falciesystemessays

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[falciesystemessays]

something that's been gnawing at me for a while playing the hundred line is that... it seems like at least the male class armors are fashioned off of ss uniforms. particularly the lightning bolt and iron cross. it's not an exact match, but it feels like one of those "if you know you know" things. i'm starting to think it was definitely intentional, that this is a comparison the game wants you to make.

i'm not going to give any spoilers for what happens in dialogue and cutscenes, in part because i'm not far enough in the game that i really have the full picture. but in combat, there is a distinct death worship in the mechanics. if you've played it you know, the game actively wants you to kill your units. i feel this particularly acutely in the boss fights, where often to get a speedy s-rank i just... throw bodies at them until the problem goes away.

while i don't know where the hundred line is Going With This, the combat sequences put you in the mindset of a military leader with no regard for human life, on either side. it's chilling. i kind of love it.

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playing the hundred line and getting fire emblem fates flashbacks. like, the two gay characters in this game are a mentally unwell sapphic absolutely obsessed with her crush, and a sadistic bisexual whose constant horniness makes the people around him uncomfortable. but while rhajat and niles were bad enough to make queer fans petition nintendo about it, i think darumi and yugamu are kind of the best characters in the hundred line. so, what's the difference?

i think what it comes down to is contrast and perspective. like, niles and rhajat stand out in a fire emblem game, where most of your army are generally decent people with light anime quirks.* in the hundred line, everyone is some kind of sicko, so queer ones aren't uniquely strange. compared to the intensely irritating ima or the actively hostile kurara, the hundred line's gays aren't even the most antisocial ones in the room. it's also a matter of scale. two gays in a cast of fourteen is genuinely kind of progressive for a AAA game. but you're telling me that in a cast of over 60 player characters, the only two romanceable queers you could come up with are these two? really?

but that last point is something you could make about the hundred line too. after all, of any two characters to make queer, why them? why the suicidal edgelord with an abusive past? why the scary kinkster who literally wants to predate on your body? these are harmful to an even greater degree, right? well, first of all i'd say it's clear the game is just as horny for them as they are in general, and these traits are a clear part of their appeal. second, the game also has a straight sicko in Gaku, with his weird brand of toxic masculinity. like, queer people do have higher rates of mental illness for a myriad of reasons, and do tend to have more of a willingness to engage in kink. i don't think it's inauthentic to represent that, as long as it's not portrayed as a unique evil.

but most importantly... i think yugamu and darumi are just, good characters. like if even you're not like me and don't relate at least a little bit to darumi's absolute loserdom, she is still sympathetic. it's clear that she's been through a lot, but has chosen to express that in deeply unhealthy ways. and yugamu, despite literally being an assassin, isn't a bad guy. he uses his unique skills to save the party, not just to kill. and while there is sympathy to be found in both niles and rhajat, the nature of being in a fire emblem game means you need to actively seek out whatever might lie under the surface.** and, while this is harder to prove... i think the hundred line is written by people who actually understand queer people and want to pander to us. can you really say the same about fire emblem fates?

*yes i know fates's cast, especially conquest's, has a higher sicko concentration than average. but there are so many and so intensely normal characters like silas, mozu, and the game's lead, that the off-beat characters stand out way more.

**this is part of a broader conversation about fire emblem's complicated relationship to storytelling. this would be its own post that i'll probably make someday, but the gist is that permadeath puts heavy limitations on the kind of story you can tell, and the kind of role that a character can have in that story.

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kind of the thing with talking about top 25s or generally rating stuff with me is that like, i don't think i have a single thing i would ever give a 10/10. i have a ton of favorites, things that have made a big impact on me that i would wholeheartedly recommend, but i don't think "a perfect piece of art" ever can or will exist.

i think it's really important, even if you love something, to recognize its flaws and think of how it "could have been better." i put that in quotes because, very often, it couldn't have. especially in the game industry, where constraints of time, budget, and staff are a real concern, it's often not worth addressing a small problem when you have so much else to deal with. that doesn't mean the flaw is not acknowledging, but it's not a "lazy devs" situation, you know.

and, yeah, it's important to take this view of your own work, in my opinion. now a lot of artists, myself included, have the opposite problem where flaws are often the only thing we can see. and it's worth acknowledging that making anything is nothing short of a miracle. but growing as an artist does require a level of humility, of self-reflection, and the ability to see where you can grow.

my favorite depiction of this mindset is in "keep your hands off eizouken," an anime about high school girls making anime. asakusa, the director in the team, always sees flaws in her work, sees things she could have done better. but while it starts out as self-deprecation, at the end of the season she's happy about it. she's proud of what she's made already, but knows this isn't the best she can do. the recognition of flaws becomes an opportunity to grow. and i think that's important for all of us on our own journeys.

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the thing about the hundred line is that it's genuinely a really good tactics game. like, it is exceptional how good this combat is. i haven't played a tactics game this thoughtfully designed since into the breach. it's doing something actually unique for the genre, and executing on it well. its combat is extremely satisfying, but has actual thematic layers beyond just Being Fun.

it's a game that makes you feel powerful, while also making you feel the physical toll of that power. and unlike basically any other game i've played, you are not just allowed but encouraged to kill your units. because they come back in the next wave, their suicide supers are powerful as hell, and one unit dying both isn't a big deal and also builds your super meter. it encourages you to see your units as disposable, to actively embrace death. and that is just... so cool to me as somebody who preaches the value of gameplay as storytelling.

i didn't expect the hundred line to be this good. i expected it to be at least a good visual novel, but i was not expecting the danganronpa people to have tactical greatness in them. and this speaks to my bias, i am a tactics game developer myself, and i feel protective over "my turf." but between this game and unicorn overlord, i'm starting to think it's time to eat crow on this. i have never been more excited for this genre than i am now, and i'm glad to be part of the future.

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that alex avila video about ai makes a point that i've been chewing on since it came out, like... whatever you or i have to say about ai art, we do still have to compete with it, in a very capitalistic sense. 'cause like, yeah, some of the stuff is genuinely aesthetically pleasing, i don't think it does us any favors to pretend it can't be. for people who only care about the output of an artist, it doesn't much matter whether something took two years or two seconds. to be clear, i don't very much respect people who don't care about the input, about the people and the process behind the work. but they do exist, and in higher quantity than people want to admit.

ultimately, people like me who never plan to use generative ai have to find a new angle to set ourselves apart from the people who do. and i'm... maybe not worried, but skeptical, that the answer we seem to have settled on is branding. i mean it makes sense, if you can't compete on output, then input becomes the selling point. there's an increased emphasis now on the person behind the work. their personality, their process, their reasons for doing what they do.

in many ways, this is a really cool thing, i like that audiences care about shit like process and vision, care about the people who make the art they love. but it's also very... you know, there's issues with branding art with a person, with the kind of auteur worship and parasociality that inevitably leads to. and i worry also that people will stop caring about the output, which is, ultimately, the thing i really care about in my own work. i don't want the emphasis in "Daybreak Hearts: an Angie Nyx Games production" to be on Angie Nyx. i want people to know that people made this, that they put time, care and effort into it. but i want them to experience the game for what it is. and i want them to like it.

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one of my favorite things about into the breach is the way it desensitizes you to what happens in it. this is endemic to all games, the more you play something, the more you stop seeing the people in the buildings, the more you stop seeing your kills as formerly living things. but in into the breach i think that works well as a commentary on eternal war. the war in itb can never be truly won, there will always be another timeline, and the game never stops to question this. all signs that more is at play here, like the vek expressing signs of being more than mindless parasites, are subdued and never dwelt upon. it is on you, the player, to decide how to feel about that. personally, i feel chills of dread, and i feel it periodically as i play. because i still play into the breach. i still fight the eternal war. into the breach, once more.

