The Rat's Den

Hakuoki Part 3: The Protagonist as Player Stand-In and Character Arcs

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 07:55:00 +0000

Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom, is a visual novel game I became engrossed with and decided to dissect (with much love) so I could figure out why I liked it. After all, I’m a writer, and I want to see why the story works.

This week I’m going to discuss Chizuru as the player stand-in and who really gets character arcs in this game. You can see Parts 1 and 2 over here:

Hakuoki Part 1: Introducing the Visual Novel and Hakuoki Itself
Hakuoki Part 2: Handling Romance

Though romance is unavoidable in this game, it is still technically the subplot to the real story, which is about Chizuru’s search for her father and discovering her secret heritage. In the majority of paths through the game, her heritage drives most of the supernatural conflicts around her and all but the bonus sixth path end with a supernatural note.

Which makes me wish that Chizuru was a more active protagonist. Though the player can make decisions as her, she has to be protected by the Shinsengumi a lot. This is not entirely the fault of the story. Given the time period it’s unlikely that the daughter of a doctor would be trained in weapons to the degree she can fight on par with career soldiers. The real world Hajime Saito was considered among the best of the Shinsengumi, making it unlikely to impossible for Chizuru to be able to hold her own against any opponent powerful enough to physically threaten his fictional analog. Staying back and letting him protect her is often the only sensible thing to do.

And most of the time I’m fine with that. Since this is a visual novel this is one of the few games where being a non-combatant is viable, but there have been a few times where if I had been the outclassed combatant in Chizuru’s place, dammit, I would have done something instead of passively watching my loved one get mauled by the bad guy. Even if I had to scream and throw rocks at the villain because I didn’t have a weapon, it would at least give rise to the possibility of distracting him so my chosen guardian could find an opening.

To be fair, there are a few times where she will do just that, or intends to do just that before someone else intervenes, but they do not happen nearly often enough. Despite Chizuru’s supernatural heritage, and the powerful abilities displayed by her distant kin, she never completely embraces it and only takes limited advantage of the fact she has regenerative abilities that would make X-men’s Wolverine envious.

There is only one time on one story path when she directly throws herself into melee and takes a hit intended for her chosen guardian because she knows she can survive what he cannot. I was hoping that would turn out to be the one path where Chizuru learns to kick butt, but unfortunately nothing moves beyond that moment.

On the other paths the idea that Chizuru is useless in combat is hammered in just a bit too heavily, and since she is the narrator, it comes off as rather irritating. We already know she can’t fight well. She doesn’t have to keep bringing it up. She’s supposed to be the stand-in for the player, and the player doesn’t want to identify as being a mopey whiner with low self-esteem. (Or at least I don’t.)

I’m fine with her wanting to repay the Shinsengumi for their hospitality, so I don’t mind that she does some cooking and cleaning, or that there are multiple scenes with her serving tea. Given the time period and limited ways she can repay at all, this is acceptable. It’s just the “I’m useless” comments that bother me, and to be fair, the only time this came to the level of me wanting to slap her has been on the Hijikata route, and I suspect it may be to balance the fact that Hijikata is an incredible overachiever to the level that Chizuru has an inferiority complex when she’s around him.

Strangely enough, if the player is aggressive about getting Chizuru to draw her sword whenever the option is available, she will likely end up with scenes involving Hijikata, which is totally at odds with the way Chizuru keeps calling herself useless if the player actually goes down his path. In fact, if the player makes Chizuru put her foot down when dealing with Hijikata his respect for her goes up. So it’s terrible knowing that being pushy gets through to him, because if she’s not being pushy at the player’s direction and she’s left to her own devices, she’s whining about her inability to help him. If Hijikata’s route is done perfectly to get the most romance points possible this makes Chizuru come off as head-scratchingly passive-aggressive.

But most of the time she just comes off as a well-meaning, but shy teenage girl/young woman (age never established, but I figure she’s probably around 16 at the start and 20-21 by the end) who feels bad that she has a hard time repaying the Shinsengumi for their help, first in finding her father and second in protecting her from the demons who want to capture her. Depending on the path taken, her love interest will voluntarily give up his humanity and become a monster called a fury in order to protect her, which of course adds a certain amount of guilt and feeling that she needs to repay him somehow.

I’m fine when she angsts over that. It’s realistic, and I like that in those cases where the love interest transforms, it’s after the relationship is established and Chizuru already cares for him. (I’m generally not a fan of stories involving normal everyday humans dating vampires, werewolves, and other inhuman things that would, all things considered, be very scary boyfriends you couldn’t take home to your parents.)

But because Chizuru is the stand-in for the player, she doesn’t really change in the story, even though she is the character with the most at stake. When playing Saito’s route I had no idea how much he grew over the course of the story until I restarted the game to do my second playthrough and realized that I barely recognized the character I had happily fallen in love with at the end of my first.

It was largely through conversations with Saito that I came to understand why the Shinsengumi were such romantic figures to portray in fiction. I saw his work crumble around him as the Shinsengumi began to fall apart. As a man who only knew how to make a living with the sword, it was terrifying to imagine a world where swords were no longer needed. He tells that player that the sword is the soul of the warrior, which raises the question: If the sword is the soul of the warrior, what is a warrior without his sword?

Saito has to learn to survive independent of the Shinsengumi, to discover what will give his life meaning. This being a game with a strong romance element, Saito is prevented from seeking death in battle because Chizuru stays with him and he comes to realize how important she is to him and that he will protect her, not because someone told him, but because he loves her, thus making it clear for the first time that he is doing something whole-heartedly for himself and not because he is a good soldier following orders. It’s a satisfying character arc.

Chizuru, though it’s her heritage that drives the story, doesn’t have that. The villain is always defeated by her love interest, after which she will live happily with him for however long that may be. Depending on the story circumstances and individual player predilections, this may or may not be satisfying.

There is one ending where the end villain is someone very close to Chizuru and it would be terrible if she was forced to kill him (and in one of the few instances of her drawing her sword, she really does try!). In that ending I really appreciated the love interest making the kill for her, with him emphasizing both to her and their opponent that he was the one killing him, and their enemy had better not lay his death at her feet.

There is a different ending where the villain is fought because he ends up developing a rivalry with the love interest and he is no longer interested in Chizuru at all. Having her not participate in that instance was less satisfying since the villain’s focus changed to someone else, making the story no longer about her.

She makes a fine window through which the player can learn about history, particularly someone unfamiliar with period of Japanese history at all, but as a protagonist Chizuru doesn't protag much, meaning the player is much more likely to form an attachment to the other characters in the game, most likely the chosen love interest. And it's unfortunate. Because Chizuru has the potentially to be so much more.

She obviously has some guts, being willing to disguise herself as a boy to go search for her missing father. She supposedly knows how to use a sword well enough to defend herself (it's just she outclassed by anyone who matters). And she has a supernatural heritage, which if she tapped into she would probably be faster and stronger than most individuals in the Shinsengumi.

It's the last part that really bothers me, especially when she realizes (depending on story route) that her people have a true form that is much stronger than their human indentities. Chizuru has this form as well (only shown in one of the routes), but she never asks how to control it, how to bring it out, how to use it. In some story paths it's not possible, because the characters who could teach her do not reappear after she learns of the true form, but in others it should just be common sense to learn as much as she can about herself to protect what she cares about. It never crosses her mind.

If Chizuru had just a little more backbone, I probably would have loved her. As it was, she was just another personality to travel with, with the lion's share of my caring going to the members of the Shinsengumi. Going back to Dragon Age again, I would never name the Warden or Hawke as my favorite character, but I did feel invested in them as the player surrogate. It would have been nice if based on the choices the player made in Hakuoki that Chizuru's personality would adapt as well. She's the only unvoiced character, so she could have had a large number of dialogue variations without racheting up the voice acting budget.

That said, I really did enjoy the game, and if you want character arcs, the love interests have them. Chizuru's passivity doesn't make or break the game. Though it is her story, the most fascinating thing for me was the historical aspects. I found myself reading the Wikipedia entries for one battle or another, for the different members of the Shinsengumi, because I just could not get enough of an era that had become so fascinating to me, and there is no shortage of historical intrigue. The backdrop is wonderful and I'd love to read more stories set in this time period, and I'd love to see more of the Shinsengumi.

I know they're popular in fiction. I was first introduced to Hajime Saito through the Rurouni Kenshin anime where he serves as an anti-hero, though he's a much more sadistic character. The currently running Gintama uses parodies of some of the Shinsengumi members as part of its cast.

There are also other games in the Hakuoki franchise. Apparently it's quite popular in Japan, with a third TV season of an anime series based on the game starting, a couple movies planned for 2013, and even a stage play. I'm doubtful that the other games will make it to the US, because the target demographic would appear to be teenage girls and young woman, who are not used to be catered to as a gamer demographic in the US. There are tons of similar games in Japan, but here the US the existence, let alone the formation, of a such market is not a sure thing.

As it was, I needed to hear about it twice to decide to pick it up. Once was a review on RPGFan, which I periodically read, and that was what first brought the game to my attention. Then I forgot about it until I saw the fanmade video I posted back in my post about the popularity of the Bakumatsu in Japanese pop culture. If the video hadn't given me a second kick I probably would have passed this game by and I like video games.

I hope Hakuoki did well enough to justify bringing over other games like it, but considering that the Limited Edition is still for sale on Amazon four months after its release I don't think that's a good sign.

Hakuoki Part 2: Handling Romance

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 07:16:00 +0000

Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom, is a visual novel game I became engrossed with and decided to dissect (with much love) so I could figure out why I liked it. After all, I’m a writer, and I want to see why the story works.

