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morshtalon · 5 years ago

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Dragon Quest II

Well, it's been a while since I wrote a review on something. I've played a number of games in the meantime, but none of them really gave me anything I felt was worth talking about or that hasn't been talked about before, so I just keep them in the backburner of my mind for possible future reference.

However, I feel like current circumstances make for a good time to dig up one of the games I wanted to share my thoughts on for a long time, and that I had beaten before even writing the first review I've ever "published". That game is Dragon Quest II.

Part of the reason why I held off on it for so long is that I don't think my review of the first game is all that great, and another part is that, again, I don't feel like I've bunched up enough good stuff to say, even though I really wanted to talk about it ever since I played it.

But hey, by far and wide my post popular post is technically related to Dragon Quest II, so why not cut to the chase and do it, right?

Anyway, to say that the first game took off in popularity is an understatement, it being the seminal harbinger of an entire genre of gaming that would soon take the world by storm. You would think that means this would be the time-old tale of "runaway success game making company executives pressure developers into slaving away at a sequel with suffocating deadlines". However, planning for DQII apparently began before DQI was released. 1986 was a different time, I guess. A time when the industry was fledgling enough that it wasn't that much more than a group of dudes banding together to bring an idea to life, and then - not a moment of hesitation after that idea comes to fruition - immediately start brainstorming ways in which they can build on it to give birth to new, more complex explorations of the concepts they had just tackled.

I believe this is why it's good to go back and play these games in their original versions, in chronological release order. Nowadays, it's virtually impossible to innovate. Back then, almost every big-time franchise was always finding ways to breathe fresh air into the structure of their games. Though Dragon Quest isn't the most innovative when compared to the likes of Final Fantasy, they were still making great strides into the codification of the type of game they had pioneered. With that knowledge in mind, one can really appreciate the evolution by going back and exploring these things as they grew with the times. And hey, Final Fantasy still wasn't around by the time DQII came out, so once again, they had to rely on ideas from western RPGs they liked.

In my opinion, II is the first jRPG that actually feels good to play, if you can put yourself into the mindset of an 80's gamer. The designers felt the 1v1 battles of the first title were boring - a sentiment which I share - and put in different groups of enemies as well as extra party members for you to find. One thing that some of these old RPGs that only let you target a group of enemies does is drawing only one enemy sprite on-screen to represent the entire group. Surprisingly, this game does not do that, even though it predates all the ones that do. It draws every enemy on-screen, which doesn't seem like much nowadays, but it's very appreciated nonetheless. Sure, it came at the cost of battle backgrounds (all fights in this game are set against pure blackness), but they did the right thing. The party itself follows what would become a typical archetype of 3-person groups: One character who is a jack-of-all-stats, balanced between physical prowess and magic, one who is focused on physical combat (in this game, this character actually has no magic capabilities whatsoever), and one who is a pure mage. Perhaps surprisingly, because these structures hadn't become tropes yet, the main character is the physical one, and he's also pretty much the most reliable party member by a reasonable margin, even though all he can do is attack normally. Balance issues aside (we'll talk about that later), I honestly sort of dig this arrangement. It's a little bit of a breath of fresh air to see the main character in an RPG rely completely on his weapons, and in the future, in any DQ title that has a reasonable degree of character customization, I always try to make the protagonist a physical powerhouse, to match the one from this game. It hardly ever works, but hey, it just goes for show that I enjoyed it while playing. Given that the other party members join you as you progress through the game at specific points, that also means the complexity of magic spells is added to your arsenal slowly, getting you used to it without feeling overwhelming. Sure, the game is simple enough that it wouldn't be overwhelming regardless of how they had set up the pacing, but I never felt like any of the times I struggled were because of insufficient knowledge of the game mechanics. So, the battles are fun enough, and they feel just right in terms of complexity vs. focus. The strategies to win are simple - really, the whole game is very simple - but it does its job well, and it allowed the developers to have near-perfect control of the game's difficulty curve. As a result, it is also - almost up to the end of the game - pretty nice, even if the whole thing is on the challenging end of things. At the end, it gets... A little special. We'll get to that later.

Let's take a step back and look at the gameplay outside battles. First of all, the story is... sparse, to say the least. Not as much as the one in the first game, and supplemented in the international version by a frankly kick-ass introduction that gives the experience a certain tone and atmosphere I appreciate a lot, but still, it's 1987. jRPGs were... not so much about the story back then, if you can believe that. In fact, they were more like an extension of a point-and-click adventure game. DQII is, essentially, a big fetch quest. In a different story, one that has enough plot points that you can sense a type of underlying narrative progression, I would not enjoy having the game interrupted by a blatant collectathon. However, the fetch quest aspect is basically the soul of this entire game. The extremely loose story paves the way for an experience that boils down to pure exploration and combat, with light elements of puzzle-solving woven in, using the fetch quest premise simply as a background to leave the developers with fertile soil to plant their little tricks and enigmas without worrying too much about how it would all connect rationally. And here, we witness an aspect of old games that could only spring about as a byproduct of limited graphics, ill-defined representations of the setting's reality, and a healthy disregard for common sense, things that were the style at the time. The puzzles, and sometimes just the exploration, violate logic quite heavily. Traversing through a monster-infested castle to get to a point that is technically outside the castle, but you can't just walk around it because most of the outside grass tiles are exit tiles that warp you back to the world map? Sure, why not? Having dedicated "teleport-room" maps that only serve the explicit purpose of housing a teleporter to another part of the world, except for one which also houses a chest with an essential item if you walk along the right border of the map, but not the identical-looking left one? Mario 2 hid a goal post inside a secret too, so yeah! Throw that in! Stairs down in a brick islet surrounded by water which brings you to a room that's... Also at water level? We hardly have enough tiles to go around, let alone a set to represent underwater or underground rooms, so whatever! Nobody cares! And, honestly, I truly don't care, either. If a game is up to, let's say, willfully forgo a bit of logic in order to formulate a creative puzzle to play around with your expectations, then all the more power to it. I honestly feel like puzzles nowadays are too sectioned-off, contained within a single room in a single dungeon, ready for the player to walk in, solve it, move on to the next point in the flowchart and never think about it twice. When puzzles are woven in so closely with the world, requiring the player to think outside the box at all times, as they're out there exploring, it makes the whole game feel like it's working together to make a point, and helps reduce that feeling one gets when playing RPGs where there are very separate elements of gameplay that... Don't really connect to each other very well. Sure, you're blatantly aware you're playing a videogame at all times, and it's not super great for immersion, but this was a time when there just... wasn't enough memory for immersion. It was a constraint that naturally gave way to challenges that capitalized on its own limitations, and therefore, created a type of immersion of its own, where the player is completely sucked into their own thoughts, holding a notebook with a rough sketch of the world map in their hand (yeah, I might have done that), taking notes and thinking where in the world could that last crest possibly be?! I think DQII hit that sweet spot of looseness vs. clarity in the narrative that helped these wild, nonsensical elements flourish. I really don't know how other people react to this sort of thing, but I don't care. I had a good time with it, and soon after this game, everything RPG started to become more focused on story. That's definitely not a bad thing, but I felt a kind of clear, developer-to-player kind of communication from these small bits of wrongness that made me more aware of the time, effort and creativity put into it by the people who were making it. I realized that, were I in the shoes of the dude who was making all this crazy stuff, I'd be stoked to see my friends trying to solve them. I'm not trying to be sentimental, that's how I honestly felt while playing that part with the teleporter and the chest. In any case, I appreciated it.

