Learning to love traditional JRPGs (A revisitation)

Learning to love traditional JRPGs originally ran on April 24th, 2013.

One of my newest video game friends, Retro Game Challenge, has taught me a lesson I didn't expect to learn. This lesson is that maybe I can like traditional turn-based JRPG?

One of my favorite Japanese turn-based RPGs is Star Prince

Challenge is structured as a literary anthology of eight fictional '80s-styled games, each deriving heavily from a real-world classic. See this post for more discussion of the overarching narrative that explains why you're playing them. The games are presented one at a time, each with four challenges that must be completed  before the next game is revealed. Each unlocked game can be revisited at will, as the challenges usually do not include seeing the ending. The eight retro games, in order of play, are:

Cosmic Gate (based on Galaga, ex. challenge: get 200,000 pts)

Robot Ninja Haggleman (based on Ninja JaJaMaru-Kun, ex. challenge: beat level 4 without dying)

Rally King (based on R.C. Pro-Am (I think), ex. challenge: complete course 2 in 5th place or higher)

Star Prince (based on Star Force/Star Soldier, ex. challenge: beat the boss of level 2)

Rally King SP (modified "special edition" of Rally King)

Robot Ninja Haggleman 2 (very similar to RNH, with larger levels and harder enemies)

Guadia Quest (based on Dragon Warrior, ex. challenge: reach level 10 with all characters)

Robot Ninja Haggleman 3 (based on Castlevania II/Ninja Gaiden, ex. challenge: kill 100 enemies)

These capture the most popular genres of NES-era gaming, as well as some of their key evolutions. Star Prince introduces scrolling to shoot-'em-ups, Haggleman 3 adds linear progression (instead of looping) to platforming, and Rally King SP adds nothing at all to Rally King. As I discussed in the previous feature, being forced to play each game for a certain amount of time (long enough to complete the challenges) makes the new games feel like exactly that: new games. Even players coming into Challenge without existing knowledge of what's to come will be primed on the "upcoming" releases by the fake in-game Famitsu/Nintendo Power pastiche, creating a sense of anticipation.

To this end, the game I most avidly awaited was of course the last to be unlocked, Haggleman 3. The first two Hagglemans are too basic for my taste; as arcade-style platformers, they share more in common with Son-Son or Mario Bros. than what we now consider the defining work of the genre, Super Mario Bros. Plus I fucking love adventure platformers like Castlevania II and Wonder Boy III. Unfortunately, what I do not love is traditional turn-based RPGs like Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, and Ultima III. I've tried to weather a number of these games and simply don't have the patience for it, nor do I derive much pleasure from incessant turn-based battling. But Retro Game Challenge gave me no choice: if I wanted to play Haggleman 3, I was going to have to stomach at least a few hours of Guadia Quest. 

What's shocking is that this dangling carrot was all I needed to become engaged in Guadia Quest, to the extent that I didn't even put it down after unlocking Haggleman 3. Up til that point, I had been playing Challenge as a curiosity, not because I particularly needed a refresher on retro gaming - I already play NES games on a near-daily basis. I wasn't expecting to come away with any greater understanding or appreciation of these game-types - after all, I hold games from the '80s in equally high esteem as those from the '10s. So it came as something of a surprise that an archetype I had already felt decided upon would take on new life in this form. But has Guadia Quest really changed my feelings on early JRPGs? Does enjoying this one mean  I'll suddenly be able to plumb new depths of Breath of Fire and Phantasy Star?

