Someone in Square Enix said that RPGs don’t need storylines

When it comes to RPGs, I don’t even need to explain how far up Square Enix is atop the gaming Olympus. It is, however, a bit surprising to find out that someone from the esteemed publisher said that RPGs don’t really need storylines.

When it comes to RPGs, I don’t even need to explain how far up Square Enix is atop the gaming Olympus. It is, however, a bit striking to find out that someone from the esteemed publisher said that RPGs don’t really need storylines.

Our source is Miwa Shoda, a writer who’s been with Square Enix (then Squaresoft) since 1995. She penned stories for big names such as Legend of Mana and Final Fantasy XII. “I’ve worked all over the place and gained a great deal of valuable experience from all sorts of people,” she said through her Twitter account, “and learned approaches to writing games I would not have been able to do on my own, but the one approach I could never understand is the notion that ‘games don’t need storylines.'”

It seems that Shoda received instructions from higher up to go easy on the story-writing. “But when I was told that RPGs don’t need storylines, I was really shocked. They said players weren’t after a storyline, so the bare minimum of events would suffice.” She didn’t say exactly who told her that, but that someone has got to be pretty high up the ladder to be able to call that shot.

Sankaku Complex [via Kotaku]