I think the Final Fantasy XV Platinum Demo sucked, and the users at Giant Bomb agree.

From the thread Platinum Demo Impressions:

Thank god for this thread. Looking at positive reactions on YouTube, I felt like I was living in a cuckoo clock. I downloaded the demo after watching the awesome trailer, and I played it in the same room as my wife, trying to come up with nice things to say while I was going through it.

“Okay, the controls are kinda responsive. The battle transitions are pretty smooth.” Knowing me, she said, “Do you believe anything that you’re saying?” and I finally admitted, “No.”

The trailer had panache and drama, and the demo didn’t have any. The coolest part was when I stepped on a switch and Leviathan soared over me and into a lake, and then just… disappeared. It’s like none of the teams working on this were ever in the same room. “Here is an ENVIRONMENT; insert SPECIAL EFFECTS; insert MONSTERS – good job, everyone.” It didn’t feel crafted at all. Really, why did any particular encounter have to occur in any particular space? It was all just Some Stuff Happening.

I was looking forward to the novel concept of playing in Noctis’ dream to, like, get into his headspace, find out more about his character. But then I realized they set it inside of a dream for one reason: so they wouldn’t have to think about how to transition from one environment to the other. “Oh, shoot, how do we get from the forest to the toy room? Ehh, just say it was all a dream and call it a day.”

Remember waiting for the release of previous Final Fantasy games? The question I always remembered asking about any new one coming out was: “So what’s the new core mechanic? What’s materia all about? How does junctioning work? Sphere Grid? Gambits?” What are the new possibilities being demonstrated here? What makes this the Next Step in the series? Really, what is the POINT of this demo? What’s the Thing we were supposed to see that was meant to confirm how we shouldn’t skip this game when it comes out?

The demo didn’t seem to know. Instead of introducing me to a world, showing me how I should play the game, showing me what makes a strategy more worthy in one situation than another, what’s the tactical difference between dodging and warping, they were like… “Circle attacks, Square dodges. Here’s some Heartless Nightmares. You’re a truck now. It’s a dream. Whatever. Here’s a summon monster.”

Cool. Can I summon it?

“Uh… No.” The game barely cared that I was playing it.

And for those defending it as “just” a tech demo:

1) I didn’t play Episode Duscae. I borrowed FF Type 0 from a friend, but found out that he had already “claimed” the digital copy of the demo, so I couldn’t play it. As a result, this demo is ALL I HAVE to go on. I also didn’t like Type 0 much, either. So I’m not gonna pay money for a game I know I don’t like to play a demo that I am now PRETTY SURE I won’t like.

2) It’s not called the tech demo – it’s called the PLATINUM DEMO. And then at the end of it they asked me if I wanted to pre-order the full game. If this demo isn’t supposed to be representative of the game, someone tell Square Enix, ’cause they don’t seem to know.

At first I thought the multimedia / Florence and the Machine / Lena Hedey movie stuff was kind of cool, but it was only cool so long as I thought FFXV would be any good. Now that I don’t think it is, I realize now how stupid all of the other stuff is – they’re doing the same crap they did with FFVII and FFXIII, banking on the success of a franchise without having even finished it. In marketing this way, it’s like they’re saying, “Oh, FFXV isn’t just a GAME – it’s an EXPERIENCE!” It lowers the stakes for all of the projects under the umbrella as a result.

No. Stop it. Just make a game.

There’s also just the fact that they’re acting like this is an action RPG… While this demo has no RPG-ing, and barely any action. I never had to be thoughtful about my resources or my equipment, and the fights are impactless. The warp sword is ALMOST cool, but hitting things just doesn’t feel fun. The Nightmares just kind of melt under your flailing, and the Iron Giant is a wall you can’t be killed by.

If you really wanna understand how I feel, check out this video:

You can watch the whole thing, or jump to 4:57.

Have you gotten to the part with the red circles?

FFXV feels like the circle on the top.

Other users’ insights:

+ I’d gotten fairly excited for this game (never played the first demo), but this thing just knocked the wind right out of my sails. Also has me really worried about FFVII Remake, which I was already way more excited for than XV.

+ When you push L1 and R1 at the same it brings up a bunch of swords around Noctis, which does… something. I dunno.

+ Transforming to a beast showed how static the maps are. You’re telling me that this animal that includes rocks crumbling in his attack animation can’t bring a lawnchair to fall?

+ Also I forgot how much I hate the Japanese take on children, particularly the sounds they make when lost and befuddled. So many stupid, unnecessary “gahs” and “huhs?”

+ I kind of hated this(?).

+ I haven’t liked the design and art choices in a Final Fantasy game since IX, not a huge fan of SquareEnix’s sci-fi takes. I don’t know the man’s name but isn’t that crazy zipper guy in charge of this game and KH3? I don’t like his style.

+ …All that said, if I had to boil time my problem with this demo into a sentence, it would be “I don’t see the product of 10 years worth of work.“

+ XII I played multiple times and enjoyed thouroughly. XIII was okay at first but I got tired of it after awhile. This I just wanted nothing to do with immediately.

April 3, 2016 Reviews No Comments

United States Gun Culture in Parasite Eve

On Day 3 of Parasite Eve’s six day journey, during a sequence of events that are peaceful as they are chilling, our blonde, blue-eyed hero Detective Aya Brea is joined by her hot-blooded partner Detective Daniel Dollis on a stroll through an evacuated Manhattan seeking to liberate resources from abandoned businesses to use in their battle against the mysterious being known as Eve and the mutated creatures at her disposal.

They are followed by a civilian biophysicist named Kunihiko Maeda, whom they’ve allowed to travel with them, since his research on a being similar to Eve from his native Japan may prove useful. And he’s also some skinny, unarmed nerd, so what harm could it do?

When the player takes control, the trio will eventually end up standing in front of Sams [sic] Gun Shop. When approached, Maeda rubs the crown of his head and says, “They weren’t kidding when they said they sell guns here in America, were they…”and then reverts to a looped animation of furtive glances to the left and right.

When the door to the shop is examined, Aya will notice that it’s locked. Her partner Daniel tells her to step to one side.

“Daniel, no…” says Aya. “Sorry, but it’s the only way,” Daniel responds.

With a flourish, Daniel pulls out his concealed firearm and shoots at the glass of the door surrounding its handle. Aya knows to cover her ears and turn away from the breaking glass. Maeda doesn’t have time to react, and so makes no move until after Daniel already holsters his gun.

“Are… are you really a cop?” he asks.

“We think so,” Aya says. “But we don’t have scientific proof, if that’s what you’re asking.”

As the player peruses the the shop for ammunition, Aya can find Daniel casually glancing between two products, and waves his arm out generously when approached. “Go ahead and pick your favorite accessories, ladies!”

Maeda, hunched over, peers through the protective glass at the bounty of weaponry, small and large: “This is just too much.”

