Michael,
I'm writing this on 4-9-15, the night
before Xenoblade comes out. I'm excited to play, although I'm also
working to make sure advance expectations don't torpedo my gameplay
experience.
Everything you said about difficulty
sounds borderline ideal; I've always been good about adapting myself
to whatever structure a game wants to impose on me, and it's rare for
me to leave content on the table unless I feel actively antagonized
by the design. (Side note: I know you didn't love The World Ends With
You, and I don't think I've ever heard you talk about the Kingdom
Hearts games, but I've always found their approaches to difficulty
very rewarding; the ability to tune your game to precisely your
preferred level of challenge, with extra benefits for pushing
yourself to harder extremes, is very satisfying to me. There's a
whole other conversation about how Square has used the games between
KH 2 and the upcoming (presumably) 3 as laboratories for weird
advancements in character development systems.)
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| Not pictured: Bring Da Funk, Bring Da Noise |
The act structure certainly makes sense
to me, to the extent that any traditional narrative structure can
work when mapped to 60-hour continuous narratives. (I've never really
thought about that before, but there really isn't a direct parallel
for that kind of extended storytelling, outside maybe a longer novel,
in the Western artistic tradition. Nothing else is that long, without
built-in episodic divisions.) Certainly, the rise of Telltale's
episodic model (and before that, games like Alan Wake, that
intentionally mimic the beats of TV shows, down to having "episode
recaps" between gameplay portions) have codified that act
structure. But they're not hard to see in older games; Chrono Trigger
is broken into discrete chapters, while Final Fantasy VI slaps the
player in the face with its split into two parts. Even games that
aren't that overt can be broken down into changes in the party's
objectives, and the overall tone. (Final Fantasy VII would be
something like Act One: Midgar, Act Two: The Pursuit Of Sephiroth,
etc.) I'll keep an eye out for them in Xenoblade when I start to
play.
I look forward to seeing synthesis at
work in Xenoblade; there's something very satisfying about feeling
story and mechanics work hand-in-hand. (I wrote about how Bravely
Default craps the bed in its last half when it abandons that synergy
in one of the guestblogs I wrote for you, and there's an essay buriedsomewhere in my blog about the satisfaction I feel when Achievement
systems act in harmony with gameplay and story.)
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| The Walking Dead |
To answer your specific questions:
1) Comedy in games is such a hideous,
weird beast. There are very few games that manage it, and even fewer
that can do it through gameplay, not through simply aping the comedic
beats of movies or TV. (Super Meat Boy is a game with funny gameplay,
for instance, as is Dark Souls (drink!), games where the levels and
traps themselves act as jokes.) On the other hand, games like
Super Time Force Ultra have legitimately funny dialogue, but it only
rarely impacts the gameplay. (If I'm using your model correctly, that
would be juxtaposition, right?) As for comedic mascots being
funny.... I'm going to say never? I have vague positive feelings
toward goofy little Chu-Chu in Xenogears, but that's about it. I can
find the character charming (although that's rarely the case), but in
general I don't think the majority of RPG designers and writers
understand humor.
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| Good RPG comedy sidekick |
Oh, wait, does Morte from Planescape:
Torment, count? I think he'd qualify, but that just underscores some
issues with the difficulty of translating comedy from one culture to
another, I think.
2) I don't have a problem with games
using references as shorthand, as long as it doesn't lead to
laziness. On the other hand, I'm not especially well-versed in
Japanese culture (for instance, gasp, shock, fainting spell, I've
never watched Evangelion and know it only through reputation/TV
Tropes), so a lot of those references aren't going to land for me. In
a way, that's nice, because it allows me to find originality in
places it wasn't necessarily present, but it also means that
shorthand won't work for me in a lot of Eastern RPGs. The Grand Theft
Auto games, on the other hand, use it quite well (up to a point). As
power fantasies, the game almost explicitly telling me, "Oh,
we're doing Scarface, now," feels great. The Saints Row games
take that even further, using musical cues and even references to the
plots/styles of other games to communicate what the player's going to
do next. They also don't fall into the trap of GTA IV, where Rockstar
got high on its own supply, so to speak, and decided that they could
tell a heartfelt tale of violence and redemption entirely through
cues taken from other works. (It turns out that they really, really
couldn't.)
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| Less so. |
Skipping over 3) because, shock, faint,
someone get the smelling salts, I don't respond terribly strongly to
Miyazaki and thus don't feel qualified to talk about his influence,
4) This one comes down entirely to the
amount of player choice I'm given. There's something deeply
unsatisfying about being locked into the role of a villain, forced to
make the world darker and grimmer with every step, with no chance of
redemption. (I turned Far Cry 3 off early on, both for unrelated
reasons, and because I could see the outline of the story and wanted
no part in it.) But give me a choice in how it plays out? Give me the
option to be a knight or a knave? Well, a lot of times I'll still
choose knight. But when I do decide to go for the Dark Side points,
it feels like a narrative of my own design, and thus relieves me of
the feeling of being trapped. Because Xenoblade is a JRPG, I'm
guessing that won't be the case; true narrative choice is scant on
the ground in games of its ilk. But I can remain hopeful! Of course,
it seems just as likely that my characters will think they're doing
something good, only to find out they've manipulated into evil,
because that's how 99% of JRPG plots go. We'll see.
Signing off with excitement,
Will
P.S.: I'm sorry I was mean about the
Chicken Man. Sir Chicken Man? Sir Thou.
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