A thought on strategy in Armored Core / Daemon X Machina

It occurred to me in considering Dick Terrell vs. Daemon X Machina that an appealing, if uselessly vague, way of describing strategy games is "puzzle games with statistics instead of rules". Decisions are weighted and evaluated in parallel rather than binary in series. 

Armored Core is in a sense the apotheosis of that idea, since there are so many decision points (equipment) weighted across so many variables (the stat sheet for a mech has a dozen or so parameters in the first game and probably 50ish by AC5), yet they are all codependent (since there's only one mech per mission). If you think about buying/loading gear as the fleet-building stage of Sins of a Solar Empire, with the choice of arm/leg/missile/etc corresponding to choice of frigates/cruisers/carriers/etc, I think they line up fairly well in terms of what the player ought to be calculating and trying to predict. There's more pressure in the action phase of Armored Core because the player is in full control of the mech, which is the advantage (design-wise) of unifying all the statistical parameters. The player needs to design a mech that they are also capable of piloting, and some decisions will be based on accomodating that (for instance, a novice might prefer a slow machine with higher armor because they find the controls clunky and can't take advantage of the ability to dodge). On the flipside, there's more pressure in the decision phase of Sins, because the entire game is played out in real-time. The action itself is almost completely automated, sheer number-crunching.

It makes me wonder what a mech game with real-time mech building would play like. Probably similar to a traditional RTS (StarCraft), since Sins and AC are kind of sitting at two extremes. StarCraft does have full unit control, it's just - there are so many independent elements that the technical bar for maximizing strategic efficiency is incredibly high, and the casual level of play relies on a lot of Sins-style automation. For the real-time element (in this theoretical mech game) to make sense, there'd probably need to be some kind of resource race, and the mech would need to be upgradeable on the fly (since there would be no additional/replacement units to build - otherwise resources would become irrelevant as soon as combat began).

Actually, if you took the standard RTS model (building drones and exploring a map to gather materials), this starts to look a lot like a MOBA. MOBAs after all were built from an experiment with WarCraft 3, asking what would happen if the player controlled just one powerful "hero" unit instead of a bunch of disposable little ones (the original Defense of the Ancients, if I'm not mistaken). MOBAs just tend to have really boring/convoluted combat, since they use an action model designed and for decades optimized for controlling dozens of independent units in parallel. They don't do nearly as good a job as Armored Core at taking the aforementioned advantage of unifying your parameters. The Dynasty Warriors/Musou games are somewhere in the middle here - only a few player units and combat more complex than League of Legends, but much simpler than Armored Core. They don't have much of a prep phase, though, and therefore play more like tactics-action than strategy-action.

Huh. So what really obvious game am I forgetting about that does exactly what I'm describing? What about if we add a metroidvania backtracking structure, roguelite procedurally generated encounters, and soulslike boss battles? Tune in tomorrow to find out. 

Shining Force II is like chess, plus it has a chess level!

Isn't that sweet? Right in the middle of this serious-ass fantasy campaign about a late-term evil abortion comes a chapter titled "Rick Moranis vs. Archon" in which the player characters get shrunken down and thrown on a living chess board. It's a game of chess... for survival! Plus Harry Potter hadn't even done it yet so this is literally the first time in the history of fiction that real people were portrayed as fighting against chess pieces. 

Although, should I be bothered that the board isn't correct? Is that a thing of Japanese game designers not knowing much about chess (is it as obscure over there as go is over here?), or did they put like five queens and not nearly enough pawns on the board as an attempt at balance? Because they could've defined the pieces however they wanted to be balanced (since it's not like they behave like actual chess pieces). It's just kinda arbitrary that the board is wrong.

This really made me smile though. The Shinings Force, Fires Emblem, and even Xs-COM are what I mentally categorize as "chess plus" games, where the principles are the same as chess - threaten units with attack ranges, create traps, use placement for blocking - but rather than movement type as the major determining factor of units' value, you have numeric statistics and rock-paper-scissors balances (like Fire Emblem's sword-axe-lance cycle). Interestingly enough (to mention in this context), Shining Force II* is the game that really got me thinking along those lines.

Initiated combat in Shining Force II is unidirectional**. That means the immediate act of attacking an enemy unit does not negatively impact the player unit. Thus, instead of considering dealt damage against received damage (as is a key factor in Fire Emblem), an attack is valued by dealt damage vs. positional advantage. "Is it worth breaking my line for a big attack on that archer?" "Should I box in that high level unit instead of spreading out to attack weaker ones?" The matter of numerical damage aside, this is chess tactics, where the key determining factors of a move are positional - as important as whether a piece is captured are which pieces the move attacks (places in immediate danger of being captured) and which pieces it defends.

Turn order in RPGs usually follows one of two paradigms: the first, that used by Shining Force II, is unit turns, where the game determines a turn order of units based on their statistics, and the player moves a unit once when its turn comes up. The alternative is team turns, where teams alternate order and during their team's turn, the player can move each unit once (as in Fire Emblem). I don't think I've ever seen an RPG using straight up chess ordering, where a turn consists of a player moving any single unit once; you can see how that doesn't really facilitate RPG leveling/balance.

