I'm Tired of Saving the World

Lately I've been playing a lot of Atelier Escha & Logy. It's a JRPG in a long line of Alchemy-focused RPGs. The primary mechanic of the game is that you're an alchemist, so the item system is incredibly complex. You combine items in recipes, but you can substitute ingredients to achieve different effects. For example, maybe a recipe will call for something flammable. Early in the game, you may only have paper scraps. Later on, you might have exotic oils with much more interesting properties. If you've played FFXIV, it's not dissimilar to the crafting system there; just add a few more layers of complexity.

Logy and Escha. Note the 'g' in Logy is soft, so it sounds like "Low-gee"

Of course, as an alchemist, you're doing combat as you explore for ingredients, so it's not all just item creation and talking to your party members. But the interesting thing to me about this game is that it's billed by a lot of people as a slice-of-life game. You're not out there saving the world, you're doing your job as a government official alchemist in an R&D department, which includes exploring ruins to gather ingredients, making new items, and helping townsfolk out with your alchemy.

High/Epic Fantasy, such as Tolkien, Final Fantasy, the Tales series, Mass Effect, and so on are all about country, world, or universe threatening problems. It's easy to create tension in a story using that motif, and the hero's journey is an extremely old yet effective plot outline. Don't get me wrong, I love epic fantasy, but the same tropes do get tiring once in a while.

We have lots of slice-of-life comics, such as Questionable Content, Boy Meets Boy, and Something Positive, and sitcoms are a veritable treasure trove of slice-of-life television shows, but not so many slice-of-life story-based games, despite the popularity of the genre in other mediums.

In the Atelier series, while there are moments at the end where something bad happens and you have to save your town/friends anyhow, the grand majority of the game isn't about that, and I find it frankly refreshing. Now, it does help that I really enjoy the deep alchemy system, and combat is pretty well done too, but I don't really find myself missing that driving need to save all the things.

There are slice-of-life games such as Rune Factory, Harvest Moon, and Tomodachi Life, but for those the story has been rather anemic. The Rune Factory series probably has the strongest story of the ones I've played, but it still leans heavily on the hero's journey and save the town tropes, and if you're talking Animal Crossing, there's no real story being told. It's not like you're peering into the life of a farmer, or a surgeon, or an alchemist. You're in a community simulator, where you can make a story, but it's not really cohesive; it's interesting because you have emergent story, rather than a crafted one allowing you to be in someone else's shoes for a period of time.

Princess Elodie, learning about Military Strategy

Long Live the Queen is a good example of a slice-of-life game, where you play as the Princess Elodie, who's mother just died and you have a year until you ascend the throne. Every week, you decide what courses to take, and pass or fail skill checks along the way, hoping to avoid assassination and ascend the throne. A great little game with a view of what a Princess in a contested kingdom might be like.

So give me more peeks into people's day-to-day lives. What's the day-to-day life of a Wizard like? How about a game where you're a Teacher and you need to ensure your students are on the right track? Tell me in the comments below if you know of any other good slice-of-life games, because I'm tried of saving the world right now.

#GameDesign, #SliceOfLife