General RPGs' Minigames 11: Hide and Seek

Ugh. Hide and seek minigames.

Hide and seek’s one of those things whose real life appeal does not translate well to video games, like fishing, auctions, and, in the case of turn-based RPGs, physical combat. In real life, you’re pitting your mind and, to an extent, your agility and flexibility against that of others, seeing who can pick the best hiding place, who can find it, who has the patience and self control to make the best use of a hiding place, who has the keen sense of sight, hearing, and, on some unfortunate occasions, smell,* to uncover those hiding. There’s usually also some sort of thrill of urgency to the game, as the longer people remain unfound, the more of a chance they have to make a break for home base or something (not that everyone plays like that, of course, there’s no real hard and fast rule about hide and seek beyond the 2 titular activities).

All of that’s pretty much out the window with a hide and seek minigame. You’re only pitting your mind against one or two (probably very bored) programmers, the same ones whom you’ve probably already matched wits with countless times before during the puzzles of various dungeons in the game. You pretty much only ever play the role of the seeker in a hide and seek minigame, cutting out half of the entirety of the game.** Oh sure, there are times in RPGs where you have to hide and stay sneaky, but those are for stealth minigames, and the ones you’re avoiding are inevitably just guards with a set movement pattern. They’re usually not actually seeking you, and in the cases where they are, they’re always doing a piss-poor job of it. There’s only one sense you’re ever using in the minigame, that being sight--there’s pretty much never any sound-based clues to your prey, as there might be in a real game. There’s no real urgency about it save the occasional arbitrary timer; those hiding just sit and wait motionlessly for you the whole time.

As well as all that, most of the hide and seek minigames I’ve played are illogical and dumb. You take the one in Breath of Fire 4, where you play hide and seek with some kids in a desert city near the beginning of the game (at least, I THINK this is an example of what I’m about to talk about; it’s been a long time since I played and I’m in no rush to relive it). Some of the hiding places the kids take are stupid because they’re only hidden from the player’s view of a skyward look. You’ll have to move the camera to locate them, because otherwise they’re out of your personal view. But from the perspective of the game character who is, according to the game’s story, actually looking for them, these spots at times should be very clearly visible!

And that’s the thing with these hide and seek games: so often the hiding places are just absolutely terrible, and would only be challenging for someone looking down from a bird’s eye view. Well that’s just fine and dandy for challenging the player, I suppose, but it sure as hell doesn’t make the slightest pretense at in-game realism. And if the damn minigame isn’t going to try to connect with the actual game events in any real way, why the hell should I give a crap about it? It’s just distracting and delaying me from continuing to experience the RPG’s storytelling properly, breaking immersion so I can go on what amounts, with no other actual human interaction, to a treasure hunt with no treasure.

Fun.









* Yes, smell. I once played a game of hide and seek in which I located my quarry because no nook or cranny in the world could contain his unique brand of body odor. When I uncovered him and he groaned and whined, “How’d you find me!?” (because his hiding place WAS very good), I had the good grace to say, that I had “just had a feeling,” and not add that the feeling had been in my nose, and that it had been terrible pain.

** Please note that this is not to be taken as a suggestion that a hide and seek minigame SHOULD give the player the chance to be the one hiding. That’s all I need--a minigame where I just sit and wait for half an hour. My point here is only that the concept of hide and seek is irrecoverably cut in half for the minigame, a loss that there is no remedy for.

The Lunar Series's Goddess Althena

Hm. Although I’ve spaced’em out pretty well, I’ve done an unusual amount of rants about the Lunar series lately. I guess it’s probably my having played Lunar: Dragon Song last year...until recently, I’d been happily content to let Lunar rest in the back of my mind in static disdain, but once the series was brought back to my attention, I started to not only recognize the unspeakable terribleness of LDS, but also really remember the previous games’ specific problems. And in this renewed attention, I have come to realize something about the series that I hadn’t particularly thought about before:

Goddess Althena sucks.

Seriously, she’s total crap. Consider this: I have played 3 of the 4 Lunar games.* She is physically present and affecting the plot in 2 of those games, and both times, she gets brainwashed to be evil and do the main villain’s bidding. So far, 100% of the time that Althena has been in a game, she’s been duped into being evil. Once, yeah, I was willing to accept that, but twice? 2 for 2? Once is acceptable for an RPG character, happens all the time. I don’t hold the brainwashing against Mary’s husband in Tales of Destiny 1, or Kain in Final Fantasy 4,** or Knights of the Old Republic 1’s Bastila. In fact, in all 3 of those cases, the brainwashing angle is beneficial to the storytelling, adding characterization or providing new, positive characteristics to the game’s plot. But when you’re getting brainwashed more than once, by 2 different people,*** and you’re a freaking goddess? That’s just pretty pathetic, lady.

Not helping that is the fact that neither villain who brainwashes Althena is a particularly compelling character or has a very well thought-out, reasonable objective. One wonders how anyone could be brainwashed by Ghaleon or Ignatius to begin with. I guess there’s some plot-convenient magic going on with it, probably, but again, why the hell is it so easy to do this to the super-powerful deity who created, maintains, and watches over all of Lunar?

That’s certainly not the only beef I’ve got with Althena, though. Here’s another big one: the endings of both Lunar: Dragon Song and Lunar 1 both contain the implication that Althena has decided, in the human forms of Lunar 1’s Luna and LDS’s Lucia, that humanity does not need her to guide them, watch over them, and serve whatever capacity she does as a goddess just sort of sitting around in a glowy chamber that people don’t regularly visit anyway. Well, okay, fine. There’s the message of her children standing for themselves and facing their future with their own strength and so on. Good message, lamely conveyed.****

Here’s the thing, though: her children not needing her to create their own future should NOT the same thing as her deciding to skip out on goddesshood forever. When Luna dies of old age after the events of Lunar 1, she doesn’t reincarnate, and so Althena the goddess is gone forever. Well, that’s fine and all, but she’s taking herself entirely out of the picture when she KNOWS that Zophar, the ungodly powerful villain of Lunar 2 whose destruction of Earth necessitated the creation of Lunar to begin with, could potentially return to threaten the inhabitants of Lunar in the future! Luna-Althena is fully aware of Zophar’s existence, of how incredibly powerful he is and that he might someday threaten Lunar’s people with extinction, and yet she makes no effort to keep herself alive in case that day may come! And you can’t even say she just stupidly forgot or something, because she left a video message for Lunar 2’s Lucia (no relation to Lunar: Dragon Song’s Lucia; why the hell did the writers have 2 separate major characters in the series named the same damn thing?) explaining that she did so.

I’m sorry, but there is a DIFFERENCE between letting your children pave their own way without your guidance or interference, and just carelessly abandoning them to let them face down a monster of pure evil that dwarfs your own goddess-level power! You can WATCH things without interfering with their destiny, you know. I may have every confidence that a child has the coordination, intelligence, common sense, and maturity to use an oven, but that confidence doesn’t mean that the first time the kid tries cooking some mac’n’cheese, I should turn off the smoke detectors, hide the list of emergency numbers, disconnect the land line, toss all cell phones in the garbage disposal, scribble out all the instructions on the mac’n’cheese box, and leave town!

It’s just stupid black-and-white reasoning with no room for the gray area of common fucking sense. If your kid is getting picked on by another kid in school, and you tell him that he should try to solve his own problems, that’s one thing. But if your child later comes running up to you in terror because he’s being chased by a vicious, possibly rabid dog, your response should obviously NOT still be to tell him to solve his own problems! That dog is dangerous enough that it poses a threat to YOU, a full-grown adult, and thus it is NOT reasonable to expect the child to deal with the problem himself. It is CONCEIVABLE that a child might just be able to protect himself successfully from the dog--the same way it’s conceivable to bulls-eye a fly with a snapped rubber band with your eyes closed--but it is horribly wrong to assume that he can and must do so. And that’s what Althena does after her permanent death after Lunar 1--she just leaves a video to whoever’s day she screwed up in the future saying, “You can do it if you believe in yourselves! Hope it all works out for you kids!” and washes her hands of her children forever.

Okay, fine, you can argue that she did, in fact, wind up being correct, and the heroes in Lunar 2 manage to find a way to stop Zophar on their own. You know what? You want to count Althena’s faith that humanity would manage just happening to come true as a point in her favor, go ahead. Just go ahead, I don’t even frickin’ care. But in my opinion, the narrow save for humanity of defeating Zophar isn’t evidence of well-placed faith, it’s just them managing to accomplish something that couldn’t possibly have been predicted or relied upon under even the best of circumstances. Lunar 2’s heroes made it happen and good on them for it, but from the perspective of Althena centuries before, she just irresponsibly rolled some dice and they happened to come up favorably. But that’s just my perspective, I suppose.

