2455: Not-So-Super Max

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I finally got around to finishing the last episode of Life is Strange yesterday. My final feelings about the whole thing were… overall positive, but a little mixed in a number of areas. Personally speaking, I didn’t feel it was the utter masterpiece most critics made it out to be; in fact, there were a number of aspects in the final episode that I found fundamentally unsatisfying and downright awkward. More on those in a moment; let’s talk more generally.

SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS FOR LIFE IS STRANGE AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Continue reading “2455: Not-So-Super Max” →

2418: The Bonds of True Friendship

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As someone who, for the most part, tends to put narrative concerns front and centre when considering what to entertain himself with, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that the main thing that draws me to my favourite genre of video game — RPGs — is not the stat-crunching mechanical goodness that goes on behind the scenes (though good mechanics can make a game I’m already emotionally invested in even more satisfying) but the almost overwhelming sense of camaraderie and “all being in it together” that a good ensemble cast brings to the table.

When considering narrative tropes, this sense of comradeship is regarded as “true companions” or sometimes nakama, from a Japanese word that translates to “friend” or “comrade”. Indeed, if you turn the Japanese voices on in many JRPGs, you’ll hear the word nakama used pretty liberally when characters are talking about their friends and travelling companions in the party; it’s a contrast to another Japanese term referring to friendship, tomodachi, which is typically used when talking about friends in a more social, casual manner. To put it crudely, your nakama friends are the ones who travel with you, who will go to the ends of the earth with you, the ones who are closer than family; your tomodachi friends are the ones you go down the pub with once or twice a month and talk about girls or football.

This sense of true companionship is, for me, what defines a great RPG story, and it’s a big part of why I find solitary experiences like Skyrim and Fallout — which, mechanically at least, ought to be right up my alley — so fundamentally unsatisfying: you don’t get that sense of being part of a group of people with complex and interesting relationships.

So with that in mind, I thought I’d share some of my favourite ensemble casts from the past few years. You can probably guess at least one of them.

Neptune and the gang

Yup, you were right! The biggest thing that keeps me coming back to the Neptunia series time after time — and the thing that kept me persevering with the shaky first game in the series — is the wonderful sense of camaraderie between the characters.

Interestingly, Neptunia’s cast can be split into a few different elements, each of which overlap a little and which all have Neptune as their common element.

First up, you have IF and Compa, who will always have an important place in any Neptunia fan’s heart due to them being pretty much the first characters you have a meaningful conversation with in the series. IF and Compa are friends, but also a study in contrasts; IF is somewhat sullen and tsundere (with a secret otaku side) while Compa is feminine, ditzy and honest. They’re good foils for one another, and with the chaotic personality of Neptune in the middle, just these three make for a good cast by themselves, and indeed a significant portion of the original Hyperdimension Neptunia consisted of just these three core cast members fighting alongside one another.

Then you have the more well-known faces of the series, the CPUs Blanc, Noire and Vert. These were introduced in the original Hyperdimension Neptunia almost as antagonistic characters, but over time their personalities have softened somewhat, and the four of them (including Neptune) have become very close friends with one another. Once again, they work as a group because of how they contrast with one another. Noire is determined and driven to a fault, but secretly wishes for close friendships; Vert likes to play the older sister but in many ways is one of the most immature of the group, often disappearing for days at a time to indulge in her hobbies rather than doing her job; Blanc, meanwhile, despite her youthful appearance, seems calm and mature until something — it doesn’t take much — attracts her ire, at which point she becomes a devastating force of fury.

mk2 onwards introduced the sisters of the CPUs to the series, and again, they made heavy use of contrast to make them stand out from one another. Neptune’s sister Nepgear, for example, is the opposite of Neptune in almost every way: she’s smart where Neptune is dim; she’s articulate where Neptune tends to let her mouth run away with herself; yet she’s timid where Neptune is (over)confident. Blanc’s twin sisters Rom and Rom contrast both with each other and with Blanc, with Rom being quiet and shy, while Ram is loud and rambunctious. And Noire’s sister Uni, in her own way, contrasts with the rest of the group altogether by actually being similar to her sister — a little too similar at times, so closely does she follow in her sister’s footsteps.

All together, you have a substantial ensemble cast with a variety of contrasting character types. They often clash with one another, as contrasting personalities tend to do, but their shared hardships and common goals bring them together time after time. The particularly dark mk2/Re;Birth2 story is arguably the catalyst for their closeness, thanks to the especially unpleasant events that occur therein, but by now their relationship has grown so close that each new Neptunia game feels like being reunited with a group of old friends. It’s a delight.

The Witcher

The Witcher series is an unusual case in that they’re not party-based RPGs, but they nonetheless carry a strong sense of camaraderie, friendship and even romance between their major characters. This is helped along in part by the fact that the games are based on some already extensive pre-existing lore from the original novels, but even if you’re unfamiliar with the source material, The Witcher’s relationships are a real highlight of the whole experience.

For starters, despite protagonist Geralt usually working alone for each of the games, there’s a strong sense of comradeship between him and his fellow School of the Wolf witchers, some of the last remaining witchers in the world. Months or even years can pass between them seeing one another in some instances, but when they do meet up with one another, it’s like no time has passed. The Witcher 3 in particular plays with this delightfully in a scene where Geralt and his witcher buddies get absolutely hammered before going to try on the fancy outfits of sorceress Yennefer, Geralt’s significant other (or onetime squeeze, depending on how you’ve chosen to play that particular subplot out) and play with her megascope. In game terms, it’s utterly irrelevant to the main plot and doesn’t give you any mechanical benefits, but it’s a beautifully captured moment that emphasises the fact that despite the work of witchers typically being solitary, they, too, still have need of the ties of friendship.

