Fast Traveling Back Home
Looking back at most games I’ve played, mainly consisting of RPGs, Pokémon titles, and in the most stripped down sense, any game with a hub area, I always find myself teleporting or fast traveling back to those first areas of exploration, tutorials, and lore. The first town, village, or even rooms hold a sense of ‘home’ in them that I revisit time to time. You don’t necessarily get to choose where you start, or dictate where your characters grew up or found themselves in. These hub areas and starting cities invoke a sense of a life lived, or a safety blanket that you can always find your way back to after journeying far and wide in these virtual worlds.
Through game progression and worldbuilding, you find yourself traversing through different cities, villages, or barren lands between story beats. All of them differently fleshing out the adventure your character takes on and the different people they get to meet along the way. When playing the Yakuza series, the in-game district of Kamurocho, modeled after the real life entertainment district of Kabukicho in Tokyo, is slowly made more accessible when you advance the story in the early chapters. The bright red arches present in these games, unchanging, reflects the feeling of home, comfort, and familiarity. These feelings get me in tune with the areas I roam and revisit in-game, even if it’s just to admire the neon signs, trying hard to find an ad or storefront I haven’t noticed before.
In Genshin Impact, the ever expanding and growing map of Teyvat undergoes a new addition and update with each big release. These updates expand the world of Teyvat, be it a new city of the promised seven landscapes in this world, underground areas, timed maps, and chasms that count on verticality and vastness to create a sense of scale much larger than any other game I’ve played before. Despite all these new areas, however, I always find myself ending my game session in Mondstadt, the first city you are introduced to. With its grand German-inspired architecture and eaved houses, guarded by towering walls, surrounded by a moat. The city and its inhabitants all share the built comfort, safety, and protection from the unknown evil haunting the outside of its gates. It doesn’t feel safe to end my session out in the open fields, or underneath the surface of the earth. I look for the consistent serenity and calmness that the city of Mondstadt can regularly provide, unwavering, even after the calamities of different nations and cities of the past and present.
Earlier this year, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company published Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Developed by Game Freak, the game takes place in a version of the Sinnoh region in the past called the Hisui region. With an open world approach to the role-playing game, the region of Hisui houses five large biomes. With bypassing certain criteria or advancing the story, your character is able to traverse through them riding on Pokémon through land, sea, and air. You’re also able to fast travel, albeit in chunks, back to the starting town, Jubilife Village. I’ve gotten so used to the area’s main theme, always looking forward to travel back to Jubilife Village. With each story progression, the slow and steady lives of the villagers was something I looked forward to and anticipated sharing my findings with. These villagers, all of them with different personalities, temperaments, and beliefs about the Pocket Monsters in and around their walled home. When taking on side quests to develop the village, the area changes subtly and opens up their world to the help and friendship of Pokémon. This is also reflected in the beautifully orchestrated village theme that crescendos and deepens throughout the story beats all the way from the novice twinkling melody of wonder, to the confident and assured knowledge and experience gained throughout the many lives inhabiting that village through you, the player character.
In the article ‘When a Game Just Feels Like Home’ Waypoint senior producer and writer Rob Zacny writes,
“[…] In seeing those places, and being immersed however briefly in their rhythms and society, you learn what it would be like to live in such a world. And the things that would make that life worth fighting for, with all its flaws and limitations.”
I feel like the lives I’ve lived through many different characters stand as a testament to how I’ve grown to appreciate and love the role-playing genre of games. Really living in these Unreal Engine or otherwise polygonally designed spaces, and befriending the NPCs I’m able to converse with, and in some cases, build meaningful relationships with. The ‘feeling of home’ exists in the different virtual spaces and characters I grow with, and the soundtracks I re-listen to in order to evoke those memories wherever I may be.
(All photos included in this article are screenshots I’ve taken from the games cited.)
