03/02/2017 EDIT: It took over a year, but I finally worked out how Undyne fits into the mirror dynamic of Alphys and Undyne in terms of the theme of depression, and have added this understanding below! DAMN, does it feel good to have figured that out at long last! Having done that, I now declare this rant officially finished!
For God’s sake, don’t read this if you haven’t thoroughly played Undertale. This rant has as many spoilers as a Bethesda game has bugs.
Also, many thanks to my pal Angahith for being a sounding board on this rant. As always, sir, you are a prince among men.
Oh yeah, and, uh, today’s rant is kinda dark. I mean, you can probably tell from the title here, but...yeah. You’ve been warned.
When it comes to RPGs that inspire theories, Undertale is pretty high up on the list. Pretty much any RPG can inspire at least a couple fan theories to explain its lore, characters, or events a little better, of course--I’ve shared a few of my own before, and I’m certainly not the only bloke who comes up with them. But there are some RPGs that just seem to invoke a huge number of theories from players. Sometimes this is because the game’s events and setting are rich, interesting, and/or subtle enough that it not only inspires love, but also creativity, from its fans, like Chrono Trigger. And sometimes this is just because the game’s plot and/or characters are sloppy and don’t make enough sense, and the players are forced to do the writers’ job and come up with some logical rationale for the idiocy they’re witnessing, like Final Fantasy 8, or Mass Effect 3’s ending.* Undertale falls into the former category, and in a major way.
Undertale’s got all kinds of fan theories being thrown around, on all kinds of websites. Theories about what’s up with Shyren’s body, theories about the backstory for Frisk, theories about the backstory for Chara, theories about why Mettaton NEO is a pushover, theories about the river person, theories about what went on in the True Lab, theories about Sans and Papyrus’s history, theories about the histories of the other 6 humans, and loads, bucketloads, craploads, truckloads, entire cargo-ship-armada-loads of theories about W. D. Gaster. And, whaddaya know, I’ve got a theory of my own to add to the mix.
Let it never be said that I was immune to peer pressure.
So, here’s my theory: Frisk is, or at least was at the beginning of the game, suicidally depressed.
“Goddammit, The RPGenius, you festering pile of bovine fecal matter!” you mutter to yourself now, which hurts my feelings, by the way. “I’ve ALREADY heard this theory from like every Undertale discussion board, chat room,” (those are still a thing, right?), “and Youtube video comment page I’ve come across. Stop wasting my time!”
You silly person, I’ve been wasting your time for like 10 years now. I’m not gonna stop now.
But anyway, yes, I am not the first individual to think that Frisk might be suicidal. Many players have inferred this possibility from a few telling lines that Asriel says during the ending of the True Pacifist playthrough. During this ending, you have the opportunity to go all through the game and talk to everyone you encountered along the way, as was the case in Earthbound, and if you go all the way back to where the game starts, you can actually find Asriel there, tending the bed of flowers that originally broke Frisk’s fall. Asriel has a good conversation with Frisk, within which he notes that people don’t usually go to Mount Ebott for happy reasons, and makes the implication that this might have been true for Frisk. That, combined with the fact that Mount Ebott is publicly known as a place where people have disappeared, makes the possibility that Frisk came to Mount Ebott to end his or her life very plausible. The implications made elsewhere in the game that Frisk doesn’t seem to have parents or a home to return to are suggestive, too, giving a potential glimpse into Frisk’s life that does not seem a happy one.
The thing is, though, that, as far as I’ve seen online, this is the end of people’s verifiable theorizing about Frisk’s potential suicidal nature. The general fanbase does not seem to have much else to add to this theory’s pool of evidence. And that is where I come into this. Because I’ve noticed a lot of things in Undertale beyond Asriel’s words and Mount Ebott’s reputation that relate to this subject.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that severe, life-threatening depression is a major theme of Undertale that underscores its entire plot!
Point A: The Neutral Pacifist Ending. This was what tipped me off and made me think there might be more to the idea of Frisk as suicidal than just Asriel’s words alone. This ending comes from your first run as a pacifist, not killing anyone but not having the ability yet to visit the True Lab. Essentially, this is the best ending you can get on your first playthrough. In this ending, like every other neutral ending, Frisk receives a call from Sans, and you learn about what the underground has been like since Frisk’s adventure through it.
Well, there are a couple of lines in this ending that stand out as slightly weird. Not completely out of place, exactly, but at the same time, they don’t quite sound like a natural part of the conversation, either. During the 1-sided conversation with Sans, Papyrus, and Undyne,** Undyne will tell Frisk, “So, where-ever you are...you have to try to be happy, okay!?”, and Sans will tell Frisk, “So, uh, hey...if we’re not giving up down here...don’t give up wherever you are, ok?”
1 occurrence of such a line I can pass off as just an oddity of conversation, but 2 lines like that in the same conversation? It gets my attention. The way Sans and Undyne are talking to Frisk, it’s not like they’re just describing the challenges they and their society face, which is, otherwise, the focus of the conversation. It’s more as though they’re saying that not only do they and their society face difficult times ahead, but also that they know that Frisk will, as well. With no explicit indication of what difficulties Frisk could be facing that would cause him/her to need encouragement such as this, my instinct is to relate it to 1 of the only things we’ve been able to infer about Frisk: the implication that the kid came to Mt. Ebott for unhappy reasons, the most likely being to take his/her own life. And if we are to connect that possibility with these slightly strange lines...they suddenly make some grim sense.
“Try to be happy.” “Don’t give up.” Are these not the words of encouragement that someone gives to a friend they know to be going through a rough time? Someone they know, or at least suspect, is depressed?***
It’s an interesting possibility, that these lines represent a further indication of Frisk being dangerously depressed, particularly when you consider that it would be a very appropriate bookmark were it the case. After all, in this scenario, you would basically have a story which starts with Frisk alone, and in that solitude depressed, and ends (Neutral ending, remember) with Frisk alone once more, with Sans and Undyne’s comments hinting that the depression threatens to return now that Frisk is once again left without anyone else.
That, however, would definitely be reading a LOT into things, so much that it’s barely a theory at all, more like an idea. But, it’s not the only point I have to make.
Point B: Having opened with one of my stronger arguments for this, we’ll take care of a minor, largely speculative detail now, though one which still can work toward the idea of an overall theme of depression and suicide. Consider how it is that Frisk gets to the land of the monsters to begin with: by falling down a hole.
Now consider: when you think of suicide, methods of death come to mind? Toaster in the bathtub. Gun to the mouth. Not being white while within a mile of a police officer in the USA. Medication overdose. Cutting ahead of me in line at a pizza place. Yes, there are a lot of well-known methods associated with taking your own life, but there’s definitely one that’s going to be pretty universally on any mental list: jumping from a fatal height. People usually think of this in terms of leaping off the top of a building, or doing a catastrophically unsuccessful reenactment of when George Bailey met Clarence, but, y’know, when you boil it down, it amounts to this: choosing to fall from a height you’re sure will kill you.
So if we were to say, for a moment, that Frisk IS suicidal when he/she goes to Mt. Ebott, that he/she IS climbing the mountain with the idea of disappearing like the legends say children do there...and that Frisk happened to see a hole in the ground, a deep, dark hole that seems almost surely a fatal plunge...doesn’t it start to seem like Frisk might not have fallen into the monster kingdom, so much as jumped?
Now, note, I do acknowledge that this is a small piece of evidence. It really only serves to bolster another, legitimate piece of evidence (Asriel’s words combined with Mt. Ebott’s reputation), rather than stand on its own, and it’s certainly somewhat iffy. After all, even considering the possibility that Frisk was suicidally depressed, he/she really might just have accidentally fallen in the hole; it didn’t have to be intentional. We know, after all, that 6 children have fallen in that hole before, and it stretches credibility way to far to try to assume that they ALL were trying to kill themselves, so we can only logically assume that the hole leading to the monster kingdom is legitimately difficult to notice (at least, until you’re falling in). Still, it’s something to think about, and lends at least a little more backing to this idea.
Point C: Think about something. When we get depressed, when we are truly at our lowest, what is it that keeps us going? What is it that a suicidal person lacks? Something in their lives to live for, perhaps, or at least, something good enough. A hope for the future. Enough survival instinct to stop themselves. When you get right down to it, though, those are reasons one turns to suicide, but not the bottom line. The bottom line is that what drives the reasons for a person to, in depression, take his or her own life, and what allows them to go through with it, is that they lack the strength of will to continue to suffer. What keeps us alive, depressed or not, from day to day is our willpower to continue living, our perseverance to meet our essential needs and see the day through to the next. In other words, what keeps us, as human beings, moving forward with our lives, overcoming obstacles, providing our bodies with the means to keep going, is...Determination. The Determination to live.
The choice to continue living is, barring the eventual and inevitable fatal circumstance that takes the choice away from us, a matter of our Determination to do so. When we go through difficult times, it is our Determination to get past those times and arrive at better ones that sees us through, if it is strong enough. When we are in pain, it is our Determination that allows us to endure that pain to endure that pain that sees us through it, if it is strong enough. The difference between someone who can keep going, and someone who simply cannot take it any more, is that one person’s Determination has been able to outweigh their difficulties, and the other person’s Determination has not.
Now look at Undertale. The human will, the drive to continue and succeed, is immensely important to this game. Determination is the mystical, indeed the divine, attribute in Undertale that allows Frisk to use save points, and return from every defeat. Determination is literally what keeps Frisk alive in Undertale!**** That which keeps us from killing ourselves in real life is also what staves death off in Undertale!
In fact, when you think about it...the only way for Frisk to honestly, permanently die in this game would be to voluntarily opt not to use Determination to resurrect. Or to put it another way...Frisk can only die by choosing to stop living.
Point D: In your final conflict with Asriel, he will taunt Frisk (and you the player) that he’s going to keep killing Frisk, and Frisk is going to keep coming back to be killed again, and again, and again. Why? Because Frisk (and you, the player) wants a happy ending. You can practically see the way Asriel spits this at Frisk in malicious mockery, but it’s certainly true enough, right? If you didn’t care about getting a happy ending, you and Frisk wouldn’t have gone through the trouble all throughout the game of not killing anyone. It would have been much easier to play the game like a regular RPG, and thoughtlessly kill anything that happened to get in your way--but you’re here, at the true final battle of the truth path of the game, because you chose not to. Indeed: you want that happy ending.
Well...isn’t this essentially a metaphor for life? What is it that we strive for, ultimately? Why do we seek to enjoy our lives, and/or give our lives meaning? Isn’t it, in the end, so that we can die without regret? By continuing to live even when we know it can’t be forever, aren’t we, in a way, trying to make it so that our death is as happy as it possibly can be? Isn’t the hope that the future holds better things, and good conclusions, that which gives us so much of our Determination? Couldn’t you say that the hope for a happy ending is something that keeps us from taking our own lives--or, in other words, from giving ourselves an unhappy ending? We keep our eyes on the prize in life to keep us going...and without a happy goal, it’s hard to keep our Determination.
Point E: “You called out for help...
...but nobody came.”
This line, found at a few places in Undertale, is a great reference to Earthbound, which used the line when enemies called for reinforcements unsuccessfully, and used a similar line during the final battle when Paula’s praying and seems to have run out of people who can answer her call for aid. Undertale, of course, expertly turns this seemingly innocuous battle text from Earthbound and turns it into something dark, a simple phrase that denotes the terror and despair of being alone, in need of help, and having your cries for a savior go unanswered.
But beyond the reference to Earthbound, and beyond being a perfect representation of the way Toby Fox took the Earthbound/Mother method and brought it to amazing new places, could there be more to this? When Frisk calls out for help in the fight against Flowey, calls out for someone to please come and save Frisk from this terrible conflict that he/she cannot overcome him/herself...when Asriel called out for help at discovering that he was alone, and not the way he should be, and could not find humanity (monsterity?) and hope within himself...could there be something more, than just an emotionally gripping phrase that expresses the true terror of danger, fear, and loneliness?
Well, let me ask you something: what would be another way to say “called out for help”? A plea for assistance. A request for aid. A shout for reinforcements. Or maybe you could say...
A cry for help.
You know. That thing that people do, as a desperate last resort to stop themselves before they fall to their inner darkness and do something terrible? The phrase used when we talk about the ways that a suicidal person tries/tried to let others know that they need(ed) help, in the hopes that those others would find a way to help them before it was too late?
Yup. That line that Toby Fox already made chilling and dark might be still darker that you thought.
Point F: The theme of serious depression runs pretty deeply through the triad of friend pairs in Undertale.
Let’s look at the first pair, Toriel and Asgore. The king and queen of monsters lost their children, a loss which is, from what I’m told, the single most horrible psychological and emotional pain that can be experienced.***** Essentially, this is something that can, and frequently does, cause serious, long depression. And how they respond to this loss is telling.
Asgore’s first response is momentary anger, as he lashes out and declares that the monsters of his kingdom will from now on kill any and all humans that find their way into the kingdom, and work towards destroying the barrier so they can make war against humanity as a whole as revenge for this loss. But afterwards, he becomes paralyzed by indecision, as his anger faded and he realized that violent revenge was not the right answer. He could manage neither to actively pursue his plan, nor take the hope away from his people, who were all just excited about finally leaving Mt. Ebott and experiencing the freedom of the surface world. As Toriel chides at the end of the game--if Asgore had truly wanted to follow through on his angry plan, if he had really not been held by indecision, then he could have done so after acquiring the first human soul (since he could use it to pass through the barrier himself, kill and collect more human souls on the outside, and bring them back to destroy the barrier altogether).
Instead, Asgore simply sat and waited, and just feebly hoped that what he feared wouldn’t come. He was crippled by an inability to move forward or back, stuck in a limbo--too afraid, regretful, and defeated to go forward with his intentions, but too afraid to disappoint those who had put their faith in him to go back.
Isn’t that similar in many ways to someone seriously depressed, who can’t find the determination or energy to follow through with their wishes and plans, instead just drifting one day at a time?
Toriel, meanwhile, is the foil of Asgore. They are connected by the same loss, the same pain that can, and in Asgore’s case did, lead to depression. But Toriel takes her grief, and acts to overcome it. She opposes Asgore’s plan, and leaves with her child’s remains so as to bury him/her. To bury the dead is a very important ritual in their passing, for it symbolizes an acceptance of the deceased having passed. Although in reality it’s rarely so simple, to bury someone is to show that you have made peace with their passing, and Toriel does so in bringing Chara to the ruins and burying him/her where he/she first entered the kingdom. Additionally, Toriel makes herself active, and in the way that will allow her to move forward and be what she loves to be: she makes herself a mother to any human who falls into the monster kingdom, and shields them (or tries to) from Asgore’s intentions. These actions, actions of acceptance of loss and of moving forward to try again to find a new way to experience the joy that had been taken from you...these are the actions of one who overcomes depression. Asgore’s actions, sadly, are those of one who succumbs to it.
Next, you have the second pair of friends, Sans and Papyrus. They represent another pain of existence that leads to serious depression: loneliness. They are both people who have no connection to others, who are outsiders. As human beings, we need connections to one another, meaningful connections that enrich our lives and give our lives so much more worth. If there’s anything that pastel princess ponies and pale teens holding mentality-shooting guns to their heads have taught me, it’s that. Some of us may need (and prefer) fewer connections than others, but few of us can healthily get by without love, respect, and camaraderie from someone. And when we feel alone, when we feel cut off from all others and like there is no one who can understand and care for us, we are in danger of the deep depression that can lead to suicide.
Sans is fatally lazy, despite his great talents, possessing only enough work ethic to do the bare minimum, if even that. The fact that he’s all about comedy is telling, to me--comedians are, I believe, famously susceptible to darker thoughts. For many comedians, humor is their defense against the misery of existence. Tina Fey writes that her view on the world as a comedian, her focus on finding that which can be laughed at, was formed when she was very young (4 years old, I think; it’s been some years since I read her book). She was playing outside, alone, and a man came up to her, slashed her face with a knife, and left, giving no explanation and never being caught. If I recall her writing correctly, Fey says that her comedian’s mindset was forged in that moment...because it was the only defense strong enough not to fall apart in the face of such terrible, dark, senseless reality.
Anyway, back to Sans. He’s from somewhere else, as Papyrus is, here for a purpose that no one can know about (and it’s doubtful that many would understand anyway), with abilities that make him unable to take part in the society around him in any meaningful way. While others lose themselves to the moment, Sans has a mastery over existence that they do not, and it separates him from them in an extreme way. And so he sits, and lazes, and accomplishes nothing in a world that he very well may see as largely meaningless. After all, as Flowey points out, once you’ve seen the same thing over and over in all its variations, it becomes less real to you; you cannot connect to it any more.
Meanwhile, Papyrus is lonely and separated from others, as well. He has no friends, and it’s clear, though not explicit, that this fact really bothers him. Just as Toriel was the counterpoint to Asgore, though, Papyrus is the healthy contradiction to Sans. Papyrus may be friendless, but he takes assertive, determined action to change this fact. He seeks to join a group and find purpose, he bangs at the door of that group’s leader (Undyne) and throws himself (albeit in a clueless manner) into the work of capturing a human so he can become publicly known and liked--he puts his all into making people think he’s worth befriending. And, of course, he genuinely befriends Frisk, seeking friendship in an unlikely place when the opportunity arises. These actions, that of actively going out and being proactive in search of companionship, are those of a person who overcomes his depression. Sans’s, unfortunately, are those of one who is succumbs to it.
Lastly, we have the pair of Undyne and Alphys. Regarding the latter...do I even have to describe her side of this, really? She’s the most outwardly obvious in terms of dangerous depression. Alphys feels herself a failure due to her past mistakes, and runs from reality in various ways. She doesn’t answer the calls and letters of the families to whom she promised more than she can deliver on. She keeps the True Lab, the site of her failures, hidden. She lies to others to make herself seem better than she thinks she actually is. Alphys is paralyzed by the thought of the world seeing what she truly is; unable to gather the courage to face the potential consequences, she lets her failures fester and her true qualities remain hidden. The feeling that you are a failure, that you have let down those who depended upon you and/or had high hopes for you in ways that you cannot make amends for, are powerful sparks to ignite dangerous depression. Alphys loathes herself, and there are even aspects of her retreat into the True Lab, once you’re on the true path for Pacifism, that imply that she might be contemplating killing herself there.
Now, I personally think that, unlike Sans and Asgore, who pretty tidily stay confined to their single (though impressive) ties to the theme of dangerous depression, Alphys represents a lot of aspects of dangerous depression mixed together. She is more connected to the theme of suicide than any other character in this game, which is probably intentional and appropriate, since she's also the friend who requires the most effort to befriend, and whose friendship unlocks the path to the game's true conclusion. Nonetheless, 1 of these depression aspects found within Alphys is mirrored by Undyne: the reliance of other people upon oneself.
For Alphys, the expectations and hopes of Asgore, the families of the 'fallen' monsters she experiments upon, and even just the entirety of the monster populace, all overwhelm her, and drag her into an abyss of self-loathing and fear. She cannot handle telling those relying on her of her failures, and this sense of both failure and of disappointing others spirals into self-loathing, which in turn dictates how she conducts herself with her friends. She can't handle letting others down, particularly not when she fails as spectacularly as she does, and so the reliance of others upon Alphys drags her down into a depression she can't escape from, which feeds and fuels every negative thing she does, says, and feels about herself. Alphys shows us the way in which we allow our fears of disappointing others, of failing when others have high expectations of us, to utterly destroy us from the inside out.
Undyne, on the other hand, is a character for whom the concept of others relying on her does nothing but empower her. To make the hopes and dreams of the monster populace come true, she throws herself into her work as captain of the royal guard, and uses the idea that others are relying on her to bolster her resolve and fight harder against Frisk. In fact, others' reliance on Undyne quite literally empowers her, during the game's No Mercy path--in much the same way as RPG and anime heroes often do for their most climactic battle, Undyne takes on the hopes, dreams, and wishes of the entire world to gain the power of a True Hero in her attempt to stop Chara. Where the expectations of others are an anchor that drags Alphys down, Undyne uses them to push herself forward all the harder. Once more, we see the the major characters of Undertale showing us a mirror image of an individual who succumbs to a cause of deep depression, and an individual who healthily overcomes it.
Point F.5: My sister has made an insight of her own on this theme of serious depression. Not only do the pairs of friends in Undertale have this theme running throughout their character development, but so, too, does the game's villain, Flowey. When Asriel describes what it was like for him after waking up post-death and finding himself now trapped in a flower's body, he talks of the horror of being trapped in an existence in which he knew he was missing a capacity for emotion which he once had, knew that he should feel love for Asgore and Toriel, his parents, yet found himself completely unable to feel that comforting warmth. Truly a terrible situation...and one which is very similar to a common part of serious depression: a numbness to all that goes on around you, a loss of the ability to feel joy and passion for things that used to be important to you.
Flowey even talks of having attempted to kill himself as a result of this condition, in fact. He tells Chara (this is during the No Mercy run, in which Frisk has been consumed by Chara's spirit) that he discovered the power of Determination at a point in which he tried to end his life, and at the last, too-late moment, got scared and desired to keep living. So yeah, that's about as hard a piece of evidence as you're going to find that serious depression and suicide are a theme underscoring Undertale.
At any rate, that’s about all I have to say, but I think this theory holds up pretty well. Subtle though it is, there is a theme of depression and suicide that underscores a very significant amount of Undertale, and considering some of the other darker themes that Undertale possesses, it certainly seems to fit the standard. The possibility that Frisk is suicidal really does fit into the rest of the cast and game undertones very well.
Ahh, I do so love a game that challenges me to really think!
* I still maintain that if SquareEnix were to swallow its completely causeless pride and adopt the Squall is Dead theory as canon, it would transform FF8 from an incompetent, sloppy, insulting mess into...well, not a GOOD game, exactly, but at least one with some modicum of artistic value.
Even the Indoctrination Theory wouldn’t be able to save Bioware’s ass, though.
** And potentially Alphys, if you did the after-Neutral-Pacifist-ending date thing with her, but didn’t go to the True Lab. Very few people are going to see this version, though.
*** Mind, I am not saying that these are necessarily effective or useful words of advice. I’m aware that cases of depression--particularly cases strong enough to cause one to commit suicide, as we are speaking of here--can’t usefully be combated solely by thinking positive. I’m just saying that these are the common words of others trying to help.
**** Well, it’s what keeps Frisk from being permanently dead, at least. Same thing, essentially.
***** I reckon that playing Wild Arms 4’s probably a close second, though.
Monday, February 8, 2016
Thursday, January 28, 2016
General RPGs' Players Changing Opinions Due to Annoying Fanbases
Crappy title for this one, but I don’t really know what else to call it. Also, this is another one of those rants that applies to RPGs, but it really also applies to many other avenues of storytelling, as well. Like my rant on Resurrection Abuse, or Hot Springs.
Guys? Girls? Ad bots?* Don’t let an annoying fandom ruin something for you. Seriously, don’t.
It seems silly, but it happens. People will like a game, cartoon, anime, movie, TV show, or whatever--we’ll say a game for now, since that keeps it relevant to this theoretically RPG-only blog. They’ll like the game a lot. But as they go online to talk about it, to draw fanart or write fanfiction or make fan videos for it, they find that there are other fans of this same game who are loud, obnoxious, crude, and/or hostile morons. And sometimes, there are a LOT of them. Enough of them that the person’s feelings for the game’s worth change by association.
Worse still, repeated encounters with an annoying fandom for a game someone has not played will convince that person that he or she doesn’t like the game solely on the basis that he or she doesn’t like its fanbase. This is something occurring with unfortunate prevalence for Undertale right now, in face.
Please don’t let either of these things happen to you.
Again, it seems silly. Why should anyone let their opinion be changed about something just because the other people who like the same thing are morons and/or jerks? Worse still, why would anyone let their opinion be formed by such morons and/or jerks? Okay, sure, maybe seeing that you’re in inordinately poor company means you should at least give that thing you like a second look, just to make sure you weren’t overestimating its value. And maybe seeing that you would be in inordinately poor company means a reasonable amount of caution about trying the game out. But beyond that, it seems ridiculous to let a game’s popularity sway your own opinion one way or another. You’d be like the pretentious hipster stereotype who hates everything solely because it’s widely loved.
But silly or not, it does happen. Back in the days when I debased myself by frequenting the Gaia Online Final Fantasy forums, I’d frequently come across people who had initially liked Final Fantasy 7, but then began to look down on and even despise the game, simply because the fanbase for it was so absolutely full to bursting with illiterate, self-important jerks who lived their lives according to utterly concrete first impressions that they based on the shallowest surface level of all they saw.
I could never figure out why someone would do this. I like Final Fantasy 7 a lot because it’s a strongly written, creative story that covers many themes of personal identity, self-determination, self-delusion, self-forgiveness (a lot of focus on the self in this game), and so on, conveyed through a cast which contained several deep, dynamic characters. Does the fact that I see the beauty, wisdom, and art of Final Fantasy 7 change just because for every 1 of me, there’s about 50 drooling doofuses who like the game because Tifa has breasts and because they (the drooling doofuses, I mean, not Tifa’s breasts) erroneously think Sephiroth is a badass? So I like Cloud as a hero for his depth as a character and his dynamic change from a delusional loner to a man who has accepted his past and weakness and becomes stronger for them, while 50 other gamers who don’t know why blue boxes keep popping up on the screen while they’re trying to play happen to like Cloud because he has a big sword and broods sometimes. So what? I’m supposed to pretend that Final Fantasy 7 is less of a masterpiece of the RPG genre just because it happens to have a massive fanbase of people who like it only for the most base, unimportant surface qualities?
Hell NO!
My opinion is not the lesser OR the greater for who stands with me! I’ve observed Final Fantasy 7 several times. I’ve given substantial thought to its every aspect. I’ve discussed it at length with others who have also analyzed it. I’ve challenged my own opinions on the game multiple times, as I do with virtually every opinion I form. My perspective on the game is as valid as any opinion can be, because I’ve put the time and thought into it, because I can refer to the evidence for it and argue my point. Whether that puts me in the company of some giggling fangirl who just finds Cloud hot, or of the brilliant Chris Avellone himself, my opinion of Final Fantasy 7 stands the same.
Obviously there are certain joys to finding yourself in accord with people you respect. And obviously there are certain irritations to finding yourself in accord with people you can’t stand. And I definitely do not want to imply that you should never allow your opinion to be changed--one should always keep an open enough mind that they’re willing to have their perspective challenged, and even proven wrong.
But one of the joys of finding yourself in agreement with people you respect should never be that this fact somehow, on its own, validates that opinion. One of the irritations to finding yourself in agreement with people you can’t stand should never be that this fact somehow, on its own, invalidates your opinion. And if your opinion is to be changed, let it be through proof, through logical and emotional truth, through a new and better understanding of the subject matter, and never by the simple presence of others who share it. Similarly, if your opinion on a game, or anything else, is to be formed, let it be formed by the game itself, and never by the nature of those who have played it before you.
It’s a pretty universal occurrence that once something, ANYTHING, reaches a certain level of popularity, its fanbase becomes bad to some degree. That’s a truth of the internet that’s pretty important to embrace, because without understanding that, you open yourself to taking a bad fanbase too personally and letting it ruin your enjoyment of something. And when you do that, when you decide that Final Fantasy 7 is too beloved by morons to be good, that Undertale’s fanbase being pushy means that the game itself must be awful, that the varying levels of obnoxiousness in the fandoms for The Hunger Games, Star Wars, My Little Pony, Steven Universe, Doctor Who, or anything else means that those products can’t be worthwhile, you’ve given up your own free will to those you despise. And do not fool yourself on this point: when that happens, when you refuse to try something or refuse to allow yourself to enjoy something because its fanbase annoys you, your decision to let others dictate what you dislike will not have any lasting negative impact on them. The only person who loses out will be you.
* I have no misconceptions about where most of my page hits come from.
Guys? Girls? Ad bots?* Don’t let an annoying fandom ruin something for you. Seriously, don’t.
It seems silly, but it happens. People will like a game, cartoon, anime, movie, TV show, or whatever--we’ll say a game for now, since that keeps it relevant to this theoretically RPG-only blog. They’ll like the game a lot. But as they go online to talk about it, to draw fanart or write fanfiction or make fan videos for it, they find that there are other fans of this same game who are loud, obnoxious, crude, and/or hostile morons. And sometimes, there are a LOT of them. Enough of them that the person’s feelings for the game’s worth change by association.
Worse still, repeated encounters with an annoying fandom for a game someone has not played will convince that person that he or she doesn’t like the game solely on the basis that he or she doesn’t like its fanbase. This is something occurring with unfortunate prevalence for Undertale right now, in face.
Please don’t let either of these things happen to you.
Again, it seems silly. Why should anyone let their opinion be changed about something just because the other people who like the same thing are morons and/or jerks? Worse still, why would anyone let their opinion be formed by such morons and/or jerks? Okay, sure, maybe seeing that you’re in inordinately poor company means you should at least give that thing you like a second look, just to make sure you weren’t overestimating its value. And maybe seeing that you would be in inordinately poor company means a reasonable amount of caution about trying the game out. But beyond that, it seems ridiculous to let a game’s popularity sway your own opinion one way or another. You’d be like the pretentious hipster stereotype who hates everything solely because it’s widely loved.
But silly or not, it does happen. Back in the days when I debased myself by frequenting the Gaia Online Final Fantasy forums, I’d frequently come across people who had initially liked Final Fantasy 7, but then began to look down on and even despise the game, simply because the fanbase for it was so absolutely full to bursting with illiterate, self-important jerks who lived their lives according to utterly concrete first impressions that they based on the shallowest surface level of all they saw.
I could never figure out why someone would do this. I like Final Fantasy 7 a lot because it’s a strongly written, creative story that covers many themes of personal identity, self-determination, self-delusion, self-forgiveness (a lot of focus on the self in this game), and so on, conveyed through a cast which contained several deep, dynamic characters. Does the fact that I see the beauty, wisdom, and art of Final Fantasy 7 change just because for every 1 of me, there’s about 50 drooling doofuses who like the game because Tifa has breasts and because they (the drooling doofuses, I mean, not Tifa’s breasts) erroneously think Sephiroth is a badass? So I like Cloud as a hero for his depth as a character and his dynamic change from a delusional loner to a man who has accepted his past and weakness and becomes stronger for them, while 50 other gamers who don’t know why blue boxes keep popping up on the screen while they’re trying to play happen to like Cloud because he has a big sword and broods sometimes. So what? I’m supposed to pretend that Final Fantasy 7 is less of a masterpiece of the RPG genre just because it happens to have a massive fanbase of people who like it only for the most base, unimportant surface qualities?
Hell NO!
My opinion is not the lesser OR the greater for who stands with me! I’ve observed Final Fantasy 7 several times. I’ve given substantial thought to its every aspect. I’ve discussed it at length with others who have also analyzed it. I’ve challenged my own opinions on the game multiple times, as I do with virtually every opinion I form. My perspective on the game is as valid as any opinion can be, because I’ve put the time and thought into it, because I can refer to the evidence for it and argue my point. Whether that puts me in the company of some giggling fangirl who just finds Cloud hot, or of the brilliant Chris Avellone himself, my opinion of Final Fantasy 7 stands the same.
Obviously there are certain joys to finding yourself in accord with people you respect. And obviously there are certain irritations to finding yourself in accord with people you can’t stand. And I definitely do not want to imply that you should never allow your opinion to be changed--one should always keep an open enough mind that they’re willing to have their perspective challenged, and even proven wrong.
But one of the joys of finding yourself in agreement with people you respect should never be that this fact somehow, on its own, validates that opinion. One of the irritations to finding yourself in agreement with people you can’t stand should never be that this fact somehow, on its own, invalidates your opinion. And if your opinion is to be changed, let it be through proof, through logical and emotional truth, through a new and better understanding of the subject matter, and never by the simple presence of others who share it. Similarly, if your opinion on a game, or anything else, is to be formed, let it be formed by the game itself, and never by the nature of those who have played it before you.
It’s a pretty universal occurrence that once something, ANYTHING, reaches a certain level of popularity, its fanbase becomes bad to some degree. That’s a truth of the internet that’s pretty important to embrace, because without understanding that, you open yourself to taking a bad fanbase too personally and letting it ruin your enjoyment of something. And when you do that, when you decide that Final Fantasy 7 is too beloved by morons to be good, that Undertale’s fanbase being pushy means that the game itself must be awful, that the varying levels of obnoxiousness in the fandoms for The Hunger Games, Star Wars, My Little Pony, Steven Universe, Doctor Who, or anything else means that those products can’t be worthwhile, you’ve given up your own free will to those you despise. And do not fool yourself on this point: when that happens, when you refuse to try something or refuse to allow yourself to enjoy something because its fanbase annoys you, your decision to let others dictate what you dislike will not have any lasting negative impact on them. The only person who loses out will be you.
* I have no misconceptions about where most of my page hits come from.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Fallout 4's MILA Placement
Fallout 4’s a pretty big deal. It’s got a strong plot (far and away the best of the series), a good cast, and, like all Fallout titles, a ton of allegorical (and sometimes direct) commentary and analysis on United States history, culture, and mentality. There’s more intellectual content, subtle nuances, and cultural and historical references to contemplate and discuss in this game than you can shake a bladed swatter at. And, of course, today we’re going to ignore every last one of these worthy topics of discourse, and instead nitpick an utterly meaningless detail that you could not possibly care about whatsoever.
Because I’m me.
So! MILAs. They’re observational doohickeys that you have to place at high places throughout the Commonwealth in Fallout 4 during a series of quests for Tinker Tom of the Railroad. Tinker Tom wants them at the tops of various buildings around the area so he can measure atmospheric conditions out of an irrational paranoia that the Institute is filling the air with mind control or something, and his boss Desdemona wants the MILAs up there for the completely rational paranoia of being able to monitor potential Institute movements throughout the Boston area. Either way, if you want to get in the good graces of the most moral and humanly decent group in post-apocalyptic Massachusetts, you’re gonna be climbing some stairs.
So here’s how it went for me on my first MILA placement quest. I travel over to the assigned building, MILA burning a hole in my standard-issue physics-defying RPG pocket. I get there, go inside, and begin to systematically wipe out the super mutants within as I climb stairs and fallen debris from 1 floor to the next...all the while grabbing every random piece of trash I can see, of course, because somehow my character can perform whatever forbidden alchemical arts are necessary to turn a packet of pencils and a few kitchen knives into a 12 x 18 foot solid wall of steel. I finally find my way to the top floor, and step out onto the roof. Time to find the little green box that indicates the exact spot to place the quest item doohickey.
...Wait. That can’t be right. There?
Allow me to explain what I am seeing right now. I have located the little green quest box that indicates the exact location of my mission objective. It is hovering over a loose board of wood, 50% (often more than that) of the length of which is extended over the side of the roof, weighed down by a single cinder block to keep it from succumbing to the seductive caress of gravity and falling 6 stories down to the ground. That is the spot where I am to place a large (think about the size of a big microwave), sensitive piece of equipment.
You know what? You need a visual. Here’s an example of a mission objective spot like that which I just described:
SCREENSHOT 1
SCREENSHOT 2
And here is what it looks like with the MILA placed:
SCREENSHOT 3
SCREENSHOT 4
Just look at that. Look at it! I know this really isn’t anything that matters, but the logistics bug the hell out of my nitpicky fan nature. Here you are, on a perfectly solid, serviceable roof where you could just put the atmospheric thingamabob down and know that it’s relatively safe and secure, and instead you’re sticking it on a single, extremely unsecured board of wood to jut out over a fatal drop. There are just so many things that make this a dumb placement!
First of all, the damn MILA is twice as wide as the board of wood it’s sitting on. There’s nothing to stop a playful breeze from unbalancing the thing and sending it hurtling down to the ground. And the weight! The MILA definitely looks heavier than the single, halfheartedly-placed cinderblock counterweight. One radroach larva happens to flutter over and land on the wrong end of that board, and the whole thing is toppling over, mark my words. And that’s all just assuming that board of wood, which has clearly seen better days, won’t just snap under the weight of it on its own* Do you really think that thing’s stable enough resist gravity when some nearby huge explosion (there are a lot of those in the Fallout Commonwealth) shakes the roof? Or when a Brotherhood of Steel vertibird flies low overhead, its rotors pushing air down from above? Hell, the heavy footfalls of a big supermutant exploring the roof might be enough to dislodge this damn thing. Or a raider in scavenged power armor. Or a Brotherhood of Steel goon in considerably better power armor. Or a deathclaw. I’ve seen all these things on roofs during my explorations, most more than once.
Even assuming that gravity does not claim the MILA for its own within 10 minutes of your having placed it there, the thing is jutting over the edge of a building, completely and totally visible to anyone looking up from the ground, or over from another building’s roof! Tinker Tom thinks that the Institute is monitoring absolutely everything everywhere, yet he wants to have his junk hanging out for all to see!** And even beyond his paranoia, it’s a fact that the Institute DOES have many agents, be they conscious or unwitting, active in the Commonwealth. Any of them could travel by 1 of these MILA points and happen to see this device and wonder about its use, which could lead to massive disaster for the Railroad. Even just a regular traveler happening to look up would be a bad thing--any given tech scavenger would probably see such a doohickey as a prize to acquire and sell off.
And hey, let’s not forget the other enemies of the Railroad, the Brotherhood of Steel...yes, the intelligent, scientifically advanced individuals with enormous resources who are specifically out to collect any and every piece of interesting technology they come across. The BoS is also the group whose members are always zooming around the Commonwealth in their vertibirds. Meaning that all they have to do is fly over a MILA, happen to be looking down at the time--which I can only assume is usually where vertibird passengers are looking; that’s kind of the point of aerial patrol ships--and they’ll see a cherry piece of tech they’ve never encountered before, just begging to having the information it’s sending out traced straight to the Railroad HQ!
And that’s STILL not the end of why this placement is so dumb. Let’s say that, miracle of miracles, the MILA does not fall and does not get noticed by anyone who would steal it or use it to harm its creators. It’s still out in the open, exposed! Say some idiot super mutant decides some time that he wants to have a staring contest with the sun. He looks up, and happens to see this weird box sitting on a board jutting out from a rooftop. Will he know what the hell it is, or have any interest in taking it? No. But will he be struck with the notion of using it as target practice? Quite possibly! Hell, we know from Fallout 3’s Galaxy News Radio dish quest that mutants have taken potshots at machinery located high above them before; there’s no reason they wouldn’t again. And if a super mutant doesn’t try shooting the MILA for shits and giggles, a raider certainly might, or a Gunner might decide to hone his aim with it. Hell, even totally unnoticed, the thing’s still not safe if it’s out in the open--the Commonwealth, particularly the Boston area where most of the MILAs get placed, is a constant warzone. There’s every chance of a MILA getting damaged in crossfire or by a stray missed shot, out in the air as it is. That’s especially true considering that a lot of fighting occurs between the Brotherhood of Steel and the dregs of the wastelands, meaning a ton of bullets and lasers firing up from the ground and down from the vertibirds.
And, that’s about all I have to say on the matter. MILA placement is dumb several times over. At any rate, congratulations on making it to the end of my most pointless rant ever! You have my condolences.
* Yeah, okay, so the MILA doesn’t actually have a weight value when it’s in your inventory. I contend that’s for gameplay purposes, so you don’t accidentally exceed your carry weight with a plot item, not because the kitchen sink-sized device of steel, copper, and plastic actually is supposed to weigh less than a marshmallow.
** You’re welcome for that image.
Because I’m me.
So! MILAs. They’re observational doohickeys that you have to place at high places throughout the Commonwealth in Fallout 4 during a series of quests for Tinker Tom of the Railroad. Tinker Tom wants them at the tops of various buildings around the area so he can measure atmospheric conditions out of an irrational paranoia that the Institute is filling the air with mind control or something, and his boss Desdemona wants the MILAs up there for the completely rational paranoia of being able to monitor potential Institute movements throughout the Boston area. Either way, if you want to get in the good graces of the most moral and humanly decent group in post-apocalyptic Massachusetts, you’re gonna be climbing some stairs.
So here’s how it went for me on my first MILA placement quest. I travel over to the assigned building, MILA burning a hole in my standard-issue physics-defying RPG pocket. I get there, go inside, and begin to systematically wipe out the super mutants within as I climb stairs and fallen debris from 1 floor to the next...all the while grabbing every random piece of trash I can see, of course, because somehow my character can perform whatever forbidden alchemical arts are necessary to turn a packet of pencils and a few kitchen knives into a 12 x 18 foot solid wall of steel. I finally find my way to the top floor, and step out onto the roof. Time to find the little green box that indicates the exact spot to place the quest item doohickey.
...Wait. That can’t be right. There?
Allow me to explain what I am seeing right now. I have located the little green quest box that indicates the exact location of my mission objective. It is hovering over a loose board of wood, 50% (often more than that) of the length of which is extended over the side of the roof, weighed down by a single cinder block to keep it from succumbing to the seductive caress of gravity and falling 6 stories down to the ground. That is the spot where I am to place a large (think about the size of a big microwave), sensitive piece of equipment.
You know what? You need a visual. Here’s an example of a mission objective spot like that which I just described:
SCREENSHOT 1
SCREENSHOT 2
And here is what it looks like with the MILA placed:
SCREENSHOT 3
SCREENSHOT 4
Just look at that. Look at it! I know this really isn’t anything that matters, but the logistics bug the hell out of my nitpicky fan nature. Here you are, on a perfectly solid, serviceable roof where you could just put the atmospheric thingamabob down and know that it’s relatively safe and secure, and instead you’re sticking it on a single, extremely unsecured board of wood to jut out over a fatal drop. There are just so many things that make this a dumb placement!
First of all, the damn MILA is twice as wide as the board of wood it’s sitting on. There’s nothing to stop a playful breeze from unbalancing the thing and sending it hurtling down to the ground. And the weight! The MILA definitely looks heavier than the single, halfheartedly-placed cinderblock counterweight. One radroach larva happens to flutter over and land on the wrong end of that board, and the whole thing is toppling over, mark my words. And that’s all just assuming that board of wood, which has clearly seen better days, won’t just snap under the weight of it on its own* Do you really think that thing’s stable enough resist gravity when some nearby huge explosion (there are a lot of those in the Fallout Commonwealth) shakes the roof? Or when a Brotherhood of Steel vertibird flies low overhead, its rotors pushing air down from above? Hell, the heavy footfalls of a big supermutant exploring the roof might be enough to dislodge this damn thing. Or a raider in scavenged power armor. Or a Brotherhood of Steel goon in considerably better power armor. Or a deathclaw. I’ve seen all these things on roofs during my explorations, most more than once.
Even assuming that gravity does not claim the MILA for its own within 10 minutes of your having placed it there, the thing is jutting over the edge of a building, completely and totally visible to anyone looking up from the ground, or over from another building’s roof! Tinker Tom thinks that the Institute is monitoring absolutely everything everywhere, yet he wants to have his junk hanging out for all to see!** And even beyond his paranoia, it’s a fact that the Institute DOES have many agents, be they conscious or unwitting, active in the Commonwealth. Any of them could travel by 1 of these MILA points and happen to see this device and wonder about its use, which could lead to massive disaster for the Railroad. Even just a regular traveler happening to look up would be a bad thing--any given tech scavenger would probably see such a doohickey as a prize to acquire and sell off.
And hey, let’s not forget the other enemies of the Railroad, the Brotherhood of Steel...yes, the intelligent, scientifically advanced individuals with enormous resources who are specifically out to collect any and every piece of interesting technology they come across. The BoS is also the group whose members are always zooming around the Commonwealth in their vertibirds. Meaning that all they have to do is fly over a MILA, happen to be looking down at the time--which I can only assume is usually where vertibird passengers are looking; that’s kind of the point of aerial patrol ships--and they’ll see a cherry piece of tech they’ve never encountered before, just begging to having the information it’s sending out traced straight to the Railroad HQ!
And that’s STILL not the end of why this placement is so dumb. Let’s say that, miracle of miracles, the MILA does not fall and does not get noticed by anyone who would steal it or use it to harm its creators. It’s still out in the open, exposed! Say some idiot super mutant decides some time that he wants to have a staring contest with the sun. He looks up, and happens to see this weird box sitting on a board jutting out from a rooftop. Will he know what the hell it is, or have any interest in taking it? No. But will he be struck with the notion of using it as target practice? Quite possibly! Hell, we know from Fallout 3’s Galaxy News Radio dish quest that mutants have taken potshots at machinery located high above them before; there’s no reason they wouldn’t again. And if a super mutant doesn’t try shooting the MILA for shits and giggles, a raider certainly might, or a Gunner might decide to hone his aim with it. Hell, even totally unnoticed, the thing’s still not safe if it’s out in the open--the Commonwealth, particularly the Boston area where most of the MILAs get placed, is a constant warzone. There’s every chance of a MILA getting damaged in crossfire or by a stray missed shot, out in the air as it is. That’s especially true considering that a lot of fighting occurs between the Brotherhood of Steel and the dregs of the wastelands, meaning a ton of bullets and lasers firing up from the ground and down from the vertibirds.
And, that’s about all I have to say on the matter. MILA placement is dumb several times over. At any rate, congratulations on making it to the end of my most pointless rant ever! You have my condolences.
* Yeah, okay, so the MILA doesn’t actually have a weight value when it’s in your inventory. I contend that’s for gameplay purposes, so you don’t accidentally exceed your carry weight with a plot item, not because the kitchen sink-sized device of steel, copper, and plastic actually is supposed to weigh less than a marshmallow.
** You’re welcome for that image.
Friday, January 8, 2016
General RPG Lists: Best Bad Endings
Happy New Year, folks! As the year of You Are Not the Hero, Xenoblade 2, Fallout 4 DLC, a romance-oriented Fire Emblem that actually caught up to 10 years ago by providing homosexual options, and oh holy shit TORMENT: TIDES OF NUMENARA!!!, 2016 shows great promise for the RPG genre. Let's see if I can write up some rants so mentally stimulating and entertaining that they can keep pace with that exciting lineup!
(Spoiler Alert: I can't. You'll just have to be satisfied with the usual fanboyish, nitpicking garbage I spew every year).
In my Greatest Endings list, I covered the best of RPGs’ good endings...but you know, good endings aren’t the only ones to be found in this genre. A lot of games also have Bad Endings, intentionally dissatisfying conclusions that let the player know that somewhere or other, they done fucked up. These are the endings whose purpose is to create regret and discontent, and encourage you to do a better job next time. There’s a lot of these lesser finales in RPGs, and most of them are pretty by-the-numbers, but sometimes you’ll come across a Bad Ending that’s extremely well done, surprising you with just how much quality the developers put into even the conclusion that represents failure. And today, we’re taking a look at the best of the bad!
Note: I’m trying to be objective here, so endings that are just representations of playstyles I don’t agree with don’t count. So, for example, even though an ending where you empower Caesar’s Legion in Fallout: New Vegas is pretty bad from any decent human being’s perspective, I’m not counting it, because it’s not based on a failure so much as it is a social philosophy, even if that social philosophy is shitty and poorly thought out. So, no Renegade Shepard, no Chiaki Discipline, no negative karma Lone Wanderer, no Yamato meritocracy, etc. None of those are meant to symbolize a failure on the player or characters’ parts (besides, perhaps, a moral one). They’re endings meant to be as legitimate as their counterparts, not Bad Endings.
Note 2: I’m sure you can figure this one out on your own, but, uh, spoilers.
5. Live-A-Live (Sad Ending)
What makes this such a good Bad Ending is that it’s so poignantly underscored by the tragedy of Orsted’s fall from grace. It’s not just about the fact that he wins, that he changes the fates of the other 7 climactic battles to result in the defeat of each hero and the dominance of the demonic force Odio. After Orsted’s victory, as the credits roll, we see him leave his fortress of evil and journey through the now empty and lifeless kingdom that he was once a hero to, quietly visiting the place of each of the losses, misunderstandings, and betrayals that pushed him from a hero to a demon, as well as the sites of the triumphs that gave him so much to lose in the first place. What this ending is really about is reminding you that the ruination of this man’s life, the circumstances that drove him to embrace darkness, is what caused the triumph of evil now in multiple places in time and space. The fickle, quick judgments of the people, the deaths of the only true and good people Orsted knew, the vicious betrayal by his best friend over petty jealousy, the emotional betrayal of the princess, she who had symbolized the pure, redeeming goal and light that he had clung desperately to when the rest of his world was falling apart...Orsted visits the site of each to remind himself and us of his tale. The people in Orsted’s life failed him with their petty, stupid vices, destroyed him...and now, in this ending, we see the tragedy compounded as his retribution seeks out not only the humanity that did him wrong, but the innocents of other worlds and times, as well.
4. Eternal Senia (Ending 2)
Ha! The real question is, are any of Eternal Senia's endings not a Bad Ending?
I kid, I kid. Because humor is a defense mechanism. And I need it right now. Because the second ending of ES breaks my goddamn heart. After all that Senia has gone through to save her sister Magaleta, and all that Magaleta has taken on herself to save Senia, Eternity still wins out, taking control of Senia while Magaleta is pushed away before she can try to shoulder this last lethal burden. Senia is lost, yet Magaleta cannot bring herself to leave her, even as Senia attacks her...instead, Magaleta simply accepts each injury, as fate’s punishment for failing to love Senia well enough, and failing to save her. After all the hurt and trials that Senia and Magaleta have endured, each girl’s only concern the wellbeing of her sister, her only wish to be with the other...Magaleta accepts death by the blade of her beloved sister, happily, as her penance, and because she’d rather be with Senia in death than attempt to live without her. The sheer weight of Senia and Magaleta’s love for one another is staggering, and the fact that they never had the chance to truly live and rejoice in that love, from circumstance and an inability to communicate their feelings and fears, makes this the saddest Bad Ending I’ve ever seen.
3. Fallout 1
This ending, which you get when the protagonist gives in and tells The Master’s lieutenant about Vault 13, is short, yet extremely effective. The Vault Dweller is taken and dropped into the vats, transformed into a super mutant, the scene nightmarish without needing to be excessive or graphic. Then, we see the result of the Vault Dweller’s loose lips: the invasion of Vault 13 in progress, through security feeds. It’s a masterfully disturbing scenario: hopeless, relentless, terrifying, and brutal. It’s simple, and again, nightmarish without the need for gratuitous detail. Stunningly horrible, this is an ending that leaves you feeling a little sick.
2. Undertale (No Mercy Ending)
Actually, there are quite a few neutral endings in Undertale that might have pushed Live-A-Live off this list, too, but they’re pretty much the ones where you’ve come close to a No Mercy run, but not quite gotten it, so I’m just going to count this one alone, and call it a day.
Okay, so this may seem like it goes against that rule I mentioned earlier about not counting alternate play styles, but the No Mercy is different than just deciding to play Revan as a Sith or something. Going out of your way to murder absolutely everyone you possibly can has no belief or philosophy behind it--even Flowey’s motto of Kill or Be Killed only logically applies to interacting with those you come across and/or possess something you want, not systematically hunting down and wiping out the weak and helpless in totality. Additionally, the No Mercy ending is not shown as an acceptable alternative to another legitimate ending that gives a deviant player what he or she was shooting for--it’s pretty unequivocally a Bad Ending. Lastly, it does not represent a success of the protagonist, Frisk’s, choices or belief. Rather, as the ending makes clear, the violent impulses of the game belong to Chara, the first child, and if Frisk kills, it is because Chara’s spirit is in control. Chara more or less says this, and even mocks Frisk’s assumption that he/she has ever been in control should Frisk try to resist. SO, the No Mercy ending can really only be seen as a failure for Frisk, never a consciously-selected consequence: it’s a failure to keep the influence of Chara at bay and stay in control.
We square on this? Okay, good. So, then, let’s talk this ending and why it’s here, which is because it
FREAKS
ME
THE
FUCK
OUT.
As is its intention, of course. In this ending, you’ve unleashed a psychotic, reasonless murderer on the world, one intent on and capable of destroying all existence, a monster that can neither be stopped by even a hero who has been imbued with the collective power of the world’s hope, nor by an unimaginably powerful creature who can manipulate the very laws of the universe. Seeing Chara, hearing him/her talk, realizing that this is truly the end of this world, and then realizing that you’ve given Chara the power to lock you out of restarting and can only ever play the game again by selling Frisk’s soul to him/her, a decision that cannot be taken back no matter how you play the game ever again...this ending perfectly blends the stuff of a living nightmare, and the sinking pit in your stomach that occurs when you realize that you’ve made a choice, an important one, for the worse, and will never, ever escape its consequences.
1. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (Kill Namatame Ending)
This is a pretty intense and emotionally painful ending all around. The scene that leads to the moment of this Bad Ending is heavy with the fresh pain of loss, and the desperation that comes of it. With the universally beloved Nanako dead, the Investigation Team privately confronts Namatame, the man believed to be responsible for her death. Although they only moments before were upset at the idea of what Nanako’s father, out of his mind with anguish, had intended to do with Namatame, the heroes find themselves also quickly blinded to reason by their grief and rage. In this moment of weakness, the team takes justice into its own hands, and murders Namatame.
Their adventure ends that night, in tragedy, their search for answers ended with a single terrible decision made without the dedication to the pursuit of truth that had united and propelled them up to that point. In the heat of this terrible moment, an act is perpetrated that cannot be undone, a betrayal of all that the team has stood for, striven for. It is an act that cannot be redacted. When it's time, a few months later, for the protagonist to go back to his home and leave the town in which the game takes place, there's no jubilant exit. There's only a small, sad speech by Nanako's father to the main character that sometimes bad actions must be taken for the greater good, awkward and quiet farewells from the protagonist's friends, and an atmosphere of regret. Regret, and perhaps shame, for what was done hastily in anger. It's very, very well done and poignant, and pretty much captures the essence of what a Bad Ending is meant to be--an unsatisfying, regretful conclusion that came about from a deviation from what the story had intended.
Honorable Mention: Mass Effect 3 (Fan-Created MEHEM Bad Ending)
You know, it’s a funny thing. The Mass Effect Happy Ending Mod gives us a satisfying, correct ending for the ME trilogy to fix that sloppy pile of shit that those incompetent, self-important fuckwads at Bioware forced on us...but worth noting is that it also gives us a Bad Ending, too, if you’ve reached the ending by making bad decisions and not gathering enough war assets. And this Bad Ending...really, really works. It’s interesting, it’s intelligent, and it’s meaningful. And it’s even a little artsy, too, with how well it conveys details and intentions without outright speaking them. Seeing that all hope for their cycle truly is lost, Joker and the crew of the Normandy heroically sacrifice themselves to keep their secret contingency plan safe from the risk of Indoctrination bringing it to light, and we cut away to see, someday, 1 of Liara’s capsules being found and activated which details the oncoming Reaper menace to the next cycle, in the hopes that the details of our own failure might be enough to give the galaxy’s next starfaring children a chance to survive. And once the credits are finished, we learn that this was, indeed, what happened.
