Protecting the Trophy Cabinet

Tales of Graces is the story of Asbel Lhant, heir to the small border domain of Lhant. Asbel begins the game as a spirited, disobedient child at odds with his militaristic father's strictness. Eventually, Asbel runs away from home to pursue his dream of becoming a knight in the King's army; the bulk of the plot kicks off as he nears the end of his training seven years later.

In short, Asbel is a textbook fantasy hero. So textbook, in fact, that he and his kind were written out of the fantasy textbook some years ago as a tired and never-terribly-interesting cliché. Graces does a pretty good job of bringing the cliché to life, though, through a combination of good visual design, good voice-acting and a solid script.

And that's a problem, because this is a cliché that embeds a lot of toxic masculinity, and Graces either doesn't realise this or outright embraces it. Asbel is obsessed with the idea of protecting people; Graces' statement of theme translates as 'Discovering the Strength to Protect'. The idea of protection at hand is fundamentally possessive.

The best illustration of this is in Asbel's relationship to his childhood friend and eventual wife, Cheria. During the childhood section of the game, Cheria is unspecifically frail, easily exhausted and doted on by the people of Lhant. After the seven-year intermission, mysteriously[1] cured, Cheria becomes the party's strongest healer and a powerful caster.

During childhood, Asbel tolerates Cheria more than actually caring about her – in his initial escapade, he drags his brother along to climb a nearby hill, but leaves Cheria behind saying he doesn't want her slowing them down. When they return to town Cheria is upset; Asbel stalls her by handing over a flower he picked idly on the hilltop and pretending he meant it all along as a gift.

In his seven years of training, Asbel never once tries to contact Cheria. When the adult section of the story begins, she comes to find him at the knight academy to tell him his father has died and he's now the Lord of Lhant. She's reticent, clearly sympathetic to Asbel's loss but also unwilling to offer comfort. Asbel is too self-absorbed to understand, but the player will; Cheria has been deeply hurt by Asbel's silence.

Matters reach a head between them a chapter or two later, when Cheria is kidnapped and Asbel rescues her. When she isn't as grateful as he expects – as grateful as she would have been as a child, or as a fairytale damsel – he protests 'You've been treating me like crap ever since I got back here!' This spectacular feat of obliviousness is compounded by every other character present ganging up on Cheria to push her to be nicer to Asbel. Asbel offers only a trite apology, plus excuses that make it unclear whether he really understands his fault.

In other places, Asbel's determination to protect is played for laughs. At one point he gets into an argument with companion Sophie about which one of them will protect the other; they end up agreeing to a race to decide, and Sophie easily wins.

There are comedic examples of how much Asbel wants to fit the rest of the party to his script, too. The game has a rich variety of victory celebrations, several of which it implies have been coordinated and choreographed by Asbel. In the one that features Asbel and the three female party members, they mess up his script and he ends the animation effectively sulking in a corner:

Asbel, when women don't do what he wants.

If this were just another game mishandling the common toxicities of masculinity, it wouldn't be worth an essay in its own right, but the sad thing about Graces is that, in some ways, it's much more sophisticated than that. Its presentation of Asbel as a centralised male raised on myths and norms of his own importance rang very true to me as a centralised male raised on myths etc. etc. etc... He's neither a trite nor a shallow character.

Asbel's ideal of military prowess doesn't come from nowhere. It's bound up in the feudal structure of his society; his father is both master of the household and military commander, and clearly doesn't separate the two roles in his own head. Lord Aston is a harsh, cold presence in the childhood section of the story, and the silence of his absence seven years on is more a continuation than a relief.

It's a cliché to blame toxic masculinity on distant fathers, of course, but the distant father archetype is part and parcel of toxic masculinity, and Graces does a pretty good job of portraying it. In fact, overall, Graces understands toxic masculinity much better than the majority of male-led games. If it deploys clichés, it does so only because toxic masculinity is so inescapable that all its features are sadly familiar.

And herein lies the frustration; ultimately, Asbel gets his fantasy. In the final moments of the story, he gets to step forward and use his martial and magical strength to protect the world. Several much more interesting possibilities that the game flirts with, including some which would require him to accept the protection of others, are squandered.

