for-my-own-sanity-blog

[for-my-own-sanity-blog]

Welcome to VA-11 HALL-A & unique storytelling in video games!!

I am a huge sucker for atypical stories and atypical ways of telling it. My favorite film is Old Boy (the Korean one, as apparently I HAVE to point it which one I mean for some reason...) due to its very different story and characters and watching it during a time where I was so jaded about the boring old Hollywood blockbusters it was a real breath of fresh air to see a director and screenwriter really make something totally different. 

Video games by there nature lead to atypical story telling. Even the most cut and dry rail roaded game like a Final Fantasy or a Call of Duty are different for every person simply due to the fact that no one ever would play the game the same way twice. Monsters spawn in different spots, players get game overs in different ways. Even if the singular outcome of saving the world is the same, the road to get there will be different every single time.

However those are the typical ways to tell a story in video games. I’m looking at the atypical like Fallout New Vegas’s 70+ ending tree that depends on who you make friends and enemies with, what certain specific some times hard to find quests you do or dont do and what bigger way did you paint your world. TellTale Game’s modern point and click meets  relationship building style of gameplay, where the choices you make have weight that spans not only chapters but full games. Or on the note of Bioware Mas Effect 3′s three color coded .....endings..... Oh boy maybe I’ll do another post sometime of the problems with atypical storytelling.

This is then finally after three paragraphs where VA-11 HALL-A comes in. Pronounced Vallhalla this sets itself in a pseudo near future distopian city where companies control the government, inflation is at an all time high, and technology is moving so fast it has hyper advanced AI robotics, brains in jars, cybernetics, and talking dogs. Yep this is Cyberpunk alright. However instead of focusing on any of that you are Jill, a bartender at the game’s name sake.

Welcome To Vallhalla! The whole idea is based around you the player getting all this information about your world second hand. Learning about it either through your patrons (who I will go into how wonderful they are in a second) or on the Internet with only half a dozen articles to read a day, split over a twenty days that the game takes place in. With the only real form of gameplay is mixing drinks for patrons, making what they ask, and only rarely getting puzzling orders to figure out or reading between the lines of there order and giving them something different. Thats it, thats the game. See why I love it? No? Alright well let me go on

Alot of people compare this to a similar game:

Papers, Please. a game where you are the boarder control officer to the only entrance to the dictatorship regime of Arstotzka. The gameplay is also simple where you get someones passport and credentials and depending on the rules for the day you accept or deny them entry into your glorious motherland and depending on how well you did you and your family and survive another day. You can see from both me explaining it and visually how similar it is right? 

Well heres the thing, while Papers, Please is about the feeling of overwhelming hardship in a dictatorship, you still play a big part of this game and its story. As a small side tangent there is the idea that when you tell a story you should consider the “why now?” of it. Why now are we looking at a protagonists day in his life? Why Now are we following Neo in the first Matrix movie instead of a week before hand? Because the movie opens with his first steps into become The One. So whats the Why Now for Papers, Please? well its the boarders opening, something you play a pivotal part in and choose what goes on in. Do you let people who shouldnt come be allowed entry in? Do you stop that obvious terrorist bomber? Its to a point that your escapades will be on the daily news paper (though the government will taut that they did all the good things instead of giving you credit).

So what is VA-11 HALL-A’s Why now? well it comes in two parts and the latter one is a spoiler I will avoid, but basically its simply due to the fact that the bar is closing. The 2nd one is a much stronger why now that focuses on Jill as a character and explains why it ends the way it does, but again spoilers! You as a character are unimportant to the larger picture and world. Imagine you were that bartender who serves Sherpard so many drinks he nearly killed him. The bartender had no idea who Shepard was beyond being some hot headed human in military uniform, maybe after he will learn that he was THE Commander Shepard and he will have a story to tell his friends and other patrons, but he wont know about Shepard’s grander or more specific adventures into defeating the Reapers, or even what brought him into his bar in the first place. 

