I am not always a good judge of the things I will like or won’t
like. I had this problem with Halo, a few years ago, as I mentioned
in a previous post. I had it again with Gears of War, somewhat more recently.
I used to think, judging largely by the artwork and some snippets of
dialogue I’d heard, that this must be the most meat-headed, frat boy douchebag
series of games in existence. Just a
bunch of lumpy, over-muscled dudes shooting things with stupidly huge machine
guns and swearing a lot. And the machine
guns have chainsaw bayonets. Chainsaw bayonets.
But then the original Gears of
War came up for free on Xbox’s Free Games with Xbox Live Gold promotion one
month, and I thought “What the hell?” So I downloaded it and gave it a shot.
I wound up buying the rest of the series not much later.
Turns out chainsaw bayonets are fun.
* * *
I don’t know of a better way to say this, except to say that Gears of War doesn’t take itself
seriously, but is still somehow a mostly serious game. The story throughout the series has moments
of real emotion and impact, and it sets these up and handles them well enough
that they come across as genuine and natural, rather than forced. The characters look like a sort of winking satire on the grizzled, armored
military guy trope (which is a broader expression of the “bald space marine”
trope that occupies so much of western gaming).
Main character Marcus Fenix, in particular, seems to embody this, with
his do-rag, his soul patch, his jutting jaw that could actually break rocks, and his “Ah, not this shit again” attitude. But
rather than crank it up beyond believability, they just kind of let it be what
it is. The characters pretty much just do
what they would do, given who they are and the context in which they exist.
The characters are really sort of brilliant, in the sense that their
designs match almost perfectly with their personalities. When you watch Marcus move, listen to him
speak, and see the things he does, the way he interacts with other characters, it
all fits so well it’s actually a
little bit scary.
I mean, here’s a guy who’s grim, gruff, and mostly quiet, and doesn’t
really seem to like anything or anyone in this hellhole of a world he finds
himself in. He often expresses
satisfaction with, and appreciation for, various skillful maneuvers (well-timed
weapon reloads, managing several headshots in a row, etc.), but this is at best
a sort of diagonally adjacent emotion to real happiness or enjoyment, which
seem utterly foreign to him. Pretty much
everything that’s first apparent about his character – his looks, his posture,
his movements, his voice – makes all of this seem right in line with who he
appears to be. It isn’t predictable,
necessarily, but it doesn’t exactly come out of left field, either.
And this is true of pretty much any character with a unique personality,
who is in any way a mover or shaker in the story. They all look and talk in such a way as to
immediately telegraph who they are. The
characters play to particular tropes and archetypes (without leaning on them
too heavily) in such a way as to provide a sort of quick sketch of who they
are, a sense of immediate familiarity.
This way, the game doesn’t have to spend minutes at a time dwelling on
who all these people are and what they’re all doing, when it could instead be
throwing you back into the action.
* * *
The action is one of the other areas of Gears of War which is surprisingly intelligent.
The original Gears of War was
one of the pioneering titles of the cover-based third-person shooter
genre. It’s not necessarily the first game in the genre, mind
you. There’s probably an argument to be
made that Resident Evil 4 was a
major contribution to its development, but there are games before this that had
many elements of the genre in one way or another. My own first experience with these game
mechanics would probably be the original Mass
Effect, which in retrospect might not be the best ambassador for this style
of play. The first Mass Effect is a game that, if you love it, you love it despite a
number of minor-to-middling problems.
The parts where you’re moving and shooting are sort of mushy and
awkward, to be honest, if still ultimately serviceable, and at least make for a
decent example of the basics (the sequels are much better in this regard, but
we’re not here for Mass Effect today).
Unlike a lot of franchises out there, Gears of War got it pretty much right on the first try. The sequels have mainly just focused on
offering more. More explosions (and more things to shoot and
blow up), more challenge, more weapons,
more areas to travel through (and, in all likelihood, destroy, intentionally or
otherwise), and more colors. The first Gears of War is a very, very grey game, you see.
Sure, it’s not as if Epic Games (fun fact: I’m old enough that I still think
of them as Epic Megagames, and have to consciously correct myself), the original
developers of the Gears of War, are
any strangers to high-quality games where you blow stuff up real good. They did make the classic first-person
shooter Unreal, after all, and they’ve
been around since well before then. But
the level of polish on display for Gears
of War is pretty remarkable when you stop to consider that it was the first
entry in a new series, in a relatively new genre, in the early days of a new piece
of hardware.
