‘World’ is, by root, as much a temporal concept as a spatial one. I’ve said before that one of the things that Tales of Vesperia struggles with is conveying the passage of time between its plot developments. The plot moves in fits and starts, tied tightly and transparently to the movements and actions of the player characters.
There is one side-quest in the game, though, which is a little more sophisticated. At roughly the end of Vesperia’s first act, you can run across Little Wolf, the nemesis of Yuri’s canine companion Repede (Repede being a playable character in his own right). Little Wolf challenges Repede to a ‘marking battle’, a contest to say which of them can claim more territory around the world.
The way this works is simple; rest in an area of the world map and Repede will claim it as his own. Meanwhile, over time, Little Wolf slowly builds an empire, taking unclaimed territories and nibbling away at Repede’s. If you, at any point, manage to take 95% of the world map from Little Wolf, you win and he shows up to concede. He will still, even more slowly, claim territory, but his submission is clear.
After starting the side-quest, you can get an item which displays Repede’s and Little Wolf’s territory on the world map – not the live one that tracks your position as you move around, but the more detailed one available from the pause menu. Repede’s territory is marked with blue blobs, Little Wolf’s with red, and the boundaries pulse and blur enough to make them seem dynamic and in constant conflict.
What the slow swelling of Little Wolf’s territory conveys, in a way that little else in this game can, is the passage of time. It’s not perfect – you have to keep opening a pretty deeply-buried menu to see it – but it’s there, and it does suggest that some things happen in the world without Yuri’s direct intervention.
It conveys some broad things about the party’s situation, too. You can only claim territory that you can get to, and if you start the side-quest as soon as it’s available, your travel options are extremely limited. Many areas are inaccessible until you get the airship late in act 2, by which time Little Wolf can claim a lot of land you can’t reach.
The world changes as the plot progresses, as well. A handful of the areas you have to claim are lakes or mountain ranges when you first encounter them, and only become places where the airship can land after the earth-shaking events of the final act. In my early play-throughs of the game I spent a long time searching for concealed landing-spots in act 2 before discovering these transformations.
Perhaps the most important function of the Little Wolf side-quest is its interaction with the sections of the plot that restrict your mobility. In particular, during the section where you’re trying to rescue Estelle, your airship is damaged and you’re forced to ground. On recovering to the nearest town, you find that a civilian exodus has tied up every last boat, and you’re trapped on one particular continent.
Vesperia then sends you on a long, torturous journey to where Estelle’s being held. From having granted you and your characters an exclusive mastery of the skies, the game narrows down to a single convoluted path, fraught with monsters and harsh terrain. It never really manages to convince you you won’t rescue Estelle, but it does its best.
Functionally, of course, the rescue of Estelle will wait for you to reach your destination. Until you hit the right series of triggers, Estelle – and her captors – remain in limbo. There’s time to chase up any of the side-quests that are available to you (not many, but there are a few diversions, at least one of which is only available during this sequence). So it’s hard to feel much urgency.
But through it all, Little Wolf advances. He’s always moved fastest on the far side of the world from where you’re stuck. Now there’s hours of gameplay where you can do nothing to stop him. Whenever you come back to the dog map, Little Wolf’s territorial gains are a diagram of your delay.
You can always recover – tents aren’t expensive by the standards of the late game, and once you have your freedom back you can claim territory pretty quickly (though you must fight at least one battle each time you rest before you can rest again). Nothing is missable, you don’t get locked out of the rewards[1], but time does pass.
It’s this sense of the inexorability of time that I think games often struggle with. In-game time is malleable in a way that real-world time isn’t, and many ways of making in-game time more restrictive also place harsh demands on players that have little respect for differences in ability or circumstance. Vesperia’s dog map offers a way to weave between this limitations.
[1] Though Vesperia is quite happy to lock you out of other sidequests if you miss particular steps. I’m of two minds about this, but it’s a topic for another time.
