The Smart Game: Building the Perfect NPCs

Pretention alert! Here comes a Descartes quote, in Latin no less.

Quid autem video praeter pileos & vestes, sub quibus latere possent automata? Sed judico homines esse.
(Meditations on First Philosophy 2.13)
"But what do I see apart from hats and cloaks, under which machines may hide? Yet I think that they are men."

There aren't many things I enjoy in games quite as much as cool towns with good NPC interactions. Something about going into a town and finding people there who are living their lives and will take a minute or two out of their day to talk with you, or maybe—heavens to Betsy—go on a quest with you, just really appeals to me. I want to enter a world when I play a game, and with the obvious exception of games like Metroid, where the overwhelming sense of isolation is part of the point, I'd like that world to be populated, thanks very much.

Twenty years ago, we were all younger and newer to gaming, and gaming itself was newer to us, so game designers often used NPCs as if they were walking bulletin boards. Think of a game like Zelda II or Simon's Quest: the other characters you meet say something simple and straightforward that advances the plot, for instance. Sometimes they'll sell you something or, as in Zelda II, they'll take you into their abodes and through some invisible, possibly dubious process, they'll restore your health. These are, in other words, NPCs who are simply means to various ends.

I don't know about you, but I was always taught to treat other people as ends in themselves. So much more interesting to me are the NPCs who have something going on that isn't just mechanical in nature. For instance, there's the crazy old man who lives all by himself in the final town before Dracula's castle in Simon's Quest. He doesn't do anything in the game except set the mood, but he does a great job of that. Here's this abandoned town where the last inhabitant has cracked just from living too close to the castle. And he wants you to stay and keep him company. Forever!

Yuck!

By and large, though, NPCs are vehicles. They don't set the scene, they propel the game. This is why it's both funny and true when, in Series 2 of the Penny Arcade/PVP D&D podcast (featuring Wil Wheaton!), Scott Kurtz talks to an NPC, finds himself rebuffed, and says, "Oh, this NPC has no quests for me at this time." That's what they are, usually: vending machines for quests. And sometimes stuff.

I have this theory that I'll explain some other time that the best way to create a really great game would be to teach the game how things work in the real world. Let's call it a Smart Game. The idea here is to bring computer games as close as possible to the wonderfully creative options available to players of pen-and-paper RPGs. The beauty of D&D and old school games like it is that players can opt to have their characters solve problems any way that ought to work, not just some way that the game's designers thought out in advance. I remember searching all over the worlds of games like King's Quest for simple tools to accomplish simple tasks when any damn old stick or rock would have
done the trick in real life. But see, in those games, you don't have the option of using damn old sticks and rocks. You have to look around endlessly and find the one knife in the entire game before you can solve the puzzle.

Anyway, that's mostly another story, but one element of the Smart Game that is relevant is the way I think it should treat NPCs. Again, the comparison to pen-and-paper RPGs is useful. The cool thing about NPCs in those games is that they're dynamic; the DM gets to create their responses to things that happen in the game, and even (if it's a creative DM) the kinds of lives they're leading while the PCs aren't around, and that makes for some interesting, realistic NPCs. So, I'd love to see NPCs who live in real-time in an in-game world just as they would in the real world. If you leave town and, I don't know, go kill dragons for five years, those townspeople should be up to something else when you get back. They should have died or had children or left on their own journeys. In other words, the NPCs would have their own little personalities and wants and dreams, and they'd follow courses of lives that weren't pre-scripted but were created as the game unfolded using a mixture of algorithms and random number generators. There would be tiny little NPC stories crawling all under the surface of the Smart Game, and it might be just as interesting to visit a single town over the course of a game and see what the NPCs ended up deciding to do with their lives. Maybe, maybe one of them could even turn into some sort of town slumlord whose empire of crappy properties you had to bring down, or maybe one could even amass power and become a horrible tyrant by the end of the game. Some NPCs' stories could grow beyond the scope of the main quest and become the main quest themselves.

