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.

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).