“Western” games vs. Japanese games: self-expression vs. self-escapism
Posted August 13th, 2009 at 05:04 PM by SeannyB
After playing Chromehounds, a friend and I both expressed our sense that it was an "accidentally American" game– a Japanese title with a lot of appeal to the semi-nerd "western" gamer. The more we discussed the issue, the more we charted the murky dichotomy of "western games" versus Japanese games.
It’s easy to think about the kind of games that are unlikely to come out of the Japanese games industry:
While there are certainly exceptions to the above, along with Japanese games that edge toward some of those designs, Japanese games tend to follow these design philosophies:
Why is Halo 3 a distinctively "western" game?
I can talk all I want about Japan never producing a sim or a "western-style" CRPG, but what about Halo 3, the most archetypal and mundane of all "western" games in a genre that’s purely "western"? After all, it’s just a simple kinetic action game. What if you up and replaced the Master Chef and his alien sidekick with anime equivalents, slung the camera over the shoulder, and performed a similar manga-esque graphic overhaul on the rest of the game world? The subtle difference is Halo 3 emphasizes creativity and self-expression through its gameplay, relative to the way Japan would design such a game.
Japanese games derive their sensibilities from comics and animation. "Western" games derive their aesthetics from Hollywood, which is not based in reduction and symbolism, but rather heightened reality. This is a critical difference. Japanese aesthetics essentialize the world into abstraction, while Hollywood aesthetics attempt to exaggerate "realness" (not to be confused with realism).
Master Chef does not have any "special moves", "combos", or an abstract gauge which must be filled in order to unleash his "ultimate" attack. Instead the world presents him with a large landscape, multitudes of enemies (and some allies) acting somewhat independently, and most importantly, toys in the form of vehicles, guns and gadgets. As the chaos unfolds in the game, it is left to you how you’re going to vanquish your foes. Will you pick them off at long range? Will you take a wheeled vehicle and plow through them? Will you pick up an assault rifle and jump into the fray? Will you just dick around and do crazy stunts? Most likely you’ll perform some combination of the above and laugh your *** off while doing it. While Japanese games emphasize sharpening your ability to master a convoluted, abstract game system and perform a fixed task with maximum efficiency, "western" games tend to be playgrounds that emphasize the player’s self-expression in an exaggerated world.
Japanese games allow you to escape yourself
While Halo and Final Fantasy both take you away to impossible, imaginary worlds, FF takes escapism one step further– it removes you from the picture. In Halo, the game has you looking through the eyes of Master Chef. In a way, The Chef is removed from the picture, replaced by the game player himself. In Japanese games, which are overwhelmingly 3rd person, it’s just the opposite. Japanese games not only take you away from your world, they take you away from yourself, allowing you to experience a reality untouched by your own.
In Japanese adventures/RPGs, there is little meaning or logic in the relationship between your choices and their consequences upon the story. While western games seek to emphasize the relationship between the player’s ego and his avatar/the game world (obvious moral choices, karma gauges etc.), Japanese games sever your ability to project your ego into the game world by making the choices and their effects obscure and arbitrary.
You know the drill when starting a JRPG: read an F.A.Q. to discover what seemingly innocuous tasks you must perform throughout the game in order to get certain rewards and/or "The Good Ending" (Suikoden 2 anyone? Tales of Symphonia?). Japanese games want you to master their fictional worlds on their terms, rather than take control of it and creatively subvert it with your individualistic ego.
Becoming someone else
There is a Japanese theme in the arts that stretches back to Kabuki theater, where a character would unmask himself in a Scooby Doo-like surprise moment. This "big reveal", the moment of transformation, would be a conventionally pivotal moment in the play. It conveyed a romantic notion that you can escape yourself and live a second life.
This theme carried over in a big way to anime, manga and sentai. For every series with a superhero, whether it’s Sailor Moon, Ultraman, Jubei-chan and so on, the transcendent transformation of a character into their "other self" is celebrated to the point that it’s often accompanied by a highly elaborate piece of special effects animation. The same cannot be said for Superman. Jubei-chan serves as an interesting example. The ghost of Yagyu Jubei literally possesses the protagonist and forces her to transform into his incarnation against her will, as he seeks to resolve the loose ends of his past life. The protagonist struggles to reconcile her mundane school life and her second life as the legendary Jubei.
