Sprint meters are stupid, annoying, and worthless.
...
...You're still here? Oh, what, you wanted more than that? Well, I guess I can elucidate, but that’s all it’s going to come down to in the end. But what the hell, let’s do this.
Sprint Meters are those little bars on the screen of some RPGs that fill up or empty as the player runs around a play area. After a certain amount of uninterrupted jogging, the bar fills up or empties completely, and the character onscreen has to rest for a period of time, unable to continue running (sometimes unable to continue moving at all) for a short period, during which they’re presumably catching their breath. Sometimes the meters also govern how tired the character is getting from more activities than just running, such as with The Elder Scrolls 4 (probably 5, as well, but I haven’t played that yet) and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, where jumping, attacking, running, swimming, and so on all cause fatigue, at which point I just call it a Fatigue Meter instead. Most, however, are just for running, which is what I mean by Sprint Meters. It all boils down to the same annoyance in the end, though.
FIrst of all, the idea behind the concept is slightly irritating. I mean, I myself can only think of 2 possible explanations for the existence of a Sprint Meter in a game. The first is for game balance. If you can only run a certain amount of steps before slowing down, it limits how many enemy encounters you can manage to avoid, and in the case of a Fatigue Meter, attacking while fatigued from other actions lessens the effectiveness of said attacks in The Elder Scrolls 4, and the speed and actions you can take while tired in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword are very limited. I guess I can accept this for Fatigue Meters when a lot of the game’s limitations and checks and balances rely on this handicap, when it seems like this was a legitimate, thought-out decision as far as how the game is played...I guess. Sure as hell doesn’t mean I like it, and it’s annoying, not challenging or fun, to work around, but whatever. But Sprint Meters limiting the time a character can run because you don’t want to allow for a player to potentially avoid all enemies possible? That comes off as a game developer just trying to cover for his/her own inability to design monster placement and pursuit patterns well enough to properly contrast a good gamer by imposing arbitrary limitations. Plus, why the hell do you even need to limit the amount of times a gamer can avoid an enemy to begin with? If a gamer avoids everything, he/she shouldn’t have the levels necessary to beat bosses past a certain point, anyway. The bosses are meant to be the balance, not some stupid bar that fills up/empties due to jogging.
The other reason I can think of for having Sprint Meters is utterly unacceptable: totally unnecessary realism. In the same vein of “genius” that spawned the unrivaled tedium of constantly having to repair weapons as they rapidly decay, some idiot realized that in real life, people, even physically fit people, cannot run perpetually and must eventually stop to catch their breath, and decided to create a game mechanic solely for the purpose of having characters travel more realistically. I hope to God that this is not and has never been the reason any game has adopted a Sprint Meter, but given the utterly, insanely idiotic ideas that have been put into practice in RPGs in the name of making things realistic (who doesn’t want to constantly have to keep track of when to use a repair item on their weapon? Monotonously counting every sword stroke and gunshot you make is just SUCH fun!), I certainly can’t rule the possibility out.
So frankly, until someone graces me with a better explanation for why Sprint Meters exist, I’m going to go with the idea that they don’t serve any particularly good purpose. And hey, if they didn’t serve any particular purpose but didn’t do anything irritating either, like achievement points and trophies and the like, then I’d have no problem. But Sprint Meters ARE irritating!
First of all, I resent not being able to have the characters on screen travel as fast as possible to all destinations. I’m not the type to run away from enemies,* so the whole potential idea of keeping me from avoiding all enemy encounters isn’t even an issue anyway, but I AM the type to want to move as quickly as is viable through towns and dungeons alike. Not to say that I rush through RPGs--I sit still quite patiently for every word spoken and story action taken. But to get from story point A to story point B, do I want to waste time just slowly walking there? Hell no! No one does! I bet you can’t find a full 5 people on the entire planet who would rather watch a character slowly trudge across the screen instead of just holding down the Run button to get around speedily.
Another minor annoyance with some games which implement this idea: they don’t always have any actual Sprint Meter or other indication of when the character’s going to slow down to a crawl. Some, like Lunar 1, just leave you to keep track of the time your character has for running yourself, giving no indication as that time comes to an end. Yeah, that’s a very minor complaint, but all the same, it’s another way in which this concept is needlessly annoying.
Another minor annoyance, although admittedly I’ve only encountered this once, is in Secret of Mana. Running in that game has no limit, per say, but it uses up an action so you do have to wait a second to regain the ability to run again, or attack properly, or whatever. It’s a bit of a departure from the usual way a Sprint Meter works, but it’s in the same vein, so I count it. That’s not the problem, though. The problem is that a running character should not be confined solely to a straight line. For some reason, in Secret of Mana, any time your character runs, they launch themselves in a straight line and cannot be made to turn or even slightly adjust their course. I don’t know about you, but I, myself, managed to become adept at the art of changing direction during forward movements fairly early in my life. Like, before I could talk. One might as well not have been given the option to run in Secret of Mana to begin with; it was too awkward to use most of the time, anyway.
Also, I have to really take issue with how long a Sprint Meter holds out in all cases. If you clock how long it takes for a running character to get winded in these cases, you’ll find that, without exception, every character in an RPG is an asthmatic overweight chain smoker born with only one functioning lung. Seriously, the amount of time any given RPG character can maintain a brisk jog is inevitably less time than I, myself, can. And trust me, I am not the picture of physical fitness--I’m so out of shape that most offensive caricatures of geeks and gamers don’t actually go far enough toward depicting my lack of athleticism. There is no goddamn way that I should be able to maintain a run longer than an seasoned adventurer who has spent the last 50 hours of game time constantly on his feet and regularly getting the natural exercise that comes from fighting for one’s life with every few steps one takes. For that matter, there is no goddamn way that I should be able to maintain a run longer than Commander fucking Shepard. If you’re gonna limit the time an RPG character can run, at least make that limit halfway realistic for the character! Most people’s frail little grandmothers could outrun every RPG character ever made whose running is limited! Sheesh.
Sprint Meters and similar movement inhibitors are stupid and needlessly annoying in RPGs. Whatever dubious benefits they may be intended to provide to the game, the end result is something annoying, and in every case to my knowledge, totally unrealistic which ultimately only takes away from the gamer’s enjoyment of the gameplay.
* Hell, I don’t even use it to run away from enemies when there’s no benefit to gaining levels. In Lunar 1, enemy bosses level up as you do, meaning there’s not all that much reason to go out of your way to gain levels since you’ll only ever be gaining a marginal advantage at best. Did that stop me from running into every damn enemy I saw on the way through dungeons? Nope.
Saturday, June 28, 2014
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4's Chie's New Voice Actress
You know what I don’t do enough of? Short rants. Let’s see about having one today.
So, when I was updating my SMT Persona 3 and 4 Social Link Comparison rant, I discovered something odd about the new version of SMT Persona 4--Chie’s voice actress was dramatically different. Wondering why, I did some extensive, exhaustive, comprehensive, penetrating research (which is to say, I clicked on the first Google result I saw), and discovered that when Persona 4 had been updated, the original voice actress for Chie was no longer available for the role, and since they did have new lines they needed to have recorded, they just brought in a new actress to redo all the original lines and then voice the new ones. Well, that’s how things go, I guess.
What gets me about it is the drastic difference between Old Chie Voice and New Chie Voice. This isn’t like what cartoons sometimes have to do, where they replace a character’s voice with a new, more available actor who can manage some close facsimile of the original actor. This is a completely different voice and acting style altogether. They didn’t even try to come close to what Chie’s voice was on the Playstation 2. Supposedly this new voice is more similar to the original voice of Chie in the Japanese version. Couldn’t say, as I’ve never played the Japanese version, but since this new one is more high-pitched and loud at times, I’d suspect that to be true--one of Japan’s major exports is the high-pitched, squealing babble of adolescent girls.
Thing is, the new one just doesn’t work for me. Now, don’t get me wrong, New Chie Voice’s actress, Erin Fitzgerald, is not a bad actress, from what I can tell. I wouldn’t call her particularly great at the role, but I’d actually say she brings more skill to the table than Old Chie Voice, Tracey Rooney, did. But honestly, Tracey Rooney’s voice simply fit the character better, acting skill be damned. Now Chie sounds similar in pitch and personality to the type of female character that Yukiko or Rise is, and without rewriting Chie’s actual character, that’s not the right fit for her. Chie’s not as feminine a character as the more standard Yukiko and Rise; she’s forward, inwardly tough, and interested in things like martial arts movies, steak, and protecting people.
Having a voice like Rooney’s attached to her character made sense and brought the package together neatly. She had a deeper tone that fit Chie, while being distinctly feminine--you’d never mistake it for a boy’s voice, even if it’s similarly deep. In this way, the voice helped emphasize the rest of the character--not standardly feminine like Yukiko or Rise, but not so far as to be gender-ambiguous, either, like Naoto. Rooney’s inflections and general tone also fit the less feminine, still-distinctly-female character of Chie, even if Rooney had perhaps a little less acting range with it.
The new voice...it’s not bad, but it and the actual character of Chie are working around each other, not with each other, you know? And I’m not saying that tomboys all have lower, deeper voices or anything like that, and that more traditionally feminine girls can’t. But the cadence of the voice, the diction of it, the way the lines are SAID, with Tracey Rooney matched Chie’s tone and character, while Fitzgerald’s higher voice is emphasized by the more girly-girl way she uses it, and that simply isn’t Chie.
I wish Atlus had tried to find a voice actress who was at least a little similar to the original one, who could give us a tone that worked alongside the tomboyish character instead of contrast to it. I appreciate that Atlus may have wanted to avoid that weird, awkward feeling on TV shows when you can tell it’s a new voice actor doing the lines but you’re not supposed to know because he/she is supposed to be really close to the original...and I can appreciate that maybe Atlus was trying to listen to the complaints of some of its fans about Chie’s original voice actress.* But in the end, the original voice for Chie was the right one, and it would have been better to find someone to try to mimic it, or at least get in the same range.
* Because heaven forbid we challenge the weeaboos’ fragile perception of reality with a teenage girl who sounds like the many, many girls in actual, real life whose voices aren’t like the shrieking Japanese mice who voice every anime female.
So, when I was updating my SMT Persona 3 and 4 Social Link Comparison rant, I discovered something odd about the new version of SMT Persona 4--Chie’s voice actress was dramatically different. Wondering why, I did some extensive, exhaustive, comprehensive, penetrating research (which is to say, I clicked on the first Google result I saw), and discovered that when Persona 4 had been updated, the original voice actress for Chie was no longer available for the role, and since they did have new lines they needed to have recorded, they just brought in a new actress to redo all the original lines and then voice the new ones. Well, that’s how things go, I guess.
What gets me about it is the drastic difference between Old Chie Voice and New Chie Voice. This isn’t like what cartoons sometimes have to do, where they replace a character’s voice with a new, more available actor who can manage some close facsimile of the original actor. This is a completely different voice and acting style altogether. They didn’t even try to come close to what Chie’s voice was on the Playstation 2. Supposedly this new voice is more similar to the original voice of Chie in the Japanese version. Couldn’t say, as I’ve never played the Japanese version, but since this new one is more high-pitched and loud at times, I’d suspect that to be true--one of Japan’s major exports is the high-pitched, squealing babble of adolescent girls.
Thing is, the new one just doesn’t work for me. Now, don’t get me wrong, New Chie Voice’s actress, Erin Fitzgerald, is not a bad actress, from what I can tell. I wouldn’t call her particularly great at the role, but I’d actually say she brings more skill to the table than Old Chie Voice, Tracey Rooney, did. But honestly, Tracey Rooney’s voice simply fit the character better, acting skill be damned. Now Chie sounds similar in pitch and personality to the type of female character that Yukiko or Rise is, and without rewriting Chie’s actual character, that’s not the right fit for her. Chie’s not as feminine a character as the more standard Yukiko and Rise; she’s forward, inwardly tough, and interested in things like martial arts movies, steak, and protecting people.
Having a voice like Rooney’s attached to her character made sense and brought the package together neatly. She had a deeper tone that fit Chie, while being distinctly feminine--you’d never mistake it for a boy’s voice, even if it’s similarly deep. In this way, the voice helped emphasize the rest of the character--not standardly feminine like Yukiko or Rise, but not so far as to be gender-ambiguous, either, like Naoto. Rooney’s inflections and general tone also fit the less feminine, still-distinctly-female character of Chie, even if Rooney had perhaps a little less acting range with it.
The new voice...it’s not bad, but it and the actual character of Chie are working around each other, not with each other, you know? And I’m not saying that tomboys all have lower, deeper voices or anything like that, and that more traditionally feminine girls can’t. But the cadence of the voice, the diction of it, the way the lines are SAID, with Tracey Rooney matched Chie’s tone and character, while Fitzgerald’s higher voice is emphasized by the more girly-girl way she uses it, and that simply isn’t Chie.
I wish Atlus had tried to find a voice actress who was at least a little similar to the original one, who could give us a tone that worked alongside the tomboyish character instead of contrast to it. I appreciate that Atlus may have wanted to avoid that weird, awkward feeling on TV shows when you can tell it’s a new voice actor doing the lines but you’re not supposed to know because he/she is supposed to be really close to the original...and I can appreciate that maybe Atlus was trying to listen to the complaints of some of its fans about Chie’s original voice actress.* But in the end, the original voice for Chie was the right one, and it would have been better to find someone to try to mimic it, or at least get in the same range.
* Because heaven forbid we challenge the weeaboos’ fragile perception of reality with a teenage girl who sounds like the many, many girls in actual, real life whose voices aren’t like the shrieking Japanese mice who voice every anime female.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
The Xenosaga Series's Failed Potential
Warning: Today’s rant is a bit raw. I mostly just tried to get everything I had to say out and didn’t worry too much about making it feel refined and well-organized. I doubt anyone cares overly much, but I figured I’d let you know ahead of time.
Yes, it is that time once again: Xenosaga Rant Time.
So what should I speak about today? Xenosaga still has so many flaws and nonsense that I could rant about. Maybe I should examine just how necessary it was for KOS-MOS, during the in-the-past-sort-of escape from Kevin, to smack Shion and knock her out--she does it to subdue the obnoxious twit and get her safely away from Kevin, but considering that KOS-MOS is a monstrously strong battle android and Shion is just a (whiny, overbearing) human being, she could have struggled all she liked and not given KOS-MOS the slightest trouble in carrying her off. Or I could point out that it doesn’t make much sense that the shockwave from Abel’s Ark can cause everything it touches to disappear, even planets, yet the Elsa, a small freighter ship, is totally unaffected by it. Or perhaps I could…
...No. You know what? I think I’ve done enough. Since beating Xenosaga 3 and closing out the series, I’ve made 9 rants about the stupidity of Xenosaga, and in nearly all of them I’ve not only examined the flaw(s) that the rant is actually about, but also listed several other ones that I could just as easily have ranted on. I’ve put forward dozens of Xenosaga’s mistakes to you all, and there are plenty more I could add to them. And perhaps I will some day. But with all this criticism at a glance and at length, on all these various flaws, there’s only one conclusion that you, the reader, could draw: that I hate Xenosaga. And, well, that’s just not true. Oh, sure, there are parts of Xenosaga that I sincerely hate, no question. Shion’s pity parade during the finale, MOMO’s last words to Jr., Kevin, the utterly disgusting way Shion’s abusive relationship with Kevin is glossed over as bad ONLY because it hurts other people and NOT because it hurts her...huh, I guess each of the moments of Xenosaga that I truly hate come from the last game. Hadn’t realized that before.
Anyway, my point is that, yes, there are a lot--a LOT--of problems with the series, and yes, there are even some parts of it which are just unforgivably loathsome. But while I don’t like the series as a complete product...well, I don’t hate it. It’s like when your parents tell you that they’re not angry with you, just disappointed. I’m not happy with Xenosaga, especially with the way it all turned out, but I can’t just dismiss it completely, either, because it had potential, and for all its terribleness, it still maintained a few of its good points throughout. This is a series that at least could have been good--even if it wasn’t.
I mean, consider the voice acting. Yeah, as I’ve mentioned, in Xenosaga 3, the voice overs are just a mess of incorrect emphasis and tones that just don’t work within the context of the characters’ intent. But back in Xenosaga 1, the voice acting was pretty consistently decent, enough to make it clear that this cast did know what it was doing when properly directed. And the voice actors themselves fit the characters very well, by and large! Hell, even when they have to change voice actors for some characters between games, the new ones still work very well! The proper matching of actor to character type by itself is enough to lend life to the characters, even if the confusion of lines constantly read in the wrong way later in the series messes that up. This is voice acting that could have been good from start to finish.