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level 0: video games are not art, because their interactivity prevents an artist from expressing a vision (the roger ebert take)

level 1: video games are art, because they can still express ideas and make us feel things (the common response to the roger ebert take)

level 2: video games are capable of expressing a vision, but the expectation of a gameplay loop gets in the way of that (what a fair few artsy games folk feel nowadays, known also as kill gameplay)

level 3: gameplay is an exploration of concepts that a player then finds and crafts meaning within (the clint hocking take, and what i've decided to go with)

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i think every game in the zero escape series is my favorite in a different way, but also my least favorite in a different way

999

i think 999 is probably the most cohesive and satisfying as a whole work, but a lot of that's because it's the least ambitious. that's not to say it isn't cool as hell, but when you're only trying to do one cool-as-hell thing, it's a lot easier to execute on that. like i can see why no game ever reviewed higher than 999, it is the best as a whole package. but the later games fumble more because they have more to fumble, and if they weren't as ambitious as they are, they would be way worse.

also both versions of 999, i feel, struggle in some major way. someone in my discord server pointed out that the remake generally streamlines a lot of the time travel experience in a way that interferes with the original's intended flow, but he himself admitted to needing a guide to beat the original ds game. i can confirm, i needed one too. that might be a skill issue, but a test of skill, truly, is not what i come to games like this for.

Virtue's Last Reward

vlr is a complicated case to me, because i hated the ending, and loved everything before it. but this is the kind of game where a bad ending retroactively ruins the rest of the experience, because those hype moments were supposed to be buildup. to be clear, i do not think vlr's ending is a poor execution of uchikoshi's vision. i just think that he and i have different values about what a story like this should even be.

because from the lens of a puzzle box sci-fi mystery, the ending is everything it needs to be. But thematically, as someone who was genuinely taking meaning from the individual scenes... the ending just feels like needless complication that renders the game's best moments completely empty of value. which is a shame, because they were some of the series' best moments. i really appreciate this game, as someone who cares a lot about storytelling through play. i just wish it stuck the landing.

Zero Time Dilemma

ztd is... definitely the game i have the most negative to say about? the puzzles are abysmal and only there as a formality. the shift to fully cinematic cutscenes just cannot be supported by a shoestring animation budget. and there's a lot of moments in the story, particularly in the twists, that are just real stinkers all around. like, yeah, this game could never have brought zero escape outside of cult hit territory like it so badly wanted to. it's just not good enough for that.

but i also kind of just... love the energy of it? one of my favorite things about zero escape as a series is that it always knows how to escalate. i came out of each game wondering how the next one could possibly top it, and each time i am shocked at just how much they do. ztd's level of unhinged is, i think, perfect for the end of the series, and although the execution of that could have been better, i think there's no other way this series' vibes could go besides zero time dilemma. i just wish that it more fully embraced the parts that it does well.

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when i think about art, i think of the word "gestalt."

like most words, i first heard it somewhere else, and started using it myself. i have only just now bothered to look up a definition, because its use to me is very specific.

the gestalt of a work is the whole of it. the holistic identity the experience holds. it cannot be captured only by raw description. you might describe it as the work's core, its heart its soul.

remember that part for later.

a couple years ago i asked a friend how they'd describe my approach to games. this friend is one i've clashed with on this subject many times, but i hold a deep respect for them. they told me that i care very deeply about the core thing a game is doing. the gestalt, in other words.

it is strange for me to imagine this not being universal, but i suppose i've seen that in action. much of the gestalt of fandom is isolating the bits you obsess over, and disregarding the rest. a lot of people simply do not see the value in a holistic understanding.

although they might pretend to.

about two years ago, a former friend of mine got to watch me play their favorite game. i had never much liked it, but wanted to give it a fair shake. i found pockets of joy scattered throughout, mostly in places they'd never looked. but everything they liked, i hated. despite giving my praises to certain parts, i could never appreciate the gestalt like they thought i should. but their appreciation was just as selective as mine.

and anyway, i'm the one making a game here, right? development of daybreak hearts has come a long way. i don't like bragging or commiserating on a public platform, but my process has had both the highs of development going well, and the lows of emotional overwhelm. i'm nearly out of one of those lows right now, but a nagging question still refuses to leave my head.

do i... have a gestalt?

