Sunday, May 18, 2014

General RPGs' Villains' Screen Time

There are many aspects of story and characters that can go a long way to making an RPG truly great, or truly terrible. It’s important that there be creativity, that the setting be interesting, that the protagonist be compelling, that the story be purposeful, and so on and so forth. Lots of factors contribute or detriment an RPG’s overall quality depending on how well they’re written, and one of those factors is most definitely the major villain of the work. Unfortunately, just like believable and touching love stories, really good villains are unusually uncommon in this genre. Even most of the good games manage to get by without compelling antagonists, by virtue of their other good qualities--Final Fantasy 7 and Disgaea 1 come to mind, as examples, though there are certainly many to choose from.

Nonetheless, RPGs have had their share of really excellent villains, and those villains have always greatly enhanced the game they’re in. Fou-Lu was one of the comparatively few memorable parts of Breath of Fire 4, The Transcendent One provides a thematically perfect climax to the utterly incredible Planescape: Torment, and I dare say that Darth Traya is responsible for 50% of the overwhelming excellence of Knights of the Old Republic 2’s writing.

There’s all kinds of ways to make a villain great, memorable, iconic, a powerfully positive part of the plot. Sometimes it’s as simple as look, attitude, and generally foreboding menace. Darth Vader, for example, did eventually get some backstory in the second and third movies of the original Star Wars trilogy, but even as an entirely unexplained bad guy in the original Star Wars, he was an iconic villain. Sometimes it’s having the villain properly reflect the hero’s nature, the way most of Batman’s foes represent the dark side to aspects of his own personality, or likewise having the villain represent and/or reflect the themes and purpose of the story, like Cato in The Hunger Games. Sometimes it’s having a villain whose fall to evil you fully understand and can even sympathize with, such as Demona from Gargoyles. And so on and so forth--there’s a huge number of ways to really make a villain work well.

One thing that really, really helps, though, is something that not nearly enough RPGs seem to understand: giving the game’s major villain(s) enough screen time. Too often, the villain of an RPG is kept out of the player’s sight for almost the entirety of the game, only showing up to twirl his/her metaphorical mustache menacingly and prove his/her evil by doing naughty things for a few minutes before vanishing again. Sometimes it’s not even that much--the 10 Wise Men of Star Ocean 2 are the masterminds behind all the major problems of the game, yet if you don’t count the actual boss battles against them, I’m not sure all of them put together have even a full 15 minutes of screen time over the course of a 40+ hour game!

Some RPG villains manage to be pretty decent despite this lack of screen time. Saren from Mass Effect 1 is as much an “only shows up to remind you that he’s there and a bad guy” villain as the next guy, but he’s got just enough characterization during those moments and just enough of a tie to the theme of “struggling against impossible odds for freedom instead of giving in to slavery in order to survive” to come out in the end as a decent villain. The Sinistrals of Lufia 2, as another example, manage to pull off the role of epic deities of destruction just well enough that it’s not significantly detrimental that they only actually show up here and there, and we more or less never see anything of note on their end.

Still, as a general rule, a villain with the qualities necessary to be great will only live up to that potential greatness if those qualities have their proper time to shine. I think an excellent example of this is Loghain, from Dragon Age 1. Now, Loghain is a very well-crafted individual, with easily understandable motives and paranoias guiding his villainous actions throughout DA1’s plot, who has many good qualities and good intentions that are interesting to learn of and make him a character with real depth, even if they do not outweigh his evil deeds. But, you’ll never know practically any of this throughout the course of Dragon Age 1 if you let him die during the Landsmeet (as, I would think, most players do, and as I do with my “true” playthroughs). It’s only if you choose to spare Loghain, and sacrifice Alistair’s friendship (and possibly life), that Loghain joins your party and has a chance through his dialogue with the main hero to become known, to explain himself and show his true nature and facets of personality. That’s why he makes such a good example of what I’m talking about. Play the game one way (the more common way, I should think), without knowledge of how it goes otherwise, and to you, Loghain is a fairly basic, unexceptional villain--not bad, has a little characterization by reputation, but ultimately there’s very little to him and he just moves the plot along as needed with his nefarious ways. But, play the game the other way, give Loghain the time on screen to capitalize on the depth of his character by conversing directly with the player repeatedly, and you suddenly have a very, very well-crafted villain who fulfills his role in a particularly human way, and fits interestingly into the setting of the game.

