Note: the title of this post in an internet scam. Presto, hide your credit card!
Such was the "welcome" that one of my favourite games ever had in store for me, more than a decade ago. It was the end of a millennium, and the end of an age: Sony was conquering the console market with a a mighty fist made of gold. Piracy or not, one couldn't argue that the 32-bit monster lacked the fangs: Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo were made in heaven in the nineties, and are still great fun today. Indeed, there was much more going on for Nintendo's biggest regret ever. Outside the REALLY mainstream titles, there was a plethora of excellent titles that often represented experiments by themselves. One of these was my favourite horror game ever, Silent Hill.
Played in black and white (wrong cable) (did I already mention "piracy"?), it scared the hell out of me. Differently from the game to beat, Resident Evil 2, Silent Hill entertained its target audience through negation, following the tradition of Japanese horror games. Where western horror proudly barked its exposition, SH kept you scratching the bottom of the plot (holes). While Resident Evil games carefully decorated your imagination with scare after scare, SH took care of throwing your expectations out of the window. Players used to spread gunfire inside the improbable corridors of unlikely laboratories were now stumbling across invisible midgets haunting an elementary school.
Fastforward to 2011, and guess what. Metal Gear Solid HD collection. Silent Hill collection. Zone of the Enders collection*. Those were the old times, those were the best times. I won't banter about today's lack of originality in videogames: there never was any, statistically speaking. For sure, a few gems managed to mix a few nifty ideas at a time when investors weren't looking. One of those is another of my favourite games, Vagrant Story.
Being the emo teen I was, when VS was released I was still thinking about the fiery princess of Timber. Actually, mainly because of the utter lack of cyberpunkness in the soonish-to-be-released-overseas Final Fantasy 9, I was completely lost. Without a light. Not even a Tokio Hotel cd to rely on. Then, a Gamestop laborer** appeared:
"So you like Final Fantasy, GOOOOD, try this, it's Vagrant Story, it had to be the next Final Fantasy but it turned out to be too short and it's just one cd***"
Instant buy. Well, it was a ridiculously good choice: light years away from the reassuring monotony of JRPGs, VS represented much needed fresh air, both for my hobby and for the Japanese videogame industry (as we used to call it before the Great Depression).
Nowadays, Demon's Souls is taking the headlines as a brutally difficult, sadistic dungeon crawl experience, whose most frequent reward is the game over screen.
But VS was, and is, in another league. A league that nobody ever watched on telly, it seems, as the apparently low sales**** doomed this classic do the antieconomic realm of fond memories.
VS was indeed a gem, albeit a flawed one. It was clumsy: during your first playthrough each single battle had to be thought over, different enemy types requiring different approaches. To chip away 2 HP was an herculean achievement. Quite a different kind of entertainment for the legions of fans used to the reassuring shallowness of titles like Final Fantasy and Diablo. In VS bashing the same button over and over wouldn't play the game for you, the player was required to pay attention at all times in the lands of Valendia.
The sheer difficulty and the constant strategic choices required were just the tip of the iceberg. The most powerful weapon, the most damaging spell, the most ludicrous Break Art would mean nothing in front of the main baddie, an infamous entity called RISK. In a context where every missed attack could have as well been your last one, the RISK system ensured that this unforgettable dungeon crawl would constantly put the player under pressure. RISK had no one but two armies at its disposal: the Chain Abilities and the Defense Abilities.
Like a Chocobo Hero de'noartri, to have Ashley Riot survive his struggle against Mullenkamp's legacy some sense of rhythm was needed. Three abilities on each type could be selected at once, and pressing the right button at the right moment enabled our favourite Risk Breaker awesome feats. Defense Abilities allowed bonues like damage reduction, damage reflection or status change immunity.
Battle Abilities, on the other hand, were the true stars: from dealing additional damage to powering up your weapons, the offensive options could always give Ashley the upper hand in a fight... Expect for boss fights, where in some cases it was really a matter of chaining 10 to 20 hits at a time, starting with a humble 1HP of damage and ending up in the 20s.
And every time Ashley performed one of those invaluable, often necessary feats... his RISK meter would go up, his critical hit rate would increase and his accuracy would go down the drain, also increasing the damage taken. RISK was the real threat, and I found myself dying most often because somebody hit me with a multi-hit spell when I had a RISK of 100/100 after interrupting a chain of 20+ hits.
Still, VS knew how to reward the player. Its plot and characters went beyond the usual emo shallowness so typical of Nomura's products, and its characters, with a particular exception, were usually much more interested in saving themselves than rescuing the multiverse. The average age of the protagonists was in the thirties, and the economic insuccess of VS ensured that the potentially glorious Final Fantasy 12 would received the "Teen" treatment at some time during its development.
If you ever watched A Bowling for Columbine, you'd remember one of the creators of South Park mentioning that the big problem for teens was their focus on the "Now" only*****. There's only now, tomorrow doesn't exist. This could explain why FF12 was neutered: why should you identify yourself with Basch, a brave and tormented warrior, when the plot can throw in a useless child who's useless enough to represent a direct link between the story and your real life skills? Who'd dream of being braver, stronger, maybe even wiser? Somebody with a bit of maturity, I believe. Because, to dream of being better, you must first define your own limits. To start traveling ahead, you must first have a starting point, and for fragile and angst-filled teens such a feat might really make their RISK go sky high.
Vagrant Story showed to all Nomura fanboys that Japanese RPGs could deliver deeper, more daring, more relevant adventures than the rinse-and-repeat apocalyptic button bashing JRPGs had showed us for almost 20 years. The Phantom Pain reached for our inner desires, showed us what could have been, the possibilities, the implications, the consequences of having to crawl through uncertainty to reach a trembling spot at the end where nobody will take your hand and everything is grey.
And the answer was Vaan.
*actually, to be completely honest, I couldn't care less about a sci-fi shooter other than Einhander 2.
**"seller"? "employee"? "genetic experiment"? Mmm...
***one cd. Measuring dicks was then the new frontier of game design (as always).
****low for your mother, Wada.
*****also see "The Glow" in Scott Pilgrim's saga.
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