Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (WiiWare) - You CAN go back home again...

(This post will be based on the first two chapters that were available at launch and may be updated as new chapters are released)

I remember hearing about this sometime ago... and I imagine it must have been on 1up when Shane Bettenhausen was still on the show or during an episode of Retronauts.

Originally released as an episodic cellphone game, Square ported the code to WiiWare and gave us shameful Westerners with our antique and quaint "iPhones" a chance to play the game for ourselves.

First of all, what is it? Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (henceforth shortened as TAY in this post) is the second "mainline" Final Fantasy game to receive a true honest to god sequel (I'm looking at you, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII) that brings back most of the original cast for an all new story. And as a sequel, it does not shy away from its original roots. I really don't know much about making a 16bit game, but I wouldn't be surprised if Square went back into the archives and dug up the original artwork from the FF4 for use in TAY. They've also reused most, if not all, the music cues from the original game, meaning that you probably shouldn't be coming into this game thinking that you'll get a completely new experience.

In fact, I would argue that most of the charm of the game comes from the fact that we're playing a brand new sprite-based RPG in 2009. It's a game that exudes nostalgia, in a way that the fourth Act of Metal Gear Solid 4 did with its flashback, taking the player back to the early 90s and reminding them of the fun (or frustration) of playing the original back on the SNES with an oldschool gamepad.

And I think it succeeds completely at that invoking my wistful longings for a simpler time. I found myself enjoying the grind because the battle animations were short (unlike the longwinded animations of modern 3D RPGs) and even though the music is just a series of endless loops, I found myself humming along to them out of habit. In many ways, I think I prefer TAY to the DS remake of FF4 simply because I much prefer the sprite-based art to the Playstation era polygon-based art that the DS version produces.

But is there more to the game than just its art assets? Certainly.

I appreciated the way that it invoked nostalgia with flashback scenes. When you travel to a location that was important in the original game, you will often flashback to the original scene. The game suddenly applies a sepia filter, plays the "sad" version of the main theme (I'm not really good with names of songs from FF games unfortunately), uses the original character sprites from FF4 and replays the original cutscene. In a game whose art design already invokves nostalgia, they managed to find a way to make the game even more nostalgic. And for me, it excused the recycling of old locations, simply because it meant that I could go back to many of these old towns and dungeons and remember the original game.

Story-wise, the game relies on that old trope of aging the original characters and introducing their children. Personally, I've only experienced this a couple of times - The Anne of Green Gables novels and the Allison to Lillia anime - so I don't have a lot to compare this to, but I think it works relatively well. It gives you a chance to relive the consequences of the original game (what happens in the first chapter of the game is almost ripped out of Persona 4 where Kain must fight his true emotions - being on the losing end of the Cecil-Rosa-Kain love triangle - made manifest in a "shadow"/evil Kain that you must battle) while also giving you a chance to explore the world from a completely new perspective (through Cecil and Rosa's child, Ceodore).

Rydia's chapter plays out the same way, as you can play Rydia and Luca - you explore Rydia's issues with her lineage from the first game while seeing the Underworld from Luca's relatively unexplored perspective. I have to imagine that all the chapters will be designed in this manner - an old character to tie the game to the old story and a new character to provide a fresh perspective.

It's a nice way to keep the game from devolving into complete fanservice by having the old characters simply relive their old issues without introducing anything new and I think it works relatively well.

Pacing wise, it appears that the game will take a page from Rashomon and have all the chapters happen concurrently, telling the story from several perspectives. This keeps in line with the fact that the game has to be sold episodically (which was probably how it was originally sold in Japan). By introducing the characters in their own episodes rather than have a single chronologically continuous story that you have to play in sequence, you don't really have the problems of serialized fiction (what happened last week?) and you might even sell the subsequent chapters to people who aren't interested in the entire story but like a particular character. I might have preferred that the game was released in one complete package, but this is a fair compromise.

There really isn't much to say until the final chapter comes out and I finish off the game. As it stands, it's all very familiar in terms of gameplay and storytelling. I still think it's clever that the game manipulates the battle system in order to impart narrative (in the form of battles that you will inevitable lose), but that's so old hat now that it's not as special as it was back in the 90s. But, you're not playing this to be blown away... you're playing this to be taken back to the past (very much like the Angry Video Game Nerd!).

One final note though. I honestly don't think any other game franchise could have pulled this off. Most companies simply remake games (like Bionic Commando: Re-armed) or just re-emulate games (pretty much everything Backbone makes) and even those just sell for 5 or 10 dollars. But TAY will cost nearly 40 dollars when the game is fully released and I don't doubt that the many older fans will be perfectly willing to part with that obscene amount of money just to play through the entire game (myself included). I look at it this way. The Penny Arcade Adventures games are brand new experiences for 20/15 dollars each and I just couldn't bring myself to buy them. With TAY, there was absolutely no hesitation. I guess it just goes to show that for a certain generation of people, the Final Fantasy name is still extremely important to them.

Prince of Persia (2008): Save me Elika! You're my only hope!

I’m not sure what I can write about this game that hasn’t been covered by reviews.  Part of it is cultural – it’s interesting to see that British reviewers didn’t like Nolan North’s Prince because it felt like an anachronism whereas many American reviewers liked the new character because he’s very much like Han Solo (which is interesting, consider who they cast to play the "real life" Prince of Persia in the new Disney film trilogy).  The other part, of course, comes down to the difficulty.  No matter how you see it, this is a game that is simply TOO easy and for many people this is its most basic flaw.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and I simply don’t have the patience to play a game for 100 hours (Persona 4, I’m looking at you) but I was perfectly happy with the game difficulty and its balance.  While you can’t die, you are penalized when you miss a jump or when you are knocked down by an enemy.  As many people have mentioned, the game implements quick save into the game itself and quite frankly, it makes it a more enjoyable experience.  That said, I do find the actual platforming to be annoying sometimes – it’s so automatic that it runs counter to all of your instincts as a gamer.  I jumped to my death so many times because I instinctually pushed a button that I shouldn’t have and it was extremely frustrating.  Although, to be fair, for someone who has never played a game before and who doesn’t have that game grammar ingrained into them this automatic nature of the platforming would make the game infinitely more accessible.  I’ll also say that if you’re able to hit every jump and grab correctly, it’s very satisfying to go from point A to point B.

With that out of the way, let’s just look at how the story was delivered in the game.  It still relies on cutscenes, but a lot of the exposition and character building moments are found in incidental dialog (primarily through your battles with the Concubine) and through the purely optional dialog cutscenes with Elika.  Essentially, if you want the story, you can stop and listen to it but if you want to breeze through the game and just play, you can do that too.  I admire the choice – rather than force you to sit through cutscenes that you can’t skip (Heavenly Sword), it gives you the choice to experience as much of the story as you want.  You can still get the basic plot points by just going through the game, but if you want to discover the characters’ motivations, you can do that too.  It’s a design that certainly satisfies both types of gamers.  (Incidentally, yes, the Prince of Persia is actually a prince.  The game hints at the fact that he has run away from his title and that in the sequel, he’ll have to face his “destiny” and assume the mantle he has rejected.)