And another reason Althena is a shitty goddess: for all the big deal that’s made about her taking a mortal form and letting Lunar’s people move forward without her guidance...well, what exactly was so great about her guidance to begin with? Quite frankly, the world that Althena has only comparatively recently stopped supposedly directly guiding in Lunar: Dragon Song is a pretty bad one. The society of Lunar: Dragon Song, which again is implied to have been until recent years under the more direct guidance of Althena, is racially oppressive! Because beastmen in Lunar are (supposedly) physically superior to humans in every measurable way, they dominate the best parts of the land to live in, rule over both themselves and the humans, enjoy all the best perks of their society’s cities and technologies, and generally just look down on all humans and see them as just a superfluous, lesser species. And don’t give me crap about how Althena has, by Lunar: Dragon Song’s opening, been away in the human form of Lucia for several years now. The idea that humans are inferior creatures is one that is an ingrained part of this society’s mentality, shared and fully accepted by nearly all beastmen AND human beings. Even if we assume that some huge social order rearrangement from a previous society of equality could have happened in the time that Althena’s been Lucia, AND had time to settle down by this point into being everyday life, there’s simply no way that an entire society would so universally adopt a notion such as one race’s inferiority to another in such a comparatively short period of time.***** This is clearly a social idea that has been around for a long, long time, so the inescapable conclusion is that for a significant period of time where Althena has been directly available and supposedly influential on Lunar’s society, she has either overlooked or actively encouraged a society in which one race is looked down upon and subjugated by another one.

And by the way, just to make things clear here for the kinds of folks who think Caesar’s Legion in Fallout: New Vegas was a legitimate social force, the Lunar society, at the time of Lunar: Dragon Song, is one which is more than sufficiently advanced enough that the supposed physical strength of the beastmen does not warrant greater social respect. It’s a well-advanced civilization with political leaders, bureaucracy, the arts, and enough technological advancement that intellect must be socially valuable to some degree. It has advanced to the point where there is no defensible reason to base social worth upon physical prowess, and obviously has been at that point for a long time. So there is no rational survival-related reason for making humans second-class citizens, or anything like that. Not that it would be rational anyway, by the evidence of the series’s own games. I mean, human Jian in LDS is the physical equal of beastmen Gabby and Rufus (not even counting Jian’s ability to attack thrice at once), humans Alex and Kyle in Lunar 1 are physically superior to half-beastman Jessica, and beastman Leo in Lunar 2 is at best only physically the equal of human Hiro.

So let’s count up what we’ve got here, shall we? We have a goddess who is brainwashed into being evil every time we see her, who 100% abandons her people even though she knows that an insanely powerful and horrible monster may someday attack them on the flimsy pretext that she thinks they’re emotionally ready to take it on and have to stand on their own and so on, and she let an inarguably unnecessary racially oppressive society rise up on her watch. So far Althena is sounding like one awesome benevolent, wise, nurturing goddess that everyone loves. Do I have anything else?

You bet I do! How about that Vile Tribe, huh? According to the legends of Lunar, the Vile Tribe were a bunch of no-goodniks who were banished hundreds of years before any of the Lunar games after they rejected Althena and for the bad deeds they did. What deeds were these? Uh, the legends are pretty suspiciously vague on this point, actually, and a quick search at a couple of Wikipedias and Lunar fanpages doesn’t offer any clarification.

Putting aside the suspicious lack of details to what the Vile Tribe did to deserve this punishment, banishment from the settled part of Lunar is a pretty big deal. Lunar takes place on the moon (uh, spoilers, I guess?), and it seems that most of the greenery and flowing water and all those nice life-sustaining environmental conditions are a result of Althena’s magic having jumpstarted and, at least for a time, maintained them. In most cases, banishment is no laughing matter, but in the case of Lunar, banishment from Althena’s lands to the untouched Frontier is to be exiled to a harsh, very nearly lifeless wasteland. I mean, it’s essentially just the moon as we understand it, except that Althena’s magical air spills over into it, I guess. As far as I’m concerned, the following are all significantly easier to survive over long periods of time than Lunar’s Frontier lands:


The Majority of Fallout’s Wasteland
Breath of Fire 3’s Desert of Death
The Arctic
Baten Kaitos’s Earth
A Long, Thoughtful Discourse between Tommy Wiseau and Sarah Palin


So I have to wonder, what crime was it that all those who would form the Vile Tribe committed to deserve this? This isn’t just your regular banishment where you send someone away to do their own thing and stop bothering you. This is the kind of banishment where you’re sending someone away to die so you don’t have to execute them yourself. This is about a quarter of a step away from an outright mass execution. So tell me, Goddess Althena, always presented as so benevolent, good, and loving, what was this vague crime of the past that was deserving of such an extreme punishment for so many? I’d love to know what they did that could be heinous enough to warrant this.

But you know, that’s not even my point here. Here’s where my real fourth argument of Althena sucking comes in. Let’s assume for a moment that whatever the people of the Vile Tribe did, it really, undeniably WAS worthy of banishment to the edges of Lunar 500 years ago. Swallowing that, let’s consider something The beings of the Vile Tribe aren’t mentioned to be any longer-lived than regular humans and beastmen (and living out on the Frontier, one can reasonably assume that most of the Vile Tribe would actually have shorter lives than the average Lunar citizen), so that means that the people who are forced to live outside of Althena’s lands by the times of the games, forced to subsist in this wasteland to beat all wastelands, are the distant descendants of the original Vile Tribe who committed the crime that we are currently assuming actually warranted banishment.

Ummmmmmmm...yeah, uh, why are they still there?

Althena’s banishment doesn’t just punish those of the Vile Tribe who actually committed the crime, it passes that punishment down from generation to generation! By the end of Lunar 1, 500 years’ worth of generations have been suffering for the sins of their forebears, sins that these children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and so on had NO PART OF! By Althena’s decree, countless people have spent their entire lives in an agonized struggle for survival for a crime they did not commit! That’s...that’s horrifyingly unjust, outright evil!

You can try to rationalize it, sure. Here, let me help you--I already thought of some good ones:

“Ah gee, RPGenius, we don’t know that it was ALTHENA that kept them on the Frontier. Maybe she would have accepted the original Vile Tribe’s descendants back, and it was just the other people of Lunar who didn’t let them back!” Well that’s certainly possible, but I’d like to remind you that the major conflicts of both Lunar: Dragon Song and Lunar 1 revolve around the question of whether Althena should be available to guide and coddle Lunar’s civilization, with the understood implication that she has been doing just that. So even if the people of Lunar are the ones who keep the Vile Tribe exiled (due at least in part to the doctrine of Althena’s followers saying that this exile is a good thing), Althena has long been in a position up until very soon before both games’ beginnings to tell the Vile Tribe that it’s okay to come back, and to tell the rest of Lunar to suck it up and deal with it--IF she was willing to forgive the children for the sins of the fathers. But that does not happen.

“Well shucks there RPGenius, the Vile Tribe members we see in the games are mostly villains anyway. Maybe they’re still there because they’re still bad!” I think not. While Royce is shown to be pretty irredeemably evil and the possibility of Xenobia being capable of any good at all is questionable, Phacia, the third leader of the Vile Tribe at the time of Lunar 1, eventually comes to redeem herself, and from some of the things we learn during the games, the Vile Tribe of current times are doing what they’re doing because they’re justifiably pissed off at their exile and the difficult life they’ve all had because of it. But as at least some of them are capable of accepting and embracing the ideals of Lunar’s society, as seen by Phacia, they’re capable of complex thought and self-awareness of morality and emotion, and they’re capable of following a leader who promises them a better life, so I would say that the Vile Tribe are no more inherently evil than you or I. They possess the human spirit and a human-level intellect and self-awareness, and anyone who does so can, potentially, be a good, worthwhile, and acceptable person, given the chance.

“Maybe Althena doesn’t actually know they’re still out there, and would offer them the chance to come back if she did, RPGenius!” Well, I can’t remember exactly whether the Vile Tribe are a known fact to the society of Lunar in Lunar: Dragon Song and Lunar 1, or if they’re just a legend that people can’t verify or disprove, but by the end of Lunar: Dragon Song, Althena, in the form of Lucia, is very aware that the Vile Tribe exists because they factored into the whole adventure. Yeah, Lucia decides at the end of LDS that the world doesn’t need Althena’s guidance, but we know, given the later events of Lunar 1, that she at some point apparently changed her mind and went back to being a goddess who at least in SOME way had something to do with human and beastman affairs (if she truly had no part in them at all in that form, then she’d feel no need to let herself permanently die as Luna at the end of Lunar 1) for a while. Yet by the time Lunar 1 opens, the Vile Tribe is still forced to be out on the Frontier. Althena knows they’re there, and she’s not changing her mind about it.

“Maybe, RPGenius, they don’t want to go back!” They certainly do want to go back; that’s why Ghaleon is able to get them to build his Grindery in Lunar 1. Now, maybe you mean that they don’t want to go back and be presided over by Althena. That is certainly possible--the original myth of the Vile Tribe does say that they rejected Althena from the start, and if my memory serves, Xenobia and Royce reject Phacia’s idea of trying to return to Lunar peacefully under the rules of Althena. But you know what? That isn’t a reason that they can’t be given a little piece of Lunar for themselves that isn’t the horrible Frontier. So long as they were peaceful and didn’t trouble others, why not let them live somewhere reasonably habitable without having to go around worshipping Althena? They shouldn’t be forced to worship her if they don’t want to, and the punishment for not worshipping her shouldn’t be banishment to a harsh wasteland! If the current generations of Vile Tribe people are seriously being kept out just because they don’t feel like worshipping the goddess that let them suffer a painful, harsh existence as penance for their grandparents’ mistakes, then we can add “raging egomaniac” to the list of Althena’s bad qualities.

“But RPGenius, children SHOULD be forced to suffer for mistakes their parents made!” Please go and be an idiotic asshole somewhere else.

No matter how you try to rationalize it, it always comes down to the same thing: the Vile Tribe descendants unfairly suffer for someone else’s crimes, because of Althena, and are either passively or actively kept in that suffering by Althena.

So yeah. That’s the rant, folks. That’s why Goddess Althena sucks. She’s brainwashed too damn easily, she abandons her people knowing what kind of danger they might someday face and just cheerfully expects them to overcome it without any reason for such confidence, she allows groundless racism to shape and maintain an oppressive society, and she forces descendants to go through the agonizing punishment earned for crimes they themselves did not commit. So essentially, she’s easily the pawn of mortals (and bad ones, at that), she can’t be relied on, her guidance leads society astray, and regardless of her supposed benevolence, she’s actually utterly ruthless and unforgiving, and in a way that’s completely unjust. I actually think that’s a pretty comprehensive list of everything that is the exact opposite of what a deity is supposed to be! It’s a damned shame, it really is, because Althena was a solo-act goddess at a time back when RPGs involving outright gods didn’t really have many such things, only heterogenous pantheons or single male deities (or entirely male pantheons). I would have preferred to like her. But the flat fact is that she really just sucks.










* The 4 separate, actual, original Lunar games, I mean. The Lunar series is bizarre in that it has 10 different title entries in it, yet of those 10, the majority are actually just remakes and rereleases. Seriously--there’s Lunar 1 (The Silver Star), Lunar 2 (Eternal Blue), Lunar: Walking School, Lunar: Dragon Song (Lunar Genesis in Japan), and then the rest of the games in the series are 1 remake of Lunar: Walking School, 1 remake of Lunar 2, and then 4 remakes of Lunar 1. This is a series where the remakes actually outnumber the original games. Even Final Fantasy isn’t that bad...yet.

** Keep in mind that though Kain betrayed the party twice, it was only 1 single brainwashing that caused that--he simply didn’t fully snap out of it the first time. It’s not like 2 separate, successful attempts were made.

*** Er, sort of. Ignatius of Lunar: Dragon Song is supposed to be his own individual character, even if it’s pretty painfully obvious that he’s just a bad copy of Lunar 1’s Ghaleon.

**** For the sake of the rant’s integrity, we will forget, for a moment, that it’s illogical and stupid for Lunar: Dragon Song’s Lucia to come to this conclusion, when she will, some time later, be Althena doing Althena world-guiding things in time for Lunar 1’s events to occur, at which point she’ll apparently relearn the same damn lesson. If you’re going to make deity non-involvement your message for your prequel game, Game Arts, then you might want to make sure that your later, already well-established game doesn’t hinge on that message never having happened.

***** Actually, I can think of one single way that would happen in a short period of time--if Althena had herself said that beastmen were better than humans and should lead society in totality. But that possibility would just directly prove my point that she sucks, wouldn’t it?

Shin Megami Tensei 4-1's Fiend Hunting

Remember the third rant I ever posted, way, way back years ago, on Rare Item Drops? Of course you don’t. None of you read my rants when I first started; it was the only time in the history of this rant blog that I’ve had fewer readers than...well, all the rest of the time. But 8 years ago, I ranted about how frustrating and utterly idiotic RPGs can be with items (and other occurrences) that only have a teeny-tiny statistically infinitesimal chance of showing up. It’s one of the few of my really early rants that I stand by 100% today and have not in any way changed or advanced my opinion on.

Well as it turns out, I jumped the gun on that rant by about 7 and a half years. I apparently should have waited until the latter half of Summer 2013 to write that one, because holy shit guys, Shin Megami Tensei 4’s Fiend encounter rates.

I’ll note right off the bat that SMT4 already has a few Random Number Generator transgressions before the Fiend business. The Incense drop rate is slightly annoying at times, although I suppose that’s not necessarily a big deal--if you’re farming Incense (or anything else in an RPG), you’ve pretty much got to have resigned yourself to wasting a lot of time on nothing important. More than that, there’s an entire line of demons in SMT4 that you can ONLY get from an accident during demon fusion, the Hero line. That’s annoying to any completionist who wants to get a full bestiary, and even annoying to someone who plays more casually like me, because Jeanne D’Arc is in the Hero line and I’ll be DAMNED if I’m going to play an RPG with a recruitable Joan of Arc and NOT have her on my team. The chances of a Fusion accident are tiny, the chances of that accident making one of the Hero demons instead of some random other one is small again (and the only way to feasibly make it happen (fusing dead and Foul-line demons) is not made known to the player), and the chances that the abilities the Hero demon inherits are ones you’d want them to have are random, too.*

Sigh. At least Atlus has finally done away with randomized skill inheritance in normal fusion, anyway. Maybe somebody in the company read my old rant about that. Or just turned on their fucking brain.

So anyway, SMT4 already has some moments where you’ll be cursing the Random Number Generator gods with some venom. But that’s child’s play compared to the ultimate of horrible randomized rate situations...the Fiend Encounter Rate. Capitalized because I think I might make that a thing, one of my special terms in this blog, like Sailing.

So here’s the deal. There are a small group of demons known as the Fiends. They are David, Chemtrail, Plasma, the Matador, the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse (The Red, Pale, Black, and White Riders, aka the infamous Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death), the Trumpeter, and Mother Harlot. They’re pretty cool because, vaguely, they kind of all represent Death in all its forms as we know it--more on that in a later, more interesting rant. In Shin Megami Tensei 4, you can encounter, defeat, and gain the ability to create and recruit David and (in the Chaos path) Mother Harlot from a couple of sidequests. If you purchase one of the especially pointless DLCs, Death has its Applications, you can also encounter, defeat, and then create and recruit Plasma. The rest (Matador, Chemtrail, the 4 Riders, and the Trumpeter) can all be just be encountered by passing by certain spots in the game and getting into a random encounter with them, and after defeating them, you can create and recruit them.

Simple, right? Yeah, ha ha ha ha, fucking no.

See, it’s like this. Let’s say you want to run into the Trumpeter. He is a super cool concept, the angel of death who announces the end of all things by the notes of his trumpet. It is he who sounds the coming of Judgment Day. Who the hell WOULDN’T want him in their mythological dream team roster? So you find out where he’s supposed to show up by looking online (because you will NEVER find out otherwise, my friend). It’s a certain spot between some trees in a certain forest. Cool. You go there (assuming you’re on the Neutral or Law path, that is; can’t get’im on the Chaos path, I think), and go to the spot. And...nothing happens.

Hm. Odd. You leave the forest and come back to it, and go over the same spot. Still nothing. Well, that’s just weird. Time to look online to see what’s wrong. Lessee...Google, GameFAQs, SMT4, Discussion, then one of the countless topics about the Fiends. Alright, let’s see...oh, here’s the problem!

You only have a 1 out of 256 encounter rate chance.

