There comes a point in most RPGs where the player, upon opening their inventory screen and looking at the piles of things within, sits back and ponders to themselves “what do I do with all of this?”  Perhaps it is a stockpile of old weapons that have since been replaced, or bags full of different pieces of animal bone and other knick-knacks that were once destined for the crafting screen; in any case, you’ve got a list full of things and a lot of decisions to make.

There was a time, in the early days of JRPGs, when it was quite simple: if you got a new weapon, you could sell the old one and be done with it.  This held true through your Final Fantasies and Dragon Warriors for many years.  Sure, there might be a time when you’d decide to hold on to a Fire or Ice sword just to have around in case of the appropriate elemental enemy, but for the most part your choice was clear: old equipment was destined for the “used” bin at the local weapon shoppe.  For other items, like Potions, the system was also pretty clear: as soon as you started getting “Hi Potions” or “Super Potions” or whatever, it was time to stop buying the old ones.

Many Western RPGs followed the same principles, though in many, such as Wizardry, it often took a little while to figure out if the strange new weapon you found was actually better or worse than what you already had.  It was in Western RPGs, though, that I saw the first signs of deeper item management complexity. Ultima VI, which allowed you to pick up pretty much anything that wasn’t nailed down, often led to backpacks full of most likely useless things.  Ultima VII upped the ante even further by randomly shifting around things in your virtual pack, forcing you to spend time moving things around to find exactly what you were looking for (which could be devilishly hard for small things like gems and rings).  Wizardry and Ultima also allowed the player to merrily drop any item, no matter how vital to the plot it was; you could discard a strange artifact in the middle of the wilderness only to discover later that you couldn’t beat the game without it; that could lead to an awful lot of scurrying around trying to remember where you last saw it.

It is in more recent years, though, that I’ve noticed RPGs both Japanese and Western have reached a new level of encouraging rampant packrat tendencies in players.  Much of this, in my opinion, stems from the growth of crafting systems.  The crafting system, at its most basic level, encourages the player to take component parts and assemble them into something new.  This can be as simple as the “alchemy pot” of Dragon Quest VIII where the player can two or three items of old equipment in and see what comes spewing out, or as complex as Star Ocean: The Last Hope’s fabrication system, which required not only a large number of component pieces, but also entire research sessions to discover new recipes.

In either case, what pretty much all of these systems do is present a dilemma to the player: sell and dispose of things as you used to, or hold on to everything on the chance it might be an important ingredient later?  Everything the player picks up holds potential, whether it is real or imagined. This can results not only in cluttered inventory screens and endless searches to find key components, but also some serious paralysis in deciding just what to do with everything.

In Etrian Odyssey II, for example, the player unlocks new items at the local shop by bringing them materials from within the labyrinth (gained by killing enemies).  The player has no indication of which or how much materials will unlock new things, so the basic strategy is to sell everything (this is also the player’s only source of income).  This would be fine, except for that there are also Quests the player can undertake which are often fulfilled by gathering specific quantities and types of materials.  So, when deciding to sell newly-found materials, especially difficult to acquire ones, the player has to stop and decide if they really want to sell it now in the hopes of getting some new equipment, or holding on to at least one or two of each material to see if they will satisfy an upcoming quest.  This wouldn’t be so rough, except you also have a limited inventory of only 64 slots; fill those up, and you can’t carry anything more.  Trying to hold on to spare materials for possible future use, plus your normal compliment of healing items and warp wires means that you are quickly filling up your available slots, and that means no gathering of anything new (or a lot of extra trips back to town).  This tends to either lead to the player holding on to far too much and discovering it’s useless, or (more likely) selling everything and getting frustrated when they have to go find three Red Rocks again after just selling twenty of them.

In previous years I might have said that EO2 is an extreme example, but that no longer seems to be the case.  If anything, it’s almost a simplified one.  In a discussion about Final Fantasy XIII the other day, a player was bemoaning the fact that they had disassembled a certain item to craft with, only to later discover that this had potentially denied them access to a much more powerful item later.  As a response, the player was now not going to craft anything until they were absolutely positive it wasn’t going to come back and bite them in the ass.

While I think inventory management and crafting can certainly be interesting additions to gameplay, making players feel like they have to constantly evaluate every single piece of scrap they come across in terms of estimate future value, as well as making them feel like they’ve made terrible decisions for selling or crafting with something less than optimally is not a good trend to follow.  When the minutiae of what stays in the pack and what goes starts to overshadow enjoyment of the core of the game, or when it takes five minutes to scroll through pages of stored items, it’s probably a sign that things have gone somewhat overboard.

Perhaps I am seeing a trend where there isn’t one, but it does seem like a growing problem.  If the future of RPGs is going to involve a ten-minute internal debate or a check of GameFAQs every time I want to sell an Iron Sword, I think it might be time to reevaluate whether we really are enjoying ourselves.