Sunday, October 18, 2009

Where the Wild Things Are Review

Where the Wild Things Are is a movie that took me quite a bit by surprise. For a film that I thought was going to be a pretty standard tale of unbridled childhood imagination I found an unexpectedly subtle and thoughtful look at themes of loneliness, desire for understanding and fear of change. Unfortunately these successes make this film feel very adult in it's focus. It is frequently lonely, has no good guys or bad guys and is sometimes frightening to a degree that makes one wonder whether this is really a movie for kids.

The movie follows most of the premise of the children's book where a young boy, Max, is sent to his room for misbehaving during dinner and escapes into a world of wild monsters who appreciate and make him their king. Max eventually becomes homesick and returns to a loving family. The movie takes the liberty of the medium to send Max to an island instead of his room and expand on the personalities of the characters. It develops a whole cast of people and monsters who are struggling for some validation and understanding from those around them. From Max's mom who is struggling with work and trying move on after a divorce from Max's dad to the goat faced monster who is afraid of dangerous games but goes along because everyone ignores his fears. Spike Jonze does a remarkable job of bringing these themes to the front using a minimum of dialog preferring to let the silence and the muppety-CGI facial expressions show what the characters don't have the understanding or vocabulary to do themselves. Max's first meeting with these monsters is as joyous as it is in the book but is almost immediately brought down by the fears and insecurities of the islands inhabitants. It soon becomes clear that each of the monsters represents a different element of Max's own fears and by interacting with them all individually he learns about his own expectations from his family.

If this is sounding particularly deep it's because the movie expects you to figure a lot of it out for yourself. The problem with this is that if you strip out the implied psychoanalysis you are left with a movie that is alternately lonely, frightening and seemingly without resolution. Psychotherapists may be able to fully explain this movie but if you miss that Max is learning about his own life through the troubles of the monsters there is really nothing left. For a movie that is so centred on the imagination and issues of children I wouldn't recommend this movie to kids unless there's someone available to have a long facts of life discussion with afterwards.

The disconnect between the image of this movie and the content aside, I really enjoyed Where the Wild Things Are. It gave a surprisingly deep and mature look at issues that we all face at some point or another and told it in a manner that depended on reading unsaid emotions that not even the characters really understood when they were feeling them. With all this backed up by real costumed actors, and helped with some subtle CG, Where the Wild Things Are is a satisfying experience for anyone who enjoys movies that blend incredible imagination with a mature understanding of itself.

Friday, October 02, 2009

Persona 4

In a marketplace that is so oversaturated with video games of every genre, level of difficulty, aesthetic style and platform these days the I've found it increasingly hard to find games that I can genuinely enjoy. Reviewers try to put quality ratings on games and to tease out the elements that are notably good or bad but I've rarely found any one or even a group of review sources that can accurately predict my enjoyment of a game. Case in point: Persona 4.

My Background

I've had a sort of spotty history with games. I've moved through a number of formative phases as I've changed personally and built up my repertoire of games that have made a significant impression on me. During one of these phases I played Japanese Role Playing Games. I think perhaps I was lucky that I got into them when I did. I started with Final Fantasy 3 (EN), moved onto Chrono Trigger, played FF7 and Earthbound... some of the most highly regarded games of the genre. But maybe that set the bar too high. As I moved onto FF8 and 9, Lufia 2 and Xenogears and the like I found them continually more frustrating. Wrote plots, extended sequences of non-gameplay, all of it just seemed like I was investing my time in inferior versions of old stories dressed up in new art styles and combat systems that stopped being fun. So I stopped playing them (and most other games for similar reasons).

Nearly ten years later I've had my own personal return to gaming but as to what I should be playing, I had no real sources outside of what games received the most hype. These were usually FPS's, casual games, action games and rhythm games. I had remembered that I was once into JRPG's but most of the conversation around them reinforced the idea that they were still exactly what I had left behind.

Traditional RPGs

With the RPG's of old you could write most of the plot on a postage stamp. A group of adventures come across an evil organization (usually a kingdom or empire) and lead a rebellion against them. Usually the empire is replaced with some demonic baddy around the halfway point and you repeat the process of resistance again. You move from dungeon to dungeon fighting bosses who activate cut scenes and generally mash the "next dialog" button until you get pointed in another another direction then you go from there. Eventually you have explored the entire planet and you run around doing side quests until you get bored then never beat the game and it sits on your shelf with a 99% clear file on your memory card. That last part might not be typical but it's not a unique way of playing RPGs as far as I've heard. By opening up the world to the player they remove any sense of urgency to resolve the plot. It is generally the time the player uses to clue up all the side quests to get the best weapons and spells and level grind to the point where the last dungeon is easy. Xenogears was probably the worst for this in my experience. The first half of the game set itself up pretty well but the latter half became a total mess of impenetrable story, battles that made any levelling you had done pointless and zero player control between boss fights. Once they let you back out of the stupid room with the story and the chair there's literally nothing to do but side quests and a battle arena. I'd admit to having more fun than I should have with the battle arena but every time I would try to approach the final dungeon I would think how much I didn't give a damn what the ending of the story was and left it.

Other games would try to rely on the strength or variety of their characters. Final Fantasy 3 holds a special place in my heart because I believe it was the first time I experienced these character memes but further games would fail to do anything interesting with them. The characters were static and developed at the whim of the story rather than in response to any of the inconsequential dialog choices the player was responsible for. On the other side of this are the games that gave you characters that had no other reason for being there other than whatever coloured bauble you happened to have in your pocket. Chrono Cross was the worst for this with a seemingly endless number of characters with perhaps 2 that had any significant development. For a system of storytelling that is based around the strength of the characters you interact with, it's eternally frustrating when you become attached to a character that has no connection to the main plot.

There's something to be said for respecting conventions that are part of the identity of a series. I'm not try to say that these systems are inherently bad, merely that there are diminishing returns as to how much enjoyment these games have given me over the years. As with any musician or artist there's a balance between innovation and satisfying your fans that must be struck and I have not remained a fan.

The Game

Persona 4 does exactly what I've been wanting from RPG's for some time now. It has taken the elements that I came to these games for in the first place and fuses them with more intimate narrative and character development while increasing the players control over how rich the world around them is. You play a pretty average shell character that you name and get to remote control around between cut scenes. One think I like about him though is that he's not completely personality-less. There are times when he will react to things that go on in the world outside of any input and other times where you'll have a number of similar sounding options. Furthermore, there is a personality system that puts gates on certain dialog choices. If you have not developed enough bravery you may not be able to ask a girl for her phone number. If you don't have a high enough understanding you may not be able to negotiate certain delicate conversations. I like how this essentially puts you at the controls of this character but not at full control.

The story in Persona 4 is thankfully reduced in scope by several magnitudes from the "save the world" progression of most JPRG's. You never actually leave the city you start off in and your central quest is to solve a mystery that is contained in that town. You do not get airships. You do not get teleported to the moon or get caught on the wrong side of a rockslide and have to make your way to your next objective via a hovercraft. You do enter a television. The TV is your all-purpose dungeon hub. Once dungeons have been unlocked you enter the TV then wander up a tower till you find a boss. It's a pretty simple system but I can't see any reason why getting into random battles on your way from a town to a cave is any better so I enjoy the compartmentalization of dungeon crawling that the TV ends up being. The rest of the world is for you to develop your relationship with the other characters in the game.

This leads into the next thing I really enjoyed about Persona 4, the social linking system. I've written here about the player/character gap that is apparent when you play socializing like a min/max game but you really do get more control over that process than any other game I've played. There are a number of people in the world who you may become friends with. Some of these have multiple outcomes from intimate relationships to becoming estranged from (apparently. I never experienced this myself). These social links are generally optional but the efficiency of your character in battle suffers. It kind of misses the point to ignore them though. If you're not social linking in between dungeons you have options but no really interesting ones. Furthermore the depth of character you discover through the social linking process is amazingly deep. You really feel like you get to know these characters and have some influence over helping them figuring out their problems. And they're real problems too. Not like the the NPC who wants you get a red herring from an enemy (though they're there too) but real issues of personal identity in a world that has expectations of gender identity, family, and self-worth. It is simply phenomenal in a world where a 10 second soft-core bump and grind session is held up as an example of immorality in video games that this game is able to bring up some serious issues of personality and societal pressure in such a mature way.

Finally, Persona is a game that has a real, measurable momentum that forces the player to be mindful of time as a crucial factor in how they play. There are many elements of the plot and the social links that are available in windows of time. If you squander your time you may miss the opportunity to progress the plot and result in a game over. Because of this you are never really given the opportunity to reach a dead end or get sidetracked by secondary or tertiary quests (most if not all, of which are banal fetch quests anyway).

It's immensely satisfying after so many games failing to properly keep momentum near the end of the quest to be treated to a fascinating, mature and somewhat relatable plotline that is populated by interesting characters and solid gameplay mechanics.


Post Script

I've left a few elements out of the main body of this article due to length and my desire to complete this in one sitting. First of all the combat is fairly standard attack/magic/item affair with an interesting twist that has you look for the right spell to best incapacitate the enemy. It's less attrition based and more Rock/Paper/Scissors. Next, the game has a huge amount of voice acting which I guess isn't all that obscure these days. I did find myself genuinely liking the characters more when I had a face and a voice to relate to them. Finally the game does not even try to hide how Japanese it is. Aside from a vaguely western design for all the characters (a la most anime) you are in a town in Japan and you hang out in ramen shops and use honourifics when referring to anyone you speak to. There's no impression of the entire world being based on feudal Japan or whatever. Inaba's actually a town name in Japan. I'll probably never know how similar the two places are but the Inaba of Persona 4 feels just small enough for you to become intimately familiar with all the locations before too long.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Ooo rah. First real paper of the term and I'm done the night before. What a student I am. Learning all kinds of stuff about stuff and putting it down on paper for people to tear apart. This is what it means to be alive.

Not that I'd really know. The idea of a lust for life has been kind of absent from my days only to be replaced by bittersweet music. I've had lyrics from the grunge era and songs about the unfairness of the world in my head all night and it's made me surly but thankfully not despondent to the point where I'll bury my head in a pile of unwashed clothing and try to evict the demons of doubt and self-deprication from my head. Nope. Just sarcastic and occasionally riled up by the odd party anthem (because sometimes it should smell like teen spirit).

It's also feeling like I went a little too far into my interests to keep my mind off things lately. I have about 10 different gaming blogs being collected through google reader and I still check Giant Bomb a few times a day. Honestly, it's better than the time I've been flushing away on Facebook but I realized not long ago that constantly worrying about the actions and inane internet activity of so many people was actually making me more stressed out than I had any right being. I don't know whether it's just right now or whether I've been becoming slowly dependant on that stream of text to pacify my need to live vicariously through other people. Probably the latter these days. Anyway I've started a weening process from Facebook in particular. Staying active on Twitter but the few people I know who do use it do so as a news stream anyway.

Here's to a month of turmoil. May it be over soon. Now where's my Scotch...