As another example, I have no doubt that Kreia (AKA Darth Traya) of Knights of the Old Republic 2 would have been a noteworthy villain either way, but compare her to the character of Ravel Puzzlewell of Planescape: Torment. Both are incredibly fascinating characters, both villains in a way that is ultimately for the greater good of the one they care most for (The Nameless One and The Exile) and even the greater good of the universe itself, in some ways. Both are masterfully wise and engrossing to listen to. Both are characters written by Chris Avellone, who is basically a living god of RPG writing. While certainly distinct characters from one another, there are certainly plenty of similarities between them. No one can say that Ravel Puzzlewell isn’t an incredible character and villain. Not without risk of getting punched in the face by me. But to me, Kreia far surpasses her.

The wisdom and insight of Kreia into the Force, people and their interactions with one another, the power of charisma and setting an example, the way one small act can snowball into a revolutionary action, the importance of striving for balance between the foolish old Jedi Order’s ways and the equally foolhardy ways of the Sith, the connection she forges with the protagonist, the way she manipulates people and destiny itself, the way she sets in motion the future of the galaxy so far that the effects of her actions are seen and felt even thousands of years later, in the actual Star Wars movies...it’s genuinely amazing, it really is. The thing is, you only truly understand all these facets of Kreia as a person and as a force of fate (and in some ways as the fate of the Force) is because you spend 4/5ths of the game in her company, listening to her words and watching her actions, and then that last fifth you spend pursuing her to try to stop her, so you’re sill seeing the effects of her machinations and encountering her as a force to be opposed. Kreia is a character of immense, utterly fascinating depth who has the time in the game to fully show that depth to us in all ways.

Ravel, on the other hand, is clearly a fascinating character as well, and might even be just as incredible a villain and person as Kreia, but in Planescape: Torment, we only ever meet a few of her shadows, hear a little of her actions, and meet her face to face a single time for a single conversation. And don’t get me wrong--the meeting with Ravel Puzzlewell is one of the many parts of Planescape: Torment that goes down in history as one of the RPG genre’s greatest moments. She only has one conversation, but it’s long, and it’s jam-packed full of intriguing character development, plot exposition, and great ideas and perspectives to think upon. As much as the writers do with it, though--and, again, they do a LOT with it--it still is only a single encounter for Ravel to be able to make herself known and understood. We can tell much about Ravel, be properly wowed by what a well-written, compelling character and villain she is, but even if she really does have the potential depth that she could match Kreia, she simply doesn’t have the time to fully explore that potential the way Kreia does, and so Kreia is by far the greater villain.

Giving a villain enough time on screen for the player to really understand them, even bond with them, just makes all the difference sometimes. Sure, we might have found Fou-Lu in Breath of Fire 4 to be an okay villain under normal circumstances, been able to at least take his word for it that the world he awoke to was populated by a pitiful, deceitful, and unworthy society of lower beings...but instead of just expecting us to accept Fou-Lu’s point of view on his word alone, Capcom took the time, had the good idea, to devote a significant amount of the game’s time to playing as Fou-Lu, showing us (instead of just telling us) his own journey and letting us see firsthand how the worst nature of people that he encountered shaped his opinion. It makes Fou-Lu not only a more complex and believable villain with a goal we can understand, but also a better counterpoint to the protagonist Ryu, who has on his journey experienced enough good and strong enough friendship that his point of view can justly be opposite.

