The Eternal Cycle of Death, Resurrection and Frustration

I think I've just found my new time-sink: Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer

I have a sort of soft spot for dungeon-crawlers like this, games more properly known as Rogue-likes. This soft spot is one of the reasons I played Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II for as long as I did, the reason why I keep coming back to Nightmare of Druaga no matter how intent on punishing me it seems to be, and the reason I bought Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja about a year and a half ago.

What makes a Rogue-like work is a matter for some debate, but the basic concept seems to revolve around the player controlling a single extremely customizable character through a series of ever more difficult randomly generated dungeons. The gameplay is generally turn-based (but not always), which gives the player time to think about what he should do next in tight spots.

And there will be tight spots. Count on it.

Still, Shiren the Wanderer is a little bit different from any of the others I've played before. As with most Rogue-likes, I die a lot. And, also true for most Rogue-likes, death means a total loss of your inventory, money and equipment. Yet, Shiren goes one step further, and strips you of all your experience upon dying also.

It's at this point that most RPG enthusiasts walk away in disgust. What's the point of playing if, in a game where death is easy to come by, every demise reduces the player's avatar to his beginning state?

But that's really the game's point, which the frequent resetting of inventory and experience levels tries hard to drive home: You don't make progress by making Shiren a stronger character. You make progress by becoming a better player. In a sense, you are the one "leveling up." Your understanding of the game grows, and you begin to see the possibilities and options available to you for every situation.

The other Rogue-likes I mentioned are somewhat more forgiving. Dying in Nightmare of Druaga or Izuna wipes out your inventory... except for weapons you've specifically imbued with the power to resist that loss. And in addition to not taking away your experience levels upon dying, Nightmare of Druaga gives you a guaranteed escape hatch so that you can exit the dungeon at any time if things get too rough. And dying in Phantasy Star Online... Well, it isn't even really a penalty, just kind of an annoyance. The only thing you lose is money. All of these games hold your hand.

Cruelty toward the player is not what seperates Shiren the Wanderer from the other Rogue-likes I mentioned. Yes, it's considerably more difficult, but the difficulty is only a part of it. You are certainly more vulnerable, but that vulnerability is the trade-off for the level of versatility you as the player command.

Here are some examples:

Killing a monster with the appropriate items yields monster meat. Eating monster meat turns you into the kind of monster you got the meat from, granting you all of its abilities. While this sounds like an excellent way to temporarily take on the strengths of some of the tougher monsters, you can work the system both ways. If you have the meat of a low-level monster - a Mamel or a Chintala, for instance - you can throw it at another monster. This turns the monster into whatever kind of of enemy the meat came from. So the big, intimidating Popster Tank that spelled certain annihiliation a moment ago gets reduced to a pathetic little Mamel that can only do a single point of damage to you if it hits.

Or you can use a Jar of Hiding. There are many kinds of jars in the game, with many different uses. This one has two. On the one hand, you could jump inside the jar to hide from roving monsters for a while, and hope that by the time it spat you back out, the coast would be clear. Or you could throw it at a monster, trapping it for a number of turns and allowing you to pass by unmolested.

Or...

I think you can get the point. And really, I'm only scratching the surface. The game offers a near-endless variety of ways to tackle the problems it presents you, and encourages you to be clever. Most Rogue-likes are content to let you attack things endlessly, maybe inflict an occasional status effect. Shiren the Wanderer wants you to think outside the box, and rewards you for it.

I might talk about the story, but that will only take a single sentence. Ready? Here we go: A ronin named Shiren decides to set out to find the Golden Condor in the lost city of El Dorado, which lies atop Table Mountain.

That's it. You might ask yourself what the fabled City of Gold is doing in Japan, but really, what's the point? We're playing a Rogue-like, here. The story is, in most cases, simply an excuse for why things are happening. It's there to give some reason for the endless smiting so many mosters will receive at your hands. The goal exists simply so that you can say, upon reaching it, that you've beaten the game. You can feel finished, if you like, although personally, the prospect of unlockable dungeons has me thinking I'll be playing this well after I've beaten the "main" section of the game.

Shiren the Wanderer is a game where learning how to play and learning how to win are two very separate tasks, and that's what makes it so interesting to me.

Sure, you'll die a lot on the way to figuring out how to handle all the scenarios the game can present to you, and you'll lose more good equipment than you care to think about. But in the end you can't ever really get too pissed off about it, because you are the one who screwed up.

It's all your fault, really.

Journey from the Depths

You'll have to forgive me for the style of this entry. I was reading a lot of Action Button Dot Net before I wrote this review, and while I didn't take anything from their article for this write-up, I was influenced by their hyperbolic style, probably more than was strictly healthy. Any influence at all is probably more than is strictly healthy, but that's an argument for another day.

Now then...

Properly speaking, this is Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. The numeral was removed from the American version of the game, probably so as not to scare off newcomers who might have wondered if they needed to be well-versed in the particulars of the preceeding four to properly enjoy this one.

They didn't.

Dragon Quarter is related to the previous games by the most tenuous of threads. It's an example of Capcom moving in a completely different direction. This isn't just innovation or improvement. It's the reinvention of the franchise. It's as if they tried to find out how much they could change and still get away with it. Take the core concepts - Ryu, Nina, powerful dragon transformations - and throw out the rest. All of it.

What's kept has been changed. Instead of Ryu, Nina is the silent one. And the transformation into a dragon, relatively penalty-free before, is now dangerous, leading relentlessly to the erosion of both Ryu's sanity and his soul. This is perhaps to offset the stupdendous power the transformation offers.

The little that remains is, really, the only thing the previous games had in common, aside from plot continuity. And most of that sounds like it was lost in translation - literally - by localizers for whom "maintaining internal consistency" ranked dead last on their list of priorities.

It would be interesting to speculate why Capcom did what they did with the franchise, but I don't really know anything about that decision, and honestly, I don't really care. What I care about is that somehow, in the process of breaking all the established rules and conventions which dictate what a Breath of Fire game is all about, they made the best Breath of Fire game I've ever played, maybe my favorite RPG ever.

Considering the corporate structure of the video game industry these days, it's hard for me to imagine how a company like Capcom can make a game I enjoy as much as Dragon Quarter, except maybe by accident.

The story of the game is Spartan, a little bit linear, but more layered than anything. It's not quite the epic romp-and-tromp through generic fantasy landscapes that series fans are used to. It goes something like this:

In the distant past, mankind created dragons as biological weapons. These powerful creatures quickly rampaged out of control, ravaging the landscape and rendering the world uninhabitable. The surviving remnant of mankind dug deep beneath the earth to eke out a living in a subterranean society. This society is ruled by a council of Regents, and everyone in it is given a number, called a D-ratio, which determines their status and position relative to everyone else.

The main character, Ryu 1/8,192, is a Ranger. Essentially, this means he is the government's muscle, taking on a wide variety of dangerous or otherwise unpleasant tasks. He's a low-ranking grunt, and because his D-ratio is so low, this is as high as he is likely to rise in the world. His partner, Bosch 1/64, is also a Ranger. However, in Bosch's case, this is only a temporary position. With his D-ratio, he could potentially be a Regent himself one day. His tenure as a Ranger is just a small, early step on his road to greatness. He treats Ryu relatively well, if a bit condescendingly, probably because he doesn't feel at all threatened by his low-D partner.

The pair are assigned to guard a cargo train heading for the BioCorp labs. Unfortunately, the normal transportation is currently down, so they have to hoof it.

Along the way, they run across the rotting corpse of a giant dragon spiked to a wall. Ryu experiences a brief mental fugue, wherein it seems that the dragon is speaking directly to his mind to tell him that he has been chosen for...something. It's not very clear to him at first. He brushes it off, and continues on his not-so-merry way with Bosch.

They make the train just in time, but it seems like they're both having a bad day, because there's an agent from the rebel organization Trinity who uses a well-placed rocket to destroy the tracks, derailing the train and sending it - Ryu included - to the bottom of a chasm. From there, he runs across the winged child Nina, who is incapable of speaking, and decides for the time being that he should look after her. Later, he is ambushed by Lin, the Trinity agent who destroyed the train, who is after Nina on behalf of Trinity. Her motives (and Trinity's) are unclear. Is this a kidnapping or a rescue? Does Lin even know? Distrustful, Ryu determines to protect Nina. This single decision puts him on a collision-course with fate, as he decides that he must attempt a task no one before him has successfully managed.

