Difficult Equation Draws Near!

Hello, gentle reader. As you may have noticed, I prefer to spend my time playing games rather than writing about games. This brings me to all sorts of odds with the rest of the staff of the Injun*, most of whom* spend far more time writing as many words as possible on the subject with little to no actual research**. Eventually, they* start asking questions as to why their* glorious leader and the founder of this great thing hasn’t written anything in, like, three decades.

Bastards.

So, I figured I’d take some time out of my busy schedule*** and answer a question posited by a curious individual*.

Why do people play RPGs?

Or rather,

Why do people play JRPGs?

I guess that one needed clarification. Everyone knows why people still play pen-and-paper RPGs, they’re awesome. And western-style RPGs, for the most part, riff off of that, and have since way back when, making them occasionally awesome.

But JRPGs… man. Just thinking about them brings up my horrible, tormented childhood****, a magical time when I could still believe in grand adventures and the triumph of good over evil. Eventually I became horribly jaded, and though I still have a shelf full of RPGs of all sorts, I occasionally find myself wondering why*****.

Believe me when I say that I am the best man for the job (of answering Kilroy’s stupid question).

Back in the day, there weren’t too many ways to depict a group of four people bashing on a horde of goblins and taking all their money. The best solution at the time, it seemed, was to put everything into a menu, and task the player with hitting the Attack button for all the characters and watch them beat down the goblins and take their money. And the best way to show exactly how hard you were beating the goblins, or how hard the goblins were beating you, was to use numbers.

Health measured in Hit Points. Magic measured in Magic Points. Your experience noted by how many Experience Points you’ve amassed by damaging monsters’ Hit Points with your Magic Points. Levels and so on. A lot of these things are really just throwbacks to pen-and-paper RPGs which, as I’ve mentioned before, are awesome******.

But in a pen-and-paper RPG, you end up with significant rewards******* beyond the numbers, things like entire kingdoms and magic rings that let your turn opponents into sandwiches. All JRPGs usually do is give you more numbers. Then you use those numbers to fight enemies with bigger numbers, and repeat until the game is over, the bestiary is complete, all the minigames are done, and you’ve beaten that superboss that takes seventeen hours of horrifying grind to even get close to harming.

But, uh, I guess that’s its own form of achievement? People seem to like making their numbers go up********. Some people, driven mad with numberlust, will do anything they can to make those numbers go up higher, and will play the absolute worst games in order to sate that feeling*********. Horrible, brutish creatures, in my opinion.

But eh. This all reminded me of one of the reasons I don’t enjoy MMOs that much. I’m gonna go ahead and put this one to bed and play some Final Fantasy IV. Ciao**********!

* Kilroy.
** In games at least. He does a ton of research on other stuff.
*** Busy playing Final Fantasy Tactics, mostly.
**** It actually wasn’t all that horrible or tormented at all.
***** Nostalgia, mostly?
****** Infinity Injun: Completely Impartial To Everything.
******* Well, if your GM is actually good at his job.
******** Deets, make sure to thank Kevin for having such an accurate description of RPGs handy.
********* I’ve got a lot of them on my shelf.
********** Probably doesn’t mean what I think it means.