Which is a mouthful of a title, but bear with me.

I bought this game on release out of a quite naturally-placed loyalty to Penny Arcade. It’s my opinion, and I can say this with absolute sincerity, that PA makes some of the most intelligent, insightful commentary on games right now, more so than many academics that I read. Plus, they can say “shitballs” while they’re doing it. Good times all around.

That said, PAA:OtRSPoD:Ep1* was one of the casualties of last year’s academic crunch, and I didn’t get around to it until this past weekend. Which is a blessing, really, since I can now move directly into Episode 2. I thoroughly enjoyed this game – it’s not perfect, and every now and then it’s a bit glitchy, but it’s rare that a game actually makes me laugh. Challenge is easy, adrenaline even easier. Honest, dialogue-centric fun? It’s been a long time since I’ve been anxious to see a cut scene or followed every dialogue path without thinking, “Hell, this better be worth it.” It’s been an even longer time since a punchline in a game has made me laugh. For the humor alone, it’s worth it.

And it’s not simple humor, some to think of it. There’s a great deal of literary allusion, not to titles or characters but to worlds, themes, and styles. Much of this comes from the overblown “dark apathy” of H.P.Lovecraft, the grand, stylized epics of Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard, or the gleeful anachronisms of steam-punk – too often referenced without irony by thousands of hack-imitators, imitated in turn by too many game writers. Yes, you can fight the great evil that threatens us all – but do it in a world with animated trashcans, a hobo king that fights with a sack full of other hobos, the Silent Pope of the mimes, urinologists, singing garbage men, exploding clowns, devious barber shop quartets, a boardwalk full of highly-inappropriate carnival games, and that infamous juicing robot, the FF-2000. Much like Penny Arcade itself, this is style writ large. Much of the world is described in Tycho’s voice: self-aware, overwrought, desperately serious, an homage and a satire on all those pulp- or pop-culture artifacts that we love in spite of ourselves, not to mention a perfect foil for the lowbrow, puerile, aggressive, and often surprisingly innocent Gabe. It’s a clever stylistic pairing, and one that hits the perfect tone for fans of the comic.

I’ll admit too that I’m a sucker for the traditional, turn-based RPG combat. Give me a line of my guys, a line of bad guys, and some semblance of weapon-upgrading or attack strategy and I’m happy -  the setting is hardwired in from my youthful obsession with the canon of golden-age RPGs. With the current crop (I’m looking at you, Eternal Sonata), the problem is always story. As a player and a narratologist, I play to find out what happens next, and the banal, hopelessly juvenile offerings of this generation of consoles has me turning to other genres for my narrative fix – even to the dreaded Console First Person Shooter, one of my least favorites. And yet Bioshock and Dead Space are in my current XBOX 360 rotation**. I miss deep, intelligent, thoughtful stories in RPGs; I’ve grown out of many of the games I used to play, and the ones that still seem worthwhile are harder to play because I expect more from both game design and technology than we had in the mid-nineties. Penny-Arcade Adventures is by no means deep or thoughtful in the traditional sense, but it is intelligent. It is absolutely absurd, and revels in its absurdity. And it’s strikingly well-crafted as well, from a design standpoint – small technical glitches aside. With writing this good, I’m not going to quibble about a few path-finding issues.

I’ll also say that there’s a certain attraction for me in short, 3-5 hour games, things that can be finished in a weekend or an afternoon. Fallout 3 has been on my list of games I’m playing for a long time now, and I’m nowhere close to finishing it. In fact, I’ll often turn to something else, knowing that I only have an hour or two in which to play, and not wanting to get so deep into something that it’s difficult to turn off. I’m also struggling with playing a long experience in such short chunks, like reading half a chapter at a time. I look forward to PAA: Episode 2 because I know I can start and finish it this coming Saturday, if I so choose, and that the time will be well-spent. I’m certainly of the generation that likes both guarantees and (relatively) instant-gratification – don’t get me started on MMO reward systems – but it’s a good thing in this case.

One last thing: the classic adventure game, which Penny Arcade Adventures certainly draws from, can be funny but runs the risk of also being frustratingly arbitrary, particularly when it comes to puzzles or “riddles”. The team at Hothead Games has walked a very fine line here: the game is easy to follow, not difficult to finish but still engaging, and hilarious in the vein of the best Penny-Arcade comics – but never random. Everything ties togther in a way that makes contextual sense, and this isn’t an easy world to make sense of. Funny, absurdist, and logical. Well done, gentlemen.

In other words – man, fuck these giant evil robots. *cracks knuckles* Let’s go make some friends.

