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Demon’s Souls – “Aesthetics of Pain”

Like its “King’s Field” forebears, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s “Demon’s Souls” is another hardcore dungeon-crawler RPG inspired by gothic fantasy. Like the fiction it aspires to homage, it embodies the exacerbation of emotion, by hyperbolizing the emotional counterpart of the ludic experience. It’s a brutally difficult game, and therein lies its key to success: when it takes hours to go between savepoints, and even one or two hits from a weakling zombie can kill you, we assure you, you’ll think differently about a game, and well, you’ll definitely feel differently about it too. Every moment ends up feeling like a battle against an overwhelming assailant that cannot be overrun or eschewed. See, you never really ‘win’ “Demon’s Souls”, you merely survive for another second. Anxiety slowly creeps to the point of vertigo, as you’ll be painfully aware of ever-standing one step away from a bottomless pit, therefore losing all the work you’ve put into the game for the last hours. The stress is so great and exhilarating that when you do die (and you will, many, many times), all hell breaks loose… inside you, that is. Tension inevitably turns to self-centered anger and frustration, and you’ll want to smash everything around you to pieces.

Some may wonder what is the point behind all this masochistic suffering. The answer is simple, “Demon’s Souls” makes you feel something – fear, anxiety, frustration, anger… and it makes you feel them in spades. It isn’t a mindless past-time, it’s a desperately tough struggle, one which must be met with all your dedication so as to bring any minute pleasure. Playing it is not unlike betting all your hard-earned money into a game of skill or luck – hours and hours of work hang in the tip of fate, time slows down to a halt, your heart races, and you stand as in a miasma, one moment away from greatness, one moment away from utter despair. If you do manage the prowess of victory, then you’ll achieve supreme bliss, as beating even the smallest of objectives in “Demon’s Souls” leads to a powerful release of tension, an overjoyous catharsis that is as fruitful as the more sweat and tears you’ve offered as sacrifice to achieve it.

And, in its most clear evolution face “From Software’s” past titles, it is a game that incorporates online systems into its conceptual grounds. Instead of merely placing players together in artificial dungeons and then letting them compete or cooperate as MMORPG’s tend to, “Demon’s Souls” actually forces players to become part of its fictional realm, by binding them through a coherent body of rules. Players can either become vindictive souls that prey on others, or they can come together as a community, battling side by side, or sharing knowledge on how to survive the game’s dangers through its simple communication system. Either way, you’ll never feel as if inside an online game, with its chat non-sense, ridiculous emoting and mechanistic online/offline variations, instead, you’ll become integrant part of a menacing world populated with lost souls.

“Demon’s Souls” may not be a work of art, nor the most profound of experiences, but it is moving in ways that only the greatest of games can be. Whilst the gloomy anglosaxonic landscape (Makoto Satoh, Masato Miyazaki) and creepily unsettling score (Shunsuke Kida) are part of the game’s aesthetic appeal, it is only when you play the game and actually sense the ever-present eminence of death, that “Demon’s Souls” reaches its emotional apex. It is pure Gothic narrative, told as only videogames can tell: through the language of unbridled challenges and supreme skill, of pain and hardship, of unfettered emotion, fantasy, and true heroic conquest.

score: 5/5

[Part of this text was originally published in Portuguese, in Coimbra’s College Paper “ACabra”, dating 29/06/10]

2010
07/13
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Final Fantasy XIII – “Heartbreaking Nostalgia”

All it took for was one brief look at the Yoshitaka Amano title screen in a local megastore for a scream to build up inside. “Final Fantasy”. We grew up with the series and for that they will always hold a special place in our hearts. Despite we being old enough to acknowledge that they do not represent the epitome of video games’ expression (nor have ever represented), they still come out as great examples of the specific realm of their genre or aesthetic. Like those wonderful storybooks you read when you were younger or the fantasy films of yesteryear, we look past their ever-lasting naivete and ingenuity, and welcome their heart-warming fantasy. It helps that they were crafted by some of the most gifted artists and story-tellers that were present in the medium: Sakaguchi, Kitase, Amano, Naora, Minaba, Uematsu. These authors breathed life into these childish incantations, making adolescents’ imagination soar high with those beautiful, magical sceneries that the world could never see unless for the power of digital art. But though our hearts cry with joy at the sights and sounds of many old chapters, they shriek in horror when faced with the XIIIth! Why is this?

