Destiny and Fate, Inevitability and Futility: a Look at X

It occurred to me recently that we have a tendency to romanticize the winter season a bit.

We look at the season as a time of warmth, friendship, fellowship, etc.  We think of shopping malls full of people looking for the perfect gift for so-and-so, a light dusting of snow making everything look silvery and enchanted, building snowmen, sledding, spending time with loved ones, exchanging gifts, having entirely too much Christmas ham or turkey or whatever you normally have for Christmas dinner (and enough cookies, candy, chocolate, and other miscellaneous sweets to provide job security for any number of dentists), and so on, and so forth.  Maybe you even go Christmas caroling; I don’t know.  I never did.  Well, I did once, with some friends.  On Halloween.  Because we were all stupid high-schoolers at the time, and it was all so random and lol.

Anyway, all of that is pretty much within the first couple of weeks of the official beginning of winter.  And then it’s over, and the hard reality sets in.

Winter is a son of a bitch.

Winter is long, and cold, and dark, and bleak.

Winter (if you’re an adult, living well above the Mason-Dixon line, and with no time for sledding and no possibility of snow days) is waking up before the sun, which tends to slack off around this time of year, and shows up far later in the day than is reasonable.  It’s scraping ice — sometimes frost, but all too often, it’s actually ice — off your windows, and going to a job where you will in all probability work until the sun has gone back down.

Winter is the miserable cold walk between your warm house and your freezing car, and the hope that you have everything you need already in your house, because you don’t want to go anywhere once you get back from work.  But it’s more than the outside cold.  It’s the inside cold, the feeling of bleak, frigid desolation in the very center of your being that no amount of turning up the furnace and curling up under blankets will ever dispel. 

Because winter is more than a season unto itself, as if that wasn’t enough.  No, instead, winter is the universe’s dirty little secret, the grim foreshadow of the inevitable future which, if we are fortunate, we will never live to see.  Winter is the foretaste of how the whole universe ends.  Oh, sure, first there will be the fire of the red giants and supernovas, but this is nothing more than the candle guttering before it goes out entirely.  And then?  When the last star burns out and collapses in upon itself, and there is no longer light, nor heat, nor sound, nor movement: That will be the winter that ends all winters.

These are the bleak thoughts I try hard not to dwell on, and I normally succeed.  Against them, I comfort myself by remembering that I will be dead, and that whatever happens after death, I will be beyond caring.  But these thoughts are always closer to the surface at this time of the year. 

Christmas and the New Year are over, and with them all the excuses for fun and family and fellowship that make the winter seem even remotely desirable.  Now it’s time to settle in for the long, dark freeze of the bleak season.

It’s time to read some X.

*             *             *

X wasn’t the first manga I ever bought (that honor belongs to Fist of the North Star).  It wasn’t the first series I really got into (that would be Bio-Booster Armor Guyver).  It wasn’t even the first CLAMP manga series I got into (that would be Magic Knight Rayearth).  But it was probably the first one that exerted such a strong grip on me.

I don’t read a lot of manga these days.  I don’t know why.  Part of it is the sheer cumbersome nature of collecting easily a dozen paperbacks’ worth of material (quite often much more) for just one story.  And of course, fans of American comics are laughing their asses off at me, because they've been following Batman or Superman or the X-Men or Spiderman or whatever for God knows how long now.  Those are comics that began well before I was born, have not stopped at any point since, and show every sign of continuing well on into the future, long after I am gone.  But the point remains.  I only have room for so much stuff, and eighteen volumes of anything seems kind of excessive these days.

Like most things, I got into X completely backward.

I was in college, in the year-and-change between when I graduated high school and joined the Army.  At the time, X the manga was being published under the name X/1999, because there was another comic being published in the U.S. at that time which had the X name.  So I got my first taste of X late, late in the fall semester of 1999 (appropriate, I know).  I had never heard of X before this at all, or of the four-woman group of manga creators known as CLAMP.  I just heard a few of my friends describing the movie based on the manga, which had recently come out, and it sounded pretty amazing.

I managed to acquire a fansub copy of the movie from my friend Sean.  In these days, that meant a VHS copy dubbed from an imported laserdisc.  Well, actually, it meant a standard VHS tape copied from a high-quality master VHS tape with subtitles, dubbed from a laserdisc.  Literally a copy of a copy.  Low-quality as it was, with its washed out colors (which seemed simply to add an extra layer of ethereal effect, to me) and slight blur, I was mesmerized.

It may help somewhat to understand that X had an unfair advantage at the time.  First off, I was a relatively new-minted anime fan.  Now, I had been a fan of anime for a few years by that point, but it was only recently that I had gotten a job.  With the job came the ability to start buying as I liked rather than recording whatever the Sci-Fi channel was showing on Saturday mornings — which was to say I was able to buy anime at all.  Having had my horizons so newly broadened, I was therefore highly impressionable.  Which is a charitable and somewhat roundabout way of saying that I wasn't terribly discerning.   Then there’s the fact that X struck me right on the unexpected intersection between my odd fascination with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, and my weird soft spot for shoujo-style artwork.

I could try to explain why I have the fascination with apocalyptica (pinpointing the when is easy; it’s the how and why that will take all day), but I’d rather focus on X, since it’s what I meant to write about in the first place.  The shoujo thing, I can actually explain with relative ease.  I like the sort of willowy, elegant designs.  It’s interesting to me to see the human form stylized in a way that expresses beauty without reference to power or sexuality, but rather emphasizes simple grace and elegance.  I don’t want everything to look shoujo, but I certainly enjoy some of the things that do.  And at that time, for me, it didn't get more shoujo-looking than CLAMP.

Unfortunately, the movie was the easiest thing for me to get hold of.  The manga was harder to track down.

What you have to understand is that these were the bad old days.  The whole market for anime and manga was different then.  Tokyopop had yet to really come into their own.  They were around, but not as they were in their heyday just a couple of years later.  They were publishing manga under their Mixx label (an offshoot of their magazine, Mixxzine, which was meant to provide a mixture of shounen and shoujo manga).   The manga boom hadn’t happened yet.  Most manga came through two publishers so far as I can recall: Viz and Dark Horse (by way of Studio Proteus).  At any rate, those are the only two prominent publishers I remember from that time.  You might have found a slim selection of manga at a bookstore back then, but chances were better at a comic shop, and even there, the selection could be most generously described as “a hodge-podge”.  God alone knew what they might have in stock on a given day.  I certainly didn’t, and it never felt much as if the person running the store gave even half of a damn about it.  It’s a small miracle that I managed to collect even most of the series (let alone all of Magic Knight Rayearth and all of the Guyver manga that was ever made available in English) before my manga-buying slowed to its current trickle.

*             *             *

It’s always interesting to see your own culture and its trappings viewed from a very different perspective, or borrowed by people who didn't grow up steeped in it, especially if it’s purely for entertainment.  It can just as easily be an offensive experience, I suppose.  And I can imagine some people feeling that way about X, since it involves religion, and in this case it’s less a matter of “borrowing” than it is of “flat-out misappropriation”,  but whatever.  To the extent that I’m religious at all, I care far more about the people and the ideas native to my religion than the mythological structure.

In loose terms – very loose terms – X tells the story of the end of the world, as originally outlined in the Book of Revelation.  Sort of.

Kind of.

You have seven seals and seven harbingers, and a Beast, and… you know, I think that’s pretty much it.  It’s been a long time since I felt compelled to read through the most metal part of the Bible, but I don’t recall there having been any psychics, super-computers, young and irreverent Buddhist monks-in-training, Shinto shrine maidens who can summon swords from their palms, or anything like that.  I mean, again, it has been a while.  But you’d think they’d mention something like that in sermons.  I can guarantee you it would spike attendance.

So it goes down like this:

The year is 1999 (at the time, you see, this was The Future).  Powerful forces are gathering in Tokyo, a modern-day Babylon, which will determine the fate of the world.  On the one side, you have the seven Dragons of Earth, also known as the seven harbingers.  These are seven individuals specially gifted with various destructive powers, whose goal is to wipe out humankind.  Though they themselves are of course human, they believe humanity is a blight upon the Earth, and must be destroyed for the Earth to survive.  Opposing them are the seven Dragons of Heaven, also known as the seven seals.  These are people likewise gifted who fight in defense of humankind.  Both sides are guided by dreamseers, a pair of sisters who, through their dreams, prophesy different versions of the future, and guide their followers toward the outcomes they see and desire.

It turns out that the fate of the world rests on the integrity of seven specific locations throughout Tokyo, particular landmarks of the city.  If all of these places are destroyed, that destruction will trigger the end of the world.

