Shin Megami Tensei Year continues, but before we get to the rant proper, Imma just plug this Kickstarter project right here: Cosmic Star Heroine. All told, it looks like it'll be a rather creative and fun RPG, so take a look and consider backing it.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled rant.
Honestly, there’s a lot about Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 that doesn’t impress me. I mean, it’s an alright RPG, but come on! “Alright” may be acceptable for a game in some other series, like Final Fantasy, “alright” may even be a tremendous achievement for a few series, like Dragon Quest, but “alright” is just not worthy of the prestigious name of Shin Megami Tensei! What’s the deal, Atlus?
But anyway, there still aren’t that many things about the game that merit outright criticism. Nonetheless, there ARE some, and I AM running an overly critical RPG blog here, so...let’s talk Yamato!
I gotta say off the bat that I don’t much like Yamato. He wants to reshape the present world into a meritocracy, an unequal world where the strong rule absolutely over the weak. Although it’s not precisely like the brutal might-makes-right world that Chiaki wishes to create in SMT3--Yamato’s intention is to maintain a clear and strong society, and the “strong” refers more to individuals who are more skilled, who perform more essential functions than others. A brilliant scientist would, I believe, be a very powerful person in Yamato’s merit-based society, regardless of their physical strength. Though I find this vision of a new world order to be leagues better than Chiaki’s nasty, brutish, and short ideal, it’s still one that I’m philosophically opposed to, and since Yamato stakes so much of his own character depth upon this idea, I can’t help but dislike him as much as I do his meritocracy.
Nonetheless, I’m fairly convinced that his vision’s got some flaws in it beyond what my bias can concoct on its own. The game offers a half-hearted argument against Yamato’s meritocracy on grounds of human equality and how we should all get along and so on, but beyond theoretical social arguments, Yamato’s vision is seriously flawed, for a couple reasons.
The first reason comes from a scene you can witness during the game’s course that’s meant to develop Yamato’s character. It’s actually rather reminiscent of some of the character development of Mitsuru from SMT Persona 3. Yamato and the Protagonist, whose semi-canon name is, I think, Hibiki, happen across some takoyaki, which he views as beneath him, since it is commoner food (good thing he explained, because I sure as hell wouldn’t have known myself). He does try it, however, and immediately finds that it is delicious.
Sadly, that’s more or less all the scene amounts to in the game, save some possible mention later on of his new fondness for takoyaki. I think it was only intended for the humor value. But take a look at this scene more deeply: we have an instance here where Yamato has a predetermined notion that something having to do with the common people, those who he considers beneath him, is bad. But when he actually gives it a chance--the very instant he does!--he finds that his belief was completely wrong, and that there is pleasing merit in this food, this product of the commoners, this representation of the weak! Although surely in a small way, this scene is a very effective metaphor for his views upon the supposedly lower people of the world and as a metaphor shows just how fragile and inaccurate his view, a view based on little to no actual, personal experience, can be! Honestly, it’s fucking tragic that this scene is never built off of later in this direction, because it would have turned this occasion into a strong and worthwhile argument and point of character development. As it is, its lack of impact on the plot and cast simply makes it a lesser shadow of a previous game’s better character and better scene. But the point is still completely reasonable to be inferred--Yamato’s views are flawed by inexperience and his own admission that the weak can provide a product, a service, that he desires.
Far more compelling, however, is my second argument for how the game itself shows the folly of Yamato’s beliefs--that argument being Protagonist Hibiki himself. It is well-established in SMTDS2 that Yamato has spent his life as head of his organization seeking out the best and brightest individuals possible as recruits, those whose skills, abilities, and intellects will be able to serve him best. And it is likewise well-established, by Yamato’s own words, that Hibiki is better and more useful than most, perhaps even all, of the agents that Yamato so carefully selected. Hibiki, who is only a volunteer, not an actual organization member. Hibiki, who Yamato never knew of until this crisis. Hibiki, who comes from the lower rabble that Yamato’s philosophy dismisses.
Question for ya there, Yamato. If you’ve crafted your organization to be as perfect a representation of your philosophy as possible, and the random bystander Hibiki has turned out to have hidden talents that make him better than any individual in your organization (and by a significant margin), doesn’t that sort of, y’know, completely invalidate your idea that the regular, unexceptional people you so casually dismiss can have no worth? You can’t even say Hibiki’s that much of an exception to the rule, because most of his party members are also civilian volunteers, and are more effective than the majority of Yamato’s elites.
Now, there is a seemingly strong argument against this point. You could say that Hibiki actually proves Yamato’s point, because Hibiki only became exceptional once the game’s events are in motion--essentially, he only excels when adversity comes to him, when it becomes a matter of survival, and that could reasonably be inferred to be the sort of circumstances that Yamato’s world order of meritocracy would naturally create.
There’s some good sense to this argument, but one must keep in mind that the dire circumstances of SMT Devil Survivor 2’s events are very different from the ones of Yamato’s meritocracy. Yamato’s meritocracy is shaped from from his view of an ideal world, and as such, the details of how the environment will pressure people to do well or be dominated will be based on his conceptions. Hibiki represents a potential of common people that Yamato has already previously failed to discover through Yamato’s methods of determining merit, so there’s no reason to think that a world based off of the beliefs and mental processes that created those faulty methods would be any less flawed in its assessment of people. If his judgment of merit failed before, and nothing significantly alters that judgment, it will fail again.
Yamato’s philosophy is flawed, flawed not by the game’s intended counter-position of a possible society of equality and share and share alike, but flawed rather by a demonstrable lack of experience and by strong representational evidence. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not unhappy to have his philosophy’s arguments weakened, being that I disagree strongly with it. But what I am unhappy about is that the game doesn’t seem to realize that it’s given itself a good setup to better explore the personal failings of Yamato’s vision of meritocracy, never acknowledges or capitalizes on these pieces of evidence and the arguments inherent within them that I’ve outlined here, but instead offers nothing but theories against the meritocracy that are just as hypothetical and insubstantial as the ones against the other side. Shin Megami Tensei usually humbles me with its subtle nuances of storytelling...it’s a very strange feeling to think that I might actually have noticed a significant avenue of their theme and plot that was apparently, to use the words of another SMT game’s character, outside the bounds of their own conjecture.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Icewind Dale 2's Superiority to Icewind Dale 1
Well, I've had the new color and placement theme for this blog up for 10 days now, and no complaints so far, so I'm gonna assume that it's good to stay.
I know it was a big hit with PC RPG gamers back in the day...but in all honesty, I didn’t really think much of Icewind Dale 1. In fact...well...I think it was actually kind of a bad RPG. Not very bad, but a little bad.
ID1 has a cookie-cutter western fantasy plot, the villains are undeveloped and uninteresting, and since the entire main cast are silent protagonists with no distinguishing traits whatever, there is seriously just nothing whatsoever in the game to catch and hold your interest besides exceptionally generic tabletop-to-video-game RPG gameplay, some kind of nice backgrounds, and a couple of nice background tunes.
If I had to take a guess as to how this came to pass, it’d be that the game’s developers were trying to bring the Dungeons and Dragons experience from your basement or the back room of the local comics shop as faithfully as possible. And in a sense, they succeeded.* With ID1, you’ve got the basics of a long-term campaign plot in a classic Dungeons and Dragons land, starring an adventuring group who kinda just rolled into town out of nowhere. They're a group of characters whose every trait is determined by the player at the character’s creation, and who are given no personality whatsoever by the game itself so as to have no impediment to the player’s ability to imagine the characters however the player wishes. That’s a pretty basic start to a D + D campaign, right there.
The problem is that there are certain elements of a tabletop game that you can’t imitate in a game like Icewind Dale 1--those featuring human interaction. The reason that a basic and unimaginative plot maintains one’s interest over a lengthy set of D + D sessions, the reason that empty characters who have no personality thrust upon them by the story’s narrative don’t get boring, is that D + D has human interaction helping it along. It’s the social aspect that gives the game most of the fun, ultimately. The way you and your friends work together to solve the conflicts thrown at you by the Dungeon Master makes those conflicts more interesting, the way that every step of your journey is narrated by your DM and your group forces you to employ your imagination to see it all (and it’s hard to be bored by one’s own imagination; your mind instinctively tries to interest itself, provided it’s given some leeway to do so), the way your characters are given personal shape both by their players and by their companions’ players’ actions...it all adds up to a good time, if you’ve got fun, imaginative people to play with.
But you see, that’s it right there--empty characters and basic plots work for a tabletop game because the social and imagination factors enhance them, fill them in (in fact, it wouldn’t work with more concrete plots and characters), but when you take those same factors and transfer them into a video game RPG, a more or less solo activity where the world and story are concretely displayed and told, and imagination’s ability to make positive adjustments is very limited, all you have is a bland game with empty characters. To make a Dungeons and Dragons video game right, one must go further, take steps in the storytelling process that wouldn’t normally be necessary. That’s why RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are good--they take the normal D + D foundations, and build off of them with well-defined (and well-written) support characters, and a more detailed plot. Icewind Dale 1 does not.
Now, Icewind Dale 2 is interesting, because even though ID1 was, so far as I’m aware, a commercial success and lauded by many players, ID2’s writers seem to have gone out of their way to try to improve several of the shortcomings of the first game.
For starters, there’s the plot. Now, I wouldn’t call Icewind Dale 2’s plot amazing or anything, but there’s definitely a stronger effort to have the plot maintain its hold over all the game’s events than there was in ID1. The events the lead into one another seem more clearly defined, and the reasons and goals of each step of the campaign feel more present--there’s considerably fewer times in ID2 where it feels like you’re kind of just vaguely wandering around, hoping to stumble over the next part of the story by accident. The plot is also better in general--it has better twists, exploration, and narration, and there’s some human depth to it this time around, aspects of it that warrant appreciation and even consideration. At its heart is the question of the treatment of half breeds in the Dungeons and Dragons setting, and even if it doesn’t exactly explore that question in depth, it at least gives us a glimpse at this deeper cause. And in doing so, we get a game that more solidly ties itself to the D + D lore and culture than ID1 did. ID1 basically was just its own bare-bones story taking place in a Dungeons and Dragons setting; ID2 takes the interesting issue of prejudice against half breeds, which is, from what little I’ve seen of the Dungeons and Dragons lore, an intrinsic element of the D + D universe. ID2 even references one of the most major overlying plot points of the setting through this theme, the Blood War. So ID2 not only has a better, fuller plot, but it endeavors to tie that plot more significantly to the series in which it takes place, and doing so makes this game all the better, makes it seem a relevant, important piece of the overall D + D picture.
The cast of ID2 is also much improved. Granted, the major flaw of the first Icewind Dale cast has not been improved upon--we’re still being saddled with not 1, but a full party of 6 voiceless, personality-less characters. Sigh. As I said earlier, I understand the reasoning behind it, but I still think that reasoning just makes for a less interesting game. Even your standard Silent Protagonist in a JRPG gives more color to his game than all 6 of these “characters” do.
Still, the rest of the casting in ID2 is very much better than its predecessor. The game’s plot-important NPCs have more personality, and actually seem to have some decent relevance to the game’s events. This time around, the narrator seems like someone actually telling a story, not just blandly reporting facts as seemed the case with ID1’s narrator, and she and her uncle are fun and engaging characters in their own right. And best of all, Icewind Dale 2 actually has a couple of decent villains. While I think that Isair and Madae had much more potential as villains than the game tried to realize, they nonetheless have some depth and background to them, with understandable motivations and emotions, and goals whose motives were good. In fact, if their actions had only been a bit less extreme, I’d actually say their villainy was justified. As with any good villain, having Isair and Madae as the game’s antagonists elevates ID2’s quality as an RPG quite a bit.
In the end, Icewind Dale 2 still isn’t much more than just an okay RPG. Its plot is fine, but not amazing, its cast is decent where it can be, but severely lacking in its most important aspects (the actual party members), and the theme of half-breed prejudice is interesting and worth exploration, but isn’t actually delved into all that much after all is said and done. Still, ID2’s a huge leap forward from the bland time-waster that was Icewind Dale 1, even though ID1’s sales meant that it really didn’t have to be, and I credit it for that.
* I only ever played a couple of sessions of Dungeons and Dragons in my youth, so I do have to admit that my familiarity with and perceptions of its universe and the general playing of the game are not too experienced. So just bear that in mind if I go in the wrong direction here.
I know it was a big hit with PC RPG gamers back in the day...but in all honesty, I didn’t really think much of Icewind Dale 1. In fact...well...I think it was actually kind of a bad RPG. Not very bad, but a little bad.
ID1 has a cookie-cutter western fantasy plot, the villains are undeveloped and uninteresting, and since the entire main cast are silent protagonists with no distinguishing traits whatever, there is seriously just nothing whatsoever in the game to catch and hold your interest besides exceptionally generic tabletop-to-video-game RPG gameplay, some kind of nice backgrounds, and a couple of nice background tunes.
If I had to take a guess as to how this came to pass, it’d be that the game’s developers were trying to bring the Dungeons and Dragons experience from your basement or the back room of the local comics shop as faithfully as possible. And in a sense, they succeeded.* With ID1, you’ve got the basics of a long-term campaign plot in a classic Dungeons and Dragons land, starring an adventuring group who kinda just rolled into town out of nowhere. They're a group of characters whose every trait is determined by the player at the character’s creation, and who are given no personality whatsoever by the game itself so as to have no impediment to the player’s ability to imagine the characters however the player wishes. That’s a pretty basic start to a D + D campaign, right there.
The problem is that there are certain elements of a tabletop game that you can’t imitate in a game like Icewind Dale 1--those featuring human interaction. The reason that a basic and unimaginative plot maintains one’s interest over a lengthy set of D + D sessions, the reason that empty characters who have no personality thrust upon them by the story’s narrative don’t get boring, is that D + D has human interaction helping it along. It’s the social aspect that gives the game most of the fun, ultimately. The way you and your friends work together to solve the conflicts thrown at you by the Dungeon Master makes those conflicts more interesting, the way that every step of your journey is narrated by your DM and your group forces you to employ your imagination to see it all (and it’s hard to be bored by one’s own imagination; your mind instinctively tries to interest itself, provided it’s given some leeway to do so), the way your characters are given personal shape both by their players and by their companions’ players’ actions...it all adds up to a good time, if you’ve got fun, imaginative people to play with.
But you see, that’s it right there--empty characters and basic plots work for a tabletop game because the social and imagination factors enhance them, fill them in (in fact, it wouldn’t work with more concrete plots and characters), but when you take those same factors and transfer them into a video game RPG, a more or less solo activity where the world and story are concretely displayed and told, and imagination’s ability to make positive adjustments is very limited, all you have is a bland game with empty characters. To make a Dungeons and Dragons video game right, one must go further, take steps in the storytelling process that wouldn’t normally be necessary. That’s why RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are good--they take the normal D + D foundations, and build off of them with well-defined (and well-written) support characters, and a more detailed plot. Icewind Dale 1 does not.
Now, Icewind Dale 2 is interesting, because even though ID1 was, so far as I’m aware, a commercial success and lauded by many players, ID2’s writers seem to have gone out of their way to try to improve several of the shortcomings of the first game.
For starters, there’s the plot. Now, I wouldn’t call Icewind Dale 2’s plot amazing or anything, but there’s definitely a stronger effort to have the plot maintain its hold over all the game’s events than there was in ID1. The events the lead into one another seem more clearly defined, and the reasons and goals of each step of the campaign feel more present--there’s considerably fewer times in ID2 where it feels like you’re kind of just vaguely wandering around, hoping to stumble over the next part of the story by accident. The plot is also better in general--it has better twists, exploration, and narration, and there’s some human depth to it this time around, aspects of it that warrant appreciation and even consideration. At its heart is the question of the treatment of half breeds in the Dungeons and Dragons setting, and even if it doesn’t exactly explore that question in depth, it at least gives us a glimpse at this deeper cause. And in doing so, we get a game that more solidly ties itself to the D + D lore and culture than ID1 did. ID1 basically was just its own bare-bones story taking place in a Dungeons and Dragons setting; ID2 takes the interesting issue of prejudice against half breeds, which is, from what little I’ve seen of the Dungeons and Dragons lore, an intrinsic element of the D + D universe. ID2 even references one of the most major overlying plot points of the setting through this theme, the Blood War. So ID2 not only has a better, fuller plot, but it endeavors to tie that plot more significantly to the series in which it takes place, and doing so makes this game all the better, makes it seem a relevant, important piece of the overall D + D picture.
The cast of ID2 is also much improved. Granted, the major flaw of the first Icewind Dale cast has not been improved upon--we’re still being saddled with not 1, but a full party of 6 voiceless, personality-less characters. Sigh. As I said earlier, I understand the reasoning behind it, but I still think that reasoning just makes for a less interesting game. Even your standard Silent Protagonist in a JRPG gives more color to his game than all 6 of these “characters” do.
Still, the rest of the casting in ID2 is very much better than its predecessor. The game’s plot-important NPCs have more personality, and actually seem to have some decent relevance to the game’s events. This time around, the narrator seems like someone actually telling a story, not just blandly reporting facts as seemed the case with ID1’s narrator, and she and her uncle are fun and engaging characters in their own right. And best of all, Icewind Dale 2 actually has a couple of decent villains. While I think that Isair and Madae had much more potential as villains than the game tried to realize, they nonetheless have some depth and background to them, with understandable motivations and emotions, and goals whose motives were good. In fact, if their actions had only been a bit less extreme, I’d actually say their villainy was justified. As with any good villain, having Isair and Madae as the game’s antagonists elevates ID2’s quality as an RPG quite a bit.
In the end, Icewind Dale 2 still isn’t much more than just an okay RPG. Its plot is fine, but not amazing, its cast is decent where it can be, but severely lacking in its most important aspects (the actual party members), and the theme of half-breed prejudice is interesting and worth exploration, but isn’t actually delved into all that much after all is said and done. Still, ID2’s a huge leap forward from the bland time-waster that was Icewind Dale 1, even though ID1’s sales meant that it really didn’t have to be, and I credit it for that.
* I only ever played a couple of sessions of Dungeons and Dragons in my youth, so I do have to admit that my familiarity with and perceptions of its universe and the general playing of the game are not too experienced. So just bear that in mind if I go in the wrong direction here.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
General RPGs' AMVs 10
I finally got around to making a personalized scheme for this blog, instead of just using the default template and colors (which WAS nicely functional, I must say). What do you guys think? I know it's not exactly a work of art, but I'm hoping it's reasonably pleasant to read on? Anyway, on with the rant.
Wow, 10 of these rants. That’s some kind of milestone, right? I guess? Well, whether it is or not, I’m sure as hell not gonna do anything special anyway. Business as usual, people, either ignore this and wait for the next, more interesting rant (as I suspect most of what few readers I have do each time I make one of these), or watch these videos and give them a Like and a Comment if they please you.
FINAL FANTASY
Final Fantasy 8: Full Moon, by Elessar1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5BgLyCLqts
The music used is FullMoon, by Sonata Arctica. While there are parts where this AMV kinda drags itself along (it’s a fairly long song), overall this is a pretty textbook case of a good AMV. The scenes match well to the lyrics, the song’s tone, or both, they’re cut together to follow the song’s direction smoothly, overall everything comes together in one neat, enjoyable package.
