theclevermonkey

Our Heroes fail to prevent the Big Bad from sundering the world. They escape the place, but also lose each other. The continents are thrown apart. The land and sea are poisoned.
Plants, animals, and humans are doomed to eking out a life, but for many this is mostly just a delayed death sentence.

One year later, a woman named Celes, a former General, wakes in a bed on a deserted island. An older scientist named Cid has been caring for her since the world was ruined, and these two have been allies, and are on good terms. Cid has recently become too sick to feed himself, so Celes decides to repay his kindness, and bring him food and water while he recovers.

Cid explains that there were other people, but they all succumbed to despair and boredom. He mentions a cliff up north, that people used to fling themselves off of when they were down - "Perked them right up!" he jokes, grimly. Celes and Cid begin referring to each other as Grandfather and Granddaughter, because they only have each other, and this is what their bond has become.

You can hunt, but the animals (random encounters) are so poisonous that they will expire a few moments after an encounter begins. So you fish. Your only company while you do this is a small, white bird. There are a precious few healthy fish, but you can catch them. And you can save Cid, of course: Bring him enough healthy fish quickly enough, and he'll get better, and help you get off the island. It's pretty standard fare.

But, and this is the surprising bit, you can fail, and the game is pretty rigged against you, making it almost a certain thing that you will. If you do, Celes will find Cid's body, and go through a few moments of denial before accepting what's happened. She flees from their home in tears, and wanders. Coming to the cliff, she recalls what Cid said about people "perking themselves up". She decides she doesn't wish to live anymore, especially not here, by herself, and especially after failing to take care of another person who has trusted her (interpersonal trust is one of this character's themes).

Celes throws herself off the cliff.

More surprising: This is not game over. Celes will wake on a beach, having been nursed back to health by a bird - now her only company. She bawls out the bird for nursing her back to health. Eventually, she finds a letter that Cid wrote while he was dying (missed in her shock, while finding his body, and missing his death), which will help her get off the island.

Interestingly, the game rewards neither option mechanically. In some ways, Celes' attempted suicide this feels like the truer version of the story. Certainly, it's much more involved, and it's a big character beat, and there isn't an equivalent character beat if Cid lives.

I bet the notoriously conservative Nintendo of America didn't know that was in there. And it's surprising for a console game that came out in 1994.

I've wanted to include something like Exalted's stunting or PTA's fan mail mechanics in the Fate system for a while now; Mechanics based around audience participation, essentially. I've thought about a few ways to do it, most of which involved the movement of fate points around the table. These seem like they'd work, but here's another idea, and one that's maybe a little less involved:

One sure way of knowing that you've got the audience interested is when you get unprovoked exclamations of "Awesome!", or "Dude!" or flicking¹, when another player's character is going through a particularly interesting or intense or compelling scene, or describes a bit of action in a particularly cool way. This is probably the most genuine expression of excitement you can get at the table, and a great measure of investment. It's also a reliable enough response that you can probably hitch a mechanic to it, triggered by the expression.

So, when someone makes an unprovoked exclamation about the awesomeness contained in the scene, perhaps it could be treated as putting a Fragile Aspect (one use, one tag, must be used on the next roll) on the scene. Naming of the aspect isn't really important here, but something like "That was Awesome!", or whatever the expression was, would work. This is something which would happen without discussion, since you don't want to pause to deal with mechanics in the middle of a scene, after all! It'd be a little way of helping to ensure that the effort the player is putting into the scene is rewarded by the fiction, and it's always really nice to see the person you're rooting for win the day².

I say "unprovoked exclamation" because this should not be something the active player is trying to prompt the other players to do by asking; The prompting should come from the content of the scene, not social dynamic of the table.

Anyway, it's a thought.

_{¹we do this at our table when we want to be quiet about expressing excitement.
²It doesn't come up a lot in FATE, but an aspect could probably also be used to reroll a good result if the player wishes to fail. Maybe even for a self-compel, but it's really difficult to imagine an impactful scene that a player would want to self-compel out of which doesn't involve one of the character's aspects already.}

Could you use our table's "wide cast" setup in order to do something Fringe-like, where there are other versions of one's self out there? Likely with the other players playing alternative versions of one's own character, to allow for self-alternative-self interactions? Having the other person *not* be your character might be just enough distance that that works, but you'd have to carefully think out your character combinations to avoid the dramatically-optimal pairings from being between two of the same player's characters.

