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It’s that time again!
As always, if you find any of these videos pleasing, be decent enough to hit the Thumbs Up button, and/or even better yet, leave a positive comment. The world has more than enough terrible, clumsy, careless AMVs, and we must cherishingly encourage and gently cradle those few, precious fans capable of creating something worthwhile.
FINAL FANTASY
Final Fantasy 8: I Just Wanna Run, by YuniX2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1GYJosKZjM&list=UU_6lJeCDQEqPruQU3rel4EA&index=3&feature=plcp
The music used is I Just Wanna Run, by The Downtown Fiction. This one’s kind of odd, really. YuniX2 crams this AMV full of visual effects (it’s obvious she’s experimenting), and a lot of the time these effects make the video rather neat where it wouldn’t actually be particularly engaging. At the same time, though, like most AMVs containing an overabundance of cinematography and editing tricks, they get to be a little much at times, being distracting or even a bit annoying. And yet, she’s skillful enough at following the music’s beats and flow and matching them to the visual element of the AMV that most of this problem is largely reduced. Ultimately, I think the end product is pretty good, and does deserve some praise.
Final Fantasy 9: I Still Remember You, by SirMichaelValentine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXyrnj2dMPo
The music used is I Still Remember, by Blackmore’s Night. Although it starts to weaken toward the end, this AMV uses the song quite well, letting its soulful tune and singing meld well with the ever-powerful visuals of the game. Nothing to really say beyond that; this is just a generally good video.
Final Fantasy 9: Viva La Vida, by YuniX2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLahbRSo_L4&list=WL7252ED8AF15FA0F7
The music used is Viva La Vida, by Coldplay. More good stuff from YuniX2, this video has her characteristic ability to match scene actions and scene changes very well to the song’s lyrics and tune, used to great effect to make the character of Kuja into an avatar of the singer. This time around it’s basically a video using FF9’s footage to tell the story of the song, and it all works surprisingly well to this effect--Kuja’s actions and expressions and so on work very well with the words and emotions of the deposed ruler whom the song is about, sometimes predictably because Kuja’s generally a good fit since he’s haughty, arrogant, and regal in a self-styled fashion, and sometimes surprisingly because the scenes weren’t really meant to imply what the song does but still work for it nonetheless. While I feel that the latter half of this AMV doesn’t have quite the strength and relevance in its scene selection as the video’s first half, this is a neat, interesting, and of course well-made AMV through and through.
KINGDOM HEARTS
Kingdom Hearts Series: Song of Storms, by Maddy Jayde: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO2vt_FRdys
The music used is a cover of Song of Storms, from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The cover is performed by LilyPichu, found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKHsN1Nr97E. You may notice I don’t really ever put up any KH AMVs in these little rants. The reason for that is that I generally don’t watch them. Not because they’re never good (although that’s very close to true), but more because of the sheer number of the things--there’s probably twice as many KH AMVs in existence as there are for every other RPG I’ve played put together. But this one happened to show up during my reviewing The Legend of Zelda AMVs (because of the song used), and I find it pretty impressive. It elegantly uses the song to go with its visuals, and the words that Maddy Jayde puts to this tune are very elegant, even beautiful, and they enhance the use of the song with the visuals. This is an AMV that’s actually very good to watch twice--once to take read the lyrics along to the music, and then to watch the video for itself with those lyrics known.
MASS EFFECT
Mass Effect Series: N7, by FatalFrameStudio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN2W7AGuF98
The music used is I am Waiting for You Last Summer, by Event Horizon. Simple, quite, elegant, powerful, and epic--the song matches Mass Effect very well, and FatalFramStudio makes the scenes match the song just as well. This is a tribute AMV that captures the events and heart of the Mass Effect series very well, and is a real pleasure to experience.
Mass Effect Series: The Call, by Tales2TellU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDekS9XtuWo
The music used is The Call, by Regina Spektor. While I can’t say I feel particularly strongly one way or another about the pairing of Female Shepard and Kaiden, this video is a pretty decent one. It’s a little slow and over-emotional, but then so is the song, and overall it does what it intends to, which is to showcase the (potential) love between Kaiden and Shepard, fitting them to the song and fitting the song to them.
VALKYRIE PROFILE
Valkyrie Profile 1: Jar of Hearts, by SarcasmYAY: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvmXduUHePg&list=WL7252ED8AF15FA0F7
The song used is Jar of Hearts, by Christina Perri. This is a very small one, but I think it accomplishes the feeling and ideas that it sets out to, and it cuts from the song well, so it doesn’t leave you feeling like it’s supposed to continue. The creator works well with the slow, heavy tone of the song, knowing how to effectively let the game’s video run its course, but also employing good scene selection when necessary, and there’s no denying that the lyrics fit well with the characters shown and backstory of Valkyrie Profile 1. It’s very rare to find such a brief AMV that doesn’t feel like it’s missing something, AND has some skill and meaning to it, but SarcasmYAY’s given us a great example of the term “short but sweet” with this one.
THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU
The World Ends with You: Fooled by Your Emptiness, by Yodizzle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iifyQqI3RCE&list=WL7252ED8AF15FA0F7
The music used is a remix of Room for Happiness, by Kaskade. The remix is also done by Kaskade. While I am reluctant to give credit to any individual who willingly calls him- or herself “Yodizzle,” this is a definite winner. The song coordinates with the visuals well, lending and combining its meaning and emotion with that of the game itself, and the scene editing helps to emphasize this connection. Yodizzle adds to the theme with dialogue taken from the game, emphasizing the meanings of the song, the game, and the amalgamation that is this AMV, and does so expertly, inserting the dialogue in when it can have great impact, while at the same time carefully avoiding letting it distract from or drown out the song. Good, good stuff, and it’s a nice change of pace to have a quality AMV whose song is slow and gently takes its time.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
General RPGs' Clear Data Bonuses
I am generally a big fan of Clear Data Bonuses.
The skinny on Clear Data Bonuses, for those who don’t already know: Sometimes, when a sequel is made to a game, that sequel will provide a bonus to the player if the player has a saved file from the game’s predecessor. Baldur’s Gate 2, for example, can be played using a saved game from Baldur’s Gate 1, which will allow you to use the same character (or characters) in BG2 as you played in BG1, and start the game with higher levels and the opportunity to pick up a few of the items you had in BG1 again (in fact, one of BG2’s best pieces of equipment can only be created by using items carried over in this way). A few of the player’s decisions in BG1 will be reflected over the course of BG2’s plot, as well, if I recall correctly, although only in minor ways. In this way, players who put the time and effort into playing the first Baldur’s Gate to its finish are rewarded with bonuses that reflect their efforts (more experienced characters and their previous actions reflected). A surprising number of games have Clear Data Bonuses in one way or another, too. Arc the Lad, Xenosaga, Suikoden, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, and many more series utilize this idea. I think Suikoden 2 was the first to come up with it, but I can’t honestly say I know that for sure.
It’s a great idea, really, one that generally benefits both the game’s players AND its creators. The positives for the players are obvious--a gratifying bonus to their new game experience that rewards them for playing previously, vindicating the dozens of hours they invested in the previous game. Not only are the bonuses typically enjoyable, but it makes the gamers feel like their patronage and dedication* mattered, and were appreciated, by the game’s makers. And on the other side, it benefits the developers because it fosters a bit of good will between them and their audience,** and more immediately relevant to a company’s interests, it provides that little extra incentive that might just encourage some newcomers to the series to pick up the previous title. It’s also beneficial often to the product itself. Many RPGs have a least a couple moments which are non-linear, where a player’s actions and/or skills cause a deviation in potential plots, and having these potentialities be addressed according to what actually happened instead of simply an assumption*** of what was done improves the product as a whole. Doesn’t it make more sense that the characters of Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 would start off more powerful if they were super beefed-up in the first game? Doesn’t it make sense that Humphrey wouldn’t just throw away the ultimate armor he’s equipped with in Suikoden 1 by the time Suikoden 2 starts? It doesn’t have to be too much (in fact, it really shouldn’t be--more on that in a moment), so it shouldn’t be much work for the developers to set up, and so I think there’s always reason to make use of Clear Data Bonus options.
That said, there ARE a few guidelines to Clear Data Bonuses that I think should reasonably be followed. The first is that they have to come in moderation, to keep things fair. I don’t think it’s right to give a previous game’s Clear Data too huge a bonus, particularly regarding the current game’s story and characters. What I mean here is that if a gamer’s choices in the previous game are going to make an impact on what happens in the new game, that impact has to be mildly limited. Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 and Dragon Age 2 are good examples of this, I think. In addition to giving the player a few special accessories for each optional boss beaten in SMTDDS1 and some stat bonuses and such according to the strength of the characters in the SMTDDS1’s Clear Data save file, SMTDDS2 reflects the dialogue choices of SMTDDS1 by having, at the end of the game, the character of Roland replaced with Heat instead, if the player chose certain statements during the course of both games.**** Dragon Age 2 uses DA1’s save files in much bigger ways, often referencing the events of DA1 in its main plot and using many of the player’s choices in DA1 to unlock/alter several sidequests. These changes and additions are significant enough to be enjoyable and worthwhile to the game’s story, but they ultimately don’t have any real bearing on DA2’s main story--its core plot proceeds basically as it would without that save file. So what you have with Dragon Age 2 and Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 is a great balance--the storytelling aspects of the games are beneficially added to for the player who gets a Clear Data Bonus, but not to the point where a new player who doesn’t have that bonus is unfairly stuck with an incomplete experience.
The next guideline I’d recommend for Clear Data Bonuses is on the other side of the equation--just as it’s not a great idea to have too MUCH of a bonus, one should also be careful not to have too trivial a bonus, as well. Xenosaga 2 and 3’s Clear Data Bonus, for example, is such a complete joke that I originally planned to make a rant specifically about it. You know what your reward in Xenosaga 2 is for having a cleared Xenosaga 1 save game? You get the option to have KOS-MOS and Ziggy wear swimsuits. That’s it. That’s ALL. If the only reward you’re going to give a player for busting their hump for 40+ hours in your last game is some stupid, completely pointless, incredibly lame semi-fanservice, don’t fucking bother! To make it known that you think THIS is what your audience wants and will appreciate...it’s not just disappointing, it’s insulting! And yeah, I realize there probably WERE some people who liked it, but just because a FEW fans are hormonally-driven morons who apparently don’t know that they could find ACTUAL porn of KOS-MOS very readily available to them with a single Google search, that doesn’t mean that ALL of your audience are easily-amused, slack-jawed drooling fucktards! And then there’s the Clear Data Bonus in Xenosaga 3. While it’s not as insulting to its audience in its nature, it is, believe it or not, even LESS than Xenosaga 2’s. For playing Xenosaga 2 from start to finish, for inflicting on yourself such viciously boring torment as to actually sit through the nonsensical, insane gibberish that comprises its entire plot, you know what your reward in Xenosaga 3 will be? The option to have Shion wear her costume from Xenosaga 1. And that’s it. I mean, that’s IT. There is NOTHING else that is given or changed in Xenosaga 3 other than that one utterly insignificant detail. Again, why did they even BOTHER?*****
Hell, it doesn’t even really make sense. Shouldn’t Xenosaga 2’s Clear Data give an item to change Shion’s clothes to the ones she wore in that game, not its predecessor? Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather see her in the first game’s outfit, as it’s slightly less dumb, but given that Xenosaga 3 has several other appearance-altering clothing, they could’ve just stuck the first game’s clothing item into the game later, or something, and have Xenosaga 2’s save file unlock that game’s awful outfit instead, have it be more appropriate. I know it doesn’t matter much, but it still doesn’t make that much sense.
Hey, you know what might have been a much better Clear Data Bonus for Xenosaga 3? Clothing for Shion that DIDN’T look stupid.
One last guideline I’d give to any company looking to inject a Clear Data Bonus into their sequel: Actually make it work right. Really, basic functionality should be an obvious necessity for ANY aspect of a game, but stupid programming mistakes do sometimes happen regardless. On this guideline, my angry gaze descends, as it has so often in the last year, once more on Bioware. In Mass Effect 2, one of the many sidequests that were unlocked by a saved game from ME1 was glitched. In ME1, Commander Shepard may come across an NPC named Conrad Verner, who is an amusing, yet also annoying, fanboy of Shepard. Shepard has the option to either gently encourage Verner away from getting himself killed by trying to emulate Shepard, or to shove a gun in his face and insult him. Mass Effect 2 is glitched in that it won’t read the save data right, and always concludes that Shepard went with the latter option. Thus, no matter what happened in ME1, Conrad will always mention in ME2 that Shepard shoved a gun in his face and made him feel pathetic, even if that wasn’t the case. It kinda invalidates the entire idea of having a previous game’s save data make a difference if a programming error keeps the save data from making a difference, wouldn’t you say?
Does that example seem small and unimportant? It is! Which is why I have another one. And whaddaya know, it’s another error by Bioware. Apparently lacking the basic human trait of being intelligent enough to learn from past mistakes, Bioware accidentally programmed Dragon Age 2 in such a way that if the main character of DA1 romanced Leliana, DA2 would never recognize it and instead proceed under the assumption that Leliana and the Grey Warden never hooked up. In fact, the game wouldn’t recognize the romance flags for any of the DA1 love interests! This is definitely more than some NPC sidequest, here. The romantic subplots of DA1 were pretty major aspects of character interactions, and let’s face it, most Dragon Age players really enjoy and get invested in the love stories that they have their main character pursue. You certainly may recall that I thought the romances involving Zevran and Alistair in DA1 were worthwhile, and that I really enjoyed the one for Leliana. In fact, the romance between the Grey Warden and Leliana is, at the time of writing this, on my Top 10 RPG Romances list! So because of a careless glitch, the entire romance of DA1, so personally important to so many players, is erased from existence in DA2. It’s especially bad for Leliana, at least to me, which is why I mention her specifically. She just shows up in DA2, with no explanation of why she’s fooling around as a church spy ninja instead of being with the DA1 protagonist, as the end of the game SAID was the case. And what makes it worse for her than for the others is because unlike other returning DA1 characters in DA2, Leliana’s also a part of Dragon Age 2’s (horrible) ending, which means that on top of all the other lousy crap the player’s had to go through during DA2’s finale, said player also then gets a quick reminder that he or she still has no earthly idea what Leliana’s doing here.
Anyway, that’s about it for the guidelines for Clear Data Bonuses I’d give. Don’t give so much as to be unfair to new players, don’t make the bonus so small as to be trivial, and for Arek the Absolute’s sake, make sure it actually works. Despite the few bad apples I’ve mentioned here, though, the majority of cases where an RPG includes Clear Data Bonuses that I’ve encountered have been very positive, and I give a big round of kudos to the RPG genre and its many developers for coming up with and almost always properly executing this very cool idea.
* Yes, dedication. Yeah, it’s only a video game, but we’re still talking (in the case of RPGs, at least) literal days’ worth of time put into it. We’re not talking about some platformer you can power through in 6 or fewer hours.
** And make no mistake, good will IS important--you foster enough of it early on one way or another, and you’ll have a customer for life. There is a significant number of people on the Bioware forums, for example, that are as angry about Bioware’s failures with The Old Republic, Dragon Age 2, and Mass Effect 3’s ending as anyone else, yet STILL say they’re sticking with the company and pre-ordering its next title (Dragon Age 3) because they have faith that Bioware’ll turn it all around and stop being arrogant, incompetent nitwits. A lot of these optimistic fools are the hardcore, entrenched fans that Bioware earned in its distant-to-middling past, when the development of products like the Baldur’s Gate games, Knights of the Old Republic 1, and Mass Effect 1, among others, showed that the company actually gave a shit about its art and its audience. Every indication of the past few years suggests that these days of Bioware’s humble dignity are gone forever, but these fans’re still there, weathering the shitstorm. That is the power of good will.
*** Example: Game A has a secret, optional character. Without Clear Data Bonus use, Game B, a sequel to Game A, will likely just assume that the secret character was recruited, and tell its story under that assumption. But if Game B uses Clear Data from Game A, Game B may be able to set up 2 separate paths of storytelling, showing what differences, if any, it makes to the plot for Game A’s secret character to have been recruited. Game B then becomes a more complete storytelling experience, accounting for a continuation of Game A’s story in ALL aspects.
**** Why you would WANT this, of course, is beyond me. While I have a certain sympathy for Heat’s character given the origin of his flaws, he’s still a huge jerk.
***** Okay, actually, according to Television Tropes, there IS one extra benefit of a previous save file for Xenosaga 2 and 3. Apparently, it can give the characters in the new game a few extra levels, but it’s barely anything. I never even noticed it myself, in either game, and if Television Tropes is reliable (and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be; I don’t think that many people care enough to give misinformation about something this unimportant), it appears that you only got like 4 or 5 extra levels in Xenosaga 2 and 3 for maxed levels in the previous game. Frankly, a ratio of 1 extra level to every 20 or so in the previous game is so small that I’m still gonna stand by my statement that it’s nothing.
The skinny on Clear Data Bonuses, for those who don’t already know: Sometimes, when a sequel is made to a game, that sequel will provide a bonus to the player if the player has a saved file from the game’s predecessor. Baldur’s Gate 2, for example, can be played using a saved game from Baldur’s Gate 1, which will allow you to use the same character (or characters) in BG2 as you played in BG1, and start the game with higher levels and the opportunity to pick up a few of the items you had in BG1 again (in fact, one of BG2’s best pieces of equipment can only be created by using items carried over in this way). A few of the player’s decisions in BG1 will be reflected over the course of BG2’s plot, as well, if I recall correctly, although only in minor ways. In this way, players who put the time and effort into playing the first Baldur’s Gate to its finish are rewarded with bonuses that reflect their efforts (more experienced characters and their previous actions reflected). A surprising number of games have Clear Data Bonuses in one way or another, too. Arc the Lad, Xenosaga, Suikoden, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, and many more series utilize this idea. I think Suikoden 2 was the first to come up with it, but I can’t honestly say I know that for sure.
It’s a great idea, really, one that generally benefits both the game’s players AND its creators. The positives for the players are obvious--a gratifying bonus to their new game experience that rewards them for playing previously, vindicating the dozens of hours they invested in the previous game. Not only are the bonuses typically enjoyable, but it makes the gamers feel like their patronage and dedication* mattered, and were appreciated, by the game’s makers. And on the other side, it benefits the developers because it fosters a bit of good will between them and their audience,** and more immediately relevant to a company’s interests, it provides that little extra incentive that might just encourage some newcomers to the series to pick up the previous title. It’s also beneficial often to the product itself. Many RPGs have a least a couple moments which are non-linear, where a player’s actions and/or skills cause a deviation in potential plots, and having these potentialities be addressed according to what actually happened instead of simply an assumption*** of what was done improves the product as a whole. Doesn’t it make more sense that the characters of Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 would start off more powerful if they were super beefed-up in the first game? Doesn’t it make sense that Humphrey wouldn’t just throw away the ultimate armor he’s equipped with in Suikoden 1 by the time Suikoden 2 starts? It doesn’t have to be too much (in fact, it really shouldn’t be--more on that in a moment), so it shouldn’t be much work for the developers to set up, and so I think there’s always reason to make use of Clear Data Bonus options.
That said, there ARE a few guidelines to Clear Data Bonuses that I think should reasonably be followed. The first is that they have to come in moderation, to keep things fair. I don’t think it’s right to give a previous game’s Clear Data too huge a bonus, particularly regarding the current game’s story and characters. What I mean here is that if a gamer’s choices in the previous game are going to make an impact on what happens in the new game, that impact has to be mildly limited. Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 and Dragon Age 2 are good examples of this, I think. In addition to giving the player a few special accessories for each optional boss beaten in SMTDDS1 and some stat bonuses and such according to the strength of the characters in the SMTDDS1’s Clear Data save file, SMTDDS2 reflects the dialogue choices of SMTDDS1 by having, at the end of the game, the character of Roland replaced with Heat instead, if the player chose certain statements during the course of both games.**** Dragon Age 2 uses DA1’s save files in much bigger ways, often referencing the events of DA1 in its main plot and using many of the player’s choices in DA1 to unlock/alter several sidequests. These changes and additions are significant enough to be enjoyable and worthwhile to the game’s story, but they ultimately don’t have any real bearing on DA2’s main story--its core plot proceeds basically as it would without that save file. So what you have with Dragon Age 2 and Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 is a great balance--the storytelling aspects of the games are beneficially added to for the player who gets a Clear Data Bonus, but not to the point where a new player who doesn’t have that bonus is unfairly stuck with an incomplete experience.
The next guideline I’d recommend for Clear Data Bonuses is on the other side of the equation--just as it’s not a great idea to have too MUCH of a bonus, one should also be careful not to have too trivial a bonus, as well. Xenosaga 2 and 3’s Clear Data Bonus, for example, is such a complete joke that I originally planned to make a rant specifically about it. You know what your reward in Xenosaga 2 is for having a cleared Xenosaga 1 save game? You get the option to have KOS-MOS and Ziggy wear swimsuits. That’s it. That’s ALL. If the only reward you’re going to give a player for busting their hump for 40+ hours in your last game is some stupid, completely pointless, incredibly lame semi-fanservice, don’t fucking bother! To make it known that you think THIS is what your audience wants and will appreciate...it’s not just disappointing, it’s insulting! And yeah, I realize there probably WERE some people who liked it, but just because a FEW fans are hormonally-driven morons who apparently don’t know that they could find ACTUAL porn of KOS-MOS very readily available to them with a single Google search, that doesn’t mean that ALL of your audience are easily-amused, slack-jawed drooling fucktards! And then there’s the Clear Data Bonus in Xenosaga 3. While it’s not as insulting to its audience in its nature, it is, believe it or not, even LESS than Xenosaga 2’s. For playing Xenosaga 2 from start to finish, for inflicting on yourself such viciously boring torment as to actually sit through the nonsensical, insane gibberish that comprises its entire plot, you know what your reward in Xenosaga 3 will be? The option to have Shion wear her costume from Xenosaga 1. And that’s it. I mean, that’s IT. There is NOTHING else that is given or changed in Xenosaga 3 other than that one utterly insignificant detail. Again, why did they even BOTHER?*****
Hell, it doesn’t even really make sense. Shouldn’t Xenosaga 2’s Clear Data give an item to change Shion’s clothes to the ones she wore in that game, not its predecessor? Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather see her in the first game’s outfit, as it’s slightly less dumb, but given that Xenosaga 3 has several other appearance-altering clothing, they could’ve just stuck the first game’s clothing item into the game later, or something, and have Xenosaga 2’s save file unlock that game’s awful outfit instead, have it be more appropriate. I know it doesn’t matter much, but it still doesn’t make that much sense.
