Now, I am really excited for the game, but that’s because I’ve (as of now) played everything in its development “pedigree” that Monolith Soft (also the people behind the Xenosaga games and Xenoblade Chronicles) has made. And as I have said before in other venues (such as the latest episode of Gayme Bar) I have a very high tolerance for JRPG nonsense. So there’s that. But I feel like PXZ is actually the end result of Monolith refining their system and approach over 4 very similar games, and having played them, I wanted to talk a little bit about it. At least one person said they’d like to read that, so here it is.

Right. So this series of four games ends with PXZ but it consists of these other three, in chronological order –

• Namco x Capcom (PS2, 2005)
• Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier (3DS, 2008)
• Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier Exceed (3DS, 2010)

Now, of these three games, only the second – Endless Frontier — made it to the US (in that case, brought over by Atlus in an extremely limited printing, so far as I know). All four games are crossovers, and story-wise they are all linked, though there is a stronger link between NxC and PXZ than there is between those two and the two Endless Frontier games. The EF games, property-wise, are basically gaiden/sidestory games to Banpresto’s Super Robot Wars series, specifically the “Original Generation” games that, rather than being licensed anime robot properties, are all Banpresto originals. If you’re an SRW fan and are curious, yes, Endless Frontier and EF Exceed are canonically linked to mainline SRW:OG.

The entire series has a few things in common:

• They’re “action RPGs,” at least in the sense that their combat is not menu-driven, but decided by realtime actions of the player. Generally speaking, in each game an individual unit (which may be more than one character) has a set list of attacks mapped to a single button, along with the crosspad or analog stick + that button for five total combinations (NxC and PXZ) or a pre-set “order” of five attacks played out by using one button (EF and Exceed).
• The plots invariably use some sort of dimension hopping or time travel (or both) to bring their casts together and, in fact, returning people to their “rightful” world is an overarching story goal. Typical crossover stuff.
• Other RPG tropes are part of the package. The games include the typical stuff you’d find: consumables, magic spells or abilities, equippable items, etc. NxC and PXZ play out like strategy RPGs; EF and EF Exceed are map-wandering, random-encounter-y RPGs.

However, there’s also a clear path as games evolve in this series over time. So let’s take a look.

Namco x Capcom

So, to start with, this game is Japan-only. I’m playing it currently, but I’m not done with it. Why? Because it’s a slog. As a strategy RPG each map takes a long time to finish due to sheer density of units (usually your 10-12 vs. their 20+). And boy, is combat slow paced. Let me show you an example –

(start at 6:30 if the video doesn’t do it automatically) You select a unit. You move. You select a victim to attack. You confirm the pre-battle data. You actually fight — the cool part where you control things and see the attacks play out all nifty — and then you select “wait” to end your turn (or use a spell or item first or whatever). Fine. The game slowly churns on to the next unit. If it’s an enemy and they’re near you, they’ll attack. You can just sit there and take it, you can defend yourself (the smart option), or you can “evade” where you automatically take less damage but can skip the defense “mini-game.”

And if you defend… aigh. Then the enemy attacks you with their one attack, repeatedly, while your crosspad turns into DDR for your thumbs. If you hit each “defense” right you don’t take less damage, but you do gain AP (action points, the game’s actions-taken currency), so that your next turn might come around faster.

That’s just the basics. Never mind that both enemies and your units have resource-costing evasions and counters and Multiple Attacks which can hit multiple enemies at once if you set them up properly and yadda yadda… yeah. Combat moved exceptionally slowly.

Reiji and Xiaomu (NxC)

In terms of story, the English patch for NxC I’m playing is… imperfect, and I haven’t played the game all the way through, but generally speaking, the plot focuses around two characters, Reiji Arisu and his partner Xiaomu. They work for an organization called “Shinra” that deals with supernatural threats to society. They’re opposed by an organization called “Ouma,” embodied in the game’s villain, Saya. In an attempt to free a demon that was sealed in the Abyss of Time (or something), Saya has basically let free villains from all sorts of worlds. NxC‘s cosmology is basically a set of parallel dimensions: the “Material World” (our world), the “Divine” and “Demon” worlds, and the “Spirit World.” The many Namco and Capcom characters all come from various dimensions, and are already crossed over WITHIN dimensions (so Chun-li’s investigation of Shadaloo from Street Fighter involves her knowing about the Mishima Zaibatsu from Tekken). Early in the game Reiji and Xiaomu, along with a bunch of Material World-ers, are tossed into a Flux (a rip in space-time) and end up in the Divine World. The game is about Reiji slowly acquiring allies (in the form of crossover characters) and working his way home/stopping Saya. Simple enough (ha ha). Of course, each world’s maps and locations are ripped straight from the games, everything from the bridge of Xenosaga‘s Woglinde spaceship to the Infernal Village/Makaimura of Ghouls and Ghosts.

I say again, NxC isn’t exactly bad… just glacially paced. If everything moved more swiftly, the game would be a hell of a lot better. And seeing your favorite characters interact can be fun. One of my favorite characters, Morrigan Aensland, has a lot of great lines teasing the various pure virginal anime girls from other series about their sexuality, for example, and watching Ryu punch out the cutesy bad guys from Klonoa is pretty great.

But the important thing is that NxC was the first, and it’s where a lot of the form took shape. Now, let’s move on to…

SRW OG Saga: Endless Frontier

Okay. So EF is not a broad, sweeping crossover like NxC. In fact, almost all of its major characters and locations are Banpresto original characters, though they are in many ways riffs on existing SRW characters. The main characters, Haken Browning and Kaguya Nanbu, are directly referencing Kyosuke Nanbu and Excellen Browning of the SRW series (as are Reiji and Xiaomu of NxC, more indirectly), while Aschen Broedel turns out to not only reference SRW’s Lamia Loveless (and to share her voice actor) but in Exceed she turns out to be the prototype Lamia is based on (both are cyborgs/biomechanical androids of a sort). However, Reiji and Xiaomu from NxC are playable, as is KOS-MOS from the Xenosaga series.

EF1′s cast minus Reiji and Xiaomu. From L to R: Haken Browning, Kaguya Nanbu, KOS-MOS, Aschen Broedel, and Suzuka-hime

Rather than a strategy game, Endless Frontier is a map-travelling, random encounter-style RPG that takes place in the titular Endless Frontier, a collection of small, connected, themed worlds (like the uber-Japanese Kagura Amahara, or the sci-fi/western fusion Lost Herencia). Without spoiling too much of the plot, since you can actually PLAY this game in the US, Haken and company get mixed up with troubles occuring across the scattered Endless Frontier, to which malfunctioning dimensional technology has thrown KOS-MOS, Reiji, and Xiaomu. Story-wise, the game takes place after NxC (when KOS-MOS, the last to be recruited, shows up, Reiji and Xiaomu recognize her from before). In the process various SRW storylines intersect, meaning you’ll get the most out of this game if you’ve played some of the US SRW titles (like the two GBA Original Generation ports).

As for the combat system, this character trailer for Haken shows it off pretty well. Rather than NxC‘s dial-a-combo where you used the d-pad and the attack button to freely choose from your 5 attacks (which were set), in Endless Frontier there is only one attack button. You choose 5 attacks (from a total by endgame of 7-8) and slot them into a pre-set order. When your turn comes up, hitting the attack button starts the chain, and tapping it again moves to the next attack in the chain for a total of up to 5 attacks (each attack costs “COM”, which refills a bit each turn). As you can see in the video, the ideal is that you attack once and then keep the chain going, juggling the enemy.

What you don’t see in the video are the Support and Chain skills. Because your party has 7 members but you can only have 4 in the party, the remaining three go into “Support Reserve.” On a given character’s turn they can call in the current support character once, who does a signature attack to add additional hits and damage. That character then rotates to the end of the reserve, so that the next time someone calls in a support, you’re continuously cycling through your reserve. Because you want to squeeze as much damage into your turn as you can, support attacks are used almost constantly (and they are generally speaking without cost to use, so why not?).

Also, depending on the turn order, if another party member is next in line to act, you can chain your turns together by calling in your ally much like you would a support unit. In that case the first character’s turn ends, and the second character immediately leaps in with the first attack in their set list. Ideally, you can use this to continue juggling your enemy and stretch a combo out — the longer you keep an enemy in the air, the greater their cumulative damage taken becomes. However, if you let them drop to the ground, many enemies will “Forced Evade” and pre-emptively end your turn before you can attack them again. Also some enemies start with a “Block” shield; you must do [x] amount of successive hits to them before the shield shatters and they begin taking damage.

