First: Sorry for the title I didn't know what to use...

Well, I was thinking this morning that the idea I have for the project I'm working on lacks something.Then my friend walks in (the same guy that introduced me to this site) and saw me lost in my thoughts, he laughed, and then asked what was wrong. I told him that my project is missing something and that I feel like those graphics were keeping my game from looking like I intended (chibi characters, colorful tiles, w/e). So he told me to stop making that project and start making one with a less complex story for a first project, that the story I was working was too complex for a beginner on Rpg Maker and that I need to learn more stuff like spriting so I could make what I wanted myself without rushing. He then took the laptop, opened this site, did a search and showed me his cliche-ish project (he said that himself). He told me he never finished any of his projects because he lacked experience in rpgs, unlike me. He told me to take his project and to turn it into one of my own, he said to challenge myself to take his cliche-ish story and turn it around to an enjoyable original story.

Now you must be wondering "what the hell, why do you need to make a topic about this?" Well the answer is easy:
I want to know what do you think about taking some cliche ideas and try to turn them into something that people will enjoy? Do you think it is a good idea to try and do this?

A list of those cliche are:
- Evil being sealed for 5,000 years and unsealed by another evil person.
- Teenage protagonists.
- 4 Legendary Warriors.
- A war between humans and another race.
- Retrieving 4 elemental orbs before the bad guy does.

This doesn't mean that I'm going to make a game full of cliches, what I'm aiming for here is to make a simple story into something better but not too complex. I already started writing the story and I've been changing a few things from the original, there were more cliches and I removed many of them but some of those are something I want to work on instead of completely removing them. I don't know if you get what I mean, just let me know if you have any doubts and don't forget to leave your opinion. Also feel free to leave your opinion on how should your first project be, etc. (optional)

Oh god I just realized how terribly cliche my game really is. Thanks a lot fucktard.

- Evil being sealed for 5,000 years and unsealed by another evil person.
The main villain is sealed inside an orb for 200 years. Goddamn it.

- Teenage protagonists.
My main characters are twins that are 18 each. Goddamn it.

- A war between humans and another race.
A war between humans and dragons is the underlying theme. Goddamn it.

- Retrieving 4 elemental orbs before the bad guy does.
Not so much. YAY ONE NOT CLICHE PART OF MY STORY

If you want to read my story and see how I expand on a cliche but make it extremely new and non-cliche, here's the link to my story.

Lol Klok. But you are making a prequel to FE who the fuck cares about those cliche in a Fire Emblem game?

No seriously, your story is what I meant by taking something overused and turn it into something original. You took some cliches and turned them into something exciting that people will be interested in. That is exactly what I want to do with my project.

My project had an interesting beginning lol. Here's how it started:

I heard about a new game maker that's even now currently in development that will be a fire emblem clone for RMXP.

I'm very good with XP and VX both, so this is exciting for me. I started thinking about what game MECHANCS I wanted, not story. Story was secondary.

The result was me writing a blog for my game. That blog can be found here.

After some time, it occured to me that (based on my first blog post) my story was a bit "meh" and since I am just naturally a good story writer, I decided to flesh it out a bit. Literally, just a bit. I ended up revising the first post (oldest) on my blog, which is still currently visible. Most of my game was just a gimmick based on "make the lord class cooler" and "have lots of cool new goals and items and stuff". While these are going to be amazing gameplay additions, the story was just lacking. Then, I stumbled upon this guy named Ghostclown who was also planning on mking a FEXP game as well. His had absolutely nothing to do with any of the Canon FE games, and was purely a new game idea. His original topic can be found here.

Him and I talked and we were going to work together, but there was no way I could implement my whole entire game concept and enmesh with his. (Incidentally, he has an excellent story going. You should keep him on your radar as well) He was good with story, I was good with mechanic, but I ended up talking with him about possibly trashing both of our original ideas and making an FE7 sequel. He said he wasn't interested, but I decided it was the perfect idea for me. I'm not good inventing an entirely new universe, but working within an existing one is exciting to me.

After a while, I got Yoshirider on my team and that's how I ended up today, with a very cool site, and a game in development. I like where I'm at. I hope that helped you out bro.

XDDDD Wow. Why herro Final Fantasy Five. How you doin?