He must, despite phenomenal resistance, get out of this subterranean dystopia, and take Nina with him.

If the goal of most console role-playing games is to allow the player to escape for several hours into a fantasy world, then Dragon Quarter is an ironic game. Its main theme - and the goal of its characters - can be boiled down into a single word: Escape.

Story aside, arguments about Dragon Quarter as a game almost inevitably devolve into semantics. Is it sparse or streamlined? Lacking in features, or daringly minimalist? The answer - there is a right one and a wrong one, I think - is that the game is streamlined and minimalist. It is lean.

You could whine, endlessly, about the lack of optional nonsense. There are no side quests to complete, no hidden characters to recruit, no secret gizmos or special doodads to be acquired. There is the fairies' ant colony to manage, but that is completely - completely - peripheral. You can't farm enemies for experience (except by "breaking" the experience system), and you can't grind for items.

Which is just as well. All of this crap is no more than baggage at best, a hindrance at worst, and it misses the point of the game. From the standpoint of the story, you shouldn't want to explore. The world is depressing and oppressive. Your goal is to get out. To do that, you have to go up. And up. And up. The game's world, with its dull colors, cramped corridors and refuse-filled corners, is not made for exploration. It's a horrible place, filled with lean and awkward-looking people. You would pity its inhabitants, if they were real, because the only reason anyone is there is because, so far as any of them are aware, there is no choice.

While I mentioned Chrono Trigger's brevity some little while ago, I should point out that it has nothing on Dragon Quarter, which can be beaten in ten hours or less, once you know what you're doing. It accomplishes this brevity in a couple of different ways.

One of them is to simply strip out every single thing that is unnecessary. Everything, and I don't just mean the side-quests most RPGs are content to offer.

Overworld? Forget it. You're trying to go up to the overworld.

Towns? There are maybe five or six, and are basically just places to buy things. The "shops" are three Shop Girls, who seem to know where you plan to be and, somehow, arrive there before you. Other than that, towns are basically just breathing space, a place to relax between the stretch of dungeon you just fought your way out of and the one you are (with some trepidation) preparing to enter. The game is one big, linear dungeon, although in a sense, it's wrong to even use that word. The world is just that hazardous.

One of the other nice things about Dragon Quarter - there are many - is its lack of pretension. There's never a point where you find your characters slinging popular philosophy at each other, none of the hope-versus-ultimate-nihilism conflict that a lot of other RPGs seem to embrace. There's little if any detectable grandstanding between opponents; the characters do not act as if they are playing for the camera, or for the audience, or for anyone at all. They act like people, and not the superhuman sort who normally populate RPG parties, whose idealism or willpower or "inner strength" can conquer all. When Ryu asks his opponents why they can't just let him go, it's real because he means it. He's been fighting constantly against physical opponents, struggling internally all the while against an entity that threatens to consume his very soul, and he is bone-achingly tired. There's no reason why anyone should want to stop him; he sees no point in it, and wonders (quite logically) if it wouldn't be easier for his enemies to just let him go on his merry way. It's not as if his wanting to reach the surface, all by itself, is hurting anyone, intentionally or otherwise.

The cutscenes, in this context, are not good because they're elaborate setpieces. They're good because they help to explain the development and the background of the characters. They help illustrate the hows and whys of what is happening.

And they do it quickly. Outside of the final cinema, and maybe the opening cutscene, I can't think of a single one that's more than a minute or two long. So they never feel intrusive, never really interrupt the experience or break up the flow.

The dark and oppressive atmosphere of Dragon Quarter is rare for an RPG. It's more along the lines of a survival horror game (a genre which, coincidentally, Capcom is often mistaken for inventing, and which they certainly pioneered). But the atmosphere is not esablished and sustained by aesthetics alone. The gameplay gets in on the player-oppressing action just as well.

