The Star Ocean Universe

Writing Tip #2 - Writing For Video Games: Why the Rules That Apply There Should Never Apply to Fanfiction Writing

As something of an avid reader of the science fiction and fantasy genre - my favorite books are The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, and I've recently finished Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams - one thing I've come to appreciate is the epic journey in such tales. The journey from village to village to the castle-cities of kings and other nobility takes days and weeks, not a hop, skip, and a jump away. Food along the way becomes an issue - Will we find more along the way? How long will we need to keep rationing out our current stores? Ghastly creatures and bandits create a sense of danger along the way. In the epic adventure, something needs to either be gained or destroyed, some item of magic or great power. An evil will arise, creating havoc and destruction, and, from the wreckage, a hero/heroine will arise.

Those are some of the many elements that make a science fiction/fantasy novel hard to resist. Many of these elements exist in video games. They certainly exist in the Star Ocean series, and it's that draw bringing people to play the games. The only difference between video games and books is the amount of time that passes when the party of heroes travel from city to city. The villages and cities are close together so it only takes scant minutes to travel from, oh, say, the royal city of Airyglyph to the mining town of Kirlsa to the riverfront village of Arias, and so on. Grand total, I think it takes less than ten minutes if one avoids the fights set up along the way or is high enough of levels to make the fights appear . . . pathetic, to say the very least. Wounds are healed with items like blueberries, and magic restored with blackberries. Major events happen at a very quick pace.

The thing is, events happening in the course of two weeks, including the battle with the final Big Bad (be it Asmodeus, Luther, or the Apostle of Creation) need to happen that way in a video game for a reason. If a game takes too long to achieve its final culmination, if the journey takes the days and weeks required in the epic fantasy adventure, people do become bored with the game and will stop playing. The gaming company (in this case, Square Enix) will receive complaints about the game, and money will be lost. Rest at an inn or free bed restores all of the damage because to stay days at said inn or free rest spot for wounds and magic to heal and recover would be dull and tedious. (It's dull and tedious in a book, too, for the character having to endure the long stay, but it's a necessity due to the realism of the situation. Also, if not much changes, the writer can take some liberties and say how many days pass, giving brief descriptions of the tedium.) Video games can get away with the constant use of restorative items and with one hundred percent healing when staying at an inn because of aforementioned players who, though they will put in copious hours of play into the game, don't want to spend most of that time in convalescence. It's just the way that it works. (In table-top role-playing, there is realism in how the quests play out. That, of course, is left up to the game/dungeon master. But realism is often applied to the table-top role-playing versus a console RPG.)

So what does this have to do with fanfiction writing? Plenty, if a person is going to write a story inspired off of RPGs like Star Ocean. The rules that apply to the video games - short distances between towns and villages so traveling takes less than a day, the quickness of healing and restoration, removing of status ailments such as petrification and paralysis - don't apply to writing. If you stop and think about it, would stories like The Lord of the Rings, the Wheel of Time series or Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn have been as truly as epic as they ended in a three months' time span? The answer to that is 'no'. They wouldn't have, Readers would be disappointed, and those authors would lose readership. They wouldn't be the current successes that they are. When it's in print that an entire kingdom is only two days of traveling at most from one end to the other, that full healing has been accomplished by eating some blueberries, it's very . . . boring. There's little action, there's little to get the blood boiling, the heart racing, and to hook the reader, immersing him or her into a world of wonders. I don't want to read how quickly the epic journey ends. No . . . I want to be sucked into it, I want to live it. I read to escape the pressures of my life, to relieve my stress, and to see something fantastic. When a fanfiction writer has the characters of a game clearing everything so quickly, I, as the reader, feel cheated. I've learned from bitter experience in the fanfiction world it isn't good to cheat your readers. Keep that in mind when you write and publish a story that promises a journey of sorts, be it an external or internal journey, and there's more than one chapter. Traveling in a game takes less time than it would in real life, and stories, the written word, have a sense of realism to them.