Why do you care if it's realistic?

(Originally published on 20/12/17 at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

By far the most common kind of complaint about JRPGs is that they are 'unrealistic' – most commonly in their combat systems or character designs. This holds true despite the fact that all JRPGs are fantasy stories of one kind or another (I know of no exceptions). In fact, given that nearly every western game is also fantastical, it's weird that we care about 'realism' at all in games.

Anyone who's ever been told that people of colour in The Witcher would be unrealistic but demons and ghosts are fine will be unsurprised at the suggestion that there's something ideological in our use of 'realism'. Trace the concept carefully enough, though, and this is revealed as the tip of a very large iceberg. The valorisation of 'realism' goes alongside many of the most toxic features of games culture.

First we should get clear about exactly what 'realism' means in games. There are two things that seem to be important here. The first is obvious: the idea that game worlds should simulate relevant features of the real world. The second takes a little more explaining but concerns authorship and the relationship a game establishes (or doesn't) between its players and creators.

 

No video game has ever accurately simulated anything more complex than very basic physics. The computational resources have never been available – the kind of high-detail simulations sometimes used in scientific research frequently use orders of magnitude more computing power than a PC or home console can provide. For the most part, game 'simulations' are complex systems of smoke and mirrors that aim at the appearance of simulation without its substance.

Even in this attenuated sense, some things are easier to simulate than others. Computers are number-crunchers; things that are easier to quantify are easier to computerise. The physical properties of medium-sized material objects (at least, those without complex internal structures) are probably easiest. Prices, which are already quantification, are also easy to handle.

RPGs are often taken as simulations, in this reduced sense, of particular people; the reduction of human beings to numbers. This is a bad way of looking at them, generally, but in looking at what RPGs can and can't plausibly be thought to simulate, it's possible to see hints of the underlying ideology. Anyone who's ever tried to play a tabletop RPG with 'social combat' – the reduction of conversation to dice-rolling – can attest to how far short it falls of modelling human interaction. Video games rarely even try on this front, except for the odd dialogue option locked behind a stat or RNG requirement.

The dream of video game simulation, I think, is the same as the simulation dreams of futurists like Nick Bostrom: that there is some algorithm, and a sufficiently powerful computer to run it, that will generate whole virtual worlds from first principles, lacking perhaps the fine structure that we can never perceive in the real world anyway but nevertheless perfectly convincing to human perception. Such virtual worlds would be no different from the real world, except in respect of how they are constituted – by silicon and electrical charge rather than whatever the building blocks of the real world turn out to be.

I am sceptical that an algorithm of this kind exists, and even more so that a computer could be built to run it. But even if I am proved wrong, it will not be for a long time yet – the simulations we will make and play in for many years yet will be reductive approximations with the rough edges very carefully hidden from view (think for a moment about how angrily gamers react when the rough edges aren't well-enough hidden, especially when these moments are perceived as 'glitches').

In a way, the second important feature of realism builds on this concealment. It's the lie of completeness, the effort to hide all the ways in which a game is a software artifact rather than a comprehensive world. Most importantly, though (and in a sense most 'realistically'), it's the hiding of the role of designers and craftspeople in the creation of game-worlds. The real world doesn't show any unambiguous evidence of design, so a game world can't be 'realistic' if it does.

This is where some of the excitement over procedural generation comes from. It's not just that algorithmically-led games offer inexhaustible permutations of level and encounter design for a finite cost. Just as the real world emerges from the wilderness of basic physics, so procedurally-generated spaces emerge from the mathematical wilderness of the algorithm anew with each instantiaion.

There is, of course, a long tradition of other art forms incorporating randomness in composition ('aleatoricism'). I see this as almost diametrically opposed to the mainstream attitude to procgen in video games. In other artforms, procedural generation has aimed at spreading out our concept of artistic value; in games, the many instantiations of a procedural algorithm are supposed to converge on some particular value – fun, or 'replayability' (notice how this term frames the experience as a repeat despite its claim to newness or variety).

And the appearance of emergence, the placing of a mathematical wilderness between developers and players, also spreads a thin veneer of neutrality over in-game events. Gamer and designer both can point to the algorithm and say 'I didn't want this specifically, the computer did it'. This is the technological analogue of economic meritocracy – people born rich handing off all responsibility for the inequalities they benefit from to 'the market' or the lottery of birth.