And yeah, we would have been able to just go along with fighting an intangible evil force called Odio acting through some random corrupted knight named Orsted in Live-A-Live, but instead of just tossing Orsted at us and telling us “This is a villain, kill it,” Squaresoft gave Orsted a game chapter just as the rest of the cast got, wherein we see how Orsted became the fallen angel that we must oppose, how this innocent hero had everything, everything, cruelly taken from him by the dark side of humanity. By the time Orsted’s chapter concludes, he’s lost every good thing his life had, tangible and intangible, and it’s no wonder to the player that he gives himself over to evil.

And of course, there’s always Wylfred, of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. As the game’s protagonist, the one you’re with from start to finish, it comes as no surprise that he’s also one of the greatest RPG villains ever, since he’s getting the time and devotion to character development that a game’s main character typically does.

Hell, a proper amount of screen time can even work wonders for bad guys who are more like forces of nature than actual characters. You know, big monsters of legendary badness, that sort of thing. I mean, look at Lavos from Chrono Trigger. Yeah, he doesn’t have any real characterization, and there’s no reason to consider him even self-aware. But he’s kept relevant throughout the game’s course--every major arc the story has to do with Lavos, from seeking to stop Magus because of the mistaken belief that Magus created Lavos, to the seemingly unrelated battle for humanity in 65 Billion BC turning out to be the time that Lavos first arrived on the scene, to the story arc involving the magical kingdom of Zeal, which feeds upon Lavos’s power and goes too far with it. In as much capacity that Lavos can exist as a character, he is kept important to the story, on the characters’ and player’s minds, and extremely significant to the game’s world. There are few moments in this game where the threat of Lavos is not being directly shown, reference, or addressed, and that elevates Lavos as a big bad monster villain way above peers of his like, say, Giygas in Earthbound or the evil Genie in Dark Cloud 1.

Of course, don’t get me wrong. A lot of screen time is not ALWAYS needed for a great villain. I mean, Luca Blight from Suikoden 2 is one of the most iconic, monstrously evil villains I’ve seen in an RPG to date, and he only got a regular small amount of time on screen in the game. He simply had the attitude and actions to really sell it. I definitely think that Seymour from Final Fantasy 10 and The Master from Fallout 1 are very good villains, and they didn’t get an abnormal amount of time on screen (Seymour gets some, but not a large amount). In their cases, their reason for villainy (for Seymour, the belief that death is kinder than an existence in the perpetually ravaged Spira, and for The Master, the belief that humanity is incapable and unworthy of surviving in the hellish wasteland it has created for itself and should be replaced with a more unity-minded and strong race of super mutants) is given weight by the time the player spends in the environment. We see firsthand just how miserable and regularly lethal life is in Spira, where the greatest hope people have is simply for a couple years’ reprieve from their tormentor (and it’s bad enough that they’re willing to sacrifice human lives for that reprieve), and in Fallout 1 we see just how much the world has been ruined by humanity’s actions, how difficult it is to live in this world, just by traveling across its endless wastelands. And Greyghast in Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle gets essentially no screen time at all, because he's not even alive for the events of the game (sort of), yet he's close to being as monstrously evil and horrifying as Luca Blight, because his evil is seen after the fact in the protagonist Catherine, who has memory-nightmares and clearly bears the mental scars that serve as legacy to Greyghast's evil. In these latter 3 cases, the game’s setting, other characters, and story themselves are aspects of the villain, an indirect way of familiarizing ourselves with the villain’s motivation and goals, and that works more or less as well as actually learning these things through more exposure directly to the villain.

