In three days, the Kickstarter for Playdek's Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians will close, and as of this writing, they're still about $100k short of their goal. This is concerning to me. Most of the time, I see high-profile crowd funding projects and sort of silently turn around and walk away. This isn't because they're bad ideas or that I have some beef with crowd funding, I just never really take the time to properly research what I'm potentially spending my money on, and to be completely honest, very few games I've seen on Kickstarter or Indigogo spoke to me so much that I felt compelled to help with them.
As it stands, I have contributed to three projects: the Retronauts Revival, a (so far) good retro old school gaming magazine called Retro, and this game. Why, then, in the wake of Double Fine's adventure, Mighty Number 9, and other high profile stuff is this the first toe dipped into actually giving money to game development? Answer: Yasumi Matsuno.
Now I'm sure if you pay attention to this stuff, you know all about Matsuno, or his pedigree, or the fact that he's the big name attached to this project. For those that don't, here's the nickel version of why this is important:
Matsuno is divisive as a game designer. As the man responsible for Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Vagrant Story, and much of Final Fantasy XII (which is a personal favorite), he has a tendency to gravitate to mechanics that can feel impenetrably complex. You can call that kind of thing a matter of taste, but what it boils down to is that playing one of his games is just as much about doing your homework as it is mastering minutiae. I'm in to that to a certain extent, but I don't really have a ton of time on my hands anymore to devote to that sort of thing, so this means less and less to me as I get older.
What really sets him apart from his contemporaries, though, is his writing. RPGs from Japan have evolved over time from simplistic Dungeons & Dragons facsimiles (like Dragon Quest) to incoherent narrative sewers (like the Kingdome Hearts games, Lost Odyssey, every Tales game, Final Fantasy XIII and it's sequels, close to everything released after 2002). Like his construction of mechanics, you could say that the stories he writes are also on the dense side, but they are filled with characters and situations that you normally wouldn't find cut out of either shitty anime or a children's book. Adults tend to act and speak like adults. Characters don't repeat dialog just for something to say ("We need to get to the mountain!" "What, the mountain?" "Yeah! Let's get to the mountain!"). His best feature, though, is that he builds worlds that feel old. Not "lived-in" like maybe the Star Wars universe is sometimes attributed, but ancient; built, destroyed, and rebuilt with all of the history surrounding it. For fantasy storytelling, this is much harder to pull off than people think, and mostly because every fantasy universe is trying to do it one way or another. One of the reasons he does it well seems to be a past academic background in history. I've heard he's done thesis work on the Balkans and its various real world conflicts, and this has informed a lot of the Ogre series.
To me personally, Final Fantasy XII basically ruined me for RPGs of any kind for years and years, and especially ones that tend to be developed in East Asia. While I still find them fun to play, it's hard to partition a role playing game's story from its actual gameplay for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it's the only genre of video game out there that begs for context for all of the button pressing (or else you'd just be looking at menus for 35 hours). I can't really say that Matsuno's stories speak to me on a spiritual level or anything, but they're coherent, if a little bleak. We need more games like this from guys like that.
Plus, the $20 you could spend on this basically pre-orders you a game on the device you want. Turns out, that's pretty important these days.
See you tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment