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grandnincompoop · 6 years

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Fire Emblem, Design Philosophy, and My Quarrels

Let's harken back to 2001 and the release of Super Smash Brothers Melee. I had an N64 and a Gameboy, so I was familiar with most of the characters. You had Mario and Fox and Samus- I had either played their game or learned about them from the original Super Smash Brothers. I didn't really know you could just go on the internet and look up how to unlock all of the characters when the game came out, and even when I did, we would just look up how to get Mew in the original Pokemon. Nor did I have a Nintendo Power subscription. I had one issue- 2003's Issue 173, probably because it had Star Wars on the cover. So in the daunting quest of trying to discover how to unlock every character, you meet Marth and Roy. As with most of the non-Japanese world, I was left wondering who these two sword guys were. I was 9, so obviously I wasn't in the market for importing untranslated Famicon games. My curiosity wasn't satiated until 2003 with the release of Fire Emblem on the Game Boy Advanced, but I was immediately infatuated.

The Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade is a highly linear game. This was an age long before sprawling open worlds were commonplace in every RPG or shooter. You merely progressed from quest to quest, accumulating an ever growing roaster with each mission. Except for the three missions that include Arenas, there's no way to deviate from the progression of game's 37 chapters. The experience points you can gain are limited, and honestly the game is stronger for that. As much fun as I had grinding Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, such as the time I trapped a high level Malboro with a cycle of sleep/attack/heal, it diminished from the thrill I experienced with Fire Emblem with its terrifying combat where every critical hit mattered. Simplicity and transparency are core to the experience. Almost like a board game, the game takes a narrow concept- in this case rock-paper-scissors, the adds some elaboration to it to make it flow into a fantasy world of mages and magical creatures. There are stats like strength and defense, and you have health and there's a grid you move on and there's a percentile to hit, all of which are visible to the player. That's about it and the game was better for it.

The core elements could easily be fitted to a pen and paper experience which is what brought me to believe that the game had a Bottom Up development. I was introduced to this term by Mark Rosewater, the head designer of Magic: the Gathering, who describes it, along with its developmental opposite (Top Down), as "Top Down is subject matter based. I want to capture the subject matter. Bottom Up is mechanical based. There's a tool I want to make use of. How can I best make use of that tool." Not to insult the subject matter of Fire Emblem, but it, like its combat system, isn't complicated. They're collections of sometimes loosely related stories of a prince having to fight some evil in a world with dragons, drakes, wizards, EVIL wizards, undead/possessed/ etc etc. You could play them for their narrative, but most people I know and have read play it for the combat and support system (hold on, I'll get back to that in a moment). Looking at interviews with Shouzou Kaga, the original creator of the series, his initial intent was to create a "roleplaying simulation", which he describes as

"A strategy game. But strategy games typically are kind of “hardcore” and dry. (laughs) You only care about winning or losing the battle, and there’s no space for the player to empathize with the characters or story.

I love strategy games like that too, but I also love RPGs. By adding RPG elements, I wanted to create a game where the player could get more emotionally invested in what’s happening. Conversely, one of the drawbacks of RPGs is that there’s always just a single protagonist. Thus, to a certain extent, you can only experience the linear story that the game creator has prepared for you.

I wanted to create a game where the story and game will develop differently for each player depending on the units they use. Thus I added the strategy elements and arrived at this hybrid system."

This idea doesn't seem to fit exactly into either of MaRo's definitions. Concept isn't exactly subject matter, usually a story or pre-established setting, nor is it strictly mechanical based, although it's definitely closer to that. If we looked at a chart from a 2007 article on Gamasutra titled "Game Design Cognition: The Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches:

We see that beginning at a concept is part of the Top-Down process. So I guess my research proved I was wrong with my assertion when taking a developmental process from a relatively simple process, making a card with rules, and applying it to a highly complicated one, creating a video game.

The concept is a fascinating one, however, playing with ideas that a modern genre, the grand strategy game, has to tackle with mindboggling amount of complexity. Since the plot is designed to introduce you to the menagerie of personalities they've designed, the writings is. . . charming, but not patricianly nuanced. By no means is the game the pinnacle of writing in interactive narratives. The characters personalities attached to a colorful aesthetic, almost comparable to what Blizzard's Overwatch did in making such a wide spectrum of characters that at least one should be appealing to even the most surly of fans. You'll have a female caviler who is a tom boy or a timed knight who, despite his bulking armor, commonly goes unnoticed. They're archetypes, not fully realized characters like you'll find in more traditionally RPGs with tomes of backstory and goals. Overwatch and Fire Emblem develop their characters in the same manner- mid-combat dialog. Fire Emblem's greatest development (and what makes it stand out among the other strategy role playing games) is the Support System. Sure, it's fluff, but it evokes the feeling that there was a world before you arrived. Fire Emblems Awakenings main character, Chrom, will reminisce the past with his sister, another solider in your army. Except she can permanently die, unlike the Valhalla fantasy that is Overwatch where they we return to their friends to the next bout. Kaga always intended for your unit's looming mortality to cause shifts in how you view the narrative. "I wanted to make a strategy game that was more dramatic, something where you would really be able to feel the pain and struggle of the characters. That’s why characters can’t be revived once they’re killed, to impart a sense of gravity and seriousness. In turn, I think the result is that the more love you have for your characters, the more rewarding the game is." X-Com, a highly popular western SRPG for MS-DOS that came out four years later, attempted this with randomly generated names, nationalities, and looks for its characters. But unless you're willing to really lose yourself in the game and make your own narrative for the characters, their deaths will only have an impact in the loss of your highest level sniper, not the archer who was currently flirting with your barbarian. The game could create emersion through its characters and their deaths, but instead it becomes what I believe is the bane of the series. There's a universe where each battle is like a chess match, where you must maliciously strategize your moves so take the least amount of causalities and each critical hit will either make or ruin your day. But we don’t live in that universe. Instead we're plagued with problems twofold: the prevalence of a dominate strategy and the existence of the reset button.

"A dominant strategy, in the context of game design, is something that emerges due to game imbalance. A clear example of dominant strategy would be "blocking the opponent from getting three in a row", in Tic-Tac-Toe."

Fire Emblem is amazingly easy to get into and play, although maybe not to master. Unless you count the tactic I commonly refer to as the "death blob". It's like creating a delicious candy with a hard exterior and gooey center. Looking at another game for a second, Final Fantasy Tactics, you'll send your warriors and knights forward to pick off the prime targets while your mages and archers mop up. (Of course, there's another strategy where you carefully positioning yourself defensively into one corner, but they have means of combating this by starting you on the low ground to make you fight your way to high ground.) You can afford to have one or two units fall in combat because it'll only be moments before the healer arrives to mend any major injuries. It allows for the type of aggressive playstyle the computer utilizes against you, creating "drama". Fire Emblem is the antithesis. Dave Riley of the Fast Karate for the Gentlemen podcast and occasional game reviewer for Anime News Network says about action, "Most of the game is a creeping, careful crawl that moves the entire army in an ironclad block three spaces at a time. Movements are so fraught, and battles so carefully measured, that when the tide turns in your favor it's hard know what to do with the power." Usually your objective is to rid the map of foes that don't tend to move until you've moved past a certain threshold within their vacinity. As such, you'll surround your weaker characters, the mages, archers, the ones you're just now getting to leveling up, with those that have heavier armor or are higher in level. Then you move slowly across the map. And I mean agonizingly slow. Unless there is some sort of pressure on you, like a timed mission or some character you can interact with before the enemy overtakes them, it's three squares at the time for you. They've tried to counter this in some ways by having enemy units spawn behind you if you're taking too long, but that just leads to the second problem. Allowing the units to pair up to increase stats in Awakening was a good solution, but it showed to be highly overpowered when combined with the stats gained from the support system.

The second problem has coexisted with the game since inception. Instead of having gameplay be a carefully planned chess match (similar to the newly released Into the Breach which rewards sticking with failed "timelines" and even has a continent function to undo one turn per mission), we play the game like a speedrunner, resetting innumerous times in leu of missed attacks and unfortunate critical hits until we have such an intense knowledge of the map that we could perform it to lull us to bed. By adding Casual Mode in later games they've done some work to rectify this, and while the game might be more fun to play without having to turn off the console for the nth time, we loses Kaga's initial intent. In a joint interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi, he admits to Kaga that "when I die, I always reset". Even the creator of Final Fantasy has become victim to this pitfall! Kaga notes that "it’s not a big problem if some of your characters die in Fire Emblem; I want each player to create their own unique story. Don’t get caught up trying to get a “perfect ending.” Have fun!" But we just can’t because we have to see how the almost insignificant side dialog between the dark mage and pegasus knight will turn out. Will they become friends? We'll never know if we don't reset because an unexpected arrow saw an end to the purpled haired rider.