The Dragons of Heaven attempt to stop this by way of an ability each of them has, which the Dragons of the Earth do not.  Each Dragon of Heaven is capable of creating a barrier called a kekkai, which pulls any combatants and the area encompassed by the barrier into an alternate dimension.  Damage done to the area within the barrier will not be reflected in the real world, unless the barrier’s maker dies within it.  If the attacking harbinger can be driven off, and the seal survives, then the damage dealt to that location never actually happens.

The end begins when Kamui Shiro returns to Tokyo after several years’ absence.  His mother (his only living relative) has passed away under mysterious circumstances.  Her dying wish is that he would return to Tokyo and try to change his fate.  He knows the power that lies within him, as do both sides of the emerging conflict.  Both sets of Dragons, Earth and Heaven alike, seek to recruit Kamui to their side, in the certain knowledge that he is destined to lead one side to victory over another.  Both dreamseers have seen it and know it to be true.  Kamui, meanwhile, simply wants to protect his childhood friends, Fuuma (a young man Kamui’s age) and Kotori (Fuuma’s younger sister, and a budding dreamseer in her own right).

While he initially comes across as callous and uncaring, we quickly learn that this is Kamui’s defense mechanism.  As with all the other players in this game, Kamui knows the stakes, and he knows the path he is destined to walk – or rather, the paths from which he is expected to choose.  At first, he wants no part of it, but it becomes all too clear that the conflict is unavoidable.  He will have to choose a side, and fight, and so he determines that in order to save his childhood friends, he will have to side with the Dragons of Heaven, and fight for humankind.

It’s at precisely this point that the story takes a hard left turn into the horrific.

A friend of mine (it may well have been the same friend who helped me acquire my VHS copy of the X movie) once told me that pretty much every work by CLAMP is notable for having a dark twist somewhere in it.  Not only does X fail spectacularly to avert this particular tendency, it stands as perhaps the single greatest example of it in CLAMP’s entire catalogue, then or now.

It turns out that both dreamseers were right, after all. 

A Kamui is destined to lead the Dragons of Heaven.  A Kamui is also destined to lead the Dragons of the Earth.  It comes down to the dual meanings of his name, which don’t really come across in English.  I’ll let Wikipedia do the heavy lifting for me, here:

“His name (神威 Kamui) carries a double connotation: "the one who represents the majesty of God", meaning the one who protects the world and carries out God's will; and "the one who hunts the majesty of God", meaning the one who kills those given God’s power and destroys the world.”

Kamui is not simply the character’s name, but a title.  And there is another Kamui in the story, a twin star, destined to take on the opposite role, regardless which side Kamui chooses.

That twin star, that other Kamui, is Fuuma, one of the childhood friends who was Kamui’s whole reason for coming back to Tokyo in the first place.

While the theme of fate and inevitability is shot through the whole story, it’s at this point that we see exactly how heavy-handed it gets.  And for me, this is the only real sticking point for the story.  I like the idea of duality (another major theme in the story), and I can appreciate the dramatic irony of Kamui being forced into a deadly conflict against one of the two people he specifically wanted to save.  And the conflict is deadly.  Rightly or wrongly, both sides seem to have surrendered themselves to the idea that the only way to win is to slaughter the enemy.

But Fuuma’s adopting the role of Kamui’s enemy happens for no better reason than, as we say on TV Tropes, “Because Destiny Says So” (I hate resorting to Troper-speak to describe things, but when the shoe fits…).  Fuuma has no stake, either practical or ideological, in the fight between both forces.  Indeed, aside from Kotori’s vague and frightening nightmares (which he has no reason to believe are anything but just that), he has no reason to believe such a fight is even occurring.  If he had a reason of his own to join the Dragons of the Earth, so that Kamui’s alliance with the Dragons of Heaven would push him over the edge into making the opposite choice, I would be set.  I would be goddamned riveted, is what I would be, and in such a way that I could not be more so without the use of actual rivets.

But even this only serves to demote X from “sublime” in my book to “really, really good”.  Maybe for me, it just scratches that itch.  It hits all the right notes of duality, touches on eschatological themes, and it has some truly gorgeous artwork.  It’s not a coincidence that my first art book was the price-gouging X Zero, which, ninety dollars or no ninety dollars, has still somehow been worth every penny.

Even at its most gruesome (and it gets very, very gruesome), X manages to be compelling – darkly poetic, if not always beautiful, when it revels in the gore.  In this, it straddles the boundary line between shounen and shoujo manga in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen.  For those not in the know, shoujo manga tends to focus on the relationships between the characters, and on their thoughts and feelings, and is generally marketed toward girls and young women.  X has this as part of its focus, and gives us the graceful, elegant character designs we’ve generally come to expect from most shoujo manga as well. 

Neatly balanced against all this thoughtfulness is the savage violence that erupts whenever the two sides of the conflict engage.  This is generally the territory of shounen manga, which often focuses more on action and conflict, and is generally marketed to boys and young men.  Given the nature of the conflicts and the violence, it might even be more accurate to describe this aspect of it as seinen, which is marketed more toward adult men.  Shoujo typically shies away from this level of brutality, but CLAMP is happy to shove your face right in it, perhaps to show how desperate and terrible people can be when this much is on the line.

There is a profound sense of duality within the story.  On the personal level, we have the potential and mutually exclusive fates from which Kamui can choose.  In a larger sense, we have the two groups diametrically opposed to each other, whose goals and ideologies make it both impossible for them to coexist and equally impossible for them not to come into conflict.  In a still larger sense, we have the two potential, and also mutually exclusive, fates of the world.  One side seeks to eliminate humankind from the world, while the other has faith that humankind will not destroy the world (despite how things appear at present), and chooses to leave the world in human hands.

The duality is even demonstrated outside the story proper, by the very juxtaposition of the narrative and the title itself.  The story relentlessly plugs the idea that fate cannot be denied.  Choices may be apparent, but consequences are fixed.  The destined order of events will not be flouted.  Yet the very title itself, X, was chosen because the letter represents possibility, and the lack of any fixed value, quantity, or inherent meaning.  This is a story all about constants and named after a variable, where most of the characters know that they are irrevocably committed to a particular cause and course of action, and treat all of it as a foregone conclusion.  They come to this sense of inevitability with feelings that range from grim determination, to stoic indifference, to cheerful fatalism.

Let’s take a look at one of these characters, to give some idea.  We’ll look at Sorata.  It was foretold in the stars when he was born (this series has kind of a thing for astrology) that he would die protecting the woman he loved.  Therefore, he was raised pretty much from birth to stick to Kamui’s side at all times and fight for him with all his might when the time came.  The logic here is very clear.  Since it is known that Sorata will only die protecting the woman he loves, then it is impossible for him to die any other way.  Thus he can serve as an invincible shield for Kamui, since nothing he does as such can possibly lead to his death.

The sense of fate is near what you see in Greek tragedy, where the will of the gods cannot be defied, and every time the heroes act to prevent it, they find that those same actions were in fact what would lead them to it all along.  You feel sometimes like it's just the knowing that's truly damning.  Oedipus would never have been set on the path to kill his father and marry his mother if his parents hadn't heard it from the oracle in the first place, after all.

Really, it's all very neatly put together.  The only really troubling thing about X  is its ending.  Endings. 

It’s complicated.

*             *             *

There are three ways to experience X, and each of them is a bit different from the others. 

The first, of course, is the manga, originally published by Viz Media.  It has the advantage of being closest to the creators’ original vision, and having a larger story with more elements to it.  It also has the disadvantage of being unfinished.

However much it may straddle the shounen-shoujo divide, X was published as a shoujo comic, in a shoujo magazine, and was subject to the same expectations as other shoujo manga.  As it turns out, you can’t go brutally subverting the expectations of your publisher without some consequences.  X was put on hiatus by the original manga magazine that was publishing the story, and it was a few years before CLAMP either found another outlet for the story, or convinced the original publisher ot give it another go.  I'm not sure which.  But it was again put on hiatus by the publisher due to the relentlessly dark nature of the material (and probably some of the graphic violence, also).  This time, it seems to have been for good.  Wikipedia lists it as “ongoing”, but this is probably wishful thinking at best.  The manga remains unfinished, and is increasingly likely to remain so the more time goes by.

The second X experience is the movie.

I have very conflicting feelings about the movie.

On the one hand, X the movie is gorgeous.  It’s not gorgeous in perhaps the same way a Ghibli film or something directed by Mamoru Oshii tends to be, but the quality of the artwork and the fluidity of its animation is consistently high.  The movie was made in 1996 (before the manga was put on its first hiatus), and holds up extremely well today.  It’s a feast for the eyes and the ears, keeping in mind of course that it preserves virtually none of what makes the X story any good.

I don’t mind spoiling it, because I have no respect for the story of the movie.  The movie, for its part, seems to have no respect for the story of the manga, so it all evens out.  And anyway, I can’t think of a better way to explain how much the story has been pared down to its absolute barest essentials to even fit it (uncomfortably, for all that) into the framework of a feature film. 