In terms of how the main story is told though, it’s pretty standard.  While the environments are stunning to look at, other than the plates left behind by Ormazd they don’t really tell a story.  There is a feeling of loss because this once vibrant and beautiful land has decayed into disrepair and neglect, but it doesn’t really tell anything more.  The game’s highlights are in its small touches – the Prince’s interactions with Elika are so fluid it feels very much like they are working in tandem.  Once in a while, you’ll find that she’ll slow you down as you wait for her to catch up but for the most part, there’s an almost ballet like quality to how they both interact with each other and the environment.   Even if you skip all the character development exposition, you get a feel for how the characters are bonded to each other.  At the very least, it’s probably the first time I’ve appreciated the storytelling possibilities of dance.

The other storytelling highlight is the ending.  On a drink fuelled podcast, Greg Miller of the IGN Playstation channel said he was angry that the game forced a decision on him (and actually suggested that GTA4 had a more open ended ending!).  I’d argue that all games are linear in terms of their plot – even GTA4 funnels you towards an ending regardless of your choices throughout the game.   I just like that they made you play through the ending yourself.  In most games, this would have been an elaborate bloviated ten minute cutscene that you’d forget about after the credits rolled.  Instead, you are forced to actively participate in the ending – whether you agree with the Prince’s decision or not.  But I’m getting ahead of myself; in the ending, you have saved the world but at the cost of Elika’s life.  Unwilling to let her die, the Prince makes the same pact with the devil that her father did and frees Ahriman in order to revive her.  The game makes you career her dead body to an altar and then directs you to destroy five newly planted trees in the game world meant to symbolize renewal.  Each tree you destroy corrupts the land and when you destroy the final tree, you are given a light seed that you can use to revive Elika.  For me, it’s a haunting sequence that is meant to invoke Shadow of the Colossus (which is a nice touch, since the Prince/Elika relationship is obviously a reference to ICO).  Like that game, here you are choosing to destroy the world in order to save the woman you love.   While games constantly refer to each other through conventional artistic signs, this is a rare example of intertextuality through gameplay itself – where a gameplay sequence is meant to invoke the gameplay in another game.  A nice touch is the use of achievements to tell you that the story will be “To be continued...”.  They even timed it to appear at the right place in the game.

I haven’t played the previous trilogy – I was a PC gamer who avoided console ports – so I don’t know if this game is any better or worse than Sands of Time.  What I do know is that this Prince of Persia should be lauded for trying to tell story and develop its characters through the game itself and not through cutscenes or blocks of text or any other traditional form of storytelling.  I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what they’ll bring to the table for the sequel because they’ve clearly raised the bar for me.

And, on a completely random note – it looks like Nolan North is now the “lead” for two major game franchises.  He really is the Harrison Ford of video games!

Also, if Wikipedia is to believed, this is all based on Persian legend.  At least we're moving away from knights and princesses and elves.  Thank Ormazd!

Games Roundup November 2008 Blowout Edition

To finish out my three post mega update, here are just some games I played but I really don’t have any long thoughts about:

Call of Duty: World at War

Really, it’s a decent enough game but they really didn’t try to do anything interesting with the story telling.  Almost every moment in the Russian section of the game is taken from a previous Call of Duty and the Japanese section of the game is very underwhelming.  They wanted to show the horrors of war (to the point where they show Japanese and German soldiers trying to execute the player TWICE in the game), but nothing in the game itself gave you that feeling.  Call of Duty 4 had the nuclear bomb moment... this one just has people die around you and at this point, that’s just not enough anymore.  

In fact, there's one point in the game where the game pauses and you're told by your Russian sargeant to execute some German soldiers who have surrendered.  But your choice is meaningless - if you kill them, the game moves on and if you spare their lives, your sargeant kilsl them and the game moves on.  If this was meant to be a chilling moment in the life of a soldier where one has to choose mercy over self preservation, it completely fell flat.  Treyarch just didn't earn that emotional investment from me as a player, despite how hard they tried throughout the entire game.  Unfortunately, Activision seems intent on pumping these games out and because there two different studios working on Call of Duty games, the “learning time” from game it game is increased.  But now that Treyarch has had the opportunity to learn from Infinity Ward, hopefully Call of Duty 7 will have more interesting storytelling.

Also, the damn clown car spawn closets are still here.  I know that’s their way of forcing the player to progress and move forward but it’s just annoying as hell.  I think I swore several times during the horrible storming the Reichstag level.  I will say that the Black Cat mission – this game’s scripted vehicle sequence – was pretty fun.  It’s nothing like the AC-130 Gunship section in Call of Duty 4 – indeed, the tone of the Black Cat mission is hectic and exciting whereas the AC-130 mission is cool and calm – but seeing your character jump from turret to turret to shoot down patrol boats and Zeroes was pretty exciting.  It also gave me an appreciation for WW2 turret gunners.  I have no idea how they could have hit anything with those viewfinders.

One other thing that’s just worth mentioning is that the intro videos for each level are edited like they were made for MTV.  It’s extremely slick and probably a little overly produced.  On the one hand they were striking and made you want to pay attention but on the other hand, they didn’t fit in with the tone of the game at all.  If anything, Infinity Ward should have used intros like this in Call of Duty 4.

Left 4 Dead

There’s not really much to say here other than this is a game that’s more of a ludic experience rather than a narrative experience.  There is no true narrative in the game other than you are survivors of a zombie apocalypse and that you are trying to escape to freedom.  As with all Valve games, the environments do tell a story (mostly through signs and writing on the walls) but otherwise, it’s pure gameplay.  And honestly, this is a game where it’s all about what happens to you and how you solve a problem.  If ever there was a game where the personal stories were “emergent”, it’s this one.  Add the fact that no two gameplays will ever be the same because of the “AI director”/procedurally generated enemy spawns and you have a game that’s all about personal experience.

And co-op makes the experience that much more fun because it’s very much like watching a zombie movie with your friends, except of course that you are all in the movie itself.  Inevitably, you’ll scream for help when you are caught by a zombie, you’ll yell in frustration if someone does something stupid and you’ll all cheer when you escape the final zombie horde in a helicopter.  This really is the best co-op experience ever designed – probably even better than the ultimate co-op game, Rock Band.

