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Ruminations on video games as an art form – this could very well become a Mother 3 review. There will be spoilers here. Seriously, don’t read it if you want to play Mother 3 and not have the plot spoiled.
There’s a trite comparison that floats around the internet almost every month that always gets my eyes rolling. Inevitably, someone will call such-and-such the Citizen Kane of video games or ask what the Citizen Kane is or claim that the medium is immature because we’ve yet to hit our Citizen Kane. It’s exhausting and, quite frankly, futile and stupid. To begin with, Citizen Kane opened with good reviews and was generally well-received, but it didn’t start to gain notoriety for ten years. It didn’t even make #1 on a top movies list until twenty years had passed. When the Citizen Kane of gaming hits (god I hate that phrase), we probably won’t know it for quite some time. The more important point is that movies and games are apples and oranges.
The day that we stop worrying about whether books or movies are better than games at expressing a particular artist’s point of view is probably the day that we’ll realize that we’ve already got fine examples of games that are reflections of authorial control already. Brütal Legend was not a great game, but Tim Schafer’s hands are clearly evident all over it. Anyone who’s ever played one of Fumito Ueda’s games knows precisely how a game can effectively be used to bring out your emotions through simple mechanics. Goichi Suda (AKA Suda 51) has been making games that show clear, artistic direction through his use of bizarre symbols and incomprehensible plots for years. My point is, we’ve been here for a while.
You may have heard of Shigesato Itoi, but chances are, you have no clue that he’s one of the most famous and respected men in Japan to such a degree that his dog was probably the most recognizable animal in the entire country for a few years. In America, we know him as a video game designer, specifically the man behind Earthbound, but not much else. Interestingly enough, Itoi is actually more famous for being an essayist, interviewer, and slogan generator than his work for Nintendo. His association with Hayao Miyazaki is well known enough that he’s famous for the Kiki’s Delivery Service slogan (“Ochikondari mo shita kedo, watashi wa genki desu” — “I was a little depressed for a bit; I’m okay now”) and he even voiced Mei’s father in My Neighbor Totoro (a role that went to Phil Hartman (rest in peace) when the movie was dubbed in English).
In his younger days, Itoi found himself sick and unable to do much but play Nintendo as he recovered. It was in this state that he discovered Dragon Quest, which set the wheels turning in his head. This experience was the impetus behind the Mother series and led to Itoi’s long, fruitful relationship with Nintendo. In case you were wondering (protip: you probably weren’t), Shigesato Itoi is the guy who came up with the name for the Game Boy. True fact.
It’s not surprising to me that most of the names I’ve mentioned were not always video game designers. The most bizarre of the bunch, Suda, was an undertaker before he tried his luck in the video game industry while Ueda was an artist and the aforementioned Itoi was a…well there’s no easy word to describe someone like Itoi. He was (and is) a cultural personality.
“If you immerse yourself too single-mindedly in your chosen art form, whether it’s video games, movies, comics or whatever,” he continues, “your work can easily become just a reflection of what others are doing in that field, rather than breaking new ground.” –Jordan Mechner
“If you immerse yourself too single-mindedly in your chosen art form, whether it’s video games, movies, comics or whatever,” he continues, “your work can easily become just a reflection of what others are doing in that field, rather than breaking new ground.”
–Jordan Mechner
Now, Schafer is, himself, a product of the industry, having held no other jobs, but he’s the exception, a true creative mind that is not crippled by his feedback loop of doom. Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts, and Brütal Legend could not be more different from each other, but just think of how rare this is. For every Schafer or Ken Levine out there trying to bring new influences into the industry, there are tons of Star Wars- and Lord of the Rings-inspired games produced each year retreading on the same, tired stories game in and game out. How many World War II games do we really need?
In 1989 Shigesato Itoi looked at the video game industry and said “How many sword and sorcery RPGs do we really need?” 2009 just passed us by and I’d say we’re still mostly mired in these medieval locales in 95% of all RPGs. Mother, Itoi’s freshman attempt at a video game, was set in “modern day” America. Earthbound (Mother 2) wasn’t exactly breaking with Itoi’s norm by being set in America yet again (in 1994), but it’s still a light among the sameness that pervaded the industry. Mother 3 is ambiguous about its timeline, but it feels like a scaled back modern day. In any case, like in the other games of the series, the weapons aren’t swords and bows, but sticks, yo-yos, and baseball bats. It’s really only a cosmetic and tonal shift, but it makes all the difference.
That’s exactly what makes Shigesato Itoi so great as a game designer. Perhaps it’s his outside status or maybe it’s just his brilliance, but Itoi understands video games to a scary degree for a man who only undertook them on a whim. I applaud him most for understanding that a game is an interactive piece of art and reflecting that with his systems. To wit, every Mother game revolves around music. The first game had the character searching for the Eight Melodies while the second repeated that idea with Eight Sanctuaries (each with a musical theme associated with it). Earthbound’s instruction manual (in Japanese) contained a little song that Itoi wrote for the player to sing as the main melody played on the overworld. Every line of text in the Mother series is written in kana (katakana or hiragana), so that the person has to vocalize Itoi’s often lyrical writing style. Mother 3’s focus on musical themes and leifmotifs (from the Masked Man to the Magypsies) is also emphasized through every character’s attacks in the battle system.