i don't just mean my work here, i mean me. i mean, they're tied. i feel often like my work doesn't have a soul, because i don't have a soul. there's just an empty void where my heart should be, only capable of imitating the real thing until it's time to be whole. i feel like other people, other game developers, just have something where i don't.

and this game is in a similar spot. i've been spending months polishing up individual levels, and only now am i starting to think about they come together. what is the gestalt of daybreak hearts? i know that a lot of art only comes together late in development, like how the final edit makes or breaks a movie.

but i feel completely overwhelmed trying to find that cohesive vision. and there's just this hanging sense that i can't do it, that i'm just missing something as a human being that would make me capable of doing what i need to do. and i know this sounds irrational, and it probably is, but i'm going to have to get past this roadblock if i'm going to do what i need to do.

(sigh)

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a thing that kind of gets to me about the "game industry is cooked" talk is that a lot of people just... genuinely don't care about the people who make games. like their issue with the industry is primarily from a consumer perspective, stuff like overpricing and microtransactions and, you know, bad games. but when it comes to shit like crunch, harassment, and union busting, a lot of people are willing to either ignore it, accept it, or even encourage it if it makes a better product in their eyes.

like, i know this is just one anecdote, but a few years ago when final fantasy xv was having its shit moment, i was talking with someone about it who was a huge fan of that game. they were absolutely livid with square enix for canceling the later dlc, and i agreed (i'll never forget you episode aranea). but when i brought up the layoffs, that a ton of people lost their jobs due to corporate bullshit, they didn't even respond. the conversation just Ended. and i worry that critiquing game companies exclusively as consumer advocacy... misses a lot of the picture of what's really wrong here

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final fantasy xiii is a game very dear to my heart. the character of lightning had a big impact on me in high school, the nature of being l'cie resonated and still resonates, and i refer to the jumbled mess that is my brain as the fal'cie system. i love the lesbians, i love the setting, i even love the combat. if anybody is going to defend ff13, it's me.

it also sucks. like, in so many ways. and most of them you've probably already heard. the gameplay for most of it is a corridor, alternating between walking and combat and very little else. the storytelling is abysmal, relying on codex entries to make any sense at all. and oh my god, the fucking proper nouns. (i swear, if they just called them angels, gods, and demons, half the people complaining would have gotten what the game was going for!)

people obviously have a reason to dislike the game, and that's their right. but for some of them it seemed like more than just dislike. ff13 wasn't just a bad game, it was a symbol. it represented the dark age of final fantasy, or square enix, or jrpg's at large. it embodied a lot of complaints they already had about the genre, of being too linear, too convoluted, and generally too anime. an atmosphere like this makes it difficult to talk about xiii on its own terms, or express what you like about the game, without it being a response to The Discourse.

because the thing is, there are really good parts to ffxiii! a lot of it's personal preference obviously, but there are some genuine pockets of brilliance. like the fight against cid raines, whose fighting style shows that he could've been on your side under different circumstances. or the use of the doom status as a potent metaphor for feelings of despair. or the final boss fight, which... well i won't spoil it, but it's really heckin' good. at his best, motomu toriyama excels at emotional storytelling, often bolstered by gameplay and metaphor. it's something i appreciate in all of his work, from the xiii games to x-2 to revenant wings.

but toriyama being director is also where i think a lot of the issues with xiii come from. see, xiii was the first final fantasy game the man had ever had to develop "from scratch." toriyama just does better with sequels, he's said as much himself. when the hard part of worldbuilding is out of the way, you have a lot more opportunity to do something new with it. this isn't a bad approach to game development, to be clear, it just needs to applied properly. he fits right in co-directing ff7r, and, yeah, i think the xiii sequels are genuinely good, even great. but xiii itself feels like it was conceived of vibes-first, with the team then desperately trying to make it make sense.

i say all of this because there is an instinct in games discourse to either double down on consensus or be a total contrarian, and i don't want to do either. i don't just want to look at games as symbols, i want to understand them as holistic experiences. i want to get a full sense of what they are and why. and i think The Discourse can make it very hard to do that, because any statement you make will inevitably be seen as a response.

(breathe in)

this essay is the prelude to one i'm going to write about fire emblem.