__________

There are are two NYPD officers who manage the weapons dispensary at Aya’s Precinct 17 offices. The first the player meets, Wayne, coolly and possessively spreads his arms along the width of the front desk. “So what’ll it be… Shotgun? Rocket Launcher?”

Wayne stands at attention when his supervisor, Torres, walks in to reprimand him. “Idiots like you are the reason why guns won’t disappear from this country!” Torres tells Wayne to get his ass back to the storage room, and let a responsible adult handle the registration process.

That’s right: the officer in charge of registering and dispensing new firearms to other cops HATES guns. He’s not too obstinate though, and recognizes that gun violence is systemic, referring to it as a “vicious cycle” of law enforcement relying on guns because criminals do, and vice versa. Moreover, he recognizes that it’s fair to bring heavy weaponry to a battle against an unstoppable, mutated terror.

Once Aya leaves, she’s met by Wayne gain. Although Torres will only modify Aya’s firearm with a permit, Wayne bypasses Torres’ authority by letting her know that she can tune weapons on her own through the game’s Tool system, the mechanic the player will use most to overcome mitochondrial monstrosities. “Trust me,” Wayne says, “you can never have too much firepower”.

__________

During the events of Day 3, Precinct 17 comes under attack by Eve’s mutated creatures. As the player makes through way through the hostile territories, they reach the weapons dispensary and find Wayne over a fatally wounded Torres. “Why didn’t ya shoot, man?!” Wayne asks him. Torres reveals that he hasn’t even fired a gun since his daughter died. “Torres, you can’t blame guns for that!”

“I suppose… you’re right…” Torres concedes. He encourages Wayne to take good care of the place, and then dies.

Afterward, Wayne hands Torres’ gun over to Aya, a decent weapon that he always kept in top working condition, although he never used it. Wayne reveals that, although Torres was an excellent shot, after his daughter’s accidental death he stopped using guns – and, in fact, he relocated to Precinct 17 for the express purpose of filling the dispensary position and keeping all the guns in check out of a sense of duty.

And so the gun safety expert, constantly surrounded by weapons that could be used for self-defense, dies because he is unwilling to use one. Meanwhile, the brash gun enthusiast lives on because of his love for weaponry.

________

Parasite Eve is one of the few games by Square to take place in a world not framed by fantasty or cyberpunk aesthetics, and the very first to take place in a representation an actual real world, current time location. In a Square game, a player often makes use of magical items and equipment to surmount obstacles. Of course, magic doesn’t exist in 1997 New York City – aside from the magic of Rockefeller Center at Christmastime. In lieu of giant swords or glowing crystals, the player uses something much more down-to-earth: guns.

Even then, firearms in Parasite Eve are treated with the same pomp and reverence as any mystical weaponry. Some of them even have fantastical qualities that sound feasible with the right wording – some ammunition is corrosive and deals acid damage, some grenades explode into… ice, and deal cold damage.

Consider that, to the average player within the originally intended Japanese audience, an actual gun might as while be a magic sword, and that playing Parasite Eve might be as close they will get to gun ownership.

Parasite Eve only briefly meditates on gun ownership and the use of firearms, but the choices made clearly indicate the game’s origins. Maeda, the only Japanese character in the game, can rather easily explain concepts related to genetics and biochemistry, but can’t quite wrap his head around the nature of American gun culture or the behavior of a New York City police officer.

This same outside perspective, though, offers a measure of moderation that isn’t often seen in the national conversation regarding gun violence – a willingness to admit that the right answer isn’t always obvious.

Wayne and Torres clearly both represent the opposite perspectives on guns in the country, with Wayne seeing no problem with putting limitless firepower in the hands of a citizen who wants it, and Torres not even believing that law enforcement should be using such weapons. It could be said that Torres, who dies, is the loser this debate. His ideas, though, live on in other officers at Precinct 17, who clearly had great respect for him, and in Wayne, who must take on his responsibilities. Although he did die during this one unbelievable situation, for the most part, aside from battles against monsters, his mediation on the vicious cycle of gun violence rings true.

That said… Wayne is much more cavalier about dispensing firearm modifications to Aya than Wayne was, going so far as to give them out in return for trading cards. What kind of trading cards? Trading cards with pictures of guns on them.

You can train someone to be responsible, and you can put obstacles in the way of someone who wants a firearm, but in the end, gun culture is bigger than any law or any one person.

December 3, 2015 Thoughts 1 Comment

Tifa and Aeris

There is one single moment that tells you everything you need to know about Tifa and Aeris, and the kind of people they are.

The calculations that go into deciding who Cloud dates at the Golden Saucer is based on how many invisible “affinity points” a given character has. Based on certain actions and dialogue choices, Tifa, Aeris, Yuffie, or Barret can gain or lose points.

When my wife and I played the game again this past year, we were determined to date Barret. We were successful — with the help of a handy guide. Rather than spoiling the fun, the guide actually provided a lot of funny insight, like how romantic or gruesome particular decisions were interpreted based on the amount of points gained or lost.

But the biggest revelation comes pretty early on in disc one, when you have to infiltrate Don Corneo’s lair.

If Aeris is chosen as Don Corneo’s date, you can say to Tifa:

“You alright?” and lose 2 points for Tifa
or
“We gotta help Aeris!” and gain 3 points for Tifa.

If Tifa is chosen as Don Corneo’s date, you can say to Aeris:

“You alright?” and GAIN 3 points for Aeris
or
“We gotta help Tifa!” and LOSE 2 points for Aeris.

Aeris and Tifa don’t even know each other yet, but Tifa is still ready to help her, and Aeris doesn’t give a shit.

That even the behind the scenes MATH of the game supports the characterization is fucking INSPIRING to me.

But still, it shows what good characters they both are. They’ve both had tumultuous pasts, but Tifa had the luxury of a stable home life for her formative years. Aeris, meanwhile, has had to run, hide, and mistrust all sorts of authority figures to stay alive and sane. Indeed, it could be seen as admirable that she’s maintained her kindness despite so much trauma, but her somewhat arrested development shows that she was not unscathed. Her penchant for pink, her coyness, her fixation on guys in uniforms, making a living in a busy city selling flowers at 22 (?!) years old… all seem to bely an unwillingness to grow up because, well, her actual childhood sucked! While Cloud lacks a strong identity, Aeris actively manufactures her own. This, ironically, is what allows her do commit her most heroic act, and also her most dangerously naive: sacrifice herself for the sake of the world. Could it be that Aeris simply wasn’t very happy inside?

Tifa, meanwhile, had her most traumatic experience at the cusp of adulthood. Because she has strong ideals ingrained on her by her family and her teacher and her peers, she is able to hold onto them and carry on, even after tremendous loss. This leads her to being somewhat reticent at times, like Cloud, but unlike Cloud, she is also sincere and usually more honest about her feelings.