On the defensive side, gone is the defense “minigame” from NxC. Instead you simply take damage when attacked. However, offensive and defensive “spells” (for SRW fans, these are “seishins” or “spirit commands”) that heal, grant you extra defense, and have other buff effects can also be used.

What Endless Frontier‘s combat system lacked in sophistication, it gained in swiftness and kinesis. Combat moved swiftly and, if you were the type who enjoyed watching your characters do cool martial arts stuff, seeing your characters do things like Kaguya’s “fill the screen with crescent-shaped boomerangs” or Aschen’s battery of rocket-powered punches and kicks was great fun. Which brings us to…

SRW OG Saga: Endless Frontier Exceed

So I’m not going to explore Exceed‘s plot in detail, because I played it in Japanese and thus don’t understand 90% of it. However, it adds more callbacks to the SRW series in characters and locations, including a new pair of main characters, Aldy Nash and Neige Hausen. What I want to talk about instead is the combat system.

Exceed took Endless Frontier‘s system and improved and streamlined it considerably. For starters, many characters from EF who had awful support attacks (such as Suzuka-hime) had theirs redesigned to hit more accurately and be less difficult to work into combos. Secondly, and most importantly, they added the idea of the “Support Unit.”

This video is an exhibition of the various Support attacks, either from party members (before the 1:04 mark) and from Support Units (1:04 and up). A Support Unit was a full character — usually an existing storyline character from EF, or a new crossover character such as NxC‘s Saya or Xenosaga‘s T-Elos and MOMO — who effectively became equipment. Each “main” character could “equip” one Support Character, who gave three benefits:

• A Support Attack that could be used on that character’s turn, just like the rotating Support Reserve (which came back from EF)
• A passive stat boost of some kind.
• A % chance to activate a buff of some kind on the character’s turn, such as extra evasion, or increased crit chance, etc.

Thus there was more customization involved for each individual unit, since Support Units could cover stat deficiencies (a speed buff for the powerful but slow KOS-MOS, for example) or enhance strengths, and since the main thrust of combat continued to be juggling the enemy, specific combinations of a Main Unit’s attacks and a Support Unit’s support attack could yield major results. An example is T-Elos’ “U-Teneritas” attack, which keeps the enemy locked in place; combined with an attack of Suzuka’s which normally throws the enemy around (reducing hit count), you can instead maximize the damage of that attack. For more story-oriented players, mixing “appropriate” support and main units — linking Saya to Reiji or Xiaomu, for example — were also possible.

Beyond support units, Exceed also gave players more use of the “special” gauge that in EF1 was mostly used to deliver a powerful special attack that used up the gauge entirely. In Exceed the gauge can power certain abilities and spells that affect the field, give buffs, or attack; it can also be spent in lump chunks to “Forced Evade,” just as enemies did in EF. Finally, in addition to being able to call in the next attacker for a chain attack, you can also call in the next person in the reserve to defend for you before an attack hits, so that carefully cycling your roster in and out can help you survive long fights better.

In short, Exceed didn’t substantially change the base from Endless Frontier, but it did develop it and streamline, creating a much smoother combat experience.

Project X Zone

So now we make it to PXZ. Having only played the demo, I nevertheless have a pretty good feel for how Monolith applied the lessons of the past three games. The game is clearly a spiritual, if not direct, successor to Namco x Capcom, as evinced by the return of Reiji and Xiaomu, some familiar settings (in one promo vid, Ryu makes a comment about “that event” in Roppongi, referring to NxC), and the fact that rather than the OG Saga series’ map exploration, PXZ is a strategic RPG played out on a grid map.

However, gone is NxC‘s clunky combat system. For the most part (going by the demo), PXZ plays like the OG Saga games once combat starts… mostly. The “choose your order of attacks” style of NxC returns, but there’s incentive not to spam one attack over and over; if you use each of your individual attacks once, you get a bonus attack you can spend on whatever attack in your list you like. Since each unit can only make [x] attacks on its turn, adhering to this bonus condition means more damage for you.

It’s also worth noting that NxC involved some units that were two people (e.g. Reiji and Xiaomu; Shion and MOMO; Stahn and Rutee) and some that were one person (Dmitri, Ryu, Jin Kazama) and even some that start single and become dual (Chun-li becomes Chun & Cammy; Morrigan becomes Morrigan & Lilith). Even the EF games had one duo unit (Exceed‘s Axel Almer & Alfimi). In PXZ, all “main” units are duo units consisting of two characters fighting together. However, the “support unit” introduced in Exceed makes a return in the form of the “Solo Unit,” which acts almost entirely the same way: an “equippable” third unit that offers a passive stat boost, a support call-in attack, and a conditionally-activated buff.

This video shows all of X and Zero’s (from Megaman X) attacks, including the support attack from their solo unit, Tron Bonne (from the Megaman Legends series). As you can see, the “Block” shield from Endless Frontier is in effect here, but there’s at least a visible gauge to tell you when the block will break.

Unlike Namco x Capcom, in Project X Zone the strategy map interface is considerably smoother. Instead of selecting every option from a menu, characters can be moved freely on the map within their movement range, with their attack range overlaid as orange highlights on the movement range. Choosing where to move and what to attack is thus considerably easier/faster than it was in NxC. It’s also worth noting that instead of Endless Frontier‘s support reserve, nearby units can be pulled in for a “support attack” (much like the solo units) to add extra hits.

The defense mini-game is gone; however, you can choose to defend yourself by spending resources (specifically the “Cross Gauge,” which also fuels special skills and powerful attacks) in three ways: “Counter,” which gives you a free hit on the enemy after you take damage, “Defend,” which reduces damage, and “Full Defend,” which effectively no-sells the enemy attack (but is expensive). When enemies attack, only the big flashy attacks of boss-type monsters get full animations. Otherwise, the damage reporting happens on the map with no need for a lengthy cut scene (another streamlining effort from NxC).

In short, PXZ is a pretty clear case of Monolith having toyed with and perfected these systems over time, and I actually think the result is going to be a pretty fun game provided the premise of an action-strategy RPG crossover game of familiar (and some not so familiar) characters is one you’re interested in at all. Hopefully this will help you understand some of the design decisions in PXZ if you buy it and then go, “Why the HELL did they do this?”

PS: When Atlus brought over Endless Frontier they wisely left in the Japanese voice acting. Combat dialogue and win quotes — of which there were many — went sadly misunderstood unless you spoke Japanese. Namco, however, not only did the same thing (I imagine voice re-recording wouldn’t have been cost effective given the amount of spoken dialogue) but they added text boxes for win quotes and other major in-combat utterances. So, you’ll at least understand what they’re saying!

Alright. So victory themes. The Final Fantasy games probably give us the iconic example because back in the 8-bit NES days, most RPGs didn’t HAVE battle win themes — if you were lucky you get the “bling-bling-BLING!” 3 tone at the end of a Dragon Quest fight (that series still doesn’t have victory music, by the way). Then FF came along with this:

You probably instantly recognized it, right? And structurally it’s extremely simple: a few seconds of fanfare and then a very quickly looped followup. The formula repeats itself… a lot.

SaGa Frontier 2: “Showing Joy I”

Xenosaga: “Battle’s End”

Final Fantasy X-2: “Mission Complete” (Small note: This track pulls double duty in the game!)

Resonance of Fate: “Victory”

Tales of Graces: “Raise the Song of Victory”

And so on and so on. Structurally, this feels like it owes a lot to D&D, doesn’t it? You won! You want an immediate, gratifying burst of energetic sound that says “FUCK YEAH, TAKE THAT METAL SLIME” (while your characters rhythmically pump their fists up and down or whatever) but more importantly, victory usually comes with ~*loot*~ and other prizes like experience points and leveling up. So, the trailing sound, which is often short loops, quieter, repetitive: it plays under your mental math (and occasional inventory management) while you sort out what you won. And there you go! The simple but effective logic of the victory jingle.

There are a few variations that I also enjoy. Probably my favorite is the “two victory themes, one for ‘perfect’ victories,” which is most commonly found in the work of Noriyuki Iwadare. Consider these Grandia-series tracks:

They’re both victory themes, but that second one certainly seems… fancier, right? You only get that one if you win without taking any damage. It’s harder to do, so the resulting song is… you know, shinier. Follows the same logic, but more colorfully/brightly. Final Fantasy XIII-2 also does this with its fanfares, the latter of which you can only get by winning a 5-star battle (thus beating everything inside the target time limit) –

So, what are your favorite victory musics?

So, I really like game music. My tastes tend to run more toward Japanese game music, if only because most U.S. game soundtracks are, in my opinion, bland atmospheric drones punctuated by loud brassy Hollywood-style action movie riffs. Not that J-games don’t do that too, but perhaps a little less often. My bailiwick is RPG music (Square music in particular; if you know a VGM fan they almost certainly got there because of various Square soundtracks, I promise you.)

Here is my problem: I love all this music but pretty much nobody else does? It makes having a conversation about the music I like very challenging because everyone else is talking about [US artist here] with his/her latest song about [choose one: the person they'd like to fuck, the person they are currently fucking, the person they are no longer fucking, money/fame] that I kind of don’t give a damn about in return. I have a massive massive inferiority complex about this issue as a result.

Dan Bruno suggested on Twitter that I blog about it, since I claimed to “know a lot” (which was probably a mistake). And I demurred but the truth is I had a really miserable evening and am really angry and I’m hoping maybe writing a short thing on game music will calm me down. So I’m gonna. Maybe I’ll write more on the future if people read this?

But nobody will because nobody cares! Saved.

So I play a lot of JRPGs and I’ve noticed an interesting trend when it comes to combat themes: “normal” (like, non-boss everyday) battle themes tend to have peppy, driving, sometimes even cheerful tones and boss themes tend to be big, dramatic affairs with lots of looming tension or a very different sound texture. Obvious when you think about it, right? Let me give you a few examples:

Final Fantasy XIII: “Blinded By Light” (normal) and “Saber’s Edge” (boss)

Chrono Cross: “Hurricane” (normal) and “Edge of Death” (boss)

Etrian Odyssey 4: “Battlefield ~ Storm” (normal) and “Battlefield ~ Fall of the Final Enemy” (boss)

Super Mario RPG: “Fight Against Monsters” (normal) and “Fight Against an Armed Boss” (boss)

And now for some really vicious examples. Persona 4 Golden: “Time to Make History” (normal) and “I’ll Face Myself (Battle)” (boss)

I could go on and on. The interesting thing to me is how the two different styles motivate different types of behavior. Consider the function that each type of battle serves in a “traditional” JRPG. Normal battles are there to build experience and resources; they’re very frequent (sometimes too frequent) and they are the “meat” of much of the gameplay. They’re where the action happens. But they’re not necessarily what you want to be doing 90% of the time. Boss battles, by comparisons, are typically climax moments; they’re story progression (or optional content) gates, involving important events or characters. They almost always take a lot longer to complete and they’re supposed to be more difficult.

So the two approaches to RPG music make a lot of sense. Normal battle themes drive you forward through the activity — they’re aggressive and usually fast-paced. They encourage a sense of heroism; after all, your party should be stronger than some group of slimes, right? Noriyuki Iwadare (the composer behind many games, such as the Grandia series and the two Ace Attorney Investigations titles) once said that when he composes battle music he specifically aims to create that feeling of heroism in battle musics. These songs also tend to loop faster because these battles are shorter.

Boss music, on the other hand, needs to create a feeling of tension. Losing a normal battle isn’t fun, or interesting; it’s annoying. But in a boss battle the precipice should always be steep and the drop irrevocable, as it were. A boss battle should tax you. Thus the music has to support that feeling of tension, where everything’s on the line and you need all your wits to survive. This is why I didn’t necessarily say boss fights are slow-paced — many are often just as driving, beat-wise, as normal battles — but the texture of the sound is different. The keys tend toward less bright/cheery sounds and more towards darker, ominous ones. Etc.

Try it for yourself. Imagine a game with battle musics and see if this holds up for those.

A little postscript: One game has done something awesome that I’ve never heard another RPG do: Eternal Arcadia/Skies of Arcadia‘s boss music is actually response/modular. This track, for example – Boss Battle (~Crisis, ~Opportunity) — changes from normal, to “crisis” when your party’s HP is low, to “opportunity” when the enemy is almost dead. Have a listen. “Crisis” kicks in around 1:26 and “Opportunity” around 1:53 –

The song Last Battle (~Opportunity) from the same album does something very similar for the final battle theme.

Be warned you will probably be mad at me after this post.

Right, so. First of all Andrew writes about games for money and I do not (except that one time). This isn’t to say he only writes about them for money, but someone coming from the working world of games journalism/criticism is coming from a different base context than me, so I want to make that clear, because I think it does color a bit of where we diverge.

That said, here’s where we agree:

• It is easier to critique all of a game when that game can be played in two hours rather than two weeks. This is an issue that’s haunted games criticism forever, though; when I wrote my Games and Culture article on Persona 3, that was a full playthrough. I put 60-70 hours of work playing the game — just playing it and taking notes — for that thing. Never mind collating notes, revisiting sections (YouTube is fantastic for this), making conclusions, drawing comparisons. That was two plus months of work. I was thankfully in an academic setting where that’s not a problem. Not everyone’s got that luxury.
• AAA games are pricey. Way too pricey, and the death of the rental market isn’t helping. Redbox is an option (that was how I experienced Bioshock Infinite), maybe, but then you’re under the gun to finish the game in record time so you can get it back before the rental starts to cost like buying new. Gamefly is also an option, but is highly unreliable with new releases unless you plan way in advance (and even then, some luck is required).
• The promo media machine of the AAA game space works on maximum overdrive, primarily to stimulate purchasing need and, by extension, almost universally manufacturing as much moment-of-play disappointment as they did consumer interest.
• While Andrew hints at this more than says it explicitly, there’s also the problem of not having any goddamned time to dedicate to a AAA title — especially something huge and sprawling like an RPG — before people have already sent their dogs to the hunt in the game critic-o-sphere. The critical community is expected to pluck, devour, and (sorry) regurgitate the experience of playing something like Bioshock Infinite or Mass Effect 3 in a matter of days. Not weeks, not even a month: days. I being up Infinite because that was what I had to do. And I did it willingly, don’t get me wrong, but some of that fatigue that Andrew describes, I felt… and part of me wonders if I became uncharitable to that game overmuch because I didn’t have time to inhabit it. It’s like saying “Oh, I’ve visited New Jersey” when the reality is you saw College Park through the windows of an Amtrak train going a zillion MPH. “There were cows! Nerf cows!”

So I think on those three points I agree. On some others, however…

I think my primary issue is with the idea of exhaustion or fatigue, because I think primarily it’s something that the post attributes to the AAA style but which I would like to argue is not necessarily endemic to them. The examples Andrew gives us are Spec Ops: the Line and Bioshock Infinite (and by small mention, the original Bioshock). To be honest with you, those games tired me out too (I lasted approximately 10 minutes into Spec Ops before I just shouted “OH COME ON” and threw down the controller, so let’s be fair and say I probably didn’t give it a fair shake). Far Cry 3 gave me a similar sense of weariness; holding the controller in my hand I went, “Do I really need to do this?”

But man, I’m going to be honest — and here is where I am about to get into serious trouble — a lot of small, independent games do this to me too, but in a different sort of way. I think the stuff Porpentine does is my entry point to this. I’ve played a few of the things she’s made, specifically Twine things in an attempt to better understand Twine’s place in the queer game dev counterpublic that’s growing and spreading out on the wild internet savannah. Some of them I found quirky but fun and engaging; my go-to there is Crystal Warrior Ke$ha, a really quite fascinating take on Ke$ha’s public persona that we played, out loud and as a group, to kick off the recent QUILTBAG Jam we did at the lab. I really liked it; it doesn’t hurt that it’s about music and making music part of the story and the thing I love to do the most to Twine games is set them to music using YouTube background links and video game soundtracks.

On the other hand, I tried Howling Dogs (which you’ve probably heard of if you were following events at GDC) and All I Want Is For All of My Friends to Become Insanely Powerful as well and… my ability to engage with them wasn’t quite as successful. I don’t know what to call them; “absurdist” seems unfair but as texts they are powerfully abstract, often drenched in vocabulary that tests your sense of abjection, using vibrant body horror imagery. And they are not necessarily technically difficult to navigate, but I found it hard to enjoy them and even harder to play them, to get involved with them, and to feel a part of them. To be honest about my affective response, I felt mocked; it was if the game was saying “I have a really smart point but you, reader, are too stupid to understand that point. Haha!”

