Balthier and Trembling

by Zen

I

Two great nations go to war.  The battleground, a small kingdom in between, is obliterated in a single explosion that asserts Arcadia's dominance over the entire globe.  This death and destruction set the tone for an era of bloodshed and fear.

The new Ivalice holds no place for the name Dalmasca; her new Dynast-King's time is nigh.  Happy the world whose hero arrives at all, to prevent these terrors.

II

Her gaze fixed on duty, her thirst for power and vengeance left unchecked, the deposed queen sees only the path to glory.  Filled with holy purpose, stones of power in hand and treaty signed in enemies' blood, the gods' will is fulfilled and a dynasty of sacred order and Roman peace is secured.  What hours of darkest night will these new shards bring?

Sword in hand, Dalmasca's enemies are laid to rest.  Sword in hand, she makes an enemy of all.  Happy the world whose hero gives not her heart to a stone.

III

When is a quest worth abandoning?  At what point do virtue and justice yield to some hope for dignity, for the peace that history denied a ruined homeland?  What price will the children of Dalmasca pay to see the machinations of empires repaid?

Revolution, resistance, insurgence--these words all splinter, shattered and bloody, at the breast of the uncompromising folly of conviction.  Happy the world whose hero must face the exhaustion her cause has brought the devoted.

IV

The knight's path is arduous but firm, watching over his charge with no concern for his self.  Even a brother's hate and a kingdom's disgrace can be no burden to him as he shields his queen from any harm or interference.  Vulnerable and weak, a desperate regent is not, alone, enough to stand against the tide of history, and a pawn for others' designs she shall ever be.

In the end, the knight's duty is to both sides of a conflict, that it may not be won but rather dissolved.  Happy the world whose hero receives such protection and whose counterpart receives it double.

V

Memoirs are filled with the posturing of nations.  History's needs are those of borders and titles, of opposing nation-states and conflicting ideals.  This dialectic holds no meaning for the meager, for those desperate lives clinging to its lowtowns, its alleys of muted sighs.

History's orphans seldom offer counsel to its masters, and thus do their numbers swell.  Happy the world whose hero knows the lot of its weakest.

VI

The ground beneath thrones has had its fill of tyrants' blood; their seats are too easily filled by their like for true peace to last.  The trick is to find that rare, solicitous leader who is both poised and willing to replace power with care.

The Other of All Game Protagonists

by Zen

Two games came out on the NES with the same design goals, but with different inspirations.  Both games were open-world action games that emphasized the hero's gradual mastery over an environment, but while The Legend of Zelda attempted to capture the spirit of adventure of a young child playing in the woods Metroid was inspired by the solitude and anxiety of the film Alien.  Understandably, this led to two very different protagonists.  Zelda's Link as the chosen hero, guided by destiny to rescue his princess, is a trope that even as a child I couldn't stomach.  His rise to victory is pre-ordained, a series of formalities the game, like its world, is obligated to bestow.  Metroid's Samus shows up similarly under-equipped, and similarly unlocks the secrets of her environment to gain the power to achieve her goal, but the game inherited Alien's emphasis on its heroine's personal struggle.  Even after awkward world-building was forced into the series Samus retained her potency, her desperate strength.

Metroid 2's only indication that Samus is a woman

It is mercifully mundane nowadays to note that Samus, like Ripley who inspired her, is a woman.  At the time it was something we talked about at recess.  "But the manual calls Samus 'he'!" Those of us who knew the code for her second quest (of course we couldn't beat the game ourselves), where the armor came off and her hair came down, knew the translators had just made the same assumption we had.  Seeing this made me think, probably for the first time, about where these assumptions came from.  But in the end Samus acted as a glorified peep show, rewarding the player with a flash of skin for completing the game quickly.  The positive impact of this representation was overwhelmed by objectification.

A few years ago I read a story about a man whose daughter loved playing Zelda games but wasn't interested in playing as another boy saving a girl.  He hacked the game script for Wind Waker so that it was a story about a young girl saving her brother, and it ended up working perfectly.  This is a really sweet story, one that highlights many of the imperfections to which "typical gamers" have the luxury of blindness.  There was a time I'd have sworn that gamers would cling to this anecdote as being indicative of video games' universal applicability, that the girl's desire to play Zelda at all meant vindication that games were more than mere focus-grouped novelty and had genuine cultural value, for everyone.  I now know better.