Final Fantasy 10: Yuna, by Zaon08: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5TBKC_4eKU
The music used is Primavera, by Ludovico Einaudi. Simple, quiet, deep, and lovely, this AMV does a very nice job of giving the viewer a short but poignant summary of Yuna’s journey that fits the tune well.
KINGDOM HEARTS
Kingdom Hearts 1 and Chain of Memories: Stars, by InvertedJabberwocky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s4-JDOZ1ac
The music used is Stars, from Les Miserables (the musical, not the sub-par movie). Not much to say about this, it’s just a decent AMV. The music’s doing the lion’s share of work in this one, with the KH visuals just sort of keeping up with it and working with its lyrics, but it does so adequately, and makes for a decent watch.
Kingdom Hearts Series: I’m Home, by FoolishNoob1337: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdA_QnEcfIs
The music used is Alex on the Spot, from Madagascar 2. This song’s strange mix of upbeat pop with a kind of beautiful desperation works really well with Kingdom Hearts’s visuals, and the visual edition and scene selection is just effortlessly streamlined and perfect. This is a great Kingdom Hearts AMV and really effectively conveys Sora’s desire to be able to return home to Destiny Islands with the people he loves. This is a damn fine AMV, and from now on I’m going to associate this song far more strongly with Kingdom Hearts than with Madascar 2.
MASS EFFECT
Mass Effect 3: Into the Nothing, by Taylor Smith: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFq7_xcB-Rw
The music used is Into the Nothing, by Breaking Benjamin. This is a great AMV, with great scene-to-music coordination that not only matches the song’s lyrics and tune nigh perfectly, but also all comes together to use the song as a description and tribute of the game. The one criticism I have (besides Taylor’s atrocious taste in love interests for Shepard, that is) is that there’s just too many scene changes too often, although I have to admit that they’re done very well all the same. Still, great AMV here, no question of it.
Mass Effect 3: My Way, by Garaman257: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoG8LB8QKWg
The music used is My Way, by Frank Sinatra. You know, with all the hundreds of AMVs out there that just use the same songs by Evanescence, Linkin Park, 30 Seconds to Mars, and so on over and over again, it’s refreshing to see someone effectively use something a little more unconventional. Putting Shepard’s journey and finale to Sinatra’s proud song of recollection works damn well, and makes for an AMV both fun and satisfying.
Mass Effect Series: Breathe Me, by Xeriana11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlbhAawBlBU
The music used is Breathe Me, by Sia. Xeriana11’s the one who made that awesome Mass Effect AMV about the Illusive Man which I did a special rant for a little while back, and she’s back with another solid offering this time. The music’s used effectively and meshes well with the visuals to set the mood and tell the story, if I’m interpreting it right, of a female Shepard who’s contemplating the things she’s done, showing us both the regrets she harbors and the love she has for her friends, the ones who she’s sacrificing herself for. A well made and emotional AMV, to be sure.
TALES OF
Tales of the Abyss: Dist the Rose Spins Around, by 2ndIgnition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDM1paIb4I8
The music used is You Spin Me Round, by Dead or Alive. Okay, maybe this one is only an AMV in the very strictest, most technical sense, but come on, cut me some slack--this is awesome.
Wow, 10 of these rants. That’s some kind of milestone, right? I guess? Well, whether it is or not, I’m sure as hell not gonna do anything special anyway. Business as usual, people, either ignore this and wait for the next, more interesting rant (as I suspect most of what few readers I have do each time I make one of these), or watch these videos and give them a Like and a Comment if they please you.
FINAL FANTASY
Final Fantasy 8: Full Moon, by Elessar1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5BgLyCLqts
The music used is FullMoon, by Sonata Arctica. While there are parts where this AMV kinda drags itself along (it’s a fairly long song), overall this is a pretty textbook case of a good AMV. The scenes match well to the lyrics, the song’s tone, or both, they’re cut together to follow the song’s direction smoothly, overall everything comes together in one neat, enjoyable package.
Final Fantasy 10: Yuna, by Zaon08: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5TBKC_4eKU
The music used is Primavera, by Ludovico Einaudi. Simple, quiet, deep, and lovely, this AMV does a very nice job of giving the viewer a short but poignant summary of Yuna’s journey that fits the tune well.
KINGDOM HEARTS
Kingdom Hearts 1 and Chain of Memories: Stars, by InvertedJabberwocky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s4-JDOZ1ac
The music used is Stars, from Les Miserables (the musical, not the sub-par movie). Not much to say about this, it’s just a decent AMV. The music’s doing the lion’s share of work in this one, with the KH visuals just sort of keeping up with it and working with its lyrics, but it does so adequately, and makes for a decent watch.
Kingdom Hearts Series: I’m Home, by FoolishNoob1337: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdA_QnEcfIs
The music used is Alex on the Spot, from Madagascar 2. This song’s strange mix of upbeat pop with a kind of beautiful desperation works really well with Kingdom Hearts’s visuals, and the visual edition and scene selection is just effortlessly streamlined and perfect. This is a great Kingdom Hearts AMV and really effectively conveys Sora’s desire to be able to return home to Destiny Islands with the people he loves. This is a damn fine AMV, and from now on I’m going to associate this song far more strongly with Kingdom Hearts than with Madascar 2.
MASS EFFECT
Mass Effect 3: Into the Nothing, by Taylor Smith: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFq7_xcB-Rw
The music used is Into the Nothing, by Breaking Benjamin. This is a great AMV, with great scene-to-music coordination that not only matches the song’s lyrics and tune nigh perfectly, but also all comes together to use the song as a description and tribute of the game. The one criticism I have (besides Taylor’s atrocious taste in love interests for Shepard, that is) is that there’s just too many scene changes too often, although I have to admit that they’re done very well all the same. Still, great AMV here, no question of it.
Mass Effect 3: My Way, by Garaman257: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoG8LB8QKWg
The music used is My Way, by Frank Sinatra. You know, with all the hundreds of AMVs out there that just use the same songs by Evanescence, Linkin Park, 30 Seconds to Mars, and so on over and over again, it’s refreshing to see someone effectively use something a little more unconventional. Putting Shepard’s journey and finale to Sinatra’s proud song of recollection works damn well, and makes for an AMV both fun and satisfying.
Mass Effect Series: Breathe Me, by Xeriana11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlbhAawBlBU
The music used is Breathe Me, by Sia. Xeriana11’s the one who made that awesome Mass Effect AMV about the Illusive Man which I did a special rant for a little while back, and she’s back with another solid offering this time. The music’s used effectively and meshes well with the visuals to set the mood and tell the story, if I’m interpreting it right, of a female Shepard who’s contemplating the things she’s done, showing us both the regrets she harbors and the love she has for her friends, the ones who she’s sacrificing herself for. A well made and emotional AMV, to be sure.
TALES OF
Tales of the Abyss: Dist the Rose Spins Around, by 2ndIgnition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDM1paIb4I8
The music used is You Spin Me Round, by Dead or Alive. Okay, maybe this one is only an AMV in the very strictest, most technical sense, but come on, cut me some slack--this is awesome.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3's AI-Controlled Party Members
So far my Shin Megami Tensei rants of 2013 have been pretty positive and meaningful, and I’ve tried to present some food for thought that emphasizes good aspects of the SMT games. But who wants to read all that crap? It’s much more fun to complain about stuff! Which brings me to today’s rant subject: the semi-infamous Party Member AI of SMT Persona 3.
It’s like this: In SMTP3, during battles, you, the player, control the protagonist Minato’s actions. But that’s all. The other 3 members of the party act according to the game’s whims, not your own. It’s not entirely outside of your control, as you can assign each party member a certain basic style of action to follow during the battle (for example, you could put someone on Healer mode, and as a result their actions will be primarily concerned with healing the party’s wounds before taking offensive actions), but that gentle prod in a certain direction is all the control you’re allowed--the specific actions from one turn to the next are outside of your control.
This is a problem.
Now, SMTP3 wasn’t the first RPG to employ AI in party members, nor has it been the last. Quite a few have had it in one way or another. Allies in Shining Force EXA are computer-controlled, for example, with the player only getting to determine their behavior patterns, rather than the whole behavior, as with Persona 3. In Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3, and The Secret of Evermore, you can control all party members’ actions when you wish, but without your direct action, the party members not being moved around by you specifically will engage in combat with the AI controlling them. Much the same with Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2--you can give party members specific orders and set them to act according to certain AI patterns, but they’re generally controlled by the game itself as you go along. And it’s basically the same with Dragon Age 1 and 2, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura, the Mass Effect series, the Star Ocean series, and so many others. On occasion you even get a party member who can’t be controlled in any way, such as with Bow-wow in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, or the troopers in The Magic of Scheherazade. That complete lack of control is also often the case of very temporary guest party members, too, like the ones you occasionally have in Final Fantasy Tactics. Persona 3 is not the only game with AI in charge of party members, not by a long shot. It’s not even the only game in its own series with AI-controlled party members; both SMT Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha titles have Raidou’s demons on semi-autopilot.
Its AI is also not even all that bad, really. I wouldn’t say that Persona 3’s ally AI is perfect, or even particularly great, but it’s certainly functional, and although you do have to compensate for it some of the time, it could be far worse. Hell, a lot of the examples I listed above have AI that makes for far less useful allies than that of SMTP3. Without direct and constant supervision, Mass Effect allies don’t tend to be much more than decoys, for example. Your allies in SMTP3 actually do seem like they’re trying to cover your back, even if they’re not always doing it well. The allies of Secret of Mana, by contrast, just seem to be going it solo, with no interest one way or another in a team effort. Allies in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates are even worse, just standing around and only sporadically attacking enemies. So it’s not like Persona 3’s AI is even all that bad.
So what’s the problem, then, with Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3’s AI? Why so much irritation focused upon it by myself and others, and not on the AI of other games?
The problem is that it’s in a game where it has absolutely no place, no practical application whatsoever. Look at most of the games I mentioned above that also have party members controlled largely or entirely by AI. You know what a LOT of them have in common? They’re games with battle systems in which fights take place in at least partial real time. Enemies move and act freely in Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, and so do you. Everyone isn’t just standing around waiting for each turn to begin and end in The Legend of Zelda, Star Ocean, and Baldur’s Gate games, and as a result, the action is fast-paced enough that the player can realistically only dependably control one single character. Sometimes you have the time and wherewithal to direct your allies’ actions in Mass Effect, but ME has pacing which necessitates you concerning yourself with your protagonist’s actions first and foremost. Some games are so fast-paced that just controlling one party member taxes you to your limit, and you NEED a game’s AI to keep the rest of the party going.
SMTP3, however, runs on a very traditional turn-based system. In true turn-based combat such as this, enemies and allies do not move until you’ve finished assigning your party’s actions for the next turn, and once everyone’s acted in that turn, they all stop and wait for you again. With a fast-paced, action RPG like Shining Force EXA, there is a REASON to have your party members directed by AI--you’re too busy controlling the protagonist to keep up with everyone else. But when the whole battle system waits on you, that reason for AI controlled teammates is gone.
Not every game I mentioned as having AI party members is an action RPG, though. The Magic of Scheherazade’s troopers are only present during the turn-based battles that occur between scenes, for example. But you know, the troopers are just nameless mercenary grunts whose services you’ve purchased, and are totally optional. The actual, real party members of TMoS are fully controllable during the turn-based battles. The troopers are just some bonus damage-dealers, not a real part of the party. You don’t have any particular reason to expect full control of them. And RPGs where an AI controlled guest is helping you in battles? Well, there it makes a certain amount of sense that you don’t have control of them. They’re not meant to be your long term comrades, they’re just helping you as an outside party. A temporary guest party member doesn’t give you the same feeling of someone you should be in control of as an actual, major member of the fighting team.
So there’s no reason, gameplay-wise, for your Persona 3 party members to be AI-controlled, nor does it seem particularly logical. And here’s the problem: that gives it no excuse for its detrimental effect on the gameplay. See, turn-based gameplay is one of the most boring kinds of gameplay imaginable, essentially reducing the actual gaming part of your game to a mundane mental process that is identical to the one for navigating windows and folders on your computer, or ordering lunch from a menu. There is really only one tiny, totally inadequate nugget of gameplay enjoyment created by vacuuming the rest of the fun out of a game to make it turn-based, and that is the strategy aspect. Planning out what to do each turn to damage your enemies and keep your party members alive, while taking into account the countless variables of stats, hit points, magic endurance restraints, elemental strengths and weaknesses, status ailments and benefits, and so on, it all takes a fair amount of strategic planning to do it successfully. Your reward for putting up with the boredom of turn-based combat is knowing that your strategies are sound and that you’ve used your resources effectively.
So what would be a really, really stupid idea when you’re making a turn-based game? Taking 75% of all precise strategic control out of the player’s hands! You can only vaguely plan out the behavior of 3/4ths of your party in this game, and that is detrimental to the ability of the player to play with precise strategy--and thus is detrimental to the main point of turn-based combat. It’s especially bad when one considers that this is a Shin Megami Tensei game, part of a series where strategic gameplay is especially important. It just makes no sense.
Atlus luckily seemed to recognize their error, and the SMTP3 remake on the Playstation Portable allowed for full control of the party. Still, it’s hard to believe that they actually thought this was a good idea. What the hell were they thinking? They couldn’t possibly have thought that needlessly taking the majority of control away from the player would increase the fun. Was it supposed to be story-related, somehow? Like...like...saying that most of the time, you can’t control other people, that you can only really control yourself and hope others follow your guidance? Because that would kinda work with the Social Links thing kinda well, and you could say that being unable to control the party members is kinda like how you can’t control the way the Tarot Cards of your destiny fall, but being able to control the protagonist in the party signifies the part our free will plays in our lives, only a third as much as uncontrollable destiny, but if your will and wisdom are great enough, that small part can be enough to tip the scales in your favor so you can make your own destiny nonetheless...By God, could it be that Atlus was using the AI-controlled party members to make the gameplay itself a symbol of the messages of fate and one great individual’s free will, creating a whole new level of beautiful meaning by layering their ideal and theme into the very process of their game art? Are they even more brilliant than I had thought?
...No, I’m pretty sure this time I really am reading way too much into this. AI party members in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 was a stupid idea, Atlus screwed up, The End.
It’s like this: In SMTP3, during battles, you, the player, control the protagonist Minato’s actions. But that’s all. The other 3 members of the party act according to the game’s whims, not your own. It’s not entirely outside of your control, as you can assign each party member a certain basic style of action to follow during the battle (for example, you could put someone on Healer mode, and as a result their actions will be primarily concerned with healing the party’s wounds before taking offensive actions), but that gentle prod in a certain direction is all the control you’re allowed--the specific actions from one turn to the next are outside of your control.
This is a problem.
Now, SMTP3 wasn’t the first RPG to employ AI in party members, nor has it been the last. Quite a few have had it in one way or another. Allies in Shining Force EXA are computer-controlled, for example, with the player only getting to determine their behavior patterns, rather than the whole behavior, as with Persona 3. In Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3, and The Secret of Evermore, you can control all party members’ actions when you wish, but without your direct action, the party members not being moved around by you specifically will engage in combat with the AI controlling them. Much the same with Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2--you can give party members specific orders and set them to act according to certain AI patterns, but they’re generally controlled by the game itself as you go along. And it’s basically the same with Dragon Age 1 and 2, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura, the Mass Effect series, the Star Ocean series, and so many others. On occasion you even get a party member who can’t be controlled in any way, such as with Bow-wow in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, or the troopers in The Magic of Scheherazade. That complete lack of control is also often the case of very temporary guest party members, too, like the ones you occasionally have in Final Fantasy Tactics. Persona 3 is not the only game with AI in charge of party members, not by a long shot. It’s not even the only game in its own series with AI-controlled party members; both SMT Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha titles have Raidou’s demons on semi-autopilot.
Its AI is also not even all that bad, really. I wouldn’t say that Persona 3’s ally AI is perfect, or even particularly great, but it’s certainly functional, and although you do have to compensate for it some of the time, it could be far worse. Hell, a lot of the examples I listed above have AI that makes for far less useful allies than that of SMTP3. Without direct and constant supervision, Mass Effect allies don’t tend to be much more than decoys, for example. Your allies in SMTP3 actually do seem like they’re trying to cover your back, even if they’re not always doing it well. The allies of Secret of Mana, by contrast, just seem to be going it solo, with no interest one way or another in a team effort. Allies in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates are even worse, just standing around and only sporadically attacking enemies. So it’s not like Persona 3’s AI is even all that bad.
So what’s the problem, then, with Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3’s AI? Why so much irritation focused upon it by myself and others, and not on the AI of other games?
The problem is that it’s in a game where it has absolutely no place, no practical application whatsoever. Look at most of the games I mentioned above that also have party members controlled largely or entirely by AI. You know what a LOT of them have in common? They’re games with battle systems in which fights take place in at least partial real time. Enemies move and act freely in Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, and so do you. Everyone isn’t just standing around waiting for each turn to begin and end in The Legend of Zelda, Star Ocean, and Baldur’s Gate games, and as a result, the action is fast-paced enough that the player can realistically only dependably control one single character. Sometimes you have the time and wherewithal to direct your allies’ actions in Mass Effect, but ME has pacing which necessitates you concerning yourself with your protagonist’s actions first and foremost. Some games are so fast-paced that just controlling one party member taxes you to your limit, and you NEED a game’s AI to keep the rest of the party going.
SMTP3, however, runs on a very traditional turn-based system. In true turn-based combat such as this, enemies and allies do not move until you’ve finished assigning your party’s actions for the next turn, and once everyone’s acted in that turn, they all stop and wait for you again. With a fast-paced, action RPG like Shining Force EXA, there is a REASON to have your party members directed by AI--you’re too busy controlling the protagonist to keep up with everyone else. But when the whole battle system waits on you, that reason for AI controlled teammates is gone.
Not every game I mentioned as having AI party members is an action RPG, though. The Magic of Scheherazade’s troopers are only present during the turn-based battles that occur between scenes, for example. But you know, the troopers are just nameless mercenary grunts whose services you’ve purchased, and are totally optional. The actual, real party members of TMoS are fully controllable during the turn-based battles. The troopers are just some bonus damage-dealers, not a real part of the party. You don’t have any particular reason to expect full control of them. And RPGs where an AI controlled guest is helping you in battles? Well, there it makes a certain amount of sense that you don’t have control of them. They’re not meant to be your long term comrades, they’re just helping you as an outside party. A temporary guest party member doesn’t give you the same feeling of someone you should be in control of as an actual, major member of the fighting team.
So there’s no reason, gameplay-wise, for your Persona 3 party members to be AI-controlled, nor does it seem particularly logical. And here’s the problem: that gives it no excuse for its detrimental effect on the gameplay. See, turn-based gameplay is one of the most boring kinds of gameplay imaginable, essentially reducing the actual gaming part of your game to a mundane mental process that is identical to the one for navigating windows and folders on your computer, or ordering lunch from a menu. There is really only one tiny, totally inadequate nugget of gameplay enjoyment created by vacuuming the rest of the fun out of a game to make it turn-based, and that is the strategy aspect. Planning out what to do each turn to damage your enemies and keep your party members alive, while taking into account the countless variables of stats, hit points, magic endurance restraints, elemental strengths and weaknesses, status ailments and benefits, and so on, it all takes a fair amount of strategic planning to do it successfully. Your reward for putting up with the boredom of turn-based combat is knowing that your strategies are sound and that you’ve used your resources effectively.
