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There was a lot of talk in the channel about RPGs of various types and countries of origin. This might have been spurred on ultimately by a thread at insertcredit which was not too kind to the Japanese subgenre. There has been a lot written on the subject, but I'm going to start with a little story.

I've been playing 「ドラガン・クエスト VI 」 (Dragon Quest 6) at an extremely liesurely pace (30 to 45 minutes at a time, once every few days). At one point in your quest, you are sent on a mission to retrieve a legendary mirror that always reflects truth. In order to do this, you head to a dark world where your appearance is that of a phantom. After undergoing various tasks to become corporeal and inquiring to the location of this artifact, you come upon an enormous tower made of mirrors.

As you make your way up the first of two halves of the tower, you come upon the ghost of a girl whose reflection does not appear in the towers mirrored walls. At this point, your RPG sense should be tingling wildly. "This girl is going to either turn into a monster now, or betray me once I find the mirror.", you're thinking. You might think this because you've played lots of Final Fantasy. But this is Dragon Quest. This is Yuji Hori.

Upon finding the mirror, the girl is thrilled that she can see herself, but sad that she is still a phantom. Using the magic tears you found to make yourself visible, you restore the girl and she gratefully joins your party.

This is why people love these games. There's a youthful innocence to Dragon Quest that gives it its most important quality: charm Dragon Quest VIII had it in droves; as did the Hori/Toriyama touched Chrono Trigger. These games just aren't about story; or at least, not about having an especially good story. You're a kid on a quest, usually involving dragons. A dragon quest.

A forum goer at IC said that they are "not really games, more like.. work". If you look at them as purely something to conquer, or to beat, then that's actually probably true, but they aren't, really. You're given a world to explore, and the game is about exploring it. If you miss out on this crucial mindset, they become work.

Some people find repetitive mechanics to be tedious. Some people find the simple battle dynamic to be primative, but there's a certain comfort and a certain elegance about simple systems that work. Lisp has this (far more timelessly and far more elegantly, but bear with the hyperbolic metaphor). Dragon Quest battles are deterministic to the point where the player can simultaneously experience danger but also wander the world in a kind of cathartic experience. The battle, magic, and class system are basic enough for a child to understand and explore and elegant enough for a grownup to enjoy.

There's this big backlash against RPG's these days. People are claiming that the genre is not evolving, or that the abstractions that old school RPG's used are outdated, but the real problem is a problem is that these games do not work as commercial ventures. The only tenable development path for a good RPG is one that allows a concentrated artistic vision to come to fruition, and as Hollywood has shown us, as upfront costs turn development into high stakes calculated risk gambling, creativity and art usually suffer as a consequence. Hori is one of the few that still gets it.