Something went wrong. Try again later

ThricebornPhoenix

This user has not updated recently.

14 0 1 2
Forum Posts Wiki Points Following Followers

Time Erodes Us

By ThricebornPhoenix 1 Comments

 In an isolated corner of Rome stands the shell of a structure, possibly the broken remnant of what was once a solid domicile, some family's home. It is not an accessible location; the house is bounded on the east and south by the massive city wall, on the west by a line of trees grown thick together on a slight, stony ridge. North is a road of worn stones, now broken, spread apart, and generally concealed by the vegetation growing out around and between them. Once out of sight of the house, the road forks, either path eventually leading to a road in better repair - but to follow or even notice one of these rough paths from the more crowded thoroughfare requires some attention and perhaps a sharp eye.

The house itself seems unremarkable. There were certainly two rooms at ground floor, and possibly more. The walls are completely missing in many places, perhaps scrapped as material for new buildings in more populated areas. There is no evidence of any roof, though the house must have had one when people still lived in it. There is a doorway with no door, and through it one enters into a room with what appears to be a mosaic of small tiles as a floor. There is no furniture, no object of any sort to adorn it. If ever there was, it was taken or looted long ago.

Of the other, larger room, nothing remains but sections of wall. Even the floor is gone, revealing a room below. This room has a mosaic on the floor identical to that in the first room, but with a fancy border and wild grass and shrubs growing in it. On the floor on the near side is rug or hide with a large cauldron on one corner and a handful of rusted eating or cooking implements. Inside the cauldron is a ladle with a curved handle and a murky brew probably long past its expiration date. Nearby are the blackened sticks and soot of some old fire, apparently made long after the place was originally abandoned, and what appear to be two hunks of uncooked meat. On the other side is a treasure chest and two crumbling columns, the latter holding up a smooth slab of stone that may or may not have been a part of the upper room's floor.

That building plays no part in the plot of the Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, but it does highlight what I consider the heart of the franchise: the grand scale of history. Assassin's Creed II did introduce some improvements over the first game (along with fetch quests, escort missions, timers, and collections, to my everlasting dismay), but it lost much of the magic that made its predecessor so powerful. Reliving the memories of an ancestor from nearly a thousand years ago, who himself wandered through ruins ancient in his day, is a very rare sort of experience, and it help put time into a different perspective. It makes our ancestors, along with their ambitions, accomplishments, and failures, seem closer and more relatable.


No Caption Provided



In this and many other ways, Brotherhood is as much a return to the first Assassin's Creed as a sequel to Assassin's Creed II. If it had less of the second game's mandatory killing and more of the first game's planning and philosophizing, Brotherhood would be unequivocally the best of both worlds. On the bright side, there is still Assassin's Creed III to look forward to.
1 Comments

Final Fantasy IV and Pacing

By ThricebornPhoenix 1 Comments

 

Final Fantasy IV: pinnacle of JRPG storytelling techniques, or nadir of the integration of music in video games? It's actually sort of both, and there's one underlying cause: pacing.

All the plot or script really has going for it is how strange it is, but everything happens quickly enough to retain the player's attention regardless. Ten minutes into the game, you are on the world map. Within half an hour, you've been double-crossed twice (quadruple-crossed?) and recruited, temporarily, two of your final party members. Most battles are quick, most dungeons are short, and there are no mini-games to disrupt the flow. Dialogue pops up instantly and can be advanced just as quickly. Animations are short and sweet. The entire game is perhaps twenty hours long, and you are involved in nearly every minute of it.

This quick pacing does have a cost. Some of the scenes are too bare-bones, as though the characters themselves are too impatient for proper introductions. Strange, but I prefer it over the long-winded melodrama of more recent JRPGs. A bigger problem is that battles and events occur with such frequency that you rarely hear more than the first few seconds of a dungeon theme before it's interrupted. Many of them don't even properly start in the first five or ten seconds; if you want to hear the whole thing, you need to sit idle or muck about in the menus for a couple of minutes, and there's no other reason to do either of those things. You will, on the other hand, hear entirely too much of the battle music. Perhaps both problems could have been avoided by theming battle music to locations - i.e., making it a variant of the regular dungeon music. Since, to my knowledge, no one has ever done this, I suppose it must be infeasible for some reason.

The single best thing about FFIV's pacing is that it's mostly made of PIE - that is, Player-Initiated Events. Even if you don't know what will happen or how it will turn out, you usually know that something will happen if you do a certain thing (and not at all otherwise). Sure beats being blindsided by the plot when you're trying to explore. Man, I love PIE.

1 Comments

Relating a Protagonist

By ThricebornPhoenix 1 Comments

Something about Assassin's Creed II lodged itself in the back of my brain, not to be noticed and uncovered for months; lately I've been poking at it to feel the tingling sensation. In going through the process of sorting it out, I will describe early-game events. This is your spoiler warning.



I'm not really a video game music appreciator. In fact, I think that little of it plays well outside of its original context, much of it simply stinks, and that most of it - whether good or bad - outlasts its welcome. That's just what you'd expect when the average length of a single-player game steadily increases to many times longer than some film directors' entire lifetime output combined, and there's nearly always some track playing. Even the best one- or two-hour long soundtrack can't hold up for 50-200 hours of continuous use.

Even if it was created by collaboration of Beethoven, Mozart, and 80's-era metallica.

I do love what Jesper Kyd has done for the Assassin's Creed series, though. The background music isn't always playing (or, possibly, has the volume turned way down), which certainly helps. More importantly, when it does play, it always seems appropriate; the selected track always evokes exactly the right mood for the scene, whether you're idly riding through the countryside or running helter-skelter from the guards. The chase music for the first game is part of Access the Animus and, from my ears' point of view, the best part of the game.

My eyes, however, listen to their own heart.

Assassin's Creed II is a little different, in that I didn't settle on my favorite piece until my second playthrough - and, for some time, I didn't understand it. It was the chase music that I felt best represented the feel of the first game, and the chase music in the sequel is also very good. So why, I wondered, did I keep coming back to Ezio's Family?

Enter the protagonist: a punk gathering a gang for a street brawl over some slander on his family name. Some taunts and a fistfight later, he has a chat with his brother, in which he reveals that he's spent his last florin on women and wine. He then loots the unconscious bodies of his victims until he has as much cash as he needs.

Pictured: role model.

So Ezio Auditore da Firenze is more sociable and charismatic than Altaïr ibn La-Ahad, and he gets a cool theme. He's also younger, brasher, and generally a scoundrel. I want to be able to connect with the character I represent in a game. Altaïr I could relate to somewhat: his pride (and fall), his questioning of right and wrong, and his too-serious demeanor are all things that I've gone through or been, to some degree. I didn't come from a wealthy family, and my partying days (such as they were) are long behind me. How could I relate to the spoiled slacker Altaïr's descendant turned out to be? After the ideas of fumbling through menus and upgrading my weapons and armor RPG-style, this was my biggest concern fifteen minutes into the game.

Breakability was to become another concern.

Meeting the other Auditores, especially his brother Frederico and father Giovanni, made me feel a little better. Even if I didn't warm up to Ezio, I thought, there are some interesting secondary characters to get acquainted with. I was, as I so often am, mistaken.

When I was very young, I wanted a brother. When I learned that I was going to get one, I was really excited. I started to think about the things we would do together, what I could teach him, and so on. That didn't come to pass. My ignorant four-year-old self didn't know what a miscarriage is, so for a long time he didn't really understand why he didn't get a brother. I also didn't have much of a father figure. I think my stepdad often had trouble expressing his feelings, and his schedule meant that we didn't spend much time together anyway.

I didn't have much time with Ezio's father and brothers before they were arrested, and summarily executed, on false charges. It felt as if I, personally, had something good taken out of my life. I had failed to prevent it; in fact, I was powerless to do so, though I tried. I tried even harder the second time around, despite knowing the inevitability of the event, and stuck around to try to fight the Brutes. Ultimately, I had to run... a defeat no less bitter for having admitted it before.



My and Ezio's shared defeated, however, was a small yet significant triumph for Ubisoft: Ezio became a sympathetic character. This is doubtless what the scene was intended to do - garner sympathy for the protagonist, although it probably had less effect on the average player than it did on me. It's a fairly common trope, in fact. It happens so early in Episode IV of Star Wars that, by the halfway point, nobody remembers Luke ever had an aunt and uncle. (Did they have names? I watched it just a few months ago and I have no idea. Was it Ben and May?) That's why he's finally free to gallivant around the galaxy with no concern for anything but what he wants to do.

It doesn't play out the same way, though. Ezio gets his revenge almost immediately, then flees with his mother and sister in search of a safe haven. He finds this when they're saved from an ambush by his uncle Mario, who furthermore insists on training Ezio in combat. When Ezio begins to track down the conspirators responsible for pruning his family tree, it's not only revenge that guides him, but also a sense of responsibility: he wants to repay his uncle's kindness and carry on his father's work as much as he wants to slake his bloodlust. Penchant for rescuing damsels in distress aside, Ezio is almost solely motivated by his family. It's unfortunate that his mother and sister fade into the background so completely for the rest of the game, but at least I still felt that my avatar-puppet and I were on the same page most of the time.

Now, when I hear Ezio's Family play, I think sometimes of Renaissance Florence in the light of a full moon, and other times of political schemes and coups; but always I think of the bonds of family and the pain of loss, and I'm thankful for what family I have. It is certainly not the best, but it is a good life I lead.

It's too early still to even speculate, but I can't help wondering how (or whether) Ubisoft will make the next Assassin relatable to me.

1 Comments