Nostalgia, Part II

 Video games. I forgot to talk about video games. Obviously, my last post laid the foundations for a lot of my nerdiness. But there is another large chunk of my childhood that I didn't talk about. Which brings us back to my first sentence. Video games. 

I spent days trying to remember what the word was that people used to make fun of people that only listen to obscure music bands. Asking people who couldn't remember and multiple failed google searches. Finally, I found the word hipster. That used to be something you could find all over the place. There were sitcoms all over that had characters that portrayed laughable hipsters. Well, when I was young, I fancied myself a kind of video game hipster. I refused to play Final Fantasy or even Legend of Zelda games because they were the popular games. I prided myself on playing RPG's that were less well known. While that was true to a degree, I also played games that made me far less hipster. I was just too young to really see the inconsistency or hypocrisy in it. 

I have to address the reality of RPG's in the video game world. Today, there is a subgenre of RPG's called jRPG's. These are the ones that are specifically created in Japan and have specific characteristics that distinguish them as such. After the establishment of games such as World of Warcraft and Skyrim and all kinds of other games, not all RPG's are Japanese anymore. Well, in my day, there was no such thing as jRPG's, because all RPG's were Japanese. Old man rant over, let's move on.

I was loyal to Sony since the first Playstation. Most RPG's back then had turn-based combat systems. What set them apart from each other was how they innovated on that basic premise. Legend of Legaia distinguished itself by identifying itself as kin to famous fighting games. Every combat, you had to put in a sequence of the buttons on the d-pad, or the direction pad. Up, down, left, and right. You could find combos, special moves, if you strung together the right sequence of moves. If you were good, you could find special moves that shared sequences with other special moves, either one ended with the same sequence that another started with or something like that. It was fun. It had a sequel, Legaia 2: Dual Saga. It shared the same combat system, which was fun, but it left the mythology of the first game far behind, started from scratch, which was sad, because the first game was very original. It was a post-apocalyptic situation in a world that had built its civilization on creatures called seru that were animal level in intelligence, but also symbiotic with humans, providing abilities that the humans took advantage of as far as it turned a person into a forklift, or a crane, or something similar. 

Other games I loved included Legend of Dragoon, which was Sony's very own Final Fantasy killer, or that's how they marketed it back then. It was a beautiful game, one that had a combat system that required precise timing to maximize the damage you could inflict on your enemies. The magic was based on using the mineralized souls of dragons to imbue chosen warriors with magical armor reminiscent of those dragons when needed. Jade Cocoon. That came out after and was heavily influenced by Pokemon. A ton of games came out after Pokemon that were about capturing and training magical creatures to fight in your stead. Jade Cocoon was a beautifully designed game that had the Cocoon master, the trainer, turn into those creatures, able to cycle between three monsters at any given time, and had an amazingly well done breeding system that let you combine base monsters and generate new ones that combined visual elements from the parents. 

Now that I mention Pokemon, I played that, too. I stopped at Gold and Silver, so way back in the actual Gameboy era. Nothing like what these whippersnappers are playing nowadays. My favorite Pokemon for a while was Shuckle. He had the highest defense and special defense in the game, meaning he was hard to hurt. He also had the lowest attack and special attack in the game, so you had to rely on other metrics to hurt your opponent. That's what I liked about him. Using him meant I had to be creative, and doing that let me express both my artistic creativity as well as my problem solving intelligence. 

Another game that I loved, that I was unaware was made by the same company, the same creative team, even, as Final Fantasy, was Star Ocean. That was like Star Trek meets Lord of the Rings. I loved it. It starts from the Star Trek side, where you have an advanced space opera civilization with laws against interfering with underdeveloped planets, only to crash land on one. Then, once there, these hard science soldiers discover magic, for the first time, on this so-called underdeveloped planet. It's like Picard landing on Middle Earth only to encounter Gandalf. It's pretty awesome. 

What mostly ended my search for the perfect RPG, though, was another game created by the Final Fantasy team: Kingdom Hearts. The first one came out when I was in high school. You might be able to imagine my skepticism of a game I was hearing about, one that promised to have a bunch of Disney characters in it. I thought it would be stupid. Then the first one came out and I was hooked. Storyline-wise, the first game was the best, hands down. Play-style-wise, the second was best, in my opinion. This series deserves its own post, so it will get it. Until then, let's just say I'm a huge Kingdom Hearts fan and I hope to buy my own keyblade one day. 

And still, there's more. My nerdiness runs very deep. I still have to talk about comic books and my experience as a ttrpg, or tabletop role-playing game, Game Master. When you GM a Dungeons and Dragons game, you are called a Dungeon Master, when you GM a World of Darkness game, you are called a Storyteller. But GM is the generic, "any rpg" term, so that's what I'll go with. I have run games for years. Not because I wanted to, mind you. I love playing more than running, any day. But nowadays, it's hard to find a GM that will run the kinds of games I want to play. So I have to run them myself. 

That being said, I do like world-building. As far as game settings go, I've got two go-to's that I have brewed up for my gamers to play in, depending on which system we go for. The first is 1st edition Pathfinder, the version that was meant to be reverse compatible with all the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 material I owned. This one is very loosely based on the Kingdom Hearts setting. I did so much digging for lore and piecing together alternate systems, just to get this one to come out resembling anything like a normal setting. First off, I settled on a version of a setting called Spelljammer. That was a space fantasy setting that was created for second edition Dungeons and Dragons. They also had adaptations made in magazines for DnD, and supplements that came out for fourth edition. Anyway, the lore for Spelljammer is that there are clear, crystal-like spheres that englobe star systems. Inside those globes is something called wild space, which is basically outer space as we know it. Outside of those globes is something called the Phlogiston, which is a kind of primal ether that is highly flammable and highly viscous. There are sometimes holes in the crystal spheres, which rotate around the systems they encapsulate, meaning you have to know where those holes are going to be and when if you want access into or out of the chosen systems. All other settings fit inside this framework. If you have any experience with Kingdom Hearts, then you know this is a decent way to translate how that game handles interstellar travel, what with gummi walls and whatnot. 

The next step has to do with filling out the worlds found inside the greater space travelling framework. For the inspiration for this, I started with the worlds found in the Kingdom Hearts games. Each world represented a different movie. There was Agrabah, from Aladdin, Atlantica, from Little Mermaid, Neverland from Peter Pan, Halloweentown from Nightmare Before Christmas, the three worlds that represent Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. There was Beast's Castle, Tron's computer world, Stitch's ship from Lilo and Stitch, San Fransokyo, Monstropolis from Monsters Inc., Corona from Tangled, Arrendale from Frozen, Monstro from Pinocchio, the Deep Jungle from Tarzan, the Caribbean from Pirates of the Caribbean, the 100 Acre Wood from Winnie the Pooh, Pride Lands from Lion King, Imperial China from Mulan, and Andy's Room from Toy Story. There were also a dozen other characters referenced throughout the games through Easter eggs. 

I have far fewer worlds. The one I've fleshed out the most, because I have actually had players play through the setting, is the desert world. Obviously, this is initially based on Agrabah. But, master mixer that I am, I drew on the archetypes of a dozen different desert settings to make something fun and real-feeling. I drew upon Agrabah itself, obviously, but also Dune, and Barsoom, from the John Carter of Mars series, to the Dark Sun setting, which is another hardcore desert setting. I have a world that is loosely based on Monsters Inc., which I've folded into World of Darkness and a video game series called Hellgate: London, which I haven't played but have read one of the books connected to it. I have another system that has two habitable worlds, loosely based on the London/Neverland dichotomy that was presented in the Peter Pan world. One is a post-apocalyptic steampunk world, the other is a pristine faerie world. I have an ice age world called Polaris, where my version of Santa Claus lives, a la Christmastown in Nightmare Before Christmas. In the works, still, a Chinese/Asian inspired setting and a jungle setting. 

One of my favorite settings, so far, is my superhero world, loosely based on the Incredible, on Marvel, and uses a modified version of the 2nd edition of a game system called Mutants and Masterminds, which was built on top of the open license Wizards of the Coast published along with the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons. This is highly dependent on my experience with comic books, so I'm going to save the outline of this world for my next post, along with my comic book history.

See you next time, True Believers!