One common criticism of Braid is that its story, infamously delivered through enigmatic and overwritten text, is largely independent of the gameplay. The ending is well done, they argue, but there are too few moments with such an effective synthesis.
I think that’s the wrong approach here. In my eyes, Braid doesn’t attempt to integrate a narrative into the gameplay; rather, it integrates the gameplay into a narrative, subverting the expectation that interactivity will be its primary language. In fact, I’d say that Braid evokes the experience of reading more than playing.
How is that? The most common way to progress through a game is to experiment. Are there any hidden goodies on this level? Let’s explore. What’s this boss’s weakness? Try the available weapons and see what works. Can I gather enough momentum to reach that ledge? Only one way to find out.
Braid, though, doesn’t tend to reward experimentation. Because of the time-bending mechanics, it’s difficult to get feedback from your mistakes and refine your solutions. Indeed, it rarely makes sense to “almost” solve a puzzle; they’re so precisely constructed that coming close can be as useless as heading down the wrong path entirely.
So instead of solving Braid’s puzzles by experimenting, I solved them by thinking: staring through the screen like it was a Magic Eye, absentmindedly tapping Shift, struggling to intuit Jonathan Blow’s intentions. To anyone watching there was little indication I was doing anything at all, let alone “playing” — but after I had absorbed everything, I could usually complete the puzzle in one fell swoop, with minimal frustration.
That is also, in effect, how I read. Interpreting literature is not a fundamentally experimental process. I don’t break off halfway through a paragraph to try out my dozen half-baked theories; I try to hold everything in my head at once and deduce meaning from the whole. It’s part reading comprehension and part sitting around allowing ideas to percolate.
As I tried to unravel Braid’s interstitial text I realized that solving the puzzles and understanding the text required very similar approaches. Their concealed machinations and thematic ambiguities are teased out using the same mental processes, and are part of the same overarching search for meaning. In a way, I was “reading” everything in the game. It’s not the unification of narrative and gameplay that we’ve come to expect, but it’s a refreshing and effective one.
Last night I listened to the conclusion of Wizards of the Coast’s D&D podcast series. After an arduous battle, our heroes Acquisitions Incorporated defeated the evil necromancer and surveyed the treasure still remaining in the half-defiled crypt. Wil Wheaton, through his character Aeofel:
We are totally not taking that treasure. This guy came here from Calarel. Listen, I know this might cost me my job, […] but this guy was sent here from Calarel to defile this tomb and steal from these people who gave their lives to defend this tower and turn back the goblins and bring light to the land. And to steal treasure from this tomb would be an affront to all of the gods. […] That would be a Lawful Good thing to do: close the tomb and seal it and not take anything…
As I listened to Wil’s surprisingly impassioned speech, and the protestations of the other party members, a thought popped into my head: role-playing is when you make poor gameplay decisions on purpose.
That’s not an all-inclusive definition — role-playing is also when Wil swears his Oaths of Enmity in an imaginary language, for example — but I think it’s a fair assessment of its outward manifestation, especially in video games.
When I wrote about Chrono Trigger last year, I mentioned that I tend to include Marle and Lucca in my party even when they weren’t the best options. Marle in particular doesn’t fit my playing style; I wanted to use her slot for a healer, but both Frog and Robo have more efficient spells that can restore the entire party at once.
Having Marle in my party didn’t help me win; in fact, it often made things more difficult. I brought her along based on something that, for gameplay, is entirely meaningless: Crono would have done it. That’s video game role-playing. (Incidentally, this time through I’ve been using Frog instead and the game seems much easier.)
It’s not just RPGs where I’ve exhibited this sort of counterproductive behavior. In the Civilization games, I insist on picking peaceful leaders and building a strong cultural foundation (libraries, universities, Wonders of the World) instead of doing anything practical (creating an army to ward off an impending invasion). I’ve never once come close to a military victory, except on the wimpiest difficulties. Needless to say, I’ve always been terrible at Civilization, though the Culture mechanic introduced in Civ III means that I’m not as hapless as I once was.
Looking further back, it seems I’ve been playing this way my entire life. I used to hold back my bloodied Footmen in WarCraft II so that they didn’t die in battle, though they were faceless, uesless, and easily replaceable. I’d routinely “call” Saria in Ocarina of Time when she had nothing new to say, because she told Link he could talk to her anytime. I’d pay money for a room at the inn in each new Morrowind town because staying at the Fighter’s Guild before meeting everyone seemed an abuse of their hospitality.
