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.

1171: Easy Listening, Part 2

As promised, I’m continuing yesterday’s post with another game music fest to introduce you to the joys of some soundtracks you might not be familiar with.

Today, it’s Cavia/Square Enix’s strange, wonderful and rather depressing action-JRPG Nier.

Nier

Nier wasn’t particularly well-received by critics upon its release due to a variety of factors. Having played it (and adored it, I might add), I can see why it was criticised, but equally I feel it was treated a little too harshly. Not only was it doing some fascinating things with the way it told its story and what its story was about — I’ll leave the spoilers out of the discussion for now — but it was also doing some really interesting things with its gameplay, too. What initially appeared to be a relatively conventional third-person character action game/RPG subsequently revealed itself to have elements of visual novels, text adventures, farming sims, 2D platform games, isometric-perspective dungeon crawlers, bullet hell shooters and numerous other genres. It really was a massively interesting game in almost every way.

And then there was its soundtrack, which even if you don’t like the game is indisputably amazing. Let’s look at some standout tracks.

This track, known as Hills of Radiant Wind, is one of the tracks you’ll hear most frequently in the game, since it typically accompanies your jaunts across the countryside surrounding the small settlement where the title character Nier and his daughter Yonah live. This track is hugely memorable both for having a catchy melody and capturing the atmosphere of the game world beautifully. The pounding drums at the bottom of the mix give a sense of adventure and driving forwards, while the vocal line atop the relatively simple accompaniment gives a suitable air of melancholy to the experience. Nier is not a happy game, and this track, while one of the more “upbeat” ones from the soundtrack, reflects that nicely.

This song, simply called Grandma, is beautiful, and is, to me, probably the most representative piece of music that illustrates what the Nier experience is all about. A simple accompaniment accompanied by a mournful voice provides a massively atmospheric backdrop to some of the most emotional story moments in the game.

And then we move on to a few tracks that use the “leitmotiv” technique I’m so fond of, where a number of different pieces make use of similar melodic or harmonic sequences to reflect various things happening to different characters and/or places.

Let’s start with Emil, who, without spoiling anything, gets fairly consistently screwed over throughout the course of the whole game, through no fault of his own. Poor kid.

Anyway, here’s Emil’s “Sacrifice” theme, which accompanies some heartbreaking, sad moments:

And by contrast, here’s his “Karma” theme, which comes shortly after a heartbreaking, sad moment when you’re venting some aggression on the perpetrators:

The addition of the pounding drums and the urgent piano line in this one always gives me shivers, particularly when I remember how it was used in context.

Then we have Popola and Devola, two characters who are extremely important to the overall narrative in ways I won’t spoil right now. When we encounter them, we hear various versions of the “Song of the Ancients” theme, beginning with this acoustic guitar-centric version:

…and moving on to this… I’m not sure how to describe this, really. Plinky-plonky version?

Well, if you’re going to do two different versions based on the two characters who sing it, you might as well do a third version where they sing it together, mightn’t you? Yes, obviously. This, along with Devola’s theme above, are some of the only examples of diegetic music in the game — the rest is there to evoke a mood rather than actually be “present” in the world.

And, hell, if you’re going to do that, you may as well go the whole hog and have a battle theme based on their (by now) iconic song, right? Of course.

The latter one, like Emil’s “Karma” theme, still gives me shivers because I can remember it in context. Gobsmacking.

Then we come to Kainé, possibly one of the most fascinating characters in any game ever for a whole host of reasons, many of which aren’t made entirely explicit in the game. Kainé has two main versions of her theme: a slow one, which goes like this…

…and a fast one, which goes like this.

Those who know their Nier lore will be familiar with the fact that Kainé is intersex. If you weren’t familiar with your Nier lore, now you know too — don’t worry, this isn’t technically a spoiler in terms of the game’s overall plot, and in fact knowing it beforehand brings a whole host of hidden meanings to a bunch of sequences in the game to the fore. I like to think that the markedly different character of these two pieces reflects Kainé’s “masculine” and “feminine” sides, because she is most definitely in possession of both. She is, it’s fair to say, a very angry person — and with good reason — but not afraid to express her feminine side in some rather… flamboyant ways.

One of the most interesting things about the vocal-heavy tracks in Nier are that they don’t use a language from this world. Instead, vocalist Emi Evans was encouraged to make up words in a “futuristic language” — Nier is set in the far, far future — and used elements of Scottish Gaelic, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, English and Japanese to create something with a very distinctive sound, but which doesn’t “mean” anything in and of itself. Instead, the vocal sounds are simply intended, for the most part, to evoke the overall feeling of sadness that pervades the whole game without distracting the player with recognisable words.

