Lunar: With Uncertain Steps

When the first bright, warm days of May come around, I always get nostalgic for the spring of 1999.  This was when I graduated high school, and when I was confronting the impending dilemma of full adulthood, and a life with no certain structure, meaning or purpose.  School and home had provided all of those things, but I was approaching the point in my life where school was going to be something I tackled purely on my own terms, in my own way (if at all), and home was becoming less of a sanctuary and more a place I wanted to escape if I could.  Still, there are a lot of things to look back and remember fondly.  Since I’ve been playing video games since about the age of four, games are one of them.  Most of the major moments of my life, I can associate with music I was particularly into, movies that especially interested me, books that I was getting absorbed in, and games I was playing.  In this case, the game in question is Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete.

It was long in the coming.

I had pre-ordered it on the recommendation of a friend, who said he’d heard our local game store might not have enough copies to go around when the game came out.  This was instantly compelling.  So I went to the store (it was a Babbage’s then, and it’s a GameStop now), put down the money for the pre-order, marked my calendar for the anticipated late February or early March release date, and waited.   And waited.  And waited.  And waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, as the release date got pushed back a week here, two weeks there, a month on one occasion.  It began to feel as if Working Designs (the company responsible for localizing the game and releasing it in the U.S.) didn’t actually have any projected release date, and were popping dates out at random because they knew they were expected to have one.

Finally, in May (possibly the tail-end of April, but I keep thinking of May), the demo arrived.  This was about a month or two after the full game was supposed to be in our hands.

Demos were different back then.  In this case, it was a disc made available exclusively to pre-order customers, and contained the first few hours of the actual game.  This was pretty generous, even by the standards of the day.  On top of that, you could save your progress in the demo, and load it up once you had the full version of the game.  So that was how I spent the last couple of weeks of high school, in between actual classes, extracurricular activities and work: glued to the TV, slowly working my way through the demo of this game that I had worked myself up over.

It was June or July by the time the game actually came out, and I was there the very first day to pick it up, of course, but some of the fire had died down a little.  The main question—“What kind of role-playing game is this, anyway?”—had been answered.  Most of the fundamental sense of mystery was taken care of at that.

My first actual RPG, of the random-encounter-having, turn-based variety, had been Final Fantasy VII.  I had technically played a couple of RPGs before, but Crystalis eschewed much of the traditional RPG framework, and Swords and Serpents  was, put bluntly, godawful, and I didn’t really play it at all once I determined that.  And I missed the 16-bit generation petty much entirely. 

So Lunar was in some ways a step backward, into the aesthetics and the mechanical framework of games of the previous generation.  Which I suppose is an especially apt way of putting it, considering that’s more or less exactly where Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete belongs.

The game began life as Lunar: The Silver Star, made by GameArts for the ill-fated Sega CD Genesis add-on, and made its way to the U.S. courtesy of Working Designs in 1993.  It was a fairly impressive use of the technology, but GameArts blew it out of the water about a year or so later with the sequel, Lunar: Eternal Blue.  It was apparently enough to make them wish they could have done a better job with the first Lunar, because they remade it and released it as Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete on the Sega Saturn in Japan in 1997, then ported it to the PlayStation, and it’s that version of this remake with which we’re largely concerned. 

The story of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete concerns itself mainly with a young man named Alex.  He stands on the borders of youth, staring across the wide and perilous gulf of adulthood, and in his heart is a single hope, a dream, and he has no idea how to turn it into a reality.  He wants to be a hero, but not just any sort of hero.  He wants with all his heart to be the Dragonmaster.  This is a title, a station, granted to one who is chosen after completing the trials of the four dragons who serve the Goddess Althena.  He is uniquely empowered to act as a champion for the Goddess herself, and fight against all threats to humankind.  This is rather a difficult path to follow, and not less so for there being no directions, no roadmap, no indication of where he should go and what he should do.  And even when he gets the chance to speak to the wise in his world, they mainly shrug and shake their heads.  Go and seek the dragons, they all tell him.  They will determine whether you have what it takes to be a Dragonmaster.

In Alex’s case, destiny turns out not to be so much a thing to be sought as an inevitability bearing down upon him.  But at any rate, his search to fulfill his dream, his ambition, resonated with the feelings I had myself, around that time.  A feeling that there were no paved roads into the future, no clear and certain paths forward into life.  I simply had to go and do whatever it was I had it in my head to do.  The rest would happen, or not, as it would.  In the meantime, stop worrying about how.  Just… do.

There are times when we read something, or see something, or hear something, and it speaks to us in ways that we do not expect.  They tell us what we need to hear, even if we do not realize we need to hear it, even if we do not understand it until many years later. 

What’s interesting about Lunar is its deceptive depth.  On the surface, it looks very rote, very done.  You have the hero, a very earnest young everyman who is mostly defined by his ambitions.  His personality is much more nebulous; we don’t know what he likes, what he dislikes, what makes him angry or sad or happy.  Well, we know one other thing that his life seems to revolve around: the girl Luna.

A young lady of uncertain parentage and unquestionable singing talent, the infant Luna was taken in by Alex’s parents not long after he himself was born.  Somehow, she and Alex managed to overcome the Westermarck Effect in order to have the sort of will-they-won’t-they romantic relationship that drives so many romantic comedy anime.  Except here, it’s actually fairly subdued.  It’s clear that they care about each other romantically, but the fact of this care and attraction runs through the story without ever being brought to the forefront, save once, powerfully.

What really sells it, though, is the earnestness.  There is a certain way of thinking which views anything simple as unworthy.  We tend to revere complexity, mistaking it for sophistication, because simplicity has so little readily apparent value in the eyes of many.  But simplicity does not mean unimaginative, or dull, or stupid, or trite, or at any rate it doesn’t have to.   And the people at GameArts who made Lunar didn’t tell a simple story because they’re just all thumbs in the ideas department; they told a simple story because that was the story that they had in them to tell at that time.  They told it with as much skill and polish as they could manage, and they made it work.  They were serious about it, and they were earnest, and that shows in their characters.  Alex and Luna are strong enough to carry the story, and if you’re looking for more colorful people, well, the game has that, too.  Your regular party includes four other main characters.  You have Kyle, possibly the oldest member of the group (at least he’s of legal drinking age), a lecherous barbarian type who takes very little seriously.  Then you have his girlfriend, Jessica, a priestess in training who much prefers punishing the wicked over quiet contemplation and prayer, and who is both a ferocious melee fighter as well as a healer.  Then there’s the brash, stuck-up, frankly irritating mage apprentice Nash, who displays a bit more depth than he might initially seem capable of, and his object of affection, Mia, who is the quiet and unsure daughter of the headmistress of Lunar’s magic guild.

Interesting how all the main party members break down into romantic pairs.

The game itself is linear almost to a fault.  There are no items of consequence tucked away in out-of-the-way corners of the world, no caches of treasure and rare items or equipment to give you the edge over some looming boss encounter.  The few optional elements are there basically for fun, or for bragging rights.  They alter the game’s difficulty and mechanics not one iota.  Character development happens purely as a matter of course.  There is no choice about which spells or techniques a character will learn.  All of them are either bequeathed by the plot, or else become available once the character reaches a certain experience level.  There’s nothing really to discuss about character builds in that regard.  And in some ways that does hurt the game.  “Replay value” is a term that gets tossed around a lot; having it is a good thing, while lacking it is a bad thing, and tends to hurt review scores.  But RPGs like this are long-form entertainment anyway, like reading a book.  They aren’t something to be played over and over again, to achieve all the multiple means of mastery.  You play it, you move on to something else, and then in time possibly years later, you come back to it fresh.  You remember very little specifically, except that you enjoyed it the first time around.  The vague memory of that enjoyment makes revisiting that world and those characters all the better; it's all suffused with a warm glow of certain affection.

Part of what makes Lunar so refreshing to play today is that despite the simplicity of its characters, they actually seem to be basically real people.  You really can’t make a game like Lunar today.  If you tried it, brand-new, all the characters would be moe, Luna and Jessica would be some kind of horrible tsundere or yandere, and Mia would be every creepy otaku’s favorite due to crippling shyness and submissive tendencies (she also might be twelve).  But Lunar strikes me as the sort of game where none of the characters were created specifically to adhere to a particular “type”, or designed to garner appeal from any specific demographic.  They were created the way they were because that was what the creators had in mind, and that was what the story needed.

The original version of the game, Lunar: The Silver Star for the Sega CD, appears to have been a bit of a diamond in the rough.  Various employees of GameArts have said as much in interviews, and this was one of the reasons for the remake.  They felt they could do better than they had, that perhaps the story deserved a better treatment than they were capable of giving it the first time around.

