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nano_mooseSo.
I think by this point I just have to accept that there'll never be another Sands of Time. That is to say, there'll never be anything with tone and gameplay so absolutely on target with my tastes. My hoping and hoping for something to hit those buttons one more time has led to nothing but disappointment from the moment I loaded up Warrior Within and found even the direct sequel by the same developer hadn't got it right.
I came to this realisation when I was leaping and swinging through one of this new game's (which for sake of my not going crazy, I'll refer to as PoP2008) platforming sequences, idly recalling a review by a gaming journal I have a lot of affection for. That review had lambasted it for, in short, not being Sands of Time. They said that PoP2008's writing was self-inflated drivel (which made me go hmm, remembered the vileness of Warrior Within and the sheer, cavernous unfulfilled potential of Assassin's Creed). They talked about the combat, which apparently required one spam sword attacks, and the platforming, which was too 'easy' and how the Prince felt unnecessary because Elika can fly (she can't, incidentally, unless you count very specific location-based powerups or the desperation-fueled short-distance teleportation she occasionally performs out of pure need).
And I realised. If I took that review at face-value, if I let my old love of Sands of Time make me hate this game, I am no better than the crazy Thief fans who can't, apparently, enjoy anything new because they're too wrapped up in what's old.
I decided in that moment to put all the baggage aside and just try and enjoy the game as hard as I could. And the funny thing was, I didn't actually have to try that hard.
PoP2008 was described by my brother as strongly resembling a Saturday morning cartoon, such as (his example) Avatar: the Last Airbender. It does. From the simple, archtype based plot to the physics-defying and spectacular combat (almost literally; designed to be watched more than played) to the writing, which alternated between the two leads bantering and storytelling (seriously, it feels exactly like that) about the setting's past, to the almost total lack of death. (Almost total. It happens, it's fairly vague/bloodless, it's taken seriously. So that's another point towards the Avatar comparision.) However, since I have a fondness for cartoons of the Saturday morning type – I grew up on them! - that's no flaw. Especially since Avatar is a very beautiful, well-written and mature-ish cartoon. PoP2008, if it was a cartoon, would be one of the most beautiful I've ever seen, and it has a darkness to the story that has nothing to do with Ahriman's black and gooey signs of influence.
I have two major-ish problems with this game.
One is that the platforming feels a little too simplified – I do like my games to be intuitive, but I'm not sure about the game getting so simple that I forget I'm supposed to have influence at all and get lulled into letting the Prince leap off into empty air. Happened less and less as the game went on and got a little harder, but the difficulty curve is very, very gentle. The devs have to remember there's a fine line between helping the player feel empowered and holding the player's hand.
The other is that I think the 'quick time events' in combat should injure the enemy if successfully navigated as well as healing the Prince, since they injure you and heal the enemy if you fail. It would go a long way toward making the later combat sequences less of a slog.
There's other little things – I could probably have done with the Prince's voice being less...blaring – his actor does a fine job, actually, much better than the Wolverine-Lite in WW, but he sometimes got a bit too enthusiastic. I think combat overall should be a bit less frequent. The series is not about that and never has been. I'd like more unique variety in the enemies – don't have them share almost all their attacks, please.
But the thing is? It's still a great game. I love everything else about it, everything. The visuals are just, just – the corrupted areas look genuinely diseased. The black goop reaches for you as you walk near it; the stone is either unnatural-looking dark or white as mould, spotted and strange; the corrupted air has black flakes suspended in it like charred paper crumbled into water and shit, I wouldn't breathe it. And then the areas after they're healed...they just burst into colour and life. Killing a stage's boss results in an unbelievably gorgeous blue sky breaking through the sickly green or black clouds, worth every second of the fight it took to see it. There's flowers and butterflies and birds and rich red wall-hangings and the most wonderful, warm, orange, sunlit stone. And yet even healed, there's melancholy about it. Every place you see is less now than it once was. And it wasn't even Ahriman who made it less. It was just time, and absence of people, and neglect.
I love that it's up to you how much you find out about the world. It's like audio logs and in-game notes. It's story delivered piecemeal.
I'll admit it: I love Elika. In my opinion, she's the hero and the Prince is the sidekick. He stumbled into this mess, but she was born into it, and she's so terribly determined to make it better yet so heartbreakingly unable to imagine any way of doing it but this. She's put aside old dreams, and she has for so very long because her nature won't let her pursue them while her land suffers.