And of course, a poor villain is a poor villain, regardless of how long the camera’s fixated on him or her. If the villain you’ve made just sucks on principle alone, then extra time is not going to help. Mithos in Tales of Symphonia is a whiny, irrational, thumb-sucking little turd. The writers made a shitty villain when they made Mithos, one whose motivations are embarrassingly bad, one whose plans are stupid and silly. Namco obviously wanted him to be a standard kinda-tragic-because-he’s-misguided sort of villain, your usual JRPG bad guy, but they failed big time. Every damn thing this self-important, mewling little jackass says is annoying and idiotic, and his existence even detriments the other characters of the game, like how he makes a major point of Genis’s character development the dilemma of choosing between Mithos, a dude who Genis has known for maybe an hour, and the friends and family he’s known all his goddamn life. Ugh. Anyway, Mithos is a sucky villain no matter how you slice it, so giving him a lot of screen time does not actually improve anything. The time Mithos spends travelling with the heroes is only more time for him to prattle on and annoy us further. A villain has to actually be WORTH the time for it to do anything good for him/her.

However, as a general rule, I’d definitely say that more screen time for a villain is a very good thing. The best, most interesting, most compelling villains of RPGs are very often the ones that the audience has had time to really become familiar with and understand, and really, it just makes sense that a character playing such a crucial role for your story, providing much of, perhaps all, of the obstacles for your heroes to overcome, to get a significant level of characterization. Sadly, most games are so caught up with developing and portraying the heroes of the story (not that there’s anything wrong with that! Heaven forbid I give that impression; if anything, the major characters in RPGs STILL often don’t enough proper development) that they seem to forget the importance of the villain as a character, and use them only as a necessary plot tool. If only more games could follow the examples I’ve mentioned above.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

The Shin Megami Tensei Series's Recent Neutral Figureheads

Doubtless I’m making mountains of molehills here, but I cannot help but feel some slight concern over what I’ve seen with a couple of the recent Shin Megami Tensei games’ characters who embody the Neutral path.

In case you’re unfamiliar with this, most Shin Megami Tensei games have multiple story paths and endings, and usually, those follow a formula of Law, Neutral, and Chaos. Law is the path of those who believe in absolute order and submission to rules and regulations (which is usually, in SMT, represented by God and the heavenly host of Christianity), Chaos is the path of those who believe in absolute freedom and that the strong should decide their own destiny (which is usually, in SMT, represented by Lucifer and a wide mythological array of demons), and Neutral is the path of those who believe that too much law or chaos is a bad thing and that a balance between them is important, that humans should decide their fate for themselves without the oversight of God or the temptations of Lucifer, and ultimately hold out hope that there can be a better tomorrow of our own design. That’s a very rough summation, but it will suffice. Not every SMT with multiple paths has a distinct Law or Chaos route, but even the titles that lack either of those routes will usually still have a path of Neutrality (or even more than one) analogous to the one I’ve just described, one which sees the flaws and benefits of both other possibilities and seeks a less extreme middle ground.

Usually, for each path there is a character in the game who is the iconic representation of that path’s philosophies. For example, in SMT Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha 2, it’s Dahn who stands for Chaos and Akane who stands for Order, and in SMT Strange Journey, Chaos, Law, and Neutral are represented by Jimenez, Zelenin, and Gore, respectively. And that’s where my problem today comes from: I find that, as representations of the Neutral path, Daichi and his followers in Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2, and Isabeau from Shin Megami Tensei 4, are disappointing, and since they’re some of the most recent Neutral Heroes, it troubles me that this could be the direction that the series is going to go in for this role.

The problem I have with Isabeau and Daichi and company is quite simple: they’re figureheads of indecision, not balance. Look at Daichi’s band in SMTDS2. Once you reach the point in SMTDS2 where the factions are starting to distinguish themselves from one another, the point at which we see that the major choice of the game is between a world of equality or meritocracy, Daichi begins to question whether either world is truly a good idea, pointing out the flaws of a society of both utter equality and complete meritocracy.* And that’s fine. I expect someone, particularly the Neutral figure of the game, to see the problems of the game’s major paths, and to seek out and offer a third, middle-of-the-road solution.

