Jer Pigs VII (Part Two: Chapter Two:The End: Closureing-Finale of the Second Part)

After realizing I had been writing for six hours on the last update I decided to take a break. I soon discovered that the bluray motor on my PS3 still didn't work, despite the many days I've spent not touching or thinking about it. Since I didn't have anything better to do that didn't involve people (which I don't like, generally,) girls (which I do like, but terrify and perplex me,) or people that are girls (terrifying things that I'm unsure if I should like,) I decided to finish the update.

5. Emancipated Freemen to the Grind

One of my favorite developers over the past several years has been NIS. NIS stands for Nippon Ichi Software, which I'm almost certain translates to Kickingest Ass Software, despite the very real fact that I just made that up.

No one was more surprised than me that I would be a fan of NIS. This is because no one I know plays NIS games and doesn't care that I do, so I was the only contestant in that particular surprise contest. The reason I was surprised was that NIS games look, at first glance, like goofy anime bullshit. More specifically, like low budget goofy anime bullshit that panders to stereotypes. And to be fair, it kind of is goofy anime bullshit a generation behind in graphics but decades ahead in underwear technology. But it is also so, so much more.

The first game I picked up by them was Disgaea 3. The internet hive mind review told me that this would be a foolish move on my part, as I would find the characters, game world, story, gameplay and everything else about the game confusing and unapproachable. And graphics. Can't have a review these days without that getting brought up. Thanks, I can see the screen shots jackass, this isn't 1992.

This wasn't true, of course. Well, I mean the graphics, yeah, but fuck you it's fun. I was a bit confused at first, but this was only because I'm so unused to in-game narratives just starting. "How am I supposed to know what's going on if every detail isn't explained in triplicate, verbally and in writing, and cross-referenced by at least 3 different NPCs over the course of several hours?!"-Average Game Designer, putting himself in our shoes and falling over, hopefully breaking a chair and landing on a pie. Also: fart noise.

Anyway, the beautiful thing about D3 and other NIS titles is that they're long. As near as I can tell, they don't really end until you finish playing, yet at the same time the main story line could be completed in a day. Okay, it could probably be completed in a day if you had a walkthrough, no friends and a large pile of methamphetamines, but still. After completing the story, though, is when the game really opens up, with an epilogue story, new game+, item world, new characters. They even have DLC for this game that I will probably never touch, because I've put well over 200 hours into this game and only have around 35% of the trophies.

What NIS has mastered, along with other things, is grinding. Grinding can be roughly defined as repeating certain in-game actions many, many times until a number changes. The actions are things like killing all of the blue skeletons in sector 70-2 for experience, killing the Winged BloodSnake of Azir-Tah over and over until he drops a certain weapon, or playing a mini-game repeatedly for money.

Some people love grinding, some people hate it, some people claim to hate it, but do it anyway because they're fucking liars, and some people do it until they get bored or find something better to do. Where some companies screw up is in making a grind mandatory, intentionally or not. Two Worlds II is a good example of bad design leading to constant grinding. In the world of Two Worlds II: 2 Fast Too Furious, everything costs a damn fortune. I'm not sure, since it's one of those aimless "Why am I killing this ostrich again?" sandbox western RPGs, but I think the main character wants to assassinate the Emporer because of inflation. In the world of 2 Worlds II a book costs 900 gold, and a piece of armor can range anywhere from a couple hundred to multiple thousands.

This wouldn't be a problem if it was just a cheap currency, like pesos or yen or the American dollar five years from now, and killing a group of whatever-they-decided-to-call-their goblins netted an appropriate amount. Unfortunately, finding gold in Two Worlds II Legit 2 Quit is almost as hard as finding gold in real life. Compounding this problem is the designers' decision to only respawn enemies that drop worthless crap. The majority of the game is spent picking flowers to sell, killing the same group of why-the-fuck ostriches and hyenas over and over, playing the impossible-ass Guitar Hero knockoff mini game, or playing dice, losing, reloading, playing dice, winning, saving, playing dice, losing and reloading until you have enough gold to upgrade your equipment every three or four levels. The semen frosting on this particular shit cake is that vendors' prices adjust to their own stock in real time, so to sell 10 of a particular item the gamer has to run back and forth between multiple vendors or suffer the insane game logic of one ostrich egg selling for 40 and 10 ostrich eggs selling for 56. This is clearly bullshit of the highest order.

 Sometimes mandatory grind sessions feel like obvious padding (White Knight Chronicles, most strategy RPGs.) Other times you don't even realize you should have been doing it until it's too late and you've used up all of your recovery items, died, and somehow respawned at your base with half your money gone (Resonance of Fate, every Dragon Quest.) The single problem with both of these things is that they almost always forget to make playing the game fun. Grinding can be FUN. Remember fun? Theoretically the entire motivation behind going to Gamestop, paying $60 for a dolled-up DVD and catching whatever local communicable illness you haven't had yet? Seriously, don't touch those display models.  Fun is not a hard thing to put into a video game. It's been done successfully since the fucking oscilloscope was the cutting edge of electronic amusements and diversions. It just seems to always get put on the back burner until it's too late, even though it's going to be on the front burner for the majority of the game. Burning, usually. Here are some examples of fun grinding in RPGs throughout history:

Diablo

People still play Diablo, because playing Diablo is like having sex with your mouse for 10 hours. On the off-chance someone doesn't know what Diablo is: Diablo is fucking perfect. This despite it being rendered entirely in eye-strain and stick figure and having about three lines of dialogue. Back in 1995 Blizzard had one of the biggest lightbulb moments in RPG history. Something so obvious that no one had really thought to do it before: "If we make combat visceral, engaging and rewarding, people will want to keep doing it." Shortly after marrying primeval man's desire to kill shit with an axe with modern man's powerlessness over Skinner Box reward systems (think slot machines,) Diablo went on to sell more copies than there were computers to play it on.

River City Ransom

River City Ransom for the NES was one of the best games ever made and probably the first Action/RPG hybrid to succeed at both. You punched and kicked bad guys, they turned into coins, you then used the money to buy food, books and sexy shower scenes that somehow made you punch and kick better. Repeat. That's the entire game. There's no shitty-ass fishing minigame. It doesn't force you to collect ten mutant cabbages that only drop one out of fifty times to get a new fireball. It doesn't take three fucking hours to explain the basics. Button 1=punch, button 2=kick, button 1+2=jump, good luck. That's the goddamn tutorial.

Tales of Phantasia

Tales of Phantasia was the best game for the Super Nintendo. That's not an opinion. That's based on like seven different kinds of science and three schools of wizardry. It wasn't released in America until years later because Japanese game companies secretly love that most American gamers think that JRPGs are cliche, repetitive pieces of shit that haven't changed in 25 years. One of the main reasons it was so good was the combat system. Unlike the games everyone remembers (FFVI/3, Chrono Trigger,) it had a live action battle system to go with it's convoluted story, goofy fucking RPG hero cliches and dozens of things named after, but having nothing to do with, Norse mythology. While Square was trying to come up with a new needlessly complex magic system and Enix was trying to figure out how to make it harder to get the copper sword before the first boss fight, Namco figured out how to put actual fighting into a JRPG fight. I'd also like to mention that Star Ocean came out around the same time with many of the same innovations, and has been playing Tales Studio's ugly friend ever since.

The thing about these games is that they improved on working formula, and they did it so well that ham-fisted, shameless ripoffs of these games are even good.

6.  If I'm Lost, It's Your Fault

 One of the problems that has needlessly plagued RPGs throughout the ages has been poor communication with the player. This began in the early 80's, before anyone had figured out how to speak Japanese AND English and most video game translations were delegated to the nearest hyperactive child with poor grammar. This eventually became known as Engrish and later as "Would you stop typing ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US every fucking time! No one's impressed anymore!" The problem with this was that between the hit-or-miss translations and early games only being able to hold 255 of anything was that sometimes crucial plot points got passed over so that nameless NPCs in villages could inform the player that "Timmy's a good boy!" or "No more cider!" even though this information is insane and unhelpful. But thank god for it, otherwise 12 year old me wouldn't know what to scream at my TV while I repeatedly wandered between the same village, field, dungeon and field over and over all fucking day trying to figure out where to go next.

