30 Days of Gaming: Day 20: Favorite Genre

Day 20: Favorite Genre

For the record, I don't really think there's an incorrect answer to this question. I play a ton of sports games, some first person shooters, some tournament fighters--even though I tend to be bad at them. I have a guitar hero controller in my closet, though don't find much time to play music games. Point is though, I play a lot of different stuff. But you're not reading this to hear me answer "everything," so let's go with...

Role Playing Games




The thing about RPGs, is that there are a lot of different varieties of them. A western action RPG, the games in Bioware's library for instance, will have a much different feel than a turn-based JRPG like a Final Fantasy. An RPG might be very on-rails and focus on a detailed, set storyline, or it might be completely open and encourage as much explanation as possible. It might give you a lot of control over customizing your characters, or it might challenge you to make the best possible usage out of a stable of fixed characters. It might have strategy game elements, card game elements, or some other stuff that's completely out of left field. Thing is, all of these things, when done well, can be fun for their own reasons. Playing Oblivion and waiting till sundown so I could pick the lock of every house in the Imperial City and rob it blind (what, that's not what you did the whole game?) and playing Chrono Trigger and saving the world from a giant-ass shell that fires lasers are both entertaining as hell for me for different reasons. Really, the key to a good RPG is depth, and that can mean different things for different games. It can either mean telling a complex and emotional story, or giving you endless permutations of how you can level up and improve your character, or both. And that's the key to RPGs: the best ones are epic enough in scope to awe you the first time you play, and with good enough and deep enough gameplay to make you want to play again.

Next: Day 21 - Game with the best story. Gonna mull this over, but might be some redundancy here again.