Review: Rayman Origins (Wii)

Let's get the critical evaluation out of the way: Rayman Origins is a fun, smartly-designed 2-D platformer that strikes a balance between the charm and detail of Kirby's Epic Yarn with the trial and error, twitch challenge of Super Meat Boy.  Sounds pretty good, right?  For the most part, it is.  Game reviewers have heaped near-universal praise upon the title using phrases like "wonderfully crafted," "gorgeous," and "controls perfectly."  I agree with all of these, and yet, Rayman Origins still comes off a bit empty.  The only reason I can think of for this disparity was the difficulty I had empathizing with the ragtag group of bohemian shit disturbers that serve as the game's protagonists.  This disconnect effectively eliminated my attachment to the characters' motivations and relegated the game to a product of craft rather than a work of art.

I do fear that this opinion could brand me as some kind of humorless square, but characters who have been created solely for mischief usually rub me the wrong way.  I have always been pretty straight-laced, staying organized and avoiding trouble whenever possible.  In elementary school, I observed conflicts and elicit conversations from a safe distance, honing my "excellent listener" skills overhearing discussions of cigarettes and R-rated movies.  I hated Michelangelo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because he was the idiot who always dragged the others into avoidable hostile situations.  So, when Rayman Origins opened with the full cast of layabouts harmonizing beatnik music via chewing and snoring noises that essentially annoyed the neighbors into retaliation, I felt less like exacting revenge and more thankful that somebody said something.

At least in Mario games Nintendo fabricates a premise of "rescue" for your quest.  You might not desperately need to save the princess, but you assume Mario probably does, so you oblige.  The "white knight" stereotype isn't what makes the character interesting or believable – on its own the characterization is quite shallow.  It does set a stage for you to quickly get behind the protagonist's motivation though.  This works for morally ambiguous protagonists too, just using different criteria to match the context.  In contrast Rayman and his friends are a bunch of hedonists, apathetic to current affairs except when their collective buzz is at stake.  It's like playing a game where a small party of stoners embark on a quest to find the nearest convenience store and eat day-old taquitos.  Actually, nevermind, I'd totally give that game a shot too.

The fluidity of Rayman Origins' level design and platforming controls largely make up for the shortcomings in plot establishment, but only to the extant that great mechanics can reach on their own. The moment-to-moment satisfaction in Rayman Origins is quite high.  Levels are designed for smooth runs if played precisely.  If the sensation of speed was faster you might think you were playing the Sonic the Hedgehog sequel that never was.  Better yet, you never feel like the characters are out of your control.  If you screw up, there's always something you could have done better.  After all your hard work, finally you reach the end of the level and the camera zooms in to show Rayman thrusting his limbless torso around, mouth agape.  This guy again.  In the scene that follows, one of Rayman's big-nosed pals straddles an incredibly phallic test tube as it fills up with all of the Lums (yellow, glowing collectables) you found in the level.  When other reviewers talk about this game being "unmistakably French," this is what they're actually referring to.

So what am I left with in Rayman Origins but an excellent product of gameplay craft, shouldering an otherwise driveless game.  It's a shame because so many pieces are in place for Rayman Origins to be a certifiable work of art, but it falls short on a holistic level.  The mechanics that are present are rich, but they're not deep.  The game doesn't invite immersion – I got burned out after few levels each time I came back to it.  It's great that Ubisoft recently published a strikingly similar game for mobile devices, since Rayman Origins' structure is better tuned to short gameplay bursts over long-form, sit-down experiences.  If a game/painting/song doesn't ultimately provoke questions or reflection or welcome a more intimate play of engagement, then it's just serving a specifically crafted entertainment experience.  Sometimes that's exactly what I want, but I had higher hopes for Rayman Origins.

We can talk "art v craft" inconclusively for longer than it takes to play Rayman Origins, so let's just consider the established critical baselines as laid out by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.  To state it plainly, Kant divided art objects into "fine art," "agreeable art," and "craft."  A great deal of intricacy goes into these categorical assignments, but the easiest way to distinguish them from one another is by the purpose of the object in question.  Craft objects serve direct practical purposes: cups are vessels for water.  Agreeable art serves to entertain: a well-written joke incites laughter.  Fine art seeks to act as, well, art: a video installation provokes a play with ideas.  Many individuals hold fast against Kant's distinctions between art, craft, and entertainment, but institutions of the art world (museums, galleries, and art schools) still hang on to them as guideposts for taste.

Games, and obviously video games, weren't a part of this discussion in the 18th century, but Rayman Origins was clearly built for entertainment.  That said, entertainment itself could be interpreted as a practical purpose too, thus placing the game into the "craft" category as well.  You could argue that even if I absolutely adored Rayman and his buds, the game would still be "agreeable," not "fine," art.  Who knows whether that would actually be true though?  If art was just a matter of pushing sliders more to the left or right, then the answers to these questions would be obvious.  But I digress.  My point isn't to trudge around in semantic minutiae, but simply to concretize why my time with Rayman Origins left me lukewarm when most signs within and around the game seemed to be pointing in a more prestigious direction.

I want games that match the mechanical challenge they're so clearly capable of with intellectual challenge, or at least stimulation. I'd love to see developers use the gameplay systems from Rayman Origins as building blocks.  The side-scrolling action/platformer can be considered perfected at this point.  That's a milestone achievement, and deserving of serious praise, along with the economical UBIart framework used to create Rayman Origins' visual assets.  But what of it?  I've spent years playing games where I move a character to the right, so here's hoping that the next Rayman game will return the favor and actually move me.

Review: Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)

How long does it take to tell a good story? In person? Maybe 5 minutes. In film? About 2 hours. A book? Let’s say 5-10 hours. Video games? No less than 50 hours. This means you could watch every major Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch film before finishing one game. Sure, the standards for game stories have changed over time as shorter action titles have steered toward a cinematic style and runtime, but the progenitors of story-driven gaming, the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG), remain as staunchly extensive as ever. Xenoblade Chronicles is the latest JRPG from cult-favorite and aptlynamed developer, Monolith Soft. In it, you play as Shulk, a “chosen-one” who brandishes a mystical sword on an epic quest to defend his homeland and unite two worlds at war, for 80+ hours.

For all of the evolving JRPG conventions that Xenoblade perpetuates, egregious game length is an interesting choice; however, it matches its expansive world. The characters live like insects on the bodies of two gigantic titans, frozen still amidst an ancient duel. Your party gradually traverses from the right leg, all the way up the titan’s back, to its head – and that is just the first act. From the “ground,” the opposing giant is always faintly, ominously visible in the distant sky. Individual areas are pretty big too, and require you to explore on foot before a fast-travel option opens up for return visits.

Battling and traversal occupy the majority of your time in Xenoblade, but their significance to the narrative remains up to interpretation. The “story” is mostly delivered in dialogue-heavy non-interactive cutscenes that flesh-out the characters and setup the next party objective. Once control of your posse is given back to you, it’s time to climb some mountains and slay some beasts. These lengthy stretches of exploration and survival put you into the shoes of the characters whose narrative motivations demand persistence and diligence. Similarly, you, as a player, must also possess a certain amount of endurance to see the journey through to the end. That’s not to say that playing the game is a struggle, just that it entails a significant physical commitment on the part of the player.

Some players may look at Xenoblade’s demands and choose to walk away from the game before the end, due to real life time limitations or in-game frustrations. EGM Managing Editor, Andrew Fitch, seemed particularly frustrated by his playthrough of Xenoblade, as evidenced in his review, so I wanted to pick his brain a bit further. He told me that he did complete the entire game, including dabbling in some sidequests, but that, in general, he doesn’t think it’s absolutely necessary to spend the full length of 80+ hours with a game to be able to evaluate its quality. “At 35 hours, a game—even an RPG like Xenoblade—has revealed its true self,” he wrote, referencing commenter outcry at Jason Schreier’s review for Kotaku. I agree with this statement, especially in terms of evaluation. You don’t need to get more than a handful of hours into a game to decide if you’ll objectively enjoy it, and if a game hasn’t made itself known by that point, it probably has serious pacing issues. However, I’d argue that stopping short of completion in a game like Xenoblade negates some of the experience of long-form play, which is in this case essential to the experience of the game.

Xenoblade took me about a month to complete, playing in chunks of a few hours here and there, and occasionally taking several days away from the game entirely. I found my attachment to the game at its fondest when I maintained a steady stream of “healthy” play sessions, where I knew that I could take a break and the game would always welcome me back. Towards the end of the game, I hit my first wall where I could not beat a boss character and continue forward.

Before this point I had never needed to actively grind through fodder enemies to level up my characters to be strong enough to topple a foe for narrative progress. That I hit this wall some 80 hours into the game made me feel a bit betrayed. I’m sure other players hit walls earlier, depending on playstyle, but mine felt like an act on Xenoblade’s part to delay my imminent completion. I knew I’d finish the game eventually, but hitting the level wall sucked all of the momentum out of the narrative as well as my general drive to play.

Grinding is an old standby of JRPGs, a design decision seemingly made for the purpose of extending the length of time spent playing one game. Grinding, on its own, is not an especially enjoyable experience, and the payoff is indirect. That said, every aspect of a game shouldn’t need to be fun for it to be considered good and/or necessary, as long as players aren’t being unknowingly exploited. If you could simply waltz up to a boss character at any experience level and win, the intended power and gravitas of those conflicts would be diminished. At some point we’re discussing the relative virtues of “practice” here as well, since grinding is also about testing out and refining different engagement strategies. Xenoblade, like most JRPGs, uses a quantitative reinforcement pedagogy instead of a qualitative one. The side effects of this are games that take eons to complete, but inspire a transposed empathy for the hardships of the virtual characters you control.

