Month of Characters Follow up: What Makes a Good Character?

Following my month of characters, I thought I might give some context to the lists and discuss what makes a good character and how so many writers and designers end up screwing up potentially iconic characters.

            First, let's start with heroes.  There are two basic types of heroes in video gaming that are very common.  The first are heroes who we find admirable, personable, or otherwise likable.  They are our avatars, but they are not us.  They have their own character, their own arcs, and their own agenda.  What makes a good hero?  Well, for starters, they need vulnerability.  The story may suggest that the hero can never die, however a hero is only compelling if the illusion of failure is hinted at through fallacies and weaknesses that the hero possesses.  For example, a personable hero having specific emotional triggers, phobias, or personality flaws is very humanizing, as we can often recognize those within ourselves.  These are sometimes the hardest to pull off in video game characters convincingly, because while a tragic past is rather easy to concoct, it can be difficult to make a hero vulnerable and weak, but still admirable and strong. 

Kratos is just not a well designed character from a story standpoint.  He's angry before his tragedy, he's angry after his tragedy and his back story barely ever comes up.  As a character, he's just a ball of rage with no reason to be but to kill.

            Kratos from the God of War series is an excellent example of a hero who fails to be relatable.  While he does have a tragic past, his personality is all rage, sarcasm, cruelty, and disdain.  He never shows signs of human weakness during battle or even during much of the plot.  And when he does attempt to show some weakness, it feels contrived because the character has not been built to actually support that weakness.  It is being jammed in where it is not wanted.  On the flipside of that, we have Ness from the Earthbound/Mother series.  Despite being a largely silent protagonist, Ness has several humanizing factors to him through game design.  Over the course of the game, Ness can come down with a number of status ailments that make it clear that he is, in fact, still just a kid and not some immortal super being.  Ness can get homesick and need to call his mother for support.  Ness can get the flu or a cold and need medicine.  Ness can get sick from allergic reactions and need homeopathic healing.  These small touches show that Ness is in fact a kid and vulnerable to childhood maladies, both physical and psychological.  It provides a nice perspective, showing that for all the new age hippies or knife wielding thugs you can take down with your psychic powers, you do still need a cuddle from your mommy or a teddy bear to start the day.  Watching a character act human is so much more relatable than a tragic back story.  If you are going to give a character a tragic back story, have it directly relate to their character and their vulnerabilities.  Dante, in the original Devil May Cry on the Playstation 2, lost his mother to demons.  While a great deal of information is not given, it comes out that this was a momentous event for him that shook him, through the story.  He takes a job from a woman named Trish primarily because of her resemblance to his mother.  When she betrays him, it hits the devil hunter very hard and after she is killed, he sheds tears for her.  His past directly relates to his character development in the game and it shows that he is vulnerable to being deceived because of his past.

Despite his cocky attitude, Dante has a tragic backstory that actually affects how he decides to act in the game, causing him to both grow and show signs of vulnerability.  This makes him a far more well rounded character than Kratos or your average shooter character.

        The other type of character is a power fantasy character.  Largely, these characters are avatars for the human players, with little to no personality of their own, allowing players to feel strong by playing the role of these characters in the game.  While this can lead to some interesting political, religious, or philosophical commentary, too often it is used for somewhat...reprehensible dreams.  A power fantasy character done wrong is where the game is built around appealing to the most base instincts of the human psyche, things like the desire to fornicate, the desire for wealth or power, the desire to kill in order to feel strong.  Modern warfare shooters appeal to players by allowing them to fit the stereotypical soldier, a walking death machine who kills without remorse in the name of the greater good(in the narrative at least) without consequence.  God of War, while not strictly a power fulfillment game as Kratos isn't a blank slate, does allow players to have sex with random women without consequence, and actually rewards the act.  Sexual games in Japan are also catered towards this style of play, allowing gamers to take on a character they can put themselves into as they either woo or abuse women for their own enjoyment.  These kinds of games do, sadly, fill the power fantasy requirement of giving characters the ability to make themselves feel strong, virile, or well off, however the actions that give off these feelings are, in my opinion, tragically flawed and can at times promote unhealthy views towards different races, genders, or the world in general. 

Ninja Gaiden 3 is power fantasy done very poorly.  It outright forces you to do acts that are horrific, even if they are empowering, without any set of consequences...they even reward you for it.  The infamous scene of Ryu killing a begging soldier, being forced to kill a begging soldier, is a sign of how flawed the game approaches making players feel tough.

            So, how do you pull of power fantasy heroes?  Well, there are a few good ways to do this.  The first is to supplant some of the more base desires and hit the itch to explore.  Power fantasies aren't just about base instincts, they are about being able to do in a game what you cannot do in real life.  Crafting a world or an environment that fosters exploration and rewards it, not necessarily with money or items, but with sights and experiences they cannot see elsewhere really helps grant players a reward for their effort.  Dark Souls does this quite well.  Though the world may be bleak and lonely, it offers a unique experience where the very act of exploring allows players to see things they could never hope to see in the real world, be it giant monsters, or unforgettable sights, such as crawling through a huge tree to reach an acid lake at the bottom.  Another good way to do power fantasy characters is to make the hero generally a good guy.  This allows you to not only enjoy the world that's been crafted around you, but also it allows some of those baser instincts to be sated without some of the guilt.  Adol Christian, for example, is an explorer and a swordsman who frequently makes romantic acquaintances with beautiful women the world over.  However, Adol does not take advantage of their affections as he is a character who acts with honor.  Adol is silent, so the interactions of those around him give us context to this effect, making the players accept the lack of ability to take advantage of those around us.  Also, Adol is a skilled swordsman and the combat in the Ys games is fast and enjoyable, allowing players to feel good about defeating monsters and protecting the innocent, rather than killing other human beings for some vaguely defined hyper masculine idea of patriotism.  Above all else, power fantasy should be about freedom, though.  Freedom to explore, freedom to challenge conventions, freedom to do as you wish.  This may lead some players to running over hookers in Grand Theft Auto, but a good power fantasy game does show that your actions have negative consequences, such as increased notoriety score and the possibility of being arrested or killed, and that while it is possible for you to hurt others for your own enjoyment...it's not the wisest idea.  In this way, they can subtly guide the player to a more fulfilling experience.  Power fantasy characters use the world and our own human impulses to affect us, often without our realizing.

While often cited as a highly adult game, Grand Theft Auto actually does do power fantasy very well.  You can do horrific acts to people around you, but it comes with consequences, like being arrested or killed.  In contrast, if you act like a good citizen, the game actually will award you money for saving people.

            Now, for villains.  Once again, there are two main types of villains.  Tragic villains and despicable villains.  Before we go into that, however, let me just say that in many games, villains are much easier to make than heroes.  If you do not have a villain who looms over the party for much of the game, you merely have to create a character at the end who has ties to the characters or the game world, has a view that is horrific or unjust, and who has a good reason to fight the main characters.  Final Fantasy Legend is a good example of this, in my opinion.  There are six main villains.  The four who guard the main worlds, Ashura, and the Creator.  The four who guard the main worlds are using their power to oppress the peoples of their worlds and/or block the way up the tower, as the higher up characters get, the stronger they become and are therefore more of a threat to these villains.  We don't have much prior contact to them, but the facts that they act in a manner that is clearly evil, that they don't replace someone more interesting or who we've had an investment in, and that they have a reason to want to stop us justifies these actions.  Ashura and the Creator are very similar in this regard.  However, they make ingratiating offers of the player, showing that while they have views that may be unjust, they are not entirely unreasonable, feral, or evil for the sake of being evil.  This shows some depth and allows the players to feel as if they have made a real triumph in refusing the offers these two make.

