Addy's NES Pages - Section III

One thing you may have noticed in my discussion of Legend of Kage is the way video game manufacturers insist on their games having elaborate plots, even when they very clearly hinder the gameplay experience.  They're often phrased in the second person and include needless trivia before getting to the point of the game:

"You are Vanadium Mikado, ace swordsman.  As a boy, you trained with your father and enjoyed sailing yachts.  Now, the Dorogi Clan has threatened an end to world peace.  Once again, you must take up the mantle of...  THE CRIMSON NINJA.  Remember: it is not known what brave warriors may find."

I think this is as good a time as any to mention that I have seen reference to a Commodore 64 game named "Bionic Ninja."  This title is interesting not only because it is the pure and utter distillation of the entirety of 80s geek fiction, but also because it serves as an example of the sort of game that needs no further explanation.  Once you know you're a bionic ninja, you can probably figure the rest out.  Ninjas in video games do little but run, slash, and jump; if the game happens to be The Last Ninja, they also have to make use of smoke bombs and die extremely often.  But what I'm getting at here is that while we video game junkies may be suckers for horrible games, we really don't need a lot of explanation once we've purchased them.  There are only about five basic types of games out there, and we've played them all.  Many times.

Of course, it does add a little to try and combine several different basic game types, performing bizarre experiments in videogame chemistry.  For example, early in the history of gaming, somebody fused Space Invaders and Pong and got Breakout, an oft-ripped-off game that, despite not being one of the basic types, is still well-known enough that all we need to do is sit down with a controller and go to town.

Here we see Arkanoid.  Even if you haven't played Blockbuster, Bananoid, or the original Breakout, it probably won't take you too long to figure out that your job here is to smash blocks to pieces by bouncing a ball off of a paddle.  That's all that matters as far as playing the game is concerned - you're not after character development, emotional involvement, or even snazzy dialogue. But to the folks at Taito, this wasn't enough.  No, we needed a plot.  See that paddle?  It's not really a paddle, it's a spaceship!  See that ball?   It's really...another spaceship!  But I'll let the game's intro text speak for itself...

None of this really affects how I play the game.  The extreme stupidity of giving a game like Arkanoid an elaborate plot is not lost on me, but I can usually forget about it and go around busting bricks as usual.  I guess my main issue is - if they were going to give the game a plot (which it clearly doesn't need) why not have it be a cool plot?  Of course, I can't think of any cool plots that could be adapted to the Arkanoid gaming experience.  I guess Taito couldn't think of any either; that should have been their first clue that the whole scheme was a bad idea.

That's not to say that I don't sometimes appreciate some window-dressing in terms of a game's plot.  It often seems to click in RPGs.  For some reason, games where I wield a sword and have greater-than-usual dialogue with idiots are called "role-playing games," and it's in these "RPGs" that we see the most tolerance for melodramatic introductions.  For example, here's most of the introduction of Crystalis, a game I never bothered to get very far in, but whose introduction is quite revealing, in that it points out several common RPG plot elements.

Every RPG ever made involves the re-emergence of an ancient threat which nearly destroyed the world upon its first appearance.  For some reason, you never play the role of the person who sealed this threat away in the first place.  I guess that's not "epic" enough.  Which I would understand; the creators of these games go to great pains to make them feel epic.  Usually this involves the present or past villain being the hero's father.  It's really super duper epic if the villain in the present is also the villain in the past and the hero's father.   I've never seen a game where the hero himself is the villain, but it would, no doubt, be swiftly dubbed a "classic" due to its "rich and involving plot."

Aside from swords and failed attempts at literary merit, the main thing that distinguishes RPGs from other games is the need to go through numerous inane tasks and dangerous quests to improve your character's in-game abilities.  That is, in RPGs, when you kill a bunch of weak monsters, you get stronger, which is good because it enables you to face stronger monsters which appear on higher levels.  This is totally meaningless, of course, since basically all games have stronger enemies as things go on; RPGs are therefore less challenging and involving because your strength increases to match the challenges you face, whereas in, for example, Mario Brothers, you have to get through the hardest levels using only the capabilities you've had all along.

As a result of all this, the only thing really unique to RPGs is an intense emphasis by the programmers on the illusion of control.  All the moronic plots and, yes, even the swords, exist solely to distract me from the rote exercise in number-crunching that actually constitutes the game.  If an RPG jerked the player around the way Kage or Simon's Quest (which is purported to have RPG elements anyway) does, it'd be savaged as "too linear."  This is a gaming codeword for a game that fails to adequately disguise the moments where the designer got lazy and decided to abandon all pretext of the player being in command of events.

An example is Terranigma, a Super Nintendo game where the townspeople don't just send you to find the missing Ruby or to kill Greater Tentaclor (who's scared away the Forest God).... no, they send you to fix their goddamn economy.  Every single town in this game has an identical economist named Keinz, who gives you cryptic, Simon's Quest-like advice about how to best bring prosperity back to the world.  Since this comes after spending some hours bringing back animals, plants, and human life to a ravaged postapocalyptic world, it seems like kind of a step down for Ark (the hero). Surely a hero with this kind of background has something better to do than travelling to China in an attempt to bring down steel prices to encourage the invention of the airplane.

Strangely, Terranigma is entertaining despite all of this.  Or, possibly, because of it.  The weirder your tasks get, the more you stare at the game with glazed-over, beaten-down eyes; your attitude by the time it's over is not "I did it!   Woohoo!" but "Yes, master, what next?"  You learn not to resist.  This is the only way to survive poorly-conceived RPGs, and successful companies try to avoid driving their players into the ground like this.  You want your customers to be transformed into zombies, yes, but you want to do it gradually, so they can be tricked into buying inferior software.  Zombifying someone within the course of one game greatly reduces public trust in the company.  But back to the specifics of good RPG-making.

RPGs often, but not always, have a combat system which is separate from normal play; that is, when you encounter an enemy, the camera shifts to some separate battle-mode viewpoint.  Combat systems usually involve a lot of really complex math in which the game determines whether ADDY, wielding the IRON STICK, can do five or seven damage points to LAMP.  Don't ask why I'm fighting a lamp.  In Earthbound Zero, anything goes.

The main problem with RPG combat is that, except in Secret of Mana, it's basically a one-player deal.  Since RPGs are genuinely themed around fighting (rather than jumping and dodging, like most Mario-type games), I'm always dying to have a chance to sit down with a couple of guys and some extra controllers and start wailing on my buddies.  Sadly, there are few RPGs in this vein, but there are still some cooperative-play games with enough RPG elements to add a little flavor to things.

Of course, those few games which allow me to "cooperate" with friends typically involve almost no cooperation, and boil down to a slam-bang chemistry in which my friend and I spend at least twice as much time yelling kung fu challenges to each other and ignoring the computer-controlled enemies than we do actually winning the game.    For an example of a game like this, let's move on to our next subject, the mother of all beat-em-ups...

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