Cause and Effect

For many years, I stayed well away from Western-developed role-playing games. I grew up with the Nintendo and then later the PlayStation. Most, if not all, of my favorite video games first saw the light of day in Japan. When I got interested in role-playing games, it was titles like Final Fantasy VII, Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, Breath of Fire and many more that drew me in. These games formed my idea of what it meant to play an RPG. They were tightly controlled games, with a very definite idea of where the story was going, and an equally definite idea of how you were going to get there and who you were going to get there with. There was no deviating from the plot. There might be excursions here and there, little side-quests to help you level up, find extra loot, maybe flesh out a hidden plot point or two, that sort of thing. But in the end, you were going to face the enemy a certain way, and there was no real choice in the matter. Any time something resembling a choice was presented, it was patently false. You hade two choices: You can say “Yes” and go save the princess, or you can say “No” and be told why you’re a terrible person before being presented with the “choice” once more.

I’m not saying this was right or wrong. It is simply what I was used to. I was so used to it, in fact, that it became part of what kept me away from Western RPGs. I was used to that linearity, that completely scripted narrative. Without the usual succession of kings and queens and helpful old men in caves telling me where to go next and who to kill once I arrived, I felt sure I’d be lost.

Then Mass Effect came along.

The first time I played it was at a friend’s house on the Xbox 360. I wasn’t really sure what I was playing at first. It looked interesting – the technology was sleek and sharp-looking, and the environment of the opening area was intriguingly natural – but then, it was bound to look interesting. This was also one of the first current-generation console games I’d seen up close and personal. There seemed to be RPG elements to the game, but this was hardly new, or interesting. I’d been seeing “RPG Elements!” or something similar as a bullet-point in box copy for years at this point. It was becoming difficult to find a game that didn’t have some form of character progression system in place. As ubiquitous as RPG elements were, you might as well also say “Has graphics!” or “Includes sounds!” to help differentiate one game from others.

When I finally got a decent gaming-capable desktop PC some years later, I was browsing Steam when the game came up on sale for $19.99. And I thought, why not? If my PC can run Crysis, it can probably run pretty much anything, up to a certain point. So I bought the game and downloaded it, went with a generic male Shepard with the default face (not wanting to deal with the character creation system very much), and clicked through the part where I was supposed to select my Shepard’s background and skillset before I realized quite what I was doing.

Then I was in the game, and it didn’t matter.

There’s a lot I could probably say about the gameplay, but that’s pretty well been taken care of by this point, I think. The mechanics of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 have been dissected in detail, to varying degrees of finesse, by people who have made it their professional business to opine about video games far longer than I ever considered doing it. Suffice it to say that much running around and shooting things from cover is done, in between bouts of talking to people to gather information about what’s happening and how one might proceed.

I will take a moment to point out that BioWare, Mass Effect’s makers, have done something unusual these days in making Mass Effect 2 such a different game, mechanically speaking, than its predecessor. Oh, the two are pretty similar, but Mass Effect 2 ditches a lot of the party member customization options. It lets you control which skills your non-Shepard party members develop, but it lets them determine their weapons and equipment for themselves. Shepard’s own equipment, particularly his armor, is now altered on a modular basis instead of swapping out whole suits.

What this ensures, basically, is that all the juggling of numbers and tweaking of statistics is where it always was meant to be: in the background.

Part of what I love about Mass Effect is that it feels so fresh and different coming from my background. Most of my idea of what constitutes a role-playing game came from my experience with console RPGs originally developed in Japan. My whole idea of what gameplay implied revolved around concepts like turn-based (or quasi-turn-based) battles which occurred by way of random encounters; grinding for experience, money, rare drops or all three; and of course the ever-present dominion of linearity.

The other part of what I love about Mass Effect is that it is more truly a role-playing game than any other I’ve played, in the critical sense that it lets you truly play a role. Shepard is who you want him or her to be. Every interaction with other characters and with the story involves choices. Most games seem to want to impress you with their story. Mass Effect aims to give you a scenario, and let you impress yourself with how you handle it. I don't know about most people, but this kind of escapism is why I got into role-playing games in the first place.