In Halo, Master Chef becomes your avatar in a playground built for your enjoyment and expression. In Final Fantasy, you become the protagonists and live out their lives and their adventure in a world built for them, performing tasks and experiencing a story that is largely not dependent on the player’s own creativity and individualism.
Japanese games grant players the opportunity to live another life as a person completely disconnected from them, in a world so heavily abstracted that it bears almost no functional resemblance to their own (e.g. you do not "level up" in real life). The countless gameplay conventions of Japanese games are all designed to protect the fantasy world of the game from intrusion from the player, and to simultaneously immerse the player in the motions of a self-contained, far away "second life".
It is for this reason games like ArmA 2, Fallout 3, and even Halo 3 are incompatible with the artistic objective of the vast majority of Japanese games. Rather than produce the next Little Big Planet, Japan will continue to perfect the art of removing the player from his world and himself.
Back to Chromehounds
Chromehounds is an "accidentally American" game because, while it has a razor-sharp emphasis on mech-building and optimization, it ultimately encourages creativity and individualism. Since it’s impossible to design a decent all-around mech, players must necessarily specialize and team up with other players in order to fight effectively in its simulated, online war. Chromehounds, like the best of "western" games, is a playground for expression and creativity, and is a social experience online. It’s as far removed from Persona 4 (a dating sim JRPG) or King of Fighters 12 as a Japanese game can possibly be.
It’s easy to think about the kind of games that are unlikely to come out of the Japanese games industry:
- A highly realistic flight simulator, vehicle sim, war sim, or any kind of simulation of anything inspired by real-world mechanics, behavior and history.
- A freeform, "sandbox" game like GTA and its clones, Spore, The Incredible Machine, Civilization, The Sims and other management games.
- Non-linear adventure games (with an emphasis on exploration and freedom) like the Ultima series. Fallout 3 and Fable II serve as a modern examples.
- Sophisticated hybrid games like Battlezone (1998) and System Shock 2 that present lots of possibility and freedom to the player.
While there are certainly exceptions to the above, along with Japanese games that edge toward some of those designs, Japanese games tend to follow these design philosophies:
- Relatively rigid, linear stories (JRPGs)… OR, heavily branching stories driven by arbitrary decisions as opposed to moral/judgement choices (visual novels).
- A well-defined task that emphasizes diligence and skill rather than creativity as the path to victory. JRPGs are the first thing to spring to mind here, but this also applies to fighting games where special moves and combos are academically memorized & practiced, shoot-em-ups where arrays of projectiles are meticulously navigated, and so on.
- A simplified, iconified, symbolic world. Just like in manga, anime, and classic Japanese aesthetics, Japanese games also express the desire to reduce and simplify the world into comic book representations. This applies to gameplay as much as graphics: the reduction of skill and learning into statistics and "level ups", gameworld attributes into "hit points" and stat bonuses, boxing and fencing into rigid "moves" and "specials"… Japan excels at making "arcade-style" games, because of their cultural knack for funneling complicated, abstract concepts and mechanics into easily understandable icons, quantifiable values and symbolism.
Why is Halo 3 a distinctively "western" game?
I can talk all I want about Japan never producing a sim or a "western-style" CRPG, but what about Halo 3, the most archetypal and mundane of all "western" games in a genre that’s purely "western"? After all, it’s just a simple kinetic action game. What if you up and replaced the Master Chef and his alien sidekick with anime equivalents, slung the camera over the shoulder, and performed a similar manga-esque graphic overhaul on the rest of the game world? The subtle difference is Halo 3 emphasizes creativity and self-expression through its gameplay, relative to the way Japan would design such a game.
Japanese games derive their sensibilities from comics and animation. "Western" games derive their aesthetics from Hollywood, which is not based in reduction and symbolism, but rather heightened reality. This is a critical difference. Japanese aesthetics essentialize the world into abstraction, while Hollywood aesthetics attempt to exaggerate "realness" (not to be confused with realism).
