After about 95 hours, I’m still dumping time and effort into Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together on the PSP. I had figured that after my first play through I would be satisfied with the game’s story and more or less fed up with trying to build my characters. With the World Tarot being featured as prominently as it is, I should have expected that this game wasn’t meant to be played just once (although it’s still quite enjoyable that way.) Since it has an excellent soundtrack and a steady stream of unlockable characters, abilities, and events it was easy to jump back into the game and continue to explore it. The branching storyline in combination with the World Tarot dismantles the conventional structure of the beginning, middle, and ending of a game and subtly reveals a meta-story of sorts which stands apart from any individual story branch. I’ve enjoyed going back and indulging the game’s “what if” scenarios that tweak the personalities in the game such that you can observe what changes about a character based on circumstance and what is consistently true about a character no matter what scenario they find themselves in. The characters of Tactics Ogre are not especially deep but have a texture to them that’s not always present in other games. It is rewarding to play even 100 hours in and I’ve come to appreciate it more since I completed my first play through and review.
Surveying the ruins of the jRPG genre has been a small hobby of mine over the last few years. I’ve been revisiting much of the Final Fantasy series and following how it’s tried to fit in to the modern gaming landscape. It’s fairly clear that even jRPG juggernauts have had difficulty doing that. In any case, these games are anything but prolific compared to 10-15 years ago. They occupied a space in the collective gaming consciousness that games like Modern Warfare occupy today: we couldn’t get enough of it. It was clear though, then and now, that the genre has its flaws which Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 have sought to address. Turn-based combat, random encounters, melodramatic plots, and linear gameplay are pointed to as reasons for the decline of the genre. It’s also been pointed out that developing an HD jRPG of the same size and scale of those of previous generations would take a disproportionate amount of time and resources compared to other genres.
I’d like to suggest another contributing reason to why the market for jRPGs has atrophied: the value of the jRPG has declined as the internet has expanded. It might be hard to believe, but there was once a time when we connected to the internet using “modems” and you couldn’t talk on the phone while you did it. You might be able to download a few MP3s in an evening, and if you were lucky they really were the tracks that the internet said they were. Around this time, gamers were impressed when a game was going to be released that was three or four discs long. It was an incredible deal, you got enough music to fill four CDs, 50+ hours of gameplay, hours of movie quality cut scenes, and an entire world to live in while you waited for stuff to download. I think of jRPGs as a more passive experience when compared to western RPGs or other games. The player mostly sat back and took in the world, doing what they wanted when they wanted rather than being about the player expressing themselves in and impacting that world. jRPG designers were determined to douse/smother you in content while the real world was still dependent on narrow-band or meat-pace content delivery systems. Your options for entertainment were limited, expensive, and required you to be seated in front of a low-res screens. jRPGs, for receptive audiences, thrived in a moment in time when people were hungry for more.
It didn’t matter if their anime-style plots were ridiculous and melodramatic, or that the game followed a strictly linear plot, or if the core gameplay was selecting menu options and taking turns hurting each other; jRPGs were a refuge from a world suffering from a dearth of content. Eventually we got Youtube, Wikipedia, Google, Netflix, Facebook, and other sites along with 24/7 access to the internet that’s available on your phone, where you are mere moments away at any given time from being able to access libraries of movies and music. The floodgates of commercial, and user-generated content were opened, and the advantage that the jRPG genre once held evaporated. The cracks in the formula became more apparent. Quantity over quality was far less attractive, and the things that made a jRPG fun to play quickly became things that made them annoying. Why should I bother to sit down in front of a TV for 50 hours to access a game world’s content when I can just watch Youtube on my phone while simultaneously doing something else? The ratio of time to quality entertainment was diminished compared to what we could find on the internet on the whole.
Obviously there are still games that people are willing to sink inordinate amounts of time into enjoying. But these are games that put the player in a more active role or offer a deeper social element. Shoveling heaps of content onto the player in the form of towns, movies, monsters, and music isn’t as easy to justify now when it must be in HD or be fully orchestrated. The value of the genre has gone down, while the costs of producing these games has gone up. They succeeded in a narrow-band world and there are still qualities of the genre that remain strong today, but they can’t hope to succeed the same way that they once did and so now they flounder. They don’t need to be re-invented – developers and publishers need to figure out how to build one that fits in as part of someone’s life and not something that demands a great deal of undivided attention. They’ve found moderate success on mobile platforms, and that should be a good indicator that there are yet good opportunities to push the genre forward. But while there are even better opportunities to build Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Mass Effect I won’t hold my breath waiting for a HD remake of Final Fantasy VII. The moment for jRPGs has passed unless developers find a clever way to re-interpret their past value.
For a long time, Final Fantasy VIII was one of my favorite video games. And in a way, it still is. Final Fantasy VII and VIII got me to thinking that games were a creative medium rather than just toys, and that was exciting. Revisiting VIII with a more critical eye, I can appreciate why so many people will react negatively when you bring the game up. It’s a departure from the series formula that has the capacity to repel jRPG fans as well as highlight the flaws of the genre. Final Fantasy VIII is an idea of what could be in a game, and then failing to execute on that idea at almost all levels. It’s still a spectacle of gaming history which retains enough entertainment value to earn a final score of 1/3.
Another day, another way to die in Dark Souls. This game has grown on me considerably since the last time I had written about it. I still can’t say that I totally buy into the hype I’ve seen for Dark Souls online but I keep coming back to it even in spite of battles with the likes of the Capra Demon or Ornstein & Smough. What’s becoming more apparent the more I play (I’m sure my girlfriend originally made note of this) is that Dark Souls is like Squaresoft’s Vagrant Story. Both are games that offer an intricate combat system that places you, alone, in an unforgiving realm that is both ruined and beautiful. What makes both games unforgiving though is how little insight they give into their gameplay mechanics. There’s no avoiding death in these games, but it’s not because they are exceptionally challenging, they are just exceedingly difficult to learn how to play effectively.
These are games that have a high price of admission while offering:
Combat mechanics that you can spend dozens of hours exploring and mastering.
Impressively daunting boss monsters.
Dungeons fraught with danger and opportunity.
Understated stories that invites you to dig deeper.
An overstated sense of confusion and frustration.
I think Dark Souls will continue to endear itself to me (but not before inspiring a series of curses a mile long) and I’ve got a feeling that by the time I finally get around to playing Skyrim I will be a little disappointed when it treats me more nicely.
Ken Levine Wants You To Stop Staring At His Big Sisters Here’s a protip to Ken Levine: if you don’t want your audience to be distracted by a character’s chest, then don’t make their chest the center of attention. I’m sure you can spare a few polygons to cover her up a bit if you’re that worried. If you want to sell a game based in part on the sex appeal of its characters then at least be honest about it like…
PlayStation 2 is still selling, 10 years later The strongest evidence that says the success of a console hinges on its game library. It will be interesting to see where the Wii is at in another five years.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim I saw the video at the bottom of the post before I actually played the beginning of the game. Now I am just disappointed when I see normal dragons in the game.
Games As An Aesthetic Form
An excellent talk on the contributing elements to games and beauty. Frank Lantz chooses to look at games as an aesthetic form instead of art, which makes for a more productive discussion.
The Game Design of Everyday Things: To Shape the Future
It’s easy to use grandiose phrasing and terminology to describe what games can do, but I really like “landscape gardening” as used to describe how a world is built around the player.
I bet the most insecure [gamers] would even start to question themselves and wonder why they liked Nathan so much. I mean, they’ve just spent three games staring directly into the ass of a gay man for hours at a time
What I’ve Been Playing
Dark Souls
I recently rediscovered that I could stream music while playing games on the 360. Playing this game to metal makes it twice as fun play and half as painful to die.
Mass Effect
The Steam sales have slain my wallet. Now it’s time to start playing them.
It’s been a couple of months now since I wrote a review and I’ve been sitting on a pile of games that I’ve beaten running back into July. So some of these are going to be brief in the hopes that I’ll get caught up again.
