Dragon Age 1's Add-Ons

So, I did a rant on the various DLCs for Fallout 3, and at the end of it, I wondered how DLC would affect other PC RPGs in the future, and whether companies could be as responsible with it as Bethesda had been with Fallout 3, saying that the then-upcoming Dragon Age would provide a good litmus test. Well, the results are in.

(Take note that I don't really pay attention to little DLC things, like individual items or the Feastday gift/prank items. I'm only really interested in the substantial add-on packages that add quests and locations and such to the game).



The Stone Prisoner: This DLC came free along with the game, so I can't argue the price. A pretty good add-on, too. It added a new, pretty nifty character, Shale the Golem, to the party, and provided not only a small new area and set of mini-quests to obtain Shale, but also another small area and mini-quest later on related to Shale's past. All in all, this was good--Shale is interesting and fun, not to mention integrated well into the main plot, and the side-quests are engaging and have some neat story to them. Definitely a good addition.


Warden's Keep: Y'know, it's funny. Warden's Keep was available for download more or less immediately after DAO's release for $5. Now, that's a pretty small amount of cash, but it's a pretty small extra quest that you get for it. I think it would have made more sense to make Warden's Keep the free DLC with new purchases, and have The Stone Prisoner be the add-on you buy, because with the Stone Prisoner, you get 2 small quest areas instead of 1, and the addition of Shale involves several extra dialogue options and a new character throughout the game. That, to me, would have been worth paying for more than Warden's Keep. Regardless, Warden's Keep provides a new side-quest in a medium-sized new area that fleshes out the history of the Grey Wardens in Ferelden a little. It's fairly informative and interesting. So, good overall.


Return to Ostagar: This is where things kind of fall apart. See, it's like this. Return to Ostagar was originally announced in November 2009 with a release date of "the holiday season." Then, during the holiday season, it didn't come out due to technical issues, and was delayed until early January. Then it was delayed again for a couple weeks due to bugs. Then, when they released it mid-January, it caused all kind of technical difficulties and was recalled and delayed once more. It finally came out at the very end of January.

You know what it was that gamers got after the add-on was 2 months late? About an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours of gameplay with barely any story elements whatsoever. It was basically $5 for the privilege of 2 hours of battling enemies and getting a few new items. THAT'S what took 2 months to make work.

Here's some food for thought. Fallout 3's Downloadable Content packages cost 15 bucks each, and added, on average, about 7 hours of gameplay for me (probably a little less for the average player, I suppose, because I'm given to scavenging for every little thing). Over half of them made for much more time added than that; I probably spent 10 hours playing through the Point Lookout DLC alone. The delays for Fallout 3's DLC add-ons were measured in days, to my recollection. The areas they added were all very large, and I can only assume, with my limited knowledge of programming, that locations, events, and individuals in Fallout 3 must be harder to properly program than in Dragon Age Origins, simply because there's more detail to the world in general and more that can be done within it. So Bethesda charged, if you average it all out, less for a bigger add-on with more to do in it that added more game time that probably involved more work to program, and managed to do so more or less on time.

Even without having Fallout 3's DLCs up for comparison, Return to Ostagar's pretty bland and doesn't add enough to the game to make it worth even a measly 5 dollars. And with the Fallout 3 example to compare to...it's quite frankly something Bioware should feel embarrassed about.


Awakening: Awakening isn't technically a DLC, as you buy it in a store and install it from a disc, but what the hell, I'll count expansions. Awakening isn't bad. The new adventure is moderately good, although I wound up feeling like the main character is a secondary player in Awakening's events. It seems like everything about the plot that would have been really interesting, creative, and notable is all happening just above the protagonist's head, and as a result, you never get to see most of the important parts of the damn plot. The new characters are generally okay, but no one save Oghren has the kind of depth that most of the characters did in the main Dragon Age Origins quest--and Oghren's a returning comedy relief character from there, so he only sort of counts. In fact, only half of them have depth at all, now that I'm really considering it. I take it back; the new cast can't be called "generally okay" if only half of them have any depth worth mentioning, and if that character depth isn't all that great.

And I once again have to look at the ratio of cost to game play here. When it was released, Awakening cost about, what, 40 bucks? That's just about the price for a new RPG. I didn't get 40 dollars' worth of content. From start to finish, with me doing and getting just about every damn thing in the expansion, I played Awakening for a few minutes less than 19. People are saying that Awakening takes about 25 hours to complete, so I dunno what THEY were doing that took them so long, but for me, the complete experience came to 18 hours and 51 minutes--and again, I was pretty thorough. To draw once again on Fallout 3 as an example, the Broken Steel DLC package for Fallout 3 extended the game past its ending to include several new quests, areas, and stuff to do while continuing the story line, not to mention optional small sidequests. I spent, oh, say maybe 10 hours playing that one. You know how much it cost? $15, like all the other Fallout 3 DLCs. 15 bucks for 10 hours of game play that extends the plot in a cool and engaging way as opposed to 40 bucks for 19 hours that creates a new but rather mediocre adventure? I didn't need the comparison to Fallout 3 to know this, but putting it out there helps cement this simple fact: Dragon Age Origins's Awakening expansion is a rip-off. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.


Darkspawn Chronicles: Back to regular DLC packages with this one. I feel like Bioware was honestly trying with this one, coming up with a decent idea for this one: play through an alternate universe version of the final battle, in a reality where the main character never existed...and for that matter, play through as one of the bad guys. Sounds good, right? Well, it would be, in a lot of RPGs. Unfortunately, Bioware forgot one important detail: the main bad guys of Dragon Age Origins are Darkspawn.

Here's the deal. I love it when I get to play as the villain for a while and see things from their perspective in an RPG. The majority of characters on my list of the best RPG villains ever fit this--Fou-Lu (Breath of Fire 4) and Orsted (Live-A-Live) you directly control as they form the conclusions that bring them to their roles as villains, and Darth Traya (Knights of the Old Republic 2) is in your party for most of the game. The more time you, the player, spend with a villain, the better chance the villain has of being developed into a deep and excellent bad guy.

The problem in this instance is that the villain you're spending time with in this DLC is a Darkspawn. A Darkspawn commander, yes, but a Darkspawn. Darkspawn, for those unfamiliar with DAO (although I don't know why you'd have read this far if that's the case), are...basically, zombie orcs, I would describe them as. Take the orcs from The Lord of the Rings, take away their ability to speak or perform any complex reasoning, make it so that hanging around them for too long can kill you and/or make you into one, make'em look ever so slightly zombie-ish, and you have a Darkspawn.

So you're not really controlling a proper villain, or even a bad guy with the power of speech. You're just controlling a semi-mindless goon, with the only dialogue in the entire add-on being your boss's psychic commands, which are short, to the point, and not terribly interesting. And as for the whole alternate-reality-where-the-main-character-didn't-exist thing, all the information on it that you get are brief entries in your journal that provide tidbits about the game's events and how they were different. Yay.

I realize that it wouldn't be realistic to have a bunch of Darkspawn have deep, involved characters, given what the Darkspawn are supposed to be. But accepting that there's no way to make the idea work in a meaningful and compelling way doesn't excuse it; it just means that they should have dropped it and moved on to another idea that they COULD make worthwhile. Sometimes an idea just can't work. And this is an example of that. All you're paying for are a few extra battles under slightly different circumstances than usual. There's nothing of substance here. This DLC isn't worth the cost. Hell, even if it were free, it wouldn't be worth your time.


Leliana's Song: After the the Darkspawn Chronicles DLC, it's a relief to see that Bioware CAN make a side-story DLC that actually incorporates a plot. While I wouldn't call it amazing, and I think many aspects of the conflict in Leliana's past shown in this DLC deserved more attention than they got (I would have liked to see more involvement of the Chantry with Leliana, seen a little more evidence of its eventual importance in her life...and I wish we had seen more of Marjolaine's perception and paranoia of Leliana's similarities to herself), this one's definitely a solid DLC package. It gives a glimpse into the past of my favorite character in the game, developing her a little further, and also provides a few tidbits of interest about Dragon Age's world's history and politics.


