Tuesday, July 14, 2015

From the Ashes - Gears of War, the Series

I am not always a good judge of the things I will like or won’t like.  I had this problem with Halo, a few years ago, as I mentioned in a previous post.  I had it again with Gears of War, somewhat more recently.

I used to think, judging largely by the artwork and some snippets of dialogue I’d heard, that this must be the most meat-headed, frat boy douchebag series of games in existence.  Just a bunch of lumpy, over-muscled dudes shooting things with stupidly huge machine guns and swearing a lot.  And the machine guns have chainsaw bayonets.  Chainsaw bayonets.

But then the original Gears of War came up for free on Xbox’s Free Games with Xbox Live Gold promotion one month, and I thought “What the hell?”   So I downloaded it and gave it a shot.

I wound up buying the rest of the series not much later.

Turns out chainsaw bayonets are fun.

*             *             *

I don’t know of a better way to say this, except to say that Gears of War doesn’t take itself seriously, but is still somehow a mostly serious game.  The story throughout the series has moments of real emotion and impact, and it sets these up and handles them well enough that they come across as genuine and natural, rather than forced.  The characters look like a sort of winking satire on the grizzled, armored military guy trope (which is a broader expression of the “bald space marine” trope that occupies so much of western gaming).  Main character Marcus Fenix, in particular, seems to embody this, with his do-rag, his soul patch, his jutting jaw that could actually break rocks, and his “Ah, not this shit again” attitude.  But rather than crank it up beyond believability, they just kind of let it be what it is.  The characters pretty much just do what they would do, given who they are and the context in which they exist.

The characters are really sort of brilliant, in the sense that their designs match almost perfectly with their personalities.  When you watch Marcus move, listen to him speak, and see the things he does, the way he interacts with other characters, it all fits so well it’s actually a little bit scary.

I mean, here’s a guy who’s grim, gruff, and mostly quiet, and doesn’t really seem to like anything or anyone in this hellhole of a world he finds himself in.  He often expresses satisfaction with, and appreciation for, various skillful maneuvers (well-timed weapon reloads, managing several headshots in a row, etc.), but this is at best a sort of diagonally adjacent emotion to real happiness or enjoyment, which seem utterly foreign to him.  Pretty much everything that’s first apparent about his character – his looks, his posture, his movements, his voice – makes all of this seem right in line with who he appears to be.  It isn’t predictable, necessarily, but it doesn’t exactly come out of left field, either.

And this is true of pretty much any character with a unique personality, who is in any way a mover or shaker in the story.  They all look and talk in such a way as to immediately telegraph who they are.  The characters play to particular tropes and archetypes (without leaning on them too heavily) in such a way as to provide a sort of quick sketch of who they are, a sense of immediate familiarity.  This way, the game doesn’t have to spend minutes at a time dwelling on who all these people are and what they’re all doing, when it could instead be throwing you back into the action.

*             *             *

The action is one of the other areas of Gears of War which is surprisingly intelligent. 

The original Gears of War was one of the pioneering titles of the cover-based third-person shooter genre.  It’s not necessarily the first game in the genre, mind you.  There’s probably an argument to be made that Resident Evil 4 was a major contribution to its development, but there are games before this that had many elements of the genre in one way or another.  My own first experience with these game mechanics would probably be the original Mass Effect, which in retrospect might not be the best ambassador for this style of play.  The first Mass Effect is a game that, if you love it, you love it despite a number of minor-to-middling problems.  The parts where you’re moving and shooting are sort of mushy and awkward, to be honest, if still ultimately serviceable, and at least make for a decent example of the basics (the sequels are much better in this regard, but we’re not here for Mass Effect today).

Unlike a lot of franchises out there, Gears of War got it pretty much right on the first try.  The sequels have mainly just focused on offering more.  More explosions (and more things to shoot and blow up), more  challenge, more weapons, more areas to travel through (and, in all likelihood, destroy, intentionally or otherwise), and more colors.  The first Gears of War is a very, very grey game, you see.

Sure, it’s not as if Epic Games (fun fact: I’m old enough that I still think of them as Epic Megagames, and have to consciously correct myself), the original developers of the Gears of War, are any strangers to high-quality games where you blow stuff up real good.  They did make the classic first-person shooter Unreal, after all, and they’ve been around since well before then.  But the level of polish on display for Gears of War is pretty remarkable when you stop to consider that it was the first entry in a new series, in a relatively new genre, in the early days of a new piece of hardware.

