Cram it in; just how complex can games become?

It seems these days that more, not necessarily bigger, is better. At least when it comes to games. If you want to see direct proof of this then go look at the top list of games on gamefaqs.com for the PSP section. As of the date of this blog, three of the games - Monster Hunter, Monster Hunter 2 and Disgaea PSP - can only be accurately described as gargantuan in their scope. The Monster Hunter series offer a huge free-roaming world where you can do battle with various different types of weapons and abilities against loads of, well monsters. Disgaea is also a remarkably silly romp which involves stats so astronomically high as to be mind-boggling. This is certainly an impressive feat considering the small size of PSP games (somewhere in the region of 800Mb a piece). But do all these extra features mean that MH and Disgaea are the best games ever created?

Well no actually, it doesn't. I tried hard, so very very hard, to like MH. I mean if everyone else liked it so much, surely it must be good? Then I remembered that everyone also likes excessive drinking and Grand Theft Auto, promptly bringing me to my senses. The major problem with games such as Monster Hunter and Disgaea is that for most hardcore gamers such as myself who demand to see everything a game has to offer (being from the North of England I have a natural tendency towards tight-fistedness), putting in all of these features almost from the word go actually causes an interesting affect; I just don't want to do it. The sheer cliff face that is the world I've been given proves too much, so I go off and play iSketch instead.

What's the problem here exactly? Perhaps it's me, maybe I'm just fickle. But I think it's something else. To me a game can be complicated and deep, it just needs the right pacing of just how complex and deep it gets. Take your average JRPG, a mixed bag of brilliant examples of narrative and hours-long trash that's as fun to sit through as genital mutilation. It would be absurd if you were given transport around the entire world, every single party member and every single spell, ability, item, weapon, armour and battery-powered dildo. There's a gradual incline of learning to be had, where new ideas are trickle-fed to you like a hamster at it's water tub. Now compare this to Monster Hunter; you're given an option of every weapon, a unnecessarily huge set of tutorials that will reasonably take double digit hours to sit through them all, and then punted out on your arse with nary a target in sight. Sandbox game or not, I need some direction, a reason to want to randomly mutilate animals besides increasing numbers.

Then there's other such issues, perhaps one that's always got my goat - multiple endings. Now the backs of games boxes are more than happy to shout out such features to the high heavens. Personally I see the term "multiple endings" on the back of a games box and feel slightly nauseous. I can say, without hyperbole, that not once in my gaming life have I ever been able to get anything positive out of multiple endings without a guide sat on my lap. Call me insane, but I don't want to have to go through however many hours it takes to complete a game and missing out on the "perfect", most expensively produced sequence because I forgot to visit Old Man Plot Device three times as oppose to just the two times I remembered whilst I was trying to play the game. I can see the virtue of multiple endings in some respects, but there's better ways of doing it. The Fallout series is easily the best example I've ever seen; you have one central storyline that always concludes the same way. What you do in individual towns changes the ending slightly; not a lot, but enough to make you want to do something a bit different to see if you can change the fate of Broken Hills (you can't by the way, I tried). Now contrast this to the J-Pop disaster that is FFX-2; not only do you need to maximize an arbitrary percentage completion that randomly increases, but you need to talk to a specific character, at a specific location, at a specific time, and a specific number of times. Are you kidding me? What happened to the days when such achievements were the realm of getting a higher score than the last player? It's sheer madness.

I personally would rather see more games being constructed that were more focused on their core elements rather than taking those same elements and spreading them out so far it becomes a tangled mess. Games such as F.E.A.R. are much more engrossing to play than something like Disgaea. It focuses itself on the tactical shooting and horror aspects to aplomb, while Disgaea complexity grows exponentially to the point where it all becomes too much to care about. It's a bit like choosing between reading a great novel or staring at a bunch of spreadsheets on a database. You're bound to get something out of both of them, but the question is just how far does your masochism go to learn all five hundred lines of the customer shoe catalogue?