Bowser is fine as a simple villain.  He opposes Mario and wants to rule the Mushroom Kingdom.  Simple and to the point.

            Now, that said, that kind of template only works for the most basic of villain.  Really interesting and memorable villains are those with nuance, who you develop an emotional attachment to, and who are iconic in their own right.  Tragic villains usually have a back story that is depressing or has altered their view points so that they are acting in a manner that seems evil, but which is justified to them.  Like characters with tragic back stories, for these villains to really succeed, you need to interweave their current actions with their past, otherwise they become stock villains.  Evoland is a game which charts the history of adventure and role playing games in a satirical fashion and the main villain, who comes out of nowhere, is revealed to have a tragic backstory of his race being hunted for some reason, despite never mentioning it, hinting at it, or showing and trace of bitterness or regret until the final battle.  This is the definition of a stock villain, and Evoland created him in that way to parody the RPG stock villains of past and future.  A tragic villain with some bite is one who knows that what they are doing may not be justifiable, but still believe it is best for them or those dear to them.  Kato from Shadow Hearts: Covenant is this kind of villain.  He carries himself with an air of melancholy and early on he and Yuri discuss the loss of his love.  This melancholy and reference to his tragic past carry on throughout the game through his interactions with his superiors, who he has contempt for, and his resurrection of his lost love, albeit without her memories.  In the end, Kato decides to try and alter fate for the sake of love.  While he recognizes all the people he can and likely will hurt through these actions, to him it is justified because of all that he has lost.  This is a really well defined villain that players feel for and grow attached to.  They are lucid, reasonable, likable even, and are not deluded about the course of actions they have chosen to take.  A good way to mess up writing a tragic villain, apart from a stock backstory that is only mentioned once for the sake of pathos, is to have them be unreasonable, petulant, and whiny about their tragedy.  I honestly believe that Luc, from the Suikoden series, is a rather poor villain because he not only does he have immense power, but he has fought on the side of justice before and has a stern, but loving teacher and girl friend.  He should be perfectly content with his life.  However, the source of his power, his "true rune" of wind, which grants him mastery over wind and eternal life, seems to cause him distress as he believes his destiny is not his own.  So, he seeks to free himself from this burden by destroying the true rune, in an experiment which could wipe out an entire country.  Really, this is like saying "Wah!  Wah!  My whole life, people have made choices for me, I never got to live MY life!"  The truth is, Luc HAS lived his life, has made choices, and even if it felt like his destiny was being controlled, it was still ultimately up to him.  We all have choices.  But this attitude makes him seem whiny and ungrateful.  A sharp contrast from his previous appearances.

Kato is an excellent tragic villain, having his tragic backstory shown in the original Shadow Hearts and explained fully in the sequel.  His back story affects his actions and he sees what he is doing as justified, even if he has to commit horrors to do it.