From Lucas to Salsa the Monkey, every character has a musical instrument associated with his attacks. So does every enemy. Each enemy also has a musical theme that plays in the background. Once you attack, you can continue to press the ‘A’ button to extend your combo to 16 hits if you can keep time with the (sometimes fiendishly difficult) beat. Just like that, something Itoi has always wanted the player to do (become musically involved with his world) becomes integrated into the activity the player does most in the game, battling.
Itoi also loves to toy with player perception to a hilarious degree. In an early sequence in the first chapter of the game, Flint becomes covered with soot after saving a friend’s kid from a fire. Why? Because that’s what would happen if you were running around in a fire. As he makes his way back out of the woods, you can bet that every person you talk to will question why you are covered from head to toe in black soot. Even better, if you hop into a hot spring to recover, the soot will wash off of your character from the neck down, since the Mother 3 hot spring animation always leaves the head exposed. It’s not until much later when it starts to rain that the soot washes off Flint’s face, this time to emphasize that we’re not joking around anymore, Flint’s family was still missing after the fire and they were almost certainly in danger.
An even more brilliant sequence comes much later in the game when the player is washed upon a tropical island with 1 HP and no equipment. The only way to progress through the jungle without dying is to eat one of the psychotropic mushrooms growing on the island. A bizarre sequence of events follows as you make your way to the next Magypsy with your perceptions completely torn asunder. Replicas of your family and friends attack you, which isn’t that unique for an RPG, but the way the narrative is presented and the visuals are warped, it becomes seriously unsettling. The one moment of calm comes when you arrive at another hot spring and recover, only to continue back into the horrors of the jungle.
Once you get to the Magypsy’s house, you’re constantly bombarded with insults about how bad you smell. It makes no sense though, because the player has done nothing different that would cause such a foul smell. Still, when your perception is returned to normal, there is a visible stench rising from Lucas and his compatriots. A quick dip in the bath follows and you’re no longer “smelly”, but, as a curious player, I wondered what had happened in the first place. Instead of continuing forward, I dove right back into the jungle to get to the bottom of it. halfway through, I was feeling a bit fatigued, so I popped on over to the hot springs and it all made sense. In my hallucinogenic state, I was unable to recognize that the pond I dove into for recovery was a festering, toxic-looking garbage dump of a pond. Off to the side, where no conceivable player would ever go, was a door into the real hot spring.
I couldn’t believe that some players would never find out the mystery behind why they were so smelly. Returning to that hot spring is hardly mandatory. Maybe that’s why it felt so amazing to see these little narrative games played with my perception of what was going on in the Mother 3 world at the time. It’s also interesting to look at from a player trust perspective, because when I saw that disgusting pond, rendered in all its GBA, low-fi glory, I felt nauseous and I know it was partly due to a feeling of betrayal. I have a feeling that this was exactly how Itoi wanted me to feel at that point.
Shigesato Itoi admits that the original draft for Mother 3 was way darker than it already is. It was written shortly after his divorce was finalized, which I think has a lot to do with the emotional betrayals of even the finalized version of this game. However this game was very nearly vaporware that was never released. Its development started for the SNES in 1994, but was quickly shifted to the N64 and the ill-fated 64DD not long after. Anyone familiar with the 64DD peripheral knows that this was going to prove troublesome for Itoi and his team. The game was even canceled at one point, but it was eventually decided to put it on the Gameboy Advance and announced around the re-release of Mother 1 + 2, no doubt to help drum up sales.
No one but the team knows just how dark the original narrative was, but Itoi claims that the story that eventually made it to print was the result of him finally becoming a good person. It boggles the mind to realize that it could have been any more dramatic, especially for a game that looks as friendly and cute as this one. In fact, this is the reason why Nintendo of America claims it will not localize the game. They claim the narrative is too mature and depressing for the way it looks and, really, the tone and the subject matter are alternatively irrelevant and deathly serious, so I kind of get what they mean. At one point you have a guy telling Flint that he’s got good news and bad news. The good news is something irrelevant and stupid while the bad news is that Flint’s wife, Hinawa, is dead. What follows is a scene that is so emotionally gripping that my little brother was affected even without hearing the music and sound associated with the scene. Flint completely flips out and starts beating on the guy who gave him bad news and even starts lashing out at the townspeople who are trying to calm him down. He is knocked out by a friend and put in a jail cell that has never before been used in the town’s existence.
It’s this weird juxtaposition of the inane and the deathly serious that creates the dissonant feelings I mentioned before with the hot tub scene and makes the player feel uneasy about what’s going on. When Hinawa’s father, Alec, is trying to tell stupid jokes to help Flint not be so tense about the certain danger his son is in. I wanted to tell him to shut up and let him focus, but I could also see that Flint was obsessing to a dangerous degree and that Alec was right in trying to calm him down. You also have the lighthearted love story of Salsa and Samba being ruined by the brutal and sadistic torturer Yokuba (Fassad in the fan-translation). It’s like Itoi is trying to say that the world is a screwed up place, but you can’t let it get you down.
I’ll tell you right here, I’m a huge sucker for any story about brothers. Later on in the game, it becomes fairly obvious that Mother 3 starts to center around the struggle of twin brothers Lucas and Claus as they attempt to collect more plot coupons than the other. The game series is called Mother for a reason and this one in particular focuses on the differences between each of Hinawa’s boys and how they came to deal with her untimely death. While Lucas comes out of his shell and becomes a healthier, more assertive and confident boy despite his absentee father, Claus foolishly rushes out for vengeance and finds himself enslaved by the Pig Army in its quest to end the world. The climactic final battle reunites the family once again, but the reunion is bittersweet. Claus has almost killed Flint and Lucas must face him alone to the death, even though he’s yet to realize that the Masked Man is his brother. Once the mask is knocked off and Lucas is staring into his own face (they are twins after all), the battle becomes a masterpiece. Selecting attack will cause Lucas to intentionally pull his punches or miss his attacks completely. Sometimes he’ll even refuse to comply. Claus, having lost most of his humanity, will continue to attack until Hinawa begins pleading for him to stop. Eventually, Claus comes to his senses and realizes that Lucas is his brother and that he is no longer anything close to himself. At that point, Claus commits suicide in a peculiar way. It becomes apparent that the Courage Badge that Flint gave to Lucas (via a Mr. Saturn in another example of absentee parenting) is actually a Franklin Badge, an item that repels lightning in the Mother world.
The heartbreaking thing about this whole sequence is that there’s nothing the player can do once Claus decides that he must kill himself to save the world. Lucas may not be physically (or psychically) killing his brother, but there’s nothing he can do but watch his brother kill himself using an item that he is holding. When it’s all over and Claus is dying in Lucas’ arms with Flint nearby and Hinawa’s ghost above them, the reunion is finally completed and the family is happy for a brief second before both Claus and Hinawa depart the world leaving Lucas to pull the last plot coupon. The world literally ends and it all fades to black. Everyone (who was alive before) is still alive in the finale, but the world is darkness and it’s not made clear what the true outcome of the whole battle was. We do know that the world is safe and everyone makes it, but not much else beyond that, it’s left to the player to decide, I guess.
If you want to really see a strangely tragic, chilling ending for a character, consider the fate of Porky, the antagonist in the game. The conflict in this game is motivated by his desire to see the world end. Porky’s mind was so warped by Giygas in Earthbound that he has remained in a permanent immature, childlike state even though he is now hundreds of years old. His influence corrupts and nearly destroys everything about the idyllic and peaceful Tazmily village and he is the one responsible for sapping Claus of all of his humanity. In his final encounter with Lucas, when it becomes apparent that he will not win the battle, he encases himself in the Absolutely Safe Machine, a capsule that renders him absolutely safe from all attacks both interior and exterior. Because it was just a prototype, there was no way to escape it, meaning that the ageless Porky can never die, but he can never leave the capsule nor can he communicate with anyone on the outside. For someone like Porky, an agent of entropy like the Joker in The Dark Knight, this is truly an ending worse than death. When all is dead and gone, when the universe dies of heat death, when existence is nothingness, Porky will still exist, alone in that capsule. It gives me chills just to think about it.
There’s so much about this game that just doesn’t quite add up and leaves the player feeling strange about the relationships they are seeing. Duster, the limping thief, is very clearly verbally and probably physically abused by his father, Wess, yet they seem to be a team and there does seem to be some love there. It’s unsettling on all levels because Itoi wants to take the player from comfortable and happy to uneasy and sad throughout the whole game.
Games like this, they make me appreciate things, like my family and my life, and think about things, like the nature of society and happiness. I’m being simplistic here, but my point is this, what is art? Wikipedia calls it, “…the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.”
So I say yet again, why are we questioning whether or not video games are art? Wake up and smell the sunflowers.
The taste of Cuban food, the smell right before a thunderstorm on a summer afternoon, the sound of disco music, the oppressive feel of summer heat, and the sight of a pink building all remind me of my childhood home. Everyone knows that the senses trigger strong memories. It’s also common sense that the media we take in over our lives can have a profound effect on our memories of our past and development. From the simple books of my childhood to the games and music I played and listened to along my 23 years of development, there are certain pieces of media that are just inseparable from the circumstances surrounding their initial consumption. They range from the simple joys of childhood all the way to the angst of high school and the harsh realities of adult life, but I wouldn’t trade these associations for anything.
My earliest conscious memories all come from the modest house in Hialeah we lived in as children. The memories come flooding in as I think about the years I spent growing up in that house, but some of the most vivid come from the John F. Kennedy Memorial library. A giant, two-story behemoth of a building, I spent many a day browsing the books with my parents and in library camp during the summers. In the corners of my mind, I can recall watching a movie about a mouse who had a race car, but I know it wasn’t Stuart Little, it was far too early for that. I remember reading books about a purple monster (El Monstruo?) with my dad to practice Spanish, I remember watching Bob Ross videos (“Happy little trees”!), and I remember the joy of getting my own library card, even though it had a single-digit limit on check-outs, but most of all I remember checking out Three Investigators books. This, initially, Alfred Hitchcock-supported trio of detectives were the main characters in a book series that my father used to read as a kid. Knowing that I enjoyed mystery books, my father recommended them to me and they quickly became a favorite of mine. I can still remember the corner of the library where I used to look for these books. He may not realize it, but those books have stuck with me to this day and they will forever remind me of my father and my time in Hialeah.
While I have plenty of memories of playing the NES in our family room or Eric’s room in Hialeah, the first gaming system that was truly mine was the SNES that lived in my bedroom from 1992 until we moved. The story behind the Christmas I got it is colorful and fun, but Super Mario World sticks out beyond that in my mind for one simple reason. I specifically remember playing that game in the corner of my room, my television sitting atop my dresser, requiring a bash or two to get the colors just right, throughout that year and the next. It was conquered several times in two different parts of my room, with David watching me or playing as Luigi.
Memories of that bedroom are also carried within the bytes of King’s Quest VI. My father brought home the game at someone’s recommendation – this was when my father still played games on occasion – and began to puzzle through its depths at night after completing his homework. His obsession with the game became so great that he would often sneak peeks at strategy guides within computer stores during his breaks or on the way home from work so that he could get unstuck that night. My memories of the game develop from fear to delight as I grew older. You see, the King’s Quest series was not like the adventure games of Lucasarts, you could die at a moment’s notice. The realism and the grisly deaths combined to make me actively fear the game as a small child and I used to cover my ears so as not to hear the inevitable phrase “Tickets Please” uttered by the gate man of Hell itself as my father as Alexander perished yet again.
I would brave the depths of King’s Quest VI years later with Eric when we had moved to Tualatin, a small suburb of Portland, Oregon. With the help of a guidebook so detailed it included a novelization of the game’s events, we easily conquered Alexander’s quest and that of Graham and Roselia in the games immediately preceding and following. Much stronger media memories from my Oregon days come more from my original playthroughs of both Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. My Chrono Trigger story was already documented pretty well with the 16-bit All-Stars, but what wasn’t as well documented were the days spent sitting on the floor of Eric’s room as we played. Poor David was relegated to spectator status as he watched me trek through the 16-bit time travel saga, but he got his money’s worth as he asked me to read and act the character’s parts aloud as I played, which I happily did for him most of the time.
An epic nine-day rental of Final Fantasy VI will always remind me of the family’s first big screen TV. I fondly remember powering through the game, grinding in the desert as we leveled up each character in our repertoire to prepare for our battle against Kefka. Since FF VI featured a two-player mode, David was more than happy to play along through battles as we forged our way through the epic story of my favorite in the series. I can still picture the position of the television next to the fireplace in our living room. I can still remember the Hollywood Video we used to go to where we rented the game.
After a few short years in Oregon, we found our way back to Florida and I found myself in my freshman year of high school. It was in that last year in Broward county that I have my strongest media-related memories. Eric started reading books by Neal Stephenson when we were living in Oregon and he got a hold of Cryptonomicon around the year 2000. I read the book in the back of my computer programming class during the spring of 2001. My desk was in the back of the room and I finished programming assignments so quickly I always had time to read. I even remember one of the assignments, a tic-tac-toe game coded in Visual Basic.
My memories aren’t completely limited to games of the video variety, the card game Spades, a game I learned also in the spring of 2001, is forever associated with being 15 and playing water polo. Coach Childs worked somewhere else in the district and he had to travel to the high school for practice every day. To pass the time before his arrival and our usual stretching routine, my friend Scott Huntley and other members of the team would play an informal variant of spades where the first to seven books won the game. Those spring afternoons playing cards in the amphitheater on the red mesh lunch tables of our outdoor cafeteria were great. I took the great card game of Spades with me when I switched schools the next year, introducing it to as many as I could and I played at the end of the year almost every year, but it could never beat those afternoons before practice.
We moved that summer up to central Florida, the greater Tampa Bay area, to be specific, much to my chagrin. The prospect of meeting new people and making friends yet again was daunting, but I had the help of aspiring pirate Guybrush Threepwood to get me through the anxiety of that summer and keep me from worrying too much. My first playthroughs of the fantastic games within the Monkey Island series come from that summer. As I type this on the desk I first got when we moved to Tampa, the memories come flooding back to me. The precise positioning of the desk in my bedroom. I can remember David lying on my bed behind me as we worked through the puzzles and my first girlfriend, Daniela, laughing at the ridiculous jokes in the later iterations of the series, brought to life through Dominic Armato’s voice. Lucasarts adventure games dominated that summer, but the Monkey Island games, by far, left the greatest impact on me. The day that I learned about the new iteration in the series and the MI remake I told almost anyone I knew who would care. They could all vouch for how excited I was. I owe this all to that one summer where I learned the art of insult swordfighting as I got ready to enter a brand new high school in a new town.
I listened to oldies music for the first 14 or so years of my life and, while it brought me my great love and appreciation for greats like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, it didn’t factor as much into my life as pop music did during my later high school years. Predictably, most music associations I have are tied to various girlfriends I had throughout high school. Take Sublime’s tribute to the working girl, “Wrong Way.” I discovered that song the summer of my Junior year when I met and was dating a girl named Stephanie I met at my job at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay. She happened to live near the park and was definitely from the “wrong side of the tracks,” so to speak. I’m not implying that she was a working girl, but I couldn’t help but think about the more dire economic situation near the amusement park (seriously, it was in a really crummy neighborhood) as I drove out there to see her after work or on the weekends.
Two songs by the Lostprophets, “Last Summer” and “Make a Move,” were weighing pretty heavily on my mind before I went off to university the summer of my senior year. Read the lyrics and you’ll understand why my good friend-turned-girlfriend Ashley is particularly associated with both of those songs in my mind before we went off to separate universities.
