Computer RPGs and the bozos with time to think about them or Why (Most) Console RPGs aren't
(with some wtf's been happening lately thrown in)
01.06.2002 Rain Man

As this is a rant and not any attempt at a worthy article for one of them there sites like Gamespy or Gamespot (my ex-roomie who did a stint for GamersX under Thresh would probably roll his eyes), I won't bother with those useful things like outlines and crap. This is mostly just junk from e-conversations with Switch.

I love cRPGs. I lose hours and hours of time to those cookie-cutter characters, situations and pseudo-realities. While I did my bit on the Human Genome Project (I worked as a research assistant/lowly lab slave in one of the labs for two years; if I get 'nuff e-mails about it, I'll do a rant on why Venter and Celera suck big fat… uh, never mind), my only leisure expenditure (other than the, err, $300+ monthly phone bills for staying in touch with my formerly long distance sweetie; no longer LDR as I will never again move without her, ahem) was cRPGs.

I've played all the Bioware D&D games except for Icewind Dale, I've played the Fallout series, DaggerFall, Arcanum, Darkstone, Gothic, Deus Ex, Anachronox, Nox, Diablo II, Freedom Force (obviously not in that order) and I'm currently playing through Dungeon Siege's single player a second time with a solo character so that I have a tougher goon prior to playing in the Utrean Peninsula. And I am anxiously awaiting Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights so bad it's not even funny (for you lucky Americans out there, I'm currently an expat in another place so Morrowind won't get to me for a couple weeks after I write this sucker). The old games I played that influenced my taste: Diablo, Lands of Lore, the gold box D&D games, a brief taste of Ultima, a bunch of text-based adventure games, and oh yeah, there was that year I wasted on a MUD (damn, I had just hit level 30 too, even just bought a house for myself and started working on the big quests). And there was Karateka. And Prince of Persia. And Tetris. And fighting games galore.

I'm not a console basher. I loved Final Fantasy VII (I plunked down $1600 for a new computer and a decent video card back then so I could play it on a pc - incidentally, I didn't just buy a playstation because, well, by then, frickin' Eudora was slow on my 486 so I needed a new desktop anyway), and actually watched the Gamers.com roomie play through quite a number of the old Final Fantasies, even ROMs translated by fans from the Japanese version (yes, pathetic but true, I sometimes liked to vicariously experience someone else's simulated recreational activity; at least it's more interactive than say, watching a soap opera, as you can yell, 'Go Gabe GO! Beat that pansy monster ass!'). Of course, I also watched that roomie play through several of the Wing Commander games (really quite pathetic that the movie didn't have Mark Hamill or Malcom MacDowell - I mean, jeezus, of course a movie based on a video game will suck if the movie's actors are crap compared to the actors in the GAME). I watched other roomies blow time on Starcraft, Warcraft I and II, Resident Evil, the Castlevania games, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid, Marathon, Hexxen, God, how did the bunch of us ever graduate from Berkeley? The point is that I do have some appreciation for games across genres even if my personal focus is in pc crpgs.

Man, how did I ever graduate from college anyway? After I started to realize I was in the wrong major, for some strange reason I stuck to it and just stopped going to class. I must say that no one who missed classes as often as I did could possibly have gotten higher grades than me, hehe. I mean, Christ, there were classes I skipped several months of at a time (I almost missed midterms that way); I even skipped 2/3 of the lectures for tough upper division classes in genetics, biochemistry, immuno and such. Not something I recommend. I tell you people, if you realize you don't like the process itself DO NOT just tough it out. Change majors. Do what you really want. You cannot be a good scientist or lawyer or doctor if the entire time you're thinking 'If I do this, I can get this at the end.' You have to like research to be good at it, and you damn well better like being a med student once the practical stuff starts or you will be a godawful doctor who gets yo' sorry ass britches sued off you for malpractice. I know a lot of you are under serious expectations do go a certain path in life, but if you don't start living your own life in college you might not be able to until it's too late.

What did I do when I shoulda been in class thinking about protein assays and enzyme cascades? You got it, I was asleep. Why? Coz I had spent the nights on games and writing/reading fanfic you goombas.

I used to be into simulations more than RPGs. I liked Jet and a couple of other flight sim stuffies from the 80s, a tank game whose name escapes me, Mechwarrior games. I slowly shifted almost completely to RPGs. Why?

RPG stands for Role-Playing Game. What is that exactly? Yes, yes, I know, all the info is out there, there's tons of rpg books and tons of meta-rpg books (books about rpg books). But what is an RPG to you? What are the essential elements to one? Which games are really RPGs and which are called RPGs because they have one or two RPG-ish things about them?

Let's deconstruct a popular cRPG. Let's look at… well, Diablo II. Diablo is an excellent game. I lost perhaps most of one year playing it.

In Diablo II, you pick a character class. What's a character class? It's some construct to give your player a collection of traits which are used to interact within the context of some virtual world. It's your fake-self's stats, your fake-self's skills, your fake-self's gear. It's all the artificial numbers your character needs to interact with everything else.

In Diablo II, picking a class affects only one thing - the style in which you fight.

The world is static, it never changes. There is no meaningful way in which you affect the outcome of the story - the story is set, and the only thing of it there is that exists in Diablo II consists of those beautifully done cutscenes. Story-wise, you get from point A to point B to C by killing stuff. That's not a story, it's like the marks on a track that say "You have run 100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters… hey, that's the finish line, isn't it?"

Diablo II is fun because you kill stuff. But wait, what keeps that from getting repetitive? The only thing is the manner in which your character class has been developed, which affects just one thing - how well you kill stuff. So why is it fun, really, to spend all those hours killing the same things just to get better at killing those things when all that means is you now get to kill artificially tougher things somewhere else? It is the perception that your guy has gotten tougher, has grown in some manner - that is the ONLY element of Diablo II that has something in common with RPGs.

It is the perception that through your actions, you have changed - this makes that flat and personality-less representation on the screen form a connection with you, making you believe that in some small way, that really is you ripping through yet another horde of those damn beasties. Who cares if the world isn't remotely real or deep or interesting? You're real and you're killing untold multitudes of those demon thingies or perhaps even other bold adventurers who've foolishly pissed you off in the chat room. Take that you bitch! Pick on my level 10 barbarian with your level 30 necromancer eh? Bend over and take my level 70 amazon's arrows you bitch, oh yes, feel that burn ream you, you pathetic hoser!

Let's move up one level to a game that has one more element of RPG-ishness but is not yet an RPG. Let's take a Final Fantasy game, I'll choose VII since it's the one I'm most familiar with. Ah, now we have one more level. We have a world that is very well worked out, it's pretty to look at, there's stuff to explore, and gee, would you look at that, it even changes a little when you get through parts of the story! My God! It's full of stars!!!

That is the one real RPG element that FF has over Diablo. Now, some might argue that FF also has a great story and very well thought out characters who shape what happens in the story.

And you know, it was a great game, really. Lots of fun. But was it really much of an RPG? Are any of the FF games?

Those characters are real and fleshed out, they even have their own theme music ferchrissake. But, but but but, and this is the big ass but of it all - nothing you do affects those characters very much. You control nothing about them. You don't control the decisions they make within the context of the story, you can't do a damned thing to affect the outcome of the story, you can't save Aerith, you can't even kill her because you hate pink and you secretly wanted to get Sephiroth to join your party. There's the tactical aspect of getting through fights, but what is that, that's not really what RPGs are about, that's just an obstacle you get through by picking the right combat options. You didn't choose how your characters look, how they act, what their personalities are… you didn't choose a damned thing.

Playing the later FF games (I watched my FF nut roomie play through one of the earlier ones, can't remember which, that had real options for how your characters develop by incorporating this complex class system) is like watching a play. Well, like watching a play where sometimes you step in and have to tell the actors how to whack the bad guys. But none of them is really you, is it? They are themselves - the main character isn't you, that's not how you would've reacted given that situation, that's just how Cloud would react.

Final Fantasy VII and most console RPGs are actually Adventure games. You remember Monkey Island? Space Quest? You remember Day of the Tentacle and Leisure Suit Larry???

What do all those have? They have stories, they have thought-out worlds, they have exploration, and they have characters you can change nothing about. The only difference is in the obstacles - in Monkey Island, the obstacles are puzzles. In Final Fantasy VII, the obstacles are mostly combat, but how do you get through combat? By picking the right options at the right time… rather like a puzzle with more visceral appeal.

Ladies and Genteels, I pronounce the subject: Adventure Game On Arrival.

Okay, so let's look at a cRPG that is very close to being an RPG.

DaggerFall. God that was quite a game. So much game in one game that they couldn't test the damned bugs out of it. Crawling with bugs. Few games have been released that were, at release, buggier. I hate bugs. I mean, Lawdie, after growing up having to smash cockroaches in my house every other night, I HATE them. God Bless America! Or at least, places in America with clean enough apartments so that it's surprising when there are bugs, and boy, you call that exterminator and everything is peachy keen. Shit, now I'm back here for another couple of years before I come back and every other night I'll be reaching for the bug spray.

Underneath those icky icky bugs, DaggerFall was a gem. It had everything. It had an expansive world (literally thousands and THOUSANDS of huge dungeons and hundreds of cities), total freedom for your character to do what you want (you wanna become a vampire, jefe? You go get yourself bit in your local dungeon and wait a few days… oh yes baby, fear me for I am the NIGHT!!!), more quests than you can shake a stick at (so what if a lot of them were randomly generated? Just the IDEA of having infinite quests ought to mean something), and most importantly, some aspects of the world respond very differently based on your actions.

What's that mean? It means that it simulates an organic experience where what you do affects the world, and at least superficially alters the story. You go postal and kill everyone in a little town in the middle of nowhere, heck, you can do it. The coppers will be after you every time you set foot in that town, but if your guy is tough enough (I actually did get far enough so that my vampiric dark elf fighter-mage with the oh-so-sweet daedra-soul-gemmed custom enchanted daedric dai-katana could get down with some serious town guard genocide) you can do it. Of course, if you kill someone you need to solve a quest, you are shit-outta-luck-baby.

You rise high enough in a guild, by god, they bend over for you when you step in. Oh, you want to use the teleportation pad? No problemo, Mastuh Nazghul Suh. If you're in the right guild, they'll give you a house.

Speaking of houses, you get enough money, you can buy a boat. You can buy a fricking ship.

A detailed world? God, you could spend hours looking through the books in a mage guild library. Those books on the shelves? Why, my man, you can read them. In fact, you read the right ones and you can figure out how to get in touch with some big ass demon lords who'll give you fantastic shit in exchange for a favor. Well, to tell you the truth only two of them gave you good stuff (that Azura's Star is really nice, and I can't remember the name of the book that gives you 30 attribute points) but come on, what other game at the time had options remotely so expansive?

And could your decisions affect the central plot? Well, unfortunately, not that much, but it's more than a lot of so-called rpgs give you. Close to the end, you got a certain doohickey, and who you give that doohickey to changes what faction triumphs in the end. Not a lot of choice in the main plot… but that's because of all the choice you get everywhere else, an acceptable design trade-off.

Other than the bugs, there was really only one problem with Daggerfall. Those damned dungeons. They were fucking huge. I mean, HUGE. Like it would be in real life if you ever suddenly got transported into Conan's shoes, you really can get lost in the dungeons. I believe it is close to impossible to finish that game without cheating if you don't have magic (there's a spell that you can use to set a waypoint, useful for quick escapes and for finding the fucking way out). Even with magic, it takes an iron will to get through without cheating at least some of the time. True 3d dungeons sound neat, but they are fricking horrendous to navigate once they get past a certain size. In DaggerFall, some of the dungeons were so gigantic that the automap was effectively useless, all you really had to go on was the compass and some impression of "I THINK I'm close to the bottom…" There were shafts straight up and down, with and without elevators (you had to climb if you didn't have the levitate spell at times), there were entire sections that were underwater (making it necessary to have the water-breathing spell for certain areas unless your swimming skill was stoopidly high). After some 12+ hours of getting turned around in A SINGLE dungeon (this was maybe 30 hours into the game), I decided that this was a level of realism I just did NOT need to enhance my fun. I cheated. I used the 'get to important marked location in a dungeon' cheat. And you know, I didn't feel bad at all.

You'll note I said that Daggerfall was only close to being an RPG. Well, yep. There's two more elements to an RPG.

One is social interaction. No amount of scripted encounters, no volume of quests, no exertion in programming can imbue the NPCs you encounter in a cRPG with the complexity and unpredictability of having a human mind behind them. It's that simple.

No number of hours of programming into the NPCs around you can match joining a party of folks in Dark Age of Camelot and laying siege to a castle. Nor can it match sitting around with your role-playing buds with some cokes and a pizza as you collectively imagined a shared world where you talk your way through to escaping that Imperial Dungeon, finding your gear and getting back to your ship.

The other is flexibility. Flexibility is always limited to some extent in cRPGs. In Pen and Paper, the real limit is the mind of your Game master. Which is why four out of the six or so groups of roleplaying buds I've been involved with in my life just collapsed. I tried being game master maybe two or three times - at first I sucked because I had no idea how to construct stories back then (all they could do was kill the next batch of invid and get some more gear), and later, I sucked because I focused so much on the story that my players didn't have enough freedom of action (they always knew it was my world and not theirs, they tended to say, "Hmm, I think it's a good time to use my character's powers and shapeshift to a beastie, gimme the claws, and hmm, H has the highest initiative, he should roll for us" rather than, "Vile deceiver! Can you really face THIS might? -I grow two foot claws on my forearms and leap at him-").

Only twice have I had the pleasure of participating in long role-playing campaigns. Once it was with the Star Wars role playing system. I was the weak guy with Jedi potential, my best buds at the time were a space pirate, a bounty hunter, and a mercenary. I got better with the Force, got a better lightsaber, and my buds got better guns, better ships, etc. Outnumbered and outgunned we faced the Empire and survived with our skins time after time against bounty hunters, Dark Jedi, and The Man In The Red Suit.

In the other campaign (it was still the same group of buddies), we didn't even have **rules**. We didn't have classes, we didn't have dice. Our world was a mismash of Battletech, Robotech, Akira and Marvel comics. We sat around and did things in our heads in a collectively developed world where our guys started out as mech pilots, learned martial arts skills (in some cases), became ace pilots (in others), switched sides, overturned our government, started a space courier service, got older and fell in love (with NPCs you gutter-minded dingbats). Heck, one of us became the leader of the new government. We actually played long enough so that we continued it by adventuring with those experienced characters' **children** now don't that beat all? We had no source books or anything; what we had was a well-established group dynamic and our collective imagination.

In single player games, the best cRPGs can hope for is to mimic the experience by having a well-thought-out world to explore, a character class and combat and puzzle interaction system broad enough to have multiple paths through conflict, and having a certain number of branch points in the game where the player makes a choice that affects the outcome of the story. I mean, jeez, Deus Ex is technically a hybrid game and it succeeds in RPG-ishness over a lot of so-called RPGs even if its only branch point is at the end when you decide the fate of the world.

Ah, but wait. Neverwinter Nights.

Hmm…

There's a player client with which to interact in a world… there's tools to make more worlds and modify the module that comes with the game… and there's an interface for a real-time game master.

!!!

My GOD, it really is full of stars!

I really don't want to be saying one thing is better than another. The point of this rant is not to say that PC rpgs are superior - on the contrary, console rpgs make more money and they really do tend to have better stories. The point is to explain what RPGing is to me, and why I think a lot of people miscategorize games into RPGs. People sometimes talk about the death of the adventure genre, but they don't seem to realize it is alive and thriving in the form of console rpgs, with ever more colorful worlds and bigger fights to figure out instead of goonier variants of puzzles. Obviously, Final Fantasy VII was a better game than Daggerfall. It was more accessible, and its story was quite simply better, to say nothing of the level of polish at the time of release.

Neverwinter Nights represents the next generation of crpgs. It is the first one that has a shot at bringing the pen and paper experience to computers, social interaction, creativity and all.

The first step towards computer rpgs was those text based adventures from way back when. The next development was the Ultima games and the gold box D&D games. Then there were RPGs with multiplayer elements.

Neverwinter Nights will be the very first TRUE computer role-playing game. There's character development, a world which can be changed at whim, the potential for stories as complex as anyone can imagine, and my goodness, there's even social interaction. You think you can make a better game? You can do it with the tools that come with it, and unlike other games that come with clunky and counterintuitive editors, everyone who has seen the Neverwinter toolset in action agrees that they have witnessed tremendously user-friendly design as well as great flexibility and power.

There are other great cRPGs being released this year (I mean, I REALLY want to play Morrowind), but Neverwinter Nights is the next step in the evolution of RPGs, for the first time having the potential to truly bring together old-school pen and paper creativity and interaction with modern computer audiovisuals and action. Barring major disasters, Neverwinter Nights will be the yardstick to measure for all RPGs afterward.

Obviously, it will not be perfect. There's scripting language to learn which I know will keep a lot of potential module designers from implementing their vision, there's limitations to what the engine can do, there are still some things that players will be forced to imagine… but everything afterwards can build on what is there. And in any engine limitations in Neverwinter Nights, why… if you happen to be one of the lucky people who will find a gaming group of buds to adventure with who have the right group dynamic… then any time something happens that isn't encompassed by the engine or toolset, your buds and the game master can just TALK over and IMAGINE what happens during those segments. I imagine that in some cases, there will be times when groups who get together for NWN will do some parts of the campaign in Pen and Paper format before continuing it in NWN for parts you can't do with the engine. "You have angered the great God so-and-so, and the ground crumbles away beneath your feet. You fall through a seemingly endless darkness, and at the end, there is a place and you are no longer falling, and in that place, you are surrounded by stars. Yet you can still walk, you still have arms and legs and your weapons. What do you do, oh brave adventurers? What do you do?"

To those few lucky people who will find your rpg buds and build on NWN and later games with imagination, real friendship and so on, you guys are damn lucky.

Ah yes, what a good time to be a gamer…

Writing Round Robin: Batter Up!
01.06.2002 Switch

Wow. It’s been, like, a year or two now, and I can’t believe I’ll be talking about, of all things, writing. I mean, Rain Man’s already been doing the most of that, or maybe elf. Me, I’ve been moping around doing “work”. Or is that “doing” work?

Anyways, the most significant amount of writing that I have done of the most recent past is probably work done on Improfanfic.com. (Yes, I’m that Switch.) After having been writing anime fanfiction for 5 years, and mostly Ranma fanfiction, and feeling as though the well of original idea had finally run dry (after mistaking the weak trickling coming just prior to be enough to jimmy out some shortfics), it was time to try something new. Lack of Common Sensei happened in the Ranma universe, but used the regular Ranma characters sparingly. Having been tossing about sidecharacter (or, as Mayhem would put it, DHYS) stories, I was fairly sure that it would feel just like home.

The first part I did was awful, but I felt like I made up for it in the second part. Encouraged, I tried my hand at round robin original fiction in another Improfanfic.com story, but that, and the entire story, didn’t pan out too well.

After having finally read the end of LoCS, I began to realize the similarities of writing in a round robin system, like Improfanfic.com’s stories, and the American pastime, baseball.

I’m not really a big baseball fan. I can’t field worth crap, just about as bad as my soccer goalie skillz. The last time I had an at-bat, way back as a junior in high school, where I ripped a double off above and to the right of the pitcher by inches, I got called out for trying to knock out several of my classmates with the aluminum bat. Nowadays, Wednesday Night Baseball keeps eating Sportscenter here. (It’s the NBA playoffs, for Chrissakes!)

So help me, it’s one of the most boring games to watch on a field. The only time I got to watch it, before I started my notorious career as a fanfic writer, I sat with a delegation on the second floor in left field. Whoopee. The only home run of that Toronto home game, heading right for the floor just above us. Whoopee. But I won’t go in to fun-to-watch/fun-to-play comparisons here.

But, as I have now been enriched by the newscast that is Sportscenter, I can make the astute analogy between the writing of a round robin fanfic and the baseball battery.

For those of us that can’t tell the difference between baseball and cricket, or American football and rest-of-the-world football, I’ll tell you about baseball. Baseball, like cricket, is about hitting a ball that’s thrown at you with a bat, then running around and around the field, around bases, to be exact. The more you run, the better. If you get tagged with the ball, you’re out. Sort of like capture the flag, where you toss the BFG as far as you can in the opposite direction of the enemy base.

The person who throws the ball in baseball is called the pitcher, and is pretty much in control of the game when his side is on the defensive (fielding). A guy who throws the ball hard, or can make the ball do some curving to fool the guy with the bat, is pretty good, since the batter is only allowed to swing at the ball three times, like a piñata. Of course, you have to make the other team go back dejected for 27 times a game, which makes for 81 throws at least, if you want to do it all by yourself.

Now, you try throwing a good-sized rock at a movie poster that’s 50-odd feet from you. Count the number of hits, and when you reach 81, stop. Then imagine a guy holding up that poster with a bat, trying to hit the rock.

And a baseball season has more than 160 games!

Major league baseball teams handle this workload is by dividing it among give or take a dozen pitchers. This is where the analogy begins.

As in a round robin pool, the group of pitchers, collectively known as the bullpen, has distinctions based on when they pitch.

First off is the starter. Of course. Much as you’d like to think that the starting pitcher sets the pace and tone of the rest of the game, the starting pitcher actually gives everyone else an idea of what they’re up against. A good starting pitcher will be able to set-up for the majority of the game - a really spectacular pitcher will finish the entire game and slap skin and bump rump with his mostly vestigial teammates. If you’re that kind of a writer, you probably are better off finishing an epic story on and off.

Now, the case is probable that the starting pitcher will start off hot, throwing heat, sliders, splitters and change-ups without a remarkable distinguishing feature between pitches, having batters watching dumbly or chasing balls. The pitch count may start to pile up, as the innings roll, the fourth ball will come before the third strike, base hits lead to people waiting to steal home.

When the runs start coming in, that’s when the coach will go to the mound. Before that, he’ll already make calls into the bullpen to ask people to warm up and bring in the shovels. In comes the interim pitcher, the reliever.

Basically, the reliever takes over for the starter or another interim pitcher when a) the outgoing pitcher is no longer confident about continuing or b) the shit hits the fan. Most often the latter. So the pitcher in relief is gonna use those shovels to pick up the slack, while giving the batter what-for. Again, these interim may end up cleaning up for the first few parts (or maybe not), but end up with more bile-sponges hitting the air-agitators, then another reliever may be called in, and so on.

Now, if usually, near the end of the game, needing to put about 3 to 6 more batters to pasture, especially in games where the score is pretty close, the team may bring out their end-game specialist pitchers, known as the closers. Their job is to make sure that the game ends neat and clean, hopefully with a win on your side.

So much for baseball.

I would rather not try to bring the point out screaming and dragging when it’s so much more obvious, aside from the fact that innings and chapters aren’t really a good analogy. It should be enough to say that not everyone can pitch, and most everyone can bat, but not necessarily well.

If you do believe you can pitch, better to hone your skills in the minors, right? Do a little softball, or maybe try out for the naked league. ^_^ Always remember: you’re in a team. And listen to the catcher - he’s in charge of keeping all the pitchers in line.

To determine whether or not you can find your pitching niche in the bullpen, ask yourself the following questions:

For starters, your job, of course, is to start off. You’ll determine how large the playing field is, and you have to make game enough so that the batters wouldn’t hit you out of the park:

• can you set the pace and the tone for the other pitchers?
• are you willing to think ahead to facilitate continuity?
• are you willing to leave enough room for other pitchers to work?
• can you keep every loose end you generate in check?

For relievers, the game can have very different rules. If the starter has done a good job, all you need to do is to continue playing the game at the pace he’s put, within the bounds already set. If the starter has neglected one or more of the points to playing with other pitchers, you have to find out how to break it open and make it a more interesting game for the all the pitchers involved:

• can you read into a game and have an idea where to continue it?
• can you extrapolate events predicated by the lay of the field in terms of people and situations?
• can you keep every loose end, produced by you, or your predecessors, in check?
• can you maintain continuity, and the pace and tone predicated?
• are you willing to leave enough room for other pitchers to work?

For closers, the game is actually much simpler. Get it done:

• can you read into a game and have an idea where to continue it?
• can you extrapolate events predicated by the lay of the field in terms of people and situations, to their logical end?
• can you tie up every loose end produced by your predecessors?
• can you maintain continuity, and the pace and tone predicated?
• can you take into account all of the information provided by your predecessors, and play out the ending according to that information?

Finally, ask yourself this: do I really want to work in these conditions? Many people want to write, but can't - many writers want to collaborate, but can't. That's why there are mailing lists abound. Lurk, find out more about these people you would want to work with. Read their work. Let them read yours, then you'll find out if you can play in the major leagues.

Where Have All the Flatmen Gone?
01.06.2002 Vector

Yo.

Officially, this rant should be available upon the re-opening of the NFT Zu webpage, version 4.something. As much as I'd like to babble on about anime or fanfiction, several of my associates here at the Zu know a lot more about those than I do. So I'll stick to something where I can claim some sort of specialized knowledge: video games.

Lately, I've been playing Legend of Mana. It's a little-known Square game for the PSX, the fourth installment in the Seiken Densetsu series of games. It's a quirky little game, but what will strike you most about the game is the amazing graphics. No, I'm not talking about FFVIII-style FMVs or such. I'm talking about the detailed hand-drawn animations. The characters are portrayed by detailed sprites, the backgrounds are colorful, hand-drawn landscapes, nothing like the mundane realism of FMV-based games. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking FMV. I certainly appreciate a great CG movie in a game.

But these days practically every game and its mother has FMV, and frankly, I tend to grow tired of it. What's wrong with good ol' 2d animation? We see a lot of games pushing the envelope as far as 3d CG FMVs are concerned, but where are the games pushing the envelope of 2d animation? As Legend of Mana and games like Parappa the Rapper show, there are certainly games and stories which are much better told in 2d animation than the mundane 3d videos of today. And for all their technical sophistication, 3d engines are still far more limited than what hand-drawn animation could show us, visions far closer to the artist's imagination.

So where are all the 2d RPGs? Sadly, outside of Square and Capcom, no one seems to be capable of thinking for themselves and differentiating themselves from the pack. In this case the console RPG scene suffers from a common problem: lack of innovation. Aside from a couple of industry leaders, few companies can afford to "try something different" when they have sales to make. It's far easier to do what everybody else is doing than to try out something which may or may not sell. The 2d RPG seems to be going the way of the handheld, as practically all 2d RPGS these days are being announced for GBA only, with the PS2, XBOX and GC all geared towards powerful 3d apps.

Granted, all of this might be chalked up to the fact that I'm an old-school gamer of sorts, and you could argue that "3d is the wave of the future!" But if you look at Legend of Mana, and its younger SNES brother Secret of Mana, you can't help but see how 2d animation has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, albeit unnoticed compared to the attention 3d animation has been getting. Five years ago, all these 3d games were getting noticed because they were bringing us something new, a greater sense of realism than what 2d animation could bring. Back then 3d WAS the wave of the future. Today, it IS the future, and 3d games are the norm, and 2d animation offers us something different, something fresh.

What am I saying? I want to see more 2d games, RPGs specifically. I want to see more Saga games, more Mana games, more Breath of Fire. I want to see new sprite-based RPGs. I want to see more fantasy worlds that look fantastic, more anime cut-scenes. Is it all too much to ask?

-Thinking about getting a GBA before a PS2

I Like Girls
01.06.2002 Pervert

Hopefully you guys’ll be reading this on the brand-spanking new Nikholas F. Toledo Zu webpage, which was down mainly because Switch has been such a lazy goofball. ^_^

Anyways, I’m supposed to write in this section rants and reviews about anime and anime fan fiction, but since this is my first rant, forgive me if I just ramble along.

Okay, as some of you guys may know, the Zu has always been a group (I don’t think we’re organized enough to be called a club) that’s based in the Philippines. If you don’t know where the Philippines is, that’s alright, since all I know about U.S. geography is that it’s composed of New York, California, and a bunch of farms somewhere in the middle. Getting back on topic, all of us are Filipinos, so right now, being is Cincinnati, OH is really a culture shock for me.

BTW, are there any cute, smart, and single females interested in a relationship with a 24-yr-old Computer Science Masters student?

(crickets chirping)

I didn’t think so. Anyway, the first thing I noticed about Cincinnati was there was so much … nothing! There’s so much empty space around here and there’s so few people! It takes some getting used to, especially since I come from a city that has a population density of around 10 people per square inch. I swear, someone bumping rudely on the sidewalk without apologizing would really make my day. Just add the stealing/mugging/kidnapping attempt and it would start to feel like home.

So, since this is going to be an anime column, I guess I should start off with my own personal preferences when it comes to anime. Well, most of the Zu has always been more or less partial to shoujo anime, but I’m probably the guy that’s most gung-ho (so to speak) about it and I’ve actually come to admit that … yes … I am a magical girl show fan.

The horror!

To be more precise … I started out liking Sailor Moon way back when it was shown on local TV (not the DIC dub you guys overseas know). I liked it, and I was shocked as hell by the end of the first season. It was all so … sudden! I’ve also watched and liked (among other shows) Utena, Pretty Sammy, Mahou Tsukai Tai, Pretear, Card Captor Sakura, Earth Girl Arjuna, and the first season of Magic Knight Rayearth. I’ve already gone through my ‘dark and brooding’ anime love phase that every heterosexual male seems to go through every so often so I’ve also watched stuff like Vampire Hunter D, Soul Taker, Lain, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, but these days I don’t take stuff like that seriously.

I’ve always, ALWAYS, preferred anime which has likable characters and uses the plot to focus on those characters. I also like my anime to have a beginning, middle, and end. If I wanted endless character sketches, I’d watch Archie. My current favorite anime series right now are Fruits Basket, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne.

I’m also a sexist pig. Male anime characters slide off my radar quite fast, whereas female anime characters are usually quite interesting IMO. Tylor from Irresponsible Captain Tylor was neat, but Yurika from Nadesico was excellent! I like some anime guys, mainly guys who are funny (Shigure from FB) and/or interesting (Touya from CCS), but those extremely bish ultra-heroic/brooding guys that girl anime fans seem to like so much (Tamahome from FY, almost every other guy from a CLAMP series, etc) are just so … never mind. There are exceptions of course. Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7 was too cool not to be liked (‘though I really REALLY wanted to kill him after disk 1).

Well, I think I’ve rambled enough for one column. Next time, I’m probably gonna use my column for yet more ego-boosting by talking about my favorite anime characters.

Peace!