The cast of X consists of seven seals and seven harbingers, two dreamseers, Kamui, Fuuma, and Kotori.  And Kamui’s mother, in a sort of flashback.  That’s twenty named characters, all of whom are important to the story in the manga.

Of these, Kamui alone survives the movie, which is about an hour and a half long.  Some characters even manage to die multiple times, by way of dreams or visions.

The movie is a fucking bloodbath, is what I’m saying.

Now, again, it is a visual and aural feast of a fucking bloodbath, but it’s still that, just the same.

X the movie has a kind of slow but steady, crushing weight to it.  It doesn’t pick up speed much, but then, it doesn’t need to.  It moves forward relentlessly, killing off its cast without granting any particular sense of importance to any individual death.  These are people we are meant to care about, and they die with impunity.  There are so many of these deaths that their collective weight wears on you in a way that any one character’s demise never could (though some stand about for being remarkably cruel or brutal).  There is such a relentless, overbearing weight of dread in the story that, very early on, you will come to assume (correctly) that nothing truly good will happen to any of these people by the time the movie’s done.

A better movie might make you feel wrung out at the end of this sort of meat grinder.  But this isn’t that better movie.  So you simply come out of the movie feeling disappointed, and maybe a little disturbed.  And if you’re new to this, and don’t have the sort of weird predilections I do, which make you say “More of this, please!” when you watch a movie like this with no real grounding, you’re probably just going to be confused.  And disturbed.  Most definitely disturbed.

The movie may prove difficult to find, as it was originally licensed by Manga Entertainment.  The license has since expired, and has not been picked up by anyone else.

The third and final way to experience X, which has the benefits of being both more coherent and also finished, would be the 24-episode TV series which ran from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2002.  Animated by Madhouse, the TV series is both very technically proficient and also well-paced (if a bit sedate).  Happily, you can still find it, as Funimation picked it up after Geneon lost the license.

While there are some elements of the manga that didn’t make it into the TV series, and not all of the characters get the same amount of development (or any at all), they at least get some room to breathe, and enough time that we can care about the ones we’re supposed to care about.  The ending to the TV series also feels just about right, as opposed to the movie’s, which just felt sort of tacked-on and a bit anti-climactic. 

*             *             *

I began this with a frankly dark, maybe even morbid introduction.  Part of it is the season, and part of it is just that those thoughts exist, and they don’t disappear, they just kind of go away for a while.  But they always come back.

Earlier, I said that I didn’t want to wrestle with the hows and whys of why I like apocalyptic stories.  And that’s still true.  I don’t.  Not here, anyway, and not now.  But I can offer up one bit of explanation in closing, to hopefully end this on a positive note.  It’s this:

Whatever my feelings about the grim inevitability of things at any particular moment, I still wrestle with it.  Nihilism and cynicism are so easy.  They are too easy, and I long ago learned to distrust very easy solutions to big problems.  Simple solutions, sure.  Big problems usually do have simple solutions, in my experience.  But simple isn’t the same thing as easy. 

What I like most about X, maybe even love, is the characters.  Even as they recognize the sheer immutability of their fates, they play with those certainties.  They find the wiggle room, sparse as it seems, to be who they are, to have their own lives, shortened though they may be.  There is something in that struggle, however much more immediate and urgent it is for them, that resonates with my own to an extent.

I like the idea that you can face the inevitability of annihilation, so long as you can give meaning to who and what you are, and what you do.

There is something amazing in that, to me, that I’m not sure I will ever have the words or the ability or the time to untangle completely.

Surprisingly seasonal: Final Fantasy IX

For some reason, Final Fantasy IX always makes me think a little bit of Christmas.

Actually, I shouldn’t say “for some reason”, because the truth is I know perfectly well why IX puts me in a Christmas frame of mind.

Set the Wayback Machine to late 2000.  I had shipped out for basic training in the Army on Halloween of that year.  What with one thing and another, I was in reception and fitness training for a while, and didn’t get to basic training proper until the day before Thanksgiving.  I don’t know if they still do, but at the time, the Army sent all Initial Entry Training (IET) soldiers home for two weeks for the holidays.  The trip home is a short story all by itself, but one for another time.

This was right shortly after the PS2 launch, and I was sorely tempted to buy one when I got home.  But at that time, it was really never even a possibility.  One reason was that I didn’t have quite enough money to justify it in addition to all the games I bought while I was home, and my buying those games — a certain core few of them, anyway — was never in question.  Since they were all PS1 games, there seemed no real necessity at the time for a PS2.  Another reason, far more practical, was that there simply were no PS2s to be had.  That soon after launch, finding a PS2 in a store was a lot like finding a Wii after that system’s launch some six years later.

It was, in some ways, one of the best Christmas seasons of my life.  I felt as free from outside responsibilities as I ever have, in a way.  Sure, basic training was a stressful environment, and there was no question of my going back to it after my brief, two-week reprieve was up.  But during those two weeks, I was liberated more completely than I have ever been (and likely ever will be again) from pretty much all the normal pressures and stresses of life, in the Army or otherwise. 

I can still remember all the games I bought in that shining two-week stretch: Breath of Fire IV, Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete (about both of these, I will assuredly be writing at some later point), Mega Man X5, Mega Man Legends 2, RayCrisis: Series Termination, Vampire Hunter D (God knows why), and of course, Final Fantasy IX.  It was Lunar 2 and Final Fantasy IX that I had been most looking forward to.  The rest were impulse buys, and mostly worth it.

To this day, the songs “The Place I’ll Return to Someday” and “Crossing Those Hills” from the soundtrack put me in mind of snowfall, Christmas decorations, being with family.  The former, especially, has a nice medieval-ish feel to it. 

Of course, there’s nothing especially Christmas-y about IX in itself, but because of this association, every year when the holidays roll around, I get the itch to start playing it again.

*             *             *

In those days, most of the Final Fantasy fans I knew came into the series with Final Fantasy VII.  I did, myself.  The history of the series prior to that point has always been a little murky to me.  There are names of characters, places, weapons, and spells which crop up throughout the series, and which I know are significant, but which by the same token I have no personal experience with.  Aside from Final Fantasy III, I haven’t really made a series attempt at any of the older games, and even my run at III was the DS version.  So even most of what I know is secondhand, things I’ve heard about and read about – absorbed through some sort of strange osmosis – rather than seen and done for myself.

Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII were pretty radical departures from the accepted norms of the series (up to that point), which had always leaned pretty heavily toward high fantasy.  Final Fantasy VI (Final Fantasy III originally, here in the U.S.) was somewhat steampunk, but that was about it.  Yet Final Fantasy IX is a call back to those earlier times, what we in the late 90s and early 2000s were calling “classic” or “old-school” (if you can believe it!).  But in the late 90s, Final Fantasy VII and VIII seemed worlds away from their immediate predecessors.  Today, of course, they hardly seem so revolutionary, except in terms of technical presentation.  But that’s hindsight for you.  In its time, the look, feel, and themes of IX seemed like a deliberate call back to yesteryear.

So Final Fantasy IX is a kind of love-letter to the elder days of the series, name-dropping characters, places, and items from times past.  It has a light-hearted streak in it, and while many of the human characters look appropriately anime-styled, a number of non-human characters, like Freya, and Doctor Tot, and maybe Amarant, look almost like something out of Brian Froud’s work.  Even as the story is mainly serious, there’s a certain sense of fun and whimsy, as if the underlying directive of the game’s overall design was a question: “Wouldn’t it be neat if…?”

Wouldn’t it be neat if there was a whole city built throughout the branches and trunk of an unfathomably massive tree?  Wouldn’t it be neat if there was an underground transit system between two cities that was basically a cart slung from the body of a giant insect who simply walks along a track in the ceiling?  Wouldn’t it be neat if…?

And the world this all takes place in treats all the oddities – the non-human people like Freya and Amarant, the odd, improbable locations – purely as a matter of course.  The game never goes out of its way in the narrative to point out all these weird, wonderful things.  It just puts them there, and you go through them, and you think, “Wow, that’s really neat!”  If anything, it heightens the sense of wonder.  You feel like you’re discovering these things for yourself, instead of having them forced upon you, or having them belabored, as if by a tour guide. 

*             *             *

If Final Fantasy IX takes its sense of light-hearted, free-wheeling adventure from the older entries in the series, it gets its overall sense of structure and mechanics from the newer entries still.

