#85: Valiant Hearts: The Great War (of Tone)

No matter what I seem to play from Ubisoft, whether I like it or hate it, there is always something worth talking about. With Valiant Hearts, the problem is not so much about quality. Though a good game, there exists an internal conflict regarding what messages players are supposed to take away from it. Some sections are clearly aiming for the tone of a pulpy adventure in the vein of a Micheal Bay movie or old propaganda films. A distinctly introspective, more melancholy tone is expressed in other areas of the game. This week, I want to detail how the game elicits these two opposing tones, and how they come into conflict with each other.

Released in June of 2014, Valiant Hearts: The Great War set out with the goal of delivering a tale about the First World War in a relatively unused way. Instead of relying on first/third-person shooting mechanics, the developers opted to utilize the in-house UbiArt engine, used to build 2D games like Rayman Origins and Child of Light, to make the 2D puzzle game out of it. Following the exploits of fictional people whose lives were directly impacted by the conflict, Valiant Hearts aimed to be more mature about its tale.

In many areas, they succeeded in this mission. Segments in the plot, particularly those surrounding Emile, an old man drafted into the French army, and Karl, his German son-in-law conscripted to fight into his national army, do their absolute best to explore how taxing World War I was on the families involved. While the two of them are off fighting in a war neither one has any true interest in, Emile's daughter and her child routinely send messages to the two of them telling them of her struggles on the homefront. There is even a more subtle emotional thread born from the knowledge that the two of them are being forced to fight against one another even though they have no real incentive to do so. This forms the central conflict of their arcs, as both men seek nothing more but to quit the war and return to their family.

Valiant Hearts also reinforces this more sorrowful line of reasoning through other means. As the player explores different locations over the course of the game, the pause menu builds up a collection of facts and pictures from the actual, real life war. The images depict great hardship, with the noticeably miserable faces of soldiers in very uncomfortable positions and conditions. From the muddy trenches, to the amputees, these help teach people about the circumstances that contextualize the game. Though it of course serves as a strong jumping off point for people without a strong grasp of history to learn more, this information also helps convey just how much the people who fought in World War I must have despised the conflict. Combined with the somber music that plays in the pause menu, Valiant Hearts does much to sell the message of “War is Hell.”

Yet, the writers of the game also follow a second, completely separate thread as the story progresses. Where Emile and Karl's tales depict the awfulness of World War I, the other subplots give off a more adventurous feeling. The first follows the American-born Freddie, whose moved to France in order to marry his lover, who was murdered by German soldiers on the say of their wedding. His is a standard-revenge story, with all of the usual trappings. Finally, we get to the story of Anna. A Belgian nurse attending school in France, she joins the war effort as a medic when she learns that her dad has been kidnapped by German soldiers, forced to create diabolical weapons for them. Her efforts to both provide medical care for injured soldiers and to find her lost father take center stage during her segments.

What unites these two threads is that both Freddie and Anna's problems can be traced to the same person. The one who both killed Freddie's lover and abducted Anna's parent is, and I swear this is true, the evil Baron Von Dorf. From the Saturday-morning cartoons most of us grew up on, the Baron represents a bad guy so absurd that no person could reasonably support him. This gives Freddie and Anna, and later Emile and Karl when the characters begin to interact with each other, a clear opponent to fight against in the context of a world-wide war. Whenever he appears, the game makes an abrupt and clear shift to the likeness of a Looney Toons short.

Furthermore, Anna in particular gets another dose of pulp in some areas. As the only playable character who uses a vehicle, Anna's driving segments often consist of her dodging obstacles on the road in perfect synchronization with classic songs like Night on Bald Mountain, Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies, among others. These segments are bizarre in how overwhelmingly energetic and cheery they are compared to most of the game. Even once Anna becomes aware of how bad things are, these segments make her seem absolutely eager to jump straight into the fray. Given what happens to both her and the other characters in the game, this is disturbing at worst and confusing at best.

These two separate tones, one of melancholy and one of adventure, are extremely difficult to reconcile with on another. Valiant Hearts makes the attempt, but never truly follows through. As a result, the game's underlying message is hard to piece together. Am I, as the player, supposed to be saddened by this chapter in human history? Am I supposed to think that war is a great thing that helps the good guys deal with the bad guys in an acceptable manner? Neither one of these questions is really answered by the game, and the writers do not appear to know which side they stand on either way for most of the duration.

Even a lot of the puzzles seem unsure of where they stand on this dichotomy. For example, at one point in the game, the player is tasked with clearing the chlorine gas out of an area so that allied soldiers can advance. To do this, they sneak into the bottom level of a German base. Seeing the large machine pumping out the gas, it is necessary to use the levers to move the pipes dispersing the gas into a position where they can build up pressure, overloading and exploding the system. Chlorine gas is was a serious issue in The Great War, to the point where chemical weapons were banned in future conflicts. Despite that gravity, the game presents uses a Pipe Dream-esque puzzle to present it. The topic lends itself to a serious exploration, yet the segment is one of the lighter ones in terms of tone. This disconnect left me feeling slightly uncomfortable, in a way that I am not sure the designer intended.

That said, no guilt was wrought. After all, nobody died as a result of me solving that pipe dream puzzle. In fact, until the very last part of the game, the playable cast does not have a single kill that can be directly traced to any one of them. Combined with the hand-drawn, exaggerated art style and a fairly vibrant color palette, Valiant Hearts invokes the impression of a children's show. This clashes with the bleakness of the source material. Even in this sense, the game seems unsure about where it wants to go.

Most of Valiant Hearts is spent in this pit of confusion over what message it is trying to convey. Not to say that the game is bad, as it does have many genuinely good moments scattered throughout, but rather that it is noticeably disjointed. Still, there is no denying that it is ambitious in its own way. There is relatively little difficulty in turning World War I into a first-person shooter. In comparison, significantly more challenge exists in building a small 2D puzzle game out of the subject. Rather than take the path of least resistance, they opted to do something unique. The final product is reflective of that, despite not fully succeeding.

#80: Far Cry 3 Vs. Wolfenstein: The New Order: A Discussion of Aesops

Though this may surprise the people who read my articles, I play more than just RPGs. Surprisingly enough, the last two games I have beaten have something in common. They attempt to teach similar aesops through their stories. However, one performs this task very well. The other fails so miserably that the writing can only be called marginally better than a David Cage game. These two games are Wolfenstein: The New Order and Far Cry 3. This week, I plan to compare the two in order to help explain how one failed and the other succeeded. The reason is that I strongly feel that they were both making an attempt at the same thing. That is, they wanted to mock the kinds of protagonists we see in the shooters that are released year after year.

To that end, they have a similar tone in terms of gameplay style. Both Wolfenstein and Far Cry 3 have a very arcade-like style to the way they play. By this, I mean that they can throw many enemies at the player and feel reasonably confident that the player has the ability to take them all out. Missions, especially towards the end of the game, tend to have enemies swarm the player in waves. Typically, these enemies die very quickly, but there are a few enemy types that require more skill to take down. Furthermore, because health and ammo do not fully-regenerate, there is an element of resource management required. Players must mind either their total health and/or the number of healing items they have, on top of their body armor and the number of bullets left in their inventory. Excessive use of these resources will make future battles more difficult. Combined, these elements give off a sense of power, but require tactics in order maintain their advantage.

On top of that, both games have sections with stealth elements. In these areas, the objective is to eliminate the opposition before they have the chance to raise the alarm and call for reinforcements. Players can just charge-in guns blazing, but they are better off if they take the time to stay undetected. Various tools in their arsenal can assist them by giving them silent attack options. Minor RPG elements are also included. With them, players can develop their character's skills and physical abilities in order to perform better. They can customize their character in order to best suit their playstyle, be it stealthy assassin, commando, or somewhere in between. With this, both games offer a sense that the protagonist is slowly developing over the course of the game, yet never lacks in skill.

Even in terms of story, there are many similarities. Both games have the player go against foes that are irredeemably evil. Wolfenstein: The New Order, as one might expect, has Nazis as the primary opponent. Far Cry 3 pits the player against kidnappers, slave traders, and drug dealers. In this way, they do not focus on the effects of violence on the enemy you are fighting. Rather, the focus in more towards the protagonist and how they change as a result of being thrown into the violence, becoming an active participant in it. Wolfenstein shows how years of fighting Nazis have affected BJ Blazkowicz's mental health. Meanwhile, Far Cry 3 demonstrates Jason Brody's decent into a spiral of death and violence after being kidnapped and ransomed by Vaas and his pirate crew. Though Far Cry 3 also uses the progression system to better demonstrate the transition, both games take close looks at their player characters.

However, there are crucial differences in these stories. The compound effect of all of these differences helps to explain how one game succeeded while the other game failed. The first difference is in the likability of the protagonist and his supporting cast. In Wolfenstein: The New Order, BJ Blazkowicz is shown in a pretty positive light. Throughout the course of the game, he often goes out of his way to assist the people he fights along-side, and not just in terms of completing missions for them. He is also frequently seen talking with other US Army and Resistance fighters, helping them cope with the realities of the world they live in. For example, early in the game, a younger recruit is visibly shaken by the war with the Nazis. BJ approaches him with tips on how to calm oneself down after going through traumatic events. We are also given reason to care about the supporting cast. Each character has their own quirks, personality, and reasons for fighting the Nazis. While some occasionally slip into jerkwad territory, they always have a reason to do so. The character Fergus, to demonstrate the point, gets a little angst when he realizes that he is an old man and is not able to fight as well as he did way back when, feeling like he is holding the team back. Overall, the characters are very well written.

The same cannot be said for Far Cry 3. In that game, almost every character that is on the protagonist's side, including Jason Brody himself, is insufferable. The game opens with them holding several wild parties and imbibing massive quantities of alcohol, using their rich parents' money. Then, they complain about their love lives and other such nonsense. All of them are the exact same character, just with different faces and genders. Even when Brody changes over the course of the game, he simply becomes another flavor of jerkwad. He transforms from a stupid, rich, white boy into a stupid, rich white boy with drug-induced delusions of being some great warrior. If anything, he becomes even more irritating as the game goes on. Unlike in Wolfenstein, the cast of characters is completely unlikable, which makes it hard to care about them when they go through their ordeals and change as a result.

Another major difference is the time-table for the ordeals in each game. In Wolfenstein, BJ fights against the Nazis for decades. At the end of the game, he reaches a point where he realizes that he has been fighting Nazis for so long, over half of his lifetime, that he can no longer do anything else. As a result, he is okay with sacrificing himself to save the world from their evil. Since he cannot live in the world he helped to save, it is preferable to end it all when he is no longer required to fight. It is a distinctly dark moment, but an important one. Most video game shooter protagonists can experience much horror and return to civilization at the end of the day as if nothing happened. Wolfenstein decided to instead play their protagonist completely straight by having him struggle for decades and realize that he cannot do the same.

Far Cry 3, meanwhile, takes place over the span of at most one or two months. Because of this significantly shorter time-frame, Jason Brody's “growth” from a novice into a full-fledged fighter is much less believable. Vaas, the game's (technically) secondary antagonist, makes a remark that best underscores this point. Paraphrased: “You think that you get a couple of tattoos and a few guns and suddenly you're a 'warrior', white boy!?” Though said by a character who is certifiably insane, this statement is no less true. No matter how much training and conditioning one undergoes in a month, they cannot make such a dramatic change like that. Those fundamental changes take years. The events of Far Cry 3 would be traumatic. However, they would not just turn some nobody into a cold-blooded murderer, at least not so quickly. As a result, any commentary Far Cry 3 is attempting to make on video game protagonists feels meaningless.

Ultimately, though Far Cry 3 is obviously the more well-known and popular of the two, it fails on a much more fundamental level than Wolfenstein: The New Order. Wolfenstein is more successful at subverting its mechanics and teaching the aesop at the center of both games. Even in a general sense, Far Cry 3 is terrible in terms of its storytelling. Having said that, both games are still really fun to play. The stand-alone Blood Dragon DLC for Far Cry 3 better demonstrates this by re-contextualizing the mechanics with a story that takes itself significantly less seriously. It is so much better than I would easily recommend it over the original game. From what I can gather, the writers of Far Cry 4 also learned a lot for the failures of the previous game in the franchise. Wolfenstein is also worth taking a look at, if you can find it at a discounted price.

#69: SEES and the Investigation Team: A Tale of Tone and Scale

One of my favorite JRPG franchises has to be the Persona sub-franchise in the Shin Megami Tensei series. Although I have played through all of the games in the franchise, Persona 3 and 4 are the ones that really captured my heart. I was talking with a friend about the two games, and we disagreed on which of them had a better cast of characters. They preferred the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad (SEES) that made up the main cast of the third entry in the series. However, I connected more with the Investigation Team of the fourth game. This lead me to think a bit more about why I have this preference, which will be the subject of this post.

One of the biggest reasons I think for my preference is the difference in scope between the two stories. In the third entry of the series, the stakes are raised fairly quickly. In the first half of the game, players are introduced to monsters called shadows, which cause havoc during this extra hour in the day in which normal, non-Persona-users are sleeping in coffins. Both the player and the main characters are told that unless the shadows are stopped, they will destroy the world. Although the plot and its twists and turns stop this from becoming another standard save-the-world story, it is hard for audiences to really comprehend the stakes for which they play. When players are out participating in story events, it is very difficult to fully understand that if they fail, then X amount of nameless, faceless people will suffer for it. Not to say that players are stupid, but rather that the human mind is not really equipped to process such high risks, when so many people are on the line (doubly so when it is a work of fiction, and not a real event).

This is in fairly stark contrast with Persona 4, where the risks involved with failure are much easier to understand. The plot to that game is not a tale about saving the world. Rather, it is a story about a serial killer in a small town. Despite the supernatural elements to the plot (since it is a Persona game and players will need to use personae to fight in some capacity), the story is actually very grounded and on a much smaller scale than its predecessor's. Every victim and potential victim of the serial murders has a face, name, and personality which players are introduced to before they become the next target. It is much easier for me to comprehend that “If I fail, my classmate Yukiko will die” then “If I fail, innocent people will die.” This is not to say that larger scope stories are invalid, but rather that the smaller scale of Persona 4 let me really understand why my characters were out doing the things they do. That difference in understanding helped me relate a lot more to that cast as a result, especially since the majority of the cast joined the team because I saved them.

Another reason that the cast of Persona 4 appeals to me more is that the personal issues that each of the cast members are dealing with are much more relatable to me than those of Persona 3's cast. In the third game, most of the main characters have very dark personal histories. Out of all nine of them, six of them are dealing with trauma related to the death of a loved one as major parts to their story arc. Two of the other three are dealing with major issues involving their parents and the last one is a robot who is coming to grips with her growing sense of humanity. Again, all of these are valid and worthwhile backstories to explore, but the sheer darkness of it all makes it very, very hard for me to personally relate to them. These are issues that people do deal with, but not so much so that it becomes a dominating force in the way they live their lives like the cast of Persona 3. It often feels like there is a barrier between me and the cast as a result.

On the other hand, the kind of issues the members of the Investigation Team in Persona 4 go through are more resonate to me. Every single member of the group has something about themselves that they do not like and refuse to admit. In order to save them, players have to defeat their shadow selves and convince each cast member to accept whatever baggage is dragging them down. Many of these issues are much smaller ones that most people can understand and empathize with. One person secretly resents moving from the city to a small town with comparatively less to do. Two best friends have to confront that deep down, they are jealous of each other. Another party member is insecure about his favorite hobby because, to others, it is not very “manly.” These are all issues that people deal with on a day-to-day basis. I can understand these kinds of pains because I personally feel them more often than I would care to admit. Although I have only had loved ones die a small number of times in my life, these other issues are some that I and most people confront regularly. This creates much more empathy and understanding of the cast of Persona 4 than it does for Persona 3.

Lastly, I suspect that a contributing factor to the popularity of the Investigation Team over that of SEES is that Persona 4 was a lot easier to play than Persona 3 was. Transitioning from Persona 3 to 4, Atlus added two major additions to the combat system. The first was the “Guard” command, which replaced passing turns from Persona 3 and allowed players to reduce that damage from powerful skills that bosses used. The second was “Direct Command”, which allowed players to take control of other party members, besides the protagonist, in battle instead of leaving it to the AI. While I am sure this was a contributing factor for many people in increasing the likeability of the Investigation Team, this was not the case for me. When I played Persona 3, I played the PSP version of the game, which brought in the above improvements from Persona 4. Despite not playing a major part in affecting my enjoyment of both groups, I am sure it was a contributing factor for many others, so I opted to mention it here for completion's sake.

When it comes down to it, Persona 3 and 4 are actually quite different games in terms of tone, scope, and style of writing, despite being nearly identical in the gameplay aspects. This makes them useful for a case study in how writing can affect the overall takeaway of the player from a game. Of course, I have to stress that this is extremely subjective and I fully expect people to disagree with my preferences. Further, both games are solid and worth playing if you are a fan of JRPGs. I might have been a little critical of Persona 3's storytelling, but it is a very well-written and fun to play game. And who knows? You might be like my friend and prefer SEES to the Investigation Team. Regardless, make sure to reflect on how the differences between the two games make you feel differently about them, despite them being very similar.