A photo of me proofreading the final draft of my book, 2013

It’s been roughly 4 years that I’ve been living in China, and in another 2 months and I’ll be back home in Australia, ready to start the next chapter in my life. After having made some close Chinese friends over the first year or so of uni, in 2008 I decided that I wanted to do a half-year exchange as part of my university course. Leading up to my departure, I never once thought about what would happen when I got there. It just felt right. And so I didn’t think about it. Facing the same situation now, but in reverse, I still haven’t thought about what it’s going to be like leaving China and going home. Once again, it just feels right. So, if there were any moment to reflect on my time in China, that moment would probably be about now, while I’m still here and have it all on the brain.

Now, despite what some people in my family might think, living in a country does not make you an instant expert on the culture. China is really complicated and I have less of a clue of what’s going on than any of the billion+ people living here already. Still, even though I can’t write about China with much authority, it’s good to finally get these ideas out in the wild. If you have any questions, then let me know in the comments. I’ll have more games-related content soon, but probably not a great deal. Most of my recent attention has been focused on book #2, which you’ll probably hear about in the next few months.

Oh, and for clarity. I did some travelling in China in 2006. In 2008, I spent 6 months in Shanghai as an exchange student. In 2010, I worked in Wuxi, Jiangsu, as an ESL teacher for more than a year and a half. And since 2012 I’ve been working in Shanghai.

The Greatest Civilisation on Earth

China is without a doubt the greatest civilisation on Earth. Some people get a bit riled up when I say stuff like this, as if I’m some kind of China-file (which is not true, I hate China-files and am far too critical of China to be one), but I speak from a more objective point of view. Chinese civilisation is one of the earliest in human existence. It’s home to twenty-two provinces, five autonomous regions, and four municipalities, most of which have their own history, culture, local foods, and dialects. There are also fifty-five ethnic minorities. China invented gun powder, the printing press, the compass, and paper (四大发明), among other inventions. Some Westerners tend to think of China as this giant monolithic structure where everything is uniform, but once you come here, you realise that China is more like an Asian version of Europe that’s been brought together as one country.

And so it changed my life…

Since living in China, I’ve unearthed and developed my passion (writing and analysis), learnt to live independently, become an experienced teacher, improved my Mandarin, made a whole bunch of great friends, and found my partner for life (yes, a wife). It’s these things which have allowed me to take ownership of my life and become a more assertive, stronger person. And for that, I’ll never forget this place.

Keeping in Good Spirits

I don’t think of myself as someone who gets depressed much, but with writing being a rather solitary and raw experience, the high expectations I put on myself, being in a strange and alienating place, and not being able to see my partner for several days at a time (as was previously the case in Wuxi), it can get pretty hard to remain in good spirits sometimes. I don’t feel like I had this problem too much when I was in Wuxi working with a team of foreign teachers, all of which were good friends, but in Shanghai where I’m the only foreigner in the office, my workmates change every week (and the people who stick around are personality-deficient, and prone to loud outbursts), and I’m not bothered making friends because I know that I’m going to be leaving soon, it can be a little trickier. Good support networks are important for anyone doing soul-dredging creative work.

Make Friends and Say Goodbye

One of the reasons why it’ll be good to go home is that I’ll be able to stick with people instead of having to always make friends and say goodbye. Such is the nature of living overseas: you can never hold onto friends for too long. After a few years, it’s left me exhausted. I haven’t been around a fixed group of friends since high school.

Orgasms in Advertising

Orgasms are often used in advertising to exaggerate “product elation”, however, I find that some Chinese ads are a little less subtle about it. I have two examples. The first is a Cadbury ad where three robot girls each consume a chocolate pod. The screen then cuts to a cg pod with the white liquid inside bursting out, before cutting back to the three girls trying to quietly hold back the sensation. The second is a Pizza Hut ad where a lady takes a bite of pizza and then orgasms as the cheese strand extends from the slice to her mouth.

Crappy Foreign Branded Products Being Marketed as Premium Purchases

Speaking of Pizza Hut, they’re probably the worst example of a company flogging a crappy product on the basis of a foreign name. Their pizzas are soaked in cheese, lack toppings, often come in strange varieties (corn and peas, anyone?), and are literally half the size of a standard Australian pizza. Yet despite the cheese soup on a mini bread base reality, Pizza Hut market themselves as a luxury restaurant of premium quality.

I’m also not a big fan of Oreos either, even though I do occasionally buy them because of the lack of alternatives. Like many chocolate products in China, they have an artificial powdery taste due to the lower chocolate content and an awesomely-high amount of sodium. Mmm..sodium. What bugs me about Oreos is how their advertising is designed to appeal to unlikeable fathers looking to win over their unrelateable son through an act of cookie and milk kinship, the good ol’ American way.

It’s worth adding that the Dove chocolate, especially their dark chocolate, is lovely indeed. Much better than the pig-fat-filled Cadbury stuff in Australia.

Chinese News

Every time I have dinner with my Chinese family, they put on the news, and I’m always surprised by how much better the Chinese news is compared to the local news back home. They have about twice the amount of world news, and a segment after the main headlines where they cover the key topics of the day in depth with lots of charts and figures. It’s worlds better than the same old crime, irrelevant local issues, AFL reports, and supplementary tabloid guff of the Australian commercial networks. The news I watch is probably around the same quality as the ABC news and 7:30 Report.

I would be remiss without mentioning that following the regular news is the CCTV news, read: government propaganda nonsense. The family always flicks over as soon as that classic opening that they still haven’t changed from the 1980s comes up.

Prostitution

In Adelaide, I knew that there were probably brothels around somewhere, but aside from walking past a few strip joints in Hindley Street, I never encountered anything even related to the practice. In China, though, I can spot a brothel a million miles away. There’s at least three of them within a 5 minute walking distance from my house.

The problem with brothels in China is that they’re there, and you know that they’re there, and for that reason I’ve thought about them more than I otherwise would have. Well, I haven’t thought about brothels so much as the moral implications of using these services. I’m not against sex work, but I think it should be legalised and regulation instead of ignored and abused by the Chinese government and certain government officials. Doing so would clear up the issues of physical abuse, human trafficking, sexual slavery, and AIDS/HIV that are connected to the industry.

Stockings and Cleavage

Where in Australia, showing some cleavage is the norm and stockings are often associated with prostitutes or open-minded people, the reverse is true in China. It can really throw you sometimes.

Collectivism at the Dinner Table

In Wuxi, I use to do a few adult and on-site business courses on cultural relations. My main focus for these classes was real-life applications of collectivism and individualism, the dominant ideologies of the East and the West, aside from free market capitalism. To introduce the topic in a familiar way, I’d use the dinner table metaphor: westerners eat their own meal by themselves (individualism) where Chinese share a selection of dishes (collectivism). From this base, you can extrapolate a wealth of discussion that can usually last for several lessons. I must admit, I do love the communal nature of sharing dishes. To use a few game terms, there’s so many natural dynamics, ways to express yourself, organic suspension of unfinished food, and emergent situations to eating like a Chinese person.

Drinking Customs

One of the things I love about China is how people drink and toast each other on special occasions. This adds to the festive nature of, say, fifteen people huddled around a round table. Usually either beer, huang jiu, lao jiu, bai jiu, or wine will be poured into rice bowls and friends can toast each other freely. Every time we have a family gathering, one of the family members, who smokes like crazy and pours his lao jiu from a large plastic jug, always looks over in my direction, encouraging me to match him, cup for cup. His enthusiasm usually extends our meals for an extra half an hour, with just the two of us clanking our bowls together.

(Correction: That’s West Lake. Tai Lake is in Wuxi)
I’m not a fan of bai jiu, a spicy kind of alcohol which has an alcohol content of 50%. The first time I had it I did four rounds in tall glasses, toasting four different members of my best mate’s family. I was fine for an hour or so, but after that, once we got home, I threw it all up and fell asleep on the couch. The other times I’ve tried it, I really didn’t like it, just because it can burn your throat.

Hardened into Place

Living here and spending a great deal of my time writing has made me more assertive, but I hope it hasn’t radicalised me too much. I care a great deal about games and politics, and push my ideas with a lot of conviction, which can probably rub some people the wrong way.

Noise

Everywhere I’ve lived in China it’s been noisy. In Wuxi, I lived on the top floor of a building next to a reasonably busy intersection. Even twenty-three stories up, the truck horns don’t get any quieter. In the last 6 months of me living in Wuxi, construction of the Wuxi subway began right next to my apartment. That’s the sound of jackhammers from 6 o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock at night, day in, day out. Although it’s been quieter in Shanghai, the pleasant ringing of jackhammers have returned twice for month-long durations as neighbours renovate old apartments. Oh, and there’s the army training that goes on on the hill next to the estates. Nothing like the sound of gun fire to wake you up in the morning. At least it’s better than fireworks going off within 5 metres of your bedroom window from 12 to 4am in the morning.

Chinese people speak loudly because they have more people to speak over. Although I understand the logic, I don’t find it any less offensive, especially from the people at work who are so disruptive that it often pushes me to an edge. I don’t know why people feel the need to yell to each other from opposite ends of an office to sustain a long conversation.

China sometimes makes me miss the hoon drivers and loud parties that we occasionally got back home.

A Point of Difference

The most important thing that one can get from going overseas is a point of difference. When you displace yourself by leaving your country, you have two options: adapt or go home. Those who stay long enough bend to the foreign culture. What separates this kind of learning experience from any other is that you’re not just tested on one small thing, but you’re forced to rethink your entire understanding of life. This is why people say that living overseas is a life-changing experience, because it literally displaces you from your culture to somewhere between your culture and the host culture. I can’t imagine living anywhere else but in the middle.

