So let me get this straight…

We’re going straight into the weeds.  So look out.  I beat Final Fantasy IX for the fourth time and I feel like I’m still just wrapping my brain around the story.  It’s kind of insane that it’s taken me that many play-throughs (I docked the score I gave it in my previous review) but it’s still an interesting story.  So if you’re interested in cutting to the chase of FFIX, or want to check my understanding of it, then go ahead and click through.  In any case, you’ve been warned.

#BoRT: The Uncanny Valley of Gameplay

The uncanny valley is a concept that video game enthusiasts are familiar with: that the closer we get to replicating the appearance of human beings, the more any remaining flaws will stand out.  The concept is often generalized to the appearance of all things that are made to look or act realistic in games.  And to generalize even further: the closer a game emulates reality, the greater the player’s expectation to interact with that world realistically.

Take, for example, Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain.  While praised for its cinematic qualities and harrowing sequences, it may be more widely known for an oddly executed section of the game that was exacerbated by its focus on realism.  In Heavy Rain, the player goes through the carefully choreographed routine of Ethan Mars.  You groom, play with his kids, and take care of the house.  Eventually, he loses track of his son at the mall.  While the actions the player performs as Ethan up to this point are believable enough, he can only awkwardly shouts “Jason” directly into the crowd.  This would probably be a reasonable thing to do a couple of times, but the game wants Ethan to keep saying it as though he suffers from Tourette syndrome.  It stands out for how clumsy it is compared to the rest of the game up to that point and more people may know what Press X to Jason is than the identity of the Origami Killer.

Another example of the uncanny valley shining through gameplay can be found in the tortured development and release of Duke Nukem Forever.  The Duke Nukem games have gained popularity over the years by promoting a caricature of action film stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Dolph Lundgren.  Duke Nukem Forever will be known for it’s infamously long development process that bridged multiple generations of video games and in that time games went from being about mascots and caricatures to fairly reasonable facsimiles of real people.  So when Duke made his grand return in the modern era, conveyed as a full-fledged character rather than a cartoon, he comes across as an abhorrent, detestable goon who drags the player along through a number of uncomfortable sequences.  For instance:

By the time Duke Nukem finally makes a “You’re fucked,” joke, which he makes in front of two girls who are about to die in the process of getting sexually assaulted, Duke does not come across as cool, witty or likable in the least. He comes across as a vile, callous, thoroughly detestable psychopath.

The joke would still be awful and tasteless if this were a game made in the 90′s, but in this example, more realism translates into a more grotesque and unpleasant experience.  Most games won’t be a trainwreck like DNF but it clearly illustrates how realism can make a bad situation worse.

There’s also an entire genre that has suffered from the emerging effects of the uncanny valley: the jRPG. Games like Final Fantasy rapidly promoted the implementation of realistic non-interactive cut-scenes as a way to highlight their storytelling potential.  But the divergence of realistic presentation against turn-based combat systems that stayed the same comes across as artificial and silly and has left developers of jRPGs struggling to come up with novel ways to bring gameplay into alignment with presentation.  A series known for aggressively pushing for more realistic character models expected its audience to not be baffled at seeing these people carefully taking turns trying to mortally wound one another.

These games go wrong by losing control of the player experience when expectations aren’t managed consistently.  If games can be made to look realistic and cinematic, then of course we want them to be.  But if the expectation for reality in appearance does not align with the expectation to be able to behave realistically then the player is less likely to suspend their disbelief.  For a recent example of a game that’s more successfully at balancing these expectations look no further than Deadly Premonition.  Deadly Premonition takes a philosophy that’s completely opposite to Heavy Rain.  DP dispenses with any pretense that the player should expect the experience to be attached to reality.  It embraces everything that made Press X to Jason unintentionally awkward and hilarious.  You are rewarded for trying to create moments like that by say, waiting until 2 in the morning to visit the sheriff’s house where the game’s protagonist asks whether he prefers mustard or hot sauce.  The sheriff rightly calls you a lunatic and sends you off.  But DP’s detachment from reality allows it to express a more genuine experience for audiences that enjoy that style of humor.  The player is left to wander about play a game that’s far fetched, but consistent by it’s own rules and as such, empowers it.