You are the NPC while characters go on there day having you possibly being one of there stops. Hackers, hired killers, robot diva singers and private police force members who all live interesting lives, half of it you dont even know about. One character you meet early on is caught in the middle of a terrorist attack and through the course of the game you learn tidbits of what happened and how she made it out alive, hints that it could be a government conspiracy, or foul play, but then through they’re unwillingness to talk about those events fearing a PTSD attack you never get to learn more. 

Lastly it goes without saying that to make this game work all that characters need to be charming, unique and creative. From Alma on the left a cyber-security contractor with both relationship issues and sister issues, to Dorothy on the right a sex-worker robot designed to look underage and though infact of legal age uses her body to corner a specific market. (who as creepy as her character sounds is the best character) and is coming to terms with existential crisis’s and wondering if her human caretaker just uses her as a replacement for her real daughter who died.  And of course Jill, our main character who’s sarcastic hard exterior can be chipped away to a genuine caring person who really want to help her patrons even if its just giving them a large beer after a hard day.

VA-11 HALL-A was the first game for me to play in 2017, but its going to take alot to top my enjoyment factor for any future games of this year.

Its time to mix drinks and change lives!

[for-my-own-sanity-blog]

Fantastic Visual Story Telling and How To Do It.

Hey that title turned out WAY better than I hoped!

disclaimer: I havent finished the original Harry Potter films or read ANY of the books. But that being said im going to go into why Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them does an amazing job for someone like me. Also Spoilers, cause duh.

Alright so, Fantastic Beasts does an amazing job of visual storytelling giving almost no story exposition and even less world exposition. More importantly when it is done, its always done from the point of view from someone who has no idea what is going on. 

For example, when we first get a look at New York its through the eyes of our protagonist Newt Scamander, which makes sense, anyone who comes from the last eight Harry Potter films are used to the magical Europe and not the magical America, so our lead into the unknown America is from a familiar style. And while I couldn’t put my finger on it, the first 10 or so minutes of him on screen screamed the collective first films, he was almost like Harry, Ron and Hermione all wrapped into one. Harry’s awkward unfamiliarity when he first arrives, Ron’s clever arrogance when hes having his bag checked, and Hermione’s awareness of exactly whats going on at all times, even if he was in over his head. Then when we are first thrust into the world via the magic police...thing we are now taken out of that, gone are the ancient halls of gothic architecture, or seemingly impossible shanty buildings being replaced by cold angular art deco. You regonize it to be the magical world, and yet its not the world YOU know.

Skip ahead a bit to when we first go into Newt’s briefcase, and its no longer following him, but instead following his new buddy Jacob Kowalski. We follow him being unfamiliar with this world, just as we are as the audience. Sure we are aware of the Beast of Harry Potter, seeing centuars, dragons, and....other things (i told you i stopped at like movie six okay?!). But certainly not to the vast extent and exotic levels are Kowalski and us are seeing. This continues when Newt chases after his horny rhino thing, and him doing his mating dance. Its silly and funny and who do we see it from? Yep Kowalski.

This is lasty mirrored later when Tina and Queenie come in to the briefcase toward the end of the film. We are now familiar with these beasts so of course the perspective changes to these two who are born in the magic world, and while unfamiliar with the beasts compared to Newt, they are aware of them. 

The movie was full of this kind of stuff, using visuals and perspectives to tell the story without straight up telling the audience.

[for-my-own-sanity-blog]

Statement Mission

What is this doing here? well for right now its just to explain to myself what this is an excuse to procrastinate from my homework at 3 am. But really, for a while I have wanted to make a blog for my own sake, a reason to always be writing and never had an idea be forgotten. Right now life is hard and for the next foreseeable lifetime it will only get harder and I’ve never been good at expressing my stress with my lips, tongue flapping and throat vibrations. So instead ill do it with fingers smacking mechanical switches sending inputs to a electric machine shooting them to a server that post it publicly for all to see (but for no one to care(did I mention it was 3 am right now? (3:22 specifically))).

well I think thats all I have to say on this, back to work