in every rpg ever

1. dress in the guards' uniforms to pass unnoticed through the enemy lair

2. talk to every single person in every single town

3. Skeleton warriors with none of their clothing left but somehow still wearing helmets

4. thieves guild
5. thinly veiled harem

6. numbers going up

7. walk in peoples houses, break everything & steal their shit

8. Fireball spell

9. Old men are wise and powerful instead of needy and incontinent

10. (i)nventory

11. oh, trust me, you don't want to go there yet, and also conveniently, you can't

12. at least one spell sounds really cool but just doesn't do all that much damage, you keep using it anyway out of faith, or the conviction that you must be doing something wrong

13. one really annoying "comedy" party member

14. "Dragon's Mail? What? Speak up, sonny! I can't make DRAGON'S MAIL unless you bring me something to help with my earwax buildup!"

15. deeply buried option sub-menu full of weird configuration shit you have never fucked with no matter hours you sink into the game

16. inventory contains 3 healing potions, 1 flaming sword, and 999 full suits of cardboard armor formerly belonging to low-level enemies

17. exactly one real-world feature which is obsessively modeled in the game (gravity, day and night cycles, garment repair); everything else is still illogical and arbitrary, but oddly, this one thing turns out to be crucial in about half of the puzzles

18. "I was playing with my puppy when it ran off into the mountains! Will you help me find him?"
19. "Huh? What's going on?" "Wake up! The castle is under attack!"
20. * * MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE * *
21. You do not have the Genie
22. Never-ending maze.

23. Mediaeval society somehow more enlightened than modern day Church of England re: employment equality for all genders, races, and species.

24. badness of bad guys correlates neatly with geographical inaccessability

25. A point at which your character/party levels up to the point where the exciting challenge of battle evaporates entirely and each confrontation from then on becomes a repetitive chore which you force yourself to undertake again and again until you reach the game's endpoint or you run out of patience and smash the disc with a hammer.

26. Shopkeepers who make you pay for weapons and armour, despite the fact you're trying to stop the whole world being destroyed.

27. random encounters with low level bandits who keep jumping out and trying to rob you, even though your party is tooled up like a branch of Halfords.

- also true of Steven Seagal movies where you'd think the last guys in the mob that attacks him wd give it up after he's crippled the first 3 or 4

28. in RPGs with powers that are either 'good' or 'evil', levelling up in the 'evil' powers makes no difference at all, because the 'good' or 'evil' ending is chosen at some very obvious point late in the game.

(and has nothing at all to do with your balance of 'good'/'evil' powers)

29. "Could it be you are the chosen one?" "Could it be you are the one the prophecies foretold?"

18. "I was playing with my puppy when it ran off into the mountains! Will you help me find him?"

This brought back some dark memories

2. talk to every single person in every single town

― ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (diamonddave85), Tuesday, December 18, 2012 6:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is why i can't play RPGs any more, no patience for this shit

30. holy shit the big boss is appearing super early in the game! wait, he has like a million hit points. oh shit, he killed us, better reload—wait, that was SUPPOSED to happen??

31. somehow every town i stumble across in my rambles has shops that sell progressively better and more expensive equipment. gentrification??

32. Rats

33. Thanks for helping! I can give either you this fire sword which is good against trolls, or this ice sword which is good against spiders. You have no idea whether the next area will be all trolls or all spiders. Now choose!

34. Your entire party has been captured and thrown in jail. All of your weapons and armor have been placed in treasure chests which have been arbitrarily scattered throughout the jail.

TBH that's not totally unrealistic

35. Cool this frog I killed was carrying some gold

don't go there

36. Finally, I got a thing that lets me go anywhere I want! Oh... but I've already gone everywhere. EXCEPT THAT PLACE! SUPER SECRET!

I remember this sweet Genesis RPG called Rings of Power that allowed you to fight any NPC you encountered if they weren't important to the story. Kill too many and soon the whole town turns against you. Thats kind of unprecendented for 1993 or whatever it was.

