DIGITAL DIVIDES

Dragon Age: Origins

I think I’ve restarted Dragon Age: Origins about three times in the years that I’ve owned it. Whenever I get an itch to experience a traditional western-style high fantasy, I always gravitate back, and each time I am quickly reminded how unsatisfying and generally dull I find this game to be. It’s funny, because I realize that a lot of people love Dragon Age and really get swept up by its world and lore. I’ve never really been a fan of Bioware; I feel like each of their games is executed in more or less the same way, and those traits, that common DNA, is exactly the stuff I don’t really like. But I’m still in a fantasy mood, and I hate the feeling of having left this game unfinished for so long. I was hoping it would keep me in the right mindset, and there were segments where I was certainly entertained. On the whole, however, I’m glad that the game is over, and I don’t see myself going back to it anytime soon.  

There’s already a lot of annoying negativity when it comes to discussions about video games, so when I start a new game, I try not to think about it on a “good” to “bad” spectrum, because that’s incredibly reductive and hardly describes the experience of playing something. Dragon Age tries a lot of things, some of which succeed, I think, while others certainly do not. I’m not sure that it was trying to be the game that I was personally looking for. Instead, it was trying to satisfy another audience, one that already exists elsewhere, whose tastes have been shaped by previous efforts very similar to this one. My main problem with the game, I guess, is that the world seems incredibly bland to me. I feel like Dragon Age has no style of its own. When I conjure images of it in my mind, everything is brown and gray, the colors of tedium. It’s sort of a perfect storm of boring dialogue, uninteresting plot, and plain graphics that really turns me off. I think if any one of those aspects were done with a little more flair or efficiency or something, I would be way more into this game. But instead it gives me nothing to latch onto, and I feel like I’m doing work to push the characters forward. So much of Dragon Age, the main quest and the abundant side-diversions, felt like a chore to me, which is the opposite of what I was hoping to experience. I wanted to get pulled into the adventure, to be invested in the characters, but the unpleasant surface blemishes of the game would drag me back out.

The plot is noticeably derivative of other popular franchises, a mish-mash of tropes from western fantasy stock, most prominently the Lord of the Rings, A Song of Fire and Ice, and Dungeons & Dragons. I realize that this is a matter of taste—that for whatever reason I have a much higher tolerance for JRPG clichés than I do for western ones. But Dragon Age does nothing for me. I never felt transported, and I never felt genuinely intrigued by the world that Bioware was trying to create (and in fact, I got tired of the amount of lore and minutiae they packed into the game via notes and other text accessible through menu navigation). Part of this might be that they do a lot of telling, and not a lot of showing. I mean, of course, we see the world, we inhabit in as much as the game allows us to, but a lot of the facts and history are conveyed to us through written back-matter or through leaden, unpleasant dialogue. I felt like Vagrant Story really transported me, and that’s a PS1 game. I cared about the characters, as thin as they were, and I thought the world itself possessed a kind of collapsing, haunted beauty. Nothing in Dragon Age really approaches that level of craftsmanship in a visual sense, though there are certainly comparable locations, and the narrative fails to really convey any kind of dread, or longing, or melancholy, or whatever emotion we are supposed to be feeling.

What I like most about fantasy is world-building. There’s a pleasant alienation that comes from being introduced to a world that feels plausible but different from our own, a kind of genuine magic, like we’re peering through space and time into a unique but comprehensible place. My mileage varies depending on the kind of fantasy world we’re talking about, but it might be that Dragon Age clings a little too closely to the standards of the past. The worlds of Ivalice, or Suikoden or the early Phantasy Star games really interested me, but Ferelden lacks something that those other, older games had. Their worlds felt a little weirder, perhaps more eccentric. They were a little more daring, mashing styles together more readily and creatively. Maybe I’ve just had my fill of elves and dwarves, but I wanted something more, something different, but I felt like Dragon Age was too obviously descended from the pillars of western fantasy canon.

And the dialogue, to my ear at least, is painfully over-written and clunky. This is true of all of Bioware’s games, and really almost all videogames. There are very few games that really get spoken dialogue right. I guess video games, as an art form and as an industry, are still developing those rules of thumb for how much is too much, and things like that. I don’t think we’ve yet found our Mamet or our Tarantino or whatever. Most of the time dialogue is serviceable; often cringe-worthy, if it’s trying to be funny.