Mechanically, the game is smarter than it appears.  Despite the gung-ho, “Fuck yeah, let’s kill all the enemies!” attitude it seems to have, in reality it encourages intelligent play.  Attacking head-on is a great way to find yourself getting mulched by a hail of enemy gunfire.  Instead, the games encourage you to outmaneuver your enemies.  Flank them or take them from behind, where they can’t easily find cover.  If you don’t, they’ll surely try to do it to you.  And like Halo before it, Gears of War requires you to acquaint yourself with a variety of weapons.  While it’s more generous with some weapon types, all the weapons and ammunition you find, you find in the environment, either dropped by fallen foes, or left behind by defeated allies who previously occupied the area.  Metal Gear Solid would call this OCP (on-site procurement), and it means you’re never in full control of your arsenal.  It means you have to learn how to use all of the game’s weapons to at least a basic degree of proficiency, and learn which weapon types work best in which environments, so that you don’t waste ammunition using the wrong tool for the job.

Rather than a point of frustration, I personally find this makes the game more interesting.  You’re not always doing the same thing over and over again.  The various weapons work best at varying ranges and rates of fire, and require different tactics for effective use.  It keeps you constantly on your toes, constantly thinking, constantly paying attention and therefore constantly engaged.  You fall into a kind of rhythm after a while, but it’s never mindless; it’s never habit.

And the cutscenes, once the game really gets going, are generally just long enough to get the point across, but short enough not to screw up the momentum too badly.  Epic understands that when you play a game, you generally want to be playing a game, not listening to the game natter on and on about things while you interact with it at intervals.

*             *             *

I was wrapping up Gears of War: Judgment last night, and my wife was lying on the couch behind me, half-watching and half-listening to me play.  Gears of War is absolutely not a Katie sort of game.  Testosterone-heavy aesthetics aside, there’s the fact that she doesn’t really get into third-person shooters that much, with the exception of Mass Effect, the mechanical problems of which I touched on above.

After explaining the story to her, and some of the backstory, she paused for a moment, and then said, “You really like games where humanity is pretty much fucked, don’t you?”

“No, no… I… don’t,” I said, and then I paused, thinking for a moment.  “Do I?”

I thought for a few minutes more about a lot of the games I’d been playing lately, and a lot of the games I really like.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter sees humanity fucked over by their own stupid choices resulting in environmental destruction, forcing them to retreat to a single subterranean habitat until someone can muster the courage to open the door after a few thousand years and see just exactly what’s out there. 

Assassin’s Creed, at least up through the third game, sees humanity fucking itself over by way of the constant squabbling of the game’s two main factions, which blinds them to the fact that there is a major solar flare set to wipe out most life on Earth, and that they actually could have been prepared for it centuries ago if they hadn’t been so obsessed with wiping each other out. 

Destiny sees humanity being fucked by way of the invasion of at least four separate races of beings driven to try to wrest control of our own solar system from us for one reason or another, with humankind reduced to such numbers that we basically only populate a single city on the entire planet Earth (yet the tone is somehow overall hopeful).   

Halo sees humanity fucked by being on the losing end of a genocidal war against an alliance of alien religious fanatics who believe us to be an affront to their gods.  This at least sounds moderately more hopeful than the first two examples, in that we at least haven’t done all of this to ourselves, except that’s somewhat deceptive.  Dig into the backstory of Halo even a little, and you’ll find that the entirety of human-controlled space was embroiled in an insurrection ready to explode into full-scale war before the Covenant showed up.

In all of this, Mass Effect is the outlier.  While, yes, humanity does appear to be pretty fucked in Mass Effect, this is actually just because space-faring sentient life in general is fucked, as part of a fairly regular, cyclical process; humankind is only one part of that.  And while, being newcomers to galactic society, the general feeling is that humankind has a long way to go to get its collective shit together, it seems to be at least doing that shit-together-getting before all hell breaks loose.

In turn, this put me in mind of a conversation I’d had some years previous with my friend Captain Overkill, who introduced me to a friend or acquaintance by saying, “he likes grimdark stuff”.

I objected to this pretty much immediately, because I don’t tend to think of myself that way, and then stopped, and thought about it for a moment.

Among my favorite anime, we have Tsukihime: Lunar Legend, Rurouni Kenshin: Remembrance, Fate/Stay Night, Berserk, Evangelion, X (the TV series and manga, not the movie), Kara no Kyokai: the Garden of Sinners, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Revolutionary Girl Utena.  That last one doesn’t seem to be very dark at first blush, but like most fairy tales pre-Perrault, there is an undercurrent of something dark and unpleasant running through it, and it’s not buried nearly as far below the surface as you might like.

So I guess I like dark, heavy stuff, wherein humanity is pretty seriously fucked.

And let’s be clear: Humanity is pretty badly fucked in Gears of War.

A lot of this isn’t really explained in the main game, because the characters’ dialogue is written to sound like real (if occasionally cheesy and often low-brow) talk, which means it doesn’t often do double-duty as lazy exposition for the player’s benefit.  But it doesn’t take much digging into information about the setting to find out that, prior to the main conflict (which, as of the main character’s release from prison in the beginning of the first game, has already been going for some 14 years), there has been an older war on for some 80 or so years.  This war, on the fictional Earth-like world of Sera, is roughly equivalent to what might have happened if our own Cold War had gone hot, minus the nuclear weapons.  Around the time this conflict (called the Pendulum Wars) was winding down, a new enemy appeared.  Referred to as the Locust (and more often, derogatorily, as “grubs” due to their pale skin and preference for subterranean living), they seem bent on the destruction of humankind for immediately apparent reason.  Despite their burly, muscular appearance and fondness for savagery, they are more intelligent than they appear, and have the added advantage of their movements being almost impossible to track.

The Pendulum Wars were already well on their way to turning the world into the bombed-out, ash-choked ruin it appears to be in the first game in the series.  The Locust really just took the first steps toward finishing the job.  Between the drain on resources, the destruction of infrastructure, and the devastation of the environment (shockingly, dropping an entire city into the ocean has consequences), the survivors of the human-Locust conflict are going to have a battle for mere survival on their hands when (if) the dust settles.  And it becomes apparent, as you go through the series, that the Locust aren’t just mindless aggressors.  Their emergence, and their war on humanity, are happening not because they simply have it in for humans (though they wouldn’t be entirely unjustified if that was all it was), but because they’re on the run from something else that also lives underground, and they don’t think they can win against it.

It gets to a point where, contemplating victory, Marcus Fenix asks (not just rhetorically), what kind of victory is even possible?  The world – the idea of civilization – is already done for.  What’s left, in the end?

*             *             *

Mentally, I tend to wind up comparing Gears of War to Halo.  There are just enough surface similarities that it almost seems like a valid comparison.  But there are major differences, too, and one of the greatest is in tone.  The difference in tone between Halo and Gears of War is about the same difference in tone between high fantasy and low fantasy, between Lord of the Rings and, say, Robert E. Howard’s stories about Conan of Cimmeria and Kull of Atlantis. 

Of course, in itself, that’s a frustrating comparison to make, because the qualities that define each are largely similar, but set apart by their context.  Like the difference between erotica and pornography, it’s tempting to simply say “I know it when I see it” and leave it at that.  But it isn’t a very helpful description for the reader.

If pressed, I’d probably say that high fantasy is best defined by its inspiration, which seems often to come from myth and legend, and its overall tone, which tends toward the optimistic and hopeful, however grim, and it reflects who we believe (or hope) we are.  Low fantasy, meanwhile, tends to get its inspiration from history, and tends to be grittier and more cynical, a reflection of who we fear we really are.

But still, gritty and cynical, there is room for hope.  It just helps to remember that hope is not always a light and happy thing.  It can be grim, and desperate, and shot through with fear.  As much as it can be uplifting, it can be a burden as well, a weight as much as a motivation.  Hope can be a sort of duty. 

I often find that this kind of hope is the more realistic kind, in that it allows for a more balanced view of the world.  It’s the one I often ascribe to, and I think that, aside from its solid mechanics, its great graphics (because, if I haven’t mentioned it yet, all of these games look fantastic, even the first one), and its surprisingly interesting characters. 


It has a view of hope that resonates with me. 

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