Shin Megami Tensei: Persona Q1 and Q2's Primary Persona Teams

Warning: This rant has sort of a spoiler about the main plot focus of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona Q2. I mean...the main theme of the game is not exactly hard to suss out from fairly early on, so it’s not “Rosebud was the name of Luke Skywalker’s father!” level of secrecy, here, but for the sake of being responsible, consider y’allselves warned.



Although I freely acknowledge that several others in the Shin Megami Tensei series are superior offerings, I must confess that my second favorite game in the franchise is SMT Persona Q1. While admittedly the significant majority of the work is just fun, mildly fanservice-y fluff, the twist that comes 75% of the way through the game turns it into a powerfully emotional, gripping tale about finding purpose in one’s life, and I absolutely loved it. I still remember weeping openly at Persona Q1’s ending (a somewhat embarrassing incident, because I was playing it while waiting for my car to get fixed at the local dealership, and it wasn’t long after the credits began rolling that an employee approached me to let me know that my vehicle was ready to go).

What never made much sense to me about SMTPQ1, though, was that the game gave you an option to play from the perspective of the cast of either Persona 3, or Persona 4. Both casts would eventually meet up and join forces either way, of course, but you were still given the option of clearly making this adventure the property of 1 group or the other. But why give the option at all? This game’s purpose and message were clearly in line with Persona 3’s, not Persona 4’s. While the question of what it is that makes life worthwhile and meaningful is not absent from SMT Persona 4, it’s inarguable that Persona 3 is far more focused upon it--the main story, the plots of many of its Social Links, the character arc of its most iconic party member Aigis, the interactions with an incarnation of Death, Minato’s status and purpose as a messiah, even the gimmick of referencing suicide through the Evoker guns, it all comes back to Persona 3’s intent to explore and speak about our search as human beings to find a reason to live. As Persona Q1 is essentially a game-sized Social Link about exactly that idea, it makes no sense to have Persona 4’s Investigation Team spearheading the adventure--this is SEES’s territory.

But SMT Persona Q1 at least offers the player the choice of selecting the thematically right team for the job. You can’t say as much for its sequel.

I’m a big fan of Shin Megami Tensei Persona Q2, make no mistake, but it shouldn’t have railroaded the player into having to play the game from the perspective of the Shin Megami Tensei Persona 5 cast. At the very least, players should have gotten the same kind of choice that they did with SMTPQ1 of which Persona cast to put into the spotlight--or better yet, Q2 should have forced the player into the perspective of a single cast, but that cast should have been Persona 4.

Because, see, SMT Persona Q2 is much like Q1 in that it is, again, sort of an entire game made out of a Social Link. There’s a single character (Hikari) whose personal history, issues, and needs, as well as the process of bringing her to a better personal state, define the vast majority of the plot of SMTPQ2. And what that’s all about is reminding Hikari of who she is inside, working her through key moments in her life which convinced her to bury her personality beneath a more bland, socially-safe facade, convincing her that suppressing herself for fear of others’ negative reactions isn’t the right course of action, and reassuring her that there are people who will and do value Hikari for who she really is. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona Q2 is, in summary, a story of the importance of having the courage to be true to yourself.

Which isn’t unrelated to Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5, of course. There’s plenty about SMTP5 that does tie into that idea, as I understand it. And, for that matter, SMT Persona 3 also has plenty of aspects in its story, Social Links, and characters that touch upon and incorporate the concept of self-honesty. But it’s not the major, important focus of either of them. Just as Persona 3 is unequivocally about finding meaning in life, and the importance of doing so, so too does Persona 5 have a different primary intent. Persona 5’s main thematic focuses are of teenage rebellion, and standing up to the corruption of the system and those who run it. Does that overlap with a “to thine own self be true” thing? Absolutely!

But the idea of personal, internal acceptance and truth isn’t just something that Persona 4 occasionally overlaps with--it’s what SMTP4 is all about. The whole point of that game is a search for the truth, an unwavering journey to clear away distractions, misconceptions, and denials to face the cold truth of reality. Its main characters each gain their powers only when they confront the shadows of things about themselves they’ve been trying to deny, and accept them as true. Its villain is an embodiment of the idea that the world prefers to see a clean, likable surface than to delve deep enough into a person or profession to know the absolute truth. Replacing SMTP3's evoker guns in SMTP4 are glasses that each character must wear when in dungeons and battle, glasses being symbolic of the ability to clearly see what could not have before been perceived. Accepting easy appearances as all there is to a matter is how you get SMTP4’s haunting bad ending.

The idea of truth and the importance of not conforming to what the world expects of one when it’s irreconcilable with one’s own true nature is a repeating concept in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. Just as SMTPQ1’s intent of finding purpose to one’s life perfectly aligns with Persona 3, making SEES the right team for the job, so, too, does SMTPQ2’s story of unearthing and accepting the suppressed truth of oneself integrate seamlessly with Persona 4. Just as The Investigation Team should be guests to SEES’s adventure in Q1, SEES and The Phantom Thieves should have been attendees to The Investigation Team’s adventure in Q2.

And yeah, I get why Atlus decided to force the Persona 5 crew into the spotlight for Persona Q2. Persona 4 is pretty old by this point (I should probably be grateful that Persona 3’s cast was even invited at all), while Persona 5 is the shiny, new, and quite successful inheritor of the franchise. The company stood the most to gain from having The Phantom Thieves of Hearts in the driver’s seat, using the new and bright recognition of SMTP5 to help sell Q2, and retroactively use Q2 to help sell Persona 5--which is definitely a thing; Q2 is my first time experiencing the Persona 5 gang, and I can’t be the only one who isn’t going to buy their main title until it comes out on a real gaming system. And I can’t help but think, much though I may like Persona Q2, that Atlus wasn’t willing to work quite so hard on it as they were Q1--a few bits and pieces of its system aren’t as polished as they should have been, and it’s telling that they weren’t willing to spend the time and money on voice acting to localize it (which is a little upsetting, because I really enjoy a lot of the vocal performances in the Persona series--not getting to hear Aigis, Yosuke, Elizabeth, Mitsuru, or Rise’s English actors again is a lost opportunity, although it is admittedly balanced a little by also not having to hear Teddy in English). So in light of that, it’s not surprising that they wouldn’t give the player a choice of which cast to choose this time around, given how much more effort that would have taken to set up. It’s just too bad, is all; if they were going to make the SMTPQ series disallow the player to choose which cast to make the game’s protagonists, they should’ve done so earlier and tied Q1 and Persona 3 together, and they should’ve opted to go with Persona 4 instead of 5 with Q2.

West of Loathing's Downloadable Content

While add-ons like Downloadable Content are generally associated (usually negatively) with the mainstream video game industry, it’s not impossible to find such additions within the Indie gaming scene. While certainly not what typically comes to mind when one thinks of an Indie game, given that it’s got more polish than a hell of a lot of (so-called) AAA titles, Pathfinder: Kingmaker was Owlcat Games’s first work (and crowd-funded, to boot), so I reckon it counts as an Indie RPG, and it had a couple DLCs. Celestian Tales 1 had its own add-on, for that matter, and there’s little debate about whether that one’s an Indie work. And today we’re going to look at the DLC available for another Indie RPG: the incredibly fun and funny West of Loathing.*



Reckonin’ at Gun Manor: You know how I tend to get way too carried away with these DLC rants and go on and on for pages, sometimes saying more about the add-on than I’ve ever said about the game itself? This will not be 1 of those times. Reckonin’ at Gun Manor is as fun and hilariously clever as the rest of West of Loathing, and if you own the game, you should own the DLC.

The premise of the DLC is exploring the mansion of the inventor of the gun, because you’re helping a parody ghostbuster with her job to exterminate a bunch of phantasms that have all invaded the premises. Along with the many paranormal jokes one might expect (through which Asymmetric proves that a female ghostbuster can be quite entertaining, contrary to what the 2016 flop compels you to believe) is a whole host of the usual random, well-written absurdity at which Loathing is so uniquely masterful, including hedge wizards, mannequin greeting practice, and a heated argument over whether or not the process of poaching an egg involves bullets, to name just a few. Oh, and of course, a spittoon, possibly the funniest so far. As a whole, it’s silly and a bucket of fun, as one expects.

But I would like to also appreciate Reckonin’ at Gun Manor for the fact that it doesn’t just deliver what you’d expect from West of Loathing: it goes a step further than the main game itself does by including a light, but nonetheless distinctly present story. West of Loathing’s overall plot can be equated with the simplicity and barely-there nature of most NES games--which isn’t really a strike against it, because WoL is all about the hilarity of the journey rather than the destination itself (even if its main story is actually just about a destination). In a humor RPG, being consistently funny is the key criteria for success, and a gripping plot and/or cast is icing on the cake--very nice when you can get it, like Okage: Shadow King or Undertale, but you can still have a great time without it as long as the laughs are plentiful, and West of Loathing keeps the chortles coming nicely. But this DLC takes WoL’s formula a step forward and does form itself around a gradual narrative, and that’s neat.

And not only does Reckonin’ at Gun Manor take the game a step forward by telling a real story, it’s also a pretty good story at that! It’s nothing fancy, but the twist to this add-on is clever, and the conclusion (if you went to the trouble to resolve each ghost the patient way, that is) is a pretty satisfying one that makes good on the DLC’s name and ties itself to the Old West theme with a little frontier justice.

Lastly, it’s a bit of a relief to me to have finally found, after so many other games have failed to do so, an offering which provides no debate over its worth from a money-to-time perspective. I got well over 5 hours of enjoyment out of Reckonin’ at Gun Manor, so its price tag of $5 is more than fair. It’s good enough that it’d still be worth purchasing even at a ratio lower than $1/hour, but Asymmetric is good enough to give you your full money’s worth.



...Alright, maybe that wasn’t as short as I thought it would be, but it’s still smaller than most of the other add-on rants I’ve done, right? At any rate, thank you, West of Loathing, for a little light through the dark tunnel of RPG DLCs. I’m sure I’ll need these unusually pleasant add-on memories when next I play a so-called AAA game’s additional content.















* At least, I think you can count it as an Indie title? Asymmetric’s run Kingdom of Loathing for like 20 years by this point, but I daresay there’s a substantial difference between a mostly-text browser RPG and a more standard game. I guess the company’s made a couple other tiny little educational games, too? The line of what is and isn’t an Indie title is sometimes as hard to define as the line of what is and isn’t an RPG, honestly.

