I've been playing Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions on my PSP, and I'm thoroughly impressed with the story so far (I'm not that far in, though). Or rather, the story presentation. Sometimes I feel like I'm reading a novel. This is distinctly different from how I felt with many of the newer Final Fantasy games, which felt rather....fake. War of the Lions feels very much like history to me, because the world doesn't feel like it begins and ends with the characters the way the other recent FFs do.
I've encountered very few RPGs with worlds that feel genuine. Most of the time, the world feels entirely contrived, like the world was designed entirely to justify a single plot point or a single game mechanic.
I wonder, are there any other RPGs, western or Japanese, that have what I'd call "historic" storylines? Storylines that try to embed themselves as only a part of a long and complex history, rather than trying to make your party of characters the be-all-end-all of the in-game world all the time? You see it in fantasy novels all the time, where authors write stories which, while still epic, also feel like they are only a small part of a much larger world. It's what makes them so compelling.
KotOR manages this pretty well, but only because the Star Wars universe has a long history that BioWare wasn't allowed to manipulate or define. The Elder Scrolls series attempts it, but since the story writers at Bethesda are pretty bad, they don't succeed very often.
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