So what would be a really, really stupid idea when you’re making a turn-based game? Taking 75% of all precise strategic control out of the player’s hands! You can only vaguely plan out the behavior of 3/4ths of your party in this game, and that is detrimental to the ability of the player to play with precise strategy--and thus is detrimental to the main point of turn-based combat. It’s especially bad when one considers that this is a Shin Megami Tensei game, part of a series where strategic gameplay is especially important. It just makes no sense.
Atlus luckily seemed to recognize their error, and the SMTP3 remake on the Playstation Portable allowed for full control of the party. Still, it’s hard to believe that they actually thought this was a good idea. What the hell were they thinking? They couldn’t possibly have thought that needlessly taking the majority of control away from the player would increase the fun. Was it supposed to be story-related, somehow? Like...like...saying that most of the time, you can’t control other people, that you can only really control yourself and hope others follow your guidance? Because that would kinda work with the Social Links thing kinda well, and you could say that being unable to control the party members is kinda like how you can’t control the way the Tarot Cards of your destiny fall, but being able to control the protagonist in the party signifies the part our free will plays in our lives, only a third as much as uncontrollable destiny, but if your will and wisdom are great enough, that small part can be enough to tip the scales in your favor so you can make your own destiny nonetheless...By God, could it be that Atlus was using the AI-controlled party members to make the gameplay itself a symbol of the messages of fate and one great individual’s free will, creating a whole new level of beautiful meaning by layering their ideal and theme into the very process of their game art? Are they even more brilliant than I had thought?
...No, I’m pretty sure this time I really am reading way too much into this. AI party members in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 was a stupid idea, Atlus screwed up, The End.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
The Final Fantasy Series's Limit Break Names
Behold, that most sacred and rare of creatures: a short rant.
Desperation Attack. Limit Break. Trance. Overdrive. EX Mode. And, inexplicably, Quickening. Why exactly does the Final Fantasy series have half a dozen names for more or less the same gameplay concept?
I don’t know why I’m so hard on Final Fantasy naming (recall my old rants on calling their lightning spells “Thunder” and on the stupid suffixes -ara and -aga (and nowadays, there’s -ada, which is just as bad)) in particular,* but this bugs me. I mean, look, in fairness, the nature of the ability does change a little from game to game, sometimes. In FF6, the Desperation Attack had a probability of activating when a character was at very low HP. In FF7, on the other hand, there was a Limit Break gauge that continually built up as the character got damaged, and once it was filled the character could use their Limit Break, although they didn’t have to--they could just kinda sit on it for a while until the player wanted to use it. FF9’s Trance was less a special ability than a mode in which, for a short period of time, a character’s abilities were enhanced, which was, like FF7, gradually built up to from taking damage. And so on and so forth. But these variations are ultimately just small changes to the same concept, that of special, climatic powers being unlocked in (supposedly) desperate situations. Naming them differently as though they were completely different concepts would be like deciding you couldn’t call a black cat the same kind of animal as a cat with white fur. The cosmetic differences aren’t enough to change the fact that they’re both cats.
I just don’t get it. What purpose does the name change serve, really? Why the desire to differentiate at all? I can understand Square’s wish to name FF7’s Limit Breaks differently since FF6’s Desperation Attacks were not really a well-defined part of the game, and were only rarely seen (I daresay most playthroughs of FF6 don’t see a Desperation Attack trigger even once), but after FF7 cemented the concept in Final Fantasy gameplay and gave it a very functional and personalized name, why keep renaming it later? Particularly since SquareEnix would eventually come back to the Limit name in its semi-Final-Fantasy-related Kingdom Hearts series. It just seems needless and silly.
* It’s not like plenty of other RPGs don’t also have stupidly-named spells and abilities. The Legend of Dragoon called one of its huge plot weapons the Psychadelic Bomb and tried to pass it off as serious, and don’t even get me started on the naming of abilities and spells in the Shin Megami Tensei series.**
** Actually, on second thought, I SHOULD get started on that. Thanks for the rant idea, me. Oh, no problem, man! I love your work. Well, except for those AMV rants. Those’re totally gay.
Desperation Attack. Limit Break. Trance. Overdrive. EX Mode. And, inexplicably, Quickening. Why exactly does the Final Fantasy series have half a dozen names for more or less the same gameplay concept?
I don’t know why I’m so hard on Final Fantasy naming (recall my old rants on calling their lightning spells “Thunder” and on the stupid suffixes -ara and -aga (and nowadays, there’s -ada, which is just as bad)) in particular,* but this bugs me. I mean, look, in fairness, the nature of the ability does change a little from game to game, sometimes. In FF6, the Desperation Attack had a probability of activating when a character was at very low HP. In FF7, on the other hand, there was a Limit Break gauge that continually built up as the character got damaged, and once it was filled the character could use their Limit Break, although they didn’t have to--they could just kinda sit on it for a while until the player wanted to use it. FF9’s Trance was less a special ability than a mode in which, for a short period of time, a character’s abilities were enhanced, which was, like FF7, gradually built up to from taking damage. And so on and so forth. But these variations are ultimately just small changes to the same concept, that of special, climatic powers being unlocked in (supposedly) desperate situations. Naming them differently as though they were completely different concepts would be like deciding you couldn’t call a black cat the same kind of animal as a cat with white fur. The cosmetic differences aren’t enough to change the fact that they’re both cats.
I just don’t get it. What purpose does the name change serve, really? Why the desire to differentiate at all? I can understand Square’s wish to name FF7’s Limit Breaks differently since FF6’s Desperation Attacks were not really a well-defined part of the game, and were only rarely seen (I daresay most playthroughs of FF6 don’t see a Desperation Attack trigger even once), but after FF7 cemented the concept in Final Fantasy gameplay and gave it a very functional and personalized name, why keep renaming it later? Particularly since SquareEnix would eventually come back to the Limit name in its semi-Final-Fantasy-related Kingdom Hearts series. It just seems needless and silly.
* It’s not like plenty of other RPGs don’t also have stupidly-named spells and abilities. The Legend of Dragoon called one of its huge plot weapons the Psychadelic Bomb and tried to pass it off as serious, and don’t even get me started on the naming of abilities and spells in the Shin Megami Tensei series.**
** Actually, on second thought, I SHOULD get started on that. Thanks for the rant idea, me. Oh, no problem, man! I love your work. Well, except for those AMV rants. Those’re totally gay.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3's The Answer's Worth
Well, I've successfully managed to not mess up my plan to do a Shin Megami Tensei rant once a month for the rest of the year during the very first month. So far, so good. Thanks to Ecclesiastes for looking this over for me, making sure it wasn’t complete crap. You’re a prince, sir.
Warning: This rant will reference directly important events of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3’s ending. It’s a great enough game, and a great enough ending, that if you haven’t already played SMTP3 from start to finish, you should avoid this rant. Go do something else instead. Watch a movie, draw some ponies, eat a delicious meal of gumbo, play SMTP3 since you haven’t already, I don’t care. Just don’t you spoil this for me. By spoiling it for you.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is an absolutely terrific RPG, one of the best I’ve played and well worthy of the honorable title of Shin Megami Tensei. It’s a pretty universal hit, too, in that the strong majority of people who have played it enjoyed it greatly, as well as a cult classic that managed to get nearly as much attention from the RPG community as one of SquareEnix’s numerous overhyped, inferior offerings. I can’t help but be pretty pleased by that fact. I feel like at least half of the truly excellent RPGs are sadly quite ignored (even more than RPGs usually are, I mean) while many of the mediocre or outright bad ones are highlighted (Final Fantasy for the last 10 years, for example), so when one of the popular ones happens to actually DESERVE its renown, it’s a happy treat for me.
The thing with SMTP3 is that it was popular enough that Atlus decided to milk the game for all it’s worth. Almost a year after SMTP3’s release, Atlus rereleased the game as Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES, which had several additions built into it. The Social Links were easier to progress, for example, leaving a little extra time during the game’s course to experience its other content, and some new content was added to the main game, most notably a Social Link for Aigis (which turned out to be one of the best in the game). Most importantly, a post-game quest called The Answer was added, which transferred the role of protagonist to Aigis, and set out to clear up some ambiguities about SMTP3’s ending and show us how the game’s cast reacted to the tragic passing of Minato.
Now, I’m not too terribly familiar with the SMT fanbase in general, so I could be wrong, but I’ve gotten the general impression from people I’ve spoken with that The Answer is not particularly liked by a significant number of players. I don’t think there are many that outright hate it, but the general outlook I’ve perceived is a negative one. And I don’t think that’s really a fair assessment.
Now, to be fair, I have to acknowledge that in some regards, The Answer IS not so good. Specifically, when one looks at it with the perspective of a practical consumer. If one were to equate the differences between SMTP3’s original and FES versions, the FES version is less like a rerelease of the original game (since the original had only come out less than a year prior, and for the same system), and more like the original game with a standard Downloadable Content package (the extra stuff in the main game) and an Expansion (The Answer addition). But you’re not just buying a DLC and an Expansion--in order to experience the FES version’s benefits, you had to pay for the whole game all over again. Fine for a consumer who hadn’t happened to purchase the original version (like me), but not so great for anyone who did. Now Atlus did take a small step to better the situation, in that you could, I understand, transfer your original version’s save game information to the FES version and be able to retain some of the stuff from the first version, so it at least wasn’t a total loss, time-wise, for the owners of the original SMTP3. But the fact remains that anyone who had bought the original and wanted to experience the FES version’s benefits was forced to pay the full price of a new game for what could only very generously be called even half a game’s worth of content.
I’m not sure what Atlus could have done about this, admittedly. Playstation 2 games aren’t really designed with the ability to be modified and added to later. Still, I feel like it’s a raw deal for the customer, and surely there was SOMETHING they could have done. I mean, just off the top of my head, maybe they could’ve had 20 or 30 bucks knocked off SMTP3’s FES version price upon purchase for anyone who could prove that they purchased the original. Like, have’em show a receipt (and ID, perhaps) to the retailer to prove they had previously bought a non-used copy of the original game as they get the new one. Something like that. But as it is, the SMTP3 FES version, and by extent The Answer, IS something of a rip-off.*
But by its own merits? Well, I don’t really have a problem with The Answer. I think that the returning cast are portrayed pretty well, and although their character development isn’t ever as strong as it was at times during the main game, it IS there, and it’s certainly not bad. I thought that the scene where Mitsuru’s comforting Yukari was really quite good, in fact, and Aigis’s character is handled pretty well and in a way that expands her beyond the tenderly wise, yearning, and loving role she had, while still properly acknowledging and building off of it. I like the general premise of the story, and while I think that the plot advances a bit slowly at times, it’s overall worthwhile to experience, and learning the truth of Minato’s fate is a pretty poignant moment.
From what I’ve gathered from the idle conversation of friends and asking around on GameFAQs, there are a few main problems that people have specified regarding The Answer. The first is Metis, the new character. Well, I can’t really argue part of this idea. Metis hasn’t got much depth as a character, and her personality’s neither especially memorable nor appealing. Still, I don’t feel that Metis is a significant detracting factor of The Answer. She does serve her purpose for the plot as the only one supporting Aigis as the group becomes divided, and even if her character adds more or less nothing to the adventure by her own individual merits, I don’t think it takes anything from it, either. And I would argue that the same thing could be said for Akihiko and Koromaru in the main game (and The Answer, for that matter), and no one seems to have much of a problem with them.
Another problem I’ve seen people state about The Answer is how it ends. The Answer ends with Aigis seeming like she should have died, but continuing to live on even though her internal robotic parts have been fried, with the only explanation of this phenomenon being Fuuka’s theorizing that she seems like she’s alive now. It’s been said that this is more your standard improbably everyone’s-happy-sunshine-and-rainbows-for-all Disney ending than a Shin Megami Tensei ending. I suppose I see some logic to this; it IS kind of quickly thrown in there, just as quickly resolved, and has an almost overbearing positivity to it. But I actually think that despite how rushed the idea is, it’s important to The Answer, because it’s ultimately showing us the Tarot’s transition from end to beginning. As I mentioned in my overly long SMTP3 and 4 Tarot comparison rant, the Major Arcana of the Tarot basically symbolize a journey of self-actualization and human understanding, beginning with The Fool, where all is blank and the journey’s potential is raw and unrestricted, and ending with The World, the end to The Fool’s journey through the Major Arcana, at which point the cycle shall begin again at a higher level with a new Fool, just as every close to a journey of understanding in life marks the beginning of a journey of a new kind. Aigis’s death as an android and as what she once was is the moment of The World Arcana in The Answer (perhaps even of SMTP3 as a whole), as she has reached the end of her small journey of understanding, and her rebirth as something alive, a being ready to join the world in a new way, a better way than she could before, represents a new beginning for her, the moment when she once again becomes The Fool, new, fresh, having all the understanding and lessons of the previous cycle within herself and ready to embark on a new journey to grow in new ways. Hell, in my opinion, this is also the start of the next cycle of the journey began and completed by protagonist Minato, for it was his journey from Fool to World in the main game that has brought all of this about, and the greatest pieces of understanding that Aigis gains from her journey through The Answer are those that Minato learned, embraced, and embodied. To me, Aigis’s beginning a new cycle is the proper completion and continuation of Minato’s as much as it is hers.
At any rate, in a game that so brilliantly and artfully employs and embodies the considerable wisdoms and themes of the Tarot, an ending like this in some degree is pretty crucial. Yes, looking at this strictly on its surface level, it is a bit too cheerfully feel-good, and too contrived to BE cheerfully feel-good. And don’t get me wrong, that IS a problem--one of the many great aspects of SMTP3 is that on top of all the immense towers of insight and wisdoms and art is a story that’s genuinely fun, interesting, and creative, making it a game that’s not just brilliant, but good even at surface level (which is sadly often not the case with works whose greatness is underlying), so for the actual, literal events and storytelling value of The Answer’s ending to be lacking is disappointing. Nonetheless, what truly makes SMTP3 exceptional, even brilliant, is its commitment to the subtle, underlying themes of the Tarot, and so I have to say that I view the happy end of The Answer as a good thing, because it all adds up to what it should.
Perhaps the biggest complaint I’ve seen about The Answer, though, is its general pace of narrative. The simple fact of the matter is that most of The Answer is about the gameplay, not the plot, focusing more on traversing the dungeon and a higher difficulty for the battles.** Many of the times when you get a break to see the story elements, they’re more about character back story than the actual plot at hand. The real, main story of The Answer is mostly present at its beginning and in its last stages, leaving the majority of the time you spend with The Answer small side stuff and just battles, battles, battles. And...well, this complaint is pretty much totally legitimate. I mean, I think I appreciate the small bits of character history more than many people do, but they’re not all that important, or even particularly good. And you know my feelings on RPG gameplay, so increasing its quantity at the sacrifice of more time with the plot is NOT a good thing to me. Yeah, this is a real problem with The Answer, one that I noticed and was very displeased with as I played through it.
But you know...it’s something I can forgive. Because, well, I think what plot IS there is worth it. The Answer provides us with a decent mini-story about how the SMTP3 cast reacts to the loss of their leader in SMTP3’s ending, and brings these broken people back to the state that Minato would have wanted them to be in, the state that he gave his life to provide for them--hope, personal awareness, friendship, and the optimistic desire to go out there and create a better world. It gives them, and we the players, the promised answer of what exactly happened to Minato, why he died, and provides a little more explanation on Nyx, as well, all in a way that is creative, interesting, and even inspiring--just what SMTP3 is supposed to be. A better understanding of Minato’s sacrifice makes him that much greater a hero, as well. I also appreciate some of the character development, even if there’s only a small amount--the stuff regarding Mitsuru and Yukari after they lose to Aigis and Metis was very well-done, for example. And ultimately, The Answer gives us what we must have from SMTP3: a story reaffirming just how powerful the human spirit can be, a reminder of how important it is to improve ourselves as humans to reach that higher level of spirit that Minato does, a story that finalizes the Tarot journey we saw before with Minato and makes the transition into the next cycle of the Tarot’s journey through Aigis (emphasized ever so cleverly by the fact that this new journey begins on April 1st, aka April Fools’ Day), and the idea that it is through our connections to those around us that we bring meaning to our lives and better ourselves as human beings.***
So in the end, what’s the verdict on The Answer? Well, it’s not as good as the main game of Persona 3. But SMTP3 is one of the top 10 greatest RPGs I’ve ever played. It’s a shame that its follow-up doesn’t live up to the game’s quality, but that’s still far and away from making it actually bad. It does what it sets out to, and even if it doesn’t give us as much content-per-playtime as it really should, what it’s got IS often good, and does, by its end, tie into the primary Tarot theme adequately. It’s not amazing, but I think saying that it isn’t good is a disservice to The Answer.
* Not the worst I’ve seen where add-ons are concerned, of course. Mass Effect 3’s Omega DLC, Dragon Age 1’s Awakening Expansion, and Borderlands 1’s Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot DLC are all bigger rip-offs, for example.
** At least, everyone SAYS it’s a higher level of difficulty. Oddly enough, I, personally, somehow found The Answer to generally be easier than the main game. I’m really not sure how that happened, but I can only guess that I was somehow playing the main game entirely wrong the whole time.
*** This is kind of neither here nor there, but I was just thinking the other day, as I rewatched the Season 3 Finale of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, how well MLPFiM fits with SMTP3 at times. I mean, one of the most important messages of that episode--a great message--can be found in how Twilight Sparkle solves her friends’ mixed up destinies by allowing their own selfless friendship to put them in the right place to rediscover themselves. The message is clear--sometimes by helping those we care about, we help ourselves even more. It’s just the kind of theme of the self-empowering nature of interpersonal connections that Persona 3 so excellently proclaims to us.
Warning: This rant will reference directly important events of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3’s ending. It’s a great enough game, and a great enough ending, that if you haven’t already played SMTP3 from start to finish, you should avoid this rant. Go do something else instead. Watch a movie, draw some ponies, eat a delicious meal of gumbo, play SMTP3 since you haven’t already, I don’t care. Just don’t you spoil this for me. By spoiling it for you.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is an absolutely terrific RPG, one of the best I’ve played and well worthy of the honorable title of Shin Megami Tensei. It’s a pretty universal hit, too, in that the strong majority of people who have played it enjoyed it greatly, as well as a cult classic that managed to get nearly as much attention from the RPG community as one of SquareEnix’s numerous overhyped, inferior offerings. I can’t help but be pretty pleased by that fact. I feel like at least half of the truly excellent RPGs are sadly quite ignored (even more than RPGs usually are, I mean) while many of the mediocre or outright bad ones are highlighted (Final Fantasy for the last 10 years, for example), so when one of the popular ones happens to actually DESERVE its renown, it’s a happy treat for me.
The thing with SMTP3 is that it was popular enough that Atlus decided to milk the game for all it’s worth. Almost a year after SMTP3’s release, Atlus rereleased the game as Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES, which had several additions built into it. The Social Links were easier to progress, for example, leaving a little extra time during the game’s course to experience its other content, and some new content was added to the main game, most notably a Social Link for Aigis (which turned out to be one of the best in the game). Most importantly, a post-game quest called The Answer was added, which transferred the role of protagonist to Aigis, and set out to clear up some ambiguities about SMTP3’s ending and show us how the game’s cast reacted to the tragic passing of Minato.
Now, I’m not too terribly familiar with the SMT fanbase in general, so I could be wrong, but I’ve gotten the general impression from people I’ve spoken with that The Answer is not particularly liked by a significant number of players. I don’t think there are many that outright hate it, but the general outlook I’ve perceived is a negative one. And I don’t think that’s really a fair assessment.
Now, to be fair, I have to acknowledge that in some regards, The Answer IS not so good. Specifically, when one looks at it with the perspective of a practical consumer. If one were to equate the differences between SMTP3’s original and FES versions, the FES version is less like a rerelease of the original game (since the original had only come out less than a year prior, and for the same system), and more like the original game with a standard Downloadable Content package (the extra stuff in the main game) and an Expansion (The Answer addition). But you’re not just buying a DLC and an Expansion--in order to experience the FES version’s benefits, you had to pay for the whole game all over again. Fine for a consumer who hadn’t happened to purchase the original version (like me), but not so great for anyone who did. Now Atlus did take a small step to better the situation, in that you could, I understand, transfer your original version’s save game information to the FES version and be able to retain some of the stuff from the first version, so it at least wasn’t a total loss, time-wise, for the owners of the original SMTP3. But the fact remains that anyone who had bought the original and wanted to experience the FES version’s benefits was forced to pay the full price of a new game for what could only very generously be called even half a game’s worth of content.
I’m not sure what Atlus could have done about this, admittedly. Playstation 2 games aren’t really designed with the ability to be modified and added to later. Still, I feel like it’s a raw deal for the customer, and surely there was SOMETHING they could have done. I mean, just off the top of my head, maybe they could’ve had 20 or 30 bucks knocked off SMTP3’s FES version price upon purchase for anyone who could prove that they purchased the original. Like, have’em show a receipt (and ID, perhaps) to the retailer to prove they had previously bought a non-used copy of the original game as they get the new one. Something like that. But as it is, the SMTP3 FES version, and by extent The Answer, IS something of a rip-off.*
But by its own merits? Well, I don’t really have a problem with The Answer. I think that the returning cast are portrayed pretty well, and although their character development isn’t ever as strong as it was at times during the main game, it IS there, and it’s certainly not bad. I thought that the scene where Mitsuru’s comforting Yukari was really quite good, in fact, and Aigis’s character is handled pretty well and in a way that expands her beyond the tenderly wise, yearning, and loving role she had, while still properly acknowledging and building off of it. I like the general premise of the story, and while I think that the plot advances a bit slowly at times, it’s overall worthwhile to experience, and learning the truth of Minato’s fate is a pretty poignant moment.
From what I’ve gathered from the idle conversation of friends and asking around on GameFAQs, there are a few main problems that people have specified regarding The Answer. The first is Metis, the new character. Well, I can’t really argue part of this idea. Metis hasn’t got much depth as a character, and her personality’s neither especially memorable nor appealing. Still, I don’t feel that Metis is a significant detracting factor of The Answer. She does serve her purpose for the plot as the only one supporting Aigis as the group becomes divided, and even if her character adds more or less nothing to the adventure by her own individual merits, I don’t think it takes anything from it, either. And I would argue that the same thing could be said for Akihiko and Koromaru in the main game (and The Answer, for that matter), and no one seems to have much of a problem with them.
Another problem I’ve seen people state about The Answer is how it ends. The Answer ends with Aigis seeming like she should have died, but continuing to live on even though her internal robotic parts have been fried, with the only explanation of this phenomenon being Fuuka’s theorizing that she seems like she’s alive now. It’s been said that this is more your standard improbably everyone’s-happy-sunshine-and-rainbows-for-all Disney ending than a Shin Megami Tensei ending. I suppose I see some logic to this; it IS kind of quickly thrown in there, just as quickly resolved, and has an almost overbearing positivity to it. But I actually think that despite how rushed the idea is, it’s important to The Answer, because it’s ultimately showing us the Tarot’s transition from end to beginning. As I mentioned in my overly long SMTP3 and 4 Tarot comparison rant, the Major Arcana of the Tarot basically symbolize a journey of self-actualization and human understanding, beginning with The Fool, where all is blank and the journey’s potential is raw and unrestricted, and ending with The World, the end to The Fool’s journey through the Major Arcana, at which point the cycle shall begin again at a higher level with a new Fool, just as every close to a journey of understanding in life marks the beginning of a journey of a new kind. Aigis’s death as an android and as what she once was is the moment of The World Arcana in The Answer (perhaps even of SMTP3 as a whole), as she has reached the end of her small journey of understanding, and her rebirth as something alive, a being ready to join the world in a new way, a better way than she could before, represents a new beginning for her, the moment when she once again becomes The Fool, new, fresh, having all the understanding and lessons of the previous cycle within herself and ready to embark on a new journey to grow in new ways. Hell, in my opinion, this is also the start of the next cycle of the journey began and completed by protagonist Minato, for it was his journey from Fool to World in the main game that has brought all of this about, and the greatest pieces of understanding that Aigis gains from her journey through The Answer are those that Minato learned, embraced, and embodied. To me, Aigis’s beginning a new cycle is the proper completion and continuation of Minato’s as much as it is hers.
At any rate, in a game that so brilliantly and artfully employs and embodies the considerable wisdoms and themes of the Tarot, an ending like this in some degree is pretty crucial. Yes, looking at this strictly on its surface level, it is a bit too cheerfully feel-good, and too contrived to BE cheerfully feel-good. And don’t get me wrong, that IS a problem--one of the many great aspects of SMTP3 is that on top of all the immense towers of insight and wisdoms and art is a story that’s genuinely fun, interesting, and creative, making it a game that’s not just brilliant, but good even at surface level (which is sadly often not the case with works whose greatness is underlying), so for the actual, literal events and storytelling value of The Answer’s ending to be lacking is disappointing. Nonetheless, what truly makes SMTP3 exceptional, even brilliant, is its commitment to the subtle, underlying themes of the Tarot, and so I have to say that I view the happy end of The Answer as a good thing, because it all adds up to what it should.
Perhaps the biggest complaint I’ve seen about The Answer, though, is its general pace of narrative. The simple fact of the matter is that most of The Answer is about the gameplay, not the plot, focusing more on traversing the dungeon and a higher difficulty for the battles.** Many of the times when you get a break to see the story elements, they’re more about character back story than the actual plot at hand. The real, main story of The Answer is mostly present at its beginning and in its last stages, leaving the majority of the time you spend with The Answer small side stuff and just battles, battles, battles. And...well, this complaint is pretty much totally legitimate. I mean, I think I appreciate the small bits of character history more than many people do, but they’re not all that important, or even particularly good. And you know my feelings on RPG gameplay, so increasing its quantity at the sacrifice of more time with the plot is NOT a good thing to me. Yeah, this is a real problem with The Answer, one that I noticed and was very displeased with as I played through it.
But you know...it’s something I can forgive. Because, well, I think what plot IS there is worth it. The Answer provides us with a decent mini-story about how the SMTP3 cast reacts to the loss of their leader in SMTP3’s ending, and brings these broken people back to the state that Minato would have wanted them to be in, the state that he gave his life to provide for them--hope, personal awareness, friendship, and the optimistic desire to go out there and create a better world. It gives them, and we the players, the promised answer of what exactly happened to Minato, why he died, and provides a little more explanation on Nyx, as well, all in a way that is creative, interesting, and even inspiring--just what SMTP3 is supposed to be. A better understanding of Minato’s sacrifice makes him that much greater a hero, as well. I also appreciate some of the character development, even if there’s only a small amount--the stuff regarding Mitsuru and Yukari after they lose to Aigis and Metis was very well-done, for example. And ultimately, The Answer gives us what we must have from SMTP3: a story reaffirming just how powerful the human spirit can be, a reminder of how important it is to improve ourselves as humans to reach that higher level of spirit that Minato does, a story that finalizes the Tarot journey we saw before with Minato and makes the transition into the next cycle of the Tarot’s journey through Aigis (emphasized ever so cleverly by the fact that this new journey begins on April 1st, aka April Fools’ Day), and the idea that it is through our connections to those around us that we bring meaning to our lives and better ourselves as human beings.***
So in the end, what’s the verdict on The Answer? Well, it’s not as good as the main game of Persona 3. But SMTP3 is one of the top 10 greatest RPGs I’ve ever played. It’s a shame that its follow-up doesn’t live up to the game’s quality, but that’s still far and away from making it actually bad. It does what it sets out to, and even if it doesn’t give us as much content-per-playtime as it really should, what it’s got IS often good, and does, by its end, tie into the primary Tarot theme adequately. It’s not amazing, but I think saying that it isn’t good is a disservice to The Answer.
* Not the worst I’ve seen where add-ons are concerned, of course. Mass Effect 3’s Omega DLC, Dragon Age 1’s Awakening Expansion, and Borderlands 1’s Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot DLC are all bigger rip-offs, for example.
** At least, everyone SAYS it’s a higher level of difficulty. Oddly enough, I, personally, somehow found The Answer to generally be easier than the main game. I’m really not sure how that happened, but I can only guess that I was somehow playing the main game entirely wrong the whole time.
*** This is kind of neither here nor there, but I was just thinking the other day, as I rewatched the Season 3 Finale of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, how well MLPFiM fits with SMTP3 at times. I mean, one of the most important messages of that episode--a great message--can be found in how Twilight Sparkle solves her friends’ mixed up destinies by allowing their own selfless friendship to put them in the right place to rediscover themselves. The message is clear--sometimes by helping those we care about, we help ourselves even more. It’s just the kind of theme of the self-empowering nature of interpersonal connections that Persona 3 so excellently proclaims to us.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Guest Rant: A 'Tranquility Lane' to Call our Own, by Adam Rousselle (Fallout 3)
A little while back, one of my readers (apparently you guys do exist, wonder of wonders) emailed me and asked whether I would be so kind as to feature some of his own RPG thoughts on this silly little blog of mine. Though I could not (and currently cannot) fathom why anyone would want to piggyback onto a blog with a whole 11 followers, I didn't see why not, and thus, we are here today, with a Fallout 3 rant by Mr. Rousselle, an intelligent fellow by all accounts I'm privy to. Will this be a one-time thing, or will Mr. Rousselle, and possibly others, share more guest rants with us in the future? No idea, but I'm all for the exchange of intelligent thoughts and ideas, so hopefully there will be more of these in the future.
I guess I ought to throw up some sort of disclaimer, though, right? That's what all the bigwigs do. I make no pretense of ownership of Mr. Rousselle's words here, and this guest rant does not necessarily reflect my own opinions and perceptions. That said, though, I wouldn't publish it if I didn't think it was at least worth reading and contemplating, so check it out.
A ‘Tranquility Lane’ to Call our Own
Adam Rousselle
July 2, 2013
It was a warm day in January as I walked the grounds of the famed Fairmont Banff Springs hotel. I had driven up from Calgary to get away from the stresses of our so-called ‘modern life’, but was still very much preoccupied by them. I climbed up the stairs and on onto the deck of an Alpine-style chalet and took in the vista below; however, not even the stunning white capped mountains in front of me and the crackling fire inside could calm my nerves. Then it struck me that this place was reminiscent of Jacobstown in Fallout: New Vegas. The anxiety left my body and I was free to take in that moment and simply enjoy consciousness.
Why?
Within seconds it struck me: as Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now famously put it “like a diamond bullet right through my forehead”. I realized that in the game, once I got past the abject horror of running for my life and desperately chasing down supplies, the virtual world of the Fallout universe is a liberating one. It is a world where I don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on unwanted neckties or other crap I don’t need. There are no credit cards, only bottle caps; success is determined by merely surviving to see the sun rise once more.
More often than not in Fallout, the most successful characters are those in communities where their fellow members band together through reciprocal kindness to carve out a life in the harsh world around them. One need look no further than Nicole from the Followers of the Apocalypse in Fallout, or James, the Lone Wanderer’s father in Fallout 3. Seeing characters like these instills in me a sense of community in these games, which serves as a welcome reprieve from the never-changing war of the world outside.
This made me think: what’s so bad about our time that I feel liberated just thinking about the virtual, albeit deep and compelling, reality of this game series? I think we can all agree that the safety of our surroundings, coupled with modern medicine and basic amenities has added more to our quality of life than detracted from it. Despite this, I couldn’t quite get past the bizarre sense of peace I got when I immersed myself in what is supposed to be a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
It was at this time that I thought of Fallout 3’s ‘Tranquility Lane’. For those of you who don’t know, Tranquility Lane is a virtual world created by Dr. Stanislaus Braun to occupy those weathering a nuclear apocalypse in an underground vault. The problem with this already terrifying scenario is that Braun has absolute power over the other subjects of the vault: I’m sure we all know that famous Lord Acton quote about absolute power corrupting absolutely.
This chapter of the game is so strange that it seems out of place, but because it is a main quest we can reasonably assume that the developers had some sort of message in mind. This is Fallout, after all.
But what were they getting at?
I fired up the old Xbox and took a trip down memory lane to revisit Tranquility Lane. In so doing, my initial emotional reactions came back to me: the stifled feeling of being stuck in a 1950s-esque black ‘n’ white cheery dystopia. The concept of the place is quite morbid and disturbing: a reality created by by a vindictive monster masked in the face of an innocent child, intent on tormenting people for his own amusement. Despite the sinister undertones, the feeling one gets from this is that of security and, juxtaposed to the adrenaline-filled terror one often finds in the wasteland, this false-reality can seem quite comfortable. This is exactly what Dr. Stanislaus Braun was going for when he designed the program:
The allegory that most of us live in some version of tranquility lane is a palpable one. Tens of millions of us have been drawn into the comforts of seemingly the ‘tranquil’ suburban life: pressboard homes with tiny pristine lawns and a plethora of consumer goods. However, lurking beneath this apparently idyllic existence is something much more sinister.
For the condemned souls of Vault 112, this sinister element is embodied in the enigmatic Dr. Braun. As mentioned above, Braun enjoys taking advantage of the peoples’ apparent complacency by ‘toying’ with them for his own amusement. This involves creating conflict by playing on people’s insecurities and even orchestrating their simulated deaths through numerous elaborate plans. What is most important is that Braun always takes the form of the seemingly innocuous, which is in this case a little girl. While some may distrust her or even call her ‘mean’, the blame for these occurrences is never placed on Betty/Braun. The residents of Vault 112 are living in torment without a clue as to why these awful things are happening to them.
What can we derive from this situation? Though it is obvious that we are not subject to the sadistic whims of some hidden little man, but we are subject to our share of torment in our own ‘tranquil’ lives.
One need only look at today’s pop culture to see that we are pushed toward an ideal that encourages self-obsession, willful ignorance, and the exploitation of others. We are taught ‘magical thinking’ by revolting figures like Oprah Winfrey and Joel Osteen who say if you just believe hard enough, you can achieve all the wealth and prestige you desire. We are given mixed messages one minute saying we are ‘beautiful no matter what they say’, and the next are implicitly told that we need to look a certain way in order to be like one of the images we are bombarded with daily. If you think I’m making this up, I dare you to subject yourself to any of the number of mind-numbing reality shows or the latest celebrity gossip to see which young starlet we will push to suicide next.
While some media figures play superficial lip service to things like friends and ‘family values’ (whatever the hell that means), more often than not the message is clear: cash is king. When we don’t have wealth and nice things to demonstrate our largesse, we become insecure and are pushed to the brink of bankruptcy with credit card debt. When we do have wealth, we are taught to lord it over others because we are somehow smarter and harder working than those who have less. We perpetuate our own cycle of insecurity, and it is insecurity that makes men most malleable.
Eddie Bernays knew this better than most. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays is best known for his work as a pioneer of public relations, the principles of which were drawn from his book “Propaganda”. He drew on his uncle’s research in psychoanalysis and became a master of creating fear and desire for both corporations and governments. He used elements like jealousy, sexuality, and terror to make people rabidly fearful of communism and ready to line up and buy a new Chrysler and a pack of Marlborough’s in the name of freedom. At the core of his beliefs was the idea of control: complacency through comfort, compliance through fear (I urge you to watch the BBC documentary “Century of the Self” to gain a better understanding of this concept – please see below).
Aside from both being native German speakers, Bernays and Braun have commonality in their desire for control. The difference is that Bernays saw his work as inherently altruistic: his 1928 book Propaganda states that manipulation and control are necessary for democracy in order to have society led those who know best. However, Braun’s two centuries in the vault seemed to have left him without a shred of altruism, only hubris.
As credit runs dry and American workers are getting squeezed continually, the illusion of their idyllic lives epitomized in 1950s sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver is being ‘suddenly broken’. What happened? Was this ever part of Bernays’ dream for an ideal democratic society?
Bernays’ principles have been used by our elite to effectively manipulate our behavior under the auspices of ‘freedom’, but his desire for good governance has been ignored. It has been conveniently ignored in much the same way Adam Smith’s call for regulations to prevent oligarchies in The Wealth of Nations has been ignored by plutocrats like the Koch brothers who espouse ‘free market principles’ while being among the greatest beneficiaries of corporate welfare in the country. The idea that society must be in the hands of our elite is reinforced with images of the stereotypical ‘unwashed masses’: stupid criminals on Cops or the rabidly ignorant ‘Tea party’ protestors who remind us that we must never leave the country in the hands of the common man. We are taught implicitly trust these elites, if for nothing else than because Oprah Winfrey tells us we can all be rich just like them someday. We wouldn’t want someone else trying to tell us what to do, would we?
For Braun, the effects are obvious: simulated torture for his own amusement. With our own elite, it seems to take the form of greed and hubris: nickel and diming the public, stripping them of their rights, and uncaringly watching as nearly half of all Americans plunge into poverty.
In both cases, the powers that be play on our fears and insecurities. Is my husband cheating on me and why? What if we have another terrorist attack? What if congress passes Obamacare? What if my date doesn’t like my car or my clothes? What if Mitt Romney wins the election? In essence, these are trivial matters that distract us from the truth: the people of Tranquility Lane are getting screwed and so are we.
Most of us have probably found that suburban life, or modern life in general are not so tranquil. Somehow we find escape in games like Fallout, despite their terrifying settings. Perhaps we like the idea of being free of debt, free of thinking we need to buy new things just to get laid, free from the fake-tan douchebags in their entry-level BMWs, free from the persistant chipping away of our civil liberties by governments beginning the resemble the infamous Enclave.