She's also clever and kind and resilient and stoic, and not naïve, and sometimes a little disturbingly fanatical, and insinuates that she has read porn. And is sarcastic with long words. I adore her. She's never an escort mission; she's a companion, and it rocks.
It was the Prince who annoyed me at first because he's just so insufferably flippant. But the little bastard grew on me, because he hums to himself and tries to play I-Spy and anthropomorphizes his flappy scarf and wails like a girl when falling a long way. He's also a lot smarter than I think he pretends to be. I mean, there's a moment when Elika asks him about the most amazing thing he's ever seen, and I fully expected him to say “A big pile of gold,” or similar. And instead he talks bizarrely eloquently about seeing sheets of ice in the mountains, “(paraphrased) cold, but they were like fire to the touch,” describing sadly how they melted in a moment.
(There were occasional line repeats, but I suspect that was because I was spamming the Talk button. There's actually an awful lot of dialogue for the Prince and Elika, and they tackle it by giving each area an ongoing 'theme' that is more or less resolved after healing that area. I think their automatic lines also change and develop as their relationship does.)
The ending – both endings, the game takes an interesting approach by letting you choose when to stop, though the 'longer' ending is obviously canonical – was perfectly in tune with both their characters in the most tragic way imaginable. It's even sadder than the end of Sands of Time.
Ultimately, it showed the difference between this Prince and the old one – the old one trades the girl for the world, this one trades the world for the girl. It says so much about their separate characters and ideologies and what each considers important.
The thing that struck me most was the silence. The Prince never says a word throughout any of it, and considering one of his defining character traits is the inability to shut up, it had impact. The moment it really hit me, though, was when I tried to make a jump too long for me, and hit the Elika button, and nothing happened. The Prince simply hit the ground with a thump and a cloud of sand. It just...broke over me, at that moment, and I charged through the rest of the sequence with gritted teeth and prickling eyes.
...It's just occurred to me that this is the third time a Prince hasn't listened to his girl, which resulted in horrible disaster for him and the girl. I doubt it's a theme, but it is pretty cool.
Edit: The more I think about it, the more awesome the ending gets, actually. If they'd left it the way it was after the credits rolled for the first time, I would have been deeply unimpressed. The Prince is a terribly obnoxious character without Elika to bounce off of - the clear intention is for them to balance each other. So him bringing her back keeps the dynamic for the sequel, although Ubisoft better do some fancy scripting if they're going to justify it.
Another awesome thing is how much more sense it makes than if he'd just left her dead and Been Sad.Throughout the entire game is the reinforcement that the Prince is a drifter who fends off closeness with wit and not, shall we say, anybody's paragon. He sees no reason why anyone (or any god) should be allowed to dictate his life, especially if they demand he have less fun. He doesn't want to love anyone because the last time he did that, he lost the ones he loved. And the game makes it very clear that he does begin to love Elika - maybe unwillingly, or unwittingly, but definitely. He trusts her enough to leap off a cliff several hundred feet from the ground, knowing she'll save him. How long has it been since he cared about anyone that way?
So when Elika dies - when he loses her to what he considers 'somebody else's war' - it makes so little sense for him to bow to the will of Ormazd and Ahriman, to lose his love again willingly. And even though it's obviously and deeply wrong (or indeed Wrong), even though it will damn the world and probably himself, he brings her back. Abstract morality has never truly meant much to him.
They didn't overplay it, either. That's a nice thing to see after Warrior Within, or even Two Thrones and the hilarious melodrama that was the Vizier.
It's pretty much on par with the Narrator Reveal at the ends of Sands of Time; boosting a competent if simplistic and somewhat generic plot into sheer genius. I hope they keep it up.
Edit 2: LONGEST EDIT EVER OH GOD.
If you got through all that, I have a present! It's the comic commissioned by Ubisoft from Penny Arcade. It's lovely, and simple, and indicates some of the backstory created for the villains without spoilers. Heeeere you go.
I think by this point I just have to accept that there'll never be another Sands of Time. That is to say, there'll never be anything with tone and gameplay so absolutely on target with my tastes. My hoping and hoping for something to hit those buttons one more time has led to nothing but disappointment from the moment I loaded up Warrior Within and found even the direct sequel by the same developer hadn't got it right.