*Doesn’t that look great as an acronym?

**Why I didn’t just buy these on PC? Call it a dependence on GameStop and their wonderful 3 for 2 sales. Hopefully my shiny new Steam account will help with that.

In honor of Bill Kaulitz (who looks, terrifyingly, like a tweenage Square Enix hero come to life – this is where Guitar Hero has brought us!), I’ve returned to one of my favorite games that shouldn’t work.

Someday I’ll have to look up what really happened, but the legend of Kingdom Hearts‘ genesis is that Square and Disney share an office building in Honolulu, and two executives came up with the idea during an elevator ride. Regardless of how the game actually got started, Kingdom Hearts is one of those titles that everyone I knew mocked incessantly in the months before release – and then played for hours and hours and hours.  Apparently, Square and Disney have a lot in common.

Looking back on it, there are things I love about the design, and things I desperately, passionately loathe. In a way, Kingdom Hearts was the beginning of the end for me and Japanese RPGs: much as I love the sheer, balls-out bashiness of the gameplay, and as perversely satisfying it is for the Little Mermaid to be one of the best fighters in the game, Kingdom Hearts contains some of my all-time least favorite elements, the sorts of things that will make me pass over a game without a second thought today. This is the game that cemented my hatred of cryptic, pseudo-philosophical, “meaningful” plotlines and all the stilted adolescent dialogue* that comes with them: things like “The time when the door will open is both very near and far away,” or “Your shadow is longest when the light is brightest, so keep a strong heart,” or the general shallowness of the friendship-is-good, darkness-is-bad, memories-are-important story. It’s also difficult to forget, even just playing through the intro, that at its core Kingdom Hearts is about the burgeoning sexual tension between three awkwardly-dressed twelve year olds. This is not a story for adults.

But it is a game for adults. Taking just the mechanics (and ignoring the abysmal camera control and the lack of skippable cutscenes – this was ‘02, people), Kingdom Hearts is an excellent way to kill an afternoon. It’s fluff, but it’s nostalgic fluff, for both Disney and Square fans. In essence, it’s fan fiction come to life, but with all the balance, timing, structure, and production value of the best Final Fantasy titles. There’s joy in very simple things here – I had forgotten how much I like gathering physical experience points, or stringing weapon combos together, or even the lovely graphical representation of the “string of pearls” that serves as the map between Disney-themed worlds. For me, it’s a nice example of how great gameplay can transcend other flaws. And yes, there are people who think that the story in Kingdom Hearts is great literature with deep meanings that “speaks to them personally.” When they grow out of it, the game will still be there.

I have a student who recently wrote an essay on “embarrassing games” – titles like Pokemon or Princess Debut that are fun and challenging enough for serious gamers, but shameful to purchase because of the content. I had forgotten that Kingdom Hearts used to be one of those titles, back when all we had was the set-up. The franchise has become of Square-Enix’s most popular, and most successful, but there’s a little bit of shame there for me. I can play this game in my office, but I feel the need to apologize for it – that it’s technically quite good but not something to be taken seriously, not like a Portal or a Braid. It’s a guilty pleasure, and a conditional one. I can’t talk about the game to colleagues without making my disdain for the narrative abundantly clear. But I still play it. Maybe it’s not gameplay, but just fun that transcends all – however we choose to define “fun” this week.

*Don’t even get me started on Kingdom Hearts II. If I ever teach a course in painfully maudlin, overwrought, incoherent melodrama in interactive form, this one’s first on the list.

I’ve recently reacquired a piano, and remembered that one of the things I taught myself to play, when I needed a break from Mozart, Chopin, and Debussy, was the intro* to this pretty, flawed storybook of a game.

Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2) is one of Squaresoft’s great classics, one of the best to come out of the mid-90s Golden Age of the 16-bit RPG. In all the “Mana” games since, they’re never managed to recapture that perfect balance of gameplay, visuals, narrative, and pure immersive fun. But they came close with this one: a beautiful experiment that had heart and ideas, and yet just didn’t hang together.

As a story-centric person, I was attracted to Legend of Mana by its promise of competing, interwoven storylines. I’ve always been a fan of collecting multiple characters into a group of adventurers; and the idea that the world and its people moved around you, rather than waiting for you to save it and them, was relatively new at the time. I was also intrigued by the complicated system of world-building, or re-building. As you adventured, you found artifacts with fun names – Jade Egg, Firefly Lamp, Trembling Spoon – that when placed on the map became a new area to explore – Meikiv Caverns, Lumina Town, and the Underworld, respectively.

What I didn’t realize was that the system didn’t work. