The Shin Megami Tensei: Persona Q Series's Characters' Loss of Memory

I guess it’s silly to warn for spoilers in a game that is, by now, as old as Shin Megami Tensei: Persona Q1 is.  I certainly don’t always extend the same courtesy to other RPGs of the same age that I rant about, or even newer ones.  But all the same, SMTPQ1’s plot twists and purpose are very dear to my heart, and I’d hate to think of them having any less impact on a player who expected them thanks to my big mouth, so, just once more, I warn you not to read this rant if you have not yet finished SMTPQ1.

Also, as a separate warning, this is definitely 1 of those rants where I’m gonna talk a lot about something as though it matters a lot when, in fact, it totally does not.  Nothing new, of course, but this time it’s even more than usual.  You’ve been warned.



I think it’s kind of crappy that none of SEES, the Investigation Team, or their associated Velvet Room attendants have any memory of the events of the first Shin Megami Tensei: Persona Q game in SMTPQ2.

I ended up really loving SMTPQ1, in spite of how late into the game it was that its story really began taking off.  But I can’t deny that the fact that the casts of Persona 3 and 4 are forced, by Q1’s end, to forget the game’s events is a major stumbling block for the impact and power of the game’s message.  I mean, no matter how beautiful and emotionally, spiritually inspiring Q1’s story of finding worth in one’s life simply for having lived it, it’s still disheartening to know that the Persona characters won’t be able to take joy or comfort from that knowledge, and it’s undeniably tragic that even if they may keep her unconsciously within their hearts, Rei will be forgotten by the only friends she ever was able to make, all the people who knew her best.

Bitter a pill though it is, however, we do swallow it in SMTPQ1, because it’s an unavoidable eventuality.  It’s made clear in the game that each Persona team has been taken from the middle of their games’ courses of events; you couldn’t get the entire SEES team together otherwise, after all.  So for practicality’s sake, the characters of Persona 3 and 4 have to forget about their shared adventure by Q1’s end.  After all, it would make no sense for them to have had this huge, life-altering experience in the middle of their separate adventures, and then make no reference whatsoever to it for the rest of Persona 3 and 4’s events.  Nor would the events of Persona 3 surrounding Shinji and Ken have gone the way they did, had they remembered their time in Q1.  And were the Persona 3 cast to remember their friends in the Investigation Team (who come from a time a few years after Persona 3), it’s almost certain that they would, out of friendship, come to Inaba to help the Persona 4 cast once Persona 4’s events are in swing.

So yes, the player can accept the necessity, at the end of Q1, that the characters involved would return to their own devices with only a subconscious impression of its events, and no tangible recollection.  But why in the world did Atlus choose to extend that amnesia into the events of Persona Q2?

It accomplishes nothing for the Persona 3 and 4 casts not to have their memories of Q1’s events returned to them in Q2.  There’s no conflict of canon--like the first, SMTPQ2 occurs at a midway point of the adventures of Personas 3. 4, and 5, and at its end, all the characters return to their respective games’ stories with no conscious memories of their time in Hikari’s cinema labyrinth, so having Minato and Yu’s groups recall their former interactions together would be fine, since they’ll forget once again by the time Q2 is over.

On the contrary, forcing SEES and the Investigation Team to continue forgetting about their experiences with Rei and Zen in Q1 only hurts Q2.  It provides an obstacle for Q2’s writers, for example, who have to find ways to have characters “meet for the first time” that aren’t just retreading the way they already met for the first time in Q1.  And it creates an unpleasant feeling at the back of the player’s mind during Persona Q2’s events.  After all, it’s easy enough to guess, with familiarity of Q1, that Q2’s ending will once again have the characters all be forced to forget all they felt and learned on this adventure, once again out of logistical necessity.  With that knowledge ever present in the player’s mind, their ability to appreciate and find significance in the events of Q2 diminishes, as they know the whole time that it shall all be forgotten forever in the end.  Yet if the memory of Q1’s events was returned to Persona 3 and 4’s casts at the beginning of Q2, then this wouldn’t be the case--the player would be comforted that Q2’s events would at least have the potential to live on in the hearts of Persona 3, 4, and 5’s casts when next they met in a crossover event like this, since there would be the precedent of that happening for Q1.

Most of all, it feels disappointing, even a little painful, to have Rei and Zen forgotten in this way.  Simple practicality forces one to accept that they’ll be forgotten by their friends in the mainstream Persona games, and that’s unfortunate, but to continue to have them be forgotten even when there’s no need for it?  It retroactively lessens the moving significance of Persona Q1 to know that Atlus ignores it not just out of necessity, but also voluntarily.

It would, in fact, have benefited Q2 if Atlus had seen fit for the characters to remember Q1’s events as Q2 plays out.  It would have, for example, given the casts of Persona 3 and 4 opportunities to connect with each other over that shared experience, build their relationships further rather than have to start from scratch and retread old ground.  And how nice would it have been to have a few scenes in Q2 of characters fondly remembering their friends Rei and Zen, from the first time they united this way?  Plus, the situation could have been useful for the character arc of Persona 3’s female protagonist, Minako, as an outsider in Q2 even to her own friends, since she wasn’t given the opportunity to participate in Q1.

I think it’s likely that there will someday be a Shin Megami Tensei: Persona Q3--I certainly am crossing my fingers for it, at least.  And when that day comes, I really hope that the game will allow SEES, the Investigation Team, and the Phantom Thieves to remember their adventures together with Rei, Zen, and Hikari.  It’s going to be a noticeably titanic impediment to the writers to have to come up with new ways for all these characters to meet for the first time for the third time, for starters, and it would be more compelling to see them building off of the interactions and relationships they’ve already created previously and going forward, rather than having to keep seeing connections born of “new” friendships the whole game long.  And more importantly, it’s only fair to the characters who have defined this sub-sub-series so far.  To have them continue to be forgotten about even when there’s no need for it will be doing Rei, Zen, and Hikari dirty.

Fire Emblem 16's Downloadable Content

The DLC landscape in general is not a good one, with the majority of RPGs’ add-ons being unworthy of one’s time and money, ethically dubious, and sometimes even harmful to the integrity of the game they’re attaching themselves to, more like a burdensome leech than a helpful asset.  For every RPG that possesses a DLC suite that enhances one’s experiences with the title, at least 3 others offer the player little more than disappointment.  For every Witcher 3, there’s a Borderlands 1, a Dragon Age 2, and a Shin Megami Tensei: 4-1.  For every Fallout: New Vegas, there’s a Radiant Historia, a Tales of Zestiria, and a Dragon Age 1.  And the situation only seems to be getting worse as time goes on, not better.

So with that in mind, as well as remembering how awful Nintendo’s showing was with Fire Emblem 14’s collection of add-ons, I can’t pretend that I hold high hopes for what I’ll find as I delve into the Downloadable Contents offered by the recent Fire Emblem: Three Houses.  Add-ons have a bad track record, JRPG DLCs have a worse one, Fire Emblem DLC has a bad track record, and Nintendo’s already goofed up a DLC related to this game already by having the worst protagonist in Fire Emblem history become FE16’s representation in Super Smash Brothers.*  Frankly, if this entire thing isn’t a complete disaster, I’ll be shocked.

But I’m a fair guy, so fair that I typed all of this up before any of the DLCs’ releases just so that if Nintendo did defy my expectations, I’d have to give them their full due and eat crow below.  So, low expectations or no, let’s take a look at these DLC packages and give’em their fair shake.



Jeritza: As a free update to the game, the character of Jeritza was added to FE16, becoming available to players as a party member on the Black Eagles path.  On the 1 hand, this is good, because Jeritza is Edelgard’s little murder-monkey anyway so it’s sensible that he’d be on the front lines with her, and who doesn’t like free stuff?  On the other hand, this means that for you to actually experience what Jeritza brings to the table, you have to throw your lot in with that self-important, gullible, tiresome automaton Edelgard.

If you’re reluctant to follow the banner of someone who fancies herself a revolutionary and warrior for the truth yet never once thought to question anything she’s been told by the evil, deception-based shadow-society of villains that controls her family and ruined her life, though, then I’ve got good news: you won’t miss much by skipping this one.  Yeah, it turns out that the 1-dimensional murder-lust of the Death Knight doesn’t make for a much more interesting conversationalist than it makes for an opponent.  I really don’t know what Japan’s obsession with this Vegeta/Bakugo character archetype is, the one where literally the only thing some guy thinks about is being stronger than everyone else, but it is not even close to being as compelling as anime and video game writers think it is.  It’s generally a bad idea to make unrelenting obsession over a hobby the 1 and only character trait of your character to begin with--that’s how you get Hisame from FE14, whose sole memorable trait is an unquenchable need to make and consume pickles--but when that hobby is “Am I better at killing this guy than he is at killing me?” it makes for an especially empty, repellent character.

Okay, I guess, to be fair, Jeritza has a couple decent moments in his Support conversations with Mercedes and, unexpectedly, Bernadetta.  And at least his stupid unwavering interest in the act of killing isn’t entirely his choice, but more a result of the terrible experiments performed on him by Those Who Slither in the Dark (or as I like to call them, Those Who Edelgard Knows are Evil Liars But is Still Gonna Take Entirely at Their Word When it Comes to Rhea).  He’s at least not, say, that small-minded buttmunch Keita from Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2, or any other given examples of the Bakugo-Vegeta archetype who actually choose to have lives so devoid of meaning or value that all they care about is whether they can throw a punch a little better than anyone else.  And actually, I guess that Jeritza’s interactions with Mercedes are a decent little boon for her character.

