Posts
I have not been posting nearly enough this year and I want to steer
back from that. To that end
I have found a 30-day blog challenge and will be writing out entries, hopefully
I can get all thirty days without any breaks, and if I manage to do that (since
August has 31 days) I will think of an additional entry to write about. I have done a 30-day
challenge before, it for movies, but that was a
while back, feel free to read those too if you like.
Today is
day 23 and the topic is “Guilty Pleasure Game”.
What does
that even mean? That is stupid. I don’t know who feels guilty about liking
something but if they are maybe they should rethink their lives. If they are doing something illegal and
feeling guilty fine, listen to that feeling and move past doing the illegal
thing, but a video game… That is just stupid.
Cloaking your interests and passions in a veil of irony so that you don’t have to feel the shame of other people knowing that you like things is stupid. The idea of someone being ashamed of having personality
that isn’t defined by group think is a concept that permeates too much of both
online culture and real life culture.
Stop feeling you have to explain away what you enjoy to idiots who think
that pretending to not like things makes them somehow superior.
Whatever. The guy writing 30 prompts was probably getting
low in the barrel at this point. I have
the benefit of only having to shave off the one’s I think are stupid and
replacing them with things I like more.
So fuck
that prompt, and the stupid culture that made someone think it was a good idea.
Today is
day 26 and the topic is “Guilty Pleasure Game” “A Game that Surprised
You”.
This might
also be a move of laziness on my part, because I have already talked about this game, the moment that surprised me, and have already heartily endorsed why it
should be played. “Call of Duty 4:
Modern Warfare” is a game that by no rights I should have enjoyed and yet it
totally delivered, pulled me in, and made me feel like a big damn hero. A feeling that would later be demonized and
excised by “Spec Ops: The Line” so I owe my enjoyment of that game (previously discussed) to the foundation laid by “Call of Duty”.
Umm… This
is too short an entry even with me railing against “guilty pleasure” as a
concept. The whole point of me doing
this 30-day challenge is to get me to write more and I have already been
slacking.
So, what was another game that
surprised me?
Ooh! I know.
The only Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) I have ever given a shit
about, “Tales of Symphonia”. This game
was introduced to me by two friends of mine that I studied abroad with in China
and continued to hang out with in spite of me annoying them far more than I
should have (because I was a loser in my early 20’s… Most of my 20’s… and now
going into my 30’s).
 |
| This is actually a less cartoon version of the originals art. I just thought it looked cool. |
“Tales of
Symphonia” is a story game, basically an entire anime series played out in cut
scenes both in and out of the game engine, sometimes text, sometimes video, and
all the action is done by the player. There
were multiple endings which made it somewhat repayable different love interests
and side missions allowed for a fun little twist on things. While the narrative was a bit baffling at
times “Tales” made up for it with a cool real time combat system that allows
for multiplayer input with a variety of moves and visuals spread among an
eclectic group of characters.
The story
is derivative when it isn’t baffling, but for whatever reason I liked it,
especially the main character of Lloyd, a sword fighting adventurer who lives
with his adopted father (who is a dwarf in the fantasy sense) and while skilled
in his areas of expertise he is not a golden boy, he can be flaky, selfish,
shallow, or just pissed. Lloyd and the
other characters are characters with layers, interests, histories, and their
own goals.
 |
| This is fan art. |
I would like to point out some basic color theory at work here. Lloyd's
clothing utilizes red for passion and drive, but is stabilized by black which
shows his mysterious past (his parents), and a shock of white emphasizing his naiveté
and pure intentions setting out on the adventure. All of the game’s characters make good use of
color theory and I think that sets their character designs ahead of most other
games (I would also point to Nintendo for other examples of great use of color
in character design, and I have already talked about what else I like about them).
The narrative of “Tales” hit all
the right notes for me and the combat system was fun enough that it kept me
invested even when the story felt a little flat or silly.
Wow, I
spent more time complaining about this game than complimenting it. Let me give it a few more positive
words. I liked the art style, it is
cartoony and bright without being too detailed and chaotic (something I lay at the feat of the “Final Fantasy” franchise).
The setting has a good blend of classic rural fantasy with tiny villages
and remote fortresses, but a big helping of Magi-tech, with towers that look
like they come off the cover of a 1970’s science fiction novel (if you like classic sci-fi art, here is a tumblr you can follow). The bad guys have a variety of interesting
motivations, ranging from greed, to lust for power, bigotry, and grief that I
found myself understanding.
 |
| "So, anyone else wondering about the old time European aesthetic... and the 7,000 meter tall towers full of robots?" "Look, if Marvel's 'Thor' can have magic space vikings and still feels like it makes sense, we can believe this." |
More positive, as I mentioned
before the story does have a few instances in which you can change things and
have the characters behave how you think they should in certain key instances,
rather than just acting out the script handed down by the creators. The Story train is mostly on rails, but you
can switch tracks at certain points to make things more interesting to
you. This minor narrative choice sets “Tales”
apart from what I consider to be the biggest sin of JRPG’s: that there is no
roleplaying, just playing a role (another thing I ascribe to “Final Fantasy”
but that might be a misplaced strike, I have never played long enough into an
FF game to see if there are opportunities to split the narrative down an unexpected path).
You could say that I have nostalgia
for this game as I sought out a used copy and played it for 25 hours last
year. My interest did peter out, but I
still saw all the things I recalled liking and messaged one of the friends who
introduced me to “Tales” about how I had gotten it. Apparently, it is out on Steam, and I think
it is worth playing, but they have been catching shit for how the graphics were not optimized for PC, so if you intend to play it on there do look into getting
some mods (there is an online fandom that is big on this) to clean up the
graphics.
Do you
disagree with me about the idea of a Guilty Pleasure? If so, please give me some kind of example in
the comments because I just do not understand it. On the other end, maybe you want to talk
about being surprised by a game, in which game do share an instance in which a
game beat your expectations. Or do what
most people do and write nothing.
______________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment