Don’t Save The World
Stories in video games seem to be a hit or miss with most gamers. Sure there are some fascinating stories such as the Legacy of Kain series or Second Sight, but then you got games with mediocre or lame stories like Painkiller or Darksiders – still good games, but only good for their gameplay. Interactive storytelling is very hard to do, as most JRPGs seem to illustrate.
Square-Enix’s excellent Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies blunders at this with the obvious yes/no choices, giving the illusion of agency to the player, yet will only progress further when the player grudgingly accepts ‘yes.’ Sakura Rivers Interactive, visual novel developers of Fading Hearts and Infinite Game Works, intends to change this with their crowd-sourced RPG, Don’t Save the World: An RPG.
There isn’t much screenshots or gameplay footage shown so far, but Don’t Save the World: An RPG’s biggest feature is hyped up as player choice. Players can choose to be the hero in the game to defeat an evil overlord – or not. The player can set their own goal in the game, such as being a shop manager that specializes in magical items, or be an adventurer on the side. The game will even encourage the player from stepping off the linear “Hero’s Journey” path by giving them quests to far-off areas or sabotage another character acting as “hero” to defeat the evil overlord.
There is no morality meter in the game to keep track of how good/evil your avatar is in the game, yet Sakura River Interactive promises that some players who are “good” will find it in their best interest to stop the hero from slaying the overlord. After all, if your character is in the business of selling weapons, maybe you want the violence from the evil overlord to continue so you could sell weapons for protection.
If you are interested in Don’t Save the World: An RPG, you can visit Sakura River Interactive’s Web site for a teaser trailer. Visit the Indiegogo.com Web page if you wish to donate money for a game, with $20 getting a copy of Don’t Save the World: An RPG and a copy of Sakura River Interactive’s previous works (Fading Hearts or Infinite Game Works).
