Since we are discussing narrative in games this week, I thought it would be useful to take a moment to consider some other forms of narrative games that are fully fleshed out in graphics, environment, character, etc. but have an interesting if not questionable relationship to mechanics and player involvement. The JRPG is a great place to start because the history of the form stems far back into the 80s and has countless examples of long, detailed, philosophical, and metanarrative games that encounter (or refuse to encounter, as I will say here) mechanics in notable ways. I cannot pretend to give a history of the form, nor can I pretend to quickly summarize the form’s principles. So instead, I want to talk about two specific examples that I have personal play experience with and account for each of them in relationship to the game-narrative forms we interacted with this week.
I want to start with Xenogears (1998), a game that once drove me to more frustration than a game ever had because I had really underestimated just how narrative it was. In the first disc of Xenogears, it appears to follow much of the form of JRPGs until then: a protagonist with mysterious abilities that he does not understand, several team-acquisition scenes in which friends are met and gathered into the party, vast amounts of origin story. All this delivered in large scenes of conversation that the player clicks through, with some scenes of turn-based combat mixed in. The fights are infrequent, but they are there to the degree that your typical JRPG player would expect. The story is grandiose and complicated and often summons vague divine forces and daddy issues, much like the more famous Final Fantasy stories. However, there is a turn in the second disc. In this disc, the game’s world map becomes inaccessible and the game turns almost exclusively to narration by the two protagonists as they sit in wooden chairs and occasional still images of narrated events appear over them. The game’s environment is now quite literally a scene of storytelling, where two seated speaker’s explain to the audience (the player, who cannot input commands other than pressing through the next line of dialogue) the events of the game and even some principles of philosophy, from Lacan to Jung to Nietzche. To what degree do players deserve to be angry about this? Many were, saying that their involvement in the game became moot. This is an issue all heavily narrative games have to reckon with: how can you make story and player involvement move in tandem?
A useful counter, I think, is the recent Persona 5 (2016). Divided into a seven part episodic structure, the game is incredibly long and detailed. The protagonist and his gang of friends (the same team-acquisition trope from Xenogears, originating most likely in science fiction and fantasy literature) enter landscapes called “Palaces” that are symbolic embodiments of the psychologies of various antagonists. Meanwhile, your character also goes to school, takes quizzes, has a part-time job, manages his personal relationships, and takes the subway. The game is divided, quite deliberately, into the exploration of Palaces (where stealth maneuvers and turn-based combat are the primary mechanics) and the living of regular high-school life (where dialogue, cut-scene, and roleplay are the primary mechanics). During the first episode of the game, where the team enters the psychology of a physically and sexually abusive track coach to attempt to stop his abuses, the player must navigate both the high-school life where real abused students are affected and fighting each other (using mechanics of role-play, decision-making, etc.) and the more classic combat within the Palace. It’s an intelligent structure because it tells the story in multiple ways, allowing both for expansive narration (the main feature of Xenogears or the light novels of early JRPGs) and inventive combat.
What I am not trying to do is argue that JRPGs should be like Persona 5 and shouldn’t be like Xenogears. Both are fascinating games, but it is clear to me that the player’s involvement in the narrative of both changes the way the narratives are received. Xenogears, on one hand, is less popular and usually characterized by frustration and boredom for players, but on the other hand is thought of often as high art, deeply philosophical, and as complex as some literary masterpieces. Persona 5 is widely loved, but the same kind of canonizing adjectives don’t always get applied to it. Gone Home is a game with an interesting and similar history of reception to Xenogears, in some senses. Ignoring for a moment its complicated position in the “gamergate” nonsense, Gone Home is a game that is commonly met with the critique that from a mechanical standpoint it is incredibly boring. Players have often said that the most involved it ever gets is in its slow walking, clicking, and occasional but extremely simple puzzles. However, it is a commonly listed game in considerations of games as art because of how full and rich its story is.
How do you solve a problem like mechanics? This is not a new problem. These debates are not new, nor are they Western. The JRPG form has been asking its players to favor narrative over action for decades upon decades, and is a form that continues to sell incredibly well. But the form has many examples of how to do this equation of story and gameplay, many of which contradict or interplay.
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