Team turns lend to a more predictive style of play where it's best to map out the opponent's likely next move and plan accordingly. Each player has complete control of the board that the opponent will face in their next turn. Though this does have its similarity to chess on a broad strategic level, the primary consequence is that players are actually making moves with gigantic multi-armed units rather than with individual pieces. There is so much a player can do with the moving parts of their army that a great deal of build-up is required, then rarely paid off, to execute individual turns. Though the player is controlling ostensibly independent units, they need to take into consideration a butterfly effect of consequences if the opponent makes a single unexpected gambit. Though this hints at grand scope, in effect it leads to an extremely safe mode of play wherein turns are constructed in such a way as to focus solely around guaranteed plays for one or two units.

With Shining Force II's style of turns, unit moves regain their chess-like significance as the primary agents of player strategies. Essentially, there is feedback after every decision point: when the player relinquishes control of a unit, they relinquish control of the game. The next turn may be theirs or the opponent's, but they won't be able to revisit that unit until the round is completed. Successful tactics need to account for how each unit on the map can benefit from each individual move, because they will get a chance to take advantage of it before an overall position is composed.

A more specific chess tactic available in Shining Force II but not in XCOM or Fire Emblem (referencing them a lot, but they really do provide the perfect counterpoint) is the sacrifice. Units are reset at the beginning of every battle in Shining Force II - a battle has no lasting repercussions except for experience point gains. Thus sacrificing a unit becomes a viable tactic. A sacrificial lamb can be used to spread out an enemy formation, lead an all-out attack, provide a momentary barrier, or to bait a trap. The lack of consequence threatens to lead to lazy play, where as a player gains the upper hand their strategy loosens and risks lose their meaning. The simple fact of it is that Shining Force II is balanced so that just isn't the case. There are of course guaranteed-win scenarios during endgame, but the pacing of the battles as tiered skirmishes means that a casualty at any point can lead to a substantial statistical disadvantage in the next skirmish. Sacrifices are still a major trade-off, and the presence of such a tactic only makes the game more strategically rich.

It may not inherently be a strength for a game to be chess-like in nature, but in my experience with strategy RPGs and Shining Force II in general it proves to be nothing but a boon. There is a reason chess is the most popular board game in the world and Warhammer isn't. That reason may have to do with date of origin and which game contains orcs; nonetheless, it's combinatorial complexity is something to aspire to, not compete against.

*For the record, I'm pretty sure everything here applies to Shining Force as well. I've just only played II.

**there is a tiny exception to this. Defending units, probably depending on their stats, have something like a 5% chance of doing a counterattack. It's so rare that it's not so much a factor in tactics as it is a forced non-determinism. I'm okay with this in Shining Force II (though it seems unnecessary given that the make-up and exact statistics of a player's squad in a grind-enabled game provides plenty of non-determinism anyway), but the similar implementation in Fire Emblem bothers me because of the drastic implications of a mistake in Fire Emblem. Get a bad roll on that 95% accuracy attack and you may lose a squad member permanently. 

Gaining ground on Gain Ground: a Duologue

Duologue. Diatribe. Dissension. Declamation. Double Talk. Double Talk. It's alllll talk. So is this feature, captured from some of the secret email archives of co-bloggers Greg (Yourself) and Greg (Golem).

Yourself: If you would care to make a case for Gain Ground being a strategy game, I think it might make a good duologue. Sorry the Mario/Wario one didn't go anywhere, you kinda took it in a different direction than I intended (I wanted to talk about the characters - the series as a whole compared is a gigantic subject). Not to mention I got real sour on Wario Land II.

Golem: The easy way is to put Gain Ground next to a strategy game and eyeball it. 

Well, eyeball away

It reminds me of strategy RPGs/Shining Force in particular. You directly control one character at a time. The space you can attack is important; can you attack directly in front of you, or can you only hit things at a range? Can you attack to the sides, or can you only shoot straight on? Even the choice between two weapons reminds me of swapping primary weapons on the fly in Shining Force (equipping a throwing dagger for a turn where you can't quite get close enough to hit an enemy by sword). Finally, there's the satisfaction of building a complementary party, and just like Shining Force (or most SRPGs, really), losing a single character is a big deal.

The hard, although more satisfying, method would first find a definition for strategy game by the goals and opposition method. I think you could say there are two possible goals, either A) felling everyone in the opposing force or B) taking out a lynchpin (a boss). Or is that too specific? As for opposition, you'd at least start by saying your army faces another army. The other army also takes advantage of space against you, with strategies like flanking. Actually, maybe your goal at any given point in a strategy game is to occupy the advantageous ground.

Yourself: "Strategy" is hard to define, because it can be both a type of gameplay OR a characteristic. Often it falls into the same category as "action", being a modifier rather than a mode unto itself. Like I was saying last night, you can have a strategy FPS. This seems to be the sense most applicable to Gain Ground, which I'd call a strategy shmup. Strategic gameplay is characterized by improvised rules, non-obvious methods and goals, and recursive strategy (yes, strategy is built from smaller strategies).

As an actual mode of interactivity, "strategy" probably refers to the chess-derived army-puppeteering that we see in, well, strategy games, as diverse as Pikmin, Shining Force, and StarCraft. I wish we had a different word for it - "tactics" perhaps - to make a distinction from the adjectival mode, but I think we both agree that nothing fits better in either case than "strategy". I don't feel like defining it in terms of goals/opposition right now because I think it's tangential to this conversation.

It's a stretch to put Gain Ground into this strategy genre, simply because it's more obviously a shooter. Its gameplay is comprised of shooting things. Calling it a strategy game is the equivalent of calling Super Mario Bros. an action game - yes, it bears the appropriate traits, but is further distinguished. That said, it certainly does fall under the strategy umbrella. It's a strategy shooter, no doubt. It presents the player with a static challenge and allows them to develop, test, and refine their own methods of approach, providing a variety of tools to allow for individualization and improvisation. Simply watching how differently the two of us approached each level evidences the non-linearity of the challenge.

