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NEWS AND VIEWS - OCTOBER 2018
WRITING NEWS Don't have a whole lot to report here, I'm afraid. I'm still working on Champions Weekly, the latest Signalverse novel, but I'm not hitting it too hard; I only added about 3,000 words this month. I originally thought I'd be able to get this one done by the end of the year, but alas, I think I'm going to have to take that back. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING Finished Herbert Asbury's The French Quarter this month, along with Alan Moorehead's The Russian Revolution: a wonderfully readable and concise history of a very complicated series of events. I also finished Robinson Crusoe, which was interesting as an historical artifact, and got a little ways into the latest Astro City trade, Broken Melody. But that's pretty much it; I haven't really been doing a lot of reading this month. * * * * * * * * RPG'S I've always liked video games, but I didn't become really passionate about them until I started getting into the really long and involving RPG's of the 16-bit era. It took several years for me to fully grok the RPG genre -- as a hyperactive kid, I had a hard time understanding the appeal of a slow-paced game like Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior. Selecting "fight" from a command list, as opposed to controlling a character directly, just seemed stupid and boring to me. I actually rented the NES Final Fantasy from the convenience store one weekend, on the strength of its cover art. It was so confusing, weird, and different from the Mario-like platformers I was used to that after about thirty minutes or so I actually burst into tears, because I'd wasted my one alloted weekend rental on a lousy game that I didn't understand. My mom took pity on me and drove me back to town, where I returned the game and picked up something else. The first game I played that led to my love of RPG's was Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, an NES adventure game. This was probably the first game I played, and actually sort of liked (because of the silly, cutesy cartooniness of it), that didn't consist of Mega Man-style action. I never really got anywhere with it, but I liked it. Pirates!, which I eventually bought, was another game that brought me closer to an appreciation of RPG's. Pirates! wasn't an adventure game or an RPG -- it was more of an open-world game with a bit of a narrative wrapped around it -- but it was long and involving, and was different from anything else I'd ever played before. It could also be very frustrating at times -- I was perhaps a little too young to grasp some of the mechanics -- but overall I really enjoyed the game, and I spent a lot of time playing it. The first game that really opened my eyes to the storytelling possibilities of video games, though, was Shining in the Darkness, a dungeon crawler for the Sega Genesis, which I borrowed from my friend Alex in (I believe) 1992. This type of game didn't appeal to me at all at the time, but Alex and his brother always looked to be having such a good time playing it that I decided there must be something to it. So, even though the game didn't really interest me, I forced myself to play it...and after a week or two, I was hooked. Not only did I finally come to see the appeal in organizing and equipping an adventuring party, I began to realize that video games could actually be an effective storytelling medium. There's a creepy scene in Shining in the Darkness where the court wizard, Melvyl, sitting alone in the tavern, reveals himself to be the evil villain Dark Sol; I was blown away by this scene. Shining in the Darkness was the first real RPG I played. It took me a while, but I eventually fell in love with it -- this was a game that told a story (not a very sophisticated story, admittedly, but for the time it wasn't half bad), had really deep and interesting mechanics, and which appealed to me aesthetically (I'd been in love with the fantasy genre ever since I picked up one of Terry Brooks's fantasy novels). Even better, it wasn't a game that you could beat in a single afternoon, like most of the other games I'd played up until that time -- this was a game that could take days, maybe even weeks, to finish (and even longer than that if you intended to fully level up your characters and plumb all of the game's secrets). This was great for me -- more bang for my buck. Remember, as a kid I could only afford to buy three or four games a year. The next game in the Shining series, which I played almost immediately afterwards (again, I borrowed this game from my friend Alex), was Shining Force. As had been the case with Shining in the Darkness, I didn't understand the mechanics at first -- unlike Shining in the Darkness, which was a dungeon crawler, this was a strategy RPG akin to Fire Emblem (which series of course I'd never heard of). After getting the hang of it, though, I promptly fell in love with it, just as I had with Shining in the Darkness. In fact, I loved this new game even more: the story was more ambitious, the character designs (by Yoshitaka Tamaki) were awesome, and the gameplay was a revelation. I played through the entire game probably seven or eight times, hunting for every special weapon and secret character. I can still remember the long afternoons I spent playing that game, wrapped up in a blanket (it was winter), sipping hot chocolate, absolutely absorbed in the game's world. Some of my fondest memories. Shining Force was, at heart, a strategy RPG, but much of the gameplay more closely resembled a traditional, Dragon Quest-style RPG: your character could walk around town, talk to villagers, open chests, buy items and weapons and armor, watch silly cutscenes, and so forth. This style of gameplay now appealed to me much more strongly than it had when I had first picked up Final Fantasy all those years ago, and I began to wonder if maybe there wasn't something to this weird genre after all. So, while on a shopping trip with my folks one day, I bought a SNES game called Final Fantasy II. Spoony translation aside, Final Fantasy II told an even more complicated and sophisticated story than Shining Force had -- it was, in fact, practically a soap opera. Characters died, reappeared, switched sides, fell in love, and sacrificed themselves in fiery explosions. The world was bigger and even more full of secrets to uncover. The menu-based battle system -- something I'd never really enjoyed/understood before -- was actually fun. I'd never played a game like this. I was enthralled. I played through it multiple times. RPG's were practically the only games I bought after that -- I was hooked. I grabbed Final Fantasy III (an even better game than Final Fantasy II, and still a contender for my favorite game of all time), Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, and Chrono Trigger for the SNES, Shining Force II for the Genesis (I basically bought a Genesis just to be able to play that game), and a ton of PlayStation RPG's. In fact, during the PSOne era, I bought RPG's almost exclusively -- the only non-RPG's I bought for that system were Tobal No. 1 (which I really only bought for the FFVII demo) and the Resident Evil games. I was always horribly frustrated when I didn't have enough money to buy a new RPG that I wanted -- I missed out on Secret of Mana, Wild Arms 2, Thousand Arms, Suikoden II, Xenogears, Breath of Fire IV, and dozens of others. (Keep in mind that the internet was still in its infancy in those days. Today, if you want to buy a new game, you just hop on Amazon or some other website and order it with your credit card. Back in those days, though, you really only had two options -- you could go to your local department store and hope that the game you wanted was there, or you could try one of those fly-by-night mail-order guys who advertised in video game magazines. I never really had much success with either. The games I wanted were usually niche titles that almost never made it into the department stores, or were in-demand RPG's that the mail-order guys couldn't keep in stock. It took me years to finally track down a copy of Shining Force II back in the day.) I eventually realized that it wasn't so much the RPG mechanics I loved as it was the stories these games told, which led to my eventually branching out into adventure games, visual novels, SRPG's, and other kinds of story-based games. And, ultimately, it was this love of stories, and storytelling, that got me into writing. I liked Shining Force so much that I wanted to write a novelization of it, but after thinking about it a bit I decided it would be more fun to write an entirely original story instead. And basically I've been writing my own stories ever since. * * * * * * * *
BH
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