Take a look at the graphic style of Xenosaga 1. Now, you know I don’t care about visuals when determining how good or bad an RPG is, but that doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge the difference between good and bad quality. Xenosaga 1 rolled out with a clean, interestingly simplistic yet distinctive artistic style for its characters and universe. Speak to a player who’s experienced all 3 main titles in the Xenosaga series about which style of KOS-MOS sticks out the most in his or her mind, which grabbed his or her attention the most and is the most interesting, and I’m willing to bet the answer will most of the time be the style from Xenosaga 1. It was different enough to grab and keep your attention: deformed but not chibi, bright but with plenty of darkness to contrast, clean but not undetailed. And then, Xenosaga 2 came around, and...the art style was completely different. For reasons best described as “moronic,” Namco decided to ditch the unique style that otherwise would have become a recognizable signature of the series and adopt, for Xenosaga 2, a much more dark, so-called realistic art style that was far more conventional for anime-styled JRPGs of that age, and in being far more conventional, was also far less interesting and thus did not hold one’s attention as well as before. And then they switched the style up again for Xenosaga 3, but this next change was a smaller departure from its predecessor, and in the end still doesn’t stand out in any particular way from other RPGs. I do know that there are some people (a minority, I believe) who liked the art styles of Xenosaga 2 and/or 3 better than that of the first game, but even still, I think most of them would have to admit that first game’s style was more distinctive--and while visuals have no effect on me, that’s something that can count for a lot with some audiences. Lose the distinctive look, you lose the benefits of novelty. This is a series that started out with a good look, and could have kept that good style to its end.
Listen to the music for the series. Both the composer for Xenosaga 1 and the composer for Xenosaga 2 and 3 are clearly talented and creative. The music of Xenosaga 1 does its job competently nearly all of the time, and there are a few tracks that I consider to be excellent. For an example, there’s only 1 single battle theme throughout the entire game, whether for regular enemies or bosses, and yet even though I heard it hundreds of times during the course of playing through the game, I still love it, and keep it in my personal song collection. It’s fast-paced yet not frenzied, common yet so very epic, promising the intensity of battle while embodying the idea that this is the first tentative step in a grand saga. The composer of Xenosaga 2 and 3 does just as well, providing solid music accompaniment to the entirety of both games, and I have to say that there are some themes of Xenosaga 3 that are just AMAZING to listen to. The theme playing while exploring the forest during the game’s foray to the past, the music that plays during Pellegri’s death scene, the background theme of the Dabrye Mine...absolutely lovely stuff. Not everything with these games’ music is a hit, but there’s certainly no noticeable failing, either, and enough stand-out moments of excellence that the soundtrack gets my endorsement. This is good music to set an epic tale of space, emotion, and drama against, and Xenosaga could have been really good if everything had been as consistently decent and occasionally great as its music is.
Watch the cutscenes of the Xenosaga games. Xenosaga 1 has a good number of FMV sequences that are very engaging, full of gripping action, and compelling suspense and drama. The scene in the first game wherein KOS-MOS saves Shion for the first time from the Gnosis starts off intense as Shion’s fading in its clutches, and becomes cool and impressive as KOS-MOS gets to work, an epic first combat for this iconic character. And what about the hyperspace chase and battle in Xenosaga 1? That whole thing is awesome and thrilling! It’s action-packed, it’s suspenseful at all the right times, it knows exactly when to cut in with comedy with the reactions of Hammer, Allen, and what’s-his-name, the commander guy below decks, it’s a great first meeting of these still-new characters and a chance to really show their personalities as they work together for the first time, it’s inventive and interesting...this is everything a sci-fi space battle should be, combined with a skillful use of the characters involved that’s thrilling from start to finish. Xenosaga 1 knows how to make good use of its exorbitant cinematic budget. Xenosaga 2’s good for a while in the same field, too--the initial battle between Jin and Margulis is very well done, and the car chase early in the game is exciting. But eventually, as the series plot and events becomes too heavy and bloated to support itself, the FMVs start being more long than interesting, more over-the-top than actually exciting. The last cinema sequence of the series that I feel is really particularly good is Jin and Margulis’s confrontation in the second half of Xenosaga 2. From that point on, the FMVs are either just not very interesting, or are advancing a story and/or characters that no longer grip the audience. Even the videos in the latter part of the series that do seem kind of interesting to watch, such as the fights between KOS-MOS and T-elos or the scene in Xenosaga 2 where KOS-MOS awakens to save Shion, are riddled with stupid elements that ruin them (see my rants on Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome, Xenosaga 3’s finale, and space motorcycles). Xenosaga could have had memorable cutscenes throughout its entire course, if it had kept up the same quality as it started out with.
Let’s move on to the more important stuff, though. Xenosaga had great potential where it really counts--the plot, the themes, the characters.
Recall the pacing of Xenosaga 1. It was just as it should have been. We were introduced to important characters at a carefully measured pace, never too many too fast, and for the most part, the characters who had a special allotment of time stayed relevant enough, long enough that the amount of time and importance the narrative afforded them seemed well-spent. The details and lore of the story and universe developed at a brisk pace, but not so rapidly that we couldn’t keep up, and although these factors and ideas kept getting thrown at us steadily right through to the game’s end, it wasn’t a problem, because it was obviously the beginning chapter of a much larger series. It’s okay to keep adding right up till the end of the first part of your saga, it’s expected. It means you’re building extra material in to be dealt with later on.
But after Xenosaga 1...well, the pacing doesn’t slow down at all; it only keeps speeding up! Ideas and details and terms and characters of all kinds keep getting crammed in, too many too fast. You can no longer keep up comfortably with all the complications and plot threads building up, too many huge events are being resolved more quickly than they should while too many small plot arcs are given more focus and time than they’re due, and even as the games try to settle the matters that they were originally building up in the first game, they’re adding more complications. And, of course, it doesn’t help that an entire half a game’s worth of events are summed up in a “this is what happened” speech in the middle of Xenosaga 2, and then another full game’s worth of events are just entirely skipped over between Xenosaga 2 and 3, known only to you if you spend the time reading up on it in Xenosaga 3’s codex. Too slow, too fast, too much stuff thrown in all at once, huge important parts missing or related as a dry, dense monologue that breaks immersion...the only consistent thing about the pacing of Xenosaga 2 and 3 is that it’s just terrible. I’ve mentioned before that the biggest contributor to this was that a 6-part series was suddenly condensed into 3 games, and I’ve gone over the stupidity both of trying to do such a thing AND of expecting to have a guaranteed 6 games to tell your story in the first place, so I won’t go into this any further. Still, Xenosaga 1 shows that the narrative pace of the series could have been fine and easily followed, instead of frenzied and too full of nonsense.
Think about the characters of the series, and how they interacted with each other early on. When you look at the main cast of Xenosaga, you’ve got a genuinely interesting and diverse set of personalities being put together, one that commands enough interest to initially get you invested in them. Initially, MOMO is cute and friendly but not in a way that’s grating, KOS-MOS is cool and robotic but in a way that brings into question the possibility of a humanity hidden below, Jr. is fun and rambunctious, Ziggy is brooding and straightforward but not in a tedious way, Jin balances being a regular guy with some quirks and being a very private and intense person, chaos is secretive yet open and outgoing, and Shion...well, actually, Shion’s never particularly interesting. Still, she doesn’t start out being a psychotic, shrill, repugnant harpy, so you could say that even she was good, early on. I guess. I dunno. The other cast members could at least make up for her, at any rate.
Anyway, the thing is, the Xenosaga cast is one that...it’s hard to describe, really. My sister, whose insight and feedback contribute immeasurably to these rants and I should really mention and credit her more often, puts it best: they’re characters that you want to like, characters you want to see, know, and learn about. Obviously everyone has their own reactions and prejudices, but I have to say, I’ve interacted with a lot of gamers who have played at least the first Xenosaga title if not the whole series, and it’s funny, but I encounter almost no one who did not have at least a little enthusiastic interest in the cast at first. It may not have lasted--sure as hell didn’t for me--but I think that Xenosaga’s cast is special in that practically all of us start on the same page of an initial interest in KOS-MOS, chaos, Ziggy, MOMO, Jin, Jr., and Shion. And there’s some decent depth to them that could maintain that interest, if was properly developed and worked with.
Additionally, I think the way they interact with one another, the dynamics between the major cast members, are, for a time, pretty neat and enjoyable. I like the connection Ziggy and MOMO share. I like the way that Shion and Jin have trouble with meaningful communication. I like the deep bond between KOS-MOS and Shion, the implicit trust and emotional openness Shion has with KOS-MOS and the way she tries to determine just what sort of humanity KOS-MOS hides within herself, and I like the way that this seems to be, for a time, working its way into a romantic angle for them. I like the puppy dog romance of Jr. and MOMO. I like the way Ziggy and Jr. treat each other as respectable equals. For the first half of the series, possibly even a little longer, the Xenosaga team feels like a genuine collection of individuals brought together, their personalities bonding with and bouncing off one another. It feels a lot like several other games with really good, interesting casts that become close-knit as time goes on, like Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, or Tales of Legendia (although not nearly as good as the latter, mind).
Unfortunately, this potentially great aspect of Xenosaga, like so many others, does not last. The character development for some characters becomes too over-dramatic and confusing (not to mention, at times, incredibly stupid--particularly when it comes to Shion), becoming, as with so much else in the game, far too much nonsense stacked up at once. Said character development also becomes too much of a solo act, with the other cast members having little real influence or input while it’s happening. Eventually the relationships and interactions between the cast members are, almost universally, dictated by the plot--by and throughout Xenosaga 3, dialogue is almost entirely restricted to reactions to the plot and forwarding it; gone is that sense of a friendly, interesting team from earlier in the series. Some aspects of relationships are just destroyed completely to make way for more convenient, plot-friendly concepts, like the clear and obvious Shion x KOS-MOS love subplot being utterly supplanted by the terrible Shion x Allen one. And since the plot that’s now dictating their interactions and character development is such a ridiculous pile of nonsense that it actually makes the Star Wars prequels look almost not totally horribly incompetent by comparison, this drags the cast down with everything else. This is a set of characters that could have really been a special, memorable, and iconic cast, if they hadn’t had to stumble along to the breakneck pace of a ridiculously overblown, convoluted plot.
On a similar note, take the villains. Frankly, not a single villain in the whole trilogy is all that good, but a few of them at least had potential to be decent. Margulis, for example, is just this perpetually antagonistic, egotistical asshat that keeps being played up by the cinematics and narrative as someone more important than he actually ends up being. But if we’d gotten some time devoted to giving the guy some honest backstory, or a few scenes that better showed us and emphasized Margulis’s religious fanaticism, he could have been a lot more compelling. We’re told, not shown, that he’s a diehard fanatic, and the only other character traits assigned to him are a rivalry with Jin originating from a history between them that’s never properly delved into, and a propensity for grandiose, frustratingly vague scheming via speeches and monologues. And the latter quality doesn’t count, because pretty much all of the Xenosaga villains, and even plenty of the good guys, do that. With a little care, Margulis could have at least been a little noteworthy, but as is, he’s just a plot mouthpiece who really makes no impact.
Pellegri’s another one. Given her history with Jin and the terms under which they went their separate ways, she could have been a really compelling individual. But the games just never go into any real detail of her old feelings for Jin, never show us what things were like between them, never give enough emphasis to the way her blind adherence to Magulis’s crusade shut out the other things, good things, she had in life. We don’t see her appreciation of the things she had then, we don’t see her regret or conflict at losing them, we just don’t see anything REAL about Pellegri. She’s little more than a rag doll wearing a sign on her head reading, “JIN’S TRAGIC PAST,” existing solely as a foil for him and not even doing very well in that capacity.
Xenosaga could have made Margulis and Pellegri actual, interesting villains. It could have dialed Albedo’s insanity back enough to make him as sympathizable as the games want him to be, and made his brotherly love for Jr. schtick more believable and realistic--as it is, this main point of Albedo’s character depth comes off more as another piece of psychosis than anything legitimate. It could have revealed Wilhelm early enough and well enough that the guy could have better explained his position and the plots he masterminded. It could have given Yuriev the time and effort to develop the idea of his fear of U-DO and better examine how it relates to the human condition, and all sorts of good jazz; there was some real potential in there! It could have given us more recollections (and better ones, for that matter) of Kevin so as to properly show why Shion would have such conflicted feelings late in the last game, so he doesn’t seem like such a one-dimensional dick that we question how Shion can have any attachment to him. So many villains in the Xenosaga series could have been good, or at the very least decent, if they’d been used and developed well.
Let’s also contemplate some of the concepts of Xenosaga’s story. There are a lot of interesting ideas to the games, such as KOS-MOS being a robotic reincarnation of Mary Magdalen. Yeah, that’s bizarre, but I feel like it’s odd enough that they really could have made it interesting and neat if they’d handled it right. They could have used the scenario to explore the character of Mary, and allowed for the contrast between her and the growing personality of KOS-MOS to give them both more depth. But the KOS-MOS-is-Mary stuff is only shoved in at the end, so nothing much can be done with it (despite how overly complicated it winds up being), and Mary’s only used as an odd plot device, not as a character. KOS-MOS could just as easily have been a reincarnation of 1 of the 12 Apostles, or Adam, or Eve, or Lassie the Dog for all the difference it makes--there’s no actual connection to the character of Mary here, so anyone could have been used in her place. Anyone in history and/or theology could have completely and inexplicably been handed God’s keys to the universe, anyone could have been retconned to have Shion’s previous incarnation as their ambiguous BFF-maybe-lover-maybe-not, and absolutely nothing would be changed.
These concepts and scenes that really could have been something good are littered through the second and third Xenosaga titles. Shion’s suffering as the greatest of all the universe, for example. I love the idea overall, that when Shion witnessed her mother and father brutally murdered on the same night that her friend Feb died and all Hell broke loose in a terrifying military battle in her city, her pain was so great and unbearable that it tore the very fabric of reality and called forth the wayward lost souls of the universe’s despondent and rejected. That is compelling and epic stuff! And yet, so much of the plot of Xenosaga 3, particularly regarding Kevin, Shion’s personal conflict, and the themes of starting over or pushing through the seemingly inevitable destruction of the universe with the hope of a better tomorrow, all comes back to the pain of Shion, and the game just doesn’t know how to make use of that all-important plot point. The problem is that while we can believe that child Shion felt that pain, over the course of the games adult Shion, the one we’re familiar with, has never given the slightest inkling of someone still carrying torment that could tear the universe asunder. I mean, she’s not a bubbling mass of happiness or anything, but she never seems to be suffering particularly, either, for the entirety of Xenosaga 1 and 2, and even the first half of Xenosaga 3. She’s just a regular character. Hell, even when the final game’s suddenly realized it has to actually start showing that Shion has some issues since they’re suddenly the most important thing in the world, Shion’s introspections and interactions seem more listless and bratty, respectively, than they do like she’s seriously hurting. Come on, Namco...you want to base the major elements of your series’s plot around the painful baggage Shion’s carrying around, you need to show us that it’s there somehow. Batman carries his parents’ murder with him in everything he does and says, and we see it and we believe it. The Nameless One of Planescape: Torment carries the torment of his lost mortality with him in everything he sees and everyone he encounters, and we see it and believe it. But as awesome a concept as Shion’s pain breaking the universe is, it’s never shown until way too late to believe in it, and even that last-minute effort is mostly just a testament to Namco’s lack of understanding when it comes to the emotions and reasoning of human beings.
Another example, while I’m thinking about it--remember 1 of my very earliest rants, about the stupidity of the space motorcycle scene in Xenosaga 2? Of course you don’t; nobody actually read this thing back then (practically nobody does now either, heh). But in a smaller way, it’s another example of this. Like I said back then, the scene SHOULD actually be good--it’s KOS-MOS hearing Shion’s cry for help across the void of countless light years, and despite being turned off, despite not even being in working order, the need to protect Shion is so compelling to her that she awakens and rushes to the rescue. It’d be pretty inspiring...but then, the silliness of a space motorcycle hits you. It’s about as pathetic and obvious an attempt to seem cool as Poochie the Dog, except that Poochie is MEANT to be a ridiculous icon of parody.
The death of Pellegri is a bit similar to that--again, it’s a scene that should be really noteworthy, and it almost is. The music that plays, the concept of her simply having gone too far along a path that ended in failure, the fact that her death is painful for Jin...it’s done well, and provokes some sadness from the player. Yet, as I outlined in the rant about Xenosaga 3’s finale, this scene’s worth is overshadowed by its immense stupidity--Pellegri’s reasoning just doesn’t make sense, and it lessens her character depth considerably by forcing her into a throwaway villain niche. The quality of what’s happening in the death scene is overpowered by the stupidity of why it’s happening. Anyway, I’m digressing a bit too much. Whether because they weren’t utilized and developed properly, or were just poisoned by really dumb elements, a great many of the concepts and scenes of the Xenosaga series could have been quite great, both emotionally charged and thought-provoking, but in the end, very, very few managed to live up to their potential.
Examine the overall themes and intended meanings and messages of the Xenosaga series. There’s actually all sorts of great things that the games are meant to explore through their plot and characters, themes like the significance of the fear of God (represented through Voyager and, more so, Yuriev), like the idea of becoming greater than the sum of one’s parts through devotion to another (KOS-MOS and, in some tiny way, Allen), the idea of whether one can choose to go against the purpose of their existence and the consequences for doing so (shown through KOS-MOS, Canaan, Jr., Gaignun, the failures of Pellegri and Margulis, and many more), and of course, the concept of personal and divine will, how to live with it, how to use it, what it’s capable of and the forms in which it exists. Xenosaga takes many strong ideas for its plot that stem from real-life great works and minds of human culture, such as the Bible, the Torah, and most notably Friedrich Nietzsche (the full titles of the games are even named for his concepts). The seeds for greatness are definitely scattered throughout the series in its many underlying themes and ideas.
