Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

Electric Challenge #14 wants us to talk about a game we're excited to see happen.

For me, that's easy. I'm looking forward to the full game release of Nanotale, the second of the Typing Chronicles games. Which, of course, is the sort of thing where someone goes "A typing game? Why would you be excited about that?" And, to some degree, it's because of playing Epistory, the first game. For someone who really loved the origami sequences from Kubo and the Two Strings, to have an entire world unfolding and springing up as you go along is a fantastic aesthetic. The main character is a girl riding a fox, and the girl (or the fox) slings magic that defeats the insects that are in the world. (And that removes obstacles in the path of the girl and the fox.) And, even more helpfully, the pieces of the narrative, as they are said, appear in text on the world, and then stay there after they are narrated to be examined.

Another thing to like about the game is that setbacks are small. Since it's a story being narrated by the protagonist (or at least, the girl on the fox is the protagonist), if one of the chitinous creatures reaches her, it cuts out, the narrator goes "no, that's not what happened," and the story restarts at the last checkpoint. This is a thing a player will get used to happening at the setpieces of each chapter's story, as well as optional locations and battles scattered throughout the world, where the girl and the fox are in the center of an onslaught by the creatures and the player has to type quickly and accurately to drive them away. During these particular segments, the narrative text and audio are signals to the player of about how far they are through the battle, as each segment is usually about one quarter of the battle, although they can sometimes feel a lot longer than that because many of the creatures being battled take multiple words to defeat.

Assisting the girl and her fox is that over the course of the game, she gains control over four elemental powers: fire, ice, electricity, and wind. Fire burns anything it touches, which in this case means that a creature hit by fire that had multiple words to defeat will have the next word slowly burn up and disappear without having to be typed. Ice freezes things, so an ice strike stops the creature from advancing temporarily. Electricity bounces between creatures, so nearby creatures that have multiple words left to defeat will have one of their words struck if a creature nearby gets hit with it. Wind pushes back any creature it comes in contact with, whether it's the target or any other one in the way, which can be handy to use to target creatures just arriving and get the ones ahead of them to stay back for a bit. Switching between the powers requires typing their names, with the exception of electricity, Instead, to keep it fair, the player has to type "spark" to switch.

Because the game needs to have a narrative structure, of course, some creatures and elements of the landscape can't be defeated or interacted with until the girl and fox have obtained the proper element. Without the element, the creatures and features that require it are rendered in other scripts. There's usually at least one segment on each of the elemental places where the girl and fox are being chased by creatures they can't defeat yet and so they have to avoid them long enough to collect the element in question.

At the core yes, they're typing games meant to help people improve their touch-typing abilities, but the story and aesthetic of the first one was so good (and the game itself, even chasing all the extras, was fairly short) that I think it's worth playing. And I'm looking forward to the full game of the second offering.

The 12th Electric Challenge Stage asks us to describe "the most epic scene ever in a game."

For more than a few people of my generation, that would be the end of the first disc of Final Fantasy VII, where the antagonist, Sephiroth, drops in on the party and kills Aerith / Aeris Gainsborough. Not in a resurrectable way, either. She's killed, and for all intents and purposes, the hope of a good resolution to the story goes with her. Up to that point, for many of the game-players, they hadn't experienced a situation with permanent death, and at a particularly strong hope spot for the game. I'm curious as to how that same scene will be handled in the remake, now that it's old enough that people know it's coming.

There's also the establishing shots of Final Fantasy VII, which zooms it extremely effectively from a lone flower girl in a street to showcase the entirety of the city, before zooming back in again on a different part of town where the action is set to begin as a train comes screeching to a halt just outside a Mako reactor.

Before that, or in conjunction with it, the opera scene from Final Fantasy VI is pretty memorable, whether because it's a freaking opera or because of the attempt by the sound chip to emulate voices that didn't go as well as the players might have hoped.