I came to this realisation when I was leaping and swinging through one of this new game's (which for sake of my not going crazy, I'll refer to as PoP2008) platforming sequences, idly recalling a review by a gaming journal I have a lot of affection for. That review had lambasted it for, in short, not being Sands of Time. They said that PoP2008's writing was self-inflated drivel (which made me go hmm, remembered the vileness of Warrior Within and the sheer, cavernous unfulfilled potential of Assassin's Creed). They talked about the combat, which apparently required one spam sword attacks, and the platforming, which was too 'easy' and how the Prince felt unnecessary because Elika can fly (she can't, incidentally, unless you count very specific location-based powerups or the desperation-fueled short-distance teleportation she occasionally performs out of pure need).
And I realised. If I took that review at face-value, if I let my old love of Sands of Time make me hate this game, I am no better than the crazy Thief fans who can't, apparently, enjoy anything new because they're too wrapped up in what's old.
I decided in that moment to put all the baggage aside and just try and enjoy the game as hard as I could. And the funny thing was, I didn't actually have to try that hard.
PoP2008 was described by my brother as strongly resembling a Saturday morning cartoon, such as (his example) Avatar: the Last Airbender. It does. From the simple, archtype based plot to the physics-defying and spectacular combat (almost literally; designed to be watched more than played) to the writing, which alternated between the two leads bantering and storytelling (seriously, it feels exactly like that) about the setting's past, to the almost total lack of death. (Almost total. It happens, it's fairly vague/bloodless, it's taken seriously. So that's another point towards the Avatar comparision.) However, since I have a fondness for cartoons of the Saturday morning type – I grew up on them! - that's no flaw. Especially since Avatar is a very beautiful, well-written and mature-ish cartoon. PoP2008, if it was a cartoon, would be one of the most beautiful I've ever seen, and it has a darkness to the story that has nothing to do with Ahriman's black and gooey signs of influence.
I have two major-ish problems with this game.
One is that the platforming feels a little too simplified – I do like my games to be intuitive, but I'm not sure about the game getting so simple that I forget I'm supposed to have influence at all and get lulled into letting the Prince leap off into empty air. Happened less and less as the game went on and got a little harder, but the difficulty curve is very, very gentle. The devs have to remember there's a fine line between helping the player feel empowered and holding the player's hand.
The other is that I think the 'quick time events' in combat should injure the enemy if successfully navigated as well as healing the Prince, since they injure you and heal the enemy if you fail. It would go a long way toward making the later combat sequences less of a slog.
There's other little things – I could probably have done with the Prince's voice being less...blaring – his actor does a fine job, actually, much better than the Wolverine-Lite in WW, but he sometimes got a bit too enthusiastic. I think combat overall should be a bit less frequent. The series is not about that and never has been. I'd like more unique variety in the enemies – don't have them share almost all their attacks, please.
But the thing is? It's still a great game. I love everything else about it, everything. The visuals are just, just – the corrupted areas look genuinely diseased. The black goop reaches for you as you walk near it; the stone is either unnatural-looking dark or white as mould, spotted and strange; the corrupted air has black flakes suspended in it like charred paper crumbled into water and shit, I wouldn't breathe it. And then the areas after they're healed...they just burst into colour and life. Killing a stage's boss results in an unbelievably gorgeous blue sky breaking through the sickly green or black clouds, worth every second of the fight it took to see it. There's flowers and butterflies and birds and rich red wall-hangings and the most wonderful, warm, orange, sunlit stone. And yet even healed, there's melancholy about it. Every place you see is less now than it once was. And it wasn't even Ahriman who made it less. It was just time, and absence of people, and neglect.
I love that it's up to you how much you find out about the world. It's like audio logs and in-game notes. It's story delivered piecemeal.
I'll admit it: I love Elika. In my opinion, she's the hero and the Prince is the sidekick. He stumbled into this mess, but she was born into it, and she's so terribly determined to make it better yet so heartbreakingly unable to imagine any way of doing it but this. She's put aside old dreams, and she has for so very long because her nature won't let her pursue them while her land suffers.
She's also clever and kind and resilient and stoic, and not naïve, and sometimes a little disturbingly fanatical, and insinuates that she has read porn. And is sarcastic with long words. I adore her. She's never an escort mission; she's a companion, and it rocks.
It was the Prince who annoyed me at first because he's just so insufferably flippant. But the little bastard grew on me, because he hums to himself and tries to play I-Spy and anthropomorphizes his flappy scarf and wails like a girl when falling a long way. He's also a lot smarter than I think he pretends to be. I mean, there's a moment when Elika asks him about the most amazing thing he's ever seen, and I fully expected him to say “A big pile of gold,” or similar. And instead he talks bizarrely eloquently about seeing sheets of ice in the mountains, “(paraphrased) cold, but they were like fire to the touch,” describing sadly how they melted in a moment.
(There were occasional line repeats, but I suspect that was because I was spamming the Talk button. There's actually an awful lot of dialogue for the Prince and Elika, and they tackle it by giving each area an ongoing 'theme' that is more or less resolved after healing that area. I think their automatic lines also change and develop as their relationship does.)
The ending – both endings, the game takes an interesting approach by letting you choose when to stop, though the 'longer' ending is obviously canonical – was perfectly in tune with both their characters in the most tragic way imaginable. It's even sadder than the end of Sands of Time.
Ultimately, it showed the difference between this Prince and the old one – the old one trades the girl for the world, this one trades the world for the girl. It says so much about their separate characters and ideologies and what each considers important.
The thing that struck me most was the silence. The Prince never says a word throughout any of it, and considering one of his defining character traits is the inability to shut up, it had impact. The moment it really hit me, though, was when I tried to make a jump too long for me, and hit the Elika button, and nothing happened. The Prince simply hit the ground with a thump and a cloud of sand. It just...broke over me, at that moment, and I charged through the rest of the sequence with gritted teeth and prickling eyes.
...It's just occurred to me that this is the third time a Prince hasn't listened to his girl, which resulted in horrible disaster for him and the girl. I doubt it's a theme, but it is pretty cool.
Edit: The more I think about it, the more awesome the ending gets, actually. If they'd left it the way it was after the credits rolled for the first time, I would have been deeply unimpressed. The Prince is a terribly obnoxious character without Elika to bounce off of - the clear intention is for them to balance each other. So him bringing her back keeps the dynamic for the sequel, although Ubisoft better do some fancy scripting if they're going to justify it.
Another awesome thing is how much more sense it makes than if he'd just left her dead and Been Sad.Throughout the entire game is the reinforcement that the Prince is a drifter who fends off closeness with wit and not, shall we say, anybody's paragon. He sees no reason why anyone (or any god) should be allowed to dictate his life, especially if they demand he have less fun. He doesn't want to love anyone because the last time he did that, he lost the ones he loved. And the game makes it very clear that he does begin to love Elika - maybe unwillingly, or unwittingly, but definitely. He trusts her enough to leap off a cliff several hundred feet from the ground, knowing she'll save him. How long has it been since he cared about anyone that way?
So when Elika dies - when he loses her to what he considers 'somebody else's war' - it makes so little sense for him to bow to the will of Ormazd and Ahriman, to lose his love again willingly. And even though it's obviously and deeply wrong (or indeed Wrong), even though it will damn the world and probably himself, he brings her back. Abstract morality has never truly meant much to him.
They didn't overplay it, either. That's a nice thing to see after Warrior Within, or even Two Thrones and the hilarious melodrama that was the Vizier.
It's pretty much on par with the Narrator Reveal at the ends of Sands of Time; boosting a competent if simplistic and somewhat generic plot into sheer genius. I hope they keep it up.
Edit 2: LONGEST EDIT EVER OH GOD.
If you got through all that, I have a present! It's the comic commissioned by Ubisoft from Penny Arcade. It's lovely, and simple, and indicates some of the backstory created for the villains without spoilers. Heeeere you go.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-04 07:29 am (UTC)SOMEDAY I will respond to your question in the meme! About what I look for in a video game/what turns me off of a video game.
Also! Happy New Year! :D
P.S. HOW WAS YOUR CHRISTMAS?
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Date: 2009-01-05 10:21 am (UTC)...What I find funny about that last paragraph is that it's more or less the point of my two thousand word post made in three short sentences. HOORAY FOR VERBOSITY
(SOMEDAY, CHRISTMAS WILL COME, SQUEEM. OH WAIT. IT ALREADY DID.)
You too!
It was quiet. Just me and my family. We ate lots of ham. Ham is delicious. I have a copy of TRON, which I am going to watch for the historical value, and Kung Fu Panda, which is much more awesome than I was expecting a Dreamworks 3D animated movie to be. How about you?