Parodies always carry baggage – they rely on something else to define themselves. If you remove the stool from their source material, or if they make their punches on unsteady ground, parodies often struggle to keep their balance. They then risk accidentally tripping over their luggage, coming comically right into a conveniently placed pie, being slapped in the face with a rake, and then falling into a trap. Fun at the time, sad in retrospect. Video Game Fables sets its sights on critiquing the traditional turn-based RPG, and while it never stumbles headfirst into a hole, it has enough close calls to make me wonder if it’s necessary to pack the extra baggage at all.
My main concern with these types of games is that they often feel like they were made out of spite; the developer has some kind of bot to choose and they use their game to choose. I see this a lot with visual novels and RPGs in particular, and I’m not a fan. You can’t make good parodies with that attitude, and really good games in general. If you don’t like the material you work with, it will show in the end result.
Thankfully, I don’t feel like the creator of Video Game Fables hates RPGs. Real affection for the genre shines through here. In some ways, though, that attitude clashes with the kind of game Video Game Fables wants to be. The core message of Video Game Fables is that conventions should not be followed blindly. It’s a story about video game characters breaking out of their traditional roles and eventually breaking the traditions of RPGs in general. Loving RPGs and advocating for them to change are not necessarily mutually exclusive. These elements just need to be weighed carefully, otherwise the overall message will be confused.
Despite its ambitions, Video Game Fables falls comfortably into the vast majority of RPG conventions. The game takes place in a typical fantasy world with all the character archetypes, locations and concepts you would expect. You encounter enemies in a relatively random way, looting their corpses for items and experience points to become stronger. As you travel across a world map, explore dungeons and defeat bosses to continue the story linearly. That’s all technically the point – the world of the game should be that of a generic old fantasy RPG video game. Whatever your excuse for using a generic setting, if you don’t do enough to make it interesting, you’ll still be left with a generic setting.
The game mainly distinguishes its world from its inspirations through its writing. Every character almost always has something hateful, goof, or hateful and goof at the same time. While it’s funny, I don’t think it’s enough. Don’t get me wrong, the writing is cute and I appreciate the silly ways it plays with your expectations. That’s all well and good, I just can’t honestly say this drastically changes what Video Game Fables really is. If you removed the crazy dialogue, you’d be left with a pretty straight forward fantasy adventure.
This feeling hit me the hardest as I crossed the world map. As you move through the world map, you are completely isolated from the writing. It’s just you, your compass and whatever mist of enemies appears in your face. During these quiet forays between dungeons, the game’s personality hibernates and you realize you’re playing a simple, relatively simple RPG.
To be fair, Video Game Fables also strays from convention with its combat mechanics, at least theoretically. The game blows its chest early on with mechanics that sound deep and interesting on paper. Critical hits are very common and landing one converts it into a resource giving access to stronger abilities. Runs on a timer – the faster you select your command, the more powerful your attack will be. The order of turns is displayed on a timeline and you can voluntarily delay your actions until later turns on the timeline for strategic purposes. Your characters are completely flexible in how they can be customized, with level-ups, skill upgrades, and gear that can be customized at almost any point in the game. It is much. This avalanche of mechanics initially buried me in the thought that a surprisingly complex game must be lurking beneath its simple presentation and structure.
In practice, the combat system requires very little of this depth for the vast majority of its enemies. I never really know what to expect when I start an RPG, so I made my first party lineup to be balanced. I had a dedicated magic user, a dedicated physical attacker, and a remote attacker who would spend most of her time healing. So my strategy was to wail against enemies with my attackers, only deviating from regular attacks for an occasional charged critical hit, while my healer kept everyone alive. Using this tactic got me through about 98% of the game (I’m basing this stat on my gut feeling, I’m not a math magician) with no issues and no reason to change things or otherwise explore my options.
The nuances of the combat system only come to the fore during the boss fights, and even then, only in a handful of them. The boss fights that take advantage of the mechanics are by far the most engaging part of the game. My favorite boss fight makes clever use of the delayed turn order mechanic by pitting you against a group of enemies, each of which has a unique “rule” attached to it. They jump in and out of battle, forcing you to pay attention to which rules are currently in effect. If you attack on a turn that violates the applicable rules, you will be punished. This battle will challenge not only your memory, but your long-term planning skills as well. It’s great – I wish there were a lot more situations like this in play.
Instead, there are more bosses focusing on gimmicks that have nothing to do with the actual combat system. A boss asks you to complete short platform sections to make it vulnerable to damage. Another puts you in control of an off-screen ally to blast away enemies that attack your party during combat. Action elements like these are the other way Video Game Fables turns convention on its head. These elements permeate more than just the combat, as you progress through dungeons, jump over holes, drive cars and drive beanstalks into the air.
These sections aren’t complicated enough to be frustrating and the variety makes for a nice distraction, but I do wonder about the developer’s priorities. The game leaves a lot of unexplored territory with the basic combat mechanics for most of its runtime, so adding some harmless, albeit messy, action elements comes across as a bit unfocused. More importantly, none of the ways Video Game Fables spice up the experience changes the fact that it’s a relatively basic, basic RPG in a relatively generic setting.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with an RPG that is simple, basic, or relatively generic in its own right. The main thing that lets this game down is that it’s also an RPG about RPGs, and as a result, it works hard to convince you of its atypical nature, even going so far as to become the core theme of the story. By drawing attention to its atypical character, it reinforces how typical it really is. Or at least it does to me, maybe I’m just so obnoxious.
What a developer does with their game is their own prerogative, and if the developer really needed this to be a game about games, so be it. For me, the parody factor hinders more than it helps in this case. It relies too much on its subject to properly criticize it or stand on its own merits. Many of the stronger elements present could have remained intact in an environment that went beyond video games and felt more like a real world. As it is, Video Game Fables is unfortunately not confident in its message and its gameplay.
Video Game Fables is a solid yet simple RPG that suffers from the baggage of its meta nature. The lighthearted dialogue will make you smile and there are glimpses of immersive RPG design scattered throughout the experience. The game just never really rises above the conventions it tries to overthrow, which given the subject matter is a distracting misstep that weakens the overall experience.
PROS
- Nice dialogue
- Mechanics is interesting
CONS
- Ineffective as a parody
- Doesn’t dig deep enough into key mechanics
- Different game styles feel unfocused
Jack’s background is law, but he’s been writing about games long before that. His writing aims to capture the essence of a game in (hopefully) new and interesting ways. Occasionally, he even makes his articles fun to read. The results differ on that. Talk to him about Mega Man! Preferably not in the third person!
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