Golems of Amgarrak: Aaaaand after our brief dalliance with some quality, we're back to unimpressive, rather pointless DLCs. Sigh. There's nothing especially wrong with Golems of Amgarrak, but there's certainly nothing noteworthy about it. The self-contained plot is underdeveloped and frankly cliche as hell ("Yes, you had to give up on what you thought you wanted...but you've learned that family is the most important thing of all!"), not to mention seems largely irrelevant to anything else related to Dragon Age's world and events, and the characters are a perfect match to the plot--underdeveloped and bland.


Witch Hunt: So...let me get this straight. You've got a post-game DLC where they bring back one party member from the game proper to join you, and it's the Mabari Hound...and they once AGAIN spend no effort to make him anything more than a drooling, peeing lummox, repeating a mistake they made for 50 hours or so already for another 2 or 3 extra. You've got a post-game DLC where the 2 new characters actually seem to have some mild potential to be interesting characters...and the DLC is too short to flesh them out properly, so they're quirky, incidental personalities at the very most. You've got a post-game DLC whose official description indicates that it's there to answer why Morrigan left at the end of the main Dragon Age 1 game's events, and, to quote the official Bioware site for this DLC, "tie up this last loose end once and for all," finding out what her intentions were and what she plans to do now and so on...and you get a 2-to-3-hour-long investigation that concludes with a 5-minute talk with Morrigan that tells you nothing you didn't already know, answers no questions at all, and only poses new ones. Seriously, Morrigan basically says, "Hey sup. I know you tracked me down to find out about the baby and all, but it's, like, super magic special and stuff, my evil mom's not dead and is evil, I'm leaving you guys behind--for REALZ this time, dawg--and you can't follow me, and basically there are a bunch of mystical magical divine mumbo-jumbo Dungeons and Dragons things at work that I can't tell you about at all. So basically, everything I already said the last time I saw you, just with a little extra flourish. Kthx bye."

There are basically 2 ways I can respond to this DLC. I am going to be very charitable, and conclude that this was a case of incompetence. They wanted to make suspenseful, interesting implications about things that will (maybe) come up in later games, and they just couldn't figure out a way to do that while properly answering our questions and revealing plot points to us. They planned poorly, and didn't have the writing talent to pull off what they'd intended without giving either too much or too little.

The other way I could respond to this DLC is to imagine it as the result not of incompetence, but of dishonest, abusive greed, a disingenuous case of them dangling an alluring carrot in front of their fans' noses, with no intention of giving it to them, only of lightening the fans' wallets to the tune of 7 bucks each. As I said, I'm going to be charitable and assume that this is a case of incompetence rather than despicable exploitation...for now. But as I play and pay for more and more add-ons from Bioware, it gets harder and harder to see their business practices and development decisions as having any more integrity than those of the Patron Saint of crooked, dishonest RPG companies, SquareEnix.



And that's that--according to Bioware, Witch Hunt was the last additional content Bioware for Dragon Age 1. So, back to the progenitor of this rant--after Fallout 3's brief but periodic add-ons, how does Dragon Age hold up?

Not very well. Not very damn well, at all. The first 2 packages were good, and I enjoyed Leliana's Song, but the rest of it? A sad collection of drivel, is all it is. We get packages that are:


Boring and Insignificant (Golems of Amgarrak)
100% Irrelevant (Darkspawn Chronicles)
A Huge Rip-Off (Awakening)
Outright Stupid (Witch Hunt)
So Late and Lacking That it's Shameful (Return to Ostagar)


And most of these crappy add-ons can apply to more than one category, too.

So what's the verdict? Well, when I left my Fallout 3 DLC rant, I was optimistic about how Bioware would handle Add-Ons, but wary that they might not use them responsibly. In the end, I was obviously right to be wary--there just seems to be a lack of competence here on the part of the writers AND, at times, the programmers that really hurts DA1's offerings of Add-Ons. And there are times, which I've mentioned, where these packages of extra content are such bad deals (especially when compared to Fallout 3's) that it looks suspiciously like exploitative, undignified business practices. Still, I'm not entirely angry or disappointed about this collection. It's bad, but as I said at the end of the Fallout 3 rant, DLCs could easily be abused to intentionally withhold content from gamers from the start until they pay more money--basically, holding legitimate parts of the game hostage as extras. And it really doesn't feel like Bioware did this--the Add-Ons of Dragon Age 1 almost all really do feel like extras.*

So in the end, Dragon Age 1's Add-Ons as a whole are pretty poor...but they don't come off to me as being the result of dishonest business practices so much as being early mistakes made by a company trying to figure out how to do them regularly. Once they're finished with Mass Effect 2's DLC packages, I suppose we'll see whether they were learning from their mistakes or not.











* The Stone Prisoner would be the exception to the rule. But it came free with a new copy of the game, so no harm, no foul.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess AMV: The Cinematic Experience

Well, it's been a little while since I had an AMV rant for you all. Simple reason for that, too--I ran out of good ones. Yeah, out of the literally dozens and dozens of AMVs I look over every few times a year for every RPG I've played to date, which has to total in the hundreds by now, I only had about half a dozen that I thought were high enough quality to make a rant about. That's probably the worst track record I've seen for fan-related works, an even worse ratio of good to bad offerings than Fanfiction.net's Final Fantasy 8 section.

At any rate, though, whilst recently perusing the AMVs created at Youtube and AMV.org since last I checked, I DID find another noteworthy subject, one made by a certain Roynerer, that's not only very good, but rather distinctive, too. Oh, and long. Like, 8 minutes. Just to let you know in advance. Oh, and this is DEFINITELY one of those AMVs that needs a SPOILERS warning slapped all over it--you're gonna essentially be seeing the plot of the game from start to finish here, so, y'know, fairly warned.


The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The Cinematic Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKFVLxDoURg


Alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm Ready for my Close-Up: The visual quality of the videos used is good enough, nothing to complain about nor particularly praise. The videos' nature, of course, is fairly noteworthy, as the visual component to TLoZ: Twilight Princess was both impressive and aesthetically effective.

The artistry of the video, though, is pretty much the main event. Roynerer hasn't thrown any notable visual tricks into the AMV, but they would be out of place, even distracting, from what he DOES use the video component for: telling a concise, yet epic and powerful, version of TLoZ: Twilight Princess's story. This AMV uses key scenes throughout the game to show the watcher the main arcs of game's events, from the beginning of Link's journey and transformation, to meeting Midna, the spirits, Zelda, Zant, and Ganondorf, to the final battle and Midna's emotional goodbye. The AMV is showing the most plot-relevant scenes during his journey, and interspersing these scenes with several quick clips of the various tasks Link engages in during the game's course, from fighting to riding the river.

This by itself is a skillful move for Roynerer's purposes--the plot-essential scenes obviously tell the game's epic story as he intends them to, but the scenes thrown in here and there that show some of the tasks and battles Link goes through on the way to the important plot points effectively conveys the length and spectrum of the journey, showing the viewer that much effort and time is expended to get from one event to the next in a way that just showing us the important parts wouldn't manage. At the same time, though, there are only a few such images, leaving most of the AMV to be filled with the story-telling scenes, which is important when you have a longer one like this (let's face it: attention spans ain't what they used to be). Roynerer also employs some smart scene selection for the major plot parts of the AMV, cutting and pasting the videos of each event to give you a concise summary of each part that tells you as much as you need to know for the story, without adding unnecessary time to the AMV.* It works pretty impressively well, creating a fairly understandable and straightforward take on the story that's shown well enough that I suspect even those not familiar with the game would have little trouble following it, while sacrificing little to none of the story's power and grandeur--if anything, this summarized version better emphasizes the epic nature of Twilight Princess's plot than the game does. Even more impressive when you consider that the AMV tells the story entirely visually--none of the game's dialogue that accompanies the scenes is shown. Roynerer takes artistic, stirring visuals from a really cool story, and edits them together to make the whole product better. This AMV is, simply put, great to watch.