Little Big Planet

Again, this is another game that is more about your own personal experience derived from the game rather than the story.  And again, co-op is very much like Left 4 Dead, although there’s less screaming because no one uses headset on a PS3.  The design itself is very charming and clever and it also has some of the greatest community features found in a game.  I haven’t really had time to play with the level making tools (and I’m not sure if I ever will), but some of the levels I’ve played are simply astonishing.  I just can’t imagine the time and effort it must have taken to make something like a Gradius clone or a level that plays the introduction to the song “Sweet Child of Mine” or to program the logic tables to make a calculator or a fully functional Tic Tac Toe game.  The Microsoft hater in me would just like to point out that I don’t have to pay to play online on the Sony network and their games have much more robust online features than any game found on the 360.  

And just for my own reference:

Pure

This is just a fun ATV off road arcade racing game really – probably my surprise of the year.  I almost never finish racing games and unfortunately, I probably won’t finish this one either, but I definitely had a lot of fun with this and I’d love to get back to it some time.

Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero 4

More plastic guitar action!  The music creator in Guitar Hero 4 was a letdown so hopefully the feature will be much improved in the sequel.  Rock Band 2 changed single player for the worse and I’m left playing quick play in order to play through my songs.  

On a random note, I think I've spent more money on Rock Band DLC than I have on music in my entire life.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix

It’s Street Fighter 2!  I just wish I could find a decent joystick... the Hori is good, but there could be something better.

Chrono Trigger DS

I really have no excuse not to finish what some people consider the greatest game in the history of games.  I've finished the game so many times when I was in high school and I've seen all the endings, but I really just need to experience the game again as an adult and "professional" academic.  Hopefully my new perspective will give me new insight into the game's design and narrative.

Fallout 3: Ethics... Ethics Never Changes

So, this is yet another one of those time cherished PC RPG Franchises that I’ve just never got into. I chalk it up to my misspent youth playing Team Fortress 1, Starcraft and Counter Strike. I didn’t go into this blind – I played about 10 hours of Fallout 2 before the summer ended and I had to get back to work (and newer games) – but I really wasn’t sure what to expect with Fallout 3.

If anything, I now know that the roots of ethical interactivity in RPGs go back way further than BioWare and the Neverwinter Nights/Baldur’s Gate series. But what about Fallout 3? If you listen to the people at No Mutants Allowed, it’s quite literally a digital representation of a piece of garbage. Or, to filter through the rhetoric, it’s perhaps a decent game but not actually a Fallout game. I agree with them in some respects. Avoiding the whole issue of gameplay – the move from isometric to first person, the move from turn based combat to real time combat – the writing just isn’t as sharp as the writing in Fallout 2. Sure, the original Fallouts were perhaps a little too off wall in terms of the number of references to 90s pop-culture, bit the dialog was clever and the plotting was very interesting. Indeed, someone rolled a low Intelligence character and the entire game changes – dialog options and all.

While I understand that Bethesda shouldn’t be burdened with the legacy of Fallout, they did choose to buy the franchise and call their game Fallout 3. But I don’t want to turn this into an X is better than Y discussion – I’ll leave that to the forums. What I really wanted to talk about was their implementation of ethics or “Karma”. Now, I’m really at a point where this is becoming to sound old hat – every single WRPG now uses morality as a way to give the player narrative agency – but there are some interesting things that Bethesda tries out in their game.

Probably the biggest aspect of Bethesda’s morality system is the fact that interacting with the environment itself affects your Karma score. Now, Fable 2 did this by associating an ethics score with various objects you can interact with – eat vegetables and you’re more “pure” or raise rents to 200% and you’re more “corrupt” – but in Fallout 3, your interaction is much more direct. It’s still very simple – if you take an object that’s not yours or “free to the world”, it’s considered stealing and you will lose Karma. The same happens if you hack a computer or pick a lock that someone in the game world owns. Of course, killing a good or bad character in the world will also change your Karma accordingly. Now, it still seems odd that there’s a cosmic Karma counter out in the netherworld watching your every move, but the fact that your actions in the non-narrative or quest part of the game has as much as an impact on your overall morality score is an interesting implementation of a fluid morality system. Essentially, they added a score counter to the stealing and lockpicking mechanic in Oblivion.

Indeed, while I was playing a saintly character that would make Jesus Christ proud, I wasn’t above looting and stealing. The game recognized that my “good” actions in the quests (or narrative section of the game) outweighed my “bad” game play actions in the rest of the world (or the ludic section of the game), but I know that I’ve stolen from a lot of people in my effort to help them. The game doesn't really say anything about your actions either way - I just had to rationalize my actions in the "real world". I think it might have been nice if the game had some dialog along the lines of "I heard that you a good person - why would you steal from me?" or "I thought you were a monster, but you saved my life!", but I suppose that's just something they couldn't account for or implement.

That said, the quest/narrative section of the game is very standard... and perhaps a step backwards from Mass Effect’s more cinematic dialog wheel system. You basically have good, neutral or evil dialog choice options that you choose from a standard dialog tree. And like Mass Effect, for the majority of the official and freeform quests in the game, you can finish the quest in a good, neutral or evil manner. It’s not that the quests weren’t fulfilling or interesting – my playthrough took me 80 hours – it’s just that Bethesda simply didn’t do anything really new with their implementation of ethical interactivity. It’s very clear when you do something morally good in the game, to the point where the game tells you that your Karma has improved.

I think my bigger problem with the game (and with games of this sort) is that there is absolutely no compelling reason to play an evil character other than to see how the story might unfold if you make evil choices. Even the first big choice in the game is rendered moot by the game play – having a home in the game is essential to survive the early stages and the quickest way to get a home is to disarm the bomb in Megaton. If you are trying to make life easier for yourself in the game rather than roleplay a bad character, there’s absolutely no reason to destroy Megaton and take the penthouse suite at Tenpenny Tower. The one location in the game where bad characters thrive – Paradise Falls – is still open to good characters that complete a quest or bribe the guard, so it’s not as if there are sections of the game world blocked off if you choose to play a good character. In fact, I would argue that the game is substantially easier in the early to mid stages of the game if you play a good character simply because the majority of the NPCs in the game won’t hate you the moment they meet you.

I will say that the world itself is almost lovingly constructed. Strolling through the Mall and going through the museums and the Capitol building was a breathtaking experience for someone who has never been to Washington DC. The detail in the rest of the Wasteland is just as astounding and the way that some buildings are constructed tell a story without relying on exposition. You might come across a room with children’s toys scattered across the floor with a couple of skeletons holding each other and even though you don’t know what happened, you can pretty much imagine that it was a mother holding her child as nuclear bombs exploded around them. Of course, the 50s aesthetic is alive and well in the game – to the point where a typical 50s suburb is lovingly recreated in a virtual reality simulation – and it serves the game really well. There’s something amusingly surreal about killing a super mutant while listening to music from the 40s over the radio (although they should have tried to license more music). I’ll agree with the assertion that a lot of the towns/cities feel completely empty – one “town” only has two people in it – and it’s probably my only criticism with a game with otherwise excellent set/art design.