So, the confluence of all these forces together made the game a chore for me, and I was either bored or frustrated most of the time. I don’t think I ever really lost myself. I never felt a spark of curiosity about where a story might go. The only impulse of pleasure was accumulation, acquiring stronger weapons or leveling into a new skill or whatever. But that was it. The feeling of being immersed into a world or the motivation to really win this war against the darkspawn wasn’t there. My character did end up being impressively powerful, glowing at all times with an ethereal aura, but throughout the game he remained such a distant, cold thing, this mannequin avatar that I was clumsily piloting through a dreary medieval set. I’ll admit a fondness for a few of the characters (the obvious ones, Morrigan and Alistair), but even that affection was limited by their overwritten dialogue and the weird choices those characters in particular make by the end of the game. I think I would have liked Dragon Age if there was a little more developer control over the advancement of the plot, if it wasn’t trying to maintain the illusion that my choices were what mattered. Creating an environment where my agency trumps everything else, by necessity, sanitizes the experience of so many narrative techniques, so that allegory, or foreshadowing, or others have little use where the plot can’t be predicted by the creator. Instead it sort of levels everything out, and prepares obvious junction points where choices can be made. I guess the seams were too obvious for me, and so I couldn’t really fully commit myself.

Dishonored

People have a lot of reasons for consuming art the way they do. I play videogames because I want to feel something. Even though I can admit that most of the time their dialogue is cheesy and tone deaf, their direction obvious and ham-fisted, I think that, at their best, videogames really do move me. Maybe I like the simplicity, the idea of a universe rich with meaning, where the hand of a creator has indeed touched all things and everything is in its place for a reason, and that my experience in that world is paramount to its existence. I’ve always liked the idea of a quest, a mission that supersedes all other needs in its importance. I think this is reflected in the kind of games I like to play (mainly RPGs or story-heavy action games), though those tastes in turn were shaped by games I was exposed to as a child. I’ve built up an impressive backlog of untouched games, but my thoughts often drift back to old favorites, mainly from the PS1/PS2 era, games that really struck my impressionable mind at just the right moment in my development.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but the point is: I have to push myself to really play a new game or a modern action game. If it doesn’t grab me right away, I fade out, and then I end up with a stack of half-played games on a shelf in my closet. When early reviews of Dishonored started to appear, glowingly positive examinations of this game’s triumphs, I was intrigued intellectually but not really motivated to play. I felt like I knew what I would get the moment I started it up. To some degree, I was right, but in other ways it definitely surprised me. Finishing Dishonored was a good exercise, as I think this game can serve as a decent example of where Western game development stands right now in terms of how seriously it’s willing to take narrative and thematic ambitions.

I don’t think Dishonored is a bad game at all, though I can say that for the most part I didn’t enjoy it. My level of enjoyment stems from exactly how I chose to play the game, and thus how I chose to shape my experience in the world of Dunwall. The only other stealth/espionage games I have any real familiarity with are the Metal Gear Solid games, a series which I think is vastly different from Dishonored and not really meant to be compared (Dishonored really has more in common with, or at least is attempting to imitate some of the progressive gameplay attitudes of, Bioshock). I will say that I never felt quite as oppressed, quite as stifled by Metal Gear Solid; there was always a little more empowerment, more clarity to the mechanics at work, and the story, while zany (and overwritten), had more depth and humanity, more sympathy for it’s characters and more dramatic flare. Dishonored feels to me like a genuine attempt at doing something, but an attempt that doesn’t altogether succeed.

Knowing that Dishonored was judging me if I killed anyone made it impossible for me to kill at all, and so I had to meticulously avoid any combat, which led to frequent saving and reloading of my game. I found the layout and demands of the game to be stressful in a way that largely sapped my enjoyment of it. I became less engaged, and by the latter third of the game I had more or less checked out (and, interestingly, the game does the same; later missions lack the same richness and diversity as those early on, and in generally the game becomes more dull). I was also aware that I could fight my way out of most situations if I really wanted to, and was seemingly expected to do this at least some of the time, even though I would be punished for it later. Engaging with the enemies and killing them just generates more rats and more disorder, which in turn invites the player to engage in more fatal violence. So even though the game sort of gestures to the illusion that there are multiple ways to play, it seems like one is heavily favored and the others aren’t. As in real life, actions have consequences, and that’s what the consequences are in this game, so maybe I should be more forgiving. Anyway, it was a strange loop, a weird choice that I suppose has merit but didn’t do anything for me. Maybe I’m nit picking. I think if the story and the world had done more to grab me I wouldn’t have cared so much about these things.

It’s a little sad to think about how much of a fantasy it is that there might be a game that features deep, meaningful scenarios and also has a satisfying circle of action or violence. I do think Dishonored is admirable precisely because it allows for the possibility that you will not want to kill, that a universe exists where your character (and by extension, you the player) does not find the idea of murder to be tantalizing. When I really think about the theory behind how and why a videogame works, elements like fighting an enemy, stealth, assassination, or whatever game mechanic you care to name are really just coats of paint layered over the actual content of a game; a complex kind of puzzle, in this case one that tests patience, timing, awareness, inquisitiveness, etc. What is rewarding about the game is not the possibility of murdering or not murdering (because, despite how accurate the graphics may be, it is obvious that these people are not real, not living), but meeting and exceeding the challenges that are presented. 

The story that Dishonored attempts to tell also isn’t bad, per se, but I certainly wished for it to go deeper, to really try and tell me something. As I played I felt like there were narrative riches just waiting for me, but they never came. Dishonored did at times suggest a sensitivity and a subtlety that went largely underused. There wasn’t much thematic power behind the events of the game, they were just missions accomplished and then briefly reflected on. There also wasn’t really any commentary on, say, fascism or government secrecy, or something that was meant to be historical and critical of life and thinking in the Victorian age. It was a stew of interesting but ultimately superficial elements, all of them finding a place to roughly fit together. I know that one of the ways Dishonored has seen any real criticism is from people who were unimpressed by the story. I don’t much want to add to that, because I do think to a large degree Dishonored accomplishes a lot with what it has, but it is interesting to consider Dishonored as a kind of watermark for where the industry is. I think we’re still at a point where games have generally pretty bad stories and storytelling mechanics. Even games that I would outright call my favorites are really not as powerful as films or novels. I realize the flaw in making these comparisons, the apples-to-oranges nature of that kind of discussion. But what would Dishonored be like in the hands of a more qualified storyteller, an artist with something to say, a statement to make? I’d be interested in that game. 

Game developers, not always as skilled at creating art as they are at programming or designing the mechanics of a game, sometimes shoehorn laughably ham-fisted elements to up the “maturity” of their product. In the past, this has usually meant some swearing, pretty brutal violence, and more recently sex. Which is fine, more that fine, great. Really. But those things don’t make a game mature, at all. Games more often than not lack subtlety, grace, sympathy, and humanity. They often lack heart, or any human emotion that would let you relate to the characters. It’s funny that a lot of games try to convince us of the horrors of something like murder or war, when few of the people involved in their development have experienced a war. I think my problem is that often it feels like videogames have very little to say. They’re not making a point, either in their narrative or in their gameplay. And, I guess, I felt that way about Dishonored. Maybe this would have been less of a problem if Arkane Studios had done a little more with the world building, had created a place where I could feel some real alienation, some actual fascination. Then I would have been all-in. But instead, Dunwall came off most of the time like a kind of pastiche, a coat of steampunk paint over a fun engine. Bioshock, in contrast, really inhabited its 1950s world, an aesthetic that fit nicely and complemented the Ayn Rand inspired philosophical dilemmas that the game confronted you with. The aesthetic and mechanical elements of Bioshock elided together well, and worked cooperatively to advance the central theme of the game and to deliver a specific kind of experience to the player. Dishonored never felt that focused to me. 

Things I liked about Dishonored: despite my “pastiche” talk, the graphics were very good, and the urban spaces were really well designed by art director Viktor Antonov (responsible for Half Life 2’s City 17). Dunwall was a fun place to move around and explore; yet still resembled and felt like a place where people might actually live. The look was excellent and well implemented. The dialogue was not terrible, and there was obvious commitment on the part of the writing staff to really sell what narrative they were committing to. There were some neat ideas, like teleporting, that were used effectively.

The ending of the game was remarkably anti-climactic. Maybe that’s not the right word, because there was a climax, and it was exactly the one I expected and was working towards throughout the entire game. So, I got what I wanted? Regardless, I felt unsatisfied. There were plenty of antagonists, but no villain, nothing in the end that really challenged any of the assumptions of the game and it’s world. Again, Dishonored didn’t have anything to say, it just wanted to give you a chance to try out some cool stealth mechanics. 

Vagrant Story

Vagrant Story is a game that I’ve owned since I was probably 14 years old. I’ve started it many times, but I’d never gotten any further than halfway through. It’s a demanding game, to say the least, though I wouldn’t necessarily call it difficult. It’s just that it asks a lot of the player, often more than I really had the energy to commit. This is the first time that I’ve really had the patience to wade through and see the story to its end. I have to say it’s enormously satisfying to finally put this game behind me. Though I’d never been able to finish Vagrant Story, it has always clung to a space in my mind, a corner where I still recall the cobbled streets and ivy-covered walls of sunken Lea Monde. The beautiful graphics and affecting cutscenes are a big part of this; everything drips with emotion, like a gothic novel. The scenery oozes with longing, regret, and remorse. Unsurprising then that the game’s subtitle, revealed at its end, is “The Phantom Pain”.

I seem to remember some reviews at the time of the game’s release (2000) eager to compare Vagrant Story to Metal Gear Solid, and to a point, I think, it’s true that the two games share similarities (although in my opinion the Metal Gear series wears its themes a bit more on it’s sleeve, and is more concerned with big sociological ideas). Yasumi Matsuno, whose credits include Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, and much of Final Fantasy XII (though he left production part of the way through), is the director and producer. I love this guy, and unknowingly I’ve purchased and greatly enjoyed almost everything that he’s worked on that’s been released in the United States.

