I beat a game!!: Soul Blazer

Soul Blazer is a cute little game for the SNES in which you play an angel sent by God to save the world; it's a mark of the fact that it was made in the pre-Playstation era in that religion, while not the huge presence you'd expect in a game with this premise, is unambiguously Not Evil. God (or "The Master" as he's named) does not betray you and show himself to be secretly the Big Bad; the Church is not corrupt; there's no moral ambiguity.

I'm a sucker for a good action-RPG. I like games that have the depths of an RPG system, but I'm sick of micromanaging my character, sick of levelling, sick of turn-based combat--I've been playing RPGs for the past 18 years, when I got a copy of Dragon Warrior for subscribing to Nintendo Power, and it gets kind of old after a while.

While Soul Blazer is far from a perfect game, it's hard to find any obvious flaws that glare at you: there's a bit too much backtracking, but I played the game on an emulator (after, of course, legally purchasing my own copy, sure). Gameplay-wise, it's a pretty solid Zelda clone with fewer puzzles. The handling of enemies is interesting: except for a slight sprinkling of respawning enemies, the enemies are all handled through monster lairs: a glowing tile that a finite number of a monsters spawn out of. When you've defeated all of them, the color of the tile changes, you stomp on it, and then you'll never get monsters from there again. It makes end-of-game levelling difficult but also unnecessary: the game expects you'll get 100% completion (which is awesome, I hate obscure and overwhelming sidequests), and you'll be at the proper level to beat the final boss with a bit of strategy.

When you stomp on an enemy lair, a few things happen: a treasure chest will appear, part of the landscape will change to let you progress further, or you'll unseal a creature. That's the main gimmick of the game: the Big Bad has sealed away all of the life in the world. When you start a level, you come upon a completely-empty town, and as you go through the level, animals and buildings and people begin to appear. It's a precursor to Dark Cloud in this regard, and calling it "a 2-d Dark Cloud without randomized dungeons" is a pretty good descriptor. The player, however, does not take an active role in arranging a town--characters appear in one location and one location only and it's all handled for you automatically. The game Actraiser--also by the same company--is very similar, and I'm interested in playing the other games in the loose series (Actraiser is simply by the same developer; Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma are somehow directly related to Soul Blazer but I misremember how; I've played all of them and all are good, and I think I'll get through them next.) If you're as much into animals as I am, you'll like it, particularly Stage 2, where you restore a forest and get to meet dogs and moles and birds and deer and all cute little things.

Particularly amusing to me--considering that the game was published by Enix, who is famous for it in the Dragon Warrior games--is the handling of a But Thou Must in the game's ending. The Designated Love Interest (who, based on the portrait of her we see during the credits, will be played by Laura Dern in the movie) asks the hero if he'll promise to remember her and come back for her, and a dialog box pops up. Because we've played RPGs before, we expect the box to say "Yes/No" and if we say "No" we'll get a scolding and the box will appear again. The box simply says "Yes"--only one option. But Thou Musts allow the forcing of one choice while giving us the option of more than one, but I've never seen it so transparent, and I've never seen subversions of it as early as this game, at least not that I can remember. More recent games do parody it by making all of the choices variations on "Yes" or "No" but I don't think I've ever seen a single option in a box.

It's worth playing--it's one of those rare games that's charming and fun enough that you can excuse any flaws and the lack of polish. Soul Blazer won't change your life, but I've got a soft spot for it, and it'll give you a week or two of idle playing (or a weekend of concentrated play) that you'll enjoy.

Non-diegetic gameplay

It's an old joke: when a meteor is poised to destroy the earth, it's only appropriate and proper to do sidequests. It'll wait. Unless there's an explicit timer counting down the time until the Mako reactor explodes, videogames give you an unlimited amount of time in order to complete their goals. Xenosaga Episode 1 is one of the more egregiously amusing examples: when the party enters the final dungeon, the Big Bad appears and tells you that he's going to Turn On The Big Gun Of Doom, which will take him about ten minutes. If I remember correctly, he wasn't bluffing. Simply going through the dungeon took me over an hour--the dungeons in that game are huge--and before I did that I decided that I was way underlevelled, so I spent another three or four levelling up and doing sidequests. Time limit of ten minutes notwithstanding, you still make it to the final room just in the nick of time.

The folks at TVTropes call this a particular form of Gameplay and Story Segregation, a fairly common one, and it's not hard to see why it exists: you want to give the story a sense of urgency, and having a villain simply hanging out in the back room playing paddleball while he waits for you to show up isn't a good way of heightening dramatic tension. We'll be told that time is of the essence because we're at the climax of the game, but meanwhile, we may not be done with the gameplay: we may be underlevelled, there may be some items we want to buy, and it's fair enough that we get the chance to club some more rats.

The term diegesis--and its related adjective diegetic--are generally used in film and most often used to describe music. Diegetic basically means in-world and has an antonym in the term non-diegetic. Diegetic music is music that the characters can hear--a character turns on his CD player and begins grooving to "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" by Mission of Burma. He can hear it--every character who comes within range can hear it. In another movie, a character is running because he's late for class and "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" comes on the soundtrack as we see him tearing across campus; the audience can hear it, it underscores the tension and speed of the moment, but all that the character can hear is his own heavy breathing, his heart pounding in his ears, and the kids he's almost crashing into yelling at him; this is non-diegetic music. It's a convention we accept: no one imagines that he can hear the song in the second case, and in fact, some movies will set up gags based on that expectation. One of my favorites is in the eating disorder episode of Strangers with Candy. Jerri looks sadly into the camera as the soundtrack swells: "Your problems couldn't be any clearer/ no one pays any attention to you/ you are large and quite obsese"--and, annoyed, Jerri turns the radio off because she's sick of hearing that song everywhere. (The gag repeats two more times, once in Spanish and is one of those examples of a repeated gag that is funny every time, Family Guy I'm looking at you.) We're set up by television convention to believe that this is not an in-world song--and our expectations are thwarted when it turns out to be diegetic.

I've heard the term "non-diegetic gameplay"--at least on Wikipedia--used to refer to, for example, the out-of-world elements of a game--talking about character sheets and rolling dice and all that--but that's a slightly different term, specifically, metagame. (In a console game, metagame refers to what you do with the controller.) I use the term non-diegetic gameplay to refer to parts of the game that don't actually happen.

Consider a hypothetical example based on Dragon Warrior mechanics. Nigel, our hero, is at level 4; he's tasked with defeating the Evil Kobold that has taken place in the woods behind the town. He fights through the wood, faces the Kobold, and promptly gets his ass handed to him. He revives in town with half of his gold taken from him but figures that he's simply misunderstanding the nature of the boss--that he's using the wrong strategy. So he fights through the wood again, faces the Kobold, tries a different, better strategy, one which knocks more damage off, but he still gets killed. So after he revives again, he spends the next hour of gameplay and makes it to Level 5. He faces the Kobold again and once more gets killed. He spends two more hours of gameplay and makes it to Level 7. This time, when he fights the boss, he defeats it, gains 100 gold and 200 experience, plus the respect of the townspeople. (If this is Dragon Warrior VII, he's got an awesome feast awaiting him too.)

Were Nigel to narrate the story of his quest, it would not be, "Well, I explored the woods, fought the Kobold, died, fought the Kobold again, died again, leveled up a bit, fought the Kobold a third time, died, leveled up some more, and defeated the Kobold on the fourth try." It would likely be along the lines of, "I explored the woods, and then I fought and defeated the Kobold." Storywise, the protagonists--even the angsty, edgy ones--are traditionally heroic as far as combat prowess goes. The plotlines of most of them describe the characters as chosen, or gifted soldiers, or specially trained, or even simply normal people who are really goddamn lucky. There is no room for a character who is clumsy or failure-prone. The storyline ignores the hours of training and preparation; while the gameplay--and more importantly, the player--can't do that, the NPCs in the game merely act as if the main character is wandering from town to town solving problems and succeeding, rather than trying and failing multiple times before getting it right.