Written for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table:
Showing posts with label Blogs of the Round Table. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogs of the Round Table. Show all posts
Thursday, 17 September 2015
Monday, 14 September 2015
Of Maps and Men
Right from the very first lines of the opening narration, Tales of Vesperia emphasises how wild and uncharted its world is. Towns are only safe because of vast and powerful magical barriers; few humans ever go outside, and those who do will be eaten by monsters if they can’t defend themselves. The failure of a town’s barrier is a cataclysmic event.
Given this strict binary between townsfolk and travellers, the game quickly sorts the player characters into the latter category. Yuri and Estelle are forced to flee from their homes into the wilderness. Before they go, though, they are given a map. Apart from the immediate area around the city, it’s blank.
Yuri and Estelle decide to fill in the map as they go; it updates automatically from this point forward. Shortly, they meet Karol, a young trainee monster hunter about to be thrown out of his guild for cowardice. Karol doesn’t have a map of his own, but takes over the role of cartographer when he realises how little of your map is filled in.
Later, your quest brings you to a forgotten shrine, Baction, where you find a dungeon consisting mostly of repetitive square rooms differentiated only by monster placement and cracks in the floor. Here, again, Karol is given mapping duties – this is the only dungeon in the game that has an on-screen minimap. Numerous skits and cutscenes emphasise Karol’s love of mapmaking, of which the most striking is when he says:
This is not a sentiment the other male characters share (Yuri responds, drily, “I’ve never had that thrill.”) Both Yuri and Raven emphasise a more familiar violent and promiscuous masculinity. Throughout the early part of the game, Yuri constantly trolls Karol for his cowardice, apparently with the idea that this will toughen him up. Later, when Karol does get to ‘prove’ his manhood by defending the rest of the party from a boss all by himself, Raven says, “Facing down challenges like that is part of becoming a man.”
But while Karol does fit or try to fit some parts of this image of masculinity – trying to be a monster hunter, carrying comically oversized weapons – his actual manhood is constructed very differently. It’s in his building a guild of his own, and developing its reputation through hard work and respectful business with other guilds. It’s in his interest in mapmaking and his (implied) willingness to step back and let others benefit from it[1].
In other words, Karol’s masculinity is sited in responsibility, and in engagement with community. What Karol seeks is not just manhood in himself but legitimacy, a place in society. For Yuri and Raven, masculinity is no such thing; one way or another, their masculinity is about the freedom of power and self-determination.
Karol’s love of cartography dovetails with his masculinity. As Kaitlin Tremblay writes in this month’s Critical Distance Blogs of the Round Table prompt:
Where Yuri and Raven – along with most of the game’s other male characters – are erratic and chaotic, Karol’s is a masculinity of order and control. It is a masculinity that takes wild spaces and tames them, and this sounds like a good thing. At least, it sounds preferable to Yuri’s rampant individualism.
But control and categorisation are the subtle weapons of masculine hegemony. Yuri’s violence – and Raven’s lechery – may seem more dangerous, but many of the game’s villains are motivated by the desire to control, to keep people in their places. And, on the face of it, Karol’s maps only really serve those already capable of using the spaces he charts – since these spaces are dungeons and the hostile wilderness, only those who can already take care of themselves benefit[2].
Mapping the world, by implication mastering it, is an expression of privilege. Maps that go beyond the purely topographical – surveillance maps, maps of national boundaries or battlefronts – are often tools of power. We see this in the refugee crisis in Europe at the moment, thousands of people dying or being mistreated for the sake of lines on a map.
Vesperia doesn’t address this facet of maps directly. Its world, Terca Lumireis, is not really divided among nations, since the land outside the magical barriers is equally hostile to everyone. While there are occasional references to governance and military action, it’s basically never the focus of events. Karol’s maps are never used to express collective, institutional or hierarchical power.
The game does entrust the map to hierarchical power, though. When you complete the world map, the ‘reward’ cutscene and title go to Estelle, an Imperial princess. By this time, she’s already passed over the possibility of succession, but she remains an image of royalty – indeed, the supernatural legacy she inherits suggests her bloodline may be exceptionally pure.
What does she use the map for? In the cutscene, an NPC notices her looking at it and asks Estelle to tell her about all the exotic places she’s visited. Estelle, whose passion is storytelling, obliges, talking right through the night.
Maps can be tools of power, but they can also be souvenirs and reminders. Somewhere I still have the map of New York I bought on a trip there in 2004, because without a map I can’t fit the memories of those four frantic days together in a coherent order. Estelle’s use of the world map does more than that, arguably; it enables her to bring the now-tamed spaces of the wilderness to those not privileged to be able to visit them.
Whether this is enough to defang the map as a tool of power, I’m not sure. The game could be seen as naïve in suggesting that. But as a suggestion of a better way – not just for maps but by implication for masculinity – it bears some consideration.
[1] I’ll return to this point later, but the rewards for completing the world map all go to Estelle.
[2] It should be noted that not all such characters are male in Vesperia. In their own distinct ways, all three of the party’s female members are empowered to be outside the safety of the towns, but where addressed at all this tends to be framed as ‘unladylike’.
Written for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table:
Given this strict binary between townsfolk and travellers, the game quickly sorts the player characters into the latter category. Yuri and Estelle are forced to flee from their homes into the wilderness. Before they go, though, they are given a map. Apart from the immediate area around the city, it’s blank.
Yuri and Estelle decide to fill in the map as they go; it updates automatically from this point forward. Shortly, they meet Karol, a young trainee monster hunter about to be thrown out of his guild for cowardice. Karol doesn’t have a map of his own, but takes over the role of cartographer when he realises how little of your map is filled in.
Later, your quest brings you to a forgotten shrine, Baction, where you find a dungeon consisting mostly of repetitive square rooms differentiated only by monster placement and cracks in the floor. Here, again, Karol is given mapping duties – this is the only dungeon in the game that has an on-screen minimap. Numerous skits and cutscenes emphasise Karol’s love of mapmaking, of which the most striking is when he says:
“Nothing calls to a man’s heart like the thrill of making maps!”
This is not a sentiment the other male characters share (Yuri responds, drily, “I’ve never had that thrill.”) Both Yuri and Raven emphasise a more familiar violent and promiscuous masculinity. Throughout the early part of the game, Yuri constantly trolls Karol for his cowardice, apparently with the idea that this will toughen him up. Later, when Karol does get to ‘prove’ his manhood by defending the rest of the party from a boss all by himself, Raven says, “Facing down challenges like that is part of becoming a man.”
But while Karol does fit or try to fit some parts of this image of masculinity – trying to be a monster hunter, carrying comically oversized weapons – his actual manhood is constructed very differently. It’s in his building a guild of his own, and developing its reputation through hard work and respectful business with other guilds. It’s in his interest in mapmaking and his (implied) willingness to step back and let others benefit from it[1].
In other words, Karol’s masculinity is sited in responsibility, and in engagement with community. What Karol seeks is not just manhood in himself but legitimacy, a place in society. For Yuri and Raven, masculinity is no such thing; one way or another, their masculinity is about the freedom of power and self-determination.
Karol’s love of cartography dovetails with his masculinity. As Kaitlin Tremblay writes in this month’s Critical Distance Blogs of the Round Table prompt:
“Maps… order and define spaces… They set a boundary to what otherwise feels vast and potentially limitless, a way to compartmentalise and therefore tackle the world.”
Where Yuri and Raven – along with most of the game’s other male characters – are erratic and chaotic, Karol’s is a masculinity of order and control. It is a masculinity that takes wild spaces and tames them, and this sounds like a good thing. At least, it sounds preferable to Yuri’s rampant individualism.
But control and categorisation are the subtle weapons of masculine hegemony. Yuri’s violence – and Raven’s lechery – may seem more dangerous, but many of the game’s villains are motivated by the desire to control, to keep people in their places. And, on the face of it, Karol’s maps only really serve those already capable of using the spaces he charts – since these spaces are dungeons and the hostile wilderness, only those who can already take care of themselves benefit[2].
