Chaos Wars does not deserve to take that tone with me.
The game has a lot of dialog that is an excellent representation of problems of tone in video games. When two of the protagonists of this game who are defined by their friendship are reintroduced after being separated, they proceed to bicker as if they have been married for 15 years and are having financial problems. The noble knight character, otherwise stoic, confides to our moronic lead boy that she doesn't deserve to enjoy life.
I don't know how it got this bad. I'm not sure when it became acceptable for games to become nihilistic pools of life-disaffirming garbage. If half the things that characters in this game said came out of the mouths of people that I know, I'd be in jail for repeated ritualistic murder.
The real problem is, I do know how we got here.
At some point in time, somebody who made games (probably somebody at Square, to be honest), decided that the best way to make a game feel epic was to assign plotting and dialog duties to middle-school teenagers in the middle of math class. That's how the Playstation-era was littered with Japanese RPG pap like Final Fantasy VII (yeah, it was Square) and its numerous children. Too many games during this time are about overly-upset people fighting versions of their parents that are dragons or robots or something. The more that a game resembled the unwatchable anime of the late-80s and early-90s, the better it sold (and was scored!). This sort of entertainment is deliberately created to impress a feeling of importance and significance by emoting, no matter how ineffectual said emoting really is.
These games are remembered fondly because they were different than what came before, and I suppose I can understand that. They weren't functionally entertaining, but they stood out.
What I can't understand is why games carried the tone established by these games like a goddamned banner across an infinite bridge. The only people that video games have left to impress upon are the ones that are really smart or really fucking dumb! Average people have some sort of experience with video games, either an understanding or emotion involved with them. The business plan worked! People know that this stuff exists! Teenagers play games (also, they always have! That's what sex in high school is all about). Even more significantly, the people that played games as teenagers are still playing games, even though they have become bankers, teachers and convicted sex criminals! People just enjoying playing good games, and it doesn't matter if they come in the form of cards or a jigsaw puzzle or a board game or Sonic the Hedgehog.
The problem is that the tone has never changed. And that tone is a kudzu vine that is strangling games around the throat and dragging them down into the cesspools of artistic hell.
Here's the facts, in a numbered list:
Games still feel the need to impress, even though there's nobody important left to impress. The Wii pretty much icepicked that rotting farmhouse door.
Good games will impress because they are good games, ie: fun to play and interesting. Kinda like how people say that songs have a good beat.
Most video game narratives are sub-pulp, misanthropic piles of sludge that reek of desperation and a need to be accepted as important.
Games need to get their swagger back. They need to cut back on their aspirations to appeal to people who buy paperback sci-fi novels when they are lonely. And they need to start reveling in their gameness. The best tone that a game can strike is a confident one.
Games like Gears of War 2 are infinitely playable because they are willing to throw everything up on the counter with the swagger of a diabetic biker gang member. Horde mode says “here's the game, strangle yourself with a necktie if you don't like it.”
The problem is that games are still growing, and are ill-equipped to truly feel EPIC in any way other than their play mechanics. Games like Gears 2 and Street Fighter can almost achieve that feeling because you are in full control of the faculties of the game. You are the game and the way you play is the narrative. Developers with the balls to make games like this are saying that they are so confident that their game is good, they trust that even the average homeless TVA victim can't screw it up.
And that's the right tone.
Shining Force is the only strategy RPG to assert this tone, if only because there is so little to do. After the first 15 minutes, there is almost nothing else to the game other than moving on a grid and not fucking up. That's pure game, baby.
The problem is that Chaos Wars can't ever say the same. It can't stand up on its own two legs, so it is propped up by misplaced emotion and sheer avarice. Idea Factory is hoping that you'll sit through the bullshit so that you can see your favorite whatevers do whatever to each other. And of course, since they aren't your favorite whatevers, there are a billion numbers to play with. Hopefully, that is enough for you to throw your 40 dollars on the table. It doesn't matter if dunk tank works, since you've already bought the baseballs. And now the fat wet clown on the sitting above the tank is calling YOU a faggot.
People who play games have been that kid at the dunk tank for too long. And I think it's time to come back to the same dunk tank with a molotov cocktail and a baseball bat. It may be too late to get our money back, but we can make some change out of the sad grinning obese clown that took it in the first place.