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

The Chinese government use the line “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to describe their political position. This is incorrect. China is a capitalist country with a powerful government and major state-owned players in the free market. All of their policies are in line with the dominant economic rationalism and social conservatism that has gripped the world since the Regan and Thatcher era. The current Chinese president, XiJinPing, was your typical big business free marketeer when he was running Fujian and the same is likely going to be true of his leadership of the mainland.

The scariest thing about capitalism in China is the lack of government regulation over industry. The recent pigs in the river and chicken scares in Shanghai are good examples of this.

Food

I’d be remiss to not mention Chinese cuisine. There’s just so much to talk about, I’m going to put everything in dot point form:

• Unlike Western food, Chinese cuisine incorporates spicy and sour flavours as part of the regular palette. They also apply the flavours in different ways too. So they have sweet pork and sour fish, combinations we never see in the West.
• Chinese cuisine is about flavour where Western cuisine is more about..I dunno, large pieces of meat. This is why Chinese people cook and eat the entire animal, not just the bits with the most meat, because the most flavoursome parts of an animal are near the bone.
• Chinese soups are also just water, a few spices, some oil, and a couple of large bones
• I’ve never had a problem with bones before. You just spit them out on the table or in a small bowl. Only once has a small fish bone got caught in my gums.
• In Australia, I never really liked eating fish because it had that fishy taste. In China, I’ve never tasted a fish with that odd fishy taste. And as such, steamed fish has become one of my favourite meals.
• Most of the dishes we eat at home are just meat or vegetables with a mixture of either oil, ginger, salt, sugar, soy sauce, spring onions, sesame oil, vinegar, and “cooking fish” oil.
• Each province has its own specialty foods. So, in Wuxi I often had Wuxi steamed dumplings 小笼包, which are largish dumplings with meat and sweet juice in the middle and nubbed together at the top. In Shanghai, the 小笼包 are really small, so I eat Shanghai dumplings instead, which are nubbed together and fried on the bottom.
• Noodles. I love noodles. Throughout China there are many Xinjiang noodle restaurants. Before I moved in with my Chinese family, I use to go there several times a week, sometimes everyday. In Wuxi, I was good friends with the chefs. They use to hug me every time I came around for a bowl of noodles. I remember one night when I was at KTV, my main Xinjiang friend, who I called Chris, was texting my friend, asking her where we were. Half an hour later, at around midnight, Chris came bursting into our KTV room half-naked before being yanked out by security. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was delivering noodles. Strange times. My biggest take away from frequenting these noodle shops is that I got to experience and talk about Muslim culture first-hand, something which I didn’t know much about before I came to China.
• I’m not much of a fan of hotpot. I just don’t like the flavour and it never fills me up enough.
• I love tepenyaki though. Meat and sake are a great match.
• In Chinese cuisine, certain foods match certain drinks. So, when we have crabs, we drink huang jiu because one is cooling while the other is warming (I think).
• The one thing missing from Chinese food is the oven. They just don’t use them.

If you’re interested in Chinese food this documentary, A Bite of China, is really fantastic. Go watch it.

Tea

Over the past year or so I’ve become a real tea aficionado. I always have a flask of tea by my side every editing session. I prefer tieguanyin. Later, when my book comes out, I’ll talk a bit more about why I like to drink tea when I edit.

KTV – Karaoke Television

I love KTV. I have no pitch control, but I still have fun anyways. There are two things that I loathe about it, though: all the KTVs in China basically have the same selection of Western songs and all the subtitles for the Chinese songs are in traditional characters. The reason for the latter is that the mainland KTV companies don’t want to pay royalties for using songs, so they just swipe everything from Hong Kong. This is a real pain as it makes it harder for me to sing songs in Mandarin, even though the lyrics are generally pretty simple.

I think the reason why KTV is popular in Asia, but not in Western countries is because Westerners are far too disparaging when it comes to amateur singing. I hate the association that you have to be really drunk to sing too, that pisses me off. Can’t people just go out and have a good time? Oh, and westerners always complain about how they can’t find their favourite song. I never have this problem. Chinese people, on the other hand, just go and have fun.

Being Civilised

In Chinese, the word文明, civilisation, is used quite often. It took me quite a long time before I realised that 文明 is more about being civilised than, say, the advancement of a society. This is quite an important issue in China. On public transport, there reminders for people to follow the 七不, the seven don’ts, which includes things like not spitting, throwing rubbish, and damaging public property. Cutting in line, peeing in the street, talking loudly on the phone in a public place, and smoking in crowded elevators are some of my big pet peeves. It’s so peculiar being in a country where the people are reminded to be civilised. The good thing, though, is that the younger generation is much better at this. I rarely, if ever, see any young people do these kinds of things. This is a tacit reminder of the abolishment of education during the Maoist era.

ESL Schools in China are a Rort

The ESL and training schools in China build their wealth on a culture that can’t, both politically and socially, let go of an education system that’s 50 years past its used by date. Chinese schools teach according to the traditions of Chinese education, where the teacher is the knower of all information and the student must be quiet as their knowledgable teacher imparts words of wisdom upon them. What this means for Chinese kids is a punishing diet of rote memorisation and skill and drill that drains their creativity and critical thinking skills, preparing them for a life of unpaid overtime and civil obedience. The backbone of the current education system is standardised testing, a way to measure a student’s self-worth. For the 高考, the student’s big set of exams at the end of high school, one’s exam results determine which university they get into, which then determines their ability to find work later. That is, when they go in for a job interview, the first thing the interviewer looks at is the rank of the university they went to. The applicant who went to the best university gets the job. Of course, university is a relative cake walk compared to high school, so it’s when most kids, burnt out by high school, finally have the chance to socialise, binge on online games, and bonk each other silly. So because the 高考 has such a strong effect on a student’s future, and parents need their kids to make a lot of money so that they can look after them when they get old, kindergarten, primary school, and middle school are all seen as preparation time for the big test. Thus, ESL and training skills have a thriving market of parents looking to give their kids an edge with out-of-school classes. And so the cycle continues. It’s a tragedy.

Office Bureaucracy

My current office in Shanghai thrives on a magpie-like scavenger culture born out of a shambles of management. Rather than being put in a shared communal spot where everyone can access them, the teacher resources (books, toys, flashcards, etc) are divided up by whoever can get their hands on something and hide it in their drawer. This way, if I need something for one of my classes, I need to scrounge around other people’s desks to find it. Of course, some of the teachers lock their drawers, which is great when they’re off from work and you’ve planned your entire lesson around that one resource. I have suggested to my manager (who can only politely be described as a manipulative bitch of the Chinese managerial kind) several times that this system of organisation is not only inefficient, but it turns the staff against each other. Her response is usually that if we had a shared space, all the evil part-time teachers would steal our resources.

Unpaid Overtime

In Wuxi, because I worked at a reputable chain school and the majority of my co-workers were foreigners, I was rarely exposed to the kinds of labour abuses that most Chinese people face in their working lives. Since moving to Shanghai and working at a bottom-rung training school (I needed the low works hours to finish my book), I’ve seen a lot. New teachers come and go each week. They come in all green and ready to do whatever the boss tells them, and then after putting up with a week or two of unpaid overtime, being forced to do a mountain of busy work which the manager just throws away, and no proper teacher training, they pack up and leave. The school takes advantage of this cycle as a cheap way to cover classes and save money. The unpaid overtime issue is common throughout China. I’m always amazed by how Chinese people take it, like it’s their destiny or something. I’ve discussed this issue quite a bit with my former co-workers and the conclusion I come to is this: China just doesn’t have a history nor a culture of resistance, in fact, is has a culture of inaction and submission. Fortunately, there are people fighting back. Two teachers who use to work at my current school have taken the school to court on accounts of unpaid overtime. I know that one of the cases was successful, but I’m not sure about the other.

Visa

The visa system in China is a complete joke. Not only is the process confusing, protracted, and the instructions on the government website are written in nonspeak (just like many of the political speeches which say a lot, but say nothing at all), the government allows for grey areas where foreigners can bend the limits of the law. Of course, it’s not like the laws and regulations in China are actually enforced, given the 关系, relationship, culture, the laws are more suggestion than anything else.

More Complaints about the School in Shanghai

I could complain about this place forever:

• They sometimes try to deny me holidays.
• They put students of mixed levels and ages in the same class.
• The marketing department write the lesson plans for our activities.
• When I refused to teach for 6 hours with only a half hour lunch break, they sent me to three different schools in one day.
• They made me work from 9am-7:30pm every Saturday for a year. Even though I only had to teach for 2-3 hours.
• For the first 3 months, I got full pay and only taught for an hour and a half each week because they didn’t have any classes for me. This was pretty good actually, but just goes to show how woefully unorganised they were.
• Often the teaching assistant can’t speak English, which is fine because I use Chinese, but it’s pretty ridiculous that they employ local English teachers that can’t speak English.
• They let kids play in the office sometimes. WTF.
• They pay me on the 15^th of the following month just to stop me from leaving.
• They also hold my labour certificate so that I can’t change jobs. Many schools do this.
• Sometimes they drop random kids, potential customers, on me in the middle of a class.

Despite all their shenanigans, I do like working at the current school, just because the class sizes are small, I have a teaching assistant, I don’t have to use the books, and I teach the same students up to the point when they leave the school. This means that I can have a greater impact as a teacher, something which is impossible to do at the larger chain schools.

Incredible People

In saying all this stuff about Chinese schools, Chinese people are not the robots the west tends to make them out to be. While it’s true that the school system has a numbing effect on people’s brain’s, I am constantly amazed by the creativity of Chinese people. There are so many awesome art galleries and museums in Shanghai. China produces an incredible number of gifted musicians, most of the students I teach learn a musical instrument, and Chinese/Taiwan pop singers like Jay Chou and Wang Lee Hom aren’t vapid pop culture products but high-grade musicians who adeptly shift between genres and fuse traditional and modern Chinese music. In my debating classes, I’m always impressed by how well some students grasp the underlying dilemmas of the topic question. Chinese people are often very funny too. That’s one of the reasons why I love my wife so much, she’s the only woman I know that can make me laugh all the time. Even though it’s not always so obvious, there’s a surprising amount of creativity hidden underneath China’s surface.

The Grey Line

In the same way that China has made me more concious of civilised behaviour, it’s also got me thinking about air pollution in an entirely different way. Over here, the darkened skies sometimes give the impression of a looming apocalypse. At my old apartment, it use to be so dark that I could barely distinguish the time of day, even with all the windows open. Now, everywhere I go I am always looking at the sky to judge the air quality, especially that grey line on the horizon. What I’ve noticed is that all major cities of the world have this line, or worse the entire sky is a blanket of grey (like Beijing and New York). The only place that I’ve been to that doesn’t have this horrible line is my hometown, Adelaide.

Directness Vs Indirectness

Westerners tend to be direct, where Chinese people are more indirect. The problem with directness is that it can easily create confrontation. The problem with indirectness is that it can easily create confusion. Obviously, it’s best to be direct in some situations and indirect in others. For a long time I hated indirectness, but over time I’ve grown to appreciate it. What changed my mind was that I started to see it as a more civilised way to communicate, whereby one attempts to minimise all hostility from an argument.

Social Awareness

When talking to Chinese people, I always feel that it’s so easy to manipulate them, because they have a real lack of social awareness. Part of this is how language works. So, if we’re speaking English, it’s harder for the Chinese person to counter tone and suggestion, which makes it easy to press them. And so every time I want to win an argument, I just switch to English. Other times though, I can just speak Chinese, and it’s fine. Most of it, I guess, is probably because of the nature of the Chinese schooling system. Because the students are under so much pressure to perform well from an early age, they don’t have as much opportunity to develop their social skills as much as Western students, who probably spend too much of their school life socialising.

While there’s a lot of perks to having a heightened sense of social awareness, like frequently showing up my manager, sometimes it feels like it’s too much power, especially when you come across someone really gullible or begin steering the conversation in my uncharted territory. One of the things I love about my wife is that I’ve never had this problem with her and she knows me well enough now that I can never pull the rug out from under her.

Internet

The internet over here is pretty shitty, partly because there are so many on it, partly because few English sites have servers in or near China. I’ve been using a VPN to get around the firewall for most of my time here. Although I never had to use it back in 2008 when I could get onto Twitter, Gmail, and YouTube without a problem. I’m gonna use dot points again:

• Sometimes I can get onto Google sites, sometimes I can’t. Often it cuts out. Google Plus and YouTube are basically always blocked.
• Sensitive topics (Tibet, civil disobedience, Tiananmen), uStream, all social media, porn, WordPress- and Blogger-hosted sites, and Vimeo are all blocked, just to name a few.
• Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google, is horrible for searching English terms, but great for everything else.
• Chinese people find music and video streaming services like Netflix, Google Play, and Spotify to be really strange because they can stream movies and music online for free through their Google and YouTube equivalents. So, any time I want to watch a movie, I just search in Baidu and get it instantly with Chinese subtitles. The same goes for music.
• Overseas TV shows appear online in China, fully subtitled, as fast as 24 hours from the last episode. So many Chinese fans of Western TV shows often watch them in parity with the Western audience.
• The main pages of China’s two most successful video sites, Youku and Tudou, resemble soft-core porn sites. You can tell who their biggest market is and why they come to the site.
• Sometimes Chinese ads will pop up in the corner of my browser, thanks internet service provider. Worse is when instead of going to the site I want, the url is redirect to a Chinese travel site, which is unbelievable. How do they get away with this stuff?

Short Comments

• Buying online in China is pretty incredible. Most things you buy can be received within 24 hours of the purchase, even if they’re on the other side of the country.
• Diarrhoea is reasonably common over here. I get it about once every 2 months. The problem comes from going out to eat, where hygiene practices are sometimes lacking.
• They don’t wash in hot water over here, so often my clothes still smell bad even after I wash them. This isn’t a problem for Chinese people because they don’t sweat as much as foreigners. The deodorants over here are really expensive too.
• Chinese people don’t iron their clothes either. They tend to wear more synthetic stuff.
• I’m constantly coming across new fruits and vegetables that I never knew existed before.
• Chinese people are addicted to television, especially the older generations. I guess this is a combination of the older generations having nothing to do all day and how TV hasn’t been around in China as long as it has in other countries, so it’s still interesting to them. Whether at home or abroad, I rarely watch TV.
• Chinese people always sit in the outside seat on public transport and when another passenger wants to sit in the window seat, they just shift to body a little bit to let them through. This annoys me to no end. It’s so rude.
• They say in China that two people could work in opposite cubicles for 20 years and still not talk to each other. I use this effect to avoid my co-workers.

Well, that’s everything I can think of for now, I’m sure that I’ll come up with more ideas later. If I do, I’ll try to write about them.

This morning I was playing around with doing a video commentary piece on Anna Anthrophy’s Mighty Jill Off. I’ve been meaning to write about this game’s level design for a while, but because the game’s only playable in full screen—meaning I can’t play a bit and then type about it, or quickly stress test my comments on the fly—I never finished my article. I knew that the video wouldn’t work because I needed to have taken some notes first, but I gave it a shot anyway, just to prolong my procrastination. After not getting very far, I thought that I could do something similar on Wario Land 4, and came up with the video above. It’s pretty rough (so many “it’s important”s) and I didn’t do any preparation, but I’m still curious to know what you all think of it? Let me know in the comments.

Some say that differentiating between games and non-games (like Proteus, Judith, and dys4ia) is a value judgement, but this is nonsense. In reality, it’s quite the opposite. A clear distinction prevents unfair and unfavourable comparisons between the two mediums, as some of the coverage of non-games by the games press has been of late. Here is an example of a non-game (well, not quite, but we’ll get to that in a minute) being treated as a game and here is an example of a non-game being treated as a non-game. Notice the difference?

There’s another dimension to this discussion, which is that within the definition of games, there are games which privilege gameplay and those which don’t. Think of games as existing on a spectrum of gameplay. On one side there’s pure puzzle games like Picross DS, on the other there’s games with only interactivity and a few easy challenges like Journey, and between them is, say, the new Tomb Raider game. Picross and friends are all about gameplay. They have no fancy graphics or gripping stories to distract the player, it’s just pure knowledge skills. Tomb Raider has solid, if not generic, third-person shooting gameplay, however, it often puts story and set pieces ahead of the player’s learning and mastery. Journey borders on a simulation, but because its easy challenges are compulsory, it still qualifies as a game. Because gameplay is learning and learning is hard, in recent years, game companies have been pushing the industry closer to the right-hand side of the spectrum, including more passive elements in their games so as to appeal to a larger audience and rake in more cash. That is to say, capitalism is killing gameplay. It’s no wonder I’m a socialist.

So why bring all this stuff up?

A few months ago, I caught onto the recent Twine phenomena and did a little investigating. (For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, here is a super short explanation of how Twine works). What I found was that many of the people out there claiming to be making Twine games are in fact making choose your own adventure stories and calling them games. The only game, as in interactive system that tests the player’s skill, that I could find was, incidentally enough, Dan Cox’s Cnossus, which is a game on the grounds of being so obtuse that just figuring out where you’re meant to be going is a challenge. So in response to all the misconceptions around Twine games, I thought that I’d try to make the first ever video game in Twine. No, not an interactive fiction, text adventure or a poor emulation of a pre-existing game (like quizzes or game shows), but a video game that tests player skill. Furthermore, I wanted to stick to the essence of Twine, text and hyperlinks,. After all, it’s all too easy to just import a Flash or Javascript game onto your main page and call it a Twine game. So, after stress testing a game design and story concept, I finished my Twine game last week. I’m reasonably content with what I’ve made, but it still needs to be playtested so that I can tweak up some of the gameplay challenges. If you’re interested in trying out my Twine game and giving some feedback, then please leave your name and email in the comments and I’ll send you a copy and some information to go with it. Oh, and I’m still looking for anyone who wants to discuss game design for female players. So, if you’re an avid female player or have a female friend, partner, or sister that plays games, I’d love to chat.

I’ve only just started the 15×15 puzzles, but I thought that I’d jot down a few ideas about Picross DS.

• Although Picross can sometimes seem impenetrable, the player can never get stuck, it’s all a matter of looking at the numbers and figuring things out logically.
• Hidden behind the simple premise are a range of deduction techniques that the player internalises through play. One of the game’s strengths is how these techniques organically emerge from the basic set of rules. You can read about them here.
• Because the player makes deductions by adding information to the board and deductions are made based on the current available information, every time a deduction is made, the nature of the puzzle is fundamentally altered. So in order to solve a puzzle, the player must continually re-adjust their mental orientation.
• The player can often make more than one deduction at the one time, so two players can solve a puzzle in two entirely different ways.
• Picross is about the way small actions build to a greater whole.
• Because information is Picross’s currency, filled squares are just as important as crossed squares, even though crossed squares don’t etch out the image. This is why punctuation is so critical.
• There should be a third camera control option for 15×15 puzzles, where the grid is large enough that the player must manually control the camera, that allows the player to move the camera with the d-pad and fill in squares with the stylus. This would prevent the player from having to manually switch back and forth between the scrolling and input functions.

Like Crosswords DS, which I’ve been playing semi-regularly for 3 years now, I guess it’ll take me a long time to finish Picross DS.

Breaking the News-Previews-Reviews Trinity

Thanks to the likes of Polygon and the collective efforts of Simon Parkin (I’m generalising, obviously, but these are two key examples), games journalism has made great strides over the past few years and “features” are now a significant part of most games press websites. Still, though, the uptake to long-form writing on a single game has been slow to say the least. Game-specific discussion pieces free writers from the cover-everything nature of reviews, allowing them to develop a voice and a style, assets which most games sites lack. I guess it’s up to bloggers like us to carry the torch for long-form games discussion.

Breaking the Tyranny that Publishers have over Players and Criticism

This paragraph was originally part of the preface to Rethinking Games Criticism: An Analysis of Wario Land 4.

Publishers are the dictators of the video games industry. Through trailers, controlled previews, planned leaks, media events, early access to review code, and “game journalists” who deliver PR straight from the horse’s mouth without scrutiny, publishers fuel the hype machine which sets the tone for the initial 4 months of a game’s release. The anticipation builds a near impenetrable wall of positive assumption of a games quality pre-release, which the majority of game reviewers do little to challenge. They either get caught up in it or just can’t overcome it individually—given their audience comes into a review expecting their opinions, shaped by the marketing, to be validated. This system, prolonged by DLC, traps players in a self-fulfilling cycle of purchases, which ensures continual cash flow for publishers. To discuss a game well past irrelevancy, like Wario Land 4, is therefore an act of rebellion, a move to show players an alternative to drip-fed corporate capitalism.

Freedom Vs Control

Freedom is an impenetrable beast. The positive associations of the word and the dominance of the American ideology, which ensures that said associations are always upheld, make it hard for someone to vouch for authorial control, but that’s what I’d like to do today. Freedom—as in absolute freedom, the kind that this heading is most concerned with—is destructive. You give too much freedom to a society and people will eat and rape each other. You give too much freedom to the markets and the financial institutions will rob the people of democracy. You give too much freedom to a player and they’ll choose the path of least resistance, thereby bypassing the education needed to develop their mastery of the game. Whether it be an open world game with a world so large that the designers can’t bend the landscape narrowly enough to ensure the player’s rigorously tested on the game mechanics or a strategy RPG where the player can customise their party to the point that they don’t have to play strategically, freedom can be a corrosive force in game design. Players, like students, need the guidance of a teacher before they can be let loose on their own. The more I think about, the more I believe restricted-to-freer practice is the only way to go when it comes to offering freedom in games. It seems that I haven’t finished with this idea just yet.

About 4 years ago, I started a semi-regular series of articles called Microtransactions. In these posts, I’d compile comments that were too long for Twitter, but not long enough to warrant their own article. Given that I’ve built up a few notes over the past 2 years of writing this Wario Land book, and not all of them can amount to their own post, I figure that it’s time for me to resurrect this long-forgotten series.

Cooperatives in the Business Side of the Trigon Theory

As a democratic socialist, I’m big on cooperative enterprises. When the people who make or use the services or products of a business own the business (ie. democratic ownership), instead of working to maximise profit for shareholders, like most current, privately-owned businesses, the company works for its members and the betterment of its services or products. Richard Terrell’s trigon theory of games, which you can read about here or listen about here, assumes that business’s only interest is to maximise profit for shareholders. I’m curious then, if video game companies were owned by their developers or fan base, how would that change the theory. I’d say that it’d significantly weaken the influence that business has over games (as for cooperatives, profit is necessary to survive, but it’s not the core part of their business) while strengthening the art side (as the workers would be freed from the tyranny of concentrated power at the top).

Information as Cultural Capital

About a month ago, my partner asked me to watch an episode of Miranda with her. Miranda is a UK comedy show about a middle-aged lady, Miranda, and her friends running into all sorts of self-deprecating scenarios. I didn’t think much of the show, I don’t care much for TV, but the comedy reminded me of a growing trend that I’ve noticed.

Many of the jokes in Miranda are based on the clique language Miranda and her friends use within their tight-knit circle. In many instances, it’s as though they try to make a “thing” or a “scene” out of nothing, with pop culture associations as their tool of choice. This form of comedy, I feel, is indicative of the nature of information in this current age. Information is no longer something that you know and can learn from, it’s now a fashion, a form of cultural capital. If you know something about something then you have enough capital to pretend to others that you belong to a particular membership group, which can make one appear cultured or sophisticated. It’s kind of like hipster culture, but with words replacing dress.

Social media has certainly made this way of thinking increasingly more prevalent. These networks operate on two foundations: following others (cultural membership/tribalism) and knowledge as capital (short bursts of text being the primary unit of exchange). A lot of what goes on in social media, whether people like it or not, is the use of information to define one’s brand/place their brand amongst brands which are advantageous to them. Knowledge is often used as a commodity. The contents aren’t important. What’s important is what underlying assumptions come from the information. This is exactly what Miranda and friends do when they make up silly catch phrases and nonsense words. What they say isn’t important. What’s important is that what’s said has a certain fashion which creates comical associations.

Although Star Ocean: Second Evolution‘s narrative is pretty run-of-the-mill, one minor narrative arc did catch me off guard. Early on in the game, Claude (blonde-haired hero archetype) and Rena (blue-haired introvert archetype) run into the seductive Celine (purple-haired extrovert archetype), who shows the duo a treasure map and sends them off to Krosse Cave to track down the reward. After claiming the “ancient text” and defeating a pair of gargoyles, Claude and Rena find Celine waiting for them at the cave’s exit. She asks Claude if she can join the party. Rena expresses her discomfort for the unreserved Celine to Claude, and the player’s left to make a judgement call. Having grown sick of Rena’s pathetic “I’m a shy country girl” act hours ago, I leapt at the opportunity of adding a little verve to the narrative. Rena expressed her discontent, but I wasn’t all that fazed

Later, the crew arrive in Marze and quickly discover that all the children in the town were stolen by a gang of thieves. Our buddying heroes decide to go after the crooks, but Rena, possibly as a result of my earlier decision, split from the group and joined her big-brother friend, Dias. Claude was a bit upset over the matter, given his not-so-secret crush on Rena, but, again, I wasn’t fazed, after all, Celine seemed like a more than adequate replacement for Rena.

She wasn’t.

The difficulty spikes a little in the forrest on the way to the thieves’ hideout, but unlike before, Rena wasn’t there to heal the party out of every bad situation, and Celine could only cast attack magic. I ended up exhausting my stash of healing items and barely making it out the forrest alive, all the while feeling guilty that I’d, quite maliciously, given Rena the cold shoulder. The forrest and its onslaught of thief soldiers did something which up to that point the game’s copious amount of text dialogue failed to do: it gave me a reason to care about Rena. There’s a moral to this story and I’m sure that you’ve figured it out already: the only way to affect the player is through play itself.

My discussion on Wario Land: Shake Dimension‘s mechanics can be found here. You should read that first.

Enemies

Shake Dimension has a scarce selection of enemies, most of which do a pretty feeble job at engaging the player. The ubiquitous pawn enemies, Bandineros, have less interplay than a Marumen and basically act as walking health refills. The rest are mostly simple variations on the same walk-left-to-right formula. None of the enemies drop spoils, so their interplay is one cycle shallower than Wario Land 4‘s foes and there’s no undercurrent of psychological stringing-along. If Wario grabs an enemy and shakes them, they may drop a clove of garlic or some coins. I guess the developers wanted to find a way to encourage the player to use the accelerometer-controlled mechanic, even though it interrupts the game’s flow (Wario can’t move and shake) and isn’t very interesting. The enemies all make the same strange monkey noise when you defeat them. Not only does the sound effect not suit their visual form, it doesn’t make sense that the individual enemies all make the same noise.

Rewards

Most of the game’s rewards come in the form of money bags. Wario can shake these sacks to clear out the coins inside, causing a flurry of them to fill the surrounding area. The coins disappear shortly after they leave the bag, so the process of spreading them around only leads to frustration as there’s usually a few coins that fall either out of reach or too far from Wario to retrieve them in time. Holding the sack while claiming the coins is a bit cumbersome, so it’s preferable to find a quiet corner and let loose. If I were to repair Shake Dimension, I would drastically overhaul the money sacks, if not remove them completely.

Level Design and Game Progression

Where Shake Dimension goes from being good and reasonable to bad and frustrating is in its level design. Having spent 2 years analysing Wario Land 4 and its levels, the issues with Shake Dimension‘s set of stages became apparent almost immediately. They are:

The difficulty level in each world slowly rises before it’s reset at the start of the next world. Wario Land 4 does this too (as with Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins), but avoids the issue of the difficulty falling off a cliff every few stages by 1) making that cliff relatively short and 2) specialising each of the four passages around a different part of the game system. In Shake Dimension, the cliff is not only relatively high, but the worlds are relatively unspecialised.

