My Hometown - September 28, 2001 - Brooke Bolander
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. 15 sexy Kung-Fu minutes! Don't say we didn't warn you. Yes, it's another one of those "dumb ol' fun" topics again. I figured two days of in-fighting about censorship and politics was enough, so if you wrote in about that subject, sorry. I would say 'I wouldn't like to live in an RPG city because they seem to get destroyed so easily,' but entire towns being blasted off the map seems all too real as of late, so... Forgive me, I'm tired. It's Friday. | Made me want to take a nap. | | Ms. Bolander, Lumina from Legend of Mana is far and away my favorite city from a videogame. Wandering around that area was like navigating an Escher painting. There was that haunting little melody that played during your time in the city (I've quite forgotten the composer's name, but she did a fantastic job), and let's not forget the open-air tavern with the goofy looking bartender! It's totally surreal, and that's what makes Lumina stand out in my mind. -Some Random Jerk | I just played Legend of Mana for the first time this week and I can honestly say that, despite the fact that it only seemed to have about three explorable areas, it was my favorite village in the game. Moonlight and lamps and all that stuff are a weakness of mine - maybe that's why Midgar and Cosmo Canyon were my two favorites in FF7. Granted, Midgar wasn't a night city, but being under that plate it might as well have been. And you forgot the best part about Lumina - the Dudbears! Or was it Dunbears...heck, I can't remember. Bub? I liked all of the villages in that game, as a matter of fact. Had a nice storybook quality to them. I'm more of a gritty Midgar chick m'self, but man were those watercolours pretty... | Fake Plastic Tree. *FF9 Spoilers* | | Narrowing down a choice of RPG towns is pretty hard, but my favorite would be Cleyra of FF9. I love huge trees, and a town built into one is even better. The inhabitants are friendly; even though they're frightened and expecting attack they're still willing to show you around. The gazebos, the windmills, the waterfall - all in all Cleyra is a beautiful paradise, which makes me wonder why the rest of their people live in dreary Burmecia. Anyway, I was very happy with the place until a certain very bad thing happened. After that, nothing can make me like FF9 again. Maybe I'm petty, but the whole "this person dies if you accidentally go the wrong way" event ruined a lot of the lighthearted nature of the game. Of course, if I actually ended up living in one of these places I'd pick one that isn't attacked, destroyed, sunk into the sea, or what have you. I'd go for Mandala of Secret of Mana. It's a reasonably big town, has a sage and a historic temple nearby, has pretty darn good armor for sale, and isn't attacked by anybody. Plus the only way you can get there is if you have a pet white dragon, which would also be nice. Anyway, keep up the good work! -Toni | They didn't seem too friendly to me when they tried to lynch poor little Vivi, which is exactly why I didn't like Cleyra. It was beautiful, I'll give you that, but after the little incident in front of the inn, I kinda held a grudge. Grrr them. Leave the lil' guy alone, dammit. I think choosing Cleyra over Burmecia would be a matter of taste though, since I thought The City of Eternal Rain was a whole lot cooler than Treesville. It's one of those taste things, I think - I like the rain, after all. Viva la Seattle. | Goin' slumming. | | My normal form of expression is quoting depressing eighties bands such as The Smiths, Morrisey and the Cure. I wear black on the outside cuz it's how I feel on the inside, and my stoic, bitter self enjoys the environs prevalent in most RPG's. I find something satisfying in the Tennessee Williams-like decay of society in Xenogears industrial towns, and Skies' Valua Slum. I reveled in the socio-political symbolism in Midgar. Valkyrie Profile, despite having small towns, permanently burned into my memory the sad stories of the unfortunates in each one. But my favorite city is not one praying for liberation from an oppressive empire. It is occupied by large limbed, rather unattractive beings in search of enlightenment, art and refinement. A city whose beauty is matched only by it's tranquillity: Shumi village. How I long to wax poetic with the elder, consult with the artisan, and form works of art with the sculpter. How I long to cast aside my scientific life and search for inner piece along the placid lake, to sit and contemplate nature in the dark grove, using the money from charging adventurers for the use of my draw point to fund the video game systems in the inaccessible hut behind the sculptors house, of course. I might have to fly my airship to Midgar (I know its a different game but still) to go slumming in the bars and gyms. This brings up a concern of mine. What's with all the cross-dressing in games? Is this some strange Japanese culture thing? An acceptable way of addressing the homosexual possibilities in these striving to be realistic worlds? Just a monty python/kids in the hall sense of humor? As with any form of entertainment, video games present some issues of gender. Why can't a boy be a white mage? Why can't a female be heavy or oddly proportioned without becoming a different species? And fangirls that are into boy sex have got it all wrong, it's not nearly as pretty as you think, even if they shave. I'm gonna get of my queer-boy-feminist soap box now and go play some Silent Hill 2. Brentron-who wishes his usually non-gaming boyfriend would quit wandering through the house calling for Mario while vacuuming.