Colonialism under the guise of the dungeon crawl: Etrian Odyssey and the invasion

I talk about a lot of things that make Etrian Odyssey great in this piece but the best thing about the game, what makes it rise above and beyond even the oldest games in the genre, is how it uses the DS screen.

Because dungeon crawls can be awful to the perfectionist. You have to buy graph paper because you’re gonna be drawing a lot of maps, and normal white paper simply won’t cut it. Then you have to buy a bunch of pencils and various fine pens so you don’t smudge or ruin your map. Then you have to annotate it and make sure every event or treasure is marked correctly. It’s a blissful, addictive experience that’ll ruin even the most patient of people.

Etrian Oydssey dedicates the touch screen entirely to your map. It’s an empty grid at the beginning of your adventure but gradually transforms into a perfectly aligned map. It maintains the intoxicating lure of drawing your own map and gets rid of all the awful ink spills and blotches that can ruin everything. It’s wonderful.

Nintendo Network Worries

With the announcement of the Nintendo Network, the internet celebrated. Finally, Nintendo were getting serious about online play and incorporating DLC, digital transactions of retail games, and even offering micro-transactions for developers if they were so inclined. But with such a step, Nintendo are now entering the murky waters of shady business practices. Despite Satoru Iwata's insistence the company will still value their customers, they are ultimately a business, and I can't help but get nervous with a service that allows Nintendo to easily go down the same path other publishers are embracing with their DLC. Cut content intentionally saved for DLC, unlock codes, DRM, broken game releases – these are the realities that face the industry today, and while we may cry out in complaint, there are too many of us that concede and buy into publishers shoddy treatment of costumers. We support this behaviour. Not only that, we actively disparage companies like Nintendo who refuse to “update” their development process to allow this sort of behaviour, a strange Stockholm Syndrome effect exclusive to the video game community. I understand that the internet is responsible for countless beneficial aspects for modern game design like encouraging a viable indie game development scene, online multiplayer (divorced from the Project $10 shenanigans), and even re-contextualising the high score as Achievements and Trophies respectively, but at the moment the bad elements outweigh the good ones. This needs to change.

Developing an appreciation for what Nintendo were doing this generation (and still are, to some degree) is a good place to start. Nintendo, in their dedication to “withered technology” over the brand new, shied away from the industry's decision to embrace an always connected gaming platform. While Xbox 360 and PS3 rushed towards the internet in reckless abandon, Nintendo were content to plod along behind them. With the prospect of an internet-enabled machine, patches and updates that were once confined to the PC became a possibility for consoles. Bugs could be fixed, online multiplayer could be continuously adjusted to accommodate unpredictable player behaviour, and even firmware updates could dramatically change the OS of the console. While Xbox 360 and PS3 games were typified by their now PC-like surroundings, the Wii was a bastion for the “old guard”. There were never any concerns when buying a Wii game that you would be getting an incomplete experience. Quality was a problem, but that's a worry for anyone familiar with the industry. What you were getting on the disc was the complete, definitive experience and it was playable as soon as you placed the disc in the machine. No “Day 1” patches and no downloading game data to a hard drive. While Nintendo Wii games typically have a firmware update on the disc now in an effort to stop the homebrew market, they still take a considerably shorter time to start playing than the rest of the gaming landscape. These efforts to instantly plunge you into the game with little hassle should be commended in an age of delayed starts.

The absence of DLC has also given Nintendo products a complete “feel”. You buy a Nintendo game knowing that, a year down the road, you won't be seeing an Anniversary Edition released with all the DLC bundled together. You're getting the definitive version right from the beginning – no exceptions – and that sort of thing is valuable to a customer. It's also valuable to preserving the history of the medium. With multiple different SKUs, nothing is definitive and it muddles what the core experience is. Who's to say that the golden Lancer in Gears of War 3 is more or less important than the vanilla Lancer? Or that the Dragon Age armour in Mass Effect 2 is more or less important than the standard armour? You might scoff and call this trivial but the inclusion of such “exclusive” items fundamentally change a player's mindset inside a game. You're not really inside of the world of Mass Effect when you're giggling over a item from another video game world. The reference breaks the fiction. It creates two differing emotional responses, and with neither version defined as the definitive experience by the developer, it lessens whatever they're trying to make us feel.

There can be a lot of good in DLC and online connectivity. Rockstar used DLC as an opportunity to make complete sequels to GTAIV that resembled the expansion packs of old on PC. Online demos are another great feature that ensures you know what you're getting into before you hand over your money. The dark designs of online connectivity far outweigh all the good that accompanies it, however. Nintendo are only just beginning to treat online play as a serious business aspect of game design and there are an awful lot of pitfalls along the way. What's stopping Nintendo from looking at other publishers DLC behaviour and supporting that? We actively encourage that business model. Ultimately, a business exists to make money and there's nothing wrong with that. Video games are a business. Nintendo's journey into the online world has the potential to treat customers with respect, we just have to support the correct behaviour.

Obligation and Animal Crossing

Obligation is a funny thing.

I don’t feel obligated to do a lot of things in life. I don’t think it’s necessary to see your family or even like your family, especially if they’re awful to you. I don’t owe my old school friends a friendship debt that I must maintain long after high school. I don’t even feel obligated to go to work week after week - I do it because I want to. While it may sound heartless, it frees me from the things that people expect of me and lets me do what I want. People understand that I’m being genuine when I want to help them... hopefully.

Obligation does rear its ugly head in my writing though. Not only do I feel a biting need to write everyday, I’m wracked with guilt and disappointment in myself if I don’t. Realising last week that I wouldn’t be able to make my weekly update on my blog was a painful experience regardless of whether or not anyone would read it, or care. In that one week, I missed practice, I missed the opportunity to improve my writing, and I missed sticking to a schedule that promotes activity. Even if I had a compelling reason that I couldn’t make my weekly update (I was writing, funnily enough), I could of written faster, dawdled less, and made firmer decisions on what word fit best in a sentence.

For a while, video games were something that resembled an obligation in my life, too. Born from my childhood when I had to wring every last drop of entertainment out of a game before I could move on, when I had no money of my own and had to wait between releases, games were things that demanded to be finished completely, regardless of quality or enjoyment. Then I grew up. I realised I was no longer a child with infinite time and if a game wasn’t enjoyable there was no reason for me to finish it. Much like how my writing is an exception to my anti-obligation attitude, however, so too is there an exception with video games.

Animal Crossing compels me to be devoted to it. In its absurd simulation of living with animals, I find myself unable to break the daily routine of talking to friends, fishing, and bug collecting. With other games, the penalty of dropping out of the experience is non-existent, you’re simply conceding that when you do return, you’ll be significantly less skilled at the game than you were previously. Animal Crossing punishes such action with inquisitive villagers asking you where you’ve been, a house filled with cockroaches, weeds littering the village, and missed seasonal events. Simply forgetting a game where such things are tracked feels heartless. I’m abandoning a group of animals and a village that simply can’t maintain itself without my input. It’s not like I can shrug off their questions and invites like I can with the friends in my life. My friends have work, school, and other people in their life that occupy them outside of my presence. These animals have nothing outside of my input – their houses stay the same, their clothes stay the same, their chores remain unfinished. Despite the seasonal changes, the out of control weeds, and the bug infestation suggesting the passage of time, the villagers of Animal Crossing don’t go along for that ride. Some might up and move towns while you’re away but - god forbid - they won’t be able to change their shirt until you talk to them and give them a new one. Even the big events that bundle your villagers to play and have fun together come across as a sort of pack mentality than true individualism. These animals are children, and they need to be looked after.

So, my irrational obligation to care for these strange little creatures stems entirely from their inability to do anything constructive for themselves. I don’t want them to live in a village filled with weeds and insects. I don’t want them to stroll through an empty museum and cry at the lack of exhibits, and I certainly don’t want them to remain in the same shirt for years on end. I care about all of these little things right up until the point where I skip a day of play. My steely, compassionate resolve falters. That one missed day steamrolls into another, and another, until weeks and months have passed and I can no longer face the endless waves of weeds and cockroaches ahead of me. Once that moment has passed, I can no longer return to my village unless a hard reset accompanies me. I can’t look Poncho in the eye and tell him I missed him without feeling a profound sense of guilt. I didn’t try hard enough, I let the poor bear down. Should he appear again in my new town and fail to remember me, I consider it a fair trade. It’s my penance for selfish neglect.