Shin Megami Tensei 5's Lack of Storytelling

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that I have a great deal of respect for the Shin Megami Tensei series.  Yes, the series has moments when creative decisions are made that I don’t agree with, and there are opportunities that it fails to take advantage of.  There are moments when the games can’t effectively accomplish their aim, some stuff that’s just plain bad, and there’s even been an SMT that’s a poor game in its own right.  And let’s not forget the fact that Atlus can’t make DLCs for shit.  Still, for all I’ve criticized this franchise, I think my enthusiasm and respect for SMT as a whole has been pretty clear for some time now.  From its SNES conception,* Shin Megami Tensei has been characterized by thoughtful, analytical creativity in its stories about the tenets and fundamentals of human systems of faith and belief, and the forms that they take.  Even if they don’t always hit the mark, because they always put in a demonstrable effort to be meaningful, I generally don’t hesitate to buy a Shin Megami Tensei title.

Well, I’m gonna start hesitating going forward.

I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not fair to compare Shin Megami Tensei 5 to Pokemon Generation 8.  Because it’s not!  Pokemon Sword and Shield is a game that actively refuses to tell you its story, repeatedly directing you away from the plot occurring in its background so you can focus solely on a paint-by-numbers Pokemon journey right until the game’s very end. But it’s not like Pokemon Generation 8 would have been a good RPG had its writers bothered to be writers, because the story it jealously guards from the player’s eyes is trite and silly, with incredibly artificially inflated stakes.  It’s a tale about 1 guy who’s neurotically, completely unreasonably fixated on a problem that’s incredibly far off in the distant future, and another guy carelessly, even more unreasonably determined not to take even a tiny, inching first step towards preparing to address that future problem.  It’s basically Linkara’s depiction of the Monitors, except 1 side is somehow engaging even less.

But Shin Megami Tensei 5, I have reminded myself more than once, is not like that.  SMT5 has some sincerely interesting concepts with a lot of potential!  Setting the game in a version of the mainline SMT series where Lucifer actually won the original conflict of Law vs. Chaos is a very interesting scenario that provides all kinds of possibilities to explore--so far we’ve generally only seen the series delve into scenarios where the war was diverted or extended in some outside way (SMT1, 3, and 4), and all of those stem from a starting point of God having the upper hand and Lucifer’s bunch being the underdogs rising up against Him.  To see how a scenario plays out where the original SMT conflict of Heaven vs. Hell naturally, without outside factors, ended with Lucifer victorious is an interesting idea.  Using this new setting as a springboard to explore a new angle on Law vs. Chaos,** since the icon of the former is gone and the forces of the latter are already in charge (so to change the world for Chaos’s sake would have to mean finding a new take on what it constitutes), is also an appealing concept.

And the incorporation of Garden of Eden mythology into the lore of Shin Megami Tensei in this game is really, really cool.  It’s a very clever, even brilliant stroke, of explaining why so many of the multicultural gods we encounter in these games are not exactly as incomprehensibly powerful and all-encompassing as they theoretically should be, by saying that the Christian God cast them down (which also neatly ties into His history of doing that with uppity angels) and stole their true divinity from them, their Knowledge, and put it into the tree whose fruit Adam and Eve then ate.  Just...SUCH a cool idea that perfectly connects on so many different levels to the story of Eden.

And what about the implications of the fact that Lucifer desires to be unmade, once he has acquired the Knowledge of God?  What a fascinating idea to explore from the angle of pondering why God created Lucifer to begin with.  Even more fun when considered in conjunction with the idea, shown by Abdiel’s corruption toward the end of the game, that a fallen angel can still be a servant of the spirit of God even while defying His word.  So many interesting concepts in this game!

So yeah, a comparison with Pokemon Generation 8 is, I remind myself frequently, unfair.  SMT5 has got some really strong, interesting ideas at its core, some of the best and most creative uses of both Christian mythology and the series’s own utility of world religions that we’ve seen since the series originated on the SNES!  The potential for intellectual exploration and analysis of Christianity and faith as a whole is, in Shin Megami Tensei 5, the highest that the franchise has seen in over 20 years.  To compare it to Pokemon Generation 8’s halfhearted take on Dad moaning about the electric bill as Junior leaves the lights on in rooms he’s not in is absurd.

And yet, unfortunately, that is the analogy that my mind keeps returning to.  Because while the potential of their ideas could not be more different, both Pokemon Generation 8 and Shin Megami Tensei 5 share the same utterly, wholly self-defeating flaw.  They each adamantly and uniformly will not tell their story.

SMT5 does not have any single infuriating plot gatekeeper like Pokemon’s Leon to repeatedly wave the player on over the game’s course, telling him/her “nothing to see here, move along.”  But SMT5 ultimately comes across as similarly lazy, because it just utterly refuses, from almost its start to almost its finish, to take the time to expound on its ideas, pace out its story beats (or even, really, possess an adequate number of plot points to begin with), develop the major actors in its cast, or delve in any meaningful way into the philosophies of Law, Chaos, and Neutrality that it presents to the player at its end.  Shin Megami Tensei 5 is narratively empty.

From top to bottom, there’s almost no aspect of storytelling in this game that feels complete, or even close to it.  It’s like the literary equivalent of an abandoned construction project.  The huge majority of the time you spend in the game is just empty gameplay, wandering through a handful of, frankly, largely uninteresting post-apocalyptic sets fighting enemies and perpetually pursuing moving quest markers.  Only occasionally is there any interruption of dialogue or exposition during these treks, most of the time with entities who are only stopping by to give a status update or not even present at all, with the lion’s share of storytelling taking place between major dungeon areas--but that lion’s share is short and rushed, cramming barebones plot beats into about 5 to 10 minutes so it can quickly ship you out to the next empty void of enemy encounters and ongoing games of Gold Skulltulla-esque hide-and-seek.

