#oneaday Day 746: I Love You, Emi

This post regards the notorious amateur-developed visual novel Katawa Shoujo. If you are intending to play this game and proceed down the “Emi” path and would like to avoid spoilers, I recommend you skip this post. I’ve even put the spoilery discussion below the break. Aren’t I nice?

If you’re still reading this, it’s highly likely you already know what Katawa Shoujo is but just in case you aren’t, it’s a visual novel developed by 4 Leaf Studios, made up of members of the much- (and usually justifiably-) maligned 4chan community along with other itinerant creative types from around the Internet. It was developed following extended discussion over a sketch by Japanese doujinshi artist Raita, and is the very definition of a “labour of love”, having come from discussions on 4chan all the way to a full-fledged, professional-quality game between the years of 2007 and 2012. It’s been described by some as “eroge” or an erotic game, but I feel this does it an injustice; there are sexual scenes in the game, yes, but the point of the game is not to get to these scenes — rather, they are part of the plot, and not necessarily a “victory” for the player. They are also not terribly frequent compared to the rest of the game, which focuses on interpersonal interactions and psychological issues.

If you want to check out Katawa Shoujo for yourself, take a peek at the official website.

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#oneaday Day 616: Characterisation

What makes a good character? It’s not necessarily one you can engage with and sympathise with because some of the most memorable characters there are are villains. A tragic villain who has some sort of dark past that led him to his evildoing is often the most interesting, but sometimes villains who are just plain evil in a variety of creative ways can be memorable, too.

On the “good” side of the spectrum, distinctive, likable characters are fun to “hang out” with. Even slightly irritating characters can be memorable in their own way — though perhaps not for the reasons their creator intended. They don’t necessarily have to “do” much, but they have to be more than a sounding board delivering lines in a flat, dry sort of way.

In the world of video games, characterisation may be frequently exaggerated, but it often leads to memorable encounters — particularly if you spend a protracted amount of time with said characters, as you frequently tend to do in RPGs. JRPGs, for all their faults and linearity, often present the strongest characters in all of gaming, even though many of them tend to fall into the cliché trap. Despite this, though, if you’ve engaged with the gameplay sufficiently over the course of the 20/40/50/90/100 hours it takes to beat whatever RPG you’re playing then you’ll probably find yourself missing those characters when the time comes to leave them behind.

On the Western front, BioWare are often regarded as masters of characterisation, and indeed characters such as Mordin in Mass Effect 2 and Shale in Dragon Age: Origins are pretty memorable. But very often when I beat a BioWare game, I don’t find myself wishing I could spend more time with those characters in quite the same way I do when I beat a Persona game, or as I anticipate I’m going to feel when Xenoblade Chronicles eventually comes to an end.

Video games are, in some ways, a more unrefined medium than other formats. Technical limitations often get in the way of being able to make use of techniques used in, say, film or writing. Writing in particular allows the author to explore a character in a level of detail arguably unrivalled by any other medium. Of course, said author has to be careful not to give away too much too soon, otherwise the pacing of the character’s story is thrown out of whack and the reader might not feel inclined to go on. Getting to know a character should be a gradual process — that doesn’t necessarily mean that a chapter of their “dark past” comes to light at a time, since a character doesn’t need a dark past to be interesting — but each hour the audience spends in the company of that character should be like getting to know a real person. You start to recognise that character’s traits, their likes, dislikes, foibles, weaknesses and the forms of adversity in which they find they can stand the strongest.

There’s an occasionally-mentioned piece of writers’ wisdom that states that to make the best stories, you have to be as mean as possible to your main character. While following a protagonist’s struggles is often entertaining, it doesn’t necessarily have to involve them being kidnapped, tortured, raped, mutilated and all manner of other things. Psychological torment can be profoundly affecting, too — and different characters have different triggers by which they can be psychologically traumatised. For one strong-stomached character, it might only be the most depraved and horrendous images imaginable that could torment their mind and keep them awake at night. For another, it could be something as simple as the fact that the guy at the coffee shop didn’t pay them as much attention as they would have liked. Characters are people, after all — and like people, they’re all different.

Inventing your characters is one of the most fun parts of creative writing. Figuring out what to do with these characters is the challenging bit that comes afterwards. Get your head around that and you’ve got yourself a story.

Player Character WLTM companion w/personality, GSOH

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“Soldiers!” she cries, as we hear the indecipherable radio chatter behind the door to the cellar we are hiding in, then that terrible bleeping that means they’re going to blow the door and come flooding in like they have done so many times before. I push the clip into my machine gun firmly and she does the same. My trigger finger itches.

The door explodes inwards, and a soldier strides in purposefully, his gun ready to fire. Fortunately, we are ready for him, hiding behind a crate. We leap up and unload a hail of bullets into his head and he slumps to the floor, blood splattering the wall behind him.

“Come on,” she says, heading for the door. I follow. Outside there is more radio chatter and more gunfire. There’s lots of them. I worry that we might not make it out of this one alive, despite her remarkable resilience to being shot in the face and my relative fragility. And I’m the one in the Hazard Suit.