Now before this spins off into an unfortunate direction, I don’t think this makes them bad or unworthy of notice/critique (quite the opposite; the less I understand something the more I want someone to work it out even if it’s not me). And like any reading of a text there’s as much of me, and my personality and likes/dislikes and whatever coming into play as anything else. But as a reader and a critic I just felt that I didn’t want to engage those two texts for very long. Doing so was taxing. And interestingly enough, it was partly taxing for some of the reasons Andrew mentions about triple-A titles.

Many of the people who I follow in the games crit space, people whose opinions I respect and trust, had all said “Dude, have you tried Porpentine’s stuff? You should, it’s fantastic!” And the less I felt like I understood what I was reading, the more hurt and angry I felt at myself for not getting it and (to some extent) the texts for making me feel that way. There was this pressure to not so much like but to “get” the “right” stuff. I shouldn’t care about the latest mass-market pap! The smart, awesome peeps I know have it down and know what’s good. And the less I agreed, the less I felt I could talk about what was “good” (and to be honest, the more I felt like not saying anything at all, for fear of feeling like a fool).

Yet I got Crystal Warrior Ke$ha. I dearly love that game, and I felt like I “got” it. So the logic or emotions behind my utter, utter inability to engage the rest of Porp’s stuff doesn’t necessarily reside in her medium/tools (Twine), in her writing voice, or anything else for that matter. It was all about the context of reception.

(Porp, in the unlikely event that you are reading this: I hope I haven’t offended you by using this example, and I think your successes speak for themselves.)

Honestly, I feel this way about a lot, a lot, of “independent” games in general. To be honest the more I perceive that a game is a “message game” or an “art game,” the more irritating pressure I feel to have a Stance™ on it, for good or for ill, in the critical community. And liking or disliking something it’s done or attempted on an individual level doesn’t seem possible: you’ve got to be for it or against it. If you’re saying “but that happens in AAA too!” then yeah, you’re 100% right and that’s sort of my point. These attempts to make cultural touchstones, regardless of arena, put a tremendous amount of pressure on people who make their way interpreting those touchstones. The immediacy and swiftness of internet publishing and social media create a time pressure; a desire to belong and to be viewed as thoughtful and smart create a content pressure; the cost of the activity in time and effort create economic pressure. I’m not saying that removing any of these would suddenly create the One True Pure Criticism of anything, but we need to take into account the effect that these things are having on our opinions.

But whatever those effects are, they’re not created solely by the AAA space. The indie community can and does have its own impacts on how people approach those games, and just because a game isn’t a big mass market manshooter doesn’t mean it can’t be taxing to consume.

On to the second point. Andrew says that ”[s]maller, cheaper games are usually way shorter, but they have a lot more to say about the one thing they really care about. Espgaluda II is about nothing more than threading a beautiful gender-fluid lazer death fairy through a wall of pink bullets. Skullgirls cares about nothing other than ridiculously high standards of traditional 2D animation and fighting. Neither of these games are very ‘intellectual’ (whatever that EVEN MEANS) but they are also genius at what they do, and so I find there’s a lot of things to talk about. I think good writing, which mine isn’t always, is really focused but deep, which describes a lot of small games to me.”

This isn’t necessarily untrue (though I would argue Skullgirls is as much about the culture of fighting games as it is a Frankenstein-style attempt to create the “perfect fighting game” but that’s a story for another day). It stands to reason that if you strip away some of the excess grandiose stuff that surrounds what happens in the AAA space, you have more of everything — effort, time, money, attention, will, passion — to put into focusing on That One Thing. There’s a reason that Ridiculous Fishing works: you trawl for fish and then you shoot them for money you use to buy better fishing/shooting gear which then lets you get more money. Vlambeer and co. put only the tiniest extraneous comedic touches on that game (like the “Byrdr” fake Twitter which, in a stroke of true genius, is linked to actual Twitter accounts) and it is the better for it.

But here is my question: why must every critique of a triple-A title be holistic? This is a problem my game studies students have — which all starting critics have and nobody ever truly grows out of — where we see a thing we are interested in and we are going to explain Everything Right Down To the Smallest Detail. Not every critique needs to be the grand unified theory of [game here]. Not every piece of art, or cultural text, is going to be 100% worth your time in terms of commentary. To be honest, this is where AAA games probably are the best example. 90% of the content in a manshooter is extraneous, carbon copy, sequelitis pablum that does not bear talking about so why bother? Take the one thing the game did well — the one thing about it that makes it worth your damn time — and talk about that. Just that. I mean, be aware of its place in the structure of the game as a whole, of course; there’s a difference between being focused and wearing blinders. But you can do worthy critique without having to Explain Everything.

I mean, think about any mass market games journalism review you have ever read of a role-playing game, especially if it’s a JRPG and comes from an established series. I swear to you, the first five paragraphs of any such review reads as follows: “Wyvern Quest 6 is the latest in the Wyvern Quest games. In it you play a hero who wanders the land beating up monsters for money and equipment so you can save a princess. I will now exhaustively list every last mechanical system that this game not only has in relation to its predecessors, but also to every other JRPG in existence, up to and including the totally nonsense phrases ‘immersive storyline’ and ‘deep customization,’ among other real whoppers. At no point will I ever say what stood out as the quality that pulled me in and engaged me about play, unless that element is the graphics.”

Whenever I read those damn articles I want to hit the speaker in the face with a shovel. Why do that? We know it has menu based combat! Look at a bloody screenshot with a menu in it, for fuck’s sake. Tell me what’s interesting! If you sat there glued to your TV for 18 hours straight then I’m going to hope something other than a looming deadline or a sorely-needed paycheck motivated that so tell me what the hell it was. The truth is, with the smaller and more focused games Andrew mentions it is probably just easier to identify that engaging thing, glom onto it, and discuss it at length because there’s less distraction. But I feel like it’s unfair to shut triple-A games out of getting that treatment. Perhaps it’s more fair to quote the old proverb, “A hunter who chases two hares catches neither.” Maybe the real fault is that AAA games considerably more often are trying to do too much and need to back off. I’ll buy that. But I think that critique that tries to focus, to read around and through a particular POV of a AAA game, has value.

So to sum up, I don’t necessarily think I disagree with what is at the core of Andrew’s critique. But I think it’s more fair to say that the triple-A form is no longer his deal and trying to adhere to the current model of critique for that space is hurting him. On the other hand, I’m actually pretty okay with my status as corporate whore in some ways. The world needs people who look at both aspects of game culture, and ideally they can speak enough of a common language so that, in speaking to their expertise, they can speak to each other about how those thoughts and ideas can inform any and every game design space.

Since there are obvious spoilers for the game (and a few for Tomb Raider, FYI), out of courtesy the rest of this post is behind the cut.

Right. So I’m not here to give my Extensive Breakdown™ of the game because that’s not really helpful or needed. I will say that my general impression is that Leigh Alexander and I came to roughly the same conclusion: Columbia is in many ways a themepark (the phrase Leigh and I batted back and forth on Twitter was “racist Disneyland”). It’s brightly colored, fantastically designed, intricate and wonderful and primarily experienced on rails. Everything about it is caricature; larger-than-life, big and bright and about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

As a secondary point, I want to emphasize another opinion I have on that game (which you can also hear in an upcoming episode of GaymeProbe) — the idea that racism is basically a red herring, in Infinite. That doesn’t mean it’s any less problematic; I think Courtney Stanton’s breakdown of that issue, among others, is pretty spot-on so do some reading there. But I mean, in terms of the plot structure and overarching narrative of B:I, racism isn’t interesting, important, or even necessary — it’s there to push the cart along the It’s A Jingoistic Racist Eminent Domain World After All ride to its inevitable, Star Trek science-y conclusion.

But it’s that major plot device — the multiple worlds, the predestination paradox ending, the time loop that has claimed the lives of 120+ Booker DeWitts — that actually interests me, even if the game waits a little too long to get into the meat of it.

Lemme start with voxophones.

I didn’t have the energy to collect them all — I had Redbox’ed the game and to be honest at about the same time you start fighting the Siren and the game becomes Resident Evil I really just didn’t want to shoot anything anymore — but the few I heard did interest me. More to the point, afterwards I made an effort to hunt down recordings/transcripts of the voxophones of Rosalinde Lutece in particular. I felt like they’d give me some insight into the events of the ending.