This means, first of all, that the cast members are generally stunted even by the minimal standards of the franchise--and let’s face it, character development is already the weakest point of the mainline Shin Megami Tenseis.  Aogami, for example, is the robot-demon-thing that fuses with the protagonist to become the Nahobino, and is thus a present entity in something like 95% of the game’s course.  And yet this abundance of time for him to develop is thoroughly squandered.  The substantial majority of his interactions with the main character are simply acting as a convenient signpost to direct you to the next quest marker.  On the rare occasions when he actually engages with the protagonist, it’s usually to offer a short, terse reaction or assessment of something which has happened.  Occasionally he’ll ask the protagonist a question, but since SMT5 has followed the series tradition of needlessly handicapping itself with a silent protagonist, these answers are 1-line, non-emotive responses that say virtually nothing and could not by any stretch of the imagination qualify as a shared communication experience.  The 1 and only character trait Aogami is given is a complete devotion to the protagonist, as he constantly, from the second chapter onward, states and restates his intention to protect the protagonist, support his decisions, empower him to achieve his goals, check under his bed for scary monsters each night, and so on.  Season 8 John Snow mumbles “MUH KWEEN” less ubiquitously than Aogami reassures the protagonist that he’s his wingman.

And where does this overwhelming, unreasoning devotion to the protagonist come from?  No idea.  There’s not a single scene in this game, not a hint of a personal conversation between them, that would even remotely explain why Aogami is willing to follow this kid to hell and back, willing to defy both his superiors and his own family for this dude, willing even to ultimately erase himself from existence because this androgynous adolescent thinks it’ll be a good idea.  Shin Megami Tensei 5 has the entire game in which to build some form of chemistry that can explain why Aogami is willing and able to defy his code, his familial instincts, and/or even his self-preservation for this kid he happened by chance to fall face-first into, and it just doesn’t do it.

And if the game won’t do it for the character who’s with you for its effective entirety, it should come as no surprise how faultily undeveloped the rest of the cast is, too.  Atsuta, for example, winds up being the Chaos Hero of the game, but there’s absolutely no development of him towards this destination--he starts as an austere defender of Tokyo, and since he’s told that the best way to protect Tokyo is to embrace Prime Minister Koshimizu’s path of Chaos, that’s the way he stays as he unquestioningly follows.  This guy is the human entity meant to be the face of 1 of the 3 major factions of the game, and there’s no development of his character, there’s no scene in which his convictions about protecting Tokyo are tested or even particularly explained, no conversation or monologue which establishes his coming to the conclusion that the best way of protecting Tokyo is a return to the days of the many old gods, nothing!  He just smiles and nods (minus the smile because Atsuta’s competing with the protagonist for the Least Capable of Human Emotion Award), and doesn’t put Koshimizu’s theory through the 20 seconds of scrutiny it would take to realize it’s absurd.  Shin Megami Tensei 4’s Walter does the Chaos Hero role proud compared to this empty schmuck, and Walter sucked.

For that matter, Koshimizu himself hasn’t got the narrative attention he needs.  He confidently states that Tokyo will be better protected by a world in which the multiple gods of Japan can oversee it, but he doesn’t go into any detail beyond that.  We’re given no indication of how the guy came to this conclusion (which is in contrast to his own damned experience as the sole director of the city for the last 20 years), and he doesn’t deign to explain his position or debate its opposition.  By contrast, SMT3’s Hikawa could actually reason for his Reason, and we could see the experiences that would clearly lead Chiaki and Isamu to their own paths (even if the latter was an idiot).  This isn’t just the half-baked posturing of some generic RPG antagonist, this is 1 of the major, fundamental paths of the game, and SMT5 doesn’t give either of its champions the time of day!  You can make the argument that the main SMTs have (excluding SMT4-2) always been focused on the intellectual, conceptual side of storytelling rather than the personal, emotional one, but characters like Atsuta and Koshimizu are still the mouthpieces of 1 of the game’s main philosophical angles--not developing them hurts the story’s bottom line, period!

The death of Tao should be a major, formative moment in shaping how the protagonist will desire to shape the world, and yet throughout the chapter in which she’s walking beside you, there’s almost no interaction whatsoever with her, and what little is there is focused entirely on moving the main quest forward.  Aogami can talk about how terrible the world is when “a dear friend’s death is a single drop in a sea of loss,” which is very poetic, but dude, the protagonist just met Tao like 3 days ago and they barely talked at all.  I have a better-established and more meaningful relationship with the guy who makes pizza at a local bar than the Nahobino had with Tao!  And in addition to badly undercutting the weight of what’s intended to be the most emotional scene in the game, the fact that Tao and the protagonist’s friendship has been so rushed and undeveloped makes her later resurrection completely underwhelming.  SMT5 was trying to pull the same thing that SMT1 did with the Heroine and SMT4-2 did with Asahi, but Asahi was an established character who’d interacted substantially with Nanashi, and even the Heroine felt like she had a better bond with her protagonist.  And this narrative negligence hurts Tao’s return twice further, because Tao as the goddess of creation is pledging to support the protagonist’s choice of what the world will be out of some confidence in his personal character that she supposedly witnessed during her time with him in the second chapter.  Where is this confidence coming from?  She didn’t know him, he didn’t know her, there is no basis for these elements of friendship and support that the game insists exist between them!

