Tag: episodic games

2190: Rubble Without a Cause

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I played through the second episode of the new King’s Quest game today. It’s a lot shorter than the first one, so I was able to get through it in a single sitting. Despite being fairly short, though, it’s an interesting contrast from the previous episode; rather than being a relatively large (for an adventure game) open world with a non-linear series of puzzles for you to tackle at your leisure, Rubble Without a Cause, as the second episode is known, takes place in a much more confined environment, and largely focuses around one big puzzle: how to free everyone from captivity at the hands of the goblins.

Yes, instead of throwing us back into Daventry, Rubble Without a Cause puts us underground in a goblin prison complex. Graham is dismayed to discover that most of the major characters from the town of Daventry appear to have also been abducted, along with the eccentric merchant’s “unicorn” Mr. Fancycakes. Thus begins a quest to find a way out of this predicament.

There’s a twist, though: unlike most adventure games, you don’t have all the time in the world with which to achieve your goals. Unfolding over the course of several days, the adventure sees the health of all of the prison’s occupants — with the exception of Graham — decline as the days pass. Thus you’re presented with some difficult, mutually exclusive choices throughout as you determine who it is best to give medicine and food to as they require it. And once you start getting closer to escaping, you need to determine which potential companion is going to provide you with the best chance of succeeding, and ensure that they are in good health for when you make your attempt.

The small scale of the episode initially felt a little disappointing, but on reflection after finishing it, I very much liked the concept of it being based around one central problem for you to solve, and felt this was a good use of the episodic format to provide a short-form but complete-feeling experience. You can solve it in a number of different ways, too — it is, I believe, even possible to complete the episode without anyone running out of health and being carried away by the goblins, but I most certainly did not succeed in that particular endeavour today.

In many ways, the King’s Quest episodes we’ve seen so far are a great example of “gaming short stories” — quite literally, since they are presented as stories narrated by the ageing King Graham (whom I’ll be very surprised to see survive the fifth episode) to his grandchildren. This presentation of the narrative as a participant narrator looking back on his past actions is an interesting twist on how old Sierra games such as the original King’s Quests used to work, with a strong contrast between the omniscient, non-participant narrator and the in-character dialogue between characters. King’s Quest, as a series, maintained this style of presentation until its seventh installment, and it’s good to see new developers The Odd Gentlemen returning very much to the “feel” of the classic Sierra adventures.

So was Rubble Without a Cause worth playing, given its short length? Well, if it was a standalone game by itself, I’d perhaps feel a little short-changed at its small scale and short length. In the context of the whole series, though, it makes a good, nicely contrasting follow-up to the excellent first episode, and has me once again hungering to know what happens next!

1929: Another Episode

One thing I really like for reasons I can’t quite explain is when one type of media uses conventions from another, and does so effectively.

I’m particularly enamoured with the idea of video games taking cues from TV shows and adopting an episodic structure. This is something that both Eastern and Western developers have been experimenting with over the last few years, and both have approached it in markedly different ways.

The Western approach involves a developer releasing a “season” of discrete, separate games (typically five or six) at semi-regular intervals, with the complete run telling an entire story, and the possibility existing for a “second season” should the first one prove popular enough. (So far, this has happened with the episodic Sam and Max and The Walking Dead games, both by Telltale Games.)

This is all very well and good — particularly as they’re usually priced in such a way that buying the complete “season” is the same price as one regular-sized game, since individual episodes tend to just be a couple of hours long — but the biggest issue Western developers have had with this format is timeliness. It’s rare to get episodes less than a month apart, and in some cases it’s several months.

The most notoriously extreme case, of course, is Valve’s Half-Life 2, which promised to follow up the original game’s story with a series of three “episodes”. A fair plan, the theory behind it being that releasing what was effectively Half-Life 3 in smaller episodes rather than as one big game would allow devoted fans to get their hands on the new game — or part of it, anyway — sooner than they would otherwise be able to. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course: Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, Half-Life 2 Episode 1 followed two years later in 2006, and it was another year before Half-Life 2 Episode 2 appeared in 2007 and ended on a cliffhanger that now, in 2015, remains unresolved due to the continued absence of Half-Life 2 Episode 3.

This is a problem for the episodic format; the power of television series is that you can check in with them at regular, predictable intervals, and your time with the cast and characters becomes something of an “event” in your life, whether you’re marathoning a show on Netflix or kicking it old-school and watching things as they’re actually broadcast on TV. In order for that to work, the episodes need to be close together — typically a week apart. As Western-developed episodic games stand, however, their development cycles are such that releasing them a week apart simply wouldn’t be possible unless they were all developed at the same time, in which case you might as well release them as one big game anyway.

So that’s what a number of Japanese developers have done: take the episodic format (in many cases, complete with teaser, opening credits sequence, “monster of the week”, cliffhanger and end credits) and stick a bunch of them together into a single game.

It’s an effective approach in several ways. Narratively speaking, it allows the story to flow through a number of different distinct but interconnected arcs before reaching a conclusion that — hopefully — wraps them all together and resolves everything nicely. Mechanically, meanwhile, it provides a suitable structure for gradually introducing new concepts at set intervals so as not to overwhelm the player with overly complex systems right from the get-go.

I’ve played a number of Japanese games and visual novels that adopt this approach in recent years, with notable examples including School Days HQ, which quite simply was an interactive six-episode anime series, and My Girlfriend is the President, which even went so far as to conclude each episode with a “Next Time On…” teaser before immediately jumping in.

Two particularly effective examples from the very recent past and present are Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus and Omega Quintet, the latter of which I’m currently playing on PS4 and, as noted yesterday, am adoring.

Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus has an interesting structure. There are four main story arcs, each of which focuses on one of the four ninja schools involved in the overall narrative. These each tell a story by themselves and have their own distinct mood, themes and tone, but they also work together to help build up a full picture of the world in which Senran Kagura unfolds. Once you have cleared all four of the main stories, there’s a final episode that wraps everything up neatly. In effect, the complete game works like one of those anime series that has an abrupt tonal shift partway through its run (either between seasons, as in the case of something like To Love-Ru, or in some cases right in the middle of a season, as seen in Sword Art Online), perhaps moving to focus on a different set of characters, a different storytelling format or simply a change of subject matter.

But it doesn’t stop there. Shinovi Versus also features a short, five-level mini-story for each and every one of the playable characters in the game, with these effectively acting in the same manner as “OVAs” — short episodes, often distributed through means such as first print run mangas, preorders and the like, that don’t have anything to do with the main story and are sometimes considered non-canonical. By the time you’ve finished these as well as the main story, you have a very thorough understanding of every single character involved in that narrative. It’s an effective approach.

Omega Quintet, meanwhile, goes all-out anime in its approach, with pre-credits teasers, opening titles, self-contained narrative arcs that build up the overall story, gradual introduction and exploration of main characters an episode at a time, cliffhangers and end credits sequences. Yes, Omega Quintet is a game in which you’ll see the “end credits” multiple times over the course of a single playthrough, and it’s always satisfying to do so; the episodes are structured sensibly in both the narrative and mechanical senses I mentioned above and it works really well as a format. One more reason to like a game I’m already enamoured with.

I wonder if we will ever see Half-Life 2: Episode 3, though. It’s become something of a joke by now, and we are, to be honest, getting to the stage where people who originally played Half-Life 2 “back in the day” probably don’t care any more (I don’t, though I’d play Episode 3 if it came out due to sheer curiosity) and a new generation of gamers might not even know what it is. It is the great Unfinished Symphony in gaming, and a warning to any other developers considering the episodic approach: take your cues from the Japanese way of doing it, and save yourself a whole lot of hassle.