Behind the Gun – Halo: Combat Evolved

When Microsoft first got into the console video game business, my first feeling was one of utter hostility.  At the time, I had trouble articulating it.  Looking back, I know exactly why it was.

Change.

From time immemorial, console video gaming had pretty much been a Japanese affair, barring some notable exceptions.  The blockbuster titles and longest-running series all seemed, in most cases, to originate from Japan.  As someone who was interested in anime (and Japanese culture generally, but let’s be honest here: mostly just anime), and had all the furious devotion of the relatively newly converted, I was perfectly fine with this.  Preferred it, really, if we’re being completely honest.  There were a few odd Western-developed games I liked (the Legacy of Kain series for one, and of course most of the PC games I liked had been developed in the West), but when it came to console games, all the best stuff came out of Japan, by and large.  At least, that was the case so far as I was concerned.

I had a life-long Windows user’s healthy disdain and distrust for Microsoft.  The last thing on Earth I wanted was them shitting up my hobby with their stupid oversized black box, which you could probably use to lay the foundations of the house, or to kill a person if you dropped it on them from a height of five feet or greater.  It wasn’t until they got the exclusive rights to Panzer Dragoon Orta that I felt anything about the machine beyond a sort of frigid, haughty dislike.

Halo’s hero, Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, and the game (later an entire franchise) he starred in by extension, put a face on all of that.

I hated Halo, hated the very idea of it.  Fucking hated it, sight-unseen.

Considering that I rarely go more than a few weeks without playing at least a few hours of one of the games in the series, to relax with something fun and familiar, this is deeply ironic.

I suppose all I can really say in my own defense is that I still had a deal of growing up to do.

*             *             *

At some point around the time when Halo first came out, or when it was imminent, I read an article in a game magazine which posited that Halo would fail to become the face of the Xbox because its hero, the Master Chief, was a faceless cipher.  The magazine in question was probably Game Informer, because I was subscribed to it at the time.

The article went on to say that previous console makers all had strong mascots, which worked to sort of symbolize the consoles.  Nintendo had the rotund and friendly plumber Mario, with his whimsical adventures in the mushroom kingdom.  Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog, whose speed and attitude helped to communicate the more “grown up” (this term should, here, be applied very loosely) nature of Sega’s first real success, the 16-bit Genesis.  Sony kinda-sorta had Crash Bandicoot, though having never played any of the Crash Bandicoot games, I couldn’t really tell you how he represented the PlayStation.  The idea, though, was that all of these characters had a distinctive look and identity, a personality which you could glean from even a brief glance.  The Master Chief was armored from head to toe, and his face was covered by the polarized, opaque visor of his helmet.  His design was comparatively real in a way that Mario and Sonic and Crash Bandicoot had never been, and were never designed to be.  The article argued that this ran counter to the whole point of a mascot.

I sometimes think this was the whole point, actually.

Halo came out in a time when the need of console makers for mascot characters was dying.  Nintendo still had Mario, but in this, as in so much else, they were and are unique.  Sega’s mascot was now appearing on whatever system would host his games, and it’s difficult to express to anyone who wasn’t really around during the 16-bit era the feeling of strangeness you got at seeing Sonic on a Nintendo system.  Strange days. 

Sony, meanwhile, had actually never had a proper mascot in Crash Bandicoot, no matter what the Game Informer article said.  He’s sometimes thought of that way, I guess, but the first problem with this assertion is that he wasn’t actually owned by Sony.  He was (and remains, I suppose) the intellectual property of a third-party developer called Naughty Dog.  He did a brief stint as a sort of spokes-creature for Sony during the PS1 era, but faded from prominence during the PS2 era, and is now pretty much a non-entity.

This was also the era when the notion of “AAA” games began to pick up steam.  Games were becoming ubiquitous.  Even before Nintendo went after the Blue Ocean, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find a person who didn’t own some sort of gaming console.  The consoles were becoming powerful enough to display some serious spectacle, and we no longer really needed mascots to represent them any more.

Ironically, in his way, the Master Chief did sort of become representative of Microsoft’s Xbox, then.  Or more accurately, be was the face of what the Xbox came to represent, which was the ascendance of Western console game design.

Hear me out on this.

Long, long ago, the vast majority of popular, “important” video games –what we might (if we were feeling especially pretentious) call the “Canon of Interactive Entertainment Software” – originated in Japan.  Atari ruled the roost for a while, it’s true, but they fumbled badly in 1983, and they very nearly took the U.S. gaming market with them.  While most publishers were shaking their heads over what they likely imagined to be a high-tech fad, and selling all their Atari merchandise at fire sale prices meanwhile, Nintendo snuck in and first revived, then conquered the market.  They did this by redesigning their console to look less like a video game console than a regular home entertainment appliance (like, say, a VCR); by positioning the product as the “Nintendo Entertainment System” in all their marketing, rather than as the video game console it actually (and quite obviously) was; and they did some hardcore, stone-cold, frankly ruthless business, certain tactics of which were later ruled illegal.

Look back on the 8-bit era and think of the classics.  The ones that practically everyone played, the ones that are on all the retro-gaming T-shirts you can buy at Hot Topic and elsewhere.  Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Contra, Castlevania, Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, and the list goes on and on.  Even games that would seem to be American were sometimes Japanese.  Tecmo Super Bowl, for instance.  It was developed by… well, by Tecmo.  They’re a Japanese developer, yet here they were making a game about football.  American football, now.  This is a sport which has very little traction (read: no traction) in Japan.

There were console games developed by Westerners, of course.  Tetris, for instance.  But these were by far the minority of games.  Western developers (both American and European) dominated the PC scene, at least in the West.  But what there was to be had on consoles – good, bad, and otherwise – largely came out of Japan.

This state of affairs continued on into the 16-bit generation and into the 32-bit era as well.  There were always exceptions, but there in 2001, at the turning point, was Halo.  A true several-million-selling blockbuster, made by a Western developer and released exclusively on a Western-built console system.  I’m not saying that Halo did it all, really, but it sold systems.  Its sequel sold more systems, and further managed to sell the idea of online play on consoles (the Sega Dreamcast tried to do this, but was in this, as in so much else, a victim of bad timing, bad circumstances, and a long history of Sega’s bad decisions).  Even if the original Xbox (fun fact: I wanted to type “Xbox 1” to distinguish it as the first Xbox, but Microsoft has made everything about the Xbox, even talking about the fucking thing with any real clarity, difficult now) never made Microsoft a dime all in all, it got their foot in the door for the 360.  Halo might not have been directly responsible for that, but it certainly helped, and quite possibly made the difference, in the long run.

But enough about business and context.  We’re here to talk about a game, after all.  Let’s do that.

*             *             *

First-person shooters on console systems had always, prior to this, been sort of compromised.  The typical control setup for a first-person shooter on a PC involves using the keyboard to move, and the mouse to aim and shoot.  Console controllers never really have been able to match this level of precision, for reasons I’m not going to get into here.  The bottom line is that with a notable few exceptions (Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 comes to mind), there weren’t a lot of first-person shooters on consoles, and most of the ones there were, weren’t very good compared to their PC counterparts, where the genre was dominant, and had been since the days of Doom.  Microsoft was perhaps taking a risk, making an FPS their flagship title on their new system.  But then, Halo wasn’t just any FPS.  In fact, when development first began, it wasn’t any kind of FPS at all.

When development on the game first  began, it was under different codenames at various points: first Monkey Nuts, and later Blam!  It was meant to be a sci-fi themed real-time strategy game, and it was going to be released on both PCs as well as Macintosh.  Bungie, the developers, had been primarily a Mac-oriented company.  Game journalists at the time, under non-disclosure agreements, seemed to be in agreement that what they had seen of the game so far was nothing short of amazing.

