Classing up turn-based games, part 2: Defining state and input classes

In the past I've sorta covered (i.e. mentioned) the notion that classing gameplay types is more important than classing game types (I really don't remember when I said that and it's not worth my time or yours to look it up). As I haphazardly introduce classes of state progression and input mechanics, keep in mind that these rarely will apply to 100% of the content of a game and certainly don't mandate anything as high-level as genre. Two games in the same state progression class may be in a different input mechanics class and a different goal/opposition class and a different origin class and etc. As mentioned in Part 1, we're looking for a middle ground for relativism, where everything isn't completely different, but everything isn't completely the same*.

*plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

State Progression

By state progression I mean "the realization of time", or what governs when the game variables (collectively, the "state") are evaluated and updated. I could probably churn out something slightly more formal but the classes can probably speak for themselves. Differentiating "game state" and "interface state" is outside the scope of this piece, but basically take "game state" to include any variables that have a direct relation to the outcome of the game (i.e. stuff like player health and position and not stuff like cursor position (unless this is Knights in the Nightmare)).

In a real-time paradigm, the game state is evaluated and updated independent of player input. Basically this means that the game will progress at the same rate whether or not the player's controller is plugged in. Having a "pause" function which halts all progress does not disqualify a game from being considered real-time, because the pause function switches evaluation to a separate state paradigm which follows its own rules.

In a turn-based paradigm, the game state is evaluated and updated only when triggered by a defined player input. A pause-command function does not guarantee a turn-based paradigm because exiting a pause state does not necessarily trigger state progression. It is necessary to the notion of turn-based paradigms that the player input for progressing the state is isolated and known. Enemies changing attack patterns at random intervals doesn't guarantee the game is turn-based.

KEY NOTE: Real-time and turn-based are not necessarily the only classes of state progression. I intentionally give them separate definitions rather than saying "turn-based is the opposite of real-time", because there's clearly flex room - delays, bullet-time, and timed turns are just a couple examples off the top of my head of ways to split the real-time/turn-based atom. Just the speed at which states progress and any customizability therein can provide countless subclasses.

Input Mechanics

Moving on to input mechanics: the rules of the interface through which the player is permitted to influence the game state ("mechanics" being the rules for an interface and "input" being the system of accepting player influence [it's kind of obnoxious to define "input" - Ed.]). Also important: an action is an externally initiated change in state.

Action mechanics execute individual game-state-dependent actions specified by the player. The game state determines an input mapping; that is to say, the same input in different states may map to different actions, while the same input in the same state will map to only one action. Essentially, action mechanics let the player do things but only at the right time. The player is required to structure inputs such that they will have the desired effect on external states.

The most significant follow-ons from this are that action inputs tend to be layered (e.g. the player must be running to roll, requiring an analog input to put them in "running" state and then a button input to "roll"), interdependent (e.g. the player must be locked on to strafe and can only strafe when locked on), and order-sensitive (e.g. aiming first and then shooting is going to be more effective than shooting first and then aiming).

Tactical mechanics execute a (series of) action(s) determined autonomously to reach a game state specified by the player. Inputs are mapped explicitly to outcomes regardless of the current game state. This doesn't mean that commands are deterministic; only that the evaluation criteria is (i.e. an attack can still have a 10% chance to miss, so long as that's an independently calculated property not dependent on additional player input). The player may need to anticipate what actions will be executed in reaching the desired state, but generally will be more concerned with simultaneously tracking game states. Tactical mechanics allow the player to chart out a sequence of events.

The first implication here is that the player has either a guarantee or a means of evaluating what the effect of their input will be. Indicators, numbers, words - some kind of abstract interface is almost necessary to facilitate tactics (that doesn't necessarily go the other way - just because a game has life bars and damage numbers doesn't mean it uses tactical mechanics).

It's all pretty self-explanatory really; action and tactics are what you expect they are. In an action game you can miss an attack by pressing a button too late, in a tactical game you'll only miss if you roll a 1.

KEY NOTE: While action and tactical mechanics are mutually exclusive (if actions are being determined autonomously the player can't be individually instructing actions...), they can easily co-exist. Pretty much any traditional JRPG where you walk around with an analog stick (action) and then issue orders from a command menu (tactical) demonstrates that. Even further, it's not uncommon for a game to offer both options for the same mode - direct your party around with stylus taps (tactical) OR use the d-pad to walk!

Input Buffering

Speaking of menus, there's one more characteristic to consider - the input buffer. An input buffer is any game component that accepts player inputs without immediately applying them to the game state. Generally speaking, something's probably wrong if the controller itself is buffering input - when the player presses A they tend to like seeing an immediate result. This is more like command menus that accept player input solely for the purpose of browsing potential state-altering inputs. AI scripting and input delays are two more examples of buffering, so long as they offer a split between choosing a command and executing it. 

While buffers more naturally complement tactics (due to the potential for input evaluation and an extended list of commands separated from game state), they are not exclusive to one type of mechanics or another. Hotkeys and point-and-click allow tactical PC RPGs to circumvent input buffering, while button-based action controls can easily be transposed onto a menu (as somewhat depressingly demonstrated by smarthphone touchpad-only ports).

We could certainly class games by buffer type, though it does seem a bit superfluous.

Now

God that all got way hairier than I wanted. Maybe it makes sense if you haven't been staring at it through eight million edits like I have. Hopefully any ambiguities will be cleaned up with some examples/applications, courtesy of Part 3. Yes, we'll take to the streets and take on Final Fantasy XII, Chrono Trigger, Dragon Age: Origins, Xenoblade Chronicles, and many, many, many more.

Take this fun fact home to mom: for the purpose of this theory article I changed my formatting scheme to bold key words and italicize titles. Normal articles don't have key words so it isn't a conflict.

Classing up turn-based games, part 1: When classifications go bad

Is a turn-based game *really* what you think it is? Take this quiz to find out!

Intro to a real-time classification problem

It's a thing where I define terms in a way to clarify gameplay paradigms and set up logical comparisons between like games. I've had the real-time / turn-based distinction on the mind recently as I've been playing Final Fantasy XII and Dragon Age Origins, both games with some kind of traditional turn-based RPG core that plays out autonomously. I discussed in my last piece how these two combat systems work; if you're unfamiliar with them you might want to start there. 

In the present games discourse, identifiers tend to be either meaninglessly high-level ("open-world", "WRPG", "action game") or prescriptively low-level ("RTwPaSC", "GTA with hovercrafts", "FHwDGaDs"). The problem with this type of classification-by-convention is obvious - it's marketing, not taxonomy. The point is to sell an idea with as concise a package as possible, not to present meaningful analysis of specifically what's in that package. It's predicated on advertising to either A.) predetermined tastes or B.) complete obliviousness. 

Do I understand that when someone calls something a "JRPG" they probably mean "linear as fuck"? Sure. Do I throw around "WRPG" as a synonym for "piece of shit"? Who doesn't? But if we want to be taken seriously like the Kotakus and the TheBlaze.coms of the world, we need more precise terminology.  Final Fantasy XII is definitely a JRPG and Dragon Age Origins is definitely a WRPG, but that just tells us where the games were made and that they have been accepted by the RPG community. At the same time I'm aware no acronym or neologism or taxonomy class or even a backcronym (?) can fully describe and differentiate the content of two like 80-hour experiences. They are compound games with a lot of moving parts.

Luckily there's a whole fuck of a lot of categorization middle ground there. We can talk about how both games use analog sticks or characters or HP meters or how they both have combat and magicwizards and at least one elf. Games are constructed and experienced piecewise (at the very lowest level just because that's how computers and brains work) so the most meaningful comparisons, and thus the most meaningful classifications, are always going to be piecewise.

Join us 

next time in Part 2 where we get our hands dirty and tackle defining the terms "turn-based", "real-time", "action", and "the tactics". You can wear gloves if you don't want to get your hands dirty though. Kid gloves, that is.

Not just code - you can't prove games *aren't* art

First let me assuage your fears that the following has anything to do with defining "art" or delving into whether games are "real art" - it doesn't. We're just going to assume that anything can be art ever because it can and who cares anyway. This is more on the subject of what is a medium and the creator/audience relationship (regardless of whether the providence is "art"). Also it's a protracted response to an 18-month old article on a politics site so whatever that means.

So it starts here:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112646/moma-applied-design-exhibit-mistakes-video-games-art

Don't worry, it's short and there's a historical fact or two to learn. To summarize Leibovitz's argument, video games aren't art because they are code and code can be functionally duplicated without actual duplication. Essentially that the experience created by a video game is not one-to-one with the process of creation. 

While I could break that down on about a million levels, what I find downright captivating is the writer's complete ignorance to the distinction between engine and content. For one thing, the music, imagery, and script (story) that go into a game are produced the exact same way as any other artwork, they are not, like, made of code. Yes they are all stored electronically, but duplicating the sprite for Pac-Man is as plagiaristic as copying an .mp3 file and claiming it as your own work. 

Still, let's bring the argument to a more abstract level, as it could be said that the drawings and songs and dialogue are incidental. If we break a game down into component parts we can see that the Leibovitz's approach only applies to half of a work. Let's call the first component a rule set, what might also be designated mechanics or an engine. The rule set governs what elements can be present in the game - inputs, graphics, sounds, avatars, static or autonomous feedback, etc. - and how such things respond and interact. The second formative component is content, the actual realization of the rule set. Content includes the aesthetics mentioned in the previous paragraph and beyond that the actual compositional elements, from levels to characters to actions, all heavily dependent on what the rule set is. Typically it's stuff that falls under a "design" umbrella, be it art design, stage design, or whatever.

Let's look at the example from the article, Pac-Man. While enumerating the entire rule set isn't feasible in this format (that would amount to rewriting the game), we can list a few basic surface level concepts. Pac-Man and four ghosts are the graphically represented characters on the screen. Each character can face in one of the four cardinal directions. When a character is facing in a direction, they move at a constant speed. If the player moves the joystick in one of the cardinal directions, Pac-Man turns to face in that direction. Walls are a graphically represented element on screen. Walls do not move. When Pac-Man is facing against a wall and directly adjacent to it, he stops moving. You get the idea. This part of the game is indeed entirely embedded in code - code being what Leibovitz describes as an instructional set for a processor.

The second part of Pac-Man is the content, the constructs built upon these rules. The graphical representation of Pac-Man is a yellow Pac-Man-looking guy. Walls are blue lines. Most importantly, walls, pellets, and fruit are laid out in corridor mazes of fixed definition. These layouts, visuals, and sounds are immutable elements of the Pac-Man experience; Level 1 always has the same layout, and that layout is not generated by the processor. I have no idea how Pac-Man itself is written, but likely the graphics are stored as image files originally produced by hand in a drawing program and the layouts are stored as some kind of numerical coordinate databases, also generated by hand (or through a graphical editor).

The content stored in those files, though interpreted by code to present an interactive representation, is originally manually created, and a game without those same elements - the same level design - is not the same game. Not anymore so than basketball would be basketball if played with a raw turkey in the snow with 100 points awarded for each basket. Are we to understand that every film directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell is the same? Near equally incredible, sure, but not the same movie.

Compare it to the work of a composer: a note can be represented on the page by its name, by a black dot on a staff, or by a literal representation of the instrument (e.g. tablature), yet a performer (human or electronic) will always play it the same regardless. It's the choice and arrangement of the notes, not their representation, that constitutes composition. No one would argue that "Moonlight" is a different piece written as a guitar tab than on a staff, nor would they argue that it is not unique because of that multiplicity of documentation. Why? Because the sheets are just a set of instructions that explicate to a human how to reproduce a series of sounds. As an .mp3 file is a set of instructions that explicate to a machine how to reproduce a series of sounds. As code is a set of instructions that explicate to a machine how to reproduce a series of sounds, images, and interactions. Cool notes don't make good songs; cool arrangements of notes do. The same goes for games.

Sadly we are living in an age where the primary gaming audience doesn't realize that level design actually exists. See Leibovitz's invocation of Angry Bird - to him that game is expressly composed of flicking a finger and watching a bird eat pigs (or w/e happens in that game). Then again, most film audiences don't realize the difference between explosions and themes, so it's not like gaming is much worse off.

What's interesting in the case of code and games is the utterly abstract nature of the output. Sheet music is limited to producing music. A filmstrip is constricted to projecting a sequence of images. Yet the code of a game can go further to create responses, physics, random events, even intelligences - all those aforementioned elements of a rule set. Thus it's ultimately ironic that Leibovitz in his piece indicts games as constrained by computers, as if computers are mystical black boxes that can't be understood. While the technological prerequisite for video gaming is hypothetically troubling, exacting boundaries on the complexity of materials is an arbitrary science. Bring a filmstrip or vinyl recording 500 years in the past and try to explain it. Just as film has a more primitive form in drama and music in song, so does video gaming in... games. Unless you'd like to make a case that the only arts are the senses, expression takes different forms across cultures and accordingly adapts to technology - eternal persistence is a fallacy. 

Hell, forget history. Literature can't even make it across language borders. Leibovitz's example of Finnegan's Wake is self-defeating in its reliance on the grapheme/phoneme associations of the English language. Though it may transcend vocabulary, the work is still inaccessible to the illiterate and non-English-speakers, and needless to say it couldn't be produced by either categories any more deftly than a monkey could write Shakespeare. To that end a video game can be far more universal than a novel. Educational, technological, and cultural boundaries are inherent in, possibly even necessary to, our current art forms. Given that programming education and computers are so readily available in our culture, the point of accessibility and universality is moot unless we reframe the debate as "are video games art in tribal Maori society in 1783?".