So...I guess, since he’s free, Jeritza isn’t a bad addition, just not really a good one, either.  If you haven’t already gone through Edelgard’s route, then yeah, Jeritza’s an unobjectionable, if also uncompelling, addition to the cast.  But he’s sure as hell not worth going through the Black Eagle route if you weren’t already planning to do so.


Wave 3: Waves 1 and 2 were all unimportant cosmetics, stat items, and battle maps, so I’m not going to waste time talking about them here; y’all know already whether or not those kinds of window-dressing knicknacks are something you have interest in.  Wave 3 also has some stuff in it that doesn’t matter, like giving you the option to feed animals around the monastery and adding 1 of the most mundane, joyless minigames I’ve seen in years, but there is 1 part of Wave 3 that qualifies as story content: you get a new quest, through which you can recruit Anna!

Wheeeeee.

I’ll never be a true Fire Emblem fan, I think, because I sincerely do not understand the appeal of this perpetually under-developed, shallow merchant-NPC-inexplicably-turned-series-mascot.  Her role in this game certainly hasn’t enlightened me at all on this point--even the woefully unexplored Anna in FE14 had a single Support conversation chain with Corrin, whereas FE16’s Anna has none at all.  The quest to actually recruit her ain’t exactly a shining beacon of effort by the writers, either: you go up to her, have her say a couple lines foreshadowing the final DLC, and then she asks to be in your party.  Truly moving stuff.

Anna does have a Paralogue chapter, which she shares with Jeritza...but it’s trite and meaningless.  All that happens is that Anna brings the party along as muscle for an economic venture, her fellow merchant tries to screw her out of her share, and Anna and company fight back and beat the enemy merchant’s forces.  And then Jeritza wanders off to murder the guy.  Not exactly a stirring narrative in its right, and all it does is reinforce the facts that Anna likes money and Jeritza likes killing people, both of which were quite clear already.

On second thought, looking at Anna, I think the ability to wordlessly cram rotten fish down a stray cat’s throat might actually be the narrative highlight of this DLC package.

This DLC, like Waves 1, 2, and 4, is not sold on its own, but rather is a part of purchasing Fire Emblem 16’s Expansion Pass.  Basically, you either buy all the DLC packs for FE16, or none; there’s no picking and choosing.  Ah, yes, taking the ability to choose away from your customer...truly the hallmark of a vendor with confidence in his products’ quality, eh, Nintendo?  Well, Wave 4 had better be able to justify that $24.99 price tag all on its own, because Wave 3’s Anna is worth nothing.


Cindered Shadows: This is such a dumb idea.  Look, whether Cindered Shadows ends up being good or bad overall, I contend that the idea of there being some group of medieval Dickensian misfits living in the monastery’s basement who somehow can go through an entire over-5-year-long war centered around said monastery without once having a single interaction with the conflict is STUPID.  It’d be like if JK Rowling suddenly told us that there had been a secret fifth house at Hogwarts all along, hiding in a corner of the pantry, and that Blurgledrumbershnufft House just happened to somehow never once come into contact with any other character in the entire school and wasn’t once affected by the yearly catastrophes of dark magic and war that pervaded Hogwarts through the entire book series.

...Oh dear, now that I say it, that totally does sound like something she would spontaneously retcon in a tweet, doesn’t it?  Everyone, for the love of Tophia, don’t tell JK Rowling about Fire Emblem.

But enough grousing about the absurdity of the situation.  Is this DLC good or bad or what?  The answer may shock you.

But it probably won’t, because it’s bad, and that’s what’s consistent to the series, in terms of add-ons.

The main plot for Cindered Shadows is okay as a concept (I mean, besides the whole “hey just FYI there’s been a nest of ragamuffin freaks living in our basement all this time” thing).  At least, I guess.  It’s thematically appropriate to FE16 as a whole, being about the machinations of a villain who can’t accept the death of the woman they loved most in the world and is willing to go to unethical lengths to revive her--the villain is basically a significantly more extreme version of Rhea.  It expands on some of the lore of the FE16 world in new directions, and provides an opportunity for Byleth’s mother to have some slight postmortem importance and presence in the game.  And it...um...

...Actually, I think that may be it for the main story’s positives.  Can’t say all that much for the general flow of events for it; as an adventure, it’s mostly just there.

Unfortunately, the story is extremely rushed once it actually gets going, which really hurts Cindered Shadows on a number of fronts.  There isn’t enough time for the game to capitalize on the villain’s thematic similarity to Rhea (nor point out their differences, so Cindered Shadows manages to simultaneously fail to draw this line of comparison adequately, and incorrectly make Rhea look more like a bad guy if the player does pick up on the comparison).  And on that note, the villain has virtually no time to develop as a character, and certainly not enough of a presence that his big reveal/twist makes any impact on the player whatsoever; the game tries halfheartedly to tell us through other characters’ dialogue why this guy’s villainy is something to care about, but this isn’t the first time that Fire Emblem 16’s approach of Tell, Don’t Show has been utterly inadequate.

