Gettin’ There

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Forget interactive movies. We’ve entered the world of interactive Peak TV series.

In The Last of Us Part II, we get another of Naughty Dog’s unique cinematic adventures, laden with scripted events, lengthy cutscenes, and exaggerated set pieces. Its focus is a single-player, stealth/shooting campaign set in post-apocalyptic America.

So…what’s the big deal? This is nothing we haven’t seen before. Why all the gushing, why all the buzzing, why the hate, review bombs, and death threats?

Well, that’s the interesting part. For what I think is the first — though likely not the last — time, we are seeing backlash against a game not because of it has bad graphics or poor design (this game has some of the best of these ever seen in fact), but because its story and themes are simply too challenging for people to handle.

Warning, spoilers.

The original Last of Us had a powerful story of its own, about an infective outbreak that enveloped most of the world, turning people into violent and dangerous beasts. The federal response was an unsurprising clampdown, so smuggling rings were formed to get needed supplies across checkpoints. One such smuggler, Joel Miller, was tasked with an unusual bit of cargo: a little girl named Ellie, who was to be brought to a group of survivalists called the Fireflies.

Ellie was special in that she was immune to the monster-making disease, and in her biology lied the possibility of a cure. During the trip, Joel, who had lost a daughter years earlier, became attached to Ellie, and when the Fireflies revealed that their exploratory research would kill her, he wouldn’t have it. In a climax that was surprisingly powerful for a video game, Joel slaughtered the survivalists, murdered their lead surgeon, and effectively destroyed any chance at ending the pandemic. Ellie, who was unconscious at the time, had no clue about any of this, and the game ended with Joel lying to her face about the whole thing. It was a particularly impressive ending as it required players to remain Joel’s agent even as he did questionable things, forcing them to pull the trigger and see it through. Maybe said players didn’t agree with Joel’s decision (I did), but they had to go along with it, or else be trapped in narrative limbo.

In Part II, Ellie, now grown up, must face the continuing ripples of Joel’s actions, as must the players. The material here takes on a life of its own, examining its characters, expanding its world, and exploring the different manners of human adaptation. The infection is reduced to little more than a backdrop, but that’s okay, as the horror in this survival-horror game lies elsewhere.

Joel and Ellie have been living in Jackson, Wyoming, a small mountain community developed by Joel’s brother Tommy. It’s rustic, but they have electricity, food, and other leisures. The monster disease is still rampant, so Jackson’s citizens run regular patrols to clear out the infected where they roam. This relative peace has attracted folks from all across the country, and one of them is Dina, a bisexual Jew who is madly in love with Ellie.

Aaaaaand this the point where Naughty Dog invited trouble. Supplanting the former protagonist — a hulking, bearded, Texan man — with a skinny lesbian was the perfect way to make right-wing reactionaries feel threatened, and the usual, scornful accusations flew. Obviously another game developer had been subsumed by the forces of woke-ness, and was using this game to push its evil agenda on us.

Agendas, for God’s fucking sake. Okay, listen, people: the only agenda the entertainment industry has, or has ever had, is to fucking make money. That means capitalizing on trends, shamelessly titillating, and deliberately pissing people off. They’re a troupe of entertainers, a traveling circus, the pushers of make-believe, the original attention whores. They’ll do anything to pull an audience. The more you bitch and moan about how they’re out to destroy your way of life, the more attention– and money — you end up drawing their way. So why don’t you just shrug it off instead of throwing a tantrum? The surest way to destroy a piece of entertainment, after all, is to ignore it. Maybe you should admit that the real reason you’re whining is that you want people to give their attention to you.

Besides, I also think there’s a bit of pandering going on here, but I can look past it, because there’s still a lot of good stuff happening beyond it.

See, what really bothers me about Ellie isn’t her sexuality, it’s her transformation to a self-centered adolescent. Now that she’s securely on the base of Maslow’s pyramid, Ellie is free to linger on dopey teenaged concerns like “omg she kissed me what do I do” and “can’t wait to score some weed.” Her journal is full of angsty poetry, and her personal pastime is plucking out wistful 80s songs on her new guitar. Ugh.

An early scene shows Ellie and Dina discovering a sort of pot house during a patrol. Instead of moving on, they stop and help themselves to some of the crop. After that, they strip down and screw, because as Orange is the New Black, Counterpart, and Game of Thrones taught us, you can’t have a mature story without a little girl-on-girl happenin’. Of course, they’re doing all this when they’re supposed to be working, and I felt like I was watching a couple of Crystal Lake camp counselors tempting fate. After playing as the no-nonsense Joel in the first game, I was incredulous about how stupid Ellie was being — and not for the last time.

Now, despite the bad behavior and obvious titillation she brings about, I really don’t hate Dina. My only problem with her is that she’s too sweet; she cloys me with her little flirty jokes and adorable glances. I realize that she’s meant to symbolize love and hope, a chance for the drifting Ellie to do right, but as such, it’s plain that she’s doomed to a life of victimhood.

The catalyst for this doom is one Abby Anderson, the other horrible blight Naughty Dog unleashed upon the world. Abby just might be one of the most reviled fictional characters in recent history, for some of the most head-shaking reasons. Due to her impressive physique, idiots online assumed she was transgender, tossed in as a token to the woke crowd, and as another attempt to devastate the American way of life. It’s always the end of the west when a woman is strong and capable, after all.

Abby does not, in fact, owe her muscularity to a now-removed penis, but to a strict diet and disciplined workout regimen. Imagine that, huh? She is part of a military-like faction called the Washington Liberation Front that has occupied the CenturyLink Field in Seattle. They eat the meat that they raise on the gridiron and make good use of its gym.

Sadly, this still isn’t a sufficient explanation for those post-apocalypse PhDs you find online, who argue that “it wouldn’t be possible to look like that in this world!” Of course, it’s not possible to turn into a flesh-eating mushroom from the inside out either, but that never comes into question. Exploding fungus people? That’s fine. Women with muscles? Gimme a break!

The other reason people hate Abby is more understandable: early on, she and a crew of her WLF buddies seek out and murder Joel, right in front of Ellie’s eyes. It’s an uncomfortable, vicious scene, but even as I watched it, I knew that the man had it coming. No one could just walk away clean from a past like Joel’s.

It turns out that Abby is the daughter of the Firefly surgeon that Joel killed, the one who could have stopped the pandemic and saved the world. Abby, hurt and haunted, is merely exacting justice. She doesn’t explain this to Ellie, though, so all we know at this point is that she’s a bloodthirsty invader with bulging arms and bitchy eyes. I can understand why people would hate her.

That doesn’t justify, however, the death threats against Laura Bailey, the actor who voiced and motion captured for her. Yep, that’s right: just like with Anna Gunn, who played the similarly disliked Skyler White in Breaking Bad, a horde of “fans,” who apparently can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, hustled online after playing this game and felt completely okay with threatening another human being’s life over the happenings of a fictional story. It didn’t even matter that this human being had nothing to do with the writing of that story.

It seems unbelievable, and I guess it’s possible that Naughty Dog’s PR department overstated the situation to get the game some extra attention, but…I don’t know. People are pretty fuckin’ dumb.

I can’t say I’m surprised at the ever-lowering depths of human stupidity, but I am impressed that it could be riled by a video game. As depressing as they are, these death threats stand as a testament to the game’s effective storytelling. Naughty Dog clearly did something right in order to get these people to react so strongly. I just hope that they played through the rest of the game, and learned a little about what such blind hatred actually earns them.

Anyway, Ellie and Dina decide to ditch Jackson and hunt Abby down. They trail her to Seattle, where they’ll spend the worst three days of their lives. You, as the player, will get to see those days from two angles, as the game switches perspectives, goes back in time, and lets you spend those days as Abby. With any luck, this will help you to understand Abby’s motivations.

So what do you actually do in this game, besides watch the story? Well, mostly you walk around and try to find your way in and out of buildings. You’ll gather supplies, build traps and tools, upgrade your abilities, but really it’s an exploration game. There are lots of little crawl spaces and locked doors to maneuver around, and you’ll spend a lot of time figuring out how to get from here to there. The attention to detail is wondrous: every location has a story. Not all of these stories are unique — you’ll find plenty of suicide notes, for example — but it’s pretty amazing that Naughty Dog took the time to put a tale behind every family, every store, and every room.

It would be pretty boring if you didn’t experience some of the dangers that made this world, though. The real challenges of the game are the groups of creatures, soldiers, and guards that you’ll need to sneak or shoot your way past.

The game tries really hard to unnerve you in these situations, but certain things trip it up. You’ll kill lots of people, people whose friends will wail out their names upon discovering their bodies. You’ll murder folks who are subdued and no longer a threat to you. You’ll even have to kill a dog or two. Now, I know these details were added to make me feel guilty, but it didn’t really work. After hearing baddies cry out, “Oh no, they got Omar!” about a dozen times in one play-through, I found it more funny than sad. After getting my face ripped off by an angry German Shepherd a few times, I was more than happy to reenact the climax of Old Yeller. And when a tense and lengthy stealth section went south because some fucking guard randomly turned around at the wrong moment, I was glad — glad, I tell you! — to disintegrate the fool with an explosive arrow. God, that shit pisses me off.

It’s all very Peckinpah, and the gorgeous, lifelike graphics slam the carnage home with maximum detail, but the simple human desire to beat the game overrides any personal or spiritual misgivings that the imagery is meant to provoke. As the game’s final trophy says, you do what you have to do.

But is it really what Ellie had to do?

In my first play-through of this game, I counted at least three instances when Ellie crossed dangerous lines, and completely without need. At times, I wondered if she even cared about living anymore. Having been robbed, as she sees it, of her purpose, she’s come to lead an aimless existence. As compared to her peers, Ellie comes off as shiftless, irresponsible, even trashy. Although we’re stuck with her as our main protagonist, the sad truth is that Ellie is kind of a mess.

Consider Ellie’s qualities, especially in comparison to the (slightly) more respectable Abby. Abby is rigid. Ellie flows. Abby follows the rules. Ellie follows her feelings. Abby embraces structure and schedule. Ellie forgets to change clothes. Abby collects coins. Ellie collects comic books. Abby’s body is a temple, and she sets goals to improve it. Ellie gets smashed and tokes up. I suspect that Ellie would abuse other substances, too, were they available.

I think that upon learning the truth about Joel’s encounter with the Fireflies, Ellie’s emotional development stalled. Her future was erased, stolen, so she became mired in the past. She tied her own destiny inextricably with Joel’s, and all her actions from that point on became about him as well as herself.

So Joel’s death begins a continuous spiral of destruction, repeated by recklessness and hate, as Abby and Ellie tear each other’s lives to pieces. People are tortured, pregnant women are killed, and in time it becomes plain that there’s just no saving these two: you’ll begin the game rooting for Ellie, and then switch to rooting for Abby, and then stop rooting altogether. There was a point in their first major clash when the game asked me to hammer the Square button so I could make Abby choke Ellie. As Ellie’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she began to slide to the floor, I felt the urge to just drop the controller. I wanted them both to just stop. The game would have caused me to lose if I’d done that, though, so I hammered on, feeling a little defeated about it.

This clash seems to end on a merciful truce, and the game continues, apparently months later, in an idyllic scene suggesting that Ellie and Dina could actually live happily ever after. News of Abby’s resurfacing, however, opens the old wound, and Ellie, again, throws a good life away for the sake of revenge.

It turns out that Abby and her friend Lev, while searching for a rumored Firefly base in Santa Barbara, have been captured by a gang called the Rattlers. Now, up to this point, the game has been pretty even-handed about its characters. It’s been fair about showing both their flaws and virtues, but when it comes to the Rattlers, there’s nothing good to show. These are irredeemable bastards who keep slave labor and taunt the infected for fun.

So when Ellie discovers Abby tied to a pole and left to die, I couldn’t help but think of the climactic reunion of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in “Felina.” In that instant, hate, history, sadness, and sympathy all intertwined in a low, pitiless place. It was an emotionally hefty scene that The Last of Us Part II succeeds in evoking.

Ellie cuts Abby free and leads her to a motorboat where salvation awaits, but then, she fucks it all up again, and demands another showdown. It’s a jaw-dropping moment. In spite of Abby’s miserable state, after all she has already suffered, Ellie refuses to let go. As a player, I felt betrayed — I now had to follow Ellie down this awful pit, all the way to the bottom.

There is some hope to be grasped in Ellie’s sparing of Abby (even if it’s a symbolic gesture of forgiveness for Joel), but when she returns home after the encounter, she finds that the price of revenge was very high indeed. Almost everything she valued is now gone, but it feels appropriate and just. As Ellie trudges off for greener pastures, we can only hope that she has learned a lesson.

This whole Santa Barbara sequence is a pretty ballsy move on the part of the writers. Not only does it defy the game’s established plot structure, it unapologetically strips Ellie of all sympathy, and reveals her as the lost soul that she is. After everything I’d already experienced in the game, I was tired of all the killing. I was disappointed in Ellie for pursuing further death, and the gameplay almost felt mechanical. When the fight on the beach began, I got the sense that Ellie was as exhausted as I was, and was only acting out of a desperate need to believe that her personal crusade still mattered.

I know that sounds grim, but I’m actually pretty pleased about it. I’ve played hundreds of violent video games, from Doom to Smash T.V. to Grand Theft Auto, so for Naughty Dog to bring us one that makes me feel something must be commended. They managed to sidestep the deadening effect of continuous video game violence by way of great writing and direction. The story could have been ripped straight from the pages of The Walking Dead, but as a video game, it’s presented in a way that makes it fresh. Since it’s lengthy and well-told, we get to know its people on an intimate level, and a slow-burn effect takes place, much as it does in today’s Peak TV series. After spending so much time with Ellie, I couldn’t help but feel sad as she descended, although I was, in essence, the one making her do it. There’s a peculiar sense of tragedy here.

Sure, there’s been some backlash about the story, and the decisions Ellie makes, but it’s not esoteric video game backlash, it’s a fundamental fan backlash, the sort usually reserved for pop culture phenomena like Lost, The Prisoner, and especially Star Wars.

“That’s not the way my favorite character would act! This is bad writing with poor character arcs! These people have ruined the franchise!”

Yeah yeah yeah. Well, sometimes artists have different things to say than what we might want to hear. Get used to it.

Now, I can’t say I’m not guilty of impugning a video game for taking its story in a direction I didn’t care for. I was appalled at Metroid Other M when I saw how it perceived the character of Samus Aran. In every Metroid game before it, Samus was a bounty-hunting badass, cool as a cucumber, all business and tough as nails. There were moments when rays of pain or empathy shone through her icy shell, but they were brief and restrained. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s good Terminators, or Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, Samus was a killing machine with a good heart, and I loved her for it.

But no, Yoshio Sakamoto had a different idea. He decided it was time to knock Samus down a peg, and present her as as typical anime heroine: self-absorbed, bratty, and due to be subjugated. Now, I know that it’s anime tradition that the tough female character must be brought low at some point, so when I heard that a story-heavy Metroid was being developed by Team Ninja (makers of Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball no less), I should have expected this. I also reminded myself that this was an origin story, meant to reveal how a distrustful war orphan became the alien-slayer I admired. It didn’t work, though. I just couldn’t stomach it. The treatment of the character was too off-putting, and to this day, I haven’t played a minute of Other M.

This isn’t fair to the game or its creators, of course. Why should my preconceptions about a fictional character enter into my judgment of the product? For all I know, the game might actually be a lot of fun. What I have to realize is that all heroes, fictional or not, are flawed, and have said or done things that would damage their mystique. That’s why we should never meet them, as they say.

So, if this is who Nintendo says Samus is, all I can do is grow up and accept it.

Yeah. Grow up. Right.

A coda: Annoyed as I was about Samus, the truth is that I actually kinda like it when my favorite characters break down. I’m totally serious. Whenever a Peak TV protagonist, following hours of rational, controlled behavior, just flips out and does something completely off-the-wall, I get a big smile on my face.

I smile because I see these moments as sober reminders that these are not statuesque idols holding the world together, but little human beings flailing to make sense of it. There’s more to them than the heroism that the story requires. Being the rock wears on them, just as it would anyone we know, and at some unexpected point, the death drive spills free, to the consternation of everyone who depends on them — their fans most of all. It’s provocative, thrilling, and it sounds a note that most of us, in our grasping, success-driven culture, are hesitant to acknowledge. To espy the Unspoken Desire is, I feel, the purpose of all drama.

And that’s the success of The Last of Us Part II, really: that it brought believable adult drama into the realm of video games. Its material may be derivative, but by banking on realism, it moved people, shocked people, and hurt people nonetheless. It also got them talking, though maybe not about the things Naughty Dog was expecting. Most impressively, the game revealed some of the ugliness we face in reality, an unpleasant but necessary deed that only the greatest entertainers can pull off. In accomplishing this, video games have truly turned a corner as a medium, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next generation of hardware is due to bring. They have a hell of a standard to live up to.

Zen in the Art of Horse-Shit

Well, there’s one consistent thing about Rockstar’s most recent games: they’re markedly inconsistent.

Red Dead Redemption II has at least three buttons for context-sensitive actions (there may be more that I can’t remember). You pick up provisions by holding the X/Square button. You pick up weapons by holding LB/L1. You mount horses and take people into choke-holds by pressing Y/Triangle.

That last, calculated choice of controller setup caused me a couple of social faux pas that quickly developed into long elusions from the police.

There are a wide variety of care-taking activities in the game. Some are quick and automatic, while others are slow and laborious. Order some fried catfish at the saloon, and your character gobbles it down in a jump cut. Take a bath at the same saloon, however, and you need to mash three buttons to make him scrub each of his extremities, one at a time.

You interact with people, camps, and horses through menus at the lower-right of the screen. For people, these menus include options for robbing, friendly greetings, or masculine taunts. For camps, you can choose to sleep, cook food or craft items, or just leave. You can give horses tender pats, brush dirt from their hides, or feed them various vegetables. To actually perform some of these actions, you need only tap a button. To perform others, you must hold a button until a ring around the button icon fills. For some actions, the options differ from occasion to occasion, so pressing Y/Triangle will make you sleep for eight hours one night, and it will make you sleep for fifteen hours on another.