All of which clearly travels with the poisonous devaluing of developer labour that pervades the game industry. If a game developer's only task is to produce an algorithm that replicates reality, there's no reason for anything creative or personal to intrude. No specific person needs to do the work, provided someone does, so one developer is much as good as another and there's no reason to care if one is fired, burned out, or excluded by hostile office culture. One could almost say that developers themselves are treated as algorithms – 'coffee in, code out', as the mug has it.

I try to avoid calling this 'realism' in my own work, though I've drawn this definition from how that word is used in games. The real – whatever it may be – is not algorithmic, nor is it ever impersonal. Instead, I prefer to call this ideology 'naturalism'. It is the idea that the order that produces game worlds cannot be moralised or challenged – in just the way that we are encouraged to take the material world. It's just something we find ourselves in, we have to accept it...

...by which, of course, the speaker always means 'we' have to accept the part of it they want you to accept.

This goes some way to explaining why these two features of realism are prized so highly in games culture, but we can dig deeper yet. We value simulation because the more detailed a simulation is, the closer its objects approach to the kind of reality we ascribe to 'ordinary', 'real' material objects; we value these because that's how we've been encultured under capitalism. The quality or character of the experience produced by an object doesn't matter except insofar as it reflects its thing-ness.

(This kind of materialism – the valuing of stuff over humanity – takes root under capitalism because stuff is easy to quantify, surveil and control. Stuff, including human flesh, can be subjected to physical force; predictive models can be formulated about the future behaviours of stuff. Again, Bostrom's simulations are an echo of this.)

Explaining the valorisation of naturalism is more complex. After all, if games are art – as so many different segments of games culture assert so vehemently, with varying degrees of sincerity and understanding – perhaps the most obvious feature of art is that it is in some sense the product of intentional action. That's not to say that authorship is essential to or necessarily an important part of the theory of art; only that what delineates such-and-such an artwork as itself is the scope of the labour invested in its creation.

In one sense, then, there's a conflict between the concealment of the labour in game development and the claim that games are works of art. In practical terms, the apparent contradiction can be resolved by recognising that most of the people who value naturalism are declaring games to be art either disingenuously or without any substantive understanding of what it means to say something is art. Capitalist labour theory does more to explain the emphasis on naturalism than any of the surface claims games culture makes around the topic.

I need to be a bit careful in how I approach this area. This is material I studied at an English university, where it was presentated as entirely natural and right, and it's only relatively recently that I've got my head far enough out of that culture to see the problems with it. Hopefully I can describe this theory without implicitly endorsing it; let me state for the record that I certainly don't intend to endorse it.

The theory I want to talk about is often attributed to John Locke, though there's an argument that it took on a meaning Locke never intended with the advent of the industrial revolution. For Locke, property is a natural right (there's that word again – remember that 'natural' generally indicates something that you're supposed to accept without question)

The argument goes something like this: we all have a fundamental right to life, and we all, as a fundamental part of being human, own our own bodies. To live, we need various forms of sustenance, and to sustain ourselves, we need to put these forms of sustenance into our bodies in such a way that they become part of our bodies – and thus part of our property. So there must be a point at which we take or claim ownership of the stuff we eat, drink, and otherwise depend on to live.

For Locke, the turning point is the application of our own labour to the raw materials of sustenance – the archetype of this being growing your own crop to eat it. A pack of seeds, a patch of soil and a shovel full of fertiliser don't make a particularly edible or nutritious meal; a farmer labours to combine these into a crop of vegetables that can be eaten. Locke holds that the farmer's labour has become the edibility of the crop – that, in a sense, the farmer has actually combined part of theirself with the seeds and soil. By the principle of self-ownership, then, the farmer owns the crop even before they eat it.

There are a lot of complexities on top of this. Locke proposes a couple of limits on our right to 'appropriate' raw material from nature in this way: that we have to leave enough for others and that we shouldn't cultivate more than we need, to avoid wastage. However, he also introduces the possibility of trade, and from that the idea of currency, which can be accumulated indefinitely without transgressing either limitation. This is how the theory makes the jump to justifying large-scale modern capitalism.

The theoretical stuff may sound fanciful, but it's not the logic of the argument that's the problem so much as the principle of self-ownership. This was an obvious way for a 17^th-century philosopher to talk about bodily autonomy as a right within the context of a fundamentally feudal society, but that doesn't make it a good way to do so. That we have a right of some sort to bodily autonomy should be self-evident, but it's not clear what the theory gains by turning this into a property over our own bodies (unless, of course, you're specifically trying to justify capitalism).