One of the coolest parts of Retro Game Challenge is that it includes full manuals for these fictional "classics"

I suppose first we need to ask how much Guadia Quest actually has in common with the classics - how well it would fit were it released in 1988, as Challenge posits it was. I'm not gonna run through the JRPG trope list in detail - let's just quickly summarize. These games feature quests to save the world, over-worlds full of random battles, towns as shelter/restocking/healing/save points, maze-like enemy-filled boss-topped dungeons as levels, turn-based battles, rigid immutable class systems and character growth, and Java+++ scripting language. Guadia Quest happily ticks all those boxes. Fixed-strength encounters communicate to the player what party level they should be at to conquer each location, experience and gold is scaled to battle difficulty such that tougher victories are better rewarded, and there's even a very light monster capturing system. Save-anywhere is a convenient feature NOT found in most of the classics, though save states are so common these days that it doesn't feel unusual to a retro-player in 2013. The difficulty curve is steep, with frequent death leading to multiple replays of each section. The player's party is made up of a warrior-type (high attack, no magic), a paladin (moderate attack and healing/defensive spells), and a black mage (low attack/defense, powerful offsensive spells), which is about the most basic assortment known to man. Implied die rolls decide whether each attack hits, criticals, or misses. 

"A", "B", and "Z". Boy this guy was creative with his character names. Mine were "You", "Womp", and "Yaky"

If Guadia Quest makes significant modifications to the JRPG formula, I don't know the formula well enough to notice. So it's not the gameplay itself that made the difference. It has to be something about the circumstances that led me to like this RPG yet reject Phantasy Star IV - and that's intentionally "like", not "tolerate". I think it's one particular sequence of challenges that changed the way I approached the game. The first is to reach Level 10 with each party member, a simple task of grinding as familiar to a gamer as the neckbeard on their chinny chin chin. This facilitates a sort of aimless, goalless wandering, where it doesn't really matter where you go or what you see, because you're always getting closer to your goal. There is some freedom of choice in that the player can try to survive a handful of high-level encounters or safely power through dozens of easier ones, but the goal remains abstract. It doesn't really matter which way you go.

The following challenge requires the player to obtain 1000 gold. As each battle comes with a monetary reward, this at first seems the exact same as the previous objective. But this treasure-hunt in fact highlights the adventurous nature of the genre, reminding me more of Dark Souls than Final Fantasy V. The need for greater rewards than victory-pennies (I think that was a kenning!) centers the experience around defying immediate danger in order to make it as far as possible on individual expeditions, always trying to make one more step on failing legs rather than giving up your progress by using a town portal. La-Mulana was another adventure that kindled this same spirit; the notion that powering up cannot in and of itself be an end. The difference between this type of play and run-of-the-mill grinding is that each quest for treasure has its own binary metric of success: you either find the gold, or you don't. There's no in-between, no reward for making it halfway. It brings life, purpose, and risk to each step forward. "Can I make it across the room without running into a random battle?" "Is it worth setting myself back 500 gold to get better equipment to survive deeper into the dungeons?" Like Dark Souls, there's a weight to failure - continue to screw up, and you're going to be sinking more and more gold into revival and healing items, which pulls you further and further from your goal. There's also an exhaustibility to rewards - you can't collect the same treasure chest twice, so you have to forge on to new territory.

I'm honestly not sure how well this immediacy will be preserved when I inevitably retry a classic I had previously dismissed (probably gonna be Phantasy Star III). True, it's simply a matter of mindset and didn't involve any real change to gameplay, but I was also being externally motivated to think that way. If I had a blog, you might be able to follow how well this experiment goes. Unfortunately, I don't :(

Right is Right: In defense of the Sacred institution of right-only scrolling (A revisitation)

As the holidays approach, we'll be seeing the typical down time around GNG. In the past I've handled down time with dead air and a pointer to the archives, but considering our extensive history of poorly-wrought material, I've decided to try a new technique: reruns. Hopefully the unearthing of these godforsaken aberrations doesn't give birth to a sort of Lovecraftian apocalypse as mankind is slowly unraveled by their primeval horror. Either way, enjoy!

Right is Right: In defense of the Sacred institution of right-only scrolling originally ran on March 19, 2013

In recent years, the long-standing tradition of right-scrolling has come under attack from all sides, challenging its relevance and historical justification and suggesting that the definition of side-scrolling should be expanded to a more egalitarian, direction-neutral practice.

