What are role-playing games?
Nowadays many types of games include role-playing elements but in the traditional sense, an RPG game is where you follow a character's life unfolding before your eyes while you alter the story by your own choices. Choosing to go on a different route or saying something hurtful to a character can greatly affect how the game progresses. Another important aspect of RPGs is that beside story development, the characters also develop, as the player is given experience points so that they can level up their characters. Experience points are gained after every battle and levelling up occurs in a point based system, in categories such as attack, defence, magic and so on. Based on how the player distributes these points, their character can become a strong warrior, a powerful wizard or anything their heart desires. However, just as with music games, RPGs have many subcategories too which I'd like to introduce in a bit more detail now.
Click the image to get a general idea of the flow of an average RPG.
Traditional RPG
There is a clear distinction between Eastern and Western RPGs. Japanese RPGs tend to focus more on the plot and the personalities of characters, and they are usually more linear than their Western counterparts. You can decide for yourself where to go and what to do but only to a certain degree. Usually you'd find paths being temporarily closed until you acquire a specific skill or in other words, proceed further in the story. Besides providing a good reading material, the main goal of these games is to prevent some evil plan by building a strong team, whose members compensate each others' weakness. The most popular traditional RPGs have become serialized, like Pokémon or Final Fantasy.
Pokémon Black & White: Battle, catch, and collect monsters to be the champion of the region while you're saving the world from an evil organisation!
Final Fantasy XIII: Each game tells a unique story of heros and evildoers, full with wonders, magical creatures, treason and friendship.
Tactical/Strategy RPG
In strategy role-playing games, or SRPGs for short, the main element becomes the battle part of the game, pushing character development to the back. Although the freedom of wandering around the world is taken away from the player, they get more choices during battle this time.
The most vital part of these types of games is to place your units in strategically favourable positions at the start of the battle. One wrong decision can have dire consequences in games such as the popular Fire Emblem series, where dead parties cannot be resurrected even after the end of the fight. But luckily you don't have to make these kind of decisions on a whim. As opposed to many traditional RPGs, the battle system in SRPGs is turn-based, giving the player plenty of time to carefully plan their moves. This kind of game-play could be best compared to chess, which also requires lots of tactical thinking and planning ahead.
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn: Place your units on the grid and move them into battle! Losses are sometimes necessarry to win the war but it's always for the greater good.
Disgaea: Join the crazy adventures of demons and angels in this fun little game with hilarious dialogues and amazing fighting moves!
Hybrid RPG
As I said before, there are big differences between Eastern and Western RPGs. American publishers usually incorporate other genre specific elements to their role-playing games, such as shooting or action. They also give you more freedom in movement, as you can wander around the world, doing small quests for fun until you decide to continue the main plot from where you left it off.
The point based levelling system is still present, but the battle system varies from game to game. For example in the Fallout series, the perspective of the game is from a first person view, giving the impression of a first person shooter game, or FPS for short. Another example is Diablo where the player has to control their character in a point-and-click environment.
It's also important to mention that while traditional Japanese RPGs have lots of playable characters and the player controls a whole party at the same time, American hybrids tend to have only one main character and no other team members. Fight scenes in a traditional RPG are more often than not turn based and you make choices by clicking on key words like "Attack" or "Magic". In an American game however, battles are set in real time so instead of timely calculations, you have to use your wits on the spot.
In conclusion, I think both game styles have good and bad characteristics so it's impossible to decide which nation does a better job of creating more enjoyable and better role-playing games.
Fallout 3: Set in a retro-futuristic world of 2277, this game deals with the after effects of a "what if" situation of atomic devastation. Truly a masterpiece.
Summary:
As I mentioned in my presentation before, playing these type of games will eventually give the player better decision making skills, tactical thinking, and overall patience. Since the completion of an RPG is roughly estimated around 50 hours, patience is just as vital a part with these games as the ability to come up with strategic battle plans or make the best decision during a conversation. Due to the massive amount of text one has to read, I'd say that a player finding at least one unknown word whilst playing is inevitable. I myself have encountered many words unbeknownst to me while playing Fire Emblem for example, which is plagued with formal jargon.
So in other words, RPGs go beyond the benefit of helping with language acquisition - they also teach you some useful skills for life.