Yes, obviously this modded ending uses a lot of what Bioware created for the official “Bad Ending” to create its own downer finale, but that’s what MEHEM does overall--it takes the bits of Bioware’s bilge that can be salvaged for something good, and then fills in the gaps with its own fan-created content (which, by the way, is very good, often indistinguishable from the “professional” content) that make for something worthwhile. The important thing here is that, whereas before the message of the Bad Ending of ME3 was Bioware saying, “Oh, you don’t like being left with only shitty options? Sure, here’s a new option for you: EVERYTHING YOU LOVE DIES. Happy?”, this Bad Ending has a theme of hope even within resignation to your own fate, and of heroic, meaningful sacrifice of oneself for the good of others whom one has never even met. There’s a powerful, inspiring nobility to this Bad Ending that shows that even in the darkest of times, when all is lost for us, there is still a beautiful light to be found in our ability to help others as we were unable to do for ourselves.
I suspect not many people will ever see this ending, as the whole point of downloading MEHEM would be to salve the terrible wounds in your psyche, still open and raw years after ME3’s ending created them, so few people are going to bother going into it with the low rating that this ending requires to activate. And that’s kind of sad, honestly, because just as MEHEM proper is an absolutely excellent ending, so too is MEHEM’s Bad Ending 1 of the best you’re ever going to come across. Thankfully, it's not hard to find on Youtube.
And that’s it for today! Personally, I think it’s pretty darned cool that there are games whose creators take such an interest in their work that they can’t resist telling the game and characters’ stories even when they go in the wrong direction. And it’s really neat that the RPG genre has quite a few of these--this list was fairly difficult to narrow down. There are a lot of quality Bad Endings out there, such as the ones for Chrono Trigger, Mass Effect 2, and Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, amongst others. The Bad Ending really can be an interesting, meaningful, and emotional little flourish that makes an already strong RPG that much more memorable and interesting, and I say kudos to those writers who take the time not only to make a Bad Ending at all, but to make one well.
(Spoiler Alert: I can't. You'll just have to be satisfied with the usual fanboyish, nitpicking garbage I spew every year).
In my Greatest Endings list, I covered the best of RPGs’ good endings...but you know, good endings aren’t the only ones to be found in this genre. A lot of games also have Bad Endings, intentionally dissatisfying conclusions that let the player know that somewhere or other, they done fucked up. These are the endings whose purpose is to create regret and discontent, and encourage you to do a better job next time. There’s a lot of these lesser finales in RPGs, and most of them are pretty by-the-numbers, but sometimes you’ll come across a Bad Ending that’s extremely well done, surprising you with just how much quality the developers put into even the conclusion that represents failure. And today, we’re taking a look at the best of the bad!
Note: I’m trying to be objective here, so endings that are just representations of playstyles I don’t agree with don’t count. So, for example, even though an ending where you empower Caesar’s Legion in Fallout: New Vegas is pretty bad from any decent human being’s perspective, I’m not counting it, because it’s not based on a failure so much as it is a social philosophy, even if that social philosophy is shitty and poorly thought out. So, no Renegade Shepard, no Chiaki Discipline, no negative karma Lone Wanderer, no Yamato meritocracy, etc. None of those are meant to symbolize a failure on the player or characters’ parts (besides, perhaps, a moral one). They’re endings meant to be as legitimate as their counterparts, not Bad Endings.
Note 2: I’m sure you can figure this one out on your own, but, uh, spoilers.
5. Live-A-Live (Sad Ending)
What makes this such a good Bad Ending is that it’s so poignantly underscored by the tragedy of Orsted’s fall from grace. It’s not just about the fact that he wins, that he changes the fates of the other 7 climactic battles to result in the defeat of each hero and the dominance of the demonic force Odio. After Orsted’s victory, as the credits roll, we see him leave his fortress of evil and journey through the now empty and lifeless kingdom that he was once a hero to, quietly visiting the place of each of the losses, misunderstandings, and betrayals that pushed him from a hero to a demon, as well as the sites of the triumphs that gave him so much to lose in the first place. What this ending is really about is reminding you that the ruination of this man’s life, the circumstances that drove him to embrace darkness, is what caused the triumph of evil now in multiple places in time and space. The fickle, quick judgments of the people, the deaths of the only true and good people Orsted knew, the vicious betrayal by his best friend over petty jealousy, the emotional betrayal of the princess, she who had symbolized the pure, redeeming goal and light that he had clung desperately to when the rest of his world was falling apart...Orsted visits the site of each to remind himself and us of his tale. The people in Orsted’s life failed him with their petty, stupid vices, destroyed him...and now, in this ending, we see the tragedy compounded as his retribution seeks out not only the humanity that did him wrong, but the innocents of other worlds and times, as well.
4. Eternal Senia (Ending 2)
Ha! The real question is, are any of Eternal Senia's endings not a Bad Ending?
I kid, I kid. Because humor is a defense mechanism. And I need it right now. Because the second ending of ES breaks my goddamn heart. After all that Senia has gone through to save her sister Magaleta, and all that Magaleta has taken on herself to save Senia, Eternity still wins out, taking control of Senia while Magaleta is pushed away before she can try to shoulder this last lethal burden. Senia is lost, yet Magaleta cannot bring herself to leave her, even as Senia attacks her...instead, Magaleta simply accepts each injury, as fate’s punishment for failing to love Senia well enough, and failing to save her. After all the hurt and trials that Senia and Magaleta have endured, each girl’s only concern the wellbeing of her sister, her only wish to be with the other...Magaleta accepts death by the blade of her beloved sister, happily, as her penance, and because she’d rather be with Senia in death than attempt to live without her. The sheer weight of Senia and Magaleta’s love for one another is staggering, and the fact that they never had the chance to truly live and rejoice in that love, from circumstance and an inability to communicate their feelings and fears, makes this the saddest Bad Ending I’ve ever seen.
3. Fallout 1
This ending, which you get when the protagonist gives in and tells The Master’s lieutenant about Vault 13, is short, yet extremely effective. The Vault Dweller is taken and dropped into the vats, transformed into a super mutant, the scene nightmarish without needing to be excessive or graphic. Then, we see the result of the Vault Dweller’s loose lips: the invasion of Vault 13 in progress, through security feeds. It’s a masterfully disturbing scenario: hopeless, relentless, terrifying, and brutal. It’s simple, and again, nightmarish without the need for gratuitous detail. Stunningly horrible, this is an ending that leaves you feeling a little sick.
2. Undertale (No Mercy Ending)
Actually, there are quite a few neutral endings in Undertale that might have pushed Live-A-Live off this list, too, but they’re pretty much the ones where you’ve come close to a No Mercy run, but not quite gotten it, so I’m just going to count this one alone, and call it a day.
Okay, so this may seem like it goes against that rule I mentioned earlier about not counting alternate play styles, but the No Mercy is different than just deciding to play Revan as a Sith or something. Going out of your way to murder absolutely everyone you possibly can has no belief or philosophy behind it--even Flowey’s motto of Kill or Be Killed only logically applies to interacting with those you come across and/or possess something you want, not systematically hunting down and wiping out the weak and helpless in totality. Additionally, the No Mercy ending is not shown as an acceptable alternative to another legitimate ending that gives a deviant player what he or she was shooting for--it’s pretty unequivocally a Bad Ending. Lastly, it does not represent a success of the protagonist, Frisk’s, choices or belief. Rather, as the ending makes clear, the violent impulses of the game belong to Chara, the first child, and if Frisk kills, it is because Chara’s spirit is in control. Chara more or less says this, and even mocks Frisk’s assumption that he/she has ever been in control should Frisk try to resist. SO, the No Mercy ending can really only be seen as a failure for Frisk, never a consciously-selected consequence: it’s a failure to keep the influence of Chara at bay and stay in control.
We square on this? Okay, good. So, then, let’s talk this ending and why it’s here, which is because it
FREAKS
ME
THE
FUCK
OUT.
As is its intention, of course. In this ending, you’ve unleashed a psychotic, reasonless murderer on the world, one intent on and capable of destroying all existence, a monster that can neither be stopped by even a hero who has been imbued with the collective power of the world’s hope, nor by an unimaginably powerful creature who can manipulate the very laws of the universe. Seeing Chara, hearing him/her talk, realizing that this is truly the end of this world, and then realizing that you’ve given Chara the power to lock you out of restarting and can only ever play the game again by selling Frisk’s soul to him/her, a decision that cannot be taken back no matter how you play the game ever again...this ending perfectly blends the stuff of a living nightmare, and the sinking pit in your stomach that occurs when you realize that you’ve made a choice, an important one, for the worse, and will never, ever escape its consequences.
1. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (Kill Namatame Ending)
This is a pretty intense and emotionally painful ending all around. The scene that leads to the moment of this Bad Ending is heavy with the fresh pain of loss, and the desperation that comes of it. With the universally beloved Nanako dead, the Investigation Team privately confronts Namatame, the man believed to be responsible for her death. Although they only moments before were upset at the idea of what Nanako’s father, out of his mind with anguish, had intended to do with Namatame, the heroes find themselves also quickly blinded to reason by their grief and rage. In this moment of weakness, the team takes justice into its own hands, and murders Namatame.
Their adventure ends that night, in tragedy, their search for answers ended with a single terrible decision made without the dedication to the pursuit of truth that had united and propelled them up to that point. In the heat of this terrible moment, an act is perpetrated that cannot be undone, a betrayal of all that the team has stood for, striven for. It is an act that cannot be redacted. When it's time, a few months later, for the protagonist to go back to his home and leave the town in which the game takes place, there's no jubilant exit. There's only a small, sad speech by Nanako's father to the main character that sometimes bad actions must be taken for the greater good, awkward and quiet farewells from the protagonist's friends, and an atmosphere of regret. Regret, and perhaps shame, for what was done hastily in anger. It's very, very well done and poignant, and pretty much captures the essence of what a Bad Ending is meant to be--an unsatisfying, regretful conclusion that came about from a deviation from what the story had intended.
Honorable Mention: Mass Effect 3 (Fan-Created MEHEM Bad Ending)
You know, it’s a funny thing. The Mass Effect Happy Ending Mod gives us a satisfying, correct ending for the ME trilogy to fix that sloppy pile of shit that those incompetent, self-important fuckwads at Bioware forced on us...but worth noting is that it also gives us a Bad Ending, too, if you’ve reached the ending by making bad decisions and not gathering enough war assets. And this Bad Ending...really, really works. It’s interesting, it’s intelligent, and it’s meaningful. And it’s even a little artsy, too, with how well it conveys details and intentions without outright speaking them. Seeing that all hope for their cycle truly is lost, Joker and the crew of the Normandy heroically sacrifice themselves to keep their secret contingency plan safe from the risk of Indoctrination bringing it to light, and we cut away to see, someday, 1 of Liara’s capsules being found and activated which details the oncoming Reaper menace to the next cycle, in the hopes that the details of our own failure might be enough to give the galaxy’s next starfaring children a chance to survive. And once the credits are finished, we learn that this was, indeed, what happened.
Yes, obviously this modded ending uses a lot of what Bioware created for the official “Bad Ending” to create its own downer finale, but that’s what MEHEM does overall--it takes the bits of Bioware’s bilge that can be salvaged for something good, and then fills in the gaps with its own fan-created content (which, by the way, is very good, often indistinguishable from the “professional” content) that make for something worthwhile. The important thing here is that, whereas before the message of the Bad Ending of ME3 was Bioware saying, “Oh, you don’t like being left with only shitty options? Sure, here’s a new option for you: EVERYTHING YOU LOVE DIES. Happy?”, this Bad Ending has a theme of hope even within resignation to your own fate, and of heroic, meaningful sacrifice of oneself for the good of others whom one has never even met. There’s a powerful, inspiring nobility to this Bad Ending that shows that even in the darkest of times, when all is lost for us, there is still a beautiful light to be found in our ability to help others as we were unable to do for ourselves.
I suspect not many people will ever see this ending, as the whole point of downloading MEHEM would be to salve the terrible wounds in your psyche, still open and raw years after ME3’s ending created them, so few people are going to bother going into it with the low rating that this ending requires to activate. And that’s kind of sad, honestly, because just as MEHEM proper is an absolutely excellent ending, so too is MEHEM’s Bad Ending 1 of the best you’re ever going to come across. Thankfully, it's not hard to find on Youtube.
And that’s it for today! Personally, I think it’s pretty darned cool that there are games whose creators take such an interest in their work that they can’t resist telling the game and characters’ stories even when they go in the wrong direction. And it’s really neat that the RPG genre has quite a few of these--this list was fairly difficult to narrow down. There are a lot of quality Bad Endings out there, such as the ones for Chrono Trigger, Mass Effect 2, and Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, amongst others. The Bad Ending really can be an interesting, meaningful, and emotional little flourish that makes an already strong RPG that much more memorable and interesting, and I say kudos to those writers who take the time not only to make a Bad Ending at all, but to make one well.
Friday, December 18, 2015
Annual Summary 2015
Okay but seriously guys, how long can I keep up this whole rant thing? Surely I’m gonna run out of good ideas for rants soon, right?
...Wait, you can’t run out of what you never had to start with. Okay, I guess we’re good to keep going!
2015 was a good year for RPGs for me. Most of the ones I played were at least decent, plenty were great, and considering that I was working AND taking courses to be a teacher all through the year, I’d say I played a good number of them. Here’s what was on the plate this year:
Anodyne
Celestian Tales 1
Defenders of Oasis
Eternal Senia
Fairune
Gothic 2
Grinsia
Legena: Union Tides
The Legend of Heroes 6-1
The Legend of Korra: A New Era Begins
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
Mario and Luigi 4
Neverwinter Nights 1
Pillars of Eternity
Shadowrun: Hong Kong
Swords + Darkness
Undertale
Witch + Hero
Xenoblade Chronicles 1
Zenonia 1
Okay, yeah, not a huge number, but again, I was pretty busy. Heck, even outside of my boring real life stuff, I filled my time up pretty fully.
With what? Why, I’m glad you (almost certainly did not actually) ask! This year, I watched a ton of great stuff. I finally, FINALLY, watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, like everyone has been telling me to for the last decade or so, and quite enjoyed it! It’s definitely a great cartoon. I also watched its sequel series, The Legend of Korra, which was great as well, and also a little more timely. I watched Brooklyn 99’s second season (hilarious as always), the recent anime Sakura Trick (meh), Rick and Morty (a much larger meh), the Dollhouse (quite good), the new show Adam Ruins Everything (fun, informative, socially important, and it stars a member of my first, favorite sketch comedy groups, Olde English!), My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’s fifth season (great as always), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (very funny), and The Tick (live action and cartoon, both are hilarious). I also rewatched Trigun and Avatar: The Last Airbender with my mother; she liked ATLA quite well and was absolutely nuts about Trigun. Naturally.
I also watched 3 things which just blew me away. The first was Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. It is, without a doubt, the greatest 80s parody ever made--and I say that now, in 2015, the very year that the indescribably awesome Kung Fury was released. Don’t get me wrong, Kung Fury comes damn close, but Garth Marenghi is just...just sublime parody perfection beyond our mortal understanding.
The second was Daredevil. Just...damn. This is now the golden standard for live action superhero shows, folks. It blows everything else out of the water. Hell, this show is so thoughtful, packed, and excellently done that it’s almost on the level of Batman: The Animated Series.
And...the third and greatest thing I watched this year was Steven Universe. I...really never expected this to happen, but...Gargoyles is no longer the greatest western cartoon ever created. Steven Universe is a thing of art and poetry, and every moment of it is wonderful and unique even as it beautifully pays homage to some of the great works of animation that inspired it. I cannot describe it. Please, please watch this show. Like MLP: Friendship is Magic, it is a show that can and will greatly benefit our society the more people, children and adults, that it touches. Yet even MLPFiM, which you guys know I have extremely high respect and affection for, does not touch the level of excellence that is Steven Universe.
What other non-RPG stuff did I do? Well, I played Kid Icarus: Uprising, and played it obsessively, at that, because damn that game is fun and funny. The quips and shenanigans of Palutena, Pit, Viridi, Hades, and all the minor characters are just a barrel of fun to experience, even several times over. Heartily recommended if you could use some simple, quirky fun. I also played Super Smash Brothers Wii U, because if you’re gonna go non-RPGs every once in a while, you might as well go with the best ever. They really pulled out all the stops on this one, and while I really miss the little story adventure that Brawl had, and my sister laments the loss of Solid Snake, overall this iteration of the series is fantastic. They finally added Little Mac! And Palutena’s there, too! What more could you ever ask for!? And lastly, I replayed both Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Undertale so my sister could experience them. She was duly impressed with them both, and I always have a blast sharing quality entertainment.
I also read a lot of stuff this year. I read books by Isaac Asimov, Peter Beagle, Robert Charrette, Agatha Christie, Mel Odom, and Benjamin Alire Saenz. That may not seem like a lot, but the authors I’m not mentioning are the COUNTLESS HORDES OF WRITERS FROM ALL DISCIPLINES WHOSE WORKS I’VE READ NONSTOP FOR CLASSES. Seriously I think my eyes are gonna pop out of my head pretty soon.
Alright, enough of all that crap. Back to the RPGs. As has become typical for me, a significant portion of my RPGs were Indie and/or crowdfunded titles, though I kept in a good mix of more “mainstream” ones. It was neat because several were games I had helped to fund, so I finally got to see how they turned out. My 3DS was as essential as ever in getting in some RPGs during transits or downtime outside of the house, although, admittedly, not a lot of them were especially memorable. I fear I’m running out of good 3DS RPGs to download which are on the cheap side...
Also, could we now, as a species, stop naming things, “The Legend of ____”? I already had The Legend of Dragoon, Grimrock, Mana, and Zelda on my tally of RPGs I’ve completed, and now I’ve got to add The Legend of Heroes and Korra in there, too. THINK OF SOMETHING ELSE ALREADY.
