ferricide

[ferricide]

Review: Final Fantasy XIII

[originally posted: April 11, 2010]  I haven't written a review in a long time. The last review I wrote, in fact, was of Devil May Cry 4, for the Official Xbox Magazine, in 2007. I didn't much like Devil May Cry 4, really. In the way of game journalists of my generation, I gave the game a 7.5 and an even-handed review, because there are things that it did do well. All the same, I was never asked to write another review for the magazine; much later, a staffer told me that someone from management had asked them to stop publishing my work. "Fine! Fuck you, too!" I thought, and then felt a burden lift. I had been reviewing games professionally since 1999 and was tired of it. I have long hinted that I would some day write an expose about what's really wrong with game reviewing, since nobody seems to quite get it right. But by the time I felt ready to do that, I was so bored with the whole business that I couldn't make myself want to. To my surprise, I instead find myself compelled to write a review once again. The game which I will endeavor to review, in a way that I'll make up as I go along, is the most complicated game of 2010: Final Fantasy XIII.  * * * Final Fantasy XIII was announced for the PlayStation 3 in 2006, at Square Enix's E3 press conference. As a long time fan of the series who was confounded by its direction at that time -- the gully between Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XII -- I was eager for both a return to form ("form" as a concept roughly equivalent to "more Final Fantasy X" in my mind) and a justification for Sony's yet-to-be-released next generation system. Well, things change. * * * One thing that will make this review dramatically different to any I have ever written is that I will be considering what I learned by reading others' reviews, talking to other players, and generally trying to synthesize the concept of why this game was made the way it was made, not just whether it's any good. To my mind reviewing games in 2010 the old fashioned way is beside the point; as a journalist I recognize my own obsolescence -- the old tools have been made irrelevant by the power of marketing and the cacophony of the internet. Plus it's boring. That's not to promise that will be a review worth reading. I'm going to try, all the same. Final Fantasy XIII was released for the PlayStation 3 on December 17, 2009 by Square Enix Co., Ltd. It was localized into English (and ported to the Xbox 360) and released on March 9, 2010 in the major Western markets by the company's international subsidiaries. This is notable because it reveals so much about the flux of development from the time this game was conceived until it was released. Final Fantasy XIII came out nearly three years too late, by my reckoning. By the time it did come out, one of the only ways it successfully aligned with the market it was released into is that publishing a major game in March isn't, anymore, all that peculiar. Final Fantasy XIII, however, is. In 2008, Square Enix delivered a talk at the Game Developers Conference in which it described the features of its Crystal Tools game engine which powers Final Fantasy XIII -- a talk which a developer friend and fan of the series emphatically described as "terrible" shortly after. Terrible not because the technology is bad; terrible because it took the company so long to step into the technological present. In 2008, Crystal Tools promised to deliver yesterday's features tomorrow. Coincidentally, Final Fantasy XIII was released into the Western market on the second day of GDC 2010. When I review games, I typically insulate myself from the opinions of others. This was a solemn requirement at the heart of reviewing games for EGM, for example. Editor-in-chief Dan Hsu, who was one of my mentors for much of my career as a reviewer, demanded three distinct opinions. That's not as easy at it sounds, and not just because editors are talkative. If you go out there with the wrong score, you're going to get a lashing from the internet; you may well have to justify yourself to the game's publisher; you may even put your job at risk. Consensus is a safe haven. This is part of why reviewing Final Fantasy XIII in April 2010 is amusing: staying isolated from opinions of this game, so polarizing and so widely discussed, is impossible. I've spent the better part of four years anticipating the game more than any other ever released. I've also spent the better part of the last four months marinating in the game and people's reactions to it. I've read, written, and spoken more words about this than any other game in years, and probably any in the foreseeable future. In fact, this may be the last time I can claim authority over any sizable chunk of the mainstream game industry. I didn't think about it that way in the past, but Japanese-developed RPGs have been, since the early 1990s, my passion. The JRPG is my favorite genre. Very, very briefly, it was also the world's: starting in 1997, with the release of Final Fantasy VII, it seemed that the games I loved would finally get their due. I used to have the mentality -- which now feels quite dated -- that I could convince people to give games a shot. I thought that if I could cut right into the heart of a game and explain exactly what made it tick and why that mattered, I could convince people, with only my words, to try something they weren't planning to. While I don't think that's impossible, I think it's an edge case; voracious consumers of games, maybe. Enthuasiasts of a genre, perhaps. Convincing someone to pick up an interesting book, CD, or go to a film is one thing; with games... it's much more difficult, it seems, and it's only getting harder thanks to everyone's shrinking reserves of money and time. One thing I realized over the years is that a large contingent of gamers who were suckered into playing Final Fantasy VII for its groundbreaking cinematics and engrossing story actually weren't that happy about it. They may have enjoyed that experience, but they began to become frustrated by and by, and other games in the genre perplexed and bored them. Many, many people didn't value what I valued in games -- and I don't just mean turn-based combat or pop existentialism. People simply didn't value stepping out of their comfort zone. I just didn't realize how true this was until my comfort zone started to shrink and become more and more irrelevant. It's now well-known that Microsoft approached Activision and Infinity Ward and asked them to deliver Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360's launch, because Halo 3wasn't going to be ready. While that's not the whole of it, it might just be the inflection point where things changed. By 2010, we know the story by heart: Western developers who'd never had access to an audience like this before had the console market hungrily in their sights and, driven by ambition and talent, made bold games that made what had come before look rudimentary. Meanwhile, the reliability of Japan's market and the peculiarity of the way its businesses are run had created somnambulent companies which attracted university graduates with a promise of reliable jobs rather than creative possibilities. Of course, these things are, to an extent, cyclical. It's not over yet. Things are changing. Square Enix is reputed to be a vision-driven company with strong creative minds in charge. Its president, Yoichi Wada, has complained that the staff's creative pursuits delay its titles from shipping on time. The most famous man at the company is Tetsuya Nomura, an illustrator who got famous for creating characters so memorable that it enabled him to get his thumb into the majority of the company's creative output within a decade. On the other hand, Final Fantasy XIII was the company's first real step into the next generation; it's a humongous production designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. For all of these reasons and more, Final Fantasy XIII is, most obviously, a bizarre compromise. In his borderline incomprehensible -- through no fault of his own -- GDC 2010 talk, the game's director Motomu Toriyama described how, over the years, the creative process for developing Final Fantasy titles changed from a collaborative to top-down structure thanks to the workflow demands put on the teams by technology. In the immediate aftermath of the development of Final Fantasy VI for the Super Famicom, the team bullshitted up some ideas for Final Fantasy VII. But when it came time to produce that game, the decision had been made to move to the PlayStation and deliver a Hollywood-style cinematic experience. Still and all, the game was put together piecemeal -- and if you remember its wild inconsistency of play, it's not a surprise to hear that now. From to snowboarding to defending Fort Condor to performing CPR to motorcycle combat to the Golden Saucer, the game provides arguably too many diversions from its core gameplay. By the time Final Fantasy X rolled around in 2001, said Toriyama, "An impact on experimentation took place. From this [game], scenario had to be fixed first, because of motion and voice [recording]. So each staff person we could not incorporate their comments or opinions, since just a small number of people were working on the story creation... It was a major change in Final Fantasy X." Throw in a platform shift for which the company was totally unprepared, a mandate for visual perfection, and a production team in the hundreds, and Final Fantasy XIII, as it is, is born. Still, I haven't even approached Final Fantasy XIII's greatest and most fundamental sin. * * *      "It starts to get good after about 12 hours," I said.    "Twelve hours? I can't believe you give that game such a huge by," said Lulu.    "It's not a by," I responded, lamely. She turned away. Zak looked at me. "I just know that if he sticks with it..."    She shook her head. "The fact that they can rely on that kind of loyalty --"    "...if he sticks with it -- I'm not talking to everybody, I'm talking to Zak -- he'll enjoy it." A few moments later: "You're right. It's a by." The biggest sin of Final Fantasy XIII is that the developers assume that once that disc slips into the drive, gamers are commited to seeing the ending credits. The developers assume that everybody wants so much to play this game that they will simply plod through it all. This sin is compounded by Square Enix's obvious, terrifying mandate to make the biggest, most popular Final Fantasy game since VII, and bring gamers into the fold who've never before been interested in the series. And it is complicated by their total misjudgment of the demands of today's audiences after years of increasing sophistication in games. * * * Let's play a game. No, not Final Fantasy XIII. Let's pretend that Final Fantasy XIII came out in December 2007, a year after the launch of the PlayStation 3, much as Final Fantasy X did in 2001 relative to the PlayStation 2's launch. And since we're already enmeshed in this fantastic scenario, let's take another little leap: let's pretend that the Xbox 360 never existed. Boy, Final Fantasy XIII seems pretty fucking excellent now, doesn't it? Yeah, it may not be the best game in the series, but I can't wait to see what these guys are going to do when they really come to grips with this next generation console technology! That's the world this game was made for. There were just some complications... * * * Thanks to Call of Duty, mainstream audiences of unparalleled size are getting used to the production style pioneered by Square Soft in the early '90s. These games are so complicated and huge, somebody thought, we ought to bootstrap a few teams and get them rolling into production simultaneously, so we can have a continuous flow of product for fans. At some point, this production process broke down. By the time of Final Fantasy XII's hideous and unprecedented delay, FF production was critically wounded; it has not recovered. Motomu Toriyama showed one deeply confusing screenshot of Final Fantasy XIII for the PlayStation 2 in his GDC presentation. I've privately been told by someone who'd know that the game was unconventional in a way that the Final Fantasy XIII that was manufactured and shipped to retailers is not. Something happened during the production of the unconventional, deeply flawed Final Fantasy XII to kill experimentation at Square Enix. Something happened during the troubled birth of Crystal Tools to complicate Final Fantasy XIII's production until a group of very intelligent and experienced developers were forced to pare down the design document to what would obviously and flawlessly function. In his GDC talk, the lead game designer of Assassin's Creed II, Patrick Plourde, talked about the production of the first game. Half an hour after he joked that "the Final Fantasy guys are probably the only others who face these problems" -- putting together a 30+ hour game with a team of hundreds, that is -- he explained that a separate team designed and implemented the assassination missions in the original Assassin's Creed. These missions were stapled onto the core game and, though they formed its primary gameplay objectives, they had nothing to do with its core gameplay. Ubisoft Montreal's production processes had been designed to produce different streams of content simultaneously and bolt them together at the end -- a method that was retained but completely rethought for production of its sequel. In a strange coincidence, Motomu Toriyama was sitting next to me during this presentation. * * * Most people who had anything to say about Final Fantasy XIII shortly after its release were those who were repulsed by early design decisions the team made about the game. And while I don't think production realities excuse a shitty game, they sure do explain it. If one thing's clear, it's that production ramped up on Final Fantasy XIII before there was a clear plan on how things were going to be bolted together. As Tim Rogers points out in his review, "A producer of Final Fantasy XIII explains that there was 'enough discarded content' from Final Fantasy XIII to make a whole other game. The 'content' in question is mainly levels -- game-play areas." He draws the correct inference: the production process for this game was so deeply flawed that artists were being paid to create content that the core creative team was unsure if it would have any use for, just to make them do something. As I explained to Zak and Lulu, the really bad part of Final Fantasy XIII is not, as many have said, the first two hours, in which you have no meaningful choices in combat and cannot earn Crystogen Points and so cannot level your characters. The worst part is also not the next five hours of the game, which establishes the core of the game's narrative premise and slowly and surely delivers its gameplay systems one after the other -- the tutorial. No, the worst part is between hours 8 to 14. This is the most vapid and superfluous part of Final Fantasy XIII. This is the painful and tedious point where the game has firmly established its core gameplay, its cast of characters, and then... refuses to give over. From the second half of the Gapra Whitewood to the end of the Sunleth Waterscape, Final Fantasy XIII is a tedious mess made by people who clearly don't understand what they're supposed to be doing. Here's my quick guide into making Final Fantasy XIII not suck shit. It'll sound pretty easy when I explain it. Immediately institute gameplay. Without changing the scenario at all, allow players to experiment with special abilities and raise levels in the Crystarium -- even allow them to raise the levels of the NORA troops Gadot and Lebreau, though the player won't ever use them again (notably, in the release, Gadot and Lebreau's HP are listed as ??? instead of numbers because they're NPCs.) Nobody will resent wasting this effort; certainly no more than they did being held back from experiencing gameplay for the first two hours of the game. By the time the party assembles for the battle against the Pulse Fal'Cie in the Pulse Vestige, they should have earned a few abilities in the Crystarium. (If there's one thing this game is spookily good at, it's balancing the distribution of CP as it effects gaining abilities and fighting boss battles, so I don't doubt the team could balance this well.) You don't have to unlock much, but just enough to give the player a sense he is making decisions: enough for advanced players to know what's in store and little enough for novices to stick with it. Remember, the novice audience wants to learn how to play your game. As the party escapes to Lake Bresha, lay on the tutorials, just as you did. There's a debate to be had here about teaching the player how to play the game by presenting challenges that require him to exercise the options at his fingertips -- remember that battle in Palumpolum which forces you to play the Sentinel role? like that -- but let's just assume we're not changing things that drastically. It'll work. The Vile Peaks proceed as normal, though perhaps the roles of some of the characters have to be tweaked. But here's the crucial difference. By the end of the Vile Peaks, the entire Crystarium must be unlocked and available to players. You have to be done with your lessons approximately... now. There's time for introductions to more advanced gameplay later, but the core: we're done. Here comes a tough part. Narratively, I don't see a way around having Hope and Lightning come to their own understanding in the Whitewood as Sazh and Vanille later do in the Sunleth Waterscape and Nautlius. A mix of cutscenes, structural changes, and judicious and much-needed cutting would have to happen here to make the game tolerable and well-paced. Get players to Palumpolum as fast as you can, and once the six party members gather in Hope's apartment for the game's first real climax, you've just delivered an adventuring party that will never be split up again. If you've balked at my earlier suggestion to unlock the Crystarium fully, now's when you really have to do it. You will never again force the party formation to follow the whims of the plot; that was annoying enough in the 16-bit days in what I would consider the most irritating game in the series, Final Fantasy VI, and it's excruciating now that we know other games actually give us a credible illusion of control. After Palumpolum, Palmecia. And after Palmecia, Gran Pulse. And in Gran Pulse, which we should get to much sooner, something besides mark hunts. "Something", in fact, like the second half of the game. "The answer is staring them right in the face. Gran Pulse should have been the World of Ruin. What were they thinking?" I said this out loud. It's very likely nobody else was in the room. * * * Let's talk core gameplay mechanics. I theorized, in December, that at some point there was a meeting in Square Enix's Shinjuku headquarters where things were decided that altered the course of Final Fantasy XIII's development profoundly. I'm not wrong, of course -- there were probably dozens of such meetings. But let's visualize this for a minute. Yoshinori Kitase, Motomu Toriyama, Yuji Abe, and the rest of the team is sitting at a conference table. The light is bright and fluorescent. There's stale coffee, 330 ml bottles of French spring water, and, since this is Japan, there might even be cigarette smoke hanging in the air. Production on Final Fantasy XIII is not, to put it lightly, going as planned. Crystal Tools is nothing like done. In the back of his mind, one of the men is wishing -- for not the first time and not the last -- that Matsuno's fucking team had got Final Fantasy XII out the door in time for FF13 to hit the PlayStation 2 before its market died, and that Crystal Tools could have been sorted out before production had begun on a next-generation title. Toriyama looks at Kitase. Kitase looks at Toriyama. "What are we going to do?" somebody asks. I tried, and failed, to write this scene with drama and snappy dialogue, but let's be fair: this is a Japanese office. One of the junior planners walks around the room handing out sheafs of stapled A4 paper to everybody. This is what they're going to do. They've identified the strenghts of the series: its characters and story, courtesy of Nomura, Toriyama, Kazushige Nojima and others; its battles -- thank Toshiro Tsuchida and Yuji Abe; its beautiful environments, Isamu Kamikokuryo; and the character leveling system, the Crystarium. Everything else is expendable -- it either has to be tied into the plot, or has to serve the purpose of getting this game out the door. When I talk about Final Fantasy XIII's battle system, I get excited. People can hear the excitement in my voice, and they get interested. I have actually seen this happen in real life. That's a measure not just of how much I care about the game and the series, but my genuine admiration for the level of execution of this absolutely core facet of the gameplay. Their plan almost worked -- or perhaps could have worked -- but it didn't. It fails in some very fundamental ways that mostly have to do with the developers' control and complacency. * * * Time for pure gameplay complaining: the Crystarium stinks. Let's do some comparing and contrasting and background here, since we might as well. At some point -- I guess Final Fantasy X -- the developers at Square Enix decided that traditional experience points / earn a level-style leveling systems were passe. I don't in the least bit blame them, since how you grow your characters is one of the best gameplay aspects of an RPG when handled correctly. The Sphere Grid, which was Final Fantasy X's stab at delivering that sort of gameplay, was compulsively addictive to me. It was essentially linear for a good portion of the game, but starting not terribly far in, you'd be forced to make decisions about what to unlock when, and how to balance your party, and soon after that what secondary sets of abilities you wanted your characters to develop. One of my absolute fondest memories of FFX is running in circles in Zanarkand raising levels for an entire day. Final Fantasy XII's leveling system, the License Board, is a pathetic thing, paltry and simple, trivial to exploit. It encourages you -- or at least it did me -- to rob your characters of any distinct identity and instead gravitate to what delivers the best advantage: my party were carbon copies of one another by the end of the game; bizarre hybrid mage-warriors with no trace of specialty nor identity. It's worth noting that when the game was rereleased in Japan, this entire gameplay mechanic was deleted and replaced with something new (called the Intenational Zodiac Job System, fuck knows what that is. I certainly don't care.) The Crystarium is not that bad. But it is not very good. I think one of the real flaws with it is that it's split into six: each role has its own distinct set of bonuses and abilities, because each role has to be defined within the context of the game's Paradigm System battles, which are in fact quite excellent. Unfortunately in concert with this, there's no freedom of movement, and your only decision-making process is which of the jobs you wish to raise first. But that complaint is really irrelevant compared to the real flaws in the system. The Crystarium is divided into levels, and levels are locked. They are not locked, as would be logical, until you complete one; they are locked until the arbitrary point in the game -- always after a boss battle -- where the developers deign to unlock the next stage of Crystarium growth. Frustratingly, too, in my experience, the game perfectly metes out experience points throughout so that you're just about ready to hit the next level of the Crystarium by the time you get it. This is one of the many things about playing Final Fantasy XIII that makes you feel like a rat in a maze. There's an ominous awareness of someone in control, just out of your field of view... And there is a severe and obvious flaw with this: gamers don't all enjoy games the way the developers intend them to. Gamers don't all enjoy games in the order developers intend them to. And gamers do not all enjoy games at the speed which developers intend them to. This is the first game in the series which does not allow for this, and that is a severe flaw. There are six potential roles for each character (pretentiously renamed in the U.S. version to Commando, Ravager, Medic, Saboteur, Synergist, and Sentinel from the readily comprehensible Attacker, Blaster, Healer, Jammer, Enhancer, and Defender.) However, for the first two thirds of the game, you aren't allowed to access any but the three the which the development team assigned to each character at its outset. The CP (Crystogen Points, or experience points) you earn are only enough to really concentrate on the three jobs you are given anyway. This, in fact, holds true for the whole game, including the last boss, unless you do a tremendously unpalatable amount of grinding, even when you have access to the other three jobs. This sucks out all player choice once again. Since you effectively can't raise optional jobs, since the CP costs are so astronomical, you can't really experiment with new party builds without swapping characters in and out to form the party you want. All I accomplished by trying to make Lightning a Saboteur was putting her behind Hope in primary job progress, and I quickly abandoned the idea. I got a slight benefit out of making Fang a low-level Synergist, but since you also only have six Paradigm slots this became irrelevant, too. There just wasn't room for that Paradigm. The worst aspect of the Crystarium, though, is that not every character gets every ability in every job. For example, as a Synergist, Fang gets Shellga and Protectga. I assumed Hope would earn access to these abilities soon after -- when his next Crystarium level unlocked. Nope. He never gets them -- ever -- and Synergist is one of his three primary jobs. Worse yet is that without consulting a FAQ, you'd never know this, so it's impossible to plan ahead for the ideal party without researching online -- and personally I like to avoid FAQs as much as I can. In the end, the Crystarium is just a linear leveling system in a Sphere Grid disguise, and it's probably my personal biggest disappointment with the game. Tim compared the game to busywork in his review, and it's not wrong -- by removing meaningful choice, the Crystarium has transitioned from a thoughtful system into something akin to stuffing envelopes. * * * All the same, when I look at the game, I'm more sympathetic to many of the mistakes the developers made because I came to the realization that they are tremendously determined to get players through this game, fully understanding its gameplay. And I also laud them for turning up the challenge at the point at which they believe players should fully understand it -- which is one of the most satisfying sections of the game, if not the most satisfying section -- the Battleship Palamecia. It's obvious that this is why the game is so drawn out, and derisively (though somewhat fairly) called a neverending tutorial by gamers. Gamers, for one reason and another, don't like to be condescended to, and this was a miscalculation on Square Enix's part. But it's not so simple as that. This isn't just about teaching novices to play the game. It's about making sure everybody gets it. Really, really gets it. This is necessary because with previous titles in the series, it was fully possible to get to the very end without understanding their gameplay. Not just possible, in fact, but likely. The most obvious culprit here is Final Fantasy VIII -- the game is complicated, more than a little broken, very abstract, and full of gameplay loopholes. On reading what people have had to say about it over the last 11+ years, I have certainly realized that I -- no newbie to Final Fantasy or RPGs in general by that point -- got to the end of the game without really understanding its gameplay in more than the most rudimentary way, and I was hardly alone in that. In fact, I never actually beat Final Fantasy VIII. I got to the last boss, but I never did defeat her. Let's go back to that word "abstract". When it comes to core gameplay, RPGs are the most abstracted of all established game genres. In a shooter, you shoot someone; he dies. You physically move the aiming reticule over a target; you pull a shoulder button like a trigger. It's simple. Game developers are forever adding abstract, complex gameplay elements to titles of all genres, because the kinds of people who buy Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games enjoy these abstractions. Only RPGs are build their foundations on them. Even relatively simple concepts like "equipment" tend to be so complicated by either special abilities or innumerable choices that they lose a great deal of their concreteness. There's the famous example, of course, of Dean Takahashi's review of the original Mass Effect -- in which he forgot to level Shepard. Dean is not a stupid guy. At this year's GDC, Peter Molyneux said that Microsoft research indicated that more than 60 percent of the Fable audience understood less than 50 percent of the series' gameplay. Fable is not as popular as Final Fantasy. The answer that BioWare and Lionhead have posed to these problems is to streamline the everliving fuck out of Mass Effect 2 and Fable III. The Final Fantasy XIIIdevelopment team tried that, too. However, where the paths diverge is that the Western teams have gone to great lengths to make their gameplay systems concrete. ME2 is a full-on shooter; Fable III doesn't have levels anymore: you gain followers, and that power is reflected visually by your character. Instead of moving towards action or something else easier to understand, Final Fantasy XIII completely retained an abstracted, command input-based tactical battle system with text and gauges and jobs and hit points -- they just tried to teach players to use it. As a hardcore gamer who loves abstraction (and in particular loves this battle system) I sure do appreciate it. But it's easy to argue that Square Enix is going both against the grain of the collective wisdom of the industry and also working against the mainstream audience they want to cultivate. One solution -- and I'm not even sure this is precisely intentional on BioWare's part, but if it is, it's genius -- would be to split Final Fantasy into hardcore nerdy and open and casual variants, in the same way Mass Effect and Dragon Age compliment each other. No significant number of BioWare otaku who want the D&D-inspired bollocks of Dragon Age's gameplay resent Mass Effect 2's simplicity. And they will buy every scrap of Dragon Age content thrown to them, and most of them will buy Mass Effect, too. Like i said, if this is intentional, it's pure fucking genius and probably what I most respect BioWare for right now. I've talked to a guy online -- a smart enough guy, an adult and avid gamer, who got to the end of Final Fantasy X without understanding the Sphere Grid and couldn't beat Sin. Despite my problems with FFVIII, this never occurred to me, simply because I understood FFX so well. And, more troublingly, I know a guy online who's gotten past the point in Final Fantasy XIII where the developers assume you understand the game and just throw everything at you -- far past, with the help of strategy guides and a level of perseverence that's difficult to credit but so refreshing to see -- and I'm not quite sure he really gets it. He certainly can't reliably execute it. Because of the tight control over the Crystarium he can't grind his way out of tight spots; because of the developers' faith that their style of teaching players how to play is adequate, he has to resort to following online strategies. Even the official guide isn't enough. So as much as I like the impetus of teaching novices to understand Final Fantasy -- because how else are you going to convert them into fans like me who live, breathe, and love JRPG gameplay? -- I don't think Square Enix pulled it off. And worse, they alienated a good chunk of their existing audience by making it sit through kindergarten, or as I like to call the beginning of the game, Disc 0 (think about this in PlayStation 1 FF terms and you'll get it.) * * * So while I'm on the subject of gameplay, let's keep this going and talk about the fucking battle system already. The best -- if not most appealing -- way I can think of to explain the Paradigm Shift system is that, in a regular FF battle system, you were the grill team in the McDonalds kitchen, all working to produce the meal. In FF13, you've been promoted to manager. Rather than making the same, repetitive individual decisions moment-to-moment, you control the overall flow of battle via the Paradigms. Once the system gets cooking, you get the same intense and strategic push-pull of a traditional turn-based battle system in maybe one fifth of the time. So each Paradigm you set up, to back up a bit, is a party build. Each character has three jobs (let's say three, because as I discussed, five or six is a lie and even four is pushing it.) Your job is to switch between Paradigms which offer the most effective mix of jobs (and thus, skills) for current battle situations -- you become the mini-general, flipping your troops' jobs around. And it's not just that you must tell them what (generally) to do; you also have to be mindful of how their skills compliment each other. That's before you take into account enemy behavior. To say that the battle system is challenging and addictive would be an understatement -- this is the compulsive and most highly polished aspect of the gameplay, bar-none. The problem is that it doesn't fucking get that way until the aforementioned Palamecia section... like 15 hours into the game. Sigh. But once it kicks in, it's fucking kicked in for the whole rest of the game; smacking the everloving shit out of the last boss was a highly amusing pleasure. There's also the extremely fast pace to laud, and also the strange but addictive process of Staggering enemies. Until you Stagger an enemy, damage is negligible, and you need to hit them with both physical attacks and magic to make them Stagger. This really is the way in which the Paradigm Shift system is unified with basic damage dealing, you see, and the icing is the game's maniacal reliance on buffs and debuffs later on to add another layer of tension and make your finger itch on the L1 button as you shift Paradigms compulsively. This is the good shit. This is where it's at. And when you Stagger (or Break) -- I definitely prefer the Japanese version's "Break", it's more forceful, more aesthetically appealing -- So when you BREAK an enemy, there's a skill called Launch that the Commando class gets which throws the fucker up into the air. When the enemy is up in the air it can't do jack shit -- it can't attack you at all, and just wriggles helplessly. This is so super fucking satsifying that I can't even articulate it. It makes me giggle. And to answer one of the questions Tim raised in his review of the game, yes, it's inherently satisfying to see giant fucking numbers (representing damage) pop out of enemies when you hit them. Of this I have not the least shred of doubt. * * * Let's talk about the whole NO TOWNS thing. The game does not fucking need towns. Towns would not solve this game's problems. The whole towns thing reminds me of people talking about Steven Spielberg's A.I. A lot of people didn't like the saccharine ending of the film and said that the movie should have ended with David staring at the Blue Angel, implicitly forever. No -- that would have just been a different shitty ending. In the same vein, stapling some classic-style towns to Final Fantasy XIII would not solve anything. What people who are asking for towns are asking for are two things, and one of them is valid and one of them is bullshit. 1. Give me what the series has always had, because I am old and I fear change. (Bullshit.) 