Then there are the recurring characters like Dandelion the bard and Zoltan Chivay the, um, dwarf. These characters show up throughout the novels and all three games, and their relationship with Geralt is likewise one of close friendship and trust. Indeed, the bond between Dandelion and Geralt is so seemingly close that all the in-game journal entries tracking your quests are written not from Geralt’s perspective or even that of an omniscient third-person non-participant narrator, but as if Dandelion is narrating Geralt’s tale in the past tense to an eager audience. It’s a nice touch.

The Witcher prides itself on shades of grey, though, and this is true for Geralt’s relationships, too. In The Witcher 3 in particular, Geralt will come into contact with a number of people with whom he’s had dealings in the past, many of whom will seem like unquestionable friends if you’re unfamiliar with their history. Yet depending on the choices you make and Geralt’s subsequent actions, their relationships can take some very surprising — sometimes tragic — turns. The arc with former spymaster Dijkstra in The Witcher 3 is particularly interesting to see play out.

The Witcher, then, definitely has an ensemble cast of the kind I find particularly appealing, even if they’re not all there obediently running along behind Geralt for the whole game. In the case of The Witcher 3 in particular, it’s proof positive that it’s more than possible for the Western open-world RPG to pull off this sense of “true companionship” — even without a persistent party — and that Bethesda should consider trying a bit harder in this regard with future Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.

Tales of Xillia

Two of my favourite RPGs in recent years were Tales of Xillia and its sequel, and the strong ties between the party members in those games are what made those games special for me.

The first Xillia had two overlapping storylines that were mostly identical apart from their very beginning and a significant chunk in the middle. The two protagonists were Jude, a somewhat idealistic young medical student who gets swept up in a series of rather peculiar events, and Milla, a mysterious young woman who claims to be the earthly incarnation of the deity Maxwell.

The journey through the two Xillias is very long, but its epic nature works to its benefit, because it allows us to get to know the two protagonists and the party members they gather around them very well indeed. There’s Jude’s childhood friend Leia, who is clumsy but charming; there’s butler Rowen, who turns out to be a highly regarded former general; there’s the cynical mercenary Alvin who seems like a pleasant enough “big brother” type but is clearly hiding something; and there’s young girl Elize, who captures the feeling of a young girl being alone in the world and finally finding people who understand her perfectly.

Xillia’s cast works because of the game’s frequent use of “skits”, where action stops for a moment and the party members have a quick chat about something. This might be important to the plot, or it might be seemingly irrelevant information, but all of it is essential to the characterisation of the group as a whole. In the first game in particular, Milla is the centrepiece of the group, and we come to understand the world of Rieze Maxia through her eyes, with her party members explaining and supporting her along the way. That said, Milla isn’t a helpless waif by any means; on the contrary, on more than one occasion her companions have to hold her back from getting a little too inappropriate with her explorations of life among the humans.

Xillia 2 takes an unusual step in this day and age by actually being a direct sequel to the first game. All the characters from the original make a reappearance, along with a couple of new ones — just enough to keep it feeling a bit different from the original, while still familiar and recognisable as a continuation of the same story. Interestingly, Xillia 2 introduces a new protagonist named Ludger, and for your first playthrough he’s an almost entirely silent protagonist, his contributions mostly being limited to grunts and gasps. (Calm down.) There is a narrative-related reason for this that I shan’t spoil for you here, but the use of a silent protagonist is also often a way of making the player feel like “they” are in the world rather than just controlling a character who isn’t them.

Regardless of the reasons for his silence, Ludger forms a suitable nucleus for the party in much the same way as Milla did in the first Xillia game, and once again we’re treated to a variety of enjoyable skits on a variety of subjects, both plot-relevant and inconsequential. By the end of the two games, you really feel like you’ve been on a lengthy journey with a group of people who have come to be close friends.

Persona 3 and 4

Shin Megami Tensei purists may thumb their nose at the later installments in the Persona series, but for me the thing that made them special to me is their strong emphasis on the bonds between people.

In both Persona 3 and 4, these bonds take many forms. They might be the bond between the protagonist and a member of an extracurricular club he attends, who gradually grows comfortable enough to open up a bit about their own concerns. Or they might be the bond between party members who come to understand one another as events start spiralling out of control around them.

In Persona 4 this latter case is particularly true, given that the majority of the dungeons are themed around one of the characters confronting their “true self” and admitting something that they would previously rather keep quiet about for one reason or another. The game goes to some surprisingly daring places in terms of subject matter, though it also leaves a few bits and pieces just ambiguous enough for you to come to your own interpretation of what you just witnessed.

Like Xillia, one of the biggest strengths of both Persona 3 and Persona 4 is the sheer amount of time their respective quests take — and the fact that, in both games, you can actually see how much virtual time you’ve spent in the world thanks to the ever-present readout of the in-game date, which also acts as a reminder that each month, you are on a tight deadline to ensure things don’t go horribly wrong for someone you know.