Hey, you know what might have been a much better Clear Data Bonus for Xenosaga 3? Clothing for Shion that DIDN’T look stupid.
One last guideline I’d give to any company looking to inject a Clear Data Bonus into their sequel: Actually make it work right. Really, basic functionality should be an obvious necessity for ANY aspect of a game, but stupid programming mistakes do sometimes happen regardless. On this guideline, my angry gaze descends, as it has so often in the last year, once more on Bioware. In Mass Effect 2, one of the many sidequests that were unlocked by a saved game from ME1 was glitched. In ME1, Commander Shepard may come across an NPC named Conrad Verner, who is an amusing, yet also annoying, fanboy of Shepard. Shepard has the option to either gently encourage Verner away from getting himself killed by trying to emulate Shepard, or to shove a gun in his face and insult him. Mass Effect 2 is glitched in that it won’t read the save data right, and always concludes that Shepard went with the latter option. Thus, no matter what happened in ME1, Conrad will always mention in ME2 that Shepard shoved a gun in his face and made him feel pathetic, even if that wasn’t the case. It kinda invalidates the entire idea of having a previous game’s save data make a difference if a programming error keeps the save data from making a difference, wouldn’t you say?
Does that example seem small and unimportant? It is! Which is why I have another one. And whaddaya know, it’s another error by Bioware. Apparently lacking the basic human trait of being intelligent enough to learn from past mistakes, Bioware accidentally programmed Dragon Age 2 in such a way that if the main character of DA1 romanced Leliana, DA2 would never recognize it and instead proceed under the assumption that Leliana and the Grey Warden never hooked up. In fact, the game wouldn’t recognize the romance flags for any of the DA1 love interests! This is definitely more than some NPC sidequest, here. The romantic subplots of DA1 were pretty major aspects of character interactions, and let’s face it, most Dragon Age players really enjoy and get invested in the love stories that they have their main character pursue. You certainly may recall that I thought the romances involving Zevran and Alistair in DA1 were worthwhile, and that I really enjoyed the one for Leliana. In fact, the romance between the Grey Warden and Leliana is, at the time of writing this, on my Top 10 RPG Romances list! So because of a careless glitch, the entire romance of DA1, so personally important to so many players, is erased from existence in DA2. It’s especially bad for Leliana, at least to me, which is why I mention her specifically. She just shows up in DA2, with no explanation of why she’s fooling around as a church spy ninja instead of being with the DA1 protagonist, as the end of the game SAID was the case. And what makes it worse for her than for the others is because unlike other returning DA1 characters in DA2, Leliana’s also a part of Dragon Age 2’s (horrible) ending, which means that on top of all the other lousy crap the player’s had to go through during DA2’s finale, said player also then gets a quick reminder that he or she still has no earthly idea what Leliana’s doing here.
Anyway, that’s about it for the guidelines for Clear Data Bonuses I’d give. Don’t give so much as to be unfair to new players, don’t make the bonus so small as to be trivial, and for Arek the Absolute’s sake, make sure it actually works. Despite the few bad apples I’ve mentioned here, though, the majority of cases where an RPG includes Clear Data Bonuses that I’ve encountered have been very positive, and I give a big round of kudos to the RPG genre and its many developers for coming up with and almost always properly executing this very cool idea.
* Yes, dedication. Yeah, it’s only a video game, but we’re still talking (in the case of RPGs, at least) literal days’ worth of time put into it. We’re not talking about some platformer you can power through in 6 or fewer hours.
** And make no mistake, good will IS important--you foster enough of it early on one way or another, and you’ll have a customer for life. There is a significant number of people on the Bioware forums, for example, that are as angry about Bioware’s failures with The Old Republic, Dragon Age 2, and Mass Effect 3’s ending as anyone else, yet STILL say they’re sticking with the company and pre-ordering its next title (Dragon Age 3) because they have faith that Bioware’ll turn it all around and stop being arrogant, incompetent nitwits. A lot of these optimistic fools are the hardcore, entrenched fans that Bioware earned in its distant-to-middling past, when the development of products like the Baldur’s Gate games, Knights of the Old Republic 1, and Mass Effect 1, among others, showed that the company actually gave a shit about its art and its audience. Every indication of the past few years suggests that these days of Bioware’s humble dignity are gone forever, but these fans’re still there, weathering the shitstorm. That is the power of good will.
*** Example: Game A has a secret, optional character. Without Clear Data Bonus use, Game B, a sequel to Game A, will likely just assume that the secret character was recruited, and tell its story under that assumption. But if Game B uses Clear Data from Game A, Game B may be able to set up 2 separate paths of storytelling, showing what differences, if any, it makes to the plot for Game A’s secret character to have been recruited. Game B then becomes a more complete storytelling experience, accounting for a continuation of Game A’s story in ALL aspects.
**** Why you would WANT this, of course, is beyond me. While I have a certain sympathy for Heat’s character given the origin of his flaws, he’s still a huge jerk.
***** Okay, actually, according to Television Tropes, there IS one extra benefit of a previous save file for Xenosaga 2 and 3. Apparently, it can give the characters in the new game a few extra levels, but it’s barely anything. I never even noticed it myself, in either game, and if Television Tropes is reliable (and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be; I don’t think that many people care enough to give misinformation about something this unimportant), it appears that you only got like 4 or 5 extra levels in Xenosaga 2 and 3 for maxed levels in the previous game. Frankly, a ratio of 1 extra level to every 20 or so in the previous game is so small that I’m still gonna stand by my statement that it’s nothing.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle
Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is a good RPG.
That’s a hard sentence for me to type; at least, it’s hard to type when I know I’m doing so as a matter of public record. I’d much rather I could say that Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is mindless crap. Nothing more than a load of base, degrading fanservice. Man would I like to be able to say that. Things would be much simpler. But what can ya do.
Alright, so, let’s just get this out in the open. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle--and I imagine that’s probably most/all of you, as it’s not, to my understanding, all that widely-known--it’s an RPG created using RPG Maker 2003, available for free download via that mysterious device known as “Teh Internetz.” I’m a bit leery of counting a legally unofficial and unrecognized work as an official entry in my list of completed RPGs, but EoWC is a sizable, self-contained, complete product, so I reckon it more or less qualifies as being “real” enough for my standards--after all, I count Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden as a “real” RPG for my list of conquests, and that one, if anything, is even less legally stable. So Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is a free, downloadable Independant RPG. And it is...well, frankly, it’s pretty heavy on the lesbian fanservice porn. If that’s not just outright the basis of the game, it’s at least a very major part of it.
If you have any familiarity with these rants, then my reticence to acknowledge EoWC in a positive light probably comes as no surprise to you. I hate bath scenes, I get extremely angry about inexplicably skimpy outfits and the over-sexualization of female characters, and I even take issue with the fact that homosexual characters and relationships in RPGs are so much more often gay women than men (since I suspect this makes it more about the titillation of the assumed male-dominant audience than about any intent of equal representation). Well, don’t misunderstand me here--the explicit content of Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle by and large does still annoy me. It’s usually excessive and unnecessary, and the weakest parts of the game (such as the Scheherazade and Hurraine arcs, along with the stupid Duchess-can’t-keep-her-dress-intact-for-5-minutes-straight running joke) are invariably the ones that rely almost entirely on the fanservice and sexual content. Even in cases where I actually feel like it’s not unwarranted, it’s still more explicit than it needs to be.
But if I may shock myself for a moment, I’d actually like to defend it to a small extent, at least by comparison to sexualized fanservice found in other games. Needless and overbearing as the sexual nature of this game is at times, I have to give Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle enough credit to point out that it’s not pretending to be something greater. What I mean is, you take a game like, say, Mass Effect 3, and you’re taking a product which makes the claim in its method and matter of being dignified, having value as art. Mass Effect 3 is clearly a story that the audience is meant to take seriously, is clearly something we are meant to believe its creators took seriously, and as such it wants to be seen as having some intellectual weight. This is the case for most RPGs--their creators want their product, their story, their intellectual creation, to be taken seriously, and we players expect to do so unless given reason early on to do otherwise. So when Mass Effect 3 changes the appearance of the character Ashley to suddenly look 300% more like an underwear model and has EDI sporting a camel toe so prominent it looks like an arcane portal to the otherrealms, not to mention also tosses us the big-titted, easily-bedded Diana Allers, who dresses and looks like a reject from Jersey Shore, it stands out as a break from the character of the game, an oily film of sleaze coating what’s supposed to be something better.
This sort of thing is, of course, by no means restricted to ME3; that’s just an example. But there’s the classic bath scene idiocy of anime-styled RPGs, if we want to look at RPGs from the other side of the Pacific. When a band of heroes start acting like hormonal lower primates at a hot spring in an RPG that until that point has held itself with some basic composure, it stands out as a lowering of its characters to a state they normally are too dignified to stoop to. And don’t even get me started on the fucktarded swimsuit competition in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. And so on; I imagine you’re getting my meaning.
Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle really makes no such pretenses. At the start of the game it spells out to you pretty clearly what content the game’s gonna have in it. Additionally, its main character, the Duchess Catherine...I wouldn’t exactly call her promiscuous, per say, but she’s not reserved by nature, and it’s clear early on that she’s pretty open, both emotionally AND physically. And maybe this isn’t entirely fair of me, but it somehow feels different to have fanservice in a game that’s 100% free and has no aims of making money whatsoever. I guess it makes it seem less disingenuous to know that the needlessly sexual content isn’t some crass, insulting marketing scheme to sell to the lowest common denominator--it’s there because it’s meant to be, not because some chortling, greedy scumbag assumes the worst of his audience in order to encourage better sales. Does that actually make it a little better, or is it all in my head? Can’t say for sure, but my head’s the one coming up with all these words that keep appearing on the screen, so I gotta go with it. Lastly, while you can’t turn off the tiny little naked sprites and the sometimes explicit dialogue, the game DOES provide you with an item which will prevent the explicit cutscene art from being shown, so if adult visuals genuinely bother you, the game’s at least taking a step to be accommodating.
So what does that all add up to? Well, I’m still not thrilled about the amount of sexual material in Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, and I still see it as almost entirely unnecessary to have it to the extent the game does, but...it’s really not as bad as it could be, all things considered, and it doesn’t really feel particularly degrading, either. It’s not so hard to look past it all to recognize EoWC’s good qualities. And really, even if it was, I’d be a hypocrite twice over if I didn’t do so anyway--I’ve always advocated judging an RPG for its storytelling content rather than its bare surface qualities, its window-dressings per say, after all, and in all honesty, I’ve written a few explicit fanfics in my time that I think, if I may say so myself, are nonetheless fairly decent stories.
So, that said, and said in probably way more paragraphs than were really necessary, what are Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle’s good qualities? Well, the first one I encountered is that it’s really quite amusing. Right from the get-go, Duchess Catherine’s comments and dialogue as she examines various objects in the background and interacts with other characters are very funny. Sometimes they’re funny on their own, often they’re funny commentary about RPGs in general (both video games and the tabletop variety). If you’re familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and video game RPGs in general, you’re probably going to find several moments of this game quite amusing. While EoWC has no small number of serious, touching, and dark moments to it, the pervading feel of the game is a lighthearted one, and the fact that it got a chuckle out of me so quickly was a lot of what drew my interest at first, gave me the inclination not to just dismiss it outright.*
Of course, the amusement factor is just the icing on the cake, the preliminary fun factor to butter you up and get your attention. More important than that is the quality of the game’s protagonist. Catherine at first seems very simplistic, very damsel-in-distress-esque, very...princess-y, but as you progress through the game, you can begin to recognize some strong depth to her, along with some subtle but solid character development. Her exceptionally dark, tormented back history, her craftiness and more than adept skill at political maneuvering and diplomacy, her enthusiasm and wish to form a positive connection with all those around her, the interesting ambiguity about whether she is, in the end, a good or evil character, her insecurities about her future and related subconscious resentment against princesses, her fleeing from the title of being Greyghast’s heir and whether or not there might be some truth to it...there’s a lot of angles to Catherine’s character, a lot of fronts that she grows as a person on, and nigh all of them are pretty interesting. The only criticism that I might have about it is that a lot of this character development is understated, left somewhat to the audience to contemplate and recognize...but I don’t really make that complaint, because I feel that this is one of those rare times in an RPG where this light touch is done skillfully and adequately. This isn’t the common case of a writer mistaking insufficient explanation and exploration as subtle writing; Catherine’s multifaceted character and her development actually ARE subtle.
The rest of the cast is not as interesting to me, I must say. To be sure, the characters by and large are adequate. But while several of them have at least a little something of interest to their characters, such as Louni and Carmina, no one in the game is as deep or well-written a character as Catherine by far. That said, though...well, they don’t really need to be. Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is pretty much completely a personal story, not a wide-reaching one. Catherine’s not the main character caught up in a story, as is typically the case with RPGs. Rather, this is a story about her; she’s the central figure of all its events, and it’s told entirely from her perspective. This is a story which in its entirety revolves around her, not the events she happens to become involved in, a fact that is even more emphasized and logical once one has seen the True Ending and knows the truth of the game’s events. To that end, the worth of the cast is not necessarily so much dependant on the characters’ worth in their own right, but rather their worth as contributors and foils to Catherine’s character through their interactions and relationships with her.
When viewed in that light, the cast is pretty solidly good. Through the Duchess’s conversations, adventures, and often courtships with Alice, Louni, Carmina, Grettel, the Good Dwarf, and most of the other characters both major and minor, we get an understanding of Catherine’s character, and come to know the world she lives in and her relationship to its workings. Even characters who have little to no significance and/or interesting qualities can be worthwhile at times for the perspectives they give us of Catherine, such as with Rain--despite her being onscreen for only about 5 minutes, Rain’s history with Catherine and the way the two of them discuss it is well-done and feels very emotionally realistic. Another example is found with Scheherazade--her story arc is kind of meandering and ultimately kind of negative, but even it has a little redeeming value for the decent scene it has wherein Catherine talks to Alice about the pain of being dumped for the first time, and Alice reveals that Catherine’s innocent polyamory** can be similarly hurtful to the ones who love her. It’s a nice scene.***
Speaking of the way the cast interacts with Catherine, that brings us to my next point as to why this RPG is good: the romances. Admittedly, Catherine’s explorations of love with the people around her are not always great. Gwearst gets way too little quality time with the Duchess for the love on either side to seem convincing, and some of the others are just not particularly interesting. But there are also some really great romantic moments in this game. Catherine’s connection with Alice winds up being pretty touching, even though a lot of it is sort of unsaid, and the similarly subtle love she shares with Louni has some very nice moments, and is even, at times, kind of intriguing. The Nereid seems silly and pointless at first, but I actually found myself very moved later at the strength of the devotion and affection she and Catherine hold for each other, one which cries out across and pulls them together from opposite ends of time and even dimensions.
And Carmina...the love story of Catherine and Carmina’s got it all. They share their histories and personalities with one another, they share a touching chemistry, they’re each willing to give absolutely everything up for the other (Catherine’s willing to make herself the enemy of the most powerful adventuring group in the world for Carmina and to use every resource she has to protect her, and/or go with her to the lands of the Dark Elves (the Drow, essentially, which any Dungeons and Dragons player knows is not a pleasant prospect for a human), Carmina’s willing to restrain her natural inclinations of evil for Catherine’s sake and give up on returning to her home in order to be with Catherine, etc), there’s a very touching aspect of Catherine’s taking a leap of faith in trusting her love to Carmina, and generally I’d just have to say that everything about Carmina’s and Catherine’s romance is emotional, moving, authentic, and natural. This is honestly the best love story I’ve seen for quite a while, actually and easily beating out most of the romances of other, “real” games I’ve seen in the past few years, including those of The Last Story’s, most of those of Mass Effect 3’s, and those of Sakura Wars 5, a game designed specifically around love interests. Seriously, I may very well find myself at the end of this year changing my Greatest Romances List to include this one.
And as a final note about the cast, what about the villains in this game? Well...Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is very, very unconventional, because the three major villains of the game, whose actions actually have the most impact on either the game’s heroine or the world around them, are virtually non-entities. Vecnatrix the lich lord is the world’s major villain, but he only actually shows up in the game a couple times, and then only for a moment or two--not to mention that it’s called into question at one point just how truly dangerous he actually is. The main villain of the game is unknown until you meet them at the very, very end, and while their hand is in all things until that point, they also, at the same time, have not really manipulated much of anything. And then there’s Bad King Greyghast the Terrible, who, at the opening of the game, has been dead for many years. Aside from these three, the most you see for villains are incidental vehicles for plot/character development.
Yet unconventional does not mean bad, at least not in this case. As I said, this RPG is a personal story, not a far-reaching one, and as far as I’m concerned it needs no more villainous presence than it has. Vecnatrix serves an adequate purpose simply by existing in the capacity that he does. The final villain is not just your standard last-minute superboss thrown in for no reason, like Final Fantasy 9’s Necron or every single goddamn numbered Suikoden’s last boss--this one is properly tied to the secretive and layered plot, and more interaction with the events of the game before the final confrontation would have jeopardized the integrity of that plot. That said, I feel like Greyghast really pulls his weight as a villain, even though it’s all after the fact. The legacy of torment he inflicted upon his family, Duchess Catherine in particular, is shown very effectively through flashback, nightmare, and unhappy remembrance at various times in the game. Greyghast’s evil is shown only very subtly, only through small windows and through the scars it left upon Catherine, but you know something, that’s enough to make him one of the darkest, sickest evildoers I’ve seen in RPGs.****
So the game’s fun and funny, the protagonist is really good, the rest of the cast is adequate, the villains’re good enough, and there’re some very good romantic parts. Sounds spiffy so far. So how’s Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle for plot? Turns out it’s quite good, at least by my reckoning. Like many other aspects of the game, it’s pretty unconventional. The setting has a lot more thought and background put into it than seems needed--there’s a lot of background to Aresland that has barely any relevance to the actual game events and characters, yet knowing that the game’s maker has put unnecessary thought into his setting pleases me, because that’s the sign of someone who genuinely cares about the story he’s telling and has enough plans for it to give it depth. A lot of the game is kind of non-linear, in that you can determine a lot of what order you do things in, and whether you do some things at all. The nonlinearity is fairly easy to pull off, since there doesn’t seem to actually BE much of a story for most of the game--you basically are just watching Catherine go about her daily task of building relationships with those around her as she waits for Embric to return. That said, the game does gain some direction after a time, with a certain number of these nonlinear events coming to a head in an attack by 1000 Anti-Paladins, after which, if you’re clever enough and have been thorough in your playing, you can set yourself on the track to the True Ending. Getting to that point (and past the false trail the game throws at you) allows you to see and understand the true nature of the game’s events (though it’s a little hard to suss out at first). It winds up being a small story, really, but emotionally powerful and layered enough that it packs a hell of a punch.
THIS PARAGRAPH IS SPOILERS. GO STRAIGHT TO NEXT PARAGRAPH. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT $200. I have to also note here that this is probably the only time where I’ve really liked an “It was all a dream” ending. I’ve seen some before that were okay and appropriate, but we all know that this kind of ending is infamous for being lame and cheesy.***** But when you add the fact that Catherine’s gift of prophecy makes that dream a set of events yet to come, examples of what could be, you get a case where anything and everything can be as real as she wants it to be, where she can use her foresight to manipulate events later (such as with Gizmod) to (presumably) create a better kingdom, and still arrive at Wulfhammer’s Castle to experience the joys and meet the people she’ll love during the events that she has (and we have) seen during the game’s span. In other words, you get every positive of the all-a-dream scenario does, and none of the downsides (after all, you can’t feel that the time in the dream was wasted or get upset over the fact that it all wasn’t real, because it prepared Catherine for what was to come and let her know that her life would have some happiness (an important thing given her state as her uncle’s captive) and it all WILL be real in as much capacity as she wills it). And I like the fact that she must struggle to return to reality, and keep her wonderful memories of things to come. I also like that there ARE some subtle hints to the nature of the game being a dream and Catherine’s foresight in the game, small enough that they don’t tip you off as anything unusual at the time but connected enough that they suddenly make sense in whole new ways once you know the truth. Good stuff.
So yeah. That’s Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle. It really, honestly is a very good RPG. Maybe not for anyone who’s not comfortable with explicit adult content (or anyone who, for unfathomable reasons, really enjoys RPG battle systems--there’s less than 10 battles in the whole game; it’s almost entirely story-driven), but if you can stick with it long enough to give it an honest chance, you may find yourself really into it. Saint Bomber (the guy who created the game) said in an email conversation with me that he “set out to write a naughty story with some heart, and ended up writing a hearty story with some naughtiness,” and that’s exactly what this is--and I love a hearty story. And hey, it’s free. I’ve paid to play many, many worse RPGs than this one, and chances are good that you have, too. So if you’re interested, why not give it a shot?