As for the actual narrative part of the game? Well, there’s really not much to say. You are funnelled down a story much like Mass Effect or Fable 2 and while you can make moral choices throughout the main quest, the overall end game remains the same. Also, there’s almost no nuance in the game when it comes to the two main factions that appear – the Brotherhood of Steel is good, the Enclave is evil. You don’t necessarily know why the Enclave is evil... you just have to take the game’s word for it. There also isn’t a “huge” interactive moment in the narrative that stands out – there isn’t a Spire or a Virmire or any other similar set piece – and it makes the story somewhat forgettable. Yes, the first time you encounter a Behemoth and the ending sequence where you have to go to the Jefferson Memorial are very exciting moments in the game, but these are moments where you do more "watching" than "playing". It’s not that I didn’t enjoy those sequences – it’s just that they didn’t challenge my preconceptions of narrative in games the way that Mass Effect or Fable 2 did.

Ultimately, Fallout 3 falls under that cliché of “iteration, not evolution”. It’s a great game that could have been much better if they tried to push the narrative storytelling that much further. That said, there really is nothing else like it in the single player RPG realm other than Bethesda’s previous game, Oblivion. Not surprisingly, Bethesda is expanding the game with three expansion packs due out in early 2009 and like the Oblivion expansions, this DLC will add new locations for the player to explore but will probably not do anything new in terms of storytelling. The Fallout universe is a rich world however, so I just have to hope that they try to do something more interesting with the narrative in the inevitable sequel.

May 29, 2009 edit!

So, I was listening to the May 29, 2009 episode of Listen Up! and one thing came up that I found really interesting - it's possible to completely break the "linear" narrative and skip ahead several steps just by exploring. I think the discussion happens around the 1:05-1:10 mark.

Garnett had a problem with the fact that he could find Doctor Li right from the get go and essentially skip the first 5 missions of the game. And yes, this is true... but as Brad pointed out, the game essentially reflects reality back at the player. In "real life", if you sometime tells you to go to Home Depot to buy a widget but you choose to search a junkyard to find the same widget, haven't you achieved the same objective?

I believe that this only happens at the beginning of the game and that after you find your father, you are essentially stuck in a fairly linear narrative... but it's interesting that you could skip a large part of the early game if you wanted to.

And come to think of it, this happened to me during an early playthrough... but being the achievement completionist that I am (at least in RPGs), I just had to reload and earlier save. But I guess achievement hunting and how that affects agency in games is another discussion.

Gears of War 2: Eat Shit and Die!

There really isn’t that much I want to say about the game especially since everyone with a 360 has probably finished it already.  In broad strokes, I’ll defend all the game play changes they made from the first game in terms of level design and pacing.  A lot of people had a violent reaction to the worm level, but I thought it was just a nice way to slow the game down and give the player a breather.  I also loved the game ending, even though it’s essentially a rail ride on a Brumak where you can’t die.  Maybe it’s just me, but I preferred that to the horrible General RAAM battle at the end of the first game.  In fact, the only problem I had with the game was the Centaur tank level – I still don’t understand why they chose to throw in a vehicle section in a game that’s a shooter.  The Brumak is a throwaway level that’s meant to be the reward for completing the game... the Centaur level?  That felt like something I needed to overcome in order to keep going.

And just as a random point – Horde mode is fun – but the fact that you can only choose your starting level if you start a private game is extremely annoying.  At this point, I don’t know anyone still seriously playing Gears of War 2 online, which means I’m dependent on matchmaking.  Halo 3 had the exact same problem – in order to have play a co-op match, you basically need to have people on your friends list willing to play the game.  I guess it’s more the nature of console gaming and the preponderance of peer-to-peer matchmaking, but they really should re-implement the server browser and let people search for games by specific criteria if they want.

Everything about the narrative is pretty standard for a AAA game – it is gameplay first and story second.  Which is fine, it’s just that there really isn’t much to say about how the story is delivered.  You essentially move from set piece to set piece and while each set piece is very well designed (from the fallen city to the inside of a worm), there really isn’t any story or thematic content delivered through the gameplay itself.  Again, like MGS4 and countless other games, Gears of War 2 relies on the cutscenes for the expositional parts of the game.

The one cutscene I want to talk about is the one that probably everyone who has finished the game remembers – the one that CliffyB claimed would make us cry.  Yep, I’m talking about when Dom is reunited with Maria.   I’ll fully admit that it was a very effective cinematic moment and if I was watching a “real” film, I might have been impressed.  In fact, it’s very similar to the moment in Brothers in Arms that I described in a previous post.  Dom frees Maria from a cage and he rushes over to her and holds her.  The background is full of colour (well, comparatively speaking for Gears of War 2 anyway) and we see a healthy, attractive looking Maria featured in an earlier cutscene.  But we soon find out that this is all an illusion; Marcus interrupts Dom and suddenly the scene changes.  The colour in the scene is quickly removed and the world turns deathly brown.  The camera pans out and we see Maria as she actually is – a victim of enslavement at the hands of the Locust.  Ostensibly, she looks like a victim of a German concentration camp, as she is thin, pale and has lost all her hair.  Unable to rescue her, ultimately the scene ends with Dom shooting Maria in the head – the only merciful act he could do in a horrible situation.

Now, the scene is fantastic but the fact that it’s something I had to watch renders some of its impact rather meaningless.  Ultimately, after the scene is complete, I’ll go back to chainsawing guys in half with my Lancer and will forget that the scene happened.  It’s another example of gameplay/narrative dissonance found in GTA4.  I’m not saying they should have ripped off MGS3 and had you shoot Maria yourself (something that wouldn’t have worked giving the co-op nature of the game), but I feel like they could have tried to have given the scene more impact by tying it to the player’s actions rather than her inaction.

Perhaps the more interesting aspect of the scene was brought up by Shawn Elliot on episode 109 of the Gamers with Jobs podcast  (incidentally, they read my letter on episode 110.  Whoo!).  He pointed out that the nature of the game pretty much spoils the outcome of the cutscene.  Why?  Because we know that Gears of War 2 just isn’t the type of game that will have a handholding escort mission – especially since they removed the limited squad control found in the original Gears of War.  Since it’s highly unlikely that the game would make you babysit Maria as you went off to fight the Horde, you know that they’ll have to somehow get rid of Maria before the game continues and Dom shooting her is the most likely outcome. 

I just think it’s interesting that games have developed enough of a convention that they cultivate reader expectations.  One analog I can think of is how a veteran television watcher can spot a cliffhanger ending to an episode of a television series based on the time.  If it’s 8:55 and the plot hasn’t resolved itself, you know that “To Be Continued...” will flash on the screen in the next minute or so (I believe a comedian did a routine based on this phenomena).  It’s not something new, but it’s the first time I’ve really noticed it as I was playing a game.  I first saw the scene while playing with someone on Live and the first thing I said was that “there’s no way we’re taking her with us” and that’s exactly what happened.

