Beating up God in Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth

My latest is up at Nightmare Mode :D

So, apparently this game isn’t as well-loved as I thought it was? That’s kind of understandable, actually.

Valkyrie Profile asks a lot of the player. There’s a strict time limit, a complex battle system, and tri-Ace have the gall to trick you into playing the game a very specific way when you actually have a lot of freedom. Valkyrie Profile is a little too clever for its own good. No wonder it didn’t stick with a lot of people.

You need to get in the right frame of mine to play it. Valkyrie Profile is melancholic. You’re not met with congratulations for mastering these systems. You spend the entire game recruiting dead people and watching their last moments on Earth.

And, similar to Majora’s Mask, the narrative is remarkably understated. You don’t recognise just how oppressive the game is until you’ve let it rest a little bit after your first play.

It’s not a happy game, there’s little room for humour. But there’s a sense of cohesiveness here rare in video games. A unified vision. It’s pretty short, too!

We need more short games.

(Thanks, as always, to TimeCowboy for the wonderful art)

An Eternally Dull Adventure in Chopin's Dreams

Remember when I said I was in a book?

I'm still in that book but now you can read one of the two pieces I wrote in that book on the internet! And you can read it even if you're 20,000 kilometres away! How does that even work?

Eternal Sonta is frustrating. It has such a wonderful idea that I forget how awful it is each time I put the game down so that I can play it again with the hopes of "oh, maybe it isn't as terrible as I remembered". It never changes. It's always awful.

Taking The World With You: Dragon Quest

Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior, if you want to be precise) was a revolution upon release. Today, it garners the respect it deserves for laying the foundation for an entire genre, but that's generally where the appreciation ends. Modern games have refined Dragon Quest's core concepts to the point where its primitive presentation and gameplay are difficult to go back to. But what's been tossed aside alongside the genre's advancements and upheavals and do these morsels deserve better treatment? Far from decrying what's been lost, let's take a look at the more esoteric elements of Dragon Quest that have been gradually chipped away over the years.

Remember drawing maps for video game dungeons? I don't, because I was born far too late to hop on that gravy train, but Dragon Quest practically demands the practice. While the world is an alarmingly small one, Dragon Quest provides you with no map or navigational tools. Towns, cities, and landmarks are all defined by cardinal directions, and dungeons are terrifying gauntlets with no easy way to navigate them. Unlike the illuminated dungeons of The Legend of Zelda, the dungeons in Dragon Quest are pitch black, safe for the four blocks lit up around you. With a Torch in hand, those four lit up spaces become a 3x3 lighting box, allowing easier exploration of a dungeon's labyrinth design. Alas, the high encounter rate inside dungeons provides a more pressing issue to deal with than your limited vision, and dungeons are frequently tackled via multiple trips to and from the nearest Inn. Each trip gradually unlocks more of the dungeon as you travel down new routes but, unless you have a fantastic memory, you'll need to crack out pen and paper to start mapping your progress.

The process of note taking in games has been largely swept aside by modern game developers and replaced with automated maps or helpful signposting. Detractors argue that a game should contain every element of play nestled inside its code, and any external elements are irrelevant. This dismisses what we bring to games by simply playing them, and each stroke of line on a piece of paper designating a dead end represents a hard fought victory, a sinking realisation, or a satisfactory conclusion to our adventure. When people dismiss the simplistic interaction of Dragon Quest, they neglect the exploration and map drawing - exploring the world and familiarising yourself with your surroundings - as a fundamental part of your actions. The turn-based combat is fast and efficient; it's a distraction more than the centre piece of the experience.

No, what's important in Dragon Quest is the hard fought ground you cover each time you set out from the safety of a village. When you emerge from that last dungeon with a veritable tome of knowledge resting on your lap, there's an immense feeling of satisfaction. More than simply having your achievements frozen inside a cartridge, they've claimed an irrefutable permanency beyond an NES chip. A quest, indeed.

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.