The forces behind leftward scrolling have gained power in contemporary culture and are now, pardon the strong language, trying to shove it down our throats. For those of you blissfully unaware, left-scrolling refers to a 2D setting in which the primary direction of horizontal navigation is left. You may be familiar with such delinquency from Bit.Trip Flux or Super Mario Bros. 3 (Stage 5-3). I don't know what kind of weirdo is into this sort of thing, but it isn't normal, bread-loving Americans such as myself. I would be caught dead (?) before I would be caught engaging in this kind of anti-natural behavior.

The work of Satin

If we allow left-scrolling, what will be next? Diagonal scrolling? Scrolling into the screen? Before you know it, every side-scroller cult is going to demand their 'right' to acknowledgement. Proponents claim that left-scrolling is the business of left-scrollers alone - that they should be allowed to do what they want, because it has no effect on right-scrollers not involved. My reply to this is: what kind of impression are we leaving for our children? Do we want to raise them in a world where they're bombarded with images of scrolling in every direction? Where they're assured that it's perfectly "normal" to scroll left, or even worse: that they're the weird ones for wanting games that scroll right?

Some have suggested that we permit left-scrolling, but slightly alter the name, that perhaps it doesn't have to be called scrolling at all - left-inclined games can be afforded the same civil rights (!) as right-scrollers, while being shuffled into a different category. This, however, fails to address the underlying issue, that perfectly solid, well-designed levels are being corrupted by the (probably Jew-backed) media proliferation of the unnatural practice of going left. Think of what Yoshi's Island could have been, had it not been so thoroughly perverted by left-scrolling advocates. If we legitimize this practice by legally observing left-scrolling in any form, by any label, we're taking yet another leap toward the cultural downfall of this once-grape nation. Kirby's Adventure, Mega Man 2, Sonic the Hedgehog - these games are tainted and devalued every time we stand idly by while games like Zelda II and Ninja Gaiden 3 include left-scrolling levels.

God defined side-scrolling as movement starting at the left side of an environment, towards the right side. From the dawn of history, every culture has observed this same basic definition. The founding fathers specifically wrote in their diaries that only upstanding games like Mega Man were intended by the Constitution.

I get that a bunch of you out there are degenerates. I get that the world needs a broom closet somewhere to shove you guys, and I get that most of the time, that broom closet is the Internet. But just because you now have a forum where you can pretend someone cares about your thoughts and your weird proclivities (they don't), doesn't mean you have to spew that shit all over my games.

It all seriousness though, I can't stand left-scrolling levels. They give me goddamned brain cancer.

Wild Guns - SNES' answer to Resident Evil 4?

I like Wild Guns. Do you?

WELL THEN GO PLAY IT!

That response worked regardless of whether you said yes or no. Who writes this damn blog? SmarterChild?

Wild Guns, along with Cabal, Blood Bros., and NAM-1975, belongs to a small niche of late-'80s/early-'90s Japanese third-person shooters. They are, to some degree, simply vertical shoot-'em-ups with an inclined viewing angle. Take Galaga, slide the camera back behind the ship to look over its "shoulder", force the player to aim along the Y-axis as well as the X, and you've pretty much got Wild Guns. It's no surprise that the originator of the style appears to be the arcade Contra's variety missions.

There aren't a ton of these games, as their first-person shooting gallery cousins like Operation Wolf and later light gun games like Time Crisis and House of the Dead were far more popular, but they set an interesting precedent for third-person shooters - a precedent which went largely unobserved but for a few modern Japanese games. It's no revelation to learn that arcade-style gallery games have gone out of fashion alongside rail-based shooters of the Star Fox 64 and Panorama Cotton variety in favor of modern Western first- and third-person multiplayer and cover shooters. These days the classic shmup and the twin-axis shooter couldn't be farther apart, but back in the days of Wild Guns they were very nearly the same thing.