The problem has exasperated even further with adding generations to the games. Awakening saw those cute support conversations to their apex by having them result in children, but not just any children- super soldiers of your own siring. Instead of being something cute you do on the side, a treat if you will, they added mechanics to the system. Depending on the abilities known by the parents and the hidden stat progressions (a thorn in the side of the wonderful transparency of the game), the child might be an unkillable machine of death that gets to move twice after reaping another soul all while regaining any lost health. Fire Emblem has always had Uber characters. There's always the gallant knight, advisor to the lordling at the beginning of your adventure! (who is there solely to suck all the experience that should be going to anyone else) Then there's the sweet young lad who starts as the weakest possible unit, needing to be babied for dozens of hours until they've shown their true colors as the harbinger of all lives, capable of taking down armies alone. But the child rearing aspect of the later games really irks me. It makes the game feel like it's become an anime character breeding simulator, where instead of letting love naturally develop on the battlefield as it has, you have to comb through wikias to see what the best combination for a certain child is. For a game that has forgone the grinding experience, it surely got lost in not remembering what made it so great to begin with in its transparency.

There are aspects of Fire Emblem that reflect actual war. Every character is such: an individual with hopes, dreams, and interests. Taking a little time to get to know them leaves you with a sense of loss when they're lost in a pillar of flame from some nameless enemy mage. These games could be so much more with a little more finesse. The series has gone on for decades now, and this has caused the games to roll up increasing more systems until it has reached the point now that it is hard to see the game for what it once was. The concessions you have to make are never "there's no way I can do this without sacrificing someone for the noble cause" like the newly released Battletech RPG throws at you; the concessions are "time to waste a little more time and reset the game again." I believe the game I want to make can come- they just have to do a little more resetting.

#short essay #fire emblem #writing practice

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grandnincompoop · 7 years

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A Love Letter to Breath of the Wild

I had felt done with the Legend of Zelda. And it's shocking, now, just how preposterous my rational was to lose faith in a series that had been dear to me for so long and just how fervently passionate and loyal I was about it. I would by no means call it a stretch to say that Majora's Mask was my favorite game for most of my life. I had charted the entire sea in Wind Waker and had explored Hyrule in Ocarina of Time countless times. Even though I was so abashedly awful at them my friends made fun of the number of times I had died, I had completed original game, Link's Awakening, and the pair of Oracles. Somehow, Twilight Princess and Phantom Hourglass killed my enthusiasm- so much so I barely noticed when Skyward Sword, a game most people agree isn't the strongest point in the series, came out. I had heard some buzz about Breath of the Wild, but I mostly met it with a scoff. Who cares if Link can jump or how large the game is compared to the world Skyrim? I honestly can't remember what exactly made me change my mind- at best I can pinpoint it being watching Brad Shoemaker stream the game on March 10 because I bought the game on March 13 (and I didn't even own a Switch). There was just something fun about watching him disjointedly go from personally made objective to objective that brought make a little of my hope.

One year later, not one soul is going to believe me, but Breath of the Wild was a surprise to me. Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Wind Waker are still some of the cornerstones in my gaming lexicon. Part of what those games magical was how immersed I found myself in them. For the longest stretch of time, I couldn't progress Ocarina because of how terrifying the Forest Temple was to my young mind. Majora's is one of my favorite, despite the reused engine that bothers those nitpicky some, because Clocktown had such a welcoming vibe, even with looming destruction from the also looming (faced) moon. Its denizens would greet this newcomer with such personality and playfulness in the wake of the coming festival I would play through the beginning of the game multiple times over. But I was eventually flooded with ambivalence after getting a Wii and playing Twilight Princess, a game that, despite a great amount of ambition toward the requests following Ocarina, feels as desolate as the sprawling wasteland of its open world elements. Nintendo had the right ingredients- Hyrule Castle felt about as realized as you could get on the systems, and it could use the plethora of tools, terms, and characters that come with the license, but in the end, saving a city full of people you can't interact with and using incredibly narrow items didn't bring about the same sense of wonderous joy that I had found in the past, Maybe like most series, Zelda had gone into the realm of rote sequels that befalls even the most heartfelt of creative media.

But Breath of the Wild is different. Most deconstructions are either very blatant with their structure or purpose, or only want to deviate with one aspect like appearance or narrative structure. Putting the cart for Breath of the Wild in and getting past the introduction cave, all you're presented with is a world. A world with beautiful landscapes and vibrant colors and fascinating set pieces like Death Mountain and the pinnacle of the crumbling Hyrule Castle- as to say "your expectations, Walker, were wrong", that just lets you go. Go where ever you want. It's daunting to just have all of this thrown at you and would have been an abysmal failure if not for the magnificence of its game design. Instead of being the typical open world approach, presenting with a map filled with objective markers straightaway- which after some hours makes the open spaces of the world feel like an obstacle and time sink between vignettes or resources, Breath of the Wild makes the world into its own adventure for you to explore and discover the beauty filled within. While I enjoyed the feeling of riding in a Jeep with D-Dog in Metal Gear Solid V, it faded away after the third hour of trying to find the quickest way to what I actually wanted to be doing: the missions. Zelda never abandons the sense of discovery that makes the opening hours of most games so magical (or daunting, in some cases). The world is so packed with wonderfully designed micro-puzzles and challenges that there's no wrong way to go, and this is where Zelda sets itself apart and really shines as an introspective rebuild of not only the meta-genre of the open world, but also the structure present within the series at large. In those games, it's easy to become overwhelmed when a new area of the map opens up and there's a plethora of markers indicating where to go and what to do- most of which merely present to bide your time until you either move on to the next area, complete all of them, or simply switch to the next game from the boredom of having assumed this being all the game has to offer. Dragon Age: Inquisitions suffered from this gravely, having so many points of menial tasks in the first area (The Hinterlands) that I quit thinking the game could have put a progression gate on some number of these if it didn't intend me to complete all of them, and since the story had just barely started, I had no incentive to press on. Zelda understands the importance of one of the most powerful forces in gaming; Player Motivated Goals. I could even call it my bane, as it has led to so many nights of "Just one more turn because I have to finish researching this tech". I've quit games at the very end all because I've finished what >I< set out to do. I never beat Red Dead Redemption, even though I only had a handful of hours left, because I completed the "Master Hunter" quest which drove me the most to keep playing. Sometimes, like in Nier: Automata, the story progression and my narrative can go hand-in-hand, where I just want to see what transgresses in the story, but most of the time I'll burn out when I get the best gear or finish building up the player owned house or when I finish the quest I liked most. Its ability to both be transparent in the knowledge that there's always something else around the corner and keeping it varied enough that you never quite know what to expect is what kept me motived. Early on in the game, you'll find innocuous enough rocks that could easily be mistaken for merely a spot of high ground. "Great, that’s perfect to let me see what's nearby!" you'll think just moments before that rock is actually living, you've disturbed it's slumber, and now it's going to crush you. I still smile when I remember the sense of wonder I felt when I saw a dragon lazily flying through the sky. Like any world of adventure, there are caves and, although they might not be the cavernous expanse you've come to expect with the Skyrims and Witchers of the world, each is crafted with such love and detail that you can't wait to discover the next.

Let me take a few minutes to talk about Zelda instead of other games. Here is a quote by Miyamoto, the man we have to thank for this masterpiece. "We did include alternate paths/solutions for players that are easier, though. Originally, the system in Zelda we envisioned was more open-ended: for example, if there was a rock blocking your way, you could safely ignore it and keep playing: there was always another way around. I wanted something that players could get so lost in, it would take them a whole year to finish." Okay, actually that was a 1992 interview with him about a Link to the Past. A game like Breath of the WIld has been a long time coming from Nintendo. Most games, the Zelda series included, are so confined by their narrative that they must gate the play off from the map as a whole. Take Majora's Mask, for instance, where you can't enter the Zora Domain until you get Epona, your faithful steed who was kidnapped, until you can acquire a powder key to blow up a rock to rescue her, which requires you to have gone to the Goron stronghold and get the mask that transforms you into the rock loving creatures, which is inaccessible until you have a bow, which you get from the first dungeon. Looking back at it, you can get a sense of accomplishment, but it still feels like an interactive Rube Goldburg machine. Some of the games have a few examples of sequence breaking- like a few dungeons you can do in any order in Ocarina of Time, and this is fine, especially given the technical limitation of the N64; but Breath of the Wild was able to break away from this convention. Let's take the fires of (strike/Mount Doom) Death Mountain for example. At its foot, I saved this troublesome pair of truffle hunters who, yet again on my adventure, were getting attacked by ravenous lizard men. They rewarded me with a potion that made me temporarily immune to fire. I was on a mission to get to Goron City where I was sure to meet someone whose name ended in -son for this wonderful quest where I built a town. Along the way, I met another human who had an extra set of fire-proof iron (which was essentially a reverse oven which kept heat out instead of in) that we was willing to give me for some of the local lizards, which he says are used to make the potion I was currently ingesting. Here the game branches: I could get him the lizards, getting the armor for free; I could use the lizards and have enough potions for any trek that would lend to near the fiery landscape; or I could continue on my quest, where I could find the same armor for sale. This is just your solution to the practically self-contained gates the game has. They're all centered around mastering the domain, whether that be heat or cold or water. You aren't on some simple fetch quest. You're gaining a greater understand of this world.

Let's look at another quote by Miyamoto. "In addition, back when LoZ was being made, having a world based on swords and magic was still a fresh idea, as was the concept of being able to save your game. A system that allowed you to buy items in-game was also new, not to mention solving dungeons. However, in the 5 years since the game’s release, a lot of titles have appeared on the market that do the same sort of thing, so the sense of innovation has disappeared. I thought hard about what we could do next that would entertain the players. On the other hand, we weren’t about to just cut out the shopping and dungeons entirely, just because they were no longer innovative." There are two points here that I'm going to expound on: Zelda being a frontrunner in gameplay innovation and the expectations that are levied with that; and the game's willingness to keep systems proven effective at the expense of seeming "safe" with sequels. The series has always had a hand in creating vast worlds to explore, usually in accessible or creative formats like in the open-world non-linear nature of the original or being the first instance of an open world in a 3D plane with Ocarina. It has been, since it became a mega-hit in 1986, the standard that other games wished to attain. Even with the brief lapse in quality between the Wii and WiiU, it was still heralded as the series to beat. With Ubisoft making strides in deployment in the meta-genre of the open world with the structure Assassin's Creed and Fry Cry 2 and the adoption by mega-projects like the Witcher, Elder Scrolls, and the Bioware projects of Dragon Age and Mass Effect, any new Zelda making a difference seemed absolutely improbable, even given it's repertoire. Against all odds, Zelda has triumphed against those expectations against some of the greatest games in the last decade and it's stands tall amongst them. Its methods are deconstutivist, to say the least, which also gets into the second section of the quote. Former Zelda games had a (not abstract but kinda non-sensical) loot system, with the skeleton you just killed dropping arrows, despite it burnishing a sword and not a bow. This system is great at preventing the players from entering a fail state where they're unable to progress, like in an example scenario where a puzzle requires bombs, but the player didn't have any, meaning all they have to do clear the room a few times to acquire some instead of having to leave and backtrack to the nearest town, killing immersion. Breath of the Wild takes a grounded approach used by more modern RPGs where, when you kill the same skeleton, it will instead drop, well, monster parts: bones, horns, any weapon it was carrying. You'll no longer question why a wolf had a broadsword. But what about puzzles that require specific tools? Almost every puzzle in the game can be solved in a myriad of ways. You're given all of key items, a main stay in the series and usually given to you during the course of your adventure, after completing the tutorial, and with a combination of those, some arrows, a bit of luck, and some physics know-how (since the game has masterfully crafted systems into the game like updrafts and momentum that work together like clockwork which they call the "Chemistry Engine") you can solve any puzzle. It's turned the player into MacGyver in being able to solve anything with in ice block, a stick, and the ability to stop time. This isn't the first game to allow for player creativity to flourish in a multitude of ways in solving the problems the game presents you, but it's top of its class.

People will complain about the rain, or how things break too easily, or how cooking takes a little too long and. . . I'm reminded of reality. Those are real complaints we experience. Someday, the rain is going to come and ruin something, but instead of putting the controller down and waiting, you're going to find something else to do. Yes, it's going to be cold if you don't wear a jacket in the winter: also meaning you can't sport that nice but impractical (something you wear I don't know). I don't see these as novelties or hindrances but reminders of our real lives. They're perfectly paired with the toolbox that is the physics of the game, like a distorted mirror that stretches the good and bad to create a funhouse.

This iteration of Hyrule is rife with loneliness and isolation, but it's to its benefit. It creates a serenity post devastation, a welcome change compared to the hectic styling of other "wastelands"- a term that doesn't work here. It's merely a world that has returned to nature. A large majority of the buildings, especially in the one section that does feel post-apocalyptic- central Hyrule where the castle and origin of the calamity are, are missing roofs and walls or have been reduced to single wall, representing not only the tone of the world but also (showing off) the freedom you now have. Finding remanence of the old world, the old Zelda, holds parallel to the game design: seeing shadows of gameplay past within a world that they've rebuilt anew. Zelda games have always been a showcase for sprawling spaces, each with their own rendition of what makes the experience unique, but most teetering so close to the beginning of a technological cycle that they can never truly expound as far as they want. This newest installment, being within an era of such greats of its ilk, is about to set itself apart. While the world can, at times, seem desolate, life is prevalent everywhere. You'll find bands of roving and wild horses, travelers and merchants solemnly making their way across the landscape, monsters around campsites- showing ever a glimpse of humanity- until they draw arms when they see your approach. There are a handful of populated villages where humanity has been able to pull together, giving you a sense of hope and serenity in what could appear, without them, like a cold and broken world. Their tone, when approached, is what tickles me most. These societies are so far gone from a time when salvation seemed possible that when the notion that you could, by some astronomically improbable circumstance, be the hero of legends told and forgotten, you're always met with a shrug and a laugh. There's no awe that you might be the mystical savior or shower of praise for just existing, just a thanks when you complete the task they mentioned to you. It's sets the tone as whimsical, and I adore that.