You can download it at
http://wulfhammer.org/ if you’re interested (get the Deluxe edition). You may also want to check out the closest thing this game has to a guide, found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x3_9cWCMpCgdyiIiVNx4iIvOCfJMbKgfYOIz4zmSZVw/edit?hl=en&pli=1#heading=h.oot0j9xbixac if you’re interested--I actually do advocate using this guide (although it’s a bit confusing to follow), because you can easily miss quite a few endings and other things if you don’t know what you’re doing (including how to get the True Ending).
Goodness, I’ve been having a wonderful time with Indie RPGs. Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, Bastion, Geneforge 1, and Mark Leung: Revenge of the Bitch have all been enjoyable. Maybe these hipsters are on to something...
* It also got MAJOR brownie points for the fact that one of the peasants at the castle, who all initially just parrot one-line NPC catchphrases, says “Times are tough.” As a general rule, game developers, if you want to get on my good side, a humorous reference to the old, discontinued, but pretty awesome webcomic RPG World is very effective. The only thing that could possibly beat it out is a reference to the equally old, completed, and even more awesome Adventurers! webcomic.
** It’s a strange concept but I really think that it’s a fairly accurate way to describe the way the Duchess romantically connects with multiple people.
*** Sadly, what Catherine takes from this conversation is “have sex with all your love interests at the same time to avoid jealousy.” But aside from that, it’s a good scene.
**** Side Note Because Not Everyone Cares About Ponies: I’m actually reminded a bit with Greyghast of King Sombra from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Though I wouldn’t say Sombra is a particularly great villain, I would argue that he was perhaps the very nastiest of the ones we’ve seen as of the end of Season 3, for the same reason that I find Greyghast so effective: the subtle way the villainy he enacted is shown. We don’t really see much of what Sombra did as tyrant of the Crystal Empire, nor do we see much of note in his actual presence in the show, but the way the crystal ponies act is a huge indicator of just how horrible he truly was--they’re dulled, introverted, joyless, and even just remembering how things were before they were liberated from him is a frightening prospect. Same deal with Greyghast--it’s the torment in Catherine’s recollections that give us a picture of just how bad he really was. It’s a more subtle way of telling the audience how evil a villain was, but if you’re smart enough to really pick up on it, consider it, then it speaks volumes.
***** Which made it all the more amusing that a HUGE amount of Mass Effect 3 players sincerely believed that Mass Effect 3’s ending was secretly going to be revealed to be an “all a dream” scenario--and that they would have preferred that to the ending Bioware actually did create. What does it say about writers when the most absurd cop-out of all time is actually preferable to the one they created?
That’s a hard sentence for me to type; at least, it’s hard to type when I know I’m doing so as a matter of public record. I’d much rather I could say that Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is mindless crap. Nothing more than a load of base, degrading fanservice. Man would I like to be able to say that. Things would be much simpler. But what can ya do.
Alright, so, let’s just get this out in the open. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle--and I imagine that’s probably most/all of you, as it’s not, to my understanding, all that widely-known--it’s an RPG created using RPG Maker 2003, available for free download via that mysterious device known as “Teh Internetz.” I’m a bit leery of counting a legally unofficial and unrecognized work as an official entry in my list of completed RPGs, but EoWC is a sizable, self-contained, complete product, so I reckon it more or less qualifies as being “real” enough for my standards--after all, I count Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden as a “real” RPG for my list of conquests, and that one, if anything, is even less legally stable. So Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is a free, downloadable Independant RPG. And it is...well, frankly, it’s pretty heavy on the lesbian fanservice porn. If that’s not just outright the basis of the game, it’s at least a very major part of it.
If you have any familiarity with these rants, then my reticence to acknowledge EoWC in a positive light probably comes as no surprise to you. I hate bath scenes, I get extremely angry about inexplicably skimpy outfits and the over-sexualization of female characters, and I even take issue with the fact that homosexual characters and relationships in RPGs are so much more often gay women than men (since I suspect this makes it more about the titillation of the assumed male-dominant audience than about any intent of equal representation). Well, don’t misunderstand me here--the explicit content of Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle by and large does still annoy me. It’s usually excessive and unnecessary, and the weakest parts of the game (such as the Scheherazade and Hurraine arcs, along with the stupid Duchess-can’t-keep-her-dress-intact-for-5-minutes-straight running joke) are invariably the ones that rely almost entirely on the fanservice and sexual content. Even in cases where I actually feel like it’s not unwarranted, it’s still more explicit than it needs to be.
But if I may shock myself for a moment, I’d actually like to defend it to a small extent, at least by comparison to sexualized fanservice found in other games. Needless and overbearing as the sexual nature of this game is at times, I have to give Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle enough credit to point out that it’s not pretending to be something greater. What I mean is, you take a game like, say, Mass Effect 3, and you’re taking a product which makes the claim in its method and matter of being dignified, having value as art. Mass Effect 3 is clearly a story that the audience is meant to take seriously, is clearly something we are meant to believe its creators took seriously, and as such it wants to be seen as having some intellectual weight. This is the case for most RPGs--their creators want their product, their story, their intellectual creation, to be taken seriously, and we players expect to do so unless given reason early on to do otherwise. So when Mass Effect 3 changes the appearance of the character Ashley to suddenly look 300% more like an underwear model and has EDI sporting a camel toe so prominent it looks like an arcane portal to the otherrealms, not to mention also tosses us the big-titted, easily-bedded Diana Allers, who dresses and looks like a reject from Jersey Shore, it stands out as a break from the character of the game, an oily film of sleaze coating what’s supposed to be something better.
This sort of thing is, of course, by no means restricted to ME3; that’s just an example. But there’s the classic bath scene idiocy of anime-styled RPGs, if we want to look at RPGs from the other side of the Pacific. When a band of heroes start acting like hormonal lower primates at a hot spring in an RPG that until that point has held itself with some basic composure, it stands out as a lowering of its characters to a state they normally are too dignified to stoop to. And don’t even get me started on the fucktarded swimsuit competition in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. And so on; I imagine you’re getting my meaning.
Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle really makes no such pretenses. At the start of the game it spells out to you pretty clearly what content the game’s gonna have in it. Additionally, its main character, the Duchess Catherine...I wouldn’t exactly call her promiscuous, per say, but she’s not reserved by nature, and it’s clear early on that she’s pretty open, both emotionally AND physically. And maybe this isn’t entirely fair of me, but it somehow feels different to have fanservice in a game that’s 100% free and has no aims of making money whatsoever. I guess it makes it seem less disingenuous to know that the needlessly sexual content isn’t some crass, insulting marketing scheme to sell to the lowest common denominator--it’s there because it’s meant to be, not because some chortling, greedy scumbag assumes the worst of his audience in order to encourage better sales. Does that actually make it a little better, or is it all in my head? Can’t say for sure, but my head’s the one coming up with all these words that keep appearing on the screen, so I gotta go with it. Lastly, while you can’t turn off the tiny little naked sprites and the sometimes explicit dialogue, the game DOES provide you with an item which will prevent the explicit cutscene art from being shown, so if adult visuals genuinely bother you, the game’s at least taking a step to be accommodating.
So what does that all add up to? Well, I’m still not thrilled about the amount of sexual material in Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, and I still see it as almost entirely unnecessary to have it to the extent the game does, but...it’s really not as bad as it could be, all things considered, and it doesn’t really feel particularly degrading, either. It’s not so hard to look past it all to recognize EoWC’s good qualities. And really, even if it was, I’d be a hypocrite twice over if I didn’t do so anyway--I’ve always advocated judging an RPG for its storytelling content rather than its bare surface qualities, its window-dressings per say, after all, and in all honesty, I’ve written a few explicit fanfics in my time that I think, if I may say so myself, are nonetheless fairly decent stories.
So, that said, and said in probably way more paragraphs than were really necessary, what are Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle’s good qualities? Well, the first one I encountered is that it’s really quite amusing. Right from the get-go, Duchess Catherine’s comments and dialogue as she examines various objects in the background and interacts with other characters are very funny. Sometimes they’re funny on their own, often they’re funny commentary about RPGs in general (both video games and the tabletop variety). If you’re familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and video game RPGs in general, you’re probably going to find several moments of this game quite amusing. While EoWC has no small number of serious, touching, and dark moments to it, the pervading feel of the game is a lighthearted one, and the fact that it got a chuckle out of me so quickly was a lot of what drew my interest at first, gave me the inclination not to just dismiss it outright.*
Of course, the amusement factor is just the icing on the cake, the preliminary fun factor to butter you up and get your attention. More important than that is the quality of the game’s protagonist. Catherine at first seems very simplistic, very damsel-in-distress-esque, very...princess-y, but as you progress through the game, you can begin to recognize some strong depth to her, along with some subtle but solid character development. Her exceptionally dark, tormented back history, her craftiness and more than adept skill at political maneuvering and diplomacy, her enthusiasm and wish to form a positive connection with all those around her, the interesting ambiguity about whether she is, in the end, a good or evil character, her insecurities about her future and related subconscious resentment against princesses, her fleeing from the title of being Greyghast’s heir and whether or not there might be some truth to it...there’s a lot of angles to Catherine’s character, a lot of fronts that she grows as a person on, and nigh all of them are pretty interesting. The only criticism that I might have about it is that a lot of this character development is understated, left somewhat to the audience to contemplate and recognize...but I don’t really make that complaint, because I feel that this is one of those rare times in an RPG where this light touch is done skillfully and adequately. This isn’t the common case of a writer mistaking insufficient explanation and exploration as subtle writing; Catherine’s multifaceted character and her development actually ARE subtle.
The rest of the cast is not as interesting to me, I must say. To be sure, the characters by and large are adequate. But while several of them have at least a little something of interest to their characters, such as Louni and Carmina, no one in the game is as deep or well-written a character as Catherine by far. That said, though...well, they don’t really need to be. Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is pretty much completely a personal story, not a wide-reaching one. Catherine’s not the main character caught up in a story, as is typically the case with RPGs. Rather, this is a story about her; she’s the central figure of all its events, and it’s told entirely from her perspective. This is a story which in its entirety revolves around her, not the events she happens to become involved in, a fact that is even more emphasized and logical once one has seen the True Ending and knows the truth of the game’s events. To that end, the worth of the cast is not necessarily so much dependant on the characters’ worth in their own right, but rather their worth as contributors and foils to Catherine’s character through their interactions and relationships with her.
When viewed in that light, the cast is pretty solidly good. Through the Duchess’s conversations, adventures, and often courtships with Alice, Louni, Carmina, Grettel, the Good Dwarf, and most of the other characters both major and minor, we get an understanding of Catherine’s character, and come to know the world she lives in and her relationship to its workings. Even characters who have little to no significance and/or interesting qualities can be worthwhile at times for the perspectives they give us of Catherine, such as with Rain--despite her being onscreen for only about 5 minutes, Rain’s history with Catherine and the way the two of them discuss it is well-done and feels very emotionally realistic. Another example is found with Scheherazade--her story arc is kind of meandering and ultimately kind of negative, but even it has a little redeeming value for the decent scene it has wherein Catherine talks to Alice about the pain of being dumped for the first time, and Alice reveals that Catherine’s innocent polyamory** can be similarly hurtful to the ones who love her. It’s a nice scene.***
Speaking of the way the cast interacts with Catherine, that brings us to my next point as to why this RPG is good: the romances. Admittedly, Catherine’s explorations of love with the people around her are not always great. Gwearst gets way too little quality time with the Duchess for the love on either side to seem convincing, and some of the others are just not particularly interesting. But there are also some really great romantic moments in this game. Catherine’s connection with Alice winds up being pretty touching, even though a lot of it is sort of unsaid, and the similarly subtle love she shares with Louni has some very nice moments, and is even, at times, kind of intriguing. The Nereid seems silly and pointless at first, but I actually found myself very moved later at the strength of the devotion and affection she and Catherine hold for each other, one which cries out across and pulls them together from opposite ends of time and even dimensions.
And Carmina...the love story of Catherine and Carmina’s got it all. They share their histories and personalities with one another, they share a touching chemistry, they’re each willing to give absolutely everything up for the other (Catherine’s willing to make herself the enemy of the most powerful adventuring group in the world for Carmina and to use every resource she has to protect her, and/or go with her to the lands of the Dark Elves (the Drow, essentially, which any Dungeons and Dragons player knows is not a pleasant prospect for a human), Carmina’s willing to restrain her natural inclinations of evil for Catherine’s sake and give up on returning to her home in order to be with Catherine, etc), there’s a very touching aspect of Catherine’s taking a leap of faith in trusting her love to Carmina, and generally I’d just have to say that everything about Carmina’s and Catherine’s romance is emotional, moving, authentic, and natural. This is honestly the best love story I’ve seen for quite a while, actually and easily beating out most of the romances of other, “real” games I’ve seen in the past few years, including those of The Last Story’s, most of those of Mass Effect 3’s, and those of Sakura Wars 5, a game designed specifically around love interests. Seriously, I may very well find myself at the end of this year changing my Greatest Romances List to include this one.
And as a final note about the cast, what about the villains in this game? Well...Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is very, very unconventional, because the three major villains of the game, whose actions actually have the most impact on either the game’s heroine or the world around them, are virtually non-entities. Vecnatrix the lich lord is the world’s major villain, but he only actually shows up in the game a couple times, and then only for a moment or two--not to mention that it’s called into question at one point just how truly dangerous he actually is. The main villain of the game is unknown until you meet them at the very, very end, and while their hand is in all things until that point, they also, at the same time, have not really manipulated much of anything. And then there’s Bad King Greyghast the Terrible, who, at the opening of the game, has been dead for many years. Aside from these three, the most you see for villains are incidental vehicles for plot/character development.
Yet unconventional does not mean bad, at least not in this case. As I said, this RPG is a personal story, not a far-reaching one, and as far as I’m concerned it needs no more villainous presence than it has. Vecnatrix serves an adequate purpose simply by existing in the capacity that he does. The final villain is not just your standard last-minute superboss thrown in for no reason, like Final Fantasy 9’s Necron or every single goddamn numbered Suikoden’s last boss--this one is properly tied to the secretive and layered plot, and more interaction with the events of the game before the final confrontation would have jeopardized the integrity of that plot. That said, I feel like Greyghast really pulls his weight as a villain, even though it’s all after the fact. The legacy of torment he inflicted upon his family, Duchess Catherine in particular, is shown very effectively through flashback, nightmare, and unhappy remembrance at various times in the game. Greyghast’s evil is shown only very subtly, only through small windows and through the scars it left upon Catherine, but you know something, that’s enough to make him one of the darkest, sickest evildoers I’ve seen in RPGs.****
So the game’s fun and funny, the protagonist is really good, the rest of the cast is adequate, the villains’re good enough, and there’re some very good romantic parts. Sounds spiffy so far. So how’s Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle for plot? Turns out it’s quite good, at least by my reckoning. Like many other aspects of the game, it’s pretty unconventional. The setting has a lot more thought and background put into it than seems needed--there’s a lot of background to Aresland that has barely any relevance to the actual game events and characters, yet knowing that the game’s maker has put unnecessary thought into his setting pleases me, because that’s the sign of someone who genuinely cares about the story he’s telling and has enough plans for it to give it depth. A lot of the game is kind of non-linear, in that you can determine a lot of what order you do things in, and whether you do some things at all. The nonlinearity is fairly easy to pull off, since there doesn’t seem to actually BE much of a story for most of the game--you basically are just watching Catherine go about her daily task of building relationships with those around her as she waits for Embric to return. That said, the game does gain some direction after a time, with a certain number of these nonlinear events coming to a head in an attack by 1000 Anti-Paladins, after which, if you’re clever enough and have been thorough in your playing, you can set yourself on the track to the True Ending. Getting to that point (and past the false trail the game throws at you) allows you to see and understand the true nature of the game’s events (though it’s a little hard to suss out at first). It winds up being a small story, really, but emotionally powerful and layered enough that it packs a hell of a punch.
THIS PARAGRAPH IS SPOILERS. GO STRAIGHT TO NEXT PARAGRAPH. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT $200. I have to also note here that this is probably the only time where I’ve really liked an “It was all a dream” ending. I’ve seen some before that were okay and appropriate, but we all know that this kind of ending is infamous for being lame and cheesy.***** But when you add the fact that Catherine’s gift of prophecy makes that dream a set of events yet to come, examples of what could be, you get a case where anything and everything can be as real as she wants it to be, where she can use her foresight to manipulate events later (such as with Gizmod) to (presumably) create a better kingdom, and still arrive at Wulfhammer’s Castle to experience the joys and meet the people she’ll love during the events that she has (and we have) seen during the game’s span. In other words, you get every positive of the all-a-dream scenario does, and none of the downsides (after all, you can’t feel that the time in the dream was wasted or get upset over the fact that it all wasn’t real, because it prepared Catherine for what was to come and let her know that her life would have some happiness (an important thing given her state as her uncle’s captive) and it all WILL be real in as much capacity as she wills it). And I like the fact that she must struggle to return to reality, and keep her wonderful memories of things to come. I also like that there ARE some subtle hints to the nature of the game being a dream and Catherine’s foresight in the game, small enough that they don’t tip you off as anything unusual at the time but connected enough that they suddenly make sense in whole new ways once you know the truth. Good stuff.
So yeah. That’s Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle. It really, honestly is a very good RPG. Maybe not for anyone who’s not comfortable with explicit adult content (or anyone who, for unfathomable reasons, really enjoys RPG battle systems--there’s less than 10 battles in the whole game; it’s almost entirely story-driven), but if you can stick with it long enough to give it an honest chance, you may find yourself really into it. Saint Bomber (the guy who created the game) said in an email conversation with me that he “set out to write a naughty story with some heart, and ended up writing a hearty story with some naughtiness,” and that’s exactly what this is--and I love a hearty story. And hey, it’s free. I’ve paid to play many, many worse RPGs than this one, and chances are good that you have, too. So if you’re interested, why not give it a shot?
You can download it at
http://wulfhammer.org/ if you’re interested (get the Deluxe edition). You may also want to check out the closest thing this game has to a guide, found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x3_9cWCMpCgdyiIiVNx4iIvOCfJMbKgfYOIz4zmSZVw/edit?hl=en&pli=1#heading=h.oot0j9xbixac if you’re interested--I actually do advocate using this guide (although it’s a bit confusing to follow), because you can easily miss quite a few endings and other things if you don’t know what you’re doing (including how to get the True Ending).
Goodness, I’ve been having a wonderful time with Indie RPGs. Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, Bastion, Geneforge 1, and Mark Leung: Revenge of the Bitch have all been enjoyable. Maybe these hipsters are on to something...
* It also got MAJOR brownie points for the fact that one of the peasants at the castle, who all initially just parrot one-line NPC catchphrases, says “Times are tough.” As a general rule, game developers, if you want to get on my good side, a humorous reference to the old, discontinued, but pretty awesome webcomic RPG World is very effective. The only thing that could possibly beat it out is a reference to the equally old, completed, and even more awesome Adventurers! webcomic.
** It’s a strange concept but I really think that it’s a fairly accurate way to describe the way the Duchess romantically connects with multiple people.
*** Sadly, what Catherine takes from this conversation is “have sex with all your love interests at the same time to avoid jealousy.” But aside from that, it’s a good scene.
**** Side Note Because Not Everyone Cares About Ponies: I’m actually reminded a bit with Greyghast of King Sombra from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Though I wouldn’t say Sombra is a particularly great villain, I would argue that he was perhaps the very nastiest of the ones we’ve seen as of the end of Season 3, for the same reason that I find Greyghast so effective: the subtle way the villainy he enacted is shown. We don’t really see much of what Sombra did as tyrant of the Crystal Empire, nor do we see much of note in his actual presence in the show, but the way the crystal ponies act is a huge indicator of just how horrible he truly was--they’re dulled, introverted, joyless, and even just remembering how things were before they were liberated from him is a frightening prospect. Same deal with Greyghast--it’s the torment in Catherine’s recollections that give us a picture of just how bad he really was. It’s a more subtle way of telling the audience how evil a villain was, but if you’re smart enough to really pick up on it, consider it, then it speaks volumes.
***** Which made it all the more amusing that a HUGE amount of Mass Effect 3 players sincerely believed that Mass Effect 3’s ending was secretly going to be revealed to be an “all a dream” scenario--and that they would have preferred that to the ending Bioware actually did create. What does it say about writers when the most absurd cop-out of all time is actually preferable to the one they created?
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Xenosaga 3's Scientia
Oh, dear, I think it’s that time again. Yes, you know the one. It’s time to talk about the frenzied insanity that is Xenosaga 3’s narrative.
What to talk about today, I wonder? Perhaps the way that the series’s subplot questioning what human rights Realians deserve just fizzles out after a while? Or I could mention the meaningless, canned symbolism of having the Elsa sprout wings in Xenosaga 3’s ending, which doesn’t even make sense since wings shouldn’t really increase one’s speed in outer space. Maybe how distracting it is for the U-TIC Organization’s battleships to look like huge barbed penises? And then there’s the absolute jaw-dropping absurdity of resurrecting Albedo, the main and iconic villain of both Xenosaga 1 and 2, and then having only one single scene in the entirety of Xenosaga 3 in which he is at all relevant--and having that scene be his redemption through (sort of) death, which comes, from the perspective of his total screen time over the course of all the games, about 10 minutes after his death as a disturbed and evil villain.
Wait, I know! I’ll rant about Scientia! That’ll do nicely.
Ah, Scientia. Where would Xenosaga 3 be without Scientia, I wonder? Actually, I don’t wonder that at all. I know where Xenosaga 3 would be without Scientia. It would be more or less at the exact same place.
Seriously, why is the Scientia organization even included in Xenosaga 3? The biggest contributions to the plot that Scientia makes is that its leader, Doctus, helps Shion and Miyuki to hack Vector during Xenosaga 3’s opening, later on Scientia analyzes some of the information Shion helped to extract (which turns out to be information relating to overly complex and largely unnecessary plot threads, just like every other goddamn thing in this game), and also Doctus has a hard time remembering Canaan’s name because it is super important to establish that she is too cool for school. Or maybe that her brain is so incredibly hard up for processing power that it could crash just from trying to remember those 6 letters in order. Hard to say, really.