Much like the Sega CD version, the in-game graphics in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete weren’t setting anybody’s world on fire.  And the music was actually something of a step down in quality.  The Silver Star had employed Redbook audio—basically CD-quality audio—whereas Silver Star Story Complete relied on the game console’s sound chip.  Still, the soundtrack is nice enough, though much of it stays squarely in the background.  In technical terms, though, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete really shines in its cut scenes.

While the Sega CD original featured anime-style artwork in its cut scenes, it was on a very limited basis.  There was very little real animation, as such.  By and large, it seems to have been mostly what I think of as “dynamic stills”, where there is only slight animation (eyes blinking, mouths moving, and the occasional more involved animation), but done with greater detail than was usual.  It still looked nice, is what I’m saying.  Silver Star Story Complete, however, had actual anime cut scenes.  This allowed for much greater dramatic impact and much more theatrical presentation.  It wasn’t uncommon for games to have an animated introductory sequence to get your attention and to serve as a sort of trailer, but it seems (to my memory, at least) to have been fairly common in those days for those intro sequences to be the only such instances of such animation.  Lunar inserted them at various points of the story so as to fully “sell” the important moments.  The in-game graphics were relatively pedestrian and old-school in their design—back when “old-school” barely applied to anything—so the anime cinematics were more than just showing off.  They were integral to the storytelling process, helping the story achieve a greater sense of urgency than a bunch of cutesy, squashed super-deformed sprites could depict convincingly on their own.  And this was at the very beginning of the anime boom in America, which certainly couldn't have hurt sales at all.

*             *             *

For a long time, Lunar was the province of Redmond, California-based localization company Working Designs.  They got their start localizing Japanese games for the TurboGrafx-16, and later became convinced that CD-ROM games were the future.  They went to the Turbo Duo (a CD-ROM add-on for the TurboGrafx-16), and after that went south, they began bringing out games for the Sega CD.  They later went on to localize games for the Sega Saturn, but their relationship with Sega soured, and they cut their ties there.  In retrospect, this was a wise business move for any reason, since the Saturn became one of the worst-performing consoles ever to be released by a serious contender in the console wars.  They then went on to enjoy a period of (for them) unprecedented (and, sadly, unequaled) success and productivity for the Sony PlayStation. 

There were two things that set Working Designs apart from most other companies, discounting their status (fairly rare for the time) as a company who did not make games at all, but localized existing games from Japan.

The first was that they believed that literal translations were inferior to localizations.  They would take the basics of the dialogue and rework it into something that more closely resembled the speech of a native English-speaker.  On many occasions, they threw out the original dialogue entirely, and wrote in its place something that conveyed the same meaning, but made use of American slang and colloquialisms, as opposed to Japanese.  While I am in favor of this practice (or some variety of it), there are those who did (and still do; some grudges die hard) harbor a fiery hatred of Working Designs because of it.  And, in fairness, Working Designs were capable of taking it too far.

The second thing about Working Designs was that they also had some kind of fetish for releasing their games as deluxe packages.  Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete shipped in a box that included a full-color, hardcover manual; a soundtrack sampler CD; a Making-Of CD; and a cloth map—with an oddly pungent odor—not to mention the two discs of game content, for something like seventy or eighty dollars.  This was in an era when PlayStation games came in standard CD jewel cases, with slender black-and-white manuals the size of CD jewel case inserts, which doubled as the cover artwork.  And while this sort of thing is usually offered as some kind of limited edition package these days, Working Designs would hear of no such thing as a division between standard or deluxe editions.  Oh, no.  It was deluxe or nothing.

But back to point number one above, there are things about the Working Designs treatment that I really could have done without. 

There’s a town in the latter half of the game, the gimmick of which is that all of the people in it are all, shall we say, uncomfortably inter-related, and talk like the worst Deliverance-style caricatures of backward Southerners.  I’m comfortably certain this was absent in the Japanese version.  Likewise the sage and inventor Myght, who dislikes people in general and lives by himself in a tower.  In the hands of more reasonable translators and localizers, his dislike of people and his cranky personality would be enough to justify his living apart from his fellow creatures.  But no, for Working Designs, this is not enough.  He must be a horrifically odoriferous old man, and also afflicted with chronic flatulence.  Elsewhere in the game (this may be either shortly before or after we meet Myght; I no longer recall), there is a scene where the characters are required to sculpt something out of clay that has personal meaning for them—I could explain why, but it’s one of those things that only really makes sense at all when you play, so let’s just go with it for now.  Jessica sculpts a copy of a pendant that is important to her.  Kyle says that it looks like an IUD.

I understand that Working Designs was trying to inject humor into the game, and I appreciate the effort.  But so many of the “jokes” fail to be humorous, and come off cringe-worthy instead.  The IUD joke struck me as particularly bad, as out-of-context as it was.  How in God’s name does a barbarian on a medieval-ish fantasy world know what an IUD even is?  Breaking the fourth wall to make unfunny jokes strikes me as a bad idea, but maybe I’m just weird.

Working Designs imploded in 2005.  Possibly one of the earliest signs of this was UbiSoft picking up the rights to an edition of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for the Gameboy Advance.  Maybe Working Designs just didn’t deign to work on handhelds.  Certainly the reviews of this particular version of Lunar have been generally unkind, and as compromised as that version must have been compared to the PlayStation version, I wasn't too enthusiastic to find out anyway.  But even diehard fans were seeing the writing on the wall at this point.  I should know.  I was one of them, kind of.

Happily, for those tired of Working Designs-style nonsense, there is another, newer edition of the game available for the PSP, titled Lunar: Silver Star Harmony.  There appears to have been some drama surrounding its release, courtesy of former Working Designs CEO and current CEO of GaijinWorks Victor Ireland trying to inspire a boycott of the game since his company wasn’t handling it.  He made much of all but one or two of the original voice actors not working on the game, castigating the one or two who "broke ranks" and lent their voices to it.  Considering that most of Ireland's voice cast seemed to consist of friends and neighbors (and some guy who made it onto O-Town), any sense of victory to be gleaned from this is questionable at best.  Thankfully, the lady who lent her singing voice to Luna, Jennifer Stigile, returned for the PSP version. 

And, it must be said, Silver Star Harmony stacks up favorably to previous releases.  It features the same anime cut scenes from Silver Star Story Complete, along with in-game graphics which look shockingly modern (by handheld standards, anyway).  The story has been added to a bit here and there as well, lending some unnecessary but still appreciated background.

*             *             *

Ultimately, it can be difficult to assess the overall quality of a game so mired in my own nostalgia.  That’s the problem with nostalgia generally speaking.  You never know when you’re objectively evaluating something (so far as objectivity is even possible with a work of art or entertainment), or when you’re artificially inflating its value due to positive associations with your own past.  And you're always consumed (at least, if you're me) by the fear that you're actually doing the latter no matter how much you feel like you're doing the former, no matter what anyone tells you.  In the end, I’d like to recommend it to just about anybody.  It’s a good, simple, fun RPG with a lot of charm and heart.

But more than that, it’s the game I remember from when I stood at a strange, uncertain point in my life.  I’d say “at a crossroads,” but that would be inaccurate.  There weren’t even roads, crossed, straight or otherwise, that I could see.  Popular thinking and fiction likes to paint any major juncture in life as a clear-cut, often binary choice: you can do one thing or the other, be one thing or the other.  But that's not always been right.  For me, that's never been right.  There are just myriad choices, and possibilities, all heading off in some vague and often worryingly tangled future-ward direction.  And whenever those choices lie before me, when there’s no clear way forward, no certain path, it’s Lunar that I think of.  And then I remember that there is no certain road ahead, and that doesn’t matter.  It’s often only when we are looking back that we can see whether our way was correct or not, and why.  Sometimes, in the moment of choice, there is no one who can tell you which way is right or wrong.  And in the end what you have to do is just go.  Do. 

Make your own way, however you may.

Long Live the Revolution

I have been contemplating writing this review for a long time.  I even took a shot at it once or twice before now.  Hopefully, this will be the last attempt and the first real success.  I know that it's pretty firmly on the long side, but it sums up most of what I wanted to say on the subject, and what I thought was worth saying.  I find it’s hard to write about especially complex things, even when you love them.  Sometimes the love is what makes it difficult.