The backlash, in a smirking equivocation that has become all too familiar, came in the form of a version of Metroid hacked so that Samus is a man.  Neither hack was a high-profile event, but the audacity of this absurd rebuttal presages GamerGate's core tenet: that even one heroine is too many.  That young girls should stay out of the treehouse.

How powerups are acquired in Other M

This juvenile tantrum presaged something else: Nintendo itself rescinded Samus's heroic status, releasing a new Metroid game whose only purpose was to retroactively excise all agency, power, and courage from its once ground-breaking protagonist.  This game, Metroid: Other M, is the most aggressively sexist game I have ever played, made all the moreso by its determination to undo the barely-progressive "mistakes" of its forebears.  Its purpose was to reassure us that Samus, while she may have done cool stuff once, is ultimately nothing but a pretty vessel for male will, delirious with her desire to procreate.  Her newfound weakness illuminated a path of unconscionable derogation.

At the center of the most important moment in gamer culture right now is a series of videos made by Anita Sarkeesian on the representation of women in games.  A lot of nerds have responded with threatening vitriol, and while no video she could possibly have ever posted to YouTube justifies death and rape threats, I was somehow still surprised by how calm and careful her videos are. All she does is follow a trope from its origins in other media through the history of video games and then point out that, while these are mostly very good games that she can enjoy despite their problematic elements, those elements are still troubling enough to warrant attention and discussion.  It's the product of someone who clearly has a great love of the art form and wants to see it rise above its shortcomings.

For any element of the gaming community to react badly to this is confusing on many levels.  First are the obvious ones: I don't like to think about how people in our society could ever be this morally bankrupt, and that anyone could watch this video series and not only find fault with it but feel the need to make a "rebuttal" that attempts to invalidate rather than engage her points takes an uncomfortable degree of dishonesty and intellectual laziness.  What keeps me wondering, though, is how wrong I was about gamers' priorities: I have always known gamers to be so obsessed with the art form that they see as "theirs" that they want it to be all things to all people.  It isn't just that they like games, it's that games are the best.  It's that a higher class of people like games, smarter people who see the value in something the rest of the world doesn't understand.  There's a smug pretense about it all, and I always found this overcompensating myopia to be constitutive for gamer culture at large.

The controversy over Anita Sarkeesian, as well as GamerGate, highlight the shameful truth: that these gamers are more interested in abusing women than they are in video games.  Rather than wanting to see games eliminate those qualities that lead to justified derision, rather than shepherding a fledgling art form into true cultural relevance, they lash out at anyone who suggests they overcome their deep and protected bigotry.

Of anyone who still thinks this is an example of "boys will be boys", or of a vocal minority, I ask simply to consider the example of Samus Aran.  An already-problematic character, she nevertheless blazed a trail of representation that, if supported, could effect real change in how young boys are taught to think about women.  I have already written about the power this art form can have over the way that we care; to not only shout down any attempt to listen to women about how our art affects them but to find whatever meager sprig can grow in the wasteland of mainstream representation and pull it up by the roots represents a degree of hatred and willful oppression that nobody can afford to ignore.

Preparing to Die

by Zen

So I last wrote about the problems that go with using zombies as the object of violence in a video game.  I was hyperbolic and self-righteous, but there's nothing in there I would want to take back, short of pointing you to some of the more recent research into the Kitty Genovese case that shows I maybe should not have used it as an example.  All the same, I'd like to talk now about one of very few games that actually does something interesting with zombies and undeath: Dark Souls.

The undead of Dark Souls are essentially ordinary people, but afflicted with a curse that gradually eats away at their memories of home and self.  The game is set in and around an asylum where the undead are sent in hopes of preventing the curse's spread.  Their ultimate fate is a violent madness, such that other undead serve as the game's foes as well as merchants and allies.  By far the most important thing about undeath in Dark Souls, however, is that it represents a real-world affliction that the game gives genuinely sweet and sincere perspective on: dementia.

There are two storylines in the first Dark Souls that I'd like to highlight.  Anyone who plans on playing the game should probably stop reading, since I'm going to spoil the ways one's interactions with these characters unfold.  While these aren't story spoilers in the usual sense, they're a part of why Dark Souls is a brilliant and challenging game and I recommend letting the game reveal itself to you naturally.

