Friday, February 8, 2013

A Lack of Vision

The trouble with hinting at a definite subject of discussion long beforehand is that with all the issues that have popped up lately - the virtual boycotting of Ninja Theory's DmC, David Cage's disastrous commentary on the industry at D.I.C.E. and shipment problems with Fire Emblem: Awakening and Ni no Kuni - what I'm going to talk about this week feels pretty small-time by comparison, no matter how timely it is.  The good news is that this blog is going to be weekly from now on as part of a class I'm taking at VCU, so I'll at least be able to touch on a few of these with some manner of timeliness.  Anyway, continuing from last time, I said I'd talk about the story of a game that I'm not fond of.  Since I usually end up writing this introductory paragraph after everything else, I see now that such a claim was misleading in that I really don't talk about the story of Arc System Works' Blazblue franchise from a sense that I talk about the written plot and dialogue.  This post focuses on the how the characters have no real vision behind them - instead focusing on the franchise's weakness of parroting other successful franchises - and how this game feels less like its own idea than it does an amalgam of everything else that's been successful ever.

Blazblue's central character, Ragna.  The red trenchcoat + white hair + big sword formula has probably only been used about a dozen times before.

Starting from square one is necessary to prove my point; Guilty Gear was a fighting game created in 1999 by Arc System Works.  The game was successful enough to garner several sequels, its most distinct aspect being the emphasis on rock soundtracks - a rarity at the time - and references to heavy metal in its characters and story.  Blazblue was created in 2008 as a result of the copyright controversy that arose after Guilty Gear publisher Sammy was absorbed by another game publisher, Sega.  In order to continue making high-quality competitive fighting games in the same vein as Guilty Gear without breaching the copyright conflict, Toshimichi Mori created and designed Blazblue, a spiritual successor to Guilty Gear's signature style.  Blazblue was also a chance for Arc to start from scratch with a newly budding arcade scene, and changed several game mechanics to help broaden its appeal.  In the long and short, Blazblue's initial iteration, subtitled Calamity Trigger, succeeded; it became a popular addition to arcades, and it became a staple at tournaments.  That being said, Blazblue failed to measure up to Guilty Gear in the character and storytelling department.  I'll air out the dirty laundry immediately, neither of the games have very good stories; they're both messy attempts to justify all these badasses fighting each other.  However, Guilty Gear's story is told well though, with a lot of subtle hints in the story and setting department that help the already unique characters shine, preventing it from becoming becoming another faceless fighting game in today's figurative mob of fighting games.  This post is an attempt to point out what's been done wrong in the past to get you up to speed for Blazblue's next installment; Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma.

Because Blazblue's initial intent was to succeed an already popular series. Street Fighter III before it proved having no familiar faces makes a reboot a tough sell, which is why Capcom put established characters Ryu and Ken in to help give the game a "face" to work with.  Ordinarily a new cast isn't a bad thing: the aforementioned Street Fighter III started over fresh and has one of the most memorable casts of characters I can think of off the top of my head.  While tossing the bulk of the series' established cast was a risky move, the shock was lessened by taking established character's traits and mixing them with new concepts that let them all stand out despite being reworks of older ideas, either through having unusual variations on existing moves - Yang's sequential slashes overlap with Fei-Long's series of punches and Hugo's body press is essentially Zangief's piledriver - or by straight up making their moves as unusual as possible, like Urien and Q's flashy super moves.  Blazblue does a terrible job of this though: it only grabs the most obvious of Guilty Gear's that it can, and rather than using them as a springboard to reach new heights simply copies all Guilty Gear's sillier decisions without trying to have them make sense on their new characters.  The most egregious example I can think of being main character Ragna forgoing his giant weapon for a lot of his attacks in the same vein as Sol, despite Sol's sword being the source of the fire that shows up for most of his special attacks.  Ragna's lifestealing abilities are shown to be used without his sword several times, which makes it all the more weird to watch Ragna wear his sword like a decoration and then all of a sudden use it for only one or two of his attack animations.  Another example is werewolf character Valkenhayne, whose signature move mimics that of Jon Talbain, another werewolf from Capcom's Darkstalkers series of fighting games who fights using kung-fu.  Rather than innovate, Blazblue's cast just uses these attacks to mimic the characters that inspired them, often in a manner that isn't consistent with hoe they're presented.  It feels like how Homer Simpson becomes more and more stupid as The Simpsons goes on just for the sake of being more stupid.

Bizarrely enough Blazblue also suffers from the opposite problem in its Story Mode.  Noel, the leading female character of Blazblue, is established to be a shy character, typically timid, but has a strong sense of justice, going hand in hand with her being an officer of the law.  That being said, she rarely ever shows any form of competence in the game's story.  She gets bullied to the point of crying by Rachel, is uncomfortable around her friends because she has smaller breasts than them, and takes it too hard when total stranger Taokaka makes fun of her for it. To cap it off, she gets shamelessly exploited for the sake of fanservice by Litchi in a gag ending, being chased around and dressed in several different sets of suggestive clothing with no real repercussions.  Because it's a gag ending, we're supposed to accept this as humor, but since it's consistent with how meekly Noel has been portrayed, it just reinforces Noel's general ineffectiveness as a leading character.  Sure you could argue that she's supposed to get beaten around because of the breakdown she has at the end of Continuum Shift, but you'd be wrong.  That scene is plot-driven and is there to force her to play a part in the villain's plan.  The earlier examples of her exploitation have no relevance to the plot, yet we're forced to see her cry and in general be bullied, taking it much harder than a character so relevant to the plot should be.  It undermines her effectiveness as a character when she whines and cries all the time, and feels sickening and exploitative to her as a whole.