So that’s Nier. Easily one of my favourite game soundtracks of all time, and a score which adds a huge amount of emotion to what is already a game rammed to the rafters with heartbreak.

#oneaday Day 866: NierCast

I’ve finally beaten Logic into submission and got it up and running on my new Mac, which means I’ve finally been able to edit the most recent Squadron of Shame SquadCast. Here it is:

(Direct link for those who can’t see the inline player)

The subject of the podcast is Nier, an action RPG for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 published by Square Enix and developed by Cavia. You may recall I was enthusing about this game quite a lot back in early May, and that enthusiasm was what sparked the desire for us to do this particular podcast.

Nier is a fascinating game. Whether or not it’s actually a good one is up for debate somewhat, but it’s certainly a unique experience in the console space. In fact, to call it an “action RPG” as I did above is a gross injustice, since the game also incorporates elements of bullet hell shooters, text adventures, 2D platform games and open world quest-based “traditional” RPGs. The only games I can think of that offer a comparable experience include Space Rangers 2 and King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame, both for PC, and both offering wildly divergent experiences from Nier, but both taking this “kitchen sink” approach to genre blending.

Nier also distinguishes itself by having a mature plot that is worth following through. Sure, it’s pure fantasy, but it’s good, compelling fantasy — and the fact that the game was released as part of a much larger opus that spans several forms of media is very much apparent if you take the time to read up on it using sources such as Grimoire Nier. The game can most certainly be enjoyed in its own right without exploring any of the additional background material, but it becomes a far richer experience once you delve into the lore of the world — and, for that matter, the story of the game’s creation. It’s very much an example of a game whose world and characters are “bigger” than the game they inhabit, much like an author who plans out their characters by writing scenes for them that never appear in the book in question.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Nier, though, is its treatment of “New Game+” — the ability to go back and replay it after you’ve beaten it once. In many role-playing games, taking on a New Game+ is simply a matter of starting again with all your awesome items, equipment and buffed-up characters from the end of your first playthrough and then romping through the game slicing off heads with gay abandon and nary a fear for your own safety. Nier certainly does this — on subsequent playthroughs, boss fights that were once challenging are an absolute joke — but it’s not the most important point.

Without getting into spoilers, Nier’s New Game+ gradually adds new layers of complexity and nuance to the plot, calling into question the actions that you undertook without even thinking in your first playthrough. The player is given additional context with which to understand exactly what is really going on — and this manages to seamlessly pull the player’s perspective around between several different characters and conflicting viewpoints while still keeping them in direct control of the titular hero. It’s a very interesting experiment in a variation on the “unreliable narrator” trope, and one which could really only be done so effectively in an interactive form of entertainment such as a video game. It also makes Nier’s New Game+ something that is actually worth doing rather than something which is just there for a bit of fun — and it’s worth noting that it makes it abundantly clear when you’ve done absolutely everything there is to do by actually deleting your save file when you’re done. In the context of the game, this somewhat dramatic action makes a great deal of sense (though you are asked to confirm whether you’re sure you’re okay with this five times) — but can you imagine what would have happened if, say, Mass Effect had pulled something similar? It would have been brilliant, but those complaining about the game’s ending would have been even more furious than they are.

The final thing worthy of note about Nier is that it takes no more than 40 hours to do absolutely everything in the whole game including three New Game+ runs (an utterly stupid real-time farming minigame aside, which can be easily gamed by dicking around with your console’s clock), making it eminently friendly to the busy lifestyles we grown-ups tend to lead these days.

So if you’ve never given Nier a shot, give it a chance. You might be pleasantly surprised. And if you have played and loved Nier — or, indeed, have no intention of ever playing it, ever — be sure to listen to our podcast for some in-depth discussion on this remarkable game.

#oneaday Day 835: I Finished Nier

As the heading says, I have indeed finished Nier… once, anyway. I’m going to hold off on doing a “review” as such for the moment, however, for several reasons. Firstly, a full understanding of the game is only attained following several playthroughs. And secondly, Nier is a fine example of how the “reviewing” system we use most of the time is, at times, flawed.

Nier enjoyed mediocre review scores on its original release, netting a Metacritic average of 68. As people who care about such things will tell you, 68 is not “bad” if you’re taking 50 to be “average”, but unfortunately no-one does. The assumption is made by most people that anything under 80 is not really worth bothering with, and anything 90 or higher is an essential purchase.

But in my experience, it’s often in these slightly lower areas that you get the most interesting games. They may be rough around the edges, they may not be perfect, but by golly they have soul.