Other pacing problems: while you get an alright feel for the personalities of the 4 new party members, the climax of Cindered Shadows hinges on the overall set of relationships and trust they have with one another, and the length just isn’t such that the strength of their bonds really comes across to you.  The finale to this DLC overall is dissatisfying, with the bad guy just transforming into a corrupted dragon thing offscreen, because the Artificial Drama in RPGs for Incompetent Slobs Guidebook says he has to, and there’s no lasting result or message that affects any of the characters.

And can we talk about Byleth’s mother?  The story also goes fast enough that it completely misses the huge opportunity to develop Byleth as a character through the fact that the story is centered around her/his mother’s life and death.  Nintendo already bungled the 60+ hours of game time you spend with Byleth in terms of character development; Byleth is, as I’ve noted before, a colossal failure as a silent protagonist, and silent protagonists are generally already failures as characters.  Cindered Shadows having Byleth’s previously-almost-entirely-unmentioned mother as the centerpiece of the plot’s table was Nintendo’s last chance to actually fucking do something with Byleth, develop her/him in any goddamn meaningful way.  But like every other table centerpiece I’ve ever seen, this opportunity is a complete waste of space, decorative rather than at all valuable.  Byleth has no fucking reaction whatsoever, as always, doesn’t advance in any way as a character, doesn’t give the slightest indication that the involvement of her mother in this story has any draw or drama for her at all.  Not that it’s easy to blame her/him, of course, given that basically the only thing this DLC really tells us about Byleth’s mom was that she loved Jeralt, which was already known to us, but still!  This entire side story gives the impression of having been created for the sake of wringing some drama out of Byleth’s family and origins, and yet Nintendo did nothing with it!

But of course, why waste those precious 8 hours or so of the DLC’s main campaign on any of that thinky-thinky stuff?  What the players really want is for 5 of those 8 hours to be dealing with unceasing waves of enemy reinforcements!

But the main story of Cindered Shadows isn’t the only thing about it, of course.  Yuri, Balthus, Constance, and Hapi, the 4 new party members it adds, are the other half of its content.  So how do they shake out?

Ehhh.

They’re not bad characters, and Nintendo did take steps to fully integrate them into the game proper--they have lines of dialogue throughout the game as any other party member does while you’re going around Garreg Mach and talking to people, they chat with one another and certain other characters during meals, there are a few situations during the major battles of the game proper in which they’ll bandy words with their foes, and so on.  As pieces in FE16’s character collection, the party members of Cindered Shadows don’t feel like outsiders.  And credit where it’s due, a couple of them even manage to expand on other characters through their presence--Constance provides another desperately-needed Support conversation to flesh out Jeritza (it’s not much, but he’s so lacking in general that even just a little character development is invaluable for him).  And Yuri provides a completely unexpected plot twist to Bernadetta’s backstory that took me totally by surprise, which is neat.

...And, of course, anything that gives more screentime and dialogue in general to Bernie-Bear is a solid positive in my eyes.  Between her and FE14’s Mitama, I’ve arrived at a far greater understanding of the siren call of the Waifu than I had prior to modern Fire Emblems.  So thanks for that, Nintendo.

Back to business: at the same time, though, all 4 of the Cindered Shadows party additions are easily among the lesser characters of Three Houses as a whole.  They’ve got personalities, and backstories that inform them, but not a lot really stands out about them on either point.  Yuri’s got a decent history, but a boring personality, Balthus is basically just Hobo Raphael, Constance is another individual whose motivations revolve entirely around her status (or lack thereof) as a noble,** and Hapi is a pill whose history sounds like it has potential, but isn’t explored much.  They’ve got Support conversations with some of the game’s characters beyond just one another, but it feels like they’re missing some Supports they ought to have.  For example, with the way that Yuri feels about the nobility as a whole, you’d think he’d have some conversation chains with at least Edelgard and Claude, not to mention perhaps Ferdinand and Lorenz.  Given that her existence revolves around being a noble who's lost her social status, shouldn't Constance have a Support chain with Catherine?  And what was the point of Ashe recognizing Yuri at the beginning of the DLC if he wasn’t going to be 1 of Yuri’s Supports?

Also, half the Cindered Shadows characters seem to have been built primarily around some quirk personality traits that are weird, silly, and stupid, even by Fire Emblem standards.  Hapi’s only notable contribution and involvement in Cindered Shadows’s main story is the fact that when she sighs, it summons monsters.  What the hell kind of defining quirk-trait is that?  Forget Final Fantasy 8’s Zell and his hot dogs, forget Asdivine 4’s Olivia and her glaring at stuff, even forget Tales of Eternia’s Max and his utterance of the word “Yeah.”  Hapi’s foundational quirky trait is so dumb that it might rival Millennium’s James, a man defined by the enjoyment of wearing a hat.

