Not Quite the Holy Grail

Hi there. My name is Max, and I do side quests in JRPGs.

I've never said it out loud before. It's actually kind of liberating.

I think I was born this way. There was never a time when, if a Final Fantasy let me do something extraneous to the critical path, I would not do it. Even if it's not congenital, my compulsion to aid imaginary villagers is certainly tied to some deep-seated psychological traits.

I'm a bit of a completionist, and that's always the first pull. The urge to collect, and the inability to leave something undone. Over the years, this aspect of my personality has manifested in relatively normal ways: collecting baseball cards and comic books as a child (wholesome!); procrastinating on college essays, then pulling all nighters (inadvisable!); responding to emails as they come in, rather than letting that little red number on my iPhone grow (neurotic!). For me, a task left undone feels like the sword of Damocles.

QUEST

SIDE QUEST

If the procrastination sounds counterintuitive, think of it as a pressure valve. When something is too big, too daunting to take care of in the usual fell swoop, I try to forget about it. Until I can't. The desire to clear my slate is all about forgetting—or rather, being afraid to forget things, to disappoint, to not live up to others' expectations. It's the waking equivalent of dreaming you're at school with your pants off. Oh, you never had that dream? How about the one where it's the last day of the semester, and you realize you forgot about one of your classes? Just me, I guess.

Which came first, I wonder: the need to excel, or the satisfaction of escaping to a world where excelling, being special, is all but guaranteed? By any sane measure, the effort required of your average RPG hero doesn't warrant much praise. Checking off tasks in a quest log is rote business, closer to reading email than to helping an old lady cross the street.

I realize I've just painted a terrifying self-portrait, and demeaned a venerable genre in our marginalized medium. Games can change the world, we're told of late. They're not passive escapism for the maladjusted. But it's not really like that! I'm not really like that! I don't sit there plucking keywords from the dialogue: "OK, 10 chickens, your sister in the forest. Got it." Efficiency is not a virtue for Maxathon, the hero of the age. (If it was, he wouldn't be off delivering poultry while Kefka poisons Doma Castle. Or whatever.)

Wanting to tie up loose ends is a motivating factor, not an end in itself. No, I help people because I'm a genuinely nice guy. Believe me. I mean, if you can't trust me, who can you trust? Nobody. And then where would you be? Holed up in your trailer clutching a golf club as you peer through a slat in the front door, because you don't believe the Girl Scouts are just there to sell you cookies. And that ain't healthy.

RPGs are like reality in this if nothing else: everybody has problems. And as a nice guy, I can help them with those problems. Sure, doing so is easy, but that's not because it's a matter of pressing buttons; it's because the situations in games are solvable. Saving the world isn't a slog through the mire of politics, but a straightforward quest to find the crystals. Even the most mundane of real world problems can be tangled webs of pain, and there's rarely a thread to pull. Last week, someone put up some lost dog flyers in my neighborhood. In a game, I can help that person—the dog is bound to be in the cave, bravely fending off a goblin. In the real world, all I can do is feel sad and move on.

Games let me pretend that what's broken can be fixed, and that can be cathartic. Side quests are often derided as monotonous, repetitive, and unimaginative: "fetch quests." This is a fair criticism. Yet that predictability can be relaxing, even freeing. It's true that there's no real challenge in it. Do what's expected and you'll never fail at the tasks put before you—like solving a sudoku puzzle, or, more charitably, a crossword.

If that puts you to sleep, I understand. For me, it's meditative: I close my eyes and imagine a world where I can make order out of chaos. Where I can take control, instead of sometimes having none.

Control and predictability might be at the heart of it. I was most passionate about role-playing games in the early 1990s, at an age when life was scary and confusing: filled with rapidly evolving social rituals, increasing responsibility, and more hormones than blood coursing through my veins. Spending an hour wading through the surf, looking for the right kind of fish to nurse Cid back to health in Final Fantasy VI was the childhood equivalent of taking a mental health day. It allowed me to be someone else, somewhere else. It required focus. It provided the illusion of selflessness. And perhaps most importantly, it operated according to unspoken rules, so that I was on safe ground: I knew what was expected of me, and what to expect in return.

Well excuuuuuse me, princess.

For all their predictability, side quests are often the only opportunity outside of battle to decide for myself what my experience will be, and who my characters really are. Remember, we're talking about JRPGs here: I don't get to pick responses from dialogue trees, or shape the direction of the main quest. But I can decide that my party leader is a diehard Marxist, and refuse to help the capitalist swine in the mansion; or that he's a greedy jerk, and pick up the necklace on the ground before I help the girl who dropped it.

My final thought in this confession/paean is that the most tired tropes are precisely the ones which clever creators subvert in interesting ways. Nier, the game that inspired this post, absolutely revels in the tediousness of its endless fetch quests. But it does so in a way that both winks at the convention and enables these seemingly thankless tasks to flesh out its characters and world. One particularly long goose chase ends with your character learning that he has inadvertently returned a runaway child to the loving arms of a family of conmen, who stiff him on his promised fee for good measure. It's a frustrating quest, leavened by one companion's sardonic criticism of you for undertaking it in the first place. This minor story beat, seemingly inconsequential, is one of several moments  that foreshadow's the game's central theme by upending player expectations.

Not doing that side quest, and others, in other games, would have been like reading a novel but refusing to bother with subplots or digressions. You'll never know whether you've just missed Tom Bombadil.