            Despicable villains can be a bit more fun than tragic villains, as they're not meant to be liked.  They are meant to be hated for their actions, which are still justified in their eyes.  Despicable villains do what makes them happy or what advances them without care for others, so they can be pretty shallow character wise.  However, their actions can speak great depths about the kind of person they are and give them some memorability.  Going back to Suikoden again, in Suikoden 2, Luca Blight is the main villain for most of the game.  He has his father poisoned and wages a bloody war across the country to spill as much blood as possible to empower the "beast" rune inscribed in his castle.  However, he really just likes killing.  Luca is a textbook case of an anti-social psychotic who gets enjoyment out of bloodshed.  Yet, he's not an impotent villain who just loves killing because it makes him feel big.  He's trained his whole life as a warrior and can hold his own, frequently taking part in the killing himself.  In fact, to bring Luca down it takes a squad of six soldiers against him, after he's been wounded, a barrage of arrows, and a final duel against the enemy commander while he is near death, bleeding out, and pumped full of holes.  This kind of villain is memorable because of how despicable he is.  Same for Kefka.  He's insane.  He wants power for his own sake, so that he can do as he pleases and takes great pleasure in causing suffering.  He's not afraid to fight on his own, but he's memorable for his quirky personality, something Luca was rather missing, and his unique visual appearance, resembling a harlequin.  Despicable villains can be well spoken or thoughtful as well, such as Grahf from Xenogears musing on the nature of human existence or on the darkness and evil which resides within us all, even though he freely kills his subordinates and wants to destroy all.  So, how do you destroy a good despicable villain?  Make their plan not make sense within the context of the world or for their character.  Barthandelus from Final Fantasy 13 is a good example.  Despite having a memorable look, his plan is very, very stupid.  He wants to reduce the entire world to nothing.  Now, you could argue that this is stupid, and I have, because he acts as a god, lives in luxury, and his children basically rule the world.  But, devil's advocate, let's say he's gone insane and wants to reduce the world to nothing.  Why doesn't he do it himself?  He is a god after all.  Why does he need to rely on proxies to do it for him?  And why does he think destroying the world will bring his creator/father back when there doesn't seem to be any evidence it will?  Why does he, if he wants himself to die to, fight and hound the players?  See, a despicable villain does not have to be terribly deep, but their plan needs to make sense from a certain perspective.  Luca likes killing, so he starts a war.  Simple.  Kefka wants power and is selfish, so he weasels his way into a position of power and then turns himself into a god of magic.  A bit contrived, but sensible.  Barthandelus wants to reduce the world to nothing, so he and his organization actively try and stop the people he manipulated into becoming the tools for the end of the world...wait, what?

Luca Blight is an excellent despicable villain who simply has a deep rooted need for slaughter.  He is absolutely reprehensible, but very memorable because, as he said, it took hundreds to bring him down, but he killed thousands with abject glee.

            Aside from a poorly realized master scheme, there are two final pratfalls to avoid when writing villains.  The first is comparison.  If you are going to have a really impressive villain in your game, one who follows the outlines set up above, you don't want to create something more impressive or more dangerous or more interesting than them.  This will leave the audience feeling cheated, as they invested time in believing your important villain was important, but then something bigger, cooler, and more evil comes along.  This is why you don't have a giant evil demon boss BEFORE you have your human trying to force people to act a certain way for the greater good.  The taste of the villain sours after you've had something bigger and more impressive.  Second is supplanting the main villain.  Especially with tragic villains, we, the audience, grow just as attached to the bastard we want taken down as we do to the heroes.  So, if we spend most of the game hating and fighting and preparing to fight one big villain, only to have him be replaced by a lamer, stupider, less powerful/intimidating villain, it will really sour the games taste.  Seymour Guado in Final Fantasy 10 should've been our final final boss, but he was replaced by Yu Yevon, who was barely alive to begin with.  Satan killed the Lord of Necromancers in Castlevania: Lords of Shadows because "Evil muahahahahaha!"  Look, I get that you want a twist, but you can do better.  Replacing an iconic villain like Vaz in Far Cry 3 will just make us call bull shit.  The only time when this can work is if you have a villain we are equally familiar with, either masquerading as a hero or hiding in the sidelines where we still know he exists but he's not the top priority, come out and one up our main villain.  The twist in the original Bioshock where Andrew Ryan is replaced is one of the more subtle and brilliant plot twists in modern gaming.  It can be done, but it takes finesse, proper scripting, and good pacing.  Not to be tried by amateurs and not to be used for shock value.  You will only piss off your audience if you throw in a twist just for the sake of having a twist.

Vaz is the face of evil in Far Cry 3...so why isn't he the final final boss?  Why waste such a good character?!

            And so, that's my follow up to the month of characters.  Aspiring designers, script writers, or storytellers, take notice.  I've given you the secret to making good heroes and villains on a silver platter.  It amazes me how, even to this day, poorly written characters just get a pass.  We, as gamers, demand better from our heroes and villains.  We want them to be memorable, but not for how bad they are.  So, I hope this has given a little bit of context to why I did the month of characters in May.

Cult Followings: Working With the Fans

There are a number of things in the game industry that confuse me to no end.  Perhaps at the top of the list is the Mother series in Japan.  It is a quirky 16-bit RPG series that has gained a huge following in the U.S.  While I have yet to play it, I know a great deal about the series.  While it did see a limited release in the west under the title Earthbound, it seems odd that games like Infamous are getting a re-release collector’s edition less than four years after its initial release, but this quirky series is left by the wayside.  The fans are there and have made themselves known to Nintendo, so why? 

17 years and Nintendo still remains silent on the Mother/Earthbound series

Nintendo claims that there might be legal repercussions based on musical ques and names as the reason for the game Mother 2 or Earthbound not being re-released.  However, this doesn’t stop Mother 1 or Mother 3 from being released as part of a compilation set or on the Virtual Console on the Wii or 3DS.  Yet, Nintendo continues to be silent on this series.  One of the arguments for this is that these games are text heavy RPGs that would require too much time to translate and adapt to the U.S.  And that is a fair complaint.  I understand that a lot of great RPGs and other uniquely Japanese games weren’t released because of translation issues.  Translating the Japanese text and mannerisms to make sense in English would cost a great deal and take a huge amount of time.  However…why doesn’t Nintendo use the fan translations?

This is the only way to play Mother 3 in English...so why doesn't Nintendo just reach out to the fans for the translation and schedule a release of the game stateside?

Here is the meat of our subject today.  Fan power.  Gamers who love games will go to all manner of extremes for them.  Fan fiction, fan art, fan translations, even fan mods and fan sequels.  These extensions of popular games are uniquely tailored to their audience and will thusly appeal to them, more often than not.  The biggest hurdle to these fan creations being released for profit is the threat of legal action from the company that owns rights to the original.  However, what if the game companies, instead of threatening legal action or trying to shut down or ignore these fan communities and fan creations, tried to make use of them?  Market them legitimately?  In fact, mods, or fan created additions, to PC games are how many gamers get jobs in the industry.  Showing they understand the tools needed to make games by adding on to games they already know and love.

And some of these fan creations show real time, effort, and dedication.  Many games never reached the shores of the U.S. because of time, money, or apparent lack of interest.  However, fans who had imported the games loved them so much that they wanted to share them with others and took to translating them.  Many fan translation or localization groups have put forth work purely out of their own interest with no hope of profit.  This is how the Mother 3, Bahamut Lagoon, and the original Final Fantasy 2, 3, and 5 translations were released.  However, fans can go even further.  One intrepid group of young hackers put games from the Satellaview, a Japanese only satellite gaming service, online for all to enjoy, with the caveat that if they were contacted by Nintendo or other companies and asked to remove them, they would.  They also stated that if the games were released stateside, they would take down their website.  What makes this remarkable, however, is that not only was the Satellaview released only in Japan, but many of the games for it had holes in the code which were meant to be filled by the satellite broadcasts.  So, these hackers not only translated the games, but filled the holes in their code, retooled their controls, added in the old music from the broadcast, and released it, for free, so that others could enjoy it.

Zelda on the Satellaview, in English, available to the masses, all thanks to fans

No matter what anyone says about copyright violation or piracy, one has to admire the passion involved in projects like this, where dozens of people spend their own time, without pay, to share the games they love with others.  However, I personally believe that this is an untapped resource for game companies the world over.  Rather than re-releasing some games as many as five times, Square-Enix, why not look at some of your older properties that have gained a cult following but were never released in the west?  If the fans have done their work right, you could offer to buy their translation from them and release your old game to the west, but at full price on a new platform.  It would require some quality control and play testing, but the lion’s share of work necessary to make it viable for a western release would already be done.  However, even given such a unique opportunity to work with fans, most game companies do not cooperate.  In fact, some go out of their way to destroy the hard work of fans.

