Today I'll be rounding up this topic, talking about some more games involving the passage of time.
Zelda OoT and MM
Both N64-generation Zeldas have some some dealing with time (apart from the ocarina of time, that is).
On Ocarina of Time, the day/night cycle gives the game realism. At day, Hyrule's market is lively, voices can be heard, there're fewer enemies on the field. When night comes, the castle gates get shut, castle candles get lit, field monsters change. NPCs do not have specific time-based schedules, though they do act differently depending on whether it's night or day (a fine example being the graveyard man).
On the other hand, Majora's Mask features different stuff. The game plays through three days, having the main character go back in time and repeating the cycle multiple times. Personally, this game was the first one which gave the "interactive village" feeling, having characters do different things at each moment of each day, being able to see them walking around, checking their mail, dancing, etc. The Bomber's Notebook, is a huge plus, as it enables the player to take note of where each character is at each moment, being able to track every one of them effectively. Not only the characters have different schedules throughout the three days, but music and dialogues also change. depending on the day The ability to slow down and speed up time was very useful, too.
Radiata Stories
Yep, Radiata Stories does feature one of the most interesting approaches to scheduling characters' daily routines. Firstly, this game greatly improves on the "interactive village" concept given above, having one huge castle city and lots of small villages populated with exceptionally dynamic characters. Secondly, the game has a real lot of characters going around, most of which you can recruit to your party, which gives you a solid reason to look into each one's schedule and activities. Although every day is exactly the same, there's still more than enough variety, as the in-game world is huge.
Each area's day music is subtly different from their night music, having lighting change drastically upon time of day, creating an interesting, inmersive experience. Unfortunately, this game doesn't give you any in-game mechanism of tracking the characters down, so any perfectionist may have to seek help from GameFAQs in order to complete their friends list. Still, in terms of time-based villages and characters, this game rocked.
To resume today's endeavor, we talked about some interesting "interactive-world" games. Different approaches were taken for this: OoT divided night and day and had each character do different things accordingly. Majora's mask took three days, and scheduled time-based routines for each character. Finally, Radiata Stories, took a single day but programmed a dynamically big interactive world. The bomber's notebook from Majora's Mask was an excellent resource to keep track of each character, as one of the most entertaining things to do is observe the game world and discover what each character does.
We end here. Next time, we'll take a step towards real-time interactive games, such as Farmville, Virtual Villagers and Animal Crossing.