Rings of Power was the complete and utter bomb

I'm not lying when I say I remember there being a Soccer role-playing game for the NES, am I?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecmo_Cup_Soccer_Game

xxxp I used to kill the NPCs in Ultima: Exodus. All you had to kill was one and the town guards would start hunting you down, though.

19. "Huh? What's going on?" "Wake up! The castle is under attack!"

dying at this for some reason

37. That really creepy dude advising the King who you hate and want to beat up but the game won't let you? Turns out he was a bad guy all along.

38. You are either from the most stable, prosperous heart of the kingdom, where the king leaves the castle gates open all day and the shopkeepers offer ridiculously cheap prices, or from the scruffy border town that just got brutally crushed as part of the rebellion.

39. incredible dilemma that threatens the world: only 1-4 people are willing to actively fight to stop it

40. every 20 minutes your character speaks in tongues and is therefore saved

41. occasionally you can get more information from someone by speaking to them again, but usually they just give you an annoyed response telling you to bother someone else

42. seriously that's your evil plan? you're going to destroy the world? where will you live, fuckbrain?

43. Fool! My interdimensional being of pure evil/love object and i will UNITE AS ONE IMMORTAL BEING

44. Treasure hidden behind a waterfall

45. "Would you like to hear what I said again Y/N?"

46. "There used to be a well in this village, but now it's all dried up"

47. travelling to the top of a mountain, you get this sinking feeling that the only thing at the top is a boss encounter.

I used to live for this game when I was a kid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenders_of_Oasis it was amazing.

48. You get separated from your party/best friend and you rejoin at a later date, with everyone stronger and wiser

49. pointless weapons/armour/items/mana draining battle with the evil character's main henchman.

50. End of game Boss drains you down to 1% of your life force with his first blow. You then have to do a clever thing that manages to boost you into super killer mode.

51. Some dude who's been self obsessed with his own crazy theory for aeons, is amazingly talked out of it in 2 seconds by yourself just because you have a high enough speech level.

Sadly, it rarely works out that way ILX.

52. potions

I just realized it's a little odd that every time you encounter a critter in the forest you have to FIGHT TO THE DEATH

lol

53. Just 'running away' is never an option.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIJzsF8mn9I

54. we have to get to the castle IMMEDIATELY before the wizard completes his SPELL to DESTROY THE KINGDOM unless obv you wanna spend six months in the mountains killing ice spiders, training's important too

hahahah yeah totally, love how exactly at whatever moment it is that you're done killing ice spiders and start sneaking through the sewers to the wizard's castle is the exact moment that the long ritual begins

55. some skill that you haven't bothered levelling up in at all because it didn't seem to be any use turns out to be essential for completing the game

56. coolest NPC on the whole motherfucking planet, with amazing stats and unique abilities, joins your party for one short, on-rails sequence that culminates in his/her death, not before he/she realizes he/she was wrong about you all along, and provides a crucial piece of information/password/quest item

57. at least one dungeon takes 4 months to beat

god damned motherfucking marsh cave

58. "That final boss battle was much easier than I anticipated!" ~moo hoo hoo ah ha~ *final boss morphs into his True Form, has 666hp*

59. the sequel may or may not contain any of the characters w/ which you grew to love from the last game — apart from vague legends abt their struggles mentioned in passing, or dubious fan-fiction retcons written by nerds.

60. Every one in your home town is surprisingly well-informed on the world's general down-turn, the old prophecy of a hero that would save the world from darkness, the legendary magic sword, and the rumors about the emperor suggesting he has become eccentric and melancholy. Oddly, the next town you visit couldn't care less about any of these things; everyone there is all business except the little girl looking for her dog.

61. After kicking shit out of everyone in a friendly town, you can return a few days later and all is forgiven.

2. talk to every single person in every single town

― ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (diamonddave85), Tuesday, December 18, 2012 6:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is why i can't play RPGs any more, no patience for this shit

Are there any rpgs that can somehow influence the player so that, for instance, they can walk into a room full of containers and the player will NOT feel like they have to explore every single one.
I would love to see a game that could enforce this sort of behaviour. Akin to not having to talk to every single bugger in the game too.