Chrono Cross's Cast's Presentation Problem

Y’know, I thought I’d pretty much covered it when it came to the way that Chrono Cross utterly fails in terms of its cast. The few characters it pays any actual attention to are generally awful, and the rest of the cast are virtually non-entities thanks to no development and the Accent System eliminating any chance at their even having distinguishable personalities. Squaresoft was not prepared to deal with its bloated cast size, but let’s face it: looking at Serge, Kid, Lynx, and the few others that Square actually did attempt to characterize, it’s pretty clear that they weren’t competent enough to handle a regular-sized cast, either.

But I’ve been thinking about Chrono Cross a bit lately, and its large cast, and trying to figure something out about my position on the game that’s been bothering me. Because if I’m to be objective, I have to recognize 2 facts: A, there are games that I consider to be good RPGs with large casts in which many characters don’t get much more development than the majority of Chrono Cross’s cast, such as several Suikodens, or the game I Have Low Stats, But My Class is Leader, so I Recruited Everyone I Know to Fight the Dark Lord, a game whose once amusing title I have begun to curse every time I need to reference it. And B, there are also games that I consider to be good RPGs whose casts did not, by any stretch of the imagination, need to be as large as they are, such as Fire Emblem 14. So why do I scorn and mock the ways in which Chrono Cross’s cast’s size fails, but not these other games, which share some of the flaws I’m so eager to point out in CC?

Well, for starters, the Accent System.

But beyond that stupid, lazy cheat which I shall never tire of ragging on ever, I think it all has to do with how these other highly populated games present themselves.

First of all, the other RPGs I’ve mentioned don’t usually have the other problems that Chrono Cross does. The characters that do get significant focus in the good Suikoden titles aren’t poorly written the way CC’s plot darlings are (and even the bad Suikodens are lousy for different reasons), for example. And even if Fire Emblem 14’s cast is clearly far larger than it needs to be, you can’t fault Nintendo’s effort with it; just about every party member has multiple chains of conversations with other characters within which to develop, and personalities defined by more than whether or not they over-pronounce vowels. I mean, they’re definitely not all winners--Hisame in Fire Emblem 14 can almost entirely be summed up as “likes to make pickles,” and it would be an uphill battle to try to argue that Midori, Shiro, or Kiragi are any better--but at least it’s clear that, whatever limitations of skill Nintendo’s writers may have had from 1 character to the next, they were putting in the hours to exercise said skill. With Chrono Cross, well, the full scope of a cavegirl’s character is that she’s a cavegirl.

More importantly, however? It’s all in the presentation.

Suikoden games may have a lot of cast members whose gravitas is, shall we say, a lot lighter, just like Chrono Cross does. One can’t deny that plenty of the service-provider characters in Suikoden who do things like run inns, man shops, and operate elevators in the heroes’ castle are as 1-note and unexamined as Chrono Cross’s Funguy, or those tiresome Dragoon devas. But here’s the thing about Suikoden titles: as a general rule, they’re stories about pivotal wars and social movements, depicting great, all-changing moments in the history of 1 wold’s civilizations. As such, Suikoden creates a mood of everyone in a country pitching in for a grand, united cause, all citizens doing their part and putting in their best efforts for their nation and fellow patriots, no matter how great or small that part may be. So even if the character development of the bath attendant or groundskeeper aren’t as deep or present as the game’s generals or strategist, that fact doesn’t lessen the game’s appeal and quality--the light impact and involvement of such characters is expected.

Chrono Cross, unfortunately, is an adventure structured far more in the standard, personalized style of most RPGs. Even though it’s a journey whose stakes can be world-saving or higher, the typical RPG focus and formula is inevitably a personal one, wherein the essence, actions, and history of the protagonist are a fundamental, inseparable core to not only the game’s events, but how those events came about. It’s not some grand venture of all the people of the land coming together as a coordinated effort to show the power of a nation united. It’s a story about Serge and the (sort of) people who travel with him to tackle a giant problem in which he is inextricably linked. Yes, Suikoden stories also have the personal element mixed in, and generally interweave it quite well, but in the end, they’re still grand struggles of armies, supply chains, strategists, communities and cultures. Even if many of the party members in Suikoden games are invested in a much more personal fashion in the adventure, it’s fully expected and acceptable for many others to be lighter on character development because of the way the games overall set an expectation of cast contribution. But Chrono Cross doesn’t have that luxury, as a more typical RPG approach, and so it’s a noticeable disappointment and flaw that the majority of its cast are empty shells defined by no more than their superficial traits. The expectation is that characters in CC should have weight, interact significantly, just actually matter, and they largely don’t.

The game I Have Low Stats, But My Class is Leader, So I Recruited Everyone I Know to Fight the Dark Lord is another example of this. IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL* has almost 100 party members, and the majority of them don’t really get any more focus than the average Chrono Cross character’s 5 - 7 minutes of screen time that covers their introduction, recruitment, and sidequest material. Admittedly, the characters in IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL all interact with one another in various ways over the course of the game--real interactions, I mean, not that Accent System shit--so they’re still substantially better developed than the Chrono Cross bunch. Still, the major problem of little to no real development past what the character actually is physically is still there. You won’t find more depth or plot importance in IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL’s barkeep, illusionist, and priest than you will in the barkeep, illusionist, and priest in Chrono Cross, for example.

But the difference in presentation once again makes that flaw more acceptable for IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL than it is for Chrono Cross. The former game is, as can be easily gleaned from the title alone, a lighthearted RPG, more focused on a bit of humor than some grand, sweeping adventure of alternate dimensions and devourers of time and whatnot. The whole thing of having a damn army of party members to save the world just by sheer numbers is the joke and the point. No one’s expecting stellar personal stories from the barber and the pet cat who got press-ganged into a heroic world tour solely because they happened to live in the same town as the expedition’s leader. They’re there because they’re instruments in the joke that the game’s making.

Chrono Cross, on the other hand, doesn’t have that excuse. I mean, yes, it absolutely is a fucking joke of an RPG, but it wasn’t trying to be. As I’ve pointed out before, CC is an RPG that handles itself with a typical seriousness--and the gravity it comports itself with is constantly, irrecoverably undercut by the absurdity of half its cast. So yeah, the teacher and her entire class of students being hauled along on a life-threatening field trip in IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL may clearly have no real reason to be there and limited character development as a result, but it’s forgiven because that’s the joke. CC, on the other hand, just leaves you wondering why the hell a living voodoo doll has chosen to come along for a 50-hour ride that has nothing to do with him.

Finally, Fire Emblem 14 is a game with a large cast--in fact, it has 2 dozen more party members than Chrono Cross! And it certainly didn’t need to be that big. Only a third of them are actually necessary for the game’s events. The game would have gotten along exactly the same without the retainers, for example, and of course, the children are a famously superfluous bunch. And yet, FE14’s huge cast never felt for a moment to me to be so over-stuffed and bloated as Chrono Cross’s.

Of course, a major part of that is that Nintendo actually gave enough of a damn to make sure every party member was given decent time to develop as a character, as mentioned. But even if the cast of FE14 had the same ratio of significant characters to empty ones that Chrono Cross does, I believe I’d still regard FE14’s cast as far less unnecessary. Yes, even the children! Because for the most part, the FE14 cast actually have a vested, personal interest in the game’s conflict. Granted, there are a couple of characters in Fire Emblem Fates who are just loosely along for the ride (Anna and Benny, for example),** but for the most part, everyone in Fire Emblem 14 has a strong, recognizable reason for traveling with Corrin. They may do so out of a feeling of duty and responsibility as a future ruler, love and devotion to Corrin herself, the obligation of their job as a personal guard to another party member, a desire to protect or prove themselves to their parents, or even just because they’re a gold-digger and Corrin’s army contains like 70% of the members of this world’s aristocracy...as a general rule, you can point to almost any of the nigh 70 individuals in FE14’s playable cast, and say, “Yeah, I know why they’ve signed on with Corrin, that reason makes sense, and they’ve got a purpose for being there.”

On the other hand, in Chrono Cross, you can walk into a random house, and walk out 2 minutes later with a masked wrestler who’s spontaneously pledged his life to the service of some kid he’s just met. Or a penniless artist’s kid, who has decided to start his own journey of self-discovery by following a murderous-looking cat-man into lethal combat, and who held the weapon he’ll be using in said life-threatening battle for the first time just before walking out the door. Or a blacksmith who has inexplicably decided to hitch his looking-for-a-rare-smithing-material wagon to the quest of a total stranger. Basically, any time you walk into a building in Chrono Cross, there’s like a 10% chance you’re gonna walk out of it with some rando who is completely willing to throw themselves at monsters, dragons, and killer robots for the sake of a guy they didn’t know existed 10 minutes ago.

Did the retainer characters in Fire Emblem Fates have to be there? No, by and large the game’s story would have continued along unchanged without them. Would the game overall be a little less silly without magically aging up all the babies of your preferred FE14 ships so they could join the war effort? Oh, absolutely. FE14 has far more party members than are needed for its story to be told. But at least they’re all there for a reason of their own, reasons that make sense of their being willing to fight to the death for their leader’s cause. None of FE14’s cast are a fucking talking turnip that inexplicably decided it owed Corrin some debt of honor just because she happened to dig it up one day.

So yes, there are other RPGs with large casts--larger, even--who commit some of the same major sins with those casts that Chrono Cross is most remembered for. And yet, CC is still the one that stands out for its mistakes, and it does so alone. Because even when these other games neglect many of their abundant cast, their overall presentation as stories of large-scale conflict or of amusement rather than gravity lessen the need and expectation for them to fully flesh out every single individual in their scope, in contrast to Chrono Cross’s basic approach of the personally-driven and serious RPG adventure. And because even when these other games clearly have many more party members than they required, those characters are still at least usually there for a relevant, sensible reason, in contrast to Chrono Cross, where a mermaid weighs Serge’s helping a band put on a show as being equal to the act of putting her life on the line to fight the forces of fate itself. Chrono Cross truly was a spectacle of failure, and even decades later, I still find myself coming to new understanding of its gross shortcomings.









* I’m starting to think I may kill the man who made this game.


