JoelCouture.com

Old RPG jokes never got old, as is showcased by how I never stop writing them.

I haven’t been having any fun with big budget games lately, something that has me questioning the validity of my favorite hobby. I mean, how often do I feel addicted to a game any more? It’s extremely rare for me to even think about most of the games I play once the power’s off, and that’s something that used to happen a lot. I have memories of being on long car trips thinking about ways to beat Kracko from Kirby’s Adventure, or figuring out when my playthrough of Final Fantasy IV went so terribly wrong (Here’s a hint, past self: If you skip every random battle because it ‘looks hard’, all of the bosses will STEAMROLL YOU). These games used to captivate my imagination, sticking with me when I was far away from them.

A handful of indie games have managed to restore my faith in games, though. After playing through Lone Survivor and Breath of Death VII, I found I was actually enjoying playing games again. A particularly humbling party wipe in Breath of Death VII had me analyzing what had gone wrong, thinking of new ways to tackle the fights while I was driving to work. The same thing happened in Lone Survivor, where one tough room filled with three enemies had me planning tactics during my shower. It was nice to actually have games that were good enough to occupy my thoughts when I was away from the controller again.

You’re probably thinking it’s just another old gamer complaining about the games of today, though. He’s just blinded by nostalgia for these old-styled games. I wonder if it’s that too, sometimes, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Then again, I think simplicity is probably the biggest contributing factor in why I’m enjoying these games so much.

These games are straight and to the point. There’s very little bumbling about while getting to the fun. There’s no giant cutscenes, no reams of text, nothing. Even so, Breathy of Death VII is almost always entertaining when it does decide to talk to you, and Lone Survivor has the most intricate minimalist story I’ve seen in a horror game in years. Both of them are credits to storytelling in their own way, but steer clear of the bloated, poorly voiced, and rambling stories of today’s blockbuster games.

And that fun I mentioned? These indie games take the combat styles I’ve always liked, but render them in a way that hones the stuff I like and tosses anything I don’t. Take RPGs, for example. At some point, developers felt like turn-based RPGs weren’t good enough any more. The combat grew more complex, but they still didn’t remove all of the grinding and random battles. Breath of Death VII threw most of that crap out the window.

Sure, you could grind, but the battle speed was through the roof. With no animations to worry about, every effect happens instantaneously. Each round lasts a few seconds if you hammer at the button fast enough, so battles can be won in a hurry. After the fight, you could continue to poke around the dungeon to find more monsters, or just select ‘Fight’ from a menu and you’d be right back in a battle. If you weren’t in a grinding mood, you’d still run into periodic random battles, but they’re spaced quite far apart. You can cross a huge distance before running into another. Also, each dungeon had a battle count, and after you’d emptied it, there were no more random battles, allowing you free reign to explore the dungeon.

And the level up system? The one that lets you customize your character as you see fit? That could have gotten out of hand too, but instead, it’s reduced to two choices, and you pick based on how you want the character to fight. Not only is this awesome, it also streamlines the process to keep the game moving.

There’s just so many good ideas about keeping games fun and engaging in these titles that I don’t feel much of a need to pick up any of the big name games for a while. With good people out there making great games on their own, I feel like there’s better places to be spending my money than on the next $60 mess that I’ll only play for an hour before shelving forever.

Joel

I don’t think a single person walking the earth had anything nice to say about Ninja Gaiden 3. I’m not even sure if it’s classy enough to merit roman numerals in its title, to be honest, and it’s certainly not good enough to justify me rifling around the house to find its case and check. Oh, sorry, quick internet scan reveals that your twenty-one year old sibling has that honor. The one that only had five continues, an act of cruelty so vicious that many of the game’s developers were imprisoned.

Anyway, I’m well off my point. I wasn’t all that impressed the first time I saw Ninja Gaiden 3. If you’re someone who’s played the modern version of the series to any degree, you probably saw it too. Didn’t it look like the players in the videos were just kind of diving into combat and swinging away? Not only were they just going wild, they were also getting away with it. I was seeing maneuvers work that would have gotten you killed on the starting screen of Ninja Gaiden Sigma. The guy in the demo wasn’t even blocking. I don’t know if you recall, but you block so much in the last two games that you may as well just tape the button down.

I was surprised to see that they’d made it into a brawler, I’ll admit. From what everyone was saying, it was a shoddy one, at that. I shrugged off what was being said in my craving for a decent action game, diving in just as stupidly as the player from the video. After feeling like the game was actively trying to get me to turn it off, I finally gave up on it after beating the first boss. You win, Ninja Gaiden 3. I give up.

