Yesterday I gave up on a playthrough of the original Final Fantasy VII. I played it back in the day, probably in 1998, perhaps 1999, and liked it quite a bit. For decades, I have been listening to its soundtrack, which is probably worthy of your attention even if you have little interest in video games. Still, the game is a bit too archaic and also quite long. FF VII is just one example, though. The problems this game has also apply to any other classic RPG. These were the “story-driven” games of their times. Partly, there was the novelty. If your exposure to games consisted of Tetris, Zelda, Mario, and Street Fighter II, then a meaty RPG was something entirely different, and you probably did not even mind the repetitiveness of the gameplay. I did not, and neither did million others. Back then, RPGs were big tent-pole releases and it took a few more years until first-person shooters like Halo or Call of Duty took over.

Replay value is a big problem. Long story-driven games you can probably only play once as the time investment is just too large. The sunk-cost fallacy also plays a role. I remember the final dozen hours or so of The Witcher III being incredibly tedious. Yet, as I had come that far, I simply plowed through it. A game can only pull this off once. Even if there were no pacing issues in that game, I would not play it again. It would have been better had there been a strong ending, following some tedium. In that case, you would likely quickly forget the lame parts of the game. My memories of FF VII certainly were along those lines as I still remember the final fight against Sephiroth, but I did not remember the many tedious filler segments throughout the game.

It is probably not even possible to produce 40, 50, 60 or more hours of killer content. Even a relatively quick romp like Uncharted 2 quickly wears out its welcome because there is too much story, and it is not that interesting. I was unable to stomach a second playthrough of Uncharted 2. When I tried, I dropped the game within the first hour. Uncharted 2 is a relatively simple action game. Yet, RPGs are mechanically even simpler, in particular old-school turn-based games. They stretch relatively little story over dozens of hours, and their good story is supposed to keep you playing.

You cannot mention classic RPGs without turn-based combat. There is the take that this style games somehow fell out of favor even though a lot of people wanted loved it so much, leading to a supposedly large under-served player demographic. This was at least the narrative around somewhat recent traditional RPGs like Bravely Default and Octopath Traveller. Yet, turn-based combat is pretty brain-dead. You stack up on potions, or rely on a healer, and only need to mash some buttons. On modern PlayStation emulators you can speed up the game by a factor of 10x or more, and even playing at that speed does not make the combat more challenging. It just saves you a lot of time. It is simply boring to go through a bunch of fights you are going to win anyway. Their only purpose seems to be to expand playtime. I recall enjoying the battle system of Grandia II, though, but if I replayed it, I would probably also think that it is a bit too simplistic. On a side note, Mother 3 had the great idea to skip battles with enemies you would very easily beat. Whenever you bump into them, the game just assumes you would win anyway and just gets you the rewards of the battle. A different approach was taken by Dark Souls. It made regular enemies difficult, requiring you to pay attention all the time, or at least until you had memorized the layout of an area and the locations of the various enemy creatures.

Recently, I have been reading some interviews with Japanese game creators on shmuplations.com. I find them most insightful. In one interview with a creator in the 1980s, the conversation centered around game length and game design of arcade versus console games. (I do not recall the name of the guy, otherwise I would have provided a link.) He mentions that console games are obviously longer than arcade games, and facilitate the creation of entirely different genres. However, console games had “too many parts in them you do not really want to play”. This is the best encapsulation of the problems of almost all video games: there is too much tedium, even if the games give you a lot to do. In FF VII I did not care about the mini-games, I did not care about its repetitive battles, and I did not find it engaging to walk from A to B to progress the story. Some of these problems have been solved by other games in the meantime, by offering a somewhat more streamlined experience, the introduction of fast travel, or simply making the environment more engaging. On a related note, Mark_MSX speaks of “gameplay density“, but this concept is too limiting because a game is not just fun because there is little downtime.

Partly, the problem is likely that I am more protective of my time nowadays. If I embarked on a 50-hour journey, which is probably on the low end in today’s gaming market, it would take me months to get through it. Worse, the feeling of spending one hour with a game, and there having been little progress, which can easily happen, is deflating. In contrast, I find myself much more eager to explore 1990s arcade games. This is not necessarily a matter of nostalgia. The games I play the most I did not play as a kid, teen or in my adolescence. Some I only learned about a few years ago, or I was aware of the name but never played them. I could play a lot of classic arcade games, and even master one or two to a reasonable degree, in the time it takes to go though another hero-saves-the-world RPG story.