Our game starts in the final castle of an RPG. You have your full team leveled up and you’re ready to go in to defeat the final boss. Before starting the last dungeon, the team reminisces about their adventure and you the player are brought up to speed about how they got together, the bonds they’ve forged, the people they met and helped along the way, and a solemn moment for the party member you lost on the journey. Your party are all RPG cliches that map to your favorites of the genre (like your hero is the standard young adult swordsman from a small town with his female childhood friend) to help bring the players up to caring about them quickly and going into the story having a bond. It’s not a parody of the genre, it’s a way for the player to know and care about them despite our game picking up at the end of the journey.
Using the final boss’s castle as our tutorial, our overdeveloped and well-geared team fights off the evil forces. Swapping teams to accomplish different goals, getting to see everybody’s skills in action, and each member shining in this dark moment. Culminating in the group coming together at the end and fighting all the boss’s different parts and phases, until the hero standing along, aided by the spirit of their departed friend, defeats the boss in a cinematic one-on-one fight!
The evil castle crumbles and you all stand triumphant as the morning sun rises. Some of your party members announce that since the boss is dead and the world is safe, they can get back to their lives. Your hero is heartbroken by this, that the group is splitting up. After all you’ve been through and overcome, you never thought that the team would just break up and that people would want to go back to their old lives before they got wrapped up in this mess. With the hero’s mood down, you guide the party members back to their villages/cities/homes/families. Mopping up any remaining enemies along the way, trying to convince your friends to stay and go on a new journey and see the rest of the world. On the trip, you return some of the legendary artifacts back to their resting places and shrines to pay respects to the forces that aided you on your quest.
Eventually, you're just left with your hero and he returns back to his village. And now the real game begins!
Alone and in a life post-adventure, the Hero develops depression. He became an adventurer young so he has no other skills. For the first years, he had some fame and glory as those in the loop knew what he and his friends did for the world and to everybody else, he drove away monsters from the village. But eventually, the townspeople moved on with their lives. While he was out fighting, they lived lives too, secret evils out there or not. So even though he had some fame, the Hero missed out on everybody else growing up and was a bit of an outsider since he doesn't really contribute to the village.
Our Hero becomes more depressed over the next year. He peaked young. At 20, he saved the world, faced off against a world-threatening evil, and faced every internal challenge and emotional growth moment he could. So what comes next?
Now the player starts to get choices and there are a few paths you can follow:
Path 1- You’ve Peaked
The Hero continues to revel in his former glory and can’t let go of the adventurer ways. You continue to make your living fighting monsters and collecting bounties. Things go well for a while, but with the master evil gone, you quickly run out of grand monsters to fight and new ones aren’t being summoned. You whittle down the ranks of monsters until the only things left are little ones that are only threats to travelers that go off the main paths. Being stuck in a nostalgia hole means you go nowhere and this will surely be a short and wasted life for our Hero.
Path 2- The Villager
You take care of monsters that come too close to the village but your main goal is helping out. It’s a Harvest Moon-y sim where you work the land to grow food, keep the surrounding land clear, and run events in the town so the village grows. You’re just a cog in the machine but everybody thrives.
Path 3- The Allure of Glory
Our Hero was only happy fighting alongside his allies so he needs them back. Setting out to retrace your steps where life was more meaningful, you find the villain’s magic tomes and decide to unleash some evil into your realm to create a need for more heroes and adventurers. It’s unethical, sure, but you can keep the monsters away from the cities and rebuild your fame as an adventurer and hunter.
With monsters about, you have to get the band back together and recruit your friends once more! You’ll need to tow the line of unleashing stronger monsters without destroying too much, but keeping things dangerous enough that you're useful to the world and you can stay with your friends. Push too far and people die and cities get destroyed. Don’t push enough and there’s no glory to be had and your friends go home again.
Is being a hero a cycle of corruption? You see your current actions in the villain you beat and you have to face that you're not any better than it was. Did your rival go through something similar? A flash of adventure and wonder and found family, only to see it go away? Are the dark arts so appealing because it’s a way to keep the good part of our lives meaningful, knowing that ultimately this can never last forever and the darkness will win if you keep it up.
Do you become the villain to inspire the next generation of heroes and give them the experiences you had in your youth, spreading the cycle forever to new people, or do you accept the futility of the life of a hero and fade into obscurity?