Perhaps a more charitable way of framing my definition is that role-playing reflects an interest in story participation in addition to gameplay-defined victory. But from the perspective of the latter, my experience has been that it’s often comically ineffectual.
Music carries with it immense power. Consider the desperation in “Dido’s Lament,” with which Purcell etches his heroine’s name into history through sheer force of will. Or consider the gravitas of “The Imperial March,” Darth Vader’s leitmotif from the Star Wars films: fear and respect in nine notes. Or, if you like, consider music theorist Nigel Tufnel’s infamous demonstration that simply playing classical music in the key of D minor is enough to make people weep.
There are few video game themes with such capacity, of course, and fewer still that achieved widespread popularity and cultural cachet. One in particular stands out, however — an emblem of the medium’s potential for musical expression, and a beacon to light the way towards its realization of that potential.
I am speaking, of course, of the Pony Friends theme.
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For all its adulations, there is surprisingly little to unpack here. The theme is thoroughly diatonic, excepting a brief implication of minor subdominant harmony in the penulimate bar. It is based almost entirely on I, IV, and V chords in C major — note the determined avoidance of Tufnel’s melancholy key — and has no rhythmic interest to speak of. And yet its appeal is immediately obvious upon first listen; its power lies in its simplicity. It is, perhaps, the perfect melody.
Here is another statement of the theme:
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Here the composer begins to play with expectations. The accompaniment is teasingly familiar — indeed, it maintains the key in addition to the harmonic language — but the melody is delayed by nearly forty seconds. The newly added percussion only heightens our suspense, and our eventual arrival at the melody is made all the more satisfying by the anticipation.
And finally, we have this:
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This is certainly the cruelest arrangement of the Pony Friends theme, if it can even be called that. The now-familiar harmony returns once again with its C major tonic. However, the theme itself has been wantonly excised. A new melody takes its place, but it is hardly adequate; it lacks the placidity and purity of its predecessor. I suspect there may even be a secret modulation to D minor somewhere, though I could find none in my analysis. This is a betrayal, pure and simple.
So it is that a simple melody can come to define a game even through its absence — and perhaps reflect an entire medium’s aspirations in the process. Would that all game music was at this level.
In my first Cruise Elroy post I argued that the real legacy of Super Smash Bros. Brawl is its curatorial treatment of Nintendo’s history. It’s high time we peeked inside that museum, and where better to start than with the music?
Here’s the beginning of the Ocarina of Time medley, arranged especially for Brawl:
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The two main pieces excerpted here are, of course, “Zelda’s Lullaby” and “Song of Storms,” but right now I want to talk about this little transitory section:
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There are actually references to three additional Ocarina songs embedded in this ten-second sample. Let’s dig them out.
First is the coda from “Minuet of Forest”:
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Compare 0:08 in “Minuet” with the beginning of the transition section above; the melody from measures 5-6 is played twice. You may notice that the second instance is higher in pitch than the first; this is what music theorists call a sequence.
The second piece is “Bolero of Fire”:
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Compare 0:05 in the transition above to the opening motive in “Bolero.” The context is different and the specific intervals have changed; however, the piece is still identifiable because it maintains the same melodic contour and is similarly sequential.
The third reference involves that quick piano snippet at 0:09 — t’s a passing allusion to the piano ostinato in the Ocarina boss battle theme:
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The medley ups the tempo significantly, but the allusion is unmistakable — both feature the same chromatic descent, in the same range, on the same instrument.
More to come on Brawl music as I discover more of its nooks and crannies. (If you’d like to read more about Ocarina of Time music, head into the archives!)
Things have been slow around here recently; here are a few quick updates:
- The Vintage Game Club recently started playing Chrono Trigger, and the discussion threads are as lively as they’ve ever been. If you’re interested in playing with us, or even just reading along, now is a great time to join. For my part, I’m still (slowly) working on the Chrono Trigger DS playthrough I started in December and may wade into the discussion towards the end.
- If, for some reason, you want to hear more of my thoughts on Mother 3’s music, head over to Square Enix Music Online — I’ve written reviews for its two soundtrack albums, Mother 3i and Mother 3+. (The short version: definitely check out the former, but pass on the latter unless you’re a big Mother series fan.) Both albums are available from the US iTunes Store should they pique your interest.
- I have a couple of music posts in the works, but I’ve been lax about finishing them. (I blame Daylight Savings.) I’m bored by navel-gazing about my playing habits, though, so I hope to have something new up this week. It may even involve Ocarina of Time, of all games. Stay tuned.
- If you’re at GDC this week, I highly recommend Dan Teasdale’s speech “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band.” I had a chance to hear him rehearse it last week and there’s a lot of fascinating stuff in there. I understand he’s speaking early Friday morning, which is unfortunate, but I think it’s worth waking up for.
- Last but not least, Cruise Elroy turned one year old last Thursday. Thanks for reading!
As I wrote last month, the way I approach games is shifting; I’m more inclined to focus on the things they do well than to dwell on their faults. I recently discovered a corollary: when something does get on my nerves, I’m much quicker to write the game off.
Case in point: After making some decent progress in Beyond Good & Evil I happened upon a tricky stealth puzzle in one of the dungeons. For the first time there was no option to fight — failure meant instant death from a mounted security gun. I died four or five times and then quit the game, exasperated. I haven’t been back.
My issue wasn’t with the difficulty. I had happily played through other difficult parts of the game already, and had much more time on them than at the security gun puzzle. There wasn’t an excessive punishment for failure, either; you lost some health and were kicked back to the entrance to the room. The problem was that the instant deaths were not fun, and once the game stopped being fun I found I had little patience for it to pick back up.
It looks obvious enough when written down, but that’s a much different approach than I’m used to. There are plenty of games that start slow or lag somewhere in the middle, and I’ve always been willing to wait for “the good part.” Hell, there were whole areas of Grim Fandango that I didn’t enjoy playing, but I just kept GameFAQs open in another window and plodded on through. Now, upon encountering the first such area in Beyond Good & Evil, I’ve bailed.
While I’m intrigued by the change, I hope that my new approach isn’t permanent. I’d like to finish Beyond Good & Evil, and I’m interested in other games that seem like they’d require more patience (such as the Persona series). For now I’ll just see if I can recalibrate my threshold for irritation.
While reading about Beyond Good & Evil, I was struck by this passage in designer Michel Ancel’s Wikipedia page:
Ancel aims for a high degree of freedom in his games. He is critical of games that claim to offer freedom, but present limits or invisible boundaries where players do not expect them.
I’m not sure how laudable a goal that is — constraints are, in my opinion, a important part of design — but if Ancel was aiming for freedom, Beyond Good & Evil falls well short of the mark.
A pile of explosives sits on a mine cart in Black Isle; the tracks beneath it extend for about six yards and end in front of a rickety wall. The Pedestrian District is a thinly disguised path, with its later segments cordoned off by guards and lasers. The upgrades from Mammago Garage ensure that each part of the game world is encountered serially. In short, there are limits and invisible boundaries everywhere you turn in Beyond Good & Evil; Morrowind it is not.
I don’t see player freedom as the goal here, though — unsourced Wikipedia quotations notwithstanding — nor do I see its absence as a fault. Many of my favorite games are entirely linear, some even more so than this one. What really stands out about Beyond Good & Evil is its compactness. There are hidden treasures, side dungeons, minigames, and all the other trappings of a typical adventure title here, but they’re all practically on top of each other.
I’ve complained in the past about game worlds, such as Twilight Princess’s Hyrule or No More Heroes’s Santa Destroy, which are largely unremarkable areas punctuated with interesting spots. Beyond Good & Evil’s Hillys, by contrast, makes the most of the space it offers, offering more entertainment per virtual square mile than any other overworld I can think of. (In this light, Jade’s animal photography is a real master stroke; every vista might contain a flock of birds, every inlet a school of fish.)
The emotional size of the game is similarly cozy. Emerging from the lighthouse at the beginning feels very much like emerging from Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time, or the prison sewers in Oblivion: Now the adventure begins! The world is your oyster! But the game doesn’t fulfill its implicit promise; the adrenaline rush of possibility is immediately subverted by the hovercraft getting towed to the neighborhood shop. Indeed, excepting the secretive members of IRIS, Jade and Pey’j are on a first-name basis with almost every NPC I’ve encountered. Hillys is, literally and figuratively, a small world.
