Who are you?

So as I'm getting close to a lot of the games that I've been waiting forever to play, I naturally need to be shoring up my familiarity with the franchise that came before in each case. Like A Dragon 8 needs me to have played all the several thousand games that came before, Dragon's Dogma could do with a refresher playthrough and though I have technically played it before, I should probably finish at least Persona 5 before I get around to 3 Reloaded. (Besides, the longer I put it off the more time I have until ATLUS release their 'full' version of the game which they're pretending they're not making right now. Yeah right, I see you eyeing up that female protagonist with envy in your eyes! Ya'll can't help yourselves!) And in the mood of all of these games I need to get around to polishing off- I'm currently replaying Baldur's Gate 1? Umm... what?

There's something about the Baldur's Gate franchise, and perhaps more Dungeons and Dragon's at large, which touches at the very most base of video gaming- and I think that lies in the genre of RPGs to being with. I've often touted how RPGs are my favourite genre of video game but rarely challenged the reasons as to why that is the case, and it isn't just for the hours of stat piling or inventory management. Certainly the genre holds more to it's name than that. Recently I've come to the realisation that the truth behind my RPG love is the belief that at the heart of role playing games lies the very same primordial essence of what gaming represents as a hobby- and though every genre touches on that essence in it's own unique way- RPGs touch it in the most sacred and raw manner. Pretty lofty claim to just make, huh? Well let me go and try and back it up before writing me off the page, eh?

So we've been through the whole 'games are escapism' thing before, breaking the hobby down to it's base elements, but what if we actually define 'escapism'? "Distraction from realities by engaging in fantasy." Essentially we're looking to obfuscate the circumstance and present situation through immersion into disbelief- we're entering another life. The purest escapism are those that can steal us away the strongest and keep us entertained, which can often translate to those that best sell the illusion of the reality they seek to invent. See where I'm going with this? Role Playing Games present the most fertile grounds for prime-time immersion building by simple merit of what they are- games that seek to place you within the 'role' of a fiction and have you act out that role. Creating the tools to sell that fantasy, building the infrastructure to facilitate it, those are the measures by which successful RPGs are separate from the modern Assassin's Creed games of our time. (Woah, he gets a Ubisoft diss in there! Just when you thought he was over it!)

Which is perhaps why the most important question an RPG can ask is the same question presented at the beginning of one of the best RPGs of all time: The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim- just before you're about to lead to a abrupt shaving appointment manned by a heavily armed barber with questionable aim- "Who are you?" Identity is core to Role Playing Games, and what that means to the player is tantamount to selling the fantasy. Sometimes that is a question asked and answered purely in gameplay terms, such as in RPGs like Diablo. "Who are you?" Would pertain to your class, the build that you craft, the weapons and skills you posses- all which define you as an individual and tie you down to the fiction. For me, however, I prefer when that question holds narrative significance.

Amnesia is such a common fantasy trope to chuck around, particularly in Japanese fantasy stories, because there's little more enthralling a concept than discovering yourself and where you fit into this world. It allows a writer to explicitly detail a complex arc of relationships that includes the player whilst presenting the agency to the player to create their own character and insert them neatly into that slot. To that end the most successful RPG stories tend to be the ones that cease that trope and turn it on it's head, or even better go so far as to question the institution of RPG storytelling altogether and put that under the spotlight. As was famously the case with the classic Final Fantasy 7 story before it got a little too lost in the sauce with all those spin-off narratives.

Final Fantasy 7 is a story about stories. Specifically role playing stories. It is about a weak and insignificant speck on the world that wanted to be more, and yearned to mean something to people and to himself. So that speck becomes someone else who was everything he once wanted to be. Cloud enters into the delusion of being Zack Fair- Soldier First Class. He plays the role of being the dashing and charismatic hero, even when the moniker doesn't quite suit him or his personality, even as the corruption of what he is underneath it all threatens to leak out. That is the under appreciated real heart at the core of what makes FF7's story perhaps the best the franchise has to offer. Nothing to complicated, but oh so terribly relatable.

And Baldur's Gate? Well those games present the kind of fantasy we always find just so enthralling. What if we were really the bad guy? It's hardly a novel prospect and we've seen it done before and since to questionable degrees of success. For every 'Infamous' and 'Prototype' you'll get the odd 'Knights of the Old Republic' to keep faith in humanity alive- because the allure of feeding our base-most inner cruelties is just that tempting of a prospect. We don't all want to be evil in our daily lives- but given a world of fabricated consequence where the things we do won't hurt actual people- well there's an appeal there. And if the world is sold well enough? Then maybe even the idea of struggling against the evil inside can be fascinating all on it's own! (Afterall- evil routes in games are so very often overlooked!)

But does any of this go to explain why it is I'm spending all of my non-working free time playing Baldur's Gate instead of Samurai-Yakuza and pretty-boy-detective-Yakuza? Perhaps. Maybe it's the comfort food of playing a game I already know how to play, doing things I'm already somewhat good at and not rediscovering a world and plot from square one. Maybe I'm a coward terrified of starting over at the beginning again. Maybe I loved the Roles I played in my first playthrough of Baldur's Gate so much that now I'm just haplessly chasing that high like an addict. And maybe I'm just cycling through a list of excuses because I can't justify my tardiness- stop judging me.