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

BREIFLY LOOKING AT TWO OLD GAMES WITH NEW SEQUELS

I've been playing a lot of PS2 games lately, because I missed a great many of the platform's best games during the bulk of its' lifecylce. I didn't have access to one until 2005, really, because I had fully invested myself in the Gamecube. I mean, completely fanboy nuts invested myself. I went so far as to convince myself that Star Fox Adventures was among the best adventure games I'd played -- my God, was it not -- and that there were enough quality RPG's to satiate my appetite for that genre. Why, it even had a Final Fantasy game! It was a janky Diablo clone that had very few ties to canonical Final Fantasy motifs, sure, but it was a Final Fantasy game.

Yep. I really did think that game was good, once.

I could convince myself of a great many things between 2002-2004, as those of you who know me personally can attest.

Also, I see no reason to (re)enter this hardware generation until I've gotten an HDTV, because I've played Ubisoft games on the 360 in SD and strained my eyes something awful just reading on screen text.

Most importantly, I haven't been able to find my DS in a few weeks. That thing might actually be my favorite console of all time, honestly. I left it somewhere creative, no doubt. Etrian Odyssey was still in the cartridge slot, too.

Hopefully, the DS will show up again soon, because I'd rather not fork out another $160 dollars and countless hours of my life remapping all those dungeons and getting slaughtered by FOEs just to say I finished one of the hardest games I've ever attempted to play. Although it might be worth all that money to hear that glorious Yuzo Koshiro score again...

Anyway, back to the PS2 games I've been gorging myself on -- two of which, God of War and Devil May Cry 3, I have to discuss right here right now. It's almost timely, too, with a new game in each franchise recently released on different systems that I don't own. That makes this post a New Sku first!

God of War is a solid action game with absolutely stunning production values. It also has a certain aesthetic style that I completely loathe, and it's killing a lot of the enjoyment I could see myself enjoying were this not the case. And the game balance is slightly off. On the default difficulty setting, there are a few different attacks that feel crazily overpowered and make the game a breeze to play.

Basically, God of War feels like a Mortal Kombat of character action games, big and bloody and stupid and mean spirited. It's more balanced and technical than any MK game I've spent time with (there's nothing as overpowered as, say, Scorpion's spear toss/uppercut combo here), but some of the attacks are just ludicrous. Whenever you see a group of enemies, just Hold L1 + Square or Triangle. You'll kill 'em all in no time.

The game also forces you to do some pretty morally repugnant things and treats them as if they were just the raddest most brutal and awesome ideas ever thought up by anyone. I'm thinking specifically of a puzzle that requires Kratos to murder a screaming prisoner in some crazy fire-spewing vice thing to continue advancing in Pandora's Temple. I got the feeling that David Jaffe and his team in San Diego were hoping to elicit the following reaction: "Dude, this game is so brutal you have to listen to a dude scream for minutes as you kick him towards his death!"

It's brutal and violent, and that's sometimes kinda cool, but there's no soul behind that violence. It's like some callow thirteen year old telling you about how Hostel was the greatest movie of all time because some dude gets his nuts cut off and the camera doesn't cut away at all.

Devil May Cry 3 (I'm playing the Special Edition, with it's readjusted difficulty settings and improved continue mechanic, btw) has a completely different, insane style that I like a lot better than the style in God of War. For example, there's a boss battle in DMC3 against a prostitute made out of bats who, when defeated, turns into an electric guitar that Dante plays like fucking Steve Vai while fireworks explode all around him. I find stuff like that extremely awesome.

I also really enjoy the lite RPG aspect of the game. Kill enemies, collect red orbs. Use red orbs to buy shit between levels. It's just like Dragon Quest, but with guns. In addition, you're given the choice between four different "styles," before each level starts (more become unlocked later on). As you kill stuff, you gain experience in whatever style you've chosen. This lets you tailor your game to the style you most enjoy playing, and that rocks.

However, there is no way to beat this game without some good old fashioned RPG-style grinding. You have to return to levels you've beaten already to collect more red orbs and more experience if you hope to stand a chance in the 17th level, because you're going to need a lot of life orbs. Killing a prostitute made out of bats is radical once; killing her again, along with every other boss in the game one after another with no real money to stock up on health items between each fight, is not.