This week I’m going to discuss romance and how it’s handled in game. You can see Part 1 over here:

Hakuoki Part 1: Introducing the Visual Novel and Hakuoki Itself

There are five different second halves to Hakuoki (six on second playthrough), which means multiple endings, and the way the player decides on a path is by bonding with one of the possible romance options. Though the romance determines which path the plot will take from Chapter 4 onward, the relationship is typically very chaste with no bodice ripping to be found. To be fair, there is one sex scene, but only on one path and it happens off camera. Most times there’s a kiss towards the end of the game and that’s it

Yes, the game is rated M for Mature, but it’s because of the occasionally graphic depiction of violence (and all the swearing from some of the rougher characters). This isn't the game to play for some skin. The only shirtless scene is done entirely for humor and the person showing off (and annoying the other characters by doing so) is not a romance option.

What I like about Hakuoki’s way of handling romance as opposed to a game like Dragon Age is that the relationship comes about more naturally. This is helped by the fact the narrative is stricter and even though there are romance meters, there are fewer opportunities to raise them.

In most games I’ve played that allow for romances, the player might do something like attend special events with the potential love interest, say the right things in dialogue, and/or give tons of gifts to the love interest. And by applying sheer persistence (or the use of a well-documented FAQ from GameFAQs) the other character will fall in love with the protagonist, even if it looks nonsensical from a straight storytelling perspective.

Hakuoki wasn’t like that for me. There are still dialogue choices, particularly in the second half of the game after the relationship is formed, but in the first half, when the player is first exposed to the characters, the romance is made up almost entirely of incidental moments where the player has little to no idea how things will play out.

When I first started the game I decided to play it straight and go with what felt right. I admit I was a bit concerned when I was approaching the branching point and all my romance meters were below the black line denoting the midpoint, but it actually wasn’t that I was failing. The game will pick the storyline of the male character with the highest romance and seamlessly segue into the character-specific storyline without any player input or halting the flow of the game. It’s much more natural than the decision point moments in other games where the player immediately knows what they do at a particular scene will decide anything that happens in the future.

And raising the romance meter is surprisingly hard. There aren’t many moments to do so and they aren’t as simple as whether or not to flirt with a particular character. Chizuru as a protagonist is somewhat shy and it’s not in her nature to chase after a man. When she first meets the Shinsengumi and has an opportunity to explain why they shouldn’t kill her, the player can choose a number of different options. How she behaves and the reasons she gives will generate approval with one of the possible love interests.

But the majority of choices do not lead to any changes at all, rather allowing the player to take different paths around the same events and form bonds with characters that have nothing to do with a graphical depiction of a relationship. Many times, there will be a decision as innocuous as whether the player decides to have the protagonist stay in her room versus going out in the courtyard that will determine who she interacts with, and most likely, there will be no meter change. But there is a player perception change, as characters the player likes interacting with will be those the player will make an effort to hang around when the options are more obvious.

For instance, Sanosuke Harada seemed like a nice enough guy, but for some reason I hardly ever saw him except in the scenes that always happen no matter what choices were made. I similarly didn’t have much interaction with Toshizo Hijikata except when he was making command decisions for the Shinsengumi as a whole. Though I thought they were potentially interesting characters, because of choices I made that had nothing to do with who I wanted to talk with, I just didn’t intersect with them.

My first time through the game, my meters went up with three possible partners; Souji Okita, Heisuke Toudou, and Hajime Saito. This was just through in character decision making with very little in the way of pursuing any of them. (I can think of only one pre-Chapter 4 choice I made where it was pretty clear that I would or would not get a meter raise depending on what I did.)

But because of “random” decisions I made as a player, I became invested in Saito.

There was one point early in the game where I went out into the courtyard and met Saito and Okita there. I did not know they would be there ahead of time, which made the encounter feel very natural. I also found I liked the way that Saito never teased the main character, took her concerns seriously, and went out of his way to reassure her when he didn’t have to, even when it was an odd sort of reassurance along the lines of “As long as it’s my orders to do so, I will protect you. No matter what.”

Then when the first mandatory scene with the potential main villain comes out, the player is defended by three members of the Shinsengumi; Saito, Hijikata, and Harada. The player is given the option to draw her sword, call for help, or stay where she is. What the player chooses determines which Shinsengumi member is the one who specifically positions himself between her and the enemy.

By luck, the choice I picked resulted in Saito being the one to defend the protagonist. No romance meter points are earned for that choice, but because I was already interested in him as a character, having him specifically be the one to defend me cemented my choice in who I wanted to spend my time with.

So later choices, regardless of whether they gave points, started to revolve around the possibility of seeing Saito. Demons attacking the compound? Forget Okita. I need to find Saito! By the end of Chapter 3 Saito had the highest score on the meter (by one point, and yes that meter is hard to raise) and it was clear Chizuru had begun to care for him.

This made the transition to the Saito-specific Chapter 4 very easy. Though it was not immediately apparent, there were no longer any opportunities to increase romance meters with anyone else and Saito in turn became very prominent in the story, with Chizuru spending more time with him than any other character.

As the story went on, it was possible to continue raising Saito’s romance meter and see how he in turn begins to accept the protagonist as more than a charge to protect, but also a woman he loves. I really liked how even after the relationship was “locked in” from a game perspective it continued to grow until at the final boss fight Saito declares that he’s not protecting the protagonist because anyone ordered him to, but because he wants to.

I think it’s that post “we’re a couple” point that other games miss. In most games where the relationship is player’s choice, it doesn’t progress after the choice is locked.

I really liked Anders in Dragon Age II, but after he moves in that’s it. The relationship is acknowledged by other characters, but ceases to progress. The player cannot continue to help him with his problems in any way more meaningful than if they were not in a relationship at all. The same story events are just slightly reflavored wherever Anders is concerned, but it is not possible that anything he does will deviate from the central plot because of the relationship.

With its multiple endings, branching from the middle of the game, Hakuoki can do this. The same events play out differently depending on the path. Betrayals will happen, or not, depending on who Chizuru is with. Characters will die in slightly different locations, or maybe not at all. Even the final villain of the story can change.

In a way it doesn’t make sense that an ally will intervene in one storyline versus another, but the major deviations are always on the part of the non-historical characters (who are all oni demons) or characters whose real life counterparts died before the Boshin War started so I’m willing to roll with the changes. The important historical bits, like the outcome of the Battle of Toba-Fushimi, never change.

If I did have one wish though, it would be that Chizuru as the protagonist could be molded to be more like the player wants her to be, rather than what she is, because she is serving as the player surrogate in the romance.

And that’s my topic for next week.

Hakuoki Part 1: Introducing the Visual Novel and Hakuoki Itself

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 07:40:00 +0000

When I really enjoy a particular work, be it book, movie, or video game, it tends to spark something of an obsession that will last for several days while I devour any and all secondary information I can get a hold of.

Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom passed into that territory.

In trying to figure out why I like it so much, I decided I’d break my thoughts down into parts, including reasons why this game flies far enough under the radar it’s difficult to find reviews of it, how it handles game elements uncommon in western gaming, and why it’s worth caring about.

Today’s post is Part 1, and will deal with the the visual novel genre and a bit about the game itself.

In terms of mechanics, Hakuoki is very simple. It’s a relatively low budget game, belonging to the visual novel genre (which is practically non-existent in the US). The story is told almost entirely through text and beautiful anime-style stills of key events, with voice acting (all dialogue save the main character’s is spoken) likely being the highest expense.

Hakuoki is closest to being a electronic choose-your-own-adventure, but with 1000% more text between choices. The player cannot affect the outcome of a battle if they are not presented with a choice, and most of the times they won’t be because the fight is part of the narrative. It is a shocking thing to a western gamer, playing a “game” with so little control over anything that happens.

And generally speaking, western gamers are not predisposed towards reading mountains of text. But I am a reader already, so reading mountains of text is fine by me as long as I enjoy the story. For a visual novel, the story is the selling point, because even the best artwork isn’t going to do a thing for it if the player is not invested in what happens.

Hakuoki is the story of a teenage girl named Chizuru Yukimura during the Bakumatsu (see my previous post) who disguises herself as a boy so she will not be harassed as she searches for her missing father. Shortly after arriving in Kyoto she nearly gets killed by some men inflicted with a supernatural madness, only to be saved by Captains Souji Okita and Hajime Saito of the Shinsengumi (a special police force that existed during that time period).

Realizing that she has seen something she should not, the Shinsengumi take her back to their headquarters and try to decide whether they can trust this “boy” not to talk about this event or if they should kill him. Before long, Chizuru’s real gender comes out as well as why she is in Kyoto. It turns out that the Shinsengumi are also looking for Chizuru’s father, so she moves in with them (still disguised as a boy, to avoid wagging tongues) so they can combine her knowledge with their resources.

The first half of the game (three chapters) covers the four years leading up to the Boshin War, so there are a lot of time skips. In them, Chizuru gets to witness multiple events in real world history that the Shinsengumi participated in, but Hakuoki is not solely historical fiction. It’s a historical fantasy, and secret history as well. Though the events play out more or less according to real world history, there is a supernatural undercurrent to everything going on.

It makes for an entertaining read, and there is an in-game encyclopedia that tracks events, locations, and characters for anyone who doesn’t understand who the Aizu are or what it means to be a nationalist or what a wakazashi is.

After the first three chapters the story branches into one of five distinct paths (six if on a second playthrough) based on Chizuru’s relationship with the different members of the Shinsengumi and these remaining three to six chapters cover her and her chosen companion’s path during the Boshin War itself.

The translation could have used some proofreading as there are a number of minor typos, but the story itself is engaging. The battles in particular are amazing considering the game is working with nothing but still images, voice over, and sound effects. There is one scene in my first playthrough where Hajime Saito is protecting Chizuru from the primary villain and even though I can’t see the blow by blow details of the fight I hear everything. The narration talks about how Saito is drenched in blood and gore, and I’m thinking to myself after hearing each slash that lands on his body “How can he still be standing?!”

