Little introduction. This article I do is only about my point of view and experience in gaming. This genre is the one I love the most and this is the only reason why I began writing articles with this subject. We may not agree, but RPGs are life.

First of all, what does RPG mean? RPG stands for Role-Playing Game. This is surely unknown to some people, maybe because video games themselves, how it is used, its diversity has changed so much that some gamers have never played an RPG in their life. To me, it is a must, for others, it’s not.

Some may have played an RPG without even knowing it, due to their age (young) or simply because the game played was chosen without paying attention to the genre it was. The first example comes to my mind, Pokemon. There can be some that play this game and don’t even see an RPG there because the little monsters and their evolutions come first and the « detail » of the genre isn’t even a subject anymore.

Second of all, which was the first and since when? We will only speak about video games, not board games like DnD (Dungeons and Dragons) which also are RPGs. And the DnD license is the first RPG in video games, on the computer. It came out in 1974. For consoles, the first one is Dragon Quest in 1986 for Famicom (NES). The Nintendo Switch allows Europeans to play it since 2019, this franchise still exists and many of them are playable in Europe. The last one to date is Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age, it came out 2017 and its « Ultimate » version came in 2019 for Nintendo Switch.

This genre is almost as old as consoles are. A year after the first Dragon Quest was out, the second one came to life and a new one, the first of this saga, Final Fantasy. From Square Soft at the time, then Square Enix after it was bought by Enix. Other older franchises are still alive today like, Romancing SaGa or Phantasy Star, which came out in the late ’80s or early ’90s. Those games are really old and have evolved very much in the last decades. RPGs have always been an important part of consoles. For my greatest pleasure and surely for many others too.

Many say you play an RPG for its storytelling and not for the gameplay itself, which could even be secondary. I do not have that opinion at all. The gameplay and the conditions in which you are to play such a game is really important to me. Naturally, without a great story, you will not be that interested in the game. But without diversity and specificity in the gameplay, you will surely be bored at some point.

This makes me think about the two first Final Fantasy. I love this franchise. Those are parts of the games I have to have. There are little and not so little differences that make you wish to have the two games. The first one is pretty basic. A cool story but simply written. A bad guy does bad things to the planet, a prophecy, four crystals that control the natural elements, and four warriors that have to save the world. A basic but fair story. For the battles, it is turn-based, attack with magic or weapons, some equipment parts, and done. You choose the class of your four warriors at the beginning of the game.

For the second one, the main characters have their own story. You understand it directly with the cinematic. There is a resistance group, a worldwide dictatorship. A more complete and complex story. There are no levels and no experience points. The evolution of your characters will depend on how you play during battles. During dialogues, you will have to play too. You may interact with people with keywords. Those can and have to be saved during dialogues. You will have to use them to get through the story. So, some differences make the two games different.

These differences are important, let's imagine for a moment that those differences don’t exist. It is possible that the story itself is not fair or clear or beautiful as the first one which would make it a boring game. People wouldn’t play it, but if you include these differences, it could be enough to be taken with that story.

RPGs are a matter of magic between the player and the game. A love story born from a little spark. If you have it, you will never stop playing such games. Otherwise, you will play only a few of them, when one has that one little thing that makes you want to play it. Maybe something innovative or because the story is something special.

Finally, video games are made to have fun and we should never forget that it is only a game. Every kind of game has its pros and cons. We should appreciate them for what they are: A way to travel to another world for a moment.