Like its immediate predecessors on the PS1, Final Fantasy IX features actively rendered 3D character models on lush, detailed pre-rendered backgrounds.  Battles are still turn-based, and still use the ATB system originally developed back in the early 90s with Final Fantasy IV.  However, the pace of IX is somewhat slow compared to its predecessors.  Loading times are longer than they’ve ever been, which is especially problematic when you’re heading into battles.  Minor battles may wind up taking longer to load (and to exit once you’re done) than they actually take to fight.  The battles themselves seem to take longer as well, compared to earlier games.  The ATB gauges fill slowly (at least, until you get your levels high enough), and the battles are in some ways bigger.  At the very least, your own party is bigger – Final Fantasy IX allows you to take four characters into battle, just like the “classic” games it strives to remind you of so much – instead of just three like VII and VIII do.

Character advancement is also simpler than in previous games.  The gear you equip will have various skills which you can activate.  If you keep a skill active long enough, you’ll learn it permanently, even after discarding the equipment itself.  For those who felt hamstrung by the subtle complexities of Final Fantasy VIII’s junction system, this is a breath of fresh air.

The characters themselves are reminiscent of Final Fantasy IV.  Not in themselves, but in the way they are presented.  Each character essentially adheres to one of the main jobs from the Job System, first introduced in Final Fantasy III.  Zidane, our hero, is a Thief.  Garnet is a White Mage and Summoner, with a focus on her White Mage abilities (another character, encountered later, has the same mix of abilities, but with the balance reversed).  Vivi is a Black Mage.  Steiner is a Knight or Paladin.  Amarant is a Monk, while Freya is a Dragoon. 

This gives you a party of characters with their own unique identities, both in terms of the story and in terms of game mechanics, which was an unfortunate failing of VII and VIII.  While the games’ various systems allowed for a lot of leeway in customization, they did so to the detriment of the characters’ sense of identity beyond what could be expressed in the story scenes proper.  I personally like the game mechanics and story to be a bit more solidly merged; I dislike the feeling that the parts I’m watching and the parts I’m playing are largely divorced, so I appreciate the way IX handles its characters.

Ultimately, I’d argue that the game’s… stately pace is probably the only major failing with regards to mechanics or structure.  While in some ways the overall design isn’t as ambitious as Final Fantasy VII or VIII, and it does wind up being fairly linear for most of its length, these are not necessarily bad things in themselves.  We tend to think of them as bad in terms of Japanese RPG design, because many Japanese RPGs are quite linear compared to many Western RPGs, and in PS1 era the problem was especially bad.  But it’s not a bad design choice inherently, and sometimes these familiar elements can be comforting.

*             *             *

Final Fantasy VII started us off with a high-intensity bombing mission, throwing us right into the action with barely a word of explanation or justification until the excitement died down.  Final Fantasy VIII gave us a CG cinema scene montage that segued into an intense duel between the two rival characters of the story, and gave us a nice, exciting battle not too long after.

Final Fantasy IX begins with the Princess Garnet til Alexandros having a dream that may be a memory from her childhood, when she was on a boat on a storm-tossed sea.  Then the story steps sideways, and gives us our hero, Zidane Tribal.  He’s a thief, a womanizer, and a wise-cracker.  He also, for some reason, has a monkey’s tail.  It’s important later, actually (kind of), but nobody comments on it.  When you have rodent people running around; and black mages with no faces except for their big, glowing eyes; and the king of a neighboring country who’s been turned into a sort of insect creature (and later on, a frog); and various other not-quite-human characters, a man with a tail seems pretty mundane in context, even if it does appear to be prehensile.  We see Zidane plotting with his companions, part of a group called Tantalus.  They have a dastardly plan to kidnap Princess Garnet, and then the story steps sideways again, and now we’re in the oversized blue coat and big, pointy hat of Vivi, a black mage.  He’s going to see a play titled “I Want to Be Your Canary” (though he seems to have been sold forged tickets by a scalper).  The play is a sort of faux-Shakespeare piece; it’s being performed by a renowned theater group called Tantalus…

It sounds maybe like a recipe for drama, or madcap hilarity, or maybe both.  It settles for being amusing, and being a deliberate start for a story that’s a slow burn most of the way through.  We find out that Tantalus’s plan to kidnap the princess is actually a rescue attempt.  Garnet’s mother has not been herself in recent years, and she has taken to leveraging the weapons being sold to her by an arms dealer named Kuja (who looks nothing at all like any other arms dealer the world – ours or the world of Final Fantasy IX – has ever known) to invade neighboring countries and claim more territory for her kingdom of Alexandria.  Among her weapons are the black mages, who seem to operate with one directive and one directive only: To destroy.

And yet not all black mages can be bad.  Vivi’s one of them, after all.  And while Zidane is the protagonist, in a major way, Vivi is the emotional center, the figurative heart of the story.  The other characters have led lives that went more or less normally – even Zidane, really – but not Vivi. 

Vivi was not born, but created.  He is a black mage; in Final Fantasy IX, these are a separate race of beings which Alexandria has recently begun to use.  Like the rest of these, Vivi was intended to be a weapon, but something went a bit off during his manufacture, apparently.  Instead of being an engine of mindless destruction, he has a conscience.  Where many other black mages you come across are menacing with their completely obscured faces and large, glowing eyes, Vivi seems simply innocent and a little naïve, childlike in a way. 

Fairly early on, you run across a village of other black mages who, like Vivi, are choosing to live their own lives.  But they face a dilemma.  After a period of time – no one knows how long, and it seems to vary for everyone – a black mage simply… stops.  They go limp, fall down, and no longer do or say anything or respond to anything or anyone.  The black mages aren’t certain what this stopping is, exactly, but they worry about it, and fear it.  Vivi, traveling with a band of much more normal people – for a given value of “normal” – begins to understand what this stopping is all about.  More, he begins to understand, from what he has witnessed of the other black mages, that although he has no way to know how much time is left before he “stops”, too, all signs point to it being not very long.

But despite his youth, his inexperience, and his childlike nature, Vivi does the thing which so many other characters, even the seemingly happy-go-lucky Zidane himself, can hardly bring themselves to do with all their experience of the world.  Perhaps he can do it simply because he is so childlike, because his experience of the world has been so limited, and so filled with kind, caring people.  He hopes.

In many ways, this hope is the theme of Final Fantasy IX.  There's the usual stuff about saving the world from an outside menace that threatens to destroy it, and it's all interesting enough, and well done, but I'd prefer not to give much away, and it will lose a lot of its impact for being known ahead of time.  The important point is this: To see that life is still worth living – that it is still worth going grimly forward in the face of danger, despair, horrible truths and pain and seemingly certain doom – requires hope, but in the end, is worth it.  The hope will sustain you, if you let it, if you choose not to close your heart to it.  And that in the darkest moments, the pain can be borne, and you can go on, because you are not alone.

*             *             *

It was surprising to write those last few paragraphs, because honestly, I hadn’t known this, or at any rate I hadn’t thought this, about the game until I started writing about it.  I find that this is sometimes the case.  An idea may be nebulous and vague in my mind, or completely unrealized, and remain that way until I start trying to put words to it.

At any rate, I think that’s where I’ll leave this for the time being.  I’m not sure how much I’ve said here that may be of any real use or import or significance, but I got here by muddling through from beginning to end, mostly, the way I usually do, and I think I ended it on the right note, however I got there. 

Friendship and fellowship and hope.

I have a hard time thinking of a better way to celebrate the upcoming holiday than these.

Toward the Sky

It took me three years to get around to finishing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

In itself, this is hardly noteworthy — for me.  Off the top of my head, the longest it’s ever taken me to finish a game was seven years for Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete, which I bought around Christmas of 2000, and finished sometime around January of 2008.  If I ever manage to beat the final boss of Breath of Fire IV, which I bought around the same time, that will make the record, I think.  I wonder sometimes if I have a very selective type of ADD, or ADHD, or something.

But most of the time, it doesn’t take me this long to get around to finishing a Zelda game.  Most Zelda games occupy a rare spot in my mind, up there with Halo or Metal Gear Solid or Mass Effect.  These are games which, once begun, I tend to play exclusively until completion.

But there were several points during the game where I was compelled to set the controller down and go play something else.  It was that, or throw my hands in the air (and the controller through the TV, in all likelihood), and scream to no one in particular “Oh, this is bullshit!”

Interestingly, it wasn’t because of the much-vaunted (or much-lamented, depending on who you talk to) motion controls.

*             *             *

Let’s talk about the motion controls for a bit, though, because from what I’ve seen that seems to overshadow most discussion about the game.  It’s kind of the Big Thing with Skyward Sword and I want to get that out of the way up front.

Skyward Sword presents us with the realization of a fantasy, or at least a lot of blue-sky speculation, that I believe a lot of people had about Twilight Princess back when speculation about the Wii and Twilight Princess was all we had.  There was this idea in some corners of the internet that with motion controls, every swing of the remote would correspond to a swing of the sword, moving in the same direction, with the same speed, that the player moved.  Of course, the reality was much different.  But Skyward Sword makes this (somewhat) possible through the more advanced motion sensors and accelerometer of the Wii Motion Plus.  For some people, this probably ought to be filed under the category of “Be Careful What You Wish For”.