Your party is pretty fragile, as RPG parties go. Strategic combat is not simply emphasized or encouraged. It is required. There are no true "fodder" enemies, as there are in so many Final Fantasies. You can't get away with attacking mindlessly until your enemies are dead, because the regular enemies you run up against are often quite capable of giving just as good as they get. Carelessness in combat will get you speedily mauled. You are required to determine and exploit elemental weaknesses, limit the scope of your encounters and use the environment to your advantage.

And the strategy here is more organic than in games like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea. Those games offer you the opportunity to bypass any need for strategy through grinding levels or finding the right pieces of equipment so that your party becomes a troop of unstoppable god-men, annihilating everything. There's a sort of gleeful enjoyment to be taken from that style of play, I suppose; the knowledge that you can demolish the opposition with relative security. So long as you remain patient enough to spend a few hours in random encounters occasionally, "being stronger" is the only tactic you need.

Dragon Quarter doesn't allow for such measures. Strength alone isn't strategy enough to win, mostly because it's more or less impossible to just muscle your way through. Ryu is capable of it in his dragon form, but there is a trade-off.

As he draws on the power of the dragon, Odjn, that has chosen him, its grip on his soul grows tighter. This is shown by the D-counter in the upper right corner of the screen. It starts at 00.00%, and increases gradually throughout the game. Every couple dozen steps, it will increase by .02%. Late in the game, that increase only requires about ten steps. Transforming and using the various powers of the dragon form causes the gauge to jump with terrifying speed.

There is no way to bring the D-counter down, ever. It simply sits up there at the top of the screen, slowly rising, even if you never use it at all, reminding you that every use brings you that much closer to prematurely ending the game. It rather effectively negates the satisfaction its raw power would otherwise inspire. You look at the counter and think, "This is what 'inevitability' means."

But while Dragon Quarter is always difficult, it's never quite unfair. Its Scenario Overlay (SOL) System allows you to restart the game at any time, while still carrying over your Party XP (assignable experience points), and equipment, allowing you to start the game with a minor edge which may make it easier to get the hang of things the next time around. You're offered the same option upon dying, with the alternative of doing a SOL Restore, which does the same basic thing as a SOL Restart, sending you back to your last hard save instead of the beginning of the game. And as you progress, you unlock new cutscenes which can be viewed the next time you start from the beginning.

Maybe it's easiest to think of the SOL System as a kind of modified New Game Plus.

And yet, for all that this game does right, it isn't likely to see any sequels.

RPG fans are just about the most static bunch of gamers in the world. They have definite ideas about what makes a franchise, and they get bent out of shape when someone mucks around with the formula. We are talking about people who are perfectly content to play the same thing over and over again in different iterations. Aside from various technical improvements, they deplore any change made to their beloved franchises, and react violently to it. Part of the reason I'm so eager to trumpet the virtues of Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is because it is a genuinely excellent game, but so many people pass it up because it's vastly different not only from other, more "traditional" RPGs, but from everything else in its franchise. Most people seem to want to write it off as some sort of bizarre, failed experiment. Most of the people I know are RPG players, and out of all of us, I am one of two who owns a copy. And I practically had to bully the other guy into buying his copy.

As has been covered elsewhere, there is something wrong with the state of gaming today. Part of it, yes, is game directors' frustrated movie-making ambitions coming to the fore. That's part of the problem with games like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. The other part of the problem is the people who only want the same thing over and over again, and who take deep and personal offense to the idea of change and experimentation. If games like Metal Gear Solid 4, Final Fantasy XIII - really, most or all of the big franchises - are part of what is wrong with gaming, Dragon Quarter is part of what's right. If those others are the problem, then Dragon Quarter is the solution. Lean, streamlined, filled with purpose, deeply challenging yet equally rewarding. And that reward does not come in the form of some gigantic cinema scene at the end, a prize for the willingness to spend hours meandering the globe, talking to NPCs and selecting "Attack" countless times in countless battles. The reward comes in the form of a strong and constant sense of accomplishment, because every step forward, every victory in battle, is an achievement that you as the player have earned.

The Road to Valhalla Is Paved with Tragic Melodrama

After several failures trying to track down a lone Resistance member in eastern Europe in Metal Gear Solid 4, it became clear that I needed something else to do for a while. Continuing the attempt in my frustrated state of mind was only going to result in some kind of violence. Since I was sick at the time, and not exactly energetic, I picked up my PSP, loaded up my copy of Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, and decided to give it another shot.

I had bought the game back in the summer of 2006, after some wild urge had me searching (fruitlessly) for the PS1 version earlier that year. I'd taken a stab at it then, been confused by what I had to do, and set it aside. I recalled hearing nothing but good things about the game, and I had the idea that its outstanding reputation wasn't solely a factor of its Panzer Dragoon Saga-like rarity.

Now, starting it over, I undertand exactly what my problem was the first time around.

I didn't read the manual.

I blame games like Final Fantasy VIII, which actually punish you for reading the manual by presenting you with long, intensely boring and unskippable tutorials covering all the game's various systems. After a while, you get so used to having your hand held that you get thrown for a loop whenever the game expects you to take responsibility for learning how to play it.

I still haven't read the manual. I've skimmed it, but I haven't read it. What I did this time that I didn't do last time was grit my teeth, square my shoulders and experiment with things until the game began to make sense to me. Now that it does, and I've made some progress, I feel like I may be able to talk about it.

Valkyrie Profile is based on Norse mythology. Well, no, that's not quite right. It's less "based on" and more "inspired by" the myths. In that sense, it reminds me of Kid Icarus nearly fifteen years before it, "based on" Greek mythology. It takes names and ideas and runs with them. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I'm saying that if you're interested in Norse mythology, you shouldn't be depending on Valkyrie Profile for an accurate depiction of it.

You play the role of Lenneth, a Valkyrie in the service of Odin, king of the Aesir of Asgard, most powerful of all the gods. He has received word that Ragnarok is soon to begin, and decides to send Lenneth to Midgard, the human realm, in order to gather the spirits of fallen heroes, train them, and send them to Valhalla to fight in the coming war as Einherjar.

As of the early stages, the game mostly breaks down into two parts. The first part consists of using Lenneth's telepathic abilities to detect recently fallen warriors and, upon seeking them out, the the player is subjected to a series of scenes depicting how the newly discovered warrior met his fate. These are (at least so far) completely non-interactive, and give the characters a sense of identity and personality they would otherwise lack. Once Lenneth has a new Einherjar under her command, the character can be put in the active party for the other part of the game: dungeon crawling.

Normally, this would be the point where I put down the game. I'm not a big fan of the grind at all, and when it doesn't bore me to tears, it frustrates the hell out of me. One of the reasons I haven't played many RPGs in the last few years is because I've gotten sick and tired of standard, turn-based combat in the genre. There's a reason I don't read manuals for RPGs anymore, and hand-holding tutorials are only a part of it. These days, the only RPGs I can really get into are the ones like Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter that shake up the formula so much that the game is practically unrecognizable as any kind of "normal" RPG.

Valkyrie Profile shakes up the formula. This is because it was created by Tri-Ace, and those people derive some sort of deep and perverse enjoyment from being deliberately different. Thank God.

The dungeons are side-scrolling action stages, involving a lot of running and jumping and other quick maneuvers to navigate through their passages. Monster encounters are represented by creatures roaming through the dungeon; contact with them initiates a battle.

Battles are another area where Valkyrie Profile shines. Rather than menu-diving, each character in the party is assigned to one of the face buttons. Pressing one of the buttons executes an attack from the assigned character. But this takes more finesse and strategy than you might think. Combos can be performed, depending on the number of attacks a character has available, and stringing together enough hits will allow special high-damage attacks. Correctly performing combos and exploiting weaknesses can allow even some bosses to be toppled in just a couple of rounds.

Because of the streamlined combat interface, battles tend to be both quick and fun. This is helped by the graphical effects used in battle, particularly for special attacks, which are impressive when you consider the limitations of the PS1 hardware the game was originally programmed for.

In fact, the graphics are nice overall, with well-detailed two-dimensional sprites overlaid on equally detailed backgrounds. The PSP also features some fairly impressive CGI cutscenes, replacing the animated cutscenes of the original version.

Unfortunately, the sound is a mixed bag. The music is exceptionally good, don't get me wrong. I have the soundtrack, and I love it. And the sound effects are all appropriate. But the voices...

Some of the characters are at least well-cast. Lenneth Valkyrie is one of those. Her voice fits pretty much exactly what I had imagined, based on her appearance and personality. But none of the voice actors act particularly well. The best that can be said of any of the performances I've heard so far is that they feel sort of stiff and awkward. You can get a sense of the feeling most of the actors are trying for but they can't...quite...reach it.

Mechanically speaking, there are a number of character customization options available to you in order to strengthen your characters. Odin requires heroes of some standing, it turns out, and most of the Einherjar you recruit aren't fit to be sent along to Valhalla the minute you get them. In addition to leveling up the normal way, you also need to modify their personal traits to boost their Hero Status. There are also a number of techniques you can teach to characters, such as counter-attacking and light healing.

Incidentally, this was the part of Valkyrie Profile that had me scratching my head for a little while. None of the character development options are ever really explained in-game, though it does take the time to show you a few of the basics (finding Einherjar and fighting; that's about it). This is what I had to experiment with, or look up in the manual.

A lot of RPGs, I get tired of after a while. Walking around killing monsters - really, the meat of the game, you know? - starts to bore me. Combat stops being an experience to enjoy, and starts being a thing I have to tolerate in order to advance the plot. And when you stop to realize that a lot of RPG plots really aren't terribly original or interesting, well, I'm sure you can see where this complaint is headed.

Valkyrie Profile, by its very nature, avoids that. Because you are constantly in the process of recruiting, building and sending off characters, you never have time to really get into any sort of "groove" with your combat. You are always tweaking your characters, looking for the right equipment, the right techniques, the right combination of moves to allow maximum damage output. Right about the time you get everything figured out and have mastered the current party, someone new comes along, and someone old gets rotated out, maybe sent up to Valhalla, and you get to do it all over again. You have just enough time to really enjoy the results of your work before everything changes.

You are always on your toes.

The only constant in your party is Lenneth, the Valkyrie herself, watching all of these mortal heroes, the tragic victims of a variety of circumstances - honor and loyalty, sacrifice, misplaced trust and the resultant betrayal - seemingly unmoved by the death that surrounds her. Yet she, too, has questions about her past. She was not always a Valkyrie, a blindly loyal servant of Odin and his Aesir. She once had a life, a mortal life, with all its attendant dreams and hopes for the future. She doesn't remember it, but it teases at the back of her mind, maddeningly vague.

Sadly, beyond that, I don't really know much about the story. I'm only two chapters in, and reading spoiler-free plot synopses gives me the impression that most of the really interesting things won't be happening for a while yet. And I'm okay with that, because the game is still interesting enough even as it currently stands. Recruiting the Einherjar involves Lenneth being present at the moment one of them dies, and observing the circumstances surrounding their death. It doesn't do much for the linear progression of the story, but it does help flesh out the world the story takes place in, giving you a sense of how things stand and giving you a view into the relationships between different countries and peoples.

In that sense, it reminded me somewhat of the different quests in Phantasy Star Online, which helped give you a better sense of what was going on in the world around you (Both on Ragol and on Pioneer 2) without actually advancing the plot (such as it was).

Are there things I could complain about? Sure, but they're limited, and mainly a result of the game being ported to the PSP. The loading times can be a pain in the ass occasionally, and the music sounds sort of tinny on account of the system's speakers. And equipment management is sort of a hassle, since you can't touch the equipment of characters who aren't in the party. But these are all pretty minor things. Sure, I've sat through all of them, griping and grousing, and shaking my fist in the general direction of whoever I feel bears the most personal responsibility at the moment - God, Sony, some random programmers at Tri-Ace in Japan. Somebody. But that's only because I get frustrated easily.

In the end, any serious bitching about the issues I mentioned is ridiculous. Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth is an amazing game, and deserves more praise and attention than it's likely to get.