The narrative of the storyline and the narrative of the gameplay are different; for all intents and purposes, a majority of the narrative of the gameplay simply does not happen in the world of the game. Levelling is non-diegetic; I would venture to say that a majority of the gameplay in an RPG is non-diegetic.

Basically this does explain a lot: If all those hours of clubbing rats to get gold to get better equipment didn't actually happen, then the characters weren't ignoring Meteor: in the world of the game, they went straight to the final dungeon. The whole "Why don't they just use a phoenix down on Aeris" argument becomes a moot point: in-battle deaths are non-diegetic; Aeris is the only character who "really" dies. (Otherwise, the narrative becomes, "Tifa died, and I revived her, and Barret died, and I revived her, and I died, and Tifa revived me, and then Aeris died, but I couldn't revive her for some reason, then Tifa died again..." It's more along the lines of, simply, "Aeris died.")

But I'm not sure if it's a good thing, and I'd like to see games do something with the concept--I mean, the metagame has gotten parodied and deconstructed and all that, but I can't think of a single instance of a game that takes seriously the concept that the player's experience and the character's experience are two different animals, or at least pays attention to it. Granted, every player levels a different amount, and you'd have to take that into consideration: Seth might beat the Kobold on his first try, and Nate might have to get to level 9 before he wins the fight. I don't think that putting the entire game on a timer is the way to go every time, but I'd like at least an acknowledgement from the game that I am, indeed, playing it.

Kingdom Hearts

I just can't tell why, exactly, I consider Kingdom Hearts to be a great game--it's certainly not a good game. It's maddeningly flawed: the level design is awful, the levels themselves are pretty barren, the gummi ship bits are execrable and you've got to do them OVER and OVER and OVER again, the controls are stiff, the whole "you can't view your menu even to change camera settings" thing was a bad idea, the whole mythology--while interesting--is convoluted beyond belief--

--and yet, somehow, it's a compelling experience: this is my third time through the game, and since I rarely replay games that's saying something significant. I think the audacity and outright charm of the premise still hasn't gotten old. It pissed me off, all the "kiddie" comments it got--I'm a red-blooded American boy, and I grew up with Disney characters, with the movies it redoes. It's impossible to play through the game without feeling like some part of your childhood is being validated--turned darker, the sequel especially but also the first game having some relatively disturbing undertones.

Kingdom Hearts ends up feeling like the effort of a team that knew the basics of what they wanted to do but not being quite able to make the end product match their vision--you can see the game they were trying to make, and that game was awesome--and it's the rare case of a sequel which fixes most if not all of the first game's problems. It's been two years almost to the day that I last played Kingdom Hearts 2, so I might be rusty (part of the reason I'm replaying the first is because I want to replay the second and need a brushup on story)--but I know the gummi ship areas were better (if still not *thrilling*.) The battle system felt a bit tighter--fighting a thousand enemies in the first game's battle system would have been a frustrating goddamn mess. Doing that fight in the second game's battle system is almost a pleasure.

The sense of pace, particularly in the first game, is very weak. It's an incredibly common technique--used in film, literature, games, any kind of media--to have an extremely tense series of scenes, a hook to thrill us immediately, and then calming down the pace and introducing the characters. Kingdom Hearts tries to do that--we get a pretty video of Sora's dream, and then we're taken to a black void with floors made of stained-glass portraits of Disney princesses, for a tutorial section. It's decently atmospheric--and it's got a badass orchestral theme which slowly and subtly increases in volume--it sets up a few themes--those princesses are important, the whole darkness/shadow themes are introduced--and it's vaguely more integrated than the average tutorial--but it doesn't come off as particularly tense--it's very obvious that you're playing a section completely separate from the rest of the game. And then, it's off for fun on Destiny Islands, where you see a series of scenes, and...get to have more tutorials. You're given a mission of putzing around the island and finding a few scavenger hunt items for a raft, and since none of the environments across the game are particularly interesting, it doesn't come off as particularly fun. After a cutscene, you're tasked with...finding more scavenger hunt items. Since you've just done that, it's much less fun. After that--almost two hours in--the game becomes properly exciting--your island begins to go to hell, people make strange pronouncements, and then...you find yourself in another town, puttering around.

