With Christine Love being an acclaimed visual novel writer, her work on the newly-releasedGet in the Car, Loser!was a whole new experience with a lot of learning involved. The game is aptly defined as a lesbian road trip RPG, and thoseRPG elementsare what made it stand out when compared to Love’s work on visual novels, as she had to learn the ropes of balancing gameplay systems and make them work. Designing those systems is no easy feat with no experience, and the process was what Love considers the biggest challenge while makingGet in the Car, Loser!.Game Rant spoke to Love, who was surprised at how hard balancing a complex game such as an RPG can be, and how finicky the team had to be when adjusting numbers. A big influence for the systems in place forGet in the Car, Loser!came from JRPGs, and specifically from games the caliber ofPersona 5,Project Valkyrie, andFinal Fantasy 13. Difficulty and balancing enemies were also something Love had to work on through several iterations, and the game ties it all together with a good story and an interesting progression system that allows players to explore all their options.RELATED:15 JRPGs Perfect For Newcomers To The Genre
Final Fantasy 13 and The Importance of Both Story and Combat
Final Fantasy 13was the biggest touchpoint for Love’s team, as it provided a good source of RPG systems that ended up being introduced intoGet in the Car, Loser!after being recontextualized and adapted. Combat gameplay is directly inspired byFinal Fantasy 13with its stagger mechanic, and each character takes up roles that shape what each item does when used by them and what sorts of abilities it provides. The game’s progression system is quite compelling as well, as it doesn’t rely on experience points to gain levels and abilities, but rather on the use of items and the acquisition of them via defeating more enemies and earning gold.
We took those ideas and expanded on them, taking them in a different direction that they’ve gone to, thinking about what sorts of feeling are we going for with our battle systems. There’s a lot of Final Fantasy 13.
Because Sam, the game’s protagonist, is the healer of the queer party, giving items to her will more often than not produce healing abilities and support magic, whereas the same item could be given to Grace in order to get high damage output. All these abilities improve with the better items that are obtained after many fights, which in turn make every character’s role more relevant and something that truly matters when customizing loadouts. Speaking of which, Love wantedGet in the Car, Loser!to allow players to freely swap items and change entire loadouts.
Some players who reviewed the game asked for astory modeof sorts that allows them to keep to the story and avoid all the fights, but that was never something Love wanted to achieve with her new project. Instead, she was adamant about how the pace of the writing was always tied to combat action, and trying to divorce the two could end up making the story feel weird.
The writing is not paced such that it would be satisfying to have this without the fights. I think a lot of the dialogues would simply just feel wrong if you were doing this without the entire structure of the game. I wrote this to match the structure. It would be paced weird.
Furthermore, the story and the experience as a whole is something Love considers to be everything a player does in the game, rather than separate processes that come together. Ultimately,Get in the Car, Loser!is just as much an RPG as it is a tale of real characters and raw emotions, and that’s perfectly fine.
Get in the Car, Loser!is available now on PC.
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