ACTIONBUTTONNET
2003
text by Thomas Callahan
⋆☆☆☆
“DOOR-BASHING, WINDOW-SMASHING VANDALISM.”
As somebody who has played Halo 2 online, I can tell you that the Xbox Live Headset is usually pretty terrifying. Women are demeaned on a medieval level. Prepubescent boys bark military jargon with gut-wrenching enthusiasm. Dead players are angry and they will let you know; racism and inflammatory bullstuff accumulates. I feel sleazy by proxy just listening to it all. These people are in my living room. At some point I'm bound to claw off my headset, banishing them out the door. Inevitably I'Il let them back in — listening to their vapid bile is almost as morbidly amusing as reading YouTube comments.
In Manhunt, you play as James Cash, a gore-loving serial killer lining up in death row. You bastard! When you escape, to the delight of journalists, you begin murdering people again — only this time, murder is your full-time job. No, you're not a hitman, you're a film star. You're employed by "The Director" to kill men in sadistic, needlessly complicated fashion. Each kill is videotaped with a shaky handheld camera and broadcast through a grainy filter. The footage is then spliced and edited into a series of snuff films.
Manhunt uses the Xbox Live Headset outside of an online context, and the result is more outright terrifying than any testosterone-fuelled internet-deathmatch banter could hope to be. We hear narration, a device criminally underused in videogames, through the headset, while all other sounds are emitted from television speakers. This maneuver reinforces the narration as separate from the in-game action; less detached and expository, more akin to a DVD's audio commentary. As you butcher and maim enemies, "The Director" chortles with uninhibited glee into your headset. To him, these illegal-voyeur-reality-HOT! death videos are captivating pornography — he's getting off, and uncomfortably close to your inner ear.
What kind of sick freak would buy tapes of real murders? Is there really an existing audience, an actual market? Are there others just like The Director, giggling rapturously at these senseless snuff films? Man, that’s hardly even a question. Of course there's an audience. There will always be an audience for depraved violence. For starters: you, the player. You the player bought Manhunt, a game documenting depraved violence in vivid detail; a game by that depraved studio Rockstar Games; a game created for depraved gamers just like you.
This is a damning portrayal of the videogame industry, where developers endlessly one-up each other, piling on the shock value for consumers endlessly craving more. Blame falls equally on the entertainers and the entertained. James Cash provides inspired violence for the camera — he is Rockstar's loathsome self-portrait — and The Director is a pastiche of you, the grinning spectator clamoring for more. What a mess. Manhunt sends up everyone. It's not preachy satire: it presents no escape from the gory supply and gory demand. Perhaps it's nothing more than an expression of videogame industry turmoil circa 2000. Either way, the whole enterprise is thick with despair. When I suffocate a man with a plastic bag and The Director chortles in my headset, his cruel delight and my instinctive satisfaction mirror each other.
And I don't like it. In fact, I find the parallel pretty hecking nihilistic. Pretty hecking patronizing.
Rockstar Games created Grand Theft Auto with the most earnest of intentions. They aimed to accommodate as many stray ideas as possible, without care or precision, in order to provide templates for more polished games to come (such as Bully, Crackdown and Dead Rising). They succeeded; the series' reckless ambition was and continues to be infectious. Somewhat regrettably, its explicit subject matter spawned lawsuits, activists, and sensationalist press. But that was mere tabloid opportunism, wasn't it?
Here comes the nigh-unwatchable navet: this controversy is treated by Manhunt as another stray idea of Grand Theft Auto's to be polished, a template to build upon.
That's not only tactless, it's, uh. What the hell's the point?
Manhunt is a pointless act of destruction. It flaunts the sickness of an industry and continues the sickness with knowing symbolism, providing more blood and sex, you sickos, and don't worry, we're sickos too. The Director is a sadist for enjoying violence; you're a sadist for enjoying violence because ha! you're still playing our violent videogame. Serial killer James Cash is forced to pump out more violence by The Director; us Grand Theft Auto developers are forced to pump out more videogame violence by you. This is not an anguished protest. It's an opportunistic tantrum. If everyone is guilty and accused, even the victims of the snuff films — yeah, they're hecking neo-Nazis — then what's the intent beneath the bleak, all-encompassing cynicism? More spotlight, more sales. So what if Manhunt can draw clever parallels; it drags its players, its developers and the public image of videogames a little further into a vague sludgy pit. Consider the mission revolving around a 300-pound mentally &^#$#ed man wielding a chainsaw. Or the anemic stealth engine, where tossing decapitated heads into distracting corners is the end-all answer to everything. Was Rockstar inspired to create this game as one giant mischievous heck You to the likes of Jack Thompson? If so, they've simply handed their opponents more ammunition. Was Manhunt intended to provoke discussion about the pitfalls of the medium? If so, Rockstar have provoked discussion from me: this review, where I give their noisy pitfall of a game a resounding half star.
As sheer horrific provocation, Manhunt succeeds. Yet underneath is dreary, methodical stealth, and underneath that is door-bashing window-smashing vandalism. None of it has purpose. A tinge of self-parody is undeniable, but it's a baseless, rabble-rousing plea for attention all the same, and the attention it received — frenzied 11:00 breaking-news drama — has subtly pushed videogames further away from respectability, further into the publicly scorned fringes that comics, wrestling and pornography call home.
Further still, now: Manhunt 2 has been banned in the UK. Nintendo and Sony, in an attempt to save face, are refusing to publish the sequel without some hefty censorship. The situation is all kinds of ridiculous. It brings to mind countless independent films forever silenced by their NC-17 ratings. I'm too drained to line up in defense of Manhunt 2, though, because judging by the adulatory PR — featuring necrophilia and castration — I doubt it will amount to anything greater than Grisly Unfriendly Action Utilizing Wiimote Stabbing Motions. I conclude now, having finished Manhunt (it ends up ditching all symbolism and resorting to trite cops vs. robbers), that the good folks at Rockstar have been playing a bit too much Grand Theft Auto. Here they snag the attention of mass media the same way giddy "sandbox-gamers" snag the attention of cops: with desperate, drunken destruction demanding immediate response. Run over that pedestrian! Ah, a policeman: a dead policeman! Twenty innocent bystanders and five unsuspecting hookers later, C.J. is under fire from the US Army. And they're using hecking helicopters, dude! Slash them down! And now Manhunt is getting blamed for homicides, dude! And now the UK government is throwing us into the bonfire — we might have too many stars to wriggle out of this one, dude! Do it again! This has gotta be the biggest adrenaline rush we've had since we free-climbed the Mayan ruins!
⋆☆☆☆
“DOOR-BASHING, WINDOW-SMASHING VANDALISM.”
As somebody who has played Halo 2 online, I can tell you that the Xbox Live Headset is usually pretty terrifying. Women are demeaned on a medieval level. Prepubescent boys bark military jargon with gut-wrenching enthusiasm. Dead players are angry and they will let you know; racism and inflammatory bullstuff accumulates. I feel sleazy by proxy just listening to it all. These people are in my living room. At some point I'm bound to claw off my headset, banishing them out the door. Inevitably I'Il let them back in — listening to their vapid bile is almost as morbidly amusing as reading YouTube comments.
In Manhunt, you play as James Cash, a gore-loving serial killer lining up in death row. You bastard! When you escape, to the delight of journalists, you begin murdering people again — only this time, murder is your full-time job. No, you're not a hitman, you're a film star. You're employed by "The Director" to kill men in sadistic, needlessly complicated fashion. Each kill is videotaped with a shaky handheld camera and broadcast through a grainy filter. The footage is then spliced and edited into a series of snuff films.
Manhunt uses the Xbox Live Headset outside of an online context, and the result is more outright terrifying than any testosterone-fuelled internet-deathmatch banter could hope to be. We hear narration, a device criminally underused in videogames, through the headset, while all other sounds are emitted from television speakers. This maneuver reinforces the narration as separate from the in-game action; less detached and expository, more akin to a DVD's audio commentary. As you butcher and maim enemies, "The Director" chortles with uninhibited glee into your headset. To him, these illegal-voyeur-reality-HOT! death videos are captivating pornography — he's getting off, and uncomfortably close to your inner ear.
What kind of sick freak would buy tapes of real murders? Is there really an existing audience, an actual market? Are there others just like The Director, giggling rapturously at these senseless snuff films? Man, that’s hardly even a question. Of course there's an audience. There will always be an audience for depraved violence. For starters: you, the player. You the player bought Manhunt, a game documenting depraved violence in vivid detail; a game by that depraved studio Rockstar Games; a game created for depraved gamers just like you.
This is a damning portrayal of the videogame industry, where developers endlessly one-up each other, piling on the shock value for consumers endlessly craving more. Blame falls equally on the entertainers and the entertained. James Cash provides inspired violence for the camera — he is Rockstar's loathsome self-portrait — and The Director is a pastiche of you, the grinning spectator clamoring for more. What a mess. Manhunt sends up everyone. It's not preachy satire: it presents no escape from the gory supply and gory demand. Perhaps it's nothing more than an expression of videogame industry turmoil circa 2000. Either way, the whole enterprise is thick with despair. When I suffocate a man with a plastic bag and The Director chortles in my headset, his cruel delight and my instinctive satisfaction mirror each other.
And I don't like it. In fact, I find the parallel pretty hecking nihilistic. Pretty hecking patronizing.
Rockstar Games created Grand Theft Auto with the most earnest of intentions. They aimed to accommodate as many stray ideas as possible, without care or precision, in order to provide templates for more polished games to come (such as Bully, Crackdown and Dead Rising). They succeeded; the series' reckless ambition was and continues to be infectious. Somewhat regrettably, its explicit subject matter spawned lawsuits, activists, and sensationalist press. But that was mere tabloid opportunism, wasn't it?
Here comes the nigh-unwatchable navet: this controversy is treated by Manhunt as another stray idea of Grand Theft Auto's to be polished, a template to build upon.
That's not only tactless, it's, uh. What the hell's the point?
Manhunt is a pointless act of destruction. It flaunts the sickness of an industry and continues the sickness with knowing symbolism, providing more blood and sex, you sickos, and don't worry, we're sickos too. The Director is a sadist for enjoying violence; you're a sadist for enjoying violence because ha! you're still playing our violent videogame. Serial killer James Cash is forced to pump out more violence by The Director; us Grand Theft Auto developers are forced to pump out more videogame violence by you. This is not an anguished protest. It's an opportunistic tantrum. If everyone is guilty and accused, even the victims of the snuff films — yeah, they're hecking neo-Nazis — then what's the intent beneath the bleak, all-encompassing cynicism? More spotlight, more sales. So what if Manhunt can draw clever parallels; it drags its players, its developers and the public image of videogames a little further into a vague sludgy pit. Consider the mission revolving around a 300-pound mentally &^#$#ed man wielding a chainsaw. Or the anemic stealth engine, where tossing decapitated heads into distracting corners is the end-all answer to everything. Was Rockstar inspired to create this game as one giant mischievous heck You to the likes of Jack Thompson? If so, they've simply handed their opponents more ammunition. Was Manhunt intended to provoke discussion about the pitfalls of the medium? If so, Rockstar have provoked discussion from me: this review, where I give their noisy pitfall of a game a resounding half star.
As sheer horrific provocation, Manhunt succeeds. Yet underneath is dreary, methodical stealth, and underneath that is door-bashing window-smashing vandalism. None of it has purpose. A tinge of self-parody is undeniable, but it's a baseless, rabble-rousing plea for attention all the same, and the attention it received — frenzied 11:00 breaking-news drama — has subtly pushed videogames further away from respectability, further into the publicly scorned fringes that comics, wrestling and pornography call home.
Further still, now: Manhunt 2 has been banned in the UK. Nintendo and Sony, in an attempt to save face, are refusing to publish the sequel without some hefty censorship. The situation is all kinds of ridiculous. It brings to mind countless independent films forever silenced by their NC-17 ratings. I'm too drained to line up in defense of Manhunt 2, though, because judging by the adulatory PR — featuring necrophilia and castration — I doubt it will amount to anything greater than Grisly Unfriendly Action Utilizing Wiimote Stabbing Motions. I conclude now, having finished Manhunt (it ends up ditching all symbolism and resorting to trite cops vs. robbers), that the good folks at Rockstar have been playing a bit too much Grand Theft Auto. Here they snag the attention of mass media the same way giddy "sandbox-gamers" snag the attention of cops: with desperate, drunken destruction demanding immediate response. Run over that pedestrian! Ah, a policeman: a dead policeman! Twenty innocent bystanders and five unsuspecting hookers later, C.J. is under fire from the US Army. And they're using hecking helicopters, dude! Slash them down! And now Manhunt is getting blamed for homicides, dude! And now the UK government is throwing us into the bonfire — we might have too many stars to wriggle out of this one, dude! Do it again! This has gotta be the biggest adrenaline rush we've had since we free-climbed the Mayan ruins!
text by Brandon Parker
★☆☆☆
“AN ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY JASON HALL AND NATHAN HENDRICKSON.”
If you take every serial killer movie cliché and let them sit under a swinging light bulb in a dark, blood-stained, dilapidated room for a few hours, you’ll eventually wind up with Condemned: Criminal Origins. The opening credits mention something about an original concept being somewhere in here. At first I just thought they meant the concept where law enforcement officials in the future have the right to kill anyone who looks vaguely homeless or might possibly become dangerous someday. Which is really not so original, the idea could have come from any number of newspapers. But it’s handy, since the game is swarming with 2×4 wielding vagrants that you kill brutally without a word when they get upset once you intrude upon their makeshift homes. Injure them enough and instead of, say, arresting them, the game offers you a few different options of breaking their necks or bashing their heads in or what have you while they’re laying helpless. So it’s really just an attempt to try and fit the circle-shape called a police procedural into the square-hole called the first-person-shooter genre.
This Original Concept by Jason Hall and Nathan Hendrickson begins with an investigation at a crime scene in a typical horror movie what-a-stuffhole type building. Don’t worry though; the investigating is made easy by magic automatic clue detecting cameras and flashlights. Wait… my god. It’s the same M.O. as the others. We got a serial killer at work here! Suddenly you hear movement upstairs. The officers on the scene throw a stuff fit and scream for backup while crying, “The killer’s still here!!” The lights flicker and shut off, “That sick bastard, he’s playing with us!”You’d think their first thought would have been, “Oh it’s just some transients hecking around upstairs,” especially if you lived in the bloodthirsty raging hobo filled world that Condemned takes place in, instead of, “Good god, the killer left the body here, waited for an officer to wander into this labyrinthine stuffhole, find the body, radio it in, waited for his backup to arrive, then waited for the FBI to show up, then flipped the light switch off, just to mess with our heads! We’re dealing with a brilliant madman obviously.â€
The crime scene itself has a dead girl posed with a mannequin that has a scarred face. That’s it, that’s the M.O.. Seems pretty ridiculous, taking the time to get mannequins and pose them like that. That’s the bottom of the serial killer shtick barrel, if you ask me. He puts more time into the mannequin than killing the girl. It’s like the girl is just some after thought, maybe they just keep catching him robbing the department store of its mannequins so he has to get rid of them like that, all he wants is a mannequin without getting caught.
Being an Original Concept, of course it has some Original Loading Screens. They consist of important looking classified-type FBI documents which try to help explain some of the finer plot points, like the endless waves of homicidal bums being simply due to an “increase in crime and drug use,” and offer helpful tips like “use block to your advantage” (so you don’t get mixed up and try to give yourself a disadvantage). There’s also, of course, a wide variety of bullets randomly strewn about on top of the document. Somebody who shoots stuff owns that document, you see, so take it seriously. I bet it was Mr. Hendrickson who thought up the bullets bit, or maybe it was a joint effort, I wish I knew the creative process of the minds at work here.
Each level consists of room after room of the same thing, yet they all don’t really look like any one thing in particular. I can’t ever really tell what the hell kind of building I’m supposed to be in. They all just look like the basement of somewhere. Room after room of some place’s basement, and it’s hard to tell where you’ve been and where you’re going.
In Condemned: Criminal Origins, slow and unresponsive combat is a feature, not poor design. Firearms are rare, so it’s mostly swinging slow pipes and hammers and things. Why make a game half-police investigation and half-first person shooter if you’re just going to dumb down the investigative parts and eliminate firearms yet still fill the game with hordes of enemies whose presence never really has a good explanation? I don’t know!
The story in the game is probably where most of the original in the Original Concept originally originated from. They took a dream-like approach to the narrative and-ah, who am I kidding. None of this makes any sense. I have a feeling the people who made this video game watched and enjoyed a few movies before, and maybe even a particular David Fincher one, but if this game was a movie they wouldn’t be able to get away with half the stuff here. One minute you’re thrown out of a window and land on a car after a guy shoots some policemen with your gun. In the next scene your waking up in your apartment and an old man is sitting there just watching you. A complete stranger, he says, “Oh me? I was a friend of your fathers.” And we’re just supposed to take all this nonsense in stride because it’s a video game and the main character has a special jawbone or something. How do you argue with a special jawbone? You just don’t.
Strangely enough, there are one or more individuals out there that think this series would make a good movie, or make good money as a movie, so that’s what they’re doing. Although it’s not going to be a direct adaptation, just set in the same “universe” as the game. I assume hordes of dirty looking murderous vagrants are to be expected. Maybe they’ll make a game based off the movie and call it “Se7en.”
★☆☆☆
“AN ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY JASON HALL AND NATHAN HENDRICKSON.”
If you take every serial killer movie cliché and let them sit under a swinging light bulb in a dark, blood-stained, dilapidated room for a few hours, you’ll eventually wind up with Condemned: Criminal Origins. The opening credits mention something about an original concept being somewhere in here. At first I just thought they meant the concept where law enforcement officials in the future have the right to kill anyone who looks vaguely homeless or might possibly become dangerous someday. Which is really not so original, the idea could have come from any number of newspapers. But it’s handy, since the game is swarming with 2×4 wielding vagrants that you kill brutally without a word when they get upset once you intrude upon their makeshift homes. Injure them enough and instead of, say, arresting them, the game offers you a few different options of breaking their necks or bashing their heads in or what have you while they’re laying helpless. So it’s really just an attempt to try and fit the circle-shape called a police procedural into the square-hole called the first-person-shooter genre.
This Original Concept by Jason Hall and Nathan Hendrickson begins with an investigation at a crime scene in a typical horror movie what-a-stuffhole type building. Don’t worry though; the investigating is made easy by magic automatic clue detecting cameras and flashlights. Wait… my god. It’s the same M.O. as the others. We got a serial killer at work here! Suddenly you hear movement upstairs. The officers on the scene throw a stuff fit and scream for backup while crying, “The killer’s still here!!” The lights flicker and shut off, “That sick bastard, he’s playing with us!”You’d think their first thought would have been, “Oh it’s just some transients hecking around upstairs,” especially if you lived in the bloodthirsty raging hobo filled world that Condemned takes place in, instead of, “Good god, the killer left the body here, waited for an officer to wander into this labyrinthine stuffhole, find the body, radio it in, waited for his backup to arrive, then waited for the FBI to show up, then flipped the light switch off, just to mess with our heads! We’re dealing with a brilliant madman obviously.â€
The crime scene itself has a dead girl posed with a mannequin that has a scarred face. That’s it, that’s the M.O.. Seems pretty ridiculous, taking the time to get mannequins and pose them like that. That’s the bottom of the serial killer shtick barrel, if you ask me. He puts more time into the mannequin than killing the girl. It’s like the girl is just some after thought, maybe they just keep catching him robbing the department store of its mannequins so he has to get rid of them like that, all he wants is a mannequin without getting caught.
Being an Original Concept, of course it has some Original Loading Screens. They consist of important looking classified-type FBI documents which try to help explain some of the finer plot points, like the endless waves of homicidal bums being simply due to an “increase in crime and drug use,” and offer helpful tips like “use block to your advantage” (so you don’t get mixed up and try to give yourself a disadvantage). There’s also, of course, a wide variety of bullets randomly strewn about on top of the document. Somebody who shoots stuff owns that document, you see, so take it seriously. I bet it was Mr. Hendrickson who thought up the bullets bit, or maybe it was a joint effort, I wish I knew the creative process of the minds at work here.
Each level consists of room after room of the same thing, yet they all don’t really look like any one thing in particular. I can’t ever really tell what the hell kind of building I’m supposed to be in. They all just look like the basement of somewhere. Room after room of some place’s basement, and it’s hard to tell where you’ve been and where you’re going.
In Condemned: Criminal Origins, slow and unresponsive combat is a feature, not poor design. Firearms are rare, so it’s mostly swinging slow pipes and hammers and things. Why make a game half-police investigation and half-first person shooter if you’re just going to dumb down the investigative parts and eliminate firearms yet still fill the game with hordes of enemies whose presence never really has a good explanation? I don’t know!
The story in the game is probably where most of the original in the Original Concept originally originated from. They took a dream-like approach to the narrative and-ah, who am I kidding. None of this makes any sense. I have a feeling the people who made this video game watched and enjoyed a few movies before, and maybe even a particular David Fincher one, but if this game was a movie they wouldn’t be able to get away with half the stuff here. One minute you’re thrown out of a window and land on a car after a guy shoots some policemen with your gun. In the next scene your waking up in your apartment and an old man is sitting there just watching you. A complete stranger, he says, “Oh me? I was a friend of your fathers.” And we’re just supposed to take all this nonsense in stride because it’s a video game and the main character has a special jawbone or something. How do you argue with a special jawbone? You just don’t.
Strangely enough, there are one or more individuals out there that think this series would make a good movie, or make good money as a movie, so that’s what they’re doing. Although it’s not going to be a direct adaptation, just set in the same “universe” as the game. I assume hordes of dirty looking murderous vagrants are to be expected. Maybe they’ll make a game based off the movie and call it “Se7en.”
2002
text by Brandon Parker
⋆☆☆☆
“IN NEED OF TROOP REDUCTIONS AND A TIMETABLE FOR WITHDRAWAL.”
If someone broke into my house and started shooting at me, even if I had a gun I’d think, “Well, maybe they’ve mistaken me for someone else,” or “Maybe someone is holding their child hostage and forcing them to shoot me,” or “Maybe they have a sick mother and they need to murder me and rob my house to get her medicine,” or, “Maybe they’re shooting at a big dangerous man behind me that I didn’t notice.” I mean, I wouldn’t be able to shoot back. If I did that there would be a good chance they’d fall down and never get up again, because they would be dead, and I just don’t want to do that to anybody.
So there’s really no reason for me to join the military, being that that’s all they do. There have been a few times when they’ve tried to call and hassle or guilt trip me into giving some sort of a stuff about my country and it’s caught me off guard when “U.S. GOVERNMENT” shows up in big letters on the Caller ID. and I think finally the hounds are closing in and the hammer is coming down. Thankfully, I need only mention my “condition” I’ve had ever since the “incident” and they just try to awkwardly end the conversation and leave me alone.
Recently, at the Missouri Black Expo, the army showed up to use their predatory recruitment tactics and show off their video game, America’s Army. Some Iraq veterans put in an appearance and protested the use of the game as a recruitment tool, since someone might sign up for the army thinking they’ll respawn after they’re shot. Since I live in Missouri, all of those people thinking about the game sent subconscious signals to the idea-antenna in my brain and that’s when I decided to play it suddenly. I also thought it might help me if I were worn down through rigorous training into a computer killing machine, especially since these giant stubborn sonsabitches with drill hands and diving armor were giving me a hard time in another video game. So I was going to get tough and come back and get those bastards. Drill hands, I mean, how do you beat that? Joining a damn army, that’s how.
During basic training, I lost control to my obsessive compulsive needs. I couldn’t settle for anything less than perfection. I retook the “Shoot House” test until I hit all targets with 100% accuracy well under the allotted time. “Hell yes,” I said, as I got up from the game to do some celebratory push-ups for my badassery. However, my arms got tired and a bead of sweat felt like it was beginning to think about forming on my forehead during the first one, so I postponed the celebration until later. It seems fate has bestowed upon me an Iggy Pop build and an Idler work ethic, incapable of performing any actions requiring more effort than grinding one’s teeth.
For combat medic training you have to actually sit through someone giving a lecture and take a real damn multiple choice test afterward. Just like real school, almost immediately after the teacher began to speak my mind sort of went off and thought about other things and the next thing I knew it was test time. They seem fairly detailed with this business. I almost felt like I could have saved a real human if I needed to. I probably could have if I had paid attention instead of just checking GameFaqs for the answers. So I was pretty disappointed when it came time for the field test and all I had to do was go up and press a button to fix up the casualties. All of that effort of alt-tabbing and looking for a FAQ with the test answers, all gone to waste, it seemed.
The training did end up coming in handy, though. Eventually after enough basic training I was deemed worthy by America’s Army of playing online with other human beings, or “in the stuff,” as us hardened veterans call it. It wasn’t long into my first mission before a teammate next to me cried out for a medic, which was me. He was a mess. He had been hit and it was bad. A heads-up-display told me he was in the RED, which meant he was probably mere seconds away from bleeding to death. But for some reason I couldn’t figure out what to do. Even in a damn video game all the best laid plans and training go right the hell out the window the second the bullets start flying.
And they were flying all around us while I was pressing all sorts of buttons, accidentally throwing down my weapon, putting my binoculars on, bringing up a large map to look at, trying everything I could think of just to help this guy. I could have sworn his character model took on a pleading look in his eyes. What do I do? What’s that damn button? GOD DAMNIT, SOMEBODY, THIS MAN’S DYING, I just wanted the co-Oh right the “Use” key. There you go pal, all patched up and good as new. He thanked me with a “Hooah!” and stood up ready to charge forward again, filled with renewed vigor, then took a round from a sniper rifle right in his hecking heart. I’ll never forget the look on his primitively textured face.
I guess in war you might end up having to fight alongside some jackasses. But war is war and we’re all buddies in war, even Texas.Lawman.357, who first made his presence known to the squad with a joke:
“HABLA ESPANOL?”
“No.”
“me neither LOL. Any wimmenz here?”
He truly lived up to his name, so much that I expected Trivette to pull up in the jeep at any moment, needing his help to solve a mystery or bust a drug ring or whatnot. It bothered me later on, though, when he was trying to get people to talk to him, and he said his TeamSpeak server was 9mm.somethingorother. I just wish he’d pick a caliber and stick with it already. You can’t just have both.
America’s Army has a curious feature: whether you pick offense or defense, the mission briefing always refers to the other side as terrorists and the player will always see himself and his allies as U.S. soldiers and the enemy as brown men in black ski masks. First of all, that makes camouflage pointless if everyone who is going to be seeing you see’s you as a black ninja. So the game deceives you by making you think you’re wearing desert fatigues or whatever, when you’re actually standing out like a sore thumb. Maybe that’s just real army training for being told you’re wearing protective gear that’s actual some flimsy bullet attracting stuff.
Second of all, the army seems to be sending some conflicting messages here. According to them, we’re the good guys and all those terrorists out there kept awake at night by the thought that we’re just too damn free need to be found and killed immediately. But according to the army’s video game, everyone is a terrorist in the right situation and to the right people. Yes, even your mother is a terrorist if the retrieval of her delicious home cooked muffins are determined to be critical to national security (she would be defense in that situation). So, which is it, army? Who is the bad guy? Mom and her hired private military company, or the army seeking her tasty home baked treats? Or is everyone the bad guy? In which case, the only way to win America’s Army is to not play at all. I like to win, so I’ll do that.
⋆☆☆☆
“IN NEED OF TROOP REDUCTIONS AND A TIMETABLE FOR WITHDRAWAL.”
If someone broke into my house and started shooting at me, even if I had a gun I’d think, “Well, maybe they’ve mistaken me for someone else,” or “Maybe someone is holding their child hostage and forcing them to shoot me,” or “Maybe they have a sick mother and they need to murder me and rob my house to get her medicine,” or, “Maybe they’re shooting at a big dangerous man behind me that I didn’t notice.” I mean, I wouldn’t be able to shoot back. If I did that there would be a good chance they’d fall down and never get up again, because they would be dead, and I just don’t want to do that to anybody.
So there’s really no reason for me to join the military, being that that’s all they do. There have been a few times when they’ve tried to call and hassle or guilt trip me into giving some sort of a stuff about my country and it’s caught me off guard when “U.S. GOVERNMENT” shows up in big letters on the Caller ID. and I think finally the hounds are closing in and the hammer is coming down. Thankfully, I need only mention my “condition” I’ve had ever since the “incident” and they just try to awkwardly end the conversation and leave me alone.
Recently, at the Missouri Black Expo, the army showed up to use their predatory recruitment tactics and show off their video game, America’s Army. Some Iraq veterans put in an appearance and protested the use of the game as a recruitment tool, since someone might sign up for the army thinking they’ll respawn after they’re shot. Since I live in Missouri, all of those people thinking about the game sent subconscious signals to the idea-antenna in my brain and that’s when I decided to play it suddenly. I also thought it might help me if I were worn down through rigorous training into a computer killing machine, especially since these giant stubborn sonsabitches with drill hands and diving armor were giving me a hard time in another video game. So I was going to get tough and come back and get those bastards. Drill hands, I mean, how do you beat that? Joining a damn army, that’s how.
During basic training, I lost control to my obsessive compulsive needs. I couldn’t settle for anything less than perfection. I retook the “Shoot House” test until I hit all targets with 100% accuracy well under the allotted time. “Hell yes,” I said, as I got up from the game to do some celebratory push-ups for my badassery. However, my arms got tired and a bead of sweat felt like it was beginning to think about forming on my forehead during the first one, so I postponed the celebration until later. It seems fate has bestowed upon me an Iggy Pop build and an Idler work ethic, incapable of performing any actions requiring more effort than grinding one’s teeth.
For combat medic training you have to actually sit through someone giving a lecture and take a real damn multiple choice test afterward. Just like real school, almost immediately after the teacher began to speak my mind sort of went off and thought about other things and the next thing I knew it was test time. They seem fairly detailed with this business. I almost felt like I could have saved a real human if I needed to. I probably could have if I had paid attention instead of just checking GameFaqs for the answers. So I was pretty disappointed when it came time for the field test and all I had to do was go up and press a button to fix up the casualties. All of that effort of alt-tabbing and looking for a FAQ with the test answers, all gone to waste, it seemed.
The training did end up coming in handy, though. Eventually after enough basic training I was deemed worthy by America’s Army of playing online with other human beings, or “in the stuff,” as us hardened veterans call it. It wasn’t long into my first mission before a teammate next to me cried out for a medic, which was me. He was a mess. He had been hit and it was bad. A heads-up-display told me he was in the RED, which meant he was probably mere seconds away from bleeding to death. But for some reason I couldn’t figure out what to do. Even in a damn video game all the best laid plans and training go right the hell out the window the second the bullets start flying.
And they were flying all around us while I was pressing all sorts of buttons, accidentally throwing down my weapon, putting my binoculars on, bringing up a large map to look at, trying everything I could think of just to help this guy. I could have sworn his character model took on a pleading look in his eyes. What do I do? What’s that damn button? GOD DAMNIT, SOMEBODY, THIS MAN’S DYING, I just wanted the co-Oh right the “Use” key. There you go pal, all patched up and good as new. He thanked me with a “Hooah!” and stood up ready to charge forward again, filled with renewed vigor, then took a round from a sniper rifle right in his hecking heart. I’ll never forget the look on his primitively textured face.
I guess in war you might end up having to fight alongside some jackasses. But war is war and we’re all buddies in war, even Texas.Lawman.357, who first made his presence known to the squad with a joke:
“HABLA ESPANOL?”
“No.”
“me neither LOL. Any wimmenz here?”
He truly lived up to his name, so much that I expected Trivette to pull up in the jeep at any moment, needing his help to solve a mystery or bust a drug ring or whatnot. It bothered me later on, though, when he was trying to get people to talk to him, and he said his TeamSpeak server was 9mm.somethingorother. I just wish he’d pick a caliber and stick with it already. You can’t just have both.
America’s Army has a curious feature: whether you pick offense or defense, the mission briefing always refers to the other side as terrorists and the player will always see himself and his allies as U.S. soldiers and the enemy as brown men in black ski masks. First of all, that makes camouflage pointless if everyone who is going to be seeing you see’s you as a black ninja. So the game deceives you by making you think you’re wearing desert fatigues or whatever, when you’re actually standing out like a sore thumb. Maybe that’s just real army training for being told you’re wearing protective gear that’s actual some flimsy bullet attracting stuff.
Second of all, the army seems to be sending some conflicting messages here. According to them, we’re the good guys and all those terrorists out there kept awake at night by the thought that we’re just too damn free need to be found and killed immediately. But according to the army’s video game, everyone is a terrorist in the right situation and to the right people. Yes, even your mother is a terrorist if the retrieval of her delicious home cooked muffins are determined to be critical to national security (she would be defense in that situation). So, which is it, army? Who is the bad guy? Mom and her hired private military company, or the army seeking her tasty home baked treats? Or is everyone the bad guy? In which case, the only way to win America’s Army is to not play at all. I like to win, so I’ll do that.
text by tim rogers
★★★☆
“TO DYNASTY WARRIORS AS SUPER MARIO BROS. IS TO THE SCORE DISPLAY IN PAC-MAN.”
Bladestorm is a new game — emphasis on the “game” — by Koei, who earned its earliest fans way back in the early 1980s by making computer software simulations of Chinese wars which were specific when it came to names and shimmeringly incomprehensible when it came to figuring if you were winning or losing, or why you were winning or losing. Koei decided much later that their cult fan base wasn’t enough, so they objectified ancient Chinese wars the way only an American man could objectify, say, a Korean woman: they rolled the bones, and out of the fireplace stepped one with the largest breasts, the smoothest skin, and the most vapid hack-and-slash action, one that constantly told you you were bigger and stronger than any other man on the battlefield. The game was Dynasty Warriors 2, sequel to a boring one-on-one fighting game. Dynasty Warriors was something like a big brother to many dozens of thousands of fully grown men who never got chances to ace their college entrance exams. Koei (and developer Omega Force) rode Dynasty Warriors like a wild young pony for six years that felt like a decade. The series has never, quite specifically, evolved past its PlayStation 2 iterations, which makes a whole lot of sense, because they haven’t made a “canonical” entry for the PlayStation 3 yet. Bladestorm is the first original PlayStation 3 game by Omega Force, and, quite frankly, it is to Dynasty Warriors what Super Mario Bros. was to the score display in Pac-Man. It takes the concept of running around a battlefield, and it turns it into a man.
The time setting for Bladestorm just so happens to be the Hundred Years War. Unlike the obsessively well-documented second-century Chinese civil wars on which Dynasty Warriors games are based, the Hundred Years War, despite having lasted a hundred years, is not quite the source of any literature outside the story of Joan of Arc, who, really, wasn’t a very big deal and couldn’t have possibly mattered much in the war if she got burned at the stake while she was still a teenager.
In other words, whereas button-bashing history buffs would march to Koei’s home office and crucify the receptionist if one pertinent person’s name failed to be present in a Dynasty Warriors title, with Bladestorm, they arrive at the proverbial table with plenty of room to heck around. The biggest, most amazing change, which on paper is enough to qualify Bladestorm as a hit of Dynasty Warriors proportions, is the fact that you can make your own character, and level him (or her) up. Choose from a variety of faces far less hideous than anything you could make in Oblivion, choose the color of your little tunic, and get out there and fight. (I named my Laurence-Fishburne-looking warrior “Jackamost”, by the way. It’s something of a one-up of “Lancelot”.) Not a second done being born, here your character is in a bar — hell of a place to be born — talking to an eyepatched bartender, who runs you through some easy-enough-to-understand training missions. When it’s time to do some actual missions, you realize that your character is just a mercenary. In some missions you fight the French as a member of the English army. In some missions, it’s the other way around. A cut-scene early in the game, in addition to featuring a slow scroll over a CG-rendered map while an announcer reads from a textbook, depicts two shoulders clashing swords in a great confusing battle charge. One soldier looks the other in the eye and says, “What are you doing fighting with the French? I thought you were with us?” “Times change!” says his old friend. So amusing was this that I was prompted to think of the language barrier an uneducated English grunt would have to overcome to fight on the side of the French. Then it dawned on me that everyone in the cut-scenes was speaking Japanese, anyway, which made perfect sense, seeing as all the Chinese people in Dynasty Warriors speak Japanese, as well. If it seems odd to you that the caucasians in Bladestorm all speak Japanese, that might make you something of a closet racist. In conclusion: you know why Final Fantasy VII‘s Wikipedia article is longer than Gandhi’s? No, it’s not because all internet users are game geeks — it’s because a high percentage of game geeks use the internet, while Gandhi geeks tend to sit around at home practicing peaceful contemplation.
The Hundred Years War setting is conceptually integral to Bladestorm, though when you realize, as many of us have, that Dynasty Warriors games manage to sell hundreds of thousands of copies despite the “history” portion being contained entirely in pre-battle talking-head screens with dialogue boxes beneath abstract maps marking enemy locations, it becomes clear: the history is more of an excuse than anything else. It’s not even the excuse to play the game — it’s excuse for the developers to make it, with all its clashing swords and whinnying horses. There are elements of the war-going experience that Omega Force has never bothered to touch upon — I’d appreciate trumpet-bearers and drummer-boys on the battlefield, or something similar — and it’s as easy to say that they’re saving these ideas for later as it is to say that it doesn’t matter: the die is cast, the game is made, and there’s more than enough bloom lighting reflecting off shiny armor textures to convince anyone with a pulse rate over 90 beats per minute that yes, this is a videogame.
And what a game it is! It’s actually not that bad at all. The lengthy tutorial is full of exclamation marks, imploring the player not to play this game like Dynasty Warriors, though not in those exact words. Though it’s obviously running the latest build of the Dynasty Warriors engine, they saw fit to actually make a game with that engine, which is just so nice of them. You’re a lone soldier, and you will die if you dash alone into a group of men with blades. So you find a small group of soldiers and take charge of them with a button-press — much easier than in real life. Where you go, they follow — if by “follow” you mean “lead the way”. (I’m suddenly reminded of how the CIA and other intelligence agencies teach field agents how to follow someone from the front.) Different button presses will change formations. When your group of guys runs into another group of guys, they start fighting, in dynamic 3D. It feels like Dragon Force, though without any screen transitions. And you can stand there watching, or issue commands to your own dude to start slashing some other dudes. You can control your dudes while they’re fighting, though only vaguely. Sometimes they won’t hear your commands to fight harder, or to retreat. Sometimes only one or two of them will. It’s seemingly random — random, like war itself. When the target group of bad guys dies, what’s left of your squad will regroup. Using your handy map screen, you can plot out a course. It’s remarkable and incredulous in Dynasty Warriors that the boss characters’ dots on the map will be larger than all the other dots — like the ancient Chinese possessed radar technology. In Bladestorm, the blinking dots of enemy-occupied castles makes a whole lot more sense, and you’ll be grateful to know where enemy generals are, so you can prepare yourself ahead of time. In other words, with a few elegant strokes, Bladestorm reveals that the dumbest design flaws of Dynasty Warriors only stand out because the game has no hecking challenge whatsoever outside of the fights with characters who actually have names. You will never be killed by a random soldier in Dynasty Warriors because that would be a disgusting distortion of history: no nameless soldier ever killed Lu Bu, because if he did, then people would know his name. Further analysis of this reveals deeper conceptual flaws in Dynasty Warriors: Liu Bei didn’t kill Lu Bu either, though in the game, he can. In Bladestorm, you yourself are a nameless soldier, meaning that death at the hands of a nameless soldier isn’t purely impossible.
Koei’s promotional push for the game involves near-limitless, unbelievably tacky use of the word “Soukaikan” (“Refreshing feeling”), which is then repeated ad nauseum in user reviews on Amazon.co.jp, by people who either have no minds of their own or think that if they constantly write like they’re PR representatives then maybe someday they’ll wake up and they’ll be a PR representative, which has to pay a lot more than their current profession of the Japanese equivalent of basement-dwelling aerosol-huffer. Dynasty Warriors games are “refreshing” because not everyone can be an astronaut: unfortunately for some people with big or even medium-sized dreams, there exists no “square button” in life which, when pounded repeatedly, causes your boss to stuff his pants, call you a genius, and then give you the keys to his Jaguar. For better — and not for worse — there is no such square button in Bladestorm, either. You actually need to possess some functional understanding of strategy to ensure you have enough troops left alive to take on the next challenge.
Prior to each battle, you choose your character’s deployment point on a massive battle map — at any given location on the map, blue squad icons are facing off against red squad icons. It doesn’t matter where you start — you’re in the middle of the fight. The epic charges of the cut-scenes are not to be found in the actual game, and it doesn’t matter. The battles play out with more of a fine quality than the general-hunting battlefield traipses in Dynasty Warriors; in Bladestorm it’s more about the minutiae, and, as you realize eventually — it’s more about playing your part in the battle. You’re not some super-warrior who, before sunset, is going to have killed every senior officer and sacked every fort in a six-mile radius — you’re just one good soldier of many. This lends the battles a more engrossing scale — they’re bigger, though at the same time exceptionally more focused. They’re easier to understand, though simultaneously more mysteriously convoluted. There’s a lot going on, though as you’ll ideally understand, you don’t need to involve yourself in all of it: by the end of the battle, you’ll have earned a lot of experience points (the in-game explanation of “witnesses to your great deeds”), and you’ll level up, earn money with which to buy bigger, shinier armor, and earn the ability to command more troops. After a couple hours, your little squad of twenty guys might soon number more than a hundred. It’s kind of a thrill, and “refreshing” in a totally different way than mowing a hundred guys with your own spear. In a way, it revokes repressed memories of Koei’s Famicom classics Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Bandit Kings of Ancient China, with their black backgrounds, randomized numerical calamities, and confounded, fascinated players. Or maybe it’s just reminding me of Kessen 3, the most action-oriented entry in the series — which began with Kessen on the PlayStation 2, a sheerly mopey map-wandering “strategy” game with automated 3D fights in which many men moved quickly and fiercely. The third game was meaty and crunchy, allowing you to take control of your general and pilot his horse around the battlefield, leading your eager acre of troops toward the field of battle, and other angry groups of men to battle. Kessen 3 was weirdly disconnected, like a real-time strategy game where you control just one unit. Bladestorm is Kessen 3 as seen from the ground. It’s reined in and, when it’s not being silly, it’s fascinating, though only if you’re in the mood.
Of course, spacious cut-scenes typical of the Dynasty Warriors games are present in huge numbers, though they always involve characters like Joan of Arc, commanding groups of seven or eight hundred thousand ant-like soldiers beneath a vomit-colored foggy sky, inter-cut with images of perfect tears falling from the eye of a pink-hair princess, images of the battlefield reflected in the globular liquid. The cut-scenes are so bland compared to the vibrant colors of the in-game graphics, though I suppose, at least, I can understand the poison: developers made CG way back when, and the computers have gotten better and better over the years, so there will always exist CG that looks better than in-game graphics, so the developers will always be bound by the corporate profile to use CG. It’s just that the disparity is more alive and hideous than ever in Bladestorm.
And then there’s the videogameliness, these little gopher heads popping up out of the ground at every opportunity and telling us “Yes, you’re playing a videogame, not watching the History Channel.” Here I will reference something I’ve referenced before: the president of Acclaim, months before the collapse of the company, showing a reporter for “60 Minutes” a beta build of some Major League Baseball game, explaining that “Our goal is to make games that people mistake for television broadcasts.” The semantics were amazing, no matter how you interpret that sentence. Koei must have had it written down in a file somewhere, stored away in the cabinet where they keep the food for the carp in the lobby pond, because there are a literally disgusting amount of big glossy numbers popping up all over the screen. There’s a chance that the “refreshing feeling” being touted by Koei’s genius marketers is supposed to have something to do with the numbers: watch your combo counter and hit counter climb — your soldiers’ hits and kills count toward your hits and kills, meaning the more guys you have, the bigger the numbers. Why not allow me to just take the battle in stride, and show me the stats at the end?
There are also little things like how you can be riding a horse one second, and then, when you get off the horse, it just vanishes into thin air, though that’s actually kind of hilarious, given the shine of the graphics. Previous hilarious Koei-isms involve soldiers in Dynasty Warriors running right up to your commander and then standing still, resulting in your commanders calling for your help to defeat said soldiers — oh Koei, you lovable scamps! Bladestorm, with its shiny graphics, is beyond such philosophical black holes with regards to strategy, though it’s by no means above a good disappearing horse trick.
Bladestorm isn’t perfect — a pseudo-menu-based-strategy-game interface overlapped with the hack-and-slash maybe isn’t the best way to make an action game (I prefer the rock-solid and rewarding parry systems of Drag-on Dragoon 2 or Sengoku Basara). Though hey, for what it’s worth, the game represents an effort to try harder, and it even has customizable characters, so what the hell — let’s give it three stars.