I love these characters. Not just because the have crazy destinies and origin stories, but, besides all that, they’re fucked up in the tragically banal way that lots of real young adults actually are. And they still carry on and care about each other.

From my comment on this

August 1, 2015 Thoughts No Comments

So I played Suikoden (or, Sometimes old ways are best)

Konami’s Suikoden lacks the panache of some of its contemporaries from Square. Some of that has to do with technical know how, but also knowing how to deal with technical limits.

Characters in Chrono Trigger, like most Squaresoft games of the time, have a repertoire of expressions and motions that are reused and recontextualized throughout the game. Crono dealing the final blow to the Dragon Tank is incredibly awe-inspiring at the time it occurs, because we haven’t seen him pull off anything quite like that yet. The violent thrust, especially coming after being wronged by the kingdom, adds a wrathfulness to him that we may not have expected. It is empowering, then, when you can voluntarily make Crono take similar actions as you learn his more complex techniques. By the end of the game, you’ll have seen the animations quite a few times.

Here we have a really lovely and nuanced set of animations as the hunky doofus Flik plays host to the cougar counterfeiter Kimberly in order to enlist her. The scene has still more animations with fine detail, like hand movements and head tilts. Moments that are played like this in Suikoden – featuring a choreographed blocking particular to a location and a set of available props – can be counted on one hand. Flik and Kimberly do not drink sake again – these animations are unique to this scene. The commitment to this brief scene is admirable, but is it efficient from a development perspective – creating an asset that can’t be reused?

In the time before 3D models were commonplace, animations could not be shared amongst characters like they are today. Sprites aren’t like models that way. In 1995, to design and animate 108 characters for a new piece of hardware is no mean feat. A character needs to face and walk in all the cardinal directions, attack, use an item, get hurt, and be knocked out. Multiply that by about 80, and that’s lot of work for a developer diving head first into a new franchise in a relatively strange genre.

The choice, then, to decide where to spend time applying unique, narrative-driven animations must have been difficult. (Especially when, it seems, battle animations and field animations are run on different engines and aren’t interchangeable) Since it would be impossible to give every potential character in your party an animation appropriate to a particular point in the story, the choice was to leave leave most character reactions abstracted and up to the imagination. In exchange, story scenes with predetermined casts like the above have moments that make them stand out. That said, this particular scene is not particularly moving or informative, so in the end, the animations themselves are what make them worthwhile.

A lot of Suikoden‘s charm comes from this unpredictability in the narrative and the turns in tone it takes. Each leg of the journey reveals a different weapon or ally you attempt to bring into your army, but they aren’t all alike in execution. It’s not always easy to tell ahead of time what moment will result in a new unit, or a large scale battle, or a boss fight, or a duel. Or whether all of the above might occur back to back or simultaneously, for either a short duration or a long. This pattern keeps you guessing what will come next, forcing you to always be prepared and make use of each of the assets at your disposal as often as possible.

Although the brisk pacing makes you eager to find what big fight is around the next corner, the most disappointing thing about Suikoden is that, for the most part, there isn’t one. Many times you may load out your party with the best equipment possible, find a great combination of characters with all the right runes and Unite attacks to make short work of any boss you’d find, and it rarely ever comes. There are only about 12 boss fights that involve the party you choose to bring with you, and half of them are weird monster lacking any narrative justification. The only way to measure the success of your tactics otherwise is against the randomly encountered riffraff along the way. It’s a shame when there are so many interesting ways that 30 runes and 80 playable characters combine that there aren’t that many appropriate challenges to test them on.

The other great challenges you face come in the form of great battles between thousands of tiny soldiers or one-on-one duels. They’re both essentially games of rock-paper-scissors. That makes them sound simplistic – and really, they are – but that’s not the whole story. Large-scale battles let you make your rock, paper, or scissors really big if you have the right people on your side, and duels challenge you to decipher which instrument your opponent will use based on context clues. The fact that so much rests on each decision, and that these situations come up as rarely as they do, makes the moments up to your choice quite intense.

What really makes Suikoden work, the urge that drives you even when you can’t quite tell what character you should be using or how difficult the coming dungeon will be, is the constant growth you enjoy as times goes on, like a lovely colorful garden. Even just the recruits you gather mandatorily add up to make a huge cast. That so many people are willing to join you, and that so many of them have sound reasons for doing so – the main ones being vengeance and employment, but there’s also glory and a hope to belong to something larger – reinforces the worth of your objective. Their personalities are portrayed succinctly and surprisingly deftly through a character portrait, their combat ability, and a few lines. Letting imagination take care of the rest, the 108-member cast of Suikoden is less annoying and/or pointless than most of the 40 playable characters in Chrono Cross.

Games like Suikoden invite player imagination by applying just enough abstraction in the right places. Older games than this have suggested fantastic battles between opposing armies, but few have let you put a face and a name to so many individual participants before. There is a limit, of course. You can’t identify each of the thousands of soldiers that fight for the Liberation Army in the grand battles that occur a few times through the game, but knowing all the kinds of people that you’ve met across the land, you can assume what they might be like.

Liberation Army headquarters in the castle on the lake is a precursor to the hub worlds of later years, the lobbies of MMORPGs, the Normandy of Mass Effect – a small space that indicates the largeness of the world outside it with each addition to your war assets. With so many of your supplies being provided within your own domain, Suikoden could have done what later games would do, and simply teleport you to your next mission when necessary. Instead, they kept the iconic 16-bit world map with which you can go from place to place, random encounters suggesting the severity of each journey. Crossing the land by foot does provide a sense of ownership and responsibility that helps make your fight for peace worthwhile.

Some aspects of old design should be thrown out, and some aspects are simply tied to the technology or the trends of the time and die off naturally. The world map is a unique vestige of old design. It was not abandoned because it was a feature that arose from having to deal with old technology, but because even new technology is incapable of presenting an entire world in realistic proportions, and new trends wouldn’t allow for a diminutive version of your protagonist crossing even tinier mountains to get from place to place. Today’s method of representation, after the graphical arms race of the past decade and a half, has come to lean on 1:1 realism. The virtual space within games today are bigger than ever – there is more traversable surface area, anyway – but it can be argued in some ways that, without being able to artfully present an entire explorable globe, the scope is smaller.

At around the same time, Final Fantasy X, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, even Wild Arms 4 were all games that did not let the player traverse a world map, even while previous entries in their series did. (Dragon Quest 8, interestingly, would pull an Elder Scrolls and make the distance between towns and dungeons realistic in scale – while keeping random battles). A game could not be on a powerhouse console and fail to deliver on visuals, nor could a game deliver on visuals and find a way to justify the minimalist abstraction of an old-style world map. I tend to believe that the questing beast of realistic scale lead to the downfall of JRPGs that struck a few years back, leading to games that could not rewrite the traditional JRPG script to match these narrower scopes. (Consider Kingdom Hearts, a game about traveling multiple worlds that are each made up of about a dozen rooms or so, or Xenosaga, a game about humanity and the cosmos that is completely linear – but, mostly, consider the shittier games that copied both of these)

Naturally, it took years of failure to adapt to new trends for players and developers alike to realize that there is a place for old design. That’s why Bravely Default, a 2014 handheld game with a world map, received such good response in comparison to Lightning Returns.

It’s also why – I hope – Sony and Konami had the good sense to bring back interesting gems like Suikoden for reappraisal. Looking back, simplicity and abstraction in a game may seem like symptoms of technological constraint, but when you consider the best possible choices that could be made at the time, the effectiveness of some ideas never truly age.

The question at the end of the day is, how do you best provide any kind of fulfilling experience? By knowing when to show off and knowing when to let the user’s imagination do the rest of the work.

February 4, 2015 Reviews No Comments

Robin Williams and the Hero of Time

In my mind, this commercial was for A Link Between Worlds, not Ocarina of Time. For me, as Zelda games go, Robin Williams is more strongly connected to A Link Between Worlds.

Because here was the first celebrity death in my life to make me shed tears and the first Zelda game to make me shed tears.

As Egoraptor said, The Legend of Zelda has for many years been reduced to a series of symbols without attention given to their context. The treasure opening sound effect, the keys, the boomerangs, and of course, Zelda and Link, themselves symbols of wisdom and courage.

Zelda – a lot like the American comic book in its Silver Age – became stale and predictable. So something has to give. There has to be a desire for growth. What if we took these symbols and deconstructed their purpose? What if Zelda had a Bronze Age?

As colorful and charming as it is, A Link Between Worlds is also the closest we’ve come to looking at Hyrule from an achingly realistic perspective. Many, if not most, Zelda games deal with duality in the world – light and dark, future and past.

Lorule is the version of Hyrule in which things did not go right, in which its residents could not fully maintain their roles. Society could not stay harmonious, the Triforce could not stay whole, and the wise ruler could not stay virtuous. This leads to civil war, the destruction of their sacred treasure, the deceit and barbarous acts of Princess Hilda – Lorule’s parallel of Princess Zelda. They are fallible and imperfect, not like symbols, but like people.

Lorule allows us to see a glimpse of the characters we’ve known for years at their absolute worst – at their absolutely most honest. Desperate, selfish, shortsighted, scared.

And of course, the big question that you often forget to ask (because you’re having so much fun) is: If Lorule has an alternate Zelda, where is its alternate Link?

What does a hero do when the mantle becomes too heavy? What can a hero do when the difference between what other people see in him and what he sees in himself diverge so fully that it’s too painful to bear? Where can a hero go to escape the lie that his life has become, the lie that he himself has participated in by virtue of his existence?

If he’s lucky, he can slip away and find someone a little bit like him to help him do the things he is too afraid to do himself.

When Ravio, the bumbling merchant who’s been gouging me for rupees for hours, finally pulled off his dumb bunny hood, my heart jumped into my throat.

Ravio, for all intents and purpose, is Link at his worst, his most vulnerable. When he revealed his identity, I felt like I was looking at Link – someone who I’ve known my whole life, someone who was born in 1987, the same year as me – for the very first time.

Only now, only after all of these years, only after seeing him at his most selfish, his most cowardly, his most honest, did I feel like I truly understood him.

Being a hero, being someone who others rely on to make their lives safe and happy, must be terribly hard.

Please take care of your heroes.

August 12, 2014 Thoughts No Comments

In defense of Nash from Lunar

You don’t know Nash, because you didn’t play Lunar, but you can assume that he is a complete douchebag.

[Trigger Warning: Nash.]

You meet Nash in a forest, stuck under one of those stick-and-box traps from cartoons. He is obviously a huge idiot, but he pretends that he’s not only not an idiot, but incredibly benevolent, smarter than you, and he assumes you are stupid enough to fall for a similar trap.

He believes he is also trustworthy and professional, and name-drops his boss, the leader of the prestigious Magic Guild of the Floating City of Vane, who trusted him with a mission to the dirty surface world. So Nash is also a classist, elitist, opportunistic asshole.

Nash is also a coward. He has a crushing infatuation for the guild leader’s daughter, but denies it at every turn. Instead of telling her, he is over-protective and condescending toward her. Even after spending a lot of time in harrowing situations with her, he never admits his true feelings.

Nash is so cowardly that, even after a long journey together, he leaves the party and willingly betrays her, you, and your entire traveling party to help the worst person in the world carry out his evil plans and seek mercy from him.

I hate Nash. I love Nash. We need more Nashes.

The other day, USGamer had a bit on the nature of localization in Square Enix games, and how it can improve. I recognized this for the trick question that it is: a translation can never be truly good if the thing being translated is actually bad.

(I say this, of course, trying not to forget that my understanding of Lunar is based on its famously contentious English localization)

It all comes down to the story, and in an RPG that means it all comes down to the characters, and writing characters means writing an ensemble.

Many the relationships in popular Western RPGs are based on mistrust, desperation, and manipulation. Fallout and Elder Scrolls has you constantly second-guessing people’s motives, and fooling people into giving you what you want. In Mass Effect, the crew assembled on the Normandy is made up of people with grudges and trust issues, and some don’t even want to be there. True camaraderie is something that can only be established after these issues are overcome.

In poorly written JPRGs, this is a one-and-done deal. “Oh, we beat that first boss together? Great: friends forever, now. We’ll never disagree again.” Every scene after that is just people standing in a row, being polite to each other and basically all having different visual designs but basically the exact same outlook. Nobody does ever does anything you don’t expect them to. Even good games fall into this trap, like Bravely Default and, by the end of it, Persona 4.

It’s fucking boring, pointless, and possibly a cultural thing, which makes it all the more depressing. Maybe Japanese gamers just want to see beautiful people be nice to each other all of the time, I don’t know.

I mean, shit, there’s a ton of problems with RPGs and their stories, writing original characters and giving them all a believable excuse to stick together. But if I can give one piece of actionable advice to someone making a JRPG, to elevate even the most cliched plot: write a Nash.

The brilliant part of Nash’s character is that his betrayal is surprising at first glance, and then perfectly natural upon reflection. You might wonder how Nash even gathers the conviction to turn his back on the only thing he seems to care about, until you realize that his action is a clue to the deeper meaning behind his shallow behavior up until this point: Nash’s dread of death is deeper than his capacity for love. Typically that’s the kind of sentence you’d use to describe a RPG villain, not a RPG hero. And yet here we have a terrible person standing right next to your other faithful allies.

And even a single Nash allows for so much to play with in a story. What do other characters say about someone like him? Do they show pity or contempt? How far will they go to correct his behavior?