Seriously. The main villain is Ex-Death. Who the hell names a character that?!

This: http://project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html -- The best list ever.

One cliche is the "Chosen One". Now you can make his Rand Al'Thor, the dragon reborn come to seal the dark one in the last battle, or you can make him Richard Raul, the production of actions taken long before his birth forcing him to take action and rid the world of a ---human--- evil.

Now, I love both the wheel of time and the sword of truth series, but Richard Raul is defiantly the better hero. From reading these serries, I conclude that there is one way to over come all cliches.

Make the problems human.

By that, I mean don't have some unspeakable evil for the sake of having an unspeakable evil. Everything is the result of choices, actions, reactions, etc. If you have some uber-badass man who wants to take out the world in an uber-evil fashion, give him the background that leads him to that and surround him with people who will help him achive his goal.

By the way, uber is actually a polish word meaning almost. So whenever you make something uber, remember that it means he's not quite there. Uber-evil is almost evil. It makes a balance.

And if you want to make it funny, do what disgaea does: Make fun of everything, including the player.

One thing though...what is with the obsession of things having happened thousands of years ago and us having an accurate history of it? Seriously, there's stuff we don't have a clear idea about that happened twenty years ago. 1,000, probably not. 11,000 (legend of dragoon), fuggedaboutit.

Um. What are you referring to?

The badguy being sealed for hundreds of years and the four elemental orbs thing. Ex-Death was sealed away and then he breaks the four elemental crystals.

Seriously, go play FFV. Terrible dialog, wretched story line, but bloody hell its fun.

Funny thing is that my friend lacked experience in rpgs specially old ones, so he just came with those ideas with the few rpgs he played on PS2. He then stopped the projects and started playing more old school rpgs until he became extremely social again lol.

So I'm reviving his old project idea and fixing all the stuff that need to be fixed. Just to gain more experience with RPG Maker.

cliches are not always bad. Remember this. It's all about the execution. Let's look at we got here

- Evil being sealed for 5,000 years and unsealed by another evil person.
- Teenage protagonists.
- 4 Legendary Warriors.
- A war between humans and another race.
- Retrieving 4 elemental orbs before the bad guy does.

the trick to making things fresh is to take one aspect, and twist it. le'ts just run through the top two and see how that works.

evil sealed in a can for 5000 years, unleashed by another evil person.
Okay, the general trope is that this other evil person is after power, after revenge, etc, and the evil being sealed away is sealed away by another hero of great power 5000 years ago. Let's twist this up a little.
- the true immortal here is the villain who unsealed the evil. The evil in question might not be that powerful, but merely holds a crucial piece of the puzzle that the villain was looking for, thereby still maintaining the "GREAT EVIL" prophecy

teenage protagonist
okay, this trick here is to make their characterization interesting enough that their age doesn't become their focal point. we do this by exploring what other aspects do they have.
- what are their genders? how does society see their gender roles and how do they react to said gender roles in kind? do they embrace it heartily, reject it with a violent temper, grudgingly accept it but nurse a deep neurosis as a result, what?
- what social class are they in? What kind of societal role is assigned to their social class? how do they respond to that? are they outcasts, are they commoners, are they soldiers, are they noblemen?
- do they have siblings
- etc

the point of these questions is to tease out what exactly is important to your character. Find maybe 4-5 things that defines your character, and zero in on them. Make sure that these things can evolve as game play progresses. This will be their primary character development. i.e. I once had a friend writing up an RPG character whose primary trait was "spit out the silver spoon". (as in give up his noble heritage) Now that's a powerful statement right there. Why did he spit out the silver spoon? And how does his family feel about that? (you can bet that his family was upset about it) Beyond that, don't forget to pick two emotions for your character. One is the motivation, the other is what he inspires in the players.