*             *             *

A friend of mine in basic training recommended Revolutionary Girl Utena to me.  This would have been back in late 2000, or else very, very early in 2001.  If you know anything about Utena, or about basic training, or both, you can well imagine that this would be the last place you might normally expect someone to recommend something like Utena to you.  But he offered to loan me his tapes of the series once we both had permanent duty stations, if we could keep in touch.  I didn’t manage to keep in touch, because as it turns out I’m lousy at that kind of thing, and while I regret it, it’s probably just as well for him in one sense.  It would have been hell getting those tapes back from me once I’d gotten good and hooked.

I had seen the Utena movie at a convention, back when it was big in the fansub community (this was back when fansubs were on VHS), and while I had loved the absolute poetry of its artwork, the way it dealt with themes as deep and dark as the center of the heart, I had very little idea what much of it had actually meant.  I knew there was a TV series that this movie was somehow connected to, and had heard of it before, but further information eluded me.

Still, I had my own interest, a keen fascination, and a solid, reliable recommendation to motivate me.  So when I saw the first 13 episodes — the first arc of the story — on DVD at Otakon in 2001, I didn’t hesitate to buy them.  I bought a lot of things at that Otakon, but that first story arc of Utena was by far the most memorable.

Among other things, Utena marked my first real foray into the realm of shoujo anime.  I had explored that territory before, in an extremely limited way.  I was a fan of CLAMP, having read what existed of Magic Knight Rayearth and X at that time, but those examples hardly count.  CLAMP has often straddled the line between shoujo and shounen (this was particularly evident with the dark and moody X), and they have always stood apart from what I often think of as “typical” (probably “stereotypical” would be more accurate) shoujo fare.  And it doesn’t get much more shoujo than Revolutionary Girl Utena.  My preference in anime has traditionally been for the weird and the dark and the thoughtful.  It’s why I gravitated toward Akira, and Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion at the time, and why I am enthralled by anime like Wolf’s Rain and Kara no Kyoukai and Puella Magi Madoka Magica today.  So on the surface of things, Revolutionary Girl Utena looked like it would be a major departure, being all pink and fanciful and fairy-tale wonderful.

Imagine my surprise.

*             *             *

For a while there, I was a sort of Revolutionary Girl Utena evangelist.  Several years ago, I was attending an anime club at a college where, oddly enough, I had never, ever been a student.  I petitioned the club president to allow viewing sessions after normal club hours, where a niche group of us could watch things that might not have a very broad appeal without any risk of alienating the club members who were there mainly because they liked Naruto and Bleach.  This was a sort of compromise we had reached.  She wanted to hijack the club’s viewing schedule to watch Utena, because she had never seen it but had a burning desire to do so, and I wasn’t willing to loan her the DVDs (you will have to trust that my selfishness was the wiser course in this situation).  I still wanted there to be a club to go to on Friday nights, and I discovered that we still technically were allowed to use the clubroom for two hours after club normally ended.  The arrangement practically made itself.

After Utena viewing sessions, we would usually head over to a nearby Steak ‘n Shake to talk about the series, or about whatever came to mind.  It was through this group that I met one of my best friends.  There’s probably a moral in there somewhere, but I’m not going after it.

*             *             *

So…  About Revolutionary Girl Utena.

There are some media — anime, books, films, TV shows, video games, works of art — which reward subsequent viewing, and Revolutionary Girl Utena is one of these.  There are some that practically require multiple viewing, and Utena is one of these, as well.

It’s difficult to describe.  It is impossible to summarize in any short form (and it would be cumbersome to the point of uselessness do so in any long form), and it is probably equally impossible to provide even a short synopsis.  Still, because I am stubborn, or stupid, or something, I will try.

Utena Tenjou is a girl just entering high school, and she attends the private and very prestigious Otori Academy.  Otori Academy is practically a world unto itself; very, very little occurs off-campus. 

Utena is, perhaps, not a normal girl.  She wears a boy’s school uniform, and on her left ring finger, she wears a rose signet ring.  When asked, she says simply that her Prince gave it to her.  But unlike so many of the young girls around her, Utena is not the sort to wait for her Prince Charming.  She wants to meet him again, of course.  Whoever he is, it’s evident even from early on that he was responsible for saving her from a very personal sort of certain doom.  But to Utena, he is also an inspiration.  She has decided that she will be a Prince like him, that she will live nobly, courageously, heroically.

One day, the captain of the kendo team, Kyoichi Saionji, carelessly breaks her best friend’s heart.  He compounds this sin by making a public joke of it.  Utena challenges him to a duel.  Being the sort of domineering, sneeringly prideful person he is, Saionji would normally ignore this challenge.  But he sees her ring.  Strangely enough, he wears one just like it — it happens to match the school’s emblem, and every member of the Student Council wears a ring just like it.  Saionji changes his mind, and tells Utena that he will meet her in the forest behind the school after classes are finished.  He is dismissive of her concerns that the forest is off limits, as though those who wear the Rose Seal are not bound by the same rules as others.

What she finds when she goes there is a staircase leading up to a dueling arena in the sky, above which, impossibly, is suspended an upside-down castle with its foundation seemingly in the clouds.  It is in this arena that the Duelists — those who wear the Rose Seal — meet and duel, in the hope that if they can become a champion, they will be granted the power to revolutionize the world.  This has been promised to them by an individual known only as The End of the World.  To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this person is never met, never seen, never heard; he is known only through letters, which instruct the Duelists on when they will go to the arena.

Utena presents a problem, though, in her very presence.  She has received no letters, and has no idea about The End of the World, or about the power to revolutionize the world for which the Duelists all strive.  Yet she clearly operates by End of the World’s mandate, since she has the Rose Seal, and no one can enter the arena without one.

And so Utena finds herself drawn into something that is both strange and dark and wonderful, by turns and all at once.

At its most basic, Revolutionary Girl Utena is a metaphor, an allegory.  For what, I will leave it to you to determine.  Half of the reward for watching is the discovery of its meaning. 

The series sets up a sort of ritual, early on, which helps bolster its sense of meaning and imparts an air of mysticism.  A more superficial analysis would dismiss this as formula, but no.  Ritual really is it.  There is a sense of heavy, grave purpose behind the repeated actions, a sense of significance.  Revolutionary Girl Utena is practically turgid with meaning.  These things are done because they impart a sense of importance, of weight, to the proceedings.  They are like the parts of a Catholic Mass. 

The strength of a ritual lies in its sameness, its repetition.  But it also serves to set a standard.  So when things change, the impact is more keenly felt.  So when the established ritual changes, you feel not only interest, but a vague sense of alarm.  Something upsets the natural order, turns the world a bit sideways, and the change signifies insecurity.  Because that is the other thing ritual accomplishes.  The motions, repeated often enough, seem almost meaningless.  Their constant and reliable form becomes a comfort, freeing you to ponder the deeper mysteries toward which they gesture.  The change to this established order, the upheaval, signifies danger — to life, to mind, to the very sense and essence of one’s self.

The word “apocalypse” pops up quite frequently throughout Utena.  It’s right there in the song that plays each time Utena ascends to the arena: “Absolute Destiny: Apocalypse”.  And there is definitely the feeling of a certain and inevitable doom as the series winds toward its climax. 

“Apocalypse” is a very apt word for the end of Utena, both of the series and the movie.  We all know the common meaning, of course.  Catastrophe, disaster, widespread (particularly on a global scale) destruction.  Doomsday, essentially.  But the word has an older meaning, and that is “revelation”.  That was, in fact, its original meaning, before the only thing it got associated with was the disaster hinted at in the Book of Revelations.  That’s linguistic drift for you.  But back to the point: “apocalypse” is the word to describe Utena, in both the modern and in the much older definitions.  For at the heart of Revolutionary Girl Utena is a revelation, and it may very well destroy worlds, in a real and personal sense.

*             *             *

In some ways, Utena has all the hallmarks of its era.  The animation is minimal, which has typically been characteristic of shoujo anime for as long as I can remember, and some of it does get reused or retraced.  This isn’t the crime it might normally be.  The focus of shoujo is usually set on the relationships between characters, and you don’t need a lot of fancy animation techniques for that.  And while a more cynical person would be tempted to take all the things I said about ritual up above and use it as evidence of something much more mundane at work — budget constraints, perhaps — I tend to think that if it wasn’t a deliberate stylistic choice, then it was either a happy coincidence, or else one of those situations where the limitations of a production, instead of hampering it, help to inspire it. 

While on one level, it does occur to me that the characters in Utena don’t usually behave in the way normal people do – people don’t normally challenge each other to duels — their behavior is to some extent stylized.  The actions can’t be subtle and nuanced, because they would either be possibly misunderstood, or else never be noticed.  Like a stage actor, the actions must be great instead, so we can see and completely understand the meaning.