2. Give me something that would improve the game's pacing, and add agency and variety. (Correct.) Let me be clear: I have no interest in seeing towns come back to Final Fantasy as towns were once executed in the series, that's for sure. But something needs to come in -- a solution must be devised. The bit where you chase the Chocobo chick through Nautilus: that was simple, and stupid, but fun. The way I much more miss towns, in all honesty, is that so many of the cutscenes in this game feature people just stopping in some corridor in some dungeon and having a conversation, and the context they do this in has absolutely nothing to do with that conversation, and it starts to feel extremely false and disconnected from any sense of reality. This is to be avoided scrupulously in future games in the series, in my opinion, and one of the ways to do that is to make sure that the important story sequences are context-driven. And to have context-driven story you need, well, a fucking context. Obviously. Things like towns are meaningful. Giant blue glowing forests, while totally fucking awesome for smacking the shit out of rampaging biological experiments in, are not so great for having a conversation about your dead mom. * * * One particularly notable object lesson in this is the segment of the game which takes place in Palumpolum. The game goes from romps through attractive but irrelevant video game backdrops to a struggle against fate in a city populated by civilians. Context comes flooding in to illustrate concepts that were so recently abstract. There's an army, there are buildings that make sense, there's the whole scenario with Hope's dad in his apartment. Things just gel fabulously here in a way that totally makes sense, and stands in stark contrast to the last several hours of the game. The Hanging Edge. Gapra Whitewood. Sunleth Waterscape. No. Vile Peaks. The Fifth Ark. Kind of; good enough. Nautilus. Palumpolum. The Palmecia. Eden. Yes. * * * Let's talk about the characters and story. The Final Fantasy series has been pretty hit or miss when it comes to antagonists. This game is pretty much a miss. It's really not until the last fucking battle that you begin to get a real understanding for what actually drives the antagonist, who is an Old Man In A Dress, the Fantasy Pope -- which is a lazy cliche, while I'm complaining -- to push your party around, try to kill them, et cetera. This is what I like to call a Big Fucking Mistake. Until then, you're confronted with the fact that he's just a floating asshole who pushes you around and lies to you. It's easy to see why the characters dislike him, but as the player, it's not so easy to feel strongly about it. Also he's a big stupid monster / god thing, really, it turns out, of course. And I found this particularly boring because, oddly enough, the real world's Evil Old Man In A Dress has been in the news a lot lately. And he has been implicated in multiple coverups involving child molesters. And while the whole complicated tale is heartbraking and infuriating, it's also a human story, one that has real heft and weight: I'm more interested in taking my band of adventurers to Rome and knocking Cardinal Ratfucker out of his Prada loafers with a hail of Blizzagas than spitting on Primarch Dysley, FF13's antagonist. Think about that rich and complicated story of venality, ambition, insensitivity, and arrogance and compare it with what motivates FF13's Pope, which is "I'm a god, but I don't like being a god that much." Right. That said, stories of gods pushing humans around don't have to suck. I mean, we have the whole pantheons of Greek and Norse mythologies, and those are just the ones I am immediately familiar with as a white nerd. Those are some fucking interesting gods. And beyond that I can think of examples from fantasy like Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief series, or Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, or Diana Wynne Jones, or Neil Gaiman. These gods have many of the same qualities of the Fal'Cie -- aloof, manipulative -- but they're used effectively. That's because the action of the story rests on the decisions of the people, even when the gods command; FF13 does, to its credit, try to do that, too, but it doesn't come together until the end. Let's detour quickly into "Fal'Cie." We already have a word for gods, and it's "gods". Bad fantasy overuses superflous terminology like Fal'Cie that obscures both the meaning and, to my mind, seriousness of its story, and this is a prime offender. I have a theory that Japanese people are more willing to accept bullshit katakana terminology because their language is full of it -- bear in mind that everyday concepts like Personal Computer and Digital Camera and Internet and Sony PlayStation are all made up fantasy words to the Japanese, more or less, and it seems easier to understand why their games are full of them. Then again Dragon Age has shit like the Grey Wardens and (gag) Darkspawn, which sound just as bad to me. It's a problem. Fantasy people: restrain thyselves. One of the really frustrating things about this game is another aspect of the Disc 0 problem I alluded to earlier. It really, really extends to the development of the characters. Plenty of people I've talked to (aka The Whole of the Internets) really hate Snow, Hope, and Vanille. I do not hate them. But I can understand it, because for the first chunk of the game, they are boring do-nothing characters. Contrast the Sazh who stumbles around the Hanging Edge with the one who talks about his son, Dahj, in Sunleth Waterscape and Nautilus. In my opinion, Hope's problems make sense, and he begins to speak and act intelligently and with conviction earlier on. But Vanille is in a way the linchpin of the plot, or many of its mysteries, and you have no bloody idea until way too far into the game. There's a reason she's narrating the thing, folks. Snow, well... Snow can't really get into gear until he and Hope have it out, and thanks to the game's shitty pacing, that just takes far too long. Someone I know said "the plot seems like it's always an hour away from getting good", and that's apt. I've also heard it said that the text Datalog entries add necessary details to flesh out what's going on -- and that's true not in terms of understanding events (I had no problems) but it's very true in terms of shading. In the end, I'm not wild about the cast. They're not as sympathetic as the Final Fantasy X crew, somehow. I felt for them, but not strongly. I think the context problem I wrote about -- Talking In Dungeons -- and the boring antagonist help screw them up. The lack of a real focused main character (aka Final Fantasy VI-itis) is also a problem. Lightning never comes to life as a character -- she's an idea of a character, a representation, a simulacrum. She's fascinating to watch in motion and she spits out some great lines -- love her attitude -- but there's no her. Sazh, on the other hand, is dependable and sympathetic, and one of the only in the party capable of surprising you with his actions. How in the fuck did Japan deliver the one of the first truly rounded and sympathetic black characters in a game (and deliver him with a Chocobo chick in his afro, and make it work?) Talk about an unexpected triumph. Snow is a stock character. Snow is not a badly-written version of that character, but he does not exceed those bounds enough to become fully three-dimensional. He's important to the story, though, and I forgive it. He's kind of like this game's Wakka, with a role that exceeds his depth, yet somehow a less interesting conflict to resolve within himself. I had thought Hope was going to be a Shinji-type character, but he's really not, or not for very long. He's a believable adolescent; his background really comes into play for his character in ways I didn't anticipate (observations easier for me to make, perhaps, because he's the one I identified with most.) You can tell he's well-educated though he never really talks about it much; later you see he's a child of privelege who grew up in the big city, and his attitude and demeanor makes sense. Characterization Success Get! He acts in ways that are logical, and if anybody sells the whole Fal'Cie/l'Cie thing, in the whole cast, it's Hope -- through both his reactions to the situation and his knowledge. Vanille... is a conundrum. First up, she's the worst character design Nomura has shit out since... Irvine Kinneas? Long time. Part of that's a cultural Japan/America thing, and part of that's a borderline misogynist "girl skipping around in a short dress is tough to take seriously" thing, let's face it... but part of it is that she has just a hideous outfit and ridiculous hair. Even Hope looks like he's dressed to walk around a bit. She... well, it'd be an okay outfit for a summertime date. If she didn't expect to have to sit down and get hit in the back with that... beaded... thing, that is. When her role in the story becomes apparent, though, suddenly she's really interesting. I can't think of another character in an RPG who lies so much, and for such believable reasons. Usually RPG characters only lie because they're Secretly On The Other Side or whatever -- normal fantasy turncoat bullshit. That's it. You know, totally unlike real people, who lie all the time with both good and bad intentions. Not so, Vanille. And Fang is kind of dumb but she looks awesome, is gorgeous, kicks ass, has a rockin' Australian accent, and is just generally too much fun to not love. And you can easily pretend she's a lesbian. The game's real strength, though, is the dynamics of the characters -- their interactions. Lightning and Hope. Hope and Snow. Sazh and Vanille. Vanille and Fang. Japanese writers seem to have a facility for group dynamics and this frequently shines through in FF13's story more than the actual plot point that's occuring. * * * Chris Hecker has warned us that if we're not careful, games will become like comic books. What he's talking about is cultural ghettoization. I think we're already there -- we're just there at a profitable scale for a wide audience, unlike comics. And in many cases we're at an even bigger disadvantage -- it's much more challenging, and at times impossible, to step out of your preferred genres and either enjoy or comprehend the games. The FF13 solution, as I already outlined, was to teach people to enjoy it. Sure, Square Enix was less than fully successful there (though the guy who I spoke about who's struggling loved the game so much -- his first JRPG ever -- that he kept at it, and has pushed through the points where he was stuck, and even crossed over into JRPG fan territory by buying the CD soundtrack!) But I digress. My brain has been programmed by long exposure to love the JRPG genre. The experience of playing genre-based games is to gradually understand them more. As long as the games are good, your accumulated knowledge makes them more enjoyable. Hell, even mediocre games in a genre that you like and understand tend to be somewhat entertaining, because they lightly caress those synapses. Your decisions are driven by your tastes, but your tastes are reinforced by repeated exposure, until you start to think about buying games you think look terrible because they have good aspects -- for example, Eternal Sonata, which I though about buying I don't know how many times before I finally gave up on the idea. Its adorable vapidity repulsed me too much to sit through just to experience a battle system which looks pretty nifty. One thing I love most about the JRPG genre is its visual panache, and one thing that the deveopers of Final Fantasy XIII prioritized beyond perhaps all else is delivering those visuals. They are stunning. The character animations in battle and exploration are excellent, the scenes burst with detail, the environments are eye-catching and complex and unexpected. The amount of art generated for this game is nuts -- especially because that's the most expensive part of current generation game production. When I saw Lake Bresha for the first time in December, I said -- out loud -- "this is why I bought a PlayStation 3" and I was not kidding. There was my $600, three years later, right there. When I had the chance to speak to him, I even brought Lake Bresha up with Toriyama, and here's what he said: That body of water you were mentioning is crystallized, and technically it's very difficult to create something that's basically half see-through to bring that frozen effect. So it's not only that artistic vision, but it's also providing that technical expertise to create that; and that's something that really sets us apart from other developers. Other developers I don't think can really create that. You know what? It sounds arrogant, but the blend of techniques, aesthetics, and Japanese orientation to detail represented by Final Fantasy XIII is unmatched this generation. This game is a visual masterpiece. Sure, it's not subtle; The Lost Guardian is going to be more refined. But FF13 can encompass so much about what's great about current generation visuals in one game: it brings in elements of all genres and all aesthetics and blends them together and makes them work, stunningly, and in realtime. And that was something I could always fall back on and enjoy, because it's something I love. And that's what being a genre fan means. Tragically, so much of the most beautiful, exciting content is saved for late in the game. The developers just presume you'll get to Gran Pulse and see its impressive vistas. What if you get bored and sell the game before then? I don't think that thought crossed anybody's mind. That. Is. Fucking. Nuts. The same goes for the game's soundtrack: Masahi Hamauzu, long relegated to Square's B-titles, does a fantastic job here. Yes, it hews close to the aesthetics that have been long established in the genre. A friend of mine, whose music taste I respect a great deal, called it terrible. I got really annoyed. But it's hard to see something like this the way he might: not as a fan of JRPG soundtracks, but as a fan of music. I actually have plenty I could say about the topic in its defense, but that's for another time: it's enough for me to put out that, in another aspect of its conventionality, this game excels. * * * Though all games don't feature strong narrative elements, I think it might be true that games are a unique medium because they are both complex software systems and content-driven media. Together, they forge a context. It's an important tenet of fantasy writing to be embroiled in worldbuilding, of course, but games literally build the worlds they describe. One of the problems that complicates both creating and reviewing games is that they are both software and media. To create software is to create function; to create media is to create feeling. The place where things get interesting is in where these two aims, which don't have a hell of a lot to do with each other, intersect. When they diverge too obviously, pain lies. In a narrative-driven game, both the story-related events and the gameplay systems are expected to come together -- and when it works, this combination is more satisfying than either element would be alone. This dual strength allows you to forgive the flaws. Though game stories are routinely, and not unfairly, criticized for the fact that they would be dissatisfying as a linear narrative (say, a movie) I also think it's valid, and I feel comfortable saying, that the intersection point is what allows games to become more than the sum of their parts. I fully believe this. Games are satisfying because they are a synthesis. They may rountely be a clumsy synthesis in 2010, but their success is still built on this. This is not an argument against games striving to improve both in narrative and play contexts, but it explains, to me at least, my immense satisfaction with flawed experiences and failed experiments. By the time you put it to bed, Final Fantasy XIII proves both that its story is functional and its gameplay is sound. But unfortunately there is a continuous shifting and even breakdown of forged context for a great deal of the adventure. What it's trying to accomplish keeps changing. The game has something like an act structure -- not as most narrative media does because the characters make decisions that propel them forward, but because it's assembled from parts and the seams are visible. The hand of the creators is all too evident in this work, and this is even worse than it could be because it's clear the hand is shaking. And that brings us back to the fundamental problem with FF13, and, finally, to the end of this text. The team have erred seriously in their assumption that players will simply, left with no other option, like the game. Their assumption is that players will, by the end, understand the game; their assumption that, in doing so, players will inevitably care about the game's content. It always comes back to that, in every facet. I would argue that it would be ridiculous to assume someone who doesn't like what Final Fantasy has to offer should or could be catered to by a Final Fantasy title. I can't play Madden just to enjoy what it does well despite a near-total lack of interest or understanding of football. I will never develop an appreciation for Halomultiplayer, even if I can understand what makes it so compelling to so many. I don't really care to try, frankly. That attitude, which I think is common, is an important part of what makes games a tough medium to create in. Even if you allow, as you should, that the game is made for an audience that could potentially enjoy it, Final Fantasy XIII takes this assumption too much to heart, and in doing so severely tries the patience and, some would say, insults the intelligence of its audience. That is a profoundly dangerous place to go and a precipice the developers absolutely must back away from. Final Fantasy XIII For PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 Released: March 9, 2010 Publisher: Square Enix Developer: Square Enix Three stars out of five