Then you get to the road to Rhone.

Though, apparently, the game was not pressured into deadlines by higher-ups, I did read something about one of the guys in the team offhandedly setting a deadline that turned out to be just that little bit too tight, requiring it to be delayed from November 1986 to January 1987. This, along with the fact that, at the time, the second title in a franchise had the habit of being designed for people who were hardcore fans of the first game in that series, might go a little ways into explaining why everything starting from the road to Rhone is absolutely fucking brutal. Every element of the game that, previously, was a tad questionable, leaving that little itch of worry in the back of your head, returns here with the express intent to make your life miserable. I have a high tolerance for difficulty, one that is even higher for RPGs where, for the most part, there are always ways to slightly circumvent it and make your life easier. The simplicity of design in DQII means that this is not the case here, and from this point on you're expected to not only have the skill and familiarity you've accrued while playing, but also a very healthy amount of luck to go with you, otherwise you will die. And rest assured, you WILL die. In fact, due to the specific way in which the player's mortality rate skyrockets in Rhone, it's almost not even a matter of the game being "hard" in the traditional sense, because it doesn't exactly require you to be strong enough or smart enough anymore, it just requires you to be patient enough to slowly trudge through the mountain of corpses of your former attempts until you figure out how to minimize your risks to the lowest degree they possibly can be minimized, then hitting that sweet spot of luck and control that finally allows you to reach the end of the game. This particular way of handling things means that, after you hit about level 30 with the main character, further leveling will only render you negligibly less likely to die, and the effects are not strong enough from level to level to even be clearly noticed. But what exactly makes it so hard? The answer is primarily RNG. When you reach the end, you will begin to notice just how much RNG there is through the whole game. Starting off, the turn order is entirely random. There is an agility stat, but I never found any evidence of it actually factoring into who goes first in battle (instead, it's a carryover from DQI that calculates your base defense). If there are more than three enemies, you're at a disadvantage, but even if there aren't, a stray run of bad luck - which is guaranteed to happen given the density of random encounters - means you're gonna have to scramble with enemy attacks, and they are perfectly capable of leaving you in such a state that it would take a miracle to put yourself back in shape, if they don't just wipe you out instantly. Now, remember, two of your three characters have magic. However, at this point in the game, enemies have a large amount of magic resistance to all kinds of different spells, and magic resistance in this game means that there is a chance the spell simply won't work. If it does, it deals full damage. If it doesn't, it deals none at all. I don't know about you, but I almost never take my chances with low-accuracy, gimmicky stuff in other games. This one renders all spells like that given enough time. If you decide to rely on physical strength, the main character is the only one who will bring you any significant results. The pure mage at this point in the game is far more efficient at support casting than direct damage, and the balanced character is - memetically, at this point - incompetent at both, and also sucks as a physical fighter, so once again, you're boned on that front. All of a sudden, running away becomes an alluring strategy. However, once again, there is an ever-prevalent random factor to it, so the pressure is on in all fronts. The game becomes a challenge of carefully planning out how to simply survive each encounter. Do you take the chance and run? If you fail, you'll be wailed on by the full force of the enemy party, and will likely be too weak to attempt mounting a resistance. Do you take the bait and unleash the full force of your attacks? What if they all target different enemies in the group? You won't deal enough damage to kill one of them, so you'll suffer heavy retaliation and waste precious MP that could be spent on healing spells. Did you win or escape successfully? You've only lost about 20% of your health, but some encounters can relieve you of the remaining 80% before you can even act, so do you spend MP healing or do you trudge on because you already don't have that many to go around? If you make the wrong decision at any of these break points - and rest assured, there won't be a shortage of them - you'll either die or get so close to death it will be almost irrelevant to keep going. And then, it's back to the last save point. Rinse and repeat many times until you clear the road and get to Rhone proper, for one final save point and one last, grueling stretch of game before the final boss. Here, the game introduces enemies that have, no joke, a move that kills your entire party and has 100% accuracy. Typing it out, it sounds like hyperbole, like i'm salty that I died so much and am exaggerating the things the game does in order to trick myself into believing that it was super impossible times infinity, but no, it's true. To be fair, there isn't a high chance the enemy will perform this move, but when they do, there's absolutely nothing you can do to save yourself. Just reset the game when the screen turns red. Other than that, the rest of the lovely cast of enemies rounding up the final waves are more than capable of just killing you the regular way, so keep your wits about you like you did back in the cave and grind yourself up until the stat bonuses start getting negligible, because now, you need to face five bosses in a row. Right, okay, technically you can go back and heal yourself right before the last one, but I didn't know that, so if you're an idiot like me, try to get ahold of a Wizard Ring, as well. It's the only way to heal MP, and can be used multiple times until - you guessed it - it randomly decides to break. After that, you just have to contend with two bosses that use a move that heals all their HP when it gets low, so you also have to roughly keep track of their state in your mind so you can unleash a full round of attack before they can get in that heal. Unless your spell doesn't hit them, of course. Or they happen to go first. Or you just barely miss the threshold of HP that will actually kill them. Oh, and be careful! One of the other bosses also knows the instant death move. He won't use it often, but 30 or so attempts in, you're likely to see it once or twice.