And oh, even after she returns, Tao still is given basically no character development whatsoever as the game rushes at breakneck pace toward its finale.  This character is in your party for nearly half the game, is meant to be a fundamental part of the story’s emotional component, and she’s no one to you!

She’s also apparently no one to anyone else, because after Tao is resurrected, she’s completely ignored by Dazai, Abdiel, Atsuta, and Koshimizu whenever you encounter them.  Yeah, no one comment on the fact that this chick is back from the dead and floating around as a creation goddess, or anything.  Not like Tao was a part of Atsuta’s friend group, or the Saint of Bethel, or the fundamental martyr whose death spurred the final stage of the war, or anything.  No, no one react in any way to her being back from the dead, that’d take like 2 minutes of dialogue and we can’t delay our headlong charge toward the ending for anything!

The writers’ disinterest with writing is just present everywhere!  The secondary players of Zeus, Odin, Vishnu, and Khonsu are only introduced minutes before the chapter begins in which they’re to be destroyed, even though they’re each major players in the game’s lore/history.  Atsuta’s sister Miyazu is introduced as though she’s supposed to be as major a character in the game as the Law, Chaos, and Neutral Heroes, yet the most she amounts to is being the plot device of the Khonsu sidequest--a sidequest based around how devoted Khonsu is to her, which means nothing to us since we see very little of Miyazu, and what little we see amounts to nothing more extraordinary than an NPC.  Amanozako is easily the best-characterized individual in the cast, and even her story is largely rushed through, an optional sidequest treated more as an afterthought than anything significant once it’s finally started.  Yakumo and Nuwa are the representatives of the Neutral path, the one that the SMT series actually wants you to choose, and yet they somehow are given even less screen time to make their case and show their character than the Law and Chaos representatives.  The monk guy is such a non-character that he makes Star Ocean 2’s Noel look like someone whose name I didn’t have to just look up by comparison..

The story goes from the first skirmish you see between Bethel and the demons, to the final battle!  This war that’s been going on for 20 years is settled the second you get involved in it, during a large-scale battle that you mostly don’t see!  The major villains of this grand conflict are introduced to you right before you kill them!

You know, the city of Tokyo is at the heart of both the Law and Chaos route’s motivation.  Both Dazai and Atsuta want to protect Tokyo specifically--the future of the world is to be decided by which path you choose, but the rest of the world’s fate is only tangential; the entities embodying Law and Chaos are acting specifically with the desire of protecting Tokyo, and to some degree the same is implied of the protagonist.  But Tokyo (the populated one you want to protect, that is, not the destroyed “real” one) is the setting in the game that you spend the absolute least amount of time in!  How can you base the primary, motivating conflict of the story on a love for a city, and then have the characters spend virtually no time in that city?  We’re expected to potentially identify with and respect Atsuta’s and Dazai’s devotion to Tokyo, yet we’ve spent no time in the city, seen none of its features or landmarks or culture or populace!  Previous mainline SMTs, and even several of the series’s spin-offs, have made Tokyo in its various forms their world map, shown its people and places over time--they gave it enough time and relevance to their events that you actually gave a damn about it, or at the very least, could believe that the characters would.  But the Tokyo that so much fuss is made of in this game is little more than a theoretical to the audience.

Characters are empty set pieces, events are paced terribly, important lore elements and plot devices are only established seconds before their activation in the story’s events, no philosophy is elaborated on, and there are even times when the game itself seems to have forgotten that it didn’t bother to show scenes it needed.  An example of the latter?  There’s a point at which Dazai talks about how Koshimizu is always checking with them and other subordinates to see how they feel about decisions that are made (as a counterpoint to Dazai, who prefers a stronger, more authoritative leader), except he never actually does this, at least not that I can see!  Need another example?  In the scene where all the remaining major players have gathered at the portal to the Empyrean, Yakumo comes up to them like the dramatically self-important loser he is and declares that it “sounds like you forgot about us.”  Uh, no, they didn’t forget about you, they didn’t even know you were in the running to begin with!  The game is acting like Yakumo has previously established himself to them all as a competitor for the throne, yet this is the first time he’s ever been on screen at the same time as Koshimizu, Abdiel, Atsuta, or Dazai.  Half of those assembled probably don’t even know who this guy is!  Yakumo, no one in this room could even be bothered to bat an eye at the fact that their dead classmate and/or saint Tao is floating in front of them, resurrected as a goddess; you think they’re gonna remember you?

Shin Megami Tensei 5’s pace reminds me of the old army saying, “hurry up and wait.”  It’s perpetually in a rush to blurt out the bare minimum amount of story elements that it can get away with so it can hurry you along to the next long, boring expanse of nothingness to repetitively, mindlessly fight enemies within as you wait for the next crumb of plot to be thrown hastily at you.  It’s a wonder they even bothered with the pretense of telling a story to begin with--it sure as hell seems like what Atlus really wanted was to follow in the footsteps of Fallout 76!

Now, it’s been pointed out to me that the mainline Shin Megami Tensei titles have always had, shall we say, a light touch, narratively speaking.  Their casts are almost always underdeveloped and unmemorable, and they don’t exactly do a lot of hand-holding when it comes to explaining their ideas and story progression.  That’s certainly true enough.  If an average RPG’s storytelling procedure could be likened to walking down a path, then mainline Shin Megami Tenseis could be seen as a set of large stones breaking the surface of a pond, a path on which you must carefully leap from 1 stepping stone to the next.  But if that’s what previous mainline SMTs can be seen as, then the narrative progression from story point to story point in Shin Megami Tensei 5 is a sadistic Mario Maker stage of giant pit after giant pit that are only barely technically traversable.  There is a world of difference between a light narrative touch, and an absent one, and SMT5 consistently goes with the latter.