Who decided that every single kill needed to have some sort of bizarre close up, one that whips the camera around and forces you to re-orient yourself every time? Again, did no one play this before it shipped out? It was kind of cool the first few times, like most of these fancy kills tend to be in games, but it got old fast, especially with the amount of enemies I was killing. If you’re going to throw thirty enemies at me over the course of a few minutes, I really don’t want there to be a kill animation for every other guy I beat. I felt like I had to get myself situated again every few seconds.

And if you’re going to keep spinning me around, at least have the attacks target something else. I’m not talking auto-targeting, but rather if I point myself in the general direction of someone, can you at least have the game fill in the blanks and send me at some dangerous thing that way? I had a lot of instances where I wasn’t quite pointing at the exact location of the enemy I was jumping at, and my attack went nowhere. This didn’t happen in either of the other 2 modern games, and those were meant to break the human spirit.

Can we also stop having people pick at me from off-screen if you aren’t going to help me target them? It’s not a hunting game, you realize. I shouldn’t have this much trouble trying to figure out where the missiles are coming from. I had to drive the camera speed up in order to have any chance of locating the gunners in this game, and even then, I usually couldn’t clear the distance between them and me and land a hit because the targeting was crap.

Oddly, those things just annoyed me. The last straw was the fact that every single person in the game refers to you by your whole name, Ryu Hayabusa. Even typing it after hearing it so many times is making me angry. People call you by that name almost every minute during cutscenes, sometimes twice in the same sentence. It drives me up the wall. And after hearing the first boss rattle off the name a few times, I just shut it off.

Ninja Gaiden 3 is a terrible game that is actively seeking its own destruction. If you see a copy of it, treat it as you would Shaq-Fu, or any other vermin.

Joel

I think there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

I don’t think I can begin to describe how much I hate May and want it to die so it can be June, and then I can finally (probably) play Lollipop Chainsaw. Devil May Cry HD Collection scratched at an itch I’ve had for a good action game, but I really want something new right now. I’m ready for some funny carnage, and I think Suda 51, the man behind Lollipop Chainsaw, is going to deliver.

The man has been at the forefront of making absurd action games that embrace the inherent ridiculousness of gaming. Really, my favorite hobby is one built on absurd concepts. The idea that you can get shot a few dozen times, or just ‘get better’ after falling down a thousand-foot chasm is pretty goofy. Games are designed with this kind of logic in mind, though, and gamers have always just gone along with it.

Few games are all that reflective of this insanity, though. Most of them are played completely straight, as if we’re just supposed to ignore the ridiculous qualities of the game and take in the serious stuff. How am I supposed to believe that the world is in danger from global terrorism when my soldiers can all recover from their wounds with a few seconds of rest? Meanwhile, the enemy is coming charging in with almost nothing in the way of tactics. It’s just really bizarre, but most people play those games without a second thought. Many of them even talk about how realistic they are.

It makes it very hard for me to take serious games, well, seriously. There’s no acknowledgement of the silliness going on in the background, no humor for the gamers at home. I just have a hard time dealing with games that are deathly serious all the time, as the medium is just so ridiculous at heart. I like a little bit of the absurd in my games. It keeps things interesting for me.

I love the fact that in Contra, despite an invasion by ruthless aliens, no one even bothers to put on a shirt. I enjoy Devil May Cry 3 because you can use an electric guitar that shoots bats because someone thought that would be a cool thing to be able to do. It’s fun to be able to punch garbage cans and whip walls to find perfectly good food. I miss the days before developers started asking ‘Does this make sense?’.

I know I’m dangerously close to not making my point, but hear me out. There’s a sensation at work in games that recognize their absurdities. It’s the difference between when you feel like you’re supposed to be laughing with the developers or at them. To illustrate, let’s look at Devil May Cry and The Witcher 2. Devil May Cry has Dante acting like he’s having the greatest time. He’s a tough guy, and he’s having a lot of fun doing it. Geralt seems like he’s supposed to be the bitter, grizzled war hero. I never saw him crack a smile or enjoy himself.

Those emotions came through the game I was playing. When I played as Dante, I was made to feel empowered and have fun. With Geralt, I was still powerful, but it felt like everything was grim and dark. While I don’t mind that sometimes, I just found that the whole game was depressing and gray. So, when I stumbled across people who looked like they were dressed in their jammies all through the first city, it made me feel like the game was just being stupid. If they were trying to be funny it didn’t work, and if they were trying to be serious, that didn’t work either.