★★★☆
“TO DYNASTY WARRIORS AS SUPER MARIO BROS. IS TO THE SCORE DISPLAY IN PAC-MAN.”
Bladestorm is a new game — emphasis on the “game” — by Koei, who earned its earliest fans way back in the early 1980s by making computer software simulations of Chinese wars which were specific when it came to names and shimmeringly incomprehensible when it came to figuring if you were winning or losing, or why you were winning or losing. Koei decided much later that their cult fan base wasn’t enough, so they objectified ancient Chinese wars the way only an American man could objectify, say, a Korean woman: they rolled the bones, and out of the fireplace stepped one with the largest breasts, the smoothest skin, and the most vapid hack-and-slash action, one that constantly told you you were bigger and stronger than any other man on the battlefield. The game was Dynasty Warriors 2, sequel to a boring one-on-one fighting game. Dynasty Warriors was something like a big brother to many dozens of thousands of fully grown men who never got chances to ace their college entrance exams. Koei (and developer Omega Force) rode Dynasty Warriors like a wild young pony for six years that felt like a decade. The series has never, quite specifically, evolved past its PlayStation 2 iterations, which makes a whole lot of sense, because they haven’t made a “canonical” entry for the PlayStation 3 yet. Bladestorm is the first original PlayStation 3 game by Omega Force, and, quite frankly, it is to Dynasty Warriors what Super Mario Bros. was to the score display in Pac-Man. It takes the concept of running around a battlefield, and it turns it into a man.
The time setting for Bladestorm just so happens to be the Hundred Years War. Unlike the obsessively well-documented second-century Chinese civil wars on which Dynasty Warriors games are based, the Hundred Years War, despite having lasted a hundred years, is not quite the source of any literature outside the story of Joan of Arc, who, really, wasn’t a very big deal and couldn’t have possibly mattered much in the war if she got burned at the stake while she was still a teenager.
In other words, whereas button-bashing history buffs would march to Koei’s home office and crucify the receptionist if one pertinent person’s name failed to be present in a Dynasty Warriors title, with Bladestorm, they arrive at the proverbial table with plenty of room to heck around. The biggest, most amazing change, which on paper is enough to qualify Bladestorm as a hit of Dynasty Warriors proportions, is the fact that you can make your own character, and level him (or her) up. Choose from a variety of faces far less hideous than anything you could make in Oblivion, choose the color of your little tunic, and get out there and fight. (I named my Laurence-Fishburne-looking warrior “Jackamost”, by the way. It’s something of a one-up of “Lancelot”.) Not a second done being born, here your character is in a bar — hell of a place to be born — talking to an eyepatched bartender, who runs you through some easy-enough-to-understand training missions. When it’s time to do some actual missions, you realize that your character is just a mercenary. In some missions you fight the French as a member of the English army. In some missions, it’s the other way around. A cut-scene early in the game, in addition to featuring a slow scroll over a CG-rendered map while an announcer reads from a textbook, depicts two shoulders clashing swords in a great confusing battle charge. One soldier looks the other in the eye and says, “What are you doing fighting with the French? I thought you were with us?” “Times change!” says his old friend. So amusing was this that I was prompted to think of the language barrier an uneducated English grunt would have to overcome to fight on the side of the French. Then it dawned on me that everyone in the cut-scenes was speaking Japanese, anyway, which made perfect sense, seeing as all the Chinese people in Dynasty Warriors speak Japanese, as well. If it seems odd to you that the caucasians in Bladestorm all speak Japanese, that might make you something of a closet racist. In conclusion: you know why Final Fantasy VII‘s Wikipedia article is longer than Gandhi’s? No, it’s not because all internet users are game geeks — it’s because a high percentage of game geeks use the internet, while Gandhi geeks tend to sit around at home practicing peaceful contemplation.
The Hundred Years War setting is conceptually integral to Bladestorm, though when you realize, as many of us have, that Dynasty Warriors games manage to sell hundreds of thousands of copies despite the “history” portion being contained entirely in pre-battle talking-head screens with dialogue boxes beneath abstract maps marking enemy locations, it becomes clear: the history is more of an excuse than anything else. It’s not even the excuse to play the game — it’s excuse for the developers to make it, with all its clashing swords and whinnying horses. There are elements of the war-going experience that Omega Force has never bothered to touch upon — I’d appreciate trumpet-bearers and drummer-boys on the battlefield, or something similar — and it’s as easy to say that they’re saving these ideas for later as it is to say that it doesn’t matter: the die is cast, the game is made, and there’s more than enough bloom lighting reflecting off shiny armor textures to convince anyone with a pulse rate over 90 beats per minute that yes, this is a videogame.
And what a game it is! It’s actually not that bad at all. The lengthy tutorial is full of exclamation marks, imploring the player not to play this game like Dynasty Warriors, though not in those exact words. Though it’s obviously running the latest build of the Dynasty Warriors engine, they saw fit to actually make a game with that engine, which is just so nice of them. You’re a lone soldier, and you will die if you dash alone into a group of men with blades. So you find a small group of soldiers and take charge of them with a button-press — much easier than in real life. Where you go, they follow — if by “follow” you mean “lead the way”. (I’m suddenly reminded of how the CIA and other intelligence agencies teach field agents how to follow someone from the front.) Different button presses will change formations. When your group of guys runs into another group of guys, they start fighting, in dynamic 3D. It feels like Dragon Force, though without any screen transitions. And you can stand there watching, or issue commands to your own dude to start slashing some other dudes. You can control your dudes while they’re fighting, though only vaguely. Sometimes they won’t hear your commands to fight harder, or to retreat. Sometimes only one or two of them will. It’s seemingly random — random, like war itself. When the target group of bad guys dies, what’s left of your squad will regroup. Using your handy map screen, you can plot out a course. It’s remarkable and incredulous in Dynasty Warriors that the boss characters’ dots on the map will be larger than all the other dots — like the ancient Chinese possessed radar technology. In Bladestorm, the blinking dots of enemy-occupied castles makes a whole lot more sense, and you’ll be grateful to know where enemy generals are, so you can prepare yourself ahead of time. In other words, with a few elegant strokes, Bladestorm reveals that the dumbest design flaws of Dynasty Warriors only stand out because the game has no hecking challenge whatsoever outside of the fights with characters who actually have names. You will never be killed by a random soldier in Dynasty Warriors because that would be a disgusting distortion of history: no nameless soldier ever killed Lu Bu, because if he did, then people would know his name. Further analysis of this reveals deeper conceptual flaws in Dynasty Warriors: Liu Bei didn’t kill Lu Bu either, though in the game, he can. In Bladestorm, you yourself are a nameless soldier, meaning that death at the hands of a nameless soldier isn’t purely impossible.
Koei’s promotional push for the game involves near-limitless, unbelievably tacky use of the word “Soukaikan” (“Refreshing feeling”), which is then repeated ad nauseum in user reviews on Amazon.co.jp, by people who either have no minds of their own or think that if they constantly write like they’re PR representatives then maybe someday they’ll wake up and they’ll be a PR representative, which has to pay a lot more than their current profession of the Japanese equivalent of basement-dwelling aerosol-huffer. Dynasty Warriors games are “refreshing” because not everyone can be an astronaut: unfortunately for some people with big or even medium-sized dreams, there exists no “square button” in life which, when pounded repeatedly, causes your boss to stuff his pants, call you a genius, and then give you the keys to his Jaguar. For better — and not for worse — there is no such square button in Bladestorm, either. You actually need to possess some functional understanding of strategy to ensure you have enough troops left alive to take on the next challenge.
Prior to each battle, you choose your character’s deployment point on a massive battle map — at any given location on the map, blue squad icons are facing off against red squad icons. It doesn’t matter where you start — you’re in the middle of the fight. The epic charges of the cut-scenes are not to be found in the actual game, and it doesn’t matter. The battles play out with more of a fine quality than the general-hunting battlefield traipses in Dynasty Warriors; in Bladestorm it’s more about the minutiae, and, as you realize eventually — it’s more about playing your part in the battle. You’re not some super-warrior who, before sunset, is going to have killed every senior officer and sacked every fort in a six-mile radius — you’re just one good soldier of many. This lends the battles a more engrossing scale — they’re bigger, though at the same time exceptionally more focused. They’re easier to understand, though simultaneously more mysteriously convoluted. There’s a lot going on, though as you’ll ideally understand, you don’t need to involve yourself in all of it: by the end of the battle, you’ll have earned a lot of experience points (the in-game explanation of “witnesses to your great deeds”), and you’ll level up, earn money with which to buy bigger, shinier armor, and earn the ability to command more troops. After a couple hours, your little squad of twenty guys might soon number more than a hundred. It’s kind of a thrill, and “refreshing” in a totally different way than mowing a hundred guys with your own spear. In a way, it revokes repressed memories of Koei’s Famicom classics Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Bandit Kings of Ancient China, with their black backgrounds, randomized numerical calamities, and confounded, fascinated players. Or maybe it’s just reminding me of Kessen 3, the most action-oriented entry in the series — which began with Kessen on the PlayStation 2, a sheerly mopey map-wandering “strategy” game with automated 3D fights in which many men moved quickly and fiercely. The third game was meaty and crunchy, allowing you to take control of your general and pilot his horse around the battlefield, leading your eager acre of troops toward the field of battle, and other angry groups of men to battle. Kessen 3 was weirdly disconnected, like a real-time strategy game where you control just one unit. Bladestorm is Kessen 3 as seen from the ground. It’s reined in and, when it’s not being silly, it’s fascinating, though only if you’re in the mood.
Of course, spacious cut-scenes typical of the Dynasty Warriors games are present in huge numbers, though they always involve characters like Joan of Arc, commanding groups of seven or eight hundred thousand ant-like soldiers beneath a vomit-colored foggy sky, inter-cut with images of perfect tears falling from the eye of a pink-hair princess, images of the battlefield reflected in the globular liquid. The cut-scenes are so bland compared to the vibrant colors of the in-game graphics, though I suppose, at least, I can understand the poison: developers made CG way back when, and the computers have gotten better and better over the years, so there will always exist CG that looks better than in-game graphics, so the developers will always be bound by the corporate profile to use CG. It’s just that the disparity is more alive and hideous than ever in Bladestorm.
And then there’s the videogameliness, these little gopher heads popping up out of the ground at every opportunity and telling us “Yes, you’re playing a videogame, not watching the History Channel.” Here I will reference something I’ve referenced before: the president of Acclaim, months before the collapse of the company, showing a reporter for “60 Minutes” a beta build of some Major League Baseball game, explaining that “Our goal is to make games that people mistake for television broadcasts.” The semantics were amazing, no matter how you interpret that sentence. Koei must have had it written down in a file somewhere, stored away in the cabinet where they keep the food for the carp in the lobby pond, because there are a literally disgusting amount of big glossy numbers popping up all over the screen. There’s a chance that the “refreshing feeling” being touted by Koei’s genius marketers is supposed to have something to do with the numbers: watch your combo counter and hit counter climb — your soldiers’ hits and kills count toward your hits and kills, meaning the more guys you have, the bigger the numbers. Why not allow me to just take the battle in stride, and show me the stats at the end?
There are also little things like how you can be riding a horse one second, and then, when you get off the horse, it just vanishes into thin air, though that’s actually kind of hilarious, given the shine of the graphics. Previous hilarious Koei-isms involve soldiers in Dynasty Warriors running right up to your commander and then standing still, resulting in your commanders calling for your help to defeat said soldiers — oh Koei, you lovable scamps! Bladestorm, with its shiny graphics, is beyond such philosophical black holes with regards to strategy, though it’s by no means above a good disappearing horse trick.
Bladestorm isn’t perfect — a pseudo-menu-based-strategy-game interface overlapped with the hack-and-slash maybe isn’t the best way to make an action game (I prefer the rock-solid and rewarding parry systems of Drag-on Dragoon 2 or Sengoku Basara). Though hey, for what it’s worth, the game represents an effort to try harder, and it even has customizable characters, so what the hell — let’s give it three stars.
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“ACTUALLY A VIDEOGAME.”
I’ve honestly never liked Pac-Man. At all. Here I will take a page from all of the middle-aged mohawkers submitting guitar effects pedals reviews on Harmony Central, and say that I’ve been playing guitar for 35 years, have owned Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, and SGs, used Bigsby tremolos and Gibson Vibrolas, have covered everything from AC/DC to Rage Against the Machine, and I’ve never found a better fuzz pedal than the traditional Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, so trust me when I say that the Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff is a pansy-ass piece of stuff.
Take all the guitar terms in the previous sentence, and replace them with the names of game consoles and software franchises.
Why don’t I like Pac-Man? In the past, when I had to stand on a milk carton, I played it in pizza joints because my dad figured I loved it; I played it on Atari 2600 because it existed, and eventually, I played Ms. Pac-Man on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I can’t say I hated Ms. Pac-Man — I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t have any balls, machismo, guts, or what have you. In later years — leading right up until Pac-Man CE was released for Xbox Live Arcade, in fact — I’d identify that I just didn’t like the way Pac-Man controlled. It felt too loose and weird, which just didn’t totally mesh with how tight the game was conceptually.
If you’d have asked me how to make a better Pac-Manning experience, I probably would have told you I’d think about it and then get back to you later. That night, when you weren’t watching, I would have cut you off of my LiveJournal friends list, and then set my own journal to “friends-only”.
It’s a hell of an IQ-test question: how do you make Pac-Man better? It’s like asking me to list, off the top of my head, as many verbs that start with “V” as possible (validate, verify, vindicate, et cetera). I couldn’t think of any possible solutions, probably because I’m not a genius game designer. Maybe I could be, I don’t know, though like my mother always told me, I guess I’m kind of lazy. Either way, it’s evokes ambiguously positive emotions that original Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was reportedly responsible for the virtuosic Pac-Man CE — it makes me feel good to know that it took him nearly 30 years to come up with all these ideas.
Was Namco ever trying, though, to make Pac-Man anything more than an icon? Judging by the quality of every game starring Pac-Man, it would seem that none of them were made for any more generous reason than to keep bumping his name to the top of the gamer subconscious, to keep telling people who play games that, hey, this company called Namco has an archetypically deep heritage, and they’re not afraid of it!
They’ve been plopping remakes and reissues of Pac-Man out on the lunchroom tray of humanity for the better part of this most recent decade. They never hesitate to flop the original game onto one of their six-game “Museum” volumes, you know, which generously use up about 1/3000th of their storage medium. As of this writing, in addition to Pac-Man CE, there are two other Pac-Mans on Xbox Live Arcade — the original, and Ms. Pac-Man, both with six-dollar price tags, ugly borders and awesome online ranking leaderboards, which can only be accessed if you unlock the full version of the game.
(Really, for heck’s sake, Microsoft, let’s stop using the word “unlock”. It’s not like we’re using keys to play these games — nor even, in the gaming sense, are we using points or in-game currency. Using the word “Unlock” makes it seem like we can purchase the games using the “Gamer Points” we get from unlocking “Achievements”. Just use the word “Purchase”, please. It’s bad enough that you’ve made your own currency with “Microsoft Points”, and it’s precisely because you’ve made your own currency with which to buy things that it’s ridiculous that you award another kind of “Points” to people who do &^#$#ed stuff in games, which in turn makes it more ridiculous that you use the same word (“Unlock”) to indicate the option to purchase an Xbox Live Arcade game as you use to indicate a player being awarded an “Achievement”.)
Anyway, yeah, who wants to pay 400 “Microsoft Points” to play the original Pac-Man, when you can just pick up Ridge Racer 6 from a bargain bin and play Pac-Man to your heart’s content on the loading screen? When (not if) you get bored, you can just play Ridge Racer 6, which has nitro in it, which is awesome. However, it doesn’t have slipstreaming in it, even though Ridge Racer 5 did, because they wanted to save slipstreaming for Ridge Racer 7, which is as marginal an upgrade as you’re ever to see in videogames, though once you’ve played 7, 6 — and its Pac-Man loading screen — should seem utterly and horribly broken. After years of not upgrading the number in the series title, Namco sprung Ridge Racer 6, a statement of their staunch support of the Xbox 360, only to announce Ridge Racer 7 for the PlayStation 3 literally months later.
There’s a point to be made of this slipstream-talk, however muddy it might be: this is the sort of bullstuff Namco does. More to the point: the Pac-Man loading screen of Ridge Racer 6 isn’t even a loading screen. It’s just there. From the second it pops up, it says at the bottom of the screen: “Press the A button to begin Ridge Racer 6.” Why do they even put Pac-Man there in the first place? One slightly morbid reason is that it’s a throwback to Ridge Racer on the PlayStation, which let you play Galaxian at the pre-game loading scene. Many Namco games since then have let you play a game at the loading screen, so maybe Ridge Racer 6 was slyly trying to stir up nostalgia in the kinds of people who give a stuff. I wonder what happened to the guy who suggested the idea of putting a game in the loading screen. He’s probably 65 years old right now, with teeth the color of wooden stuff, and just finished paying off the loan for his mid-size condominium in a boring neighborhood in Tokyo. I’ve probably walked past his home a hundred times and never realized it. Probably some younger guy came up with the idea, and passed it on to the older guy out of “respect” so that the older guy could get a promotion, after which he would remember the younger guy and promote him some day. The younger guy probably never smoked a single cigarette until he was twenty-four years old.
Pac-Man is not just for loading screens — no, he’s also all over scoreboards in the Ridge Racer series, as well. Every time you hit a checkpoint, he pops up on your time display, chasing ghosts. This retro-gamer appeal is sprinkled into Namco games quite viciously, aiming to be the sort of thing some surreal-Dig-Dug-painting-owning poser on a UK games forum hears about and then says “SOLD”, maybe with some exclamation marks.
Also, a little Pac-Man badge appeared on Klonoa’s hat. Klonoa was Namco’s would-be mascot, star of a bland 2.5D game released for the PlayStation; some people still think that game was Jesus, and it kind of sucks to be those people. Klonoa had potential, anyway, though Namco didn’t care, and immediately resumed exhuming Pac-Man’s iconic profile and propping his corpse up in the weirdest places.
At the same time, developers all over the place claimed to love the original Pac-Man and tightened-up Ms. Pac-Man. Shigeru Miyamoto said, in an interview, that without Pac-Man, there would have been no Donkey Kong, and I guess he’s probably right. Donkey Kong is, subtly, about as inspired by Pac-Man as a game can get without also playing a lot like Pac-Man. The one game publisher in the world to understand the core of Pac-Man the least, ironically, has been Namco: since the success of the two “canon” games in the series, Namco has used and abused the “character” on numerous numbing occasions, such as the dull platformer Pac-Land, which no one likes unless they realize first that no one else likes it, or Pac-Man World, a 3D take on Pac-Land, where Pac-Man is now a sphere instead of a circle, which makes the fact that he has legs all the more freakish, and the fact that he has a speaking voice actually quite terrifying, and the fact that the stages lack actual design unforgivable. Recently, there’s been Pac-Pix on the DS, a game less tangentially related to the original Pac-Man than Pac-Man World, though jarring all the same: you have to keep drawing pictures of Pac-Man, his mouth facing in the correct direction, so that he munches the perpetually spawning ghosts. Pac-Pix, while a tiny bit interesting, misses the core of Pac-Man — the game is no longer about the “hunted becomes the hunter” dynamic, it’s just about drawing pictures big enough and quickly enough.
Arguably the most inspired of all the Pac-Man rehashes was Pac-Man VS, designed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. This was back when Nintendo was pushing the feature to connect a Gameboy Advance to a Gamecube, and use the Gameboy Advance as a controller. This era also brought us the dismal Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (it’s as much a challenge to try to enjoy it alone as it is to find three people willing to play it at the same time) and the friendship-wrecking The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords.
It might be most accurate to say that, back in those days, Nintendo was forcing all developers to include some level of GBA-Gamecube connectivity in all games. Player two could use a GBA to control remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell, for example. Games like Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles were big-scale brainstorms. Pac-Man VS was a lot smaller-scale, and as such, Nintendo and Namco had no clue what to do with it. Ultimately, they just slopped it onto some discs that included other games. I guess that was about the best place for it.
Pac-Man VS isn’t so much a game as a reason to scream. Essentially, it’s Pac-Man, where one player plays as Pac-Man and the other players play as the ghosts. Only the ghosts can’t see the entire playing field. Pac-Man, however, can see the ghosts. The Pac-Man player plays with the Gameboy Advance. The other players control their ghosts on the television. If it doesn’t immediately sound brilliant, it’s because it’s subtle. You really have to play it to “get” it, and playing it is, as you might imagine, kind of a hard thing to arrange: there is no one-player mode.
Yet none of these games cut to the heart of Pac-Man, where the ghosts hunt you until you eat a Power Pellet, at which point the tables turn and the ghosts flee in terror, because now you can eat them. This is a really good dynamic, and it’s just been sitting there locked up in a clunky shell for decades, reissued time and time again as-is by its shrugging, money-hungry parents, or else being shot in the feet and told to dance in monsterpieces like Pac-Man World 2, with its elbow jabbing, LOLing bullstuff cut-scenes wherein Pac-Man talks about constantly being hungry, and Ms. Pac-Man gives Pac-Man a birthday cake with a Power Pellet on top of it.
When Microsoft announced at their press conference at Tokyo Game Show 2006 that they would be holding the world’s first “Pac-Man World Championship”, I had to groan. First of all, hasn’t some guy played a perfect game of Pac-Man? How can you have a world championship of something that someone out there is perfect at? Aren’t you just asking him — and hundreds like him — to show up and dominate? Sitting there at the press conference, I couldn’t even begin to conceive of Pac-Man Championship Edition. Maybe it was because of how bullstuffty the whole presentation of it was. Peter Moore stood up there with a little headset microphone on his cranium, looking like he was either Madonna singing “Vogue” live or a high-rolling coach of a Halo team on Xbox Live. When he said that they were planning this Pac-Man world championship with the help of original creator Toru Iwatani, he repeatedly mispronounced Mr. Iwatani’s last name with such ferocity that I found it exceedingly hard to believe he’d ever met the guy. He kept calling him “Mistah Iwatawwy”. Seriously, Mr. Moore, I see only one “W” in the man’s last name, not sixteen of them.
EE-WAH-TAH-NEE.
For God’s sake.
Iwatani came out and gave a little speech. He talked about his plans to leave Namco in 2007 to become a lecturer on the subject of game design at Tokyo Polytechnic University. Listening to Iwatani’s speech, I figured this Pac-Man World Championship thing was just a big corporate flog, and Iwatani was only called in, thanks to a modest-sized envelope of money, to temporarily increase the number of Japanese people on the stage, making for a friendlier “photo op” (or, “shutter chance” as they call it in katakana) with which to infiltrate the Japanese juvenile consciousness via many games news services. Seriously, I’ve seen the notes on the PowerPoints they use to set these things up.
When Pac-Man: Championship Edition was announced and subsequently released, six whole days went by before I noticed and then downloaded the demo. Three days later, I played the demo, and purchased the full version after three play-throughs, making it the first thing I ever purchased with Microsoft Points.
Holy stuff, this is a hell of a videogame. Toru Iwatani, before walking out of Namco, put his balls on the table, and holy stuff, that’s a lot of balls. It’s like him flipping off decades of idiocy, and telling Namco to, seriously, heck Pac-Man as a “character”.
It’s basically Pac-Man with the aesthetic completed, and the dynamics mastered. Simply put: you can’t ever completely clear the board. It constantly re-seeds. The whole thing starts with just a few dots and a power pellet on each side. Eat all the dots on the right side and a fruit will appear on the left side. Eat the fruit on the left side to re-seed fresh dots and power pellets on the right side. Eat all the dots on the left side to reveal a fruit on the right side. Eat the fruit on the right side to re-seed the dots and power pellets on the left side. Et cetera, to infinity. As you repeatedly refresh the board, the layout changes, subtly. This gives the game a flow that no Pac-Man had ever possessed — the original is too stop-start to be nearly this much fun: eat all the dots to clear the stage, then start back at the middle of the maze with a completely fresh board of dots. Pac-Man CE nails the flow: the action never stops, and by staying alive, you start to feel like a hero. Every successful outwitting of ghosts, every eight-ghost combo scored, every time sparks shoot from Pac-Man’s body as he grinds around a corner, you want to pump your fist.
The longer you stay alive, the faster Pac-Man moves, and the more points the dots are worth. Being hunted by ghosts and escaping would-be run-downs is such a glimmering, pure experience that no car-chase in any 3D videogame can touch its primal thrills of success. Power pellets let you eat ghosts, as always; when you eat a ghost, the game pauses for a second, as the controller thumps, letting you savor your big point score. Eat several ghosts in a row to score increasing points — eat another power pellet before all four ghosts escape from the middle of the board, and you can find yourself lining up eight-ghost combos. If Pac-Man is fast enough and you’re a bad enough dude, you can eat twelve, sixteen, twenty ghosts in a row.
At first, scoring big in this game feels like luck. Eventually, the skill involved is undeniable. Look up some replays on YouTube after your first shot at the game, and feel the doors unlocking in your brain. I force everyone who sits on my sofa to play this game at least once, and every time I watch intently, always picking up little idiosyncrasies that I myself either possess or don’t possess. Every time, I learn a little something about my friend, the game, or — ideally — both.
So — final answer: Pac-Man CE has essentially made Pac-Man into a videogame I’m likely to enjoy for the rest of my life, and it gives Toru Iwatani good enough reason to lecture about videogame design. Maybe he has a whole lecture based around how and why it took him thirty years to wonder, “If the ghosts refresh constantly, why do the stages reset to zero every time?” Cheers, Mr. Iwatani, for having the guts to go back and complete what your company and your public had never doubted was a masterpiece.
There are a couple of other modes apart from “Championship Mode” in Pac-Man CE, including one where the power pellets don’t refresh, and ones with longer wraparound escape tunnels — where you can seriously get screwed by clever ghosts. Some people have complained about a lack of variety in the modes, or moaned about the lack of an endless mode, and I guess the latter complaint is kind of valid. It would be hella cool to see how long people could last, though I think the designers probably feared that the game might devolve into extreme, Tetris-Grand-Master-esque freakish speed, or else because they were getting conscientious, and didn’t want people losing their whole lives to this game. At any rate, the “Championship Mode” is pretty finely tuned as-is: get as high a score as you can in five minutes. I think that’s good enough. It’s good enough, even, for Japanese arcades: I could totally see this game working in Japanese arcades. Twitch masters would eat it up — figuratively. If they managed to hook it up to the internet, said twitch masters could even participate in the international leaderboards.
Then again, why pay 100 yen per play if you can just play the demo of this game for free? You don’t even need to pay for the game. All you really get out of paying for it is the ability to put your score up on the international leaderboards, which is kind of boring. I mean, I don’t suspect I’ll ever be not tied for 10,000th place, if you know what I mean. As willing as I am to admit that this game is a masterpiece by default, I’m not exactly jumping at the chance to spend my life playing it. I’d much rather continue cycling guitar scales (this week it’s the Spanish Gypsy Scale) in the dark when I should be sleeping, if you know what I mean.
When I do play this game, though, I find the Xbox 360 controller sorely lacking — either the D-pad or the analog stick is too wishy-washy about rounding corners. I wish I could play it with a joystick, though I never bought a joystick for the 360. I wish I could just get a Sanwa ball-type stick and one button (the Start button), and hack my own exclusive controller for this game, though the Xbox 360 is too complicated to work with. Damn it. There’s always the Hori Dead of Alive 4 stick, still clogging select Japanese retailers ever since that game tanked, hard. I could get one of those, I guess, though the prospect of another monolithic Hori joystick in my house — and of the tacky plastic-like boobs engraved into said special-edition stick — kind of turns me off. As it stands, the Xbox 360 controller is Pac-Man CE‘s biggest fault, though I really can’t dock its score for that.
The second-biggest flaw would have to do with the cheesy American glazed-over aesthetic. The glimmering rainbow colors of the playing field are a bit much. I mean, it’s high-definition enough, though I personally would probably prefer it more if the cute neon texture of the borders just stayed one solid color, and maybe changed just once every time both sides of the board re-seed. As it is now, it gives me a bit of a headache. There’s too much jumpy flashing going on, like the producers were trying to overcompensate for something. Leave it the hell alone, man! It’s Pac-Man. Next thing you know, they’ll release a patch that gives Pac-Man legs and eyes and a hecking snifter of brandy.
Also, the music is pretty terrible. It sounds something like what’s playing in any given club in Berlin the moment a hip German teenager first contemplates acting on the insecurity that his penis is smaller than that of other guys. It’s cute how it builds to a swell in the five minutes allotted for play-time, though really, it’s not even good techno. It’s like the record the DJ puts on when the club manager tells him they need to sell some drinks right now.
I know, I can use the Xbox 360’s excellent custom soundtracks feature, though isn’t that kind of cheating? It sounds almost like game companies are giving up, refusing to budget good music, and hoping that the player has good enough taste in music to make up for their games’ faults. As I’ll no doubt say again, ideally, a game should have music good enough to make me not want to use a custom soundtrack.
Even so, it’s convenient that a game of Pac-Man CE lasts only five minutes. There are many songs that are exactly five minutes in length, like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (off the “Scary Monsters” album). The Stone Roses’ “This is The One” is also precisely five minutes. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is 5:01, though that last second doesn’t really have too much going on.
After dipping deep into my memory banks, I recall that “Big Bikes” by Kyuss is 5:01, and would probably be really awesome to listen to while playing this game. It even has an awesome little false stop with twenty-two seconds to go, and then with nineteen seconds left it comes back, at double-time. That would be pretty badass for the closing seconds, rushing to kill just a couple more ghosts, to push the score up over your record.
I can think of a couple more songs off the top of my head, though I keep getting tempted to just check iTunes and sort all songs by length. In the face of this strong temptation to cheat, I’m just going to go ahead and quit writing this.
EXTRA BONUS PARAGRAPH. Hello and welcome to an extra bonus paragraph, written in celebration of Pac-Man: Championship Edition‘s induction to the Action Button Dot Net Manifesto Hall of Fame. Anyway, here’s Pac-Man. Since beginning this list, we have received literally dozens of emails from readers who promise terrible things if we don’t acknowledge some “Actual Great Games” on our pissy little contrarian list of videogames we possess the gall and nerve to pretend we like. Pac-Man is our way of throwing you lovable scamps a bone and flipping you off at the same time. On the one hand, it’s a Classic Japanese Videogame made by an Indisputably Wise “Genius”! On the other hand, it’s a remake! On the one hand, it’s Pac-Man! On the other hand, it’s Microsoft! On the one hand, it’s got retro-cool geek-chic in spades! On the other hand, it’s got Horrifying, Terrible Electronic Music!
All kidding aside, though, really, this is a brain-blastingly perfect videogame. There’s this cliche, about how music was great on the NES “because” of the limitations of the hardware, or how retro remakes are a key to the future of game design because they force us to examine what game designers used to do when they didn’t have normal maps, when they didn’t have the ability to drench any character’s skin in oatmeal and add six pounds of simulated fat into their chest with the click of a mouse. To this, we say “Duh”. Freedom will always breed laziness: compare yourself to a convicted bank robber Doing Hard Time. You have the freedom to leave your house; you also have the freedom to do this in your living room. However, it goes without (and sometimes with) saying that the guy Doing Hard Time is probably better at doing that than you are. Grand Theft Auto III is you — Pac-Man: Championship Edition is the convicted felon. We like the convicted felon more than we like you.
Anyway, Pac-Man: Championship Edition is a classic arcade game revisited with an attention to detail, money, and a newfound kernel of wisdom re: the very concept of games and their rules. It’s sharp, punctual, and entertaining. You can enjoy it as much as you want. For example, though the game was promoted well before its release as a proving ground for a Pac-Man world championship, and though we find that marvelous and precious, we have never bothered to check Wikipedia to see if the anybody won, or if the championship is still going on, or what. We don’t care! Pac-Man: CE is a brilliantly polished little product; it is the computer programming of 1977 graduated from Tetris university. It is an actual videogame. It is the Return of Awesome. Recently, Taito released Space Invaders Extreme, which is also pretty astounding, and kind of has better music, and Capcom released Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which has amazing music though now looks so good that the idea of being unable to jump is actually vaguely creepy (when a single chest-high stone brick blocks your progress in one direction, it feels funny to have all that HDR lighting); meanwhile, a man named Jonathon Blow makes a game called Braid, as serious a meditation on the core of classic game design as it is an exercise in making something absolutely new, which coincidentally might have actually existed twenty years ago. Then there’s Megaman 9: rather than simply remake an old Megaman game with slick graphics for a quick yen, Capcom have decided that they are Not Afraid of Death, that they are going to make a new installment in an old series, complete with old-like graphics: only now, the level design has the benefit of decades of wisdom. It could be glorious.
Thus it is abundantly clear that someone, somewhere, has sounded a giant gong, proclaiming that Games Today Kind of Suck. Cautious backward-tiptoe-steps (tipheels?) are being taken in the direction of Maybe It’s Not Just Nostalgia After All, and people are looking long and hard at the very essence of “fun”. We’d really love to see Takashi Tezuka take one for the team with New Super Mario Bros. 2, remove the “world map” segments, get rid of the “Whoa Crazy Huge” mushroom, shoehorn harder Mario Physics in, and actually make the triple-jumping and wall-jumping work in the context of the level design. That would make for something really excellent. For the meantime, Pac-Man CE is the best example yet of how to look backward and forward at the same time. Since making it, Toru Iwatani has bowed out of the games industry, though it won’t surprise us to see his former slavemasters at Namco exhuming Pac-Man and splattering him all over menus, loading screens, and car hood ornaments in Ridge Racer — nor will it surprise us to see level design and game design (Tenuous Namedrop: Gears of War (2), Uncharted (2?)) re-awakened to the awesome simplicity of Pac-Man. It’s kind of funny, and kind of sad — all these years, Namco has been looking for ways to make Pac-Man marketable, and all they could ever think of was to give him arms, legs, and a family. Really, what they should have been doing, is applying the delicacy, grace, and utter shocking nobility of the original Pac-Man‘s game design into other games starring new characters. In short, to use the phrase we hope you’ve caught on to by now: Artistic Conscience.
In closing, it has come to our attention that not everyone owning an Xbox 360 has purchased Pac-Man: Championship Edition or even downloaded the free demo. If one of you is reading this, please, stop being a jackass. Don’t let the fact that Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are also available for download fool you. It’s not a cop-out of a cash-in: it’s something real. Download it and make everyone you know play it. If anyone doesn’t enjoy it, tell them to hit the bricks.
★★★★
“ACTUALLY A VIDEOGAME.”
I’ve honestly never liked Pac-Man. At all. Here I will take a page from all of the middle-aged mohawkers submitting guitar effects pedals reviews on Harmony Central, and say that I’ve been playing guitar for 35 years, have owned Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, and SGs, used Bigsby tremolos and Gibson Vibrolas, have covered everything from AC/DC to Rage Against the Machine, and I’ve never found a better fuzz pedal than the traditional Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, so trust me when I say that the Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff is a pansy-ass piece of stuff.
Take all the guitar terms in the previous sentence, and replace them with the names of game consoles and software franchises.
Why don’t I like Pac-Man? In the past, when I had to stand on a milk carton, I played it in pizza joints because my dad figured I loved it; I played it on Atari 2600 because it existed, and eventually, I played Ms. Pac-Man on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I can’t say I hated Ms. Pac-Man — I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t have any balls, machismo, guts, or what have you. In later years — leading right up until Pac-Man CE was released for Xbox Live Arcade, in fact — I’d identify that I just didn’t like the way Pac-Man controlled. It felt too loose and weird, which just didn’t totally mesh with how tight the game was conceptually.
If you’d have asked me how to make a better Pac-Manning experience, I probably would have told you I’d think about it and then get back to you later. That night, when you weren’t watching, I would have cut you off of my LiveJournal friends list, and then set my own journal to “friends-only”.
It’s a hell of an IQ-test question: how do you make Pac-Man better? It’s like asking me to list, off the top of my head, as many verbs that start with “V” as possible (validate, verify, vindicate, et cetera). I couldn’t think of any possible solutions, probably because I’m not a genius game designer. Maybe I could be, I don’t know, though like my mother always told me, I guess I’m kind of lazy. Either way, it’s evokes ambiguously positive emotions that original Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was reportedly responsible for the virtuosic Pac-Man CE — it makes me feel good to know that it took him nearly 30 years to come up with all these ideas.
Was Namco ever trying, though, to make Pac-Man anything more than an icon? Judging by the quality of every game starring Pac-Man, it would seem that none of them were made for any more generous reason than to keep bumping his name to the top of the gamer subconscious, to keep telling people who play games that, hey, this company called Namco has an archetypically deep heritage, and they’re not afraid of it!
They’ve been plopping remakes and reissues of Pac-Man out on the lunchroom tray of humanity for the better part of this most recent decade. They never hesitate to flop the original game onto one of their six-game “Museum” volumes, you know, which generously use up about 1/3000th of their storage medium. As of this writing, in addition to Pac-Man CE, there are two other Pac-Mans on Xbox Live Arcade — the original, and Ms. Pac-Man, both with six-dollar price tags, ugly borders and awesome online ranking leaderboards, which can only be accessed if you unlock the full version of the game.
(Really, for heck’s sake, Microsoft, let’s stop using the word “unlock”. It’s not like we’re using keys to play these games — nor even, in the gaming sense, are we using points or in-game currency. Using the word “Unlock” makes it seem like we can purchase the games using the “Gamer Points” we get from unlocking “Achievements”. Just use the word “Purchase”, please. It’s bad enough that you’ve made your own currency with “Microsoft Points”, and it’s precisely because you’ve made your own currency with which to buy things that it’s ridiculous that you award another kind of “Points” to people who do &^#$#ed stuff in games, which in turn makes it more ridiculous that you use the same word (“Unlock”) to indicate the option to purchase an Xbox Live Arcade game as you use to indicate a player being awarded an “Achievement”.)
Anyway, yeah, who wants to pay 400 “Microsoft Points” to play the original Pac-Man, when you can just pick up Ridge Racer 6 from a bargain bin and play Pac-Man to your heart’s content on the loading screen? When (not if) you get bored, you can just play Ridge Racer 6, which has nitro in it, which is awesome. However, it doesn’t have slipstreaming in it, even though Ridge Racer 5 did, because they wanted to save slipstreaming for Ridge Racer 7, which is as marginal an upgrade as you’re ever to see in videogames, though once you’ve played 7, 6 — and its Pac-Man loading screen — should seem utterly and horribly broken. After years of not upgrading the number in the series title, Namco sprung Ridge Racer 6, a statement of their staunch support of the Xbox 360, only to announce Ridge Racer 7 for the PlayStation 3 literally months later.
There’s a point to be made of this slipstream-talk, however muddy it might be: this is the sort of bullstuff Namco does. More to the point: the Pac-Man loading screen of Ridge Racer 6 isn’t even a loading screen. It’s just there. From the second it pops up, it says at the bottom of the screen: “Press the A button to begin Ridge Racer 6.” Why do they even put Pac-Man there in the first place? One slightly morbid reason is that it’s a throwback to Ridge Racer on the PlayStation, which let you play Galaxian at the pre-game loading scene. Many Namco games since then have let you play a game at the loading screen, so maybe Ridge Racer 6 was slyly trying to stir up nostalgia in the kinds of people who give a stuff. I wonder what happened to the guy who suggested the idea of putting a game in the loading screen. He’s probably 65 years old right now, with teeth the color of wooden stuff, and just finished paying off the loan for his mid-size condominium in a boring neighborhood in Tokyo. I’ve probably walked past his home a hundred times and never realized it. Probably some younger guy came up with the idea, and passed it on to the older guy out of “respect” so that the older guy could get a promotion, after which he would remember the younger guy and promote him some day. The younger guy probably never smoked a single cigarette until he was twenty-four years old.
Pac-Man is not just for loading screens — no, he’s also all over scoreboards in the Ridge Racer series, as well. Every time you hit a checkpoint, he pops up on your time display, chasing ghosts. This retro-gamer appeal is sprinkled into Namco games quite viciously, aiming to be the sort of thing some surreal-Dig-Dug-painting-owning poser on a UK games forum hears about and then says “SOLD”, maybe with some exclamation marks.
Also, a little Pac-Man badge appeared on Klonoa’s hat. Klonoa was Namco’s would-be mascot, star of a bland 2.5D game released for the PlayStation; some people still think that game was Jesus, and it kind of sucks to be those people. Klonoa had potential, anyway, though Namco didn’t care, and immediately resumed exhuming Pac-Man’s iconic profile and propping his corpse up in the weirdest places.
At the same time, developers all over the place claimed to love the original Pac-Man and tightened-up Ms. Pac-Man. Shigeru Miyamoto said, in an interview, that without Pac-Man, there would have been no Donkey Kong, and I guess he’s probably right. Donkey Kong is, subtly, about as inspired by Pac-Man as a game can get without also playing a lot like Pac-Man. The one game publisher in the world to understand the core of Pac-Man the least, ironically, has been Namco: since the success of the two “canon” games in the series, Namco has used and abused the “character” on numerous numbing occasions, such as the dull platformer Pac-Land, which no one likes unless they realize first that no one else likes it, or Pac-Man World, a 3D take on Pac-Land, where Pac-Man is now a sphere instead of a circle, which makes the fact that he has legs all the more freakish, and the fact that he has a speaking voice actually quite terrifying, and the fact that the stages lack actual design unforgivable. Recently, there’s been Pac-Pix on the DS, a game less tangentially related to the original Pac-Man than Pac-Man World, though jarring all the same: you have to keep drawing pictures of Pac-Man, his mouth facing in the correct direction, so that he munches the perpetually spawning ghosts. Pac-Pix, while a tiny bit interesting, misses the core of Pac-Man — the game is no longer about the “hunted becomes the hunter” dynamic, it’s just about drawing pictures big enough and quickly enough.
Arguably the most inspired of all the Pac-Man rehashes was Pac-Man VS, designed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. This was back when Nintendo was pushing the feature to connect a Gameboy Advance to a Gamecube, and use the Gameboy Advance as a controller. This era also brought us the dismal Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (it’s as much a challenge to try to enjoy it alone as it is to find three people willing to play it at the same time) and the friendship-wrecking The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords.
It might be most accurate to say that, back in those days, Nintendo was forcing all developers to include some level of GBA-Gamecube connectivity in all games. Player two could use a GBA to control remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell, for example. Games like Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles were big-scale brainstorms. Pac-Man VS was a lot smaller-scale, and as such, Nintendo and Namco had no clue what to do with it. Ultimately, they just slopped it onto some discs that included other games. I guess that was about the best place for it.
Pac-Man VS isn’t so much a game as a reason to scream. Essentially, it’s Pac-Man, where one player plays as Pac-Man and the other players play as the ghosts. Only the ghosts can’t see the entire playing field. Pac-Man, however, can see the ghosts. The Pac-Man player plays with the Gameboy Advance. The other players control their ghosts on the television. If it doesn’t immediately sound brilliant, it’s because it’s subtle. You really have to play it to “get” it, and playing it is, as you might imagine, kind of a hard thing to arrange: there is no one-player mode.
Yet none of these games cut to the heart of Pac-Man, where the ghosts hunt you until you eat a Power Pellet, at which point the tables turn and the ghosts flee in terror, because now you can eat them. This is a really good dynamic, and it’s just been sitting there locked up in a clunky shell for decades, reissued time and time again as-is by its shrugging, money-hungry parents, or else being shot in the feet and told to dance in monsterpieces like Pac-Man World 2, with its elbow jabbing, LOLing bullstuff cut-scenes wherein Pac-Man talks about constantly being hungry, and Ms. Pac-Man gives Pac-Man a birthday cake with a Power Pellet on top of it.
When Microsoft announced at their press conference at Tokyo Game Show 2006 that they would be holding the world’s first “Pac-Man World Championship”, I had to groan. First of all, hasn’t some guy played a perfect game of Pac-Man? How can you have a world championship of something that someone out there is perfect at? Aren’t you just asking him — and hundreds like him — to show up and dominate? Sitting there at the press conference, I couldn’t even begin to conceive of Pac-Man Championship Edition. Maybe it was because of how bullstuffty the whole presentation of it was. Peter Moore stood up there with a little headset microphone on his cranium, looking like he was either Madonna singing “Vogue” live or a high-rolling coach of a Halo team on Xbox Live. When he said that they were planning this Pac-Man world championship with the help of original creator Toru Iwatani, he repeatedly mispronounced Mr. Iwatani’s last name with such ferocity that I found it exceedingly hard to believe he’d ever met the guy. He kept calling him “Mistah Iwatawwy”. Seriously, Mr. Moore, I see only one “W” in the man’s last name, not sixteen of them.
EE-WAH-TAH-NEE.
For God’s sake.