I’m sorry that this rant has been 1 of my more unfocused ones.  There’s just so many different examples of Shin Megami Tensei 5’s failure to adequately tell its story, and its failure frustrates me so much each time, that I kinda just have to holler it all out in a jumble.  And make no mistake, it’s not just the lacking quantity of its writing--there are some serious issues with the writing’s quality, too, which we’ll be discussing more over the course of this year.  But by far the greatest obstacle that prevents Shin Megami Tensei 5 from being a good game, which it absolutely could have been with its core ideas, is the same great failing of Pokemon Generation 8: it’s just not interested in taking the time to tell its own story.














* Yes, I know Megaten has existed in some capacity or other since before the 16-bit era, but the series clearly came into its own as an intellectual property and pursuit as Shin Megami Tensei, and I’m content to simply labor under the idea that SMT1 was where it all really started.


** Well...sorta new.  SMT5’s take on Law is the idea of following the spirit and ideal of God even in defiance of His own will, which is a fascinating concept and gives us a new perspective on fallen angels, but...well, Shin Megami Tensei 2’s Law route did already basically do that.  Still, SMT5 at least finds an angle where defying the letter of God’s law in order to preserve its spirit doesn’t require one to punch God in the Face, so there’s a little difference, at least.

Chrono Trigger's Cutscene Comparison

For most RPGs with Full Motion Video, the events contained within the cutscene are an active part of the game’s sequence of events.  If you take out the anime cutscene in Tales of Berseria of Seres offering herself to Velvet as sacrifice, you’re going to miss the scene of her death and the revelation within her last words to Velvet.  If you remove the pre-rendered conversation between Adam and Eliza in her office from Deus Ex 3, you’ll be left without crucial information about the story of the game and its characters.  If you excise the boat scene in Lunar 1, you won’t have any idea, going forward, of just how incredibly boring it is when Luna sings.

Chrono Trigger, on the other hand, originates from the Super Nintendo, a full console generation before FMV cinematics became a reality for gaming.  As such, its anime cutscenes, added to the game when it was later re-released on the Playstation 1, represent an interesting situation: they show several major events in the course of Chrono Trigger’s plot, but they’re a duplication of events already playing out in the game, rather than the sole depiction of said events.  When you reach 1 of the correlating moments in the story, you’ll see the event transpire both within the game itself, as CT was originally designed, and also in its anime rendition.

Which naturally leads us to today’s question: Which version of Chrono Trigger’s narrative is better at these points, the original in-game scenario, or the anime cutscene version?  Well, rest assured, everyone, I am here today to answer this question so pressing and interesting that it never occurred to anyone in the past 20 years to bother asking it!



OPENING

We start with a pretty close call.  Both opening sequences to Chrono Trigger create an exciting montage that make great use of the game’s appealing diversity in settings, characters, and events, and while each opening is displaying a different set of scenes in a different order from one another, they’re pretty much equally intriguing and accurate representations of what the game offers.

Each opening has a couple potential flaws, but they’re totally negligible.  The fact that the original opening’s battles are staged is clear to anyone familiar with the game, but that’s insignificant since the point of the opening is to introduce you to a game you AREN’T familiar with.*  Each does technically show spoilers for the game (even such major ones, in the original, as the Kingdom of Zeal and Lavos’s emergence!), but most of what you witness in the cinematic will be forgotten by the time the player actually encounters the event, particularly with the scenes the anime version portrays (since they’re not a direct display of how it will play out in the game).

As far as which is better...I like the way that the original synchronizes the race with Johnny to the change in the music, and it has a slight advantage over its anime counterpart in terms of its ending--while the Epoch blasts off into another time at the end of each opening, it’s the original sequence that perfectly times it to the final few notes of the song, the exact right thrilling conclusion to the dramatic build-up that the opening has created.  Nonetheless, one really can’t deny that the pace and animation quality of the anime opening has an advantage in catching and holding the audience’s attention.  I also like the fact that the anime starts softly, reaping the benefit of slowly and gently intriguing the audience before it jumps into the flashy, exciting stuff.  And while we’re talking about the quiet beginning of the anime version, having us look fondly through Crono’s eyes at a picture of him and his friends is a great way of invoking a pleasing nostalgia, somehow more so than the actual original opening can!  Lastly, I like the fact that the anime makes a point of briefly showcasing each of the game’s main characters, lightly introducing them in a way that gives the audience a taste of them, yet doesn’t give anything away.  While the original certainly does show all the members of the party doing stuff (besides Magus, obviously), it’s the anime version that calls attention to them as characters rather than simply parts of the plot’s larger whole.

Thus, although each version is a great specimen of what a game’s opening should be, when one takes everything into consideration, it’s the anime introduction to Chrono Trigger that’s the better version, I feel.

In-Game: 0
Anime: 1


FINDING ROBO

Now this one’s much easier to award the win to the anime version.  In the original Chrono Trigger, discovering the deactivated and abandoned Robo is...well, it’s pretty much just a case of walking up to him and hitting the A button.  After all, the anime version is only covering the actual approach and initial discovery, not the dialogue and events that follow of Lucca deciding to fix him, Marle’s finding an insight about Lucca’s character, and Robo’s subsequent activation.  So this is basically just a case of whether it was better to have the player walk up to something and investigate it, or display the approach and discovery in anime format--no competition.