Flawed though the article is, picking out the shortcomings set me thinking on the staged procedure of game development. What's interesting about the division of games into a rule set and content is that it results in two individuated creative processes - there's the rule design in which the tools are created, then the actual construction of the player experience. The first person in the process is essentially inventing the medium for the second, as if redefining the notes a composer has to work with or the colors for a painter. A single game is its own medium in which countless authors can experiment and create, each owning it in their own way. Taken thusly, video gaming as a whole becomes a sort of meta-medium in which diverse unique media - game rule sets - are collected under the principle of interactivity, and the creation of those media is itself a medium. Creating a strong rule set that facilitates expression and creativity is itself an artistic triumph, even if that canvas is only available to a select few. Public level creators, simulation games, and even franchise iteration expose the inspirational power a good set of mechanics can have.

The creative interaction between the development of rules and content is reflected in the relationship of the player and the game. Though the element of audience participation has been ingrained in art criticism for over a hundred years, games bring interactivity to the explicit, conscious level. The player takes progression into their own hands and is free to explore the experience in accordance with their own predilections. The degree to which a game facilitates this and the uniqueness of feedback is a discussion unto itself - the well-known subject of "depth" - but the presence of control at all puts the player into a creative role. Thus the chain of agency is completed and you know games become the greatest artistic super-medium ever conceived by mankind etc.

Events, items, pick-ups, and power-ups in Shatterhand

Key to understanding the elements that make a game interesting and challenging is classification. The same way genre taxonomy sheds light on what we look for from games as a whole, grouping individual components by function and presentation clarifies their role. Items - pick-ups or power-ups or what have you - are one of the more boring classes to discuss, but they are a powerful tool that can shape an entire game experience. Shatterhand is one such experience, reliant on a complex combination system for building power-ups. So let's take a step back and define some categories of elements that form the baseline from which this system is constructed. These definitions are contextual (as always) and are here formulated primarily for Shatterhand and its parent class of action platforming games. That said, they could easily serve as guidelines for similar rules in other game types.

An event is an input-result link tied to some fixed point in the game's progression. The game state where the event is available and the input that sets it off are together called the trigger, while the resultant game state is called the outcome. The fixed point could be a fixed point in time, location, etc., the idea being that the player can't take an event with them.

An example event from Shatterhand is the elevator activation in Area F: when the player moves through a certain area, a platform starts moving upward from the bottom of the screen. The trigger is pressing right on the control pad when the player character's X coordinate matches the midpoint of the below screen before the elevator has begun moving (that is, crossing the midpoint). The outcome is the same as the original state except a new moving platform and enemy have spawned and are moving upward from the bottom of the screen.

The invisible trigger line for the elevator event

An item is the visual representation of an event. Some events, like the one described above, are not paired with an item. However, an item not paired with an event would simply be a graphic (a visual representation); thus, every item must be tied to an event. Items are extremely common, including everything from doors (which represent an event that transfers the player location) to coins (which represent a score-increase event).

An example of an item from Shatterhand is the transporter. The transporter present at the end of every stage represents an event where the player is transported to the boss chamber. The trigger for this event is pressing down on the control pad while standing on the transporter. The outcome is that the player's location is set to the middle of the boss room and the boss is spawned. The boss spawning is not a separate event because it does not require further input from the player. It is part of the outcome of the interaction with the transporter - that is, if you aren't ready to fight the boss, the only way to stall is to not trigger the transport event.

Other Shatterhand items that don't fall into the lower classes are the health-up/extra-life stations, the money bag, and the act of punching an Alpha to turn it into a Beta or vice versa.

The transporter item

A pick-up is a specific class of single-use item that does not change the environment state. A pick-up can change the player state, the enemy state, or the state of other items, but it cannot change the environment state - that is to say, it can't move the player around or change the room. There's a bit of intentional ambiguity here - I initially had that a pick-up also disappeared or visually indicated once its event had transpired, but I realized that that conflates the functional and visual roles of the object. Aside: an item that changes the environment state and that may be multi-use is a switch (there are none of these in Shatterhand). 

An example of a pick-up from Shatterhand is the coin. The trigger for the coin is crossing it's location while it is visible and the outcome is an increased player G count, the disappearance of the coin, and an otherwise identical game state.

The coin pick-up triggering a score increase event

A power-up is a specific class of event that has a beneficial effect of variable duration to player mechanics. It does not necessarily have to be a pick-up or even an item, but often is. An instance of a non-pick-up power-up would be the Pow station - when the player presses down on the control pad while standing on a Pow station and carrying more than the displayed amount of G, their jacket turns red and they gain additional attack power until they are damaged three times.

An example of a pick-up power-up from Shatterhand is the sword helper. The trigger for the sword helper is walking across an Alpha item when the player is already holding exactly an Alpha and a Beta (in that order) and does not already have a helper. The outcome is that a sword helper spawns, the players letter inventory is cleared, the Alpha item disappears, and the game state otherwise remains the same.

All of the helpers in Shatterhand classify as power-ups, each with a corresponding letter requirement. Another pick-up power-up is the armor suit, which is triggered when the player already has a helper and collects the same three letters in the same order that created it.

Picking up the Alpha under these conditions causes the creation of a sword helper

[this random-ass post courtesy of a nearly finished outline I wrote six months ago for a podcast]

The token trans sexual predator in Azure Striker Gunvolt

Inti Creates' Azure Striker Gunvolt contains a negative stereotype of a transgender person that serves no purpose other than a cheap giggle and the degradation of an already marginalized social minority. That's all that really needs to be said.

But maybe you played the game and you didn't see that. And that's fine. I miss this kind of thing all the time, probably because I don't have a personal stake in it. I'm a regular old male dude and I like being a regular old male dude. I want other people to like being regular old female dudes and regular old trans dudes and regular old agender dudes and whatever else they choose to be. I don't care what they want to be. And I even more don't care what anyone wants me to think of them. That's where portrayals like Azure Striker Gunvolt's Zonda overstep their bounds.

This is a pretty basic race/gender theory 101 subject, but let's remember what "tokenism" is. Tokenism is the use of a single contrasting character in an otherwise homogeneous group who, through isolation, becomes representative of their group of origin. Tokens are typically portrayed as bland and insignificant (simply present to fulfill a diversity obligation) or aggressively stereotypical (either as a subconscious perpetuation of stereotypes or to draw attention to the element of diversity). To grossly simplify things, tokenism is a problem because it subverts the perception of minority individuals as individuals. The one black or gay or female character is shown as representative of group, rather than personal, identity.

As with everything in theory, I'm sure there's probably some specific name for the portrayal of a trans person as lusty, sexually predatory, perverse, and ultimately evil. A "Dr. Frankenfurter" maybe, except that Frankenfurter was ultimately sympathetic. Whatever it is, that's strictly where Zonda falls. The only trans character in Azure Striker Gunvolt, Zonda is a sexually threatening, dehumanized embodiment of indulgence, constructed from lurid imagery, rape-tinged dialogue, and sadomasochistic delight in death.

As is typical of Inti Creates and Mega Man in general, each of Gunvolt's villains has a distinctive palette and visual design, from Viper's flaming red mane to Elise's serpentine curves. Zonda, described as "bigender", is distinguished by a giant pink phallus erupting from their crotch. While other characters are identified by animal traits, Zonda flaunts the classical symbol of male sexuality awash in the textbook color of femininity. The portrait is reduced to an in-your-face caricature of intrusive sexuality, aligned with the damaging stereotype that a transgender person is defined solely by their choice of genitalia.

Zonda's dialogue (approved for ages 10 and up by the ESRB) is carefully crafted to disturb, laced with the flagrant prurience and innuendo used to dehumanize trans characters. Upon encountering the player character, they open lasciviously, "Mmm, look at you. You're all boy, aren't you?". The dialogue immediately objectifies the avatar ("look at you") and goes even further to hint a pedophilic angle with the use of "boy". From there we launch into biological sexual fixation - "A plug for every socket, and a socket for every plug" and onto the conflation of physical and sexual aggression, "I should warn you - I'm carnal. I'm a carnivore.". Zonda finishes - and I'm not exaggerating that all I've quoted here is all the character says - with what, in context, is a threat of rape: "right now, you're a dangly little piece of meat. Taking you for a tug is going to be fun.". The relentless association of transgenderism with sexual assault feeds into the underlying societal perception that trans people are a threat to straight males and tolerance is equivalent to a sacrifice of male liberty.

The subsequent death scene makes a mockery of the character and suggests Zonda is ultimately unworthy of life. The character is the only villain not to be directly confronted by the player - they are defeated off-screen and the player arrives just in time to witness them on their knees salaciously begging for the pain of death. Zonda's final words transcend innuendo into prolonged grotesquerie; "So hot... inside me... aaah!" "This pain... exquisite... nngh!!!" "Kill me... just like that... aaahhh...". In case you weren't sure what the game was getting at, the player character adds "that was no cry for help!" and the killer calls Zonda "abomination". In a world where violence against trans people is epidemic to the point of being a daily reality, sexualizing, mocking, and glorifying the demise of a trans character carries disturbing implications with regard to both the victims and perpetrators of this violence.

A subtler subversion of trans acceptance comes in the terminology used to reference the character: "bigender" and the pronouns "xe" and "xem". By invoking what have become standards of the gender discourse - that is, variable gender identities and gender-neutral pronouns - the game juxtaposes genuine political correctness with its relentlessly negative portrayal of Zonda. The overt sexualization and dehumanization of the character through their conduct concurrently devalues these otherwise positive trends, dragging the entire gender conversation into mocking dismissal. For the record, I chose not to use "bigender" and the x-pronouns to refer to Zonda in this piece because the general ignorance inherent in the portrayal makes me skeptical that any terminology from the game is appropriately applied.

Invariably it must be remarked that the developers and localizers of Azure Striker Gunvolt probably didn't "mean anything" by their characterization of their sole transgender character. The concept probably evolved naturally in conceiving an embodiment of Lust (the game has a seven deadly sins motif). They probably didn't approach it any differently from their Pride character who spouts "thee"s and "thou"s and makes for the honorable fool. It must also be remarked that intention does not matter at all. The game propagates negative stereotypes to its audience, whether through ignorance or choice. Transgender people are very real and in choosing to present a transgender character, Inti Creates now owns the stereotype that a trans person is nothing more than a thrusting phallus of deviant sexual predation begging to be beaten to death.

Addendum on the subject of localization: As with most Japanese-developed games, Azure Striker Gunvolt was translated into English by an entity external (8-4 Ltd.) to the original development team. The exact parallel between the English and Japanese scripts remains nebulous; however, the blame almost certainly falls on both parties. The visual design of the character and their use in cut-scenes - half of the problem - would've been defined by Inti Creates. As for 8-4 - even if the dialogue was translated exactly as written in Japanese, they have the responsibility of appropriating that to fit the target culture - leaving in socially irresponsible content is an active choice to create a socially irresponsible game.

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. 

America's Next Top Hack and Slash Part 1: What is a Hack? What is a Slash?

Both as an attempt to research/define the genre and because hell I like them, I've been on the prowl for a hack and slash that really clicks with me. What is a hack and slash? Something that has no concrete definition in the primary gaming discourse. The term is thrown around to mean everything from beat-em-ups with swords (Golden Axe) to click-fest action RPGs (Diablo) to 3D action games with swords (Devil May Cry). Crazily enough, the term originated as a description for any tabletop D&D campaign heavy on combat (and was thus later applied even to such turn-based D&D video games as Baldur's Gate, Fallout, and Icewind Dale). Read without context, that's leaves it about as meaningless as "beat-em-up" (a term which I reclaimed already).

Black Isle's Icewind Dale represents the most traditional D&D notion of a hack and slash. An RPG with combat.

That's not good enough for me. I mean, I'm not gonna go burn someone's house down over a meaningless term - I've been through that with "the cloud" and around year five of the prison sentence I realized it wasn't worth it. But after defining brawling (combat with enemies who can counter), there remains a wide swath of melee combat action games uncategorized. And it is immensely tiresome to write "melee combat action game" every other sentence. You wonder why I haven't posted in so long? That term right there.

Naturally I want to try to define the type of non-brawling combat that stars in top-down games like Ys, Gauntlet, Beyond Oasis, Dynasty Warriors, and Torchlight - whether they all fall into a single category remains to be seen. I'll need some games to analyze more closely and I'd prefer ones that gravitate as close as possible to the traditional notion of an action RPG "hack and slash" (Diablo) so as to retain some of the term's original flavor. For now our working definition can be "isometric melee combat games", though it'll become more refined as we go.

I could play Diablo III, but I could also spend the $60 on at least six non-Blizzard-taxed games

The problem in instantaneously summoning such a game from my library is that the mouse/keyboard interface of Western action RPGs adds an additional variable; an extra barrier to comparison with other combat I've examined. Whether the interface precipitates a different type of action or the same action simply feels different through a different interface is hard to tell. If I really wanted to dig into that subject I'd grab the console version of Diablo III and compare it side-by-side with the PC (which I may at some point do). But for now I think it's more straightforward to factor out the extra variable by choosing an isometric action game that was designed for controllers in the first place. Which until the 7th generation was essentially a unicorn and is still not a particularly common thing.