The game’s story missions involve a lot of horse travel, usually in the company of your gangster buddies. Sometimes, in the course of these trips, the game will draw black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, meaning you can release the controller and just watch them talk and ride until they reach their destination. Other times, the game just keeps going, and you have to hold A/Cross and steer carefully while the characters talk and ride. If you don’t keep pace or follow the paths of your companions, they’ll yell and complain at you until you fall back in line. The game offers a “Cinematic Camera” for these situations, which helps keep your steed where it needs to be for the mission’s sake, but you still need to hold A/Cross for the duration of the ride.

The sum of this is that you simply cannot count on your character to do what you expect him to, without keeping vigil over the game’s prompts. The game involves a terrific amount of engagement and planning, in both the short and long terms. You can’t just gallop your horse through downtown Saint Denis, and then skid into the post in front of the barbershop. You might barrel over a pedestrian and wind up in jail over an assault charge. Besides, you need to position your horse just right, and then hold Y/Triangle for a couple of seconds to hitch it properly in the first place. No, no, you have to judge the road before you enter it, and then make your way along it with patience, just as you would in real city traffic. That is, of course, unless you don’t mind getting into a costly accident.

So, is all this just complaining? What do you think? The word “inconsistent” has a foul connotation, but I haven’t done anything other than describe the game’s details. When I began playing RDRII, I deemed its confusion as the mark of poor communication between a series of disparate design teams. Maybe that’s how it happened; I don’t know. Whether it was intentional or not, though, I find that I now appreciate it.

I rush through games nowadays. I was playing Skyrim a few days ago, when I felt exasperated at the repetitive combat, and the annoying characters who still gave me lip after I’d slain Alduin the World-Eater and saved their ungrateful butts. I asked myself just why in hell I was doing it. What, exactly, had compelled me to start the game up on that particular day? After some boiling, I got to the bones of my motivation, and discovered that I just wanted to get some of those god-damned entries off of my quest list.

When I manage my farm or explore a mine in Stardew Valley, I always fall into an efficient rut of behavior, always in pursuit of the most profitable wines, always seeking the next ladder to the unseen floors below.

Metroid games reward quick completion with images of Samus in varying degrees of nudity. People brag that they reached the final boss of Breath of the Wild within ten minutes of play. Online clubs devote themselves to speed-running. 

I understand that games are about goals, and that much of the joy of play is in building wise strategies to meet those goals. Of course you want a high score. Of course you want 100%-completion. Of course you want that rare achievement, so you find the quickest, most effective way to get it, and then you win. Right? I feel like I’m forgetting something.

What RDRII is telling me is to slow the hell down. Its makers worked pretty damn hard to construct its world, and though it’s little more than a weaving of smoke, so is most of real life. Do you want to rush through that, too, without taking a moment to, you know, experience the moment?

Arthur Morgan’s actions, even in the chaos of combat, are all very deliberate. He saunters. He slurs. He peeks into chests and drawers with a languid, I-got-all-the-time-the-world casualness. Sometimes he doesn’t even act when you tell him to. Not immediately, anyway. He just isn’t a hurried man. He certainly doesn’t have the crisp, stimulated motion of a Black Ops character, I’ll tell you that. Now, you can scream at the screen about it if you want to, but if you just relax and have a little faith, you’ll see. Arthur’ll get to it. Sure.

The fascinating truth is that the button menus in this game force you to think about what you’re doing right now, not about what you’re going to do a few seconds into the conceptual future. They force you into the moment. Arthur’s ponderous nature keeps you there.

This might sound peculiar, but when I hear the creaks of Arthur’s footsteps, or the rustle of his coat, or the jingling of his horse’s bridle, I think about the miracle of my own movement. How the heck do I do it, anyway? Where does the will to move come from?

I think about the minor motions of simple, daily activities, and about the ripples they send into the void. Opening the cabinet, pulling down the coffee mug, lifting the sink lever, seeing the mug fill with ripples, waves, and bubbles. Moving the mouse, opening the software, clacking the keys to make symbols that others will interpret. I do this everyday, altering and expressing into the pattern at large, and I don’t even know how it’s done. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that tremendous? Isn’t that worth stopping to wonder about?

RDRII is full of beautiful things to look at. The trees, the birds, the horses, the horizons — they’re all strikingly depicted. But isn’t the real world infinitely more beautiful than a mere simulation? Isn’t a twenty-minute drive to work just as lovely as a twenty-second, imaginary horse ride? Isn’t the idea of controlling a magnificent contraption with incremental, reflexive motions, just extraordinary?

Then, when you arrive at work, you enter into a sea of people united in the process of providing for themselves, and for the community. You are involved in a thoughtfully devised social structure where everyone makes a difference, no matter how small. Everything you say to your co-workers changes them, and everything they do changes you. Just like when you greet or antagonize those random pedestrians on the muddy streets of Valentine, you’re adding to the pattern, expressing the process. All you have to do is…well, take the time to do it, and then watch what happens. Isn’t that incredible? Isn’t that empowering? Isn’t that worth living for?

So maybe they fucked up. Maybe Rockstar screwed a whole litter of pooches and didn’t wind up with the perfect product that Nintendo or Blizzard would have made. Maybe a wide part of their audience won’t like it, and the game will get a lot of flak for it. I like it, though. My time with Red Dead Redemption II has been one of the most Zen experiences I can remember, and it’s been very good for me. When you try it out, I hope you’ll take a little time to enjoy it, too.

Breath of the Wild: Master of Disaster Mode

Holy cannoli! Nintendo wasn’t screwing around when they originally christened this “Hard Mode.” I’ve been tooling about in my DLC replay of The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild and I’ve learned right away that the giant world of Hyrule is best used to give those monsters their space, man.

The new mode replaces the game’s wimpy red monsters with their black and silver brethren, and reduces weapon durability to the level of dried straw. There are also snipers hanging about in the sky, and Lynels on the Great Plateau! This new Hyrule is no place to strut like the lord of the land, at least not without some careful strategies.

First, you gotta play it sneaky. I’m not used to doing that, but it really makes a difference. Sit by fires until nighttime, and then slip into enemy camps for weapons. Then get the hell out of there before you wake anyone up. Master Mode monsters recover their health if you don’t finish them quickly, and odds are those spears and clubs you just gathered won’t last long enough to kill even one of them. Save those weapons for when you really need them, because they’re precious.

Second, getcha ass southwest, and into Lurelin Village as soon as you can. If you want to counteract that enemy health regeneration, you’ll need the bananas and Mighty Porgies found there to make strength-boosting meals. Also, Lurelin is one of the few places where you can buy Shock Arrows, whose power to disarm enemies is invaluable.

Third, play with physics. Use two-handed weapons to send bad guys soaring, specifically off of cliffs or into deep water. If you have no two-handed weapons, use charged attacks. If you have no weapons at all, use bombs. If there’s no chance for victory, knock the monsters away and run for the hills.

I’ve found that these strategies are most important when facing Silver and Black Bokoblins, who can absorb so much punishment that toe-to-toe fighting will only eat up your armaments. Moblins are usually easy to Sneakstrike or avoid altogether, while Lizalfos aren’t especially hardy, and don’t require so many hits to take down.

I’m not very far into my replay, so there may be many challenges that I haven’t seen yet. I’ve heard that there are Gold monsters, even tougher than the Silver ones, who have yet make their debut. I…think I’ll avoid the dungeons for a while so I can delay their arrival.

Still, I’m kinda looking forward to it. Encouraging creative thinking is what Breath of the Wild does best, and I can’t wait to put my Zelda skills to their greatest test yet.

Review: The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild

At last, the winds of modern gaming have turned Nintendo’s sails, and tipped its fantasy-action flagship on its side. With The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild, the trendsetter has become the trend follower, and though this could be viewed as a sad capitulation, I prefer to think of it as an overdue adaptation.

Most gamers revere the Zelda series as a standard-bearer for action-adventure video games. The original NES game mixed fast-paced action with a relatively large world full of secrets of surprises, and then made it all easy to learn and play. A Link to the Past took this formula and structured it to align with a simple but dramatic plot. Then The Ocarina of Time transplanted the whole thing into a beautiful production that didn’t just look like a dream, but felt like one. The controls in Ocarina of Time were genius in their elegance, employing lock-on targeting and adjustable viewpoints. Its presentation rivaled anything seen on the PlayStation. The game wasn’t as challenging as previous entries in the series, and the game featured extensive tutorials to ease players into its features, but the graduation to 3D was so impressive that this didn’t matter. All the familiar elements of Zelda were present, but they were grander and more impressive than ever before. Ocarina was everything that Zelda fans had hoped it would be: a glorious jump into a new generation, and a literal game-changer.

I guess this is all you really need to see.

Ocarina was such a success, in fact, that Nintendo itself became fearful of it. Its lengthy development had demanded a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of risk, and Nintendo didn’t want to mess with it. Aside from the polarizing Majora’s Mask, future titles were pretty safe in their design. There were gimmicks here and there, from Wind Waker’s sailing and toon graphics, to Skyward Sword’s motion controls, but the overall flow is the same: you explore a fantasy world, delve into a series of caves, castles, and dungeons, find special tools that aid your navigation, and then use those tools to advance to other caves, castles, and dungeons. Even the minute-to-minute action went untouched. Each game had its own unique monsters and puzzles, but they were conquered with the same backflipping and block-pushing we saw in 1998. Worst of all, the constant hand-holding only grew with each release. The language of 3D Zelda became static, and then stagnant.

