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This piece is a fanboy satire. The views and opinions expressed herein do not state or reflect those of Nintendojo or any of its affiliates.
All those old school Japanese RPGs were pretty cool…
For, like, a few years.
Making your team super bland, personality-free fighters in Final Fantasy was a blast (only hozers used mages, magic is for n00bz). And then all those crazy Japanese people started putting in story and character development and everything went down the drain. I mean, those dudes thought they could think up better stories than me and that’s just crazy.
I didn’t get into those games until I was about ten so I couldn’t read and just made everything up, and I made up some awesome stuff. Seriously, I made J.K. Rowling look like R.L. Stein– I’m just that awesome.
So with all that story mumbo jumbo getting in the way of my monstrous imagination, I turned to pen and paper RPGs and became the master dungeon master… master. I made quests so complex and plots so thick that even the one creepy dude who works down at the comic store and smells vaguely of Funyuns and Diet Mtn Dew couldn’t handle. Eventually I grew tired of how restricted those games were and began searching for my next RPG fix, and boy did I find it.
Live. Action. Role. Playing. (That’s LARPing for all you hozers out there) It was like Einstein discovering gravity or Chuck Yeager breaking the world hot dog eating record– it was an epiphany! Pretending to be a cool knight dude slaying orcs on a TV screen bored me, pretending to be one in my mind was a let down, but when I put on my cardboard armor and pick up my foam sword I become the king of Nesteria, an epic kingdom from my parents’ yard to that stream in the forest out back. I seized this glorious land from its native hobgoblins in an epic campaign that lasted three weekends, and I would have gone further if the evil warlock of the north, Mr. Jonas, hadn’t told me to get off his property. In the end though, my kingdom still wasn’t quite enough.
LARPing injected my life with a vim and vigor I had never felt before, so I went ahead and turned my life into one giant LARP. That’s right, now I treat everything like it were an RPG. Before I make any decision I whip out my D-20 and give it a toss (though those bullies at school totally cheated, I rolled a Natural 20 for my Evade and they still hit me). Have you ever wondered why everything I write is always so uber cool? It’s because whenever I sit down to write I put on my Epic Cowboy Hat of Literacy which gives me a Plus-10 to Writing.
Maybe I should lend that hat to those guys in Japan, then maybe they will make a RPG worth playing.
