Tales

I am learning to cry.

Not learning to stage-cry. Not learning to perform crying, whether in honest fiction or dishonest manipulation. Not training a nerve pathway to bypass my emotions en route from brain to tear ducts (if that's how it works – I wouldn't know).

I am learning to cry when my chest tightens and breathing becomes difficult. Learning to cry when I have a reason to cry. Learning how to tell when I have a reason.

I am learning to cross an emotional wall that I don't remember building. I haven't cried a lot since childhood. I internalised early the idea that crying is weak or shameful, so that by the time I learned otherwise I had ruined the emotional pathways to doing so.

In my first nine years of adulthood I think I cried three times.

This is not healthy. I have spent the last year trying to re-engage with myself, to allow what I feel – which is who I am, really – to manifest in what I do and how I live. I've written a bit about it before.

Video games are helping. Virtual worlds are an emotional gym, albeit one I often stare through the window of rather than using. Like going to the gym, it takes an act of will and an openness to pain to engage with a game.

It's interactivity – I extend myself, and something responds. It's as interactive as any button-press, except that the buttons are inside me.



Okay, I freely admit that sentence is ridiculous. I'm using humour to restore emotional distance.

The inner button I'm pressing is the power switch.

Tales of Symphonia was maybe the first game to bring a tear to my eye, long before I realised crying was something I would have to learn. I can't now remember exactly what it was that got to me, but somewhere in Symphonia's convoluted turns, Lloyd and Colette were so alive that even I couldn't stay numb to them.

Don't Kiss the Prince

Not all tears are the product of sadness.

Emil, the hero of Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, is one of the queerest characters I've encountered. He talks openly about how handsome Regal is, at one point suggesting the other man take to carrying a rose in his teeth. His struggle, both literally within the world and thematically within the story, is against his violent second nature, his 'Ratatosk Mode'. But for incongruous baggy trousers, his outfit is pretty much a dress:

(Somebody please buy me this outfit)

Marta, who accompanies him throughout the game, initially idealises him as her heroic 'prince', mistakenly believing he saved her life once. She pushes him constantly to play into a romantic fantasy. He resists the casting, even to the point that doing so drives him into Ratatosk Mode.

There is no noble core to Emil's masculinity, only the physical, verbal and emotional savagery of Ratatosk. And Emil feels this, deeply. He dreads this loss of self.

So I cried when, on the last night before the final confrontation, Marta went up on tip-toes to kiss Emil. I cried – or at least achieved a single, proper, rolling tear – because she accepted Emil for what he is, because she released him from her fantasies, because Emil was not required to be something he was not in order to be loved.

(Emil never protests anyone's use of male pronouns for him, or I wouldn't be using them)

It must be said, too, and I will try to say it with as little scorn for myself as possible, that I am easily moved by the simplest romantic resolutions. Emil is given this – and given it without cost to his identity, given it as an act of faith in his eventual freedom – without Marta or the game forcibly normalising him. However far it felt from reality, the assertion of the possibility felt powerful to me.

I cried at the end of Tales of the Abyss, too, even though that's a much more normative romance. I try not to put scorn on myself for it, but I really am a sap.

Turds in the Soup

It doesn't take much turd in your soup to ruin it. Once there's a turd in there, you aren't going to keep eating. It doesn't matter how good the rest of the ingredients are, or how carefully they were prepared.

There's an archetypal character in the Tales franchise that is a turd in the soup. In Tales of Symphonia, he's Zelos Wilder. Tales of Vesperia has Raven, Tales of Xillia Alvin and the latest incarnation is Tales of Zestiria's Zaveid.

A brief summary of crimes:

- Constantly hitting on female characters

- Forcing physical intimacy on other characters

- Responding to literally every situation with humour, irrespective of the mental and emotional cost to anyone else nearby

Pictured: turd

It's weird to me that these characters are such a consistent feature of the franchise (Tales of the Abyss doesn't have an obvious example, but Jade is close in some ways; I've written about the displays of masculine toxicity in Tales of Graces before). Tales games, if they exhibit any common feature, specialise in emotionally rich male characters, men and boys who feel and grow and communicate better than many real male human beings.

And yet, floating in the middle of every otherwise delightful soup, a turd. Tales of Xillia 2 almost fixed the problem by spreading the unwelcome behaviour across multiple characters. This had a diluting effect; to some chefs, absolutely anything can be seasoning.

Indeed, if we're really going to tell stories that grapple with masculinity as Tales aspires to, we're going to have to deal with this behaviour, because it happens, it's real. It's common, even. But playing Tales games is generally, to me, immersing myself in something better. It's participating in a world where that archetype doesn't feel realistic.

Zestiria is the best yet for this. The central theme is respect for the feelings of others. Maybe it's an unrealistic picture of a better world (maybe it isn't) but it's at least a consistent one.

Except for Zaveid's turdery. And while the rest of the cast are unanimous in their rejection of his behaviour, when the emotional tone of a scene has been tainted it is very difficult to restore. Too often, I cannot get the odour out of my nostrils.

If there's one Tales game I don’t think I'll ever cry at, it's probably the one I know best: Tales of Vesperia. It's just a little too cynical, and it concerns itself more with other emotions. Moral abhorrence, mostly.

A Tale of My Own

I sprinkled tears right across Tales of Xillia 2, but I think the superlative writing team would be surprised at where.

I didn't cry at the first grand sacrifice of the story. By that point I was more than a little distracted by upheavals in my living arrangements over the summer, having to take significant breaks from the game because I was away from my consoles. The longest of those breaks, over two months, broke the spine of the game's wider story despite my best efforts.

I didn't cry at the ending, responding to its cruelty with angry defiance instead. Between that and struggling with the bosses because of the break, I found it hard to engage.

When I did cry with the plot, it was in sympathy with Elle's tears. They served as training wheels in a way – we're conditioned quite deeply to be moved by the distress of children. It could be seen as manipulative, I suppose, though that depends a bit on whether you feel the game exploits Elle or whether her situation is treated with respect. There are definitely questions to be asked of Ludger's paternalism.

But mostly I cried about Nova. The circumstances that justify her presence in the game are a cruel mismatch for her personality and force her into a conflict with Ludger that just isn't fair. When it came to a head, and I realised that her displays of affection towards Ludger weren't just sprightly service manner, I was cored.

For the rest of the game, her periodic phone calls carry hints of the hurt she feels. Her attempts to regain good cheer ring desperately hollow. Her voice falters in greeting, her eyes drop away in parting.

I wanted the game's finale to reconcile them. For once, I found myself with a headcanon, something I'm never normally comfortable with. The game didn't deliver, but that wasn't why I cried. I cried because the part of my version of the story that the game allowed me to enact is the kind of thing I would cry at.

If I were able to cry.

I'm learning.



The Uses of Eyes

Which brings us up to the present day, and Tales of Zestiria.

I could talk about the story. That provides plenty of reasons to cry.

The plot, of necessity, is a tapestry of tragedies. The malignant power that provides the story's existential threat is a manifestation of human inhumanity – the tangible essence of a lack of empathy. Hero Sorey, whose defining advantage is the limitless empathy facilitated by an upbringing without spiritual or material want, can't save everyone.

I could talk about the masterful subtlety of the writing, or the moments when it breaks and the characters do too.

But one thing I've heard about, that I'd never managed before, is to cry for beauty. To be moved not by an emotion of my own or one borrowed from a story, but simply by a raw phenomenon, an experience without leverage of pain or triumph.

I can't quite claim to have achieved that, if achievement is the right word (and it is, but in the therapeutic rather than the Xbox Live sense). When the sun-haze and scudding cloud-shadows over the golden fields of Pearloats Pasture became too much to look at, when I had to look away, blinking, a little of that was the transformation of the place from my first visit to it, and everything it implied about what Sorey had achieved there.

But I cried for the low sweep of the valley, and for the beams of daylight I could almost feel. I cried for the breeze and the gentle swell of the music, for the view across the walls and rooftops of Pendrago and the towers of the great bridge beyond the hill in the distance, and for the wonder of motion, Sorey's divinely-empowered run eating up but somehow also reinforcing the miles.



I can't really express my gratitude to this series of games without gushing. There are other experiences I've learned from this year, too, and I'd gush about them if I got started. What I'll finish on is this: open your heart, if it needs opening, and give some Tales a try.

Whose Silence is This?