A common sentiment of the game around its release was "it's like the first Zelda". It could be completely incidental and only appears genius, but I believe this feeling is what made the game so successful. Twilight Princess stumbled from waiting to capture everything we, the angst ridden teens that played Ocarina of Time, wanted when instead we got Wind Waker, which met unfair criticism for being and looking "childish", when in essence the games have always been the whims of our childlike instincts to learn and explore and play pretend. No, Breath of the Wild looked at everything that made the series great, but build from the foundation from the original. At their GDC talk from 2017, you can see they built a world that looked very much like first grand adventure but added the elements that populated this newest installment to test their "multiplicative gameplay" concept. The game we got, as a result of this careful planning of systems and logical solutions, is instilled with a freedom that lacks the restrains of any expectations short of complaints of "hand holding" from Skyward Sword. They rebuilt what made the game so legendary in the first place.

Expectations born from legacy are a dangerous mistress. We hold dear the great, curse the terrible, and forget the mediocre. When, during a dynasty, greatness of continually achieved, the fortune that are begin to form can become the Sword of Damocles, causing even the most steadfast and loyal to abandon the cause in fear of the cognitive dissonance of loving a series but hating one installment. The aspirations of the cursed and lost legacies are overshadowed merely by the memories of those expectations we once help, even if the thing in question is fine in all other regards. I'm glad this game was able to convince that it could still produce magic because now I’m in love.

Sources:

https://youtu.be/QyMsF31NdNc

http://shmuplations.com/zeldalttp/

http://shmuplations.com/miyamoto1989/

#legend of zelda #zelda #breath of the wild #writing practice

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grandnincompoop · 7 years

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Disclaimer: I have not played Monster Hunter World. I’ve watched Giant Bomb and Waypoint play it for somewhere around three hours. My moral dilemma isn’t stopped me from playing it- still playing Metal Gear Solid V, Breath of the Wild (essay to come), and Yakuza Kiwami is.

Monster Hunter World is a game I should enjoy, I’ve been told as much by a friend. It features deliberate combat, enough systems and engines that you’ll still be picking your teeth weeks later, and a bestiary of monstrous and organic designed levels, but watching a handful of low level hunts and reading about it, the underlying themes makes me question it from a philosophical standpoint- mainly the tones of big game hunting and colonization of the new world.

Honestly, it was the reposting of Bob Mackey peice on an initial inability to “stomach” slaughtering monsters- merely going about their Dino-business, that got me to thinking critically about it. He approached it from the perspective of a vegetarian and animal lover, and I find that a fascinating viewpoint. It’s the fact that you’re hunting these beasts to collect their trophies of horns and bones and guts for the purpose of upgrading your (masterfully designed) weapons and armor to… Kill more monsters and settle this new world. These are just concepts that I rather object to. I ran into a similar conundrum while playing Breath of the Wild. I ran into a spending problem, as most people do. To beat Ganon, I needed arrows, I needed armor, I “needed” to help build a new town- and picking apples or being a lawn mower wasn’t refilling my coffers quite fast enough. I found that going into the frozen wilderness and throwing bombs at wolves and moose and strange rhinoceros creatures netted (let’s just say) more than enough in selling their prized “gourmet” meats. I felt bad doing this. Link is trying to save the world, sure, but I’m causing major ecological trauma to not feeling wearing a barrel. Eventually I rationalized it by saying “I’m saving the world” or “I’m feeding people” (although looking at it now I’m only feeding the rich, who I can only imagine are the arrow sales people and Oh God what kind of war economy have I started I’m Hyrule), and here I am continuing to bomb helpless arctic animals.

Let’s look at a game where monster hunting is actually integral to the series- the Witcher. I’ve killed my share of mythical beasts in the Wild Hunt; how is that different from MonHun? I’m still going to their lair and taking their spoils. Well here, I’m not big game hunting. I didn’t decide to kill a wyvern because I needed its back left molar to complete my wicked armor, I did it because someone hired me that was in some way harmed by it. It saw this quaint mountain village as an occasional hunting ground, merely acting on instincts. When it attacks you, it’s because you’re invading its territory, its home, where its children or eggs are. Do you blame the wyvern? In Monster Hunter, they also attack you because you’re in their territory BECAUSE you want to kill them for their various useful parts. There are mutiple quests in the Witcher (mainly involving trolls) where you don’t have to harm them at all, just talk to out of whatever wrong they’re doing to my client. Game or not, I try to apply my personal ethics to it. I don’t want to disrupt the good or even misguided (too much). Games that allow for different interpretations of play sit high with me, which is why in MGSV I’m mostly nonlethal (although I’ve gotten into this immoral real during longer missions where I’ll fulton out the strong and execute the weak who are knocked out, making Snake a physical manifestion of natural selection).