In the end, Mia – the meek, back row, magic-using girl that Nash has been fawning on and patronizing for hours of game time – walks up to him and smacks him in the fucking face, leaving a red handprint that I’m sure many fans still remember fondly. It is the single violent action she commits outside of battle, and it’s the moment she realizes that being docile and accommodating won’t make every problem go away.

Characters doing awful things lets other characters do amazing things. And those ups and downs break up the fucking monotony inherent to all RPGs.

I’m trying to think of any other video game character who pulls a Nash (leaving player control of his own will to act against you), and I’m having a hard time. It’s such a fucking good schtick, why does no one else do it

EDIT: Speaking of writing an ensemble with conflicting perspectivesf…

March 18, 2014 Thoughts 1 Comment

The Torres Bros. Podcast Review The 3rd Birthday

My brothers, Tim and Brendan, and I got together a while ago to review The 3rd Birthday, Square Enix’s worst ever treaty violation.

It was our first night together since Christmastime, so we were excited AS HELL to talk about this, and well, we started recording around 10 at night and we stopped around 2 in the morning. We cover the game with a fine-tooth comb from beginning to end, with plenty of (non-boring) tangents related to many other games (Resident Evil, Mass Effect, Illusion of Gaia, etc.) and ideas (sci-fi and art, etc.).

It’s in .mp3 format, split apart into four segments for palatable listening.

3rd Birthday Stinks and We Don’t Like It

Part One: 3rd Birthday Stinks and We Don’t Like It
Some Parasite Eve 1 talk and a lot about 3rd Birthday’s premise and setting.
Spoiler Level: Low

Part Two: The Greatest Foe Lies Within (Bad Games)
All the gameplay and the entire plot up to the ending gets dissected.
Spoiler Level: HUUUGE

Part Three: It Was the Best of Time Zero, It Was the Blurst of Time Zero
The entire ending under the microscope.
Spoiler Level: Monumental, and not just for The 3rd Birthday. PE1, PE2 and even Chrono Cross get spoiled.

Part Four: One More Final: I Need You (To Make Good Games Again)
Final thoughts, a lot of talk about recent and past Square games.
Spoiler Level: Minimal

January 30, 2014 Thoughts No Comments

The Torres Bros. Podcast Review: Bioshock Infinite

Tim, Brendan, and I haven’t round-tabled about a game since The Third Birthday, but as soon as Tim finished Bioshock Infinite, we had to have it out.

Trigger warning for people who like Bioshock Infinite.

Bioschlock Infinitum

Part 1: Two Ways of Spelling the Same Game
We tackle the introduction, “racism”, Columbia, combat, Elizabeth as a character, and their problems.

Part 2: Grodd Only Knows
We leap between dimensions and talk about the acting, writing, plot, twists, ending, and their implications for society.

YouTube Reference Materials:
The Lighthouse Puzzle
Elizabeth, the waifu
It’s like poetry, it rhymes
Secret lullaby password
You are the demons

EDIT 1/31
additional reference materials:
Preston E. Downs
Helpful Yorda
It’s Time to Time

January 30, 2014 Thoughts No Comments

So I started playing Grand Theft Auto 5

At first I was excited. Now I’m ready to stop.

I wanted to start a mission with the awful paparazzi guy, so I stole a car to get to that side of town. About 15 seconds later, the police are on me, and my wanted level is at 3 – y’know, three white stars up in the corner. I thought maybe I could start the mission and the police would go away. No, I can’t do missions while the police are chasing me. So I drive around for a few minutes, into a dead end, jump out of my car, over a divider, and just sprint away.

When I finally lose them, I steal another car, evade police detection, and make it to the side of town with the paparazzo. But as I turn into the driveway to start the mission, thinking that the mission would start automatically when I did so (which usually happens), I end up bumping into the paparazzo, who just kind of… runs away.

So I drive waaay up the street and wait for his little map indicator to come back, drive back, park away from him, get out, and start the mission.

Then as we walk down the street he gets hit by a bus making a U-turn. Mission Failed.

I always thought the growing realism of sandbox games only made them less fun. Things like having to elude the police in a stolen car should be fun, unless it’s getting in the way of something else I want to do.

Another big problem I’m having is that I’m sick of GTA protagonists somehow being “better” than the people they’re working for. Every word out of Franklin’s mouth is always about how dumb or petty other characters are, or how stupid the thing he’s being asked to do is.

What sucks about that is I also happen to think that all the characters are stupid and petty, and everything we do is stupid. I did three really dull missions in a row, and for each one Franklin mostly just complained through the whole thing.

For the most part, the player and the protagonist should want the same thing, and for the most part, that thing should be accomplishing the next mission objective. Contrast the self-aware reluctance of Franklin with the doggedly sadistic passions of the Third Street Saints in any given Saints Row. When the missions objective reads, “Save Shaundi,” and I Need a Hero is playing, you better believe the Boss is saying to his pals, “I’m gonna fucking save Shaundi!” When Bayonetta slinks into a room and says, “I’m here to beat up Angels,” and then Angels start coming after her, you’re gonna say, “I am also here to beat up angels.” The least you should do for the player is reinforce that what they’re being asked to do is worth doing, that they and the game are on the same page.

So the 15th time Franklin asked something to the effect of, “Why am I even doing this?” I was like, “Good question!” and quit the game.

I actually really like Franklin as a character. His reluctance to do dirty work despite his obvious skill at it says a lot about the unrelenting siren call of criminal life. That same struggle was easily the best part of Niko’s story in Grand Theft Auto 4, as well. But that motif is somewhat self-sabotaging in a game that doesn’t feel the need to invite deep thought about any of its other messages. The talk-news and the commercial segments that parodize vapid American pop culture seem less biting now than they did in 2008. Four whole seasons of South Park have come out since then.

There’s also a seeming confusion between what counts as satire and what is just biased observation. Yeah, west coast tennis instructors do have affairs with clients. Sure, aging black women do uses cliched mantras to inspire self-confidence. Uh-huh, pop sensations are actually older than they let on. And? The observations themselves fall flat since the characters themselves aren’t deep enough to invite scrutiny over their ways of life, nor are they broad enough as caricatures to invite laughter and derision. Cut scenes start up and I just twiddle my thumbs until Rockstar is done thinking they’ve made a point about some facet of modern life, waiting until I can pick the controller up again and play the goddamn game.

The parts of the story I’ve liked best so far are scenes with Franklin and his allies in crime, mostly because they’re actually focused on character growth. At this point there’s still a question of how far Franklin is willing to go to gain independence, and his respect for others shifts as he tries to answer that question for himself. What’s nice about this pre-Michael segment of the game is that there’s far less “parody” – more plot development and less lame “satire”.