Through these, and some reading of in-game events, we know this about Rosalinde and Robert Lutece:

• They’re effectively two different versions of the same person from different dimensions
• They’re “unstuck in time and space” thanks to Fink sabotaging their Tear-producing machine. Instead of killing them (as Fink intended) it basically de-anchors them. Thus they can appear and disappear at will across the timeline and across the “probability space,” as Rosalinde puts it.
• Once upon a time they aided Comstock together, but after seeing what will happen if his plans for Elizabeth come true, Robert makes a demand of his sister: they fix this, or he and she will part ways forever. Not wanting to lose his company, she reluctantly agrees.
• Rosalinde believes that certain events will occur the same way across dimensions and timelines regardless: “There are constants and variables.” She is against the ‘experiment’ of using Booker (or, more accurately, multiple Bookers) to resolve their situation.
• Robert, on the other hand, is less fatalistic and believes things can change — as his sister puts it, “He sees a blank page where I see King Lear.”
• Blah blah Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, blah.

In summary, Booker is their catspaw in an attempt to stop all this before it even starts, which — presuming you make it through the game — he actually manages. Your deaths and game overs when Elizabeth aren’t around are even resolved by their auspice: pulling yet another Booker into the appropriate reality (note Booker’s confusion on your first game over to find himself in his office once again).

Now I’m regretting that I don’t like to fav tweets, because someone in my feed made the comment that they couldn’t enjoy Infinite as a multiple-realities story because in the end, the game presented an intensely fatalistic view of things: trying to change events in one universe doesn’t feel like it matters because there will always be an endless number of universes where it does. And I thought that was a really fascinating statement and it got me thinking about the nature of choice and causality in this game.

If you’ve played Bioshock Infinite then you know that the game gives you a very small number of “X or Y?” choices that are barely choices at all –

The first one is the “Racist/Not Racist/Indifferent” non-decision, as you can see (there’s some nasty violence in this video, be warned), though I noticed if you spare the couple they appear later to thank you. Warm fuzzies you’re not a cartoon racist!

The Bird or the Cage, which slightly changes Elizabeth’s character model for a time but other than some foreshadowing is irrelevant

There’s the question of whether or not you kill Slate, which seems pretty irrelevant since if you don’t kill him, he gets dragged down to Finkton and, I believe, trepanned as part of either torture, interrogation, or both.

But as you can tell the “choices” here are non-choices. Their results are cosmetic, not meaningful. And as for the rest of the game, your choices are amazingly limited: shoot, or… uh that’s basically it, since using Vigors is just “shoot” with pretty lights instead of bullets. The result is, as I said, a theme park ride… or maybe like a Mario Kart track. Taking a sharp left or right at branch X will show you option Y or option Z, but then they converge again onto the main road.

In the end you don’t even get to make meaningful choices about whether Comstock lives or dies (Booker beats him to death with his bare hands) or if you accept Elizabeth’s judgment about how to fix all this and let her drown you in the “baptismal.” There are many moments where Elizabeth is about to open a Tear that will shift reality and she goes “I’m not sure,” and we hear her tell Booker to be really sure he wants to do this, but as players we have one option: “Open Tear.”

Part of me wonders, though, if this lack of choice is part of the game’s ultimate message, or at the very least an idea we need to consider about games in genreal. Because so much of the game’s thematic material really drives home the point that choice is often irrelevant. Comstock makes different choices than Booker — their divergence as people symbolized by the rhetoric of being born anew via baptism — but those choices don’t actually make a meaningful difference between the two individuals. Both are goal-driven men, willing to kill to get what they want, and certain that their path is the right(eous) one. Perhaps we see Booker in a more favorable light because he is “us,” our agent in the world, and because he helps Elizabeth, who is intended to be the focus of our empathy and our compassion, but he is not that different from Comstock in the end.

The evocation of Rapture — and thus, of the original Bioshock — in multiple ways suggests that the flavor may be different but ultimately the choices will be the same. The Tears that Fink and Comstock exploit to create the very structures of Columbia, everything from Vigors to Songbird, are proof positive of that. The ideological content is different, but the result is the same, right down to Elizabeth’s oft-cited line, “There will always be a man, his city, and a lighthouse.” To quote the Battlestar Galactica remake, “all this has happened before and will happen again.” Perhaps somewhat hilariously, in what feels like an attempt to evoke the “feel” of Rapture in Columbia — an establishment of the “Bioshock aesthetic” — we get proof that nobody’s learned anything. Infinite doors to infinite worlds all making the same critical mistakes.

And honestly, I think that’s why Bioshock Infinite is a marvelous commentary on the state of (parts of) the industry right now. It’s is a living testimonial to the phantom of choice and the homogenizing effect of constant iteration on mass-market game titles, especially in the FPS genre.

Some of us are Robert Lutece: we think things can change, we want things to change, and so we enter the experiment “knowing it can fail.” Maybe this time the constants will change. Maybe this time, maybe in this world, things will work out differently. On the other hand some of us are Rosalinde Lutece: we don’t think things can change. Where everyone else sees the blank page of possibility, we see King Lear. But as long as we have what we want, we’re content. We don’t experiment because, as she says, “One does not undergo an experiment knowing one has failed.”

All that being said: almost all of us are Booker, invited to wipe away our sins by hurling ourselves again and again into the proverbial meat grinder. We play these games over and over, either hoping things will change or safe in the knowledge that they won’t. And the result is an endless array of “[x]ist Disneylands,” vaguely steerable themepark rides, minor iterations on each other.

I had a longer argument about the irrelevance of “meaningful choice” as an ontological rubric for “game-ness,” to tie into the current debate raging among the elites about formalism, but I think I’ve made the right choice in getting rid of it for now. Certainly, Bioshock Infinite is one of the better pieces of evidence in that regard because not only are its literal choices entirely irrelevant, but the game itself hinges on questions of if any choice can really have meaning in the end. Certainly, if Bioshock Infinite, with its almost total lack of player agency, is a game, then any product of the Twine Revolution is a game as well, if that’s a label they even want at this point… the label being shorthand for legitimacy, and I imagine the counterpublic working in that space has little need for the blessing of their detractors in that regard.

Part of me wonders, in the end, if the minds behind Infinite are Roberts or Rosalindes. Is the endless amount of shooting a weary adherence to an established norm that cannot be questioned, or is it an earnest attempt to present it in a way that will somehow elevate it out of the mire of orthodoxy? Maybe it’s a little of both? Bioshock as a universe, after all, is a cosmos in love with ambiguity — a universe where the line between angel and devil, between good and evil, is a matter of perspective… or at least this is what I believe we’re supposed to think. And, like I think Leigh gets at toward the end of her review, I see the shadows cast by Infinite’s ambitions and I am thankful for them. But I wonder if we’ll be content to stay in those shadows or step out and make new decisions.

As a closer, let me make this observation: I enjoyed Bioshock Infinite at first, but as time wore on I became fatigued, not energized. I was never really worried about having “meaningful choices,” per se; after all, I am a huge fan of JRPGs, which are about the most choiceless genre in the history of gamedom. As a point of comparison, however, I want to point at Tomb Raider, another game I recently played. Like Bioshock, it’s really another themepark game, the Lara Croft ride at Disneyland. And in many ways I had the same fatigue, by the end of both games: I was tired of, every time I was just about to engage some other element of the game, a horde of faceless jerkwads dropping out of the sky, standing between me and engagement. Because while combat can engage me, Bioshock‘s never did and TR‘s only did briefly, and when I could engage it cleverly, like taking out a bunch of guys with a stealth arrow and listening as they verbally started to flip their shit about this killer 23-year-old who, less than a day ago, had a tank top and a cell phone to her name.

As I climbed the mountain to save Sam and as I headed toward the top of Comstock House, every time a horde of enemies appeared I groaned. I put my hands to my head. I literally started saying “Enough!” and “Come on guys, REALLY?!” out loud, to myself. My frustration and anger mounted. Yet I feel good about finishing Tomb Raider because I was able to tune out the themepark ride part of the game — the Himiko plot, which is as much a red herring as Infinite‘s racism plot, just there to push the cart along — and focus on the personal growth of Lara Croft into the amazing, smart, powerful badass we know she will become. Her triumphs are my triumphs. But I didn’t feel that in Bioshock and I think that, perhaps, is where Irrational’s efforts fell short. I’m supposed to care about Booker and Elizabeth and their choices but I don’t. I really don’t.