I haven't finished either game yet (although I think I'm fairly close to the end in God of War, and if I have to face a gauntlet of every boss in DMC I'd say it's safe to assume that I'm pretty close to the finale), so I'll reserve final judgment until then. Also, it's 3:00 AM. I'm going to bed.

Happy Easter, everyone.

A HIND D?! A REVIEW OF MGS3

Here's another one of the user reviews I wrote for Gamespot. Eventually, all those reviews will be up here, excepting the complete garbage I wrote early on. Here at New Sku, "the slowest growing, least popular videogame blog currently on the web^tm," I won't just recycle without adding anything -- I'm not Square-Enix -- so we can expect improved grammar, better formatting, extensive profanity and jokes about cystic fibrosis

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. It's more a clothesline to hang footnotes on than a review proper.



'Snake Eater,' is a weird game. Really weird. Remarkably, unsettling, unfailingly weird. Do not let any person tell you different.

Yet I have been reading some other reader reviews here at Gamespot and have been surprised at how little attention this issue has received. Comments like this statement in user megjur's review are ubiquitous: "I'd love to tell all about the story , but I'd hate to spoil it so let just say it's better than ever."

I wonder how one spoils a story that makes no cogent sense.

'Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater,' was developed and produced by Japanese Konami employees under the guidance of Hideo Kojima. In my imagination, this videogame was developed to be a deliberate accident, something like a John Cage composition, as conducted by Kojima.

Kojima strikes me as a bright, idiosyncratic guy. I would call him a 'postmodernist developer' if videogames were done with modernism. He's one of the few producers with a distinctive style. Casual gamers know the name. I think he is really sick of making videogames. If that is true, it is a shame, because - well. I like his games. [1].

I want to believe this game is a farewell to the entire Metal Gear franchise. It is a perfect way to end the series, coming as close to wrapping up all the loose threads as possible in a series as lousy with convoluted plot twists as this one. I'm striking Metal Gear Solid 2 out of the official canon, however, because MGS2 is more like an elaborate joke than a videogame. It's a really great joke, though!

This is my pet theory: everyone involved in the Metal Gear franchise at Konami was told to build the game as though it were a mega-budget 80's thriller (I'm thinking of Red Dawn, the second greatest Patrick Swayze film of all time, when I say this[2]). After this task was completed, Kojima and his team began a much more difficult task: to radically obscure any hint of authenticity - turning reality into something oblique and abstract, breaking all the conceits of 'stealth action' realism in as many subversive ways as possible without calling broad attention to their gambit.

I can almost hear Kojima cackling madly though a tear in space and time from the moment the 'opening credits' segment begins, complete with a brassy James Bond-esque theme song. The cinematic aspiration-traditionalist videogame design dichotomy inherent in every Kojima production is evident right off the bat, here.

MGS3 is soaked in allusions, many of them allusions to other Konami games. However, the history of cinema is evoked more often, and just as heartfelt. Even saving your game (done with the familiar 'codec' system fans of previous MGS games may recognize[3]) calls up your cute companion 'Para-Medic" who will tell you (playing as Naked Snake) a little story about a 'real life' movie, everything from Godzillia to the Magnificent Seven to schlock drive-in films.

A large percentage of game time is devoted to cut scenes. 'Cut Scenes' is something of a four letter word to some gamers, and to place the non interactive sequences spread throughout the course of MGS3 in the same category as the nonsensical drivel that nearly every other PS2 game provides us with is incorrect.[4]. The cut scenes, or whatever they are, are not very game-like, and they aren't 'movie-like' either. Stringing all the cut scenes together and watching them, start to finish, would make for a repetitive, confusing, and somewhat inexplicable film. The best comparison to MGS3's non-interactive bits are the collected writings of Kobe Abe & William Gaddis & Thomas Pynchon: outrageously hilarious events with deadly serious ideas hiding underneath.

I'm most reminded of Gaddis' 'The Recognitions,' a novel that tells a story (most novels tell stories, right?) of one Wyatt Gwyon, a masterful forger of great painters. Sort of [5]. 'The Recognitions' explores the struggle to define authenticity in a world like ours - and, after we've determined what is authentic, it asks us to ponder the value of authenticity. Why, exactly, is authenticity important?

Which brings us back to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. This game cheerfully smashes the authentic and the absurd together, like demolition derby cars. MGS3 is the sort of game where you are free to utilize sensible and prudent stealth tactics while wearing a gigantic fake crocodile head. It is the sort of game that, with a straight face, can insert a megalomaniac Russian general who can shoot electricity out of his hands for some reason or another. A game in which The Boss, Snake's mentor turned traitor, appears to be younger than he is. This is a game that tries to implement militarily accurate solo jungle operations in such a videogame-y way that it succeeds almost in spite of itself.

More so than most videogames, Metal Gear Solid requires you to play "The Right Way," to get the most out of it. "The Right Way," to play Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is similar to "The Right Way," espoused by Larry Brown [6]: move slowly, listen to your superiors, don't worry too much about the logic of your superiors' thinking, and make damn sure to play good defense. One can, of course, set the game's difficulty to "Super Easy," run around with a gun that never jams and has unlimited ammo, wearing the most outlandish costumes and eating the most outlandish things [7], and have fun. You'll be abusing the system, and you'll look like a deformed mongoloid while abusing said system, but you'll have fun.

I do not abuse the system. I take all this stuff real seriously. I do not sneak around with an alligator mask on my head very often. I camouflage Snake appropriately at all times. I almost always restore my last saved game when I mistakenly blow my cover, not because I am worried about seeing a 'GAME OVER' screen[8], but because I felt like I had let Snake down, in some way. I empathize with him, and with Boss, and with all the Fear and EVA and the virtual families of the guards I do kill [9]. I feel this way because game creates such a sense of atmosphere that even the most outlandish events seem reasonable in these Russian jungles. [10]. By "sense of atmosphere," I don't simply mean the graphics and sound effects are phenomenal (although they are phenomenal). I'm referring to the meticulous placement and use of graphics and sounds. The world of Snake Eater could pass for a real geographic location in the real world. The dense foliage of the jungles; the functional and nondescript architecture of the Soviet facilities; the dank caves... intellectually, I am aware this world has been set up and tweaked to stimulate the most enjoyable gaming experience possible by a bunch of people more talented than I am. Doesn't matter; when I turn out all the lights, put on my headphones, and sit in front of my little Daewoo television, I am in 1965, in that jungle.

All the Metal Gear Solid games have this immersing quality to a degree, but the verisimilitude I've been writing about is closely related to the obvious effort the folks at Konami have put into researching their game. Snake Eater has an obsession with technical detail, made blatantly obvious in the extended conversations between Ocelot & Snake. These non-interactive bits are shockingly precise - "this gun does these things when held this way" Snake will tell Ocelot - and a creepy fetishistic streak creeps into the narrative. While undeniably cool-sounding, this kind of trivia can feel showy, even hypocritical, given the subtext of the game's plot.

Snake Eater is, after a fashion, an examination of the mechanisms that drive patriotism and loyalty. Ultimately, at the end of the game, these mechanical processes lose out to a triumph and celebration of the strange bonds and friendships all humans accrue in their lives. John Lennon does not make an appearance on the Snake Eater soundtrack, but there are a few ghostly signs of the dead Beatles' hippie world-view tucked underneath all the macho gun-porn.[11] By treating weaponry and violence like a fetish, the subtext is undercut - but only slightly. The characters in this game are largely military personnel. Of course these people would love guns and bombs and scientists willing to make them more, bigger guns and bombs. Boss is redeemed though violence, not by her rejection of it.

There is only one major flaw in the way this story is told, and it has been a pet peeve of mine since I started reading manga, watching anime, and playing Japanese videogames. Snake never fails to repeat new information given to him in the form of a question. Major Tom (I don't care if he changed his handle, he's f'ing Major Tom) will say: "Snake, listen closely. There's a robot that shoots nuclear warheads somewhere in the wastelands of Russia. Then Snake will say: "A robot that shoots nuclear warheads?"

