind you of this guy later on.  Rrgh.

Bonus points: I got the version of this that game out for the Game Boy Advance (Phantasy Star Collection).  The game CRASHED MY GAME BOY.  Several times.  How the fuck do you manage to do that?

PS II drives me absolutely INSANE, though.  I still haven't beaten that one.  They got rid of the first person dungeons and replaced them with overhead dungeons (FF-style, but WAY more confusing).  The dungeons are totally impossible to navigate; every wall looks the same and the dungeons are filled with teleporters which jump you to different floors which also look the same and the entire thing is laid out like someone just spilled a bunch of legos on the floor and randomly assigned start and end points.  Your character isn't even centred on screen when he moves; the screen only moves over if he's more than, like, half way towards that side of the screen.  So you can see maybe a quarter of a screen ahead of you.  And it takes FOREVER to level.

If it wasn't for PS IV, I would never be able to understand why anyone would be a fan of this series.

[schild]

I can only assume that Kail LOVED Stonekeep.

[Glazius]

If it wasn't for PS IV, I would never be able to understand why anyone would be a fan of this series.

PSIV makes the whole series look awesome specifically _because_ it throws back to the three previous games and incorporates elements of all of them. If it had been just another sequel in the same series it wouldn't have had nearly the impact it did.

(also someone should totally remake the first games using the PSIV "engine", with maybe a bone thrown to PSIII's tech focus system.)

--GF

[Sky]

I liked Stonekeep. Custom totem spells ftw.

[Jain Zar]

First off, Phantasy Star 1 came out in 1987.  That's pretty fucking impressive for 1987.  Beats the shit out of the first Final Fantasy and the first 2 Dragon Quests, which were its contemporaries and which were far WORSE grindfests.  And uglier too.  About the only RPG series that wasn't a grindfest was Ultima, and it was only 4.  1-3 were 90% grindsville.  Wizardry was even worse, and it was far more draconian in difficulty, and instead of lovely scrolling dungeons you had a lockstep wireframe dungeon.  Ultima had this too.

Shit, Bard's Tale 1 takes about 30 minutes to beat if you know exactly what to do.  However the required level grinding takes a good 15 hours or so.  3 hours to get a dungeon ready party, 3 more hours in the Sewers and Wine Cellar, 5 hours in the Temple of the Mad God, another 2 hours in the Temple grinding some backup PCs in case your main party eats it,  then a minimum of 2 hours fighting 396 berzerkers on the third floor of the castle till you have a pair of Archmages (Everyone else is a meatshield after about level 15 in Bard's Tale.  They just run interference for your mages and the game forces you to have a Bard who is actually a decent backup mage given enough Fire Horns.), then another hour for more backup character grinding, then go run the 30 minute gauntlet through the dungeons with APAR, and game over.

Put it this way, Ultima 4 was the first electronic RPG that was more than a level up, map dungeon, kill final foozle game.  Sadly, Console RPGs pretended 4 never existed and have based their designs almost soley on Ultima 3 and the first Wizardry game, except they get progressively easier, and have increasingly shitty anime stories you just watch in between whacking shit with your cast of characters who seem to have stolen things out of Liberace's closet to wear into battle.

Pretty much for the entire 8 bit RPG genre this was how it was, with maybe Dragon Wars, Magic Candle, and Wasteland actually trying to evolve electronic roleplaying.  (Sure the Gold Box games were popular, but they were pretty much the precursors to FF Tactics and the whole Tactics genre.  Cept the story was mostly in a booklet.)

There would be a minor evolutionary tick with Dungeon Master and its ripoff Eye of the Beholder (which was better IMHO), but it would lead to a then dead end with Ultima Underworld, the first 2 Elder Scrolls games, and the PSX's Kings Field (Largely hated for being slow moving and not anime enough.).

Ultima and Wizardry had a lovely set of twins called Wizardry 6 and 7, but much like the few action RPG experiments (Moebius, Windwalker, Legacy of the Ancients, 4 Crystals of Trazere) it would fall by the wayside.