Games are still escapism, but I’m not going to lose myself like other people seem to where they use it as a tool for their fantasy of wanting to murder everything. Holding my moral obligations as such, I find it hard to play some games, and I’m not sure everyone approaches games like this. Certainly some do to a greater extent, mostly in extreme player motivated restrictions, but morality is mainly what stops me from playing something like critically acclaimed darlings like Uncharted, rip roaring adventure aside, because of the sheer body count and lack of remorse toward killing. That’s why media like Gundun 0079 or Yakuza 0 resonate hard with me, because of the hesitation (or frustration in the case of Majima in the lack of) regarding murder. Maybe there is some story finagling in Monster Hunter that makes it okay, but on the surface it seems wrong. Having your NPC companion be a cat is all but fitting here, as their role as an invasive species, killing anything it possible can, can’t be ignored. Yes, they’re cute and the best domesticated animal, but that doesn’t change their nature and in turn yours. I can’t choose to have an indoor Hunter.

Especially since a major reason for doing this is in part the fetishistic notion of conquering a new world. A fetish of humanity that hasnt been acted on since 1492 (unless we’re talking about the usurping of already established cultures ala India), mostly it lives now in science fiction and fantasy, and if we’re talking about concepts in games that feel wrong, this should be front and center. Except in this case we’re not acting on the human urge to dominate other humans but of nature (as far as I can tell, like I said I’ve not played the game yet). This brings the moral quandary of whether humans have a right (either divine or earned through intelligence because in this world we certainly aren’t the strongest) to own everything. All land. All beasts. Is everything yours for the taking, with the only other humans to counter that right? They do such a fantastic job making the herbivores like an organic part of this world that I don’t want to disturb them. I want their weird dinosaur family to flourish, not me using them as bait so I can kill weird dragon #2.

And I might love this game when I give it a chance! When I have time (and after hearing a bit of professional opinion) I’ll give it a shot, but right now it feels like what I avoid on games.

Sources and Influences: http://www.usgamer.net/amp/monster-hunter-and-the-conflicted-vegetarian

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/8xvpw5/monster-hunter-world-review

#monster hunter #short essay #morality in video games

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grandnincompoop · 7 years

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Spoilers, I guess.

I feel there’s a universe not too far from this one where I really loved the new Star Wars film. One where the comedy sits with me. Because, after reading the slashfilm article defending the film, I see some quirks in it that I really like. The movie was that I thought it was going to be, but in reality, any movie by Disney is going to be like that. The Force Awakens, which I thought was an absolute snorefest, made over $2 billion, making it the third highest grossing film EVER. And I’m not saying it shouldn’t be, Star Wars is a cornerstone pop culture icon- together they’ve grossed $7.5, only sitting behind Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And I’m not delusional enough to think that what was an important part of my childhood (as it was billions of others) isn’t, at some level, a medium for toy promotion- they had already given the rights of toy production to Kenner before the original came out. These movies have colossal budgets. The estimated break-even point for The Last Jedi is $800 million, which by itself would nearly put it in the top 50 highest grossing movies ever. So they need to get butts in seats.

That being said, attempting of endless jokes, which probably working well for most people, just didn’t resonate with me. Which really upsets me because I feel there were a lot of good things in this movie. Being a movie about failure, about protecting what you love, and about deflecting expectations are all concepts, when applied to a Star Wars movie, really exciting to me, but I couldn’t get over the Guardians of the Galaxy-esque punch after punch of frivolous humor. While it’s true I’m not the biggest fan of comedy, especially as what seems to be a sort of depressurizing of scenes with a more serious tone, there are times it has really worked for me. Even thought its a member of the malicious MCU, Thor: Ragnarok has really excellent delivery of its strange improve for a strange movie taking place in a strange land of strange Jeff Goldblum and the world of Hulk fanatics. It knew when to sink a “You’re only using me to get to him, aren’t you” and when to... play Immigrant Song for a third time. Disney seemed to have a quota for the Last Jedi, though, with a joke or Porg appearing at what seemed like every five minutes. And for a movie that has themes of the evils of militarization and weapons manufacturing and acceptance of the fact that you’re a nobody, it just didn’t work for me. But they had to do it. Despite the PG-13 rating, there are going to be children seeing this movie. And I’m not dismissing them, because also want them to be able to grow up with the same magic that I felt from the movies. When I was 7, I was just an excited as they are to see the Phantom Menace and boy did I think that duck/dog/horse that was Jar-Jar was the shit.

