Dev Take Tuesday - Fullmetal Salvatore

R.A. Salvatore has been my favorite fantasy author for over a decade. His novels feature memorable characters, compelling narrative themes, and crisp “cinematic” action sequences. I’m currently reading an older novel of his titled The Orc King. In contrast to my long history with Salvatore, Fullmetal Alchemist was an anime I’d heard about but never looked into. When I saw the latest version of the series (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) was available on Hulu, I decided to finally take the plunge. I’m glad I did!

This one time I met R.A. Salvatore at SLCC

Fullmetal Alchemist follows the story of two young brothers who lost parts of their bodies as a price paid for essentially trying to play god. As they search for a way to recover their bodies they unravel a dark secret that threatens their entire nation. While the narrative focuses on the brothers’ tale, plenty of time is granted to literally dozens of side characters and branches off the primary plot. Eventually, all those characters and branching subplots unite at the end of the anime’s arc in an immensely satisfying way. This careful and patient weaving of interconnected stories is one of Salvatore’s strengths as well. Ostensibly disconnected characters—including, usually, the villain(s)—eventually find themselves entwined in the main narrative by the novel’s end.

A small selection of Fullmetal Alchemist's extensive cast (Image found here on Pop Verse)

Of course, other stories in all sorts of mediums end up trying to perform a similar type of weave. But if the weaving goes poorly, side characters and subplots seem more like distractions. So what makes Fullmetal and Salvatore so effective? I believe it’s a combination of a confident focus on the nexus point where all the various subplots will merge into the main storyline, as well as careful and consistent pacing with the primary narrative.

What can we take away from this as game devs? Many games, especially roleplaying games, are frequently criticized for how side quest content detracts from the urgency and significance of the game’s primary storyline. Game writers and designers will often blame story pacing issues on the inherent interactivity of games, since they can’t control the players who decide to ignore the impending doom of civilization by seeing if they can spam the jump key all the way up a seemingly impassable mountain. 

I've done my share of mountain hopping in Skyrim (Image found here)

But setting mountain hopping aside, I think side quest content could often be much more thoughtfully connected to the main narrative. Side quests and minor characters can and should be compelling by themselves, but connecting them to the chief plot in a satisfying way will help prevent them from feeling like distracting and unneeded “filler.” Not every problem will be fixed this way, and not every optional quest needs to tie in to the protagonist's main quest. However, every little step we take as game developers to encourage player investment in our game worlds will help our games be more compelling and fun.