When people talk about why they can’t get into anime like Dragon Ball Z, it often comes down to the same reason people don’t play RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3: both are really, really, really big time commitments.
Watching Dragon Ball Z’s 291 episodes from start to finish would take you about 6,693 minutes (or 111.55 hours). Playing through Baldur’s Gate 3 took me even longer, about 200 hours. But Dragon Ball Z has a solution to this in the form of Dragon Ball Z Kai. The recut and remastered version of the series cuts it down from 291 episodes to 167. Yes, that’s still a lot. But instead of making your way through the adventures of Goku, Piccolo, and Vegeta in 111 hours, you can see the most important bits in a brisk-ish 64.
Please don’t Google how many episodes of
One Piece
there are. That will take even longer.
Skip Lists Aren’t For Me, But…
I have mixed feelings about this, honestly. I’ve never been one to skip so-called ‘filler’. I don’t skip boring pages or paragraphs in books and, when I was a teenager, I had a (perhaps borderline obsessive compulsive) need to read all the text on the copyright page, plus all the blurbs, and the full list of the author’s published works. I feel the need to watch a movie again if I take a bathroom break, and I’m always going to pause a TV show if I need to get up and do something while it’s playing. I wouldn’t describe myself as a completionist, but I do tend to finish the media I start.
So I tend to look askance at episode skip lists, the kinds designed to lead you through a series with minimal friction. What viewers tend to see as ‘filler episodes’ like Breaking Bad’s excellent, but widely hated, Fly are just episodes that advance the series’ thematic thrusts and develop its characters, but don’t obviously move the plot forward.
Games are a little different. Most games already arrange their content into ‘necessary’ and ‘optional’ silos. That’s most obviously true of open-world games where a main quest mission is presented very differently than a bandit camp. The option to skip over stuff you don’t care about has been there since the dawn of the medium. Did you find every secret level in Super Mario Bros.? Hell, did you collect every coin? If not, you left some content on the table. It’s rare that I pick up my remote and skip over a scene in a movie. But in games, you’re usually skipping something.
Why Aren’t Abridged Games A Thing?
In light of that, it would be interesting to see lengthy RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 introduce shortened story modes, inspired by Dragon Ball Z Kai, that cut the game down so that, if you want to replay it but don’t have 100 spare hours, you can jump in, see the highlights, and move on. Right now, games are ceding this territory to YouTube, where summary videos get a lot of hits in anticipation of a new release. But developers could build this into their actual games, allowing players to experience a condensed version of the story.
This could take various forms. I’m not just talking about skipping side quests, which you can already do. In a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, where combat can be pretty tough, you kinda need the experience those quests are going to provide. It’s also the main quest moments that go on longer than they need to in Baldur’s Gate 3, and in most games to be honest. For example, you could cut several fights and boss phases out of the climax of Act 2, and you wouldn’t miss too much.
It would be difficult for a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 to include a level select, since it depends so heavily on personal choice. My Act 3 isn’t going to look like your Act 3. But the game could include an act-skip option, that allows you to go through a list of the important choices and pick whichever suits the character you want to play. Dragon Age: The Veilguard lets you take a questionnaire before you start so that the game can reflect your choices in previous games. This would be a more impactful version of that.
It also reminds me of the motion comic included with the PS3 version of
Mass Effect 2
where you made all of the major decisions for the first game in lieu of it being an Xbox 360 exclusive.
Unlike an episode skip list, this would ideally be created by the developers themselves. They could choose the beats that are strictly necessary and which would be okay to yada-yada over. Vince Gilligan would never tell you to skip Fly, and Larian would similarly have a stronger handle on what elements of the game are thematically load-bearing, and which are safe to skip. Of course, even if this halved my playtime I would still be spending 100 hours exploring Faerun, so maybe I’m the problem here.
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I’d Eat Up A Star Wars What-If? Campaign Like Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero’s
An entire game of Revenge of the Sith alternate endings.