(even if they don't get square, gamecube is pretty cool)and believes there's no such thing as a bad rpg, except Koudelka. | Mmmm....gritty and depressing. Same thing I go for in my towns, as a matter of fact. Valua and Midgar are my two all-time favorites, despite the fact that you can't go to the upper-class sectors - heck, maybe that's part of what makes them so intriguing, wondering what's up there. There's usually a large deal of pathos getting flung around amongst the lower denizens too, which makes them easier to sympathize with. The little girl drawing on the sidewalk outside the inn in Lower Valua? The boy whose money you may or may not steal in the Sector 5 slums? Memorable stuff. Valkyrie Profile's villages and towns have the same tone, except for being industrialized hellholes, they're more 1600s-Europe hellholes. Beautiful architecture, and yet there's a slave trade going on just beyond the bend. Creepy. | Plus it had Dan The Midget. *Xenogears Spoilers* | | Lemme think... OK, done. It's simple. Lahan. Midgar's a close second, and Mars lies comfortably at third. Of all the towns, in all the RPG's I've played, Lahan really tugs at my heart-strings the most. Why? Well, if you're asking that, then I guess you haven't played Xenogears. Sure Midgar's great, with some decent attachment and the ever-present longing to see a sequel made solely revolving around it, so I could finally explore the elusive upper plate, but it just doesn't quite bring a tear to my eye. Every time I play through, and am sitting in Lahan, with the lovers, the kid, the old man, and all the others, I can barely bring myself to the point of leaving, of taking the fate of loved ones into my hands, and sealing those fates with that last click of the button, talking to the Guardian Angel himself, Hyuga. Sure, he's my favorite, but it's just so damn hard to get up the nerve to talk him. I actually have come to within an inch of a tear at that moment, knowing that I was once again choosing to kill them -- you know who. Sometimes I think to myself: "I can't take it. I can't kill them. Not again! I just won't go to Citan's House. Ever." and then I think "but, dammit, it's already hard enough to reach level 99, and I'm just not up to rolling that mammoth clock." I'm reliving the pain right now, as I write this, in my memory. I'll never, ever forget those wonderful people. They will live inside my heart, regardless of how many times I may have killed them. (and they'll just have to stay there for a while, until I can actually find another copy somewhere -- how I long to hear those words: Greatest Hits!) ~Beowulf_VII, heavy of breath, waiting for the tear to begin its sad roll | For such a small town, and the first one you encounter in the game at that, Lahan had a hell of a lot of personality. All the NPCs were different from one another, and the entire place just seemed to be bustling. Every house could be entered and explored - yes, even the well. I didn't find that little secret until my second time through, and it made me chuckle. I think it would have been interesting if you could've explored the burned-out ruins later, but maybe that's just my morbid curiosity kicking in. Plus it had Lucca!! You can't get much cooler than that. | Little Green Men?... | | Re: "Here comes a candle to light you to bed..." And that's what I've been TRYING to tell you idiots! The government's just destroying the major population centers so the stragglers will be easier to control once the aliens invade! FOOLS! --France | Oh come on, that's beyond ludicrous. Aliens? In league with the government? Where the hell do you guys come up with this stuff? Actually it's the Tonberries. The Cigarette-Smoking Man? Just a Tonberry in disguise. BOW TO YOUR MASTERS. | Sick Of It All. | | Actually, I appreciate the trend toward less expansive towns. I like to have a variety of things to do, sure, but after years and years of visiting RPG towns, talking to all the inhabitants just doesn't do it for me any more. At times it seems more like a chore than a pleasure. "Oh great, a new town... yippie." I think perhaps this may stem from the fact that almost every RPG town is essentially THE SAME TOWN. There's the inn, the weapon shop, some important people to talk to, blah blah blah-blah blah. Too often a large town can seem like an impediment to proceeding with the game, rather than an integral part of it like it should be. My vote is for the towns that do just that -- say Vagrant Story's Lea Monde, Silent Hill, or that European town from Shadow of Destiny. The settings in those games are like characters themselves, acting upon all of the living characters whether they like it or not. I'm not