Master Chef does not have any "special moves", "combos", or an abstract gauge which must be filled in order to unleash his "ultimate" attack. Instead the world presents him with a large landscape, multitudes of enemies (and some allies) acting somewhat independently, and most importantly, toys in the form of vehicles, guns and gadgets. As the chaos unfolds in the game, it is left to you how you’re going to vanquish your foes. Will you pick them off at long range? Will you take a wheeled vehicle and plow through them? Will you pick up an assault rifle and jump into the fray? Will you just dick around and do crazy stunts? Most likely you’ll perform some combination of the above and laugh your *** off while doing it. While Japanese games emphasize sharpening your ability to master a convoluted, abstract game system and perform a fixed task with maximum efficiency, "western" games tend to be playgrounds that emphasize the player’s self-expression in an exaggerated world.
Japanese games allow you to escape yourself
While Halo and Final Fantasy both take you away to impossible, imaginary worlds, FF takes escapism one step further– it removes you from the picture. In Halo, the game has you looking through the eyes of Master Chef. In a way, The Chef is removed from the picture, replaced by the game player himself. In Japanese games, which are overwhelmingly 3rd person, it’s just the opposite. Japanese games not only take you away from your world, they take you away from yourself, allowing you to experience a reality untouched by your own.
In Japanese adventures/RPGs, there is little meaning or logic in the relationship between your choices and their consequences upon the story. While western games seek to emphasize the relationship between the player’s ego and his avatar/the game world (obvious moral choices, karma gauges etc.), Japanese games sever your ability to project your ego into the game world by making the choices and their effects obscure and arbitrary.
You know the drill when starting a JRPG: read an F.A.Q. to discover what seemingly innocuous tasks you must perform throughout the game in order to get certain rewards and/or "The Good Ending" (Suikoden 2 anyone? Tales of Symphonia?). Japanese games want you to master their fictional worlds on their terms, rather than take control of it and creatively subvert it with your individualistic ego.
Becoming someone else
There is a Japanese theme in the arts that stretches back to Kabuki theater, where a character would unmask himself in a Scooby Doo-like surprise moment. This "big reveal", the moment of transformation, would be a conventionally pivotal moment in the play. It conveyed a romantic notion that you can escape yourself and live a second life.
This theme carried over in a big way to anime, manga and sentai. For every series with a superhero, whether it’s Sailor Moon, Ultraman, Jubei-chan and so on, the transcendent transformation of a character into their "other self" is celebrated to the point that it’s often accompanied by a highly elaborate piece of special effects animation. The same cannot be said for Superman. Jubei-chan serves as an interesting example. The ghost of Yagyu Jubei literally possesses the protagonist and forces her to transform into his incarnation against her will, as he seeks to resolve the loose ends of his past life. The protagonist struggles to reconcile her mundane school life and her second life as the legendary Jubei.
In Halo, Master Chef becomes your avatar in a playground built for your enjoyment and expression. In Final Fantasy, you become the protagonists and live out their lives and their adventure in a world built for them, performing tasks and experiencing a story that is largely not dependent on the player’s own creativity and individualism.
Japanese games grant players the opportunity to live another life as a person completely disconnected from them, in a world so heavily abstracted that it bears almost no functional resemblance to their own (e.g. you do not "level up" in real life). The countless gameplay conventions of Japanese games are all designed to protect the fantasy world of the game from intrusion from the player, and to simultaneously immerse the player in the motions of a self-contained, far away "second life".
It is for this reason games like ArmA 2, Fallout 3, and even Halo 3 are incompatible with the artistic objective of the vast majority of Japanese games. Rather than produce the next Little Big Planet, Japan will continue to perfect the art of removing the player from his world and himself.