Developers are getting better at balancing the expectation of realism with the current limitations of the medium.  Realism can artificially constrain the players options in a game and can tie a designer’s hands.  Certainly, when realism is used well, it can make for a powerful experience.  If it goes wrong though, it can go very wrong.  Generally speaking, I prefer games that keep reality at arm’s length.  I find them to more often have a greater capacity for sincerity and entertainment.

Note: #BoRT stands for Blogs of the Round Table.  The preceding post was an entry to the February 2013 theme: Reflecting Reality.

What I love about Indie Games

While perusing the XBLA for games I could spend my holiday MS points on, I stumbled upon Fez.  I’d loosely followed it’s development and learned more about it watching Indie Game: The Movie.  I knew there was buzz around it (as well as some controversy) but I got the demo and that’s all it took to convince me to fork over the magical moon money I had left on my account.  It was a good purchase.  I was vaguely familiar with the premise and that there was more to it than it appeared, but simply cruising around as Gomez, enjoying all of the scenes and animations, the music, and finding all the unique little tricks to each level really endeared the game to me.  It motivated me to go back and watch some of Indie Game: The Movie again and to pay closer attention to the portions concerning Phil Fish and Fez.

I hadn’t really thought about it much up to this point, but over the last four to five years, “indie games” have provided the more memorable gaming experiences I’ve had during that time.  IG: The Movie, highlighted a few: Braid, Super Meat Boy, Limbo, Minecraft, and Castle Crashers.  I never really considered myself in tune with the indie gaming “scene” (if you want to call it that) but as time goes on I’m becoming more and more drawn into it’s content.  Hotline Miami and Lone Survivor were close contenders for being my favorite games of 2012, and playing Fez now I’m starting to have the realization “hey, this is what playing games used to feel like.”  Of course, on the surface, most of these games hearken back to the 16-bit games of yesteryear, and many were developed by people in my generation who played many of the same games as me.  Though I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else to it.

The internet changed games forever.  It opened up entirely new possibilities, and obsoleted entire game formats.  It opened the floodgates of communication and information, and the world felt like a much smaller place.  Games used to be mysteries that you could tinker with and mull over endlessly.  When it’s just you and your friends playing them, it feels like the possibilities are endless.  When everyone in the world is playing a game, it’s old news days after release and we quickly move on to whatever is next.  Coincidentally, games became more predictable in certain ways.  They cost more money to make, creating a great amount of risk-aversion in developers and publishers.  They also required larger teams of content creators, making any singular vision of a game that much more difficult to filter out of the noise.  I should probably only speak for myself, but games became more boring as a result.  There isn’t the same type of magic in AAA gaming now.

The other mystery that was dispelled was in how games are created.  Anyone can download an IDE and build software.  The novelty of the video game lost its luster in an age of iPads and smart phones.  At the same time though, it gave everyone else a chance to create games that could afford to foster a more intimate relationship with their audience.  Adding mystery to a game didn’t automatically create risk, and these games could actually be built out of the creator’s desire to express an idea rather than attempt to persuade customers to hand over their cash.  Indie games and gamers get a reputation for creating self-indulgent “art” games that lean too heavily on having a retro flavor.  That may be true.  It can’t be denied though, and I’m probably stating the obvious here: the games industry landscape is changing and so is the market for games.

We may have an abundance of side-scrolling 2D platformers out there right now, but people like Phil Fish are on to something here.  And the next wave of indie developers are going to start creating games that you will never mistaken for a Super Mario Bros. knock-off.  I’ve more or less been a skeptic of indie gaming up to this point but I’m ready to buy in now.  These games will speak to people in ways that the professional industry is afraid to now, and no degree of production value is going to compare with that.

#BoRT: Challenging The Use of Force

Deus Ex: Human Revolution offers a wide array of challenges in its gameplay, and save for a few boss fights the player is allowed to select the way that they play.  Hacking, stealth, combat, and persuasiveness are all tools that can leverage to tackle a level, but no one approach alone is the solution.  Playing DXHR is about constantly re-balancing your strategy by selecting which skills to “augment.”  And while it explicitly pushes you to work between its four “pillars” of  gameplay, there is always another choice the player is expected to make which is obscured by those pillars: how are you going to deal with the human beings who stand in your way?  Will you kill them?  Will you avoid them?  How do you plan on handling them?  DXHR doesn’t throw a QTE in front of your face and ask you to make a moral choice.  It envelopes you as you progress through it.  Your potential targets are all sorts of people – some of them are clearly vicious, others dangers, and many are innocent and just happen to be in Jensen’s way.  It’s difficult not to try and rationalize your decisions in light of the controversy surrounding your abilities.

For myself, Jensen was someone who could kill but had great reservations about doing so.  I used this as a guide to selecting the augmentations he would install.  He needed to be able to control the situation and not have his actions dictated by targets.  I reserved his lethal firepower for use against professional soldiers, and desperate situations.  I found the strategy to be an enjoyable one.  Not being able to rely on stealth, I found myself trying to mitigate threat environments by persuading as many people as I could, disabling security, and then using non-lethal force to subdue anyone left in the way.  It consumed a lot of energy along the way to use Jensen’s non-lethal take downs, but I felt it was a sound approach to the game’s challenges.

Eventually, Jensen must travel to a sea-based science facility where a world-wide signal is being broadcasted causing those who use augmentations to be driven to homicidal madness.  Jensen himself is immune to the signal’s effects at this stage in the game, so he takes it upon himself to reach the facility and disable the signal.  The problem arises, however, that many of those working at the facility required augmentations by the nature of their work.  The ending of DXHR is commonly written off as being lackluster, but I felt that it was one of the most interesting and cohesive examples of challenge in a game that I’ve encountered.  Here, when the world has fallen into chaos due to augmentation, the player is being challenged to justify the value of the same augmentation in how he or she uses them to preserve life, or concede that they are a grave danger to humanity.

In my game, Jensen was now faced with trying to avoid having to kill dozens, if not hundreds of workers who were entirely innocent.  It was the most extreme target profile the game could throw at you.  These were people who had absolute no ill-intent toward Jensen, but not only stood in his way, but were ready to try to kill you on site.  I worked my way through the facility quickly using up my generous supply of tranquilizer darts, stun guns, concussion grenades.  I exhausted my energy bars subduing crowds in hand-to-hand fighting.  And when I had nothing left, I tried to attract people one at a time so that I could use a take down and then wait until I could recharge for the person.  (Jensen can only recharge one energy cell without using items.)  Even with the aid of the super-human abilities I’d accumulated over the course of the game, the odds were still overwhelming.  And to top it all off, the non-lethal weapons I had been carrying left little room for lethal weapons.

Ultimately, I was faced with a predicament that forced me to re-evaluate the rules I had selected for the game.  I reached a bridge that was crowded with the deranged workers.  Even if I had chosen to enhance Jensen’s stealth abilities further, I no longer had anything to replenish my energy with.  I couldn’t even try to use taken downs against them one at a time, as I would be quickly overwhelmed and killed when I drew the crowd’s attention.  To my knowledge at the time, Jensen was the only one who’d be able to stop the signal, and I did have one option left.  I could hack into a turret and kill everyone on the bridge from afar.  I’d somehow managed to corner myself into having to look at the situation in terms of the needs of the many versus the needs of the few, and the game had forced me to abandon my rules.  The turret cut them all down, but it was my fault.

The decision was rationalized by the notion that if I could make it through, then I would save more people.  Of course this is asking people to die based on the presumptions of one person.  Presumptions that I couldn’t be sure of, even if the people on the bridge agreed that turning off that signal, no matter what the cost, was the right thing to do.  It was murder, no matter how you choose to look at it.  In the end, given what my decisions had led to, I decided that Hugh Darrow’s message about the conspiracy surrounding augmentation was the message that needed to be broadcasted, even if it did scare people into banning this technology.  Because it actually was scary.

I realize that DXHR is just another game, and the people who were shot on the bridge weren’t going to be missed, but challenging the player to justify the narrative that they are constructing in their mind is a powerful tool that was well realized.  The impressions that the player makes in a game make it their own, and while my narrative didn’t quite make it out in one piece, the consequences of my decisions made them particularly memorable, and made DXHR my favorite game of 2011.

Note: #BoRT stands for Blogs of the Round Table.  The preceding post was an entry to the January 2013 theme: Challenge.

The Walking Dead

It comes as a surprise (at least to me) that The Walking Dead has been named “Game of 2012″ by so many blogs and publications.  It certainly doesn’t resemble many of the more recent game of the year winners.  It doesn’t carry the sense of scale of Skyrim, the bombast of Call of Duty, the outlandishness of Uncharted, or the action of Red Dead Redemption.  What we got was a small, thoughtful package of a game that resonated with the gaming community, and should give publishers pause to consider what role writing plays in games.

I’ve had the chance to play through it once myself now, and to watch someone else run through it as well.  While I’m still kind of chewing on the game as a whole, there are gripping moments peppered throughout the experience that ensure its place in my mind as one of the more memorable games I’ve had the opportunity to play.

Players begin the game as Lee Everett, who has stumbled across a young girl named Clementine.  After discovering that her parents are most likely dead, he takes it upon himself to try and take the girl some place safe.  But as the list of safe places is very short, it becomes apparent that protecting Clementine will be Lee’s responsibility for the foreseeable future.

Verbs
The foundation of Walking Dead is an adventure game.  The player navigates Lee Everett through each episode, searching for clues to puzzles, talking with NPCs, and responding to situations that unfold around you in the form of various quick time events ranging from dispatching the undead, traversing the environment, or holding a door closed.  What brings the game to shine however, is the player managing the relationships between Lee and the rest of the group he’s with.  Lee will talk with character’s extensively throughout the game’s five episodes, and the player is responsible for directing the conversation (or refraining from doing so) and making key decisions.

I’ve not spent a great deal of time with adventure games myself, and I wasn’t sure what form a modern game in the genre would look like.  Telltale impressed me though with a fluid interface and intuitive controls.  There’s never a need for a tutorial, since most everything is easy to understand at face value.  There’s rarely a need for the player to think about how they are playing the game rather than about the game itself.  It gets out of your way, allowing you to focus squarely on it’s content.

Spaces
The game’s space is really the story it’s trying to tell, and how you contribute to it as Lee.  It’s what gives the game’s verbs all their weight.  Taken on their own, completing a QTE to stomp a zombie or telling someone to shut up is pretty boring.  But when they’re done to protect someone you care about or when they result in a particular decision being made, then moments like those are tense and create anticipation.  The Walking Dead’s writing and art direction are thoughtfully crafted and result in characterizations that are believable, engaging, sometimes touching, and other times repulsive.

The conversations will always give you something to turn over in your mind while each scenario is composed of multiple layers founded in the game’s themes or present dilemma’s.  This is used to dramatic effect more than once and highlights the contention between group dynamics and the horrific situation unfolding around them.  Lee is challenged by almost everyone he encounters, be it about his fitness to take care of Clementine, his moral standing (Lee is said to be a convicted murderer), or his role in leading the group and what it will take to survive.  These are all themes that are played out in the TV series, but are given weight through player ownership of the decisions that are made throughout the story.

Impressions
The Walking Dead is perhaps best known for the impressions that players can make on the game’s story.  With each episode, you’ll be faced with several “big” decisions which have a dramatic impact on the story.  And at the end of each episode, you’ll get to see each of those decisions and where you stand amongst other gamers.  Your decisions can determine who lives and who dies; who trusts you and who will stab you in the back; and whether or not you as a player can come to terms with who Lee is and what you believe he has to do.  Your interpretation of Lee is just as much of an impression made on the game as the decisions you have him carry out, and game does a remarkable job of reading this and reflecting it back at you.  Even being as small in scope as the story is, the writing weaves all of these player options together into the plot, the dialogue, and NPC characterizations.  They all develop in concert and create an experience that can’t be replicated in other formats, or really in other games.

Your decisions don’t necessarily change the plot to a great degree.  The game uses a foldback scheme to manage the plot and guide players back to a linear path.  This mechanic is so well hidden though that you will believe that each decision has the potential to make or break everything.  Subsequent play throughs will make it more apparent that some outcomes cannot be avoided, but how you reach them still provides great incentive to go along for the ride.  In the end, anyone who’s played the game can probably retell the story as their own, explaining why they had Lee do what he did, and how they look back on those decisions.  And no two people will tell the same one.  There’s always an overarching meta-story at play, and Telltale executes it against the player’s interpretation of the story in an incredibly effective manner.

Telltale has  found a way to interactively deliver storytelling that can contend with entertainment across mediums.  It’s what has excited the gaming community so much.  This is a game that has the potential for mass appeal that demonstrates the medium’s strengths as we understand them to be.  It may not catch the public’s attention this time around, but the game has paved the way for whichever game does.  It’s taken gaming conventions that have been thought to be obsolete and used them to push the medium forward.  It’s a concise and unassuming piece of entertainment that’s not trying to be the game of the year – just a good game.  You can’t go wrong by at least taking a step into the first episode, but you can count on getting drawn into Lee and Clementine’s journey.

Official Website

Note: For more information on the context that I use the terms “verbs”, “spaces”, and “impressions”, please see the post titled I’m going to take the fun out of games.

Final Fantasy IX Revisited

I’ve almost entirely failed at keeping up on new games this year.  I haven’t even managed to keep up on new jRPGs this year and have instead found myself replaying Final Fantasy IX, just over two years since the last time I played it (this makes it my fourth time through the game.)  I reviewed it in early 2011, and here I am again pretending to know what I’m talking about.  It’s not like the game has changed each time I’ve rolled through Gaia.  I might have since playing the game in late 2000, but since late 2010?  Probably not.  Perhaps I just like it and I don’t need any other reason to play it, but I’ll take another shot at trying to pry out what makes the game enjoyable.

Verbs

FFIX has three sets of verbs.  The first being the navigation and exploration of the game’s environments.  Much of the time, the player is represented by Zidane Tribal, a thief who belongs to the Tantalus “Theater Troupe.”  The player character can be moved about screens with the d-pad and can use an action button to initiate interactions with NPCs or to inspect the environment.

The game also has a set of management verbs which allow the player to build and customize characters, manage the inventory of items, and change each character’s equipment.  At any given point in time, the player will have control of four characters, and they are rotated in and out of the party as events progress.  This can make management of characters tedious, since your stock of equipment is limited and when a character is removed from your party, their equipment becomes inaccessible.  This is mitigated to an extent by the fact that many characters use different types of equipment.

And the final set of verbs revolve around the game’s battle mode.  The battle mode is entered at semi-regular intervals while exploring the environments.  The shift in and out of battle mode can be frustrating since there is no indication when it may occur.  And having the entire active verb-set switched so frequently detracts from the value of both.  In any case, once in battle mode, each character the player has control of will have a timer which runs down.  Once it has, they can take an action against any of the targets on screen.  This is also operated entirely through menus, which is adequate but does not serve to highlight and differentiate between your options very well.  Characters act by attacking, defending, using magic/abilities, and items.  Battles are exercises in managing your party’s health and functionality while simultaneously dispatching all targets.  The rotation of characters in and out of your party continuously tests your ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

In all honesty, verbs are probably the weakest point of Final Fantasy IX and the Final Fantasy series as a whole.  They are games that were very well designed for what is now obsolete technology and

Spaces

Spaces on the other hand are where the game shines, and are the reason why Final Fantasy has embedded itself so firmly in the collective consciousness of gamers.  IX takes place in the world of Gaia, initially on the “Mist Continent,” an area with several quasi-medieval societies.  Players begin in the Kingdom of Alexandria as part of a plot for the Tantalus gang to kidnap Princess Garnet.  This sets off a series of events that have Zidane traversing the continent from kingdom to kingdom while exploring dungeons in between.

IX establishes a pacing to the game that consistently introduces new content and reinforces its systems to the player.  In each town you will have the opportunity to shop for new equipment, start side quests, learn more about the town, or participate in completely diversionary card game.  Every location offers sights and sounds that are still memorable 12 years after the game’s original release.  Backgrounds are presented as snapshots and animations of 3D renderings that, even if technologically obsolete, are artistically cohesive and interesting.  At times, playing the game can be like running through a series of paintings, set to a soundtrack by the ever-talented Nobuo Uematsu.

When the player feels ready to move the game forward, they will generally need to clear a dungeon first.  In addition to opening up more of the world map, clearing dungeons will offer opportunities to hunt for treasure and test your party’s configuration.  The game will constantly provide feedback through battles as to how you are managing characters. And as might be expected, each dungeon is generally finished with a boss fight.  While there are ways to efficiently dispatch these enemies rather than simply relying on brute-force, battles are not puzzles and are more about managing situations rather than solving problems.

Eventually the entire world is opened up and free for the player to explore for as long as one might care to before completing the game.  Gaia offers a great deal of content and challenge both inside, and outside of the core plot of the game.  And even if the verbs are lackluster, IX’s spaces more than compensate for that.  At least in my own experience, Gaia is a game world where you can just enjoy being there.

Impressions

The player has a number of opportunities to make impressions in the game.  First among these opportunities being what you choose to unlock in the world.  While player’s will inevitably unlock all of the key locations on the map associated with the plot (this is satisfying in its own right), you will also be able to unlock purely optional areas as well.

Another key opportunity to make impressions in the game is by how you choose to build your characters.  IX does not have an open ended class system.  Each character is bound to a specific class, but never-the-less how each character is equipped and how their individual abilities are unlocked is up to the player.  Choosing how to invest your currency is always an interesting choice when visiting towns.  Abilities must be learned by equipping different items and then using them for a predetermined number of battles before the character memorizes the ability.  If it is unequipped any sooner than that, the ability is no longer available.  Some equipment is only available to specific characters, while some can be shared among them.  It can also be synthesized into new equipment.  In other scenarios, a more powerful item will be available to a character who is still learning the abilities offered by older equipment.  Balancing these options can be challenging and lends itself to subsequent play-throughs, but the option always remains to fight additional battles to obtain more money.  Final Fantasy IX is a linear experience, but there’s a lot of leeway granted to the players to control the pacing and revisit earlier locations.

Perhaps it’s just me, but 2012 felt like an underwhelming year for games.  There have been some gems, but I get the impression that things are starting to change – be it with KickStarter, the ubiquity of mobile and free-to-play games, or that we’re at the tail end of the current generation of game consoles.  We’re in a transitional period for games, and it’s given me an opportunity to revisit some earlier favorites (even if I do have other games to catch up on still.)

I still feel that Final Fantasy IX has much to offer when it comes to fundamentals.  I would hope that someone at Square-Enix is continuing to look at games like this and trying to find ways around its 20th century limitations.  It’s re-release for the PSP and PS3 is a worthy half-step forward.  It doesn’t need to be radically updated, just re-packaged in terms of how the experience is delivered and how players interface with it.

Download at PSN or purchase at Amazon

Note: For more information on the context that I use the terms “verbs”, “spaces”, and “impressions”, please see the post titled I’m going to take the fun out of games.

Resident Evil 6

I very much want to enjoy Resident Evil 6.  While the series has moved towards a more cinematic and action-oriented format, I had a lot of fun with Resident Evil 5 based on its cooperative game play elements.  It may have dispensed with much of its survival horror flavor, but I find science fiction and action elements that have replaced it to be agreeable enough.  That’s not the problem with 6 though.  No.  Capcom and Resident Evil have found themselves in a world that’s less receptive to the series’ traditional format.  It’s not the triple-A series of years past and Resident Evil 6 looks at the road ahead and resolves not to go down without a fight.  And it’s motto going into the game is “if you can’t beat ‘em, join all of them.”

Verbs

Taken individually, the verbs in RE6 are a lot of fun.  I can pop off a quick shot at the nearest target, then make a mad dash across the level, kick a zombie in the face and then take the sledge hammer out of their hands and finish the job.  I can fling myself backwards and unload a magazine while on the ground.  I get to fly airplanes, drive motorcycles, and fire mini guns into a host of mutants as the world comes crumbling down around me.  What’s the problem then?  RE6 is trying to be so many games at once that these verbs don’t come together in any meaningful way.  It’s Gears of War, it’s Call of Duty, it’s Resident Evil, it’s Dark Souls, and a bunch of other games on top of trying to be blockbuster action movie packed with explosions, cute girls, and one-liners.  The designers were clearly given free reign to reinvent the series, and they were definitely inspired by the biggest games from the past 5 years.  But unlike Resident Evil 4, RE6 doesn’t reboot the series in a coherent fashion.  It feels more like Capcom is throwing every idea it can think of at the audience in the hopes of finding something that sticks.

Spaces

The player is thrown into the action immediately for each of the game’s three campaigns.  There’s been a bio-terror attack with global repercussions and you must take control of several of Resident Evil’s well known characters.  The game is frustratingly limited on specifics about who, what, and why things are happening.  This would not be a problem if the game weren’t driven so much by its story and attempts to create a cinematic experience.  At every turn, when characters ask perfectly reasonable questions, they will inevitably be shut down with some variation of “there’s no time” or “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”  After so long, any plausibility for this response evaporates and all you’re left with are cheap excuses for the dog ate Capcom’s homework.  So what if the game is fun to play though, right?

The trouble is that the game is exhausting to play.  You will never be given a chance to stand back and absorb the experience, reflect on what’s happening, and contemplate what lies ahead of you.  You are always running, and not five minutes are allowed to go by before something explodes or otherwise tries to cajole you into continue.  There is novelty in splitting the game up into three campaigns with three different styles of play, but where, say, a cover system makes sense for Chris’ campaign, it only serves to complicate the controls for Leon’s campaign.  Capcom understood this, and as a result, there is no foundation to build on the game play and present new challenges.  All levels in each of the campaigns are a blur of gunfire, explosions and QTEs that really little more investment from the player than time to complete, but with no reward.

Impressions

Being that the challenges of RE6 are so unsubstantial, the chances for the player to make an impression on the game are pretty limited.  Your actions are choreographed to the game’s script, and the decisions you can make have little bearing on the experience.  After completing each level, you will have the opportunity to exchange collected experience points for perks, which you can have three equipped to your character at any given time.  This includes quicker reloads, more frequent item drops, or steadier aiming.  In the end, these are all things that would be useful if the game required players to actively formulate a strategy.  Instead it’s as though you’re given access to a debug menu and are told to tune the game to be less of a chore.  And yes, much of the game’s levels do feel like a chore.  It’s a chore to learn how to use the game mechanics when there’s not much to gain from it.  It’s a chore to fight the same bosses repeatedly in the same campaign, only to have to fight them again when playing the other campaigns.  It’s a pain trying to figure out how to respond to the game’s QTEs.  And it’s a pain to play the game three times over to figure out what’s going on in the first place.  There just isn’t much of the reason to replay the game or to master its systems.

As far as I’ve been able to find out, it sounds like RE6 has been selling well enough in the US and Japan.  I’m not entirely surprised by this.  If I had to make a wager, gamers are as excited about trying out new ideas with as venerable of a series as this.  While the final game doesn’t measure up in the end, Capcom and fans all seem to quite like the idea of RE6.  It’s definitely a series that struggling to find an identity in the modern gaming landscape, and any gamer goodwill being shown at this point won’t last indefinitely.

Note: For more information on the context that I use the terms “verbs”, “spaces”, and “impressions”, please see the post titled I’m going to take the fun out of games.