The reasons there isn’t as much “biting satire” in this early segment of the game is that there is nothing to satirize. People like Franklin – stuck in a cycle of violence with friends and opportunities constantly drifting in and out of his life at with the whims of society at large – actually exist in the real world. If there are any jokes to be made here, they’re only to be touched by writers who know what the hell they’re doing. Even Rockstar’s writers know well enough.

So they stick with the same old targets: rich white people, Fox News, and most kinds of women. “Okay, writing staff, here are your Safe Topics. These things are funny. Everything else is off limits. We don’t want to confuse or alienate anyone who matters!”

January 15, 2014 Reviews No Comments

So I watched Beyond: Two Souls

I say “watched,” you may assume, to suggest that Beyond: Two Souls is more of a movie than a game. In reality, that isn’t quite true, either. Beyond: Two Souls isn’t really a game or a movie. And I don’t say this to suggest that Beyond: Two Souls is somehow bolder or more expansive than either a video game or a movie, or that it defies categorization. I refuse to put a label on Beyond: Two Souls because, if I were to do so, whatever category I were to put it into would be irrevocably worsened.

It is not a video game, nor is it a movie. If pressed to define it, I’d say it’s a twelve-hour piece of performance art where some innocent fuck is tricked into spending sixty dollars on a boring, useless item, then is compelled to use it despite a mounting sense of rage of disgust.

* * *

My relationship with David Cage, Beyond: Two Souls intrepid W R I T O R and D E R E K T O R, is a complicated one, except that it’s actually very simple, because I hate him and I think he’s a piece of crap (and a racist). I loathed Indigo Prophecy with the force of a thousand suns–enough to temporarily blind me to the surprising successes of the later Heavy Rain, which I now begrudgingly admit is an innovative and highly enjoyable piece of game-making, for all its wacky Europeanisms.

So I approached Beyond: Two Souls with a skeptical but overall neutral point-of-view. I didn’t want to deprive myself of a fun experience, but it’s hard not to feel twice-shy being once so bitten. And there was a very specific moment in our playthrough, towards the end of the first act, that made me go cold with incredulity, and erased any charitable feelings I’d allocated for Cage.

There was a point in which Jodie, our implausibly old-name-having protagonist, has to walk through a ruined medical facility. There is an encounter with an enemy that asks you to follow the on-screen prompts to evade danger and progress. We missed several prompts somewhat clumsily, and I was actually rather surprised that we cleared the challenge, remembering how easy it was for Madison Page to meet any number of context-sensitive grisly deaths in her encounter with the good doctor in Heavy Rain.

Anyway, immediately following this sequence, Jodie got stuck in the wall trying to exit the room, frozen and inanimate (but still crying and panting–thanks). Ah. Well. Glitches happen, it’s no Fallout: New Vegas–at least not yet. So we restarted the chapter, participating in the QTE fight again, this time never missing a prompt. It was at this point that we realized is that, despite how much better we were at pressing the appropriate buttons this time, the scene played out in exactly the same manner as it had previously. Our suceesses and failures merited no rewards or consequences within the scene.

What we realized is that were never really truly participating at all. We were just along for the ride, humoring Beyond: Two Souls.

What greatly angered us was another realization. Does David Cage know that we’re humoring him, or does he really think he’s humoring us?

* * *

There is another point in B:TS where Jodie has to run away from something terrible that’s chasing her. Just to see what would happen, I put the controller down on the floor. Would Jodie be captured by this monster and torn limb from limb?

No. Some moments later, Jodie, on her own, ran away.

(Spoilers will get slightly more persistent from here forward, but only slightly. After all, you’ve seen everything that happens in this “game”–the reversals and surprises and betrayals and losses you encounter as Jodie are all rote recitations of the same Hollywood junk you’ve seen crammed into games for the last fifteen years. Even the least savvy of eight year-olds can tell you the most shocking twists to expect in such a formulaic offering. DUDES! Your idealized mentor father-figure is actually MORALLY AMBIGUOUS OMMMMMGGGGAAAAAAADD!?!?!?!?!?!)

* * *

Later, we wanted to find out if it was actually possible to get intimate with one of the other characters in the game during a romantically-charged scene. (And I don’t mean “emotionally close,” I mean “can we get THIS penis in THAT vagina?”) So I Googled “beyond two souls walkthrough”. What a redundant phrase. For the most part, Beyond: Two Souls is a walkthrough of itself.

We discovered that there was, indeed, a way that the chapter could end with sex AND a Playstation Network Trophy. We figured we’d go for it. As long as we’re going through this, we might as well get some gamer cred, or whatever.

However, there was a disclaimer in the walkthrough for this particular portion of the game:

NOTE! If in [the chapter] “Like Other Girls”, the protagonist was groped by the bar’s clientele, no closer relationship with Ryan will happen.

I know you’re probably reading this sentence because you had already finished the previous sentence, but I want you to go back and read it again.

In this story about the supposed complexity of a human being’s life and identity over the course of many years, it is suggested that because Jodie was sexually abused several years prior, she is incapable of intimacy in the present.

There aren’t many choices you can make in a chapter that actually affects the events of another chapter – just one reason the boneheaded achronological narrative is just a bloody smoking hole in the foot of the story – but Cage made sure to fit in the little moral that if you didn’t have the foresight not to avoid your attempted rape, you are damaged goods.

Not only is this thing void of good ideas, whatever ideas it manages to portray are toxic for society and antagonistic to humanity.

* * *

While experiencing B:TS I was often on Twitter, writing thoughts about it as they occurred to me. Although this form of expression is troubling in several ways, it is appropriate for the works of David Cage. Deep analysis isn’t terribly necessary. All that needs to be done is present without irony exactly what occurs in Beyond: Two Souls, and any intelligent person can construe that it is lesser than garbage.

What follows are more detailed extrapolations of my Tweets as I experienced B:TS. These are essentially a list of observations in the order they were made.

B:TS opens with Ellen Page’s talking head, sounding confused. This is running motif in Cage’s work – big heads seeming unhappy. Supposedly, this is the end of the events of the story, and the following chapters take place BEFORE this point. This scene is mostly meaningless considering we have no idea who this is or when this takes place. It’s not like Sunset Boulevard – there are no expectations set up here.

After every chapter, the wavy-looking “timeline” for Jodie’s life is displayed, along with the name of the next Chapter and at what point on the timeline it occurs. It would be neat if this were a screen in which you could select what chapter you wanted to experience next. It would even feel somewhat immersive if the next chapter did not proceed until you pressed X to indicate you were ready to relive this memory. Instead, the timeline is just a loading screen, loading whatever part of Jodie’s life Cage thinks you should walk through next. Though it is marginally useful in finding out at what point the next chapter occurs based on chapter you’ve already seen.

Child Jodie is a pretty good actor. Way better than the French kids Cage got to play children from Philadelphia in Heavy Rain.