** Which, by the way, still isn’t as bad in Fire Emblem as it is in a more typical RPG like Chrono Cross. While certainly nowhere near to the same degree as Suikoden, FE also has a certain focus on the whole large-scale war thing (even if these “wars” only seem to be fought by the dozen or so individual characters you select for any given battle; FE16 was the first title, to my knowledge, to mildly involve actual battalions of soldiers). So it’s neither unusual nor out of place for a character in Suikoden to have no more personal a stake in a conflict than, say, being a mercenary who was paid to join the party, or something like that.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker's Nyrissa's Punishment

Just a short rant today (stop scoffing). This rant’s subject is probably something that many others have realized, of course, but it just occurred to me, and I really liked it, and my trend towards trying to only rant about things that are utterly unique to my own head in recent years has made it difficult to keep a decent cushion of rants on standby, so it’s time to start making some little ones now and then for whatever comes to my mind, regardless of whether others have doubtless expounded upon it before. The game itself does not (I think) specifically spell this out, at least, so that’s good enough for me.

It’s just occurred to me that the punishment inflicted upon Nyrissa by The Lantern King--or at least, her means to redeem herself--is a clever piece of symbolic irony. The so-called crime that Nyrissa is punished for, after all, is her ambition to join the Eldest as an equal, her pride at thinking that she could rise above her station as a queen to join the ranks of gods (or at least beings very close to gods). For her hubris, she was struck down by the beings she thought to join, tormented, and stripped of her ability to feel love, and told by The Lantern King that she would be forgiven once she had caused the fall of 1000 kingdoms, empires, and so on within the Stolen Lands. The long history in the Pathfinder universe of the Stolen Lands being impossible to settle, the innumerable rises and falls of communities within them, are all due to her influence, as she inspires the creation and then instigates the destruction of all manner of societies over the centuries, as penance to terrible higher beings.

What I find interesting about it is that it’s an atonement that echoes the crime that created it. Just as the Eldest stepped forth to punish a queen’s hubris at thinking she could become an Eldest, so now is a queen forced to punish the hubris of lower mortals thinking they can become royalty. Not only is Nyrissa forced to suffer for centuries the inability to feel love, twisting her into the very antithesis of what she originally was, but the terms of her sentence force her to witness her “crime” over and over again, and to take on the role that her own punisher took. It’s not enough for the Lantern King that she suffer--she must suffer while every single day being reminded of what brought about her suffering, and being forced to become the monster who destroys these ambitious mortals that represent herself. An elegantly sadistic, tragic punishment, indeed.

Understanding this also makes me really enjoy and appreciate the connection that Nyrissa and the protagonist of Pathfinder: Kingmaker have all the more. Because in many ways, the Queen/King (is there a more canon term for the protagonist?) is a living embodiment of hope and inspiration to Nyrissa, as a representation of her that shows the possibility of success, that represents everything Nyrissa hoped to be. After all, the protagonist of Pathfinder: Kingmaker is, like all the others that Nyrissa has struck down, a woman/man who reaches above her/his station to become more...and yet, each time that Nyrissa moves to punish that ambition, to strike the Queen/King down and destroy the reign she/he has built and earned, the attack is thwarted, and the Queen/King continues to rule in defiance of the higher being that would punish her/his daring. There’s even a parallel in that you can, with a hell of a lot of careful work, have the protagonist pursue a romance with Nyrissa--another act of being bold enough to reach above her/his station--just as Nyrissa once was the lover of 1 of the Eldest. No wonder Nyrissa can, once you return the capacity to love to her, fall so easily and deeply in love with the protagonist--not only is she/he the hero that saved who Nyrissa was from who she was forced to become, but the Queen/King is also an inspiring symbol of Nyrissa’s own past that vindicates her, whose success proves that Nyrissa’s own dreams and hopes were not wrong, no matter what her conqueror and tormentor tried to abuse her into accepting.

Really cool, Owlcat Games. Looking forward to quality like this in the next one!

Gurumin's Requirements to Unlock Popon

I like features that add replayability to a game as much as the next guy. At least, I assume I do; I can’t truthfully say I’ve gone around polling other gamers on the issue. But, y’know, if people have a generally favorable opinion on game replayability, then we’re in the same camp.

I like New Game+, whether it be a general, static kind as found in most RPGs, or one you can customize a bit, as the Tales of series features. I’m fine with RPGs having multiple ways to solve quests and sidequests, thus encouraging to players to go through a second time to see the other possible results of their actions, as with many western RPGs like Fallout and Mass Effect. I like it when games have multiple story paths based around the philosophical and moral stance of the player, encouraging multiple playthroughs to see each path’s events, like most Shin Megami Tensei games or Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. I found it interesting that The Witcher 2’s second chapter had essentially 2 entirely different stories to tell, depending on whether Geralt had backed Roche or Iorveth in the first chapter--kind of like getting an entire extra third of a game for free. I’m even generally not too unhappy about the RPGs which lock significant story content behind the first playthrough, requiring you to play and finish the game once before giving you the ability to play it through to its full extent--stuff like Sakura Wars 5, which only unlocks the option to romance Ratchet after you’ve completed the game once, or the more common scenario of Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers, which requires you to play through the game twice to get the better ending.

Yes, I generally embrace RPGs’ replayability-enhancing features. I’m not exactly looking to sacrifice more time to a game than I have to, but the results are usually pretty positive in the genre.

Gurumin, however, can go spelunking in a garbage disposal.

Who the hell was the madman on the development staff of Gurumin, known here as Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure, who decided to introduce the character of Popon to the game during a second playthrough as an NPC, but then only allow her to become playable after you beat the game on four separate difficulties?

That didn’t seem crazy to anyone around the Nihon Falcom offices? When the idea of Popon was batted around for the first time at a meeting, not a single staff member spoke up to say, “Hey, maybe forcing the player to play an initially charming but, let’s face it, not especially mentally stimulating game on Easy, Normal, Hard, and Happy Mode, a difficulty setting we’re just making up right now, in order to unlock a second character is a little excessive?” No one looked at the plan to make a player have to go through the same 2 dozen levels or so 4 separate times and thought there was anything wrong with that?

To make a bad situation worse, they didn’t even implement this ludicrous requirement well. Let’s compare Gurumin’s replayability strategy to Fire Emblem 16’s, for a moment. Both Gurumin and FE16 require the player to experience them at least 4 times to get their full effect.* In Gurumin’s case, we’re talking about unlocking Popon as a playable character, while in FE16’s, it’s a case of seeing all the game’s paths in order to fully understand its lore, events, and major characters, as all the details of such won’t be available to the player on any single given playthrough.

It’s a crazy time sink either way to achieve this 4-playthrough-goal, but Fire Emblem 16, at least, is smart enough to make the journey to that destination somewhat worthwhile: the latter half of each of the game’s paths is different from the others,** allowing you to see variations each playthrough, ones which are perhaps a little more engaging than simply “this enemy takes 2 more hits to kill now.” Each path of FE16 tells the story of a different focal character, the purpose and events vary to some degree, certain important supporting cast members are given prominence, and you’re given more understanding of the game’s story as a whole each time.

By contrast, what you potentially get from your second, third, and fourth playthroughs of Gurumin are a couple different outfits for Parin. Woohooooo.

What’s possibly the worst part of this is that, if you’re mentally unhinged enough that you actually DO go and spend the time to beat Gurumin 4 times and unlock Popon...you find that she feels like a bit of a cop-out on the developers’ part. Gameplay-wise, she controls basically the same as Parin does--the only real differences, to my understanding (I sure as hell ain’t gonna put in the time and monotony to personally confirm this) are that she can’t equip headgear, and she does crazy damage during the final battle since her sword is dragon kryptonite. That’s seriously it! 4 entire playthroughs doing the same things, fighting the same enemies, with a single character...and the developers couldn’t even be bothered to code a player character who could change the formula a little!

And worst of all, Popon not only plays identically to Parin, she speaks and acts identically, too! And that’s not an exaggeration. When playing as Popon, spoken dialogue just reuses Parin’s lines! Supposedly the cutscenes even still show Parin! How fucking lazy is that? And no, this is not excused by the fact that Gurumin makes a clever little joke about it by having Parin confirm with Popon, when switching out with her, that the latter got Parin’s script for the game. The fourth wall is not there so you can get away with being lazy, Nihon Falcom!

I like Gurumin overall, but as far as its situation with unlocking Popon goes, it’s both absurdly unreasonable in its demands, and insultingly slothful.










* In theory, at least. In practice, you can totally just ditch the Blue Lions and miss virtually nothing of importance or interest.


** Yes, the Church and Golden Deer routes are virtually identical in terms of the battles you fight, and not strongly dissimilar in terms of their events, either. But there are variations, most notably character-based ones, nonetheless. It’s not a case of experiencing a literally identical game again, at least.

General RPGs' Preferable Non-Realism List 2

A few years back, I made a list of instances in which it was better for a game to be unrealistic than to strictly adhere to the limitations of real life. It was kinda fun to write! And also, I soon after realized that there were more examples of these moments of desirable suspension of disbelief to be found. So I figured, why not do another rant once I’d gotten a decent number of them? And as we all know, 8 is the best number, so I went with that. Thus, now that I’ve thought of that many more of these things...let’s waste our time once again with this nonsense! Here are 8 more examples of RPG conventions that are much, much better sans realism.



Expiration Dates: Let’s face it: RPG characters do not have any great gift of common sense when it comes to what they put in their mouths.

No, I’m not just talking about Shion’s love life in the Xenosaga series. I’m referring to RPG characters’ universal belief that anything and everything that they find in a box is good eatin’. An herb discovered within a treasure chest situated at the very bottom of an abandoned mine? A blackberry found in the back corner of a rotten armoire located in an underwater city last populated over a hundred years ago? A vial of healing potion just left out in the sun on the floor of a floating ancient temple created by a race that went extinct a millennium prior? Throw it all in the Inventory sack and live like there’s no tomorrow, guys! Age won’t have desiccated that herb’s ability to restore 40 HP, no amount of rot and fungus will interrupt that fruit’s dedication to restoring 30% of your MP, and c’mon, what harm could there possibly be in ingesting a beaker of liquid chemicals allowed to react to one another and heat for ten centuries in a row?

By Asmodeus, do you realize that there is a moment in Millennium 4 in which the heroes explore a series of abandoned, forgotten sewer passages, find a treasure chest with meat inside, and actually take this long-lost sewer meat with them to potentially consume later? It isn’t even like this is some edible item found in a normal, disgusting RPG sewer system--it’s a section of underground fecal water-park that has gone unvisited for so long that the city above has outright forgotten about it! This is meat that has been stewing in a highly populated and active city’s poo-gas for an indeterminable set of decades, and rather than forever swear off the act of consuming food then and there at the mere sight of this wretched stuff, they intend to EAT IT. Oh my God.

And frankly, even the stuff you can buy fresh from a vendor at the beginning of the game probably shouldn’t be exactly as useful at the end of an adventure that spans weeks, months, or possibly even years.

With a mere touch more realism, 90% of the healing herbs you find in RPGs should cause more harm than they repair, as the flora should cause paralyzing digestive distress that puts an adventure on hold for a good 24 hours at a time, as the potions should probably fatally poison their consumer’s innards. And just opening that sewer meat’s chest should have straight-up melted Marine’s face right off with the fumes alone. But as amusing as it is to theorize that diarrhea should be so intrinsic to most RPG adventures that it counts as a party member, I sure as hell don’t want to deal with some knucklehead developer creating a timing system for using up items before they go bad, or denying me vital vitality victuals as I explore various dungeons just because it’s not realistic that they’d still be edible after being placed into a treasure chest a thousand years prior.

EDIT: Thanks to reader Adam E, I have now remembered that I have dealt with the realism of food spoilage in action in an RPG before. Baten Kaitos, though generally a pretty laudable couple of RPGs, does indeed have a system in play wherein certain items, those being health-restoring food, will indeed, after a set period of time, transform into a spoiled food item that no longer restores health but instead has a virtually uselessly low chance of inflicting poison on someone. I don't know how I could have forgotten this little example of some developer thinking a bit too highly of how clever he/she was, but I'm guessing I mentally blocked this part of the Baten Kaitos experience out, because this mechanic serves no purpose whatsoever beyond inconvenience and frustration.

But thanks for reminding me, Adam! I mean, sort of. Admittedly it's not a blast to remember the experience. But still, thanks!


Village and City Size: Anyone ever get concerned about the viability of most RPG towns’ genetic diversity? I mean, I like the coziness of small-town communities as much as the next guy, but 4 houses and 1 shop stall does not a village make! Hell, it doesn’t even fill out a cul-de-sac properly. Even the largest RPG city that you’re allowed to fully explore from 1 end to the other doesn’t usually amount to much more than the population and geographical area of my local shopping mall.

But that’s not really a bad thing. I really don’t need to explore every nook and cranny of New Tech Fantasyburg to get the overall idea of the city’s size and scope, nor do I especially want to spend the next 5 hours of the game doing so--repeated architecture tiles and NPC dialogue doesn’t have that powerful a pull on me. I’ve played RPGs that stuck around 1 single city well past the novelty’s expiration date, and it wasn’t a great time--Ordon Village in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was infuriatingly dull and overplayed, Kingdom Hearts 2’s beginning in Twilight Town was worse, and poor Dragon Age 2 never even escaped from the city of Kirkwall.

Also, on a personal note, I am absolute shit with directions, and this flaw absolutely does translate to my gaming. I already frequently get lost in the more decently-sized city microcosms in some RPGs--even navigating a moderate city section, like those in Deus Ex 3, is a spatial nightmare for me. Seriously, game developers, never give us any more than these tiny slices of RPG towns. Please. For my sake.


Running Endurance, Part 2: As I noted last time, RPG characters generally seem indefatigable when it comes to jogging from 1 screen to the next nonstop for 50+ hours of game time, a fact that I’m very glad for, because as little value as I clearly place upon my time, even I have better shit to do than to fritter away an extra cumulative 60 minutes’ worth of time per game because some slow-ass protagonist wanted to meander instead of trot his way to every goal.

But as a sharp-witted and anonymous reader pointed out on the last rant, not only does unflagging limb motion as they literally cross the world never tire most RPG characters, but their running endurance and speed are also rarely, if ever, affected by their actual physical condition. Spikehair McSwordbutt will jog at exactly the same speed, for exactly as long, whether he’s at full health or a measly 1 HP. Be he of robust constitution or suffering from no less than 6 different status effects, some of which may be states of unconsciousness, his pace is equally unfaltering.

Now, I can’t say this for absolute certainty, as I just avoid running and all other forms of physical activity altogether either way, but I think that if I were deeply poisoned and every step I took literally drained the life from my person, it might have a negative impact on my capacity to hustle.

But of course, this is a good thing, and should not change. Because 1 game did, in fact, link a character’s ability to run to their HP. And that game was Lunar: Dragon Song.

And you never, ever follow Lunar: Dragon Song’s example.

On anything.

EVER.


Decaying Weapons: Okay guys I know I did this one last time, and don’t worry I’m not counting this as 1 of the new 8 things on this list, but hear me out on this: I just really fucking hate equipment degradation. Seriously who the fuck is the obnoxious little shit that first came up with this ass-ery? To the first video game developer that decided to apply the natural entropy of all things to video games’ weapons, armor, and whatnot, let me just say: I want every badger on Earth to become uncontrollably, very aggressively attracted to you and seek you out. I desire the last moments of your life to be someone forcing you to binge-watch Star Trek: Discovery. I hope you accidentally bite your tongue every single day.

Oh, and hey, just to keep things fresh, there’s a whole new reason these days why weapons that disintegrate as you use them is a bad thing, as if the obvious wasn’t enough: game developers can use this shitty game mechanic to scam you into paying them more. Never afraid to be unequivocally proven to be liars and cheats, Bethesda used the annoyance of weapon degradation in Fallout 76 as an opportunity to, after having said on record that all microtransactions would have no effect on gameplay, sell players special equipment repair kits to make the weapon degradation less inconvenient. Yes, Bethesda took this spectacularly anti-fun gameplay mechanic, put it in their game, sold that game to you for 59 dollars and 98-and-a-half cents more than the game was worth, and then charged you more money for a solution to the problem that they created. So yeah, besides just the obvious reason that it’s fucking asinine beyond the human capacity to fathom, weapon degradation is a bad idea in RPGs because it is also, it seems, an invitation for Todd Howard and his unethical corporate shitstain peers to rape your wallet.


Return Policies of Limitless Possibilities: Life for a merchant in an RPG world must occasionally become something of a nightmare, when the heroes roll into town. Sure, these assholes will probably lay down some coin to purchase a few necessities...but they may very well drop 99 battle axes on your counter, instead, and demand that you buy every single one off of them at half resale value. Does it matter that you’re strictly a potion vendor? Nope, you’re still obligated to purchase nearly a hundred of an item that you don’t even peddle--and even if you did, it’d still be a tough sell, since the adventurers wouldn’t be unloading an overstuffed sack of helmets on you if every last 1 of those damn things wasn’t obsolete compared to the equipment offered in this very town. Does it matter that you’re located in a tiny, rural farming hamlet, on an island with no port? Absolutely not--you’d better goddamn well have the full 46,000 that the pile of outdated knives is worth on hand and ready to fork over, down to the last gil!

However, as silly as it may seem that any given stall in a farmer’s market has got more shekels in its cash box than Randy Pitchford has stains on his immortal soul, I’d much rather have the convenience of being able to sell any amount of anything to anyone in an RPG than to have the alternative that you see in some Western RPGs like Fallout, games which actually limit how much currency any given merchant has on hand at any given time. As convenient as Fast Travel makes the process, it’s still something of a pain to find yourself carrying a load of valuable crap to sell, and have to hoof it to 1 vendor after another to get rid of it while still getting your money’s worth. And while I can appreciate the amusing subversion of RPG tropes inherent to it, it was nonetheless kind of annoying in Undertale when merchants refused to buy your junk off you, even if for admittedly logical reasons. Although the concept of the “Looter Shooter” is relatively recent to the industry, the quick and gratuitous acquisition of stuff, and the immediate pawning of said stuff for cold, hard zenny, is a longtime staple of the RPG genre, and adding the frustrating minutia of real-world restrictions to these transactions doesn’t have a beneficial tradeoff. Just let the dirty trash-picking waster living in a torn tent under a collapsed overpass possess the 1600 caps he owes me for unwisely handing him a dozen laser shotguns, and let me get on with my Fallout life, Bethesda!


Global Monolingualism: Basically, every single culture on any given fantasy planet (or undefined magical land, or magic-locked sister dimensions, or collapsed titanic divine mecha that they crawl on like disgusting parasites, or whatever) has a 95% chance of speaking the exact same language, and, to compound this miracle several times over, often all with the same accent! If anyone speaks a different language, you can be damn sure it’s only because it’s useful to the game’s narrative--padding the game’s time with quests to translate plot-relevant prophecies and instructions, padding the game’s time with sidequests to translate not plot-relevant dialogue for no particular reason because what was the point of Al Bhed really?, emphasizing how alien Tales of Eternia’s Meredy is even though the game gets lazier and lazier on implementing this different languages thing once it stops being useful and just kind of says “fuck it, everyone perfectly understands everyone because magic, we can’t be bothered to keep track of this shit any more” eventually, and so on.

This is, of course, not an RPG-specific trope by any stretch of the imagination, but they certainly make use of this convenient bit of non-realism at least as often as any other form of storytelling - perhaps more than most, even. And just as obvious are the benefits of taking this approach that every single being in the world, even a bunch of schmucks who’ve been living for a thousand years on a floating sky city apart from the world, or a bunch of inner-earth-dwelling dwarves who have never before this moment even encountered an inhabitant of the surface, speaks a single, unified language. If we were to introduce the concept of a realistic divide of languages between a planet’s cultures such as what we deal with in our own world, the complications of having to set up appropriate narrative devices for translation would soon become overly burdensome--and that irritation would easily outweigh what little benefits the story would gain from the situation. If there were any benefits to be had at all--I can’t really think of what, say, Lufia 2, or Lunar 1 would gain from such linguistic distinctions. Even the benefits for games in which a cultural divide is a plot point wouldn’t necessarily have much to gain--Grandia 1 and Chrono Trigger, for example, don’t have the kind of storytelling objectives that would get any real mileage from language barriers, even though encountering and exploring new lands is a major part of Grandia 1, and doing the same for different times is a major part of Chrono Trigger. For the pleasure of not having to hire a new translator every time I get shot from a canon into another county in a Mana game just for the sake of realism, I’ll gladly embrace the “all the universe speaks English” approach.

