Happy Video Game Nerd – EarthBound (Original)

Games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Final Fantasy have their own official music, were as Earthbound/Mother 2 has some remix’s by actual artists. Them actually selling it in the west would sadly cause them more damage and loss on their part. It’s understandable why they wouldn’t want too sell it in the west.

Skyrim is coming out in a few days, there was also Dragon Age (origins was a really good game, II was just average), there’s fallout (although I’m willing to admit that falls in the threshold of an FPS more than a WRPG, but I do agree on the fact that MMO games are killing the single player RPG experience. Now it seems there’s no point in playing a game and leveling up your characters, getting the best equipment if there’s no way for bragging about it. I won’t say that MMO’s are a cancer, since in themselves and within the realms of what they present they do their job of a massively ever-expanding world shared with more users, although the people who play them are mostly my only complaint about them since they ruin the game, no offense, plus the fact that there are too many of them and therefore it completely ruins the atmosphere since there’s like a gazillion heavily armored PC’s walking about or fighting.

All I’m saying is that while Mother 2 might be a fantastic game it is so not because of its plot but rather the way it’s presented (say it with me now, GYIGAS/Geige FTW) and the characters that move the plot forward.

For me, the only real RPG series’ that remains true to its origins is The Elder Scrolls, since it not only presents a magnificent single player experience and has a mythology so rich and deep it’ll take you weeks or even months to get to the bottom of it, and in the end if an RPG has the ability to immerse the player so much that he/she’ll start reading up on the whole universe around the game, it’s doing its job right.

While on the subject, the two things I miss from old times RPG are Role playing (which is mostly gone due to the lack of immersion games nowadays present) and non-linear standard adventures, a la Ultima. Every game nowadays seems to be too focused on the player creating their own experience and forgets a role playing game is supposed to BE an experience, so the plots are always threaded and non-linear and your character is as blank as a cardboard cut-out. Which isn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, when a game can present all those many possibilities to the player it’s good in its own right but when EVERY game in the market does it it starts getting pretty annoying, since there’s just no soul to the games anymore. The main offenders for this are fallout and mass effect.

TL;DR I agree with you but I stand by my argument about the plot’s lenght.

/Rant over.