Willem Dafoe plays Jodie’s mentor and father figure, Nathan, trying to find out how she connects to her invisible psychic/ghost friend, Aiden. He does it through all the usual bullshit ways movie paranormalologists detects psychics – by asking her to pick cards with pictures on them.

You can control Aiden by interacting with objects marked by blue dots and knocking them over. This is Aiden’s primary purpose: knocking shit over. The game asks you to knock things over. But then at some point you knock something over and everyone in the lab starts freaking out. We start to think, “Okay, I guess we’ll stop knocking shit over.” But the story doesn’t proceed if you don’t knock more shit over. In order to convey that Aiden is sometimes “out of control” and “dangerous” the story forces us to force Aiden to knock shit over. Aiden doesn’t feel “out of control” to me. He just seems to be stuck in a story in which he is “out of control,” despite the fact he is completely in my control.

Nathan, calming Jodie down, says, “It’s alright, Jodie, it’s over.” Jodie responds, “It will never be over.” ಠ_ಠ Yep, because real people talk this way.

The next chapter, bafflingly, takes place at Sheikh Ahmed’s black tie gala. At this point, Jodie is in the CIA, and she’s going to use Aiden to find out what important secrets she can find in Sheikh Ahmed’s house. It’s one of the few times you have reign to float around and do stuff. Unlike other games in which you can decide how to use your powers to solve the problem in front of you, Aiden can only use certain powers on certain objects that the story needs to be interacted with to progress. Imagine a Legend of Zelda game in which the room you are in has a locked door, and there are switches all over the walls, and there is only one switch that opens it, but that switch is glowing blue, and the other switches actually don’t do anything. That is every sequence with Aiden.

Jodie is wearing a dress with her entire back exposed. The texture of her back is somewhat terrifying – as though her skin is paper thin and you an see every muscle fiber under it. This is one of the most unsettling dips into the Uncanny Valley, but sure not the last.

The bathroom signs for Ahmed’s place feature a veiled face over the door for the women’s bathroom, and a bearded face over the door for the men’s bathroom. This seems racist to me, but then I’ve never been to the Middle East.

The next chapter involves a birthday party at some brat’s house. Nathan thinks it’ll be good to meet kids my age. He already picked out the present for the birthday girl: an old collection of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Our guess is that the girl will think it’s a terrible gift and that it will act as an additional reason we should feel absolved for torturing her later. We are right.

The party has beer and weed. We indulge in both. We also get to pick the music. We picked disco. Another brat said it was a stupid, and changed the song. We weren’t sure if that moment was to get us to hate that girl, or just B:TS trying to simply negate another one of my choices.

You can score with some limey kid, but in the end, he and the others turn on you for being a “witch.” Their bright idea for dealing with witches? Lock them in a closet. ‘Cause that won’t backfire.

It totally backfires. This is the only point in the story where we feel as though Jodie, Aiden, and us are on the same side. We toss knives and set fires. We’re finally having fun, despite how blurry and floaty Aiden is.

There is a chapter that has us training to be in a special division of the CIA. It plays out like an actual montage. Pressing X to run over tires. Pressing X to solve… math equations? Flicking the analog stick to punch dudes. Do we really need this shit? I have an invisible ghost friend.

Suddenly Aiden can “heal” wounds by just kind of floating over them. This is used again I think four more times afterward.

Jodie’s step parents are really funny. The mother might actually be a good actor, but it’s hard to tell in this game, since nobody says things that regular people say. The father is hilarious. He just is always angry and often shouting. At some point I think you get a Trophy based on whether or not you display hatred toward him.

For the most part, the only way for things to progress is for Aiden to knock hist over. This could easily be called Knock Shit Over Simulator Pro.

The first wham-bam “blockbuster” sequence involves going through a ruined medical facility where people are trying to harness the awesome power of ghosts for ??????? reasons. It is at this point that all the seams show, if they haven’t already.

All QTEs are rigged in your favor.

Solving puzzles means switching to Aiden to knock over the “correct” thing – Aiden, really, is just a more complicated QTE.

You can read memories from dead people’s corpses or possessions, but they only tell you what you already know.

People respond to crises and tragedy in ways that don’t make sense. “Go!… Nothing but… DEATH… in there!”

The logic of Aiden’s powers and the ghost world are completely inconsistent. Sometimes Aiden can help Jodie, and sometimes she’s all on her own. Aiden can beat up ghosts, but they can’t do anything to him.

Jodie does things she should know better than doing. Like taking the elevator instead of the stairs in an emergency. What the FUCK is actually wrong with you. I don’t care if you have a magic zombie-goast pal to bail you out–take the stairs, you lazy bum.

Jodie seems to know how to find and shut down the power for a unique piece of machinery. She doesn’t think to just cut all of the wires around her, but instead has to cross through a ghost tornado for reasons.

Fighting the ghosts – which should be a big deal, they’re fucking flying screaming horrors that have the power to make people kill themselves and each other – is exactly as fun as knocking shit over in the rest of B:TS, in that it’s not. They could have invented a different action specifically for fighting the ghosts, but it’s the some input as knocking over paper and water bottles and crap.

Nothing is scary or surprising, because most humans have seen a movie before, and sound cues indicate what’s going to happen all of the time.

The engine Cage uses to make these games only heightens the excitement and drama of small things – most famously The Lizard trial in Heavy Rain. It is incapable of capturing the complexity of a fantastic action sequences the same way most video games already can pretty well.

Jodie’s thighs are too fucking thin.

Jodie tells Nathan, “Don’t let them do that again. If they open a passage, there’ll be nothing left.” The bad news? I think we’re supposed to be surprised that they do it again. The worse news? Because of the way the story works, it won’t be relevant for another 10 hours.

The chapter in which Jodie is homeless and makes friends with homeless people invites a question for anyone interested in seeing more scenarios that aren’t typically presented in video games: Why isn’t the whole game about using your ghost powers to overcome and navigate the challenges of being homeless? Because 1) Cage does not have anything poignant to say about being homeless, 2) he hasn’t met enough black people in his life to write about more than one in the same story for too long, and 3) despite all the smoke he blows about taking video games to a new level, he’s afraid NOT to put in more scenes that involve the same guns and violence that every video game has.

There’s a point where you can accept someone’s sexual proposition, but even if you do Jodie just changes her mind about it. Again, your choices are negated if David Cage doesn’t like them, yet he’s still willing to put women in dangerous and titillating situations without seriously confronting their consequences.

There are maybe one or two times where Jodie has prophetic visions in her dreams. These were likely put in so the plot would make slightly more sense. Since the story is presented out of order, it totally doesn’t work.

By the way. Aiden is pronounced throughout the game as “Eye-den,” except for one point when Willem Dafoe pronounces it “Ay-den.” He probably pronounced it that way because that is how you are supposed pronounce the name Aiden. Cage did not deign to correct Willem, even if it meant an inconsistency.