Compare this, for example, to the engagement with masculine toxicity that Austin C. Howe finds in Final Fantasy VIII. Graces does try to build a contrast between Asbel and his even-more-toxic brother Hubert, but given its endorsement of Asbel, this doesn't actually achieve much. 'This is acceptable because it isn't as bad as that' is a child's excuse for a game that purports to be about growing up.

It is not enough to understand, or to present clear understanding of, dominant cultural constructs. That which does not explicitly challenge will be taken as tacit endorsement. Graces wastes its opportunity, and the good work of its writers, by allowing Asbel his triumph.






[1] Even the game doesn't think it's kidding anyone as to the nature of the mystery, but it's not relevant here.

Reporting a Wonder

One of the strangest scenes in Tales of Vesperia happens right near the start of the game, before you've even made it to the first combat tutorial. As protagonist Yuri is making his way from his humble abode up towards Zaphias' Royal Quarter, a wall calls out for his attention.

Yuri walks up to the wall, which explains that it is the 'Wonder Reporter', an individual whose raison d'etre is tracking the activities of heroes and documenting them. They draw Yuri's attention to the 'wonder log' he carries (the game's in-built synopsis), and claim to be the one responsible for keeping it up to date. Then, with an admonition to pay no attention to the fact that they're in the wall, the Reporter ends the cutscene.

They appear (or at least, speak) twice more in the course of the game, once in a pillar tucked out of the way in one of the game's most semiotically rich locations and then finally in a tree near a desert oasis. Neither of these later encounters triggers automatically – both must be found, and without so much as a hint to go on. Neither offers any metaphysical explanation for the Wonder Reporter, though the dialogue increasingly emphasises their essential voyeurism.

These cutscenes were what first induced me to look beyond Vesperia's narrative, and eventually led to my conceiving this project. I initially took the Wonder Reporter to be a symptom of budget limitations – devs with no resources to add another character model coming up with a desperate quick-fix to make the wonder log diegetic. This gives the game too little credit, and is probably a naive way of thinking about the relationship between budget and resources for game development.

The Wonder Reporter is absurd, but in a way that very carefully directs player attention. Vesperia has five separate 'log books' – the wonder log, the battle book (which records information from tutorials), the world map, the bestiary and the 'collector's book' (a list of all the items you've encountered in the game). Of these, only the battle book lacks narrative contextualisation, and even then Yuri's possession of it at the start of the game, and the fact that all the tutorials are his experiences, suggests it may be a holdover from his military training.

The bestiary is kept by Karol, a trainee monster hunter. The sidequest that revolves around completing it involves Karol's desire to prove himself to love interest Nan, herself an accomplished hunter. As a romance, it's sweet but quite straightforward. As a way of contextualising the monster book, though, it's both effective and more or less plausible.

By contrast, the item book sidequest is, on the face of it, a nonsensical mess. The book itself initially belongs to genius mage Rita, and she introduces it as a self-updating tome that automatically records whatever you pick up. The rewards from the quest hinge on a couple of chance encounters with another obsessive mage seeking the same information. The whole idea of a book that records every item in the world is absurd, particularly since it only documents those items the game allows you to pick up and none of the otherwise plenty detailed set dressing.

Even worse, for the sake of two items, the item book quest is the only thing in the game that can't be completed on a single play-through. The items in question aren't plot-sensitive, either - just a couple of weapon synthesis forms where two different weapons can be made from the same root, only one of which is available per play-through. To complete the item book you have to play the entire game twice and carry over your collection data.

There isn't really space to get into the diegetics of the world map, since there are a few different things that link to it. In particular, Karol's cartography is used as a metaphor for masculinity in a way that I could probably write a whole book on by itself. Still, topic for another time.

In essence, the game takes the same idea – log books to augment player memory – and plays it out in five different ways. At least one of these, the bestiary, is pretty strong. One, the item book, is obnoxiously hostile to player engagement. The battle book asks nothing; the map creates a compelling set of metaphors and challenges. And the wonder log draws attention to the sheer 'gameyness' (if you know a better word for this, please let me know) of the whole idea – the fact that this is all essentially what Devon Carter calls a concession to convenience.

Western criticism of JRPGs, at least at the time of Vesperia's development and release, was primarily ludic in focus. Apart from the stereotype of the effete, self-indulgently gloomy protagonist (always something of a mirage), mechanically linear narratives and formulaic, one-dimensional combat were the main complaints – but those same complaints were often paired with exceptions, usually either Final Fantasy VI or VII, depending on the age of the speaker.

What Vesperia does, in this case and in several others, is show that what matters is not the mechanic itself but the way meaning is built around it. That it is willing to embrace the absurdity of the Wonder Reporter (and, again, several similar signposts) to draw attention to this issue suggests a reading of the game as not just existing in tension with but actually outright responding to such unjust criticism.

This is the foundation of the close reading I'm working on. Vesperia expresses a frustration with the (Western) consumer response to JRPGs that I share, and makes an argument that I believe can be resoundingly justified. Obviously there's a lot more to it than I've covered here, but I'm working on it.

Real Space

A few weeks ago I discussed one of the problems with trying to use 'real' to differentiate between video game worlds and our world. There, my discussion was based around issues of constitution and factuality. Now, I want to pick up a different issue in the same vein, one that I touched on when discussing Unwind; the fact that video games don't take place in our space.

In fact, it's tempting to say that video game events don't take place in (a) space(s) at all. They represent spaces (better: they present visual patterns which represent spaces), sure, but that's not the same as involving a space. Or is it? Depends what 'a space' is.

At the most basic level, Barry Dainton (full disclosure: my boss) identifies two functions we attribute to space rather than its occupants. Constraint is the function of limiting the ways we can move; our space is three dimensional, so any motion we can make is a combination of movements in those three dimensions[1]. Connection is the function of allowing space-occupants to interact; wherever you are, you and I are spatially connected because there are logically possible spatial movements that would bring us into contact.

It should be obvious that video game spaces meet these criteria. Connectedness is almost trivial when it comes to game objects, since a game cannot present an object unless it is possible within the game to view that object (and thus connect it at least to the camera/viewpoint). Dimensional constraint is such a significant factor in some games that we use different dimensionalities to partly define some genres – 2D and 3D platformers, for example.

Of course, this is a broad definition. It allows as a space anything that has both dimensions and occupants; the standard windows and HTML colour charts become spaces, whose dimensions may be rendered either as red, blue and green or hue, saturation and value. This shouldn't seem too counterintuitive, since we often and productively represent the colour chart spatially.

The colour chart is a kind of space we might naturally think of as abstract, but it's quite hard to pin down what this means. Its occupants are abstract in that they are colours abstracted from any particular object possessing them, but this is a fact about the occupants of the space, not the space itself.

Video game spaces are in a similar situation; we know they don't take place in our space, since we are not conventionally connected to their occupants (nor, indeed, conventionally constrained by their dimensions). But if there is a difference in kind between our space and game spaces – if video game spaces are not real in the way that our space is – it is difficult to articulate.

The simplest way is to adopt the substantival construal of space put forward by Newton to fit his classical mechanics. According to this view, space is a thing that exists independently of its occupants; list the fundamental ingredients of the universe and in addition to a set of physical atoms, there will also be a set of spatial points or regions. Empty a room of all its physical contents, and a substance remains: space, separating the walls and permeating the intermediary void.

Despite the utility of the physics that go alongside it, Newton's theory of space is notoriously difficult to prove. Newton's proofs rely on demonstrating absolute motion and rest – motion which is relative not to other objects but to space itself. The bucket argument is the best-known of these. Whether the bucket argument proves Newton right about substantival space, though, it cannot differentiate systemically between our space and game spaces; any game may be programmed to mimic the effect on which the argument trades.

Newton, then, cannot help us differentiate between 'real' and 'virtual' spaces. The chief opponent of substantivalism, the relationism of Leibniz and Descartes, does even less to distinguish the two. According to relationism, space is merely a matter of the spatial relations among objects; no objects, no space. So any set of real objects that are connected and subject to shared dimensional constraints will constitute a space.