Iwatani came out and gave a little speech. He talked about his plans to leave Namco in 2007 to become a lecturer on the subject of game design at Tokyo Polytechnic University. Listening to Iwatani’s speech, I figured this Pac-Man World Championship thing was just a big corporate flog, and Iwatani was only called in, thanks to a modest-sized envelope of money, to temporarily increase the number of Japanese people on the stage, making for a friendlier “photo op” (or, “shutter chance” as they call it in katakana) with which to infiltrate the Japanese juvenile consciousness via many games news services. Seriously, I’ve seen the notes on the PowerPoints they use to set these things up.
When Pac-Man: Championship Edition was announced and subsequently released, six whole days went by before I noticed and then downloaded the demo. Three days later, I played the demo, and purchased the full version after three play-throughs, making it the first thing I ever purchased with Microsoft Points.
Holy stuff, this is a hell of a videogame. Toru Iwatani, before walking out of Namco, put his balls on the table, and holy stuff, that’s a lot of balls. It’s like him flipping off decades of idiocy, and telling Namco to, seriously, heck Pac-Man as a “character”.
It’s basically Pac-Man with the aesthetic completed, and the dynamics mastered. Simply put: you can’t ever completely clear the board. It constantly re-seeds. The whole thing starts with just a few dots and a power pellet on each side. Eat all the dots on the right side and a fruit will appear on the left side. Eat the fruit on the left side to re-seed fresh dots and power pellets on the right side. Eat all the dots on the left side to reveal a fruit on the right side. Eat the fruit on the right side to re-seed the dots and power pellets on the left side. Et cetera, to infinity. As you repeatedly refresh the board, the layout changes, subtly. This gives the game a flow that no Pac-Man had ever possessed — the original is too stop-start to be nearly this much fun: eat all the dots to clear the stage, then start back at the middle of the maze with a completely fresh board of dots. Pac-Man CE nails the flow: the action never stops, and by staying alive, you start to feel like a hero. Every successful outwitting of ghosts, every eight-ghost combo scored, every time sparks shoot from Pac-Man’s body as he grinds around a corner, you want to pump your fist.
The longer you stay alive, the faster Pac-Man moves, and the more points the dots are worth. Being hunted by ghosts and escaping would-be run-downs is such a glimmering, pure experience that no car-chase in any 3D videogame can touch its primal thrills of success. Power pellets let you eat ghosts, as always; when you eat a ghost, the game pauses for a second, as the controller thumps, letting you savor your big point score. Eat several ghosts in a row to score increasing points — eat another power pellet before all four ghosts escape from the middle of the board, and you can find yourself lining up eight-ghost combos. If Pac-Man is fast enough and you’re a bad enough dude, you can eat twelve, sixteen, twenty ghosts in a row.
At first, scoring big in this game feels like luck. Eventually, the skill involved is undeniable. Look up some replays on YouTube after your first shot at the game, and feel the doors unlocking in your brain. I force everyone who sits on my sofa to play this game at least once, and every time I watch intently, always picking up little idiosyncrasies that I myself either possess or don’t possess. Every time, I learn a little something about my friend, the game, or — ideally — both.
So — final answer: Pac-Man CE has essentially made Pac-Man into a videogame I’m likely to enjoy for the rest of my life, and it gives Toru Iwatani good enough reason to lecture about videogame design. Maybe he has a whole lecture based around how and why it took him thirty years to wonder, “If the ghosts refresh constantly, why do the stages reset to zero every time?” Cheers, Mr. Iwatani, for having the guts to go back and complete what your company and your public had never doubted was a masterpiece.
There are a couple of other modes apart from “Championship Mode” in Pac-Man CE, including one where the power pellets don’t refresh, and ones with longer wraparound escape tunnels — where you can seriously get screwed by clever ghosts. Some people have complained about a lack of variety in the modes, or moaned about the lack of an endless mode, and I guess the latter complaint is kind of valid. It would be hella cool to see how long people could last, though I think the designers probably feared that the game might devolve into extreme, Tetris-Grand-Master-esque freakish speed, or else because they were getting conscientious, and didn’t want people losing their whole lives to this game. At any rate, the “Championship Mode” is pretty finely tuned as-is: get as high a score as you can in five minutes. I think that’s good enough. It’s good enough, even, for Japanese arcades: I could totally see this game working in Japanese arcades. Twitch masters would eat it up — figuratively. If they managed to hook it up to the internet, said twitch masters could even participate in the international leaderboards.
Then again, why pay 100 yen per play if you can just play the demo of this game for free? You don’t even need to pay for the game. All you really get out of paying for it is the ability to put your score up on the international leaderboards, which is kind of boring. I mean, I don’t suspect I’ll ever be not tied for 10,000th place, if you know what I mean. As willing as I am to admit that this game is a masterpiece by default, I’m not exactly jumping at the chance to spend my life playing it. I’d much rather continue cycling guitar scales (this week it’s the Spanish Gypsy Scale) in the dark when I should be sleeping, if you know what I mean.
When I do play this game, though, I find the Xbox 360 controller sorely lacking — either the D-pad or the analog stick is too wishy-washy about rounding corners. I wish I could play it with a joystick, though I never bought a joystick for the 360. I wish I could just get a Sanwa ball-type stick and one button (the Start button), and hack my own exclusive controller for this game, though the Xbox 360 is too complicated to work with. Damn it. There’s always the Hori Dead of Alive 4 stick, still clogging select Japanese retailers ever since that game tanked, hard. I could get one of those, I guess, though the prospect of another monolithic Hori joystick in my house — and of the tacky plastic-like boobs engraved into said special-edition stick — kind of turns me off. As it stands, the Xbox 360 controller is Pac-Man CE‘s biggest fault, though I really can’t dock its score for that.
The second-biggest flaw would have to do with the cheesy American glazed-over aesthetic. The glimmering rainbow colors of the playing field are a bit much. I mean, it’s high-definition enough, though I personally would probably prefer it more if the cute neon texture of the borders just stayed one solid color, and maybe changed just once every time both sides of the board re-seed. As it is now, it gives me a bit of a headache. There’s too much jumpy flashing going on, like the producers were trying to overcompensate for something. Leave it the hell alone, man! It’s Pac-Man. Next thing you know, they’ll release a patch that gives Pac-Man legs and eyes and a hecking snifter of brandy.
Also, the music is pretty terrible. It sounds something like what’s playing in any given club in Berlin the moment a hip German teenager first contemplates acting on the insecurity that his penis is smaller than that of other guys. It’s cute how it builds to a swell in the five minutes allotted for play-time, though really, it’s not even good techno. It’s like the record the DJ puts on when the club manager tells him they need to sell some drinks right now.
I know, I can use the Xbox 360’s excellent custom soundtracks feature, though isn’t that kind of cheating? It sounds almost like game companies are giving up, refusing to budget good music, and hoping that the player has good enough taste in music to make up for their games’ faults. As I’ll no doubt say again, ideally, a game should have music good enough to make me not want to use a custom soundtrack.
Even so, it’s convenient that a game of Pac-Man CE lasts only five minutes. There are many songs that are exactly five minutes in length, like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (off the “Scary Monsters” album). The Stone Roses’ “This is The One” is also precisely five minutes. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is 5:01, though that last second doesn’t really have too much going on.
After dipping deep into my memory banks, I recall that “Big Bikes” by Kyuss is 5:01, and would probably be really awesome to listen to while playing this game. It even has an awesome little false stop with twenty-two seconds to go, and then with nineteen seconds left it comes back, at double-time. That would be pretty badass for the closing seconds, rushing to kill just a couple more ghosts, to push the score up over your record.
I can think of a couple more songs off the top of my head, though I keep getting tempted to just check iTunes and sort all songs by length. In the face of this strong temptation to cheat, I’m just going to go ahead and quit writing this.
EXTRA BONUS PARAGRAPH. Hello and welcome to an extra bonus paragraph, written in celebration of Pac-Man: Championship Edition‘s induction to the Action Button Dot Net Manifesto Hall of Fame. Anyway, here’s Pac-Man. Since beginning this list, we have received literally dozens of emails from readers who promise terrible things if we don’t acknowledge some “Actual Great Games” on our pissy little contrarian list of videogames we possess the gall and nerve to pretend we like. Pac-Man is our way of throwing you lovable scamps a bone and flipping you off at the same time. On the one hand, it’s a Classic Japanese Videogame made by an Indisputably Wise “Genius”! On the other hand, it’s a remake! On the one hand, it’s Pac-Man! On the other hand, it’s Microsoft! On the one hand, it’s got retro-cool geek-chic in spades! On the other hand, it’s got Horrifying, Terrible Electronic Music!
All kidding aside, though, really, this is a brain-blastingly perfect videogame. There’s this cliche, about how music was great on the NES “because” of the limitations of the hardware, or how retro remakes are a key to the future of game design because they force us to examine what game designers used to do when they didn’t have normal maps, when they didn’t have the ability to drench any character’s skin in oatmeal and add six pounds of simulated fat into their chest with the click of a mouse. To this, we say “Duh”. Freedom will always breed laziness: compare yourself to a convicted bank robber Doing Hard Time. You have the freedom to leave your house; you also have the freedom to do this in your living room. However, it goes without (and sometimes with) saying that the guy Doing Hard Time is probably better at doing that than you are. Grand Theft Auto III is you — Pac-Man: Championship Edition is the convicted felon. We like the convicted felon more than we like you.
Anyway, Pac-Man: Championship Edition is a classic arcade game revisited with an attention to detail, money, and a newfound kernel of wisdom re: the very concept of games and their rules. It’s sharp, punctual, and entertaining. You can enjoy it as much as you want. For example, though the game was promoted well before its release as a proving ground for a Pac-Man world championship, and though we find that marvelous and precious, we have never bothered to check Wikipedia to see if the anybody won, or if the championship is still going on, or what. We don’t care! Pac-Man: CE is a brilliantly polished little product; it is the computer programming of 1977 graduated from Tetris university. It is an actual videogame. It is the Return of Awesome. Recently, Taito released Space Invaders Extreme, which is also pretty astounding, and kind of has better music, and Capcom released Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which has amazing music though now looks so good that the idea of being unable to jump is actually vaguely creepy (when a single chest-high stone brick blocks your progress in one direction, it feels funny to have all that HDR lighting); meanwhile, a man named Jonathon Blow makes a game called Braid, as serious a meditation on the core of classic game design as it is an exercise in making something absolutely new, which coincidentally might have actually existed twenty years ago. Then there’s Megaman 9: rather than simply remake an old Megaman game with slick graphics for a quick yen, Capcom have decided that they are Not Afraid of Death, that they are going to make a new installment in an old series, complete with old-like graphics: only now, the level design has the benefit of decades of wisdom. It could be glorious.
Thus it is abundantly clear that someone, somewhere, has sounded a giant gong, proclaiming that Games Today Kind of Suck. Cautious backward-tiptoe-steps (tipheels?) are being taken in the direction of Maybe It’s Not Just Nostalgia After All, and people are looking long and hard at the very essence of “fun”. We’d really love to see Takashi Tezuka take one for the team with New Super Mario Bros. 2, remove the “world map” segments, get rid of the “Whoa Crazy Huge” mushroom, shoehorn harder Mario Physics in, and actually make the triple-jumping and wall-jumping work in the context of the level design. That would make for something really excellent. For the meantime, Pac-Man CE is the best example yet of how to look backward and forward at the same time. Since making it, Toru Iwatani has bowed out of the games industry, though it won’t surprise us to see his former slavemasters at Namco exhuming Pac-Man and splattering him all over menus, loading screens, and car hood ornaments in Ridge Racer — nor will it surprise us to see level design and game design (Tenuous Namedrop: Gears of War (2), Uncharted (2?)) re-awakened to the awesome simplicity of Pac-Man. It’s kind of funny, and kind of sad — all these years, Namco has been looking for ways to make Pac-Man marketable, and all they could ever think of was to give him arms, legs, and a family. Really, what they should have been doing, is applying the delicacy, grace, and utter shocking nobility of the original Pac-Man‘s game design into other games starring new characters. In short, to use the phrase we hope you’ve caught on to by now: Artistic Conscience.
In closing, it has come to our attention that not everyone owning an Xbox 360 has purchased Pac-Man: Championship Edition or even downloaded the free demo. If one of you is reading this, please, stop being a jackass. Don’t let the fact that Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are also available for download fool you. It’s not a cop-out of a cash-in: it’s something real. Download it and make everyone you know play it. If anyone doesn’t enjoy it, tell them to hit the bricks.
2002
text by Thomas Callahan
★★★☆
“A VILLAIN OF THE HIGHEST ORDER.”
Survival horror is the name of a genre, as befitted by obsessive-compulsive drones categorizing and ranking their favorite videogames to their heart’s content, and to every last decimal point. It certainly is a name that bears repeating. Survival horror. Wonderfully evocative, wonderfully specific.
I figure that yes, aside from the gloomy connotation it carries, apart from the notion of plodding, claustrophobic backtracking it implies, and despite having bogged down Shinji Mikami for almost a decade, survival horror remains a wonderful concept. In videogame terms it is long gone, sure, cast aside in favor of bigger, better things — namely, the functionally sublime run ‘n gun, Resident Evil 4. Whenever survival horror does resurface — that is, in Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami’s notorious collaboration, killer7 — it is only to be mocked and parodied. Yet I continue to gaze fondly in the genre’s effectively extinct direction, as its now-arcane devices and design philosophies were honed to perfection exactly twice. Survival horror served a purpose, is what I’m saying.
This game, a loving remake of the Resident Evil series debut, marks the second of two instances where survival horror jumped out of the mud long enough to spark something brilliant.
The original Resident Evil tried and largely failed to emulate the experience of watching a B-rate camp horror film. Ingredients were set in place; every last animal phobia was perpetuated, with a cast of giant snakes, giant sharks, giant spiders and . . . bees; porn actors were rented out to provide the now-internet-famously stilted voiceovers; and camera angles were fixed in place, lending an uneasy, half-obscured cinematic perspective to the schlock horror. Go back and play the original, however, and you’ll be stunned at how badly it has aged. That every hallway is fairly well-lit, often with comfortable fluorescent lighting, drains every last shred of suspense in one fell swoop. Navigating the mansion begins to feel like stumbling around the lobby of an only-slightly rundown nightclub at 3 pm in sunny California. There, that’s all. It didn’t work, it was hopelessly garish. The original failed simply because it was too bright.
In this Gamecube remake (neatly abbreviated REmake), the offending hallway lights are unplugged, smashed, and strewn across creaky wooden floors. I can now reevaluate the game, good as new. I am comfortable with calling it beautiful. Achingly beautiful, really; almost hallucinatory in its detail. As it represents a direct translation of Resident Evil series traditions onto more muscular hardware, however, a certain, peculiar graphical disconnect is amplified. Each camera angle is completely immobile, each area pre-rendered and static. The game, then, plays out as a series of photorealistic stills, each with the glistening fascination of moody nighttime photography, each completely non-interactive. Only the character models are animated: Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield and an assortment of T-Virus-infected monsters shuffle deliberately through this succession of elaborate photographs, this world around them, frozen in time. Shotgun pellets fired at glass windows go unnoticed, or what have you — nothing can be harmed. Unlike videogames that pride themselves on their fully destructible environments, REmake is intent on keeping its house of cards standing. By subscribing to popular suspense cinematography theory — most notably, the principle of One Correct Angle for each scene — REmake achieves a striking delicacy, one that gamers with energy to spare cannot disrupt.
Odder still are the controls. Detractors have long accused the Resident Evil series of suffering from “tank controlsâ€. Here, in an earnest response to the user-generated catchphrase, a literal tank control setup is offered. Hold the “R†button like a pedal, and Jill accelerates forward. Spin the analog stick like a gearshift, and Jill lurches, rotating. This qualifies as bizarre novelty, though alternatives are equally if not more obtuse — in the default control arrangement, pushing the analog stick forward results in Jill, as seen from inconvenient and weirdly voyeuristic angles, moving forward from her point of view, rather than yours — continuing Shinji Mikami’s legacy of finely tuned, aggressively unintuitive control schemes. There’s something to be said for pointedly limited controls; REmake, which strips away our typical third-dimensional empowerment, and routinely sends us into bouts of fish-out-of-water panic, is living evidence.
And no less backhanded is the saving system, wherein “ink ribbons”, small black objects found in limited numbers within the mansion, are required to save game progress. Limited saves?! At some point it becomes clear that these snide little anti-features don’t really need to be redeemed. You’ll never die from careless use of stupid goddamn controls, you’ll never even begin running low on stupid hecking ribbons. These are malicious design decisions in theory — as such, the shuddering premise of them will keep any player alert, careful, and one step ahead of the game.
This is, by all means, a piece of entertainment pitted squarely against its audience. We are the protagonists, REmake is the antagonist. Escaping REmake‘s shocking obstacles is its own reward. And while this white-knuckle purity sounds exhausting, it’s enjoyable, honestly, to slip through REmake‘s cruel grasp. This is something compulsively replayable: a compact, intricate, high-stakes game of resource management. This is the survival horror genre, firing on all cylinders.
I used to carry a pistol along with my shotgun; I gave up this practice years ago. Keys and herbs would pile up, and soon enough I’d be right out of inventory space. I’m relegated to six item slots, yeah? So as I ramp up the difficulty level, space becomes a growing concern. Now I figure, hey, who needs a pistol? I don’t use it to shoot zombies — I never shoot zombies. Zombies take about ten wasteful bullets to kill. Then once they’re down, I’ve gotta pour lighter fluid over their rotting bodies and flick the match: if they aren’t reduced to a small pile of ashes, they’ll lurch back to life, grow 10-inch claws, and gain the terrifying ability to sprint. And I obviously don’t have enough room for lighter fluid and a match in my backpack, thank you very much.
No, smarter to bust moves around those zombies, avoiding their grasp. This works about 20% of the time. Sometimes the zombie in question will actually vomit from sheer confusion. Most times, though, it’ll grab me in a bloody embrace. Hopefully I’ve packed a knife to thwart its attack. If not, I withstand the pain for a few seconds before sprinting off, healing with a green herb, and hey, at least I free up some space by getting rid of that green herb.
And hey: when I kill and burn a zombie, it’s gone forever, though numerous other, angrier beasts soon take its spot. Everything is in decline, falling apart; the world becomes steadily harder to traverse. Halfway through the game, doors, previously a convenient artificial barrier to the undead, begin being punched aside by giant bloodthirsty bullfrogs. Backtracking becomes a harrowing task, and meticulous planning is required to avoid large-scale blows to my resources. Pivotal moments of the original are distorted, throwing me onto false trails. Audio cues manipulate me like a puppet: unhinged, screeching violins signal the entrance of a newfangled monster, or signal nothing at all. Enemy placement shifts, amidst repeated trips into the forest, or across the upstairs floors of the mansion, and oh . . . oh god. This is not intelligent horror by any means. It’s relentless, and not much else. Rising above it, however — plotting out paths, successfully micromanaging supplies — is genuinely gratifying. REmake is a rare breed, forcing players to adapt to, and overcome, its terrors. That, on top of an astonishing hyperrealist aesthetic, makes it a highly recommended purchase.
★★★☆
“A VILLAIN OF THE HIGHEST ORDER.”
Survival horror is the name of a genre, as befitted by obsessive-compulsive drones categorizing and ranking their favorite videogames to their heart’s content, and to every last decimal point. It certainly is a name that bears repeating. Survival horror. Wonderfully evocative, wonderfully specific.
I figure that yes, aside from the gloomy connotation it carries, apart from the notion of plodding, claustrophobic backtracking it implies, and despite having bogged down Shinji Mikami for almost a decade, survival horror remains a wonderful concept. In videogame terms it is long gone, sure, cast aside in favor of bigger, better things — namely, the functionally sublime run ‘n gun, Resident Evil 4. Whenever survival horror does resurface — that is, in Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami’s notorious collaboration, killer7 — it is only to be mocked and parodied. Yet I continue to gaze fondly in the genre’s effectively extinct direction, as its now-arcane devices and design philosophies were honed to perfection exactly twice. Survival horror served a purpose, is what I’m saying.
This game, a loving remake of the Resident Evil series debut, marks the second of two instances where survival horror jumped out of the mud long enough to spark something brilliant.
The original Resident Evil tried and largely failed to emulate the experience of watching a B-rate camp horror film. Ingredients were set in place; every last animal phobia was perpetuated, with a cast of giant snakes, giant sharks, giant spiders and . . . bees; porn actors were rented out to provide the now-internet-famously stilted voiceovers; and camera angles were fixed in place, lending an uneasy, half-obscured cinematic perspective to the schlock horror. Go back and play the original, however, and you’ll be stunned at how badly it has aged. That every hallway is fairly well-lit, often with comfortable fluorescent lighting, drains every last shred of suspense in one fell swoop. Navigating the mansion begins to feel like stumbling around the lobby of an only-slightly rundown nightclub at 3 pm in sunny California. There, that’s all. It didn’t work, it was hopelessly garish. The original failed simply because it was too bright.
In this Gamecube remake (neatly abbreviated REmake), the offending hallway lights are unplugged, smashed, and strewn across creaky wooden floors. I can now reevaluate the game, good as new. I am comfortable with calling it beautiful. Achingly beautiful, really; almost hallucinatory in its detail. As it represents a direct translation of Resident Evil series traditions onto more muscular hardware, however, a certain, peculiar graphical disconnect is amplified. Each camera angle is completely immobile, each area pre-rendered and static. The game, then, plays out as a series of photorealistic stills, each with the glistening fascination of moody nighttime photography, each completely non-interactive. Only the character models are animated: Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield and an assortment of T-Virus-infected monsters shuffle deliberately through this succession of elaborate photographs, this world around them, frozen in time. Shotgun pellets fired at glass windows go unnoticed, or what have you — nothing can be harmed. Unlike videogames that pride themselves on their fully destructible environments, REmake is intent on keeping its house of cards standing. By subscribing to popular suspense cinematography theory — most notably, the principle of One Correct Angle for each scene — REmake achieves a striking delicacy, one that gamers with energy to spare cannot disrupt.
Odder still are the controls. Detractors have long accused the Resident Evil series of suffering from “tank controlsâ€. Here, in an earnest response to the user-generated catchphrase, a literal tank control setup is offered. Hold the “R†button like a pedal, and Jill accelerates forward. Spin the analog stick like a gearshift, and Jill lurches, rotating. This qualifies as bizarre novelty, though alternatives are equally if not more obtuse — in the default control arrangement, pushing the analog stick forward results in Jill, as seen from inconvenient and weirdly voyeuristic angles, moving forward from her point of view, rather than yours — continuing Shinji Mikami’s legacy of finely tuned, aggressively unintuitive control schemes. There’s something to be said for pointedly limited controls; REmake, which strips away our typical third-dimensional empowerment, and routinely sends us into bouts of fish-out-of-water panic, is living evidence.
And no less backhanded is the saving system, wherein “ink ribbons”, small black objects found in limited numbers within the mansion, are required to save game progress. Limited saves?! At some point it becomes clear that these snide little anti-features don’t really need to be redeemed. You’ll never die from careless use of stupid goddamn controls, you’ll never even begin running low on stupid hecking ribbons. These are malicious design decisions in theory — as such, the shuddering premise of them will keep any player alert, careful, and one step ahead of the game.
This is, by all means, a piece of entertainment pitted squarely against its audience. We are the protagonists, REmake is the antagonist. Escaping REmake‘s shocking obstacles is its own reward. And while this white-knuckle purity sounds exhausting, it’s enjoyable, honestly, to slip through REmake‘s cruel grasp. This is something compulsively replayable: a compact, intricate, high-stakes game of resource management. This is the survival horror genre, firing on all cylinders.
I used to carry a pistol along with my shotgun; I gave up this practice years ago. Keys and herbs would pile up, and soon enough I’d be right out of inventory space. I’m relegated to six item slots, yeah? So as I ramp up the difficulty level, space becomes a growing concern. Now I figure, hey, who needs a pistol? I don’t use it to shoot zombies — I never shoot zombies. Zombies take about ten wasteful bullets to kill. Then once they’re down, I’ve gotta pour lighter fluid over their rotting bodies and flick the match: if they aren’t reduced to a small pile of ashes, they’ll lurch back to life, grow 10-inch claws, and gain the terrifying ability to sprint. And I obviously don’t have enough room for lighter fluid and a match in my backpack, thank you very much.
No, smarter to bust moves around those zombies, avoiding their grasp. This works about 20% of the time. Sometimes the zombie in question will actually vomit from sheer confusion. Most times, though, it’ll grab me in a bloody embrace. Hopefully I’ve packed a knife to thwart its attack. If not, I withstand the pain for a few seconds before sprinting off, healing with a green herb, and hey, at least I free up some space by getting rid of that green herb.
And hey: when I kill and burn a zombie, it’s gone forever, though numerous other, angrier beasts soon take its spot. Everything is in decline, falling apart; the world becomes steadily harder to traverse. Halfway through the game, doors, previously a convenient artificial barrier to the undead, begin being punched aside by giant bloodthirsty bullfrogs. Backtracking becomes a harrowing task, and meticulous planning is required to avoid large-scale blows to my resources. Pivotal moments of the original are distorted, throwing me onto false trails. Audio cues manipulate me like a puppet: unhinged, screeching violins signal the entrance of a newfangled monster, or signal nothing at all. Enemy placement shifts, amidst repeated trips into the forest, or across the upstairs floors of the mansion, and oh . . . oh god. This is not intelligent horror by any means. It’s relentless, and not much else. Rising above it, however — plotting out paths, successfully micromanaging supplies — is genuinely gratifying. REmake is a rare breed, forcing players to adapt to, and overcome, its terrors. That, on top of an astonishing hyperrealist aesthetic, makes it a highly recommended purchase.
2006
text by David Cabrera
★★★☆
“LIKE GOING TO HIGH SCHOOL IN THE SENSE THAT DAYTONA USA IS LIKE DRIVING A CAR.”
I spent my high school life in a basement obsessively playing Japanese RPGs. Realizing that my education was soon coming to an end, and suddenly nostalgic for miserable old times, I spent the last week of my last summer vacation from college obsessively playing a high school simulator which happens to contain a Japanese RPG as a minigame.
Playing Persona 3 is like going to high school in the sense that playing Daytona USA is like driving a car: the reality of the situation has been eradicated, and in its place stands a wonderful dream reality, familiar yet wholly alien, in which everything feels just right. Such is the charmed life of Cross Docking (this is what I named him: it is who he is), leading man of Gekkoukan High’s Class 2-F. The hardest thing in his life is how he can warp from his classroom to Naganaki Shrine, but, when he is done making his daily brain-enhancing offering to the gods, he has to take the train back.
Everything the protagonist gets to do in this game is either extremely special or painlessly simple: sometimes both. The game’s fast and breezy flow skips the mundane and puts you through all the parts of high school that make you look cool. Even the teen angst is glamorous: in this game, you summon your Personas– spirit beings that act like summoned monsters in a typical RPG or, more accurately, like Stands in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure— to attack by shooting yourself in the head. This is, after all, a Japanese RPG. But let’s get back to high school!
Cross Docking is, by default, the most extraordinary and superior human being in existence: this is regularly confirmed in dialogue by everybody around you. Join a sports team: you’ll take it over at the second practice. Girls fall all over you: one girl thinks it’s a medical condition, and even the robot girl was apparently programmed with the hots for you. You get the idea. The school day is played in fast-forward, slowing down only for highlights like answering a question for your buddy. After school, you have free reign to run around town doing whatever you like, ranging from no-committment extracurricular activities to eating food to raise your stats. How videogamey! How charming! You’ve got to manage your free time, though, because you will be tested: midterms, finals, and of course, a monthly boss fight. And of course there’s a dungeon to explore!
That part comes in by night: you see, your high school was built on an ancient Indian burial ground– it’s okay that I revealed this plot detail because it is false– and it happens to transform into a randomly-generated dungeon of obscene height and questionable foundations. Up in Tartarus, you run up stairs and kill things and pick things up until you get tired and have to go to sleep. Exploring Tartarus is ostensibly the game’s long-term goal, and the game explains outright that even your social interactions are in service of strengthening your summoned Personas for use in battle. However, in terms of actual player experience, the dungeon RPG is in service of the high school sim: whether you like it or not, you will spend far more time with the latter than the former. As such, I will not recommend this game if you simply want to run up stairs, (you can’t even run down stairs because when you run up stairs, they cease to exist) kill things, and pick things up. The way the system works, you can’t ignore high school in favor of the dungeon, nor can you ignore the dungeon in favor of high school. There are plenty of dungeon RPGs on the market, and none of them are secondary to an emo-haired Tokimeki Memorial. Of course, if you’re like me, an emo-haired Tokimeki Memorial is exactly the hecking videogame you want to play.
Yes, Tokimeki Memorial. I mentioned briefly that the player’s summoned Personas are strengthened by his level of social interaction. All of your important acquaintances correspond to a Tarot card, and the Tarot cards all correspond to Personas. If you hang out with a classmate (or date, in the girls’ cases), Personas of that type will become far stronger than they would have through simple leveling. Needless to say, your social life becomes extremely important. You can only hang out with certain people at certain times, and since everybody wants to hang out with Cross Docking, you’ve got to let people down easy sometimes too. Other people won’t hang out with you if you’re not smart enough or cool enough or ballsy enough, so you’ve got to steadily work on improving yourself when you’re not hanging out with somebody. Not to mention keeping your Sundays free for home shopping and MMORPGs: your plate is overflowing with meaty, delicious gameplay chunks, and you have to juggle them all into your mouth.
Your social life becomes a goal and a motivation unto itself: if you play your cards right you can be best friends with everybody in the world and serial-date every chick in school. The dungeon RPG is quite a complete and well-made game in and of itself– this is Megami Tensei, after all– but it always feels like a hell of a lot more is going on outside of it. It helps, of course, that the school-sim formula is a lot fresher than the dungeon RPG formula.
The game feels lopsided at first, especially the long, linear exposition section at the beginning, but the flow soon establishes itself, and both the game and the player quickly settle into a groove. Once you’re in that groove, the game’s really got you: I haven’t been hooked on any game lately, short of Picross on the subway, the way I’ve been hooked on this game. God help me, I’m playing a game that advertises itself as 70+ hours long and I am loving it: not only am I loving it, I want Atlus to translate the currently Japan-only expansion pack. I want more of this. I only play arcade games anymore, man. This is a feat.
★★★☆
“LIKE GOING TO HIGH SCHOOL IN THE SENSE THAT DAYTONA USA IS LIKE DRIVING A CAR.”
I spent my high school life in a basement obsessively playing Japanese RPGs. Realizing that my education was soon coming to an end, and suddenly nostalgic for miserable old times, I spent the last week of my last summer vacation from college obsessively playing a high school simulator which happens to contain a Japanese RPG as a minigame.
Playing Persona 3 is like going to high school in the sense that playing Daytona USA is like driving a car: the reality of the situation has been eradicated, and in its place stands a wonderful dream reality, familiar yet wholly alien, in which everything feels just right. Such is the charmed life of Cross Docking (this is what I named him: it is who he is), leading man of Gekkoukan High’s Class 2-F. The hardest thing in his life is how he can warp from his classroom to Naganaki Shrine, but, when he is done making his daily brain-enhancing offering to the gods, he has to take the train back.
Everything the protagonist gets to do in this game is either extremely special or painlessly simple: sometimes both. The game’s fast and breezy flow skips the mundane and puts you through all the parts of high school that make you look cool. Even the teen angst is glamorous: in this game, you summon your Personas– spirit beings that act like summoned monsters in a typical RPG or, more accurately, like Stands in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure— to attack by shooting yourself in the head. This is, after all, a Japanese RPG. But let’s get back to high school!
Cross Docking is, by default, the most extraordinary and superior human being in existence: this is regularly confirmed in dialogue by everybody around you. Join a sports team: you’ll take it over at the second practice. Girls fall all over you: one girl thinks it’s a medical condition, and even the robot girl was apparently programmed with the hots for you. You get the idea. The school day is played in fast-forward, slowing down only for highlights like answering a question for your buddy. After school, you have free reign to run around town doing whatever you like, ranging from no-committment extracurricular activities to eating food to raise your stats. How videogamey! How charming! You’ve got to manage your free time, though, because you will be tested: midterms, finals, and of course, a monthly boss fight. And of course there’s a dungeon to explore!
That part comes in by night: you see, your high school was built on an ancient Indian burial ground– it’s okay that I revealed this plot detail because it is false– and it happens to transform into a randomly-generated dungeon of obscene height and questionable foundations. Up in Tartarus, you run up stairs and kill things and pick things up until you get tired and have to go to sleep. Exploring Tartarus is ostensibly the game’s long-term goal, and the game explains outright that even your social interactions are in service of strengthening your summoned Personas for use in battle. However, in terms of actual player experience, the dungeon RPG is in service of the high school sim: whether you like it or not, you will spend far more time with the latter than the former. As such, I will not recommend this game if you simply want to run up stairs, (you can’t even run down stairs because when you run up stairs, they cease to exist) kill things, and pick things up. The way the system works, you can’t ignore high school in favor of the dungeon, nor can you ignore the dungeon in favor of high school. There are plenty of dungeon RPGs on the market, and none of them are secondary to an emo-haired Tokimeki Memorial. Of course, if you’re like me, an emo-haired Tokimeki Memorial is exactly the hecking videogame you want to play.
Yes, Tokimeki Memorial. I mentioned briefly that the player’s summoned Personas are strengthened by his level of social interaction. All of your important acquaintances correspond to a Tarot card, and the Tarot cards all correspond to Personas. If you hang out with a classmate (or date, in the girls’ cases), Personas of that type will become far stronger than they would have through simple leveling. Needless to say, your social life becomes extremely important. You can only hang out with certain people at certain times, and since everybody wants to hang out with Cross Docking, you’ve got to let people down easy sometimes too. Other people won’t hang out with you if you’re not smart enough or cool enough or ballsy enough, so you’ve got to steadily work on improving yourself when you’re not hanging out with somebody. Not to mention keeping your Sundays free for home shopping and MMORPGs: your plate is overflowing with meaty, delicious gameplay chunks, and you have to juggle them all into your mouth.
Your social life becomes a goal and a motivation unto itself: if you play your cards right you can be best friends with everybody in the world and serial-date every chick in school. The dungeon RPG is quite a complete and well-made game in and of itself– this is Megami Tensei, after all– but it always feels like a hell of a lot more is going on outside of it. It helps, of course, that the school-sim formula is a lot fresher than the dungeon RPG formula.
The game feels lopsided at first, especially the long, linear exposition section at the beginning, but the flow soon establishes itself, and both the game and the player quickly settle into a groove. Once you’re in that groove, the game’s really got you: I haven’t been hooked on any game lately, short of Picross on the subway, the way I’ve been hooked on this game. God help me, I’m playing a game that advertises itself as 70+ hours long and I am loving it: not only am I loving it, I want Atlus to translate the currently Japan-only expansion pack. I want more of this. I only play arcade games anymore, man. This is a feat.
2003
text by David Cabrera
★★★☆
“INACCESSIBLE.”
This story is a little far-fetched and you’re probably not going to believe me, but here it goes: a few months ago, when I was in line to play Arcana Heart at Chinatown Fair, a girl approached me. “Bullstuff!”, you tell me, and then you give me a variety of reasons:
“This isn’t a girl game!”, you tell me. Arcana Heart represents a fascinating genre paradox: it’s an all-girl arcade fighting game targeted very specifically to the only people left playing arcade fighting games. The traditional genres have had to recapture this nearly exclusively male core audience by going after what they all left videogames for: moe crap. Moe is a Japanese term which approximately equates to “pink, covered in hearts”, “girls who act like children”, and “obsessively detailed fetishes”. Konami recently modernized Gradius by turning it into Otomedius: the Vic Viper turned from a claw-shaped spaceship into a doe-eyed girl with big tits.
Arcana Heart is a moe fighting game: that means that its crisp, high-resolution 2D sprites are all representative of some pink, heart-covered, childlike, obsessively-detailed fetish. I play Aino Heart (Heart of Love in English; eclipsing the entire Final Fantasy series for worst videogame name ever), whose powerful fetishes include a single hair which pops out from her head (the term is ahoge) in the shape of a heart, and a very specific ratio of exposed thigh between her stockings and skirt (the term is zettai ryouiki). She is the plain one. Other characters include ninja fox-girls in gym uniforms, the ubiquitous maid, and the grappler, a small girl half-suspended inside of a giant Dragon Quest slime.
What sane girl would even hecking want to be seen near this thing? is what you’re asking me, is what I, in my geek paranoia, was asking myself. I’d tell you to chill, man. Did you think she was even looking at the thing, dude? Did you think she cared that much? Come on. She just wants to ask a simple question: “Do you go to Hunter?” I tell her I do. So she just recognizes me from school. I don’t recognize her from school. I want to lie and tell her I do, but I don’t. I take it as a compliment.
She’s seen me around, she tells me, but the thing is, I’m inaccessible. It’s the look on my face, she says, and she pauses and emits a low, protracted “eeeueeeeuueeeeh”: the sound of ennui. She’s right. That’s exactly what the look on my face sounds like. I had no idea anybody was watching.
I try to explain myself: I just don’t smile easily–I’m lousy at taking pictures– but I’m actually pretty agreeable, and I totally warm up once I get to know people, but I’m seeing an airplane spiraling earthward in her facial expression. By the time I’ve told her to feel free to come over and say hi next time she sees me around, she’s got that “eeeueeeeuueeeeh” look going, and after a silence, she walks away. I haven’t seen her since. While I’m wondering to myself whether I’m really that bad, one of the guys I’m learning Arcana with turns to me with eyebrows raised and asks me if I knew the girl. “Same school,” I tell him. “Not too bad,” he appraises enthusiastically. Like we’re involved, or some stuff. Nevertheless, I’m glad somebody came out of that thinking I was cool.
Bear with me, here: this anecdote has something to do with a videogame. What my analogy is hamfistedly reaching for is that both I and this game are, to a point, inaccessible. This is why we get along so well.
Arcana is more inaccessible than I was to that poor girl: I’m a fairly old hand in the fighting game genre, but at first glance, this game was still completely incomprehensible to me. I didn’t understand how the more competent players were moving around, defending and attacking the way they did. I couldn’t so much fight as flop about like a fish, and was killed, torn apart and consumed as such. The game was so inaccessible, it turned out, that it and I made a fine match and got along very well together. The game opened up, and what was at first nonsensical now simply appeared liberated.
Freedom is a very sticky point in a fighting game, because fighting games are, by design, about the business of having or lacking strategic options. A nuts-and-bolts technical explanation is beyond the scope of this review, but ultimately fighting game players win by maximizing their own options while minimizing their opponents’. Arcana Heart uses two fresh new systems in particular– the Homing Cancel movement system and the mix-and-match Arcana special move system– to dramatically widen a player’s range of options. The Arcana is selected right after a character is chosen and acts as a support, giving the player additional special moves which often dramatically alter tactics from one Arcana to the next. Homing Cancels offer offensive options– particularly acting as the cornerstone of the game’s complex combo system– and defensive options that ensure that even in the midst of the worst beatdown, a player is never completely trapped.
The previous paragraph, jargony as it is, illustrates exactly what I mean when I call Arcana Heart inaccessible: beautiful high-resolution 2D aside, what makes this game special is exactly what makes it difficult to explain. What makes this game special is a string of little technicalities that form a backbone: plain and simple good game design. For the previously indoctrinated and well-versed fighting game player, even for the new player who puts some time into learning, fulfillment awaits. But this is a kind of player: this game has little to offer the player who cannot take enjoyment from simply learning the game, from the process of sorting the unintelligible into something that works. Most people aren’t. I can’t fully explain the joy I that personally take away from the genre: It’s a natural affinity, and if it’s not your thing, it’s not. Inaccessible videogames for inaccessible people, I say. Like attracts like.
★★★☆
“INACCESSIBLE.”
This story is a little far-fetched and you’re probably not going to believe me, but here it goes: a few months ago, when I was in line to play Arcana Heart at Chinatown Fair, a girl approached me. “Bullstuff!”, you tell me, and then you give me a variety of reasons:
“This isn’t a girl game!”, you tell me. Arcana Heart represents a fascinating genre paradox: it’s an all-girl arcade fighting game targeted very specifically to the only people left playing arcade fighting games. The traditional genres have had to recapture this nearly exclusively male core audience by going after what they all left videogames for: moe crap. Moe is a Japanese term which approximately equates to “pink, covered in hearts”, “girls who act like children”, and “obsessively detailed fetishes”. Konami recently modernized Gradius by turning it into Otomedius: the Vic Viper turned from a claw-shaped spaceship into a doe-eyed girl with big tits.
Arcana Heart is a moe fighting game: that means that its crisp, high-resolution 2D sprites are all representative of some pink, heart-covered, childlike, obsessively-detailed fetish. I play Aino Heart (Heart of Love in English; eclipsing the entire Final Fantasy series for worst videogame name ever), whose powerful fetishes include a single hair which pops out from her head (the term is ahoge) in the shape of a heart, and a very specific ratio of exposed thigh between her stockings and skirt (the term is zettai ryouiki). She is the plain one. Other characters include ninja fox-girls in gym uniforms, the ubiquitous maid, and the grappler, a small girl half-suspended inside of a giant Dragon Quest slime.
What sane girl would even hecking want to be seen near this thing? is what you’re asking me, is what I, in my geek paranoia, was asking myself. I’d tell you to chill, man. Did you think she was even looking at the thing, dude? Did you think she cared that much? Come on. She just wants to ask a simple question: “Do you go to Hunter?” I tell her I do. So she just recognizes me from school. I don’t recognize her from school. I want to lie and tell her I do, but I don’t. I take it as a compliment.
She’s seen me around, she tells me, but the thing is, I’m inaccessible. It’s the look on my face, she says, and she pauses and emits a low, protracted “eeeueeeeuueeeeh”: the sound of ennui. She’s right. That’s exactly what the look on my face sounds like. I had no idea anybody was watching.
I try to explain myself: I just don’t smile easily–I’m lousy at taking pictures– but I’m actually pretty agreeable, and I totally warm up once I get to know people, but I’m seeing an airplane spiraling earthward in her facial expression. By the time I’ve told her to feel free to come over and say hi next time she sees me around, she’s got that “eeeueeeeuueeeeh” look going, and after a silence, she walks away. I haven’t seen her since. While I’m wondering to myself whether I’m really that bad, one of the guys I’m learning Arcana with turns to me with eyebrows raised and asks me if I knew the girl. “Same school,” I tell him. “Not too bad,” he appraises enthusiastically. Like we’re involved, or some stuff. Nevertheless, I’m glad somebody came out of that thinking I was cool.
Bear with me, here: this anecdote has something to do with a videogame. What my analogy is hamfistedly reaching for is that both I and this game are, to a point, inaccessible. This is why we get along so well.
Arcana is more inaccessible than I was to that poor girl: I’m a fairly old hand in the fighting game genre, but at first glance, this game was still completely incomprehensible to me. I didn’t understand how the more competent players were moving around, defending and attacking the way they did. I couldn’t so much fight as flop about like a fish, and was killed, torn apart and consumed as such. The game was so inaccessible, it turned out, that it and I made a fine match and got along very well together. The game opened up, and what was at first nonsensical now simply appeared liberated.
Freedom is a very sticky point in a fighting game, because fighting games are, by design, about the business of having or lacking strategic options. A nuts-and-bolts technical explanation is beyond the scope of this review, but ultimately fighting game players win by maximizing their own options while minimizing their opponents’. Arcana Heart uses two fresh new systems in particular– the Homing Cancel movement system and the mix-and-match Arcana special move system– to dramatically widen a player’s range of options. The Arcana is selected right after a character is chosen and acts as a support, giving the player additional special moves which often dramatically alter tactics from one Arcana to the next. Homing Cancels offer offensive options– particularly acting as the cornerstone of the game’s complex combo system– and defensive options that ensure that even in the midst of the worst beatdown, a player is never completely trapped.
The previous paragraph, jargony as it is, illustrates exactly what I mean when I call Arcana Heart inaccessible: beautiful high-resolution 2D aside, what makes this game special is exactly what makes it difficult to explain. What makes this game special is a string of little technicalities that form a backbone: plain and simple good game design. For the previously indoctrinated and well-versed fighting game player, even for the new player who puts some time into learning, fulfillment awaits. But this is a kind of player: this game has little to offer the player who cannot take enjoyment from simply learning the game, from the process of sorting the unintelligible into something that works. Most people aren’t. I can’t fully explain the joy I that personally take away from the genre: It’s a natural affinity, and if it’s not your thing, it’s not. Inaccessible videogames for inaccessible people, I say. Like attracts like.
1995
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“HANDS-DOWN THE BEST 'JAPANESE RPG' OF ALL-TIME.”
In 1986, Enix’s Yuji Horii made Dragon Quest; in 1987, Squaresoft’s Hironobu Sakaguchi made Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi claimed to not have been inspired by Dragon Quest. The reason his game had turned out very similarly to Dragon Quest was because both Sakaguchi and Horii were mainly influenced by at-the-time unheard-of (in Japan) obsessions with the Ultima series of PC role-playing games and the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop, basement-bottom imagination-requiring adventures. Dragon Quest was to Ultima what Pac-Man was to Missile Command — a slimming reinterpretation that somehow managed to be both more mysterious and less vague. Final Fantasy was to Ultima as Super Mario Bros. was to Centipede — it’s more fun, more straightforward.
The two series grew up side-by-side, Final Fantasy continuing to dazzle and entertain (the sequel included a half-dozen vehicles for the player to ride, including big ostrich-like birds called Chocobos, a canoe, a boat, an ice-boat, and an airship), and Dragon Quest striving to perfect its original aims. At the outset of the 16-bit-era, Final Fantasy games had evolved to tell stories that involved hovercrafts, giant robots, and a trip to the moon; Dragon Quest, meanwhile, was all about telling simple little stories with simple, palm-sized gimmicks. The Super Famicom saw the two producers (and their talented teams) at the top of their games: Dragon Quest V, a casual, lighthearted yet affecting roman-fleuve, and Final Fantasy VI, a thrilling, operatic story spanning two eras of history and starring fourteen main characters. When it was announced that, for whatever miraculous reason, the two teams would work together on a game called Chrono Trigger, everyone who touched the issue of Weekly Famitsu carrying the exclusive preview literally and figuratively exploded.
This was in 1995, when just about anyone’s big brother or sister was reading Interview with a Vampire and writing in their diary about how they thought it would be so cool to be a vampire, too. Those of us who cared about videogames couldn’t have witnessed a more amazing alignment of the stars: the makers of the two hottest Japanese game series were teaming up (back then, that they would someday unite to form one super-corporation was kind of unthinkable) to produce the kind of game they were each individually good at, and it would be about time travel.
The Wikipedia article on Chrono Trigger can fill you in with all the details on the production of Chrono Trigger. Yuji Horii wrote the majority of the scenario before the production of the game began. The theme was to be “time travel”, which was simultaneously a simple, childish game concept, like something a six-year-old Catholic boy would include at the end of his nightly prayers (“Please God, let them make a videogame about time-travel”) and something infinitely more ambitious than anyone had previously ever attempted in RPG stories. Horii has admitted openly to being inspired by the story of an old American science-fiction TV series called “Time Tunnel”, though there’s an almost-certain hint of “Doctor Who” in the way the story flows from casual episodes to world-threatening chaos and back again. The tale begins when a young boy runs into a young girl (literally) at a fair; there’s a spark of friendship between them, and just when they’re getting to know one another, the boy’s machine-loving tomboy friend uses the girl in a demonstration of her teleporting device, which malfunctions and sends the girl into a mysterious vortex. The boy follows her unthinkingly, and finds her four hundred years in the past, where she’s been mistaken for the missing queen of the very kingdom that was celebrating its one-thousandth year in the boy and girl’s home time period. The boy ends up rescuing the missing queen, and subsequently the girl, though once he gets her back to the future, he’s arrested for having absconded with her.
There’s a virtuoso sequence here, involving a court trial and imprisonment of the main character. The game has ingeniously recorded the actions of the player at the fair, where you had an opportunity to steal and eat a man’s lunch or even make a kid cry. If you were nice, you can find a girl’s missing cat and score positive points with the jury. How well you do doesn’t matter in the end, though — you’re gonna get jailed. In a breathtaking use of fast zooms and side-angle shots, with an amazing swell of music, Chrono Trigger impresses the player with a feeling of dread: the main character is being led across a bridge, under an ominous moon, hands and legs shackled, by an evil man. Here, all of the tools of the “Japanese RPG” developer’s idea kit are being used simultaneously, transforming the game at once to the 1990s videogame equivalent of “Gone with the Wind”. The crucial pieces are all in place, both physically and emotionally — and though the player might have just endured the more subdued colors of an older world, and a boss battle in a possessed church, the terror of being wrongly accused and imprisoned, awaiting the death penalty, in one’s own time period really hammers something home. Of course, your friends are on hand to break you out of prison, and in the thrilling escape from the prison, your brainy friend notices a time gate, and uses a handy device she created to pop open the gate and escape into an unknown time period — which happens to be the barren, destroyed world of the year 2300 AD, where the last surviving humans huddle, starving, in dilapidated domed cities, kept alive only by a machine that rejuvenates their bodies while leaving their stomachs empty. A little bit of spelunking into the mutant-infested outskirts of a dead future city brings the party to a computer that, when activated, shows them the last record of the prosperous human civilization of 1999 AD: the day when a giant demonic alien parasite named Lavos burst out of the crust of the earth and rained napalm over all civilization. Having witnessed this catastrophe, the three friends swear to unlock the secrets of time travel and prevent the destruction of the world.
The one-two-three emotional punch of Chrono Trigger opening stages lays everything on the line. We have pleasant chumming and character-development at the Millennial Fair, we have quirky medieval time-traveling hijinks in 600 AD, we have the trial and conviction in the present, and then the revelation of the premature end of the world. The rest of the story sees the characters spanning seven crucial eras of world history, jumping all the way back to the year 65,000,000 BC to find a stone to repair the legendary sword Masamune, which must be wielded by a hero (now turned into a humanoid frog) to defeat an evil wizard named Magus, who they suspect is attempting to summon Lavos from the ether in the year 600. It turns out to all just be a wild goose chase — Magus isn’t really a bad guy; he’s summoning Lavos because he wants to kill the monster, to set right some tragedy that occurred in the past, and we realize we’ve just spent the past dozen hours of gameplay messing up his whole righteous plan.
The tale splits in wild directions from this point. It’s like a hit television series striding into its second season — new characters are introduced, old characters change, major overarching plot details rise slowly from the ashes. The wildest, most imaginative fragments of the game’s tale take place in the year 12,000 BC, at the height of an enlightened civilization, where a mysterious prophet intones warnings of armageddon to a vain queen set on building an enormous palace beneath the ocean — which will draw all of its electrical power from the sleeping parasite nested in the earth’s core. These script for these sequences was written by Masato Kato, the man who had been responsible for the invention of in-game cinematics in Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden.
The developmental theme of Chrono Trigger, then, was “talent”. Something tells me it was all Yuji Horii’s idea — get talented people together under a unified purpose, let everyone do what they excel at, and then bundle the results up into a highly polished package. Masato Kato, for example, would go on to pen stories for Xenogears and Chrono Trigger‘s prodigal (as in, one day it will return to us, and we will see about actually loving it) sequel Chrono Cross, and he’d mostly pump out noisy nonsense, though in moderation — in Chrono Trigger — his talents sparkle.
Whether you like him or not, even Akira Toriyama shines in Chrono Trigger, and mostly by doing exactly what’s expected of him. The main character, Crono, is a reworking of his spiky-haired Son Goku stereotype, now given a samurai sword and a headband; the girl, Marle, is a cleaning-up of Bulma from Dragon Ball, now dressed in white; Lucca, with her big glasses and boyish haircut, is clearly a teenaged rebirthing of Arare-chan, the heroine of the manga that put Toriyama on the map, Doctor Slump. Frog is the typical Toriyama beastman oddity, vaguely familiar yet unlike anything he’s drawn before or since, and Frog’s nemesis Magus is a vampire-like, scythe-wielding, caped man with a widow’s peak and a chalky complexion. He might remind you of what Vegeta would look like if Dragon Ball had been influenced by Lord of the Rings instead of Journey to the West. Robo the robot (from the future) exhibits Toriyama’s thoughtful talent for making technology look like high fashion, and Ayla the cavewoman is, well, the token breasty blonde. It’s a hell of a mish-mashed collection of characters and caricatures, though Toriyama pulls it all of with exceptional grace.
Chrono Trigger‘s art design is quite remarkable from a modern perspective, in this day and age where every Tales of… game that Namco cranks out opens with a fully animated cut-scene under music by a hot Japanese pop act: the Tales of… openings are always at least halfway lifeless, with the “camera” panning in front of stationary characters who change pose just as the pop song reaches a drum fill and the pan ends. Meanwhile, many years ago, Chrono Trigger was able to drop jaws and inspire daydreams with only poster-sized stationary images that are actually not featured anywhere in the game. Akira Toriyama’s massive talent — again, whether you like him or not — is scarcely more visible than in the promotional paintings he did of Chrono Trigger‘s characters in various dangerous situations. The sweep of the clouds, the etched lines of the landscapes, the throwaway details — everything good about Toriyama’s decades-long Dragon Ball series is captured in his Chrono Trigger scenes: a battle against Magus outside his castle in 600 AD, a scene with Lucca repairing Robo’s innards at her home in 1000 AD, the time machine Epoch soaring through the skies of 1999 AD, a battle in a mysterious coliseum, an epic battle of Crono, Marle, and Frog against a giant snow beast (which amazingly graced the American release’s cover art, even in the anime-fearing 1990s, when game publishers were usually inclined to commission some airbrushed Dungeons and Dragons stuff), and a virtuoso scene of the characters asleep around a campfire while curious monsters peek in from the trees. These out-game scenes, leaked into pop-culture through Japanese magazines, did more to establish the tone and wonder of the game than any in-game cut-scene or animated theme-song intro has ever done.
Yes, Chrono Trigger might just be the best-produced Japanese videogame of all time, where the word “produced” is taken at face value. Just two years after Chrono Trigger, we’d see Final Fantasy VII, and more than immediately (that is, well before the game was even released), the old guard was announced prematurely dead, and the world as we knew it grew obsessed with simplistic, manufactured angst, canned armageddon, fierce mathematics masquerading as “character customization”, and increasingly less blocky computer-animated full-motion video. Around this point, Hironobu Sakaguchi, no doubt shell-shocked from his wonderful experience helming Chrono Trigger, retreated from the world of videogames, and saw about directing a major motion picture.
Ten years have passed, and now Sakaguchi is back. And, perhaps ironically, his current vision has a lot in common with the conception of Chrono Trigger. Remembering that day and age when he and a team of talented, respected men assembled and instantly sold 2.3 million copies of a brand-new videogame franchise based on their names alone, Sakaguchi has sounded the call, and begun working on new legends — Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, both with characters by white-hot artists (Blue Dragon sees Toriyama reprising and dialing down his Chrono Trigger vibe; Lost Odyssey sees masterpiece-maker Takehiko Inoue’s original videogame debut), and one of them with a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, modern Japan’s equivalent of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
When one speaks of Chrono Trigger, the first names to crop up usually belong to artist Akira Toriyama, scenario-writer Yuji Horii, and music composer Yasunori Mitsuda. Though it was Sakaguchi’s gumption that made a videogame out of this glob of brain-ambrosia. High off of the — dare we say it — conscientious artistic success of Final Fantasy VI, Sakaguchi must have seen Chrono Trigger as the perfect opportunity to sharpen his pen. Final Fantasy VI‘s major stylistic achievement had occurred in virtuoso segments like the “Opera House”, where things are happening in the story — the beautiful female general Celes is impersonating an opera diva who a notorious gambler is slated to kidnap during the climax of her big performance, because the adventurers want to commandeer the gambler’s flying ship; meanwhile, a rogue octopus who hates our heroes for selfish reasons decides to sabotage Celes’ opera performance. As the unenthusiastic Celes, the player has to learn the lines of the opera, so as to sing convincingly; as the daring Locke, the player has to make his way around backstage, flipping the right switches to gain access to the rafters and take down the octopus so that the performance can go on. There’s a neat little twist ending to the whole fiasco. In the end, nearly every participating player was wowed. The “Opera House” scene, however, had just been an experiment, and one that required literally gallons of precious creative juices, so the rest of Final Fantasy VI (though not without its gems) was a tiny bit thin in comparison. In Chrono Trigger, few scenes stand out like the “Opera House” did in Final Fantasy VI, though we dare say that there’s not a single storyline event that isn’t more thrilling than anything event that’s occurred in any other RPG since. The raid on Magus’s castle in 600 AD is particularly amazing — though you barely do any more than walk down straight corridors, the planning is miraculous: mini-bosses pop out at just the right moments, and speak just enough dialogue before the fights to endear themselves as rounded characters. There’s a side-scrolling trek across parapets, an ominous descent down a dark, long staircase, during which the satanic chanting music builds in volume and intensity. Enter the door at the bottom of the stairs, and the chanting stops at once: silence. It’s not just an RPG dungeon — you’re not plunging into a crypt to dig up some magic mirror or something, you’re raiding a castle with the purpose of killing a guy, and the flawless presentation keeps you believing all the way up to the thrilling showdown and the cliffhanging revelation.
Future RPGs would tackle Chrono Trigger from the wrong angle — the game was, for better or for worse, the death knell of fantastic RPG dungeons. It birthed a tendency to keep everything straightforward and clean, with bosses popping up when needed. Xenosaga and Final Fantasy X pull the player forward through lifeless corridors laced with random battles and occasional boss battles prefaced by cute little dialogues. These games, however, are bloodless corpses when stood up beside Chrono Trigger, a miracle born of its creators’ attention and love, and of its tremendously tight, personality-fueled writing. (Note: if you’ve only played the English version, I assure you that the writing in the Japanese version is magnitudes smarter.)
Reviewers of the age praised Chrono Trigger for a multitude of reasons, including its fantastic plot, its multiple endings, and its great graphics. Electronic Gaming Monthly was sure, also, to praise the fact that its cartridge was 32 megabytes in size. Many critics semi-wrongly pumped their fists at the game’s method of presenting battles. Previous RPGs had faded to black occasionally and changed to a “battle screen” for each battle; Chrono Trigger, however, keeps all three characters visible on the screen at all times, and at specific points in dungeons (perhaps more accurately called “traveling sequences”), when enemies jump in from the sidelines, menus simply slide onto the screen and the characters draw their weapons; the battles then progress just as any pseudo-realtime battle in a Final Fantasy, now with a semi-pointless distance variable thrown into the mix. This wasn’t the “death” of the “random battle”, as many reviewers seemed to believe — it was just a conscientious workaround, a placeholder for something awesome — which would continue to elude RPG producers for the better half of a decade. For one thing, almost every battle in the game is unavoidable. Random battles, then, are most insulting because you can’t see the enemies before the battle begins — which I guess makes sense. Though hey, the typical RPG uses higher-quality character models during battle scenes than they use during field screens, meaning that the battles are deemed more important than the plot events by a majority of the games’ staffs. Really, has an RPG (not counting Dragon Quest, where your party members are usually invisible) ever had in-battle character models of lower graphical quality than the field models? I’m going to say no — maybe that’s the chief symptom of the RPG malaise: the developers find battling more important than adventuring, and it’s a weeping pity that, nine times out of ten, the battle systems in RPGs are just plain not exciting.
I might possibly review this game again someday, several times. It might even be useful to review it every time a new big RPG comes out. Maybe I’ll play that big new RPG, be thoroughly disappointed by it, and then replay Chrono Trigger, and review Chrono Trigger again, based on what the new game did wrong. One might say that this review is a counterpoint to my Blue Dragon review, where I score the game pretty highly; after playing Blue Dragon, I played Chrono Trigger again, and Blue Dragon is actually quite bland in comparison — though not as bland as, say, Final Fantasy X. All Blue Dragon lacks, when compared to Chrono Trigger, is smoother battle transitions and a rock-solid, palm-sized story gimmick. (Like, say, time travel–no, that’s been taken.) Compared to Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest Swords lacks dramatic weight in its action stages as well as the rock-solid, compelling story gimmick and exceptional writing.
Most pointedly, replaying Chrono Trigger again for the purposes of this review made me remember Hironobu Sakaguchi’s recent declaration of love for Epic Games’ shooter Gears of War. In Gears of War‘s campaign mode, I couldn’t help remembering Chrono Trigger when, around every shattered city block, enemy gunfire rained from the sky and my men swore aloud, shouted orders, and scattered to find cover. What’s that, if not a RPG battle transition? Are we not “playing” a “role” in Gears of War, anyway? Sakaguchi is a man of love, life, and details, and Chrono Trigger is the best project he’s ever been involved with. (It’s the best project that anyone involved with it has ever been involved with, in fact.) Surely, the battle presentation was a revolution waiting to happen; what if they would have thought a little harder, though? What if they would have incorporated a Secret of Mana-style action-packed, button-jabbing battle system? I’m sure Sakaguchi didn’t do it because Secret of Mana felt too thin. What about a crispy, poppy, 16-bit Zelda-like battle system, with simple, pleasant guarding and item management? No, he’d wanted each battle to have a kind of dramatic weight — a Zelda flow would have made the game feel too loose in comparison to an actual Zelda title, and there wasn’t enough staff to bring everything up to speed. Over a decade later, Gears of War must have been a tremendous revelation: maybe it’s possible, now, to stage intriguing, cinema-worthy battles of spectacle during straightforward trudges through fascinating surroundings. That Gears of War recycles and reuses the same three play mechanics (take cover, fire guns, throw grenades into emergence holes) a million times without ever feeling old should be a wonder to anyone who’s ever slogged through a Tales of… game.
I always ask, these days — what if someone were to take the Gundam story that has fascinated generations of Japanese manboys and give it a full, loving RPG treatment, complete with towns and atmosphere, customization, animated cut-scenes and an enthralling, action-packed battle system? I know this won’t happen because game companies don’t want to set the bar higher than they’re willing to jump. Why haven’t any Neon Genesis Evangelion games — ever — allowed the player to control a giant robot? Why are they all alternate-universe high school love stories, or detective murder mysteries, or sequels to alternate-universe high school love stories, or pachinko-slot-machine simulators? In the late 1990s, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Final Fantasy VII gangbanged the Japanese RPG format from opposite, grisly angles, and the developers have been auto-erotic asphyxiating themselves with ropes made of money ever since.
It’s amazing, in this light, that Chrono Trigger ever got made. The amount of creativity and balls that went into its production is just about unthinkable in the present climate. The story is as lovingly presented and conceived as an entire four-season sci-fi television series, the characters are as endearing as anything ever put into a classic Japanese animated series, the ingenious multiple endings and “New Game +” mode keep the fan-service close to the game’s heart, and the music of Yasunori Mitsuda is studded with innumerable gems as evocative of Ryuichi Sakamoto as of Rick Astley (see here), all equal parts three-minute-pop-song, new-age experiment, and classic videogame BGM. Future games would try to disassemble Chrono Trigger‘s winning formula and sell it piece by piece, which makes a lot of sense when one considers that yes, videogames are a commodity. Though it really is kind of sad, when you go back and play Chrono Trigger again, and witness how obscenely together it is, and wonder why no one ever summoned the conscience required to tighten up its noble ambitions. Here’s to Dragon Quest X, then, and to whatever Sakaguchi’s planning for after Lost Odyssey, and to White Knight Story. The kid deep inside us, who grew up in the 1980s watching reruns of 1970s Japanese animations about plucky boys somehow outsmarting grave fates will live again — we look forward to how.
★★★★
“HANDS-DOWN THE BEST 'JAPANESE RPG' OF ALL-TIME.”
In 1986, Enix’s Yuji Horii made Dragon Quest; in 1987, Squaresoft’s Hironobu Sakaguchi made Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi claimed to not have been inspired by Dragon Quest. The reason his game had turned out very similarly to Dragon Quest was because both Sakaguchi and Horii were mainly influenced by at-the-time unheard-of (in Japan) obsessions with the Ultima series of PC role-playing games and the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop, basement-bottom imagination-requiring adventures. Dragon Quest was to Ultima what Pac-Man was to Missile Command — a slimming reinterpretation that somehow managed to be both more mysterious and less vague. Final Fantasy was to Ultima as Super Mario Bros. was to Centipede — it’s more fun, more straightforward.
The two series grew up side-by-side, Final Fantasy continuing to dazzle and entertain (the sequel included a half-dozen vehicles for the player to ride, including big ostrich-like birds called Chocobos, a canoe, a boat, an ice-boat, and an airship), and Dragon Quest striving to perfect its original aims. At the outset of the 16-bit-era, Final Fantasy games had evolved to tell stories that involved hovercrafts, giant robots, and a trip to the moon; Dragon Quest, meanwhile, was all about telling simple little stories with simple, palm-sized gimmicks. The Super Famicom saw the two producers (and their talented teams) at the top of their games: Dragon Quest V, a casual, lighthearted yet affecting roman-fleuve, and Final Fantasy VI, a thrilling, operatic story spanning two eras of history and starring fourteen main characters. When it was announced that, for whatever miraculous reason, the two teams would work together on a game called Chrono Trigger, everyone who touched the issue of Weekly Famitsu carrying the exclusive preview literally and figuratively exploded.
This was in 1995, when just about anyone’s big brother or sister was reading Interview with a Vampire and writing in their diary about how they thought it would be so cool to be a vampire, too. Those of us who cared about videogames couldn’t have witnessed a more amazing alignment of the stars: the makers of the two hottest Japanese game series were teaming up (back then, that they would someday unite to form one super-corporation was kind of unthinkable) to produce the kind of game they were each individually good at, and it would be about time travel.
The Wikipedia article on Chrono Trigger can fill you in with all the details on the production of Chrono Trigger. Yuji Horii wrote the majority of the scenario before the production of the game began. The theme was to be “time travel”, which was simultaneously a simple, childish game concept, like something a six-year-old Catholic boy would include at the end of his nightly prayers (“Please God, let them make a videogame about time-travel”) and something infinitely more ambitious than anyone had previously ever attempted in RPG stories. Horii has admitted openly to being inspired by the story of an old American science-fiction TV series called “Time Tunnel”, though there’s an almost-certain hint of “Doctor Who” in the way the story flows from casual episodes to world-threatening chaos and back again. The tale begins when a young boy runs into a young girl (literally) at a fair; there’s a spark of friendship between them, and just when they’re getting to know one another, the boy’s machine-loving tomboy friend uses the girl in a demonstration of her teleporting device, which malfunctions and sends the girl into a mysterious vortex. The boy follows her unthinkingly, and finds her four hundred years in the past, where she’s been mistaken for the missing queen of the very kingdom that was celebrating its one-thousandth year in the boy and girl’s home time period. The boy ends up rescuing the missing queen, and subsequently the girl, though once he gets her back to the future, he’s arrested for having absconded with her.
There’s a virtuoso sequence here, involving a court trial and imprisonment of the main character. The game has ingeniously recorded the actions of the player at the fair, where you had an opportunity to steal and eat a man’s lunch or even make a kid cry. If you were nice, you can find a girl’s missing cat and score positive points with the jury. How well you do doesn’t matter in the end, though — you’re gonna get jailed. In a breathtaking use of fast zooms and side-angle shots, with an amazing swell of music, Chrono Trigger impresses the player with a feeling of dread: the main character is being led across a bridge, under an ominous moon, hands and legs shackled, by an evil man. Here, all of the tools of the “Japanese RPG” developer’s idea kit are being used simultaneously, transforming the game at once to the 1990s videogame equivalent of “Gone with the Wind”. The crucial pieces are all in place, both physically and emotionally — and though the player might have just endured the more subdued colors of an older world, and a boss battle in a possessed church, the terror of being wrongly accused and imprisoned, awaiting the death penalty, in one’s own time period really hammers something home. Of course, your friends are on hand to break you out of prison, and in the thrilling escape from the prison, your brainy friend notices a time gate, and uses a handy device she created to pop open the gate and escape into an unknown time period — which happens to be the barren, destroyed world of the year 2300 AD, where the last surviving humans huddle, starving, in dilapidated domed cities, kept alive only by a machine that rejuvenates their bodies while leaving their stomachs empty. A little bit of spelunking into the mutant-infested outskirts of a dead future city brings the party to a computer that, when activated, shows them the last record of the prosperous human civilization of 1999 AD: the day when a giant demonic alien parasite named Lavos burst out of the crust of the earth and rained napalm over all civilization. Having witnessed this catastrophe, the three friends swear to unlock the secrets of time travel and prevent the destruction of the world.
The one-two-three emotional punch of Chrono Trigger opening stages lays everything on the line. We have pleasant chumming and character-development at the Millennial Fair, we have quirky medieval time-traveling hijinks in 600 AD, we have the trial and conviction in the present, and then the revelation of the premature end of the world. The rest of the story sees the characters spanning seven crucial eras of world history, jumping all the way back to the year 65,000,000 BC to find a stone to repair the legendary sword Masamune, which must be wielded by a hero (now turned into a humanoid frog) to defeat an evil wizard named Magus, who they suspect is attempting to summon Lavos from the ether in the year 600. It turns out to all just be a wild goose chase — Magus isn’t really a bad guy; he’s summoning Lavos because he wants to kill the monster, to set right some tragedy that occurred in the past, and we realize we’ve just spent the past dozen hours of gameplay messing up his whole righteous plan.
The tale splits in wild directions from this point. It’s like a hit television series striding into its second season — new characters are introduced, old characters change, major overarching plot details rise slowly from the ashes. The wildest, most imaginative fragments of the game’s tale take place in the year 12,000 BC, at the height of an enlightened civilization, where a mysterious prophet intones warnings of armageddon to a vain queen set on building an enormous palace beneath the ocean — which will draw all of its electrical power from the sleeping parasite nested in the earth’s core. These script for these sequences was written by Masato Kato, the man who had been responsible for the invention of in-game cinematics in Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden.
The developmental theme of Chrono Trigger, then, was “talent”. Something tells me it was all Yuji Horii’s idea — get talented people together under a unified purpose, let everyone do what they excel at, and then bundle the results up into a highly polished package. Masato Kato, for example, would go on to pen stories for Xenogears and Chrono Trigger‘s prodigal (as in, one day it will return to us, and we will see about actually loving it) sequel Chrono Cross, and he’d mostly pump out noisy nonsense, though in moderation — in Chrono Trigger — his talents sparkle.
Whether you like him or not, even Akira Toriyama shines in Chrono Trigger, and mostly by doing exactly what’s expected of him. The main character, Crono, is a reworking of his spiky-haired Son Goku stereotype, now given a samurai sword and a headband; the girl, Marle, is a cleaning-up of Bulma from Dragon Ball, now dressed in white; Lucca, with her big glasses and boyish haircut, is clearly a teenaged rebirthing of Arare-chan, the heroine of the manga that put Toriyama on the map, Doctor Slump. Frog is the typical Toriyama beastman oddity, vaguely familiar yet unlike anything he’s drawn before or since, and Frog’s nemesis Magus is a vampire-like, scythe-wielding, caped man with a widow’s peak and a chalky complexion. He might remind you of what Vegeta would look like if Dragon Ball had been influenced by Lord of the Rings instead of Journey to the West. Robo the robot (from the future) exhibits Toriyama’s thoughtful talent for making technology look like high fashion, and Ayla the cavewoman is, well, the token breasty blonde. It’s a hell of a mish-mashed collection of characters and caricatures, though Toriyama pulls it all of with exceptional grace.
Chrono Trigger‘s art design is quite remarkable from a modern perspective, in this day and age where every Tales of… game that Namco cranks out opens with a fully animated cut-scene under music by a hot Japanese pop act: the Tales of… openings are always at least halfway lifeless, with the “camera” panning in front of stationary characters who change pose just as the pop song reaches a drum fill and the pan ends. Meanwhile, many years ago, Chrono Trigger was able to drop jaws and inspire daydreams with only poster-sized stationary images that are actually not featured anywhere in the game. Akira Toriyama’s massive talent — again, whether you like him or not — is scarcely more visible than in the promotional paintings he did of Chrono Trigger‘s characters in various dangerous situations. The sweep of the clouds, the etched lines of the landscapes, the throwaway details — everything good about Toriyama’s decades-long Dragon Ball series is captured in his Chrono Trigger scenes: a battle against Magus outside his castle in 600 AD, a scene with Lucca repairing Robo’s innards at her home in 1000 AD, the time machine Epoch soaring through the skies of 1999 AD, a battle in a mysterious coliseum, an epic battle of Crono, Marle, and Frog against a giant snow beast (which amazingly graced the American release’s cover art, even in the anime-fearing 1990s, when game publishers were usually inclined to commission some airbrushed Dungeons and Dragons stuff), and a virtuoso scene of the characters asleep around a campfire while curious monsters peek in from the trees. These out-game scenes, leaked into pop-culture through Japanese magazines, did more to establish the tone and wonder of the game than any in-game cut-scene or animated theme-song intro has ever done.
Yes, Chrono Trigger might just be the best-produced Japanese videogame of all time, where the word “produced” is taken at face value. Just two years after Chrono Trigger, we’d see Final Fantasy VII, and more than immediately (that is, well before the game was even released), the old guard was announced prematurely dead, and the world as we knew it grew obsessed with simplistic, manufactured angst, canned armageddon, fierce mathematics masquerading as “character customization”, and increasingly less blocky computer-animated full-motion video. Around this point, Hironobu Sakaguchi, no doubt shell-shocked from his wonderful experience helming Chrono Trigger, retreated from the world of videogames, and saw about directing a major motion picture.
Ten years have passed, and now Sakaguchi is back. And, perhaps ironically, his current vision has a lot in common with the conception of Chrono Trigger. Remembering that day and age when he and a team of talented, respected men assembled and instantly sold 2.3 million copies of a brand-new videogame franchise based on their names alone, Sakaguchi has sounded the call, and begun working on new legends — Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, both with characters by white-hot artists (Blue Dragon sees Toriyama reprising and dialing down his Chrono Trigger vibe; Lost Odyssey sees masterpiece-maker Takehiko Inoue’s original videogame debut), and one of them with a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, modern Japan’s equivalent of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
When one speaks of Chrono Trigger, the first names to crop up usually belong to artist Akira Toriyama, scenario-writer Yuji Horii, and music composer Yasunori Mitsuda. Though it was Sakaguchi’s gumption that made a videogame out of this glob of brain-ambrosia. High off of the — dare we say it — conscientious artistic success of Final Fantasy VI, Sakaguchi must have seen Chrono Trigger as the perfect opportunity to sharpen his pen. Final Fantasy VI‘s major stylistic achievement had occurred in virtuoso segments like the “Opera House”, where things are happening in the story — the beautiful female general Celes is impersonating an opera diva who a notorious gambler is slated to kidnap during the climax of her big performance, because the adventurers want to commandeer the gambler’s flying ship; meanwhile, a rogue octopus who hates our heroes for selfish reasons decides to sabotage Celes’ opera performance. As the unenthusiastic Celes, the player has to learn the lines of the opera, so as to sing convincingly; as the daring Locke, the player has to make his way around backstage, flipping the right switches to gain access to the rafters and take down the octopus so that the performance can go on. There’s a neat little twist ending to the whole fiasco. In the end, nearly every participating player was wowed. The “Opera House” scene, however, had just been an experiment, and one that required literally gallons of precious creative juices, so the rest of Final Fantasy VI (though not without its gems) was a tiny bit thin in comparison. In Chrono Trigger, few scenes stand out like the “Opera House” did in Final Fantasy VI, though we dare say that there’s not a single storyline event that isn’t more thrilling than anything event that’s occurred in any other RPG since. The raid on Magus’s castle in 600 AD is particularly amazing — though you barely do any more than walk down straight corridors, the planning is miraculous: mini-bosses pop out at just the right moments, and speak just enough dialogue before the fights to endear themselves as rounded characters. There’s a side-scrolling trek across parapets, an ominous descent down a dark, long staircase, during which the satanic chanting music builds in volume and intensity. Enter the door at the bottom of the stairs, and the chanting stops at once: silence. It’s not just an RPG dungeon — you’re not plunging into a crypt to dig up some magic mirror or something, you’re raiding a castle with the purpose of killing a guy, and the flawless presentation keeps you believing all the way up to the thrilling showdown and the cliffhanging revelation.
Future RPGs would tackle Chrono Trigger from the wrong angle — the game was, for better or for worse, the death knell of fantastic RPG dungeons. It birthed a tendency to keep everything straightforward and clean, with bosses popping up when needed. Xenosaga and Final Fantasy X pull the player forward through lifeless corridors laced with random battles and occasional boss battles prefaced by cute little dialogues. These games, however, are bloodless corpses when stood up beside Chrono Trigger, a miracle born of its creators’ attention and love, and of its tremendously tight, personality-fueled writing. (Note: if you’ve only played the English version, I assure you that the writing in the Japanese version is magnitudes smarter.)
Reviewers of the age praised Chrono Trigger for a multitude of reasons, including its fantastic plot, its multiple endings, and its great graphics. Electronic Gaming Monthly was sure, also, to praise the fact that its cartridge was 32 megabytes in size. Many critics semi-wrongly pumped their fists at the game’s method of presenting battles. Previous RPGs had faded to black occasionally and changed to a “battle screen” for each battle; Chrono Trigger, however, keeps all three characters visible on the screen at all times, and at specific points in dungeons (perhaps more accurately called “traveling sequences”), when enemies jump in from the sidelines, menus simply slide onto the screen and the characters draw their weapons; the battles then progress just as any pseudo-realtime battle in a Final Fantasy, now with a semi-pointless distance variable thrown into the mix. This wasn’t the “death” of the “random battle”, as many reviewers seemed to believe — it was just a conscientious workaround, a placeholder for something awesome — which would continue to elude RPG producers for the better half of a decade. For one thing, almost every battle in the game is unavoidable. Random battles, then, are most insulting because you can’t see the enemies before the battle begins — which I guess makes sense. Though hey, the typical RPG uses higher-quality character models during battle scenes than they use during field screens, meaning that the battles are deemed more important than the plot events by a majority of the games’ staffs. Really, has an RPG (not counting Dragon Quest, where your party members are usually invisible) ever had in-battle character models of lower graphical quality than the field models? I’m going to say no — maybe that’s the chief symptom of the RPG malaise: the developers find battling more important than adventuring, and it’s a weeping pity that, nine times out of ten, the battle systems in RPGs are just plain not exciting.
I might possibly review this game again someday, several times. It might even be useful to review it every time a new big RPG comes out. Maybe I’ll play that big new RPG, be thoroughly disappointed by it, and then replay Chrono Trigger, and review Chrono Trigger again, based on what the new game did wrong. One might say that this review is a counterpoint to my Blue Dragon review, where I score the game pretty highly; after playing Blue Dragon, I played Chrono Trigger again, and Blue Dragon is actually quite bland in comparison — though not as bland as, say, Final Fantasy X. All Blue Dragon lacks, when compared to Chrono Trigger, is smoother battle transitions and a rock-solid, palm-sized story gimmick. (Like, say, time travel–no, that’s been taken.) Compared to Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest Swords lacks dramatic weight in its action stages as well as the rock-solid, compelling story gimmick and exceptional writing.
Most pointedly, replaying Chrono Trigger again for the purposes of this review made me remember Hironobu Sakaguchi’s recent declaration of love for Epic Games’ shooter Gears of War. In Gears of War‘s campaign mode, I couldn’t help remembering Chrono Trigger when, around every shattered city block, enemy gunfire rained from the sky and my men swore aloud, shouted orders, and scattered to find cover. What’s that, if not a RPG battle transition? Are we not “playing” a “role” in Gears of War, anyway? Sakaguchi is a man of love, life, and details, and Chrono Trigger is the best project he’s ever been involved with. (It’s the best project that anyone involved with it has ever been involved with, in fact.) Surely, the battle presentation was a revolution waiting to happen; what if they would have thought a little harder, though? What if they would have incorporated a Secret of Mana-style action-packed, button-jabbing battle system? I’m sure Sakaguchi didn’t do it because Secret of Mana felt too thin. What about a crispy, poppy, 16-bit Zelda-like battle system, with simple, pleasant guarding and item management? No, he’d wanted each battle to have a kind of dramatic weight — a Zelda flow would have made the game feel too loose in comparison to an actual Zelda title, and there wasn’t enough staff to bring everything up to speed. Over a decade later, Gears of War must have been a tremendous revelation: maybe it’s possible, now, to stage intriguing, cinema-worthy battles of spectacle during straightforward trudges through fascinating surroundings. That Gears of War recycles and reuses the same three play mechanics (take cover, fire guns, throw grenades into emergence holes) a million times without ever feeling old should be a wonder to anyone who’s ever slogged through a Tales of… game.
I always ask, these days — what if someone were to take the Gundam story that has fascinated generations of Japanese manboys and give it a full, loving RPG treatment, complete with towns and atmosphere, customization, animated cut-scenes and an enthralling, action-packed battle system? I know this won’t happen because game companies don’t want to set the bar higher than they’re willing to jump. Why haven’t any Neon Genesis Evangelion games — ever — allowed the player to control a giant robot? Why are they all alternate-universe high school love stories, or detective murder mysteries, or sequels to alternate-universe high school love stories, or pachinko-slot-machine simulators? In the late 1990s, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Final Fantasy VII gangbanged the Japanese RPG format from opposite, grisly angles, and the developers have been auto-erotic asphyxiating themselves with ropes made of money ever since.
It’s amazing, in this light, that Chrono Trigger ever got made. The amount of creativity and balls that went into its production is just about unthinkable in the present climate. The story is as lovingly presented and conceived as an entire four-season sci-fi television series, the characters are as endearing as anything ever put into a classic Japanese animated series, the ingenious multiple endings and “New Game +” mode keep the fan-service close to the game’s heart, and the music of Yasunori Mitsuda is studded with innumerable gems as evocative of Ryuichi Sakamoto as of Rick Astley (see here), all equal parts three-minute-pop-song, new-age experiment, and classic videogame BGM. Future games would try to disassemble Chrono Trigger‘s winning formula and sell it piece by piece, which makes a lot of sense when one considers that yes, videogames are a commodity. Though it really is kind of sad, when you go back and play Chrono Trigger again, and witness how obscenely together it is, and wonder why no one ever summoned the conscience required to tighten up its noble ambitions. Here’s to Dragon Quest X, then, and to whatever Sakaguchi’s planning for after Lost Odyssey, and to White Knight Story. The kid deep inside us, who grew up in the 1980s watching reruns of 1970s Japanese animations about plucky boys somehow outsmarting grave fates will live again — we look forward to how.
2006
text by tim rogers
★★★☆
“A BOTTOMLESS BOWL OF CAP'N CRUNCH ON A FIFTY-HOUR SATURDAY MORNING.”
Quite accidentally — that’s how obsessive-compulsize behavior gets started. Case in point: I was eight years old when I first played Dragon Quest, and the game boggled my overweight mind from so many directions — here I’d spent most of my sentient life making Super Mario run and jump, and here was a game that required me to open a menu and click a command to open a door. I needed to sit and review the instruction manual, which I did upon waking early one Saturday morning. I poured a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and read over the instruction manual at my family’s dinner table.
Ever since then, I can’t play a new RPG without reading the instruction manual over a bowl of cold cereal. They used to be big and fascinating. They used to have cryptic, six-to-twelve-page-long story descriptions and tons of character art; Final Fantasy VI for the Super Famicom easily had the best RPG instruction manual of all-time. Most RPGs these days don’t break much new ground in their instruction manuals; part of me wants to groan at every Square-Enix manual, where they will spell everything out in extended notation: “Use the directional buttons up or down to move the cursor up or down; when the cursor has highlighted the ‘Fight’ command, press the O button to confirm.” Namco’s Tales of manuals, on the other hand, are fresh, clean, and honest, three words you’re seldom to hear used about anything made by Namco: they all start with a big chart, in which the directional buttons’ use is described as “On the field: move character” “In menus: move cursor” and the O button is described as “In menus: confirm” “On the field: speak / investigate”. Square-Enix’s games’ manuals earn their lengths by describing the menu selection confirming process every time they explain the function of a different menu selection. Tales of games earn their length and weight when they drift into extended segments about the unique in-game magic systems.
RPG instruction manuals nowadays are rendered unnecessary by droning, in-game tutorials that make sure no newbie is left behind. The manuals continue to exist, it seems, to satisfy the obsessive, now-archetypal desire that sleeps deep within the RPG-playing hordes: the package must be heavy. It must be heavy, and it must be shiny. People like me didn’t use a razor blade to open our Super Nintendo games for nothing: we wanted as much plastic clinging to the package, forever, as possible. This was part of the reason why we balked at Final Fantasy VII‘s being on the PlayStation: because the Nintendo 64 was going to have proper boxes for its games, boxes with plastic wrap, and plenty of room for superfluous maps and posters and posters of maps. Promises of three discs — three ridiculous discs — swayed us, and we stayed when we saw the big instruction manual; years later, with Final Fantasy X, it became dreadfully apparent that DVD cases, made of soft plastic, are lighter than CD jewel cases, and DVDs hold more information, making multi-disc games obsolete; and thus the Heavy-box RPG of yore has faded into the past. People tried to bring it back, by stuffing trinkets and/or soundtrack CDs into the cases, though those people happened to mostly be idiots or, worse, Working Designs.
The Heavy-box RPG has returned to spectacular form, however, with Hironobu Sakaguchi, Mistwalker, and Artoon’s Blue Dragon, which sports a forty-seven-page (not too huge, not too short) glossy instruction manual and a foil-stamped mirror-shiny label (reversible!) over a DVD case that weighs about as much as a loaded laser pistol will weigh in the year 2148. Taped to the outside of the case, when I bought the game back in December of 2006, was a fat, pristine plastic package of stickers to put on anything I wanted, as long as anything I wanted was an Xbox 360 or related peripheral. Breathing through my mouth, I tore open the package, and screamed like a clown on fire when I saw what lay inside: an Xbox-green plastic hinging apparatus, containing one disc on each side, and then a third disc sitting on a spindle inside the back of the case. Three discs! Why hadn’t I, in all my obsessive, news-combing, information-gathering frenzy, known that this game was three discs? Why hadn’t Microsoft advertised such a fact? I suppose game companies aren’t proud of three discs, or of heavy boxes, anymore. It’s something to reflect on that a country like Japan is able to produce values of this caliber, when they’ve gone out of their way to reject value in all other forms; a six-pack of beer, here, is precisely the price of six cans of beer, plus ten extra yen for the package.
Hironobu Sakaguchi saw a grand vision; it told him to get together the most talented artists, programmers, game designers, writers, and musicians, and throw them at several videogames until he had successfully defeated his former home of Square-Enix. In minds as idealistic and pure-hearted as Sakaguchi’s, there’s no way this plan could fail: if you’re able to think on his wavelength there’s no way his RPG Lost Odyssey, featuring the art of Takehiko Inoue and a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu — both immense talents from outside the videogame industry — will not be awesome. However, this corner of the industry is currently in a stinking state of inbreeding; the first young man in line to purchase Final Fantasy XII, when allowed to ask a question of Square-Enix president Yoichi Wada before a television audience, meekly spoke “Please remake Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3 thank you” and shuffled away. The people like Tetsuya Nomura; they don’t care that he got started as a one-bit pixel-chopper in the Super Famicom days, or that his art style has slowly fluctuated from idiocy to madness. As far as the hardest-cored RPG fans are concerned, Nomura is one of them. Never mind that the first RPGs in the legacy of Japanese RPGs were made by bold, daring people on risk-taking budgets, pouring more money into the pockets of an artist who ended up only ever drawing a couple of shots for the instruction manual than they would pay the programmers. Yuji Horii scored white-hot manga artist Akira Toriyama for Dragon Quest back in 1986, and the move helped the game sell millions. Sakaguchi, meanwhile, in building his counter-Dragon Quest, sought out semi-fine artist Yostuffaka Amano to lend a lofty air to Final Fantasy.
Since those two series exploded all over the world, kids with access to pens and pencils have sought to be as awesome as their idols, and this has resulted in many a Japanese elementary schoolchild telling his teacher he longed to design characters for RPGs when he grew up. What kids are doing, with their cute little dreams, is cutting out the middleman — which, in this case, happens to be “Earn recognition outside the field of videogames before being asked to collaborate on a videogame” — and the videogame industry has never stopped to slap them and tell them to eat their vegetables. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not! I’m certainly not one to judge people provably more successful than me (I’ve never designed characters for a major videogame, et cetera), though certainly, the quality is growing me-too-ish and even dull. Namco’s Tales of games are an ironically good example of uneven distribution of talent. They’ll get a hot rock band like Bump of Chicken to do the theme song, and then let said theme song play out over an animated scene of ferocious vapidity: the camera pans slowly toward each character as they stand perfectly still, and then, just as the camera stops, the character makes some crudely vague gesture with their weapon or magical pet. Sakaguchi must have seen this tsunami coming from miles away. He apparently wanted no part of Final Fantasy VII because he thought the technology wasn’t up to the vision yet. He wanted to keep making games on Nintendo systems, with sprite graphics, while the other half of his team worked squeaked out FMV-laden adventures. When Square subsequently got huge, he probably entertained the idea of sacking Nomura and using the Huge Revenues to hire an awesome artist, like Kentarou Miura, artist of the manga Berserk, which had inspired both the story and the character designs for Final Fantasy VII. He knew from the start that he wouldn’t be able to do this, though; the managers around him were growing increasingly hard-headed, and success would only make their heads harder, and their souls paranoid as hell. Sakaguchi knew that with great power came great potential to piss off one’s fans, and he knew that RPG fans were, more than anything else, fans of the package: if someone likes Final Fantasy VII, then they are fans of Nobuo Uematsu’s music, and of Tetsuya Nomura’s characters. The managers would have considered swapping in a new artist to be like admitting that the previous one hadn’t quite been exactly all that he could have been. It would have been like confessing to a lapse in judgment. It would have been flipping off the fans. To exist in the world, for an artist, is to have fans. Sakaguchi probably knew all these things, and he would have rather loved for Squaresoft to die in loud obscurity.
