Dear Artsy Game

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, but I've had a very busy month. Anyway, I'll be talking about a very untraditional game this week. So untraditional, it's questionable as to whether or not it constitutes a game.Dear Esther first came out as a mod for Valve's Half-Life 2 in 2008 by indie developer thechineseroom. It's very simple: you are on an island, and as you walk from one side to another, snippets of the island's story are told by your character in the form of letters he has written to his late wife. It was promising, and indeed rounded up a cult following, but it's amateurish design was a major downfall. I'll be frank- I only played about 3 minutes into the original Dear Esther because its environmental design was just downright awful.

My experience basically constitutes walking along the shore of the island on the only obvious path, until the game kills me for wandering off. The level geometry in the mod is particularly overcomplicated and shoddy; aside from the pathways along the cliff sides being very confusing in itself, I was once flung about 50 feet for squeezing between two rocks. What's more, the narration occasionally whispers "come back...," sometimes even talking over itself. Not only is it annoying, it's confusing. In fact, I heard this before I really even went anywhere in the game. So... come back to what? Now, get this, I was later informed that this narration wasn't directed at me at all, but was actually my character pining for his dead wife. While the intent of this mechanic is understandable in retrospect, this, along with the environmental design, is a transgression on one of the most fundamental concepts of game design: not confusing your player when teaching him how the game's system works. And even if Dear Esther not a game per se, this principle still applies to almost anything interactive; it's why malls have maps in front of every entrance and school courses have syllabi; people can only interact with a system as correctly and elegantly as information about it is handed to them.

But at the same time, this is still a title I'm very glad exists. Whether it succeeds or fails, only good things can come out of experimentation. (Ethical experimentation, anyway.) And despite the bad taste the finished product left in my mouth, I could see the potential from the get go. The writing was very elegant, the narration eloquent and the music was very atmospheric and engaging. My problem is that the quality of the product itself seemed to kill whatever immersion these elements would hope to create.

Fortunately, its positive merits didn't die with the rest of experience. A year later, Robert Briscoe, a former employee of DICE (the developers of the Battlefield series and Mirror's Edge) began collaborating with thechineseroom to revamp the game to become an independent commercial product of a much more professional quality. Did they succeed? Short answer: yes.

For starters, the Source engine allowed the team to make a much more graphically appealing environment. But I'm not giving them credit for the engine- that would be like complementing the painter on the canvas. It's what the developers were able to do with it that counts, and what they did do with it is just amazing. The vistas on the cliff tops, the glow of the minerals in the caverns, the moonlit ocean- there are no words for how stunning the art direction in this game was.

Now, as for the experience itself... When it comes to video games (or related interactive media, as the case may be), I find there is seldom a better way to tell a story than through its environment. And storytelling via level design is not just what Dear Esther is, that's ALL it is. The narration that guides you along the way fills the island with context and exposition, and the beautiful soundtrack helps establish the world with a somber tone, but ultimately you discover the details of the island for yourself. I don't mind this actually, as it allows the narrator to be informative and emotional, but nonintrusive and subtle. Presentation is really all Dear Esther offers, and what it has is magnificent. And I'll admit without spoiling anything, I teared up a bit towards the end.

There's really little else to discuss about the Dear Esther in terms of its content, but what brings my attention to the game more than anything else is what it implies. One of the shortcomings of written and spoken language is that all words are connotative, having different connections and meanings for different people. Most words have a strong objective definition, but this quality leads us to argue the meaning of certain words when something comes along to tread on the bounds of what they define. "Art" and "game" are such words. So what is Dear Esther's role? Is it either of these? Is it none? There may very well be as many answers as there are people, but if you ask me, it's most certainly art, as well as a game. The way I see it, "art" covers anything intended to incite an emotional reaction from or spread an idea to people while a "game" is a subset of art whose final expression is incomplete without the interaction of a participant. And Dear Esther certainly covers both bases, but again, those are just semantics that anyone can fill the blanks for.

Ultimately, Dear Esther is a very niche title; it's not even close to something that would appeal to everyone, but it helps to know that when going into it, you shouldn't expect a game, at least what most would envision as one. But if you want a visual novel, a simulated walk on the beach with a fascinating, enigmatic tale to keep you company, look no further.

Dim Souls

There are a lot of things that can be said for the 2009 hit title Demon's Souls, but the first thing that comes to mind for anyone who's played it is its difficulty. A (very) dark fantasy action-RPG, Demon's Souls is known for its lack of checkpoints, the possibility of losing an hours worth of accumulated souls (the game's currency) by accidentally slipping off a cliff and ruthless enemies. It's a strong contender for the most unforgiving game since Battletoads. So developer FromSoftware took it upon themselves to make a sequel* that's even harder. Thus, Dark Souls.

