HOUSEKEEPING'S PROFILE

My dad kept a bunch of glass bottle Cokes in the garage. They must've been in there for 5-10 years. We ran out of cokes one day and he gave one to me, and it tasted like someone had poured ditch water into an ashtray and filtered it through an old sock. How your friend managed to stomach that shit in the first place is beyond me.

I've always wanted to play a game featuring all my favorite non-branded candy. Candy corn! Those chalky Valentine's hearts! Maybe those strawberry Tootsie Roll knockoffs that come in the bulk mixed candy bags! Yummity yum yum yummers!

I don't want to sound like a contrarian--I mean, Candy Crush is obviously the immoral party in this scenario--but do you really have license to take the artistic high road when you ripped off Bejeweled (which ripped off Shariki, which more or less ripped off Columns)?

JRPGs didn't get married to storytelling until SNES, really, and even then the stories didn't start having merit until Playstation (other than a few key titles from the previous generation). So, if your goal is to make a stripped-back story with an emphasis on battles, exploration, puzzles, and/or looting, then you absolutely can, and if the gameplay is engaging enough, it could really work. If that's your goal, though, make sure that you don't tack on a crappy story--you still have to use the story element smartly, even in a stripped-down, self-aware kind of way. A good example of what not to do is Diablo 3's storyline: banal characters, inane twists, and the phrase "I am legion" being used earnestly.

Personally, I really LIKE the storytelling aspect of JRPGs, and when it's done well it engages me probably more than good gameplay can (not that there isn't room for both).