Even if that had happened — and even though it didn’t — I’ll tell you what that all makes Sakaguchi: it makes him a man. A trooper. He’s wanted little else than to stick to his guns. Even his majorly unsuccessful film debut, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”, while bland, was the work of a man: it wanted nothing more than to push an envelope, and whether you liked it or not (hint: I didn’t), even if the people’s faces were creepy and surreal, it’s just not kosher to diss Sakaguchi about it, when you consider that he was the first to attempt to make a feature-length computer-animated motion picture about realistic-looking human beings, and that no one’s tried such a feat since.
You have to wonder, though, playing Blue Dragon: would Sakaguchi have stayed a film director for life, had “The Spirits Within” been popular? It was well-made enough, and it was even critically acclaimed. Had it set the world on fire, would Sakaguchi still be a film director today? Blue Dragon leaves one with the distinct impression of “maybe”, and that either way, Sakaguchi truly possesses more of the love-like attention to detail necessary to craft a videogame world than any RPG producer outside of Yuji Horii. Sakaguchi said in an interview prior to Blue Dragon‘s release that he wanted to stick with what he knew, with the field and the format he spent years working in, that of the Japanese RPG. After leading the Final Fantasy series slowly down a flaming corridor from utter normalcy to complete nonsense, after spending more time reinventing himself than he ever spent being himself, Sakaguchi has finally settled down, given in, and admitted that there is something he can do better than he can do anything else. Back in the old days, it was a pissing contest, Hironobu Sakaguchi versus Yuji Horii, Final Fantasy versus Dragon Quest, Relentless Reinvention versus Astute Revision. A few hours of Blue Dragon is enough to sound the gong: the war is over, Yuji Horii kind of won, and Hironobu Sakaguchi wears his fatalism pretty well.
If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG before, or if you hate them, or especially if you despise them, you’re probably just going to sigh a lot at Blue Dragon. If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG, at least, you might be able to really get into the game. It’s as good a first RPG as any, and it’s a better one than most. Though if you hate the genre, be not fooled by the precious, amazing graphics. It’s the same old-school game, the same old-school story progressions, the same old-school focus on numbers that go up and hit points that go down. In design, it’s far more reined-in and focused than perhaps any Japanese RPG has ever been, though if you don’t like these games, you’re not going to like this one. If you’ve played dozens of these games and ever loved one of them while hating a couple other ones, chances are you’ll be able to play Blue Dragon, like it a fair deal, and shrug at the end and kind of feel like you’re qualified to judge it as superiorly well-made. Just don’t walk in expecting it to find your hecking car keys and/or change peanut butter into jelly.
There’s certainly a fine-wine quality about this game. Akira Toriyama’s character designs are subtle — the most amazing hairstyle is a pretty average shaggy ponytail — darker, and less fantastic than something he’d submit for Dragon Quest, though if you’ve ever appreciated his work, you’ll no doubt consider these designs sublime. Likewise, Nobuo Uematsu’s musical compositions, while lacking the chintzy flourishes and brassy motifs of his celebrated Final Fantasy VI soundtrack, are rounder and far more musician-like than anything he’s ever composed. Some tracks even approach a Kenji-Ito-like level of pop-song-esque fullness; when Ito makes such music, it tends to stand out so strongly that it distracts from the game, so that the graphics become a background for the music. Uematsu’s score is just subtle enough to fit in, and just catchy enough to make buyers of the soundtrack scratch their heads and wonder why it’s not a little more catchy. And Hironobu Sakaguchi’s scenario is a thing of beauty. After ripping through literally a dozen Tales of games over the years (such was my hunger for scenario-heavy entertainment-focused RPGs), it’s revealing how effortlessly Sakaguchi manages to make “Go to the castle to speak to the king” seem like something legendary heroes really do have to do every other day. Blue Dragon is Sakaguchi blowing steam out of his system; he plays the RPG cliches like a trumpet. Not minutes after we go to a castle to speak with a king, here’s an enemy army invading. Here’s the sky clouded purple. Here’s an opportunity for our heroes to help. The story starts as something of a fractured steampunk yarn, in which our young heroes fight several battles and eventually find themselves aboard a giant flying fortress.
We get to know the characters as they journey back home, and shortly after they discover their purpose — after about fifteen hours of action-packed wandering — the game does something of a snickering little 180. It’s as though, suddenly, the game is now in color, even though it hadn’t quite been in black and white before. It’s something of a low-key “Wizard of Oz”, then. Beyond all expectations, there’s a point where, suddenly, the gorgeous graphics become infinitely more gorgeous, where the lazy threads of the story suddenly and fiercely tie themselves tight together, and the game straightens up and begins, finally, to gain momentum. This is fascinating among modern RPGs, where the plot usually starts hot and heavy, and then gradually loses steam. In Blue Dragon, you’re plinking around dungeons until, at last, the game adopts something of a Chrono Trigger stance, and starts creating elaborate events and set-pieces. More than anything else — even the Active Time Battle system, yes, especially that — this is Sakaguchi’s contribution to the Japanese RPG: where Dragon Quest focused on tricky mazes filled with complex puzzles, Final Fantasy games, as of IV, shifted their focus to short, straightforward, corridor-like dungeons in which dynamic things were happening. A play-through of some of Blue Dragon‘s more complex, domino-like events will perhaps reveal why Sakaguchi is currently so in love with Gears of War: that’s precisely the kind of thing Sakaguchi has always been trying to make, only without the guns, or the action. Sakaguchi’s curb stomps be words.
Once Blue Dragon hits its crescendo, you probably won’t stop playing. Its final act — its third disc — manages to make you actually care about these big-headed kid-like characters (who are all supposed to be sixteen years old, which is kind of creepy, given how tiny their hands are) and what happens to them.
On the whole, it feels like Final Fantasy IV, plot full of gleeful twists and turns. At many points, you can almost imagine the scenario writer snickering as he writes the scene where the characters finally get on a boat and almost instantly get attacked by a sea monster. Every other battle or event in Blue Dragon is like an all-new episode of the only cartoon in the world that could cause you to wake up at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning after a full week of hating elementary school. If there’s anything negative I can say about it, it’s that the beginning part isn’t nearly as much fun as the middle part, though I only noticed that in hindsight: I had been, truthfully, hyperventilating in my excitement to play the game, so I hardly noticed. I had high-definition three-dimensional quasi-realistic super-deformed Akira Toriyama characters before me — the game could have been an interactive paper-doll-dressing simulation, and I would have played it for at least twenty hours.
As I warned earlier, if you hate the genre of Japanese RPG, you won’t like this game. Though if you sincerely like the genre, as far as RPGs go, this one’s pretty great. The battle system is mostly borrowed from Final Fantasy X — an excellent move, as that battle system could benefit from a second chance and some tweaking — though instead of three characters, you have five. Characters’ turns come up based on their agility statistic; you choose an action for them; they execute the action. The similarity to Final Fantasy X‘s battle system is more than skin-deep — it penetrates to the soul. FFX made a ballsy move by eliminating the Active Time Battle system, which is what had differentiated Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest in the first place. The designers of FFX knew that the Active Time Battle system was, effectively, bullstuff. It was a heavy handed and somewhat jack-offish way of making the player feel rushed during battles, though someone, somewhere, must have realized that making players hurry to make menu choices was kind of unnecessarily mean. FFX made the conscientious choice by making the battles truly time-based, tactical contests, rather than forcing players to press buttons and squeal like speds.
The battle system is as stoic as it is frantic. You can see characters’ and enemies’ turns displayed at the top of the screen; highlight an enemy with your attack cursor, and his position in the timeline, also, will be displayed. Use this knowledge to plan your tactics, et cetera. Only FFX kind of flunked out early, by having somewhat tacky disparities: you can only have three party members at a time, and at the start of the game, you basically have one character who can use white magic (for healing), one character who can use black magic (for killing enemies that can only be killed by black magic), one character with an aerial attack (for killing flying enemies), and one character with an armor-piercing attack (for killing armored enemies). This made the battle system kind of cheap: “Oh, there’s a flying enemy — gotta switch in my flying-enemy-killing dude now!” The effect was kind of like walking into an empty room thirty hours into a Zelda game and being asked to light a torch in order to open the door, which you’ve been doing for thirty hecking hours now, even though you’d only ever been playing the game for maybe fifteen minutes.
FFX eventually let you customize your characters, and make them all equal — maybe make them all able to kill flying, piercing, or magical enemies. Blue Dragon, slightly similarly, starts with all of your characters in a gray area. Like in Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy V, you’re constantly changing the focus of your characters, and hard work (of the level-grinding variety) is rewarded by winning your characters extra, class-specific abilities that can be equipped to any other job class. As you level up your “Black” class, for example, you’ll earn “Black Magic Level 1” or “Level 2” or “Level 3”, allowing you to use different levels of black magic even if you’ve switched back to the “White” class. In this way, you’re mixing and matching your abilities to make “custom” characters — though this isn’t always what makes the battle system interesting. That would be the charge attacks; in any other game using a pseudo-real-time battle system, like Final Fantasy Tactics, magic spells and special attacks carry a basic casting time. Choose to cast a fire spell, and then wait patiently until it’s casted. In Blue Dragon, you can cast any spell or special attack right away — or you can cast it later. It’s all your choice: just after you’ve selected a spell and a target, a charge meter is displayed; the charge meter is marked at the appropriate places with icons representing your fellow party members and the enemy party. Hold down the attack button to charge your attack. Let go when you think you’ve held it down for long enough. At first, it seems like an innocent little tedium-breaker, though it ends up being executed rather brilliantly. Not a third of the way into the game, enemies start showing up who can kill your party members in one violent hit, 100% of the time. You’ll need to hit them before they hit you, while also hitting them hard. A lesser game, like Grandia III, would concentrate your party’s tactics on slowing the enemies down, or canceling their actions. Blue Dragon, on the other hand, forces you to think hard about your own actions. Say you’re fighting an enemy you know to be somewhat vulnerable to paralysis spells. You want to cast a paralysis spell on him, so as to render him immobile for your boys to beat on him for a couple of rounds, and you want to charge the spell up as much as possible — charging increases effectiveness — though you also want the spell to execute before the enemy’s next turn. So you need to think about it for a bit, and you might end up making a compromise that costs one character his (revivable) life. A similar “fine-wine” delicacy creeps into dozens upon dozens of battles throughout the game, and again, if you love these games, it’s a real treat.
There’s a freewheeling, casino-like nature to battling, so that when you win, whatever you get feels like a pay-out. The ability to battle multiple enemy parties at once at first feels kind of a throwaway feature, though it ends up miraculously making grinding more than entertaining for anyone who’s ever played, say, a “Mysterious Dungeon” game. Press the right trigger on the field map to see a list of all the enemies within battling range — choose to fight all of them, and you’ll fight each party, one after another, in sequence. Between enemy parties, a slot machine will pop up on screen, and award you with a bonus: increased strength, speed, et cetera. Interestingly, the only negative effect on the slots is “remove all bonuses”. The game understands, as all Dragon Quest games do, that the game doesn’t lose when players win. It’s already an oath of bravery to take on six enemy parties at once, so the game cuts you a little slack and applauds appropriately when you win.
After more than twenty hours of playing this game, a question popped into my head, and I had to consult the instruction manual. I can’t remember this happening with any other game in the last ten years. My question was about the little red blip on the magic / special attack charge meter. Did I get a bonus if I stopped the bar on that red blip? Or did it do less damage? I honestly couldn’t tell. The instruction manual told me that stopping the bar on the red blip (sometimes very difficult) resulted in the spell doing maximum damage and costing only half as much MP as usual. I felt a little dumb for having not noticed that, though I quickly justified my dumbness by remembering that I’d been avoiding the red blip most of the time because it seldom puts me in a good strategic position. Sometimes the red blip appears at the beginning of the charge bar, sometimes at the end. The battle system kind of starts to philosophically unravel when you realize that a red blip at the beginning is subtly stressing how important it is to attack as quickly as possible and as hard as possible. It’s a slick little quirk, almost worthy of a Romancing SaGa game, though it’s far more philanthropic. Either way, it’s applaudable that the game doesn’t spell this out for you — nor, really, does it spell out anything for you. It expects you to figure things out for yourself, or to read the manual.
That day, I spent an extra twenty minutes or so re-reading the manual. There’s a two-page section at the end, called “Jiro’s tips”, where Jiro, the boy-genius of your party, offers dozens of tips, such as “If the monsters are too strong, try leveling up!” or “You should probably save your game whenever you see a save point!” In the lower-right corner of the second page of the tips section is Maro, the semi-unintelligent, loudmouthed character. He says: “Hey, let me give some tips, too!” and then gives the reader precisely two tips: “Accessories and armor boost your stats” and “Raise your agility statistic to attack more quickly!” Why it has to be Maro giving these two tips, I have no idea. Though I guess that’s the long and short of it, for you. Why bother releasing a Japanese-style RPG, when the genre has been astray so long, and innovated so infrequently, misunderstood by its detractors whenever it does wrong, misunderstood by its fans whenever it tries to reach out? Why step into this minefield, and make another breezy, entertaining game that’s happy not really changing anything? Why, because accessories and armor boost your stats, of course.
★★★☆
“A BOTTOMLESS BOWL OF CAP'N CRUNCH ON A FIFTY-HOUR SATURDAY MORNING.”
Quite accidentally — that’s how obsessive-compulsize behavior gets started. Case in point: I was eight years old when I first played Dragon Quest, and the game boggled my overweight mind from so many directions — here I’d spent most of my sentient life making Super Mario run and jump, and here was a game that required me to open a menu and click a command to open a door. I needed to sit and review the instruction manual, which I did upon waking early one Saturday morning. I poured a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and read over the instruction manual at my family’s dinner table.
Ever since then, I can’t play a new RPG without reading the instruction manual over a bowl of cold cereal. They used to be big and fascinating. They used to have cryptic, six-to-twelve-page-long story descriptions and tons of character art; Final Fantasy VI for the Super Famicom easily had the best RPG instruction manual of all-time. Most RPGs these days don’t break much new ground in their instruction manuals; part of me wants to groan at every Square-Enix manual, where they will spell everything out in extended notation: “Use the directional buttons up or down to move the cursor up or down; when the cursor has highlighted the ‘Fight’ command, press the O button to confirm.” Namco’s Tales of manuals, on the other hand, are fresh, clean, and honest, three words you’re seldom to hear used about anything made by Namco: they all start with a big chart, in which the directional buttons’ use is described as “On the field: move character” “In menus: move cursor” and the O button is described as “In menus: confirm” “On the field: speak / investigate”. Square-Enix’s games’ manuals earn their lengths by describing the menu selection confirming process every time they explain the function of a different menu selection. Tales of games earn their length and weight when they drift into extended segments about the unique in-game magic systems.
RPG instruction manuals nowadays are rendered unnecessary by droning, in-game tutorials that make sure no newbie is left behind. The manuals continue to exist, it seems, to satisfy the obsessive, now-archetypal desire that sleeps deep within the RPG-playing hordes: the package must be heavy. It must be heavy, and it must be shiny. People like me didn’t use a razor blade to open our Super Nintendo games for nothing: we wanted as much plastic clinging to the package, forever, as possible. This was part of the reason why we balked at Final Fantasy VII‘s being on the PlayStation: because the Nintendo 64 was going to have proper boxes for its games, boxes with plastic wrap, and plenty of room for superfluous maps and posters and posters of maps. Promises of three discs — three ridiculous discs — swayed us, and we stayed when we saw the big instruction manual; years later, with Final Fantasy X, it became dreadfully apparent that DVD cases, made of soft plastic, are lighter than CD jewel cases, and DVDs hold more information, making multi-disc games obsolete; and thus the Heavy-box RPG of yore has faded into the past. People tried to bring it back, by stuffing trinkets and/or soundtrack CDs into the cases, though those people happened to mostly be idiots or, worse, Working Designs.
The Heavy-box RPG has returned to spectacular form, however, with Hironobu Sakaguchi, Mistwalker, and Artoon’s Blue Dragon, which sports a forty-seven-page (not too huge, not too short) glossy instruction manual and a foil-stamped mirror-shiny label (reversible!) over a DVD case that weighs about as much as a loaded laser pistol will weigh in the year 2148. Taped to the outside of the case, when I bought the game back in December of 2006, was a fat, pristine plastic package of stickers to put on anything I wanted, as long as anything I wanted was an Xbox 360 or related peripheral. Breathing through my mouth, I tore open the package, and screamed like a clown on fire when I saw what lay inside: an Xbox-green plastic hinging apparatus, containing one disc on each side, and then a third disc sitting on a spindle inside the back of the case. Three discs! Why hadn’t I, in all my obsessive, news-combing, information-gathering frenzy, known that this game was three discs? Why hadn’t Microsoft advertised such a fact? I suppose game companies aren’t proud of three discs, or of heavy boxes, anymore. It’s something to reflect on that a country like Japan is able to produce values of this caliber, when they’ve gone out of their way to reject value in all other forms; a six-pack of beer, here, is precisely the price of six cans of beer, plus ten extra yen for the package.
Hironobu Sakaguchi saw a grand vision; it told him to get together the most talented artists, programmers, game designers, writers, and musicians, and throw them at several videogames until he had successfully defeated his former home of Square-Enix. In minds as idealistic and pure-hearted as Sakaguchi’s, there’s no way this plan could fail: if you’re able to think on his wavelength there’s no way his RPG Lost Odyssey, featuring the art of Takehiko Inoue and a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu — both immense talents from outside the videogame industry — will not be awesome. However, this corner of the industry is currently in a stinking state of inbreeding; the first young man in line to purchase Final Fantasy XII, when allowed to ask a question of Square-Enix president Yoichi Wada before a television audience, meekly spoke “Please remake Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3 thank you” and shuffled away. The people like Tetsuya Nomura; they don’t care that he got started as a one-bit pixel-chopper in the Super Famicom days, or that his art style has slowly fluctuated from idiocy to madness. As far as the hardest-cored RPG fans are concerned, Nomura is one of them. Never mind that the first RPGs in the legacy of Japanese RPGs were made by bold, daring people on risk-taking budgets, pouring more money into the pockets of an artist who ended up only ever drawing a couple of shots for the instruction manual than they would pay the programmers. Yuji Horii scored white-hot manga artist Akira Toriyama for Dragon Quest back in 1986, and the move helped the game sell millions. Sakaguchi, meanwhile, in building his counter-Dragon Quest, sought out semi-fine artist Yostuffaka Amano to lend a lofty air to Final Fantasy.
Since those two series exploded all over the world, kids with access to pens and pencils have sought to be as awesome as their idols, and this has resulted in many a Japanese elementary schoolchild telling his teacher he longed to design characters for RPGs when he grew up. What kids are doing, with their cute little dreams, is cutting out the middleman — which, in this case, happens to be “Earn recognition outside the field of videogames before being asked to collaborate on a videogame” — and the videogame industry has never stopped to slap them and tell them to eat their vegetables. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not! I’m certainly not one to judge people provably more successful than me (I’ve never designed characters for a major videogame, et cetera), though certainly, the quality is growing me-too-ish and even dull. Namco’s Tales of games are an ironically good example of uneven distribution of talent. They’ll get a hot rock band like Bump of Chicken to do the theme song, and then let said theme song play out over an animated scene of ferocious vapidity: the camera pans slowly toward each character as they stand perfectly still, and then, just as the camera stops, the character makes some crudely vague gesture with their weapon or magical pet. Sakaguchi must have seen this tsunami coming from miles away. He apparently wanted no part of Final Fantasy VII because he thought the technology wasn’t up to the vision yet. He wanted to keep making games on Nintendo systems, with sprite graphics, while the other half of his team worked squeaked out FMV-laden adventures. When Square subsequently got huge, he probably entertained the idea of sacking Nomura and using the Huge Revenues to hire an awesome artist, like Kentarou Miura, artist of the manga Berserk, which had inspired both the story and the character designs for Final Fantasy VII. He knew from the start that he wouldn’t be able to do this, though; the managers around him were growing increasingly hard-headed, and success would only make their heads harder, and their souls paranoid as hell. Sakaguchi knew that with great power came great potential to piss off one’s fans, and he knew that RPG fans were, more than anything else, fans of the package: if someone likes Final Fantasy VII, then they are fans of Nobuo Uematsu’s music, and of Tetsuya Nomura’s characters. The managers would have considered swapping in a new artist to be like admitting that the previous one hadn’t quite been exactly all that he could have been. It would have been like confessing to a lapse in judgment. It would have been flipping off the fans. To exist in the world, for an artist, is to have fans. Sakaguchi probably knew all these things, and he would have rather loved for Squaresoft to die in loud obscurity.
Even if that had happened — and even though it didn’t — I’ll tell you what that all makes Sakaguchi: it makes him a man. A trooper. He’s wanted little else than to stick to his guns. Even his majorly unsuccessful film debut, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”, while bland, was the work of a man: it wanted nothing more than to push an envelope, and whether you liked it or not (hint: I didn’t), even if the people’s faces were creepy and surreal, it’s just not kosher to diss Sakaguchi about it, when you consider that he was the first to attempt to make a feature-length computer-animated motion picture about realistic-looking human beings, and that no one’s tried such a feat since.
You have to wonder, though, playing Blue Dragon: would Sakaguchi have stayed a film director for life, had “The Spirits Within” been popular? It was well-made enough, and it was even critically acclaimed. Had it set the world on fire, would Sakaguchi still be a film director today? Blue Dragon leaves one with the distinct impression of “maybe”, and that either way, Sakaguchi truly possesses more of the love-like attention to detail necessary to craft a videogame world than any RPG producer outside of Yuji Horii. Sakaguchi said in an interview prior to Blue Dragon‘s release that he wanted to stick with what he knew, with the field and the format he spent years working in, that of the Japanese RPG. After leading the Final Fantasy series slowly down a flaming corridor from utter normalcy to complete nonsense, after spending more time reinventing himself than he ever spent being himself, Sakaguchi has finally settled down, given in, and admitted that there is something he can do better than he can do anything else. Back in the old days, it was a pissing contest, Hironobu Sakaguchi versus Yuji Horii, Final Fantasy versus Dragon Quest, Relentless Reinvention versus Astute Revision. A few hours of Blue Dragon is enough to sound the gong: the war is over, Yuji Horii kind of won, and Hironobu Sakaguchi wears his fatalism pretty well.
If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG before, or if you hate them, or especially if you despise them, you’re probably just going to sigh a lot at Blue Dragon. If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG, at least, you might be able to really get into the game. It’s as good a first RPG as any, and it’s a better one than most. Though if you hate the genre, be not fooled by the precious, amazing graphics. It’s the same old-school game, the same old-school story progressions, the same old-school focus on numbers that go up and hit points that go down. In design, it’s far more reined-in and focused than perhaps any Japanese RPG has ever been, though if you don’t like these games, you’re not going to like this one. If you’ve played dozens of these games and ever loved one of them while hating a couple other ones, chances are you’ll be able to play Blue Dragon, like it a fair deal, and shrug at the end and kind of feel like you’re qualified to judge it as superiorly well-made. Just don’t walk in expecting it to find your hecking car keys and/or change peanut butter into jelly.
There’s certainly a fine-wine quality about this game. Akira Toriyama’s character designs are subtle — the most amazing hairstyle is a pretty average shaggy ponytail — darker, and less fantastic than something he’d submit for Dragon Quest, though if you’ve ever appreciated his work, you’ll no doubt consider these designs sublime. Likewise, Nobuo Uematsu’s musical compositions, while lacking the chintzy flourishes and brassy motifs of his celebrated Final Fantasy VI soundtrack, are rounder and far more musician-like than anything he’s ever composed. Some tracks even approach a Kenji-Ito-like level of pop-song-esque fullness; when Ito makes such music, it tends to stand out so strongly that it distracts from the game, so that the graphics become a background for the music. Uematsu’s score is just subtle enough to fit in, and just catchy enough to make buyers of the soundtrack scratch their heads and wonder why it’s not a little more catchy. And Hironobu Sakaguchi’s scenario is a thing of beauty. After ripping through literally a dozen Tales of games over the years (such was my hunger for scenario-heavy entertainment-focused RPGs), it’s revealing how effortlessly Sakaguchi manages to make “Go to the castle to speak to the king” seem like something legendary heroes really do have to do every other day. Blue Dragon is Sakaguchi blowing steam out of his system; he plays the RPG cliches like a trumpet. Not minutes after we go to a castle to speak with a king, here’s an enemy army invading. Here’s the sky clouded purple. Here’s an opportunity for our heroes to help. The story starts as something of a fractured steampunk yarn, in which our young heroes fight several battles and eventually find themselves aboard a giant flying fortress.
We get to know the characters as they journey back home, and shortly after they discover their purpose — after about fifteen hours of action-packed wandering — the game does something of a snickering little 180. It’s as though, suddenly, the game is now in color, even though it hadn’t quite been in black and white before. It’s something of a low-key “Wizard of Oz”, then. Beyond all expectations, there’s a point where, suddenly, the gorgeous graphics become infinitely more gorgeous, where the lazy threads of the story suddenly and fiercely tie themselves tight together, and the game straightens up and begins, finally, to gain momentum. This is fascinating among modern RPGs, where the plot usually starts hot and heavy, and then gradually loses steam. In Blue Dragon, you’re plinking around dungeons until, at last, the game adopts something of a Chrono Trigger stance, and starts creating elaborate events and set-pieces. More than anything else — even the Active Time Battle system, yes, especially that — this is Sakaguchi’s contribution to the Japanese RPG: where Dragon Quest focused on tricky mazes filled with complex puzzles, Final Fantasy games, as of IV, shifted their focus to short, straightforward, corridor-like dungeons in which dynamic things were happening. A play-through of some of Blue Dragon‘s more complex, domino-like events will perhaps reveal why Sakaguchi is currently so in love with Gears of War: that’s precisely the kind of thing Sakaguchi has always been trying to make, only without the guns, or the action. Sakaguchi’s curb stomps be words.
Once Blue Dragon hits its crescendo, you probably won’t stop playing. Its final act — its third disc — manages to make you actually care about these big-headed kid-like characters (who are all supposed to be sixteen years old, which is kind of creepy, given how tiny their hands are) and what happens to them.
On the whole, it feels like Final Fantasy IV, plot full of gleeful twists and turns. At many points, you can almost imagine the scenario writer snickering as he writes the scene where the characters finally get on a boat and almost instantly get attacked by a sea monster. Every other battle or event in Blue Dragon is like an all-new episode of the only cartoon in the world that could cause you to wake up at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning after a full week of hating elementary school. If there’s anything negative I can say about it, it’s that the beginning part isn’t nearly as much fun as the middle part, though I only noticed that in hindsight: I had been, truthfully, hyperventilating in my excitement to play the game, so I hardly noticed. I had high-definition three-dimensional quasi-realistic super-deformed Akira Toriyama characters before me — the game could have been an interactive paper-doll-dressing simulation, and I would have played it for at least twenty hours.
As I warned earlier, if you hate the genre of Japanese RPG, you won’t like this game. Though if you sincerely like the genre, as far as RPGs go, this one’s pretty great. The battle system is mostly borrowed from Final Fantasy X — an excellent move, as that battle system could benefit from a second chance and some tweaking — though instead of three characters, you have five. Characters’ turns come up based on their agility statistic; you choose an action for them; they execute the action. The similarity to Final Fantasy X‘s battle system is more than skin-deep — it penetrates to the soul. FFX made a ballsy move by eliminating the Active Time Battle system, which is what had differentiated Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest in the first place. The designers of FFX knew that the Active Time Battle system was, effectively, bullstuff. It was a heavy handed and somewhat jack-offish way of making the player feel rushed during battles, though someone, somewhere, must have realized that making players hurry to make menu choices was kind of unnecessarily mean. FFX made the conscientious choice by making the battles truly time-based, tactical contests, rather than forcing players to press buttons and squeal like speds.
The battle system is as stoic as it is frantic. You can see characters’ and enemies’ turns displayed at the top of the screen; highlight an enemy with your attack cursor, and his position in the timeline, also, will be displayed. Use this knowledge to plan your tactics, et cetera. Only FFX kind of flunked out early, by having somewhat tacky disparities: you can only have three party members at a time, and at the start of the game, you basically have one character who can use white magic (for healing), one character who can use black magic (for killing enemies that can only be killed by black magic), one character with an aerial attack (for killing flying enemies), and one character with an armor-piercing attack (for killing armored enemies). This made the battle system kind of cheap: “Oh, there’s a flying enemy — gotta switch in my flying-enemy-killing dude now!” The effect was kind of like walking into an empty room thirty hours into a Zelda game and being asked to light a torch in order to open the door, which you’ve been doing for thirty hecking hours now, even though you’d only ever been playing the game for maybe fifteen minutes.
FFX eventually let you customize your characters, and make them all equal — maybe make them all able to kill flying, piercing, or magical enemies. Blue Dragon, slightly similarly, starts with all of your characters in a gray area. Like in Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy V, you’re constantly changing the focus of your characters, and hard work (of the level-grinding variety) is rewarded by winning your characters extra, class-specific abilities that can be equipped to any other job class. As you level up your “Black” class, for example, you’ll earn “Black Magic Level 1” or “Level 2” or “Level 3”, allowing you to use different levels of black magic even if you’ve switched back to the “White” class. In this way, you’re mixing and matching your abilities to make “custom” characters — though this isn’t always what makes the battle system interesting. That would be the charge attacks; in any other game using a pseudo-real-time battle system, like Final Fantasy Tactics, magic spells and special attacks carry a basic casting time. Choose to cast a fire spell, and then wait patiently until it’s casted. In Blue Dragon, you can cast any spell or special attack right away — or you can cast it later. It’s all your choice: just after you’ve selected a spell and a target, a charge meter is displayed; the charge meter is marked at the appropriate places with icons representing your fellow party members and the enemy party. Hold down the attack button to charge your attack. Let go when you think you’ve held it down for long enough. At first, it seems like an innocent little tedium-breaker, though it ends up being executed rather brilliantly. Not a third of the way into the game, enemies start showing up who can kill your party members in one violent hit, 100% of the time. You’ll need to hit them before they hit you, while also hitting them hard. A lesser game, like Grandia III, would concentrate your party’s tactics on slowing the enemies down, or canceling their actions. Blue Dragon, on the other hand, forces you to think hard about your own actions. Say you’re fighting an enemy you know to be somewhat vulnerable to paralysis spells. You want to cast a paralysis spell on him, so as to render him immobile for your boys to beat on him for a couple of rounds, and you want to charge the spell up as much as possible — charging increases effectiveness — though you also want the spell to execute before the enemy’s next turn. So you need to think about it for a bit, and you might end up making a compromise that costs one character his (revivable) life. A similar “fine-wine” delicacy creeps into dozens upon dozens of battles throughout the game, and again, if you love these games, it’s a real treat.
There’s a freewheeling, casino-like nature to battling, so that when you win, whatever you get feels like a pay-out. The ability to battle multiple enemy parties at once at first feels kind of a throwaway feature, though it ends up miraculously making grinding more than entertaining for anyone who’s ever played, say, a “Mysterious Dungeon” game. Press the right trigger on the field map to see a list of all the enemies within battling range — choose to fight all of them, and you’ll fight each party, one after another, in sequence. Between enemy parties, a slot machine will pop up on screen, and award you with a bonus: increased strength, speed, et cetera. Interestingly, the only negative effect on the slots is “remove all bonuses”. The game understands, as all Dragon Quest games do, that the game doesn’t lose when players win. It’s already an oath of bravery to take on six enemy parties at once, so the game cuts you a little slack and applauds appropriately when you win.
After more than twenty hours of playing this game, a question popped into my head, and I had to consult the instruction manual. I can’t remember this happening with any other game in the last ten years. My question was about the little red blip on the magic / special attack charge meter. Did I get a bonus if I stopped the bar on that red blip? Or did it do less damage? I honestly couldn’t tell. The instruction manual told me that stopping the bar on the red blip (sometimes very difficult) resulted in the spell doing maximum damage and costing only half as much MP as usual. I felt a little dumb for having not noticed that, though I quickly justified my dumbness by remembering that I’d been avoiding the red blip most of the time because it seldom puts me in a good strategic position. Sometimes the red blip appears at the beginning of the charge bar, sometimes at the end. The battle system kind of starts to philosophically unravel when you realize that a red blip at the beginning is subtly stressing how important it is to attack as quickly as possible and as hard as possible. It’s a slick little quirk, almost worthy of a Romancing SaGa game, though it’s far more philanthropic. Either way, it’s applaudable that the game doesn’t spell this out for you — nor, really, does it spell out anything for you. It expects you to figure things out for yourself, or to read the manual.
That day, I spent an extra twenty minutes or so re-reading the manual. There’s a two-page section at the end, called “Jiro’s tips”, where Jiro, the boy-genius of your party, offers dozens of tips, such as “If the monsters are too strong, try leveling up!” or “You should probably save your game whenever you see a save point!” In the lower-right corner of the second page of the tips section is Maro, the semi-unintelligent, loudmouthed character. He says: “Hey, let me give some tips, too!” and then gives the reader precisely two tips: “Accessories and armor boost your stats” and “Raise your agility statistic to attack more quickly!” Why it has to be Maro giving these two tips, I have no idea. Though I guess that’s the long and short of it, for you. Why bother releasing a Japanese-style RPG, when the genre has been astray so long, and innovated so infrequently, misunderstood by its detractors whenever it does wrong, misunderstood by its fans whenever it tries to reach out? Why step into this minefield, and make another breezy, entertaining game that’s happy not really changing anything? Why, because accessories and armor boost your stats, of course.
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“THE VIDEOGAME I'VE WANTED TO PLAY SINCE I WAS SIX YEARS OLD.”
I’ve wanted to play Dragon Quest Swords since I was six years old. Back then, of course, my parents and schoolteachers were confused as to whether I was Gifted and Talented or just mentally &^#$#ed, and in such a state of emotional probation, it would have been rare (and probably perverted) of anyone to give the time of day to a design document I’d banged out with a pair of purple crayons. I hardly even knew what Dragon Quest was, and all I could think about is how awesome it would be to swing a sword at a television. Well, I’ll tell you one thing I was for sure back then: I was unemployed. I certainly didn’t have enough money to buy a condo with my credit card, I’ll tell you that much. What I did have was a large forest near the house, and fields and rivers and creeks and hills to play in, me and my brother bleating and screaming at each other with toy guys. That was a hell of a something to do. Ultimately, it was probably better than playing videogames. Too bad we ended up in Tokyo, where environmentalists and educators united to declare in 1991 that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was more wholesome than the actual outdoors, what with all the rapists in panda costumes and abandoned amusement parks we seem to have growing like fungus in the back alleys around here.
Twenty-some years have passed, and any kid in his right mind would rather play Gears of War on his big brother’s Xbox 360 than with some broken GI Joes in the rumpus room. Action figures are, perhaps slowly, hurtling into obscurity — now almost exclusively the playthings of seriously adjusted adult collectors with full-time jobs — because videogames are able to reproduce at least the same thrills without requiring any of the imagination. Dragon Quest Swords is a mutant fried-chicken-wing of videogame design. It’s half action-figure, half videogame. It’s half a serenade to that little boy fallen headfirst into the well of our hearts, who used to heave a giant rubber Godzilla twenty feet across the living room, toward Cobra Commander’s giant purple plastic headquarters, filled to the gills with meticulously posed Star Wars figures at action stations, and it’s halfway just another Dragon Quest game. It’s halfway a joyful exploitation of the Nintendo Wii’s remote-control gimmick, and halfway a disappointing clash of cool concept versus watered-down execution.
A couple of years ago, Square-Enix released Kenshin Dragon Quest, which was, at the time, kind of a shameful thing, though also kind of hilarious, and also kind of awesome. Sporting a box large enough to contain delicious cereal and coated in original art by Akira Toriyama, Kenshin Dragon Quest was essentially a plastic sword that you plugged into the yellow and white jacks on your television. There was, somehow, a game inside that plastic casing. They showed this at Tokyo Game Show — the line to play it was bafflingly three hours long. I took a picture of a guy swinging the plastic sword at a television, and later loaded the photo onto a computer workstation, where I realized that the sword was glowing fiercely white, like a lightsaber. At first, I wondered if the sword had been, perhaps, possessed by the ghost of a vampire, though I soon realized: that’s how the TV knows where the sword is.
When released, the game had an odd amount of depth. There was walking, there was fighting, there was leveling-up, there was Dragoning, there was Questing. It was good enough, when one considered it was a plastic sword that you plug into your television. I first played it with a playground-like delight, then eventually felt a little stupid and guilty. To make a menu choice, you have to hold the sword up, and point it at the choice you want to make, and keep it held there for a couple of seconds. That feels kind of weird; it feels kind of like Sony’s EyeToy games for PlayStation 2 (while we’re at it: why does no one yell at Nintendo for “stealing” the DS’s touch-screen concept from the EyeToy? enough people yelled at Sony for “stealing” motion controls, hell). Though eventually, one remembers those “Captain Power” TV games from the early 1990s: you aim a plastic toy spaceship with a gun handle at a television playing a videotape of hokey animation full of epilepsy-inducing orange patterns that, when detected by your ship’s light sensor, cause you “damage”. If enough “damage” is scored, the action figure in the pilot’s seat is ejected. The thing is, “Captain Power” was only ever just a videotape; it couldn’t assess your performance any way other than negatively. It could only tell you “You Lose”, and never “You Win”. (If we wanted to keep beating off to this rhythm, we could mention Tetris, and how the only things you can see in Tetris are your mistakes, the blocks “left behind” after a successful line-clear. In Tetris, when you lose (and lose you must), you growl and start over. At least Tetris can tell you your score.) All “Captain Power” did, to the kids unfortunate enough to stumble across it at a yard sale in 1993 and beg their mothers to buy it, was instill a kind of gentle, furious justification for rule-breaking: if Captain Power gets ejected, you just put him right back in the hecking pilot’s seat like nothing happened, maybe yell at mom if those frozen pizzas are done yet.
A year after Kenshin Dragon Quest was released, Square-Enix released Dragon Quest VIII for the Sony PlayStation 2, and my, it was such a gorgeous little videogame. It was the biggest little videogame in the world. Like the original Dragon Quest many years before it, it wore its heart on its sleeve, only now its sleeve was so three-dimensional and lovable and touchable. The adventure was huge, the environments painstakingly rendered, and the insides of houses looked so lived-in. The color palettes were breathtaking. The battle system was the same as ever — the same as in all seven Dragon Quest games before it — and no one whose opinion is worth trusting really cared too much, because the heart of the game lies in the adventure, anyway, hence the word “Quest” in the title.
A year later, Nintendo announced the true shape and form of their Nintendo “Revolution” controller. A video presentation shown at the press conference contained footage of an interview with Yuji Horii, Dragon Quest series producer. He said he found the controller quite brilliant, and he looked forward to developing something for it. A year later, the name of the “Revolution” was revealed: it would be called the “Wii”. A game called Dragon Quest Swords would be a launch title. Japan halfway imploded, then halfway exploded. In other words, Japan ended up pretty much how they’d been to begin with, only after experiencing a little quick and drastic pressure change.
Dragon Quest Swords didn’t make the launch window. One thing that did make the Wii launch window, however, was the announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be an action game for the Nintendo DS. The collective gasp-scream sucked the air out of the island of Honshuu for a full three seconds.
Dragon Quest Swords would actually be released eight months after the release of the Wii, though before that, it was announced that Dragon Quest IX would not, as previously reported, be an action game. Rather, it would be a multiplayer menu-based RPG. Half the world hated this revelation; the game, nonetheless, still sits at the top of Weekly Famitsu‘s top-twenty “Most Wanted” games chart, leading Final Fantasy XIII for the PlayStation 3 by some 500 votes, at the time of this writing.
Why did they change Dragon Quest IX back to a menu-based battle system? Yuji Horii said, in an interview, that too many people were scared of it being an action game. Blame Famitsu, then, for running a four-page feature of reader moans and groans.
Playing Dragon Quest Swords, though, I’m not really sure if that was the case. It’s a subtle thing to put precisely into words. Let’s try:
Dragon Quest Swords kind of sucks. It also kind of doesn’t suck. It’s in the weirdest state of flux.
Let’s try to talk about the good stuff. First of all: it’s a Dragon Quest game. It has precisely one town, though that town is big and bright and beautifully rendered, like the towns in our darling Dragon Quest VIII. There’s curious, flames-of-fantasy-igniting architecture on display, like the giant stone staircase leading from the bottom of the town up to the castle. There are shops to buy items, weapons, armor. The characters in town all have friendly faces, and many of them speak in animated voices: this is the first Dragon Quest released in Japan to feature any voice acting, as such.
The story segments are lovingly presented, as well — about as lovingly as the segments in Dragon Quest VIII, plus voices, and delightful midi music by either the great Koichi Sugiyama or the kind-of-great Manami Matsumae, whose compositions are almost indistinguishable (she’s no doubt been astutely listening for years). The story itself is a little (or, well, a lot) thin: you play the part of a boy who’s just turned sixteen years of age, which means you’re old enough to be recognized as a man, though only if you complete the hero’s trial at the dungeon-like cave close to town. Complete the task, and the prince confides in you: his mother has been acting strange lately. She’s wearing a weird mask and seldom leaving her room. Go with the prince, now, on adventures to discover the nature of the mask. On your first hiking expedition together, you’ll meet a big-haired, rag-doll-like Gothic Lolita named Setia, who, should you select her as your questing partner instead of the prince, will incessantly tell you you’re cool and/or strong at precisely the exact same point during each loop of the battle music, in addition to casting a spell that makes your shield bigger. If only I could find a girlfriend with such attention to detail. The full title of the game is Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors, which makes it the first Dragon Quest adventure to name a dungeon in its title. I’ve already told you about the “Masked Queen”. You can probably guess the rest of the story, maybe with the assistance of some crayons. Just because you can approximate its narrative arc with crayons and construction paper, however, doesn’t mean that Dragon Quest Swords can’t end with a nice little splash of emotion. Though when it does, it kind of feels like Dragon Quest: The Spirits Within, taking all the feelings normally evoked in a Dragon Quest game and condensing them all into an easily digestible goo of entertainment. Too bad that the preceding 99% of the game has been pandering nonsense-bullstuff.
Yes: the biggest and blackest blotch on Dragon Quest Swords‘ report card would be that it took me four hours of casual, mostly-naked play to complete. Yes, four hours. I’m normally not one to complain about the lengths of games, seriously. My favorite game ever, Super Mario Bros. 3, can be bested in less than an hour. However, in the case of Dragon Quest Swords, which comes from a long line of excessively long-winded games, the shortness is a symptom of a minor-class disaster. There is love in its construction, though there’s hardly any empathy. It’s the first Japan-released Dragon Quest to feature voices, though it does so at the cost of featuring only a fraction of a story, a fragment of a “Quest”, a mere sliver of the attention granted to other games in the series — though not without half of a good reason.
Tragically, however, the game’s thinness is most startlingly revealed by just how thick and juicy the good parts are. I’m talking about the control scheme. It’s wonderful. At a Nintendo Wii event in Chiba in 2006, the game was playable, and it required both the nunchuk and the Wii-mote to play; soon after, the game missed its launch-window release date. By the time the Square-Enix Party event in early 2007 rolled around, the game only required the Wii-mote. Someone on the team had seen through the bullstuff. Why should you need the nunchuk? You can walk perfectly fine with the D-pad on the Wii-mote (though I’d still kind of wish it was just an analog stick). I mean, what else is it there for? Press up on the Wii-mote’s D-pad to walk forward, or just keep the B button trigger held, and use left and right on the pad to steer. Listen to the cute little footsteps coming out of the Wii-mote speaker! Press the B button and up on the pad at the same time to run. Listen to the cute running sound effect coming out of the Wii-mote speaker! (Oh, wait, it’s just the walking sound effect, sped up. And . . . glitching. It makes a little pop-squeak sound, now. I guess the cuteness is unintentional.) Using this control scheme, we can quite flawlessly navigate the town in first-person. If you see a suspicious barrel, hoist the Wii-mote up out of your crotch and point it at the TV. Click on the barrel, and its top flips off. You got an herb! Wow. It’s like one of those point-and-click adventures all over again. Yeah. You know what this game is? It’s the world’s first FPDQ.