[ferricide]

LUSH / BLIND SPOT

When I listened to "Out of Control" -- the first single from Lush's Blind Spot EP, and the first new recordings the band has released in 20 years -- I was struck by how it reminded me of some of their very first songs, recorded in the late 1980s, and how it was just as good as those songs, too.

No, better even, than many of them. Because it builds confidently on the band's own history.

Lots of musicians enter late-career creative slumps. That fact is, in fact, now a cliche. But "Out of Control" left me wondering about something quite different: What happens to a band that simply disappears for 20 years?

The answer, according to that song, seemed to be "back to basics" and a renewed commitment to their original sound. "Out of Control" would fit right in on Gala, the compilation album formed from the gaggle of EPs and singles that formed Lush's earliest recorded output. Only the context of its release offers the clues needed to comprehend the difference.

There's an assurance to the song that underpins that first track. It's because Emma Anderson, who wrote it, knows just what Lush is capable of, and more importantly, what Lush excels at. There's a completeness to "Out of Control"; it almost seems to have been written as an exemplar of the Lush sound, and that grants it depth belied by any initial impression it's just a throwback.

And after I'd looped it enough times on YouTube to get over the shock of the very idea of new Lush music, it left me wondering what the Blind Spot EP would even sound like. It would be two months before I found out.

The thing is, I've loved Lush since 1992. Just four years later, the band called it quits. Their recording career spanned just seven years. Whether or not the band ever released new music, I'd still be listening. But I'd be doing it alone.

There are bands we like, bands we love, and the bands where we actually care about everything they've recorded. For me, Lush is the third kind of band. There wasn't a lot of it, but I had everything I could find.

I remember finding the Japanese pressing of 1996's Lovelife at Tunes, the best CD shop in South Jersey, and buying it just for the bonus 8 cm CD of B-sides. I remember ordering Cookie, the Japan-only Split-era B-side compilation, from an independent online store, even though I couldn't really afford it at the time. I was terrified it would sell out. I'm not even sure Amazon sold CDs back then.

Before this new EP, I finally lucked into a copy of the For Love CD single, which has two essential tracks on it: the Wire cover "Outdoor Miner," and the original recording of "Starlust," which is better than the version on Split. I say this only because just a few years ago, I was still noticing things. I guess that says things about me and the band, both.

Lush is one of those bands defined by the hackneyed phrase "small but passionate fan-base."

And yet, 20 years off the job; 20 years without new music. What happens then? No matter how much a few people might still like the band, it's up to nobody but the band to make things happen. The question is: What shape will that thing take? The answer is: It's almost like a career retrospective.

Lush's sound is hard to categorize. One of Lush's tricks is that the band records a lot of different kinds of songs, but they're all run through the "Lush sound." Some could be handed off to other bands and recorded as original tracks, and nobody would be the wiser. Some could be nothing but Lush. 

But that's too simple! There isn't a "Lush sound" -- it’s reductionist to suggest that. In fact, the band spent much of its career in search of a sound. The thing is, that's such an odd claim to lay at the feet of a band that sounds like nothing so much as itself, so instantly recognizable, but it's true.

The sound of Spooky, the band's first full-length album, was tightly controlled by producer and Cocteau Twins guitarist Robin Guthrie. The songwriting is nothing but Lush; the production is Heaven or Las Vegas. This was a sore spot for the band (and its fans). Did he manhandle the band, or did his distinct style bring out a hidden side of their music? My answer to that question is: both. But it's a sound the band probably can't even recapture if they even wanted to. And, indeed, Blind Spot says "nope."

Now, there's something else to consider about this EP. Though it just came out, the liner notes reveal that it was recorded a year ago -- without a drummer. Justin Welch, late of Elastica, joined up for the band's live shows. He was brought on to replace Chris Acland, whose 1996 suicide was a major precipitating event in the band's breakup.

Is that a drum machine on "Out of Control"? That's not unusual for Lush. Less characteristically, all four songs were written by Emma Anderson (lead singer Miki Berenyi wrote just as much of the band's catalogue, either singly or collaboratively with Anderson, but on Blind Spot, she contributed just lyrics.)

I guess what I'm trying to say with this info-dump is that there's little doubt that this EP is transitional, tentative, and as reawakenings go, it's just the very first step out of bed. It's basically impossible to gauge what might come next.

When I was a teenager -- that brief period when Lush was releasing albums -- I'd welcome nothing so much as new music from my favorite bands. I was hungry for it. I was eager to see how they grew and changed. The only reason I have a distinct memory of Tuesday, June 14, 1994 is that I hurried down to the local record shop to buy Split.

Sometimes I was simply blown away by the turns a band took over the course of its career. Sometimes, bands devolved into mediocrity, laziness, or even worse, revealed that they were never that great in the first place.

But things are quite a bit different after 20 years of no music. That gap is a chasm, filled with the meandering footsteps of other musicians who soldiered on -- for better and for worse. It profoundly changes how you look at things.