Eventually game makers started to learn English or Japanese or sometimes even both, and that would have resolved the issue had this event not taken place in concert with the cutscene explosions. So as game designers developed the tools to effectively tell the gamer where to go next they were doing so while burying the gamer in an avalanche of backstory, made up science and superfluous bullshit, making it that much harder to tell the player "Talk to the bard, then the prince, then the bard again."

Eventually, new tools were created to help combat this stupid ass problem, such as quest logs, map markers or chapter overviews. Unfortunately, the more cunning and inventive the "Go here next" system is the less likely it is to work. Sure, "Talk to Bobby at HQ," sounds like a good tip, until you realize that no one at your headquarters is named Bobby. And while there very well may be someone at the enemy headquarters named Bobby he (or possibly she,) won't be wearing a nametag but will be surrounded by several hundred people that want to kill you.

7. No One Wins the Lottery 

Some game mechanics never work. Some work occasionally, but the odds of it happening again are so close to infinity against that they shouldn't be attempted. I'm sure that somewhere, in some forgotten RPG that only video game designers have played, there was a good fishing minigame, an exciting escort quest, a rewarding time trial, platforming that wasn't clunky and infuriating and a stealth quest that wasn't borderline impossible. I imagine this must have been the finest game ever made, with a fluid, challenging and engrossing battle system, a balanced, intuitive inventory, fetch quests so artfully integrated that the player wasn't even aware that they were playing fetch, natural, organic dialogue that didn't involve the village elder screaming about people you've never met in places you've never been to in broken English for the first half hour of the game. The thing about that game is that it will never, ever, ever be your game.

If I see a game called Barbarian Hero, and the cover art shows a picture of a barbarian hero, and the back of the box shows screencaps of barbarian heroing alongside text bubbles screaming "DOZENS OF HOURS OF BARBARIAN ADVENTURE AWAIT!!!" and I decide to buy this game, guess what convinced me to buy it? That's right. I really fucking want to play an agriculture simulator. Let's see, I can kill the mad spider goddess, or rescue the princess from the dragon, or lead the people of the plains in their battle against the people of the mountains, or, wait, I know! I'm going to fish and maybe grow some corn! That sounds so much more like something I can't do in real life!

I can at least see the need for some kind of farming/fishing/sharecropping simulator. It never works, and it almost always is a poorly designed, clunky, user-hostile mess, but I can understand the logic behind it. Your character needs gold. Basilisks and manticores aren't real, but if they were, they probably wouldn't vomit gold when they die.The problem here is that the solution to one small problem always seems to lead to many big problems, like an antacid medication that causes explosive diarrhea, blindness and suicidal ideation.

Some games (FFXII, 2 Worlds II, Neir,) try to find their way around this by having enemies drop junk items to be sold to the nearest merchant. This also creates problems as most of these same games have customization mechanics that rely on saving the junk to upgrade your weapons and armor. Since there is never an in-game guide illustrating whether or not to sell off your stock of Rotten Kidneys or how many Wolf Hides you're going to need for the next upgrade this inevitably leads to the old guesswork method of learning. And there are very, very few things more infuriating than selling off five of your ten Goat Eyeballs to buy the Improved Short Sword, saving, and learning an hour later that you need seven Goat Eyeballs to forge the Excalibur Blade and there are only fucking 11 Goat Eyeballs in the entire world!

As pointless and time wasting as developers insistence on trying to reinvent this particular wheel is, it's nothing compared to some of the exercises in futility regularly found in these games, such as the time trial, platforming and escort quests.

It's a known fact than an action game can incorporate RPG elements to improve their product. This is NOT a two way street. Platformers are designed to be platformers. The majority of the game is made with this in mind. Adding a sidequest or a hidden dungeon doesn't change that. It just means jumping in new and exciting locations. Adding a platform section to an RPG is basically telling the world "We're not very good at this."

I have never played a good escort quest in an RPG. Ever. And there have been hundreds. Maybe it can be done right, but that's what alchemists said about turning lead into gold. The problem with escort quests is that the person being escorted almost always falls into one of two categories. They're either a complete panty-waste that sucks up all of your healing potions before charging face first into certain death and being right (Sacred II,) or being a complete asshole that won't take orders and constantly gets in the way (Final Fantasy XII.) What always happens in these situations is the game stops being a game and becomes a chore. Whether it involves inching forward while spamming health potions or charging through the dungeon to get this selfish retard back out of your party, it never adds anything worthwhile to the game. Except for once. And that was a Blind Guardian video. If that was at the end of every escort mission I'd be happy.

