I've done some rearranging of things on here lately and
thought it would be a good opportunity to pull links to all my critical work
together in one place. There's an introduction to my old podcast about JRPGs here,
and I want to highlight my enormous Twine essay about Persona 3, Boogiepop,
gender transition and death, Empty Halls//Don't
Laugh. For the rest, here's a breakdown of the blog posts:
JRPGs
These are a collection of writings about 'JRPG' as a genre
label, the sorts of common features found under this label and the appearance
of a 'gender crisis'. Some of these are fairly early efforts, and I need to
revisit many of the claims, but I still think the underlying ideas have some
merit.
A personal reflection on my own experiences of the 'death of
the JRPG', from which I developed a (currently-stalled) project on the first
JRPGs to appear on the Xbox 360, between 2006 and 2009; the first JRPGs
developed directly for a US-made console and a predominantly US audience.
This was my first attempt at collaboration with Val Carter
and LeeRoy Lewin, a collaboration that would eventually lead to the Dead Genre
Chronicles podcast. Over the almost five years since, we haven't really found
anything to overturn the fundamental insight that we were nosing at here, that
JRPGs are characterised by a particular non-representative kind of abstraction
and a particular use thereof in narrative pacing.
A brief attempt to characterise the abstraction of time and
duration in JRPGs.
Time again, this time the expression of time within
narratives.
Using a contrast with the Legend of Zelda series to
clarify (hopefully, a little) the kind of abstraction we take to typify JRPGs.
A direct investigation of the 'death of the JRPG' and the
role in it of a particular kind of youtube-centric rhetoric from the late 00s,
via an analysis of the reception of The World Ends With You.
Mostly a joke, but there's a serious point at the end of
this one.
A detailed analysis, of a kind I'd like to do more of, of
what it means for a game to be 'turn-based', and whether there's any period of JRPG
history in which one stable concept of 'turn-basis' was ubiquitous.
Final Fantasy
I have spent way too much of my life writing and thinking
about the Final Fantasy franchise, especially the entries since the turn
of the century. Several of these are personal reflections on individual games,
but others are substantive engagements with the franchise's history and
contemporary status.
Originally a mini-episode for Dead Genre Chronicles, in this
essay I dug into the critical reception of FFXII and identifying a turning
point in the western reception of JRPGs attendant in part on its troubled
development.
Written before the release of FFXV, in this essay I wondered
about why the FF games of the 21st century turned their attention so
heavily towards female heroes and lead characters.
A critical review of World of Final Fantasy, a game which
uses an unexpectedly sophisticated bait-and-switch narrative to call into
question the habitual expectations JRPG fans have of an FF-branded game.
The marketing campaign for FFXV was a bizarre, extravagant
spectacle. Here, I did my best to dig into why.
My review of FFXV, in which I grappled with the question of
why so few western critics had paid any attention to the fact that the game was
clearly, for all its flaws, a pointed critique of America at the end of the
American Century
And the personal reflections:
On my loyalty to FFXII at a time when it seemed largely
forgotten even by its corporate owners.
On FFVII and its fans, shortly after the remake was
announced.
Why FFXIII's Lightning resonates so much for me.
I was genuinely surprised to hear a port and remaster of
FFXII announced in 2016, and did my best to put words to why it was important
to me.
There's a lot more in this than personal reflection,
including a fairly deep read of the narrative structure of FFXIII, but
ultimately it's about home, family, and the hostility of both to queerness, a
theme I plan to revisit more analytically in other work.
Realism
These five pieces are a gradual and inconsistent evolution
of an idea I'm still struggling to express, about what exactly 'realism' means
in a videogame context. The first few are really ropey, and all are heavily
steeped in my philosophical background, but I've tried to offer introductory-level
explanations throughout.
I start here with a classic philosophical problem of the
truth of fictional claims (did Sherlock Holmes live at 221B Baker Street?), and
a brief foray into Kantian metaphysics.
This time I turn to the debate between Newton and Leibniz
about the nature of space and the question of videogames contain or merely
simulate spaces.
There's less explicit philosophy in this one, where I focus
on emotional impact as a ground of reality.
Here it's George Berkeley's turn to take centre stage
(though really I was using his theories all along); this is probably the most
detailed metaphysical engagement I've made with this topic so far.
This is the best of these five pieces, and digs much more
directly into what people are actually expressing care about when they talk
about realism in videogames; it's a product of an ongoing shift in my
philosophy from analytic to critical methods, and there's a substantial
engagement with John Locke towards the end, which I plan on developing further
in the future.
Tales
In 2015 I made an effort to play all the Tales of
games, from Tales of Symphonia onwards, as part of a project on Tales
of Vesperia and JRPGs on the Xbox 360 (see above). That project is on the
shelf at the moment but I did some writing about each of the games.
On how Tales of Symphonia 2's combat reflects its
central themes of fragility and isolation.
On the more subversive elements of Tales of Vesperia's
sidequest design.
On toxic masculinity in Tales of Graces.
More on Vesperia, and how its deeper meaning emerges
from surface absurdities.
How Tales of Vesperia challenges conventional ideas
of heroism.
On the relationship between masculinity and the idea of
'uncharted territory' as manifested in the map-making sidequests in Vesperia.
Another sidequest in Vesperia, and how it affects the
temporality of the game.
On silent protagonists and dialogue choices – a theme that
would come up repeatedly on the Dead Genre Chronicles podcasts – in reference
to Tales of Xillia 2's Ludger Kresnik.
My attempt to put a capstone on my love for this franchise,
unfortunately written too early to include the most recent instalment, Tales
of Berseria, about which I might have been even more powerfully moved.