I will say that the cutscene has its flaws, though.  It begins strangely comically, with a rat’s goofy eyes blinking to a silly sound effect before we see the scene proper.  It doesn’t really feel right to this moment in the game, to me.  I mean, you’re still in the midst of the exceptionally portrayed apocalyptic world of 2300 AD, and this is the first major location that Crono and company have come to since only recently witnessing, to their horror, a visual record of the day the world was destroyed.  This dome seems completely empty and abandoned, a worse state even than the previous domes of residence we’ve encountered.  Put all that together, and...should this moment really start with something vaguely lighthearted?  Still and all, that weird start is done with very quickly, and the rest of the scene is adequate.

...Well...sort of.  I mean...if you’re gonna use a cutscene to introduce Robo, is showing him sitting in a scrap heap really the best way to do it?  Couldn’t they instead have had the cinematic portray the moment of his activation, with the energy sparks and spinning and whatnot?  Would’ve been way more dynamic.

Still, it’s a fine enough cutscene, doing well with showing just how alone and wrecked Robo is when he’s first discovered, and neatly displaying Lucca’s enthusiastic science-first questions-later attitude.  And like I said, there really isn’t any notable competition for it here.

In-Game: 0
Anime: 2


MEETING AYLA

Ayla’s introduction is awesome either way you slice it.  In its original format, she comes leaping on screen for a jump kick against 1 of the reptites that have mobbed Crono’s party, then proceeds to kick the ass of several more, before running another off the screen.  The previous fight has established to the player that these things are resistant to physical attacks, and yet here this out-of-nowhere cavewoman is wrecking each of them with a single hit.  Badass!

Being a bit divorced from the game’s visuals, the anime version doesn’t carry the same inherent gameplay-created implication to the player that Ayla must be incredibly strong to be so devastating with clearly physical attacks.  Also, I gotta say that it’s annoying that this cutscene (like Ayla’s official art) prominently displays her using a club, when she never actually does in the game, or is even implied to ever do so.  Weapons are for sissies; when Ayla wants something immediately and violently reduced to its component parts, it’s a hands-on approach or nada! 

But despite that, and although the in-game version gets the job done very well, I have to hand the victory once again to the anime iteration.  It’s fast, it’s exciting, it’s animated really well (this might be the best damn animation the whole game has, even!), it gives us an opportunity to see what reptites look like up close, it adds to Ayla’s combat prestige by showing her beating the crap out of even more of them, and it even makes her exit from the scene better--she’s actively leading a bunch of the enemies away from Crono and company to help them further, not just deciding to single 1 out to particularly work over off-screen.  I even dig Crono’s dumbfounded “I gotta tap me some ooga-booga ass ASAP” stare at the end of it.  Ayla kicks fucking ass, and this cutscene escalates on the original in showing that.  A well-earned point to the anime.

In-Game: 0
Anime: 3


FROG WIELDS THE MASAMUNE

Possibly the most cool and epic moment of Crono Trigger is that in which Frog accepts the mantle of Destiny, even if it had been meant to be worn by Cyrus, takes the Masamune in hand, calls his heroic pledge to the heavens, and cuts a freaking mountain in twain.  And this time?  The point goes to the original version.

Don’t get me wrong, the cutscene is a worthy contender!  Frog moves and acts with awesome purpose, the moment is appropriately epic, the skybeam is appropriately shiny, the mountain’s splitting is clean.  And the anime has an advantage in the windstorm that converges on Frog as he brandishes the Masamune--that’s a cool touch.

But honestly, the in-game version is just better.  First of all, it’s way, way more meaningful that Frog is not already carrying the Masamune, but instead asks that Crono give it to him, finally ready, having confronted his memories of Cyrus 1 final time, to become the world’s hero.  As awesome as the scene is for its own merits, it’s also meant to show an emotional culmination of Frog’s will, and his accepting, demanding the Masamune is a necessary part of it.  And of course, it’s also cool (if admittedly inexplicable) that Crono does not simply hand him the sword, but plunges it into the ground so that Frog can claim it for his own--very reminiscent to King Arthur drawing the sword in the stone.  Which in turn allows for Frog to gaze on it for a moment, and then make a vow to the world and to fate that he shall use the blade to slay his foe and restore honor.  Honestly, that moment of monologue by itself elevates this version above its anime counterpart; you really just can’t have the scene without it.  Finally, I actually think that the skyward explosion of power from Frog’s drawing the sword is in fact a lot cooler in-game, even with the SNES’s limited graphics.  While the anime version is neat, seeing an exploding dome of pure power radiate outward from him as he draws it, so massive that it’s seen from the world map as it expands, then converges into a beam blasting to the sky and higher, really just sells the epic nature of the moment and the Masamune’s incredible power so much better.  The mountainside being blasted in 2 with a fanfare of explosions and debris is cooler, and the whole scene having Frog’s theme playing louder than in the cutscene is also beneficial.

The anime version does it well!  But it’s completely out of its league on this one.  Point goes hard to the original!

In-Game: 1
Anime: 3


APPROACHING MAGUS

This one is a really tight race.  The anime version does not do much to mess with perfection--the blue flame path lights as Frog gradually approaches Magus, then leaps forward and forms a circle around the summoning chamber in which Magus stands, and the big man himself appears, seen ominously from the back.  It’s pretty much an exact interpretation of the original scene--although I do like that Frog hesitates at the first flames, waiting to see whether this is a danger before proceeding.  A nice detail.