Anyway, enough boring stuff. Let’s get to the fun part! Well, assuming you find ANY part of these self-indulgent little narcissistic report cards I give myself fun, that is.
RPG Moments of Interest in 2015:
1. Did I...did I just play a Xeno- game that made a lick of sense, had a decent narrative structure and some good characters, and overall just didn’t suck? And in fact, was quite good?
...
XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 1 IS A WITCH BURN IT BURN THE WITCH
2. In Shadowrun: Hong Kong, you can pickpocket excited convention-goers who are too busy messing with con activities to notice. I don’t know why, but somehow, something about this strikes me as a new low.
3.Have you seen that new Sonic Boom show? I can’t believe it, I really can’t fucking believe it, but it’s actually come to pass: after 24 prolific years of games, comics, cartoons, anime, and God only knows what else, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has actually produced something that doesn’t suck ass. Sonic Boom ain’t exactly a work of art, but it IS pretty damn funny, at least, and you can tell that the folks writing it are sharp and have great comical instinct.
It’s also funny to see a lot of long-time Sonic fans react to the show. They have no idea what to make of a Sonic product that’s actually enjoyable, having never encountered such a thing before, and so a lot of them decry it as getting the franchise all wrong. Pretty sure that’s the reason the show’s actually watchable, guys.
(Yes, this counts as an RPG thing. Sonic the Hedgehog had his own (shitty) RPG. Totes legit).
4. One of the many impressive things about Undertale is how it uses the game mechanic of save points and resets as an actual part of its story. It’s very rare for a game to incorporate a meta-game mechanic like that into its narrative...off the top of my head, I can only think of 2 other RPGs that have done so: Breath of Fire 5 (which incorporates save file resets as a necessary part of seeing the game’s full story), and Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle (which incorporates and gives narrative cause for its multiple endings once you reach a true understanding of what’s really going on with Duchess Catherine). Neither of them, however, so expertly manipulates the system into its plot as Undertale, and it was really neat to see the creativity with which Toby Fox made it happen.
5. Oddly, I encountered 3 separate games this year whose battle mechanic is basically running into enemies to both do and take damage: Eternal Senia, Fairune, and Witch + Hero. Nothing really to say about it, I just find it weird that the first year I come across such an idea, I hit upon it 3 times.
6. A couple of games I’ve played this year really remind you of just how great a product you can get from a single person’s vision. Toby Fox didn’t develop Undertale entirely by himself, but from what I understand, it’s still fair to call the game his personal vision and overall a 1 man show. And Eternal Senia, as far as I understand it, really WAS a case of a single person, going by the name Holy Priest, making the whole thing on his own. Considering Undertale’s excellence and how emotionally powerful Eternal Senia is, it really proves that you can get some pretty amazing results from even just 1 person’s passion.
7. This is going to be the most relevant Annual Summary rant I’ve ever done, because I actually played an unusually high number of RPGs that were released this very year. Celestian Tales 1, Eternal Senia, Legena: Union Tides, Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, and Undertale were all released in 2015. How crazy is that--The RPGenius is actually talking about stuff that’s current!*
Best Prequel/Sequel of 2015:
Winner: Shadowrun: Hong Kong
While Dragonfall is still the best Shadowrun video game to date, this year’s addition to the series is darned good, and it does the Shadowrun series proud, making good use of all the signatures of this awesome franchise: dark, gritty cyberpunk characters and settings, dark threats from both the corrupt corporate society and the forces of the supernatural, wry humor and earnest streetwise philosophy, and a twisting, layered plot. Settling into the Shadowrun universe perfectly to tell its story of greed, regret, and redemption, Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a cyberpunk gem.
Runners-Up: NA
Nothing to say, really. I didn’t play many games that were sequels or prequels this year, and of the few I did play...well, Shadowrun: Hong Kong was the only game that really did well by its predecessors and title.
Biggest Disappointment of 2015:
Loser: Mass Effect 3
You may think that the reason I keep mentioning Mass Effect 3 here every year is just to reinforce my disgust with its ending in an entertaining fashion. And you are not entirely wrong. Nonetheless, this isn’t just for the sake of hyperbolic amusement.
See, 3 years later, the atrocious pile of shit that is Mass Effect 3’s ending is still no less utterly vile and repugnant than ever. And that means, see, that the mere memory of it still brings forth feelings of disappointment that far eclipse any others I have felt this year. Since 2012, there has been no fresh disappointment in my RPG life that is great enough that it competes. Even if it’s just through memory, the ending of Mass Effect 3 really is still the most disappointing part of my year. Eat shit and die, Bioware.
However, if we limit ourselves to fresh disappointment, and reject that of recollection...
Actual Loser: The Legend of Korra: A New Era Begins
Honestly, I didn’t really expect too much of this game, but seeing as the show it’s based on is really high quality animated entertainment--one of the top 10 non-anime cartoons ever, I’d say--I was expecting, I dunno, something decent, you know? This game, though, is just...blah. It’s nothing. The story is hasty, boring, and honestly doesn’t really feel like it belongs in the Avatar universe more than it could belong in any other setting, with minimal tweaking. The characters are bland and interchangeable mockeries of the characters from the show, recognizable only from their appearance, not their personality...if they’re even there at all. When you get to the end and beat the game, you feel nothing, no sense of accomplishment or victory, and for a game based on The Legend of Korra, a show possessing such epic, meaningful, and in-universe historically significant climaxes and finales, that’s damned disappointing.
Almost as Bad: Neverwinter Nights 1, Swords + Darkness, Zenonia 1
No real story to tell with S+D and Zenonia 1--I just went into them as I do any other RPG, with the expectation that there would be a minimally acceptable plot and characters that don’t suck, and I was disappointed. Neverwinter Nights 1, though...if it weren’t for the last third of the Hordes of the Underdark expansion for it, NN1 would have been the most disappointing title for me this year. NN1 made such a splash in the RPG community when it came out, everyone was talking about it and praising it, and yet when I finally played it, all I found was a cliched, repetitive plot with terrible, boring pacing that bided its time with 1 stupid fetch quest after another instead of developing its story and characters in any real way. The main game’s only redeeming feature is Aribeth, and she’s also disappointing because she clearly has some potential as a character and villain, yet the game just doesn’t bother to do a damn thing with it. Some of the official add-ons for the game are good, but overall they’re drowned out by the others’ mediocrity, and even the best of the add-ons have problems, as I mentioned in a previous rant. So yeah...this vaunted Dungeons and Dragons game I’ve heard about for years and years just wasn’t anything of interest. Too bad.
Best Finale of 2015:
Winner: Undertale (True Ending)
Fun, heartwarming, fulfilling, grand in its scope, with a thrilling final battle that resonates strongly with the beauty of forgiveness and peace...the True Ending of Undertale is everything you want from this excellent game.
Runners-Up: Pillars of Eternity; Shadowrun: Hong Kong; Xenoblade Chronicles 1
The final part of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is interesting and adds a bit of the existential food for thought that Xeno- games are so fond of, without getting its head stuck up its own ass about it, which Xeno- games are also fond of. Pillars of Eternity has a strong finale, clarifying much of its lore and purpose in its final area (without feeling like they were cramming the information in last-minute, as some RPGs do), and concluding with a classic individualized ending, where you’re told what the results of your actions were for each place and important person in the game. Finally, Shadowrun: Hong Kong has a solid final mission, composed of both otherworldly horrors and matters of the human spirit, and ends its tale of regret and redemption as any Shadowrun adventure should: with the pride of a job well done, the satisfaction of a world-altering conflict settled, and yet the casual acceptance that in the end, the status quo of this tyrannical corporate world remains the same, as does life in the shadows. Grand yet also insignificant, as is the story of the individual standing on his or her own in the corporate world--that’s the way of the Shadowrun ending, and Hong Kong does it well.
Worst RPG of 2015:
Loser: Zenonia 1
Honestly, I’m happy to say that none of the RPGs I played this year were truly terrible games. I mean, there was some crap, to be sure, but even Zenonia 1 here is only faulted by being very lackluster and a general waste of time. That’s really nothing compared to the asinine yawn-weaver that won this spot last year, Rune Factory 1.
Almost as Bad: Gothic 2; The Legend of Korra: A New Era Begins; Swords + Darkness
Like Gothic 1, Gothic 2 is an exercise in tedium that wants to trade you 50 hours of your life for absolutely goddamn nothing. The plot of Swords + Darkness barely exists, and is the sort of generic, pointless drivel that tells you that its creators didn’t give half a damn about it. Its story may as well have come from a 1990s side-scrolling beat’em-up title, it’s so phoned in. Lastly, well, I’ve spoken multiple times about what a careless waste of time The Legend of Korra: A New Era Begins is. I frankly wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out that its entire script had been written on some napkins by a distracted intern on his lunch break, whose only knowledge of the show’s characters came from a brief glance at Wikipedia.
Most Improved of 2015:
Winner: Gothic 2
Gothic 1 was forgettable and let its moderately interesting premise languish in slow and distracted pacing and a thoroughly uninteresting cast. Gothic 2...does pretty much the same thing, but, I dunno, sorta not as poorly as the first game? The story is slightly less boring, the characters are slightly more interesting, the setting is slightly better explored...it still doesn’t add up to anything worth playing, but an improvement is an improvement nonetheless.
Runners-Up: NA
Meh. What can I say? Most of the games I played this year that weren’t standalone works just weren’t improvements. Mario and Luigi 4 isn’t any less boring than MaL3, the Legend of Zelda titles are both inferior to Link’s Awakening, and even though Shadowrun: Hong Kong is quite good, as I said, it isn’t as great as its direct predecessor, Shadowrun: Dragonfall.
Most Creative of 2015:
Winner: Undertale
As I said in more detail in my Undertale rant, this is one hell of a creative RPG, from its setting and lore, to its cast, to its style of storytelling, to its gameplay, to its premise, to its deconstruction of its genre, to its use of RPG mechanics within its plot. Seriously, this is 1 of the most creative RPGs you’re ever going to come across.
Runners-Up: Fairune; Pillars of Eternity; Xenoblade Chronicles 1
The world and history of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is interesting and had some decent thought and effort put into it. It’s nothing mind-blowing, but it’s also a lot more than your standard JRPG package. Fairune is kind of neat, using mostly nonverbal methods to tell...well, less tell, actually, and more imply, a vague but present backstory that makes the game a little more than it seems at first. Makes me think of Crystalis, though for what reason, I couldn't really guess. And lastly, Pillars of Eternity is a classic, yet distinct fantasy world which delves into the concepts of reincarnation and soul, and what meaning and impact one’s life really can have. It’s pretty neat, and I think the mechanics of souls and rebirth that Chris Avellone and company have come up with is quite singular.
Best Romance of 2015:
Winner: Aribeth and The Sleeping Man (Neverwinter Nights 1)
This romance is mostly awesome in a 1-sided way--the history of The Sleeping Man in Neverwinter Nights 1’s Hordes of the Underdark expansion is just terrifically epic, beautiful, and inspiring. He can actually get together with a few of the women in the expansion, but some are disappointing (it’s total bullshit that the disciple chickens out and flees him), and others just don’t feel very genuine. Aribeth, though...there’s something about the idea of the soul of the fallen paladin, as she walks the frozen plains of Hell in an attempt to find redemption and create purpose from her sins in life, finding this divine being slumbering for countless ages as he awaits her with unshakable faith, that I find really, really awesome. He, a man who gave up all he had because he lacked love, and traveled to the center of Hell itself to wait faithfully for it, and she, a woman who turned from all she had and believed in because she lost love, and was condemned to that same Hell to languish, finding one another and completing a destiny written beyond the fates of planes and time itself...it just speaks to me.
Runners-Up: Alphys and Undyne (Undertale); Fiora and Shulk (Xenoblade Chronicles 1); Frisk and Papyrus (Undertale)
Eh, Alphys and Undyne are cute. That’s really all there is to it; they work well together. Moving on, Fiora and Shulk have some believable chemistry, and their devotion to each other is romantic. I also like the fact that they just kind of naturally, mostly unconsciously acknowledge and embrace their feelings for one another. I mean, they do explicitly talk about it, too, it’s not all left unsaid, but most of the time, it’s kind of just a case of each clearly showing through their actions, tone, and motivations that they love the other, and understand that they’re loved back. It’s nice.
Finally, skeleton dates are best dates. ‘Nuff said.
Best Voice Acting of 2015:
Winner: Pillars of Eternity
There’s a lot of heavy dialogue with some of the more nuanced members of the Pillars of Eternity cast, and in such a situation, having voice actors who can bring each line alive in the right way for their character can be the difference between an engaging speech of philosophy and inquiry into the nature of humanity, the universe, and the spiritual...and just coming off as being overly gabby. Pillars of Eternity, thankfully, has a vocal cast that really do their jobs well, bringing complex characters like Eder and unique characters like the Grieving Mother to life and shaping their words into personality and depth.
Runners-Up: Neverwinter Nights 1; Xenoblade Chronicles 1
In the case of Neverwinter Nights 1, “Best” voice acting really just means “Wasn’t Bad” voice acting. I didn’t play many RPGs this year with vocal work, and some of the ones I did play had awful voice acting (Gothic 2**), so it hasn’t taken much to make it onto the list this year. Still, NN1 does its job adequately in most cases, at least. Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is better, with a cast that have pretty good and personal vocal work that distinguishes their characters well. I actually quite enjoyed the accents, too--most of the time, English translations of games are released in the USA or Canada first, but this time Europe got the game before we did, so our English dub is done by British voice actors. It’s an enjoyable change of pace, and the acting is competent and fits the characters well...and you just can’t resist the ridiculous, almost campy charm of Reyn shouting those goofy battle quotes of his.
Funniest of 2015:
Winner: Undertale
Among other things like heartwarming and creepy, Undertale is just goddamn hilarious. From bad bone puns and mischievous little dogs to amusing item descriptions and deranged robot TV stars, Undertale doesn’t fail to keep you chuckling.
And Papyrus. Papyrus is comedy.
Runner-Up: Witch + Hero
While nothing special overall, Witch + Hero makes it clear from its opening that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and with what few opportunities it allows itself to develop a tiny story, it’s generally fairly amusing. There’s not much more to the game than a few giggles, but hey, that’s something, right?
Best Villain of 2015:
Winner: Flowey (Undertale)
Vicious, creepy as fuck, infuriating, smart, remorseless...and secretly pretty deep as a character, Flowey is an awesome villain, just another of the many reasons that Undertale is so damn good.
Runners-Up: Aribeth (Neverwinter Nights 1); Colonel Richard (The Legend of Heroes 6-1); Thaos (Pillars of Eternity)
Even though the game doesn’t even attempt to use Aribeth to her full potential, she’s still not a bad villain, and the Hordes of the Underdark expansion later develops her character and villainy nicely, fleshing out her rationale, regrets, and revelations. Thaos is...well, honestly, he’s not exactly compelling, but he does have an interesting purpose and provides some good food for thought while adequately serving the role of obstacle-with-a-connection-to-the-protagonist, so he’s a pretty good villain. Lastly, Richard is decent, a conspirator whose motivation for his well-intentioned but immoral methods is paranoia and a hero-worship that he can’t get past. As I’ve mentioned, I think the fact that he connects to an overall trend of his country’s people that we’ve seen constantly throughout the game, the tendency to credit their country’s success and peace to a single man, is very smart and well-reasoned. Richard’s a good villain; he’d probably have won this year if not for that evil little plant bastard.
Best Character of 2015:
Winner: Grieving Mother (Pillars of Eternity)
Well, hell, what is there to say but that Chris Avellone has done it again? She’s no Kreia or Ravel, but the Grieving Mother is still fascinating and unique, a fresh character in both personality and complexity that I would say is an intellectual highlight of this thoughtful RPG, and certainly the best part of it in terms of emotional impact. Truly an impressive character, to be certain.
Runners-Up: Eder (Pillars of Eternity); Gaichu (Shadowrun: Hong Kong); The Sleeping Man (Neverwinter Nights 1)
You know, for a game I didn’t actually like overall, NN1 seems to be showing up in this rant a lot. Well, I wish I could have put some (or all) of the characters from Undertale in here, because I dearly love them, but objectively speaking, this bunch just has more depth, development, and worth.
Eder is a well written character, great in every aspect: he’s likable, he’s got great depth, he’s interesting to listen to and contemplate, you can see him grow (and help guide that growth) as a person and more importantly as himself, and you really feel for the guy. He’s just a solid character from every angle. Gaichu is a rich and complicated character whose conflict is interesting, and whose warring sense of honor and duty, his acknowledgement of his own rights and individuality, and his brutal instinct makes for a great character. Finally, again, I just really admire the grand romance of The Sleeping Man, the fact that his is a story of inspiration in both love and faith, to be found and cherished at the center of a place for the condemned and the seemingly irrevocably evil. Just...so damn epic!
Best Game of 2015:
Winner: Undertale
Undertale really is just a remarkable piece of fun, wit, poignant emotion, massive creativity, and meaningful commentary. It’s an RPG that will stay with you, and which shakes up what we think of as our standards for the genre, becoming a new example of excellence for other games to strive to match. Out of over 280 I've played, this is the eleventh best RPG I've ever encountered--and if you want some context, that puts it higher than Final Fantasy 7, every Mass Effect and Fallout, and Mother 3. I sincerely hope this will not be the only game we see made by Toby Fox, because he apparently possesses the talent and drive to create art of great worth.
Runners-Up: Pillars of Eternity; Shadowrun: Hong Kong; Xenoblade Chronicles 1
Actually, in all honesty, I personally like Eternal Senia better than some of these, but objectively speaking, these are the 3 best non-Undertale RPGs of the year. Pillars of Eternity is great, an RPG devoted to higher order thought which challenges the player intellectually with its plot of previous lives, how a single life can matter, the question of science vs. tradition in a society newly emerging into an intellectual Renaissance, and so much more. Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a solid, interesting cyberpunk venture, as Shadowrun should be, and getting to see the Shadowrun universe’s take on China and the eastern supernatural is a treat. Finally, while I think that Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is overrated somewhat, it’s still a solid, enjoyable JRPG with heart, and content that invites contemplation and attachment.
List Changes:
Greatest Villains: Flowey has been added; Delita has been removed. Sorry, you resourceful rags-to-riches ruffian.
Greatest RPGs: Undertale has been added; Shadow Hearts 2 has been removed. Sorry, you European yarn about Yuri’s yearning.
