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When you think of casual games, the first thing that comes to your mind is not Final Fantasy. In fact, usually you’re nowhere near the RPG genre when you’re thinking about casual play. You might consider a shooter or a puzzle game long before you even consider the remote possibility of a casual RPG, and then when you actually stop to contemplate it for a moment, you stop, laugh, and say “Nah, that won’t happen.”

But how little informed we all are!

As a matter of fact, there’s been a few attempts at casual role-playing games in the past. One of the most noteworthy is a PC game by WildTangent (makers of Lumines and Runescape) called Fate. They declare it an “Enthusiast”game (same category as Runescape, an MMO) on their website, but in truth it’s much more a casual game in spirit than a hardcore one. You can play Fate for ten minutes or ten hours, and the result is pretty much still the same experience. And it’s just as addictive as Peggle, so you might end up working it for hours on end and somehow get no sense of accomplishment but all the sense of enjoyment.

There’s been other experiments in the casual/hardcore mix market for RPGs recently in even AAA titles–at least, what I perceive to be triple A. Not only triple A, but the very game we’d never expect to be a casual game. Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (which I have to say I enjoy immensely) is very much a traditional RPG in the sense that it has a long, spanning story mode that has cutscenes and choices and menus and running around collecting lumber to build flower wagons. But Square Enix and the Kingdom Hearts team therein that was responsible for this amalgam of a game decided to put casual elements into gameplay and allow short, playable bursts of fun for two to five minutes at a time like any good portable game should, and I applaud any PSP title for achieving this standard instead of being a ported PS2 title. This effect is achieved through Missions, a mysterious menu option never before seen in any Final Fantasy game.

It works beautifully–you choose a mission from the Missions menu, complete it, and usually you’ll get another mission to do until you run out of them and need to seek out more through the regular story mode. Missions consist of running around a map and seeking a particular enemy while fighting baddies of differing skill levels (depending on the mission) and picking up treasure chests along the way. You can only access Missions while at a save point, making the transition between missions and saving seamless, quick and effective. It takes about two minutes to run one, and they’re addictive, despite their repetitiveness. There’s just something about Crisis Core‘s seamless battlesystem that makes those two minutes gloriously fun. It might be the fact that in running them, you level up and acquire enhanced items and materia that beef your character and you can use through regular story mode, making yourself vastly more powerful and advantaged. Even so, the game is still challenging, and you have Hard Mode to run through after you complete it once.

Using these kinds of elements in gameplay, Square Enix has toed in on a very different market in a very different way. Remaking Final Fantasy IV for the DS is lovely, I’ll admit, but the truth is that Final Fantasy was never meant to be a portable game. It’s always been a sit-your-ass-down-and-play-that-thing-for-hours game. Seeing a Final Fantasy that has mixes of both gameplay styles makes me content, especially since I’ve noticed from watching the industry that developers think hardcore games are waning. Both elements in a big title like Final Fantasy show that there’s rooms for both styles in the industry, and there’s no reason developers should stop trusting that the epics will sell to the mainstream audience.

In that light, give both games a try. Fate is a fairly low-hardware-specs game and Crisis Core needs only a PSP to work. They’re good fun and I’ve enjoyed both in their own right. When casual games are disguised as RPGs, some interesting things are probably on the horizon. What will Final Fantasy XIII bring? We can only guess.

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Brenda Brathwaite blogged (it’s a verb now) on Scott Jon Siegel’s 9am Class game. The game sounds wonderfully hilarious, and it’s the kind of thing I would probably find wonderfully entertaining to play with my geeky friends.

She also, however, posted on the Casual Game Industry article at Gamasutra. I read over both blogs and articles, thought a little, and actually pieced them both together in an interesting way.

Brenda writes: “This got me thinking that maybe this concept of a super-fueled, polygon drunk industry is just that – a concept, and not a reality at all – and that the bigger industry is presently the non-blockbuster games industry.”

The issue here is that I, and I’m hoping I’m not alone in this, LOVE polygon-crazed games that border on breaking the bounds of reality and make the player so immersed it’s like slipping into a second skin. I want players to look into a screen and think “Wow, I can barely tell this is a game anymore.” I remember playing make-believe that I was in a game as a kid, when I was bored, and I would walk around the localpark thinking of objectives, looking around, and thinking “Wouldn’t this be an awesome first person game if everything was this real?”

Of course, it’s all aiming towards the interactive-movie end which I and so many others (like Hideo Kojima, my best-friend-if-he-only-knew) hold dear to our hearts. I guess we think a lot about the idea of not just fun but immersion, fun and drama–being impacted by what you see and experiencing the full range of emotions from joy to sorrow to anger to mirth to pain.

I guess it just comes down to the fact that I love storytelling. And what better way to tell a story than to show it? We’ve evolves such a long way from the oral tradition. We went from reciting to writing and painting to pictures and films to the internet and modern cinema and theater. Telling a story is such a huge part of human culture because that’s one of the easiest way for us to grasp ideas: when a teacher wants to illustrate a point (I call Brenda) they’ll often try an anecdote or an example to try to get kids to understand it more in context. We, as humans, are very good at roleplay–that’s why we use stories so often. It’s very easy for us to get into others’ shoes and understad their reactions when exposed to certain elements–we get a very clear idea of character and context. The funny thing is, despite how effective we are at this sort of thing, we have a very hard time employing it to identify with others.

The concept of storytelling is such a vast and exciting realm, and that’s the realm so many games want to try–but with the idea of interactivity, a player can actually experience the story, which makes it all the more giving–they can see the positive and negative aftereffects of their actions and learn from their mistakes and the experience.  It’s the same kind of deep learning experience and thematic development found in any great work of literature.

This is what brought me to Scott Siegel’s game. I recall, when I was a child, an odd sort of computer game with pixelly graphics played on my grandmother’s ancient computer of whose origin I have conventiently forgotten. I also couldn’t read English, so the name of the game escaped me, too. The whole point of the game was a kind of click and go adventure where your main character (a punkish, skateboarding superdeformed looking kid who skateboards) needs to sneak out of class, run about town and simply have fun. Particularly at the arcade. Which is as far as I ever got. But the point of it is, much like Scott Siegel’s game, the absurd task of just playing hooky and ditching school is a story in and of itself that teaches messages as I played (I would get arrested for stealing quarters out of the fountain, for example, or take so long to sneak out my main character would raise his hand, pretend he was sick and get sent to the nurse’s office, a place of which I still have bizarre erotic nightmares). Playing a game where you have to check if you’re awake and try to answer questions based on that consciousness level may seem decievingly simple but there’s a story there in every game that you can easily allude to in real life.

So how does this prove my point? Really, it doesn’t. You can say a lot in a casual game. It’s true, people don’t need fancy graphics. But getting people to play a story is one thing. Getting people experience a story is somethng far more difficult. Anyone can make a game. But making a game that pushes the limit–that’s where all the elements come in. Writing, system, graphics–the whole shebang. I would love to see that game. I would love to know its story, and know the highways and byways of the plot and choices you can make and break. And I think the Trompe l’oeil brought forth by increasingly more realistic visuals may be vital to getting players fully immersd into the world. Those are the kinds of experiences I want people to have–the ones that move your heart and change the way you react to stories in kind completely.

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