Mapping the world, by implication mastering it, is an expression of privilege. Maps that go beyond the purely topographical – surveillance maps, maps of national boundaries or battlefronts – are often tools of power. We see this in the refugee crisis in Europe at the moment, thousands of people dying or being mistreated for the sake of lines on a map.
Vesperia doesn’t address this facet of maps directly. Its world, Terca Lumireis, is not really divided among nations, since the land outside the magical barriers is equally hostile to everyone. While there are occasional references to governance and military action, it’s basically never the focus of events. Karol’s maps are never used to express collective, institutional or hierarchical power.
The game does entrust the map to hierarchical power, though. When you complete the world map, the ‘reward’ cutscene and title go to Estelle, an Imperial princess. By this time, she’s already passed over the possibility of succession, but she remains an image of royalty – indeed, the supernatural legacy she inherits suggests her bloodline may be exceptionally pure.
What does she use the map for? In the cutscene, an NPC notices her looking at it and asks Estelle to tell her about all the exotic places she’s visited. Estelle, whose passion is storytelling, obliges, talking right through the night.
Maps can be tools of power, but they can also be souvenirs and reminders. Somewhere I still have the map of New York I bought on a trip there in 2004, because without a map I can’t fit the memories of those four frantic days together in a coherent order. Estelle’s use of the world map does more than that, arguably; it enables her to bring the now-tamed spaces of the wilderness to those not privileged to be able to visit them.
Whether this is enough to defang the map as a tool of power, I’m not sure. The game could be seen as naïve in suggesting that. But as a suggestion of a better way – not just for maps but by implication for masculinity – it bears some consideration.
[1] I’ll return to this point later, but the rewards for completing the world map all go to Estelle.
[2] It should be noted that not all such characters are male in Vesperia. In their own distinct ways, all three of the party’s female members are empowered to be outside the safety of the towns, but where addressed at all this tends to be framed as ‘unladylike’.
Written for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table:
Monday, 10 August 2015
When Did I Return to Nibelheim?
I’m replaying Final Fantasy VII at the moment, partly prompted by the announcement of the remake and partly to see how Tales of the Abyss relates to it[1]. I’m having a very different experience of the game than I did either of my previous forays into it. I don’t have much to say about the first of those, on the original PC version in about 2003, since I didn’t get very far before losing interest, but in light of the upcoming remake, I do want to talk about the second.
The second time I played FFVII, and the first that I completed it, I was sharing a house with a number of other gamers, all keen fans of the franchise. Foremost among them was a guy I’ll call Tom, who was one of Those FFVII Fans.
I don’t want to disparage Tom’s love of the game. It’s a great game, and unlike me he first encountered it completely fresh and had time at the right time in his life to explore it fully and have his mind repeatedly blown. But as what might be called a ludocentric gamer – whose play focussed on the mastering of systems and surpassing of challenges – he engaged with a very different FFVII to the one calling out to me.
It’s not even that Tom didn’t recognise the depth and complexity of FFVII’s story. It just wasn’t what he focussed on. When I wanted to include Aeris in my party, because I felt that that was what Cloud would do (not an opinion I hold anymore, but I did then), Tom told me off for wasting XP and equipment on her – we both knew she was going to die, but for Tom that made her useless to me in a way that I just didn’t care about that much.
I played through the whole game with Tom breathing down my neck, pushing me to play in a certain way, take a certain attitude to the in-game events. I enjoyed the game, overall, and indeed enjoyed most of my conversations and arguments with Tom about it, but I wouldn’t say it made much of an impression on me. It was a good game, but I couldn’t feel its tremendous influence.
This is not a complaint about ludocentric play. I know I’m complaining about ludocentric play, but the problem isn’t how Tom chose to engage with the game, or what it meant or was to him. My complaint is with the way he insisted the game had to be the same thing to me. (Something similar happened with a number of other games over the years we lived together – FFVII is strong enough to stand up, but some of the others are probably spoiled for me forever).