Not all song associations have to do with girls, one in particular, “All My Life” by the Foo Fighters, is actually associated with the swim team, my friend Chris, and districts. The slowly building beat was perfect for hyping us up for our races and Chris and I both gave it a listen before lining up on the blocks to get the heart pumping in preparation. I can still almost picture the tent-like structures pitched off to the side of the pool, the smell of chlorine in the air, and the simultaneous excitement and dull boredom that is a district-wide swim meet.
All that’s great, but I want to end where I started, video games. This past summer was a huge period of transition for me. I was graduating, but the job I thought I had was closed off to me through circumstances I’m completely at fault for. Faced with the prospect of heading back home with my tail between my legs or sticking it out and looking for work, I chose to find a job or starve. I was determined to make it out here and I was lucky to have a very understanding roommate allowing me time to get back on my feet. The days were spent working toward finding myself a new job, but the nights were spent finally indulging in something I had to put off for my final semester at school: Metal Gear Solid 4. Any link between the struggles of Solid Snake to stay alive and determinedly finish one last mission despite his clone degeneration and my job hunt would be ridiculous in more ways than can be named here, so I won’t go there, but I will say that playing MGS4 on the floor of my apartment (we had no furniture at that point) on my teeny 25″ television (we have a 65″er now) will always be special to me. It was the first game I completed after completing my education. The first game I finished after I was set free in the world on my own. It was (supposed to be) the end for Solid Snake and a new beginning for me (I couldn’t resist). Beating it was my first victory amidst some pretty terrible losses that brought me to that point throughout the summer and I’ll never forget the mixed emotions I felt once I’d finished Snake’s swan song. On one hand, the MGS story was done (so I thought) and Kojima went all-out to end his landmark series I was thankfully not alone in a new state (glad to have you around Eric, Min, Duffy, and my other local friends). On the other hand, the finale was overwrought, overproduced, and kind of lame and there I was jobless and left with a feeling of “What now?” thanks both to Kojima’s ending and my situation. It been working out for me so far, but I find that I can’t go back and play MGS4 just yet. Something about the experience resonates too much within me to just replay it in these better days.
That was a rather long-winded way for me to talk about memories of my past. Any of my readers (all three or four of you) have any memories of media strongly associated with their past that they’d like to share? Comment away.
As if to drive home the need for a companion, Dan is now left completely alone on his quest thanks to Harry’s departure. This next part of the game features Dan coming in contact with his childhood sabrecat pet Leo, but this part of the game is, quite frankly, dull to me, despite the themes of friendship and family, since Leo is has been dutifully searching for Dan and joins his team only once he is shown Bianca’s ribbon.
Leo recruited, the real meat of the story begins when the hero hears of a potential location for the Zenithian Shield, the city of Mostroferrato, which is far less intimidating than it sounds. Mostroferrato is home to the Briscoletti family whose patriarch, Rodrigo, is supposedly searching for a suitor for his daughter Nera. The good news: Rodrigo owns the Zenithian Shield. The bad news: he will only give it to the man deemed worthy enough to pass his trials and marry his daughter. Rodrigo’s two trials are fairly standard RPG fare; namely, Dan must retrieve the Circle of Fire and the Circle of Water to serve as the rings for the wedding.
Between this point in the game and the part of the questline involving the Circle of Water, Dan comes into contact with three important women. If you hadn’t guessed, these are his prospective wives. The first is Nera, one of Rodrigo’s daughters and a serene, beautiful girl. She is clearly a catch, but there’s one slight caveat. A man in Mostroferrato, Crispin, is clearly in love with Nera and he is Dan’s prime competitor in this event. I can’t exactly remember, but I think that Nera may even have feeling for Crispin as well. This isn’t an ideal situation.
Dan’s second choice comes in the chance reunion with Bianca en route to collecting the Circle of Water. She joins up with Dan to fetch the ring and she’s clearly in love with Dan. Unlike Nera, she is far less sophisticated with a common lineage, almost no money, and the localization team chose to give her a bit of an accent to further hammer home her “peasant” status, at least compared to Nera. I like to think that the game subtly nudges the player toward marrying Bianca. The box art features Bianca along with blonde children (Nera has black hair) and Bianca is unsubtly head over heels with Dan. Combined with the preexisting competition for Nera, I bet Yuji Horii assumed that most players would choose Bianca on their first playthrough especially due to his narrative nudging encouraging that choice.
The final choice for Dan is actually a DS-remake exclusive. Debora is Nera’s sister and, thus, another Briscoletti daughter. She is rude, domineering, heartless, and an all around terror to be around. In an interview for the DS remake, Yuji Horii described Debora as a girl “nobody in their right mind would pick!” Naturally, Dan chose to marry Debora when the time to choose between the three women was upon him. I realized that this would cause my experience to be subtly different from the most common SNES or PS2 experiences back in the day, but I just couldn’t help doing what I was clearly not supposed to do.
Yuji Horii has been known to say that Dragon Quest V is his favorite of the series. I think this is a function of just how affecting the story he chose to tell really is for the player. I’m not exaggerating when I say that turning down Bianca, watching her take the rejection with sad pride, and listening to her wish Dan and Debora happiness in their marriage was a difficult thing for me to experience. I was so invested in Dan’s life and the world of DQV that I felt like I had broken that poor pixelated girl’s heart.
