Playing Favourites

(Originally published on 18/9/18 at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

My favourite videogames, in no particular order, are Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy XIII and Tales of Vesperia. These are not the games that move me most, or that I would necessarily recommend to others – I could list things that aren’t real, Even The Ocean, Butterfly Soup, Queers in Love at the End of the World and probably others in those groups. Nor are they the games I’ve spent most time on (I write, glaring at World of Warcraft).

They are, of course, each in their way, very good games. Final Fantasy XIII is maybe the most tightly-tuned RPG ever made. Final Fantasy XII is the only game I’ve ever played that does for epic storytelling something that could not be better done in a novel. Tales of Vesperia is harder to exalt in superlatives or unique features but is nevertheless a slick system delivering nuanced moral storytelling through an effective play with genre expectations.

But there’s a difference between holding that a game is good and holding it as a favourite, even if you reject (as I do, to be clear) the idea that there’s some objective rubric of game quality. I’ve been worrying at the thread of this distinction for a long time, and I’m still not sure what I make of it, but I’m writing this in the hope of digging something out from the topic.

Of course, one difference between the two lists of games in my first paragraph above is that the first group belong to the section I’ve taken to referring to awkwardly as ‘commercial games’ while the latter are ‘independent’ in at least three different meanings of the word. Indeed, the two Final Fantasies are among the very small number of Japanese games that might be counted as blockbusters, per Vincent Kinian’s extremely useful definition; they are games that dominate discourses, that one is in relevant contexts expected to have an opinion on.

On the other hand, these are idiosyncratic choices; the opinion one is expected to have is negative. Or, to be more precise, if one has a positive opinion of these games, there is an expectation attached to that, that one is positioned a certain way relative to Video Games in general. In other media (my impression is that this is rarer in videogames), the phrase used to describe properties like this is cult classics. To declare a preference for them is to declare by implication membership in a community (a ‘cult’).

My declaration of favourites, then, is a symbolic gesture. It is a kind of self-making; my self is in part my social loyalties. I wonder at the internal mechanism that makes me say that commercial games are my favourites over the work of close friends and mutual supporters (it’s capitalism, I’m sorry).

But consider the difference between declaring FFXIII to be a favourite and, say, Super Mario World. That second term sits on a slider; move it and one finds, in sequence, A Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger and FFVI very close together, FFVII and FFX. How close can one get, historically and in commercial context, and preserve the contrast I’m poking at here?

I’m not sure. There is something unmistakeably contrarian about holding FFXIII as a favourite which is not shared by those other games, except in very narrow contexts. Is there a context in which counting A Link to the Past among one’s favourite games is contrarian? (PC gamers, but fuck them for the moment).

Maybe what’s going on here is that my declaration of favourites is more about who I differentiate myself from than who I ally myself with. Identifying myself with things that aren’t real and Butterfly Soup would distinguish me from basically the same majority of reactionary gamers (and in this, apart from the serious allegations of abuse against Anna Anthropy, the other games I mentioned above include and exclude exactly the same people).

There’s some sort of sweet spot, I think, between games that exclude too few and too many people, in which a ‘favourite’ game can be meaningful. This in itself is contextual – if most of the people I knew in real life were committed hardware-obsessed PC gamers, even Mario World might be enough to set me apart. It’s interesting – though too big a topic to go into here – how contingent this makes self on social location.

So I think the function of favouriting is social positioning, or the element of self-making that is most concerned with social positioning. Where have I placed myself?

Here, I want to offer a bit of a mea culpa. Over the last four years, I’ve written a huge amount about Final Fantasy and Square Enix (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12). And while there is something to be said for a western writer stepping up to criticise what other western writers have written about a non-western group of artists and their art, Square Enix is also now an international corporation, every bit as capable of the monstrosities of capitalism as Nintendo, Sony, Uber or Amazon. The corporation neither needs nor deserves defence.

I’ve definitely been rude or short with people for saying stupid stuff about Final Fantasy games. I’ve written aggressively. Some of the stuff I’ve responded to has deserved it; some of it not so much. There’s a big difference between some random dude on twitter dunking on FFXIII and an editor at one of the biggest (self-declared) progressive websites declaring Final Fantasy dead because a fanservicey outfit got added to Lightning Returns as dlc.