I’m not averse to serious stories in games, but even the most serious story can’t be grim all the time. There has to be a little bit of laughs every once in a while to let some of the pressure off. If you pour the emotions on for too long, they get dull or annoying. I didn’t think The Witcher 2 was ever going to give me that break, and I just couldn’t take it any more. I needed something that was more worried about being fun.

So I’m really looking forward to something that embraces the absurd nature of gaming, creating something that’s over-the-top and fun. I want to see people ordering lightsabers over the internet so they can become assassins. I want to see more dirty jokes told by demon hunters. I want to defeat evil with my skills as a baseball pitcher. I just want someone to tell me that it’s okay to demand that my games be colorful, funny, and ridiculous, and I trust Suda 51, and Lollipop Chainsaw, to do that.

Joel

I’ve been thinking about the bigger players in the world lately, the people who are pulling the strings that make my characters dance. I’ve created quite a few characters in odd situations, but I’ve been starting to think about the people that are running Planistis. I knew that there was a single ruler for the world from an earlier short story, Provider, but what was he all about? What kind of ruler is he? I thought about doing something about him, but then I remembered the other people who were working from the shadows.

What about Waker, and the other people he’s allied with? What about all of those wizards who I mentioned in passing, or only talked about for a page or two in Lost City? What are they up to? It’s something that, well, I didn’t actually know. I have a grasp on what Avanarus is up to, but I’m completely in the dark about the group of wizards I know as the Circle of Twelve.

Who better to help me learn more about them than a tired, aging detective? Since I gave one such man a compelling reason to look into matters way back in Charred House, I figured I might as well start digging.

Shakedown flailed for a while. It wasn’t bad, but I was at a loss as to where Darvis should be looking. I’m not exactly a detective myself, so I had to keep working over what little I could come up with. I knew that someone as powerful as Waker would draw the wrong kind of attention coming into town, but who would actually be able to find out anything about him?

Covetous.

Trouble is, Covetous is a member of the Circle of Twelve, and I can’t imagine why he’s leaving a trail of bread crumbs for Darvis to follow unless he’s manipulating him in some way. I didn’t get to see much of his true motivations in the story, other than him sounding like he’s setting everyone up to lose in the end. He could be helping push Darvis along to suit Waker’s desires, but I’m pretty sure no member of the Circle does anything that isn’t helping them out exclusively.

Despite getting Covetous’ dangerous clues, I sill had nothing to go on, which led me to bother the guy I’d gone after at the start of the story, hoping he had a little bit more information to spill. Luckily, he had one more scheme in mind, forcing me back to the Shodar Mansion, a place I’d dismissed as soon as the story began.

How could the Shodar Mansion be of any use by this point? It had probably been investigated a dozen times over, so I just couldn’t imagine what else could be hidden there. It was only through a fluke that a bunch of ideas came tumbling together. Waker’s talk about ghosts being memories was one important piece, as we saw him steal Shodar’s ‘ghost’ at the end of Charred House. Assuming he was telling the truth (Probably a bad idea), that meant he’d taken a memory. If he had all of Shodar’s thoughts, he should have been able to steal all of his research. He hadn’t, though, or at least I don’t think he did, so that meant that something was stopping him from doing it.

That left Shodar’s memory, contained within Waker himself. How to get the old man to talk, though? With Darvis slipping into a ghostly world every once in a while from Waker’s curse, I figured the two things had to be tied together. Waker was leading Darvis to Shodar to get answers from him. Now, it’s a matter of who can outwit the other, something I can definitely get interested in.

The next leg leads us to the Wastelands, a place I’ve been dying to talk about. Some fun, interesting stuff should eventually come of this storyline. Can’t wait to come back to it again.

But first, I think I owe you guys the ending to a story I haven’t touched on in almost a year…

Joel

Some of the more dangerous players on Planistis begin to appear in this month’s story, Shakedown, as Darvis starts looking into the events at the Shodar mansion from waaaaaaaaaaaay back in Charred House. Waker stole the memory of Juchelm Shodar for a reason, and Darvis will need to figure out why if he’s going to have any chance of catching up to the deadly wizard.

Waker has ties to powerful enemies and friends, although who is who isn’t exactly clear as Darvis starts getting closer to his opponent. With every bit of information he gains, Waker’s motives become less clear, leaving Darvis to wonder if he’s following a trail or being dragged along it.

It’s the beginnings of a detective story, a mystery that we just start to scratch the surface of. I hope you’ll come along with me!

Joel