Of course, the problem is that those seeds just never have a chance to sprout into something more. Essentially all of the great themes are buried 6 feet deep underneath a tightly-compacted morass of over-complicated details, poorly written characters, bad pacing, grandiose and completely unnatural speeches and exposition, and military-grade insane nonsense, far too deep for the seeds of greatness to ever have a chance to break through to the surface without some serious digging on your part, narrative digging which is effort way beyond what an audience should be expected to put forth. Many of the great themes are simply too unexplored before the crisis point of the character they’re linked to--like Yuriev’s fear of God thing. It’s practically unmentioned until its major moment in the story is upon you, which lessens how much of an impact it can make, how much narrative importance that you can give it. Some discussions earlier in the game on the subject--REAL discussions, not incredibly vague, poorly-written hintings--would have gone a long way to giving the concept its narrative due, and the same is true for so many of the themes of Xenosaga.
And hell, it doesn’t even seem like Namco got a lot of the deeper concepts they borrowed from others like Nietzsche right--though I’ll let smarter people than I explore and explain that here and here.
But make no mistake: Xenosaga may have bitten off way, way more than it could chew and lacked the narrative skill to make proper use of its grand, intelligent messages and themes, but they were there, just nearly inaccessible through the mountains of chaotic foolishness. It’s like a brilliant philosopher with no tongue, no computer, and atrocious, illegible handwriting trying to share the incredible things within his mind. The Xenosaga series could have been fascinating and intellectually meaningful, even on par with the best that the Shin Megami Tensei series can offer, if only its writers had been able to effectively convey their ideas.
And that’s essentially all I have to say on the matter. I could probably keep going, but I think this covers pretty much all the bases. From the small matters to the greatest, Xenosaga had the potential to be a really great series. Great science fiction, great characters, great ideas, great themes, great execution. It could have been something absolutely incredible, it really could have, and that’s why, despite its incalculably numerous flaws, in spite of all the criticism I’ve heaped upon the series (particularly its final installment) in my rants, in spite even of the disgust and animosity that I do feel towards some of its truly vile aspects (Shion’s motivations in its finale still make me shake with loathing)...in spite of everything, the fundamental truth of the matter is, as I said before:
I don’t hate Xenosaga.
It may be less sensible than Final Fantasy 8. It may be more of a disappointment to itself than La Pucelle Tactics, and have just as hasty and ill-thought-out a love story for its protagonist. It may be as idiotically over-complicated as Chrono Cross. It may be almost as much a waste of a good cast as the Kingdom Hearts series’s decision to focus more on its own bland original villains than the Disney rogues available to it. It may be more confused about what it’s doing and how to get to its plot destination than Dragon Age 2, and have a finale almost as stupid and terrible. It may seem as groundlessly self-important as Final Fantasy 12. And it may have been as screwed up by its parent company’s time and budget constraints as Xenogears. But you know what? Xenosaga started out solid and good, and it carried the potential for greatness. If you dig, you at least find and recognize those seeds of quality that never germinated; you can’t say the same for most of the games I just named. And honestly, in spite of the massive incompetence at Monolith Soft and Namco and whoever else was involved in the creation of the series, I have to say, rarely does it feel like the writers weren’t trying, weren’t giving their ideas and desires for the story a sincere effort, and at no point does it feel like the writers didn’t honestly think that these ideas were worth conveying. Which again is not the case of several of the aforementioned titles.
So maybe I’m dissatisfied with the Xenosaga series. Maybe it makes me angry often, and maybe it disappoints me because it started off so well. Maybe it’s made poorly enough that it’s a very easy target for my derision. And maybe...maybe I don’t even actually like it. But I don’t hate Xenosaga, either. And I don’t resent it, and I don’t feel like it was a true waste of my time to play, not like many of the other RPGs I criticize here often. Xenosaga is a failure, but it failed trying to do something worthwhile, and I’ll always respect that too much to ever hate or fully dismiss the series.
Yes, it is that time once again: Xenosaga Rant Time.
So what should I speak about today? Xenosaga still has so many flaws and nonsense that I could rant about. Maybe I should examine just how necessary it was for KOS-MOS, during the in-the-past-sort-of escape from Kevin, to smack Shion and knock her out--she does it to subdue the obnoxious twit and get her safely away from Kevin, but considering that KOS-MOS is a monstrously strong battle android and Shion is just a (whiny, overbearing) human being, she could have struggled all she liked and not given KOS-MOS the slightest trouble in carrying her off. Or I could point out that it doesn’t make much sense that the shockwave from Abel’s Ark can cause everything it touches to disappear, even planets, yet the Elsa, a small freighter ship, is totally unaffected by it. Or perhaps I could…
...No. You know what? I think I’ve done enough. Since beating Xenosaga 3 and closing out the series, I’ve made 9 rants about the stupidity of Xenosaga, and in nearly all of them I’ve not only examined the flaw(s) that the rant is actually about, but also listed several other ones that I could just as easily have ranted on. I’ve put forward dozens of Xenosaga’s mistakes to you all, and there are plenty more I could add to them. And perhaps I will some day. But with all this criticism at a glance and at length, on all these various flaws, there’s only one conclusion that you, the reader, could draw: that I hate Xenosaga. And, well, that’s just not true. Oh, sure, there are parts of Xenosaga that I sincerely hate, no question. Shion’s pity parade during the finale, MOMO’s last words to Jr., Kevin, the utterly disgusting way Shion’s abusive relationship with Kevin is glossed over as bad ONLY because it hurts other people and NOT because it hurts her...huh, I guess each of the moments of Xenosaga that I truly hate come from the last game. Hadn’t realized that before.
Anyway, my point is that, yes, there are a lot--a LOT--of problems with the series, and yes, there are even some parts of it which are just unforgivably loathsome. But while I don’t like the series as a complete product...well, I don’t hate it. It’s like when your parents tell you that they’re not angry with you, just disappointed. I’m not happy with Xenosaga, especially with the way it all turned out, but I can’t just dismiss it completely, either, because it had potential, and for all its terribleness, it still maintained a few of its good points throughout. This is a series that at least could have been good--even if it wasn’t.
I mean, consider the voice acting. Yeah, as I’ve mentioned, in Xenosaga 3, the voice overs are just a mess of incorrect emphasis and tones that just don’t work within the context of the characters’ intent. But back in Xenosaga 1, the voice acting was pretty consistently decent, enough to make it clear that this cast did know what it was doing when properly directed. And the voice actors themselves fit the characters very well, by and large! Hell, even when they have to change voice actors for some characters between games, the new ones still work very well! The proper matching of actor to character type by itself is enough to lend life to the characters, even if the confusion of lines constantly read in the wrong way later in the series messes that up. This is voice acting that could have been good from start to finish.
Take a look at the graphic style of Xenosaga 1. Now, you know I don’t care about visuals when determining how good or bad an RPG is, but that doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge the difference between good and bad quality. Xenosaga 1 rolled out with a clean, interestingly simplistic yet distinctive artistic style for its characters and universe. Speak to a player who’s experienced all 3 main titles in the Xenosaga series about which style of KOS-MOS sticks out the most in his or her mind, which grabbed his or her attention the most and is the most interesting, and I’m willing to bet the answer will most of the time be the style from Xenosaga 1. It was different enough to grab and keep your attention: deformed but not chibi, bright but with plenty of darkness to contrast, clean but not undetailed. And then, Xenosaga 2 came around, and...the art style was completely different. For reasons best described as “moronic,” Namco decided to ditch the unique style that otherwise would have become a recognizable signature of the series and adopt, for Xenosaga 2, a much more dark, so-called realistic art style that was far more conventional for anime-styled JRPGs of that age, and in being far more conventional, was also far less interesting and thus did not hold one’s attention as well as before. And then they switched the style up again for Xenosaga 3, but this next change was a smaller departure from its predecessor, and in the end still doesn’t stand out in any particular way from other RPGs. I do know that there are some people (a minority, I believe) who liked the art styles of Xenosaga 2 and/or 3 better than that of the first game, but even still, I think most of them would have to admit that first game’s style was more distinctive--and while visuals have no effect on me, that’s something that can count for a lot with some audiences. Lose the distinctive look, you lose the benefits of novelty. This is a series that started out with a good look, and could have kept that good style to its end.
Listen to the music for the series. Both the composer for Xenosaga 1 and the composer for Xenosaga 2 and 3 are clearly talented and creative. The music of Xenosaga 1 does its job competently nearly all of the time, and there are a few tracks that I consider to be excellent. For an example, there’s only 1 single battle theme throughout the entire game, whether for regular enemies or bosses, and yet even though I heard it hundreds of times during the course of playing through the game, I still love it, and keep it in my personal song collection. It’s fast-paced yet not frenzied, common yet so very epic, promising the intensity of battle while embodying the idea that this is the first tentative step in a grand saga. The composer of Xenosaga 2 and 3 does just as well, providing solid music accompaniment to the entirety of both games, and I have to say that there are some themes of Xenosaga 3 that are just AMAZING to listen to. The theme playing while exploring the forest during the game’s foray to the past, the music that plays during Pellegri’s death scene, the background theme of the Dabrye Mine...absolutely lovely stuff. Not everything with these games’ music is a hit, but there’s certainly no noticeable failing, either, and enough stand-out moments of excellence that the soundtrack gets my endorsement. This is good music to set an epic tale of space, emotion, and drama against, and Xenosaga could have been really good if everything had been as consistently decent and occasionally great as its music is.
Watch the cutscenes of the Xenosaga games. Xenosaga 1 has a good number of FMV sequences that are very engaging, full of gripping action, and compelling suspense and drama. The scene in the first game wherein KOS-MOS saves Shion for the first time from the Gnosis starts off intense as Shion’s fading in its clutches, and becomes cool and impressive as KOS-MOS gets to work, an epic first combat for this iconic character. And what about the hyperspace chase and battle in Xenosaga 1? That whole thing is awesome and thrilling! It’s action-packed, it’s suspenseful at all the right times, it knows exactly when to cut in with comedy with the reactions of Hammer, Allen, and what’s-his-name, the commander guy below decks, it’s a great first meeting of these still-new characters and a chance to really show their personalities as they work together for the first time, it’s inventive and interesting...this is everything a sci-fi space battle should be, combined with a skillful use of the characters involved that’s thrilling from start to finish. Xenosaga 1 knows how to make good use of its exorbitant cinematic budget. Xenosaga 2’s good for a while in the same field, too--the initial battle between Jin and Margulis is very well done, and the car chase early in the game is exciting. But eventually, as the series plot and events becomes too heavy and bloated to support itself, the FMVs start being more long than interesting, more over-the-top than actually exciting. The last cinema sequence of the series that I feel is really particularly good is Jin and Margulis’s confrontation in the second half of Xenosaga 2. From that point on, the FMVs are either just not very interesting, or are advancing a story and/or characters that no longer grip the audience. Even the videos in the latter part of the series that do seem kind of interesting to watch, such as the fights between KOS-MOS and T-elos or the scene in Xenosaga 2 where KOS-MOS awakens to save Shion, are riddled with stupid elements that ruin them (see my rants on Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome, Xenosaga 3’s finale, and space motorcycles). Xenosaga could have had memorable cutscenes throughout its entire course, if it had kept up the same quality as it started out with.
Let’s move on to the more important stuff, though. Xenosaga had great potential where it really counts--the plot, the themes, the characters.
Recall the pacing of Xenosaga 1. It was just as it should have been. We were introduced to important characters at a carefully measured pace, never too many too fast, and for the most part, the characters who had a special allotment of time stayed relevant enough, long enough that the amount of time and importance the narrative afforded them seemed well-spent. The details and lore of the story and universe developed at a brisk pace, but not so rapidly that we couldn’t keep up, and although these factors and ideas kept getting thrown at us steadily right through to the game’s end, it wasn’t a problem, because it was obviously the beginning chapter of a much larger series. It’s okay to keep adding right up till the end of the first part of your saga, it’s expected. It means you’re building extra material in to be dealt with later on.
But after Xenosaga 1...well, the pacing doesn’t slow down at all; it only keeps speeding up! Ideas and details and terms and characters of all kinds keep getting crammed in, too many too fast. You can no longer keep up comfortably with all the complications and plot threads building up, too many huge events are being resolved more quickly than they should while too many small plot arcs are given more focus and time than they’re due, and even as the games try to settle the matters that they were originally building up in the first game, they’re adding more complications. And, of course, it doesn’t help that an entire half a game’s worth of events are summed up in a “this is what happened” speech in the middle of Xenosaga 2, and then another full game’s worth of events are just entirely skipped over between Xenosaga 2 and 3, known only to you if you spend the time reading up on it in Xenosaga 3’s codex. Too slow, too fast, too much stuff thrown in all at once, huge important parts missing or related as a dry, dense monologue that breaks immersion...the only consistent thing about the pacing of Xenosaga 2 and 3 is that it’s just terrible. I’ve mentioned before that the biggest contributor to this was that a 6-part series was suddenly condensed into 3 games, and I’ve gone over the stupidity both of trying to do such a thing AND of expecting to have a guaranteed 6 games to tell your story in the first place, so I won’t go into this any further. Still, Xenosaga 1 shows that the narrative pace of the series could have been fine and easily followed, instead of frenzied and too full of nonsense.
Think about the characters of the series, and how they interacted with each other early on. When you look at the main cast of Xenosaga, you’ve got a genuinely interesting and diverse set of personalities being put together, one that commands enough interest to initially get you invested in them. Initially, MOMO is cute and friendly but not in a way that’s grating, KOS-MOS is cool and robotic but in a way that brings into question the possibility of a humanity hidden below, Jr. is fun and rambunctious, Ziggy is brooding and straightforward but not in a tedious way, Jin balances being a regular guy with some quirks and being a very private and intense person, chaos is secretive yet open and outgoing, and Shion...well, actually, Shion’s never particularly interesting. Still, she doesn’t start out being a psychotic, shrill, repugnant harpy, so you could say that even she was good, early on. I guess. I dunno. The other cast members could at least make up for her, at any rate.
Anyway, the thing is, the Xenosaga cast is one that...it’s hard to describe, really. My sister, whose insight and feedback contribute immeasurably to these rants and I should really mention and credit her more often, puts it best: they’re characters that you want to like, characters you want to see, know, and learn about. Obviously everyone has their own reactions and prejudices, but I have to say, I’ve interacted with a lot of gamers who have played at least the first Xenosaga title if not the whole series, and it’s funny, but I encounter almost no one who did not have at least a little enthusiastic interest in the cast at first. It may not have lasted--sure as hell didn’t for me--but I think that Xenosaga’s cast is special in that practically all of us start on the same page of an initial interest in KOS-MOS, chaos, Ziggy, MOMO, Jin, Jr., and Shion. And there’s some decent depth to them that could maintain that interest, if was properly developed and worked with.
Additionally, I think the way they interact with one another, the dynamics between the major cast members, are, for a time, pretty neat and enjoyable. I like the connection Ziggy and MOMO share. I like the way that Shion and Jin have trouble with meaningful communication. I like the deep bond between KOS-MOS and Shion, the implicit trust and emotional openness Shion has with KOS-MOS and the way she tries to determine just what sort of humanity KOS-MOS hides within herself, and I like the way that this seems to be, for a time, working its way into a romantic angle for them. I like the puppy dog romance of Jr. and MOMO. I like the way Ziggy and Jr. treat each other as respectable equals. For the first half of the series, possibly even a little longer, the Xenosaga team feels like a genuine collection of individuals brought together, their personalities bonding with and bouncing off one another. It feels a lot like several other games with really good, interesting casts that become close-knit as time goes on, like Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, or Tales of Legendia (although not nearly as good as the latter, mind).
Unfortunately, this potentially great aspect of Xenosaga, like so many others, does not last. The character development for some characters becomes too over-dramatic and confusing (not to mention, at times, incredibly stupid--particularly when it comes to Shion), becoming, as with so much else in the game, far too much nonsense stacked up at once. Said character development also becomes too much of a solo act, with the other cast members having little real influence or input while it’s happening. Eventually the relationships and interactions between the cast members are, almost universally, dictated by the plot--by and throughout Xenosaga 3, dialogue is almost entirely restricted to reactions to the plot and forwarding it; gone is that sense of a friendly, interesting team from earlier in the series. Some aspects of relationships are just destroyed completely to make way for more convenient, plot-friendly concepts, like the clear and obvious Shion x KOS-MOS love subplot being utterly supplanted by the terrible Shion x Allen one. And since the plot that’s now dictating their interactions and character development is such a ridiculous pile of nonsense that it actually makes the Star Wars prequels look almost not totally horribly incompetent by comparison, this drags the cast down with everything else. This is a set of characters that could have really been a special, memorable, and iconic cast, if they hadn’t had to stumble along to the breakneck pace of a ridiculously overblown, convoluted plot.
