The Handheld Dilemma

I am not a big fan of Japanese role-playing games. Truth be told I’m not a big fan of RPGs in general. There are some exceptions to the rule – Final Fantasy VI, Fallout 3 and Skyrim spring to mind – but it’s not a genre that has ever really grabbed me.

It’s not for want of trying. After I got a PlayStation 2 for Christmas I bought every Final Fantasy game I could get for the system. Why not? I mean, I’d enjoyed Final Fantasy VI on the SNES; it stood to reason that I’d enjoy its predecessors and successors. But with the exception of Final Fantasy IX none of the other games in the series did anything other than leave me wondering why I just wasted £60.

More recently – 2009, I believe – I bought Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS. It’s one of those games I’d never gotten around to playing despite being told by more or less every person on this planet, living or dead, that it’s one of the finest SNES-era RPGs available. So I bought it while on a return visit to the UK with a view to playing it on the various buses, trains and planes I’d be on during that particular excursion.

What I thought would happen was this: I’d bung the game into my DS, boot it up, and get sucked into an engrossing storyline with interesting, three-dimensional characters. What happened instead was this: I played the game for about fifteen minutes, then turned it off.

It’s probably not the game’s fault – in fact I’m fairly certain it isn’t – but rather a problem with me. See, I don’t think large-scale games really work on a handheld gaming system. Handheld consoles work best for games you can just pick up and jump into. Some of the most successful handheld RPGs have been games that got moving within the first five minutes. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is a great example – you’ve got your sword, shield and mission objective within five minutes. Pokémon has you picking your first Pocket Monster and battling your rival in less time than it takes to boil an egg.

It’s for this reason that handheld RPGs tend to incorporate a quicksave option. People need to be able to hop in and out of their game at any given moment, but the bigger and more complex the story, the more difficult to becomes to remain focused. Just as the PSP didn’t really work as a media playback device because staring at a tiny screen for two hours wasn’t really ideal, so RPGs with lengthy scenes filled with wordy dialogue don’t really hit the mark. I shudder to think what playing Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is going to be like on the 3DS.

Chrono Trigger takes time to get going, and it’s not really time I’m willing to spend looking at a tiny, poorly-lit LCD screen instead of actually doing something. The same gores for Final Fantasy VI – as much as I love it, there’s no goddamn way you’ll get me playing it on a handheld. It simply takes too long to get going.

Does this make me an impatient person? Probably, yes. I have no problems sitting on the couch, controller in hand, deep and involved game on the TV, but ask me to sit on a bus or a train with a tiny bit of plastic in my hand giving me the same experience and I get cranky.

When Twilight Princess is inevitably ported to whichever Nintendo handheld is unfortunate enough to receive it, I don’t imagine it’ll fare particularly well – it takes about an hour and fifteen minutes before you even get a proper sword, and much of the time beforehand is spent herding sheep, fishing, and doing other irrelevant bullshit that ultimately adds little to the game. On the Wii, this was annoying. On a handheld, it would be absolutely excruciating.

In order for a handheld RPG – or indeed, any handheld game – to be a true success, it needs to get going much more quickly than a game on a home console does. We need to be making our first decisions, engaging in our first combat, much sooner than we would be otherwise. For that reason, I think Super Mario RPG would translate rather successfully to the handheld format. Mario RPG gets going almost immediately; it’s not bogged down by any particularly heavy preamble or text, and it moves along at quite a zippy pace. Frankly it’s astounding that the game hasn’t been given the handheld treatment already.

We play games to be engaged, and games to be played on the go need to engage us just that little bit more. It’s no surprise that games like Angry Birds and Tetris are such popular handheld titles – they’re active, engaging titles from more or less the moment they’re started up.

Given the choice, I’d rather play Worms Open Warfare 2 or Super Scribblenauts on the bus than attempt to grapple Final Fantasy VII or… well, Chrono Trigger.