Then RPGs mostly farted out except for the same old shit, cept this time it was found by the console kiddies, and made popular by cutscene only FF7 ads. 

Luckily we had a new hope called Fallout, and 2 lesser hopes that really SHOULD have been evolutionary dead ends called Everquest and Diablo (Im not quite sure what UO was other than a good idea ruined by the reality of human beings actually getting to play it..) that helped usher in the rebirth of some older style games with improved gameplay, cept by now most people were still enamored with 1983 esque gameplay with modern graphics and a boring story...

[dusematic]

Crap.  Diablo is sweet though.

[Tebonas]

Dungeon Master had an innovative magic system, an open class system and an actual ending sequence.

Eye of the Beholder was nice, but a dumbed down derivate.

[Pococurante]

There would be a minor evolutionary tick with Dungeon Master and its ripoff Eye of the Beholder (which was better IMHO), but it would lead to a then dead end with Ultima Underworld, the first 2 Elder Scrolls games, and the PSX's Kings Field (Largely hated for being slow moving and not anime enough.).

EoB - man I loved that game.  First time I'd wired my PC to the home stereo.  I can't imagine what my downstairs neighbors thought about max volume fire balls toasting man-sized spiders.  The only "MMOG" I was playing at the time was Gemstone at $13.95 an hour...

I agree with the chronology.

[WindupAtheist]

RPG stuff

Just to cross-pollenate with my own thread, you left a signifigant RPG series out.  Namely, Grand Theft Auto.  Yes, I'm serious.  At least in regards to the last one or two games.  The more I think about it, the more I see the GTA series as sort of a nascent independant RPG lineage, separate from the one that started with tabletop D&D and now comprises nearly the entirety of the genre.

GTA and the traditional RPG aren't related, GTA just happened to have evolved in such a way that it shows a lot of similarities to the traditional RPG.  Except because GTA isn't dragging around decades worth of Gygax/Tolkien bullshit nerd-fury baggage, it's free from the shackles that hobble the traditional RPG.  Nobody told the GTA guys that once your game hits a certain level of "worldiness" that your combat has to start sucking ass.  Nobody told them that they had to have "experience points" or a bunch of other cocktastic 1970's tabletop game mechanics.  Nobody told them that they had to set it in some fruity fantasy land, or that they couldn't just set their game in the real world.

I love it.  It's the RPG that doesn't know it's an RPG, and thus doesn't know that it's supposed to suck in parts.  It's the first RPG I've played in a long time that isn't dragging J.R.R. Tolkien's corpse around behind it.  Goddamnit, I haven't slept since Sunday night, so forgive if I'm rambling.

[Pococurante]

You go girl!

[Tebonas]

He left more than one out, I think a conclusive history wasn't what he was going for. The Gygay/Tolkien bullshit baggage is missing in some RPGs for aeons. Darklands was basically our middle ages with superstitions coming true. Superstitions that predate Gygax. Deus Ex predates GTA, System Shock predates Deus Ex. Both are not RPGs in the strictes classic definition, but both fit the shoe you want to put on GTA.

Many hybrids are missing. He culled the tree. Which is good, because once you start there you could name many many games. GTA is in the Ultima Underworld Tree, somewhere on the action side. Just as Fallout Tactics is in the Gold Box tree.

Stats don't make a RPG. RPGs have been watered down over the decades so that dumbed down RPGs and clever shooters with a good story are almost identical twins. I sure don't think these labels are what they were anymore. And I'm quite sure thats not important anyway. You have fun with the game. But if you bought GTA as a role playing game and you hate street racers, you have been screwed.

[Jain Zar]

While I hate GTA with a passion, it really is a quasi RPG, I cannot deny it.  But most of its advances were done in much earlier games, only ignored.
The same way Oblivion babbles on about its NPC schedules and such when Ultima 5 did it on my 1mhz 64k ram Commodore 64.
(However I fucking HATE urban gangster bullshit games.  Its a sign for me to avoid the game entirely, just like in anime & manga any title that's description involves "An ordinary High School student UNTIL".  I know its going to be utterly offensive to me and avoid it like the plague, even if there may be a few good things about it.)