But yeah, that’s pretty much it for Scientia. Doctus and her group (a group we never actually see much evidence of other than Doctus, incidentally, lessening even further its ability to make an impact) do almost nothing overall, and spend the majority of the game completely forgotten by the main plot. Yeah, okay, the group’s goal is discovering the truth about, warning people away from, and seeking the destruction of the U.M.N., the cosmic network that all human culture is dependant upon in the future, yet even after being detailed and explained over the course of 3 separate games still is incredibly vague and puzzling in nature (the best way of going about understanding it, really, is to think of the U.M.N. as a magic psychic internet). And a (sort of) major plot point of Xenosaga 3 is discovering the problems and darker parts of the history of the U.M.N., so you could, I guess, say that Scientia has some relevance by introducing you to the idea that this inexplicable interweb could have drawbacks early on...but that’s a real stretch. In reality, Scientia is a mere shard of plot that slips through the fingers of a game trying to hold way, way too much stuff at one time.
Additionally, one has to wonder just how much need there was for Doctus and her organization even in the extremely small role they serve. I mean, does Doctus really have to be there in the game’s opening to start with? Since Xenosaga 3 already is jarringly putting forth the idea that Shion is secretly working against Vector now anyway, it would be as believable to have Shion and Miyuki doing their raid on Vector without Doctus’s help--Shion’s intelligent enough that it would be entirely feasible for her to be the one fronting the technological and intellectual resources necessary for the operation herself. There are other, better-established avenues and characters for going over the data she obtains in this event, so it’s not like Scientia’s organization is particularly necessary for that, either (hell, a simple time-consuming plot-convenient automated program would have worked just as well). And since the idea that the U.M.N. is something more than just Magical Space Internet is only truly being introduced and explored in this installment anyway, it’s a conclusion we could just as easily believe Shion or some other pre-established character coming up with themselves, rather than inventing an entire organization for it if that organization is going to lose relevance in the next 5 minutes.
The real problem here has its origins in the between-games story of the Xenosaga series. As you probably know already, the Xenosaga series was originally meant to be 6 games long, instead of 3, which explains a lot of the major flaws in Xenosaga 2’s mashing so much plot nonsense together and monologuing a full month forward at its halfway point, and more importantly explains why Xenosaga 3’s codex includes within it the details of an entire game’s worth of plot that happened between the second and third game that we’ll never actually see. Rather than doing the sane thing and trying to adjust the original 6-game-long story of the series so it would properly suit a trilogy by dropping its extraneous material (and there’s a LOT of that), the Xenosaga team tried to jampack every part of it they possibly could into half the games. I mean, obviously it would have been best if the series had had its full 6 games to develop over, but if they’d at least just tried to cut down on some of the peripheral plot arcs and ideas instead of smush everything together, the trilogy might have at least been comprehensible.
Anyway, this between-games story arc (let’s call it Xenosaga 2.5) is, according to the codex in Xenosaga 3 that summarizes it, where Doctus and Scientia originate in the series, and where they had a major role in Xenosaga’s events. Under normal circumstances (as in, Xenosaga 2.5 having been its own game), Scientia’s small role in Xenosaga 3 would actually be fairly sensible. I mean, the plot of Xenosaga 3 doesn’t require them in any real capacity, but if they were an established sect and Doctus an established character, as would be the case if Xenosaga 2.5 had been its own game, then the writers wouldn’t want to just drop Scientia altogether, because players would wonder why this group that was so important the last time was suddenly gone and forgotten. Abrupt absences like that actually tend to irritate returning audiences. So to have Scientia at least acknowledged, even if they aren’t important, and then have them relegated to non-screentime importance would have been a good way to get on with things without having the players wondering in mild annoyance where the group went.
But that’s IF Xenosaga 2.5 had been an actual game as was the original intent, IF it had been an actual product that the players had experienced to its fullest. And that isn’t how it wound up happening. So what would have been a minor but appropriate return of a previously well-established important group and character turns into an inexplicably important-seeming introduction of a character and group that has very little to do anything, and even what minor relevance they have seems forced.
So that’s the problem with Scientia. Like so many of the unnecessary and confusing variables of the Xenosaga series, Scientia is, in the end, basically unimportant and should have been removed altogether for the sake of a clearer and more sensible narrative. Given Scientia’s origin in Xenosaga 2.5, you can say the fault lies in Namco for refusing to give the series the time adequate to tell its story. But you can also say that the writers of Xenosaga are at fault for being unwilling to give up the extraneous details that had been planned, trim the fat of the plot so to speak, and/or for having no rational understanding of what plot devices are necessary and effective for a well-told story, and which devices just distract from and convolute it. Either way, it’s just another of the countless storytelling bungles to be found in Xenosaga 3.
What to talk about today, I wonder? Perhaps the way that the series’s subplot questioning what human rights Realians deserve just fizzles out after a while? Or I could mention the meaningless, canned symbolism of having the Elsa sprout wings in Xenosaga 3’s ending, which doesn’t even make sense since wings shouldn’t really increase one’s speed in outer space. Maybe how distracting it is for the U-TIC Organization’s battleships to look like huge barbed penises? And then there’s the absolute jaw-dropping absurdity of resurrecting Albedo, the main and iconic villain of both Xenosaga 1 and 2, and then having only one single scene in the entirety of Xenosaga 3 in which he is at all relevant--and having that scene be his redemption through (sort of) death, which comes, from the perspective of his total screen time over the course of all the games, about 10 minutes after his death as a disturbed and evil villain.
Wait, I know! I’ll rant about Scientia! That’ll do nicely.
Ah, Scientia. Where would Xenosaga 3 be without Scientia, I wonder? Actually, I don’t wonder that at all. I know where Xenosaga 3 would be without Scientia. It would be more or less at the exact same place.
Seriously, why is the Scientia organization even included in Xenosaga 3? The biggest contributions to the plot that Scientia makes is that its leader, Doctus, helps Shion and Miyuki to hack Vector during Xenosaga 3’s opening, later on Scientia analyzes some of the information Shion helped to extract (which turns out to be information relating to overly complex and largely unnecessary plot threads, just like every other goddamn thing in this game), and also Doctus has a hard time remembering Canaan’s name because it is super important to establish that she is too cool for school. Or maybe that her brain is so incredibly hard up for processing power that it could crash just from trying to remember those 6 letters in order. Hard to say, really.
But yeah, that’s pretty much it for Scientia. Doctus and her group (a group we never actually see much evidence of other than Doctus, incidentally, lessening even further its ability to make an impact) do almost nothing overall, and spend the majority of the game completely forgotten by the main plot. Yeah, okay, the group’s goal is discovering the truth about, warning people away from, and seeking the destruction of the U.M.N., the cosmic network that all human culture is dependant upon in the future, yet even after being detailed and explained over the course of 3 separate games still is incredibly vague and puzzling in nature (the best way of going about understanding it, really, is to think of the U.M.N. as a magic psychic internet). And a (sort of) major plot point of Xenosaga 3 is discovering the problems and darker parts of the history of the U.M.N., so you could, I guess, say that Scientia has some relevance by introducing you to the idea that this inexplicable interweb could have drawbacks early on...but that’s a real stretch. In reality, Scientia is a mere shard of plot that slips through the fingers of a game trying to hold way, way too much stuff at one time.
Additionally, one has to wonder just how much need there was for Doctus and her organization even in the extremely small role they serve. I mean, does Doctus really have to be there in the game’s opening to start with? Since Xenosaga 3 already is jarringly putting forth the idea that Shion is secretly working against Vector now anyway, it would be as believable to have Shion and Miyuki doing their raid on Vector without Doctus’s help--Shion’s intelligent enough that it would be entirely feasible for her to be the one fronting the technological and intellectual resources necessary for the operation herself. There are other, better-established avenues and characters for going over the data she obtains in this event, so it’s not like Scientia’s organization is particularly necessary for that, either (hell, a simple time-consuming plot-convenient automated program would have worked just as well). And since the idea that the U.M.N. is something more than just Magical Space Internet is only truly being introduced and explored in this installment anyway, it’s a conclusion we could just as easily believe Shion or some other pre-established character coming up with themselves, rather than inventing an entire organization for it if that organization is going to lose relevance in the next 5 minutes.
The real problem here has its origins in the between-games story of the Xenosaga series. As you probably know already, the Xenosaga series was originally meant to be 6 games long, instead of 3, which explains a lot of the major flaws in Xenosaga 2’s mashing so much plot nonsense together and monologuing a full month forward at its halfway point, and more importantly explains why Xenosaga 3’s codex includes within it the details of an entire game’s worth of plot that happened between the second and third game that we’ll never actually see. Rather than doing the sane thing and trying to adjust the original 6-game-long story of the series so it would properly suit a trilogy by dropping its extraneous material (and there’s a LOT of that), the Xenosaga team tried to jampack every part of it they possibly could into half the games. I mean, obviously it would have been best if the series had had its full 6 games to develop over, but if they’d at least just tried to cut down on some of the peripheral plot arcs and ideas instead of smush everything together, the trilogy might have at least been comprehensible.
Anyway, this between-games story arc (let’s call it Xenosaga 2.5) is, according to the codex in Xenosaga 3 that summarizes it, where Doctus and Scientia originate in the series, and where they had a major role in Xenosaga’s events. Under normal circumstances (as in, Xenosaga 2.5 having been its own game), Scientia’s small role in Xenosaga 3 would actually be fairly sensible. I mean, the plot of Xenosaga 3 doesn’t require them in any real capacity, but if they were an established sect and Doctus an established character, as would be the case if Xenosaga 2.5 had been its own game, then the writers wouldn’t want to just drop Scientia altogether, because players would wonder why this group that was so important the last time was suddenly gone and forgotten. Abrupt absences like that actually tend to irritate returning audiences. So to have Scientia at least acknowledged, even if they aren’t important, and then have them relegated to non-screentime importance would have been a good way to get on with things without having the players wondering in mild annoyance where the group went.
But that’s IF Xenosaga 2.5 had been an actual game as was the original intent, IF it had been an actual product that the players had experienced to its fullest. And that isn’t how it wound up happening. So what would have been a minor but appropriate return of a previously well-established important group and character turns into an inexplicably important-seeming introduction of a character and group that has very little to do anything, and even what minor relevance they have seems forced.
So that’s the problem with Scientia. Like so many of the unnecessary and confusing variables of the Xenosaga series, Scientia is, in the end, basically unimportant and should have been removed altogether for the sake of a clearer and more sensible narrative. Given Scientia’s origin in Xenosaga 2.5, you can say the fault lies in Namco for refusing to give the series the time adequate to tell its story. But you can also say that the writers of Xenosaga are at fault for being unwilling to give up the extraneous details that had been planned, trim the fat of the plot so to speak, and/or for having no rational understanding of what plot devices are necessary and effective for a well-told story, and which devices just distract from and convolute it. Either way, it’s just another of the countless storytelling bungles to be found in Xenosaga 3.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Mass Effect Series AMV: Go Back to Sleep
Wow, I found another RPG AMV so good that it deserves its own rant, and it hasn’t even been a full year since the last one! Truly we live in wondrous times. Today we look at the first Mass Effect video to get its own spotlight here, Go Back to Sleep, by Xeriana11.
Mass Effect Series: Go Back to Sleep: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpuwTZca_rg
Look. Look With Your Special Eyes: Top-notch visual quality on this one. Everything looks as good in this AMV as it does in the actual games, and anyone familiar with Mass Effect knows just how good that is. Along with being well-suited for the AMV’s story and the song’s lyrics and tune (more on that later), Xeriana11’s selected a set of clips of footage from the Mass Effect series that has a decidedly darker tint to it, even when it’s bright, which definitely accentuates the darkness of the music and the video’s intent. I don’t know how much credit to give her for this, since ME2 and 3 (from which most footage is pulled) have a generally darker visual tone anyway, but it works great for the AMV’s purposes, so kudos all the same.
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I’m very partial to AMVs who employ visual bells and whistles with moderation, keeping them simple but effective (not that more grandiose visuals in an AMV are necessarily bad, but they usually wind up just getting in the way, distracting the viewer from the video’s actual content). So it should come as no surprise to you that this AMV that I like so much is another case of a video with a moderate number of basic visual effects, used effectively to increase the effect of the AMV without going overboard. Some of the best instances of this come when the video starts out, with some quick blurs, discolorations, and jerky visual transitions, which effectively convey the subconscious mood set for both the song and video in those few first notes, finally getting into the song and video proper with a quick focusing upon the Illusive Man’s face, which brings to mind how the world looks when you first open your eyes after awakening--a simple but absolutely great effect to use to portray Shepard’s just having awoken and to visually set up the idea of The Illusive Man wanting Shepard to “go back to sleep.” The blurred zoom-in* that follows that scene at 0:34 is another example of a comparatively basic effect that coordinates really well with the AMV as a whole, this time mirroring the abrupt and violent change in the music to abruptly and violently bring us into the scene of Shepard’s death in ME2.
Those are the best examples of Xeriana11’s touch, visually, but the visual effects stay solid throughout. Lots of faded overlay transitions link one scene to the next in a more connected way than a simple switch would when the scenes should be associated together, some color-burny effects at times to coordinate with the song’s harsher notes, that sort of thing. It’s all well-placed and effective.
Your Music’s Bad and You Should Feel Bad!: This AMV employs the song Pet, by A Perfect Circle. This is the first I’ve ever heard this song, and I have to admit that while I don’t actually like it personally, it IS impressive to me--dark, creepy, powerful, even disturbing. This is one of those rare occasions I can look at a song and actually see it as an example of art.
There’s no denying that the music is the dominant force in this AMV, driving the visual component of the music video and its message. The AMV endeavors to follow along to the song on several different levels, and succeeds admirably on all counts. On its most basic level, the AMV follows the music’s tone and changes admirably with its visuals. The quiet and creepy parts are reflected by appropriate scenes, most often involving The Illusive Man, which fit perfectly with his bright and yet dark surroundings. As the music turns to a harsher, more hostile tone, we see the visuals reflect it, violently transitioning to scenes of destruction and the nightmarish situations and foes that Shepard faces off against. On the next level, the video also follows along and excellently compliments the lyrics of the song, as well. Practically every moment in the AMV during which there are spoken words is an example of this, but I’ll throw out a few exemplary moments anyway. Moments like 1:16 through 1:19, where “truth” and “choice” are represented by unpleasant moments of ME2 and 3 where Shepard learns that The Illusive Man knowingly allowed Shepard to walk into a trap because he wanted the potential prizes of information from the situation (the truth that The Illusive Man is only interested in what Shepard can do for him, rather than what Shepard can do for everyone), and where Shepard must choose whether or not to shoot a misguided old friend in order to save the council’s, and by extension countless others’, lives. Or like 2:56, where we see The Illusive Man’s dream of Control from the (horrendously awful) ending to the lyrics talking of a new world order, 3:12, which show Shepard’s visions of the Reapers to the lyrics “the boogiemen are coming,” and 4:01, showing Shepard’s loyal and good friends as the “other” and “evil” ones to The Illusive Man. It’s all good stuff.
There’s one last, overall level of the music that I feel the video meshes with excellently, too. As the song continues, there’s a point near its middle that seems...well, if I had to play musical interpreter, I’d say that it’s the point at which the singer’s manipulations seem to be failing. Eventually the singer’s vocals become louder, more insistent--he’s no longer soft and wheedling as in the song’s beginning, he’s now frustratedly shouting his manipulations, as the music itself starts to sound more energized and epic, and thus, hopeful--as though the one the singer is trying to control is breaking through the manipulations. This, of course, could be entirely a misinterpretation by someone who prefers the optimistic and positive conclusions to the dark and unhappy ones, but even if that’s definitely not what the song means to portray, the AMV uses the song in this way, going from primarily using ME2’s visuals halfway through the song to primarily using ME3’s scenes--in other words, going from the visuals of a game where Shepard was working for The Illusive Man to the game where Shepard is his enemy, using the scene at ME2’s end where Shepard has destroyed the Collector Base against The Illusive Man’s wishes and walks out on him as a transition between these two halves of the AMV. As the music becomes more powerful (again, like the manipulator is fully losing his control over the song’s subject) at around 3:23, we see scenes from the assault on The Illusive Man’s base, and scenes from the game’s finale where Shepard finally has the opportunity to break through his control and shoot him dead, as the singer gives one last whispered plea of manipulation. Again, maybe this more hopeful message of the manipulator’s illusions failing isn’t what the song intended, but that’s the direction the AMV’s interpretation of the song goes in, and it does work.
Guy, You Explain: The purpose of this AMV is to portray, and perhaps even explore, the relationship The Illusive Man has with Shepard in the light of the song. As the representative of Control for Mass Effect, The Illusive Man and his manipulations of Shepard, both successful and failed, are a great match to the creepy control the singer of Pet seeks, through threats and reassurances, to exert over the song’s subject. It’s interesting, even intriguing, to see The Illusive Man’s perspective of Shepard in this way, and casts him in a decidedly sinister light, one which fits him well. Xeriana11 also states that her intended purpose with this AMV was to show Shepard’s struggle to figure out whether or not to believe The Illusive Man, to show how his skillful manipulations of Shepard that would create doubts in Shepard’s mind, and that’s definitely achieved here, too, partially through use of scenes where the embodiment of Shepard’s connection to the Alliance, Kaidan (or Ashley; whomever survived Virmire--in this case, Kaidan is the one used), is cutting his ties with Shepard in ME2 and standing against Shepard in ME3, and partially just from the overall effect of having The Illusive Man be the narrative force of the video.
Now granted, this isn’t a perfect AMV in some respects. It’s an interpretation of The Illusive Man and Shepard that takes a certain amount of liberties in their interactions, liberties that perhaps separate it from being a perfect, literal match to the actual game’s characters. And I have to say it confuses me a little why a Male Shepard is not used in this video rather than the Female version of Shepard, because one of the opening visuals of the AMV has The Illusive Man looking, for a brief moment, at a dossier of Male Shepard, and one of the last lines of the song refers to the song’s subject (who is Shepard for the purposes of this AMV) as “son.” It wouldn’t be a problem for me if the AMV were forced to use a character who had no male version available, but there IS a male version of Shepard, so why not use him instead and simply avoid that incongruity?
Still, the gender thing is so small an issue that it barely even warrants mention anyway, so it’s not really a problem at all in the end. And regardless of how accurate you consider this video, it’s more than close enough that it works well as an AMV to the Pet song and provides an entertaining, and maybe even thought-provoking perspective on Shepard and The Illusive Man, whose connection is interesting to consider and explore. Ultimately, Go Back to Sleep is a very well made, interesting, and creepily powerful AMV, just great overall, and I think it deserves real recognition.
* Once again: I totally do not know anything about cinematography terms. I guess some day I should really attempt to learn them rather than have to keep making these apologies, but for the moment, you’ll just have to bear with my ignorant descriptions of visual effects.
Mass Effect Series: Go Back to Sleep: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpuwTZca_rg
Look. Look With Your Special Eyes: Top-notch visual quality on this one. Everything looks as good in this AMV as it does in the actual games, and anyone familiar with Mass Effect knows just how good that is. Along with being well-suited for the AMV’s story and the song’s lyrics and tune (more on that later), Xeriana11’s selected a set of clips of footage from the Mass Effect series that has a decidedly darker tint to it, even when it’s bright, which definitely accentuates the darkness of the music and the video’s intent. I don’t know how much credit to give her for this, since ME2 and 3 (from which most footage is pulled) have a generally darker visual tone anyway, but it works great for the AMV’s purposes, so kudos all the same.
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I’m very partial to AMVs who employ visual bells and whistles with moderation, keeping them simple but effective (not that more grandiose visuals in an AMV are necessarily bad, but they usually wind up just getting in the way, distracting the viewer from the video’s actual content). So it should come as no surprise to you that this AMV that I like so much is another case of a video with a moderate number of basic visual effects, used effectively to increase the effect of the AMV without going overboard. Some of the best instances of this come when the video starts out, with some quick blurs, discolorations, and jerky visual transitions, which effectively convey the subconscious mood set for both the song and video in those few first notes, finally getting into the song and video proper with a quick focusing upon the Illusive Man’s face, which brings to mind how the world looks when you first open your eyes after awakening--a simple but absolutely great effect to use to portray Shepard’s just having awoken and to visually set up the idea of The Illusive Man wanting Shepard to “go back to sleep.” The blurred zoom-in* that follows that scene at 0:34 is another example of a comparatively basic effect that coordinates really well with the AMV as a whole, this time mirroring the abrupt and violent change in the music to abruptly and violently bring us into the scene of Shepard’s death in ME2.
Those are the best examples of Xeriana11’s touch, visually, but the visual effects stay solid throughout. Lots of faded overlay transitions link one scene to the next in a more connected way than a simple switch would when the scenes should be associated together, some color-burny effects at times to coordinate with the song’s harsher notes, that sort of thing. It’s all well-placed and effective.
Your Music’s Bad and You Should Feel Bad!: This AMV employs the song Pet, by A Perfect Circle. This is the first I’ve ever heard this song, and I have to admit that while I don’t actually like it personally, it IS impressive to me--dark, creepy, powerful, even disturbing. This is one of those rare occasions I can look at a song and actually see it as an example of art.