Vagrant Story came out late in the PS1’s life cycle, at a time when Squaresoft was releasing some of its biggest hits; the PS1 trifecta of Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, as well as games like Chrono Cross. I think, understandably, a lot of the residual feelings around those games ended up rubbing off onto Vagrant Story’s legacy, a game that is, in a lot of ways, a very different experience. It’s hard to call Vagrant Story a masterpiece, but for the most part it accomplishes what it sets out to do extremely well. Unlike the aforementioned Square games, I feel like the scale of Vagrant Story’s ambitions is considerably smaller. Essentially it has two pretty well thought out mechanics (the battle system and the weapon growth/management system, inherently subordinate to each other) that it ties together with dungeon exploration, treasure hoarding, and a narrative told through brief but poignant, extremely well-directed cutscenes. I think it succeeds because the aesthetic elements are so convincing and beautifully implemented. The cinematics are very short (I would be surprised if any of them last more than 5 minutes), and none of the dialogue is spoken (which I think benefits the game tremendously), but because of their high level of quality I found them to be entirely compelling. The crumbling environments of Lea Monde enhance the air of grief and tragedy that suffuses the plot. The artistic design the underpins the city is outstanding, as at times we see the city slowly being overtaken by nature, with moss and creeping vines covering the brick walls and cobbled streets. Moldering dungeons are lined with half-melted candles and shelves of ancient books. Ashley passes through haunted forests, decrepit wine cellars, and collapsing churches as he infiltrates the city in persuit of Sydney.

The music is lovely as well, never anything less than ideal for this setting, expertly composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, who frequently collaborates with Matsuno.

Vagrant Story manages to wring a great deal out of a surprisingly small amount. The script itself is quite modest, and the cutscenes, the primary narrative device of the game, are few. This is no Metal Gear Solid at all. But, through first-rate art direction, music, and editing, the game manages to tell a surprisingly emotional and complex story. The audience isn’t really given a whole lot to work with as far as understanding what is going on; like Ashley Riot, we’re dropped into the middle of a crazy situation, and we’re figuring it out as it unfolds. Only, to us, the world is unfolding along with it. To a degree I think Vagrant Story is undeniably opaque, and it’s hard to really say what is going on or what is at stake much of the time. I also believe, however, that the writers were able to transform this from a problem into an asset by hinting at the much larger and culturally/politically complex world just outside the confines of the player’s view. Vagrant Story really implies that Ivalice is a huge, breathing, teeming world, grimy and rich like our own, and that this game, along with Tactics, are just slivers of light through a small window. Maybe it’s a way of saving time and conserving development resources, while tantalizing the player with untold narrative riches just beyond their perspective. A lot of fantasy, in video games and other mediums, is so excited about building new worlds that it bombards the player (or reader or whatever) with a lot of information all at once, and you can kind of sense how implausible it all really is. The strings end up showing, and while it can still be a lot of fun, it would maybe be a little more fun if the telling of it were more organic, if the scenarios were a little more reasonable. So Vagrant Story succeeds because the director and writers realize that a little can go a long, long way, and that it’s always better to leave the audience hungry, wanting more, or forced to use their imagination to fill in some of the holes. And sure enough, the ending does hint at further adventures, which remain, as yet, unrealized.

Matsuno and the game’s other creators wisely chose to keep the cast small, and we receive tantalizingly little of their back-stories. However, I really felt like the game delivered a satisfying emotional arc, and it was surprisingly earnest and full of heart for something that initially seemed a little cold. Like Metal Gear, the most stoic characters (particularly Ashley and Sidney) are revealed to have hidden depths, nuances of emotion that were resonant to me personally. I found Ashley’s transformation to be pretty captivating, and the conclusion of his story was handled well by the designers. Was Ashley a murderer, or simply a man who failed his family? He can never know, and neither can we. Ashley, and by extension the player, are left to decide.

There are a lot of threads that the game never picks up on. Why was Merlose in particular chosen to accompany Ashley? What role were Tieger and Neesa meant to play? What did parliament know about the connections between Duke Bardorba and Sydney? It’s hard to tell if these elements were meant to be fleshed out later but abandoned because of budget constraints (or something), or if the creator was giving himself options for a sequel.

Like I’ve said before, I think Vagrant Story seems to have relatively modest ambitions. Really, the only mechanic that is fully fleshed out or used to its greatest effect is the combat system (which is wildly complex, and which I still don’t understand even after beating the game). The rest of the game is a string of single room environments, usually not particularly big. There is occasional platforming, added seemingly as an afterthought and only difficult in a few places. There are crate puzzles, like an old Zelda game, and these are a fun, if frustrating, diversion from the combat in the rest of the game. But otherwise, that’s it. You fight monsters, and go deeper into the dungeon. Once and a while you see a cutscene to advance the plot, or fight a boss. This isn’t bad, and in fact, is probably the smartest way to get a game like this made, but the beautiful graphics and the hints of narrative complexity obscure what is otherwise a small-scale effort.

The battle system, it has to be said, does feel rather tedious to me, but I’ve never been one for endless min-maxing and menu navigation. I honestly still don’t know what many of the variables really did on most of my weapons. Though, in retrospect I’m glad that the game respected the player enough to allow them such a wide breadth of options as they navigate the experience. I think that the alternative, a combat system that was very simple, would have been detrimental to the product. The minutia of managing weapons and navigating menus seems to work in direct contrast to the narrative elegance and visual artistry of the game; Vagrant Story thus seems to be pulling the player in opposing directions. I suppose the argument could be made that this is the way that Ashley perceives the world, that the extensive technical intricacies are a symbolic way of allowing the player to experience Ashley’s expertise in the “killing arts”. There is an undeniable level of monotony involved in the combat, particularly during bigger battles. Without being properly armed it’s easy to waste a lot of time doing 1 or 2 damage per hit, if that. Regrettable, but overshadowed by the enormous satisfaction that comes with getting it just right, arming yourself with the perfect combination to take down a foe quickly and effectively.

I think the feeling of having beaten Vagrant Story is better than the actual playing of it. I don’t know what that says about it in the end, but I really do like and respect Vagrant Story. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the time or patience to return to this game, it does feel good to finally have it completed.

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

Sometimes I like to play a game that coincides with the other things I’m enjoying in my life. So, right now I’m reading a sword and sorcery fantasy novel and watching a fantasy TV series, and I thought it would enhance the experience if I also played a fantasy-themed video game. All three require a relatively long-term investment of time, but taking them in at all at once really helps me to maintain the right mindset. It seems like an irrelevant point to make, but it also helps to illustrate that video games, like other artistic mediums, don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re part of an ongoing cultural conversation, a push and pull with the other products of our culture.

Fire Emblem is a series that I would readily say I’m a fan of, though in actuality I’ve played very little of it. I’ve been aware of the franchise for some time, or at least I seem to remember vague conversations about it as this flagship Nintendo property that never made it out of Japan. I’m not sure how accurate that might have been, but I do remember being pretty excited for the Game Boy Advance title that was released a few years ago, a game that I would go on to greatly enjoy. I was immediately impressed by the gorgeously animated sprites and the eclectic medieval fantasy world that reminded me in no small way of another favorite, the Suikoden series (which, now that I think about it, probably took many of its cues from the more popular, and much more enduring Fire Emblem series). Today, I couldn’t tell you much about the plot of GBA Fire Emblem (something about a lost princess?), but the experience and the effect were more important than the immediate minutia of the diagetic plot. 

(As an aside, writing this has reminded me how much of a fantastic system the Game Boy Advance was. So may great games that I want to go back and replay.)

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is a further installment to the series, bringing the action to the Gamecube. I have to say that, overall, I greatly enjoyed this game. Certainly, the presentation is a bit stiff, and the graphics are nothing more than plain (the developers chose to forego the animated look of previous games and instead opted for a banal 3D). Gameplay is standard Japanese fantasy-strategy fare that has been around for some time now, and noticeably less daring than something like Final Fantasy Tactics, a game that came out in the late nineties. These aren’t necessarily criticisms, but I think knowing this grounds the game in a certain era, and shows that Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is striving for a certain kind of experience, that it wants to wrap itself in the effect of it’s predecessors. Nonetheless, it asks you to reproduce the same experience again and again, more or less throughout the entire game. I did enjoy the art and character designs, a solid anime fantasy that showed hints of both eastern and western historical influence. The world of Fire Emblem, like the Suikoden games, is a kind of stew where the cultures of medieval Europe and Asia are thrown together. The large cast of characters is made more charming by this deliberate merger of eastern and western medieval fantasy aesthetics.

The plot is concerned with the political and military struggle of several nations; it eventually becomes clear that a supernatural force (in this case, the medallion of a dark god) lies at the heart of these events. Though the graphics are limited, I felt like the game did a good job communication the scale and importance of events, especially early on, when the main character and his mercenary band are on the run from a much more powerful military force. I actually enjoyed the dialogue scenes, when well-drawn anime portraits would conduct conversation with each other. The characters, surprisingly, displayed something like unique personalities; Soren was brusque and rude, Titania was stern but supportive, Ike was idealistic and driven. I mean, these aren’t the deepest characters, let’s be honest, but for what it is, essentially glue that holds together battlefield set-pieces, they were effective enough, and I really came to like some of them. I feel like the writers of Fire Emblem devoted a little extra energy to characterization, as well as the exercise of world building, and it shows through the (relatively) plausible events that transpire in the plot.