I Gotta Have More Cowbell: The music used in this AMV is comprised of several parts of the soundtrack for the movie The Last Samurai, composed by Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is, apparently, one of Roynerer's musical heroes (and the same goes for my sister--she just loves The Last Samurai's music), and one can certainly see (well, hear, anyway) why--regardless of your musical tastes, it would be hard not to recognize this music as strong, moving, and masterful.

Now, under normal circumstances, the visual part of this AMV would certainly be its highest virtue--as I describe above, it accomplishes a great deal with its video portion, and does so with excellence. But with this AMV, the audio component is actually an equally strong part of what makes it great--and once again, this is a combination of the music itself being great, and the skill of the AMV's creator. The score to The Last Samurai is at many points designed to be epic, and Roynerer takes full advantage of it--in fact, he goes beyond what I'd consider "taking full advantage." That implies (to me, at least) working with a song perfectly within the normal expected, established parameters of that song. I believe, however, that Roynerer's selection of which pieces of music to put where makes great use of it in ways that were not intended. See, one of the really great things about The Last Samurai's music is that it's meant to be the mood-creating theme to a movie about Japan at (I think) the end of its feudal age; it takes its cues from traditional Japanese sound, and creates and emphasizes the movie's Japanese setting at least as much as any visual aspect of The Last Samurai.

Basically, what I am saying here is that this soundtrack really sounds Japanese.

Yet, when I watch this AMV and see the scenes that the music plays to...it becomes transformed to me, somehow. Put to the well-chosen and entrancing Twilight Princess scenes, the music seems to meld with the game's video, and suddenly the epic and emotional music doesn't sound like it was taken from another source--it becomes such a connected part of the AMV that it sounds like it was somehow made for THIS. Seriously, when I watch this AMV, everything clicks so perfectly that the music doesn't seem like it was taken from something else and put into this--it's like it was MADE for this game's visuals. It's hard to describe how it happens, especially since I don't know much about cinematography and music to begin with, but the pace at which the visuals tell their story matches the music's tone and pace perfectly throughout the AMV, and that, along with the individual scene segments fitting extremely well with the moments of the song that accompany them, makes the song clips seem less a separate entity's music and more like they were designed around this AMV. That's an illusion that requires a lot of skill to create and maintain.

Also, as I mentioned, the individual scenes shown to the music are often flawlessly matched to its tone, coordinated as well as any AMV I've reviewed so far. My favorite example of this is at 1:22, when Link turns around and sees Zant. The music characterizes the visual wonderfully, taking a sudden, surprising dip into a deeper set of notes that work with the sudden appearance of the bizarre and formidable mask of Zant to startle the viewer and emphasize the unsettling nature of the villain in a slightly unnerving, almost regal way. And I'd like to note that it's also an excellent example of the AMV taking the music and changing how the listener reacts to it...this moment in the music is, in The Last Samurai, used for a moment of strong emotion in a way that you would expect. It's used perfectly, but conventionally, in its original use. Yet in this application, where the same moment of the song is used to convey unsettling, shocking imagery and timing to properly create a feel for Zant, it works equally well--it's a completely different way of using the same moment of music, yet it feels equally natural.

Overall, the scene's a really cool coordination of audio and visual and my favorite individual moment in this AMV, although it's very far from the only one--I'm not going into detail on the others simply because they go throughout the AMV, many, many scenes and moments mirroring and meshing with the music's mood of pitches, tones, and crescendos, singular scenes that sync with the sound so well and so successively that they simply become whole segments of superb coordination.**

Guy, You Explain: Like a few others I've reviewed, the point of this AMV is to provide a summary for the game, to give you an idea of its epic power and grandeur. Unlike the ones I've done here before, though (not to mention practically all other AMVs I've seen), this is no attempt to communicate the general feel and emotion of the game--this AMV actually attempts to show you the game's plot from start to finish, using the scenes of important events in the plot to give you a basic, but effective, story to watch. It's done so well that a person who hasn't played the game before would, I imagine, have very little difficulty following the AMV's story (and thus, the game's) from start to finish from this musical movie and pretty much understand most of the game's important ideas and plot points. Roynerer has told me,

"The idea just kinda sparked one night as I was trying to look for a new way to be creative and productive within the music area...which then resulted in the idea of making a short movie-like sequence made up of footage from a game, carefully structured around specifically chosen orchestral music. Orchestral music helps tell the story and grip the viewer a lot better, you see.

"...after the first section of the video was finished, I found it rather enticing, I said to myself that this has to be big, different, nothing like other AMVs on YouTube; I wanted it to be gripping, meaningful and in tune with the music I'd chosen."

Creative, movie-like, gripping, meaningful, and in tune? Mission Accomplished on each. This is a fresh and engaging idea for AMVs that I hope to see more of. The combination of a great set of visuals with a cool story set to an epic and emotional score makes it very movie-like. From start to finish, the AMV grasps the watcher's attention masterfully, impressing us with its power and feeling, gripping us like few AMVs can. Meaningful? I think there are scenes from TLoZ Twilight Princess that this AMV conveys more impressively than the game itself does, and if you can find any meaning within the game (and it's definitely there), you can find it almost perfectly preserved within this AMV--indeed, the meaning may even be better off in this form, because it's all presented together, rather than over the course of 50 hours. And in tune? I already mentioned earlier that this is so "in tune" that it basically BECOMES the tune.

TLoZTP: The Cinematic Experience is really just a splendid work. The care and skill in it is practically palpable, and I can't recommend enough that anyone and everyone check it out.

















* To be critically fair, this may have been done as much out of necessity as of artistic considerations--the original version of this, according to my correspondence with Roynerer, was 12 minutes long, which won't fly on Youtube with its short-sighted demand that all videos on it be in the 10 minute range or less. Regardless of what could have been, though, the version we have now is good AND efficient, so I still feel it fair to count this as one of its virtues.

** Why yes, I DO like alliteration, now that you mention it.

Startropics 1's Password

Startropics was a delightful little game released way, way back in the days of the NES. It has a special place in my heart as one of the first games I ever beat, and, provided that you count it as an RPG (which I do), probably the first RPG I ever played from start to finish.* And I think it holds up pretty well against time, too--it's got a decent enough plot, there's a certain lighthearted personality to it that you still, to this day, don't find very often in an RPG, and, providing you're one of those people who count gameplay as an important part of an RPG, it's still fun to play--in a refreshing way, even, since few games in the past 2 decades have tried to copy its exact feel.

There are, for me, 2 really notable aspects of this game that I feel are worth recognizing here. The first I've already covered--the game's ending, which is strangely powerful for the little game, yet not so epic that it's over the top in such a title. The second, however, is a clever little gimmick.

I've mentioned in a previous rant that I really do like the idea of interesting swag that comes packaged with a game--stuff like a game's soundtrack, or that marvelous little Vault Boy bobblehead figure that came with Fallout 3. It's not always good, of course--FF12's metal case was pointless, and its little bonus disc on the history of the FF series was little more than a stupid advertisement--but it's generally an effort I appreciate. And I appreciated it even all the way back to when I was 7 or 8, when I opened up the Startropics 1 box and found that with my game came a neat little mock letter from Dr. J, a character from the game, to his nephew, the main character, which basically just set the premise for the game. "Neat!" I thought, and set it aside.

Well, as it turns out, that letter was actually a part of the game itself. See, it's like this. There's a part in the game where you need to put in a password to your little navigating robot to continue on with the quest. The game gives you no information on what it is, with its only hint being to put the letter Dr. J sent Mike (the hero) into water. The game, of course, has no letter item in its inventory, and I found myself wondering exactly how I was supposed to accomplish this in-game if Mike didn't still have the letter on him. I spent some time looking for the item, in case I had missed it, but couldn't find anything.

