The things that I write

So, I've been a little bit slack with updating this side of the internet. I have two blogs alongside my scheduled writing at Nightmare Mode and I invariably pay more attention to my Tumblr. Why do I do this? I'm not sure. I'd like to say it's because I have an established audience there but that "established audience" is honestly not the sort who would have the time/patience/effort to read the things I write.

I mean, it's Tumblr. It thrives on reblogs and funny images. I'm kind of out of my element there.

Art by Jake Lawrence. Always and forever.

Anyway, I've written two pieces recently that now rest at Nightmare Mode for the foreseeable future. The first was a little treatise on flying in video games and looked at what is my ideal form of flight. It's a little whimsical - as all my pieces often are - but I had a lot of fun with it.

The second piece is, well, I hesitate to call it controversial, but it's certainly the most confrontational piece I've written. I don't get angry or shout at anyone but I look a little deeper into what I want when I play games and respond to a piece by Richard Cobbett about guilt and choice. It's certainly a piece that has words and opinions in it!

And, finally, go pitch things to Nightmare Mode. They're lovely people and they want lovely writing. Write some lovely things, please.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles & Nostalgia

I mean, I get the sentiment. Playing Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles by yourself is, arguably, the "wrong" way to play the game. It's simple to pick up and play, the levelling system is obnoxiously centred around having more than one player with you, material hunting for equipment is awfully grindy, and boss fights are nightmarishly difficult. The odds are stacked against you; I get it. But, after finally playing (so many years of waiting) Crystal Chronicles with four players recently, I can't say that one experience is inherently better to the other. Different, sure, but the more abstract qualities of play and the experiential nature of these two modes make equally enjoyable - and equally valid - experiences.

More so than any other multiplayer game, Crystal Chronicles develops a remarkable sense of travel and community. This is conveyed primarily through the narrative conceit itself. You're not so much embarking on an epic quest from point A to point B, but travelling to three different levels per year before looping back to your village and starting all over again. You travel with an old-fashioned caravan across worn out roads and through lived-in spaces. A diary system tracks your progress upon notable discoveries with flavourful text written in a personal, first-person style. Beautiful music with long-forgotten instruments play all manner of medieval tunes that evoke timeless images of adventures long past. Square-Enix nail all the more romantic, intangible aspects of travel so perfectly, but manage to leave a few holes to let the player fill in with their imagination. It's the type of game where you can imagine you and your party members huddled around a crackling campfire at night, looking up at a starry night sky, and talking about all manner of things until the wee hours of the morning.

For this reason, single-player is frighteningly lonely and overwhelmingly terrifying. The responsibility of collecting enough myrhh to rejuvenate the crystal protecting your village weighs far more heavily on your mind. Levels feel longer and more arduous; teeming with wildlife far more aggressive and dangerous when they only focus on you. Tactics change from the wild, agressive attacking of a four man party to a more measured, coaxing of individuals to engage you one at the time. Bosses are hulking behemoths that are almost exclusively beaten down with hit and run tactics as you carefully count out the frames of your attack animation. Even level ups shifts focus from collecting the simple stat boosting artefacts to the more permanent health upgrades and spell skills, since far greater stat boosts can be found with armour and weapon upgrades.

But, more importantly, your journey through the world of Crystal Chronicles feels more important travelling by yourself. The beautiful art style can be absorbed at a more leisurely pace, and hard fought battles feel much more satisfying when you pull your caravan up to the nearest town over to barter and trade with the locals. The brief, random encounter cutscenes with other caravans as you travel from level to level feel warm and lighthearted but intensely transient. Nothing feels solid and reassuring. It shifts focus away from the familiar and the reliable and lets you consistently absorb wonderful new environments. The Legend of Zelda is consistently praised for its spirit of adventure, but its dedication to habitual, world-building has you routinely returning to some places over and over again during the course of adventure. While Crystal Chronicles drops you back at your village at the end of every game year, the narrative elements of your stable family at home and the gradual changes in earlier levels as the years pass by, give a greater sense of time passed by. Funnily enough, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword achieves the same fluidity of time via Link's consistent returns to his home village of Skyloft, but apparently that game is too linear or something, I don't know. The internet - it hates a lot of things.