That’s right. 1 out of 256. 1. Out of. 256. Any time you cross over the one single spot where the Trumpeter, or any of the other Fiends I mentioned, is supposed to show up, the game is gonna pull up a list of 255 boxes saying NO and 1 box saying YES, and pick a single box from that list at random to decide if the guy you’re looking for is there. 1 out of 256. I would like to remind you that the Final Fantasy 4 Pink Puff enemies, those elusive fuckers who can drop the Pink Tail, are famous for how low their encounter rate is, and their encounter rate is 1 out of 64.

Now I think most of you know what I’m getting at here, but for those of my readers who are, I dunno, SquareEnix Executive-level morons, allow me to make my point clear: 64? It’s a LOT LOWER than 256. It is, in fact, 4 times less than 256. Meaning that the Pink Puffs, held up as the standard of stupidly rare enemy encounters in RPGs, mentioned in my own Rare Item Drop rant so long ago, are actually 4 times more likely to appear than one of the Fiends in Shin Megami Tensei 4.

Not fun. But not the end of the story, either. Remember what I said about that single spot that the Trumpeter might show up in? Well, you can’t just run over it back and forth for an hour or two to get him to show up. See, the chance of his showing up there is generated when you enter the area of the forest in which that spot resides. Meaning that if he’s not there the first time, that’s not going to change until you turn around and leave the area altogether, then come back to try again. So you’re not just wasting time going over this spot a few hundred times--you’re wasting time getting to the spot, going over it, then turning around and running all the way out of the area so you can do it again.** Over and over and over again.

And one more thing about the whole shows-up-on-a-single-specific-spot thing. It’s a small spot. So let me tell you something. When you’ve run over the same spot over 200 times and have yet to see results, you start to wonder. To doubt. You start to ask yourself, “Am I even running over the right place? This internet picture and map diagram is specific, but not absolutely perfect. Could I have been going over the wrong spot all this time?” You torment yourself with this doubt, making it worse with every screen reload, thinking each time louder and louder with ever growing horror, “Have I perhaps been going over the wrong spot for the last hour?! Have I actually been wasting my time this whole while!?”

(The answer is yes, yes you have, whether or not you have the right spot).

And we’re still not done. Let’s say, amazement of amazements, you run into the Trumpeter at long last. He probably kills you, but that’s okay--hell, it’s almost a GOOD thing. If you have Charon bring you back to life where you were, you’ll be right beside the encounter spot and Trumpeter is guaranteed to be waiting for you to walk over it. Just save, and you can fight him at your leisure. So you save, you get your team better prepared for the attacks that you now know he has since you fought him once already, and you try again. You beat him this time! THANK. GOD. Phew. Okay, FINALLY, since you have beaten him, you have unlocked him and can now fuse him and put him in your team. Alright, open up the menu, go to the fusion part, check out the Special Fusions...

...Um. Hm. Where is he?

Did you miss him? Go back. Back, back, yup, further, and...no, you’re at the beginning of the list. He’s not there. What the hell. Back to the internet! Google, SMT Wiki, look up the Trumpeter, find his game-specific information...here it is, his fusion requirements...oh, THAT’S why he hasn’t shown up on your list! In order to fuse Trumpeter, you’ll have to have the 4 Rider Fiends available to you, and since you haven’t encountered any of them, he’s not on the list. Well that’s simple enough, you’ll just have to go find them and beat them so you can...can...

Oh.

Oh right. THEY’RE all Fiends, too! Yes, that’s right, reader peeps. If you want to fuse the Trumpeter, the best of the bunch, you will have to encounter ALL 4 FIEND RIDERS as well. You will have to repeat this agonizing 1/256-chance-per-screen-load-in-a-tiny-spot all over again. And you will do it 4 times.

And by the way, this does not get much better if you’re not that interested in the Trumpeter, so long as you have an interest in almost ANY of the Fiends. Yes, Chemtrail and Matador can be fused from demons you regularly have access to, so once you (finally) encounter and defeat either of them, you can immediately fuse them. BUT, the Pale Rider, White Rider, Black Rider, and Red Rider ALL have fusion requirements that require previous Fiends. One basically leads to the next in order to fuse it--in order to fuse the Pale Rider, you must have a Black Rider, in order to fuse the Black Rider, you must have a Red Rider, in order to have him, you must first have a White Rider, and to fuse a White Rider, you must have a Matador. All of them require you to have encountered and defeated them to unlock them. So actually, if you want the Trumpeter (and Mother Harlot, for that matter, since her fusion needs a Trumpeter), you’re not doing the horrible process only 5 times (1 for him, 4 for the Riders), you’re doing it 6 times, because you need that initial Matador to start the whole thing off. That’s struggling 6 times against odds of 1/256. Finding the spots, and going over them again and again hundreds, thousands of times, waiting for something to happen.

They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Atlus is actually making its players crazy.

Okay okay OKAY, yes, obviously this is pretty clearly self-inflicted frustration for any gamer who goes into it. All the Fiends are entirely optional to encounter (even the ones who are a simple matter of going on a side quest), and though they’re very powerful, it’s not like you can’t make a huge, powerful team without them just fine (in fact, if you work the system properly, pretty much ANY demon can be a titan of pure unbridled power--when I was done with the game, my Pixie was tearing through Hard Mode’s shit like if you dropped Pinkie Pie in Sugar Rush). The only reason you’d need to go through all this bullshit for the Fiends would only be your own misguided need for completionism, or if you just really, really like 1 Fiend in particular.*** This isn’t really a case of a company outright abusing its audience, like a disturbing number of other creators do nowadays (by this point, I think you might actually be able to diagnose fans of Bioware or Spider-Man with Battered Person Syndrome--and you may think that’s just a joke made in bad taste, and it mostly is, but I’ve read some of the things fans have said on Bioware’s forums, and it’s actually kind of creepy how close some statements can sound to the BPS mentality). This is just them going too far with something that’s ultimately very unimportant. Like Game Freak does with the whole Shiny Pokemon thing--although to be fair, at least with the Shiny Pokemon, the regular, non-rare version of the damn thing is readily available to capture and recruit, while this Fiend Encounter Rate nonsense is the ONLY way to get these demons. Ultimately, I can’t hold too much of a grudge against the folks at Atlus for this nonsense; the person who decided to waste my time with getting the Trumpeter is me, not them.

But all the same...Atlus, please, for the love of everything good and just in the universe, don’t ever do anything like this ever again.











* SORT OF random. Technically speaking, you can rig it--figure out what the Hero demon is automatically going to have (their starter moves, essentially), then, using creative fusion skill inheritance, make sure that the demons you’re fusing to make the accident to create the Hero demon ONLY have the skills you want the Hero to have and that there are EXACTLY as many of those skills between the 2 parent demons together as there are free skill slots for the resulting Hero demon (FREE skill slots, as in, not the ones that will be used for the natural skills the Hero starts with anyway). This at least takes the randomization out of the skill inheritance aspect of Hero demon fusion accidents. By replacing it with tedious planning and executing of long chains of parent fusions. Joy.

** There’s a slight work around for this. If you own one of the stupid DLCs that take you to an Experience/Money/App farming area, you can stand in front of the Fiend’s encounter spot, open the DLC and go into it, quit it and come back, and that will re-generate the Fiend’s encounter area. This is incredibly tedious to do 400 times in a row, but still faster in most cases than turning around and leaving the area and then coming back again that same 400 times, particularly since you can add a complex save-reload trick to this process to shave a few more seconds off, a trick that is way more work to explain than I really think is necessary at the moment (but if you really want to know, say so). This is, however, obviously not a good enough solution that it makes the situation any more excusable, especially since not everyone wants to waste money on meaningless DLC nonsense.

*** Why oh why must I be such a sucker for the Trumpeter?

General RPGs' Sprint Meters

Sprint meters are stupid, annoying, and worthless.

...

...You're still here? Oh, what, you wanted more than that? Well, I guess I can elucidate, but that’s all it’s going to come down to in the end. But what the hell, let’s do this.

Sprint Meters are those little bars on the screen of some RPGs that fill up or empty as the player runs around a play area. After a certain amount of uninterrupted jogging, the bar fills up or empties completely, and the character onscreen has to rest for a period of time, unable to continue running (sometimes unable to continue moving at all) for a short period, during which they’re presumably catching their breath. Sometimes the meters also govern how tired the character is getting from more activities than just running, such as with The Elder Scrolls 4 (probably 5, as well, but I haven’t played that yet) and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, where jumping, attacking, running, swimming, and so on all cause fatigue, at which point I just call it a Fatigue Meter instead. Most, however, are just for running, which is what I mean by Sprint Meters. It all boils down to the same annoyance in the end, though.