There’s no denying that the music is the dominant force in this AMV, driving the visual component of the music video and its message. The AMV endeavors to follow along to the song on several different levels, and succeeds admirably on all counts. On its most basic level, the AMV follows the music’s tone and changes admirably with its visuals. The quiet and creepy parts are reflected by appropriate scenes, most often involving The Illusive Man, which fit perfectly with his bright and yet dark surroundings. As the music turns to a harsher, more hostile tone, we see the visuals reflect it, violently transitioning to scenes of destruction and the nightmarish situations and foes that Shepard faces off against. On the next level, the video also follows along and excellently compliments the lyrics of the song, as well. Practically every moment in the AMV during which there are spoken words is an example of this, but I’ll throw out a few exemplary moments anyway. Moments like 1:16 through 1:19, where “truth” and “choice” are represented by unpleasant moments of ME2 and 3 where Shepard learns that The Illusive Man knowingly allowed Shepard to walk into a trap because he wanted the potential prizes of information from the situation (the truth that The Illusive Man is only interested in what Shepard can do for him, rather than what Shepard can do for everyone), and where Shepard must choose whether or not to shoot a misguided old friend in order to save the council’s, and by extension countless others’, lives. Or like 2:56, where we see The Illusive Man’s dream of Control from the (horrendously awful) ending to the lyrics talking of a new world order, 3:12, which show Shepard’s visions of the Reapers to the lyrics “the boogiemen are coming,” and 4:01, showing Shepard’s loyal and good friends as the “other” and “evil” ones to The Illusive Man. It’s all good stuff.
There’s one last, overall level of the music that I feel the video meshes with excellently, too. As the song continues, there’s a point near its middle that seems...well, if I had to play musical interpreter, I’d say that it’s the point at which the singer’s manipulations seem to be failing. Eventually the singer’s vocals become louder, more insistent--he’s no longer soft and wheedling as in the song’s beginning, he’s now frustratedly shouting his manipulations, as the music itself starts to sound more energized and epic, and thus, hopeful--as though the one the singer is trying to control is breaking through the manipulations. This, of course, could be entirely a misinterpretation by someone who prefers the optimistic and positive conclusions to the dark and unhappy ones, but even if that’s definitely not what the song means to portray, the AMV uses the song in this way, going from primarily using ME2’s visuals halfway through the song to primarily using ME3’s scenes--in other words, going from the visuals of a game where Shepard was working for The Illusive Man to the game where Shepard is his enemy, using the scene at ME2’s end where Shepard has destroyed the Collector Base against The Illusive Man’s wishes and walks out on him as a transition between these two halves of the AMV. As the music becomes more powerful (again, like the manipulator is fully losing his control over the song’s subject) at around 3:23, we see scenes from the assault on The Illusive Man’s base, and scenes from the game’s finale where Shepard finally has the opportunity to break through his control and shoot him dead, as the singer gives one last whispered plea of manipulation. Again, maybe this more hopeful message of the manipulator’s illusions failing isn’t what the song intended, but that’s the direction the AMV’s interpretation of the song goes in, and it does work.
Guy, You Explain: The purpose of this AMV is to portray, and perhaps even explore, the relationship The Illusive Man has with Shepard in the light of the song. As the representative of Control for Mass Effect, The Illusive Man and his manipulations of Shepard, both successful and failed, are a great match to the creepy control the singer of Pet seeks, through threats and reassurances, to exert over the song’s subject. It’s interesting, even intriguing, to see The Illusive Man’s perspective of Shepard in this way, and casts him in a decidedly sinister light, one which fits him well. Xeriana11 also states that her intended purpose with this AMV was to show Shepard’s struggle to figure out whether or not to believe The Illusive Man, to show how his skillful manipulations of Shepard that would create doubts in Shepard’s mind, and that’s definitely achieved here, too, partially through use of scenes where the embodiment of Shepard’s connection to the Alliance, Kaidan (or Ashley; whomever survived Virmire--in this case, Kaidan is the one used), is cutting his ties with Shepard in ME2 and standing against Shepard in ME3, and partially just from the overall effect of having The Illusive Man be the narrative force of the video.
Now granted, this isn’t a perfect AMV in some respects. It’s an interpretation of The Illusive Man and Shepard that takes a certain amount of liberties in their interactions, liberties that perhaps separate it from being a perfect, literal match to the actual game’s characters. And I have to say it confuses me a little why a Male Shepard is not used in this video rather than the Female version of Shepard, because one of the opening visuals of the AMV has The Illusive Man looking, for a brief moment, at a dossier of Male Shepard, and one of the last lines of the song refers to the song’s subject (who is Shepard for the purposes of this AMV) as “son.” It wouldn’t be a problem for me if the AMV were forced to use a character who had no male version available, but there IS a male version of Shepard, so why not use him instead and simply avoid that incongruity?
Still, the gender thing is so small an issue that it barely even warrants mention anyway, so it’s not really a problem at all in the end. And regardless of how accurate you consider this video, it’s more than close enough that it works well as an AMV to the Pet song and provides an entertaining, and maybe even thought-provoking perspective on Shepard and The Illusive Man, whose connection is interesting to consider and explore. Ultimately, Go Back to Sleep is a very well made, interesting, and creepily powerful AMV, just great overall, and I think it deserves real recognition.
* Once again: I totally do not know anything about cinematography terms. I guess some day I should really attempt to learn them rather than have to keep making these apologies, but for the moment, you’ll just have to bear with my ignorant descriptions of visual effects.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
General RPGs' Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome
Unnecessary Paternal Ties Syndrome, Love Hina Syndrome, Anime Girl Run Syndrome, now this...Maybe I ought to make a glossary for this blog’s special terms.
You know what I’m getting kind of sick of? Moments in RPGs when the heroes of the game just sit there and do nothing as a scene goes sour in front of them. I call it Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome. It strikes an entire group of heroes at once and renders them totally incapable of doing anything useful or heroic as events unfold around them even though this is exactly the kind of shit they’re supposed to stop. It could be sitting back and letting someone else do all the hero work during a disaster even though they themselves have the power to help, like that moment in Mega Man Star Force 2 when Sonia just sits back with the rest of Geo’s friends and lets him go save the town as Mega Man, even though she could transform into Harp Note (what a stupid hero name) and help him, like she had the sense to just a little while before. It could be just the heroes standing silent like morons in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 as they watch someone deny their dark side, even though the heroes have seen several times already that this denial powers that dark side up and makes it into an annoying boss fight. All they’d have to do to avoid half the bosses in that game is to tell someone, “Please don’t say the words “You’re not me.”” By far the most memorable and iconic of Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome, though, are the moments in RPGs where a good guy’s getting beaten to a pulp and his friends just stand there like fucktards and watch without lifting a finger to help.
Example: Mass Effect 3. Assuming your Shepard isn’t a Renegade tool, and assuming that you’re a competent player, then there will be a point in the game wherein lame villain Kai Leng attempts to assassinate the Salarian Councilor, but is foiled by Shepard’s former comrade Thane. What ensues is a close-quarters combat between Kai Leng and Thane, in which Kai Leng is forever immortalized as the wannabe tough guy who could only barely keep up with a dude currently going through the last stages of a fatal, debilitating disease. The scene ends with Kai Leng managing to stab Thane with his laughably anachronistic sword, and running off like the weak little bitch-clown he is.
Throughout this entire scene, Commander Shepard and his allies just stand there watching. It is only after Shepard’s friend has been fatally stabbed that he thinks to step forward and shoot at Kai Leng.
This is what I’m talking about. Now, Shepard’s no ultra-assassin like Thane, nor a prancing little glee club ninja like Kai Leng, so yeah, he’s not going to be able to keep up with them at hand-to-hand combat, but it’s well-established that Shepard’s highly competent at unarmed fighting all the same, so it’s not like he’d get in Thane’s way or something. All Shepard would need to do in this scene is provide enough of an attacking threat to Kai Leng that the pretentious jackass would be distracted, forced to split his attention between Thane and Shepard, and this whole fight could easily have ended a lot differently. It’s already a close enough fight that it looks like Kai Leng wins more by luck than skill. The addition of Shepard to it would have made a significantly positive impact.
And there’s always the fact that Shepard and his companions have, y’know...guns. I’m somewhat mystified as to why Shepard doesn’t see fit to open fire on Kai Leng to help Thane out. Okay, yes, you can argue that with Thane and Kai Leng going at each other as fast and hard as they are, Shepard runs the risk of shooting Thane. Fair point. But Shepard’s not exactly unused to hitting moving targets, his companion EDI has advance combat programming that we could only assume contains a very functional targeting system, and his companion Liara has Biotic powers and could presumably use them to knock Kai Leng and Thane apart and down to the ground, at which point there’s no problem opening fire on the asshat without endangering Thane (Shepard himself may have Biotic powers, for that matter, depending on how the player chose to build him, although God forbid Bioware actually acknowledge any individualism in Shepard’s abilities during a cutscene). And lastly, there’s clearly a moment during the fight in which Thane and Kai Leng are standing reasonably distanced from one another for long enough that Shepard and company have no excuse not to start shooting.
Once again, though, instead of any of that logical stuff happening, Shepard and his pals just stand around and fucking watch as his buddy gets punked.
This problem of characters inexplicably just watching as their supposed friends get brutally murdered in front of them is not an RPG-only thing, not by a long shot (Hollywood has been particularly fond in the past 50+ years of the idea that women are incapable of assisting their rescuers in fighting for their own lives). But I have to say, the most shocking moments of it, in my mind, always come from RPGs. That’s probably due in part to the fact that in an RPG, the friends who are just standing there partaking of your punishment are usually all powerful warriors who have already proven their combat prowess in approximately 200 to 2000 random battles.
It’s probably also due in large part to that scene in Xenosaga 3 where KOS-MOS spends a good 5 minutes being thoroughly worked over by T-ELOS, a faster, stronger, combat-smarter android. Like, Jesus Christ, guys, it’s apparent from the start of that fight who’s gonna win it. You think maybe you guys should use those guns, or that sword, or that fucking large combat cyborg to help out somehow? I mean, they’re just standing there, minute after fucking minute, watching T-ELOS smash KOS-MOS into parts, and they don’t do ANYTHING. At least Shepard can lamely cling to the excuse that Thane’s fight with Kai Leng was a short one. KOS-MOS’s beatdown takes long enough that you could plan out and finish packing a basket for a reasonably decent-sized picnic before it ends.
What makes it even worse, if that’s even possible, is that later in the game the party encounters T-ELOS again, and THEN several party members (Shion, Jin, and Ziggy) DO try to attack her, and while she’s obviously way too much for them, they’re clearly shown to be able to distract her enough, to pose enough potential threat, that KOS-MOS could take advantage of it for her own attacks (and it could work vice-versa, too; KOS-MOS obviously has the capacity to fully engage T-ELOS’s attentions, which would leave the others free to capitalize on that. T-ELOS may prevent Ziggy from scoring a hit in the fight we do see, but if he had the opportunity to land one, one can assume it would be damaging). Where was this unified attack earlier in the game, when KOS-MOS was still underclassed and really needed the assistance? That sequence is so fucking ridiculous that I really think it’s why I now associate Voyeuristic Paralysis more to RPGs than any other media form.
Now I understand the storytelling imperative of this phenomenon. For purposes of the plot, the writers feel that it’s important for a character to be locked in a one-on-one struggle against an enemy, and for the result of that struggle to be uninfluenced by the other characters. The writers at Bioware wanted Thane to go out like a champ and they wanted to establish Kai Leng as a dangerous badass.* The writers (if such they can be called) for Xenosaga 3 wanted to establish T-ELOS’s supposed dominance over KOS-MOS and to remove KOS-MOS from the picture for a while, as well as create a transition into the lengthy part of the game where the party is stumbling around back in time inside Shion’s head.** And so on and so forth--each game’s writers who allow their characters to be overcome with Voyeuristic Paralysis are doing so because there’s something they want to accomplish with the scene that they feel is necessary for the game’s plot, and they feel that it can only be done by having a single particular character step up to the challenge. I understand the reasoning. But that just doesn’t excuse the fact that it makes no sense for a group of normally proactive heroes to just stand around and watch a situation play out. Some allowance can be made during occasions where the characters facing off have some personal rivalry, of course, but that’s only sometimes the case.
The thing that makes this whole issue really silly is the incredible ease with which it can be solved, which a huge number of RPGs are smart enough to utilize. It’s really, really simple. If you want your one character to fight, probably to the death, alone against an enemy, just make sure that character’s friends can’t help. Why does Galuf’s death in Final Fantasy 5 not seem as silly as Thane’s in Mass Effect 3? Simple--because Galuf’s allies are all down for the count, unable to contribute to his fatal battle to protect them. Why do I find KOS-MOS’s gratuitous beatdown in Xenosaga 3 so stupid, yet have no serious complaint about General Leo’s fatal, futile struggle against Kefka in Final Fantasy 6? Because when Leo’s getting stabbed, his numerous allies have all been knocked unconscious and/or killed already.*** All it would have taken for the Xenosaga gang to have a reason not to be helping KOS-MOS was some mild nerve gas, all it would have taken for Shepard’s non-involvement to make sense was a flash grenade, and it only gets easier for the many magic-involving RPGs out there, since you can just whip up some random paralysis spell/power whenever it’s convenient.
Is that incredibly cheap? Absolutely. But is it better than the nonsensical notion of having your cast break character and do absolutely nothing? Definitely. I’ll take conventional and cheap writing over illogical and stupid writing any day.
* That they only achieved half of these ambitions is irrelevant.
** That this is weird and makes no sense is irrelevant. Also, expected.
*** Although I do have to say that the actual act of them being taken down earlier was dumb, and sort of a case of Voyeuristic Paralysis itself, as they all just kinda watched themselves get blasted by the Magitek Armors. But, at the time of Leo’s last stand, there’s no one to help him.
You know what I’m getting kind of sick of? Moments in RPGs when the heroes of the game just sit there and do nothing as a scene goes sour in front of them. I call it Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome. It strikes an entire group of heroes at once and renders them totally incapable of doing anything useful or heroic as events unfold around them even though this is exactly the kind of shit they’re supposed to stop. It could be sitting back and letting someone else do all the hero work during a disaster even though they themselves have the power to help, like that moment in Mega Man Star Force 2 when Sonia just sits back with the rest of Geo’s friends and lets him go save the town as Mega Man, even though she could transform into Harp Note (what a stupid hero name) and help him, like she had the sense to just a little while before. It could be just the heroes standing silent like morons in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 as they watch someone deny their dark side, even though the heroes have seen several times already that this denial powers that dark side up and makes it into an annoying boss fight. All they’d have to do to avoid half the bosses in that game is to tell someone, “Please don’t say the words “You’re not me.”” By far the most memorable and iconic of Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome, though, are the moments in RPGs where a good guy’s getting beaten to a pulp and his friends just stand there like fucktards and watch without lifting a finger to help.
Example: Mass Effect 3. Assuming your Shepard isn’t a Renegade tool, and assuming that you’re a competent player, then there will be a point in the game wherein lame villain Kai Leng attempts to assassinate the Salarian Councilor, but is foiled by Shepard’s former comrade Thane. What ensues is a close-quarters combat between Kai Leng and Thane, in which Kai Leng is forever immortalized as the wannabe tough guy who could only barely keep up with a dude currently going through the last stages of a fatal, debilitating disease. The scene ends with Kai Leng managing to stab Thane with his laughably anachronistic sword, and running off like the weak little bitch-clown he is.
Throughout this entire scene, Commander Shepard and his allies just stand there watching. It is only after Shepard’s friend has been fatally stabbed that he thinks to step forward and shoot at Kai Leng.
This is what I’m talking about. Now, Shepard’s no ultra-assassin like Thane, nor a prancing little glee club ninja like Kai Leng, so yeah, he’s not going to be able to keep up with them at hand-to-hand combat, but it’s well-established that Shepard’s highly competent at unarmed fighting all the same, so it’s not like he’d get in Thane’s way or something. All Shepard would need to do in this scene is provide enough of an attacking threat to Kai Leng that the pretentious jackass would be distracted, forced to split his attention between Thane and Shepard, and this whole fight could easily have ended a lot differently. It’s already a close enough fight that it looks like Kai Leng wins more by luck than skill. The addition of Shepard to it would have made a significantly positive impact.
And there’s always the fact that Shepard and his companions have, y’know...guns. I’m somewhat mystified as to why Shepard doesn’t see fit to open fire on Kai Leng to help Thane out. Okay, yes, you can argue that with Thane and Kai Leng going at each other as fast and hard as they are, Shepard runs the risk of shooting Thane. Fair point. But Shepard’s not exactly unused to hitting moving targets, his companion EDI has advance combat programming that we could only assume contains a very functional targeting system, and his companion Liara has Biotic powers and could presumably use them to knock Kai Leng and Thane apart and down to the ground, at which point there’s no problem opening fire on the asshat without endangering Thane (Shepard himself may have Biotic powers, for that matter, depending on how the player chose to build him, although God forbid Bioware actually acknowledge any individualism in Shepard’s abilities during a cutscene). And lastly, there’s clearly a moment during the fight in which Thane and Kai Leng are standing reasonably distanced from one another for long enough that Shepard and company have no excuse not to start shooting.
Once again, though, instead of any of that logical stuff happening, Shepard and his pals just stand around and fucking watch as his buddy gets punked.
This problem of characters inexplicably just watching as their supposed friends get brutally murdered in front of them is not an RPG-only thing, not by a long shot (Hollywood has been particularly fond in the past 50+ years of the idea that women are incapable of assisting their rescuers in fighting for their own lives). But I have to say, the most shocking moments of it, in my mind, always come from RPGs. That’s probably due in part to the fact that in an RPG, the friends who are just standing there partaking of your punishment are usually all powerful warriors who have already proven their combat prowess in approximately 200 to 2000 random battles.
It’s probably also due in large part to that scene in Xenosaga 3 where KOS-MOS spends a good 5 minutes being thoroughly worked over by T-ELOS, a faster, stronger, combat-smarter android. Like, Jesus Christ, guys, it’s apparent from the start of that fight who’s gonna win it. You think maybe you guys should use those guns, or that sword, or that fucking large combat cyborg to help out somehow? I mean, they’re just standing there, minute after fucking minute, watching T-ELOS smash KOS-MOS into parts, and they don’t do ANYTHING. At least Shepard can lamely cling to the excuse that Thane’s fight with Kai Leng was a short one. KOS-MOS’s beatdown takes long enough that you could plan out and finish packing a basket for a reasonably decent-sized picnic before it ends.
What makes it even worse, if that’s even possible, is that later in the game the party encounters T-ELOS again, and THEN several party members (Shion, Jin, and Ziggy) DO try to attack her, and while she’s obviously way too much for them, they’re clearly shown to be able to distract her enough, to pose enough potential threat, that KOS-MOS could take advantage of it for her own attacks (and it could work vice-versa, too; KOS-MOS obviously has the capacity to fully engage T-ELOS’s attentions, which would leave the others free to capitalize on that. T-ELOS may prevent Ziggy from scoring a hit in the fight we do see, but if he had the opportunity to land one, one can assume it would be damaging). Where was this unified attack earlier in the game, when KOS-MOS was still underclassed and really needed the assistance? That sequence is so fucking ridiculous that I really think it’s why I now associate Voyeuristic Paralysis more to RPGs than any other media form.
Now I understand the storytelling imperative of this phenomenon. For purposes of the plot, the writers feel that it’s important for a character to be locked in a one-on-one struggle against an enemy, and for the result of that struggle to be uninfluenced by the other characters. The writers at Bioware wanted Thane to go out like a champ and they wanted to establish Kai Leng as a dangerous badass.* The writers (if such they can be called) for Xenosaga 3 wanted to establish T-ELOS’s supposed dominance over KOS-MOS and to remove KOS-MOS from the picture for a while, as well as create a transition into the lengthy part of the game where the party is stumbling around back in time inside Shion’s head.** And so on and so forth--each game’s writers who allow their characters to be overcome with Voyeuristic Paralysis are doing so because there’s something they want to accomplish with the scene that they feel is necessary for the game’s plot, and they feel that it can only be done by having a single particular character step up to the challenge. I understand the reasoning. But that just doesn’t excuse the fact that it makes no sense for a group of normally proactive heroes to just stand around and watch a situation play out. Some allowance can be made during occasions where the characters facing off have some personal rivalry, of course, but that’s only sometimes the case.
The thing that makes this whole issue really silly is the incredible ease with which it can be solved, which a huge number of RPGs are smart enough to utilize. It’s really, really simple. If you want your one character to fight, probably to the death, alone against an enemy, just make sure that character’s friends can’t help. Why does Galuf’s death in Final Fantasy 5 not seem as silly as Thane’s in Mass Effect 3? Simple--because Galuf’s allies are all down for the count, unable to contribute to his fatal battle to protect them. Why do I find KOS-MOS’s gratuitous beatdown in Xenosaga 3 so stupid, yet have no serious complaint about General Leo’s fatal, futile struggle against Kefka in Final Fantasy 6? Because when Leo’s getting stabbed, his numerous allies have all been knocked unconscious and/or killed already.*** All it would have taken for the Xenosaga gang to have a reason not to be helping KOS-MOS was some mild nerve gas, all it would have taken for Shepard’s non-involvement to make sense was a flash grenade, and it only gets easier for the many magic-involving RPGs out there, since you can just whip up some random paralysis spell/power whenever it’s convenient.
Is that incredibly cheap? Absolutely. But is it better than the nonsensical notion of having your cast break character and do absolutely nothing? Definitely. I’ll take conventional and cheap writing over illogical and stupid writing any day.
* That they only achieved half of these ambitions is irrelevant.
** That this is weird and makes no sense is irrelevant. Also, expected.
*** Although I do have to say that the actual act of them being taken down earlier was dumb, and sort of a case of Voyeuristic Paralysis itself, as they all just kinda watched themselves get blasted by the Magitek Armors. But, at the time of Leo’s last stand, there’s no one to help him.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Contest Announcement--NEW RANT (03/18/13) BELOW THIS POST
Hey guys. New rant is below this post. Don't forget to check it out! I mean, it's got words, and opinions, and everything. You wouldn't want to miss out on all that, right?