And that’s it for 2015! Certainly a good year for RPGs and beyond, and 2016 is promising, with many more Kickstarter RPGs I’ve backed set to release during its course, finishing Fallout 4 and playing its no doubt awesome upcoming DLCs, and plenty more RPGs on my playlist to go! I just wonder how much I’ll actually be able to get done as I move from taking classes to teaching them...I hope 2016 won’t be the year I have to permanently throttle back how many rants I’m releasing, but the possibility is there. Of course, if I were to get more Guest Rants from you fine folks, that would alleviate the difficulty greatly, I’m sure...hint, hint.
At any rate, thank you all again for continuing to read this silly drivel of mine, and here’s hoping 2016 will be a great year for us all. I’ll see you then.
* I’m also playing another 2015 release, Fallout 4, right now, but let’s face it, the game’s so massive that I’ll be lucky to finish it in time for the 2016 Annual Summary rant.
** Although it’s certainly not solely the voice actors’ fault. A lot of Gothic 2’s singular vocal weirdness comes from the bizarre choice of the developers to have a few lines just reused over and over again for many varied situations. Like, the line, “Hey, you!” must be said for at least 50 different dialogue openings, and it’s weird because it’s always the same accusatory “Hey, you!” used, even when the protagonist is just casually opening conversation with a friend. The rest of the conversation can be amiable and light, but it’ll unfailingly begin with the guy acting like he’s just caught someone stealing a purse or something.
...Wait, you can’t run out of what you never had to start with. Okay, I guess we’re good to keep going!
2015 was a good year for RPGs for me. Most of the ones I played were at least decent, plenty were great, and considering that I was working AND taking courses to be a teacher all through the year, I’d say I played a good number of them. Here’s what was on the plate this year:
Anodyne
Celestian Tales 1
Defenders of Oasis
Eternal Senia
Fairune
Gothic 2
Grinsia
Legena: Union Tides
The Legend of Heroes 6-1
The Legend of Korra: A New Era Begins
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
Mario and Luigi 4
Neverwinter Nights 1
Pillars of Eternity
Shadowrun: Hong Kong
Swords + Darkness
Undertale
Witch + Hero
Xenoblade Chronicles 1
Zenonia 1
Okay, yeah, not a huge number, but again, I was pretty busy. Heck, even outside of my boring real life stuff, I filled my time up pretty fully.
With what? Why, I’m glad you (almost certainly did not actually) ask! This year, I watched a ton of great stuff. I finally, FINALLY, watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, like everyone has been telling me to for the last decade or so, and quite enjoyed it! It’s definitely a great cartoon. I also watched its sequel series, The Legend of Korra, which was great as well, and also a little more timely. I watched Brooklyn 99’s second season (hilarious as always), the recent anime Sakura Trick (meh), Rick and Morty (a much larger meh), the Dollhouse (quite good), the new show Adam Ruins Everything (fun, informative, socially important, and it stars a member of my first, favorite sketch comedy groups, Olde English!), My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’s fifth season (great as always), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (very funny), and The Tick (live action and cartoon, both are hilarious). I also rewatched Trigun and Avatar: The Last Airbender with my mother; she liked ATLA quite well and was absolutely nuts about Trigun. Naturally.
I also watched 3 things which just blew me away. The first was Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. It is, without a doubt, the greatest 80s parody ever made--and I say that now, in 2015, the very year that the indescribably awesome Kung Fury was released. Don’t get me wrong, Kung Fury comes damn close, but Garth Marenghi is just...just sublime parody perfection beyond our mortal understanding.
The second was Daredevil. Just...damn. This is now the golden standard for live action superhero shows, folks. It blows everything else out of the water. Hell, this show is so thoughtful, packed, and excellently done that it’s almost on the level of Batman: The Animated Series.
And...the third and greatest thing I watched this year was Steven Universe. I...really never expected this to happen, but...Gargoyles is no longer the greatest western cartoon ever created. Steven Universe is a thing of art and poetry, and every moment of it is wonderful and unique even as it beautifully pays homage to some of the great works of animation that inspired it. I cannot describe it. Please, please watch this show. Like MLP: Friendship is Magic, it is a show that can and will greatly benefit our society the more people, children and adults, that it touches. Yet even MLPFiM, which you guys know I have extremely high respect and affection for, does not touch the level of excellence that is Steven Universe.
What other non-RPG stuff did I do? Well, I played Kid Icarus: Uprising, and played it obsessively, at that, because damn that game is fun and funny. The quips and shenanigans of Palutena, Pit, Viridi, Hades, and all the minor characters are just a barrel of fun to experience, even several times over. Heartily recommended if you could use some simple, quirky fun. I also played Super Smash Brothers Wii U, because if you’re gonna go non-RPGs every once in a while, you might as well go with the best ever. They really pulled out all the stops on this one, and while I really miss the little story adventure that Brawl had, and my sister laments the loss of Solid Snake, overall this iteration of the series is fantastic. They finally added Little Mac! And Palutena’s there, too! What more could you ever ask for!? And lastly, I replayed both Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Undertale so my sister could experience them. She was duly impressed with them both, and I always have a blast sharing quality entertainment.
I also read a lot of stuff this year. I read books by Isaac Asimov, Peter Beagle, Robert Charrette, Agatha Christie, Mel Odom, and Benjamin Alire Saenz. That may not seem like a lot, but the authors I’m not mentioning are the COUNTLESS HORDES OF WRITERS FROM ALL DISCIPLINES WHOSE WORKS I’VE READ NONSTOP FOR CLASSES. Seriously I think my eyes are gonna pop out of my head pretty soon.
Alright, enough of all that crap. Back to the RPGs. As has become typical for me, a significant portion of my RPGs were Indie and/or crowdfunded titles, though I kept in a good mix of more “mainstream” ones. It was neat because several were games I had helped to fund, so I finally got to see how they turned out. My 3DS was as essential as ever in getting in some RPGs during transits or downtime outside of the house, although, admittedly, not a lot of them were especially memorable. I fear I’m running out of good 3DS RPGs to download which are on the cheap side...
Also, could we now, as a species, stop naming things, “The Legend of ____”? I already had The Legend of Dragoon, Grimrock, Mana, and Zelda on my tally of RPGs I’ve completed, and now I’ve got to add The Legend of Heroes and Korra in there, too. THINK OF SOMETHING ELSE ALREADY.
Anyway, enough boring stuff. Let’s get to the fun part! Well, assuming you find ANY part of these self-indulgent little narcissistic report cards I give myself fun, that is.
RPG Moments of Interest in 2015:
1. Did I...did I just play a Xeno- game that made a lick of sense, had a decent narrative structure and some good characters, and overall just didn’t suck? And in fact, was quite good?
...
XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 1 IS A WITCH BURN IT BURN THE WITCH
2. In Shadowrun: Hong Kong, you can pickpocket excited convention-goers who are too busy messing with con activities to notice. I don’t know why, but somehow, something about this strikes me as a new low.
3.Have you seen that new Sonic Boom show? I can’t believe it, I really can’t fucking believe it, but it’s actually come to pass: after 24 prolific years of games, comics, cartoons, anime, and God only knows what else, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has actually produced something that doesn’t suck ass. Sonic Boom ain’t exactly a work of art, but it IS pretty damn funny, at least, and you can tell that the folks writing it are sharp and have great comical instinct.
It’s also funny to see a lot of long-time Sonic fans react to the show. They have no idea what to make of a Sonic product that’s actually enjoyable, having never encountered such a thing before, and so a lot of them decry it as getting the franchise all wrong. Pretty sure that’s the reason the show’s actually watchable, guys.
(Yes, this counts as an RPG thing. Sonic the Hedgehog had his own (shitty) RPG. Totes legit).
4. One of the many impressive things about Undertale is how it uses the game mechanic of save points and resets as an actual part of its story. It’s very rare for a game to incorporate a meta-game mechanic like that into its narrative...off the top of my head, I can only think of 2 other RPGs that have done so: Breath of Fire 5 (which incorporates save file resets as a necessary part of seeing the game’s full story), and Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle (which incorporates and gives narrative cause for its multiple endings once you reach a true understanding of what’s really going on with Duchess Catherine). Neither of them, however, so expertly manipulates the system into its plot as Undertale, and it was really neat to see the creativity with which Toby Fox made it happen.
5. Oddly, I encountered 3 separate games this year whose battle mechanic is basically running into enemies to both do and take damage: Eternal Senia, Fairune, and Witch + Hero. Nothing really to say about it, I just find it weird that the first year I come across such an idea, I hit upon it 3 times.
6. A couple of games I’ve played this year really remind you of just how great a product you can get from a single person’s vision. Toby Fox didn’t develop Undertale entirely by himself, but from what I understand, it’s still fair to call the game his personal vision and overall a 1 man show. And Eternal Senia, as far as I understand it, really WAS a case of a single person, going by the name Holy Priest, making the whole thing on his own. Considering Undertale’s excellence and how emotionally powerful Eternal Senia is, it really proves that you can get some pretty amazing results from even just 1 person’s passion.
7. This is going to be the most relevant Annual Summary rant I’ve ever done, because I actually played an unusually high number of RPGs that were released this very year. Celestian Tales 1, Eternal Senia, Legena: Union Tides, Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, and Undertale were all released in 2015. How crazy is that--The RPGenius is actually talking about stuff that’s current!*
Best Prequel/Sequel of 2015:
Winner: Shadowrun: Hong Kong
While Dragonfall is still the best Shadowrun video game to date, this year’s addition to the series is darned good, and it does the Shadowrun series proud, making good use of all the signatures of this awesome franchise: dark, gritty cyberpunk characters and settings, dark threats from both the corrupt corporate society and the forces of the supernatural, wry humor and earnest streetwise philosophy, and a twisting, layered plot. Settling into the Shadowrun universe perfectly to tell its story of greed, regret, and redemption, Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a cyberpunk gem.
Runners-Up: NA
Nothing to say, really. I didn’t play many games that were sequels or prequels this year, and of the few I did play...well, Shadowrun: Hong Kong was the only game that really did well by its predecessors and title.
Biggest Disappointment of 2015:
Loser: Mass Effect 3
You may think that the reason I keep mentioning Mass Effect 3 here every year is just to reinforce my disgust with its ending in an entertaining fashion. And you are not entirely wrong. Nonetheless, this isn’t just for the sake of hyperbolic amusement.
See, 3 years later, the atrocious pile of shit that is Mass Effect 3’s ending is still no less utterly vile and repugnant than ever. And that means, see, that the mere memory of it still brings forth feelings of disappointment that far eclipse any others I have felt this year. Since 2012, there has been no fresh disappointment in my RPG life that is great enough that it competes. Even if it’s just through memory, the ending of Mass Effect 3 really is still the most disappointing part of my year. Eat shit and die, Bioware.
However, if we limit ourselves to fresh disappointment, and reject that of recollection...
Actual Loser: The Legend of Korra: A New Era Begins
Honestly, I didn’t really expect too much of this game, but seeing as the show it’s based on is really high quality animated entertainment--one of the top 10 non-anime cartoons ever, I’d say--I was expecting, I dunno, something decent, you know? This game, though, is just...blah. It’s nothing. The story is hasty, boring, and honestly doesn’t really feel like it belongs in the Avatar universe more than it could belong in any other setting, with minimal tweaking. The characters are bland and interchangeable mockeries of the characters from the show, recognizable only from their appearance, not their personality...if they’re even there at all. When you get to the end and beat the game, you feel nothing, no sense of accomplishment or victory, and for a game based on The Legend of Korra, a show possessing such epic, meaningful, and in-universe historically significant climaxes and finales, that’s damned disappointing.
Almost as Bad: Neverwinter Nights 1, Swords + Darkness, Zenonia 1
No real story to tell with S+D and Zenonia 1--I just went into them as I do any other RPG, with the expectation that there would be a minimally acceptable plot and characters that don’t suck, and I was disappointed. Neverwinter Nights 1, though...if it weren’t for the last third of the Hordes of the Underdark expansion for it, NN1 would have been the most disappointing title for me this year. NN1 made such a splash in the RPG community when it came out, everyone was talking about it and praising it, and yet when I finally played it, all I found was a cliched, repetitive plot with terrible, boring pacing that bided its time with 1 stupid fetch quest after another instead of developing its story and characters in any real way. The main game’s only redeeming feature is Aribeth, and she’s also disappointing because she clearly has some potential as a character and villain, yet the game just doesn’t bother to do a damn thing with it. Some of the official add-ons for the game are good, but overall they’re drowned out by the others’ mediocrity, and even the best of the add-ons have problems, as I mentioned in a previous rant. So yeah...this vaunted Dungeons and Dragons game I’ve heard about for years and years just wasn’t anything of interest. Too bad.
Best Finale of 2015:
Winner: Undertale (True Ending)
Fun, heartwarming, fulfilling, grand in its scope, with a thrilling final battle that resonates strongly with the beauty of forgiveness and peace...the True Ending of Undertale is everything you want from this excellent game.
Runners-Up: Pillars of Eternity; Shadowrun: Hong Kong; Xenoblade Chronicles 1
The final part of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is interesting and adds a bit of the existential food for thought that Xeno- games are so fond of, without getting its head stuck up its own ass about it, which Xeno- games are also fond of. Pillars of Eternity has a strong finale, clarifying much of its lore and purpose in its final area (without feeling like they were cramming the information in last-minute, as some RPGs do), and concluding with a classic individualized ending, where you’re told what the results of your actions were for each place and important person in the game. Finally, Shadowrun: Hong Kong has a solid final mission, composed of both otherworldly horrors and matters of the human spirit, and ends its tale of regret and redemption as any Shadowrun adventure should: with the pride of a job well done, the satisfaction of a world-altering conflict settled, and yet the casual acceptance that in the end, the status quo of this tyrannical corporate world remains the same, as does life in the shadows. Grand yet also insignificant, as is the story of the individual standing on his or her own in the corporate world--that’s the way of the Shadowrun ending, and Hong Kong does it well.
Worst RPG of 2015:
Loser: Zenonia 1
Honestly, I’m happy to say that none of the RPGs I played this year were truly terrible games. I mean, there was some crap, to be sure, but even Zenonia 1 here is only faulted by being very lackluster and a general waste of time. That’s really nothing compared to the asinine yawn-weaver that won this spot last year, Rune Factory 1.
Almost as Bad: Gothic 2; The Legend of Korra: A New Era Begins; Swords + Darkness
Like Gothic 1, Gothic 2 is an exercise in tedium that wants to trade you 50 hours of your life for absolutely goddamn nothing. The plot of Swords + Darkness barely exists, and is the sort of generic, pointless drivel that tells you that its creators didn’t give half a damn about it. Its story may as well have come from a 1990s side-scrolling beat’em-up title, it’s so phoned in. Lastly, well, I’ve spoken multiple times about what a careless waste of time The Legend of Korra: A New Era Begins is. I frankly wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out that its entire script had been written on some napkins by a distracted intern on his lunch break, whose only knowledge of the show’s characters came from a brief glance at Wikipedia.
Most Improved of 2015:
Winner: Gothic 2
Gothic 1 was forgettable and let its moderately interesting premise languish in slow and distracted pacing and a thoroughly uninteresting cast. Gothic 2...does pretty much the same thing, but, I dunno, sorta not as poorly as the first game? The story is slightly less boring, the characters are slightly more interesting, the setting is slightly better explored...it still doesn’t add up to anything worth playing, but an improvement is an improvement nonetheless.
Runners-Up: NA
Meh. What can I say? Most of the games I played this year that weren’t standalone works just weren’t improvements. Mario and Luigi 4 isn’t any less boring than MaL3, the Legend of Zelda titles are both inferior to Link’s Awakening, and even though Shadowrun: Hong Kong is quite good, as I said, it isn’t as great as its direct predecessor, Shadowrun: Dragonfall.
Most Creative of 2015:
Winner: Undertale
As I said in more detail in my Undertale rant, this is one hell of a creative RPG, from its setting and lore, to its cast, to its style of storytelling, to its gameplay, to its premise, to its deconstruction of its genre, to its use of RPG mechanics within its plot. Seriously, this is 1 of the most creative RPGs you’re ever going to come across.
Runners-Up: Fairune; Pillars of Eternity; Xenoblade Chronicles 1
The world and history of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is interesting and had some decent thought and effort put into it. It’s nothing mind-blowing, but it’s also a lot more than your standard JRPG package. Fairune is kind of neat, using mostly nonverbal methods to tell...well, less tell, actually, and more imply, a vague but present backstory that makes the game a little more than it seems at first. Makes me think of Crystalis, though for what reason, I couldn't really guess. And lastly, Pillars of Eternity is a classic, yet distinct fantasy world which delves into the concepts of reincarnation and soul, and what meaning and impact one’s life really can have. It’s pretty neat, and I think the mechanics of souls and rebirth that Chris Avellone and company have come up with is quite singular.
Best Romance of 2015:
Winner: Aribeth and The Sleeping Man (Neverwinter Nights 1)
This romance is mostly awesome in a 1-sided way--the history of The Sleeping Man in Neverwinter Nights 1’s Hordes of the Underdark expansion is just terrifically epic, beautiful, and inspiring. He can actually get together with a few of the women in the expansion, but some are disappointing (it’s total bullshit that the disciple chickens out and flees him), and others just don’t feel very genuine. Aribeth, though...there’s something about the idea of the soul of the fallen paladin, as she walks the frozen plains of Hell in an attempt to find redemption and create purpose from her sins in life, finding this divine being slumbering for countless ages as he awaits her with unshakable faith, that I find really, really awesome. He, a man who gave up all he had because he lacked love, and traveled to the center of Hell itself to wait faithfully for it, and she, a woman who turned from all she had and believed in because she lost love, and was condemned to that same Hell to languish, finding one another and completing a destiny written beyond the fates of planes and time itself...it just speaks to me.
Runners-Up: Alphys and Undyne (Undertale); Fiora and Shulk (Xenoblade Chronicles 1); Frisk and Papyrus (Undertale)
Eh, Alphys and Undyne are cute. That’s really all there is to it; they work well together. Moving on, Fiora and Shulk have some believable chemistry, and their devotion to each other is romantic. I also like the fact that they just kind of naturally, mostly unconsciously acknowledge and embrace their feelings for one another. I mean, they do explicitly talk about it, too, it’s not all left unsaid, but most of the time, it’s kind of just a case of each clearly showing through their actions, tone, and motivations that they love the other, and understand that they’re loved back. It’s nice.