On a similar note, take the villains. Frankly, not a single villain in the whole trilogy is all that good, but a few of them at least had potential to be decent. Margulis, for example, is just this perpetually antagonistic, egotistical asshat that keeps being played up by the cinematics and narrative as someone more important than he actually ends up being. But if we’d gotten some time devoted to giving the guy some honest backstory, or a few scenes that better showed us and emphasized Margulis’s religious fanaticism, he could have been a lot more compelling. We’re told, not shown, that he’s a diehard fanatic, and the only other character traits assigned to him are a rivalry with Jin originating from a history between them that’s never properly delved into, and a propensity for grandiose, frustratingly vague scheming via speeches and monologues. And the latter quality doesn’t count, because pretty much all of the Xenosaga villains, and even plenty of the good guys, do that. With a little care, Margulis could have at least been a little noteworthy, but as is, he’s just a plot mouthpiece who really makes no impact.
Pellegri’s another one. Given her history with Jin and the terms under which they went their separate ways, she could have been a really compelling individual. But the games just never go into any real detail of her old feelings for Jin, never show us what things were like between them, never give enough emphasis to the way her blind adherence to Magulis’s crusade shut out the other things, good things, she had in life. We don’t see her appreciation of the things she had then, we don’t see her regret or conflict at losing them, we just don’t see anything REAL about Pellegri. She’s little more than a rag doll wearing a sign on her head reading, “JIN’S TRAGIC PAST,” existing solely as a foil for him and not even doing very well in that capacity.
Xenosaga could have made Margulis and Pellegri actual, interesting villains. It could have dialed Albedo’s insanity back enough to make him as sympathizable as the games want him to be, and made his brotherly love for Jr. schtick more believable and realistic--as it is, this main point of Albedo’s character depth comes off more as another piece of psychosis than anything legitimate. It could have revealed Wilhelm early enough and well enough that the guy could have better explained his position and the plots he masterminded. It could have given Yuriev the time and effort to develop the idea of his fear of U-DO and better examine how it relates to the human condition, and all sorts of good jazz; there was some real potential in there! It could have given us more recollections (and better ones, for that matter) of Kevin so as to properly show why Shion would have such conflicted feelings late in the last game, so he doesn’t seem like such a one-dimensional dick that we question how Shion can have any attachment to him. So many villains in the Xenosaga series could have been good, or at the very least decent, if they’d been used and developed well.
Let’s also contemplate some of the concepts of Xenosaga’s story. There are a lot of interesting ideas to the games, such as KOS-MOS being a robotic reincarnation of Mary Magdalen. Yeah, that’s bizarre, but I feel like it’s odd enough that they really could have made it interesting and neat if they’d handled it right. They could have used the scenario to explore the character of Mary, and allowed for the contrast between her and the growing personality of KOS-MOS to give them both more depth. But the KOS-MOS-is-Mary stuff is only shoved in at the end, so nothing much can be done with it (despite how overly complicated it winds up being), and Mary’s only used as an odd plot device, not as a character. KOS-MOS could just as easily have been a reincarnation of 1 of the 12 Apostles, or Adam, or Eve, or Lassie the Dog for all the difference it makes--there’s no actual connection to the character of Mary here, so anyone could have been used in her place. Anyone in history and/or theology could have completely and inexplicably been handed God’s keys to the universe, anyone could have been retconned to have Shion’s previous incarnation as their ambiguous BFF-maybe-lover-maybe-not, and absolutely nothing would be changed.
These concepts and scenes that really could have been something good are littered through the second and third Xenosaga titles. Shion’s suffering as the greatest of all the universe, for example. I love the idea overall, that when Shion witnessed her mother and father brutally murdered on the same night that her friend Feb died and all Hell broke loose in a terrifying military battle in her city, her pain was so great and unbearable that it tore the very fabric of reality and called forth the wayward lost souls of the universe’s despondent and rejected. That is compelling and epic stuff! And yet, so much of the plot of Xenosaga 3, particularly regarding Kevin, Shion’s personal conflict, and the themes of starting over or pushing through the seemingly inevitable destruction of the universe with the hope of a better tomorrow, all comes back to the pain of Shion, and the game just doesn’t know how to make use of that all-important plot point. The problem is that while we can believe that child Shion felt that pain, over the course of the games adult Shion, the one we’re familiar with, has never given the slightest inkling of someone still carrying torment that could tear the universe asunder. I mean, she’s not a bubbling mass of happiness or anything, but she never seems to be suffering particularly, either, for the entirety of Xenosaga 1 and 2, and even the first half of Xenosaga 3. She’s just a regular character. Hell, even when the final game’s suddenly realized it has to actually start showing that Shion has some issues since they’re suddenly the most important thing in the world, Shion’s introspections and interactions seem more listless and bratty, respectively, than they do like she’s seriously hurting. Come on, Namco...you want to base the major elements of your series’s plot around the painful baggage Shion’s carrying around, you need to show us that it’s there somehow. Batman carries his parents’ murder with him in everything he does and says, and we see it and we believe it. The Nameless One of Planescape: Torment carries the torment of his lost mortality with him in everything he sees and everyone he encounters, and we see it and believe it. But as awesome a concept as Shion’s pain breaking the universe is, it’s never shown until way too late to believe in it, and even that last-minute effort is mostly just a testament to Namco’s lack of understanding when it comes to the emotions and reasoning of human beings.
Another example, while I’m thinking about it--remember 1 of my very earliest rants, about the stupidity of the space motorcycle scene in Xenosaga 2? Of course you don’t; nobody actually read this thing back then (practically nobody does now either, heh). But in a smaller way, it’s another example of this. Like I said back then, the scene SHOULD actually be good--it’s KOS-MOS hearing Shion’s cry for help across the void of countless light years, and despite being turned off, despite not even being in working order, the need to protect Shion is so compelling to her that she awakens and rushes to the rescue. It’d be pretty inspiring...but then, the silliness of a space motorcycle hits you. It’s about as pathetic and obvious an attempt to seem cool as Poochie the Dog, except that Poochie is MEANT to be a ridiculous icon of parody.
The death of Pellegri is a bit similar to that--again, it’s a scene that should be really noteworthy, and it almost is. The music that plays, the concept of her simply having gone too far along a path that ended in failure, the fact that her death is painful for Jin...it’s done well, and provokes some sadness from the player. Yet, as I outlined in the rant about Xenosaga 3’s finale, this scene’s worth is overshadowed by its immense stupidity--Pellegri’s reasoning just doesn’t make sense, and it lessens her character depth considerably by forcing her into a throwaway villain niche. The quality of what’s happening in the death scene is overpowered by the stupidity of why it’s happening. Anyway, I’m digressing a bit too much. Whether because they weren’t utilized and developed properly, or were just poisoned by really dumb elements, a great many of the concepts and scenes of the Xenosaga series could have been quite great, both emotionally charged and thought-provoking, but in the end, very, very few managed to live up to their potential.
Examine the overall themes and intended meanings and messages of the Xenosaga series. There’s actually all sorts of great things that the games are meant to explore through their plot and characters, themes like the significance of the fear of God (represented through Voyager and, more so, Yuriev), like the idea of becoming greater than the sum of one’s parts through devotion to another (KOS-MOS and, in some tiny way, Allen), the idea of whether one can choose to go against the purpose of their existence and the consequences for doing so (shown through KOS-MOS, Canaan, Jr., Gaignun, the failures of Pellegri and Margulis, and many more), and of course, the concept of personal and divine will, how to live with it, how to use it, what it’s capable of and the forms in which it exists. Xenosaga takes many strong ideas for its plot that stem from real-life great works and minds of human culture, such as the Bible, the Torah, and most notably Friedrich Nietzsche (the full titles of the games are even named for his concepts). The seeds for greatness are definitely scattered throughout the series in its many underlying themes and ideas.
Of course, the problem is that those seeds just never have a chance to sprout into something more. Essentially all of the great themes are buried 6 feet deep underneath a tightly-compacted morass of over-complicated details, poorly written characters, bad pacing, grandiose and completely unnatural speeches and exposition, and military-grade insane nonsense, far too deep for the seeds of greatness to ever have a chance to break through to the surface without some serious digging on your part, narrative digging which is effort way beyond what an audience should be expected to put forth. Many of the great themes are simply too unexplored before the crisis point of the character they’re linked to--like Yuriev’s fear of God thing. It’s practically unmentioned until its major moment in the story is upon you, which lessens how much of an impact it can make, how much narrative importance that you can give it. Some discussions earlier in the game on the subject--REAL discussions, not incredibly vague, poorly-written hintings--would have gone a long way to giving the concept its narrative due, and the same is true for so many of the themes of Xenosaga.
And hell, it doesn’t even seem like Namco got a lot of the deeper concepts they borrowed from others like Nietzsche right--though I’ll let smarter people than I explore and explain that here and here.
But make no mistake: Xenosaga may have bitten off way, way more than it could chew and lacked the narrative skill to make proper use of its grand, intelligent messages and themes, but they were there, just nearly inaccessible through the mountains of chaotic foolishness. It’s like a brilliant philosopher with no tongue, no computer, and atrocious, illegible handwriting trying to share the incredible things within his mind. The Xenosaga series could have been fascinating and intellectually meaningful, even on par with the best that the Shin Megami Tensei series can offer, if only its writers had been able to effectively convey their ideas.
And that’s essentially all I have to say on the matter. I could probably keep going, but I think this covers pretty much all the bases. From the small matters to the greatest, Xenosaga had the potential to be a really great series. Great science fiction, great characters, great ideas, great themes, great execution. It could have been something absolutely incredible, it really could have, and that’s why, despite its incalculably numerous flaws, in spite of all the criticism I’ve heaped upon the series (particularly its final installment) in my rants, in spite even of the disgust and animosity that I do feel towards some of its truly vile aspects (Shion’s motivations in its finale still make me shake with loathing)...in spite of everything, the fundamental truth of the matter is, as I said before:
I don’t hate Xenosaga.
It may be less sensible than Final Fantasy 8. It may be more of a disappointment to itself than La Pucelle Tactics, and have just as hasty and ill-thought-out a love story for its protagonist. It may be as idiotically over-complicated as Chrono Cross. It may be almost as much a waste of a good cast as the Kingdom Hearts series’s decision to focus more on its own bland original villains than the Disney rogues available to it. It may be more confused about what it’s doing and how to get to its plot destination than Dragon Age 2, and have a finale almost as stupid and terrible. It may seem as groundlessly self-important as Final Fantasy 12. And it may have been as screwed up by its parent company’s time and budget constraints as Xenogears. But you know what? Xenosaga started out solid and good, and it carried the potential for greatness. If you dig, you at least find and recognize those seeds of quality that never germinated; you can’t say the same for most of the games I just named. And honestly, in spite of the massive incompetence at Monolith Soft and Namco and whoever else was involved in the creation of the series, I have to say, rarely does it feel like the writers weren’t trying, weren’t giving their ideas and desires for the story a sincere effort, and at no point does it feel like the writers didn’t honestly think that these ideas were worth conveying. Which again is not the case of several of the aforementioned titles.
So maybe I’m dissatisfied with the Xenosaga series. Maybe it makes me angry often, and maybe it disappoints me because it started off so well. Maybe it’s made poorly enough that it’s a very easy target for my derision. And maybe...maybe I don’t even actually like it. But I don’t hate Xenosaga, either. And I don’t resent it, and I don’t feel like it was a true waste of my time to play, not like many of the other RPGs I criticize here often. Xenosaga is a failure, but it failed trying to do something worthwhile, and I’ll always respect that too much to ever hate or fully dismiss the series.
Sunday, May 18, 2014
General RPGs' Villains' Screen Time
There are many aspects of story and characters that can go a long way to making an RPG truly great, or truly terrible. It’s important that there be creativity, that the setting be interesting, that the protagonist be compelling, that the story be purposeful, and so on and so forth. Lots of factors contribute or detriment an RPG’s overall quality depending on how well they’re written, and one of those factors is most definitely the major villain of the work. Unfortunately, just like believable and touching love stories, really good villains are unusually uncommon in this genre. Even most of the good games manage to get by without compelling antagonists, by virtue of their other good qualities--Final Fantasy 7 and Disgaea 1 come to mind, as examples, though there are certainly many to choose from.
Nonetheless, RPGs have had their share of really excellent villains, and those villains have always greatly enhanced the game they’re in. Fou-Lu was one of the comparatively few memorable parts of Breath of Fire 4, The Transcendent One provides a thematically perfect climax to the utterly incredible Planescape: Torment, and I dare say that Darth Traya is responsible for 50% of the overwhelming excellence of Knights of the Old Republic 2’s writing.
There’s all kinds of ways to make a villain great, memorable, iconic, a powerfully positive part of the plot. Sometimes it’s as simple as look, attitude, and generally foreboding menace. Darth Vader, for example, did eventually get some backstory in the second and third movies of the original Star Wars trilogy, but even as an entirely unexplained bad guy in the original Star Wars, he was an iconic villain. Sometimes it’s having the villain properly reflect the hero’s nature, the way most of Batman’s foes represent the dark side to aspects of his own personality, or likewise having the villain represent and/or reflect the themes and purpose of the story, like Cato in The Hunger Games. Sometimes it’s having a villain whose fall to evil you fully understand and can even sympathize with, such as Demona from Gargoyles. And so on and so forth--there’s a huge number of ways to really make a villain work well.
One thing that really, really helps, though, is something that not nearly enough RPGs seem to understand: giving the game’s major villain(s) enough screen time. Too often, the villain of an RPG is kept out of the player’s sight for almost the entirety of the game, only showing up to twirl his/her metaphorical mustache menacingly and prove his/her evil by doing naughty things for a few minutes before vanishing again. Sometimes it’s not even that much--the 10 Wise Men of Star Ocean 2 are the masterminds behind all the major problems of the game, yet if you don’t count the actual boss battles against them, I’m not sure all of them put together have even a full 15 minutes of screen time over the course of a 40+ hour game!
Some RPG villains manage to be pretty decent despite this lack of screen time. Saren from Mass Effect 1 is as much an “only shows up to remind you that he’s there and a bad guy” villain as the next guy, but he’s got just enough characterization during those moments and just enough of a tie to the theme of “struggling against impossible odds for freedom instead of giving in to slavery in order to survive” to come out in the end as a decent villain. The Sinistrals of Lufia 2, as another example, manage to pull off the role of epic deities of destruction just well enough that it’s not significantly detrimental that they only actually show up here and there, and we more or less never see anything of note on their end.
Still, as a general rule, a villain with the qualities necessary to be great will only live up to that potential greatness if those qualities have their proper time to shine. I think an excellent example of this is Loghain, from Dragon Age 1. Now, Loghain is a very well-crafted individual, with easily understandable motives and paranoias guiding his villainous actions throughout DA1’s plot, who has many good qualities and good intentions that are interesting to learn of and make him a character with real depth, even if they do not outweigh his evil deeds. But, you’ll never know practically any of this throughout the course of Dragon Age 1 if you let him die during the Landsmeet (as, I would think, most players do, and as I do with my “true” playthroughs). It’s only if you choose to spare Loghain, and sacrifice Alistair’s friendship (and possibly life), that Loghain joins your party and has a chance through his dialogue with the main hero to become known, to explain himself and show his true nature and facets of personality. That’s why he makes such a good example of what I’m talking about. Play the game one way (the more common way, I should think), without knowledge of how it goes otherwise, and to you, Loghain is a fairly basic, unexceptional villain--not bad, has a little characterization by reputation, but ultimately there’s very little to him and he just moves the plot along as needed with his nefarious ways. But, play the game the other way, give Loghain the time on screen to capitalize on the depth of his character by conversing directly with the player repeatedly, and you suddenly have a very, very well-crafted villain who fulfills his role in a particularly human way, and fits interestingly into the setting of the game.
As another example, I have no doubt that Kreia (AKA Darth Traya) of Knights of the Old Republic 2 would have been a noteworthy villain either way, but compare her to the character of Ravel Puzzlewell of Planescape: Torment. Both are incredibly fascinating characters, both villains in a way that is ultimately for the greater good of the one they care most for (The Nameless One and The Exile) and even the greater good of the universe itself, in some ways. Both are masterfully wise and engrossing to listen to. Both are characters written by Chris Avellone, who is basically a living god of RPG writing. While certainly distinct characters from one another, there are certainly plenty of similarities between them. No one can say that Ravel Puzzlewell isn’t an incredible character and villain. Not without risk of getting punched in the face by me. But to me, Kreia far surpasses her.
The wisdom and insight of Kreia into the Force, people and their interactions with one another, the power of charisma and setting an example, the way one small act can snowball into a revolutionary action, the importance of striving for balance between the foolish old Jedi Order’s ways and the equally foolhardy ways of the Sith, the connection she forges with the protagonist, the way she manipulates people and destiny itself, the way she sets in motion the future of the galaxy so far that the effects of her actions are seen and felt even thousands of years later, in the actual Star Wars movies...it’s genuinely amazing, it really is. The thing is, you only truly understand all these facets of Kreia as a person and as a force of fate (and in some ways as the fate of the Force) is because you spend 4/5ths of the game in her company, listening to her words and watching her actions, and then that last fifth you spend pursuing her to try to stop her, so you’re sill seeing the effects of her machinations and encountering her as a force to be opposed. Kreia is a character of immense, utterly fascinating depth who has the time in the game to fully show that depth to us in all ways.