Okay lol I'll play along with this because it sounds fun and I'm bored

Let's see here,

- Evil being sealed for 5,000 years and unsealed by another evil person.
I actually have kinda something like this in my story. When is the evil freed? Is it at the beginning or the end? I kinda did what Paper Mario 2 and Earthbound did with the "evil person" being an agent of the evil thing. What I'd do is make the evil person think he's fixing the world, like he's doing it because he thinks he's the good guy. That's what usually makes a good villain if you play your cards right. Even better, when he's defeated, he admits he's a giant brat and just wants the world to be destroyed, and that he was just lying about all those reasons why the world has the be burned in holy fires, even if those reasons were true anyway.
- Teenage protagonists.
Just don't do this. Just don't. I don't care, just, don't. Make them 30 at least.
- 4 Legendary Warriors.
Nothing really wrong with one. I mean firstly don't make it obvious to the world of your game that they're destined heroes. Second, you should probably make a damn good reason why they're chosen ones, like they were randomly selected by the gods or some shit, or maybe their family committed a great sin, so they were sentenced to fix the world of the ancient evil has arisen.
- A war between humans and another race.
Make it darker and realistic, like the Humans are like white people and the other race could be like black slaves, and they're revolting against the humans. And since the king or whatever is a giant pussy who would rather pretend this whole thing never happened rather than just nuking their asses, there's a war.
- Retrieving 4 elemental orbs before the bad guy does.
Sorry, this'll probably seem cliche' no matter what. Even Mother 3, in my opinion the holy grail of RPGs, did this with the 7 Needles, and even I went "oh gog seriously?". My only suggestion is to make 8 of these, and the villain only needs 4, so he/she doesn't even give two halves of a shit about the other 4. But that's really all I can give you on that matter.

In the end I think it's hard to "fix" a story. The best thing to do is make a story from scratch and iron out any problems as it goes along so you don't end up having the story supported by cliche's in the first place. And if it IS supported by cliche's, might as well make it a comedy game. And no not another "hurr RPG parody it's funny because I put cliche's in there on purpose aren't I funny guise??" we have enough of those. I mean like Conker's Bad Fur Day, you know, just, not serious. or maybe an almost half-serious story like Banjo-Tooie.

I use teenage protagonists for several reasons.

1. Their father dies and they seek revenge. They are not do gooders.
2. Based on the three timelines I had going and the required number of years my story had to fit into, teenage was the only way to go.
3. It allows me to show their immaturity and brashness, something you don't typically see in a teenage protagonist.
4. The third game in the series will be about 7 years later, when they're in their late 20's. This will allow me to show their emotional development even more fully. It'll be great

Haha I love how many ideas you guys have and how you make these little cliche into something awesome.

BTW I'm kinda making the game from scratch, just using his game idea as a base. I've been reading what I wrote and so far... I ended up removing the four legendary warriors stuff. The 5,000 years event was reduced to a few hundred years and it is known by a small number of people and they're not even sure if the story they know is 100% true. I changed the war to be between humans, I dropped my friend's idea of humans going to war with elves. I'm keeping the teenage protagonist (from age 17 to young adults). And the 4 elemental orbs are staying but not because of a race to take them before the bad guy does. I have something else planned for them.

well, protagonists being teenagers aren't THAT far fetched in a setting where the average life expectancy is like, 40 or something. Heck, Jewish people consider a 13 year old boy a man, Latino culture has the Quinceanera that celebrates a young girl's womanhood, medieval japan has the gembuku to celebrate a 15 year old boys coming to adulthood.

all of these coming of age situations are RIFE with story possibilities. The fact that people like to use teenagers for stupid reasons doesn't mean it is in of itself bad. It's all about how you handle it.

i.e. if I were to use a teenager in my story, chances are I would show how this teenager is ultimately still very naive and green but then through the course of the story wises up over time. I would also use that character to explore issues of forming an identity within the context of that society. These are all great things to explore in your game, if you want to go that direction.

Oddly enough, given that fantasy games are rife with races that life for absurdly long times, I don't see many teenage protagonists who are outside our usual idea of 'teenage'. For example, if a race lives for hundreds and hundreds of years, what they regard as 'teenagers' are probably still older than some of our adults. And while they would still be lacking in experience by their own peoples' standards, they're probably also a lot more knowledgeable and experienced than what we would consider teenagers to be.

If you're using any of these long-lived fantasy races, it can be an amusing twist, and if not a solution to the 'teenage heroes who happen to be better than all the adults who have been doing this all their lives' rpg cliche, when stuck in with shorter-lived party members it can make for a fun way to play it straight.