Also, the current system of only involving other languages when they’re useful to the plot actually works to our benefit in another way, too. While it’s frequently just a convenience to have everyone speak Galactic Basic Standard, the fact that we’re groomed to expect everyone we encounter in a game to speak a single language actually makes it more noteworthy when a character or plot device doesn’t. An indecipherable sacred text or a magical girl falling from the sky who speaks a foreign language wouldn’t seem all that eye-catching in a game whose course of events already had to juggle English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Gaelic, Polish, Cantonese, Al Bhed, Klingon, Animal Crossing, and Wookie. But in a game with only a single widely-spoken language? The difference stands out far more.


Money-Changing: Is it especially likely that a typical human empire, the human kingdom said empire is at war with, a secluded elven village, an underwater town of merpeople, a single vendor inexplicably and unapologetically living in ruins that have been abandoned for over 500 years, a community of extra-dimensional cat-people, the denizens of a post-apocalyptic wasteland existing over a thousand years in the future, and real, actual fucking penguins would all happen to accept the same gold coins or colorful gems as payment for their goods and services? No.

Do I want to revisit Secret of Evermore’s system of requiring you to visit a money exchange merchant every time I reach a new area of the game whose currency is completely different from the last? A far, far more emphatic no.

Seriously, nothing important is accomplished by this. No one cares, no one possibly could care, about that level of realistic detail in their RPG adventure. It’s a mild annoyance which adds nothing to the experience. Or it’s not even that much--the currency differences between the NCR, Legion, and general wasteland in Fallout: New Vegas were all but meaningless in a game whose economic system is primarily about barter.


Dietary Realism: Honestly, even when they’re consuming food items that haven’t been sitting in a moldy pouch for multiple lifetimes, RPG characters have got some shit diets. The Secret of Mana kids go their entire adventure subsisting on nothing but candy, chocolate, jam, and an occasional walnut. You trying to tell me that after weeks, maybe months of being in the wilderness, subsisting on nothing but ice cream toppings, they’d be in any condition to take on dark sorcerers and gigantic dragon-furries? Randi’s Strength stat should have been going DOWN every time he leveled up; the only healthily robust part of these characters’ bodies should have been their acne!

And what about all the game meat some RPG characters acquire as they go along their travels? Yeah, not everything caught in the wild is as dangerous as the infamous bushmeat (although it’s certainly present in some RPGs; the Millennium series outright has you collecting edible, health-restoring monkey and gorilla meat, for example), but a steady diet of game meat is a dicey gamble--realistically, in games where you get consumable meat items from wild boars and birds and so on, at least 1 party member would be struck with a nasty parasite or possibly even fatal disease per long adventure from all the untreated dire woof-woofs they’ve been cramming down their gullet. And that’s assuming they’re even cooking the damn stuff--some RPGs distinguish between raw and cooked food items, after all. Really, Fallout 4, you’re trying to tell me that Nora can spend her days devouring the raw innards of giant mutated cockroaches that roll around in and actively dig through the filth of post-apocalyptic Boston--not an especially clean and sanitary city even before Armageddon, I’d like to point out--all the time, and nothing, absolutely nothing will threaten her health beyond a slight increase in rads?

Man, just a little more realism to this situation, and Adventure Bar Story wouldn’t even exist.

But of course, even though the act of sinking my teeth into the twisted, bloated bulk of a hideously mutated mole-rat makes me queasy merely to think about and would probably lead to a legendary battle with my bathroom if I tried it, it’s better not to transfer the real-life reactions to living off the fat of fantasy and post-apocalyptic lands. Because I don’t think there’s a single person alive who won’t agree that malnutrition and food poisoning are major fucking bummers.


Fuck You, Second Law of Physics: Two objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time. But 5 - 8 objects that happen to be several humans, a robot, and a talkative self-aware guinea pig fully decked out in medieval armor? Oh, yeah, that’s no problem. Pile on in, guys, plenty of room in the single block of texture space which the protagonist inhabits! Just cram yourselves so far up into the main character’s personal space that you outright vanish from sight, as a Japanese subway attendant looks on with tears of envious admiration in his eyes. Or, alternately, all the supporting party members can just sort of trail behind the hero as he wanders around, single-file, keeping a respectful and exact distance behind him like dutiful, emotionally-repressed wives of olden times, while maintaining no more than a phantasmal presence, since the protagonist can unexpectedly double back whenever he feels like it and just walk right the hell through them with nary an effort.

Still, as peculiar as it may be for characters like Star Ocean 2’s Noel, the majority of Chrono Cross’s cast, and 95% of all Kemco characters to possess a physical presence equal to their overall substance as characters, it’s way better to have one’s party members disappear into the protagonist’s pocket or haunt his every step as no more than specters, than to have them running around as solid objects. Because then you get situations wherein your companions block your path if you want to go back, or loiter in doorways, trapping you indefinitely within small rooms because you can’t push past. The problem of becoming trapped by inconvenient and random NPC movement paths is already enough of an irritation; we don’t need to add the people who’re supposed to be your allies to the mix.

Just imagine if the 98 party members following Josephine around in I Have Low Stats But My Class is Leader, So I Recruited Everyone I Know to Fight the Dark Lord were all solid. The RPG would basically be a highly frustrating game of Snake.

I will say that, while my preference is the non-realistic approach to this issue, I’ll also accept a scenario that is much more realistic, too. As in, party members are solid beings who can obstruct your path, BUT you also have enough realism as a person to, y’know, open your stupid mouth and ask them to move. Fallout 2 was, I believe, the first RPG to come up with this idea, probably due to how infuriatingly often companions got in one’s way during the first Fallout, and a few titles since have gone this route, and bully for them. Whatever it takes to keep a narrow passage at the corner of the area map from becoming my protagonist’s final resting place because he’s just too damn shy to ask his closest friends in the world to take 2 steps to the left.




Well, that was fun, again. I really don’t have anything new to close this one out with, so, I dunno, I guess I’ll just reiterate what I concluded with last time: realism is a fine and lovely thing in our games, but it’s not an end in itself. It’s a tool to serve the purpose of a better gaming experience. So if implementing a new gameplay mechanic or eliminating a trope of the genre for the sake of realism does more harm than good to the audience’s experience, well, don’t fucking do it! You’d think this sort of thing would be obvious, honestly.

General RPGs' Show-and-Tell Writing Method

There’s a long-held wisdom about writing: Show, Don’t Tell. It’s a reliable guideline for all who wish to create and share a story, which advises a writer not to simply Tell an audience, whether through narration or characters’ exposition, something about a character or an event, but rather to create actions, circumstances, and dialogue that display this characteristic the writer wishes known to the audience, and allow the audience to experience it firsthand. Definitely a sensible and worthy method of storytelling, to be sure, because empirical evidence is just generally more compelling than hearsay--the phrase “I’ll believe it when I see it” exists for a reason. Roseportal Games, as an example, can Tell me as much as they like that Aerin of The Princess’ Heart undergoes personal growth during the game’s events and is at the game's end a better, more mature romantic partner than she was at its beginning, but they’ve Shown me not a single piece of evidence to back that up, so I don’t buy it for a moment.

With that said, I think it’s a common mistake that many people believe that Show, Don’t Tell is the final word on quality storytelling. It’s a great and a safe method, absolutely, but not the be-all, end-all of how to write well.

First of all, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: If you know what you’re doing, the Tell method actually can work very well. Isaac Asimov used a lot of Telling in his works, especially his famous Foundation series, and pretty much everything he wrote that I’ve come across is fantastic. He knew how and when to rely on his own narration to get the job done, what situations it would work for--the Foundation stories, for example, involve not a small theme of historical documentation, for which the Tell style adds authenticity, since we associate such an approach with things like history textbooks and biographies and whatnot. To bring it back to RPGs, I would say that a fair portion of the narration of Planescape: Torment, and its spiritual successor, Torment: Tides of Numenera, could be considered as Telling more than Showing--and PT and TToN have definitely got the masterful writing talents on staff to make such scenes as brilliant and captivating as all the rest.

More importantly, however, is my belief that Show, while more desirable in general than Tell, is still only a part of the ideal way of writing. In my opinion, you’re at your best when the idea you want to convey is Shown and Told. Yes, you can be Told that some character is amazing and wonderful and/or has undergone incredible personal changes for the better, but the sentiment is meaningless because you’re not able to observe evidence of it. However, you can also be Shown the character’s greatness and how dynamic they are, but not fully appreciate these facts because the lack of a Telling element hasn’t framed these qualities for all they’re worth.

Since I used a non-RPG example initially a moment ago, let’s start the same way with this. You can see an example of what I mean by a Show-and-Tell method in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, specifically with the character of protagonist George Bailey. The key, core element of the film around which every part of its plot, message, and cast revolve is the outstanding virtue of George as a man, and the irreplaceable value he has to his friends, family, and community as a whole. Now, the movie does an excellent job in establishing the greatness of George Bailey through Showing the audience many, many examples of his selfless and kind nature throughout his lifetime, allowing us to see, from the perspective of an observing angel, his past. And for that matter, we also see examples of that generous spirit once the movie catches up to the present: Clarence’s entire plan to keep George from committing suicide revolves around the knowledge that George will put his own despair on hold to save another person, and a little later, George feels compelled, even while still distraught over his own terrible circumstances, to express to Clarence that the latter worries George, and to ask about whether Clarence’s own situation is stable. There’s more than enough Show in It’s a Wonderful Life for us to adequately understand George Bailey’s saintlike qualities.

Yet at the same time, we’d be missing out if the movie were not also Telling us what a great guy George is, too. The fact that we hear angels themselves speak highly of George Bailey helps to confirm what we can ourselves see, and also brings to light which specific merits of George’s are most relevant to our understanding of him and the film as a whole. Furthermore, hearing the prayers at the movie’s beginning from those who know George, prayers which Tell the audience that this (as of this moment) unknown character is a good person, is not just a useful framing device for our perceptions of what we will be Shown, but emphasize and sell 1 of the most important aspects of George’s character, the quality around which Clarence’s plan to help him revolves: his invaluable and wonderful impact upon the lives of all those in Bedford Falls. It’s a confirmation and emphasis that could only go so far with Showing alone. And the movie’s filled with such examples--in another, we can see an individual instance of the Bailey Building and Loan’s positive impact on the community as we see the celebration of Mr. Martini moving into his new home, but that example of Show means much, much more with the context of the audience having been Told by Peter Bailey why this is especially important in a town otherwise run by Mr. Potter, and having also been indirectly Told by George during his angry speech to Potter about the people of the town deserving a decent living situation regardless of their economic situation. What we can be Shown is a single occurrence, what we can be Told is the significance of that occurrence and the great number of times it has happened. There are many reasons why It’s a Wonderful Life is a truly excellent movie, but part of it is that it combines Showing and Telling perfectly to keep every major cog in its narrative machine turning smoothly.