If you were judging Nier purely mechanically, it’s easy to see why it attained the mediocre review scores it did. There are a very limited number of environments to explore which you spend a lot of time backtracking through. The environments are pleasant enough, but not that interesting. The enemies are repetitive. Combat can be a bit clunky. Most of the magic spells are fairly useless. The AI partners you pick up over the course of the game are completely useless. Most of the game’s quests involve either killing things or fetching things. Choices you make don’t matter. And the “real-time” mechanic for growing crops is just ridiculous.

The thing is, though, play Nier and become invested in its story, and absolutely all of these factors cease to matter completely. Nier tells an interesting, mature, emotional tale, and it tells it well with a small cast of well-defined, unique (and bizarre) characters — and a much larger supporting cast who make the bleak, far-future world of the game seem all the more believable. It piles on the darkness but knows how to lighten the mood with a pithy comment or two at just the right moment. It constantly does things you don’t expect — with the story, with the characters, with the style of gameplay, even with the camera angles. It encourages the player to get inside the head of this unyielding, determined protagonist and almost “method act” their way through the game as he toils and struggles to save his daughter.

Do Nier’s occasionally-clunky mechanics and sometimes-repetitive gameplay make it a “bad” title? Absolutely not. They may, however, put off the less patient players out there — and that’s fine. Those who stick with it will find themselves enjoying a surprisingly creative adventure, while those who chose to forgo the game’s hidden charms and depths for whatever reason doubtless have plenty of other things they’d like to spend their time playing.

The sad thing, though, is that the mediocre review scores were probably enough to put a lot of people off even trying the game in the first place. Why bother buying and playing a “68” when you could play a “90”? This problem becomes compounded when you take into account the fact that a lot of publishers make strategic decisions about what franchises they want to explore further — and in extreme cases, which development studios get to keep taking home their paycheques — based on Metacritic scores. Do you think we’ll ever get another Nier (or at least a game like it)? Probably not. Why? Because it’s too risky. Nier has its fans, sure, but they number relatively few, and aren’t necessarily going to be enough to let the game make a profit.

I’m glad Nier exists, though. It’s evidence that all hope is not lost for creativity, maturity and a desire to do something a little bit different, even in these days of budgets spiralling out of control and a growing desire to create games that are “services” rather than “creative works”.

Nier most certainly is a creative work, a labour of love, and it should be applauded for that.

#oneaday Day 833: Some Further Thoughts on Nier

I haven’t yet finished Nier, but I thought I’d take a moment to write a little more about it since I’ve been playing it quite a bit over the course of the last week or so.

Nier is a game that rewards patience and perseverance. The game’s enormous number of completely optional sidequests is testament to this fact. These sidequests tend to fall into one of several categories — gathering materials, killing things or delivering things. There are a couple of outliers (one of which I’ll discuss later) but for the most part they are mechanically very simple, and usually simply involve beating up a bunch of monsters or running from one place to another.

In gameplay terms, they’re very boring, and this is one of the reasons why Nier received rather mediocre reviews on its original release. But thematically, they are entirely appropriate. Nier himself is known among his peers as “that guy who will do anything” and so is regularly called upon by various villagers to do things for them. Some are respectful and kind about this, others less so.

The key thing about the gruelling experience that is attempting to 100% the sidequests in Nier is that it reflects Nier’s own struggles. Life in his world is hard, and everyone has to pull together in order to survive. This sometimes means knuckling down and doing things you don’t really want to do, or things that are time-consuming, or things that are expensive. By completing these quests you may not be directly making Nier himself any stronger, but you as the player come to understand his strength of character and his resolve to do the right thing. Couple this with Grimoire Weiss’ sarcastic comments about the inane nature of the tasks his companion is asked to complete (which reflects what the player might be feeling about taking on such seemingly meaningless missions) and you have a very clever piece of characterisation and storytelling that would only really be possible in the medium of video games.

Some aspects are just ridiculous, however, the most notorious of this being the farming minigame, where Nier is able to grow various crops outside his house and then harvest them, hopefully for profit. The thing is, these crops grow over the course of a day or so of real time, meaning that anyone getting serious at farming is going to have to do one of two things: play Nier for weeks at a time, or take the path of least resistance (which I don’t know anyone who has played the game that hasn’t done) and start messing around with your console’s clock. I can’t speak for the process on PS3 as I haven’t tried it, but on Xbox this is an unnecessarily cumbersome experience that involves quitting the game entirely, turning off the Internet connection (to stop the clock being automatically set), resetting the time and then reloading the game. It works, though, and allows for a considerable amount of harvesting in a very short period of time.