Then, the final boss can randomly spawn with a number of hit points between 75% and 100% of his assigned value (every enemy does that), and you're gonna deal an average of about 15% damage per turn to it. Sounds easy at first, but he will take you out in either one or two moves, and...

...Here's the motherload...

...He has a 1 in 16 chance of casting the full heal move at any point in the battle. And he WILL do that the first 2 or 3 times you get to him, sucking you dry of resources and smashing your face all the way back to the save point to try the 5 bosses again, so it's back to grinding attempts until you have another mostly hopeless shot at him.

But when you get him, man...

When you do it...

*sigh*

Anyway, this was a long, rambling, focus-shifting tangent just to correctly capture the degree of luck and randomness that constitutes the final stretch of Dragon Quest II. How does it impact the rest of the game? Well, I still appreciate it for what it did right, and there's a small, strange part of me that actually thinks the insane difficulty perfectly fits the stakes that the game set up, but it is, nevertheless, very hard. And once again, it's the kind of hard that is virtually impossible to circumvent. For any average, non-god-tier player, there is no alternate way of tackling the simple-looking, but highly controlled challenges in this game that trivializes it. You can't change your party, you can't buy extra spells, you can't really use stat-up items to change stat configurations in any significant way. You just have to keep trying and hope it works, and for the first few dozen times, it won't, so you'll just have to deal with it.

Still, it shows, even up to the end, that the DQ team has a certain grasp of consistency in design that will slowly grow and adapt as the series embraces new complexities through the years. DQII stands as somewhat of a black sheep in the series (as the second titles of old franchises often do), but I think it has its place, and it's surely a wild ride. Also, if you can get yourself into the mindset of late 80's design, I can assure you it won't ever be boring. Maddening, sure, but not boring. It's more fun in the midgame, in my opinion, as for someone who is very used to RPGs, it can be exceesingly simplistic at the start and too hopelessly uncontrollable at the end, but I feel it deserves a score of 7 out of 10. It's pure gameplay, and, for what it's worth, you WILL get an intense experience. Just be ready to shake, a lot. And pad your walls.

#rpg #video games #review #dragon quest

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dangermousie · 5 years ago

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Oh, Cassandra Clare! I don’t mind cliche or crazy melo but I can’t stand boring

Sorry, gotta rant about Queen of Air and Darkness.

Perhaps I should have known this book would not work for me since I barely made it through Lord of Shadows and my resounding feeling about that work was a giant meh. But still - I loved all six books of the Mortal Instruments series, with all its delicious overwrought melodrama (fakecest! evil parents! mortal illnesses! love pentagons!) and enjoyed the Infernal Devices one. And the first book in this series worked for me.

But now, somehow, it's as if the switch flipped off. I'd say I am getting older, except I was not the target audience even with the earlier books and I enjoy plenty of other YA fantasy even now. I think it's because Clare has one idea/situation she writes over and over and over and it's beginning to wear thin.

So, problems:

1. The plot. It's all over the place and nothing in it is particularly interesting or compelling. That would be fine if there were characters/ships I adored as I've read many a poorly plotted novel because the characters, separately or together, were compelling. Alas, that brings me to the next problem:

2. The characters are boring and paper thin. It doesn't help that the book has seemingly 7561 POVs - that results in clutter and repetition without getting to truly know anyone.

3. The OTPs. Good God. They are divided into two categories - characters from other series and original TDA characters - neither draws you in.

a. Look, I love me some Clary x Jace. I read six freaking books about their never-ending tribulations. But enough is enough. Retire them, Clare. Clare strikes me as someone who had a shiny new toy and still keeps playing with it even though it's ratty and worn out now. That's fine if you are a Velveteen Rabbit, not so much if you are a YA author. At this point, I am mildly puzzled she didn't invent a time machine for the sheer purpose of sticking them into the Infernal Devices somehow. Be done. Let Leather Pants Draco and AU Ginny live in peace.

b. Alec x Magnus and Tessa x Jem. Same. They are awesome, they are cool, they deserve to be happy, THEY SHOULD BE LEFT IN THEIR OWN SERIES ENOOOOOOOUGH!!!!

c. Julian x Emma. I do not care. They are nice people so I suppose I wanted them to get a happy ending in an abstract "they are nice and nice people deserve nice things" kind of way. But my emotional involvement was nil because they pretty much got lost in the shuffle of the bazillion other characters and because I felt I knew them less/could feel them less than characters in some 200 page novel.

d. Mark x Christina x Kieran. SIGH. It's not enough to write a poly relationship in a cursory fashion, say "I am super progressive," and call it a day. I want to have a reason to care whether these people are happy together or not. I have no particular interest in OT3s in fiction or in real life so there is no inherent appeal to me in the situation where I like the trope so much, I don't even care how well it's written. I could probably go for it if I cared about the characters (I have cared about many a pairing/situation that is not normally my thing because of loving and/or understanding the characters) but the writing failed to make me care for any of these three separately or together.

e. All the other ships. Whatever. If Clare didn't bother to develop the main couples, would she really bother with the secondary ones? Nope.