Women in David Cage games exist to 1) be fucked or threatened with unwanted fucking, 2) be beaten up, 3) be impregnated, 4) cry, or 5) all of the above.

Flashbacks to Child Jodie are mostly complete wastes of time. The only good part is when you have a snowball fight.

Girls’ Night Out is the chapter is which Jodie is whiny, entitled, and uses her powers for stupid reasons. Rather than making you appreciate Jodie’s growth, it only highlights how often Jodie is whiny and entitled throughout the story.

The Navajo chapter has already been equated to a bad episode of the X-Files. Doesn’t that sound great, though? What if every chapter was Jodie drifting into some town and solving their ghost problems?

Believe it or not, the sequence in which a white girl teaches a Navajo family how to deal with the vengeful spirit that their ancestors foolishly summoned to repel the White Man 200 years ago is still not the most racist thing David Cage has written.

The horses on the Navajo ranch are wearing English bridles, while they should be wearing Western bridles. They’re the only horses in the game, I mean, come on

Also, nearly every time there is an elevator in this game, a sign nearby refers to it as a “Lift”. It’s like in Heavy Rain when abandoned lots were referred to as “wastelands”. Cage would never let a copy editor near his precious script.

Nathan’s back story is illuminated very quickly and very late. Cage probably had exactly 6 hours with Willem Dafoe to just cram everything in.

Also, I know I said Nathan was Jodie’s father figure, but is he really? Seriously. I can’t think of a single nice thing he does for Jodie, or even a single lasting lesson he imparts on her. Nathan’s assistant Cole is nicer to Jodie than basically anyone else in the story, and he’s still just a “supporting” member of the cast.

The one environment that gets reused over and over is the dorm that Jodie stays in while working with Nathan. It’s suggested at one point we should feel sentimental about it, even though it is the least impressive looking residence in the whole game and nothing pleasant ever happens there.

It’s during The Dinner scene where we had the brilliant revelation that the game might have been better if the chapters were divided between those in which you controlled Jodie and those in which you controlled Aiden. As is, the opportunites where you can control Aiden seem arbitrary, and when you actively control one to sabotage the other, as in this scene, it seems as though your presence at best deteriorates the story and its logic, and at worse puts you in control of the character who is in the least interesting situation at the time.

David Cage loooooves making women take showers with their hands against the wall being all live, “Uhhh, I just looove being NAKED and wet.” It’s not sexy, though, because Jodie washes her hair while it’s still pulled back in a ponytail. Grrrrrross. No shampoo, no conditioner, just a pile of wet, dirty, smelly hair trapped in a festering pile. Help me, Aiden!

It seems to be completely arbitrary, as well, what actions get QTE prompts. Opening a bottle of wine gets two. Putting on a diving suit doesn’t get any.

Ellen Page is a fine actress. But she just doesn’t have the range to hold my interest or sympathy for 20 hours.

Ellen Page is also one of the least expressive actors in Hollywood. She’s known for having a somewhat monotone voice and deadpan delivery, no matter her role. This may make her an excellent choice for some movie roles, but this makes her particularly poor one for an animated medium. Compare Ellen Page’s extremely faithful motion capture to that of Kristen Bell, from the Assassin’s Creed series, and you’ll see a markedly less wooden character model, despite the less sophisticated technology. Bell is a naturally more animated, physically/facially/vocally expressive actress, which makes her tremendously more interesting and engaging to look at when rendered as a 3D nonhuman.

There’s a scene in which someone gets news that someone they cared about died. It’s hard to tell, though, because literally no one acts like they would have had it occurred in reality. Think about it: if someone asks you, “What’s happened?” after getting this news (first off, fuck them for not figuring it out while they’re in the room with you) would you say, “A truck… wrong side of the road… drunk driver… sentence fragments… just phrases!”

The saddest part of the game is that there is a dedication to someone who had died. Which means, even having known the death of a friend and colleague, David Cage STILL wrote this scene. This man doesn’t know what empathy means. He can’t even empathize that Americans use elevators and not lifts!!

And again, it’s even more jarring when, like, name actors have to work with horseshit.

There is a chapter that is, basically, just the first act of Metal Gear Solid 4, except with a lot more floating around and wondering, “What the hell do I do now?” Yep – that’s David Cage! Pushing the envelope by making you kill brown people in a blown-out desert town! In a video game, no less!

Jodie gets betrayed at some point. The suggestion is that we, too, should feel betrayed, but by this point she has made so many poor decisions – decision the game railroaded you and her into making – that it just feels like it’s her fault. In another game this would feel like a revelation. Here, it just doesn’t fit in with the birthday party and the homeless pregnancy and the estranged father figure and all the other stuff that happens in the story that has nothing to do with CIA missions.

There are no fat people in this game. Cage probably hates them, too.

In case you were wondering, yes, even while on a government mission, Jodie is still whiny and panicky and complaining.

Your purported love interest is a terrible person who lies to you. You have the option to forgive him, when you should have the option to push him into a fast-moving river.

As B:TS approaches its “climax,” several new characters are suddenly introduced who are conveniently “the bad guys”.

If you put down the controller during a bout with one of these villains, you will still live and they will still die. They are so inconsequential that you don’t even need to fight them to succeed.

Jodie is knocked out by antagonizing forces more than once after walking through a door. Considering she can see through walls, this likely means that she is an idiot.

The only reason that the climax occurs is because several people do really stupid things that make no sense.

Every once in a while B:TS made us say, “If only this was the whole game.” If only the whole game was spent spying on enemies governments. If only the whole game was exorcising ghosts. If only the whole game was trying to get a boyfriend. If only the whole game was stealing and turning tricks on the street.

One of the hallmarks of the truly great auteur is the ability to self-edit, and show self-restraint. Tarentino edited Gogo Yubari’s vengeance-seeking twin sister Sakura out of the already incredibly genre-bending and seemingly unrestrained Kill Bill. He prioritized a cohesive, coherent narrative over simply cramming in all the stories he’d originally hoped to. And Cage seems to think of himself as an auteur, but ultimately he shows no fidelity to his own narrative–he is too eager to spill his every thought to just buckle-down, focus, and tell us a goddamned good story. Like a five year-old recounting his day at school, Beyond: Two Souls is filled with “and thens.” And then she’s a witch with magic powers. And then she’s a secret agent. And then she’s an angsty teenager. And then she’s a jilted lover. And then she’s a homeless person. And then she’s a great white savior to a bunch of hunky Injuns. And, like listening to a five year-old, I can only nod my head woodenly, praying his mother will save me from his incoherent babble before I eat my own hands out of boredom and frustration.

Instead, it’s all of these things and more. Nothing lasts long enough for it to become important. It’s none of these things and less.

tl;dr: “SHIMISANIIIIII!!!!!”

January 2, 2014 Reviews No Comments

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Content

3rd Birthday Stinks and We Don’t Like It

Bioschlock Infinitum