FIrst of all, the idea behind the concept is slightly irritating. I mean, I myself can only think of 2 possible explanations for the existence of a Sprint Meter in a game. The first is for game balance. If you can only run a certain amount of steps before slowing down, it limits how many enemy encounters you can manage to avoid, and in the case of a Fatigue Meter, attacking while fatigued from other actions lessens the effectiveness of said attacks in The Elder Scrolls 4, and the speed and actions you can take while tired in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword are very limited. I guess I can accept this for Fatigue Meters when a lot of the game’s limitations and checks and balances rely on this handicap, when it seems like this was a legitimate, thought-out decision as far as how the game is played...I guess. Sure as hell doesn’t mean I like it, and it’s annoying, not challenging or fun, to work around, but whatever. But Sprint Meters limiting the time a character can run because you don’t want to allow for a player to potentially avoid all enemies possible? That comes off as a game developer just trying to cover for his/her own inability to design monster placement and pursuit patterns well enough to properly contrast a good gamer by imposing arbitrary limitations. Plus, why the hell do you even need to limit the amount of times a gamer can avoid an enemy to begin with? If a gamer avoids everything, he/she shouldn’t have the levels necessary to beat bosses past a certain point, anyway. The bosses are meant to be the balance, not some stupid bar that fills up/empties due to jogging.

The other reason I can think of for having Sprint Meters is utterly unacceptable: totally unnecessary realism. In the same vein of “genius” that spawned the unrivaled tedium of constantly having to repair weapons as they rapidly decay, some idiot realized that in real life, people, even physically fit people, cannot run perpetually and must eventually stop to catch their breath, and decided to create a game mechanic solely for the purpose of having characters travel more realistically. I hope to God that this is not and has never been the reason any game has adopted a Sprint Meter, but given the utterly, insanely idiotic ideas that have been put into practice in RPGs in the name of making things realistic (who doesn’t want to constantly have to keep track of when to use a repair item on their weapon? Monotonously counting every sword stroke and gunshot you make is just SUCH fun!), I certainly can’t rule the possibility out.

So frankly, until someone graces me with a better explanation for why Sprint Meters exist, I’m going to go with the idea that they don’t serve any particularly good purpose. And hey, if they didn’t serve any particular purpose but didn’t do anything irritating either, like achievement points and trophies and the like, then I’d have no problem. But Sprint Meters ARE irritating!

First of all, I resent not being able to have the characters on screen travel as fast as possible to all destinations. I’m not the type to run away from enemies,* so the whole potential idea of keeping me from avoiding all enemy encounters isn’t even an issue anyway, but I AM the type to want to move as quickly as is viable through towns and dungeons alike. Not to say that I rush through RPGs--I sit still quite patiently for every word spoken and story action taken. But to get from story point A to story point B, do I want to waste time just slowly walking there? Hell no! No one does! I bet you can’t find a full 5 people on the entire planet who would rather watch a character slowly trudge across the screen instead of just holding down the Run button to get around speedily.

Another minor annoyance with some games which implement this idea: they don’t always have any actual Sprint Meter or other indication of when the character’s going to slow down to a crawl. Some, like Lunar 1, just leave you to keep track of the time your character has for running yourself, giving no indication as that time comes to an end. Yeah, that’s a very minor complaint, but all the same, it’s another way in which this concept is needlessly annoying.

Another minor annoyance, although admittedly I’ve only encountered this once, is in Secret of Mana. Running in that game has no limit, per say, but it uses up an action so you do have to wait a second to regain the ability to run again, or attack properly, or whatever. It’s a bit of a departure from the usual way a Sprint Meter works, but it’s in the same vein, so I count it. That’s not the problem, though. The problem is that a running character should not be confined solely to a straight line. For some reason, in Secret of Mana, any time your character runs, they launch themselves in a straight line and cannot be made to turn or even slightly adjust their course. I don’t know about you, but I, myself, managed to become adept at the art of changing direction during forward movements fairly early in my life. Like, before I could talk. One might as well not have been given the option to run in Secret of Mana to begin with; it was too awkward to use most of the time, anyway.

Also, I have to really take issue with how long a Sprint Meter holds out in all cases. If you clock how long it takes for a running character to get winded in these cases, you’ll find that, without exception, every character in an RPG is an asthmatic overweight chain smoker born with only one functioning lung. Seriously, the amount of time any given RPG character can maintain a brisk jog is inevitably less time than I, myself, can. And trust me, I am not the picture of physical fitness--I’m so out of shape that most offensive caricatures of geeks and gamers don’t actually go far enough toward depicting my lack of athleticism. There is no goddamn way that I should be able to maintain a run longer than an seasoned adventurer who has spent the last 50 hours of game time constantly on his feet and regularly getting the natural exercise that comes from fighting for one’s life with every few steps one takes. For that matter, there is no goddamn way that I should be able to maintain a run longer than Commander fucking Shepard. If you’re gonna limit the time an RPG character can run, at least make that limit halfway realistic for the character! Most people’s frail little grandmothers could outrun every RPG character ever made whose running is limited! Sheesh.

Sprint Meters and similar movement inhibitors are stupid and needlessly annoying in RPGs. Whatever dubious benefits they may be intended to provide to the game, the end result is something annoying, and in every case to my knowledge, totally unrealistic which ultimately only takes away from the gamer’s enjoyment of the gameplay.













* Hell, I don’t even use it to run away from enemies when there’s no benefit to gaining levels. In Lunar 1, enemy bosses level up as you do, meaning there’s not all that much reason to go out of your way to gain levels since you’ll only ever be gaining a marginal advantage at best. Did that stop me from running into every damn enemy I saw on the way through dungeons? Nope.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4's Chie's New Voice Actress

You know what I don’t do enough of? Short rants. Let’s see about having one today.

So, when I was updating my SMT Persona 3 and 4 Social Link Comparison rant, I discovered something odd about the new version of SMT Persona 4--Chie’s voice actress was dramatically different. Wondering why, I did some extensive, exhaustive, comprehensive, penetrating research (which is to say, I clicked on the first Google result I saw), and discovered that when Persona 4 had been updated, the original voice actress for Chie was no longer available for the role, and since they did have new lines they needed to have recorded, they just brought in a new actress to redo all the original lines and then voice the new ones. Well, that’s how things go, I guess.

What gets me about it is the drastic difference between Old Chie Voice and New Chie Voice. This isn’t like what cartoons sometimes have to do, where they replace a character’s voice with a new, more available actor who can manage some close facsimile of the original actor. This is a completely different voice and acting style altogether. They didn’t even try to come close to what Chie’s voice was on the Playstation 2. Supposedly this new voice is more similar to the original voice of Chie in the Japanese version. Couldn’t say, as I’ve never played the Japanese version, but since this new one is more high-pitched and loud at times, I’d suspect that to be true--one of Japan’s major exports is the high-pitched, squealing babble of adolescent girls.

Thing is, the new one just doesn’t work for me. Now, don’t get me wrong, New Chie Voice’s actress, Erin Fitzgerald, is not a bad actress, from what I can tell. I wouldn’t call her particularly great at the role, but I’d actually say she brings more skill to the table than Old Chie Voice, Tracey Rooney, did. But honestly, Tracey Rooney’s voice simply fit the character better, acting skill be damned. Now Chie sounds similar in pitch and personality to the type of female character that Yukiko or Rise is, and without rewriting Chie’s actual character, that’s not the right fit for her. Chie’s not as feminine a character as the more standard Yukiko and Rise; she’s forward, inwardly tough, and interested in things like martial arts movies, steak, and protecting people.

Having a voice like Rooney’s attached to her character made sense and brought the package together neatly. She had a deeper tone that fit Chie, while being distinctly feminine--you’d never mistake it for a boy’s voice, even if it’s similarly deep. In this way, the voice helped emphasize the rest of the character--not standardly feminine like Yukiko or Rise, but not so far as to be gender-ambiguous, either, like Naoto. Rooney’s inflections and general tone also fit the less feminine, still-distinctly-female character of Chie, even if Rooney had perhaps a little less acting range with it.

The new voice...it’s not bad, but it and the actual character of Chie are working around each other, not with each other, you know? And I’m not saying that tomboys all have lower, deeper voices or anything like that, and that more traditionally feminine girls can’t. But the cadence of the voice, the diction of it, the way the lines are SAID, with Tracey Rooney matched Chie’s tone and character, while Fitzgerald’s higher voice is emphasized by the more girly-girl way she uses it, and that simply isn’t Chie.