But if the words and actions are grandiose, the characters still retain the subtlety of normal people.  If their words and actions are at times grandiose to the point of improbability, their feelings, with all the layers of meaning and subtlety, are absolutely real.  And that is part of the mastery of Utena, that the essential feelings, thoughts and ideas come through clearly despite the limitations, and because the people making this thing used the limitations smartly when and where they could.

The story itself, as mentioned above, is complex, symbolic, and many-layered.  You can understand it well enough on a single viewing.  But there are things that you see differently after you’ve seen the series through once.  There are things that were mysterious before that now have clear meaning.  There are subtle bits of foreshadowing here and there that the show just moves right over; you almost have to know what to look for or what’s coming ahead in order to see them.  There’s a particularly neat bit done with a row of photos toward the end of the second story arc that I didn’t notice at all until I was on my third run through the show.  So while you can pick up the essential meaning of the show in one pass, I do think subsequent viewings are best for full appreciation.

*             *             *

I should mention it at some point, so I suppose now is as good a time as any.  I may write about it in more depth some other time, but right now we’re going with the short version, so here goes:

There is a Revolutionary Girl Utena movie.  It tries to cover the same basic themes as the TV series, but in a much different way, and in a heavily altered setting.  The Otori campus looks like something out of an Escher painting.  The themes and relationships between the characters in the movie are more obvious, most likely due to the movie being somewhere under an hour and a half (as opposed to nearly 20 or so for the series), but for those less willing to sit and ponder and ruminate on things, that might actually be a benefit.  The ending to the movie is terrible — I get the metaphor, but I think it’s horribly, clumsily handled, completely out of line with the general tone of the series (and of the movie immediately prior to the ending), and most of the time, I just turn the movie off at a certain point. 

Still, the movie is absolutely, amazingly one hundred-percent drop-dead gorgeous.  It should be running on an endless loop in a gallery somewhere.  (That might be hyperbole.  Possibly).

*             *             *

Now, I want you to understand, in this next section, that I am typically a pro-dub sort of anime fan (please, save your pitchforks and torches for another time).  I’m going to take a moment to talk about the English dub here, because it certainly deserves a mention.

The dub is fucking awful. 

To describe it in more precise terms than that—to find terms precise enough—would exhaust the thesaurus, and I’m not about to do that.  I am neither Stephenie Meyer nor Christopher Paolini; I can’t write with one hand on the keyboard and the other busily searching for synonyms.

It’s difficult to put my finger on the exact nature of the problem with the Utena dub.  It isn’t that it’s poorly acted—it’s not even acted.  Some of the actors recite their lines in the same way that you might read a storybook to a small child, reading things in an overemphasized way and accenting your syllables too hard because you’ve never been to acting school or done any professional acting, so you don’t know any better.  Except nobody here has that excuse.  Other characters’ voices just seem to be a bad fit for their roles, or they’re altering their voices in an attempt to sound different (and failing miserably).

In a note to a friend, I described the English dub of Utena as follows:

“There is no dub.  I know the DVDs all have a dub option, but this is a mistake.  A dub may have been recorded at some point, and it may even have been good, but it was for some reason removed, at the point of manufacture, and therefore before the DVD menu options could be altered to reflect the change.  What exists in its place sounds deceptively like English dubbing, but carries, buried within it, a subtle subliminal command that will, with increased exposure, drive you to claw your own ears out.”

I mean, there are worse dubs out there.  The Fist of the North Star movie has a godawful English dub.  But that movie couldn’t be dubbed any other way.  To dub that movie with serious acting from serious actors who performed like they meant it would have been an absolute disaster.  The ridiculous dubbing of that movie is part of what makes it bearable.

Utena, by contrast, absolutely requires a skillful dub.  I guess that’s my problem, really.  There are all sorts of implications and fine distinctions and a range of subtle emotions that the dialogue needs to carry.  Then here comes the English voice case, stumbling and bumbling and fumbling their way through it, with their heavy overemphasis and breathless whisper-shouts and mismatched voices, turning what ought to be a serious, deep and layered character drama into something more like a fifth-grade school play.

And some of these actors are good!  Crispin Freeman is in this thing, and he’s on my short list of voice actors I’d like to meet in real life.  But he sounds like he was acting through a concussion here.

*             *             *

Finally, I’m going to take a few moments to talk about the various releases that Revolutionary Girl Utena has seen over the years.  There have really just been three.

The first release was on VHS, sometime in the mid-90s, and consisted of the first 13 half-hour episodes, released across four VHS tapes (par for the course at the time), of the whole 39-episode series.  It went no further than that, and for several years, those 13 episodes were all we had to go on in the U.S., unless you wanted to go the fansub route.  And let me tell you, that was an extremely dodgy practice in those days.  It wasn’t as if digital fansubs were even possible at that time, after all.

The story I heard regarding this was that Be-Papas, the company that made Revolutionary Girl Utena in Japan, believed that the U.S. market for their show would be pretty small, and so they charged a fairly small fee to Software Sculptors to license it.  Because Murphy’s Law is the one ruling principle of the universe, Utena actually managed to achieve a fair degree of success.  This is not a bad thing in itself, but of course it was impossible for Be-Papas not to find this out, and that was the problem.  So when Software Sculptors went back to Be-Papas to negotiate the rights for the rest of the series, Be-Papas decided they wanted a bigger slice of that pie.  Software Sculptors was either unwilling or unable to pay Be-Papas’s price.  Of course, one side or the other must have changed their minds at some point, because in the early 2000s, we got the movie, and then started getting the rest of the series.

After the VHS tapes, there was the first DVD release, which basically covered the same ground as the original VHS release.  The DVD release of these first 13 episodes is frankly atrocious.  On the one hand, those episodes, the first story arc of the series, are contained on two DVDs.  Economy is always a plus. 

That about does it for the positivies.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Software Sculptors simply took the VHS tapes and recorded them onto DVD.  The episodes are divided only into halves.  There are no separate chapter divisions for the credits; chapters only go either to the halfway point of the current episode, or to the beginning of the next.  So unless you really, really like “Rinbu Revolution”, you’ll need to manually fast-forward through it.  I know, I know; talk about your First World Problems.  But literally no other anime DVDs I have ever owned worked in this way.  Even back then.

The subtitles are also a wreck.  Dialogue text is a paler yellow than is usual for subtitles, and the borders around the letters are thin enough that the dialogue sometimes gets lost in the background.  It doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen often enough to be notable.  The text for the song lyrics is the more usual style for subtitles, and is in a bolder green text. 

The real problem with these DVD releases, though — the one issue that could excuse the other problems if it wasn’t such a problem itself — is the poor transfer quality.  There’s a kind of jitteriness to the picture which I tend to associate with VHS.  You don’t notice it as much when everything’s in motion, but Utena is the type of show that has lots of long, contemplative stills and slow panning shots.  There’s also a kind of fuzzy, murky quality to everything, and the colors overall seem a bit washed out.  It seems minimal at first, but watching later discs throws it into contrast.

Between the poor transfer quality, the lazy chapter breaks, the sparse menus and the sub-par subtitling effort, I suspect that my comparison of the DVDs’ quality to the VHS is much less of a joke than I’d like.  The DVD release of the first 13 episodes makes only the most basic concessions to the benefits of the DVD format.  Granted, the DVD format itself was a somewhat newfangled thing when the Utena DVDs were first coming out, but the level of “quality” on display here is frankly ridiculous.

The only excuse I can think of for this is that perhaps, with the rumored shaky relationship between Software Sculptors and Be-Papas regarding the equally rumored newer and much-higher price Be-Papas demanded for further episodes, Software Sculptors may not have had access to more high-quality video to copy onto the DVDs.  Perhaps the reason this first DVD release is so bare-bones is because they were trying desperately to scrounge up the cash necessary to get the rest of Utena into the States.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I have, in all seriousness, watched pirated Taiwanese fansubs of anime that have more attractive menus and a bigger suite of features.

Thankfully, from this point forward, the DVD releases get better.  From Episode 14 onward, the video quality is much crisper, the colors are sharper, the chapter selections are in line with what seems to have become the standard for anime on DVD, and the subtitles are respectable.  The English dub is still as awful as it ever was, but what can you do?  At least they’re consistent.

The third and final release is a much more recent one, coming to us through The Right Stuf International and Nozomi, and oh my God, is this ever the sort of thing Utena always deserved.

It’s available in a series of three box sets, split by story arc (more or less).  The first one contains the entire Student Council arc, the second contains the Black Rose arc, and the third contains the Apocalypse arc as well as the movie.  Each one comes with a small booklet which contains background information on the making of the show, and also brief interviews with director Kunihiko Ikuhara.

The video has been completely remastered.  Colors are brighter and bolder, and lines are crisper.  As much as the original Software Sculptors DVDs seemed like a giant leap in quality after Episode 13, these constitute a yet more tremendous leap.  The animation is still pretty sparse, but Utena still has it where it counts, and if you’re looking for a beautifully animated Utena, I mean, the movie is right there.

The sound has also been remastered.  Some of the effects have changed, for the better of course.  The bells that signal the duel sounded like a decent approximation of bells, in the previous additions (if a little tinny), but now they are no longer approximations; they are honest-to-God real bells ringing, or the next closest thing, and it is wonderful.  Some of the music is also a little different.  The songs are all the same, but there seems to be a slight difference in the mixing.  Parts that were drowned out before are brought forward to enhance the original sound.  It’s not noticeable in every piece of music—probably not in most of the music—but there are definite changes here and there.

I am of two minds on these changes.

Part of me is absolutely thrilled at this set.  It’s basically the definitive Utena compilation, and I had no compunctions about giving my previous set away to a friend who is fairly new to anime, and since I am something of an Utena evangelist, I felt as though this was a good way to spread the word.  “Here: Have 39 episodes and one movie of raw excellence.”

Another part of me, smaller but still significant, feels a little odd watching and hearing the new box set, because there are large parts of Utena that I am familiar with from multiple viewings.  My brain fixes on certain images, certain sounds, and these are different.  My main issue in this sense is with the visuals—the sound still has some getting used to, but I can appreciate its superiority with little trouble.  But I had come to love the oddly pale visuals of the series as a whole.  I doubt that it was ever an artistic choice, but I felt that they lent the series a sense of insubstantiality that oddly worked.  It made things seem just slightly removed from reality, as if the whole thing took place in a realm where things and events mattered less than thoughts and feelings, and that light and airy feeling, that insubstantiality, placed the emphasis of the story on the latter rather than the former.

This is not a gripe, exactly.  Not really.  It’s more just a thought.

*             *             *

In case it wasn’t abundantly clear by this point, Revolutionary Girl Utena is probably my favorite anime, period, and I am happy to recommend to anyone open-minded enough to watch it.

Behind the Gun: Doom

So we have a history lesson that needs to be gotten out of the way, if we’re going to do this whole “writing about FPSs” thing right.  And since I’ve been going back to games of this period lately anyway, it makes sense personally as well.

So…  Doom.

Doom isn’t necessarily where the first-person shooter genre began — that honor probably belongs to Wolfenstein 3D, or possibly some game even older — but Doom is where the FPS style of game really took off.  Before Doom, the genre hardly existed.  There were really only a handful of notable games in that vein.  After Doom, the first-person shooter quickly became one of the major staple genres of computer gaming.

The success Id Software achieved with Doom is a thing of legend.  According to the stories, productivity at IT firms and computer engineering outfits ground nearly to a halt as the employees apparently preferred to install the game on their workstations and play against each other on their respective companies’ networks.  In addition to its PC release, Doom has found its way to a number of consoles, both those popular at the time of its release, and subsequent generations.  There are versions of it for the Super Nintendo, Sega’s 32X add-on for the Genesis, the ill-fated Atari Jaguar, the Sega Saturn, the Playstation, the N64, the Xbox, the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, the Gameboy Advance, and this is not a complete list.  It was also ported to the Macintosh (albeit some years after its original PC release and, oddly, after even its own sequel).  There were also several games made by other companies who licensed the Doom engine (essentially, the technology which allowed for the creation of 3D graphics, placement of items, enemies, doors, etc., and governed their operation in the game’s environment): Heretic, Hexen, Strife: Quest for the Sigil, and expansions to these.  Doom itself received a couple of expansions (and got re-released in different versions with those additional episodes included), and then had a full-blown sequel using the same engine just a year or so later.  In addition to all this, the fan community continues to create source-ports, which (for the uninitiated) are programs designed to make the game run on newer operating systems, taking advantage to a limited degree of some of the technical advances that have occurred since 1993, when the game was new.  The only game I can think of with more source-ports is Quake, also an Id Software product, and the immediate successor to the Doom crown.

Let’s let all of that soak in, just for a minute.  For the past twenty years, Doom has been commercially viable and readily available on almost any platform you could ask for.  With video games, that kind of longevity is mind-blowing.  The willingness of both fans and the developers alike to create either updated versions of the game, or software to make running it on modern systems possible, speaks of a demand practically unheard of in this particular medium.

So the obvious question practically asks itself: why all the fuss?

Well, the problem with thinking critically about Doom is that it’s so completely ingrained in the DNA of the FPS genre, it’s almost impossible to really touch.  It seems quaint, these days, though in its time it was at the absolute leading edge of both the technology seen in computer games and of game design.  It’s only because its design elements have become so ubiquitous, and been iterated and improved upon so much, that it seems absolutely mundane today.  The best analogy I can come up with at the moment is like reading about the moral panic that erupted when the Beatles became popular.  Beatles music seems so… safe, these days.  You hear them on the lite-rock stations, for God’s sake.  It’s difficult to fathom how anybody in their right mind got their shorts in a twist about lyrics like “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah,” unless you look at the context and realize that, in that time, nobody else was making music like that — or if they were, they didn’t manage to touch that particular nerve.  But now, things that the Beatles have done are practically everywhere in popular music. 

So that’s Doom today.  The Beatles of the first-person shooter genre.  And just like them, although it may seem simple by today’s standards, there’s an entirely satisfactory game that’s still quite enjoyable even today.

While it was modern for its time, Doom today still feels fairly old-school.  Its structure is still a fairly rigid, level-based affair, with clear beginnings and objectives.  Most games today tend to feature much more fluid play, breaking things up for story, but otherwise feeling like a more unified experience.  If you put Doom at one end of this play-style scale, Half-Life is a prime example of the opposite extreme, never once breaking away from the player’s perspective, and moving in a single, unbroken line from start to finish.  Most games tend toward this end of the spectrum these days.  By comparison, Doom’s sense of pacing is more… well, game-like.  You begin each level at one point, and your object is to get to the clearly marked level exit and throw a lever.  This ends the level, and you’re given a brief rundown of the percentage of enemies you’ve slain, secrets you’ve uncovered, and the amount of time it took you to complete the level compared to a given par time.

This isn’t a bad thing!  In some ways, it’s actually good.  Rather than constantly mounting tension that goes on for hours, Doom gives it to you in smaller doses, allowing you some time to relax at the beginning of a level before the challenge ramps up again.  It also serves to make your goals fairly clear.  You always know what you need to be looking for or doing at any given moment, and there’s never so much ground to cover that you have to worry about getting completely lost, or intimidated by the sheer scope of the environment.  But the level structure does make Doom feel very different from more modern FPS titles.

Another concept Doom introduced (or at least made popular) was that different weapons have a different effect.  This in itself doesn’t seem revolutionary, but there’s a template of weapon progression that Doom laid out.

1. Melee weapon (here, that’s punching or using a chainsaw, if you can find it): requires no ammunition, and generally does little damage, but still allows you to attack if you’ve exhausted your ammo and are in a tight spot.

2. Pistol: Fairly accurate, better than nothing in terms of offensive power, and ammo is fairly easy to find.  However, while it’s sufficient early on, it’s going to take forever to drop the more powerful enemies, and it has almost no stopping power.

3. Shotgun: Questionably useful at long ranges, but respectable at medium ranges (still more powerful than the pistol) and devastating up close, the shotgun is the weapon you’ll be using the most, as it strikes a good balance between offensive power and ubiquity of ammo.

4. Chaingun: Rapid-fire machine gun which uses the same ammo as your pistol.  The rate of fire makes it powerful, but that same speed means you have to use it judiciously.

5. Rocket launcher: Devastating at any range, to the point that most lesser enemies fall after a single hit.  However, the blast can damage the player as well as the enemies, and ammo is scarce, so choose carefully when and how to use it.

6. Plasma gun: The “fun” weapon, firing rapid-fire bursts of energy that are accurate and fairly damaging.

7. BFG-9000: The Big One.  Basically clears a room in one blast, but requires an obscene amount of ammo for even a single shot.

The template itself wouldn’t be all that interesting, of course, except that until pretty recently, almost every FPS followed that model pretty much to the letter.  The weapons may have gone under different names and had a different appearance, but in terms of function, order of progression and best application, this is pretty much the list for FPSs, until Halo came along and introduced the concept of a more limited and situationally available arsenal.

But what perhaps set Doom apart most in its own time was something that its predecessors were incapable of.

Atmosphere.

Now, again, it all looks a bit long in the tooth today, what with our mip-mapped, bump-mapped multi-million-polygon character models, realistic physics models, fancy lighting effects, and locales modeled from real life.  But Doom was a pioneer in its time.  It used lighting to create contrast between high-visibility areas and cramped, dark areas, for one thing.  It was able to induce a sense of actual fear.  You ran around in narrow corridors where the light flickered or was totally absent, occasionally hearing the sounds of creatures that hunted you through the level.  Wolfenstein 3D had blown people away just a year or so before, but Doom made it look about as tense and atmospheric as an early level of Pac-Man.

Part of why this was possible was due to the leap in technology between the two games.  While neither of them is truly 3D, tricks of rendering made Doom’s levels much more believable environments.  Wolfenstein 3D was very rudimentary.  You were in a series of mazes meant to evoke, vaguely, the interior of a German castle, or bunker, or something.  It varied depending on the episode.  The environments were all fairly uniform, with a flat, even floor and ceiling that had no texture, and bright, consistent lighting throughout.  There were occasionally objects placed in the environments (tables, chairs, potted plants, hanging cages), but these seemed to be placed as much to break up the monotony as for any other purpose.  They suggested a sense of purpose to various locations, but were rarely ever very convincing about it.

A modern FPS thrives on a sense of place.  Wherever you are, whether you’re struggling across battlefields in World War II, or duking it out on space stations centuries into the future, or slaying monsters in medieval fantasy worlds, a large part of what makes the game work is how convinced the player is of the reality of the environment.  Wolfenstein 3D offered little reality.  Its appearance was novel in its time, but Doom blew it away.  In addition to better lighting and sound, Doom also allowed for more varied environments in terms of overall design.  It sounds perhaps a little simple to say now, but things like staircases, elevators and moving platforms dropped jaws when Doom introduced them.  Vertical movement of any kind had never really been possible before.  It was still technically impossible then.  I could never explain it in technical terms, but there was some sort of coding sorcery at work that allowed for vertical movement in what was still technically – so far as the computer was concerned – a 2D space.  It’s one of the reasons the game offered no capability to look up or down.  The perspective only looks right when you’re looking straight ahead.  Playing Doom in source-ports, where vertical looking is possible, exposes it.  The perspective distorts in odd ways that make looking up and down kind of uncomfortable after a while.  Later source ports have fixed this, or at least mitigated the effect somewhat.  Still, the use of visual trickery to achieve the more advanced 3D effect and the resultant improved realism made a world of difference in the necessary sense of place.  Doom’s environments still seem a bit abstract by today’s standards, but if you were to make a sliding scale, with one end being abstract environments and the other being absolutely realistic, Doom would land just on the realistic side.

So what about actually playing the game?

Well, one thing Id Software seems to believe in quite firmly is that the player should not be kept waiting, that the average player starts the game not to be dragged kicking and screaming through tiresome opening cutscenes, hand-holding tutorials, or beginning levels that offer little action, no challenge and no satisfaction.  The player, in Id’s mind, wants to start up the game and just play, without distraction or delay.  That approach wasn’t quite so revolutionary in its day, but it’s a refreshing novelty today.  Not that there would be much time to waste in the first place.  The controls are simple for this sort of game, and as for story…  Really, Doom doesn’t have a story to speak of.  John Carmack, head honcho at Id, is famous for his expressed belief that video games need story about as badly as porn does, and at least with Doom, he certainly put his money where his mouth is.  Where most games have a story, Doom has a premise, which is confined to the manual, and to the brief text crawl that accompanies successful completion of an episode.  It’s simple, uncomplicated and unsophisticated, and could probably be summed up like a prompt for some drama-class exercise.

“You’re a lone space marine on one of the moons of Mars, where the government has been conducting secret experiments into teleportation technology.  However, there is an unforeseen hitch in this technology, which is that the portals work by transporting things through another dimension, which turns out literally to be Hell.  Now the demons are using that technology to invade.  You’re the last one left alive (that anyone knows of), and you have a pistol with a couple dozen rounds in it.  Go!”

And by God, that is exactly where and how Doom starts you off.  From there it’s pretty much just a brutal, blood-soaked and gory gauntlet to the end of the game.  You pick up additional weapons on your way through the Mars base and then the bowels of hell itself, and the game does a good job of keeping you tense and anxious for action.

Even the traditional complaint leveled against pretty much every Id Software game — namely, that the enemies are mindless, and their main tactic (their only tactic) is to advance toward the player and attack whenever possible — falls flat here.  First of all, for 1993, that’s about all that was possible.  Doom at least can be forgiven for this sin (its descendants… not so much).  Second, while the enemies may indeed be dumb as a sack of hammers even so, their placement is smart.  Large, massively powerful enemies may be intimidating, and are certainly lethal, but almost always pose less of an actual danger than mobs of low- to mid-strength enemies.  As the game progresses, learning how to bait enemies into attacking each other is a skill that becomes increasingly mandatory.

There’s not much to dislike, unless you absolutely can’t stand the sort of tongue-in-cheek heavy-metal aesthetic that the game uses in its imagery.  And really, even that has its purpose, which seems to be to remind us all that it’s just a game — a violent one, yes, but almost cartoonishly so — and therefore probably not worth getting into a moral panic over.

Not that that stopped anybody.

Behind the Gun: F.E.A.R.

Well, F.E.A.R. is about six and a half years old now.  Maybe I should write about it, before it becomes completely irrelevant.

F.E.A.R. isn’t the first horror-themed first-person-shooter out there.  Doom 3 beat it by about a year, and I’m sure there have been others that I’m unaware of.  But Doom 3 tried to be frightening by way of survival horror, which failed for reasons I’ll explain later.  F.E.A.R., in my inexpert opinion, is largely successful on this count.

What does F.E.A.R. stand for, you ask?  It refers to a fictional top-secret special operations unit that deals with supernatural threats.  It stands for First Encounter Assault Recon.  It also, depending on who you ask, stands for Fuck Everything And Run.  Your tolerance for blood and jump scares will be a good indicator of how true this is for you.

For me personally, F.E.A.R. is rarely ever truly frightening.  In fairness, though, that’s more a consequence of its being an FPS than any failing on the creators’ part.  Generally speaking, most FPS games put you on an even footing with the enemies, in terms of power, maybe even make you more powerful.  It makes sense, since you need some kind of edge, and the enemy pretty much always has raw numbers on their side.  Going the route of survival horror in an FPS, then, is generally a bad idea.  This is where Doom 3 failed.  Survival horror is concerned in large part with managing the character’s resources and relative fragility (hence the word “survival”).  The main notions of the FPS genre run entirely counter to that.  So the game relies on jump scares, unsettling fake-outs, disturbing tableaux and of course a few actual “gotcha!” moments.  Maybe that does it for some people, though.  I’ve seen at least one Let’s Play on Youtube where the player seemed pretty consistently freaked out. 

And to be fair, F.E.A.R. does mess with you a bit.  There are often objects which seem to exist for the sole purpose of being knocked over or bumped into in order to make a startling noise that wrecks the otherwise eerie quiet.  And there are a few moments where some scripted brief weird and eerie event occurs, but is actually harmless, and largely happens just to keep you on your toes.  Particularly on a first pass through the game, you can’t really write these events off, because there’s no real way of knowing (short of familiarity with the game) when these events are happening just to screw with you, and when they preface an actual threat.

So what’s it about, then?

F.E.A.R.’s story is a mix of horror and science fiction.  Long story short, it involves your attempts, as the Point Man of one of at least two First Encounter Assault Recon units, to find a genetically engineered psychic commander named Paxton Fettel, and kill him.

Up until quite recently, Fettel was the property of Armacham Technology Corporation, which is the kind of corporation that employs a small army, complete with fully automatic weapons, as a security force, and has policies in place to murder anyone who might leak incriminating information during the sort of disaster that unfolds as the game begins.

Because it would be far too easy otherwise, in addition to being a psychic commander, Fettel has an army of clone soldiers, referred to as Replicas, who are especially susceptible to his mental commands.  While he was once locked up tight, he has recently been released by persons unknown, and he clearly has a mission of some sort.

He also has an appetite for human flesh, but this is just a means to an end, really.  He indulges mainly because eating part of someone allows him to absorb their memories.

You know precious little of this starting out, and one of the ways in which the game supports its eerie atmosphere is by never spelling any of this out very directly.  What you really know in the beginning is that you, fellow soldier Spencer Jankowski and forensic specialist Jin Sun-Kwon are being called upon to find and eliminate Fettel, which in theory will render the Replica soldiers insensible, thus ending the threat.