Devon Carter's 'This Silence is Not Mine' stands as one of my favourite pieces of critical writing. It resonates with me because it points towards the novelistic understanding of narrative that I prefer over the dominant conception of video game narrative built around agency and expression[1]. Normally I can tolerate the silent protagonist only in worlds that are silent.

But then there's Tales of Xillia 2's Ludger Kresnik, a character without significant dialogue of his own yet probably the character I've engaged most deeply with this year. Ludger is no blank slate – he emotes both vividly and subtly, and indeed occasionally even utters the kind of not-quite-verbal speech that silent protagonists are sometimes allowed. But in all scenes where there is explicit communication among characters, Ludger is silent[2].

Part of what brings Xillia 2 so powerfully to life is the richness of the characters around Ludger, but more is the incomplete and very human structure of submission it imposes on him. However dire the circumstances, Ludger cannot speak. Whatever his anger or frustration, explicit goals and plans must come from other characters. Ludger exists only in tension with the will of others.

This is something I seek in games, in quasi-circumscribed virtual worlds, because lifelong anxieties make it difficult for me in the 'real' world. Games are safe spaces to allow external forces free rein; their dominance and their costs are confined to a small box which can be switched off if it becomes too much[3]. In-game events cannot affect one to quite the same extent that rent, bills and hunger can, to say nothing of more complex relationships.

This is why I love Vaan in Final Fantasy XII, the perfect viewpoint character for a game about the unmanageability of history. It's why I feel such empathy for Final Fantasy X’s Tidus, who can only ever be a hanger-on to Yuna's journey. And it's why more competent, driven protagonists like Tales of Vesperia's Yuri and Tales of Graces' Asbel leave me cold (see also: protagonists on whom the broader story centres, like Cloud and Squall).

There is a second twist to this, though, because Xillia 2 has dialogue choices. Quite a lot of them, even. It's almost retro, a throwback to the idea that a plot is more interactive if you chuck a menu up on screen occasionally.

At the very moments when silence and submission would be most comfortable, would exonerate me of the party's toughest decisions, I'm forced, with Ludger, to take responsibility. I found it paralysing. Often choosing would take me far longer than the pace of real dialogue would have afforded Ludger. At least once, on a choice for which there was a time limit, I deliberately elected to let the timer run out, as if I could force the game to take responsibility back.

It's never clear what effect the choices have on the game's core narrative (for some choices, the game will tell you which other characters you've impressed, but only after you make the decision). More than once, I found myself doggedly opposing choices that led to plot events that were probably inescapable. Even when it comes to affecting which ending you get, few choices before the game's climactic chapter matter.

The choices exist to reward engagement in the characters with the agony of choice. It's an interactivity far more palpable than pushing buttons. More importantly, because of the way choices are framed, because of the game's narrative structure taken as a whole, Ludger's voice is restored in them, and harmonised with my own.

I played Ludger as a reluctant, stumbling non-hero, unwilling to make tough choices and struggling to communicate with his allies. Partly this was because I struggled to intuit which potential nuance of any given phrase the game would pick up on, so I often made choices which the characters put a different spin on to the one I was expecting[4]. But by accident (or maybe design, though not mine), there was a coherence to my errors.

Ludger's silence, and the awkwardness I bequeathed him, fitted. My Ludger made bad decisions and hurtful remarks because neither of us could handle loving the people around him as much as we did in such cruel circumstances. His silence was not mine, but it was so like mine – a silence I often find myself in – that the difference seldom mattered.

All of which was only enough to earn me the sorta-OK ending, out of the game's four choices. For the true ending, not only would Ludger have to be braver, nobler, and more confident, but so would I. It may be a while before I can face trying again.







[1] Herein lies the (perhaps over-strong) line I draw between games I play for narrative and games I would prefer display as little narrative as possible. Silent protagonists – truly silent protagonists, the Gordon Freemans who are silent because they are protagonists in a video game, not because their silence is part of the plot – feel to me like holes, like an absolute barrier to my engagement rather than a necessary precondition for it.

[2] It was pointed out to me after I drafted this that in Xillia 2’s new game plus mode, Ludger’s speech is restored for his dialogue choices. I imagine this changes a few things about how the story feels, but I can’t comment on it directly as I haven’t experienced it myself.

[3] So the orthodoxy goes, anyway. Perhaps I would be a healthier being if I had not spent so much of my life believing it.