The relative ease of battle was also inviting. Fire Emblem treats it’s battles like games of chess, each discrete, but allows for the possibility of the permanent death of a unit. This fact actually enhances the tension of play. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing one of my comrades, both because each one represents an investment of time, and because they have personalities and stories I wanted to see through. I think the fact that I was always on the razor’s edge of losing a man enhanced my enjoyment of the narrative and the game as a whole. There was a certain kind of empowerment here, a follow through on the medieval sword and sorcery power fantasy like Conan the Barbarian or Berserk. Ike, the central character, satisfyingly becomes an unstoppable force by Fire Emblem’s end. Though the game is never terribly challenging, it’s also not particularly deep, so it never became an issue for me.

Of course, Fire Emblem is about as accurate a depiction of war as a game of chess is, and the ultimate villain of the game has a preposterous, almost hilarious commitment to being evil. Nonetheless, Ike and Princess Elincia’s quest is a satisfying and worthwhile journey, an installment in a well regarded, if technically conservative, franchise.  An enjoyable excursion. I look forward to diving into Radiant Dawn later on. 

Jet Set Radio

I have a strong fondness for Sega. I grew up with a Genesis, and a small library of interesting and remarkably high-quality games that are often overlooked in favor of Nintendo’s litany of hits. There was style and personality present in Sega’s 16-bit efforts, something that still occasionally comes through in games like Yakuza and Valkyria Chronicles. Like Nintendo, Sega possessed a house style; common characteristics that it’s core stable of games shared that made you feel like you were participating in something unique. That might be mostly nostalgia talking, but kids imprint onto things, especially brands, strongly. I read once that Sega was always more popular in the United States than it was in Japan, which I find surprising. My earliest exposure to anything resembling Japanese culture certainly came from Genesis games. I remember exploring absolutely every corner of those games, in the obsessive ways that only a kid could. I loved Sonic, Shining Force II, and Phantasy Star IV (a game I would still readily say is one of my favorites of all time).

 I missed out on the Saturn, which is something I regretted despite how much of an obvious mess the system was (I own one today, along with the handful of excellent games that were produced for the system). The Dreamcast, however, was incredible. I’ve often thought of re-buying one, though I worry that nostalgia might be more powerful than my memories (and also, conveniently, many of the better games from the Dreamcast’s library have been updated or ported to other consoles). Sega, as a company, was apparently a failure because of the poor financial decisions of its leadership. As producers of innovative and artistic content, however, they were nearly unrivaled. Jet Set Radio stands out in my mind as one of those innovative experiments, the kind of game I couldn’t really imagine coming from anywhere else.

 Jet Set Radio was designed by Smilebit, the entity that emerged out of the ashes of Team Andromeda (the designers of the Panzer Dragoon series). This lineage is important, I think, as this group really seemed to have an interest in trying new things and being different. It seems that while ambitious, their designs were ultimately unsustainable. However, certain choices, namely the cel-shaded graphics, have echoed through the industry as a whole.

 While Jet Set Radio’s gameplay can be cumbersome and unwieldy, the graphical artistry is dazzling. I could be wrong, but I think that Jet Set Radio was one of the first games to prominently feature cel-shaded graphics, a look that I still greatly appreciate whenever I see it put to effective use. At the time, I think, everyone was talking about realism, and video games increasing ability to realistically render people and environments. It was a cold splash of water to see something that resembled a moving cartoon. It showed smart audiences that there were options, that designers could make aesthetic choices about how to convey the experience of their game. This was also around the time video games became better at articulating urban spaces. Crazy Taxi came out around the same time, and Grand Theft Auto 3 only a little later.  The zany, colorful, hyper-Japanese world displayed by Jet Set Radio was entirely unique to the video game landscape at that time.

 Jet Set Radio, ultimately, is a brief experience, but I think an impressive one. The colorful and bizarre aesthetics, the music, and the hilariously ridiculous anti-plot, all contribute to a fun and memorable game. Knowing the place Jet Set Radio holds in gaming history, as a part of Sega’s creatively fertile but ultimately untenable twilight period, endows it with weighty nostalgic power. I’m glad I revisited it. 

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

I’ve always been a fan of the Castlevania franchise. I remember playing Simon’s Quest as a child, and being legitimately frightened by the strange imagery, as well as the persistent atmosphere of hopelessness that emanated from those simple graphics. The series always stuck in my mind as one of unique aesthetic value, with art that resembled renaissance paintings of hell, and powerful music that enhanced the urgent, haunted atmosphere. Castlevania always seemed like a reliable experience, too. I owned Bloodlines for the Genesis and found it to be excellent, and then a few years later Symphony of the Night, which was really one of the defining games of the PS1, another touchstone among the people I knew who played video games. I guess its generally agreed upon that the series kind of lost its way in recent years, as many bedrock franchises from the late 80’s seem to have, but I’ve never been anything but satisfied.

Aside from the graphics, the weird, ahistorical narrative of Castlevania always appealed to me. I thought the idea of a family line, cursed with the task of fighting Dracula throughout the centuries, was interesting and unique. Dracula was treated more like some demon king, a powerful force that was trying to break back into our world through his haunted castle, itself a nexus of incomprehensible evil. Like an H.P. Lovecraft story, I think Castlevania was effective because you were only scratching the surface of an entire universe of horror that the games seemed to gesture toward. The games didn’t provide a lot of context or explanation for the various monsters and creatures you encounter during your quests, only that they served Dracula and they inhabited his crazy castle. There were layers of evil that they emanated from, and your task was to keep them at bay efficiently enough to defeat Dracula, and buy the human race another century, when another Belmont would take up the whip and do it again.

So, nothing I play is really being played for the first time. Every game fits in somewhere, a part of a lineage of experiences and memories. Castlevania is a part of that.

The latter installments of the series have featured art by Ayami Kojima, whose gothic, androgynous, and complex style elevates its source material. Like Shigenori Soejima’s work for Atlus (and many other artists, whose names don’t immediately come to mind), her exceptional designs demonstrate the artistry behind the development of a video game, and show us that games are not just a final product, but the result of many artists working together to craft a series of experiences that eventually find their way to the player. 

I think Lords of Shadow snuck past me in 2010. I wasn’t really playing games then, so it’s not too much of a surprise. Like most of the other Castlevania games, I found this one to be a generally excellent experience. The typical attitude about Lords of Shadow seems to be that it’s a God of War clone, and doesn’t really “feel” like Castlevania. Fair, I guess, but I’m not sure that I agree. In a superficial sense, it certainly departs from the more comfortable tropes of the Castlevania series, but in general, I felt like it still contained the same core experience. Exploration, platforming, combat, a little horror, diverse enemies, excellent graphics. The music was a departure, I suppose, but there were nods to famous tunes from the past. As far as the allegation that it’s derivative of God of War, it’s interesting to think about why people are making that assertion; God of War itself seems like the natural evolution of the 2-D action-platformer, integrating into itself elements of other successful games (like Shadow of the Colossus). These games all share common DNA, and so it doesn’t surprise me that they end up in similar territory.

There were a lot of things about Lords of Shadow that I enjoyed. I liked the fixed camera, the feeling that the designers had a firm hand on the experience I was having. The environments were incredibly well designed, and I thought the game did a lot to communicate the sense of scale, the scope of Gabriel’s adventure. I liked the references to the old gods, the moss-covered stone ruins scattered throughout primeval European forests. These elements gestured to a world once full of magic, now only dimly perceived by the human observer. The surface-level plot, that is, the story of Gabriel Belmont and his battle against the Lords of Shadow, was kind of irrelevant to me, though I did come to enjoy it toward the end, when it became clear that Gabriel would go on to become Dracula, the scourge of later generations. While I appreciated this twist, like all Castlevanias the real fun was not in the superficial story, but in inhabiting this weird world and playing as the one man who’s not afraid to stand up to the monsters that live in the dark.

The DLC, which acted as a kind of coda to the main story, soured the ending for me a bit. It was pointlessly difficult, and really only elaborated on things that could have been inferred from the standard ending. It also jumped from the cinematic style of the main game, which was handled by the in-game engine, to animated cutscenes (akin to Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker). This is cool, but it’s a noticeable inconsistency that tells me it was probably a choice necessitated by budget, and not artistic desire or compulsion. Oh well.

On the whole, I found Lords of Shadow to be very satisfying, a worthy adventure.

Xenoblade Chronicles

I remember spending plenty of late, lonely Friday and Saturday nights in middle school wading through the long turgid experience that Xenogears provided. It was good company for a lonely kid, and the anime aesthetic, ample world building, and kooky quasi-philosophical story were impenetrable enough to be absolutely fascinating to me at that age. This was the late 90’s, the post Final Fantasy VII era when anime was experiencing its modest American boom, and videogames that would have previously stayed in Japan were being released in the US. The game has become kind of legendary, I think, a definite touchstone among people who were longing for that kind of meaty, substantive game experience. Playing Xenogears was an enormous undertaking, and it bites off a little more than it can chew (the last quarter is pretty much a mess), but it certainly can’t be faulted for being bold.