I wish Atlus had tried to find a voice actress who was at least a little similar to the original one, who could give us a tone that worked alongside the tomboyish character instead of contrast to it. I appreciate that Atlus may have wanted to avoid that weird, awkward feeling on TV shows when you can tell it’s a new voice actor doing the lines but you’re not supposed to know because he/she is supposed to be really close to the original...and I can appreciate that maybe Atlus was trying to listen to the complaints of some of its fans about Chie’s original voice actress.* But in the end, the original voice for Chie was the right one, and it would have been better to find someone to try to mimic it, or at least get in the same range.










* Because heaven forbid we challenge the weeaboos’ fragile perception of reality with a teenage girl who sounds like the many, many girls in actual, real life whose voices aren’t like the shrieking Japanese mice who voice every anime female.

The Xenosaga Series's Failed Potential

Warning: Today’s rant is a bit raw. I mostly just tried to get everything I had to say out and didn’t worry too much about making it feel refined and well-organized. I doubt anyone cares overly much, but I figured I’d let you know ahead of time.



Yes, it is that time once again: Xenosaga Rant Time.

So what should I speak about today? Xenosaga still has so many flaws and nonsense that I could rant about. Maybe I should examine just how necessary it was for KOS-MOS, during the in-the-past-sort-of escape from Kevin, to smack Shion and knock her out--she does it to subdue the obnoxious twit and get her safely away from Kevin, but considering that KOS-MOS is a monstrously strong battle android and Shion is just a (whiny, overbearing) human being, she could have struggled all she liked and not given KOS-MOS the slightest trouble in carrying her off. Or I could point out that it doesn’t make much sense that the shockwave from Abel’s Ark can cause everything it touches to disappear, even planets, yet the Elsa, a small freighter ship, is totally unaffected by it. Or perhaps I could…

...No. You know what? I think I’ve done enough. Since beating Xenosaga 3 and closing out the series, I’ve made 9 rants about the stupidity of Xenosaga, and in nearly all of them I’ve not only examined the flaw(s) that the rant is actually about, but also listed several other ones that I could just as easily have ranted on. I’ve put forward dozens of Xenosaga’s mistakes to you all, and there are plenty more I could add to them. And perhaps I will some day. But with all this criticism at a glance and at length, on all these various flaws, there’s only one conclusion that you, the reader, could draw: that I hate Xenosaga. And, well, that’s just not true. Oh, sure, there are parts of Xenosaga that I sincerely hate, no question. Shion’s pity parade during the finale, MOMO’s last words to Jr., Kevin, the utterly disgusting way Shion’s abusive relationship with Kevin is glossed over as bad ONLY because it hurts other people and NOT because it hurts her...huh, I guess each of the moments of Xenosaga that I truly hate come from the last game. Hadn’t realized that before.

Anyway, my point is that, yes, there are a lot--a LOT--of problems with the series, and yes, there are even some parts of it which are just unforgivably loathsome. But while I don’t like the series as a complete product...well, I don’t hate it. It’s like when your parents tell you that they’re not angry with you, just disappointed. I’m not happy with Xenosaga, especially with the way it all turned out, but I can’t just dismiss it completely, either, because it had potential, and for all its terribleness, it still maintained a few of its good points throughout. This is a series that at least could have been good--even if it wasn’t.

I mean, consider the voice acting. Yeah, as I’ve mentioned, in Xenosaga 3, the voice overs are just a mess of incorrect emphasis and tones that just don’t work within the context of the characters’ intent. But back in Xenosaga 1, the voice acting was pretty consistently decent, enough to make it clear that this cast did know what it was doing when properly directed. And the voice actors themselves fit the characters very well, by and large! Hell, even when they have to change voice actors for some characters between games, the new ones still work very well! The proper matching of actor to character type by itself is enough to lend life to the characters, even if the confusion of lines constantly read in the wrong way later in the series messes that up. This is voice acting that could have been good from start to finish.

Take a look at the graphic style of Xenosaga 1. Now, you know I don’t care about visuals when determining how good or bad an RPG is, but that doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge the difference between good and bad quality. Xenosaga 1 rolled out with a clean, interestingly simplistic yet distinctive artistic style for its characters and universe. Speak to a player who’s experienced all 3 main titles in the Xenosaga series about which style of KOS-MOS sticks out the most in his or her mind, which grabbed his or her attention the most and is the most interesting, and I’m willing to bet the answer will most of the time be the style from Xenosaga 1. It was different enough to grab and keep your attention: deformed but not chibi, bright but with plenty of darkness to contrast, clean but not undetailed. And then, Xenosaga 2 came around, and...the art style was completely different. For reasons best described as “moronic,” Namco decided to ditch the unique style that otherwise would have become a recognizable signature of the series and adopt, for Xenosaga 2, a much more dark, so-called realistic art style that was far more conventional for anime-styled JRPGs of that age, and in being far more conventional, was also far less interesting and thus did not hold one’s attention as well as before. And then they switched the style up again for Xenosaga 3, but this next change was a smaller departure from its predecessor, and in the end still doesn’t stand out in any particular way from other RPGs. I do know that there are some people (a minority, I believe) who liked the art styles of Xenosaga 2 and/or 3 better than that of the first game, but even still, I think most of them would have to admit that first game’s style was more distinctive--and while visuals have no effect on me, that’s something that can count for a lot with some audiences. Lose the distinctive look, you lose the benefits of novelty. This is a series that started out with a good look, and could have kept that good style to its end.

Listen to the music for the series. Both the composer for Xenosaga 1 and the composer for Xenosaga 2 and 3 are clearly talented and creative. The music of Xenosaga 1 does its job competently nearly all of the time, and there are a few tracks that I consider to be excellent. For an example, there’s only 1 single battle theme throughout the entire game, whether for regular enemies or bosses, and yet even though I heard it hundreds of times during the course of playing through the game, I still love it, and keep it in my personal song collection. It’s fast-paced yet not frenzied, common yet so very epic, promising the intensity of battle while embodying the idea that this is the first tentative step in a grand saga. The composer of Xenosaga 2 and 3 does just as well, providing solid music accompaniment to the entirety of both games, and I have to say that there are some themes of Xenosaga 3 that are just AMAZING to listen to. The theme playing while exploring the forest during the game’s foray to the past, the music that plays during Pellegri’s death scene, the background theme of the Dabrye Mine...absolutely lovely stuff. Not everything with these games’ music is a hit, but there’s certainly no noticeable failing, either, and enough stand-out moments of excellence that the soundtrack gets my endorsement. This is good music to set an epic tale of space, emotion, and drama against, and Xenosaga could have been really good if everything had been as consistently decent and occasionally great as its music is.

Watch the cutscenes of the Xenosaga games. Xenosaga 1 has a good number of FMV sequences that are very engaging, full of gripping action, and compelling suspense and drama. The scene in the first game wherein KOS-MOS saves Shion for the first time from the Gnosis starts off intense as Shion’s fading in its clutches, and becomes cool and impressive as KOS-MOS gets to work, an epic first combat for this iconic character. And what about the hyperspace chase and battle in Xenosaga 1? That whole thing is awesome and thrilling! It’s action-packed, it’s suspenseful at all the right times, it knows exactly when to cut in with comedy with the reactions of Hammer, Allen, and what’s-his-name, the commander guy below decks, it’s a great first meeting of these still-new characters and a chance to really show their personalities as they work together for the first time, it’s inventive and interesting...this is everything a sci-fi space battle should be, combined with a skillful use of the characters involved that’s thrilling from start to finish. Xenosaga 1 knows how to make good use of its exorbitant cinematic budget. Xenosaga 2’s good for a while in the same field, too--the initial battle between Jin and Margulis is very well done, and the car chase early in the game is exciting. But eventually, as the series plot and events becomes too heavy and bloated to support itself, the FMVs start being more long than interesting, more over-the-top than actually exciting. The last cinema sequence of the series that I feel is really particularly good is Jin and Margulis’s confrontation in the second half of Xenosaga 2. From that point on, the FMVs are either just not very interesting, or are advancing a story and/or characters that no longer grip the audience. Even the videos in the latter part of the series that do seem kind of interesting to watch, such as the fights between KOS-MOS and T-elos or the scene in Xenosaga 2 where KOS-MOS awakens to save Shion, are riddled with stupid elements that ruin them (see my rants on Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome, Xenosaga 3’s finale, and space motorcycles). Xenosaga could have had memorable cutscenes throughout its entire course, if it had kept up the same quality as it started out with.

Let’s move on to the more important stuff, though. Xenosaga had great potential where it really counts--the plot, the themes, the characters.

