1897: Ruins of the Moon

It occurs to me that I never gave some final thoughts on Fragile Dreams after I finished it the other day, so I shall do my best to rectify that right now. There will be spoilers ahead!

Fragile Dreams wasn’t a particularly outstanding game from a mechanical perspective — its use of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combo made combat in particular extremely cumbersome, a fact not helped by the extremely limited repertoire of moves available for each weapon and the seeming inability to dodge quickly — but it nonetheless proved to be a consistently compelling experience from start to finish.

Fragile Dreams also didn’t quite match up to its own ambition in storytelling: the final hours descend somewhat into your fairly typical “madman wants to destroy the world” (in this case, destroy the world again) scenario, and the overall plot itself is riddled with holes and inconsistencies. But again, this certainly didn’t diminish from the overall experience.

Fragile Dreams was an oddly beautiful game. Despite being a low-resolution Wii title, it looked good. It had a distinctive aesthetic all of its own, and immediately set itself apart from other post-apocalyptic adventures by the simple use of colour and contrast throughout. There’s a fair amount of crawling around in the dark by torchlight, but the game sensibly breaks this up with some colourful segments. Escape from a subway system earlier in the game and you’re treated to the gorgeous, rich colours of dawn in the sky. Pick your way through a forest to a secluded hotel and you’re surrounded by lush greenery. It’s a far cry from the greys and browns that usually come with the post-apocalyptic territory, and it made the game less of a chore to play than the trudging through endless wastelands of something like the Fallout series.

There were some interesting characters, too. Much of the story is about protagonist Seto’s desire to find someone with whom he can share his experiences — to laugh, to cry, to point out how beautiful something is. The characters he does run into throughout the course of the story all provide him with a certain degree of companionship, but none are quite the same as actual human company.

First he runs into what appears to be a piece of military hardware called “Personal Frame” or “PF”, which has its own artificial intelligence and personality. PF provides good company for Seto for a few hours as he explores, and it’s clear that Seto starts thinking of “her” (for although she looks like a backpack-mounted radio, she has a female voice) as a friend. This friendship is cut short, however, when PF’s battery runs out and she “dies”, leaving Seto all alone once again.

Then he runs into Crow, a somewhat androgynous-looking boy who appears to have cats’ eyes and fangs. Crow initially antagonises Seto by stealing his locket — which is full of precious memories, including a screw he took from PF’s “body” — and this results in a chase all over the abandoned theme park Crow calls home. Crow eventually admits defeat after taking a nasty fall from the park’s Ferris wheel; seemingly against all odds, he survives, and claims to accept Seto as a friend, even going so far as to steal his first kiss because “that’s what friends do” — something which Seto is somewhat surprised by, but which he doesn’t reject outright. It becomes clear that all is not quite right with Crow, however, as many of the things he says are direct quotations from a children’s storybook Seto finds a little earlier; indeed, Crow’s true nature is revealed later when Seto discovers him slumped in a room with hundreds of discarded robotic bodies: Crow is indeed a robot, and their budding friendship is once again cut short as his batteries expire, leaving him, like PF, as an empty shell devoid of life and consciousness.

Seto’s next encounter is with Sai, the ghost of a young woman who appears to have committed suicide or at least succumbed to a drug addiction; this isn’t made outright explicit, but can be easily inferred from the pills scattered around her dead body and the syringes, tourniquets and other paraphernalia littering the room. Sai doesn’t mention this and Seto clearly doesn’t understand it, so nothing more is said; the two develop a close and honest friendship as a result, with Sai accompanying Seto for most of the rest of the game from this point onwards. Again, though, although Sai and Seto become fast friends, it’s not quite the same as real human company for Seto; in a heartfelt speech to Sai, Seto admits that he just wants to share his experiences with someone else, to feel their warmth, to feel like he isn’t alone, and for that, a ghost just isn’t going to cut it, hence his game-long search for the mysterious silver-haired girl Ren.

The characters are all interesting, unconventional and have plenty left open to interpretation, and this is something of a pattern for the game as a whole. One of the strongest pieces of narrative design in the game comes through the use of “memory items”; bits and pieces of junk that Seto comes across in his journey that have the last memories of the dying world’s inhabitants infused into them somehow. Some of these are mundane, some of them are profound, some of them form part of a larger story, some of them hint at the truth behind the situation in which the world finds itself. There’s a sequences of recollections between a young woman whose legs became paralysed when she was a little girl and her botany-obsessed childhood sweetheart Mao that is particularly heartbreaking, for example.

After a while, then, you start to build up a very vivid mental picture of the game world both as it exists now and as it existed prior to the disaster that wiped everyone out. It’s pretty bleak and lonely, but also fascinating to explore, and one of the most interesting things about the experience is how many unanswered questions it leaves at the end. Whether this is intentional or simply due to the writers not having thought about it — a bit of both, I feel, if an interview I read a few days ago is anything to go by — doesn’t really matter in the end, since it’s this thought-provoking nature that will keep you thinking about Fragile Dreams long after you’ve finished it.