Bully, Persona 4, High School, & The Perils of the Open World: Introduction

Consider the high school. While the advent of the institution as we think of it today is less than a century old, its tendrils have burrowed so completely into our consciousness it seems to have existed forever, outside of time. It is something mandatory, something we view with a mixture of contempt, romance, and bewilderment in our adulthoods. Everything was the most important thing to ever have happened for about 20 minutes, replaced by the next greatest event. After Jimmy Stewart and Robert Michum died, every movie was either set in a high school or calibrated to appear as though everyone in it was in the arrested emotional state of a 10th grader.

High school was a thing that did not exist for most of the medium's history. River City had one, of course. It even organized sporting events. The Garden in Final Fantasy VIII was kind of like high school, for orphaned killing machines. Otherwise, nothing. 

Nothing, save Atlus's Persona series. An offshoot of the Shin Megami Tensi franchise, Persona has overtaken its parent and straddles the Japanese RPG world like a colossus. 

I started playing Persona 4 shortly after it came out Winter ‘08, smugly assuming I would discover all of its mysteries and defeat the major antagonists well before April 11th, 2011. That was some crazy future-day. A special one, to be sure, the day this sickly, bespectacled teenager (I named him Chris, because that is my name) from the big city was to arrive in a quaint little resort town for the school year, knowing not what terror lay ahead for he to thwart.



Well, I beat Persona 4 a handful of days ago - I do wish I'd have done it on April 10th 2011, because of my largely fictional OCD. The game clock reads 103 hours. That’s, let’s see, about 9 minutes a day of linking my socials and fusing my Jack Frosts with other Jack Frosts. It wasn’t a perfect game - Pac Man Championship Edition CX is the only perfect game - but it brought  all the things I adore in the frequently maligned Japanese Role-Playing Game genre into a high school setting.

Persona 4 is not the only game set in a high school that I've randomly played recently. There is also Rockstar Vancouver’s Bully. Released in 2006 for the PS2, this game must have sold well, because I don’t think any secondary marketplace - your Gamestops, your pawn shops - has fewer than 90 copies of it lying around. Like, there’s more copies of Bully than all the Madden games put together.

Let me be upfront: I have huge, irrational problems with Rockstar and their games. I’ve hated their sophomoric jokey tone and their functionally broken camera and aiming mechanics. I've hated the dissonance between the open world, let’s fuck around sandbox aspects and the mainline story missions. I’ve hated the number of those story missions that are simply janky races on ill-defined courses. I’ve hated the half dozen or so impossible roadblock objectives where you have to pilot a goddamn remote control helicopter or whatever that no reasonable person can be expected to satisfactorily complete, but which must be finished to unlock more of the entertaining sandbox stuff, and I’ve hated how smug their entire enterprise reads to a guy who mostly just wants to see dudes with anime haircuts hit each other with swords, be it an RPG, a fighting game, or that dubious moniker “character action”: the Devil May Crys, the Bayonettas, and the like.

Rockstar has started to win me over - Red Dead Redemption told a story worth telling, although in typical Rockstar fashion, our protagonist was required to sometimes act heinously on the behalf of some vile yokel in direct violation of his redeemed character. The wild west setting kept that ludo-narrative dissonance from bothering me as much as it does in Grand Theft Auto. LA Noire sounds pretty neat, and Ken Cosgrove and Peter Bishop are in it.



These Rockstar games are all open world games, promising you the freedom to do all sorts of fun things. Because games should be fun. Fun fun fun free fun. Persona 4 comes from different stock - the dreaded “linear” “Japanese” school of game design. In this case, “freedom” is the hobgoblin of small minds. Outside of Nethack, the games designed by Yasumi Matsuno, Clint Hocking, and that fellow what made Minecraft, Persona 4 gave the illusion that there were more opportunities to push the limits of a game’s systems and mechanics than the stereotypical JRPG, and invested me in its world more successfully than I can readily recall. Bully... well...

NEXT: A LOOK AT BULLY

"I Hope That's Not Chris's Blood"

Here's some thoughts on Resident Evil 4. They're pretty much identical to my feelings re: Resident Evil 5, actually. Why is this series so frustrating to me, and yet still so endearing? One of life's mysteries, I guess. Also, this essay is a goddamn mess. I don't know why I'm posting it.