And there's the first time that the party characters witness the Day of Lavos in Chrono Trigger and vow to stop it from happening at all costs. The setpieces in Square games are always really well-scripted for the narrative purposes they intend to accomplish.

But what about the music video sequence as the end credits of Plants vs. Zombies? Or, for that matter, the promise of new adventures that happens when you rescue the princess from Bowser's clutches (or the classic refrains of "Your princess is in another castle" or "Oh, thank heavens! I'm back to my old self again!") Are those any less epic than, say, the various Couch Gags of Mario destroying the Koopaling castles in Super Mario World? Or the animated end sequence of Dust, which promises further possibilities for Dust, Arah, and Fidget in the future, even if no further games have happened?

Do romhacks and speedruns count, too? It can be pretty epic to watch someone play games blindfolded or to watch a tool-assisted speedrun that loses three of its four white mage early on and then proceeds to win Final Fantasy I by manipulating luck and using the mechanics of the game as they were intended to be used, even if the result is that the final boss flees rather than is defeated. Or to see the engine-exploiting tricks of high-level competitive play or tricks performed in service of speed. The idea of being able to understand a game so completely as to do things that would seem impossible is pretty epic. (I got a much smaller version of this when I finally figured out how to consistently pull off the super pogo jump in the Commander Keen games.)

Is a particularly epic cascade in a match three game the very best thing, or a similar cascade done in Tetris or PuyoPuyo just to watch the lines melt or the Puyo penalty stack up completely? I've had a few of those, too.

I dunno. The one that I kind of come back to, because of the art and the music direction, and the way that it weaves a certain thing throughout the series are the Dives To Heart in the various Kingdom Hearts games. They set difficulty levels, and give tutorials, but the stations of awakening are gorgeous (especially when you look at KHIII and see the technological improvements) and I'm always a little sad that the particular music for those games almost never shows up again as the game progresses. Because it would be interesting to see how the game might work if there were more regular Dives. Even after many years of waiting, the Dive is still one of my favorite parts of any given Kingdom Hearts game.

The tenth Electric Challenge stage asks us to talk about our favorite adaptation of a video game.

That cuts the space of the available possibilities down significantly. Unless, that is, the thing you are thinking about is already a transmedia property or originates and has some amount of fandom in Japan.

Because outside of Japan, movies or television shows of games happen very rarely, and they tend not to be A-list productions (things like DOOM and Bloodrayne come to mind), and it is much more likely that you will have games of movies instead (which are also often less than A-list productions, and I'm not just thinking about E.T. here.)

If I were going solely on nostalgia value, because I am an adult of the appropriate age to have seen this in occasion, the Super Mario Brothers Super Show (where, we note, Mario is played by a professional wrestler turned comedy actor, Lou Albano) old certainly rank highly, mostly for the animation segments, rather than the live action ones that strung together a sitcom-like plot and few appearance of various guest stars. Mostly I was there for Harvey Atkin's King Koopa, as that's basically how I have imagined every incarnation of Bowser ever since, even though most of them haven't been voiced in game or otherwise. And then there are the Legend of Zelda segments, which made a bit of a catchphrase meme, "Well, excuuuuse me, Princess!" in addition to being a loose adaptation of the Nintendo Legend of Zelda games.

But that's not a favorite, just a trip down nostalgia lane. (And I never did see the movie called Super Mario Brothers that came out in the 1990s.) It would be the same thing if I were talking about Jaleel White's Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons as the Sega Genesis era came into prominence. Also enjoyable, but not necessarily a thing that would qualify for a favorite even with the nostalgia boost.

There have been a few different series about games, like ReBoot, or games that came after movies, like Enter the Matrix, but when it comes to adaptations of games, most of the available space is animated adaptations of games, whether as short series, or 26 (or more) episode shows.