One such game I did recently get through is Lord of the Rings: War in the North, one I really enjoyed for its stripped down leveling and looting in favor of tactical action. It's what got me on this whole kick. War in the North is good stuff, pretty much exactly what I'm looking for in terms of gameplay - challenging action, arena combat, ranged/melee mixing, skill based targeting, and defensive mechanics (blocking and dodging). Something I can get my teeth around. The only real shortcoming is that it's a bit limited on the enemy front - most foes are a basic iteration of the standard grunt, the shielded grunt, the slow bruiser, or the ranged archer. It's also not isometric perspective - not that that REALLY matters, just that I'd like to get a game as close as possible to the top-down archetype (since the perspective of this one makes for an easy counter-argument that it's just an RPG aping DMC conventions). It's a fall back, but the truth is, if there aren't other games out there in its bracket, this search will be meaningless anyway.

The "Fellowship's little brothers" syndrome seems to afflict every LOTR game. As if the idea of an alliance of a dude with a pointy-eared dude with a short dude is really fundamental and intrinsic to Middle-Earth.

When I get to playing, I'll try to take a look at these basic questions to help me understand what's going on during the combat:

• What is my goal in battle?
• What persistent factors are there to manage? Health? Mana? Inventory?
• Are there priority classes of enemies? Ones that need to be taken down first? Why?
• What is the spawning behavior of enemies? Fixed position? Arena-style? Infinite?
• What is my opposition?
• What type of attacks do enemies have?
• What type of defense do enemies have?
• What is the size of enemy groups?
• How are enemy types distinguished?
• How are enemy types mixed?
• How do the enemies react to the player?
• BOSSES????
• What options does a player have in combat?
• At what point are those options available?
• What drives one choice over another?
• How are those choices paid off?

Naturally, good answers for these questions require more than demo-play. But that's of course the point of picking a handful of games to stick with it.

So next time on part 2 I'll be listing up some 360 demos I've checked out, how they stack up, and whether any is truly fit for the title of America's Next Top Hack and Slash for Consoles That Actually Has Some Combat To Analyze, Definitely Not DeathSpank.

What is "depth" in combat, and how does it relate to combos? Part 1 of 2

There's this idea that a combat system isn't "deep" unless it involves artificial input complexity. I see this a lot in reading up on beat-em-ups - the first acknowledgement is usually that "this game isn't particularly deep, as there are only two buttons: one for attack and one for jump, and only one combo string - attack, attack, attack". It's rarely (and by rarely I mean I've never seen it) acknowledged that this is a gigantic logical leap unless depth is explicitly defined as "the presence of multitudinous input facilities", which just doesn't sit right with me. That logic would lead to the conclusion that Bit.Trip Runner has deeper gameplay than Super Mario Bros. because it uses more buttons. I get where people are going with the "lots of stuff to do = more choices = more variations = depth" logic, but I think it's a little too quickly become second nature. What about when all of those buttons do the same thing? What about when the player can't tell the difference between the combos? What about when variations are provided through means other than direct input? For example, strategic variations? I'm pretty sure chess can be played with one button. What is the relationship between input complexity in combat and gameplay depth?

Sources tell me this is what chess will look like in the future.

First of all, what precisely do we mean by "depth"? Depth as I understand it is a measurement of the number of means available to the player to create a unique challenge from a presented scenario. So a game that only provides a single means to overcome each situation - say, Pitfall, in which there is an exact jump you have to make to cross each pit - ranks at the minimum possible gameplay depth, as there is only one unique challenge present: hit "jump" at the right moment. A game that provides near infinite means to overcome approach each situation - say, Ogre Battle 64, in which your battalion is made up of dozens of uniquely evolving members whose growth is affected by every decision you make, thus influencing the available factors to fight the next battle - has an incredible amount of depth. The challenge of a mission is dependent on what units you have available to you, and those units will be unique on every playthrough.

Much of the depth of a game may be non-obvious - "deep" games are often associated with "hard to learn", as the gameplay variations usually must be explored and uncovered by a careful player. For instance, a new player approaching Alien Soldier will get some instantaneous depth from the weapon choice. When they reach that first purple centipede boss, they may be firing away with Buster, Sword, or one of the other six Forces, and this alone creates a wealth of strategic choices (without even getting into ammo management and whatnot). The battle will play slightly differently depending on the weapon choice (using Ranger the player can stay on the run but the fight will take a long time, using Lancer they need to wait for openings to peg just a few powerful shots), but is still made to be won with any of them. A more skilled player will learn an even more direct approach to the boss - play the preceding level carefully enough to maintain full health (or use counters on the boss's projectiles to grab life-ups) and then nail a single Phoenix Dash while the boss is relatively still - this is a one-hit kill. This strategy is tougher to pull off and quicker if done correctly, but it doesn't supplant the gun-based strategy of a novice. It's a totally unique challenge, no longer about dodging and aiming but instead about conserving health and then aligning a single dash attack. This is how learning can translate into depth.

How do we apply the concept of depth to melee action combat? Every game develops its own notion of depth through the means it presents the player choices and situations. If the primary goal of the game boils down on a moment-to-moment basis as landing hits without taking too many consecutive hits in return, the choices will probably revolve around "ways to safely land hits". Take Streets of Rage for instance: the player can safely land a hit by punching (only when the enemy is not attacking) or by grabbing (from the side) or by jump-kicking (which has long range but is easy to miss). There is no clear "right" way to land a hit in any situation, so the player can arbitrarily select from these choices - all of them will always work if timed correctly.

So on the surface they seem superficial - isn't the challenge always just to land the next hit? The difference - and thus the guidance for the decision - is what happens after each attack, the way the attack translates the current situation into the next. After a punch, the player is in exactly the same situation as before, but can quickly throw another punch or switch to another attack. A jump kick will instantly knock down its target but leave the player vulnerable for a lengthy period of time. A grab presents A SECOND choice: the player can continue to pummel the grabbed enemy for heavy damage while remaining totally vulnerable or throw them over the shoulder to clear out neighboring foes and create an open space in the direction of the throw. The choice of attack is not arbitrary - it can create a widely different subsequent combat scenario. Using throws spaces enemies out, while using jump attacks keeps them on the ground. Concentrating on punches can help kill off targeted foes fastest. Fighting spaced enemies requires different strategy than fighting a close crowd and killing off certain individuals first can change the way the crowd functions. Thus, the player's attack choices have dynamic enough effects to be directly responsible for the flow of battle, which is that key aspect of the "depth" definition: creating unique challenges.