Much of the more complex later stages of the theory aren't of interest right now. It's the basic idea of labour-mixing that I think is relevant. A crucial part of Locke's view is that, without the consent of other human beings, we can only appropriate raw materials from nature. I can't harvest your crop without your permission, but I can take unclaimed land and raise my own crop there (it's probably important to note that, according to Locke, in doing so I come to own the land as well, since in working the soil I inevitably increase its productivity).

There's another precondition, too, which is that Locke, a Christian, believed the Earth to have been given to humanity by God specifically for the purpose of sustaining us. We had not just a right but a god-given imperative to cultivate it. Locke's scornful and racist remarks about 'primitive' cultures not doing enough cultivating to count as having taken ownership of the land they live on certainly emerge in this context, and served to justify the disposession and displacement of native peoples who opposed European colonisation.

What does this have to do with video games? Well, there's no 'unclaimed nature' in the real world anymore – all (or at least almost all) land is legally the domain of some institution or individual. If video game environments are analogous to the real world thanks to simulation, though, they offer us new, unclaimed, natural worlds with each new instantiation.

That frees gamers, in some sense, to appropriate new property from their virtual activities. Of course, virtual objects can't be literally mixed with a person's body for sustenance, but real human activity (button-pressing, and decisions about which buttons to press) can be mixed with virtual objects to produce new phenomena, or at least new instantiations of designed phenomena – this is what happens whenever a player input affects whatever's on screen or coming out of the speakers.

(It's definitely true that player activity contributes to the production of new and valuable experiences during play, but experiences – being non-material – aren't often highly-valued under capitalism. They're too ephemeral, too hard to measure and control.)

This leaves two problems. Firstly, because these virtual natures are infinitely reinstantiable, anyone can possess them – there's nothing special about possessing what anyone can have. Secondly, button-pressing, and making decisions about which buttons to press, generally doesn't rank very highly on the arbitrary scale of labour value that our culture has built.

'Difficulty' – a word that, like 'realism', turns out to have a special, and pretty incoherent, meaning in video games – is the crutch used to remedy this. 'Difficult' work is supposed to be more valuable, which is why we pay bankers millions and nurses barely a living wage (to say nothing of the pittance we pay to people who can, by mind-blowing dexterity and stamina, keep a supermarket checkout flowing through lunchtime rush). Similarly, if a thing is 'difficult' to do, that is supposed to entail that few people have done it; if a thing is difficult to appropriate, then few people must own it, restoring its scarcity.

I hardly need to make explicit the relationships to games culture here, but also there are too many apposite examples to list. It's every 'hard' difficulty mode that describes itself as 'the way the game was meant to be played' and every gamer who says 'well, you haven't really beaten it until you've beaten it on hard'. It's also every single use of the phrase 'dumbing down', and every complaint about 'girl gamers', 'casual gamers' and other dogwhistles for non-cishet-white-male gamers.

(There's a reciprocal relationship here, too, just as in conventional capitalism. Activities that are associated with less-privileged groups get devalued by that association, so it's entirely consistent that forms of game interaction associated with less-privileged groups are automatically assumed to be less 'difficult' – and thus a less legitimate path to owning games-culture real estate).

But most of the games celebrated as 'hard' are actually finely-tuned to be completable. Think how narrow the tolerances are on a Super Meat Boy level. Or how carefully the challenge of Demon's Souls rises to each boss, how there's always just enough room that, if you're really good, you can dodge and not die. It takes extraordinary testing to produce that kind of precision in experience.

Difficulty as it features in life in the real world is a very different beast. Not everyone starts with the same basic resources. Misfortune can ruin a life in seconds without warning or recourse to justice. Games that come close to this pattern (and few if any really deliver it, since the costs are so carefully constrained within the virtual) tend to be regarded as 'unfair' and shoddily-made (interestingly, a lot of older, less well-known-in-the-west Japanese RPGs fall into this category).

If we still lived against the backdrop of Locke's theological context, with our appropriations justified because God ordained them for us, this might not be a problem. But the context has changed, perhaps vaguely thanks to Darwin. The idea that ownership is a paternalistic grant from a benevolent deity smacks of 'participation trophies' and – again – 'dumbing down'.

So just as capitalism has come to function without the idea that the world was created by God for our benefit, and even depend on its absence, so games culture needs to deny that its worlds are created specifically to be claimed.

All this, of course, is a barely-plausible web of half-baked ideological positions. There are contradictions if you look much closer than I have here. And it would be wrong to say that the culture as a lived and enacted thing was predetermined by this structure of ideas; ideologies are always constituted by the human behaviours they promote. But a chair is constituted by the ass-holding-up behaviours of its legs and seat, and it's still true that the chair holds your ass up.

JRPGs – specifically the Square Enix/later Final Fantasy kind – have suffered more than most under this ideology not only because they make little pretense of simulation. This particular strand, which has come to stand for the whole Japanese RPG tradition in the west by accident of marketing and sales more than any defining aesthetic or formal feature, also unapologetically lifts and guides the player, arranging the environments and encounters carefully around them. There's no better example of this than Final Fantasy XIII, and we know how that was received.

There's nothing neutral or simple about the way video games use 'realism', nor about the complaint that such-and-such a game isn't 'realistic'. This terminology is grounded both in an immediate material/industrial context and in a philosophical history that predates video games by several centuries. The baggage that we bring in when we talk about realism is complex, dangerous and already contributing to wide-ranging harm.

Written in the Land

(Originally published on 11/3/17 at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

Blood and Bone

After finishing Final Fantasy XV the first time, I wrote that I thought there was 'a story written in the bones of this landscape'. The thought wasn't entirely figurative; the most obvious icon of the land of Eos is the great stone arches vaulting across the hills of Duscae like the exposed ribs of a decaying corpse. It's not subtle – little about this game is, really – and yet so much symbolism seems to have gone unnoticed here.

Decline pervades the world of FFXV. The lands immediately surrounding Insomnia, Noctis' home city and the capital of Lucis, are a barren desert. Further afield, lush growth survives, as if the vast and untouchable city is leeching the life from its domain. The desert is even bordered by miles of pipes, apparently oil-bearing.

In a game where driving is central, gas is essential, but it is also a scar on the landscape. The roads, rest stops and scattered towns are Noctis' and the Lucians' rightful place; to the land they are alien, parasitic.

This impression is reinforced whenever you stop to visit any settlement not directly connected to the road network. These places are styled after a completely different century to Insomnia, all big wooden barns, low white stone walls and oldsmobiles. The divide between the king and his subjects is clear.

Iconography of America is everywhere, perhaps nowhere more obviously than in the Daisy Duke-like figure of Cindy, the mechanic who keeps Noctis and friends on the road. Her character design has come in for substantial criticism:

My biggest negative from my time so far with FFXV is Cindy. She was in the Duscae demo, attired as she is here, a single loose thread away from indignity. I remember back then thinking: surely, surely, Square will see how people react to the girl's lack of sensible coverage ... and respond accordingly. But nope. (Waypoint)

It's 2015, we're starting to talk openly and often about race and gender stereotypes in games, and yet Square Enix thinks it's totally cool here to wrestle a Barbie-proportions female mechanic ... into a preposterous outfit.... What impeccably poor timing, when the game industry is at this inflection point in regards to examining and rethinking how women are portrayed in games, for Square Enix to roll out this ridiculously tone-deaf walking cleavage texture Cindy – and as the only female character in the demo? (Wired, discussing 2015's Episode Duscae demo)

There are other similar remarks (Kotaku called Cindy 'a personalityless mechanic who dresses like a stripper', for example), but these two passages are particularly good examples of the finger-wagging some have directed at Square Enix. The games industry is supposed to be past this, the tone suggests, why are Square so backward?

Final Fantasy XV definitely has problems with its representation of women, but it must be acknowledged that apart from Cindy, the female character designs are 'past this'. Luna is a model of contemporary grace. Iris' outfit looks comfy as hell and is incredibly cute. Even the obvious cosplay-bait, Aranea, has nothing more egregious than a low neckline.

Cindy's design is not just the most comically hypersexualised in the game, it's also the most obviously American. Sexualised women are part of the iconography of American (and, more generally, western) car culture. Yes, things are better than they used to be, but 'grid girls' are still part of the tradition of every major motorsport event.

None of this is an argument to forgive the designers the indulgence of Cindy's design (though it didn't bother me nearly as much as it seems to have bothered the men quoted above). It's the hypocrisy of sneering at Square Enix for representing things as they are in American culture that I object to. This is a game about America, and where that leads it into content or symbols that are repulsive, it is critically irresponsible to ignore how this reflects ways in which America is repulsive.

The much-celebrated 'male intimacy' of the central cast is relevant here, too. Please, if the conduct of Noctis, Gladio, Ignis and Prompto reminds you of your close friends, get better friends. Better yet, call them out for being such terrible assholes. The four protagonists could almost be a catalogue of western toxic masculinity.

Noctis is the sullen stoic. Coddled from birth, he has no mental resources to deal with grief and loss, no ability to communicate his inner life to others. He perhaps has the excuse of grief – his reaction to the destruction of his home city and the sequential loss of his loved ones is more convincing than his comrades' – but more often he comes across as petulantly entitled.

Gladio is macho posturing made flesh. On a charitable reading, he is a man who believes that kings and those who serve them surrender their autonomy – that their duties supersede their rights as humans. This still leads him to two outright assaults on Noctis as the prince grieves. Putting that aside, Gladio bullies the slighter Noctis and Prompto constantly about their physiques and urbane lifestyles.

Ignis' vice is intellectual austerity. Mechanically he's far and away the most useful party member, responsible for keeping you informed of and able to exploit enemy weaknesses as well as feeding everyone. He pecks at the other boys like a mother hen, though, and is particularly cruel in policing Prompto's eating habits, providing constant reminders of the latter's struggles with his weight and body image.

In turn, the nasty side of Prompto is his attitude to women. He is possessively infatuated with Cindy, at one point in a sidequest snapping at Gladio for even mentioning the mechanic's attractiveness. The game makes no attempt to play this as wholesome affection, though; as soon as Aranea appears, Prompto takes up her case as well, agonising over which woman he prefers without any mind for whether either of them would give him the time of day.

Having grown up among boys, all four archetypes ring true. Privileged teenage boys are not nice people, and at times it was painful to follow a story that captured this so well. In a way it's worse than the formulaic, prepackaged TV relationships of a Persona game – the cringe factor of a Junpei or Yosuke at least comes with a layer of insulation from reality.

That Final Fantasy XV's use of American iconography is not an accident or superficial becomes clearest when its overarching plot is properly understood. Extracting the relevant details from the game is a bit tricky – most of them are found on bits of paper lying around in the nooks and crannies of the thirteenth chaper, and some are easy to miss – but again, it's not really subtle.

One of the game's cleverest touches is that, as you proceed further through the plot, the hours of daylight grow shorter. At first I thought I was imagining it, then I wondered if it might be a surviving remnant of a cut seasonal system, but it dovetails quite well with another gimmick; at night, the animals and monsters of Eos' landscape go to roost, and demons emerge. There are well-defined differences between the two kinds of enemy; not only do demons look more obviously supernatural, but they do an additional kind of damage that requires different items to heal.

What chapter 13 reveals, though, is that this is not necessarily magic at work. Eos is suffering a plague, a parasitic microorganism (or possibly a virus) that preys on humans, transforming them into demons. The microorganism is damaged by sunlight, but secretes a particle that absorbs light and tends to accumulate in the upper atmosphere – thus causing the shortening of the days and the eventual onset of perpetual night.

A motif through the early chapters of the game, if one leaves the road to explore on foot, are abandoned settlements, neat wooden houses with no-one around, sawmills with fresh-cut tree trunks but no loggers or trucks and so on. It feels unfinished, but actually the people have just been consumed by the darkness. It's clear that the rural culture of Eos is doomed – only where there's enough power to keep the lights on can the demons be kept at bay.

The pseudo-sciencey explanation of FFXV's apocalypse robs it of a lot of its fantasy and wonder. It feels mundane, depressing because it sits a little too close to reality. There are lethal viruses and bacteria advancing inexorably across our world at the moment.

But there's more. While the origin of the infection is unknown, it is revealed that when it first emerged several centuries before the game's events, a human was gifted with the power to fight it, only to be killed by a jealous king. That king was then cursed to immortality, and goes on to become Ardyn, the final boss. In the same chapter where the truth about the demons emerges, Ardyn reveals that he is Noctis' ancestor, even though he now serves as Chancellor of Niflheim, the nation invading Lucis.

Noctis' destiny and the apocalypse he must avert are the legacy of his own family. And like the people of his walled-off capital city, Noctis has been oblivious to the consumption of the world by the fruits of his ancestors' evil. No-one in Insomnia, either in the game or the tie-in movie Kingsglaive, seems to have any idea what is happening in the lands outside the city wall.

This is America viewed from the outside; conceited, decrepit and deadly dangerous[1]. For this game to have arrived, after a 10-year development journey, only three weeks after the election of Donald Trump, seems an almost magical coincidence. Its fatalism, and the dreary nature of its ultimate danger, fit the tone of the moment too well.