The sheer amount of time you spend with the characters in both Persona 3 and 4 coupled with the game’s setting in a school and its surroundings means that you really come to think of these characters as friends by the end of the game. This makes a relatively minor aspect of Persona 4’s ending, where you leave on a train and see all the people whose lives you touched standing on the platform to see you off, incredibly touching and borderline heartbreaking. It is likely no coincidence that one of the most frequently heard pieces of music on the soundtrack is called Heartbeat, Heartbreak.

The Witch and the Hundred Knight

This is an unusual one in that it’s an action RPG in which you play a distinctly non-human silent protagonist and don’t actually have a party gathered around you at all times, but nonetheless it manages to have that strong sense of “true companions”, with numerous characters who go through significant developmental arcs over the course of the complete narrative.

In The Witch and the Hundred Knight, you play the Hundred Knight, a mythological creature that turned out to be a bit disappointing in the flesh. You were summoned by the witch Metallia, who lives by herself in a swamp and is pretty much a psychopath. Your stated aim at the outset of the game is to spread Metallia’s swamp across the land so she is able to move freely and dominate the world — she can’t go far from her swamp — but over time things become much, much more complex.

The Hundred Knight, despite being the playable protagonist, is in many ways the least important part of the plot, though his actions do serve as the catalyst for most of the major plot beats throughout the narrative. Instead, the story is about Metallia: why she is so angry, why she is so violent — and why she is so sad. The tale itself features some gut-wrenchingly horrible moments to depict Metallia’s seemingly “beyond redemption” status, but her growth as a character across the entire narrative — a process witnessed and helped along by a young cursed noblewoman called Visco, who eventually becomes very important to Metallia — and the three possible finales, none of which can be called particularly “happy”, makes for a game that takes the unusual step of being an outright tragedy in terms of its narrative.

The story works, once again, because of the close bonds between the characters. We see how horrible Metallia is at the beginning of the game, and we see how poorly she treats Visco. But we see how Visco keeps coming back for more, obviously seeing something in Metallia that others don’t, and we see how Metallia, despite continuing to be foul-mouthed and aggressive, softens a little as she realises that she is developing feelings of friendship — arguably more — for this young woman cursed with the face of a dog. I shan’t spoil the “bad” ending (which is actually the most significant ending, despite the game’s terminology) but suffice to say the Metallia at the end of the game is a completely different person from the one at the beginning, and as the Hundred Knight, we’ve been there to see that whole process.

Fairy Fencer F

And perhaps most relevantly, given that I’m still playing through it at the moment, I was delighted to discover that Fairy Fencer F has a wonderful ensemble cast, too — and despite its aesthetic similarities to the Neptunia series thanks to artist Tsunako on character design duty, it has an overall darker tone to its stablemate, allowing for its characters to share hardships and sadness as well as good times with one another.

Like Neptunia, FFF’s cast can be split into a number of components. There’s the core cast of playable characters who centre around protagonist Fang, who is initially lazy and cynical, but later turns out to be far more responsible and caring than he would care to admit. Then each of these characters has a companion fairy, who form a sub-cast of their own who are usually with their human partners, but sometimes get the chance to do things by themselves. Then there’s a cast of villains, too, but without spoiling too much, let’s just say that on the Goddess route, at least — the narrative path that comprised the original Fairy Fencer F, rather than one of the two new ones introduced for the PlayStation 4 version — the lines between “good” and “evil” are frequently blurred to quite a significant degree.

An crucial moment at the midpoint of Fairy Fencer F carries more emotional weight than I’ve ever seen from a Compile Heart game, eschewing the company’s usually breezy comedy and satire — both of which are present in Fairy Fencer F when appropriate, make no mistake — in the name of something truly awful happening as a catalyst for one of the three subsequent divergent narrative paths that follow. This moment only works because of the first half of the game, in which we get to know Fang and his ragtag group of companions very well indeed, and because of its sharp, surprising contrast with what we, the player, had been led to expect would happen at that point in the story.

I haven’t yet seen how things turn out. I can guess, but given that this game has already surprised me more than once with the direction its narrative takes — mostly with regard to how dark it gets at times — I’m not going to believe it until I actually see it. It’s been an enjoyable journey so far, though, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it ends. And then seeing the other two ways in which it ends after that.

2250: Is There Anything More to ‘Senran Kagura 2’ Than Big, Bouncing Cartoon Breasts?

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Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson is actually something of an increasing rarity in the modern games sphere: it’s a sequel that actually rewards knowledge of its predecessors rather than acting as a standalone story or reboot. For sure, you can play through Deep Crimson without having played Senran Kagura Burst or Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus — despite the “2” in the title, this is actually the third in the series canonically, or fourth if you count the original Japanese release of the first half of Burst as Senran Kagura: Portrait of Girls — but you will get far, far more out of it if you have knowledge of the setting, characters and backstory of what’s going on.

Senran Kagura as a series concerns itself with the happenings in the secret world of the shinobi. Trained in secret at specialised academies, shinobi are split into two main groups: “good” and “evil”. “Good” shinobi follow orders, help people, Do No Wrong, that sort of thing. “Evil” shinobi do the more shadowy work that is more traditionally associated with those of the ninja persuasion — assassination, espionage and generally being a bit of a bastard without anyone finding out about it until it’s much too late.

youma1 Life can’t be interpreted in such black-and-white terms, however; there are myriad shades of grey, and this becomes particularly apparent over the course of the Senran Kagura series’ overarching narrative threads and themes. In Senran Kagura Burst, the “good” shinobi of Hanzou Academy came to understand a little more about their “evil” Hebijo counterparts and that they weren’t so different despite their theoretically opposing ideologies; in Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus, we learned the truth about this stark good-evil divide: it’s an artificially created construct intended to provoke bloodshed between the two opposing sides, the net result of which lures horrific creatures known as youma out of the darkness so they can be slain by high-ranking shinobi.