Ironically, the most humane way to beat Tranquility lane is to not facilitate in Braun’s systematic torture, but to inflict catastrophic destruction in the form of a simulated Chinese invasion. With real climate scientists and real economists (not Lawrence Summers or Allen Greenspan) warning us of the potential catastrophic risks of living the way we do, the threat of some awful disaster freeing us of this illusion is a very real and terrifying one.
The good news is that we don’t have to be like the poor folks of Tranquility Lane: we just need to stop kidding ourselves. We need to stop being led by our insecurities and actually get to know those with whom we’ve been told to compete. We need to stop criticizing others for voting for one political party when and realize that the one we vote for is serving the same interests. We need to be like those brave pioneers speckled throughout the Fallout landscape that go above and beyond their own needs to commit acts of profound and selfless kindness in an otherwise brutally unforgiving world. It’s not convenient or glamorous, but I for one don’t want my grandchildren to have to walk something resembling the irradiated expanse of the Capital Wasteland.
For more on this subject, please see:
Bernays, Edward (1928) Propaganda
http://www.amazon.ca/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598
Documentary: The Century of the Self
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Documentary: Human Resources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1EvCH8czhk
Smith, Adam (1776) The Wealth of Nations - Free online at:
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/adam-smith/wealth-nations.pdf
I guess I ought to throw up some sort of disclaimer, though, right? That's what all the bigwigs do. I make no pretense of ownership of Mr. Rousselle's words here, and this guest rant does not necessarily reflect my own opinions and perceptions. That said, though, I wouldn't publish it if I didn't think it was at least worth reading and contemplating, so check it out.
A ‘Tranquility Lane’ to Call our Own
Adam Rousselle
July 2, 2013
It was a warm day in January as I walked the grounds of the famed Fairmont Banff Springs hotel. I had driven up from Calgary to get away from the stresses of our so-called ‘modern life’, but was still very much preoccupied by them. I climbed up the stairs and on onto the deck of an Alpine-style chalet and took in the vista below; however, not even the stunning white capped mountains in front of me and the crackling fire inside could calm my nerves. Then it struck me that this place was reminiscent of Jacobstown in Fallout: New Vegas. The anxiety left my body and I was free to take in that moment and simply enjoy consciousness.
Why?
Within seconds it struck me: as Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now famously put it “like a diamond bullet right through my forehead”. I realized that in the game, once I got past the abject horror of running for my life and desperately chasing down supplies, the virtual world of the Fallout universe is a liberating one. It is a world where I don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on unwanted neckties or other crap I don’t need. There are no credit cards, only bottle caps; success is determined by merely surviving to see the sun rise once more.
More often than not in Fallout, the most successful characters are those in communities where their fellow members band together through reciprocal kindness to carve out a life in the harsh world around them. One need look no further than Nicole from the Followers of the Apocalypse in Fallout, or James, the Lone Wanderer’s father in Fallout 3. Seeing characters like these instills in me a sense of community in these games, which serves as a welcome reprieve from the never-changing war of the world outside.
This made me think: what’s so bad about our time that I feel liberated just thinking about the virtual, albeit deep and compelling, reality of this game series? I think we can all agree that the safety of our surroundings, coupled with modern medicine and basic amenities has added more to our quality of life than detracted from it. Despite this, I couldn’t quite get past the bizarre sense of peace I got when I immersed myself in what is supposed to be a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
It was at this time that I thought of Fallout 3’s ‘Tranquility Lane’. For those of you who don’t know, Tranquility Lane is a virtual world created by Dr. Stanislaus Braun to occupy those weathering a nuclear apocalypse in an underground vault. The problem with this already terrifying scenario is that Braun has absolute power over the other subjects of the vault: I’m sure we all know that famous Lord Acton quote about absolute power corrupting absolutely.
This chapter of the game is so strange that it seems out of place, but because it is a main quest we can reasonably assume that the developers had some sort of message in mind. This is Fallout, after all.
But what were they getting at?
I fired up the old Xbox and took a trip down memory lane to revisit Tranquility Lane. In so doing, my initial emotional reactions came back to me: the stifled feeling of being stuck in a 1950s-esque black ‘n’ white cheery dystopia. The concept of the place is quite morbid and disturbing: a reality created by by a vindictive monster masked in the face of an innocent child, intent on tormenting people for his own amusement. Despite the sinister undertones, the feeling one gets from this is that of security and, juxtaposed to the adrenaline-filled terror one often finds in the wasteland, this false-reality can seem quite comfortable. This is exactly what Dr. Stanislaus Braun was going for when he designed the program:
“There's beautiful irony with this particular simulation as well. The residents here are naturally at home, naturally safe. When I toy with them, when their suburban illusion is suddenly broken, its that much more satisfying.
I do believe we shall all remain here in Tranquility Lane for a very long time. A very long time indeed.”
-Dr. Stanislaus Braun, Vault 112 Terminal Entries
The allegory that most of us live in some version of tranquility lane is a palpable one. Tens of millions of us have been drawn into the comforts of seemingly the ‘tranquil’ suburban life: pressboard homes with tiny pristine lawns and a plethora of consumer goods. However, lurking beneath this apparently idyllic existence is something much more sinister.
For the condemned souls of Vault 112, this sinister element is embodied in the enigmatic Dr. Braun. As mentioned above, Braun enjoys taking advantage of the peoples’ apparent complacency by ‘toying’ with them for his own amusement. This involves creating conflict by playing on people’s insecurities and even orchestrating their simulated deaths through numerous elaborate plans. What is most important is that Braun always takes the form of the seemingly innocuous, which is in this case a little girl. While some may distrust her or even call her ‘mean’, the blame for these occurrences is never placed on Betty/Braun. The residents of Vault 112 are living in torment without a clue as to why these awful things are happening to them.
What can we derive from this situation? Though it is obvious that we are not subject to the sadistic whims of some hidden little man, but we are subject to our share of torment in our own ‘tranquil’ lives.
One need only look at today’s pop culture to see that we are pushed toward an ideal that encourages self-obsession, willful ignorance, and the exploitation of others. We are taught ‘magical thinking’ by revolting figures like Oprah Winfrey and Joel Osteen who say if you just believe hard enough, you can achieve all the wealth and prestige you desire. We are given mixed messages one minute saying we are ‘beautiful no matter what they say’, and the next are implicitly told that we need to look a certain way in order to be like one of the images we are bombarded with daily. If you think I’m making this up, I dare you to subject yourself to any of the number of mind-numbing reality shows or the latest celebrity gossip to see which young starlet we will push to suicide next.
While some media figures play superficial lip service to things like friends and ‘family values’ (whatever the hell that means), more often than not the message is clear: cash is king. When we don’t have wealth and nice things to demonstrate our largesse, we become insecure and are pushed to the brink of bankruptcy with credit card debt. When we do have wealth, we are taught to lord it over others because we are somehow smarter and harder working than those who have less. We perpetuate our own cycle of insecurity, and it is insecurity that makes men most malleable.
Eddie Bernays knew this better than most. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays is best known for his work as a pioneer of public relations, the principles of which were drawn from his book “Propaganda”. He drew on his uncle’s research in psychoanalysis and became a master of creating fear and desire for both corporations and governments. He used elements like jealousy, sexuality, and terror to make people rabidly fearful of communism and ready to line up and buy a new Chrysler and a pack of Marlborough’s in the name of freedom. At the core of his beliefs was the idea of control: complacency through comfort, compliance through fear (I urge you to watch the BBC documentary “Century of the Self” to gain a better understanding of this concept – please see below).
Aside from both being native German speakers, Bernays and Braun have commonality in their desire for control. The difference is that Bernays saw his work as inherently altruistic: his 1928 book Propaganda states that manipulation and control are necessary for democracy in order to have society led those who know best. However, Braun’s two centuries in the vault seemed to have left him without a shred of altruism, only hubris.
As credit runs dry and American workers are getting squeezed continually, the illusion of their idyllic lives epitomized in 1950s sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver is being ‘suddenly broken’. What happened? Was this ever part of Bernays’ dream for an ideal democratic society?
Bernays’ principles have been used by our elite to effectively manipulate our behavior under the auspices of ‘freedom’, but his desire for good governance has been ignored. It has been conveniently ignored in much the same way Adam Smith’s call for regulations to prevent oligarchies in The Wealth of Nations has been ignored by plutocrats like the Koch brothers who espouse ‘free market principles’ while being among the greatest beneficiaries of corporate welfare in the country. The idea that society must be in the hands of our elite is reinforced with images of the stereotypical ‘unwashed masses’: stupid criminals on Cops or the rabidly ignorant ‘Tea party’ protestors who remind us that we must never leave the country in the hands of the common man. We are taught implicitly trust these elites, if for nothing else than because Oprah Winfrey tells us we can all be rich just like them someday. We wouldn’t want someone else trying to tell us what to do, would we?
For Braun, the effects are obvious: simulated torture for his own amusement. With our own elite, it seems to take the form of greed and hubris: nickel and diming the public, stripping them of their rights, and uncaringly watching as nearly half of all Americans plunge into poverty.
In both cases, the powers that be play on our fears and insecurities. Is my husband cheating on me and why? What if we have another terrorist attack? What if congress passes Obamacare? What if my date doesn’t like my car or my clothes? What if Mitt Romney wins the election? In essence, these are trivial matters that distract us from the truth: the people of Tranquility Lane are getting screwed and so are we.
Most of us have probably found that suburban life, or modern life in general are not so tranquil. Somehow we find escape in games like Fallout, despite their terrifying settings. Perhaps we like the idea of being free of debt, free of thinking we need to buy new things just to get laid, free from the fake-tan douchebags in their entry-level BMWs, free from the persistant chipping away of our civil liberties by governments beginning the resemble the infamous Enclave.
Ironically, the most humane way to beat Tranquility lane is to not facilitate in Braun’s systematic torture, but to inflict catastrophic destruction in the form of a simulated Chinese invasion. With real climate scientists and real economists (not Lawrence Summers or Allen Greenspan) warning us of the potential catastrophic risks of living the way we do, the threat of some awful disaster freeing us of this illusion is a very real and terrifying one.
The good news is that we don’t have to be like the poor folks of Tranquility Lane: we just need to stop kidding ourselves. We need to stop being led by our insecurities and actually get to know those with whom we’ve been told to compete. We need to stop criticizing others for voting for one political party when and realize that the one we vote for is serving the same interests. We need to be like those brave pioneers speckled throughout the Fallout landscape that go above and beyond their own needs to commit acts of profound and selfless kindness in an otherwise brutally unforgiving world. It’s not convenient or glamorous, but I for one don’t want my grandchildren to have to walk something resembling the irradiated expanse of the Capital Wasteland.
For more on this subject, please see:
Bernays, Edward (1928) Propaganda
http://www.amazon.ca/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598
Documentary: The Century of the Self
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Documentary: Human Resources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1EvCH8czhk
Smith, Adam (1776) The Wealth of Nations - Free online at:
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/adam-smith/wealth-nations.pdf
Thursday, August 8, 2013
The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road's Controls
So Capcom announced a few days ago that there will, after a decade since the last real game in the series, finally be a Breath of Fire 6. And they have also announced that it will be a smart phone/tablet game. Whereas Electronic Arts practices a casual, accidental cruelty in which they don’t care whether or not their pursuit of every dollar in existence leaves the entire game industry a cultural wasteland and destroys video games as an artistic medium, I think Capcom is by this point actively, maliciously attempting to hurt as many human beings as they possibly can.
Anyway, on with the actual rant.
The DS and 3DS have become pretty much the signature RPG systems of the current age. Sure, you get some RPGs for the Wii, Playstation 3, and X-Box 360, and a decent number for the PC, but as a general rule, the RPG system of the current day is Nintendo’s handheld, at least as far as JRPGs go.* This is just fine by me, since it gives me a chance to get my RPG on during my break at work and generally any other time I’m sitting around waiting for something whilst out of my house and away from my other consoles. The list of RPGs in each of my Annual Summary rants that denote what RPGs I played in the past year would have been cut almost in half in the last few years if I hadn’t had my DS and 3DS available to me.
There is, however, one potential problem with this situation: the Stylus.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Stylus-oriented gameplay can be pretty awesome for most game genres. Nintendo’s seemingly never ending gameplay creativity has brought about a lot of awesome uses for the Stylus in gaming, and many other companies making DS games have also creatively and effectively incorporated the stylus into their works. And even in the case of RPGs, the stylus isn’t necessarily a bad thing, when used effectively. The general pace and play style of RPGs doesn’t fit that of a stylus-oriented game very well, but there are plenty of occasions in an RPG where stylus input can be a good way to do things, like with minigames, or certain puzzles, and so on.
Unfortunately, when a game developer isn’t using the stylus effectively in an RPG, it can get messy. And when they’re doing a REALLY bad job with it, well...then you get The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.
First problem with TWoOBtYBR’s control system: EVERYTHING is controlled with the stylus. The buttons on the DS don’t actually do anything. Now, this is the problem with the stylus when it comes to RPGs: a developer may look at this highlighted gameplay device of the DS and think, “Well gee, that sure is nifty! I think I’m gonna make my RPG ONLY use the stylus for input!” What I wish they would also think is, “Wait, is the stylus actually going to be the BETTER input choice for every part of an RPG?” Because the answer is that it definitely will not be. Most RPGs, regardless of what side of the ocean they come from, involve a heavy amount of menus in their gameplay. From inventory screens to character abilities screens to dialogue boxes to battle menus, a huge part of most RPGs’ gameplay is handled through selections on a menu. It’s the reason why RPGs are boring to actually play. And here’s the thing: it is faster, less work, and more accurate to select things in a menu using your direction pad and the A and B buttons than it is to tap your way through said menu with a stylus. If the menu is complex enough, hitting the exact menu selection you want is difficult with the stylus simply because that selection is small enough that you may need to be very precise with where you’re hitting the screen to get it. If the menu has enough choices for each selection, you’ve got to be moving the stylus to several places and tapping over and over again just to perform one action. And if it’s a heavily menu-based game, you’re having to do this literally thousands of times through the game’s course. Yeah, in the end it’s not all that big a deal, I suppose, but compared to simply hitting a directional button a couple times to highlight your selection exactly and then hitting the confirm button, it’s quite inconvenient and annoying.
However, that is only part of the problem with this game’s controls. If I were going to rant about a game whose gameplay was annoying for being entirely stylus-driven, I would have more than just The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road to rant about. I wasn’t a fan of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks doing it, either, even though Nintendo did a great job at making the system work mostly adequately. And the controls for Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, another all-stylus game, are just plain lousy.
What really sets TWoOBtYBR apart from other all-stylus games, however, is the way you move Dorothy around. Now, you won’t hear me praising Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood about anything any time soon, but I’ll give the game this: directing your character by holding the stylus down in the direction relative to said character that you want them to move in at least seems sensible in theory. It sure as hell didn’t wind up working out very well, but the thought of having your character move toward where the stylus is pointing is, at least, a rational way to go about character movement if you’ve already stupidly decided to only allow the game to be played with a stylus, no buttons. Here, however, is a considerably less obvious and straightforward idea: they’ve put a crystal ball on the bottom screen, and the player drags the stylus across it in the direction that they want Dorothy to move in. The ball will roll for a bit, the character will move forward for a bit, and then as the crystal ball slows its roll, so will Dorothy slow until both halt. This necessitates the player to repeat the stylus stroke incessantly to keep her moving.
I’m sorry, Media Vision, but which focus group was it, exactly, that said they wanted an RPG in which the simple act of just moving a character forward replaced the Up Button with a fucking bowling minigame?
One which doesn’t work all that well, I should mention. Dorothy takes a second or 2 to pick up any real speed, which I admit is only annoying to a player who wants her to get to her next destination quickly--but that would be presumably any player who’s trying to make her run in the first place. She also has to skid awkwardly to a halt after running, rather than stopping just meaning stopping, and her changes in direction are a bit sluggish at times. That said, when I say that these things make this ball-spinning process not work all that well, I don’t mean it in the sense of faulty coding or anything like that. I’m fairly certain that each of these little irritations I mention are intentional, as they make Dorothy’s running realistic. Unfortunately, this is the Totally Unnecessary, Annoying, and Reeking of Stupid Lack of Common Sense brand of RPG realism, like when you have to constantly take the time to repair your weapons to keep them functional (like with Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and the Dark Cloud series), or RPGs with Sprint Meters, where characters can only run for so long without getting tired and having to stop (like with Lunar 1 and 2, or Baten Kaitos 1). This sort of tiny bit of realism typically adds absolutely nothing of value to the game,** and would not be missed if they were not present--I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall ever having heard a Final Fantasy player groan, “Aw, man, this game would be so much better if my sword were disintegrating faster than Dan Slott’s dignity! And why isn’t my character getting winded from 10 seconds of movement? I’m really sick and tired of being able to travel to places in a timely manner! And where’s the “Breathe” button? How can my character possibly stay alive if I don’t press a button to make him breathe every 2 seconds?” Part of the core principle of Suspension of Disbelief is that we, the audience, are willing to let some tiny, irrelevant details of reality slide if it justifiably improves the storytelling process and quality of the product, and this “realistic running” business is exactly the sort of tiny, irrelevant detail that is acceptable to trade away for the sake of the product’s quality--in this case, basic playability and convenience. No one expects an RPG character’s inn stay to actually last a realistic 12 hours instead of the customary 5 seconds, and in the same spirit, no one expects an RPG character’s running to require buildup, gradual turns, and skidding halts.
Even if this stupid ball-rolling-based movement style controlled more pleasantly, though, it’s tedious and dumb in nature. The Crystal Ball barely has a connection to The Wizard of Oz to begin with, to my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the Oz universe--isn’t it basically only a small prop of the fortune-teller in Kansas, from early in the story?*** And that connection isn’t even relevant to the game, since part of TWoOBtYBR’s departure from the original Wizard of Oz’s story is to eliminate the fortune-teller (and pretty much everything else in Kansas) anyway. And tap-dragging a stylus over the thing over and over again, once per second or so, for half of a roughly 20 to 30 hour game, can be described with many words, but “fun” is not among them. I don’t know who it was over at Media Vision who decided how the gameplay of The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road would be set up, but whomever you may be, if you ever happen to read this, I would like you to know that you are an idiot.
* Although I have to say that for all the many new RPGs that have come out for the DS and 3DS, there are unfortunately few great ones for the system. Of the 36 I’ve played, I’d say only 5 of them (Radiant Historia, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 1, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, and The World Ends with You) were truly exceptional. The rest range anywhere from pretty decent (Infinite Space and Pokemon Generation 4, for example) to just fucking terrible (Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood and Megaman Starforce 1, for example), with most falling right into the middle of that range and being kinda okay but not really worth playing (Pokemon Generation 5 and The Glory of Heracles 5, for example). I can’t help but feel that the previous signature RPG systems, the Super Nintendo, Playstation 1, and Playstation 2, all had significantly better ratios of quality games per capita. Maybe the newly released Shin Megami Tensei: Soul Hackers and Shin Megami Tensei 4 will tilt the DS/3DS library a little more in the direction of quality, though.
** I guess you could say that the constant decay of equipment in Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas ties to the setting of post-apocalyptic decay...but that’s still a bit of a stretch to justify forcing the player to constantly handle this meaningless maintenance busywork.
*** EDIT FROM THE FUTURE (LIKE FOR REAL, THIS IS GOING IN 9 FREAKING YEARS LATER): My coworker read this rant on a lark and has gleefully pointed out my mistake on this matter, because the crystal ball does return later in The Wizard of Oz for the scene when Dorothy has been trapped by the witch and is chilling in the room with the hourglass that's counting down to her demise. She sees Aunt Em in it, and "Waaah waah I'm scared and so on" to it, before the ball shifts its image to display the witch mocking her. So there IS, in fact, more to the crystal ball than I indicated at the time of original publication.
Does this make the stupid thing significantly more relevant? Not especially. I'd say my sentiments here are still correct, even if the technicality is not. It's still too small a prop to give this much gameplay importance to, and its roles in the original story still don't sensibly connect it to that which it plays in this game.
Anyway, on with the actual rant.
The DS and 3DS have become pretty much the signature RPG systems of the current age. Sure, you get some RPGs for the Wii, Playstation 3, and X-Box 360, and a decent number for the PC, but as a general rule, the RPG system of the current day is Nintendo’s handheld, at least as far as JRPGs go.* This is just fine by me, since it gives me a chance to get my RPG on during my break at work and generally any other time I’m sitting around waiting for something whilst out of my house and away from my other consoles. The list of RPGs in each of my Annual Summary rants that denote what RPGs I played in the past year would have been cut almost in half in the last few years if I hadn’t had my DS and 3DS available to me.
There is, however, one potential problem with this situation: the Stylus.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Stylus-oriented gameplay can be pretty awesome for most game genres. Nintendo’s seemingly never ending gameplay creativity has brought about a lot of awesome uses for the Stylus in gaming, and many other companies making DS games have also creatively and effectively incorporated the stylus into their works. And even in the case of RPGs, the stylus isn’t necessarily a bad thing, when used effectively. The general pace and play style of RPGs doesn’t fit that of a stylus-oriented game very well, but there are plenty of occasions in an RPG where stylus input can be a good way to do things, like with minigames, or certain puzzles, and so on.
Unfortunately, when a game developer isn’t using the stylus effectively in an RPG, it can get messy. And when they’re doing a REALLY bad job with it, well...then you get The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.
First problem with TWoOBtYBR’s control system: EVERYTHING is controlled with the stylus. The buttons on the DS don’t actually do anything. Now, this is the problem with the stylus when it comes to RPGs: a developer may look at this highlighted gameplay device of the DS and think, “Well gee, that sure is nifty! I think I’m gonna make my RPG ONLY use the stylus for input!” What I wish they would also think is, “Wait, is the stylus actually going to be the BETTER input choice for every part of an RPG?” Because the answer is that it definitely will not be. Most RPGs, regardless of what side of the ocean they come from, involve a heavy amount of menus in their gameplay. From inventory screens to character abilities screens to dialogue boxes to battle menus, a huge part of most RPGs’ gameplay is handled through selections on a menu. It’s the reason why RPGs are boring to actually play. And here’s the thing: it is faster, less work, and more accurate to select things in a menu using your direction pad and the A and B buttons than it is to tap your way through said menu with a stylus. If the menu is complex enough, hitting the exact menu selection you want is difficult with the stylus simply because that selection is small enough that you may need to be very precise with where you’re hitting the screen to get it. If the menu has enough choices for each selection, you’ve got to be moving the stylus to several places and tapping over and over again just to perform one action. And if it’s a heavily menu-based game, you’re having to do this literally thousands of times through the game’s course. Yeah, in the end it’s not all that big a deal, I suppose, but compared to simply hitting a directional button a couple times to highlight your selection exactly and then hitting the confirm button, it’s quite inconvenient and annoying.
However, that is only part of the problem with this game’s controls. If I were going to rant about a game whose gameplay was annoying for being entirely stylus-driven, I would have more than just The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road to rant about. I wasn’t a fan of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks doing it, either, even though Nintendo did a great job at making the system work mostly adequately. And the controls for Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, another all-stylus game, are just plain lousy.
What really sets TWoOBtYBR apart from other all-stylus games, however, is the way you move Dorothy around. Now, you won’t hear me praising Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood about anything any time soon, but I’ll give the game this: directing your character by holding the stylus down in the direction relative to said character that you want them to move in at least seems sensible in theory. It sure as hell didn’t wind up working out very well, but the thought of having your character move toward where the stylus is pointing is, at least, a rational way to go about character movement if you’ve already stupidly decided to only allow the game to be played with a stylus, no buttons. Here, however, is a considerably less obvious and straightforward idea: they’ve put a crystal ball on the bottom screen, and the player drags the stylus across it in the direction that they want Dorothy to move in. The ball will roll for a bit, the character will move forward for a bit, and then as the crystal ball slows its roll, so will Dorothy slow until both halt. This necessitates the player to repeat the stylus stroke incessantly to keep her moving.
I’m sorry, Media Vision, but which focus group was it, exactly, that said they wanted an RPG in which the simple act of just moving a character forward replaced the Up Button with a fucking bowling minigame?
One which doesn’t work all that well, I should mention. Dorothy takes a second or 2 to pick up any real speed, which I admit is only annoying to a player who wants her to get to her next destination quickly--but that would be presumably any player who’s trying to make her run in the first place. She also has to skid awkwardly to a halt after running, rather than stopping just meaning stopping, and her changes in direction are a bit sluggish at times. That said, when I say that these things make this ball-spinning process not work all that well, I don’t mean it in the sense of faulty coding or anything like that. I’m fairly certain that each of these little irritations I mention are intentional, as they make Dorothy’s running realistic. Unfortunately, this is the Totally Unnecessary, Annoying, and Reeking of Stupid Lack of Common Sense brand of RPG realism, like when you have to constantly take the time to repair your weapons to keep them functional (like with Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and the Dark Cloud series), or RPGs with Sprint Meters, where characters can only run for so long without getting tired and having to stop (like with Lunar 1 and 2, or Baten Kaitos 1). This sort of tiny bit of realism typically adds absolutely nothing of value to the game,** and would not be missed if they were not present--I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall ever having heard a Final Fantasy player groan, “Aw, man, this game would be so much better if my sword were disintegrating faster than Dan Slott’s dignity! And why isn’t my character getting winded from 10 seconds of movement? I’m really sick and tired of being able to travel to places in a timely manner! And where’s the “Breathe” button? How can my character possibly stay alive if I don’t press a button to make him breathe every 2 seconds?” Part of the core principle of Suspension of Disbelief is that we, the audience, are willing to let some tiny, irrelevant details of reality slide if it justifiably improves the storytelling process and quality of the product, and this “realistic running” business is exactly the sort of tiny, irrelevant detail that is acceptable to trade away for the sake of the product’s quality--in this case, basic playability and convenience. No one expects an RPG character’s inn stay to actually last a realistic 12 hours instead of the customary 5 seconds, and in the same spirit, no one expects an RPG character’s running to require buildup, gradual turns, and skidding halts.
Even if this stupid ball-rolling-based movement style controlled more pleasantly, though, it’s tedious and dumb in nature. The Crystal Ball barely has a connection to The Wizard of Oz to begin with, to my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the Oz universe--isn’t it basically only a small prop of the fortune-teller in Kansas, from early in the story?*** And that connection isn’t even relevant to the game, since part of TWoOBtYBR’s departure from the original Wizard of Oz’s story is to eliminate the fortune-teller (and pretty much everything else in Kansas) anyway. And tap-dragging a stylus over the thing over and over again, once per second or so, for half of a roughly 20 to 30 hour game, can be described with many words, but “fun” is not among them. I don’t know who it was over at Media Vision who decided how the gameplay of The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road would be set up, but whomever you may be, if you ever happen to read this, I would like you to know that you are an idiot.
* Although I have to say that for all the many new RPGs that have come out for the DS and 3DS, there are unfortunately few great ones for the system. Of the 36 I’ve played, I’d say only 5 of them (Radiant Historia, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 1, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, and The World Ends with You) were truly exceptional. The rest range anywhere from pretty decent (Infinite Space and Pokemon Generation 4, for example) to just fucking terrible (Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood and Megaman Starforce 1, for example), with most falling right into the middle of that range and being kinda okay but not really worth playing (Pokemon Generation 5 and The Glory of Heracles 5, for example). I can’t help but feel that the previous signature RPG systems, the Super Nintendo, Playstation 1, and Playstation 2, all had significantly better ratios of quality games per capita. Maybe the newly released Shin Megami Tensei: Soul Hackers and Shin Megami Tensei 4 will tilt the DS/3DS library a little more in the direction of quality, though.
** I guess you could say that the constant decay of equipment in Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas ties to the setting of post-apocalyptic decay...but that’s still a bit of a stretch to justify forcing the player to constantly handle this meaningless maintenance busywork.
*** EDIT FROM THE FUTURE (LIKE FOR REAL, THIS IS GOING IN 9 FREAKING YEARS LATER): My coworker read this rant on a lark and has gleefully pointed out my mistake on this matter, because the crystal ball does return later in The Wizard of Oz for the scene when Dorothy has been trapped by the witch and is chilling in the room with the hourglass that's counting down to her demise. She sees Aunt Em in it, and "Waaah waah I'm scared and so on" to it, before the ball shifts its image to display the witch mocking her. So there IS, in fact, more to the crystal ball than I indicated at the time of original publication.
Does this make the stupid thing significantly more relevant? Not especially. I'd say my sentiments here are still correct, even if the technicality is not. It's still too small a prop to give this much gameplay importance to, and its roles in the original story still don't sensibly connect it to that which it plays in this game.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Xenosaga 3's Omega Res Novae Demonstration
Yup. It’s that time once more. Time to delve into the seemingly never-ending well of bad decisions whose multitudes when patched together form the writing of Xenosaga 3.
What to talk about today? There are still just so many things I’ve not mentioned left that I could rant at length about. Things like the famous first FMV fight against T-elos. Putting aside the annoying Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome causing them not to even think of actually helping out with the fight, which I already criticized in a previous rant...why the hell do Shion and company just stay to watch KOS-MOS get her ass kicked by T-elos when KOS-MOS is fighting for the specific, clearly expressed purpose of delaying T-elos and allowing them to escape? Or things like the weirdness that all the highest technologies of Xenosaga, like combat Realians and A.G.W.S. mecha, are almost always shown as ineffective cannon-fodder, while all the heroes are saving the day with antiquated crap that’s decades,* centuries,** and even millennia*** out of date? And then there’s the bizarre and distracting decision to change the art style with each game, a change that is always for the worse--the best, most memorable art style was Xenosaga 1’s; nothing looked right for the characters after it. I could always talk about the distracting, totally unnecessary Xenogears cameos and connections (Fei as Abel, Elly as Nephilim, Maria as Mai, Shion and Jin having the same last name as Citan, etc), which serve no purpose whatsoever since the creators have explicitly said that there’s no actual plot connection whatever between Xenogears and Xenosaga.
Wait, no--I seem to remember that the last time I did a Xenosaga rant, I told you all I’d be ranting some time in the future about the Omega Res Novae presentation. Well, let’s do that, then!
Ahhh, the Omega Res Novae demonstration. What about this moment in the game makes sense, exactly? Basically, this is a military demonstration of the new giant mech suit, the Omega Res Novae, which the military wants to use against the Gnosis. To show its power and effectiveness, the demonstration pits it against KOS-MOS in a fight.
Now, insanely powerful though KOS-MOS is, I think it’s a rather strange idea that you would pit your new building-sized mecha against a human-sized battle robot to show the former’s effectiveness. I mean, these are two machines whose supposed purpose of fighting Gnosis is obviously going to take on very different roles and applications for each. Wouldn’t it make more sense to make your new giant mech suit’s competitor in this demonstration another mech suit? Wouldn’t that give you a better gauge of how much better the Omega Res Novae is than a previous piece of military hardware meant for the same form of combat? It’d be like if the Navy were to demonstrate how incredible their newest battleship was having it engage in a sea battle against one of their Navy SEALs. Obviously both the SEAL and the ship engage in combat involving water, but they’re just as obviously not meant to be doing it the exact same way. And for that matter, if the Omega Res Novae’s purpose is supposed to be fighting Gnosis, as this demonstration proclaims, why the hell are they showing how well it can fight against a humanoid battle android? Wouldn’t the obvious thing to do for the demonstration be to show it fighting Gnosis? Y’know...the thing that it is supposedly being created to fight? It’s not like they don’t have captive Gnosis they can release for it to show its stuff; they did the same thing for the T-elos demonstration just minutes before this scene. If they don’t have enough Gnosis, why the hell not just move the thing out to a part of space with Gnosis and watch it fight there? By this point in the series the Gnosis are showing up everywhere; it wouldn’t be hard to find some. Having it fight a battle android of much greater power and far different size than any Gnosis, which additionally employs entirely different combat tactics and has a completely different arsenal then any Gnosis, does not actually provide any idea whatsoever of the Omega Res Novae’s ability to combat Gnosis! If you want to prove that your new pet cat is more effective at taking care of mice than a pet ferret, you don’t show that by ordering your cat to go on a ferret killing spree, you show it by having your cat catch some damn mice!
That’s not where the nonsense ends, though, not by a long shot. The actual setup for the demonstration is completely ludicrous, too. First of all, the demonstration of the Omega Res Novae is taking place inside an enclosed arena. Now, it is a big stadium, but this is a giant fucking mech suit! The ceiling of the arena is only a little higher than it is, relatively, and the walls on each side are just as relatively close. It’s basically like if you were to go and stand in the middle of a dentist’s reception room. Fine for when you’re sitting around waiting to have your molars capped, not so good when you’re a battle mecha meant to be showing everything you can do in combat. If the damn thing doesn’t have the room to fly, dodge, and maneuver, how is this demonstration supposed to effectively show its full capabilities? All we can know for sure is that it can stand still and shoot at things.
And speaking of this enclosed space, hey, how about the fact that you’re testing a massive, hyper-advanced battle machine in an arena comparatively small to it, with many of your audience and technicians seemingly watching from the walls of this arena, protected only by fucking glass? This is a LIVE FIRE DEMO; the Omega Res Novae is actually, fully armed with missiles and lasers and who knows what else, and you’ve got your audience sitting what amounts to a few feet away! A single stray laser blast in that direction and they’re all toast! Yeah, okay, the glass is obviously going to be very strong, and can, we see, withstand a very heavy object crashing against it at a high velocity, but the Omegat Res Novae is meant to be Armageddon in a fucking can! There is no way some safety glass is going to protect against it! And to compound that, again, KOS-MOS is the Omega Res Novae’s opponent, and given that she is very much smaller and obviously meant for more personal combat, her best defense in the fight is clearly going to be evasion, meaning that the giant mech suit’s going to be firing all over the place at a moving target--giving it just that much more likelihood that one of its lasers is going to accidentally kill some bystanders. And to top it all off, the pilot of the Omega Res Novae is a kid whose mental processes and connection to the suit seem relatively unpredictable, and who is unresponsive to regular human communication--just the sort of not-fully-understood wild card you’d want at the controls of a laser-spouting death machine surrounded by helpless bystanders, right?
You also gotta love the nonsensical aftermath of this demonstration. After the Omega Res Novae’s pilot goes, surprise surprise, out of control and starts firing wildly, KOS-MOS has to jump up in the way of one of its lasers to protect the people in the observation deck. Had she not taken a laser to the face, everyone where Shion is currently standing would be atomized. The Omega Res Novae’s shut down quickly after. So once that’s done with, the very next scene has the scientist who created T-elos walk up to Shion and Allen and casually introduce himself, and the three briefly exchange pleasantries. No one seems agitated in any way that they all almost were blown to hell and back by a giant laser blast. Allen’s not saying, “Holy shit, Shion, are you okay? You could’ve been melted in there!” Shion’s not pouting in annoyance because the idiot in charge didn’t pull the mech suit’s plug the second it started going nuts. No one’s rushing around, no announcement’s being made apologizing for the near death of everyone in the observation deck where Shion is, nothing. Just business as fucking usual. Like everyone just finished watching KOS-MOS and the Omega Res Novae having a picnic lunch together. And of course, when Shion meets moments later with Juli Mizrahi, who was the one in charge of monitoring the Omega Res Novae during the demo and who must realize Shion was in that almost-destroyed deck from seeing her come from its exit, Juli doesn’t offer any sort of apology for the incident, or even fucking mention it.
Awesome grasp of basic military procedures and basic human reactions, Namco, as usual. Stellar work.
* Cyborgs like Ziggy.
** Androids like KOS-MOS.
*** Jin did you seriously just bring a Katana to a Titanic Missile-Launching Laser-Blasting Bullet-Spewing Robot Fight?
What to talk about today? There are still just so many things I’ve not mentioned left that I could rant at length about. Things like the famous first FMV fight against T-elos. Putting aside the annoying Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome causing them not to even think of actually helping out with the fight, which I already criticized in a previous rant...why the hell do Shion and company just stay to watch KOS-MOS get her ass kicked by T-elos when KOS-MOS is fighting for the specific, clearly expressed purpose of delaying T-elos and allowing them to escape? Or things like the weirdness that all the highest technologies of Xenosaga, like combat Realians and A.G.W.S. mecha, are almost always shown as ineffective cannon-fodder, while all the heroes are saving the day with antiquated crap that’s decades,* centuries,** and even millennia*** out of date? And then there’s the bizarre and distracting decision to change the art style with each game, a change that is always for the worse--the best, most memorable art style was Xenosaga 1’s; nothing looked right for the characters after it. I could always talk about the distracting, totally unnecessary Xenogears cameos and connections (Fei as Abel, Elly as Nephilim, Maria as Mai, Shion and Jin having the same last name as Citan, etc), which serve no purpose whatsoever since the creators have explicitly said that there’s no actual plot connection whatever between Xenogears and Xenosaga.
Wait, no--I seem to remember that the last time I did a Xenosaga rant, I told you all I’d be ranting some time in the future about the Omega Res Novae presentation. Well, let’s do that, then!
Ahhh, the Omega Res Novae demonstration. What about this moment in the game makes sense, exactly? Basically, this is a military demonstration of the new giant mech suit, the Omega Res Novae, which the military wants to use against the Gnosis. To show its power and effectiveness, the demonstration pits it against KOS-MOS in a fight.
