By Aaron Mingus
So let me get this straight, I thought as I was led through the Hero Academy. My whole purpose in life is to be the chosen one and I have the ability to either save or doom the planet… It was a lot to put on a child who had just watched his entire family killed and home burned to the ground. Sounds like the standard affair! After all, this game, Fable, was a fantasy RPG and being the most important person in the universe, often with a tragic background, tended to be par for the course.
And that’s… kind of sad actually. It seems like for all the fantasy games in existence (nearly every one that isn’t exclusively science fiction) very few unique stories have been told. Most are either save the princess or save the world, and frequently “fulfill your destiny” is in there somewhere too. Once while visiting a friend, he told me that he considered Final Fantasy XII a breath of fresh air, because it wasn’t as much about saving the world but saving the country, which is only marginally different at best.
This lack of originality is probably why so many fantasy games are obsessed with side questing and activities. One would think saving the world would be a pressing matter, but you can always stop to help the local farmers fight off bandits. “Help me, help me!” shouts the princess in a dull, flat tone, obviously devoid of personality.
“I’ll save you, fair maiden!” you call. “…just after I mine enough silver to craft my new shield.”
And it’s all busy work added to pad out the game. If the world was really in danger, if a meteor was really heading for the earth, then you wouldn’t waste your time with local squabbles over fishing territory. That’s the kind of problem that should be solved by a local board of administrators and held up by the police. The noble adventurer should have no time for it when the world is in peril, and the public should recognize that.
If you get tired of saving the world, I suppose the best thing to do is to embrace the trivial side quests. That’s why I spent some time traveling throughout the wintry landscape of Skyrim as Charles the Cabbage Thief, World’s Greatest Cabbage Thief, who would walk into town with empty pockets and waltz out with a cart load of cabbages.
The idea came to me when I was trying to enjoy my play-through of Skyrim to no avail and came across a farm. I plucked up all the cabbages and the owner didn’t even react. No officer lurched over to me demanding compensation. Then I started browsing around the houses and found that there were many cabbages left unattended and poorly guarded. Being dragon born had gotten old, so I was reborn (spelled: restarted the game) as Charles and took the cabbages by storm!
It was a fantasy adventure that had never been told! Villagers would see what they perceived to be a mercenary walk into town. They’d ask for favors, and to keep up the charade, I gladly obliged. I recovered a warrior’s sword from a gang of bandits, but was sure to snatch up every cabbage in the hideout on my way. The sword was secondary. After I returned it to the rightful owner, the people of the town gleefully thanked me for my good work as I rooted around their kitchen cabinets.
Eventually, cabbages became all that mattered to me. I would rifle through dressers and drawers. Onions, no! Collard greens, pass! Wizard robes, pah! Healing potions, well, even a cabbage thief has to think about his health. I would get calls from friends on Saturday nights. “Where are you?” They’d say. “We haven’t seen you in weeks. We’re going to Bon V in an hour. Come with us.” Four hours later, I had accrued a hundred and forty-six more cabbages, and that part of the story’s a complete and utter lie. I have a wonderful social life.
I imagined the peasantry of Skyrim missing that vital ingredient for their coleslaw. They posted wanted signs all across the kingdom. They would run into each other on the street and one would say, “I was struck by the cabbage thief last night, now what am I going to put in my egg rolls?”
“He hit us to,” her friend would reply. “I wonder what he does with all those cabbages. He must have an awfully large store of kimchi.” But the truth is I never learned to cook! They were all sitting in a single barrel (…somehow) by the blacksmith’s front door in Riverdale, rotting away in disuse! Oh, if only he had asked himself about the smell. If only he used that barrel to store hammers or scraps of tin. If only he had taken time to question why a man periodically came by shoving crate loads of cabbages inside his unused barrel, the mystery could have been solved.
At last, the cabbage thief retired when I sold my PC, it being virtually impossible to ship a computer through US customs. But for a while, it had really spiced up the dull narrative of Skyrim. Someone once told me that when you play an Elder Scrolls game, you shouldn’t focus on following the story. You should just explore and find something to do. At the time that seemed like ridiculous advice, and now even after successfully doing that, I still find it bewildering.
What’s the point of having a story in a game if the players are going to ignore it? What’s the point of having a plot about saving things and restoring peace if that is the least interesting part of the game? The driving force of a good, narrative game should be its plot. That’s the part which moves us forward and keeps us coming back. If always “saving” things doesn’t work than maybe we need something new and different, instead of searching for our own ways to amuse ourselves.
