I beat a game!!: Dragon Quest IV

Well, let's just say I take back a lot of what I said: I don't necessarily hate the RPG genre, I hate its bloat under the reign of Final Fantasy. I'm not interested in tedious sidequests, or long drawn-out storylines, or playing for 70 hours just to get through the main quest.

Dragon Quest IV is an RPG without the bloat. I made it through the main quest in a little under 20 hours, and it took me another 3-4 to finish the bonus dungeon and get the secret ending, and I enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. There is no padding, no overly-long dungeons, no extraneous levels. Part of this is faithfulness to the original game it's a remake of--which was made right around the time RPG Bloat was discovered--but part of it is the fact that Dragon Warrior, even in its 100+ hour seventh incarnation, simply prides itself on the fact that it is simple, stripped-down, old-school.

In 1992 I was too young to get games on the day they were released--pre-orders didn't exist that I was aware of, and I was dependent on pooling allowance and begging my folks for money and to drive me to the store--but I'd been anxiously awaiting the game since it was announced. Previews were not the prominent irrelevancy that they are today, and I didn't have much more information than a notice in Nintendo Power to the effect of, "Dragon Warrior IV is coming out!" I got the game soon after it was released and it kicked me in the face, with its structure, with the simple hugeness of the world.

DWIV's main conceit is its chapter system. When you begin the game, you get to name and gender your hero, and you won't see him or her for a very long time (unless you're playing the remake, where you get a 5-minute prologue showing the hero in his hometown.) The first four chapters of the game each take place in a different area of the world (with a few overlaps) and star a different main character. It's like a collection of short stories--each has a goal which ranges from a simple "go on an adventure to prove yourself" to a more elaborate "find out who killed your father and go and get revenge." Behind the scenes, the overarching plot begins to bubble up--you begin to hear whispers of someone named Saro, begin to learn about the chosen hero, begin to realize that the forces of darkness are gathering. Each of the characters ends his or her story knowing their journey has just begun, and resolves to do something about the evil that is about to awaken and destroy their land. In the fifth and longest chapter (longer than the other chapters combined), you finally get control of the hero you named at the beginning, and the first half of this quest is to find the other characters to form your party.

At the time, nothing like this had been seen in RPGs or otherwise--the most elaborate narrative structures were either "go through the same amount of levels but pick a different character to go through each" (Mario 2) or "select your stage from a menu" (Mega Man). I've always been a sucker for multiple points of view--not sure if Dragon Warrior IV started this love or if I love the game because of it, but whatever--and this was one of the most sophisticated structures I'd seen. It makes the threat to the world seem much more dangerous--people from all over are becoming aware of it, and we get to see it build up from a personal threat (the kidnapping of children from a small remote village) to a worldwide one. It also services the non-Hero party members much greater than any other game. DW4's immediate predecessor allowed you to form your party from random adventurers--you picked a name, gender, and class and that was ALL you learned about the person. Here, rather than passively learning their backstory through flashbacks or dialogue or whatever, you actively participated in How We Got Here. And rather than simply supporting the hero, the characters are shown to be perfectly competent and capable on their own before they meet him.

I remember the game being extremely hard, a few dungeons in particular; it took me over a year to get to the final boss and I still have never defeated him on my original cartridge. In contrast, I made it through the main quest of the remake in about a week, with another week (of admittedly less-concentrated play) to get through the bonus dungeon. The final boss kicked my ass on the first try; after about a half hour or so of levelling, I beat him on my second. I'm not sure if I've just gotten more used to levelling up--when I was a kid I would try to avoid it as much as possible, and now, even though I'm not grinding's biggest fan, I recognize that it needs to be done sometimes--or if they've tweaked the system to make it easier. Possibly a combination. Finally beating Necrosaro was almost sad. It's like the conversation between Bud and Elle Driver in the trailer in Kill Bill 2--Do you feel relief, or regret? Necrosaro was one enemy from childhood I could never kill, and now I've done it.

Necrosaro has the most sympathetic backstory in the Dragon Warrior series. For the most part, the villian is a Big Hulking Evil who wants to Destroy Everything because he is Evil. (And the vast, vast majority of these Big Hulking Evils turn out to be controlled by a Bigger Hulking Evil who is More Evil than you could imagine.) Saro is different. He's got the general monster contempt for humanity and an insatiable ambition and lust for power, true, but he's in love with an elf woman that cries rubies. Because of her talent, she's cruelly abused by greedy humans and eventually killed. Her mistreatment and eventual death drive him insane and lead him to believe that humans need to be purged from the world. It ain't Dickens, but by 1992 standards it's impressive. The bonus dungeon--which you need to go through either six or seven times if you want to get the best equipment--lets you find a way to resurrect the elf. It turns out that Saro's been manipulated by one of his generals--a mini-boss character that you face earlier--who turns out to be the true villain of the game. Saro joins your party for revenge, and he's a tough little guy. It's very weird--I've always been fond of the-enemy-of-my-enemy teamups--but this is a guy I've cursed for the past 16 years, and now he wants to join my party?! Although I guess that's kind of the point. The bonus boss is a simple pallate swap of the final, and that's disappointing too--it'd be cool to have some new and more horrible design--and he went down on my first try. (I had made my way through the bonus dungeon those 7 times, had the best possible equipment in the game, and was very overlevelled, but still.)