4. If one were feeling uncharitable (and oh, I was, after reading this mess of a book), one would think that the author thought bringing back popular characters from other series, sticking in every possible romantic set-up she could come up with, throwing in a lot of purple prose, and checking a number of "I am so woke" boxes (I have a trans character! And a poly relationship! And my bad guys are bigots! And one of the faves is autistic!) would be enough that she would not have to develop either compelling characters or an interesting plot.

I think this is the last Clare book I read. It's not you, it's me. Or maybe it's not me, it's you. Either way, I am out.

#books #cassandra clare #rants #fantasy #the dark artifices

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wazafam · 4 years ago

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With each new episode, WandaVision makes a point to showcase just how strong Scarlet Witch is getting, and it could be because it's gearing up to position her as the mother of mutants across the globe. Wanda has been a recurring character in the MCU since 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, and in that time she's experienced an exponential growth in power from once simply being able to manipulate minds and move objects. However, even with all that power, she hasn't been able to save the people in her life, such as her brother, Quicksilver, or even her lover, Vision. After being forced to destroy the Mind Stone (along with Vision's consciousness) to save the world from Thanos, Wanda could only watch in horror as the Mad Titan reversed time in order to take the Mind Stone from Vision himself, performing the Snap and killing Wanda and half the universe's population in the process.

Even now that the people lost in the Decimation have returned, Wanda still seems to be bearing the scars of her trauma, both from Thanos and before. The series picks up mere weeks after the ending of Avengers: Endgame, dropping audiences into a black-and-white domestic fantasy based on the tropes of 50s sitcoms, in which Wanda and Vision are a happily married couple in the middle of a cheery neighborhood named Westview. However, after the most recent episode, audiences are now aware that there's much more going on behind the scenes, as the intergalactic peacekeeping organization S.W.O.R.D. is now actively monitoring Scarlet Witch's situation.

Related: WandaVision: Daydream Believer's Original Lyrics Fit The Show Even Better

With everything going on, it's easy to see that Wanda's powers have grown into the realm of her full-blown reality manipulating abilities from the comics, allowing her to imprison the town of Westview and even create her own children within her ill-fated fantasy. While that in and of itself is terrifying, there's also another, subtler implication there: If Wanda's powers can rewrite reality and ostensibly bring people like Vision back from the dead, it's entirely possible they could create other superhumans, too.

The concept of Wanda warping reality is directly influenced by the classic comic book storyline "House of M," which played out over the course of eight issues back in 2005. While WandaVision is nowhere close to a straight adaptation, the core idea of both series shares similar strands of DNA, with Wanda constructing a pocket reality after severe mental trauma. Just like in the show, Wanda's powers trap the citizens of the Marvel Universe in a transformed timeline that they have no recollection of entering, but the big difference in the comics is that "House of M" takes place on a global scale (something the MCU might replicate if all of Marvel's Phase 4 is a House of M adaptation).

But most comic book fans recognize that "House of M" isn't as iconic as it is just because of Wanda's alternate reality shenanigans. At the end of the book, after Wanda realizes what she's done and just how traumatized she and her brother, Pietro, have been thanks to their father Magneto's extremist views on mutant-human relations, she lashes out and utters the phrase "No more mutants," which initially seems to reverse her changes and transform the world back to normal. However, readers and heroes in-universe quickly realize the disturbing truth of Wanda's words: she didn't just erase her changes to the timeline, she actually de-powered a massive swath of the mutant population, turning a species that once ranked in the tens of thousands to just hundreds, nearly rendering mutants extinct. Scarlet Witch's actions in "House of M" eventually became known as the "Decimation" to the mutant community and would have long-standing and far-reaching consequences for years to come. Yet, it's possible the live-action universe could reverse-engineer this event to introduce mutants to the MCU.

Both Scarlet Witch and her brother, Quicksilver, were introduced into the MCU in 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, where it was revealed that their powers came from experimentation using the Mind Stone. The MCU has continued to build on a connection between Wanda and the stone that essentially birthed her powers, especially in Avengers: Infinity War, where it was confirmed that her powers were the only thing strong enough to destroy the Stone as they were made of the same energy. However, it was recently confirmed in the pages of the newly-published book The Wakanda Files (Shuri's scientific journal exploring the world of the Avengers) that Hydra chose to settle in Sokovia because a large portion of its population possessed preexisting genetic anomalies that made them promising candidates for experimentation. By that logic, MCU Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are already mutants, at least in theory. This reveal has massive significance for the world of the MCU moving forward, especially when considering the idea that there are potentially thousands of people on Earth with latent mutant genes.

Related: WandaVision: All The Evidence That Scarlet Witch Isn't Controlling Westview

Episode 4 of WandaVision introduced several major players within S.W.O.R.D. moving forward, and also gave audiences a glimpse at the inner workings of their investigation into the Westview phenomenon, but there was also an important reveal slipped into the episode that is easy to miss. During her investigation, Darcy discovers that the town of Westview is emitting low levels of a very specific radiation signature referred to as Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. CMBR is an actual phenomenon in the real world (tied to leftover energy from the expansion of the universe), but it's also directly tied to the Infinity Stones in fiction because of the fact that they were born into existence during the Big Bang. This means that Wanda's powers emit the same cosmic radiation that turned her and her brother into superhumans in the MCU. In the comics, cosmic radiation and extradimensional energies have been responsible for giving dozens of characters powers, such as the Fantastic Four and Monica Rambeau, the latter of which is currently in WandaVision and the former soon to be introduced into the MCU.

While the town of Westview is what Wanda's powers look like operating on a contained scale, there's no reason to believe she couldn't expand her area of influence onto a much bigger scale. Wanda's powers have never stopped growing, and as far back as Age of Ultron she was capable of detonating enormous shockwave-like blasts of energy, something she used to take out almost an entire army of Ultron drones in the moment she felt Pietro's death. It's entirely possible something happens in the finale of WandaVision that pushes Wanda even further, causing her to blast out her powers on a mass scale and activating latent mutant genes in a huge swath of the population - particularly as it looks as though the show is setting her up to be someone S.W.O.R.D. considers a threat in the MCU.

