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Please Developers, Stop Sending Us Love Letters

Please Developers, Stop Sending Us Love Letters

I sigh every time I read yet another PR email about some game being a “love letter” to [insert genre here]. I expect a lot of you feel the same way when you peruse Steam. Plenty of retro-style games on the platform bear that very moniker in the product description. And I don’t blame them – “love letter” sounds better than “focus tested.”

I don’t want game developers to stop writing their love letters to retro games. The world of gaming can be a dark, scary place. It is a labyrinthine forest of expanding complexity, and sometimes I just need an old man to acknowledge my loneliness – and while you’re at it, how about you take this wooden sword with you? “Gee! Thanks, mister!”

My problem with love letters is that they often err too much on the side of parody. Don’t get me wrong; I like parodies too, but sometimes a parody acknowledging the ridiculous nature of random battles is all the more aggravating when I trigger yet another random battle, which, I suppose, is the point.

Sometimes I just want my love letters to read sincerely. Anything that feels disingenuous I want to toss carelessly into a drawer of piling letters while I continue my affair with newer, more adventurous games. And the greatest example of a love letter I’ve played recently is I Am Setsuna by Square Enix.

I Am Setsuna is a relentlessly melancholic JRPG, and while that’s a common criticism of the genre, I find this trait to be utterly refreshing. There are certainly references to games in the genre – the story is essentially a retelling of Final Fantasy X . And as morose as it is, you can still find a sense of humor somewhere in the vast, endlessly snowy fields.

Everything you hate about the JRPG is present in I Am Setsuna , except for random battles, but even then you might be the kind of player who thinks turn-based battles are inherently flawed to begin with. And yet, it also has everything you might love about the genre. It even tries new things like having exactly one setting that you may or may not hate, plus lovely piano music that starts to sound the same after a dozen or so hours.

Please Developers, Stop Sending Us Love Letters

The entire time I played the game, I could tell Tokyo RPG Factory revered the classic JRPGs produced by Square Soft. By incorporating its own tweaks to the turn-based battle system, Tokyo RPG Factory not only created a spiritual successor – or love letter, as some might say – to Chrono Trigger ; they created a game that could have stood the test of time had it been released during the golden years. Some reviewers even said that had this been released in the ’90s, I Am Setsuna might have been among their favorite JRPGs.

I should clarify that there’s nothing wrong with parody. Evoland is a damn fine example of a parody of both Zelda and Final Fantasy while introducing a unique ideas (the game starts as with a Gameboy aesthetic but gradually builds up to PS1 graphics), and, yeah, feels like a love letter.  No love is complete without some playful teasing, after all. Plus, some games that do try to be serious can also feel generic. But sometimes the constant bombardment of love letters thanks to digital distribution, many of them relying on parody, feels just as disingenuous. Sometimes, I just want a game that strives to take its place in the genre, to revere the genre while being its own thing like I Am Setsuna . Now that’s a love letter!

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