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).

Survive, Mola Mola! No, wait, don't-!

In its little retro-blue text box, my mola mola screams about how scary the sea turtle is. The screen fades white, my gut slowly turning with it as I wait to see whether this will be the adventure that kills my largest-yet pet. Before the clunky software delivers its verdict, though, I'm already twisting in another direction. If this fish dies, I'll probably have enough game points to buy the last new food from the shop...

For those who've missed it, Survive! Mola Mola is an iOS/Android idle game from Select Button. It mainly concerns the wondrous ocean sunfish (in case you can't guess from my header, I've added the ridiculous, oversized fish-head to my list of favourite animals). Ostensibly, it's a Tamagotchi – feed your digital pet, and occasionally it dies. The longer it lives, the larger it grows, achieving new ranks including Mola King, possibly the best piece of visual design I've ever seen.

Seriously, look at this guy.

But there's another side to this, because it's also a cookie-clicker phone game and so has to have some stuff in it that you can unlock. So it does; you can unlock new foods, new 'food levels' that make food spawn faster, and new adventures (once-hourly set-pieces with a cute graphic and some text, like the 'greet a sea turtle' one described above). These are bought with an in-game currency that you can also pay for.

Thing is, the quickest way to earn currency is to die. There are small rewards for completing missions and reaching ranks, but the bulk of the points come from your rank at death. High-scoring death is worth as much as ten times any other points dividend in the game. To cap that off, most of the game's obvious entertainment value (discounting my inability to keep a straight face when looking at mola king) comes from the quirky explanations of each death.

If you've seen but not played Mola Mola, this is what you'll have seen. The 'Sudden Death! Cause: Sea Turtle Was Too Scary' tweets. The scary turtle is perhaps the most infamously strange, but exemplifies the tone. They're quirky, cute and fun, well-matched to the game's retro feel, and enticing to collect.

I know, I know, it's starting to sound like I might be talking about (whisper it) ludonarrative dissonance. Putting aside the well-established criticisms of that term, though, it's not clear that it applies here. After all, what's the narrative? It's true that there's a vague sequence of discovery moving through the game but it's not much of a story per se.

I think a better term is Heather Alexandra's idea of 'ludic pressure' (see also), defined as "the application of a force by the game on the player, as expressed through the mechanics, intended to elicit an emotional response." Mola Mola's tamagotchi mechanics push me to want the fish to survive; the currency and humorously morbid death-collecting push me in the opposite direction. The net effect is the hanging sensation just below my diaphragm, the swallow half-caught in my throat as I wait for the randomiser to deliver.

This gets closer to the essence of the sensation, at least. But let's look a bit closer at these pressures. On the one hand, the pressure to have your mola mola die clearly fits the bill – arbitrary and abstract as the currency mechanic is, it's a clear and immanent component of the game. But what mechanics power the pressure in the other direction?

I'm not sure they're mechanics in Mola Mola at all. And while the art and text are cute, I don't think they explain the gut response of wanting my fish to survive. That pressure, I think, comes from other games, other mechanics. It comes from my first tamagotchi, probably 15+ years ago, and the numerous other tamagotchis I've had since, and every other virtual pets game I've played/seen/heard of in that time. It's an expectation grounded in a much broader experience of the genre.

The best piece of evidence I can offer is that this second force, call it an interludic (as opposed to an intraludic) pressure, has faded as I've grown more familiar with this specific game. I don't get that pulled-in-two-directions lurch anymore when the screen whites out. It's just 'dammit, fish, die so I can buy that giant clam!'

Maybe this sounds like a specious concept. I think it's quite important, though, to recognise that mechanics have at least as much intertextual significance as any other element of a game. Our earliest experiences of a given game are coloured by our familiarity with its mechanic set and interface. These things can shape our whole understanding of the context we're inserting ourselves into.

Remember Test Chamber 16, the first level with the turrets in Portal? How disorienting it was to face a combat situation in a first-person shooter where your gun wasn't a weapon? I found it utterly panic-striking, but the level itself isn't that hazardous. One of Portal's greatest strengths is its smooth tutorial arc, and Test Chamber 16 is a perfect example of that, carefully feeding you just enough difficulty at each encounter to keep you at the edge of safety but never over it.

Right near the end of the level, you open a door – that you're more or less forced to stand in front of – to reveal a turret pointed right at you. In a standard fps, this would be a simple reflex test. Even replaying it for this article, I almost tried to shoot the turret... with my portal gun.

That twitch reflex, and the gut lurch that followed it as I realised no, I have to dodge, are the product of a force exerted on me by the mechanics of a game – just not the one I was playing. Many shooters have conspired to train my reaction. Someone who didn't know the genre would still, doubtless, feel a stab of anxiety at that moment, but without any frustrated expectation of empowerment through reflex.

If (intra)ludic pressure is a force exerted on the player by the mechanics (ludic elements) of a game, then interludic pressure may be useful as a way to analyse influences on the player derived from their experience of other titles. We could distinguish further, between specific and generic interludic pressures or between those deployed deliberately for subversion and those that designers subconsciously rely on, but these are questions for another time.