# Give Me Your Story

published: 2020-04-04

Imagine, if you will, a MOGAI teenager infected with Tumblr Syndrome, blog full of nothing but reblogs of other people. Sick with consumption, not the historical kind but the modern kind, personality nothing but fandoms worshipping corporate creations. Scattered between movie GIFs are desperate attempts to co-opt genuine LGBT oppression with the sexuality or gender of the week, pride flags like someone put on a blindfold and threw darts at a color wheel set to random. Just as devoid of a working sense of color theory as they are of a coherent sense of self outside the internet, outside the Cathedral of Tumblr Zoomer Culture.

I only paint this picture so that those who have experienced the kind of person illustrated will instantly know what I mean by "give me your toes". Vague and nonsensical non-threats pointed at anyone who dares to blaspheme or transgress against their Cathedral like "pee your pants" or "I'm revoking your kneecap privileges", non-threats because the standard "kill yourself" has lost its edge (and is also illegal). Usually these are accompanied by a poorly-photoshopped image of a celebrity or fictional character holding a gun and pointing it at the viewer.

It is with this same sense of semi-ironic desperation that I find myself more and more pointing the fictional gun at the video game collection on my bookshelf.

When I was about ten or so, I got a copy of The Legendary Starfy for the DS. For those who've never played it, it's a platformer about a little starfish dude (the titular Starfy) who gets woken up one morning by an alien rabbit dude crashing through his roof, and then the two go romp around the underwater world trying to find the rabbit dude's memories. Apparently it's the first game in a four-part series that was originally for the Gameboy Advance, but only the first one was ever translated to English and remade. Since, at the time, I was only allowed to play handheld games in the mornings or during car rides, I spent almost every moment I had to take a car ride struggling through the levels in small snatches here and there. I always got stuck on the sunken pirate ship, trying to push a button and then pass through a gate before time ran out, and only rarely did I ever get past it.

But I did get past it: I must have, because I remember doing the final boss battle. Or, rather, I remember failing the final boss battle in the back seat of my grandma's van and giving up and never touching the game again.

To this day, I still have not completed the game. Not that I could, since, while writing this post, I went to pop it in and see how long it's been sitting unfinished- and apparently the cartridge is missing. Most likely one of my brothers "borrowed" it like I'm apt to let them do when I'm in my better moods and managed to lose it.

There are lots of other games that I have worked my way through with virtual sweat and real tears and then had to give up because the final boss battle (or some other far-down level) was too tricky for my fingers:

- Code Name S.T.E.A.M., a turn-based shooter about an alien invasion in some alternate universe where steampunk went worldwide, which truthfully I only bothered pirating and playing because my waifu Smash main happened to be a playable character. Default Fortnite Man just isn't appealing enough on his own.
- Charlotte's Web, a platformer and also the very first video game I got for the DS. There are several parts in the early levels where one has to sneak past the farmer, hiding behind boxes and tractors. If Wilbur gets seen and the farmer catches up to him, the poor pig makes a tortured face and the screen quickly goes black, which likely contributed a lot of my early nightmares about being murdered. (At least, that's what I remember happening. This timeline might be different.) I got stuck somewhere right before the Templeton levels. I have a cheat program installed on my 3DS which could give me infinite health (which really wouldn't help with the levels where you parkour to avoid falling into a barn's endless abyss), but replaying through all the levels brings back frantic memories of elementary school that I'd rather stay buried.
- Scribblenauts, yet another platformer for the DS (can you sense a pattern here?) that I only truly remember in hazy memories of a certain former friend's house during sleepovers. I borrowed her DSi (which was essentially the same as a DS, but this time with cameras and a funky camera app) and plowed through the sequel as far as I could in the wee hours of the morning, doing my best with everyone else not to wake up the host's parents. And I beat that one! But not this one. Because this one doesn't understand the concept of adjectives.
- Xenoblade Chronicles.

Oh dear, good old Xenoblade. I am going absolutely batshit insane from the government-inforced COVID-19 home quarantine, and this game, which I have poured the last two months into (or, at least, sixty hours for one hour a day) has pushed me to the limits of insanity these past two weeks.