Then the gameplay videos of a new, “open-world” Zelda trickled out of E3 2016, and everything changed.

The first surprise was that these videos were hours long. We weren’t looking at bite-sized, self-contained samples with trite “Thank you for playing!” messages at their ends; this was the full game, and Nintendo was just setting people loose on it. They knew that even with the unprecedented access they were allowing, players would make meager progress, if any.

The reason for this was that the players didn’t want to make progress. They were too busy bounding across grassy hills, leaping streams and scaling cliffs. They were marveling at endless, gorgeous landscapes and devising clever methods for taking out monsters. They were chasing every distraction, and not once did a fairy or a lion or some glowing, talking sword interrupt or redirect them. The world was theirs to enjoy, and on their own terms. This was Zelda as I remembered it from the good old NES days: unbound, untethered, free, wild.

With their well-advised Let’s Play approach, Nintendo conveyed a significant message: they’d recognized the rut they’d been in, they’d acknowledged the concerns of the fans, and most importantly, they’d paid attention to the market. They hadn’t overlooked the rise of Dark Souls, Skyrim, and Minecraft. They were going to take those upstarts on, and show that they still had the magic.

Breath of the Wild was Game of the Show. It will likely be Game of the Year. It sold a million Nintendo Switches. It sold me a Wii U. I don’t regret the purchase.

I won’t go over the premise or details of the game, as many other reviews have already done so, and any attempt of mine would be mere parroting. Instead, I’d like to describe what I find so confounding about the game: its unoriginality.

That’s right: Breath of the Wild doesn’t do anything I haven’t seen in video games before, and yet it somehow comes off as groundbreaking and magical. In taking familiar concepts and spinning them into Zelda’s universe, Nintendo makes the old appealing.

Not something I expected to read in a Zelda game.

Why does this work? I think it’s because Zelda fans — and by extension, Nintendo fans — have been frustrated at Nintendo’s sideline strategies as of late: aiming for a theoretical market outside of the established hardcore where Sony and Microsoft hold court. Those who grew up with the genre-defining Nintendo have been holding their breaths, waiting for the emergence of their beloved franchise into the crafting-heavy, DLC-laden, micro-transaction world that gaming has become. They have accepted that Nintendo is no longer dominant; they hope for it at least to remain relevant.

By all measures, Nintendo has done this.

Gone is the formula of “find dungeon, clear dungeon.” Breath of the Wild still has its dungeons, but they needn’t be cleared or found in order to complete the game. The overarching goal is presented right at the beginning, and all else is optional. The real focus is on the world and how the player chooses to take it in.

There are familiar concepts at work to facilitate this. You’ve got towers, a la Far Cry, that Link can climb in order to reveal portions of the world map. There are Shrines where Link must solve a Portal-sized puzzle or two so he can claim a health enhancement. There are wild horses to tame as in Red Dead Redemption, and stables where he can board or take them out, like the garages in Grand Theft Auto V.

There’s also a crafting element, in the form of cooking. It’s very much derived from alchemy in Skyrim, right down to the principles. You gather ingredients by hunting animals, picking flowers, or catching insects. You throw these ingredients in an established crafting pot and you get a healing/buffing food item. Mix two or more ingredients with similar properties, and you get an improved version of that property. Nothing new, right?

There are tweaks, though. You’re not restricted like you are in Skyrim. You don’t need to taste items and ensure that their properties match before combining them. You can experiment with multiple ingredients from the start and end up with satisfying results. Different categories of ingredients affect healing value, buff type, and buff duration. There are elaborate recipes like tarts, pies, and sushi that actually look kinda tasty. Plus, there’s a cute little animation that plays when you cook, in which all the little apples, herbs, and hunks of meat hop around to a tune.

Then there are the environmental hazards. Link has to deal with rain, snow, extreme heat, and even thunderstorms. Some of this stuff is just annoying: rain will make climbing any surface nigh impossible, while snow and sand slow Link’s movement. Others are dangerous, and even deadly, but a smart player can use them to his or her advantage. Setting a metal weapon in an enemy camp during a thunderstorm can bring about a wrathful Zeus-blast that spares Link a risky fight. Dropping fruit and meat in a volcanic area will result in instantly roasted meals with added healing potential. Toss food in icy water, and they’ll freeze over, gaining a heat-resistance buff. There’s a natural logic happening here that’s reminiscent of Minecraft, and if you ever catch yourself wondering if something will work, odds are that it will. It’s a wondrous feeling. The last time my experimentation was rewarded in a Zelda game was way back on the original NES, when I first tried burning a bush with a candle and found a hidden passage beneath it. The guy inside stole my money, but that’s not the point. The point is that I had a funny idea, tried it out, and found something I didn’t expect.

Another significant change from previous Zelda games is that Link has learned how to climb like Altair in Assassin’s Creed, or Nathan Drake from Uncharted. Link can climb almost anything now, and that means that there are no real barriers in Hyrule, other than its furthest borders, of course. Link still has to manage his stamina as he climbs, or he’ll lose his grip and fall, possibly to his death (sorry, you can’t roll when you fall from a high place anymore). Even with this smart limitation, climbing allows a tremendous amount of freedom, and different players will approach their exploration in different ways. An anal player will likely seek out every possible path around a mountain, while an impatient one will simply climb over it.

The greatest change — and to me, the most important — is the dramatic increase in difficulty. It’s very easy to die in Breath of the Wild, especially since the game doesn’t warn you of its many lethal threats. Monsters can hack off as many as ten hearts with a single blow, so it’s easy to charge into a fight completely unprepared. When Link collapses from an unexpectedly powerful attack, and that red “GAME OVER” wafts onto the screen, I’m sure that Dark Souls fans will have some unpleasant flashbacks. Beating the challenges of Breath of the Wild requires harsh learning, and perhaps the occasional face-plant.

This is critical to me because I feel the Zelda series has become far too easy for its own good. Monsters in past 3D Zeldas have been typified by their slow, lumbering movements, but here, they hop about madly, make lengthy combination attacks, and are happy to gang up on Link for unfair fights. Link still has his backflip and side dodges, but he can also parry attacks with his shield and respond with mighty counterattacks. There are satisfying callouts for these special defenses, and it’s all very Dark Souls. The toughness of the monsters demands skillful play, and I find this invigorating and refreshing. Again, I think the thrill is amplified simply because it’s unexpected from this series. I’m just so happy that Zelda is difficult again! It’s a fanboy thrill, but I’ll take it anyway.

There’s something more, though. Something greater. It’s the mixture of these many systems with this beautiful, expansive world that makes Breath of the Wild irresistible. The possibilities presented by the game’s physics, logic, and move-sets are almost limitless, and enterprising players can create action sequences far more memorable than any scripted Call of Duty set-piece:

THIS is the success of Breath of the Wild: its steadfast faith in the talents of the player. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will play this game in a predictable and conservative manner, but the option for experimentation is there, and that alone makes me very happy. For once, Zelda isn’t about searching for Hookshot targets, it’s about making your own way through, and if we’re going to get anywhere with Nintendo, we must praise them for respecting our intelligence.

Now that I’ve gushed, it’s time for the negatives. I realize that to complain about anything in such a generous feast of a game would come off as exceedingly ungrateful, but I’m compelled by honesty to mention the few minor issues I had with it. Bear with me.

First, the game chugs, and unnervingly so at times. In grassy areas with lots of monsters, the frame rate drops into the teens. It didn’t affect my fighting, but it was frustrating to see. There were also a few occasions — usually upon slaying a Moblin — when the game froze completely. Several anxious seconds passed before it snapped back into action, just an instant before I made to reset my console. Nintendo has released a patch that’s mollified the problem, but hasn’t rectified it.

Second, I wish there was greater variety in the monster types. There’s an impressive panoply of baddies in the game, and they increase in strength as Link does, but there are really only three major types you’ll deal with during your travels. As I wandered the game’s diverse environments, I hoped to encounter all kinds of monsters to match them, like nests of Skulltulas, rock-hopping Tektites, or burrowing Leevers. I soon learned, however, that Bokoblins, Moblins, and Lizalfos were the meat of the enemy army, and that was disappointing.

Finally, some of the game’s quests are bummers. Most of the side quests are quite interesting and involving, particularly the ones regarding Shrines. There are others, though, that slip into typical RPG tedium, and make me wish that Hyrule was even less populous than it already is. Bring me fifty bundles of wood. Show me a Moblin Club. Can I have ten luminous stones or restless crickets? There’s some cute and charming dressing to it, but it’s still just filler.

Still, Breath of the Wild is so engrossing that I performed every task it assigned to me. Then, as my quest list shrank and I struggled to refill it, I realized that it was time to stop screwing around and make for the final goal. That was when I stopped playing for a few days, and became hesitant, uncomfortable about returning to it.

The reason was simple, and yet oh-so-rare: I didn’t want it to be over. That may be the kindest, most recommending thing to be said about a piece of entertainment, and Breath of the Wild is one of those precious few pieces that earns it. I can’t say that this is my favorite Zelda game; that title remains with the very first Zelda on the NES, which is short, so I can play through it every week if I want to. Breath of the Wild is like an epic novel that one reads once every few years. You’ll never forget it, though. Once you’ve played it, it will always be a part of you.