And then I remembered the letter that came with the game itself.*** Wondering if an idea this crazy could actually be the solution, I found it amongst the junk in my room, ran out to the kitchen, and held it under the faucet for a moment. A moment later, lo and behold, across its bottom appeared a secret message with the code.

If only I knew any proper swear words at that point. I could have properly conveyed my feelings: Holy shit that is so cool.

It's just an example of really neat, creative thinking going into the design of a game puzzle. Where so many RPGs are content with just pushing crates into the right place, or having the sheer genius to be able to press the "Search" button in front of something really suspicious in order to find a password or essential item, Startropics 1 included in its neat puzzles one that required sleuth work in the real world, making a plot-essential item an actual, real object. What a neat, creative thing to put in the game it was. Kudos to Nintendo for such a nifty idea!












* "Probably" because I'm not ENTIRELY sure about this--it MIGHT have been The Magic of Scheherazade. My memory's a little foggy on this; it WAS something like 20 years ago.**

** Jesus CHRIST how the hell did I get so old?

*** Yeah, yeah, I know it seems obvious enough to figure out from the start, but give me a break. I was in the second grade. At that point, my deductive reasoning with video games peaked at "Hey, that enemy has spikes on his head. Maybe I shouldn't jump on him."

Terranigma's Theme of Advancement

Proof that Enix WAS, in fact, capable of creating a good RPG prior to the merger with Squaresoft, despite all the contrary evidence provided by Dragon Quest and Star Ocean,* Terranigma has become quite a favorite among fans of old, obscure RPGs in the past decade, thanks to emulation making it possible for Americans to play it--the game was only ever released in Japan and Europe. The old SNES Action RPG was very creative, had a generally entertaining protagonist, and a plot and setting that took a look at several interesting themes, most of which seemed to revolve around the idea of essential contradictions.

My favorite theme of Terranigma, I think, would have to be its portrayal of technological and social advancement. The goal set for Ark (Terranigma's protagonist) is to resurrect the dead Earth's lands and life forms, and then to nurture human advancement to quickly bring the world to a modern state. Ark is thus present to witness several events and inventions that forever changed the flow of human history, technology, and culture, and helps in several cases to bring them about. Ark's actions (if you choose to do everything in the game, that is) advance culture in the fields of naval navigation, preparing and keeping food, art, economics, foreign trade and travel, alcohol, and (most of all) scientific progress, among others. He nurtures such monumental technologies as telephones, airplanes, and usable electrical power. And as he does all this, the towns of the world change, going from your standard RPG villages to modern cities.

It's a pretty neat process, honestly, even if the game's translation is, as was often the case back in the SNES days, not always great at conveying the game's elegance properly. What I really love about it, though, is that the game tries to show both sides of cultural advancement, both the good and the bad, in several different ways.

The first aspect of advancement it looks at is the basics of success. The painter Matis provides a good example of this. Matis is a poor, largely ignored painter who wants to show his works to others, hoping to find people out there who enjoy the work he pours his soul into. He thus gives Ark an example of his work, and asks Ark to show it to others to get their opinions and interest. After Ark shows it to a famous and rich critic who likes it, Matis becomes famous, and orders for his paintings begin pouring in. Eventually Matis's fame, however, leads to him being overworked, and by the end of the game, he says, "Before fame, I thought it was great just to paint. Now look! I work like a machine for money chased by time. This is no good! Even if it sells, it's no good if it's not what you want to paint." Through Matis, as well as some others that Ark meets, the game shows the desire for success and its rewards of a bigger business and home, wealth, and popularity, but it also shows the downside of the success that comes with advancement, the way that success can take over one's life and draw the pleasure from what one does.

The next aspect are the effects of cultural advancement in general, which are shown through the games' several towns and how they grow. As Ark promotes the world's sciences, economy, culture, and globalization, the small villages he visits become large towns and finally modern cities. The benefits are easy enough to see--modern comforts become available to all, there are more pastimes for the people of the cities, and international trade and tourism brings new goods, money, and visitors to each city. But at the same time, the game shows the bad with the good. Many residents complain about how crowded, busy, and complicated life is now, while the animals that Ark saved earlier in the game and that helped him along his quest suffer for mankind's success, being taken from their homes to be put in a zoo, or sold on the black market.

The last aspect, and that of particular note, is the consequence of advancing technology. I feel that the game does especially well with this. It treats great moments of scientific history with reverence quite often--the successful use of Columbus's navigation methods to reach a new continent is played out as quite a big moment in history, and the discovery of how to harness electricity to create light is treated with such reverence in the game that the moment almost seems divine. The usefulness of scientific advancement, as well as the yearning to create a better life through invention, is treated as a marvelous thing in Terranigma.

Yet, at the same time, the game also shows how much is lost with the spread of high technology. Bell remarks that his phones are a huge success, and wonders casually if perhaps people can no longer live without having the instant ability to hear others' voices. A random NPC scoffs at many of the legendary and mystic ideas of old as silly and impossible in such an advanced world (even though Ark has encountered many of these things), showing the loss of belief in legend and the intangible brought on by the modern world. Columbus laments that his navigation methods, so monumental and important before, now seem old fashioned, even quaint, in this world of airplanes and television, showing that scientific advancement can even cause a lack of appreciation for itself. The use of technology for the creation of attack robots and a super virus in the game shows the dangers that technology can have, of course. Most telling of all to me are the words of Eddie,** the one who harnessed electricity into a light bulb: "I worry about how much light from electricity has changed our lives. It may have stolen the warmth like a candle's flame from human souls."

Technology and advancement in general can do great things for us, but we can also lose much because of it, and Terranigma tries hard to show both sides of the coin. Having seen this double-sided nature to the world's progress throughout the game makes the game's ending, in which Ark looks down on the world he's created and nurtured and sees it for all its greatness, all the more poignant, for we know that the greatness comes at a cost, and we know that Ark is aware of this. Terranigma does a fine job with its theme of the joys and despair of human advancement.

















* Keep in mind I said PRIOR to the merger. Star Ocean 3 and Dragon Quest 8, which are actually good games, wouldn't count.

** Don't ask me why the game can't be bothered to just call him Edison when it's got people like Bell and Columbus in there by name. Then again, they misspelled Matisse as Matis for some reason, too. Who knows why, I guess.

General RPGs' Curative Falls

Thanks to my sister GHTLovesTHG for this rant idea.

Here's a question. Why is it that, in an RPG (and almost every other entertainment medium, but as usual, I just focus on the RPG side of things), falling to your death almost never results in dying?

Think about it. How many times in an RPG have you ever seen a character die from a seemingly lethal plunge down the side of a cliff, or off an airship, or whatever? Admittedly, minor characters can be killed by falls--Dyne from Final Fantasy 7 and Barinten from FF Tactics, for example--but no one with any particularly strong relevance to the plot ever is. If you ever see someone important leap off a height of hundreds of feet and you don't actively watch them perish, and they weren't already dead or dying when they did it, they didn't die.

Examples? Why, I thought you'd never ask.


A. Final Fantasy 6: After the airship is destroyed in midair, everyone falls off it from what we can safely assume is a huge height. Aside from Celes hitting her head and being in a coma for a year, everyone winds up being just fine after falling from an air transport in the sky--right in the middle of Armageddon, I might add.

B. Final Fantasy 7: (SPOILERS--BUT REALLY, DO ANY OF YOU NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS GAME BY NOW?) During Cloud's flashback, the bridge over a huge and deep chasm between mountain peaks comes apart while Sephiroth, Zack, Tifa, Cloud, and Miscellaneous Shinra Grunt are traveling across it. Big surprise, the grunt is the only one who dies, and everyone else, after falling far down into the abyss that you can't even see through the mist and distance, is perfectly okay.

C. Xenosaga 2: Early in the game, Jin and Margulis have a fight that results in Margulis falling through the roof of a building, down into darkness. Now, the actual height of his fall isn't specified, but since he doesn't just hop back up or shout that he'll be back in no time, and since Jin seems convinced that he's not going to return for a good measure of time, it's only reasonable to presume that he fell quite a ways. And, of course, he survived just fine and dandy.

D. Tales of the Abyss: After a fight between the heroes and several of the God Generals on a snowy mountain, the fight's noise and seismic collateral damage causes an avalanche that engulfs the combatants and sweeps them off the cliff's face. Naturally, being hit by an avalanche and thrown off the edge of a mountainous cliff kills all of...most of...some of...actually, every person involved survives with no significant injuries.


See what I mean, here? It's like RPG characters are impervious to the consequences of gravity. I mean, don't get me wrong, there are times when this is decently sensible and okay, like in Tales of Legendia, when Senel falls off a cliff but survives because we see him caught by mystical glowing energy stuff, or when Yuna in Final Fantasy 10 takes a plunge off that Bevelle wedding tower thing and summons her flying Aeon to catch her, or even in Arc the Lad 2 when Gruga falls off a platform down to the lava, but turns out to have caught himself on the edge or something and climbs back up. If the game SHOWS me or at the very least TELLS me how they survive, and it's actually FEASIBLE, then I have no problem with it. But that's only rarely the case.

Worse still, however, is not the fall that doesn't kill you--it's the Curative Fall. A Curative Fall is an occurrence in an RPG where not only doesn't a fall manage to kill someone, but that someone who survives it should have died anyway from other causes. Basically, the person who falls is in really bad shape, but, somehow, they wind up being just fine after the fall brings them off-screen for a while, even though they should have died not only from the drop, but from their current injuries. Plot-wise, the fall seems to have CURED them from their otherwise fatal wounds, rather than increase the damage.

Instances of this phenomenon:


A. Final Fantasy 7: After being sliced deeply across the chest by one of those standard Ridiculously Huge RPG swords, Sephiroth is lifted up, slammed into the wall, and falls into the heart of a reactor that runs on radioactive magic. Does the drop's impact aggravate his grievous wound at all? Doesn't seem so, cuz he's just fine later on.

B. Tales of the Abyss: So Van has been beaten to shit by his adversaries, and is surely going to die from his injuries. But look, he's falling off the platform, into the planet's core! I guess he's dead, right? Well, only if by "dead" you mean "he'll be just fine and will come back stronger than ever."

C. Final Fantasy 8: At the conclusion of a rough battle while on a mission, Laguna, Kiros, and Ward are in a bad way in enemy territory--Laguna's beat up and exhausted, Kiros is so badly injured he can't get up, and Ward is like Kiros only with his neck slashed open. What does Doctor Laguna prescribe for his dying friends? Why, heaving their broken bodies over the side of a cliff to the rough sea several stories below, of course! Naturally, hitting the water whilst a bloody, dying mess and being forced to swim for who knows how far is just the miracle cure Laguna was hoping for, as all 3 fellows survive the event. Rather than death, the only permanent consequence of their wounds and the aggravation to said wounds of a fall and power swim is that Ward can't talk. Everything else is A-OK!

D. Final Fantasy 4 (there IS a lot of falling in this series, isn't there?): Okay, yeah, see, Cid is flying this airship, and for reasons that only kind of make sense, he jumps off of it with a bomb in his hand or strapped to his chest or caught in his beard or something. The point is, a bomb goes off that is right next to him, the explosion of which is large and destructive enough to blast the hell out of the nearby rocky underground cliff face, while he is falling through the air from a height that can only be multiple miles high, down to a very hard and rocky underworld surface that may or may not have lava on it. This causes me to theorize that there is actually a second rule to go with the one stating that no one dies from falling: the more inescapably fatal a fall should be, the greater its curative effect. This at-least-60-years-old mechanic has a bomb go off in his face, yet somehow the healing power of him accelerating to an incredible velocity then slamming into a hard and unmoving surface manages to piece his smithereens back together so effectively that the next time you see him, he's just sleeping it off in a bed.


THIS IS NOT HOW GRAVITY WORKS, PEOPLE.

Mass Effect 1's Downloadable Content

When I did my Fallout 3 DLC rant, I thought at the time that the next game I would be giving a similar review of would be Dragon Age Origins. But as it turns out, Bioware just keeps releasing one thing for it after another, and supposedly has no intention to stop for a while. So whilst I wait for that to end so I can answer the question I ended with in the Fallout 3 DLC rant (whether or not other RPGs would be able to follow Fallout 3's example with as much, less, or more integrity), let's take a look at semi-old school RPG Downloadable Content with Mass Effect 1.



Bring Down the Sky: This is a very good DLC. First of all, it's free (to PC users, at least; X-Box gamers might have to pay for it, but I can only speak from a PC gamer's perspective here). That's always good. More importantly, though, it adds a new mission to the game that's about an hour long, and has a small but reasonably exciting plot and premise while introducing a villain and species that further expand and flesh out the Mass Effect universe interestingly, giving you a glimpse at certain aspects of galactic society and humanity's private inter-species concerns that the game proper doesn't explore. It also gives another couple opportunities for the player to further develop Shepard's personality. A solid add-on, to be sure.


Pinnacle Station: After Bring Down the Sky, Pinnacle Station is a disappointment. It's basically just a combat simulator for you to test how long you can survive a constant stream of enemies, with a few different locations and objectives to very slightly mix things up. The story to go along with the station is tiny and utterly meaningless; just calling the events of Pinnacle Station a "story" at all is an exaggeration. Bland, meaningless, not worth the cost, and disappointing. Still, I HAVE seen considerably blander, less meaningful, less monetarily worthwhile, and more disappointing DLCs by far, so I can't be too terribly harsh, I suppose. At least it wasn't outright stupid, the way Fallout 3's Mothership Zeta DLC was.



Actually, those 2 are the only add-ons released for Mass Effect 1. ME1's DLC seemed to be an experiment for Bioware in large part, testing out their ability to do DLC packages, and both gamers' immediate (Bring Down the Sky) and long-term (Pinnacle Station) interest in continuing the game. I'd say the experiment was positive on the whole--Bring Down the Sky outweighs Pinnacle Station, in my opinion, so the overall feeling I take from this game's add-ons is a good one. But once I can do a complete rant on Dragon Age Origins's add-ons, we'll see whether Bioware took this experiment's results and went in the right or wrong direction with them.

Fallout 1 and 2's Stupid Protagonists

A common trait of Western-style RPGs is the ability to choose what kind of person your protagonist is through their actions. In games like Dragon Age Origins, the Knights of the Republic series, and the Mass Effect series, you have the opportunity in most of the game's situations to choose how your character will respond to dialogue or deal with a situation. This typically boils down to your character being a super nice, understanding fellow who saves everyone always, makes everyone feel good about themselves, and walks on water, which he has turned into wine...or a complete and total douchebag who destroys everything, pees on puppies, and eats children.

It's a fairly good idea, making the games into actual Role-Playing Games by giving you some control over who your character is, and the RPGs I've played usually do a good job of it, allowing for quite a lot of distinction between the characters you can create.* But Fallout 1 and 2 gave players a 3rd option--you could be Good, Evil...and Stupid.

Basically, when you start a Fallout game, you get to choose the stat build of your character, deciding what areas he/she will be strong in, what his/her skills will be, etc. This, of course, affects the game in many ways, and a character with higher Intelligence will have more and better dialogue options in many situations. However, the Fallout designers had some fun with this idea, and made it so that having an extremely low Intelligence score (3 or below) would actually get rid of most normal dialogue options, and replace them with entirely new ones--the often meaningless babble of a complete imbecile.

And man, is it hilarious.