But no more! Because I quit today. And I was at- you guessed it- the final boss battle.

There was absolutely no way I could have continued, even if I had wanted to. Where I started today, I was at the final point in the game where one could save (inside the interior of Prison Island). Past that is a tough boss battle, which halts halfway-through to a cutscene, and then the same boss regains all of his health and you have to try to kill him again. And then another cutscene, and you get sent off to space, which isn't really space but apparently just a simulation. There are no edges or any kind of borders outlining the walkway between teleportation points, just a glowing line connecting said points, so theoretically you could just walk in a single direction forever (if you don't fall out of the universe, that is; I didn't try). You walk past every planet, and by every planet, you have to fight a replica of (nearly) every major boss in the game so far. And after those, another cutscene, and then the fight where the god of the world kills your entire party in fifteen seconds flat. Supposedly, according to the wiki, after that fight is another, even harder, final final boss battle.

But for every other boss battle in the game, if you lost, you were just revived and teleported to the last landmark you passed by. You had the option of exploring the surrounding lands and grinding until you got strong enough to survive the battle, or even teleporting to other lands where there were shops with specific equipment or a furnace to craft gems to boost one's stats. If you got frustrated, you could save right where you were and quit for the day and come back the next right where you left off.

This exemplifies the two major problems I have with modern story-based (as opposed to competitive) games: that you can't save before the final boss battle, and that grinding is necessary to advance in the storyline.

As far as I know, there is no technical reason why Shulk and friends aren't allowed to save before they go kick Zanza's ass. It's not for memory limitations, as the space simulation requires far less objects in view than every other battle: a few spheres are far less demanding for the Wii's admittedly pitiful hardware to render than a snowy mountainside with lots of jagged edges (Mt. Valak) or the inside-and-out of a fortress with plenty of walls and doors and windows (Galahad Fortress) or the entirety of a small village (Colony 9). It's not for entities, as there are only the party and Zanza there (and Xenoblade just respawns everything in an area upon loading a save, anyway). And Dunban's insistence in Prison Island that "there is no turning back from this point" or however he worded it isn't a valid excuse either because, for example, most of the modern Fire Emblem games allow saving right before said final boss battle (with the exception of Fates, which is a burning dumpster fire of its own, and Three Houses, which I don't know anything about gameplay-wise because I refuse to play it).

The player, shocking as this might be, has a life outside your game, developers. You need to respect that they might not have the time to commit to a several-hour-long stretch without saving. Especially if it's a console game. Do you know how infuriating it would be to be an inch away from success and then suddenly have a power outage? What about adults with jobs? There were several instances for me where I thought I'd just play a bit before a work shift, and then end up frantically skipping crucial cutscenes to get to a savepoint faster. What about kids with homework and chores to do, which can't necessarily be planned out? The game needs to accomodate their schedules, not the other way around, or else they're simply not going to be able to (healthily) play it.

And this might just be the /r/StopGaming in me speaking, but I am fucking sick and tired of having to grind in games, of having to waste my time performing repetitive actions over and over and over again for absolutely nobody's material benefit. The first time, it was about fifteen hours in, stuck teleporting among levels in the ether mine in order to evade Xord's banhammer. And then it was about forty hours in, repeatedly saving and loading in the same part in Agniratha again so that I could survive Gadolt and his megalasers for more than thirty seconds into the battle. And then it was fifty hours, and I was inside the Bionis' chest cavity, acting as cancer cells razing down everything in sight for a week so I could go make explode some woman who thought turning her son into a giant telepathic bird was a good way to become immortal.

In some alternate dimension where I did manage to finish the final boss fight, and thus the game, when I think about the positive things about the game, it's not going to be the frantic timing to every battle, or hearing the same catchphrases over and over again. It's going to be the content of the cutscenes. The framing, the shots, the content: you know, the story! I'm not in it for the fighting; I'm in it for the story! If I wanted to play a game where I beat shit up, I'd just drag one of my brothers into my room (where I have my consoles set up, since the house flooded again) and we'd play Smash together for a few hours.