Nonetheless, I’m calling this for the in-game version.  Although virtually identical in theory, the reality of the matter is that the main purpose of this scene is to culminate the unnerving atmosphere of Magus’s castle into a final, overwhelmingly tense approach to the sorcerer, and the simple fact is...it works better when the player has to be a participant in it.  It’s an unusual statement coming from a guy who usually sees the gameplay of an RPG as little more than a hindrance to its narrative, I know.  But it can’t be denied: forcing the player him/herself to be the one taking the steps forward along the sorcery-lighted path in a room of otherwise complete darkness raises the tension better than watching Frog do it in a cinematic, so the original iteration’s gotta take the win here.  I also think that its sound effects and the chanting background, in spite of being cruder, are more effective here, and the exact timing and reverse-fading dark silhouette of Magus coming into focus is also superior.  Those are tiny details--but when atmosphere is the highest priority, it’s the tiny details that count the most.  In-game wins the round.

In-Game: 2
Anime: 3


MOUNTING THE DACTYLS

Like finding Robo, this is essentially a default win for the anime version.  In the original game, upon finding Ayla at the dactyl nest about to embark on a solo mission to save her village and stop the reptites once and for all, Crono and company pledge to help her, she gratefully accepts, some dactyls are called down for them to join her, and the scene fades to black, resuming on the world map with the party flying on the dinosaurs’ backs.  This cutscene is basically showing the actual process of Ayla and company getting on the dactyls and flying off, so I guess its gameplay equivalent is the aforementioned black that was faded to?  Not very hard to determine which is the better contender.  I mean, honestly, it’s really only an okay cutscene (I do like the last moment in which it focuses on the ominous red star, though), and I have to wonder why this particular moment was selected for animation over so many other, more significant moments in the game, but...eh, it’s fine enough, and it’d have to be pretty bad not to be better than its competition of nothing at all.  Point to the anime.

In-Game: 2
Anime: 4


THE EPOCH TAKES OFF

This one’s surprisingly easy for me.  The Epoch isn’t able to fly at this point in the game (remember, it only gains flight because Dalton was an avid watcher of Pimp My Ride), so seeing it hover in the air and take off annoys me.  That may be nitpicky, but it’s not like there’s all that much in the anime cutscene that I’m unfairly disregarding.  Crono eagerly gets into the pilot seat, flips some switches (I guess it must be the exact same design as the car he races against Johnny, because otherwise I don’t know how exactly a kid from the 1000 AD suburbs knows this much about driving a time machine), and takes off.  Functional, but unremarkable, so the lore inconsistency is enough to put me off.  Also, with the anime version, the scene’s music and movement are clearly intended to get you excited for this moment, which...I mean, it’s not a bad thing, because the Epoch is very cool, but at the same time, having you already be hyped up is going to make the impact of the next moment in-game, seeing the inferno of the time-scape as the Epoch crosses through it, less impressive.  The quieter, almost reverent atmosphere of boarding the Epoch in-game creates a greater contrast to what’s to come, allowing the latter to be all the more impressive for it.  Point to the original.

In-Game: 3
Anime: 4


CRONO’s DEATH

Original version wins.  Not even a question.  Look, the anime cutscene is fine enough, but it completely lacks the power of seeing Crono’s death play out in-game.  There’s too many distractions, first of all--as great as it is to get to see something of Magus besides his back, doing a close-up of him watching Crono standing against Lavos is dumb, interrupting our view of the kid’s last stand.  Toriyama has a terrible habit of being utterly incapable of showing any important scene of conflict without constantly interrupting it to check in with the spectators...I should probably just be thankful that it didn’t go full Dragon Ball and have Magus and Vegeta start up a 10-minute play-by-play conversation to explain why what we’re ostensibly watching is so amazing.  The sudden flashback to Janus’s prediction that 1 of the party would perish is likewise an unnecessary distraction, and too damn heavy-handed to boot.  We don’t need to be reminded of it, guys, we’re watching it happen.

Maybe most importantly, though, the timing and act of Crono’s undoing is just far, far more moving and impactful in the original.  The anime only has a close-up of his face just kinda bwoosh outward, suddenly and with sound.  The original version, though...okay, the whole thing of Crono raising his arms up to the heavens might be more than was needed, but you see him disintegrate.  The screen is white and void of all but him and those he’s dying to protect, and after the keening windup sound effect of Lavos’s beam, the game goes utterly silent, allowing nothing, nothing, to distract us from the fact that we are watching him reduced to ash, a particle silhouette of Crono that dissolves before our eyes with cruel simplicity.  The silence, the intensity, the weight...this is a moment that is Chrono Trigger’s and Chrono Trigger’s alone, singular and uniquely powerful.  By contrast, the cutscene just shows an anime guy dying in an anime way.  Easy victory for the original version here.

In-Game: 4
Anime: 4


ENDING

So, this is a bit tricky to judge, because much like the opening, this isn’t so much 2 versions of the same scene as 2 different things accomplishing the same purpose.  Also, tough to really say what we should count as the in-game version.  I think it’s fairest that for the purposes of our comparison, the in-game version will be the ending starting with the fireworks being set off by Taban, since that’s the point at which the final sequence is fully out of the player’s hands.  Also, we are absolutely not gonna count the stupid bullshit crappy thing in the anime cutscenes where Guardia falls because even that far back Square was conducting experiments on how to cheapen and destroy the things their audience love.  It’s not part of the ending, it’s not a thing in Chrono Trigger, it doesn’t exist in the narrative or timeline, I will not be accepting questions at this time.

