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Longpost Fencing Academy
2012-04-21 21:30:21
edited 2012-04-21 21:30:21 in General
One foot in front of the other, every day.
I'll pretty much be dumping longer posts here as a form of control. Hopefully some will be interesting enough to inspire some good discussion.
Comments
I thought this was going to be a contest on who could write the most interesting and intelligent essay posts.
I am now disappointed.
^It's Alex, what did you expect?
Anyway Alex, sword me. sword me hard.
In-depth discussions on bladed melee weapons interspersed among homoerotic innuendo using bladed melee weapons as metaphors? :P
Actually, I think it's the opposite. A shafted object is an excellent tool, which is probably why evolution uses it commonly for insemination. Rather than phallic weapons being reflections of patriarchal psyche, I think the penis is a reflection of the most efficient tool shape that actually exists.
But didn't the penis exist before human tools?
(Wonder who's said that sentence before.)
Yes, but I believe it's a case of convergent function rather than direct influence. A penis isn't really much different from a stick; it's just a funny kind of human stick used for reproduction. It has length for efficiency and perhaps curvature to match the needs of its application within its appropriate context, essentially being a pathway of A to B. But isn't, say, a mace just a pathway of A to B for kinetic energy? Or a spoon a pathway of A to B for food? A tool by definition is a courier device for human influence, and the stick-like version has the most diverse universal application -- why is probably why evolution found it efficient in the first place.
A penis is not a sword, Alex.
^^ One is used for reproductive funtimes, the other is used for hurty funtimes, same/diff.
A thought suddenly came to my mind that Alex must have no girlfriend. I mean, if I was a girl, I'd stay away from him just to be on the safe side.
I thought Alex was gay... :P
Alex is blatantly swordsexual.
There's one Tropette I ship him with, though.
I think it's blatantly obvious I don't have a girlfriend. I mean, if I had one, do you think I'd spend ages on here typing excessively long posts?
Almost certainly.
There is at least one hentai manga about dickgirls having penis swordfights.
Or so I've heard...
>Implying Alex hasn't been trying since he got out of college.
They're probably Australian, too. Or Colombian.
I think you would use them as an excuse to avoid her.
Alex is whatever orientation fits the joke you're currently trying to make.
Alright, so I think it's actually time to make good the thread title and put down a wall of text.
An early retrospective on Skyward Sword's combat.
Skyward Sword's combat has been widely praised for bringing to the Wii what Red Steel advertised itself as doing (and failed to deliver) years ago, and true to the concept, it's probably the best and most natural use of swordsmanship to find motion controls. Since the introduction of the third dimension, combat in Zelda games has been pretty excellent all up, improving with every major instalment. This is probably why the combat in Twilight Princess is better than the combat in Skyward Sword -- practise. I think the development team for Skyward Sword was a bit dizzy on the novelty of its axis-based combat, which leaves it in a strange position; some of the strongest options available to an axis-based combat system weren't available, and some of the combat principles that defined previous Zelda games were gone. Following, I'm going to explore the weaknesses in Skyward Sword's combat, and the things that could be done to deepen the experience and make it more dynamic.
One of the things I didn't notice until near the end of the game is that Skyward Sword's combat is axis-based rather than direction-based. While both systems are very similar, a direction-based sword system usually recognises a series of different directional inputs for the angle of a cut, whereas an axis-based system combines both directions along the same axis and essentially counts them as the same thing. This was arguably taught to the player via the logs in the training hall, which could be cut from either entry point into an axis, and likewise the carnivorous flowers that become your first worthy opponents. Where this begins to get confusing is with the Bobokins, the game's mook of choice. If they're blocking to the right, you might think, "Oh, hey, I should strike from the left, because that's the longest distance from their block" -- you'd be wrong, as they'll undoubtedly block it due to the axis-based nature of most engagements. In that case, you'd have to strike on the vertical axis rather than the horizontal axis, despite the fact that your sword passes closer to their defense this way. While it makes systematic sense, it doesn't make narrative sense to such a degree that I was fooling myself for most of the game.
The other thing I found lacking in Skyward Sword's combat is its use (or disuse) of the principle of movement. Since Ocarina of Time, combat in Zelda games has usually been pretty active; lots of jumping around, rolling, backflips -- and certainly you can still do these things in Skyward Sword. Again, the flaw of movement's implementation here, at a guess, would be the developers' novelty at the new axis-based combat system. A layperson to swordsmanship sees a sword fight as a largely static affair of geometric conflict, where angles intersect linearly, defenses and attacks are separate and so on. Obviously, implementing every aspect of true swordsmanship is inappropriate for The Legend Of Zelda, but I think a few could stand to be added and the way movement is handled is one of them. See, most engagements have an enemy move up to you and, if they don't attack, they'll wait in ready just beyond your nose in some kind of telegraphed blocking position. It's not very dynamic, and doesn't well represent the intensity of an actual sword fight. Observation of one's adversary is a short process, after which combat becomes a moving whirl of steel. In Skyward Sword, however, enemies will wait, take a stance and then attack with a heavily telegraphed animation. There's a kind of linearity and silver-bullet-counter mentality to the combat design that I think makes it less exciting than the combat in previous 3D Zelda titles. One thing that could be done is detaching strikes from Link's movement. To be fair, in all Zelda games, Link has had to remain static while attacking, but it could be very interesting in terms of combat design if he could move as he made cuts. If nothing else, this would contribute in a big way to give combat a sense of greater movement.