Sure, some choices are minor, amounting to a simple difference in dialogue options. Some decisions are major. Do you let a once-extinct but recently revived species – one which brought the galaxy to its knees millennia ago – live, or do you allow them to be destroyed? Do you sacrifice the heads of government so you can focus on the primary antagonist in the short term, or do you divert attention and manpower to saving them in order to make sure there is some stable government in the long term when the conflict is ended? Be careful how you choose; the decisions made in the first Mass Effect will be carried over into the second, and those made in the second will be carried into the third.

The decisions aren’t always easy, and are rarely, if ever, black and white. Most choices in games that actually let you choose are rarely this well handled. Most games give you two choices, usually quite binary in nature. The spectrum ranges from saintly good to Snidely-Whiplash-moustache-twirlingly evil.

Mass Effect does away with the good and evil paradigm altogether, and characterizes its choices instead in terms of Paragon and Renegade. Paragon choices usually break down into actions that are either diplomatic and willing to compromise in order to satisfy all parties where talk is concerned, or options which are traditionally heroic (no one gets left behind, we’re doing what’s right even if it’s the far more difficult thing to do, etc.) in terms of actions and deeds. Renegade choices generally are more “the ends justify the means” types in their overall outlook and justification. A Renegade Shepard has no problem threatening a criminal during interrogation, and pummeling said criminal into paste should the need arise.

The games usually are very clear about which choices are Paragon and Renegade. What they are deliberately vague on is whether one choice is more “right” than another. Usually, when a choice is presented, there are good reasons (or what certainly appear to be good reasons, given what you know at that moment) for any of the options presented. Assuming you make the choices based on what you as a player feel is right, as opposed to what you think the game wants you to choose, you will probably wind up leaning toward one of the extremes of Paragon and Renegade, but probably also with some decisions made in the other direction as well.

Recently, I started a new playthrough of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. I knew the third installment was coming soon, and I wanted to have the events of the previous games relatively fresh in my mind. I also wanted to make a more unique Shepard than the one I’d made the first time around, and handle some decisions differently in both games. I decided to do this probably no more than a year (likely even less) from when I originally finished Mass Effect 2. It’s rare for me to do this for any game, particularly in the RPG genre, where games run into the dozens of hours just as a regular thing.

On a final note, I would like to mention the writing in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. I’ve experienced precious little video game writing that is this good, and this good on this consistent a basis. Sure, the Portal games have good writing, but there are only a few characters in those two games combined (GLaDOS, Wheatley and Cave Johnson are pretty much it). And while I certainly don’t want to belittle that work, to have such good writing (and high-quality voice work!) in a series of games with perhaps hundreds of characters both major and minor, in situations where you are, through the protagonist, directing the dialogue on the fly, and are in the presence of several different possible combinations of party members who have to react to your words believably…that takes skill.

It helps, too, that the characters are both believable, interesting, and humorous. Particularly valuable is the humor. I don’t normally require a huge amount of comedy in my games, but when you consider that you are going to be into this game for possibly a couple dozen hours or more, especially when the situation the game presents is pretty damned grim, the ability and the opportunity to laugh here and there is greatly appreciated.

I’ve even considered buying some of the tie-in novels for this series. Never seriously, or for long, but that the thought has crossed my mind at all should tell you something about how much I like these games.