Alright, so, first of all, let’s talk about the anime cutscene.  We start with Crono and Marle’s marriage, which is...I mean, it’s nice, but while I am and always have been a Crono x Marle shipper, and the game itself certainly does imply that Marle romantically likes Crono, it seems a bit weird to just jump to showing them outright getting married.  Implications or not, CT simply doesn’t contain a love story for Crono and Marle, so this really would’ve been a lot better as, I dunno, them on a picnic date, or doing a holding-hands-and-looking-affectionately-at-each-other thing while they hung out with Lucca, or something.

Better than that is the next scene of Ayla and her tribe having a feast, in which Ayla casually shows what a fucking queen she is by out of nowhere jamming a ring on Kino’s finger, then tossing him a second ring (a substantially better one, I can’t help but notice, but then, it should be), and expectantly holding her hand to him with the disaffected expectance of a mob boss who’s also royalty.  Kino gets the idea and secures his status as Number 1 Bottom in Ayla’s inevitable harem as he slips the ring on, and everyone cheers.  

Following this, we get a scene of Glenn, curse-free, getting knighted by the King of Guardia, who looks...really, really old.  Is he supposed to be that old in the game?  I thought this guy had yet to father Leene’s daughter; the whole thing about Marle disappearing was that Leene dying at that time would erase her bloodline because a successor hadn’t been born yet.  Then again, let’s face it, there’s...pretty good odds that Glenn is Marle’s ancestor, not this guy.  Anyway, it’s a nice celebration of Frog’s chivalrous honor as he exits to a salute by the kingdom’s knights.  Then we’re back at Crono and Marle’s wedding in time to see King Kai Melchior, for...some reason, and they finish the aisle walk, and there’s balloons and a thrown bouquet, and it’s all nice and happy.

And then Lucca has to walk up with Mini Proto-Robo and find baby Kid and ruin everything by reminding us that Square erroneously believes that Chrono Cross is canon.

Yeah, uh, look, this is overall nice and all, and Ayla and Frog’s parts are really good, but...it’s not an impressive ending.  First of all, it doesn’t show Robo at all, and while there was a concern during their final goodbyes of whether Robo would still exist in the future, the game’s original ending (see below) confirms this to be the case, so I really don’t know why the anime ending stiffs him.  Second, Magus is likewise completely absent--yes, he COULD be dead in this ending if the player decided to off him in 1200 BC, but surely it wouldn’t be impossible to have a separate ending cutscene bit for Magus that could play or not play determined by that decision?

Third, even if you discount the sin of forcing Chrono Cross lore upon this defenseless game, Lucca’s part of the ending is kinda just bad--the scene clearly just isn’t meant to be about her, Lucca the character.  The damn baby she finds is the star of the scene, Lucca merely a vehicle for its introduction.  More is said about Lucca’s future life by the stumbling little proto-Robo than anything she herself is doing.  And fourth, I’m sorry, but even if you inexplicably DO like Chrono Cross, there’s still no reason to clumsily scotch-tape it onto Chrono Trigger like this.  The original game never contained any such hints of its (shitty, shouldn’t-be-considered-canon) sequel, and that sequel unfortunately tied itself to CT without any such help.  If you’re gonna end this game, end THIS game, let it stand as a testament to itself; don’t just exploit it as an advertisement for the later product.  And if you’re gonna make a “where are they now” ending about the characters, actually DO it for ALL the characters in the main cast!

The anime ending is serviceable to be sure, but it’s definitely and substantially flawed nonetheless.  The original, on the other hand...well, it’s basically perfection.  Whether it’s Crono and friends in the Epoch or Crono and Marle floating along with a bunch of balloons, you see the heroes carried across the world they’ve saved, the night-darkened ground illuminated by the lights of people’s homes, to a gentle, joyful tune.  In the case of the Epoch, eventually you get to see a simple scene for each of the rest of the party--Robo and Atropos sitting peacefully on the side of a notably non-ruined mountain in the future (happily confirming that Robo does, indeed, live in the saved future), Ayla and Kino riding dactyls through the sky, Frog leading a royal procession along Zenan Bridge with the king and queen behind him, and Magus, well, doing his grumpy solo act.**  In the case of the balloons, we transition to watching Crono and Marle from below as they climb higher into the heavens.  In each version, we finally begin to zoom out, to view this precious planet that we’ve put so much work into preserving, as a beautiful whole.  The credits finish rolling, and a shooting star tells us that all is done.  The Epoch version of this is quite simply the greatest RPG ending I’ve seen, and the balloon version is not significantly lesser.  Even discounting the shortcomings of the anime version, it’s hard to conceive how it could compete with this.  The tiebreaker goes to the original.

In-Game: 5
Anime: 4



Huh!  I wasn’t expecting it to be such a close score, but it looks like the final tally has the original, in-game scenes edging out the later anime additions 5 to 4.  While there’s a lot of merits to the cinematics and plenty of times that they’re a valuable addition to Chrono Trigger, the game in its pure, untouched form is still the better experience more often than not.  Neat.  I have no idea what that proves or why I felt the need to make the comparison to begin with, but I had fun and it’s always a joy to talk about Chrono Trigger.  Hopefully you enjoyed it to some degree, too.  Until next time!


















* Weirdly, the fight against Zombor is shown in both openings, and each time it’s portrayed incorrectly, with the original misrepresenting the beginning of the fight with him, and the anime implying that Frog can be involved in the battle.  Why Zombor was so important as to warrant representation in both openings, yet not important enough to show him correctly either time, is a mystery to me.


** Admittedly, you aren’t seeing the “ending” for Crono, Marle, and Lucca, so you COULD say that this is incomplete as the anime version is, in terms of displaying the game’s characters.  But I would argue that this ending is more definitively about the game and adventure as a whole, whereas the cinematic was clearly focused specifically on the cast, and also, Crono and Marle and Lucca’s ending IS that they’re out there, seeing the times they’ve saved and the people they’ve befriended, on a new quest.

