Brain Barf: RPG = WTF

Grargalarg to the spambots.


Been tearing about in various games, mostly that Rim Sky thing.


Starting thinking about things and came up with something I doubt is original, but wanted to say anyway:  RPG backgrounds are frickin' weird.


Do not get me wrong; I'm pretty hardcore in my addiction to the vidya game monster mashing and looting.  It's just that, well, I've also been doing this for-frickin'-ever.


Take the Elder Scrolls games.  The least bizarre thing is that the local furries are all crack heads.   Its so pervasive I'm amazed "WillYiff4Skooma" isn't a meme.  Maybe I should fix that.


Those moons?  The corpse of a god.  By the way, from what I gather about the lore, there's a third black moon out there.  Totally not a Dragonlance reference.  Also when the three are aligned properly, its extremely significant to the cat-folk.  That's the plot of a whole damn Dragonlance book, damn it.


And these are tame compared to some of the other crap in there.  Celtic Zulu with plant hearts.  A god whose background reads like what would happen if the Kama Sutra became a religious text.  Artificial gods made from mech-sized golems that break time over their knees.


Like, damn man.


It got me thinking.  Other RPGs are usually no slouches in the bizarre department either.


Take Chrono Cross.  We start with the primary (but largely ignored and all but unexplained) antagonist being a fusion of a giant space termite thing and a princess.  It manages to manipulate all of space and time within the game world, creating two primary antagonist factions.  The first is a supercomputer and it minions from the future, set adrift in the past and watching over the descendants of their creators, using what amounts to hypnotherapy and eugenics to get its way.  The second, somewhat nastier bunch, is a city of dinosaur-descended reptile folk ripped from an alternate universe by the planet itself as a counter.   Highlights include these elemental golem...doll...things, and a biocomputer that is an embodiment of all the local magical elements and happens to be a dragon with some sort of jewel laser mouth cannon.  Oh, and after an apocalyptic battle with the first bunch, the biocomputer was fractured into seven dragon gods; three in one universe, three in another, and the seventh set adrift to screw around with main characters.


All this nuttiness is compounded by nobody bothering to explain this crap until the two final dungeons of the game!  This was right when Square was in the middle of there hipster-esque "minimal explanation means maximum profundity" phase.


This is only two examples out of the many, many RPGs out there.


Please don't get me wrong.  I'm not some dullard that only goes for smash-and-grab, screw-the-plot antics.  I love having complex stories and interesting backgrounds.  There's a reason I own stuff like Tactics Ogre, Atelier Iris 1-3 (not at straightforward as they seem, trust me), multiple SaGa games, and so on and so on.  But sometimes, I really don't get why game writers seem to come up with stuff that requires enough hits to buzz a Grateful Dead concert to actually figure out.


Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find something uncomplicated to do for a while.