Alternatively, as a character concept: What if the character were replaced by a look-alike very early in the game, such that much of the character bonding stuff happens with the replacement? Or, possibly, after that, and going into the climax? This'd be fun with our open-secrets style of play, since everyone at the table would know, but the characters wouldn't. It'd be an interesting RP challenge, too, to play a subtley-wrong version of your own character.

I finished Shadow of the Colossus a few weeks ago. A few notes:

The Colossuses themselves are generally pretty straight-forward, once you've got the hang of things, but there's a surprising variety of them. The game lets you figure out a lot, which I quite like, because nobody has really told me that this is how you kill one of these things; I've earned that knowledge.

I did get frustrated a few times. The Colossuses are like combat puzzles, but their organic nature makes them difficult to figure out sometimes. Some frustration is good in a game, though, I think. When you work past it, it's all the more rewarding.

The game is very large, and very quiet. You spend long periods of time with only your horse for company, riding through landscapes. No enemies, just the landmarks, and the occasional bird or lizard on a rock. Not even music. It very contemplative, and also very isolating. I get to thinking that this is what being an adventurer must really be like - weeks of isolation, carrying around your worries about what's to come, and riding on forever.

Because of the quiet, one appreciates the art in the game (I often find there's little chance in other games to do this, which is a bit of a shame). The rock structures and the sun playing on the mountains, that kind of thing.

I finished Skyrim this past weekend, in so far as one can finish a game like that. I suppose it would be better to say that I'm done with it.

I think that Bethesda crafts interesting settings, and interesting locations to explore.

I generally find, though, that they have no idea what to do with these interesting locations and settings. I find that I grow to care much what's going on in the world, especially around characters and the main plot. This game was better than Oblivion and Fallout 3 in this regard, and there were a number of NPCs and Companion characters who had some good dialogue, but my inability to have an evolving relationship with these characters prevents any of them from becoming memorable.

There's a warrior named Mjoll, for example, who seems to have an interesting backstory. She's connected to her past adventures which she speaks about, she discusses her relationships with her parents, and seems to worry that she enjoys bloodshed too much... but she tells you about these things over and over and over again, often during inopprotune times. In my case, she often spoke through sensitive political moments and negotiations. While I think the character is pretty well written, and well voice-acted, she quickly becomes annoying as a result of this. Further, after she joins your cause, you're unable to ask her about any of the interesting things that she talks about, or what she thinks about things, or help her work through things she's thinking about.

That may read as a strange criticism, but it feels like Bethesda has picked up writing tips from other modern games, but then not followed through with them in the way that those games do. As a result, the extra characterization feels strange - like you're being invited to interact, but you're not actually allowed to do so.

I'm coming to realize that I tend to evaluate games based on specific moments I have with them. My favourite games have a number of moments where I'm struck by something really interesting going on, or how well things are coming together, clever writing, big drama, et cetra. These moments tend to result in posts on Facebook or LJ, or at least me getting up to speak to Amy for a few minutes. Elder Scrolls V has far more of these than any of the other Bethesda games I've played, and that's to their credit. However, after finishing Skyrim, I found that there had been relatively few exciting moments for me, considering the amount of time I'd spent playing.

Then again, there's an argument to be made that Bethesda's games aren't about characters or storytelling or evoking emotion from the player. They're about exploration, and it certainly has a lot of locations to explore. I just feel that more and better motivation to explore would be nice. Fallout: New Vegas managed this very nicely, I thought, so I'm going to continue to maintain that Bethesda should focus on making game engines, but allow other studios to write and produce the final products.

I posted this on Facebook, on Sunday night:
"Tetsuo Tamashiro, I am going to destroy you.
There has been no villain since Sephiroth that I've hated the way that I hate you."

Yakuza 3 has an incredible amount of heart to it, especially the bits set in Okinawa. When the life you've built for yourself gets attacked, I found myself getting really upset at the villain of the chapter. The game is amazing for the emotions it's able to evoke.

And seriously, I have not wanted to destroy someone so bad since the final moments of the first disc of Final Fantasy VII. I was sad. I was furious.