Controller1.com rating: 3/3

The Five Weaknesses of Zelda

I wrote the following essay in 2003, after playing through both the Japanese and US versions of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Now that Breath of the Wild is on its way, I find that the essay makes for some interesting reading. I hope you enjoy.

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The Five Weaknesses of Zelda

I love The Legend of Zelda series, but there are some unfortunate trends happening in it that have ruined the wondrous feelings I had while exploring the very first land of Hyrule on my NES. Listed below are five suggestions aimed primarily at Wind Waker, but that should have been applied to each Zelda game since A Link to the Past. I am aware of the need for game franchises to evolve as the market grows, but these aspects I condemn are altogether weak, and in their retooling I see the series’ return to its former glory.

Here are five things Nintendo needs to do to Zelda.

1.) Remove needless “RPG” elements.

Start by eliminating the worthless “Magic Meter.” That big green bar not only clutters the screen, but it seems to have been added only to give the Zelda games a closer resemblance to popular RPGs. Rarely have I emptied this thing, let alone wasted a bottle on some green potion to refill it. Thinking over the items that have required “magic power” to function through the series, I notice that none of them are useful enough to warrant limiting. The rods and canes from A Link to the Past, the spinning sword technique, the magic spells from Ocarina of Time…none of them aided me outside of certain unique circumstances. Certain tools that can be abused, such as Din’s Fire from Ocarina and the Deku Leaf from Wind Waker, should come with built-in limitations rather than share a meaningless resource with other items.

Towns need to go, as well. Bastions of civilization are integral to gameplay in series such as Dragon Warrior and Chrono Trigger, but they have little use in Zelda games (with the exception of Majora’s Mask, whose time-based gameplay created unique possibilities with regards to NPCs). Their needlessness can be identified by noting their usage in other titles. What are towns good for in other games? Shopping? Well, there’s no need to shop in a Zelda game since hearts and weaponry can be replenished from pickups in the wilderness, and all of the special treasures are found in dungeons. Recovering health? Zelda has Fairy Fountains and potions for that. Getting clues for upcoming quests? Well, allow me to say that I was able to complete a Japanese copy of Wind Waker after going in cold and not knowing a word of the language. I missed a couple of sidequests as a result, but my enjoyment of a game has never hinged on the presence of a character trophy collection. My progression from one goal to the next involved little more than deciphering the game’s many visual cues, which comprise another complaint that I will share further below.

Early in my first playthrough of Wind Waker, I watched Link regain consciousness in the little red boat in that tiny cave at the edge of Taura Island and felt a bolt of excitement. The pirates’ assault at the Island of the Magical Beast had failed, and now I was alone in a new land, rescued by a kind god of the sea and spirited to a quiet place away from enemy eyes, a lone adventurer on an unknown beach. I gleaned from the cinematics that the boat wasn’t seaworthy, and that I needed to find something to shove it off. Thus I expected to find a barren ruin about me, connecting to a dangerous network of passages infested with monsters. Somewhere inside this labyrinth would be the item I’d need to fix my damaged vessel. After skipping through the boat’s monologue, I ran out of the cave and heard chirpy, cheerful music playing. Disappointment swept over me as I realized that I was on a settled island. I wasn’t alone after all. The boat hadn’t brought me to the tiny cave to protect me. This beach wasn’t wild or unknown. The aura of mystery was gone. This place had already been discovered. And now, instead of having to explore a creature-crawling dungeon, I had to talk to a bunch of people.

In the original Zelda, the only people who talked to players were the survivors of Ganon’s invasion, scattered remnants of a devastated kingdom who were reduced to living in caves. Sometimes they sold treasures or information, sometimes they gave money, sometimes they offered clues, but they never asked pointless favors, they never held the player back, and they never seemed safe. It was a subtle way of explaining why Link was alone on his journey: these folks were depending on him to complete HIS goals, not theirs.

It can be argued that a Zelda world without settlements would be a boring place. I disagree. I have played through Ocarina several times over, and with each playthrough I find myself doing less and less talking. This isn’t because I know what I am going to be told by each character, but because the things each character says are inane. So what if that guy’s proud of his beard? Is this Mido guy supposed to be funny? Am I the only one who never bothers to sell anything “with C?” Should I be offended that Malon keeps calling me a “fairy boy?” As such, I have decided that Hyrule’s townsfolk are altogether unnecessary and that the places where they live are little more than poor attempts at duplicating an element of successful RPGs. Now I run straight through Zelda towns and only stop to talk with those folks who give me treasures.

Which makes for a fine segue into the last “RPGish” concept that Zelda has adopted and which now must be abolished: treasure chests. They were cute in A Link to the Past, in which the newly implemented “action” button needed as many uses as possible, and opening chests seemed as good an option as any. The “opening” cinematic that was added in Ocarina of Time was meant to generate suspense and excitement in players as they waited an extra five seconds to discover which item they were to receive. Now, however, the chests have worn out their welcome. In Wind Waker, the opening animation plays every single time Link finds a large treasure chest, whether the contents are critical to game progress or not. With dozens of undersea and hidden chests in the game to open, that’s a whole lot of repetitious animation to sit through.

A fundamental question of design arises from this: Why disconnect the player from a reward with a container, anyway? Aren’t the activities of seeing a pickup icon on the game screen and moving the player-character to touch it both parts of basic player/game interaction? Metroid Prime has proven that there is still satisfaction to be drawn from the simple action of moving the player-character into an object to obtain it. Despite their efforts at creating an immersive, realistic environment, Metroid Prime’s designers chose to display Energy tanks, missile expansions, and major power-ups as icons that float, glow, and even hum for no reason other than to make them recognizable to the player, even from a distance. None of the major pickups in Metroid Prime is stuck inside some futuristic container that Samus must open for the sake of context. The point is to instill the excitement of discovery in the player, and encourage them to rush up and grab their prize. The game still features scripted animations that depict the collection of most power-ups, but they aren’t shown until the player actually comes into contact with the pickup icon.

These concepts of pickup design may detract from the game’s realism, but they promote a sense of active player control. In contrast, the scripted animations of Zelda which describe the receipt of an item foster distance and passivity. Ugly and surprising examples of such passive receipt are everywhere in Wind Waker: consider the episodes when Link attains his first bottle, the Grappling Hook, and even the game’s titular treasure, the Wind Waker itself. All of these items are just given to the player in lengthy cutscenes displayed as the plot requires them. Ocarina of Time started this trend with its odd Spiritual Stones and Sages’ Seals: untouchable, completely scripted objects given little meaning by the game’s design and plot except as abstract marks of player progress.

This growing player/inventory disconnection is a serious threat to the Zelda experience, one that began with the incorporation of treasure chests for the sake of making the series more “RPG-like.”  Eliminating the Dragon Warrior/Final Fantasy chest concept from Zelda will help the series return to its action gaming roots.

2.) Say no to pot, grass and rock.

A disturbing trend has developed in the Zelda series in which Link has turned his sword away from monsters in favor of harmless stationary objects, namely the stones, bushes and jars that are sprinkled across Hyrule like so much grass seed. Upon their introduction in A Link to the Past, these environmental accents were innovative: to the designer they were a new method of hiding passages and treasure, to the player a new level of interactivity with the game world. Now, however, they’ve simply become replacements for more deserving targets.

Here is a quote from the original Legend of Zelda’s instruction manual: “The basic principle of the game is, of course, to defend yourself and destroy the enemy one after the other in quick succession.” This line is accurate because Hyrule used to be packed with monsters. Everywhere Link went, he had to fight for his life. Though his adversaries were not intelligent or aggressive, players still needed to think fast and move faster to adapt to each situation. When things got too hot, players could either retreat from their current course and run for a fairy spring, or continue fighting, praying that the next enemy they dispatched would drop a precious heart so that they might continue their adventures a little while longer.

Boy, those were the days, weren’t they? Ganon’s army has since seen a great reduction in volunteers. The overworlds of recent Zelda titles are sparsely populated, and the creatures that do appear there fail to present a significant threat. Even the dungeons aren’t as dangerous as they used to be, as their denizens either lumber about like tortoises (moblins, ironknuckles, redeads), or are rooted in place (skulltulas, deku babas, octoroks). There are a few monster types that provide a thrilling challenge (the ‘fos monsters in particular), but their encounters are few and far between, and often over too soon.

It is presumed that this change in focus from furious charge to leisurely tour took place to ease gamers through the series’ transition to 3D, but that guiding hand has been too gentle. I haven’t lost once while playing a 3D Zelda game. In contrast, I’ve perished several times in each of the Game Boy Zeldas, and dozens of times on the NES Zeldas. The greatest challenge to the original Zelda wasn’t in figuring out where to go next, it was in surviving the trip. Clearing dungeons didn’t involve endless hunts for keys (there was an overabundance of keys in that game), it was about fighting through hordes of Wizzrobes, Like Likes and Darknuts, using reflexes and skill to pick them off one by one until it was safe to move forward. The monsters were tough, too; there were no quarter-heart-taking wimps in this game. The beefiest monsters like the Blue Darknuts would relieve an unarmored Link of two entire hearts if they touched him, and players couldn’t go and chop a bush or smash a jar to get them back. They had to go right back into the fray and slay until the desired pickups appeared.