Now, to bring things back to RPGs, think of Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect trilogy.* I think most people would agree that he/she is a pretty awesome hero, and while going through ME, the player gets a personal sense of confidence and capability that I believe few other game heroes can create. I certainly never have felt anywhere near as cool and can-do when playing as any Link from a Legend of Zelda game, for example, nor as inspiring and leaderly as Dragon Age 1’s Grey Warden, and so on. And sure, a lot of that is due to the fact that the Mass Effect series Shows us, time and time again, that Shepard has the brains, the physical prowess, and most importantly, that intangible quality of guts that can carry him/her to victory against any odds. But a huge part of why Shepard stands out as such an iconic action hero isn’t just the fact that we can see him/her acting as such--we can see that stuff in lots of significantly less memorable main characters. It’s also the fact that all along the way, from the very start of the series, other characters frequently point to Shepard as an incredible soldier and leader who can get seemingly impossible shit done. From Anderson’s paternal confidence and encouragement, to The Illusive Man outright telling Shepard that he spent incalculable sums of money to bring Shepard back to life, virtually unaltered, because he/she represents a unique human quality of accomplishment, to Shepard’s closest companions expressing time and again their faith in him/her to pull them through any situation, to even NPCs like the consort Sha'ira showing an almost reverence for him/her...yes, all this Telling would be empty if we weren’t Shown over and over that it’s confidence well-placed, but at the same time, all that Showing wouldn’t be nearly as empowering to Shepard as a hero without the Telling calling appropriate attention to it. Shepard stands out as a hero thanks to a Show-and-Tell process.

This approach is also good as a way of emphasizing the development of a character, too, not just their unchanging qualities (George Bailey and Commander Shepard, while arguably not static characters, nonetheless are most significant for qualities that don’t really change too terribly much overall). Take the relationship between Tear and Natalia in Tales of the Abyss. Early in the game, soon after Natalia has filled the last empty party member slot, it’s clearly shown from their interactions that Natalia and Tear don’t really get along very well; they just rub each other the wrong way. As time goes on, this gradually changes, with Tear and Natalia interacting more and more amiably as they assist one another on the game’s journey, and find neutral or positive ground upon which to communicate in the form of discussions with their mutual companions. It’s a natural alteration of their relationship, which happens at an organic pace, and as such, even though it’s being Shown to the player the entire time it’s happening, it doesn’t usually stand out--eventually Natalia and Tear are on good terms, and it’s happened smoothly enough that it seems like the normal state of affairs to the audience. I think that it’s only late in the game, during a certain skit, that the magnitude of their friendship’s journey is really apparent. At 1 point, as they converse, they look back at what they initially thought of each other, and Natalia reflects that she disliked Tear at first. When Tear prompts her with the question of what Natalia thinks now, Natalia warmly responds that Tear has become very dear to her. It’s a heartfelt moment, but it’s also an interesting one, because this changed relationship is one that wouldn’t have even really occurred to me to pay attention to if I’d only been Shown it--as I said, it’s gradual and natural enough a process that Natalia’s and Tear’s becoming trusted friends is just something you go along with automatically. It’s only once the game Tells us what a difference has come about that we realize the significance of their relationship’s growth, and properly appreciate the warm fuzzies of a sincere friendship between them. The Tell has given us a chance to appreciate the Show to a degree we would have otherwise missed out on.

The old adage isn’t a bad one: if you have to choose between Showing and Telling, then go with Showing, because by itself, Telling is much less likely to get the job done, unless you have a specific style or circumstance that particularly connects to Telling. But I do think that Show, Don’t Tell is a policy that will ultimately limit a truly talented writer if followed too stringently. The best results are going to come from a story that knows how to use the process of Telling to showcase and enhance the strength of what is Shown.
















* Yes, trilogy. Andromeda does not count as Mass Effect.

Tales of Berseria's Final Battle Cutscene

There’s a lot to say about Tales of Berseria that’s positive. It’s an engrossing, terrific RPG with a fresh take on a bread-and-butter RPG story concept, starring a protagonist who is absolutely excellent in both her personality depth and her character development, a striking and perfectly reflective antagonist to her, and a likable, strongly-characterized supporting cast whose hundreds of interactions are unfailingly engaging. It’s got great plot twists, it knows when to be heavy and when to pour on the charming humor, it makes you think, it has so much to say about the human condition and about finding and embracing one’s personal truths and individuality...and it even manages to do all this, and tie itself with masterful care and startling frequency to its predecessor, Tales of Zestiria, making the mediocre latter seem better simply by association. Tales of Berseria is a magnificent RPG for so, so many reasons.

And I have no interest in talking about any of them today.

Because my ranting whims are fickle and utterly ineffable, what we’re here today to laud about ToB is instead just a minor little moment of its epic span, a pleasant quirk that doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference overall, but which I still liked and took note of. In my defense, you can find people to wax adoration of the important stuff about the game in all sorts of places. But for a dissertation on tiny details which would otherwise go completely unnoticed? That’s my specialty, baby.

So, to whit: I think that the battle cutscene at the end Tales of Berseria, as the good guys* engage in combat with Artorius and Innominat, is really awesome, and more than that, refreshing, as final battle cutscenes go.

The scene is a pretty simple, straightforward one overall: Velvet and her team of misfits approach Artorius and Innominat. Some of your standard final confrontation dialogue is exchanged,** then the two sides begin fighting for a bit in cutscene form, before eventually transitioning into the actual battle system.

But simple as it is, it’s really quite awesome. First of all, on the basic level, it’s a really cool fight. The action flows quickly but intelligibly, and is varied enough that the party members’ diverse fighting talents are shown off well; you get to see swordplay, magic, fisticuffs, spear...play? What’s the word for spear-fighting? Well, anyway, you get to see the whole gamut of their talents at work, and it’s cool.

I also appreciate it for the fact that this fight cinematic even exists to begin with. Most of these final boss confrontations only amount to the party approaching the ultimate villain and exchanging their last-battle speeches, then jumping immediately into the battle screen. You don’t usually get to see any narrative representation of the fight itself, save perhaps a few lines delivered here and there during the fight. Cinematically, final confrontations in most RPGs aren’t significantly different, once they get started, from any given random encounter. The fact that Tales of Berseria was willing to put some extra flash into Velvet’s final battle with Artorius by letting a fully-choreographed, exciting fight scene play out as the first part of the battle is an example of Namco’s willingness to go all in on the quality of this title.

That’s not to say that this sort of thing is never done, of course. Tales of Berseria didn’t invent the practice of amping up the idea of a final battle by actually having, well, battle. But in the already rare case that you get some unique visual action in an RPG’s final confrontation, it’s uncommon for it to be this good. I mean, remember Wild Arms 5’s showdown with its major villain, Volsung? Yeah, you got a pre-battle cutscene with action...but that action was Dean riding that stupid fucking monowheel down a hallway avoiding some lasers, and then trying to use his vehicle as a club against Volsung. Yes, after that point, there was like 30 seconds of some fighting between them that was actually cool, but it was completely overshadowed by the sheer, mind-boggling anime-brand camp of what had come before it. And also by the stupidity of Dean just holding his gun in Volsung’s face for like 10 seconds straight without pulling the goddamn trigger. Point is, even when a game treats the player to some final battle action, it’s rarely as good as Tales of Berseria’s is.

More than the fact that it’s just a high-quality fight scene as a whole, though, it is so, so, so refreshing to see a major confrontation in cutscene format that actually uses the entire party in the battle. Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome is an RPG pandemic, and if this were a more typical, lazier RPG, this scene would just be of Velvet and maybe Laphicet stepping forward to do all the fighting themselves while the rest of the party idles about like they’re having a fucking picnic. That’s sure as hell how it goes down over and over again in Xenosaga 3, and a myriad of other RPGs. But instead, the characters decide to take this culmination of a months-long journey to decide the fate of humanity seriously, and actually all join in the fight! They’re willing to prioritize the victory of their ideals over the possible ego of their leader, and not just leave the most important battle in all history up to just a single representative. Miracle of miracles, the party members of Tales of Berseria treat this conflict with enough gravity to pool all their combat resources together--it’s almost as if they have a desire to win.

What a sorry state RPG storytelling is in that I can actually be impressed by an RPG’s willingness to treat its major characters as more than just notaries to its grand conflict. Nonetheless, that’s how things are, and so I think it’s worth giving Bandai-Namco some kudos for making a final battle cutscene that is of exciting high quality, and which possesses enough basic intelligence to involve all parties present within it. Really wish we could see this sort of narrative flare and common sense more often.
















* I mean, sort of. They’re also the villains. Tales of Berseria is fun like that.


** Standard in the sense that it is, as you expect, a reaffirmation that each side is firmly set in their beliefs, and are ready to throw down to the death over it. Don’t get me wrong, though, the quality of what’s actually said is, as with everything in ToB, quite above average.

The Banner Saga

Who's got 2 thumbs and just finished another Indie RPG? This Guy.
Who may or may not have 2 thumbs and is about to hear This Guy recommend it in a rant? You Guy.

So, The Banner Saga is a trilogy of strategy RPGs which basically comprise a single, ongoing story, less 3 games than it is a a single tale split into 3 parts, separated at good intermission spots. While I didn’t play them all at once, I did experience them roughly close together, which was a great benefit of having waited to get started on the series--I daresay it was probably quite difficult for contemporary fans to wait for each installment to come out, because it’s a pretty compelling tale overall. The saga has several earthly draws to it, such as numerous rather inventive characteristics to its battle system, and an art and animation style very much in the spirit of the works of Don Bluth, Ralph Bakshi, and Eyvind Earl (in fact, 1 of the most important characters in The Banner Saga is named Eyvind in homage to Mr. Earl). To me, however, such qualities are nice extras, but not capable of swaying my opinion on whether an RPG is good or bad. For me, that’s a determination dependent entirely on its story, its characters, its theme and purpose...all the juicy food-for-thought stuff.