And to put that in perspective, I offer Doubt, a Twine game from the recent QUILTBAG Jam. Your “choices” in Doubt are, speaking solely as a game mechanic, no more effective or “meaningful” than they are in Bioshock Infinite. Yet Doubt, as a powerfully personal narrative with which I felt a great deal of empathy, drew me in and wrapped me up and, if I may, chewed me up and spit me out at the end. It was a highly powerful 10 mnutes, playing that game, and I recommend you give it a go. It lacks the polished, painted marvel of racist Disneyland, but what it’s able to create — this powerful connection between player and text — is worth that price.

Bioshock Infinite is fundamentally about accomplishing a goal. Doubt — and maybe Tomb Raider, in its own way — is about becoming something through play. I think, in the end, I vastly prefer the latter.

Lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on my physicality, for all sorts of reasons… and more than a few of those reasons are related to what I perceive as my relationship with gay culture, an endeavor I have persistently referred to on Twitter as “That Thing I Did,” and my thinking on the broad story arc of a novel I have been wanting to write off and on for over a decade.

But really, I just wanted to tell a pair of stories about my school years. Apologies: this post is light on pictures, so don’t feel bad if you stop reading out of boredom.

Story 1: Harry S. Fisher Middle School, Grade 6 (circa 1988-1989)

My mother had married my stepfather and we picked up and moved to Connecticut. Specifically Plymouth, a small town outside Bristol (where ESPN is). I started going to school in the Plymouth/Terryville school district as the new kid. And the fat kid. And (increasingly) the fey-seeming proto-gay kid although at that point I was pursuing girls because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be doing.

Needless to say I wasn’t popular, and I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear I was a total doormat, too. Once in art class I found jumping up and down in place made my classmates laugh, so I kept doing it for their amusement. Obviously, they found the effect gravity and physics have on a fat kid in semi-flight hilarious. But what strikes me about this memory is also that our art teacher — a younger guy, doing his best to seem “cool” — came up to me and said “You know, they’re laughing at you, not with you.” It says something about me that even at age 10 I stared him in the face and said “I know. It’s better than the alternative.”

Waiting in line for lunch one day, holding a spiral notebook, I started getting punched by a tall, thin young woman with a very bad attitude. She was just punching me in the arm, over and over and over again. Not knowing what I was supposed to do, and having been told since time immemorial that you have to “not let it get to you,” I sat there and took it. Over, and over, and over again. And then eventually some tiny part of me got tired of that and I held up my notebook in front of her fist. She punched the notebook instead of me. She made a face and stopped. I ate lunch.

Then in the middle of lunch, the vice principal came and got me and brought me into his office. He sat me down and said, in a very serious tone, that the young woman who had been punching me had broken her thumb, and what did I have to say for myself? I really wish I could have been outside myself looking at me, because I imagine my face was priceless. I said the only thing I could think of at the time, which was: “I didn’t hit her. She was hitting me.” The vice principal did not seem to like that answer. He informed me that fighting in school was a very serious offense, especially the case of a big guy like myself picking on a girl. “But you seem like a good kid,” he said. “Usually it’s five days out of school suspension for fighting. But I’m going to give you one day in-school suspension.” And that was that. Oh, and I had to call and give the girl an apology for “breaking” her thumb.

I’m sorry to say that day of in-school suspension was the best day of my school year. I sat in the school office at a desk, quietly doing work assigned by my teachers. When it was done, I read books. Nobody hit me, shouted at me, asked me to perform demeaning physical stunts for them, or anything of the sort. I was almost sad to see it go. As far as I can tell, nothing ever happened to the girl who punched me repeatedly until she injured herself trying to hurt me, physically and emotionally. Except the day off school she had to go to the doctor, maybe. I dunno; I was suspended.

Story 2: Paul V. Moore High School, Grade 9 (Circa 1992-ish)

Eventually we moved back to my hometown of Central Square, NY. This meant switching schools, again, but this time it was more complicated. For those who don’t know, Central Square is one of NY’s largest (geographically speaking) school districts, covering about a third, if not more, of Oswego County. I had gone to grade school with some of my classmates, but there were suddenly people who’d moved up from 4 other elementary schools, through middle school. I was both the new kid and the returning old kid. I wish I could say this made people friendlier, but it didn’t; in general, the new people didn’t like me and the old ones only remembered me as an 8 year old kid who they found off-putting and weird.

Another impact of a geographically large school district is that you often have a long and crowded bus ride to school if you don’t drive (and at age 14, I did not drive). Mine was from out near West Monroe, so not too long, but it was crowded, and I had no friends who lived even remotely close, so it was also me by myself, trying not to catch the attention of anyone on the bus. For those of you who never took a school bus to school every day while being “different,” please let me tell you it’s not pleasant. The bus driver has bigger problems than what the kids in the back are doing or saying to each other. They have to drive a big, difficult to handle vehicle with frequent stops and on a nastily tight schedule. I get that.

One day on the way to school I was dressed relatively nicely — slacks, I want to say a nice polo. I was in choir, and we had a choir concert for the whole school that day. I was sitting by myself on the left side of the bus (the one behind the driver’s big, blocking chair) around the middle of the bus. I was reading, probably, or just staring into space, or possibly listening to a walkman, I can’t remember. But what I do remember is that once we got close to school, a kid from the back — lanky, short brown hair, freckled — started heading to the front of the bus, holding a yogurt container, presumably to throw it out.

As he walked by my seat, he turned to me and smiled — a big :D face, I can remember that with perfect clarity — and flicked the yogurt at me with his spoon. I got big splashes of white-pink yogurt on my nice, for-the-concert clothes. And then he finished his trip to the front, threw out the container, and walked back to his seat, laughing.

The bus driver noticed… eventually. He asked who did it and I said I didn’t know, which was a lie on my part but also on the bus driver’s part.

When I got on the bus to go home that night, the driver said “Here… right behind me. We’re gonna sit you there from now on.” And that’s what happened. For the rest of the 18 months or so I went to that school, I sat behind the bus driver, unable to move, because someone had thrown yogurt on me. To the best of my knowledge, the guy who did that was never punished. He also sat wherever he wanted on the bus, a thing I noticed every day.

…

So, I’m sure some of you who’ve read this blog and/or know me personally have heard these stories before. I don’t tell them often, but they were both in my head as I’ve been reflecting on what it’s like to be fat in the various cultures I inhabit, because they have all the parts of that experience. The idea that your body is community property, not just verbally in terms of people shouting things at you, but physically in terms of doing things TO you, like punching or yogurt or the guy who laughingly tried to run me off the sidewalk with his car in Milwaukee when I was out walking, attempting to get some weight-reducing exercise in. And because being fat is always your fault, nobody cares what happens to you because of it. If bad things happen to you because you’re fat, well, try not being so fat and maybe people will stop doing things to you. None of this even discusses the impact that the perception I was gay had on what people did to me over my years in public school, either.

I’m not telling you this story because I want a pity party. But as I’ve often said, I think these experiences have helped me greatly to understand people outside of my own experience. All this stuff happened to me as a white male, for example. Imagine what it’s like if this liberty people feel they can take with your body for being “different” doesn’t stop at acts of petty personal violence and escalates to things like rape. That is a fear women live with in our culture every day of their lives. That vice principal immediately assumed I was the violent perpetrator when that girl broke her thumb, because I was male and because I was the cultural outsider. But imagine that on an economic and sociopolitical scale. Imagine having that happen when you walk into a grocery store, because you’re perceived to be a certain way because of something like skin color, clerks start watching you to make sure you’re not going to steal something. These are experiences friends and colleagues have related to me.

And perhaps the worst part about both stories is that I was the sinner for being different. When bad things happened to me, it wasn’t the perpetrators of violence who got punished. It was me that was punished for being the “cause” of the problem in the first place. If you are a person without privilege in this country that is the rhetoric you live in every day of your life. If you could just stop being so different for five seconds, people would stop treating you poorly. Victim blaming paradigms like that make me sick and I’m sure these experiences are part of that.

So no, I had a miserable childhood in school for these and many other reasons. But seeing as those things are said and done, I am glad at least that they gave me the empathy to understand others, even a little bit.

First, game journo/critic/maven Patricia Hernandez gave my post a write-up on Kotaku which is humbling/gratifying. While I’m not normally a proponent of ignoring comment threads — I think that sort of sweeps them under the rug as “not real” somehow when I firmly believe they’re badges of the times — I would suggest skipping those if you agreed with me in any way, and rubbing them all over your body if you thought I was wide of the mark.