Most fans respect the wishes of the game companies and agree to shut down their work if they are asked.  And some companies, like Nintendo, agree to look the other way so that the fans can be fans.  However, many game companies take one look at a promising project and immediately shoot it down.  For example, a 3D remake of the critically acclaimed Chrono Trigger was being made by fans and the company who owned the rights to it, Square-Enix, threatened them with litigation if they did not cease and desist.  This effectively killed the project.  However, think for just a moment.  Square-Enix has a propensity for re-releasing their popular titles.  Recently, Chrono Trigger was just re-released for the Nintendo DS.  So…why not simply work with the fans instead of threatening legal action on them?  Buy them off and have them continue their work.  Square recently released a 3D remake of Final Fantasy 3 done in house, a process which had to be unbelievably expensive.  So, if a group of gamers who loved the game are working to create the exact same thing, but are doing it for free…then buy them off and have them continue their work.  Don’t simply waste all their time and effort by threatening legal action.

This is what Chrono Trigger would look like in 3d...if it hadn't been shut down.  Yeah...thanks for that, Square-Enix

Fans of video games, like fans of almost any property, can have an unbelievable drive, love for their medium, and a power to change it.  However, too often, game companies see them as the problem, not the solution.  In my opinion, game companies have forgotten that fans are the force which keeps them profitable.  Without the fans, they are nothing.  Yet, every day the gaming world is outraged at some new form of on disc DLC or DRM which locks players out of games they paid for, or online passes.  Game companies treat gamers more like thieves or free money than lifelong friends.  And that is a major problem.  Fans will continue to love games, regardless of the companies, but if companies don’t understand and respect the power of fans it will hurt them in the long run.  Before being acquired and merged with Activision, Blizzard, for example, knew how to treat fans.  After releasing Starcraft, Blizzard encouraged its piracy to a degree.  Burn a copy, share it with friends, and then they might go buy a copy themselves, or at least share the popularity of the game with their own friends, who might go buy a copy.  While this kind of policy changed after their merger, this should prove that fans have power.  And fans want to be friends to game companies, even if the reverse is not true.

Blizzard used to just spread the love.  Then Activision happened.  And now we get online passes.  Progress...?

And it is curiously true that many times, fans orchestrate the biggest changes in the gaming world.  Gamers modding Half-Life created the incredibly popular Counter-Strike mod that has become a mainstay of Valve’s and which has seen several sequels and spin offs.  Importers who picked up Demon’s Souls, even though it wasn’t planned for a western release showed Japanese developer From Software that there actually was a market for their game in the west, convincing them to release it and its sequel, Dark Souls, in the west.  The Defense of The Ancients mod in Warcraft 3 became so popular that it even spawned an entirely new genre of game, the massively multiplayer online arena fighter, which has one sequel in the works and at least a dozen competitors.  The highly publicized Operation Rainfall brought awareness to the titles Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, and Pandora’s Tower, and helped them get out of Japan, into Europe, and eventually to U.S. shores.  Fans have an incredible gift for changing the industry and game companies need to start respecting and making use of their fans, like partners, rather than treating them like thieves trying to take a piece of their pie.

This funny little fan mod spawned an entire sub genre of MMO games

If game companies would open themselves up to fan assistance they would not only find strong potential employees, but might actually get to release some games they would not be able to otherwise.  For example, Vanillaware recently had to cancel the western release of a game called Grand Knights History, due to “lack of resources to localize.”  However, what if fans stepped in and agreed to work with the designers to get this project done?  Some wouldn’t even ask for payment, so long as the game was released.  Fans can be a powerful boon for small companies that need assistance and can be loyal followers for stronger companies who already have their footing, provided they don’t alienate their fans.