This passes the question of whether game spaces are real or not back to the question of whether game objects are real, and as I argued last time out, there's little ground for saying game objects are less real than the conventional objects we deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Perhaps it's better to view this as a reductio ad absurdum on the common use of the term 'real'. We can intuitively understand that there's a difference between our relation to game objects and our relation to regular tables and chairs without needing to dismiss game objects as lesser.

Here, one final philosophical notion may be useful. In his work on possibility, David Lewis developed the theory of modal realism, which holds that every possibility is a universe in its own right, on a metaphysical par with our own. His reasons for this extremely profligate version of parallel world theory aren't important; what's useful is how he understands one particular possibility's being 'actual'.

For Lewis, 'actual' just means 'in our universe'. It's an indexical term, like 'here' or 'now' – its meaning depends on who says it. When I say 'here' it (almost always, because I don't get out much) means my house in Liverpool. I can say 'It's warm here', and absolutely not contradict you when you say 'It's cold here', so long as you and I are in different places.

We can use 'real' to distinguish between our space and video game spaces in much the same way; a 'real' space is a space we're in. Our space is real to us; the space of Hyrule is real to Link.

I've got one more sense of 'real' that I want to discuss, the one that I think is both most important and most clearly shared by game events and objects, but that will have to wait for another time.







[1]: This puts aside, for simplicity's sake, string and M theories which suggest our space may have more than three dimensions, as well as holographic theories which suggest it has fewer.

Knight of Ratatosk

(Content note: Dawn of the New World features a character with two personalities. While the game eventually decides this is not a psychological condition, it remains a regressive engagement with dissociative identity disorder. I apologise if this essay causes harm or discomfort by touching on this theme).

About halfway through Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, I characterised its combat as brilliant, but almost completely unplayable. I think I had more game-overs in this game than in any other JRPG I've ever played, so quickly is it possible to go from full health and a full party to four corpses. What makes it brilliant is that every feature of the combat – including the difficulty itself – adds meaning to the experience of play.

Dawn's plot centres on Emil Castagnier, who makes a pact with a spirit of darkness, Ratatosk, to gain the power to protect Marta Lualdi, who (at that point) is a complete stranger to him. The game's engagement with masculinity-as-protection is better than average, I think, but tangential to my topic for today. What I'm interested in now is that subsequent to this Emil, heretofore a timid creature, develops a second nature, one of violence, aggression and cruelty.

The exact metaphysics are unimportant (I'm honestly not sure I ever figured out what was going on). What matters is that the character becomes as divided as his game; Dawn maintains the conventional JRPG separation between exploration and combat gameplay, and Emil's 'Ratatosk mode' is generally reserved for combat. Combat becomes a reflection of Ratatosk's values.

The most obvious element of this is in Emil's fragility. Where other Tales games can be tanked through as slugging matches, in Dawn taking damage is extremely risky. There's little feedback when you take a hit, as if Ratatosk doesn't feel pain. Health bars evaporate in moments.

It's also easy to get combo'd and stun-locked. Stuns last a long time, as do staggers. Get between even a couple of enemies and they can lock you down completely. The game knows this, too. Enemy packs are large, and most bosses come with multiple minions. Attacks generally have huge hurtboxes, so that even enemies attacking nearby friendlies may contribute to a lockdown.

The upshot of which is that unless you keep tight control of the battlefield, your position is always precarious. In many JRPGs, control is just a matter of keeping a safe margin of health, magic and item stocks. In Dawn, it means aggressively breaking up enemy attacks, shutting them down before they can do the same to you.

Mechanics can make meaning in the obvious way, as with the lack of feedback for incoming damage mentioned above, but they can also make meaning by incentivising certain player behaviours. Dawn heavily pushes one particular way to sustain the control needed to survive.

On the ground, Emil's attacks are sluggish, and his combos both short and easy to interrupt. Stagger an enemy and launch it, though, and Emil becomes the vengeful demon the 'Ratatosk mode' personality suggests. His combos are fast, fluid and long, startlingly easy to execute. And, of course, by being airborne with only a staggered enemy (often more than one, thanks to the large hurtboxes) for company, he's out of harm's reach.

