Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
Following up from last week’s thread, I’ve been playing a lot of Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Just beat Chapter 5. And although it hasn’t really come up in my writing about the game, I’ve been thinking a lot about parties. Companies. Fellowships. Teams of found, fire-forged friendships. Ichiban has a motley assortment so far, of fun and charismatic sidekicks who can fit into several different classes. And also, you can make him be a folk singer or a breakdancer. It’s a rad game, and it really puts the interpersonal element of RPGs front and center, both narratively and mechanically.
And this has led me to thinking about parties in games, particularly but not entirely in the world of role-playing games. Mario collects neurotic friends in Paper Mario who fight by his side one at a time. Trainers put Pokémon in and out of rotation, almost like a football team. Joker’s Phantom Thieves work as a group of four in Persona 5, while the Courier’s New Vegas companions will likely never meet. And then you have games like, say, EarthBound, which has only four characters and doesn’t ask for you to send people to the benches, or a mammoth cast in a Fire Emblem game that may be absolutely overwhelming. How many people you’re controlling, what they’re doing, how their actions impact each other… this can wildly change the length, pace, tone, and pretty much everything else. Look at the composition of Deltarune, which has exactly enough space for the heroes Kris, Susie, and Ralsei, and Suikoden 2, with enough space for six characters… of a possible 108.
Of course, that’s just numbers. You also have things like composition, abilities, and needs. Blades in Xenoblade 2 are organized by different groups, so you’re gonna want an even distribution of elemental types, combat specialities, and optional Field Skills. It’s ideal for a four-person team in Dragon Age: Origins to have at least one or two mages, and you’ll probably want the other slots saved for a warrior and rogue—just don’t be like me and skimp on the rogue before the final boss that almost requires a rogue. Into the Breach always gives you three units, but three in a set, with each member being wildly divergent in their strengths and drawbacks. And you can even think about guest party members; Kingdom Hearts I and II often let you sub in a Disney character for a certain world, making it a question of whether Donald or Goofy (but probably Donald) should sit that level out. In this way, parties in RPGs are not merely a bunch of guys to beat on people but complex problems to solve. They can be actual puzzles or challenges in their own right. When I go through Xenoblade 3, it’s important for all six main characters to constantly level up in different classes, but it’s also important that their classes are balanced. How best do I allocate their roles? Which seventh guest party member is most complementary?
But perhaps the most important thing is that parties are groups of characters, and that allows for character dynamics. In Mass Effect, squad members aren’t really useful on missions as specific problem-solving tools (at least on the lower difficulty settings); they’re there as extra muscle, but mostly as castmates and love interests to provide color or add a scene to a story. I know I’ll always wait to do Tali’s Loyalty Mission last because she and Legion should be in each other’s. I also know how much people, people here especially, love the Baldur’s Gate 3 party members, and how much the game does to make them feel like dynamic and powerful parts of the world. And this brings us back to Ichiban, because while Yakuza is not the most mechanically deep Japanese RPG, it’s been really good at this. Compare his personality—which has a clearly defined core but can adapt based on your intentions as a player—with the joyless Luminary of Dragon Quest XI, or the joyless leads of Sea of Stars. If we look at it like that, parties are really just large main casts, and the fights are either incidental to their interpersonal relationships or things that define and alter those relationships. RPGs like Final Fantasy VI and Disco Elysium put this idea front and center.
So the party can clearly be a complicated thing, a trope that can effect or even flat out be one of many kinds of gameplay mechanics or structures. And this is where you come in for today’s prompt: what is your favorite kind of party in an RPG. You can talk about your favorite individual examples, in fact please do, but I’m interested in the way you’ve reacted, and perhaps even used, this commonplace trope of game design.
But that’s not all, and so I hope you’ve also got some stories about what you played this weekend.