Resident Evil 4 is winning the lottery a few hours before getting diagnosed with terminal cancer. Resident Evil 4 is a reunion with your childhood sweetheart, now mired in drug addiction and madness. Resident Evil 4 is the affordable, rustic old house with a shockingly low rent and 

a wonderful view of the city; Resident Evil 4 is also the roommate who never does the fucking dishes. Resident Evil 4 is large; it contains multitudes.

Resident Evil 4 calls itself a "survival horror" game. You may not understand what a "survival horror" game is; that's okay. Capcom has no idea what the "survival horror genre" is, either (so is it horror to survive?). As the abecedarians [it seems like the most accurate word to use, douche-y as it makes me feel] behind this weirdly compelling marketing-speak nonsense branding, Capcom was the moral compass to all the other developers of "survival horror"-esque games. No, they were more than a compass, they were a role model, like Sandy Kofaux. Just as Kofaux's famous decision to sit out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it coincited with Yom Kippur inspired countless Jewish sportswriters to write identical columns about how brave and inspirational Kofaux was every Yom Kippur, so does Capcom's brave embrace of anachronisms inspire others to embrace anachronism. When one sets out to make gobs of money with a spooky videogame, one must examine the Resident Evil franchise intently. How stingy should one be with ammuntition in the game if one expects a player to survive the horror? How many rubies must one pry from the eye sockets of marble statues? And should there be marble things other than statues, with emeralds instead of rubies crammed into various places? What is the optimal ratio of marble statues to other gem-hiding objects ? How often should these rubies and emeralds be inserted into hidden mantelpieces behind trick bookshelves before a horror can truly be survived?

Nevermind how much the Resident Evil series borrowed from Alone in the Dark. Alone in the Dark never owned these conventions as Resident Evil owns them. Alone in the Dark was so awkward to control, and so ugly, I could never get past the first 20 minutes or thereabouts. If I wanted to survive horror whilst playing Alone in the Dark - hell, if I wanted to tell my friends what happens after advancing past the first couple of spectral encounters - I would have needed serious commitment. I imagine "solving" Alone in the Dark was similar to entering an empyrean realm of joy and enlightenment. I'll never know. I'd get bored watching someone else play Alone in the Dark. I'd rather go off to buy a cheeseburger and some Magic: The Gathering cards or whatever. No, without Capcom's help, the "survival horror" tropes might simply have disappeared, and we'd live in a world where Konami might have implemented something like, oh, let's say functional controls to Silent Hill 2, the undisputed masterpiece of this whole silly genre, and what a tragedy that would have been! Defenders of the tank controls tell us a 'widely believed fact' that busting a player's ability to interact simply with his game "increases the tension and makes the game scary." These mouthbreathers also find the incredibly limited resources scattered obliquely thoughout the game something of a turn-on; the very idea that you cannot save your game without ink ribbons is enough to excite them.

No more! With a simple shift of the camera and a creepy guy willing to sell you massive amounts of weaponry, Resident Evil 4 not "survival horror." It is something else entirely.

It's fair, for one thing.

Every failure to survive the horror is instructive -- and, due to some smart planning on the part of the developers, most scenarios allow for quite a bit of freedom, depending on how adept you are at improvisation and the availability of ammunition, This breadth of options is the best thing about Resident Evil 4, and it's a wonderful consequence of the obstinate, fixed camera's demise.

The change from the pre-rendered backgrounds and frustrating camerawork of RE's past to the more traditional third-person camera found in this game once prompted some internet commentators to declare this a complete break from the bad old Resident Evil ways. Their enthusiam is only partially warranted. Due to the extreme emphasis on shooting gooey things in this iteration of the franchise, that old, German Expressionist-influenced series of pre-rendered rooms would have crippled the game. Seriously, though, this is kind of a clunky and unintuitive half-solution to the problem, not a revelatory departure from the old style.

The function of the Resident Evil camera is to generate a mood -- claustrophobia, creeping dread. Fear, in short. I'd hate to see Shinji Mikami's (now Jun Takoishi's) team of developers allow anyone to program some full, freely adjustable camera, because the shlock horror style shocks of the series depend greatly on shlock horror tactics borrowed from films as old as "The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari," or Bela Lugosi's "Dracula," and as new as, um, "Resident Evil: Apocalypse."

The still-clunky controls also fit the game better than they probably should, because it's clear a lot of thought went into pacing and designing your typical LAS PLAGAS encounters so the specific limitations of the control scheme are moot. This elicits a confabulation of excitement, tension, dread, exhilaration, and an increased sensation of personal self-worth when playing.

It's clear just as much thought went into the first third of the game as did the control scheme. While the game is rigidly linear, each major location where killing's gonna be going down is filled with dozens of options as to how said killing will actually go down. Never are you stuck in a linear corridor with tenticle-headed monsters blocking your forward momentum -- at least, not during those crucial first hours.

Resident Evil games have always cultivated a sense of desperation, but prior to RE4, the balance between the "I don't have enough ammo or herbs and I've got to run though this hallway and GOD I hope I have an ink cartridge so I can save my game," moments, and the "I just got me a big, new gun, and I got plenty of ammo, time for vengeance!" moments was never quite right. Here, again, things are different.

RE4 - which is much, MUCH more action packed than previous games in the series - gives us opportunities to experience genuine power uncommon in this made up genre. Fairly early on, we're treated to a set piece that illustrates what amounts to a philosophical change in "survival horror" perfectly. While riding down a ski lift, or industrial crate transport, or something, I had trouble arriving at my destination until I equipped a bolt-action sniper rifle -- a weapon I had used not once the first 4 or so hours of the game, because, hey, I like to look my kills in the eye as they die. Imagine my delight when a handful of well-aimed shots -- three dead zombies per round, when they were queued single-file --ended the ambush on the little train-car-thing before it started. Not a single injury to myself or my traveling companion during the entire gondola trip -- and around 14 corpses re-corpse'd to my credit. Never were there killing sprees like this in Resident Evils past.

Also, goddamn. This game looks great, and it isn't just flash for the sake of flash; the technical proficiency is married with a perspicacity to the overall atmosphere. Nothing is done just becuase some whiz at tech whipped up a rockin' new shader. It's not showy or gaudy in the way something like Devil May Cry is. It's atmospheric.

Sadly, as I write this review, I admit waning interest in the game. Moving out of the village and into a more traditional RE setting -- a musty castle -- gives me the feeling that, before the adventure is over, I'm bound to see some abandoned laboratories where mad scientists devise unspeakable chemicals. The plot is going to continue along it's convoluted, half-retarded path, and it is likely that I will murder, if that is the word, hundreds more of these quasi-zombies.

So. If a AAA Capcom production of one of their flagship franchises, intelligently updated to both revive a staid product without fundamentally changing it's cadence can lose my interest with an almost admirable, if shocking, legerity -- well, there is a fundamental problem at the core. I think that problem might just be me and my interests. It also might be a problem with the game being too padded with nonsense to extend that length.

But -- there must be a middle path between the mental anguish and pain the Silent Hill protagonists face and the cheesy scenarios our friends from Resident Evil endure. A videogame that manages to be both thrillingly creepy and populist without suffering from Stupid Plot Syndrome is going to be huge. Fatal Frame? Siren? Maybes. I'm pinning my hopes on Heavy Rain, which is unlikely to be a survival horror game per se but will at least have serial killers and stuff in it.

Well. Maybe it's not that. It's just - the Resident Evil formula doesn't feel like homage any longer. It feels like self-plagurization. I've read elsewhere that this is a 20+ hour video game. I'm already starting to sense that the game doesn't have many more tricks up it's sleeves, after that phenomenal first 3 or 4 hours. I'll finish the game if I can find time, because I have faith that there will be a few more bright spots along the way. That I feel obligated to complete it rather than compelled to see the conclusion saddens me.

Entertainment Ennui

The annual deluge of holiday releases has begun in earnest this week, and here I am, sitting at my desk, confused and unhappy, struck by waves of exuberance and complete indifference in equal measure.

Left: Hideo Kojima feels the same exuberance and indifference that I do about videogames, only towards alcohol

Few rational creatures follow the enthusiast press as enthusiastically as I do, and if one were to look at my Google Reader or the list of podcasts I subscribe to in iTunes, one might get the impression videogames consume the entirety of my mental faculties. I read gaming related stuff across the entire alphabet, from actionbutton.net to Michael "Zonk" Zenkie. I read the British PC games blog Rock Paper Shotgun; the last PC game I played was probably Irrational's underrated superhero strategy game, Freedom Force -- which is something like six years old (also, Rock Paper Shotgun's British sensibilities are sometimes lost on me, what with their Dues Ex enthusiasm being waaaaaaay out of proportion with what my experience with the game led me to feel). I just read an essay by some Lucasarts employee about the difficulties of choosing middleware solutions best suited for your development philosophy and project goals on GameSetWatch. Weirder still, I enjoyed reading about middleware.