The first character on the list is Big Hat Logan, a ravenous scholar who has ditched his apprentice and keeps getting himself captured:

Initial meeting:
  Mm, you seem quite lucid! A rare thing in these times.
  I am Logan. I'm a bit cooped up, as you can see.
  I have a bright idea. Suppose you set me free?
  I'm old and empty-handed, but i could repay you with my knowledge, and sorcery.
  This place is melting my mind. The inactivity is repressive!

In the Duke's Archives, after rescuing him:
  A great pool of knowledge, the fruits of superior wisdom and an unquenchable desire for truth.
  Some would say Seath had an unsound fixation …But his work is a beautiful, invaluable resource.
  All progress demands sacrifice.
  And I certainly bear no antipathy for that wonderful scaleless beast.

After defeating the area boss in the Duke's Archives:
  Oh, there you are, it has been a while.
  Or were you just here?
  This fascinating place defeats my sense of time…

Then later:
  Mm…mm…

Later still:
  …Who are you…
  …Stay clear…stay clear of my work…
  …Curses upon you!
  …How dare you disturb me!

After this you find his clothes in a heap, and if you search carefully you'll find him in another area of the archives running around naked.  He attacks you on sight, wild and paranoid.  The player has witnessed Logan's decline from celebrated intellectual to babbling fool, and there is no "good path" to take with Logan to prevent this fate.  It's a sad perspective on the fragility of intellect, where we witness perhaps the heaviest fall from greatness in the game.

But for me the most poignant story in Dark Souls will always be that of Siegmeyer of Catarina and his daughter, Sieglinde.  It's always been a heartbreaker, but when I sat down to write about it I realized it was even sadder and far more real than I had thought.  Siegmeyer is an undead adventurer.  He's friendly and good-natured, but not really up to the task of scurrying around Lordran getting into scrapes.  Time and again the player helps him out of a bind, and eventually comes across his daughter.  She's not undead, but she's come to Lordran to track him down and make sure he spends his remaining time comfortably instead of being a burden on others and getting into trouble.

Sieglinde is just as sweet and kind-hearted as her father, but when the player eventually comes across their reunion it's the aftermath of his inevitable decline: he has gone hollow, and it was up to her to put him down:

My father…all Hollow now…has been subdued. He will cause no more trouble.
It's finally over…I will return to Catarina.
You assisted us both greatly. I can hardly return the favour.
Oh, father…dear father…
Sob…

Rather than leave him to his fate in the Undead Asylum, Sieglinde sought to look after her father herself.  When the time came for him, it was left to her to pull the plug.  This is the scene that rewards the player for helping Siegmeyer through all of his difficult troubles, and it's representative of the tone of Dark Souls in general.

Dark Souls 2 made a tiny change that drives these themes even further.  Instead of being called "Humanity", the item that returns the player to full human status is called a "Human Effigy".  Upon creating a new character, the player is not prompted to decide the character's appearance or background until Strowen the firekeeper bestows one of these, saying it is a doll made in the image of a famous adventurer.  She then says it is the player's image, and this is when appearance and background are decided.  The doll is in fact completely vague in appearance, but the act of trying to make it out as one's self allows one to recall one's own self by trying to project it on the effigy.  Instead of a magic soul item, it's a definite focus for "getting it together" and recovering one's sense of self.

robotignoreskitten

by Zen

It doesn't get any easier than this.

There are thousands of games that are just this.

A 2000 Penny Arcade strip that almost makes a point.

Kitty Genovese

This is not a murder simulator (per se - it is, arguably, a second-person murder simulator), and it won’t train anybody to become violent, yet it is perhaps the most base and monstrous game imaginable.  What it will train is a lack of concern for other human beings.  It is the worst kind of role play, explicitly encouraging the player to not help anyone, ever.  To this end, care must be taken in ensuring that the player is never ignoring the game itself, but instead focused exclusively on the task of ignoring the atrocities that occur within the game (for example, if the player is idle the game will automatically start toward the window or the phone, forcing the player's hand).

Poverty as Art

by Zen

The fact that it's now possible for authors of video games to receive federal grant money has fascinating possibilities, not least of which is the divorce of game development from the corporate bottom line. NEA grants are available only to non-profit organizations, which means more or less that money is available only to authors more interested in making games than in making money. The paradigm of the starving artist has been missing from video games, instead represented by the risk-taking entrepeneur. When you hear "video game exhibition" you think of a trade show like E3 instead of an art exhibition. And while I believe it should be possible for artists of any sort to make some proper money doing what they love, the only way to keep it from staying merely a business venture is to make it somewhat impractical.