It’s worth examining how much “story” is really being told in Xenoblade since the vast majority of play time is spent doing things that seemingly have no bearing on the plot beyond contextual nuance. Monolith Soft previously developed a trilogy of RPGs called Xenosaga, each providing 40-50 hours of gameplay and featuring what at the time were considered extensive cinematic cutscenes. Part 1 was never released in Europe, but bundled with the EU version of the sequel was a video of all of the original’s cutscenes, running over 3 hours. That’s a long movie, but less than 10 percent of the game. I bring this up to illustrate Monolith Soft’s penchant for story-centric games that actually put the player in command the vast majority of the time. It’s the player’s choice of actions with those characters that makes the story sink or swim as a game. After all, what’s way more boring than 5 hours of expository dialogue, rote cinematography, and a short rotation of canned animations? Answer: 45+ hours of tedious button-pressing sequences, broken up only by fits of inventory management.

Xenoblade comes out mostly on the positive end of the spectrum here. Battles play out MMO-style, similar in execution to FFXII’s Gambit system, which makes for seamless transitions between fighting and traversal and fun, snappy combat. Individual battles require you to position yourself on specific sides of monsters to increase chances of dealing critical damage. Things actually happen so quickly that it takes a few hours with the fighting system to catch up and really understand what you’re doing. Once you’re there though, you can establish rhythms to maximize how different characters’ attacks can play off of one another. Xenoblade piles systems on top of systems to such a degree that you really won’t master everything unless you play well beyond the basic story path. I felt like I was constantly reaching new tiers of understanding with the combat system up until the final fifth of the game. The length of Xenoblade allows you time to figure this stuff out at your own pace. Even after finishing the game there are several parts of the battle system that I never grasped, particularly Melia’s magic spells, which could make for a totally different approach to confrontations altogether.

One of Xenoblade’s major accomplishments was how briskly and efficiently it flowed throughout its considerable breadth, level-walls in the final stretch aside. Its dialogue has an economic sensibility that prioritizes character action over character depth, making narrative setpieces attention-grabbing, if emotionally detached. This is bucking the JRPG trope of long-winded, redundant internal monologues and painfully melodramatic conversations. Not that Xenoblade doesn’t turn insular and sappy from time to time, but you end up tasting it far less than you’d normally expect. The UK voice crew deserves some credit here too for realistically grounding the characters and delivering lines in a way that brings them to life when some of the animation falls short. Outside of cutscenes though, be prepared to hear the same handful of pre- and post-battle quips hundreds of times, which will grate no matter how much you like hearing the word “jokers” in an English accent.

And that’s the quandary of the epic game: how much repetition can players take without “play” turning into “work?” The more similar battles you fight, the more likely you are to notice a multitude of annoying “flaws.” Why do party members willingly tread into poisonous water when fighting? Why is the camera so close when fighting gigantic enemies that you can’t see anything? Why is the inventory system so laborious to configure? The list goes on (again, Andrew Fitch has your back). When Xenoblade is flying high, the imperfections fade into the background, but there are bound to be lulls in any 80-hour experience.

Repetition and “practice” reveals the true nature of systems and mechanics to the player over time, both good and bad. Xenoblade’s approach to this inherent hazard is to load up with so many systems and accruable points that something is always unlocking or reaching a new level. It’s the video game equivalent of sleight of hand. This strategy works remarkably well most of the time, pushing you through slower moments without batting an eye. That said, nothing brings the whole trip to a screeching halt like detrimental AI behavior or an unwieldy camera, both of which plague Xenoblade sporadically.

Monolith Soft could have just made a shorter game and delivered much of the same content, but it just wouldn’t have been the same Xenoblade Chronicles. There is something to the 80-hour experience that 20-hour games don’t have, that they can’t have. It is a unique feeling to play such a gargantuan journey. This is because each upcoming play session is iterative, building on the last, but offering the same repetitive pleasure that keeps people tuning into soap operas on a daily basis. There is drama and progression to a point, but you know the actions to get there are going to be relatively unchanged each time. What separates playing Xenoblade from watching Days of our Lives is the sense of increasing complexity that eventually comes to a head. I’ve always found the unending nature of MMOs unappealing and desperate. In contrast, the monumental JRPG isn’t afraid to end, shoving you out of the nest and into a world in its wake. I respect that confidence; it’s a rare thing. That’s a large part of why I consider my experience with Xenoblade Chronicles as time well spent.