Multiplayer in Crystal Chronicles feels like a party. There's a greater sense of forward momentum as your party barrels through levels at breakneck speeds, there's camaraderie and competition, communication - the world suddenly feels like a happier place than before. Teamwork rears its [ugly?] head at every opportunity with spell stacking, careful party composition, and a communal aspect of material gathering. Team roles shift at a moments notice depending on the severity of battles. The rigid and careful planning of single-player is thrown out the window in favour of a more adaptive, flexible play style.

A lot of the more romantic aspects of the game are lost in the process. The soothing music is washed over by near constant chatter, the methodical and gently placed story telling feels out of place in an environment that now requires almost constant action and quick reflexes. In fact, you don't even want to watch it; you skip over it. There are monsters to kill and levels to be beaten - you don't have time to stop and breath for a little while. Unless that stopping means armour and weapon upgrading at the nearest town.

Eventually though, and by the very nature of social gatherings, you have to stop playing and move on with your lives. All the GBAs and Link Cables have to be packed up and taken away with their respective owners. Your multiplayer playthrough is frozen in time until a later date. Returning to your singleplayer file feels ever more lonely, and the textual cries of your friendly, chalice-carrying Moogle can't hope to match the anguished sighs of a party member who's forced into the same deed. Your multiplayer adventures feel like they happend an eternity ago; a long lost memory.

Which is ultimately what Crystal Chronicles is all about - memory. The game timestamps your achievements, small and large, with a diary entry that you can read at any time. The amount of memories you have at the very end of the game determines whether or not you can complete the game. This theme is supported beyond the mechanics of the game, too. The visual style, the intensely melodic music sculpted with ancient instruments, the dense in-game lore - every element of the game is efficiently crafted to engage with familiar, deep-seated tropes of fantasy and mythology. It's a living artefact. It goes beyond the simple nostalgia play and referentialism in the mainline Final Fantasy entries to create manufactured nostalgia. It's a remarkable achievement to make something feel old without actually being old.

What happens in video game narratives is just as important as what happens while we experience the story. The memories we create while playing games are so often fragmented from the games themselves. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles remains one of the few to thematically tie the two together.

East Meets West: The RPG

I have a problem with RPGs. A Western RPG and a Japanese RPG do two very different things and both suffer from poor design choices that prevent me from completely enjoying them. To cover for what the other one lacks, I need to awkwardly jump between two different games in order to get the experience I'm after. I don't have this problem with other genres. An action game from any country satisfies everything I look for in the genre – explosions, intensity, violence – everything is accounted for. A WRPG and JRPG, though, have become so distinct from one another that they've typically been called entirely different genres, despite my insistence that a RPG is a RPG and nationality segregation is dangerous. In their differences, a WRPG and a JRPG have very distinct qualities that feel essential to the RPG genre, and the historical devision between each of them has left me endlessly frustrated. There's a middle ground that can – and should – be reached between each other that would enrich the genre as a whole if the internet bickering settled down.

WRPGs are, technically speaking, a mess. In their pursuit of wide open spaces, enormous dialogue permutations, storyline branches, and open-ended feel their technical difficulties are a severe and noticeable problem. While others can look past this and see the bigger picture, I cannot. Broken quest lines, graphical glitches, and unexplainable occurrences don't enhance the experience of living in a real world – they break it. On top of that, their incorporation of quest design in such a massive space often leads to gameplay that frequently feels like you're simply running to different checkpoints and, in worst case scenarios, can leave you horrendously lost and unsure how to progress. Looking beyond the negatives, WRPGs excel in dialogue (when it isn't endless lore exposition in favour of natural dialogue) and narrative, creating scenarios that feel important and challenge you with moral quandaries. There's a lot of player agency and that feels good. Unfortunately, the execution of these narrative elements leave me wanting. For all the money that Bioware and Bethesda pour into world building, they seemingly pay no attention to animation or character movement. Having a conversation is a painful process of watching an awkward looking NPC stand stock still, look directly into eyes (your soul), and occasionally move through one or two different arm waving animations. It feels like you're conversing with a puppet than a living creature and it's difficult to emphasise with these... things. They speak and sound like humans but move nothing like them. Even my own character, who you think would be blessed with wonderful animation, resembles an inanimate doll. I can't relate to these people no matter how real they sound when they move so unnaturally.