The Fair Unknown

The problem (well, a problem) with Final Fantasy VII is that being its hero, Cloud Strife, is kind of a raw deal. Let’s take a look at all the wonderful things that happen when you’re Cloud:

You grow up alienated from your peers, set off to make something of yourself by joining an elite military organization (the one to which your hero, your idol, belongs) only to be denied, and consigned to be one of the faceless rank and file. You make a cool friend in this military elite, a sort of role model, but your whole life goes sideways once more when you’re sent on a mission to your hometown with your cool friend and your hero. You’re too embarrassed to show your face after having failed in your one grand ambition, afraid even to go to your own mother’s house or confront your childhood friend because of it, and then over the period of a few days your hero completely loses his shit. He burns down your hometown, kills your family and severely injures your childhood friend (at least she gets better). He beats your cool friend nearly to death, and does quite a number on you, too, but you manage to put him out of commission for a while. Your reward for this is to be put in a coma for four or five years while a mad scientist runs experiments on you and your cool friend. Then, when the two of you break out (really, when your cool friend breaks out and drags you along with him because you’re catatonic), your cool friend gets killed protecting you and with his dying breath asks you to live on for him.

So you do.

You become a mercenary like he planned to be, use the sword he used, unwittingly fall in love with the girl he fell in love with, and wind up building an entire false reality for yourself. In this false reality, your memories are no longer trustworthy. Without quite realizing it, you revise your memories so that you see yourself doing all the things your cool elite military friend did because now you are the badass, and you forget all about him. Then you inadvertently help fulfill the dark designs of your old hero (you know, the psychotic one who burned down your hometown and killed your mother? Yeah, he’s back), who has determined to erase all life from the face of the planet. Then you get to watch as he kills the woman you (and your cool friend) loved, and are eventually made to confront the humiliating truth that the story of your life as you have thus far presented it to everyone you know is a lie. Your misery is made complete when the scientist who ran the experiments on you tells you that the experiment was a failure (and by extension, so are you).

And in your mind, a certainty begins to emerge: you are clearly the world’s whipping boy.

All of which helps to make Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII so refreshing. In it, you play Cloud’s friend from his days as a Shin-Ra military grunt: Zack Fair. And Zack enjoys his life. He likes being in SOLDIER, the organization that (as it turns out) Cloud could only dream of joining in reality. Zack is kind and upbeat and kind of cool. He’s big on proving his honor and being a hero, but he’s also still pretty in touch with reality, which makes him a rarity among role-playing game heroes in general. He’s what you’d get if the sort of plucky young heroes who populate a lot of RPGs ever grew up and had some sense knocked into them without having all the idealism knocked out.

Crisis Core also benefits from taking place at a point in time some years before the events of Final Fantasy VII proper occur, so the world doesn’t seem to be in quite such a dire position at this point. Shin-Ra doesn’t seem to be quite so evil, and Sephiroth seems – shockingly! – to be a relatively well-balanced person.

Speaking of Sephiroth…

I always wondered about this “being a hero” business he gets credited with in the backstory of Final Fantasy VII. Cloud looks up to him, and when he’s explaining the backstory in the village of Kalm, just after the party escapes Midgar, he mentions that Sephiroth was sort of his role model. The world at large, and Cloud in particular, apparently saw him as some kind of hero at the time. Which is funny, because, however much we know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, one look is all it takes in this case. Something about Sephiroth just screams psychotic, unrepentant, nihilistic destroyer of worlds.

Crisis Core gives us a much-appreciated look at him before the insanity set in, though, and what we see is someone who could actually have been a decent guy if he was left well enough alone. But part of what Crisis Core does is widen our gaze on this era of the Shin-Ra Electric Power Company, and we see that Sephiroth isn’t the only superhuman badass on the company’s payroll. In fact, there are two others.

One is Genesis, who looks a whole lot like Sephiroth, except his coat (and overall color scheme) is red instead of black, and he wears a shirt under his coat. He carries a straight, double-edged sword, and his face is modeled after the Japanese rock star and actor Gackt. He feels like the sort of Mary-Sue character who inhabits online role-play forums, and he’s just about as annoying, what with his constantly quoting from the in-universe play Loveless. He’d probably be insufferable if he had a greater presence in the game.

