Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Storytelling Troubles in Twilight Princess and Final Fantasy XII

I don't get around to playing most of the big franchise games these days, but I did make time for a couple of grade-A titles, namely Final Fantasy XII and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Both games present the player with very convincing virtual worlds to explore, and both take their series' storylines in more realistic directions. The degree to which they succeed at this is quite remarkable, but this trend toward realism clashes with many traditional video game elements.

The realistic nature of these virtual worlds has psychological consequences - the creatures within them are so convincing that I sometimes feel a bit conflicted over killing them. Video games are famously casual about death, with the traditional value of a life being set at twenty-five cents. But as the monsters become more lifelike, the spirit of adventure no longer seems to justify slaying entire ecosystems full of wild animals. It is, of course, only a game, and anyone who thinks my rampant virtual slaughters will be echoed in the real world is a fool. But when virtual reality looks this real, it causes a certain moral dissonance. The lesson of games is that it doesn't matter; those animals you kill will reappear magically when you leave the area and return. Video games have always taken a haphazard approach to ecology, which we didn't really notice until now. The realistic illusion of Twilight Princess's world collapses when you stand in a desert and look over a small hill at a massive lake.

Both games also struggle to present more mature plots while still delivering classic gameplay in the amount fans expect. In Twilight Princess, the storyline starts strong, but becomes stagnant about halfway through. The latter half of the game is occupied mostly by a single goal, and there is minimal dialogue compared to the first half. FFXII similarly reaches a status quo early on, and while its plot keeps moving, it also seems to suffer from having a longer "laundry list" than its script. Things that make the early storyline interesting, such as conflicting goals and motivations, disappear behind the need to have all the player characters fulfill their functions in the game. In both cases, the needs of the game stretch the story to the point of absurdity.

FFXII also flirts with absurdity by having its relatively realistic characters engage in the sort of over-the-top fighting moves that have been part of the Final Fantasy formula since the seventh installment in the series. Anime-like action scenes that were consistent with characters like the spiky-haired Cloud from FF7 seem totally bizarre in FFXII. When rogue hero Balthier waves his hands in the air and conjures a tsunami, I can't help but wonder where this power came from. You can, however, see the roots of this game/story division in the earlier games, particularly the distinction between game-death and plot-death.

I expect that the next stage of evolution for video games will be to overcome issues like these. The PS2/X-Box/Gamecube era gave us convincing 3D graphics, but the design challenge of putting this technology to use still remains.

No comments: