Another short intro this week, because I went on and on again in the Addenda section. I wanted to talk a little about Indie RPGs and design prioritization, since it relates to this week's Indie Game of the Week. RPGs are some of the most expensive games to produce: not only are there a lot of systems to create and balance, from equipment to character and enemy stats and skills to elaborate combat engines which have to account for multiple approaches depending on the player's class ("How would a mage tackle this encounter as opposed to a melee type?"), but the games themselves are generally pretty long. That means that, for an Indie studio wanting to tackle the genre, the ability to compartmentalize and only focus on what they feel is the most vital to the essence of an RPG is highly beneficial to their otherwise crushing workload.
When I played Aarklash: Legacy this week, it was remarkable to what extent they made the combat the focal point. A more detailed story, side-quests, NPCs, or elaborate level design would've taken them too long, and Cyanide's a studio with many irons in the fire at any given moment. Aarklash has a fairly sophisticated graphics level for an Indie RPG - it has a fixed top-down camera perspective but everything has a 3D model, so we're talking around Neverwinter Nights era - but it's streamlined to the extent that all the characters are pre-generated with a small selection of unique abilities each, and there's usually about half a dozen enemy types or less in each area. The story is told mostly through exposition dialogue clips and brief synopses between "acts", delivered via loading screens as the party leaves one area and enters the next. The equipment system is fairly minimal too: a Diablo-style randomized selection of buffs between four different accessory types, with the smart feature of breaking down unnecessary items to build a gauge that eventually unlocks one strong item further down the road, rather than worrying about currency and vendors.
But Aarklash succeeds based on the strength of that combat system, which finds multiple clever applications for its real-time group-managing and positioning system (similar to the Infinity Engine games) and ensures a steady challenge level throughout by eliminating random encounters for the sake of distinct, bespoke battles. It occurs to me that other Indie RPGs have followed a similar pattern; focusing on what the developer feels as important and letting other elements fall to the wayside. Elements like graphical prowess and expensive 3D modelling (a lot of Indie RPGs use the 16-bit reminiscent RPGMaker, and other antiquated formats), or level design (many use proc gen instead, especially those of a roguelike nature), or elaborate characterization (hence the ubiquity of customizable "tabula rasa" protagonists and parties, though that goes back a lot further than just Indie RPGs). Pillars of Eternity II was a huge production, relatively speaking, but many of the other Indie RPGs I've played of late had their priorities in order and didn't suffer too much overall just concentrating on the tenets of the genre that mattered most to them.
I think we'll continue to see innovative design built with the intent to truncate or prune aspects of the traditional RPG experience from Indie developers looking to trim the fat wherever they can, and if that has the side-effect of shorter but more impactful/intense playthrough lengths then all the better for those of us who are a little more time-deficient.
Hopefully you aren't so hard up on free time yourselves that you can't give these weekly blogs a read:
- As mentioned above, the Indie Game of the Week this time was Aarklash: Legacy, one of Cyanide Studio's many curious RPGs. Aarklash seems specifically built to get the most out of the Infinity Engine style real-time/turn-based combat, presenting situational scenarios where you'd have to move characters to get out of the away of damaging enemy attacks, singling out the deadliest opponents to deal with first, and using every trick and cooldown ability at your disposal to win. I can't fault that aspect of it, but the game has to sacrifice everything else I like about the genre - a rich story and characters, side-quests, an elaborate treasure/loot system - to get there. An acquired taste, but I'm glad something this oddly focused can exist.
- We're dropping in on the Super Nintendo for a couple of Japan-only multiplayer block-stacker puzzle games in SNES Classic Mk. II: Episode XXI: Writer's Blocks. Our wildcard candidate was Kan's Super Gussun Oyoyo 2, the Super Famicom-exclusive sequel of a port of an arcade game that reimagines Tetris as a madcap rush to save a little bald idiot from catastrophe by building a tetromino staircase to the exit. The considerably safer nominee option was Bullet-Proof Software's Tetris Battle Gaiden: a game beloved of the Giant Bomb crew and a Tetris variant specifically built for multiplayer antagonism and upsets with its spell system and shared upcoming tetromino pool. If this second SNES Classic is going to succeed it's going to need some good multiplayer games, and I think we have that covered here.
Addenda
TV: Maniac (2018)
I'd heard enough positive things about Netflix's new show Maniac to want to check it out, but what really sealed the deal was how reminiscent its aesthetic was to the latest season of Marvel's Legion. Legion's a weird show that owes a lot to narrative unpredictability (a quality I also appreciate in NBC's afterlife sitcom The Good Place) but that second season really started shifting things towards the obtuse with this retro-futuristic (I think TV Tropes calls it "zeerust"), 1970s, quasi-Japanese, not-quite-cyberpunk-but-getting-there look that, while it didn't make the show any easier to follow, it did at least make it visually rich and stylistically remarkable. Maniac's a little more grounded than that show, but even outside its multiple fantasy dreamscapes the quotidian lives of these characters are markedly different from our own. The reality of the show has all these boxy computers and 80s pastels but is identifiable as the future with its non-existent (in our world) commodities, some good but most bad: the idea that a company will pay your immediate expenses by having someone follow you around all day telling you about amazing offers from their commercial sponsors is a real shitshow that I could see happening one day outside of a Black Mirror episode. The dreamscapes, meanwhile, are linked to the show's central narrative drive of a pharmaceutical test that administers a trio of special drugs to eliminate the need for therapy by having the mind create scenarios that will process trauma and identify mental illnesses on its own, but these flights of fancy often serve as an excuse to get silly.
That last point is what really makes Maniac an interesting show to watch, if not always in the most positive sense. It's a gloriously rendered world, with plenty of excellent costume and set design work, but it's alternately landmarked by moments of raw emotional honesty and ridiculous scenarios that its main leads - Jonah Hill as Owen Milgrim and Emma Stone as Annie Landsberg, both accomplished dramatic and comedic actors - play either as close to the bone as possible or for broader laughs as is appropriate. That the show's primarily about mental health conditions like depression, schizophrenia and other psychoses kinda makes the funny parts all the stranger for their inclusion. My theory is that, without these occasional moments of levity, the show might become too suffocating. When it's time for some dramatic emotional tension, both Hill and Stone handle their on-screen misery with aplomb: a whole show of that might be too much, or at the very least somewhat discomforting. Same's true for the (only slightly) more straight roles of Justin Theroux's project lead Dr. James Mantleray, Sonoya Mizuno's asocial computer whiz Dr. Azumi Fujita (who really has this bookish "Barb from Stranger Things" vibe that I'm sure will win her character some fans), Gabriel Byrne as the intimidating patriarch of Owen's WASPy family of rich New York industrialists, and Sally Field as both the narcissistic pop-psychology author Dr. Greta Mantleray (and the source of her son James's own psychosis) and as G.R.T.A., the AI of the supercomputer running the central pharmaceutical experiment of the show that was based upon Greta's academic persona.
As the human guinea pigs of Maniac get put under and lead rich symbolic inner-lives as con men and secret agents and half-elven rangers, the show has a lot of fun putting everyone in costumes and having them act out trope-laden scenarios that were no doubt inspired by the avid movie-watching of its subjects, and I will say that it's visually arresting to see the show bounce from genre to genre, each adventure deeply symbolic of the characters they pertain to. The show's narrative drive can get a little muddled with these sequences, but a more patient audience could get a lot out of picking apart the semiotics of each scene and the psychology of certain recurring actors appearing in secondary roles within them. A skit where Hill and Stone are a Long Island couple in the 80s trying to rescue a lemur from a fur trader to fulfill the elaborate dying wish of a hospice patient ends with a revelation that the embittered, estranged daughter is about to give birth to the man who would eventually crash into Stone and her sister in the future, the outcome of which scarred her mentally and physically for life. Certain character names, bit-part actors, and events are worth watching and listening out for because of the way the show keeps tossing out callbacks and call-forwards with abandon. I'm sure it'd be easier and more rewarding to catch them all on repeat viewings, making Maniac one of the few shows exclusive to a streaming service to take full advantage of how easy it is to rewatch and binge television in that format.
It's a mixed-up show that perhaps overindulges a tad, but visually rich with some excellent semi-futuristic world-building, is well-acted, is built with a certain road map in mind that takes multiple viewings to appreciate, and is overall worth your time if you have the means to watch it.
Movie: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
While I was watching Maniac, I thought several times, "Oh hey, they're kinda riffing on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind here." It was only after Maniac ended that I realized I didn't remember anything about Eternal Sunshine besides the broad strokes of the story and Jim Carrey looking mopey. Then I realized it's actually because I've never watched it. Huh. For a movie about the ephemeral nature of memories, that struck me as some rich irony.
I probably don't need to explain what the movie's about given how popular it is and how long ago it was released, but for the sake of clarity: Jim Carrey's moody Joel and Kate Winslet's firecracker Clementine fall in love, fall slowly out of it, and after a fight she impulsively decides to get her memory wiped of their relationship via a state-of-the-art medical procedure. Hurt, Joel follows suit, though begins to fight the deletion process midway through when he realizes how precious those memories are to him - though, tellingly, only after the more vivid bad memories of various fights and arguments are gone leaving just the content and happy ones to be eliminated. Like Maniac, the movie's full of little notions and callbacks and call-forwards that would probably make repeat viewings a gas; tracking the various past versions of Clementine through her hair color changes, the way Elijah Wood's dirtbag memory-removal technician character "borrows" the best lines from Joel and Clementine's relationship when he starts courting her, or the significance of relationship mementos seen earlier in the movie when the memory train eventually goes far enough back to provide them their context. It's not exactly a movie that's difficult to follow, even with its achronological structure, but one rich in subtext that would become clearer a second or third time around.
Like Groundhog Day, which I discussed back when I covered The Adjustment Bureau in how it's a not-so-secret love story carried by its romantic leads, Eternal Sunshine's not so much a thriller with a sci-fi/supernatural conceit as it is an autopsy on a dysfunctional but loving relationship taken from multiple angles and multiple perspectives as it is slowly dissected. That also means it's the type of movie where the cast lifts most of the emotional weight, with Carrey and Winslet taking center stage along with strong supporting roles from David Cross, Jane Adams, Tom Wilkinson, and an extremely young Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst. It's the last of those that really caused me to sit up and notice just what kind of time period we're talking about: here, Dunst is a young woman barely out of her teens both in her role and in the year (2004) the movie came out. She's also my age. The way the movie shows adults at a formative period of their lives - even if I don't buy Carrey as a 20-something for a moment, though perhaps that wasn't the intent given he's the Depressive Human Reality Boy to Clem's youthful Manic Pixie Dream Girl (though the movie's recent enough and smart enough to knowingly subvert this common '00s trope) - hanging out, smoking up, getting drunk, and just chilling in lieu of anything more substantial to do with their non-working time is a stark reminder of what it was to be that age at that point in history, even if I doubt a whole lot has changed for the frequently pressed-for-money millennial generation. It reminded me of Spaced: very much not my own situation at that time, but close enough to be eerily recognizable.
I think by leaving it fourteen years, and having it fill in this part of my early 20s retroactively, I've accidentally stumbled on the most germane way to consume Eternal Sunshine. There are worse ways to finally watch a movie, I suppose.
Game: Tales of Berseria (2017)
I'm only a few hours into Tales of Berseria, which I eventually settled on after last Saturday's dilemma of which giant-sized RPG to hop into next, but I can already tell that it's a big improvement over Tales of Zestiria and has a far darker story (and protagonist) than this series is used to. Without spoiling anything, since I'm not really far enough in that I have anything to spoil, the heroine is a daemonic claw-wielding fugitive named Velvet who is out to assassinate the man who destroyed her idyllic life for the sake of "saving the world". Most of my party members so far have been fellow outcasts: other daemons or dissidents sought out by the "exorcists" that now control the planet, and it's evident that during Velvet's incarceration the world has changed considerably and not necessarily for the better.