FIRST CONTEST
So! Here's the deal. My birthday is in a few months. Go me. And on my birthday, I like presents. Actually, I like presents any day of the year, but for some reason my best odds of having my wish for presents be fulfilled seems to be on my birthday. And I was just looking at my computer desktop wallpaper folder, and thinking that it doesn't have enough of the RPG characters and scenes and such that I love. And that is sad. What is also sad is that I suck at everything related to visual arts, so I can't really rectify this situation myself.
That's where you come in! Make stuff for me.
Nothing in life is free, of course, so I tell you what: if you make me 3 desktop wallpapers that I really like and want to keep of any of the things below, I will buy you a game on GOG.com. What game it will be depends on whether or not you own and have played Planescape: Torment. You haven't? That is what I will buy for you. You have? Well, we'll figure out another title, then; there're lots of good ones on there. Nothing over $10, of course, I'm not made of money, but that's still like 90% of their RPG catalog right there.
And incidentally, you don't HAVE to make it yourself, if you happen to find a really good one and send it to me. Just keep in mind, I've looked for these things myself, so I've probably seen whatever you find and not particularly loved it.
So here's what I want. Some games I'm just looking for a general, visually appealing image to represent the game as a whole--its cast, or its main character, or some setting or scene of particular importance to the game, that sort of thing. These I'll list under General. Everything else will be specific characters or images. Bolded requests count twice, because I really want them.
Anachronox: General
Breath of Fire 4: Fou-Lu
Final Fantasy 10: Tidus
Final Fantasy 12: Balthier (But I swear to God if you send me a wallpaper of him in that idiotic "come hither" pose that every piece of art on the planet has him doing you are disqualified; trying to find a decent Balthier wallpaper that didn't have that stupid pose is what prompted this whole contest)
Final Fantasy Tactics: Ramza
Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon: General
Kingdom Hearts Series: Sora
Knights of the Old Republic 2: Kreia
The Magic of Scheherazade: General
Mass Effect Series: Wrex
Mother 3: General
Okage: Shadow King: General
Planescape: Torment: General
Radiant Historia: General
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3: 1. Akinari. 2. SEES Vs. Nyx and/or Minato rising to finish Nyx
Suikoden 1: General
Suikoden 2: 1. General. 2. Luca Blight
Tales of Legendia: General
Tales of the Abyss: Jade
Terranigma: General
Valkyrie Profile Series: Lenneth
Wild Arms 4: Racquel
Xenogears: Citan
Xenosaga Series: KOS-MOS
Credit only goes to the wallpapers I like enough to keep, and I only want one of each of the above things, so if 2 people submit, say, kickass wallpapers of Fou-Lu, only the better of those 2 wallpapers will get credit toward the prize. Also, I'm picky so I just might not like what you make. Tough cookies. Lastly, everything has to be compatible with a 1024 x 768 display. You're not limited to 1 prize; if you make more than 1 set of 3 awesome wallpapers, you get as many prizes as you're entitled to.
Contest ends June 8th--not my birthday, but close enough to it. Just send your submissions to my email address, which, at hotmail, is the_rpgenius.
SECOND CONTEST
Probably no one will go for this one, but who's heard of M.U.G.E.N., the online fighter game engine for which people can make their own characters? It's very fun, and it's surprising how many characters have been translated from other games, shows, animes, books, and so on into MUGEN--why, just the earlier day I was playing a team of Final Fantasy 7's Cloud Strife and The Nostalgia Critic, royally getting my ass handed to me by Fire Emblem 1's Tiki and Tales of Legendia's Chloe (next time I'm gonna school the jerks with Applejack and Popeye). Well, if you have heard of MUGEN, and if you're skilled enough to actually create a MUGEN character (or if you're able to find rare ones that I can't, at least), then I'd be happy to reward you. If you find one of the characters below that I haven't been able to, you get a game from GOG.com. If you actually take the time to MAKE one, and it's halfway decent, I'll get you a game from GOG.com AND buy you a copy of Torment: Tides of Numanera, the future sequel to Planescape: Torment, or Chris Avellone's RPG project, Project Eternity, then it's released.
Here's who I'm looking for:
Anachronox: Democratus; Sly Boots
Arc the Lad Series: Choco
Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaidan: Charles Barkley (Note: MUST have abilities tied to those of Barkley in the game)
Bastion: The Kid
Baten Kaitos 1: Llyude (TRUMPET GUN), Savyna
Breath of Fire Series: Bleu; Katt
Eternal Poison: Thage
Final Fantasy Series: Freya; Mog (FF6 Version); Orlandu; Zidane
Grandia Series: Feena; Gadwin; Justin; Ryudo; Tio
Knights of the Old Republic Series: HK-47; Kreia
Legend of Dragoon: Rose
Lufia 2: Dekar (NOT the shitty SquareEnix remake!)
Makai Kingdom: Pram
Mass Effect Series: Mordin; Wrex; Zaeed
Okage: Shadow King: Ari, Rosalind
Paper Mario 2: Ms. Mowz
Phantasy Star Series: Alis; Demi; Rune; Wren
Planescape: Torment: Dak'kon; Nameless One
Radiant Historia: Stocke
The Secret of Evermore: Protagonist (MUST have his Dog involved somehow)
Shadow Hearts Series: Yuri
Shadowrun (SNES): Jake
Shin Megami Tensei Series: Aigis; Argilla; Gale; Serph
Shining Force Series: Mae
Star Ocean 3: Nel
Startropics Series: Mike
Suikoden Series: Chris; Chrodechild; Luca Blight; Viki
Tales of the Abyss: Jade
Terranigma: Ark
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume: Wylfred
Wild Arms Series: Maya; Racquel; Virginia
Xenogears: Citan
As making a MUGEN character takes a huge amount of time and work, I'm not really expecting any takers on this one, but I figured I'd throw it out there, cuz who knows, right? So if you find any of these characters or decide to make one, lemme know at the same email address as the contest above by June 8th.
FIRST CONTEST
So! Here's the deal. My birthday is in a few months. Go me. And on my birthday, I like presents. Actually, I like presents any day of the year, but for some reason my best odds of having my wish for presents be fulfilled seems to be on my birthday. And I was just looking at my computer desktop wallpaper folder, and thinking that it doesn't have enough of the RPG characters and scenes and such that I love. And that is sad. What is also sad is that I suck at everything related to visual arts, so I can't really rectify this situation myself.
That's where you come in! Make stuff for me.
Nothing in life is free, of course, so I tell you what: if you make me 3 desktop wallpapers that I really like and want to keep of any of the things below, I will buy you a game on GOG.com. What game it will be depends on whether or not you own and have played Planescape: Torment. You haven't? That is what I will buy for you. You have? Well, we'll figure out another title, then; there're lots of good ones on there. Nothing over $10, of course, I'm not made of money, but that's still like 90% of their RPG catalog right there.
And incidentally, you don't HAVE to make it yourself, if you happen to find a really good one and send it to me. Just keep in mind, I've looked for these things myself, so I've probably seen whatever you find and not particularly loved it.
So here's what I want. Some games I'm just looking for a general, visually appealing image to represent the game as a whole--its cast, or its main character, or some setting or scene of particular importance to the game, that sort of thing. These I'll list under General. Everything else will be specific characters or images. Bolded requests count twice, because I really want them.
Anachronox: General
Breath of Fire 4: Fou-Lu
Final Fantasy 10: Tidus
Final Fantasy 12: Balthier (But I swear to God if you send me a wallpaper of him in that idiotic "come hither" pose that every piece of art on the planet has him doing you are disqualified; trying to find a decent Balthier wallpaper that didn't have that stupid pose is what prompted this whole contest)
Final Fantasy Tactics: Ramza
Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon: General
Kingdom Hearts Series: Sora
Knights of the Old Republic 2: Kreia
The Magic of Scheherazade: General
Mass Effect Series: Wrex
Mother 3: General
Okage: Shadow King: General
Planescape: Torment: General
Radiant Historia: General
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3: 1. Akinari. 2. SEES Vs. Nyx and/or Minato rising to finish Nyx
Suikoden 1: General
Suikoden 2: 1. General. 2. Luca Blight
Tales of Legendia: General
Tales of the Abyss: Jade
Terranigma: General
Valkyrie Profile Series: Lenneth
Wild Arms 4: Racquel
Xenogears: Citan
Xenosaga Series: KOS-MOS
Credit only goes to the wallpapers I like enough to keep, and I only want one of each of the above things, so if 2 people submit, say, kickass wallpapers of Fou-Lu, only the better of those 2 wallpapers will get credit toward the prize. Also, I'm picky so I just might not like what you make. Tough cookies. Lastly, everything has to be compatible with a 1024 x 768 display. You're not limited to 1 prize; if you make more than 1 set of 3 awesome wallpapers, you get as many prizes as you're entitled to.
Contest ends June 8th--not my birthday, but close enough to it. Just send your submissions to my email address, which, at hotmail, is the_rpgenius.
SECOND CONTEST
Probably no one will go for this one, but who's heard of M.U.G.E.N., the online fighter game engine for which people can make their own characters? It's very fun, and it's surprising how many characters have been translated from other games, shows, animes, books, and so on into MUGEN--why, just the earlier day I was playing a team of Final Fantasy 7's Cloud Strife and The Nostalgia Critic, royally getting my ass handed to me by Fire Emblem 1's Tiki and Tales of Legendia's Chloe (next time I'm gonna school the jerks with Applejack and Popeye). Well, if you have heard of MUGEN, and if you're skilled enough to actually create a MUGEN character (or if you're able to find rare ones that I can't, at least), then I'd be happy to reward you. If you find one of the characters below that I haven't been able to, you get a game from GOG.com. If you actually take the time to MAKE one, and it's halfway decent, I'll get you a game from GOG.com AND buy you a copy of Torment: Tides of Numanera, the future sequel to Planescape: Torment, or Chris Avellone's RPG project, Project Eternity, then it's released.
Here's who I'm looking for:
Anachronox: Democratus; Sly Boots
Arc the Lad Series: Choco
Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaidan: Charles Barkley (Note: MUST have abilities tied to those of Barkley in the game)
Bastion: The Kid
Baten Kaitos 1: Llyude (TRUMPET GUN), Savyna
Breath of Fire Series: Bleu; Katt
Eternal Poison: Thage
Final Fantasy Series: Freya; Mog (FF6 Version); Orlandu; Zidane
Grandia Series: Feena; Gadwin; Justin; Ryudo; Tio
Knights of the Old Republic Series: HK-47; Kreia
Legend of Dragoon: Rose
Lufia 2: Dekar (NOT the shitty SquareEnix remake!)
Makai Kingdom: Pram
Mass Effect Series: Mordin; Wrex; Zaeed
Okage: Shadow King: Ari, Rosalind
Paper Mario 2: Ms. Mowz
Phantasy Star Series: Alis; Demi; Rune; Wren
Planescape: Torment: Dak'kon; Nameless One
Radiant Historia: Stocke
The Secret of Evermore: Protagonist (MUST have his Dog involved somehow)
Shadow Hearts Series: Yuri
Shadowrun (SNES): Jake
Shin Megami Tensei Series: Aigis; Argilla; Gale; Serph
Shining Force Series: Mae
Star Ocean 3: Nel
Startropics Series: Mike
Suikoden Series: Chris; Chrodechild; Luca Blight; Viki
Tales of the Abyss: Jade
Terranigma: Ark
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume: Wylfred
Wild Arms Series: Maya; Racquel; Virginia
Xenogears: Citan
As making a MUGEN character takes a huge amount of time and work, I'm not really expecting any takers on this one, but I figured I'd throw it out there, cuz who knows, right? So if you find any of these characters or decide to make one, lemme know at the same email address as the contest above by June 8th.
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Thanks a bunch to my friend Jolt, who handily kept and sent the conversation I had with him that became this rant, and to my friend Racewing, who, for reasons utterly unfathomable to me, is a Sonic the Hedgehog fan, and allowed me to double-check some of my perspectives against his knowledge. Kudos, sirs.
Hey, guys. Remember when I had good things to say about Bioware games? I miss those days.
Alright, so. It started kinda slow with Super Mario RPG for the SNES, but there’s been an increase over the last five years or so of RPGs being made about video game characters or series who are associated with other game genres. Mario keeps churning them out, Mega Man got in on it lately with the Mega Man Star Force series (if, that is, you really want to call that whiny pile of sad who stars in the game “Mega Man”), and apparently, someone at Bioware thought it’d be a neat idea to get Sonic the Hedgehog into the genre. I could have quite happily gone my entire life without Sonic invading my adopted genre, but this was back in 2008, when Bioware was still known for good quality and treating their work with some respect, so you’d think it’d be pretty okay, right?
I’m sure France had every reason to think the Maginot Line was impregnable, too.
So what’s wrong with Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood? Well, I could just say “everything,” and call it a day, but we all know I love hearing the sound of my own voice too much for that.* So let’s delve into detail, as is my wont.
We’ll start off with the light stuff: battle mechanics. Now, you know gameplay isn’t my concern, but for those that consider it important, SCTDB has some major issues, at least for me. I can’t speak for others--apparently several reviewers found the game very simple and easy, so maybe I just suck. But for me, the frustration level was high because the effectiveness of battle powers and characters was imbalanced quite often--and that’s when I could actually get those characters and powers to work right, since the game employs a somewhat poorly-executed timed-hit system. Like, there would be many times when some characters would be so unable to keep up that it reminded me of how badly skewed Sailor Moon: Another Story was, except that with the Sailor Moon RPG, once you hit a certain level, you’d go from just barely grazing a boss to utterly obliterating them with ease--there was no middle ground, but you could at least taste both extremes. With this Sonic game, some characters just never seem to be able to get out of extreme ineffectualness.
Additionally, I have no damn clue what anyone would do in the game if they didn’t recruit Cream, the secret character. Again, could just be me sucking, so take this with a grain of salt, but her healing powers only barely managed to sustain the party most of the time, and no one else in the game seems to have anything to speak of when it comes to healing. I think Tails has like one underpowered single-target healing skill, and that’s it. I think that it’s a mistake to make any one character in your cast indispensable, and if you’re gonna make that mistake, that character should NOT be the one whose recruitment can be missed!
One other thing about the gameplay factor is that the game didn’t seem to control all that well. I mean, it wasn’t unplayable or anything even close to that, but all the same it felt quite unpolished, even clunky. It’s not a big thing, obviously, but it’s still not a point in the game’s favor (particularly, I would think, from the perspective of an actual Sonic fan, since the rest of the Sonic series is pretty gameplay-dependant, to the best of my knowledge).
But anyway, enough about the unimportant gameplay bunk. Let’s talk about what matters: the characters and story. First of all, if you are not already a fairly knowledgeable fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog series, you are going to get left behind, and often. Now, I know the game is meant for Sonic fans, meant for the people who WILL know all these characters and be familiar with past events vaguely referenced and pre-established plot devices. But I still think it’s reasonable to say this is a strike against this game, because when you have a major shift in genre for your product, it means your audience changes, too. Sure, many of the fans of the Sonic series will and no doubt did follow this genre-switch from action platformers and the like to an RPG, but the change introduces an entire new potential demographic to win over, too--players who regularly and partially, or even entirely exclusively, play RPGs, for whom this game will be a first experience with Sonic’s franchise. The Knights of the Old Republic games required little knowledge of the Star Wars movies to understand and enjoy, for example. A good genre-changer should also be an adequate introduction to the series, and not just seem to assume that everyone is going to have a familiarity with a series that’s been adding to itself for almost 20 years now. Mind you, it’s a minor flaw in the long run, but still worth mentioning, I think. I’m fortunate enough to have picked up some minor familiarity with the basic characters of the Sonic universe, so I was familiar enough with Sonic, Tails, Amy, Rouge, Cream, Eggman, and Shadow that the lack of proper background given to them didn’t trip me up, although I had no idea who Big the Cat or Omega, that random red robot thing, were. But overall, I at least was not left completely clueless about what was going on, as could easily have been the case.
Whether you're a knowledgeable fan or a newbie, however, there's no denying that the characters involved in the game should have some reasonable character development of some sort, correct?
That did not happen.
Sonic remains Sonic the entire time, mostly (he's kinda watered down a bit, I think). The most character development you could say they give him is that you can, if you play your cards right, have him take part in one extremely brief, wholly uninteresting scene of romantic implications with Amy. Now frankly, if I were to pretend for one second that I care half as much about Sonic’s love life as I do about the fart I just released a minute ago, I'd probably be dissatisfied with this scene, since it's not romantically fulfilling at all, and it comes from more or less goddamn nowhere. Maybe there are implications that Sonic has an interest in her in previous games and other series installments (though from what little I’ve been told, there aren't really), but in this one, there's really no indication whatsoever that he returns her feelings in the game until this scene, and even the stuff you need to opt to have had him say to her in order during the game to access this scene is generally pretty platonically positive--it’s really not so much him being shown to like her as him just not being outright hurtful to her. So his 0 character development remains a 0 regardless.
Rouge seems to still be a licentious howler out for her own personal gain and little to nothing else, which stands out not only as a case of her being incredibly under-developed, but also a little unbelievable. I mean, from what little I know of the Sonic series backstory, she has been involved with so much ridiculously convoluted hero shit on every side of the equation that it seems insane to me that she would not at SOME point have developed SOME sort of motivation beyond "sneakily flirt my way into money." But whatever, I guess.
Amy has no intellectual or emotional existence beyond her infatuation with Sonic, a personality type that always annoys me--I hate it when writers decide some female character's ONLY distinguishing point of character focus has to be obsessive romantic interest.** I realize that this has probably been the case for the character of Amy prior to this game, but that doesn’t mean Bioware couldn’t have added to the character, so it’s not excused. This one-dimensional personality type keeps Amy from having any actual character, it RUINED Prier from La Pucelle Tactics, and it made Martha the most boring Companion to date in the present Doctor Who. God forbid a female should have more than one single solitary thought in her head, and God equally forbid that thought be something other than unhealthy emotional dependence on some guy.
As for the rest of the cast...the random red robot has no character development to speak of. Big certainly doesn’t. Knuckles only has any characterization if you count his occasionally giving some slight context to the echidna legends and history and so on, but if I didn’t count Fran’s encyclopedic knowledge in Final Fantasy 12 of all things magical that she displayed whenever it was convenient to the plot and the writers’ subpar abilities to perform their job as characterization, I’m sure shootin’ not gonna do it for Knuckles. The new character, Shade, has a backstory, but it's quite boring and about as cliche as could be imagined, your standard “Proud Warrior of a Tribe that was Abused a Bajillion Years Ago Who Has a Grudge But Eventually Realizes Her Obviously Evil and Obviously Manipulative Boss is Actually Evil, and Manipulating Her” package that you’ve seen dozens of better incarnations of previously. Cream’s practically a non-entity. Shadow is the same boring, shallow brooder that made him such a hit with vapid, sexually-frustrated furry fangirls in the first place, and since he is basically completely superfluous to the plot, I’m gonna have to assume that his presence in this game is solely to boost sales with that demographic.
I will say that Eggman and Tails have character development, sort of. Eggman is acting reformed and exploring how one can act like a mad scientist while working for the good guys. This is pretty much the highlight of the game, depressingly, even though it’s fairly obvious that it’s all a ruse. But aside from how obviously false it is, it’s done pretty well, I guess. Tails's character development is that he enjoys finally having a friend and equal in Eggman, since they're both the brainy ones of the team. This is actually a pretty decent idea, and given the folks that Tails is running around with, it’s not exactly far-fetched that he might feel intellectually lonely. I can appreciate this characterization.
Or rather, I could, if it were not pretty obvious that Eggman is putting on a charade...and if it were not 100% PURE FANTASY RIDICULOUSNESS that any of them, Tails especially given he's been with Sonic the longest, would actually even remotely buy Eggman's reformation, even if Eggman were putting on a performance so great as to make Kevin Spacy jealous. The guy has been trying to murder you all for over 2 decades, Tails, in games and comics and cartoons and anime and I don’t even know what else. GET A CLUE.
Anyways, that's the cast. It's not good. It's underdeveloped, half of the characters are frankly a bit dislikable (Shadow, Knuckles, Rouge, the random robot, Sonic himself), and the one redeeming area of the cast is built off the assumption that after 20 years of unrepentant evil and plans that relied on deceiving his foes, no one has figured out that maybe the main villain does not really mean it when he says he's good now.
The main villain of the series in general, I mean. The main villain of this actual game is just cliched as hell. Which is another sizeable problem right there.
So the cast is a dud, but what about the plot? A well-written story can be more than enough to carry a game to success, after all. Unfortunately, that is not the case here. The writing doesn’t seem to be terribly cohesive, first of all, although I’m willing to accept that my occasional difficulty in keeping track of the magical pseudo-science bullshit here and there could have been my lack of intimate knowledge of the Sonic series. But when things were straightened out in my mind, all this game ever seemed to amount to was generic "formerly cast out peoples of the distant past come back for vengeance for the hell of it" crap, complete with the obligatory "thought she was totally into this vengeance thing but now has doubts for vague reasons so she joins our side" character. There’s nothing new here, and certainly nothing interesting. Despite being so maddeningly predictable that it almost physically harmed me, as well as embarrassingly obviously rushed, Eggman's sequel-bait betrayal at the game's end was literally the only part of the entire game's plot that stood out at all--and I’m honestly not even sure why it does!
So yeah. In the end, anyone who’s not a Sonic fan has no reason to play Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. The majority of the poorly-introduced cast is one-dimensional, what character development is there is either an extremely overused cliche or doesn’t make much sense and doesn’t last anyway, and the villain’s generic and boring. The gameplay isn’t done well, and the music is kinda crappy (didn’t really have a chance to mention that above, but there you go). And finally, the plot is a bit messy yet irritatingly simplistic, and completely unrewarding.