And then there’s Constance, who might somehow be worse, as she suffers from possibly the most made-up mental illness of all time: when she’s in the shade or indoors, Constance is a brash, aggressive, haughty go-getter, but if she’s in sunlight, suddenly she becomes quiet, humble, and self-deprecating to a tiresome fault.***  Yes, at any given time, Constance is a single passing cloud away from going from Marianne to genderswap-Lorenz and back again.  Really, Nintendo?  This is the best you could come up with?  A character who makes Dragon Ball’s Launch look serious by comparison?

So unfortunately, this DLC is, as a whole, kinda bad.  It’s sloppy because its storytelling is rushed, and the characters it adds bring a few positive elements to the table, but are ultimately lacking, and half are highlighted by such absurdly dumb gimmick traits that I have to wonder whether Nintendo assigned whoever came up with the keychain Pokemon to develop them.  If Cindered Shadows were, like, $5, then I’d say it was an alright purchase.  Maybe even worth as much as $10, if you’re a huge fan of Fire Emblem, as the main campaign and characters’ Support conversations shake out to about 10 hours or so altogether.  But as I mentioned earlier, FE16’s add-ons are an all-or-nothing venture; you either buy them all for $25, or you don’t get any.  And since none of the previous DLCs to Wave 4 were worth anything at all, Cindered Shadows is essentially saddled with justifying that 25 bucks all on its own, which it just can’t do.  In no reasonable terms can one view the cost of the Expansion Pass as anything less than 2.5x more expensive than what Cindered Shadows is worth, and even that’s a generous estimation.



So, the final verdict for Fire Emblem 16’s Downloadable Content?  Awful.  Unsurprisingly, given what I said before: A, Nintendo’s history with Fire Emblem add-ons, B, JRPGs’ history in general with add-ons, and C, just the history of add-ons overall.  I guess I’ll credit Nintendo in that last time, with FE14, they only put even the slightest narrative effort into 1/3 of their DLCs,  while this time, it was 2/3 of them, so, I guess that’s a step up?  But with the exception of a few positive blips here and there, the quality of this new content is still low across the board, under-performing and grossly overpriced.  I’m at least happy that I learned my lesson well enough from last time to experience these through Let’s Play videos rather than waste my money on them, but frankly, I still feel cheated just for the time I invested in this crap.











* Don’t get me wrong, I’m not 1 of those slobbering morons who were shocked by the fact that Nintendo stupidly decided to shove another Fire Emblem character into the roster.  I think that for that to surprise you at all, you basically have to never have played a Smash title since the original N64 version; any idiot looking at the Smash roster’s growth from 1 game to the next could see that Three Houses’ inclusion was regrettably destined.  But couldn’t Nintendo have at least given us a better character than Byleth?  I can’t think of a less worthwhile representation for the game than the static, less-personality-than-a-tree-stump Byleth.  Even Dimitri, Hubert, or Edelgard would have been better selections--and they’re a dipshit, an asshole, and a dipshit AND an asshole, respectively!


** I do admit to quite enjoying Constance ripping Ferdinand a new asshole in their initial Support conversation.  That, however, is fairly subjective, as I generally just don’t like Ferdinand.  Guy’s a dingus.


*** I find it amusingly ironic that, when this aspect of Constance is first introduced, Dimitri observes that he’s never seen anything like this before.  Because if anyone in this game should be able to identify with an unwell mind instantaneously going from 1 extreme to another, it’s the guy who goes from 0 to CRAWWWLING IN MY SKIIINNNNN in 60 seconds.

Beautiful Desolation

Ah, Indie RPGs.  As the mainstream developers like Activision/Blizzard and especially Bethesda continue to make their priority the separation of consumers from the money they’ve earned by any scummy means necessary, in place of the quality of their work, the Indie development community has fast become the more reliable industry for providing actual, honest-to-Erastil salable video games as its wares, rather than unabashed monetization schemes tacked onto lazy, unfinished faux-games like Fallout 76.  There are plenty of exceptions on both sides, of course, with a few ethically upstanding mainstream companies like CD Projekt Red (most of the time, anyway; can't say I'm pleased by their recent decision to abuse their employees with crunch after promising they wouldn't--that's some Pete-Hines-level lying right there) and a few shamelessly avaricious, soul-hollow Indie companies like Glumberland, but generally speaking?  If you want to be treated like a human being purchasing a product, you’re better off buying an Indie video game, these days.  Of course, if what you actually want is to be treated like a dairy cow whose only purpose in life is to be milked with efficient, factory-like apathy until you run dry, then by all means, Bethesda, Ubisoft, EA, and their peers will be pleased to make that happen for you.