I did want to share one of the best, most Bingo card-iest of them, though hilariously, I think the last comment is actually spot on, just not for the reason this individual thinks:

Bingo!

The second thing I wanted to call attention to, however, is a blog post that a college friend of mine, Kristin Bezio, posted her own riff on this topic. In particular she discusses my argument that Taric being a powerful, good-at-his-job character was essential to create buy-in, and she agreed, expressing it thusly:

In short, the only way to eliminate the kind of bias and bigotry that generally accompanies the inclusion of gay, minority, and female heroes (player-characters or otherwise) – and the inevitable screaming we hear from the “probably straight white cismale gamer audience” about corrupting their precious male power-fantasy games – is to make them valuable. Basically, we need to see in videogames the same things that we want to see in the real world: if you’re good at your job, then it shouldn’t matter whatelse you are, whether female, gay, lesbian, African American, Asian, Hispanic, atheist, Muslim, or covered in purple and orange tattoos.

I don’t necessarily disagree; in fact I argued for the same principle. But I do want to point out something relevant to both Kristin’s and my stances on the matter, something that came up during the “Moving forward in queer game studies” panel I was part of at the AoIR conference this year: we need to be careful about the rhetoric of “we’re worth market share so you could include us.” We saw this a lot with TV in the late 90s/early 00s: “gays are a good target demo, they are faithful consumers of our material, so we need to include gay themes.” The problem is that the unspoken flip side of this is “once they are no longer an important demo, we will abandon them.” It moves the imperative for inclusivity from a moral or social imperative — “the right thing to do” — to a purely economic one. I don’t necessarily have a problem with economic imperatives, mind you, because they are terribly effective… but not always in the long term.

We need to make sure that we frame this desire for inclusivity along multiple dimensions. Be upfront, use the economics. Say “Hey, you’ve got an LGBTQ audience. Give them some love and they’ll support you in the short term.” But we ALSO need to argue that “Hey, you’re a media creator and like it or not, you have a role in (re)producing culture. Including a wide range of characters and themes in your work is a responsible thing to do, as well as being economically in your benefit.”

Check out that hair.

(Yes, I used his Chinese artwork. Shut up.)

Taric is a champion in League of Legends. In terms of types, he is both a support and a tank, having strong healing and buffing abilities as well as a stun and defensive power. His schtick is that he uses earth-elemental magic through the power of cut gems (as his wiki page observes, this is a ref to Blizzard’s jewel-socketing schtick in both Diablo and World of Warcraft). While I tend to prefer more caster-y supports with a lot of harrass/poking potential, Taric is pretty great. I really enjoy him.

There’s also the minor fact that Taric is rumored to be gay. To do a little pull-quoting from his official champion info background:

His neat and stylish appearance combined with his shiny bejeweled armor and weapons have rapidly made him a celebrity champion of the League of Legends. Valoran’s media, for some reason, has taken a great interest in his personal life. While open about his life as a champion and gracious in all things, Taric is tight-lipped about his life outside the League and prefers his privacy.

Yeah. I mean, that seems pretty low-key, right? He has two abilities called “Dazzle” and “Radiance.” Also, let me add in some additional context. The first is his voice samples:

And the second is this amazing fan-made music rap video which really needs to be seen to be believed:

So, yeah. To quote Jeremiah Bratton of Gayme Bar: “I laughed? But it also kind of made my spine crack in half.” Those pain sounds in the middle of the voice samples I had actually never heard before I went to make this post (in combat, other stuff is dominating your attention) and they actually kind of infuriated me. And if you really want some fun, consider that a lot of the rumors/claims started when they released the US art for his “Armor of the 5th Age” skin:

Legwarmers. Because those are necessary.

Yeah.

So, a lot of this is sort of annoying — hur hur metrosexuals are gay, hur hur pink is gay, hur hur gay guys sound like women when they get hit — but I’m sort of willing to put up with it because I guess it’s kind of harmless? I dunno why I tolerate it, actually, but I do. And while I love League and I respect Riot, I do have some serious problems with how… hegemonic their designs are as regards sexualization of women (though I do love the tough-as-nails bruiser look for upcoming champion Vi). Yet I kind of let this go by, until I started thinking about it, and now I’m kinda not okay with it. But I want to deal with my not-okay-with-it-ness in a constructive way.

For starters, let me pick apart why this annoys me: I don’t like “wink-and-a-nod” characters like Taric. It’s like they want all the benefits of having a gay character — which usually amount to “Look! A gay character!” while pointing vigorously — but without having to actually own up and say: “Yeah, we put a gay character in our game. Want to fight about it?” It also seems to encourage the mindset that queer identity is always already illicit, always on the sly and kept a “public secret” where everyone knows but nobody talks about it. And I can imagine that Riot — or any other company for that matter — would deploy the usual list of suspects for why characters like Taric exist in the wink-and-a-nod mode: “We don’t think the playerbase will accept it,” “We don’t want to lose sales,” “We don’t want to politicize the game,” etc. And let me tell you, that last logic — “Why you gotta politicize our fun fantasy vidyagame” — gets on my nerves with a vengeance. A wink-and-a-nod character is already political; in fact, it’s deploying the epistemology of the closet as a politic right off the bat. So don’t even get me started on that one.

Yet part of the great thing about Taric is that the playerbase has embraced him, mostly because he’s an amazing support. Teams at the highest competitive level regularly deploy Taric because he brings a powerful support toolset to the table. This has some resonance with earlier statements I made about Valkyria Chronicles‘ gay anti-tank lancer Jann Walker – part of the great thing about Jann (and Taric) isn’t just that they’re gay (or, you know, “gay” in quotes) but that they’re also extremely good at their jobs. That last part is really important, because as annoying as it sounds, it’s the key to getting that character buy-in from your probably straight white cismale gamer audience. I should also point out that something both of these characters are good at — Jann being a heavy-weapons demolition specialist and Taric being a highly durable, punishment-soaking tank — are activities that are not often “masculine-coded,” although in Taric’s case the fact that people play him most often as a pure heal bot complicates matters (there’s interesting research on how gendered certain team play roles get in games like LoL).

So why the open letter to Riot?

Lately, some champs with very old character models — Katarina, Twisted Fate, Nidalee, Soraka — all got visual upgrades with new art, new animations (including Katarina’s really unfortunate “please come into my vagina” recall animation, SIGH), and some new voice samples. Taric isn’t exactly old-old, but he’s aging a bit, and I feel like he could easily be in line for a graphical upgrade and some new voice samples as well. And as long as he might be eligible to go through that, here’s my call to you, Riot: just make him gay already. Don’t wink-and-a-nod things like a giggling schoolboy; put it out there. Have him be out, proud, and a badass tanky support. Hell, if you really want to go the whole nine yards, do something like you have with Caitlin/Jayce/Vi, or Twisted Fate/Graves, or Kha’zix/Rengar: make a boyfriend champ, or maybe even a former lover who’s now a rival, or something. If you want to get real crazy, make him an AD carry so they can bottom together (pause to giggle; I am 12 years old). I guarantee you Taric will still get played, he’ll still have a great space in the lore of the game, and you will be trading in a very adolescent-seeming joke for a mature inclusion of a queer character in your game.

Considering I heard you say at GDC this year that you want to be “the most player-focused company in the world” and are constantly concerned with the toxicity of your playerbase — which includes deeply homophobic sentiment in many an occasion — I think this would be a great step forward.

For some reason I cannot fathom the folks at Gaymism – the Wonder Twins-style merger of Gayme Bar and Silly Frags — have taken a shine to me and so I have been blessed with the opportunity to chat with them on a number of occasions! If you’d like to listen to these, then here’s your chance:

GaymeBar Podcasts:

Function 45: “A Closed World” – The one that started it all. Jeremiah and Toups liked ACW and wanted to talk about it! So we did. For FOUR HOURS. The podcast was thankfully edited down to two.

Function 58: “A Blaze” – They brought me back to discuss GDC 2012! Fun times for all.

Function 63: “Dragon Ageless” – Bereft of a guest this week on short notice, I dropped in. As the running joke went, I was totally the last minute guest star Carol Channing to their Johnny Carson/Laurence Welk.

Function 65: “GaymeBar Goes to College” — Probably one of my favorites, because we actually had Jason and Jeremiah up to GAMBIT to talk about their podcast and to have them hang out in person! We went to IHOP! Yay!

