VG Vivisection

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A few weeks ago, my best friend and I decided spend the last few days of our freshman year not studying, as would be the logical thing to do, nor partying, which would be the second-most logical thing to do. Instead, we decided to play Super Mario 64, right from the beginning. In the ultimate list of logical things to do at that juncture, Super Mario 64 is obviously #0.

I could rant for hours about how Galaxy can’t stand up to 64, about how important and trailblazing it was in the way of not just platformers but 3D games in general (and don’t try to pull any of that NiGHTS into Dreams shit on me), but I’d rather hone my focus to a few key things that stood out in my more mature playthrough. I believe I’ll start with the aforementioned (er, afore-embedded?) Koopa race.

Appropriately enough, being that this race happens so early in a game set in a revolutionary 3D world, the sequence is recanting is the old Aesop fable of the “Tortoise and the Hare” that everyone grew up with and knows by heart. In this particular instance, Mario is substituting for the hare and Koopa, being the tortoise, does exactly as his fabled counterpart does: he goes slow and steady. Of course, the inversion here occurs with the player embodying what was formerly the antagonist of the story—Mario is expected to bolt that shit out, and get to the top of the mountain pronto. Yet the inherent personality flaws that the fable condemns—carelessness and cockiness and all those other hubris-y things—cannot be present in Mario’s run, because he will lose. Instead, the player is called upon to repair the flaws, and restore the hare to his naturally successful celerity. Extrapolated further, it could be interpreted that it is the new 3D world, the new incarnation of the Mario mythos, that allows for tragically proud characters such as the hare to be restored to their virtuous (and competent) states.

Truly, the new, extra-dimensioned world Mario finds himself in is essentially a green world, where the new rules allow for greater restructuring of the previously flat world he has moved on from. We should all be so lucky.

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Sitting here listening to the title screen’s music, I’m experiencing a complex and emotional nostalgia: I remember restarting constantly after lost battles and failed expeditions and hearing the song repeat over and over; I can remember dropping the controller and fleeing the room as my monsters died and waiting for the song to signal the safety of the scene thanks to my brother; the excitement aroused by what was, at its time, my favorite video game, played religiously every day after school (despite the horror it constantly struck in me). And now, so many years later, it evokes a kind of American jubilation, an ideal of of expansion and innovation, standing on the precipice of something great and profound, while still remaining innately rustic. Watching the video backstory only underscores this: in grainy black-and-white, miners uncover a stone disc that, when properly unlocked in a shrine, allows a dinosaur to pop out.

It’s worth noting that there’s a seeming continuity issue with this story—the miners supposedly come across a very early disc, prior to monsters being a common thing in their world, and yet the shrine to unlock it already exists. Though it’s probably a simple slip-up (afterall, the game isn’t exactly known for its expansive storytelling), it evokes the idea that long-standing spiritual institutions should be the mechanism to discern and uncover the secrets and artifacts of past ages.

And where does the revelation of monster-discs lead? That’s right—battle. Battling is the principle mechanism of the game, and described to be the important feature of the game’s world. Perhaps it’s my general cynicism that leads me to connect these particular dots, but I’ll direct your attention directly back to the American ideals and long-standing spiritual institutions. Take from that what you will.

Skip forward to monster production, the crux of the game’s innovation and appeal. The general idea is that, in the game’s world, disc stones create monsters—to provide a sense of verisimilitude, the game calls for literally taking other CDs and putting them inside the Playstation so that specific algorithms can crank out a unique monster (see the Wiki for a little more detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_rancher#Monster_Generation). I’m still mystified by how the machine’s hardware is utilized in such a way that the game still operates despite having another goddamn disc inside it—and such is the general reaction meant to be engendered, as the process is meant to be an inherently mystical one. Lots of candles and lights and shit, not a whole lot of machinery, and then BAM! Monster. It mimics the reality of the act of generation pretty well.