Even the part that would be considered the last boss fight in most every other game was still riveting despite having minimal player input. It wasn’t just a question of whether or not Saito would win, but how. (Since there are game over scenarios for making cumulative poor or not-good-enough choices, this was still a possibility in the back of my mind.)

I have a friend who thought it was a waste when I finished my first playthrough of the game in a couple of days. I replied that I often finish novels in a day. Ah, he said, but games cost more. True enough, but because of the multiple game paths and the incredibly handy fast forward option that skips text the player has already read, there’s a lot of replay value. I figure it took me around 40 hours to see and do everything (all six endings and unlocking all the artwork), which is fine for a video game.

The different second halves of the game will likely appeal to different people, as will the companions whose story the player can follow. I think I was fortunate in that I ended up with Saito’s path first because it wades hip deep into historical events, which was a huge draw for me, and it hit all the plot points that were important to me. The other endings I got different amounts of satisfaction from, but Saito’s is by far my favorite and I don’t think it’s just because it was my first.

For history buffs, Hajime Saito or Toshizo Hijikata are the best paths to take, since their real life counterparts made it to the final days of the war. For those who really like the fantasy elements and can’t get enough of Japanese demons, Souji Okita and Heisuke Toudou, who died early or were otherwise incapacitated in real life, go down different story paths only possible because this is a work of fiction and they are given means to survive the circumstances that otherwise removed them from history. Sanosuke Harada’s path is kind of in the middle of the others, but if you’re a hopeless romantic, you’ll probably get a kick out of it.

Aside from Hakuoki being a heavily text based game set in a time period unfamiliar to most westerners, there is one other element of gameplay that likely limits its audience. Romance is well integrated into the game, and it is not possible to play through and avoid it. I think men who are fine with playing a female protagonist who is going to enter a heterosexual relationship with a male character can enjoy the game, but it’s rare in western gaming to have only a female protagonist option with a required romance, especially one that is not aimed at elementary school girls. Yes, this is an M-rated game aimed at older teenage girls and young women.

It’s the romance and how it’s handled that I’ll get to next week.

[Note: The game translation is inconsistent with how it treats elongated vowels. This makes little difference to the English speaker, since “Saitou” versus “Saito” sounds much the same to the untrained ear. However most of the material on the web for Hakuoki is under “Hakuouki” (with the extended “o” sound) if a reader would like to look into more of it. The game itself is unfortunately inconsistent with some names getting shortened (like Saito) and others being left alone (like Toudou). For this series of posts, I’ll be using the Aksys localized names.]

Looking at Japanese History Through Pop Culture: The Bakumatsu

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 28 May 2012 05:29:00 +0000

I like looking at the stories told in other cultures, because they often have different flashpoints for us, events of cultural significance that decades or even centuries afterwards they still resonate with us. In the U.S. we seem to be in love with World War II, given the number of movies about it. The American Revolutionary War is still a big deal too, especially when still in school.

Judging from Japanese cultural exports, in the form of anime and video games, one of their cultural flashpoints is the Bakumatsu.

I first learned about the Bakumatsu (the closing years of the Edo period and the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate) from watching the Rurouni Kenshin anime, which actually takes place after the Bakumatsu had ended and dealt with the rough times that followed. Unfortunately Asian history is rarely taught in the U.S. so I didn't have much of a clue as to what the Bakumatsu was, other than was the end of the era of samurai and the beginning of westernation by Japan.

That alone should make it interesting, because Japan modernized at an incredibly rapid pace once the nation set its mind to do so, but the war that resulted in westernization was already over in Rurouni Kenshin and the main hero was a former Imperialist. He was on the side that won. His enemies, sometimes reluctant allies (depending on when in the series you're watching), often were people who had lost.

Among them was a fictionalized version of Hajime Saito, who had belonged to the Shinsengumi, a special police force that had been employed by the Tokugawa Shogunate. The Shinsengumi had been popularized in movies, manga, anime, and games, still put out over a century after their passing.

What I didn't get, was that the Shinsengumi had been on the losing side of the war. In the U.S. it might be equivalent to having Robert E. Lee and company glorified in pop culture... which they're not. The American Civil War might come up every now and then in media, but on the level of multiple games and TV series and movies? We tend to focus on WWII if we go for historical drama or video games. It was also a war where the side we root for won.

So why the Shinsengumi so popoular? Why the guys who lost, many of whom did not survive?

I recently played a game on PSP called Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeing Blossom. And now I think I finally understand.

The above video is something I stumbled across on YouTube. I was unfamiliar with the anime series being shown, but as I watched the video I found myelf engrossed. The only names I recognized off the bat were Hajime Saito and Souji Okita (the video runs through a large cast of characters, about 80% of whom are historical figures), but something about this fanmade video made me want to watch the anime series it came from.

When I discovered the that title of the anime was read as Hakuoki, I had a flash of recognition. I'd heard of it before. It had originally been a video game. In fact, the game had just been translated into English earlier this year, which meant it was still in print!

Hakuoki follows the story of a teenage girl, Chizuru, who joins up with the Shinsengumi because they are looking for her missing father and they believe that having her assistance will help them in their search. The story is not a straight historical, there are supernatural elements to it, and while I'm sure the details of the major historical events are fudged with a little, the outcome is still the same. The player gets to experience the rise and fall of the Shinsengumi through the eyes of a teenage girl, later young woman, who has fallen in love with one of them (player's pick).

It might not be the same for all paths, since the game is like a choose-your-own-adventure but with lovely anime style pictures and excellent Japanese voice acting, but on my path through the game I spent most of my time with a fictional Hajime Saito.

In trying to understand Saito's motivation for being part of the Shinsengumi, particularly as the Shinsengumi starts crumbling, I think I learned a lot about why they have a place in modern Japanese pop culture (a romanticized place, I'm sure, but there nonetheless) and why the Bakumatsu is a popular subject at all.

Listening to Saito and the Shinsengumi I began to understand their despair as the years spent honing their swordsmanship come to nothing against the most modern western firearms. Saito in particular has spent nearly all of his adult life as a killer of men, not because he's cruel, but because that was his job and he was working under orders. Now he was facing an era where warriors would no longer fight with swords, and what was he without his?

Throughout the game the Shinsengumi roll with awful punches, particularly in the later chapters they prepare for losing battles against better geared opponents with rifles and cannons. Some of them do it out of loyalty to the shogun, some because of loyalty to their commander or their group, others because they do not otherwise know what to do with themselves.

Living with these characters, and seeing their determination to keep fighting despite the fact they know it's a losing battle, showed me why they make a good story. Even if they do not have a happy ending, their spirit in the face of losing everything they know, is something that resonates across time, even across cultures.

There is an epilogue that runs through the main cast and discusses their fates. My character ended the game with Hajime Saito, who is one of the few Shinsengumi members who survived the real Bakumatsu, so I don't know how it works in other endings when the main character is paired with someone else. I skimmed Wikipedia to see if the fates of the other major characters were the same in real life and for the most part they are (though one of them uses a rumor for his fate rather than what probably actually happened).

It makes the ending bittersweet, because even though my character survives, not all of the people she was with live to see her again. It was not unexpected, in a historical game set during a period of revolution, and I think holding to that element of tragedy is what makes the game memorable.

When Not Giving Up Needs a Kick in the Posterior

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 14 May 2012 01:47:00 +0000

If you watch a lot of anime or play a lot of JRPGs, there's a common scene where the male hero comes to doubt himself and sell himself short. He's giving up. Then a friend comes along and smacks some sense into him. Sometimes it's just a verbal thing, other times it might be physical.

The other day, I got to be that friend.

For a little history, my friend and I have never met in person. I have no idea what he even looks like. But we met about fifteen years ago on the internet while we were both teenagers. We had a couple things in common, mainly that we liked RPGs and we both wanted to become professional writers writing fantasy and science fiction.

Fast forward all these years and we're in our 30s. Amazingly enough, we're still in contact. Neither of us have book contracts, but we're both still writing. Perhaps not as regularly as we should be, but we still are.

I've merrily passed on any nuggets of information I've gleaned from my time at Writers of the Future or the Superstars seminar to him. When Angry Robot had their open call this year, I sent him the information, because I knew he had an epic fantasy novel he'd been trying to get published sitting in his back pocket. It was too good an opportunity to miss.

But it's been fifteen years.

I've found some success in my short fiction, winning WotF and making a few sales since then. My friend is a Brandon Sanderson type. He couldn't write short fiction if his life depended on it. So it's been a long discouraging slog for him without getting a sale.

The other day, he announced that he had self-published a book on Amazon. That's a perfectly viable thing to do with a book that has done the agent and publisher rounds and not gotten a bite. But what got me, what made me angry, was that he said this was his fleeting chance to be more than an amateur. Those were not his exact words, but I could read between the lines.

This was his swansong. He was giving up. He was throwing the book out there to sink or swim for that vague chance that someone might want to buy his work.

I was peeved.

And I was a little surprised by how much it bothered me. I guess it's because we've known each other so long, and I expected that we'd both keep trying.

I chewed him out. I warned him that I was going to be cranky and blunt, and I was.

Feeling sorry for yourself doesn't get a writer anywhere. I have my doubts and stuff, but ultimately I'm writing for myself, so even if no one likes my work enough to buy it, I know I would still be writing. My friend is that way too. He writes because he enjoys it. He's written millions of words (and I'm sure that's no exaggeration) he can never publish due to being fanfics, and some of them for a limited audience of perhaps a half dozen people.

So for him to deflate and go out with a whimper, to talk about his dream as if it's some vague future that might never come to pass, I wasn't buying it. I knew that wasn't what he wanted. It's what he was convincing himself to settle for.

It might be because we both like anime and RPGs, so he knew where I was coming from, but he took the beatdown surprisingly well. I did think that I might be tearing a rift in our friendship by yelling at him, but they were words that I think he needed to hear.

Turns out my suppositions were pretty much on the mark. He admitted as much.

It's not enough to say "I'm not giving up" or "I still want to be a pro writer." It's just lip service unless he does something about it, and I told him that. And that goes for anyone who wants to try becoming a professional. I had 372 rejections across all my stories before winning Writers of the Future (and how!). He can't talk to me about rejection. I keep track of that number for a reason, so that I can tell people like him that it can be done, that dogged persistence can work!

I made him an offer to invest in his career. The details are between the two of us, but he perked up at my faith in him and agreed it was generous. I think something may have been rekindled, and he got the kick in the pants he needed. That's what old friends are for, right?

In Memoriam: K. D. Wentworth

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:18:00 +0000

As an unpublished writer and later a writer of meager credentials, I often looked at the Writers of the Future contest as opening to get into the business of a storytelling professional. Unsurprisingly, I didn't win on my first attempt.

I didn't win on my second or third attempts either. They were all flat rejections letters, and at the time I had no idea there was such a thing as a coordinating judge or that there was just one dedicated soul reading through all the submissions. But I was stubborn and kept trying.

Eventually, on my sixth attempt, the unimaginable happened. I won. And by then I knew there was a name attached to the early judging.

It was K.D. Wentworth, but I didn't know much about her besides her name and the brief bio on the WotF site.

That would change.

At the workshop that all winners go to, I got to meet K.D., who as coordinating judge read all the submissions for any given quarter before passing on the top eight to the panel of judges who then pick out the first, second, and third place winners of the quarter.

I can only imagine how many boxes of manuscripts that used to be (the year after my win, they started allowing electronic submissions). Those of us at the workshop asked K.D.: How could she do it? How come she didn't ask for any help?

And she said she didn't want to spread out the reading because she wanted to make sure it was a consistent mind that was doing all the rejections. The contest entries were getting so much better and she wanted to cultivate that. She would answer questions on her newsgroup about the contest on her own time and encourage writers to keep submitting.

Sometimes a writer would thank her on her newsgroup for being a finalist or a semi-finalist, and since she judged all the stories blind, she would ask for the name of the story they wrote. And she would remember that story. Sometimes she might comment on a scene she liked, or a theme the writer ran with.

K.D. had faith in a lot of us, many of whom hadn't managed a single professional writing credit. She said that the contest was getting better and better entries every year and she didn't want it to lose that momentum.

We had a lot of instructors our workshop week, but K.D. was always there to quietly offer her advice. I remember sitting next to her at my first bookstore signing (which was part of the workshop then) and how she told me a story about a small prank she'd done to Tim Powers at a con. The story was tied into the greater lesson that every writer has a different opinion on how things should be done and each writer needs to decide for themselves what is the right thing to do, but the silliness of the story is what made it memorable.

One of my most significant memories about K.D. was the night of the award ceremony itself.

My family and I were having dinner at the banquet when K.D. came up to meet them. After the pleasantries were exchanged, she told me, "Remember, I loved your story first."

At the time I didn't understand what she'd meant. Of course she had liked my story before the other judges. She was the coordinating judge.

Then, perhaps two hours later, I won the Gold Award.

K.D. had plucked my story "Living Rooms" out of the thousands of stories she must have received that quarter and sent it on to be a finalist, where it eventually was awarded first place, and then later still the grand prize. It was a dream come true. I could hardly believe it as I walked down the aisle to the stage where K.D. was there to present me with my award.

She set me on my path, and the win has done so much for my motivation as a writer. Everyone wants validation that what they are doing means something to someone, and every year she gave validation to dozens of writers.

She was the sweetest person, and it meant to lot to her to pay it forward.

An author once told me that he could never pay back the people who'd helped him, because now that he was successful they were no longer around, so he does his best to pay it forward.

I can't pay back K.D., except by being the writer she knew I could be, and to in turn pay it forward for writers still to come.

Hotel Dusk: Room 125 Playthrough

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:57:00 +0000

I got a hankering to read a book. And I'm a binge reader, so I can't just start a book and read a half hour a day until it's done, let alone put it down for weeks only to finish up months later.

So I didn't want to start a book. But I really wanted something with a plot.

I looked at one of my bookshelves, which does double duty holding not only the majority of my books, but also all my Nintendo DS games, and I spied Hotel Dusk: Room 215. I first played through Hotel Dusk three years ago as something to do while on a long car trip to an out of town wedding.

I liked the game, if you could call it that. It was 80% reading text and 20% running around doing everything else. If you hate text in a video game you'll hate Hotel Dusk, with its gobs of dialogue and complicated chronology of events, but if you love mysteries, if you can keep a good internal checklist of what you know and don't know and where you still need to investigate, then Hotel Dusk is a basket of candy with your favorite treats (and probably a few of the bad ones mixed in for those moments where you get stumped).

I decided to play Hotel Dusk again because I didn't get the best ending last time and there are a few new scenes when playing a starred game (basically New Game+ when you continue off your old end game save). I still remembered a lot of the plot and the hardest of the puzzles, so my most recent playthrough took me about ten hours versus the seventeen the first time.

Arguably the most fun in playing or reading a mystery is that you don't know everything. When I first played through Hotel Dusk I wasn't sure if there were any supernatural elements to the game (there's a rumor about a ghost haunting the hotel) or what the whole story was.

All I knew was the premise. The main character Kyle Hyde was an NYPD detective three years before the start of the game, and his undercover partner went turnout and sold out the police to the smuggling ring they were investigating. Now Kyle works as a door-to-door salesman for a friend of his deceased father, with an illicit side job of finding objects that don't want to be found.

It's the side job that takes him to Hotel Dusk, a rundown hotel on the outskirts of Los Angeles on December 28, 1979 (yes, this is a period piece).

Hotel Dusk takes place over the course of a single evening and, barring the opening and ending scenes, entirely within the confines of the hotel. It makes for a hugely condensed plot, which is divided into ten chapters which last anywhere from a half hour to two hours of plot time.

As a writer, I love the story for its structure, because it is so contained by the nature of being a single night in a hotel. All the information and the back story has to come through the characters (the staff and the other guests) and the few noteworthy items that Kyle finds, and it really is enough to unravel the mystery of Hotel Dusk, his partner's defection, and still provide a realistically satisfying conclusion.

Playing through a second time made things a little interesting as there were times where I knew I needed to do something before I would actually be able to do it. Initially Kyle can only visit the public areas of the hotel and his own room, but as the game progresses more and more of the hotel becomes accessible.

Kyle is a fantastic character and I certainly did not mind sticking with him for another go around. It's not often the main character is a down-on-his-luck ex-cop driving a shabby car and traveling with a battered suitcase handed down from his dad. But it really fits the noir-ish feel to the game.

The characters frequently talk in hardboiled crime slang, with Kyle referring to money as "cabbage" or "scratch" depending on context. A character wasn't just murdered, but "plugged." A gun is a "piece."

The translation team did a marvelous job with the dialogue (despite the game being set in L.A., the game was originally released in Japan), with multiple characters exhibiting their own speech patterns. You can practically hear Dunning Smith's cranky old voice and it fits perfectly for a man that Kyle describes as an "piece of leather."

Depending on how the player goes through the game, there are two extra scenes in the end, with one of the extras being a little longer if things are done correctly on a second playthrough. I had gotten one of the extra scenes my first time playing through the game, but missed the second because I had gotten several Game Overs. (Let's just say that my first time through the game, Kyle Hyde was very clumsy and got himself thrown out of the hotel a lot.)

This time around I got both the scenes and the extension. I'm not sure they alone were worth the second playthrough, but as I probably would have played through again anyway they were a nice bonus.

The no Game Over bonus scene, by the way, is unrealistic. The writer in me has some trouble with suspension of disbelief, but because this is the bonus scene for doing everything perfectly I'm a little more forgiving and it does allow for something closer to a happy ending for one of the characters.

Unfortunately the developer behind Hotel Dusk, Cing, has closed up shop, but the game itself is still easy to find for purchase online, and the price is low since it's now an older game.

Happy Chinese New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:41:00 +0000

Gong Hey Fat Choy! It's now the Year of the Water Dragon.

The Chinese zodiac is decently well known in Western parts of the world. I know in the US if I go into the right type of Chinese restaurant I might even find the zodiac printed on the tablemat. Since the zodiac runs on a twelve year cycle, most of my friends from high school and college fit within a three year span.

We're all dragons, snakes, and horses. I admit, I'm just a bit sad that I was born a snake rather than a dragon, just because the dragon by virtue of what it is, is the coolest animal in the zodiac.

A little less commonly known is that the Chinese calendar also cycles through the five elements. So it's not just the Year of the Dragon this year, but the year of the Water Dragon. (How appropriate that it's raining for me today.)

Five elements, you say?

The Chinese have a five element system which is slightly different from the Western version of Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water. We use Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water, which move in a cycle. Wood feeds Fire, which turns into Earth, which yields Metal, which carries Water. (The last one is a little harder to picture, but Wikipedia suggests thinking of how water condenses on metal.)

I'm actually playing a bit with the five elements in a new story I'm squeezing in on the weekends when I'm not working on the current novel. It's very easy to write a character who uses magic based on the Western elements because we've seen it done so much. Using metal-based magic, that's a little trickier.

Farewell, Anne McCaffrey

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 04:25:00 +0000

Most writers start writing because because he or she was inspired by something she’d read. There was another storyteller who’d left an impression and became who they wanted to be.

I didn’t think about such things when I was a kid. I generally consider my starting point as a writer to be when I was twelve, and because I wanted to write an adventure story set in my favorite video game. But at about that same age I really got into reading. My dad encouraged my brother and I to read, and agreed to pay half of any book we purchased, which made books affordable entertainment in comparison to video games.

Not that it stopped my love of video games, but I read, a lot.

My first Anne McCaffrey book was actually Dinosaur Planet, chosen because it was quite obviously a science fiction story involving a planet full of dinosaurs, and how could you go wrong with that? I still remember the day I bought the book. A brand new bookstore had opened in town and my dad took me there for a look around. It wasn’t a very large paperback, and there were tons of books on the shelves, but I picked that one. I still have it at home.

Then, when I was a little older in high school, I discovered the school library had an amazing selection of science fiction and fantasy. It had volumes upon volumes of these dragon books by Anne McCaffrey. I liked dragons, so it wasn’t a hard sell. The problem was which one to start with.

I figured the one called Dragonsdawn was a good place to start, given the title, and fell in love with the genetically engineered dragons and their riders. I was disappointed to discover that the rest of the books in print at that time (the Chronicles of Pern collection would later revisit the First Pass) took place centuries if not millenia later, and I had to adjust to a new cast of characters, but I read nearly every Pern book in the school library (skipping only Nerilka’s Story).

After I graduated I continued to read all the way up to 2001’s The Skies of Pern. I read her other books too; The Rowan and Damia, The Ship Who Sang, Decision at Doona.

One of the reasons I thought Writers of the Future was the awesomest contest ever was because Anne McCaffrey was a judge, and the thought that she might one day read my writing was amazing.

Though I won the contest in the biggest way possible, she was not one of my judges, and by then her health no longer permitted her to travel the distance it would take for her to get from Ireland to California for the award ceremony. I wish I had met her.

But she remained an inspiration to me. There is no other author I’ve read more, and I have no doubt that a part of what makes me a writer today came from her.

Farewell, Dragonlady of Pern. And thank you.

Solaris Rising Now Out in Stores

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 19:44:00 +0000

The anthology Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction is now in stores (Amazon, B&N, Mysterious Galaxy)! Thanks go to my fellow WotF winner Adam Colston for giving me a photo of the copy he found in the wild. I haven't been in a bookstore since my local Borders closed so it was a pleasant surprise to know the book's out.

I've been a bit hermit-like the past couple weeks, working on writing in between weekend events (took some time off from the day job), but I have good news. I've been contracted to do another story for Story Portals, this time for their upcoming Qi Lin property. Just got the signed paperwork back a few days ago.

And my previous Story Portals story, "The Nightmare Beast," has been collected into the ebook anthology of Katya, Lady Assassin stories: The Taste of Waterfruit and Other Stories.

I had a fantastic time at Blizzcon last weekend, and it turned out more useful from a writing standpoint than I thought. Richard Knaak and Christie Golden, who I read while I was in high school, were both there doing book signings as well as on a panel discussing their tie-in work with Blizzard.

Upcoming Travels

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:38:00 +0000

October's a busy month for me. Fortunately the day job is winding down so I should be able to take a vacation soon. First up is a wedding, second is BlizzCon, and third is the World Fantasy Convention.

BlizzCon is purely for fun since I'm a World of warcraft player and I'll be attending with a few of my guildies. If you happen to going and would like to meet up, I'd be happy to do so, though I'm not there in any writerly capacity (though if Blizzard is looking for another writer for their books I'd be happy to talk about it!).

I mostly plan on being a fan that weekend and soak up all the WoW and Diablo III news I can. Oh, and attend the Foo Fighters concert that closes out the con. I just hope my ears will be able to take the screaming.

WFC will be my first major spec fic convention and I hope to meet a lot of fellow writers I've only met on forums up until this point, as well as a few familiar faces from Writers of the Future. Again, I'll be happy to meet up sometime. From my understanding, WFC is on the small side since the number of attendees is restricted, so it shouldn't be difficult for find people.

After that, in November I plan to be at LosCon, the local LA convention, again. I'm really more of a stay-at-home type, so this is mind-bogglingly busy for me.

Writing "The Nightmare Beast"

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 05:16:00 +0000

My first work-for-hire story, "The Nightmare Beast," is available now to the general public at Story Portals. This is not the first time I've written in someone else's universe (my story "By Whatever Means Necessary" was an Honorable Mention in the first of Blizzard's annual writing contests for their Starcraft/Warcraft/Diablo properties), but happily enough, it's the first time I've been paid to do so.

"The Nightmare Beast" stars an assassin named Katya, the lead franchise character over at Story Portals. One of the best, Katya finds herself on a variety of dangerous jobs over the course of the series. In "The Nightmare Beast" she finds herself meeting an old acquaintance who hires her unaware of who she really is. She's asked to assassinate a man and steal package he neglected to deliver to her client, but the job can't be that simple, can it?

Doing work-for-hire can be fun since a lot of the world-building is already done, I can just cut loose and write, and I was able to write the first draft much more quickly than I could my original work.

"The Nightmare Beast" was also my trial run using Scrivner. I don't normally do first drafts on computer anymore, since I find the lure of the internet to be too distracting, but I didn't want to write "The Nightmare Beast" in longhand in my notebook because it would end up getting mixed in with the novel project I was working on at the time.

Scrivner has a feature though that allows the entire screen to be covered with nothing but a big white sheet, reminiscent of a typewriter, that hides everything else in the background. At first I thought it was a silly feature, but when I used it, I found it really did do a good job of blocking out distractions. The only problem was that the "typewriter" didn't advance with every new line (I was using the Beta) so I was usually writing at the bottom of the screen instead of the middle.

I’m not a complete convert, but the program might be used another time in the future if I need to avoid getting my notebook cluttered with multiple projects again.

I listened to several songs to get into the mood for writing Katya. Songs used for "The Nightmare Beast" were "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry, "According to You" by Orianthi, and "Who Knew" and "Please Don't Leave Me" by Pink.

RPG Talk: Lunar: Silver Star Harmony

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 03:46:00 +0000

Platform: PSP
Year of Release: 2010

The original Lunar: The Silver Star holds a special place in my heart. I was sixteen, loving console RPGs, and at an age when games were finally powerful enough to start including complex stories and cinematic moments. Lunar was one of the first RPGs to feature a well developed cast of characters in a setting that was unique enough to not be just any old fantasy land and featured a plot with something more personal at stake than just saving the world.

It also featured the first RPG villain that I really felt sympathy towards. Until then all the villains I'd seen in games had been fairly cartoony or quite thoroughly evil. Ghaleon was amazing. He was a former hero who had a legitimate reason for hating the Goddess Althena. While I disagreed with his means, I could not disagree with his reason, and that cemented him as one of my favorite villains of all time.

Perhaps as a testament to the story's enduring appeal, Lunar: The Silver Star has been remade a number of times; Lunar: Silver Star Story, Lunar Legend, and now Lunar: Silver Star Harmony. With four versions now in existence, there are variations in how the tale has been told in each one, though the later remakes tend to follow SSS more than the original TSS.

I recently finished playing through Silver Star Harmony and there are some things to be appreciated considering that the game was brought over from Japan by the third company to localize it. Perhaps knowing that many of the people buying it would be players who remember it from childhood (seventeen years passed between the original TSS and the release of SSH) the names of the characters use the changes and spellings used by the original localization team, even when they did not match the Japanese.

Name changes are much rarer in RPGs now, with fans demanding fidelty to the Japanese as much as possible, but Lunar continues to skate by, and so Fiddy continues to be Quark, Killy is still Kyle, etc.

I was initially reluctant to buy yet another copy of the same story, but was convinced to open my wallet when I found out about new material added in. If there's anything the Lunar remakes have done, it's that they add their own tweaks and turns, as if to tell the repeat player this story really is a legend and there are many variations to it.

Comparing this to a more recent property, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony is much like Harry Potter in that the actions of the previous generation echo down into the present and nothing that happens now would have happened if not for what happened before.

Lunar has always had the Four Heroes in every iteration; Dragonmaster Dyne; the sage, Ghaleon; the pirate, Mel; and the heir to the magic guild, Lemia. Every version tells how Dyne went off on one final adventure with his best friend Ghaleon and never returned, and only Ghaleon knew what had really happened. (And no, he didn't kill him.)

Silver Star Harmony's addition to the legacy allows the player to go through a new prologue sequence as the Four Heroes (image above). I wonder if this was perhaps an apology to fans who've requested a Four Heroes game in the past and never got one, instead getting three other games set in different time periods with different characters. The prologue is decently involving, its two boss fights surprisingly punchy, and features a fair deal of new "lore" in gaming parlance. We learn of a Black Star for the first time and finally know the name of the villain who made the Four Heroes household names.

Though there is an aside later in the game that refers back to the prologue, sadly I don't think the writers took as much advantage of the new material as they could have. The prologue villain Eiphel prophecizes that Ghaleon will fall the same way as he did, but there's only one other line of dialogue in the first third of the game that refers back to it. I would have liked Ghaleon to recall that warning at the end of the game to bookend with the beginning and it seems too good a writer trick to miss.

The rest of the game hews fairly closely to the first remake, Silver Star Story, though the dialogue may differ a bit.

The mysterious event that led to Dragonmaster Dyne's disappearance and presumed death, is what sets the story of Lunar in motion, and the main character, Alex, is a village boy who aspires to one day be a Dragonmaster like his hero. On his journey he meets the daughters of the Four Heroes Mel and Lemia, and the main cast is rounded out with a pompous young magican who is apprenticed to Ghaleon and a sleazy bandit.

Now that I'm older and no longer a teenager, what follows is decent enough adolescent quest to rescue a childhood friend who happens to be the key to Ghaleon taking over the world. The story is bright-eyed and optimistic, hearkening back to a simpler time when belief in the human heart is enough. Even when bad things happen, they are obstacles to be overcome and the heroes never completely lose heart, though they may at times falter.

The heroes are perhaps a bit unrealistic in their faith. Ghaleon certainly believes so, and not just because he's the villain. Lack of belief in the human heart is the cornerstone of why he fell (in the remakes). And that brings me to what really stood out for me now that I'm older.

This guy here is Nash. He looks pretty sure of himself, doesn't he?