Wanda lashing out against that would be a perfect response to the trauma and experiences that Wanda has already gone through in the MCU. Not only has she lost her parents, her brother, and her love, but her abilities indirectly led to a tragedy that caused the world to view her as a menace and question the autonomy of superpowered beings. It would make perfect sense for her to want to disrupt the status quo by adding more superpowers to the equation, forcing the people in charge of structures like the Sokovia Accords and S.W.O.R.D. to contend with the fact that the world is rapidly changing around them in ways they'll never be able to control.

On top of this is also the recent birth of Wanda's own children, characters who will presumably grow up to become the MCU versions of Young Avengers Wiccan and Speed. Growing up with Scarlet Witch as a mother and powers of their own, her children face a severe risk of being ostracized for their connection to her, so creating an entire new species of beings might have also been a protective reflex on Wanda's part. For better or worse, the mutant community frequently sticks together in the face of the prejudice and fearmongering that regular humans throw their way. While WandaVision hasn't directly confirmed this path as their endgame, having Wanda Maximoff be the mother of mutants in the MCU would be the perfect way to pay homage to her legacy as a major force within X-Men comics, as well as finally giving her the respect and storytelling depth she's always deserved in the MCU.

More: How Endgame's Scrapped Post-Credits Scene Connects To WandaVision

WandaVision Theory: Scarlet Witch Becomes The MCU's Mother of Mutants from https://ift.tt/3tpdw3b

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arabhusband · 8 years ago

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Sometimes I really feel like big name movie/shows/game writers just don’t realize what kind of characters they’re handling. However good a writer you are, no one can create a “new personality”, in the end all fictional characters are based off real people the writer knows, and their own personality traits (and on existing fictional characters, who, in turn... you guessed it).

And just like you can only know so many people through and through, really often, the personality traits you’ve picked up from existing people for your writing, they’re from people who, without your knowledge, could be lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people; could be neurodivergent, could be autistic, could be a number of things they didn’t disclose to you for their own safety. And yes, people belonging to the same group of ANY kind end up sharing some behaviour/personality traits specific to that group. Not every single time, of course, but it’s undeniable that it’s a real phenomenon. Especially with neurodivergence for the obvious reasons, where some symptoms are mixed in with traits. Don’t try to fight me on this. But you’ve picked up those “interesting” character traits for your character. And you’re outraged that someone who has those personality traits recognizes them and goes “they’re just like me!” and people chime in saying “you can’t know the character better than the creator!”. Anyways, here’s 3K words about GTAV, Trevor Philips and Michael De Santa, the Trevor end, disappointing character writing, and how mainstream narrative keeps failing me. Warning for the use of lots of ableist words (in reference to the vocabulary used in canon).

I was just gonna vent about Trevor and Michael and how painfully, obviously gay they are for each other but I realized I had so much more to say, especially about Trevor. Get ready for this wild ride.

I) Trevor

First off, what breaks my heart very often is the portrayal of Cluster A personality disorders in mainstream media but that’s not news. Quoted from Rockstar themselves, “Trevor was considered to embody insanity”. A lot of writers still believe widely that it’s okay (or even interesting) to make a “crazy” character, by stating that their actual mental illness is irrelevant. That they appreciate the ~concept of insanity~ dismissing that it is a caricature of very real mental illness.

Very often in this case clinical terms are not mentioned, creating some fantasy mental illness that just makes the character violent, scary, unpredictable. It’s very convenient when you’re a lazy writer to just stick the word crazy on your character and not have to do any actual character writing, apparently. The fact that the terms “mentally ill” are not used is because those writers feel better about it if they distance themself as much as possible from the reality of neurodivergence and mental illness. I’m not gonna explain the whole history of demonization of mental illness in media for the sake of a narrative... I think most of my mutuals here are aware of the reality of it, and how much it hurts and stigmatizes mentally ill and neurodivergent people. In the case of Trevor, clinical terms are used messily. Trevor is said interchangeably ingame to be a sociopath or a psychopath, and even if that is technically a word associated with an antisocial personality disorder it’s obvious that the words aren’t used in reference to it, but rather as a catch all for cr*zy, ins*ne.

A) Trevor is Not Like The Other Cr*zies :)... aka We Forgot People With Cluster A Are People Too

But here’s the irony with Trevor.

Steven Ogg, the voice actor and motion capture model said himself: [while Trevor embodies the violent, psychopathic GTA anti-hero archetype] he wanted players to sympathise with Trevor's story. "To elicit other emotions was tough, and it was the biggest challenge and it's something that meant a lot to me,"

It’s just baffling to me how...somehow, a step forward in writing a mentally ill person HUMANLY, at last, was pretty much inintentional. The focus was more on having the players root for Trevor for the sake of playabilty, since Trevor was to be a playable character, rather than just thinking, hey, mentally ill people are actually human and not entirely defined by their illness, so maybe we should give the character some relatability.

But the conflict shows, glaringly: From video game journalists only, you can tell that the two concepts (A dehumanizing first concept; A want for the character to be likable) clashed so much that a lot of people didn’t understand where the character was going. Let’s take a look at a few popular reviews.

“Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell, however, felt that Trevor undermined the other characters because he was a "shallow and unconvincing" sensationalised anti-hero, and that "his antics derail[ed] the narrative" and overshadowed the character development of Michael and Franklin.”