Now, insanely powerful though KOS-MOS is, I think it’s a rather strange idea that you would pit your new building-sized mecha against a human-sized battle robot to show the former’s effectiveness. I mean, these are two machines whose supposed purpose of fighting Gnosis is obviously going to take on very different roles and applications for each. Wouldn’t it make more sense to make your new giant mech suit’s competitor in this demonstration another mech suit? Wouldn’t that give you a better gauge of how much better the Omega Res Novae is than a previous piece of military hardware meant for the same form of combat? It’d be like if the Navy were to demonstrate how incredible their newest battleship was having it engage in a sea battle against one of their Navy SEALs. Obviously both the SEAL and the ship engage in combat involving water, but they’re just as obviously not meant to be doing it the exact same way. And for that matter, if the Omega Res Novae’s purpose is supposed to be fighting Gnosis, as this demonstration proclaims, why the hell are they showing how well it can fight against a humanoid battle android? Wouldn’t the obvious thing to do for the demonstration be to show it fighting Gnosis? Y’know...the thing that it is supposedly being created to fight? It’s not like they don’t have captive Gnosis they can release for it to show its stuff; they did the same thing for the T-elos demonstration just minutes before this scene. If they don’t have enough Gnosis, why the hell not just move the thing out to a part of space with Gnosis and watch it fight there? By this point in the series the Gnosis are showing up everywhere; it wouldn’t be hard to find some. Having it fight a battle android of much greater power and far different size than any Gnosis, which additionally employs entirely different combat tactics and has a completely different arsenal then any Gnosis, does not actually provide any idea whatsoever of the Omega Res Novae’s ability to combat Gnosis! If you want to prove that your new pet cat is more effective at taking care of mice than a pet ferret, you don’t show that by ordering your cat to go on a ferret killing spree, you show it by having your cat catch some damn mice!
That’s not where the nonsense ends, though, not by a long shot. The actual setup for the demonstration is completely ludicrous, too. First of all, the demonstration of the Omega Res Novae is taking place inside an enclosed arena. Now, it is a big stadium, but this is a giant fucking mech suit! The ceiling of the arena is only a little higher than it is, relatively, and the walls on each side are just as relatively close. It’s basically like if you were to go and stand in the middle of a dentist’s reception room. Fine for when you’re sitting around waiting to have your molars capped, not so good when you’re a battle mecha meant to be showing everything you can do in combat. If the damn thing doesn’t have the room to fly, dodge, and maneuver, how is this demonstration supposed to effectively show its full capabilities? All we can know for sure is that it can stand still and shoot at things.
And speaking of this enclosed space, hey, how about the fact that you’re testing a massive, hyper-advanced battle machine in an arena comparatively small to it, with many of your audience and technicians seemingly watching from the walls of this arena, protected only by fucking glass? This is a LIVE FIRE DEMO; the Omega Res Novae is actually, fully armed with missiles and lasers and who knows what else, and you’ve got your audience sitting what amounts to a few feet away! A single stray laser blast in that direction and they’re all toast! Yeah, okay, the glass is obviously going to be very strong, and can, we see, withstand a very heavy object crashing against it at a high velocity, but the Omegat Res Novae is meant to be Armageddon in a fucking can! There is no way some safety glass is going to protect against it! And to compound that, again, KOS-MOS is the Omega Res Novae’s opponent, and given that she is very much smaller and obviously meant for more personal combat, her best defense in the fight is clearly going to be evasion, meaning that the giant mech suit’s going to be firing all over the place at a moving target--giving it just that much more likelihood that one of its lasers is going to accidentally kill some bystanders. And to top it all off, the pilot of the Omega Res Novae is a kid whose mental processes and connection to the suit seem relatively unpredictable, and who is unresponsive to regular human communication--just the sort of not-fully-understood wild card you’d want at the controls of a laser-spouting death machine surrounded by helpless bystanders, right?
You also gotta love the nonsensical aftermath of this demonstration. After the Omega Res Novae’s pilot goes, surprise surprise, out of control and starts firing wildly, KOS-MOS has to jump up in the way of one of its lasers to protect the people in the observation deck. Had she not taken a laser to the face, everyone where Shion is currently standing would be atomized. The Omega Res Novae’s shut down quickly after. So once that’s done with, the very next scene has the scientist who created T-elos walk up to Shion and Allen and casually introduce himself, and the three briefly exchange pleasantries. No one seems agitated in any way that they all almost were blown to hell and back by a giant laser blast. Allen’s not saying, “Holy shit, Shion, are you okay? You could’ve been melted in there!” Shion’s not pouting in annoyance because the idiot in charge didn’t pull the mech suit’s plug the second it started going nuts. No one’s rushing around, no announcement’s being made apologizing for the near death of everyone in the observation deck where Shion is, nothing. Just business as fucking usual. Like everyone just finished watching KOS-MOS and the Omega Res Novae having a picnic lunch together. And of course, when Shion meets moments later with Juli Mizrahi, who was the one in charge of monitoring the Omega Res Novae during the demo and who must realize Shion was in that almost-destroyed deck from seeing her come from its exit, Juli doesn’t offer any sort of apology for the incident, or even fucking mention it.
Awesome grasp of basic military procedures and basic human reactions, Namco, as usual. Stellar work.
* Cyborgs like Ziggy.
** Androids like KOS-MOS.
*** Jin did you seriously just bring a Katana to a Titanic Missile-Launching Laser-Blasting Bullet-Spewing Robot Fight?
Thursday, July 18, 2013
General RPG Lists: Lamest Villains
Well hey, it’s been a little while since I did a list rant, and also hey, I did a list of the Best Villains, so hey x3, why not make a list of the opposite?
Because it’s hard, that’s why! There are only so many truly great villains in RPGs, but lousy villains are a blue rupee a dozen. And how are they defined, really? It’s easy to tell what makes a great villain great, but there are just so many different ways for a villain to suck. Some are too ineffectual to really take seriously (such as that armored idiot in Grandia 3), some are pointless and thrown in at the very last second for no reason (remind me what Final Fantasy 9’s Necron’s deal was, again?), some make absolutely no goddamn sense in their role whatsoever (I’ve never seen a more painful stretch for a shocking twist than I have for The Last Story’s surprise traitor villain), some are just bland, unoriginal, and unexamined entirely (Snidely fucking Whiplash has more character depth than FF5’s Exdeath), some have moronic goals and/or methods (Dear Mass Effect 3’s Catalyst Star Child: if it is an elegantly simple task to reduce the entirety of your actions and motivations to a Yo Dawg meme, then everyone on the development team associated with you should feel profoundly ashamed of themselves), some are just spiteful, laughable little dicks (Kai Leng from ME3, for example), and so on. There’s all kinds of reasons, far more than I could really list here, or even accurately figure out. So this list is less about following any specific criteria, and more just about going with a gut impression of what villains have qualities that are just plain more pathetic than all the rest. So your list might be different, but I hope the losers below would at least be in consideration for it.
5. Ramsus (Xenogears)
Every villain loses eventually. For some, it’s only that fatal one loss, at the end of the game. Others fail at their task more than once. A few, like Ganondorf of The Legend of Zelda series, just keep failing over and over again (in fact, Ganondorf was a big contender for this spot). But Ramsus is just...sad. I mean, the dude just loses again, and again, and AGAIN. And unlike Ganondorf, who at least limits his failures to only 1 or 2 an installment, Ramsus manages to cram his dozens of losses all into the same game. His enemies outrun him. His enemies defeat him in combat, over and over again. His enemies outsmart him. His planned hostages immobilize him. He loses battles, he gets demoted, he gets manipulated, and the one time he manages to successfully beat his rival Fei, it’s only minutes before Fei beats him in a rematch. It’s just over and over and over again that you see this guy fail at everything he does. Honestly, Ramsus has got to be one of the most colossal fuck-ups in villain history.
4. Isamu (Shin Megami Tensei 3)*
I’ve seen a lot of villains’ plans for remaking all of reality so it will conform to their personal beliefs on what the world should be like. It’s really quite common in RPGs. Some want a chaotic world of constant struggle for supremacy. Some want to rule all of existence. Some want a world of complete equality. And so on--there are lots of different visions of a new world order that you come across in RPGs. However, Isamu’s is...pretty unique. Isamu basically wants to remake the world so that no one has any interaction with anyone else, and everybody exists as an island, no interference or assistance from any other human
So basically...Isamu wants to rework the nature of all existence so that he can sit in his room and listen to The Cure all day.
That’s pretty pathetic. Pretty damned pathetic, in fact. Seriously, Isamu, the coming birth of the new world demands that you determine a philosophy of the ideal world, and all you can come up with is to just have everyone be a hermit? Weak, Isamu, fuckin’ weak. But it’s not the only reason Isamu is a sad sack. First of all, there are the events that drive Isamu to this intelligent and totally not entirely idiotic idea. You know what was the clincher for him, that caused Isamu to isolate himself from others and led him to the place where his ideal was given shape? Well, he gets captured a couple times during the game’s course, and the protagonist rescues Isamu each time, but that’s not GOOD enough, because after the second time, Isamu throws a little hissy fit and complains that the protagonist is always too late for Isamu. Oh, I’m sorry, Your Highness, that my life-and-death struggle to free you from situations that you got yourself into wasn’t speedy enough for you! What a whiny ass.
To top Isamu’s whiny nature off, he is a tremendous hypocrite. If the game’s protagonist decides to follow any path beyond Isamu’s, Isamu insults him, saying that the protagonist is just wasting his time as a blind pawn of others. But if the protagonist DOES opt to assist Isamu, well, you better believe Isamu’s not gonna criticize the protagonist’s decision to be a pawn of another person then! And then there’s always the hypocrisy of Isamu’s wanting the protagonist’s help to achieve his goal when Isamu’s entire lame philosophy for the new world is to eschew others in all ways. Wanting and NEEDING it, I should say, because no matter what else happens, Isamu will always get killed by the other villains, so even if the protagonist were out of the picture entirely Isamu still wouldn’t be able to succeed in his goals. Yeah, way to stand true to your beliefs, jackass. What a whiny little git.
3. Thumb-Sucking, Irrational, Whiny Little Bitches (General RPGs)
You know what I’m so fucking sick of? I am so fucking sick of RPG villains who are oversensitive and have no fucking sense of proportion. They’re the ones who decide it’s okay to annihilate entire populations because they’ve had a bad experience in the past that they somehow think MUST represent ALL possible experiences, or decide to overreact to one bad thing in a villainous, world-threatening manner.
Shin from Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon could read the minds of those around him, and decided, somehow, that because the few dozen people whom he worked with didn’t think nice things, the same MUST be true for ALL of humanity, so he decided to wipe them all out. BOO HOO HOO PEOPLE WEREN’T AS NICE TO ME AS THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN! Shirley in Tales of Legendia** had a crush on protagonist Senel, but was told by him that he wasn’t interested a mere day after the woman he DID love (her sister Stella) died to save them, so she decided that humans like Senel and magical water people like her couldn’t exist together and began going along with a plan to wipe the humans out.*** BOO HOO HOO THE GUY I LIKE DOESN’T LIKE ME BACK! Emelious of Grandia 3 was born to an important destiny of communicating with the godlike Guardians, but he has to share that destiny with his younger sister because each was born with half the destined birthmark, and so he makes plans to summon a dark god to destroy the Guardians. BOO HOO HOO I’M NOT THE ONLY IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD!
Don’t get me wrong, there are ways you CAN make the concept work. I mean, look at The Master in Fallout 1, and Seymour in Final Fantasy 10. The Master believes that humanity is a hopeless species and wants to replace it with a world order of mutants under his command. Yeah, that’s an extreme stance, but he IS living in a time after a global nuclear war destroyed all human civilization utterly and left the whole world a hellish wasteland, and the current state of Fallout’s societies isn’t exactly a pleasant one. He has enough REASON for his villain motivation that he seems to be making a decision that we can understand to a certain degree. Seymour in Final Fantasy 10 had a shitty childhood, but that pain isn’t the entire reason for his villainy--it was simply a catalyst, that which was necessary for him to recognize the pain of all of Spira. Spira has for a thousand years or more (can’t remember the exact time frame) been under nearly constant attack by an unstoppable, mindless monster that destroys everything the people create and kills indiscriminately, leaving deadly beasts behind that only further cause misery. Spira’s not as visibly miserable as Fallout’s wasteland, but one can understand why Seymour would think that a quick death to all would be a preferable existence to a life of constant terror and destruction, where the greatest hope you have is a small reprieve of a few years. Give me real, believable motives for a campaign of evil--lust for power, philosophical ideals, ambition, outright hatred, that sort of thing. But failing that, at least give me some real, sensible evidence for the villainy.
Because I’m tired of clowns like Dragon Quest 9’s Corvus, who tried to destroy both humanity and gods because he thought that a single human’s betrayal (she didn’t even actually betray him) meant that all humans were evil, and that abhorrent little turd Mithos from Tales of Symphonia 1, and that whiny doofus Volsung from Wild Arms 5, and that sneering charlatan Akechi from Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5, and so many more. These hordes of overreacting, childish fools with no sense of proportion or perspective are just tearful, immature lamers to me.
2. Sephiroth (Final Fantasy 7 and Kingdom Hearts Series)
Oh yeah, like you all didn’t know this much-glorified fucktard was going to be here. The only surprise here is that Sephiroth didn’t make it to the very top.
When it comes to lame villains, Sephiroth’s kind of the patron saint. This guy is toted by SquareEnix as the man with the strongest willpower on FF7’s planet, and yet he lost his mind from reading a book. What did that book tell him? That his superior power comes from having been implanted with alien cells while he was still in the womb. So you’re 1/3 space monster, big fucking deal. My dad’s Canadian; you don’t see me losing my shit and trying to enact Armageddon in some clumsy attempt to become a god over it. Shouldn’t the “strongest will on the planet” be a little better able to keep together under a little stress?
While it’s not too important, Sephiroth’s look doesn’t exactly help me take him seriously. I mean, he’s essentially a chick in bondage gear, wielding the only sword in history to make Cloud Strife’s look feasible by comparison. Putting aside the obvious fact that he should not, even with super soldier strength, be able to lift and control the stupid thing, even with full ability to manipulate it, it’s still a stupid, ineffectual weapon! Carrying a sword that long would be an incredibly awkward prospect, with it unavoidably poking walls, slicing and stabbing ceilings, and dragging along the floor all the time, and in an actual battle, its length, while admittedly handy for outreaching your opponent, would mean that once it’s been parried off to the side, it can’t be retracted enough that it could be used to make a different attack. You could just hold his blade off to the side with your own and calmly walk up to him; all he could do is try to slide his sword up or down your own, which would only work out if you for some reason forgot to slide it with him, or swing it again from the side. Easy enough to get close, where his ultra long sword suddenly has absolutely no use.
Small surprise that the only people he ever seems to be able to actually beat are unarmed, untrained, and/or taken completely by surprise. But you get anybody who actually knows what they’re doing and is ready to fight, and you get Sephiroth getting thrown down reactor pits, slashed to ribbons, demolished utterly, and fought to a standstill by a 12-year-old who hangs out with Saturday morning cartoon characters and fights with a stupid giant house key. The only time Sephiroth ever seems to accomplish anything is when it’s actually pieces of Jenova shaped like him.
Which brings me to the next point of why he’s fucking lame--he’s never actually DOING anything. The entirety of Final Fantasy 7, he’s just sitting in the fucking northern crater cave, letting Jenova do all the work of freeing itself, controlling former SOLDIERs, fighting Cloud and company, killing Aeris, and retrieving the Black Materia. Sephiroth’s another one of those lazy idiot RPG villains who just sit back and can’t be bothered to actually do his own work. Okay, yeah, fine, it’s not actually laziness, there IS a reason for it--in FF7, I believe he was too wounded by his encounter with Cloud 5 years prior to leave the healing mako energies of the crater, and in the FF7 Advent Children movie, his agents have to do all the work because he’s very busy being dead. But lemme ask you something--which is lamer, him not being able to be bothered to do his own work, or him having gotten so badly punked in the past that he has no choice but to have to rely on others to do his work for him? You’d think being put in magic traction would be enough to convince a guy maybe he’s not the best candidate for godhood, but I guess suppressing rational second thoughts is what that “strongest will on the planet” is doing to make up for being on vacation when he went nuts.
Dear sweet merciful heavens, this guy is just so fucking lame.
1. Dracula (Castlevania Series)
Well, this is honestly a surprise. When I first thought about this list, Dracula never even occurred to me as a possible candidate for it, let alone making the number 1 spot. I figured Sephiroth would be taking this part, or maybe those insufferable tools from FF9, Zorn and Thorn (who didn’t even end up making the list, shockingly). But the more I looked at it, the more this list began to take form...the more I realized that Dracula is the most pathetic RPG villain ever. And why is that? Because he is everyone else on this list put together.
Think about it. Dracula is a colossal fuck-up, just like Ramsus. I mean, the guy resurrects over and over and over again, and every damn time, he’s killed before he can cause much trouble, usually almost immediately after reawakening. When does he ever actually succeed at his goals? Only a couple times, one of which was in Castlevania Legends, does he even get partially there, and CL was an alternate reality and a different Dracula, so...it’s pretty rare for the real Castlevania Dracula to really get anything done. He can’t even seem to leave his room before some Belmont flays him to nothingness.
A lot of the opportunities that his incompetence squanders only come to Dracula because of the work of others, as with Isamu and Sephiroth. Many of Dracula’s resurrections are possible only through the ceaseless efforts of cultists, Dracula’s servant Death, and other vampires. And also like Sephiroth, the guy just sits around waiting to be killed; as I mentioned, most Castlevania games I’m aware of with Dracula never even have the guy leave his damn room. The majority of Dracula’s villainous history can be described by the following set of instructions:
1. Be Revived
2. Sit in Room for a Few Minutes, at Most a Few Hours
3. Fight a Hero
4. Die
At least other recurring villains like Ganondorf have their shit together enough to actually DO some evil stuff before they’re put down again. Being murdered is by this point as mundane and traditional a part of Dracula’s morning experience as having a bowl of cereal.
And of course, he is also a Thumb-Sucking, Irrational, Whiny Little Bitch, as evidenced by Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, which shows the origin of Dracula. I mean, look, I get it that losing the woman you love is a truly horrible thing and one of the worst kinds of pain imaginable, I do. And I don’t blame a guy for getting pissed off at God for letting it happen (don’t AGREE, mind, but don’t blame), and turning his back upon God in that rage. People do actually DO that.
But you know what people DON’T do when they blame God for their unfortunate circumstances, no matter how angry they may be? They don’t try to make a pact with the forces of darkness to become lord of all vampires just so they can stick it to God by being immortal like Him. I mean, what about that even makes SENSE? You’re pissed off with God about not keeping your girlfriend alive, so to defy Him, you...show Him that He’s not the only one who can be immortal? What exactly does the one thing have to do with the other? Hell, your plan involves you choosing to adopt a characteristic of the individual that you hate so much, a characteristic which most prominently separates Him from your late beloved, so, y’know, good thinking there, champ. Then later on apparently Dracula is sweet on some other chick named Lisa, and SHE gets burned for supposedly being a witch or something to that tune, and it’s at that point that he decides to declare war on all of humanity. And, like, yeah, I GET why he’s pissed at humanity for it, and obviously the society where such a thing could happen needs serious overhaul, but rather than go after the people who did the act, or even going after them AND the ones who control and guide the societal evils that led to Lisa’s death, Dracula instead decides that ALL humanity must be destroyed. That’s grossly overreacting; he’s gonna go around killing people who are completely innocent, including people who are good like Lisa and his first girlfriend--he can’t seriously pretend such people don’t exist, he’s shacked up with 2 of them now. So yeah--thumb-sucking, irrational, whiny little bitch? Check.