And as far as I can tell, there's no real aim for you puttering around. The game tries to make some Comedy out of it--you're looking for the next cutscene while Goofy and Donald are looking for you, and they do the thing where you exit a room and they come into the same room looking for you. And you go to the next area, and they come into the area that you just left. Repeat until you get bored, go to the save point, and quit for the night, because leaving the room where the save point is is apparently the trigger for the cutscene. There's no real indication of that--it happened to me almost randomly. The entire game is like that--fight some mooks, wander around, fight some more mooks, wander around, and hope that this is the room with the cutscene. (If I remember correctly, KH2 features a minimap with a flashing red arrow, and I hate anyone who thinks that that cuts down on exploration, because by and large wandering around is not fun.)

It's like I said: the game works in spite of itself, and while it might have made a better movie, a lot of it is great--I love seeing familiar plots get turned around to fit an overarching metaplot. And where the game succeeds, it succeeds brilliantly: the beginning of Wonderland was exactly how I wanted it to be (and I wouldn't have minded if it'd been extended in favor of kicking out the boring Lotus Forest scavenger hunt), and I remember flying around in Neverland to be awesome. (I'll see if my memory is correct.) I'm hoping to knock this one out quickly, although Cerebus is being a bastard--I know I beat it within a rental period the first time around, although I didn't have a job wasting all of my time when it came out. Some, start paying me to write about games: I hate working.

Your Girlfriend Mode

It may not be the most feminist term I've ever come up with, but my friends and I use the term "Your Girlfriend Mode" to describe the difficulty level that I regularly play at.

The etymology is along these lines: You have this game, and you want your girlfriend to see it, because it's blowin' your mind and it's awesome and you'd like to share it with her. Unfortunately, all girls, without exception, suck at videogames. If you give the game to her at a normal difficulty level, she'll keep dying, will get tired of it, and won't want to play it, and will miss the experience. Easy Mode to the rescue: put it on a level where all enemies will die on one hit, where all the secret riddles are extremely simple, and there are health nummies all over the place, and she'll be able to have a version of the experience that's more than just watching you play.

I tease--it's funny on the level that many of my female friends do play videogames and can kick my ass, and on the level where I haven't dated a girl since 1999--but I am extremely glad that many games nowadays contain a Your Girlfriend mode. This is the level that I regularly play on. It's excusable when I'm just renting a game--I want to beat it before the rental period is up, and don't want to spend much time dying--but even on games I've purchased, I just simply don't find harder difficulty settings to be more enjoyable. Normally they do things like give monsters more hit points, give you fewer, and scatter fewer health items around--and that, to me, doesn't make games harder, it simply makes them more frustrating. And let's face it: I have a job and a life and if I'm spending too much time on a level, I'm going to give up on it, plain and simple. The types of challenges I enjoy in games--mostly environmental puzzles like in Zelda or ICO--can't really be made any harder or easier.
Well, okay, they can, but then you're going to get into the area of multiple versions of dungeons--in effect creating two or more separate games--and few if any developers are willing to do those things. It is much easier to make combat more "difficult" and since I don't enjoy combat...

Difficulty settings are one of the few things that The World Ends With You did perfectly--you are able to customize the game's difficulty level on the fly to your heart's content. You can raise or lower your character's level, which mostly affects how many hit points he has. You can raise or lower the difficulty level of the fight--which I believe affects the monsters' stamina. And there's an actual reason to make the game harder on yourself--lower levels make the enemies drop more items; higher difficulty makes the items better-quality. It goes beyond simple bragging rights ("Yeah, I beat that boss on SUPER HARD.") There's usually no functional difference between difficulty levels as far as most games are concerned. If there's any difference, it's usually there'll be a different cutscene or a better ending on a harder level--and frankly, I'm just going to go on Youtube and watch it anyway. If you're going to make difficulty settings, give me a reason to play harder, make it more of an interesting challenge rather than a frustrating challenge--don't simply make it easier for me to die.