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intelligent systems hire me as ui designer for your next fire emblem game i have ideas

okay really just one idea: your optimize button is pretty handy for taking care of the parts i don't care about fast, but you should give players an option to lock things to a specific character. like, right now i want to lock emblem micaiah onto hortensia, and stock her up exclusively with staves, because it seems fun. while the first one is handled automatically with optimize, the second one i have to do myself, by hand, every time.

it'd be fun if i could set hortensia to always have that be her inventory even as optimize does its thing elsewhere. i think this could apply in other places too, like if you're trying to build bond with a specific emblem, or if you want one specific character to have one specific weapon. your next game probably isn't going to have the emblem system, but i think this change could really help players like me.

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So like, representation in games is weird. It's critically important, but uniquely challenging due to the nature of interactivity. And a big part of this is that there's, by my estimate, two separate tracks for how representation works in video games. I'm going to be talking primarily about queer rep here, because I am a white, American, and (mostly) able-bodied transbian. If anyone wants to add on to this conversation, I absolutely encourage it, so long as you don't fling shit at people. So!

The first track of representation is one that's mostly unique to games. Representation as player empowerment. This manifests as giving players the freedom to be and express themselves in the game world.

So like, character creators are the most obvious example. What gender can you be? What race? What body type? A thing I've seen a few games do that I love is letting you pick any voice set regardless of the rest of your character, so like in Baldur's Gate III, you can pick a masculine voice but a feminine body, and that's just really cool.

Another way it's important is with romance options when applicable. Like, it was a problem with the early Mass Effect games that you couldn't enter a gay male relationship. It was a problem with Fire Emblem Awakening that for all of its marriage options across characters, apparently none of your 30+ units were interested in a same-gender marriage. Functionally, you aren't allowed to be gay in these games. So Mass Effect 3 letting you date Steve Cortez, and Fire Emblem Three Houses giving several options for queer S-Supports (although I haven't played the Mass Effect games and some of FE3H's romances are controversial) were welcome changes.

But the other track is representation as storytelling, and this is pretty broad. Basically every topic in the representation discourse surrounding other forms of media also applies here. I'm not gonna go into this too much because you've heard a lot about this already, but in my opinion it's important to have positive representation that mainstreams us to society, but also diverse representation because the human experience is vast. We need the joy, the sorrow, the rage, all of it, and games offer a unique artistic space to convey all of this.

...But sometimes, these two tracks rub up against each other. Because storytelling sometimes means disempowerment, but a disempowered player can often be viewed as "bad game design" by people who aren't thinking of video games as stories or art, but as entertainment or toys.

For example, remember when I mentioned Three Houses? That game was a massive stride in queer rep for Fire Emblem. But I had an annoyance as I looked through these romantic options. While yes, some characters can married as the same gender, all of them can also be married as the opposite gender. In fact, there is nobody in this game that a straight person can't date. Opposite-gender attraction is a given and the default. Everybody is either straight or bisexual.

To be clear here, because I know people are going to get at me for this, no I'm not against bisexual representation in Fire Emblem. I'm not even criticizing any individual example, Dorothea is one of my favorite characters. But what I am saying is that, in real life, some people are exclusively gay. There are a lot of men who a woman would never be able to date, and vice versa. I don't think that's a bad thing to want to express.

But from a pure empowerment angle, having a woman that a straight man can't marry is incomprehensible. Isn't having more choices better, rather than blocking someone off for "choosing the wrong gender?" I've actually heard this point from someone, phrased in this exact way, and I can't really sugarcoat this: I find it repugnant.

It's a stance that views these characters as entitlements and not as people worthy of respect. And I know that these are fictional characters and not real people, but a good character isn't just a proxy for audience expression. Also, if we take "romance as player expression" to its natural conclusion, then having a character who is asexual becomes bad game design. A character romantically inaccessible to me, the protagonist of the world? Blasphemy.

