Guest Blog: Meagan Talks Death in Fire Emblem: Awakening

Meagan talks a bit about her experiences with the woes of death in the Nintendo 3DS RPG Fire Emblem: Awakening. She also has her own blog about emotions and music here.

Fire Emblem: Awakening is a great role-playing game that really takes character death to a whole new level. If none of you have played the game, you are pretty much going through a great story line and using tactical strategies to take down your enemies. At the beginning of the game you get to design your own character and choose the difficulty, casual or classic. In casual, if one of your characters dies, they simply are taken out of that battle and return again for a different battle. You have two main characters, you and Prince Chrom and if one of those two characters were to die, it's game over and you have to restart that level. In classic, if the character dies, he/she dies for good, which means you can never use them in combat ever again. Fire Emblem calls this kind of death permadeath (an amalgam for permanent-death). If one of your characters die, they are gone for good and the plot-line or sub-plots will be altered or sometimes even non-existent. Even so, these characters are eventually replaced by another, each with their own personalities and stories.

Fire Emblem takes death seriously which makes this game have unique gameplay. You work hard on building the stats of these characters which makes losing them so much harder. Most players, if they have a connection with their character, they will just restart the game to get back their lost player. It can be frustrating to lose something you put so many hours in to which can cause some major game rage. Why would someone want to go through all this just to keep restarting and getting more frustrated? Most people like the challenge and you can pay more attention to your character’s health and stats because you don’t want your character to die on the battle field. You also move around the battle field more carefully.

So if you want a bit of a challenge, play Fire Emblem Awakening with the classic difficulty on and get your rage on.

A Brief History of Role-Playing Games

The Early Days

It all started in 1974, when a couple of guys named Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson decided to make a game. Not a video game mind you, but a pen and paper dice-rolling game called Dungeons & Dragons. This is the game that really popularized the role-playing genre; the rules were relatively easy to learn, and playing meant having a good time with your friends around the table. The game in of itself is very fun, but I believe the most important thing about D&D was the legacy that it left and continues to leave to this day. This game was an inspiration for multitudes of RPGs to follow; many games even used modified D&D rules for their systems such as Bioware's critically acclaimed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. D&D set the stage for everything that was to come, whether it was a video game RPG or not

The Renaissance

The mid 1980s through the 1990s are what I consider to be the "golden age" of role-playing games. This is finally where the technology (for the period) caught up to what the storytellers were wanting to accomplish. Out of this period came masterpieces such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, which are still series that are going strong today. A lot of the great RPGs during this time were from Japanese developers, so this is also the time when the distinction between "western" and "eastern" RPGs began to crop up. Speaking of the west, a little company called Bioware released a game called Baldur's Gate in 1998, a Dungeons & Dragons game in fact. I'll be coming back to them later.

The Modern Era

Today, pretty much every game will try to shoehorn in some RPG elements, whether it be leveling mechanics in a First person shooter, or skill trees in an action game, but even if the genre is somewhat saturated today, there are still quality RPGs out there, especially when it comes to giving players meaningful choices. There are three franchises today which I believe encapsulate the modern quality of the RPG; Mass Effect, The Witcher, and The Elder Scrolls. Each of them present meaningful choices which a lot of the time inhabit a moral grey area for the protagonist--especially in the case of The Witcher-- and on top of of that they are of the highest quality in terms of design, gameplay, and art. Games such as these will be the focus of this blog, and I hope you stay with me as we explore the dilemma of player choice in Role-Playing Games.

NEXT TIME: Bioware's early attempts at choice

Resources

Wizards of the Coast. (2007). What is d&d?. Retrieved from https://www.wizards.com/default.asp?       x=dnd/whatisdnd

Schreier, J. (2012, August 8). What in the world is final fantasy? a beginner's guide to the biggest rpg series on the planet. . Retrieved from http://kotaku.com/5931304/what-in-the-world-is-final-fantasy-a-beginners-guide-to-the-biggest-rpg-series-on-the-planet

Dragon quest(series). (2014, March 18). Retrieved from http://dragon-quest.org/wiki/Dragon_Quest_(series)

Harris, J. (2009, July 2). Game design essentials: 20 rpgs. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20091109154652/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4066/game_design_essentials_20_rpgs.php?page=10

Bioware and the Art of Conversation

Bio..who?

Chances are, if you're an RPG fan, or even if you're not, you've heard of Bioware. They have developed some of the most high profile games of recent years, such as the Mass Effect and  Dragon Age series. However, the game that really put them on the map, so to speak, was one of their earliest; 1998's Baldur's Gate. 

Baldur's Gate

Baldur's Gate is a game based in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons and Dragons, so Bioware had quite a bit of source material to pull from, and it was from this rock solid foundation that they crafted an RPG that would completely change the playing field for the genre. 

Baldur's Gate was one of the first RPGs to offer the player meaningful choices beyond how they decided to equip their character and manipulate their statistics. Although the story was still quite linear, the player could now dictate if they wanted different characters to travel with them, and in turn these characters would offer new quests, adventures, and conversation options; you couldn't possibly see everything in one play-through. 

Talk, Talk, Talk

The mechanic that set Baldur's Gate apart from other RPGs at the time was the conversation system. When you click on a Non-Player Character (NPC) to initiate a conversation, instead of a linear back and forth taking place, you may be presented with several different choices of response. Each response could garner yet another unique response from the NPC, creating what is called a conversation tree, and at the end of some branches could lie a quest or a hint on how to move forward. Bioware is widely considered to be the first developer to really evolve this branching conversation system in a meaningful way. Of course Baldur's Gate was only the first iteration of this system. I will explore how they refined it later on!

Resources

Baldur's gate for pc reviews. (1998, November 30). Retrieved from http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/baldurs-gate

Insert a Coin to Continue...

What is this all about?

Ah, that timeless question; Continue? Quite possibly one of the first choices ever posed to a young gamer, in those musty old arcades. Besides the choice of whether you wanted to pay the arcade another fifty-cents, there hasn't been much meaningful choice making in video games until recently, with the popularization of the Role-Playing Game(RPG) genre. What will be provided in this blog, is an exploration of the genre as it pertains to choice, player agency, and the evolution of choice-making and how it impacts storytelling. It will include my opinions, and the opinions and findings of other researchers and developers in the industry.

Of course, every RPG--and there are thousands-- can't be covered within the scope of this blog, but it will attempt to cover major players when it comes to choice-making, such as Mass Effect, The Witcher, and others. And if you were worried that the venerable (but still very much relevant) pen and paper games would be left out, don't be, they will get the spotlight as well; we wouldn't be here without them. So join me, as we explore this time-tested genre, and one of the most exciting aspects of it; crafting your own legend with the power of choice.

A Bit About Me

I'm Cameron, a university student currently studying Arts and Technology at The University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson, Texas. I'm mostly focusing on character rigging and technical animation, but one of my passions has always been gaming and game design. And of course, my favorite genre since I first picked up Final Fantasy VII as a kid, has always been the Role-Playing Game.

NEXT TIME: A Little History Lesson