How to use your imagination
When your party stays at the Inn overnight,
what do they eat?
If you ever catch yourself wondering that then
you know you’ve formed an attachment to
your characters.
With Etrian Odyssey’s characters, you only give them a name and a portrait,
so no matter how you think of the character it’s technically just your imagination.
But even in that case, without your imagination, the character is nothing.
For example, a landsknecht who uses an axe might eat his meat with his bare
hands and no utensils, but one who wields a sword might prefer a knife and
fork at dinner. You might think differently, but... if you can imagine small
details like that, you might find that you enjoy this kind of RPG even more.
The essense is an RPG is using numbers to make calculated decisions, but if
you invest those “numbers” with your own feelings, you can spice up the game
little. Think about this:
In your party of five, three characters are dead. Two of them are alive, but they
only have a couple of HP left and no TP. They’re certain to die in their next
turn, giving you a game over. Number-wise, those characters are useless, but
how do you imagine they feel about that? What kind of people are those 2
characters who are about to die? Try to imagine things like that in the brief
time before your game ends.
Are they a landsknecht and a ronin, who’ll die facing the enemy and laughing?
Is it a protector, ordering the weak medic to run with his last breath?
The game over screen looks the same every time, but in your imagination, it
could play out very differently.
The game itself isn’t that big of a thing; what you imagine for yourself is much
more fun. We hope that the player uses this game as a tool, to create dramatic
and fun situations in your own minds.
—Kazuya Niinou
Been thinking about the use of imagination in video games lately, or how I feel there are few and increasingly fewer games that ask the player to use their imagination to engage with them.
This post Kazuya Niinou wrote to accompany Etrian Odyssey often comes to mind so I decided to remake it.