At some point (and I am struggling mightily to recall where I read this; you’ll have to take my word for it that I have done so, somewhere, at some point, and am not just making all of this up), the game changed.  It was redesigned as a third-person squad-based shooter, heavily focused around online multiplayer.  The idea was that you would log onto the game with teams of friends and fight each other over large, sprawling arenas and battlefields.  Footage of the game in this stage of development looks familiar, if a bit more rudimentary than the finished product.  Later still, this design idea was scrapped in favor of a first-person shooter.  I’ve never really known why, beyond theorizing that perhaps Bungie just had more experience with that genre, having cut their teeth on Pathways Into Darkness and made a name for themselves with the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Marathon trilogy.

Along the way, in 2000, they got acquired by Microsoft, news which no doubt came as a kind of betrayal to their largely Mac-owning fanbase.  Bungie still promised that the game would see PC and Mac release, but still.

In November of 2001, the game came out as a launch title for the original Xbox, under its full title of Halo: Combat Evolved.  The “Combat Evolved” bit was apparently suggested by a Microsoft executive because “Halo”, all by itself, didn’t connote the necessary intensity, or perhaps even the fact that this was a game about combat.  Never mind the large gentleman in green armor wielding a machine gun on the cover.  Clearly, no one would understand.  Online play for Halo was scrapped, as Microsoft was unable to roll out its planned Xbox Live service with the system itself.  Instead, Halo supported what we now call “couch co-op” either by way of split-screen view or, for the extravagant, networking several Xboxes and TVs together to play online.

This gave the game a perhaps unexpected amount of success (and therefore sales) in college dorms and fraternities, where large groups of young people could haul the obscenely large system and their TVs around to someone else’s place with a minimum of real travel.  And since the game was designed not just with consoles in mind, but (as of the most recent revamping of the project) with consoles exclusively in mind, it played well on consoles, which made it accessible, which led to still more sales, ultimately.

Damn it, I’m talking about business again.

*             *             *

The reason it’s important to understand the sort of higgledy-piggledy development of Halo: Combat Evolved is because this helps to understand why it’s so unique even within the auspices of its own series.  The series groundwork is still all there, of course.  You can play Halo 3 – really, you can play Halo 4, even – and feel the underlying DNA of the series, the mechanical core which has defined it since its beginning, which has remained unchanged.  You can play a lot of other FPS titles which have cribbed shamelessly from Halo and feel it.  But Halo: Combat Evolved is still a very different beast, and it’s because of all those changes it went through on the way to becoming what it became.

What you notice, early on in Halo, is that it’s a game of uncertain goals and direction, and of places wherein you get lost.  This isn’t because it’s a maze, but rather because it’s the exact opposite of a maze.  Many of the spaces you play in are huge, wide-open environments without any clear sense of exactly where you’re supposed to go next.  If you wait around long enough, demonstrating your helplessness, the game will throw you a bone and set up a marker for you to run or drive toward, but mostly, it just leaves you to find a path.

This is unusual today, and it was unusual then. 

Older FPSes like Wolfenstein 3D or Doom, or even Quake, are structured like mazes for the most part.  Each discrete level bore little connection to the ones that came before or after it.  It’s usually a labyrinth of tunnels, doors, a few more open areas, and the occasional locked door, for which you typically need to go find a key.  But the total playing field you might have access to is relatively small, and there are all sorts of landmarks to help you keep a good sense of where you are in the grand scheme of things.

In the middle and end of the 1990s, FPSes were undergoing a shift.  Games like Unreal and Half-Life featured a more narrative-driven experience.  The story wasn’t just a few quick paragraphs in the manual and a few lines of text you got at the end of the game, but something that was happening all around you while you played.  The whole structure of discrete and vaguely connected levels was thrown out the window.  The game was typically divided into chunks for the purposes of handling data, but the way it was presented was effectively as a non-stop journey from start to finish, with natural transitions from one area to the next which helped to more effectively convey a narrative, or even just a sense of narrative.  Game environments became less maze-like (and abstract) and more linear and realistic.  The use of terrain and more tactical maneuvers became a greater concern than simple navigation, and enemies were made smarter (usually) as a result.  The player was, at all times, being funneled in a certain direction.  The cleverer games were just set up in such a way that the player rarely realized just how few options he or she might have for travel.  You just went where you could, and if the game was well built, it never really occurred to you to wonder why you couldn’t go somewhere else.

Halo existed, then, in open defiance of this trend.  It’s probably a mistake to attribute this wholly to any intentional design, especially considering that Bungie abandoned this design in its immediate sequel.  This openness is instead more likely a result of the game’s development.  The huge battlefields and arenas originally envisioned for the real-time strategy game and team-oriented first-person shooter were carried over into the final product probably as a matter of simple practicality.  If you’re redesigning your game twice during development, you’re going to want to save some time by reusing as many assets as possible.  When your project has been appropriated to coincide with the launch of a new piece of high-profile hardware, and you now have a much firmer deadline, you’ll re-use anything and everything you conceivably can.

*             *             *

The moment-to-moment mechanics of Halo were quite different from most other games.  I’m not sure how much of this was a deliberate choice Bungie made early in development, and how much of this was Bungie attempting to scale back the usual FPS design to something that would “fit” on a console.

At the core of the experience, so far as combat goes, is Halo’s “Golden Triangle” of guns, grenades, and melee attacks.  Let me explain a bit.

Prior to this, the usual approach in an FPS was to make the character a veritable walking armory.  You would typically have over half a dozen weapons, including grenades, rocket launchers, machine guns, shotguns, pistols, weapons more unique to the game, and usually a dedicated melee weapon for up-close hand-to-hand attacks.  Each weapon was typically bound to a number key on the keyboard, so switching back and forth in your armory was relatively easy, but still somewhat deliberate.

This was a problem on consoles, what with lacking number keys, and having far too many of the buttons on the controller devoted to the more immediate and urgent actions of running, jumping, crouching, shooting, and whatnot.  The usual solution was to have you just cycle through your weapons, but this was a cumbersome process that only became more so as your armory expanded throughout the game.

The “Golden Triangle” solution was ingenious, all the more so because it was also fairly realistic.

Firstly, the player can carry only two guns at once.  You can swap out any gun you’re carrying with any other gun you find lying around, but you can only have two on your person at a time.  This means there is no lengthy cycling through weapons.  Just a simple button press switches the weapon you’re currently using with the one you have in reserve.  Secondly, grenades are given a dedicated button, so that you don’t have to select them in lieu of other weapons.  This made using them much easier, and therefore more practical and effective.  Third, there is no specific weapon designated for melee attacks, but rather a button assigned to execute a melee attack with whatever weapon is currently equipped.  Typically, this takes the form of a sharp strike with the stock of the weapon.  Unlike a lot of prior games, melee attacks are powerful (if risky, given the close range), and can be fatal when executed from behind. 

As a result, even at its most frantic, you can always keep up with the pace of a given fight.  And there are never moments where you might, say, cycle past the weapon you actually meant to use.  Your entire repertoire of tactical options is right there at your fingertips, never more than a single button-press away.

Halo is also unique (or was, for its time) in the way it allows you to use vehicles.  Nearly every enemy and friendly vehicle you see in the game, you can and will get to drive at some point.  The game seamlessly transitions between the two, and driving these vehicles is as easy as maneuvering your character.  The lone exception to this is the Warthog, a sort of futuristic Humvee which was designed by someone who has no real idea how loud and cramped the interior of a Humvee (at least, a military Humvee) actually is.

You’ll drift-race your Warthog all over the place, not because it’s fun (though it kind of is), or because it looks cool (though it definitely does), but simply because the vehicle’s maneuvering is so piss-poor that it is literally impossible to take a sharp turn at any kind of speed without the ass-end of the vehicle trying to outrace its front.  And as frustrating as it all is – as tempting as it might be to hop into the gunner’s spot for a change – you will be the one doing the driving, because the alternative is to let the game’s AI-controlled Marines drive, and if you’re seriously going to do that, you might as well just jump off a cliff and get it over with.  The non-player characters uniformly drive as if they have both a lead foot and a lobotomy, and even at your most new and raw, you will be better than any of them.  The Warthog is easy to drive, but takes considerable practice to drive well.  Or at any rate, that’s been my experience.