And happily, The Banner Saga is solid on those points. It’s got a good plot (if admittedly one that feels no particular rush to tell itself), one that’s very much its own as a story more of survival than of heroism for most of its cast, and it’s quite creative in both its premise and its execution. I certainly can’t think of another RPG like it, myself. It’s also got a solid cast, whose main characters are often compelling and developed well. They’re not all winners, mind you--I never had much interest in the Ravens and found even less appeal in their leader Bolverk, despite the games seeming to want me to--but it’s a good spread of personalities overall, be they static or dynamic. I especially like the fact that minor party members (there’s many characters who can be recruited) will occasionally, unexpectedly have a part to play or a conversation to witness here and there during the games’ course, sometimes even a very significant one. Considering how many variables there are to whether they were able to be recruited, whether they might have been killed or had cause to leave the party permanently, and so on, it’s pretty neat that these tiny, mostly-overlooked characters can come out of nowhere and do or say something major. Such instances exemplify just how much the choices you make throughout the course of The Banner Saga have consequences, whether for good or ill--if you’re the type of RPG player who wants to feel the weight and significance of every decision a game offers you, you’ll find very few RPGs more suited to your taste than The Banner Saga.

In addition to being a concretely good RPG series overall, The Banner Saga also has 2 elements in which it truly shines. The first is its basis in Norse mythology. Now, The Banner Saga certainly isn’t the first Norse-themed RPG out there--the famous Valkyrie Profile 1, and its successors, base themselves around the pantheon and general religious beliefs of Norse mythology. Odin, Valkyries, Freya, Midgard and Yggdrasil and all that jazz, it’s all there.

...At least, it all was there, until SquareEnix decided to clumsily, mindlessly retcon half of it at the end of Valkyrie Profile 2, because they’re fucking morons.

Nonetheless, The Banner Saga fulfills a very different, and perhaps more important function in using a Norse foundation. All the jazz that Valkyrie Profile utilizes with the gods and the afterlife and so on, that’s all fine and fun stuff, but it’s the...flashy part of Norse mythology, if that makes any sense. It’s the go-to stuff that everyone always uses if they’re looking to include Viking stuff in their product, the popular (admittedly with good reason) part of the beliefs and stories of Norse mythology that we’re all used to. I mean, it’s such an easy, accessible crowd-pleaser that Marvel Comics just basically stole 1 of the mythology’s leading gods and said “Yeah, he’s totally our guy now.” The Banner Saga, on the other hand, is more concerned with the...perhaps the best way to describe it is the down-to-Midgard parts of Norse mythology. Rather than revel in the lofty rainbow bridges and deities drinking mead in golden halls and all that flashy junk, The Banner Saga builds itself upon the grit and grime of giants, hard-fought battles, beings of iron clashing against bearded berserkers bearing basic axes and bulky bulwarks of wood. It’s inspired by and an homage to Norse mythology in a way that a game like Valkyrie Profile, which for all its laudable qualities is still in many ways a distinct JRPG simply adopting the trappings of a western culture for its own purposes, can’t be. And more than that, The Banner Saga is also, in its style and approach, based in Norse culture as much as in Norse mythology, and in the modern mythology of vikings that we’ve created about what that culture was like.

Basically what I'm saying is that if you are in any way big on Norse mythology and the whole viking thing, The Banner Saga will give you tingly feelings in your pants, and probably to a way greater degree than most other games on the subject can.

The other quality of The Banner Saga that really stands out to me is its long and realistic portrayal of a fantasy end-of-world scenario. Sure, worlds on the brink of destruction are fairly frequent in RPGs, without a doubt. I’d say at least 4 out of 5 times, the stakes of any given RPG you play are going to be of a saving-the-world variety, or possibly even higher. But it’s fairly rare that you get to really see the gravity of a world in its stages of collapse, isn’t it? Most of the time, all you’re gonna get on this matter are perhaps a few scenes of the sky darkening, or an earthquake or two, during the last moments of the game, which are really only there to prompt some NPCs to join hands and sing Kumbaya so that this can (somehow) empower the heroes during their final battle. On the rare occasion that an RPG draws out its world-ending circumstances to any degree, you still don’t usually get a very strong feel for them, or the desperation of the global population over them. Remember in Final Fantasy 5, when the elements that govern the world’s natural forces begin to wane and die, creating a world of stagnant air, machines that can’t function because fire can’t power them any longer, and so on and so forth? That is some terrifying, Armageddon-level shit right there, and yet the game just kind of presents it in a tone like it’s an inconvenience to the world more than anything else, obviously a problem in need of a solution but only one for the heroes to worry about in the backs of their minds. There’s no real focus on the reaction to this world-ending loss of elemental function, nothing in NPCs’ dialogue that comes across as more than a moderate worry about what is a cataclysm!

The Banner Saga, on the other hand, makes you feel every despairing, desperate step of the world’s slide into destruction. You’re not some flashy handful of colorful destined heroes soaring above the people’s problems on an airship. The characters you follow are refugees, trekking across lands embroiled in war and panic as armies of steel-clad monsters from the inner earth pour by the millions across unprepared lands and communities, a titanic serpent born to swallow the world splits mountains and poisons the oceans, and an all-consuming, corruptive darkness continues to spread unabated. The circumstances for your heroes are desperate from the beginning and only become worse with every stop on their journey to escape their world’s end. Panic, hatred, paranoia, mistrust, and worst of all, ambition: these are the everyday facts of the people of an actively disintegrating world, and The Banner Saga displays them all in harsh reality as the caravan of its heroes faces 1 catastrophe after another, and marches more and more desperately in an attempt to survive and find a safe haven whose existence becomes more doubtful with each step taken.

Not to say that The Banner Saga’s an ugly or depressing series, or anything like that. It doesn’t pull punches with showing the end of the world and the plight of a community of refugees, but there’s always just enough bits and pieces of determination, enough opportunities for its main characters to show heroism, generosity, and solidarity, enough small victories even as the war of attrition is slowly lost, to keep you going along without falling into the same despair as the characters themselves repeatedly must fight against. The Banner Saga isn’t an inspiring, good-feelings adventure, but it’s not a downer RPG, either. It just is what it is--and that’s a pretty cool story that lets you feel the long struggle with an apocalypse that no other RPG I can immediately think of can provide. The closest you can get normally is the retrospective viewpoint of a good post-apocalyptic setting, like Fallout, Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, or Chrono Trigger’s 2300 AD. The Banner Saga’s the first time I’ve seen an in-depth look at humanity’s fall as it happens in an RPG.

And yeah, that’s about it. The 3 installments of The Banner Saga are a solid buy, in my opinion, if you’re looking for a good story and characters in general, particularly if you’re interested in making some choices that’ll have consequences, both immediate and far-reaching. But where it really shines, what I’d most recommend it for, is its great and dedicated use of Norse mythology and culture for its setting and style, and its portrayal of a world’s end from the perspective of everyday men, women, and heroes trying to survive it, 1 catastrophe at a time. If any of that sounds cool to you, then I recommend you check out The Banner Saga.

Fire Emblem 16's Silent Protagonist

It’s long been my opinion that silent protagonists contribute nothing to a game’s quality, but rather have the potential only to worsen it. The general understanding is that the intention behind silent protagonists is to make it easier for the player to personally relate to the main character, but this reasoning is, frankly, stupid. Audiences of all forms of storytelling have been able to identify with characters who speak and act with a definite personality for thousands of years, without difficulty, and frankly, as someone whose communication options aren’t limited to basic hand gestures, I find protagonists’ silence to lessen my ability to relate to them. I’m a hell of a lot more likely to understand and empathize with, say, Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard, or Tales of Berseria’s Velvet Crowe, than I am to my partner in a game of Charades. Even considering that I have not and, hopefully, never will find myself in similar situations to those of Shepard and Velvet, their ability to emote and express themselves verbally connects me to them and allows me to empathize with and understand them as people, and become invested in their adventures and struggles. The idea that I’d have a better chance to form a bond with a silent marionette than with someone animated enough to reflect some form of the human condition is insane.

There’s also the reasoning behind silent protagonists that they allow the player an easier time of enjoying the wish fulfillment aspect of gaming, as they get to, in some RPGs, be adulated as a hero and have all manner of love interests thrown at their feet. I can’t say that I have many positive thoughts on this rationale, either.

There are, however, a few cases in which a game will use a silent protagonist for an actual, legitimate reason. In most Metroid games, for example, Samus, though not unable to do so, never speaks--and this is a shrewd move on the developers’ parts, because a major part of the Metroid style and theme is solitude. Metroid was designed to capture the same terrifying feeling of being alone in a hostile science-fiction environment that the movie Alien created, a survival-terror series rather than survival-horror, if you will. And the later installments of the Metroid Prime trilogy took this in a different direction, lessening the overbearing and frightening atmosphere, and instead making the style of the games about the solitude of exploration, the ability to quietly enjoy natural wonders all to oneself, and the entrancing thrill and fear of being made to challenge the wilds and beasts all on one’s own. Samus’s silence works toward the purpose of Metroid, not out of some idiotic misunderstanding of how human beings empathize with fiction, but rather because that silence allows the loneliness of the game’s atmosphere to be that much more complete.

Bringing things back to RPGs, another example would be found in Undertale’s No Mercy playthrough. Quirky and harmless during the Neutral and Pacifist routes, Frisk’s refusal to ever speak becomes chilling as Chara fully overtakes the final human child and mercilessly exterminates every living thing before them. As many slasher flicks have taken advantage of over the years, a horrifying, murderous figure becomes all the more terrifying when they are silent, unwilling to engage with others in any but a lethal way. Chara’s silence, broken only at the end of the game, substantially adds to the grim, disturbing nature of the No Mercy route.

Now, Fire Emblem 16’s Byleth is an interesting case.* Yes, it’s almost certain that the “put the player in her/his shoes more easily” school of thought was the primary motivating cause for Byleth’s silence--it’s hard to consider any alternative when so much of modern Fire Emblem revolves around the dozens-of-love-interests wish-fulfillment thing I mentioned, and everyone in the cast is always yapping about how great Byleth is at everything she/he does. But Nintendo actually went a step further on this front than most others do, in that they did consciously create a story reason for Byleth’s silence, incorporating her/his non-communicative nature into the actual, established character development and lore of the game. And I appreciate that, because just as confusing to me as the notion that I should find eternal laryngitis easy to relate to is the fact that the rest of the cast rarely acknowledges that they’re hitching their wagons to a leader who speaks less often than most RPG characters’ pets. Unfortunately...the most interesting part of all this is that, unlike Samus or Chara or probably any other silent-for-actual-legitimate-reasons heroes, it’s still a complete failure and Byleth is as crappy, worthless a character as any standard silent protagonist.

