A not-so-brief introduction to my journey throughout videogame RPGs
Welcome! This little blogging effort of mine will likely stay unnoticed, so an elaborate introduction could end up being a bit pointless and more than a bit self-important, but I still feel it could be useful to explain the underlying methodology behind the work I hope I will be able to accomplish on this platform.
I have been an avid enjoyer and collector of all manners of videogame RPGs since the early '90s and, until some years ago, I used to write extensively about them both online and on magazines, something I mostly stopped doing when the publication I worked for finally went under, and something I still miss dearly, since writing about an hobby gradually ends up becoming a new, endearing hobby in its own right. This has gradually motivated me to create a cozy place where I can gather my thoughts and ramblings about the many different subgenres, trends and undercurrents historically associated with videogame RPGs, the evolution of their core systems during the decades in different geographical and cultural contexts and the long list of titles, developers and series I'm interested to discuss with like-minded hobbyists.
Broadly, you can expect two kind of articles here. The first is akin to a relaxed, rather long-form review open to all manners of tangents and meanderings, focusing on RPGs from every part of the world, regardless of platform and time period, with a bit more emphasis on the obscure and lesser known ones, just because I think it’s more useful to shed some light on titles that haven’t already been dissected by countless others. Those kind of pieces will be written from an openly subjective, sometimes even a bit autobiographical, point of view, as I try to place each game not just in its own context in terms of development, narrative, cultural, historical and religious themes and inspirations, mechanics and art direction, but also attempt to express how it influenced me during my lifelong journey through RPGs, what expectations I had before starting it, how its marketing and broader context influenced the way I evaluated it and why, how the game made me change my preconceived opinions (if it did, obviously) once the credits rolled or how I ended up revising my thoughts about it long after completing it, based on the later state of its subgenre, franchise or developer.
In the context of videogame reviews, I always felt that, while objective, dry and factual descriptions of game systems are necessary to properly introduce each game's identity and to provide readers some much needed context about its mechanics, development and relation to past titles, so-called objective, neutral evaluations are an impossibility given the way each observer's perception is informed by his past experiences, whether he is able to recognize it or not. In this regard, I think the most honest approach is to offer the readers a chance to glimpse the writer’s tastes, biases and habits, without trying to hide their influence on any given take, but also without letting them flow outside the boundaries of internally consistent, logical arguments that can be understood, if not necessarily shared, by readers.
Depending on when I played a game, this method can also offer some glimpses about the way RPG fans (or at least, the one who is currently boring you) used to play out their hobby when the internet was still an unexplored wasteland crossed by enthusiastic pioneers, videogame magazines were still the main sources of information (something I dearly miss, even more so since I ended up directly experiencing the sunset of that once-glorious niche in my country), importing games was hard but knowing they even existed was often even harder and puzzles and what people now describe as “lack of handholding” weren’t countered by taking a quick peek at your smartphone, but required racking one’s brain, since mail-ordered clue books, guidebooks or the tips randomly given in magazines' tips section were far less immediate to peruse, and sometimes not even that effective. While I have mostly focused on providing some sort of methodology for tackling older titles, obviously I will also end up giving the spotlight to games I have recently completed and those I’m currently enjoying. As a word of caution, I won't avoid spoilers, even if I will try to warn readers before discussing them and to avoid needlessly mentioning twists that don't contribute to the points I'm interested in making.
Aside from reviews, I will also try to provide essays and opinion pieces of various length, focused not on individual RPGs, but on broader topics like the evolution of certain design trends, the history of a franchise or developer, the videogame RPG market in various geographical areas or the issues linked with the many descriptors usually associated with the RPG family and its countless subgenres, a topic that, as tedious as it is after decades of mostly pointless (and equally heated, as it often happens) debates, still needs to be tackled here, at least in order to provide a stance that is internally consistent for the purpose of a blog such as this.
Broadly speaking, I'm not interested in measuring the degree of RPG-ness of any given game, or to excommunicate any title by crafting elaborate definitions that, in my experience, are often disconnected with the long historical evolution of videogame RPG design trends and tend to keep out whole series or even subgenres for arbitrary reasons, whether they go for a focused approach, crafting an extremely narrow definition in order to single out certain alleged RPG-defining traits that end up being accepted by small communities at best, or a mainstream-friendly one, equating RPGs with the most well known series or titles usually associated with that label, regardless of the differences between them or even inside each franchise, or, again, an emotive one, which sometimes devolves in equating RPGs with the titles or subgenres experienced or liked by the writer during their prime.
Rather, I tend to treat the videogame RPG umbrella as little more than a rather chaotic toybox filled with wildly different subgenres and design choices that cater, often in contradicting ways, to the various ways pen and paper Role Playing Games first, and then a more abstract idea of role playing, often mixed with other media, were perceived and adapted to the videogame medium in different time periods and geographical areas by people with wildly different sensibilities and objectives.
For this reason, you can expect to find here games whose legitimacy as RPGs is normally considered to be questionable at best, RPG-contiguous and RPG-adjacent titles, hybrid subgenres and the likes, since, in the end, I believe embracing the sheer variety developed by this heterogeneous family throughout the last four decades, while still recognizing how it caters to different audiences and needs to be properly differentiated and compartimentalized, is much more interesting than ignoring this fascinating complexity and cultivating the illusion of perfectly coherent categories. I'm also absolutely open to the idea that the RPG subgenres I refer to can often actually be considered as independent genres, as this difference is mostly related to considering RPG as an extremely vague and open genre label or, rather, a purely thematic layer borrowed by mechanically diverse videogames and, ultimately, no genre at all. One could playfully paraphrase one of Prince Klemens von Metternich’s famous quote to say RPGs aren’t a videogame genre, but rather a cultural expression.
So, if I think a game caters to any of the niches that have been historically linked with the RPG moniker in the videogame space, even if for conflicting reasons, that title is fair game for this blog, at least once I clarify its target and nature. After all, a label shouldn't be treated as some sort of secret to discover, but as a tool to facilitate debates among fellow hobbysts. In this regard, using a generic "RPG" label after providing a lenghty subjective definition that leaves out thousands of titles is far less helpful than using longer, more detailed definitions. After all, even a more specific genre label like "Action RPG" has historically been used by different people in different communities to define drastically diverse mechanics in series like Ys, Mana, The Elder Scrolls, Diablo, Tales, Gothic, TWEWY, Souls and countless others, and throwing it into an ongoing analysis without explaining which action RPGs you are actually referencing isn't really helpful unless one is intentionally using that in the vaguest possible way.
Aside from a small number of exceptions taken from posts or articles I wrote elsewhere, the vast majority of what I plan to post here will be newly written and, if and when I repurpose something I wrote before, either in English or in my native language, I will clarify it and briefly reference the original piece. Images, logos, artworks and such used in this blog will usually be sourced from the web, opting for official publisher-released material when possible.
Thanks to all who managed to read this not-so-brief introduction to the end, I hope what I end up writing can be at least of some interest to other like-minded, curious hobbyists.