Final Fantasy XIII & A Better RPG

I've been playing a fair amount of Final Fantasy XIII since I fixed my blu-ray drive, and it has got me thinking about a couple of things:

1) People need to stop complaining about Final Fantasy.

Any time there is a new installment or even an announcement regarding the series, there's a collective moan from the gaming community that the series needs to take a break, or that Square Enix need to go back to making "good" Final Fantasy games.  This is ludicrous.

Neil Gaiman may have been talking about a game of thrones when he said: "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch," but this sentiment applies equally well to Square Enix and their Final Fantasy games.  Square Enix does not owe anyone a Final Fantasy game that lives up to their expectations of what the series should be. I think that Final Fantasy VI was the best one followed by IV and then Tactics, but I don't need them to make those games again the way that some people think it would be the best thing ever if they made VII again.  Did I like Yoshitaka Amano's character designs better than Tetsuya Nomura's? Of course I did, Nomura's designs are mostly terrible. Does whining like a spoiled baby about it on the internet solve anything? No.  Grant Morrison said it well in his design manifesto printed in the back of the New X-Men hardcover: "Longtime fans will read the book and bitch about it no matter what."  What he's saying here, is that fanboys are irrelevant.

Internet, you are ludicrous! Stop it!

Yes some of the criticisms that have been leveled at this game are accurate. It's incredibly linear. You don't interact directly with random NPCs the way you do in many JRPGs. It's extremely slow in introducing gameplay concepts.  All of those things are true, but you know what's also true? It looks great. The voice acting and cinematics are very well done. The combat system is very interesting. The story is actually kind of cool and not just crazy unintelligible JRPG nonsense.  This game has a lot of really cool stuff going on, which probably explains why it wound up with generally good review scores (metacritic of 83 on the PS3) and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide.  That doesn't sound like a series that's in dire shape to me.

FF-XIII is a game about Kurt Cobain and two pink haired girls.

2) Final Fantasy, along with other video games, can help us make better pen and paper RPGs.

I've been playing a lot of pen & paper RPGs lately, mostly D&D 3.5 and also the occasional Rogue Trader when I can get my group together.  D&D 3.5 is a good game; it's a better game than 4.0 really.  However, it suffers from a lot of the same problems that 4.0 suffers from.  One of these problems is that hit points are a terrible abstraction of how wounded a character is.  In D&D, a character can be hacked apart by double handed swords with no ill effect until he drops below 0 hit points.  Really then, only that last hack of the great sword really does anything to change the dynamics of the game.  Rogue Trader solves some of this problem by giving characfters an extra 7 or 8 points of critical damage beyond 0 hit points where they suffer progressively worse and sometimes permanent injuries.  Still that doesn't solve the major problems that hit points cause for games.

Most of the time, the adventure will proceed until characters become sufficiently wounded and the risks of carrying on outweigh the rewards of going back to town and resupplying their healing items or regenerating whatever restorative abilities they might have. This puts DMs in a terrible (possibly impossible) spot where they have to carefully design adventures that will just exhuast the party's supply of abilities, otherwise they risk creating a narrative that makes no sense.  If the party only makes it through half of the bandit cave before having to turn back to town, do the rest of the bandits just sit around and wait for them to come back when half of their comrades have been slain? If they do - it's crazy. If they don't - all that carefully designed bandit cave has gone to waste and the DM must quickly come up with some convenient resolution to the adventure.

I will sleep until the party finds me, or maybe go to another cave. Whatever.

So, we have a situation where players are healing wounds (most of which don't matter anyway) at the expense of manageable games and stories that make sense.  In older Final Fantasy games I remember carrying around loads of cheap potions so that I could heal up between fights or save spots in dungeons, preserving my precious magic points for combat rather than healing.  Final Fantasy XIII does something to solve all of this by making hit points automatically regenerate between combats and not having any kind of magic points or limits on the number of times class abilities might be used.  On In a way, it's similar to the way health, magic and abilities regenerate in other modern games like Skyrim or even non-RPGs like Call of Duty.  This system is itself an abstraction.  After all it seems silly that you could get shot in a game like Gears of War and that ducking briefly behind a broken piece of chest-high masonry could somehow make that go away.  Still, it's what allows those games to maintain a sense of forward momentum and constant excitement. There must be some middle ground to be found for pen and paper RPGs. That's the game I want to play.

On the other side of this chest-high wall there are good ideas.

Maybe someone has made that game already and I don't know that it exists. A game where each encounter is a self contained challenge where the players don't have to worry about how many more times their wizards can cast fireball.  A game where being wounded is not a binary condition (that's the tricky part).  Let's find that game, and if it doesn't exist, let's make it.