So, here’s the deal: Byleth’s schtick is a decent one, if you’re looking to make a silent protagonist. She (just gonna go with the gender that makes more sense thematically for Byleth to be, you’ll just have to bear with it, sorry) is an individual whose heart doesn’t beat, and is instead sustained through the divine magic of the goddess Sothis’s crystalized soul, which was implanted into Byleth during birth. While not explicitly stated, the clear implication is that this is the reason that Byleth has significant difficulty with interacting with others, and feels (and expresses) very little in terms of emotion. It’s not scientific, granted, but the world isn’t anywhere close to giving up that age-old, dumb misconception that one’s emotional nature is located in their body’s equivalent to a municipal pumping station. Anyway, a silent protagonist fits quite naturally to this idea of a character of stunted, bare emotional presence. The restriction of personal interactions to head-shaking and the occasional mildly different facial expression helps sell Byleth’s initial state of being humanely lacking. So even if the main intent was almost surely rooted in the typical, dumb reasons for a silent protagonist, Nintendo was clever enough to make Byleth’s status as such a legitimate part of her character.

Unfortunately, however, they couldn’t keep up with their own pace on this.

See, this all would have been fine if Byleth had been intended to be a static character (which is a trait shared by most other silent protagonists, presumably out of necessity). But she wasn’t. Byleth is meant to have a character arc over the period of Fire Emblem 16, in which her job as a teacher at the monastery and her interactions with the rest of the main characters cause humanity to bloom within her, bringing out new feelings within her and inspiring a fierce attachment to her students, fellow teachers, and (potentially) Rhea. Byleth wasn’t meant to be the reserved homunculus she starts out as all the way to the game’s end, but rather to grow into her humanity.

And that’s a problem, when the silent protagonist schtick she has at the beginning doesn’t likewise change with her. It’s okay for Chara and Samus to never change, because the nature of each’s game doesn’t change--the No Mercy route is chilling and horrible through to the end, so Chara’s silence continues to aid it throughout, and Samus’s solitude is, in most games, virtually uninterrupted, so her quietude never stops being thematically appropriate. But when your character’s development is supposed to go from an inhuman reserve to being substantially more in touch with her personhood and emotional state, the silence and accompanying reserved expressions go very quickly from a boon to a detriment to her character.

Let’s contrast Byleth for a moment to a character whose writers had similar intentions, and pulled it off successfully. There are quite a many RPG characters who go from an unemotional, robotic (usually literally) state to being stirring examples of human nature, such as Aigis from Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, or Tio from Grandia 2, but I believe it’s the nature of Laphicet from Tales of Berseria that makes him our best example. He, too, is a being whose origin causes him to initially be very unemotional and reserved, more like an automaton than a person. And, also like Byleth, his character arc, which is of substantial importance to the game as a whole, is centered around his awakening humanity, and using his awareness of himself as a person to explore what kind of an individual he wants to be. And the result is an excellent, engaging story of personal growth, of the pursuit of personal growth, one which ends with Laphicet being perhaps the most authentically human member of the entire cast, and the player knowing and appreciating exactly how the kid got to that point.

On the other hand, the biggest change to have occurred within Byleth over the course of Fire Emblem 16 is that her hair turned green somewhere along the way.

Both characters began similarly, and had comparable goals, narratively-speaking. So what’s the disconnect? Well, for starters, there’s the obvious fact that Laphicet speaks and Byleth does not, which means that Laphicet simply has better opportunities to develop as a character, as the primary vehicle for showcasing character development and personality in an RPG (and most other mediums) is through dialogue and monologue. FE16 tells us, through the words of other characters, over and over again how much Byleth has changed over the course of the game’s events, but that’s all it is: telling. Because she never speaks, we almost never get to witness anything from her that could confirm these assertions--and the fact that her facial emoting is slightly less expressive or humanlike than the pantomimes of Chrono Trigger’s Crono, who was working with the limitations of 16-bit sprites, doesn’t help matters. Tales of Berseria, of course, also has Laphicet’s companions remark, from time to time, upon his growth as a person, but the difference there is that they’re observing something that the player him/herself has also noticed, because Laphicet’s growing personal awareness is shown through how he speaks with others, the topics he becomes interested in remarking on and exploring, the questions he asks, and the desires, preferences and reactions he makes known through his words. When ToB’s cast reflect on Laphicet’s growth, it’s a realistic reaction to the phenomenon the player can recognize--when FE16’s characters do the same about Byleth, it’s solely to convince the player of it, and a rather futile attempt, at that.

But there’s also another angle to the problem of Byleth’s character development being told and not shown, which can be seen once more through a contrast to Laphicet: beside the fact that being verbal affords Laphicet more opportunities to grow, the fact is that just the act of speaking itself is a vital component that Byleth’s character needed to succeed. Forget what is being said: just saying is an important act. After all, as I said, Byleth’s silence is an expressive component of her initial character state...so for the audience to believe FE16’s frequent assertions that she’s grown past that point, she has to talk. Forget the quality of the speech, forget the actual content of her dialogue contributing to character development--just at a basic, fundamental level, any claim that Byleth’s character has moved past its starting point requires her to actually say something, because to maintain her silence is to maintain her inhuman beginning state!

Laphicet, too, begins his character journey very quietly, requiring input from others to prompt him to speak at all, and initially having little to say even then. But as he becomes more and more a person in his own right, so too does he initiate conversation more frequently with others, voluntarily put forth ideas and opinions without them needing to be actively drawn from him, and just generally interacting with others with the same frequency and assertiveness as any given social, healthily self-confident human being. Laphicet could have some of the most ineptly-written dialogue and monologue in the history of gaming, and he’d still be a far, far superior example of the narrative archetype that he and Byleth share simply for the fact that the substance of change, regardless of its quality, is there for him, and it is not for Byleth.

It’s such a shame, because Nintendo could so easily have turned it around. They could have made Byleth silent for the first half of the game, up until the scene in which Jeralt dies--already a powerful scene (especially considering how little dramatic weight you’d expect Byleth to have for it), but imagine how much more moving and significant it would be if the first words we heard Byleth say, without our input and outside of a critical hit quote, were to express a loving goodbye to her father. And from that point on, she could speak normally, as a standard character would. It would give her the opportunity to show her growth as a person rather than having the game keep trying to force you to take it on faith, and having that scene be the turning point of that growth would retroactively sustain the importance and value of her protagonistic silence up until that moment, even when it had seemed to be getting old.

Or hell, they could’ve gone an interesting direction with it: have Byleth begin talking, but only once she had absorbed Sothis into her being and gone all greeny-green. While not a pleasant and rewarding prospect, it would at least pose an interesting question to the player thereon of whether Byleth had grown and the speech was a reflection of that fact...or whether she was no more the person she had been, and the speech was an unsettling evidence of a greater mind and will having largely overtaken the Byleth that had been. I probably wouldn’t have liked it, but at least it would have been interesting.

But no, we just get silent Byleth from start to finish. A self-defeating character created from a halfway decent idea executed in the worst possible way.

And it’s worth noting that this really, really didn’t need to be this way, in this series. Nor should it have been! Fire Emblem isn’t Dragon Quest. FE isn’t a series whose writers use a dogmatic adherence to traditions like silent protagonists as an excuse to never have to do their jobs. Fire Emblem games are ones built on speaking protagonists who interact with the plot, and as such, the FE story tends to be one which personally involves the protagonist as a major psychological focus. Fire Emblem 14 wasn’t a game written broadly and objectively about warring nations in danger of being overtaken by an evil, outside force--it was a game written about 2 specific nations, within both of which protagonist Corrin has a personal family stake, being threatened by an evil, outside force who has significant ties to Corrin’s true heritage. FE14 is a game written for and about its protagonist--and it would be immeasurably the worse if Corrin had not been able to voice her thoughts and reactions, nor possessed the ability to confide with Azura as the hardships of her struggles and choices weighed upon her.

What would FE4 be, if Sigurd could not profess his love for Deirdre? Would Fire Emblem 9 have had as much weight had Ike been forced to convey the entirety of his reactions to his father’s death, and the weight of that legacy, through non-verbal means? How the hell would we even have known Lyn’s deal and who she was as a person in Fire Emblem 7 if she couldn’t talk about herself?

Fire Emblems are written, as most RPGs are, with stories which very personally involve their protagonists, and FE16 is no different. Byleth’s existence has several substantial ties to the game’s lore and some of its most important characters, and several other major characters are written with the idea that Byleth is their rock of stability to depend upon. It’s a role that was written as all Fire Emblem protagonist roles I’ve seen have been--with the idea that the game’s sequence of events is something that she should interact with, be personally invested in, be affected by. And to expect any of that to work with a character who meets virtually every situation with reticence and an arsenal of no more than 3 facial expressions is lunacy!

I can give some credit to the idea of Byleth as a silent protagonist for the fact that it is, for her, a good starting point, as a character who’s intended to grow into her humanity. But the fact that it works for her in that capacity means that it immediately starts lessening her quality as a dynamic character, as visual, hard evidence undermines the game’s other (halfhearted) attempts to show her growth. It also, predictably, limits her depth in the general sense as it restricts her ability to express her personality, and it cuts her off from enjoying the benefits of a story designed to showcase her as its lead and most personally involved participant. Byleth is a colossal failure as a character and as a main hero, and I strongly hope that Nintendo won’t be foolish enough to again arbitrarily force a silent protagonist into a series that doesn’t know how to work around the stupid restrictions inherent thereof. Leave the silence schtick to The Legend of Zelda’s Link, Nintendo; he’s at least got the wide array of expressive constipation noises to make it funny, and his games don't require us to really give a crap about him to work.
















* I’m not sure whether it’s worth even noting, but yes, I do understand that Byleth is not completely silent to the other characters in-game--the idea is, I believe, that she/he IS interacting with them to some degree, and we, the audience, are just not privy to the exact nature of it, save for when we have to choose between 2 replies for her/him to make. This is usually the case with silent protagonists--one way or another, they’re clearly being understood by their companions and other NPCs. But from the perspective of we, the audience, they’re silent.