There is no simple button combination you press to strike one way or another.  Swing the remote horizontally, and Link executes a horizontal attack.  Swing it vertically, and Link attacks upward or downward, depending on how you swing.   Thrust forward, or slash diagonally, and Link does those as well.  He holds his sword at whatever angle you’re holding the remote; there is literally a one-to-one correspondence between the remote and the sword.  At first, it’s sort of neat.

It quickly gets difficult.

Combat used to more or less boil down to pressing the attack button when the enemy was not defending, to continue pressing it until the enemy was dead, and to let up occasionally when the enemy was defending itself (if it was capable of such a thing).  Bosses and a handful of other enemies (mini-bosses and Darknuts, mainly) typically took a little more thought, but the rank-and-file bad guys have traditionally been relatively simple to dispatch.

Skyward Sword makes every enemy a puzzle. 

Enemies may block high or low, left or right.  You learn quickly to attack from the side opposite their defense.  Your own defense is less than assured.  All of your shields can take damage, and eventually break, under the strain of constant abuse.  The Hylian shield is the exception to this, but it’s found late in the game, is completely optional, and frankly, if you have the skills to earn it, you can probably pretty safely do without.  Now, if you can manage to time a shield thrust just right, no damage will be done to the shield.  Of course, failing in this shield thrust results in getting hit.  And the enemies in Skyward Sword can punish you brutally.  This is the first game in the series to start you off with six heart containers instead of the usual three, and it only feels generous until you start fighting enemies. 

And then (if all of this wasn’t enough) if you’ve been simply blundering along, relying on blind luck 

and persistence to carry you through, the first boss will annihilate you.

So that’s combat in Skyward Sword:  Learn, or suffer.

I may be overselling it a bit.  It takes a measure of getting used to, for sure.  But Nintendo made sure that the controls weren’t just a gimmick.  They are central to the game.  You can’t scrape by on luck.  You must learn, or you will get nowhere.  And ultimately, it works.  By the end, I had only two real problems with the motion control scheme.

The first problem was mainly just me.  When it gets down to the wire, I tend to get a little panicky and flustered, which resulted in me more than once just wildly swinging the remote when even just a little bit of clear thinking would have gotten me through.   And that’s a thing you learn quickly with Skyward Sword: you need to be on the ball pretty much all the time.  Even minor enemies require a little bit of thought.  Take slimes, for instance:  If you attack one with a horizontal strike, that will split it into two slimes.  But because it’s a horizontal cut, that means one of the two is directly on top of the other.  When it falls onto the one below, the two merge, and now you have one slime again, and meanwhile have dealt no damage.  You have to attack them vertically.  Also, some Deku Babas now have a four-part jaw, which can open either horizontally or vertically, and you have to attack along the line of the jaw’s opening to deal any damage.

The second problem was with the controls, though.  While they never once, in my play through, failed to track motion correctly, the “neutral position” did tend to wander a bit.  That is, I would hold the remote control forward, while Link would hold his sword out to the side.  All motion would correspond completely to how I moved the remote, but would be offset in proportion to the initial difference between how I held the remote and how Link held the sword.  Now, if this only occurred during sword fights, it wouldn’t be so bad.  The neutral position does tend, over time, to wander back to true.  But it becomes especially frustrating with swimming and flying, which are done by angling the remote.  Thankfully, this can be fixed.  You can go into the menu at any time and recalibrate the remote.

The overall experience I had with the motion controls was positive, if not completely enthusiastic.  Put more simply, while it was a fun experiment on the whole, I definitely don't want Nintendo doing this for every Zelda game.  Skyward Sword was an interesting divergence, but should not be the way of the future.  But when it worked, it worked phenomenally.  The final few battles of the game were some of the most exhilarating I’ve ever fought through because of it.

*             *             *

So if it wasn’t the sharply divisive motion controls that brought me to a halt so often, what was it?

Well, Skyward Sword has a few segments where you’re looking for magical energy to upgrade the Goddess Sword, which is the weapon you have for most of the game.  To do this, you enter into a kind of spirit realm, and must search for the Goddess’s Tears.  The spirit realm segments are taken from actual areas of the main game, except certain points are closed off here and there to make navigating more difficult.  You have no access to your equipment or weapons in this part of the game, and must traverse the terrain with just the basic maneuvers available.  This would be tedious all on its own – I tend to dislike hunt-the-widget challenges in general, because I invariably get down to a final two or three widgets which are hidden in infuriatingly clever spots, and run around in circles trying to find them.

Skyward Sword makes this worse by imposing a time limit.  From the moment you leave the starting point, you’re pursued by enemies who will “kill” you in a single blow.  If you collect a Goddess Tear, the enemies revert to their starting positions for two minutes.  Each Goddess Tear you collect restarts the countdown, but if you run the timer down or manage to trip the alarm in another way, the enemies will begin chasing you again.  If any of them strike you, you’re returned to the starting point, and have to collect the Goddess Tears all over again.

So the game takes a task I already find tedious, and ups the ante by making it stressful.  There is no part of these sections of the game which I enjoy.  The game makes you do this four times in all.  What was especially frustrating was that the last of these collectathons should have been the easiest, since unlike the others, it takes place in an area you’ll have visited countless times prior.  But since it was so long since I’d actually played the game, it was just as bad as the rest because my memory of that area was fuzzier than it would normally have been on a straight run through.

These parts of the game were why I took so long to finish it.  Pretty much everything else was highly enjoyable.  But these particular parts of the game, I found infuriating to the point where I had to stop playing because I couldn’t keep my composure any longer, and the thought of going back to them was actively repellent.

“You feel betrayed,” my wife told me, when I tried to explain all of this.  “This is a series you’ve been playing since you were a kid, and enjoying all the time, and now it’s doing something you hate.”

She’s right, mostly, but I feel like maybe “betrayed” is putting it a bit strong.  “Disappointed” or “let down” might be a better description, but at any rate “deeply unhappy”.  I play games to relax and have fun, not to get stressed out and made to do tedious, frustrating tasks over and over again, from scratch, as punishment for even a single mistake.

But this is probably less a problem with the game itself, and more a problem I personally have with the game.  I have spoken to people who like these segments, after all, and to the best of my recollection, none of them were mental patients.  Not at the time, anyway.

*             *             *

So that’s the bad, then, in a nutshell.  The motion controls (which people in general seemed pretty divided about), and the bullshit collectathons, which I personally hated, but which may be someone’s cup of tea, at least.

How’s the rest, then?  Barring these two specific things, how does Skyward Sword stack up, broadly speaking?

When it comes to long-running game series, it’s difficult to think about them in a vacuum.  What they do right and wrong, and what you (or I, anyway) tend to like and dislike about them has a context, a frame of reference, derived from things the series has done well or poorly in previous installments.  The longer the series, the more of an issue this becomes.  I was going to say “the more of a problem this becomes,” but I’m not sure it’s a problem really, so much as it’s just a kind of … thing.

Let’s overlook this failure of articulation for a moment, and move on.

So when you have a massive video game franchise spanning multiple video game systems and dating farther back than the birth of a sizeable portion of your fan base, it can be risky to go mucking around with the established structure, mechanics, and lore of the series.  A strange thing happens when people become fervent fans of something: they begin to identify with it.  And any changes they dislike, whether they be additions to or subtractions from the original formula, tend to be unwelcome.  And that’s putting it kindly.  Not that Nintendo seems to be worried about this overmuch.

There are people who have been declaring each new Zelda game since (and including) Majora’s Mask to be a failure, and a harbinger of the death of the franchise.  That was back in 2000.  And yet, somehow, here it is plodding gamely along in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Fourteen, reliably turning a profit for Nintendo all the while.

This is the most curious definition of “failure” and “franchise death” I have ever seen.  And there certainly have been changes. 

In this outing, Link is more athletic and maneuverable than he’s ever been.  The roll maneuver has been done away with.  Among other things, this tremendously improves on the series soundtrack which, since Ocarina of Time, has largely consisted of “Hup!” *thump* *thump* *thump* “Hup!” *thump* *thump* *thump*, at least if you wanted to get anywhere in a hurry and had no access to a horse.  Instead, Link sprints for short stretches.  He can run up walls for a couple of steps before hopping up to grab a ledge, and can hang from these ledges to avoid notice, groping his way along them, hand over hand.  He also spends a lot more time climbing and swinging from vines and ivy.   We’re not quite dealing with the levels of parkour present in, say, Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, but it’s still nice to have a different set of maneuvers, and Link seems to navigate the landscape more smoothly.

