Worlds Apart
Here’s a quick recap of Freedom Wars’ setting, in case you missed Anthony John Agnello’s review of the game earlier this week: In the distant future, Earth is a barren mess and humans live in sovereign underground city-states called Panopticons that are constantly at war over what little resources remain. Panopticons are also surveillance states with laws ridiculous enough to make Draco himself ask, “What the hell, man?” Any citizen who is thought to be wasting resources is immediately sentenced to at least 1,000,000 years of military servitude, battling against giant monsters that raid Panopticons and kidnap their more productive members of society. Time gets knocked off a prisoner’s sentence with every monster they kill, and the more labor they undertake, the more human rights they slowly earn.
A handful of commenters applauded this batshit crazy setup, and duwease also wondered why we don’t see as many role-playing games developed outside of Japan taking a similarly bizarre tact:
The story and setting at least sound unique. That’s one of the things I like about Japanese RPGs: They often prioritize completely out-of-left-field central concepts like that, and they provide a lot of enjoyment through novelty.
That’s not to say western RPGs don’t have their strengths that I adore, but setting-wise, most break down to fairly generic Tolkien-esque or sci-fi worlds that are differentiated by how well the writers are able to flesh out the characters or background details on the way to taking down the big bad critter or political faction. I’m not battling demon senators trying to get a bill passed so I can run the Netherworld. I’m not traipsing around during a mysterious 25th hour during which people turn into coffins and fighting monsters with aspects of my personality that I unlocked by being nice to people in my town. I’m not escaping a computer simulation that pits religions against each other, turning my algorithms into flesh and blood, and flying into the sun to punch God in the face. I’m not—every weird thing that happens in EarthBound.
Novelty isn’t everything, but dang it, I’m glad someone is out there turning their most off-the-wall concepts into games.
Shinigami Apple Merchant had some thoughts about this divide between Japanese RPG developers and the rest of the world:
I find on average (not always, but in general) Japanese RPGs tend to focus on basic story conventions and instead make the premise and individual characters unique. It seems to me these conventions are most often Beowulf-descends-into-hell-and-emerges-stronger affairs or Joseph Campbell “Hero’s Journey” type stuff, but really, Japanese RPGs can jump off from any point, as it’s about the storytelling (no matter how out-there it gets) and the play is sectioned off as a separate entity.
On the flip side, I think western RPGs try harder to immerse players in the worlds the developers create. They aren’t tying you into a conventional narrative so much as trying to get you to feel connected to the world in which you’re adventuring. They want what you experience and feel to be visceral and unique to the reality they’re presenting and preserving through the combat.
For example, in Freedom Wars you can fight multiple Abductors/Giant Robots at once. They can seemingly pass right through each other, and you get thrashed about but are always equally hurt from being hit, whether it’s by their tail or their arms or their feet. But the story itself is trying to get you to connect to its archetypal characters and the themes it’s trying to present, separate from the immediate gameplay.