Honestly, I wasn’t too put off by the menu driven nature of what occurred in the game. I doubt many people care for the intricacies of said worlds, yet people still love the characters and their trials in the midst of a brand new world – clearly, there’s something beyond these mechanics that drive the games. I find many people do not pay attention to JRPG plots, assuming them to be totally nonsensical from the outset – that’s a problem with the player, not the game. Subtle hints are laid out within the plot’s structure that reveal the true nature of events if you’re paying attention. The attention to detail Japanese developer put into the world’s aesthetic look, feel, and sound tries for a holistic blend, a transportation into another world – they work, more often than not. Who didn’t love deciphering the metaphysics of, say, Final Fantasy X’s complex chain of being? What’s an aeon, a Fayth, and all these new races? What are the physics of Besaid, and why can people hold their breath under water so long? Everything has an explanation if you choose to search for it – even Final Fantasy XIII has a Wikipedia database (although, really, that’s not the point of that game). JRPGs create worlds, subtly like our own, yet totally different. The act of reading, from my view, makes a game more interactive than it would be otherwise – it forces you to grapple with the text, create character voices, and bring life to what the developers could not with their limited translation skills and simple spritework. How grand, how metaphorical, and how true to Scripture. Even Final Fantasy IV works brilliantly in that context – imagine, a dark knight must become a paladin, a warrior of light, to defeat the evils of the world. I remember my mother telling me that The Nightmare Before Christmas was actually a story of a man being born again, and I think it actually works that way. Since I was inundated with the Bible at the same time, the parallels were obvious: every story in every medium were filled to the brim with redemptive overtones. Certainly, they weren’t great localizations, but the world which Squaresoft created was amazing. I would call myself an avid reader, and these games OVERFLOWED with text.

Cecil’s journey from dark to light was a revelation. However, sometimes you needed a breather from the intense focus of such games – or, perhaps, you desired something a little more from the standard.Įnter Final Fantasy II/IV. That’s not to say that having Mario or Sonic as a constant companion was a bad thing – most games of that era took inspiration from their more advanced arcade counterparts, and retained their love of reflex-based challenge. It’s difficult to imagine my life without JRPGs – both my love for video games and my development as a Christian stem from them.īeing a console gamer in my youth, there weren’t many choices for games other than platformer X or action game Y.

Spoony microcosm