But there are three more tracks to talk about, so I'll get on with that.

"Lost Boy" is probably my favorite song on the EP, though I wouldn't really like to pick. I had this weird moment when I first heard it. After listening to "Out of Control" for two months, suddenly, the universe of "new Lush songs" expanded by 100 percent.

But here's the thing. The very beginning of the song sounded prosaic -- almost like a demo. And not a good demo. I wasn't ready to be disappointed. But I couldn't help leaping there.

Thankfully, that turned out to be a fakeout.

Lush is a band that records a lot of three-minute songs, and I think that the three-minute song is actually its own art form, in a way. A minute in, and "Lost Boy" grows dramatically, with dissonant organ and a strident rhythm. It keeps going, keeps growing. I think it makes as good an argument as any other song possibly could for why Lush was worth reviving in 2016.

And then it's over.

"Burnham Beeches" whipsaws Blind Spot in quite the other direction; like The Cure, Lush has a reputation for being one-note, but has always produced songs in a variety of modes. This is the most recent example of the band's fetish for bubblegum pop, which is a notable slice of their discography. It's not exactly "500," but it's something yet again than the other two tracks. Era-wise, it sounds like a Lovelife B-side; you might find it on Topolino.

And that brings us to "Rosebud," the closer. Mood-wise, it might belong on Split, somewhere near "Never-Never." Split's sound was defined by the band trying to recapture its sound from Guthrie, and prove that Lush was capable of more without him than it had been with him.

"Rosebud" is, like every other song on this EP, concise. Like "Lost Boy," the song gradually builds, this time pulling in a variety of elements long-established as part of the band's sound, and blending them by the end into a vibrant whole. I know I just mentioned Split, but it has something of the wistfulness of "Olympia," the closing track of Lovelife. That sensation is one of the most poignant weapons in Lush's arsenal.

It's worth noting what's not here, as much as what is; Lush always loved a great cover, but even without Berenyi contributing to the songwriting, there was no temptation to include one. The effect of "Rosebud," as it draws to a close -- and the very act of using it as the capstone of the EP -- is to prove that Lush has nothing to prove.

Plenty of 1990s bands of varying stripes have bounced back onto the tour circuit and into the studio, whether or not the world needed more of their work. But Lush? That's a surprise, right? If you were around in the 1990s, did you even listen to Lush? If Twitter has taught me anything, more people care about Lush than I expected, but fewer than ought to.

Lush had a hard time finding respect. Lush never got that popular. The last time I saw Lush live, in 1996, they were in a medium-sized general admission venue, the same exact one they'd played on their 1994 tour -- which Miki described, then, as a "fucking toilet" -- despite finally starting to taste success as Lovelife somehow managed to ride the Britpop wave to a smidgen of popular recognition. The San Francisco concert hall I'll be seeing them in soon is quite easily double its size.

It's clear from the evidence of this EP that of all of the pressures that caused Lush to fold in 1996, it wasn't a lack of self-understanding of themselves as musicians. Anderson clearly knows the tools that work, and Berenyi's lyrics and vocals are as good as they ever were. It was circumstances -- which you can easily read about online, if you're curious -- that drove the band apart.

Circumstances are powerful. They can break people apart; they can silence people. When circumstances change, things can go back to how they were. That may be the strangest thing of all, and the hardest to believe 20 years later. But here we are.

[ferricide]

salamander, the best looking cartridge on earth

Salamander for Famicom. 

salamander, for the famicom, by konami -- known in the US under the title life force -- is the best looking video game cartridge on earth, i would argue. i’d certainly like to see any contenders that can seriously compete.

frank cifaldi tweeted out this pic with that assertion a few weeks ago, and i wrote up a bit of a tumblr blog, but then i got busy, and then chrome crashed and i lost it. so i’m starting again... 

not just to agree with frank, because i do, but to talk about a few things.

one, of course, is just to let you know: hey, this is the best looking game cartridge. in case you didn’t know.

two: it started a conversation that made me think about my first trip to japan, which was for tokyo game show 2003, in september of that year.

salamander was probably the first retro game i bought.

this is a surprisingly complicated question to answer, sort of, i guess.

the first game i bought in japan, i am almost certain, is the PC genjin (bonk’s adventure) remake for the PS2. it’s sort of a remake, really, but not exactly. it’s a new game, really. the first store i went to that had games only sold new games.

i also asked my friend andrew to buy a lot of famicom games on yahoo auctions (what japan uses instead of eBay) because i’d just gotten my AV famicom that summer, after writing about the console’s anniversary for gamespy. and he did. so does that count? sort of. i guess?

but i’m reasonably sure that if salamander wasn’t the first retro game i tracked down, it was damn close. how about we say it’s first in my heart?

that’s because i’d always wanted it. in college, in 1997, before the era of cell phones, i’d missed my chance at my first famicom games ever.

i went to school at the university of the arts in philadelphia. several blocks away from the school (walkable, and i did, often) was a game shop called “the gamerary” (which people pronounced “gamery”) which sold playstation and saturn imports (and also rented anime on VHS, too.) 

one of the guys who worked there brought in his personal famicom collection from when he was a kid and sold it off one day, and i missed it. this is why i mention “no cell phones.” my friend went and she managed to score the salmander cart, and i was so incredibly jealous. she brought it home and hung it on her bedpost from a chain through that hole on the top left (yes, it goes all the way through. i have no idea why.)  so i guess in the back of my mind i was kind of fixated on that, to be honest, though in a low key way. i’m not the kind of person who easily forgets things. 

so yeah: probably the first game i bought. can you blame me?

i mean, life force is really good, too. if you’ve never played it you really ought to. 

and i should, i realize, probably write an interesting essay about the gamerary, because that kind of culture is essentially completely dead. i was talking to a friend about an upcoming book project he’s doing about a retro game, and we started talking about 1990s game culture, and i realized what a brief and unique moment in time it was. i don’t mean to make more of it than it is, but it’s something i look back on with fondness, but also i think if it’s not explained it’s harder for people to understand why game culture took the shape it has. 

the gamerary closed, suddenly, in 1997. my friend tried to go one day and there was a handwritten sign in the door. i didn’t want to believe it, but there it was.

[ferricide]

SKY THINK SYSTEM

In Japan, the 32-bit era seems to have some meaningful parallels with the Atari 2600 era over here, or at least one I can think of: Companies jumped on that gravy train hard. Companies that weren’t particularly known for games, that is. I I would have to spend a lot more time analyzing releases to see how well this comparison actually holds up, but it’s something I’ve noted, vaguely, over the years.

With the closure of Kaga Create and Agatsuma Entertainment, recently, which were offshoots of (respectively) an electronics firm and a toy company, I’ve thought about this more. Plenty of companies that used to make games across the Famicom through PS1 eras survive as not-game companies. Vap and Meldac still exist as music labels, believe it or not!

So, Sky Think System. (Which still exists, to my earlier point, as Sky.)

Sky Think System made three video games, two of which came out on both the Saturn and the PlayStation, and one which was PlayStation exclusive: Harmful Park, which I finally tracked down in 2005 and wrote about here. 

I found KURURIN PA! via SATURN SUPER, a demo-disc magazine for the Sega Saturn. It’s a competitive dropping puzzle game, which was a huge genre during the PS1 era on consoles (and in arcades) and which I was a particular fan of. We played this game a lot.  

I should say -- we played the DEMO a lot. The demo on the Saturn Super magazine disc allowed for versus play; it just locked the number of characters. I tried to buy a full version of the game, but I couldn’t find one at any of the e-tailers that sold import games at the time. 

It’s really a simple game, and I find it a ton of fun.

I’m going to admit something here: I really suck at puzzle games. I can’t think that far ahead and grasp the deep strategies that people need to excel at things like Tetris Attack/Puzzle League/Panel de Pon. Hell, I suck at Puyo Puyo. My favorites in the genre at the time were games like this, Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move, and Hanagumi Taisen Columns, which are as much about things like precision and speed (and maybe luck!) as planning. My favorite, bar none, is Magical Drop III, which is about paying attention and playing fast. 

Back in those days, customer service for the import gamer was top-class; When Shingata Kururin Pa! came out, NCS actually called me on the phone because they’d recalled I had wanted to buy the game in the past. 

Shingata Kururin Pa! has much better art direction and is much more strategic; you can store the flames and set off major chain-reactions, and in fact, if you don’t, you’re not going to be dropping garbage blocks on your opponent. So, in fact, I suck at it, because that’s the level of planning at which my capabilities break down. 

Harmful Park I’ve addressed at the above link; it’s a gorgeous and fun little 2D shooter which you can play cooperatively; I think its value has blown up since I bought it, but it’s also on PSN for 600 yen if you have a Japanese account and a PlayStation 3, like a lot of the high-value games for the PS1. I’d recommend checking it out. (By the way, Kururin Pa! is up there too!)

Finally, I tracked down this photo of Saturn Super:

I still have this and another issue, but didn’t find time to make my own photos. This issue is legendary to me, not just because of Kururin Pa! but also Albert Odyssey Gaiden and Dark Savior -- two demos I played every which way till Sunday and two Saturn games of which I am unreasonably fond to this day. AOG’s localization is probably Working Designs’ worst, and it’s a dull game, but I really like it and its staid, straightforward, SNES++ atmosphere. Dark Savior on the other hand is just weird and awesome. 

I always wanted to buy Saturn Super but the PS1/SS era was SO exciting and there was NEVER enough money for games (or demo discs.) So, alas, I only have two. 

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THE AFTERIMAGE of FINAL FANTASY VII

I wrote an essay about Final Fantasy VII, which gets at what’s good about the game, what I think people should take away from the game if they approach it these days -- and less so, what’s wrong with the franchise these days, and what I think will be the challenges of trying to pull off an HD remake.  You can read it here. A sample:

The Final Fantasy of the 1990s was steeped in humor, both gentle and overt; of late, the games have gotten more bombastic and pompous. The majority of the humor in the largely nonsensical 2005 Final Fantasy VII film, Advent Children, was inadvertent. If anything, things have gotten worse since then. What little comic relief there is, is generally cringe-worthy, even perplexing.

I'm talking about humor here, but what I really mean is broader than that. What I'm talking about could be called "humanity," maybe -- spirit and verve. Final Fantasy VII has a lot of all of that, and it comes across in a lot of different ways. With its tale of a world divided, the original Final Fantasy XIII tried to recapture the tragedy of Midgar, but it got lost amidst a tremendously artificial setting that did a great job of painting hallways of frozen crystal and glowing trees but completely failed to portray any cohesive (or comprehensible) world at all.

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パンチライン

I've been watching a hell of a lot of anime lately, and it's all been really good. We're in the middle of a boom again, but right now, I'm enjoying the hell out of that boom.

Of course, during boom times, it's easy for shows to get overlooked. These days, people tend to dismiss things really quickly, too. Given that climate, I suspect Punch Line didn't get much attention. On the surface, it looks like a cheesy fanservice show, and I saw people writing it off as one. But it's a lot more than that. I worry that most people will never know.

This despite the fact that it was written by Kotaro Uchikoshi. If you recognize the name, it's from the Zero Escape games: 999 and Virtue's Last Reward. And if you know those games, you already have an inkling of the depths hidden below Punch Line's 1990s harem anime sheen.

And that's the thing: In the end, Punch Line may have a dopey premise -- the main character powers up when he sees panties flash, for heaven's sake -- but in practice, it's about as risque as the second Ranma ½ movie, which came out in 1992. The fact that I'm even using the word "risque" should give you an idea how quaint the sexy stuff turns out to be.

What you'll find is the focus, instead, is a complicated sci-fi story about identity, alternate timelines, and struggling to do the right thing after being done wrong.

Here's how it begins: After the bus he's riding gets hijacked by a mysterious stranger, Yuta's spirit is knocked out of his body -- somehow -- and he ends up back in his apartment building (a marvel of visual design, by the way) as a ghost.

