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Button Mashers is a periodic audio podcast covering a range of topics in the gaming industry. This blog was created for myself, Tetsuotrunks, as well as a few guest co-hosts, to contribute our 2 cents on topics that really don't warrant any discussion, or to just express things that we'd like to get off our chests. Check back often, as we update frequently and feel free to leave any feedback.
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The story? Who cares!
By TetsuoTrunks on 05.07.08 at 04:34 AM CST |
Sorry about the lack up updates. Some (relatively) minor medical issues kept me from posting this weekend and then yesterday...I don't have a real excuse, but it was one of those days when our personal lives keep us from our 'professional' responsibilities. I know I let this happen more than I should, and I once again apologize for that. The following is something I've had for a while, but just haven't been able to put up for some time. Let me know what you guys think.
A few weeks after the game came out, I was sitting in a friend's room playing Kingdom Hearts 2. We had both finished the title again, so this was a repeat play through for me. After one of the longer early cut scenes in the game, she turned to me and said "You know, this story makes NO fucking sense." I turned around and was going to issue a rebuttal, until I realized that she was absolutely right, the story makes absolutely ZERO sense. Mathematically speaking, planet hopping kid with shape shifting key-based-sword plus lots of Disney characters who know NOTHING about each other's existence, but who all manage to remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that their entire 'world' usually is composed of A castle or A city or A mountain and that that's perfectly normal that in this tiny area there could be multiple anthropomorphic talking animals that they would have never met. Add all that together, along with the occasional summoned creature that literally has no place of their own and the fact that the kid can become the uber-badass at will (seriously, how DOES Sora know to use a reaction command and just press triangle, and if he can jump and move like that, why not do it more often?) and you get ABSOULTE NONSENSE!
I'm going to stop now and say two things. One, this is, contrary to what you might think so far, not a rant designed to say 'I hate Kingdom Hearts', if I wanted to say that I would have. This is, in fact, a discussion about the role story telling does or does not play in the games we play. And 2, as I know how many fans they have on here, I want to make it clear that I feel Disney bears full responsibility for absolutely everything that is wrong in all of the Kingdom Hearts universe, despite not being the actual people who made the game. While neither company really needed to get this game made, it benefits Square-Enix a lot more than it benefits Disney, which Disney knew, so from day one, the ball was always in Disney's court. As such, we ended up with button masher(s) gameplay, a mind-numbingly easy difficulty level, and a storyline that required the same (lack of) mental prowess. In short, a kids game that despite combining Disney and Final Fantasy universes, keeps them as separate and unequal as any Southern US school prior to the 1950's. But like I said, this isn't a "I hate Kingdom Hearts" rant, this is about story.
Now, as I was saying, the story in Kingdom Hearts 2 is, at best, very abstract, unclear and more than a little confusing, not because of its depth or breadth, but because there is so much that just goes unexplained. But at the same time, did that stop just about any of us from playing it? Completing it? Unlocking all the extras or repeating it on the (and I use this term lightly) 'harder' difficulty level to see the special ending? Yeah, I didn't think so. And I'll bet its not the only game that you were confused about or didn't really like the story that you've gone back and replayed. Even some of the best games of our era have awful stories. I love Metal Gear Solid and, well…the first game is your standard Hollywood action movie. Gruff former solider is pulled out of retirement by an old commanding officer, forced headfirst into the most dangerous situation anyone could think of (at the time), blindly follows orders for as long as he can get away with it without being betrayed, is betrayed, and manages to kill everyone and their mom without breaking a limb, or even a sweat. You know where it goes from there. Armies of 30 foot biped walking (and swimming) tanks, ghosts and spirit mediums, nanobots and a disease that targets people based on their genetic material alone, severed limbs becoming important characters and, whenever its deemed necessary, a reference to American and British film. Oh yeah, and somehow it's a morality tale about deterrence as a bad foreign policy. HUH?!? THIS is one of the best games ever? Yeah, kinda is. The fact is, if you break them down, there's really like 6 stories in the world, with lots of variables. The love story, the action story, the ghost story, etc. In fact, if I describe the plot of any game without using names of characters or items, it could probably apply to dozens of titles we could each think of. Ever met a child who was a dreamer and then after their home town/village is attacked they're led on a quest to avenge a murder, rescue someone, find an artifact, or all of the above? Yeah, I did too. Hell, sometimes they don't even change the name of the kid doing the questing. How many times can one kid named 'Link' end up being a hero? Seriously, what's up with that? Oh, and you know how you can always tell when the action hero is about to be dicked over? Yeah, that's cause its always at the same point right when they thought they had won.
Ok, so the story isn't there to win points for originality. And technically, it isn't the story itself, but the cut scenes that are there to display what the developers think are 'awesome visuals'. So what is the purpose of the story? Put simply, to save us money on player's guides. Think I'm kidding? Let's take Twilight Princess, or any other 3-D Zelda. Sure, some of the items are new, but you could figure out what they do without really reading. The fact of the matter is, all you really need from Zelda is those little shots of red text to tell you where to go next or what item you might need to buy. If we didn't have ANY dialogue, you'd probably still know exactly WHAT was going on, you'd just be a bit iffy about the where. Viewed in this light, story really becomes the least of 3 evils. Option A is to have story in as it is now; there mostly to point us in the right direction. Option B, as I already said, is to have NO story, NO dialogue, and make us either figure out all puzzles and game play bits ourselves (which some games do anyway) or force us to buy player's guides to just be able to get through our own titles. Gaming retailers would love this one for the very obvious reason that you and I hate it; lots more money involved and not the kind that we get, the kind we spend. Option C involves monkeys, lots and lots of monkeys. The idea here is that, as an industry standard alternative to story, we get monkeys at every viable moment, pointing in the direction we should be traveling or looking to advance the story. It would probably decrease development costs by a fair margin; no writers, no translators in the localization process, hell by and large if you remove text there pretty much IS no localization process. But seriously, if the gaming industry announced as a collective effort that starting tomorrow, all text and dialogue would be removed in favor of monkeys…well, I can't speak for all of you but I'd take that as a universal "well fuck it" from all those developers and I'd probably take the same approach and stop buying stuff. Hate to beat a dead horse, but viewed in this light, Kingdom Hearts 2 looks even worse; the only thing the story isn't confusing about is that it gives you no hints whatsoever on what's supposed to happen next, you'll usually just see a bright flash on the world map around the area you should visit.
I think the problem is that no one knows anymore how to really tell a story using a game. The original Metal Gear Solid, by itself, is a beautiful piece of art (yes Roger Ebert, I said it), and yes, I know it seems silly for me to criticize a game and then praise it in the same paper, but yes, I'm doing just that. Got a problem with it? Then try and stop me. Go on, try! MWAHAHA….sorry, got carried away there. Anyway, my point earlier was that originality is not something that's found a lot when you boil things down. Its much more important what you do with the materials you have. How well executed are your characters? How connected do you the player feel not with the action, but with the people? That is the mark of a well told story in a game, and in my opinion, Metal Gear Solid hits those points.
So what now? Well, how about a game that actually has your actions affect something other than the ending? Fable, according to Peter Molyneux, was supposed to have every single choice or action your character makes affect the entirety of the world around you, but as it has been pointed out more than once in the past, there are times when you can kill major characters that a lot of people seemed to actually like and there is absolutely zero impact on the story. Jade Empire, another game with a 'morality system', does alter some of your character's speech options depending on your alliances, but almost nothing else. The point I'm trying to make is, if you as the developer went through so much trouble to make me as the player have a large impact on me as the character, why not do so in a way that feels meaningful?
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