Perhaps in that case we should expect depth in a combat action game to be associated with a one-to-one relationship between inputs and outputs - that is to say, the game plays differently depending on how the player plays, where "plays differently" means "presents a unique set of challenges". If each choice leads to a new challenge, a multitude of choices would provide a wealth of challenges, and hence, depth of gameplay. It's clear from the definition and the above examples that there's more to depth than just lots of buttons and combos, but we can also see how lots of buttons and combos could easily provide lots of options and hence depth. Let's take a closer look at one particular action game (a beat-em-up, naturally) to see how complex input choices starring combos don't necessarily translate to unique challenges (and hence depth). That game'll be Sengoku 3 - tomorrow. 

Mario VERSUS Luigi: Character select in platformers. 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).

Golem: So, I was thinking about what I might use to write a hefty email, and character distinction in Super Mario 3D World kept bugging me. I dunno how much of this is me repeating myself from the other night, but hey, it's worthwhile to get it written down. None of this is a specific rebuttal to what you said the other night.

In Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Tails and Knuckles offer platforming abilities far beyond Sonic's. The huge, sprawling levels offer plenty of opportunities for areas that only Tails can access, other areas that only Knuckles can access, and some they can both reach that Sonic can't.

I don't know how familiar you are with Sonic 3 & Knuckles, so you may have to take some of this on faith.

I wouldn't call that a particularly shallow system, especially since Sonic 3 & Knuckles often blends in paths naturally. Even when it's something dopey like a wall that only Knuckles can break, the path beyond A) explores a new space of the level map that you may have imagined exploring and B) sticks to the assets and general design sensibilities of the stage. (That latter point is a frightening discussion unto itself, but I think for the purposes of this email, we can gloss over that.)

But mechanically speaking, I think it's a copout compared to something like Super Mario Bros. 2. That is, I mean to compare the low-level rhythm of gameplay, the feel of each individual jump. Sonic 3 & Knuckles' system offers greater possibilities in terms of overall level exploration and uncovering entire new areas.

Anyway, every time you separate characters into their own unique stage segments, that's one less chance for a comparison. If you get a part that requires Knuckles so you can glide over pits, you'll never know what it's like to carry Sonic through that section (you'll have two different sections and only one way to experience each). On the other hand, if you have a tough platforming segment with Sonic, you might remark to yourself that Knuckles would sure be helpful (one section that has two different experiences).

And that leads to a lot of neat strategery in Super Mario Bros. 2. 1-2 has a difficult cave portion where Snifits corner you as you try to blast open walls. One option is to take Toad, who's built for combat--not like you need to make big jumps in the cave anyway. Or, you could take Luigi; if you're skilled, you can bypass that cave section entirely by jumping to the top of a tall hill. Anyone can play that part, but the character you choose will cast the same stage design in a different light.

There are neat moments of character comparison in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and Super Mario Bros. 2 does feature character-specific paths. I just mean to compare their overall demeanor. Can I use the word "demeanor" like that?

So, in general, I like to have a way to cheese a situation and a skilled way to approach a situation. That's as opposed to something binary, either you can do a segment or you can't.

And I think that fits Super Mario 3D World's overall arcadey mentality. Something like Sonic 3 & Knuckles or Super Mario 64 is built for hanging out and poking around. Super Mario 3D World, on the other hand, has stages built around a single path. The interesting part isn't how you explore, it's in the mechanics of experiencing that path.

You also get character-relevant puzzles, but they're not character-dependent. So, that green star might be easier to grab with Peach, and recognizing as much is solving a puzzle. Figuring out how to get there with Mario is another puzzle.

3D World does have moments where you can only collect something if you have the right powerup, but that's a matter of skill rather than character choice. They'll always give you the necessary powerup in the level, too.

If all the character-specific switches in 3D World lead to stamps, and none to green stars, that would fall in line with my reading. I have no idea if that's the case.

On that note, it's worth saying that my points about Super Mario 3D World are in theory. A better writer would have examples: here's one green star that suggests the use of one character and provides challenge for another, something like that. Not only has it been like two weeks since 3D World came out, but given the game's size and range (see: the Super Mario Galaxies), I don't know that I'll ever have a great grasp on it.

[So we had a bit of an offline discussion about how many games actually have a character select, particularly platformers featuring exploration, and particularly ones that don't allow swapping on the fly. The answer we came up with is that we don't know a ton :( . Super Mario Bros. 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles are not a particularly common model - if you think about it, the primary games starring character selection are fighters/racers/shoot-em-ups/brawlers/etc. Those adventurier games that do allow character selection, like a few from the late Castlevania and Mega Man series or Ganbare Goemon, usually have completely scripted differences in campaigns (a la Resident Evil) or superficial or action-only distinctions between characters.

Nonetheless, the conversation on SMB2 and S&K3 is valid and in keeping with the original lead-in, Super Mario 3D World]

Yourself: What it sounds like you like about Super Mario Bros. 2 is that it's a platformer with a weapon select; your 'weapons' here being the characters' physical attributes. I suppose what leads me to make that wholly semantic distinction is the notion that there are really two skill-sets at play in a game that includes both action and exploration, one for each type of gameplay. In as simple a platformer as Sonic 3 & Knuckles or SMB2, those skill-sets are comprised of the same abilities, but still applied differently - Knuckles' glide may allow him to safely swoop over a boss or cross a gap to a new section of a level that Sonic can't reach. Anyway, I liken the selection of an action skill-set to a weapon select because, really, isn't that the same thing you see in a Gradius or a Gunstar Heroes or an Earth Defense Force 2017? The pre-determination of a set of functional capabilities?

You say of Super Mario Bros. 2: "the character you choose will cast the same stage design in a different light". I find that to be a somewhat optimistic way of looking at things. For instance, the aforementioned cave from 1-2 - it really doesn't feel like it's made to be played as any character BUT Toad/Mario. Sure Luigi can make it through, but his skills don't offer any benefits - in fact, his high jump just kind of gets in the way, causing him to bump into the ceiling and making Snifit bullets harder to dodge, and his slow pick-up speed makes the bombs more tedious to deal with. I suppose that's "a different light", but to me that light seems to be revealing that that part of the level is meant for a different character - similar to the way 4-1 (Lakitu stage) of Super Mario Bros. is suited to the Fire Flower, even though it can certainly be survived without. I see how Luigi's version is different, but it's not totally clear to me how it's rewarding (it's slow and awkward to time).

I'm not saying this is a universal syndrome or that I have a problem with that, simply that my impression of the game is that it vacillates between generic-enough-to-play-the-same-with-every-character and character-specific segments, such that I don't think it really is so much more complex than "pick the character you like best, and occasionally switch to someone specific for a particular segment". There are subtly variant experiences and plenty of parts that do play uniquely interesting with all four, and there's certainly nothing to dictate that you must have a favorite character, i.e. that you can't equally enjoy playing with all four, but I've never found nearly enough variation in the bread-and-butter gameplay between characters to make it feel any more like four games in one than Pokemon Red is 1.1390625e+13 (150^6) in one.

