天下制覇

I got tired of grabbing pics before I made it through all the games.

I didn’t play any more of Corona this week. Seinarukana, ever the slave driver, reared its head again as the real script compiler for it was finally bludgeoned into working on English text, which opened up all kinds of special new surprises. Like the existence of save-labels needing translating for every single scene in the game. All 500 of them. And that the scripts apparently use furigana at times, which the ones I’ve been working off of decided was something that just wasn’t worthy of informing me of, so hey, nothing like getting to redo and recheck work, right? And all ~650 or so strings from the exe, which is about 620 more than I expected. Granted, only a fraction need to be translated since many are for debug functions, but I still need to go through them all. But at the same time, it also showed some neat things that I’m hopefully able to implement that are simply commented out. Well, and I found a new and somewhat bizarre bug too, but we can leave finding that one as an exercise to the eventual audience.

So all I really played this week was a few hours of Xillia. Well, and practiced my Poison Akane just because I like the warm feeling of taking off 80% of a life bar in one basic combo. That left my two options as a writeup of something older I have played significantly (which would likely be Prism Ark) or rant for a while about my recent frustrations with a few recent RPGs. Well, recent being most of the last year or so. Since the bile’s still churning in my gullet over Xillia’s awful beginning, let’s go with that in an undirected random venting spew of frustration and bile. 

Let’s start with Xillia then in the list of games that I feel have personally slighted me lately. I continue to be baffled by Namco’s love of the Chain Capacity (or Assault Counter or whatever they’re calling it) system. Who exactly thinks to themselves upon seeing Abyss/Vesperia’s combat "Boy, we’re giving the player way too much freedom. We better limit that with a tiny hard to see number." I have this sneaking belief that it’s a solution to the ever-awful AI. If they can’t get the AI to act more like a player, this way, they can get the player to act more like the AI. Making it variable by critical hits or really any random factor just makes matters worse.

And then there’s also the special attacks. What chains into what? Who knows! And this vaunted link system that will change what pressing an attack button does on the fly? Why thanks. I didn’t want to execute the same normal attack as before. I did want to go vaulting into the air instead. I play fighting games. I can handle a complex engine. What frustrates me is not knowing what the button is going to do when I push it. Or worse, having a basic combo interrupted because the AI got its ass into place while I was already attacking.

Maybe it’d even be forgivable had it been implemented well, but more often than not, the little combo rondo takes place 3 feet above the enemy’s head because they were too small, too heavy, one pixel off from due north, etc. Nor do I really see what the problem was with something far more basic. You get three regular attacks, chain into any special, chain into any EXTRA special. Someday, once you’re used to it, we can start messing around, adding cancels, different chains, maybe even a fourth or fifth normal attack. Press buttons and maybe, if the special link thing activated a quarter second before, something entirely different happens, is just repeatedly frustrating. This great new ‘strategic’ mechanic interferes with my own elaborate strategy of "press attack button three times, then press special." So I play most of the time with it turned off. Fantastic work on that one, Namco.

And to close off my Xillia rant and segue into the Atelier games, enough with the goddamned busy work. Christ. These maps are already practically lazy MMORPG maps as it is, giant two screen meadow followed by giant two screen meadow followed by a coast followed by a giant two screen meadow followed by backtracking through them, but then take all the crap strewn literally every 15 steps and individually drop it all off at every single shop? What fun. At least it gave me a break partway through to collect rocks in a town.

There should be a formula weighing the amount of BS a game makes you do just so you can keep playing the game. And on that note, we’ll get a twofer here with Meruru and Ayesha, two games that I really think I could have liked even if Gust is still struggling to get the combat engine back to where it was with MK five years ago… if they weren’t so determined to piss me off in spite of themselves. I had kind of a similar positive initial experience with both. Admittedly, that was a lot because I didn’t like upgrading equipment until I needed to, so that ended up creating a lot of nice challenge. Challenge that immediately evaporated in both games the moment I stopped and upgraded my equipment, but it was nice while it lasted.

At the same time though, it was frustrating to go to the ‘wrong’, higher level places, clear them out, and then be forced to cake walk through the easier ones, and find after spending 6 months clearing out the western path, that if I had instead gone to the 3 day northern path that looked useless, I’d have been given magic shoes or gloves that would have cut down my other voyage’s time by half. There’s clearly a natural progression, so why is freedom even given in this way? I’d much rather have a more controlled and balanced game than be forced to mindlessly kill another 40 palette swapped squirrels. And where’d all the bosses go? Are we taking lessons from goddamned Tales of Destiny? No, backtracking to kill a damned bear from one area higher does not count as a mini-boss.

Where Meruru really killed me though, was the bloody Clippy-esque ‘friendship’ events. The quickest way to piss someone off and make them unproductive is to constantly badger them when they’re trying to do something. Can I make do some alchemy? But after each component, we’ll need to go eat some pie, fix a window, look at some flowers, go shopping, hook some lesbians up. Christ. Creating three items, about a five second process in Kamidori or 15 seconds in MK, turns into an arduous, constantly interrupted process more irritating than a half dozen Clippies all badgering you that it’s time to put down what you’re doing and have pie. You are not as cutesy, heartwarming, silly, or lesbian as you think you are, Gust.