Although you only get a few really funny moments in Fallout 1, Fallout 2 is just full of extremely amusing situations arising from a world-saving protagonist who is dumb as a stump. Stumbling around the post-apocalyptic wasteland as a simpleton more interested in ice cream and shiny objects than with their mission and the fate of the world is just loads of fun. Granted, you don't get to do as much stuff, as many people don't want to entrust all their problems to a grinning moron, but there're still plenty of side quests available to a stupid character, and all the necessary stuff on the path to completing the game will work out for you. It's actually funny to watch a stupid character basically manage on dumb luck to do everything a regular character has to work at to save the world.

There are even occasions where being a stupid character makes parts of the game easier, or provides a better reward. A stupid character can more or less just walk into Vault City and gain access to its Vault, where normally you have to buy or fast-talk your way into the city, and then do a long quest or have crazily good stats to get into the city's Vault. A stupid character will, in the town of Modoc, get paid with a partially eaten cookie for a pest control job, an option not open to a regular character. You wouldn't THINK that's actually a good thing, but the cookie is a very rare item that can temporarily boost how many actions you can take in combat, which is a pretty big deal in a tough fight. And in San Francisco, a stupid character who completes the Brotherhood of Steel's tasks will be rewarded as a regular character would, but be given the bonus of having the tanker ship fully fueled, something that a normal character has to do an extra quest for.

So the game does play a bit differently here and there for this third character path. More importantly, though, the dialogue is just absurdly funny quite often. In a generally dark and serious game, you get to watch a nitwit run around and...

Have his/her feelings hurt by jeering 10-year-olds, and try to get them back by telling them that he/she is going to go to a party with cake and ice cream and presents and that THEY aren't invited.
Walk off in the middle of an involved conversation because he/she becomes distracted by some nearby sand.
Obtain plot-essential computer parts only because he/she is hungry and they look like electronic Pop-Tarts.
Get electrocuted while exploring the insides of a computer, having confused an automated voice for a woman trapped inside the computer in need of rescue.

And so on. It's a really fun third alternative to the usual Good and Evil way of playing through the game, giving the game not only a lot more replay value, but also an entertaining extra perspective that helps to emphasize the games' tongue-in-cheek humor, which is almost as large and important a component to their storytelling as the serious and dark aspects. I was really disappointed that Fallout 3 eliminated the option for a stupid character, but at least the upcoming Fallout: New Vegas is supposedly bringing it back--although I'm not sure, from reading about it in Game Informer, whether or not it will be in a significant capacity. Still, here's hoping.


















* Though not all of them--Risen's protagonist, while not lacking a personality, is fairly mild in general and doesn't seem to vary too much in how he acts regardless of what you choose his actions to be.

Final Fantasy 7's Cait Sith's Worth

For someone who criticizes SquareEnix's poster child series as much as I do, I sure do wind up defending its characters strangely often.

Cait Sith. If you had to list the most universally hated characters from the Final Fantasy series, he'd be up at the top with Final Fantasy 9's Quina Quen. Nobody can seem to stand him. And, as is often the case with overly disliked Final Fantasy characters, all this scorn is nearly entirely undeserved.

So, here's what I gather are the major reasons to hate Cait Sith:


1. He looks stupid.
2. He's not useful in combat.
3. He betrays the good guys at one point.
4. He's annoying.


So let's see. First off: looking stupid. I probably shouldn't even dignify this with a response--if you're a shallow enough person that how a character looks is going to be the major determining factor in your opinion about that character, then you're not worth wasting words on. Nonetheless, I would like to point out that, beyond the fact that it's moronic to judge a character's worth by how they look, this is FINAL FANTASY. Stupid-looking people are not exactly a rarity in these games. If you're going to dislike Cait Sith for not looking particularly awesome, you might as well hate the majority of the characters in the series, because most of them look ridiculous one way or another.

Next is my personal favorite, his use in combat. I actually find this to be an even less intelligent reason to dislike Cait Sith than his looks. I mean, to start with, I really don't see the point of liking or hating someone according to how immediately useful they are to me personally. But putting that aside, this opinion is wrong on multiple levels. To start with, Final Fantasy 7 is a game where differences in combat abilities between characters are so minimal that they almost don't exist--the only major skills that distinguish one character from the next are the Limit Breaks, which are only rarely available to use. Other than that, combat skills are determined by the Materia the player puts on a character. So for most regular battles, and the majority of each boss fight's duration, it's the abilities granted by Materia--most prominently, the Magic and the Summons--that determine how useful a character is. So Cait Sith's only going to be about as useless as the player is inept.

So in general, it's Materia, not Limit Breaks, that's going to determine how useful a character is going to be for the long haul. So, while the Strength stat is handy if you put on the right Ability Materia to enhance the regular attack (and the good ones for that only come late in the game), it's the Magic stat that more determines how powerful a character is going to be, since most offensive Materia provide magic spells and Summons. And hey, guess what? Cait Sith's Magic stat is one of the best in the game. So unless you're really fond of tripling how long each battle takes by just using the Attack command every time and ignoring Magic and Summon (and E. Skill, always damn handy), he's going to actually be one of the more useful characters you can get.

And about his Limit Breaks, which everyone says suck: for his Slots Limit Break, there's a tiny chance of getting a match-up known as Death Joker. Now, Death Joker is simple: it kills everything in battle. Enemies and your team both die, no questions asked, doesn't matter what enemy it is. This can be countered by the famous Materia combination of Final Attack + Phoenix (or Final Attack + Life, I guess, but that's not nearly as handy), which makes it so that when a character gets KO'd in combat, they cast a spell as they die--in this case, Phoenix, which restores them and any other party members at 0 HP to fighting condition.

So, basically, Cait Sith can pull off a Limit Break that will kill a Weapon, and can be countered by a common Materia combination trick. Yeah. That's not precisely what I would call useless.*

Lastly, his betrayal. Okay, yeah, Cait Sith betrays Cloud and company. THIS is actually a legitimate strike against him. Acknowledged. That said, however, it's still not fair to hate him for it. To begin with, the betrayal isn't his final defining act. He pulls his traitor act while you're still on the first disc of the game--every moment after that, he's working to help Cloud as best he can, making sure that those dear to Aeris and Barret are safe, becoming Cloud's informant about Shinra's activities, fighting alongside the group, and so on. He makes up for his misdeed plenty times over, no mistake about it.

It also makes no sense to hold it against him when other RPG traitors rarely have such grudges held against them. I mean, just going by the Final Fantasy series, look at Kain. Kain from Final Fantasy 4 turns traitor TWICE during his game, and while mind control is involved, it's only made possible because he already has within him the negative emotions of jealousy and anger that betrayal is created from. The way I see it, that makes it a more earnest case of betrayal than Cait Sith's--with Cait Sith, he probably doesn't have much choice, given that he's employed by a company with military power that is not particularly nice to anyone who doesn't play ball with it, and Cait Sith's actions and dialogue throughout the game paint the picture of a character who wants to help people and do everything in his power to keep others safe from danger. His betrayal isn't motivated by bitterness the way Kain's is. Yet Kain nearly never receives the kind of badmouthing over his multiple betrayals that Cait Sith does about his one.

While we're on the issue of comparisons, other RPG traitors often tend to do worse things when they turn on the good guys. I mean, think about it. Cait Sith's traitorous act is to feed Shinra information for a while, and then to give the evil corporation a key item that it needs to get at the Black Materia, which Sephiroth, who both the good guys and Shinra are opposing, wants to destroy the world with. End result? Shinra keeps up-to-date with Cloud's group of do-gooders, which it basically was doing fairly well anyway before Cait Sith came along (the Turks know he's coming in the cave outside the marshes, Hojo sights Cloud in Costa del Sol, and they obviously know he's going to the Gold Saucer since they place Cait Sith there to find him), and Shinra gets a head start on obtaining the Black Materia--which, while bad, would still be better than Sephiroth getting it. Compare that to the betrayal of, say, (MAJOR BATEN KAITOS 1 SPOILERS) Kalas from BK1. Kalas is a double-agent the entire first half of the game, and his betrayal of his friends, which is motivated solely by his own selfish desires, results in the releasing of a freakish, malevolent god's power, the capture by an enemy military of the girl that was digging Kalas up to that point, and the finger being given to you, the player, as Kalas actually attempts to forcibly eject you from the game's events. Yet you never hear of people holding a major grudge against Kalas for how royally he screwed everyone over (even considering the much smaller fanbase for the Baten Kaitos series). So why the ever-lasting hatred for Cait Sith on this count?