It’s only in playing the game afresh, on my own, that I’m starting to find the FFVII that matters to me, that will leave an impression on me. Now I can pause and appreciate the blocking in the cutscenes, the exquisite care of the camerawork and sound design, the surprising nuance of so much of the writing.
Why talk about this now? Well, sometime in the next couple of years, a whole lot of people are going to get the chance to come to FFVII fresh, in a game that really won’t – can’t, for better or worse – match the memories of people who played it when it was new. That disconnect could do a lot to hurt the actual experiences people have with the remake, maybe on both sides (I imagine it’s hurting some people in conversations within the dev team already).
The thing is, FFVII is actually a great game to have as a new experience. It’s a game about having an image of something – Cloud’s image of the past, his fateful return to Nibelheim – that is slowly revealed to not match reality. FFVII is a landmark of games history and culture, but the memories of those who ‘were there at the time’ are necessarily personal, even a distortion.
Like Tifa, shaking her head and murmuring worries while Cloud grandly recounts fighting alongside Sephiroth, those of us who weren’t there encounter a striking dissonance between the deeply-held beliefs of our friends and the actual experiences in front of us. Having the space to explore that dissonance has definitely enriched the game for me, but in a different context – with Tom’s memories of the game pressing in around with me – it could be stifling.
Whatever FFVII is to you, please try to be aware of the fact that that isn’t neutral; you aren’t right about it. It’s a game that can be many things to many different people. It doesn’t need justifying. It doesn’t even need justifying in its current half-updated incarnations, like the Steam version I’m currently playing, with its hi-res low-poly models and low-res un-updated backgrounds. The game is strong enough that it doesn’t need nursemaiding through encounters with new players.
I’d say also that fussing too much over spoilers is counterproductive. That’s for two reasons; firstly, that spoilers are inevitable given the prominence of the game. Secondly, what makes FFVII’s major twists interesting and powerful has very little to do with surprise. This is true for almost everything that people worry about spoiling, and surprise is rarely interesting in and of itself[2], but, as someone who knew all along that Aeris would die and that Cloud’s memories are actually Zack’s, I can promise you from personal experience that those revelations don’t lose their power to foreknowledge.
It is all well and good to love a game, particularly if that game has been important to your love of the form (and provided it doesn’t blind you to its shortcomings). But nostalgia for your own experience of a game can be a prison that keeps the game away from other players, even other players who play it for seventy hours and see every bit of content it has to offer. If you love FFVII, please be prepared to let it go, at least a little bit.
Of course, I can say all this now. You might want to save a link to this article to throw right back at me if and when Final Fantasy XII gets a HD remaster/remake, because I will be insufferable as hell during that launch week…
[1] This is a topic for another time, but Abyss has a protagonist with a whole bunch of false memories and a metaphysics based on the Kabbalah mythology from which Sephiroth’s name is drawn. I am pretty sure this isn’t a coincidence.
[2] Okay, that may be a little strong, particularly since I personally hate surprise and the unexpected in all its forms. I do, however, believe strongly that very little that can actually be ‘spoiled’ is valuable in and of itself – most plot twists are either interesting whether or not they’re surprising, or actually not interesting at all.
Written for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table:
The second time I played FFVII, and the first that I completed it, I was sharing a house with a number of other gamers, all keen fans of the franchise. Foremost among them was a guy I’ll call Tom, who was one of Those FFVII Fans.
I don’t want to disparage Tom’s love of the game. It’s a great game, and unlike me he first encountered it completely fresh and had time at the right time in his life to explore it fully and have his mind repeatedly blown. But as what might be called a ludocentric gamer – whose play focussed on the mastering of systems and surpassing of challenges – he engaged with a very different FFVII to the one calling out to me.
It’s not even that Tom didn’t recognise the depth and complexity of FFVII’s story. It just wasn’t what he focussed on. When I wanted to include Aeris in my party, because I felt that that was what Cloud would do (not an opinion I hold anymore, but I did then), Tom told me off for wasting XP and equipment on her – we both knew she was going to die, but for Tom that made her useless to me in a way that I just didn’t care about that much.