One of the perceived flaws of the arcade third-person shooter is that the style is inherently limited and died out simply because it had reached its maximum potential. In accordance with that understanding, such games are often referred to as "Cabal clones", evidencing the opinion that they never evolved past that seminal classic. I say this is bullshit. Beyond a personal distaste for proclaimed limits, there's a very simple response to this defeatist attitude: Sin & Punishment. Not only does Sin & Punishment take over-the-shoulder shooting and dodging to the next level, Sin & Punishment: Star Successor pushes it even further. It comes as no surprise that Treasure would be the ones to wring blood from this stone, but it's asinine to suggest that they're the only developers capable of expanding upon Cabal and Wild Guns' gameplay.

More interestingly, I think Wild Guns is a sort of secret predecessor to the arcadey Japanese third-person shooters that we don't see often enough today (if anyone knows another game like Vanquish or P.N.03, please call me on the phone immediately). There's an interesting little detail to Wild Guns that subtly expands the game's sense of realism and helps it leap-frog over other shooters into the true third-person shooting field ("true" in the sense of "not a rail-shooter"): the environment is wider that the screen and the camera is in the player's control. It may seem trivial, but this gives the player the ability to explore - they can choose what to look at, they can miss out on things, and they can strategically position themselves within the enviroment, not just on the screen. Even games like NAM-1975 and Sin & Punishment which introduce humongous contiguous journeys into the arcade over-the-shoulder shooter still rigidly auto-scroll, preserving the notion of the screen as the playing field. By handing camera control to the player and offering just that tiny bit of exploration, Wild Guns creates an experience uncannily reminiscent of a fetal Resident Evil 4 or Vanquish.

If you like scrolling shooters, fast paced over-the-shoulder action, or rail-shmups like Star Fox, I can't strongly enough encourage you to go check out Wild Guns (on Virtual Console or... other platforms). If you haven't played it in a while, give it another go, this time thinking less about Contra, Gradius, and Cabal, and more about Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War. 

John Dies at the End of This Review (I hope that joke hasn't been done before)

Unlike Andrew, I watched John Dies at the Movies but did not read the book, because I am not a loser. I would say definitely watch if you enjoyed the book, and I also recommend it to anyone looking for contemporary scifi, genre comedy, or the kind of action/fantasy/horror/adventure-fun that they just don't make anymore (probably - except for this movie I guess). While JDatE didn't blow by head out of the water, it did make me nostalgic for days (when I was like 3 or not even born) of movies like Army of Darkness, Adventures in Babysitting, and Gremlins 2. 

The more detailed review is that it is from Don "Phantasm" Coscarelli, filmed on a shoe"laces"string budget. If you know Phantasm, you probably already know whether you want to see this movie (or, more likely, have already seen it). Wongburger's source book provides a number of decent jokes and kooky characters (the eponymous John "Dies at the End" Cheese being a particular favorite), but it's the bizarre atmosphere and trippy twists that keep the film moving moreso than the haphazard punchlines. Perhaps the same is true of the novel and this is simply a case of a perfect matching of director and script - either way, it feels like a natural continuation of what I know of Coscarelli (I've seen the first two Phans Tasm). Interestingly enough, Costco manages to wrangle together both his acid-nightmare storytelling impatience of Phantasm and the everyone's-holding-a-gun-yet-there's-never-any-action apocalyptic tension of Phantasm II for a story that's disorienting in bursts but never gets out of hand. The movie is somehow both meanderingly philosophical and frantically time-shifting, probably due to the use of a frame story and drugs. Not probably, I'm saying it is because of those things. I just worded it wrong - probably due to the use of a frame story and drugs.

As a B-movie aficionado, it pains me to complain about effects, but it's impossible to ignore the overbearing truth that (what I assume was) the scope of Wongburger's novel was simply not in the studio's budget. Kudos for the attempt to bring Korrok the unspeakable Lovecraftian abomination to life, but the heroes' final showdown with the demonic god was so painfully green-screened and the practical explosions so penny-pinchingly meager that the film's climax felt light-years out of its league, more like an SNL (or Agents of Cracked!) parody than a feature film. I don't really know the solution to this problem - switch to animation? stock footage? shaky cam? but what we got took me severely out of the movie at what is ostensibly the most crucial moment. Luckily the rest of the movie works well enough at a small Phantasm-esque scale that it didn't really need this action climax to sell. 

