Summer Long Back Blog-Part 1 + Game Documentaries

Not my actual backlog but I wanted to put the image up just to say, holy fuck.

Finally part 1 of my summer long journey to finish of my back log of games has come to its beginning and a roaring one I might add. I finished Rogue Galaxy. It took a surprisingly short time. Its still about 40 hours long but I managed to clock in those 40 hours in 5 days.

Rogue Galaxy was okay. Its what you would expect from a jrpg, its really nothing new. If you've ever played any of the Dark Cloud games you kind of know what your getting into. The combat is simple hack n' slash with a few RPG elements. Combat is incredibly easy to learn and mastering it is hardly an achievement of any value. A lot of that could come from the fact that I ended up grinding my characters to the point where they were stronger then most foes that I encountered later on in the game. It didn't hurt that I managed to create a weapon that ended up being the strongest weapon in the game, I kind of made the experience less challenging for myself.

That reminds me though, the weapon creation system is great. To fill you in, at one point early in the game you meet a toad named toady (how creative!) and he offers his services to you. What does he do? If you make him eat two different weapons he'll mix them together by the means of indigestion, well not really indigestion but he spits a new weapon out after chewing the two together. Whatever, its hard to explain, all you need to know is, chew and spit and voila new weapon. This mechanic was preposterously addictive. Back in my World of Warcraft days I was a serious loot whore. I loved making new weapons and things of that nature in Rogue Galaxy. I ended up accidentally making one of the strongest weapons in the game, I figured this out after I checked a gamefaq on it.

The story is kind of "Meh", I mean its kind of what you would expect from a jrpg. The only really interesting thing is the story's similarities to Star Wars. You start off as a rag tag kid whose an orphan on a planet that's essentially a desert. You have a robot friend who has a pseudo-British accent and is very formal and all that. At one point in the story the words "I am your father" and "That's not possible!" are said in the game in a way that just sparks off memories of Star Wars. The one big gripe about the story I have is the ending and a big plot hole.

First off, the plot hole. During your adventures you meet an archaeologist in the game named Burton. You end up bumping into Burton a fair amount of times during your journey. During a sequence in the story he finds a tablet, its regarding a planet (Called Eden) that the group of protagonists are trying to reach to find an amazing treasure. On the tablet is a message about the planet. Burton reads the message and seems terrified. He says something around the lines of "Eden isn't actually a planet" and "I have to warn the group about this danger". What bothered me about this moment is that by the end of the game the developers completely ignore the scene I just mentioned. They never tell the player what the tablet said. Burton is even found on the planet Eden and he doesn't say a damn thing about what the "Danger" is. Its almost like something else was supposed to happen at this point in the story and the developers scrapped it. There was never any danger. The game ended after I explored through Eden and did what I had to. No danger or secret, that one scene is completely left ambiguous and unanswered.

I've played some bad boss battles in my time but ,my god, is the last boss of this game terrible. The battle is divided into about 10 different sequences. Now this part is fine with me, I likr long boss battles, but I also like checkpoints and saves. All of the fights are in succession of each other with no saves or stops or checkpoints. If you fail one of the fights its straight back to the start. What's worse is that the last fight is super frustrating and difficult. The last boss battle turns the gameplay into a completely different direction as well. It takes away most of the RPG elements the gameplay had and turned into a reflex based action game. Also the ending of the story is essentially a big "Fuck you" to the player. One of the characters in your party (named Kisala) goes off and leaves the group to become the queen of the planet Eden, the game ends the group of main characters going separate ways except the final 3 characters, your character, a character named Zegram, and the ship captain who is the man who adopted Kisala, go off to take back Kisala. The game ends with a screen of text saying that the party's mission to take Kisala back was "Their last mission as pirates". It ends with that piece of text. Literally that's it, no closure at all. An ending open for fanfic. Such bullshit.

For the most part the game was fun but a lot of the content at the end really ruined it for me but that's one game off the list nonetheless. I was thinking of changing up the list, I want to add more games to it. 20 hours of game seems to be an easy feat for me so I'm thinking I might be able to to more jrpgs. I'm thinking of doing Final Fantasy 7 but that's up in the air for now. I'll give an update on that later.

Jason Rohrer and his wife

On a totally unrelated topic I watched a German/French documentary today called "Into the night..." its a documentary series where two people in a related field have a conversation together for the span of a day. This time around they had well known indie game designer Jason Rohrer and game designer Chris Crawford who has become well known for his criticisms of the game industry.

This episode of "Into the night..." has an extremely pessimistic atmosphere to it. It wasn't a surprise to me after I read up on Chris Crawford a little more after I watched the documentary. They discussed a lot of interesting topics that you would assume to hear from indie game designers but what really had me thinking were their criticisms on current game design. I wont go into all of them but I do want to talk about one point Chris Crawford made specifically.

During a dinner with Jason he mentioned that he hated the "Techie" approach to game design. This is regarding how game designers like to, as Crawford referred to it as, "Fucking around with computers and when they discover something somewhat interesting they try to build a game around it". I'm paraphrasing but you get the point. Adam Sessler did a Soapbox a while back where he discussed the idea that video games, apart from being a technical media, that they are also a creative medium mentioning people who learn to code and think they can be game designers.

I know these people. I know these "Game Designers". This concept of the techie approach to games becomes all too apparent to me the more I grow old. People seem to think that if they are good at coding they can make games when that's far from it. Sure, coding is an essential part of creating a video game but you are also creating. You're not just fucking with numbers, you're creating a piece of work that can illicit emotion and share ideas. You're making a piece of art. When someone wants to be a film maker do they just learn how to work a camera and get straight to work? Fuck no. They go off and learn about other forms of art. Video games are a creative medium as I feel this techie approach is really a product of the mainstream perception of video games: Tits guns! Lawl Halo! I definitely disagree with a fair amount of the points these two games devs made in this documentary I can whole heartedly agree that the medium has some growing up to do.