Of course, it doesn’t work out quite like that.  It never does.

While he’s supposed to have a tracker chip embedded in his head, Fettel seems to appear and disappear at will.  That he always seems to be a step ahead of the F.E.A.R. team, having slain and dined upon pretty much anyone who might tell you anything useful about what’s really going on, makes things somewhat frustrating.  You uncover clues as you go on, relating to a girl or woman named Alma, who is in some way integral to the experiments Armacham was running prior to the creation of Fettel himself. 

Most of the plot details are revealed through the messages left on various important people’s answering machines, which you encounter as you work your way through the Armacham offices and other nearby locations.  I guess it’s a good thing the game takes place in 2005.  If it was set in the present, the Point Man would have no idea what was going on, unless he could retrieve everybody’s cell phones.  Eventually, the truth emerges, and you realize that Armacham has about a cemetery’s worth of skeletons buried in its closet.  You begin to feel a little sympathy for Fettel.  Clearly, his methods are horrific, absolutely intolerable, and yet his goals are not wholly without justification.  At least a few of the people who die at his hand (or fangs, whatever) had it coming.

So what about the game itself?  That the story is well done is all very well and good, but how does it play?

Pretty well, actually.

F.E.A.R. follows in the newer trend of FPS games in that it limits the player’s arsenal.  There are close to ten different weapons (the number differs depending on whether you count the ability to wield pistols singly or as a pair as two separate weapons), plus a handful of different types of grenades, but you’re limited to carrying only three firearms at a time.  In a game like Halo, this helps to liven up the experience by requiring you to adapt your tactics to whatever weapons and ammunition happen to be on hand.  F.E.A.R. backs away from this restriction somewhat, though, by making a couple of weapons consistently available.

In addition to the FPS-standard melee attack (in this case, hitting enemies with the butt of your chosen weapon), F.E.A.R. also gives you a handful of other melee attacks.  You can holster your current weapon to strike with your fists, and in fact, the smaller the weapon you’re carrying at the moment, the faster you move.  You can also employ a flying bicycle kick and a sliding tackle with a few simple commands.  This amount of attention paid to melee attacks is rare in FPS games, and it’s all the more interesting that melee attacks are so powerful.  Most standard foes will fall in a single hit, especially if you can sneak up on them from behind.

And that’s not even the best of it.  The Point Man has superior reflexes and perception, which manifests in a limited ability to slow the game down.  This allows you to maneuver among the enemies more quickly than they can easily track, and line up precise shots under pressure.

All of these abilities would make the game sound stupidly broken and easy, were it not for the fact that the enemy A.I. is some of the smartest around.

Enemies are intelligent enough to shoot from behind cover, flush you out with grenades, employ suppressing fire, and split their forces in order to flank you.  That last bit is something they will do at every opportunity, and it’s important to remember when playing, because that opportunity presents itself distressingly often.  Pretty much every area has a couple different paths you can take to get through, and whichever one you’re paying attention to in the middle of a firefight, the enemy will probably be sending people through the other route to take you down from your blind side.  They’ll also spot you coming if you have your flashlight on (and the game has enough dark areas to make sure you need it, often at the worst possible moments), and are bright enough to target any exploding barrels or other explosive hazards that happen to be nearby.  As logical as it sounds for the enemies to be this intelligent, it was pretty unusual for its time, and continues to be kind of impressive even today.

In fact, in their way, the regular enemy encounters are some of the more harrowing and taxing parts of the game.  Sure, the intentionally horrific scenes—the hallucinatory nightmare walks through blood-filled hospital corridors, the unsettling encounters with dim phantoms in a fire-lit void—do their job, but the main combat does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to making you feel strung out. 

To which I can say only: Bravo.

Of course, F.E.A.R. isn't quite perfect.

The environments do wear out their welcome after a while.  There is entirely too much time spent wandering through the Armacham offices, though I do think that’s the worst part.  The industrial section that precedes said offices could probably stand to be trimmed a bit, also.  It’s not that they’re bad, just long to the point that you start wanting to see something new well before anything new actually appears.  The game could stand to be shorter.  If it had to be just as long, then it should have more diverse environments.

The sound effects are a bit of a mixed bag.  Most of the more conventional firearms have oddly low-key sound effects; the submachine gun and the machine gun sound about as threatening as a popcorn popper.  This is in direct contrast to the visceral, meaty sound of bullets ripping into your enemies, which is something I don’t think most other games I’ve played even have a sound effect for.  It’s kind of unsettling.  The more “future-y” weapons, I can’t really complain about.  To my knowledge, nobody actually knows what an energy weapon that vaporizes flesh and leaves a charred and bloody skeleton would actually sound like, so F.E.A.R.’s take on that is as good as anybody else’s.  The voice-acting, though, is done well.  There's something in the mixed anger and frustration in the enemies' voices when you're whittling down their numbers that almost makes you feel for them, and that's rare in any game, let alone in a genre where enemies exist almost solely to be mowed down in a hail of gunfire.

Enemy variety could also stand to be a little more diverse.  You have your normal Replica soldier mooks who (to be fair) come with a  variety of different weapons, armored mooks that are considerably harder to kill, mooks in mech suits, Armacham security mooks, flying gun turrets, ceiling-mounted gun turrets and the odd ghostly phantom enemy.  Still, aside from the phantoms (they go down fast, but move more quickly and erratically than anything else in the game to make up for it), fighting the enemies gets harrowing enough that you may find yourself honestly thankful that they come in strictly limited varieties.

There are also two expansion packs: F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point and F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate, which take place after the events of the main game.  Both of them add new enemies and weapons, and if my own experience has been any judge, are somewhat more difficult than the original F.E.A.R.  But I’m honestly kind of bad at FPSs in general, so that may just be me.  I can't speak on these much, as I haven't finished either one of them yet.  But it's kind of a moot point by now; buying the game on Steam, which is pretty much the only way to get it, nets you both expansions automatically.

All in all, F.E.A.R. is definitely worth playing.  The graphics have aged surprisingly well—character models are a bit simple, but expressive and well-animated enough to compensate—and the flaw of overlong areas is far outweighed by the skillfully handled atmosphere.  The story, while simple, is handled well and internally consistent, and there are some nice bits of foreshadowing in the beginning which will probably make you go “Ohhhhhh,” on later playthroughs.  And F.E.A.R. is, frankly, still mechanically better than some later games I’ve played.  That it set a new high-water mark for enemy A.I. in FPS games doesn’t hurt its reputation, either.  After Half-Life 2 and the original Quake, F.E.A.R. is the FPS I’ve probably spent the most time on, and not because it’s difficult.

Not just, anyway.

Behind the Gun: Half-Life 2

I’ve had it in my head for a while now to write a series of “reviews” of first-person shooters.  I somehow doubt I’ll be doing so exclusively for the next little while, but we’ll see.  In any event, here is the first.

*    *    *

I have a fascination with these bleak, dystopian settings, these harsh wastelands barren of hope and promising decay, and death for the unwary.  I think I’ve felt this way ever since I was a child, reading through the mini-comics that came with the Starriors figures I got for Christmas for a couple consecutive years.  The idea that the Earth might be damaged to such an extent as to be inhospitable to human life—that it might conceivably be destroyed, even—is so repellent to instinct that it becomes in some way perversely compelling.

Half-Life 2 pretty much opens up with that kind of scenario and gets progressively more grim from there.  I think it’s safe to say I was going to be a fan right out of the gate.

You start off on a train, a nod to the tram car where your player character, Gordon Freeman, ended the original Half-Life after doing the smart thing and accepting the G-man’s offer of “employment”.  He took you into some kind of stasis, and now here you are, some twenty-odd years later (give or take).  You haven’t aged a day, but things sure have become different while you were gone.

“Wake up and… smell the ashes,” the G-man tells you, in his oddly haunting and strangely emphasized tones.  Who he is—what he is, precisely—remains unknown.  What we know for sure is that he is some sort of interdimensional bureaucrat who has retained you for your unique skills.  Your first glimpses of this future world are not uplifting.  Wake up and smell the ashes, indeed.