Ravel, on the other hand, is clearly a fascinating character as well, and might even be just as incredible a villain and person as Kreia, but in Planescape: Torment, we only ever meet a few of her shadows, hear a little of her actions, and meet her face to face a single time for a single conversation. And don’t get me wrong--the meeting with Ravel Puzzlewell is one of the many parts of Planescape: Torment that goes down in history as one of the RPG genre’s greatest moments. She only has one conversation, but it’s long, and it’s jam-packed full of intriguing character development, plot exposition, and great ideas and perspectives to think upon. As much as the writers do with it, though--and, again, they do a LOT with it--it still is only a single encounter for Ravel to be able to make herself known and understood. We can tell much about Ravel, be properly wowed by what a well-written, compelling character and villain she is, but even if she really does have the potential depth that she could match Kreia, she simply doesn’t have the time to fully explore that potential the way Kreia does, and so Kreia is by far the greater villain.
Giving a villain enough time on screen for the player to really understand them, even bond with them, just makes all the difference sometimes. Sure, we might have found Fou-Lu in Breath of Fire 4 to be an okay villain under normal circumstances, been able to at least take his word for it that the world he awoke to was populated by a pitiful, deceitful, and unworthy society of lower beings...but instead of just expecting us to accept Fou-Lu’s point of view on his word alone, Capcom took the time, had the good idea, to devote a significant amount of the game’s time to playing as Fou-Lu, showing us (instead of just telling us) his own journey and letting us see firsthand how the worst nature of people that he encountered shaped his opinion. It makes Fou-Lu not only a more complex and believable villain with a goal we can understand, but also a better counterpoint to the protagonist Ryu, who has on his journey experienced enough good and strong enough friendship that his point of view can justly be opposite.
And yeah, we would have been able to just go along with fighting an intangible evil force called Odio acting through some random corrupted knight named Orsted in Live-A-Live, but instead of just tossing Orsted at us and telling us “This is a villain, kill it,” Squaresoft gave Orsted a game chapter just as the rest of the cast got, wherein we see how Orsted became the fallen angel that we must oppose, how this innocent hero had everything, everything, cruelly taken from him by the dark side of humanity. By the time Orsted’s chapter concludes, he’s lost every good thing his life had, tangible and intangible, and it’s no wonder to the player that he gives himself over to evil.
And of course, there’s always Wylfred, of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. As the game’s protagonist, the one you’re with from start to finish, it comes as no surprise that he’s also one of the greatest RPG villains ever, since he’s getting the time and devotion to character development that a game’s main character typically does.
Hell, a proper amount of screen time can even work wonders for bad guys who are more like forces of nature than actual characters. You know, big monsters of legendary badness, that sort of thing. I mean, look at Lavos from Chrono Trigger. Yeah, he doesn’t have any real characterization, and there’s no reason to consider him even self-aware. But he’s kept relevant throughout the game’s course--every major arc the story has to do with Lavos, from seeking to stop Magus because of the mistaken belief that Magus created Lavos, to the seemingly unrelated battle for humanity in 65 Billion BC turning out to be the time that Lavos first arrived on the scene, to the story arc involving the magical kingdom of Zeal, which feeds upon Lavos’s power and goes too far with it. In as much capacity that Lavos can exist as a character, he is kept important to the story, on the characters’ and player’s minds, and extremely significant to the game’s world. There are few moments in this game where the threat of Lavos is not being directly shown, reference, or addressed, and that elevates Lavos as a big bad monster villain way above peers of his like, say, Giygas in Earthbound or the evil Genie in Dark Cloud 1.
Of course, don’t get me wrong. A lot of screen time is not ALWAYS needed for a great villain. I mean, Luca Blight from Suikoden 2 is one of the most iconic, monstrously evil villains I’ve seen in an RPG to date, and he only got a regular small amount of time on screen in the game. He simply had the attitude and actions to really sell it. I definitely think that Seymour from Final Fantasy 10 and The Master from Fallout 1 are very good villains, and they didn’t get an abnormal amount of time on screen (Seymour gets some, but not a large amount). In their cases, their reason for villainy (for Seymour, the belief that death is kinder than an existence in the perpetually ravaged Spira, and for The Master, the belief that humanity is incapable and unworthy of surviving in the hellish wasteland it has created for itself and should be replaced with a more unity-minded and strong race of super mutants) is given weight by the time the player spends in the environment. We see firsthand just how miserable and regularly lethal life is in Spira, where the greatest hope people have is simply for a couple years’ reprieve from their tormentor (and it’s bad enough that they’re willing to sacrifice human lives for that reprieve), and in Fallout 1 we see just how much the world has been ruined by humanity’s actions, how difficult it is to live in this world, just by traveling across its endless wastelands. And Greyghast in Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle gets essentially no screen time at all, because he's not even alive for the events of the game (sort of), yet he's close to being as monstrously evil and horrifying as Luca Blight, because his evil is seen after the fact in the protagonist Catherine, who has memory-nightmares and clearly bears the mental scars that serve as legacy to Greyghast's evil. In these latter 3 cases, the game’s setting, other characters, and story themselves are aspects of the villain, an indirect way of familiarizing ourselves with the villain’s motivation and goals, and that works more or less as well as actually learning these things through more exposure directly to the villain.
And of course, a poor villain is a poor villain, regardless of how long the camera’s fixated on him or her. If the villain you’ve made just sucks on principle alone, then extra time is not going to help. Mithos in Tales of Symphonia is a whiny, irrational, thumb-sucking little turd. The writers made a shitty villain when they made Mithos, one whose motivations are embarrassingly bad, one whose plans are stupid and silly. Namco obviously wanted him to be a standard kinda-tragic-because-he’s-misguided sort of villain, your usual JRPG bad guy, but they failed big time. Every damn thing this self-important, mewling little jackass says is annoying and idiotic, and his existence even detriments the other characters of the game, like how he makes a major point of Genis’s character development the dilemma of choosing between Mithos, a dude who Genis has known for maybe an hour, and the friends and family he’s known all his goddamn life. Ugh. Anyway, Mithos is a sucky villain no matter how you slice it, so giving him a lot of screen time does not actually improve anything. The time Mithos spends travelling with the heroes is only more time for him to prattle on and annoy us further. A villain has to actually be WORTH the time for it to do anything good for him/her.
However, as a general rule, I’d definitely say that more screen time for a villain is a very good thing. The best, most interesting, most compelling villains of RPGs are very often the ones that the audience has had time to really become familiar with and understand, and really, it just makes sense that a character playing such a crucial role for your story, providing much of, perhaps all, of the obstacles for your heroes to overcome, to get a significant level of characterization. Sadly, most games are so caught up with developing and portraying the heroes of the story (not that there’s anything wrong with that! Heaven forbid I give that impression; if anything, the major characters in RPGs STILL often don’t enough proper development) that they seem to forget the importance of the villain as a character, and use them only as a necessary plot tool. If only more games could follow the examples I’ve mentioned above.
Nonetheless, RPGs have had their share of really excellent villains, and those villains have always greatly enhanced the game they’re in. Fou-Lu was one of the comparatively few memorable parts of Breath of Fire 4, The Transcendent One provides a thematically perfect climax to the utterly incredible Planescape: Torment, and I dare say that Darth Traya is responsible for 50% of the overwhelming excellence of Knights of the Old Republic 2’s writing.
There’s all kinds of ways to make a villain great, memorable, iconic, a powerfully positive part of the plot. Sometimes it’s as simple as look, attitude, and generally foreboding menace. Darth Vader, for example, did eventually get some backstory in the second and third movies of the original Star Wars trilogy, but even as an entirely unexplained bad guy in the original Star Wars, he was an iconic villain. Sometimes it’s having the villain properly reflect the hero’s nature, the way most of Batman’s foes represent the dark side to aspects of his own personality, or likewise having the villain represent and/or reflect the themes and purpose of the story, like Cato in The Hunger Games. Sometimes it’s having a villain whose fall to evil you fully understand and can even sympathize with, such as Demona from Gargoyles. And so on and so forth--there’s a huge number of ways to really make a villain work well.
One thing that really, really helps, though, is something that not nearly enough RPGs seem to understand: giving the game’s major villain(s) enough screen time. Too often, the villain of an RPG is kept out of the player’s sight for almost the entirety of the game, only showing up to twirl his/her metaphorical mustache menacingly and prove his/her evil by doing naughty things for a few minutes before vanishing again. Sometimes it’s not even that much--the 10 Wise Men of Star Ocean 2 are the masterminds behind all the major problems of the game, yet if you don’t count the actual boss battles against them, I’m not sure all of them put together have even a full 15 minutes of screen time over the course of a 40+ hour game!
Some RPG villains manage to be pretty decent despite this lack of screen time. Saren from Mass Effect 1 is as much an “only shows up to remind you that he’s there and a bad guy” villain as the next guy, but he’s got just enough characterization during those moments and just enough of a tie to the theme of “struggling against impossible odds for freedom instead of giving in to slavery in order to survive” to come out in the end as a decent villain. The Sinistrals of Lufia 2, as another example, manage to pull off the role of epic deities of destruction just well enough that it’s not significantly detrimental that they only actually show up here and there, and we more or less never see anything of note on their end.
Still, as a general rule, a villain with the qualities necessary to be great will only live up to that potential greatness if those qualities have their proper time to shine. I think an excellent example of this is Loghain, from Dragon Age 1. Now, Loghain is a very well-crafted individual, with easily understandable motives and paranoias guiding his villainous actions throughout DA1’s plot, who has many good qualities and good intentions that are interesting to learn of and make him a character with real depth, even if they do not outweigh his evil deeds. But, you’ll never know practically any of this throughout the course of Dragon Age 1 if you let him die during the Landsmeet (as, I would think, most players do, and as I do with my “true” playthroughs). It’s only if you choose to spare Loghain, and sacrifice Alistair’s friendship (and possibly life), that Loghain joins your party and has a chance through his dialogue with the main hero to become known, to explain himself and show his true nature and facets of personality. That’s why he makes such a good example of what I’m talking about. Play the game one way (the more common way, I should think), without knowledge of how it goes otherwise, and to you, Loghain is a fairly basic, unexceptional villain--not bad, has a little characterization by reputation, but ultimately there’s very little to him and he just moves the plot along as needed with his nefarious ways. But, play the game the other way, give Loghain the time on screen to capitalize on the depth of his character by conversing directly with the player repeatedly, and you suddenly have a very, very well-crafted villain who fulfills his role in a particularly human way, and fits interestingly into the setting of the game.
As another example, I have no doubt that Kreia (AKA Darth Traya) of Knights of the Old Republic 2 would have been a noteworthy villain either way, but compare her to the character of Ravel Puzzlewell of Planescape: Torment. Both are incredibly fascinating characters, both villains in a way that is ultimately for the greater good of the one they care most for (The Nameless One and The Exile) and even the greater good of the universe itself, in some ways. Both are masterfully wise and engrossing to listen to. Both are characters written by Chris Avellone, who is basically a living god of RPG writing. While certainly distinct characters from one another, there are certainly plenty of similarities between them. No one can say that Ravel Puzzlewell isn’t an incredible character and villain. Not without risk of getting punched in the face by me. But to me, Kreia far surpasses her.
The wisdom and insight of Kreia into the Force, people and their interactions with one another, the power of charisma and setting an example, the way one small act can snowball into a revolutionary action, the importance of striving for balance between the foolish old Jedi Order’s ways and the equally foolhardy ways of the Sith, the connection she forges with the protagonist, the way she manipulates people and destiny itself, the way she sets in motion the future of the galaxy so far that the effects of her actions are seen and felt even thousands of years later, in the actual Star Wars movies...it’s genuinely amazing, it really is. The thing is, you only truly understand all these facets of Kreia as a person and as a force of fate (and in some ways as the fate of the Force) is because you spend 4/5ths of the game in her company, listening to her words and watching her actions, and then that last fifth you spend pursuing her to try to stop her, so you’re sill seeing the effects of her machinations and encountering her as a force to be opposed. Kreia is a character of immense, utterly fascinating depth who has the time in the game to fully show that depth to us in all ways.
Ravel, on the other hand, is clearly a fascinating character as well, and might even be just as incredible a villain and person as Kreia, but in Planescape: Torment, we only ever meet a few of her shadows, hear a little of her actions, and meet her face to face a single time for a single conversation. And don’t get me wrong--the meeting with Ravel Puzzlewell is one of the many parts of Planescape: Torment that goes down in history as one of the RPG genre’s greatest moments. She only has one conversation, but it’s long, and it’s jam-packed full of intriguing character development, plot exposition, and great ideas and perspectives to think upon. As much as the writers do with it, though--and, again, they do a LOT with it--it still is only a single encounter for Ravel to be able to make herself known and understood. We can tell much about Ravel, be properly wowed by what a well-written, compelling character and villain she is, but even if she really does have the potential depth that she could match Kreia, she simply doesn’t have the time to fully explore that potential the way Kreia does, and so Kreia is by far the greater villain.
Giving a villain enough time on screen for the player to really understand them, even bond with them, just makes all the difference sometimes. Sure, we might have found Fou-Lu in Breath of Fire 4 to be an okay villain under normal circumstances, been able to at least take his word for it that the world he awoke to was populated by a pitiful, deceitful, and unworthy society of lower beings...but instead of just expecting us to accept Fou-Lu’s point of view on his word alone, Capcom took the time, had the good idea, to devote a significant amount of the game’s time to playing as Fou-Lu, showing us (instead of just telling us) his own journey and letting us see firsthand how the worst nature of people that he encountered shaped his opinion. It makes Fou-Lu not only a more complex and believable villain with a goal we can understand, but also a better counterpoint to the protagonist Ryu, who has on his journey experienced enough good and strong enough friendship that his point of view can justly be opposite.
And yeah, we would have been able to just go along with fighting an intangible evil force called Odio acting through some random corrupted knight named Orsted in Live-A-Live, but instead of just tossing Orsted at us and telling us “This is a villain, kill it,” Squaresoft gave Orsted a game chapter just as the rest of the cast got, wherein we see how Orsted became the fallen angel that we must oppose, how this innocent hero had everything, everything, cruelly taken from him by the dark side of humanity. By the time Orsted’s chapter concludes, he’s lost every good thing his life had, tangible and intangible, and it’s no wonder to the player that he gives himself over to evil.
And of course, there’s always Wylfred, of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. As the game’s protagonist, the one you’re with from start to finish, it comes as no surprise that he’s also one of the greatest RPG villains ever, since he’s getting the time and devotion to character development that a game’s main character typically does.
Hell, a proper amount of screen time can even work wonders for bad guys who are more like forces of nature than actual characters. You know, big monsters of legendary badness, that sort of thing. I mean, look at Lavos from Chrono Trigger. Yeah, he doesn’t have any real characterization, and there’s no reason to consider him even self-aware. But he’s kept relevant throughout the game’s course--every major arc the story has to do with Lavos, from seeking to stop Magus because of the mistaken belief that Magus created Lavos, to the seemingly unrelated battle for humanity in 65 Billion BC turning out to be the time that Lavos first arrived on the scene, to the story arc involving the magical kingdom of Zeal, which feeds upon Lavos’s power and goes too far with it. In as much capacity that Lavos can exist as a character, he is kept important to the story, on the characters’ and player’s minds, and extremely significant to the game’s world. There are few moments in this game where the threat of Lavos is not being directly shown, reference, or addressed, and that elevates Lavos as a big bad monster villain way above peers of his like, say, Giygas in Earthbound or the evil Genie in Dark Cloud 1.
Of course, don’t get me wrong. A lot of screen time is not ALWAYS needed for a great villain. I mean, Luca Blight from Suikoden 2 is one of the most iconic, monstrously evil villains I’ve seen in an RPG to date, and he only got a regular small amount of time on screen in the game. He simply had the attitude and actions to really sell it. I definitely think that Seymour from Final Fantasy 10 and The Master from Fallout 1 are very good villains, and they didn’t get an abnormal amount of time on screen (Seymour gets some, but not a large amount). In their cases, their reason for villainy (for Seymour, the belief that death is kinder than an existence in the perpetually ravaged Spira, and for The Master, the belief that humanity is incapable and unworthy of surviving in the hellish wasteland it has created for itself and should be replaced with a more unity-minded and strong race of super mutants) is given weight by the time the player spends in the environment. We see firsthand just how miserable and regularly lethal life is in Spira, where the greatest hope people have is simply for a couple years’ reprieve from their tormentor (and it’s bad enough that they’re willing to sacrifice human lives for that reprieve), and in Fallout 1 we see just how much the world has been ruined by humanity’s actions, how difficult it is to live in this world, just by traveling across its endless wastelands. And Greyghast in Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle gets essentially no screen time at all, because he's not even alive for the events of the game (sort of), yet he's close to being as monstrously evil and horrifying as Luca Blight, because his evil is seen after the fact in the protagonist Catherine, who has memory-nightmares and clearly bears the mental scars that serve as legacy to Greyghast's evil. In these latter 3 cases, the game’s setting, other characters, and story themselves are aspects of the villain, an indirect way of familiarizing ourselves with the villain’s motivation and goals, and that works more or less as well as actually learning these things through more exposure directly to the villain.