Time trials don't work either. If I wanted to race I would have bought a racing game. If I wanted a racing game with RPG elements I'd play F-1: Built to Win. If I wanted to play an RPG with racing elements I'd soon learn I was wrong to want that.  I first remember this shitty design choice cropping up in Chrono Trigger, an overrated but otherwise harmless JRPG for the Super Nintendo. At one point you have to race a bad guy across a junkyard. The bad guy is some sort of gang leader and also a motorcycle with a mohawk. I've probably played that damn race 30 times and every time I felt as if I had exactly a 50% chance of winning, regardless of whether or not I even held the controller and did stuff. It was impossible to get more than a couple of car lengths ahead or behind and both vehicles handled like they were powered by flubber. Absolutely pointless fucking thing to put in that game, and that was a game that involved walking in a circle three times to learn character-specific magic.

What most people that don't make RPGs professionally learned from that race was that racing doesn't work in RPGs. When the best thing anyone has ever said about something is a shrug, it's probably not something worth pursuing. Of course, following the game making logic of "We're doing it cuz they did it," time trials keep popping up and keep getting worse, with Final Fantasy VIII, a game best described as 'test anxiety,' possibly being the nadir. I remember watching a friend try to play FFVIII about a decade ago. After about three hours she screamed at the TV "GODDAMMIT! I'm a nerd! I don't buy nerd games to show off my reflexes!!"

As if to perpetuate my abusive it'll-be-different-this-time-baby relationship with games, our old friend 2 Worlds II: Too Hot To Handle sucker-punched me with a horse race the last time I played it. After acquiring the horse I came to the conclusion that, even though it steered like a plow and only had two speeds (canter and buck wildly,) it was still marginally quicker than walking. Twenty minutes later I find myself having to challenge the self-proclaimed Hulk Hogan of imaginary horseridering's best time for the privilege of entering his inexplicably walled shantytown  to meet my contact. Fuck you, game. I'm taking the kids and going to my mama's.

So in conclusion: Stop doing things that don't work and start doing things that do. Please.

Jer Pigs VII (Part One: Chapter One: The Beginning: Startenings.)

Role Playing Games, particularly Japanese Role Playing Games, suck now. Over the past several years the American mainstream gaming media, as well as American gamers themselves, have grown increasingly indifferent, dismissive, jaded and openly hostile towards the once-beloved genre. For example, Final Fantasy VI (released as III in 1994, then re-released as VI in 1999 when we figured out how Roman numerals worked, then again in 2006, then again again in 2011,) is one of the most highly praised games in the genre's history. To quote one American internet goer: "Epic Win for Sony!!! Lol!!!!"-some dumbass on a message board, probably Gamefaqs. Now take Final Fantasy XIII, released in 2010, which is like Final Fantasy VI but with a nigh-unlimited budget, no deadlines and the engine replaced with a warp core. What could go wrong? Everything, apparently. Reviews ranged from unimpressive to openly psychotic. To quote a review from a message board: "Fail game is fail. Meh."-Probably the same dumbass from Gamefaqs.
Here is a masturbatory list of why I think that is.

1. I'm Not Fucking Rain Man 

Tutorial levels haven't evolved. "Bring up your menu, select ITEM, press X, select POTION, press X" and "select ATTACK to attack," still happens almost verbatim in current games, despite the fact that anyone not knowing how to operate a menu AND playing games rated, usually, E10-Mature, would have to be impossibly stupid and imaginary, and yet YOU, game developers, believe that somehow make-believe cavemen are falling out of time rifts, picking up your game, installing it on a hard drive, and navigating through character creation without knowing what buttons or words are.

Yet, at the very same time, in the very same games, you leave the explanation of the majority of the game mechanics to that dumbass on Gamefaqs. For the past three generations, you've added new game mechanics, metagames, alchemy/blacksmithing/runecrafting/moral choice systems, weather/time/hunger/stamina penalties and bonuses and god knows what else. Don't patronize us by explaining how your game is like other games, explain how it's not. I'm pretty sure things like 'broadsword=a sword that is broad,' 'HP=hit points' and 'save/load= save or load your game' are universal givens in RPGs. How about you spend your time and resources explaining whether or not identical +exp rings stack, or why the inexplicable stars next to the name of this piece of armor are there and if it means wear it.