*             *             *

Having played the newer games in the series (more recently and more often), it’s interesting to look back as I play through the original again, and see what’s changed.

The original Halo, in addition to the occasional wide-open field lacking in clear goals, also had an unfortunate tendency toward copy-and-paste level design.  It occasionally got to a point where I would get lost, not because the environment was terribly complicated, but because I’d get turned around in a firefight, and take off down a hallway in the wrong direction without realizing it for some time because everything looked so repetitive. 

This is helped somewhat by playing the anniversary edition of Halo: Combat Evolved, which came out in 2011 (and which is also included with the somewhat disastrous Master Chief Collection for the Xbox One).  The upgrade to HD and the added detail in textures, polygon count, and lighting lend a lot more specificity to the environments.

It’s also odd watching the melee attacks being performed.  Later games in the series seem to have these attacks execute with greater speed and a sense of sharper motion.  By contrast, the Master Chief’s melee attacks in the original Halo seem to be almost leisurely; they lack the needed sense of sharp force that makes them feel both fast and effective.

On the other hand, there’s a lot that has remained basically the same.  Weapons and gear have a different sound, look, and feel between the UNSC and Covenant factions.  Many of them work differently, with different benefits and drawbacks, and therefore require different strategies.  And, because you generally have to take whatever you can find, it behooves you to familiarize yourself with everything.

Enemy behaviors are also a nice touch.  Enemy Grunts, for instance, will attack in groups when they have a leader (usually an Elite) present, but if the leader is killed, they tend to panic and scatter, though some will instead prime grenades and make a suicide rush at you.

This is the underlying DNA I mentioned previously, the thing that’s still quite present in the series, even as the developers add to it.

*             *             *

I’ve spend a lot of time talking about the development and mechanics and impact of Halo, but none of this is really what drew me to the game despite my initial (and poorly reasoned) dislike in the first place.

If it hadn’t become such a phenomenon, honestly, I probably would never have gotten interested.  But it was hard to avoid.  I would go to game stores, or places like Best Buy, and it was always there on the shelf, or else there would be posters up and cardboard displays.  I read good things about it from reviewers whose opinions I trusted.  I would even see merchandise for it on sale at Barnes and Noble.  It’s not quite at the level of, say, Star Wars when it comes to ancillary merchandise, but it’s something like that.  It has an expanded universe of novels and comic books which tell stories taking place before, after, and between the games, fleshing out the mythology.  There are toys, there are Mega Bloks sets, there’s a Halo-themed version of Risk.  You can buy the soundtrack albums.  There are movies, though nothing that’s yet seen release in theaters.  There’s even an anime.

Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me, and I started reading about the games and the story they told.  And I got interested, and thought, “Man, it’s a shame that this really great-sounding stuff is bound up in these games I hate.”  And then it occurred to me that I was being really stupid and pig-headed.  If it all sounded so interesting, why didn’t I give it a shot?  By the time this happened, you could buy the first two games on the original Xbox for about ten dollars apiece.  The absolute worst thing that would happen was I’d lose twenty bucks on an experiment, and God knows I’d spent more money than that before with less information to go on.

So what’s to like?

I like a grim story that still has a thin sense of hope to it, something with noble sacrifices and hard decisions.  And I like a big, epic story in a well-built world, with a sense of secrecy and mystery, and huge events that seem to carry you off and sweep you along with them.  And Halo has that.

We start off in the 26^th century, where humankind has a civilization spanning many planets.  However, we have recently been discovered by a theocratic alliance of alien races known as the Covenant.  According to the Covenant’s religion, humanity is an affront to their gods, and must be destroyed.

The “gods” the Covenant worship are a race of beings known to humans as the Forerunners, who had a galaxy-wide civilization and achieved an unparalleled level of technological sophistication, and who disappeared a hundred thousand years ago.  No one knows why.  The Covenant believe that they departed on a Great Journey, transcending physical existence . 

It isn’t made explicitly clear in the first Halo, but it becomes so throughout the original trilogy.  If there was ever any doubt, Halo 3: ODST will go on to spell it out in terribly clear terms in its opening text crawl: “We are losing”.  The Covenant probably outnumber humankind; they definitely outclass us in technology, having reverse-engineered much of theirs from Forerunner relics.  Even if they don’t really understand a lot of it, they have it, and they know how to use it to devastating effect.  Among other things, they are capable of turning the surface of a planet to glass.

So the story of Halo opens with the United Nations Space Command vessel Pillar of Autumn escaping from a Covenant attack on the planet of Reach, by way of a supposedly blind slipspace jump (later developments in the series will suggest this arrival point was selected based on much more than chance), and coming across an artificial ring-world orbiting a planet.  The interior of this ring structure has a natural environment consisting of hills, valleys, forests, lakes, and oceans, as well as breathable atmosphere.  It appears to be of Forerunner origin.

Before the crew of the Pillar of Autumn can do much more than stare at it in awe, they find themselves under attack by the Covenant, who have followed them here.   As part of the Pillar’s battle preparations, the ship’s captain, Jacob Keyes, has Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 unthawed from cryosleep.

The Master Chief is among the few remaining Spartans.  Identified as being genetically predisposed toward all the skills of war, he was taken as a child and educated solely for this purpose.  Chemically and cybernetically modified, outfitted with a suit of powered armor, he stands literally head and shoulders above the average soldier in the UNSC.  Faster, stronger, with quicker reflexes and better endurance than most, Spartans are nearly the only humans who can go toe-to-toe with the more physically imposing races of the Covenant in a fight.

Initially, the Master Chief is given the task of escaping from the Pillar of Autumn to the ring-world, which the covenant call “Halo”, and taking the ship’s AI Cortana with him.  Given all she knows about UNSC capabilities and important locations, it is imperative that she remain out of Covenant hands.  Her sarcasm and sense of humor serve as a counterpoint to the Master Chief’s near-complete silence and stoic professionalism.

As the Master Chief and Cortana aid in and help organize the guerilla war the UNSC winds up fighting on the Halo ring-world, they become aware that the Covenant believe there is an ancient Forerunner weapon on this installation, and also a way for them to follow their gods on their Great Journey.

This is technically true, in the most horrible way possible.

Near (or just after) the middle of the game, the Master Chief and Cortana learn the horrifying truth that, among its other functions, the Halo installation is a quarantine facility, and is holding samples of a parasitic organism known as the Flood.  In their blind zealotry, the Covenant unleash it, and it quickly begins to infect both Covenant and UNSC troops alike.  The Flood consumes biomass and repurposes it,  but these are no mere shambling zombies.  Infected Flood forms are faster and hit harder than any uninfected creature, and they typically pick up some skills (such as, unfortunately, marksmanship) from their hosts.

As the outbreak begins, the Master Chief is confronted by a Forerunner AI named 343 Guilty Spark, who was assigned to oversee this installation.  He explains to the Chief that there is a way to stop the Flood, but it requires a human to do this, as humans are evidently the chosen successors to the Forerunners.

But Cortana, learning the full purpose of the Halo installation, stops the Master Chief before he can activate this countermeasure against the Flood.  The Flood, she explains, require sentient life to feed on and to grow, merging the infected biomass into ever more powerful and intelligent forms.  Each soldier who falls to the Flood then becomes part of the Flood; every troop lost is one the Flood gains.  The Forerunners came into contact with the Flood, some hundred thousand years ago, but this was not in itself what destroyed them.

The truth is that the Halo installation, contrary to the Covenant’s garbled understanding, does not house a weapon.  It is a weapon.  More accurately, it is one of seven such weapons.  When activated, it will fire a pulse that will, in concert with the other six Halo installations, destroy all sentient life in the galaxy, thus starving the Flood to death.  The Forerunners were able to preserve uninfected samples of most of the sentient races they knew about, but were unable to save themselves.  And so they died, to stop the Flood, of a self-inflicted genocide.