Said landscape, by the way, is completely gorgeous.

The artwork in Skyward Sword strikes a nice balance between the more realistic look of Twilight Princess and the cel-shaded cartoony look of Wind Waker, and has an overall sort of Impressionistic look to it.  Or so I’m told.  I don’t know enough about art to say for sure on my own authority.  But, look, it looks beautiful, even playing on an HD TV, where the picture quality is (unavoidably) sort of jagged and awful.  The artwork allows for more realistic figures to stand together in the same environment as more fantastical structures and landscapes and creatures that are wildly improbably or frankly impossible in reality, and still look coherent and internally consistent.

Part of the reason this style seems to have been chosen was to facilitate the sword-fighting mentioned above.  With the bolder colors and more pronounced, cartoony animation, and less intricately detailed designs, it’s easier to tell how the enemies are posed and to telegraph their movements.

The world itself is a bit smaller than some outings, and honestly more linear, but denser with secrets and things to do.  As opposed to the emptiness of Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule Field, or Twilight Princess’s main overworld or, God help us, the ocean from Wind Waker (which I get weirdly nostalgic about, even as I remember its tedium), all of the areas you visit seem to have a purpose other than just being big so as to contribute to the world’s sense of scale.  Each location hints (some more strongly than others) at a place which once had a purpose in the larger context of the ancient world.  There is a bit of emptiness to the hub world in the sky where Link nominally lives, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it could be, and can be navigated with relative speed and ease.  At any rate, it doesn’t take much time or hassle to get to the interesting areas.

Another common complaint leveled against the Zelda series in recent years is that the various tools you unearth are, much like keys, useful only in the dungeons where you find them.  Skwyard Sword happily averts this.  You will frequently be called upon to use your tools (this is more true of some than others) throughout the adventure.  At first, this was actually disorienting to me.  I’d gotten so used to finding an item, using it in the one dungeon, and then promptly forgetting about it (barring items with some combat utility, like the bow and arrows) that I kept getting thrown for a loop by the constant need for older items.  It didn’t help that, putting the game down for long intervals here and there, I tended to forget the varied uses of some of the game’s tools. 

So that’s another nice thing about Skyward Sword: it keeps you on your toes a bit, demanding that you keep in the forefront of your mind a good working knowledge of everything you can do with the tools at hand.  The first major tool you get, a sort of remote-controlled metallic bug, can be used to scout out difficult-to-reach areas, grab items from far off, hit switches, and even drop bombs.  The gust jar can be used to blow sand off of surfaces to reveal items, but can also be used as a sort of jet to propel you along on hanging platforms.  In addition, many of these items can be upgraded in town, to increase their power, range, and duration of use.  This includes your shields, which helps to offset their destructibility somewhat.

Another nice change is the way bosses are handled.  For a good long while now, the typical pattern of most Zelda bosses has been pretty much a three-step process.

1.       Use the item you found in the dungeon to expose the boss’s weak point.

2.       Mash the attack button repeatedly, until the weak point is no longer exposed.

3.       Repeat.

While this is still true to some extent, in that you need to use the dungeon item to expose the boss’s weak point, getting to the boss and actually doing any kind of damage often requires some skill with using the sword, or other mastery of the motion controls.  The particular pattern you need to follow, while still being mostly logical, seems a bit less blatantly telegraphed.  Like combat in general, this helps to avoid the motion controls becoming some kind of gimmick.  Nintendo clearly took the idea seriously and integrated it into the core of the game, and you have to likewise take it seriously yourself, and learn it.

*             *             *

So in addition to making substantial changes to the mechanics of the series, Skyward Sword also delves into the deeper background lore of the series.  In fact, it sets out to tell the origin story for the whole series.  Amusingly, the whole thing calls back to a conflict even further back in the past, which isn’t elaborated upon much.

The Zelda history/mythology/legendry, whatever you want to call it, has never been terribly complex.  It’s seemed pretty variable and flexible over the years (to the point of seeming just plain inconsistent at times), but the main beats and the major elements are all there.  Skyward Sword purports to give us a foundation for all that’s happened so far, to explain what set this recurring conflict into motion.  But The Silmarillion, this isn’t.

We begin with two deities:  the demon Demise, who seeks to conquer the world and destroy all who stand in his path, and the goddess Hylia, who seeks to stop Demise and protect her chosen people.  How the triple goddesses of the Triforce fit into all of this is alluded to and implied more than explained outright, which I personally think was the right call.  The vagueness helps it all retain a certain sense of mystery.

In the end, Hylia managed to seal Demise away, but before doing so, led her chosen people to escape by way of her magic.  This escape involved taking their town away into the sky, where it remains today.  It is called Skyloft.  The people there have basically forgotten that there ever was a world on the surface.  There, many young men and women train to be knights at the knight academy.  When they graduate, they are given a particular set of clothing to wear, with the color varying every year.  The cut and color for Link’s year should look familiar to most series fans.

In Skyward Sword, Zelda is not a princess, but she is the daughter of the headmaster of the knight academy.  Predictably enough, she finds herself imperiled by the forces of Demise, who have not been sitting idly by since his imprisonment.  She is in short order plucked out of the sky and left stranded on the long-forgotten surface world.  So it falls to Link, chosen champion of the goddess, to save her.  To say that Zelda is more than she appears to be is to state the obvious.

Relatively early in his travels, Link runs afoul of Ghirahim, who is an agent of some sort for Demise.  Ghirahim seems to strike a fine balance between sinister and foppish.  He teases and mocks Link, which backfires on him spectacularly, but he ultimately serves as a kind of nemesis.

Aiding Link on his travels is Fi, the spirit within the Goddess Sword which Link is given on his search for Zelda.  Fi seems to be a mostly mechanical being, imparting advice on where to go next and initially quite dispassionate on anything not immediately related to the quest she shares with Link.  Most of the time, she just reminded me of Midna from Twilight Princess (one of the only things most people can unanimously agree that Nintendo got right with that game), except not as amusing or as interesting.  She’s not a bad character, but she’s not as good as Midna, and is tied into the mechanics in unfortunate ways.  She will, for instance, inform you that you are low on health and need to seek hearts, as if the constant, irritating chime that always accompanies dangerously low health needed clarifying.

The world in many ways makes me think of the original Legend of Zelda.  Like the first game in the series (perhaps deliberately as a tribute to the origins of the series; Skyward Sword marked Zelda’s 25^th anniversary, after all) the world is largely abandoned, and most of the people you encounter wandering about it do so at some degree of peril.  The abandonment heightens the sense of mystery.  You see various statues and structures built by a long-vanished people for purposes which never seem quite clear.  Odd gazebos and fences give certain sections of the woods an almost park-like feel, albeit run-down and overgrown.  The mining facilities in Lanayru province, now a desert, speak of a fascinating, highly advanced past, which you glimpse here and there, in bits and pieces.

Done correctly, I tend to prefer this to endless exposition.  I’d rather not know, sometimes.  The wondering is almost always more fun than the knowing.  Granted, the world doesn't have quite the hostility of, say, Shadow of the Colossus (itself based to some extent on the original Legend of Zelda in this respect).  It’s a Nintendo game, so it’s going to be a little more friendly, a little more cozy.  Ironically, while Shadow of the Colossus's world felt more threatening, it was completely safe to traverse, barring the colossi themselves.  Skyward Sword, meanwhile, is bright colorful, and full of things trying to kill you.

Yet at the same time it feels abandoned, Skyward Sword does get across a sense of ancient mystery and loss.  Alone in the wastes and the wilderness, you have the feeling that there was something here, once.  Something great that is now lost, left largely to the keeping of the monsters that roam seemingly at random, and of which the civilization of Skyloft and its people is but a dim shadow.

*             *             *

Taken as a whole, I thoroughly enjoyed Skyward Sword.  There were sections that frustrated me, but this is less because they seemed unfair and more because they explored game mechanics that I dislike.  For the most part, I enjoyed myself.  I can see where the motion controls would be a hurdle for some, and while I didn’t have too much problem with them beyond the one or two hitches I mentioned above, I can see others not caring for them much.

Aside from that, I feel like Skyward Sword did nearly everything else pretty much right.

A Galaxy of Possibilities

My experience with Western role-playing games is, well…  “Sparse” would be a tremendous understatement.  “Just this side of non-existent” is probably more accurate.  I played Stonekeep for a few months back in 1999 or early 2000, well after it was new (I was going to say “after it was relevant”, but then remembered there was really never any such time).  And I’ve sunk some hours into Diablo and Diablo II.  But that’s pretty well it.

Final Fantasy VII was my first real RPG of any kind that wasn’t part RPG, part something else (like Crystalis on the NES).  And of course, then there were the subsequent Final Fantasy installments (and some earlier ones), Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Lunar: Eternal Blue Complete, a few Breath of Fire games, some time spent tinkering with a few Tales games... 