Does this immersion in games journalism correlate to a similar expenditure of energy into the actual playing of videogames? Well, no. Not really. I'm estimating that, since the beginning of July, I have spent my gaming time with the following:

1. Metal Gear Solid 4 (beat it; still wondering how I'm going to write about it)
   
2. Soul Calibur 4 (3 hours against my friend Onuliak; loved it)
   
3. Bionic Commando ReArmed (didn't finish the game; wonderful accomplishment, but the level design in Bionic Commando wasn't all that good, really.)
   
4. Mega Man 9 (beat it; going to write something about it later)
   
5. Vintage arcade gaming at Ground Kontrol (90 drunken minutes; crazy awesome)
6. Games played at PAX (???)
7. Final Fantasy IV DS (beat it; it's Final Fantasy IV, and it's pretty swell)
8. PixelJunk Eden (played it quite a bit; mixed feelings)
   

Nothing to sneeze at, that -- serious time that could have been spent in more "productive" ways went into gaming -- but not enough time to develop ideas about the experience. When the zeitgeist shifts as constantly as it does in videogame culture, when every AAA game gets dissected incessantly months before hitting retail, disappearing from the conversation a week later, sucked away in the undertow as the next wave of hype crests, when one posts on blog comments sections and on message boards not because one has something exciting to say but because one does not want to feel left out and because it beats grinding a couple levels out in a remake of a Final Fantasy game one has beaten like 5 times... it's hard to keep up. It's frustrating to keep up.

Yet.

Little Big Planet. Mirror's Edge. World of Goo. New, exciting IP. Coming out in multiple SKUs. New ones, at that.


Fallout 3. Yakuza 2. Persona 4. Chrono Trigger DS. Not so new, but very exciting IP. Games bound to take me about a year to finish. Except Chrono Trigger - not a very long game. But I have been playing Chrono Trigger, on and off, since 1998, and having an opportunity to do so on the bus is reason enough to make with the jazz hands.

Fuck it. I only wrote this post to support Blog Action Day (if the script embed worked, there should be a little thing at the bottom of this post. Click on it, would you?). You guys fight poverty. I'm gonna play me some Blazing Lazers.

Goodbye, Soulless Corporate Dope Peddlers - Hello, Temp Work!

Today, I have an appointment at a temp agency. Why did I schedule this appointment, considering that I am currently employed at the nation's largest videogame retailer? Although working retail is never much fun, does it not help to enjoy the product you sell?

Well, yes and no.

Games are cool. I would have no objection, no reason to seek outside employment, if my sole task was that of a shopkeeper, selling goods to eager individuals with genuine use for 0ur products. As anyone who has ever shopped at GameStop before knows, however, the sales associates are not only enabling monetary transactions; they're pestering you ceaselessly to spend money on preorders, warranty plans, club memberships, strategy guides, and all manner of useless ephemera. You may find this behavior obnoxious -- shut up about preorders already, you may think, I shouldn't have to preorder a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 when copies of it are about to become as rare as air molecules! -- but please understand: our jobs are entirely dependent on you purchasing this stuff. You don't sell, your hours get cut. You don't meet quota, you get reamed by your (almost always sleazy) manager.

I would field calls every day inquiring as to the trade-in value of certain games. Guess what? I was absolutely forbidden from answering that question over the phone. Why? Because if a potential customer hears what a pittance our store offers in trade-in value for a two month old game, they are far less likely to drive to the store and trade their game in. The entire business model revolves around inconveniencing the customer for our profit.

Ethical quibbles aside, it is very difficult to maintain my kind of lifestyle while working a part time job in a strip mall. "My kind of lifestyle", of course, is a misnomer -- I live with my parents and spend most of my income on games, beer, and cigarettes -- but still. I invested all my liquid capital in a PS3, limiting opportunities to socialize with other people, and right now I need to interact with humans for my own mental well being.

Hopefully, I'll get a higher paying job, full time work -- then, I will have more disposable income for games, hence a few more articles on the blog. Articles about Pocky & Rocky, the history of pirated fighting games, the PC Engine, the effect gaming can have on serious mental illness, DeJap, Metroidvainias (specifically Cave Story), and more!

I've written around 20 words in each of the above ideas for posts -- just so you know, I may only put things up a few times a month, but I'm constantly agonizing over new, equally awful posts.

Sigh.