Frankly, I find this compactness refreshing. There’s very little here that could be called filler; I can scratch my adventuring itch without the enormous time investment these games normally require.
More thoughts on Beyond Good & Evil when I finish the game.
I haven’t been into video games much lately. The last game I finished was Mother 3 back in November; I then spent three months writing about it in minute detail and barely played anything else. I’d spent too much time thinking about games recently and needed to recalibrate, as it were.
Last night I dove back in with Beyond Good & Evil, the most recent Vintage Game Club selection. I’m actually quite late to the party — most everyone else is done, or nearly so — but I’m assured that the game is short and hope to finish it in a week or two. And though I don’t yet have a solid first impression to give you, I can say that I feel uncommonly positive about it.
Here are some comments culled from the VGC forum about the first hour or so of BG&E:
“crimsonclone”:
[...] when driving the hovercraft why does the camera feel this need to correct itself to reorient behind the hovercraft? If I wanted to look behind the hovercraft I would do that, instead driving the hovercraft feels like a constant tug of war as the mouse goes one way and the game tries to compensate by going the other. The end result is a constant jitter and an unintuitive mess.
“Kimari”:
[...] apparently the game designers thought that it would be alright if the player could only save through a console. Auto-saving? Ha! Who would want something like that? Well, me. I want to quit whenever I feel like it, I don’t want to hunt down a “console” so I can finally quit without loosing all my progress.
“sparky”:
I’ll admit I don’t much care for the combat in this game generally, and I particularly don’t care for some episodes of it in this dungeon. The long gallery containing the encounter with the jellies feels like the developers ran out of things to do and so decided to have Jade whack some glowing thingies with a stick.
“sharc”:
right off the bat we have a detached view to show the gate opening after we unlock it, with a reaction shot from our hero. for what, exactly? is jade easily amazed by doors? if it’s necessary here to show that she’s excited, nervous, apprehensive or whatever else then it’s because less obtrusive opportunities were missed.
I don’t think the members I singled out are being nitpicky — overall the responses were quite positive, and in hindsight these all seem like fair criticisms. However, I’m struck by the fact that not one of them actually occurred to me while I was playing. Camera issues and archaic save points? Didn’t even register. Repetitive combat? I quite enjoyed it. Lame cutscenes? They seemed all right; maybe I just zoned out.
What’s the deal here? Has my mini-vacation from games blunted my critical faculty, rendering me oblivious to their faults? Or have I returned from my hiatus a less cynical player, eager to focus on the positive?
I like to think it’s the latter, of course. Either way, though. I find myself approaching Beyond Good & Evil a bit differently than usual — glossing over defects while highlighting success and innovation. I’ll be interested to see how this more charitable approach to criticism turns out.
The increased audio fidelity of 16-bit consoles brought several significant changes to video games, but perhaps the most important was that instruments could be readily identified. Instead of the melody being assigned to a triangle wave, for example, it could be assigned to a trumpet.
This change, I would argue, brought about a shift in musical thinking. Before the 16-bit era, game composers thought like programmers (“How can I arrange this so that the countermelody will sound all right?”); with the ability to mimic real instruments, they thought more like composers (“Which instrument do I want for this part?”). The upshot was that virtual instrument parts began to more closely resemble real ones; when the audio actually sounds like a trumpet, it feels natural to compose a trumpet-like part.
The bass parts in 16-bit Sonic games helped lead the way here, featuring smooth melodic lines and memorable hooks. They’re some of the earliest video game bass parts that sound like they could be from real pop songs.
Let’s look at some examples. Here’s the bass from the Mystic Cave Zone theme, from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (starts at 0:02):
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I’m leading off with an unusually prominent part here; if you asked ten Sonic 2 fans to sing this song, I’d bet that eight of them would pick the bass. There’s simply not much else of interest here, except for the “Thunder and Blazes”-like section that shows up at 0:20.
Here’s the Emerald Hill Zone theme, also from Sonic 2 (starts at 0:03):
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This bassline picks up on a simple rhythmic motive from one part of the melody and repeats it — even as the rhythm it’s imitating changes. While this part doesn’t overpower the piece in the same way as Mystic Cave’s, it’s still easily noticed thanks to the riffs played in the higher octave.
Here’s the Marble Garden Zone Act 2 theme in Sonic the Hedgehog 3:
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As with Mystic Cave, the bass hook is far and away the most memorable part here. In fact, the large gaps in the melody give the impression that the piece was written around the bass part, so as to highlight it further.