The game starts with your character escaping from an atrophied asylum for undead spirits. Here, you'll encounter the first difference between Demon's and Dark: Checkpoints. Yes, tghe most comforting image you'll ever see in this game is a bonfire; they give you a chance to rejuvinate and a place to respawn when you die. (Yes, when. Not if.) Most of them are fairly far apart, but their introduction is a double edged sword gives the game an excuse to throw more numerous and difficult enemies your way. Indeed, right off the bat, the game throws a humongous boss at you that will club you to death in about two hits, just to give you a glimpse what you're getting into. But unlike Demon's Souls where you're supposed to lose the first boss fight to move on with the story, your task in Dark Souls is to defeat him. Fortunately, your first task is to escape his chamber and search the building for a weapon that makes the fight actually fair. This is where the game teaches you the First Principle of Dark Souls: don't do anything before you're ready. This is far from the only time in the game where you will wander into the unknown unaware you're walking into the lion's den.

After the tutorial, you'll be whisked away by a giant bird into the Kingdom of Lordran, where the game truly begins. And with that you'll discover the other major departure from Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls had a somewhat untraditional "hand-like" game structure- there were 5 semi-linear worlds with 3 or 4 levels in each. You can't progress through all of them at once, but you can explore them sequentially and jump between them in the hub. The world of Dark Souls, however, is open, nonlinear and interconnected like a traditional RPG. This approach makes the world more immersive and gives it a stronger identity through how its environments are connected, but this came with some downfalls in design. For starters, you will be retreading old ground. A lot. And not just from dying a lot and having to restart from the last bonfire, but because you'll often need to pass through old locations to get to new ones and after some time, the commute will get extremely tedious. Halfway through the game you'll come across the ability to teleport between bonfires, but only two or three of the ones your allowed to use aren't completely out of the way and pointless. Furthermore, Demon's Souls' linearity allowed it to through harder and harder obstacles your way as the game progresses, but since Dark Souls is open world, you'll be retracing your steps very often and crossing the paths of a lot of the same enemies. As such, the difficulty curve starts to converge downward as you get more powerful and even the hard enemies begin to seem anticlimactically easy. At first, it was satisfying to see enemies that were once a terrifying threat go down in two or three hits- I love it when games reuse minibosses as common enemies later in the game- but once you find enemies that drop a few thousand souls go down with two swings of your mighty blade, you'll start farming without even trying and leveling up becomes a snap.

That said, reaching that point is going to be quite a haul, make no mistake. Every time you turn a new corner, you will be reminded of the Second Principle of Dark Souls: Proceed with absolute caution. Paranoia is a virtue for Dark Souls players, as the placement of enemies and obstacles is very treacherous. And I don't just mean proceeding in the physical sense; when you upgrade yourself or your weapons or buy an item, there's no turning back. Never do anything you think you might regret; there have been boss fights where I thought "I KNEW I should have saved that item." What's more, the game isn't lenient enough to give much room for experimentation; the save system is turned against you in that the game autosaves with every event, so don't think you can avoid death by turning off the console just after your HP hits zero. Plus, NPCs you kill stay dead for the rest of the game, so be particularly careful around them.

But to get back to the positive side, the world is worth exploring and retreading if only to see the world itself. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most gorgeous game I've ever played in my entire life. I'm sorry Skyrim, but my mind's made up. There isn't even that much treadable ground, but the sheer scale of the vistas in this Dark Souls made it feel immense enough to just blow my mind on several occasions. A red dutch window shining down over a seemingly endless castle skyline. Entire cities and walls running down mountain sides. An endless crag with ancient shrines off in the distance. As if the gameplay isn't rewarding enough, just taking a breather to look at each new destination you reach is more than enough to make progress worthwhile. Unfortunately, this beauty comes at the cost of some serious framerate issues. Particularly in Blighttown where it can drop as low as 5 FPS if you look the wrong way. But what's amazing is that despite the scale of these things, it never feels like a part of the background. The level design in this game feels uniquely natural, in that it doesn't feel like it was built to be part of a game. If you look at, say, Half-Life 2, the level design is set up so it's always obvious what direction you need to go in. There's not really much of a need to explore the environment because there's always a light or a strange platform or a prompt of some kind that tells you exactly where the next destination is- as if fate is your GPS. Dark Souls level design is far more natural and entropic, with rigid hills and dilapidated paths that seem just narrow enough to support you. Beyond that, each section has a distinctly unique architecture, and this variety is further enhanced by the juxtaposition of the environments; the cramped, trap-filled hallways of Sen's Fortress are immediately followed by the free and enormous walkways of Anor Londo. The naturally formed environments are the most distinctive of all; exploring Lordran really feels like climbing a mountain, with uncertain contours that force you to keep an eye out for what is a path and what isn't, and this gives it the quality of some of the most uniquely immersive level design I've ever seen.