He can't get access to his body, but a cat-spirit called Chiranosuke appears and cajoles him into some sort of action -- so he flits from room to room, hoping to figure out what's going on by observing the other tenants. Soon, he's learning their secrets -- but it's okay, because they turn out to be more significant and interrelated with his own problems than he ever expected. He's got his own secrets, too.

The thing you'd never guess from a casual glance is how sympathetic the characters are. If you've played Uchikoshi's games, you won't be surprised to hear it, though; yes, his talent is for creating ultra high-concept and high-stakes scenarios that twist back on themselves -- but he populates them with vulnerable, flawed human beings.

You don't have to look further than Punch Line's treatment of its PC gamer shut-in character, Ito, to realize it. She's not there as rhetoric about NEETs, and she's not the butt of a nudge-nudge, wink-wink joke, either. She's just somebody who ended up the way she is and she's trying to keep going. Everybody is.

All of the characters in Punch Line are in the middle of that muddle called life. Their (secret) natures might be extraordinary; strange, terrible, enormous and seemingly unavoidable things might be around the bend. But they're taking things day-by-day, as best as they can.

Call it slice of life, with the apocalypse looming.

Much more than either of his best-known video games, Uchikoshi was utterly willing to make Punch Line incredibly stupid, apparently because it amused him to do so. But I find a dose of honest, gleeful stupidity refreshing; so much of the really dreadful stupidity in anime these days is obscured by self-serving pomposity. He pierces it. We don't need more lies that glitter and shine; we need contrast, shadows and light.

Punch Line, in the end, is about sacrifice. You wouldn't think it from the upbeat intro, the stupid premise, or the '90s-style rainbow-haired cast of young women, but it's a sad show, too. Because there's always, ultimately, an unsparing brutality to Uchikoshi's worldview.

And no superhero, not even one called Strange Juice, can save us from it.

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Dreamcast 4

Last night Fran and I finished watching SHIROBAKO, which is an anime series about anime creators at an anime studio - it’s one of the best anime I’ve seen in years, incidentally, and deserves being written about (though I’m sure a lot of others have beat me to the punch...) Anyway, this is a non-spoiler post, but in the last episode there’s a scene where one of the characters gets this...

A “Dreamgast 4,” the box proclaims, which is funny for at least a couple of obvious reasons right off the bat. For those who are unaware, anime often contains tweaked “real world�� trademarks that remain recognizable, so as to add a sense of realism, but are clearly not the actual represented product, like this “SUNY” boombox I found on a tumblr devoted to fake brands in anime:

Anyway, the other reason it’s funny (besides “Dreamgast” or the very idea of a Dreamcast 4) is the fact that the target was clearly chosen because the staff of SHIROBAKO (someone on it, anyway) is a Sega hardware otaku. Because after a second I noticed that the hardware depicted on the front of the box is a Victor Wondermega.

What’s a Victor Wondermega? It’s a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) and a Sega Mega CD (Sega CD) all-in-one unit released by Victor (aka JVC) in Japan in the 1990s, while that was a viable (?) system option. It’s pretty obscure (natch) and really cool looking, in a 1990s electronics kinda way.

Being that it was released by an electronics company, it has some enhanced functionality for music. Or something. I forget, and the top Google hit for it isn’t that informative.

The Wondermega was released in the U.S. by JVC:

As the appallingly-named “X’Eye.” Where do they get these names?

You’ll notice that is a different casing design than the original. At some point a revised Wondermega was released, which looks way less cool. That’s what we got in the West.

Images mercilessly ganked from Google Image Seach.

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Reflecting on Iwata as a game dev, and Nintendo's boss

Over at Gamasutra I took some time to write up some of the thoughts I had about Satoru Iwata, now that he’s passed away. I read a bunch of interviews with him, and as I did, I started to notice patterns... and that’s how you end up with a story:

One constant of Nintendo is that the company will surprise you. Iwata discussed this many times in the interviews I've been reading, and it's fascinating. It's not an accident that Nintendo behaves this way; doing something different than what's expected has become a codified part of the Nintendo way of doing things, but it also stems from Iwata's own convictions, too.

You can read the post on Gamasutra.

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月下の夜想曲

As you’ve probably heard by now, Koji Igarashi is back with Bloodstained, a game designed to let him continue the legacy of the design of Symphony of the Night (which stalled out after Order of Ecclesia, when Konami lost interest in letting him make Castlevania games.) 

I interviewed Igarashi about Bloodstained for Gamasutra, though that’s not really why I’m writing this post. I also took a look back at a decade-plus of interviews I did with the guy, because the hype around what turned out to be Bloodstained left me reflective.  

And, of course, I played a little of Symphony of the Night with my boo this weekend because how can you not, when this kind of thing is going on? 

I don’t have some grand thesis to write about the game, or even a love letter -- Leigh Alexander just took care of that, anyway -- but some scattered thoughts.

 When I was a kid I loved adventure games -- spawned by a mix of Maniac Mansion (my favorite game, period, when I was 10) and my dollhouse fascination, I suppose, which I’ve already written about. But it wasn’t just the small stuff -- it was interacting and discovering these things, the little details. 

Symphony of the Night is all about the little details. 

I knew this, of course. I’d always been a big fan of it. But I hadn’t played it for years. At the time, yeah, I played it so many times -- in Japanese, in English, again on the Saturn. Hell, I played the (pretty poopy, and buggy) Saturn version like three times, never mind how many times I played it on PlayStation. 

But of course remembering and playing a game are very different activities, and I was struck by the game when playing it on my Vita today. I got to the tower on the right side of the map and went down to the bottom, to the little room with the spyglass inside. That’s not the only example of how full and rich Dracula’s Castle is -- the confessional is another obvious one -- but it’s a great little room that was just there because it’s interesting. 

And that’s why I mention adventure games. Because, for me, when I left PC gaming behind, JRPGs mostly took the place of adventure games for me. But they didn’t have everything. And SotN has that one missing part. 

I miss details. There’s a lot of gloss in modern games. But the details get lost. They’re not part of the core loop. 

...

It’s hard to understate all these years later just how excellent the game looks and feels. And those two ideals are inextricable, in the context of Symphony of the Night. Alucard has amazing animations and they affect how he moves -- with weight. But they’re used judiciously; they don’t get in the way of the play at all. 

It’s hard to overstate just how much the people who made this game knew exactly what they were doing. They absolutely did. There’s plenty of wisdom in Igarashi’s “Devs Play” video, and I wish there were even more. There’s only so much time, but there’s so much to learn about this game. 

...

One thing I think people have forgotten about this game, though, due to years of praise (like I’m pooping out right now) is that the opinion of the game press and the general populace was hardly unanimous at the time. 

JOURNEY BACK TO 1997....

The truth of the matter (or how I remember it, anyway) is that it was viewed as a good game, and a niche game, and -- I’m sure about this -- a throwback. Outdated. Not moving things forward. 

Well, EGM gave it 9s and 9.5s, I see, though this doesn’t surprise me -- John Ricciardi was the guy who turned me on to the game in the first place.  

But I distinctly recall that Next Generation gave it 4 stars, instead of 5 -- because a 2D game was ineligible for 5 stars, as I recall. It just wasn’t next generation enough. You can imagine what I thought of that attitude then, and what I think of it now, for that matter.

This is my favorite Next Generation scan, by the way: 

(It was actually a really good magazine. But it had its silly biases.)

Then there were the people who didn’t want to play it because it wasn’t a “real” Castlevania game -- no whip! Contiguous map! You would run into this more than you might expect. I distinctly remember the futile conversations, where I tried to steer them onto the correct path.

...

I was thinking about Igavanias at large, too, and how the franchise could never get out of the shadow cast by SotN. 

“Every time we make a new game... our goal is to make a game better than Symphony of the Night. If you look at the games that came after it, they are great games, but very few people consider those to be better than Symphony of the Night. So we always like to set the bar high, and until we come up with a game that's better than Symphony of the Night, that's still going to be the gold standard that we're trying to shoot for." - Koji Igarashi, in an interview with Bob Mackey.

It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? But true, you’ll have to admit. It even got to the point, with Order of Ecclesia, where I didn’t even try the game -- just filed it away. I have nothing against it; in fact, I really want to play it sometime. But better to file it than to get tired of Igavania, right?   

By my reckoning (which excludes Portrait of Ruin, too) the only game in the series that manages to get to Symphony’s level of pure quality is Aria of Sorrow; that game has such an elegant design, is so tight and well executed. It’s actually more focused and polished, in that way, than Symphony of the Night. Hell, it even has a really good story. I can’t recommend it enough (and it’s only $8 on the Wii U virtual console, too).

Dawn of Sorrow looks great, but it drops the ball a bit.  

But what I’ve also noticed is that so many people lost track of Igarashi’s games when he was forced to go portable. One thing that bugs me (and which the 3DS has seemed to combat a bit, though not 100 percent effectively) is the ghettoization of portable games -- people don’t see the need to play them (ironically, I think, because I think a bunch of people who got sick of triple-A console games would have been happier if they had played portables instead.) 

For them, Bloodstained is the new coming of Symphony of the Night because there hasn’t been anything since. And that’s probably part of the explanation of why it’s doing so damn well on Kickstarter, right?

...

Back in the day, in 1997, this game seemed to come out of nowhere. As a TurboGrafx fan, I knew that Dracula X existed, though I can’t say I was aware how great it was supposed to be until a few years later. I didn’t buy it in 1993, certainly.

With that in mind, Symphony of the Night really did feel like it came out of nowhere. 

That’s fitting; the team behind it was not the main Castlevania team -- it was Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, which had only made Dracula X, as a spin-off. Hence the “X” -- the original series was just Dracula. 

The internet was around then, but it was really different. Still, I absorbed everything I could, news-wise. And I was obsessed with import games. Yet somehow I don’t remember reading a thing about PlayStation Dracula X (I must have, mustn’t I? I’m sure I did) until John Ricciardi (of EGM) started rhapsodizing about it on IRC, after devouring the Japanese version. 

Soon after that, I was able to borrow the game from my friend Aaron, who’d borrowed it from this guy who worked at the EB in the Echelon Mall. And I mowed through it, totally enraptured. 

That feeling of playing a cool new game that you don’t know a thing about is pretty rare. It’s actually getting a bit less rare thanks to the rise of indies, I think -- without marketing-heavy hype cycles for every game, you can be surprised. 

After playing through the game in Japanese, I bought the U.S. version the day it came out. And played it again. And again. And with friends, again and again. 

And thus the cycle began... 

...

I’m going to be frank: I have my reservations about Bloodstained. But even Harmony of Dissonance, which is just okay, is worth playing. So I’m not expecting a bad game. But I do worry that it’s going to be tough to pull off making an entirely original game, with a new team, while working with Unreal Engine for the first time, and trying (probably) to execute on a boatload of stretch goals (scope creep!) 

And I’m definitely in the “uh, I’m not so sure about Mighty No. 9″ camp at the moment. If that game turns out better than it looks, that’ll go some way to alleviating my worries.  

But my hope is that, yeah, Bloodstained will be the Harmony of Dissonance that paves the way to an Aria of Sorrow down the road. In that regard, this quote gave me the most hope:

"This sort of a game is one that, as you build out multiple iterations of it and make sequels, then it naturally gets better and better and more crafted and more polished. So from my perspective, I’d like to make future versions of it. Because with each version, it should hopefully become a better and better game." - Koji igarashi in an interview with Matt Leone 

So yeah. Let’s have a new Castlevania. Let’s not assume it’s going to be Symphony of the Night. Let’s just see how it goes, and go from there.

...