But I do like that I could have all the best equipment. The hero's legendary equipment is gained through the normal course of the game; Saro's ultimate is gained through the aforementioned 7 trips through the bonus dungeon; everyone else's is either found in treasure boxes or bought from stores. There are two major sidequests in the game--one involves scouring the world for medals which can be traded in for better equipment, and I got most of those; the other involves finding people around the world in order to grow a town, and you're given clues as to where they are. I like this very very much. The game can be completed to perfection without a guide if you're in an exploring mood--nothing is vague or bizarrely clued or arbitrary. There's no clicking on every single pixel on a wall to see if there's a secret there. RPGs should be this way. To me, who does not have the time or the ambition to dodge 100 lightning bolts, a game like this feels challenging--I do have to explore and find stuff--but not frustrating--everything's findable. Again, the original game came out before RPG Bloat.

The Final Fantasy IV DS remake felt useless--it was in a way too faithful in that it kept all of the problems of the original and what it added was stupid. DWIV's remake keeps everything that was good in the game, and fixes any problems it has by virtue of being almost 20 years old: battles are streamlined, the Tactics system is fixed (originally, in Chapter 5 you could only have your characters be computer-controlled and you only manually controlled the hero in battles. It's handy when levelling or going through random encounters, but a lot of the characters ended up doing stupid things like wasting turns and MP casting Instant Death spells on the final boss. You can now have the option to manually control everyone, which makes bosses a LOT easier), there's an excellent map screen, there's a bag (Dragon Warrior has always had a limited inventory for each character; since VII, I believe, they've added a bag which never gets filled; it's balanced by not letting you access it during battle, so you've still got to manage your character inventories), walking is fast, the graphics are excellent. Polygons only vaguely make sense as far as the DS is concerned--although I'll usually come on sprite graphics' side whenever possible--because with the system's power, it's a lot easier to make good-looking sprite graphics than it is to make good-looking polygon graphics. FFIVDS comes across looking ugly and dated; DWIVDS looks fresher and prettier.

I'm mildly excited about the remake of V coming out--it's not my favorite in the series but it's not a bad one--and I'm extremely thrilled for the upcoming remake of VI, which I've played and loved (it's got a job system! I'm a sucker for job systems!) IVDS does exactly what a good remake should--it stays close enough to the game to give the same sense of it, but makes enough changes that it still feels fresh. It does not stray so far that it feels like a different game, but is not so slavish that it keeps what sucks.

It seems the Enix branch, then, knows what it's doing a little better than the Square branch.

Ugh, Passage. Ugh.

Are people seriously still convinced that Jason Roher's Passage is a brilliant artistic work? Like, seriously, it's late 2008 and we still believe this?

I'm actually sick of most "art games" in general--there have only been a handful that I've actively enjoyed. Mighty Jill Off is perhaps the best of them--it manages both to make an interesting parallel between a queer/lesbian SM aesthetic and the inherent concept of "games as a hopefully-increasing challenge put upon us by a higher authority" and somehow it's still a hell of a fun game. That's an exception.

The La La Land series, heavily recommended by MJO's author, I found to be completely incoherent and unplayable--to the extent where there were goals and controls, they were actively unfriendly. I dimly understood that the author was making some sort of comment about game goals and game controls, but it was made with such carefully-studied ineptness that whatever he was trying to say was lost. I've used programs such as Game Maker before and I know it takes a lot of talent to suck so much at design.

Rod Humble's games (The Marriage and Stars Over Half Moon Bay) are also cited as textbook art-game examples, and both are terrible--too abstract, too fuzzy and unclear.

But Passage is the worst of the lot. There's the old playground joke about Sonic the Hedgehog that Nintendo supporters would say--in Mario, you get to explore and shit. In Sonic, all you have to do to win the game is hold right and you'll be at the end of the level. Well, in Passage, that's pretty much what you have to do to win. You're in a very simple maze and you have to get to the end. Your character starts off as a child on the left side of the screen and by the time you finally make it to the end of the maze, you're an old man. There are tiny little diversions--you can get a wife, who follows you for the entirety of the game until she dies of old age, and you can get little treasure chests which do nothing. That's the entire game. If you hold right, with the exception of a couple of roadblocks which you navigate around, you will get to the end.

I know, I know, not the point. It's Symbolic. The maze symbolizes your Journey through Life. Many "players" (I use the term loosely since I'm not 100% sure it's a game, but I don't want to get into that argument today) report tearing up when the wife died because she's with you the entire game and then...not. The treasure chests represent random goals that you can achieve.

I do find this an extremely nihilistic interpretation of life. The characters are given no characterization whatsoever--I'm not so much upset with that per se. Cutscenes would be inappropriate. [Though it's not like games have been unable to convey emotion without words and cutscenes. ICO is the gold standard for this--most of the characterization of Yorda (and Yorda and Ico's relationship) is done wordlessly, through the way the two interact; Roher seems to be unable to do this--partially because he has chosen such a simple and retro style which does not physically allow for much interaction.] But as it is, the wife is just a sprite. And the protagonist is not me--I'm not heterosexual or married, and I don't feel interested in doing the work to mentally substitute "male partner" for "female wife" in my mind--I do enough of that crap when listening to music. So ultimately the game seems to be saying that marriage is meaningless--there is no benefit to having a wife. Fact is, in traditional game terms, it's a disadvantage--it slows down your character speed, and certain paths with treasures are unattainable. Even getting those treasures is pointless. Some of the chests are empty, symbolizing, according to the author's statement, that "not every pursuit leads to a reward---most of them are empty"--but there is no particular difference between getting every reward and getting none at all. In other words, there's no point in accomplishing anything. He who dies with the most toys still dies.

But I'm not living a life, much as Roher would have me believe. I'm doing something similar to playing a game. Videogames' most obvious inherent trait is their interactivity (I'm convinced that bit is completely grammatically wrong, but if Roher can throw out all the rules of videogames and get acclaim, I can through out the rules of grammar), we all know this, and the point of games is to convey delight through that interactivity. While many games do have cosmetic awards--unlocking an alternate costume for your character if you kill enough monsters, for example--that can be successful, games are at their best when they reward in a system of gameplay advantages and disadvantages. (I'd go to say that cosmetic awards are the lowest form of reward--altering the sprite with no particular gameplay advantage or disadvantage. It just gives you something different to look at.) Mighty Jill Off rewards good progress by making its levels harder--which fits its theme (masochism) perfectly--the more pain a bottom takes, the more a good top will respond by increasing that pain; a masochist will find that pain pleasurable, and dammit, we do to when playing the game: the difficulty spikes every level and gives the impression of, yes, now I have to use all of my reflexes here, now I have to step up to this challenge that's been given me. Most good games do this ramping in difficulty; while the balance isn't always as good in MJO, a well-crafted game will teach you to play itself. It'll present you with a challenge that you have to solve; the next level will be harder and you've got to apply what you learned in the last level plus come up with some new techniques. If the character's moveset is static throughout the game, this is the best way of giving reward to the player.

With a dynamic moveset, you've got a few more options--namely, giving more toys to the player. Zelda and Metroid work this way--you do a challenge, and you get a new weapon, or more energy or ammunition. Obviously this can tie in with cosmetic rewards and difficulty ramps--sometimes learning a new technique proposes its own challenges. In its best incarnation, which is the Spinner from Twilight Princess (a toy so awesome that my best friend and I were moved to dub it The Coolington), it provides a new technique, shows you a cool picture, and gives you a new type of level to worry about.

Passage attempts to give all of these and fails. Having a wife in tow is a cosmetic award, but since the sprites are so stripped-down (I'll get more into that later) and since it conveys a strong disadvantage as far as pure gameplay goes, it's not that great of one. It attempts to ramp up the difficulty--it adds more roadblocks as the game goes on--but it's neither challenging nor pleasurable, it just means you have to tap up or down a little more often than just tapping right. And it attempts to give you toys--the treasures--but since they don't do anything, what the hell is the point?

Many art games are done in a retro pixelly style [partially to tap into nostalgia, partially because they're generally made by one person and simple sprites are easier to do without a graphics team], and Passage is no exception. The problem is Roher's art is just plain ugly to me. It's like he's trying to tap into the Iconic--as Scott McCloud and several papers I wrote in grad school will tell you, the more stripped down an image gets, the more likely you are to identify with it--but failing greatly. I'd go to say the graphics are too stripped down. McCloud identifies two dots and a curved line--the clasic smily face--as the most iconic you can get within cartooning; a single large pixel (remember Atari 2600 days?) is the most iconic you can get within videogames. But there's such a thing as too iconic--when something gets to that level of abstraction, it stops being something to identify with and starts going to be a symbol. That dot represents an adventurer, Roher's art represents a man on a life journey; both are too roughly-drawn to do the work of being a shell to put ourselves into. If he's trying to create empathy, he's failed: it almost seems like he's drawing in his style because That's What Art Games Do rather than because it helps his theme. The Marriage features geometric shapes as its "characters"--and we see them as geometric shapes rather than the types of people he's making a comment about. It doesn't work; it's about as emotional as an Excel chart. Facade, which features distinctive characters (except for the protagonist, who's first-person and faceless and designed to be an avatar of the player), manages to create more empathy because it gives you something to hang emotions on. Passage is alienating.

I'm just the most familiar with Passage, but the same could be said about most Art Games, and it's a damn shame, because there is a need for more sophistication in videogames. But it just seems they concentrate too much on the "art" and not enough on the "games." A game is fundamentally interactive and the joy comes from that interactivity. Story, we have found, can be incidental to an excellent game--"save the princess" was the cliche of 80s and early 90s gaming, and the games were often fun--but gameplay cannot--there's a reason that Interactive Movies failed. Using interactivity to tell a story and create emotions and empathy has been done before many times--we wouldn't be playing games if this weren't the case--and Passage most emphatically does not do that: it's an exercise in tedium and pretentiousness with no point to back it up.

So guys, stop getting hysterical about how "great" it is.