“Gordon, look out!” she cries as a grenade flies in through the door. Quick as a flash, I pull out the Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator, grab the live grenade and fling it back out of the door. It explodes as it lands, sending soldiers flying every way. I look over to her for approval. “Nice shot,” she says with a smile. Then she turns back to the window to clean up the survivors. I do the same.

After the battle, we manage to deactivate the force field that was holding our car captive, allowing us to get on our way. We sprint back to the waiting vehicle, a battered old wreck that will hopefully get us where we want to be. I hop into the car, and she jumps in through the front and lands in her seat. I look over at her before I start the engine, and she smiles and winks at me, a small gesture that means a lot.

Right at that moment, I fell in love with Alyx Vance.

Companions in videogames are nothing new. The earliest RPGs saw the player tooling around town/fantasyland/space with a party of fellow adventurers in tow, but it’s not been until relatively recently that we’ve had a true feeling of “camaraderie” between a game’s protagonist and their companion(s). When it’s done right, though, it adds a huge amount to a game, and even makes the presence of a silent protagonist less jarring.

Take Alyx above, for example, in a scene from Half-Life 2 Episode 2. (Apologies if that constitutes a “spoiler”, by the way.) Her distinctly “human” responses to situations that she and Gordon find themselves in allow the player to engage on a personal level with what is going on without Gordon himself having to say anything. Half-Life is sometimes criticised for its lack of characterisation of Freeman, but it’s safe to say that as Half-Life 2 has developed through the original game and its two Episodes so far, Alyx has very much become a “protagonist by proxy”, coming out with the quips and one-liners that you might hear a typical character in a third-person action game come out with. The fact that she’s not the player character, though, allows her to be used as a sort of “reward mechanic”. Achieve something good and Alyx will praise you, which always feels nice, even if you know it’s scripted in many cases.

Squad-based shooters would be a fine genre to use this kind of approach in, since by their very nature you have constant companionship of at least one other character. So why are these characters so often generic and uninteresting, little more than “Yes sir, open and clear” when there is such scope for characterisation and storytelling?

The best use of a squad in a game to me is in Star Wars: Republic Commando. From the outset of this game, your character and his three squadmates are set up to be unique characters with their own attitudes – peculiar, given that they’re supposed to be clones, but you can suspend your disbelief for that one, I guess. Throughout the game, there is constant radio chatter between the squad members, a good mix of simple “Yes sirs” and commentary on their surroundings. Proof positive that it can be done.

Beyond Good and Evil is another great example. Throughout the game, protagonist Jade is constantly accompanied by at least one companion character, sometimes more than one. As she proceeds through the areas of the game and comes across obstacles, the banter between Jade and this companion again helps the player to feel more like they are part of a “living world” rather than a lifeless avatar simply solving puzzles and fighting monsters. Sometimes, though, this banter is not simply there to provide a hint on how to solve a puzzle – it’s just there as a means to develop the characters. Jade herself is perhaps underdeveloped throughout the course of the game, though the reactions of her companions more than make up for this.

This approach was taken to another level in Uncharted, where both protagonist Nathan Drake and his companions throughout his adventure are well-defined characters with personalities of their own – and, notably, great voice acting. Uncharted is often quoted as an example of what happens when you let your voice actors have more than one take at each line – you get very naturalistic conversations between them that sound like scenes from a decent film rather than a bad late-night porno.

Uncharted takes the approach of Nate and his companion offering “commentary” on what is happening, much as characters in a movie would do. As Nate and Sully run through the jungle at the outset of the game, for example, they are discussing what they think they might find and how they think things will proceed. This adds interest and also adds to the movie-like ambience – when was the last movie you saw that consisted of the protagonist just running and jumping without saying anything for ten, fifteen minutes at a time?

This even continues throughout battle scenes. Get into a shootout and your companion will contribute to the battle rather than being a useless meatshield who causes a “Game Over” if they happen to catch a bullet in the neck. As the battle goes on, Nate and his companion will shout things to one another, and you’ll hear their reactions to things happening. If a grenade lands near Nate or his companion, they’ll react, not only with a hasty “Oh, shit!” but also with some beautifully naturalistic animations – cowering away from the blast, rolling away, scrambling to escape.

This sort of thing is something that we will hopefully see a lot more of in games to come – and I don’t mean in the sense of your squad saying “Eat shit and die!” every time you shoot a bug in the head, I mean in the sense of feeling like you’re “there” with someone else, someone who you’d fight for, someone who you’d die for, someone for whom you wish there was a “hug” button on the keyboard.

Perhaps we’re not up to the level of a fully artificially-intelligent companion character who can accurately respond to absolutely anything we’d care to do, but we’re certainly getting there. Characters are getting more “human” (or perhaps it would be better to say “more natural”) in their responses, and this, in turn, helps to create a greater and greater feeling of immersion in the game’s world.