suggesting that all games should be confined to a single town like these examples happen to be, but I would like to see more games push harder towards this kind of emphasis. - El Cactuar (noticing that you haven't printed any of my letters since I started calling you "Bibi.") | The more RPGs I play, the more I feel this way. I used to absolutely adore searching through towns, talking to every NPC that would speak back, but as of late, the towns really have to have a distinct feel to 'em for me to get interested. Otherwise I tend to forget the names and details rather fast, being an old fogey and all. | This explains so much. | | Ms. Bolander, I wonder why do you end up in slums of cities all of the time. Also don't you wish you could smack an NPC upside the head for being such a moron? Especilly since they can say no more than a few half-coherent phrases. But they're still more intelligent than than the people who mess your order up at fast-food places. Imperial Mog | I think you just answered your own question, Bubby. If all they can do is repeat the same phrase over and over and over, who in their right mind is going to hire the poor suckers? No wonder they end up in the Slums - no brains, no job, no money, no future. Hmm. That reminds me - why the heck don't these places have schools, for Pete's sake? I don't mean a Magic Guild, just a general generic high school or something to keep the kids out of Wall Market. I guess the toils of living in a world where a pack of Whole-Eaters could rip you to shreds walking to class kinda renders higher education moot. | Only if you count Disneyworld as a city. | | Hi DA! Hey, just like Nikita said in Legend of Mana, "Smile!"...I mean, life's is just too damn short to waste it sulking in bed (believe me, I've done that too many times). So anyway, back to the topic at hand. Ahem, in my many travels across RPGs I think there are 3 places that sucked up, er I mean I spent a lot of time in. They are: 1. FF6 Colosseum. Yeah, the grandpappy of all secrets. Heck, I bet I still haven't found everything this place has to give. God knows that I was never able to beat Chupon (damn Locke...at least I hit him once!...but he sneezed...). 2. FF7 Golden Saucer. Snowboarding rules. I spent hours and hours just playing with my friends. Gosh the memories. Damned Choco Racing too. 3. FF7 Kalm. Yeah, the little town you go to after you exit Midgar. After being stuck in techno city for about 6 hours (hey! it was 1st play thru) you suddenly take on a calm little city that reminds you of old FFs. Heck, even the town theme reminds you of old FFs on purpose. I actually came back a lot of times here because it felt like home more so than Cloud's hometown. | I hate to nitpick, but neither of those first two would really be considered 'towns.' Both the Colosseum and the Gold Saucer were more like amusement parks than actual cities. Of course, when I think of an RPG town I think of an area where the NPCs actually live, but that might be one of those things up for debate. You know what I really love? 3D world maps, like the ones in FF7 or Star Ocean II. Especially when they have as much attention to detail as the one in FF7 did. I loved how the land all around Midgar was scarred black from the Mako Reactors - now that's quality. | Oooh! | | The only residential area in gaming I ever lost days in was the Gesellchaft from The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. Going from room to room, encouraging some Servbots, punishing others (bwah ha haa), handing out gifts...at its core, I suppose, it was a dating sim without that 'desperate pimple-pocked loner' mystique. But it was still a hell of a much more effective (and fun) method of 'getting to know you' than RPGs where our sympathy and attachment to a character is how horrible their past was. And the torture room. We cannot forget how inherently cool a home with a torture room is. - SonicPanda | ...Torture room? Damn, I've really gotta pick this game up. Heh heh heh. | Should I really be laughing at this so much? | | Hi Brooke! The guy already mentioned it, but I liked the ruined castle from SoE, too. It was mostly because of the music. Like the castle itself felt nostalgia for its old, glory days. Kinda sad. I'll never be entirely satisfied with RPG towns, I think. Most just seem like another footnote in the journey: "Stopped in Town X; bought some stuff; taked to NPC; got an item; left Town X." Like that. No real depth or meaning to the experience. And the fact that you can just walk into everybody's houses and rummage through their personal effects just doesn't make sense anymore. My ideal RPG town is one where you can really DO stuff. Like rent out a house or something and hole up for a while. Plant a garden. Make friends with the townspeople. Get married! Raise livestock and SAVE THE FAR-- Oh, that's ... been done... Howzabout an RPG where each town or city has the depth and interaction of a "Harvest Moon" town? But it's still an action-adventure type game, yeah? That'd be cool. I'd have illigitimate NPC children everywhere!