In Deep Crimson, the questions over what “good” and “evil” really mean are further raised when the Hanzou students are tasked with initially capturing and then slaying a young girl called Kagura. Kagura, it seems, is destined to fend off the youma in particularly spectacular fashion, so surely the “good” shinobi want to keep her safe rather than splatter her over the nearest wall? Being good little, well, good shinobi, though, they set about making preparations for their mission, because good shinobi follow orders and don’t question them. It takes the “evil” shinobi of Homura’s Crimson Squad — the former Hebijo students — to convince them to think for themselves and realise that questioning this sort of drastic action is really probably okay if you stop to think about it for just a moment or two. And indeed, there’s quite a lot more to Kagura than initially appears.

youma2 In Senran Kagura Burst, the relationships between the Hanzou and Hebijo girls was explored through each of them fighting one another and coming to an understanding with their opposing counterpart. It was revealed that “evil” is actually a more inclusive concept than “good” in the world of Senran Kagura, since “good” can turn people away for “not being good enough”, while “evil” accepts everyone, no matter how nice or nasty they might have been in the past. Indeed, Burst’s storyline — particularly the Hebijo-specific path — takes great pains to humanise the Hebijo girls and depict them as interesting, flawed and often tragic characters who all have their own reasons for turning to the darker path.

In Deep Crimson, these relationships are further explored in a number of different ways, both through the narrative and through the game mechanics. A significant addition to Burst’s 2.5D brawling action is the ability to play missions in cooperative pairs, either with another player on a second 3DS system or with the AI taking control of the other character and you being able to switch the one you’re in direct control of at will. The game’s narrative makes a point of putting “opposing” — or perhaps it’s better to say “complementary” — characters together; here, rather than fighting against each other, as in Burst, the girls come to understand one another better by fighting alongside one another against the shared threat of the youma. This doesn’t, of course, preclude the fact that a number of comic misunderstandings lead to physical altercations between these pairs at several points in the story — Senran Kagura as a series has always known how to strike a good balance between pathos, drama and humour — but the net result of all the girls’ battles right up until the end of the game is that they all come to understand, appreciate and like one another better.

youma3 This paired-up action is more than just a gimmick, too; the way it’s presented really creates a strong sense of these characters being real people and having actual feelings towards one another. Whether it’s the tomboyish, loudmouthed Katsuragi giving the emotionless Hikage an enthusiastic high-five after a successful combat or the dour but utterly besotted Yagyuu catching her darling Hibari in a perfect princess hold after a joint special attack, the game’s beautiful animations are absolutely packed with personality, giving each character both a unique look and feel, making them all instantly recognisable.

This uniqueness extends to the way each of the girls plays as well. Far more so than in Senran Kagura Burst, at least, each girl has a very different fighting style, with their own unique button combinations required to unleash combo attacks and specific moves. While you can get away with button-mashing to a certain degree early in the game, once you start fighting more powerful bosses — and even more powerful individual enemies — factors such as positioning, launching, air control and dodging become significantly more important, and there are even some RPG-style status effects to inflict and contend with, just to make things that little bit more interesting.

Each character’s three special moves are unique, too; while some are simple area-effect nukes around the character position, others are charge attacks across the arena, good for cutting through swathes of enemies, while others have more specialised uses that can turn the tide of battle in your favour. Of particular note is Haruka’s “Death Kiss” move, which charms anyone hit with a large heart-shaped projectile and prevents them from attacking for a brief period; frustrating and combo-breaking when it hits you, massively useful when you’re able to do it yourself.

youma4 Unfolding across five separate chapters — each with an escalating focus and scope from the previous — and culminating with some dramatic moments of personal growth and epic conflict in the final chapter, Deep Crimson’s narrative is a strong one that is paced well and feels like it’s the series really hitting its stride. While Burst in particular felt like it was more concerned with introducing the characters and their relationships with one another — no bad thing in a series as characterisation-focused as this — Deep Crimson feels like the overall narrative of the series is moving significantly forwards. The characters aren’t treading water: their personal growth in the previous installments is acknowledged and used as a basis for this game’s narrative to build on, and this is where the particularly rewarding aspect of complete series familiarity comes in. It has, so far, been an absolute pleasure to witness these girls growing up and finding out more about themselves, their place in the world as people — and their place in the world as shinobi.

As I say, you can absolutely get some appreciation out of Deep Crimson if considering it in a vacuum, but the Senran Kagura series as a whole is at its most rewarding when you take in every piece of information available out there: creator Kenichiro Takaki and his team have created a very strong and believable setting and sense of context across these games, with some wonderfully human-feeling characters that interact with one another in relatable, believable ways — even when they’re being silly rather than serious. Like other prolific Japanese series such as Neptunia, the cast has transcended its original context to become a convincing set of “virtual actors” who wouldn’t feel out of place in situations other than fighting for their lives — indeed, we’ve already seen them put their weapons down and do other things in the immensely silly (but immensely entertaining) Senran Kagura Bon Appetit — and I sincerely hope that we see a lot more of these girls in the coming years.

Fortunately, I needn’t lament that my time with them has come to a close with the conclusion of Deep Crimson’s story, since Estival Versus has just released and is eagerly awaiting insertion into my PS4. More thoughts on that to come when I’ve spent some time with it.