Back to Chromehounds
Chromehounds is an "accidentally American" game because, while it has a razor-sharp emphasis on mech-building and optimization, it ultimately encourages creativity and individualism. Since it’s impossible to design a decent all-around mech, players must necessarily specialize and team up with other players in order to fight effectively in its simulated, online war. Chromehounds, like the best of "western" games, is a playground for expression and creativity, and is a social experience online. It’s as far removed from Persona 4 (a dating sim JRPG) or King of Fighters 12 as a Japanese game can possibly be.
Total Comments 10
Comments
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great post
I was watching a MGS4 stream and had to constantly remind myself "this" is what japanese gamers want
and by "this" I mean MGS's blend of 2 minutes of action for every 15-minute cutscene
good point about 1st-person vs 3rd-person view, I had not noticed that.
as an aside I find menu-based rpgs reaaaaaaaaally boring.Posted August 13th, 2009 at 06:01 PM by Victory 
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Very interesting post which has illuminated my view on some things. I can finally quantify what I used to refer to as "an American game" and "a Japanese game", which used to be intuitive notions, but I can now see the clear differences that characterize the two. It always bugged me I could never put the difference into words.
I do have a few questions, though I don't mind if you can't answer:
- On what do you base this assessment? While I agree with just about all of it, I'm curious to know how you came to make it.
- Why are Western and Japanese games the way they are? I know you referred to Hollywood and Kabuki theatre, but how does this explain the difference in tastes from both cultures? Sure, Westerners love JRPG's as much as anyone, but I'm also aware that the Japanese do not like the FPS genre.
- If the Japanese educational system were to emphasize critical thinking as the American system does, would we see a shift in the kind of games Japan produces? Meaning, does this game preference stem from deeper roots, or are they the product of how they were brought up?
Finally, I must say I'm impressed with the amount of thought that went into your post, which are things I should have thought about myself, but never could quite grasp. Kudos. Would read more.Posted August 13th, 2009 at 06:16 PM by Holy Knight
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thats true because japanese are some 'a the most stressed out people in the world so of course it makes sense for there games to be like an escape more then american games.Posted August 14th, 2009 at 09:29 AM by fujyoshi
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I think the reason Japanese games are as they are is because of a lack of PC games. Games like Ultima, The Sims, Civilization, System Shock 2, Battlezone and most flight and war sims came out on the PC. The Japanese PC games market on the other hand is more niche (there's an article on RPS about it, I'll try to find it..
This probably sounds like elitism or something but I've always found that PC gaming seems to be haven for innovation, as opposed to the console market (the dominant form of gaming in Japan).
I'm probably just talking out of my PC gaming arse though.Posted August 14th, 2009 at 12:35 PM by Foppish Dandy
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Nice post.
I remember reading something on the Internet about a Japanese game developer saying how he believed that the Western game developers have surpassed the Japanese developers.the ArticlePosted August 14th, 2009 at 02:53 PM by Tonyx35
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While I agree in the whole that games do reflect the culture of the people who made them, and that on the whole goals are more ego driven in games from America and more story-following in Japan, and you get more random well-here's-fun-stuff-our-physics-engine-can-do toys in Western games, I can't help but think...
What about the "A-Train" train network management simulation games? Why is the "Densha De Go!" series so popular in Japan, when it's a deathly boring realistic simulation?
What about "Tokyo Bus Guide"?
One of Konami's biggest franchises is the "Winning Eleven" series, known as "Pro Evolution Soccer" here in Europe, and they sell by the ton. There's also their Jikkyo Power Pro Baseball series of games.
They are realistic sims, they are widely known, they have been popular enough to be long franchises, they don't use special power ups or anything, and they are from Japan.
There are other realistic simulations from Japan in the realms of driving games, fishing games, radio controlled helicopters, safari photography and other wildlife observation games, running small businesses, producing a TV show, etc.
Whether the player is permitted free reign over the simulation varies from game to game.
I think partly the distinction between "East and West" is made all the clearer by the games industry itself. There's the idea in America that Japan=WACKYLAND and the people who generally like Japanese things are into escapism. So, you don't get many realistic sims localised for America. Similarly, there is the attitude from Japan that all Western games are Hollywood explosions and macho man FPS. The players reflect this too, and the stereotypes loop round and feed back on themselves endlessy.
Plus, on either side, text heavy realistic management simulations with a lot of technical jargon must be a real pain to localise. There are a lot of Japanese management sims, though. I see them regularly when browsing on ebay. You would expect it from the way that RPGs are statistic-crazy, yeah?
When Sim City was new, we did get Sim Tower localised from Japanese, followed by Yoot Tower (Ironbear has a thread about the game on the videogame forum at the moment). It's a fully fledged business management sim, you're free to make or break things as you would like.
I don't play FPS often because they tend to give me simulator sickness. Due to that I have read a paper that cited some US Army research into simulator sickness that mentioned that the condition is more common in Asians than other ethnic groups. That doesn't explain it all away, because you also hear stories of Korean players who are exceptionally good at FPS and menacing other players.
You don't get realistic war sims from Japan, but the last time Japan was in a war was in WW2 where they were quite notably really-super-bad-guys. Since then, their army got renamed to the Self Defense Force and they aren't allowed to do military things in other countries. I think expecting realistic war sims from Japan would be... unrealistic.
You don't seem to get space trading type games either. I mean, *at all*, now I think about it. That seems strange to me, but I suppose they never had the greatness which is Elite.
JRPGs with a lot of exploration... I think this kind of got phased out after a while. It's funny to see so many kids in recent months complaining when playing old rereleases of JRPGs, complaining that they aren't linear enough. They don't know what to do next! They are used to modern games where your hand is held all the way through the game. That's true of all types of games, it's considered bad game design if the player is not told what to do next. The same way people today are disgusted if they have to thumb through a manual instead of being led through a tutorial.
You do still get wide open exploration and total freedom in East-Asian MMORPGs, where you are often just "dropped in at the deep end" and left to find everything for yourself. They tend to be either Korean or Chinese, though.
The Legend Of Zelda games have really always been kind of "sandbox", right from the start. "Windwaker" especially gives you a lot of world to explore at your whim.
Oh, one last thing, I do think that the ideas of "levelling up" and stat building and special moves pre-date video games and televised sentai shows. If you have a look at old black and white samurai or ninja films from the 1960s and before, you often see themes of "the more suffering a man can endure, the more he grows, the greater his power becomes" central to the discipline. In these stories, the more pain a man goes through, the better he will be as a fighter, until he is invincible. The structure is the same as experience gathering, stat building, levelling up. I think this is so engrained in their culture that it does not seem like an abstraction, but as a visual / statistical representation of their beliefs.
Your blog post gave me a lot of things to think about, so I've managed to state my thoughts but I'm sorry they are a bit jumbled...Posted August 14th, 2009 at 04:21 PM by tenshi_a
Updated August 14th, 2009 at 04:51 PM by tenshi_a -
Holy Knight: this is basically where I have to hang my head in shame and give the disclaimer: I am not a scholar. The kabuki thing came from a lecture I saw from a Japanese academic who connected the theme of "transformation" in Kabuki with magical girls and sentai. I took it for granted, and connected a bunch of other disparate observations and assembled them into this article, heh.
Not having grown up in Japan, I can't put my finger on why Japan makes games that stress "ego displacement". Meanwhile "we" make games that stress ego expansion, which is pretty natural when you look at the foundations of American culture (e.g. the constitution) which is all about the power of the free individual. A lot of "our" games serve us the fantasy that we can become someone important and change the world just by projecting our ego a lot. As an outsider, I can't say what lies at the foundation of Japanese culture that expresses itself into its games. All I can do is decode its themes and aesthetics from its artistic output.
Dunno, but I'd wager that it stems from something fundamental in Japanese culture. A lot of what's expressed in anime (e.g. moe) are just modern incarnations/evolutions of the type of aesthetics found in The Tale of Genji and whatnot. You can sometimes connect it to buddhist/shinto ideas, but as to where it all "comes from" and why it persists in modern Japanese culture, I can't say.Quote:If the Japanese educational system were to emphasize critical thinking as the American system does, would we see a shift in the kind of games Japan produces? Meaning, does this game preference stem from deeper roots, or are they the product of how they were brought up?
Foppish Dandy, Victory: the sad thing about the Japanese approach is that it stifles innovation to some degree. Back in the day we've had text-based adventures (Zork) and D&D-esque crawlers (Wizardry) & roguelikes. The west continued to evolve and innovate beyond those boundaries into games like the later Ultima games, Daggerfall, and Ultima Underworld, offering bigger worlds and more interactivity with the growth of technology. The lineage of those games can be traced to Fallout 3, Bioshock, Deus Ex series etc... meanwhile Japan continues to produce old-style Wizardry games (literally), text adventures in the form of visual novels with far less interactivity, and "roguelikes" like the Megami Tensei games.
It's as if Japan found what it was looking for with those old, classic PC games and arcade titles. Metal Gear serves as an example, since its gameplay and presentation hasn't evolved from 1990's Metal Gear 2 to 2004's Metal Gear Solid 3. MGS4 provided an overhaul by doing away with the unwieldly top-down perspective, but it still felt abstract and gamey with nintendo-esque boss battles and rigid levels. Meanwhile in the US, we pushed ahead with games like Thief and Splinter Cell the minute lights and shadows could be simulated in a 3D engine... they were much less abstract and gamey, Thief in particular. Nowadays it's not uncommon to find "stealth elements" integrated into other games for better or worse.
I admit that it sounds like I'm crusading for "western"-style gamplay and... I guess I am, but I find the western approach to story very lacking. In Fallout 3, it's a little too easy to be Wasteland Jesus by default, simply by not murdering every NPC in sight and committing horrific acts. Same deal with Fable, Bioware games and so on. It's not that interesting to project your ego in a story sense, if the story doesn't challenge you.
Japanese games let you step into someone else's shoes, but in a very passive way. There have been a couple games I played that successfully bridged the gap between these two styles... Planescape: Torment and KotOR 2. In both games, you stepped into the shoes of characters who have lost their memory. While there's freedom to define your character, you're constantly being challenged by characters who know you better than you know yourself. The games constantly challenge your ideals and ego as you struggle to resolve your protagonist's dark past.
More games should be like that in their approach to story. I don't like the current dichotomy of non-interactive stories vs ego-wanking fantasies... I don't think they play to the strengths of games.Posted August 14th, 2009 at 05:02 PM by SeannyB
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tenshi_a: oh ok, I didn't know they had so many funky sim/management games. Sports games are pretty practical though and typically very big sellers... I don't think of them the same way as niche, hardcore simulation games like ArmA 2 and (oh god) DCS: Black Shark
yeah, Zelda (and its derivatives like Okami), earlier FF games like #6 came to my mind too as games that edge toward western designs, since they emphasize exploration at times. FF12 kinda came to mind too, since you could take a wrong turn and get your *** beat by high level monsters. The JRPGs I've played rarely give you that kind of freedom to get ahead / get killed. In fact, not even modern triple-A "western" RPGs let you do that AFAIK, hehPosted August 14th, 2009 at 05:17 PM by SeannyB
Updated August 14th, 2009 at 05:25 PM by SeannyB -
You responded to my comment but I think it's sitting awaiting moderation or something because it doesn't show up when you're not logged in. Is that something you can sort out, or do we need to call a mod?
I don't know whether there's anything like that DCS Black Shark in the East Asian market, because I'm not a vehicle geek at all.
I know they do have Densha De Go! as a massive geek train simulator, but I have no idea how in depth the controls are aside from they sell train controller accessories that cost a fortune. It is true you certainly can't wander off wherever you like when driving a train.
FF12 is just pretending to be an MMORPG, which do allow freedom to wander about anywhere you like, and get you arse kicked.
If you ever get a chance to play a copy, look up the Way Of The Samurai games for PS2. What happens in those is you are a samurai (I think that's the beginning and end of your backstory), something is going to happen in a few days time, play the game and change the events. You can wander off wherever, and walk into story events which end up being missions, and through multiple playthroughs and depending on where you go and what you do, you end up getting a different story.