The hows and whys of the Forerunners’ apparent inability to save themselves; other measures that did not work (if they were tried); the designation of humankind as Reclaimers, heirs to the Forerunner legacy; and the preservation of other species, are not answered here.  Halo simply presents these things as facts.

A lot of the draw, for me, before and beyond the actual narrative, is the feeling of it.  There is a sense of the far future mingling with the ancient past, a deadly secret and a steadily mounting sense of mystery.  You experience it when you first land on the Halo ring, in what I tend to think of as the first real establishing moment of both Halo the game and Halo the franchise.  You step out of the escape pod on a grassy rise.  You look off into the horizon, and instead of seeing it drop off into the distance, it rises up, arcing overhead how many thousands of miles beyond, and coming back down to become the horizon again on the other side.  As you look at it, you can see water and landmasses all along the inside of it.  A massive gas giant looms in the near distance, and a sun farther off.  The environment is natural-looking, but punctuated by the stark architecture of Forerunner structures which rise out of the landscape.  The effect is ultimately alien.

Perhaps wisely, Bungie (when they were still making the games) opted never to explain much of this.  I’ve probably said it before, but sometimes, it’s better to wonder than to know.

This is Halo, for me.  This is what drew me.  This mingled sensation of strangeness and wonder, grim despair and hope, a salvation dearly bought, a victory barely won, and the sense of ancient secrets at long last uncovered.

Rise, and Escape – Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

I’ve written about this game before, but my wife requested that I write about it again.  I’m sure I’ll probably wind up saying a lot of the same things I said on the first go-‘round, but who knows?

Well, here’s something I didn’t say last time: When I first introduced my wife to Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, she got really into it.  Really into it.  Given her relative inexperience with Japanese role-playing games, this was surprising to me.  But as she pointed out, the things that made it seem out of the ordinary to me meant little to her.  She didn’t have much “ordinary” to compare it against.

Unfortunately, watching her play it made me want to play it also.  Part of this is the natural (and deeply unfortunate) backseat-driving instinct I have whenever I’m watching someone do something that I’m familiar with, but feel they could be doing better, and in fact, if they’d just let me have the controller for a few minutes, I could show them exactly how…  But part of it was also just that seeing the game played really made me want to be playing it myself.  This presented a problem, what with us having only the one copy.  It led to arguments.  Not real arguments, but not exactly cute arguments, either.  We did, at the time, have both a working PlayStation2 and a backward-compatible PlaySation3, so it was only owning just the one copy of the game that was really a problem.  So the solution was pretty simple.

That’s how good it is.  Dragon Quarter: The game so nice, we bought it twice.

*             *             *

Technically, we only bought the game once.  I bought it when it first came out, back in early 2003.  I played it for a while, and while it was pretty to look at, and it had good music, and the setting was interesting, it just didn’t come together for me.  Despite this, I had no desire to trade it in.  I had the feeling I was onto something good, though I couldn’t quite grasp it at the time.

I hadn’t had much experience with the Breath of Fire series then.  I owned a copy of Breath of Fire IV, which was really the first game in the series that I even tried to tackle seriously.  Having unwillingly skipped over the 16-bit generation (owning a TurboGrafx-16 and five games hardly counts), my impression of the series at that time could basically be described as “like Final Fantasy, only not quite as inventive”.  It perhaps wasn’t a fair assessment, but I was basing this on the opinions of friends and acquaintances; I was unable to draw my own conclusions.  Still, I liked Breath of Fire IV well enough, even outside of some positive personal associations, so I hung on to Dragon Quarter, feeling relatively certain that one day, I would get the itch to try it again.

As it happened, I did, a couple of years later.  The story and the characters were calling to me, and this time, everything finally clicked. 

It probably helped that, around that time, I was beginning to feel that JRPGs as a genre were becoming deeply conservative in terms of design, as well as character and story archetypes.  Realistically, this has probably been the case since the days of the original Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Phantasy Star.  But I got into these types of games in late 1998 with Final Fantasy VII; I was new to the genre in those days.  And in fairness, I’ve enjoyed a number of these types of games.  But by this time, I found myself wanting games in the genre to branch out and do something new.  So many of the mechanical mainstays of the genre, the “traditions” of JRPG design, began life as frankly clunky workarounds for technology that wasn’t really up to giving us a less abstract simulation of the expected features of a fantasy adventure: travel, exploration, fighting monsters, finding treasure, getting new and more powerful gear, and saving the world and any number of princesses.  There was only so much you could do with eight bits, and if you wanted to simulate all of these things, you had to have a certain amount of abstraction.  So you have your turn-based battles, your random encounters, and so on, and so forth.

By the PS2 era, the technology was rapidly growing beyond the need to adhere to the old way of doing things for any reason other than nostalgia’s sake.  It had been doing this for some time – Chrono Trigger shook up the formula way back in the mid-90s, but despite the universal acclaim that game received, no one involved seemed terribly interested in implementing any of its innovations.  Developers were, by and large, unwilling to grow out of those old ways.  In part this might be down to the reluctance of their audience (or at least a very vocal portion of it) to part ways with those same traditions.  Either way, the result was the same: stagnation.  Or so it felt to me.

I wanted something that was different from the JRPGs I’d played before.  Something that still offered the thought and planning that went into playing an RPG of any kind, something with a good story and interesting characters, but which went off the beaten path and did something different.

And so, in late 2004 or maybe early 2005, two years after I originally bought it, tried it, and hung it up for the foreseeable future, I started playing Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter again.

*             *             *

It’s an odd beast, this game, even when you look at it in the context of its own series.  All the more so, really.  The earliest Breath of Fire games got compared to the 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy games, at least by most of the people I knew back then.  Really, a more apt comparison would be to Dragon Quest, but I hadn’t played that game, and I was part of a group of friends who oddly lacked much experience with Dragon Quest, so maybe nobody was in a position to make that particular comparison.  With most of my friends, Dragon Quest (then known as Dragon Warrior; I feel so old sometimes) was always “That game where you grind for hours and hours and then you finally say ‘fuck this!’ and go do something else, maybe play Final Fantasy or go outside or something, I dunno”.

Anyway, the whole series up to this point had been pretty standard high-fantasy fare, with the unique selling point being the main character’s eventual ability to transform into a dragon.  Most of the game mechanics beyond this were pretty straightforward.  My experience with the series at large was pretty much limited to some time spent on the fourth game, and some time spent goofing off with ROMs of the first two out of idle and quickly satisfied curiosity. 

One other consistent feature of the series is that your main character, the aforementioned dragon-transforming person, is always a young man with blue hair and a sword named Ryu, and there is always a blonde, winged young lady named Nina who typically focuses on magic.  Additional characters tend to be of all shapes, sizes, and species.

Dragon Quarter, by contrast, occurs in a future dystopia where humankind, having pretty much destroyed the environment through the use of biologically engineered weapons called dragons, has retreated to a single subterranean dwelling.  There, they survive as best they can.

In this society, everyone is given a rank, called a D-ratio.  On the surface of things, this ratio is a measure of one’s social standing, limiting the kinds of jobs they can hold, places they can live, and overall determining just exactly how high they can rise in the world, figuratively and literally.

“Low-Ds”, that is, people with low D-ratios, live further down in this habitat.  The air is worse, people’s lifespans are shorter, and there are occasionally monsters called genics that roam around down there.  The people with high D-ratios live closer to the surface where the air is better and things are generally less dangerous.  A nice touch is that, especially in cut scenes, the game is literally more hazy and grimy, visually, the further down you are.  As you go up, the environments gradually become clearer and brighter.  It happens bit by bit, so you may not notice it the first time through, but if you finish the game and start over again, the difference stands out.

One of the few story beats to be preserved is our hero: Ryu.  Here, he’s a low-D ranger, whose job mainly seems to involve security and hunting down genics.  His D-ratio is abysmally low: 1/8,192.  His current job is the very highest he can hope to achieve.  He’s partnered with another young man named Bosch, D-ration 1/64.  While Ryu is effectively at the very limit of how far he can rise in the world, Bosch is only at the beginning.  A D-ratio as high as his means he can potentially qualify to become a Regent, one of the four rulers of this underground world.  Bosch is basically just paying his dues, here.  He’s friendly enough to Ryu, in a condescending sort of way, which Ryu mostly just shrugs off.  What else is he going to do?

While reporting for an assignment together, Ryu succumbs to a brief fugue, in which he has a vision.  He sees the decaying remains of a giant dragon spiked to a wall.  Despite clearly being dead, the dragon seems to talk to Ryu, mind-to-mind, though what it says to him makes virtually no sense at the time.  Moments later, he comes across the real thing, though it is very visibly dead and inanimate.

A terrorist attack splits up Ryu and Bosch, and shortly thereafter, Ryu runs into this game’s version of Nina, as well as a member of the resistance movement Trinity, named Lin.  She seeks Nina for her own – or rather Trinity’s – purposes.  The three form an unlikely but highly effective team.  But allying himself with these two has its consequences, and by the time Ryu and Bosch reunite, circumstances have made them into enemies.  Bosch is a good fighter, and he has plenty of allies with him, but Ryu refuses to betray his new comrades.  Thankfully, his encounter with the dragon was no mere dream or hallucination.  Unbeknownst to him, it has bestowed him with awesome power… and a deadline.

With every passing moment, the monstrous dragon power lurking within Ryu grows more prominent, threatening to overcome him.  While Ryu is in control, he can transform into a bestial form capable of slaughtering even bosses within just a couple of rounds of combat.  But drawing on that power accelerates its progress in overtaking him.

And so, with all hands turned against him, Ryu, Lin, and Nina have ultimately just a single option: Escape.

*             *             *

One of the things that I like about Dragon Quarter – one of many things – is the way that the game’s more prominent mechanics and its story are so closely intertwined.

The dragon power bestowed upon Ryu early into the game isn’t just a narrative device or story element, coming out only when dramatically convenient.  It’s also a game mechanic, in the form of what the game calls a D-counter.  This is a number, a percentage, that appears in the corner of the screen.   As you play, it slowly ticks up toward 100 in intervals of a hundredth of a percent.  Everything you do in the game causes it to increase.  Everything.  Every 24 or 25 steps will cause it to increase by one interval.  Later in the game, this happens every dozen steps or so.  Ryu’s special D-dash ability, which allows him to avoid enemy combat, causes it to tick up faster.  Transforming, all by itself, raises the counter, and any actions taken while transformed increase it by whole-number percentages.  It is literally overpowered.  What I mentioned about crushing bosses in just a couple of turns was not hyperbole.  I’ve done it.  It’s basically my end-game strategy.

There is no way to drop the counter.  Ever.  There are no items, no spells, no techniques which will allow you to reset it or undo any of its progress.  It just sits up there in the corner, slowly increasing and glowing ever more furiously as the number grows.  The tension between the temptation to use it whenever you’re in a bind and the punishing consequences of said use can be exquisite.

When I first heard Dragon Quarter described as a survival-horror RPG, it didn’t make sense to me.  But that’s mainly because I associated the mechanical elements of most of the survival-horror games I’d played with the more thematic elements of horror.

The key here, I think, is the word “survival”.  You might more accurately call Dragon Quarter a survival-RPG, except it’s basically the only one of its kind that I know of.  It’s kind of hard to wrangle a whole genre out of that.

At their heart, survival-horror games generally “work” based on two principles.

The first is the fragility of the player character relative to other types of games.  You are not the hero of a more action-oriented games, who can take maybe a dozen sword strokes straight to the face and just keep going, or who can withstand a hail of gunfire and duck behind cover for a few seconds while your shields recharge.  Every bit of damage taken is a significant setback that needs to be planned around, and every attack must be calculated.  This is because of the second principle, which resource management.

The in-game resources available to you, both those which you use to preserve yourself and those you use to eliminate your enemies, are finite.  So they must be spent wisely, frugally.  Because of this, you are constantly required to take a measured, careful approach to any situation.  You can never just blithely wander around; to do so invites disaster twice over.  In the short term, you risk serious harm, leaving yourself vulnerable to future threats.  In the long term, if you come out of the situation relatively unscathed, it’s generally at some expense of resources, leaving you ill-prepared for future encounters.  Carelessness becomes indistinguishable from suicide.

This puts pressure on the player to play extremely well at all times by punishing mistakes immediately and brutally.  As a result, some of the typical elements of JRPGs are missing.

There are no healing spells or techniques.  All healing – whether restoring health or curing negative status effects – is accomplished by way of expendable (and frequently pricey) items.  And you have to consider how often (if at all) you’ll be using some of these items, because inventory space is limited, and multiple items of a single type don’t “stack” very much before requiring another inventory slot.  And, naturally, the usual economics of JRPGs are in full effect.  Whatever you get for selling an item is a pitiful fraction of what it costs you to buy.

The game offers you the ability to use bait and traps to lure enemies into a position of compromise and get the drop on them, but even these need to be used sparingly.  There’s hardly enough for every encounter.

Interestingly, the game knows exactly how difficult it is, and gives you something of a way around the problem.

As with most RPGs of any kind, Japanese or otherwise, you earn experience points, new equipment, and new abilities as you go through the game.  In addition, Dragon Quarter also gives you what’s called Party XP.  Basically, this is experience you can dole out to party members as you like to boost their levels. 

Should you find yourself in a situation where you can’t progress without either having your party wiped or running the D-counter up to 100% (which, if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is an instant Game Over), you have the option to do what’s called a SOL Restart.  This restarts the game from the beginning, but lets you keep all the equipment and skills you’ve learned, as well as any Party XP you still have.  This gives you get a fresh start while retaining your improved gear, and the Party XP lets you give yourself a boost in the early going.

There’s also an option to restore a previous hard save along these same lines.  Dragon Quarter allows “soft” saves anywhere, but these are temporary by design.  Once loaded, these saves disappear.  There are only a few “hard” save points, from which you can restore at will, and to which you will be returned with a SOL Restore.

If this sounds ridiculous for what is typically a long-form type of game, it may help to understand that Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is only about eight to ten hours long from start to finish on a single play through, once you know what you’re doing.  Even with a couple of full-blown restarts, you’ll be spending no more time on Dragon Quarter than any other game from the same time period.  Less, probably.

Writing this now, I just about want to say that Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is Dark Souls before Dark Souls really existed.  There’s a certain similarity in that both games are more difficult than usual while still being relatively fair, and in the expectation that you will die, probably more than once, and that rather than being a tragedy, it’s simply an instructive part of the experience.  Or in the case of Dragon Quarter, you’ll experience (probably more than once) a situation in which death is basically a given should you continue, and the smart thing would be to cut your losses and restart.

*             *             *

Dragon Quarter’s infliction of pressure extends even to the representation of the game’s characters and world.

Most characters have a skinny, almost emaciated appearance.  Part of this is simple stylization, of course, but it still contributes to the overall effect.  These people live a thin and narrow existence, it says, devoid of the expansive pleasures humankind was meant to enjoy.  There is a grimness and a quiet desperation underlying it all.

The world itself is a fucking hole.  Corridors in the lower areas are littered with random junk and debris; it’s best not to think what it might all actually be.  The air is hazy and grimy, and things have a sort of cobbled-together look that just makes the whole place look cramped and dingy and uncomfortable.  Especially in the lower areas, everything looks like it’s about one stern look away from falling right apart.  The upper areas are cleaner, more solid, but can seem so sterile and strictly designed as to be hostile.  Dragon Quarter does a wonderful job of creating a world you want to get the hell out of as soon as you can.

It’s ironic, really.  Most games, I play to escape from the troubles and stresses in my life.  And most games oblige this desire.  Even the ones that take place in barren wastelands tend to take place in gorgeously rendered barren wastelands that encourage you to examine every carefully tailored nook and cranny.  They’re an invitation to exploration and adventure, and are “barren” or “waste” only as a matter of aesthetics.