This change has enabled small companies to get their games released on a global scale without signing all of their intellectual property over to the publisher. This appears to be the arrangement that Jenova Chen (né Xinghan Chen) has with Sony, who have contracted him for three games to appear on the Playstation 3, two of which (Flow and Flower) have been released already. Chen has repeatedly shown a willingness and desire to give up the easy, profitable path for more artistically fulfilling work. He co-founded a company called Thatgamecompany (TGC), which he indends to keep small and personal, and he gave up a secure position at Maxis to do so. They've apparently made action games that follow traditional formulae internally, and these games were allegedly quite promising, but Chen says he decided not to spend his time on anything that wasn't pushing him creatively.

All of this is just marketing, of course, if the games don't show this personal touch. His newest project, Journey, promises to live up to this talk by alienating most core gamers. It's an online game that seeks to remove all of the convenient chatter from the online experience. No gamertags, no voice chat, no text. All the players get with which to interact are a unique identifying mark (so that you know if you've played with that person before), a shout, and one's actions within the game world. The goal of the game is to traverse a vast desert and reach a mountain on the horizon, but the reasons and the method are left unstated. The players are supposed to work toward that goal, either together or independently, and presumably the story will become more clear as they do so.

What excites me about this project is the attention to how players interpret the actions of others in a video game. Anyone who follows professional Starcraft has seen how playing a game can be a form of expression, but most online games do little more than provide a list of canned animations and phrases. Starcraft's example is that the game itself ought to be enough, and the question is whether an inteface on the PS3 can allow for expressive gameplay rather than relying on a layer of menus and XBox Live features to pretend that anything like communication is happening.

Emmanuel Levinas, a 20th-Century Jewish philosopher who worked hard to develop an ethics out of the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, concentrated on the "face-to-face" of human interaction. For Heidegger this meant a recognition of the other as being fundamentally the same as oneself, but Levinas went further. He said that when one encounters the other there is always already a responsibility for the other, and that this innate commandedness is fundamental to any such experience. Every human interaction, then, is already a response.  Furthermore, it is this act of being "singled out" by the other that establishes one's own identity.  That's right: "face-to-face" interaction with others is fundamental to our being in that the gaze of the other establishes us in our being.

I'll try to leave the explanation of Levinas to just that, but outside the context of philosophy it seems a relatively odd claim. In context it's clear just how bold a claim it is: that such relations, such responsibilities, are the primordial foundation of all human interaction. More to the point, it is the experience of being faced with another person that allows us to recognize our own personhood.

So far online gaming has built its social elements by making chat programs bleed down from above into the games, but a project like Journey promises to start from scratch, making us interact in ways that are similarly primordial for a video game. That is to say, reducing our social gaming experience to the initial revealing made possible only through gameplay itself. My hope is that this will make it possible to have an online game without a "gamer culture", letting us discover for ourselves what playing a game together really means.

Anyone who played Ico has experienced the prototype of this experience: Yorda was a character within the game world whose plight was the same as the protagonist's, and as the player one couldn't help but feel that connection by proxy. But Ico only shed light on how far video games have to go: ultimately the character players felt kinship with was a mess of pre-scripted weakness and extremely convincing animation. Once the façade breaks down, once the glass darkens and the player recognizes the experience for what it is, this interaction becomes tiresome and irritating. The great promise of a project like Journey is for us to experience Ico's fellow feeling on a truly human level, one that never reduces to rote interactions. As a commercial enterprise, the odds are against this project's success.

The core ideas behind Journey are, to me, a breath of the freshest air. The question marks that plague the game all have to do with everything we haven't heard: how the gameplay is actually going to keep people working together for an extended period, and how the game is going to make its multiplayer experience last more than a week after its release. My fear is that TGC is going to undermine itself by removing all of the traditional or comfortable elements from its game; without the hook of engaging and satisfying gameplay--elements of game design that Jenova Chen apparently considers himself to be above--to hang it on, all the audacious and brilliant social commentary in the world isn't going to make a mark on the industry. Which is probably fine, because the industry would only have learned all the wrong lessons from it anyway. But this brings me back to the point I started with: that sometimes the industry is better served by an unprofitable, audacious disaster than it is by another blockbuster hit. Maybe in the next few years some new artists can get just enough grant money to push the boundaries of what video games can and should do, and the lack of executives looking over their shoulder is going to let them do just that.