Genesis is also something of a monomaniac, with the overarching obsession of proving himself greater than Sephiroth. In this, he serves to make Sephiroth himself (even the 100% pure, distilled villain Sephiroth of Final Fantasy VII proper) seem calm and well-balanced in comparison. For those reading who thought Sephiroth was overwrought and overplayed as a villain (both in the setting of Final Fantasy VII and related media, such as Kingdom Hearts), I ask you to look at Genesis and take note: it could have been so much worse.

The second of these superhuman characters is Angeal, who is kind and good-natured, even-tempered and humble. He is the peacemaker of the three, the one who strives for harmony, and also manages to be kind of a tree-hugger. How this man manages to live with himself, being a member of Shin-Ra and all, confuses me to no end. In terms of appearance, he looks a lot like Zack (and therefore, to an extent, a lot like Cloud). Or rather, since Zack is his protégé and Cloud has based himself more or less completely on Zack, it might be more accurate to say that they both resemble him, but more on this later. In any case, it is partly Angeal who instills in Zack a sense of honor and a need to do whatever is right, despite the costs.

Sephiroth comes across somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, as someone who is troubled at times by the mysteries in his past which he cannot or will not face (yet), but who is capable of real warmth and likability. And you have to like the silver-haired villain if for no other reason than that he finds such an eloquent, almost poetic, way to tell Genesis, late in the game, to fuck off and die.

As for the game proper, it covers a period of time between Shin-Ra’s ascendance (having recently conquered the nation of Wutai) and the beginning of their truly serious troubles with the terrorist organization AVALANCHE which occupy the beginning of Final Fantasy VII proper. This is a period that sees the fading of the heroic pantheon of SOLDIER, who seem to have little purpose now that the major wars and conflicts have been fought, and the dredging up of a plethora of dirty little secrets Shin-Ra would prefer to leave forgotten. As the danger and the violence spiral further and further out of control, Zack finds himself sent hither, thither and yon trying to exert some basic form of damage control. As he tries to find and capture those responsible, it begins to feel like the world he knows and has been trained to protect is crumbling around him. And yet, he keeps his head squarely on his shoulders, keeps his upbeat attitude, and in general behaves like the only sane man in a world going rapidly insane.

Unlike the main game, Crisis Core is a more action-oriented game. It still has the trappings of an RPG, but they support and underpin a game that is largely a frantic scramble carried out in real time. You still have random encounters, but they occur in the same space you explore the game in. There's still a sort of “beat” to the fighting, though, which still allows it to retain a very, very vague sense of having turns. Increasing experience levels are determined by part of the Digital Mind Wave, which also determines when Zack will perform a limit break. The leveling-up seems random, but that may be a consequence of the DMW resembling a doubled set of slot machine wheels (one controlling increases in Zack’s level and the level of his material, and the other controlling which attacks or techniques he uses in battle). Level increases happen with relative regularity, and it seems like they’re either not actually randomly determined, or else the randomness is mitigated by other unseen mechanics.

The DMW also serves another purpose: it serves to tell us what thoughts are going through Zack’s mind as he repeatedly throws himself into dangerous situations. This becomes clear in the game’s final encounter, though it’s fairly apparent beforehand, in the way that new events and characters are added to it as you progress.

As you might imagine, Crisis Core expands generously on the original material. This is of course unavoidable. The story of Zack as presented in Final Fantasy VII is brief – you could barely even make it a short story, if you were to write it in prose. Certainly it doesn’t justify a game all to itself without expansion.

Part of this expanding comes in the form of missions, which you can take on at any time throughout the game (and never mind how illogical or nonsensical it would be to be able to do so at whatever time you choose to accept them). I don’t much care for the missions. Most of them are unimaginative, simply re-using areas previously visited in the game, with simple goals that usually amount to nothing more complex than “kill the boss of this area” or “find this item”. I know they’re there to add replayability, or to add to the portability of the game, but they’re boring and repetitive and the fact of the matter is that I’d rather not have them at all, length of the game be damned. I know they’re present to add to the length of the game, but length is not the same as quality. If I had my choice, I’d prefer not to be presented with material that I don’t actually enjoy in any real sense, but feel obligated to try completing anyway thanks to the persistent obsessive-compulsive tendencies ingrained in me through years of RPG-playing. I’ll play a short game, gladly, as long as every bit of it is actually good.