Like I say, I love towns in games, and I want to love the people that inhabit them. What if those NPCs could live their lives for themselves and change over the course of a game? It sounds good to me.

And That's Why I Never Play Dwarves

So, an experience with a recent RPG the other day, and a session of the class I teach the night after, got me thinking about how I roleplay and how I might do it better. I try so hard to play a variety of ways to get, you know, the maximum experience, but there are just limits, I guess, to my ability to do everything convincingly. The thing is that there are two parts of my brain—let's call them Evil Genius and Softy—that vie for governance of my actions in any given situation, and frankly I have kind of a hard time following through with evil or even basically amoral actions in video games. In other words, Softy wins most of the time.

The other day I managed to get in my first few minutes of Dragon Age (yes, lttp), and I decided to play as a dwarf. I almost never play dwarves. Evil Genius said, "Let's play a dwarf. We never do that. It'll be fun. New horizons." Softy said, "I concur."

Well, there happen to be two kinds of dwarves to play in DA, nobles and commoners, and I thought the dwarven noble was a better fit for the Thorin Oakenshield (okay, Binwin Bronzebottom) flavor I was looking for. As it happens, there's a lot of room in the dwarven noble's life for arrogant, elitist ugliness. Evil Genius thought, "Awesome! This'll really let us stretch our legs!" Softy said, "Hmmmm."

There were, by my count, two major crossroads in my short play session where I made a real impact on what my character will become. At one, I was given the opportunity to chastise, punish, kill (I think), or praise a dwarven scholar writing a book questioning the authenticity of a rival house's founder. At the other, I had to decide whether to go along with a dwarven lord's seemingly magnanimous plan to restore noble rights and privileges to surface-dwelling dwarf expats. That's a big thing, I guess, because the dwarves in this game interpret moving to the surface as a fundamental rejection of the dwarven way of doing things.

My inner professor won out big-time in the first quandary, and Softy's belief that "The truth should always be known!" didn't really conflict with Evil Genius' opinion, which was "The only power this scholar's research undermines is that rival house's, and screw those guys." The scholar got a hearty clap on the back, and the angered member of the other house got a giant middle finger. Everybody won. Except the member of the rival house.

The second decision, um, turned out weird, frankly. Evil Genius' totally reasonable protests that I was playing against character in voting to help out the surface-dwellers, because that was the decision I started out making, were drowned out by Softy's whole "just think of those poor surface dwarves and the pain they must be feeling! Oh, the humanity!" thing. But THEN another dwarf pulled me aside and warned me that I was playing right into the hands of our mutual enemies—i.e., houses who'd never lost members to the surface world and stood nothing to lose if the expats' rights were restored. Our houses, she pointed out, would by contrast end up losing an awful lot of money on this thing. In other words, the lord who'd petitioned me for help was really just trying to advance his house at the expense of my house's coffers.

Well, I did what any reasonable noble dwarf would do: I marched right back to that Lord Dace and told him I was on to his paltry scheme. He basically said, "Oh, whatever. Welcome to politics, kid." So I told him his little tricks were an insult to my house. Here he was pulling this crap at my debutant ball, after all.

If this happened in real life, probably I'd challenge someone's honor, and that would be the end of it. But regardless of how dishonorable they act, nobility—like white-suited, revolver-carrying Southern gentlemen—want to appear honorable, so calling this guy out committed me to a fight to the death with his son! Evil Genius crowed victoriously! Softy collapsed in a heap on the floor.

I won the fight, because pretty much every other dwarf in town sucks at fighting, and the other lord hung his head and said something like, "My machinations have led to the death of my own son." "That's right! Suck it!" exulted Evil Genius. Softy twitched imperceptibly from his place on the floor.

As I told my students the other night, I usually can't act well enough and/or distance myself from those computer-generated NPCs enough to really start acting like a monster. I got the teensiest little ways down the path on the Temple of Shadows initiation quests in Fable II before I felt horrible and couldn't go any further. Hell, I felt awful when Sheriff Simms and I busted in on Mr. Burke in Moriarty's bar in my first game of Fallout 3 and the sheriff ended up dead. The twist of the knife came when I ran into his orphaned son later and realized this poor little guy was all alone in the world. All alone in this computer-generated, fictional world. Yeah, Softy tends to run the show.

I don't know if it's my upbringing or not, but I think I have almost as hard a time treating NPCs like trash as I do people in RL. My inner lawman just down't let me play it otherwise. Oh, except in DA, apparently. I'm interested to see how my little duelin' Dalton (see what I did there) turns out.

The picture of the angry dwarf above comes from paizo.com.

Opus of Loquacity (Part 1)

If I'm remembering correctly, Super Mario Bros. was the video game that introduced me to the concept of a level. You see, I'd grown up with nothing but the standard 1970s-to-early-1980s iterative games, the kind where you play on a single screen and, when you kill the last enemy on that screen or eat the last pellet or whatever, you're taken to another screen that's almost identical, even if the challenge is higher or the colors have changed.

My understanding at the time—please understand that I was three or four years old—was that the one screen was essentially the whole game; since the gameplay was almost identical the next time around, if you'd played one screen, you'd played them all. You could justly claim to have “beaten” the game, so I thought. This must have done quite a bit for my self esteem as a child. I can actually remember a childhood trip to a Pizza Hut where I finished exactly one screen of Centipede. When that last centipede bit exploded, I gladly turned away from the machine and beamed at my mom. “We can leave now,” I said, proudly. “I beat that game.”

Obviously, Ninja Gaiden was still ahead of me.

Anyway, since I didn't play Donkey Kong until after I'd gotten my NES, I had no idea that a game could be broken up into small segments of play that constituted only a portion of the whole. DK would certainly have gotten the message across; in its absence, though, SMB did the trick, and after I got to the end of World 1-1, slid down that flagpole, and went in the tiny castle, I was genuinely surprised to see Mario exit the castle immediately afterward and go down a pipe into another level. I mean, World 1-1 could have been the whole thing. I had no expectations for game length; as far as I was concerned, World 1-1 was quite long enough. It was certainly hard enough; my six-year-old hands had never had to work with such precision in a game. Sure, that whole “World 1-1” label in the corner of the screen should have clued me in that there might be a world 1-2 and perhaps even a world 2-1, but I guess I'll chalk that one up to the fact that it was a Christmas morning, and I was ridiculously overstimulated; not to mention, I still had this new Zelda game to play! I was in no condition to use my reason.

But as it turned out, Mario's adventure had just begun, and so had mine, and yes, that is the way I'm opening this thing.

So I learned about levels with Mario, but it really wasn't until a few years later—1990, in fact—that I learned that game levels could actually communicate ideas. If you think about Super Mario Bros., this isn't surprising; what does the level design in SMB communicate? SMB's level design doesn't communicate a whole lot. There's a clear sense of progress, paradoxically reinforced by the game's repeated use of four-level cycles, and there's a fairly vague sense of movement, as if Mario were traveling from province to province within the Mushroom Kingdom, but that really is about it.

I know I'm oversimplifying, but I'm going to try to boil level design for 2D platformers down to just two things, which I am lazily going to refer to as challenge and aesthetics. By “challenge,” obviously I mean the kinds of things that are purely related to gameplay: platforming challenges, enemy placement, that sort of thing. “Aesthetics” covers a broad range of considerations, but the ones I'm mostly interested in are those that involve the kind of real-world sense the level makes to the player experiencing it. Could this level exist in the real world, and if so, how would it work? Both of these elements are necessary, but the degree to which either one is necessary depends entirely on the kind of game a designer wants to create. Something like SMB needs just scads of challenge, because frankly that's what SMB is all about. The need for that real-world sense is way less important, since SMB is essentially a virtual playground with environments that don't need to (and don't!) make much sense at all. If the player can tell what's solid from what's not, and what's harmful from what's safe, that should just about do it. Anything else—end-of-level castles, occasional weather effects, all the other little things SMB happens to do—is just icing.

When you think about a game like Castlevania, the importance of the two elements is almost reversed. Thinking back on the level design for the first Castlevania, I don't remember anything like the sort of sophistication on the level of that “challenge” element, though CV is, duh, hella harder than SMB. It just isn't nearly as involved as a platformer. Thank god for that, too, because Simon Belmont is very nearly immobile; he might, in fact, be gaming's first asthmatic (or perhaps pneumonic) protagonist. On the other hand—and as so often I owe this basic observation to Jeremy Parish—the environments in Castlevania make perfect real-world sense. Think about it: there are so many games from the 8-bit era that are basic platformers. How many actually made those platforms make sense? Castlevania did just that; as Parish points out, “whoever crafted the levels actually took the time to make the platforms logical -- something of a first. Whenever there was a hole to leap over, it was clear by looking at the background that the gap was caused by crumbling masonry as the castle rotted with age.”

Castlevania's great achievement is that it marries these elements of challenge and aesthetics. Challenge, yes, is at a minimum, if only because the Belmonts suck at walking, to say nothing of jumping, but almost all of the challenging aspects of the game are justified by the game's strong aesthetic sense.

It's a brilliantly designed game, but it isn't the focus of this series of posts. I enjoyed the design of Castlevania when I was a child, but I also took it for granted; I could never have told you how well the game was designed, because it never occurred to me how much thought must have gone into crafting a game like that. However, there was a game that shook me from my slumber, not because it made me take notice of the way platforms were thought out, but because it got me thinking about the way levels were strung together to create a world.

This could have happened several times by 1990, but it didn't. In fact, Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse was the first game that really made sense to me as a cohesive collection of levels.

This isn't really too surprising; CVIII takes the already brilliant inclusion of the inter-level castle map from the original game and pumps it up a bit by adding the element of choice. Now, the player could take one of two routes to get to the innermost reaches of Dracula's castle. Further, Dracula's castle was much more varied now, with the environments covered in the first game comprising only the last quarter or so of the game. Dracula's castle was now more of a ranch, really, complete with swamps, dismal underground caverns, and even a pirate ship (!). The way that Trevor and his spirit buddies started out in a creepy ghost town in Transylvania—perhaps the same town haunted by the crazy old man right on the outskirts of the castle in Simon's Quest—and slowly made their way towards the castle, working their way in through miles of hostile territory, just made perfect sense to me. It also set Dracula's castle inside a world that felt real and varied. It wasn't just a castle that sat at the end of a tree-lined path, as in the first game, and its surrounding environs weren't the repetitive towns and wilderness areas of the second game. It was a fortress built on an island surrounded by inhospitable countryside, and suddenly, it made perfect sense to me why a game character would go through that opening town and attempt to make the straightforward crossing at the bridge only to double back to the swamp when the bridge collapsed.

In other words, the series of levels in CVIII told a story. It wasn't an involved story, but it was one that made a certain amount of sense. In games that were roughly contemporary, like Ninja Gaiden, characters bounced from place to place, and even the cutscenes that ran between levels did little to make these levels feel connected. CVIII, on the other hand, did next to nothing by way of explaining the transitions from level to level, but the game's world felt organic and real nonetheless. In fact, CVIII feels like the perfect run-up to the current “Metroidvania” school of CV design; replace the map screens (and the level breaks) with transitional areas and make it possible for Trevor and friends to backtrack, and all of a sudden there's little separating CVIII from a modern installment in the series. It isn't surprising at all that after the refinements on the CVIII formula in Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, the next CV game happened to be Symphony of the Night.

I have much more to say, some of which might actually be of interest, and I have some observations on genre I'd like to explore, but excuse me, because A) it's getting dark and bad things are out at night and B) my laptop's battery is about to go dead.

The above image comes from retrojunk.com

Still Going

Ugh! It's been three months since I last wrote an entry on thisyuh blog. I sort of apologize if you're a reader, and I sort of don't. I did say this would happen, and it's not a sign that I'm going to stop blogging, but it is a sign that there are lots of big things going on right now.

Really, almost everything I've done since my last post has consisted of adjustment: adjusting (still) to being a parent, adjusting to being in the new apartment, adjusting to balancing the responsibilities of parenting with those of being a grad student and a college instructor. Yes, I am a stay-at-home dad, and yes, it is difficult to finish up a dissertation and teach a class (even just one) when I'm also trying to do take care of the little guy. Most recently, I've been adjusting to being on the job market: I've been learning, all over again, what it's like to present yourself to people who have a great deal of say on the course your life will be taking for a significant period of time. The last time I did this, I applied to teach Contemporary Civilization at Columbia, and I was accepted, but that was a two-year position. This new thing could be, you know, a thirty- or forty-year gig. I mean, I'd love it if that would work out; I'm ready to feel like I've gotten where I'm going, like I can settle for a while, maybe for good, and do some real work. This grad school thing, this perpetual state of being about to leave for somewhere else, just isn't for me. But the application process is time-consuming, and there's a lot that goes into those applications, as I had imagined before I started, and as I'm really learning now that I've started to send a couple of apps out.

I didn't mean to pour out quite so much there, when the idea here is to tell you what I've been up to since August. The thing is, this is a busy and an important time for me. I do think that, if you're still reading this blog, I do kind of owe you that apology I mentioned earlier. I am still playing games, and I'm still thinking about them a lot. I'm trying to learn to write shorter postings, because I know that the length of my usual posting is making it harder for me to post regularly, and I'm sure that it's something that deters readers from time to time, too. If I can get the planets to align, if I can find a little bit of time here and there and also sort of cut back the length a bit, then you'll be seeing a lot more from me on Nuclear Houseplant.

ドラゴンクエストIX: Doing this thing the right way

It has been so long since I've updated. Look, I'm not an interesting person, and I hate to talk much about myself, even on my own blog, but I think I should explain. This won't be one of those "Oh, I promise I'll keep writing, because I love this so much" things that goes up and ends up being one of the last few posts someone ever writes; on the contrary, I do love this blog, but I anticipate that there are going to continue to be intermittent interruptions in my posting schedule, and anyone who cares to keep reading in spite of that has my sincere gratitude. My grad school career is, I certainly hope, coming to an end this year, one way or another, and that means one more big life change: going on the job market. In an economy like the present one, this process may feel like playing musical chairs with about half as many chairs as there are players. Yipes!

I say "one more big life change," because the second in the trilogy just occurred. Carrie and I just moved, which was a process that took, all told, maybe a week and a half—remember, one or the other of us is taking care of Alan most of our waking hours. Paradoxically, it is often necessary to move because of a new baby's arrival, but the arrival of a new baby is just about the worst thing that can happen to you if you want to effect a move that's anything like efficient. We're not that picky, so...

That's where I've been. I have been up to one big gaming thing lately: I've been trying to play Dragon Quest IX. The problem is that I do not speak or read Japanese. Not at all. I know both sets of kana blah blah, but really, my Japanese is nonexistent. I am not lacking in groundless confidence, though, and so I've thrown myself at the game in the hopes that the language will start clicking somewhere along the way. This is sometimes how language acquisition works, believe it or not.

If you have any experience with this sort of thing, you're probably thinking yeah, so how's that turning out? And you're right. It's not turning out so well so far. On my first attempt, I tried to use an online dictionary, which ended up being a decent idea except that it's impractical; a lot of the point of a DS game is enjoying it, you know, in contexts where you might not have access to the internet. I guess places like that are becoming fewer and fewer, but I don't really own a portable internet-capable device that will work on the bus or anything, so that's not such a good option. On my second attempt, I tried just playing through, saying screw it, forget the language. That defeats a lot of the fun for me; I still do want to learn Japanese, and while DQIX is, so they tell me, a job class-type game with lots of interesting mechanics, the early game requires actions of the player that aren't immediately obvious without text and context. It can be done, but it isn't fun for me; plus, what's going on while I'm skipping the text looks intriguing, and I really do want to follow along.

So here goes attempt number three. I have a good kanji dictionary already, but I don't want to count strokes, and DQIX has all the furigana your heart could desire, so I thought it made sense to get a phonetic Japanese dictionary, and that's what I did. The early verdict? My God, they're playing my song. It's like sitting down with a Latin dictionary and Cicero or Virgil, only this time it's for me, not my professor, and I'm playing a goddamn video game. I like this. Wish me luck!

Rose-Tinted Twenty-Twenty Hindsight, Part 2 of 2

(If you're interested, you can have a look at the previous part of this posting)

So yeah, Final Fantasy II.

I find myself caught between revulsion and admiration for this bizarre game. The leveling system, combined with the glacial rate of advancement, almost invariably led players to stop living in the game and to start treating it like an SAT math problem. At the same time, the game also went to some trouble to try to make leveling something that made sense and mattered to the player, rather than just something that happened all at once after you'd killed a few hundred goblins. The problem wasn't that FFII's system was a bad idea to begin with, not really; it was that FFII's system went a bit awry.

What made me want to look more closely at FFII is that I think Jeremy Parish has been feeling the same way lately. He's been writing recently about the Game Boy in honor of the 20th anniversary of its launch, and one of the series he's talked about a bit on Retronauts and elsewhere is Final Fantasy Legend, the American version of a series called SaGa in Japan. These games are renowned for their obtuse and bizarre (much more bizarre than FFII) mechanics, and guess what? They were directed by Akitoshi Kawazu, who worked as a designer on FFII.

Parish has pointed out the spiritual connection between FFII and the FF Legend/SaGa games, saying that the original Final Fantasy Legend is essentially Final Fantasy II-2 (cf. Retronauts episode 69 and, I think, 71). The oddities in the designs of FFII and the SaGa games (which I can't get into here) seem like annoyances in the abstract, but putting a face to this work, and acknowledging the obvious links among these arcane RPG systems, begins to show that though this be madness, well, you know.

This is interesting, of course, but it's Parish's observation, not mine, and for the sake of this post, I was just as interested in Parish's change of heart. In the past, Parish has been as cool towards FFII as everyone else—in fact, I just happened to listen to episode 1 of Retronauts a few days ago on the way to work, and the scorn he heaps on FFII and the SaGa games there is the stuff of legend. But one of the secrets we keep about being worthwhile human beings is that no one is perfect, and as a result, we all get to change our minds from time to time (hint: don't tell your kids about this). And somewhere among the Retronauts podcasts and the GameSpite posts of the last month or two, Jeremy Parish has slightly redacted his old take on FFII, acknowledging the game's strengths without reversing his previous position on its overall quality.

This got me thinking: what if we'd gotten FFII back in the early 1990s? We very nearly did: if you ever tried to emulate FFII and FFIII for the NES/Famicom back in the day (back before we all knew that emulation was immoral and illegal and something none of us should ever, ever do), you might have noticed that for some time it was impossible to find an English-language FFIII ROM, whereas it wasn't nearly as difficult to find one for FFII. That's because FFII was actually translated into English (not to a finely polished sheen, but...) for a North America release, but guess what? FFI came out in Japan in 1987; it wasn't released here until July of 1990. The SNES came out a year and a month later here, and at that point, do you really think Square was going to release another Final Fantasy for the NES? Leave that to Enix, who would publish Dragon Quest III in June 1991 and Dragon Quest IV in October 1992! Not to mention that there were huge problems in adapting FFII into an English-language game, as you can see if you look at the Lost Levels feature I've linked to below. No, Square held out a bit and gave us Final Fantasy IV instead, in November 1991. Granted, it wasn't the real Final Fantasy IV, and it was relabeled as FFII, but that's another story.

Anyway, my question is this: is Final Fantasy II such a horrible game that, if we'd ever gotten it, we would hate it as much as we do now? We look at FFII with the advantage of critical insight and an increased sense of self-worth, after all. We know we're better than games that waste our time like this. I mean, I can remember early in my NES career playing games that, in retrospect, I realize are complete crap, like Deadly Towers, Hydlide, and Dragon Power (Dragon Power...shudder) and realizing there was something off about the whole experience and, because I was a naïve seven- or eight-year old, blaming myself for the games' failings. A few years later, I would be able to play even worse games and shrug off the experience with the help of those three valuable but now overused words, "this game sucks," and life would go on. But there was a time when I would slog through even the worst game with the worst mechanics and the worst design sensibilities, to the best of my abilities, never realizing it wasn't my fault I didn't like this particular game.

This meant that I finished a lot of games that were sometimes challenging, sometimes not, but which certainly wouldn't persuade me to waste more than a minute or two of my time on them now. It's just easier as a more seasoned gamer to see the difference between good and bad.

However, this sort of no-taste approach to gaming also meant that I put more time into games that, if I were to play them for the first time now, I might give up on as poorly designed. To be honest, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is almost certainly of this kind. I honestly like that game a lot, but it's a bizarre, often idiotic game that expects leaps of intuition from the player that are just not going to happen. You need the Nintendo Power with the scary cover; you need your (weirdly knowledgeable) elementary school buddies' help. When a game expects you to fight even ridiculously difficult enemies for too-gradual increases in power, that's okay, I guess. When a game expects you constantly to check walkways for invisible pitfalls, that's annoying. When a game expects you to guess that you're supposed to crouch next to a lake for several seconds, that's ridiculous and unfair, and it doesn't make for an interesting game, it breaks the game. If CVII hadn't had the twin advantages of 1) coming out during gaming's (and our) youth and 2) being part of an important franchise, we'd all hate it now, I suspect.

Several other games fit this mold, too, I think. Zelda II might well be one; I love it, but think of the problems: inexplicably, you receive three lives, even though the Link is supposed to advance like an RPG character. Doesn't this mean you should have either no extra lives (like a FF game) or an infinite number of them (like any other Zelda game)? If you lose those three lives, it's back to the first section on the world map with you, even though all you'll have to do to get back where you left off is walk a while and maybe suffer a few monster encounters; that gets annoying over the course of an entire play-through. Still and all, I love Zelda II, but come now, is that because it overcomes its faults and ends up being pretty good in the final reckoning, or is it just because it's a Zelda game and it's one I loved as a kid? I honestly can't say.

You know what else fits the mold? Sad but true: Metroid. Gasp! But yes, it totally does. Granted, Metroid kept things much more in moderation than Zelda II or Simon's Quest or FFII, but there was no way to play through the game just intuitively and get all the stuff you needed; you'd have to bomb all the walls and floors you could to find it all. Or you got lucky and got a map somewhere.

And yeah, as I was saying, if we'd all had to press through FFII as little kids with lots of free time and little else to do with it, would we be so unanimous in our scorn for it now? Or would it be another one of these borderline games that are obviously pretty wonky but we just can't help loving? The old Famicom version of FFII is hard as hell, and it takes forever to level anything, but do you remember what it was like trying to save up the gold for spells in FFI? Or what it was like trying to learn how to survive act 6-2 of Ninja Gaiden?

I'm just saying.

FFII screenshot from The Lost Levels (www.lostlevels.org, and please also see this excellent feature on the canceled translation of Final Fantasy II). Metroid screenshot from Strategywiki's Metroid section. Ninja Gaiden level map swiped from The Video Game Atlas' NES section.

Rose-Tinted Twenty-Twenty Hindsight, Part 1 of 2

I'd been playing Final Fantasy II for all of thirty seconds when what's pictured above took place. Of course, this is a scripted total party kill, and it will happen to everyone who plays the game; it's part of the story. Everyone survives, but you start with four characters and lose one in this fight; he doesn't show up again until a good deal later. The point is, though, a game that kills all of your characters off as its first narrative act—that may be, as the saying goes, nature's way of saying "don't touch."

And Final Fantasy II is almost universally reviled. I did a little research before I wrote this posting, and I noticed that, well, reviewers' remarks about FFII are rarely bland. Here's a small sample:

"plagued by a fundamentally busted experience system that encourages you to attack your own party members
in order to beef them up. Truly bizarre." (from Shane Bettenhausen's EGM/1UP review of FFI/II: Dawn of Souls for the GBA)

"it is a terrible game, forcing players to attack themselves in order to increase their stats and bombarding them with
evil deities that could melt faces at the beginning of the game if they dared to accidentally wander too far" (Ashton Liu's RPGFan review of FFII Anniversary Edition for the PSP)

"Final Fantasy II - arguably the most messy and directionless game in the series ... originally Final Fantasy II was an utterly unforgiving experience, where hours of levelling up could be required just to prevent your characters from falling off the game's power curve" (Rob Fahey's Eurogamer review of FFI/II: Dawn of Souls)

The annoying thing about FFII is its advancement system, which implemented a bit differently could have been its greatest strength. I'll explain: unlike other FFs, FFII levels characters' individual stats based on what sorts of actions they take in the game. This plays out just a little bit like advancement in the old Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory games, though FFII's skill set is directed towards combat while QFG's is directed towards puzzle-solving. The hero in QFG, for example, might try climbing a tree ten or fifteen times until his climbing skill increased and he managed to get all the way up; a character in FFII might fight with an axe repeatedly until his/her axe skill increased.

This is actually kind of neat when it comes to casting spells. Unlike FFI and FFIII, where even spells belonging to the same family are purchased separately, or FFIV, FFVI, and so on, where spells are gained arbitrarily with levels, FFII features spells that level up with use. So if you have a mage who knows Fire, she only has to cast the spell a certain number of times until it becomes more potent, the equivalent of one of the other games' Fire 2 (or FIR2!) or Fira. This really does feel right in context, actually; a spellcaster should become more powerful with practice.

The problem is that FFII is a cruel, cruel game, and it requires a LOT of repetition of the player before it begrudgingly doles out rewards. It's no better for fighters, since they can't specialize in broad groups of weapons but must specialize in narrow weapon categories like staves, spears, swords, and axes. It can also be hard to have a combo weapon user/magic user, because intelligence and strength, the abilities that determine black magic ability and fighting ability respectively, are treated as opposites: one will deteriorate gradually with use of the other. Perhaps worst of all, FFII gives out health rewards based on the net amount of damage characters have taken over the course of a battle. This means, first, that a character who takes 100 HP of damage in a fight but receives 70 HP of healing will only get the benefit from the 30 HP of damage that is left unhealed; worse, this system encourages the kind of exploitation the reviewers above noted, where players would have their characters attack each other to boost the amount of HP gained at the end of a battle.

At its best, this makes for an intricate system that a player can really get to know and play with and (perhaps) enjoy; at its worst, it creates an obtuse mess of a game that favors the worst sort of power gaming, which is the death of all fun when it comes to RPGs. I think a person with a real love for game systems can't help but feel a mix of excitement and disgust when she looks over the various nuances of FFII's system, which HCBailly has more or less exhaustively detailed in his impressive and lengthy series of Let's Play videos on Youtube.

Layered on top of this weird system is a kind of cool dialogue-based mechanic which requires the player to learn certain words and phrases in conversation and repeat them later in the game to other characters to accomplish certain tasks. So, for instance, accosting an old man early in the game prompts the bizarre response, "I'm just an old man." Mentioning a certain password, though, gets the old man to reveal that he is actually a legendary blacksmith who will help the player by fashioning powerful items.

That's probably enough for one posting, so I'm going to call it a day. In the second half of this posting, I'll bring up a question that's been bugging me about FFII's reception since its first North American release (2003's Final Fantasy Origins for the PlayStation) and how that reception might have been completely different if we'd gotten the game much sooner.