RPGs: Combining fantasy with high tech

You can obviously tell I'm running out of ideas, since I barely if ever update this blog for more than 10 days. Might as well keep running down the list. At our 10th, we reach the Luddite (George Lucas) Rule: Speaking of which, technology is inherently evil and is the exclusive province of the Bad Guys. They're the ones with the robots, factories, cyberpunk megalopolises and floating battle stations, while the Good Guys live in small villages in peaceful harmony with nature. (Although somehow your guns and/or heavily armed airships are exempted from this.)

Well, it's actually quite common, as most JRPGs I played tend to straddle the line between both fantasy and sci-fi. Most Final Fantasies end up doing this. Dual Orb 2 ends up doing this to a tee, while Chrono Trigger and a few other games are completely all over the place. Meanwhile, stuff that blacksmiths create from a fiery forge, as well as medicinal herbs being bought at stores that look like they're not gonna last more than a year in such poor villages are among the things that the good guys end up going to more often. The bad guys, which include all those evil empires, tend to have the biggest technological advancements. Look at Valua in Skies of Arcadia or the Empire in Final Fantasy 6, then compare it to the much more poorer locales everywhere else in those games. Or an even better example, the Kingdom of Zeal and the incredibly poor and famished lands below in Chrono Trigger.

Yep, this is an RPG cliche I see far too often that it makes perfect sense that it's considered one. Even Phantasy Star, an otherwise mostly sci-fi game, has shades of this, with the third game almost seeming like complete fantasy at first but showing some big robots later. And the second game actually replaces biological organisms with robots as the main enemies at the halfway point. Again, it's the ones with the most technology that end up always being the biggest of the bad.

And yeah, your own weapons and airships definitely are exempt from the "inherent evil", most likely because the people who create them (like the numerous Cid's in early Final Fantasy titles) are always good guys, making technology great, unhackable, whatever. Wild Arms tries to oust characters with guns as bad, but given that they stay with the players all the way through and don't do anything outrageous like turn on their users, the guns also are exempt. I can't think of any other examples of technology that's perceived evil but is used for good, but it would also be exempt. So yeah, this is a cliche I pretty much agree with. Especially since it's worded so well.