Thankfully, the second way Square Enix chose to expand the game was through simply adding characters and events to the story that were not mentioned the first time around. This is the sort of thing that would normally worry me; it’s rare that tampering with the history of an established story works out well. Often, this process can open up as many plot holes (if not more) as it attempts to close, but in this case it actually works, and for reasons that make sense.

It helps to remember that the person explaining most of this background in the original Final Fantasy VII is Cloud. And Cloud, as I mentioned above, is not the most reliable of narrators. He gives us the events from his perspective, but even when you account for his depressing tendency to alter his own memories so that he did all the things Zack was responsible for, there's a lot that gets left out. This is because he wasn’t there for many of the pivotal events which Zack witnessed.

So the story we thought we knew changes somewhat, now that we see it through Zack’s eyes. When Cloud related these events to us, for instance, we were led to believe Sephiroth deduced on his own that he was not in fact human, but the result of a fantastically unethical series of experiments designed to create a superhuman warrior based on alien DNA. In Crisis Core, Genesis appears before Sephiroth to deliver this crushing revelation. Of course, Genesis and Angeal were both in a position to know, by the end. Genesis has embraced the inherent monstrosity of his nature. Angeal fought it, as does Sephiroth for a time.

And this revision of the continuity merges pretty seamlessly with the original tale. The events of Crisis Core are depicted differently here than they are in the main body of Final Fantasy VII not because the scenario writers are lazy or incompetent, but because Cloud, who related these events the first time around, wasn’t there to tell us for sure how Sephiroth found out about his origins. He wasn’t inside the Mako reactor at Nibelheim when the horrible truth came crashing down. In fact, for most of the revelatory moments of Crisis Core’s story, he was absent. He told us what he knew, and filled in the blanks as best he could. There is no reason to believe he ever even crossed paths with Genesis or Angeal, so of course he would be oblivious to the impact they had on Zack’s life, and therefore his as well.

Obviously this was not entirely by design. I’m comfortably certain nobody at Square Enix thought, way back in 1997 when they were still Squaresoft, that they could leave these plot hooks in place on purpose to craft a sequel ten years later. But they capitalized on the natural gaps in the backstory in an impressively skillful way.

But perhaps one of the greatest things that sticks out in my mind about Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is that it is a tragedy. This is rare in video games. Embedded in the very nature of anything that we call a game is the drive to win. This has been true since the very first video games were created; it has only been with the rise of the notion of games being a form of narrative that a non-victorious “victory” could even be considered, and very few games do it even now.

Of course, we know that Crisis Core is a tragedy going in. If you’re playing Crisis Core, the odds are good that you’ve played Final Fantasy VII. And if that’s the case, you know how all of this has to play out in the end. It’s a little heartbreaking to see Zack make friends, goof around, have fun and fall in love. You start rooting for him because, damn it, he’s just a likable person.

It’s even more heartbreaking watching him get in over his head.

And he is in over his head, make no mistake; that's part of the tragedy. There’s no question that he’s strong, determined and highly skilled. But pitted against the likes of Sephiroth, well… Let’s just say that – as Final Fantasy VII fans know full well – Sephiroth wasn’t beaten in Zack’s era by main strength, but because he underestimated the rage and determination of a regular rank and file fighter he had every reason to believe was out of commission.

In the end, what surprises me about Crisis Core is how I find myself reacting to it. I know the story of Final Fantasy VII fairly well. I know what happens to Zack, and I know that although Square Enix is happy to add as many events as you can think of to the story to flesh it out, they can’t really change the ending. And yet I keep finding myself wishing, as the game heads into its final chapters, as Sephiroth descends into madness and as Zack and Cloud make their final journey to Midgar, that events would play out in a different way.

And that is a mark of good storytelling.