Because of the dash attack’s new-found flexibility and how it’s deeply embedded into the post-fold by way of level design and side objectives, all of the post-folds, regardless of the type of folding, are about speed running. In Wario Land 4, the post-fold is—aside from a few levels—used as a time-pressured way of continuing the exploration of the game idea. Because Shake Dimension‘s game ideas are restricted to half a level, they tend to be shallower than they could be. To combat this, certain concepts are started in some levels and picked up in others, usually not sequentially. It’s this mixing and matching of odds and ends, combined with occasional Subwarine diversions, that makes the game’s narrative so incoherent.

The restricted-to-freer practice that defines Wario Land 4‘s education and variation isn’t as tight in Shake Dimension, so the game has a harder time of leading the player through the rigours of the level arrangements.

The level design and optional objectives work in tandem to offer the player a multitude of ways to scale the difficulty. There are two problems, though. Firstly, the player is usually only given one shot at accessing each of the secret areas and routes needed to fulfil the objectives. Given that, on their first go, the player doesn’t know what to expect from a level, it’s easy for them to overlook the indicators that lead to said secret routes and areas. Not being able to immediately retry therefore encourages them to manually restart the level every time they miss one of the many secret hidey holes. (Incidentally, the designers included such an option in the pause menu). Furthermore, Wario Land 4‘s “try again at the expense of more time” dynamic (that makes deciding what to do after failing an optional arrangement post-fold engaging) is lost. In Shake Dimension, when the player fails, they only have one option: press on. Secondly, most of the side objectives are set high enough that the only way to beat them is to access ALL the secret areas. Yet, since the player only gets one chance at reaching each individual area, reaching them all more often than not requires the player replay a completed level multiple times. This process of making the perfect run is heavily steeped in memorisation and trial and error

Conclusion

Since I started the first post summarising everything I’ve subsequently said, I guess I should end this final post with an introduction (there’s an allusion here to folded level design, I’m sure of it), or maybe just a mini-announcement. I’m nearing the end of my stockpile of notes, so that means I can start work on book #2. It’s a bit of a relief, actually. Although I think I’ve made a few good points over the past 2 months, writing short-form comments based on notes of games I finished months, even years ago is a real drag. I can’t wait to move onto something newer and more meaty, where I can really flex my skills. Of course, I’m always playing new games, so I’ll still be updating the blog with short-form observations. I’m aiming for a frequency of one or two articles a week, so actually not much will change, will it? Besides some “fresher” writing, I hope.

Additional Readings

Wario Land: Shake It! Review – Critical Gaming Network

To wit, Wario Land: Shake Dimension takes Wario Land 4, pairs back or removes the mechanics, transformations, and game elements to a sort of proto-Wario Land 1 state and then replaces all the nuance and dynamics that made Wario Land 4 engaging with gestures that don’t evolve beyond their base level application. That’s not to jump on the “motion controls ruin everything, boo, hoo, hoo” bandwagon. In this case, the gameplay concepts themselves aren’t expanded beyond the player shaking the remote to make Wario do a particular action. The folded level design also isn’t so crash hot either, and the game has a nasty habit of making it easy for the player to fail optional challenges (often listed as side objectives, for the compulsive) and then denying them a retry, something which encourages manual restarts. Shake Dimension is a bare bones Wario game to say the least. Let’s extend on this a little though:

Mechanics

Wario’s core ability set is identical to Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land, except that the player can turn the Wii-mote to angle throws and shake the Wii-mote to shake a held object or activate an Earthshake Punch. Shaking a held object can cause coins or other treats to come bouncing out of them. The Earthshake Punch has Wario punch the ground, stunning enemies and altering certain level elements. The mechanic’s similar to Wario Land 4‘s heightened smash attack (level 2 quake), but can be activated instantly and runs on a cool down meter.

The Earthshake Punch and shaking held objects aren’t very engaging mechanics: the player waggles the controller and Wario does the action, that’s it. Although the mechanics are intuitive, as the input matches the output (shaking), there’s no variability to the motion. So, Wario can’t not do an Earthshake Punch because the player didn’t shake the controller hard enough, for example. Furthermore, the player can’t charge the mechanics like Wario Land 4‘s smash attack (ground pound), frame cut like Wario Land 4‘s attack jump, or activate frame-specific moves like Wario Land 4‘s dash attack.

Many of Wario’s mechanics are allocated to specific game elements. It’s these game elements that make up the majority of gameplay concepts—as opposed to the transformations in Wario Land 4, which are extremely paired back in Shake Dimension. These devices make clever use of the Wii-mote’s accelerometer and are much more engaging than the two permanent, motion-controlled mechanics. The unibuckets, for example, accelerate sharply when the Wii-mote is tilted, so the player must work against this nuance so as not to oversteer (more examples in the image above). I’m not so convinced of the Subwarine, though, which is fiddly and unnatural. Best to leave the submarining to Mario.

When Wario enters a red, right-angled pipe, officially called a Max Fastosity Dasherator, he can dash attack. Shake Dimension‘s dash attack is modelled after Wario Land 4‘s, but there are two significant differences:

• The player can’t end the mechanic at will, Wario must hit a wall, instead.
• Wario can change direction mid-dash, resulting in a short skid which sees him moving in the direction he was travelling for a few pixels.

These changes put a stress on the player keeping the dash attack active over an extended distance, where they can make the most of its fast speed. The folded level design and reward-based sub-objectives play into this, hiding the best rewards where only a dash attacking Wario can reach, at the end of the post-fold. This is also true of the time-based sub-objectives, which can only be met by completing most of the post-fold with the dash attack. The ability to change direction allows for more latitude in the level arrangements and plays into the mechanic’s skid nuance.

As for the other differences between Shake Dimension and its predecessor:

• The throw mechanic’s charge time is shorter, to the point that you can’t do a regular throw.
• Wario slides down slopes on his stomach. The animation ends after a set distance.
• Wario can only swim on the surface of water, left or right.
• Wario can aim his throws with the Wii-mote. Snappy and responsive game feel.
• The Wii-mote’s d-pad is made of hard plastic with sharp edges (at least for a game controller), so it’s not as comfortable to control Wario.

This is a two-parter, so stick around for part #2 where I discuss Shake Dimension‘s enemies, rewards, level design, and progression structure.

A few years ago, in the midst of a rail-shooter bonanza for the blog, I wrote a series of articles on Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. Most of what I said in those posts is also true of its sequel, Darkside Chronicles, but there’s a few comments I’d like to make specifically about the second game:

• The most immediate point of difference between the two games is Darkside Chronicles‘s higher colour saturation. It can still look a bit drab at times, but at least it’s free of Umbrella Chronicles‘s nihilistic, nearly monochromatic colour palette.

• The other thing that becomes immediately apparent is the forced attempts of playing up the horror element. Let’s explore these one by one:

Shaky Cam – During the transitions between shoot-outs it’s nausea-inducing. During the shooting sequences themselves, it’s just obnoxious. Given that the hit boxes for enemy weak points are still quite small, the hit box for critical hits are tinier still, and the enemies occasionally approach from some distance, the shaky cam only makes it harder to aim accurately.

More Talky-Talk Sequences – More than the original game, the characters talk their heads off about the supposed horror of the situation. Since the sequencing of the shoot-outs, perspective control, mechanics, game elements, and interplay with enemies aren’t structured around creating scares (some good ideas on this here), there’s an odd and somewhat comical disconnect between the fear the characters are expressing and the fear the player is not participating in. I reckon that about 2 hours of my play time was spent inactive, waiting for the characters to shut up.

Sudden Attacks – One technique which is sure to guarantee frights, and Darkside Chronicles reuses over and over again, is sudden enemy attacks. Whether zombies pop out of nowhere or interrupt one of the game’s excessive dialogue sequences, the player is caught off guard and must quickly react. This cheap trick often frustrates as the window between seeing an enemy and them taking a bite of your neck is short, indeed.

Run Away Sequences – Sometimes the characters will spot a group of enemies and quickly turn around and run because “there’s too many of them!”. The player can take a few shots before the viewpoint is suddenly yanked away from them. Given that “too many” tends to be just as many as the player had face earlier in the level, these sequences are frustrating and illogical. If anything, these sequences only encourage reckless shooting.

• Each chapter is undertaken by two characters, one male, one female. The player can select one of the two Resident Evil staples prior to each mission. The viewpoint and gameplay is a little different for each. For example, one character being caught by a zombie while the other tries to shoot it off. This is a subtle, yet significant feature.
• Branching paths also add to the game’s longevity.
•  The gun upgrades only work to unbalance and displace the selection of weapons. That is to say, what’s the point of having a shotgun when you can buff up the firepower of your pistol to be just as strong?
• Choosing your load-out, however, encourages the player to find an optimal balance between gun types and keeps a continuity going between levels. The player’s selection of weapons should be reset each story arc, though, as it doesn’t make sense that their cache of weapons can travel between different points of the Resident Evil timeline. This would also add a salvage dynamic to the initial chapters of each arc.
• Some enemies have protracted reaction animations in which they’re protected by invincible frames. The tofu mini-game epitomises this problem as, even though the animation is the same/similar to the zombies, the tofu squares have no physical features, so it’s difficult to tell when they’re about to sprint towards you and when they’re still recovering from a gunshot.
• Similarly, it can be hard to tell which objects are breakable and non-breakable. Amazingly, some windows break while others remain solid.

• This fight with William Birkim is horrible. Small hit boxes, invincible frames, and Birkin’s health bar has no relationship to how close you are to defeating him. Even when the boss’s health is whittled down to nothing, the player still needs to go through the sequence where they’re about to fall off the platform. This is a great example of how the designers betray form for the sake of contrived scares, much to the detriment of gameplay.

I played this game on Wii and would recommend a standard Wii-mote and nun-chuck setup.

It only took about half an hour of play for me to realise that Platinum Games is one of the world’s best game developers. Vanquish is a supremely well-designed action game that deserves more time than I’m about to give it. Consider these dot points as preliminary commentary for when I get back to Australia and can explore the game more thoroughly on its harder difficulties.

• The slide boost and slowmo functions are tied to a visible cool down meter, which forces the player to carefully consider when to use these mechanics and for how long.
• When the player’s health is low, the slowmo function is automatically activated. This makes it easier for them to dodge attacks and quickly retreat into cover, where their health can regenerate.
• The player can only manually activate the slowmo function after rolling, slide boosting, jumping out from cover, or slide kicking an enemy. This limitation forces the player to strategically consider their plan of attack so that they can use the mechanics in tandem to turn the tides of a fight. More specifically:

Rolling – Access to the slowmo ability encourages the player to identify the enemy’s weak point (observation, knowledge), determine when they can roll around the enemy to get a clear shot at its weak point (space, knowledge), and then execute (dexterity, reflex).

Sliding Boosting– Because Sam Gideon slides so ridiculously fast, the slowmo is activated any time the player shoots in this state, allowing them to cleanly target enemies. If it weren’t, shooting when slide boosting would clutter the game design. By joining the two mechanics, the player’s presented with a meaningful strategic choice: use the boosters to get behind enemy lines and then keep going forward or flank the enemy with a few melee moves or shotgun blasts (less cool down juice) or slowmo as you slide in, picking apart the enemy line (more cool down juice). With the former, the player risks being caught off guard by a pack of enemies. With the latter, the player risks being caught with their suit overloaded and nowhere to hide. Depending on the composition and layout of grunts and larger foes, you’ll want to vary your strategy accordingly.

Jumping Out From Cover – Access to the slowmo ability encourages the player to identify their targets (observation, knowledge), wait until they’re open (timing), and then leave the cover, line up the crosshair, and shoot (dexterity, reflex).

After Slide Kicking – The slowmo ability allows the player to follow up the slide kick with some close-range shooting. This can destroy decimate grunts and take large chunks of health off larger foes, but comes at the expense of a lot of cool down juice.

• When in slowmo, the bullets move slow enough for the player to manually dodge them. This makes the chaotic bullet-hell sequences manageable. It’s quite the spectacle.
• When slide boosting, the camera pulls back to give the player an optimal view for targeting enemies.
• Walking/running in a shooter is often a low engagement action, especially once the conflict has died down. By sliding boosting instead, the player can keep the game moving at a rapid pace.
• The red/blue colour palette of the enemies distinguishes them from the detailed environments.
• Unlike Resident Evil 4, which often allows the player to play for long stretches without being interrupted by a cutscene, Vanquish’s various battles are strung together through cutscenes which, perhaps unnecessarily, set up the next confrontation. This is a pity as these sequences lack the gameplay’s finesse, never mind the “McCheeseMo” script. Over time the expository melodrama becomes tiresome.
• Despite the innovative slowmo and slide boosting mechanics, and all the enemy and level design that works in with it, Vanquish lacks legs. The inventive gameplay scenarios keep the game going for a while, but there’s simply not enough enemy, weapon, or level design variety in the game’s second half to maintain the initial momentum. Blue-coloured grunts which cut Gideon down with their shotguns, a morphing particle boss, and sequences where the ARG suit is disabled are noteworthy exceptions.
• Vanquish shares many similarities with shmps, both in terms of aesthetics and gameplay. All of the player’s actions contribute to a high score tally, the enemies spawn in waves, some enemies let loose with a bullet-hell-esque hail storm of gun fire, and most bosses are introduced with a “warning, enemy ships approaching” alert notice, as in most shmps.

Hopefully, there will be more for me to say in the future.

When my brother and I were kids, we finished SNES RPG, Lufia II, about six or seven times between us. Every time you beat the game, in the subsequent New Game+ file, your party’s EXP is multiplied by the number of your current playthrough. So beat the game once and start a New Game+ file and your party will receive double EXP each battle. Needless to say, we adored this game. When Square-Enix announced that Neverland, the original developers, were going to re-envision the game for the DS, it seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, this gorgeous-looking dungeon crawler is full of bad design. I got a bit further than half way through the game (the Mountain of No Return, ironically) and gave up. Here’s why:

• Unlike the Zelda games, where the combat and puzzle portions are organised so that one doesn’t intrude on the other, Lufia frequently dogs the player with enemies in the middle of them pushing blocks or targeting a grapple point. Worse still, enemies respawn endlessly without any cool down period between defeating one and attacking its replacement.
• There’s little strategy to the combat. You just combo enemies until they perish and then attack their dead carcass to earn bonus gems and coins (odd, I know).
• Comboing attacks adds a lot of negative space (button mashing, in this case) to the combat design.
• There’s a ton of weird stuff going on with the combat. Hit boxes are off. Enemies sometimes flicker from one spot to another. Geemer-esque enemies in the first dungeon can take off 999 HP in one go!
• The levelling system means nothing when you can prop your party up five levels every time you game over. I jumped ten levels in the second fight against Gades and it didn’t make a huge difference. Since levelling is useless, there’s no “incentive” to participate in the tiresome battles.
• The rooms in the dungeons are too large, so the camera is zoomed in in order to prevent slowdown. This, however, conceals a lot of important information from the player, making it easier for them to overlook certain details and get stuck.
• The logic behind the puzzles can super unintuitive at times. I got roadblocked about once every hour of play.
• The characters’ unique abilities are underutilised in the puzzles.
• Oftentimes, the game makes it easy to accidentally mess up a puzzle, such as the block puzzles in Gruberik Bridge W. Yet, when the player resets the puzzle through the reset function, they have to start the whole room again. This can be frustrating when you continually mess up the fifth puzzle because of an issue with the game’s design, and so you have to repeat puzzles one through four several times over.
• Some areas, like Gordovan Drawbridge, are too open-ended and the layout, architecture, and visual design often lead the player away from where they need to go.
• Maxim and Selan’s wedding is far too sudden compared to the original game.
• I don’t remember Guy being a big, dumb oaf. Curse of the Sinistrals also turns the once-cool Dekar into a bit of a bonehead too. Because of this character rearrangement, Dekar and Guy are too alike, and ultimately it makes Dekar, who joins the party later in the game, feel superfluous.
• Maxim pronounces Gades as gädis, not gādēs (the latter having the same pronunciation as “Hades”).
• Like most RPGs, the equipment side of things is pointless and should be cut.

Here’s what I did like:

• The localisation is surprisingly aware of the trite plot and character archetypes, and often makes good use of these traits for comedic effect.
• The level of detail in the environments is amazing, and the scale of some of the bosses is nothing short of remarkable.
• The grid system—where players are rewarded with Tetris pieces for solving puzzles and said pieces can be placed on a grid to unlock new abilities, tributes, and bonuses—is a neat way of tying together the game’s two halves.

Ah, now that I’ve written this article, I don’t feel so guilty over ditching this game early.

The colon in Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor is significant. The purpose of a colon is to separate “two clauses of which the second expands or illustrates the first”*. In this case, “Spider” is the gameplay, being a spider catching insects in your web and “The Secret of Bryce Manor” is the narrative, the spider’s exploration of the manor, which occurs through the gameplay. The colon then can be considered as a representation of the harmony between the two elements.

As said, you play the role of a spider who creates webs to catch insects. This is done by touching the spider to plant silk onto a surface and swiping to send the spider leaping to another surface, where the thread connects, making a line. When several lines make an enclosed space, a cobweb is formed. Cobwebs catch any insects that pass by. By touching the screen, the spider will walk to the touched location, either along the cobweb or along the edge of the environment. The spider eats any of the insects caught in its web when it touches them. The player progresses to the next part of the manor after they’ve cleared all the insects in a level.

The core game loop involves:

1 – Exploring the area and identifying the movement patterns of the insects (observation, knowledge).

2 – Determining where the paths of the insects intersect (deductive reasoning, knowledge) so that the player can catch as many insects as possible in the one web.

3 – Determining how to make the web (spatial reasoning, knowledge). Doing it well requires the player consider how they can cover the most area with as few strands as possible.

4 – Making the web (finger sensitivity and direction, dexterity).

Observations

• Catching several insects in the one web increases the score multiplier. Hidden areas contain caches of insects and nuggets of narrative insight. The player gets a higher score by using less silk. These three aspects give the player the opportunity to scale the difficulty in a variety of ways.
• The insect counter shown after completing a level informs the player of whether or not they accessed the secret area(s). This acts as a sly prompt for the player to scale the difficulty.
• Each level has a silk limit which encourages considered play.
• The wasps, dragonflies, and butterflies really mixup the standard gameplay loop by forcing the player to line up jumps and consider light sources.
• Variation is achieved by: adding new insects and mixing up the combinations (some of which make for highly engaging spatial reasoning), adding and combining different types of surfaces, decreasing the number of available surfaces, mixing up the arrangement of surfaces (modifying the available space), and spreading the surfaces further apart so that the player has to consider the length of the silk (nuance). If the silk is too long, the spider can’t form a strand.
• The flicking motion that makes the spider jump feels fantastic. The faster the flick, the faster the jump.
• If the player knocks a bee hive and fails to catch one of the bees that fly out, they’ll have to reset the level if they want to get a 100% completion rate. The hard punishment of the player losing progress adds a tension to the game.

Repair

I don’t have many complaints for this game, it’s a pretty smooth experience, but one thing that really bugs me is the positioning of wasps in some of the levels with no ceiling. In one of the levels set on a clothes line, the spider must jump up to attack a wasp which is off-screen. This, however, is tremendously tricky as the only available surfaces are to the sides of the level and they aren’t very high. Furthermore, when the spider jumps up underneath a wasp, it will float upwards. This can all amount to frustration as you slowly drive the wasp out of your reach and must restart the level.

*According to the New Oxford American Dictionary.

Additional Reading

Tiger Style Interview – Touch Arcade

The Legendary Starfy is the first game in the TOSE-developed, Nintendo-published series of the same name to be published in the west. The games have been around in Japan since 2002, debuting on the GameBoy Advance. The game’s cuteness and the franchise’s former status as a Japan-only hole in Nintendo’s western offering captured my initial interest. After completing the game a few weeks ago, here are my thoughts:

Young Audience Appeal

Cute characters, colourful visuals, and easy gameplay, The Legend of Starfy seems like a great game for kids, with the customisation options and secret treasure (random praise) likely to appeal more specifically to young girls. The dialogue, however, is layered on thick and full of uber clique speak. There’s no way that a 7-year-old is going to understand much of what’s being said.

Mechanics

Starfy has three types of mechanics: traversal, jumps, and attacks. They’re all fairly balanced and unique. The game balances the mechanics so that the player can choose between: swimming and star spinning, gliding and falling, and walking and dashing, ie. two sets of game speeds. The mechanics have some dynamics and nuance, but not a lot. Examples include:

• All jumps and glide are affected by gravity.
• Dash (Starfy’s run) has a slight skid (momentum).
• Star Spin (Starfy’s attack) runs on an invisible cool down, spin too much and Starfy becomes dizzy. The player can also steer Starfy as he attacks.

The transformations primarily allow Starfy to activate specific level elements: they don’t add any new wrinkles to the gameplay. They also lack the nuance and dynamics of Starfy’s regular move set.

In some levels, certain areas are only accessible when playing as Starly, using her exclusive abilities, but the only way the player can play as Starly is if they have a friend to link up with. Since these areas hold treasures, they only way to 100% complete the game is to have a friend who also has a DS and a copy of the game.

The choice of game speed via the mechanics, optional treasures spread throughout levels, and ability to rack up more stars by comboing up enemy attacks allows the player to scale the difficulty.

Level Design

Each world is based around a game idea. For example, changing water levels or swimming in the air through bubbles. The individual game ideas aren’t very interesting, there’s little variation to them, they’re stretched too thin, and are never combined to create deeper, more engaging gameplay concepts. In a Mario game, one of Starfy’s game ideas would be enough for a level. In the Legend of Starfy, they make up seven or eight. To continue this comparison, Starfy’s levels tend to dawdle back and forth between the world’s game idea and unrelated distractions, while Mario’s levels are unified around the one concept. Where each arrangement of level elements in a Mario game offers a newer, increasingly more elaborate take on the game idea (variation), in The Legendary Starfy, each level only offers one or two arrangements based around the game idea, and the variation between each is slight. As a result of all these factors, Starfy’s world lacks a cohesive narrative of gameplay.

Not only are the levels not optimised for gameplay, they’re also far too open. Most of the player’s time is spent holding a button as they wait for Starfy to swim from one point to another. The game is just brimming with excess waiting to be trimmed out, some of which includes whole levels. Take level 8-6 as an example. I can’t believe they didn’t cut this. A rock, paper, scissors boss battle near the end of the game is an equally disastrous example of padding.

I want to thank Chic Pixel for helping me gather my thoughts on this game.

Judith is a short narrative game by Terry Cavanagh, the guy who did VVVVV and Super Hexagon. You should play it. Only takes 25-30 minutes. Here are some of the ways narrative is delivered in this game:

• The text dialogue sets the context for the interactive sequences. It’s brief and well written, so it’s never intrusive.
• The length of the secret passage creates dead space (where the player can only wait as the avatar moves forward) and thereby anticipation.
• Repeated structures develop simple routines which the player finishes more quickly the more times they complete them. This builds into a climax, adding to the tension as the various revelations unfold. For Judith, the routine is leaving the bedroom, opening the secret passage, and unlocking the next door. For Jeff, this is going to the next room.
• Music is used to set the mood, such as the piano notes at the beginning of each sequence and the prisoner’s cries.
• Judith always begins her part next to the bed. This, along with the dialogue with her husband, creates a sense of time.
• The hardest part of the game, uncovering the secret passage, is also the biggest revelation. So there’s a nice harmony there between difficulty and narrative.
• Forcing the player to leave the secret passage without first prompting them to return the knife or necklace simulates Judith’s uncertainty.
• Control is taken away from the player when Judith runs into the woods. This simulates the character’s fear of her husband and inability to do anything but run away.
• In Judith’s final sequence, the passage door is left open for her (as her husband mentioned in the preluding dialogue). This small difference from the repeated structure asserts a feeling of unease.

If you’re interested, Don’t Look Back, Hero’s Adventure, and American Dream are also great little games that’ll only take a few minutes.

There’s a few good comments made by Jason Rohrer here.

The internet is no place for sustained reading and deep thought.

That’s a strong statement, but it’s one that I feel increasingly adamant about. The form of a media determines the nature of its content, and there are aspects of the internet which dissuade the user from critical thinking. Of course, the internet is an umbrella for many different types of media. For the purpose of this post, I want to discuss the medium you are consuming right now: the article.

From early last year, I started doing most of my reading on my Kindle, a device which, I guess many Kindle enthusiasts would also attest to, has totally changed my reading habits. Almost straight away, I noticed that it was easier to read through my Kindle than through a web browser, as I’d been doing in the past. I’ve become a better reader ever since. After a bit of investigating, I discovered why. Online, long-form text is usually surrounded by:

• images
• hyperlinks
• ads
• video
• social media/comments

With all these distractions demanding your attention—not to mention things outside the browser, such as instant messages, software alerts, time displays, and the visual interface of the operating system—it’s difficult to engage with the text. On Kindle, all of these diversions are stripped away. The only thing that can cause you to lose your concentration is the progress bar at the bottom of the screen, which I can see some people fetishising over, but it’s relatively minor.

The other thing that diminishes the reader’s ability to deep read online is the transition between different types of media. Every time the reader switches between watching a video to writing a tweet to sending an email to reading an article, they must adapt to each format. There’s certainly a skill to juggling several kinds of media, but deep reading is no doubt something that becomes weakened in transition, particularly as the internet favours the most accessible, immediate media: images, video, short text, and search, none of which require committed engagement. When a reader approaches a long-form piece after having skim-read through Google, Wikipedia, and Twitter for the past half hour, despite their best intentions, they’re not in the right head space to consume the text.

Going forward, I am committed to long-form writing on video games. While it does pose its own challenges (more on that in a later article), as far as I see it, it’s the only format that does games analysis justice. Writing is the only medium in which complicated ideas can be clearly conveyed, and it’s only in the long-form that the complex nature of games can be fully unravelled. Given everything I’ve said on the internet and deep reading, it makes no sense for my long-form articles, which require deep reading and engagement, be placed in a medium which constantly tells the reader to stop reading. As the author of such content, it’s my responsibility to slow the reader down and ease them into the analysis, something that I simply can’t do online. So the only responsible thing I can do is to take my writing and put it offline. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to close down the blog, but it does mean that I’m going to be smarter with how I write and position my content.

My plan is to reserve all good long-form articles (anything more than 3 pages, I guess) for future books and use the blog for short-form articles, updates, and stuff that can’t fit anywhere else. As you may have already noticed, I’ve been customising the articles that go onto the site for internet reading. That is, more headings, bullet points, and snappy commentary. This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s a real improvement over what I was doing before. Now, I have a space to bang out some real nuggets of insight and a space to sit and stew over ideas for a prolonged period. Although I’m still settling into this groove, in the long run, I think it’ll work out for the better.

There are a few more ideas that I wanted to bookend the article on. Fittingly, I’ve presented these as a series of dot points:

• Yes, I’m aware that people can still be distracted by the internet when reading on a tablet or a computer, out of browser, but these methods are still better than in-browser reading.
• I think there’s certainly a case to be made for video—it has a lower barrier to entry and allows for more “embedded” analysis—but I’m far too wary of the medium’s tendency to reduce all content into entertainment to engage in it myself (see: Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death).
• If you’re interested in deep reading online, then you might want to check out the following:

-Instapaper – This service saves online articles and delivers them, in packages, to your mobile, tablet, or reading device. Very useful. Thanks to Instapaper, I basically do all my online reading on my Kindle.

-Safari’s Reader Function – The little blue button in Safari’s address bar darkens the website and pulls up a white slate with the contents of the article inside, removing the distractions of the website.

Additional Readings

Is Google Making Us Stupid

Every day I go to work, I walk through this underground channel connected to the subway. When I first started work in Shanghai, different colours were projected onto the side panels, creating a neat saturation effect (it’s orange in the photo). About 6 months ago, the colours were replaced with video ads, so now, when you walk through the tunnel, you’re bombarded with slick marketing messages. The problem with these ads, besides being intrusive and annoying, is that most of them aren’t made for the 25-metre wide-screen format: they just project eight TV ads that play simultaneously. Stupid, right? So, I was thinking, armed with a dozen Kinnects, what kinds of interactive/reactive multimedia experiences could be created to make this underground passage more interesting? I only have a few ideas at the moment, but I suspect that I’ll get more over the coming weeks. So, I’m gonna start a list, feel free to contribute in the comments and I’ll add your ideas to the list. A few more details:

• The two screens are facing each other on opposite walls.
• There’s a series of handrails in the centre.
• The tunnel has a slight ascent.
• Sound is played through speakers attached to the ceiling.
• There are eight projectors in total, four for each side. The projected images overlap slightly.
• Thousands of people pass through here each day. Most people are transferring between subway lines.

Ideas

1) The screens display video of people walking through the passage, acting as a mirror. Zombie textures are then mapped to the passersby. This could be an advertisement for The Walking Dead, being a literal representation of the name.

2) The Kinnects could track walking data and present it on the screen. So, steps taken so far for the day, week, month or year could be displayed. By comparing sets of data—for example, how many steps were taken yesterday to how many have been taken today—a relative high score element is added, encouraging commuters to take more steps.

Any kind of quantification of activity which is then presented back to the people who engage in the activity encourages certain types of behaviour, so there’s certainly ethical questions that need to be considered*. Personally, I think it’d be better if steps were translated into calories burnt, or something like this. This would encourage commuters to think more about their health, as opposed to taking more steps, which is a bit silly.

*For a better example of ethics and gamification, watch this video and ask yourself whether the Delite-o-matic is “right” or “wrong”.

I normally don’t write about music. It scares me a bit because I don’t know much about music theory and lack the cultural capital and general know-how that comes with being a hardcore music buff. Still, given that I find myself more and more invested in what I listen to, but have been struggling to find writing that clearly explains it to me, I’d like to give it a try myself. I only have two, maybe three, posts worth of ideas, so this’ll only be a short excursion. I’d like to start with an album that I’ve been listening to for about 3 weeks, Maxinquaye by Tricky (1995). You can hear the whole album here or just listen to several select songs below:

Ponderosa

Black Steel

Aftermath

Maxinquaye has an elusive quality which is created through harmonic dissonance, contrasting styles, and a subversive approach to singing and songwriting. Examples include:

• The blend of different genres, including hip-hop, rock, soul, and electronica.
• Tricky’s role as a backing singer for more than half of the record, despite it being “his” album.
• Tricky’s assortment of singing styles (sing-speak, rapping, whispering, and various inhaling, exhaling, moans, and groans).
• The way a singer of one sex sings lyrics written from the viewpoint of the other (eg. Black Steel). This gives the music an ambiguous sexual identity.
• The vocal relationship between Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird.

In regards to the former most point, sometimes:

• Tricky speaks the lyrics before Martina sings them (Strugglin’), which sounds like Tricky is the voice in the back of Martina’s head, feeding her the message.
• Tricky speaks as Martina sings, producing an out-of-time backing vocal (Aftermath, Abbaon Fat Tracks).
• Tricky whispers and his vocals are, seemingly, cut up and looped, creating a bedrock of background conversation (Feed Me).
• Tricky is absent altogether (Overcome).
• Tricky moans and exhales (Ponderosa).
• Tricky sings the verses, while Martina sings the chorus (Suffocated Love).

The changing relationship between the two singers, through Tricky, conjures up a variety of associations. Do they know what the other is going to say? Are they conversing or just talking over each other? How are power roles expressed through the vocals?

Ponderosa combines several of these points together. In this song, Tricky is the backing vocalist. He backs the last few words of each line, sometimes sitting out, other times taking the lead. At the start of the song, he whispers. After the first verse, the song pauses while he exhales and moans, before the chorus kicks in. Near the end of the song, he repeats key words that come later in the track as he waits for Martina to catch up. The result is a dynamic layer of vocals that weaves in and out of the main thread, lifting the peaks (“different levels of the devil’s company”) and prompting the listener to mentally rewind and fast forward the lyrical content of the song.

Similar to Ponderosa’s vocals, Black Steel’s second half sees the singing become detached from the music and weave in and out of the time of the instrumentals, before eventually finding its focus.

Additional Reading

Classic Tracks: Tricky ‘Black Steel’ Sounds on Sound

The blog’s been a bit quiet this week cause I’ve been relaxing a bit more, working on a few longer posts, and doing a ton of research. It seems like some of my notes are turning into their own mini-projects, so we’ll have to see where that gets me. By the way, if you like the Wipeout series, you should totally check out Hellfire_WZ’s YouTube channel. This guy has done hours worth of tutorials, tournament matches, and documentaries on the series. I’ve been watching his stuff for the past few days and learnt a whole bunch. I would recommend Wipeout HD Fury – The Basics, Wipeout – Circuits from Hell, and Wipeout – Through the Ages – The Weapons.

Over the past 3 months, I’ve invested about 50 hours into Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. I usually don’t play portable games out in the wild, but my PSP has proven to be a great companion on the subway, particularly as I can charge it via USB when I get to work. The game itself has rekindled my love of SRPGs and prompted me to write a small pile of notes on the genre. I’m not quite ready to share those ideas, but I would like to talk about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which has a strong lineage with Tactics Ogre and its designers. Playing Tactics Ogre:LUCT reminded me of why I dislike Final Fantasy Tactics Advance so much. Because I haven’t played this game in years and don’t currently have the cart on me, I’m going to have to rely on memory, so don’t think of this post as being “proper” analysis. At times, I may be a bit loose with the facts, so if I’m feeling unsure, I’ll indicate so by ending the sentence with “I think” in parenthesis.

Laws

The core difference between the original Final Fantasy Tactics and the later games is laws. Each battle is governed by a set of arbitrary rules (I’m not sure if they’re preset or selected randomly, probably depends on battle type). These regulations prevent the player from using various abilities or weapons. If the player breaks a rule, they’re given a yellow or red card, depending on how serious the violation. Acquire too many of these and the party member in question is hauled off to jail and must sit out a few battles (I think you can pay money to reduce their sentence).

I guess that the intent behind law cards is to challenge the player to play in particular ways. They certainly do that. However, the specifics of the law system, quickly put the process on the nose. The rules can be viewed any time during a battle (and are shown at the start, I think). Yet, although they’re clear and unambiguous, it’s easy to forget that your archer is wielding a bow and not a crossbow, or your knight is equipped with a sword and not an axe (these are theoretical examples). And so mid-battle, I’d unknowingly break a law or two and have several party members instantly leave the battlefield, prompting me to reset my GBA and try the battle again. If I held on and eventually won the match, then I wouldn’t be able to use half of my party in the proceeding fight. If the prohibited abilities were marked in the selection screen, then there’d be much more clarity and the player wouldn’t find themselves losing units in the midst of an epic duel. More warning pre-battle, when the player’s selecting which units to send out, would help them avoid putting party members with banned abilities into play in the first place. A list of how the laws affect the individual units would be nice.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance also does a poor job of contextually justifying laws. It’s ridiculous that a law master (a knight on a Chocobo), a formal member of some government or association, would oversee every random, spontaneous battle that occurred between two groups of mercenaries.

Sending Units Off on Missions

Missions are the units of progression. Each tavern on the world map has a list of missions which the player can choose to take on. The idea is that the player’s party is a group of mercenaries for hire (I think). There are two types of missions: regular missions, which the player does directly, and adhoc missions, where the player sends out a unit or small team of units to go and fight independently. After a few days, the unit(s) returns and the player’s told the results of the battle. I found the adhoc battles to be intrusive and unnecessary. To accept these missions, the unit(s) needs to meet the level requirement. Initially, I had a designated gimp which I sent out to do all the side missions. Despite some initial success, it was quickly under-leveled, even though I’d included it in some of the regular battles too. Near the end of the game, the adhoc missions were draining my party of key units, but I had to do them in order to unlock the story missions. Because some of the adhoc battles require the player to complete X number real battles before the units return, I’d often be forced to go into battles with an incomplete team.

The other problem with the adhoc missions is that the player has no involvement in them, so it’s really hard to care about them.

Trail of Missions

The player needs to complete certain missions in order to unlock more missions and keep the game going. Although they’re told which missions they need to beat, figuring out how to access them can be tricky, as each tavern offers their own set of missions and if the player fails a mission, it might not come back around for some time. Factor in that some of these missions may themselves need to be unlocked (or the player needs to beat certain adhoc missions or have a certain item, I think) and the progression system quickly divulges into a tangle of loose ends. The last 20 hours of my time with this game was dedicated to untangling leads and heavy reading of GameFAQs.

Few Story Missions

The best missions are the story missions, where the map, enemy composition and layout, and laws are tuned to create deep and rewarding play. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of story missions in the entire game. Most missions are random battles in a preset location, where the enemies are randomly selected and positioned based on a few parameters.

Races

In Final Fantasy Tactics, any unit can change to any job, so long as they meet the conditions to do so. In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, each character belongs to a race, with each race being a container that houses a particular set of jobs. So, if you want a unit to have a certain job, they need to belong to the right race. This adds a layer of complexity to the job system.

I don’t like the races for two reasons. The first is that I don’t personally find the appearance and dialects of the races to be particularly interesting. The second is that the race system restricts party customisation and cross-pollination between jobs, the core asset of the RPG side of the game.

Story

Although the game’s premise of the characters being stuck in their friend’s dream is neat, the narrative is sparse to the point of near absence. I much prefer the dense political intrigue of the original Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre: LUCT. You don’t get a lot of medieval politics in video games.

So, as you can see, basically everything I don’t like about this game is everything they changed from the original Final Fantasy Tactics.