Ayesha ‘solved’ this by kicking about 80% of the events to the world map instead of the workshop, and admittedly, it is less annoying to be interrupted there since you’re less likely to forget what the hell subitem you were making with what properties and why, but it was still obnoxious to have 4-5 pit stops while trying to simply get back to playing the game, but as the game went on and it started spawning absurdly powerful palette swapped minibosses that you only know are worse than anything the ‘plot’ is going to throw at you by going there and being one-shotted, my patience began to wear. 

The second to last straw was when I beat the game. I mean, I killed what was clearly the last boss. The story was over. Everything was wrapped up. And then when the question was asked "So, what the hell just happened?" the answer given back was "You don’t need to worry about it. Go home and make some damned pie." No, seriously. At least when Vesperia did the same thing, it had the good graces to let you go out feeling like a champ before it sprung "Uhhhh, there’s some extra evil sitting around. Go to these 6 dungeons because, uh… Look. Just do it." So like Vesperia, I declared the world already saved and quit there. Actually, I didn’t. I checked an FAQ online to see if that was really it, whereupon I discovered that I had been locked out what might have added some more to that because I had ‘accidentally’ killed a boss without visiting a specific useless out-of-the-way spot enough times first. That was what prompted me to consider the world saved and move on.

Last up is Fire Emblem: Awakening, and that boils down to really one simple thing. It’s a complaint I’ve had with the series for a long time too. I think I would have loved it too, had the cast either been a third the size or the maps twice as big. I had higher hopes for the game too since FE4 and the crossbreeding of nobles is my favorite one of the series, but similar to my issues with Xillia so far, the excessive complexity killed it for me. Not that it was complicated. God no. It was that it gave you literally dozens of characters, went "choose however you want, that’s cool," with one hand and "YOUR CHOICES SERIOUSLY MATTER" with the other. It’s just a massive demonstration of Paradox of Choice (or Buyer’s Remorse, or Paralysis by Analysis, etc etc) in action.

Let’s explain then for those not in marketing or usability. The Paradox of Choice is a psychological phenomenon (technically debated, but let’s roll with it) whereby giving more choices, which logic says will satisfy the chooser more since they can choose the exact option that is best for them, will instead come out of it less satisfied than if they had fewer options, or even make no choice whatsoever. Prototypical example: Given the choice between crunchy or smooth peanut butter, everyone can easily make a decision and is satisfied because they understand the alternative. But if instead, there’s every combination of crunchy vs smooth, brand vs generic, organic vs non, sodium vs sodium free, preservatives vs non, etc, etc, etc, what was once a simple automatic decision becomes an extremely complex one requiring cognitive attention. Or if you want a more technical example, imagine trying to figure out how to start a car vs start an airplane. One is a simple automatic process. The other terrifying and filled with uncertainty with the only real difference being "number of buttons."

FE:A then did almost every single thing it could to make these choices get under my fingernails and dig in. There are lots of ways to make them work. Make them very limited and forced choices like FE4 did. Or incremental low-impact choices like Civ (or really, most strat games). Or make the gameplay very different between using characters to not make the grind feel so painful. Or not force so much effort into making a choice. They could have encouraged experimentation with a strong rubber banding system like Disgaea, but leveling and relationship building progresses very slowly so just making a choice at all of either characters to use or relationships requires significant and cognizant commitment. It also loves to remind you of all the characters you’re neglecting and relationships you haven’t grinded, so there’s buyer’s remorse added to any choice made too. And maybe it could be worth all the investment and effort if the reward was worth it, but no. There’s too little difference between the characters and the outcome for the effort put in.

And so when I started getting to where the kids’ side stories were being unlocked, I simply didn’t want to deal with all the rigamorale of unlocking that stuff. It said "You want all the toys? Better get grinding!" And I opted out. Of the whole thing. I’m sure that the weight of these choices is less for people who expect or even want to play through the game multiple times and/or love to grind the hell out of it, but I just got fed up and left. And then sent it to a farm in Canada months later. Packaged with a copy of an Idea Factory port that somehow found its way into my house despite never being purchased or given to me that I felt dirty just knowing it was in the same house. I feel better now knowing it’s in another country, likely tainting the Canadian water supply with its filthiness.

Consider anything I didn’t mention about the games above as something it did well then. That’s not true, but I’ve got to use my multiple degrees built around pointing out crappy design for something. I did enjoy most of them (jury’s still out on Xillia) until they gradually wore me down like an insistent sandpaper rub on the groin. Perhaps once only tingly, but raw, bleeding, and painful after 20+ hours. I could probably do another few paragraphs on why the newer alchemy systems are poor or the flat out bizarre design choices of Xillia. My favorites so far are the ability to make giant purple eyebrows hover 2 feet to the side of a character, and having four save points in a one-screen village plus two more literally four steps outside it, in addition to a quick save anywhere option. The phrase "spoiled for choice" comes to mind.

And now, back to work. All 650 exe strings. Aah, the heady life.