Finally, the annoying factor. Well, frankly, I'm not sure I get it. I mean, Cait Sith's role in the general plot and dialogue of the game is on the lower side of average, and his major acts and speeches, from what I can see, are focused on his betrayal and his desire to help people and make up for his earlier deception. Not all that annoying a focus, and his personality itself is a fairly mild-mannered, yet energetic, guy who adopts a southern accent at random. And without him, Cloud and company wouldn't have gotten the Black Materia, Barret wouldn't have escaped Junon during the Weapon attack, and Elmyra and Marlene wouldn't have been kept safely away from Meteor's ground zero. He also provides intel to Cloud about Shinra's movements once his connection to them is revealed. So it's not like he was just some hanger-on; he significantly contributed to the world-saving effort, more than several other members of the party who are rarely criticized. Honestly, he doesn't have a loud enough or dull enough personality to be all that annoying. I just think that most people who say he's annoying do so because they dislike him for one of the other criteria I've mentioned.

Cait Sith gets way, way more resentment sent his way than he deserves. That's what I think, and that's what I stand by. People forgive poorer characters for worse acts, and half of the complaints people have against him are groundless, stupid, or both.

















* Yes, I know, the chances of Death Joker are crazily rare. But I'm willing to bet that if you compared the time it takes to keep trying for a Death Joker to hit the Weapons against the time it takes to get the levels and the rare Materia and the levels for said Materia, along with the best weapons and armor and such, plus a goodly amount of healing items, all of which is required for the standard way to take out a Weapon, you're probably going to spend less time waiting for the Death Joker. The time it takes to get a goddamn Golden Chocobo alone...

Dragon Age 1's Morrigan: Why I Don't Like Her

Well, I've played the game a few times over, seen everything there is to see, examined the merits and flaws of each of the characters pretty thoroughly, and discussed it all with a few people whose opinions and tastes are trustworthy. And the verdict is in: Morrigan is my least favorite part of Dragon Age Origins.

There are quite a few small aspects about her that don't exactly ingratiate her character to me, of course. Her general attitude is one. She's kind of a bitch. While she treats the main character pretty decently, more or less, she's unceasingly cold and hostile to everyone else in the party, while they, aside from Alistair,* continue to attempt to be civil to her. While other characters in the game may criticize each other in a light-hearted way or with a constructive purpose in mind, Morrigan's jabs and insults are ever done spitefully. So she's not exactly the most likable person to begin with.

Still, annoying personalities I can get over, if there's a decent character beneath. I mean, look at Final Fantasy 10's Tidus--you all know I really like his character, but I'll be the first to admit that he can be really annoying at times. I've also always been a fan of Chrono Trigger's Magus, and he's not exactly friendly to the rest of the party, either.

The true problem for me with Morrigan is that her inner character is rather shallow, and far less likable than her bitchy exterior. Fundamentally, Morrigan believes in looking out for number 1, that connections to other people are meaningless farces, that religious belief is foolish, and that the mages who follow the Chantry's laws and allow themselves to be regulated are weak. Now, these are all things that I disagree with myself. But what makes her such a lousy character compared to all the rest of the cast, and what makes me really dislike her, is how she holds and expresses these beliefs.

Morrigan is a raging, senseless hypocrite who cannot extract her head from her ass. She criticizes the mages who live under the shackles that society places on them, even though she has grown up free because her adoptive witch mother, Flemeth, kept her relatively safe and almost totally secluded from the society that would have imprisoned her. She has absolutely no experience of the difficulties a mage faces when they try to escape, and she doesn't care. Even when confronted with the fact that she could have been brought up in this imprisonment and been the same as any other mage, she dismisses the argument without really addressing it, rather than even consider that the situations of other mages and herself could have been reversed. She scorns others for not fighting for the freedom she enjoys when she herself has had little role in attaining and keeping that freedom.

This is more or less how it goes every time Morrigan comes across something she doesn't approve of. She criticizes the people and society of the world around her unflinchingly, while having never had to experience it--by her own admission she knows more or less nothing of civilization, since Flemeth raised her alone in a swamp her whole life.

But it's more than just ignorance bordering on hypocrisy, here. There's also just complete and utter hypocrisy, too. One of her big things is to criticize the followers of the Chant of Light, the major quasi-Christian-esque religion of this world, for being unthinking followers to laws and beliefs that they're told. The problem here is that, again, by her own admission, most everything she knows of the world (which is, again, not very much) is what Flemeth has taught her. Nearly every opinion she has and holds is formed before she's properly out in the world to experience that which she holds the opinion on. Of all the characters in the game, she's the one whose beliefs have been determined the most by what she's been told, and she also ends up being the character whose views are the most unchangeable. Sten can learn to accept outsiders and embrace at least a precious few aspects of other cultures. Alistair comes to accept his place in the world and has his preconceived hopes about family's acceptance challenged. Oghren comes to recognize that it truly is himself and not circumstance that brings him to his lowly states. Zevran, Shale, Wynne, Leliana, they're all at least open to views other than their own. But Morrigan? On almost every point, the woman who criticizes the Chantry's followers for their blind, unquestioning obedience to the moral codes given to them absolutely refuses to entertain the possibility that what she's been told could be untrue.**

Now I'll give you the fact that Morrigan is not 100% a loathsome hypocrite. She CAN come to appreciate the friendship and/or love that the main character offers her (if the main character is a good fellow/fellowess and gives her gifts and does her a huge favor), and she doesn't deny that she values it. And that much IS fairly touching, I'll give you that. Although it does seem to be a thing so private that only she and the main character can ever know it; in all other ways and situations, Morrigan continues to scorn human connections as worthless. But I'll still admit, that's a highlight to her, and one moment where she does learn that her preconceptions are wrong.

Nonetheless, this one occasion of her appreciating someone going to extreme lengths for her for the sake of friendship does not change her overall character, and that is one of an ignorant, venomous hypocrite. While this may put me at odds with the general gaming community, which seems totally enamored by her,*** I seriously dislike Morrigan, and consider her the low point of the game's cast.











* And she gives Alistair plenty of reason to dislike her, at that.

** And while it's really neither here nor there, I'd like to point out that her religious criticisms never graduate past the most rudimentary level. Morrigan isn't bringing up any more insightful arguments about the fallacies of faith and organized religion than those you would expect to hear from a teenager testing the waters of religious rebellion.

*** Which I think is largely because she spouts those empty but "edgy" anti-faith arguments here and there, and is a goth chick that shows a lot of skin--proof that Bioware can shamelessly exploit an audience just as well as SquareEnix!

General RPGs' Lack of Significant Homosexual Characters

Thanks muchly to Ecclesiastes for correcting me on the matter of Juhani.


It's less prominent nowadays than it was a few years back, but if you're at all tired of hearing tirades about furthering gay rights, you might wanna skip this rant.

So. Homosexuals in RPGs. There really aren't many. While homosexual and bisexual characters are starting to show up in the genre with more frequency, gay women and especially gay men are rarely given any significant roles in RPGs. You are way, way more likely to have a fantasy creature for a party member than a human being with even a hint of bisexual tendencies,* let alone an actual gay person. Hell, there are more DOGS in RPG parties than there are people that you could even reasonably infer are homosexual.

It's not that I want to see gay people everywhere I look in my RPGs. And I realize that, while it's estimated that 10% of America's population are homosexual, the estimate is only about 1% for Japan's population,** which is where most of the games in this genre come from. So it's not as big a cultural thing for the game makers, and it's not a big cultural thing for their primary and most profitable audience.