And finally, for the love of Satan, either don't allow the tutorial to break narrative flow or give us the option to skip it. I bought your game because I want to play it, not because I like having every action for the first two hours interrupted by some condescending asshole that feels it's necessary to explain that a hard attack is an attack that is harder than a normal attack, sacrificing speed for power, watch your opponents and time your attacks when they aren't blocking, don't leave yourself open and remember, every time you think I'm finally done explaining the obvious, my twin sister Captain Obviousette will rise in my place to further talk down to you, you mouth-breathing simian, good luck with the sphere-shift-grid-ultra game mechanic that appears in about 6 hours, I'll be long gone by then and you'll have to puzzle that shit out through trial and error.

A good tutorial either asks if you want it (like most competent JRPGs,) or works with the gameplay as, for example, an unobtrusive popup (like most competent WRPGs.) The absolute worst tutorials explain the game through a series of endless, overly-verbose cutscenes that are either unskippable or worse, skippable but containing so much tertiary information regarding the plot, the game universe and your mission in it that taking the skip option fucks you over in an entirely unexpected direction. Star Ocean 3, I'm looking at you.

2. Put Your Shit in Order

Here's how an effective role playing narrative goes: You, Chopsocker the Lumberjack, are traveling home from the forest where you have spent the day jacking lumber. You come across a wounded adventurer along the path who says "Goblins!...Took my non-gender-specific but probably not gay companion...Cave...To the east...Take this...Ack! I am dead!" Taking the crude key you set off for the cave, killing wolves, slimes and probably giant spiders along the way, after first sensibly leaving a note for any other travelers along the path to send for help from the village Woodshere, because really, who runs off to fight a hoard of goblins alone to rescue a stranger at the bequest of another stranger? After slaying the goblins, probably giant spiders and definitely rats and rescuing the Slave Girl and an obscene amount of shitty weapons, she asks you to escort her to the port town of Boatshere, for which you will be well compensated when she is reunited with her family. And so on.

Here's how an effective narrative goes for game designers: "Gosh Generus, I, GenerisB, need to tell you that Empress Evilia sure has gotten the kingdom of Madeupwordia into a fix with the Madeupnouns of the kingdom of Totallynottolkienderivativetopia over the mining rights for Maguffin-ore, which they say is the bones of the dead god Ominousia, Lord of the Tertiary Plane. They say the Madeupnouns even had the Empress' daughter, WeepysidekickB, kidnapped by goblins and held in some cave in the rural province of Rusticfolkia. My sister, GenerisA sure must be tired of waiting on this loaf of bread. See Ya!"[take three steps] "Ho, Generus, and you, GenerisB! Don't run off just yet. How is your sister? Generus, as you know, when your parents, nearly dead from the pillaging of the Alsotolkienderivative's 16 years ago left you on the doorstep of I, OldguywithasecretA's doorstep 16 years ago I pledged to raise you as if you were my own. You should know that the Tertiary Plane is a realm of madness and despair, lorded over by the dead god Ominousia, where he waits for reunification of the Maguffin-ore, once used for purely religious observations but now used for mad magi-science by Empress Evilia's secret coven of Wizard Scientists, The Order Of The No Good Wizards. See Ya!" [take three more steps] "Hey watch where you're going! I know I, SpunkysidekickA, just bumped into you, but you should always keep a look out for obvious troublemakers charging blindly through the street looking behind them! See Ya!" [take another three more steps] "Gosh, Generus, I, Generis B, think that SpunkysidekickA may have stolen your coinpurse. And by coinpurse, I mean balls because you're inevitably going to turn into a moon-eyed hippie crying because you had to kill a named bad guy and ignoring the corridor of bad guy corpses you waded through to get to him when she becomes further involved with the narrative. You're hitherto unexplained Gem of Plot Device is glowing! The guards are after her! We should help her defy the established law of her and our people and kill the shit out of local authority figures in lawful execution of their duty to crown and country to help her escape the city of our birth!" And so on.