Mechanically, the game is smarter than it appears. Despite the gung-ho, “Fuck yeah, let’s kill
all the enemies!” attitude it seems
to have, in reality it encourages intelligent play. Attacking head-on is a great way to find
yourself getting mulched by a hail of enemy gunfire. Instead, the games encourage you to outmaneuver
your enemies. Flank them or take them
from behind, where they can’t easily find cover. If you don’t, they’ll surely try to do it to
you. And like Halo before it, Gears of War
requires you to acquaint yourself with a variety of weapons. While it’s more generous with some weapon
types, all the weapons and ammunition you find, you find in the environment,
either dropped by fallen foes, or left behind by defeated allies who previously
occupied the area. Metal Gear Solid would call this OCP (on-site procurement), and it
means you’re never in full control of your arsenal. It means you have to learn how to use all of
the game’s weapons to at least a basic degree of proficiency, and learn which
weapon types work best in which environments, so that you don’t waste
ammunition using the wrong tool for the job.
Rather than a point of frustration, I personally find this makes the
game more interesting. You’re not always
doing the same thing over and over again.
The various weapons work best at varying ranges and rates of fire, and
require different tactics for effective use.
It keeps you constantly on your toes, constantly thinking, constantly
paying attention and therefore constantly engaged. You fall into a kind of rhythm after a while,
but it’s never mindless; it’s never habit.
And the cutscenes, once the game really gets going, are generally just
long enough to get the point across, but short enough not to screw up the
momentum too badly. Epic understands
that when you play a game, you generally want to be playing a game, not listening to the game natter on and on about
things while you interact with it at intervals.
* * *
I was wrapping up Gears of War:
Judgment last night, and my wife was lying on the couch behind me,
half-watching and half-listening to me play.
Gears of War is absolutely
not a Katie sort of game.
Testosterone-heavy aesthetics aside, there’s the fact that she doesn’t really
get into third-person shooters that much, with the exception of Mass Effect, the mechanical problems of
which I touched on above.
After explaining the story to her, and some of the backstory, she
paused for a moment, and then said, “You really like games where humanity is
pretty much fucked, don’t you?”
“No, no… I… don’t,” I said, and then I paused, thinking for a moment. “Do
I?”
I thought for a few minutes more about a lot of the games I’d been
playing lately, and a lot of the games I really like.
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
sees humanity fucked over by their own stupid choices resulting in environmental
destruction, forcing them to retreat to a single subterranean habitat until
someone can muster the courage to open the door after a few thousand years and
see just exactly what’s out there.
Assassin’s Creed, at least
up through the third game, sees humanity fucking itself over by way of the
constant squabbling of the game’s two main factions, which blinds them to the
fact that there is a major solar flare set to wipe out most life on Earth, and
that they actually could have been prepared for it centuries ago if they hadn’t
been so obsessed with wiping each other out.
Destiny sees humanity being
fucked by way of the invasion of at least four separate races of beings driven
to try to wrest control of our own solar system from us for one reason or another,
with humankind reduced to such numbers that we basically only populate a single
city on the entire planet Earth (yet the tone is somehow overall hopeful).
Halo sees humanity fucked by
being on the losing end of a genocidal war against an alliance of alien
religious fanatics who believe us to be an affront to their gods. This at least sounds moderately more hopeful
than the first two examples, in that we at least haven’t done all of this to
ourselves, except that’s somewhat deceptive.
Dig into the backstory of Halo
even a little, and you’ll find that the entirety of human-controlled space was
embroiled in an insurrection ready to explode into full-scale war before the
Covenant showed up.
In all of this, Mass Effect
is the outlier. While, yes, humanity
does appear to be pretty fucked in Mass
Effect, this is actually just because space-faring sentient life in general is fucked, as part of a
fairly regular, cyclical process; humankind is only one part of that. And while, being newcomers to galactic
society, the general feeling is that humankind has a long way to go to get its
collective shit together, it seems to be at least doing that shit-together-getting before all hell breaks loose.
In turn, this put me in mind of a conversation I’d had some years
previous with my friend Captain Overkill, who introduced me to a friend or
acquaintance by saying, “he likes grimdark stuff”.