Addendum: Chris Charla, former EIC of Next Generation, tweeted that there was no policy against giving 2D games 5 stars. For my part, I haven’t actually read the review since 1997, and couldn’t find a scan when writing this post.  I do remember being struck by what the writer WROTE about the game, and maybe I made a bad inference. I also remember inferring that from the “guide to our review scores” type section in the magazine. If it wasn’t an official policy, it was (at least during the PS1 era) an editorial priority for the mag: pushing the shiny and new, which meant 3D. Writing up thoughts on Next Gen (like I said, it was a great mag) was not really why I wrote this post, but thought it fair to at least point out there was apparently no official policy.

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TowerFall

I have another thing up on TowerFall Ascension over at Gamasutra today. That last blog post I wrote came out of my conversation with the game’s developer, Matt Thorson. This is the transcript of our interview.

I really love TowerFall and speaking to Matt was a lot of fun and, more to the point, quite interesting. He’s a (largely) solitary developer, so he’s extremely self-assured and aware of what exactly he’s making; at the same time he feeds off of (and feeds!) the community to influence the direction he’s taking his work.

“TowerFall is, to me, about that competitive spirit -- but in a really silly, friendly way, where you're self-aware and laughing about it the whole time, but you're still trying your best and fighting each other.” - Matt Thorson

That’s part of what’s great about the game. It’s just fun. It’s not “serious” though you can play it seriously if you like. Later on I talk to him about how it’s taken the place of Bomberman for me -- I don’t go into that point (it was a bit tangential) but ultimately that’s it. TowerFall is my current-gen Bomberman and Nidhogg is my Bushido Blade.

You can read the interview here.

#towerfall gamasutra interview videogames indiegames

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Console CD player apps

And now for something totally irrelevant...

That’s the CD player for the TurboGrafx-CD/PC Engine. In 1990, I used that to listen to the very first music CDs that I bought. It was the only CD player we had. CD players... were not cheap, back then. And I was the only one in the family who really cared to listen to music, too.

It’s a simple interface, due to the system’s constraints, but it also is fully-featured -- they were trying to replicate the functions of a high-end CD player of the time.  This came up thanks to a question from Frank Cifaldi on Twitter. 

Of course, the Sega-CD (aka Mega-CD in Japan and Europe) had a CD app, too.

This is the Japanese (and European?) app. It’s similarly usable and fully featured.

The US system had a redesigned interface. This is the earliest example of skeuomoprhic design (in the context of computers, digital applications that mimic physical objects) I can think of, and the app suffers for it. Since it’s supposed to look like a piece of audio equipment, features are hidden or missing. It’s stupid. Skeuomorphism became somewhat controversial a few years ago when Apple went crazy for it on iOS, but that changed with iOS 7.

I am not a big fan of it, though I think in a limited way, in games, it can actually enhance the experience by making it more thematically congruent. In other words, it’s immersive to see an interface that is thematically relevant to the game’s content. Just don’t try too hard, because above all game interfaces should be useable.  There’s another purpose to this post: I have friends in their 20s who never actually owned a CD. I mean, I still own a bunch, but I don’t use them anymore. They’re in boxes. If I need the data on them, I rip them into iTunes -- itself almost an anachronistic act, as Apple removed the CD from the icon of the app several years ago given that CDs no longer are key to the music acquisition experience. Hell, do their computers even have CD drives anymore?

And now, a bonus...

That’s the CD player app for the Sega Saturn. I used this a bit, too, because it was so cool -- those green cubes change color and move in time to the music, and the starfield moves, too. It was nice to use in the dark.  It’s funny. CDs were so important back then and so irrelevant now. Really, CDs were everything to me -- they were my connection to music. And to people just a bit younger than me, they’re just bizarre artifacts. 

#sega cd #turbografx #pc engine #cd #video games #sega saturn

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Towerfall Ascension

Two in one day!? In a fit of pique I wrote about Towerfall Ascension, one of my very favorite games of the current generation, and specifically what drives people to choose different characters in the game, despite the fact that they’re all functionally identical, after a conversation with its developer Matt Thorson. 

What's funny is that I probably pick my main in Towerfall even more regularly than I might in a fighting game where the characters play wildly differently. I've been playing a lot of Smash 4 since it came out last fall, of course, and over any decent-length session, I'm likely to switch between Villager, Pac-Man, and Kirby. The Last of the Order? I never fail to pick her unless someone else picks her first.

You can read the rest here.

#ps4 #video games #towerfall #gamasutra

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Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

I’ve realized that I shouldn’t just blog my original writing here, but also my writing elsewhere, so you can check that out too. Elementary.

Over at Gamasutra today, I have a feature on The Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and how the developers treat storytelling as core gameplay and work with it:

"What we wanted to be able to deliver is not only story beats, but also space for you to contemplate and reflect on the story you'd experienced," says Turner. "And that really informs the actual, the practical development process. We laid out scenarios; we had them put in with temp dialogue. You go round and play it."

It’s interesting stuff, IMO, as the Western industry moves to try to make storytelling a core part of the medium once again.

You can read it here.

#everybody's gone to the rapture #gamasutra #game narrative #video games

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ライアーゲーム

Recently my husband and I finished watching Liar Game (or thought we did, anyway -- turns out there's a special and a second movie waiting for us.) It's a Japanese TV drama based on a manga series.

Fran told me he loved the show when he watched it in 2007, so I'd been curious about it for awhile now. And what made me even more curious was how he described it, something like: "The manga came out around the same time as Death Note, and the two series were rivals." I mean… Sold. That's good enough for me. Even if it's not true -- even if Liar Game is half as tense or as good as Death Note… Sure!

In the end, I wouldn't really compare them (and with this being a J-drama, not a manga I'm talking about, it's not that fair anyway) but as an introduction, it serves the purpose. If you like screwed up things happening in complicated, devious ways to people who don't deserve them, well… Merry Christmas. Here's Liar Game.

The main character of the show is Nao Kanzaki, a "stupidly honest" young woman who suddenly gets invited to the Liar Game -- a contest to make (or lose, and be in debt for) enormous sums of money based on whether or not you can trick (or, in her case, trust) your opponents. She's not cut out for it; she'll fall for anything, and she's not at all greedy either. She doesn't know what to do -- so she enlists the help of a con man called Shin'ichi Akiyama, recently released from prison, who's sharp as a tack and lives to plot and scheme.

The first contest is mano-a-mano, but from then on, the cast expands, the prizes expand, and the games expand in complexity and deviousness. Friends and rivals (and both-in-one, in the form of Yuuji Fukunaga, who's one of those supporting characters that ends up eclipsing the main cast from time to time) show up.

The whole thing snowballs out of control as Nao struggles to get people to be fair and good to one another and Akiyama spends his time unraveling everyone's plans. The show is filled with feints and double-feints, back-room deals and double-crosses.

It's a lot of fun, and it's really silly. J-dramas have a (deserved) reputation for being over-the-top and cheesy; Fran says that the best way to approach Liar Game is to think of it as live-action anime, and that's good advice.

I know a lot of Westerners who live in Japan, and a lot of anime fans. None of them seem to really watch a lot of J-dramas.

Before we watched Liar Game, we watched about two-thirds of the first season of The Following, which is a FOX TV series from a few years ago. Kevin Bacon plays an ex-FBI agent who's tracking down an internet-based killer cult that's obsessed with a narcissistic serial killer. It's a premise I'd expect from Japan before the West, so it seems interesting to use it as a point of comparison -- it's the execution that makes it feel so much different.

It got me thinking: What most clearly separates Western TV drama from J-drama is really a reliance on the culture of cinema: How stories are told, how visuals are constructed. What says "serious," and what says "frivolous," as taken from decades of movies and TV.

The Following is just cribbing what works from what's already been established. There's really nothing fundamentally serious or adult or intelligent in the execution of it. Take the scene where Kevin Bacon has to rescue his sister from an cardboard-thin crazy who ends up capturing and torturing him on a table. It's as goofy as anything in Liar Game, but Bacon sells his physical suffering as real, not posed. The scenes that immediately precede it, showing how Bacon and his sister fell out with one another, aren't inventive, but they prime us for how to feel when he comes to rescue her.  

In other words, its “seriousness” is unearned; it’s delivered via convention.

Meanwhile, the ridiculous theatricality of Liar Game will be a turn-off if you're not used to that sort of thing -- despite the fact that it's jam-packed with clever scenes and fun ideas. Japanese dramas actually run pell-mell for what we've been taught says "frivolous" by Western drama. In Liar Game, the characters have stupid costumes, the actors are way, way, way over-the-top, the sets are tacky and cheesy (though sometimes cool), and there are almost game show-like filming techniques (constant three-peats of dramatic moments are a favorite) or cartoonishness (ridiculous reaction shots anytime something crazy happens, for example.)

“Nao-chan, this is my real hair. Do you believe me?”

But stick with it. Like I said, the show is really clever. The escalating deviousness of the ongoing rounds of the Liar Game itself create fertile ground for drama. The rules of these games are confusing and weird; they're specifically designed to trip up the participants so that they make bad mistakes, or are forced to bluff; they also offer loopholes for the savviest players to jump right through.

And the opponents who make their way into the games ensure the show is always entertaining -- but tough to predict. Particularly as alliances are always shifting, as everyone tries to think two steps ahead of the competition.

Nao never drops her principles, but she learns a trick or two along the way; it's easy to forget she's intelligent at all because she's so damn naive (which is something that's played up in the show, of course.) And Akiyama is undeniably cool. He's the kind of character that you're always waiting for him to reveal how he did it -- even when you're not even sure if he even did something yet.

When the situation looks incredibly screwed -- when there's no possible way out -- is exactly when you start anticipating that big reveal that blows it wide open. That's the kind of show this is: one of anticipatory glee that shit is about to get very silly.

It's also extraordinarily dialogue-heavy. But this is the right kind of talky -- sure, it's got an abstracted premise (a game with very strange rules -- a situation we'll never find ourselves in) but it ties in very well with the concrete (a shitton of money is at stake!)

Then there are the easy-to-grasp feelings about the situation: ("she's completely screwed if she loses"; "that guy is a fucking asshole and needs to go down"; "not this fucker again!") So when Akiyama is explaining exactly how he manipulated this stupid system to force everyone to do exactly what he wanted, you're just like … yessss!

It's not really a premise that holds up under much weight, on the face of it. Anytime the show dives into what's behind the Liar Game, it feels a little off, even if it's sold as one of the central mysteries of the series. Like many video games, the game itself and what comes from that is the important thing, and the back-story isn't really what you're here for.

But to do a 180 from that, I'd recommend the series to people who enjoyed stuff like the Zero Escape games or Danganronpa -- it's definitely in a similar "Japanese mindgame clusterfuck" kind of spirit. I really like these weird habitrails of human frailty, no matter how unrealistic they might be. That blend of high-concept with high-octane pathos is what grabs me. Just enjoy the struggle. I definitely did.

Side note: There's a newer, Korean version of Liar Game. Dare we? I think we dare.

#jdrama #liar game #review

[ferricide]

ガンダム Gのレコンギスタ

It seems like as soon as it came into focus, it disappeared.

When I look back at the latest Gundam series, Reconguista in G, I'm left with a blur of impressions rather than a complete tapestry. I've found it hard to write about, as a result.

It's fast-moving, filled with characters, surprising. It seems to me that writer/director Yoshiyuki Tomino had a goal in mind and an idea how to get there, but if things got bumpy along the way, that didn't concern him in the slightest.

And you know what? That's cool. Because this is a show about a fast-moving, rapidly escalating conflict. It shouldn't be smooth. It never lets up -- if anything, it keeps accelerating. 

I'm glad I watched it.

I've been a fan of Gundam for around 20 years now. Before then, I had no interest in the franchise whatsoever, but in the 1990s a guy I met online sent me VHS copies of Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory in the mail.

I was actually hostile to the idea of watching robot anime back then, but I decided to give it a go. I found a universe inventive and well-realized, one that focused (to my surprise) on people much more than space battles, and told a story with maturity and depth. And 0083 isn't even the best Gundam series by a long shot, I've since discovered.