Recall the pacing of Xenosaga 1. It was just as it should have been. We were introduced to important characters at a carefully measured pace, never too many too fast, and for the most part, the characters who had a special allotment of time stayed relevant enough, long enough that the amount of time and importance the narrative afforded them seemed well-spent. The details and lore of the story and universe developed at a brisk pace, but not so rapidly that we couldn’t keep up, and although these factors and ideas kept getting thrown at us steadily right through to the game’s end, it wasn’t a problem, because it was obviously the beginning chapter of a much larger series. It’s okay to keep adding right up till the end of the first part of your saga, it’s expected. It means you’re building extra material in to be dealt with later on.

But after Xenosaga 1...well, the pacing doesn’t slow down at all; it only keeps speeding up! Ideas and details and terms and characters of all kinds keep getting crammed in, too many too fast. You can no longer keep up comfortably with all the complications and plot threads building up, too many huge events are being resolved more quickly than they should while too many small plot arcs are given more focus and time than they’re due, and even as the games try to settle the matters that they were originally building up in the first game, they’re adding more complications. And, of course, it doesn’t help that an entire half a game’s worth of events are summed up in a “this is what happened” speech in the middle of Xenosaga 2, and then another full game’s worth of events are just entirely skipped over between Xenosaga 2 and 3, known only to you if you spend the time reading up on it in Xenosaga 3’s codex. Too slow, too fast, too much stuff thrown in all at once, huge important parts missing or related as a dry, dense monologue that breaks immersion...the only consistent thing about the pacing of Xenosaga 2 and 3 is that it’s just terrible. I’ve mentioned before that the biggest contributor to this was that a 6-part series was suddenly condensed into 3 games, and I’ve gone over the stupidity both of trying to do such a thing AND of expecting to have a guaranteed 6 games to tell your story in the first place, so I won’t go into this any further. Still, Xenosaga 1 shows that the narrative pace of the series could have been fine and easily followed, instead of frenzied and too full of nonsense.

Think about the characters of the series, and how they interacted with each other early on. When you look at the main cast of Xenosaga, you’ve got a genuinely interesting and diverse set of personalities being put together, one that commands enough interest to initially get you invested in them. Initially, MOMO is cute and friendly but not in a way that’s grating, KOS-MOS is cool and robotic but in a way that brings into question the possibility of a humanity hidden below, Jr. is fun and rambunctious, Ziggy is brooding and straightforward but not in a tedious way, Jin balances being a regular guy with some quirks and being a very private and intense person, chaos is secretive yet open and outgoing, and Shion...well, actually, Shion’s never particularly interesting. Still, she doesn’t start out being a psychotic, shrill, repugnant harpy, so you could say that even she was good, early on. I guess. I dunno. The other cast members could at least make up for her, at any rate.

Anyway, the thing is, the Xenosaga cast is one that...it’s hard to describe, really. My sister, whose insight and feedback contribute immeasurably to these rants and I should really mention and credit her more often, puts it best: they’re characters that you want to like, characters you want to see, know, and learn about. Obviously everyone has their own reactions and prejudices, but I have to say, I’ve interacted with a lot of gamers who have played at least the first Xenosaga title if not the whole series, and it’s funny, but I encounter almost no one who did not have at least a little enthusiastic interest in the cast at first. It may not have lasted--sure as hell didn’t for me--but I think that Xenosaga’s cast is special in that practically all of us start on the same page of an initial interest in KOS-MOS, chaos, Ziggy, MOMO, Jin, Jr., and Shion. And there’s some decent depth to them that could maintain that interest, if was properly developed and worked with.

Additionally, I think the way they interact with one another, the dynamics between the major cast members, are, for a time, pretty neat and enjoyable. I like the connection Ziggy and MOMO share. I like the way that Shion and Jin have trouble with meaningful communication. I like the deep bond between KOS-MOS and Shion, the implicit trust and emotional openness Shion has with KOS-MOS and the way she tries to determine just what sort of humanity KOS-MOS hides within herself, and I like the way that this seems to be, for a time, working its way into a romantic angle for them. I like the puppy dog romance of Jr. and MOMO. I like the way Ziggy and Jr. treat each other as respectable equals. For the first half of the series, possibly even a little longer, the Xenosaga team feels like a genuine collection of individuals brought together, their personalities bonding with and bouncing off one another. It feels a lot like several other games with really good, interesting casts that become close-knit as time goes on, like Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, or Tales of Legendia (although not nearly as good as the latter, mind).

Unfortunately, this potentially great aspect of Xenosaga, like so many others, does not last. The character development for some characters becomes too over-dramatic and confusing (not to mention, at times, incredibly stupid--particularly when it comes to Shion), becoming, as with so much else in the game, far too much nonsense stacked up at once. Said character development also becomes too much of a solo act, with the other cast members having little real influence or input while it’s happening. Eventually the relationships and interactions between the cast members are, almost universally, dictated by the plot--by and throughout Xenosaga 3, dialogue is almost entirely restricted to reactions to the plot and forwarding it; gone is that sense of a friendly, interesting team from earlier in the series. Some aspects of relationships are just destroyed completely to make way for more convenient, plot-friendly concepts, like the clear and obvious Shion x KOS-MOS love subplot being utterly supplanted by the terrible Shion x Allen one. And since the plot that’s now dictating their interactions and character development is such a ridiculous pile of nonsense that it actually makes the Star Wars prequels look almost not totally horribly incompetent by comparison, this drags the cast down with everything else. This is a set of characters that could have really been a special, memorable, and iconic cast, if they hadn’t had to stumble along to the breakneck pace of a ridiculously overblown, convoluted plot.

On a similar note, take the villains. Frankly, not a single villain in the whole trilogy is all that good, but a few of them at least had potential to be decent. Margulis, for example, is just this perpetually antagonistic, egotistical asshat that keeps being played up by the cinematics and narrative as someone more important than he actually ends up being. But if we’d gotten some time devoted to giving the guy some honest backstory, or a few scenes that better showed us and emphasized Margulis’s religious fanaticism, he could have been a lot more compelling. We’re told, not shown, that he’s a diehard fanatic, and the only other character traits assigned to him are a rivalry with Jin originating from a history between them that’s never properly delved into, and a propensity for grandiose, frustratingly vague scheming via speeches and monologues. And the latter quality doesn’t count, because pretty much all of the Xenosaga villains, and even plenty of the good guys, do that. With a little care, Margulis could have at least been a little noteworthy, but as is, he’s just a plot mouthpiece who really makes no impact.

Pellegri’s another one. Given her history with Jin and the terms under which they went their separate ways, she could have been a really compelling individual. But the games just never go into any real detail of her old feelings for Jin, never show us what things were like between them, never give enough emphasis to the way her blind adherence to Magulis’s crusade shut out the other things, good things, she had in life. We don’t see her appreciation of the things she had then, we don’t see her regret or conflict at losing them, we just don’t see anything REAL about Pellegri. She’s little more than a rag doll wearing a sign on her head reading, “JIN’S TRAGIC PAST,” existing solely as a foil for him and not even doing very well in that capacity.

Xenosaga could have made Margulis and Pellegri actual, interesting villains. It could have dialed Albedo’s insanity back enough to make him as sympathizable as the games want him to be, and made his brotherly love for Jr. schtick more believable and realistic--as it is, this main point of Albedo’s character depth comes off more as another piece of psychosis than anything legitimate. It could have revealed Wilhelm early enough and well enough that the guy could have better explained his position and the plots he masterminded. It could have given Yuriev the time and effort to develop the idea of his fear of U-DO and better examine how it relates to the human condition, and all sorts of good jazz; there was some real potential in there! It could have given us more recollections (and better ones, for that matter) of Kevin so as to properly show why Shion would have such conflicted feelings late in the last game, so he doesn’t seem like such a one-dimensional dick that we question how Shion can have any attachment to him. So many villains in the Xenosaga series could have been good, or at the very least decent, if they’d been used and developed well.

Let’s also contemplate some of the concepts of Xenosaga’s story. There are a lot of interesting ideas to the games, such as KOS-MOS being a robotic reincarnation of Mary Magdalen. Yeah, that’s bizarre, but I feel like it’s odd enough that they really could have made it interesting and neat if they’d handled it right. They could have used the scenario to explore the character of Mary, and allowed for the contrast between her and the growing personality of KOS-MOS to give them both more depth. But the KOS-MOS-is-Mary stuff is only shoved in at the end, so nothing much can be done with it (despite how overly complicated it winds up being), and Mary’s only used as an odd plot device, not as a character. KOS-MOS could just as easily have been a reincarnation of 1 of the 12 Apostles, or Adam, or Eve, or Lassie the Dog for all the difference it makes--there’s no actual connection to the character of Mary here, so anyone could have been used in her place. Anyone in history and/or theology could have completely and inexplicably been handed God’s keys to the universe, anyone could have been retconned to have Shion’s previous incarnation as their ambiguous BFF-maybe-lover-maybe-not, and absolutely nothing would be changed.

