I’ve been fascinated lately by micro-RPGs, and specifically micro-JRPGs.
Whatever their tone or focus, micro-RPGs show that miniaturisation in itself can be a kind of critique.
Helpfully, they’ve has left this to the evening before the loop resets.
And of course, you must fight: the fortress is full of undead.
But there is something powerfully bizarre at the heart of it all, and that is the Fray.
The Fray isn’t just another word, here, for people fighting.
It lies somewhere between a quality, an entity and a point in space.
Forcing somebody inside it is like lifting the lid on Schrodinger’s Cat.
They are twisty, poetic microcosms for a narrative that is itself a work of spiralling theatrical machinery.
I call this “poetic” because turns are rather important to poems, too.
Am I giving you a headache?
Repetition in poetry has served many purposes through the ages.
It’s a recipe for tension and contrast.
Or the ironic contrast between one word and the word it’s rhymed with.
In more experimental works such as Cataphract OI, it can also become the excavation of a theme.
Battles in classic JRPGs are perhaps better understood as stanzas.
Going into battle is about participating in this telling, retelling and mistelling of who your people are.