You have only the vaguest notion of where you are and what you’re supposed to be doing. The question of “where” is easier.  You are in City 17, located somewhere in eastern Europe, which serves as a sort of capital for the much-diminished human civilization.  The Earth has been overrun twice over.  First it was the creatures that slipped into this dimension due largely to the events of the original Half-Life.  Then came the Combine, a collective of alien races bent on utter domination.  Between creatures making the countryside and wilderness highly unsafe, and the Combine’s efforts to corral and control humanity, the numbered Cities seem to hold the majority of humankind.  A suppression field prevents reproduction.  Volunteers are modified to become troops for the Combine; troublemakers are also modified, but in a much different, less pleasant fashion (not that the volunteers’ modifications look to be all fun and games, mind you).  The message is clear: those who can be used, will be used.  Those who cannot will be driven to extinction.  The bottom line is that humankind as we understand it will be destroyed, and the Earth will be gutted for its resources.  Half-Life 2 shows us subtle signs of this gutting already happening.  Docks and boathouses on dry land, well away from the shore, give a good indicator of how much water has been drained from the oceans already. 

None of this is shoved in your face.  The Seven-Hour War, in which humanity rose up against the Combine and was decisively trounced—which served, really, as little more than a prologue for the complete surrender and “treaty” brokered by one Dr. Wallace Breen—is hardly mentioned.  It’s in a few newspaper clippings you’ll find here and there, pinned up by the sorts of characters who would want a reminder of all that has been lost, perhaps to goad them ever onward toward some action.  Maybe some conversations mention it.  It’s difficult to recall, exactly.

One of the many strengths of Half-Life 2 is in its narrative subtlety.  There are very few scenes where characters exposit at you for long stretches.  People talk about background events and history in much the same way you or I might talk about history.  They talk about the Seven-Hour War like we, today, might talk about 9/11.  We don’t expound on the tragedy.  We mention it; we share a grim, knowing glance; and everybody understands the full meaning of what’s been said.  In much the same way, characters in Half-Life 2 don’t feel the need to speak in brief history lessons specifically for your benefit.  They talk how people talk.  You want to be in the know, great; go figure it out on your own. 

So there’s Half-Life 2’s setting in a nutshell, if we want to be flip: part War of the Worlds, part 1984, part Children of Men.

That answers the question of “where” nicely enough.  What about that question of “what”?

What, indeed?

The G-Man himself provides a subtle answer to this in his brief opening monologue.  “The right man, in the wrong place, can make all the dif-ference in the world,” he tells you with his off-kilter enunciation.

The original Half-Life saw you pretty much being exactly that.  Surviving a catastrophic accident that opened a portal to another dimension was practically a fluke.  The game from that point forward amounted to little more than the player character’s attempts to escape from Black Mesa (the research facility where the disaster occurs) for much of its length.  That there are alien creatures running around, and later, U.S. military personnel whose job was to shush the whole affair up, is practically incidental.  Freeman just happened to be fit enough and determined enough to beat the odds and escape.

The right man in the wrong place.

So, rather than give you any real direction (or even a stated goal), the G-Man just drops you into a train car bound for City 17, apparently having faith that you’ll do exactly what he (or his employers) want, just by doing what comes naturally.

You’re quickly pulled aside at the train station’s processing center, presumably for understandably lacking important documentation.  Thankfully, the guard who pulls you aside is Barney Calhoun, one of the heretofore nameless security guards from Black Mesa.  He discreetly sends you on your way to Dr. Isaac Kleiner, one of your colleagues from the back-story of Half-Life who is, despite his apparent nervous disposition, part of the resistance in City 17.  Lacking a map or even basic directions, however, you are quickly cornered by the City Overwatch.  You’re saved in the nick of time, however, by Alyx Vance, the daughter of Eli Vance, another scientist from Black Mesa.  Alyx guides you to Dr. Kleiner’s lab, where you’re given your familiar Hazardous Environment (HEV) Suit.  Also, your old crowbar.

This is pretty much the iconic image of the series in a nutshell: the bearded and bespectacled theoretical physicist-turned-action hero Gordon Freeman, with nothing but his HEV Suit and trusty crate-breaker to fend off hordes of aliens and other assailants.

From here, you’re pretty much on your own.  You’re tasked with finding Black Mesa East, which is the resistance headquarters, and reconnecting with Eli Vance, where Freeman will theoretically do some science for once.  Of course, this is not to be.  Upon being discovered at Black Mesa, Freeman is forced to flee through Ravenholm, which has been infested with headcrabs, which effectively make zombies of their victims, and make Ravenholm one of the more unnerving sections of the game.  From there you go through the mines, and shortly thereafter find yourself tooling along a lonely stretch of sea-cliff highway toward Nova Prospekt, which is a political prison.

Half-Life 2 never seems to wear out its welcome.  The various environments you traverse last just long enough to feel substantial (especially on your first, most clueless playthrough), yet are short enough that you never really get tired of a particular area.  Even in the game’s various areas, there is often diversity in the different sorts of places you’ll go.  The aforementioned highway section is broken up frequently by various obstructions.  You find yourself dealing with the occasional ambush, or removing a barricade, or deal with rolling mines or any of a number of other things.  There is always some variety to keep things interesting and novel.

The game occurs largely in big setpieces.  There’s a rhythm to the game; you’re usually alternating between more navigation-heavy sequences which involve solving puzzles on your way from Point A to Point B, and more combat-oriented sequences where puzzle-solving is nonexistent and you’re gunning down bad guys or blasting a way to freedom.  But even in combat, you have to use your head.  Sure, some minor encounters can be solved by charging in with guns blazing and mowing down every mook that comes into sight.  Most battles don’t work that way, though.  Like most FPS games, Half-Life 2 requires you to manage your resources.  There are only so many health and armor recharging stations and items in the game.  Likewise, there is only so much ammunition.  And while there are also only so many enemies, unlike you, they can shoot and throw grenades forever.  Some of them are immune to most your many weapons.  (Half-Life 2 is somewhat old-school in that Freeman carries an arsenal of nearly a dozen weapons, and ammo for each, on his person throughout much of the game).  Fight smarter, not harder, in other words.

A common complaint with Half-Life 2 is that its enemy AI is lacking.  This complaint is probably lent more weight than it should be on account of how intelligent (relative to the standards of the day) the enemies in the original Half-Life were.  When it comes to Half-Life 2, the complaint is both true and false.  Custom-made levels have shown the enemy AI to be quite intelligent.  However, the way environments are set up, it’s difficult for the enemies to really showcase their abilities.

So all of this provides a halfway-decent description of the game, but why do I like it so much?  If it’s my favorite FPS of all time, surely it does something special, right?  Well, yes and no.  I tend to think of Half-Life 2 as the sort of game where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  The game is getting somewhat long in the tooth by now—it was released in late 2004, after all—but that doesn’t matter much to me.  After all, I’ve played the living hell out of older games.  Quake, for instance.

A lot of it comes down to the atmosphere I mentioned back in the beginning.  And it’s not just that Valve chose a post-apocalyptic atmosphere (or one similar to it) when they made this game.  It does take a little more than that to get my interest.  It’s that they were at some considerable pains to reinforce the sense of despair and slender hope that are manifest every inch of the game’s world.  You periodically run across resistance outposts, all of which have the appearance of having been lightly manned and (in most cases) hastily abandoned.  You’ll walk into a room in some dilapidated shack by the road, or some platform tucked away just out of sight, and there will be a small cache of supplies there, and a mattress and a radio to show that someone, however briefly, occupied that spot.  If you’re observant, there are occasionally clues as to why that person isn’t there any more.  The atmosphere is in the way the people dress, the way they talk, the way they mutter to each other about how terrible things are, or warn you not to drink the water while in the city (there’s something in it that makes you forget, apparently)…  There are probably a hundred things that are beyond description because I’d take them for granted, and only notice them by way of their absence in other games.  “Man, I wish this game did X like Half-Life 2 did,” I’ll think, and then pause.  “Or that it did X at all.”

I tend to come back to atmosphere a lot when I think of what makes a game’s story good.  That’s mostly because I think atmosphere is one of the most important things a game has to get right in order for its story to have the greatest impact.  Atmosphere is in the subtle, delicate details of the game world.  A game may look real and sound real all it wants to, but atmosphere is what makes it feel real, in a compelling way, and that feeling is infinitely more important than any one thing we see or hear.  The environment doesn’t have to be realistic, but atmosphere is what gives a game’s environment a sense of consistency and purpose, which translates into a form of realism.

Of course, the rest of the game is also great.  The graphics, despite showing signs of age, still function perfectly well.  The sound effects and music are done admirably.  But I tend to look at the overall experience, and what stands out to me is the attention to detail everywhere you look, the atmosphere balanced so well that it helps to sell the setting while not being cloyingly thick, the aggressive adherence to realism in the environment's details.

Long story short: go play Half-Life 2.  Then go play the two episodes.  Then go play Black Mesa (the fan remake of the original Half-Life).