And many of the ones I can think of in that regard are in the "MMO where people are trapped without the ability to log out" like the .hack franchise or elements like Sword Art Online. Or ask questions like "Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?" (Which is an actual title.) Most recently, I've been seeing a series that takes the idea of "a person has been reborn into an MMO of some sort and needs to find their way out using the skills of the class or monster class they've been locked into," which might make for an interesting game, if the game came first. (But a lot of these things are light novels first and then adapted into other things, instead of games first and then adapted back.)

I forget, actually, whether the first series of .hack games came before .hack//SIGN, and whether the second series of games precedes .hack//roots, but the thing about those is that the animation and the game, except for .hack//roots, aren't even about the same characters, so they're mostly not actually adaptations of each other, they're transmedia properties instead. Augh.

Lastly, it's actually difficult to condense the interactivity of games into an adaptation, because unless it's Clue, and they show you the random ending, or all of the endings, the character takes a single pathway through the game and makes particular choices, some of which you might agree with, some which you might not, and there's usually not any sort of "but wait, I wanna see the one where they took a different route!" feature possible. Because, one, filming that many alternate scenes would be recreating the game itself (and people were very meh on games that were essentially full-motion clips with decision trees, unless they had gotten the attention of the Congress as corrupting the youth, as Night Trap did), but also, two, that's a lot of additional footage to animate or shoot, and very little in television or film works on an extravagant budget to be able to do that kind of thing. So, no matter what decisions get made about the path the game is taking, there will be some fans that are not on board with that decision.

And then there are games like Dust that I would love to see get adapted, and they probably won't, or the Typing Chronicles games.

So, favorite adaptation of a video game, then. It's not going to be Pokémon, even though I have a soft spot for Team Rocket's least competent trio the older I get. I think I might have to cheat and say something like PAC-MAN 256, which is a game adaptation of a game. The grind on it is awful for the last achievement, but as an endless runner form of Pac-Man, it's really a quite good adaptation of the original game.

Electric Challenge #8 asks us which of our fictional worlds we would most enjoy living in. At which point I realize that most of the worlds that I have played games in, I may not be all that interested in being a part of, unless I end up being a protagonist. Being an NPC in a lot of games is pretty dangerous, whether it's the roving gangs of adventurers, the villains doing their best to level everything, and how difficult it would be to have any kind of comfortable living in many of the fantasy worlds that I've been in (or their technological dystopian counterparts.)

Like, I also want to know whether I'm living in the world where the adventurers find the True and Golden Ending and everything is the best they can be or whether we're in the ending where the heroes fail and we're on our way to the worst of the Bad Endings. That's stressful enough on this reality.

In terms of worlds I've played where it wouldn't be terrible to live in, the world of Pokémon seems like it would be a good fit. I could continue to do the profession I do, and perhaps the kids and I would have friendly trainer battles and the like, and even though there's always the local crime syndicate that has to be dealt with, they can be dealt with by kids with sufficiently powerful Pokémon. As an NPC, being in the Pokémon world seems like it's a relatively safe bet without too many potential world-destroying events happening.

And who knows? I might end up being one of the Gym Leaders. Although that would mean having to specialize in a type of Pokémon, wouldn't it?

If it were the kinds of worlds where I knew I would be heroic and that I would find the right pathway to the best ending, it would be good to be part of the Kingdom Hearts universe, mostly for the opportunities to traverse the worlds and keep the light strong. Or possibly study under the Master who figured out how to bridge both his light and his darkness.

Electric Challenge #6 asks us to talk about our favorite soundtrack, and this is the one where I go "but there are so many good ones, can I possibly choose one?" I tend to cue into music as one of the things that helps determine whether or not the game is good, so I have a large collection of possibilities for good soundtracks. Good soundtracks have loops that don't become grating, battle music that remains exciting even if it's battle one thousand, boss and optional battle musics that are a step up from the regular ones.

( Time to wax lyrical, even though generally tend not to like the vocal pieces in an OST )

Electric Challenge #4 has a lot it would like us to do: declare our favored genre, select the three best examples of the genre, select our favorite character from each of those three games, and then make recommendations for fanworks that involve at least one of those three favorite characters. Bit of a Puzzle Boss, that one.