Nash is probably the least popular of the five main characters. It might be because he starts the game as an arrogant snotbag, overly proud of being apprentice to Ghaleon, the most powerful magician in the world. But it's mainly because of something else Nash does in all versions of the game.

He betrays the party. (Methods vary depending on version, but rest assured he will do it.)

I remember other players saying that after Nash betrayed them they never could forgive him. They didn't want him back in the party.

But the thing is, Nash is probably the most realistic of the main characters. The problem is that he doesn't fit in the mold of having faith and hope that somehow they will emerge successful. He betrays the party because he calls it as he sees it. Sure, Ghaleon isn't a nice guy, but fighting against the most powerful magician in the world, who is capable of single-handedly capturing or killing dragons and enslaving the goddess? It's suicidal.

Nash wants to live, and he wants to protect the girl he loves (fellow party member Mia). In Silver Star Harmony he sabotages the party's airship not just to prevent the group from attacking Ghaleon, but to prevent Mia from getting close enough to be killed.

That might make him out to be a misguided hero, but Nash isn't entirely selfless in this. There is a part of him that appreciates the idea of being special, of having a place in Ghaleon's new order. We find out midway through the game that Nash prizes status because he's from a peasant family and he wanted his parents to be proud that he became an elite magician.

Still, it's Mia that matters the most to him, and it's because he realizes that he's hurting her by fighting on the wrong side that he choses to come back to the group.

(As an aside: I much prefer the original TSS version of Nash's snapping out of it to the slapping Mia gives him in all the remakes since he comes to his senses on his own. It's visually less dramatic since there is no special sprite animation for it, but the guts it must have taken for Nash to return to the party, almost at the cost of his life and knowing they might not take him back, made a much stronger emotional impact.)

All the characters except probably Alex (who is as noble in the end as he was in the beginning) grow, but it's Nash who grows the most, saying that "We can't value people only for their power, magic, or wealth" in defiance of what he'd once believed.

He's a refreshing voice of reason, and once Nash was ready to believe in the power of the human spirit, I found I was too. He might not have been liked by a lot of players (in this forum poll he's in a three way tie across two Lunar games for least favorite--ouch!), and he's certainly not a character to aspire to be, but I wonder if players will find him more understandable, if not necessarily likable, with age.

If we were real people in the story of Lunar, I think a lot more people would be a Nash than an Alex.

Images courtesy of IGN, which amazingly enough provides links so external sites can embed their images.

"The Nightmare Beast" Now Available at Story Portals

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:56:00 +0000

My story "The Nightmare Beast" is now available for registered members at Story Portals (and registration is free!). It will become available to the general public in a week.

In "The Nightmare Beast," accomplished assassin Katya finds herself hired by an old acquaintance, who is unaware of her hidden identity as a killer-for-hire. But Katya is not the only one with secrets and the assassin soon discovers she's not the only one who's changed since they last met.

Story Portals Going Live!

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:30:00 +0000

Story Portals is a new hub for fantasy adventure stories, set to go live on September 1st, which for most of the world, is already today!

The launch character is Katya, a lady assassin and the sole remaining follower of the goddess of love and death, Shi'in. For those who read a lot of D&D novels, at least a couple of the names on the roster for writing Katya will look familiar, such as Marsheila Rockwell and Richard Lee Byers.

Ten stories are going to be available at launch with an eleventh available to registered members, with new stories to come. I'm happy to say that one of them will be mine.

Classic Read: The Road Back

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 06:12:00 +0000

When I was in school, I had a love/hate relation with my English classes. I loved creative writing. I hated having to analyze the classics and there are certain books much beloved in literary circles that bored me to tears.

But there was a bright spot in all the assigned reading. Sometimes I actually did find a book I enjoyed, no assigned reading book reached me and possibly influenced me as much as All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. It's the story of a young German soldier assigned to fight in the trenches in World War I and how it whittles down everything and everyone he cares about. Perhaps because the main character was only a few years older than me, I found him relatable.

Some years later I heard that there was a sequel called The Road Back that followed characters from the same combat company, but since Paul dies at the end of All Quiet I wasn't sure I wanted to read it. And then I was busy with college, then work, and for a good long while I forgot about the whole thing.

Until I had a hankering to read All Quiet again, and finding myself without a copy at home, I drove over to the public library to check out a copy. They also had The Road Back and I figured, Why not?

I wish I hadn't waited so long.

Though many of the characters who appeared in All Quiet on the Western Front are dead, Tjaden makes a return, still very much the light-hearted prankster of the group, and we're given names to newer characters who presumably were always there in the first book, but weren't as close to Paul (the first person narrator of All Quiet) to have been worth mentioning by name.

For instance, there's a reference to the time they caught two suckling pigs and made pancakes during an air raid. In the first book Paul mentions there were eleven people in the group, but we didn't know the names of all of them at the time. Now we know a few more.

Ernst, the main character of The Road Back, is a similarly eloquent first person narrator to Paul, but does not suffer from the same despair that Paul eventually falls into. He and his friends come back from the war only to find it difficult to fit back into society, which is going into upheaval due to a revolution that has driven the Kaiser from the country and turned Germany into a republic.

Aside from political issues, food is still scarce among civilians and there is little effort to integrate the veterans, several suffering from what we now call PTSD, back into society. Ernst and some of his friends attempt to resume going to school, where they had been studying for their teaching credentials, but their schoolmasters have no idea what it's been like for them in the war and the former soldiers have little patience for what they see as useless work.

All the former soldiers deal with their return differently. Some recover quickly, becoming successful business men. Others fall prey to the demons still haunting them. Ernst himself runs in the middle, for though he cannot escape his memories of the front, there is a certain spark to him that refuses to back down.

Though The Road Back gives the feeling that civilians didn't learn anything from the war, the epilogue even shows a bunch of children just a few years shy of drafting playing war games under the direction of adults, it ends on a brighter note than All Quiet on the Western Front. Ernst realizes that his road is going to be long, painful, and most likely traveled alone. He might never get back to the way he was before the war, but he's going to try.

And I really like that hope that All Quiet never gave. Ernst is a broken man who has trouble fitting into society, but he still fights for what he believes in. He still hopes. He's not beyond repair.

Remarque writes at the start of the All Quiet on the Western Front that:

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."

The Road Back shows us that what has been destroyed can still be salvaged, and perhaps with time, restored to what it was.

The Promise Made with a Series

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 04:57:00 +0000

I finished rereading a much loved book from my middle school/high school years. It's book 3 in a seven book series (and no, it's not Harry Potter, I'm not that young), and the series had been designed from the start to be exactly seven books. None of this extending the series because it's popular or because each novel is a stand alone deal. It was intended to be seven books. No more, no less.

I really liked the third book because it took the series to another level. It was the dark turning point where the stakes were raised and ancestral enemies realize they might not be enemies at all. And I fell in love with one of the periphery characters introduced in the book. He had to grow up fast and became a tragic character by the end. I think I may have cried the first time I read the ending.

After that, I was very bright-eyed and optimistic about the series, and while books 4 and 5 never quite peaked as high as book 3 with me, they were solid. Then something happened with books 6 and 7.

Without going into specifics, the spelling of my favorite character's name in book 3 was changed by one letter. Not much, but it certainly threw me off. The prophecy from book 3 never came back again (despite being a huge deal in that book) and my favorite character didn't do much of anything except act like a talking piece of furniture (and he'd been the one the prophecy was about).

There were other issues too. Some minor. Some big enough that one could drive a truck through. The implied gender of a character's child was swapped between books. And even within the same book an implausibility happens that makes sense on an initial read (while the main characters and the reader don't know better), but fails once a certain character is revealed. Astute readers will catch it on the first read and check back a few chapters to see if the events leading up to the reveal make still sense. I remember I did (and they don't).

I still appreciate the series for its characters and fine world building, but finishing it bothered me as a high school reader because I thought someone would have planned the whole thing out from start to finish, since it was known from the beginning that it would be a seven book series. I felt like the tail end of the series had been phoned in, nobody cared anymore. Or, the series really had not been planned as well as I thought it was, and so the series had been wrapped up as neatly as possible given the circumstances.

There's probably a reason behind the ending sagging that I'm not aware of. But as that high school kid, I was really disappointed. I was promised awesome sauce all the way up through the fifth book, and I got middling sauce by the end. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good, and felt worse because it wasn't awesome.

When I think of the most popular seven book series of today, when I think of Harry Potter, I realize that whatever I may think of Rowling's prose, I respect her ability to write a plot. She might have added and subtracted things behind the scenes that the reader never knew, but what was laid down made sense and I didn't feel any promises betrayed.

I've never written a long book series, but this is something I want to keep in mind for when or if I do.

Listening to Feedback

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 05:07:00 +0000

I recently finished playing through the Dragon Age 2: Legacy DLC. For those a little less video game savvy, that's extra paid download content beyond what comes with the game itself, and what it exactly contains varies from game to game. It could be bonus items, levels, costumes, etc.

Legacy is like an extra adventure which story-wise takes place during the main game. It's also a bit remarkable in that the developer said they took pains to listen to player feedback in what they didn't like in the main game when they crafted the DLC and even now maintain a feedback thread on their forums to get a handle on what people liked or didn't like about this particular DLC.

The reason I find this interesting as a blog topic is because writers, particularly new writers, are often in pursuit of feedback. It's not uncommon to balance reader feedback (often in the form of a critique) with what to do in the next draft of the story. The difference here is that writers often focus on the current project they're working on and that game developers look foward just as often to the next iteration (be it patch, DLC, or sequel).

The result of feedback is quite good when it comes to Legacy. It immediately fixed common criticisms of the main game such as recycled area maps and nonsensical waves of enemies. It is also more story-based than previous Dragon Age DLCs, culminating in a very nice "lore" moment where astute followers of the series can be shocked by the complete identity of the last boss. I quite enjoyed it all.

