Popka's Blog

Anime Relations: Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä

Fallout 1 is exceptional because it implements game design on a massive scale. You always have to figure out where to go next because of how the game drops the smallest, most naturalistic hints for you. You don't go to Necropolis to find the water chip because a quest marker points you there; you go to Necropolis because of deductions you make from information about where water comes from in the game's world.

Fallout: New Vegas does have quest markers, and sometimes just points you to where to go next. But, it still implements a similar design philosophy on the small scale. When you go to Vault 22 to find parts for an air filter, you first see what each level of the vault is for. Level 2 is oxygen recycling, so you infer that you have to go there. If you follow the quest marker, it leads you to a dead end, a room whose door is barricaded. But you can see through the window that a hole has been blasted through the room's wall. Nothing has told you how you can get to the hole, but when you remember that there are still more levels underneath Level 2, you deduce that you need to try to go in from below.

It's the subtlety of the best Fallout games that makes them so satisfying. You don't just get to explore a large open world, you're constantly thinking about its details. The advantage Fallout: New Vegas has is the immediacy of the 3D first person perspective. Vault 22 is filled with plants; just outside is a sign saying "STAY OUT THE PLANTS KILL." For the longest time, nothing happens; but the plants are ever-present, and the tiniest sound can put you on guard.

Some levels achieve this kind of subtlety while being designed around the first person perspective. When you have to protect the president from being assassinated, you collect details that give you hints of what's going to happen - but only hints. The perspective from which you watch the president's speech has you looking in the direction of a tower behind him. Since you're looking over there, maybe you noticed an almost imperceptible visual cue: a man falling off the tower. So, you go to investigate, and find a sniper on top of the tower. You take him out, and run back. On your way back, another attempt is made on the president's life; if you interpreted the hints from earlier correctly, you'll be prepared for it. Once that's dealt with, you're in a state of the utmost caution, and you know there's only one place left to check. Sure enough, there's a bomb planted on the president's helicopter that you need to disable.

The game demands brainpower and mindfulness in every aspect, and while it all feels natural, you can also tell it's because people thought very deeply about how to make the game interesting. Even some of the choices you have to make are difficult and ambiguous. The choice of which faction to support is tough on its own; Mr. House makes a very compelling argument against trying to make things go back to the way they were, which is what the seemingly good-natured NCR is trying to do. Not only that, Mr. House makes an equally compelling argument for autocracy. He's been alive and working on the same plan for over 200 years - if he was the autocrat, the problems of mortality and capriciousness simply fade away. But then he asks you to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel; can his judgment really be trusted if he wants you to do something so monstrous? Then again, the Brotherhood of Steel are hardly perfect themselves, and he might know something you don't. You just have to weigh your options and decide what you want to do. The game isn't going to tell you what the right choice is.

In general, one of the most important things a game can do is demand some mindfulness from the player. It's a way a game, and only a game, can affect a person, and it can draw you even further into a game's world than the act of playing can by itself. Fallout: New Vegas accomplishes this by being exceptional on every front of its design.

Anime Relations: Casshern Sins

Lisa is similar to Mother 3 in how it directly addresses the player. Both games involve the game commenting on the act of playing, but not on any choices the player makes. In Mother 3, you don't have any choices. In Lisa, you can try to make the right choices, or you can make grossly immoral choices, and either way the main character Brad (and by extension, you) can only make things worse.

It doesn't thank you for playing like the ending of Mother 3 does. You could say it punishes you. If you try to do the right thing, you'll probably just fail. And throughout the entire game, there's always a risk of randomly losing a party member forever. Sometimes, as you're walking toward your next destination, you can see an ambush waiting for you, and if you want to progress through the game, you have no choice but accept that it's going to happen.

But it doesn't really punish you, because all the "punishments" are hilarious. Yes, it's exasperating that Nern talks forever and then suddenly appears in front of you on the next screen when you're finally able to get away from him. But it's also a joke that's perfect both in its structure and its boldness. The game's jokes are all at Brad's expense, so they fit when it takes a turn for the upsetting.