Yes, the landscape of the gaming industry is indeed a desolate one, RPGs included.  So that’s part of why I’m always eager to laud those little Indie gaming patches of beauty within it when I find them, and that’s why we’re here today...even though, if I’m to be honest, this recommendation will be a bit of a challenge for me to make, for reasons I’ll get into below.

Beautiful Desolation is a new (at the time of writing this, April, which will probably be several months before it’s posted) game of the isometric style of RPGs,* famous for such lasting classics as Planescape: Torment and the original Fallouts, and such newer works of excellence as Torment: Tides of Numenera and Pathfinder: Kingmaker.  Of the 2 ends of the chronological spectrum of this particular genre of RPGs, however, BD is clearly far closer to the latter than the former--in fact, that’s perhaps its greatest selling point.

You see, unlike so damn many other RPGs, Beautiful Desolation’s title is absolutely dead-on.  This is a game for which the striking aesthetic of the far, far future’s post-apocalypse is Job 1.  And that may not seem like all that big a deal, on paper, because let’s face it, that setting has been explored many times, thoroughly and with great visual and audible power.  It’s been many years since the mutant-filled ruins of Chrono Trigger wowed me as a child.  The unsettling contrasts between harsh wasteland and twisted remains of civilization that were explored long ago in the first couple Fallouts, and the harsh conflicts of civilization trying to restart itself among rubble and rebar in the later Fallouts, have likewise become well-known to us.  We’ve seen a world of beautiful melancholy in Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, glimpses of a world of stasis in Suikoden 3, the harsh frozen wastes of ICY: Frostbite Edition, the poisoned earth of Baten Kaitos, a vision of a world of lifeless sand in Radiant Historia...whether a brief snapshot of an end to be avoided or a panorama of a reality to be survived, the whole post apocalypse thing has had plenty of opportunities to be seen and felt in a myriad of ways within RPGs.  So a game for which a significant portion of purpose and appeal is simply “show off the world after the fall of human civilization” doesn’t seem like it could be anything to write home about.

However, the thing about Beautiful Desolation is that it draws its inspiration from the isometric RPGs of the past most in terms of visual style...and when you’re setting your artistic bar at Planescape: Torment and the original Fallouts, you’re reaching for the sky.  But its developers, The Brotherhood, must have some damn long arms, because they meet that standard and even exceed it.  The setting of the varied savagery of Africa’s physical environment is an unexpectedly perfect partner for the singular disturbing beauty of the aesthetic quality and style of the early Fallouts, Torment: Tides of Numenera, and Planescape: Torment, and Beautiful Desolation’s ability to join the setting and aesthetic together is generally flawless.  In many ways, it’s impossible to separate what in the wastes and wilds of Beautiful Desolation is the result of a post apocalyptic world from the natural harsh reality of Africa, and the result is a game of striking atmospheric presence with both a new, fascinatingly twisted and creative portrayal of the far aftermath of major civilization’s end, and a gorgeous rendition of the landscape, themes, and historic cultural dynamics of Africa.**

Its aesthetic is definitely the greatest part of Beautiful Desolation, and I’m sure that was the intention of its developers (given the game’s title, and all).  But it has virtues worth noting beyond that, too.  The use of future-tech is creative, inevitably dark and unsettling, and frequently intriguing in how it both intersects with and diverges from the basic foundations of life and reality--sometimes the objective of your latest quest involves finding a lost piece of incredible technology, and at other times, it’s as rudimentary and fundamental as finding a good place to grow a plant.  Just as it’s hard to know where the post apocalypse ends and Africa’s natural state begins, so too is it hard at times to separate the natural, the technological, and the mystic from the characters, events, and devices of Beautiful Desolation.  And that’s pretty neat.

The game also does well with presenting some decent choices to the player of who to help and what to do, some of which are tough to make and have no real right answer.  And sometimes, the consequences aren’t as you’d expect, either...I’d advise a healthy habit of saving with several different file slots, just in case.  Although there are a few times when even that may not help, given the length of time it may take to see the results of an action you didn’t even know was significant.***  Also, I like the twist and presentation of its ending.  That stuff’s not where Beautiful Desolation really stands out as its own unique entity, of course, but they’re virtues, nonetheless, and worth noting.

Now, here’s the thing that makes this rant a little challenging for me: I think Beautiful Desolation is an artistic, laudable game, I’m very pleased to have helped to Kickstart it, and I do recommend it on the terms stated above.  But oddly enough, I actually don’t really like it very much myself.