I don't think I've seen a single review of the game that so much as mentioned this. Some commented on the aesthetic of Americana, but no-one seemed to make the connection. This would be a fitting-enough comment on the theme of our obliviousness, and there's a lot to be said on that front alone, but when it comes to specifically discussing theming in Japanese RPGs, it makes FFXV a perfect example of an endemic problem.

See That Mountain? You Can't Climb It

Something that has attracted a lot of comment with FFXV is the game's 'open world'. After western gamers castigated FFXIII for being 'linear', it's easy to construct a narrative of Square Enix swinging back towards the opposite extreme and embracing the structure that typefies western RPGs. Some remarks by director Hajime Tabata, and the incorporation of western feedback into the development process, have also suggested a westward turn[2].

If it's possible to generalise that western games are more 'realistic' and Japanese games more 'abstract', then I'll concede the point that FFXV at least looks western at first glance. Much was made – including a lovely video for the IGN launch event – of the fact that the dev team actually went camping and climbing and potholing during development, and that experience shows in the inch-by-inch design of the environments.

But the world map is... not very open:

For clarity, this is the world map as it appeared in-game at the end of my 70-hour second playthrough. I did my best to go to the boundary of every explorable area (I'm missing one tiny bit at the left-hand side because I couldn't for the life of me land the flying car on the Pitioss landing strip – more on this later); the lit-up areas indicate where the map has been revealed by exploration, and in almost all cases the highlights spread beyond the boundary of where you can walk or drive.

Every space you can explore in the 'open' world is the verge of a stretch of road. Occasionally two verges will overlap. The further west you go, the less the spaces between roads are filled in, even though those environments are clearly designed to be wilder. Apart from dungeons, there are very few areas that aren't visible from a road.

I've already noted that settlements that don't directly serve the road network are very different to those that do; part of this is architectural design, but it's also partly mechanical/systemic. There is nothing for you to do in these offroad hamlets. You can't talk to the people, there are no quests to pick up, only the occasional blue sparkles of items to collect, just like everywhere out in the wilderness. These settlements are just more landscape.

And the landscape of FFXV is designed to be looked at and driven past, not explored. Exploration is something you do by following roads you haven't followed before, not by leaving the road to wander beyond civilisation. When you do explore on foot, you may find items (seldom rare ones) or enemies, but no new scenes or vistas, no people or plot development.

Perhaps a better term would be 'open-road game', though even there, the roads aren't that open – the longest straight-line distance in the explorable part of the game world is about 7.5 miles, as far as I can tell. Including later plot areas, the furthest Noctis ever gets from home might be about 40 miles. There's good evidence the game's world was intended to be much larger, but based on what is fully-realised in-game, I doubt any other area would have been more open.

I don't play a lot of open-world games, but I can't really understand how you'd apply the word 'open' to the play area of FFXV. It's like nothing so much as the 'routes' that make up a Pokemon game, a network of linear areas with a little bit of space to each side for finding odds and ends and random encounters.

This is an environment-structure approach that's been growing more and more common over the last couple of generations, as the development costs of world maps with contemporary-standard graphics have risen. It was particularly noticeable in Tales of Xillia, for example, where every named location was separated from its neighbours by a nondescript box canyon full of loot spots and monsters. These kinds of environment perform the same pacing function as passages of world-map travel without committing the devs to building whole worlds.

Functionally, we're talking about the same phenomenon in all these cases. The world maps of the SNES era, if you trace how the boundaries were drawn, ultimately boiled down to paths from one place to the next, it's just that more than one path was laid out on the same 'map'. In this light, FFXV's 'open world' isn't a lean towards western design at all but a return to an older, deeper understanding of how Japanese RPGs have always presented their worlds.

As if to emphasise the point, this is the first Final Fantasy in a decade and a half to give the player direct control over the airship while in flight. And just as airships were never quite as freeing as you wanted them to be, so it is here; in fact, FFXV has maybe the most useless airship ever in a JRPG.

The 'airship' is an upgrade to your car; as such, you can only land it on the road (and doing so is surprisingly difficult; clip a lamp post, tree or roadside barrier and it's an instant game over). The area in which flight is possible is a lumpy oval covering most but not all of the explorable ground area and sometimes spilling a little bit outside of it. There's no flying to any of the overseas territories. You can't even fly under the bridges that span the massive canyon between Cleigne and Duscae.