Yourself (7 hours later): Well, I take that back a little bit. Gain Ground could be viewed as a true strategy game. The fact that you only control one unit (or at least that only one unit exists at a time) doesn't preclude it from that style, even if it simplifies it significantly. And of course, when multiple players are introduced (up to three in the arcade version), the player squad starts to resemble an SRPG battalion.

I was originally approaching Shining Force from a strategic combat paradigm, thinking of the entire game as one drawn-out fight. If we instead understand it as a marriage of combat and tactics, separating the unit face-offs (combat) from the overarching army / battlefield management (tactics), it becomes clear how it relates to Gain Ground. Swap in shooting for automatic turn-based battles and hit the real-time clock on the tactics (a la Ogre Battle), and you're pretty close. Keeping in mind that, again, the tactics are relatively simple because of the limited number of independent units.

Golem: The comparison between Ogre Battle and Shining Force bugs me because in Ogre Battle, attacks don't take up space, units do. Ogre Battle is a more macro experience, while Shining Force happens on a per-soldier basis. But then, I don't know how meaningful that difference really is.

Ogre Battle: A More Macro Experience. Wait a minute, there was never a Queen song by that name!

Actually, I like that distinction. If I had my way, strategy would refer to more macro games while tactical would refer to more micro games. Like Wario Ware.

Also, even though you only control one character at a time in Gain Ground, you still face off against an army. Is all-Ike mode in Fire Emblem: The Gamecube One not a strategy RPG? This is what prevents Mega Man from being a tactical platformer, too, since you don't face off against armies. Or, if you do fight armies, like in Contra, you're not interested in occupying any single space.

Yourself: "in Ogre Battle, attacks don't take up space, units do" doesn't mean anything to me. Are you referring to the fact that units in OB must make contact to engage, while Shining Force units are often able to attack from two spaces away or use area-of-effect spells? If so, that's just being nitpicky between individual games. We picked OB to be the example of tactical action because it's the most SRPG-like RTS, and we picked Shining Force to represent the other side because apparently that's the only tactics game you've ever played, but it'd be easy to pick two that sync up better and hold just as true for the rest of the comparison. Units have range ("attacks take up space"?) in RTSs like Starcraft and Command & Conquer, and in some turn-based strategies like Romance of the Three Kingdoms units have zero range ("attacks don't take up space"?). So... what's your point? Both mechanics clearly exist across the real-time/turn-based barrier. It is not news that Ogre Battle and Shining Force are not perfectly identical in every way.

I think spatial control is certainly key to what we're calling the tactics (chess) gameplay mode. As I said (or at least thought) before, one of the things that keys us off to Gain Ground's tactics predilection is that it takes place in static, one-screen environments. Contra is pretty immediately thrown out as a parallel, because - as you said - there's no urge to maintain space. The environment is in a constant state of change. A more revealing comparison is with Smash TV or Robotron 64, which similarly keep the setting to one screen. Here the primary contrast with Gain Ground is the mobility of enemies - they render the idea of controlling space a near impossibility.

Golem: I'm trying to think if there's anything more to be said on Gain Ground, but nothing's coming to mind. I don't think anything is left for issues of range and space. I'll have to look back and see if there are any lingering threads.

I also tried to think about a version of Gain Ground where you control multiple units, and I got Syndicate. Can't say the gameplay is all that similar. Definitely a game I don't know what to do with, but I think we've discussed it before.

You just got Syndicated

Yourself: On the subject of armies and where the line is drawn between the opposition in Mega Man/Contra and Gain Ground/Fire Emblem, I think the barrier is largely perceptive. When I mentioned that strategy gameplay is composed of controlling armies, I meant specifically that - there are two (or more) singular forces which each control a span of dumb subordinates. While I realize that the processor doing computations for Mike Mettaur and Phil Screwdriver is indeed a singular force, they act autonomously without communication - simply put, they're independent AIs. Whatever "teamwork" might happen between them is incidental. Even if they are programmed to act as a team (or, say, controlled by two separate players), they're still behaving with selfish interests and internal motivation. And if they do start to form large scale strategies, and strictly adhere to those strategies, and alternate them in turn, well then, um, yeah, it does become a strategy game.

On the player side, an army/force is defined by division of control, be it synchronously or asynchronously. Gain Ground does possess that with its multi-character squad, but I'm not sure it's a necessary element of strategy anyway. Probably a lot of this conversation could have been alleviated by properly defining strategy early on, but whoops, too late now.

Golem: Well, I can't say it was a bad conversation to have. This is vague territory--as you said, some barriers are largely perceptive--so it's good to have something more to go on.

While I don't know that two players make up an army, it did help during Gain Ground when we had complementary abilities. If one person can throw high and the other can throw far, you can assign unique paths to each player. In particular, I think there were times when one of us stayed back as the other person cleared a path. In most games, coop works just fine playing as identical units.

Yourself: As for Syndicate - is that Gain Ground with multiple units? At least, any more so than any other RTS we've already mentioned? I thought it used cursor control. What makes you call it out - do you have to aim and dodge bullets and stuff? Or just that it has little dudes instead of tanks?