Then you leave the town.
Click a location on the world map to enter a stage. Now, here you are. Out in the wilderness. The very first stage pits you against a bolt-straight path through a grassy field, headed for a cave in the side of a mountain. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to walk straight down that path, straight into that cave, and straight through to the boss. Beat the boss, and you’ll be shown a status report: how many enemies you killed, how many you let get away, how much damage you scored, et cetera.
The catch is, you can’t deviate from the path. All you can do is walk straight forward or slowly step backward. You can’t even turn around. All turning around would accomplish is to make you realize that you can’t fight any enemy party more than once. My first run-through of the game, I was so excited to be swinging a controller at my TV that I barely had time to notice this potential for joylessness. It was more like a creeping suspicion, that first time through. Either way, it spoiled my full enjoyment.
One could justify the game’s design choices, kind of. The dungeons aren’t “dungeons” so much as they’re DQ-flavored “action stages”. You walk from fight to fight. The fights are exhilarating. Sometimes you ace a battle, sometimes you make a couple mistakes. The aces make you feel awesome, the mistakes make you want to do better next time. Between run-throughs of stages, you can assess your performance, buy new weapons or armor, and head back and try it again. Never before has a Dragon Quest encouraged such nonchalant controller-passing, either: give the Wii-mote to a buddy and tell him to try an action stage. It’s a nice kind of a camaraderie, a good beverage-sipping game (just don’t sip beverage during a battle, when your arms are flailing). You won’t mind your friends playing your save file because, really, there’s nothing they can mess up. And therein, kind of, lies the flaw.
In a game with all the trappings of an epic adventure, it just never feels like your epic adventure. The most brilliant way to capsulate this vacant feeling is to merely describe what happens between battles in an action stage: absolutely nothing. You just keep walking. Straight down the path. You may not deviate. Win two battles in a row and then walk backward, all the way to the front of the stage, and you can enjoy a super-slow, merry stroll. You can stand still and drink your way through an entire six-pack of beer, and the white clouds wafting in the blue sky won’t know any better. The action stages, shockingly, are wallpaper. And even more shockingly still, it makes you realize that that’s typically all videogames are, is wallpaper. I could do without the existential dread, Square-Enix!
What a role-playing game (RPG) should do is tell me a story, make me forget it’s all just wallpaper. Japanese-style RPGs take a lot of guff in the game-critique community for being vapid and shallow button-mashers with sub-literary stories. Personally, I’ve always tried to give them more credit than they’re perhaps due, probably because game designers deserve encouragement too, yeah? In recent years, I’ve wondered why the battle systems in RPGs — the oft-criticised, oft-bemoaned battle systems — are always so drab and boring. Xenogears might have been recognized as brilliant, if the battle system hadn’t been plain as hell. What about all these Gundam games? Why can’t someone make an RPG with an action-packed, dynamic battle system? How about the plot, pacing, and love that a developer puts into an RPG, applied to one of those giant-robot action games, or even a Dynasty Warriors-like action schlock-fest? Would it be too much to budget? Game developers would rather divide up the talent: have team A make a slow-paced game with a great story that some people will like, and have team B make a fast-paced schlock-opera that some other people will like. Some people might like both — well, they can buy both. Maybe it’s naive to imply that someone should at least try to please everyone at once. Though really. Maybe if Xenosaga‘s battle system had at least matched the, um, ambition of its story, it wouldn’t be regarded as the most fantastic bullet-train-wreck in Japanese game design history.
. . . Right?
Or maybe it would have just revealed how pale the rest of the game is. Hmmm.
Dragon Quest Swords has a hell of a battle system. Enemies pop up on the screen. You slash at them. There’s more to it than that, though. Sometimes the enemies are far away. They might cast a spell — hold down the B-button to change your pointer to a shield! The spell’s target location shows as an orange dot on the screen. Hold the shield over the orange dot to block the spell. Sometimes enemies get really close. It’s hard to do damage when they’re too close, so use the shield to block their physical attacks. It can get pretty tricky: you have to be looking for actual visual cues. Some enemies will fly at you in formations. Press the A button to lock on to a specific point of the screen. Now swing the Wii-mote horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in order to hit all of the enemies at once. (Some people have complained about the screen-locking, though seriously, if I had to slash a precise vector every time I wanted to take out a line of enemies, I’d have probably not bothered to play through the game. Enix have studied the Wii-mote in all its glory, and made the right design choice.) Some enemies might prefer to stay back and shoot projectiles — like, say, arrows — at you. The arrows’ targets will be marked with little blue dots. Lock on to the blue dot, and then swing the Wii-mote with the correct level of fierceness, and in the right direction, to send the arrow back. The geometry gets even more interesting when two or three arrows are coming at you at once. Occasionally, you’ll meet an enemy that can only be slashed vertically, not horizontally, and sometimes, you’ll have to block an enemy’s attack in order to get him to fall back and open himself to your own attack, and sometimes, these enemies won’t attack you if you’re just standing there holding your shield up. Sometimes, you’ll need to “lunge” at enemies by locking on to their location and jabbing the Wii-mote at the screen.
These are the basic elements of the battle system, and it’s mildly fascinating to see how many permutations the designers can put them through without it ever feeling old. If you’re really good at it, or really bad at it, however, the weirdest little quirks become visible. Namely, it’s not much fun if you’re very good, and it’s too easy if you’re very bad. Let’s put it this way: most enemies’ middle-strength attacks will knock you back for a full five to ten (maddening) seconds if you’re hit, so you can assess the battle without danger of being hit by any of the other enemies. Get hit too much, and you’ve still no worries: you can open the menu at any time, which pauses the action, so you can heal yourself. Your partner will probably be healing you at all times anyway, though if he or she runs out of magic, you can use an herb on yourself. (As a side-note, the menus are great. Very Wii-mote-optimized. After surviving Resident Evil 4 for Wii’s menus, I’m tipping my hat at Dragon Quest Swords.) If you run out of herbs and magic, you can just head back to town by choosing “Head back to town” from the menu at any time, even during a battle. There, you can spend all your money on new armor or weapon upgrades.
The first armor upgrade boosts your “defense” stat from 3 to 7. The second upgrade boosts your “defense” from 7 to 22.
Math fans in the audience: you now have enough information to solve the mystery of “Who Killed Dragon Quest Swords?”
Exhibit B: the sound effect that plays when your sword is fully charged. The sound effect, a radiating “SHOOON”, is something like the mental reverberation that occurs when it’s time to stop delaying and put on the god damned condom — before it’s too late. When the sword is charged, you can pull off a deathblow attack, which is basically a super-strong attack that kills everything on the screen if it’s done correctly. Doing it correctly requires mild precision in a Wario Ware-like mini-challenge. Hit, and the sword depletes to 0%. If you miss, your sword is depleted to 90%, so that you’ll be back up to 100% in no time. Even from this, we can crayon-draw a loopy line straight to a red hand: the better you are at the deathblow attacks, the less frequently you’ll be asked to use them; the worse you are at the deathblow attacks, the more frequently you’ll be asked to attempt and then fail them. This isn’t even the clue, though: the clue is the sound effect. It’s loud and piercing. It cuts right through the heart of a battle, letting you know your sword is charged. In Final Fantasy VII, a character’s “FIGHT” command is highlighted in pink when their “LIMIT” gauge is full. If you don’t want to use that character’s Limit Break, you can just keep putting it off for several battles, until a boss battle, if needs be. In Dragon Quest Swords, it isn’t that simple. The sound persists. Even when the battle ends, the sound persists, even as you continue to walk slowly, stand still, or peruse the menu. It reminds me of this microwave I had once, which kept beeping every thirty seconds after the burrito was done cooking, to remind me, hey, jackass, you have a burrito in the microwave, and it’s getting cold.
Likewise, the game commits the 3D Zelda Sin, and sees fit to throw up a tutorial window in front of your face every single time you meet a new enemy whose projectiles can be slashed back at him with your sword. If only the first tutorial window had mentioned something about all attacks with blue target markers being returnable! Well, maybe it did, and maybe the designers just knew we weren’t going to read that tutorial window, anyway. Again, we recall the mad-scientist-like discovery of Team 3D Zelda: players absent-minded enough to forget that keys unlock doors have probably lost the box and the instruction manual, though miraculously not the game.
What this all indicates — well — I won’t dare put it into words, for fear of being flamed. All I can say is that, maybe, “Nothing in excess” isn’t the best rule for designing videogames. Maybe there always should be at least one thing in excess. Let’s leave it at that. There you go. I’m done.
Okay, maybe not: the simplest way to put it is that Dragon Quest Swords is a brilliant, shining shell. It has some ripe gameplay concepts that could, quite easily, be popped into place in a game of more integrity. It gives me a newfound appreciation for scenario in RPGs — why not just take the scenario of, say, Dragon Quest VI, render the game in first-person 3D, and replace all of the random, turn-based battles in the minutely-plotted dungeons with these clever action-based challenges? Because that would make the game too hard for some people, obviously, and this new age of videogames isn’t about that. We can’t render a huge quest in a game if we’re not certain that everyone will be able to get through it to the very end. Millions of people play these things; in Japan, if a Dragon Quest was too hard, people would give up, and then, when the next one came out, they’d think, “Well, I didn’t quite finish the last one, did I?” If nothing else, these games are balancing acts, and Yuji Horii is a veritable master of the tightrope, a king of the flying trapeze, able to smoke a cigarette and down a snifter of brandy even when upside-down. This kind of action-heavy play is a loose cannon, and it’s just exciting enough to tip the scales, to send Dragon Quest Swords down into the fiery hell of games that just weren’t made as well as they could have been. As-is, the game doesn’t take a moment to flirt with any dynamic possibilities, and just squanders every damned moment of its running time; it takes until 90% of the way through the game for the designers to realize that hey, they can have multiple paths through stages, which are activated by the players’ performance in battle, and then about two-percent more of game for them to drop it altogether in favor of keeping everyone — even Comatose Grandpa — from feeling inadequate. And then there are drop-dead-Square-like, physiologically appalling spots, like how the game doesn’t offer to buy back your old armor right away after you buy new armor, nor does it let you sell something that’s currently equipped (Dragon Quest VIII did, damn it), even if the shield you want to sell is worth just enough to bump your current supply of gold to the price of the new shield. The truth is clear as mud: the game doesn’t want you to be without a shield for even a second, because then you might forget to ever equip the shield again, and when one of the pop-up tutorial menus in the final stage mentions the B button and the shield and you press the B button and there’s no shield, your tiny head might explode. Either that, or because the coal-tar-stuffters at Square got the better of the production, and forced in as much menu-navigation as possible. They — the men who play PowerPoint like a piano — call that “replay value”.
I’m going to be as mean as possible in the next paragraph. Maybe it’ll be funny, though it probably won’t be.
Why it took them seven extra months of stalling, of inverse wheedling, to release this game, I have no clue. They could have thrown it on the hecking Wii Play disc and got it over with. I’d dare to say that it isn’t even a real hecking game. Sure, you can play the stages over again, though why would you bother? To get higher scores? To make money to buy more groovy items, so you can have one of every sword? Or you can be extra daring, and take the secret path hidden in each level. Yes, this would be the part of each level where, after a fork where you’re given a chance to go left or right, you end up walking five feet into a solid wall and then being told you have to turn around, and then returning to the fork. Once you beat the game, go back to those forks, and get your revenge on that wall to, eventually, find a hidden final boss. This kind of OCD just isn’t fun in Dragon Quest Swords, when the only action between battles is stoned walking, imprisoned between two invisible brick walls, unable even to rotate your character’s head left or right. Almost everything about this game, come to think of it, is an afterthought, the only fore-thought being “Let’s make a game about slashing with the Wiimote, and let’s make it straightforward enough for lobotomites to play”. They didn’t put in any, say, puzzles, I guess, because that would distract the team from the meat: the battle system. I guess, if you put it that way, it sounds noble. Though guess what, jackass? It’s not noble. It’s actually kind of pathetic! The developers knew they had a surefire hit on their hands — phenomenally selling console, casual fans popping out of the woodwork — and this whole cancer of an industry is too bone-headed to shake off the “only the first weeks of sales matters” mentality, so the game ends up, essentially, a shell — not even half a game, or a quarter of a game, or even an eighth of a game: it’s a sixteenth of a videogame. Square-Enix, whose last dozen or so “big” games have ended up on the bargain racks, needs to learn, like Nintendo has, to harness the power of the word-of-mouth sell. Because right now, the word-of-mouth on the street is that Dragon Quest Swords isn’t worth six thousand yen, and that word is right. It gets two stars for the gall and the balls possessed by its benefactors, who published a game with a design document apparently written by a six-year-old. (For comparison, Kingdom Hearts gets zero stars on account of the forty-year-old who wrote its design document’s being mentally handicapped.)
Oh, well.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the odd “I’d rather play my real guitar instead of Guitar Hero” argument doesn’t quite apply to Dragon Quest Swords; it’s with the weirdest sensation of guilt that I admit the reason I wouldn’t rather swing a real sword than play Dragon Quest Swords is because I would probably rather play a real Dragon Quest game. In that sense, Dragon Quest Swords is to Guitar Hero as a regular Dragon Quest game is to a real guitar. Puzzling times, indeed.
Another sign of puzzling times: Akira Toriyama’s character designs. Some of them, like the father — who used to be the greatest swordsman in the kingdom, until he lost a hand, which is now replaced with a robotic metal hand, which you would imagine might make him a better swordsman — are pretty inspired. The prince is unlike any nobleman Toriyama has designed before. The young girl character, however, a gothic lolita of the highest distinction, is already being moaned about on the internet: “why must Toriyama give in to the times and make a maid-like gothic lolita character? Has he no dignity!?” These same complainers might have said as recently as two weeks ago that all Toriyama ever does is draw the same three faces. Make up your minds, people! I find the character designs a remarkable gesture; as long as Toriyama’s willing to design characters, I’m willing to have him design characters. I’m not the biggest fan or anything, though hey, he’ll be missed when he retires. Distinctiveness is something games have all too little of and too much of at the same time. If the gothic lolita in Dragon Quest Swords is Toriyama’s way of imitating Kingdom Hearts‘ Tetsuya Nomura, then it’s even more classy than I thought. Nomura obviously got into videogame character design because he was a fan of Toriyama; he asked himself, one day, “What would [Dragon Ball Z’s] Son Goku look like, if he was real?” and then answered his own question, by drawing a cartoon character who would eventually be named Cloud. If art is self-expression and design is theft, then getting better with age requires a pinch of in-breeding. Mr. Toriyama, we look forward to Dragon Quest X, as long as it’s not for the Nintendo Wii. To everyone involved: thanks for the preview. It was kind of fun. You know my number; give me a ring the next time you decide to release a real game.
★★☆☆
“THE VIDEOGAME I'VE WANTED TO PLAY SINCE I WAS SIX YEARS OLD.”
I’ve wanted to play Dragon Quest Swords since I was six years old. Back then, of course, my parents and schoolteachers were confused as to whether I was Gifted and Talented or just mentally &^#$#ed, and in such a state of emotional probation, it would have been rare (and probably perverted) of anyone to give the time of day to a design document I’d banged out with a pair of purple crayons. I hardly even knew what Dragon Quest was, and all I could think about is how awesome it would be to swing a sword at a television. Well, I’ll tell you one thing I was for sure back then: I was unemployed. I certainly didn’t have enough money to buy a condo with my credit card, I’ll tell you that much. What I did have was a large forest near the house, and fields and rivers and creeks and hills to play in, me and my brother bleating and screaming at each other with toy guys. That was a hell of a something to do. Ultimately, it was probably better than playing videogames. Too bad we ended up in Tokyo, where environmentalists and educators united to declare in 1991 that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was more wholesome than the actual outdoors, what with all the rapists in panda costumes and abandoned amusement parks we seem to have growing like fungus in the back alleys around here.
Twenty-some years have passed, and any kid in his right mind would rather play Gears of War on his big brother’s Xbox 360 than with some broken GI Joes in the rumpus room. Action figures are, perhaps slowly, hurtling into obscurity — now almost exclusively the playthings of seriously adjusted adult collectors with full-time jobs — because videogames are able to reproduce at least the same thrills without requiring any of the imagination. Dragon Quest Swords is a mutant fried-chicken-wing of videogame design. It’s half action-figure, half videogame. It’s half a serenade to that little boy fallen headfirst into the well of our hearts, who used to heave a giant rubber Godzilla twenty feet across the living room, toward Cobra Commander’s giant purple plastic headquarters, filled to the gills with meticulously posed Star Wars figures at action stations, and it’s halfway just another Dragon Quest game. It’s halfway a joyful exploitation of the Nintendo Wii’s remote-control gimmick, and halfway a disappointing clash of cool concept versus watered-down execution.
A couple of years ago, Square-Enix released Kenshin Dragon Quest, which was, at the time, kind of a shameful thing, though also kind of hilarious, and also kind of awesome. Sporting a box large enough to contain delicious cereal and coated in original art by Akira Toriyama, Kenshin Dragon Quest was essentially a plastic sword that you plugged into the yellow and white jacks on your television. There was, somehow, a game inside that plastic casing. They showed this at Tokyo Game Show — the line to play it was bafflingly three hours long. I took a picture of a guy swinging the plastic sword at a television, and later loaded the photo onto a computer workstation, where I realized that the sword was glowing fiercely white, like a lightsaber. At first, I wondered if the sword had been, perhaps, possessed by the ghost of a vampire, though I soon realized: that’s how the TV knows where the sword is.
When released, the game had an odd amount of depth. There was walking, there was fighting, there was leveling-up, there was Dragoning, there was Questing. It was good enough, when one considered it was a plastic sword that you plug into your television. I first played it with a playground-like delight, then eventually felt a little stupid and guilty. To make a menu choice, you have to hold the sword up, and point it at the choice you want to make, and keep it held there for a couple of seconds. That feels kind of weird; it feels kind of like Sony’s EyeToy games for PlayStation 2 (while we’re at it: why does no one yell at Nintendo for “stealing” the DS’s touch-screen concept from the EyeToy? enough people yelled at Sony for “stealing” motion controls, hell). Though eventually, one remembers those “Captain Power” TV games from the early 1990s: you aim a plastic toy spaceship with a gun handle at a television playing a videotape of hokey animation full of epilepsy-inducing orange patterns that, when detected by your ship’s light sensor, cause you “damage”. If enough “damage” is scored, the action figure in the pilot’s seat is ejected. The thing is, “Captain Power” was only ever just a videotape; it couldn’t assess your performance any way other than negatively. It could only tell you “You Lose”, and never “You Win”. (If we wanted to keep beating off to this rhythm, we could mention Tetris, and how the only things you can see in Tetris are your mistakes, the blocks “left behind” after a successful line-clear. In Tetris, when you lose (and lose you must), you growl and start over. At least Tetris can tell you your score.) All “Captain Power” did, to the kids unfortunate enough to stumble across it at a yard sale in 1993 and beg their mothers to buy it, was instill a kind of gentle, furious justification for rule-breaking: if Captain Power gets ejected, you just put him right back in the hecking pilot’s seat like nothing happened, maybe yell at mom if those frozen pizzas are done yet.
A year after Kenshin Dragon Quest was released, Square-Enix released Dragon Quest VIII for the Sony PlayStation 2, and my, it was such a gorgeous little videogame. It was the biggest little videogame in the world. Like the original Dragon Quest many years before it, it wore its heart on its sleeve, only now its sleeve was so three-dimensional and lovable and touchable. The adventure was huge, the environments painstakingly rendered, and the insides of houses looked so lived-in. The color palettes were breathtaking. The battle system was the same as ever — the same as in all seven Dragon Quest games before it — and no one whose opinion is worth trusting really cared too much, because the heart of the game lies in the adventure, anyway, hence the word “Quest” in the title.
A year later, Nintendo announced the true shape and form of their Nintendo “Revolution” controller. A video presentation shown at the press conference contained footage of an interview with Yuji Horii, Dragon Quest series producer. He said he found the controller quite brilliant, and he looked forward to developing something for it. A year later, the name of the “Revolution” was revealed: it would be called the “Wii”. A game called Dragon Quest Swords would be a launch title. Japan halfway imploded, then halfway exploded. In other words, Japan ended up pretty much how they’d been to begin with, only after experiencing a little quick and drastic pressure change.
Dragon Quest Swords didn’t make the launch window. One thing that did make the Wii launch window, however, was the announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be an action game for the Nintendo DS. The collective gasp-scream sucked the air out of the island of Honshuu for a full three seconds.
Dragon Quest Swords would actually be released eight months after the release of the Wii, though before that, it was announced that Dragon Quest IX would not, as previously reported, be an action game. Rather, it would be a multiplayer menu-based RPG. Half the world hated this revelation; the game, nonetheless, still sits at the top of Weekly Famitsu‘s top-twenty “Most Wanted” games chart, leading Final Fantasy XIII for the PlayStation 3 by some 500 votes, at the time of this writing.
Why did they change Dragon Quest IX back to a menu-based battle system? Yuji Horii said, in an interview, that too many people were scared of it being an action game. Blame Famitsu, then, for running a four-page feature of reader moans and groans.
Playing Dragon Quest Swords, though, I’m not really sure if that was the case. It’s a subtle thing to put precisely into words. Let’s try:
Dragon Quest Swords kind of sucks. It also kind of doesn’t suck. It’s in the weirdest state of flux.
Let’s try to talk about the good stuff. First of all: it’s a Dragon Quest game. It has precisely one town, though that town is big and bright and beautifully rendered, like the towns in our darling Dragon Quest VIII. There’s curious, flames-of-fantasy-igniting architecture on display, like the giant stone staircase leading from the bottom of the town up to the castle. There are shops to buy items, weapons, armor. The characters in town all have friendly faces, and many of them speak in animated voices: this is the first Dragon Quest released in Japan to feature any voice acting, as such.
The story segments are lovingly presented, as well — about as lovingly as the segments in Dragon Quest VIII, plus voices, and delightful midi music by either the great Koichi Sugiyama or the kind-of-great Manami Matsumae, whose compositions are almost indistinguishable (she’s no doubt been astutely listening for years). The story itself is a little (or, well, a lot) thin: you play the part of a boy who’s just turned sixteen years of age, which means you’re old enough to be recognized as a man, though only if you complete the hero’s trial at the dungeon-like cave close to town. Complete the task, and the prince confides in you: his mother has been acting strange lately. She’s wearing a weird mask and seldom leaving her room. Go with the prince, now, on adventures to discover the nature of the mask. On your first hiking expedition together, you’ll meet a big-haired, rag-doll-like Gothic Lolita named Setia, who, should you select her as your questing partner instead of the prince, will incessantly tell you you’re cool and/or strong at precisely the exact same point during each loop of the battle music, in addition to casting a spell that makes your shield bigger. If only I could find a girlfriend with such attention to detail. The full title of the game is Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors, which makes it the first Dragon Quest adventure to name a dungeon in its title. I’ve already told you about the “Masked Queen”. You can probably guess the rest of the story, maybe with the assistance of some crayons. Just because you can approximate its narrative arc with crayons and construction paper, however, doesn’t mean that Dragon Quest Swords can’t end with a nice little splash of emotion. Though when it does, it kind of feels like Dragon Quest: The Spirits Within, taking all the feelings normally evoked in a Dragon Quest game and condensing them all into an easily digestible goo of entertainment. Too bad that the preceding 99% of the game has been pandering nonsense-bullstuff.
Yes: the biggest and blackest blotch on Dragon Quest Swords‘ report card would be that it took me four hours of casual, mostly-naked play to complete. Yes, four hours. I’m normally not one to complain about the lengths of games, seriously. My favorite game ever, Super Mario Bros. 3, can be bested in less than an hour. However, in the case of Dragon Quest Swords, which comes from a long line of excessively long-winded games, the shortness is a symptom of a minor-class disaster. There is love in its construction, though there’s hardly any empathy. It’s the first Japan-released Dragon Quest to feature voices, though it does so at the cost of featuring only a fraction of a story, a fragment of a “Quest”, a mere sliver of the attention granted to other games in the series — though not without half of a good reason.
Tragically, however, the game’s thinness is most startlingly revealed by just how thick and juicy the good parts are. I’m talking about the control scheme. It’s wonderful. At a Nintendo Wii event in Chiba in 2006, the game was playable, and it required both the nunchuk and the Wii-mote to play; soon after, the game missed its launch-window release date. By the time the Square-Enix Party event in early 2007 rolled around, the game only required the Wii-mote. Someone on the team had seen through the bullstuff. Why should you need the nunchuk? You can walk perfectly fine with the D-pad on the Wii-mote (though I’d still kind of wish it was just an analog stick). I mean, what else is it there for? Press up on the Wii-mote’s D-pad to walk forward, or just keep the B button trigger held, and use left and right on the pad to steer. Listen to the cute little footsteps coming out of the Wii-mote speaker! Press the B button and up on the pad at the same time to run. Listen to the cute running sound effect coming out of the Wii-mote speaker! (Oh, wait, it’s just the walking sound effect, sped up. And . . . glitching. It makes a little pop-squeak sound, now. I guess the cuteness is unintentional.) Using this control scheme, we can quite flawlessly navigate the town in first-person. If you see a suspicious barrel, hoist the Wii-mote up out of your crotch and point it at the TV. Click on the barrel, and its top flips off. You got an herb! Wow. It’s like one of those point-and-click adventures all over again. Yeah. You know what this game is? It’s the world’s first FPDQ.
Then you leave the town.
Click a location on the world map to enter a stage. Now, here you are. Out in the wilderness. The very first stage pits you against a bolt-straight path through a grassy field, headed for a cave in the side of a mountain. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to walk straight down that path, straight into that cave, and straight through to the boss. Beat the boss, and you’ll be shown a status report: how many enemies you killed, how many you let get away, how much damage you scored, et cetera.
The catch is, you can’t deviate from the path. All you can do is walk straight forward or slowly step backward. You can’t even turn around. All turning around would accomplish is to make you realize that you can’t fight any enemy party more than once. My first run-through of the game, I was so excited to be swinging a controller at my TV that I barely had time to notice this potential for joylessness. It was more like a creeping suspicion, that first time through. Either way, it spoiled my full enjoyment.
One could justify the game’s design choices, kind of. The dungeons aren’t “dungeons” so much as they’re DQ-flavored “action stages”. You walk from fight to fight. The fights are exhilarating. Sometimes you ace a battle, sometimes you make a couple mistakes. The aces make you feel awesome, the mistakes make you want to do better next time. Between run-throughs of stages, you can assess your performance, buy new weapons or armor, and head back and try it again. Never before has a Dragon Quest encouraged such nonchalant controller-passing, either: give the Wii-mote to a buddy and tell him to try an action stage. It’s a nice kind of a camaraderie, a good beverage-sipping game (just don’t sip beverage during a battle, when your arms are flailing). You won’t mind your friends playing your save file because, really, there’s nothing they can mess up. And therein, kind of, lies the flaw.
In a game with all the trappings of an epic adventure, it just never feels like your epic adventure. The most brilliant way to capsulate this vacant feeling is to merely describe what happens between battles in an action stage: absolutely nothing. You just keep walking. Straight down the path. You may not deviate. Win two battles in a row and then walk backward, all the way to the front of the stage, and you can enjoy a super-slow, merry stroll. You can stand still and drink your way through an entire six-pack of beer, and the white clouds wafting in the blue sky won’t know any better. The action stages, shockingly, are wallpaper. And even more shockingly still, it makes you realize that that’s typically all videogames are, is wallpaper. I could do without the existential dread, Square-Enix!
What a role-playing game (RPG) should do is tell me a story, make me forget it’s all just wallpaper. Japanese-style RPGs take a lot of guff in the game-critique community for being vapid and shallow button-mashers with sub-literary stories. Personally, I’ve always tried to give them more credit than they’re perhaps due, probably because game designers deserve encouragement too, yeah? In recent years, I’ve wondered why the battle systems in RPGs — the oft-criticised, oft-bemoaned battle systems — are always so drab and boring. Xenogears might have been recognized as brilliant, if the battle system hadn’t been plain as hell. What about all these Gundam games? Why can’t someone make an RPG with an action-packed, dynamic battle system? How about the plot, pacing, and love that a developer puts into an RPG, applied to one of those giant-robot action games, or even a Dynasty Warriors-like action schlock-fest? Would it be too much to budget? Game developers would rather divide up the talent: have team A make a slow-paced game with a great story that some people will like, and have team B make a fast-paced schlock-opera that some other people will like. Some people might like both — well, they can buy both. Maybe it’s naive to imply that someone should at least try to please everyone at once. Though really. Maybe if Xenosaga‘s battle system had at least matched the, um, ambition of its story, it wouldn’t be regarded as the most fantastic bullet-train-wreck in Japanese game design history.
. . . Right?
Or maybe it would have just revealed how pale the rest of the game is. Hmmm.
Dragon Quest Swords has a hell of a battle system. Enemies pop up on the screen. You slash at them. There’s more to it than that, though. Sometimes the enemies are far away. They might cast a spell — hold down the B-button to change your pointer to a shield! The spell’s target location shows as an orange dot on the screen. Hold the shield over the orange dot to block the spell. Sometimes enemies get really close. It’s hard to do damage when they’re too close, so use the shield to block their physical attacks. It can get pretty tricky: you have to be looking for actual visual cues. Some enemies will fly at you in formations. Press the A button to lock on to a specific point of the screen. Now swing the Wii-mote horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in order to hit all of the enemies at once. (Some people have complained about the screen-locking, though seriously, if I had to slash a precise vector every time I wanted to take out a line of enemies, I’d have probably not bothered to play through the game. Enix have studied the Wii-mote in all its glory, and made the right design choice.) Some enemies might prefer to stay back and shoot projectiles — like, say, arrows — at you. The arrows’ targets will be marked with little blue dots. Lock on to the blue dot, and then swing the Wii-mote with the correct level of fierceness, and in the right direction, to send the arrow back. The geometry gets even more interesting when two or three arrows are coming at you at once. Occasionally, you’ll meet an enemy that can only be slashed vertically, not horizontally, and sometimes, you’ll have to block an enemy’s attack in order to get him to fall back and open himself to your own attack, and sometimes, these enemies won’t attack you if you’re just standing there holding your shield up. Sometimes, you’ll need to “lunge” at enemies by locking on to their location and jabbing the Wii-mote at the screen.
These are the basic elements of the battle system, and it’s mildly fascinating to see how many permutations the designers can put them through without it ever feeling old. If you’re really good at it, or really bad at it, however, the weirdest little quirks become visible. Namely, it’s not much fun if you’re very good, and it’s too easy if you’re very bad. Let’s put it this way: most enemies’ middle-strength attacks will knock you back for a full five to ten (maddening) seconds if you’re hit, so you can assess the battle without danger of being hit by any of the other enemies. Get hit too much, and you’ve still no worries: you can open the menu at any time, which pauses the action, so you can heal yourself. Your partner will probably be healing you at all times anyway, though if he or she runs out of magic, you can use an herb on yourself. (As a side-note, the menus are great. Very Wii-mote-optimized. After surviving Resident Evil 4 for Wii’s menus, I’m tipping my hat at Dragon Quest Swords.) If you run out of herbs and magic, you can just head back to town by choosing “Head back to town” from the menu at any time, even during a battle. There, you can spend all your money on new armor or weapon upgrades.
The first armor upgrade boosts your “defense” stat from 3 to 7. The second upgrade boosts your “defense” from 7 to 22.
Math fans in the audience: you now have enough information to solve the mystery of “Who Killed Dragon Quest Swords?”
Exhibit B: the sound effect that plays when your sword is fully charged. The sound effect, a radiating “SHOOON”, is something like the mental reverberation that occurs when it’s time to stop delaying and put on the god damned condom — before it’s too late. When the sword is charged, you can pull off a deathblow attack, which is basically a super-strong attack that kills everything on the screen if it’s done correctly. Doing it correctly requires mild precision in a Wario Ware-like mini-challenge. Hit, and the sword depletes to 0%. If you miss, your sword is depleted to 90%, so that you’ll be back up to 100% in no time. Even from this, we can crayon-draw a loopy line straight to a red hand: the better you are at the deathblow attacks, the less frequently you’ll be asked to use them; the worse you are at the deathblow attacks, the more frequently you’ll be asked to attempt and then fail them. This isn’t even the clue, though: the clue is the sound effect. It’s loud and piercing. It cuts right through the heart of a battle, letting you know your sword is charged. In Final Fantasy VII, a character’s “FIGHT” command is highlighted in pink when their “LIMIT” gauge is full. If you don’t want to use that character’s Limit Break, you can just keep putting it off for several battles, until a boss battle, if needs be. In Dragon Quest Swords, it isn’t that simple. The sound persists. Even when the battle ends, the sound persists, even as you continue to walk slowly, stand still, or peruse the menu. It reminds me of this microwave I had once, which kept beeping every thirty seconds after the burrito was done cooking, to remind me, hey, jackass, you have a burrito in the microwave, and it’s getting cold.
Likewise, the game commits the 3D Zelda Sin, and sees fit to throw up a tutorial window in front of your face every single time you meet a new enemy whose projectiles can be slashed back at him with your sword. If only the first tutorial window had mentioned something about all attacks with blue target markers being returnable! Well, maybe it did, and maybe the designers just knew we weren’t going to read that tutorial window, anyway. Again, we recall the mad-scientist-like discovery of Team 3D Zelda: players absent-minded enough to forget that keys unlock doors have probably lost the box and the instruction manual, though miraculously not the game.
What this all indicates — well — I won’t dare put it into words, for fear of being flamed. All I can say is that, maybe, “Nothing in excess” isn’t the best rule for designing videogames. Maybe there always should be at least one thing in excess. Let’s leave it at that. There you go. I’m done.
Okay, maybe not: the simplest way to put it is that Dragon Quest Swords is a brilliant, shining shell. It has some ripe gameplay concepts that could, quite easily, be popped into place in a game of more integrity. It gives me a newfound appreciation for scenario in RPGs — why not just take the scenario of, say, Dragon Quest VI, render the game in first-person 3D, and replace all of the random, turn-based battles in the minutely-plotted dungeons with these clever action-based challenges? Because that would make the game too hard for some people, obviously, and this new age of videogames isn’t about that. We can’t render a huge quest in a game if we’re not certain that everyone will be able to get through it to the very end. Millions of people play these things; in Japan, if a Dragon Quest was too hard, people would give up, and then, when the next one came out, they’d think, “Well, I didn’t quite finish the last one, did I?” If nothing else, these games are balancing acts, and Yuji Horii is a veritable master of the tightrope, a king of the flying trapeze, able to smoke a cigarette and down a snifter of brandy even when upside-down. This kind of action-heavy play is a loose cannon, and it’s just exciting enough to tip the scales, to send Dragon Quest Swords down into the fiery hell of games that just weren’t made as well as they could have been. As-is, the game doesn’t take a moment to flirt with any dynamic possibilities, and just squanders every damned moment of its running time; it takes until 90% of the way through the game for the designers to realize that hey, they can have multiple paths through stages, which are activated by the players’ performance in battle, and then about two-percent more of game for them to drop it altogether in favor of keeping everyone — even Comatose Grandpa — from feeling inadequate. And then there are drop-dead-Square-like, physiologically appalling spots, like how the game doesn’t offer to buy back your old armor right away after you buy new armor, nor does it let you sell something that’s currently equipped (Dragon Quest VIII did, damn it), even if the shield you want to sell is worth just enough to bump your current supply of gold to the price of the new shield. The truth is clear as mud: the game doesn’t want you to be without a shield for even a second, because then you might forget to ever equip the shield again, and when one of the pop-up tutorial menus in the final stage mentions the B button and the shield and you press the B button and there’s no shield, your tiny head might explode. Either that, or because the coal-tar-stuffters at Square got the better of the production, and forced in as much menu-navigation as possible. They — the men who play PowerPoint like a piano — call that “replay value”.
I’m going to be as mean as possible in the next paragraph. Maybe it’ll be funny, though it probably won’t be.
Why it took them seven extra months of stalling, of inverse wheedling, to release this game, I have no clue. They could have thrown it on the hecking Wii Play disc and got it over with. I’d dare to say that it isn’t even a real hecking game. Sure, you can play the stages over again, though why would you bother? To get higher scores? To make money to buy more groovy items, so you can have one of every sword? Or you can be extra daring, and take the secret path hidden in each level. Yes, this would be the part of each level where, after a fork where you’re given a chance to go left or right, you end up walking five feet into a solid wall and then being told you have to turn around, and then returning to the fork. Once you beat the game, go back to those forks, and get your revenge on that wall to, eventually, find a hidden final boss. This kind of OCD just isn’t fun in Dragon Quest Swords, when the only action between battles is stoned walking, imprisoned between two invisible brick walls, unable even to rotate your character’s head left or right. Almost everything about this game, come to think of it, is an afterthought, the only fore-thought being “Let’s make a game about slashing with the Wiimote, and let’s make it straightforward enough for lobotomites to play”. They didn’t put in any, say, puzzles, I guess, because that would distract the team from the meat: the battle system. I guess, if you put it that way, it sounds noble. Though guess what, jackass? It’s not noble. It’s actually kind of pathetic! The developers knew they had a surefire hit on their hands — phenomenally selling console, casual fans popping out of the woodwork — and this whole cancer of an industry is too bone-headed to shake off the “only the first weeks of sales matters” mentality, so the game ends up, essentially, a shell — not even half a game, or a quarter of a game, or even an eighth of a game: it’s a sixteenth of a videogame. Square-Enix, whose last dozen or so “big” games have ended up on the bargain racks, needs to learn, like Nintendo has, to harness the power of the word-of-mouth sell. Because right now, the word-of-mouth on the street is that Dragon Quest Swords isn’t worth six thousand yen, and that word is right. It gets two stars for the gall and the balls possessed by its benefactors, who published a game with a design document apparently written by a six-year-old. (For comparison, Kingdom Hearts gets zero stars on account of the forty-year-old who wrote its design document’s being mentally handicapped.)
Oh, well.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the odd “I’d rather play my real guitar instead of Guitar Hero” argument doesn’t quite apply to Dragon Quest Swords; it’s with the weirdest sensation of guilt that I admit the reason I wouldn’t rather swing a real sword than play Dragon Quest Swords is because I would probably rather play a real Dragon Quest game. In that sense, Dragon Quest Swords is to Guitar Hero as a regular Dragon Quest game is to a real guitar. Puzzling times, indeed.
Another sign of puzzling times: Akira Toriyama’s character designs. Some of them, like the father — who used to be the greatest swordsman in the kingdom, until he lost a hand, which is now replaced with a robotic metal hand, which you would imagine might make him a better swordsman — are pretty inspired. The prince is unlike any nobleman Toriyama has designed before. The young girl character, however, a gothic lolita of the highest distinction, is already being moaned about on the internet: “why must Toriyama give in to the times and make a maid-like gothic lolita character? Has he no dignity!?” These same complainers might have said as recently as two weeks ago that all Toriyama ever does is draw the same three faces. Make up your minds, people! I find the character designs a remarkable gesture; as long as Toriyama’s willing to design characters, I’m willing to have him design characters. I’m not the biggest fan or anything, though hey, he’ll be missed when he retires. Distinctiveness is something games have all too little of and too much of at the same time. If the gothic lolita in Dragon Quest Swords is Toriyama’s way of imitating Kingdom Hearts‘ Tetsuya Nomura, then it’s even more classy than I thought. Nomura obviously got into videogame character design because he was a fan of Toriyama; he asked himself, one day, “What would [Dragon Ball Z’s] Son Goku look like, if he was real?” and then answered his own question, by drawing a cartoon character who would eventually be named Cloud. If art is self-expression and design is theft, then getting better with age requires a pinch of in-breeding. Mr. Toriyama, we look forward to Dragon Quest X, as long as it’s not for the Nintendo Wii. To everyone involved: thanks for the preview. It was kind of fun. You know my number; give me a ring the next time you decide to release a real game.
text by Brandon Parker
★★★☆
“THE BEST MOVIE I EVER PLAYED.”
Once, in a junior high science class, the teacher asked the class what the scientific name for a wolf was. A girl next to me raised her hand. “Cannabis?” she asked. No, that wasn’t quite it. It was canis lupis of course. I knew because I played The Beast Within. You can learn things playing these games.
With each of the Gabriel Knight games you get practically a whole god damned tour and history lesson. The first game took place in New Orleans and involved voodoo. The third one is in a small French village and is about Da Vinci Code type stuff. The Beast Within is the second game in the series, it takes place in Germany. The first time I played it, I remember I didn’t care too much for the Bavarian history lesson on Mad King Ludwig II; I wanted to get back to hunting werewolves. Now, as a more mature and less bloodthirsty individual, I’ve come to appreciate it more. I even bought a biography on Ludwig so I could separate fact from the game’s fiction and educate myself further on the matter. Sure enough, I didn’t see anything in there that said he wasn’t a werewolf.
The Beast Within was the part of the series that was unable to get out in time before the big Full-Motion-Video Plague of the mid-nineties hit. I’m sure you remember it. That was where they filmed real people dressed up for the game, the idea being that it would be like controlling a movie. Of course, like anything in life, they always took the cheapest, most uncreative and stufftiest route available. The Best Within is the sole survivor of this pandemic that swept the nineties. To this day it still sits upon its lonely throne, formed from the bones of Sewer Shark, Night Trap and many other Sega-CD titles. Shining like a beacon of hope in the darkness, Gabriel Knight 2 is a symbol to inspire others to put the effort and thought towards a quality experience, rather than the dark and lazy path of cheapness and poor production values.
I still prefer the pixelated painting look of the older Sierra games though. In this one you’re walking around on top of postcards. It’s still better than those generic and lifeless pre-rendered and 3d backgrounds in modern adventure games. And since it’s an FMV game, with real people, I think it’s better at pulling off the horror atmosphere of the series than the cartoons in the other games. It’s never really scary, but I don’t find hardly any horror movies scary or very interesting though so what do I know. This one is interesting though, and while not scary it can be somewhat nerve-wracking at a few points. The story is more the focus here anyway.
Gabriel wanders around Munich looking for a lead in the mutilation killings, while his research assistant Grace reads books on Ludwig in libraries and goes to museums. Good idea, leaving the street work to the men. Though by the end, all the Ludwig and Richard Wagner stuff ends up tying into the modern day case. Jane Jensen, the writer of the Gabriel Knight games, also worked on King’s Quest 6 which happened to have the best writing out of all of them. So it seems she’s a good writer. She’s like Grace, researching the important stuff, trying to educate us, while we’re wandering around like a jackass looking for some hotspot to click on.
Let me tell you my favorite part of the game, since you aren’t going to play it anyway. Gabriel infiltrates a hunting club that he’s pretty sure has the murderer among its members. You go off with the club on a hunting trip at one of their lodges out in the middle of some Bavarian forest. So you’re isolated out there with a bunch of suspects. It’s then that you finally realize, “Oh stuff. One of these guys is a child eating wolf, better do something about that.” Because you’re pretty sure at that point the suspect knows you’re on to him and is going to use this opportunity to probably kill you, or something. I mean who knows what happens; you’ll have to play the game to see.
There’s also a part where you have to pray to a spirit for help to advance in the game so if you like Earthbound you might want to check this one out.
The acting in this game is pretty good. The only real bad acting is at the beginning when the villagers come to talk you into taking the case. I can’t tell if the guy who lost his daughter is so broken up he’s turned into some sort of vegetable man, like that guy in A Better Tomorrow 2, of if he’s just a terrible hecking actor, like that guy in A Better Tomorrow 2.
Dean Erickson, who plays Gabriel Knight here, is good, a real classy bastard. Especially since his only previous acting job was in a couple episodes of Frasier as a waiter. So it’s sort of depressing to find out he hasn’t acted since The Beast Within and went back to his original career as a real estate agent. Jane Jensen once said she’d want him back for Gabriel if it were a game that used “real people” again. Well now that we’re in some fancy HD-ADD era with photo-realistic textures and advanced motion capturing and whatnot I think it’s time to bring Dean back. If you’re ever given the chance to do another Gabriel Knight game, do this one thing for me Jane. I’m sure he’d be up for it.
Tim Curry is the guy who voices Gabriel in the other games, I’m not sure why but he’s usually the fan favorite. To me he just sounds less like a southern jackass struggling to adapt to his new role of modern day inquisitor, and more like convicted sex offender recently paroled and on the hunt for fresh victims. The two roles may sound similar Tim, but they aren’t, there’s subtle differences that I don’t think you have the range for. We need Dean for the job.
Dean Erickson for GK4.
★★★☆
“THE BEST MOVIE I EVER PLAYED.”
Once, in a junior high science class, the teacher asked the class what the scientific name for a wolf was. A girl next to me raised her hand. “Cannabis?” she asked. No, that wasn’t quite it. It was canis lupis of course. I knew because I played The Beast Within. You can learn things playing these games.
With each of the Gabriel Knight games you get practically a whole god damned tour and history lesson. The first game took place in New Orleans and involved voodoo. The third one is in a small French village and is about Da Vinci Code type stuff. The Beast Within is the second game in the series, it takes place in Germany. The first time I played it, I remember I didn’t care too much for the Bavarian history lesson on Mad King Ludwig II; I wanted to get back to hunting werewolves. Now, as a more mature and less bloodthirsty individual, I’ve come to appreciate it more. I even bought a biography on Ludwig so I could separate fact from the game’s fiction and educate myself further on the matter. Sure enough, I didn’t see anything in there that said he wasn’t a werewolf.
The Beast Within was the part of the series that was unable to get out in time before the big Full-Motion-Video Plague of the mid-nineties hit. I’m sure you remember it. That was where they filmed real people dressed up for the game, the idea being that it would be like controlling a movie. Of course, like anything in life, they always took the cheapest, most uncreative and stufftiest route available. The Best Within is the sole survivor of this pandemic that swept the nineties. To this day it still sits upon its lonely throne, formed from the bones of Sewer Shark, Night Trap and many other Sega-CD titles. Shining like a beacon of hope in the darkness, Gabriel Knight 2 is a symbol to inspire others to put the effort and thought towards a quality experience, rather than the dark and lazy path of cheapness and poor production values.
I still prefer the pixelated painting look of the older Sierra games though. In this one you’re walking around on top of postcards. It’s still better than those generic and lifeless pre-rendered and 3d backgrounds in modern adventure games. And since it’s an FMV game, with real people, I think it’s better at pulling off the horror atmosphere of the series than the cartoons in the other games. It’s never really scary, but I don’t find hardly any horror movies scary or very interesting though so what do I know. This one is interesting though, and while not scary it can be somewhat nerve-wracking at a few points. The story is more the focus here anyway.
Gabriel wanders around Munich looking for a lead in the mutilation killings, while his research assistant Grace reads books on Ludwig in libraries and goes to museums. Good idea, leaving the street work to the men. Though by the end, all the Ludwig and Richard Wagner stuff ends up tying into the modern day case. Jane Jensen, the writer of the Gabriel Knight games, also worked on King’s Quest 6 which happened to have the best writing out of all of them. So it seems she’s a good writer. She’s like Grace, researching the important stuff, trying to educate us, while we’re wandering around like a jackass looking for some hotspot to click on.
Let me tell you my favorite part of the game, since you aren’t going to play it anyway. Gabriel infiltrates a hunting club that he’s pretty sure has the murderer among its members. You go off with the club on a hunting trip at one of their lodges out in the middle of some Bavarian forest. So you’re isolated out there with a bunch of suspects. It’s then that you finally realize, “Oh stuff. One of these guys is a child eating wolf, better do something about that.” Because you’re pretty sure at that point the suspect knows you’re on to him and is going to use this opportunity to probably kill you, or something. I mean who knows what happens; you’ll have to play the game to see.
There’s also a part where you have to pray to a spirit for help to advance in the game so if you like Earthbound you might want to check this one out.
The acting in this game is pretty good. The only real bad acting is at the beginning when the villagers come to talk you into taking the case. I can’t tell if the guy who lost his daughter is so broken up he’s turned into some sort of vegetable man, like that guy in A Better Tomorrow 2, of if he’s just a terrible hecking actor, like that guy in A Better Tomorrow 2.
Dean Erickson, who plays Gabriel Knight here, is good, a real classy bastard. Especially since his only previous acting job was in a couple episodes of Frasier as a waiter. So it’s sort of depressing to find out he hasn’t acted since The Beast Within and went back to his original career as a real estate agent. Jane Jensen once said she’d want him back for Gabriel if it were a game that used “real people” again. Well now that we’re in some fancy HD-ADD era with photo-realistic textures and advanced motion capturing and whatnot I think it’s time to bring Dean back. If you’re ever given the chance to do another Gabriel Knight game, do this one thing for me Jane. I’m sure he’d be up for it.
Tim Curry is the guy who voices Gabriel in the other games, I’m not sure why but he’s usually the fan favorite. To me he just sounds less like a southern jackass struggling to adapt to his new role of modern day inquisitor, and more like convicted sex offender recently paroled and on the hunt for fresh victims. The two roles may sound similar Tim, but they aren’t, there’s subtle differences that I don’t think you have the range for. We need Dean for the job.
Dean Erickson for GK4.
2006
text by Christian McCrea
★★★★
“BEAT THEM UP. BEAT THEM ALL THE WAY UP.”
The litmus test is this: are you the type of person that played Gears of War and thought, “Yes: this is the future I was promised by my gaming forebears”? If so, then go right ahead and do whatever it is you do in your sad, blinkered, little worlds. It’s clear Tim Rogers liked it because he has a giant television, so he’s excused. The rest of you, those of you who thought Gears‘ “There’s the grub! Push him back into his hole!” was a tad creepy, from a “Forced Entry III: Boys Behind Bars” perspective, may want your camp heroics a little more with it, as it were. Before the dissolution of the promising Clover Studio, it was widely thought that God Hand could become the new Devil May Cry. If you looked at the electric fora, you would find people frothing at the chance to play an old-school beat-em-up. God Hand promised a return to the epoch of pain, where trigger-happy players had to scale mountains of difficulty to assert themselves over an unforgiving and cruel system. Combine that with a self-aware action hero and a gang of ready-to-beat mohawked punks, and you had what seemed a perfect formula. So who stuff the blanket on this one?
The sad truth is that nobody really got the joke. I don’t much give a damn as to the industrial side of games, because, frankly, the veil between being one of those people hitting refresh on a gaming forum three times a minute is thin. Given that, I don’t really understand how an outfit could turn out something so self-assured and potent and get the arse. Even as a branding exercise, Clover was surely worth spending a few. The menace and swagger with which both this and Okami take over your senses is pretty bewildering. In an era of cotton-wrapped, market-tested rubbish like Kingdom Hearts 2 and Gears of War (sorry, Tim), that one outfit decided to take daddy’s money, go out in the middle of the street and punch a nun – merely to prove their manhood – just leaves me in awe.
That’s all an aside. Nobody cares about who makes games. They’re all pigs. They earn the human card by escaping the pen and producing something startling. If you begin to rattle the numbers around briefly and come to grips with the difference between total gaming-time with actual positive life experience you can build something out of – even if it’s some dumb socialising with a fellow electric chap or lady – you’ll get The Fear. The Fear creeps in whenever you realise that something beautiful could have happened, it didn’t, but you’ll go through ten, maybe twenty or more, hours just to see it through.
So it is with God Hand, which opens with a soft parody of Fist of the North Star and a good, solid forty-five minutes of pure pain. No introduction, no real tutorial outside a rudimentary set of “dodging will save your life” pop ups. You are in a fight, son, with the machine you bought with your hard-earned, videostore nightshift sweat (Do they even have videostores anymore?). You are thrown into an impossible situation; a bare understanding of a baroque control system, a stream of poorly drawn enemies, the need to devastate virtual men, and camp music. I must have shown the first level to every gamer within local reach; not one could pass it without multiple deaths.
Consider this; while my friends are obviously a bit soft, we still have opposable thumbs. This thing – this piece of software – could quite possibly be capable of hate, or something like it. A digital form of contempt for the input mechanism it recognises as a user on the end of a Dualshock. The bastard PS2 dangles the control at you like a bucket into an oubliette as it tucks its little emotion engine between its legs. You are essentially doomed. Essentially.
You don’t ‘slowly get it’ or ‘learn the system’. You get it beat into you like Kumon mathematics. Your body – God help me for visualising it – is trained to accept that in a game wrapped around the idea of style, what you actually need is a razor-sharp reflex mechanism with very few choices in order to progress. Where Ninja Gaiden (***) will shave you in the morning and give you a piece of honey toast before taking you out in the garden for a spot of ginseng tea, just to warm you up, God Hand wakes you up with a kick in the tit. He pays the doctor’s bills. He’ll break what he wants.
The situations are not even dumb game scenarios; they are like bad hallucinegenic daydreams of a game. Everybody is openly gay, everybody is screaming, boxes explode, giant fruit replenish health. Remember; Gears of War‘s bloody circle is ‘mature’ and an ‘evolved mechanic,’ while fruit and a health bar are ‘outdated’. This is what it’s come to; the videogame medium’s penis envy of other media has finally made it insane. Now, it’s freaking out and telling people a growing red circle in the middle of the screen is somehow different than a simple health bar differential. Remember when a thousand journalists giggled and whooped at the GDC news that Halo 2 would have dual-wielding? This – and that – is what God Hand is up against. That sort of person. This sort of world. Where Oblivion is a ‘rich open world’ (it isn’t), where Viva Pinata is ‘fresh and innovative’ (it isn’t) and every bit of marketing double-speak passes for some semblance of a movement forward. You may remember this classic from the release of the Tribal Game Boy Advance SP: “We feel we have created a product in the Tribal Edition that reflects the sentiments of today’s youth – rebellion, attractiveness and spirituality. The new console allows gamers to express these emotions in a fun and interactive way, enabling them to communicate their individuality.â€
This is the corporate culture that infects games; people who believe ‘rebellion, attractiveness and spirituality’ are sentiments that will go on to make decisions which subtly alter the lives of young people.
God Hand is not an alternative to this; don’t get me wrong. It’s Capcom’s money. But something honest can happen in the midst of something as vast as a corporation, sometimes. By freak accident, the machine makes a noise that sounds like a song. And when you’ve set your punch system up for the 50th time in as many minutes, that’s what you feel. That something harsh but fair has happened. A sluice for the control of pleasure in your brain is broken. The game pushes and pushes and hurts and kills and maims – and at one point, it just melts away, completely folds in an instant and you never look back. It doesn’t balance the game this way; it’s just what occurs to you. In Soviet Russia, game plays you.
If there’s a problem with God Hand, it’s that the ultra-cheap production values aren’t fully followed through. Some elemental decisions seem to fray at the edges, amongst them the totally bizarre camera/movement quirks – as if Clover could not decide what to do with this mechanic or that. You can see it; bits fall away at the edges like a sentence drifting away. “Hey, you know what I’d like to – ahhh, damnit.”
Yet nothing pulls you away from the central conceit. It’s one thing done forcibly, powerfully, incredibly right. It offers an alternative where only certain things matter. Where you know you’re in front of a painting looking for the strokes and streaks. Where the only way forward in life is through the fighting mechanic it has taught you to fear. God Hand is a tilt to an essentially dead people; a game built from the ground up to reward a pre-existing obsession with punching men in the bells. It will not be anyone’s first computer game.
★★★★
“BEAT THEM UP. BEAT THEM ALL THE WAY UP.”
The litmus test is this: are you the type of person that played Gears of War and thought, “Yes: this is the future I was promised by my gaming forebears”? If so, then go right ahead and do whatever it is you do in your sad, blinkered, little worlds. It’s clear Tim Rogers liked it because he has a giant television, so he’s excused. The rest of you, those of you who thought Gears‘ “There’s the grub! Push him back into his hole!” was a tad creepy, from a “Forced Entry III: Boys Behind Bars” perspective, may want your camp heroics a little more with it, as it were. Before the dissolution of the promising Clover Studio, it was widely thought that God Hand could become the new Devil May Cry. If you looked at the electric fora, you would find people frothing at the chance to play an old-school beat-em-up. God Hand promised a return to the epoch of pain, where trigger-happy players had to scale mountains of difficulty to assert themselves over an unforgiving and cruel system. Combine that with a self-aware action hero and a gang of ready-to-beat mohawked punks, and you had what seemed a perfect formula. So who stuff the blanket on this one?
The sad truth is that nobody really got the joke. I don’t much give a damn as to the industrial side of games, because, frankly, the veil between being one of those people hitting refresh on a gaming forum three times a minute is thin. Given that, I don’t really understand how an outfit could turn out something so self-assured and potent and get the arse. Even as a branding exercise, Clover was surely worth spending a few. The menace and swagger with which both this and Okami take over your senses is pretty bewildering. In an era of cotton-wrapped, market-tested rubbish like Kingdom Hearts 2 and Gears of War (sorry, Tim), that one outfit decided to take daddy’s money, go out in the middle of the street and punch a nun – merely to prove their manhood – just leaves me in awe.
That’s all an aside. Nobody cares about who makes games. They’re all pigs. They earn the human card by escaping the pen and producing something startling. If you begin to rattle the numbers around briefly and come to grips with the difference between total gaming-time with actual positive life experience you can build something out of – even if it’s some dumb socialising with a fellow electric chap or lady – you’ll get The Fear. The Fear creeps in whenever you realise that something beautiful could have happened, it didn’t, but you’ll go through ten, maybe twenty or more, hours just to see it through.
So it is with God Hand, which opens with a soft parody of Fist of the North Star and a good, solid forty-five minutes of pure pain. No introduction, no real tutorial outside a rudimentary set of “dodging will save your life” pop ups. You are in a fight, son, with the machine you bought with your hard-earned, videostore nightshift sweat (Do they even have videostores anymore?). You are thrown into an impossible situation; a bare understanding of a baroque control system, a stream of poorly drawn enemies, the need to devastate virtual men, and camp music. I must have shown the first level to every gamer within local reach; not one could pass it without multiple deaths.
Consider this; while my friends are obviously a bit soft, we still have opposable thumbs. This thing – this piece of software – could quite possibly be capable of hate, or something like it. A digital form of contempt for the input mechanism it recognises as a user on the end of a Dualshock. The bastard PS2 dangles the control at you like a bucket into an oubliette as it tucks its little emotion engine between its legs. You are essentially doomed. Essentially.
You don’t ‘slowly get it’ or ‘learn the system’. You get it beat into you like Kumon mathematics. Your body – God help me for visualising it – is trained to accept that in a game wrapped around the idea of style, what you actually need is a razor-sharp reflex mechanism with very few choices in order to progress. Where Ninja Gaiden (***) will shave you in the morning and give you a piece of honey toast before taking you out in the garden for a spot of ginseng tea, just to warm you up, God Hand wakes you up with a kick in the tit. He pays the doctor’s bills. He’ll break what he wants.
The situations are not even dumb game scenarios; they are like bad hallucinegenic daydreams of a game. Everybody is openly gay, everybody is screaming, boxes explode, giant fruit replenish health. Remember; Gears of War‘s bloody circle is ‘mature’ and an ‘evolved mechanic,’ while fruit and a health bar are ‘outdated’. This is what it’s come to; the videogame medium’s penis envy of other media has finally made it insane. Now, it’s freaking out and telling people a growing red circle in the middle of the screen is somehow different than a simple health bar differential. Remember when a thousand journalists giggled and whooped at the GDC news that Halo 2 would have dual-wielding? This – and that – is what God Hand is up against. That sort of person. This sort of world. Where Oblivion is a ‘rich open world’ (it isn’t), where Viva Pinata is ‘fresh and innovative’ (it isn’t) and every bit of marketing double-speak passes for some semblance of a movement forward. You may remember this classic from the release of the Tribal Game Boy Advance SP: “We feel we have created a product in the Tribal Edition that reflects the sentiments of today’s youth – rebellion, attractiveness and spirituality. The new console allows gamers to express these emotions in a fun and interactive way, enabling them to communicate their individuality.â€
This is the corporate culture that infects games; people who believe ‘rebellion, attractiveness and spirituality’ are sentiments that will go on to make decisions which subtly alter the lives of young people.
God Hand is not an alternative to this; don’t get me wrong. It’s Capcom’s money. But something honest can happen in the midst of something as vast as a corporation, sometimes. By freak accident, the machine makes a noise that sounds like a song. And when you’ve set your punch system up for the 50th time in as many minutes, that’s what you feel. That something harsh but fair has happened. A sluice for the control of pleasure in your brain is broken. The game pushes and pushes and hurts and kills and maims – and at one point, it just melts away, completely folds in an instant and you never look back. It doesn’t balance the game this way; it’s just what occurs to you. In Soviet Russia, game plays you.
If there’s a problem with God Hand, it’s that the ultra-cheap production values aren’t fully followed through. Some elemental decisions seem to fray at the edges, amongst them the totally bizarre camera/movement quirks – as if Clover could not decide what to do with this mechanic or that. You can see it; bits fall away at the edges like a sentence drifting away. “Hey, you know what I’d like to – ahhh, damnit.”
Yet nothing pulls you away from the central conceit. It’s one thing done forcibly, powerfully, incredibly right. It offers an alternative where only certain things matter. Where you know you’re in front of a painting looking for the strokes and streaks. Where the only way forward in life is through the fighting mechanic it has taught you to fear. God Hand is a tilt to an essentially dead people; a game built from the ground up to reward a pre-existing obsession with punching men in the bells. It will not be anyone’s first computer game.
1995
text by Ario Barzan
★★★★
“KICKING ASS AND WRITING SYMPHONIES AT THE SAME TIME.”
Ask me about RPG's, and I'll admit to once having a thing for them: an affinity that drove me to emulate Tales of Phantasia on a stuttering computer and max out the timer on Final Fantasy VII. Ask me to tell you what the thing was, and I can't, exactly. I'd like to think the unmentionable was a phase, that the games were an outlet for nervous ticks at an unstable period. Now, the phrase "random battle" will get a rolling of eyes, a sigh, maybe a bar of soap in your mouth.
Final Fantasy XII has recently been called a Beacon of Nobility. I’m sorry, though: it was only a step forward on the long staircase RPG's need to climb to escape from their stone-age. See, back in 1995, Secret of Evermore was doing what should be done now. It was, presumably, Square USA's answer to Secret of Mana, and it got damn near everything right.
Select a new file, and you'll find those first moments slightly…off. The setting: dingy Podunk – a nameless name. Trash rolls about on the street, a couple youths play marbles, and a boy and dog emerge out of a theater showing “The Lost Adventures of Vexx.†It’s humble, and clunky. In no time at all, a cat grabs the canine’s attention, and he sprints away in the pursuit of happiness. As the boy follows, the chase leads to an old mansion, setting in motion Very Unusual Things. Once inside, bumbling curiosity activates a mechanism – a transporter that shifts the kid and his pet over to another dimension. This dimension is Evermore, a combination of personal Utopias. Utopias of whom? Why, the scientific minds behind the project.
Charming as this concept is, if you go invest in RPG’s for their plots, you are not going to be thrilled with Evermore. If, on the other hand, you are like me, and realize that most “fabulous†video game plots are poor summer movies, and prefer to revel in what the medium is better at doing now, then you’re in luck. The plot is there to dictate advancements in setting, but it is by no means a backbone. Sparse and never-too-serious events take the boy to different locales, each representing historical periods. Prehistoria segues into Antiqua, then Gothica, and, finally, Omnitopia.
Let’s throw the trash-bag out. In what seems to be a common cold of video games, Evermore’s conclusive chunk is weak: an obtuse splurge of glass tubes and pristine interiors. The rest is picked at the peak of freshness, so what happened? Omnitopia is, however, small, and not a flow murderer. Also, the dialogue. But, no, at the same time, it’s not bad, really. Just funny, in the way that it would be funny to see a figure skateboarding in a Friedrich painting. The stuff’s saved by being brief and reasonably pleasant.
Onto the good. On the chance one has played Mana, they’re already acquainted with part of Evermore’s system. Everything is presented from a lightly lopsided bird’s-eye view. Press Y to bring up a ring menu (very slick), and hold A when the percentage display on the bottom, representing stamina, allows you to dash. The boy’s dog acts as a secondary character whose aggressiveness can be toggled on an A.I. scale.
As the boy progresses through trials or passive events, he is rewarded with, or given, weapons, be it a bazooka, sword, or…bone. Use that weapon enough, and it will deal more damage. After a certain point, you can hold down the attack button to charge your attack. Effects vary – if you’re wielding a spear, it launches across the screen for long-range damage.
Not to worry. Combat supports improving statistics’ hardiness. It is actualized, seamless – no swirling vortexes, chess board positioning, or victory animations here, folks. And, hell, it’s well done. What a blessing. Dragon Quest VIII was lovely, lovely enough to make R2 my MVP button, but that didn’t stop its NES mechanics from plunging the package into flames of torment. Here’s the thing. DQVIII, and the bulk of RPG’s, are the British army, and Secret of Evermore is the feisty American force that runs around, hides in trees, and doesn’t stand for the horsestuff of lining up and trading blows.
There’s a compact, brisk intelligence to fighting. Unravel your rival’s capabilities, and when the choice moment comes, line up and strike the bastard, resulting with the sound of hitting a table with one’s knuckles. This is not as easy as it sounds. Many enemies are faster, or, if they are slower, unexpectedly lunge out with territorial ferocity, making well-played victories against them an “A†on the proverbial paper. Bosses do not forsake their title. You’ll go from fighting a crab-like arachnid in the skull of a dead behemoth, to a gladiator in a Colosseum, to a freak-show-gone-loose (think Bigfoot, but ten times bigger…and only his head is visible) accompanied by possessed puppets on a stage.
Rather than spells being introduced by leveling up, they’re taught to you by a people. And in place of magic points are raw materials, which can be combined to specific effects. It’s guaranteed that you’ll miss out on the bulk of these spells the first time through, and even the second. Evermore is crawling with so many secret locations that it’s kind of mind-boggling. It’s also rich with said materials. Try nudging suspicious crannies: they will often yield something.
Most important of all is this: A lush wonder surrounds the journey. You need to give Evermore a little time. It doesn’t have an immediate sparkle. Where its inspiration is truly outdone is in the ripeness of emotion.
You can feel this in the visuals’ layers: sights give the impression of a mystery beyond what’s in front. This is a bit of a wonder, considering Western games’ ugly art history that continues to perpetuate itself (the best recent, popular example is Oblivion – an attractive, albeit generic, world with character models that look like the team modeled and mirror-imaged hecking middle-aged cosplayers). There’s the amazing, gravitational soundtrack by Jeremy Soule – his first project in the medium, and still his best. And it’s not only in the music – it’s in the lack of music. Evermore’s world is not afraid of quietness. There are forests, ecosystems, whose leaves rustle as animals chirp and hoot, and vast, windy expanses with grumbling pits.
Here is also why the game succeeds: structure. FFXII improved combat’s flow by removing a number of unnecessary abstractions, though hell if its containers for the combat weren’t blunt. By contrast, Evermore’s dungeons are curious, nuanced complexes testing not only your offensive skills, but your navigational and puzzle-solving abilities. In them, a hint of surreal Metroid design emerges, as well. Get inquisitive or lucky enough, and you might walk past a wall and through an unseeable maze to appear in a secluded chamber. Maybe there will be a person who can teach you a spell, or maybe a series of pots will await their opening.
Honest-to-God life was invested into towns and villages. Nobilia, Antiqua’s capital, is a flood of happenings – chickens being fed by children, an old man preaching apocalyptic messages, people in their trading booths waiting for customers (keep track of the bartering system for great deals!); there is no other Super Nintendo site that matches this level of inhabitance.
When I was a kid (I can hear the groans. Hush), one of my favorite things was to be outside for hours, lifting up rocks, logs, whatever, to see the life underneath. Evermore is those rocks, those logs. If you want to poke around, it lets you, and rewards you with impeccable atmosphere and sublime, little game-y elements. You’re thrown into the thick of things, and there’s a whole world out there, one that trusts the competence of the player behind the controller. Its craft holds up because it’s not bound by flimsy tech demos or self-absorption; it is universally, wonderfully made. Go out, get a copy, make a cup of tea, and settle down for a slice of joy.
★★★★
“KICKING ASS AND WRITING SYMPHONIES AT THE SAME TIME.”
Ask me about RPG's, and I'll admit to once having a thing for them: an affinity that drove me to emulate Tales of Phantasia on a stuttering computer and max out the timer on Final Fantasy VII. Ask me to tell you what the thing was, and I can't, exactly. I'd like to think the unmentionable was a phase, that the games were an outlet for nervous ticks at an unstable period. Now, the phrase "random battle" will get a rolling of eyes, a sigh, maybe a bar of soap in your mouth.
Final Fantasy XII has recently been called a Beacon of Nobility. I’m sorry, though: it was only a step forward on the long staircase RPG's need to climb to escape from their stone-age. See, back in 1995, Secret of Evermore was doing what should be done now. It was, presumably, Square USA's answer to Secret of Mana, and it got damn near everything right.
Select a new file, and you'll find those first moments slightly…off. The setting: dingy Podunk – a nameless name. Trash rolls about on the street, a couple youths play marbles, and a boy and dog emerge out of a theater showing “The Lost Adventures of Vexx.†It’s humble, and clunky. In no time at all, a cat grabs the canine’s attention, and he sprints away in the pursuit of happiness. As the boy follows, the chase leads to an old mansion, setting in motion Very Unusual Things. Once inside, bumbling curiosity activates a mechanism – a transporter that shifts the kid and his pet over to another dimension. This dimension is Evermore, a combination of personal Utopias. Utopias of whom? Why, the scientific minds behind the project.
Charming as this concept is, if you go invest in RPG’s for their plots, you are not going to be thrilled with Evermore. If, on the other hand, you are like me, and realize that most “fabulous†video game plots are poor summer movies, and prefer to revel in what the medium is better at doing now, then you’re in luck. The plot is there to dictate advancements in setting, but it is by no means a backbone. Sparse and never-too-serious events take the boy to different locales, each representing historical periods. Prehistoria segues into Antiqua, then Gothica, and, finally, Omnitopia.
Let’s throw the trash-bag out. In what seems to be a common cold of video games, Evermore’s conclusive chunk is weak: an obtuse splurge of glass tubes and pristine interiors. The rest is picked at the peak of freshness, so what happened? Omnitopia is, however, small, and not a flow murderer. Also, the dialogue. But, no, at the same time, it’s not bad, really. Just funny, in the way that it would be funny to see a figure skateboarding in a Friedrich painting. The stuff’s saved by being brief and reasonably pleasant.
Onto the good. On the chance one has played Mana, they’re already acquainted with part of Evermore’s system. Everything is presented from a lightly lopsided bird’s-eye view. Press Y to bring up a ring menu (very slick), and hold A when the percentage display on the bottom, representing stamina, allows you to dash. The boy’s dog acts as a secondary character whose aggressiveness can be toggled on an A.I. scale.
As the boy progresses through trials or passive events, he is rewarded with, or given, weapons, be it a bazooka, sword, or…bone. Use that weapon enough, and it will deal more damage. After a certain point, you can hold down the attack button to charge your attack. Effects vary – if you’re wielding a spear, it launches across the screen for long-range damage.
Not to worry. Combat supports improving statistics’ hardiness. It is actualized, seamless – no swirling vortexes, chess board positioning, or victory animations here, folks. And, hell, it’s well done. What a blessing. Dragon Quest VIII was lovely, lovely enough to make R2 my MVP button, but that didn’t stop its NES mechanics from plunging the package into flames of torment. Here’s the thing. DQVIII, and the bulk of RPG’s, are the British army, and Secret of Evermore is the feisty American force that runs around, hides in trees, and doesn’t stand for the horsestuff of lining up and trading blows.
There’s a compact, brisk intelligence to fighting. Unravel your rival’s capabilities, and when the choice moment comes, line up and strike the bastard, resulting with the sound of hitting a table with one’s knuckles. This is not as easy as it sounds. Many enemies are faster, or, if they are slower, unexpectedly lunge out with territorial ferocity, making well-played victories against them an “A†on the proverbial paper. Bosses do not forsake their title. You’ll go from fighting a crab-like arachnid in the skull of a dead behemoth, to a gladiator in a Colosseum, to a freak-show-gone-loose (think Bigfoot, but ten times bigger…and only his head is visible) accompanied by possessed puppets on a stage.
Rather than spells being introduced by leveling up, they’re taught to you by a people. And in place of magic points are raw materials, which can be combined to specific effects. It’s guaranteed that you’ll miss out on the bulk of these spells the first time through, and even the second. Evermore is crawling with so many secret locations that it’s kind of mind-boggling. It’s also rich with said materials. Try nudging suspicious crannies: they will often yield something.
Most important of all is this: A lush wonder surrounds the journey. You need to give Evermore a little time. It doesn’t have an immediate sparkle. Where its inspiration is truly outdone is in the ripeness of emotion.
You can feel this in the visuals’ layers: sights give the impression of a mystery beyond what’s in front. This is a bit of a wonder, considering Western games’ ugly art history that continues to perpetuate itself (the best recent, popular example is Oblivion – an attractive, albeit generic, world with character models that look like the team modeled and mirror-imaged hecking middle-aged cosplayers). There’s the amazing, gravitational soundtrack by Jeremy Soule – his first project in the medium, and still his best. And it’s not only in the music – it’s in the lack of music. Evermore’s world is not afraid of quietness. There are forests, ecosystems, whose leaves rustle as animals chirp and hoot, and vast, windy expanses with grumbling pits.
Here is also why the game succeeds: structure. FFXII improved combat’s flow by removing a number of unnecessary abstractions, though hell if its containers for the combat weren’t blunt. By contrast, Evermore’s dungeons are curious, nuanced complexes testing not only your offensive skills, but your navigational and puzzle-solving abilities. In them, a hint of surreal Metroid design emerges, as well. Get inquisitive or lucky enough, and you might walk past a wall and through an unseeable maze to appear in a secluded chamber. Maybe there will be a person who can teach you a spell, or maybe a series of pots will await their opening.
Honest-to-God life was invested into towns and villages. Nobilia, Antiqua’s capital, is a flood of happenings – chickens being fed by children, an old man preaching apocalyptic messages, people in their trading booths waiting for customers (keep track of the bartering system for great deals!); there is no other Super Nintendo site that matches this level of inhabitance.
When I was a kid (I can hear the groans. Hush), one of my favorite things was to be outside for hours, lifting up rocks, logs, whatever, to see the life underneath. Evermore is those rocks, those logs. If you want to poke around, it lets you, and rewards you with impeccable atmosphere and sublime, little game-y elements. You’re thrown into the thick of things, and there’s a whole world out there, one that trusts the competence of the player behind the controller. Its craft holds up because it’s not bound by flimsy tech demos or self-absorption; it is universally, wonderfully made. Go out, get a copy, make a cup of tea, and settle down for a slice of joy.
text by tim rogers
★★★⋆
“THE BEST REASON SO FAR THIS YEAR TO BREATHE CONTINUOUSLY THROUGH YOUR MOUTH FOR TWENTY STRAIGHT HOURS”
Before you read this review, please ask yourself: “Have I breathed through my nose at any point during the last twenty-four hours?” If the answer is “no”, probe deeper: the last forty-eight hours, the last week, month, year? If the answer keeps coming up “No”, then chances are you don’t need to be reading this. The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass is better than a hand job from Super Mario Bros. 3-era Shigeru Miyamoto. If you find yourself continuing to read despite the revelation that you are, in fact, a mouth-breathing fan of Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda franchise, it’s your fault if any of the following words hurts you.
That said, I absolutely loved this videogame. And believe me, it’s very rare that I use that word concerning anything outside of breakfast cereals. This game is a rare event indeed. It’s full of character, personality, attention to detail, and actual courage with regards to game design. It’s perhaps the best Zelda game Nintendo’s made since Link’s Awakening back on the Gameboy. It’s small, short, and polished to a high shine. The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass was a more fulfilling entertainment experience, on the whole, than any of the so-called “blockbuster” movies I’ve seen so far this “summer”. (Especially more than “Spider-Man 3”.)
Story-wise, the game is a direct sequel to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which, coincidentally, I remember kind of hating. Wind Waker was fluffy, silly stuff, for the most part, with the main character, Link, being a big-eyed, stylized, cartoon child. When Nintendo originally unveiled Wind Waker, it spurred a weird controversy: apparently, the childish men voted most likely to bleep-bloop around with the babies’ toys called videogames deep into their forties or fifties complained that the game wasn’t being serious enough about its heritage. A confusing, dark era came and passed over the months after the game’s unveiling. Some true, champion-like gamers’ reaction was so fierce that they admitted on internet forums that they hoped the game’s box wasn’t too childish looking, or else they’d be ashamed to pay money for it. I mean, what if the cashier was a girl? Shrewd forum-goers were quick to suggest buying the game at a game store, because there wouldn’t be girls in there, though paranoia set in: the girls might be buying games for their boyfriends. The obvious rebuttal was that guys who play games don’t have girlfriends, and that girls who have boyfriends who do play games wouldn’t want to go out with you, regardless of whether or not you’re the type of cartoon pedophile to play Wind Waker. These kinds of comments set fire to lively conversations for months on end.
The fans ended up lining up overnight in freezing cold with Triforce face-paint to buy the game, anyway. Very few reviewers were able to put together a paragraph about the game without describing it as “near-perfect” or posing the million-dollar question: might this be the best game ever?
The objective truth is, Wind Waker, for the most part, was cloying, obsessive-compulsive bullstuff. It was the world’s slowest locomotive, powered by a vague combination of stinky fossil fuels and delicious watermelon Slurpees. On the one hand, it had a genuinely amazing visual style and tons of personality. On the other hand, it was cluttered up with nonsense. The game sold several million copies in America, where people have been known to vote Republican because their dads vote Republican, and Europe, where people generally respect their magazines’ critics. In Japan, though Weekly Famitsu gave it a dazzling 40/40 score, the game sold poorly, and littered bargain bins all over the place. Japanese Gamecube games came in these cute little paper sleeves; there’s Wind Waker, still overstocked today at my favorite game shop in Akihabara, only 980 yen new, paper sleeve all nicked and ripped, a sad sight.
The math was simple enough for even Nintendo of America’s eventual president Reggie to figure out: Zelda sold more in English than it did in Japanese. So it was that with the next Zelda, Nintendo would speak directly to the confused, huddled hordes ashamed to buy a game that might get them convicted of indirect pedophilia. That game was Twilight Princess, which is actually kind of a hilariously dainty title for “THE Serious Zelda Game”. Twilight Princess sent Nintendo press conference attendees into a panicking, screaming frenzy for something like three out-of-control minutes. Backstage, Nintendo PR guys were pushing earbuds into their ears and shouting into microphones: pause the hecking tele-prompter! I don’t care who you have to punch! we’re losing the speech! The internet was soon aflame with the news: “The new Zelda totally looks like ‘Lord of the Rings’ and it’s going to be awesome as heck.”
The next year, when the game still wasn’t released, Nintendo showed a longer trailer at their E3 press conference. From my seat, I could see the tele-prompter. After the trailer had ended, the words “PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE” stood there on the screen for a whole minute and a half. The applause, unfortunately, didn’t last that long. It would have been kind of hilarious if it did.
One of the consolation prizes for attending that press conference, for surviving the elbow-throwing mosh pit that kind of didn’t happen, was a DS card with the Twilight Princess trailer on it.
I sold mine on eBay, through a friend, for about a hundred dollars.
Twice, then thrice-delayed, Twilight Princess was said by producer Eiji Aonuma himself to be a more conscientious, focused Zelda. It ended up containing most of the joy of Wind Waker with surprisingly less fat. Rather than revel in aimless wandering, it sported series of joyous, breezy set-pieces. However, the specter of idiocy still loomed over the whole experience: the first “puzzle” in the game requires you to catch a fish for a cat, which won’t eat the first fish you catch, though he’ll go nuts for the second. To make things worse, the nuances of fishing just aren’t covered well enough in the game, which is semi-hilarious given how obsessive recent Zelda games are about constantly holding the player’s hand.
When the Wii console was launched in Japan, Wii Sports and Wii Play sold a million copies each, and Zelda failed to sell 100,000. Originally released for 7,000 yen, you can now find Twilight Princess for 2,000, new. When asked about this in an interview, Shigeru Miyamoto replied that Japanese gamers just don’t want complicated adventures anymore. The internet gasped so hard — through its mouth, yes — that a small animal somewhere might have imploded. Twilight Princess was quite simply a treat for die-hard Zelda fans — meaning, non-Japanese gamers. It was the first Zelda to not even have a Japanese title in Japan. They stuck the English version’s logo on there, title and all. They must have left the title in English because all of the Japanese players truly interested in the game had read about it from English sources.
So here’s The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, for the Nintendo DS. This is Miyamoto and Aonuma’s supposed streamlining of the Zelda experience, presented so that any human being capable of deciding to buy a DS and Brain Training would be able to make his or her way through the game. In addition to confirming that yes, Zelda games should have a cartoon aesthetic for as long as possible, it’s also something of a smashing success as a videogame.
For one thing, you control the entire game with the stylus. You move Link by touching the screen and holding the stylus atop the direction you want Link to run. The farther you hold the stylus from Link, the more quickly he moves. You even use the stylus to attack with the sword: tap an enemy to jump-slash at it, wherever it is on the screen. If Link’s path isn’t obstructed, he’ll score a hit. Slide the stylus to slash in your chosen direction. Swirl it in a circle to make Link do a swirling slash (do this too many times in a row and Link will get dizzy). If you’re thinking it seems impossible for such a battle system to present any challenge, you’re not thinking as creatively as Nintendo’s Genius Game Designers. Sometimes enemies will block your lock-on attacks, so you need to actually walk behind the enemies to attack them in the back. Yes — the simple idea of walking around the enemy with the stylus makes a battle magnitudes more challenging. And it just about never feels cheap. It feels like a real videogame, as robust as Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time.
The items are ingenious. The boomerang flies on the exact path you draw on the screen. The grappling hook can be used to fix a tightrope between two poles; you can then use that tightrope as either a bridge or a slingshot to make link jump farther. And the Bombchu — a bomb attached to a mechanical mouse — is brilliant: in Ocarina of Time, you could control it in 3D, though in Phantom Hourglass, the game pauses when you equip one, and then, once you’ve drawn a path on the map, the action un-pauses so that the Bombchu can run its course while you get where you have to go.
Though the first puzzle in the game is baby stuff — count the palm trees on the beach, write the number on a sign to unlock a door — it really sets the tone for the level of intelligence Phantom Hourglass‘s designers exhibit in some of the later dungeons. Say you encounter a puzzle where there’s a switch that causes a super-far-away door to open for a split second. You have to cross a couple of platforms to get to the door. The Bombchu can’t run across the platforms, because it’ll fall into the pit. What do you do? Of course, you draw a superfluously long patrol path for the Bombchu, release him from the edge of the pit, just as you’re about to board the first platform, and then run to the door while the Bombchu is happily running circles around the switch. Do you remember when Zelda games used to be about simply lighting all the torches in a room to unlock the door? What the hell did that even mean, anyway? How can lighting torches unlock a door? How can killing all the enemy spiders in a room make a key fall from the ceiling, either? Though Phantom Hourglass has its moments where killing spiders makes keys fall from the ceiling, at least they’re understated, and at least these moments happen strictly while you’re in frantic transit from one place to another; though there are points where you’ll have to light torches, at least they’re all uniquely fascinating. Say there are four torches in a room, all on pedestals, one of them lit, and the other three obstructed peculiarly from one side. You have to find a way first lower just one obstruction, and then get on top of that odd platform in the middle of the room, and throw the boomerang on a steady course to spread the flames.
For the most part, however, it’s the smart puzzles that stand out. If this is Nintendo’s effort to make a Zelda game that can appeal to the casual, Brain Training crowd, then it’s excellently fitting and kind of hilarious that the puzzles tend to require a certain sharper degree of actual intelligence than the last few Zeldas.
Personally, I liked a lot of Twilight Princess‘s execution; I liked how the boomerang was something of a clever little mini-game in and of itself. I like targeting a bomb and then a wall that needs to be bombed, all while dodging enemies. Twilight Princess has a certain thick, pleasant, action-heavy crunch to it. As an evolution of Zelda games, it’s a hell of a thing, and as a bit of a committed-for-life videogame-player, I can’t honestly say there’s anything wrong with it.
Phantom Hourglass is just exponentially fresher. Twilight Princess has a bad habit of willing, wanting, and waiting to be huge and epic, of stuffing one- or two-hour-long intermissions between dungeons and pre-dungeons, and then another fetch-quest intermission between the pre-dungeon and the actual dungeon. Unfortunately — and this might be hard for a die-hard Zelda fan to hear — the game just doesn’t look or sound good enough for all the dramatic intonations to hang together.
What these games in the Zelda genre need to truly hold together is an ingenious gimmick. The Minnish Cap on Gameboy Advance thought it had that gimmick — a hat that makes you small, so that the world appears huge, allowing you to solve puzzles that have been ham-handedly plotted to be solved in a manner that requires you to change sizes as many times as possible. Majora’s Mask — where the player has three days to save the world, and must reset time to the start of the first day whenever necessary — much as I regard it as my favorite Zelda, didn’t quite get the gimmick right, either. Three game-days was almost too much time. The game was overwhelming for many players who had tromped through Ocarina of Time — in which the gimmick was your typical two-world time-traveling stuff — with ease. To tell the truth, it was overwhelming for me, for the longest time, as well. The game is a tough nut to crack, and it starts as terribly as it does awesomely. Whereas Ocarina of Time was a wide-armed welcoming of long-time Zelda fans who’d been replaying Link to the Past for five years, Majora’s Mask was an arms-akimbo bastard wearing a T-shirt that said “If the first hour bothers you, run the heck away.” It took a lot of balls to make Majora’s Mask, and it took just as many balls to make Wind Waker chock-full of cloying bullstuff again. Likewise, it took just as many barrels of balls to make Phantom Hourglass, only this time, they nailed the gimmick out of the park.
Phantom Hourglass‘s gimmick is that it features one large central dungeon — The Temple of the Sea King — into which you must enter multiple times throughout the game. An item called the “Phantom Hourglass” determines how long you can stay in this temple. Your goal in the temple is to find sea charts which will allow you to explore other regions of the sea, which contain islands containing temples containing the items you need to complete your quest. Find a sea chart, get out, sail to the new island, solve a couple of pre-dungeon puzzles, get in the dungeon, clear the dungeon, beat the boss (who then turns to sand for your Phantom Hourglass), get the mystic item, and then head back into the main temple on the first island. Sometimes, hijinks happen at sea on the way to the dungeon, or on the way back. Maybe you’ll get attacked by a sea monster, or a lady pirate. The hijinks are always scripted, though they’re never enough to distract your joy. The game is linear in its flow, yes — I mean, why can’t I just sail the ocean looking for these dungeons for myself? — though it’s indisputable that this is a joyful kind of linearity we’re dealing with here. The game is just short enough that the flow never gets tiring — one dungeon, main dungeon, another dungeon, main dungeon again, another dungeon, side-dungeon, main dungeon again, final series of dungeons, main dungeon one last time, final boss. The dungeons are all fun, the weird happenings at sea are fun, shooting the cannon at monsters or jumping over torpedoes at sea never has time to stop being entertaining, and the central dungeon is enthralling.
The hook of the central dungeon impressed me on paper and floored me in execution. (Literally, I played this game on the floor. That’s . . . where we sleep, in Japan.) You have a limited amount of time to explore the main dungeon. Time counts down when you’re moving about the dungeon, and the countdown freezes when you’re standing on a special, blessed, purple floor. Enemy knights called Phantoms patrol the dungeon on set paths. If they see you, they will hunt you down. If they slash you, you lose thirty seconds of time and are sent back to the entrance of the current floor. In Metal Gear Solid, the enemies will go back to their patrol and assume they were just seeing things if you hide for long enough after, say, shooting them in the leg. In Phantom Hourglass, the stupidity of the guards has an airtight, almost Final Fantastic reason — these purple floors are parts of the temple that the curse of the Phantoms has yet to leak into, so they simply don’t register.
In your first few forays in the Link’s Mysterious Dungeon, you might be nervous, or even on the edge of your seat. Get to the third basement to get the first sea chart, and then warp back out. The next time you come back, after the second dungeon, you’ll have to start the whole mysterious dungeon all over again. Only now, you’re not creeping around nearly as carefully. You’ve fallen into the Comfort Zone with those first three floors, and you feel like a genius chemist when you realize there’s a destructible wall near one of the Phantoms on the second floor. You didn’t have bombs the first time through the dungeon, though you do now! Might as well bomb that wall! Get down to the fourth basement, however, and things are complicated all over again. Finally get the next sea chart, beat the next dungeon, come back to the main temple, and now you have a bow and arrow, and you can shoot the Phantoms in the back, freezing them for a whole ten seconds or so. Yes! You now have a new strategy for getting through those first six floors.
Eventually, after popping in and out of the main dungeon enough times, you will waltz through those first couple floors like you own the place. And by the time you penetrate to the last couple floors, you’re packing all the items in the game; though the developers’ intended solution to any given puzzle might float to the surface if you relax your mind a bit, there’s a tiny bit of workable freedom with which to execute your own insane schemes (many of them involving the Bombchu, if you’re like me).