I objected to this pretty much immediately, because I don’t tend to
think of myself that way, and then stopped, and thought about it for a moment.
Among my favorite anime, we have Tsukihime:
Lunar Legend, Rurouni Kenshin:
Remembrance, Fate/Stay Night, Berserk, Evangelion, X (the TV
series and manga, not the movie), Kara
no Kyokai: the Garden of Sinners, Puella
Magi Madoka Magica, and Revolutionary
Girl Utena. That last one doesn’t
seem to be very dark at first blush, but like most fairy tales pre-Perrault,
there is an undercurrent of something dark and unpleasant running through it,
and it’s not buried nearly as far below the surface as you might like.
So I guess I like dark, heavy stuff, wherein humanity is pretty
seriously fucked.
And let’s be clear: Humanity is pretty
badly fucked in Gears of War.
A lot of this isn’t really explained in the main game, because the
characters’ dialogue is written to sound like real (if occasionally cheesy and
often low-brow) talk, which means it
doesn’t often do double-duty as lazy exposition for the player’s benefit. But it doesn’t take much digging into
information about the setting to find out that, prior to the main conflict
(which, as of the main character’s release from prison in the beginning of the
first game, has already been going for some 14 years), there has been an older war
on for some 80 or so years. This war, on
the fictional Earth-like world of Sera, is roughly equivalent to what might
have happened if our own Cold War had gone hot, minus the nuclear weapons. Around the time this conflict (called the
Pendulum Wars) was winding down, a new enemy appeared. Referred to as the Locust (and more often,
derogatorily, as “grubs” due to their pale skin and preference for subterranean
living), they seem bent on the destruction of humankind for immediately
apparent reason. Despite their burly,
muscular appearance and fondness for savagery, they are more intelligent than
they appear, and have the added advantage of their movements being almost
impossible to track.
The Pendulum Wars were already well on their way to turning the world
into the bombed-out, ash-choked ruin it appears to be in the first game in the
series. The Locust really just took the
first steps toward finishing the job.
Between the drain on resources, the destruction of infrastructure, and the
devastation of the environment (shockingly, dropping an entire city into the
ocean has consequences), the survivors of the human-Locust conflict are going
to have a battle for mere survival on their hands when (if) the dust settles. And it becomes apparent, as you go through
the series, that the Locust aren’t just mindless aggressors. Their emergence, and their war on humanity, are
happening not because they simply have it in for humans (though they wouldn’t
be entirely unjustified if that was all it was), but because they’re on the run
from something else that also lives underground, and they don’t think they can
win against it.
It gets to a point where, contemplating victory, Marcus Fenix asks (not
just rhetorically), what kind of victory is even possible? The world – the idea of civilization – is already
done for. What’s left, in the end?
* * *
Mentally, I tend to wind up comparing Gears of War to Halo. There are just enough surface similarities
that it almost seems like a valid comparison.
But there are major differences, too, and one of the greatest is in
tone. The difference in tone between Halo and Gears of War is about the same difference in tone between high
fantasy and low fantasy, between Lord of
the Rings and, say, Robert E. Howard’s stories about Conan of Cimmeria and
Kull of Atlantis.
Of course, in itself, that’s a frustrating comparison to make, because the
qualities that define each are largely similar, but set apart by their
context. Like the difference between
erotica and pornography, it’s tempting to simply say “I know it when I see it”
and leave it at that. But it isn’t a
very helpful description for the reader.
If pressed, I’d probably say that high fantasy is best defined by its
inspiration, which seems often to come from myth and legend, and its overall
tone, which tends toward the optimistic and hopeful, however grim, and it
reflects who we believe (or hope) we are.
Low fantasy, meanwhile, tends to get its inspiration from history, and
tends to be grittier and more cynical, a reflection of who we fear we really
are.
But still, gritty and cynical, there is room for hope. It just helps to remember that hope is not
always a light and happy thing. It can
be grim, and desperate, and shot through with fear. As much as it can be uplifting, it can be a
burden as well, a weight as much as a motivation. Hope can be a sort of duty.
I often find that this kind of hope is the more realistic kind, in that
it allows for a more balanced view of the world. It’s the one I often ascribe to, and I think
that, aside from its solid mechanics, its great graphics (because, if I haven’t
mentioned it yet, all of these games look fantastic, even the first one), and
its surprisingly interesting characters.
It has a view of hope that resonates with me.
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