As we discussed IRL (sadly not captured in this duologue - until I explain it now!), the main difference between traditional real-time strategy and Gain Ground (besides the number of player units) is that a real-time strategy uses AI routines to determine character behavior, while Gain Ground uses direct input. This parallels the difference between Fire Emblem and Shining Force - in the former, the player controls a cursor while a path-finding algorithm determines units' routes. In Shining Force, the player directly controls each unit during its turn and can freely walk within set bounds (similar to - lol - Quest 64). Of course, in these turn-based games, the difference is completely superficial - nothing can happen until the turn is executed, so all that matters is the characters' final resting place. In real-time games like Syndicate and Gain Ground, the difference between cursor control and direct input is so dramatic that it would lead most to classify one game as strategy and the other as action, despite the fact that they are both hybrids.

Golem: Oh, Syndicate gives you direct control over the little dudes, and you can decide if you want to control all four of them at once or just one at a time. (I say this based on the SNES one.) Control all four at once and hit down on the D-pad, and they all go down. That said, I just meant it as an offhanded remark, since I can't claim to understand anything more about that game. I'll double check that when I have access to it.

-----------------------------------------------------

And that he did. Happily ever after.

Awakening the potential with Fire Emblem

The collective Fire Emblem is a great experience. I've said it before - it made my top 10 SRPGs of all time. The problem is that it's composed of something like a dozen individual games spanning 20+ years. That's a whole hell of a lot to simplify into just one generalized playthrough memory, but it does so with no problem. They're all the exact same. And I'm not talking like "all [insert-genre]s are the same!", I'm talking like exact same characters, exact same classes, exact same combat rules, exact same environments, exact same subject matter, exact same story, exact same graphics, exact same music, exact same everything. Okay, maybe they change the main character's hair color from time to time. Seriously. It's not even like iterations of a fighting game where they at least throw in a handful of new characters and arenas. I would honesty say, mean, and fight to the death over the claim that there is more variety in the Street Fighter II subseries (i.e. Turbo, Super, Champ. Ed., etc.) than there is in Fire Emblem's entire discography.

Then there's that "trademark" element, permanent character death. I'm going to move my diatribe against perma-death* to the end of the post, because it's going to be lost on anyone who isn't a series fan.

Fire Emblem: Awakening wants to finally take a step forward with the series. It'll blow classicists minds right off the bat by providing the option to turn off perma-death. While I'm a bit insulted by the fact that this mode is called "Casual" - fuck you Nintendo, I'm playing a goddamn Fire Emblem game - it's an addition that totally opens up the strategic playing field to a degree never available before. Think of how your tactics will change, now that units are disposable. If all you can see is an easier, "casualer" game, you aren't being creative enough. 

Allowing units to perma-live is a natural decision considering the focus of the game's evolution: role-playing. Where warriors' growth was once rigidly predestined (except in Sacred Stones where you could choose-your-evolution), Awakening introduces that role-playingist of role-playing elements: customization. As a matter of fact, someone might argue that a game cannot be an RPG without character/world customixation. The degree to which that's true can be sidelined for this discussion, because directly compared, Awakening is much more an RPG than its predecessors. The first thing the game has you do is create an avatar - his (or her!) appearance, name, and statistical preference. The demo suggests that this may be an Ishmael character - one of my preferred tacks to video game storytelling. Other characters promise to have flexible classes and skill sets, deepening their individual roles and allowing the player to create a personalized army.

The game's newborn visual style emphasizes this further. Equipment is displayed in true paper-doll fashion and battles are viewed from an (optional) first-person perspective. Synergizing teammates are shown entering battle side-by-side, rather than as a hidden statistical bonus. The game wants to draw you deeper into the emotional level of the combat.

Boringer players might object and lament that "hey, you got your micro-managing Tactics in my pure chess-like board-game strategy", but, who gives a fuck. For better or worse, it is indeed time for a change, and Awakening seems to bring a bit of that spirit. Maybe it's not the utter revolution the series needs, but it's the minor uprising it deserves (TM (Batman (TM))). 

I am gonna call bullshit on the hero being called Crom though. I mean, fuck that. Or I guess I should say "then the hell with you!"

*Perma-death, as it's so fondly called by fans, is fucking stupid. The idea of perma-death is that if a unit dies, you now need to fill that gap with a weaker unit that is going to need to catch up. Since Fire Emblem rigidly dictates what back-up units you have (and provides them in finite supply), it's easy to get into a situation where there is no replacement. Also consider that letting even a single unit die permanently weakens your entire army, as there is no training/practice/grinding to make up for the lost experience. This means that losing units is not only a temporary inconvenience, but a permanent difficulty spike. Considering the difficulty already increases over the course of the game, and the added consequence that a lost unit may have been the key to unlocking further allies or items (thus making one death equal to multiple lost units), it becomes apparent to even the most casual player that letting a character perish is simply not an option. So instead of a system where mistakes have game-changing consequences, you have a system where the player must win without mistakes every time. Which just makes for a lot of restarting missions.

The Top of the Ten SRPGs: Ogre Battle 64

What dost thou hold within thy sword? Ardor? Passion? Belief?

Just try to answer that question disingenuously. What player, confronted by that choice, could try to lever it toward a concrete goal? This question, as part of a series, serves as an introduction to the vaunted, Shakespearean tone of Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber. This, you know as soon as you start, is going to be a fucking serious game. It wants you to think beyond the notion of dialogue as a minigame.

You know what really struck me about Person of Lordly Caliber when I first played it? The element that made the strongest impression on my 12-year-old brain? It was the profanity. I'd heard the "fucking damn"-word before, but this was different. This was in a video game that my mom bought me. Suddenly I had my hands on something rare and precious. A real adult world. 

Imagine a game where murder is considered bad...

It went beyond profanity. The game portrays bigotry, murder, and even rape with an uncompromising frankness, simply as a part of the unromanticized truth of humanity. Though the setting may be fantasy, the heroes and villains are people, victim to human vices and real-world injustice. The set-dressing creatures, from the titular ogres, to Greco-Roman inspired griffins, gorgons, and cerberuses, are natural beings, simply a part of the earth and subject to humanity's whims. They don't create evil - it comes from men's hearts. The only monsters, according to Ogre Battle, are greed, lust, and ambition.

The dark and pessimistic nature of this tale is magnified by the struggle undergone by the player avatar. While a lawful/chaotic meter does serve as a vague indicator of the character your actions are creating, the consequences run deeper. While the general structure of the plot remains the same regardless of how it's played, the tone of these events is set by choices between revolutionary factions, whether one executes opponents or allows them to surrender, and the manner in which civilian populations are treated. One of the watershed moments for the narrative comes a few chapters into the game, when the player is given a choice whether to release or execute the leader of the enemy forces. Whichever you choose, this enemy survives and you soon find yourself on his side of the war. Nonetheless, the option makes all the difference to the character. Fate is inevitable - so does one take the wheel and steer his own life, or allow himself to be washed along? This is the type of dilemma that Ogre Battle presents.

If I haven't said much about the gameplay, it's because the mechanics aren't what make the work beautiful. It'd be like starting an analysis of a painting by discussing the brushstrokes. Yet don't take that as an assertion that story is everything. Far from it. Everything about Ogre Battle 64 revolves around the themes of fate, mercy, and order, from the battlefield to the dialogue. The game can't be understood as simply a series of real-time unit-based battles or class evolution and statistical systems. We have to go from the top down to look at how these elements are woven into the greater tapestry, how they play into each other to create a whole.

...B, Battle!?

Of course that wasn't much of a discussion of it's SRPG-iness, but I'd rather take the time to properly introduce the game, since it's something I'm going to be revisiting often. It'd be worth writing a thesis if I had time to go around writing theses all over the place.

Top Ten SRPGs: Part Threeve

Wait, Earthbound isn't a Strategy RPG, that reference makes no sense. Can't change it now. Must... move... forward... to talk about a few unique occupants of the genre.

7. Gladius

Here's obscure for ya. A non-Star Wars LucasArts game from the middle of the Gamecube's life-cycle that I've never heard mentioned even once by another player. Did anyone out there play this game?

The game's advertisement is immediately misleading - it's not really a game about gladiators. Well, it's a game about tough guys who fight to the (kinda) death in a ring, but it's not historically set. The first (or second) quarter of the game takes place in an ancient-Rome analogue, but it turns out that this Roman nation sits directly next to Dark Ages Scandanavia, ancient Egypt, and the Asian steppes. These worlds are populated both by their traditional warrior classes and mythological beasts. This gives a memorable best-of-mythology feel to the setting where you'll see secutors duking it out with giant scorpions, mummies, and bearskin-adorned barbarians.

The game utilizes a combination of group tactics, rock-paper-scissors, and timed/metered critical hits along with a streamlined command system (where you can skip through movement turns directly to actions) to create generally fluid and fast battles that feel less disjointed than in other strategy titles. Some games go full-on board game and use turn breaks as an escape from realism, but Gladius (and as we're about to discuss, XCOM) feels like it could play out in real-time if you stopped the pauses for commands. This draws the player closer to the battle, making each decision feel more immediate and weighty.

8. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
A game I've of course much discussed recently, I debated for a while whether Enemy Unknown is really an RPG. I'm not gonna go through my entire justification here; the main role-playing principle which is indeed a central element of the game is your relationship to characters. They may not speak except for zingy one-liners and have no relation to the plot, but they provide a medium for the player to express himself uniquely. I doubt anyone could get through Enemy Unknown without feeling like they've been in the trenches with their squaddies, feeling every alien kill and human death in congruence with their collective avatar. This projected emotion is executed better than XCOM far better than many by-the-books RPGs, so it's clearly more deserving of the label.

The game feels almost like it needs to be labeled 'action' as well, but in reality there are no coordination-based efforts. XCOM's pacing is nerve-racking, between the fog of war obscuring anything outside the soldiers' fields of view, the permanent character deaths, and the immediacy with which friend can become foe. Even with its futuristic setting and extraterrestrial threat, the game displays the emotional depth of a true war narrative. The "terror missions" in particular evoke images of 21st century urban unrest and its consequences.

9. Knights in the Nightmare

Admittedly, I feel like it's almost an insult to include this game here, since it so completely defies the conventions of genre as recently discussed. Knights in the Nightmare (and many of St!ng's other games) picks and chooses what appear to be a few familiar ideas and mixes them so wildly that it's no longer recognizable as any remotely familiar formula.

KITN (I read it as "kitten") is SO weird. It's a game about ghosts. Each battle has you reliving the final moments of a new set of knights lives, as you are gradually worked into the immediately-post-apocalypse story. You play as the cursor (wha?) as it silently revives these tragic dying memories. Honestly it's all a bit beyond my capacity to describe. The story is a Germanic tragedy, one which in this presentation seems to say... nothing matters and all life is doomed? K, so we listen to death metal all of a sudden?

