tinyvalor

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tinyvalor
@tinyvalor

if you followed game websites or saw promo videos or whatnot in the late 2000s i feel certain you've read or heard a certain phrase many times. a phrase that was a battlecry of game narrative writers, and a memorable and punchy tagline to boot,

"your choices matter"

as is often the case with these kinds of sayings, i find the verb used rather ambiguous, though if you play the kinds of games this was said about, it's clear enough what the meaning is: the game, and possibly its sequels, acknowledges your choices. there are mechanical and narrative outcomes designed in response to the choices presented, and you will know what they are. in a sense, i think this easily starts to feel like it pares down a complex narrative into a series of things to see, especially when you realize how many players are wont to optimize systems before they even understand them. not that these were usually very hard to figure out. "well, next time i'll just do the opposite thing to find out what happens!" as a result, the game tends to also become very obvious about what the developers think is important.

this isn't to specifically criticize those games, but i don't think it's a coincidence this aligned with sony and microsoft codifying "achievements" as a system level function expected in every game. these markers of progress through a game and completion of various aspects are even more straightforward about what the developers think is relevant, or at least what they can measure. see every ending! defeat 100,000 enemies! find all the weapons! (but enough about drakengard,) people still pour their hearts into making new games, but the expectations of delivering "the good stuff" constantly and presenting a clear path to completing everything became even more obviously expected from games. and look, i'm saying all this from my own experience-i got all the achievements in dragon age on xbox 360. i think it's the only game on the platform i've actually done that on. so maybe i'm passing judgment on that game in particular. "dragon age origins - i thought it was pretty fun!! (also leliana was cute and whatever the achievements were weren't really annoying to do!)"

anyway, these days i find it much more enjoyable to think about the opposite. a game where your choices don't matter. the game doesn't care. here's a bunch of systems: you don't have to figure out how any of them work, you don't have to do most of them at all to progress the game, but if you'd like to use them, here they are! atelier marie made me think of this, as i've recently discussed, but because of that it made me think back to my reigning champion of "games that don't care":

legend of mana


legend of mana starts off with some pretty normal choices for an rpg. does your character look like a boy or a girl. what's their name. what weapon do you want to use. and then goes into some weirder and more subtle ones. choose a part of this map you like. now, put down the mailbox somewhere on the land. the mailbox turns into a little house and you start controlling a character. soon you get to put more objects on the ground. you talk to characters and they'll ask if you want them to come with you. they'll fight with you and are often a part of the story aspects of quests, which are the main things that cause you to get closer to the end of the game, but the vast majority of quests in the game are optional. and everything else that comes up is also optional.

this game's often associated with saga series head akitoshi kawazu, who's credited as the producer, and it does have elements not particularly unlike some of those games, but in an interview from the ultimania with a wonderful translation on shmuplations he's not really mentioned as having any particular creative input here, and a huge portion of the creative leads were other people coming off of working on saga frontier. they talk about having wanted to implement many ideas they'd thought up during the production of the previous game, and some of their creative motivations, which of course leads me to my favorite part:

(Koichi) Ishii: Speaking of SaGa Frontier, actually, I remember having lunches with Takai then and talking about the next game we wanted to make. “Let’s do something with TOTAL freedom!”, we said.

(Hiroshi) Takai: Yeah, and we’re both kind of contrarians at heart, so instead of a normal RPG, we were talking about making a game where you wouldn’t do anything. (laughs)

"total freedom." "a game where you wouldn't do anything." these are compatible ideals, and also nonsensical ones. any game has rules and limitations; it's the kinds of choices you have that define what the game actually is. legend of mana almost never tells you what to do, or where to go, and the combat is generally pretty easy and not too complex. i almost feel like the game is the inverse of saga, where you make choices and the game just kind of mediates them unpredictably. in legend of mana the design is more like, you pick a friend and wander around to see if something happens. eventually the game will probably ask if you want to do something, like suddenly go on a quest you didn't know about or play music for the elements. and if you say no then you know all you're really missing is...the thing you chose not to do. the game doesn't care. there's only one ending. your choices don't matter.

your choices do matter, though. to you. fa'diel is a dreamlike world of fragmented stories and weird and sometimes dislikeable characters. and sometimes it's slow and awkward to figure out how to get more items or quests to progress in the game! but those small choices and small moments are the essence of what brings a person to love fa'diel, and that in turn is what legend of mana is. its freedom presents not a world that you build yourself but one that the game invites you to participate in the creation of. your care for this world depends on you: what you've decided to do, whose stories you've decided to share, and the little details of your pets' names or the cool weapon you made. and yes, correspondingly i think this game doesn't have much to offer to a person who's not interested in engaging with its methods of expression. i can understand why this game is boring or even frustrating to people, because sometimes it really does feel like the last thing it wants you to do is something.

to me there's no game like this. there's plenty that have a good amount of the same vibes, like marie as i mentioned, steambot chronicles, or the two most recent zelda games. but none of them have both a narrative i love so much (though i'll get into that next time) and such a compelling sense of "nothing" for me. though i think because it's so exaggerated in legend of mana it's become the game that really crystallized that feeling for me and led me to recognize it more easily from others. that "nothingness" is not something missing, but a space left for you to put pieces of yourself into the game. in doing so, you're sharing in the experience with the creators who thought of it all in the first place. and you won't stay the same self. when you come back, you'll have something new to add once again.

i'll write more later!


tinyvalor
@tinyvalor

"i'm deeply fascinated by games where the entire texture is made up of subtle player choices."

that's what i wrote when i was thinking about why atelier marie reminded me of legend of mana. almost every action you pick has some kind of outcome that has alternatives (at least in the moment), whether it's a rare hardline choice that leads to you abandoning a quest abruptly to go to another one, or just choosing what kind of fighting style to try playing with for a bit. (i haven't played the remaster, but the option to turn off battles feels like an appropriate thing for the game in that sense, too.) these games certainly have goals but they're not very insistent about having the player pursue them, and the goals aren't so much of a challenge as to require specific approaches, even as the games are occasionally apparently resistant to the player's efforts. the same, again, is true of something like the rain in breath of the wild, though i think that may outrank even weapon durability as the game's most generally disliked design feature...but the recent zelda duology offers so many activities and choices in most situations, including combat, that it's not an entirely different pull of "do you want to do one of these things? or none of them" which are presented to the player near constantly.

that aspect is a huge part of why i love the game, but the other thing that's really stuck with me is its narrative. the other games i've mentioned have their own approaches to the problem of having a story the player can simply choose not to see, and i appreciate those as well, whether it's marie's focus on a small number of events sprinkled through the game you can ignore if you'd like or zelda's use of flashbacks to focus the main plot around, in both cases using incidental npc encounters and dialogue to flesh out the rest of the world.


legend of mana begins with an exhortation from the mana goddess, and given the structure of its predecessors it wouldn't be all that surprising if the command to "find me" led to some kind of world-spanning adventure, except that...well, at the start of the game, there's nothing in the world. it's a blank section of the map you chose with your house on it. you get more places to explore by placing artifacts you receive from quests on the map, in a system which i love because it's so weirdly dreamlike. as in, the way things work in dreams. really, i feel that way about a lot of the game; it's a world populated by unusual sorts of anthropomorphized creatures (there's also more traditionally furry ones, but one of the first characters you're likely to meet is a person-sized teapot) and weirdly elaborate bits that are often initially incomprehensible, like the dudbears. the li'l cactus living at home listens to your stories of what happens after each quest, if you tell him, and will frequently respond to the endings with punchlines or non-sequitur thoughts, either immediately or if you read his diary entry about it later. other npcs also tend to have vivid yet deeply weird dialogue, most memorably for me the kid from the mage school who contentedly sighs "ah, good air. i should dream well tonight." somewhat similar to from games, i feel it's difficult to form a coherent vision of the world, but all the more compelling to feel disparate ideas and themes slowly converge as the details start to click, but never lock tightly together.

