“I mean, deep down they function how we want the real world to function, right? There’s a set of rules and, if I follow them and do the right things in the correct order, success is kind of guaranteed. That’s true of all videogames, but in JRPGs there’s the story too. They have a set trajectory that leads me out of the bastard confusion of adolescence towards an endgame of maturity and identity and, er, status I guess. And all you need to do to experience that is follow the breadcrumb trail and keep turning the cogs…”
I’ve been wanting to write this piece since I turned 30. Thanks to Brandon Boyer and Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing for giving me a public platform on which to share what is, essentially, a private story about my relationship with videogames, especially JRPGs.
I’m glad I was able to write it down before I grew too old to be able to tell it.
I won’t reprint the whole thing here, as Boing Boing laid it out with such care and attention, I’d rather you saw it in situ. I hope you enjoy it.
If Limbo, last week’s inaugural Summer of Arcade release, aspired to the art house aesthete’s choice – Braid through a glass, darkly – Hydro Thunder Hurricane is a hyperactive celebration of balls-out, dumbass, American videogame-ness. 25-foot racing boats, whose engines roar in Texan accents, roll and bounce through white water rapids. They gobble down speed boost capsules like froth-mouthed junkies under a maelstrom of distorted keyboards and six-foot snare drum clacks.
Delicacy and finesse be damned, screams developer Vector Unit into the wind and spray: videogames are about domination and high-speed spectacle; they’re about shaving a few seconds from the times of every last name on your Enemies List; about finding the odd secret bonus and, every three laps or so, making your jaw hang slack as a giant f**king sea serpent explodes out of the water and sends your boat ricocheting off into a rock face.
Videogames should exaggerate physics in search of perfecting the chemistry of play, the game argues. Spin out on a corner and you need only stab the back button for a rolling reset: combo the endorphins without pause for thought. If Limbo’s deadly waters represented a cloying quicksand to oblivion, Hydro’s undulating waves are ramps to the stars.
As such, ponderousness is, quite literally, for losers. Hydro. Thunder. Hurricane. A three-hit combo of elemental nouns, each threatening to whack you from your sofa into a squall of testosterone.
And why not? Microsoft’s decision to juxtapose Limbo with an uncomplicated speedboat racer in their scheduling demonstrates not only the publisher’s understanding that it takes all types to make a medium, but also exemplifies the full range of approaches their service has the capacity to house. Moreover, while Hydro Thunder Hurricane’s brash brand of interactivity has a different timbre, underneath the theme and colouring, the two titles sit together quite comfortably.
Both games demand trail and error, the former in feeling out its immovable solutions, the latter in feeling out the optimum routes to facilitate the fastest possible lap times. Both games demand lightning quick reactions for success. Both games offer neat twists on age-old tropes.
The RPG-ification of mainstream videogame genres has been the defining design trend of the past three years, with experience points and leveling a key feature of everything from Modern Warfare to Borderlands. Everybody’s Tennis is no different, doling out experience points on a per shot basis, rewarding you in endorphin micro-payments for every ace served and on-the-baseline lob successfully landed.
As you level your character, so you unlock new items of clothing in the shop which boost your attributes in subtle ways: for example, giving your budding young tennis star a buff to his backhand while cross-dressing in a Japanese schoolgirl’s uniform.
Not only that, but the developer subscribes fully to the RPG’s wider tropes as you roam the grounds of tennis clubs or the hallways of a high school solving simple puzzles and challenging opponents to throw-downs on the court. The snappy dialogue and bold characters supply what is one of the most entertaining, if unlikely, stories to be found in a sports game, adding both sharp flavour and context to each match.
Of course, we’ve seen some of this assured, cartoonish approach to sports before in the developer’s other output. Cousin Everybody’s Golf has been a consistently solid, enjoyable feature on Sony gaming hardware for well over a decade. The Nintendo-esque, breezy presentation has always been backed up by solid, irresistible systems that often communicate the spirit of the sport far more effectively than those games that stick to a drier, realistic approach.
Pleasingly, that’s true here too; the tennis game at the core of the experience is effortlessly robust. More twitchy and fast-paced than Virtua Tennis, it has the feel of Namco’s PlayStation-era Smash Court Tennis, quick in the hands but with all the precision required to execute a cross-court volley to the baseline.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
A young woman who works tirelessly to honour her father’s memory by making the inn she inherited a success. A knight caught in purgatory under a witch’s spell that, down the generations, has cruelly kept him from his one true love, her memory now limited to a likeness in a distant descendent. A village brought to its knees by sickness, its mayor wheezing desperate cries for help.