Mother 3 is thankful for those who become engaged with its story, and expresses its appreciation for them by seeing the game through to the end and thus letting the story play out. Lisa isn't mad at the player for seeing the game through to the end, but it is very, very cross with Brad and it intends to make that clear. It just happens to make jokes at his expense using the game form, so to an extent they're at your expense too.

So, it exploits the relationship between the player and the player avatar. And that relationship allows the game to be as brutal as it is, and to condemn Brad as harshly as it does, without precluding the possibility of the player having some sympathy for him.

Comedy in games can be difficult, both because the majority of games are poorly written and even when they're not, not many take advantage of the form to tell jokes. Some work, like Katamari Damacy, Little King's Story, or Portal. Lisa works too, and it especially deserves credit for making it work without dissonance in a story which is otherwise almost excessively dark.

Anime Relations: Sword Art Online II

Despite the freedom the game offers you - you can do whatever you want whenever you want - Fallout doesn't offer you much room to fill in the blanks. You can determine your character's personality and skills and affect the world in different ways, but you'll always be the guy from Vault 13 who set out for a water chip and found it.

Still, this isn't a problem because Fallout's narrative is actually very good, and the way it manages to give the player as much freedom as it does while also implementing this narrative is even more impressive. Everything is a mystery; the game doesn't guide you to your next goal unless you search everywhere for answers, and as long as you don't, there's no sense that you're failing to deal with something urgent if you decide to do your own thing for a while. When you finally break open the big mystery, you're the one taking action first.

The game teaches you to do this right off; you have a time limit to find the water chip, and no indication whatsoever of where you might find one. The first place it sends you sets you upon a small town, and from there, by talking to as many people as you can, you will eventually deduce the water chip's location on your own.

Once you reach that part of the game, you'll be traveling between locations a lot. You can do it on your own, or as a caravan mercenary. So, when the need for travel ramps up, the game offers you a way to accumulate money, items, and levels while you travel.

The battles are interesting; the different tactics are well-balanced in terms of their respective advantages and disadvantages, especially for battles in which you have allies; they're more vulnerable than you, and if you go for an accurate melee against a nearby enemy, you might miss out on killing an enemy who's about to kill one of your allies. There's also balance regarding whether you play aggressively or conservatively. You could play it safe, but then the battle will take longer, and the enemies might use up the difficult-to-find healing items before you get a chance to loot them.

Even though the game doesn't have enough to do for a player to really make up their own stories in its world, you get a sense of what life is like therein because of the fact that the narrative so elegantly accommodates grinding, other elements of character building, and consequently combat.

That it has a living world makes a big difference when you discover the existential threat that constitutes the game's central conflict. The sheer difficulty of fighting against the mutants is enough to offer at least a little justification for their plan. When you finally battle the Master, if you've gone out of your way to get the right information, you'll feel at least a little regretful that you had to massacre them all, even though you had no other choice.

I guess the most interesting thing is the part where choosing the wrong speech options can lead your character to be imprisoned without any of their items. If you don't have major commitment to stealth, this is, in effect, a fail state. You won't be able to play anymore. But it makes you curious enough to want to play the game again if you aren't a stealth character.

Anime Relations: Pokemon

The campaign of Pokémon never has been and probably never will be difficult. But it does make you feel something for each of your Pokémon effectively, since you end up thinking so much about what they can do for you and how they complement the other Pokémon in your party. You might even think of them as something that characterizes your mute avatar: maybe your character is someone who prefers cute Pokémon, or beautiful ones, or intimidating ones.

Each time you use a Pokémon, you’re identifying it by type, by the moves you chose for it, and by its role on your team. The game tells you what Pokémon your opponent is going to use next, so you can start thinking about which of your Pokémon will be your best option. You can store hundreds of Pokémon on your PC, but only bring 6 with you in your party, so you need to think about the roles you need to be filled.

So, training and using your Pokémon helps you attach to the game and role-play. Immersive games are easy to sink hours and hours into, and Pokémon is certainly a game that's taken up a lot of people's time.

The problem with many of the Pokémon games for me, though, is that the narratives doesn't always contribute to the immersion. In generations 3, 4, and 5, the narratives are enormous in scale and place the player at the center of a conflict that threatens to wipe out human society as we know it. Even if this doesn't strain your credulity, the act of just exploring or pursuing your own goals can seem insignificant by comparison. Emerald version gets around this by having the Battle Frontier, an extremely long and difficult challenge that makes up the post-game.

The campaigns of generations 1 and 2, and their remakes, lack such epic scope. In generation 1, the entire game is about nothing more than your character's effort to overcome the Kanto Pokémon League. The final boss is your rival, another character who's made the same journey as you have and is meant to highlight the progress you've made.

What gives generation 2 an edge up on generation 1 is that the Johto region has personality. Johto has traditional dancing, ceremonial towers, homemade PokéBalls, and a lighthouse powered by an Ampharos. Johto has culture and history in a way no other region in the Pokémon series does, and by being the only games in the series to include two regions, the second generation also lets Kanto’s culture become clear through contrast.

Moreover, it has a tone. The Burned Tower, the way Team Rocket is just searching for their leader who never returns, the fact that Cinnabar Island has been destroyed by a volcano, and the true final battle with your own character from the previous game. Major things have happened in this world that were before your character's time and beyond their control. And someday, your journey will also be a thing of the past, just like Red's. There's not much that makes you feel significant; even the Elite Four is fairly weak, compared to other Pokémon games.

Instead of immersing the player and trying to make them feel significant, it immerses the player in a world that feels a little more alive (this isn't to say other Pokémon games lack personality, but Johto's way about appeals to me more). The way the trainers in Jasmine’s gym thank you for your help instead of battling you (this only happens in SoulSilver, not Silver Version, which is why I prefer the former). The way Whitney and Claire are too childish to give you your badges right after you beat them. The bug catching contest north of Goldenrod City. Neither the story nor your quest is "big," but the world itself is.

It's because of all this that I was able to sink more hours into SoulSilver Version than other Pokémon games before getting tired of it (it also helps that it has a Battle Frontier where the original Silver doesn't). Even when later games offered more options for how to spend your time, I eventually just stopped playing. But I stuck with SoulSilver version longer, and was more inclined to restart the game and play through the campaign again.

Anime Relations: Yama no Susume

Grow Home is one of the only games I've played where loose controls actually made it better. One of the problems I had with the LittleBigPlanet games (which I like) was that the controls stopped the campaigns from being satisfying as platformers (player-made levels could be better by being especially creative with the challenges or by not being platformers at all).

But in Grow Home, BUD's looseness adds depth to the game. The goal is always either to ascend or to explore, and complications arise from BUD's inability to stop or turn sharply, jump precisely, or carry objects and jump at the same time. Fortunately, the glide leaf, bouncy platforms, and BUD's grab compensate for the awkwardness; though BUD's movements aren't stable or exact at all, it's not too difficult to end up where you want to be if you plan a little and correctly estimate your momentum.

When you die in Grow Home, you immediately come back to life, and can continue playing. But the fail state isn't death so much as falling: when you fall, you lose progress, and have to climb back up to where you were. This can be a slow process, since BUD's climbing requires you to grab with one of his arms at a time. But there's enough variety in the number of routes and methods you can use to ascend that it never becomes tedious.

Moreover, trying different routes is immensely satisfying, because you can get into every nook and cranny of the game world, and there are plenty of interesting little details to catch. Maybe you'll find a giant Venus fly trap, a golden bird, a plant that can suspend things in the air, or a bull that tries to ram you. If that's not enough, there are crystals to collect that further increase your options, seeds that you collect as an objective, and achievements you get from finding things. The game actively encourages you to explore, but in a way that's never forceful.

Since the climbing is nothing more than using BUD's grab to literally pull him up surfaces (or along the underside of a surface) and is animated in real time, the sensory feedback from Grow Home is greater than almost any other game I've played. My hands hurt after my first time playing it because I was gripping the controller too hard while climbing (this is possibly also attributable to the grab button on an Xbox controller being the trigger, so using the grab requires you to literally make a contracting motion with your hand).

And I think it should be obvious that a strong sensory experience is an excellent complement for exploration elements. What could draw you more into a game's world than the sense that it's a physically real place?

Even though Grow Home is short and takes place only on a small island and the space above it, it feels freer than almost any other game I've played because it really does give you free reign, and because there's nothing in the game that suggests you should be able to do more than you can. It's an open-world game, but not the kind where you can invade someone's house with impunity, rummage through their stuff, and find scads of useless items that theoretically should do something, but don't (which is not inherently bad, but not good either). There's not even much of a UI in Grow Home. If you can think of doing something, you can probably do it; and if you can do something, you're almost certainly doing it only with BUD's movements and nothing else.

This could perhaps be summarized by saying Grow Home's success comes from its simplicity, but for me that's not saying enough. It's a true statement, but not one that speaks to the degree of Grow Home's success. When you have real freedom and a strong sense of physicality, it feels amazing when you climb the trunk of a giant plant through a hole in a gigantic floating land mass in the sky with waterfalls cascading down around you. That's the only way I can think of to explain why a game that was originally meant to be an experiment is my favorite 3D platformer I've ever played.

Anime Relations: Hotaru no Haka

This War of Mine is difficult because of the amount of information you need to juggle: you need food, medicine, crafting components, weapons, tools, and items for trade. If you intend to fight, then you need a measure of strategy, and then you need to deal with the psychological damage your characters suffer if they steal from or kill anyone. If you don't, they might commit suicide. And if any one of them dies, the others will become depressed and be more likely to commit suicide.

On the one hand, the utterly harrowing nature of the game simulates the experience of the characters. But on the other hand, it does something which is, to me, more interesting. You end up with these emergent narrative moments: for instance, if your characters are suffering from depression, you can have them console each other. At the same time, people will periodically come to your door to ask for help; your characters will feel guilty for not helping. So, you might have your characters consoling each other while deliberately ignoring the children knocking on the door outside just to spare further psychological damage.

Or, maybe you become desperate. You quickly realize that the best places to find food are dangerous. Going there would be an immense risk, and even if you make it out alive, your character will probably have to kill someone. But you do it anyway, both because you need the food and simply because it starts to feel unfair that the enemies in the game who kill your characters without hesitation get to have all the food. So, if you end up in such a difficult position that you really have no choice, you might choose to take the high risk for the high reward - only to find that the characters you left back home abandoned you, or were killed by raiders.

There's very little to do during the day, since you can only leave the house at night. Your characters get tired quickly, and sometimes can't even sleep enough if they're too depressed. What's more, you might keep more than one of your characters up at night (one to scavenge, the others to guard your home). The best way to get them to sleep, then, is to make them sleep during the day. So, you'll end up putting some of your characters to bed and just waiting. Maybe that sounds boring or tedious, but it turns out to be a welcome reprieve from the brutality of the rest of the game. And while you're waiting, you can just sit back for a second and appreciate the game's wistful music and wavy lineart.

Playing This War of Mine feels like it takes a lot longer than it does because of this, and because of how your characters move more slowly when they're injured, exhausted, starving, ill, drunk, or depressed. When they reach the trough of their depression, they can't move at all.

And even if your characters die, there's a strange continuity between different times you replay the game. Trying and failing to play the game turns you into as much of a pragmatist as you can possibly be without breaking your characters' psyches. Learning to play the game better doesn't necessarily make narrative sense; experiencing failure after failure is probably what would actually happen to people dumped into such a situation. But on the other hand, if your characters had managed to survive, they probably would have adopted new behaviors the same way you did.

Between the slowness, the constant and random barrage of problems, and the fact that it's impossible to know when a ceasefire will finally come, This War of Mine is not a fun game so much as one that causes discomfort. And yet, it's challenging and engaging, and is most certainly a "game" - something that requires you to master a rule system to succeed.

Eventually I had to think about how I was playing this game in a perfectly warm building and how I didn't lack for food or a real bed. Experiencing firsthand how uncomfortable it is to play This War of Mine necessitates the question of what it must be like to live it. It's successful as a game, and truly anti-war. You don't want to just walk away; you do want to finish the game and see how things turn out. But you also want nothing more than for it to just be over. It's very, very hard to play This War of Mine without feeling like the situation depicted is so abhorrent that nothing could be worth precipitating it.