But that’s just it--Diachi never offers that solution, never has any idea of what it might be. I give him credit that he seems to be thinking about it and trying to come up with a solution, but when the day in the game comes where all must choose their sides, he’s got nothing. True Armegeddon is approaching fast at this point in the game, and the only way to prevent all existence from being reduced to utter nothingness, a white void of nonexistence, is to approach the entity causing this situation with a plan for recreating and reshaping the world. It’s Yamato’s plan to take this entity’s power and make a world where only those who have strength, intellect, or do something useful to society have any power. Ronaldo opposes Yamato, and intends to instead make a world where all people share all resources equally and harmoniously, where the strong protect the weak and all are valued exactly the same. At this point in the story, with only a day or so left before the last small piece of the world left is erased, everyone must make a decision on which side they will follow.

Except for Daichi. Still insisting that neither side is ideal, and that if a philosophy makes you fight against those important to you then it can’t be a good one,** Daichi, and the friends who then follow him, refuse to follow either Equality or Meritocracy. Okay, fine. So what’s his middle-ground solution?

“I dunno.”

Yes, that’s right. One day from the erasure of all existence, when all the lives that ever were and ever could be are on the line, when everything and everyone will be blanked out forever if a leader does not step forth and provide the blueprints of a new, ideal world, Daichi just wants to sit on his hands. Not only that, but he wants everyone ELSE to do so, too. Daichi insists that there must be some better way than to force friends to fight each other over which flawed world to enact, but when outright asked by Yamato what this alternative is, Daichi can produce no answer. Just...what the hell? It’s 24 hours to the end of existence, dude! If you don’t like either Yamato’s or Ronaldo’s option, fine, that’s your choice, but if you’re going to actively oppose them and encourage others to do the same, you’d sure as hell better have an alternative plan of action beyond “sit tight and hope things work out” in mind! Good God, I’m all for the “finding a better way” approach to things, it’s an RPG story staple, but if you don’t actually find that better way by Go Time, and the universe and all its history and future is on the line, that is not the time to cross your arms over your chest, pout, and whine, “I don’t wanna!”

Yes, if you do support Daichi, a different option besides Equality and Meritocracy does present itself, but that’s beside the point, honestly. The point is that when the chips were down and it was time to nut up or shut up, Daichi, and the characters who choose to follow him, had no plan, no idea, just the dislike of the options presented. The fact that another path does present itself eventually if the player chooses to follow Daichi feels more like a lucky break than some sort of reward for his commitment, a blind gamble with all of existence as the ante, that thankfully just happens to pay out.

Ugh, and Isabeau in SMT4? Pretty much just as bad. It’s not noticeable at first, but when you watch her for the entirety of the game, you come to realize that she is completely, utterly incapable of making a decision or picking a side at any time of significance during the story. The Passage of Ethics? Can’t make a decision on any of the questions; doesn’t even try--Jonathan and Walter are the ones who mull over the philosophical ramifications, and Isabeau just stays silent. When the time comes that Jonathan and Walter split, one to kill Lilith and the other to do her bidding? Isabeau can’t choose either and instead chooses to go fool around with some NPCs she’s met all of twice because she has no convictions about the matter at hand beyond a vague disapproval. Even once the protagonist, Flynn, has set his path at the end of the game to Neutral (assuming he doesn’t go Chaos, Law, or Nihilism), and Isabeau joins him as his only fellow who also sides neither with angels nor demons, she STILL doesn’t know what to do. Seriously, Flynn comes back to his own world, and Isabeau finds him, and says she’s going to hang out with him during this crisis of heaven and earth, and the reason she gives is just a flat-out confirmation that she doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know her priorities, doesn’t have any idea of how to do the fence-straddling act she wants to pull, just wants to dump it all on Flynn and have him do her thinking for her.

If Daichi’s bunch and Isabeau are any indication, it seems that Atlus has begun to mistake paralyzing and incredibly irresponsible indecision for the balance and self-determination that Neutrality is supposed to be known for. Yes, the first half of the Neutral path in SMT games is a denial of the extremes of the other paths. But that’s not ALL there is to it; there has to be an actual plan, conviction, even just the faintest wisp of an idea as to what should be done instead! The most proactive action either Daichi or Isabeau takes in the end is to inspire someone else (Flynn and what’s-his-name, SMTDS2 protagonist) to do the figuring-out-a-different-path legwork for them!

I mean, compare this to those characters who have previously represented the Neutral path. When the party splits apart in SMT Persona 3’s The Answer continuation on whether they should change the past for the sake of their late friend Minato, Aigis walks the middle road, refusing to make a decision on this matter. That seems like indecision, but we see soon after that Aigis was not refusing because she felt unable to decide--she’s refusing because she won’t make the decision until she knows more about what, exactly, it was that happened the day that Minato banished Nyx and was in turn doomed to be taken from his friends. Aigis is a character whose ethics have been clear by this point for quite some time, and she’s walking the Neutral path on the decision her friends are warring over with an actual plan in her mind, having thought of an important angle to the situation that no one else has. Like Isabeau and Daichi, she doesn’t know enough to comfortably decide the best course of action with their chance to change the past. But unlike Isabeau and Daichi, Aigis is proactive in her lack of understanding, and moves to correct that indecision, to give herself the knowledge she needs to make an educated choice. Isabeau and Daichi are people who don’t know something and sit there stagnating in that ignorance, and Aigis is a person who doesn’t know something and so goes out and finds the answer.

Gore in SMT Strange Journey? Once he’s back in the game and ready to take up the mantle of the Neutral Hero, he has an ideal and a plan for his path. Atsuro and Gin in SMT Devil Survivor 1? Each comes up with a way to put control of the city and world back in the hands of humanity, proactively dealing with the situation of Babel and the war between demons and angels. These are characters who have strong feelings of what is best for humanity, characters who make choices and actively seek ways to do what they think is right and act upon their convictions.

Even the unnamed Heroine of Shin Megami Tensei 1 is better than Daichi and Isabeau. The SMT1 Heroine’s only ethic and plan of action eventually is to stick with the protagonist and support him no matter what course of action he chooses, and yeah, that obviously ain’t a stunning example of a strong, iconic character, but at least she’s showing consistency and loyalty, at least she’s making the choice to follow the SMT1 protagonist. It’s not much better than Isabeau’s joining Flynn because she doesn’t know what to do with herself, but still, it IS a step up. A paid servant and a slave may perform the same tasks, but the fact that a servant has chosen to do so makes for a world of difference between them, and so I say that the decision to follow another and trust his judgment is different from being led because you cannot self-determine. And the SMT1 Heroine’s decision is, at least, thematically appropriate, since the SMT1 protagonist is essentially the avatar of humanity, the one who will decide what path humanity will follow, so you could see her putting her faith in him as putting her faith in humanity itself. And since Neutral is, y’know, about humanity standing on its own to make its own decisions and whatnot...I dunno, it sort of works, right? At any rate, since it’s a case of the Heroine actually choosing to put faith into someone, rather than Isabeau’s desperately turning to someone else to find her path for her, it’s a point in the Heroine’s favor over Isabeau.

Anyway, that’s all I really have to say about this. Being unsatisfied with the obvious paths offered, that’s a natural part of the SMT Neutral figurehead. But the point is for them to go from there to taking action, asserting their views, addressing their lack of knowledge, doing SOMETHING about the situation, taking SOME step toward the future. And that’s a level of proactivity that Isabeau and Daichi never reach; they just stall at the dissatisfaction stage. And that does concern me, because it’s a strike against their games’ storytelling value, and that strike has come both times against some of the series’s newest titles. I’m probably worrying over nothing, but nonetheless, I do hope that characters based entirely upon indecision and choking at the finish line aren’t going to become the norm for future SMT titles’ Neutral figures.






* At least, he tries to point out those flaws. If you’ve read my SMTDS2 rant on the supposed major flaw of the world of equality, you’ll remember that the major criticism of that path doesn’t hold any water whatsoever.

** Which is hypocritical idiocy, of course, since, if you follow Daichi, the protagonist will be leading a campaign against his friends in the other factions anyway.