The stories found within the latest Dragon Quest are as straightforward as they are affecting. While Final Fantasy has swung between overcooked Tolkien epic and sci-fi fantasy over its 20 years, Dragon Quest has never aspired to more than the fairytale yarn. Placed somewhere between Grimm and Disney in terms of narrative light and shade, its creator Yuji Horii is a masterful storyteller, and his ostensibly simple fables pack more sincerity and weight than games with 20 times their ambition.
Dragon Quest IX – a game in which you guide an angel who has lost its wings to bring redemption and help to lost, broken humans, in the hope that their gratitude may sprout him new ones – is his best work yet. A perfect storm of creative input, it pairs Horii with the warm touch of Professor Layton developer Level-5, the inspired translation work of Square Enix’s best localization team, and the DS hardware itself. The result is a JRPG less concerned with gimmickry than articulating, in perfect balance, the things which always made the genre irresistible for those with eyes to see.
While it’s progressive for a Dragon Quest title in dispensing with random battles and emphasising MMO-style multiplayer, placed within the broader contemporary videogame landscape, Dragon Quest IX’s building blocks are humble and familiar. There is little novelty here.
The main story is entirely linear, with numbered, World of Warcraft-style side-quests that are ticked off as they’re completed. Your party, composed of characters you design and name yourself, can be assigned one of a handful of classes each, and their development trees are limited to weapon specialisations upgraded with a clutch of skill points at level up. Battles are fast and straightforward and the new emphasis on customisation and questing with friends over Wi-Fi, while new to the series, is covered in Monster Hunter’s fingerprints.
But it’s in the execution and balance of these components that the game inspires wonder. Character development is pitched in perfect balance with your reach into the world and sweetened by a drip-feed of meaningful rewards and new features as the hours roll by.
The game finds its backbone in Horii’s deft pacing of the story. Your wider mission is always clear: help people, earn their praise (which finds substance in “benevolessence”) and, wings crossed, you’ll make it back to heaven. This conceit breaks the game into a series of short-term goals wrapped up in narrative vignettes.
You make it to a new town, find out what the social problem is, and set about fixing it. Once done, you’ll have a raft of new friends, a gauge full of benevolessence and an instruction for which hill to head over in search of the next story. The set-up keeps the cast of NPCs transient and fresh. Set within these wider missions, you’ll also encounter men and women, both living and dead, who ask for help with micro-tasks, unaware that there’s an angel in their midst. In particular, there’s keen satisfaction to be found in aiding those souls caught in purgatory, unable to move on because of some unfinished business on earth. Solving their riddles in order to bring spiritual release is consistently rewarding, with echoes of Chrono Trigger as you work to fix the world, one life at a time.
So often in history it has fallen to the 3D fighting game to establish the appeal and capability of a console in its formative days. Tekken communicated the pace, pluck and glowering J-cool of Sony’s PlayStation; Virtua Fighter bespoke the sometimes finicky technical prowess of Sega’s Saturn; Dead or Alive 2 the weight and wobble of the Xbox; while Soul Calibur, in its jaw-dropping polish and elegance, secured Dreamcast’s legacy even before SEGA had a chance to secure its demise.
Why should a relatively niche genre so often be responsible for defining hardware in its earliest days? In part it’s visual: the language of one-on-one combat is universal, allowing the viewer to focus on the showboating flamboyance of the characters, without being distracted by having to interpret what’s going on. Then, in the speed of battles, the split-second combo windows that allow players to link together chains of rock paper suckerpunch, the fighting game reveals how good a console is at speed maths, in parsing the causes and effects that fire any videogame.
And they can do all of this at the start of a console’s life-cycle because the fighting game’s straightforward structure – pitting one character against another in a linear string of discrete battles – provides tight scope and focus, yielding the most visually impressive results in the shortest space of time. 3D fighters allow a skilled developer to say: this is what this machine is capable of. They are a shorthand account of competence.
On the evidence of Tournament of Legends, Nintendo’s Wii is a decrepit appliance capable of little more than some awkward, shuffling, cat-swipe animations interrupted by impromptu quick time events.
Tournament of Legends’ archaic visuals clothe a lacklustre fighting system that is heavy on shallow gimmicks that fail to combine into a competent whole. The paltry character roster consists of mythological stereotypes – the gladiator, the Valkyrie, the Medusa, the birdman – each so generic they could have been pulled from a stock library of 3D objects.
A substandard, under-featured one-on-one fighting game, the game pushes not one of its host hardware’s technical boundaries. The high point of its creative endeavour is the inclusion of Volcanus (Roman slang for Vesuvius’ gluteus maximus, perhaps?), a gold-plated robotic golem controlled by a bespectacled professor who drives around in a hyperactive, malfunctioning electric wheelchair. Without him, the game would be entirely devoid of flourish.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here