Then comes raising the thing you’ve created. Furthering the Americanized ideals, there’s a sense of individualism at work here, since there can only be one monster being raised at a time. Week to week, the monster trains by doing manual labor of various sorts—delivering mail, being a security guard, hunting, mining, pulling carts, etc. This is the part I like more than most of the subsequent games in the series: monsters grow by doing work for other people and earning money (which basically pays for its food), rather than just doing generalized training courses. There’s a definite expectation of productivity here that simply isn’t present in later games.

Then onto battles. I don’t need to say much on this, other than that, since the goal of the game is (ostensibly) to win as many battles as you can, it’s a violent, brutish, and ultimately pessimistic means of interacting with and gaining prominence within the world.

The main thing that I can say about the game is that it does a good job of engendering utter terror in impressionable and emotional players. A not-uncommon experience in the game is for your monster to run away—after a battle, or training, or an expedition, or just for fun. And the music that plays is horrific. Like, I’m talking on par with the Requiem for a Dream theme. If nothing else, it instills pretty powerfully a sense of dread, imagining that your monster is running off in the world, getting hurt and so forth—and appropriately enough, lifespans take a tremendous plunge after such experiences.

The other noteworthy mechanic of fear is the death sequence. It’s a shame I can’t scrounge up a video, because it’s brutal—this monster, into whom tedious effort and care and support have been poured, proceeds to struggle, wail, and fall grotesquely to the ground, all set to somber music and a lifeless backdrop. This alone made me repeatedly flee the room in terror as a youth, as my beloved Dino-Monol Barney, my earliest fully-raised monster, died suddenly and horrifically in front of my eyes.

I have to respect this game if for no other reason than its rendering of death. In almost every other video game that employs killing as a plot or play mechanic, the player is desensitized to the occurrence, usually because it just happens so damn often. Yet in Monster Rancher, hours upon hours have been spent raising solely this creature, to whom the player is, on some level, bonded (despite the abusive and violent nature of its destiny). Watching your monster wither and die in front of you is certainly an emotional experience, and one that, to this day, I avoid like the plague.

RIP, Barney.

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God, if nothing else, I just fucking love the music.

When I said previously that my next post would be dedicated to Mega Man, I feel the need to clarify a little: I’m going to be dealing exclusively with the overarching themes of Mega Mans 1 through 8, with no attention given to 9 (which I haven’t had the privilege of playing yet), the Gameboy iterations, the .EXE series, the Legends series, or the X series (or the Zero series, as I am just discovering upon perusing the Wikipedia page).

I think the brilliant and beautiful Penny Arcade strip accurately illustrates a very common attitude toward Mega Man. I myself used to sit in my friend Zack’s basement when I was only about 7 playing these games and making plans to essentially be mall-going cosplayers with him being Zero, and me Mega Man (I’ll point out here, to you nitpickers, that despite Zero not showing up properly until the X series, he was one of Dr. Wily’s creations—that shit would not have technically broke canon…all that badly…). That the game’s original challenge and nostalgia are so powerful to necessitate a modern return to the retro style in every capacity (I’m of course referring to 9) speaks volumes about the importance of the series in video game development, and its cultural impact.

The more video game work I’ve done, and the more academic routes I’ve taken with it (meeting with college advisors and journal editors and such, trying to make what I’m doing more than a bloggable pasttime), the more I’ve been pushed to focus my scope, and pick out specific aspects to look at a broad scope of games with. Power structures, particularly between player and game, have become a fairly prominent theme in my analyses, and given how frustrating, careful, and weak the player is in Mega Man, it seems only appropriate that I hone in on this theme for my one analysis of it.

In the beginning, Mega Man set out to crush the errant Robot Masters, claim their powers, and defeat the rogue scientist Dr. Wily. For the first installments, player faculties are severely limited: you can shoot, and jump (neither sliding nor Rush appear until 3, nor the charged buster until 4). And even then, there are a capped number of burst shots that can be taken at a time (or at least exist on-screen), and jumping longevity is cruelly curtailed. Thus, at almost any pitfall or set of spikes, a sloppily performed jump can—and more often than not, is—fatal, particularly if there are airborne enemies patrolling to halt momentum with an attack. The Robot Masters themselves are no joke either—the blaster does very little damage, and only one other Master’s acquired power can defeat them.

Continuing with the first game, the Robot Masters themselves present a few interesting power structures: For one, in order to even begin discerning weaknesses, one boss must necessarily be beaten with the regular attack. The task is often unbearably difficult—they do assloads of damage just by brushing against you, and your pea-shooter does minimal damage. The difficulty curve for the game is as a result even higher, and the difficulty gets progressively lower as more bosses are defeated. But once a power is gained, two problems crop up: the player is now called upon to use some specious form of Rock-Paper-Scissor logic (apropos to what the designers had in mind, as revealed in a G4 interview, the Wiki tells me [“Mega Man”. Game Makers. No. 19, season 2.]) to figure out which power will weaken which boss (and as the series goes on, and the powers become more and more random and even esoteric—i.e. Gemini Man, Ring Man, Toad Man, Yamato Man—and matching strengths to weaknesses becomes a completely arbitrary task). The other problem presented is that acquired powers have a limited amount of ammo, so not only must the player correctly gauge the elemental matches, but they must also be appropriately thrifty and sparing in its use leading up to, and during, fights with the Robot Masters.

Now I’d like to shift and talk about terrain. I’ll begin with the specific instance, for continuity: One of the fascinating experiments put forth by Mega Man 8 is to divide up the Robot Masters into two separately available sets of four, for the purpose of using powers gained from the first four—namely, the electric whip-type power—to surmount terrain obstacles, in the frequent case of the electric whip being used to swing Indiana Jones-style. While this does improve the capacity for gameplay in each individual stage as well as expand the otherwise violence-centric utility of each power, it curtails the open-ended order with which a player may approach the game (for each quartet, their powers obviously only apply to defeating each other)—which could very well be considered a positive trait or a negative one, depending on the personal value of uncovering the proper Rock-Paper-Scissors order of powers, though it should be noted an extra boss must necessarily be defeated without having a weakening power by transitioning from one group to the next.

The other terrain feature I’d like to examine is spike pits. More often than not, spikes are encountered at what would be considered non-lethal altitudes—being impaled is not a physical possibility for most of the heights. So, then, why are they uniformly lethal? The primitive graphics might be to blame here, but my reaction to them now is that they aren’t lethal objects in and of themselves—they are metaphors for other environmental hazards. Keep in mind, the backgrounds for environments are usually very lush and detailed (as much as the NES could afford for the games on it, at least):

Though of course, on the last one, I’ll point out that it’s hard to deny that lava is its own hazard, and will fuck you up. It doesn’t need metaphors. And, likewise, electricity is represented as its own obstacle in other levels, but the ubiquity of some sort of super-sharp auto-impaling spikes seems a little…incongruous. It’s a fairly archaic weapon, and given the unspoken complexity and danger of the cyberindustrial levels, it, and I intend every bit of this damn pun, sticks out a little.

So that’s it for Mega Man. For now, at least—the more I play it, the more I realize how it forces you to think ahead, adapt your strategies to enemies with unknown abilities, and time your moves in specific ways that carry speciously deconstructive overtones (in one instance I can recall, since ice blocks fell in irregular intervals, it wasn’t a matter of following an on-off binary tempo—it was expanding the binary to time jumps in the interstices…which is kinda like deconstructionism…kinda…). But this was my fun interlude, and I hope it brought some depth to your retrospect.

The Virtuous Mission, my ass. Virtuous only insofar as innocence and a romanticized sense of duty constitutes virtue. And indeed, that’s precisely how the game starts—Snake arrogantly flicks his cigar away in an unnecessary slow-motion sequence, he wears that dumb mask as a way of playing a joke on returning MGS2 veterans, and his mission is clear: go in, get Sokolov, get out. He is told to make no contact with the enemy, and is warned that failure will likely result in his forced acceptance of the jungle as his new home, effectively framing it as solely a foreign battlefield. He is carrying out a heroic mission for his country against an enemy force.

