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The Scoop on Role Playing Games
by John Annese for Gamers Today
To complete every console role playing game (RPG) on the market will take you, approximately, two weeks, three days and two hours. Forget about sleeping, bathing, working or having any sort of social life.
The average role playing game, regardless of its quality, takes about 40 hours to complete. Players typically spend this time managing menus, slashing through meaningless random battles, searching for magical plants to heal stricken comrades, and scrolling through page after page of not-quite-English text describing millennial evils and unconsummated love stories.
Of course, the role playing fan can look past all this. Besides, smart fans of the genre know to steer clear of titles like Legend of Legaia, Shadow Madness and Wild Arms 2 and spend their money on the next Squaresoft release instead. And compared to the dark ages, before Final Fantasy VII when Playstation owners had to settle for Beyond the Beyond and an intravenous drip of morphine to dull the pain, the glut of RPGs on the market must seem like paradise.
For the novice RPG player, however, choosing the right game can be trickier. Usually, a 40-hour game takes about a month to complete, maybe two. A college student on vacation with no desire to join his comrades in Daytona will probably finish in a few days and move on to the next challenge. The normal, well adjusted gamer may not have the time or money to buy more than two or three RPGs a year. With so many titles, it's easy to overlook winners like Vagrant Story, Front Mission 3, or Chrono Cross.
To make matters worst, the critics aren't critical enough. Unless a game is truly rancid (e.g., the above-mentioned Beyond the Beyond), most critics will give a mediocre RPG a generous rating. For instance, Daily Radar called The Legend of Dragoon a "direct hit," ignoring a lousy translation and a battle system so tedious it could induce narcolepsy in a sugar-saturated hyperactive seven-year-old. A couple of critics noticed the game's problems, but most were blinded by the pretty graphics to comment.
Ideally, American companies would not import sub-par RPGs. Alas, from the look of the saturated market, including three dismal Playstation 2 launch titles, it appears the bar has fallen. Gamers will just have to make careful choices between games like Final Fantasy IX (Square's juggernaut flagship title) and Skies of Arcadia for the Sega Dreamcast. Obviously, the selection is not all good, so gamer beware.