Oh, yeah, and getting back to his Lament of Innocence debut, the guy’s got another characteristic of lameness in common with Isamu--he’s a hypocrite. Only he’s a much bigger jerk of a hypocrite than Isamu. See, Dracula’s plans to give God the finger by becoming an immortal vampire include the manipulation of his friend Leon Belmont into killing the current master vampire dude, a process which results in the death of Leon’s beloved. And then, once Dracula shows up for his villainous reveal, he’s actually surprised that Leon doesn’t want to join him in vampiring it up. Just...DUDE. You are going to ridiculous extremes out of a hate for God because you blame God for not preventing your girlfriend’s death. You just ACTIVELY created the events that led to Leon’s girlfriend’s death. You actually don’t expect him to be equally righteously pissed off at YOU for ACTUALLY causing her death as you are at God for neglecting to prevent your girl’s passing? Are you SERIOUS? What a fucking idiot!
Anyway...I’ve wasted enough time on this twit. Dracula is the culmination of all the other lamers on this list, and so do I dub him Most Pathetic RPG Villain of All.
Dishonorable Mention: Stupid Organizations (General RPGs)
What’s the only thing worse than a lame villain? A whole organized group of lame villains! What IS it with RPGs and stupid, pathetic villain organizations? You get the trite, gimmicky fuckwits in Organization 13 from the Kingdom Hearts series, who basically have substantially lowered the quality of the games by taking a huge amount of the focus away from the Disney characters with actual depth and personality. You get those lazy, useless doofuses in the Turks from Final Fantasy 7, whose talent at running away is matched only by their talent at losing. And don’t even get me started on Team Magma and especially Team Aqua from Pokemon’s Third Generation. Dear sweet God what a bunch of incompetent numbskulls.
Well THAT was a lot more words than I’d anticipated. As usual.
* One might argue that Isamu (and Chiaki and Hikawa, for that matter) is not truly a villain since one of the 4 major paths of the game can have you ally with him, but I’d point out that following any other path WILL make Isamu one of your major opponents, so that’s still him being an enemy thrice as often as an ally. And he IS out to forcibly remake the world according to his personal beliefs with no regard for anyone else’s opinion on the matter even though his actions will directly affect them--and if that doesn’t just scream “JRPG Villain,” then I don’t know what possibly could.
** Yeah, I realize Shirley’s also one of the good guys in ToL, but there’s a point where she’s ready to go all in on the second villain’s plans of genocide.
*** Okay, fine, there WERE extenuating circumstances, but the core cause of the problem was pretty indisputably Senel’s rejection, since it’s Senel’s romantic 180 later that snaps her out of it.
Because it’s hard, that’s why! There are only so many truly great villains in RPGs, but lousy villains are a blue rupee a dozen. And how are they defined, really? It’s easy to tell what makes a great villain great, but there are just so many different ways for a villain to suck. Some are too ineffectual to really take seriously (such as that armored idiot in Grandia 3), some are pointless and thrown in at the very last second for no reason (remind me what Final Fantasy 9’s Necron’s deal was, again?), some make absolutely no goddamn sense in their role whatsoever (I’ve never seen a more painful stretch for a shocking twist than I have for The Last Story’s surprise traitor villain), some are just bland, unoriginal, and unexamined entirely (Snidely fucking Whiplash has more character depth than FF5’s Exdeath), some have moronic goals and/or methods (Dear Mass Effect 3’s Catalyst Star Child: if it is an elegantly simple task to reduce the entirety of your actions and motivations to a Yo Dawg meme, then everyone on the development team associated with you should feel profoundly ashamed of themselves), some are just spiteful, laughable little dicks (Kai Leng from ME3, for example), and so on. There’s all kinds of reasons, far more than I could really list here, or even accurately figure out. So this list is less about following any specific criteria, and more just about going with a gut impression of what villains have qualities that are just plain more pathetic than all the rest. So your list might be different, but I hope the losers below would at least be in consideration for it.
5. Ramsus (Xenogears)
Every villain loses eventually. For some, it’s only that fatal one loss, at the end of the game. Others fail at their task more than once. A few, like Ganondorf of The Legend of Zelda series, just keep failing over and over again (in fact, Ganondorf was a big contender for this spot). But Ramsus is just...sad. I mean, the dude just loses again, and again, and AGAIN. And unlike Ganondorf, who at least limits his failures to only 1 or 2 an installment, Ramsus manages to cram his dozens of losses all into the same game. His enemies outrun him. His enemies defeat him in combat, over and over again. His enemies outsmart him. His planned hostages immobilize him. He loses battles, he gets demoted, he gets manipulated, and the one time he manages to successfully beat his rival Fei, it’s only minutes before Fei beats him in a rematch. It’s just over and over and over again that you see this guy fail at everything he does. Honestly, Ramsus has got to be one of the most colossal fuck-ups in villain history.
4. Isamu (Shin Megami Tensei 3)*
I’ve seen a lot of villains’ plans for remaking all of reality so it will conform to their personal beliefs on what the world should be like. It’s really quite common in RPGs. Some want a chaotic world of constant struggle for supremacy. Some want to rule all of existence. Some want a world of complete equality. And so on--there are lots of different visions of a new world order that you come across in RPGs. However, Isamu’s is...pretty unique. Isamu basically wants to remake the world so that no one has any interaction with anyone else, and everybody exists as an island, no interference or assistance from any other human
So basically...Isamu wants to rework the nature of all existence so that he can sit in his room and listen to The Cure all day.
That’s pretty pathetic. Pretty damned pathetic, in fact. Seriously, Isamu, the coming birth of the new world demands that you determine a philosophy of the ideal world, and all you can come up with is to just have everyone be a hermit? Weak, Isamu, fuckin’ weak. But it’s not the only reason Isamu is a sad sack. First of all, there are the events that drive Isamu to this intelligent and totally not entirely idiotic idea. You know what was the clincher for him, that caused Isamu to isolate himself from others and led him to the place where his ideal was given shape? Well, he gets captured a couple times during the game’s course, and the protagonist rescues Isamu each time, but that’s not GOOD enough, because after the second time, Isamu throws a little hissy fit and complains that the protagonist is always too late for Isamu. Oh, I’m sorry, Your Highness, that my life-and-death struggle to free you from situations that you got yourself into wasn’t speedy enough for you! What a whiny ass.
To top Isamu’s whiny nature off, he is a tremendous hypocrite. If the game’s protagonist decides to follow any path beyond Isamu’s, Isamu insults him, saying that the protagonist is just wasting his time as a blind pawn of others. But if the protagonist DOES opt to assist Isamu, well, you better believe Isamu’s not gonna criticize the protagonist’s decision to be a pawn of another person then! And then there’s always the hypocrisy of Isamu’s wanting the protagonist’s help to achieve his goal when Isamu’s entire lame philosophy for the new world is to eschew others in all ways. Wanting and NEEDING it, I should say, because no matter what else happens, Isamu will always get killed by the other villains, so even if the protagonist were out of the picture entirely Isamu still wouldn’t be able to succeed in his goals. Yeah, way to stand true to your beliefs, jackass. What a whiny little git.
3. Thumb-Sucking, Irrational, Whiny Little Bitches (General RPGs)
You know what I’m so fucking sick of? I am so fucking sick of RPG villains who are oversensitive and have no fucking sense of proportion. They’re the ones who decide it’s okay to annihilate entire populations because they’ve had a bad experience in the past that they somehow think MUST represent ALL possible experiences, or decide to overreact to one bad thing in a villainous, world-threatening manner.
Shin from Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon could read the minds of those around him, and decided, somehow, that because the few dozen people whom he worked with didn’t think nice things, the same MUST be true for ALL of humanity, so he decided to wipe them all out. BOO HOO HOO PEOPLE WEREN’T AS NICE TO ME AS THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN! Shirley in Tales of Legendia** had a crush on protagonist Senel, but was told by him that he wasn’t interested a mere day after the woman he DID love (her sister Stella) died to save them, so she decided that humans like Senel and magical water people like her couldn’t exist together and began going along with a plan to wipe the humans out.*** BOO HOO HOO THE GUY I LIKE DOESN’T LIKE ME BACK! Emelious of Grandia 3 was born to an important destiny of communicating with the godlike Guardians, but he has to share that destiny with his younger sister because each was born with half the destined birthmark, and so he makes plans to summon a dark god to destroy the Guardians. BOO HOO HOO I’M NOT THE ONLY IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD!
Don’t get me wrong, there are ways you CAN make the concept work. I mean, look at The Master in Fallout 1, and Seymour in Final Fantasy 10. The Master believes that humanity is a hopeless species and wants to replace it with a world order of mutants under his command. Yeah, that’s an extreme stance, but he IS living in a time after a global nuclear war destroyed all human civilization utterly and left the whole world a hellish wasteland, and the current state of Fallout’s societies isn’t exactly a pleasant one. He has enough REASON for his villain motivation that he seems to be making a decision that we can understand to a certain degree. Seymour in Final Fantasy 10 had a shitty childhood, but that pain isn’t the entire reason for his villainy--it was simply a catalyst, that which was necessary for him to recognize the pain of all of Spira. Spira has for a thousand years or more (can’t remember the exact time frame) been under nearly constant attack by an unstoppable, mindless monster that destroys everything the people create and kills indiscriminately, leaving deadly beasts behind that only further cause misery. Spira’s not as visibly miserable as Fallout’s wasteland, but one can understand why Seymour would think that a quick death to all would be a preferable existence to a life of constant terror and destruction, where the greatest hope you have is a small reprieve of a few years. Give me real, believable motives for a campaign of evil--lust for power, philosophical ideals, ambition, outright hatred, that sort of thing. But failing that, at least give me some real, sensible evidence for the villainy.
Because I’m tired of clowns like Dragon Quest 9’s Corvus, who tried to destroy both humanity and gods because he thought that a single human’s betrayal (she didn’t even actually betray him) meant that all humans were evil, and that abhorrent little turd Mithos from Tales of Symphonia 1, and that whiny doofus Volsung from Wild Arms 5, and that sneering charlatan Akechi from Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5, and so many more. These hordes of overreacting, childish fools with no sense of proportion or perspective are just tearful, immature lamers to me.
2. Sephiroth (Final Fantasy 7 and Kingdom Hearts Series)
Oh yeah, like you all didn’t know this much-glorified fucktard was going to be here. The only surprise here is that Sephiroth didn’t make it to the very top.
When it comes to lame villains, Sephiroth’s kind of the patron saint. This guy is toted by SquareEnix as the man with the strongest willpower on FF7’s planet, and yet he lost his mind from reading a book. What did that book tell him? That his superior power comes from having been implanted with alien cells while he was still in the womb. So you’re 1/3 space monster, big fucking deal. My dad’s Canadian; you don’t see me losing my shit and trying to enact Armageddon in some clumsy attempt to become a god over it. Shouldn’t the “strongest will on the planet” be a little better able to keep together under a little stress?
While it’s not too important, Sephiroth’s look doesn’t exactly help me take him seriously. I mean, he’s essentially a chick in bondage gear, wielding the only sword in history to make Cloud Strife’s look feasible by comparison. Putting aside the obvious fact that he should not, even with super soldier strength, be able to lift and control the stupid thing, even with full ability to manipulate it, it’s still a stupid, ineffectual weapon! Carrying a sword that long would be an incredibly awkward prospect, with it unavoidably poking walls, slicing and stabbing ceilings, and dragging along the floor all the time, and in an actual battle, its length, while admittedly handy for outreaching your opponent, would mean that once it’s been parried off to the side, it can’t be retracted enough that it could be used to make a different attack. You could just hold his blade off to the side with your own and calmly walk up to him; all he could do is try to slide his sword up or down your own, which would only work out if you for some reason forgot to slide it with him, or swing it again from the side. Easy enough to get close, where his ultra long sword suddenly has absolutely no use.
Small surprise that the only people he ever seems to be able to actually beat are unarmed, untrained, and/or taken completely by surprise. But you get anybody who actually knows what they’re doing and is ready to fight, and you get Sephiroth getting thrown down reactor pits, slashed to ribbons, demolished utterly, and fought to a standstill by a 12-year-old who hangs out with Saturday morning cartoon characters and fights with a stupid giant house key. The only time Sephiroth ever seems to accomplish anything is when it’s actually pieces of Jenova shaped like him.
Which brings me to the next point of why he’s fucking lame--he’s never actually DOING anything. The entirety of Final Fantasy 7, he’s just sitting in the fucking northern crater cave, letting Jenova do all the work of freeing itself, controlling former SOLDIERs, fighting Cloud and company, killing Aeris, and retrieving the Black Materia. Sephiroth’s another one of those lazy idiot RPG villains who just sit back and can’t be bothered to actually do his own work. Okay, yeah, fine, it’s not actually laziness, there IS a reason for it--in FF7, I believe he was too wounded by his encounter with Cloud 5 years prior to leave the healing mako energies of the crater, and in the FF7 Advent Children movie, his agents have to do all the work because he’s very busy being dead. But lemme ask you something--which is lamer, him not being able to be bothered to do his own work, or him having gotten so badly punked in the past that he has no choice but to have to rely on others to do his work for him? You’d think being put in magic traction would be enough to convince a guy maybe he’s not the best candidate for godhood, but I guess suppressing rational second thoughts is what that “strongest will on the planet” is doing to make up for being on vacation when he went nuts.
Dear sweet merciful heavens, this guy is just so fucking lame.
1. Dracula (Castlevania Series)
Well, this is honestly a surprise. When I first thought about this list, Dracula never even occurred to me as a possible candidate for it, let alone making the number 1 spot. I figured Sephiroth would be taking this part, or maybe those insufferable tools from FF9, Zorn and Thorn (who didn’t even end up making the list, shockingly). But the more I looked at it, the more this list began to take form...the more I realized that Dracula is the most pathetic RPG villain ever. And why is that? Because he is everyone else on this list put together.
Think about it. Dracula is a colossal fuck-up, just like Ramsus. I mean, the guy resurrects over and over and over again, and every damn time, he’s killed before he can cause much trouble, usually almost immediately after reawakening. When does he ever actually succeed at his goals? Only a couple times, one of which was in Castlevania Legends, does he even get partially there, and CL was an alternate reality and a different Dracula, so...it’s pretty rare for the real Castlevania Dracula to really get anything done. He can’t even seem to leave his room before some Belmont flays him to nothingness.
A lot of the opportunities that his incompetence squanders only come to Dracula because of the work of others, as with Isamu and Sephiroth. Many of Dracula’s resurrections are possible only through the ceaseless efforts of cultists, Dracula’s servant Death, and other vampires. And also like Sephiroth, the guy just sits around waiting to be killed; as I mentioned, most Castlevania games I’m aware of with Dracula never even have the guy leave his damn room. The majority of Dracula’s villainous history can be described by the following set of instructions:
1. Be Revived
2. Sit in Room for a Few Minutes, at Most a Few Hours
3. Fight a Hero
4. Die
At least other recurring villains like Ganondorf have their shit together enough to actually DO some evil stuff before they’re put down again. Being murdered is by this point as mundane and traditional a part of Dracula’s morning experience as having a bowl of cereal.
And of course, he is also a Thumb-Sucking, Irrational, Whiny Little Bitch, as evidenced by Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, which shows the origin of Dracula. I mean, look, I get it that losing the woman you love is a truly horrible thing and one of the worst kinds of pain imaginable, I do. And I don’t blame a guy for getting pissed off at God for letting it happen (don’t AGREE, mind, but don’t blame), and turning his back upon God in that rage. People do actually DO that.
But you know what people DON’T do when they blame God for their unfortunate circumstances, no matter how angry they may be? They don’t try to make a pact with the forces of darkness to become lord of all vampires just so they can stick it to God by being immortal like Him. I mean, what about that even makes SENSE? You’re pissed off with God about not keeping your girlfriend alive, so to defy Him, you...show Him that He’s not the only one who can be immortal? What exactly does the one thing have to do with the other? Hell, your plan involves you choosing to adopt a characteristic of the individual that you hate so much, a characteristic which most prominently separates Him from your late beloved, so, y’know, good thinking there, champ. Then later on apparently Dracula is sweet on some other chick named Lisa, and SHE gets burned for supposedly being a witch or something to that tune, and it’s at that point that he decides to declare war on all of humanity. And, like, yeah, I GET why he’s pissed at humanity for it, and obviously the society where such a thing could happen needs serious overhaul, but rather than go after the people who did the act, or even going after them AND the ones who control and guide the societal evils that led to Lisa’s death, Dracula instead decides that ALL humanity must be destroyed. That’s grossly overreacting; he’s gonna go around killing people who are completely innocent, including people who are good like Lisa and his first girlfriend--he can’t seriously pretend such people don’t exist, he’s shacked up with 2 of them now. So yeah--thumb-sucking, irrational, whiny little bitch? Check.
Oh, yeah, and getting back to his Lament of Innocence debut, the guy’s got another characteristic of lameness in common with Isamu--he’s a hypocrite. Only he’s a much bigger jerk of a hypocrite than Isamu. See, Dracula’s plans to give God the finger by becoming an immortal vampire include the manipulation of his friend Leon Belmont into killing the current master vampire dude, a process which results in the death of Leon’s beloved. And then, once Dracula shows up for his villainous reveal, he’s actually surprised that Leon doesn’t want to join him in vampiring it up. Just...DUDE. You are going to ridiculous extremes out of a hate for God because you blame God for not preventing your girlfriend’s death. You just ACTIVELY created the events that led to Leon’s girlfriend’s death. You actually don’t expect him to be equally righteously pissed off at YOU for ACTUALLY causing her death as you are at God for neglecting to prevent your girl’s passing? Are you SERIOUS? What a fucking idiot!
Anyway...I’ve wasted enough time on this twit. Dracula is the culmination of all the other lamers on this list, and so do I dub him Most Pathetic RPG Villain of All.
Dishonorable Mention: Stupid Organizations (General RPGs)
What’s the only thing worse than a lame villain? A whole organized group of lame villains! What IS it with RPGs and stupid, pathetic villain organizations? You get the trite, gimmicky fuckwits in Organization 13 from the Kingdom Hearts series, who basically have substantially lowered the quality of the games by taking a huge amount of the focus away from the Disney characters with actual depth and personality. You get those lazy, useless doofuses in the Turks from Final Fantasy 7, whose talent at running away is matched only by their talent at losing. And don’t even get me started on Team Magma and especially Team Aqua from Pokemon’s Third Generation. Dear sweet God what a bunch of incompetent numbskulls.
Well THAT was a lot more words than I’d anticipated. As usual.
* One might argue that Isamu (and Chiaki and Hikawa, for that matter) is not truly a villain since one of the 4 major paths of the game can have you ally with him, but I’d point out that following any other path WILL make Isamu one of your major opponents, so that’s still him being an enemy thrice as often as an ally. And he IS out to forcibly remake the world according to his personal beliefs with no regard for anyone else’s opinion on the matter even though his actions will directly affect them--and if that doesn’t just scream “JRPG Villain,” then I don’t know what possibly could.
** Yeah, I realize Shirley’s also one of the good guys in ToL, but there’s a point where she’s ready to go all in on the second villain’s plans of genocide.
*** Okay, fine, there WERE extenuating circumstances, but the core cause of the problem was pretty indisputably Senel’s rejection, since it’s Senel’s romantic 180 later that snaps her out of it.
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