The weakness of Beautiful Desolation is the glue holding its narrative together.  The game has a core story, and that story is okay (but no better) as a whole: help Mark, his brother, and a robo-dog get back to their own time after they’re accidentally taken into the very distant future by a big ol’ techno-divine sitting-in-the-sky thingy.  But that driving motivation never feels like a very powerful force in the game, a goal you’re meandering in a roundabout way towards instead of actively seeking.  I don’t know exactly why that is, to be honest, because most of the time when Mark interacts with major NPCs, his goals toward getting back home are involved at some point or another in the conversation, and most of the substantial locations you can find are related in some way toward the game’s ultimate goal.  And yet, I nonetheless never felt strongly connected to Mark’s quest in Beautiful Desolation, never felt the presence of a story strong enough that it seemed actually involved in the experience of playing the game.

Maybe the problem is that BD is fairly open-ended in how and when you approach the goals of the main story?  But that’s really no excuse; the search for the water chip and subsequent need to stop the Master were always with me in Fallout 1, the stages of Mass Effect 1’s compelling story were never far from my mind as I made unreasonable demands of the Mako while exploring irrelevant alien worlds...Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4, ICY: Frostbite Edition, The Witcher 3,  all managed to allow for great exploration and some level of player choice in when and how to approach story goals, yet all possessed stories with a strong enough presence that at no point did they feel faint or disconnected from the experience.  Beautiful Desolation, on the other hand, has an overall plot that’s just kind of limply hanging onto the rest of it.

The other thing that turned me off of getting into Beautiful Desolation is that a lot about the main characters aren’t executed very well.  Pooch I have no problem with; she’s written well enough and I can mostly believe and appreciate her character arc.  But Mark and Don...they just don’t grab the player’s interest the way they should.  There’s great potential there, with Don’s troubled history and what that history has indirectly cost Mark.  But I never once really felt it from either of them, you know?  The way Don is written feels like someone going through the motions of being a man with deep emotional troubles, not someone who’s actually experienced and still grapples with them.  Meanwhile, Mark’s dialogue with Don is much the same--whether you choose to have Mark lash out in pain and anger at Don or rebuild their brotherly love, it never feels like a cohesive emotional story, and either way it feels insincere.

And I’m sorry to say that the voice actors (the English ones, at least; perhaps the performances of what seems to be the default (South African) are better) exacerbate this problem several times over.  Silent, the dialogue between Mark and Don feels somewhat artificial, but delivered by the voice actors for them, it feels bizarrely nonchalant.  Whether the subject is the abuse Don suffered in his childhood, Mark’s pain at losing his wife, a traumatic event during Don’s stint as a soldier, Mark telling Don he’s a piece of shit, or Mark warmly forgiving his brother and making his love for Don known, it all sounds like 2 buddies casually shooting the shit while they’re fly-fishing on a lake.  The overall writing for Mark and Don is unconvincing for who they’re supposed to be, but what chance their characters might have had to draw me into their individual and shared growth in spite of that is snuffed out by the voice acting.

The voice acting for the rest of the cast is kind of back-and-forth in quality, too.  Some characters’ vocals are done well, like Pooch, and a couple are even really good--the actress for the scientist in the hidden frosty region sells her character very well, I think.  At other times, the cadence of NPCs’ dialogue being spoken feels as uninvested as Mark’s tends to be.

Also, as a protagonist interacting with the world around him, Mark can be a bit puzzling.  When the player directs Mark toward neutral or good guy dialogue options, Mark’s fine, if a little underwhelming sometimes, but you often have the option to have Mark act like a big tough guy and throw his weight around.  It’s rather jarring to watch and listen to for a variety of reasons.  For starters, this game has no combat system (beyond a very isolated arena minigame), so most of the time, the player knows damn well that Mark’s not going to be making good on any of his threats.  Also, at least half of the entities that Mark can pull this bully crap with in this game are any combination of bigger, more combat-trained, better armed and/or armored, and in greater numbers than he is, and that’s if they’re not just an outright terrifying embodiment of monstrous death and violence.  So he’s either coming across like a completely needless bully, or more often, like an idiot with no sense.  And lastly, the genial tone that Mark’s voice actor seems perpetually stuck in doesn’t exactly help the situation.

And since I mention it, I’m not entirely sure where I stand with this game’s lack of a combat system.  Now, that may seem hypocritical of me, as I’ve many times said--with pride, even--that the measure of an RPG is, to me, entirely separate from technical details such as the quality of its gameplay, so long as it IS playable.  Even more hypocritical since it wasn’t all that long ago that I made a case for why Rakuen is a fine RPG in spite of having no combat whatsoever.  But hear me out.  Beautiful Desolation isn’t Rakuen.  Rakuen doesn’t have combat because it doesn’t need combat, because fighting isn’t what Rakuen’s about.  The obstacles and problems within Rakuen are personal ones that could be a part of my life or yours, and the purpose of the game isn’t about stopping someone or preventing something from happening.  The story, aims, guiding purpose, and interpersonal conflicts in Rakuen aren’t ones that involve battle any more than those you would find in, I dunno, a romantic comedy, or a soap opera, or an inspirational movie about family ties, or something.