To wit: you’re able to draw on the map in this game. Just tap the map icon in the drop-down menu tab (or press down on the control pad) to make the map occupy the touch screen. Now draw or write whatever you want. Your first two or three trips into the dungeon, you might notice, say, destructible walls, so you might write “bomb” there, or even draw a cute bomb icon. There are red pots in the dungeon, which can be lifted, carried, and thrown wherever you want to throw them, spilling the holy essence of the purple-floored safe spots. I found myself — originally kind of suspicious of the map-memo-writing feature — chicken-scratching the letters “RP” at the location of every red pot. At some points in the dungeon, you’ll find yourself tracing the routes of guard patrols. If you’re savvy enough, you can trace the exact width of each guard’s range of vision, and find airtight safe spots in which to stand and shoot the guards in the backs with arrows.
This is the closest a videogame has ever come to making me feel like the hero of a heist movie, like Tom Cruise lowering himself through the laser net in “Mission: Impossible” — hell, they even made a videogame out of that! And here’s Phantom Hourglass, a videogame that makes me feel like a character in a movie so awesome that it would be super-disappointing if they made a videogame out of it.
This isn’t to say the dungeon is perfect, however. The chief fault is that the game doesn’t end if you run out of time. Rather, Link’s health simply starts to drain if he’s away from the safe spots. And there are blue pots everywhere, with abundant hearts in them. And unlike the red pots and yellow pots (which give you extra time), the blue pots reappear whenever you exit a floor and come back, so running out of time is hardly the end. I find this a very disappointing oversight: I wish the dungeon would simply kick me out for not making the time limit.
Late in the game, though, near the very end, the main dungeon curls up like Ouroboros, though instead of eating its own tail, it just stuffs in its own mouth. I’m sure there’s someone on the internet who would see me dead for putting this in plain writing, though here we go: they give you a way to kill the Phantoms, and it’s way too easy. As invincible enemies, they were the most intriguing moving obstacles ever to exist in a Zelda game. Once you’re able to kill them, the main dungeon becomes depressingly easy.
The game swiftly recovers, however, by throwing in a thrilling final boss with enough surprise recoveries and epic final forms to gag Epona (that’s, um, the name of Link’s horse in Twilight Princess). Many of the boss encounters prior to this one had been smart, two-screen affairs, where the top screen offers you some kind of alternate view (for example, one battle uses the top screen as an FPS-camera-style view of Link from the monster’s eyes), though this final battle takes the cake. And what’s more, as the game winds down, these cute, breezy characters — Link’s fairy partner, Ciela, the greedy pirate Captain Lineback, the mysterious old man, the angry, squinting girl-pirate Jolene, and the kidnapped Princess Zelda / Tetra — whose ridiculous banter you’ve been half-enjoying and half groaning at for twenty hours suddenly become interesting, rounded-out people. It’s not quite expected at all for the game to become something of a fulfilling narrative at the end, though there it is, and I can’t help thinking that I would have never seen the end at all if they’d decided to stuff the game with unnecessary stuff of, say, Wind Waker.
The game is not without its teeth-grinding faults. And no, dear readers of GameFAQs, the “totally gay hub dungeon” is not one of them. If you go by GameFAQs’ Phantom Hourglass discussion forum circa the game’s launch, three of the most Frequently Asked Questions were “How many islands are there in this game?” “How big are the islands?” and “How do I get to the island on the first island?”
The problems with Phantom Hourglass tend to ironically revolve around the miraculous stylus control scheme. Sometimes, for example, Link will slow to a morbid crawl as you near the edge of a screen. The mathematical explanation for this is that Link’s running speed is programmed to be relative to the distance of the stylus from Link’s current position; Link is usually positioned at the center of the screen by default, though if you’re in a dungeon or a house, or nearing the exit of a location, Link will move to a different position on the screen, causing him to break his run and tiptoe toward the exit. It can be maddening when, say, there are Manic Monsters chasing you. Actually using Link’s rolling attack, so brain-bustingly simple and convenient in the 3D Zeldas, is just a few hairs short of writing a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem on the back of a nine-millimeter bullet that’s flying toward your skull. It says you’re supposed to draw a quick circle with the stylus on the edge of the screen while Link is running, and it also says that you’re able to use this to shake trees to see if they have any items inside, though because Link rolls the instant you draw the little circle on the edge of the screen, the edge of the screen has to be an immaculately calculated distance from the tree you’re trying to roll into in order for Link to actually roll into the tree. It’s a real head-bender, man.
Sometimes, these fine movement issues will show up at precisely the wrong time, and you might find yourself screaming. If you scream, and some particles happen to land on the screen, be sure to pause the game before wiping the particles off, or else Link might gallop right into a lava pit, and you’ll be screaming again.
Other unfortunate problems involve the incessant hand-holding. I remember, back with the original Zelda, my little brother — a regular Baby Huey, he was sociopathically afraid of being locked in a department store after closing for most of his life (he still is, probably) — would mutter over and over again “You might want to take your bombs off” as I played. My brother was worried I would accidentally press the B button and lay a bomb, which would be a total waste. “You might want to take your arrows off”, he’d say, if it were arrows. Once, shaking with annoyance, I began placing bombs all around the screen, one at a time, listening to my brother shiver and spit and eventually start crying.
You don’t need my brother to enjoy this newest Zelda game, however. The game will do enough spitting and crying all on its own. Most groan-worthy are the messages when you pick up a small key: “This is a small key! You can use it to unlock one locked door. After you use the key once, it will disappear.” This Zelda game’s focus is on quick, frequent, taxing puzzles, which means a lot of locked doors, and a lot of keys, and a lot of instructions on how to use the keys.
It used to be, if you found a key in a Zelda game and you didn’t know what a key did, you were either mentally handicapped or you reached for the instruction manual. I suppose, eventually, someone in Nintendo’s R&D did a big Powerpoint presentation, with the cooperation of a local psychiatrist, proving — quite logically — that people absent-minded enough to forget what a key does have probably also lost both the box and instruction manual of the game they’re playing. As an employee in a videogame company’s marketing division myself, I could put up a convincing presentation to explain that we should probably just explain once what a key does, and then leave it up to these instruction-manual misplacers to either remember that, or figure it out anew. If anyone attacked my views and said that we can’t shut out the morons and the idiots just because most people — not to mention most gamers — aren’t either, I would jump up onto the boardroom table and scream, what the heck do you do if the person loses the hecking cartridge, huh? What the heck do you do then! Would you give out a free game and console to a shaky kid who showed up at a game shop and said that first he lost the manual, then the box, then he forgot what keys did, then he lost his lunch money, then he lost the game cartridge, and then his DS? There’s a certain line, separating the place where enough is enough and the place where enough is more than enough, and incessant “You got a key!” messages, as a habit, is at least a couple steps into “more than enough” country.
Well, maybe the message is meant to convey that the key will disappear after one use? Maybe so, Sherlock. Though maybe it might be best if you add a little animation that shows the key fly out of the lock and float in the center of the screen and poof into purple smoke, all in the space of one second, whenever a key is used. Maybe that’d be better than words displayed before the key disappears. Show, don’t tell. Live in the moment. Trust the player’s common sense, et cetera.
Nintendo’s pathological belief that the majority of newcomers to videogames are also repulsive idiots penetrates deep into Phantom Hourglass, and rears one of its hundreds of ghostly eyeballs at numerous points. The non-optional side-quests, for example: sometimes you have to use the shovel to dig in the right place on an island, though instead of presenting you with a riddle as to where you have to dig, a stone plaque will contain the necessary information verbatim. “Connect the upper-right tree and the lower-left tree, and then the lower-right and the upper-left trees, and dig where the lines intersect.” At the beginning of the game, such a puzzle feels kind of fresh. It kind of recalls the old point-and-click adventure games that people seem to still long for so hungrily. You feel kind of cool, as you wander the island, finding the four items, marking them on the map, and then connecting them, and then heading for the X-marked spot. Get a little farther, though, and many of the non-optional puzzles are still playing the same game. They tell you what to connect, and you’ll obey, and that’ll be that.
Other elements of the game, quite frankly, make me feel like I’m being talked-down-to by a three-year-old, and that stuff just isn’t appreciated. For one thing, before every boss, there’ll be a stone plaque that explains that you can use this blue portal to return to the dungeon entrance. Then a blue portal appears. Okay. After you beat the boss, a treasure chest containing a heart container — the game explains what a heart container is, of course, every time — drops down, and then, slowly, the screen narrows to letterbox again, and a blue portal appears. Your fairy is ecstatic: “Link! We can use this blue portal to go back to the dungeon entrance!” Does Nintendo think people are goldfish, or what? The natural thing to do, when faced with a dead end, is go back one room. And then, hey, there’s that blue portal, there. At least let us feel like we’ve made some effort to walk back out of the dungeon.
Other tiny flaws seem to run ironically counter to Nintendo’s hand-holding habits. Like the first shop, which sells bombs, even though Link isn’t allowed to have bombs. “You need a bomb bag to carry these bombs!” you’re told, when you try to buy them. When you find bombs in a dungeon, the text box tells you “There’s a bomb bag included!” What the hell? Just don’t sell bombs in that shop, if I’m not allowed to buy them. For god’s sake.
In every dungeon, the fairy pops out right at the entrance and says “Here we are, in the dungeon! Maybe the item we’re looking for is somewhere in this room!” What a blue-baller. Of course the item isn’t in that room. We have a whole huge map up on the top of the screen.
The stone plaques with hints on them can be weirdly frustrating, as well. You might click on one, only to have Link run around to the side of it, and try to read it. A message pops up: “It’s hard to read it from here.” For heck’s sake, I clicked on the plaque itself — Link will jump out and slash an enemy I’ve clicked on; why can’t he walk around to the font side of a plaque and read it when I click on it? You figure in a game with pathological key-explanation messages, this sort of thing would be balance-tweaked, yeah?
Deeper balance issues include the boss keys — which are huge, and must be carried back to the boss door over Link’s head. I’m sure this was a good idea on paper, though in execution, it totally falls flat. It’s neither frustrating nor challenging nor fun. It’s just there. There’s Link, waiting for a platform so he can cross a pit over to the boss door. Yawn. On the way to obtaining the boss key, you’ll have unlocked numerous mandatory sub-puzzles that open a wide, eight-lane-highway-like path back to the dungeon entrance. And then, you open the boss door, and . . . huh? There’s a blue portal back to the entrance of the dungeon. You should think, “What do I need this for?” or “This isn’t hard anymore.” This is almost a compliment: it’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube, and then turning one side one click over and handing it to your friend and daring him to solve it. Just leave the Rubik’s Cube solved, man!
And then there’s the hecking postman. With squinted eyes and buck teeth and a little red hat and a Kid Icarus getup and this poofy little sound effect as he flies in and out, flapping his arms like a hypnotized man imitating a chicken, he’s a pretty disgusting-looking character — a simultaneous mixed bash of homosexuals, Greek mythological cosplayers, mail carriers, people without sunglasses on a sunny day, and Warner Bros. cartoon characters. And there he is, every time you get off your hecking boat, delivering you a letter you don’t want from a character you couldn’t care less about. Oh, here’s a letter from the guy who runs the cannon-shooting minigame. He’s lonely and wouldn’t mind it if you came around to play again. Who gives a flying heck! The letter-senders always attach gifts, as well, usually treasure trinkets you can trade for money, or give to friends over Wi-Fi for no real reason. Is this supposed to be fun?
The Animal Crossing inspirations are appreciated, though the execution falls flat before it can even take its first steps. For one thing, though Link can upgrade and change the appearance of his boat, the changes are merely cosmetic. Also, though you may collect tons of unique treasures, there’s no visual representation of them. You can walk around the cabin of Link’s boat at will, viewing your treasures. So what’s the point of collecting and trading them, if you can only view them through a stupid menu? These features seem tacked-on, and tacky.
And then there are the items that are actually important to the game — the fairy power-ups, which will increase Link’s various powers for every ten of them he collects. Sometimes these are buried in odd spots on islands, or sometimes they’re obtained by playing a shockingly fun deep-sea-salvage mini-game out on the ocean, though more often than not, they’re attached to letters from out-of-left-field characters. It’s clear that this Zelda game is determined to roll back on the Collectible Bullstuff Disorder that’s wracked the last few Zeldas — most famously manifested with the heart containers in Twilight Princess being made up of five pieces each instead of the usual four. In Phantom Hourglass, there are no heart pieces — only full hearts. And, amazingly, Link can only obtain a maximum of sixteen heart containers. What’s more, the dungeons no longer have compasses or maps. So far so good, yeah? Then there are these puzzling fairy drops, given away at the weirdest, most random moments, simultaneously belittling both the concept of inane Collectible Bullstuff in games and the developers’ desire to cut back on said bullstuff. It’s a confusing whirlwind of feeling.
Despite all these weird, sometimes-angry complaints, I arrived at the end of this game feeling like I’d just been read a picture book called “All That is Joyful in the World”. Looking back on its breezy construction makes me realize how much a work of the times it is, how evenly it fits in with the new Nintendo “Brain Training”, “Games for People, not for Gamers”, “Gamers are people too” aesthetic. The highest compliment I can pay Phantom Hourglass is that I realize how easy it must have been to make it, once the developers had realized what its hooks would be and how they would be positioned.
The developers of this game are the exact same people who created Four Swords Adventure for Gamecube, and subsequently destroyed its flow with hideous puzzles that required the four players to read signs to one another, or wander aimlessly around a town, talking to townspeople. As shown at E3, the game was fresh and fast. The Phantom Hourglass Dungeon reminds me quite heavily of the spirt of Four Swords Adventures, now perfected. Even the multiplayer mode of Phantom Hourglass radiates enlightenment: as something of a mix of Four Swords and Pac-Man VS, one player controls Link while the other controls three Phantoms (moved by drawing lines on the map). Link disappears from the Phantom player’s map whenever he stands in a safe spot. Meanwhile, Link can’t see the Phantoms on his own map until he picks up a Force chunk, which he then has to transport back to his base. If Link is caught, the player controlling the Phantoms becomes Link. It’s an amazing dynamic, especially when you get into the more complicated tactics — like stealing your opponent’s force out of his base on the other side of the arena, or using the staircases to warp around the battlefield, or mobilizing the Phantoms to the potential staircases where Link could be about to reappear after he disappears into a safe spot. It’s enthralling stuff, if a tiny bit thin.
What I want is for these same developers to make a sequel to this game every year. In fact, one might say I require it. I want to see bigger and better puzzles, and I don’t even mind if they use the exact same central dungeon concept and the same basic multiplayer mode. I wouldn’t mind spinoff games starring the pirate captain, or the Goron prince. Simply put, I want to see more of this level of creativity, with maybe a bit less of the bullstuff. In the past couple of years, I’ve come to groan at Zelda‘s fervent fandom, and have, many times, wondered why people aren’t more receptive to, I don’t know, new franchises, though with Phantom Hourglass, I guess I’ve given up. Go ahead, Nintendo. Keep making Zelda games, then. You’ve already reinvented the series quite significantly with Phantom Hourglass, and the game has sold, in just one week, more than four times what the Wii version sold in six months. You have your cue. Time to retrofit this level of ingenuity back into a console Zelda. I don’t even care if it’s not 1080p or fully voice-acted (as it should be) the next time around. Just get on it. And — so help me god — don’t you dare ever tell me that a key can unlock a door ever again.
★★★⋆
“THE BEST REASON SO FAR THIS YEAR TO BREATHE CONTINUOUSLY THROUGH YOUR MOUTH FOR TWENTY STRAIGHT HOURS”
Before you read this review, please ask yourself: “Have I breathed through my nose at any point during the last twenty-four hours?” If the answer is “no”, probe deeper: the last forty-eight hours, the last week, month, year? If the answer keeps coming up “No”, then chances are you don’t need to be reading this. The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass is better than a hand job from Super Mario Bros. 3-era Shigeru Miyamoto. If you find yourself continuing to read despite the revelation that you are, in fact, a mouth-breathing fan of Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda franchise, it’s your fault if any of the following words hurts you.
That said, I absolutely loved this videogame. And believe me, it’s very rare that I use that word concerning anything outside of breakfast cereals. This game is a rare event indeed. It’s full of character, personality, attention to detail, and actual courage with regards to game design. It’s perhaps the best Zelda game Nintendo’s made since Link’s Awakening back on the Gameboy. It’s small, short, and polished to a high shine. The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass was a more fulfilling entertainment experience, on the whole, than any of the so-called “blockbuster” movies I’ve seen so far this “summer”. (Especially more than “Spider-Man 3”.)
Story-wise, the game is a direct sequel to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which, coincidentally, I remember kind of hating. Wind Waker was fluffy, silly stuff, for the most part, with the main character, Link, being a big-eyed, stylized, cartoon child. When Nintendo originally unveiled Wind Waker, it spurred a weird controversy: apparently, the childish men voted most likely to bleep-bloop around with the babies’ toys called videogames deep into their forties or fifties complained that the game wasn’t being serious enough about its heritage. A confusing, dark era came and passed over the months after the game’s unveiling. Some true, champion-like gamers’ reaction was so fierce that they admitted on internet forums that they hoped the game’s box wasn’t too childish looking, or else they’d be ashamed to pay money for it. I mean, what if the cashier was a girl? Shrewd forum-goers were quick to suggest buying the game at a game store, because there wouldn’t be girls in there, though paranoia set in: the girls might be buying games for their boyfriends. The obvious rebuttal was that guys who play games don’t have girlfriends, and that girls who have boyfriends who do play games wouldn’t want to go out with you, regardless of whether or not you’re the type of cartoon pedophile to play Wind Waker. These kinds of comments set fire to lively conversations for months on end.
The fans ended up lining up overnight in freezing cold with Triforce face-paint to buy the game, anyway. Very few reviewers were able to put together a paragraph about the game without describing it as “near-perfect” or posing the million-dollar question: might this be the best game ever?
The objective truth is, Wind Waker, for the most part, was cloying, obsessive-compulsive bullstuff. It was the world’s slowest locomotive, powered by a vague combination of stinky fossil fuels and delicious watermelon Slurpees. On the one hand, it had a genuinely amazing visual style and tons of personality. On the other hand, it was cluttered up with nonsense. The game sold several million copies in America, where people have been known to vote Republican because their dads vote Republican, and Europe, where people generally respect their magazines’ critics. In Japan, though Weekly Famitsu gave it a dazzling 40/40 score, the game sold poorly, and littered bargain bins all over the place. Japanese Gamecube games came in these cute little paper sleeves; there’s Wind Waker, still overstocked today at my favorite game shop in Akihabara, only 980 yen new, paper sleeve all nicked and ripped, a sad sight.
The math was simple enough for even Nintendo of America’s eventual president Reggie to figure out: Zelda sold more in English than it did in Japanese. So it was that with the next Zelda, Nintendo would speak directly to the confused, huddled hordes ashamed to buy a game that might get them convicted of indirect pedophilia. That game was Twilight Princess, which is actually kind of a hilariously dainty title for “THE Serious Zelda Game”. Twilight Princess sent Nintendo press conference attendees into a panicking, screaming frenzy for something like three out-of-control minutes. Backstage, Nintendo PR guys were pushing earbuds into their ears and shouting into microphones: pause the hecking tele-prompter! I don’t care who you have to punch! we’re losing the speech! The internet was soon aflame with the news: “The new Zelda totally looks like ‘Lord of the Rings’ and it’s going to be awesome as heck.”
The next year, when the game still wasn’t released, Nintendo showed a longer trailer at their E3 press conference. From my seat, I could see the tele-prompter. After the trailer had ended, the words “PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE” stood there on the screen for a whole minute and a half. The applause, unfortunately, didn’t last that long. It would have been kind of hilarious if it did.
One of the consolation prizes for attending that press conference, for surviving the elbow-throwing mosh pit that kind of didn’t happen, was a DS card with the Twilight Princess trailer on it.
I sold mine on eBay, through a friend, for about a hundred dollars.
Twice, then thrice-delayed, Twilight Princess was said by producer Eiji Aonuma himself to be a more conscientious, focused Zelda. It ended up containing most of the joy of Wind Waker with surprisingly less fat. Rather than revel in aimless wandering, it sported series of joyous, breezy set-pieces. However, the specter of idiocy still loomed over the whole experience: the first “puzzle” in the game requires you to catch a fish for a cat, which won’t eat the first fish you catch, though he’ll go nuts for the second. To make things worse, the nuances of fishing just aren’t covered well enough in the game, which is semi-hilarious given how obsessive recent Zelda games are about constantly holding the player’s hand.
When the Wii console was launched in Japan, Wii Sports and Wii Play sold a million copies each, and Zelda failed to sell 100,000. Originally released for 7,000 yen, you can now find Twilight Princess for 2,000, new. When asked about this in an interview, Shigeru Miyamoto replied that Japanese gamers just don’t want complicated adventures anymore. The internet gasped so hard — through its mouth, yes — that a small animal somewhere might have imploded. Twilight Princess was quite simply a treat for die-hard Zelda fans — meaning, non-Japanese gamers. It was the first Zelda to not even have a Japanese title in Japan. They stuck the English version’s logo on there, title and all. They must have left the title in English because all of the Japanese players truly interested in the game had read about it from English sources.
So here’s The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, for the Nintendo DS. This is Miyamoto and Aonuma’s supposed streamlining of the Zelda experience, presented so that any human being capable of deciding to buy a DS and Brain Training would be able to make his or her way through the game. In addition to confirming that yes, Zelda games should have a cartoon aesthetic for as long as possible, it’s also something of a smashing success as a videogame.
For one thing, you control the entire game with the stylus. You move Link by touching the screen and holding the stylus atop the direction you want Link to run. The farther you hold the stylus from Link, the more quickly he moves. You even use the stylus to attack with the sword: tap an enemy to jump-slash at it, wherever it is on the screen. If Link’s path isn’t obstructed, he’ll score a hit. Slide the stylus to slash in your chosen direction. Swirl it in a circle to make Link do a swirling slash (do this too many times in a row and Link will get dizzy). If you’re thinking it seems impossible for such a battle system to present any challenge, you’re not thinking as creatively as Nintendo’s Genius Game Designers. Sometimes enemies will block your lock-on attacks, so you need to actually walk behind the enemies to attack them in the back. Yes — the simple idea of walking around the enemy with the stylus makes a battle magnitudes more challenging. And it just about never feels cheap. It feels like a real videogame, as robust as Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time.
The items are ingenious. The boomerang flies on the exact path you draw on the screen. The grappling hook can be used to fix a tightrope between two poles; you can then use that tightrope as either a bridge or a slingshot to make link jump farther. And the Bombchu — a bomb attached to a mechanical mouse — is brilliant: in Ocarina of Time, you could control it in 3D, though in Phantom Hourglass, the game pauses when you equip one, and then, once you’ve drawn a path on the map, the action un-pauses so that the Bombchu can run its course while you get where you have to go.
Though the first puzzle in the game is baby stuff — count the palm trees on the beach, write the number on a sign to unlock a door — it really sets the tone for the level of intelligence Phantom Hourglass‘s designers exhibit in some of the later dungeons. Say you encounter a puzzle where there’s a switch that causes a super-far-away door to open for a split second. You have to cross a couple of platforms to get to the door. The Bombchu can’t run across the platforms, because it’ll fall into the pit. What do you do? Of course, you draw a superfluously long patrol path for the Bombchu, release him from the edge of the pit, just as you’re about to board the first platform, and then run to the door while the Bombchu is happily running circles around the switch. Do you remember when Zelda games used to be about simply lighting all the torches in a room to unlock the door? What the hell did that even mean, anyway? How can lighting torches unlock a door? How can killing all the enemy spiders in a room make a key fall from the ceiling, either? Though Phantom Hourglass has its moments where killing spiders makes keys fall from the ceiling, at least they’re understated, and at least these moments happen strictly while you’re in frantic transit from one place to another; though there are points where you’ll have to light torches, at least they’re all uniquely fascinating. Say there are four torches in a room, all on pedestals, one of them lit, and the other three obstructed peculiarly from one side. You have to find a way first lower just one obstruction, and then get on top of that odd platform in the middle of the room, and throw the boomerang on a steady course to spread the flames.
For the most part, however, it’s the smart puzzles that stand out. If this is Nintendo’s effort to make a Zelda game that can appeal to the casual, Brain Training crowd, then it’s excellently fitting and kind of hilarious that the puzzles tend to require a certain sharper degree of actual intelligence than the last few Zeldas.
Personally, I liked a lot of Twilight Princess‘s execution; I liked how the boomerang was something of a clever little mini-game in and of itself. I like targeting a bomb and then a wall that needs to be bombed, all while dodging enemies. Twilight Princess has a certain thick, pleasant, action-heavy crunch to it. As an evolution of Zelda games, it’s a hell of a thing, and as a bit of a committed-for-life videogame-player, I can’t honestly say there’s anything wrong with it.
Phantom Hourglass is just exponentially fresher. Twilight Princess has a bad habit of willing, wanting, and waiting to be huge and epic, of stuffing one- or two-hour-long intermissions between dungeons and pre-dungeons, and then another fetch-quest intermission between the pre-dungeon and the actual dungeon. Unfortunately — and this might be hard for a die-hard Zelda fan to hear — the game just doesn’t look or sound good enough for all the dramatic intonations to hang together.
What these games in the Zelda genre need to truly hold together is an ingenious gimmick. The Minnish Cap on Gameboy Advance thought it had that gimmick — a hat that makes you small, so that the world appears huge, allowing you to solve puzzles that have been ham-handedly plotted to be solved in a manner that requires you to change sizes as many times as possible. Majora’s Mask — where the player has three days to save the world, and must reset time to the start of the first day whenever necessary — much as I regard it as my favorite Zelda, didn’t quite get the gimmick right, either. Three game-days was almost too much time. The game was overwhelming for many players who had tromped through Ocarina of Time — in which the gimmick was your typical two-world time-traveling stuff — with ease. To tell the truth, it was overwhelming for me, for the longest time, as well. The game is a tough nut to crack, and it starts as terribly as it does awesomely. Whereas Ocarina of Time was a wide-armed welcoming of long-time Zelda fans who’d been replaying Link to the Past for five years, Majora’s Mask was an arms-akimbo bastard wearing a T-shirt that said “If the first hour bothers you, run the heck away.” It took a lot of balls to make Majora’s Mask, and it took just as many balls to make Wind Waker chock-full of cloying bullstuff again. Likewise, it took just as many barrels of balls to make Phantom Hourglass, only this time, they nailed the gimmick out of the park.
Phantom Hourglass‘s gimmick is that it features one large central dungeon — The Temple of the Sea King — into which you must enter multiple times throughout the game. An item called the “Phantom Hourglass” determines how long you can stay in this temple. Your goal in the temple is to find sea charts which will allow you to explore other regions of the sea, which contain islands containing temples containing the items you need to complete your quest. Find a sea chart, get out, sail to the new island, solve a couple of pre-dungeon puzzles, get in the dungeon, clear the dungeon, beat the boss (who then turns to sand for your Phantom Hourglass), get the mystic item, and then head back into the main temple on the first island. Sometimes, hijinks happen at sea on the way to the dungeon, or on the way back. Maybe you’ll get attacked by a sea monster, or a lady pirate. The hijinks are always scripted, though they’re never enough to distract your joy. The game is linear in its flow, yes — I mean, why can’t I just sail the ocean looking for these dungeons for myself? — though it’s indisputable that this is a joyful kind of linearity we’re dealing with here. The game is just short enough that the flow never gets tiring — one dungeon, main dungeon, another dungeon, main dungeon again, another dungeon, side-dungeon, main dungeon again, final series of dungeons, main dungeon one last time, final boss. The dungeons are all fun, the weird happenings at sea are fun, shooting the cannon at monsters or jumping over torpedoes at sea never has time to stop being entertaining, and the central dungeon is enthralling.
The hook of the central dungeon impressed me on paper and floored me in execution. (Literally, I played this game on the floor. That’s . . . where we sleep, in Japan.) You have a limited amount of time to explore the main dungeon. Time counts down when you’re moving about the dungeon, and the countdown freezes when you’re standing on a special, blessed, purple floor. Enemy knights called Phantoms patrol the dungeon on set paths. If they see you, they will hunt you down. If they slash you, you lose thirty seconds of time and are sent back to the entrance of the current floor. In Metal Gear Solid, the enemies will go back to their patrol and assume they were just seeing things if you hide for long enough after, say, shooting them in the leg. In Phantom Hourglass, the stupidity of the guards has an airtight, almost Final Fantastic reason — these purple floors are parts of the temple that the curse of the Phantoms has yet to leak into, so they simply don’t register.
In your first few forays in the Link’s Mysterious Dungeon, you might be nervous, or even on the edge of your seat. Get to the third basement to get the first sea chart, and then warp back out. The next time you come back, after the second dungeon, you’ll have to start the whole mysterious dungeon all over again. Only now, you’re not creeping around nearly as carefully. You’ve fallen into the Comfort Zone with those first three floors, and you feel like a genius chemist when you realize there’s a destructible wall near one of the Phantoms on the second floor. You didn’t have bombs the first time through the dungeon, though you do now! Might as well bomb that wall! Get down to the fourth basement, however, and things are complicated all over again. Finally get the next sea chart, beat the next dungeon, come back to the main temple, and now you have a bow and arrow, and you can shoot the Phantoms in the back, freezing them for a whole ten seconds or so. Yes! You now have a new strategy for getting through those first six floors.
Eventually, after popping in and out of the main dungeon enough times, you will waltz through those first couple floors like you own the place. And by the time you penetrate to the last couple floors, you’re packing all the items in the game; though the developers’ intended solution to any given puzzle might float to the surface if you relax your mind a bit, there’s a tiny bit of workable freedom with which to execute your own insane schemes (many of them involving the Bombchu, if you’re like me).
To wit: you’re able to draw on the map in this game. Just tap the map icon in the drop-down menu tab (or press down on the control pad) to make the map occupy the touch screen. Now draw or write whatever you want. Your first two or three trips into the dungeon, you might notice, say, destructible walls, so you might write “bomb” there, or even draw a cute bomb icon. There are red pots in the dungeon, which can be lifted, carried, and thrown wherever you want to throw them, spilling the holy essence of the purple-floored safe spots. I found myself — originally kind of suspicious of the map-memo-writing feature — chicken-scratching the letters “RP” at the location of every red pot. At some points in the dungeon, you’ll find yourself tracing the routes of guard patrols. If you’re savvy enough, you can trace the exact width of each guard’s range of vision, and find airtight safe spots in which to stand and shoot the guards in the backs with arrows.
This is the closest a videogame has ever come to making me feel like the hero of a heist movie, like Tom Cruise lowering himself through the laser net in “Mission: Impossible” — hell, they even made a videogame out of that! And here’s Phantom Hourglass, a videogame that makes me feel like a character in a movie so awesome that it would be super-disappointing if they made a videogame out of it.
This isn’t to say the dungeon is perfect, however. The chief fault is that the game doesn’t end if you run out of time. Rather, Link’s health simply starts to drain if he’s away from the safe spots. And there are blue pots everywhere, with abundant hearts in them. And unlike the red pots and yellow pots (which give you extra time), the blue pots reappear whenever you exit a floor and come back, so running out of time is hardly the end. I find this a very disappointing oversight: I wish the dungeon would simply kick me out for not making the time limit.
Late in the game, though, near the very end, the main dungeon curls up like Ouroboros, though instead of eating its own tail, it just stuffs in its own mouth. I’m sure there’s someone on the internet who would see me dead for putting this in plain writing, though here we go: they give you a way to kill the Phantoms, and it’s way too easy. As invincible enemies, they were the most intriguing moving obstacles ever to exist in a Zelda game. Once you’re able to kill them, the main dungeon becomes depressingly easy.
The game swiftly recovers, however, by throwing in a thrilling final boss with enough surprise recoveries and epic final forms to gag Epona (that’s, um, the name of Link’s horse in Twilight Princess). Many of the boss encounters prior to this one had been smart, two-screen affairs, where the top screen offers you some kind of alternate view (for example, one battle uses the top screen as an FPS-camera-style view of Link from the monster’s eyes), though this final battle takes the cake. And what’s more, as the game winds down, these cute, breezy characters — Link’s fairy partner, Ciela, the greedy pirate Captain Lineback, the mysterious old man, the angry, squinting girl-pirate Jolene, and the kidnapped Princess Zelda / Tetra — whose ridiculous banter you’ve been half-enjoying and half groaning at for twenty hours suddenly become interesting, rounded-out people. It’s not quite expected at all for the game to become something of a fulfilling narrative at the end, though there it is, and I can’t help thinking that I would have never seen the end at all if they’d decided to stuff the game with unnecessary stuff of, say, Wind Waker.
The game is not without its teeth-grinding faults. And no, dear readers of GameFAQs, the “totally gay hub dungeon” is not one of them. If you go by GameFAQs’ Phantom Hourglass discussion forum circa the game’s launch, three of the most Frequently Asked Questions were “How many islands are there in this game?” “How big are the islands?” and “How do I get to the island on the first island?”
The problems with Phantom Hourglass tend to ironically revolve around the miraculous stylus control scheme. Sometimes, for example, Link will slow to a morbid crawl as you near the edge of a screen. The mathematical explanation for this is that Link’s running speed is programmed to be relative to the distance of the stylus from Link’s current position; Link is usually positioned at the center of the screen by default, though if you’re in a dungeon or a house, or nearing the exit of a location, Link will move to a different position on the screen, causing him to break his run and tiptoe toward the exit. It can be maddening when, say, there are Manic Monsters chasing you. Actually using Link’s rolling attack, so brain-bustingly simple and convenient in the 3D Zeldas, is just a few hairs short of writing a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem on the back of a nine-millimeter bullet that’s flying toward your skull. It says you’re supposed to draw a quick circle with the stylus on the edge of the screen while Link is running, and it also says that you’re able to use this to shake trees to see if they have any items inside, though because Link rolls the instant you draw the little circle on the edge of the screen, the edge of the screen has to be an immaculately calculated distance from the tree you’re trying to roll into in order for Link to actually roll into the tree. It’s a real head-bender, man.
Sometimes, these fine movement issues will show up at precisely the wrong time, and you might find yourself screaming. If you scream, and some particles happen to land on the screen, be sure to pause the game before wiping the particles off, or else Link might gallop right into a lava pit, and you’ll be screaming again.
Other unfortunate problems involve the incessant hand-holding. I remember, back with the original Zelda, my little brother — a regular Baby Huey, he was sociopathically afraid of being locked in a department store after closing for most of his life (he still is, probably) — would mutter over and over again “You might want to take your bombs off” as I played. My brother was worried I would accidentally press the B button and lay a bomb, which would be a total waste. “You might want to take your arrows off”, he’d say, if it were arrows. Once, shaking with annoyance, I began placing bombs all around the screen, one at a time, listening to my brother shiver and spit and eventually start crying.
You don’t need my brother to enjoy this newest Zelda game, however. The game will do enough spitting and crying all on its own. Most groan-worthy are the messages when you pick up a small key: “This is a small key! You can use it to unlock one locked door. After you use the key once, it will disappear.” This Zelda game’s focus is on quick, frequent, taxing puzzles, which means a lot of locked doors, and a lot of keys, and a lot of instructions on how to use the keys.
It used to be, if you found a key in a Zelda game and you didn’t know what a key did, you were either mentally handicapped or you reached for the instruction manual. I suppose, eventually, someone in Nintendo’s R&D did a big Powerpoint presentation, with the cooperation of a local psychiatrist, proving — quite logically — that people absent-minded enough to forget what a key does have probably also lost both the box and instruction manual of the game they’re playing. As an employee in a videogame company’s marketing division myself, I could put up a convincing presentation to explain that we should probably just explain once what a key does, and then leave it up to these instruction-manual misplacers to either remember that, or figure it out anew. If anyone attacked my views and said that we can’t shut out the morons and the idiots just because most people — not to mention most gamers — aren’t either, I would jump up onto the boardroom table and scream, what the heck do you do if the person loses the hecking cartridge, huh? What the heck do you do then! Would you give out a free game and console to a shaky kid who showed up at a game shop and said that first he lost the manual, then the box, then he forgot what keys did, then he lost his lunch money, then he lost the game cartridge, and then his DS? There’s a certain line, separating the place where enough is enough and the place where enough is more than enough, and incessant “You got a key!” messages, as a habit, is at least a couple steps into “more than enough” country.
Well, maybe the message is meant to convey that the key will disappear after one use? Maybe so, Sherlock. Though maybe it might be best if you add a little animation that shows the key fly out of the lock and float in the center of the screen and poof into purple smoke, all in the space of one second, whenever a key is used. Maybe that’d be better than words displayed before the key disappears. Show, don’t tell. Live in the moment. Trust the player’s common sense, et cetera.
Nintendo’s pathological belief that the majority of newcomers to videogames are also repulsive idiots penetrates deep into Phantom Hourglass, and rears one of its hundreds of ghostly eyeballs at numerous points. The non-optional side-quests, for example: sometimes you have to use the shovel to dig in the right place on an island, though instead of presenting you with a riddle as to where you have to dig, a stone plaque will contain the necessary information verbatim. “Connect the upper-right tree and the lower-left tree, and then the lower-right and the upper-left trees, and dig where the lines intersect.” At the beginning of the game, such a puzzle feels kind of fresh. It kind of recalls the old point-and-click adventure games that people seem to still long for so hungrily. You feel kind of cool, as you wander the island, finding the four items, marking them on the map, and then connecting them, and then heading for the X-marked spot. Get a little farther, though, and many of the non-optional puzzles are still playing the same game. They tell you what to connect, and you’ll obey, and that’ll be that.
Other elements of the game, quite frankly, make me feel like I’m being talked-down-to by a three-year-old, and that stuff just isn’t appreciated. For one thing, before every boss, there’ll be a stone plaque that explains that you can use this blue portal to return to the dungeon entrance. Then a blue portal appears. Okay. After you beat the boss, a treasure chest containing a heart container — the game explains what a heart container is, of course, every time — drops down, and then, slowly, the screen narrows to letterbox again, and a blue portal appears. Your fairy is ecstatic: “Link! We can use this blue portal to go back to the dungeon entrance!” Does Nintendo think people are goldfish, or what? The natural thing to do, when faced with a dead end, is go back one room. And then, hey, there’s that blue portal, there. At least let us feel like we’ve made some effort to walk back out of the dungeon.
Other tiny flaws seem to run ironically counter to Nintendo’s hand-holding habits. Like the first shop, which sells bombs, even though Link isn’t allowed to have bombs. “You need a bomb bag to carry these bombs!” you’re told, when you try to buy them. When you find bombs in a dungeon, the text box tells you “There’s a bomb bag included!” What the hell? Just don’t sell bombs in that shop, if I’m not allowed to buy them. For god’s sake.
In every dungeon, the fairy pops out right at the entrance and says “Here we are, in the dungeon! Maybe the item we’re looking for is somewhere in this room!” What a blue-baller. Of course the item isn’t in that room. We have a whole huge map up on the top of the screen.
The stone plaques with hints on them can be weirdly frustrating, as well. You might click on one, only to have Link run around to the side of it, and try to read it. A message pops up: “It’s hard to read it from here.” For heck’s sake, I clicked on the plaque itself — Link will jump out and slash an enemy I’ve clicked on; why can’t he walk around to the font side of a plaque and read it when I click on it? You figure in a game with pathological key-explanation messages, this sort of thing would be balance-tweaked, yeah?
Deeper balance issues include the boss keys — which are huge, and must be carried back to the boss door over Link’s head. I’m sure this was a good idea on paper, though in execution, it totally falls flat. It’s neither frustrating nor challenging nor fun. It’s just there. There’s Link, waiting for a platform so he can cross a pit over to the boss door. Yawn. On the way to obtaining the boss key, you’ll have unlocked numerous mandatory sub-puzzles that open a wide, eight-lane-highway-like path back to the dungeon entrance. And then, you open the boss door, and . . . huh? There’s a blue portal back to the entrance of the dungeon. You should think, “What do I need this for?” or “This isn’t hard anymore.” This is almost a compliment: it’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube, and then turning one side one click over and handing it to your friend and daring him to solve it. Just leave the Rubik’s Cube solved, man!
And then there’s the hecking postman. With squinted eyes and buck teeth and a little red hat and a Kid Icarus getup and this poofy little sound effect as he flies in and out, flapping his arms like a hypnotized man imitating a chicken, he’s a pretty disgusting-looking character — a simultaneous mixed bash of homosexuals, Greek mythological cosplayers, mail carriers, people without sunglasses on a sunny day, and Warner Bros. cartoon characters. And there he is, every time you get off your hecking boat, delivering you a letter you don’t want from a character you couldn’t care less about. Oh, here’s a letter from the guy who runs the cannon-shooting minigame. He’s lonely and wouldn’t mind it if you came around to play again. Who gives a flying heck! The letter-senders always attach gifts, as well, usually treasure trinkets you can trade for money, or give to friends over Wi-Fi for no real reason. Is this supposed to be fun?
The Animal Crossing inspirations are appreciated, though the execution falls flat before it can even take its first steps. For one thing, though Link can upgrade and change the appearance of his boat, the changes are merely cosmetic. Also, though you may collect tons of unique treasures, there’s no visual representation of them. You can walk around the cabin of Link’s boat at will, viewing your treasures. So what’s the point of collecting and trading them, if you can only view them through a stupid menu? These features seem tacked-on, and tacky.
And then there are the items that are actually important to the game — the fairy power-ups, which will increase Link’s various powers for every ten of them he collects. Sometimes these are buried in odd spots on islands, or sometimes they’re obtained by playing a shockingly fun deep-sea-salvage mini-game out on the ocean, though more often than not, they’re attached to letters from out-of-left-field characters. It’s clear that this Zelda game is determined to roll back on the Collectible Bullstuff Disorder that’s wracked the last few Zeldas — most famously manifested with the heart containers in Twilight Princess being made up of five pieces each instead of the usual four. In Phantom Hourglass, there are no heart pieces — only full hearts. And, amazingly, Link can only obtain a maximum of sixteen heart containers. What’s more, the dungeons no longer have compasses or maps. So far so good, yeah? Then there are these puzzling fairy drops, given away at the weirdest, most random moments, simultaneously belittling both the concept of inane Collectible Bullstuff in games and the developers’ desire to cut back on said bullstuff. It’s a confusing whirlwind of feeling.
Despite all these weird, sometimes-angry complaints, I arrived at the end of this game feeling like I’d just been read a picture book called “All That is Joyful in the World”. Looking back on its breezy construction makes me realize how much a work of the times it is, how evenly it fits in with the new Nintendo “Brain Training”, “Games for People, not for Gamers”, “Gamers are people too” aesthetic. The highest compliment I can pay Phantom Hourglass is that I realize how easy it must have been to make it, once the developers had realized what its hooks would be and how they would be positioned.
The developers of this game are the exact same people who created Four Swords Adventure for Gamecube, and subsequently destroyed its flow with hideous puzzles that required the four players to read signs to one another, or wander aimlessly around a town, talking to townspeople. As shown at E3, the game was fresh and fast. The Phantom Hourglass Dungeon reminds me quite heavily of the spirt of Four Swords Adventures, now perfected. Even the multiplayer mode of Phantom Hourglass radiates enlightenment: as something of a mix of Four Swords and Pac-Man VS, one player controls Link while the other controls three Phantoms (moved by drawing lines on the map). Link disappears from the Phantom player’s map whenever he stands in a safe spot. Meanwhile, Link can’t see the Phantoms on his own map until he picks up a Force chunk, which he then has to transport back to his base. If Link is caught, the player controlling the Phantoms becomes Link. It’s an amazing dynamic, especially when you get into the more complicated tactics — like stealing your opponent’s force out of his base on the other side of the arena, or using the staircases to warp around the battlefield, or mobilizing the Phantoms to the potential staircases where Link could be about to reappear after he disappears into a safe spot. It’s enthralling stuff, if a tiny bit thin.
What I want is for these same developers to make a sequel to this game every year. In fact, one might say I require it. I want to see bigger and better puzzles, and I don’t even mind if they use the exact same central dungeon concept and the same basic multiplayer mode. I wouldn’t mind spinoff games starring the pirate captain, or the Goron prince. Simply put, I want to see more of this level of creativity, with maybe a bit less of the bullstuff. In the past couple of years, I’ve come to groan at Zelda‘s fervent fandom, and have, many times, wondered why people aren’t more receptive to, I don’t know, new franchises, though with Phantom Hourglass, I guess I’ve given up. Go ahead, Nintendo. Keep making Zelda games, then. You’ve already reinvented the series quite significantly with Phantom Hourglass, and the game has sold, in just one week, more than four times what the Wii version sold in six months. You have your cue. Time to retrofit this level of ingenuity back into a console Zelda. I don’t even care if it’s not 1080p or fully voice-acted (as it should be) the next time around. Just get on it. And — so help me god — don’t you dare ever tell me that a key can unlock a door ever again.