As I continue my Strange Journey into the Schwarzwelt, there will be spoilers. Although Strange Journey Redux, especially, telegraphs its story beats heavily, there will eventually be some things that you don’t find out from watching the intro movie on game boot-up or the opening dialogue on starting a new game.
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First off – it’s been awhile since I posted. Normally I’d say “real life”, which is also true, but I’ve been writing for VL (among other things – reviews of a couple SaGa games, some longer last-decade retrospective stuff, and working on a review of SMT5 still to come).
I’ve made a minor (or major, I guess, if you’re here for some stuff) tweak to the site – I discovered the encoding was off, which I think was a result of some mySQL migration along the way. As a result the Game Dev Story guide actually displays Japanese characters appropriately. There are probably some other pages that were broken, but none come to mind offhand.
I struggle to write things that aren’t reviews. Honestly, I kind of struggle to write reviews, because I try to be objective. Sometimes it means I qualify too much (game X is like game Y in that … … which loses anyone who didn’t play game Y). Other times it means I try to remove the emotion from writing a review, which means that I don’t capture the essence of how a game makes me feel. That’s an important essence of a review – for example, to take a game I’ll never review – the Cook, Serve, Delicious! games are interesting to me in how they make me enter a hybrid state that oscillates between panic and flow. On one level, that’s gratifying because never having a state of panic would make things uninteresting, and “flow” is one of my favorite aspects of my job. On another, it’s off-putting because it’s a little too much like my job.
I guess it’s another aspect of why I like and hate writing. Communicating using only words (and the occasional image) is difficult. But then, communication in general is hard. I find that readers on VL typically understand the point I’m trying to make better than I do – one of many reasons I’m grateful it’s back in existence.
Anyway, I decided to write something about Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux, which is the actual reason I started putting finger to keyboard. I’m far short of completing the game – having only gotten partway through the second sector. Having not completed the original, I’m sure that I have quite the dungeon-dive ahead of me. But I wanted to mention the incredible, hostile atmosphere that the game has. In contrast to its series cousins, Strange Journey not only has a more mature cast, it takes clear inspiration from science fiction horror. It goes past “disaster” into “isolation in a hostile environment” with the Red Sprite and its crew stranded in the mysterious Schwarzwelt – itself an apparent natural disaster, hinted to be a consequence of humanity’s excesses. The atmosphere plays into the Shin Megami Tensei series’ strengths – with the nails-hard early difficulty mirroring the crew’s first fights with demons, and the pseudo-mythical SMT designs hinting at the Schwarzwelt’s human-derived origins. As soon as the first sector seems knowable, Strange Journey starts throwing new things at you – first a second floor that is different from the first, then a new cast of demons, then one-way doors – in a way that keeps things fresh from a gameplay perspective, but also hints at the oppressive environment that you’re in.
Although Strange Journey has a limited cast, the crew members that you do meet all serve to reinforce the hostile atmosphere of the Schwarzwelt – as hardened warriors, analysts, and engineers all react to their surroundings in different ways. Some crack under the pressure, while others try to focus on the mission. The dispassionate Arthur, AI for the Red Sprite and your de facto quest source, serves as an effective foil throughout. Even as the player knows Arthur’s instructions and observations are correct, its lack of emotional reaction to the surroundings makes it seem somehow untrustworthy – and likewise, much of the crew struggles to cope and comprehend with what is going on.
Meanwhile, when you start a conversation with demons and discover just how capricious they are, it serves to reinforce the feeling of danger – it’s not just that the demons are explicitly hostile to you. Many of them can be engaged in conversation where you find out they are well aware how jacked up the state of the human world is, occasionally giving you the option to defend human behavior or suggest ways to fix it (alongside more mundane conversation topics). And although they might be sympathetic and even join you if you play your cards right, they will just go back to fighting you in most cases.
More to come…
Suikoden 3 came out on PSN last night (PS2 classic – unfortunately, only playable on PS3 so far).
A long, long time ago, I played one of the very first Massively Multiplayer games. It was actually a set of games, really – dubbed the ImagiNation Network and owned by Sierra, it had several different sub-sections including standard board and gambling games, a multiplayer Red Baron, and, most importantly, an RPG called Shadows of Yserbius (later, Fates of Twinion and Ruins of Cawdor would be added).
At the time, the MMO had to be a part of basically its own internet, since the World Wide Web wasn’t really much of a thing at that point, and so service was extremely expensive especially by today’s standards. Unfortunately, it seems to have also been too expensive for the owners, since they ended up being shut down. It’s fascinating that the decision to kill Yserbius and its cousins was made to avoid competition with (the MMO) Neverwinter Nights, as that’s another such game I have some memories of.
In any case, it’s possible to download a version of Shadows of Yserbius and play it on your own, but that only gets you maybe a quarter of the experience. Yserbius was meant to be played online, and its balance for single-player is really pretty bad. We’ll set aside whether it’s actually a good game.
Where does this leave us? Some hobbyists are trying to resurrect INN in some form, but haven’t really gotten much of anywhere. If they did, it would be perhaps a fraction of the original subscribers — of which there weren’t all that many in the first place. It couldn’t possibly be the same, only somewhat similar. There is an experience here that is arguably irrevocably vanished, impossible to reproduce. Maybe that’s okay — change is a part of life, and pining for interaction with others in the form of an RPG that’s kiddie-pool level compared to dozens of free-to-play games is sort of silly.
But when I thought about it in the context of current free-to-play games, like World of Tanks, Maplestory, and especially less popular games such as Uncharted Waters Online, there are some experiences that will, in turn, be lost forever in a sense. This is one reason why I prefer games to have an offline mode of some kind, or a design that won’t make a single-player version of it totally pointless. I’ve heard Guild Wars does this well, and presumably. when it finally kicks the bucket, Diablo 3 will handle it gracefully.
Another interesting facet is that there is an admittedly small sub-genre of RPG that mimics online games, most famously the .hack series. I can “log onto” that and find a dozen or so “other players” to have a good time with — in fact, that service will stick around forever, effectively. It’s not quite the same as interacting with real people, but it arguably solves real-people problems such as excessive public chat, dancing in the streets of Stormwind, totally stupid players, and so on. While .hack doesn’t feel like an MMO, in another few years games could reach the uncanny valley where I’m not sure if I’m interacting with a player or a bot.
I wonder if eventually, the remedy for dead and dying MMOs could be a “single player mode” which contains dozens of AI-guided characters playing alongside you? The thought is simultaneously fascinating and chilling — if it were possible to get the AIs to the point where they could interact with people well enough, it could have all the benefits of MMO and few of the downsides.
I returned from another trip to Japan about a week ago. This was my third journey there, and I was lucky enough to share it with my significant other. She was most enthusiastic about visiting as many places as possible each day, so I had a ton of really good experiences I hadn’t before.
What was interesting about this trip versus my second was that I actually did very few of the same things I did the first time. The only repeats were:
Although I only went to a few stores by comparison, I still made it out with some pretty good game-related loot. I got the following games (all for SFC/SNES):
In addition, I picked up a pack of soundtracks I’d been looking for:
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