Beautiful Desolation, by contrast, is a story about survival in the post-apocalyptic wildernesses of Africa, involving interactions with tribes who are at war, militarized robot societies, and a technological theme of revivifying the remains of the dead with various sciences.  You will chat with as many, if not more, individuals in Beautiful Desolation whose “face” is a skull in some form of decay and who are animated through technological means alone, as you will with anyone who you can say for certain checks “Living” rather than “Deceased” on his tax forms.  The concept of violent struggle with others is an inseparable component of the game’s setting and several of its themes.  So the idea that Mark, Don, and Pooch are never once forced to fight for their lives--especially if you have Mark going up to towering warriors carrying giant automatic rifles and telling them they better do what he says or he’ll kick their ass--is very strange to me.  It might even be part of what disassociates me from the game.  Even in as low-stakes a genre as RPGs and even to a player like myself who likes lower difficulties, doesn’t go near Shin Megami Tensei Persona Q’s Risky mode, and spams the Reset button shamelessly to avoid companion perma-death in old Fire Emblems and Romancing Saga 3 and whatnot, Beautiful Desolation has very little weight to its conflict.

On the other hand, even though the setting and several themes of the story essentially demand it, I can’t deny that a battle system has no real relevance to what Beautiful Desolation is ultimately here to accomplish, nor to its primary virtues.  Sure, Beautiful Desolation wants to tell you the story of Mark and company traveling through and surviving post-apocalyptic Africa...but more than that, it just wants you to experience that world.  Mark’s quest is not the purpose, but an excuse for The Brotherhood to convey to you the heart and soul of an Africa of the distant, creative future, which is more than ever the Africa of our distant, formative past.  And accomplishing that doesn’t require little guys with guns and swords taking turns making white numbers appear over each other’s heads.  It just needs you to lean in with interest to try to figure out where the twisted biological origins end and the animating technology begins in the bartender you’re talking to, to take a moment to admire the way in which nature’s flora has reclaimed an aircraft hangar for its own, and to feel the withering, silent heat of a settlement situated in a barren plain

And that’s what my conflicted recommendation for Beautiful Desolation comes down to, I suppose.  The game has problems with its storytelling, big ones.  They’re not aggravating problems like the nonstop anti-adult chatter of Jude in Wild Arms 4, or the convoluted, absurd idiocy with which Nomura explores the full range of emotional nuances of the human condition (as long as part of that human’s condition is NOT having yet graduated from middle school) in Kingdom Hearts.  That is to say, BD’s flaws aren’t actively working against it to make the experience as a whole negative.  They’re just problems of being lacking; Beautiful Desolation is wanting when it comes to cohesive, present, and convincing elements of storytelling.  And that’s the stuff that really matters to me when it comes to RPGs, the stuff upon which I will almost always judge an RPG as good or bad.  So if you’re at all like me, well, I can’t really recommend Beautiful Desolation.

But I do respect its artistic virtue, and I recognize that it’s on that virtue that it almost entirely stakes itself.  Beautiful Desolation’s purpose for being is its art of ambiance and creativity, rather than its art of story and characters.  And on that regard, it certainly succeeds, as a vehicle for a post apocalyptic world and (as far as I can tell) as a tribute to much of Africa’s physical personality and its cultural heritage.  There’s certainly an audience that enjoys immersing themselves into a new, striking setting and becoming enchanted by its nuance and craft, enough that they don’t need, as I do, a narrative purpose present at all times to shepherd them along.  And to those of you who may fit into that group, I say, by all means, consider giving Beautiful Desolation a try.  I expect you’ll greatly enjoy it.












* Although, inspiration notwithstanding, I expect not many people will agree with my classifying Beautiful Desolation as an RPG (in fact, it’s not even listed as such on GOG, and GOG tends to play at least as fast and loose with that label as I do).  But it’s my blog and my readership is low enough that you all can’t possibly outnumber me too greatly, so nyeh on you!


** I mean, I think.  I’ve got no personal experience with the continent, and to say I have even a layman’s impression of the cultural history of any of its nations and peoples would probably be an exceptionally generous estimation.  But from what I’ve read of others’ impressions of the game, I seem to be generally correct in my impression that Beautiful Desolation accomplishes its intent of capturing the heart and soul of Africa.


*** I think I may have accidentally doomed the world in my first playthrough just by using a certain item on a certain machine without realizing it would do anything, with the immediate result not giving any indication of what was to come and the final result only being revealed like 4 hours of gameplay later.  Which irritates me, honestly; I can’t help but feel a little resentful toward The Brotherhood that an innocuous bit of curious “try every item on everything” (which is a fairly standard rule of behavior in point-and-click games of this variety) could have such consequences.  Word to the wise: don’t go sticking nanite technology in stuff willy-nilly.