Finally, skeleton dates are best dates. ‘Nuff said.
Best Voice Acting of 2015:
Winner: Pillars of Eternity
There’s a lot of heavy dialogue with some of the more nuanced members of the Pillars of Eternity cast, and in such a situation, having voice actors who can bring each line alive in the right way for their character can be the difference between an engaging speech of philosophy and inquiry into the nature of humanity, the universe, and the spiritual...and just coming off as being overly gabby. Pillars of Eternity, thankfully, has a vocal cast that really do their jobs well, bringing complex characters like Eder and unique characters like the Grieving Mother to life and shaping their words into personality and depth.
Runners-Up: Neverwinter Nights 1; Xenoblade Chronicles 1
In the case of Neverwinter Nights 1, “Best” voice acting really just means “Wasn’t Bad” voice acting. I didn’t play many RPGs this year with vocal work, and some of the ones I did play had awful voice acting (Gothic 2**), so it hasn’t taken much to make it onto the list this year. Still, NN1 does its job adequately in most cases, at least. Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is better, with a cast that have pretty good and personal vocal work that distinguishes their characters well. I actually quite enjoyed the accents, too--most of the time, English translations of games are released in the USA or Canada first, but this time Europe got the game before we did, so our English dub is done by British voice actors. It’s an enjoyable change of pace, and the acting is competent and fits the characters well...and you just can’t resist the ridiculous, almost campy charm of Reyn shouting those goofy battle quotes of his.
Funniest of 2015:
Winner: Undertale
Among other things like heartwarming and creepy, Undertale is just goddamn hilarious. From bad bone puns and mischievous little dogs to amusing item descriptions and deranged robot TV stars, Undertale doesn’t fail to keep you chuckling.
And Papyrus. Papyrus is comedy.
Runner-Up: Witch + Hero
While nothing special overall, Witch + Hero makes it clear from its opening that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and with what few opportunities it allows itself to develop a tiny story, it’s generally fairly amusing. There’s not much more to the game than a few giggles, but hey, that’s something, right?
Best Villain of 2015:
Winner: Flowey (Undertale)
Vicious, creepy as fuck, infuriating, smart, remorseless...and secretly pretty deep as a character, Flowey is an awesome villain, just another of the many reasons that Undertale is so damn good.
Runners-Up: Aribeth (Neverwinter Nights 1); Colonel Richard (The Legend of Heroes 6-1); Thaos (Pillars of Eternity)
Even though the game doesn’t even attempt to use Aribeth to her full potential, she’s still not a bad villain, and the Hordes of the Underdark expansion later develops her character and villainy nicely, fleshing out her rationale, regrets, and revelations. Thaos is...well, honestly, he’s not exactly compelling, but he does have an interesting purpose and provides some good food for thought while adequately serving the role of obstacle-with-a-connection-to-the-protagonist, so he’s a pretty good villain. Lastly, Richard is decent, a conspirator whose motivation for his well-intentioned but immoral methods is paranoia and a hero-worship that he can’t get past. As I’ve mentioned, I think the fact that he connects to an overall trend of his country’s people that we’ve seen constantly throughout the game, the tendency to credit their country’s success and peace to a single man, is very smart and well-reasoned. Richard’s a good villain; he’d probably have won this year if not for that evil little plant bastard.
Best Character of 2015:
Winner: Grieving Mother (Pillars of Eternity)
Well, hell, what is there to say but that Chris Avellone has done it again? She’s no Kreia or Ravel, but the Grieving Mother is still fascinating and unique, a fresh character in both personality and complexity that I would say is an intellectual highlight of this thoughtful RPG, and certainly the best part of it in terms of emotional impact. Truly an impressive character, to be certain.
Runners-Up: Eder (Pillars of Eternity); Gaichu (Shadowrun: Hong Kong); The Sleeping Man (Neverwinter Nights 1)
You know, for a game I didn’t actually like overall, NN1 seems to be showing up in this rant a lot. Well, I wish I could have put some (or all) of the characters from Undertale in here, because I dearly love them, but objectively speaking, this bunch just has more depth, development, and worth.
Eder is a well written character, great in every aspect: he’s likable, he’s got great depth, he’s interesting to listen to and contemplate, you can see him grow (and help guide that growth) as a person and more importantly as himself, and you really feel for the guy. He’s just a solid character from every angle. Gaichu is a rich and complicated character whose conflict is interesting, and whose warring sense of honor and duty, his acknowledgement of his own rights and individuality, and his brutal instinct makes for a great character. Finally, again, I just really admire the grand romance of The Sleeping Man, the fact that his is a story of inspiration in both love and faith, to be found and cherished at the center of a place for the condemned and the seemingly irrevocably evil. Just...so damn epic!
Best Game of 2015:
Winner: Undertale
Undertale really is just a remarkable piece of fun, wit, poignant emotion, massive creativity, and meaningful commentary. It’s an RPG that will stay with you, and which shakes up what we think of as our standards for the genre, becoming a new example of excellence for other games to strive to match. Out of over 280 I've played, this is the eleventh best RPG I've ever encountered--and if you want some context, that puts it higher than Final Fantasy 7, every Mass Effect and Fallout, and Mother 3. I sincerely hope this will not be the only game we see made by Toby Fox, because he apparently possesses the talent and drive to create art of great worth.
Runners-Up: Pillars of Eternity; Shadowrun: Hong Kong; Xenoblade Chronicles 1
Actually, in all honesty, I personally like Eternal Senia better than some of these, but objectively speaking, these are the 3 best non-Undertale RPGs of the year. Pillars of Eternity is great, an RPG devoted to higher order thought which challenges the player intellectually with its plot of previous lives, how a single life can matter, the question of science vs. tradition in a society newly emerging into an intellectual Renaissance, and so much more. Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a solid, interesting cyberpunk venture, as Shadowrun should be, and getting to see the Shadowrun universe’s take on China and the eastern supernatural is a treat. Finally, while I think that Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is overrated somewhat, it’s still a solid, enjoyable JRPG with heart, and content that invites contemplation and attachment.
List Changes:
Greatest Villains: Flowey has been added; Delita has been removed. Sorry, you resourceful rags-to-riches ruffian.
Greatest RPGs: Undertale has been added; Shadow Hearts 2 has been removed. Sorry, you European yarn about Yuri’s yearning.
And that’s it for 2015! Certainly a good year for RPGs and beyond, and 2016 is promising, with many more Kickstarter RPGs I’ve backed set to release during its course, finishing Fallout 4 and playing its no doubt awesome upcoming DLCs, and plenty more RPGs on my playlist to go! I just wonder how much I’ll actually be able to get done as I move from taking classes to teaching them...I hope 2016 won’t be the year I have to permanently throttle back how many rants I’m releasing, but the possibility is there. Of course, if I were to get more Guest Rants from you fine folks, that would alleviate the difficulty greatly, I’m sure...hint, hint.
At any rate, thank you all again for continuing to read this silly drivel of mine, and here’s hoping 2016 will be a great year for us all. I’ll see you then.
* I’m also playing another 2015 release, Fallout 4, right now, but let’s face it, the game’s so massive that I’ll be lucky to finish it in time for the 2016 Annual Summary rant.
** Although it’s certainly not solely the voice actors’ fault. A lot of Gothic 2’s singular vocal weirdness comes from the bizarre choice of the developers to have a few lines just reused over and over again for many varied situations. Like, the line, “Hey, you!” must be said for at least 50 different dialogue openings, and it’s weird because it’s always the same accusatory “Hey, you!” used, even when the protagonist is just casually opening conversation with a friend. The rest of the conversation can be amiable and light, but it’ll unfailingly begin with the guy acting like he’s just caught someone stealing a purse or something.
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
General RPGs as Classroom Texts
Check it out: in this rant, I do what I should have been doing for the last 9 years and actually italicize titles! Don’t expect to ever see me fulfilling this fundamental grammatical responsibility again, though. Today’s rant is related to what will hopefully be my career soon, so I feel more compelled to be somewhat professional about it. After this, I’m just gonna slump back into my slovenly, gibbering ways that you all know and mildly like just enough to read this blog sometimes when you’re really bored.
So, as I mentioned in last year’s Annual Summary Rant, I’ve been doing some graduate work to be certified as a teacher. High School English, specifically. It’s a fairly rigorous program (or it’s not, and I’m just not very good at it), so matters of the classroom have been going through my mind quite a lot during this past year. And of course, with my head already so full of all the RPG stuff that I overthink, it was really only a matter of time before a Teacher thought would collide with an RPG thought, and so we come to the question of today’s rant:
Can an RPG be a suitable text for the classroom?
First of all, let’s briefly define what a classroom text even is. We tend to think of texts in school as being things like novels, textbooks, short stories, articles, plays, reports, and various other typed, readable examples of fiction and nonfiction. Which makes sense, of course, as these are all things that communicate their ideas via, y’know, text. In the program within which I am enrolled, however, “text” takes on a broader meaning, associated with any outside work introduced for study in the classroom, regardless of its format. Under this definition, a text could certainly be a physical copy of The Great Gatsby or an online posting of an Emily Dickinson poem, as you’d expect, but a movie adaptation of Hamlet, a picture of one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings, or an audio recording of a speech by the Dalai Lama, would also each be considered texts if used in the classroom.
So, then, if we allow that any work that can be studied is a text, and so long as we also allow that avenues of fictional storytelling are even something that we believe worth studying to begin with,* it is as possible that an RPG can be a text as it is possible that anything else can be. But can an RPG be a suitable text?
Well, the answer to that, of course, is subjective, and also quite dependant on what RPG you’re looking at. Certainly not all RPGs are worthy of study in a classroom. In fact, I’d say most of them aren’t. But that doesn’t really prove much by itself; I daresay even most books don’t warrant focused study. But are there at least some RPGs that have something to offer to a program of study, that are worth the effort of teaching?
Yes!
As an example: A great many classrooms study Fahrenheit 451, 1984, or some other book that covers the dangers of totalitarian societies, how they are perpetuated and the ways of fighting back against them--or the hopelessness of trying to do so. Some enlightened schools have started incorporating The Hunger Games into this study of dystopias, which I heartily applaud, and hope to do so myself. It’s a good genre to have students study, at least a little. First of all, by directly encountering, studying, and coming to understand this concept of an overbearing, freedom-restricting, anti-intellectual society, the students can come to have a better understanding of important aspects of other works, such as Animal Farm or The Scarlet Letter (the Puritans needed to chill out, man), or even nuances of parts of their history class (such as why it was so important for the institution of slavery that slaves be forbidden to learn to read). Secondly and far more important, learning about this idea of a society which uses meaningless distractions, propaganda, and the destruction and alteration of idea exchange is important in teaching students to look critically at their own society, and recognize dangerous similarities between real life and the dystopias they have read about when they encounter them. Studying dystopias can make students better, more vigilant guardians of their society and their freedom.
Would not the RPG Deus Ex 1 fit into such a unit perfectly? It is, after all, all about dystopia, how it might come to be enacted in our world, the questions of when government goes too far and the means through which it does so, the dangers of propaganda, the questions of total surveillance, and so on and so forth. In fact, while I do think the primary text of a dystopia unit should remain 1984, The Hunger Games trilogy, or Fahrenheit 451, I would say that the second most important text in such a unit would be Deus Ex 1, rather than a second book chosen from that list. Why? Because those three books I mentioned, and most other dystopian works I’ve encountered, all describe to us a dystopia that is already in place. They describe the incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible, struggle to overcome a dystopia once it is a fact of life. The cautions they offer to the reader on how to stop a dystopia from coming to be are all general, non-specific advice--don’t let authority ban or destroy literature or any other free exchange of ideas, don’t let yourself be tricked by doublespeak and meaningless wars, be critical of what you see and read, don’t let yourself be put at odds against those as oppressed as you are by the people causing the oppression, and so on. All very good pieces of advice, of course, but in some ways harder to put into practice because of how unspecific they are.
Deus Ex 1, on the other hand, shows us the moment at which an oppressive authority takes the final step to become a dystopia, and it details to us the methods that evil authority uses--the kinds of agencies, the kinds of propaganda, the kinds of tools, and the reasons these things work. The books I’ve mentioned give you the grim caution of what could happen, but Deus Ex 1 shows you how it could happen, and so better forearms its audience with the knowledge of specific warning signs of the dangers that the books could only give generalized cautions against. Providing a practical example of how a dystopia could be enacted is a GREAT way to support your primary dystopia text, and DE1 would be able to do that with its level of specific detail.**
...Okay, wow, I didn’t mean to make this one example long enough to be its own rant. Sorry. I’ll try to be less long-winded on these other points.
DE1 isn’t the only RPG that could be used as a great supplemental text, of course. In a unit which examines, for example, the question of Man against God, a number of RPGs could be used as supplements--Grandia 2, some Shin Megami Tensei titles if you want to be literal about the issue, Okage: Shadow King, Star Ocean 3 (if you could really, really abridge the game’s first half), Wild Arms 3...wow, this is a really, really frequent theme in JRPGs, now that I think about it.
Fill in the blank: It would be _______________ to follow Ahab in his journey in Moby Dick to destroy the white whale and prove he has free will, while playing Tales of the Abyss at the same time, watching Van Grants set forth in his own machinations to break the world free of destiny’s cage, the Score of Lorelei, and draw comparisons between them in class discussions.
If your answer was “Pretty Cool,” give yourself a gold star. If not, see me after class.
You could do a lot with some of the richer intellectual western RPGs in a unit about teaching effective reading--Planescape: Torment would be ideal for it. Any unit involving a look at religion and how it shapes us and our society could be benefited greatly by a number of Shin Megami Tensei titles, or Final Fantasy 10. In a unit that covers the theme of a young adult seeking to find themselves and their place in life, I can see far worse companions to Paper Towns, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Catcher in the Rye than the games Wild Arms 3 or Final Fantasy 9.*** Surely any unit that uses works like The Great Gatsby, Our Town, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to speak about the social history and personal essence of the United States would benefit from a great deal of the stories and events, both direct and allegorical, found within the Fallout series. And so on and so forth--I daresay there are few typical High School English units (and even fewer college-level ones, for that matter) that I couldn’t associate with at least 1 RPG that could add thoughtful, worthwhile insights into the matter.
And so, coming back to the question of this rant, can an RPG be a suitable text for a classroom? Well, in my reasonably expert opinion, the answer is...no.
“Oh COME ON, The RPGenius, you inimitable, self-important asshole!” you grumble now, as your mouse cursor hovers dangerously close over the X button in the corner of your browser. “Did you seriously just waste all that time convincing us that RPGs have as much to offer a thoughtful curriculum as any other method of expression, only to turn around and tell us it can’t be done anyway?”
Of course I did. I’m a total jackass. I thought you guys would’ve figured that out by now. Really, you have only yourselves to blame.
See, here’s the thing. I do believe wholeheartedly in what I’ve been saying here. As methods of storytelling and expressing higher thought, RPGs are no less capable and worthy than any other narrative art form, be it books, television, movies, comics, visual art, theater, or what have you. Obviously those other forms have a huge head start on video games, but I’d nonetheless place the likes of Planescape: Torment, Deus Ex 1, Final Fantasy 7, Wild Arms 3, Mother 3, and many more RPGs at the same level of worth and intellect as the average classic work of literature.****
Here, however, is the “but” that makes that opinion meaningless: Many RPGs are worthy of academic study, but, it is, logistically speaking, impossible to make them a part of any school’s curriculum, for a number of reasons:
A: The time. Even reading a full novel from start to finish, a task that a class unit gives its students a time of about 1 - 4 weeks to complete, is never a task that’s going to take more than 20 hours of a student’s time altogether, and as far as I can tell, most assigned books take considerably less time than that. Heck according to this site, you can read the entire Hunger Games trilogy in less than 17 hours. Obviously the mileage of high school students is going to vary greatly, but still, you get the idea.
Now consider the fact that RPGs average anywhere between 25 to 60 hours to complete. If it takes 2 to 3 weeks to have students read and learn about The Great Gatsby, which averages in at less than 3 hours to read, or To Kill a Mockingbird, which clocks in at less than 6 hours to finish, how the hell would you ever find a way to include, say, Grandia 2, which takes, according to How Long to Beat, about 35 hours? You’d basically have to be including it in your curriculum for an entire term, and probably be well past whatever unit it was meant to coincide with before you even got to the relevant details in the game.
Even Deus Ex 1, a short RPG, takes 20 to 25 hours to complete, which would translate to, what, a month in class? You could maybe make your unit on dystopian fiction last a full month, but you wouldn’t be able to fit in anything but DE1, and while I think it’s an ideal supplementary text, it can’t be the anchor for the unit--you really just need to have Orwell, Bradbury, or Collins serving as the unit’s foundation.
I can’t really see it being possible to effectively teach an RPG as a text in parts, either. While you can take excerpts from some books and such to teach with, RPGs are typically a very linear story that really requires that you’ve witnessed all of what’s come before each scene in order to get what’s going on. Context and background knowledge is too vital for almost any RPG’s significant scenes and dialogues to be able to work effectively with excerpts from the game.
B: The cost. School budgets in the USA are pretty meager. Honestly, most of them are outright pathetic. It is flabbergasting, honestly, the expectations that this country has of an education system that it staunchly refuses to adequately fund at any level of government. There are a lot of reasons for why so little (sometimes even none) of a high school’s English class literature comes from any time more recent than the 1960s, all of them bad, but one of the big reasons is simply that books cost money. Even with the discounts that publishers give schools, it’s a lot easier to pay for a few replacements each year of an older book that the school already has a few hundred copies of, than it is to buy a few hundred copies of a new book that the school’s never taught before. Especially considering that newer books are priced higher.
So really, how would you be able to fit RPGs into the budget? If you have to get enough copies for every student in each classroom, there’s no possible way, even if we assume that you magically always have access to a PC version of the game and don’t have to outright buy the game systems that run the RPG to begin with. You could try to do a school account at GOG, purchase the game once, and have the students download it from that account, but that’s definitely not ethical, particularly when you consider how easy it would be for the student to just keep it for themselves even after the class was done with it. And even if you were unethical enough not to care, I’m fairly sure that the unusual number of downloads would be noticed by the retailer before too long, and they’d take steps to prevent it from happening again.