Still, when I looked over the list of RPGs I've played to this point--and not to toot my own horn or alternately make myself look extra pathetic, but it's a sizable list--these are the occurrences I can see of homosexuality being shown (beyond reasonable doubt, I mean; no speculation, even if Final Fantasy 7's Sephiroth DOES look like a chick in bondage gear that likes holding long swords and obsesses over a pretty sword-user in purple). I may have missed 1 or 2, because my memory's not perfect, but I'm confident I didn't miss more than that 1 or 2. Here we go:


1. Shadow Hearts 2 and 3: Pierre, Gerard, and Buigen are gay characters who serve in the game both as merchants and as "hilarious" stereotypes.
2. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4: Kanji has some confusion about his orientation early in the game, and it's mentioned (and then forgotten forever) that Yukiko has had a passing interest in her friend Chie.
3. Star Ocean 3: Claire and Nel are, from what I understand, canonically a couple according to the SO3 manga. It's only vaguely hinted at in the game itself, but I guess I'll count it.
4. Suikoden 5: Lucretia and Lelei are very clearly implied to be together.
5. Tales of Legendia: Elsa has a pretty clear romantic crush on Chloe (which Chloe has little to no reaction to one way or the other, oddly enough).
6. Fallout 2: You get the chance to marry a guy or a girl regardless of your protagonist's gender. Female protagonists also get a few chances for a quickie with various female NPCs.
7. Knights of the Old Republic 1: Juhani mentions having loved her female Jedi Master, if I remember correctly. She can also fall for a female main character and have those feelings returned, though few people will find this out without guidance because the requirements for doing so are supposedly fairly unusual.
8. Mass Effect 1 and 2: Female Commander Shepards can hook up with Liara in ME1, and either stay faithful to Liara or hook up with Kelly in ME2. Female Shepards can also have a one-timer with Sha'ira.
9. Dragon Age Origins: Leliana and Zevran are both bisexual and are romantic options for the protagonist regardless of the protagonist's gender. Protagonists of either gender can also hook up with a partner of either gender at the game's brothel.
10. Sailor Moon: Another Story: Sailors Uranus and Neptune are established as being together.
11. Baten Kaitos 2: Geldoblame and his superior Verus are together for most of the game.
12. Wild Arms 2's Caina was a man in the original Japanese version, and had a serious crush on his boss.


Now that list doesn't just fall short of hitting 10% of game characters that I've seen. That list also falls pretty damn short of hitting even that 1% ratio that Japan has (again, according to the internet). And that's a pretty generous list, too. I mean, the Sailor Scouts really shouldn't even be counted, since they were established in the show as being together before the game existed, especially since the game seems to generally ignore or downplay it. Not sure I should put on Caina, either, since I haven't actually SEEN that, given that he became a she for the US release. And frankly, including the Shadow Hearts guys is generous, too, because blatant and fairly offensive stereotypes aren't exactly the step in the right direction that I'm looking for. And you'll note that a lot of the examples I list come from Western RPGs. As far as just including non-heterosexual characters and relationships goes, Western RPGs seem to be on the right track, mostly. I do think that they could try including a homosexual relationship or two between characters who aren't the protagonist, but I'm satisfied overall with this hemisphere's work. Most RPGs, however, come from Japan, and, when you compare how many more Japanese RPGs there are than Western ones, my list shows a much smaller ratio for them--and as those Shadow Hearts nitwits prove, instances of homosexuality in Japanese RPGs aren't always handled well.

Now, an argument I hear defending Japanese RPGs on this matter often is that since it's not a significant issue or demographic in Japan, it's not fair to expect anything more of their games than what we've got. Well, I call bullshit on that. Deep, smelly, steamy bullshit. And the reason for this is the same one that I had for not accepting the same defense for why there's not much racial diversity in Japanese RPGs: the very foundation of the RPG genre in Japan lies almost ENTIRELY with Western culture and mythology. The vast majority of RPGs from Japan, past AND present, have drawn huge influence from Western culture--the medieval weapons and worlds, the most important monsters (even if dragons are a multi-cultured thing, most dragons in RPGs fit into the European styles), the clothing and cultural design, and so on. Just look at Christianity--how many RPGs have a structured religion clearly based on the basic principles and/or practices of Christianity? Christianity's as tiny and alien a thing to Japanese society as homosexuality, from the vague impressions and information I've got. They bend over backward to throw THAT into every other RPG they make. So why not throw a few more decent and more-than-extremely-vague-implication instances of homosexuality into the games? In addition, homosexuality is all OVER the place in anime, which is a Japanese artistic medium whose tropes, styles, and ideas are tied pretty strongly to the video game industry over there. So not only does it not make sense to have the issue all over the place in one and not the other, but the argument that it's not a big enough part of their culture to show up in the games more often is that much more flawed--they MAKE it a part of their entertainment culture frequently already.

I also have a problem with the importance placed on what few homosexual characters there are--or rather, the lack of such. Now, again, Western RPGs aren't so bad in this area--from the list above, we see multiple game protagonists that can be gay or bisexual, and the characters they can start a relationship with are major ones, genuinely important to the game's events. But if you look at the Japanese-born RPG characters from that list, what do you see? No protagonists, that's for sure. I've played about 140 RPGs that came from Asia, and not ONCE in all of them have I seen a homosexual protagonist. I'll give them that most of the Eastern RPG examples I've found at least have fairly important secondary characters--the Persona 4 kids, Star Ocean 3's Nel, and Suikoden 5's Lucretia are all very important to the plot, and I do at least appreciate that. Still, with as few homosexual characters to be found as there are in Japanese RPGs, the fact that none of them are protagonists just makes the problem seem worse.

There's also a really major problem I'd like to point out that occurs regardless of which side of the planet makes the RPG: lesbians. Now look, I am all for gay women characters in RPGs. All for them. What I am NOT all for is them being the ONLY homosexual characters being put into the games. Look at that list again. Even if you count the crappy Shadow Hearts embarrassments, gay female characters outnumber gay male ones by a ratio of about 2 to 1. As unfairly absent as homosexual characters are from RPGs in general, the problem is doubly bad for gay males.

Oh, I know WHY this is. Something a lot of people mistakenly thought after my old complaining rant about the lack of guy-guy romances in Mass Effect 1 was that I didn't get why they did it. I do. It's because it's marketable. Since the major demographic of gamers is young, typically stupid guys (even for more intellectual games, as RPGs can be), their main audience is going to be eager to see lesbians in their game, while they'll have considerably less interest--profitable interest--in seeing gay guy romancing. I do get it.

I just don't accept it.

It's not a good reason. Shallow marketing ploys do not interest me. What I want is to see intellectual integrity in my games. That is what I care about. Games, RPGs in particular, are vehicles for ideas, opinions, and creativity, and it is and always will be my firm belief that THOSE are the aspects that should hold ultimate importance in creating an RPG. Maybe I'm the minority--in fact, there's no "maybe" about it, I just am--but creative, intellectual integrity is what I want to see in my games, and so I'm going to keep complaining about the lack of gay male romances in RPGs when compared to the number of gay female ones even if I understand the reason why it's that way.

So yeah. Ultimately, I think there needs to be way more homosexual characters, important or minor, in RPGs in general, particularly male ones. I mean, not every single game or anything, but not once every 15 games, either. I don't need them in the spotlight, I don't need them to always be happy and perfect and all that jazz, but I do need them to BE there.











* A REAL hint, I mean. Yaoi fangirls can find romantic undertones in the greatest of hatred or apathy between any 2 (or more) attractive boys in any RPG, I know. Their perverse optimism notwithstanding, though, there's not much actual, reasonable evidence of homosexual tendencies in game characters in general, is what I mean.

** This is not exhaustively researched. This is just a ballpark estimate from a few sites Google pulled up. But the internet is never inaccurate, right?