A lot (surprisingly, and believe me, not al!l) of Trevor’s “antics” are cringeworthy caricatural “cr*zy” behavior. It’s obvious that those scenes aren’t intentionally added for comedic relief: when you take the game as a whole, you can see that they’re there to establish Trevor’s character. But the thing is, Trevor’s character is understandable enough in the main storyline through his interactions with Michael and Trevor without all the stuff that felt superfluous. It felt superfluous because Steven Ogg’s performance, meant to humanize him in the main story line, is... well it’s good!! When you pick it apart, all the parts that “derailed from the narrative” were insulting portrayals of vague Cluster A symptomes. And I find it surprising that no thinkpieces on GTAV has mentioned that. It’s almost like people have a blind spot for ableism.

Not only that, but Trevor’s past establishes so much about his personality and behaviour... I’ll talk about this in a minute.

Lucas Sullivan of GamesRadar praised Trevor for being the first character in the series that "makes sense". He stated that, upon their first playthrough of a Grand Theft Auto game, most players "carjacked some poor schlub, then started doing 90mph on the sidewalk, mowing over civilians", as opposed to playing peacefully. "Trevor's existence isn't a commentary on any group of people–he's just the first logical fit to the way people have been playing GTA games for the past decade," he said. Sullivan concluded that Trevor is one of the few protagonists in the Grand Theft Auto that would willingly execute popular player actions, such as murder and violence.

God, this review kills me. Here’s why. This review, in my opinion, says everything that is wrong with mainstream character writing. No one has ever needed a character to be a “psycho/sociopath” to feel the need for inconsequencial fictional violence. “Most players” enjoy partaking in violence in video games simply because it’s cathartic, it doesn’t (directly) hurt anyone... I’m not gonna talk about the debate on whether violence in video games makes people violent etc. But the thing is, I’m pretty sure a majority of players do this, and I’m pretty sure the majority of them aren’t psycho/sociopaths either. Moreover, previous GTA characters all willingly exectuted mindless violence, without the whole violent mental illness trope!

So what does it say about people like Lucas Sullivan, and what does it say about the game? Unfortunately, Lucas Sullivan is right about one thing, in my opinion: “ Trevor's existence isn't a commentary on any group of people”.

He could be, but he isn’t, because of that conflict I mentioned earlier. Trevor, in the end, has a major character writing flaw: he’s torn between an accurate representation of a mentally ill character, and an ableist, empty psychopath archetype that neurotypical people love to, pardon my French, jack off to. Lucas Sullivan particularly enjoys this roleplay in which he’s this weird fantasm of what a psycho/sociopath is, because that’s what’s being served up to him.

B) Writing Good???? Not at Rockstar! Not On Their Watch!

The writing in GTAV (and most mainstream media) is held back and sabotaged by their own, real fear of seeming “politically correct” or “activism driven”. Just for being accurate. And they’re very aware of it. And I mean you’ll tell me, of course, Ziyed, it’s Rockstar!!! What did you expect!! Well, I expect nothing but I’m still disappointed. I’m very aware that all big video game corporations are Terrible and Awful but hey, sue me, it makes it all the more satisfying to pick apart.

Obviously I’m sure that people who follow this blog are already aware of that, which also applies to the lack of race diversity, lgbt representation and body diversity in mainstream media. The reason I’m talking about Trevor’s mental illness in particular here is because 1. There’s a cruel lack of writing on the subject of neurodivergence and mental illness ableism even in blogging spaces 2. His “insanity” (mental illness) is, according to the writers themselves, his defining trait.

And it is disappointing particularly since the premise for Trevor is so promising when you start out, or else I wouldn’t bother criticizing it. It’s not ALL BAD, and it frustrates. His environment and past all make sense, they’re all mentioned in canon plainly, but briefly: unstable, physically and mentally abusive family that normalizes his violent impulses early on; It’s implied his family is poor (hence the dream of big heists later and getting rich), so he has no access to mental health; a failing education system that pushes him out; The detail that all of society pushes him out because of his mental illness, when it is mentioned that Trevor’s dream was crushed when he fails his mental health test to enter the military to become a pilot.

When you put it all together, Trevor is the product of a society that hates the poor and the mentally ill and drives them to a life of crime. And it kills me that all of this is thrown at you in maybe two boring long conversations that throw Trevor’s story at you, the first one in the long car ride to meet Michael for the first time, and the second one in the long first plane ride. 1.It’s lazy writing. I don’t want the game to tell me, I want the game to SHOW ME. 2. You’re really gonna cram everything that made Trevor who he is in two tutorial scenes? Really...???

I said Rockstar is aware of their fear of being viewed as politically correct, and here’s why: With all of this, you’d think Trevor would be the perfect character for social commentary, but the game skirts around it with useless antics. But when Rockstar is accused of gratuitous violence for shock value in the waterboarding scene, suddenly it’s a “political commentary on the use of torture by the United States government”. So obviously Rockstar knows to pick its topical battles.

C) Gay and Crazy, Now Made Gamer-Friendly

The same way Trevor’s mental illness is diluted down to an archetype, his gayness is played in large part for laughs and shock value, and is made part of his overall outrageous, chaotic behaviour. Trevor is (almost) everything American society views as shocking: mentally ill, addicted to drugs, a criminal, and outrageously sexual. He is so sexually offensive to a point where he’s not just a crude flirty bisexual man but the overly sexual nightmare of a cishet man. Alright, for this part, I might be missing information, because overtime I’ve heard a lot of people call Trevor a rapist, and the only scene I know people have interpreted as rape is when you spawn as Trevor in the apartment, and Floyd is laying in bed sobbing next to him, fully clothed, apologizing to his girlfriend out loud. I personally didn’t interpret it as rape (because it’s not mentioned, explained, and also because they were spooning, I honestly believed that they just had sex and Floyd was just disgusted with himself because Trevor is generally unattractive, and I thought that was the “joke”) but it’s undeniable that it was in poor taste and implied it for whomever wanted to believe that. Either way, it proves my point which is: Rockstar just couldn’t make Trevor gay without making him a sex offender with rapey undertones because... it’s Rockstar, because Gay Panic, because Rockstar is homophobic and that’s not news. In such a strongly LGBTphobic mindset that is the GTA franchise and the culture surrounding it, the kind of gamers it targets, I was surprised when I started playing to see Trevor was implied to be bisexual. I was thinking, hey, he’s violent and kills people, but so do all the characters in this game, they’re all terrible people: but Trevor was interested in men??? Then the more I played, the more I was hit with all the rape jokes... But, since I wasn’t expecting anything half decent, I would sheepishly be grateful that there was no actual rape. I mean, we obviously deserve to have higher expectations than that, but it’s GTA we’re talking about. The thing is, all the cat calling and verbal sexual harassment is mostly from Trevor, out of the three playable characters, and it was obvious that it was trying to cover up Trevor’s gayness with something that would speak to GTA’s vile average cis het gamer dude audience: rape jokes, violence and misogyny. See, Gamers? Trevor’s kinda gay, but it’s funny, because he’s just generally gross :)