Some think we are too old to indulge in such infantile musings [like our dear friend dieubussy or Carless]. Such an idea seems puzzling, not just because older J-RPG’s still click today with many of us, but also because other mediums have consistently shown that family entertainment directed at children is possible. So much literature, film and music is non-age specific, despite apparently being directed at young ones, that one must question why such a reality is not possible in video games. Are we really that old not to appreciate a light fantasy story? We aren’t, and yet “Final Fantasy XIII” makes us squirm. Why? Is it the clear-cut plot? The plastic theatricality of anime aesthetics? The combat system, high on acrobatic thrills, yet devoid of meaningful strategy and, in a clear step backwards from “XII”, also absent of naturalistic control and animation, drowned in decades of turn-based prejudice? Are these elements worse than they were 10 years ago? Somehow the memory of past titles, however tainted by nostalgia, inclines us to say: these are worse in every possible way.

Perhaps it is just the fact that technology has opened doors that current age video-game creators still are not adept at exploring. Just as “Final Fantasy X” botched the expressive potential of adding voice-acting, maybe “Final Fantasy XIII’s” creators just didn’t know how to fill with detail that which once bloomed with mystery and so powerfully ignited the hidden corners of our imagination. But even that doesn’t explain everything. Because, not only does “Final Fantasy” avoid and even contradict welcome evolutions to basic video-game language – such as a predominance of spatial metaphors and real-time dynamics – as it seems crafted for audiences far less demanding than those of past titles. Impoverished storyline and characters, gun-crazy action sequences, fast beat soundtrack and sugar-caned visuals are all elements that mar the experience of a proper fantasy tale, making it only fully digestible by those with short attention spans, spoiled by the frantic plethora of inputs that governs this information age. Nonetheless, we remain in doubt. We know not why “Final Fantasy XIII” does not resonate with us. Perhaps for all the aforementioned reasons, or perhaps for none at all. But one thing we take for certain in the midst of these questions: “Final Fantasy XIII” isn’t good. Despite the big budget and technical finesse we’ve come to associate with Square’s productions, the game simply lacks the fine artistic craftsmanship of the past, and thus it no longer represents the standard by which all J-RPG’s should be measured. And of that, let no doubts remain.

2010
05/07
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Dragon Age: Origins – “Ancient Lore”

Seldom have we felt such dismay and sheer disappointment when presented with a new Bioware title. Theirs is surely not the most consistent of libraries, but it would be a disservice not to recognize their continuous establishment of new standards in the western role-playing genre. But “Dragon Age” seems to be a mere compendium of all that has been done before under the Bioware banner, with every element screaming of unfathomable familiarity, just now stripped of its time-bound ingenuity that granted its past appeal. This makes “Dragon Age” feel, from the very early moments, awkwardly dated. Such matter is all too evident in the tactical combat system – a hark back to the old days of over-complicated micro-management and hard-plodding of “Baldur Gate’s” “Dungeons & Dragons” skeleton, with but a scent of modern game design in the form of a poorly implemented “Final Fantasy XII“-esque gambit system. This spirit of sodded revivalism goes to the point of overlooking simple technical evolutions, with a return to pre-“Mass Effect” dialog trees and generic character designs and animations. Such musings may not ruin the experience, and could even content players who still revere those massive tomes of rules and numbers and written lore that defined pre-computer role-playing, but their nature is ill-fit for the realm of the video game, where the experience of adventuring and storytelling can be made so much more elegant and dynamic, not to mention more intuitive and natural to the senses, with real time interactions and cinematic exposition.

Granted, such glaring faults could’ve been easily downplayed, as others have in the past, should the narrative background prove captivating enough to warrant involvement of players in that world. But Ferelden, the realm where action takes place, is probably the most derivative piece of pseudo-Tolkien fantasy since “Neverwinter Nights”, more even, one visibly corrupted by Peter Jackson’s film adaptation and a hedious, absurdly violent, comic-book dark-fantasy aesthetic. And one cannot even immerse in such a poor virtual world properly, because exploration feels confined by claustrophobic loading screens and over-world maps, robbing the space of that precious sense of physical presence and vast, unshackled exploration that recent RPG’s such as “Fallout 3” and “Mass Effect” reveled in. But most telling of all coming from Bioware, is the lack of a proper cast of characters (with minor exceptions) and a mere skimming of Drew Karpyshyn’s traditional themes of morality. This, and the fact that development was helmed by what appears to be a secondary team inside the studio (Brent Knowles, Mike Laidlaw and James Ohlen), makes it painfully clear that “Dragon Age” never was meant to be one of Bioware’s finest, but a mere back-step in their long run of role-plays.

2010
02/22
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Castle Crashers – “Empty Nostalgia”

castle_crashers

Video-game revivalism is in. Thanks to on-line download services, gamers now have access to all those childhood classics that they cherished, or missed out on. More so, smaller development companies have started to cash in on that retro-spirit, in hopes of reaching vast audiences with low-budget titles available in download services. A return to the past is usually welcome – going back to simpler game designs, sustained only by the intricate quality of its interactivity, instead of its next-gen graphics or physic engines. But not all retro-revivalism is welcome. Video-games have evolved in the last years. Surely not as much as some (me included) might have wanted, but they have, for all intents and purposes, evolved. “Castle Crashers'” developers (Dan Paladin and Tom Fulp) however, seem to take advantage of the lack of criticism surrounding retro-gaming, to produce simplistic games that when properly dissected, show how empty and retrograde their game-design philosophies really are.

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Simply put, there’s nothing new about “Castle Crashers”. It’s a bare knuckles “Golden Axe” clone without the dark fantasy ambiance, a mindless brawler without the polish and challenge arcade games excel at… it’s, well, utterly redundant and uninteresting. Nevermind the fact that the its authors seem to take pleasure in exposing the shallowness of their venture, through their crude humor and infantile, cartoonish aesthetic; the bottom line is that “Castle Crashers” is simply not that good of an action game. Not that it doesn’t have its fair share of well executed ideas – level design is sometimes inspired, and its RPG character levelling is simple, but effective – but nothing it does well actually deserves mentioning or praise. Of course, the answers to all my criticisms could be “co-op”, to which I’d reply, if you don’t take pleasure in playing a game solo, why would it make it better if you play it in the exact same way with someone? Co-op needs to be inserted in games with the purpose of allowing cooperative or competitive efforts. “Castle Crashers'” idea of cooperation is bashing enemies together.  Now, this can be entertaining, but it’s entertaining because you get to play with your friends. You should compliment your friends, not the game.

castle_crashers

Nothing about “Castle Crashers” is actually any good. If it were released a few years back, it would be seen as a quirky game, but little else. So many, many classic games have already done what “Castle Crashers” does well, but with much more creativity and care to detail, that it makes no sense to even look it as anything more than a glorified de-make.  Sure, its on-line features are a blessing, but today you have access to many of the classic games that inspired “Castle Crashers” available for download, sometimes even with online play. So why settle with the demeaning qualities of a copy, when you can get the superiority of the original, for a smaller price?

2009
05/16
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Takayoshi Sato Interview

It’s not in my habit for me to link to other blogs or sites, as a way to propagate news or otherwise irrelevant pieces of information on the videogame media landscape. I simply assume people who take an interest in my blog have access to the same information as I have, and are smart enough to select their own dose of internet dailies.  However,  sometimes one must break his own rules, and this is that day for me. As you may or may not have noticed, I nurture a big reverence towards “Silent Hill”, a series of games which I believe to be mostly unmatched in the History of games, for the complexity of its human dilemmas, its brilliant aesthetic background, and its success as an interactive work. My dear, dear friend Dieubussy [who besides being someone I hold dear, is, hands down, the most cultured, knowledgeable individual that I have ever met, when it comes to video-game’s history and art (and many other areas)] has had the pleasure of interviewing one of the geniuses behind the “Silent Hill” series, Takayoshi Sato (CG director and director of “Silent Hill 2”).  Read the interview, in English, here, it’s probably the best advise I have ever given in this blog.

2009
05/15
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