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Comments
I have a feeling most of the people here have already played Iji.
Hm. Must've slipped my attention.
I was linked to the TVT article a couple of times a while ago. IIRC, Iji is apparently a willing (or is she?) subject of her father's medical experiments in cybernetics, and one day Earth is invaded by Martians and she has to fight them all off with her arm cannon or something.
But she has to kill as few Martians as possible, does she? Interesting...
While it's debatable from here to the moon whether killing or awful-thing-X-or-Y is worse morally, some of the "good" mission endings make you complicit in some pretty horrible stuff in order to avoid bloodshed. Such as torture, slavery and potentially rape. I get that the game is trying to relay a moral point, but that gets lost in the noise when, of all the wrong things you can do, killing is the most merciful, direct and honest.
So if you were linked to the TVT article I'm gonna leave the explaining to TVT, but... your memories got a little fuzzy.
*gasp* You dare to suggest that you can explain a videogame better than the amazing website TV Tropes?! Well then, let's see you try.
Huh? I said, if you were already linked to TVT, then I'll just refer you back to it. (I know you're joking BTW)
Oh, sorry. I thought you meant you were going to blame the TVT article for my horrible recollection of what little I know about the game...
Iji is a metroidvania with an extensive weapon-customization system wherein the only way to get the good ending is to not kill anything.
Because that's good game design.
>While it's debatable from here to the moon whether killing or awful-thing-X-or-Y is worse morally, some of the "good" mission endings make you complicit in some pretty horrible stuff in order to avoid bloodshed. Such as torture, slavery and potentially rape. I get that the game is trying to relay a moral point, but that gets lost in the noise when, of all the wrong things you can do, killing is the most merciful, direct and honest.
...what exactly is the moral point? Because I haven't seen any attempt to deliver one, and the narrative is so poorly told that I'm honestly not seeing what the 'non-lethal' options lead to.
And Jesus Christ, rape? Really?
Vidya!
Fuschlatz: I don't think they're Martians, but that's not too far off. Avoiding killing them is more of an optional thing than something you "have" to do though.
Super Lazuli: Hey, iirc you still get the pacifist ending if you kill exactly one enemy!
The idea is that the "good ending" can only be reached by having a low chaos rating, which comes from avoiding lethal options in missions and general gameplay. It's a really noble idea, because it's an attempt to convey an idea through the actual game mechanics rather than in cutscenes alone. The execution (haha) isn't there, though, especially given that you can get a low chaos rating by avoiding detection while slaughtering a whole lot of people.
Spoiler tagged, just in case you or someone else cares:
Everything to to with the maybe-rape and its mission reads like a diatribe against female sexual agency. That's partially sensible given the time frame that the game represents, but the combination of factors goes beyond the game, to my interpretation. Ultimately, you're supposed to be on board with this as a player, and once the character is set up as a villain (albeit a minor one), the game lets loose with gendered and sexual criticism against her.
So I was pretty displeased with the game's moral heavy-handedness given what it considers "good" options.
^That's pretty disgusting, I regret buying Dishonored now.
>The idea is that the "good ending" can only be reached by having a low chaos rating, which comes from avoiding lethal options in missions and general gameplay. It's a really noble idea, because it's an attempt to convey an idea through the actual game mechanics rather than in cutscenes alone.
Not to mention either way, you're solving your problems with violence, sometimes even abhorrent systemic violence that most people acknowledge as abhorrent such as slavery.
You know come to think of it, it'd be interesting if a game tried to play that up, how by keeping your hands clean you're actually causing more damage and hurting more people, albeit indirectly but Dishonored plays itself so straight. The not-rebel alliance is good, the bad guys are evil. Even the guards who should just be dudes doing their job are comically evil. At least when the stormtroopers in Star Wars talked it was about cars and not how much they enjoyed kicking baby kittens.
It's a shame because there's actually a really solid core mechanic but there's no narrative to drive me forward.
It's weird but I can forgive a lot of gaming problems when a narrative is strong enough (see Persona 2 or Virtue's Last Reward) but to me it feels like without some context or proper stylistic framing gameplay has trouble standing on its own. They're functional games but not something that really fires me up.
And it's not like the upcoming G.I. Joe movie. These things cost $40 if you don't have Gamefly.
I think the one "good" option in Dishonored that I found palatable was branding that guy as a heretic and stripping him of his power and effectively having him exiled. The rest are all... "yeah this is way worse than just killing the dude"
LPing is hard.
Just bother to post-process out the least interesting of your failures, travel time, and random encounters and it'll be at least watchable. Which is more than a lot of LP's can say.
I usually feel the opposite way. Truly interesting and engrossing gameplay can allow me to forgive a lot of narrative flaws, because I feel as though great characters and stories coupled with mediocre gameplay may as well be a book, film, TV series or what-have-you. Although the obvious best case is a game excelling in both areas.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown wasn't exactly great shakes when it came to characters or story, but it had an interesting narrative structure. The game is highly freeform, but with a linear set of story events that depends upon the player fulfilling tasks in gameplay rather than moving a character to a physical area or whatnot. Your story objective might be to capture an alien organism, for instance, and the story only progresses once you achieve that -- however many missions it takes, and randomised events continue to take place in the interim. That kind of structure has the potential to not only tell a great story with the advantage of narrative linearity, but to include the kind of freestyle, mechanical narrative that games like Mount & Blade excel at, by constructing minor stories and providing tension just through their gameplay.
One thing worth noting in Dishonored is that IIRC, it never says "good" or "evil." Rather, it goes with "order" and "chaos." IMO, Order is actually the evil option a lot of the time. But I haven't finished the game, so Idunno if that remains true.
What "gaming problems" were you referring to in Virtue's Last Reward. No spoilers, please. I am buying it tomorrow.
Mostly that it's a visual novel with rather opaque and random puzzles where you have to go 'how the fuck was I supposed to figure that out?'
I feel like 999 was actually enhanced by its initially out-of-place-looking gameplay because of certain revelations about what was actually going on.
Dunno if that will still apply in VLR, since I haven't played it yet.
I was SUPPOSED to get it today. But amazon fucked up, so I have to wait for tomorrow.
^^VLR has a similar thing, but with a completely different gameplay mechanic.
Basically there's no way this couldn't have been a visual novel.
I'm totally okay with that.
Huh, now I'm thinking about the mechanics if VLR was an RPG ala Persona. With the FLOW system and everything. That might be cool actually.
Am I doing it right?
I was originally going for 0 coins, but it's actually impossible to beat the game with less than 300 coins, as beating the final boss gives you 300 coins directly.
Just for the record (because I couldn't respond earlier), I mentioned Iji as an example of a game where pacifist-ending-as-best-ending does not feel forced, not fitting or something like that. I'm not gonna say anything about game design, I'm not competent enough in this area.
Wow, the ending of Dishonored should have a written apology about running out of their cinematics budget.
Also I got Low Chaos despite fucking murdering everyone I could. It actually makes me think the bad ending is harder to get.