There is a lot of story in most role playing games. A lot of story, characters, characterization, culture, history. For fans of the genre, this is one of the attractions. As technology has advanced, games have gotten bigger, and with bigger games comes more fully realized worlds, characters, motivations, depth and scope. Unfortunately, some game makers don't realize that more words don't necessarily equal better understanding. I can't tell you how many times I've screamed at my TV "I get it! It's like Otherland, but longer, boring, and poorly written! It's 2000 and fucking 4! I know what emails, message boards AND online games are!! Fucking let me kill goblins you selfish fuck!!!" during the first two and a half hours of .hack Infection, in which time I watched my character accompany Captain Obvious and Captain Obviousette through one of the worst examples of Shitty Tutorial Level I've ever witnessed. Or best. Whichever.

My point is that the more information you throw at the gamer at the beginning of the game, the less the gamer will remember. If you introduce one or two NPCs, one dungeon, one town and maybe three or four ancillary characters necessary for the immediate plot I'm far far more likely to not only remember their names, but to develop an attachment to the narrative than if you feel the need to explain every fucking name character in the game, the massive political struggle, the history of the church and have me meet every fucking member of your family tree in the first 5 hours. I'm not going to remember any of that. Especially since I'm given absolutely no frame of reference for any of it. We're in the middle of a civil war. Okay, is that more important than my job as an errand boy? Because that's what I'm doing. Errand boying. Why the fuck should I care if the Captain of the Guard sided with the King's Brother, Duke Whoever of Wherever? Don't tell me all that and then send me out to fetch your groceries so I can suffer through a barter tutorial, ass.

Video games aren't movies. They aren't books. Video games are in the unique position, along with comics, of weaving a deep and engrossing epic, visually, over the period of dozens of hours. Every conversation doesn't have to play out like someone with a bad memory explaining the plot of The Watchmen. If you want me to fetch bread, fine I'll fetch bread. I have enough trust in both your skill and my judgement to believe that I didn't accidentally pick up Stockboy3: The Dark Ages. Let the plot happen when it happens.

I don't need to know every subtle nuance of the sociopolitical situation to enjoy a world. Some of the best game universes relied on the game itself, along with the player's imagination, to tell the story. Give the people that play your game enough credit to make a few logical deductions. I remember, right now, that Boletaria is the kingdom Demon's Souls takes place in, that Ostrava is really the prince and that Patches the Hyena is a shithead. What I don't remember is the name of a single location in Final Fantasy XII, whether the 13 year old boy in my party turned out to be a bad guy or not or how I, mighty stock boy Vaan, went from fetching wine to fighting undeads a continent away surrounded by sky pirates, princesses and whatever the fuck the black chick is supposed to be. Here's the kicker though: I've played FFXII more recently than Demon's Souls.

Bunny Elf? That's what she was, right? A Bunny Elf?

3. Don't Tell Me How I Feel

If you're going to kill off my best friend/girlfriend/parents/village, don't forget to give me at least one goddamn reason to care. Likewise, if I'm out saving the world from the forces of evil and wizards and probably a dragon at some point, don't forget to give me a believable motivation to do so. Finally, if you're going to give me a moral choice system then you're going to have to deliver on a couple of things: A) moral gray area, and B) believable human reactions. If I'm on a message board reading a list of appropriate responses to every choice in the game so I can unlock the best shield 30 hours from now then you did something fucking wrong. I'm not an obsessive-completionist gamer. I'm an 'I want to escape reality for a while' gamer.

Remember how big it was when Aerith died in Final Fantasy VII? So does everyone else. Especially the people who make RPGs. Also writers of creepy fanfiction. They remember so hard they try to shoehorn it into every single fucking game whether it needs it or not. Remember how big it was when your shipmates were turned to stone in Final Fantasy IX? Of course not, they were a bunch of one dimensional throw-away characters with exactly two personality traits each, one of which was 'kind of a dick.' And that's my motivation to keep fighting the good fight? Fuck you, game. Fuck you and your frilly little girl of a monkey boy.