Berseria is very much modelled on Zestiria, to the extent that I almost wonder if someone didn't want to give that game another attempt with some improvements; the Tales games always have a baseline formula of sorts, which can make them all run together a little, but the similarities between Berseria and Zestiria in particular are more than just skin-deep. For one, they're clearly set in the same world: Zestiria sets it up early that there are humans and celestials, the latter are more like elemental spirits that are worshipped as angels by the humans and - unless a human has a strong spiritual "resonance" - are invisible and imperceptible to them, and that was at one point true also for Berseria's humans and "malakhim". There's also the fact that one celestial in particular appears in both games, in a manner of speaking, suggesting the games are just a few hundred years apart. The second concerns the game's new reminiscent battle system, which as always incurs the biggest changes from one Tales game to the next.
Without getting too deep into the many variants of Tales's LMB systems ("there's tons about LMB systems", after all), Zestiria pioneered a model that replaced the usual TP - technique point - system of having a stat you'd have to replenish with consumables with a regenerating gauge. This meant less futzing around with regular attacks combos to build up your TP to use more elaborate "artes", and more to do with pausing/guarding in battle to let your TP gauge fill back up between assaults. It made battles even quicker and more fluid, which was highly beneficial to the game's flow especially where throwaway encounters against lesser foes were concerned. Berseria improves on this idea further with its new "soul" system: each soul is represented by a blue orb on the character's section of the UI, and each signifies about 30 TP to draw from for artes. At the start of the game, you begin battles with three of these soul orbs which is enough for a handful of combos before resting and letting them regenerate. However, you can earn more soul orbs by defeating enemies and devouring their essence, which in turn grants you longer combo chains between rests. You can also "break" a soul for a HP boost and a temporary period of greater strength, which ends with a powerful finishing attack: the cost, of course, is destroying one of the soul orbs you have and reducing the length of your combo chains. Battles tend to revolve around building up this soul orb gauge and then breaking it down for these bursts of high-powered activity, the idea being that you'll defeat enemies faster when buffed and thus quickly replace the soul orbs you lost to invoke it. For regular battles, this means they move super fast: you can break a soul immediately and destroy the nearest enemy, keeping that chain going until the battlefield is clear, or play a little more conservatively and defeat a foe or two first so you can perform longer combos while in the break form. For bosses, it means taking full advantage of any adds the boss might have with them for additional soul orbs, building that gauge to max for a healthy amount of combos and artes for the majority of the fight, and then maybe only breaking them when the boss is on the ropes to finish it off quickly before any of the boss's desperation attacks show up. Just this one new aspect alone makes Berseria's fights move that much faster and still maintain some basic level of a tactical risk vs. reward system.
Berseria also draws on an older Tales system (and one present in RPGs like Final Fantasy IX) of having basic skills, like additional damage to certain enemy types or extra stat boosts, attached to equipment. The idea is, you have to keep using that piece of equipment across multiple battles before the skill is "unlocked" and becomes a permanent boost. After that, you get the double the effect if you continue to use the same item but can move onto something else without losing what was attached. But, the intentional downside to this system is that you're often using older equipment because you still haven't unlocked the skill that it's attached to, which can serve to make you underpowered for the foes you're facing at that point in the story. New characters, too, might want to learn the skills associated with much weaker equipment, and so the player has to decide how to balance their loadouts between equipping weaker gear with the most useful skills or current gear that will give them the best boosts and keep them alive, regardless of how useful their attached skills might be. You can mitigate the ineffectiveness of weaker gear with the game's upgrade system, however: by spending crafting resources and cash, you can upgrade old and new gear alike to make them more useful and competitive, and any duplicate gear you don't need can be broken into more crafting resources. It's another slight tweak on what Zestiria had, only put to much more sensible use here.
I'll have more to say about Berseria later - it's going to take a few more weeks to complete, at least - but early impressions are very favorable. I like the cast more than that of Zestiria, even if I've only recruited about half of the playable characters so far, and all the gameplay tweaks from minor stuff like the new upgrade system to major stuff like the soul-oriented combat have been marked improvements over those same systems in Zestiria, which I still liked but am now starting to realize how much more polish it could've used. I'm psyched to play more of it this weekend.
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