That's what's nice about John Dies at the End though - you can take it seriously. It's not a cartoon horror comedy like Evil Dead 2, wherein scares are alternated with laughs to keep you guessing, nor is it a straight-up black comedy like V/H/S, where everything is pretty horrifying but the audience takes pleasure in utterly despising every human onscreen and watching them earn their justice hurts. JDatE is just an adventure through an extremely strange world, taken alongside protagonists ready for strangeness. The weirdness (like a dried-meats golem and a fighting detachable mustache) is plain expected and isn't played with a trombone effect for a joke. The characters' cynicism, exasperation, and wit parallel our own reactions to the mundane world. It's reminiscent of Jossy Whedon's Buffy/Angel, which bring's me to a shocking point...

The one guy looks so much like David Boreanaz that why not just cast David Boreanaz. Was he described in the book as Angel Jr.? And while we're on actors, everyone was pretty good, though I don't know who to blame for the weirdness of Wongburger's character - he changes so drastically throughout the course of the film from solemn know-it-all to disturbed denier to snarky comebacker that I can only imagine it was a problem with adapting a 100 (200?) page novel into a <2 hour movie. The guy did a great job looking like he was on drugs though. Talk about someone who looks like he's bugging out at all times. The "known" actors were fine - Paul Giamatti doesn't do anything for me, if anything he's kinda a distraction by being too famous for this movie. Clancy Brown, on the other hand, gives a delightful turn as the kind of character that only the villain from Highlander/Raiden/Mr. Krabs/Sgt. Zim could provide.

Were there any women in the movie? Sorry, I shouldn't be reviewing a movie I saw 6+ months ago, as I suppose this question reveals. Just doing it because of the reason of yesterday's TBA. Movies without female characters are racist and I cannot in good conscience recommend them. I'm probably just forgetting the female lead though. That's a testament to the strength of the role. No hang on it's probably just a testament to me being racist but hang on I'm gonna blame that on society so we're all good, movie still totally recommendable. Society, on the other hand: ONE OUT OF FIVE STARS.

In conclusion, David Wongburger and Don Coscarelli are a fun and entertaining team that I hope once again come together to bring the sequel (This Book is Full of Spiders, I think) to the big screen. Hell knows I ain't readin' no pansy-ass book. I would certainly watch a TV series about The Adventures of Wongburger and Cheese with Clancy Brown as a recurring Macaroni, and considering this movie was probably lower budget than most episodes of Game of Thrones, someone should make that happen. I officially bestow my creative blessing on that idea. Go hence and make it so. 

Tiny Book Assessments: Part Deux

My reading queue these past months has been quite a bizarre mix of "classics" I, for some reason, decided needed revisiting. It's safe to say I've reached a point in my life distant enough from high school English class where a novel's position either within or outside the literature bubble does little to the odds I pick it up, save for my merely knowing it exists. I, as discussed somewhat meandering-ly in this post (link post [Editor's note: u dont tell me wat 2 do (author's note: i'm not spending the time it takes to find an old post. can you even sort by author on blogger??!?)] ), am a firm opponent of any high/low culture divide; that being said, the sheer tonnage of crap that exists out there disguised behind three-thumbs up San Antonio Report reviews means that going to the classics is a better bet than reading well-reviewed more recent novels. It makes a certain amount of sense: being considered a classic is not a guarantee that I will find the book well-written, filled with interesting ideas, or artistically fulfilling, but the fact that it has survived a noticeably longer span of time without becoming culturally irrelevant probably means there's a better chance it is some of those things. Man, it feels pretentious as hell to review these first two books...like everything intelligent to say about them hasn't already been said. Oh well this blog has to be filled with something, right?

I picked John Dies at the End from the reviewable heap probably more as an oddly appealing juxtaposition to the other two earlier works: each of the earlier having well-known themes of war and disillusionment, while JDatE navigates questions of grotesque monstrosities and zombie dogs.

Here's a link to JDatE online: http://jdate.com/

And awayyyy weeee gooooooooo

Slaughterhouse 5

"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

Mr. Kurt "Cobain" Vonnegut has apparently written a number of novels about the Dresden firebombing, but Slaughterhouse 5 is the most famous and probably the only one I'll ever read. I wanted very much to love this book, but ended up only liking it. So much of it is brilliant satire, but a good bit of it falls flat...like say all of the parts where Billy Pilgrim interacts with aliens. The central time travel conceit works well: the details of Pilgrim's life are fleshed-out non-linearly as the central and horrifying story of his march towards Dresden plays out. But Vonnegut really beats you over the head with his ideas about fatalism and freewill, or lack thereof, whenever Pilgrim is hanging with the aliens. It's pretty rough going for anyone that has ever spent more than 10 seconds contemplating these VERY basic philosophical concepts.

Where Vonnegut clearly shines is his portrayal of war and the comical personalities therein. A history professor who dismisses Billy's account of the firebombing for something more heroic. A 16 year old German boy put in charge of guarding the US POWs because all the grown men are dead, and who is a distant cousin of Billy's. An officer who considers himself the leader of the beaten prisoners, refers to himself as "wild Bob," and who doesn't seem to realize what war he is in, only that his soldiers know they can always call on him if they happen across his Wyoming home.

When Slaughterhouse shines, it shines as a biting anti-war satire. 

The Sun Also Rises

"You'll lose it, if you talk about it.”

Hemingway's best novel and his most endlessly readable, The Sun Also Rises struck me viscerally as it followed the author's literary manifestation of himself from life in Paris as an ex-pat, to the Spanish countryside to Madrid for the running of the bulls. The novel does a great job of capturing the American zeitgeist of the time despite being set abroad: the contrast between the few American characters and their various European settings highlights Hemingway's love for his home despite his fleeing it following the First World War.

Midway writing the previous paragraph, thinking about why the book was so appealing to me and others I've talked to around my age that have read it, a thought hit me: maybe the book's contemplation of the so-called Lost Generation is striking because that generation and my own, generation Y, share a number of similarities that would make themes like traditional masculinity, inherited versus earned wealth, addiction, and changing moral paradigms resonate with both groups. A quick google search reveals that this is not as novel a thought as I would hope. But I arrived at it independently! Hoorah!

And I think the fact that the story of a group of younger people traveling and drinking and at the same time trying to cope with or run away from severely emotionally crippling problems makes sense to me is not surprising. But Hemingway's combination of clarity and subtlety, and his appeal, in the end, to values I agree with make the novel one of my absolute favorites.

John Dies at the End

“Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.”

This one is from a Cracked guy, right? I'm pretty sure that's the case. I am neither a particularly avid horror fan nor a Cracked fan (5 Crazy Ways that Rotten Hot Dogs have Influenced Science Throughout History!!!!?!?) but if I recall correctly this was recommended to me on Google Play and I needed something to read. I admire David Wong's fearless descent into nonsensical gore and violence while retaining enough emotional realism so that the reader is creeped out along with the characters. The novel is broken into 3 interwoven but distinct stories, with a fairly throwaway frame narrative in between, which do a nice job of pacing a story that, if told in one chunk, would blow its proverbial insanity wad much too early to last more than one hundred pages. The world is populated by flesh-eating spiders, shadow men, and villains like "shitload," a body swapping insect-swarm monster that delivers only nut-shots, and Korrok, a divine world-destroyer whose physical manifestation in an alternate reality the hero describes as "the mass of grease and hair washed by years of filthy dishwater." Wong does a nice job of keeping the showdowns varied and the plot moving at a blistering pace in order to avoid the reader thinking about how idiotic some of the jokes are.

I haven't seen this.

So there we have it! Keep reading, or don't!