Here’s the Mushroom Hill Zone Act 1 theme from Sonic & Knuckles (starts at 0:03):
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This piece similarly emphasizes the bass by featuring it during breaks in the melody. Also, did you notice the muted attack in the first measure? It’s small, but performance quirks are another way that virtual parts are made to sound more like real ones.
Finally, here’s the Spring Yard Zone bass part in Sonic 1 (starts at 0:02):
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This is a strange piece any way you look at it, but I think the bass is particularly interesting. It provides a rhythmic anchor but goes out of its way to avoid resolving the melodic and harmonic ambiguity. Its erratic motion keeps the listener off guard until the more consonant B section at 0:21.
This post contains a Mother 3 plot spoiler, believe it or not.
With a good handle on the functional aspects of Mother 3’s music, let’s move into more nebulous territory: where some of these tunes come from.
As it turns out, the game is chock full of winking musical references. Some are quite obvious; others are tenuous and quite possibly imagined. Let’s check out a few of them.
One of the earliest enemies in the game, Mr. Batty, has a battle theme called “Mr. Batty Twist”:
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This is an easy one. That chromatic ostinato is the characteristic feature of the old Batman theme, composed by Neal Hefti. Here’s a clip:
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Amusingly, “Mr. Batty Twist” is more harmonically complex than the song it alludes to.
Here’s one of the more unusual battle themes, “Etude for Ghosts”:
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It’s strange having a piano as a backdrop for a fight among all of these hard-rocking pieces, isn’t it? While I can’t peg this to a particular extant piece, I’d put my money on a Beethoven or Chopin influence here. [Update: Trilby, in the comments, suggests Rachmaninov or Shostakovich.] [Further update: I've reviewed everyone's suggestions for what this piece might be, and I think we have a winner: it appears to be based on the third movement of Piano Concerto No. 2 by Saint-Saëns. Thanks, anonymous emailer!]
In fact, Mother 3 contains several references to Western classical music (I use “classical” in the broad record-store definition). “Family Matters: 2nd Movement,” a boss battle theme, is an ambitious medley: It co-opts the famous opening to Beethoven’s 5th, interpolates some of “Etude for Ghosts,” and wraps things up with a bit of Mozart’s 40th. [Update: As some commenters have pointed out, there is also a quote from the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, and a very brief excerpt of Beethoven's 6th. Thanks, everyone!]
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If you thought that was odd, “Ode to Ancestors: 8th Movement” takes the classical medley concept and does it one better. This piece includes parts of Beethoven’s 5th, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah, and “Spring” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
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It’s such an absurd juxtaposition that I can’t help but laugh at it every time I listen.
“Leder’s Gymnopedie,” meanwhile, is not a pastiche — rather, it’s an excerpt of the lovely Gymnopédie No. 1 by Erik Satie:
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In addition to popular classical motifs and kitschy TV themes, Mother 3 also makes musical references to other video games. This is especially true for songs related to Porky — who, as a spoiled brat in a former life, was presumably a big gamer.
“Blip-Blip High Score,” the background music for Porky’s arcade, is mostly a collage of beeps and bloops. If you listen closely to the left channel, though, you’ll hear the infamous descending riff from Space Invaders:
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Here’s a reference that I may be imagining, but which I’ll propose nonetheless. “Natural Killer Cyborg,” the boss battle theme for Porky’s eponymous robot, has a particular guitar riff that kicks in at about twelve seconds:
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Does it ring a bell for you? It’s very similar, harmonically and rhythmically, to the Dr. Wily Stage 1 theme from Mega Man 2:
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That’s a bit of a stretch, of course, and the reference may not have been intentional — but I like to think it was.
Finally, here’s “Porky’s Porkies,” a chiptune-style battle theme:
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This piece takes the Pigmask Army leitmotif, which appears dozens of times throughout the game, and gives it the old-school 8-bit treatment. Listen to that vibrato!
I haven’t played many GBA games, but I suspect that very few pull a trick like this. The sound capabilities of the machine are limited; a retro low-fidelity aesthetic could be mistaken for a failed attempt at verisimilitude.
More on music in Mother 3 to come. For now, though, I’m planning to dive into Beyond Good & Evil with the Vintage Game Club.