Gayme Probe:

Rather than list these individually, I’m just going to link to all the Gayme Probe podcasts because except for #3 (“Value”) I’m in all of them. They’re the brainchild of Dean of Silly Frags, who wanted a podcast with a focused theme, breaking down individual issues in gaming. A valiant and often totally unaccomplished goal but these are still a fun listen.

So there you have it! It’s me, for your eardrums.

So, when I first saw the “traditional ending,” I wrote in this space about how the ending had a few holes and a few elements I didn’t like, but I was satisfied with it. I also mentioned in the comments to that post that I increasingly felt the “Synthesis” ending was the “right” choice (I went “Destroy”, for reasons listed in the post). Well, friends, having now played the Extended Cut, I can tell you that each of those opinions basically were reversed by the new content: I really didn’t like the new ending at all but can tolerate a few things, and despite the game pushing the Synthesis ending hard, I found it to be the most obnoxiously saccharine nonsense possible.

I bet you’re wondering, what are the ‘new’ things? I don’t know for 100% sure, because damned if I was replaying the entire endgame a second time (from the raid on Chronos Station onward); I started at the beam of light and went from there. But here are the things I observed as being ‘new’ –

• Cut-ins complete with short FMVs explain more of what’s going on outside the Citadel and out of Shepard’s POV. So now we know, what happened to my squad? (Shepard calls in a Normandy evac), why was the Normandy flying away? (Hackett gave a retreat order when the Crucible spins up), etc.
• Dialogue options with the Catalyst expand. Shepard can now ask for more information about each choice, including the consequences and benefits of each. The Catalyst also, in these dialogue options, has more of an opinion about what the “right” choice is than it did in the original.
• In the closing FMVs, the mass relays aren’t destroyed — a big change — and are instead merely heavily damaged. It becomes clear that the Normandy crashes because the blast wave from the Crucible is steadily eating away its mass effect field mid-jump, so it’s pulled out into space at some random point.
• Each of the three main endings — Control, Synthesis, Destroy — has a long slideshow with narration after the closing FMVs that explains what happens to the galaxy after the events of Mass Effect 3‘s endgame.
• Finally, there’s a new, brief fourth ending — Refuse — that I think is actually quite neat:

I’ll leave it to you to trawl YouTube for the rest of the endings, if you’d like to watch them.

So, what did I think of all the changes? Well, here’s the things I did like –

• The little scenes that filled in plot holes were good. They were also the smallest part of the ending, and I think they filled in the only things I really wanted from the “original” ending: making explicit connections that were theoretical in my head. I also like that certain things theory wonks glommed onto — the difference between a relay exploding and merely being disabled — got at least canonized if not properly explained.
• I actually enjoy the “Refusal” ending. I think it’s the wrong choice — it shouldn’t be the ‘canon’ choice — but it is thematically consistent from top to bottom. I can imagine a person not wanting to make the decision Shepard’s asked to make (though I think my Shepard would choose), and I think the result makes sense. I also think the change to the Stargazer part of that ending, where the child is talking to what I believe is an asari (!), is interesting.

And what did I NOT like? –

• The slideshows. What a bunch of tell-don’t-show nonsense. Unlike the little FMVs and scenes, these don’t actually explain anything. Mass relays repaired? By whom? With what? And using what bloody knowhow, for that matter? All of the slideshows are also a little too Disney happy ending for me, especially the Synthesis ending (we’ll get to that in a second). Even the one that recognizes loss most — the Destroy ending, interestingly enough — is pretty ‘upbeat’ in that way.
• The extra dialogue options with the Catalyst. They rarely shared any information with the player that wasn’t already reasonably deducible from content in the original. In fact, it was yet more tell-don’t-show, a lot of pointless talking where the Catalyst slowly and carefully explains Every Last Possible Freaking Thing That Might Happen for each option. In my opinion it takes the teeth out of every possibility for the endings, except perhaps for the Refusal ending which hilariously enough is the natural consequence of Too Much Goddamned Information.

Here is what really gets me about the extended cut: people were uncomfortable with ambiguity in the original ending, and so Bioware removed ambiguity entirely as a result. Everything is painstakingly explained, and that gets on my nerves. Look, I have a problem with ambiguous endings too, to an extent; I hate them when they’re a cop-out, when they’re a 10 second “YAY WE DID IT! CREDITS NOW” FMV at the end of an 80 hour trek through a story and universe I love. But I don’t think the original ME3 endings were copouts. They were merely ambiguous, leaving some space for the player to wrap things up in their head.

I mean, check out this chunk of the Destroy ending slideshow –

I’ve been told people wanted “to know what happens to the crew afterwards.” Well, here you go: still shots that prove the crew are just how you left them. Samara lounges with her daughter! Exciting. Kasumi broods over Kenji. Exciting! Man, I love those two characters, and neither of those things are meaningful to me. The Samara thing in particular; she and her Ardat-Yakshi-inclined daughter are standing on Thessia. How did THAT happen? What changed the asari’s collective minds? I don’t know! But I’m supposed to accept that this is a meaningful way to wrap up that story for me? And hell, even that is miles better than “Zaeed Masani is old, and likes to fish on this pier.” What the ever-loving hell!

That ambiguity in the original ending was useful to me. I tried to imagine the stories that weren’t told, that could be told yet and weren’t. That excited me! And it seemed like a great window for Bioware to build the ME universe, which is one of my primary joys in playing the series. Now? Now it’s a series of postcards.

And don’t even get me started on the Synthesis ending. What nonsense. For starters, the Catalyst’s new dialogue intensely implies that the Synthesis ending is the “right” choice. And before, I actually kind of agreed with that, but that was back when we didn’t really know what might happen. Now?

Well.

Isn’t that just super? You get all the benefits of the Control ending (the Reapers are now docile/helpful) and all the benefits of the Destroy ending (the Reapers are no longer a threat) and all it takes is the same cost (Shepard gets sacrificed).

What in gay hell is this shit.

I’m not necessarily against the happy ending. Destroy and Control are also happy endings, in their own way, but they’re happy endings that are built on some sort of meaningful loss or issue that makes them worthwhile. The Destroy ending’s happy ending was bought with the sacrifice of a massive amount of people. The Control ending’s happy ending might not be happy forever; it has a decidedly sinister overtone in some spots (and there is the tragedy of Shepard, now all but a god, who stands lonely vigil over a world she can no longer be a part of).

But the Synthesis ending doesn’t address the one thing about it that make it interesting: the actual melding of synthetic and organic, and how an entire galaxy of lifeforms suddenly adjusts to this new paradigm. That’s all glossed over, smoothed out. We’re assured people have just adjusted and everything’s hunky-dory, and because of that, a new golden age will arise, ten times better than before. This is, in a word, pathetic. You can’t just rewrite the fundamentals of life itself for untold billions and then just go “Welp, everyone seemed okay with it.” This is especially problematic because the avatar of the Synthesis ending is EDI, a fantastically multi-layered character whose journey from subservient AI to actual living being by the end of ME3 is one of the best stories of its kind, in games or otherwise. Why don’t we see any of her struggle, her incredible effort to bridge the gap, reflected in the ending for which she speaks? That’s nonsense.

I mean, we’ll just skip over the artistic laziness that is “glowy green eyes + holo circuit board overlay = SYNTHORGANIC!”

I’m not saying that there couldn’t be a strong Synthesis ending. But it’s not about everything becoming hunky dory. It’s about adjusting to a new paradigm, it’s about making the actual leap that the ending (and the Catalyst’s “yeah yeah pick this ending!”) suggests should be made. It’s about doing what’s narratively interesting, not about the wrap-up musical number.

Hilariously, my problem with the extended Synthesis ending (and somewhat the other extended endings) is the problem that people seemed to have with the original ending. There’s irony here, I’m sure of it.

Anyhow, final verdict: I think the original endings, plus a few plot hole-correcting cutscenes and the Refusal ending, would make a pretty strong package. But the whole “It’s A Small Galaxy After All” slideshow we get at the end — including the bizarre inclusion of Shepard’s now-even-more-likely but weirdly unused and unexplained survival in the Destroy ending — is silly, and the Catalyst’s sudden downshift from “mysterious entity” to “Wikipedia terminal” is kind of insulting to my intelligence. You kind of hit the mark, Bioware, but it’s clear to me that the real problem with the original endings wasn’t the game. It was the fans.