This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. I probably wouldn't have noticed Mars: War Logs except for the PR email I received which included a line about how it had been influenced by the French film "Army Of Shadows." This piqued my curiosity for two reasons: first, it seems utterly astonishing to me that a game would advertise itself as being based on a 45-year-old foreign film that was buried for decades due to its politics. Second, after I discovered it via a feature on cult films, I watched it and enjoyed it, and have come to cite it as an excellent example of one of my favorite types of narrative: the resistance story.

Role-playing games have a long and storied association with resistance stories. Many of the classic JRPGs of the 1990s began with the premise that an evil empire or corporation was taking over the world (and probably awakening an ancient evil), and only you and your ragtag band of spiky-haired misfits could stop it. Final Fantasy 6's Returners and Final Fantasy 7's Avalanche were two of the most famous resistance groups of their era, but they weren't alone. The Suikoden games, The Secret Of Mana, Wild Arms, and Grandia all had the equivalent of evil empires of their own. It's not limited to that era and type: there are also modern JRPGs like Radiant Historia, as well as classic PC RPGs like Ultima 5, Ultima 7 and The Magic Candle 2.