The pattern to all of these is usually pretty straightforward, well worn territory.  You have a town where someone tells you where to go next and who or what you need to kill there, some other people might give you helpful hints, drop information about a short side-quest, or let you buy and sell various items and bits of equipment.  Experience is earned from battles, which tend to occur randomly – this particular ageing, hoary mechanic comes down to us from of old, when this was the best way to simulate the occasional encounter with dangerous monsters you might expect while traversing the trackless wilds of the fantasy world du jour.  Killing monsters earns you experience points, and eventually, when you accumulate enough, your experience level increases.  This makes all the monster-pummeling marginally easier.

In between these bouts of village-finding and random encounter-having, the story occurs.  This typically happens in chunks of cut-scenes, completely non-interactive.  These tend to be riddled with bits of whatever the director or scenario writer can remember of their time in Philosophy 101.

Perhaps I’m being unfair, but if so, well, familiarity breeds contempt.  Certainly there are exceptions.  And there is a certain amount of comfort in having one’s expectations catered to.  But these exceptions are just that: exceptions.  And by their nature as such, they merely serve to underscore the general pattern. 

So as you can likely imagine, much of Mass Effect was strange to me.  Getting experience points just from talking to people and examining things?  Having party members I can actually talk to when I want, to explore their personalities and their pasts (or not) as I choose?  Being able to choose what I wanted to say?  Being asked a question, and being able to say “No” without the game saying, effectively, “Haha, okay, seriously though: say ‘yes’ or you’re not going anywhere”?  What madness was this?

*             *             *

I first encountered Mass Effect at a friend’s house, back when the game was still new.  I was vaguely intrigued by what little I saw of the opening mission, though I was horrible at what little I played because the Xbox 360 controller was unfamiliar to me.  Its placement of the A, B, X, and Y buttons was completely the opposite of what I expected.  Back then, the game looked amazing.  This was the first HD game I had seen played on an HDTV, and so that perhaps has something to do with it.  Today, the graphics are far less impressive.  But aside from running around awkwardly and shooting very poorly, I had no real sense of what the larger game was like.  That I was, effectively, in the game’s tutorial portion didn’t really register with me.  That the game was actually some species of RPG went right over my head.  It was an odd night.

Still, the title Mass Effect, and the general sense of interest, stuck with me.

I wasn’t able to own the game for myself, initially.  This was still in the early days of the last console generation.  I’d taken a long, hard look at my finances, and chosen, rather than an Xbox 360 or the then-astronomically priced PS3, to buy the system I could afford.  Sadly, Mass Effect didn’t look likely to see a release for the Wii at any point in the near future.  But I kept it in mind.  And then, some two or three years later, my wife (then my pseudo-fiancee) and I got together the money for a respectable desktop PC.  Browsing Steam one day not long after this, I found Mass Effect for twenty dollars.  Realizing, suddenly, that I could play beefy HD games like this, I thought, “Why not?”

Not since Ico, back in 2001, or Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter a year or so later, have I been more amply rewarded by an impulse buy.  Maybe not even then.  Roughly an hour or two after I started playing Mass Effect, I quit, went into the Steam store, and bought Mass  Effect 2.

In an odd way, playing Mass Effect is like going to Disney World.  There are a lot of interesting things to see and do, and you can’t really see and do all of them in a single trip.  And subsequent trips are like returning to Disney, in that you’re faced with a dilemma: Do you revisit all the highly enjoyable things you did before, which made the experience enjoyable and memorable for you in the first place, or do you forsake those and do something completely new?

*             *             *

Choice is a big part of Mass Effect.  And ironically, most of the choices are, on some level, irrelevant.  Well, maybe “irrelevant” is putting it a bit strongly.  What they mainly boil down to is a matter of flavor, or perspective, for lack of better terms.  

The story always hits the main beats.  You play as Commander Shepard.  The gender, face, first name (never used in-game), personal background, military history, and skill set of the character are all up for grabs.  Humankind is the new kid on the galactic block.  There is the Citadel, a construct built by an ancient precursor race, now vanished, known as the Protheans.  The Citadel isn’t quite a capital, and the representatives of the various other sentient races of the galaxy who live and work and negotiate there aren’t actually the rulers of their respective people, but at the same time, the Citadel is a symbol of galactic civilization and unity.  Of all the races who have embassies and representatives there, only three are actually on the Council.  The asari are a mono-gendered race (who tend to appear female to most other races), great policy-makers and diplomats, and are almost universally adept with biotics, which serve as magic in this game’s setting.  The salarians, by contrast, are a relatively short-lived species, for whom 40 is pushing decrepitude.  Warm-blooded amphibians with a habit of speaking quickly, they take a very scientific approach to life.  Lacking the brute force of the other Citadel races, they rely upon spying, espionage, sabotage, and other trickery to gain the advantage in warfare.  Lastly we have the turians, militaristic and hawkish, but disciplined; essentially Romans in space.  They have a somewhat antagonistic attitude to humanity, due in large part to a brief conflict fought between the two races not long after humanity discovered the Mass Relays.  These are the giant structures which allow for convenient space travel; like the Citadel, these are believed to have been built by the Protheans, and the technology behind them is poorly understood.

Shepard is earmarked to be the first human Spectre.  Spectres are operatives working for the Council, given an almost absurd amount of leeway and virtually no oversight (the better to plausibly deny, if necessary).  The Spectres are the Council’s right hand, and having a human Spectre is generally seen to be a step toward having a human on the Council.  But the first mission, meant to be one of many, to see whether Shepard would qualify as a Spectre goes sideways before it’s fairly begun.  Instead of retrieving the Prothean artifact recently discovered in the human colony on Eden Prime, Shepard encounters an attacking force of geth, synthetic beings who have not, until now, ventured beyond their own little corner of the galaxy for some centuries.  These are led by a turian named Saren, himself a Spectre, now apparently gone rogue.  The mission ends with the artifact being destroyed, but not before it grants Shepard a strange, disturbing, distorted vision of the doom visited upon the Protheans fifty thousand years ago by a race of spacefaring machines known as the Reapers.

It is these Reapers Saren appears to be serving.  He seeks the Conduit, which will allow him to bring them into the galaxy to wreak havoc once more.  Shepard, once he or she is able to prove to the Council beyond doubt that Saren has gone rogue, is then made a Spectre and charged with bringing him in.

From here the game opens up, offering three different story missions, each of which offers certain information about Saren’s plans and movements.  There is also an ocean of side-missions in which to lose yourself, about which more later.

Ultimately, the plot unfolds, as mentioned before, along the same lines no matter what you do.  Your choices mainly tend to affect how events happen, rather than determining the outcome directly.  You’ll always, for instance, rescue your teammate Liara from her entrapment in an ancient Prothean ruin, but you can choose whether to be nice about it, or whether you’d rather be an asshole instead.

This type of choice is really the heart of the game’s morality system.

*             *             *

Most games that feature any kind of morality system are honestly kind of laughable, mainly because of the way the choices are presented.  Your options usually boil down to either being able to do something very obviously good which is also very obviously reasonable and sensible, or something outlandishly evil, such that it is completely ridiculous and could only be considered even remotely reasonable from a completely insane point of view.

I’ve heard this particular tendency in game design referred to as the “Save the Baby/Eat the Baby Dichotomy”. 

Mass Effect tends to avoid this problem by not presenting its choices in a good and evil light.  Instead, where the choices break down into obvious types at all, they break down into two.

Paragon choices tend to emphasize cooperation, diplomacy, and appealing to people’s better natures.  A Paragon Shepard would generally rather negotiate than go in guns blazing, and is often forgiving and understanding, and keen on behaving in a way that seems fair.  But a Paragon Shepard isn’t all sweetness and niceness.  As much as he or she may want to avoid starting a fight, they rarely have problems with ending one.

Renegade choices, by contrast, tend to go pretty much the opposite.  A Renegade Shepard has no compunctions about using force to do what seems right, and often feels quite certain that the ends justify the means.  Renegades don’t hesitate to threaten, and tend not to be overly concerned with the needs of others.  The mission takes priority, and God help you if you find yourself in the way and slow to move.  However, a Renegade Shepard isn’t completely evil or tyrannical, and it may be that some Renegade options seem more just, or at least more expedient when it matters.

Both choices, when offered, will get the job done equally well.  What changes is the way other characters respond to you.  The “flavor” of the story, the sense of perspective it takes as you play, changes according to your choices.  What you do or don’t do, and how you do what you do, causes the characters to respond in different ways.  And Mass Effect keeps track of it all, as you discover in the sequels.

As much as personalizing your character’s face and background, these choices personalize both the story and the character for each player.  More than changing the story, the choices offered let you feel more involved in it. 