Legacy is an example of where audience feedback was taken to heart can judging from forum comments, the result was received well. It's not possible to please everyone, but it's a good thing when people who didn't like the main game as much found the DLC to be quite enjoyable.

As writers I've heard there's a point where you want to avoid "writing by commitee." In games "designing by committee" isn't considered much better, especially since the fanbase may want conflicting things, but I think if the target audience is saying something, it's a good idea to listen. They're the ones paying the money.

And here where it gets murkier for a writer. Until we have a fanbase, and a particularly ardent one, it's not likely we'll hear from those who are paying the money.

I can't think of a solution to that, aside from making sure your critiquers are also in the target audience you want your readers to be, so what they're suggesting or asking for as a reader is more likely to match up with what potential readers who've yet to discover you want.

Solaris Rising Table of Contents Released

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 03:11:00 +0000

The table of contents for Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science-Fiction is out! This anthology, edited by Ian Whates, will be featuring my story "Mooncakes" in collaboration with Mike Resnick. I recognize several names that I'm quite happy to appear in the company of.

Introduction - Ian Whates
A Smart-Mannered Uprising of the Dead - Ian McDonald
The Incredible Exploding Man - Dave Hutchinson
Sweet Spots - Paul di Filippo
Best SF of the Year Three - Ken MacLeod
The One that Got Away - Tricia Sullivan
Rock Day - Stephen Baxter
Eluna - Stephen Palmer
Shall I Tell You the Problem with Time Travel? - Adam Roberts
The Lives and Deaths of Che Guevara - Lavie Tidhar
Steel Lake - Jack Skillingstead
Mooncakes - Mike Resnick and Laurie Tom
At Play in The Fields - Steve Rasnic Tem
How We Came Back From Mars - Ian Watson
You Never Know - Pat Cadigan
Yestermorrow - Richard Salter
Dreaming Towers, Silent Mansions - Jaine Fenn
Eternity's Children - Eric Brown and Keith Brooke
For the Ages - Alastair Reynolds
Return of the Mutant Worms - Peter F. Hamilton

The book will be available in paper and ebook in November. With any luck, that means copies will be available in time for Loscon.

Shopping at Borders

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 06:38:00 +0000

I stop by the physical bookstore maybe once a month. I admit, I have a certain fondness for paper (despite my affinity for computers and video games) and there's nothing quite like adding to the stacks of books on my shelves. I wish they were better organized, but that's a different issue.

This was my first time at the bookstore since reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's observations about bookstores. My local bookstore of choice is part of the Borders chain, which unfortunately is working through a bankruptcy at the moment. It's not in danger of being immediately shut down, but I'm concerned that a couple years from now it won't be there. There isn't a single indie bookstore that sells new books in the entire city, so when this Borders goes, I'm likely to have to do all my shopping online.

I first started shopping at this Borders as a senior in high school, which was about the same time that the B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks started to disappear from malls. At the age I was though, I didn't think much of it. As long as I could get the books I wanted, which was usually fairly often, I didn't have a problem with where I shopped.

After reading Kris's article though, and planning my most recent trip to Borders, I realized that I had a rather bizarre habit.

I dislike driving to the bookstore and not finding what I want, so I've developed a habit of checking online whether or not a potential half dozen books I'd be interested in were inventory. That way I know whether or not the trip would be a waste. I do like browsing the shelves to see if I find anything interesting just by happenstance, but I don't like leaving empty-handed.

I've actually starting picking up manga as stop-gaps if the novels I want aren't available, because a popular manga series will generally have various volumes in stock, and if one volume of a series I'm reading is missing I can probably find the next volume I need of a different one. (Sadly, I'm now facing a different problem where I'm getting far enough in various series that it's less likely the volume I want is in the store.)

I didn't used to do this. I remember in high school I could go to a bookstore and find nearly all the books from Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series in stock. These days she occupies half the shelf she used to and there isn't nearly as much of the older Pern material (mostly the newer stuff with her son Todd). I imagine other authors' shelf spaces have shrunk as well. If it's not relatively new, it's not on the shelf.

I've been wanting to start reading Naomi Novik's Teremaire series, but had some trouble finding the first book in stock. How a bookseller expects to market book six without book one available I don't know, but His Majesty's Dragon had been on my "I hope to find it in stock one of these days" lists for a while.

Finally, I found it... as part of a boxed set containing the first three books. It was a score as far as I was concerned (I'd read a sample of the book already so I had a reasonable sense that I could gamble on three books and enjoy them all), but still a little annoying that the book just hadn't been there, on its own, months ago. I would have bought it months ago as well if it'd been there.

I can't really pinpoint why a bookstore's selection seems so much worse than in previous years. Borders does have a section of the store devoted to Kobo, but the science fiction and fantasy rows don't feel that much smaller. Though, I admit the tie-in portion is a lot bigger than before.

That makes me wonder, just as a wild idea, if perhaps the future of printed books will be in franchises.

Living Rooms: Now on Kindle

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 06:17:00 +0000

There's been a lot of chatter around the blogosphere and writing communities about ebooks, their relevance, and the path to success. Perhaps most telling is that at this year's Writers of the Future workshop, the judges could not agree on what the industry was going to look like in the next five years.

Some people have jumped whole-heartedly into independent publishing. Others are quite stubborn about sticking to tradition. The best way may well indeed be a mix between the New York model and the indie one. I'm not in a position with my novel manuscript to be worrying about that right now, but I figured I would begin to experiment with my previously published work, since ebooks seem to lend themselves to novelette and novella length stories, which is a hard sell in the traditional world.

"Living Rooms," my Gold Award winning story of the Writing of the Future contest, is now available for purchase on Kindle (other formats forthcoming) for just $0.99. The artwork is by my friend Denis Takara, who happens to also be the Dungeon Master for the D&D group I play with on Sundays.

That does mean we sometimes get nifty illustrations of his custom made monsters when we play. Isn't that cool?

Japanese Light Novels

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 04:27:00 +0000

Last year I started reading the Spice & Wolf series by Isuna Hasekura. It's what is called in Japan a "light novel" series. It's a short novel comes with a few illustrations up front and more or less makes for "light" reading, though I'm a little skeptical about whether that's where the name comes from.

Light novels appear to work much like comics in that they are serials marked by volume number rather than with a separate title for each installment. If Spice and Wolf is anything to judge by, each volume is a self-contained story, an episode if you will, of the larger series, with an overarching storyline running between multiple books.

It's not quite the same as a fantasy trilogy, which is why the serial analogy works.

For instance, in volume 1 of Spice and Wolf, the characters of Lawrence and Holo begin traveling together, with the goal of returning Holo to her long forgotten home in the distant north. That's the overarching story. But the climax of volume 1 has nothing to do with her homeland, so much as to what lengths do Lawrence and Holo want to remain traveling companions when they have the opportunity to part ways.

Volume 2 covers a deal gone wrong where Holo has to bail Lawrence out of a mess of his own creation, which of course is at a city that's a stopover on their travel north.

Volume 3 looks to further the relationship between Lawrence and Holo as their journey continues (since there's definitely some unresolved sexual tension between the both of them), with of course another wrench thrown in the plan.

Persumably the series, which has gone up to sixteen volumes as of this writing, continues in this way until Lawrence and Holo inevitably find Yoitsu. Or, perhaps, there will be a different reason for them to keep traveling.

Spice and Wolf is a fresh and breezy read. It's a very minimalist sort of narration with short paragraphs, lots of dialogue, and the pages turn fast.

I don't think we really have an analog to the light novel in the US, save the ones that are translated from the Japanese, and that's too bad. I feel like we're missing some sort of marketing niche.

WotF Workshop Week and Catch-up

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Sun, 22 May 2011 21:52:00 +0000

The day job was demanding a lot of me, right up to the point where I departed for this year's Writers of the Future workshop, which took place last week. This is the first weekend I've had to myself in nine weeks. Not that I stopped writing, even during the business. I kept writing even during the WotF workshop, and that was a blast to attend.

One of the things that isn't widely talked about (and I had no idea happened prior to my own win) is that recent winners of previous years will often come back and sit in the back of the workshop. A few of them, the more successful ones, may give a talk about how they made it.

When I won for WotF 26, Ken Scholes, Steve Savile, Eric James Stone, and Jordan Lapp were our recent winners and mentors.

Until you're in the position of a brand new winner, you have no idea why it's so helpful to have previous winners at the workshop. For many winners, the judges are childhood idols, the people who they've wanted to be. Talking to them is difficult, especially those first few conversations. I was so nervous the first night I met most of the judges that I was afraid Kevin J. Anderson would only remember me as the "giggling girl" because I couldn't stop. I was still in disbelief that people like them could actually enjoy my writing.

Me, who'd received a grand total of 372 rejections before landing my Gold Award winning story!

But the previous winners were able to take me by the arm and introduce me to the judges, get conversations going, and make me feel welcome.

This year, I was privileged enough to return as a previous winner and continue the favor for this year's crop of winners, maybe of whom were in the same state of disbelief I was last year. It's funny how much of a difference a year makes.

I came in middle of their week, right after they'd done their meeting a stranger exercise, so they were about to embark on their 24-hour story exercise. I never worried about whether or not I'd finish mine, since I'd done a story start-to-finish in a single evening before, but I knew the exercise was an eye-opener for some.

The workshop week was an adventure in an entirely different manner now that I no longer had the pressure of the workshop or the grand prize hanging above my head. (I don't know how the illustrators stand it, since all of them are up their Gold Award.) While the winners worked on their 24-hour stories I got to tour inside a co-op garden closed to the public due to an intrepid conversation started by Tim Powers and his wife Serena with a gardener who was able to tell us tales about the Hollywood area and its history with the garden. It was the meet a stranger exercise magnified to something ten times better than what I'd experienced.