I think the real important thing about games is that, even outside of representation, "the player should be empowered" is a view that's often unspoken but unquestioned. A game can be moving, tragic, heartfelt, but it must also be an experience where you, the audience, are fucking cool. Every obstacle exists for you to rise above, every entity in the world that isn't you is either a tool or an adversary. Meg Jayanth calls this "White Protagonism" in her excellent piece that I couldn't do justice here. Keep in mind as always that it's both possible and necessary to enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic aspects.

Empowerment is a valuable tool in game design like any other, but the issue is that it's also extremely popular, to the point where it's just become what games are. And it's worth pushing back against that, so games can grow as a medium. So that we can tell stories, and have characters, and convey themes, that aren't tied up in a game designer's quest to make the protagonist the coolest guy.

But despite how critical I've been, these two tracks aren't mutually exclusive. They do clash with each other sometimes, but ultimately there's room for both. I look forward to the day I can play a bog-standard RPG that lets me change gender mid-game. I look forward to playing a polyamorous character, in a game that recognizes that as valid. But I also look forward to more characters like Guilty Gear's Bridget, an actual character who goes through a genuine journey of discovery, in a way that's warmed the hearts of so many trans women, including me. Ultimately, we just need queer rep in games, more of it, and it's never been a better time to make some. Just remember, there's a difference between letting the player be queer, and having a queer character.

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there isn't really a GOOD way to monetize a game is the thing, even choosing not to. there's the model that makes you money, and there's the model that makes your players not hate you, and sometimes these can be the same, but they're still in tension with each other.

because hot take, game developers deserve to be paid for their work! because it IS work, is the thing, and there is such a thing as undercharging. there have been indie games i've gotten for free, that i've felt genuinely guilty about not paying for, even though they were freeware to begin with. and i suspect part of WHY they were freeware is because they didn't think they could get away with more.

the way i've taken to viewing monetization these days is, it's about the kind of relationship you want to have with your audience. for me, i'm just trying to build up ANY kind of audience, and so charging up front would get in the way of that. but i'll probably include SOME kind of tip jar so people can show their appreciation. this will probably make players hate me less, and i'm okay with not profiting off of it as long as it gets me exposure. we'll see. though.

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i'm gonna start with the good bit here. fire emblem engage has a lot of facilities you can visit between battles, that let you raise friendship points between units, and eventually unlock conversations between them. this is something that nearly every fire emblem game has done for decades, but here's the special thing about engage: when you train a unit in the Arena, which is primarily for gaining exp, the game picks a sparring partner at random, and builds friendship points between the pair.

why is this cool? well, fire emblem has historically had a problem that is kind of endemic to big rpg's, which is that a very large amount of story information will be missed on an average playthrough. like, if i say "i don't like this character because every conversation i've seen with them depicts them as one-dimensional and boring," someone else could point to a conversation i missed that gives them the depth i'm looking for. if i say "i don't like engage's cast because they have very little in the way of vice or conflict," people who are hardcore into engage could point to some example that shows me the conflict i'm looking for. and, this is an embarrassing true example, if i go on an impassioned rant about a three houses character's sexuality one day, someone who's seen different conversations from me can prove that i'm wrong and then block me.

the issue here is that it's unreasonable to expect one person to have full knowledge of every duo in the game. getting that knowledge requires either replaying the game multiple times or going online and checking every single conversation. like, you know when someone is so wrong about a movie's themes that you wonder "did we even watch the same thing?" you can't apply that question to games, because the answer is literally no. you and another person will have very different experiences from each other. you'll play the game differently, different things will happen. this is what makes games so frustrating to talk about as stories, because it's hard to know if two people are even talking about the same thing.

engage's arena system, i'd argue, actually helps to combat this a bit. because it builds friendship points (yes i'm calling it this and not Support, so that people who don't FE still understand) with random units, it gets you to see conversations you otherwise wouldn't have. For example, I stopped using Boucheron because his conversations seemed to be entirely "wow bouchie you're so buff, what's your secret?" but seeing his first dialogue with Alcryst, a character i more immediately liked, got me wondering, well, what kind of guy is he? same with Yunaka, who i mostly dismissed before seeing her talk to Citrinne. it's a nice way of using game design to bolster storytelling in a subtler way.