Don't ever assume people will be attached to your characters or your story just because you say they should. In fact, do the opposite of that. Every time you assume I give a shit about your lazy writing I want you to remember that you are wrong and a bad person. And for fuck's sake, don't use 'Because," to explain things. "Because," is only an acceptable explanation when dealing with a four year old. People have been writing compelling stories with identifiable, likeable characters for centuries. There are books on the subject. Colleges offer courses in it. If you're not good at it go find someone who is.

"You are the chosen one, you must slay the Demon King," might have been enough plot for a NES game, but a Nintendo game's idea of a moral choice system was "Wilt thou help us?" "No." "But thou must! Wilt thou help us?" "No." "But thou must! Wilt thou help us?" ad infinitum. According to the nearest bookstore's fantasy/sci-fi section, moving a plot forward is not a hard thing to do. I played Tales of Symphonia until my Gamecube broke. Years later I bought another gamecube at a garage sale for exactly one reason: to play Tales of Symphonia. You know why? It had a kickass plot. And why did I give a shit? Simple, I identified with the main character. At least in the beginning. He turned into kind of a weepy bitch later, but by then there were other characters I liked more anyway. The point is, I got Lloyd. He constantly failed to see the bigger picture. Just like a real person. He tried to protect a nice old lady on the way home from school and doomed his village to slavery, leading to his exile and his obsession with revenge on the half-elves. Good intentions, blame, anger, prejudice, limited intelligence, acting on bad information; those are real shortcomings that motivate real people.

At the other end of this Belle Curve we have Final Fantasy XIII, which I played for almost three hours. And here is what I had to say, verbatim:

1. Why is there a mini-map? I'm in a corridor. I've been in a corridor. There are exactly 2 directions I could possibly go.
2. I really hope that's a girl. It looks, sounds and acts like a girl, but after XII it doesn't pay to assume.
3. Alright, this one has that weird, skin-colored facial hair college kids always try to pass off as a beard, so he must be a boy.
4. "We're the good guys!" Really? So far I've broken out of a prison transport, killed every authority figure I've come across and participated in a violent revolt against established authority for no defined reason. Forgive me for being skeptical, as this is the exact opposite of what good guys do. In fact, this is what The Joker and Harley Quinn did in Arkham Asylum.
5. "Hero's don't need a plan!" Yes! a direct, frontal assault to your numerous heavily-armed, well-organized,  and properly trained enemies with your ragtag team of escaped prisoners, children and terrible haircuts! They'll never suspect that! If only because it's far too stupid to possibly work.
6. Hey! Five stars again! For just spamming auto-attack over and over! It was an effort, and I thank you for rewarding me for my almost-effort, Game.
7. Also, thank you for explaining what the X button is in yet another tutorial, Game. This is so much easier than screaming commands at the television.
8. I seriously just unlocked a trophy by watching a cut scene. I've seen screen-savers that were harder to win at than this game.
9. Why is the black guy the jive-talking comedy relief? I appreciate that at least it's not another entire game of skinny, bug-eyed white teenagers being plucky, but did Square-Enix learn about black people from Michael Bay movies?
10. It's nice to see that the writer's from those old Mattel and Captain Planet cartoons can still find work polluting my TV with their monochromatic, retardedly oversimplified worldview. I missed thinking like an 8 year old.
11. Move forward, mash X, watch cut-scene, repeat. This isn't a game, it's a DVD menu.

As one would surmise, I was not impressed, especially since this bloated, self-righteous piece of shit was hogging Cavia masterpiece Nier's spotlight and was published by the same goddamn company. Idiots.

My point is, I can put up with the molly-coddling tutorials, the endless fucking cutscenes of boss fights I don't get to participate in, the turn-based combat (why is that even still a thing?) but what I just cannot put up with is you expecting me to treat this corny fucking puerile fucking adolescent fucking dialogue with anything other than contempt and you not giving me a single reason not to attack the next group of soldier's bullets with my face.

Except I'm not given that choice. Which brings me to my next subtopic: Moral choice systems. Morality systems have been one of the most consistently disappointing children in RPG designers' marriage to Bigger. Like the middle child that gets worse grades than his older brother and doesn't play sports like his little sister, and is a picky eater, and probably is really the mailman's kid, but would be such a great kid if he would just DO WHAT HE'S SUPPOSED TO!