C: The Inequity. Even assuming, again, that you’re only using computer-based RPGs in a curriculum, not every student has regular access to a computer for the length of time it would take to play the game through to its end. Public-use computers in the library or a school computer lab are great for writing a paper or doing some research, but they certainly aren’t going to do it for something that takes 20+ hours to experience, saved games or no. Not every family can afford a reliable PC, and not every family can accommodate their household computer being tied up for that long on just a single assignment.
D. The Disparity. Plenty of RPGs are completely linear, which would be fine for teaching, but a lot of others provide experiences that vary greatly depending on what decisions the player makes. A player who plays Planescape: Torment without putting a single point in the Wisdom stat is going to have a significantly different (and poorer) experience from the game than a player who properly prioritizes that particular stat, which is all-important to the game’s storytelling. A player who doesn’t bother with the Social Links in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 in his/her haste to forward the game’s plot will have less than half as enriching an experience as the player who does. Trying to teach a class on the significant stuff in an RPG where player input has any influence on that content would be an exercise in futility.
E: The Teaching. Yeah, it’s easy enough to have everyone look in their books during class to examine a specific passage, or watch a video on a TV or a projector at the front of the classroom, but a game and its console isn’t exactly something you can easily have everyone bring into class and just go to specific scenes within it the same way you flip a page or pause and rewind a video. I mean, it’s not the hardest logistical problem of these, but the teacher would still have to go to extra trouble to hunt down a Let’s Play of the game to show the desired scenes to the class for whatever examination is part of the day’s lesson, then go to further extra trouble to find a Let’s Play that doesn’t involve an awkwardly-voiced idiot chattering nonstop as he plays as though it’s his dull witticisms, inept musings, and garbled mumbling that you’re watching the video for. And if a suitable Let’s Play can’t be found, then you’d need to make videos of the gameplay yourself, which of course adds heaven only knows how much extra time to your class prep.
F: The Administration. Video games as a respectable medium of art is an idea that is new, and not going to take hold of the culture for a long, long time. We might not even live to see the day where games are recognized by the common person as such. I mean, graphic novels and comic books as we recognize them have been around, what, about 100 years now, and there’s still a LOT of people who would scoff at the idea that they can express ideas as well and as worthy as books or theater. Parents and administrators may not question a teacher’s decision to include a movie or recorded play in the curriculum now and then, but even if you could get all your other logistical ducks in a row, actually convincing the people in charge of your department, your school, your students, and your very employment that there’s anything worthwhile to be taught in a video game is a tall order at best. Hell, I don’t even know if I’ve even convinced you of that, and you already came here specifically to read about RPGs!
So in the end, do I think RPGs are worthy of study, as any other form of expression? Yes.
Do I think they are so, to the extent that they are as deserving of academic focus as many accepted novels, plays, and so on? Also yes.
Do I think there is any way at all that you could make an academic study of them work in school? Nope. Not a chance in hell. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it is, from any angle I look at it: it’s a nice idea, but it just can’t be done. If you think otherwise, please do tell me how you’d get around all the problems I’ve listed, because I’d love to be able to make this work.
And finally, am I self-aware enough to realize that no one beyond myself actually cares about this to begin with, and that I have wasted everyone’s time with this rant? Of course. Hell, I just assume that’s true for every rant I post here.
* Apparently a number of high schools across the country are moving to curtail or even altogether eliminate their English programs. It’s quite a frightening social trend.
** You might worry that being more specific could also mean that DE1 would be more dated, given it came out over 15 years ago. After all, the more specific something is in its use of real world details, the more easily it becomes dated as those details change. Well, no worries there. I’m pleased and utterly terrified to assure you that DE1’s portrayal of governmental and private movements to disempower the world’s citizens and restrict freedoms is more relevantly accurate today than ever before!
*** In fact, if you ask me, one of those worse companions for such a unit IS Catcher in the Rye. Yeah, I’m an aspiring English Teacher that doesn’t like Salinger’s most famous work. Bite me.
**** Maybe even above that level, in fact, if you count Kurt Vonnegut’s works as part of the classics canon. Yeah, I’m an aspiring English Teacher that doesn’t like Vonnegut. Again, bite me.
So, as I mentioned in last year’s Annual Summary Rant, I’ve been doing some graduate work to be certified as a teacher. High School English, specifically. It’s a fairly rigorous program (or it’s not, and I’m just not very good at it), so matters of the classroom have been going through my mind quite a lot during this past year. And of course, with my head already so full of all the RPG stuff that I overthink, it was really only a matter of time before a Teacher thought would collide with an RPG thought, and so we come to the question of today’s rant:
Can an RPG be a suitable text for the classroom?
First of all, let’s briefly define what a classroom text even is. We tend to think of texts in school as being things like novels, textbooks, short stories, articles, plays, reports, and various other typed, readable examples of fiction and nonfiction. Which makes sense, of course, as these are all things that communicate their ideas via, y’know, text. In the program within which I am enrolled, however, “text” takes on a broader meaning, associated with any outside work introduced for study in the classroom, regardless of its format. Under this definition, a text could certainly be a physical copy of The Great Gatsby or an online posting of an Emily Dickinson poem, as you’d expect, but a movie adaptation of Hamlet, a picture of one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings, or an audio recording of a speech by the Dalai Lama, would also each be considered texts if used in the classroom.
So, then, if we allow that any work that can be studied is a text, and so long as we also allow that avenues of fictional storytelling are even something that we believe worth studying to begin with,* it is as possible that an RPG can be a text as it is possible that anything else can be. But can an RPG be a suitable text?
Well, the answer to that, of course, is subjective, and also quite dependant on what RPG you’re looking at. Certainly not all RPGs are worthy of study in a classroom. In fact, I’d say most of them aren’t. But that doesn’t really prove much by itself; I daresay even most books don’t warrant focused study. But are there at least some RPGs that have something to offer to a program of study, that are worth the effort of teaching?
Yes!
As an example: A great many classrooms study Fahrenheit 451, 1984, or some other book that covers the dangers of totalitarian societies, how they are perpetuated and the ways of fighting back against them--or the hopelessness of trying to do so. Some enlightened schools have started incorporating The Hunger Games into this study of dystopias, which I heartily applaud, and hope to do so myself. It’s a good genre to have students study, at least a little. First of all, by directly encountering, studying, and coming to understand this concept of an overbearing, freedom-restricting, anti-intellectual society, the students can come to have a better understanding of important aspects of other works, such as Animal Farm or The Scarlet Letter (the Puritans needed to chill out, man), or even nuances of parts of their history class (such as why it was so important for the institution of slavery that slaves be forbidden to learn to read). Secondly and far more important, learning about this idea of a society which uses meaningless distractions, propaganda, and the destruction and alteration of idea exchange is important in teaching students to look critically at their own society, and recognize dangerous similarities between real life and the dystopias they have read about when they encounter them. Studying dystopias can make students better, more vigilant guardians of their society and their freedom.
Would not the RPG Deus Ex 1 fit into such a unit perfectly? It is, after all, all about dystopia, how it might come to be enacted in our world, the questions of when government goes too far and the means through which it does so, the dangers of propaganda, the questions of total surveillance, and so on and so forth. In fact, while I do think the primary text of a dystopia unit should remain 1984, The Hunger Games trilogy, or Fahrenheit 451, I would say that the second most important text in such a unit would be Deus Ex 1, rather than a second book chosen from that list. Why? Because those three books I mentioned, and most other dystopian works I’ve encountered, all describe to us a dystopia that is already in place. They describe the incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible, struggle to overcome a dystopia once it is a fact of life. The cautions they offer to the reader on how to stop a dystopia from coming to be are all general, non-specific advice--don’t let authority ban or destroy literature or any other free exchange of ideas, don’t let yourself be tricked by doublespeak and meaningless wars, be critical of what you see and read, don’t let yourself be put at odds against those as oppressed as you are by the people causing the oppression, and so on. All very good pieces of advice, of course, but in some ways harder to put into practice because of how unspecific they are.
Deus Ex 1, on the other hand, shows us the moment at which an oppressive authority takes the final step to become a dystopia, and it details to us the methods that evil authority uses--the kinds of agencies, the kinds of propaganda, the kinds of tools, and the reasons these things work. The books I’ve mentioned give you the grim caution of what could happen, but Deus Ex 1 shows you how it could happen, and so better forearms its audience with the knowledge of specific warning signs of the dangers that the books could only give generalized cautions against. Providing a practical example of how a dystopia could be enacted is a GREAT way to support your primary dystopia text, and DE1 would be able to do that with its level of specific detail.**
...Okay, wow, I didn’t mean to make this one example long enough to be its own rant. Sorry. I’ll try to be less long-winded on these other points.
DE1 isn’t the only RPG that could be used as a great supplemental text, of course. In a unit which examines, for example, the question of Man against God, a number of RPGs could be used as supplements--Grandia 2, some Shin Megami Tensei titles if you want to be literal about the issue, Okage: Shadow King, Star Ocean 3 (if you could really, really abridge the game’s first half), Wild Arms 3...wow, this is a really, really frequent theme in JRPGs, now that I think about it.
Fill in the blank: It would be _______________ to follow Ahab in his journey in Moby Dick to destroy the white whale and prove he has free will, while playing Tales of the Abyss at the same time, watching Van Grants set forth in his own machinations to break the world free of destiny’s cage, the Score of Lorelei, and draw comparisons between them in class discussions.
If your answer was “Pretty Cool,” give yourself a gold star. If not, see me after class.
You could do a lot with some of the richer intellectual western RPGs in a unit about teaching effective reading--Planescape: Torment would be ideal for it. Any unit involving a look at religion and how it shapes us and our society could be benefited greatly by a number of Shin Megami Tensei titles, or Final Fantasy 10. In a unit that covers the theme of a young adult seeking to find themselves and their place in life, I can see far worse companions to Paper Towns, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Catcher in the Rye than the games Wild Arms 3 or Final Fantasy 9.*** Surely any unit that uses works like The Great Gatsby, Our Town, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to speak about the social history and personal essence of the United States would benefit from a great deal of the stories and events, both direct and allegorical, found within the Fallout series. And so on and so forth--I daresay there are few typical High School English units (and even fewer college-level ones, for that matter) that I couldn’t associate with at least 1 RPG that could add thoughtful, worthwhile insights into the matter.
And so, coming back to the question of this rant, can an RPG be a suitable text for a classroom? Well, in my reasonably expert opinion, the answer is...no.
“Oh COME ON, The RPGenius, you inimitable, self-important asshole!” you grumble now, as your mouse cursor hovers dangerously close over the X button in the corner of your browser. “Did you seriously just waste all that time convincing us that RPGs have as much to offer a thoughtful curriculum as any other method of expression, only to turn around and tell us it can’t be done anyway?”
Of course I did. I’m a total jackass. I thought you guys would’ve figured that out by now. Really, you have only yourselves to blame.
See, here’s the thing. I do believe wholeheartedly in what I’ve been saying here. As methods of storytelling and expressing higher thought, RPGs are no less capable and worthy than any other narrative art form, be it books, television, movies, comics, visual art, theater, or what have you. Obviously those other forms have a huge head start on video games, but I’d nonetheless place the likes of Planescape: Torment, Deus Ex 1, Final Fantasy 7, Wild Arms 3, Mother 3, and many more RPGs at the same level of worth and intellect as the average classic work of literature.****
Here, however, is the “but” that makes that opinion meaningless: Many RPGs are worthy of academic study, but, it is, logistically speaking, impossible to make them a part of any school’s curriculum, for a number of reasons:
A: The time. Even reading a full novel from start to finish, a task that a class unit gives its students a time of about 1 - 4 weeks to complete, is never a task that’s going to take more than 20 hours of a student’s time altogether, and as far as I can tell, most assigned books take considerably less time than that. Heck according to this site, you can read the entire Hunger Games trilogy in less than 17 hours. Obviously the mileage of high school students is going to vary greatly, but still, you get the idea.
Now consider the fact that RPGs average anywhere between 25 to 60 hours to complete. If it takes 2 to 3 weeks to have students read and learn about The Great Gatsby, which averages in at less than 3 hours to read, or To Kill a Mockingbird, which clocks in at less than 6 hours to finish, how the hell would you ever find a way to include, say, Grandia 2, which takes, according to How Long to Beat, about 35 hours? You’d basically have to be including it in your curriculum for an entire term, and probably be well past whatever unit it was meant to coincide with before you even got to the relevant details in the game.
Even Deus Ex 1, a short RPG, takes 20 to 25 hours to complete, which would translate to, what, a month in class? You could maybe make your unit on dystopian fiction last a full month, but you wouldn’t be able to fit in anything but DE1, and while I think it’s an ideal supplementary text, it can’t be the anchor for the unit--you really just need to have Orwell, Bradbury, or Collins serving as the unit’s foundation.
I can’t really see it being possible to effectively teach an RPG as a text in parts, either. While you can take excerpts from some books and such to teach with, RPGs are typically a very linear story that really requires that you’ve witnessed all of what’s come before each scene in order to get what’s going on. Context and background knowledge is too vital for almost any RPG’s significant scenes and dialogues to be able to work effectively with excerpts from the game.
B: The cost. School budgets in the USA are pretty meager. Honestly, most of them are outright pathetic. It is flabbergasting, honestly, the expectations that this country has of an education system that it staunchly refuses to adequately fund at any level of government. There are a lot of reasons for why so little (sometimes even none) of a high school’s English class literature comes from any time more recent than the 1960s, all of them bad, but one of the big reasons is simply that books cost money. Even with the discounts that publishers give schools, it’s a lot easier to pay for a few replacements each year of an older book that the school already has a few hundred copies of, than it is to buy a few hundred copies of a new book that the school’s never taught before. Especially considering that newer books are priced higher.
So really, how would you be able to fit RPGs into the budget? If you have to get enough copies for every student in each classroom, there’s no possible way, even if we assume that you magically always have access to a PC version of the game and don’t have to outright buy the game systems that run the RPG to begin with. You could try to do a school account at GOG, purchase the game once, and have the students download it from that account, but that’s definitely not ethical, particularly when you consider how easy it would be for the student to just keep it for themselves even after the class was done with it. And even if you were unethical enough not to care, I’m fairly sure that the unusual number of downloads would be noticed by the retailer before too long, and they’d take steps to prevent it from happening again.
C: The Inequity. Even assuming, again, that you’re only using computer-based RPGs in a curriculum, not every student has regular access to a computer for the length of time it would take to play the game through to its end. Public-use computers in the library or a school computer lab are great for writing a paper or doing some research, but they certainly aren’t going to do it for something that takes 20+ hours to experience, saved games or no. Not every family can afford a reliable PC, and not every family can accommodate their household computer being tied up for that long on just a single assignment.
D. The Disparity. Plenty of RPGs are completely linear, which would be fine for teaching, but a lot of others provide experiences that vary greatly depending on what decisions the player makes. A player who plays Planescape: Torment without putting a single point in the Wisdom stat is going to have a significantly different (and poorer) experience from the game than a player who properly prioritizes that particular stat, which is all-important to the game’s storytelling. A player who doesn’t bother with the Social Links in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 in his/her haste to forward the game’s plot will have less than half as enriching an experience as the player who does. Trying to teach a class on the significant stuff in an RPG where player input has any influence on that content would be an exercise in futility.
E: The Teaching. Yeah, it’s easy enough to have everyone look in their books during class to examine a specific passage, or watch a video on a TV or a projector at the front of the classroom, but a game and its console isn’t exactly something you can easily have everyone bring into class and just go to specific scenes within it the same way you flip a page or pause and rewind a video. I mean, it’s not the hardest logistical problem of these, but the teacher would still have to go to extra trouble to hunt down a Let’s Play of the game to show the desired scenes to the class for whatever examination is part of the day’s lesson, then go to further extra trouble to find a Let’s Play that doesn’t involve an awkwardly-voiced idiot chattering nonstop as he plays as though it’s his dull witticisms, inept musings, and garbled mumbling that you’re watching the video for. And if a suitable Let’s Play can’t be found, then you’d need to make videos of the gameplay yourself, which of course adds heaven only knows how much extra time to your class prep.
F: The Administration. Video games as a respectable medium of art is an idea that is new, and not going to take hold of the culture for a long, long time. We might not even live to see the day where games are recognized by the common person as such. I mean, graphic novels and comic books as we recognize them have been around, what, about 100 years now, and there’s still a LOT of people who would scoff at the idea that they can express ideas as well and as worthy as books or theater. Parents and administrators may not question a teacher’s decision to include a movie or recorded play in the curriculum now and then, but even if you could get all your other logistical ducks in a row, actually convincing the people in charge of your department, your school, your students, and your very employment that there’s anything worthwhile to be taught in a video game is a tall order at best. Hell, I don’t even know if I’ve even convinced you of that, and you already came here specifically to read about RPGs!
So in the end, do I think RPGs are worthy of study, as any other form of expression? Yes.
Do I think they are so, to the extent that they are as deserving of academic focus as many accepted novels, plays, and so on? Also yes.
Do I think there is any way at all that you could make an academic study of them work in school? Nope. Not a chance in hell. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it is, from any angle I look at it: it’s a nice idea, but it just can’t be done. If you think otherwise, please do tell me how you’d get around all the problems I’ve listed, because I’d love to be able to make this work.
And finally, am I self-aware enough to realize that no one beyond myself actually cares about this to begin with, and that I have wasted everyone’s time with this rant? Of course. Hell, I just assume that’s true for every rant I post here.
* Apparently a number of high schools across the country are moving to curtail or even altogether eliminate their English programs. It’s quite a frightening social trend.
** You might worry that being more specific could also mean that DE1 would be more dated, given it came out over 15 years ago. After all, the more specific something is in its use of real world details, the more easily it becomes dated as those details change. Well, no worries there. I’m pleased and utterly terrified to assure you that DE1’s portrayal of governmental and private movements to disempower the world’s citizens and restrict freedoms is more relevantly accurate today than ever before!
*** In fact, if you ask me, one of those worse companions for such a unit IS Catcher in the Rye. Yeah, I’m an aspiring English Teacher that doesn’t like Salinger’s most famous work. Bite me.
**** Maybe even above that level, in fact, if you count Kurt Vonnegut’s works as part of the classics canon. Yeah, I’m an aspiring English Teacher that doesn’t like Vonnegut. Again, bite me.
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