Don't try too hard to understand the gameplay from video. Just go try the DS version yourself.

Thus rooted in insanity, it's no surprise the gameplay should be so far off the rails. As you piece together your lost memories and one-by-one raise an army of dead knights, you'll be trying to construct logic out of a similarly disparate hodgepodge of systems that remind of this jigsaw approach to the whole. KITN is a narrative in which time does not necessarily pass linearly, but rather contracts toward a point. It is a game about taking small parts and embracing them without understanding (but eventually experiencing) what makes the sum work so well together.

How can you top the bizarre masterwork of KITN? Well I'd say you'd not only have to go off the genre rails, but you'd have to do it with like a goddamn Shakespeare of a plot. Which game is it? Come on, anyone who's reading this has to know by now.

Oh, sorry, not to blue-balls ya. Here:

Top Ten SRPGs 2: ContinYOUd

This is the part of the strategy RPG cake where I take you down memory lane to look at some genre classics that provide popular tweaks on a generally accepted framework of Chess Plus. What I mean by that is grid-based gameplay with alternating turns and pieces that only have one type of action. These games vary mostly in their implementation of the notion of role-playing, as you'll come to lovingly understand.

What?

Anyway.

4. Fire Emblem: Pick Which One You Like Best

As the years have passed, Fire Emblem seems to have evolved the least of Nintendo's mainline series. Complain all you want about Zelda and Mario being formulaic, but they take us on journeys through worlds. Link sailed across the ocean and soared through the skies while Mario sunbathed in the tropics and reached for the stars. The adventure and discovery make old mechanics new again. Fire Emblem loses this because its trademark is the setting, not the characters. The heroes change every time, and the castles stay castles. So there isn't much to see - oh well, strategy games were never about the scenery anyway.

The Fire Emblem model is very cut and dry. Units have flavors which define their relationships: axe beats lance beats sword, archer beats magic, so on. There's not much rolling of the dice on the battlefield; once the machinery begins to turn, you won't be surprised (or have to react) to the results. That makes Fire Emblem a preparation game, all about choosing the right units and the right equipment. The choice to take a character into battle carries a greater weight because they each have their own back-story and persona. They may chat with the characters next to them, or perhaps have a town or enemy to uniquely interact with. 

5. Shining Force II

Of the Shiny Forces, I've only played II, so this is a freebee. At first glance, Shining Force is just an even boringer Fire Emblem. Seems like the battles go slower, you have less units, etc. Yawn. Actually what you're witnessing is that Shining Force is more a traditional JRPG than its other SRPG compatriots. You're first clued in by structure of the game. You walk around in towns, chat about, and explore a world map. There are shops and churches and castles, as one would see in Dragon Warrior or Ultima. Battles can be escaped and replayed. This sets a leisurely pace for the game. 

Shining Force wants you to get in there, take your time, and beef up your team. You'll hit the wall occasionally, even if you think you're playing with strategic perfection. Part of the experience is investing time in each character, learning their individual strengths and weaknesses. There aren't the rock-paper-scissors hierarchies, so each unit is more well-rounded and self-sufficient. I'm saying you can grind, got it? To some that is a most comforting notion.

6. Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII

Alright, finally, something interesting. Romance VII is a large-scale, territorial strategy game. Based in historical scenarios, some would call the game a simulation, as it demands that the player manage economy, culture, and diplomacy across his very own Ancient Chinese Dominion. It's true that Romance VII presents itself as a numbers game, all about allocating resources and

Wow you know I'm realizing here how boring strategy games are to write about. Admittedly, plenty of people find them boring to play as well, but I find something impossibly soothing, engrossing, and rewarding about these games. When I sit down to play Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I know I'm going to lose a few hours of my life, and yet am satisfied to see the growth of my sandcastle. There is a quantifiable element of success that goes beyond a high score or kill/death ratio, a constructive effort with nigh-tangible results. The more granularity the game provides and the more hardship one must overcome to amass his little kingdom, the more gratifying it is to witness it come to be.

ROTK7 offers exactly as much control and granularity as you need, through its RPG element. You don't rule directly over the land and all of its day-to-day business, rather this is handled by warlords with individual statistics and predispositions. These characters allow for indirect and personalized development of your domain, keeping the details hidden while you watch your borders expand.

Come back next time to learn about some non-traditional, and maybe even Western!, strategy RPGs. 

The Last Story: The Game That Kind of is a Strategy RPG (if you squint)

(Yourself is compiling his list of top ten strategy RPGs, so I figured I'd write about the second one I've ever played. The first one being Knights in the Nightmare.)

There's a sense of desperation in JRPGs today. You see a general frustration with PlayStation-era JRPG trends as the genre tries to gain new relevance. Combat can't be all menus, cutscenes absolutely must be skippable, so on and so forth.

Enter The Last Story. Initially, its combat doesn't do anything out of the ordinary; you attack automatically by rubbing up against foes, your party members assist you in real time--stuff I first encountered in Final Fantasy 12.

But with only a few minutes of gameplay under its belt, The Last Story introduces stealth shooter mechanics. By holding ZR, you can aim a crossbow in third person, and by pressing A, you can hide behind cover. So, by crawling behind cover, you can sneak around enemies and snipe them. I understand the need to experiment with the genre, but does it really help to throw in elements from Gears of War WinBack?