If I am going to talk about the genre that I've played the most of and enjoyed quite a bit of, It's going to be the RPG, since those genres often don't require as much twitch-reaction skill as they do turn-based strategies, although that's not actually true, really, either, as there are plenty of RPGs with elements or minigames that require either more twitch-type skills or the ability to think tactically because there's some amount of Active Time Battle idea going on, or they're really a stylish action game with RPG elements, or they're a first-person shooter with RPG elements, and so forth.

RPGs are not the first games I played, partially because I did a lot on arcade games (simple loops are easier to understand), but in the big adventure game blitzes of earlier, and as part of my beginning console work when I was young, the RPGs were the things that stood out the most, or at least, the things that I wanted to replay and have a lot of time invested in were the RPGs.

I started on PC with the Quest For Glory series, as best as I remember, on the remade version of the first game, and branched out from there into Square's RPGs, starting with the original Final Fantasy. But just about all of my major genres are ones I started in early, and I've been playing them for decades now. And I've seen the genre branch our into various specialized forms and to have other game styles adopt "RPG elements" when what they want to have is a progression system andor a set of elemental weaknesses, special powers, and other things that are elements derived from tabletop and RPG kinds of games.

So, in the RPG department, there are a lot of different styles of RPG, and so I thought I would grab a couple of different styles and talk about the ones that I think are the best of their style.

Console RPGs have, for a significant amount of time, been the province of the Eastern RPG (sometimes referred to as JRPGs, given that a lot of them come from companies headquartered in Japan and are marketed to Japanese audiences, with some of them then getting international releases and coming across to the United States or other markets. For a significant amount of time, the companies Square and Enix had differing flagship series that took theRPG genre and worked it in different ways. Square's RPGs generally were third-person and featured some pretty flashy battle sequences and effects associated with the characters and their skills. Enix's RPGs shifted to a first-person type battle sequence, with a rolling readout of what happened in each combat round, much more like a tabletop RPG might do. The two companies merged later on in their lives to form Square-Enix, and most RPGs that want to work in the Eastern RPG style of genre have to contend with Square-Enix's dominance and large audience reach. And the fact that one company has both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest under the same roof.

This will sound unoriginal, I'm sure, but one of the finest-designed RPGs of the Square / Squaresoft era was Chrono Trigger. It's a time-spanning story that starts with the everyperson who turns out to step up to the challenge and gather a lot of allies along the way. Well, okay, it actually starts with a princess ditching her handlers and going to the fair to have fun, where she runs into one of the locals, drafts him as her traveling companion for the fair, and then goes to watch the local technologist's daughter demonstrate a working short-range teleporter. Unbenownskt to everyone, including the princess, her family heirloom pendant is actually supercharged with magic and interferes with the teleporter, turning it into a time gate that dumps the princess, her companion, and the one who built the teleporter several hundred years into the past, where they accidentally change the past through a useful coincidence. And from there, the time only gets twistier.

It's difficult to have a favorite character from this particular story, as the ensemble itself has a feel to it where all of them have specific stories that occasionally interact, and that occasionally, those characters need help from someone else to complete the tasks they want to achieve. There's a playable character from eachof the eras the time team meets, with the exception of the Day of Lavos, which is prety nice.

Since so much of the game is about teamwork and working together (even if I do like that all of the women on the cast are able to be powerful and to exercise the power they have), the fanwork I want to highlight is Chrono Jigga, which takes the soundtrack of the game and mashes it up with Jay-Z's Black Album vocal tracks. Which sounds like the sort of thing that shoud go completely wrong, but instead turns out quite well. (And all of thosetracks are fanworks, thanks, so that covers the "three or more" bit.)