Angelic choir goes here.

What's more, the setting is aided by some very strong character, enemy and sound design. NPCs aren't just random passersby who may hold a conversation or laugh at you, they each have their own deep backstory and it's very easy to tell what an NPC's intention and disposition are simply by their location, appearence and general decorum. Although they do have a strange tendency to giggle. I can't even count how many conversations I've had that ended in "heh heh heh", "mm hmm hmm" or "ahh hah hah" without even a punchline to precede it. I guess it's supposed to seem ominous, but it just gets annoying. As for the characters you fight, the enemies in this game are also some of the most impressive, colorful and most varied in any game I've ever played- they range from giant knights to dragons to ghosts to abstract abominations that would make H.P. Lovecraft himself puke. Really, this game is more frightening than most survival horror games for the kinds of enemies you find in the deepest and darkest environments, from shrieking ghosts to giant blobs with skull-like faces protruding from their surface. Some of the most interesting designs include a titanic dragon with a giant, gaping vertical mouth, a naked woman who's bottom half has been replaced with a giant, lava-spitting arachnid and... wow, now that I actually think about it FromSoftware's character designers probably have some severe women issues.

Seriously, they should rename it the "Freud-gon"

Anyway, the sound design in this game is also strong, particularly the soundtrack in that there really isn't much of one at all. The game is silent barring a few important sequences and boss battles. The strength of the sound design is really all in the ambiance- how the sounds of approaching enemies instill fear. How the isolated echo of your footsteps in long hallways can make you feel lost and alone. How the crackling of a bonfire makes you feel safe and sheltered after a long journey. These are the feelings that music could only mar.

A unique feature Dark Souls inherits from Demon's is its quasi-multiplayer gameplay. See, while it plays out like a single player RPG, players can interact with each other, from leaving hints and warnings throughout the game to helping players beat bosses to outright invading other people's games and stealing their souls. But in my experience, you're less likely to be invaded if you avoid relying on other players for support, so it doesn't feel like an unbalanced system.

This is starting to run on, but I think I've said all that needs to be said. If you're feeling intimidated by the hype surrounding this game's difficulty, don't let that stop you from playing this magnificent experience. A story told through each step in its world. An atmosphere that makes its spirit come to life. A challenge that teaches resilience, rewards talent and punishes carelessness with tact, precision and impact. A cast with variety and presence. A design that truly understands how the player thinks. Though it may stumble towards the end and be literally hindered by some mismanaged processing power, this doesn't stop Dark Souls from being a paragon of modern game design. Though the fantasy RPG might be a niche genre and the difficulty and time investment will throw casual players, this is still a game that should be appreciated for its worth. I wouldn't ask anyone to complete it, but it is something that any gamer worth his beans should try at some point in life.
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*FromSoftware calls the game a "spiritual successor" but it's really closer to a sequel as far as I'm concerned, having an almost identitical interface, tone, genre, etc. to its predecessor to the point they may as well be in the same universe. The fact that a character appears in both games supports that theory anyway.

Legend of Groose: Skyward Pompadour

To get my personal biases (or lack thereof) out of the way, I didn't grow up on Zelda. I only jumped on the bandwagon the last decade because A. Being a gamer and not playing Zelda is nearly tantamount to being a nerd and not seeing Star Wars and B. I had a great aunt named Zelda. Don't know why that's relevant, but it seemed reason enough to start. So I have played through several major Zelda games, namely Twilight Princess, Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time, so I at least understand the standard for this series.

With that out of the way, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the latest entry in the Zelda franchise, so the question is how does it stand up next to the rest of the series?

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The game starts with Link (or at least this incarnation of Link. This crazy timeline- I know, right?) living on the floating village of Skyloft. He's enrolled in a specialized academy for piloting giant birds. He, among other students, has his eye on the headmaster's daughter Zelda. So as the final exam comes up, some bullies lock up Link's bird so he can't participate, so it's up to Link to find his bird, get back to the exam in time, come out on top and win the girl. But this isn't the cliched high-school dramedy this sounds like. There's no heartwarming graduation speeches or throwing-mortarboard-hats-in-the-air-then-freezeframing-and-cutting-to-black. During a stratospheric joyride, Zelda gets sucked down to Earth by a tornado and Link once again finds it's his duty to save the world from the abstract evil forces involved.

In all seriousness, the opening is a very strong tutorial stage; not only does it well acquaint the player with the game's mechanics, but it has some strong character development. It's just as well, since there's very little of it for the rest of the game, but better here at the beginning than anywhere else, because I've never really been as motivated to save Zelda than I have here; you really see a bond between them that's more than just hero and damsel; despite only just being seen acquainted for an hour, you can tell they've been friends their whole lives.

The opening chapter also introduces Groose: the bully who locked up Link's bird, and while I don't wish to spoil anything, he goes on to become a great character- perhaps one of the best in the series. But what really caught my attention in all this is how fantastic the facial expressions in this game are. Zelda has always had very unique and memorable character design, but technological limitations always seem to leave their expressions lacking; particularly in the N64 games and Wind Waker where they're literally two-dimensional, but character expressions in Skyward Sword are practically Pixar quality- not only are they detailed, but they really make each of the characters feel human and relatable despite the lack of voice acting (or in Link's case, any dialogue period.) I suppose this doesn't exactly make or break the game, but I think it's a great demonstration of how for all the detail L.A. Noire's 32 cameras give you, it's really more about how good the expression looks than how many facial muscles you can see.

Trust me, this one's hilarious in context.

Coming back from that tangent, you'll find out very early on about what's probably the game's most controversial aspect: the controls. The Wiimote, and motion controls in general, are generally criticized for not being reliable among other things, but if there are two things the Wiimote's suited to above anything, they're gun play and sword fights so at least this has a fighting chance. Twilight Princess flunked hard on that end, since it had trouble telling thrusting from slashing so I was naturally skeptical that Skyward Sword would be any better, but the WiiMotionPlus made more improvements than I could have hoped for. It's not 100% accurate, but it has to be at least 90. Most of the enemies in this game are designed to have their weakpoints exposed at a certain angle that your strikes have to match, and the controls were good enough to satisfy, so I can give the sword play a good thumbs up. Unfortunately, the nunchuck's accuracy is still weak, so you can't rely too much on your shield. (Speaking of which, the shield in this game is pretty awkward; you have to raise it manually every time you lock on, where in previous games Link automatically held it up whenever he would lock on. Frankly, I didn't understand its potential until the final boss fight, but I feel that was more my fault for focusing more on offense.) Of course, without a secondary analog stick, you can expect the camera to be pretty bad. And it was. It's not a deal breaker, but it makes switching between regular and aiming modes and running at the PRECISE angle you want to jump off a platform at to be kind of awkward.

The core of the game takes place in three environments on Earth's surface: a forest, a volcano and a desert. These environments are pretty par for the course for a Zelda game, but Skyward Sword manages to keep it fresh; the forest, at one point, gets flooded so you have to swim through it, the volcano is a particularly vertical level that requires you to run up a lot of slippery slopes and the desert has special rocks that cause everything in a small radius around them to essentially go back in time to before the land desertified (The time travel logic is kind of weak in some places, i.e. causing some gates to open in the past when you open them in the present, but it still makes for some interesting puzzles regardless.)

And what about the puzzles? The dungeons in this game were pretty hit and miss as far as I'm concerned, the volcano ones being the weakest, the desert ones being awesome and the forest ones being okay. I guess it's strange to generalize the quality of all the dungeons in each area, but it really comes down to the general environmental mechanics for each area. Navigating over and around lava was pretty tedious where playing with those time-travel rocks was just awesome. Either way, the game had some cool tools, perhaps the most notable one being the beetle, a remote controlled bug that scouts the area and can pick up items. It's something like to see return, but my personal favorite was the whip, which just felt so satisfying to use with the motion controls.

Pictured: Me using the whip

In the later chapters, there's a new minigame that separates each chapter, where Link must stealthily find collectibles throughout the core area in each region without waking up dormant enemies. Were it a simple scavenger hunt, it probably wouldn't be anything special, but the threat of waking the enemies adds a layer of intrigue to the challenge. If you wake up the enemies, the music gets crazy terrifying, and they will hunt you down and try to put a one-hit kill shot on you while you will run in panic for the next item so they'll go back to sleep.

