Final Fantasy XIII: Culture clash

The Playstation era of the Final Fantasy series was a curious phenomenon. On the one hand, the huge sales of Final Fantasy VII forcefully vaulted RPGs into the mainstream. On the other, for every gamer who genuinely loved RPG stat progression and turn-based battles, there were another five who were really only along for the ride because of Square's spectacular technological displays and gorgeous FMVs. While series like Zelda and Mario awkwardly transitioned into muddy 3D, Final Fantasy VII opted for gorgeous pre-rendered backgrounds. The series cashed in on the promise of next-generation visuals quicker than anyone else, and for a while its selling point was that it just looked better. True, some loved the genre for what it was, and went on to play Suikodens and Xenosagas and Chrono Crosses and Tales of Symphonias. Many others, however, ooh'd and aah'd at the opening cutscenes, played it for a couple of hours, wondered what the fuss was about, and then went back to GoldenEye.

Final Fantasy VII

The criticism is often levied upon JRPGs that they haven't evolved as a genre. While some of the genre's standard bearers (see: Dragon Quest) may be guilty of this claim, I don't think it can be said of the Final Fantasy series. True, Final Fantasy coasted on its ATB battle system and its superior visuals for pretty much the entirety of the 90s. But once the Playstation 2 rolled out, and full 3D became effectively mandatory, Square was forced to experiment with the series to ensure that it continued to stand out. Even the ardent fans were growing weary of same old, same old. Consequently, every Final Fantasy outing since X has taken a surprising new direction.

Final Fantasy X scrapped the pseudo-real-time ATB for a true turn-based system, eliminated character levels and XP, and introduced character swapping during battles. The product was still functionally the same – stat-based, menu-driven combat – but the tenth installment marked a definitive shift away from the cut-copy nature of the previous nine. XI dipped the series' feet – for better or worse – into the waters of massively multi-player online role-playing games. XII did away with compartmentalized enemy encounters, with every battle occurring in real-time on the world map, and was Square's first foray into party meta-management. That is to say, rather than controlling characters directly through specific commands, the bulk of the strategy was in setting up a tactical suite of Gambits – simple AI scripts – to manage characters indirectly.

Final Fantasy XII's real-time combat

And that brings us to XIII. What's very clear about the game, after playing it for only a few hours, is that the end result we get in Final Fantasy XIII is the result of Square Enix listening sensitively to player feedback for the past twenty years. All of the following has been said about Final Fantasy at one point or another, some of them rightly:

“The game is too easy. All you do is press attack over and over.”
“Status effects and secondary abilities aren't useful compared to attacking and curing.”
“It's too easy to get lost in dungeons and get interrupted by random encounters.”
“There are too many dumb mini-games cluttering up the experience.”
“The pacing is too slow; there are too many cutscenes.”
“The core gameplay isn't that fun. You'd really only play this game for the story.”

Lightning and Sazh from Final Fantasy XIII

The team behind Final Fantasy XIII clearly made earnest attempts to incorporate all of this feedback when designing the game. The desire to produce an RPG that could be appreciated on a wide scale as an RPG, and not just as a technical showcase or an interactive storybook, is transparently fervent, and perhaps best exhibited in the combat system. As a corpus of gameplay mechanics which demand tactical thinking, quick reflexes, and thoughtful responsiveness, it's easily one of the best in the series. Players are frequently required to make tactical switches between Paradigms - customizable party setups based on job combinations - to succeed. One might begin the fight with "Evened Odds" - which focuses on simultaneously debilitating the enemy and bolstering the party's status - and then switch to "Relentless Assault" for an all-out offensive. It's fast-paced, mentally demanding, makes good use of its mechanics, and most important of all, it's fun.

But in refining the genre's gameplay to its logical endpoint, Square Enix produced a game which could be accused of being stripped-down, grueling, and unfriendly. The game is certainly no longer easy; the question now is whether some of its encounters simply demand the player to think about too much too quickly. There's no risk of being lost in dungeons, but that's because most of them are just a straight line. There are certainly no mini-games to break up the pacing, but neither is there a proper town in sight, a world map to explore, or even many people to talk to. And the gameplay? If you like RPGs, it's definitely fun – but you had better like RPGs, because the game is more laboriously combat-focused than any other in the series.

The gameplay experience is refined, yes – perhaps over-refined, because it ends up feeling a little bit emaciated. This vague sensation of hollowness is the product of game designers diligently stripping the game of any chaff that might get in the way of a fun battle system; the result is a game which is pretty much just a battle system (albeit a very good one) and a handful of cutscenes. And the reviews, which were lukewarm as the venerable series goes, reflect this problem – Square Enix, for all their efforts, just can't seem to make an RPG that a Western audience wants to play for its own merits. They can't be accused of not trying. Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIII are such polar opposites of each other that they almost feel like the results of a thought experiment. But, while their visuals continue to dazzle, their game mechanics both continue to elicit the same general apathy from North American gamers.

Why? What is it that makes an RPG accessible to a Western audience? If we were to look at recent hits like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Bioshock, the common denominator would seem to be guns. But the distinction lies a bit deeper than that. The JRPG is fundamentally about abstraction from reality. The fun is that it does not closely mimic the way actual battles work: Enemies line up on opposite sides of the battlefield and take turns. Characters learn abilities from items, sphere grids, or mythical beasts. Mechanics like Boosting (Xenosaga), Comboing (Shadow Hearts: Covenant), and Paradigms (Final Fantasy XIII) have only very loose analogs to real life, if any at all. Any semblance of realism is wholely in service of developing tactical depth and satisfying character progression.

Mass Effect 2

Modern RPGs produced by Western developers tend to take the opposite approach. RPG abstractions, like XP and levels, tend to supplement what is a fundamentally realistic experience. Recently, even highly realistic games which are decidedly not RPGs – like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare – have decided to spice up the package with the succulent allure of grind-reward. Meanwhile, the “proper” RPGs, like Mass Effect 2, blur the genre's boundaries by putting a greater focus on twitch gunplay and cover mechanics. Experience points are only doled out upon mission completion; the ability system is vastly streamlined when compared to its predecessor. It's not that the statistical elements are just gravy – Mass Effect 2 is quite unambiguously an RPG, though some of the ambiguity is dissolved by the presence of actual role-playing – but the crucial distinction is that the game wants to make you feel like Commander Shepard, much moreso than it makes you feel like the sum of your stats.

I should conclude by noting that I am a huge fan of both Final Fantasy XIII and the series in general, and I don't think the sum of Square Enix's experiments over the past decade was a string of bad games. Japanese RPGs scratch a very particular itch; if you get the urge for Sphere Grids or Paradigm Shifts, Mass Effect or Bioshock just won't do. On the other hand, their inability to connect with the popular audience that the games were intended for certainly represents a failure of some sort. If there is a lesson to be learned from the languishing state of JRPGs, it is that many gamers resonate much more strongly with non-abstracted experiences. In a way, RPGs are going stronger than ever, but they must be wary of letting their own fetish for statistics consume them.

Cave Story: Indie games done right

Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to listen to three indie game developers speak at the July meeting of Boston Post Mortem. I went into the meeting with mixed feelings on indie games in general. I've played a reasonable handful of them - World of Goo, Everyday Shooter, Geometry Wars, N, Trials HD, the ever-controversial Braid - and while all of them were pretty fun, none of them approximated the sort of gaming experience I'd grown to love. Without exception, the indie games I've played focus on taking a very simple, clever gameplay mechanic and executing it very, very well. This is perhaps by necessity - for a developer operating on a limited budget, putting forth basic, fun, functional gameplay is a much more plausible way of making a good game than trying to produce a sprawling, 30-hour cinematic epic. (One of the speakers lamented making this very error, having recently put his own epic on indefinite hold.)

Everyday Shooter by Jonathan Mak

But while I spent some number of hours being entertained by all of those games, none of them formed an emotional connection with me. I couldn't relate to most of them as anything more than the sum of their gameplay mechanics, and (with the possible exception of World of Goo) I'm not going to look back at any of them years from now and remember them with unqualified fondness. And it struck me as problematic that, upon reflection, I struggled to come up with a single character from an indie game that I identified with, or even remembered. (I posed my question to another attendee, who frowned at the sentiment, puzzled for a while, and then offered the goo balls from World of Goo as a counterexample. I don't remember reacting to the little guys in quite the same way, cute as they may have been.) Now, I should get this out of the way: there is nothing wrong with making games like these. Not every game needs to be a life-changing experience; some of them just need to be fun. And some of them even manage to be more than this - World of Goo and the recent Limbo boast art direction which is genuinely impressive. My concern, however, is that the minimalist, non-story-based gameplay of many indie games is beginning to constitute an ethos.

Geometry Wars by Bizarre Creations

There is, after all, a definite adverse reaction to the view I've raised among the indie buffs I talked to at the meeting, as well as throughout the web. The idea persists that big-budget titles have so thoroughly drowned themselves in superfluous frills - highly realistic graphics, sweeping orchestral scores, lengthy cutscenes - that they've lost sight of gaming's actual roots: gameplay. By positioning themselves in opposition to the big budget title, many indies tout themselves as a sort of return to form, injecting some badly-needed innovation into a medium that is increasingly stagnant and awash with frivolous eyeglitter. The constraints of indie development - simple, accessible gameplay instead of complex mechanics, abstract visuals rather than realism, loose interpretive plots instead of concrete ones - become construed as a kind of purism.