There are still swords to power up, gauges to fill, special moves to collect and learn... but I do think that these games might just be the happy medium of exploration and dynamic story you are seeking.
The limitation is that in order to make this kind of game, the story has to be really short.
You started off talking about Chromehounds, which I haven't actually played (it's sitting on my shelf), but I do know it's by FROM SOFTWARE, and their games are quite often competently bilingual - aside from stats in English in the Armored Core games, Metal Wolf Chaos was completely in English (Japanese release only), Ninja Blade is dual language throughout - the characters speak English and Japanese whenever they like, and Demon's Souls is famously already dual language by default (that's one reason it's big on the PS3 imports scene). It's good English too. So, maybe they are a good company to bridge the gap?
I don't know much about Demon's Souls other than a lot of notable people are raving about it, including those who normally hate Japanese games. It looks like a really creepy and misery-filled Monster Hunter to me, so I haven't been paying attention even though some people are going "it really isn't! it's great! you should buy a copy!" It is open ended, you get to customise your character, I do know that. You may want to look into it as your next action RPG.
I've been thinking about some games I've played recently, and in Western games I think of the promise of freedom but being delivered linearity. Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy), you have a strong story and strong characters, extreme limitation as to what you can do, the game appears to change depending on what you do, how well you perform, and you're offered choices which appear to change things but it ends up being really really linear anyway. Mirror's Edge is all about people who are the only free people in the oppressed Big Brother type city... yet you never get to wander about at your will. In Fable 2, you can choose between being good and being evil (but it's stupid, you can kill people and atone for it by eating tofu) but apparently the story and end choices are identical no matter what. I heard the same of Infamous.
I suppose one reason I really liked GTA IV was because when I was playing as Niko Bellic, I never for a moment felt that I was Niko Bellic, which is great because his life sucks. :/ It was funny, it had a good story, it let you wander about but not too much, missions unlock each other, you can only get to other parts of the map when you've cleared certain missions, and the city felt like a real city, it had notably different districts, different people living in different parts of town depending on the price, and the choices you could make were personal. It never gave you false hopes as a player, yes some as Niko but it's the storyline and he's very cynical anyway.
Overall, I find that more satisfying. You can put me in a box and give me some toys and I don't mind, but if you put me in a box and tell me I can go to wonderful places and it turns out you've lied to me, I feel bad about it.
Come to think about it, Fahrenheit, Mirror's Edge, Fable 2, and GTA IV all have scripts written by European people. I wonder if that's significant... oh well...Posted August 15th, 2009 at 12:29 AM by tenshi_a
Updated August 15th, 2009 at 12:32 AM by tenshi_a -
oh ok, I didn't know I had to approve some(?) comments. Should be good now.
I tend to overemphasize the potential and possibilities of ideas than their implemented actuality. There's definitely been a trend toward "streamlining" gameplay across the whole game industry in order to cut down those "well now what do I do?" moments. It's generally good when the archaic conventions of a genre are streamlined, but not at the expense of reducing the possibilities of the game world itself.
Some games go too far, depicting worlds that feel more like disneyland rides than anything else (Call of Duty 4). I wrote a lot about that trend here. In short: it takes time and innovation to make a game world that presents lots of dynamic possibility that's easy to think about and easy to interact with. A lot of game projects don't bother I guess. They opt for "here, jump through these hoops. They are marked on your map, compass and HUD". Yet game projects keep touting supposedly open, dynamic worlds filled with endless possibilities and all that jazz. Some of the end products offer fleeting glimpses of that vision. Some of them fulfill the dream completely (ArmA 2) but at the expense of being overly complicated and buggy/weird.
re: FF12, yeah that's true. It felt like "FF11 offline". It was an interesting change for FF, but it wasn't anything new new.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll take a look at them. I did play Indigo Prophecy, which was a pretty funny game... an "interactive movie"-type game with Simon Says gameplay, like something out of the mid-90s CD-ROM era. I couldn't believe they made that.Posted August 15th, 2009 at 04:07 AM by SeannyB
Updated August 15th, 2009 at 04:11 AM by SeannyB
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