And of course, a poor villain is a poor villain, regardless of how long the camera’s fixated on him or her. If the villain you’ve made just sucks on principle alone, then extra time is not going to help. Mithos in Tales of Symphonia is a whiny, irrational, thumb-sucking little turd. The writers made a shitty villain when they made Mithos, one whose motivations are embarrassingly bad, one whose plans are stupid and silly. Namco obviously wanted him to be a standard kinda-tragic-because-he’s-misguided sort of villain, your usual JRPG bad guy, but they failed big time. Every damn thing this self-important, mewling little jackass says is annoying and idiotic, and his existence even detriments the other characters of the game, like how he makes a major point of Genis’s character development the dilemma of choosing between Mithos, a dude who Genis has known for maybe an hour, and the friends and family he’s known all his goddamn life. Ugh. Anyway, Mithos is a sucky villain no matter how you slice it, so giving him a lot of screen time does not actually improve anything. The time Mithos spends travelling with the heroes is only more time for him to prattle on and annoy us further. A villain has to actually be WORTH the time for it to do anything good for him/her.
However, as a general rule, I’d definitely say that more screen time for a villain is a very good thing. The best, most interesting, most compelling villains of RPGs are very often the ones that the audience has had time to really become familiar with and understand, and really, it just makes sense that a character playing such a crucial role for your story, providing much of, perhaps all, of the obstacles for your heroes to overcome, to get a significant level of characterization. Sadly, most games are so caught up with developing and portraying the heroes of the story (not that there’s anything wrong with that! Heaven forbid I give that impression; if anything, the major characters in RPGs STILL often don’t enough proper development) that they seem to forget the importance of the villain as a character, and use them only as a necessary plot tool. If only more games could follow the examples I’ve mentioned above.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
The Shin Megami Tensei Series's Recent Neutral Figureheads
Doubtless I’m making mountains of molehills here, but I cannot help but feel some slight concern over what I’ve seen with a couple of the recent Shin Megami Tensei games’ characters who embody the Neutral path.
In case you’re unfamiliar with this, most Shin Megami Tensei games have multiple story paths and endings, and usually, those follow a formula of Law, Neutral, and Chaos. Law is the path of those who believe in absolute order and submission to rules and regulations (which is usually, in SMT, represented by God and the heavenly host of Christianity), Chaos is the path of those who believe in absolute freedom and that the strong should decide their own destiny (which is usually, in SMT, represented by Lucifer and a wide mythological array of demons), and Neutral is the path of those who believe that too much law or chaos is a bad thing and that a balance between them is important, that humans should decide their fate for themselves without the oversight of God or the temptations of Lucifer, and ultimately hold out hope that there can be a better tomorrow of our own design. That’s a very rough summation, but it will suffice. Not every SMT with multiple paths has a distinct Law or Chaos route, but even the titles that lack either of those routes will usually still have a path of Neutrality (or even more than one) analogous to the one I’ve just described, one which sees the flaws and benefits of both other possibilities and seeks a less extreme middle ground.
Usually, for each path there is a character in the game who is the iconic representation of that path’s philosophies. For example, in SMT Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha 2, it’s Dahn who stands for Chaos and Akane who stands for Order, and in SMT Strange Journey, Chaos, Law, and Neutral are represented by Jimenez, Zelenin, and Gore, respectively. And that’s where my problem today comes from: I find that, as representations of the Neutral path, Daichi and his followers in Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2, and Isabeau from Shin Megami Tensei 4, are disappointing, and since they’re some of the most recent Neutral Heroes, it troubles me that this could be the direction that the series is going to go in for this role.
The problem I have with Isabeau and Daichi and company is quite simple: they’re figureheads of indecision, not balance. Look at Daichi’s band in SMTDS2. Once you reach the point in SMTDS2 where the factions are starting to distinguish themselves from one another, the point at which we see that the major choice of the game is between a world of equality or meritocracy, Daichi begins to question whether either world is truly a good idea, pointing out the flaws of a society of both utter equality and complete meritocracy.* And that’s fine. I expect someone, particularly the Neutral figure of the game, to see the problems of the game’s major paths, and to seek out and offer a third, middle-of-the-road solution.
But that’s just it--Diachi never offers that solution, never has any idea of what it might be. I give him credit that he seems to be thinking about it and trying to come up with a solution, but when the day in the game comes where all must choose their sides, he’s got nothing. True Armegeddon is approaching fast at this point in the game, and the only way to prevent all existence from being reduced to utter nothingness, a white void of nonexistence, is to approach the entity causing this situation with a plan for recreating and reshaping the world. It’s Yamato’s plan to take this entity’s power and make a world where only those who have strength, intellect, or do something useful to society have any power. Ronaldo opposes Yamato, and intends to instead make a world where all people share all resources equally and harmoniously, where the strong protect the weak and all are valued exactly the same. At this point in the story, with only a day or so left before the last small piece of the world left is erased, everyone must make a decision on which side they will follow.
Except for Daichi. Still insisting that neither side is ideal, and that if a philosophy makes you fight against those important to you then it can’t be a good one,** Daichi, and the friends who then follow him, refuse to follow either Equality or Meritocracy. Okay, fine. So what’s his middle-ground solution?
“I dunno.”
Yes, that’s right. One day from the erasure of all existence, when all the lives that ever were and ever could be are on the line, when everything and everyone will be blanked out forever if a leader does not step forth and provide the blueprints of a new, ideal world, Daichi just wants to sit on his hands. Not only that, but he wants everyone ELSE to do so, too. Daichi insists that there must be some better way than to force friends to fight each other over which flawed world to enact, but when outright asked by Yamato what this alternative is, Daichi can produce no answer. Just...what the hell? It’s 24 hours to the end of existence, dude! If you don’t like either Yamato’s or Ronaldo’s option, fine, that’s your choice, but if you’re going to actively oppose them and encourage others to do the same, you’d sure as hell better have an alternative plan of action beyond “sit tight and hope things work out” in mind! Good God, I’m all for the “finding a better way” approach to things, it’s an RPG story staple, but if you don’t actually find that better way by Go Time, and the universe and all its history and future is on the line, that is not the time to cross your arms over your chest, pout, and whine, “I don’t wanna!”
Yes, if you do support Daichi, a different option besides Equality and Meritocracy does present itself, but that’s beside the point, honestly. The point is that when the chips were down and it was time to nut up or shut up, Daichi, and the characters who choose to follow him, had no plan, no idea, just the dislike of the options presented. The fact that another path does present itself eventually if the player chooses to follow Daichi feels more like a lucky break than some sort of reward for his commitment, a blind gamble with all of existence as the ante, that thankfully just happens to pay out.
Ugh, and Isabeau in SMT4? Pretty much just as bad. It’s not noticeable at first, but when you watch her for the entirety of the game, you come to realize that she is completely, utterly incapable of making a decision or picking a side at any time of significance during the story. The Passage of Ethics? Can’t make a decision on any of the questions; doesn’t even try--Jonathan and Walter are the ones who mull over the philosophical ramifications, and Isabeau just stays silent. When the time comes that Jonathan and Walter split, one to kill Lilith and the other to do her bidding? Isabeau can’t choose either and instead chooses to go fool around with some NPCs she’s met all of twice because she has no convictions about the matter at hand beyond a vague disapproval. Even once the protagonist, Flynn, has set his path at the end of the game to Neutral (assuming he doesn’t go Chaos, Law, or Nihilism), and Isabeau joins him as his only fellow who also sides neither with angels nor demons, she STILL doesn’t know what to do. Seriously, Flynn comes back to his own world, and Isabeau finds him, and says she’s going to hang out with him during this crisis of heaven and earth, and the reason she gives is just a flat-out confirmation that she doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know her priorities, doesn’t have any idea of how to do the fence-straddling act she wants to pull, just wants to dump it all on Flynn and have him do her thinking for her.
If Daichi’s bunch and Isabeau are any indication, it seems that Atlus has begun to mistake paralyzing and incredibly irresponsible indecision for the balance and self-determination that Neutrality is supposed to be known for. Yes, the first half of the Neutral path in SMT games is a denial of the extremes of the other paths. But that’s not ALL there is to it; there has to be an actual plan, conviction, even just the faintest wisp of an idea as to what should be done instead! The most proactive action either Daichi or Isabeau takes in the end is to inspire someone else (Flynn and what’s-his-name, SMTDS2 protagonist) to do the figuring-out-a-different-path legwork for them!
I mean, compare this to those characters who have previously represented the Neutral path. When the party splits apart in SMT Persona 3’s The Answer continuation on whether they should change the past for the sake of their late friend Minato, Aigis walks the middle road, refusing to make a decision on this matter. That seems like indecision, but we see soon after that Aigis was not refusing because she felt unable to decide--she’s refusing because she won’t make the decision until she knows more about what, exactly, it was that happened the day that Minato banished Nyx and was in turn doomed to be taken from his friends. Aigis is a character whose ethics have been clear by this point for quite some time, and she’s walking the Neutral path on the decision her friends are warring over with an actual plan in her mind, having thought of an important angle to the situation that no one else has. Like Isabeau and Daichi, she doesn’t know enough to comfortably decide the best course of action with their chance to change the past. But unlike Isabeau and Daichi, Aigis is proactive in her lack of understanding, and moves to correct that indecision, to give herself the knowledge she needs to make an educated choice. Isabeau and Daichi are people who don’t know something and sit there stagnating in that ignorance, and Aigis is a person who doesn’t know something and so goes out and finds the answer.
Gore in SMT Strange Journey? Once he’s back in the game and ready to take up the mantle of the Neutral Hero, he has an ideal and a plan for his path. Atsuro and Gin in SMT Devil Survivor 1? Each comes up with a way to put control of the city and world back in the hands of humanity, proactively dealing with the situation of Babel and the war between demons and angels. These are characters who have strong feelings of what is best for humanity, characters who make choices and actively seek ways to do what they think is right and act upon their convictions.
Even the unnamed Heroine of Shin Megami Tensei 1 is better than Daichi and Isabeau. The SMT1 Heroine’s only ethic and plan of action eventually is to stick with the protagonist and support him no matter what course of action he chooses, and yeah, that obviously ain’t a stunning example of a strong, iconic character, but at least she’s showing consistency and loyalty, at least she’s making the choice to follow the SMT1 protagonist. It’s not much better than Isabeau’s joining Flynn because she doesn’t know what to do with herself, but still, it IS a step up. A paid servant and a slave may perform the same tasks, but the fact that a servant has chosen to do so makes for a world of difference between them, and so I say that the decision to follow another and trust his judgment is different from being led because you cannot self-determine. And the SMT1 Heroine’s decision is, at least, thematically appropriate, since the SMT1 protagonist is essentially the avatar of humanity, the one who will decide what path humanity will follow, so you could see her putting her faith in him as putting her faith in humanity itself. And since Neutral is, y’know, about humanity standing on its own to make its own decisions and whatnot...I dunno, it sort of works, right? At any rate, since it’s a case of the Heroine actually choosing to put faith into someone, rather than Isabeau’s desperately turning to someone else to find her path for her, it’s a point in the Heroine’s favor over Isabeau.
Anyway, that’s all I really have to say about this. Being unsatisfied with the obvious paths offered, that’s a natural part of the SMT Neutral figurehead. But the point is for them to go from there to taking action, asserting their views, addressing their lack of knowledge, doing SOMETHING about the situation, taking SOME step toward the future. And that’s a level of proactivity that Isabeau and Daichi never reach; they just stall at the dissatisfaction stage. And that does concern me, because it’s a strike against their games’ storytelling value, and that strike has come both times against some of the series’s newest titles. I’m probably worrying over nothing, but nonetheless, I do hope that characters based entirely upon indecision and choking at the finish line aren’t going to become the norm for future SMT titles’ Neutral figures.
* At least, he tries to point out those flaws. If you’ve read my SMTDS2 rant on the supposed major flaw of the world of equality, you’ll remember that the major criticism of that path doesn’t hold any water whatsoever.
** Which is hypocritical idiocy, of course, since, if you follow Daichi, the protagonist will be leading a campaign against his friends in the other factions anyway.
In case you’re unfamiliar with this, most Shin Megami Tensei games have multiple story paths and endings, and usually, those follow a formula of Law, Neutral, and Chaos. Law is the path of those who believe in absolute order and submission to rules and regulations (which is usually, in SMT, represented by God and the heavenly host of Christianity), Chaos is the path of those who believe in absolute freedom and that the strong should decide their own destiny (which is usually, in SMT, represented by Lucifer and a wide mythological array of demons), and Neutral is the path of those who believe that too much law or chaos is a bad thing and that a balance between them is important, that humans should decide their fate for themselves without the oversight of God or the temptations of Lucifer, and ultimately hold out hope that there can be a better tomorrow of our own design. That’s a very rough summation, but it will suffice. Not every SMT with multiple paths has a distinct Law or Chaos route, but even the titles that lack either of those routes will usually still have a path of Neutrality (or even more than one) analogous to the one I’ve just described, one which sees the flaws and benefits of both other possibilities and seeks a less extreme middle ground.
Usually, for each path there is a character in the game who is the iconic representation of that path’s philosophies. For example, in SMT Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha 2, it’s Dahn who stands for Chaos and Akane who stands for Order, and in SMT Strange Journey, Chaos, Law, and Neutral are represented by Jimenez, Zelenin, and Gore, respectively. And that’s where my problem today comes from: I find that, as representations of the Neutral path, Daichi and his followers in Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2, and Isabeau from Shin Megami Tensei 4, are disappointing, and since they’re some of the most recent Neutral Heroes, it troubles me that this could be the direction that the series is going to go in for this role.
The problem I have with Isabeau and Daichi and company is quite simple: they’re figureheads of indecision, not balance. Look at Daichi’s band in SMTDS2. Once you reach the point in SMTDS2 where the factions are starting to distinguish themselves from one another, the point at which we see that the major choice of the game is between a world of equality or meritocracy, Daichi begins to question whether either world is truly a good idea, pointing out the flaws of a society of both utter equality and complete meritocracy.* And that’s fine. I expect someone, particularly the Neutral figure of the game, to see the problems of the game’s major paths, and to seek out and offer a third, middle-of-the-road solution.
But that’s just it--Diachi never offers that solution, never has any idea of what it might be. I give him credit that he seems to be thinking about it and trying to come up with a solution, but when the day in the game comes where all must choose their sides, he’s got nothing. True Armegeddon is approaching fast at this point in the game, and the only way to prevent all existence from being reduced to utter nothingness, a white void of nonexistence, is to approach the entity causing this situation with a plan for recreating and reshaping the world. It’s Yamato’s plan to take this entity’s power and make a world where only those who have strength, intellect, or do something useful to society have any power. Ronaldo opposes Yamato, and intends to instead make a world where all people share all resources equally and harmoniously, where the strong protect the weak and all are valued exactly the same. At this point in the story, with only a day or so left before the last small piece of the world left is erased, everyone must make a decision on which side they will follow.
Except for Daichi. Still insisting that neither side is ideal, and that if a philosophy makes you fight against those important to you then it can’t be a good one,** Daichi, and the friends who then follow him, refuse to follow either Equality or Meritocracy. Okay, fine. So what’s his middle-ground solution?
“I dunno.”
Yes, that’s right. One day from the erasure of all existence, when all the lives that ever were and ever could be are on the line, when everything and everyone will be blanked out forever if a leader does not step forth and provide the blueprints of a new, ideal world, Daichi just wants to sit on his hands. Not only that, but he wants everyone ELSE to do so, too. Daichi insists that there must be some better way than to force friends to fight each other over which flawed world to enact, but when outright asked by Yamato what this alternative is, Daichi can produce no answer. Just...what the hell? It’s 24 hours to the end of existence, dude! If you don’t like either Yamato’s or Ronaldo’s option, fine, that’s your choice, but if you’re going to actively oppose them and encourage others to do the same, you’d sure as hell better have an alternative plan of action beyond “sit tight and hope things work out” in mind! Good God, I’m all for the “finding a better way” approach to things, it’s an RPG story staple, but if you don’t actually find that better way by Go Time, and the universe and all its history and future is on the line, that is not the time to cross your arms over your chest, pout, and whine, “I don’t wanna!”
Yes, if you do support Daichi, a different option besides Equality and Meritocracy does present itself, but that’s beside the point, honestly. The point is that when the chips were down and it was time to nut up or shut up, Daichi, and the characters who choose to follow him, had no plan, no idea, just the dislike of the options presented. The fact that another path does present itself eventually if the player chooses to follow Daichi feels more like a lucky break than some sort of reward for his commitment, a blind gamble with all of existence as the ante, that thankfully just happens to pay out.