:Reposted on Medium Difficulty:

Review: Digital: A Love Story (Mac)

It's often taken for granted that people who play a lot of video games know a lot about technology.  I'll attest that there is generally aptitude in these circles beyond that of the non-gamer crowd, but it's not something that comes entirely natural.  Maybe I'm just being defensive because I was always late to the party on so many aspects of new and emerging technological trends in the past 3 decades.  I didn't send an email or use AIM until I started college in 2002.  Same goes for having a cell phone for more than emergency calls.  I would have needed to be unrealistically aware of the personal computer scene at a very early age to feel nostalgic about the interface of the Amie Workbench, an Amiga analogue, and Bulletin Board System (BBS) communications represented in the game, Digital: A Love Story.  Since I wasn't, few of the game's techie in-jokes and references stick.  However, since Digital places you in a sort of 1988 simulation mode, the unfamiliarity lent itself to a more personally authentic experience.

You begin Digital as a someone who's using, for all intents and purposes, the Internet for the first time, but through the very limited lens of the Amie Workbench.  Visually, the game is the computer screen: everything fits the blue/white/orange color scheme, the monitor has heavy scanlines, and the cursor is a big, fat, red arrow.  You receive a message from a friend of your dad that tells you what to do to get on BBSes and chatting with folks.  Where instructions in a game can often remove you from the experience, here everything is presented in proper context and actually reads like messages real people would send.  Because the connection between using a computer to play and the game virtualizing a specific operating system is so direct, very little suspension of disbelief is needed to jump into the narrative.

As the title suggests, Digital is a love story, but it's also a mystery.  You're introduced to the "love interest" character, *Emilia, early on, and when she disappears, it's up to you to figure out what happened.  The narrative convention, which is also the primary game mechanic, is the exchange of BBS posts and private messages.  Everyone you interact with has a unique voice and motivation, creating conversations that reach far beyond typical NPC fare.  You never actually type any messages, instead simply hitting reply and reading contacts' responses.  This string of communication works best when you're in "conversation" with one or two other people and the back and forth is readily apparent.  At other times you'll just callously reply or send PMs to everyone on your list, making sure you're doing everything necessary to trigger the text that will allow you to progress further in the story.  The introduction to *Emilia follows the better of those two paths, and though it's clear that I was just messaging a fictional character as part of an interactive short story, I did develop an attachment to that character; enough of an attachment to drive the mystery plot forward with a degree of urgency.

The writing in Digital is very consistent, believable, and emotionally affecting.   Digital's designer and author, Christine Love, bills herself as a writer first, and it shows.  That's meant as a compliment to her writing skills, not a knock on her game design abilities.  Truly well written games are few and far between, but even fewer are as dependent on quality writing as Digital.  Characters' messages vary in articulation and sophistication, as you'd expect from a bunch of random people on the Internet.  I'm reminded of Gus Van Sant's teenager-starring Paranoid Park for how real its characters felt despite, or perhaps because of, the amateur statuses of its actors.  Love is likewise able to find a tone that is reflective of the production process, and somehow more authentic in doing so. 

Digital plops you into the world of BBSes, stranger-in-a-strange-land style.  Yes, there's a missing person mystery to solve, but navigating the uncharted online world is a mysterious voyage in its own right.  Imagine a game that has a clear story objective, but in order to proceed you need to drive a tractor, and before you can drive the it you have to figure out how it works.  Do you need keys to start it?  Where are the keys?  Which lever is for reverse?  Oh wait, does this run on gas?!  BBSes are just as foreign to me as tractors, and I appreciated how Digital didn't assume any prior knowledge.  If there's a tendency nowadays to forget just how open the Internet is, typing in phone numbers in hopes of connecting to a heretofore unseen places is a healthy reminder.  No one even dials numbers to place phone calls anymore, further distancing us from the real technological processes happening in the background.  If you did hand-dial phone numbers, you might mess up and call a random bystander by mistake.  In Digital, instead of hanging up and correcting the error, every number has an unknown on the other end; there's a sense of discovery.

The feeling of openness makes for an ideal learning space, which goes as much for the in-game world as the one outside of it.  Digital teaches you about BBSes and early Internet history through message texts, but in allowing you to actually dial the numbers and direct message other users, you learn by doing.  The mystery/love story paces you through the learning process, heightening the meaning behind your actions.  Later on, the Internet "history lesson" takes some sensationalist turns, but it makes for a great moment of culmination when you finally gain access to the fabled University BBS where they don't just have direct messages, they have email!  A story that's willing to go a little over the top is helpful to make up for the potential dryness of a game centered around an archaic computer interface. The online communications depicted in Digital remain the foundation that our modern Internet is built upon, reminding us of the vast expanses available to users at increasing speeds and densities.  It's up to us to make the stories real.

Digital: A Love Story is available to download for free here.