Oh, hold on now, I didn’t answer the question in the headline, did I?

YES

2161: Story is About More Than Cutscenes

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One of the most common complaints I’ve read about Xenoblade Chronicles X recently is that “the story isn’t as good as Xenoblade Chronicles“. And, if you look at it in a somewhat superficial manner, that’s true to an extent; it suffers a little from the open-world RPG’s perennial problem that is putting Important Things on hold while you go and pick flowers or whatever.

You may feel this way until you get your head into the mindset of Xenoblade Chronicles X. It’s not a typical JRPG with a fast-paced, completely linear storyline that you can then break completely when the game opens up towards the end. With a few exceptions — most notably the giant mech “Skells” and, later, the ability to fly in them — much of the game is open to you from the very outset, and the whole game is designed around the concept of “what would happen if you (and the rest of humanity’s survivors) were stranded on an alien planet with no hope of getting away any time soon?”

In that sense, Xenoblade Chronicles X‘s narrative — and the way it is told — starts to make a whole lot more sense. The story isn’t just about the “story quests” and the cutscenes they incorporate; there’s only twelve chapters to the main story, after all. Instead, the complete Xenoblade Chronicles X narrative consists of a blend of all the game’s elements: your freeform career as a BLADE operative and the emergent narrative that comes from your adventures in the field; the simple, short stories that come from the Normal Missions and give context to many of the NPCs in the world — and, in many cases, have significant impacts on the world as a whole; the more in-depth, character-centric stories of the Affinity Missions — which also have cutscenes and are fully voiced, unlike the Normal Missions; the conversations you overhear from NPCs you meet in town and in the field; the implied, non-explicit narrative you can deduce from the scenery of the world; and, finally, the “main” story itself.

I mentioned at the beginning the open world RPG’s curse of the party putting saving the world (or equivalent activities) on hold while they went to pick flowers, but in fact Xenoblade Chronicles X has been designed with that very criticism in mind. It’s strongly implied that a fair amount of time passes between each of the story missions, since there are numerous references to time-consuming things happening “off-screen” throughout. Rather than simply asking you to accept that several days/weeks/months have passed, however, it’s more than likely that, unless you’re taking a “critical path” approach to racing through the storyline as fast as you can, a significant amount of time probably will have passed between each of the story missions. And it’s in those “in between” moments that Xenoblade Chronicles X has some of its most interesting moments.

The aforementioned Normal Missions, for example. While these may appear to have had less attention lavished on them than the cutscene-heavy Affinity and Story Missions, in actual fact they tend to have more noticeable impacts on the world as a whole. As a result of Normal Missions and your choices therein, characters move around and live or die; buildings are built or destroyed; relationships between characters change; and, in the most drastic example of things changing as a result of your actions, new alien races move into the human city of New Los Angeles, meaning that you can then see them wandering around the streets as random crowd NPCs, talking to named members of their species and even accepting missions from them. As you play through the game, your understanding of Mira — and the wider universe outside the planet — begins to grow, as you get a feel for who the Ma-non, Zaruboggan, Prone and numerous others are, and, more importantly, how they feel about both one another and humanity.

The complete picture you build up in your mind as you play is one of the most comprehensively detailed pieces of worldbuilding I’ve seen for a very long time. It brings to mind the whole idea of “extended universes” for things like Star Trek and Star Wars, only in this instance, the “extended” universe is right there in the game for you to discover if you see fit. There’s no obligation to do most of this stuff — though some story missions have prerequisite Affinity or other missions before you can proceed — but doing so makes the game several orders of magnitude more rewarding, as it starts to tell its story in all manner of different ways rather than simply through cutscenes.

As the year draws to a close, there’s no doubt in my mind that Xenoblade Chronicles X is absolutely my “game of the year”. It’s full of all the things that I love, and, while its way of doing things may not to be everyone’s taste — particularly the complexity of its systems and the subtleties in its storytelling — I feel pretty confident in saying that it’s a landmark game that deserves to be counted among the greats of not just the RPG style of game, nor just the sci-fi genre of narrative games, but of gaming as a whole.

2077: Narrative Media

Since I’ve become particularly interested in Japanese popular media, I’ve often found myself pondering which particular aspect is my favourite — in other words, what do I feel is the “best” means of enjoying a story that, in many cases, spreads its tendrils across a number of different forms of media with varying degrees of success?

There’s not really an easy answer to that, but I feel my own personal attitude towards it is inclined towards whatever the original version of the work was composed in, where available. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, by any means — on balance, I think I slightly prefer the anime of High School DxD to the manga, for example, and there are a number of interesting spin-off games that tell a completely different story to an anime or manga series, making them worthwhile in their own right — but I do tend to find myself preferring to experience a story as originally intended.

Part of the reason for this is enjoying a story in its original medium means that you don’t “miss out” on anything. In theory, anyway; that theory runs that a creative work is composed for a specific medium, and then adapted to other media at a later date. The adaptation process often involves editing, changing and even cutting content from the original, usually as a means of ensuring that the important beats of the story fit into what may be a more restrictive format. Consider an indefinitely running manga series that is adapted into 20-minute anime episodes, for example; you’re going to lose some detail, like it or not, unless you want the pace of the show to slow to a crawl. (Some long-running shows do indeed take this rather leisurely pace to their ongoing storyline, but for the most part, manga-to-anime adaptations tend to try and get through a significant amount of printed content over the course of 12-13 episodes.)

That said, different media are more or less appropriate for different ways of exploring material. Anime, as the most visually flexible of these media, allows you to outright depict things happening without having a narrator explain things (as in a visual novel, manga or light novel) and take a more subtle approach, implying things rather than making them explicit. At the other end of the spectrum, a novel relies almost entirely on the reader’s imagination, perhaps stimulated a little by illustrations here and there. The nature of text means that the inner thoughts and feelings of characters can be explored in much more detail than in an anime, and even from multiple perspectives.

Visual novels, meanwhile, tend to unfold from a single first-person narrative perspective. This allows for in-depth exploration of a specific character and their responses, feelings and attitudes towards various situations — as if you “were” that character. It’s not quite the same as a full-on game where you take full control of a character, mind; most visual novels give you relatively limited choices as to how they proceed, and the protagonist otherwise has a mind of their own: you’re just along for the ride. Some visual novels do experiment with multiple perspectives — The Fruit of Grisaia’s various routes each feature a sequence where the main heroine of that route narrates an important event in their lives, be it to the reader or to protagonist Yuuji; Deus Machina Demonbane, meanwhile, features a first-person protagonist narrator, but occasionally slips into third-person to depict things happening elsewhere when appropriate. For the most part, though, when you come to the end of a visual novel, the character you almost certainly understand the best is the protagonist.

Video game adaptations — i.e. those that aren’t visual novels — present their own challenges by allowing the player to control iconic characters and perhaps make them behave in ways that aren’t necessarily in keeping with their character as depicted in other media. This is partly a matter of attitude, though; someone who is already particularly engaged with a series and comes to a video game adaptation after reading the manga/visual novel/light novel or watching the anime may well find themselves “method acting” as the character they find themselves in full control of, even if the game mechanics do provide the opportunity for them to do unexpected and strange things.

In other words, I don’t really have a concrete answer for the question. At the moment, I’m particularly enjoying reading The Fruit of Grisaia’s visual novel, and after hearing how the anime adaptation packs the VN’s many hours of narrative and interesting happenings into just a single season, I feel that the VN is probably the best means of experiencing this story in full detail. At the same time, I’m enjoying the video game of Sword Art Online, the manga of Monster Musume, the anime of Himouto! Umaru-chan — there really isn’t a straightforward answer as to which one is “best”.

It sometimes pays to explore a single work in different media, though; the unwritten rules that “the book is usually better than the film” and “video game adaptations are universally terrible” don’t always apply!

1709: Stories All Around

Whenever I see a police car or an ambulance screaming down the road in the opposite direction to the way I’m going, I can’t help but wonder where they’re going, what they’re doing and what the story behind that split-second encounter was. For a brief moment, my own story — usually something rather mundane like going to the shops or to get some petrol — intersects with that of some other people; an exciting, possibly tragic story that I will likely never know the details of.

That doesn’t stop me wondering, though.

Stories are all around us. Everyone you see is living their own story. And while few of them live up to the obnoxious banner currently hanging in Southampton’s WestQuay shopping centre (which promotes a local photography studio and reads “The Most Important Story Ever Told: Yours”), they’re all different and they’re all interesting in their own way. It can be kind of mind-boggling to contemplate quite how many things are going on at any given time, particularly when you contemplate how many things happen to you — however mundane — on any given day.

It’s in acknowledging the fact that stories are going on all around us — and continue without our intervention — that it becomes possible to craft a convincing, compelling fictional world. And it’s true across all forms of media: many comic books these days unfold in shared universes, with foreground events in one series fading into the background in others, but still being acknowledged; crossover TV shows keep their own narratives mostly parallel, but occasionally bend inwards a little to meet for a fleeting episode or two before diverging again; prolific authors spend volume after volume building up a convincing mental picture of how their world works, and the many adventures that the people therein have over time.

And the same is, of course, true of video games. The most well-crafted video games embrace this feeling of stories happening all around us at any time and, more so than any other medium, allow us to explore them at our leisure, pursuing the threads we’re interested in to build up a full picture of what it must really like to be an inhabitant of a virtual world.

This sort of thing is particularly important in sprawling role-playing games, where a poorly crafted world can do great harm to the immersion factor of the game. It’s the reason why the Elder Scrolls games have never really resonated with me: I never got the sense that the people wandering around and occasionally looking in my direction mattered; I never got the sense that they had their own personal stories, even when they formed the basis of a quest or two. There was the odd exception — tucked away in a few nooks and crannies were some interesting diary entries and illicit items that suggested all was perhaps not as it seemed with a character that seemed otherwise respectable — but for the most part, the identikit nature of most of the characters in these games was immensely offputting.

It will doubtless not surprise you to hear that this is one thing I feel Final Fantasy XIV does exceptionally well, much as its predecessor Final Fantasy XI did before it. Although the world is primarily populated by static NPCs who go about their same old business at all times of day or night — that and the players, of course — the game does, on regular occasions, make the effort to make the land of Eorzea feel truly lived-in.

This is most apparent in the relatively recently added “Postmoogle” quests, in which you’re recruited (somewhat reluctantly) by the Deputy Postmoogle to deliver a series of letters to various characters around the realm. Mechanically, these quests are little more than “go here, talk to this person” fetch quests, but if you stop and pay attention to what is being said — and who is involved — they take on a whole new amount of meaning.

This is because they involve characters that you will have seen elsewhere out and about in the world in various contexts.