To go in a completely different direction, the strategy-RPGs from Nippon Ichi might sometimes be called "stat-RPGs" in that they often have ridiculously large caps for levels, statistical categories, and the other numerical elements of the characters under the player's control and the enemies those characters will face. Often times, because of the vast swaths of post-narrative content are locked behind some one of the most important parts of figuring out a NIS game is how to power-level effectively so that a character can jump from creation to being an effective fighter as fast as possible. You can sink an awful lot of time into those games in between unlocking bits and pieces of the content that's available.

While I've done a lot of those games, and one of them, Phantom Brave, is the only one I've actually made it all the way through the post-game content for, the original Disgaea is the one that I've liked the best, and it's pint-sized powerhouse of a demon overlord, Laharl, is absolutely hilarious in his ambitions and…lack of loyalty among his underlings in the scramble as to who will become the next supreme Overlord of their partcular underworld. It's not Laharl, with his supreme aversion to sexy bodies (Laharl identifies as male, and so "sexy bodies" in this particular case means "women characters with larger chests") who is my favorite character in this series, but his most loyal vassal, Etna. Etna is absolutely looking for whatever opportunity she can to stick with the winners, whomever that may be, and she has spent a significant amount of time trying to kill Laharl or otherwise usurp his authority and become Supreme Overlord herself. Because Laharl is supremely tough (and because he has a few other people looking out for him), Etna's attempts do not succeed, but her cheery willingness to look out for herself makes her the best demon that she can be.

Have some Etna fanart, with her preferred weapon type from the game, a spear. Then, several of the main cast reimagined as Prinnies, the lovable but expendable explosive penguins of the underworld, d00d, and one more of Etna in her full Beauty Queen self.

Finally, yet another different style of game, the "action-RPG," where RPG-style progression, elemental counters, and other elements usually present in the tabletop-derived games are layered on top of a stylish action kind of game, where combo attacks, timing blocks and dodges take on additional importance for success. I'm not actually all that fond of the trend of many games to move in this direction, as a large amount of the reason that I got into RPGs was because they had great story and they didn't require a significant amount (or any) twitch-action skills to be good. (And that I could eventuall achieve numerical superiority so that even the RNG would have difficulty keeping me from my goals.)

I will still play a lot of those games, though, if their stories look interesting, and "interesting" is one of the kinder adjectives used to describe the overarching and twisty plotline of Kingdom Hearts. The current lines, so far, have been about children on Destiny Islands proving their island's name is quite true, and they go forth and interact with worlds based mostly on Disney films and properties. Then they introduce the villain, and the Organization that is looking to assist the villain, and they spend a lot of time on those things, in such a way that you have to have played or watched the cutscenes of all of the games for everything to make sense.

And that's before the other plot that's weaving in continues lurking in the background, about how the current Keyblade War is only the latest Keyblade War, and there are Foretellers and the Master of Masters and, as of the most recent DLC, a particular character who was only hinted at might be much more important than we had originally determined. And possibly an attempt to resurrect something that had been previously changed.

Who's my favorite from Kingdom Hearts? Well, there are a lot of possibilities, but I have a particular soft spot for Naminé, Kairi's Nobody, who has the power to manipulate memories. And who eventually ends up working with the heroes instead of with the Organization that holds her prisoner. Unlike the other aspects of Kairi, Naminé gets to make progress, on-screen, and has more than a few biting remarks involved as well. Her storyline is the developed one, and she doesn't, at any point, end up being fridged or dismissed by the narrative. So it's pretty good.

Here's a nice bit of fanart with her and Roxas, Sora's Nobody. And before he began work on RWBY (and then passed well before his time), the sixth installment of Monty Oum's Dead Fantasy series, pitting Team Ninja's Dead or Alive against Square-Enix's Final Fantasy cast has Naminé as Kairi's Super Mode, putting her abilities with Keyblades to some significant use. This is the sort of thing that helped get Monty into Rooster Teeth in the first place. Finally, serie11 made me a very nice gift of Kairi and Naminé helping each other with expressing their feelings to their someones special.

Wow. That's a lot to have gotten done for a single challenge. But now it's finished.