I really enjoy exploring worlds, and RPGs are particularly keen with this. Step outside. Rotate your camera, take in all you can see. Explore a vast world. Adventure games are often good with this as well. But I have also noticed as time has gone on that in-game towns and civilizations are starting to suffer...drastically. With the increasing popularity of side-scrolling and locked-view areas in Adventure and RPG video games, the cheap corner-cutting endeavors of video game developers is becoming more and more apparent.

I do not like my camera being taken from me, but i can deal with it. Some really great games have been made with locked views for towns, but these days it is starting to feel more and more cardboard-ish. More and more 'fake houses' that you can't enter. Landscapes you can't walk onto. Staircases that are just for show. What happened to the days when a Town was a Town? What you saw was generally touchable. Final Fantasy 7, 8 and 9 used locked views for some towns, but they were also done very well. Lindblum from FFIX is something worth mentioning. You had a town split into three areas, all accessible by a train. There were houses EVERYWHERE and almost all of them were real, and explorable. They cut no corners with the development of the towns, making sure they had a good feel to it. Lindblum was enormous, yet I very quickly learned my way around, due to proper town designs. Final Fantasy 8, it's predecessor, was released in 1998 [or '99, can't remember which] and FFIX was released in North America in late 2000. So FFIX had two or so years of development, give or take. And you know what? It had large towns, fully accessible, and it was one of the best looking games of the PS1's career. Why am I sharing this? Well....

Wada, current President of Square Enix, is a jackass. Final Fantasy 13 was in development for roughly six years. Final Fantasy 13 has no towns. Uh, not kidding here. Seriously. No towns. When asked why there were no towns in a game that took 5+ years to develop, he stated "It would simply have taken too much time for us to focus on town development. I decided to make this game a story-driven RPG, and towns just take away from that." Let's examine this. The president of a highly successful gaming company said that a game that took over FIVE YEARS to make lacked towns because, well, it would have taken too much time. Oh, and they would take away from the story?

Any of you played a really badass game with a kickass story? Did it have towns? I'm sure it did. I know I've played plenty of great games, great stories, with many great towns to behold. Let's look at Grand Theft Auto IV. That game was in development for 4 years, and it didn't just have a town - It had one of the most realistic cities EVER created for a video game. Wake up people! These are the kind of leaders of game companies we have now. If you are like me, when you have a free moment, you're probably writing Wada letters that start with 'Dear Enix President Wada' and and with 'go fuck yourself.' We NEED to do something. The games that come out for our portables, our consoles, our PCs, our cellphones, they're getting cheaper and cheaper. Game companies do NOT exist without us. WE buy the games. WE pay their overhead costs. WE give them profit, and WE can take them out if the time comes. You don't like how a company's doing business with your favorite game series? Boycott the shit out of them. Spread the word when companies start their 'we are untouchable' tyrany.

...As for me, I'm going to start hoping for a day when towns and cities come back. Until then, i'll have to suffer through games like Tales of Vesperia, Eternal Sonata and Final Fantasy X, where the towns are just there for looks, mostly un-accessible. I won't even touch FF13, the game that took 6 years to make but has NOTHING to show for it except really good graphics. I hope one day towns will pop out at us again and say hello. I'm eager to have a cup of tea with a local again. I hope he brings a newspaper. A sugar packet would be great too. I always forget to bring a few. -Astro-