If You Die In A Cut Scene, You Die In Real Life January 23, 2009

One of my favourite things about the Ar tonelico series is that you can’t dodge the consequences of your actions simply by being the protagonist. You are held accountable to the same moral standards as the enemy, and you can’t just get away with the end justifying the means. Sometimes both sides look like the bad guy, and the game doesn’t try to excuse your side just because you’re on it.

The first game has a little of this, but it was downplayed because the story doesn’t revolve around political factions as much as the second game’s does. AT1 hints at it in the beginning, but you don’t see it really blossom until the end of the game. I think in AT2, the story’s genuine acceptance that both sides have a sincere point, and neither is pure evil but neither is perfect, has finally come into the spotlight.

I’m a big fan of that approach. When I was a kid I didn’t really notice, but nowadays I can’t help being critical of games that oversimplify and let the heroes get away with being as callously destructive as the enemy. Most RPGs tend to let that fly (other than the Suikoden series, which as far as I’m concerned is in a class of its own w.r.t. understanding of politics, morals, and the human heart), and I’m used to putting up with it, but it’s truly refreshing to see a game that applies a consistent set of standards to everyone in the story.

Another Boy Meets Another Girl June 12, 2008

I’ve been fairly busy with non-game-related matters, but I’m nearly halfway through the third Ace Attorney game, so today I picked up Apollo Justice– I have to feed the addiction. Sometime I mean to blog about the ending to the second game and why I think it was a huge leap in quality for a series that I was already enjoying, but for now you get a quick critique of love stories.

Sasarai and I have been discussing Tidus and Yuna (or Tuna, as I hear the shippers have amusingly labelled it) from FFX. Specifically, the two seem to have very little in common, and we were wondering what could make this relationship tick. What I’ve been thinking is that perhaps they aren’t compatible at all– perhaps they are in love with the idea of love itself. Tidus has always been so popular, he may have been more interested in impressing lots of girls than in really devoting himself to one beloved person, and Yuna likely hasn’t explored relationships too much because everyone acts like it would be selfish given her future. So perhaps neither of them has ever been in a serious relationship, and suddenly they’ve realised how nice it would be to be in one– the rush of love itself, without necessarily any foundation or strong connection to the other person to back it up. It would be quite easy, especially for teenagers as naive as that, for them to mistake interest in love itself for interest in the other person. Perhaps what they love is the idea of being in love with each other, which doesn’t bode well for a lasting relationship.

I think that Squall and Rinoa from FFVIII have a similar lack of apparent compatibility, but the big difference is that FFVIII isn’t just a love story, it’s a story about love. Its theme is love– as Square told us from the very beginning– and it explores people’s insecurities and problems relating thereto. If Squall and Rinoa don’t last, that doesn’t make the whole relationship futile; the point is that Squall has learned that it’s okay to love and trust someone, and it will always be good that this has happened. This lesson is far more important than whether this particular teenage relationship lasts forever. Tidus and Yuna, though, don’t make any such personal progress through each other. They’re just two teenagers with hormones in overdrive, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Where I’m going with all of this is that there is a good way and a bad way to do love stories. Most RPGs have them; Final Fantasies make a good example because they often completely revolve around them; but they’re not often done well, despite the huge amount of focus they tend to get. Need a plot element, a motive, or a sidequest? Add a romance! (It’s either that or cloning.) Romance is so often used as a MacGuffin that the ones with the most justification tend to be the incidental ones between minor characters, the ones which do not serve a plot function and seem to happen in the background just because those two characters have so much in common (since we’re pointing at Final Fantasy, I’ll nominate Beatrix/Steiner as an example). The worst ones are often the ones that drive the main plot; in order to make the heroes relatable, developers tend to make their interactions so generic that they are rarely unique, memorable, or driven by anything that could show a very private bond between them. Such a bond would be exclusionary of anyone else, including the player, which I think the developers try unduly hard to avoid. And we can’t share in the hero’s experience of love anyway; the game can dramatize all it wants, but it can’t guarantee that we will fall in love with– or even like– any given character. But because it’s the main plot, it drags on… and on… and on.

I think it’s no wonder that many of us– myself included– groan when the main plot of a game turns out to be a love story. They’re so often generic in a way that leaves one cold and emotionless, watching some teenager embrace the lovely girl beneath the setting sun in a dramatic cut scene while the music swells, and thinking, I need to remember to equip her before we leave town. If the developers can’t do better than this tell-don’t-show expression of love and bonding and personal connections, they should stay away from love stories and get back to the part about saving the world already. Most of us probably don’t want to sit through a love story unless it’s a good one.