The question of Debora was also very intriguing to me here. Horii created a wife for Dan that was absolutely unlikeable, yet I wondered if he would go the clichéd route and have her completely soften up thanks to Dan’s love. Plenty an anime and video game have taken these normally confident, mean, and strong-willed women and put forth what I feel to be a subtly sexist message that “wild” women will be tamed through domesticity. Given the skill with which Horii has woven the narrative so far, I put my money on him not trivializing Debora and keeping her character suitably abrasive to Dan throughout the entire game.
Anyway, so Dan has himself a lavish wedding thanks to the Briscoletti affluence aboard Rodrigo’s casino ship. Harry and his wife Maria attend along with the Briscolettis, Bianca, and the Mostroferrato townspeople. Debora and Dan enjoy their first night together, Dan gets himself the Zenithian Shield, and then it’s back to the quest. Naturally, Dan wouldn’t want to expose his wife to such danger…wait, Debora has announced that there’s no way Dan is leaving without her. He’s also pretty much supposed to cater to her every need. It’s time for the newly formed family to continue Dan’s quest to find his mother.
Get Dragon Quest V from my aStore!
Hey loyal readers,
I need your help in deciding what game to play next. I haven’t quite gotten my polling software down, so here’s a nifty embedded poll instead.
Which game should I play next?(survey software)
Basically, I want to continue to write impressions about games that I’m playing, but I don’t know which one to move on to next. A little about each of the choices:
Earthbound (Mother 2)
A fantastic, Dragon Quest-inspired RPG series by Shigesato Itoi, Earthbound is fantastic, quirky, and interesting. I played this back when I was in middle school, but I think it deserves reexamining. Ideally I would be hooking up my SNES, which I still have, to get this to work, so that would be an adventure in and of itself.
Suikoden Tierkreis
I’ve never played any of Konami’s Suikoden RPG series, but this DS gaiden-type story is said to have a pretty neat narrative.
Shadow of the Colossus
Universally hailed by nearly every human being who has played it, this game is held in such high regard that it was featured in Reign Over Me because its themes of loss and regret actually coincided with those of the movie. I can only go on without playing a game by Ueda for so much longer.
Mother 3
Held in super-high regard by the likes of Tim Rogers, among many others, the third of the Mother series is chock full of the same light irreverence of Mother 2, but coupled with a somber, deep, dark, heavy story that is sure to tug at the heartstrings.
Chrono Trigger DS
The DS remake of my favorite 16-bit game, you can’t really go wrong with CT. Developed by a dream team collaboration between Square and Enix before they were Square Enix (Squeenix!), Chrono Trigger was the swan song of the 16-bit JRPG.
Final Fantasy IV DS
The Final Fantasy whose release immediately preceded (in the US) my favorite in the series, FFIV has eluded completion from me on multiple rentals. A fine game that I just haven’t had the time to ever finish.
There’s also the obvious choice that you don’t like this feature, which I won’t take personally. If no one likes it, why do it, right?
This poll will remain open until 0000 14 July whereupon I will either narrow it down further or, if one wins outright, simply play that game next.
You can get some of these games at my Amazon aStore!
Kids are stupid. It’s really not their fault, how can they know anything about the important things in life without any real-life experience. Take my music-habits as a kid as a prime example. It’s not like I was listening to The Wiggles or anything so terrible, but among the real musical gems that I was listening to (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones) on Majic 102.7 (WMXJ) was some questionable material. Sure, Alvin & the Chipmunks singing country music (Urban Chipmunk, lovingly referred to as “a piece of shit” by Rolling Stone magazine), Bugs and Friends Sing the Beatles, and Kermit Unpigged may have featured music by legitimate artists or actual classics in their genres, but, did you notice that it’s all marketing trash?
That was what I spent most of my time listening to, laughing like an idiot and thinking they were the greatest thing ever. Little did I know that I was far closer to musical perfection than I realized by another way I wasted my time. Of course, I apply that phrase liberally, because we all know that spending hours playing video games certainly seems like a waste of time, but is 100% legit. The year was 199X and I was manning the controller to save the world from Dr. Wily’s Robot Masters as they threatened humanity in the year 200X. Did you know that, with an easy gap of a decade between when I last played Mega Man and back in January of this year I can still remember and point out tunes from that game? Wait, did Dan just go and say that the soundtrack to Mega Man 2 is equivalent to great rock music? Just roll with me on this one, I’m making a point (a correct one).
It’s been said that necessity breeds innovation and nowhere was necessity more evident than the 8-bit sound processors encased within the video game systems of old. Ok, it was more evident in the previous generation of sound processors, but I wasn’t alive then and I don’t really care. Necessity bred one of the most kickass soundtracks ever to grace the 8-bit era. Takashi Tateishi, Manami Matsumae, Yoshihiro Sakaguchi made the Nintendo sing. Sure, they’re not quite as iconic as the works of Koji Kondo or Nobuo Uematsu, but they were really catchy, hip, and cool tracks.