In this, there are shades of the tree- and mountain-covered continents of older games, late-game areas where the developers couldn't afford to have the player just fly straight to their destination. FFXV's airship is, in terms of spectacle and the exhilerating feel of takeoff, the realisation of a decades-long dream of what flying around a world map could be, but ultimately it serves to emphasise just how artificial and compressed the world beneath actually is.

FFXV's 'western-style open world' is actually well-grounded in Japanese design traditions, and is much better understood as the latest development of a long history of incremental changes. There are, undeniably, western influences, especially at the level of surface visual style, but it is wrong to understand these as a rejection of a tradition which has always absorbed and transformed western ideas alongside its own.

Another part of the game that has attracted similar rhetoric is the dungeons. I've seen a few critics compare these to Uncharted games (of which I have no first-hand experience, but I gather the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot is similar). There's certainly an attention to how bodies move that earlier generations of JRPG haven't paid, and there are Zelda-like moments where you shimmy along ledges or crawl through small holes, but it's a stretch to label that a 'westernisation'.

Visually, the caves and thickets of Eos bear a stronger resemblance to natural features of our Earth than has been seen in older Japanese RPGs (I balk at calling this 'realism'). The dev team's hiking adventures have clearly paid off in that respect – for once, the caves in an RPG feel like they were designed by someone who's actually been in a cave. But scratch the surface, and again, long-standing design traditions lie beneath.

JRPG dungeons are generally mazes, spacial compositions built to deplete resources and create duration (which is not the same as 'waste time', though that's how it's often characterised). They are pacing structures, in some cases almost entirely without semantics or narrative content[3]. What matters is how long it takes the player to move through them, how progress is shaped, directed and resisted.

FFXV's dungeons are definitely mazes. Even where a path loops back on itself in a larger space, there's often no way to shortcut from one section to another. There are no climbing or scrambling mechanics to let you get back on a ledge you've slipped off (or catch you before you slip off in the first place). The caves might look naturalistic, but the routes through them are deliberately, even oppressively, curated.

Some of the dungeons, especially the optional Costlemark Tower and Pitioss, even float in pitch-black subterranean voids which to me harked back to the black screenspace around any SNES-era cave dungeon. The dead space between walkable ground in the other dungeons – which often can't even be warp-striked across except to specific points – is a direct descendant of those gaps.

One way in which progress through dungeons has often been moderated in JRPGs is with floor effects that either slow the player down or encourage them to move faster by inflicting damage at regular intervals. Both of these effects appear in FFXV, most notably in the Rock of Ravatogh dungeon which includes a literal 'the floor is lava' area (and yes, you probably can walk on lava, but you probably can't hop around fighting set-piece battles against flocks of eagles). Poisonous pools of stagnant water in the Daurell Caverns function almost exactly the same way; the purpose is not to simulate any natural phenomenon but to induce the player to move in particular ways.

Combat also helps influence the player's passage through a space, of course. FFXV's combat is poorly-conceived, poorly-implemented[4] and shallow, but it has its roots in Kingdom Hearts and Tabata's Final Fantasy spinoffs, especially Type-0. That's a lineage that has steadily streamlined its fundamentals, moving further and further away from reliance on menus, but FFXV carries it too far, simplifying out almost everything that would make the fights interesting. Only a couple of boss-fights, that make specific use of the warp-strike mechanic, really stand up.

Sleeping Next to the Mirror

Final Fantasy XV is not, by any definition, a good game. It's unstable, inconsistent and often turgid. Most of the things that make its interesting ideas interesting are buried, rushed or otherwise easy to completely miss. But it is also not the game being reported on, and this oversight is systemic.

The claim that FFXV is 'westernised' or even a 'western-style RPG' is grounded in some very superficial elements of the overall experience. Yes, the characters have marginally less outlandish outfits than we're used to seeing in a Final Fantasy game. Yes, the world map gets a bit Ubisoft-y as the sidequests pile up. Yes, from a distance Eos looks wide and open.

But the core of the game – travel to a location, talk to some NPCs, enter a dungeon, fight a boss, repeat – is a formula that's stood since Dragon Quest. The environmental structures that direct progress might be called modernisations of older Japanese forms, but it's ridiculous to suggest that they constitute a wholesale abandonment of tradition (any more than it was when, say, FFVII traded 16-bit tile-based dungeons for free-roaming pseudo-3D prerendered backgrounds).