So those would be the major things that should be altered to my mind if Nintendo wanted to continue using the same general idea for combat in future Zelda games. But along with changing the axis-based combat to direction-based combat and expanding the sense of movement and intensity of combat, there's one other change I think would go well: weapons collision. This isn't exactly new to Zelda titles; some of the 2D titles included this concept in a very simple form and it was interesting because of what it brought to even those simple battles. The short version is that one could not attack the same way they could attack a regular undefended enemy, but instead had to try to angle themselves and their attack so collision was made with the body of the enemy rather than being intercepted by their weapon. It can be done better in this context, though, and I think here's how:
This kind of single-time counter system with sword parries would lend not only combat depth but, I think, a new level of narrative satisfaction. After all, there's just something traditional about two attacks meeting at the same time, isn't there? It's often lost in the world of modern fight choreography and video games that have a linear separation between attacking and defending, but the idea of both combatants being the active party is an exciting one.
Skyward Sword was a successful foray into the world of compass-based sword combat, but it also lost the sense of immediacy and movement from previous Zelda games and could stand to be better in its own right. The solutions to my mind are pretty simple; direction-based moreso than axis-based, a greater sense of movement and a simple counter and parry system that allows both combatants in any fight to act as the aggressive party at any moment.
I would like it if Link could defend with his sword, really.
He kinda can in some situations, but it's not reliable enough that I'd call it an actual mechanic.
^^ Yeah. It would be realistic, but more importantly, it's a narrative element from all those traditional audio-visual versions of things Link is drawn from -- King Arthur, Robin Hood, Peter Pan and so on.
Wait a minute...made of swords...MadassAlex is Emiya Shirou!
I was thinking of fantasy media. Big surprise and all that swords swords swords swords.
The thing is, I got around to thinking about the differences in fantasy media between Europe and the USA, and noticed that Europe is more responsible for low fantasy, historical and hybrid works. US fantasy literature makes up the great bulk of stereotypical high fantasy, and I think that's very interesting if you take these two factors into account:
Citizens of the USA can look into their own ethnic backgrounds and identify on that basis, but that's inherently divisive. Not necessarily in an adversarial way, but if each US citizen interested in their own ethnic history looks into the past about seven hundred years, they'll end up looking from the perspective of many warring kingdoms rather than a singular, collective culture.
This leads me to think that stereotypical high fantasy has become a way for the USA to identify with a past they never had on a collective basis. I suspect the overblown magic and related content comes from the same sense of hyperbole that was responsible for superheroes. If you ask me, it all fits together very neatly.
For comparison's sake, Australia is likewise a colonial nation and even younger than the USA. All the same, we have a better grasp on our cultural heritage (insofar as it applies to the white majority) -- Anglo-Celtic. Amongst white people interested in the past, Celtic culture and its related pursuits is very, very popular. Being of some Celtic ethnicity is considered very "Australian" -- no surprise, considering that the bulk of white settlers were Irish convicts. This unwritten social cohesion might be responsible for Australia's near complete lack of fantasy literature, film or games,a lthough we're not big in any of those industries to begin with.
My thoughts on this aren't even nearly complete yet, but it's something I've been considering. Thoughts?
Mostly, I agree.
I will say, though, that a lot of superheroes were built off of pulp novels which trace back to penny dreadfuls like The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu and A String of Pearls.
Rule of spectacle expansion and all that.
How superhero comics came into being is peripheral, I think -- the fact of the matter is that they existed before and during the period when the USA was creating its own fantasy, which no doubt was a large influence on the level of spectacle expected and desired.
I think it should also be explained that Americans and British are pretty much the two defining factors of modern fantasy writing.
There's Tolkien and Moorcock, sure, but before that?
Howard, Lovecraft, Leiber, all of which Moorcock and Tolkien were fans of and generally provide the flipside of derivation from those who wank to Tolkien's worldbuilding.
The American writers (and Moorcock) were more concerned with much more simple (which is a different word from worse) stories, more focused on the characters and how awesome they were.
Of course I don't find Tolkien's style of writing particularly British (though it does reveal some classism and other highly british stuff) so much as a quirk of Tolkien.
One of the interesting things about that quintuplet is that all of wrote what would be considered today to be "low fantasy", where magic existed mostly on the fringes and wasn't necessarily well-understood, even by its practitioners. In some cases -- such as in Lovecraft's -- magic and sorcery was outright evil. On that note, though, it's interesting how science is a path to oblivion and magic is evil when it comes to Lovecraft, but that's neither here nor there.
With that in mind, I'm almost entirely convinced that it was the superhero element of American psyche that provided the seeds for what we now know to be high fantasy. The superhero concept takes what would usually be magic powers and makes them into pulp science fiction, where most of the superheroes have a great understanding of the tools at their disposal -- and if they don't, someone else does. In that respect, magic in high fantasy can be considered an enlightenment element rather than a romantic element. Science is what harnesses greater things; magic is, by definition, paranormal, supernatural and unknowable. In the real world, something can only ever be magic until we know how it works, and considering that we're confident of our ability to work out everything eventually, nothing is magic.
Makes sense. For bonus points, consider why superheroes developed in the US (and why they're more popular here than anywhere else).