Tom: "Yes Snake. We believe it is northeast of your current location."
Snake: "Northeast of here?"
Tom: "Yes Snake. I don't have to tell you how important it is to find and destroy this weapon."
Snake: "Destroy the weapon? How do I do that?"
Tom: "Use your training, Snake."
Snake: "Training. Got it. Crab Battle."

This goes on and on and on[12], adding maybe a full hour of time to your game clock. I don't know any Japanese, so I am not sure why this phenomenon reoccurs so often, but there must be a good reason for it.

Now, the interactive bits (also known as 'the game proper') are not without flaws, but I find them to be endearing flaws, like how a slight imperfection in your lover's body makes them all the sexier in your eyes. After playing other, more western stealth action games, the myopic, old-skool overhead perspective is very irritating. To counterbalance this limitation, the developers have given Snake superhuman resistance to physical energy and pain; even on "Hard" difficulty, Snake can take a good 20 bullets before collapsing and dying. This does not constitute "stealth action" so much as it constitutes "stubborn game design."

Meanwhile, the much vaunted new "realistic" additions to the franchise during its' development: namely, the need to hunt and eat food in the jungle, and the required self-doctoring of injuries suffered in battle, as well as the ability to camouflage Snake to best blend in with his environment[13], come across as tacky and poorly implemented. In the middle of a heated gun battle, Snake should not be allowed to pause time to remove a bullet from his shoulder with his knife.

Que serra, serra.

Snake Eater is still very fun to play, both "The Right Way," and the "Crocodile-Headed Mass Murderer Way." It is just a dated game. I like dated games. I'm odd that way. Snake Eater is just as much fun to watch, if you enjoy the near-miss as much as you enjoy the unqualified masterpiece.

FINAL SCORE: A SHOEBOX FILLED WITH ALL THE COLLECTABLE CARD GAMES I PLAYED WHEN I WAS A KID.

footnotes:
[1] - Except Boktai, which was really stupid in both concept and execution.
[2] - What is the best Patrick Swayze film of all time? Roadhouse. And it is not even close.

[3] - ...and hate.

[4] - I still have no idea what the hell was supposed to be going on in Devil May Cry 3, and I've logged dozens and dozens of hours into that game.

[5] - Or is it? Gaddis is a pretty difficult read.

[6] - Larry Brown is a vagabond basketball coach notable for his tendency to quit jobs as soon as he has a chance & his creepy devotion to former North Carolina head coach Dean Smith. Not that there is anything wrong with that; give me Smith over John Wooden and Phog Allen and Allen Rupp and especially Mike "I swear I'm not actually a mouse, really!" Kyskvskiwinskiwizzi (I purposefully misspelled that name, by the way, because I hate Duke, and therefore hate him by proxy).

[7] - I had a roommate that exclusively fed Snake rotten food. He loved spinning Snake around in the menu screen until Snake puked the poisoned food back up. Admittedly, I thought this was funny as hell.

[8] - Rumor is, Kojima wanted to release the game with the following feature: death is permanent. Dying automatically would wipe any MGS3 saved games from your memory card - actually "killing" your progress in the game. Knowing him, he wasn't going to advertise this 'feature' until the game was out -- I imagine he would do his best to keep the secret, Rayden-style (remember MGS2: Sons of Liberty?). This is such a mischievous and evil maneuver that I can think of very few parallels in gaming history. I love it.

[9] - I've always been uncomfortable killing beings clearly meant to be humans in videogames, and I usually think I'm alone in this way. But I'm going to ask something of you, dear reader: I want you to try this experiment sometime when playing Grand Theft Auto or MurderDeathAwesome or whatever. Pretend that every human you kill has a family to take care of. A wife, expecting. An ill uncle to take care of. A boyfriend who was planning to pop the question later in the day. A stack of half-finished poems that could revolutionize the literary world. Then pull the trigger.

[10] - Except for that RPG thing that fires nuclear warheads.

[11] - Plus, if you play the game backwards at half speed on an old belt-driven turntable, you can clearly hear Lennon say "Paul is dead."

[12] - And on.

[13] - Yeah, it's a bunch of compound fragments strung together. Just be happy there are not any dangling participles around.