My one complaint about the gameplay is how insignificant the sky feels as a mechanic. Wind Waker made strong use of its open ocean, with a large archipelago to explore, but the open sky in Skyward Sword feels more like a small hub that only exists as a relay between levels rather than an explorable environment in its own right. This also makes the individual levels feel rather formulaic. Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time felt like it was the center of a large and expansive kingdom where everything in this world feels very split up, only tangentially connected through Skyloft. Until the end of the game, the only reasons you'd really need to return is shopping and fetch quests. That said, there are side missions though. Not particularly engaging ones, but they're there nonetheless. For instance, Link apparently finally grows weary of breaking pots for rupees and upgraded to breaking an entire chandelier for a heart piece and is forced to work for the owner to pay it off by delivering soup to people. Not particularly engaging, so I just walked out the door and never looked back. It's his problem now.

So in terms of gameplay alone, it's a solid entry for the Zelda series, but what about the art style and atmosphere? As I already mentioned, the game has beautiful facial expressions and standout character design, but it also has a fresh art style. There's apparently a rift in the Zelda fanbase between supporters of the cel-shaded Wind Waker and supporters of the more mature Twilight Princess art direction, so this game compromises between them for something with bright colors, but characters no longer look like they came out of South Park and it looks all the better for it. And like the rest of the series, Skyward Sword has an incredible soundtrack with memorable tunes, some old and some new, that always match the mood of the environment. When it should be epic, the music's epic. When it's dark and gloomy, the music's moody and quiet. When it's emotional, the music's soft and melancholic. It sounds great and it fits, what more can you ask for?

Now for the story itself- I hesitate whether I can call this the best story in the Zelda series or just a really good one, because on one hand, there isn't much of one; there isn't really a presence of a plot outside of the very beginning, the very middle and the very end. It's not even that strong- you're a hero, destined to stop the forces of evil from rising from the underworld and consuming the world under a reign of darkness, blah blah blah, etc. On the other, the character development in this game absolutely blows away the rest of the series' attempts. Again, the relationship between Zelda and Link is more tangible than ever, but the aforementioned Groose really takes the cake in this game. He starts out as a meathead greaser with a slick pompadour and slicker ego, but when he tries to join Link in his quest, he starts to both come to grips with his shortcomings and realize his potential and it doesn't feel forced on him at all.

The new face of heroism. Kind of. Sort of. Eh.

And then there's the villain. Oh, our old friend Ganondorf is nowhere to be seen this time; instead we have Girahim, a flamboyant sadist and affable maniac. Good God, this guy's one sick psycho. He toys around with you at first, but he's elegant, eloquent and threatening. Despite his almost civil decorum, not even Ganondorf's said anything quite as dark as "I will torment you until you are deafened with the sounds of your own screams." Above all that, he has a strong ego, but his plans failing is an obvious berserk button, making it all the more satisfying to take him down.

And as par for the course in this series, Link has a sidekick. And I'll give this game credit, one thing I was never really expecting to see in a Zelda game is a robot. The Navi of the Day is Fi, an automaton that lives in the hilt of your sword. I have to admire her character design; her crystal face slender, armless body and textured legs give her the appearance of an anthropomorphic sword. Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to like her, she's a tad intrusive. She tends to break up the flow of gameplay far too often, usually to say trivial things, sometimes even giving the answers to puzzles that I should have the right to figure out for myself. And when I do ask for hints, they're generally vague or irrelevant. She's not "Hey! Listen!" annoying and I'll admit I kind of grew attatched to her as the game progressed, if only because I like robots, but she's pretty mediocre at her role as sidekick.

So that's pretty much all I have to say on The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Overall, the gameplay turned out better than expected, even if the kingdom isn't as immersive as in previous games, the cast was fantastic even if the story was a little dry, the music is amazing and the new art style works out. It's not the be-all-end-all Zelda game, but if nothing else it shows Nintendo's still got it. I'd recommend it to any Zelda fan, but if you've never played a Zelda game before and intend to, this is the one I'd start with.

Hello World!

VIDEO GAMES. What a glorious, ingenious creation. The power to build cities, destroy monsters, save worlds, explore universes, condensed to our fingertips. In case you didn't realize, this isn't some mamby-pamby medium like books where you can begin to get immersed in the plot only to get lost in thought halfway through the chapter and realize you haven't been paying attention for 4 pages and skim back to the last conscious word you read. A story can be told without a listener, but a game can't work without a player. That's what makes them special to me and that's why I'm writing this right now.

So let me cut to the chase- call me a reviewer, a critic, whatever you want, this is my soapbox. I'm just here to share my thoughts on the games I play. Yes, the internet has no dirth of gamers. There's a lot of online discussion and diatribe about games, so what's one more in the pool? If you want to come along for the ride, a seat's always available.

First thing on the agenda: Skyward Sword.