and part of of this is that there's ultimately not a whole lot in the game's "main" plot-i think you can even walk out of the room instead of reading one of its most important scenes, although i haven't actually tried doing so-there's not a direct line from the first couple of quests (which are, as far as i know, basically unavoidable, though they don't have a strong connection to other storylines) to the final few which lead to the game's ending. the item that you need for those quests instead comes from any of three major subplots. these questlines feature the game's most apparent sense of conflict but also most clearly showcase the core theme, which is, well...love. as i seem so fond of saying recently, that word means a lot of different things! i feel like a lot of singular works tend to focus on one kind of love, and it's often treated as if it has some kind of ultimacy. romance stories, songs about heartbreak, and works featuring other kinds of deep bonds between people are commonplace, and naturally i enjoy plenty of things like that too. other times, it's almost treated as magical, something to draw strength from, unknowable and overwhelmingly powerful.

which it is, of course. but i really appreciate the way that legend of mana's fragmented storytelling and use of a player insert distanced from the other major characters allows it to engage with many different concepts around love. the stories individually are largely familiar tragedies of conflicting loyalties and the like, but the character representing "you" is mostly external to them, placing the focus on the individual characters and their feelings and motivations. taken as a whole, the story features a broad spectrum of love: something that can bring people together or create impassable rifts between them, bring purpose to life or become poisonous. even with its offbeat sense of humor, legend of mana is a melancholy game, and even more than its predecessors it ends not with a triumphant victory over grand evil but the bittersweet deliverance of a wounded world. a world that you've helped to restore and seen the joys and sorrows of. life changes, and continues on.

it's been very difficult to write this. playing through this game a few years ago was a powerful experience for me, and one that greatly helped me to construct a certain framework for thinking about games and other art, to such an extent that i expect few people feel similarly. the sense of freedom and ambiguity present in the game is something that speaks to me deeply, so i've wanted to convey some of where that comes from and what it means to me without trying to influence people's views or expectations too much...it's much more my hope for other people who haven't played it to approach this game with an open mind and discover something within it that moves them as well. but i can't possibly say what that might be. it's something to be found by each player, by entrusting their thoughts and feelings to the game and seeing what reflects back. i know that's not necessarily easy, but it's worth it.


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in reply to @tinyvalor's post:

One thing that really charmed me with Breath of the Wild that I think ties into this idea of a game with lots of negative space in their design/progression, games that don't just give you a clear checklist with waymarks to go to next in order to consume the next bit of prepared plot, is the idea of what is left undone being as important a part of your experience as what you do.

I didn't get all the shrines in Breath of the Wild by a long shot, and while it's certainly possible to do the game doesn't seem particularly interested in encouraging you to do it. And I like that there's an air of mystery to the game when I know there are things I didn't find. It makes it feel bigger. It makes me wonder what was down another path, or in a part of the world I didn't spend much time in for whatever reason. Sometimes it might draw me back to play again and go actually look, but I think some of the value is just having that sense of known unknown.

yes! i feel b/ot/k are a bit more goal oriented but they're the closest games i've played from like, at least the past decade, to that kind of sense. they're huge and the mechanics target pretty specific ideas and interactions in the world with broad impacts, while excluding a lot of things that aren't related to them. and the amount of anything in particular you have to do to finish the game (especially outside of combat, which in itself is a broad system that offers many approaches and is hugely affected by the dynamic nature of environmental interactions) is very limited. not to mention how full the games are in general, of course; i've talked to people who adored botw and hardly even touched the main quest.

and this isn't some unheard of thing of course. morrowind and the gta3 trilogy were enormous and hugely popular games of 20 years ago which, as far as i've always had the impression, were as beloved by people who spent dozens of hours chasing their own vibe as by those who "beat" them. i think it's telling that, like lom, those games were generally criticized for their "mechanics" in comparison to other games, even at the time. "the driving's bad", "the combat's messed up" etc.

because the vibe transcends what you're doing with the buttons. and in the next part (which is the last one i've thought about but maybe i'll come up with another one while writing it) i'll probably hit on a few more things with how i feel about lom's vibes before i dig into the themes and presentation stuff that also really hits for me. in a way i've come to think of lom as a singular game, but that's not because it's broadly doing something that nobody else has ever done; i just think that the opportunities for expression it offers the player are really compelling and mesh nicely with the narrative and design of the game.