Anyway, I’ve always wanted to revisit Xenogears. Or really, I’ve wanted to revisit the feeling of playing Xenogears, those late nights, alone, when the world made sense but was still stiflingly small. Xenogears was a window out, a weird adventure produced by the Japanese imagination that gestured toward a whole universe of ideas that I wasn’t quite ready for. I remember being very excited for the Xenosaga games that followed a few years later. But life had gotten in the way at that point, and even though I made an earnest attempt, I never really made it all the way through part 1 (though I own the trilogy, and would love to take the time to really power through them all). 

Xenoblade Chronicles, however, came at just the right time. I was so excited for this game that I actually took the time to “hack” my Wii and import the European edition, ultimately kind of a pointless effort, but I think indicative of my enthusiasm. Xenoblade was supposed to be (according to some people) a sort of marriage of those late-90s games with modern innovations of game design; a game that took into account the advances made in the medium in general and the RPG genre in specific, to maybe redeem the JRPG a little bit for current audiences.

I guess I would say that RPGs are my favorite genre, in as much as these terms have any purchase. But they’ve also kind of ruined games for me. I have this strong desire to really complete them, to experience the best version of the narrative, to get the best items and the full clear. I spend most of the game feeling like I’m about to miss something. I want to hover over an FAQ the whole time, and make all the right moves so that I can play the game the right way. I feel like I’m building a ship in a bottle, putting all the pieces together the way they’re supposed to go (I stole this analogy from another blog that I read years ago, which I can’t currently remember the name of). I never get the chance to just lose myself in the experience, or rather, I never get a sense of the kind of experience the designer really wants me to have. So when I play now, I have to constantly ignore this urge, or tell myself I’m just going to play for a while and have fun, and then hunt down all the sidequests or whatever later.

So I tried to experience Xenoblade Chronicles, to just have fun with it. There are a lot of things I really appreciated about this game; efforts that the designers made that I think really paid off in creating an effective experience. It definitely builds a strange, compelling world. The premise, a war between the civilizations that have sprung up on the bodies of long-dormant gods, is unique, weird, and interesting. In most other ways it doesn’t really stray too far from typical Japanese RPG/pop-culture adventure conventions, but I appreciate the weirdness it does infuse into the setting. And honestly, I appreciate those conventions for what they are, too. This is a genre work, and genres have stock characters, they repeat things, they copy other people’s ideas. The fun is seeing a slightly new, unique spin on those tropes. Xenoblade definitely offers this.

Early on, and really throughout the entire game, Xenoblade Chronicles does a good job establishing the emotional connection between the principle characters. Shulk and his friends interact with each other enough to really drive home that these character would actually be friends. I didn’t find myself questioning why anyone was on this quest. The only really weak character was Riki, but even he had his moments. The incidental little interactions that trios of characters would have after a battle added to the sense that these were companions. They had relatable emotions. They were grounded, and so I felt like I could understand why they were doing this. The designers made the wise choice to show, not just tell.

The game marries a few RPG concepts together, or continues the work of blending these elements further. The battle system, and the large, persistent world, as well as a few other gameplay elements (the sidequests, the crafting, the way dialogue scenes play out) betrayed a lineage that certainly includes Final Fantasy XII and MMO’s like World of Warcraft. It’s interesting (to me at least) how luminary franchises of the gaming medium can introduce a new technique, a new word into the vocabulary of gaming concepts, and it will be dutifully implemented by future endeavors. I don’t know that Xenoblade necessarily improves on the design elements of either of those games (I greatly enjoyed Final Fantasy XII, and have little exposure to WoW), or if its even trying to, but it certainly rests somewhere on the same evolutionary ladder.

I will say that I think Xenoblade Chronicles overstayed its welcome a little bit. I logged over 100 hours, which for me is crazy. The game was long, longer than I would have liked and longer than I think it needed to be to tell this story and deliver this experience. The extremely numerous sidequests, inherited (probably) from MMOs, were a distraction; I felt like I had to be doing them, and they ate up a lot of time, even with the ability to warp around the map. Doing all of the quests didn’t seem to provide a benefit that set me too far ahead of where the story expected me to be, meaning I don’t think I could have really avoided doing them if I wanted to keep up with the game. Anyway, I found some of them fun, but many were distracting. They gnawed at me when I knew they weren’t complete, and I was constantly afraid something would happen in the story that would cut me off from the regions where these quests had to be completed (this does happen at a late point in the story).

But I liked Xenoblade Chronicles. I liked it a lot. It lacked the weird mystical complexity of Xenogears, but maybe this was for the better. It didn’t necessarily allow me to relive the feeling of being in eighth grade again, but that might also be a little too much to ask of a video game. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t hoping for something a little more philosophically complicated, but it provided a good story and endearing characters. It had heart, and it was good company for a while.