I think there's something to learn from this game. It isn't afraid to devote sections of the game to helping your children through difficulties which seem unconnected from the primary plot, something that most developers seem to shy away from (or reduce to fetch or rescue quests). It also isn't afraid to attack things that the player is attached to, and in a way that can't be undone.

I played an awful lot of games in 2011:

Skyrim
Innsmouth Escape
Uncharted 3
GeoDefense
Infinity Blade
Dark Souls
Back to the Future: The Game
Limbo
From Dust
PixelJunk: Sidescroller
Tecumseh Lies Here
Yakuza 3
Tiny Bang Story
Deux Ex: Human Revolution
Katamari Forever
Sherlock Holmes Vs. Jack the Ripper
Civilization Revolution
Civilization 5
Trauma
Once Upon a Time
The Stanley Parable
Pocket Academy
Breath of Fire IV
Taluva
Planescape: Torment
Catherine
The History Canada Game
7 Wonders
Final Fantasy III
The Cat and the Coup
Nier (Like, three times)
Darksiders
Outland
Appy 1000 mg
LA Noire
Don't Take it Personally Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story
Broken Sword
Strongbad's Cool Game for Attractive People
Kirby's Epic Yarn
Portal 2
Puzzle Agent
Inside a Star-Filled Sky
The Sims: Medieval
Mass Effect 2: Lair of the Shadowbroker
Alpha Protocol
Final Fantasy IX
BioShock 2
Dragon Age 2
Metro 2033
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

That's a lot of games. It doesn't even include the tabletop roleplaying games I played this year, which may become a separate post.

I've writen about the games I thought were most interesting already, but I was curious about all the games I've played this year... and apparently there were quite a lot of them.

My year's highlights were probably as follows, in no particular order:

Dragon Age 2 - BioWare generally does a fine job of crafting interesting characters, and did here. They also took a stab at an interesting story design with this game - the story of a single city, and events that happen there over the course of many years. It has places of disjointedness, but they tried something new it mostly works. I'd like to see more of it.

Nier - I've written a lot about Nier already, but it's the most interesting game I've played in a long, long time. It's far from perfect, but between the issues of parenting, of going too far, and several uncomfortable changes in perspective, it's worth every minute I put into it. The music is also fantastic.

Portal 2 - Fine level and puzzle design, excellent writing and voice acting, and an incredible amount of digital polish.

BioShock 2 - I enjoyed my second delving into the BioWare series a lot more than my first delve. I found it provoked a lot more thought on the topics it presented, and provoked a proud sense of parenthood towards the end. The gameplay was mixed up a lot compared to the first game, too, which I think helped the overall play experience.

Planescape: Torment - This game is simply incredible. Oddly, it's nearly unplayable without modding, and I found (unusually) that my enjoyment was maximized by cheating like hell. The game isn't about mechanics, which are pretty dated now. It's about the writing, and the writing could go toe-to-toe with anything put out today. It's also a great example of what we lost when we moved away from text-based dialogue, and to voice acting.

Final Fantasy IX - An old friend, revisited. Very little about the game has aged badly, and I think age has increased my enjoyment of the game. Heartwarming.

Tecumseh Lies Here - The first ARG I've played in. There was an incredible sense of immediacy and reward to everything uncovered, and some wonderful moments on Twitter where the group reacted together to things.

Yakuza 3 - Tough as nails, with a heart of gold. The first act feels the strongest, about a former-Yakuza who has escaped his life and trying to change who he is, and about orphaned children creating new families.

Dark Souls - Definitely my favourite game this year. Dark Souls is absolutely a refinement of Demon's Souls, and like many sequels, it gets a lot more things right. The difficulty is exactly right, very challenging and very rewarding, but rarely to the point of frustration. There was an incredible sense of accomplishment any time I worked to defeat an area, or finally made it past a section that I had been working on for some time.

A question which is sometimes useful to ask about characters you are designing: What is this character doing which they may later come to regret?

Good people make bad calls sometimes, because of anger, grieve, ignorance, or any number of other reasons. Dealing with the consequences of a decision your character has made for themselves can sometimes be more interesting than dealing with a situation when your character is simply a victim of circumstances, or the victim of another character in the story.