This year I was able to speak with the judges without stumbling over my words, no longer the giggling girl too nervous to talk, and I could talk with the new winners with the confidence that all would be fine. Most of them had made their first professional sale with their win, and are simply drowning in information. The workshop keeps tough hours too, with events often starting at 8am and unofficial hanging out in the lobby not ending until midnight or 1am.

The award ceremony was particularly enjoyable for me this year, since I honestly don't remember a whole lot of last year's. I was so nervous that I spent the entire time between my first place award and the Gold Award announcement mentally rehearsing my second acceptance speech just in case I won. I was terrified I would forget and end up not being able to say a word.

I take that back.

I remember just before they made the announcement for the Gold Award I was so nervous I turned to my dad, who was in the audience with me, and said, "I think I need to go to the bathroom."

And he, leaning towards me for an entirely different reason, said, "Good luck!"

After the award ceremony I had the pleasure of collecting autographs from the new winners, who were overwhelmed by all the fuss. We had an after party as well, during which I found out that my collaboration with Mike Resnick, had sold to the New Book of Solaris Science Fiction anthology. (The editor's in the UK, so the news had come in at about 1am.)

All in all, it was a very good week. I can see why Tim Powers and Eric Flint have said they like going to conventions so much.

Going back to WotF was like a reunion, seeing people who I would never get to see otherwise. These people: the judges, the previous winners, and now the current group, are all part of a greater writing community that I'm now a part of.

Writing is so often a solitary pursuit, and I'm not sure when I'll see all of these people again. A few of them I know I'll see again at this year's World Fantasy in San Diego. Others I might catch at LosCon, our local L.A. convention. The rest, I really don't know.

But we'll keep in touch, and by next year I hope to have more stories published and coming down the pipeline.

Doing Taxes

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 05:07:00 +0000

This is the first year that I did taxes on the earnings for my writing. It was hard not to, with the 1099-MISC staring me in the face from Writers of the Future. But aside from legal obligations, 2010 was the first year where I earned enough more to cover more than a couple of dinners or maybe a convention membership.

I don't expect 2011 will be better (it's hard to top the WotF grand prize), but I'm hoping for some decent pocket change.

What I did learn though, from doing my taxes, is being organized!

At the WotF workshop Tim Powers told us to start counting everything related to our work as expenses. Meals while traveling. Books for research. SFWA membership. I kept all my receipts. But keeping all my receipts didn't mean that I had them all in the same place.

Sadly enough, I had receipts inside of books (if I bought a book from a physical bookstore, I tended to use the receipt as a bookmark), receipts tucked off to the side on my computer desk, receipts still inside my wallet...

I found them all. I can't think of a one that's missing. But not only did I have to find them all, I had to organize them into different categories because they can't all be lumped together. (For instance, food expenses count differently.)

This year I plan to do better. I have my receipt drawer already prepared. Receipts aren't wandering away without a fight!

Good Writing, Dragon Age II

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 06:48:00 +0000

I recently finished playing Dragon Age II. What does this have to do with writing one could ask? It's a video game.

Well, I started writing because of video games.

I suppose if one goes back to the very first time I tired to write fiction it was really cartoons and toys, but when I was twelve, I played a particular video game and decided I wanted to write a story about it. It took me six months of on and off writing, but I finished that story, and decided then that I wanted to be a writer.

Video games have been a part of my storytelling consumption ever since. While I read books and watch the occasional movie, video games have always been one of my favorite methods of storytelling and probably always will be. Sometimes the quality isn't that good, not every game focuses on the plot, but a story adds something. It gives running through levels and fighting bad guys meaning.

I've watched storytelling in games rise from simple plot setups in the game manual, maybe in the game itself, to full fledged epics. I remember the first time I played a game and I felt my eyes water. I couldn't believe it. A game was moving me to tears.

Dragon Age II didn't make me cry, but it has been one of the best written games I've played in a long time and I attribute that to the excellent writing team at Bioware. There are moments I want to revisit again and again because they left such an impact on me.

In all role-playing games there is always a balance that has to be struck between player freedom and the need to serve the story. Some RPGs such as the Elder Scrolls series allow a great amount of player freedom, so much so that the story can be all but forgotten as the player roams a giant sandbox playing with whatever catches their interest. If there are other party members, they might simply be window dressing so the player has more people to control in battle.

On the other side are games such as the Final Fantasy series which are carefully scripted to the point where the player can only go to certain places and do things as dictated by the story. Choice is an illusion and the main character is quite likely a defined character on his or her own. There is only one way to save the world, one way to go through a cave, one destiny for a character to have, and the player will perform it in that fashion.

DA2 let me decide who I wanted my character to be within the confines dictated by the plot. While I could not make game-breaking decisions like pack up and move to another country, what choices were available did matter and I could not take the team of people I wanted to work together the most into my character's final battle because I had to make a choice.

DRAGON AGE II SPOILERS AHEAD

My version of Hawke, the main character, was played as a kind and helpful person; sympathetic to the oppression of mages. As an apostate (illegal) mage herself it made sense she would feel for those mages trapped within the Circle and managed by the templars, out of fear they could hurt themselves or others.

She met Anders, a fellow apostate with a kind heart working in a clinic for the poor; a healer. Anders had a problem, being possessed by a formerly well-meaning spirit that had been warped into a spirit of vengeance, but it was clear he was a good man. She liked him quite a bit.

At the same time, she met Sebastian, a former prince and brother in the chantry (church). He had lapsed in his vows to the chantry, but wanted to convince the grand cleric that he was ready to be committed again.

The way DA2 works, is that as the player and their party members roam around, the companion characters can talk to each other, so it's possible to hear what their views are, how they live, what they think of each other. Anders and Sebastian are only two of them, but they turned out to be favorites of mine so I had them in my party almost all the time. As the game progresses, there are special quests that are specifically assigned to each companion, allowing the player to find out more of that character's backstory and move their personal plot along.

The mechanics of the quest are the same for each player, but the dialogue changes depending on choices the player has made, giving the player something of a personal investment in how the story plays out.

For instance, Sebastian knew that my Hawke and Anders had entered a relationship with each other, so after I helped him with something he warned her that "He's a dangerous man. And selfish. Whatever he promised, don't believe that he will ever put your needs above his own."

And that bothered me as the player. At this point in the story I already knew that Anders was losing the battle keeping his own mind separate from that of the spirit inside of him, but Anders had been so kind earlier on that I couldn't put what Sebastian was saying together with the Anders I knew.

But then I did one of Anders's quests and found out that he lied about the reason he needed certain ingredients gathered, and he wanted Hawke to do something very shady for a reason he wouldn't tell her. He asked if she could simply trust him, and that what he was doing was for the good of all mages.

It was a very ominous thing, and suddenly I knew what Sebastian was warning Hawke about. But the order of the scenes, the way the dialogue came out, it wouldn't have been the same for every player. Not every player would even get the warning from Sebastian because not every player would have started a romance with Anders, not every player would become good enough friends with Sebastian, not every player would even meet Sebastian in the first place. While certainly there are a good deal of people who saw exactly what I did, it made what Anders was doing very personal.

The final straw came near the end of the game, when the mages of the city are arguing with the templars, and it looks like they will come to blows. There is a power vacuum in the city and the mages are sick of their templar overlords. In desperation, the mage leader says he will go to the grand cleric of the chantry to ask her to rein in the templars, and the templar knight-commander tries to stop him.

But the one who really stops them both is Anders. The chantry lights up in a magical explosion, an explosion Hawke unwittingly helped set up, because she agreed to trust him.

Anders had been slipping throughout the story. Particularly in the last third it had become apparent. He wasn't getting along with most of Hawke's companions, he was frequently irritable, and he was becoming more extreme in his belief that mages needed to be free of the templars. Was it really him, or the spirit inside of him? Hawke had been warned that getting involved with the possessed mage had been a bad idea, but he had been such a kind person, especially to Hawke when her mother had died.

Now an entire city block was destroyed and the grand cleric killed to remove any illusion of compromise. It was now war between the templars and the mages.

And I had to choose more than whether I would side with Knight-Commander Meredith or First Enchanter Orsino. I had to choose between Anders and Sebastian, both of whom were my dearest companions.

Anders expected to die for what he'd done, and Sebastian wanted him dead as punishment for killing the grand cleric and who knew how many innocent lives, but the choice is left to the player. It is possible to spare Anders.

I thought about it, and asked the other companion characters what they thought, and though the majority of them said he should die, one of them pointed out that if he lived he could work to put things right. After some deliberation, I decided this companion was right. Anders was clearly a tormented man who had done a horrible thing for what was probably in the grand scheme of things, the right reason. The mages would fight for their freedom now, because they had no choice. And there can be no redemption for Anders if he does not live.

Unfortunately Sebastian would have none of it, and he walked out on my party.

I can't say the choices I made throughout the game were in my favor, but they mattered. Would I have cared nearly as much about what happened to Anders if my character had not chosen to love him? Would Anders's betrayal have hurt as much if Hawke had merely been his friend? And then I lost Sebastian. It was an either/or with him and Anders. There was no way they could ever have come to common ground and gone into the final battle together.

A story, whether in a book or in a game, matters when the audience cares about what happens. It doesn't matter whether they are a player or a reader. I had become invested in these characters to the point where I wanted them to succeed. I wanted Anders to become whole again. I wanted Sebastian to find out for himself whether he should remain a chantry brother or reclaim his title as prince.

I looked on the Bioware forums and there is a thread over 300 posts long talking about Anders. Some players hate him. Some players love him. The fact that there is so much discussion about a character in a video game shows how much he moved us, one way or another.

A tip of the hat to Ms. Jennifer Hepler and rest of the Bioware writing team, for writing such a fascinating character. Traveling with Anders has been a painful journey, but a memorable one. Every now and then I meet a character who I consider an inspiration for what I hope to do in my own work. Anders is one of them.