Inanimate puppet.

Emotive, expressive characters.

Where WRPGs meander without direction, JRPGs are intensely focused. There is the central storyline and... not much else. Side quests and distractions pop up here and there but their design feels so divorced from the central gameplay that they never take centre stage. You'll never find yourself lost in a JRPG, the narrative is consistently knocked over your head to ensure you know where you're going at all times. More often that not, you're playing a fully-formed character rather than being one yourself. There's very little leeway in determining the arc of your playable character and their comrades; they will be someone very different by game's end no matter what you think. This character focus over inhabiting a world also permeates the cutscenes and character animation. Watch a cutscene from any modern Final Fantasy game and you'll see characters walking around a space, their faces and body language visibly changing to reflect their emotional state, and actively touching and interacting with the people around them. Art style preferences aside, you can see what a character is feeling rather than merely hearing it from their voice actors. Lightning and friends sound and look like they truly believe what they're saying... even if half of the time it doesn't make any sense at all. Yes, JRPGs are still very much “Anime: The Video Game” with all the frustrating tropes and cultural awkwardness that implies. That didn't matter for a time, back when games were text only and the earnest platitudes of JRPG folk felt less forced and easier to digest. More importantly, Neon Genesis: Evangelion didn't exist and had yet to infect Japanese game development with all the wrong lessons about narrative. It's difficult to find a JRPG that has a coherent storyline nowadays and this – more than unnatural dialogue or bizarre character archetypes – is much harder to swallow. Final Fantasy IV was a simple tale, with characters whose motivations could be summed up in a sentence, but the narrative made sense from beginning to end and has stood the test of time.

Outside of narrative differences, WRPGs and JRPGs differ in user interfaces. JRPGs have copped a lot of flack for their lack of evolution in terms of mechanics, often sticking to a tried and true turn-based battle system with little flourishes and measured innovations. Their menu systems too have remained relatively the same. While this can be criticised, its led to very refined, simple, and easy to read menu tinkering from the years and years of playtesting its gone through. The same can't be said of WRPGs who, in their pursuit of meshing the artificial nature of menus with the realistic world inside of video games, have resorted to form over function. Skyrim's user interface is a pain to work with and leads to more time spent dilly-dallying inside of menus than playing the actual game. Mass Effect tripped over itself with item dumps and an obtuse weapon modification system that most didn't even see and Mass Effect 2 decided to simply remove all menu shuffling altogether (almost all, anyway). This isn't a hard feature or a forgotten art of game design. Diablo II has a perfectly functional menu system, hell, even Dragon Age: Origins got it right. People don't mind artificial as long as it's readable and simple to use. We've turned pages in books for years and it hasn't broken the “immersion” yet.

Simple to use.

Nightmarish to use.

I don't think I'm asking for much. I'm merely asking for restraint on both sides and less hesitance to see what individual developers brings to RPGs. WRPGs offer great writing and wondrous world building but in their vastness lies problematic bugs that take away from the experience. Their “Quest” design mentality leads to a to-do list that prevents me from inhabiting the world and WRPGs lack of expressive animation prevents me from forming any emotional connection with the characters in the story. On the other side of the pond, JRPGs are practically bug free and are ravished with little details that complement the experience. Characters move realistically and behave like real people... when they're not spouting out platitudes and awkwardly translated dialogue. JRPGs are focused and easy to follow and you barely ever lost... unless it's in the confusing narrative being told. I want both JRPGs and WRPGs to improve and, at the moment, each one has what the other one doesn't. If they weren't so deathly afraid of each other, I can't help but think that the RPG genre would improve as a whole from their intermingling.