I found that one particular battle from the first chapter highlighted The Last Story's stealth shooter side. Up ahead, the enemy formation held one healer surrounded by grunts. If I decided to charge straight forward, I'd meet the grunts head on. I could handle them easily, but the problem was that healer. He could heal them from his protected position behind a line of grunts. The front line would constantly get healed, and I'd never break through their formation.

The smarter option was to sneak around the side of their formation, using cover to remain hidden. Luckily, the enemy party hadn't seen my party in hiding. So, I tip-toed behind cover until I found a good location for sniping the healer with my crossbow. I fired a shot, all but taking him out, and all hell broke loose as the enemy party realized I was invading their personal space.

The same formation that seemed so advantageous to my enemies was now their downfall. Once I killed the healer, I was planted right in the middle, able to strike their back line of troops. Meanwhile, the three other members of my party rushed up to meet me and took out the front line. The battle was clean and quick.

The largest difference between RPGs and strategy RPGs is the sense of space. In strategy RPGs, you can flank enemies, you can bottleneck them, etc. In games like Shining Force, spells have an area of effect; Blaze level 2 hits any enemy within a two-block radius, for instance.

And that sense of space is what stealth mechanics add to The Last Story. If you study the terrain, you can often use it in your favor against the enemies. For example, attacking an enemy from behind cover will deal bonus damage. In other words, where you attack is important.

The Last Story has a nifty assemblage of mechanics that develop the JRPG's action/strategy edge, but at the end of the day, they're often undercut by execution.

Taking a strategic approach is often pain-staking compared to the tried and true method of running into everything until it dies, especially given the low difficulty of many battles.

And, when the game does encourage you to play around with landscape and stealth, your party members will be sure to give you the full run-down on how to win that fight. For instance, for the battle detailed above, my party immediately told me exactly what to do.

But it was worth a shot, and it's a game I'll gladly tip my hat to.

Top Ten SRPGs: The first three, TRPGs

Allow me to copy the top ten rules here, they apply the same as ever. Same as it ever was....

DESERT ISLAND DISC! These are the ten games I would take if all other qualifiers were forever destroyed. That means there is a strong preference to take only one game per series/creative unit; however, this is not a strict rule. I may find myself unable to dispose of either Highway 61 (Revisited) or John Wesley Harding.

NO RANKING! The ten are presented arbitrarily ordered unless otherwise noted.

NO COLLECTIONS! Re-releases and remakes are okay, but no anthologies. Games must be originally intended as a standalone work.

WHAT I SAY GOES! These are my choices. They aren't the games considered the best, or that were the most influential or successful. They are my subjective preferences. I will provide as much objective reasoning as I can, but at the end of the day, I like what I like and am always right, and you like whatever stupid things you like, because you're an idiot.

If you weren't with us last time, you'd be wise to read the intro, where you'll learn the difference between Strategy RPGs and their subset, Tactical RPGs. The first three games I'll cover will fall into the Tactical category.

Give me let you a little history of tactics games. 1995's Japan-only Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together seems to have instantiated the genre standard, and was closely followed by Final Fantasy Tactics, which brought the idea to Western shores. Though LUCT was published by Enix and FFT by their arch-rivals Square, both games were directed by the legendable Yasumi Matsuno. LUCT itself was the bastard child of two games: Ogre Battle (also Matsuno-directed) and Fire Emblem (a then-Japan-only Nintendo franchise). Ogre Battle laid out the class and terrain systems that the genre would adhere to, as well as the notion of unit facing (side- and back-attacks), while Fire Emblem was responsible for appropriating the grid-based antics of strategy and tabletop games, themselves likely inspired by simple old chess.

Until recently, the original LUCT and FFT were very expensive to get one's hands on, and Fire Emblem required a Famicom to play. Proving that there is a Baby Jesus in heaven, in the last five years all three games have been remade and released in the West on DS or PSP. You won't see them on this list, because I haven't gotten around to buying a PSP to play LUCT and FFT, and Fire Emblem... well, let's just say another Fire Emblem might make an appearance later on. But it isn't a TRPG, so erase it from your brain for the time being! With a pencil eraser! Because your brain is a pencil!

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1.) Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (GBA, 2003)

Hey, I said FFT wouldn't be on the list, didn't mention anything about the pseudo-sequel. This game saw the reunion of Quest with their former compatriot Matsuno under the Square Enix banner, where they produced their second, and probably last, tactics game together.

The game's greatest strength is a superb job system, which requires frequently rotating your characters' classes in order to give them ridiculously broad skill sets. It can get a bit unbalanced, but never requires grinding, and keeps your army in a constant state of flux. No character ever becomes useless. A range of character races provides further variety to the system. There are hundreds of possible class permutations, and (as always when such numbers are tossed about) while some are superficial and will only be explored by the most hardcore players, the result is that every player will feel like he has a unique set of characters of his very own engineering.

A weird feature that I feel obligated to mention is that the world map starts off blank, with a bunch of empty spaces where towns and battlegrounds will be. As the story necessitates the introduction of new areas, it gives you an icon to place on whichever space you choose. This customizable world map seems to serve little purpose, but hey, it's unique.

2.) Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis (GBA, 2001)

We jump from the most popular Western Tactics series, to the most acclaimed in the East. I haven't played LUCT, but if every other Quest game is any indication, I'm sure it's fantastic. Until then, we have Knight of Lodis. This side-story (gaiden!) to the original Tactics Ogre tells the backstory of a character who I won't reveal, because it's a pretty big shocker (or so I'm told by fans of the original).