I'm not necessarily saying that the FFXV dev team deliberately set out to make a game devoted to developing and defending their traditions and background (as Square Enix definitely did with FFXIII). But under the severe pressure of FFXV's turbulent development, it's clear that whatever attempts they made to emulate or adopt western styles still leaned heavily on what they knew and have always known.

Interviewed during one of the launch events, Hajime Tabata was asked what he thought made a game a Final Fantasy game. His answer was that it's the continuity of the team that works on it; the overlapping chain of shared experiences that stretches back probably to before development even started on the first game. That's certainly in evidence with FFXV, even where there may have been attempts to hide or get away from it.

The 'westernised' meme didn't start in a vacuum, of course. FFXV's devs did make deliberate attempts to engage western audiences during development, with several demos, requests for feedback and regular 'Active Time Report' events to talk about how that feedback was being taken on board. This was perceived as an attempt to forestall the incredibly toxic and hostile public reception of FFXIII, reifying the idea that that game 'failed'.

It had a whiff, too, of some of the rumours which cling to FFXII. Yasumi Matsuno's entry in the series also had a troubled development and was taken over late-on by directors regarded as lesser talents. It's also often claimed that 'focus grouping' led to changes that made the game blander for an international audience.

So it's easy to construct a narrative about FFXV being the product of a desperate and fumbling developer, struggling to reclaim lost glories, reaching westward because there's no money in the Japanese domestic market anymore. It's easy to say, in the condescending way that so many thinkpiece writers do, that the Japanese industry is in trouble, or that Final Fantasy or JRPGs are dying.

This narrative misses a lot, though, and not just the actual features and design histories present in the game that I've already discussed. It misses, for example, the ongoing commercial successes of Square Enix games and Japanese RPGs in general (Pokemon, anyone?). Yes, Square Enix as a company had a couple of serious commercial blips – the first with The Spirits Within and the second with the original launch of Final Fantasy XIV – but by the absurdly rapid life-cycles of the games industry, these are generations in the past now.

It also misses that the 'crisis' of the Japanese industry in the latter part of the last decade can't be accounted for simply in terms of Japanese developers 'losing their touch'. Part of it was that the increasing technological demands of game development strained the employments structures of the big Japanese development companies and publishers. Another part of it was a deliberate commercial attack by the west:

 Alex St. John's 'Manhattan Project' joke may be apocryphal, but there is a legacy of animosity in the west towards Japan. It surfaced again in another poor-taste joke just recently:

 

This is a violent and terrible history – on both sides – to be messing with, but it wouldn't be the first time that games culture in the west has been fundamentally shaped by a failure to give violent and terrible history due respect. The vindictiveness of some 'JRPGs are dead' thinkpieces over the last decade betrays the same petty, small-minded spirit.

The idea that, at the largest commercial scale, Japanese developers only feel able to compete by 'copying' western developers (see also: almost every English word ever written about Dark Souls) must be very satisfying to people who think this way. The videogame industry of the 90s is one of the few domains and periods in modern history where a non-western nation has dominated over the west. So much of the response in the west as the balance has started to shift back westward has an undercurrent of people – and a whole culture – being 'put back in their place'.

Meanwhile, of course, Japanese developers have continued to make a vast diversity of brilliant and sometimes-not-so-brilliant games, steeped in their own traditions and culture. FFXV, perhaps, does not deserve better than it's got, either because it's bad or because, as a work of media rather than a person, it doesn't have rights. But the team behind it – and all the other teams for whom they inevitably stand proxy in the west – deserve at least an attempt on our part to engage with their history.

[1] It is, of course, the west in general viewed from the outside, not just America, and it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that. I focus on America because Square Enix stuck a bunch of large signs on this game screaming 'LOOK, THIS IS AMERICA' and the allegory still seems to have gone largely unnoticed.

[2] The sales figures also back this up – FFXV has apparently had the series' best ever launch in the west, but its worst launch in generations in Japan. LeeRoy suggested on our Dragon Quest V cast that Square Enix see FF as their international export and Dragon Quest as their domestic brand; it will be interesting to see whether sales figures for Dragon Quest XI bear this out later this year.

[3] There are, of course, plenty of other ways for a dungeon's design to be meaningful.

[4] There's a combat encounter in Costlemark Tower which is far and away the worst encounter I've ever seen in a video game. It took well over twenty minutes to clear, because with so many enemies in so small a space, every time Noctis managed to get to his feet he was instantly knocked down again, usually taking enough damage to immediately need an elixir's worth of healing.