Be Here Now

While my last entry wound up being a bit too heavy on the mopey side, it's assuring to find that the bright spot at the end turns out to be even shinier than I realized. By that, I mean the games stacked up in front of me --specifically Shadow of Mordor and Wolfenstein: The New Order-- are pretty darn good so far. Sure, I'm only in the first hour or two of each, but after mentioning them in the last post, I decided to circumvent my usual game playing policies to briefly sample them. But they're back in the cabinet for now, and that's just fine. This is why:

Resonance of Fate, the game I had been slowly picking at for weeks, has recently turned from neat distraction to fascinating case study. As niche as niche games get, it does things with combat and story that are downright nutty, but in ways that take what we think of as common video game tropes and flush them down the toilet. Not all of them work, and some barely make sense (and make even less if you think about them too hard), but after taking a step back and looking at the forest for the trees, it's almost shocking that a game like this received any funding at all.

There isn't too much about the game that's made its way to the mainstream internet as far as I can tell. A few good writers have gushed over it in their way, but the only real notice the game's gotten has had more to do with its stupidly opaque battle system than anything else. I can't blame anybody for that, because it takes the better part of the first third of the game to properly wrap your head around it, and I'm not even going to try to go through the motions of explaining it myself (fun side note: my parents decided to unexpectedly drop in on me last weekend while I was playing it. My father, an intuitive specimen, was fascinated and wanted me to explain what was going on. I barely got through the gist of things in a 10 minute demonstration, and was impressed with myself that I made it in that amount of time. My mother didn't give a shit whatsoever). However, after some careful consideration and experimentation (which the game gives you ample opportunity to try so long as you don't mind being punished for it), Resonance of Fate is basically a giant board game scaffolded on top of a smaller one.

At the top is the combat: a sometimes random occurrence on the map that's set up to be played by two opponents. The player clearly represents one opponent, while the computer AI is obviously the other, as in most video games. However, while a random number generator is present and a certain dice-roll mentality is understood, the rules are essentially the same for you as they are for the AI. There are set turns for both sides of the table, and careful use of those turns decides the winner of each skirmish. Often these turns can be manipulated to make battles lopsided one way or the other, not unlike most strategy games. While there's definitely strategy genre tropes that must be considered like positioning and the employment of proper tools for the job, it's really up to the player to come up with the proper use of them. This is made evident by the player always going first in every encounter. This is counter to almost every other console RPG in that there is always a random chance that the AI will take the first turn, but not so with RoF. With that said, the player is always in a position to win every battle, and almost always without the AI getting a chance to counterattack. Bring the right kinds of weapons to the table, even in a seemingly very underpowered state, and the player will always come out on top with careful consideration of the factors of the game board. The flip side to this, of course, is that the computer is always smarter than the player. Screw up at all, especially in more high stakes situations, and the AI will almost certainly make the player pay for their mistakes, and often to the point that restarting whole battles is often smarter if the first turn is botched. It's a careful risk/ reward scenario made up of various other risk/ reward moments within each fight. I'd encourage anyone interested in complex tabletop battle games to invest in it.

The other, smaller board game is the world map; a series of hexes blocked to the player. The point of the game, ultimately, is to open these hexes to move to various locations, but doing so burns through finite resources. As you may have guessed, these resources can be obtained through battles (random or scripted). However, without the grunt work of grinding through battles, which will ultimately make the characters stronger, you will never have enough hexes to open up the entire game. Not by a long shot. But you can certainly play through a requisite handful of random fights and the inescapable scripted stuff to get exactly what you need to get to the next main objective, provided that you're not just randomly using them. But again, their random use is the nuance of the hex system. Uncovering out-of-the-way hexes will yield rewards (some, honestly, of limited practical use), and careful, well-planned use of colored hexes --rarer than the standard ones-- will boost battle capabilities of your team. In practice, it's actually very simple, and this is why it's considered the "small" board game. You can definitely plow through the story missions and be just fine. But by clever plotting and smart use of resources, you can uncover larger, and often richer rewards. Regardless, mastering the complicated process of battle is the key to doing so. This is not a game that partitions you off simply by the strength of your stat levels, and one can perhaps even game the system provided they're intuitive with their hex use.

But this is all mechanical. Cold, even. What makes this game really unique is how it tells its story. Or, rather, how nothing actually happens. It's not a stretch to say that many, many video game plots are badly edited junior high school essay contests. RoF is definitely no exception. But RPGs have, through the process of their own evolution as a genre, found that they need to have some semblance of a story to contextualize these mechanics, lest the games actually do turn cold. Seriously, digging through menu after menu in battles is nothing if there is no emotional reward; whether that's beating the guy across the table or saving Spira. But, in what I can only assume is a byproduct of knowing its nature, RoF clearly doesn't give a damn. A large amount of the main story missions are useless busy work for the three heroes, and they even know it. The first mission had me deliver a ring to socially awkward shut-in. Another had me delivering a bottle of wine. Yet another found my characters dress up as bears so they can give Christmas presents to young children. Sure, there is some larger conspiracy happening in the background, and a few cutscenes definitely want to try to get you invested in the larger goings-on. Through that lens, everything you're doing seems childish and stupid. But the story beats are presented as small bites. Each mission can be completed in easily less than 20 minutes, and all of them are broken into individual chapters, almost like the whole game is more or less a season of a network television show. Yes, there are bigger things happening in the background, but RoF takes the unusual stance that what is happening in the here and now is equally important, maybe even more so, than saving the theocracy of the world that it takes place in (if that's even the case. I've lost interest in the background noise long ago). The context given for playing these large and small board games feels inconsequential for a reason, because that's pretty much what they are. But RoF lives in the moment, which something a lot of video games don't really do. We know that our princess in another castle. We know we have to stop Liquid and Rex. But in RoF, you wouldn't be alone in wondering what the point of it all really is until just about the end of the game, but by then, who really cares, anyway? Souls games notwithstanding, there aren't a whole lot of examples of other games that do this. Looking at it that way, it's pretty spectacular.

I have a hard time thinking that Resonance of Fate will be considered a sacred video game text over time, and that further, deeper analysis is even all that necessary. Still, it's kind of a fascinating experiment, something the console RPG space gave up on in the previous generations after development costs began to bloat for the medium as a whole. I can't stress enough how none of these individual pieces are flawless: the story missions, weird as they are, still seem dumb, and the combat can feel a little too easily exploited once you really get it. But for it's own sake, it's a big picture sort of game. A fine niche to be in.