Knight of Lodis implemented the concept of Achievements long before they were foolishly made an OS-level idea on Xbox (quick question: do you pay more attention to your Achievements or your Mii?). Characters are defined not by their numerical statistics, but by what they've done (represented by medals they're awarded). Kill too many beasts? You'll never become a Beast Tamer. One-hit kill a weak enemy? You're now eligible to be a Berzerker. Killing lawful opponents will sway a character towards chaos and vice-versa.

This is role-playing at its finest. Characters defined not by what they say or choose, but what they do. Show me, don't tell me. There are consequences to every action, rewards and punishments, and they'll influence the story in ways you weren't expecting. Which of the plethora of endings you reach will depend on ambiguous dialogue branches (not of the save/kill variety, but rather philosophical musings on the purpose of war and the reality of love), your choice of soldiers (did all of your men fall to chaos?), and who died or lived through the final battles.

Ogre Battle is a series for which I have endless praise (don't think you've seen the end of it on this list, let alone this blog), and Knight of Lodis upholds its shining standard.

3.) Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (PS2, 2003)

Prinnies, dood! Disgaea is real fucking weird. You probably aren't expecting how weird. It's irreverent and bizarre humor may be in line with anime tradition (it calls to mind FLCL in particular), but you still probably won't expect it when a spaceship shows up in Hell to try to blow you up. Also, prinnies are half-penguin, half-bombs, which I believe are said to be created from human souls.

What the game is primarily known for, and of course the key element to winning a cult following, is that the content is essentially bottomless. Every single item in the game contains a dungeon. Every character can be leveled up to... Lvl 9999 I think? And it's not like they move way faster than in a normal game - that's going at a pretty standard pace. I think my characters were like level 30 when I beat the game for the first time. And you're meant to reset them to level 1 all the time! You can also go to Demon court and try to pass Demon laws, and then fight the Demon jury if they don't Demon pass.

I must admit I never quite "got" all these weird systems in Disgaea. It seemed neat, but I'm not the kind to dump six hundred hours into a single game. The reason I've included the game here is that the battles themselves are quite clever. While most TRPG battles are interchangeable (note that I barely mentioned those in FFTA and Knight of Lodis), Disgaea throws in puzzle elements. Sometimes you can't kill your opponents, or every square on the battle field is instant death. Certain mechanics (namely including these uh gem thingies) need to be manipulated to solve each battlefield. Sometimes the battles play out straightforward, and other times you have to fight nearly fifty enemies all crammed side-by-side onto the same tiny grid.

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Next time we'll be departing from the Tactics subgenre to discuss some more traditional (and sometimes much older!) Strategy RPGs.

Strategy RPGs: Intro to a Top Ten

Hey y'all, it's snowing! Or, it was supposed to snow today. How romancetic. There's nothing I like better than curling on a cold winter's day. Yes, curling, the sport of true men and brooms all across the world.

What's with "curling up by the fire" or whatever such oft-repeated Cold Winter's Day Xpressions? I hate that kind of phoned-in memory imagery. You know what it looks like because you've heard the expression before. Were that not the case, you'd hear "curling up by the fire" as someone calculating ∇ × F where F is the rate at which that bank I just blew up burns to the ground. No you wouldn't. Why would anyone need to know the curl of that function? It would be useless. It wouldn't even be a vector field for that matter.

Remember on exams when they would make you draw stupid vector fields like this, then add stuff like the curl? If you haven't been there, you may not realize how impossibly annoying it is to hand-draw this many tiny arrows and distinguish their angles and lengths by such a small factor, while the clock ticks away your three hours. Hey, where did everybody go? This is interesting!

On an afternoon like this, I like to divergence up under the covers and grab a nice fresh Japanese Tactics RPG. I originally intended to make a list of just TPRGs, but it turns out there aren't enough worth playing to really sustain a top ten. So instead I'm going to broaden the category to Strategy RPGs in general. Allow me to distinguish the terms, since careless writers (EVERYONE BUT ME) tend to jumble them interchangeably.

This is what a TRPG will always look like; you probably recognize it like your own mother. Whom, by the way, you definitely should not have strangled. That wasn't nice at all!

I use the term T[actical]RPG to impose the tightest possible genre restriction. It refers strictly to games that play exactly like Tactics Ogre (to my knowledge the first to define the standard, as well as the tradition of using the word "Tactics" right there in the title). These form a sub-genre which fully falls under the larger SRPG salsarito. If you're blind and couldn't see that image, let me wordalize the concept of the TRPG: it's set on an isometrically-viewed elevated grid, usually sized to the screen, with individual character placement and facing, using a traditional experience-leveling system with jobs/classes/skills and persistent units.

Check out Valkyria Chronicles as an example of an SRPG will very little in common with TRPGs

As TRPGs carve out their own niche within SRPGs, SRPGs are themselves encapsulated in the larger RPG salsarito. However, they can also be considered a subset of strategy games, as they share elements with XCOM, Nobunaga's Ambition, and Famicom/Advance Wars. So really they're an intersection of Strategy and RPG. I'm trying to phrase this as set theory since I've unwisely chosen a mathematics motif for this post. The main defining element of an SRPG is that the player controls a force (strategy) of independently developing components (RPG). A pure strategy game has you controlling generics (essentially descended from chess), while a pure RPG puts you in control of a uniquely developing singular control unit (either a single character or a party). 

I'm not going to bother listing examples from either genre, because the list will give you plenty if you still don't get it. Plus I don't want to spoil anything. So come back in a little while as I kick off another Thrilling Ten Tops: SPERG edition.