That’s about as Structuralist as shit gets.

Functionally, the game is getting the player used to the controls, climbing, sneaking, and potentially killing. But what it comes out to be is an oversimplified mission—everything is too clear-cut, too definitive in its ethos. When Sokolov is rescued, it is revealed that the Russian government is in fact protecting him from a more radical faction—and so, with Ocelot’s appearance, the enemy is no longer a single entity, and the essential binaries underlying the mission begin to crumble. Ocelot, furthermore, does his damnedest to embody a cocky, slick commander—as well as a western cowboy—by twirling his gun in a rogue fashion and making trick shots. But the instant his gun jams, Snake is back in control, as his idealized showmanship gives way to the gritty response of a seasoned warrior—thus, romanticized conceptions of a soldier (as silly and hyperbolic as they are, for Snake and Ocelot alike) are beginning to fall away as well.

So when The Boss shows up, effectively tearing down Snake’s conception of country, loyalty and duty as she assaults him and defects, the rest of the tenants of reality fall apart as well. Suddenly, there are enemies that can summon lightning, control hornets, and even rain blood from beyond the grave. Reality has shattered, along with his bones and his tightly-held sense of honor.

As he lies broken, Snake is overcome with the white flash of Volgin’s nuclear blast. The jungle, as well as the rest of Snake’s world, is revealed in a hideous and sickly light as it is hurled into a disgusting sort of green world: there is no sense of honor or country, as The Boss has abandoned him and her cohort has attacked his own Mother Russia country; the jungle itself is no longer just a mission site, but also a battleground, a graveyard (The Sorrow’s skeleton can be seen among the rocks beside him), a hospital, an enemy, an ally, and even a twisted kind of home; and the pursuit of science and development, along with the lives devoted to it, are rendered meaningless in the destructive nuclear trial Volgin decides to run—even technological advancement doesn’t matter, as it just leads to self-satisfying sadism (even here, we can see Volgin’s sadistic and rapacious appetites building).

But even in spite of the hideous destruction of all the world’s stable philosophical and moral structures, we see a paratrooper coming in to rescue Snake, haloed by the blast as he descends. I use “halo” for the specific reason that it is an angelic force coming to provide one final salvation to Snake, one last chance for him to come back and fight against the coming bleakness of the world that he has unwittingly discovered. Undeniably, the virtue of the so-called Virtuous Mission has been blown away, in the most literal sense…it becomes Snake’s mission, then, to not let the wreckage fall into the hands of sadistic, nihilistic men such as Volgin.

I feel almost like a bastard for even trying to examine this game. Whereas many details and plot points of games are heavily influenced by necessity of technology, player accessibility, etc., Hideo Kojima knows what the fuck he’s doing. And for a long time his prowess went unquestioned by me—Metal Gear Solid changed my life when I first played it at an age far too young (I didn’t understand the reality boundaries it was inadvertently breaking in my head), and Sons of Liberty likewise threw me headlong into thinking about the importance of existentialism, self-determined meaning, and the nature of reality, long before I made more academic forays into the subjects. And of course, the definining characteristic of the games were their insane cast of villains: Psycho Mantis remains a favorite of mine (and most everyone’s), Ocelot is the Russian cowboy, and Vamp is, for someone once so obsessed with vampire mythos, among the most creepy and enigmatic villains ever. And both MGS1 and 2 were very good about providing detailed backgrounds for these characters—there was usually a lot of build-up to each fight, and if a player was like me, they could spend hours listening to inane codec calls trying to find out obscure points about them. They were the core of the game, as far as I was concerned, and responsible for so much of the gripping intensity and overall pleasure of the game.

