Guide: How to Survive in Any RPG from Something Awful

Hillarios! -- Ren

An Overview / Introduction

If it's a console title, the main character WILL ALWAYS have spiky hair of some odd, unnatural color and lug around a humongous, penis-size-compensating sword. The spiky hair helps express how different your character is from everyone else in the game world, without actually being different or making the developers create an interesting character. If the main character is a female, she will limit her wardrobe to clothing which is so tight that it suffocates every single skin pore and melds into her epidermal layer.

If you're playing a pc game, then your main character will be some utterly generic, homogenized boring guy voiced by the same jackass who reads out movie previews...

It's also noteworthy that when a pc RPG employs voice acting, even the biggest and most capable stars lose all talent the moment they step into the recording room. When you hear your character being voiced by Mark Hamill halfheartedly mutter "I can't take any chances, I must track Dorfgannon down before more innocent lives are lost," the sense that he's really thinking "I was Luke fucking Skywalker, I used to bang Harrison Ford and now I'm doing this shit" is frighteningly palpable. If the game is a port from a Japanese title, there's a chance that the English dub may be fatal.

... your evil arch-nemesis is located very, very far away from wherever you live, and the power of his evil minions increase with every step you take towards his goofy floating castle or invisible tralier park of doom. Sure he may have two spike-laced, fire spewing demon overlords guarding his palace doors with automatic plasma gun turrets, but 2,000 miles away and in your town, all he has is a handful of slightly aggressive wasps and a toad that shoots mossy rocks from its mouth.

... At the end of any given fight, a man's first reaction is to place his hands on his hips somberly, while a woman will jump in the air like a cheerleader with her mouth open, clapping her hands or giving a peace sign depending on whether her mood is "ditzy" or "really fucking ditzy."..

Upon beginning your quest, you'll likely find yourself in a quaint town full of people who love it when you casually saunter into their bedroom and start looking through their shelves for items you can steal. Sure they may have been saving up that healing potion to cure their dying son of the dreaded disease AIDSarion, but by all means, if somebody else like you might want it to heal himself after battling a winged elf fairy frog king (weaknesses: lightning, upholstery), it's all yours! Amazingly, their drawers and cupboards are entirely empty aside from potions, gold, and equipment ideal for warriors such as yourself.

... there's always ONE magic tree you can cut down to create a bridge or dam to safely cross the deadly six inch deep abyss full of deadly minnows. Speaking of trees, they often act as impenetrable force fields, somehow growing in perfectly straight lines to constantly block your way, thereby creating labyrinths alongside the highly important boulders and signposts. This explains why nobody except you ever bothers leaving towns in any RPG. If I had to fight off several hundred monsters while nearly braining myself against a magic tree every few feet, I'd stay in town with a shit-eating grin on my face too.

Know Your Enemies

The main villian will invariably have some quality which makes them more human and likeable in the player's mind.. Giving good traits to bad guys and bad traits to good guys constitutes "depth" in RPGs, and you should be very impressed that the bad guy wants to commit genocide because his dog was run over by the king's wagon when he was a kid..

The population of RPG worlds have apparently pushed the local birds, rats, and wombats too far, and they now have no choice but to randomly retaliate against wandering adventurers.. When was the last time anybody had to save other villagers or towns from rat attacks? Where the fuck is Animal Control? Don't towns have some kind of department which travels more than 10 feet outside of the town to make sure there aren't any fire owls waiting to attack?...

Many insects and animals carry around money and other things such as healing potions or magic herbs. They choose to haul these items around with them because the banks in town refuse to open up accounts for "deadly moths" and "some kind of evil wombat-goose creature."..

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