General RPGs' Paternal Relationships' Limited Dimensions

Happy New Year, all!  No better way to start a fresh new year than by immediately souring it with nitpicky complaining, so let's get right down to business!



When you get down to it, even though the relationship/legacy of a character’s father is 1 of the most used--and the most frequently unnecessary--narrative tools in RPGs (and practically all other forms of fiction), there’s a pretty damn limited set of dimensions that this father-child dynamic usually takes on.  

Generally, everything boils down to a question of what the father is, both unto himself and in relation to his child, rather than who.  RPG fathers are important for their legacy, the facts of their existence, their actions in the world, the whats rather than the whos like who they are and who they have been to their son or daughter.  Pop’s significance to a narrative comes in forms of being a motivational figure for the protagonist to avenge (Greil and Ike from Fire Emblem 9), or an impressive icon whose legacy the hero is expected and/or struggling to live up to (James and the Lone Wanderer in Fallout 3), or an antagonist whose legacy the hero is expected to resist and overcome (Jecht and Tidus in Final Fantasy 10)...or hell, sometimes it just boils down to goddamn eugenics, in which Dad’s basically only important for what family line or species he is (Cecil and KluYa in Final Fantasy 4).  And sometimes it’s all of these things crammed together in a confusing, poorly-written, badly-conceived messy jumble, because fucking Xenogears just has to be fucking Xenogears.

It’s a very lazy trend overall in the genre, because it allows the game to shamelessly milk Dad Drama* without having to actually create and write a relationship between father and child that extends at all past this single narrative point.  These fathers can be as distant as you like, have as little physical presence as you like, and you can still get your money’s worth out of them.  Half the time, they don’t have to even really exist as characters, just plot points who can count themselves lucky to have gotten even a few lines in (Suou in Xenosaga, Wazuki in Chrono Cross, the Human Noble father in Dragon Age 1).  At other times, their connection to their kid stays unknown or irrelevant for so long that even if they ARE an actual character, there’s still really no development of a specifically father-child relationship to be found (Hauser in Wild Arms 4, Kratos in Tales of Symphonia, Jeralt in Fire Emblem 16).  You don’t have to know anything more about paternity than a whiptail lizard who briefly glanced at the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s entry for “Father” to more than meet the standards RPGs have set for depicting fatherhood in their stories.

Frankly, it makes me wonder sometimes if there’s anyone writing for RPGs who’s actually especially comfortable with their own relationship with their dad.  This bizarre combination of fixation, and constantly keeping the portrayals of that fixation at emotional arm’s length, doesn’t feel like it comes from someone who’s really secure about the subject.

It’s also a rather distinctly male-oriented perspective on the connection of a father to his child, as far as I can tell.  I mean, obviously every case is different. Still, I think by and large, an obsession with living up to or opposing Dad and/or Dad’s legacy/expectations, and this thought that what Papa is to oneself being the most essential part of the father-child relationship, rather than who he and his kid are to one another and who they have made each other into through their shared love and communication, is far more a signature perspective of sons than daughters.  Unsurprising, of course, given that society is generally much more insistent on questions of a father’s legacy, lineage, and emotionally distant/absent respect applying to sons than daughters.  And stupid societal expectations of men not adequately opening and expressing themselves emotionally to other men doesn’t help the matter any.

Not to say that this father-child dynamic is strictly found in male characters, of course.  Chris and Wyatt in Suikoden 3, Maduin and Terra in Final Fantasy 6, Cassius and Estelle in The Legend of Heroes 6-1, there’s plenty of examples of female characters with plot-relevant fathers in this same narrative mindset.  Some are even really good and well-crafted--Virginia and Werner in Wild Arms 3 are among the finest that video games can offer on the matter, for example.  But even when it’s a daughter, if her relationship with her dad is defined by these what factors that don’t require any real, personal relationship with him, it still feels distinctly like a father-son dynamic.

It’s not that there’s NO deviation from this box that RPGs have placed paternal relationships within, but it has gotten to the point that I actually felt pleasantly shocked to recently witness the relationship between Lita and her father in Ara Fell.  Lita and her dad have an actual, honest-to-Saranrae character story of a father and a daughter with an emotional, normal relationship.  Lita is a young woman whose adventurous and initially brash personality is at odds with her father’s desire for her safety and stability.  Through conversation, conflict, and circumstance, they reach a point at which Lita’s father accepts that he cannot, and shouldn’t even if he could, keep her sheltered from the world.  His acceptance and his encouragement is part of Lita’s journey to come into her own, and helps her to move forward with her adventure.  Her old man isn’t of narrative value for his ability to die dramatically or get horny for other species or be a villain or any of that stuff.  Lita’s father is important to Ara Fell for being a father to her.  Who he is to Lita, how his relationship with her is a part of her character, that’s what matters.  And somehow, this simple, believable, relatable portrayal of a normal relationship where a father is protective of his little girl, then eventually accepts and encourages her independence and ability, feels almost alien to the genre.  Their bond, their love, isn’t just that of family as some obligation-based concept--their bond and love is that of family which has lived as family, and that really stood out to me, and it’s a weird state of affairs that it did.

It’s unfortunate that RPGs are like this.  I’ve felt for a long time that the “Oh my GOD look look look it’s DAD!” card is hugely overplayed in RPGs, but maybe I would feel differently if these games didn’t so drastically limit themselves in what a story-relevant father can be.


















* Dare you to read those last 4 words aloud in a crowded room.