So when I first got to Snake Eater, I was fucking pissed. Maybe once or twice, outside of their boss battle, I saw the Cobra unit members (excepting, of course, The Boss). There’s little to no background provided for each of them, beyond “The End invented sniping”, “The Fear’s got a bajillion joints in his body”, “The Pain is covered in beeeeeees” and so forth. But the depths of their personality, and their intrinsically linked insanity, is never explained—sure, The Fury fell through the atmosphere and was burnt, so he flamethrowers everyone else, but how can that top Vulcan Raven’s obsession with his spirit raven, or Sniper Wolf’s tragic backstory and collection of wolves? And this remained my attitude until several weeks ago—that the game, while technically superior, fell short as far as plot and characters went, which are really what the series is known for.

Then I realized, after a lengthy discourse on Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, that the reason each Cobra wasn’t fleshed out is because they aren’t individual entities. They aren’t even villains, in their own right—they’re manifestations of the emotional hardships Snake experiences while fighting his way through the jungle. In short, the Cobra’s are Snake, and defeating them is Snake coming to grips with the horrifying world he’s been thrust into. Whereas the other installments have told you all about the plot and characterizations and so forth, Snake Eater shows you. And that’s a big step forward for the narrative.

Now, what do I mean by “horrifying world”? Aside from the obvious dangers and survival techniques absent from the old games—no radar, deadly animals, a need for food and proper medical care, enemies that can actually see beyond their goddamn blue cones of blind-as-hell vision—the world itself can only be characterized as bleak, chaotic, and devoid of sound existential meaning. Heroes, villains, honor, patriotism, dignity, disgrace, battleground, mission—these ideas simply have no meaning in the jungle. More on that, after I delve deep into the first episode of the game. Suffice it to say, the only thing the jungle values is survival—and survival is blind, unfeeling, unmotivated, and ruthless. The jungle simply doesn’t care. Thus, the game forces the player to answer the question: why bother anyway? What’s the point of this arduous, terrifying, and possibly useless mission?

On a more technical note, being that I’ve played through this game before, I realize that I’ve become accustomed to simply tranquilizing any inconvenient enemies and them murdering them viciously with my survival knife. I’ve resolved to take an ascetic path through the game, refraining from killing whenever I can (except, of course, for food-gathering), on the grounds that this is necessarily a stealth game, and Snake, as a canonical character, has always denounced killing. I’m gonna do my damnedest to listen to him, in spite of the chaotic, postmodern world he fights in.

That’s my general introduction to the game. Keep in mind, I have not played Guns of the Patriots, so any claims or theories I put forth regarding the series’s larger canon is completely speculation that I realize might not hold true, and as such, I will try to minimize my insertion of them. Once MGS4 drops for the 360, I’ll be all over that shit—but for now, I hope you enjoy what I have to say about this particular masterpiece of gaming literature. I just pray I do Mr. Kojima’s work justice.

I remember when I first encountered this magnificent fight, and Sephiroth dropped out of the sky, one-winged and all, I nearly shit myself.

I am a man who has spent many, many hours replaying video games—I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone through most of the Final Fantasies, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana and Evermore, and god only knows how many other damned RPGs (to say nothing of the vast list of genres that appeal to me otherwise). Being that I’ve somewhat become proficient at playing these games through—leveling to proper degrees, outfitting my characters correctly, teaching them good skill sets, etc.—a large part of the replayability lies in the optional sidequests that almost ubiquitously inhabit RPGs.

Aside from often providing the most consistent challenge in an otherwise conquered game, sidequests, more often than not, carry the necessary burden of worldbuilding—I recall Chrono Trigger specifically, wherein each of the sidequests at the end of the game is designed to resolve an individual character’s personal conflict and flesh out their being infinitely more than the entirety of the linear plot has; for example, given that Frog’s sidequest gives the player an oportunity to explore an otherwise innocuous and unimportant island in the game, become personally invested in the conflict, and resolve it, demonstrates that the world of Chrono Trigger is one which proper honors must be bestowed upon those worthy of them, lest they wreak havoc well into the afterlife.