I think story-based games should have an easy mode for people who value the story over the gameplay. Not skipping the battles altogether, since a lot of the story can surprisingly be conveyed through simple passive experience (the passivity of playing as opposed to the activeness of cutscenes), but easy so that one isn't spending weeks upon weeks grinding it out. If Xenoblade wasn't such a time suck with grinding in order to progress anywhere at all, I'd probably replay it again. But I won't, because I don't have the time. I'm not sacrificing sixty hours again to just be barred from collecting the payoff at the end. If you like the gameplay more and get your enjoyment from constantly fighting monsters, be my guest! But some of us just want to see Le Epic Anime Boy murder God and then move on with their day.

"But, Vane," I hear an eager strawman pipe up, "if you don't want to put in the effort, you should just watch a movie instead."

But movies don't have the same kind of natural immersion that games have. In Xenoblade, for instance, the cutscenes aren't pre-rendered. Whatever armor your party members wear in combat also shows up in the cutscenes. There was one instance I remember where my party was in Alcamoth, a stuffy imperial city full of futuristic technology, but since the last good armor drops had been in the Makna Forest region, my whole party was wearing hilariously out-of-style "tribal" outfits that made them stick out like sore thumbs against the pale pearlly sheen of everything. A few I had taken to the city's store and upgraded a few pieces of theirs, making even more nonsensical outfits.

Imagine you're a sheltered prince who is eager to meet the people who saved his sister's life, and then some buff dude walks in wearing a whole-ass headdress, and another dude with what looks like a metal crown put on upside-down tells you to your face that your rituals don't mean shit to him because he's a different species...

But I can't watch Advent Children and have Cloud or Kadaj wearing a funny hat the whole time but everything else the same. Not without serious video editing. And even then, it would never look quite right.

In movies, everything has to be prim and proper, and every facet of the experience has to be set in stone, the same for everyone. In games, developers can give the players some leeway. Reyn can walk into the royal audience chamber looking like a crackhead doing shitty (and possibly culturally insensitive) cosplay if I want him to, and by gods, Kallian will take him just as seriously as if he were wearing anything else.

"But what about a book?"

Books are slightly different. Most books sans movie adaptations don't have set illustrations for every single character and setting inside, giving the reader the freedom to imagine whatever they want within the loose confines of the author's descriptions- and even then, the reader can just ignore these at their peril.

Books have serious advantages, I will concede- no, I will loudly proclaim. For starters, you can bookmark a book at any time. Sure, there are optimal places to stop and quit for the night, like right at the first page of a new chapter, but unless you're reading on some incredibly restrictive electronic device, you can stop whenever and wherever. And books don't require your active participation, at least if you're not reading them for school. There is no such thing as grinding, stagnation- only progress, only forward through the pages so long as your brain can comprehend the words. (Academia, with its insistence that you constantly be highlighting and taking notes, ruins the immersion and the fun of books. But that's beside the point.) And if you get a paper copy, or a low-powered e-ink device, so long as the sun is shining bright enough to read, you don't have to fear a power outage blinking your effort away in a... blink of the eye.

Games don't translate well into books (or movies either, now that I think about it), but there are a few that have tried anyway, most notably a handful of the Zelda games as Americanized manga. (And what with Sonic and Pikachu up on the big screen, it's only a matter of time before Ninty gets hungry for money and poor old Link gets shoved up there too.) And while this example I've found to be superior to playing the actual games, it's uncertain whether this is because of the method of storytelling actually being superior to how the game presented it or because the Zelda games that were manga-ized I just didn't like playing because of their aging mechanics. (Without the save states that an emulator affords, old games suck. Imagine not being able to save at all. this post was sponsored by RetroArch gang)

"But what about someone livestreaming the game? You get the best of all worlds!"

Do I really? Because then I often have to put up with some obnoxious person screaming into their microphone every few seconds in a pitiful attempt to be "funny". Or I'm just watching straight-up gameplay, and then I feel silly. I don't want to watch someone play the game. I want to play the game myself. I just don't want to be playing it forever.

I want to point a poorly-photoshopped gun at the game and yell, "Give me your story!"

But until developers get their heads out of their asses and stop making their players waste unnecessary time, we have wiki pages. And the wiki pages are a poor substitute for the actual experience.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander