Workhate Inc. Home of Captain Broadband

And other basic technique developers seem to forget.

When not being assaulted by the age old argument ‘Does violence in video games cause one’s children to become docile, little sheep with no intents of aggression as a result of a cathartic release of said aggression resulting further in a generation of youngsters who develop no discernable goals’, video games are assaulted by people who don’t play them as not being art. The argument is simple. Video gamers say that games can constitute as an art form. Some people who aren’t gamers say they do not. Most other people don’t care and quite a lot are still asking for us to get on with helping them developing basic food and hygiene. The last of these debates will not be covered in this article.

In fact most of them won’t. This was just a starting argument really for the idea that I found the last three Final Fantasies to be complete abominations in the notion of the RPG that I want to tear them apart and doing it on an artistic level sounds fun.

I’m actually kinda of glad that I don’t intend to try and answer this question because the question is unanswerable. ‘Are video games art?’ is as about as vague a generalizing question as saying that I know video games like I do the stains on the inside pockets of my ex-girlfriend favorite pair of jeans (do I have a ex-girlfriend? Probably. I haven’t called her in a while). I mean, come on, just how does one define art anyway? Pretty pictures? An expression of the human consciousness? A symbolic representation of human thoughts and emotions colliding with an objective reality to bring about an amalgamation of mind and universe? Who cares! I just want to mock Final Fantasy XII for having too big a level design in a pitiful attempt to hide a complete absence of story, and I plan on using art metaphors to do it!

Let’s start with the word composition. In art, this is how the picture is presented, where objects are placed, what colour scheme is used, what art style and so on. In games, you can think of this as the overall design layout; how a game is laid out, based on its intentions, concepts, characters, plot, gameplay mechanics, musical score, level design, quirks, features, variation of the limit break, plot twist, overuse of tropes, attempted underusement of tropes, viral media and so on and so forth with everything that makes us the game with the most prominent exception of the fan base, who both should and should never be taken into account because they are impossible to please.

Now in art (yes I can still focus), there is a rule of composition, so important, that some may consider it THE GOLDEN RULE OF DOOM! The rule is simple ‘Never make two intervals the same. In essence, this means repeating stuff is boring. A line of trees is organized but samey. Kids will ignore a line of trees planted precisely ten meters apart from each other by the roadside and groomed to look identical, but would spend hours playing in the forest. Same applies with use of colours, tonal values and even positioning. A picture looks naturally a lot more interesting is the lone gunman figure is standing off to the side of the canvas rather than directly in the middle. Mood can be created simply by taking a boring picture and moving it into the corner.

This applies in all media, from photography to music to media to literature. That last one may sound confusing, but think where we’d be without paragraphs and chapters. Paragraphs prevent a book from a single block of text that becomes all the more difficult to scan. Composition is involved in everything.

Including video games.

The problem is, how it’s used in video games.

Now the older games had it easy, simply based on the irony of their restrictions. A 2d platform world, a bird’s eye view of a maze; these were pictures in their own right and since they only had to be at one angle and two dimensions, composition was easy. The Pac Man maze has become iconic. The choice of angle and layout won’t be mistaken with another maze any time soon.

The same applied with games that were more than just one screen. Sonic the hedgehog had multiple layers in the background, but with no need to turn the camera around, the focus on that one angle made it all the more encompassing, The level designers simply had to master that one side of things and go from there.

What am I getting at? Why, insulting Final Fantasy 12 of course!

But let’s get there slowly. Video games didn’t stay 2D of course. They evolved. Some would say they created some other form of dimension. A third if you will. Some would get anal and argue that Duration was already present so technically they became 4D. Some would point out that there was 2.5D and that’s a valid point so we’ll sort of touch it a bit later.

Games hit what we will call 3D and here is where they were thrown a hardball. There was no focus on just one angle anymore. All had to be covered. So Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time came out and that one sided 2d environment was gone and now we had a camera to look round. The absence of detail helped a lot here in keeping the art and the games still looked good. Hell they looked great and got better as they continued to evolve. Soon camera limitations were lost. Worlds were expanded and created in full high definition, integrated bump mapping spherical perfection. It was the next age of gaming and we’re all still bouncing along for the ride and having the time of our lives as we’re thrown one new game to waste hours on after the next. Now we’re getting systems that respond to our movements rather than our controllers. Lawnmower man 2 technologies is getting every bit closer and then the matrix is just the next step away. Yee ha!

Still, doesn’t it feel like something’s missing?

Doesn’t it feel like we’ve lost something along the way?

Does anyone get that insipid little feeling that, somewhere along the way, the type of games that we liked the best (and if you’re not an rpg fan you can piss off now) have been losing the parts we liked the most and replaced them, sometimes with  things that seem nothing better than time expending tactic? Suspiciously long fields, generic towns, unnecessary side quests that bring nothing to the plot, the complete removal of side quests which didn’t add to the plot but were fun anyway, mini games that added variety, an over reliance on pretty movies, non interactive, stock characters and the barest of excuses for a plot that seems to be made up on the fly kind of like this article…?

Gasp! We’ve standardized the RPG. Even worse, it feels we’ve allowed middle manager accountant types to scratch their withered claws all over our gaming scene, optimizing the quantitative to give us more and more and more grind fights and less of that useful character development. It seems nowadays meta-rpgs are being made, rather than actual ones. We don’t need a town renowned for its ancient bounty hunting traditional where the party arrives to have their valuables stolen and they must preserve among a folk who provide them small yet useful chunks of information ultimately leading to a boss fight with an invading army’s Director President and his monster dog that all ends in a dramatic motorcycle escape that brings the two female characters closer than they were before. No, now all we need is the appearance of a town that does this.

Lost and confused and think I’m just blabbering? Correct on that third one, but let me ask Final Fantasy fans to do these two little exercises.

A)    Name three towns in Final Fantasy XII.

B)    Name ten towns in Final Fantasy VII.

Be honest with yourselves here. I understand people exist out there that are of the opinion that 12 is better than 7. And if you were arguing in terms of the battle system, I might partly agree with you, boring programming based combat system that it was. But let’s face it, were you to grab Rabanastre (I had to look that up!) in Final Fantasy XII and with a techno futuristic cyberpunk layout instead of middle/eastern European bazaar town that you had, move all the races across by one and turned the overall theme of the game into a space opera but kept all the mythos the same would you have actually experienced any difference. The answer is No, because to the designers the actual city didn’t matter. It was just generic capital city A. Try to do the same with Midgar and you won’t have Midgar anymore. The same with Balamb Garden. The same with Zanarkand. Locations were individuals in themselves. They weren’t just convenient stops along the way. They weren’t just huge bumbling cities designed to show off just how much time the developers had on their hands, and now we’re back to the Golden rule.

The problem with making a game level too big is a simple one. Quantity over quality. You can make a game bigger simply by grabbing a piece of grass texture and stretching it so it’s ten miles long. You can make a city bigger using the copy and paste function. Legitimate techniques one couldn’t say, but perhaps one could say that this argument is a generalization and of course the buildings are different. It’s obviously not all the same and instead there’s a bustling metropolis full of vibrant people and places to explore.

The only problem is, it’s not that at all.  The fifteen or so people of the town before that had the history of the town divided between them and now the fifty or so people are all just being part of the picture. But this isn’t ‘show, don’t tell’. This is just ‘show nothing of interest at all and tell even less because we’ve destroyed the elements that create location exposition’.

The game probably won’t come where the newest blond haired, sword wielding hero won’t enter a town that has fifteen large streets all identical to one another, but the time is already here where wandering the large town with different sized houses and shop vendors and the like has become all but pointless because there ain’t no monsters there and there certainly ain’t no characters of sub-plot interest. 3D game cities are easy to make big nowadays and let’s face it, putting something in every nook and cranny would be even more time consuming than making the large city in the first place in the end a pointless exercise obsessive compulsive retardism.

Except back then it wasn’t. Back in GTA we explored those city streets in attempts to find new cars and weapons. In Super Mario we searched for Stars and were awarded with big green dinosaurs and even in the pointless little town of Kalm, we still ran through every available door and searched every piece of background be it table, wardrobe and under the stairs cupboard containing a dog and goddammit we weren’t happy until we got that Peacemaker weapon that we didn’t know who it belonged too and that future hint about coming back later to do some of the hardest side quests in the game.

And this was the town that existed solely for the purpose of a flashback scene to explain the main characters hero complex. For the hour of game time you spent in it, it provided a lot more to itself than Eruyt Village.

So what did it best? What would prevent this in the future? What tricks did Final Fantasy VII do right that Final Fantasy XII tried to ignore by increasing its field zones so that anyone wanting a decent plot would be gravely disappointed. What made that 3D world different for the other 3D that I so love hating about?

Well, it wasn’t 3D for a start.

Not properly anyway. Created 3D, but portrayed 2D. This alone makes a world of difference in showing the world. It turns it into a movie. Hell it’s what turned it into art. It’s what prevents two intervals from being the same and whilst one can have 3D and 2.5D, just having 3D run the risk of making everything samey, especially the more you fall into sandbox territory and start dragging everything out.

Having fixed camera angles warps the controls, it changes the distance you can see the characters. It allows characters the sneak behind the scenery to find a hidden potion. Seeing everything turns off the imagination. It stops it being a fantasy.

So am I saying 3D is bad? No. We have plenty of 3D games that do bring character to their location. Silent Hill. Call of Duty. Even the giant Hyrule field had more to it than every open space filled with monsters in it from Final Fantasy XIII. And these just wouldn’t work if they were 2D or even 2.5D.

A location is not just a convenient place for a story to happen. It is the story, integrated into it with the rest of the characters, plot and gameplay. You could have a game without music and you could still create atmosphere in a good location design. Hell you could even have large open field the size of the game and get away with it (Shadow of the Colossus, praise be to ye), as long as it served a point beyond the notion of ‘let’s put monsters here’. 3D can be successful, but it also has to have a point. If you create a large empty space for the sake of travel time, you don’t need to create a large empty space.

Final fantasy developers said they wanted to break the formula of village/field/dungeon/village/field/dungeon. That’s fine. Great. Be innovative. Make something new, but their alternative seemed to be some bizarre mix of field/field/field/field/field/field/dungeon/field/village of complete pointlessness/field/field/field/field/field. I like to think I could field the next statement into the pigeonhole of obviousness but the aim of making your video game shouldn’t be ‘let’s take out the interesting parts and replace them with grinding’. And Cosmos help us when the designers’ next best thought goes along the lines of ‘Hey, people liked that Cloud character. Let’s make a girl version of him with pink hair!’

If such an argument was made, one would hope that a character designer would take Cloud for the deconstruction of the heroic jackass that he was, living on a revenge fueled hero drive, acting cool, talking smart, but all the while with a paranoid undertone of something not quite right that leads to the full on breakdown and eventual sidequest of self redemption that made Cloud the reconstructed success he is today. And while little Miss Lightning did this the rest of her game didn’t exactly jump to it.

At least it was better than Tidus from Final Fantasy XII.

No wait, I meant… crap. What was his name again? Balthier? No, that was the character they decide to claim was the real main character after they realised they forgot to make a decent story for the main character. Whatever, I can already be assured that he was completely pointless to the plot. He could have died and served as an invisible ghost and the rest of the cast would have been none the wiser. Basch was kind of cool. Ashe was secretly Yuna and Penelo was a lobotimised Rikku.

Mind you, this brings us to the next point of rant. Stock characters! Why do we have them and how the hell could we forget that the one thing you don’t do when making a story is make characters that lack character?

Let’s move onto Persona 3. Another game that wasted 15 hours of my life before it was deleted. For those who haven’t played it I’ll warn you now. It is boring. People will try to convince you otherwise but I’ll assume that’s to justify their own pathetic lives. Not only is it boring (apparently enough to win awards) it also goes out of its way to underachieve itself.

A special extra hour after midnight. People wander the streets with their minds sucked out of them. Monsters that are summoned by enacting suicide. All great ideas! Lovely original concepts that could be used to build up great plots and inspired character deelopNOOOOO! It’s a dungeon crawler where they don’t even bother to make the dungeons unique. They have a computer program randomly churn them up instead and the part that isn’t battle is you wandering around the same fifteen points of the game over and over and over again.

But don’t worry because at least they have a lot of strong character development with many different side plots to follow that are certainly interest and brig about a full flavour of LIES!!!! The character development appears to be the equivalent of what a person who has never had any friends ever and even their parents shunned them could only imagine the process of friendship to be. Why you just have to wander (the same places in the same city) over and over again. Occasionally, people with character portraits will appear. Start a conversation with them to spend ‘hours and hours of fun with them’. At least that’s what the computer will tell you as the screen fades to black. It seems depth isn’t necessary anymore, just statistical integers that represent friendship the more times your character hangs out with them.

And these characters! Geez. Nameless, traitless hero character number one. Cocky, wise talking, bumbling sidekick, generic female, embarrassed love interest #1, sexy superior love interest #2, female robot #3485. Never make two intervals the same! No matter how differently they were drawn and how different they were said to be, stock characters remain stock characters unless you develop them an these characters. Well, let’s just say after 15 hours all I knew about them is that they were part of a group to stop the latest evil. Other than that, they might as well have been replaced with the Scooby squad.

RPGs differ in their narrative (or in my opinion they should) from other games.  There is an extra focus on story that won’t be there for other games. FPS’s and third person’s might, but RPGs are expected to go that extra mile. Some seem to be of the opinion that RPGs should be games that are secretly about numbers. Leveling up, adjusting your strength scores, balancing your party. But these are not the heart and brains of the game. These are merely veins that the game must travel through, bringing the game along with itself. There are dungeon and dragon types where you’re supposed to allow your imagination to fill in most of the blanks and that’s all sweets and sugars. Go halfway between the two and you often end up with a monster whose main power is boring one side of the fanbase and deluding the other side into this being THE BEST THING EVER!

The intervals of the game must not remain the same over time and if they do, they must have variety. A good game is not spending three hours in a row grinding enemies for the sake of leveling up, or riding horseback to your next destination all for the purpose of creating distance (cause there sure ain’t anything to bother looking for traveling between Iranian cities A and B in Assassin’s Creed). Distance can be created in five minutes of scene. Walk across a screen for two minutes, stop to talk/create character development while one complains he’s tired, continue walking again for two minutes = hundreds of miles traveled! Peanuts you could do it in three seconds if you cut away fast enough. It’s the law of montage. It allows you to create years in minutes and allows you to create giant cities without actually needing to render every building.

Your aim should not be to fill every gap and stretch every minute. Your aim should not be to bypass plot by telling the player that plot occurred and it was good so have +2 social experience points and that allows you to unlock a new friend. Your aim in an RPG should be immersive depth that leaves the imagination tingling because it wants to imagine more. It should leave the character second guessing, not droning on so long that after a while it feels like there’s no point even trying to initially guess because there ain’t no well developed plot here.

And if you can’t do that THEN STOP MAKING FINAL FANTASY GAMES!

Art is lost when two intervals are the same. It becomes a diagram, a poor simulation. But even with different intervals, stretch one out to five hours and you’ve lost the plot.

I think I’ve made my point.

Or on the forum!

Like this? Want more? Subscribe?

More stuff back in the archives!