*             *             *

 Ultimately, a large part of what interests me about the story of Dragon Quarter, what keeps me coming back, is that rather than a big, trampling save-the-world epic, it’s about a group of characters who just want out.  This is a smaller story, a “tiny tale of time”, as the game itself tells us.  It’s huge in its implications for its world and its characters.  It’s great in the scope of the ideas it asks its characters to contemplate.  It that sense, at least, it does involve the end of the world, in one way or another.  But the scale is smaller, and the characters strike me as being more real because of it. 

Ryu, Lin, and Nina don’t want to fight anybody.  There’s at least one memorable occasion where Ryu, surrounded by enemies, asks why they can’t just let him and his friends go.  The character animations in Dragon Quarter aren’t spectacular, but they get the job done here.  There’s something about the way that Ryu asks his question that seems to have layers.  On one layer, he seems genuinely fatigued from fighting all the time.  On another layer, he seems mentally, psychologically tired from the toll of all the deaths he’s inflicted.  On yet a deeper layer, he seems likely to be tired of fighting the thing inside him that threatens to take over.

They aren’t trying to harm anybody.  And it seems reasonable just to let them go, on the one hand.  But on the other, there is the major problem that letting Ryu and company out of this subterranean pit will completely upend the social order – will end this idea of the world – purely as a side-effect of his escape.  Because the underlying problem with Ryu’s world is a variant on the same problem that keeps people in dead-end jobs and abusive relationships long beyond the point when, logically, they should be getting out. 

Fear.

The world of Dragon Quarter, objectively speaking, is an absolute, utter shithole.  Even the people in charge don’t seem to be enjoying themselves much.  And it’s because everyone seems to be in agreement, unspoken, that even if the current circumstances are awful, at least they’re familiar awful circumstances.  It’s possible that things are better on the surface, but it’s just as possible that they aren’t.  It’s just as possible that they’re far worse.  This, at least, is the devil we know.

Even one of the main villains, the ruler of this subterranean nightmare, is ruled by fear.  A thousand years before the story proper, he was given the opportunity to open this world to the surface.  But he backed down.  In his fear that the world above might still be the barren wasteland people left ages ago, he turned back at the final moment, sentencing himself and everyone in the underground to remain in it indefinitely.

There’s an anime I like quite a bit – it’s probably my favorite, really – called Revolutionary Girl Utena, and in it there is a bit of dialogue that is recited so often it’s practically a ritual.  It goes like this:

“If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever being born.  We are the chick.  The world is our egg.  If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without ever truly being born.  Smash the shell, for the world revolution.”

This is actually a paraphrase from the Hermann Hesse novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth (usually just known as Demian), in which it’s put this way:

“The bird struggles out of the egg.  The egg is a world.  Who would be born must first destroy a world.  The bird then flies to God.  That god’s name is Abraxas.”

To go up, to go out, to rise, to escape: This is an act of tremendous faith.

To Faraway Places – Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim

Ever since I first heard of Ys, I’d been obsessed with finding a copy of the games and playing them.  I don’t know why, exactly.  I just remember, back in 1998 or 1999, looking up ROMs for TurboGrafx-16 games, and reading good things about Ys, and being more and more interested the more I read.  It marked my first foray into something truly esoteric in my hobbies of anime and video games.  The whole Ys series is reasonably popular in Japan, but few of the games ever saw U.S. release, and those that did were either not the best efforts in the series (such as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis versions of Ys III, which was a fairly divisive game within the fanbase), or came out for systems which were unpopular in the U.S. (like the TurboGrafx-CD).

The obscurity of it was part of the appeal.  It was like finding buried treasure, or stumbling across some hidden wisdom or lore.

Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim was the first game in the series I actually got my hands on.  This would have been on the PlayStation2.  I was talking to an acquaintance of mine at the time about my curiosity regarding the games, and my frustration with how the fan translation effort for Ys I & II Complete seemed to be indefinitely (infinitely, it seemed then) on hiatus.  It was at this point she informed me that one of the newer Ys games was available for the PS2.

“You’re shitting me,” I said.  I’d heard absolutely nothing about this.

“I’m not,” she said.  And she was right. 

I had my own copy of Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim within 24 hours.

*             *             *

A little history may be in order here, to put Ys VI into its proper context.

Nihon Falcom, the company who makes Ys, is probably one of the oldest Japanese game developers still in existence.  They got their start in the 1980s on Japanese PCs, mainly developing action-RPGs.  Ys was only one of the series they made, and it wasn’t even the only one they made which came to America.  Legacy of the Wizard on the NES was a port of one of their Dragon Slayer series installments, and Faxanadu on the NES was a Nintendo-specific entry of their Xanadu series (the name is a portmanteau of Famicom Xanadu).  Brandish on the Super Nintendo was also a port of theirs.

The key word here is “port”.  Falcom did not, at this time, do console games themselves (Faxanadu and Ys V, about which more later, being the only exceptions I’m aware of).  Console ports were generally handled by other developers.  In the case of Ys I & II, the developer who brought them to the States was Hudson Soft, who created by the TurboGrafx-CD ports of the games which would go on to be practically the definitive editions of those games for many years, at least as far as American audiences were concerned.  There was also a port of Ys I to the Sega Master System, but the TurboGrafx-CD version had something the Master System version didn’t, or rather, couldn’t have: Redbook audio, voice acting, and (admittedly quite limited) animated cut scenes.  This level of presentation made Ys I & II a stand-out title, especially in the U.S., where games of real quality for the peripheral (an expensive add-on to a system that seems to have been dead in the water from pretty much the beginning) were oases in a desert.  This was less true in Japan, however, where the system’s Japanese equivalent (the PC Engine) did good business, ultimately trailing behind only the revered Famicom itself.

Ys III received this same treatment: Released on the PC-8801 first, it was later ported by Hudson to the TurboGrafx-CD.  Ys III also got ported to the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis; the three console versions were the ones we got in America.  But the Super NES and Genesis versions weren’t promoted very well and faded into obscurity.  The TurboGrafx-CD version likewise suffered obscurity, but in this case, that was simply the consequence of being a TurboGrafx-CD game. 

Ys III was a bit of a black sheep.  Where Ys I & II (I refer to them together because they are, for all practical purposes, a single game) were action-RPGs with an overhead view and an odd ramming mechanic for combat, Ys III was a side-scrolling action-RPG with platform jumping and a dedicated attack button.  The difference was not entirely unlike that between The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, albeit somewhat less pronounced, ultimately.  And the reaction among fans of the original was similar.  Ys III had (and has) its fans, but many who loved the originals were angered by the new direction the series had taken.

This was in 1991.  At this point, the lack of success Falcom had witnessed with the first three installments of one of their star series apparently convinced them to give up on the American market, because that was the last Ys game we saw in the U.S. for close to 15 years.

It’s also at this point that the Ys series gets a bit weird.

There were originally two versions of Ys IV, and neither of them were developed by Falcom themselves.  Instead, in 1993, Falcom drew up an outline and licensed the development of Ys IV to two different developers.  Both of them, perhaps wisely, decided to return the game mechanics of Ys IV to the series roots.

Tonkin House (I love their name for reasons I have difficulty describing) developed their version, titled Ys IV: Mask of the Sun for the Super NES.  Hudson Soft, meanwhile, developed theirs under the title Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys for the TurboGrafx-CD.  The two versions of Ys IV vary a great deal in their story, and while there are some characters and other elements in common, the two versions are different and mutually exclusive.  Among the fan community, the general consensus seems to be that while both games are certainly worth playing, The Dawn of Ys is the superior version.  So, naturally, the one ultimately considered canonical was Mask of the Sun.  That was until just a couple of years ago, when Falcom released their own version of the game, Ys IV: Memories of Celceta.

 1995 saw the release of Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand exclusively for the Super NES.  PC-8801 fans were pissed off.  TurboGrafx-CD fans were likewise pissed off.  Even the fans who owned a Super NES were pissed off, really.  For one thing, there was the music.

What you have to understand about Ys games, broadly speaking, is that the music is always fantastic.  This is no mere opinion, mind you, but an objectively provable scientific fact.  Oh, sure, there’s always an assortment of sort of ho-hum town music, but even that is at least well done.  But the music for roaming the overworld, delving into dungeons, and fighting bosses, is always great.  Much is made of Ryo Yonemitsu’s arrangements for the TurboGrafx-CD Redbook audio, and rightly so.  But even the original PC-8801 arrangements by Yuzo Koshiro and Mieko Ishikawa are equally worth listening to.  Not just “good for their day”, but good listening, period; Koshiro and Ishikawa play to the strengths of the PC-8801’s sound chip to create music that is alternately fast-paced and intense, happy and upbeat, or moody and ethereal. 

By contrast, Ys V made use of the Super NES sound chip, which tended to have a very synthesizer-y sound quality to it.  In itself, this wouldn’t be a bad thing.  God knows there are any number of soundtracks for Super NES games that are worth a listen as-is (Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, just to name two).  But the Ys games’ music has a certain character to it which the Super NES is poorly equipped to emulate, let alone replicate.  It’s not bad, it’s just… not Ys.

In fact, the real problem with Ys V in general is just that.  It’s not Ys.  It’s like countless other generic Super NES action-RPGs.  The color palette is murkier, eschewing the bright, attractive graphics of the earlier series entries in favor of something more “realistic”.  They also overhauled the game’s mechanics, and made it considerably easier than previous entries.  In fact, this last point was such a bone of contention, that Falcom released an updated version called Ys V Expert with the challenge ratcheted up significantly.  But the damage was already done.

A number of people will tell you that Ys V nearly killed the franchise.  I’d like to wave my hand dismissively at that suggestion and say “that’s the worst kind of hyperbole”.  I’d like to.  But then, it’s an undeniable fact that for the next eight years, Falcom did not make a single new Ys game.  In 2001, they remade Ys I & II for Windows PCs (this has since become basically the definitive version of those games; with every port thereafter using its assets), and that was pretty much it.  The various games in the series were, in that eight-year interval, ported to pretty much any and every system; the list of consoles which haven’t received an Ys port of some kind (usually of the first two games) is short indeed.  But like pretty much all ports, they were handled by non-Falcom developers, and they weren’t all of exactly the highest quality.

To leave off one’s flagship series for a span of eight years is not exactly a good sign for said series.  It would be like if Nintendo just stopped making Mario or Zelda games for a whole console generation.  (I was going to add Metroid to that short list, but then I remembered that they’ve done that very thing, and look poised to do it once again).

So if you’re wondering why I’ve spent so much time leading up to Ys VI, that’s why.  There’s significance to The Ark of Napishtim well beyond its existence itself.  No creative endeavor exists in a vacuum, after all.  Every game you play is a product not only of its creators’ hopes and wishes and ideas and compromises, but also of the times in which it was made, the capabilities or limitations of the technology of those times, and (unfortunately) the business climate of those times.

While I suspect there’s some hyperbole to the notion that Ys V nearly killed the franchise, I suspect there’s also some truth to it, and to the logical conclusion that it was then up to Ys VI to save the franchise.

I’m really glad it did.

*             *             *

The first thing you have to understand about the Ys series, as a whole, is that these are not complicated games.  Whether you look at them narratively, thematically, structurally, or mechanically, there is a lack of complexity that, far from being dull, is honestly refreshing.  Hell, the first two games (and the fourth, returning to form as it did) don’t even have an attack button.  You just ram into your enemies, making sure you hit them at the right angle to deal damage without receiving any yourself (this is both more difficult and more entertaining than it probably sounds).  You could practically have ported Ys I to the Atari 2600, with its one-button-and-one-stick controller.  I mean, it would have looked ugly as the south-facing end of a north-going horse, and the soundtrack would have been a crime against the very idea of music, and I’m sure it would have been godawfully slow into the bargain, but you could just about do it, I think.

Anyway, you don’t play the Ys games to be immersed in a deep, complex plot.  The plot’s there, and it basically makes sense, and that’s about all there is to it.  There are some mysteries, but they’re not terribly subtle or surprising.  Until Ys Seven came along, Ys games were always pretty much content to give you exactly what you were expecting.

A large part of most every Ys game is spent on creating a new and strange place, and new people to visit.  This is part of what makes Ys games intriguing.

Most RPGs put you in the shoes of a hero (or heroes) appointed by fate to do whatever it is the game has you doing.  A lot of the time, this involves saving the world while avenging the destruction of your main character’s hometown, though there was a period where killing God was all the rage.  These games tend to give you a huge world to explore, and see you crisscrossing vast continents, making your way through forests, deserts, mountains, and plains, traveling under earth and above it.  Ys, by contrast, usually confines each game to a single locale.  With the exception of one game in the main series, you play as Adol Christin, a red-haired adventurer who has a tendency to roll into a town right as some ancient and sinister shit is about to hit whatever the closest fan-equivalent would be in the medieval pseudo-Europe in which these games take place.  Adol isn’t your average RPG hero.  He does not wait for Joseph Campbell’s call to adventure, oh no.  He has a tendency to just sort of show up right about the time adventure would be picking up the phone.

Instead of giving you a huge world to explore, Ys always gives you a single locale to roam.  The games in general try hard to give you a sense of place, a feeling of some new and foreign locale teeming with a unique sense of self.  So each game has its own feel and sense of itself, its own story.  So while there are narrative and thematic elements connecting each game, they all stand alone (barring Ys I & II).

In this, Ys VI follows in the footsteps of its forebears.  It gives you a straightforward fantasy adventure in an exciting new place.  For this particular installment, Adol is traveling far into the western ocean.  Most of the series thus far (and afterward) takes place in what is basically Europe and the Mediterranean with the serial numbers filed off.  This is at least more imaginative than, say, Drakengard, which takes place in upside-down Europe. 

The Ark of Napishtim is a bit unique, though, in that it occurs in its world’s equivalent of the Caribbean – the Bermuda Triangle, actually.  In Adol’s world, this area is referred to as the Canaan Islands, and said islands are surrounded by a massive storm vortex similar to the one that surrounded Esteria, the island where he traveled on his first adventure to find the legendary lost civilization that has lent its title to the whole series.  It’s similar to the one that formerly surrounded Esteria, in that pretty much any ship hoping to get through it is destroyed.  It differs, however, in that it is far more powerful.

As it happens, Adol has a problem with boats.  Specifically, he has a problem with staying in them.   Anyway, he’s knocked off the boat he’s traveling in (due to cannon fire, this time), and washes ashore on Quatera Island, which is inhabited by a tribe of people called the Rehda.  They’re basically elves, except they also have tails.  They don’t like humans much, though this is somewhat understandable.  The humans on the neighboring island (all castaways or descendants of castaways) have built their city by scavenging stones from the Rehda’s ancient holy places.  So while Adol isn’t exactly welcome there, the people at least understand it isn’t his fault, and are at least willing to nurse him back to health before insisting that he leave.

Their mercy does, perhaps, have something to do with the fact that Adol is discovered by the chief priestess of the island, Olha, while she and her sister are spending time on the beach.

It’s funny that the game opens this way, with Adol washing ashore unconscious at his destination, and being revived by the inhabitants of that land.  I get the feeling that Falcom is sending us a message with the opening of Ys VI, as it basically borrows the opening premises of Ys I and Ys II both.

In Ys I (at least, in the Ys I Eternal version, which seems to have lifted this and other plot elements from the Ys I anime), we begin the game with Adol washing ashore in Esteria after having braved the storm vortex in a one-man sailboat.  Unconscious, he is taken to a doctor, who heals him until he is well enough to go exploring the island.  In Ys II, we start off with Adol being launched through the sky, to land near the Ruins of Moondoria in the floating land of Ys.  That he isn’t killed stone dead by this is a testament to his strength, or at least to the power of the Law of Dramatic Necessity.  Again unconscious, he is discovered by that game’s love interest (well, “love interest”; Ys’s love interests are a lot like Bond girls, with the exception that Adol seems largely oblivious to the effect his heroics have on the hearts of attractive young ladies in need), who takes him in and cares for him until he’s well enough to continue on adventuring.

It’s basically Falcom saying, “Look, okay, all that goofy shit with Ys V?  We’re sorry for that.  Okay?  Look, we’re going back to our roots (and not, thankfully, just to the well).  You know?  Back to the good stuff.”

At the same time, it preserves many of the mechanical changes made with Ys V.  Some of this is just a concession to modernity.  The ramming combat from the older Ys games would be pretty impractical in 3D.  Two-dimensional graphics make it possible because of the simplified movement and perspective, but with the more nuanced range of motion and 3D environments, it would be impossible.

Which is not to say that Ys VI is complex.  It’s more complex than its predecessors, but not complex in itself.  The aim of every Ys game has always been to turn you loose to explore the world and navigate the dungeons and other places of dark and danger with as few barriers to entry as possible.  You’re given free rein pretty quickly, with a minimum of up-front exposition and few hand-holding tutorials, if any.

Simple, no-nonsense, straight to the point.  That’s Ys in a nutshell, and that’s the example Ys VI follows.  It isn’t long at all before you’re roaming the forest outside the starting village looking for a way to the human town on the next island over and also trying to find out where Isha (the younger sister of the young lady who cared for you after you washed up) wandered off to.  Not long after that, you’ve leveled up a bit, found one or two little hidden nooks with treasure in them, and fought your first boss.

If I’ve neglected to mention it before, let me mention it now.  Bosses are one of the staples of Ys in general.  These are frequently challenging and frantic affairs, accompanied by up-tempo, intense, guitar-and-synth-heavy rock.  It’s hard to care about how anachronistic this might seem.  Do Not Go Gently, indeed.  And Ys VI is no slouch in this department, either.  All of this serves to express and heighten the sensation of fighting creatures far more massive and powerful than you could ever hope to be, the sheer adrenaline-burst of excitement and anxiety at facing such enemies, and the rush of a well-earned victory, a narrowly avoided defeat.

But that’s another thing that sets The Ark of Napishtim, and the series as a whole, apart.  Most RPGs, and adventure games in general, are deliberately paced affairs that require patience, careful planning and forward thinking.  Ys, by contrast, has an almost arcade-like focus on action.  It favors quick reflexes and the ability to stay on top of frantic situations.  Its best, most intense encounters keep you on your toes and demand that you think on the fly.  Indeed, long forward planning is almost impossible.  One of the quirks of older Ys games which Ys VI preserves is that once you’re in a boss battle, you’re locked into it as-is.  You can normally equip one healing item of your choice for quick use at a single button press.  You can have more than one item of this type, but can only have one type equipped.  Elsewhere, you can swap out equipped items to your heart’s content.  Once you’re in the boss battle, however, you’re locked out of your menu and can’t change it.  It’s just you and the boss, period.

In that, Ys VI shares its greatest strength with the best entries of the series: A sense of constant, forward momentum, a continuous feeling of doing.  Everything about the game, from the pace of Adol’s movement, to the way experience levels tend to increase rapidly, to the way even just a couple of levels make the difference between getting stomped and doing the stomping, is designed to keep you moving toward your goal.  There’s a lot of backtracking in Ys VI, and a fair amount of hunting for hidden treasures or other bonuses, but it rarely feels too laborious.  The game’s snappy pace means traversing the game world typically takes just minutes.

*             *             *

I’ve been bouncing all over the place in this write-up, and I know it, and the thing is I don’t know how to go about it any other way.  There’s a lot I like, about Ys in general and Ys VI in particular.  It’s hard to stay on one topic, to stay focused, and to give a dry run-down of what Ys VI has to recommend it.  It’s especially hard because this is one of many cases where the whole is greater than the mere sum of its parts.  I say that a lot, I think, but that’s because it’s true of a lot of games I like.  I mean, I could write out a bullet-point list of what Ys VI has, if that would be helpful:

•          Fast-paced action
•          Massive, intense bosses
•          Dungeon mazes
•          Fantastic music

But when you put it like that, it doesn’t look like so much.  I mean, really, that’s barely more than back-of-the-box copy, and it’s not like I’m trying to sell you the game.  Well, I guess I am, sort of.  I like Ys VI and want to share it with other people.  Not in a “Please buy this game so I can pay my bills!” sort of way, but more of a “This is a cool thing I’ve found, and that I enjoy, and I’d like it if more people were enjoying it too!” sort of way. 

About the only problem I have with The Ark of Napishtim is that the improvements made by its own sequels show the one or two things Ys VI could stand to do slightly better.  Ys: The Oath in Felghana (a from-the-ground-up remake of the once-divisive Ys III) and Ys Origin are both built on the same game engine, but are improved in a number of ways.  One of those is the pacing.  As much as I love it, it's hard to deny that Ys VI has an odd sense of pace.  It feels like this is dictated mainly by the plot, but even so, there is a sort of awkward sense of flow to the game.  Few of the other improvements made by Oath in Felghana and Ys Origin are really major, but they still make those games more refined experiences than Ys VI.  Ys VI has to settle for being merely pretty good if somewhat uneven, as opposed to Ys: The Oath in Felghana, which rates somewhere near really fucking excellent, for me.

So if you like a lean, fast-paced action-RPG with rocking music and fun mechanics that will never get you bogged down, then there’s not really much else for me to say.  Go buy it already.  It’s on Steam.  You’re only about five clicks away from a great time.

Version history and miscellany

In accordance with tradition (which is to say, as Ys games typically were before 2008), Ys VI was released on PCs first in Japan, in 2003.  Two years later, Konami picked up the rights to port the game to consoles, and released a version for the PlayStation2 in 2005.  This version added fully voiced dialogue to the game, and swapped out the original anime-style cut scenes with generic (and honestly kind of hideous) CG cut scenes instead.  They also replaced the 2D character sprites with 3D models, which is less of a crime when you stop to consider all the detail that would’ve been lost converting the game to the lower resolutions available for TV screens anyway. 

In addition to these changes, they added a few bonus mini-dungeons, with rewards of experience, money, or emel upon completion.  In Ys VI, emel is a mineral you collect and use to improve your weapons.  These dungeons are entirely unnecessary, and honestly somewhat tedious, but they can be helpful if you want to avoid grinding for money or experience or emel elsewhere.

In gleeful defiance of good business sense, Konami translated the PS2 version and made it available in the U.S. also.  All the dialogue was re-recorded in English (badly, alas), but can thankfully be switched to Japanese by entering the right code (the anime cut scenes can be unlocked in this way also).  About a year or so later, Konami also brought over a PSP version of the game.

Ys VI on PSP isn’t really worth it, in my opinion.  The loading times are a headache, the 2D character sprites (thankfully used in this version of the game) are kind of blurry, and the 3D graphics are blockier and have muddier textures than either previous version of the game.  It also suffers the fate of so many other console games ported to handheld systems: There’s less screen area on display, giving you less time to react to incoming threats.  If this cramped, slow, murky mess is the only way you can get Ys VI, then by all means, go for it.  The game is still eminently worth playing.  But otherwise, go for the PS2 version.

Or better yet, go for the PC version.  XSeed, as part of their deal with Falcom, have recently made the PC version of Ys VI available on Steam and GOG.com.  While it lacks the additions and changes made by Konami (those are exclusive to the console ports, to which Konami probably still owns all rights), it’s available in HD, and the system requirements are quite modest.  About the only thing really worth complaining about is that, with the PC version being developed for machines in 2003, it doesn’t have the best widescreen support.  You can play it in HD and in widescreen, but there’s at least one part I’ve noticed early on where the screen is large enough that you can see the edges of the rendered game world.  This has yet to be anything more than a mild irritation – really, it’s more funny (in a kind of “oh my God, look how far we’ve come since then” sort of way) than any kind of real problem.