These concepts and scenes that really could have been something good are littered through the second and third Xenosaga titles. Shion’s suffering as the greatest of all the universe, for example. I love the idea overall, that when Shion witnessed her mother and father brutally murdered on the same night that her friend Feb died and all Hell broke loose in a terrifying military battle in her city, her pain was so great and unbearable that it tore the very fabric of reality and called forth the wayward lost souls of the universe’s despondent and rejected. That is compelling and epic stuff! And yet, so much of the plot of Xenosaga 3, particularly regarding Kevin, Shion’s personal conflict, and the themes of starting over or pushing through the seemingly inevitable destruction of the universe with the hope of a better tomorrow, all comes back to the pain of Shion, and the game just doesn’t know how to make use of that all-important plot point. The problem is that while we can believe that child Shion felt that pain, over the course of the games adult Shion, the one we’re familiar with, has never given the slightest inkling of someone still carrying torment that could tear the universe asunder. I mean, she’s not a bubbling mass of happiness or anything, but she never seems to be suffering particularly, either, for the entirety of Xenosaga 1 and 2, and even the first half of Xenosaga 3. She’s just a regular character. Hell, even when the final game’s suddenly realized it has to actually start showing that Shion has some issues since they’re suddenly the most important thing in the world, Shion’s introspections and interactions seem more listless and bratty, respectively, than they do like she’s seriously hurting. Come on, Namco...you want to base the major elements of your series’s plot around the painful baggage Shion’s carrying around, you need to show us that it’s there somehow. Batman carries his parents’ murder with him in everything he does and says, and we see it and we believe it. The Nameless One of Planescape: Torment carries the torment of his lost mortality with him in everything he sees and everyone he encounters, and we see it and believe it. But as awesome a concept as Shion’s pain breaking the universe is, it’s never shown until way too late to believe in it, and even that last-minute effort is mostly just a testament to Namco’s lack of understanding when it comes to the emotions and reasoning of human beings.

Another example, while I’m thinking about it--remember 1 of my very earliest rants, about the stupidity of the space motorcycle scene in Xenosaga 2? Of course you don’t; nobody actually read this thing back then (practically nobody does now either, heh). But in a smaller way, it’s another example of this. Like I said back then, the scene SHOULD actually be good--it’s KOS-MOS hearing Shion’s cry for help across the void of countless light years, and despite being turned off, despite not even being in working order, the need to protect Shion is so compelling to her that she awakens and rushes to the rescue. It’d be pretty inspiring...but then, the silliness of a space motorcycle hits you. It’s about as pathetic and obvious an attempt to seem cool as Poochie the Dog, except that Poochie is MEANT to be a ridiculous icon of parody.

The death of Pellegri is a bit similar to that--again, it’s a scene that should be really noteworthy, and it almost is. The music that plays, the concept of her simply having gone too far along a path that ended in failure, the fact that her death is painful for Jin...it’s done well, and provokes some sadness from the player. Yet, as I outlined in the rant about Xenosaga 3’s finale, this scene’s worth is overshadowed by its immense stupidity--Pellegri’s reasoning just doesn’t make sense, and it lessens her character depth considerably by forcing her into a throwaway villain niche. The quality of what’s happening in the death scene is overpowered by the stupidity of why it’s happening. Anyway, I’m digressing a bit too much. Whether because they weren’t utilized and developed properly, or were just poisoned by really dumb elements, a great many of the concepts and scenes of the Xenosaga series could have been quite great, both emotionally charged and thought-provoking, but in the end, very, very few managed to live up to their potential.

Examine the overall themes and intended meanings and messages of the Xenosaga series. There’s actually all sorts of great things that the games are meant to explore through their plot and characters, themes like the significance of the fear of God (represented through Voyager and, more so, Yuriev), like the idea of becoming greater than the sum of one’s parts through devotion to another (KOS-MOS and, in some tiny way, Allen), the idea of whether one can choose to go against the purpose of their existence and the consequences for doing so (shown through KOS-MOS, Canaan, Jr., Gaignun, the failures of Pellegri and Margulis, and many more), and of course, the concept of personal and divine will, how to live with it, how to use it, what it’s capable of and the forms in which it exists. Xenosaga takes many strong ideas for its plot that stem from real-life great works and minds of human culture, such as the Bible, the Torah, and most notably Friedrich Nietzsche (the full titles of the games are even named for his concepts). The seeds for greatness are definitely scattered throughout the series in its many underlying themes and ideas.

Of course, the problem is that those seeds just never have a chance to sprout into something more. Essentially all of the great themes are buried 6 feet deep underneath a tightly-compacted morass of over-complicated details, poorly written characters, bad pacing, grandiose and completely unnatural speeches and exposition, and military-grade insane nonsense, far too deep for the seeds of greatness to ever have a chance to break through to the surface without some serious digging on your part, narrative digging which is effort way beyond what an audience should be expected to put forth. Many of the great themes are simply too unexplored before the crisis point of the character they’re linked to--like Yuriev’s fear of God thing. It’s practically unmentioned until its major moment in the story is upon you, which lessens how much of an impact it can make, how much narrative importance that you can give it. Some discussions earlier in the game on the subject--REAL discussions, not incredibly vague, poorly-written hintings--would have gone a long way to giving the concept its narrative due, and the same is true for so many of the themes of Xenosaga.

And hell, it doesn’t even seem like Namco got a lot of the deeper concepts they borrowed from others like Nietzsche right--though I’ll let smarter people than I explore and explain that here and here.

But make no mistake: Xenosaga may have bitten off way, way more than it could chew and lacked the narrative skill to make proper use of its grand, intelligent messages and themes, but they were there, just nearly inaccessible through the mountains of chaotic foolishness. It’s like a brilliant philosopher with no tongue, no computer, and atrocious, illegible handwriting trying to share the incredible things within his mind. The Xenosaga series could have been fascinating and intellectually meaningful, even on par with the best that the Shin Megami Tensei series can offer, if only its writers had been able to effectively convey their ideas.

And that’s essentially all I have to say on the matter. I could probably keep going, but I think this covers pretty much all the bases. From the small matters to the greatest, Xenosaga had the potential to be a really great series. Great science fiction, great characters, great ideas, great themes, great execution. It could have been something absolutely incredible, it really could have, and that’s why, despite its incalculably numerous flaws, in spite of all the criticism I’ve heaped upon the series (particularly its final installment) in my rants, in spite even of the disgust and animosity that I do feel towards some of its truly vile aspects (Shion’s motivations in its finale still make me shake with loathing)...in spite of everything, the fundamental truth of the matter is, as I said before:

I don’t hate Xenosaga.

It may be less sensible than Final Fantasy 8. It may be more of a disappointment to itself than La Pucelle Tactics, and have just as hasty and ill-thought-out a love story for its protagonist. It may be as idiotically over-complicated as Chrono Cross. It may be almost as much a waste of a good cast as the Kingdom Hearts series’s decision to focus more on its own bland original villains than the Disney rogues available to it. It may be more confused about what it’s doing and how to get to its plot destination than Dragon Age 2, and have a finale almost as stupid and terrible. It may seem as groundlessly self-important as Final Fantasy 12. And it may have been as screwed up by its parent company’s time and budget constraints as Xenogears. But you know what? Xenosaga started out solid and good, and it carried the potential for greatness. If you dig, you at least find and recognize those seeds of quality that never germinated; you can’t say the same for most of the games I just named. And honestly, in spite of the massive incompetence at Monolith Soft and Namco and whoever else was involved in the creation of the series, I have to say, rarely does it feel like the writers weren’t trying, weren’t giving their ideas and desires for the story a sincere effort, and at no point does it feel like the writers didn’t honestly think that these ideas were worth conveying. Which again is not the case of several of the aforementioned titles.

So maybe I’m dissatisfied with the Xenosaga series. Maybe it makes me angry often, and maybe it disappoints me because it started off so well. Maybe it’s made poorly enough that it’s a very easy target for my derision. And maybe...maybe I don’t even actually like it. But I don’t hate Xenosaga, either. And I don’t resent it, and I don’t feel like it was a true waste of my time to play, not like many of the other RPGs I criticize here often. Xenosaga is a failure, but it failed trying to do something worthwhile, and I’ll always respect that too much to ever hate or fully dismiss the series.

General RPGs' Villains' Screen Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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