There are other little rewards for focussing on aerial play, too. While Emil is slow to develop supplementary skills that improve his ground combat, skills and special moves for aerial use are commonplace, a sharp inversion of the Tales norm. And since TP ('tech points', the MP of Tales games) regeneration is tied to combos, the longer aerial combos mean basically never running short.

The only way to prevail, then, is aerial combat, and aggression. Single out the most dangerous enemy, lift them above the fray where they can do no harm, and repeat until they vanish in a puff of spirit energy. This is a fundamentally proactive violence.

It is also arrogant, a literal rising above Emil's fragility, rising above enemies and allies alike. To play this way is to ignore what happens on the ground, and focus all your attention on the kill. So it is with Ratatosk, who holds Emil in utter contempt. He resents sharing such a weak body, being trapped in it and only kept around for his utility.

Violence, though, is essential in this world. Monsters are everywhere, often in narrow passages that make them unavoidable. The respawn rate is high; some dead-end passages are long enough that if you kill the monster guarding them, collect whatever treasure they hold, and return, you must fight the same encounter again on the way out. Emil needs Ratatosk.

But Ratatosk does little more than kill. He does not protect – while he flies by sheer power of bloodlust, Marta must take care of herself on the ground (to her credit, she's generally more than capable of this). As is revealed later in the plot, he feels no compassion for the humans he aids.

And Ratatosk is isolated, too, literally and symbolically. The story is Emil's and Marta's, and indeed partly concerns their letting go of what meagre vindictiveness they each possess. They grow together as they work to bring peace to a divided and sometimes brutal world. Ratatosk must be isolated, the emotions and policies he stands for restrained.

Ratatosk stands for destruction, Emil and especially Marta for preservation. This creates a problem for resolving the game's story through traditional boss fights, given that combat remains Ratatosk's domain to the last. To cover the finale, I'm actually going to give an extra level of spoiler warning. Nothing I've described so far is game-ruining, but if anything I've said so far makes you interested in playing the game, stop here and go play it (it's worth it).

Experiential Worlds

Video game worlds are, we generally think, not real. This is an opinion often used dismissively (for an example, see the attitudes of the architectural establishment reported by Claris Cyarron in this recent piece). But on closer inspection, it turns out to be quite difficult to clarify what the claim means – what is real?

You can tell I've devoted the last ten years of my life to philosophy, huh?

On the face of it, a thing is 'real' if there are facts, or true statements, about it. My desk is real, because it has a mass, a shape, an extension. It supports my computer, and sometimes my face if I doze off while working.

By contrast, Sherlock Holmes' house at 221B Baker Street is not real. No such address exists, so no claim that Conan Doyle makes about its size, architecture or decor can be true. Of course, there are some conventions about this house which we can all agree on. If I ask you 'What is Sherlock Holmes' address?', there is a correct answer: '221B Baker Street'.

And this answer is correct because it is in at least some sense true – it is an accurate report of Conan Doyle's fictive claim that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. So, there is a kind of truth to some statements of fiction, and thus a kind of reality to their claims.

This will convince no-one that video game worlds are real by itself, though, and nor should it. It is hardly a novel claim that I can give you a correct report of something I have read. The truth of 'Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street' is not the same kind of truth as the truth of 'My desk is six feet wide'. Or is it?

Let's look a bit closer at this second statement, or rather at the object to which it purports to refer. The desk, we know, is a composite. It is made up of atoms, which are themselves composed mostly of empty space and a few tiny subatomic particles; these particles fuzz away into inconsistent, ill-defined energy fields on even closer inspection. Where does my desk end? Look close enough and it becomes difficult to recognise the desk at all.

Other properties of the desk – its mass, its solidity – become even more ephemeral. Does this mean that we should regard the claim that my desk is six feet long, or that it is solid, as false? If so, the only true statements are presumably the scientific ones (certainly this is the way the philosophical establishment tends to think of it).

But the scientific facts, about minute particles and fields, are much less useful to us in the everyday. Yes, technically the Standard Model of quantum physics describes all possible fundamental interactions, but good luck using it to derive the GDP of Chile, or whether so-and-so fancies you, or even if your bus will show up on time. (For reference, all these calculations are impossible – the universe cannot provide sufficient computing power).

In philosophy, we identify two different classes of fact at work here; experiential facts, which concern how things appear to us, and fundamental facts, which concern how things are in themselves, independently of us.

While variations on this distinction have been a major theme in much of modern philosophy, it's probably Kant who did most with it, in distinguishing between the phenomenal (experiential) and noumenal (fundamental) worlds. His grandest claim was that the truly noumenal is unknowable – because after all, we can only know about scientific fundamenta through experiments that bring them into the experiential realm. Privileging only noumenal facts as true, or truly real, then, is self-defeating; we cannot know anything about that reality.

So we should expect to have to take experiential facts seriously – and indeed we do. Experiential facts are what we use to navigate our way to the shops; to choose what to eat; to cook without burning ourselves. Can you tell I'm hungry as I write this?

The application to video game worlds should be clear by now – they are experiential worlds, on their own terms. It is true that the second '?' block at the start of Super Mario Bros contains a mushroom. That, fundamentally, this truth is sustained by the electrical properties of a handful of tiny pieces of silicon in a cartridge is not relevant to whether you get past the first Goomba (or get mocked for failing to do so).

There is a lot more that could be said on this – my 70,000-word doctoral thesis, for example, is entirely concerned with the nature of experiential worlds and how we should understand the relationship between the world we experience and the world posited by contemporary physics. Many philosophers would prefer to throw out Kant's distinction altogether – many more would defend it (philosophers are like this about everything, by the way). But this serves as a reasonable introduction.

So next time someone tells you video game worlds 'aren't real', ask them what they mean.

Random Encounters

Spring 2008, Skies of Arcadia Legends. Discovering that when you're flying about the eponymous skies, the D-pad fixes the camera in a range of positions that must have been carefully chosen to bring out the best in the Delphinus. Seriously, it's the sexiest airship you will ever see.

Summer 2008, Final Fantasy XII. Arriving at Mt. Bur-Omisace to learn that Vayne has murdered Larsa's father and usurped the throne of Archades. Somehow the politics of the situation mean the arduous journey I've just completed is now irrelevant. I share Vaan's confusion – not so much getting sucked into the character as his mental state jumping out to run around my synapses for a moment.

Winter 2008, The Internet. Every week a new thread on The Escapist's forums complaining about 'emo protagonists', 'linear plots' or 'turn-based combat' (that last always with an exception, of course, for X-Com and no mention of Disgaea). The code by which Halo and Yahtzee fanboys scorn the JRPG.

Spring 2009, Eternal Sonata. The game's pathological fixation with absurd gamewalls peaks with a wide-open meadow where some invisible force constrains me to the middle third.

Summer 2009, Blue Dragon. I kick every rock and search every poop left behind by a defeated monster, collecting endless items I barely have any use for. Is there a comprehensive guide to this game? And if so, how small is the print on the maps?

Winter 2009, Athera. Finally catching up on Janny Wurts' Wars of Light and Shadow with the storming of volume 8's titular Stormed Fortress. The close of a tale whose arc has encompassed a life from infant to manhood and the decades of history that go along with it.

Spring 2010, Final Fantasy XIII. Splitting the cost with a similarly hard-up student friend so we can get it on release day. Spending the next three weeks arguing about whether it's any good, squeezing every drop of value we can from the wasted characters and incoherent world.

Summer 2010, Resonance of Fate. Is this a world map or a puzzle minigame? I struggle to make headway, captivated by the mechanical geography but slowed by the dreary colour scheme. I never finish the game.

Summer 2012, Extra Credits[1]. Normally brief, it takes three episodes and almost twenty minutes for the series to dismantle the genre and render verdict: JRPGs are in trouble. Failure to evolve and a slow decline in core quality mean players can now get everything the JRPG used to specialise in elsewhere, without the steep time costs and stodgy combat.



And yet.