And you know what? I think that anyone who IS a Sonic fan also has no reason to play it. The characters that fans like seem clumsily handled by writers determined not to explore them at all, and whether or not you happen to like the universe in which it takes place, a cheap, bland story is still a cheap, bland story. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is a shoddy, careless product, and if I had to take a guess, I’d say Bioware developed it with SquareEnix-esque intentions, by which I mean, made in the hopes that Sonic fans have all the consumer discretion of a 4-year-old seeing Dora the Explorer's face pasted poorly onto a cheap Walmart backpack so shoddily made that even the 10-year-old kid in China was embarrassed as he stitched it.***
The really amusing thing to me is that according to Wikipedia, the developers at Bioware were big enthusiasts of the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. This slop is what FANS of the series came up with! Apparently, Sega would’ve done better to hand the project over to someone like me, someone who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Sonic series, because even I could have and would have put more effort into making this a decent title than Bioware did.
* Okay, yes, typed text isn’t really the sound of my own voice technically, but how do you know I don’t read these things aloud to myself?
** An obsessive romantic interest that usually makes no sense, for that matter. Most of the time these characters are chasing after people who obviously have 0 interest in them (and even actively seek to avoid them), and/or are mean to them or just mean in general.
*** Of course, this game, and the Shadow the Hedgehog game, for that matter, were both commercial successes from what I gather, so apparently this kind of insulting assumption of a fanbase’s tasteless idiocy is, as with SquareEnix, a profitable one.
Hey, guys. Remember when I had good things to say about Bioware games? I miss those days.
Alright, so. It started kinda slow with Super Mario RPG for the SNES, but there’s been an increase over the last five years or so of RPGs being made about video game characters or series who are associated with other game genres. Mario keeps churning them out, Mega Man got in on it lately with the Mega Man Star Force series (if, that is, you really want to call that whiny pile of sad who stars in the game “Mega Man”), and apparently, someone at Bioware thought it’d be a neat idea to get Sonic the Hedgehog into the genre. I could have quite happily gone my entire life without Sonic invading my adopted genre, but this was back in 2008, when Bioware was still known for good quality and treating their work with some respect, so you’d think it’d be pretty okay, right?
I’m sure France had every reason to think the Maginot Line was impregnable, too.
So what’s wrong with Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood? Well, I could just say “everything,” and call it a day, but we all know I love hearing the sound of my own voice too much for that.* So let’s delve into detail, as is my wont.
We’ll start off with the light stuff: battle mechanics. Now, you know gameplay isn’t my concern, but for those that consider it important, SCTDB has some major issues, at least for me. I can’t speak for others--apparently several reviewers found the game very simple and easy, so maybe I just suck. But for me, the frustration level was high because the effectiveness of battle powers and characters was imbalanced quite often--and that’s when I could actually get those characters and powers to work right, since the game employs a somewhat poorly-executed timed-hit system. Like, there would be many times when some characters would be so unable to keep up that it reminded me of how badly skewed Sailor Moon: Another Story was, except that with the Sailor Moon RPG, once you hit a certain level, you’d go from just barely grazing a boss to utterly obliterating them with ease--there was no middle ground, but you could at least taste both extremes. With this Sonic game, some characters just never seem to be able to get out of extreme ineffectualness.
Additionally, I have no damn clue what anyone would do in the game if they didn’t recruit Cream, the secret character. Again, could just be me sucking, so take this with a grain of salt, but her healing powers only barely managed to sustain the party most of the time, and no one else in the game seems to have anything to speak of when it comes to healing. I think Tails has like one underpowered single-target healing skill, and that’s it. I think that it’s a mistake to make any one character in your cast indispensable, and if you’re gonna make that mistake, that character should NOT be the one whose recruitment can be missed!
One other thing about the gameplay factor is that the game didn’t seem to control all that well. I mean, it wasn’t unplayable or anything even close to that, but all the same it felt quite unpolished, even clunky. It’s not a big thing, obviously, but it’s still not a point in the game’s favor (particularly, I would think, from the perspective of an actual Sonic fan, since the rest of the Sonic series is pretty gameplay-dependant, to the best of my knowledge).
But anyway, enough about the unimportant gameplay bunk. Let’s talk about what matters: the characters and story. First of all, if you are not already a fairly knowledgeable fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog series, you are going to get left behind, and often. Now, I know the game is meant for Sonic fans, meant for the people who WILL know all these characters and be familiar with past events vaguely referenced and pre-established plot devices. But I still think it’s reasonable to say this is a strike against this game, because when you have a major shift in genre for your product, it means your audience changes, too. Sure, many of the fans of the Sonic series will and no doubt did follow this genre-switch from action platformers and the like to an RPG, but the change introduces an entire new potential demographic to win over, too--players who regularly and partially, or even entirely exclusively, play RPGs, for whom this game will be a first experience with Sonic’s franchise. The Knights of the Old Republic games required little knowledge of the Star Wars movies to understand and enjoy, for example. A good genre-changer should also be an adequate introduction to the series, and not just seem to assume that everyone is going to have a familiarity with a series that’s been adding to itself for almost 20 years now. Mind you, it’s a minor flaw in the long run, but still worth mentioning, I think. I’m fortunate enough to have picked up some minor familiarity with the basic characters of the Sonic universe, so I was familiar enough with Sonic, Tails, Amy, Rouge, Cream, Eggman, and Shadow that the lack of proper background given to them didn’t trip me up, although I had no idea who Big the Cat or Omega, that random red robot thing, were. But overall, I at least was not left completely clueless about what was going on, as could easily have been the case.
Whether you're a knowledgeable fan or a newbie, however, there's no denying that the characters involved in the game should have some reasonable character development of some sort, correct?
That did not happen.
Sonic remains Sonic the entire time, mostly (he's kinda watered down a bit, I think). The most character development you could say they give him is that you can, if you play your cards right, have him take part in one extremely brief, wholly uninteresting scene of romantic implications with Amy. Now frankly, if I were to pretend for one second that I care half as much about Sonic’s love life as I do about the fart I just released a minute ago, I'd probably be dissatisfied with this scene, since it's not romantically fulfilling at all, and it comes from more or less goddamn nowhere. Maybe there are implications that Sonic has an interest in her in previous games and other series installments (though from what little I’ve been told, there aren't really), but in this one, there's really no indication whatsoever that he returns her feelings in the game until this scene, and even the stuff you need to opt to have had him say to her in order during the game to access this scene is generally pretty platonically positive--it’s really not so much him being shown to like her as him just not being outright hurtful to her. So his 0 character development remains a 0 regardless.
Rouge seems to still be a licentious howler out for her own personal gain and little to nothing else, which stands out not only as a case of her being incredibly under-developed, but also a little unbelievable. I mean, from what little I know of the Sonic series backstory, she has been involved with so much ridiculously convoluted hero shit on every side of the equation that it seems insane to me that she would not at SOME point have developed SOME sort of motivation beyond "sneakily flirt my way into money." But whatever, I guess.
Amy has no intellectual or emotional existence beyond her infatuation with Sonic, a personality type that always annoys me--I hate it when writers decide some female character's ONLY distinguishing point of character focus has to be obsessive romantic interest.** I realize that this has probably been the case for the character of Amy prior to this game, but that doesn’t mean Bioware couldn’t have added to the character, so it’s not excused. This one-dimensional personality type keeps Amy from having any actual character, it RUINED Prier from La Pucelle Tactics, and it made Martha the most boring Companion to date in the present Doctor Who. God forbid a female should have more than one single solitary thought in her head, and God equally forbid that thought be something other than unhealthy emotional dependence on some guy.
As for the rest of the cast...the random red robot has no character development to speak of. Big certainly doesn’t. Knuckles only has any characterization if you count his occasionally giving some slight context to the echidna legends and history and so on, but if I didn’t count Fran’s encyclopedic knowledge in Final Fantasy 12 of all things magical that she displayed whenever it was convenient to the plot and the writers’ subpar abilities to perform their job as characterization, I’m sure shootin’ not gonna do it for Knuckles. The new character, Shade, has a backstory, but it's quite boring and about as cliche as could be imagined, your standard “Proud Warrior of a Tribe that was Abused a Bajillion Years Ago Who Has a Grudge But Eventually Realizes Her Obviously Evil and Obviously Manipulative Boss is Actually Evil, and Manipulating Her” package that you’ve seen dozens of better incarnations of previously. Cream’s practically a non-entity. Shadow is the same boring, shallow brooder that made him such a hit with vapid, sexually-frustrated furry fangirls in the first place, and since he is basically completely superfluous to the plot, I’m gonna have to assume that his presence in this game is solely to boost sales with that demographic.
I will say that Eggman and Tails have character development, sort of. Eggman is acting reformed and exploring how one can act like a mad scientist while working for the good guys. This is pretty much the highlight of the game, depressingly, even though it’s fairly obvious that it’s all a ruse. But aside from how obviously false it is, it’s done pretty well, I guess. Tails's character development is that he enjoys finally having a friend and equal in Eggman, since they're both the brainy ones of the team. This is actually a pretty decent idea, and given the folks that Tails is running around with, it’s not exactly far-fetched that he might feel intellectually lonely. I can appreciate this characterization.
Or rather, I could, if it were not pretty obvious that Eggman is putting on a charade...and if it were not 100% PURE FANTASY RIDICULOUSNESS that any of them, Tails especially given he's been with Sonic the longest, would actually even remotely buy Eggman's reformation, even if Eggman were putting on a performance so great as to make Kevin Spacy jealous. The guy has been trying to murder you all for over 2 decades, Tails, in games and comics and cartoons and anime and I don’t even know what else. GET A CLUE.
Anyways, that's the cast. It's not good. It's underdeveloped, half of the characters are frankly a bit dislikable (Shadow, Knuckles, Rouge, the random robot, Sonic himself), and the one redeeming area of the cast is built off the assumption that after 20 years of unrepentant evil and plans that relied on deceiving his foes, no one has figured out that maybe the main villain does not really mean it when he says he's good now.
The main villain of the series in general, I mean. The main villain of this actual game is just cliched as hell. Which is another sizeable problem right there.
So the cast is a dud, but what about the plot? A well-written story can be more than enough to carry a game to success, after all. Unfortunately, that is not the case here. The writing doesn’t seem to be terribly cohesive, first of all, although I’m willing to accept that my occasional difficulty in keeping track of the magical pseudo-science bullshit here and there could have been my lack of intimate knowledge of the Sonic series. But when things were straightened out in my mind, all this game ever seemed to amount to was generic "formerly cast out peoples of the distant past come back for vengeance for the hell of it" crap, complete with the obligatory "thought she was totally into this vengeance thing but now has doubts for vague reasons so she joins our side" character. There’s nothing new here, and certainly nothing interesting. Despite being so maddeningly predictable that it almost physically harmed me, as well as embarrassingly obviously rushed, Eggman's sequel-bait betrayal at the game's end was literally the only part of the entire game's plot that stood out at all--and I’m honestly not even sure why it does!
So yeah. In the end, anyone who’s not a Sonic fan has no reason to play Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. The majority of the poorly-introduced cast is one-dimensional, what character development is there is either an extremely overused cliche or doesn’t make much sense and doesn’t last anyway, and the villain’s generic and boring. The gameplay isn’t done well, and the music is kinda crappy (didn’t really have a chance to mention that above, but there you go). And finally, the plot is a bit messy yet irritatingly simplistic, and completely unrewarding.
And you know what? I think that anyone who IS a Sonic fan also has no reason to play it. The characters that fans like seem clumsily handled by writers determined not to explore them at all, and whether or not you happen to like the universe in which it takes place, a cheap, bland story is still a cheap, bland story. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is a shoddy, careless product, and if I had to take a guess, I’d say Bioware developed it with SquareEnix-esque intentions, by which I mean, made in the hopes that Sonic fans have all the consumer discretion of a 4-year-old seeing Dora the Explorer's face pasted poorly onto a cheap Walmart backpack so shoddily made that even the 10-year-old kid in China was embarrassed as he stitched it.***
The really amusing thing to me is that according to Wikipedia, the developers at Bioware were big enthusiasts of the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. This slop is what FANS of the series came up with! Apparently, Sega would’ve done better to hand the project over to someone like me, someone who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Sonic series, because even I could have and would have put more effort into making this a decent title than Bioware did.
* Okay, yes, typed text isn’t really the sound of my own voice technically, but how do you know I don’t read these things aloud to myself?
** An obsessive romantic interest that usually makes no sense, for that matter. Most of the time these characters are chasing after people who obviously have 0 interest in them (and even actively seek to avoid them), and/or are mean to them or just mean in general.
*** Of course, this game, and the Shadow the Hedgehog game, for that matter, were both commercial successes from what I gather, so apparently this kind of insulting assumption of a fanbase’s tasteless idiocy is, as with SquareEnix, a profitable one.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Mass Effect 3's Add-Ons
This is the updated, supposedly final version of this rant, which now reflects all 4 of the ME3 DLC packages.
Well, it’s finally time for a look at the add-ons for Mass Effect 3. Historically, Bioware’s done much, much better with its extra content for Mass Effect than it has for Dragon Age, but who knows if that’s going to hold up? Historically, Mass Effect games had great endings, but just look at the horrible mess that ME3 concludes with. And on that note, because I’m still pissed that there is no morally acceptable and satisfying ending to this game, I won’t be purchasing any of the DLCs below (besides From Ashes; that one came with the edition of the game I got), not until one of them provides an appropriate ending. My knowledge of the packages below shall come from Youtube. Why review them at all, you might ask, assuming your mind magically thinks up the exact same questions that mine does? Well, because I don’t assume that everyone ELSE is going to do the boycott-ME3-content-until-Bioware-fixes-its-mistakes thing, so this might still potentially have some meaning to someone else on which add-ons to purchase.
From Ashes: From Ashes adds a mission to Mass Effect 3 that contains a few opportunities to add a few resources to Shepard’s private army, and also adds a new character, Javik the Prothean, to the party. Although this one loses points for being a Day 1 DLC, Javik’s a decent addition to the cast. By himself, he’s only a so-so character, with character development that’s decent but never more than that, and the history and lore he shares of the long-lost Prothean culture is, surprisingly and unhappily, not actually all that interesting. However, he adds a lot to some of the game’s events, particularly during the mission to Thessia, and he’s a useful tool for some much-needed character development for Liara. He’s also fully integrated into the game--he’s no half-assed addition; he has as many dialogue interjections and personal scenes as any other party member. Of course, that’s not as impressive as it could be, given that he was released at the same time as the game, so they had the entire time of the game’s development to make sure he was integrated properly. Still, this DLC package is overall good.
Leviathan: This one’s just not very good. The plot somehow seems both too hurried, and yet meandering at the same time. Too hurried, as the search for Leviathan boils down to a few relatively short missions that desperately try to cram in a sense of meaning and emotional attachment to the introduced supporting character, Ann Bryson, and also tries to pack in an entire new perspective on ancient galactic history to boot. Meandering, as a large part of it is just following leads and learning little of actual value about Leviathan--all the actually important lore comes in at the end, when Shepard finally tracks down and meets Leviathan. Everything up until that point is just...humdrum. Not bad, I guess, but closer to bad than good. And the actual meeting with Leviathan is pretty lackluster, too. It lacks narrative power in its presentation, and all it really does is give a very tiny bit of supporting information to the poorly-conceived claptrap that the Catalyst spouts at the end of the game. I suppose it’s good that Bioware actually bothered to put something in the game that connects in some way to its awful conclusion, given that until this DLC everything about the ending was completely out of left field, but that’s about the best thing I can say about this. This DLC also adds a couple lines of dialogue to the ending, but nothing even remotely important. Finally, some of this DLC just doesn’t even make sense--like how ridiculous it is that Leviathan’s race would see the problem of the supposed lower races being betrayed and destroyed by the synthetic life that said lower races created and then...create a super-ultra synthetic life to fix the problem. Oh yeah, clearly THESE guys are the higher species.
“DURR, hay thar Godlike Bob, Ah dun heared that those self-aware machine-doohickeys that theym thar little folkses made have done gone plumb loco on their creators! Y’reckon we should aim ter fix that sitch-ee-aye-shun?”
“HURR, THAT SOUND GOOD THINKING, GODLIKE FRED. ME WILL CREATE GODLIKE SELF-AWARE MACHINE TO FIX PROBLEM OF MAKING SELF-AWARE MACHINES. ME AM SMART LEVIATHAN!”
Overall, the Leviathan add-on is, if considered very charitably, dead weight. It’s emotionally and intellectually lacking, it provides background to the ending’s foolishness without making it seem more valid at all, parts of it just don’t make any damn sense (so Leviathan says they controlled the lesser species but...couldn’t stop them from building those dangerous AIs. Does Leviathan understand what “control” means?), it ultimately makes no difference, and honestly, adding the angle of living Leviathans hiding and probably, given their god complexes, biding their time, adds a rather unwelcome new entity to a series that’s starting to feel crowded from all the ancient secrets of galaxy-shaking importance being stuffed into it. Even the tiny little satisfaction that I theorize a person could feel from ME3’s ending at having, at the very least, ended the Reaper threat is now stolen away by the knowledge that there’s already an entire other potential super-huge, super-powerful enemy out there. Definitely pass on this one; it’s not worth the time to play through it, and it sure as hell is not worth your money.
Omega: It seems at first like this DLC should be fairly decent. I mean, it’s an action-packed side story, which involves Aria, an NPC from ME2 whose presence in ME3 was not as strong as it should have been, introduces Nyreen, a new character who catches your attention (what with being the first female Turian we’ve seen in the series), and isn’t designed to try in vain to justify the horrible ending. But ultimately, the damn thing just falls flat on its face. First of all, the whole thing feels like it serves no real point whatsoever--the only lasting effect from it on the rest of the game are some War Assets, which ultimately change absolutely nothing, a few new gameplay tweaks (weapon mods, bonus powers, some extra money, etc) which of course are meaningless when just about everyone has by now beaten the game at least once and the game has more or less nothing to surprise them with in battle, a chess board in Shepard’s room that you can’t actually interact with at all, and your bank account suddenly being $15 smaller. Apparently it’s too much to hope that Bioware will see fit to use another DLC to make a minimally acceptable ending possible, but even for a self-contained add-on, those are some pretty paltry rewards, so if this is going to be worth the time and money, it’s going to have to be worth it within its own self-contained events.
The problem is that it’s not. The plot of it is just straightforward action garbage; there’s nothing to learn or think about that comes from it, no layer of meaning attached to it, no intellectual motivation whatsoever. You’ll find more of that in a James Bond movie than in the Omega DLC, and Bond films are usually the thing I point out as prime examples of mindless action fluff with no substance! Shepard goes to Omega, Shepard fights bad guys in Omega, Shepard finds out about a bad guy plan to breed super monster soldier things but has very little reaction to it, Shepard happens to stop this plan when he beats the bad guys, the bad guys are gone. The end. There’s nothing remotely unexpected, nor is there anything to add depth to this cookie-cutter “plot.”
And what about the character development? Disappointing is the most generous term I can think of for it. Aria’s character, who is vocally acted in a surprisingly subpar fashion, stays for all appearances completely static for the entire length of the DLC, except maybe at the end, when Shepard’s influence might cause her to be a little less of an evil bitch. I’d say this, at least, shows character development, but I can’t, because it really didn’t actually develop--up until that moment, Aria’s basically rebuffed every suggestion anyone’s made about maybe being less of a bad person, and she hasn’t been shown to have any interest beyond irritation for Shepard’s heroic ways, so this idea that he influenced her in some way comes out of nowhere. It’s not subtle, it’s just not there. Shepard certainly isn’t developed at all; he has so little to say or do in relation to the plot that it’s almost like he’s trying out the Silent Protagonist thing for kicks. The villain, Petrovsky, has very little in the way of introduction (I think Bioware wants to pretend that every single player has read their comics, from which Petrovsky originates), less in the way of personality, and less still than that in the way of development. And lastly, there’s Nyreen, the female Turian whose character is just as static as Aria’s (though thankfully far less proud, selfish, and proud of being selfish), and doesn’t change from the first time it’s properly shown until her completely arbitrary, unnecessary death, a death that shows just how sloppy and careless the Bioware writers are with their work. I suppose she works as a foil for Aria, but they’re so blatantly, clumsily opposites that the contrast just winds up making Bioware look like they’re trying way too hard. Plus, it makes the vague, half-assed explanation for why Nyreen and Aria were previously lovers questionable at best. And once she dies, she’s just GONE. Like, she dies, Aria gets really angry for just long enough to get caught in a trap,* and...that’s the end of any thoughts of Nyreen. The last battle ensues, Aria and Shepard fool around with Petrovsky, Aria makes a trite little speech, Shepard gets the useless chessboard in his cabin, and that’s that. No mention of Nyreen’s loss that I could see, no moment of Shepard or Aria mourning or even recollecting her, nothing. Bioware seemed to give more of a shit for the stupid scientist who died like 30 seconds into the Leviathan DLC than for Nyreen.
Anyway. So what’re we left with? Well, a large price tag. At 15 bucks, Omega costs more than the Leviathan DLC did, and, for that matter, more than any single DLC I can remember having encountered for an RPG so far. And you know what? It’s incredibly short! You can easily finish the whole thing in 4 hours, and that even accounts for thorough searching and battles that aren’t immediately won from being overpowered. I imagine most players will finish it in significantly less time. $15 for less than 5 hours of gameplay? Even considering a weak US dollar, that’s ridiculous! I mean, if this DLC had a worthwhile story to tell, that’d be one thing, but as I noted above, it does not. Bioware’s not just charging more (and its price choices were already sketchy to start with), it’s providing less at the same time!
