surprised by pixel art

[egypturnash]

I spent this evening playing the fan translation of Mother 3. (Or you could call it Earthbound 2 - the usual nonsense with only parts of series being localized comes into play here.)

Partway through the first chapter, something happened that I've never had happen to me in a computer RPG.

(Definite spoilers follow; I would seriously suggest grabbing the translation, the Japanese ROM, and a Gameboy Advance emulator, and playing until a certain moment by a riverbank in Chapter 1 - you'll know what moment I mean if you've played it.)

Sure, I've played a lot of games in which I was in the shoes of some teenager, thrust rudely into Adventure when his parents were killed by the baddies. But watching Flint lash out at his friends as they tried to console him after his wife's death was the first time I'd ever really sympathized with my character's loss. It's the first time I've ever been in the shoes of an adult in one of these games. An adult with something to lose. He'd found someone he wanted to spend his life with, and now she'd been taken away from him after just a few years. This is just not an emotional place video games go in my experience - when a love interest is lost, it's one who's been shoved down your throat with one badly-written scene after another, with few characteristics besides an inexplicable interest in the protagonist and a low-cut dress.

For all its pixelly abstraction, the animation of Flint hitting his friends and neighbors was amazingly powerful. Because I'd been the one searching for Flint's sons, and for his wife, for the past half hour or so. It was done so understatedly that it worked. It could have been a "women in refrigerators" moment, and maybe to some people it is - but for me, it was a hideous shock that I'd been growing to expect for several story points.

The game keeps being whimsical, as you'd expect from its predecessors, but it's all changed. The pig-themed aliens who turned peaceful lizards into killing machines straight out of a 15-year-old boy's margin doodles for no better reason than 'dude, that'd be cool'? They're not comedic. They're just malignant. And now the game is trying to leaven my desire for vengeance by having Flint's father-in-law tag along as part of my party and tell me to smile. Which is cruel, really.

This is just not the kind of emotion I was expecting out of this game. I'm wondering what else it'll surprise me with.

And really, I feel like the fact that this is the first time I've been in the shoes of an adult while playing a console RPG is an indictment of the whole sorry genre. Can we have more story-focused games where the lead character is believably past puberty, and has something to lose besides the life they hate because they're an angsty teen, please?

Edit: And then after Flint has his vengeance that tastes like ashes, it forcibly shifts me away from his story to this nonsensical crap about a thief being browbeaten by his father. I would consider being horrified by this portrayal of child abuse continuing into adulthood - but I can't take it at all seriously when the game makes me steal a fucking golden spittoon. Ah well. We'll see if it finds another way to get to me before the inevitable use of my name somewhere in the endgame.

Comments

[leighqualix.livejournal.com]

this came exactly 1 year too late

You cannot comprehend the true form of Giygas' attack!

[bossgoji.livejournal.com]

The Mother series is like that as a whole, really. Earthbound in particular hit me hard: as you go through, the game becomes less 'quirky' and more genuinely sinister, in a way that only something that started with colorful, candy-land sincerity could. You start realizing why random objects of furniture, animals, and vagrant weirdos are accosting you: the decision to avoid explicit death actually makes the game more creepy. Enemies don't die, they "stop moving," "run away," or "return to normal." There's the very real sense of this bizarre, happy little world of caricatured Americana being infected, infiltrated by an evil presence you can't truly understand or combat, and it all clicks during the final boss battle: the whole game you've been assuming the technicolor vomit backgrounds during random battles are just showing off the hardware, but then you find out that the enemy IS the background, that it's been controlling every single individual enemy you've faced, you realize you're fighting something way out of your league, something so vast and alien and insane that it's utterly beyond the conception of mortals... it's downright Lovecraftian, the way the story progresses. As opposed to a capable adult or a hotheaded teenager, you feel very much like the child that the protagonist is, forced by circumstance to face something so hideous and mad that it corrupts all it touches.

Re: You cannot comprehend the true form of Giygas' attack!

[relee.livejournal.com]

It's sort of satisfying then when you, personally, behind the controller, are summoned into battle to deliver the final ultimate attack and destroy Giygas once and for all.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

I saw that scene while Tanya played the game. It was... profound. I hadn't expected it because I hadn't seen everything leading up to it, but I didn't even need to. The way it played out was exceedingly raw and honest. That phenomenon there – you hit it right on the head, the 'something to lose' element that I really want to work into my self-as-character in City of Heroes but am afraid to. It's one of the most difficult things to face.

Really, Earthbound accomplished similar emotional resonance, just in different places.

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

I honestly wasn't expecting that to happen, which made the whole scene that much better. And that dude is SO bad at delivering the news. I would have punched him too.

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

I've been playing quite a bit of it myself as of late. There's a lot of themes in the game that are particularly close to my heart and yeah, it has this manner of getting you emotionally involved in it from the get go.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Wow, yeah, that scene hurt. I got all sniffly and teary eyed. I've got (mostly) nothing but good things to say about this game so far.

[jirris-midvale.livejournal.com]

The guy who wrote the Mother series is brilliant. He manages to take things that happen in a lot of games (evil aliens, character deaths) and happen poorly, and make them profound via subtlety. And that's why the impact is so powerful. You don't see it coming.

In Earthbound there's a part of the game where some random dude asks you your name. Not the PC, but the player. Erm, ok. Moving on. This doesn't come up often in the game. When it does, it hits you like a goddamned hammer.

When the game takes it's shift from whimiscal to increasingly dark; when your best friend (who has been becoming more and more corrupted over the game) tells you that he's pretty much sold you out to something far more horrible and evil than any mortal mind is possible of understanding. It doesn't even have a sprite or boss music. It's this horrible background that looks like some kind of monster fetus/awful face with what amounts to white noise for music. It's a completely insane personification of hatred, when nothing you do does any good whatsoever...

You pray. You call out to everyone you've talked to. Over the course of the game, you make connections with all these people, do these little things (or big things) that touch them and change their lives. They are all you have. This works. The love and hope, great or small, these people have for you can confront this unspeakable and uncomprehendible evil. And then the game asks you to believe in Ness and his friends.

It's at this moment and the few minutes afterwards that several people I know cried. This sense of relief and release from what just went down. Itoi knows how to move people.

[relee.livejournal.com]

That was a great scene, yeah. Be sure to keep playing, the game isn't over yet.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how much emotion the developers could convey with a few sprites.