What’s scary is that other games have adopted this useless element of incidental breakable objects as though it’s a legitimate step forward for gameplay. Even the Diablo series and its clones have pots and barrels to kick. Designers have forgotten that these characters are not landscapers, they’re warriors. They wield weapons, not tools. They fight evil, not aphids. I spend more time in Wind Waker cutting grass than I do fighting monsters, and it’s a boring shame to witness. Zelda is about action, not yardwork.

3.) Consolidate the subscreens.

A Link to the Past has the right idea: in it, there is a main screen for action, a subscreen for information, and a map screen for guidance. That’s it. That’s all any player should need.

Unfortunately, in Ocarina, the developers saw fit to add an “equipment screen” and “Quest Status screen” to this formula. As a result, Ocarina has one of the least elegant subscreens ever designed. The concept of an equipment screen in a Zelda game is questionable at best: weapons such as the Megaton Hammer were used with the C-buttons, so the Giant’s Knife could have been too. Boots should also have been relegated to the item buttons, as they are in Wind Waker, since the Water Temple demonstrated to players how annoying it is to have to pause the action dozens of times just to move from room to room.

As for the shields, it should stand to reason that players will always want the best, all-purpose defenses equipped, and as such any upgradeable aspects of Link’s character should have a single, layered path for improvement. After all, the Mirror Shield was just as useful as the Hylian Shield and it had the added ability to reflect beams of light; why didn’t it just replace the Hylian Shield altogether? Why is the choice even available when one shield is only better than the previous shield?

Then there are the tunics. As Link discovers the tunics that allow him to breathe underwater or withstand great heat, these abilities should simply accrue upon his character. The player shouldn’t be forced to go into the equipment screen to switch tunics so as to enter a different environment. The Metroid games already have this down pat with their handling of suit upgrades, why did Zelda make this mistake? Thankfully, the equipment screen was axed in Majora’s Mask, replaced with the much more appropriate “Mask Screen.” Here’s hoping it never appears again.

Now we come to the “Quest Status Screen,” another that can be removed with little hindrance to gameplay. In Wind Waker, the subscreen is divided into an “Item Screen” and “Quest Status” screen, and I still don’t understand why, when several of the elements found on the Quest Status Screen could easily fit on the Item Screen if certain game elements were designed and organized better.

First of all, all of the item and equipment graphics can be shrunk down, as can the Triforce display. After all, most video game players aren’t blind, and those who are probably don’t play Zelda.

Next, the main widgets of collection (Triforces, Seals, Instruments of the Siren, etc.), can easily fit on the Item Screen. This consolidates information and acts as a more effective method of reminding the player of how far along they are in the main thread of the quest. Every time players go to change items, they will see just how much farther they need to go.

Item #4 of this essay will deal with the issue of Heart Pieces as gameplay elements, but for the purposes of this subject of subscreens I will say to simply eliminate the Heart Piece display altogether.

Finally, get rid of the song list. Playing musical instruments with the controller buttons or analog sticks is fun the first few times, but tiresome each thereafter. Since all other objects and characters in the world freeze while instruments are in use, there is no point in making the player go through the lengthy doldrums of recalling and then inputting extended button sequences. If Link is going to use a musical instrument, let him use it the way he did his ocarina in Link’s Awakening: by choosing a specific song beforehand in the Item screen and then playing it with a single button press. By using this method for playing instruments, designers eliminate the need for memorization, and thus the song list can be altogether cleared from the Quest Status screen.

With all these pointless graphical elements removed, the required elements can be retained and placed in the extra space made on the Item screen by shrinking the graphics there, and lo and behold, all information has been condensed into one screen. The game is streamlined, players have less to remember, and designers have less work to do.

4.) Stop with the collections.

You know what I’m talking about: Heart Pieces, Golden Skulltulas, Joy Pendants, Chuchu Jellies, Golden Feathers, Knight’s Crests, Skull Necklaces, and all the other objects that are useless unless you have a certain amount of them. There is only one item type that should function this way, and it’s called money.

Too often has the thrill of discovering a secret cave been defused by the anticlimactic Heart Piece at its end. The reward for the player’s exploration is an object that is worthless until three more of them are found. In the original Zelda, players would often find whole Heart Containers in the caves they blasted open. Awarding entire Heart Containers in one swoop may seem to lessen the challenge of a Zelda game, but if designers would make the monsters less wussy, this wouldn’t be an issue.

In Metroid games, players don’t have to retrieve four Energy Tank “pieces” before powering up: they get the whole thing at once. The enhancement, and thus the reward, is felt right away. The reason it works is that the game is tapered and balanced well enough to continually challenge players even as they grow stronger and more skilled.

In fact, there isn’t a single instance of pointless collection in Metroid Prime. The only objects that function as a collection in that game are the twelve Chozo artifacts, and gathering those is the main goal of the game. There aren’t any items that need to be hoarded and brought to an NPC for a reward. There are no items that need depositing or reforging or rebuilding before they become useful to the player. Everything works at once, so when players attain something, they know it’s important, and they keep their eyes open for more.

If Zelda’s designers want to make their game feel longer by making players collect things, why don’t they dip into the bag of tricks from the original Zelda, and bring back the treasure-hawking merchants? By tempting players with expensive shields and rings that cannot be found anywhere but in shops, designers can encourage players to hunt monsters and seek out caves to gather Rupees, an asset that has been ill-used in recent Zelda games. The disappointment that used to settle on players who found Rupees inside of chests instead of more powerful items would turn to cheer, especially if the archaic wallet-size limitation is removed, and players are allowed to hold as many as they can find. What’s more, by driving players to gather Rupees and nothing else, designers won’t have to waste valuable development time coming up with flimsy NPC fetch quests, so everyone will be happy.

5.) Let the players do the thinking.

In the first Legend of Zelda, players had only their brains and the instruction manual to guide them in their adventure. Almost all of the dungeon entrances were hidden. The occasional old crone or hermit found tucked away in a cavern may offer some clues about where to find them, but said clues were cryptic (not to mention poorly translated), and so the players were encouraged to think, to explore, and most of all, to experiment. In their hunts for the next piece of the Triforce, players would bomb every wall, burn every tree, push every rock to succeed.

Sometimes these searches would get tedious, or even frustrating, and players who had gotten stuck and exhausted of time or energy would often quit the game for a while before returning, drawn by its action and spot-on play control. They would proceed to enjoy themselves as they fought their way through Hyrule, until through some chance bombing, burning, or flute-playing, they would come across that dungeon which had so far eluded them, and interest would rise anew.

Such personal quests have all but disappeared from present Zelda games, in which every goal is spelled out and underlined before the player in extensive cutscenes and dialogue.

What’s worse is that every item’s usage is described by the game as well, and as such there are no surprises as to what an item may be used for. Part of the joy of exploration in Zelda was discovering new ways of interacting with the environment so as to find new areas to explore. The instruction manual for the original Zelda didn’t explain how the boomerang could be used to catch items, nor did it explain how candles could be used to burn down trees, nor did it describe how bombs could be used to find hidden caves or blast open walls in dungeons. Players had to realize these through experimentation and effort, and when something unexpected happened, accompanied by the now overused “Zelda secret” jingle, jaws would drop in astonishment.

Now the bombs, boomerangs, hookshots and other items have been around so long that their usage is clear even to newcomers to the series, and those who don’t have an idea will be promptly filled in by the game’s “helpful” text. It doesn’t help that every target for these items is now marked or made clear in some way which discourages experimentation. Wind Waker is replete with cracked walls, wooden pegs, and bull’s-eye circles all in plain sight. Whatever happened to instilling subtle suspicion in players by placing blank walls, tree branches or empty torch hangers in unusual places?

What caused Zelda’s designers to underestimate the intelligence and moreover, the creativity of players? Long player-driven quests to unearth hidden treasures and passages can be aggravating, but in taking the aggravation away, designers have also robbed players of the reward that accompanies the rare success.

In vast, detailed 3D worlds, even the best player will need some guidance, so being aided by in-game text isn’t always a bad thing, but sometimes players should be allowed the freedom to figure out what to do on their own. Once again, the Zelda design team need only look at Metroid Prime to see a decent, though not perfect, method of mixing player freedom with a guided quest. In Prime, Retro implemented an optional “Hint System” that gave players a helpful push towards the next step of game completion. Attentive players, however, could go through the entire game without using it, as each power-up in the game is placed to help players reach areas they’d already seen, but were unable to access.

Zelda used to be designed in the same way, but in Wind Waker, the gameplay has mutated to the point where players are pushed through nonsensical plotlines and disconnected locales, so they need to be inundated with information in order to get to places they hadn’t even thought of approaching.

This can be blamed on the ocean-based overworld, which cuts landed locations off from each other by empty distance, but even with a large ocean, the game world could have been designed with greater cohesiveness. Today’s gamers are smart. They can handle it. If I could finish the original Zelda at seven years old, I think that today’s children could handle a greater challenge than Wind Waker any day.

So the Zelda game series needs some serious retooling to reclaim the throne of action-adventure games. With all these steps to take, the game may as well undergo a whole design overhaul, and why not? Good graphics, even cel-shaded ones, don’t create a beloved franchise, innovation does. Perhaps a Zelda game unlike any other is in order to revive interest in the series. One with new villains, new worlds, and entirely new mechanics. Swordplay that doesn’t involve merely pushing the B button repeatedly. A life meter that doesn’t use hearts. All this might sound strange, but who knows what new concepts Nintendo could come up with if they unfettered themselves from the five weaknesses they’ve pressed upon the once infallible Zelda franchise? Players would get something wonderful that doesn’t emulate RPGs, doesn’t have a bunch of ancillary decorations to destroy, doesn’t require navigation through unnecessary screens, doesn’t force players to gather worthless trinkets, and doesn’t do all the thinking for them.

After all, they’ve already lost the console wars; what else do they have to lose?

Final Fantasy Foolishness Part 1

After seeing a bit about some Final Fantasy V charity stream on YouTube, I’ve taken an interest in the early Final Fantasy games. I never touched the remakes on the GBA and DS, and I’d like to see what improvements have been made. So I’m going to play through the first six games as they appear on the handhelds.

I have many fond memories of playing the original Final Fantasy on the Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s a pretty typical role-playing game: you explore the world, fight lots of monsters, delve into caves and castles, and purchase spells and items. The object is to slay four big monsters and save the world. My brother and I worked together: he would handle the dungeons and battle strategy, while I took care of grinding, shopping, and planning. We sat and watched each other as we took turns, seeing the quest unfold.

Unfortunately, the NES game had many problems and inconveniences due to its new and unrefined gameplay style. The worst of these was the ineffective attack. If one of your characters slew a monster that another character targeted, the second character would simply slash at the air, wasting a turn. You couldn’t choose the quantities of purchased items, so if you wanted to stock up on Healing Potions, you had to buy them one at a time. We had an NES Advantage controller, which featured auto fire, so when we hit the item store, I would place my brother’s quarter jar on the A button and go read a book. There was no way to tell which weapons or armor were more effective than others without checking the status screen. Spells were extremely limited in use, and there were no items to recover magic power. The menus were clunky and the in-game map took several seconds to draw onscreen. Debuff and death spells had so little chance to work that they were practically useless. Also, there’s no real plot to speak of, no dramatic moments. The world is static, waiting for you to go clean it up.

I don’t really mind that last part, though. RPGs of this time rarely had elaborate plots. Final Fantasy II put great emphasis on story, but that game didn’t come out in the United States until the GBA version came along years later. I’ve never played it, and I’m curious to see what it’s all about.

Anyway, FF1 puts everything on the player. You create and name every character (I like to use my friends’ names), and they only get whatever personalities you dream up for them. You have to talk to people in towns to figure out where to go next, and you have to go explore on your own with no real guidance. There’s a risk of running into enemies that are too strong for you, but it’s very low. Grinding really isn’t necessary as long you fight most battles.

Preparation is a big part of FF1. Sometimes you’re required to travel long distances from civilization to reach an important dungeon, fighting monsters along the way. Then you have to fight your way through that dungeon, beat its boss, and fight back out. You eventually get to learn a quick-exit spell, but it’s a ways into the game, and only certain character types can use it. Without the proper spells, equipment, and a huge stock of healing items, you won’t complete your trips. Thankfully, the updated version of the game has a much fairer economy than the NES original did, and buying great amounts of items is a breeze.

You’ll enter a variety of settings in the game, from ruined fortresses to burning volcanoes, and some of them get a little out there near the end. The monsters are all suited to their environments, and each type has different resistances and weaknesses. Experimentation with different magic spells is recommended.

The semblance of a story features only one last-minute development, and it’s a silly one. It’s not the last time you’ll see this in the series; Final Fantasy games often falter at their ends, introducing sudden twists that have little to do with the build-up before them. Still, the first game is not about a designer’s story; it’s about player-driven quests and adventures. Players are meant to create their own tales as their little heroes travel the world, fight, die, and overcome adversities.

FF1 is a simple, fun fantasy adventure that rewards inquisitive and attentive players. The niggling problems of the NES game are cleared up in the GBA version, and the graphics and music all have impressive overhauls. Even though it’s been polished up in this way, it still turns me back to my eleven-year-old self, who teamed up with his brother to destroy evil.

Diablo III Video

My first video game recording. Watch me clear a Nephalem Rift with my Hardcore Monk!

Gently Down the….

Making cartoons takes a long time. I’d like to keep in touch with my fans somehow. I’m thinking of making some YouTube videos of the production process, but I was also thinking of something else.

Lately I’ve been pouring an hour or two into playing PC games each night, including Diablo III, The Sims 4, and Grand Theft Auto V. Why not use that time to record a Twitch stream? Of course, I’ll talk about the game, but I also think it’d be a good forum for discussion of other topics, such as art, animation, movies, game design, writing, etc.

I’ll be sure to notify you beforehand. I hope to see some of you! Of course, the channel name will be “lisvender.” Now I just have to find a convenient time to do the recording. Hope to see you online!

Games of the Year

Ah, video games. I love them and hate them. They seem like childish wastes of time one minute, and they’re engrossing adventures the next. I believe I’ve sworn myself off of gaming as often as I’ve come back to them. I hate the checklist-addiction  that many modern games substitute for fun now, and yet, I still think new games have smarter, more efficient design than old ones.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to go over the top five games that I enjoyed best this year. Keep in mind that only two of them actually came out in 2014, but if they’re on this list, it’s because they’re timeless.

#5, The Sims 4: A lot of folks complained about The Sims 4 when it came out. They bemoaned the divided neighborhoods, the load times involved in moving between lots, the lack of toddlers, etc. As someone who’s played The Sims since its first incarnation in 2000, I wasn’t surprised at this strip-down; every new game in the series cut out features that were added in expansions for the previous game. That sounds like it might suck, but every game introduced original concepts that made up for the loss, and I think The Sims 4 adds some meaningful new ideas that make it worth ditching The Sims 3 for.

First of all, creating characters and building homes, two activities that felt a little too much like work in the past, is much more intuitive in 4 than in previous Sims games. You just grab what you want to change with your cursor and pull. It’s quick and it’s fun, which means that you can get to playing sooner. Live Mode has been overhauled; Sims generally move and respond more rapidly than they did in previous games, they can perform multiple actions at once, and the retooled UI is sleek and lovely. Maxis has finally succeeded in moving Needs to the back burner, too. Emotions are what matter now, and it’s a lot of fun to see the differences in your Sims’ demeanor as their moods shift. Depending on how they’re feeling, they’ll move, talk, gesture, and generally carry themselves in unique ways. Emotions also affect what they feel like doing, and what they enjoy. There are tons of surprising, emotion-based actions to find, as well. Sims who are feeling Flirty can bake heart-shaped cookies. Playful Sims can paint cartoon characters. Confident Sims can “Pee like a Champion,” and more.

I like that Maxis scaled things back a bit, and returned the game’s focus to the dynamics of the household. My only complaint is that if you get addicted to it, as I did, it might feel like the well of surprises dries out quickly. Sometimes I felt myself struggling to come up with new ideas for my Sims to play out. Still, I find it tough to stop playing it whenever I start, so it’s earned a place on this list.

#4, Soviet Strike: Boy, am I glad I kept my PlayStation 2, because it turns out there are tons of fun and fascinating PlayStation 1 games that I simply overlooked during the system’s heyday. Soviet Strike is one of them.

Back in the 16-bit era, I read a lot about the Strike series of games for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive (for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call it the Genedrive). I dismissed them because I completely misunderstood them: from the pictures, I expected them to be serious flight sims with complicated controls and slow-paced gameplay.

Man, was I wrong. Turns out they’re cousins to one of my favorite NES games, Solar Jetman. You pilot an assault chopper around massive battlefields, rescuing POWs, collecting fuel and ammunition, and blowing up everything else. The 16-bit games were still kind of slow, though. The explosions were weak-looking and poorly animated, the maps had few distinguishing landmarks, and there was no music during gameplay, so flying from one point to the next felt desolate. Even worse, the games had no HUD: you had to pause in order to check vital stats like armor, fuel and ammo. Not cool. When I first played Desert Strike on the Genedrive, I shook my head in disappointment. It was so close to greatness, and yet so far.

Soviet Strike, the first Strike game on the PSX, is something else though. The gameplay backbone was carried over, but improvements were made in several areas. The controls are more responsive than in the 16-bit games, your weapons have better aim, and the explosions look terrific. There are two camera settings, so you can play with the viewpoint centered behind your chopper now. There’s a HUD with all the important stats, but if it gets in the way, you can toggle it with a button press. And there’s music during gameplay now! When I started playing Soviet Strike, I couldn’t stop until I’d cleared every possible mission on the map. Then I wanted to jump into the next one. This game is the closest thing I’ve found to a Solar Jetman sequel, and that’s a big deal to me.

#3, Street Fighter Alpha 2: I grew up during the fighting game craze, so yeah, I’ve played this one before. Still, I never recognized just how gosh-darned good it is until this year. While all the one-on-one fighters around it made significant missteps, Alpha 2 just got everything right.

