(no spoilers)

In most games, there’s a specific role to play. In Serious Sam, I control a wise cracking uber muscled super soldier with absurd amounts of ammunition. In GTA, I’m a city dweller only interested in cars, and perhaps an aspiring criminal lowlife.

When I play FFVI, what am I playing exactly? On the one hand, I’m an explorer, flying around a continent, discovering caves and towns and places, and solving the errant puzzle. I’m also one of a rotating cast of characters, each with their own motivations and personalities, an actor in a vast, world-transforming narrative. On top of that, I’m also playing a mini-tactical combat simulator every 30 seconds.

I’ll bet that most people playing a JRPG play it somewhat more holistically than that. We don’t separate the different parts of the experience unless they break immersion (the Bioshock hacking minigame comes to mind). The trouble with JRPGs is that they’re often so well made that the seams don’t show, but they’re still there. (Now that I think about it, Myst, for all its foibles, is remarkably cohesive for a story game…)

Exercise: What if you actually broke all the different pieces apart? What if there was a game that was completely wandering around a map picking up things and making dialogue choices? And another game that was nothing but fighting through a big arena?

It seems, at least superficially, that both of these games would be much worse than FFVI, but it could just be that we don’t imagine those games polished on the level that FFVI is.