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!! - Friarjohn (then you'd REALLY be able to spread you seed! Get it? Ha!) | Maybe the NPCs are just really, really tolerant or something, and that's why they don't call the cops on you when you haphazardly wander into the house and start looting Ethers. Even more plausible - if there's no police department (which there usually isn't) who the hell are they going to call to kick you out? It's not that they don't mind; they're just paralyzed with fear. The idea of a SaGa Frontier 2 / Harvest Moon type game where you live the life of a dysfunctional Midgar slum family would be incredibly fun. Live a life of poverty and misery over three decades! Spawn children wherever you roam! I dunno if it'd be funny or just depressing as feck. | *Yawn* | | My favorite rpg-type town... Well, I can tell you what RPG had the worst towns... Final Fantasy Tactics. It took me a while to finally realize there was no way to actually walk around inside the towns. No exploration is needed at all, just select the shop from the list: there's an area for catching up on the plot, a shop to buy things at, and an office to add more soldiers which you'll never use because they start off with the crappiest equipment and the lowest levels possible! A few button presses, and you could easily check for new equipment and job offerings and then there'd be nothing left to do at that town... Now that I think of it, for towns that just had a lot of fun things to do, Illusion of Gaia comes to mind. That's still the only RPG I can think of that had a town where you actually had to *wait in line* at a store to get in. It's so simple, pointless, even irritating, but it's darn realistic... Another good point was that a lot of those towns in Illusion of Gaia had lots of secrets to find, and you usually couldn't return to the cities at all after a certain point, so it provided even more incentive to go look everywhere and try everything. Whether Illusion of Gaia could really be called an RPG is debatable though... but it's by far the best example I can think of that had really fun and weird towns to explore. Every town had a dark side to its appearance: Freeja had the lucrative slave trade, Watermia had its "Russian roulette" players, Angel Village had the creepy artist that somehow killed everyone he painted, Dao had it's slaves which would spend over forty years of their lives doing nothing but hand-knitting carpets for a castle you had visited in the first hour of the game, etc. etc... -Cal Adams PS: The government crashing a plane into New York and blaming it on terrorists... wasn't that an idea on an episode of X-Files? | FFT bored me for that very reason - it was an excellent game, but jeez, the only thing to do in-between plot points was level up. And I'm not a big fan of the whole 'level up' thing. Booorinng. And you know, if I hadn't heard so many bad things about IOG, I'd want to rent it just for the things you mentioned. Sounds nice and creepy...but naaah. Especially since all my old systems were sold long ago. Oops. | Musical Chair- erm, towns. | | If only I could remember the names of any of the towns in the RPG's I've played, then I could write a halfway decent letter. I'll try anyway, because it has never been the towns themselves that have intrigued me in RPG's. The towns' theme songs are what pulls me in. If I like the music that is playing in the town, then I like the town and vice versa. In Skies of Arcadia, I loved how the towns songs had a cultural flavor to them, especially the desert cities. And after...(My memory sucks!) the desert metropolis is destroyed, the music retained it's style, but was more somber. I often stopped by just to listen. I could go on and on about it, but then I would just be writing a letter about soundtracks. It's also about 3am and my brain isn't working right. I doubt this'll be posted, but I hope you at least know where I'm coming from, and maybe you'll decide to pop in X RPG and listen to Y town theme. Keep up the good work, Brooke. - Jonezy63 | Skies of Arcadia had great towns, each one with it's own personal style. Some of my favorite cities ever were in that game - not just Valua, but the sailor's town you first encounter as well. It just seemed very European, and the music was great too, of course. Seeing all the ships go blasting by was a neat touch, as well as the rock reef looming off in the distance. One of the few towns that I really recall getting attached to was in FF8 - the sleepy little village of Winhill. So many bad things happened there, and it just seemed so different when compared to the rest of the modern towns in the game...the 'Raine's Ghost' sub-plot was really interesting, too. It didn't help that the music was freaking depressing, though... Closing Comments: I needed something that goofy after the uber-serious topic of the last two days. Heck, let's make it two days - yesterday I got a letter talking about a common habit among gamers, the 'I have twenty games I haven't even played and yet I need more' syndrome. Do you think there can be such a thing as gamer's addiction? How many is too many? Do you have a game addiction? Put down the credit card, turn your browser away from E-Bay, and write Drew about it. Please. - Brooke Bolander, addicted to wuv. |