N+ by Metanet Software

The problem with this view is that art matters. The corners that were cut to make N fit the indie budget weren't just secondary and they weren't just frills - they were what pushed the game above the level of Minesweeper or Solitaire. This is not to say that all or even most indie games don't care about art. Limbo, for instance, boasts some of the best art direction I've seen in a game in the past few years. But it is becoming increasingly and troublingly difficult to find an indie game which doesn't ascribe to the minimalistic indie paradigm. Limbo was a great game, but once I realized that the game was adamantly refusing to give me anything concrete to work with plotwise, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointment that all its artistic brilliance was going to produce another minimalist, interpretive story. Minimalism, while not a flaw in its own right, is consuming the genre, and this cannot be a sign of health for it.

Braid by Jonathan Blow

Worse still, some indie games are receiving praise for their minimalistic elements they have no business receiving. GameSpot described N+ as having "stylish design;" worthplaying.com writes "I think [the basic graphics] work in favor of the game, though, because there's something charming about its plainness. It's almost as if the devs created the graphics that way on purpose, knowing that the gameplay would carry the game." N+ is a visual abortion. It falls well short of what can be accomplished visually on an indie budget, and it troubles me to see such low effort met with such high praise. Meanwhile, Braid's lopsided, fanfiction-level prose has been lauded as a "moving story "(GameSpot), a "beautifully written text-based story filled with philosophical turmoil and horrifying twists," (GamePlanet) "a fairy tale full of melancholy... unlike any story you'll see on XBLA" (IGN). When the outright ugliness of N+ becomes "charming," and Braid's present-only-just-enough-to-be-embarrassing story becomes "beautifully-written", this suggests that a fetishization of minimalism is beginning to pervade.

By contrast, let's look at a series like Metal Gear Solid. When the first game was released in 1998, it pushed the envelope for storytelling, cinematography, voice acting, and production values like no other game before it. But although the series is much-beloved, it has acquired increasing notoriety over the years for its liberal use of in-game cinematics, which occasionally drag on for longer than half an hour and frequently indulge in labyrinthine, preposterous plot developments. It's enough to occasionally bring out the gaming purist in all of us - "When do I get to actually play?" many have asked, as they twiddle their thumbs through the opening cutscene. The player sometimes feels downright browbeaten by the sheer volume of expensive art assets that were poured into the game. In this respect, Metal Gear Solid is the anti-indie. It is as far from minimalism as you can get. What does it say about the state of indies, then, if I love the series to bits? What do indies have to offer someone who views Solid Snake not as an unfortunate logical extreme of directorial excess, but as a permanent fixture in gaming history and an irresistably captivating character?

Cave Story by Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya

Of course, Metal Gear Solid is kind of a laughable standard to hold indie games to: it just costs too much money to be an exemplar. However, the ability to form an emotional bond with the player is not a function of money, and there's certainly untapped room on the spectrum of minimalism somewhere between N and Metal Gear Solid. Enter Cave Story. Developed by a single individual (Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya) over five years, Cave Story's detailed sprite art and chiptune soundtrack evoke the SNES golden age, circa 1994. If you've played any of the material which obviously inspired Cave Story, it's almost impossible to not be immediately enchanted with it. And when I reflected on my experience with Cave Story, it made an enigma of itself. Why does it connect with me while other indie games fail to do so? Why did I care about Cave Story, instead of just play it?

I owe the solution to this problem to Scott MacMillan of Macguffin games, one of the three speakers at the Post Mortem meeting. When asked to describe a sequence of different games as "indie" or "not indie," MacMillan refused to answer, claiming that the distinction was not only stupid, but counterproductive. All it accomplished, he argued (and I paraphrase), was to further the stratification of "indie" as a brand, positioned in a sort of counterculture opposition to the triple-A spectacle. And the persistence of this brand is harmful to the development of indie games, because it just gives them another form to mimic, instead of letting them be their own production.

Cave Story connected with me where other indie games failed to do so because, in spite of the fact that it was produced independently, it refuses to wear the indie label. It positions itself firmly within the history of video games, instead of in opposition to them. It's not an experiment, it's not an exercise in purism, and it's not any more minimalist than it needs to be - it's just a good game. As a gameplay experience, Cave Story doesn't do anything creative or new - it's homage to Super Metroid, plain and simple. But Cave Story is captivating precisely because it makes no effort to be new-wave. I remember it because of its rich, retro-evocative soundtrack, its classically-styled, charming sprite art, its cute, likable characters and quirky writing. Perhaps best of all, it tells a concrete, linear story, something even the best indie games have historically been averse to doing. It has the feel of a concept that was the artist's original, sprawling vision, conceived in wide-eyed naivete, unfettered and uncompromised.

The drive to realize such visions is what makes games great, and Amaya shows that it can be done on your own, but Cave Story is a frighteningly rare breed. With the "games as art" debate set as a permanent backdrop for the philosophy of game development, the minimalist, interpretive puzzle game is beginning to look like gaming's equivalent of the Oscar-bait Scorsese drama. I am glad that games like Limbo and World of Goo exist - they need to exist - but fledgling independent game-makers need a development culture in which Cave Stories are encouraged just as much as Limbos.