Ugh, and Isabeau in SMT4? Pretty much just as bad. It’s not noticeable at first, but when you watch her for the entirety of the game, you come to realize that she is completely, utterly incapable of making a decision or picking a side at any time of significance during the story. The Passage of Ethics? Can’t make a decision on any of the questions; doesn’t even try--Jonathan and Walter are the ones who mull over the philosophical ramifications, and Isabeau just stays silent. When the time comes that Jonathan and Walter split, one to kill Lilith and the other to do her bidding? Isabeau can’t choose either and instead chooses to go fool around with some NPCs she’s met all of twice because she has no convictions about the matter at hand beyond a vague disapproval. Even once the protagonist, Flynn, has set his path at the end of the game to Neutral (assuming he doesn’t go Chaos, Law, or Nihilism), and Isabeau joins him as his only fellow who also sides neither with angels nor demons, she STILL doesn’t know what to do. Seriously, Flynn comes back to his own world, and Isabeau finds him, and says she’s going to hang out with him during this crisis of heaven and earth, and the reason she gives is just a flat-out confirmation that she doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know her priorities, doesn’t have any idea of how to do the fence-straddling act she wants to pull, just wants to dump it all on Flynn and have him do her thinking for her.
If Daichi’s bunch and Isabeau are any indication, it seems that Atlus has begun to mistake paralyzing and incredibly irresponsible indecision for the balance and self-determination that Neutrality is supposed to be known for. Yes, the first half of the Neutral path in SMT games is a denial of the extremes of the other paths. But that’s not ALL there is to it; there has to be an actual plan, conviction, even just the faintest wisp of an idea as to what should be done instead! The most proactive action either Daichi or Isabeau takes in the end is to inspire someone else (Flynn and what’s-his-name, SMTDS2 protagonist) to do the figuring-out-a-different-path legwork for them!
I mean, compare this to those characters who have previously represented the Neutral path. When the party splits apart in SMT Persona 3’s The Answer continuation on whether they should change the past for the sake of their late friend Minato, Aigis walks the middle road, refusing to make a decision on this matter. That seems like indecision, but we see soon after that Aigis was not refusing because she felt unable to decide--she’s refusing because she won’t make the decision until she knows more about what, exactly, it was that happened the day that Minato banished Nyx and was in turn doomed to be taken from his friends. Aigis is a character whose ethics have been clear by this point for quite some time, and she’s walking the Neutral path on the decision her friends are warring over with an actual plan in her mind, having thought of an important angle to the situation that no one else has. Like Isabeau and Daichi, she doesn’t know enough to comfortably decide the best course of action with their chance to change the past. But unlike Isabeau and Daichi, Aigis is proactive in her lack of understanding, and moves to correct that indecision, to give herself the knowledge she needs to make an educated choice. Isabeau and Daichi are people who don’t know something and sit there stagnating in that ignorance, and Aigis is a person who doesn’t know something and so goes out and finds the answer.
Gore in SMT Strange Journey? Once he’s back in the game and ready to take up the mantle of the Neutral Hero, he has an ideal and a plan for his path. Atsuro and Gin in SMT Devil Survivor 1? Each comes up with a way to put control of the city and world back in the hands of humanity, proactively dealing with the situation of Babel and the war between demons and angels. These are characters who have strong feelings of what is best for humanity, characters who make choices and actively seek ways to do what they think is right and act upon their convictions.
Even the unnamed Heroine of Shin Megami Tensei 1 is better than Daichi and Isabeau. The SMT1 Heroine’s only ethic and plan of action eventually is to stick with the protagonist and support him no matter what course of action he chooses, and yeah, that obviously ain’t a stunning example of a strong, iconic character, but at least she’s showing consistency and loyalty, at least she’s making the choice to follow the SMT1 protagonist. It’s not much better than Isabeau’s joining Flynn because she doesn’t know what to do with herself, but still, it IS a step up. A paid servant and a slave may perform the same tasks, but the fact that a servant has chosen to do so makes for a world of difference between them, and so I say that the decision to follow another and trust his judgment is different from being led because you cannot self-determine. And the SMT1 Heroine’s decision is, at least, thematically appropriate, since the SMT1 protagonist is essentially the avatar of humanity, the one who will decide what path humanity will follow, so you could see her putting her faith in him as putting her faith in humanity itself. And since Neutral is, y’know, about humanity standing on its own to make its own decisions and whatnot...I dunno, it sort of works, right? At any rate, since it’s a case of the Heroine actually choosing to put faith into someone, rather than Isabeau’s desperately turning to someone else to find her path for her, it’s a point in the Heroine’s favor over Isabeau.
Anyway, that’s all I really have to say about this. Being unsatisfied with the obvious paths offered, that’s a natural part of the SMT Neutral figurehead. But the point is for them to go from there to taking action, asserting their views, addressing their lack of knowledge, doing SOMETHING about the situation, taking SOME step toward the future. And that’s a level of proactivity that Isabeau and Daichi never reach; they just stall at the dissatisfaction stage. And that does concern me, because it’s a strike against their games’ storytelling value, and that strike has come both times against some of the series’s newest titles. I’m probably worrying over nothing, but nonetheless, I do hope that characters based entirely upon indecision and choking at the finish line aren’t going to become the norm for future SMT titles’ Neutral figures.
* At least, he tries to point out those flaws. If you’ve read my SMTDS2 rant on the supposed major flaw of the world of equality, you’ll remember that the major criticism of that path doesn’t hold any water whatsoever.
** Which is hypocritical idiocy, of course, since, if you follow Daichi, the protagonist will be leading a campaign against his friends in the other factions anyway.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Friday, April 18, 2014
Lunar: Dragon Song's Gameplay
I warn you right now: if you’ve read any reviews for Lunar: Dragon Song, then this entire rant is probably not going to tread any new ground. Everyone has the same complaints about this title’s gameplay, and this is just me adding one more indistinguishable log on that fire. But if you don’t have anything better to do--and let’s face it, if you’re actually here, with the intent to read the nonsense that I incessantly chatter on about, then chances must already be good that you’re pretty hard up for entertainment at the moment--then read on.
Lunar: Dragon Song. It is nothing short of legendary for how horrible it is to play. This game does so many things wrong with its design, making itself utterly unplayable at every turn in so many ways, that I actually think it was designed by a super villain. Really, there cannot be any way for this many completely unique gameplay problems to have come about without malicious intent; this game is a work of an evil, twisted creative genius. You almost have to admire it, as a work of art made to commemorate frustration and human suffering. I’m 30 years old now, so I don’t actually have the time left to me on Earth to really go into every part of why this game is virtually unplayable, but here’s a quick Who’s Who list of the more horrible design flaws:
Experience OR Items After Battle: Yeah, you don’t get both. Items are the only reliable source of income in this game, and the badly designed challenge curve guarantees that you’re eventually going to really, really need every edge you can get, which means that after a certain point in the game you HAVE to be buying every new piece of armor you come across. That means twice as much time wasted grinding against enemies, once for EXP, once for the items you’ll need to make money. Since enemies level with you, you might be thinking that you COULD try for the money alone and do a low-level run of the game, but…
Frustrating Challenge Curve: The game gets too hard, too fast, and never lets up; every dungeon is a war of attrition with the player. This makes it more or less impossible to do a low-level run of the game. Yes, enemies do level with you, so if your levels are lower then they’ll be likewise less powerful, but that isn’t enough--even low-leveled, the enemies’ power will eventually outpace updated armor and weapons’ effectiveness, and you’ll be unable to defeat bosses without gaining levels. So what you have here is a game where gaining levels is almost meaningless because your enemies are gaining them with you so each level only provides you with marginal superiority, but also a game where you also can’t take advantage of low enemy levels past a certain point, either.
Enemies Can Break Your Equipment: There are a fair number of enemies in this game that can break your equipment with their regular attacks. Yeah. That’s annoying in any game, but consider what I’ve mentioned so far. First of all, that you have to spend time battling enemies over and over just for money alone. So if a random enemy attack means that you’re forced to replace that piece of armor you just bought for tens of thousands, you’d best grab yourself a Snickers, because you’re not going anywhere for a while. And then consider what I’ve mentioned about the difficulty curve. After a while, you’re not going to be able to do diddly-squat damage to enemies if you don’t have the best possible weaponry, so if an enemy happens by chance to break your main character’s weapon, that’s really just too fucking bad for you. You’re not going forward until you replace that weapon, unless you want your already tediously long and overabundant battles to take 5x longer. Oh, and if the piece of equipment that breaks happens to be one you got from a chest that’s better than any other equipment you can currently buy? Tough shit.
Painfully Slow Walking Speed, But Running Costs HP: The pace of your characters when walking is best described as “plodding,” but your characters lose HP when they run. Want to get anywhere in a timely fashion in this game? You’d better stock up on those healing items. But oh wait, you have to waste twice as much time fighting enemies for the money you’ll need for those healing items, won’t you? So either way you’re going to be wasting that much more time. Awesome.
Jian’s the Only Useful Attacker: Jian the protagonist does more damage in one of his attacks than any other character does in one of theirs. This wouldn’t be a big deal (pretty standard for RPGs, really), except that Jian also does 3 attacks for every round, while everyone else just does your standard 1 attack. This means early on that Jian is overpowered and the rest of the party are just some fumbling, nearly useless support. Later on, when the game figures out what’s going on, this means that Jian is just 1 competent fighter against groups of enemies designed to challenge a full party of competent fighters, and the rest of the party are still just some fumbling, nearly useless support. Not helping this problem is my number 1 complaint, which is:
Oh My God Are You Serious, You Can’t Target Specific Enemies!?: Self-explanatory, really. When you tell your party to attack, they randomly select their target from the enemy party. Did Jian spend his turn attacking one enemy, whittling its HP down to nearly nothing? You can’t tell your weak supporting characters to finish it off, so more than likely they’ll just ineffectively attack something else (probably a weak enemy that Jian could 1-shot-kill a minute from now anyway), and Jian will waste his next turn finishing off the weakened enemy instead of being free to go to the next. Remember when I said that every dungeon is a war of attrition in this game? That’s because in every single battle, enemies get several more turns to attack you than they should due to the game’s random AI having no concept of attack strategy. You simply watch, powerless to do anything, each battle dragging on that much longer and costing that much more HP. Unbelievable. What is even the point of having a battle system at all if you only half control it? You have about as much say in what happens in battle as you would if you were watching someone play it on Youtube.
There’s plenty of other terrible things that make playing this game agonizing, like very low starting MP values, MP restoration items not being able to be purchased, weird map object-collision detection, the fact that money-making delivery sidequests often have the name of the supposed receiver and the name of the actual receiver not match up due to translation errors, the fact that a lot of your money comes from stupid delivery quests to begin with, and so much more, but the ones above are, I think, most of the really big ones.
Now you look at those, and you tell me that a game this perfectly designed to suck, where its gameplay flaws all coordinate with one another to strengthen each one’s dysfunction, was not MEANT to be as painful a playing experience as possible. Sorry to get all Intelligent Design on you, but there is no way something this horrible happened accidentally.
Lunar: Dragon Song. It is nothing short of legendary for how horrible it is to play. This game does so many things wrong with its design, making itself utterly unplayable at every turn in so many ways, that I actually think it was designed by a super villain. Really, there cannot be any way for this many completely unique gameplay problems to have come about without malicious intent; this game is a work of an evil, twisted creative genius. You almost have to admire it, as a work of art made to commemorate frustration and human suffering. I’m 30 years old now, so I don’t actually have the time left to me on Earth to really go into every part of why this game is virtually unplayable, but here’s a quick Who’s Who list of the more horrible design flaws:
Experience OR Items After Battle: Yeah, you don’t get both. Items are the only reliable source of income in this game, and the badly designed challenge curve guarantees that you’re eventually going to really, really need every edge you can get, which means that after a certain point in the game you HAVE to be buying every new piece of armor you come across. That means twice as much time wasted grinding against enemies, once for EXP, once for the items you’ll need to make money. Since enemies level with you, you might be thinking that you COULD try for the money alone and do a low-level run of the game, but…
Frustrating Challenge Curve: The game gets too hard, too fast, and never lets up; every dungeon is a war of attrition with the player. This makes it more or less impossible to do a low-level run of the game. Yes, enemies do level with you, so if your levels are lower then they’ll be likewise less powerful, but that isn’t enough--even low-leveled, the enemies’ power will eventually outpace updated armor and weapons’ effectiveness, and you’ll be unable to defeat bosses without gaining levels. So what you have here is a game where gaining levels is almost meaningless because your enemies are gaining them with you so each level only provides you with marginal superiority, but also a game where you also can’t take advantage of low enemy levels past a certain point, either.
Enemies Can Break Your Equipment: There are a fair number of enemies in this game that can break your equipment with their regular attacks. Yeah. That’s annoying in any game, but consider what I’ve mentioned so far. First of all, that you have to spend time battling enemies over and over just for money alone. So if a random enemy attack means that you’re forced to replace that piece of armor you just bought for tens of thousands, you’d best grab yourself a Snickers, because you’re not going anywhere for a while. And then consider what I’ve mentioned about the difficulty curve. After a while, you’re not going to be able to do diddly-squat damage to enemies if you don’t have the best possible weaponry, so if an enemy happens by chance to break your main character’s weapon, that’s really just too fucking bad for you. You’re not going forward until you replace that weapon, unless you want your already tediously long and overabundant battles to take 5x longer. Oh, and if the piece of equipment that breaks happens to be one you got from a chest that’s better than any other equipment you can currently buy? Tough shit.
Painfully Slow Walking Speed, But Running Costs HP: The pace of your characters when walking is best described as “plodding,” but your characters lose HP when they run. Want to get anywhere in a timely fashion in this game? You’d better stock up on those healing items. But oh wait, you have to waste twice as much time fighting enemies for the money you’ll need for those healing items, won’t you? So either way you’re going to be wasting that much more time. Awesome.
Jian’s the Only Useful Attacker: Jian the protagonist does more damage in one of his attacks than any other character does in one of theirs. This wouldn’t be a big deal (pretty standard for RPGs, really), except that Jian also does 3 attacks for every round, while everyone else just does your standard 1 attack. This means early on that Jian is overpowered and the rest of the party are just some fumbling, nearly useless support. Later on, when the game figures out what’s going on, this means that Jian is just 1 competent fighter against groups of enemies designed to challenge a full party of competent fighters, and the rest of the party are still just some fumbling, nearly useless support. Not helping this problem is my number 1 complaint, which is:
Oh My God Are You Serious, You Can’t Target Specific Enemies!?: Self-explanatory, really. When you tell your party to attack, they randomly select their target from the enemy party. Did Jian spend his turn attacking one enemy, whittling its HP down to nearly nothing? You can’t tell your weak supporting characters to finish it off, so more than likely they’ll just ineffectively attack something else (probably a weak enemy that Jian could 1-shot-kill a minute from now anyway), and Jian will waste his next turn finishing off the weakened enemy instead of being free to go to the next. Remember when I said that every dungeon is a war of attrition in this game? That’s because in every single battle, enemies get several more turns to attack you than they should due to the game’s random AI having no concept of attack strategy. You simply watch, powerless to do anything, each battle dragging on that much longer and costing that much more HP. Unbelievable. What is even the point of having a battle system at all if you only half control it? You have about as much say in what happens in battle as you would if you were watching someone play it on Youtube.
There’s plenty of other terrible things that make playing this game agonizing, like very low starting MP values, MP restoration items not being able to be purchased, weird map object-collision detection, the fact that money-making delivery sidequests often have the name of the supposed receiver and the name of the actual receiver not match up due to translation errors, the fact that a lot of your money comes from stupid delivery quests to begin with, and so much more, but the ones above are, I think, most of the really big ones.
Now you look at those, and you tell me that a game this perfectly designed to suck, where its gameplay flaws all coordinate with one another to strengthen each one’s dysfunction, was not MEANT to be as painful a playing experience as possible. Sorry to get all Intelligent Design on you, but there is no way something this horrible happened accidentally.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Shin Megami Tensei 4-1's Downloadable Content
3DS RPG DLC! Besides being way too many abbreviations all at once, it’s a subject I haven’t touched on yet. This is partially because most add-on content I’ve seen so far has been for PC games, which traditionally are more used to DLC and expansions and so on than Japanese RPGs are. This is also partially because there was not one single bit of Dragon Quest 9’s DLC that was even worth ranting about, so I didn’t bother. Fucking Dragon Quest.
Anyway. This will be the first time I’ve seen an add-on for a Shin Megami Tensei title (unless you count The Answer for SMT Persona 3, which does sort of count, but also sort of doesn’t since it was less an add-on than it was an expansion that you’d have to re-purchase the entire game for). Let’s see how Atlus does. I can only hope they’ll outperform some of the games I’ve seen in the past.
As usual, I’m not paying any attention to anything that doesn’t have any particular story content. You can just assume that the DLC packages for different armors and Experience/Money/App Point grinding are wastes of money.
Clipped Wings 1 and 2: There’s no point in separating these 2 DLCs, they’re each half of a whole. Uh...nope. Nope. Don’t like’em. They’re each about $2.50, which is not very much these days, but even then, you are not getting your money’s worth. All they are is a tiny bit of plot dialogue, and a series of fights against the Archangels (Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael). They’ll take you 10 minutes each at the very most to complete, assuming you’re victorious--and I don’t think it’s fair to count it if you have a longer experience just because you lose a few times. As fights go, they’re fine, but it’s not like the game isn’t already filled with plenty of decently challenging fights already.