I played through the whole game with Tom breathing down my neck, pushing me to play in a certain way, take a certain attitude to the in-game events. I enjoyed the game, overall, and indeed enjoyed most of my conversations and arguments with Tom about it, but I wouldn’t say it made much of an impression on me. It was a good game, but I couldn’t feel its tremendous influence.
This is not a complaint about ludocentric play. I know I’m complaining about ludocentric play, but the problem isn’t how Tom chose to engage with the game, or what it meant or was to him. My complaint is with the way he insisted the game had to be the same thing to me. (Something similar happened with a number of other games over the years we lived together – FFVII is strong enough to stand up, but some of the others are probably spoiled for me forever).
It’s only in playing the game afresh, on my own, that I’m starting to find the FFVII that matters to me, that will leave an impression on me. Now I can pause and appreciate the blocking in the cutscenes, the exquisite care of the camerawork and sound design, the surprising nuance of so much of the writing.
Why talk about this now? Well, sometime in the next couple of years, a whole lot of people are going to get the chance to come to FFVII fresh, in a game that really won’t – can’t, for better or worse – match the memories of people who played it when it was new. That disconnect could do a lot to hurt the actual experiences people have with the remake, maybe on both sides (I imagine it’s hurting some people in conversations within the dev team already).
The thing is, FFVII is actually a great game to have as a new experience. It’s a game about having an image of something – Cloud’s image of the past, his fateful return to Nibelheim – that is slowly revealed to not match reality. FFVII is a landmark of games history and culture, but the memories of those who ‘were there at the time’ are necessarily personal, even a distortion.
Like Tifa, shaking her head and murmuring worries while Cloud grandly recounts fighting alongside Sephiroth, those of us who weren’t there encounter a striking dissonance between the deeply-held beliefs of our friends and the actual experiences in front of us. Having the space to explore that dissonance has definitely enriched the game for me, but in a different context – with Tom’s memories of the game pressing in around with me – it could be stifling.
Whatever FFVII is to you, please try to be aware of the fact that that isn’t neutral; you aren’t right about it. It’s a game that can be many things to many different people. It doesn’t need justifying. It doesn’t even need justifying in its current half-updated incarnations, like the Steam version I’m currently playing, with its hi-res low-poly models and low-res un-updated backgrounds. The game is strong enough that it doesn’t need nursemaiding through encounters with new players.
I’d say also that fussing too much over spoilers is counterproductive. That’s for two reasons; firstly, that spoilers are inevitable given the prominence of the game. Secondly, what makes FFVII’s major twists interesting and powerful has very little to do with surprise. This is true for almost everything that people worry about spoiling, and surprise is rarely interesting in and of itself[2], but, as someone who knew all along that Aeris would die and that Cloud’s memories are actually Zack’s, I can promise you from personal experience that those revelations don’t lose their power to foreknowledge.
It is all well and good to love a game, particularly if that game has been important to your love of the form (and provided it doesn’t blind you to its shortcomings). But nostalgia for your own experience of a game can be a prison that keeps the game away from other players, even other players who play it for seventy hours and see every bit of content it has to offer. If you love FFVII, please be prepared to let it go, at least a little bit.
Of course, I can say all this now. You might want to save a link to this article to throw right back at me if and when Final Fantasy XII gets a HD remaster/remake, because I will be insufferable as hell during that launch week…
[1] This is a topic for another time, but Abyss has a protagonist with a whole bunch of false memories and a metaphysics based on the Kabbalah mythology from which Sephiroth’s name is drawn. I am pretty sure this isn’t a coincidence.
[2] Okay, that may be a little strong, particularly since I personally hate surprise and the unexpected in all its forms. I do, however, believe strongly that very little that can actually be ‘spoiled’ is valuable in and of itself – most plot twists are either interesting whether or not they’re surprising, or actually not interesting at all.
Written for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table:
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)