In this, Mass Effect actually walks a very fine line.  On the one hand, you have the wide-open narratives of Western RPGs where your characters are usually blank slates (of necessity, being player-created), and the story is therefore never very personal.  In these, you usually have a lot of choice about what you’ll do and how you’ll do it, because the view taken in most Western RPGs is that they are a simulation of an adventure.  Japanese RPGs, on the other hand, tend to focus more on the story.  Where exploration is possible, it’s rarely of much consequence, as the game typically wants you to go to specific places in a specific order so as to advance the story a certain way.  These games typically have a more in-depth story, as the characters are pre-made, with personalities and appearances designed by the developers.   Most Japanese RPGs tend to focus on the plot, rather than the simulation of an adventure.

Between the two, we have Mass Effect.  I don’t think it was BioWare’s intention for the game to necessarily take a middle way between these two schools of RPG design, mind you.  But I feel like it does that, just the same.  And the way BioWare handles it, we still get an engrossing sci-fi adventure without losing the feeling that we can choose how we go through it.  We feel like we’re doing it all our own way – and we are, in a sense – even as the game always, always dictates what we do.  It’s because we choose how to do it that we feel like we’re in charge.

*             *             *

Actually playing Mass Effect, from a mechanical perspective, and from a broader game-design perspective, can be frustrating.

While it’s structured as an RPG, it has the basic mechanics of a cover-based third-person shooter.  But the mechanics are just that: basic.  Moving can be imprecise, and the character slow to respond.  Taking cover isn’t handled by way of a button press.  You just shove the character up against a wall, and if you’re moving more or less perpendicular to the surface in question, Shepard will take cover.  From there, you can lean out and shoot at your enemies.  But if you come at your cover from the wrong angle, it can be difficult to “stick” to it.  This usually results in the enemies taking potshots at you while you try to actually take cover, and likewise results in you having a frustrating time aiming and firing.  This is especially irritating if your squad (two chosen ally characters who may accompany you) gets in the way, which they invariably do. 

Worse than this, and less forgivable, is that the game itself is a bit…  Well, “janky” is the word that comes immediately to mind.  The framerate suffers visibly during more intense conflicts (when you most need it to be smooth), to the point that aiming and firing can occasionally be difficult for more than just the usual reasons.   Even outside of battle, camera movement is kind of rough and jagged.  Vehicular combat can also be an issue, as you may occasionally find yourself too close to a target to be able to actually hit it, even when you have it in your sights.  And the less said about the driving segments, the better.

Playing the game on PC, rather than on console, can mitigate this somewhat.  While still not exactly worth writing home about, Mass Effect’s visuals look considerably better, and lack the framerate problems and rough camera issues when running on even modest hardware.  It’s also nice when the textures load more or less immediately, rather than taking several seconds to pop in as they do on the Xbox 360 version.  But then the PC port introduces bugs not present in the original version of the game (to the best of my knowledge, anyway).  I found myself ejected from the level geometry during a boss fight in one run through the game.  A friend of mine says that he’s run into a situation where, once a weapon overheats, it never, ever cools down again.  This isn’t just the Overload ability (which you can also learn and use against enemies); Overload is temporary.  This is permanent.

In a broader sense, the gameplay of Mass Effect is a bit uneven, also.

Story missions are a blast to play.  Wonky mechanics aside, they provide interesting environments, objectives, and enemies.  The story that advances through these missions is also pretty interesting, and of course playing through multiple times lets you play through it multiple ways, with different party combinations. 

But then you have the side-missions.

These are given to you by other characters.  Sometimes you’ll enter a system and be alerted to an occurrence that requires your attention.  Sometimes you’ll find clues while on a main mission that lead to a side-mission.  There’s always a bonus to be had in experience, gear, and money for completing these, but they don’t offer much beyond this, and are kind of lacking in themselves.  The vast majority of them are barebones affairs with little interaction or plot advancement, and usually go something like this:

You touch down on a planet, and are given a small part of its surface area to explore.  There will be a few different points of interest, often in the form of rare minerals you can survey, or abandoned gear you can pick up, and one or two places (depending on the mission) where the actual meat of the side-mission happens.  Traversing the planet surface is an exercise in aggravation.  Typically, the shortest distance between any two points on the map is a straight line which has that planet’s equivalent to Mount Fucking Everest right in the middle of it.  It’s fun, at first, to realize that the Mako (your exploratory vehicle) can drive up virtually any surface that isn’t an actual 90-degree cliff, given time enough, and sufficient finagling.  It goes from fun to irritating in a hurry, however, when you realize that not only can you, you’ll have to.  Frequently, and at length.  Then, as you begin to thank your lucky stars for finding a nice, flat stretch of ground to drive over…  Invariably, this is when you will encounter a Thresher Maw.  This is essentially a giant worm, found on many worlds, that spits acid and does its level best to ruin your day.  You can fight and kill Thresher Maws, but this quickly (which is to say, more or less immediately) becomes tedious.

So you drive to where the mission actually happens.  And here, you’re confronted with the fact that there are only three maps in which side missions take place.  You have the mine shaft, the pre-fab dwelling, and the underground bunker.  The only variation to speak of in these is where the crates and any (entirely static, non-interactive) machinery in them will be placed. 

Finishing the side mission usually nets you some money, maybe some halfway interesting gear, and often fleshes out some of the “lore” or other sub-plots going on in the main story.

The side missions aren’t actually awful, but they do get tedious, and the work-to-fun ratio is not favorable.  They’re best done a few at a time, between story missions.

*             *             *

My most recent play-through of Mass Effect is actually my wife’s play-through.  She has been in the room for a good portion of all four of my previous runs through the entire trilogy, and has gotten more than a little curious about the game.  So she took a stab at playing herself.  For this, I had to leave the room.

It turns out that a lifetime spent not playing more violent video games, developing the skills necessary to run, jump, punch, shoot, throw grenades and otherwise ruin your opponents’ whole week does not predispose one to much skill with this sort of gameplay.  So it’s more than a little intimidating, and even its basic mechanics offer a comparatively steep learning curve to a raw newcomer.  I should explain that this is nothing against my wife.  She plays games like The Sims, and all its countless and myriad variations and expansions, and as much as I tease her, secretly, at the bottom of my heart, those games are intimidating to me because they are completely inscrutable.  So I do the running around and the shooting things, and she chooses where we go and what we do and say, who we do it and say it to, who we like, who we dislike, who we’ll fall in love with, who we’ll ultimately have to sacrifice.

She’s playing a female Shepard, out of curiosity as much as anything else.  I always play a male Shepard, because I am boring and dull.  I have run through the entire trilogy about four times, and have played Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 five times.  Always, I play a male Shepard.  After all of that, she’s been curious about what it’s like with a female Shepard.  It’s actually helped to make the game new for me, because I’m so used to hearing certain lines of dialogue at certain times, and when those lines are delivered by a different person in a different way, it sometimes jars the whole experience into a strange feeling of newness.  Especially since characters react differently depending on whether you play a male Shepard or a female one.

*             *             *

Ultimately, Mass Effect is a diamond in the rough.  I love it, really – despite all it does wrong, there’s a lot it does right to be worthy of that love – and I still, in the end, enjoy playing through it.  I love setting down on alien worlds, seeing strange skies with strange moons, suns, and planets in them.  I like standing on a high place, hearing the ambient music, and the booming of the wind, and staring out across the vista.  Even with all the lack of refinement, there’s a certain rough elegance to it at times.

But playing at someone else’s direction lets me think about things in a way I sometimes don’t get to when I’m focused on the decisions I want to make.  When I know a choice is coming and I’m debating it silently in my head, running through a particular firefight or stretch of Mako driving purely on auto-pilot, I don’t have time to notice the minor flaws, and the not-so-minor flaws, that have been there since the beginning.  Then, too, it doesn’t help any that I’ve since played much better third-person shooters.  Gears of War, of course, and then Mass Effect’s own sequels both stand as better examples of how this sort of gameplay should really work.  Sure, you can always say that Mass Effect is supposed to be a sort of RPG-shooter hybrid, but problem isn’t that the shooter mechanics aren’t very deep or fleshed out.  They’re just shaky, and kind of bad.  You have only to play Mass Effect 2, with its much tighter and more responsive moving, maneuvering, and shooting, to understand what could have been – what should have been.

But, at the same time, Mass Effect’s story elevates it above these problems, and the sense of exploration is unrivaled in anything else I’ve played, including its own sequels.  If it falls a bit short of the mark in this, it at least aimed high, and you can tell.  When it’s on, it’s really, really on.  At its worst, Mass Effect is a diamond in the rough. 

And when that’s the worst you can say about a game, well…  Some studios live and die wishing they’d made a game you can say that about.