It’s not that I don’t like the game.  While I didn’t really find the storytelling in the game all that interesting, the game itself is solid.  Headshots are still extremely satisfying and the Lancer never gets old.  Horde mode, despite the matchmaking difficulties, is a great co-op mode that is part of a larger trend in gaming this year (Call of Duty 5’s Nazi Zombie mode for one).  It’s clear that they made an effort to tell a deeper story this time around – compared to the first game, the story here is Shakespearean.  I just hope that in Gears of War 3, Epic directs their efforts toward HOW they tell their story and not just WHAT their story should be about.

Fable 2 (or The Book of Job 3D)

My confession:  I got about half way through the first Fable before I just lost interest and gave up.  It does a lot that BioWare games of that period tried to do (and Molyneux himself experimented with interactive morality back in Black and White), but it didn’t grab me.  I’m not sure if I was just too young to appreciate the British sensibility of the game or if there were other games I ended up playing at the time, but I just never felt the need to go back to it.  So, when Fable 2 was announced, I figured that this would give me a chance to atone for the past and finish a Fable game without having to dip back into “last gen”.  

With that out of the way, let’s just cut straight to the rhetoric:  Fable 2 has some of the most interesting ethical choices in games today and blows everything BioWare has done right out of the water.  Mass Effect tried to nuance ethics by forcing you to play a hero regardless of your ethical choices and Fable 2 does exactly the same thing – ultimately, you will kill Lucien whether you are good or evil.  But Fable 2 handles the ethical choices by directly integrating them into the game play and the narrative of the game itself.

There are two points in Fable 2 where the game will jump far into the future, following the progression of your character from childhood to adulthood.  After each time jump, the choices you’ve made will directly influence how the world evolves.  As a child, if you decided to be “naughty” by losing arrest warrants, smashing up a warehouse, giving booze to a drunk, then Bowerstone Old Town will turn into an inner city ghetto run by criminals and flooded with drunks and prostitutes.  Alternatively, if you try to be “nice” Old Town will go through a renaissance, looking as cleaned up and as nice as the rest of Bowerstone.  You can have the same effect on West Cliff and the two Temples near Oakvale after you enter The Spire.

What’s interesting about having these chronological jumps is that you can actually see the long term consequences of your actions.  Whereas the BioWare games hint at what might have happened at the end of the game, here you not only get to see what happens but play through what happens.  And there’s the interesting bit of narrative interactivity.  Because the entire landscape and demographics of an entire section of the game world is so drastically altered by your actions, you may come to regret your decision.  The fact that the chronological jump happens twice in the game gives you the opportunity to at least change your mind the second time around.  At the very least it makes the game much more fluid with its system ethics than the typical game where you have to be either good or bad and being able to see the results of your ethical choices makes those choices that much more meaningful.

Like Mass Effect, Fable 2 presents you with ethical set pieces where an entire sequence is based around an ethical choice.  Whereas in Mass Effect these set pieces take place almost exclusively within the conversation system, Fable 2 integrates these choices into the game play itself.  Drawing from the story of Job, in which Job’s faith to God is tested by God himself through progressively difficult and horrific trials, the player is forced to make harder and harder choices if they wish to roleplay as a “good” character.  When you’re at The Spire, you have the choice to be an obedient soldier for Lucien and the Commandant or you can try to defy orders and do the right thing.  In Mass Effect, this may have taken place within the conversation wheel and you may end up getting “good” or “evil” points based on the choices you make.  Here, every time you choose to be “good” you are punished by having experience points and skills taken from you at a geometric rate.  In other words, every time you don’t follow orders, you are given an in game penalty that directly affects your player progression and sets you back maybe several hours. 

The choices in The Spire start off very simple and progressively become more difficult – including a reinterpretation of the classic Stanford Prison Experiment.  Needless to say, the last sequence is the most interesting – the Commandant orders you to kill Bob, one of the friends you’ve made during your stay at The Spire, for being disobedient.  If you refuse to kill Bob, the Commandant drains your experience and gives you another chance to kill Bob.  This happens at least several times before the sequence ends.  Why does this happen?  The game is trying to pressure you into changing your mind by progressively taking away more and more of your experience points.  It wants to see if you will panic, if have a breaking point where you will kill Bob because you don’t want to lose anymore of your hard earned experience points.  The ultimate tragedy of this sequence is that if you last the gauntlet of experience loss and refuse to kill Bob up until the end, the Commandant gets tired of you and kills Bob himself.  Your choice to spare Bob’s life is rendered meaningless and you’ve lost all your experience points.  All you get for your trouble is a small number of “good points” that affect your alignment.   Here I believe the game is trying to make you feel guilty for regretting your decision to spare Bob’s life.  With most narratives, you expect a payoff for making a sacrifice and choosing the good choice – maybe Bob lives and is able to see his wife again.  But the game robs you of even that payoff.  You choose to be good simply because you want to stand by your conviction to be good – there is no in game reward, either in experience points or in the plot, for making the “right” choice.  Because there’s no payoff, there must be a small part of you that wishes you just killed Bob in the first place and kept your experience – it’s a perfectly natural response, especially for a player who is familiar with how games and RPGs work.  In fact, I’m sure that’s the response that Molyneux and the designers wanted you to have when you choose to be good throughout the entire Spire sequence.  If you want to “feel good” for making the “good” choice, you are forced to come to the realization that sometimes being good means you won’t be rewarded.  In fact, you may even be punished for your conviction.

The second major test of your conviction to being “good” comes at the end of the Reaver/Dark Seal quest.  You learn that Reaver has spent the last few centuries sacrificing the lives of innocents in order to maintain his own youth and he has sent you as his latest sacrifice.  However, this time an innocent woman has accidently ended up at the same sacrificial altar as well and you are forced to choose whether to sacrifice yourself or to sacrifice the woman.  There are two aspects of this sequence that makes this choice interesting.  First, the effects of the sacrifice are permanent.  If you choose to be good and sacrifice yourself, your character is permanently scarred for the remainder of the game (which has the annoying side effect of having all the NPCs in the game – including your spouse and child – run away from you whenever you walk next to them).  Second, and more interesting from my perspective, the choice you make isn’t immediate.  Unlike other games, you don’t simply make a choice and watch the consequences of your choice play out.  Here, if you choose to sacrifice the innocent woman, she pleads and begs for her life and you have the chance to reverse your decision and sacrifice yourself.  In fact, the whole sequence is timed so that you will agonize over the decision.  What I like about this sequence is that it uses game design to try to make you feel guilty if you make the “evil” choice and sacrifice the woman as you make the choice rather than wait until after you make the choice.  The fact that the game gives you a chance to reconsider forces you to live in the moment of the choice, realizing exactly what you are doing when you are choosing to sacrifice the woman.  Of course, the fact that making the good choice permanently scars your own character makes the “good” choice difficult as well.  Either way, the game makes it difficult to choose one over the other.  What’s doubly frustrating is that you aren’t given the chance to reject the premise of the choice – you need Reaver’s co-operation, so you can’t just abandon the quest and bring Reaver to justice for sacrificing so many innocent people throughout the years.