I’ll admit that Omega’s got an edge over Leviathan for not trying to violently shove support for the game’s shitty ending in my face, but in the end, this DLC gets a major thumbs-down from me. Spend your 15 smackers on something worthwhile instead--games at GOG.com, a decent meal, My Little Pony dolls, an environmental charity, new socks, anything but Omega.
Citadel: Well...it’s hard to really know what to say here. The final ME3 DLC is...odd. It’s sort of separated into a miniature adventure, like you’d expect from a DLC, and then a bunch of small, just-for-fun stuff afterwards. So let’s look at it in parts.
First of all, the adventure itself is...well...I like it, but I’m not sure I should. The premise is weak, weaker even than ME3’s main premise involving the Crucible. The two villains...well, one’s an incredibly predictable double-cross, and the other is...eh, I’ll just spoil it for you. It’s Shepard’s unheard-of-until-this-second clone. It’s like someone at Bioware saw the awful, nonsensical, stinks-like-rotten-fish plot twist in Pluto Nash and thought it would be a good idea to steal it. The clone’s end is the tired old “rather fall to my death than grab your hand” affair, the other villain’s end is cheap and seems to depend very strongly on the player having formed some emotional attachment to her over the, what, 2 hours’ time that the player has known her? Additionally, the adventure part of the DLC is about as absurdly short as the Omega add-on was, for the same bloated, completely unreasonable price of $15.
Still...still, it’s good for what it is. Even if the clone thing is just outright stupid, it has just enough drive to get a slightly heartwarming message across about how much of what Shepard is was formed by his companions and friends. Even if the adventure feels rushed and contrived, the large amount of interaction between all the members of the party is really enjoyable, and it really cements their personality as a team. There’s a lot of humor, and it’s almost all good, while never seeming inappropriate to the situation. There’s some real good character and universe history and development you can experience through Anderson’s logs and the Citadel archive, which of course I really liked. It doesn’t have the ultra-important, epic mission feel that’s typical of the game’s missions, but that’s not actually all that bad a thing sometimes.
After the adventure’s done, there’s still a lot to do in the DLC: meeting up with party members, both past and present, to hang out (except for Legion, Mordin, and Thane, of course, but there are some nice bits for Mordin and Thane, too), stupid minigames, a pointless arena, NPCs to hear talk, and finally a party to which you can invite pretty much the whole crew. This post-mission content kind of ranges all over the place in terms of quality. Some scenes are just horribly stupid, like Zaeed’s and Javik’s, some are mostly boring and/or pointless, like Ashley’s and Garrus’s (if he’s not Shepard’s love interest), some are pretty decent, like Liara’s (if she’s not Shepard’s love interest) and EDI’s, and Thane’s (whether or not he was Shepard’s love interest) is really great. I have to give Bioware props on one account, though--they really did good by the love scenes overall. Okay, yes, Traynor’s scene is pretty lame, as is Ashley's (but that's to be expected), and Tali’s is...well...kind of stupid, I have to say, but the rest range from solidly good to just outright great bits of romance, and they all are touching at the DLC’s end (Thane in particular). Hell, Miranda and Jack got such good love interest scenes in the Citadel DLC that they actually almost seem like viable romantic options now...well, Jack does, at least. ME3 has been criticized, and very rightly so, for skimping too much on Shepard’s romantic interests, and Bioware did a good job making up for it here.
Actually, that seems to be largely what this DLC’s about, really--Bioware addressing fan feedback. This whole DLC is basically fanservice--but instead of the typical shitty, demeaning, mindless, subhuman kind of fanservice, which is mostly just a sagging heap of tits sitting sloppily atop a pillar of special effects and violence, this is fanservice of a good caliber, giving fans the things of substance that they want. Fans wanted more romance, they got it. Fans wanted better character interaction, more inclusion of Wrex and ME2’s largely forgotten cast, and they got that. The jokes of the DLC play on themes and jokes of the Bioware fan community--Shepard’s infamous “I should go,” Traynor’s toothbrush, the volus pizza delivery guy (“pizza delivery” is how the Bioware community refers to the package retrieval objectives in the Multiplayer mode of ME3), and so on. For the first time since this time last year, Bioware actually seems to be giving a flying fuck about their characters and their fans, instead of their own egos and what the marketing department thinks will sell.
In the end, I still won’t buy this DLC. Because in the end, after all the good times of it, the story of ME3 continues, and Shepard comes to a finale where he (Paragon Shepard, at least) cannot win without betraying his values. For all the listening to its fans that Bioware did in its creation of the Citadel DLC, it still didn’t listen to the most important, frequent, and widespread feedback--like a doctor who’s more interested in treating your foot pains than taking a look at the harpoon stuck in your chest. But this is the first (and last) DLC for ME3 that I would actually want to purchase. Citadel is fun and funny, it reminds you of two of the great draws of the Mass Effect series--its characters and its lore--and it feels like the satisfying send-off to this beloved cast that they deserve. God have mercy on my soul, I actually DO recommend this DLC, even at its exorbitant price of $15 (although if you feel you can wait it out until that price drops a long time from now, by all means go for it). The only reason not to is the one I’ve adopted, the principle of the matter of ME3’s ending.
And that’s it. According to Bioware, there will be no more ME3 add-ons. And yeah, any official statement of Bioware’s has better odds of being a blatant lie than actually coming true, but I’m gonna throw caution to the winds and work on the assumption that they’re actually being honest on this. How’d ME3 do as far as add-ons went? Well...not very well, honestly. The first DLC is pretty good, as I said, but the Leviathan package is just a lot of really, really poor writing trying to justify an even more poorly written ending, and it far outweighs the modestly positive From Ashes. And yeah, I clearly thought that the Citadel DLC was good overall, but the hackneyed, contrived basis for its main story brings it down a bit, and the Omega DLC is such overpriced, useless, meaningless garbage, that the scales are tipped significantly to the negative side when comparing them. On a whole, the good aspects of the ME3 DLCs can’t save the collection from its flaws, and overall the experience has not been a good one. I sure hope whatever game I play next with add-ons can do better.
Wow, I can’t believe the length of this rant. I swear to Isfa I’m never spending this much time on a DLC rant again. No one even reads these damn things! I have got to be out of my fucking mind.
* Although there doesn’t seem to be any reason (save general incompetence) for Bioware to have killed Nyreen off so quickly after introducing her, I really hope that the rationalization was not that her death would make Aria angry enough to fall for Petrovsky’s (highly stupid) trap. Because if there’s one thing this DLC has established by that point, it’s that Aria is ALREADY pissed off about this whole situation, and an enraged charge for those last few steps of the way would have been plenty believable without Nyreen’s death.
Well, it’s finally time for a look at the add-ons for Mass Effect 3. Historically, Bioware’s done much, much better with its extra content for Mass Effect than it has for Dragon Age, but who knows if that’s going to hold up? Historically, Mass Effect games had great endings, but just look at the horrible mess that ME3 concludes with. And on that note, because I’m still pissed that there is no morally acceptable and satisfying ending to this game, I won’t be purchasing any of the DLCs below (besides From Ashes; that one came with the edition of the game I got), not until one of them provides an appropriate ending. My knowledge of the packages below shall come from Youtube. Why review them at all, you might ask, assuming your mind magically thinks up the exact same questions that mine does? Well, because I don’t assume that everyone ELSE is going to do the boycott-ME3-content-until-Bioware-fixes-its-mistakes thing, so this might still potentially have some meaning to someone else on which add-ons to purchase.
From Ashes: From Ashes adds a mission to Mass Effect 3 that contains a few opportunities to add a few resources to Shepard’s private army, and also adds a new character, Javik the Prothean, to the party. Although this one loses points for being a Day 1 DLC, Javik’s a decent addition to the cast. By himself, he’s only a so-so character, with character development that’s decent but never more than that, and the history and lore he shares of the long-lost Prothean culture is, surprisingly and unhappily, not actually all that interesting. However, he adds a lot to some of the game’s events, particularly during the mission to Thessia, and he’s a useful tool for some much-needed character development for Liara. He’s also fully integrated into the game--he’s no half-assed addition; he has as many dialogue interjections and personal scenes as any other party member. Of course, that’s not as impressive as it could be, given that he was released at the same time as the game, so they had the entire time of the game’s development to make sure he was integrated properly. Still, this DLC package is overall good.
Leviathan: This one’s just not very good. The plot somehow seems both too hurried, and yet meandering at the same time. Too hurried, as the search for Leviathan boils down to a few relatively short missions that desperately try to cram in a sense of meaning and emotional attachment to the introduced supporting character, Ann Bryson, and also tries to pack in an entire new perspective on ancient galactic history to boot. Meandering, as a large part of it is just following leads and learning little of actual value about Leviathan--all the actually important lore comes in at the end, when Shepard finally tracks down and meets Leviathan. Everything up until that point is just...humdrum. Not bad, I guess, but closer to bad than good. And the actual meeting with Leviathan is pretty lackluster, too. It lacks narrative power in its presentation, and all it really does is give a very tiny bit of supporting information to the poorly-conceived claptrap that the Catalyst spouts at the end of the game. I suppose it’s good that Bioware actually bothered to put something in the game that connects in some way to its awful conclusion, given that until this DLC everything about the ending was completely out of left field, but that’s about the best thing I can say about this. This DLC also adds a couple lines of dialogue to the ending, but nothing even remotely important. Finally, some of this DLC just doesn’t even make sense--like how ridiculous it is that Leviathan’s race would see the problem of the supposed lower races being betrayed and destroyed by the synthetic life that said lower races created and then...create a super-ultra synthetic life to fix the problem. Oh yeah, clearly THESE guys are the higher species.
“DURR, hay thar Godlike Bob, Ah dun heared that those self-aware machine-doohickeys that theym thar little folkses made have done gone plumb loco on their creators! Y’reckon we should aim ter fix that sitch-ee-aye-shun?”
“HURR, THAT SOUND GOOD THINKING, GODLIKE FRED. ME WILL CREATE GODLIKE SELF-AWARE MACHINE TO FIX PROBLEM OF MAKING SELF-AWARE MACHINES. ME AM SMART LEVIATHAN!”
Overall, the Leviathan add-on is, if considered very charitably, dead weight. It’s emotionally and intellectually lacking, it provides background to the ending’s foolishness without making it seem more valid at all, parts of it just don’t make any damn sense (so Leviathan says they controlled the lesser species but...couldn’t stop them from building those dangerous AIs. Does Leviathan understand what “control” means?), it ultimately makes no difference, and honestly, adding the angle of living Leviathans hiding and probably, given their god complexes, biding their time, adds a rather unwelcome new entity to a series that’s starting to feel crowded from all the ancient secrets of galaxy-shaking importance being stuffed into it. Even the tiny little satisfaction that I theorize a person could feel from ME3’s ending at having, at the very least, ended the Reaper threat is now stolen away by the knowledge that there’s already an entire other potential super-huge, super-powerful enemy out there. Definitely pass on this one; it’s not worth the time to play through it, and it sure as hell is not worth your money.
Omega: It seems at first like this DLC should be fairly decent. I mean, it’s an action-packed side story, which involves Aria, an NPC from ME2 whose presence in ME3 was not as strong as it should have been, introduces Nyreen, a new character who catches your attention (what with being the first female Turian we’ve seen in the series), and isn’t designed to try in vain to justify the horrible ending. But ultimately, the damn thing just falls flat on its face. First of all, the whole thing feels like it serves no real point whatsoever--the only lasting effect from it on the rest of the game are some War Assets, which ultimately change absolutely nothing, a few new gameplay tweaks (weapon mods, bonus powers, some extra money, etc) which of course are meaningless when just about everyone has by now beaten the game at least once and the game has more or less nothing to surprise them with in battle, a chess board in Shepard’s room that you can’t actually interact with at all, and your bank account suddenly being $15 smaller. Apparently it’s too much to hope that Bioware will see fit to use another DLC to make a minimally acceptable ending possible, but even for a self-contained add-on, those are some pretty paltry rewards, so if this is going to be worth the time and money, it’s going to have to be worth it within its own self-contained events.
The problem is that it’s not. The plot of it is just straightforward action garbage; there’s nothing to learn or think about that comes from it, no layer of meaning attached to it, no intellectual motivation whatsoever. You’ll find more of that in a James Bond movie than in the Omega DLC, and Bond films are usually the thing I point out as prime examples of mindless action fluff with no substance! Shepard goes to Omega, Shepard fights bad guys in Omega, Shepard finds out about a bad guy plan to breed super monster soldier things but has very little reaction to it, Shepard happens to stop this plan when he beats the bad guys, the bad guys are gone. The end. There’s nothing remotely unexpected, nor is there anything to add depth to this cookie-cutter “plot.”
And what about the character development? Disappointing is the most generous term I can think of for it. Aria’s character, who is vocally acted in a surprisingly subpar fashion, stays for all appearances completely static for the entire length of the DLC, except maybe at the end, when Shepard’s influence might cause her to be a little less of an evil bitch. I’d say this, at least, shows character development, but I can’t, because it really didn’t actually develop--up until that moment, Aria’s basically rebuffed every suggestion anyone’s made about maybe being less of a bad person, and she hasn’t been shown to have any interest beyond irritation for Shepard’s heroic ways, so this idea that he influenced her in some way comes out of nowhere. It’s not subtle, it’s just not there. Shepard certainly isn’t developed at all; he has so little to say or do in relation to the plot that it’s almost like he’s trying out the Silent Protagonist thing for kicks. The villain, Petrovsky, has very little in the way of introduction (I think Bioware wants to pretend that every single player has read their comics, from which Petrovsky originates), less in the way of personality, and less still than that in the way of development. And lastly, there’s Nyreen, the female Turian whose character is just as static as Aria’s (though thankfully far less proud, selfish, and proud of being selfish), and doesn’t change from the first time it’s properly shown until her completely arbitrary, unnecessary death, a death that shows just how sloppy and careless the Bioware writers are with their work. I suppose she works as a foil for Aria, but they’re so blatantly, clumsily opposites that the contrast just winds up making Bioware look like they’re trying way too hard. Plus, it makes the vague, half-assed explanation for why Nyreen and Aria were previously lovers questionable at best. And once she dies, she’s just GONE. Like, she dies, Aria gets really angry for just long enough to get caught in a trap,* and...that’s the end of any thoughts of Nyreen. The last battle ensues, Aria and Shepard fool around with Petrovsky, Aria makes a trite little speech, Shepard gets the useless chessboard in his cabin, and that’s that. No mention of Nyreen’s loss that I could see, no moment of Shepard or Aria mourning or even recollecting her, nothing. Bioware seemed to give more of a shit for the stupid scientist who died like 30 seconds into the Leviathan DLC than for Nyreen.
Anyway. So what’re we left with? Well, a large price tag. At 15 bucks, Omega costs more than the Leviathan DLC did, and, for that matter, more than any single DLC I can remember having encountered for an RPG so far. And you know what? It’s incredibly short! You can easily finish the whole thing in 4 hours, and that even accounts for thorough searching and battles that aren’t immediately won from being overpowered. I imagine most players will finish it in significantly less time. $15 for less than 5 hours of gameplay? Even considering a weak US dollar, that’s ridiculous! I mean, if this DLC had a worthwhile story to tell, that’d be one thing, but as I noted above, it does not. Bioware’s not just charging more (and its price choices were already sketchy to start with), it’s providing less at the same time!
I’ll admit that Omega’s got an edge over Leviathan for not trying to violently shove support for the game’s shitty ending in my face, but in the end, this DLC gets a major thumbs-down from me. Spend your 15 smackers on something worthwhile instead--games at GOG.com, a decent meal, My Little Pony dolls, an environmental charity, new socks, anything but Omega.
Citadel: Well...it’s hard to really know what to say here. The final ME3 DLC is...odd. It’s sort of separated into a miniature adventure, like you’d expect from a DLC, and then a bunch of small, just-for-fun stuff afterwards. So let’s look at it in parts.
First of all, the adventure itself is...well...I like it, but I’m not sure I should. The premise is weak, weaker even than ME3’s main premise involving the Crucible. The two villains...well, one’s an incredibly predictable double-cross, and the other is...eh, I’ll just spoil it for you. It’s Shepard’s unheard-of-until-this-second clone. It’s like someone at Bioware saw the awful, nonsensical, stinks-like-rotten-fish plot twist in Pluto Nash and thought it would be a good idea to steal it. The clone’s end is the tired old “rather fall to my death than grab your hand” affair, the other villain’s end is cheap and seems to depend very strongly on the player having formed some emotional attachment to her over the, what, 2 hours’ time that the player has known her? Additionally, the adventure part of the DLC is about as absurdly short as the Omega add-on was, for the same bloated, completely unreasonable price of $15.
Still...still, it’s good for what it is. Even if the clone thing is just outright stupid, it has just enough drive to get a slightly heartwarming message across about how much of what Shepard is was formed by his companions and friends. Even if the adventure feels rushed and contrived, the large amount of interaction between all the members of the party is really enjoyable, and it really cements their personality as a team. There’s a lot of humor, and it’s almost all good, while never seeming inappropriate to the situation. There’s some real good character and universe history and development you can experience through Anderson’s logs and the Citadel archive, which of course I really liked. It doesn’t have the ultra-important, epic mission feel that’s typical of the game’s missions, but that’s not actually all that bad a thing sometimes.
After the adventure’s done, there’s still a lot to do in the DLC: meeting up with party members, both past and present, to hang out (except for Legion, Mordin, and Thane, of course, but there are some nice bits for Mordin and Thane, too), stupid minigames, a pointless arena, NPCs to hear talk, and finally a party to which you can invite pretty much the whole crew. This post-mission content kind of ranges all over the place in terms of quality. Some scenes are just horribly stupid, like Zaeed’s and Javik’s, some are mostly boring and/or pointless, like Ashley’s and Garrus’s (if he’s not Shepard’s love interest), some are pretty decent, like Liara’s (if she’s not Shepard’s love interest) and EDI’s, and Thane’s (whether or not he was Shepard’s love interest) is really great. I have to give Bioware props on one account, though--they really did good by the love scenes overall. Okay, yes, Traynor’s scene is pretty lame, as is Ashley's (but that's to be expected), and Tali’s is...well...kind of stupid, I have to say, but the rest range from solidly good to just outright great bits of romance, and they all are touching at the DLC’s end (Thane in particular). Hell, Miranda and Jack got such good love interest scenes in the Citadel DLC that they actually almost seem like viable romantic options now...well, Jack does, at least. ME3 has been criticized, and very rightly so, for skimping too much on Shepard’s romantic interests, and Bioware did a good job making up for it here.
Actually, that seems to be largely what this DLC’s about, really--Bioware addressing fan feedback. This whole DLC is basically fanservice--but instead of the typical shitty, demeaning, mindless, subhuman kind of fanservice, which is mostly just a sagging heap of tits sitting sloppily atop a pillar of special effects and violence, this is fanservice of a good caliber, giving fans the things of substance that they want. Fans wanted more romance, they got it. Fans wanted better character interaction, more inclusion of Wrex and ME2’s largely forgotten cast, and they got that. The jokes of the DLC play on themes and jokes of the Bioware fan community--Shepard’s infamous “I should go,” Traynor’s toothbrush, the volus pizza delivery guy (“pizza delivery” is how the Bioware community refers to the package retrieval objectives in the Multiplayer mode of ME3), and so on. For the first time since this time last year, Bioware actually seems to be giving a flying fuck about their characters and their fans, instead of their own egos and what the marketing department thinks will sell.
In the end, I still won’t buy this DLC. Because in the end, after all the good times of it, the story of ME3 continues, and Shepard comes to a finale where he (Paragon Shepard, at least) cannot win without betraying his values. For all the listening to its fans that Bioware did in its creation of the Citadel DLC, it still didn’t listen to the most important, frequent, and widespread feedback--like a doctor who’s more interested in treating your foot pains than taking a look at the harpoon stuck in your chest. But this is the first (and last) DLC for ME3 that I would actually want to purchase. Citadel is fun and funny, it reminds you of two of the great draws of the Mass Effect series--its characters and its lore--and it feels like the satisfying send-off to this beloved cast that they deserve. God have mercy on my soul, I actually DO recommend this DLC, even at its exorbitant price of $15 (although if you feel you can wait it out until that price drops a long time from now, by all means go for it). The only reason not to is the one I’ve adopted, the principle of the matter of ME3’s ending.
And that’s it. According to Bioware, there will be no more ME3 add-ons. And yeah, any official statement of Bioware’s has better odds of being a blatant lie than actually coming true, but I’m gonna throw caution to the winds and work on the assumption that they’re actually being honest on this. How’d ME3 do as far as add-ons went? Well...not very well, honestly. The first DLC is pretty good, as I said, but the Leviathan package is just a lot of really, really poor writing trying to justify an even more poorly written ending, and it far outweighs the modestly positive From Ashes. And yeah, I clearly thought that the Citadel DLC was good overall, but the hackneyed, contrived basis for its main story brings it down a bit, and the Omega DLC is such overpriced, useless, meaningless garbage, that the scales are tipped significantly to the negative side when comparing them. On a whole, the good aspects of the ME3 DLCs can’t save the collection from its flaws, and overall the experience has not been a good one. I sure hope whatever game I play next with add-ons can do better.
Wow, I can’t believe the length of this rant. I swear to Isfa I’m never spending this much time on a DLC rant again. No one even reads these damn things! I have got to be out of my fucking mind.
* Although there doesn’t seem to be any reason (save general incompetence) for Bioware to have killed Nyreen off so quickly after introducing her, I really hope that the rationalization was not that her death would make Aria angry enough to fall for Petrovsky’s (highly stupid) trap. Because if there’s one thing this DLC has established by that point, it’s that Aria is ALREADY pissed off about this whole situation, and an enraged charge for those last few steps of the way would have been plenty believable without Nyreen’s death.
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