Honestly, the gag endings as a whole feel silly - not in the haha way that they should - and out of place.  While it's understandable that a joke ending should be silly and unusual, hardly any of them actually feel like they're playing to their character's funnier aspects and just try and jam in as much out of context humor as possible.  The only time that the gag endings work is when they center around Bang, whose character revolves being as over the top as possible.  Games like Guilty Gear never implemented gag endings because they were unnecessary.  Pretty much every character was unusual in some way and a lot of the game's humor came from their interactions with the other bizarre members of the cast.  Even in the case of straight shooters like Ky and Slayer, one could always count on Faust or Bridget to show up and make things hilarious.

Interestingly, the American publisher for the series is renowned for their excellent localizations.  I can only guess that they included a tired pop culture reference to accurately capture how unfunny these gag endings are.

The last physical aspect of characters that I'll touch upon is the clothing that the characters wear.  It may feel like nitpicking, but I promise that I'm trying to make a point.  Blazblue has this motif of mixing Japanese and western clothing.  I guess it's supposed to contrast, but all it does is make these characters feel disjointed, like they didn't know what they wanted to wear.  It's even more odd now that a character for Chrono Phantasma - Amane - is supposed to be full-on Japanese and wears all Japanese clothing.  It feels so strange because Jin's full name is clearly Japanese, yet he doesn't share Amane's cultural taste in clothing.  It all contrasts poorly with the mixed motifs for other characters, like Ragna's hakama pants and Devil May Cry-esque trenchcoat or Tager's bizarre samurai skirt.  It clashes pretty hard with characters like Noel and Carl who wear full-on "western" style clothes.  This frustrating lack of consistency makes it feel like the designers have no clue what these characters should be doing visually.  Guilty Gear has characters that go the full monty with Japanese clothing, but the story touches upon the entire Japanese race being an endangered species.  When characters with Japanese names wear these traditional looking clothes, it's not a stretch to assume that an endangered race is holding onto the only thing that they had left of their culture.  Such a simple detail that falls in line with the established story gives the world depth.  Blazblue just sort of tacks on these Japanese-style looks for the sake of appealing to more people.

Another thing that Blazblue has problems with is implying the traits of its characters rather than showing them off.  One of the characters from the new Chrono Phantasma exemplify this well; the first character is Bullet, a female grappler whose presentation as a strong, tomboyish woman acts as an anti-thesis to the weeping mimsy of the cast, Noel.  In her character description, it says that she dislikes skirts, which is supposed to keep with her tough female character image I guess.  Despite this, her character design unironically sports what Ragna's Japanese voice actor refers to as "hot pants."

are you kidding me

If you label characters as having wacky traits in their profiles but never take them into account when actually making the game's scenario you get inconsistencies like this.  I won't say that Guilty Gear did it well, but it at least it showed this to its audience rather than committing the writing faux pas of telling us rather than showing. Without even looking at story mode, there's a pre-fight aniation between Sol and Axl where they argue about what Queen's best album is, which goes hand-in-hand with the rock-inspired world of Guilty Gear.  At the very least, they're acknowledging these traits rather than telling us.  Another thing that sticks in my craw about these profiles is that they detail the characters' origins being real places, but the game's actual setting is a fictional city that seems to sprout a new district as the plot demands it.  With no real connection to the world that it claims to be set in, the city of Kagutsuchi feels like it's suspended in the air, untouched by the settings that the characters are all listed to come from.

Given that I'm talking about a fighting game though, I'm sure that plenty of people will rebut my argument with lines like "It's a fighting game, who cares about characters?  I just want to play online.  Who cares about story mode?"  To which I say that in a game like this, characters are everything.  As a casual player of fighting games, I don't just pick the best characters and roll with them; I pick a character who appeals to me visually, and if their personality and other attributes appeal as well I stick with them, regardless of how bad they are.  In a game like Blazblue, Arakune is the one of the few characters that isn't a mess, so I'm less likely to look into other characters, and thus spend less time with the game overall.  Long story short, because Blazblue couldn't think for itself, a potential customer has been lost.

I saved the counter-argument for last because it segways well into my next counter-argument for Blazblue.  I'm sure that some will argue that if it's got solid  mechanics, then who cares about the story and characters?  Blazblue's emphasis should be on how it's a fighting game, and I have no trouble putting up with shallow characters so long as I have fun playing the game.  My rebuttal is this: next week I'm going to drop the bomb on Blazblue's mechanics.  If Blazblue's story shows its lack of vision, then Blazblue's gameplay shows how this still young intellectual property is already irrelevant amidst the swarm of other fighting games that crowd the market.


All images can be found at http://blazblue.wikia.com/wiki/BlazBlue_Wiki

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