That spirit of innovation was a requirement during the days of the NES and SNES, but by the time the Playstation hit most developers had moved onto Red Book audio and if they weren’t shelling out for full orchestras they were using MIDI synthesizers and the like. The art of what would eventually come to be called chiptunes was no longer necessary. We were better for it, right?
Last year I remember listening to an episode of Retronauts and the subject of video game music came up. The hypothesis was posited that in-game music had actually declined in quality and had become somewhat same-y. Iconic tunes were a thing of the past. There are a lot of things that could really affect this, I mean, do we ever really think that new media we come across as better than what we discovered in the past? For most people the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia prevent new, quality media from being better than what we used to watch/listen to/read in our youth. Things just aren’t the same anymore. To tell you the truth, that argument doesn’t even really matter in the context of this post, so we’ll move on.
All I was trying to say is that we, the video game-consuming public, have strong feelings of nostalgia with respect to chiptunes. So much so that musicians began to voluntarily restrict themselves just to see what they could musically produce. The chiptunes scene was born, social networking allowed it to grow, and we’ve arrived at Anamanaguchi.
Let’s face it though, just how much can a genre of music that involves 8-bit chirps, bleeps, and bloops penetrate the mainstream? I love video games and video game music, so something that sounds like it is naturally going to be attractive to me. Anamanaguchi can’t get around the fact that there are 8-bit samples in their music, but what they can do is try to broaden their sound by adding in real drums, guitar and bass. It’s brilliant. Limiting yourself to 8-bit samples will keep the audience equally limited.
There are definitely two names mentioned far too often on this blog, but I’m going to still mention Leigh Alexander of Sexy Videogameland, Kotaku, and Gamasutra fame, because her SVGL and Kotaku articles are the ones that alerted me to this band rising in the Brooklyn indie music scene. Her article mentions that the band has been listed as an up-and-coming band and not just among other chiptunes (or bitpop) artists. They cite their influences as real rockers, not 8 Bit Weapon, and it shows.
Of course, it’s still on the awkward side to share with random individuals who you can’t be sure will jive with chippy music. I picked up the albums this weekend hot off of watching a video, but I balked at exposing my visiting friends to it and opted to play it quietly in the background, but all that did was let the occasional muddled chirp sound through. Definitely not what I wanted anyway, so I just put on some FOB when I got tired of quiet bitpop.
Once I had some privacy and the ability to listen in depth, I found a great punk sound that totally blew me away. There are two small albums available on Amazon.com: Dawn Metropolis and Power Supply EP, with the former being the more recent release. At their website, Anamanaguchi.com, you can listen to all of Dawn Metropolis and you can also check out an interpretive video that plays in the background of their shows at this site. The little videos show an interesting mini-epic that the music is trying to convey and are pretty cool and trippy.
The best tracks to check out on each album are:
Power Supply EP
– “Video Challenge” – “Helix Nebula” – “Air Base”
Dawn Metropolis
– “Jetpack Blues, Sunset Hues” – “Tempest, Teamwork, Triumph (at Sea)”
There’s just a great sound to these discs and I think it would be a definite challenge to keep your toes from tapping to these beats.
Below are some videos, one of “Jetpack Blues, Sunset Hues” and another from Blip Festival 2007
Anamanaguchi – Jet Pack Blues, Sunset Hues from Dr. Limelight on Vimeo.
Anamanaguchi // Blip Festival 2007: The Videos from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.
Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.
With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.
It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.
Week 1 – Garland Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness Week 4 – Zeromus Week 5 – Exdeath Week 6 – Kefka Week 7 – Sephiroth Week 8 – Ultimecia
Now that we’ve moved past my least favorite Final Fantasy, we can talk about Sakaguchi’s swan song. Final Fantasy IX was a return to roots: a story about crystals, medieval technology, and cartoony characters. Unfortunately, the nostalgia-fest was not quite a return to SNES days of glory. The story was pretty unfocused and not all that interesting and if you didn’t play the first three of four Final Fantasy games, most of the jokes and references were totally lost on you.
Then there are the villains in the game. You have Kuja, a villain who subscribes to the Squall school of acting, Garland, a clear FF I reference, and the final boss Necron, basically a force of evil you’ve never seen before, kind of like the Cloud of Darkness.
So what can I even say about it?
Evil Rating:
?/10
Who knows?
Cool Rating:
3/10
The concept art is kind of cool…
Images and Video:
In-Game
Sweet Concept Art
Week 1 – Garland Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness Week 4 – Zeromus Week 5 – Exdeath
It’s no secret that I love everything about Final Fantasy VI. The game was my second best 16-bit game, if you remember that old feature. In fact, this feature was inspired almost completely by the antagonist of the greatest Final Fantasy villain to ever grace the screen: Kefka.
Heading away from the job system and small parties, Square did something they’d never done before by creating a large, mostly de-centralized cast of protagonists. The main character is, ostensibly, Terra, but pretty even attention is given to at least four or five other characters, you can spend quite a bit of time without Terra in your party, and you don’t even have to re-add her to your party once you’ve reached the World of Ruin.
Then we have the main evil man of the series, Kefka. Talk about an odd one. The guy looks like a clown, both in his sprite and his Amano-inspired portrait. It turns out (and I don’t think this was that clear in the original translation, the GBA one is clearer) that he is not a jester of any sort, he’s the court mage of the Empire and one of the Emperor’s big four general-types among Leo, Celes, and the magic soldier Terra.