So, just like Trevor is fantasy cr*zy, he is fantasy gay, where it’s a whole lgbt-phobic mess of what a cis het man imagines a gay/bi man to be. What really reinforced that feeling to me was adding up the “Trisha and Michelle” story and the spawn scene where he wakes up in the middle of nowhere wearing a dress. ((Now the dress thing in itself didn’t even have any lines or remarks: As much as it is obvious that it’s originating from a Man In A Dress transphobic joke, I’ll have to admit, there’s no actual joke happening, since he doesn’t comment on it nor does anyone else ingame. But it is still transphobic and homophobic when you take it in the context of Trevor’s terrible writing)). His identity is not discussed further, but all in all it feels as though the writers were like well, he’s Kinda Gay or whatever, (I don’t believe they’ve said the B word ingame) gay guys wear like, dresses, right?? And they’re sexual offenders??? I Mean As A Cis Het Man I Definitely Feel Offended By Gay Men Existing So This Must Be Right... So it manages to be transmisogynistic and homophobic at once

Again, this dichotomy compromises Trevor’s credibility as a character, again because Rockstar is pissing themselves at the idea of writing a well rounded character because what if people think we’re Gay

But here’s the thing!!. This very problem, GTAV’s terrible fear of seeming Gay, resonates throughout the main character arc between Trevor and Michael (I don’t think I even have to explain this to fandom: Literally everyone read Trevor and Michael as having some glaring romantic tension) and makes both characters skirt around their sexuality and personnal conflict in numerous no homo jokes. And that’s... where Rockstar’s Gay Panic backfired.

II) Michael, or how GTAV’s Gay Panic played itself and turned the video game into a metaphor for the consequences of repressed homosexuality, or The Trevor End

A little search showed me it’s widely accepted in the GTAV fandom that the Trevor End (End C) is the canon end but if you haven’t heard, here’s why quickly:

-Everyone Lives End has several plotholes and didn’t resolve all conflicts -Trevor’s death resolves most conflicts -Franklin killing Michael is widely out of character, and if you don’t do anything, Michael literally just trips and falls. It’s not a gratifying or meaningful end. -The events featuring Trevor in GTAV Online happen before the game, making it possible for Trevor to be dead. -Generally, everyone felt that the final conversation between Franklin and Michael in the Trevor end resonated most than other ends.

So, Michael and Trevor originally were written to mirror each other. And they do in many ways: Trevor does everything openly, is sincere, and he is shameless. Michael, throughout the game, is ashamed of Trevor, is ashamed of most things in his life, and tries to do things discreetly, when he isn’t overcome with rage/emotion. That is when he hates himself the most: when he’s pushed to be open about things. And it’s almost funny how caricatural it is that Michael is afraid of Trevor’s qu**rness: how he drops their partnership for the perfect nuclear family, the big house on the hills, the skinny white blonde wife, two kids and tennis on the weekends. How utterly miserable he is living that life! Until Trevor finds him again, and he’s so torn and angry about how Trevor makes him feel alive again.

God, it’s right there. It’s so obvious it’d be funny if it wasn’t frustrating and sad and making me write 3K about it.

Xav de Matos of Joystiq found [...] "though each character has a valid motivation for his journey, it's difficult to want them to succeed." He also felt that the ambivalence between Trevor and Michael was a tired device by the conclusion of the story as it became a "seemingly endless cycle" of conflict between them.

Another popular review, and evidence of another dichotomy in the writing. It’s not made truly clear what Michael’s conflict with Trevor really is, which is what should be driving the end of the story, but ends up just being blurry and confusing in the two other ends. The “seemingly endless cycle” comment is what fascinates me here. Because it’s actually something that, for me, makes the Trevor end so spectacular at how it blindly hit the mark and remarkably played itself. Yes, the Michael/Trevor narrative must be very confusing for Xav de Matos. And honestly, I’m still really confused myself as to what Rockstar thought they were writing, if not a tragic gay romance.

I’ve considered that Michael grows tired of Trevor pulling him back into crime and wants to end the conflict but it does not add up: Michael was a criminal before meeting Trevor, so he’s not the bad influence here! But there is definitely the feeling of an “endless cycle”.

I truly have no other explanation: The overall aversion to gayness starts to become a pattern, and their entire character arc strikes like one big metaphore for repressed homosexuality on Michael’s part. He says that he’s almost afraid of Trevor, but the only times he seems to be having fun is when he’s with Trevor. He pushes him away constantly, and it all culminate to the Trevor end.

The whole scene is awfully dramatic. First, it’s by chance that Michael survives crashing into Trevor at full speed like that: you clearly see and hear him speed up. It seems like a deliberate choice and adds to the drama of the scene. It’s very desperate and self destructive. As Franklin, you’re given the choice to kill Trevor. But it is out of character, since a few seconds prior, he doesn’t have the courage to shoot Trevor, he definitely has sympathy for him, lets him go and tells him they can talk it out. Eventually, Michael takes the shot (not shooting Trevor directly) and sets him on FIRE. Talk about intense. His death is very violent and dramatic. Franklin is shocked that Michael would kill his “best friend” and that starts the final conversation. Michael’s speech is erratic, he’s panting, screaming, but he says two things that struck with me.