[4] A familiar experience. I'm not great at verbal communication.

What a Wonderful Genre

I sometimes wonder whether there’s a value in genre-based critique, particularly for a genre as diverse and nebulous as JRPGs. Looking at Tales of Vesperia means addressing the genre at large as well as its contemporaneous western perception, but I’m wary of falling into the trap of fanboyism. I’m not even sure what might constitute a ‘genre crisis’, never mind whether one actually occurred.

The perception of a genre crisis persists, though. I think it’s probably been there for a long time – some of the things that bring it about are inescapable consequences of an international games industry – but the phenomenon of games being proclaimed ‘the saviour of the JRPG’ is newer, I think. The World Ends With You is the first such game I was aware of.

To quote the almost inevitable arch-villain of any extended defence of the JRPG, Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, from his 2008 review of TWEWY:

“I had heard that The World Ends With You does things differently to most JRPGs, and while I took that with mountainous piles of salt … I thought if the release dates are from bizarro world, maybe the entire game is, too, and will turn out to be the first good JRPG.”[1]

And that’s very much the perception I remember having of TWEWY. That it does things differently. Maybe it’s just what this genre needs. TWEWY certainly positions itself as modern and exciting, not always successfully. Its contemporary setting, punk aesthetic and action combat were all trumpeted as much-needed progress; even Yahtzee found a positive word for the game’s look.

But the actual extent to which the game innovates is unclear. Modern settings weren’t new; the Persona franchise was a decade old by TWEWY’s release, and more obscure modern-set games go back much further (the original Mother, for example, came out in 1989). Action combat in Japanese RPGs goes right back to the SNES (Secret of Mana, Tales of Phantasia). Even the ‘punk fashion’ doesn’t actually look so very different from the outfits on display in any number of earlier titles.

The game’s treatment of its female characters is sadly predictable. Shiki, Neku’s first partner, gets damseled at the end of the first act to provide motivation for acts two and three. One of the female villains is an ‘ice queen’ archetype, the other emotionally erratic and constantly being told to calm down. Rhyme gets fridged in act one, then turns out later to have already been in a different fridge all along[2].

On the mechanical/structural side, the game really isn’t that innovative at all. The plot progresses as the search for cutscene triggers, along with the completion of occasional arbitrary challenges and a steady supply of boss fights. You can overlook it at first, but about half-way through the second week there’s a day where all you do is go to a new area, find out what the next challenge is, backtrack to grind it to completion, and repeat.

There are genuine innovations here – the gender-neutral but not gender-ignorant clothing/bravery mechanic is one that I wish had taken off – but the game’s biggest strength lies in its dialogue writing. When not burdened with the demands of exposition, the dialogue is incredible. But TWEWY isn’t the first well-written game, and good writing predates digital games by a few years at least.

In fact, I’d argue, one of the things that got the game touted as forward-looking, the non-turn-based combat, is a real weak spot thematically. For a game trying to engage with the modern, digital era, where combat serves among other things as a metaphor for brand advertising, I feel like turn-based combat would have been quite at home. It could have been built around the frantic exchange of text messages or emails – discrete bursts of activity followed by an anxious wait for the potentially disastrous response.

Turn-based combat was a favourite punching bag of JRPG haters, though, and probably still is. Certainly Yahtzee went after it with knives drawn – reviewing Super Paper Mario, he crowed that “The stupid, effeminate, blouse-wearing turn-based combat is replaced with wholesome, traditional, masculine head-stomping,” which is a perfect distillation of the insecurity that underpins a lot of JRPG criticism.

But attempts to get away from turn-based combat have had mixed results. TWEWY’s system at least produces some sense of rhythm and party interaction. Eternal Sonata and other games that adapted Paper Mario’s action command system tended to end up with blind guesswork and repetition. More drastic experiments like the gunplay in Resonance of Fate could be bewildering, not to mention difficult to balance because of a lack of precedent to learn from.

Meanwhile, games that stuck to a known formula for combat tended to draw less notice, but be more consistent. Tales of Vesperia adds only tweaks to a system polished through Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss. Blue Dragon worked wonders with a modified version of Final Fantasy X’s completely turn-based battles.

I’m not complaining about innovation per se. My problem with all these examples is that they’re innovation at gun-point, innovation not driven by the needs of the work but the demands of a hostile audience. If there is a genre crisis at all, it resides in this tension. Certainly that’s what Vesperia engages with at every level of its design.

What I’m not sure of is whether there’s any great value to my pointing this out, which is a bad thing to say at the end of a thousand-word blog post. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people, and I don’t really want to try. I’m certainly not qualified to approach this as a design textbook, or even as a way of advocating a design principle. I do want to capture what Vesperia expresses, though, and that involves at least a little of both those other things.







[1] Yes, I watched that video carefully enough to transcribe it. Don’t say I never suffer for my work. (The note about release dates refers to the fact that TWEWY – like more recent ‘genre-saviour’ Xenoblade Chronicles – came out in Europe before America).

[2] Okay, yes, I’m indulging my love of tortured metaphors here. Bigger-than-average-spoilers for explanation: having been killed off in act one to get Neku angry at the Reapers, Rhyme turns out to have come into the Reapers’ game as a result of a death whose function in the story is to motivate Beat.

Dog Time

‘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:

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:

“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:

Coherence, Dissonance and Tales of Vesperia

When trying to characterise the phenomena that induced me to make a study of Tales of Vesperia, I fumbled with a variety of terms. ‘Gamey’ and ‘self-conscious’ were among them, but I eventually settled uncomfortably on ‘absurd’. ‘Absurd’ has a particular sense and history in art, though, and I’m not sure it quite fits what I was getting at.

Fortunately, thanks to Lana Polansky, I now have a better terminology to work with. Polansky discusses two terms, ‘coherence’ and ‘dissonance’. These aren’t opposites; Polansky makes clear that a work can be one or the other, both or neither. They refer to distinct characteristics a work (experience?) can have.

Dissonance, as I understand it, is something felt or sensed; a phenomenal property of things not quite seeming right. As such, dissonance is an artist’s tool, with well-documented uses. Across every genre of music, dissonance is used to create uneasy moods and dark feelings. Elements of a painting may be dissonant with one another, leading to a work that resists simple, literalistic readings.

By contrast, I understand ‘coherence’ as a logical/cognitive property, whose opposite is contradiction. This is very much a philosopher’s understanding, so take it with a pinch of salt, but it’s what I’ve got to work with. Contradiction is what happens when two propositions cannot be held together; a set of statements is coherent if they can all be held together.

It’s very hard, given how the language of academic philosophy has bled into wider culture, to prevent this distinction seeming hierarchical. There’s a cultural tendency to privilege the logical over the sensed/apparent/phenomenal. But whatever your feelings about feels and reals, I think Polansky makes clear that coherence and dissonance can’t stand in a hierarchical relationship because they don’t denote specific points on a shared continuum. They’re phenomena different in kind, not degree.

Simplifying, dissonance is when something feels wrong, whether or not anything ‘actually is’. It’s when a surface reading of a work won’t fit. Incoherence is when the statement being made by a work – or being attributed to a work by a critic – doesn’t make sense because parts of the work actively detract from it. So Clint Hocking’s (in)famous ludonarrative dissonance is actually more a kind of incoherence[1].

Bringing this back round to my interests, we can now say that Tales of Vesperia is often dissonant, but that it is also strikingly coherent. The game’s plot, visual design and mini-games/side-quests make it a jagged landscape littered with obvious cracks. The Wonder Reporter is just the most aggressive; there’s a whole city built to look like a giant mace, and you could drive a bus through some of the holes in the world-building, particularly the schemes of the various bad guys.

For every dissonant chord, though, there is a resolution into harmony. Sometimes this is prominent, as in the contrast between the way the game handles its ‘Wonder Log’ and the other player logbooks. Sometimes it is more subtle, as when one realises that a plot hole is really protagonist Yuri ignoring key plot details because they don’t fit his personal narrative.

Every time, though, a pattern is reinforced; a genre trope is instantiated in a way that brings out its laziness, its familiarity, its gaminess or its wrongness, then subverted to critique the mainstream reception or expectation that created it. In other words, something is first presented as dissonant, and then its dissonance is attributed to forces outside the design of the game.

This establishes a very coherent – not to mention angry – message. For Vesperia, and/or its developers, the ‘genre crisis’ in JRPGs has nothing to do with the actual experiences produced by any of its immediate predecessors, but is instead a matter of conflicting expectations among its audience. I happen to think there’s a lot of truth to this, but the argument would be coherent even if it turned out to be completely misplaced.

