It seems it’s another episode of “stuff I don’t get”. This should totally become something I do regularly. Probably not though.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love role playing games- I’ve been playing them for many many years now, ever since my parents bought me a GameCube way back when. Ok, so I never played old-school stuff, but that’s beside the point.

The plot of an rpg goes something like this. You start out as some unnamed generic hero living your everyday boring life. Even though you're completely oblivious to it, there is something special about you or your town, but you really could care less, you’re too busy laying around in the sun. Sometimes your weird neighbors ask you to do menial tasks and shit, but you know nothing those chores teach you will ever come in handy.

So one day just out of the blue day bad stuff happens. Maybe your family, friends or one of your lazy-fuck neighbors got carried off by some big ugly guy. Who knows. Perhaps your town was housing some uber valuable but super dangerous treasure somewhere, and that those guys that took your baby sister (or girlfriend, or whoever) yoinked that too.  They probably plan to destroy the world and rape little children with it.

Suddenly, you realize you have some amazing power within you, and that you and only you, all by yourself, can defeat your cousin's captors and free them. You might get some training (read: mashing buttons) along the way, a shiny oversized weapon, and most likely some magical sidekick who has nothing better to do than follow you around and spout obvious observations about your surroundings.  You then proceed get up off your lazy ass and leave the only place you’ve ever known to go god knows where and trudge through countless obstacles that somehow get placed directly in your path. If you are lucky enough to be able to talk, you may even get some companions to help.

There’s plenty of interesting people out there in NPC land too, most of them looking for some poor chump to be their errand boy. “Hey, I know the world is on the verge of destruction and all, but could you go and gather gleaming piles of Dorlax Droppings for me? You only have to kill 500 of them! Thanks!”

Don’t even get me started on how messed up the crafting systems are in some of these games…