“I’m a bad piece of work, but that guy?”

“No boundaries. No sense of... when to back off. No Nothing! 24/7 insanity ”

These two lines spoke to me. As a gay man, growing up-- and though I know my experience of it is slightly different than cis men’s- I’ve had to deal with internalized homophobia. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say pushing away behaviour that seems too “extravagant”, too “qu**er” is a frequent sign of internalized homophobia: Trying to feel like somehow you’re better than The Other Gays. Or otherwise, when completely denying one’s homosexuality, pushing away other gay people to try to feel “normal”. “No boundaries/ No sense of when to back off” is his explanation to why he kills Trevor: He was got too close to him, and Michael couldn’t deal with those feelings. That, especially in the world of GTA, like I explained earlier... added to it how both these men grew up in an especially violent environment, how they’ve both normalized murder in their lives. It all makes sense suddenly to culminate there? Michael ends the cycle, the only way he knows how to.

And it made me sad. One, because I knew that Rockstar would laugh in my face for interpreting their terrible game as anything meaningful to a gay person, and two because of, still, how much it hit home, and how that is a reality. Growing up hearing my brother saying he would beat up his friend if he had a crush on him, growing up hearing of stories of men actually killing other men rather than face their feelings. I was upset to think about how this game, filled with so many bad intentions, a game that probably hates me, still made me feel something like this.

And it’s like, sometimes I feel like writers forget that we exist, but we’re still there in the back of their minds, unknowingly? It’s like no matter how much they don’t want us to be there, we still exist.

Every ending in GTAV has a different song. The song for the Trevor End was specifically written for the game and for this end by Yeasayer. And I feel like the band understood the game better than the writers. You can give it a listen here and read the lyrics, which I feel, if you’ve managed to read all of this to the end, you won’t have trouble understanding. It’s pretty transparent.

Thanks for reading my thoughts on this terrible game!! I probably missed things, I didn’t backread much and didn’t make sense sometimes but I guess I had a lot on my mind. Hope you appreciated and didn’t feel like you wasted 20 minutes of your day.

#ziyed speaks #long text #long post

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webcomixtape-blog · 8 years ago

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DISCUSSION: Webcomic Time

DISCUSSION/TROPE

This is going to be one of those discussions that either draws a lot of blank looks and ‘Yes and?’ responses, or sets a few light-bulbs flashing over heads. Possibly both? It’s one of the more well-known concepts in digital comics, and certainly one of the more commonly lampooned and lampshaded parts of this whole webcomic… Thing.

Let’s have another one though. Because I want to.

Webcomic Time is, essentially, the disconnect between time inside and outside of a comic. Say your comic is updated twice a week, with a solid…Most of a conversation each update, assuming you have multiple panels. We’re going to assume you have some kind of plot going on here, as pure joke-a-day comics don’t really count here. Now, say you have a plot arc that involves about a day worth of events, whatever they are. Maybe Aerith and Bob need to go and fight some villain downtown, with time allotted for a few jokes and witty social commentary in there for flavour. They investigate, fight, get into trouble, and eventually come out on top! It’s been a big day, full of ups and downs and life affirming moments for the cast.

It took a day for them, and… What, most of a year for the readers? Sure, this is an exaggerated example, but there are comics out there that will happily spend more real-world time on less in-comic time. Lackadaisy, a charming story of bootlegger cats, has taken over 6 years to cover about 4-5 days, and a few brief moments of flashback. It’s great, and I’m a huge fan of the comic, but the art style and level of story detail demands a lot of time to cover brief events.

And it’s worse when the comic is set in the modern day. Take any video game themed comic with a plot, and you’ll find new games being included every few comics, keeping it up to date with the flow of games in the real world… Even though only a few weeks or months of in-comic time has passed for the characters. Apparently, they live in a world where console generations last like… two, three weeks tops? Must be expensive.

I could say the same happens with world events, politics and such, but… Then I would be writing about politics, and this is meant to be a blog about nice things that don’t make people curl into anxious balls of desperation.

So, how do you deal with this sort of thing? Often, you don’t need to. Comics set in certain times and places are detached from real life, able to go at their own pace. Does it matter that The Meek has been going on for years, while only a few months have passed in-universe? Not really. It’s a fantasy comic, set on another world. It’s a normal story being told slowly, it isn’t commenting on current events in our world.

Those that do need to worry about such things have… Other methods. Time skips are a pretty blunt was of dealing with it. ‘Wow, took me 3 years to tell that two-week story. Let’s jump ahead three years, and keep the date in the comic closer to reality!’ It’s it tends to demand a little nod to what happened, some wink at the camera. Hard not to draw attention to it, even if you would want to. It also tends to affect the flow of the story, and when not planned for, can really throw a wrench in planned characterisations and plot-lines. It does work though, when used correctly. Homestuck did a decent job of it, jumping ahead 3 years as half of the cast zipped between two windows at light speed. Then again, this was Homestuck. It’s meta enough to get away with a lot of things. Could be an article in that.

It’s possible that the best way to deal with webcomic time is to ignore it completely. Joke-a-day comics, and those will either no, or just an ill-defined and simplistic plot can get away with a lot. Nobody really minds that Penny Arcade has a new comic for each new game release of note, as it’s hardly following a central plot beyond the occasional 3-4 page plotlines. Others just… Throw the occasional nod at the audience to say ‘Yeah, we know it’s weird, but remember it’s still that same week over here.’ Like in Questionable Content. ‘I can’t believe it’s only been a few weeks’ indeed…

Honestly though? It’s mostly just a joke we all get to share about this medium. You can have a good laugh remembering that it took like 8 years to get that storyline done, just as a side effect of the way these comics are delivered.

Could be worse. Could still be on that fucking boat…

-James

#discussion #webcomic time #trope #questionable content #homestuck #the meek #lackadaisy

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