I did cull things, because it would get slow otherwise.  Baldur's Gate 1&2 are basically Ultima 7 with less world interactivity and realism, BG Dark Alliance is Diablo with a pregenerated world and a tighter gameplay control, Nethack is Ultima 1(Or Aphsai) taken to extreme levels of detail, and so on.

Largely every electronic RPG can trace itself back to Ultima and Wizardry.  (The first two big electronic RPGs, not to dismiss stuff like Wumpus or Aphsai though.)

This is pretty fucking sad.

However, there are a TON of subcategories these days.  Here is a list I made up for my 1up blog:

There was a little discussion going on in a forum I visit under a different name and the various types of RPGs out there came into play. This was my attempt at categorizing 26 years worth of a genre:

The thing is, there are so many different subgenres of RPGs these days, defining them gets ROUGH.

But Ill attempt it.

Braunstein: (FFTactics, Front Mission, X Com, Warhammer Dark Omen, Silent Storm) These RPGs are primarily wargames with persistent characters that go from battle to battle with a story framework surrounding it. Braunstein was the first miniatures gaming scenario that eventually lead to Dungeons & Dragons. These games can be real time (Warhammer Dark Omen), but are most known as turn based affairs. The story tends to be fixed, and very little actual role playing happpens.

Roguelike: (Rogue, Larn, Diablo, Nethack, Evolution, Phantasy Star Online) Take a character or three into a mostly randomly created dungeon and kill things till you achieve the objective. Largely based around survival and the replayability of different layouts each game. Little story or roleplaying involved. Its purely combat and exploration with character development.

JRPG: (Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, Grandia, Phantasy Star 1-4) Popularized due to Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy, these games generally have a fixed storyline, few puzzles, and very little interaction outside of combat and character development. These games are largely anime stories with RPG combat thrown in. The earliest games were offshoots of Ultima and Wizardry style games only simpler and less draconian and evolved into their own story driven niche.

Ultima Style: (Ultima 1-7, Morrowind, Fallout) Full character creation and a generally open world to explore and problem solve in whatever manner you choose. The player has a decent affect over the gameworld and how the story actually unfolds compared to JRPGs and Braunsteins. Most actual roleplaying.

Wizardry Style, aka Dungeon Crawl: (Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder) Player creates a single or group of characters to explore a complicated pre set dungeon enviroment. Little actual roleplaying is involved. Gameplay is based around exploration, combat, puzzle solving, and resource management.

Hack n Slash: (Record of Lodoss War, many of the later era Gauntlet games, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance) Similar to Roguelikes, these games are almost exclusively action based with RPG character development. Usually a bit more roleplaying and story than a Roguelike, but its based more around the player's action skills.

MMORPG: (World of Warcraft, Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online) Multiplayer online RPG with simultaneous interaction with other players in a persistent world. Most games have very little actual roleplaying or player effect on the gameworld, and most actions are drawn out to keep players playing longer. Tend to be similar to Ultima Style games. Character advancement is the primary goal in these games, though some player driven socialization and conflict is pronounced in many titles.

Hybrids: (KOTOR, Ultima Underworld, Rifts, .Hack, Quest for Glory, Guild Wars) These games tend to mix parts of multiple RPG styles as needed. Kotor has the roleplaying aspects of a Ultima Style game, yet an overarching story closer to a JRPG. Rifts is a Braunstein mixed with a more freeish JRPG style. .Hack attempts to mix a JRPG with gameplay similar to an MMORPG. Guild Wars mixes an MMORPG with a nearly fixed story of a JRPG. Ultima Underworld mixes Ultima Style with Wizardry Style. Hybrids are generally going to be the future of RPGs as they pick and choose the best parts of the entire genre instead of fixating on just one bit.

Next up when I get the desire: Combat Systems.

[Pococurante]

/contemplation