One quest sees you accompanying the aptly named Hunberct Longhaft and his two adoring Miqo’te companions around the city of Ul’Dah; your only previous contact with these characters will have been during one of the major “FATE” events out in the world, at which point there was little time for conversation, but just enough time to wonder exactly what was going on between Hunberct and the two Miqo’te.

Another sees you engaging in conversation with a group of four gladiators whom you’ve likely only ever encountered as the last “boss” of the dungeon Halatali (Hard). Another still delves into the background of the “aesthetician” — the character you can summon from your inn room to get a new haircut — and his Ishgardian heritage.

It’s not just the Postmoogle quests that do this, however. Many of the sidequests that have been added since the game’s launch acknowledge popular minor characters, such as the ill-fated adventuring party you run into early in the game’s main scenario, whose erstwhile leader is beheaded in battle “off-camera” while you run your first dungeons. The next time you meet the group, the healer of the party — the deceased leader’s fiancee — is carrying his head around in a bag with her, stricken with guilt; the next time you meet them, which is much, much later, at level 50, long after the initial main scenario is over and done with, things have gone very, very wrong indeed.

Final Fantasy XIV is far from the only example of this idea of stories being all around us being used effectively in video games, but it’s one of the best in recent memory.

I still can’t help wondering where that ambulance was going, though. I hope the person it was on its way to help is all right.

1233: Playing It for the Articles

I overheard a Twitter conversation the other day (yes, I’m back on there, largely to make my professional self easier to reach if necessary) in which disparaging comments were thrown around regarding people who “play games for the story”.

As someone who primarily plays games for the story, I feel honour-bound to take exception to this line of argument, though I forget exactly what the actual point of the discussion in question was. Anyway. Allow me to describe what being someone who plays games for the story — a self-professed “narrative junkie” — means.

Quite simply, it means that I am extremely forgiving of a wide variety of “sins” on a game’s gameplay front if — and it’s a big if — the narrative content of the game in question keeps me interested and compelled. (Caveat: the only unforgivable sin that I simply can’t get past is a free-to-play game putting up a paywall with an energy system or similar mechanic; no matter how good your narrative is, if you actively stop me from playing your game before I’m good and ready to stop, I’m not coming back. Ever.)

Said narrative doesn’t have to be big and clever, or trying to be anything more than a piece of enjoyable entertainment. But it pretty much needs to be there to keep me interested.

Similarly, I can happily take a game with practically no “gameplay” in a traditional sense — see: interactive movies like School Days HQ or any of the myriad visual novels available — so long as the narrative entertains me and keeps me interested.

I’m relatively easily pleased when it comes to storylines. About my only real requirement to enjoy a video game story (or any story in any medium at all, really) is that there are some characters in it that I either like or find interesting — because those two feelings aren’t necessarily the same thing. Give me something in which relatively little “happens,” but in which I gain a deep understanding of the characters involved, and I’ll be very happy indeed.

It’s this love for the art of the story that has led me to give a whole bunch of much-derided games the time of day where others would pass them by. The titles which spring most readily to mind are the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, which is riddled with technical flaws, dull gameplay (in the first game, at least; I actually thought the second was genuinely fun, and I’m yet to try the third one) and various other issues; and Nier, which everyone seems to have decided looked drab and boring and thus was unworthy of further exploration. (I never quite understood this; I thought Nier was actually a pretty good-looking game — it certainly had a lot of personality.) Even the Ar Tonelico series, which I’ve been playing through for the last… quite a while isn’t widely regarded as providing shining examples of “good games”.

For the record, I found the Neptunia series genuinely amusing as well as being a wonderfully on-the-nose parody of both anime and video game culture; I found Nier a fascinating, deeply moving experience; and Ar Tonelico… well, having known nothing about it when I started playing, this is now a series I would happily defend to the death.

It’s this attitude which brought me to the realisation I’m not really a fan of Western-developed role-playing games any more — particularly those of the “open world” variety favoured by Bethesda. I enjoy a good dungeon crawl, sure, but when your lovingly-crafted game world behaves more like a diorama with animatronics than a living world with actual people in it, I get a bit bored.

I realise there’s a certain degree of irony in accusing titles like Skyrim of having diorama-like worlds when most JRPG towns are populated by NPCs who constantly stand in the same place and spout the same crap every time you talk to them. But for me, paradoxically, that gives them a lot more personality. Rather than constantly running into the same recycled guard model and wanting to throw a brick through the TV every time someone makes an “arrow to the knee” reference, each NPC is unique and, for those one or two lines they speak, vaguely interesting.

Ar Tonelico handles this rather well by having the NPCs’ lines change according to the point in the story you’re at. The stories of all three games in the series take place over a relatively small geographical area, so you’re revisiting locations a lot; it’s a fun little “unofficial” sidequest to check in with your favourite NPCs and see how their own completely irrelevant story arc is progressing. Will the little kid outside the General Store ever get up the courage to ask Sasha to come and play with him? Will Skycat ever actually make a move on Luca or is she just flirting? Will those weird furry creatures ever say anything other than “Poo”?

This is all a matter of taste, of course, and I’m well aware that there are thousands — millions? — of people out there perfectly happy with the way Skyrim does things. And that’s fine. Just, as always, be aware that not everyone enjoys the same things in the same way — no-one’s way of enjoying a creative work is inherently “wrong”, so live and let live.