(Yes, that’s a thing that happened. No, I won’t sully myself by linking to it).

There are good reasons for writing a lot about squenix. Enix might have given us the JRPG originally, but it’s their endlessly relitigated merger with their upstart competitor which has been the lodestone for JRPG talk for the better part of two decades. Pretty soon the resulting corporation will be old enough to drive.

The western discourse around Square Enix combines all the worst elements of gamer technophilia, exoticising orientalism, and capitalist imperialism. When western writers crow about the death of the JRPG, they are realising the paranoid fantasy of Alex St. John’s ‘Manhattan Project’. Rhetorics of ‘anime bullshit’ infantilise Japanese writers while the tedious drivel about ‘literal translation’ positions Japan as some sort of nerd Brigadoon, untroubled by any taint of social justice.

ALL OF THIS IS BULLSHIT. STOP IT.

 
But equally, if there is a defence to be made, it needs to be separate from an emotional loyalty to corporate products (however much those corporate products and the discourse around them reflect exactly the tensions just described). My job is not marketing. Whatever follows on from the podcast here at DGC, this is an intellectual scruple I need to practice.

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:

What the Hero Cannot Save the Princess From

Tales of Vesperia is the story of a young man going on an adventure with a princess, so of course, at one point, she gets kidnapped and he has to ‘rescue’ her. As this happens about two-thirds of the way through the plot, there will be some more detailed spoilers than are usually necessary in what follows.

The kidnapping happens shortly after the game’s sequence of big reveals plays out. We discover that Estelle, the Imperial Princess Yuri has latched onto, is the Child of the Full Moon, imbued with a power that threatens the natural order of the entire world of Terca Lumireis. Estelle, who is possessed of a compassion that borders on the cherubic, has already once said that if her power cannot be controlled she is willing to accept death for the sake of the world.

Yuri will have none of this. When the party work out, collectively, just how much of a danger Estelle poses, Yuri insists that Estelle not give up on the slim chance that they may be able to find some way to control her power. As he pressures Estelle, berating her for saying that she’s prepared to die if necessary, she cracks and runs off, seeking a moment alone to process her desperate straits.

The rest of the party give her space, spending the time discussing what might be done to help her. After a few moments, Raven, the shifty older dude who’s latched on to your party for as-yet-suspect reasons[1], complains he can’t follow the discussion and goes outside. When the rest of the party emerge later, both Raven and Estelle are missing.

It seems pretty obvious what’s happened. The only ambiguity is where Raven might have taken Estelle, and who exactly he might be working for. This prompts a search of the current town, which – if taken at face value – the game makes an oddly laboured affair, with some really awkward progress triggers.

The complicating factor in all this is that the town in question is the sky-city Myorzo, isolated and secret[3] home of the Kritya (basically Vesperia’s ‘descendants of the Ancients’ race). The only way out of the city is your airship, which is still docked. Eventually, you find an old, decommissioned teleporter which has been reactivated, and the guardian spirit of the city tracks its signal to tell you where to go.

Here’s where things get weird. When someone asks how the teleporter was reactivated, the party’s magic expert and expositor, Rita, specifically says that it could only have been Estelle’s powers that got it working. On top of that, when you follow the trail that the spirit identifies, you go to a location that there’s no sign Estelle ever visited.

Now, when you finally catch up to Estelle after blindly chasing another false lead, she’s definitely being held against her will, tormented and puppeteered by the current arch-villain to serve his ends. But while it’s unclear exactly how much power he has over her, what is clear is that the threat she poses to the world is contained.

What’s suggested, subtly but insistently, is that Raven, acting on the mastermind’s behalf, made some vague promise to Estelle that he knew someone who could control her power, and Estelle jumped at the chance. The mastermind’s solution is cruel and painful, but Estelle is still conflicted about whether she wants freedom – even during the rescue, she begs you to kill her.

Some of this – the cackling, sadistic villain, the tortured princess – could be chalked up to standard and regrettably exploitative video game melodrama, and it’s clear that Yuri himself reads it that way. It never occurs to Yuri that the Princess might not want to be rescued, or might be terrified of the implications of rescue even if she wanted it, or even that he can’t actually save her by rescuing her. He just chews his way through three levels of delaying tactics and diversions and rescues Estelle.

Rescuing Estelle, by the way, means fighting her as a mind-controlled boss; in the final phase of the battle, Yuri fights alone, without the rest of the party. On the way he’s accepted that it might be necessary to kill her to save her from Alexei – he’s willing to do that, even though he wouldn’t let her give her own life up willingly. All through this, he has no answer for the question of what they might do to prevent Estelle accidentally destroying the world.

Yuri’s actions and misjudgements come from two sources. One is his assumption of his own narrative, what I think of as ‘hero privilege’. While never as overt or self-aware about it as someone like Final Fantasy XII’s Balthier, Yuri understands both the structure of fairytales and the role into which he fits within that structure[4]. One of the key thrusts of Vesperia’s narrative is to highlight how inhuman this can be, how much we accept from heroes that in other contexts would be abhorrent.

But Yuri’s actions, and particularly his insistence that Estelle not ‘give up’ (i.e. accept death), are also part and parcel of his personal ethos. Yuri has a devotion to self-determination and authenticity that would do Sartre proud. Self-serving as his manipulations to prolong his time with Estelle are, it’s clear he earnestly believes that she wants and needs the adventure for her own sake.

Generally speaking, Estelle agrees, too. She speaks often of needing to find her own way. If she does indeed go willingly to Alexei, it is because she gives in to fear of the consequences of not doing so, fear that the cost of her freedom for others would be too high.

Yuri can embrace the existentialist life because he has very few social ties. For Estelle, as a princess and as the inheritor of a powerful mystical lineage, things are more complicated. The game eventually comes down much more on Estelle’s side; before you can go to the final boss, there’s another awkward sequence where you have to go around the world seeking the blessing of its various heads of state for your near-apocalyptic plan.

Rhetorically, Tales of Vesperia positions ‘hero privilege’ as a distortion of responsible interaction with society. Yuri is always willing to take responsibility for his actions, but he is never required to face truly horrible choices the way Estelle is purely in virtue of who she was born. There’s no question that Vesperia’s way of making this point exploits and objectifies Estelle, but its use of dissonant, ‘gamey’ surface to address Yuri is worth some attention.

This is not a game that hangs together well on the surface. Yuri doesn’t really get to be the hero, the rescue of Estelle makes no sense and the final act is unfocussed, confusing and disorganised. You can play this as a Video Game Story, but it won’t satisfy you.

The coherent narrative of Tales of Vesperia is buried under Yuri’s story; just as Yuri is blind to the harshest consequences of his actions, reading him as the hero blinds you to what’s really going on. In a way, this is futile, since the only players who are going to see this are already beyond the shallow engagements the game critiques, so it’s preaching to the choir, but it’s still a very competent use of the narrative to express theme.







[1] There’s a character like this in every Tales game and he’s always the worst[2]. Yes, Val, that includes Alvin.

[2] Actually, in Tales of Graces, the role is played by Asbel’s younger brother, and the older dude who hangs around with you is pretty cool.

[3] There’s an essay in exactly how isolated and/or secret the city is, but I’m still puzzling that out.

[4] Vesperia plays this up by contrasting Yuri, the social drop-out, with his childhood friend Flynn who has joined the Imperial Knights and steadily climbed their ranks. That relationship is too much to get into here, as is Flynn’s relationship to Estelle.

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.

The Price of Time

A couple of weeks ago, I said I’d be talking about time in JRPGs, and one of the particular issues I picked up on was this: “Plot developments that are tied to player progress can seem preposterous coincidences.”

When plot events in a game are tied to triggers based on player progress, whether that’s beating a particular encounter, arriving in a particular location or just talking to the right NPC, that connection can be pretty obvious. Sometimes this is fine, but often it centres the player characters, and through them player action, at the expense of effective storytelling.

Tales of Vesperia, for all its subversion, never quite escapes this. The first half of the story is characterised by coincidences – every other town you arrive at gets attacked or otherwise disrupted within minutes of your arrival – and despite the characters joking that protagonist Yuri must be ‘cursed’, it’s impossible to miss the underlying artificiality of the plot structure. Nor does this crack in the façade feel as planned, as deliberate as other things the game does; Vesperia fails to provide contrast by handling its triggers better elsewhere.

There are ways around the problem, though. Final Fantasy XII is at its strongest when confronting this head-on. It has to be, given its theme of the insignificance of the individual. It would be strange to spend most of the plot declaring Ashe inconsequential only for the grand schemers of the world to wait on her every move.

So, for the most part, FFXII does something a little different. You spend much of the game out of touch with events, travelling on foot through the wilds[1]. The plot triggers are generally associated with your arrival at the end of the journey, whether you travel to defeat or just to meet a plot-relevant NPC. When you arrive, what you feel is not that you have caused something to happen, but that you have missed something happening and must struggle to catch up.

When you return to Rabanastre after escaping prison near the start of the game, it’s the kidnapping of Penelo. When you arrive at Mt. Bur-Omisace after travelling across half the world in search of support for Ashe’s royal claim, it’s the replacing of the kindly Emperor Gramis with his merciless son that removes all hope for parlay. Later, arrivals at the Imperial capital Archades and the summit of the Pharos lighthouse are similarly recontextualised.

The exception to the pattern is after the first long journey in the game – here, you’re swooped down on by the Imperials right after subduing and recruiting the powerful spirit that guards Ashe’s inheritance. Why? Because for a brief moment, holding that inheritance, the characters are globally significant. Then the Imperials take it off you and destroy it.

This symbolic disenfranchisement of the player is very FFXII, but doing things this way doesn’t have to be so stark. The key is not that things happen without the player involved (though that helps) – it’s that things happen without a precisely-defined moment. The plot develops while you travel, however long that takes. Even if a specific timestamp were to be given for the event when you’re told about it (‘three days ago’, ‘last week’), the fact that different players will have taken different amounts of ‘real-world’ time to get from trigger to trigger establishes ambiguity.

Plot developments can only seem temporally coincidental if they can be tied to specific moments[2]. The ambiguity of the translation between play-time and narrative time can be used to break these ties and make the narrative feel much more (for want of a better word) organic.

There’s also the brute-force solution, of course: the Majora’s Mask approach. Games like MM and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII keep the clock ticking throughout. Events happen at precise moments whether you’re there or not. This is, in a sense, the most realistic way of presenting time.

But it has costs, at least if you want to tell a conventional story. Narrative triggers must be stretched, pulled out of shape, or repeated, to prevent the player missing them altogether. It’s telling that both MM and LR let you supernaturally manipulate time – without that affordance, the games would be unnavigable.

What FFXII shows is that the structure of in-game time can contribute powerfully to the meaning of the events portrayed. Temporal structures need not be neutral, invisible systems for the delivery of cutscenes; and they need not function based on an analogue of real time to do so.









[1] There’s something to be said, I realise now, about the relationship of this narrative device to the communicative intensity of the modern world. I’ve felt for a long time that this is something that fantasy narratives will struggle (or are struggling) to adapt to, and I’ll probably return to this theme later.

[2] This is actually tautologous, but I couldn’t think of a better way to put it.

'World'

In my work on Tales of Vesperia particularly and JRPGs in general, I’ve been poking at a lot of virtual worlds, looking for the places where they start to come apart and the meaning that can be gleaned therefrom. In trying to develop a theoretical framework for this, I spent some time going through the etymology of the word ‘world’[1], and hopefully what I found is at least worth this post.

‘World’ comes from a Germanic root, a combination of ‘were’, meaning ‘man’ (as in ‘werewolf’) and ‘old’ for (if this isn’t obvious) things relating to age. The OED gives an ‘originally literal’ meaning of ‘age of man’[2]. What interests me about this is the temporal component.

I think it would be fair to say that we generally use ‘world’ as a geographic or ontological descriptor; ‘the world’ is either a place, or a(n in-some-way-maximal) set of objects. That’s not universally true, as we might speak of ‘the Jurassic world’ or ‘the modern world’, or say of some era of history that ‘it was a different world back then’, but I think it fits how the word is used today (I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who disagrees). We tend to use ‘age’ or ‘era’ to speak of periods of time.

And I think this is worth remembering when discussing ‘world’ in videogames, because it’s the temporal dimension of game worlds that tends to be the more complicated. Games compress distance, and even chop it up a bit, but as I’ve argued before, game spaces are generally straightforwardly spatial.

Time in game worlds, though, is rather more complicated. Partly out of technical limitations and partly out of courtesy to players, games have to convey the passage of time in mostly-abstract ways. Even the most literal driving/racing game, with a millisecond-precise lap timer in the top corner of the screen, will run its career mode, car tuning and car select menus in abstract time (thank heavens).

One of the coolest and most effective single experiences I’ve had in a game was Queers in Love at the End of the World by Anna Anthropy (go play it quickly and come back). This seems, on the face of it, to be a game with very literal time – a timer at the top of the screen counting down from 10 in seconds – but it relies on an abstraction to make that time meaningful. Specifically, the duration of your actions is abstracted to the time it takes to read, understand and navigate the hyperlinked options.

Without wanting to dig too deeply, this does complicate things. Time in Queers in Love passes differently depending on your reading speed. I tend to have time for about two choices; I feel like I can usually do more than ten seconds’ worth of actions in the game’s ten literal seconds. A slower reader, someone reading in their second language or with a condition like dyslexia, may find time flowing rather faster for their in-game avatar than I do.

The kind of games I spend most of my time playing – JRPGs and other epic narrative games – have to compress time much more severely. Sequences of events that by rights should take years must be fitted into forty hours or less. There are lots of ways to do this, all of which can be clunky in some contexts and entirely graceful in others.

It’s often in handling time that JRPGs get most abstract, or furthest from literalism. Plot developments that are tied to player progress can seem preposterous coincidences; taking time to complete sidequests after reaching the final save point before the final boss can drain all urgency from the impending apocalypse.

I’m not going to go into these topics in more detail this time, because each is worth at least a post on its own. But I do think it’s important to look at how games represent time, how we should interpret those representations, and how virtual experiences may conflict with our relationships to non-virtual time – and the non-virtual world.







[1] This is a Thing Philosophers Do, and I don’t necessarily mean to advocate for definitions based on etymology over use, but it’s often helpful when trying to develop a lexicon to get a sense of what other linguistic roots may be relevant.

[2] It should be noted – though it’s by no means my place to do more than note – that ‘were’ means ‘man’ in the sense of ‘male person’, not as a generic term for human beings. I leave it to more astute feminist scholars to examine the fact that ‘world’ is by root a gendered term.

Abstraction, Simulation and Narrative Time

This post grew out of a conversation that’s happened between several people over quite an extended period of time, so apologies if I have to send you on a bit of a reading list to catch you up.

It more or less started here with Devon Carter’s Critical Switch guest episode about the role of abstraction in JRPG mechanics (which is basically essential reading if you want to follow anything I write on this blog, so get to it if you haven’t already).

Then Austin C. Howe had some thoughts about JRPGs on generation 7 hardware, which I Storified, where he discussed how more powerful technology had revealed some of the ways in which the classic JRPG form struggles with ‘realism’.

That prompted LeeRoy Lewin to write this excellent piece about how the basic abstractions of JRPG combat – HP, MP and XP – are bad representations of anything ‘real’.

Finally, and possibly independently of all this, Vincent Kinian reviewed Yuuyami Doori Tankentai with a focus on how it actually does address the real successfully.

Got all that? The key point I want to focus on is LeeRoy’s, that the mechanical abstractions in JRPGs don’t directly represent the things we ordinarily take them to. HP are a poor representation of health, or even endurance, because health is not linear or one-dimensional. XP in particular, to quote LeeRoy, models “the purest meritocracy, the most awful gamification, the idea that labor can transfer 1:1 value.”

If MP and equivalents are innocent in this, it’s only because they represent something that makes no claim to reality – magical power. Because it’s entirely up to an author to invent a magic system, we can’t gainsay the device of MP, but we can point out that it’s a formulaic and often uninteresting way of limiting power. To be fair, sometimes it doesn’t need to be interesting and is just an unobtrusive balancing tool, but I feel like there’s often a lot that could be done here that isn’t.

The more complex, player-engaging systems built on top of these stats – materia, GF junctions, sphere grids and so on – may be a little more representationally rich, depending on how they are contextualised[1], but the statistical foundation is poor in this regard. So why are these numbers so ubiquitous?

Convention, and the legacy of tabletop roleplaying games, makes up one major part of it, of course. Things are Done This Way because That’s How They’ve Always Been Done (and in the case of at least HP, the problem isn’t unique to JRPGs or even RPGs in general). But these stats do serve a function, or at least are a crucial pillar of a system that serves a function, and that function, I would argue, can be meaningful and valuable.

What JRPG systems – the stuff we think of as ‘systems’, the numbers bits – do is control the delivery of a story. They may do other things as well, but one persistent function is to determine when the story moves forward. Part of this is just to space things out, so you’re not just playing a novel (and to meet the ever-louder consumer demand for ‘value for money’, as measured in hours of ‘content’), but there’s also a crucial contribution that this makes to JRPG stories.

Pacing is everything. JRPG stories tend towards the epic in style as well as length. They are stories of big deeds, world-shaking changes. Worlds do not change overnight. Many forms of storytelling work just fine over short periods – one can hardly object to the near-real-time duration of Twelve Angry Men, or the one-night framing of Die Hard – but the grander the scale of a story, the slower it needs to feel like it moves.

The games industry is already bankrupting itself and driving employees to exhaustion to deliver games of sufficient length and graphical quality to keep ‘the market’ placated. As graphical standards continue to rise, representing the passage of time non-literally is going to get more and more important for delivering long-form stories.

This is where RPG mechanics, and particularly their JRPG versions, can shine. HP and MP represent the costs of time; the wear and tear of travel, the hazards and labour it involves. XP represents the benefits of that time – as LeeRoy pointed out, often badly, but I think this approach to them at least suggests some ways to complicate them into something more meaningful.

What is represented by these stats – perhaps it would be better to say ‘encoded’, since ‘representation’ implies something more explicit – is not really anything about the software objects to which the variables belong. What is represented is the world, the time and space through which these objects move.

If an encounter, or sequence of encounters, leaves your party on their last legs, you’re given the sense of characters limping into town, propping each other up, maybe dragging a stretcher, bags emptied of supplies. Backtrack over the same ground later in the story, and the easy passage, the image it conjures of marching proudly through the same gates with head held high, represents the sheer length of time it takes to master what was once marginal.

Here is where that stuff from Austin and Vincent becomes important. Taking stats to be directly representative creates misleading indulgences about vast gains in personal power and importance over implausibly narrow stretches of time. Austin’s point that realism is about more than just visual literalism, and Vincent’s that the sense of the real comes from the mundane, the stuff that happens between the fantasies, suggest that the way to get real value from explicit stats is to look at what they imply.

If a magic spell allows you to do ten times as much damage to a target as the strongest physical attack, but costs ten times as much to use, what does that say about the scarcity of that spell, the rarity of this casting? If a character is dying of poison and you’re out of antidotes, can you make it to the next inn or item shop in time? Frequent easy encounters that wear you down slowly suggest a long journey; fewer more potent encounters suggest danger and pain but less time; a surfeit of brutal fights implies that the world must turn a little longer before you can make it through.

The actual games could do a lot more to draw attention to this side of reading them, but that doesn’t mean that existing games shouldn’t or can’t be read in this way. It’s an approach that I’ve found useful particularly when looking at games that focus their narratives on journeys – I'm a broken record, I know, but Final Fantasy XII and Tales of Vesperia are both excellent examples of this[2].





[1] Some are much worse, particularly ‘relationship’ systems that reduce social ties between characters to single score variables.

[2] There are a couple of sequences in Vesperia where mechanical representations of the passage of time are directly contrasted with what cutscenes have told you about the time-frame of events, which show both how effectively good stat usage can suggest the passage of time and how quickly bad stat usage can undercut it.