One quest in the game (and a related achievement/trophy) practically requires that you do this. It involves cross-breeding various colours of flowers in order to produce rare breeds. The trouble is, the game doesn’t explain how this works anywhere, and debate still seems to rage on the Internet at large as to what is actually necessary in order to perform this task in the most efficient manner possible. In some senses, this could be argued to be another aspect of the game inviting the player into Nier’s shoes and tasking them with finding out how this flower cross-breeding works, then applying that knowledge in the game — because it sure as hell isn’t going to tell you.

How anyone was expected to do that without a strategy guide to hand is anyone’s guess. Still, even when simply following instructions on how to do it (with something along the lines of a 10% chance of success each time) it’s strangely satisfying when it does all come together.

I’m about 77% of the way through the sidequests in the game now, meaning that shortly I’ll be able to pursue the rest of the game’s main plot, which has been both interesting and unconventional for a Japanese game so far. I’ll talk more about that when I come to do more of a “review” of the entire experience, however. The game also supposedly encourages repeat playthroughs (minus the sidequests, thankfully) to get to several different endings, but how this actually works I haven’t found out yet.

In fact, I’ve managed to remain completely spoiler-free for the entire game so far, meaning I’ve been able to appreciate all the game’s unexpected and bizarre things as they happen. This has been a big part in why I have come to regard the game so fondly; though the characters, writing and music are all excellent too. Again, though, further thoughts on these when I’ve actually beaten the whole thing.

For now, I have some white moonflowers to harvest, if you’ll excuse me.

#oneaday Day 829: Nier: Some Early Impressions

I’ve been playing Nier, a game I’ve been meaning to try for absolutely ages and struggled to find a copy of. As it happens, my local second-hand games emporium had a copy, allowing me to sample its delights. Like many titles I’ve wanted to try for a while, I’ve managed to go into the experience with a relative sense of “beginners’ mind”, allowing me to enjoy it as if it were “new”, so to speak. This, I feel, is a key part of the Nier experience, since it continually throws you curveballs as you play, remaining constantly surprising.

At its heart, Nier is a simple action RPG, but to call it that is to do it a gross injustice. The hack-and-slash combat may be a bit simple, but when combined with the variety of bizarre magical attacks Our Hero gains the capability to perform over the course of his adventure, the gameplay is shaken up regularly enough to keep you questioning exactly what sort of game it is that you’re really playing.

So far I’ve experienced open-world “run around and kill shit to get their stuff” gameplay; lots of “fetch quests”; side-on platforming sections; top-down Zelda-style sections; fishing; “bullet hell” shooter sections… and I have little doubt that the game has further surprises along the way.

Nier subscribes to the “less is more” viewpoint by taking place in a relatively limited geographical area. Within these relatively few zones, however, lots of things happen. Locals have their own little questline stories to follow, many of which end in surprisingly bleak tragedy. Some people drop a few hints about Nier’s curious far-future setting. It’s quite a believable world at times, and your attachment to it as a player grows as Our Hero tries his very best to Do Good.

One of my favourite things about the game so far has been the stark contrast between the random errands you find yourself doing for locals and the more intense, “main story” stuff which tends to culminate in ridiculously over the top boss fights. For the best part of 10 hours, for example, I barely gained any experience points whatsoever, instead choosing to pursue quests. In the process I acquired plenty of items and money, but most importantly I learned a great deal about the world of Nier and its characters. It’s a vaguely similar approach to what The Last Story does with its completely optional, often seemingly reward-free sidequests on Lazulis Island. By immersing yourself in the lives of the characters going about their day to day life, their struggles carry greater meaning when things start to get a bit crazy.

The writing is worthy of note, too. Early in the game, Our Hero acquires a sentient magical book known as Grimoire Weiss, and there are some extremely well-scripted sequences between the two of them prompted by all sorts of things — starting a new quest, going fishing, coming across a new location. The very British-seeming sarcasm of Weiss is juxtaposed beautifully with Our Hero’s stoic determination — but Nier himself isn’t above the odd sarcastic comment. “Try not to get crushed!” yells Weiss during an intense boss battle that carries the risk of being crushed. “That’s good advice, thanks,” spits Our Hero sarcastically as he rolls to escape the aforementioned fate.

I’m given to understand that there are numerous endings to the game requiring several playthroughs to fully appreciate, so I’m going to reserve full judgement and further comment on the game until I’ve done exactly that. I will say, however, that I am having a blast with it so far, and am even enjoying running back and forth doing errands for the people of Nier’s world.

Expect further bulletins as events warrant!