95 percent of the time a 'moral' choice comes down to one of three options. When asked to save a village from ogres, or the space station from space ogres or whatever, you'll get to select either A) save the day and ask for nothing in return because you're that guy. Fuck that guy. B) Kill the villager for even asking, rob her corpse and rape her house, because evil for evil's sake happens so often in the real world. I haven't once in my life met a rotten person that wasn't thoroughly convinced that he was one of the good guys. And finally, the only option that makes sense outside of either Sunday School for the Children of Pussies or Legion of Doom board meetings: C) Goods or monies received for services rendered. Which is so boring I don't even have a snarky little joke for it.

Occasionally a game will make me think about my next move. Very very occasionally. In fact, "parts of Dragon Age," is exactly every time. Which seems impossible, since there are so many morally gray areas in real life. You'd think applying that to a fantasy narrative would be easy. Take an ethics class. Read a newspaper. Replace the nouns with 'ogre' and 'dwarf.'

Writing the story seems like it'd be the easy part, right? Even given the added difficulty of linking reactions to actions in a nonlinear story it can't possibly be harder or more expensive than rendering the environments or balancing the stats. "If we defy the King's wishes for an open boarder, and fortify ourselves from the barbarian hoards, we gain the benefit of of superior defenses, but run the risk of having a new foe at our backs and no way to receive supplies. Not to mention the people of the next village over; We don't want to sentence them to death by barbarianing and we can't afford to take in refugees." See, right there you have like a dozen different choices, none of which are "Fuck you die now!"

4. Fucking Scene! Cut!

Game developers seem to want their games to be cinematic. Somehow, someway, they seem to forget one of the most fundamental differences between video games and movies: VIDEO GAMES ARE NOT MOVIES! I can't believe this should even be a thing on current gen hardware. Movies are not interactive. Games are not two hours long (RPGs aren't, anyway.) Action scenes in movies turn your brain off. Action scenes in games turn your brain on. Romance in movies works (sometimes.) Romance in games never works (always. MMORPG weirdos aside).

One of the things people with selective memories always remember about FFVII were the CGI cutscenes. And I'll admit, they were awesome. At the time. In 1997. When 3D meant "everything is made of cereal boxes." Back then it had the novelty of being new. Back then movie sequences and actual audio files longer than 2 seconds were the flying cars and thought activated sex-bots of today. I can tell you this: When I first played FFVII, 17-year-old me wasn't thinking "Every game should have cutscenes!" No, he was thinking "Every game should LOOK LIKE these cutscenes!" And guess what? We're there. There is absolutely no fucking reason to leave the game engine so you can show me a marginally better bloom or particle effect.

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into a video game is getting an old one out. Remember Shadow of the Colossus? God of War? From last generation? There is no excuse for you to show me a movie of an epic, live action boss fight instead of a boss fight. Remember Fallout? From 1997? The same year Final Fantasy: Cutscenes Forever was released? If you wanted more information you asked for it. When things blew up and shit got heavy it happened to you, in game. Fallout only had about three colors: cigarette ash, coffee grounds and radioactive, and a barely animated avatar for some name characters. And it was brilliant! There is no excuse to break immersion to further the plot.

You may have noticed that I've hinted around at having a problem with rolling cutscenes piling up at the beginning of the game. If you haven't, then let me say this: I have a problem with rolling cutscenes piling up at the beginning of a game, or at any point before the denouement for that matter. If you want to make a CGI movie, make a CGI movie. Don't try to build a video game around one, because you wind up with a shitty movie AND a shitty video game at the same time. To this day I have not been able to get more than 4 hours into .hack Infection, Star Ocean: Til the End of Time, or Final Fantasy XIII because they all share that problem (along with FFXIII's many other problems.)

Having said all that, I'm not totally against cutscenes. I'm against TOO MANY cutscenes. Sacred 2 had the perfect amount of cutscenes: intro movie, motherfucking sweet Blind Guardian video, outro movie. Everything else was handled in game, by me, the player, not you, Mr. I Take Fucking Two Hours To Restate What You Read On The Back Of The Box Because I Suck At Things.

Up Next: Jer Pigs VII (Part Two: Chapter Two: The End: Closureing-Finale of the Second Part)