Summer 2012, Tales of Vesperia. The climactic cutscene of act 1 is as potent as I remember from my first brush with the game. Something in how this murder is delivered makes it just that – not a righteous execution, not vengeance, not a desperate but ultimately ennobling act. Murder. The dark side of a certain ideology.

That cutscene – and a second that echoes it a few hours later into the game – floated around in my head as I was starting this blog and rounding up possible topics. Vesperia is one of my favourite games and I really wanted to dig into what made that scene so effective. So I loaded up the game for the first time in a while and started playing.

And the cutscene stands up, don't get me wrong, but I started to notice other things that were also really effective, or at least weird enough to be worth commenting on. By the time I reached the second cutscene I had other things I wanted to look at through the rest of the game. By the end of the game, I had enough questions to justify a second play, then a third.

Long story short, I've put 200 hours into the game in the last six weeks, and produced some 26,000 words of notes. Vesperia, I think, is as concerned as I am by the trend that Extra Credits episode picked up on. This idea that 'the genre has lost its way'.

Thematically, Vesperia deals with journeys and exile, hostile wilderness and troubled homecomings. Formally, it turns back on itself and its franchise, poking at the foundations of the JRPG world with a mix of wry affection and lampshades. And lampshades on lampshades.

And there's a slightly weird technological context, too. I feel like JRPGs were slow to make the jump to 7th generation hardware[2]. Blue Dragon, Eternal 'how the hell did I get made?' Sonata and even later titles like Resonance of Fate feel like a tentative toe in uncertain waters. For a brief period, the majority of new JRPG stories were appearing on a non-Japanese console, the Xbox 360. Vesperia emerged towards the end of this displacement.

What I've found myself working on, ultimately, has three dimensions; in the first place, it's a close reading of Tales of Vesperia. The game deserves it, whatever its relation to its genealogy. More broadly, I'm taking a historical look at the JRPG as a genre. For now, I've fenced that in to the window between Final Fantasy XII and XIII (Q1 2006 to Q4 2009), because Final Fantasy generally does more to shape 'public opinion' than the rest of the genre. Sandwiched between those is a reflection on the Tales franchise, because Vesperia can hardly address its genre without looking at its own peculiar subgenre.

To that end, I'm building a reading list (gaming list? Playing list?). For now, it's here on Backloggery (in my wishlist as well as my actual backlog). I'm looking for key JRPGs – especially on gen 7 home consoles[3] – that ought to feature in any critical look at the genre in that period. This is a starting point only – I'm not expecting to be able to write a thoroughgoing history from such a narrow slice, and I don't have access to every species of hardware I'd need for that either – but suggestions are most welcome.

A lot of what I've discussed here is my own impressions, and really my impressions not of the games themselves but of other people's impressions of them. For my money, the JRPG was never 'in trouble', except possibly commercially. But the idea of a genre crisis is widespread, and that bears some investigation.





[1] EC has a bit of a reputation for appropriating the work of other writers. If anyone can point me to more nuanced writing on which their JRPG episodes are based or build, I'd appreciate it – it'll save me quite a bit of work.

[2] I did a bit of a survey, and as far as I can tell there were 10 new JRPGs on gen 7 hardware between 2006 and 2009, compared to 16 on the PS2 alone.

[3] I specify home consoles partly just to narrow my focus, but also partly because I think they shape perception of the genre a bit more – they're seen as 'more important' by a certain key section of the press and player base.

To Walk a Turning World

About a month ago, Austin C. Howe was firing some shots at Final Fantasy XII on Twitter, and I responded with this somewhat ambitious declaration:

More seriously, I do think Howe's wrong that "There's nothing to say" about FFXII. I certainly didn't find it "Boring to engage with" (as my 500+ hours in-game across multiple playthroughs will testify), nor do I personally think it has a "Bad story." It's certainly a divisive, much-maligned game, but I love it and want to offer a few thoughts in its defence.

Not helping, Vaan. (image from)

I love FFXII, first and foremost, because I love travelling through its world. As the first banner Final Fantasy title to present its entire world at a single scale[1], spaces that would previously have been very abstract are now robust, tangible and teeming with life. They're also much less, for want of a better term, cartographical – there are dramatic contours where previously there would have been only the fine lines of insubstantial cliffs.

And the game's biggest, most controversial innovations all serve to draw attention to this world. Combat no longer happens in a separate, distinct space. The gambit system has the direct consequence of minimising the role of combat altogether, reducing ordinary combat choices to a matter of how you move through the space of each zone. The random chests challenge and frustrate the idea that the goal of exploring a world is tangible or ludic reward.

FFXII is a game about travel – movement not just through space but through time as well. Where ludic elements intrude on this journey, it is to add labour and slow 'progress'. Monsters punctuate their zones, some barely dangerous enough to slow you a step, some that must be navigated carefully around (there's probably a whole essay just in the placement of the toxic marlboros and lethal elementals).

Time, and the sense of its passage, are vital to the scale of the story. FFXII's story is about being a small boat on grand, historical tides. Even your princess represents a kingdom swamped by its much larger neighbour – she is a pawn much as her domain is[2]. The story moves at the speed of monolithic empires, and if your journey was deprived of its temporal extension the game would feel fast-forwarded.

Where the plot does touch the lives of the characters, it's mostly to devalue the destination or motivation for the journey. Roughly speaking, we can identify five journeys in the narrative:

-Across the Yensan Sandsea to Raithwall's Tomb, a journey invalidated at conclusion when the Imperial Navy fly effortlessly over the same ground and capture you, in a scene that could not belabour the theme of 'you are very small and we are very big' more heavily if it tried.

-South to the sacred Mt. Bur-Omisace, where on arrival you discover that the political situation in the Empire has changed and made your trek irrelevant (bonus points here for the return to Bur-Omisace after the Stillshrine of Miriam where the Empire has been and gone in your absence, symbolically destroying the authority to which you had appealed).

-North to Archades, the Imperial Capital; here, in theory, the Empire can't trivialise your journey by effortlessly catching up because, y'know, they're already there. Instead, when you finally reach the Draklor laboratory, someone else – Reddas – is there ahead of you and already causing trouble.

-South again to Giruvegan in pursuit of Cid, who turns out not to have gone there. Giruvegan is the closest you get to a journey that is rewarded, but at best it's rewarded with a gift from the ambiguous Occuria – and the discovery that one of their number, the renegade Venat, has been supporting Vayne and Cid all along.

-Finally, the ascent of the isolated Pharos lighthouse is long enough to arguably constitute a journey in its own right, and sure enough, it gets doubly trivialised – not only is Judge Gabranth waiting at the top, but once you beat him Cid turns up out of nowhere to mess with you.

The journey, always, is what matters, what allows the world to turn; that turn serves always to extend the journey. If the ending of FFXII feels weak (and to me it felt almost irrelevant), it's because the limit of the disk means the journey can't be meaningfully extended again. The last level is short, tacked-on, isolated. It breaks away from this game's mould to fit the genre's expectations of a dramatic final confrontation.

This is a game with a profound contempt for classical notions of player engagement and reward. Its story denies the power fantasy of being the hero who shapes the world (the villains, Vayne and Cid, both use the slogan of 'the reins of history back in the hands of man'); its combat is designed to minimise any sense of environmental mastery on the player's part by detaching combat power from player input.

One of the most rewarding experiences I ever had in-game was when, needing to do some grinding to tackle some of the more daunting side-content, I decided to try walking from one end of the world to the other. It took about half an hour, I think, and I really got to feel the geographical, especially topographical, qualities of the world – down out of the Paramina Mountains, across plains and deserts that rise into the Mosphora, back down along the coast of Archadia and up again across highlands to Balfonheim.

I played it as a walking simulator, basically (maybe a hiking simulator?). And I think the game liked it.

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[1] Yes, there's a case to be made for FFX, but I'd argue the ambiguous scale of the Calm Lands (as well as possibly the Thunder Plains and Bikanel Desert) counts against it.

[2] It's not my place to launch into gender critique, but I'll acknowledge there's no way the devs would have ever done that with a prince – they even kill both prince and king off at the start of the story to avoid doing so.