There's a consistency to the franchise, though, that G-Reco (much faster than typing "Reconguista in G," isn't it?) dispenses with. It has a new story to tell.

We ended up watching the first three episodes twice, because we wanted to show them to a friend. This turned out to help a lot. That's because this train moves fast. It seems that, these days anyway, movies and shows tend to move fast or give you a lot to pay attention to, but not both. The thrill-ride judders to a stop to info-dump exposition before lurching back into motion. G-Reco, by contrast, expects you to pay attention, and put things together yourself.

The main character of the show is a smart teen called Bellri Zenam. He a son of privilege (his mom's an important bureaucrat). As the show begins, he's about to graduate from class and take his place in the Capital Guard, the self-defense force in his city. But without aggressors, is a defense force really necessary?

So here come some aggressors, of course.

There's an attack on Capital Territory, where Bellri lives, and he gets pulled into the conflict -- because he's a capable pilot and he's too curious for his own good. He's smart enough to assume that he's looking before he leaps -- but he isn't, really.

What happens next isn't from the Gundam playbook. Yes, many Gundam series follow teens that get swept up into a rapidly escalating war who somehow lay their mitts on a Gundam -- Bellri ends up piloting the G-Self. In that sense, it's typical Gundam.

It's the setting that's all jacked up.

It explores atypical themes -- like, how do societies that have vowed to put war behind them end up prosecuting it? How do kids who grew up in ease and comfort handle violent conflict? How does someone who only has a dim and distant idea of what a nation-state is, and why it might butt heads with another one -- one who's lived a life of perfectly prescribed order under a system carefully designed to preclude conflict -- react when conflict suddenly arises?

I haven't read much about the show online. I know it's not so popular. The one thing that I did read and which helped bring G-Reco into focus was this: Tomino said that the show isn't for Gundam's older, established fan-base, but for the youth of today. He wants to get something across to them. In his eyes, today's adults have dropped the ball.

But for all that, G-Reco is not a straightforwardly moralistic kind of show; it's more of a comedy of escalating errors, as people in positions of power make increasingly poor and more desperate decisions because they feel pressured by circumstance -- or comfortable in their ignorance or arrogance.

If Tomino has something to say, it seems to be: "You don't want to end up like these clowns, do you? It's not too late for you to figure shit out."

Looking back on the show, I see people making really bad decisions that lead to conflict and catastrophe; people lying to others or themselves; people being lazy and suffering for it; people taking action without stopping to consider the consequences, which turn out much different than they anticipated; people who make bad decisions because they've never even had to make hard decisions before, and it has never occurred to them that decisions have costs.

The characters in this show often make the wrong choices because they're inexperienced. They rely on a system of taboos to tell them what (not) to do. Everyone has a vague notion of what to do and not do, but no real idea why. So when conflict comes, those rules can't stand up to it, because they're inflexible. It's a system that works great, until someone starts breaking the rules. Suddenly, nobody can really see what the rules were for. 

Characters in this show are constantly stealing mechs from each other -- because nobody imagined that they would.

Nobody in the Capital Army (which is supposed to be so much more gung-ho than the Capital Guard, mind you) is even on alert on the weekends. Why would they be? Nothing ever happens here. Everybody else gets those days off. There's this great moment where one of the characters yells at his subordinates for not being on-call on the weekend; a few episodes later, he's not ready … because it's the weekend.

In short, the people in this show are incompetent. But that's the point. In the 1970s, Tomino's future was about humans cruelly waging war. In the 2010s, his future is about humans stupidly waging war.

A war with weekends off.

If using an anime TV series about robots fighting in space to make a commentary on how society works doesn't sound interesting to you, you probably want to skip G-Reco. And I don't say that because it's didactic, because it isn't. I'm saying it because it's the kind of show where you're not just watching for the basic stimulus of "cool shit happens." There's cool shit happening, sure, but G-Reco as a narrative tends toward the ambiguous and multilayered, not straightforward and badass.

There's often little doubt, for example, what the mental state of a show's main character is. Anime can take this to theatrical extremes, in fact. But Bellri? I don't know what he's thinking. I have to pay attention to his actions and try to figure out why he went from Point A to Point B. I have to listen to what he says and who he says it to. And I have to think of it in the context of the conflict, and its factions, and the shifting alliances that come along with that as more, and stranger, facts -- about the very nature of life in G-Reco's setting -- come to light.

I think that explains a lot what's off-putting about this show for people.

I do not mean to condescend. A lot of good shows put more effort into crafting their arcs and slowly building up to dramatic climaxes. A lot of shows that are not that great make big dramatic moments routine, because they push people's buttons. People seem to like that just fine. And some shows do both at the same time; it's pretty special when the staff gets that blend just right.

G-Reco doesn't do any of that, really. Shit Just Keeps Happening. The closer you get to the end, it even starts accelerating. It doesn't offer easy answers, or set-piece episodes that are just so damn cool, or sustained dramatic moments, or even effective comic relief!

It all makes sense, though. That's the thing. That's why it works. Because that's actually how life works, too. And there isn't anything in this show that isn't there for a reason. The reason may not be apparent at first blush, but it exists.

I've come to realize something, lately: What will get me to drop something partway through is whether I have faith that I trust the writer is taking me somewhere -- that he or she knows where we're going together.

This doesn't mean that I'm only looking to read or watch things that wrap up in a neat little bow. That's an unfair demand. But I need to have faith that the journey will have been worth taking. A couple of works I've dropped in the last year: Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch; Attack on Titan (the TV show.) Neither of them could convince me that a continued investment of my time was going to pay off in either the short or long term.

G-Reco isn't perfect. It's solidly good, though, and with an outlook and execution that are modern, paired with a mode of storytelling that is idiosyncratic. It's true to itself and to the viewer, and I think that counts for a lot. That's what I want to see. I'm grateful when I do.

Tomino had something to say, and he did it, via Bellri Zenam's journey through our solar system. Bellri's always learning, and thanks to that, there's always something to see and think about. It just happens that Tomino envisions our solar system as a clusterfuck of human arrogance and error.

Good news, by the way: Sunrise has put the show up on YouTube -- so you can try it for yourself. Here’s Episode 1.

#gundam #g-reco #anime #review

[ferricide]

Pour quoi, Gunpla

So a little bit ago, Fran and I picked up plastic model building.

This took me by surprise. I hadn't been looking for a new hobby, and my one experience building a Gundam model when I got into the show in the '90s wasn't satisfying. But I have to say -- there's a lot of upside here. I'm really enjoying it. Like, new hobby for real enjoying it; I'll keep doing this.  

I thought I'd explain why… and make a few recommendations.

I think the main reason is this: I lacked anything real-world in my hobbies. Video games, movies/TV, and reading are all activities that take place in imaginary spaces -- they're media hobbies. And far too often, screen-hobbies.

The screen can be a vortex. A sucking, sucky fucking vortex.

Until I sat at a table for a couple of hours to put together a plastic model with my hands -- clipping the plastic pieces off the sprue, feeling them, making them fit, slowly assembling something -- I didn't realize that a hobby like this was something I was missing. It uses my body and brain differently than other stuff that I do. 

And then I started to notice more upside. Besides the obvious (you end up with a cool-as-shit model at the end of the process) there's the fact that it's meditative. It's a quiet, thoughtful little hobby; it's not stressful (you can screw things up, but usually not too bad, and all you have to do is take it easy and do your best) and it's the kind of thing that lets your mind sort of … float. Not space out, because it requires attention -- but not so much that it's engaging you cognitively.

And it's a nice thing to do with someone else. We've had friends over to build, and Fran and I are often both building together. You can converse or not, and just work side-by-side.

It's also a fun hobby. I know people can be all collectory about it, but for me it's just about finding things you like and then building those. Everyone has a different approach to that; I lean to either toy-like models, or ones that are related to the characters from the anime I like. Fran just shops for the ones he thinks are coolest. There is an incredible variety of kits, and it's still easy to get a large number of the kits released over the last 20 years.

And it's a pretty cheap hobby: Kits can be had for as low as $10, and building them straight-from-the-box results in a pretty good-looking model at the end, even without paint. If you add some money for a couple Gundam Markers for panel lining, which will last you awhile, it's still not a big expenditure.

And so I'm encouraging people to get interested in this hobby, in the end! Fran put together something a little bit ago called #gunplaweekend -- a Twitter hashtag where everybody built Gunpla (Gundam plastic models, in the hobby's parlance) over the weekend and then tweeted out the results (and I Storified those here, if you're curious how that all turned out. It'll give you a great idea what various kinds of Gundam models look like -- price ranges, styles of mech, complexity and difficulty, and builder experience level.)

There's another positive, that I think is more subtle but worth mentioning. One of the reasons I've been seeking a non-screen hobby is because the internet just doesn't feel great anymore. It's not just the obvious reasons; it's also the noise everyone is making all the time to stand out, and the fact that Twitter (which in my life has become default "internet," the hub I always return to) encourages many bad kinds of communication (too-short, unsubtle, nuance-starved, negative, knee-jerk) over more meaningful kinds. It's fatiguing on its best days.

Well, showing off your models and sharing the love just adds cool positivity to the space, which is something it badly needs.

Interested in starting to build? The #gunplaweekend link is a great resource if you're wondering how to get started, but I also have another suggestion.

Right now, at Toys R Us stores across the U.S., Bandai has shipped LBX model kits (under the moniker "Sprukits"). LBX is based on a Level-5 video game/anime franchise (the show's on Nickelodeon) and the kits are great beginner kits. They look good, they're easy and fun to put together, and they're readily available (though avoid the "level 1" kits, they're too tiny, basic, and poor-quality to be any fun or look good. Jump to "level 2," the $20 kits.)

(N.B.: You can also easily get Gundam kits at Barnes & Noble, btw, and tons and tons more on Amazon or other retailers, like robots4less, HLJ, or Tatsu Hobby, one of our local shops.)

So, with that in mind, the secondary purpose of this blog is to show off the LBX kits I've built -- we've actually branched away from the domestically-released kits (there are only 4) and into the Japanese-release kits, which are on Amazon and generally affordable there, because they're so much fun. They have a latter-day Mega Man-type vibe -- more Mega Man Zero, but a little bit Mega Man Legends, too. 

They're designed for kids, so they're simple and toylike, but the latter makes them incredibly appealing and fun; the former makes them good starter-kits.

Some pics:

The first kit I built: The LBX Deqoo. Simple, but with cool details (like a shiny red eye.) This one is available at TRU. 

The show’s hero-mech, Achilles. I did paint his spear-tip silver, so it’s not completely stock, but the kit is very detailed out-of-the-box and a really fun, yet easy, build. This is the kit I would recommend specifically to beginners to start with, both because of the build and the result. Available at TRU, though getting rare, comparatively, at least around here. Japanese kits are on Amazon too.

LBX Trivhine. A Japanese kit. A badass lizard.

One of Fran’s LBX kits - Dot Blastrizer. Another Japanese kit. Too much cool clear stuff on this one (all the yellow parts.)

[ferricide]

squirrels

recently fran and i played through suikoden II, and we got the squirrel team. it was SO CUTE that i took screens (we were streaming) and here you go. (the gist of it is this: 4 of them are totally optional characters and not part of the main cast at all; you'd rarely if ever find them by accident. 

mukumuku is a star of destiny [a character you need to recruit to fill the game's main roster] but tricky to find in and of himself... 

the game has team attacks, and if you set up your party with 5 squirrels and the main character, they, well... power ranger out.) to make it even cuter fran made sure to be FIGHTING flying squirrels with our team of flying squirrels. 

(no, we didn't use the squirrels through the end of the game or really at all. but how can you not catch them all? for more fun read richmond's investigations for them. 

#suikoden