Of course, no work of art assembled by the size of team that works on most major industry game titles could be completely coherent. Vesperia fails most prominently in its engagement with temporality, where it just doesn’t do as much with its dissonance. This isn’t necessarily a problem – I am, after all, doing arts criticism right now and not abstract formal logic[2] – since it’s not a broad enough incoherence to obliterate the overall point.

Generally speaking, then, my ongoing work with Vesperia is going to involve taking each point of dissonance in turn and pushing at it until it resolves. Depending on your attitude to art and meaning, this can be seen either as a forensic or a creative endeavour, or a combination of the two. It’s the approach I’ve already applied to the Wonder Reporter, and I’ll have another piece along those lines next week sometime.







[1] I think this is the essence of Robert Yang’s complaint about the term – we don’t feel any dissonance playing, say, violent games that attempt to critique violence, even if on a closer look these games end up seeming terribly hypocritical.

[2] Again, it’s hard to make that sound non-hierarchical, but having taught formal logic I can say its uses in pure form are very limited.

Abstraction and Attention

I’m trying not to say ‘Zelda isn’t an RPG’. ‘Zelda’ and ‘RPG’ both mean too many different things to too many different people for that to be a useful statement. But I think I can say something useful about what I look for in an RPG – and particularly a JRPG – by contrasting it with what I look for and love in Zelda games. For clarity, I’m a 3D Zelda person – I’ve generally found the 2D games frustrating to play, though that may be because I’ve mainly played them on handheld and I kinda hate handheld gaming.

To start, here’s what I understand by ‘RPG’: a system of abstraction(s) that primarily serves to mediate the telling of a story. This is a pretty broad definition (the ‘primarily’ is important), but I think it’s useful because it captures the connection between pre-digital pen-and-paper RPGs and their digital analogues. The downside is that it leaves out the act of roleplaying that makes up such an important part of the pen-and-paper experience.

Anyway, what I mean by it is this. The abstractions in RPGs serve a primarily extrinsic focus[1]. Phenomena like HP and XP encode the labour and temporal cost of travel. World maps and sidequests indicate scale. The more abstract components of the game are there to set a tone and player mindset for the story developments, which are generally treated as less abstract[2].

The 3D Zelda games, though, have a different focus. For one thing, the biggest abstractions in Zelda games are the puzzles; not the player’s actions but the environments that induce them. The player’s attention is drawn more to the phenomenal/sensory qualities of their actions – the flight of the boomerang, the heft of the megaton hammer, the whoosh of flying through the air with the hookshot.

As a complement to this, Zelda games generally have less involved storylines. It’s telling that the games that do have stronger emphasis on storytelling – Majora’s Mask and especially Twilight Princess – have more in the way of player action that mediates story. Moments like the sequence where you carry the injured Midna to Zelda, or the horse-and-cart bit where you transport Ilia to Kakariko Village, are more about the urgency of the moment, the dramatic interruption to the otherwise pervasive melancholy of Twilight Princess’ Hyrule, than the phenomenal qualities of the specific actions the player takes[3].

There are exceptions on the other side of the equation as well, of course. Action RPGs and even some more recent turn-based ones do take an interest in the intrinsic qualities of their abstractions. This can take the form of Tales-style combat, levelling systems like Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid and the Lillium Orbs from Tales of Xillia, or even quicktime events, as in Final Fantasy XIII-2.

Almost every game that has a story dabbles in abstractions that favour the story; similarly, almost every game period dabbles in abstractions that feed the senses. The question is one of balance. When I go to my collection of Zelda games, it’s because I’m looking to have my attention drawn to a particular sensory/phenomenal mode of engagement. When I go looking specifically for a (J)RPG, I want to focus on the narrative and register other interactions as in service to that.







[1] I think this is true whatever RPG you play, but it’s probably less true for more modern western RPGs than JRPGs.

[2] There’s a whole complicated question of the role of abstraction in fantasy narratives – magic and magical creatures as metaphor, fantasy hierarchies as engagements with real politics and so on – but it’s too big a topic to get into here, hence the ‘generally treated as’.

[3] The cart-and-horse sequence is also a call-back to the similar escort mission in MM, an explicit link between the two games.

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.

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).