The final test comes at the end of the game after you defeat Lucien.  Theresa tells you that The Spire will be able to grant you one wish.  You can choose between Sacrifice, where you wish that everyone who was killed by Lucien in order to construct the Spire was brought back to life; Love, where you wish that your sister, spouse, child and (most importantly!) your dog is brought back to life; or Wealth, where you wish for a larger amount of gold.  Now, I think it’s fair to say that the Wealth choice is the false choice.  Since money is so easy to make in the game, even if you don’t use the Pub Games glitch, the only reason why you might choose this option is to get the achievement and if you are dead set on roleplaying a purely “evil” character.  So the real choice is between Sacrifice and Love, and yet again this is an extremely difficult choice.  As a “good” character, the expectation is that you will be a martyr and sacrifice the people you love for the greater good of humanity... like another figure in Christianity.  But throughout the game, you steadily grow attached to the companionship of your faithful dog (and maybe even your family), so that your instincts are to choose to bring back the people that you love and that personally love you.

If the true moral of the game is that blind devotion to being “good” is a fallacy, that life is more nuanced that the moral binary of good and evil, then Molyneux made it work with this final choice.  For me, I agonized over the choice for a moment before choosing Love over Sacrifice.  I want to save the world, but I wanted to save my sister and my dog that much more.  The path that Job took based purely on his faith in God was extremely difficult and I think Molyneux has shown that most people, despite their good intentions, could never make the same sacrifices.  Ultimately, this is what makes the game more interesting than the system of binary choices presented in BioWare games (and, at least at first glance, in Fallout 3).  This game questions the nature of morality itself, considering the possibility that being purely good may be as destructive as being purely evil.

While I definitely wanted to focus on how ethics is constructed in the game, there are just a few unrelated points I wanted to touch on.  First, the game draws upon the Dungeons & Dragons system of ethics.  That is, there are two axes for codifying morality in the game – Good vs Evil and Purity vs Corruption.  In D&D terms, it’s the same as the Good/Evil, Chaotic/Lawful system.  That means that you could be a perfectly Good character that is also completely Corrupt or an Evil character who is also Pure.  By having two axes of morality rather than the basic binary of Good and Evil, the game wants to nuance morality much more than it usually is in games of this kind.  Both axes will ultimately affect how NPCs in the world will react to you and whether or not they like you, but both are influenced by very separate actions.  Good/Evil is influenced by the big choices you make in the game – for example, whether you save people captured by slavers or whether you enslave people yourself.  Purity/Corruption is influenced by the smaller, inconsequential choices you make in the game.  If you own a house and increase the rent by 100%, you will be more corrupt.  If you discount the rent by 100%, you will be more pure.  Similarly, if you eat meat, you will be more corrupt because an animal had to die for your food but if you eat tofu, you will be more pure because you are getting the same health benefits without killing an animal.  That’s right!  Being a vegan in Fable 2 has a tangible affect on your character!  It may not have a great bearing on how the game plays out in the end, but it’s just a more interesting way to think about morality.

Second, the game has taken into account a lot of the choices you can make in the game.  If you are a bigamist and get married to more than one person (yes, the game lets you pursue a gay/lesbian relationship if you so choose), at some point in the game you will be blackmailed.  If you don’t pay the blackmailer, he’ll tell all your spouses about your infidelity and wreck your relationship with all of them.  While the price the blackmailer asks for is relatively low, making paying him off the easy choice, it’s just neat that the designers took bigamy into account and tries to penalize you for keeping more than one family.

Third, I just wanted to talk about the final flashback in the game after Lucien shoots you.  There is another pseudo-flashback that you can get if you buy the Brightwood Tower where you have to fight “Chesty the Chest” as a child which is also pretty surreal (and British, honestly), but that’s not the one I want to touch on.  Here, you are brought back to the farm you and your sister grew up in before your parents were killed and you were orphaned.  The final flashback is just an interesting gameplay sequence because it brings you back to the beginning of the game, reminding you of why you are a hero in the first place – Lucien killed your sister.  By making you to spend time with her as a child, you are reminded of the tragedy without actually showing your sister being killed again.  It’s made that much more depressing because your sister follows you around in the flashback, encouraging you as you go around having fun.  As the flashback ends, the dream becomes nightmare and the farm becomes a twisted, burning landscape as screams punctuate the soundtrack, bringing you back to the reality that your entire family is dead.  It’s just a fascinating sequence that brings you back to the beginning of the game without relying on a cinematic.  Indeed, it’s a sequence that only makes sense in gameplay, because it depends so much on your interaction with your sister.  And most important of all, this takes place right before you have to choose between Sacrifice and Love, making that choice that much more difficult.  Even if you forget your spouse and your dog, you’ve just spent time with your sister – the person who helped raise you when your parents were killed and the person who you vowed to avenge when you grew up to become a hero.  Given the chance to save her, after spending all the time with her, wouldn’t you?  Even if you condemn thousands of others to their deaths?  It primes you for the tough choice you’ll have to make at the end of the game.

Fourth, there’s the ending itself.  There is no real boss battle in the game.  It builds to a confrontation with Lucien, but you never actually fight him.  All you do is press a button to activate a magical item that drains him of his power.  You don’t even get a chance to hear his motivation for trying to take over the world (brought on in part by the murder of his wife and daughter) because as he begins to explain himself, Reaver gets tired of hearing him talk and shoots him to death.  As someone at the 1up Boards brought up, this is a game where the climax isn’t in a boss battle but in the final narrative and ethical choice you have to make.  Even Lucien’s death is anti-climatic, even if it is somewhat humorous.   It’s just interesting to see that games have come to a point where you don’t need to end a game on a pointless fight against a large boss (Bioshock, I’m looking at YOU!).  Instead, games can end on a story note and that's okay!

Fifth, I want to talk about the Orb system.  This is perhaps the first Massive Multiplayer Online Singleplayer game and I hope that other designers look at this feature and rip it off.  It’s not only nice to see that other people are playing the game at the same time as you, turning a solitary experience into a shared communal experience, but the fact that you can communicate and talk to these people pushes the communal experience to the next level.  If you’re stuck at a point in the game and you see an Orb, you might ask them for help... or, you may just want to chat with random strangers about anything else that comes to mind.  It’s just a great feature that makes the singleplayer experience more interesting than the typical RPG.