Comedy aside, I feel the movie does quite a lot right. From what I can gather from Reddit and the backlash against the backlash on Twitter, fans are upset their pet theories weren’t true. Snope (or whatever his name is, it honestly doesn’t matter) didn’t matter. Rey was someone important’s daughter. Jar-Jar wasn’t a Dark Lord. Walking out of the Force Awakens, it seemed pretty clear that Rey was going to be SOMEONE important, because that’s what JJ Abrams does- question his work. And I’m pleasantly shocked she wasn’t. After reading defense of the movie (and it’s comparison to Metal Gear Solid 2), it feels like the Empire-like twist was that there was no twist. I’m fine with that. It’s a movie about disappointment. Poe, thinking he’s been the hero in destroying a dreadnought, disappoints Leia. Luke disappoints Rey because he disappointed himself for betraying his ideas of what a Jedi Master should be. Snoop disappoints fans for being worthless (no complaints from me). Rose disappoints Finn by saving his life while he tries to be a hero. We see our heroes fail (albeit without being too harshly punished). We see them be wrong, and I feel that is the biggest strength of the film.

I can’t say this movie disappointed me because it’s think with trying to dismantle our ideas of what makes heroes and legends. It’s not your legacy or linage or if you die for the cause, it’s your actions. I just wish I could have enjoyed watching it. It feels like it’s trying to play to every audience, and that fails me. They have to include the reference for the lifelong fan every few minute, or a joke, or breathtaking set piece. Those pieces are what make an blockbuster action/adventure film, sure, but the movie never feels like it gets to just be content with being itself. It had some breathtaking scenes (the mirror scene and jump to lightspeed especially), fantastic costuming and props, a great score, it just felt like it had to get to the next place post haste. For being an overly long movie, they sure were in a hurry.

http://www.slashfilm.com/the-last-jedi-defense/

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grandnincompoop · 7 years

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It’s so strange how we can forget about entire sections of our life and the small things that remind of us them. Two weeks ago, I had a manager what I can only assume was him bragging about his time “living in the ghetto” when he was very young, probably before the age of 7. In his story, he talked about eating cereal with water (and how awful it tasted) and how his mom would give him $5 to walk ten minutes to the convenience store to “buy dinner for himself” before she left for work, which he said usually was mac and cheese. Everyone at works assumes I’m rich because my father is a lawyer, but that comes with some sort of assumption that he’s A. good with money B. didn’t waste it on owning goddamn horses or C. I lived with him primarily after my parents divorced. My parents had split custody, and since he and his wife both worked well past 3 when my sisters and I got out of school, we were with my mom at least some part of every day.

I’d have to ask her the exact circumstances, but we were FAR from well off during the beginning of her living alone. She worked as a bank teller at a Regions bank in Jackson, and we lived in the second floor of an apartment in a one bedroom above a dentist office downtown. At the time, I was sometimes sad to go there because she didn’t have cable so I would never be able to keep up with the anime on Toonami and how she never had anything to eat there. I remember how she befriended a homeless man who lived nearby who she would always give a cigarette to, because at the time she wasn’t the hyper health conscious person she is post Giam TV. Her second place, a duplex, felt more at homely, but it was still plagued with the problems of no cable, internet, or food, and probably about three times a year she wouldn’t pay the utilities on time and our power would be out for a day. Looking back on it now, it almost feels like my evolution from apartment to duplex just which the accruing of furniture, except those are with her help.

I remember when she bought the house she lives in now. It was in our hometown where my dad still lived and where we went to school, and we had Chinese food there on the sectional couch that the previous owners left at the place. As an upgrade from that duplex, it was monumental. It had the luxuries from the 70s that home buyers no longer really care about, like a wet bar (that we never used), indoor hot tub (that is filled with spiders), and three porches (okay, we used those). When we first moved there, I still really didn’t like it because we didn’t have internet, or cable, and we never seemed to have food. My mother was still working at the Regions near the Mexican restaurant that burned down that I loved so much as a child, but now she was also going to nursing school. While she still does that today and has enough money to pretty much spoil her three kids that no longer live at home, we were so very far off from being “well off” during that time. I would always hunt in the cabinets for food that made I missed the last time, because while they were numerous, they were filled with foodstuffs inedible to a 13 year old who can’t cook like dried beans and corn meal. That was over ten years ago and I guess I wanted to forget it in the whirlwind that was my teen angst/the void that was my very early 20′s living there. It felt less and less like home, even after we had cable and internet, because of the miasma in my mind that was depression and loneliness. But now, I really just want to visit there and see her beautiful garden and be smothered by the dogs that were dumped on us as puppies a few years ago and see how, now, she was far too much food that’s migrated beyond the fridge and cabinets to occupy the dining room table.

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