Spiel und Zeit

by Zen

A lot's already been said about Braid. Back when it was released everyone was in a froth about the limitless potential of indie gaming, or (again and again) about whether games were finally art yet, or about how it's a game for smart people and did I mention how much it appeals to me? It was an enormous flurry of New Games Journalism, one which served as a model for a lot of other releases that didn't have as much going on under the hood. I've honestly avoided writing about it, if only out of a desire to distance myself from the enormous reflex action. Call it my inauthentic moment of the day.

What I've wanted to see games do ever since I decided to be pretentious about them is make a point with the game itself. Games have had stories, music, and pictures that make points before, and they have certainly been art before, but very rarely does it all come together in a way that couldn't have happened as anything but a game. Most people, when pressed, will (rightly) cite Hideo Kojima and maybe a little Shigeru Miyamoto before shrugging it off as a pseudoproblem. I guess I think too much, but I'm still waiting for the medium to come to presence and establish itself as a part of our lives rather than as an escape from them. I was delighted to find that Jonathan Blow agrees:

You can go to a movie just as escapism--and be swept up by the visions and emotions, or whatever. Or you can attend a movie with a more expansionist mindset: you want to experience those same visions and emotions, but you're doing it to connect those things to the rest of your life, to bring them back; not to escape from the rest of your life. The goal is, maybe, to expand yourself into perhaps a greater, more experienced person. Even just a little bit.
...
Games can provide this kind of mental, emotional and spiritual expansion, and they can push it in a different direction than movies, or books, or music, or whatever.

[All Jonathan Blow quotes were taken from this interview at the MTV blog.]

Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness. By forgiving too readily, we can be badly hurt. But if we’ve learned from a mistake and become better for it, shouldn’t we be rewarded for the learning, rather than punished for the mistake?

What if our world worked differently? Suppose we could tell her: “I didn’t mean what I just said,” and she would say: “It’s okay, I understand,” and she would not turn away, and life would really proceed as though we had never said that thing? We could remove the damage but still be wiser from the experience.

Tim and the Princess lounge in the castle garden, laughing together, giving names to the colorful birds. Their mistakes are hidden from each other, tucked away between the folds of time, safe.

[Braid "Chapter 2: Time and Forgiveness" parts 4-6]

While presented in blocks of text between levels, the story of Braid is more than just a bit of writing hidden behind the façade of gameplay. The two are not only intensely related, but they rely on each other to fully realize the game's argument. In playing the game, the player is not only controlling Tim on the screen but experiencing his (quest for) perfection firsthand.

For a long time, he thought they had been cultivating the perfect relationship. He had been fiercely protective, reversing all his mistakes so they would not touch her. Likewise, keeping a tight rein on her own mistakes, she always pleased him.

But to be fully couched within the comfort of a friend is a mode of existence with severe implications. To please you perfectly, she must understand you perfectly. Thus you cannot defy her expectations or escape her reach. Her benevolence has circumscribed you, and your life’s achievements will not reach beyond the map she has drawn.

Tim needed to be non-manipulable. He needed a hope of transcendence. He needed, sometimes, to be immune to the Princess’s caring touch.

Off in the distance, Tim saw a castle where the flags flutter even when the wind has expired, and the bread in the kitchen is always warm. A little bit of magic.

[Braid, Chapter 3: "Time and Mystery" parts 2-5]

Through its time control mechanics, Braid the game has the player make the same decisions as the character in Braid the story. All the trappings of gameplay serve to reinforce the idea of escape, of trying to attain an ideal, of trying to protect everybody all the time and maximize the result of every action. Much like with Shadow of the Colossus, the player's complicity in the game's events serves a greater role than any cutscene or passage of text. The final level of Braid uses the current of its gameplay to accomplish the single most poignantly expressed storytelling I have ever experienced.

...the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security, pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them, the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over the territory--a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated, which will encompass the whole social field, and which is fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally under the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger).

[Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, "The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence", p. 61]

The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity), for installing a universal security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question, except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war, when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance.
...

There lies the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social. Here as well, nothing will be left to chance, moreover this is the essence of socialization, which began centuries ago, but which has now entered its accelerated phase, toward a limit that one believed would be explosive (revolution), but which for the moment is translated by an inverse, implosive, irreversible process: the generalized deterrence of chance, of accident, of transversality, of finality, of contradiction, rupture, or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm, doomed to the descriptive transparency of mechanisms of information.

[Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, "The Precession of Simulacra", pp. 33, 34-35]

Braid, like any game, can't possibly be for everyone. Nevertheless, I strongly urge everyone who reads this to at least give it a go. It's a spectacular achievement, one that speaks on a personal level and has the ability to mean something to you in your life instead of just pulling you out of it for a few hours. I've thrown down some thoughts here, but there's more in the game than I could ever write technically about, more than I have any right to enumerate for you. As Blow put it, "The story of rescuing the Princess has a literal interpretation, as well as a metaphorical one; and then there are other small-scale levels of change to the interpretation, too. I don't intend for any of them to be the sole truth; the story I am trying to tell is something like the quantum superposition of all these things."

That statement, like Braid itself, is for me about the nature of truth as aletheia, as a phenomenological pulling-back of the curtain on beings in the world rather than a technical attempt to freeze them in time. Please discover and let me know what they mean for you.

Sins of Our Fathers

by Zen

As an avid reader of German philosophy, I so often find myself at the mercy of translators to properly understand the material. Even if I, like Heidegger, refuse to concern myself with fidelity to the philosopher's intent, a poor translation can obfuscate or even completely cover over useful nuances and enlightening tricks of meaning. This problem is as much present for novels and music as it is for philosophical works, and I've found it applies to video games as well. Masterpieces like 7th Saga, Final Fantasy V, Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu II), Chrono Trigger, and even parts of Final Fantasy VII suffered from having poor to nonexistent translations that hid their greatness from view.

Fortunately, Japanese publishers started to catch on that not everyone in the US is a drooling moron around the time the original PlayStation came out. Instead of dumbing down hard games and not even releasing games that were too complicated, Japan discovered that gamers in the US were thirsty for true works of art. For me, the turning point was a game called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and after the opening scene I knew things would never be the same again.

What follows is an annotation, a sort of recreation of my own thoughts as I relive these precious moments today. You are encouraged to click this YouTube link first, so that you can appreciate these lines as I first did all those years ago.

Richter: "Die, monster! You don't belong in this world!"

Dracula: "It is not by my hand that I am once again given flesh. I was called here by... humans who wish to pay me tribute."
Richter: "'Tribute'?! You steal men's souls, and make them your slaves!"
Dracula: "Perhaps the same could be said of all religions..."

Richter: "Your words are as empty as your soul! Mankind ill needs a savior such as you!"
Dracula: "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets! But enough talk... have at you!"

Selective Depth

by Zen

Fans of 2D games put up with a lot of abuse. Often we find ourselves playing a game simply on the basis of its visual and gameplay sensibilities, while the quality of the game could be worse than quick time events. It's sort of like being a Sonic fan, or driving an American-made car. It's sort of like being a battered spouse.

Still, sometimes being 2D doesn't have to be enough; sometimes Vanillaware makes a game. Now I've only played two of their games, but both have offered a distinctive perspective on action RPGs while delivering the most astonishing visuals I've possibly ever seen in a video game. Odin Sphere was a meticulous and harsh brawler, one where each chapter of its intricate story not only provided new perspective on seemingly clear events but also presented the player with completely new play styles. There was variety to the combat, and each playable character focused on a different aspect in a way that really explored the potential of this variety.

In short, it was a masterpiece, although in some ways having a score by Hitoshi Sakimoto could be considered cheating in this regard. When a Wii successor was announced I got pretty excited, since I seem to be the only person who still wants the Wii to work as a platform for more than Gamecube ports, opportunistic shovelware, and kusoge. After playing several hours of Muramasa: the Demon Blade, the 2D gamer in me feels sated without feeling cheapened or insulted.

Like Odin Sphere, Muramasa proves that sprites are still way, way more detailed and beautiful than 3D models. 3D effects are used for complex animations, especially for some of the more enormous sprites, but always as emphasis for actual frame animation. It's a distinctive visual style, somewhat reminiscent of Flash animation, this time given the same kind of Japanese art flavor as Okami. The colors are phenomenal, the backgrounds lively and deep, and the gameplay excellent.

Vanillaware action RPGs have a flow of gameplay that simplifies or removes some of the more traditional obstacles, like platforming challenges or fetch quests, and instead offers the same variety and depth of experience in just combat and map navigation. In Odin Sphere this was accomplished with parallel systems of food and weapon experience which fed into each other, along with a ridiculously complex item crafting system that was tied into every single aspect of combat and character progression. In Muramasa the item crafting is simpler, but there are still parallel systems affecting what weapons you use. This relative simplicity is made up for by a much more flexible combat system. Instead of cautiously performing hit and run tactics on swarms of durable enemies, combat happens in quick skirmishes that coerce you into using all your abilities without ever explicitly requiring it.

Basically, the theme for these games is that nothing is wasted. Every action you perform is working double-duty, and every action you perform provides toward a goal elsewhere. This is how a game that essentially boils down to running around a simple map fighting random battles can stay fresh and interesting for so long.

To explain more about why I love the game's combat so much, especially in the face of accusations that it's too button-mashy, I'm kind of a sucker for any combat engine that emphasizes mobility. There are simple ground and air combos if you just mash the attack button, but it's usually a better idea to take advantage of the dash attacks. You hold down the attack button and just aim the control stick in the direction you want to go. Combat feels more like a flow from one enemy to another, punctuated by stationary combos, than a simple round-up followed by an attack combo. Dodging and attacking become the same, and just like everything else in a Vanillaware game no single action serves a single purpose, but everything works double duty.

Another feature of the combat, and probably the primary reason people think it's too easy, is the blocking. For the most part (things change in the game's hard mode) you block by attacking while being attacked, which makes sense as far as parries are concerned. The reason this all works is that blocking uses up sword integrity, which is necessary for performing special moves. After a sword breaks it will slowly regenerate, and you can carry up to three at a time, but for the most part you will be more worried about keeping your swords intact than actually taking any damage. Once they all break you're basically dead meat. Think of it like the recharging shields in any post-Halo shooter, only because it's Vanillaware they pull double duty and power special moves, too.

The game is brilliant and the game is beautiful, but that's not even why I love it, exactly. It's the same sort of feeling I got when I played No More Heroes and felt like I really got to know Suda 51. We're all used to loading up a game and seeing corporate logos for thirty seconds, but you don't even see Vanillaware's logo until after you press Start. It's a unique touch, and it reminds me every time that the people who made the game are a part of the game experience itself. When the cover falls off of House of Leaves you're left with a book written by characters, and it's the author's hope that you forget about him entirely. If the cover fell off of Muramasa you'd still be spending time with George Kamitani, because he puts so much of himself into what he does. Please join me in loving him for it.

The New Prose

by Zen

... deconstruction ... needs a clear distinction between philosophy and literature. For the kind of reading which has come to be called "deconstructionist" requires two different straight persons: a macho professional philosopher who is insulted by the suggestion that he has submitted to a textual exigency, and a naive producer of literature whose jaw drops when she learns that her work has been suppported by philosophical oppositions. The philosopher had thought of himself as speaking a sparse, pure, transparent language. The poetess shyly hoped that her unmediated woodnotes might please. Both reel back in horror when the deconstructionist reveals that each has been making use of complex idioms to which the other has contributed. Both go all to pieces at this news. A wild disorder overtakes their words. Their whimpers blend into interminable androgynous keening. Once again, deconstructionist intervention has produced a splendidly diffuse irresolution.

There is something suspiciously old-fashioned about this way of setting up one's subjects. It is a long time since we have had writers who considered themselves in the business of providing pleasure. ... [Essays on Heidegger and Others, p.86]

Still, it's not as though there haven't been games that tried to address these issues within a narrative. Whatever you think of the results, there can be no denying that Hideo Kojima's impenetrable oeuvre makes various comments on (post-)modern lifestyles and political attitudes. I encourage anyone who plays his games to forgive the failure at achieving the impossible task of tying all his games together into a single narrative, and to those of us who started playing Metal Gear games at the outset his turn to the dissonant and absurd is jarring and sometimes revolting. In spite of all this, one can discern a few central threads that he's been struggling to follow to their conclusion, possibly without even realizing it.

Sometimes Kojima just seems to be a guy stuck in Metal Gear, but if you go back to his other work you'll find that Metal Gear is simply stuck in the broader narrative of Kojima himself. There's never been a better time to find this out, either: Policenauts, his legendary follow-up to Snatcher, has finally been translated by dedicated fans. I urge everyone to find out firsthand what Hideo Kojima has really been up to all these years.