Finally, I’ll end with the dog, the breadcrumb system and the combat.  The dog is a great companion character that makes the solitary experience that much more palatable.  And because it’s a dog, they didn’t have to worry about trying to design a character that could interact with the player – they just had to model how a real dog would react and have him run around interact with you based simply on a dog’s emotions.  If the dog is scared, he’ll whimper.  If he’s hurt, he’ll limp at you.  If he finds treasure, he’ll run towards it excitedly.  It’s a smart way to create a companion character that is more than just a pack mule or a boring NPC. 

The breadcrumb system was also a nice touch because it tells you exactly where you need to go.  Some people hate being told where to go and what to do, but I don’t want to have to learn Albion in order to enjoy the game and the breadcrumb system is perfect for players like me. 

As for the combat, the one button combat is a great way to make the game accessible to casual players and advanced players alike.  It’s easy enough for people who just want to play through the game and not worry about killing things but deep enough for the people who want a full combat experience.

In the end, Fable 2 has pushed ethical interactivity to a whole new level, complicating the whole Good vs Evil binary that has defined games up until now.  Hopefully the next BioWare and Obsidian Entertainment games will be able to draw on Fable 2 and continue to evolve storytelling in games.  At the very least, it's the one of the first games to draw from the Bible (and the Book of Job specifically) in an interesting way.  There aren't random crosses or devils and angels, it just draws from one of the most well known stories from the Old Testament and leaves you to connect the dots.

Edit:  Just a final note - the fact that you can only have one save forces you to stick with your decisions during your playthrough.  Unlike other games, you won't have the chance to go back and change your mind after the game has saved.  It's an interesting, if not frustrating, way to make the choices you make more important to you.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

“War is hell”, as I’ve been told in many war films and games and Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway does not trend far from the norm.  That’s what makes writing about the game so difficult – it’s so remarkable in its average-ness.  Now, don’t get me wrong – the game itself is solid and I actually appreciate the slower paced puzzle-like combat (know the four “fs”!) that you can’t find in any other game – but in terms of what the game does narratively, it’s just fairly lacking.

The game tells the story of a group of paratroopers during Operation Market Garden, following the story developed through the two previous Brothers in Arms games.  The fact that Market Garden was ultimately a failure, the developers of the game have the opportunity to present the darker side of the Second World War.  In fact, the tone of the game is sombre and depressing with the bombing of Eindhoven being the centerpiece of the game.  We see Germans execute Dutch civilians and we see a Dutch boy that we’ve rescued in an earlier mission killed by a German bomb.

But why doesn’t this resonate with me?  The designers chose to use cutscenes to tell the story but for whatever reason, these cutscenes fall flat.  On several podcasts, one common complaint is that the game doesn’t provide any context for the character’s behaviour – it assumes you’ve played the previous games and know these characters intimately, treating the story as if you were watching an episode of Band of Brothers in the middle of the series.  And I’ll admit that not knowing who these characters are did affect how I interpreted the story.  Baker’s struggle with PTSD and losing men around him should have been as effecting as Compton’s breakdown at Bastogne in Band of Brothers but it just doesn’t work.  I don’t know enough about Baker or the rest of the characters to be invested enough in his breakdown or any of the character development.

The designers do really try with their cutscenes though and there are several very impressive editing tricks that you’d only find in film – the reveal of what happened to Leggett and the history of Baker’s gun is perhaps one of the most cinematic cutscenes I’ve seen in gaming.  It’s just that the writing doesn’t seem to be up to par with the presentation.  The climax of the film features Baker recovering from the guilt he feels over the deaths of Leggett and the other men, triumphantly climbing atop a jeep to give the soldiers who are still alive a rousing and inspiring speech about war.  It’s a moment that should pay off, especially since it’s meant to lead into a sequel that is almost certainly going to be set during the Battle of the Bulge, but for me it just falls flat.  Even though I played through the entire game as Baker, I didn’t feel any connection with him.

Maybe like so many other games, there’s a disconnect with the gameplay and the narrative.  During the game itself, Baker and the rest of the characters are so anonymous that you see them only as pieces to be moved around the game field.  When a member of your team is hit and falls down, you don’t react and move on as if nothing happened.  Now, I understand that in a combat situation you can stop to nurse the wounded but for a man suffering from PTSD as a result of seeing men die around him, you’d think there would be some indication that these casualties are effecting.  Of course, there’s also the problem with the fact that no one really dies during the missions – characters only die in the cutscenes when the story requires them to die.  Any desire you have to keep your men alive is quickly evaporated when you realize that they won’t die anyway.

There is one “ludic” or “game-telling” narrative moment that I did find interesting.  As with most games of this nature, the first level is inevitably a tutorial that teaches you how to play the game.  Here, they get you to learn how to shoot, how to order your men around and the importance of suppression fire and flanking.  As you make your way through a hospital in Eindhoven, learning how to play the game, you eventually reach the end of the level where you are knocked down and surrounded by Germans.  The game proper then begins three days in the past.  As you work your way through the storyline, you eventually find out how you end up in that hospital.  What’s interesting here is that you end up replaying the tutorial level all over again so you know exactly what happens.  You race through the level heading toward the end where you know you will end up in a showdown with the German soldiers.  This is an interesting moment that manipulates your previous gameplay knowledge of the level in order to give you the feeling of agency.  It’s the equivalent of a film that builds to a climax that you’re introduced to right from the beginning (The Bourne Identity being one of many examples).  While this is the only example of “game-telling” in the game, it’s certainly worth mentioning.

Ultimately, I think the biggest letdown of the game is its inability to get across the “horror” of war either through cutscenes or through gameplay.  Sure, there’s the killcam with the slow motion shots of German soldiers being killed, but this almost trivializes gore and violence rather than emphasize any effect it may have on a soldier.  Call of Duty 4 showed that there are ways that games can explore war that other media can’t.  If Gearbox is given the opportunity to make the sequel that they’ve set up at the end of this game, I hope they look at games like Call of Duty 4 and try to implement some game specific narrative techniques.

Side note – they got Dale Dye to provide the voice of Colonel Sink in the game.  Now, I’m not invested enough to find out if this is meant to be the same character found in Band of Brothers, but I’m almost certain that it’s more than just a coincidence.  He may have consulted on the game and the designers may have thought it would have been a nice crossover with .

Second side note – Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts tells story of Market Garden from the perspective of the Germans.  I haven’t played the game so I don’t know how the story is handled, but it’s probably the only example of a Canadian/American representation of the Second World War that sympathizes with the “enemy”.  Admittedly, storytelling in the original Company of Heroes wasn’t all that remarkable either – mostly due to the limitations of the Real Time Strategy genre – but the fact that this is pretty much the Canadian/American version of Das Boot makes it worth considering.

Mass Effect

Again, this will be spoilerific... perhaps more so than my Call of Duty 4 post.