Alpha 2 is a Capcom standard bearer. It has bright, eye-popping graphics (cleverly animated to maintain timing), catchy musical themes (none of the bland techno stuff like in Alpha 3), hefty sound effects (I still don’t know why Capcom stopped using those sweet smacking punches), and a variety of unique abilities that are always at your disposal (no ISMs or single Super Arts). I’m no expert at the game, and I can’t work a super move into a combo for the life of me, but I can just feel it when things are going right. The game is consistent enough that you can shift between planning and improvising, pressing the attack and breaking away in a flash. It’s not so crazy that you can’t tell what’s going on, and it’s not so advanced that newcomers won’t stand a chance at it. My only complaint is that the AI can be a complete cheap-ass. Still, when I want a quick gaming fix, Alpha 2 is the game I’ve been going to this year, so it makes the list.

#2, Diablo III Reaper of Souls: Like The Sims 4, D3 took a lot of flak from gamers for “dumbing down” the series. I don’t really understand this. Diablo was never a very smart game to begin with. You click monsters, monsters die. What’s to dumb down? The most common complaints I hear are that it takes too long to get unique items, the monsters are too easy, and that move choices are too limited early on in the game. “Too much action,” they said, “not enough RPG!”

I find it tough to care about these things, though, when the action looks and feels this good.

That’s a typical scene from D3. There’s more shit blowing up and bodies flying around here than in most first-person shooters. Complainers say it’s all just so much bluster, but hey, I love bluster. Explosions, particles, rag dolls…I can’t get enough of it. That there’s a solid Action RPG beneath it, with fast-flowing combat, customizable moves, and endless randomized quests just sells me further. I’m very happy with the direction Diablo has taken, and if Blizzard keeps adding new features via patches, I can see myself playing it for yet another hundred hours. Still, as much as I love it, I can’t say it’s my favorite game of 2014.

#1, Medal of Honor: No, not the reboot. I mean the original on the PlayStation 1. The one that set the standard for World War II shooters with its objective-based gameplay, authentic weaponry, and superlative sound design.

It looks pretty crappy by today’s standards, but Medal of Honor has an atmosphere that keeps it engaging. The starry nights, the clattering guns, the distant blasts and gunfire, they all just wrap around you and pull you into them. The “war room” menus are also quite cool. The game just does a terrific job of putting you amid the agony and intrigue of WWII Europe. The action is tense and methodical, but never frustrating or cumbersome. The controls are surprisingly modern, too; it’s built to play with a Dual Shock, and there’s a setting to play using the familiar move/look control setup we all know and love.

Medal of Honor walks the line between the exploration-based design of Doom and the scripted spectacle of Call of Duty, and I love it. In fact, I find this “middle ground” philosophy to be quite common among PSX games, and I really enjoy it. The PSX carried the soul of the 16-bit era that came before it, even while it tried on some of the trappings of the oncoming future. We got big, crazy games with detailed 3D worlds, but none of the obsessive-compulsive, subscription-based, online-only, multiplayer-focused, on-disc DLC, micro-transacted bullshit we have to deal with today. I think I’ll dig a little deeper into the PSX library to see what other gems I missed. Who knows? Maybe my whole top five for 2015 will be made up of what I find!

Game Review: Grand Theft Auto V

**

Developed by Rockstar Games. Published by Take-Two Interactive. Available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Reviewed on Xbox One.

Guess what? Grand Theft Auto is back…again. Like other hits released at the tail end of the last console generation, the gaming event that was Grand Theft Auto V has received the “Definitive Edition” treatment: a next-gen coat of paint, some added features, and a re-release at full price. Should you shell out for it a second time? Well, a year ago I would have said “Hell yeah” simply because of the hype, but now I’d give a careful “Yes, so long as you tweak your expectations.” GTA has changed a lot over the past thirteen years, and its current focus might not be where you want it to be.

By now, you already know what GTA V is about: three criminals with very different backgrounds unite and perform a series of heists around the fictional city of Los Santos. You have Michael, a former bank robber who’s having a mid-life crisis. You’ve got Franklin, a repo man who’s trying to break free from his gang ties. Then there’s Trevor, a manic meth-head who dreams of a life of chaos. When these three get together, you get shooting, you get driving, you get carjacking, you get a whole hell of a lot of missions. You know the drill by now: steal cars, drive here, shoot that, lose the cops, torture this guy, blow up that guy, watch that woman get sucked into a jet engine. Typical GTA stuff. In fact, it feels a little tiresome by now. What puts the missions a cut above other games is the story. There’s a constant stream of social commentary flowing through this game, and you’ll love it if you can get on its cynical wavelength. I don’t usually care about story in games, but I care about this one. Of course, the plot isn’t sensical or plausible, and Michael and Trevor are such strong characters that they overshadow the rest of the cast, but there’s some heady, heavy stuff in here. The cutscenes are well-acted, dramatic, shocking, and they’re even laugh-out-loud funny. If you play GTA V just to screw around in the open world, you’re missing the best parts.

It helps that they look breathtaking. GTA V looked incredible even on consoles past, but now it’s even better. The characters have convincing faces and movements. Car interiors, the only aspect of the previous version that looked bad, now have full ridges and contours. The California sun bathes the world in beautiful, natural-looking color, and the northern deserts look like photographs. Never before has a game inspired me to stop what I was doing just so I could watch a freaking sunrise. Those bleeding pinks and grays…they really just nailed it. Los Santos isn’t just a place to make trouble, it’s a place to sightsee (an activity that works especially well with the new first-person viewpoint). If you look around long enough, you’ll find some cool surprises to look at, though that’s pretty much all you can do with them.

I have to say, GTA V is a strange product overall. Within the framework of its missions, it’s an excellent, story-based video game, but between those missions, it’s like visiting an amusement park, complete with the walks and the waiting and the expensive food. It is the latest step on a path that Rockstar started on in 2002 with Vice City. That was the point when they steered away from the development of groundbreaking gameplay, and focused on the construction of incredibly detailed worlds. I don’t just mean that their games have great graphics, either. While other game makers concentrate on stretching their environments to enormous sizes and packing them with slightly varied side quests, Rockstar pours its efforts into that less-tangible quality of atmosphere. Their mantra seems to be “deeper characters, smarter dialogue, more texture in the corners.” You can trace the rise of this design dogma as it threads through games like GTA IV, Red Dead Redemption, and Max Payne 3, with GTA V sitting at the pinnacle. No one else does world-building of this caliber. Even role-playing games, with their volumes of backstory and lore, don’t capture the sensation of BEING THERE as well as GTA V does, but that doesn’t mean it’s always exciting.

I’m just going to say it: there are a lot of parts of GTA V that are pointless, or just plain dull. Driving from one place to another can take a good long while, and it actually made me sleepy at times. The game has ATM machines that display your cash balance, when your HUD already does a perfectly good job of that. You can take a star tour, get a lap dance, hunt animals, run marathons, do yoga, play tennis and golf, and even go skydiving, and all these activities are surprisingly rich little mini-games, but, really, just…why? Isn’t this supposed to be a game about crime? Oh, and get a rubber band out of the junk drawer if you want to complete the cult storyline, because one of its missions requires Michael to WALK FIVE MILES IN A CIRCLE. I’m not joking. I know it’s supposed to be satirical of cult practices, but five miles? Wouldn’t one mile get the point across? No video game should ask such a thing. It’s like something Andy Warhol would come up with if he made games. If it’s a joke, then the joke’s on us.

What’s even more frustrating is that GTA V introduces some neat gameplay ideas to balance out the boredom, but then it leaves them half-baked. Michael can saunter around his mansion and say hi to his wife and kids, but he can only have conversations with them over the phone. You can take pictures with your phone, but you can’t record video. Franklin has a Rottweiler named Chop who can sniff out collectibles or run down bad guys, but he only features in one or two missions. Hand-to-hand combat is much more responsive than it was in GTA IV, but strangely enough, most of the people you fight will hit the floor after a single punch. You can swap characters at will during some missions, but it’s only useful at certain scripted moments. The famous heists appear full of emergent possibilities from the surface, as they allow players to pick their plans and allies, but all these choices affect are the branches in pre-determined events. You don’t get to post shooters, choose vehicles, draw escape routes, or anything like that.

Then there are the controls. Like the game’s design, they’re not exactly bad — they’re greatly improved over GTA IV’s — they’re just unconventional. Most games assign context-sensitive actions to a single button, but GTA V uses three. The buttons used for reloading weapons and taking cover also stubbornly differ from gaming standards. The game’s generous auto-aim makes most firefights too easy, but if you turn it off, they get too hard. There’s no cruise control option, in a game whose long freeways demand it. And you still have to hold a button to make your character jog at a reasonable speed…but not in multiplayer or first-person mode. It makes no sense. Just ditch the run button already!

These oversights aren’t deadly to GTA V, as they’re from the same vein of niggling problems common to most Rockstar games. It’s just that I think a lot of this stuff should be ironed out by now, especially in a second release. I also think this game would be better if it was structured like Max Payne 3, and if the game world felt, well, more like a game. The truth is, though, that this is a story-based game whose story is so good it makes everything surrounding it look lame and unnecessary, and sadly, most of it is.

The good news is that you have a lot of good options for open-world games now. GTA isn’t your sole choice. Get Far Cry 4 if you want a variety of activities with emergence and freedom of play. Get Sunset Overdrive if you want constant engaging action. Get GTA V, though, if you want to take part in a beautiful, well-produced, action-adventure story that’s on par with AMC’s best dramas. Just expect a little ennui dashed in there as well. Sorry, but you can’t have it all.

Kifflom!