RPGs are complex. A relatively short time ago, I realized that something I like about the genre is that no matter how realistic it pretends to be, it will always have a set of clearly visible abstract rules.
Dragon Age attempts to generate a certain sense of realism (including, but not limited to, the development of rich cultures and history through text), but you can always see the organizing principles of an RPG. There's an underlying grid that can't even try to stay hidden; the only reason it isn't too visible (it hides in plain sight) is because of how crystallized the concepts behind it are within the genre and because, at the moment, the expansion of RPG elements (seemingly interpreted as any system of character progression clearly visible in the game's structure and not necessarily dependent on the player's skill development) (1) into other genres makes it something naturalized in a more over-arching way.
Anyway, where was I going with this?
Oh, right.
The greatness of Mamono Sweeper is that it pulled out an RPG's skeleton through its mouth and put it on display as a kind of Minesweeper. The fact that character levels are what most games take from RPGs (as Anna Anthropy would say: "the curse of the experience point"), might give one the notion that they are at the core of the genre, and that is precisely what Mamono turns into the central game mechanic. The numbers located on each space in the grid don't represent the amount of mines (monsters) surrounding it, but rather the total sum of those monsters' (mines) levels. As a consequence of this, the player is required to discover what terrain they can safely navigate and in that way construct the leveling zones, based on the difficulty of the enemies that inhabit them.
As in Minsweeper, the first movement (occasionally, the first few movements) is (are) random, but from that point forward, areas are discovered and must be respected: terrain is randomly generated, a much more flexible form of Diablo that boils down all episodes and an entire world in just a single screen (the size of which determines the game's difficulty, as per Minesweeper rules). However, randomness is somewhat controlled: the player character boasts 10 whole HP (meaning death isn't instantaneous) and every time you click on a patch of terrain inhabited by a dragon, demon or some other foe, combat immediately takes place. The rules are quite simple: in turns (starting with you), each character deals damage equal to their level to the other. Beautiful.
MS seems to present a problem. It produces satisfaction due to the overcoming of obstacles and the player's skill increasing like in games that aren't explicitly RPGs; there is a Tetris-like simplicity in a game of Mamono that gives it infinite replayability, even though the RPG's skeleton -far from typically having such staying power- is still there. Often, the joy of an RPG is in observing and feeling your character's progression as their numbers (stats, damage, levels...) increase, allowing them to vanquish fouler foes and dispatch minor ones with barely any effort. This isn't central in Mamono. Or, rather, it isn't central in the same way. The importance of those increases here is that they organize the play session, but the satisfaction emerges from problem resolution: do the math correctly in order to find the perfect spot to continue your adventure. This speaks quite eloquently about what an RPG is: mathematical operations, dice rolls, increasingly covered in both mechanical and aesthetic make-up. As the genre advances, the ways in which it hides its mathematical skeleton become more sophisticated, but we all know it's there.
Mamono Sweeper is an incredibly effective simplification. If you want to know what an RPG is, this is the blueprint. And you might also find a new addiction.
(1) It might be pertinent to discuss this. Is it easier for a game designer to implement a rules system which allows them to structure precisely what kind of progress players are allowed, independently of the development of their skills? I would initially say yes. It seems more difficult to measure "development of [player] skills" than "character level." However, I find a mixture of both to be a productive trend. The main issue is that most games which attempt that seem to have been asleep while Deus Ex taught class.