So when I come to Kingdom Hearts, the sidequests are an impressive letdown. Neither Kurt Zisa, nor the Phantom, have any actual worldbuilding or character-developing qualities—they simply are enemies that Carpet and Tinkerbell, respectively, want you to go kill because they’re wreaking havoc. So what? There is no revelation about Kurt Zisa’s nature when he is defeated—he simply dissipates, and the game goes on; essentially the same happens to Phantom. Why is the Phantom haunting Big Ben and manipulating its clock? Who the fuck knows—the only thing that matters is getting rid of it, end of story.

Sephiroth has a bit more weight to him, as he is a cameo from a well-developed plotline. And it is certainly worth consideration how the Coliseum got ahold of him (to say nothing of the Rock and Ice titans), summoned him, and had him confine his phenomenal cosmic powers to that tiny arena with some punk-ass key-wielding kid. The implication to be derived from the setting is that the Coliseum is, not surprisingly, a heroic nexus—a space where all manner of heroes and villains come to prove their valor (or treachery). Sephiroth’s appearance in his true, one-winged angel form furthers this notion by providing that the nature of the Coliseum is that it brings out one’s true identity; in the pursuit of glory, one must necessarily expose their true being in order to be capable of receiving said glory.

But what of the repeatability of the duel? Why can Sephiroth be constantly summoned to battle, over and over and over? There is a part of me who would like to argue that the Coliseum is, in fact, a surreal setting, and that the battles that take place there are not necessarily even happening at all. Surely, Hades has a few neat tricks up his sleeves—but summoning not one, but TWO titans to repeatedly do combat in such an arena? That just breaks the reality barrier as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps, then, in fighting to the more epic matches in the Coliseum, one fights more and more abstract enemies—Sora grapples not with the literal Ice Titan, but the chilly terror it embodies (which is reduced to a tiny charicature of itself when defeated, as it flees comically). Likewise, Sora is not literally dueling Sephiroth, but instead fighting with the ultimate archetype for an antihero—and in conquering that battle, proves not only his as a hero, but as an almost religious force that can dominate the powers that fall from grace as one-winged angels. Therefore, it can be said that the sidequest to defeat Sephiroth fleshes out the Coliseum as a surreal battleground where one not only faces opponents, but fears, and even absract archetypes.

More valuable than any of these is the 100-Acre Wood sidequest. Here, combat is no longer an issue—whereas the rest of the game has taken Disney movies and injected a twist of violent darkness, the 100-Acre Wood stands as a world of literary purity. In recovering the pieces of the world, Sora is able to immerse himself fully into the Taoist stories and morals that underlie the original Winnie the Pooh texts, and gain an entirely different vantage point regarding his duty to protect these worlds. I’ve decided not to focus on the individual minigames that accompany the sidequest, but rather on the importance of accessing it: Throughout the game, Sora collects Torn Pages that are fragments of the book the world is contained in. By reassembling them properly, Sora is able to reconstruct an entire world—not fend it off from Heartless onslaught, but engage himself in the purely creative act of rebuilding the book. As such, when he is granted access to the world and finds animate characters that exist just as all the other encountered characters do, a new driving virtue is revealed to Sora: in seeking to protect each world, he also seeks to protect the very vitalic creations each has—not merely the world, but the creations of each world that necessarily possess their own life, are just as important to defend from dismantling effects of the Heartless.

Beyond that, the sidequests are rather inconsequential—finding each of the 99 dalmatian puppies, activating each Trinity, constructing Ultima Weapon—each of these, while materially valuable within the context of the game, do not make the universe of Kingdom Hearts and more multidimensional, beyond the profound existance of reward-bearing dogs that miss their puppies. Luckily, I find Kingdom Hearts to be a game that does not rely on sidequests to flesh out its world—throughout the game, I am continually sucked in by the already lush philosophical atmosphere it presents. These sidequests, then, are just the icing on an already-delicious cake.