1141: Give Me A Reason to Race

Why are there no racing games with stories? No, wait, scratch that, why are there no racing games with good stories? Or at the very least well-told stories?

It is surely not a difficult thing to do. You take the basic game structure from Wing Commander and replace all the space combat with racing cars around tracks and/or city streets. Then you profit. Why has no-one done this?

The few racing games out there that do have storylines of sort are generally half-assed efforts where all the plot is delivered through badly-written text put into the game as an afterthought, or they simply don’t carry their potential through far enough.

I can think of a few recent examples. Motorstorm Apocalypse, though I didn’t play it, reportedly had a plot of sorts, but it fell into the former category above. Motorstorm Apocalypse, lest you’re unfamiliar, had you racing around a city that was blowing up and falling to pieces — surely an ideal situation for a rudimentary Michael Bay-style plot with some characters and shouting. It wouldn’t have to be a complex plot, just something to break up the racing with some motivational scenes that gave it some meaning.

Split/Second had a go, too, with its TV show-style presentation, incredible electro-orchestral cinematic soundtrack and episodic structure. It stopped short of actually giving the game’s antagonists, the “Elite Racers”, any degree of personality (or indeed faces), though it did end on a cliffhanger (which will now never be resolved — thanks a lot, Disney).

Recent Need for Speed games have taken a pop at it too, but tend to lose interest after the introductory sequences. The closest example I’ve seen to what I’m looking for is Need for Speed The Run, but apparently — again, I haven’t played it — neither the racing nor the plot are particularly up to much. (I must say, I am curious to try it, though, purely to see how close they get to what I’m imagining in my head.)

There’s also a Japanese eroge called Moero Downhill Night Blaze that reportedly combines a visual novel with racing action, but judging by its required system specifications, I’m not counting on it being an especially spectacular offering on the racing front. (I do intend to play it, though, as the whole series sounds like fun in story terms, even if the racing ends up sucking.)

And then there’s Midnight Club Los Angeles, which occasionally has Grand Theft Auto-style cutscenes, but not nearly enough to carry a coherent plot.

I’m honestly bewildered as to why no-one has tried this properly yet. We live in an age where video games are more “cinematic” than ever, and yet the racing game genre is still following the same old conventions it’s been using since the PlayStation 1 era — and possibly before. I would pay good money for a racing game with a good, well-written plot — given that I never, ever complete racing games (Split/Second is, to date, the only exception), an unfolding narrative with interesting characters and a degree of overblown drama would be just the incentive I need to up my game and see the experience through to its conclusion.

If I had any clue how to make such a game — or indeed access to a team to make such a game — I would do so in a heartbeat. Sadly, though, I have a sneaking suspicion my desire to see a game like this will remain nothing but a far-off dream.

#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.

#oneaday, Day 344: Bullshit Filters

One of the biggest challenges in creative writing is overcoming your own personal bullshit filters—those parts of your brain that point out what you’re writing is complete worthless nonsense and garbage that no-one in their right mind would ever want to read.

My own tolerance for nonsense is pretty high, as my enjoyment of JRPGs and love of Bayonetta will attest. But even when I’m writing creative stuff myself, I end up picturing some variant on Comic Book Guy reading what I’ve written and saying “BUT THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN!” I guess I have bullshit filters by proxy, as if I were writing stuff purely for myself, it could make as little sense as I please.

One simple way to overcome your own bullshit filters (whether or not they’re proxies like mine), though, is to watch some movies or read some books. When you see how much nonsense other people—published people who actually get paid for their bullshit—put out, you’ll feel a lot better.

Let’s take Tron: Legacy for a moment, which I went to see the other night. This is a movie built almost entirely on nonsensical premises. Why are the programs in the computer personified as humans? Why do they behave in a human way? Why do they need vehicles? And given that the main distinguishing feature of one group in the movie is that they act “more human”, what, in fact, is the difference between them and those who are already acting pretty human? How does a virtual projection of an aircraft stall at altitude in a virtual environment which presumably has no air? THAT WOULD NEVER HA—

Stop. Tron: Legacy isn’t a bad movie despite the fact that all of the above issues are clearly nonsensical plot holes which spectacularly fail to be resolved by the end of the movie. I enjoyed it very much and intend going to see it again. In fact, Tron: Legacy is a movie which actually benefits from you specifically not trying to read too much into it. The reason the programs act human? Because it’s relatable. The reason they drive vehicles? So there can be awesome action sequences. The reason a virtual aircraft stalls at altitude? Because it’s exciting. Nothing more than that.

So it is when you’re writing. Not everything has to be laced with hidden meanings, metaphors and commentary on the human condition. In fact, some of the best “hidden meanings” come about completely unintentionally, as an unconscious communication on the part of the author, an unconscious expression of something deep-seated in their mind that comes out in the things that they are writing. A window onto their soul, if you will.

Of course, some people can transcend that kind of writing and deliberately do clever things. But then they probably get labelled as “pretentious” and don’t get appreciated in their own lifetime. And everyone wants to be appreciated in their own lifetime, right?

So, the next time you’re writing something, take care that it makes sense, sure. But if you want to write something which initially appears to be “stupid”, think about the rest of what you’re writing too. Does it make sense in context, however “unrealistic” it might be when compared to reality? If so, then there absolutely is no reason that the Blood Sausage of Agamemnon can’t turn into a semi truck at the push of a button when combined with the Amulet of Lindor under a full moon.

And if you still feel what you’re writing is ridiculous, go watch Tron: Legacy.