So, before I begin, I will gladly admit that I am a BioWare fan... and dare I say it? Yes, I dare. I am a BioWare fanboy. While I'm not hardcore enough to have MDK... I have the two Baldur's Gate games, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and the recently released Mass Effect. In fact, I am probably one of 50 people in the world who would openly admit to being a David Gaider fan and while I hate displays of nationalistic pride when it comes to art or sports (USA! USA!), I am genuinely proud that BioWare is a Canadian company.

With all that preamble out of the way, I'll say that I have forgiven the game for many of its game breaking and technological problems. Some of the classes are just unbalanced for even normal difficulty while some of the classes are essentially invulnerable once you reach level 25. There's the classic loading problems (people ignored Portal's elevators, didn't they?), screen tearing and Unreal Engine 3 related texture pop-up problems. I also think Jennifer Hale is the best voice actress in the industry and I would pay her to read the back of cereal boxes, so having her be the voice of (female) Shepard didn't hurt either.

But, let's ignore all that reviewey stuff. At this point, you've either played the game or you've ignored it to play Halo 3 or Lost Odyssey. Mass Effect is the latest game in BioWare's opus of interactive ethics games. The twist this time is that the binary isn't good vs evil... it's good cop vs bad cop or Paragon vs Renegade. "Jack Bauer in space", as one of the designers put it. In many ways, the system has been greatly simplified from previous BioWare games. Being Paragon unlocks some Charm points and opens up more Charm slots to allocate points to, which in turn unlocks various dialogue options in the game and to make shopping at stores cheaper. But unlike KoTOR or JE, there are no specific gameplay advantages to being a full Paragon. The light side character in KoTOR has a special advantage when using light side powers and is penalized for using dark side powers. In ME, a rifle is a rifle... it doesn't matter if you're good or bad. The end result is that you are maxing out your Paragon slot in order to max out your Charm and to unlock new dialogue options and nothing more.

The huge problem here is that you are forced to choose a path one way or the other. There are no shades of gray here (in KoTOR, there was a specific item that you could only equip as a "gray" Jedi, and Jolee Bindo encouraged you to ride the line and not choose one or the other). If you want to unlock the "Charismatic" achievement where you "Use Charm or Intimidate to resolve an impossible situation", you must have 10-12 points in Charm or Intimidate. (This is when you convince Wrex to stand down on Virmire or convince Saren to commit suicide at the Citadel). The only way to do that in a single playthrough is to stick to a course and rack up as many Paragon or Renegade points as possible. The only advantage to this system is that unlike past BioWare games, there is no one single point where you choose your ending. In both KoTOR and JE, your previous actions had no bearing on the game ending... it came down to one specific choice you made near the end game. Here, your ending is based on your Paragon or Renegade values at the end of the game, even in spite of your decision to save or kill the Council.

Despite the simplified morality system, some of the complex emotions still exist. Just like many other gamers out there, I slowly grew more uncomfortable making Renegade choices. I felt horrible while my Shepard gleefully pushed the button that killed the Rachni queen. And Feros? That planet nearly broke me. Not only did I have to kill every colonist who was being controlled by the Thorian, an event which is horrible enough... but the aftermath of the battle with the Thorian? In case you haven't seen this part, after you kill the Thorian, the Asari is set free. She tells you everything she knows about the Conduit and in the end, you have to decide her fate. The Renegade choice here is to "make her pay for her crimes". But this isn't just a simple case of shooting her. She looks at you, agrees with your choice, turns around and kneels down so that you have a perfect shot at the back of her head. It was perhaps one of the most disturbing moments in the game for me.

The deeper question is why was this disturbing? For me, the answer is player agency. The mere fact that you personally choose to drive your character down this path makes you complicit in a way that you aren't when you read a novel or watch a film. Like the famous ending of Metal Gear Solid 3, you pulled the trigger... not the author of the text. This is something I've wanted to explore for the last three years, but I haven't found the right framework. Psychology? Sociology? Philosophy? Narratology? Or God forbid, Ludology? There are also a lot of questions, of course. Is this system of ethics culturally located? For the few Japanese players who have finished the game, did they have the same experience? Is it "wrong" if you do not feel guilty after making "bad" choices? Many players can, as with novels and film, separate themselves from the text. Even though they are personally making the decisions, to them it's "just a game". While I'm far, far away from contemplating my dissertation, I know that I will be answering these questions and more.

For a game of choices, there is also one moment in the game where player agency is constructed in a, as a Star Trek fan might put it, "Kobyashi Maru" scenario. On Virmire, near the end of the mission your team splits up and at some point, both members of your team are under attack. You have to make a choice to save either Kaidan or Ashley. Now, there is of course the larger meta-game at play here - if you are pursuing a romantic relationship with one of the characters, obviously you would want to save them. Also, if you need a strong Soldier or Sentinel in your party, that might inform your decision as well. But let's ignore that for a moment. Here you are presented with the illusion of choice, since either decision you make you are condemning one of your characters to death by nuclear explosion. This is a scene that replicates the "tough choice" that we see military officers make in various war films, only this time you are the one who is forced to make the choice and deal with the consequences. Indeed, if you choose to save your love interest, the character will wonder if you saved them because of that relationship, questioning your ability to make rational judgements (and perhaps reinforcing the idea that superior officers should not sleep with their subordinates). However you read it, narratologically, it is a moment of player agency that isn't agency at all. You choose who to save, but in an ideal game situation, you would be able to save both characters and still kick Saren's ass.

Peter Molyneux suggested that most game players simply could not accept negative outcomes as a natural property of video games. In Fable 2, when you are knocked out your character is permanently physically scarred. He pointed out that in testing, most players would simply turn of their consoles and restart the game rather than deal with the consequences of their failure. As a result, he was forced to remove that aspect from the game entirely. By building in failure right into the game narrative, Drew Karpyshyn (and his writing team) created a narrative where failure was inescapable and the player was complicit with that failure. While you can react to that failure with compassion or anger after the fact, this is an failure you must face whether you are a Paragon or Renegade player.

In a year where player agency was the new focus of major games - see Bioshock, Portal and The Darkness - this moment was as much a standout as the nuclear weapon going off in Call of Duty 4 and potentially says as much about the text itself and its underlying themes of leadership, command and ethics.

One final point. As someone who saw the anxiety over the series finale of The Sopranos, both in public discourse and within academia, the lack of narrative closure in Mass Effect did bother me. For all their successes, BioWare's writing teams seem to have a problem with denouements. KoTOR just ends, regardless of your choices. JE gives you an ending, but they are a series of text pages that perhaps foreshadow the ungainly reading that Sakaguchi put into Lost Odyssey. Mass Effect is no different. Yes, the game is the first in a trilogy... but does that mean that your characters can't take the time to mourn the death of Kaidan or Ashley? Or that your character can't take the time to help Tali find her way back to her fleet? Or perhaps help Wrex use Saren's research to save his people from extinction? Or have your character simply spend time with your love interest, if you chose one?

Maybe the sequel will address some of these unfinished plot threads... we can only hope.