So he’s an evil henchman, so what? I bet there’s some ancient evil that secretly steals the scene and becomes the true villain, right? No…not even close. Kefka is truly evil, and a nihilist to boot, with actions that are truly deplorable. Edgar and Figaro won’t cooperate and hand over Terra? He sets Castle Figaro on fire. Assault on Doma taking too long and Imperial losses getting to be too much? Poison the city’s water supply, murdering women, children, captured Imperial soldiers, and everyone else.
It gets even worse. He brutally massacres a bunch of espers, throws the balance of magic off in the entire world, and causes the apocalypse. After becoming a god, he brutally unleashes his wrath against people, seeking to end life on the planet, because he can. All this unparalleled evil, yet in most every battle with the player, Kefka just runs away at the completion.
Here’s to the most evil, human villain Final Fantasy has ever seen.
War criminal, bringer of the apocalypse, brutal murderer, slaver. An all around bastard embodying the worst of humanity. He also looks like a clown :shudder:
10/10
Pure evil, mage, jerk, first speaking part in a Final Fantasy game, but also has a penchant for running away from battles that he can’t win. He also looks like a clown.
8/10
Images:
Sprite Amano Art More Amano Battle Sprite Anthologies CGI Final Boss Kefka Godform CGI Godform Dissidia Kefka Dissidia Concept Art Kefka Figurine
Video:
Kefka Cosplay:
Kefka Battle:
Week 1 – Garland Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness Week 4 – Zeromus
Final Fantasy V took a step back from the ridiculously large cast of characters in FF IV and refocused on a cast of four characters in order to fully emphasize the hardcore, awesome job system implemented within the game.
The new four light warriors (one of whom was quite unfortunately translated as Butz…) were united by trans-dimensional travelers as they attempted to solve the crystal shattering crisis affecting the entire planet. Once it became apparent that they were fighting a concerted evil entity, they found out the dreaded monster’s name: Exdeath!
Exdeath. What a terribly generic name for a decently evil villain! His ultimate goal was to unite the two dimensions and harness the power of the Void to erase existence. Pretty basic and common villain stuff, par for the course for a Final Fantasy game. His evil deeds do include sinking an entire island and killing off one of the Light Warriors in plain view of his granddaughter. She eventually takes up his mantle as a Light Warrior and fights the good fight with all his abilities, but the loss of a character you’d just spent about half to 3/4 of the game with is one FF players won’t feel for another few years.
Then things start to get weird. You see, Exdeath was originally…a tree. I’m not kidding. A tree. A malevolent tree who somehow managed to get himself into the form of a man, but who returns to his tree form near the end of the game.
Tree…
One of the first permanent deaths in a Final Fantasy game of your core group, the sinking of an entire island, and the merging of two dimensions while shattering crystals. Not a bad rap sheet.
One word: Tree.
1/10
Exdeath (Amano Artwork) Tree Form (in game)
Week 1 – Garland Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness
Final Fantasy IV was a masterpiece of soap operatic storytelling. Characters joined, left, fell in love, died, were amnesiacs, and were under mind control. It was a mess, but it was an entertaining tale of redemption for an evil man and his love for his woman.
Unfortunately we still had this very strange story anomaly where you’d play through about 90% of the game thinking one guy was your enemy (Golbez, in this case) only to find out that the real culprit was some other bloke (Zemus/Zeromus, in this case). While we can forgive the weak characterization in these early games, FF IV started to reach the saturation point for this nonsense. Sure, we love fighting evil, but wouldn’t it be nice to not just have a quick “Oh, this guy was mind controlling everyone” kind of thing be pulled on us?
So Zemus/Zeromus happens to be a Lunarian, or a dude from the moon, who’s decided that living on the moon blows. To fix this problem, he’s decided to kill everyone on the planet and take the planet for the Lunarians to live on. The other Lunarians are, surprisingly, not on board, so it’s up to the crew to take this sucker down.
He’s evil, but not evil enough to want to get his own hands dirty. 99% of the evil he causes is realized through his mind controlled puppets. I’ll give him points for wanting to kill everyone on the planet, but he’s gotta lose some for laziness. That and he totally gets owned by the heroes and has to let the embodiment of his hatred be the final boss.
7/10 (mostly because his evil intentions raze an entire town, kill multiple player characters, and are cool, but he loses points for the totally lame mind control plot)
Well he gets cool points for being from the moon. He’s also too cool for school, preferring to make others do his dirty work while he chills out on the moon. It doesn’t get much cooler than that, except that he gets owned pretty easily and has to unleash his hatred upon the world to actually be formidable.
7/10
Zemus (DS) Zeromus (Amano Artwork)
It’s probably too early to start calling me Nostradamus (we’ll have to wait until the regular season of baseball ends to know just how good I am), but if you remember this post I mentioned that Mario RPG’s launch on the VC in PAL territories would spearhead a US release. Lo and behold, Mario RPG, one of the greatest Mario games, SNES games, and RPGs in gaming history.
It’s too bad that Square Enix won’t be releasing any of its other landmark SNES RPGs on VC, preferring to milk tons of money out of players with remakes (which we like) and ports (which we find a bit annoying, but kind of like anyway). Go out and buy Mario RPG and let’s hope that Earthbound hits the system soon.
