What's a Nidhogg?

In Norse mythology, Níðhöggr (Malice Striker, often anglicized Nidhogg) is a dragon who gnaws at a root of the World Tree, Yggdrasill. In the mythology, the Nidhogg is said to be controlled by only one person, the Norse God named Hel.

Hel was clearly busy when Nidhogg, the indie, two-player fencing game, was released because he's all up in its business. Having grown fed up with the tasteless morsels of bark and leaves, Nidhogg left his sanctuary in search of man flesh, and found two colour-coded stick figures fighting each other in dark space.


I wrote a thing about Nidhogg!

Black Books

Gaming related? No. Film and TV related? Yes.

"Well, to be honest, after years of smoking and drinking, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...you know, just sometimes, in between the first cigarette with coffee in the morning to that four hundredth glass of cornershop piss at 3am, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...this is fantastic. I'm in heaven."

Let there be no mistake, Black Books is hilarious.

Writing Forays!

Hey friends,

I've written a lot about Nier already (Papa Nier or Brother Nier?, Ambiguity and Nier) but my piece on nightmaremode.net entitled Confronting Violence in Nier truly, finally, closes the book on what I've been trying to put into words for a long time. Click the link to read about Nier, Epic Theatre, New Game +, and excessive murder all in one piece! SPOILERS AHOY!

Cavia have always struck me as a developer that finally found its feet when they released Drakengard. Nier is in many ways a continuation of what Yoko Taro started in Drakengard and you get the sense that if Cavia stuck around long enough, they would have ironed out all the kinks on the technical side of development and made something really important and recognised. There are the grubby marks of an auteur embedded into each game.

We need more games like Nier. They might not be perfectly executed, but what Nier gets right is far more important than anything else in games: It makes you think.

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.

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.

Doggy!

Pretty cute, am I right? Our cat Alice is very good with dogs and the two have become fast friends. Alice is quite old though and the dog's playfulness when she's trying to sleep isn't always appreciated. Stick around until the two minute mark to have your heart microwaved by sweetness.

The dog was adopted and she was already called Lolly, except she doesn't really respond to it when called. We're trying to think of new names for her. Someone on Twitter suggested Colossus because she's little, you see. "Killer" made me laugh but that name is not appropriate for such a little thing >:( .

Can you think of any names?