Yeah, this ain't making it stateside anytime soon

Perhaps the biggest issues preventing gamers and companies from coming together are legal concerns and profit concerns.  This is frustrating, because gamers are more than willing to lend their hand to help make something they want a reality, but game companies have their own interests to protect.  Legal concerns, such as the rights of the fans making the game vs. the company would be a problem and if any materials or resources, such as the game engine, levels, or characters, were used in other projects by the fans, there might also be a need for litigation.  Game companies are very protective of their assets, most of the time.  And there would also be the issue of compensating the fans for their work and whether or not their work turns a profit for the company.  Game companies, especially the big ones, like Square-Enix and Electronic Arts, have to protect not only their own profit margins, but cater to their investors and shareholders, which would make any project with fan assistance a hard sell, as investors are naturally skeptical of people not on their payroll and who they cannot properly penalize should something go wrong.

Pretty much how game companies feel if a product bombs...and we want them to approve fan games?

            I really do believe that with the right business model, any number of game companies could use work done by the fans and turn a profit, for both themselves and those who worked on it. NES Reproductions, for example, has managed to make a fair profit by releasing fan translated NES games for sale directly to gamers.  They can do this because the copyright on the games and the technology is usually long expired, since the NES and Famicom were released almost thirty years ago.  This kind of business model takes the work of the fans and turns it into something that can be bought and sold for a profit.  If an independent party can do it with properties that have passed their expiration date, imagine what a game company still holding onto the rights for almost a dozen retro titles never released in the west could do.  I have a vision that I’d like others to indulge in for just a moment.  Say, instead of making reproduction cartridges with fan translated or altered games on them, game companies created a digital service, like Steam?  Then, took old games like the Mother series, Bahamut Lagoon, Sweet Home, or any number of other titles they still owned and released them at a fair price, like 10-20 dollars?  If they used the fan translations and gave a cut of their profits to the translators, that’s a tidy amount they had to do basically nothing to make.  Granted, this kind of business model would require a digital distribution service and would take time to set up, but it would go a long way in discouraging emulation and piracy.  As it stands, emulation is the only viable way to play English language copies of games like Mother 3 or Bahamut Lagoon for most people.  However, if the game companies made it easier to get these games off their service, perhaps with a sale or two and built in rewards just to sweeten the pot, emulation would practically die out overnight.  This happened for countless Wii owners who found games they used to emulate on the virtual console for a fair price.  The Extra Credits crew have said time and again, if you provide a better service, people will use that rather than piracy.  Convenience is the key.  A service like Steam or the Wii’s virtual console caters to fans and makes it easier to get the games they want.  Emulation has a lot of legal and computer based issues.  However, when emulation is the only option, then that is what people are going to choose.

How many people would give their left foot for this game to be released overseas legitimately?

            Regrettably, this kind of business model may never see the light of day.  There is a lot of red tape involved in some of these dealings, such as giving proper credit to the fan translators, ensuring they get fair compensation, the compromise between game companies who have had their properties tampered with and the fans who only want to bring old favorites to the masses, and countless other problems.  Most game companies don’t want to adapt to make use of their fans.  And the sad thing is, unlike some of the other issues discussed here, they don’t really need to adapt.  Fans will continue translating, making unofficial sequels, modding, etc. as long as it gives themselves and other gamers joy, while companies will either tolerate them or crack down on them so long as they feel their rights are threatened.  If a company cracks down, the fans may just make the game an original title and release it as an indie game on Steam or some other digital service.  So, while there isn’t really a big loser if these two sides stay separate, I feel that it is a huge missed opportunity for the developers and publishers to foster relationships with their fans that benefit everyone.  Even if fans keep on being fans and companies keep on being companies, imagine what they could do if they came together to work on something they loved?  We could get a third Chrono game, translated versions of games that were never released stateside, genuine fan feedback on changes made to try and modernize old classics…the possibilities are limitless.  Well, even if it’s never meant to be, we can all dream, can’t we?

Dare to dream, people.  Dare to dream.