The Insane Asylum

I love RPGs. Perhaps the idea of taking turns like gentleman to attack may seem odd to those more involved in more action focused titles, but the genre holds great appeal to me. However, even I must ponder what lunacy drives some of the genre's more common traits. Today I would like to discuss the concept of having allied player characters snatched from you.

This blog post will contain spoilers for some rather old games.

Techincally I could use spoiler markup, but I don't want to.

Anyway, some RPGs seem to have this rather annoying trait of snatching allies right out of your hands, and often without warning. It may be an important plot point, a test of skill or done merely for the lulz on the part of demented designers. It almost doesn't matter why though, because the very action almost wants you to dive in and start smashing things personally.

Some RPGs are on the lesser end of this frustration. In other words, these are the games that give them back to you. Often this comes quite late, but you're given some relief in knowing that all the hard work still exists to be used at some point.

Skies of Arcadia is a fine example. You have three permanent party members (once all three are gathered into one group) and then a fourth member that switches between three possible choices as you progress through. Although late, a point comes where you can choose between all three, and while the game is almost over at this point it's not bad and at least returning characters are auto-levelled each time. The end game still exists and various sidequests can still exist at this time.

But then you have the monsters, and by that I'm not referring to the generic enemies you carve up with whatever pain-inflicting object you can put your hand on. These are the games that watch over you carefully raising a character only to gleefully snatch said person away from you on a rather permanent basis, possibly holding back a laugh so maniacal it would put the evil dictator you're fighting to shame. It's the ultimate kick in the balls, because any hard work is instantly destroyed and it often means trying to train a replacement to serve in their role who at this point is going to be woefully inept at pretty much anything.

My first encounter with this horror was Evolution Worlds on the Gamecube. It was also my first RPG outside of the world of Pokemon. The game is effectively split into two parts. During my initial playthrough I was busy using Linear Cannon (who, as far as video game characters go, was a cute girl and also a very strong supporting party member). I worked to open up her skill sets and train her stats. Then as the first segment was coming to a close she was bloody kidnapped, leaving me to defeat the midgame antagonist with a fairly weak Gre trying to fill the third spot.

Linear was rescued and was usable again, so I went about using her in my active party again with the hope that the game would continue in a logical sense; a hope that was duly crushed under the weight of deja vu. More skills gained, more stats raised and then she gets kidnapped again, leaving me to once again trying to fill the now empty third slot with a weaker character to defeat the end game boss. WHAT THE *bleep*?!?! STOP STEALING MY FAVOURITE CHARACTER YOU *BLEEP*S!!!

Quite how that experience didn't turn me off the genre entirely is a mystery, but hey, here I am. Now, it's not as if games can't pull off the character steal well, but there are better ways to go about it than just taking them away without any options or warning.

Tales of Symphonia has nine playable characters but only eight party slots. Kratos does leave you for a notable period of time early on, but this is where ToS differs from the norm. You have the option of getting Kratos back, but doing so means permanently losing another character whose playstyle is virtually identical (although their personalities and appearance couldn't be more different).

This choice isn't exactly obvious, and chances are most players wouldn't even realise it exists for their first playthrough. However, the point remains that the choice is there. We're going to lose someone and we can't change that. However, we have the power to decide who, and that swings things in the game design's favour.

So there we have it. There's no need to remove the concept entirely, because we all know that killing off a popular character can raise interest in even the blandness of stories. However, there are ways to do it right that won't result in a controller getting buried in the TV.
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