In the 2008 blockbuster film Kung Fu Panda, right before his body transcends into cherry blossom petals as he leaves this world, master Oogway informs a frustrated Shifu that his student Po “will never fulfill his destiny until you let go of the illusion of control”. Oogway is right, of course - no skill or move allows Po to defeat Tai Lung, and any of his progress throughout the film toward becoming a Dragon Warrior is achieved through complicated, seemingly random, personal development, setting aside physical ability as secondary.
So what does this mean for the 2011 platformer adaptation Kung Fu Panda DS?
Kung Fu Panda DS contains multiple elements of a good puzzle platformer; an intuitive control scheme, satisfying level design, and collectables for completionists. The art style, music, and premise of this game are all derivatives of the film: Po masters his destiny by thwarting Tai Lung’s attempt to thieve the secrets of the Dragon Scroll, saving Po’s village from the cruelty of the would-be usurper in front of a semi- three dimensional backdrop with an art style derived directly from the locations in the film. In fact, while the game’s attachment to the film can be accounted for in elements such as the voice acting, soundscapes and texturing of the various visual elements, it can also be measured by the lack of aesthetic creativity in areas where the level design cannot draw from the film. Good examples of this appear in the texturing of underground caves (where no inspiration can be taken from the film and textures resort to various shades of red inspired by other 2.5D platformers) and in the bland grunts, where enemies must take up shields and combat modifiers to add some variety, as the film dictates only four animal species can be villains. In these ‘inspiration gaps’’, the game resorts to tropes from its own genre, creating ambiguous wooden moving platforms and buttons and walls textured with the occasional dragon. Eventually, the visual and mechanical elements become a blend of the art style of the film with the mechanics of the platformer genre, with the exception of movie-inspired kung fu moves on the control side and classic platformer elements slightly altering the aesthetic side.
Oogway’s words, however have implications past the aesthetic style Kung Fu Panda DS sometimes idolizes and sometimes drops - rather, his words illuminate a critical narrative theme that underlies the surface-level action-movie tropes in the film. While a movie about the inevitability of destiny, unlikely heroes, and fighting could not make a more obvious choice economically for a platformer adaptation, Kung Fu Panda DS embodies the conflict between cinematic personal development and the form of the platformer because of the way Po is supposed to develop narratively: erratically, and without external markers.
The best example of this is when Po actually “becomes” the Dragon Warrior. In the film, Po leads his father out of the village before Tai Lung’s arrival, and in the middle of conversation with his dad about noodle soup, he finally understands the emptiness of the Dragon Scroll is symbolic of the subjectiveness of the extraordinary. When he takes this revelation into the final battle with Tai Lung, the audience watches closely, attempting to discern whether Po has evolved inhuman abilities from his realization. The ‘secret’ is, of course, that his position as the Dragon Warrior is subjective, hidden, and dependant only on what we, the audience, believe him to be; his mastery is fully his own, unrelated to any real skill or move. Even when Po reaches the end goal of his personal progress, it is not physically manifested - it is as subjective as his ‘destiny’. But when Po understands the secret to becoming the Dragon Warrior is nothing in Kung Fu Panda DS, the top screen informs us “Dragon Warrior knowledge causes explosions with each of Po’s attacks”, and our avatar is crowned with a glowing straw hat, a gettup that cannot be removed for the remainder of the game.
Kung Fu Panda DS demonstrates perfectly the limitations on narratives in the platformer genre because its development team is forced to imitate one of those impossible narratives in the style of a platformer. Because many other formal elements make the film craftable into the style of game that it is, the audience is forced to see that the final piece of the puzzle doesn’t fit. Personal development unrelated to physical ability shouldn’t be able to be understood through increased control or freedom of movement, and when obstacles are tackled with decreased physical limitations on the character, the controls and rules of a game are forced into the position of becoming a metaphor for a character’s interior difficulties. In the movie, Po is emotionally trapped helping his father carry his dumplings away from the village when he understands the scroll. In the game, he’s in a jail cell - a cell he can only escape with the explosive punches his newfound character progression has gifted him.
So what does this mean for narrative? If platformers and puzzle games give us skills or items to loosen the very restrictions the game puts on us for ‘solving’ the world around us, there remains no subjectivity in terms of progress or ability. All progress is manifested in objects, items, and skillsets. In the game, ‘proving yourself’ to the five Kung Fu masters gives you their ability scrolls, letting you use their powers in battle or movements to complete puzzles. All progress is measurable by its ability to adapt your character to the world around you - and if we really want to know the implications of this, it’s derivable from the fact that Kung Fu Panda DS qualifies as an acceptable adaptation of Kung Fu Panda. Even as personal development is commodified into rewards and items, we intuitively understand them as collectable. Because it does not seem strange at first glance, we see that we never really buy into Oogway’s worldview.
Platformers are able to map the interior struggles of characters because we already buy the link between physical ability and interior progress. Kung Fu Panda DS is a game that butchers a storyline about the randomness and subjectiveness of interior progress by having that progress be measurable and collectable, and yet the form fits well enough to traverse the story from beginning to end. A platformer adaptation of this movie is only possible because we are used to the commotified, measurable markers of progression that videogames often give us, and it is already accepted that any narrative of any complexity can be diluted down into that form.
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