A few years ago, IGN published their list of the top 100 role-playing games. At the time, I liked it for one reason: Wizardry 8 made the list. Someone at the biggest mainstream gaming news site agreed with me that Wizardry 8 is great, and what’s more, it beat 26 other games on the list. Looking back at it now, there’s even more surprise entries than I realized at first. Dungeon Master. Pool of Radiance. The Bard’s Tale. Might & Magic VI. Clearly, at least one other person at IGN was into first-person dungeon crawlers as much as I am. More than that, though, the list as a whole is unrelenting in its worship of retro games. Plenty of good RPGs have come out in the last ten years, but only the best of them make this list. Because of this, it seems like an excellent snapshot of console and computer RPG history, both from Japanese and western developers.
Point being that if one were to play all the games on this list to completion, one would have a nigh unmatched understanding of the history, design, and stories of RPGs. The price of such an education? Well, aside from the monetary sacrifice, the endeavor would take approximately 6,000 hours to complete. I came up with that number after adding up the average time users claimed they took to complete each game on HowLongToBeat.com. The presence of massively multiplayer online games on the list made calculating that figure less exact, but I just assumed one would have to play any MMORPG for at least 100 hours to do a valid analysis. I allotted 1,000 hours to World of Warcraft, because that game is just too damn important. My personal feelings on WoW aside, I’ve put off exploring it for too long, and as a designer I need to have a deep knowledge of why WoW has remained the king of a genre for over a decade. Playing for 20 hours per week, it would take a person about six years to finish every game.
But isn’t it possible to understand a game without playing it to completion yourself? On a base level, I’d agree with that, but I’d never presume to say I have comprehensive knowledge of Ulysses just because I read the CliffNotes or attended a lecture series. And in my experience, there’s just no substitute for actually playing through a game yourself. I tend to remember aspects of a game much better if I have spent personal gaming time with it, and there’s really no substitute for the greater context gained by observing every challenge, interaction, and design decision firsthand. For these reasons and the fact that I love RPGs more than any other genre, I want to take on this challenge. Furthermore, I want to document my progress through each game, noting what I observe and really taking the time to analyze the important facets of each title.
There are a number of decisions I’ll have to make about how to approach this monumental task, and I hope to address a lot of them with the first few entries. Inevitably, I’ll arrive at a standardized format for each game, and you and I will both know what to expect from each post. But until then, I’m just excited to think about how my thoughts and feelings about RPGs could change after six years of playing through the foundations of the genre. I’ve completed a fair number of games on the list already, of course, and I won’t be replaying each of those all the way through. However, some of them will likely warrant another go, and I will absolutely write up an analysis of each game. Honestly, I jump at any chance to replay Final Fantasy VI I can get.
I hope you’ll come along with me for the journey in whatever capacity you’d like, and I can’t wait to see what I discover. Am I committing to a 20-hour play schedule for the next six years? God no, I have lots of other games to play and things to do, and I think I’d go crazy if I could only play RPGs from now until I’m 33. But I’ll be going at my own plodding, steady pace and posting every now and then. I’ll be playing through each game in sequence as it appears on the list, which means that Nihon Falcom’s Ys Book I & II are up first. Wish me luck, and may there still be dragons on your hard drive. Til next time, farewell!
Grue Ate My Homework 