Bearing that in mind, neither Super Mario Bros. 2 nor Super Mario 3D World is purely an action game. There is exploration and (light) puzzle-solving to be done as well, thus the characters' exploratory skill-sets come into play when I'm making a selection. In fact, in Super Mario 3D World my choice is dictated almost entirely by how I'm looking to play the game. While the characters are largely balanced, the heavy use of scrolling and mobile and rhythmic obstacles, like the Train levels, the gate level [fill the number in later], and the rolling tiles in Star-2 certainly suggest faster characters for better scores and play times. With that on top of the tendency for Green Stars and Stamps to be hidden past high and long jumps, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to designate Mario and Toad as the action characters and Luigi and Peach as the explorers. So, playing with that understanding, I don't even really need to be on the lookout for Luigi- or Peach-specific puzzles - I can just plow through the fun-runs with Toad and not worry about missing a Star, knowing that when I go back with Peach I'll have a much easier time grabbing it anyway. 

I don't think I've come across any (or enough to remember) "puzzles" complex enough that they demand character-specific solutions (yeah, Peach can cheese a lot of stuff, but so can anyone with a Raccoon suit) - the game has not broken my general Mario mentality of playing stages once for challenge and once for completion - the difference here is that I have different characters suited for each play-through. That's really nice - since I'm still going for completion on every run, I get to see multiple variations on the action and on the puzzles. But again, I don't think the game provides a compelling argument to play every stage with every character. And that's not even touching on the fact that a larger number of the levels are built around equalizing mechanics like the boost pads and beep-boop blocks that essentially nullify character benefits. 

Golem: That got me thinking; one key difference between Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario 3D World is the sense of platforming. I notice fewer bottomless pits in Super Mario 3D World, lessening the importance of someone like Peach. On top of that, verticality isn't played up as much, either--after all, judging how tall something is in 3D World is harder than in 2D. So, I might pick Luigi in Super Mario Bros. 2 if one level has those plants that shoot fire straight up, since he'd be able to jump over the fire. I don't think I ever have trouble jumping over anything in Super Mario 3D World. In all, the size of my jumps is less important for regular old action, meaning it (pretty much) only holds relevance when I'm exploring. That's on top of the other gestures that even out character attributes that you mentioned, such as powerups and boost pads.

So, when it comes to something like Super Mario Bros. 2, I think you don't give "subtly variant experiences" enough credit. Assuming you enjoy the game enough to play all the way through four times, it's neat that the characters tweak that experience. It's not an entirely new game, but I gain a new appreciation for old challenges. So far, in Super Mario 3D World, I've struggled to find enough subtle variance to care. These days, I'm usually just picking Mario because I can't find something to care about in the other characters. (Rosalina aside, who opens up new attack possibilities.) Granted, that's working alongside my general fatigue with the game, so I'm already biased against it.

But it sounds like you'd say the game is fairly balanced between action and exploration? You have one approach to the stage where you just clear it, and another where you collect everything, so it sounds like you pick from Mario/Toad just as often as Luigi/Peach.

Yourself: When it comes to a mechanic though, is it fair to presume you enjoy the game enough to play all the way through four times? I'm not even sure I agree with the unpleasantly specific thesis, "if you like SMB2, you'll love playing through as all four characters! If you don't like SMB2, you won't!" Given the presumption that one likes the game enough to play it multiple times, the proclivity still exists for a player to pick the same character that felt best the first time. That's typically how I end up playing any given game - as you said, we're assuming I'm already motivated by other factors to replay, so I don't tend to re-evaluate the character selection process. If I decided I liked Mario for 3-1 the first time, there was probably a reason I made that decision, so I'm likely to stick with Mario for 3-1 the second time. 

I think the issue we've been skirting is simply a difference in the way you and I play games. We both enjoy gameplay that encourages experimentation, and selection is an explicit mechanic through which a game can facilitate tomfoolery. I think the conversation on SMB2 has pretty clearly illustrated the two sides of the issue - your approach, to uniquely combine skills with challenges to gradually uncover more information about every individual part of the game, and mine, to try to solve the puzzle of which selection maxes some metric for each situation and then to put together the solutions to form a grand picture of the game. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the way you think about it is: "what is Mario's version of the game like? How does it compare to Toadstool's?" Whereas I think about "which parts of the game belong to Luigi? Which are played as Toad?" Don't get me wrong, I'm not coming out in support of the Sonic 3 & Knuckles / World of Illusion approach, where there are portions of the stage ONLY accessible by a single character, because figuring out which parts I like to play as whom - solving that puzzle - is entirely why I like character select. But that rarely involves actually playing all the parts with all the characters.

Back to 3D World - I think we both land in the same place, that for the purported experimental avenue that the character select provides, there aren't enough original rewards to reap from the levels to justify exploring it. No to your latter question, I wouldn't say 3D World is anywhere even close to balanced between action and exploration. As I said, I still go for completion on every run, even the "action" run, and the game is so light on puzzles/exploration that I usually do get the 100% on that Mario/Toad attempt. It's only maybe a quarter of the time that I find myself dropping to the Luigi/Peach pool for a collection rerun. It's a slightly different kind of play-though, but one that I only experience on a small fraction of the levels.

Golem: That's a succinct way to put it--that is, "what's X's version of the game like?" versus "which parts of the game belongs to X?" You know, using X reminds me that that's what X4 versus X5 is like. Putting aside the question of whether or not one would actually want to play X5, you get character selection on a per-level basis because some levels work better with a ranged weapon, while others feel better with a strong melee move.

Is the conclusion that Super Mario 3D World's characters ultimately satisfy no one? I mean, I'd take it over New Super Mario Bros' character selection any day, but they aren't different enough, and the stages don't do much to evoke their differences. On the other hand, if you're building a game for four-player coop, I can see why you wouldn't want the characters to stray too far from one another.

Yourself: Yeah. The conclusion is that it's a game that's made for co-op, so going too out-of-bounds for an interesting single-player character would've made it a hassle to play. I'll give them that co-op is fun, and that given more balanced stage design - a Super Mario Galaxy 2, if you will - I think the differentiation between action and exploratory characters would be sufficiently interesting. Of course, the portioning and flow of levels in Galaxy 2 vs. 3D World is an entirely different conversation... and one we almost had instead of this one, had I fired off my half-completed opening email before yours on character select.

It figures you would bring up X4/X5 - this conversation actually made me want to go back and replay them. I always enjoyed the distinction between X and Zero in X4, feeling like it really was two different games, but never got a feel for it in X5. 

The two (and a half?) sides of 2.5D - how to capitalize on depth

2.5D is one heck of a silly-ass term introduced in the PlayStation era to describe the 2D gameplay set in a 3D environment featured in games like Klonoa, NiGHTS into Dreams, and Kirby 64. More recently the term has been applied to Trine, New Super Mario Bros., 'Splosion Man, and dozens of others. It's a bit ironic - in the fifth generation, the 2D gameplay was conservative and the 3D graphics cutting edge, while in the seventh generation, it's the 3D visuals that are the norm and the 2D playing field that subverts expectations. Anyway, I mostly just said that to prove that I know what irony is, cuz no one does anymore. Even complaining about people not understanding irony has become cliche. How ironic.

See that time I used it wrong.

2.5D did exist in some sense before polygonal graphics - I'd say it's not too much of a stretch to say that parallax scrolling (Moon Patrol, Sonic the Hedgehog) is its predecessor. Parallax similarly strives to 

Man I just had to go bitch out Wikipedia for the terrible article it has on 2.5D. Don't go there, it's ugly. The page looks like a Frankenstein's Monster of unrelated articles on isometric graphics and pseudo-3D with a teeny tiny paragraph acknowledging actual 2.5D games as we know them today. If you do go, make sure to check out my bitchin' takedown on the Talk page. See, I'm an armchair armchair Wikipedian. That is to say, one can edit Wikipedia without getting out of their seat. But I don't even do that much. I just yell on the Talk pages at the actual productive editors that they're doing it wrong. But seriously, who has time to do all that research? Let a monkey do it. Did you know that infinite monkeys given infinite cheeseburgers will inevitably produce the entire content and discussion pages of Wikipedia? This is a known scientific fact. The real question is: who's cooking the cheeseburgers? Or wait, by the infinite monkey clause, are the infinite monkeys also guaranteed to produce infinite cheeseburgers the same way they wrote Hamlet? In that case maybe it'd be easier just to do hamburgers.

Where was I? Goddamnit why did I stop mid-sentence for that? Okay. Parallax. Parallax scrolling is the adjustment of the scroll-rate of distant objects to create a 3D perspective using only 2D objects. You knew that though. When 3D models turned real, they became the preferred method for displaying 3D environments (shocking!), though 2.5D didn't really take off because 2D gameplay was simultaneously going out of vogue. With 2D's recent resurgence in popularity, 2.5D games are probably even more common than strict 2D, as these days 3D visuals are actually easier to make decent-looking on TVs than are 2D sprites.

2.5D is very popular with modern fighters

I've gotten into the bad habit of spending a few paragraphs just defining my terms and thus wasting a lot of time before getting to my actual point. It's because I don't know who the audience of this blog is. I want it to be accessible, but it's almost a prerequisite for interest in this discussion that you've played 2.5D games... in which case you likely already know what 2.5D is, so you don't need me to explain it. Hey looks like this is one of those articles with running commentary - sweet!

Even the most primitive 2D games use some approximation of 3D - any game with a backdrop has extended its world beyond a strict 2D plane. Super Mario Bros. shows us hills, clouds, and castles beyond our reach. The limitation of 2D is not a graphical one, but the very distinction between the field of play and the field of observation - traditionally, the foreground and the background. Tantalizing players with beautiful vistas and distant ruins can enhance their engagement with the world, so one of the great appeals of 3D gameplay is the ability to reach those places - the unification of the entire game world into a continuous, playable space. A player who is free in all [three] dimensions can strive toward that distant castle and everything else they see, limited only by real environmental boundaries like walls and cliffs. 2.5D offers a chance to bridge the gap between these modes - to use a two-dimensional field of play to span a three-dimensional space. While this keeps movement comfortably in the 2D realm, the plane of movement itself can wind through the third dimension.

Surprisingly, most 2.5D games do not capitalize on this opportunity. Games like Little Big Planet, New Super Mario Bros., and Donkey Kong Country Returns retain the traditional 2D distinction between background and foreground. 3D visuals endow the backgrounds with more depth than is achievable strictly in 2D, but the field of play remains as limited as ever. Check out an example from DuckTales: Remastered: 

Gameplay starts at 1:45. Observe all the background objects that Scrooge can never reach. The game takes place entirely on a flat plane parallel to the screen.

This type of game remains strictly left-to-right and is really just a visual upgrade (or downgrade, if you're of that opinion) to 2D. The player's involvement in the world isn't enhanced because the dissonance between playable and observable space is retained. Prepare for a mind-blowing MS Paint graphic I made to illustrate this type of world-thickening:

The distinguishing factor of this kind of 2.5D is the continuous depth of the background.

You can see that the only difference between 2D and this approach to 2.5D is a parallax-plus-one filling-in of empty space between layers - these are very much 2D games with 3D graphics. The camera still shows only one side of the action and the environment.

More ambitious 2.5D games take advantage of their 3D worlds to eliminate this wasted space. The 2D plane of play loops and twists through a logical 3D environment, allowing the player to fully explore (in a guided fashion) everything that they see. Check out the recent Castle of Illusion remake:

Gameplay starts at 0:20. Watch how Mickey's paths curve around to span the entire room.

This type of intertwining movement can also be seen in games like NiGHTS, Goemon's Great Adventure, and my personal favorite 2.5D game: Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil. Note how these - like full 3D games - only bound the player's exploration with physical barriers. There is an invisible dimensional limit on movement that forces a fixed left-right path through the world, but the end result looks like a trace of any given run of Super Mario 64 or Bubsy 3D. The camera moves along with these curved paths, keeping the player parallel to the screen - in doing so it swoops and rotates to show us many different sides of the game space. Back to MS Paint:

Convoluted image, but hopefully you can see I'm trying to represent that the plane of player movement bends within a fixed area. The camera angle at any given point can be represented by the normal vector of the plane.

The drawing in this post gives a different view of the same situation. We can see that, removing the presence of time, a 2.5D game like Klonoa is actually identical to a 3D game. Of course, we can't remove the presence of time (or at least, I can't - I don't know if I have any Tralfamadorians among my readership), so the experience is distinct. But it's also distinct from classic 2D, in that, although the gameplay could be spread out over a flat plane, the game world could not be flattened with it. 

The term 2.5D seems often to be considered a superficial distinction, as evidenced by its application to these two very different styles of presentation. While there is certainly no right/wrong, good/bad here, it seems clear to me that the latter Klonoa-derived category are indeed games attempting to bridge the gap between 2D and 3D, while the former are just glorified 2D. Don't get me wrong, I love 2D. But 2.5D has the potential to portray a space of greater depth and complexity, which expands the applicability of 2D gameplay to more realistic world models.