Part I - What makes RPG's so great?

There are three things people expect, want, and need out of every role-playing game: a solid story, a good amount of playtime, and a sense of growth/progress through the game.

First, the story. Think of the most memorable storylines in video games. Think of the characters you connected with the most. Think of the time Aeris died. These are all in RPG's. When you spend eighty hours of your life in a fictional world, there had better be some people there that you can't live without. With the growth of technology, the power to tell stories with increasingly dramatic panache helps keep RPG nerds glued to their screens far into the early hours of the morning. We see things in the characters we wouldn't notice at first glance as we become better acquainted, like moving in with your girlfriend of three months. You notice little character quirks and flaws you wouldn't see at first, but instead of becoming disgusted, it makes your characters/girlfriends feel even more real and important to us. Gamers usually don't play RPG's for the battle system. They play to see and be in control of their own epic story. They finish the games to see what transpires between real, believeable characters. People don't care about the characters in Halo; if your sidekick dies, big deal. If you play FFVII and you have an integral part of your party snatched away after 30 hours of playtime, you get mad. That connection makes RPG's interesting, and they will continue to be long into the forseeable future.

Next is the length of the game. No other genre (excluding games you can play online ad nauseum) makes you expect sixty hours of playtime as almost the average. At $60 a pop, that's a whopping dollar per hour. In today's economy, gamers and people in general are trying to get the biggest bang for their buck. When Fable came out with its paltry 15-hour length, people actually got livid over its length. I know people that would not buy a fifteen-hour-long RPG because they expect more game. But Metal Gear Solid 2 was about that long including ten hours or so of dialogue, and people flipped over it and would gladly pop down fifty bones for it while Fable sat next to it on the shelf, a sad and neglected step-child that nobody loves. It took me 100 hours to complete Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with all 1250 achievement points (including the expansion). That one game took a year and a half.

A year and a half.

Name a game in another genre in which you can discover something new a year and a half after you started playing it. There aren't other games with this kind of longevity. Another reason RPG's are special.

Finally, the sense of growth. In nearly all RPG's, your characters level up, get stronger, and get all around better as the game goes on. You uncover new abilities, or you can jump higher and run faster, or you are merely more capable of exploring farther into the world. This aspect of RPG's harkens all the way back to games like Dragon Warrior on the original NES. There was one save point, and it was in the castle in which you started the game. In order to even venture into the wilderness very far, you had to build your strength fighting weak slimes and bats and rats until you could make it more than three steps from the castle without having to run back to the Inn. But you got stronger. After a few hours, you find that you can turn bosses that once gave you a hard time into jelly with one whack of your trust Iron Broadsword. You become able to heal yourself without retreating to a town. You find stronger weapons and armor on the corpses of fallen foes and you become increasingly more mighty. Eventually, your powers rival those of the gods. You feel cool in real life because your game avatar can beat the pants off any wandering monster with a simple push of the A button. That power makes RPG's great.

The growth aspect of RPG's is so influential that even games such as Call of Duty 4 use it in their online play. You use a gun long enough, you get better with it, and you get more powerful guns. Metroid and Castlevania have been using the power-up-then-go-to-a-previously-inaccessible-part-of-the-world formula for decades. Without growth, there is only stagnation. People know this. Game developers know this.

Even my blog has growth. I'm past 50 posts! Ba-DOOP! Level up. RPG's are awesome, and I just showed you why.