The storyline for the DLC is mildly interesting, but too light and too lacking explanation. Oh, to be sure, I appreciate that this DLC provides us with some information on how 3 of the 4 Archangels were captured prior to SMT4’s opening, and that it provides us with some background for Mastema’s role in the game. But that information is rushed, and frankly, I’m not sure that randomly throwing time travel causality loops in was really the best way to handle this scenario. While the passage of time in SMT4’s a little difficult to get a firm grasp of at times due to inadequately explained differences in time flow between Tokyo and the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, the game hadn’t had any time travel until this moment, so it feels forced and out of place.
Plus, this DLC introduces a plot hole (besides the standard logical paradoxes of time travel to the past): if protagonist Flynn did indeed go back in time to defeat the Archangels and allow Mastema to capture them, why in the world does Gabby not recognize him during the game proper’s course of events? Once the other 3 are freed, why don’t they recognize Flynn, for that matter? Yeah, you can argue that they realize that the past events are set in stone and they shouldn’t attack him in the present before he’s traveled back to set the past events in motion, but even accepting that answer, it makes no sense for Gabby, or any of them, to trust Flynn as much as she does and they do. She charges him and his companions specifically with rescuing the other 3 Archangels in the middle of the game, and if Flynn follows the Law path, all of them will completely trust him to fight Lucifer alongside them. Do they somehow think he isn’t the same guy as from back in the past? Even if they’re not sure, wouldn’t they say something, ask something, do some sort of investigation or take some kind of precautionary measures?
There is 1 criticism I’ve heard for this DLC that I don’t share in, though. Some people have complained that since the Archangels are significant parts of the main storyline, they should have been fought in the game proper, not as optional add-on bosses. I actually don’t agree with this criticism. I mean, taken at face value, it’s logical, but the plot of the game kind of makes it hard to make that happen. By the time you reach the point of the plot where you may actually be opposing the forces of God, the Archangels have already fused with Jonathan to form Merkabah. Until then, there’s no reason they would attack Flynn, and at that point, they’re no longer individually in the picture. Still, that’s just one small thing that isn’t a problem with this DLC. The facts remain that it has too little story and play time, the story isn’t done well, and it is WAY overpriced for what it is. Considering how little you get from this DLC, I’d say paying even a single dollar would have been an unfair price.
Ancient One of the Sun: This one is a little better. It actually relates to the main plot of the game without mucking about with time travel (granted, it uses dimension travel, which isn’t much better, but at least that’s an established part of the game already), and furthers one of the main plot’s story arcs. In this DLC, you’re brought back to Blasted Tokyo to defend its citizens from God’s wrath once more, this time by defeating an actual piece of God, the Ancient of Days. Essentially, it’s pretty similar to Clipped Wings in that it’s short, doesn’t have an actual gameplay area, and is just a battle with some dialogue before and after it, but at least it seems somewhat relevant to the game. It develops a little further the fate of the Blasted Tokyo survivors, and ends with a little better closure for them, with uncertainty but hope that they’ll be able to greet the new culture of Genesis and live with them peacefully. I kind of wish poor Kiyoharu didn’t have to be disillusioned during the battle, since he would probably have been able to quite happily embrace these new people of God and easily maintain his fanatical faith, but ah well. So is this DLC worth it? Well...more than Clipped Wings was, but overall, no. Again, even if $2.50 isn’t much to spend, we’re talking about 15 to 30 minutes of game time total. To me, a dollar should equal at least 1 hour of play time in a DLC. If Atlus lowers the price of this one to 50 cents, I’ll buy it, but I’m sure as hell not paying any more for it.
The Eternal Youth: Meh. Since Sanat kind of comes out of nowhere with no background to precede him, this DLC, which is again just some dialogue, a fight, and final dialogue, feels contrived and doesn’t particularly draw one in. It’s nice to help Infernal Tokyo’s Akira again, I guess, but it doesn’t feel like any particular step has been taken by the end of it. I guess the idea is that now that Akira has supposedly beaten Sanat, all the demons think he’s hot shit and awesome and all that, but why the hell didn’t they already think that? The events of the main game have Akira taking the credit for beating Kenji, the guy who was previously the strongest individual in Infernal Tokyo, so this is one of those annoying cases of characters forgetting what they’ve learned solely so they can re-learn it. Sanat’s story and powers and role and motives and whatnot are too vague and mysterious, Akira’s side of things is too much a repetition of before, and nothing seems to have really been accomplished by the DLC’s end. Even if this one were long enough that the cost ($2.50, again) were tolerable, it wouldn’t be worth it. Pass.
For the Past...For the Future: Now see, this is the kind of DLC I hate the very, very most. In this DLC, you’re transported once again back in time, this time to the day that the land above Tokyo was created that would later be the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado. You get a bit of dialogue beforehand, which explains a fair bit about several important parts of SMT4’s past history, including the disaster whose results separated the 3 dimensions we see during SMT4 (the home dimension, Blasted Tokyo, and Infernal Tokyo), a little background for the Yamato Reactor, how things went down with Masakado, of course part of the origin story of the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, and we even see that the whole day of fate relates very strongly to similar cataclysms in other SMT games (the missile strike is just like the one from SMT1, and the conflict of angels and demons and humans in the streets of Tokyo is similar to the events of SMT Devil Survivor 1), which is a nice touch. Admittedly, Masakado is stupidly overpowered during your fight with him which doesn’t really fit the SMT lore,* and this DLC once again brings in time travel where it’s not wanted and REALLY opens a can of worms as far as cyclical event time paradoxes, but overall, this DLC has a lot of really good, really critical backstory for the setting and history of SMT4.
And that’s the damn problem. Why the HELL is such a critical part of understanding how events led to the current situation of SMT4 a Downloadable Content package!? There is just absolutely no denying that this is important, story-relevant narrative that absolutely without a shadow of a doubt should have been in the main game! This is important backstory that is just outright missing from the game, and whose absence is most definitely felt! At most the main game gives you vague hints and impressions of the things this DLC shows us, things that are incredibly relevant to understanding and appreciating the major plot events of Shin Megami Tensei 4! Holy hyper hell in a hamper, I hate it when a game has content in its add-on that obviously belonged in the main game. You wanna sell me Downloadable Content, then give me additional, unrelated aventures, give me character side stories, give me special epilogues and ending adjustments, give me expanded stories on minor things I’ve heard about in the game...but you sure as hell better not give me significant parts of the main plot that you just messily ripped from the game so you could charge me more money! If I want to understand the primary plot, the core story, of a game to the fullest possible extent, I should NOT have to pay extra! I paid for a full, complete story when I purchased the game, Goddammit!
I do not take kindly to being swindled, and that’s what this DLC is. At $3 for 20 to 35 minutes of play time, it’s not worth it anyways, but since its content is relevant enough to the game proper that keeping it separate is obviously a ploy to take advantage of you to make a quick buck, I wouldn’t pay for this thing if it only cost a single cent. Definitely go find a Let’s Play video of this add-on, because it’s certainly content that you should experience if you’re playing SMT4, but don’t waste your money supporting this kind of disingenuous scam. Shame on you, Atlus. I thought you were better human beings than Bioware. Perhaps I misjudged you.
So what’s the verdict for my first true foray into JRPG add-ons? Not good. Only a couple of SMT4’s DLCs have any plot content worth your time, they’re all way overpriced for the piddly amount of game time they add, and the last one is a classic example of how disgustingly dishonest the add-on business can be. If Atlus does another set of DLCs with its next SMT game, I sure hope they’re better than this.
* He’s supposed to be the ultimate demon of Neutrality in the SMT series, but as such he is, power-wise, way below the high iconic demons of Chaos and Law. That’s how it should be, because Neutrality is supposed to be all about humans finding their own way through their own strength, so it makes sense thematically for Masakado to be less powerful than Lucifer, Merkabah, Ancient of Days, even perhaps the Archangels, because that way the hero who chooses the path of Neutrality must compensate for the lesser power he receives by using his own abilities to see himself through--a human being’s abilities. Making Masakado into clearly the most powerful boss in the entire game just tosses all that thematic consistency out the window.
Anyway. This will be the first time I’ve seen an add-on for a Shin Megami Tensei title (unless you count The Answer for SMT Persona 3, which does sort of count, but also sort of doesn’t since it was less an add-on than it was an expansion that you’d have to re-purchase the entire game for). Let’s see how Atlus does. I can only hope they’ll outperform some of the games I’ve seen in the past.
As usual, I’m not paying any attention to anything that doesn’t have any particular story content. You can just assume that the DLC packages for different armors and Experience/Money/App Point grinding are wastes of money.
Clipped Wings 1 and 2: There’s no point in separating these 2 DLCs, they’re each half of a whole. Uh...nope. Nope. Don’t like’em. They’re each about $2.50, which is not very much these days, but even then, you are not getting your money’s worth. All they are is a tiny bit of plot dialogue, and a series of fights against the Archangels (Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael). They’ll take you 10 minutes each at the very most to complete, assuming you’re victorious--and I don’t think it’s fair to count it if you have a longer experience just because you lose a few times. As fights go, they’re fine, but it’s not like the game isn’t already filled with plenty of decently challenging fights already.
The storyline for the DLC is mildly interesting, but too light and too lacking explanation. Oh, to be sure, I appreciate that this DLC provides us with some information on how 3 of the 4 Archangels were captured prior to SMT4’s opening, and that it provides us with some background for Mastema’s role in the game. But that information is rushed, and frankly, I’m not sure that randomly throwing time travel causality loops in was really the best way to handle this scenario. While the passage of time in SMT4’s a little difficult to get a firm grasp of at times due to inadequately explained differences in time flow between Tokyo and the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, the game hadn’t had any time travel until this moment, so it feels forced and out of place.
Plus, this DLC introduces a plot hole (besides the standard logical paradoxes of time travel to the past): if protagonist Flynn did indeed go back in time to defeat the Archangels and allow Mastema to capture them, why in the world does Gabby not recognize him during the game proper’s course of events? Once the other 3 are freed, why don’t they recognize Flynn, for that matter? Yeah, you can argue that they realize that the past events are set in stone and they shouldn’t attack him in the present before he’s traveled back to set the past events in motion, but even accepting that answer, it makes no sense for Gabby, or any of them, to trust Flynn as much as she does and they do. She charges him and his companions specifically with rescuing the other 3 Archangels in the middle of the game, and if Flynn follows the Law path, all of them will completely trust him to fight Lucifer alongside them. Do they somehow think he isn’t the same guy as from back in the past? Even if they’re not sure, wouldn’t they say something, ask something, do some sort of investigation or take some kind of precautionary measures?
There is 1 criticism I’ve heard for this DLC that I don’t share in, though. Some people have complained that since the Archangels are significant parts of the main storyline, they should have been fought in the game proper, not as optional add-on bosses. I actually don’t agree with this criticism. I mean, taken at face value, it’s logical, but the plot of the game kind of makes it hard to make that happen. By the time you reach the point of the plot where you may actually be opposing the forces of God, the Archangels have already fused with Jonathan to form Merkabah. Until then, there’s no reason they would attack Flynn, and at that point, they’re no longer individually in the picture. Still, that’s just one small thing that isn’t a problem with this DLC. The facts remain that it has too little story and play time, the story isn’t done well, and it is WAY overpriced for what it is. Considering how little you get from this DLC, I’d say paying even a single dollar would have been an unfair price.
Ancient One of the Sun: This one is a little better. It actually relates to the main plot of the game without mucking about with time travel (granted, it uses dimension travel, which isn’t much better, but at least that’s an established part of the game already), and furthers one of the main plot’s story arcs. In this DLC, you’re brought back to Blasted Tokyo to defend its citizens from God’s wrath once more, this time by defeating an actual piece of God, the Ancient of Days. Essentially, it’s pretty similar to Clipped Wings in that it’s short, doesn’t have an actual gameplay area, and is just a battle with some dialogue before and after it, but at least it seems somewhat relevant to the game. It develops a little further the fate of the Blasted Tokyo survivors, and ends with a little better closure for them, with uncertainty but hope that they’ll be able to greet the new culture of Genesis and live with them peacefully. I kind of wish poor Kiyoharu didn’t have to be disillusioned during the battle, since he would probably have been able to quite happily embrace these new people of God and easily maintain his fanatical faith, but ah well. So is this DLC worth it? Well...more than Clipped Wings was, but overall, no. Again, even if $2.50 isn’t much to spend, we’re talking about 15 to 30 minutes of game time total. To me, a dollar should equal at least 1 hour of play time in a DLC. If Atlus lowers the price of this one to 50 cents, I’ll buy it, but I’m sure as hell not paying any more for it.
The Eternal Youth: Meh. Since Sanat kind of comes out of nowhere with no background to precede him, this DLC, which is again just some dialogue, a fight, and final dialogue, feels contrived and doesn’t particularly draw one in. It’s nice to help Infernal Tokyo’s Akira again, I guess, but it doesn’t feel like any particular step has been taken by the end of it. I guess the idea is that now that Akira has supposedly beaten Sanat, all the demons think he’s hot shit and awesome and all that, but why the hell didn’t they already think that? The events of the main game have Akira taking the credit for beating Kenji, the guy who was previously the strongest individual in Infernal Tokyo, so this is one of those annoying cases of characters forgetting what they’ve learned solely so they can re-learn it. Sanat’s story and powers and role and motives and whatnot are too vague and mysterious, Akira’s side of things is too much a repetition of before, and nothing seems to have really been accomplished by the DLC’s end. Even if this one were long enough that the cost ($2.50, again) were tolerable, it wouldn’t be worth it. Pass.
For the Past...For the Future: Now see, this is the kind of DLC I hate the very, very most. In this DLC, you’re transported once again back in time, this time to the day that the land above Tokyo was created that would later be the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado. You get a bit of dialogue beforehand, which explains a fair bit about several important parts of SMT4’s past history, including the disaster whose results separated the 3 dimensions we see during SMT4 (the home dimension, Blasted Tokyo, and Infernal Tokyo), a little background for the Yamato Reactor, how things went down with Masakado, of course part of the origin story of the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, and we even see that the whole day of fate relates very strongly to similar cataclysms in other SMT games (the missile strike is just like the one from SMT1, and the conflict of angels and demons and humans in the streets of Tokyo is similar to the events of SMT Devil Survivor 1), which is a nice touch. Admittedly, Masakado is stupidly overpowered during your fight with him which doesn’t really fit the SMT lore,* and this DLC once again brings in time travel where it’s not wanted and REALLY opens a can of worms as far as cyclical event time paradoxes, but overall, this DLC has a lot of really good, really critical backstory for the setting and history of SMT4.
And that’s the damn problem. Why the HELL is such a critical part of understanding how events led to the current situation of SMT4 a Downloadable Content package!? There is just absolutely no denying that this is important, story-relevant narrative that absolutely without a shadow of a doubt should have been in the main game! This is important backstory that is just outright missing from the game, and whose absence is most definitely felt! At most the main game gives you vague hints and impressions of the things this DLC shows us, things that are incredibly relevant to understanding and appreciating the major plot events of Shin Megami Tensei 4! Holy hyper hell in a hamper, I hate it when a game has content in its add-on that obviously belonged in the main game. You wanna sell me Downloadable Content, then give me additional, unrelated aventures, give me character side stories, give me special epilogues and ending adjustments, give me expanded stories on minor things I’ve heard about in the game...but you sure as hell better not give me significant parts of the main plot that you just messily ripped from the game so you could charge me more money! If I want to understand the primary plot, the core story, of a game to the fullest possible extent, I should NOT have to pay extra! I paid for a full, complete story when I purchased the game, Goddammit!
I do not take kindly to being swindled, and that’s what this DLC is. At $3 for 20 to 35 minutes of play time, it’s not worth it anyways, but since its content is relevant enough to the game proper that keeping it separate is obviously a ploy to take advantage of you to make a quick buck, I wouldn’t pay for this thing if it only cost a single cent. Definitely go find a Let’s Play video of this add-on, because it’s certainly content that you should experience if you’re playing SMT4, but don’t waste your money supporting this kind of disingenuous scam. Shame on you, Atlus. I thought you were better human beings than Bioware. Perhaps I misjudged you.
So what’s the verdict for my first true foray into JRPG add-ons? Not good. Only a couple of SMT4’s DLCs have any plot content worth your time, they’re all way overpriced for the piddly amount of game time they add, and the last one is a classic example of how disgustingly dishonest the add-on business can be. If Atlus does another set of DLCs with its next SMT game, I sure hope they’re better than this.
* He’s supposed to be the ultimate demon of Neutrality in the SMT series, but as such he is, power-wise, way below the high iconic demons of Chaos and Law. That’s how it should be, because Neutrality is supposed to be all about humans finding their own way through their own strength, so it makes sense thematically for Masakado to be less powerful than Lucifer, Merkabah, Ancient of Days, even perhaps the Archangels, because that way the hero who chooses the path of Neutrality must compensate for the lesser power he receives by using his own abilities to see himself through--a human being’s abilities. Making Masakado into clearly the most powerful boss in the entire game just tosses all that thematic consistency out the window.
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