Skyrim kind of manages that actually, by filling every sack and barrel with carrots or potatoes. Still takes a good few hours to stop thinking "but maybe this will be the one with magic dragonscale armour instead" but eventually it sinks in and you stop looking.

interesting. Another way I was thinking was to actually fill containers with the obvious items that they would contain. ie fridges don't normally contain cash.

(but that sounds pretty much what skyrim was aiming for doesn't it)

RPGs have nothing on beat-em-ups for moronic object/container match-ups (punch a trash can to bits, find inside...a single, perfect hamburger) but yeah, the obsession with opening things is terrible. I haven't played a lot of new games but I sort of figure old ones have an edge here because so much less of the world was interactive in the first place.

But yeah, it'd be cool to do an RPG set in a world that actually contained no chests or cabinets or end-tables in the peasant's hut. All items reach you in some other way than opening things and searching for them.

62. Except for two cows and/or sheep sometimes seen at the periphery of towns, the entire animal kingdom seems to consist of apex predators. This oddity may or may not be explained as a sign of how out-of-balance the world is becoming in these troubled times.

crushing poverty for first 1/2 of the game, carrying around the nation's GDP for the 2nd

^^^ yes! Going from 'hours of wandering around with only just enough resources to get by' to 'more weapons/armour/spells and shit than you will ever need' in about ten minutes.

(although not an RPG, Minecraft suffers from that big style)

its basically an rpg, it has swords

63. mana

64. female party member is healer/sorceress/love interest

65. forced stealth section despite having slaughtered everything in sight a minute ago

66. cutesy integration of game programmers - or alternately their pets/kids/love interests - as NPCs, forest animals, dolls you can try to win at a carnival game, etc.

67. Dickwolves

68. sub-boss tough enemy becomes routine mook later on

68a. ...with garish palette-swap and synonymous name.

that's great

69. boss is obviously dead in the battle mode, but comes back to life afterwards for some dialogue ("i can't believe you beat me" etc)

70 boss kills the hell out of you in battle mode, then same

71 fight to top of castle/tower/floating castle/floating tower, defeat placeholder boss and find magical barrier on bottom floor now allows you to go down to the eight floors of basement and fight important plot boss / defeat important plot boss and find magical barrier on bottom floor now allows you to go down to the etc and fight surprise even more important plot boss

72 strangely absent good guy mentioned in early scenes is final boss

73 final boss kills god

74 final boss is god

75 sewers

76. you wait too long to return to the peaceful town that teased a side-quest for much later in the game; it's been blasted off the face of the earth by the final boss

(I gave up entirely on FF9 because at some point I skimmed a walkthrough to solve some particular problem, and discovered I'd missed dozens of side quests, none of which could now be attempted because of event x, y or z.)

i kind of like that as a thing tbh

it adds replay value for sure

It's fine up to a point, but when the quests are poorly-telegraphed it just means the first play is harder and less rich than it could be. Just seems punitive.

all this is making me want to play chrono trigger again

25. A point at which your character/party levels up to the point where the exciting challenge of battle evaporates entirely and each confrontation from then on becomes a repetitive chore which you force yourself to undertake again and again until you reach the game's endpoint or you run out of patience and smash the disc with a hammer.
― bizarro gazzara, Wednesday, 19 December 2012

^^^ skyrim after level 40

xxxp I used to kill the NPCs in Ultima: Exodus. All you had to kill was one and the town guards would start hunting you down, though.
― xanthanguar (cwkiii), Wednesday, December 19, 2012 1:14 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e55P2XF38O0

77. At least one or two traps from this grim series of books

http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/gifs/grimtooth4.jpg

78. mithril

looking for some youtube actual play videos of RPGs that go a bit off the beaten path? toon is the one that comes to mind.

suggestions of both games and channels that gravitate towards that kind of stuff appreciated

Undertale is a game that goes off the beaten path in a creative way.

Where are the Paranoia actual plays?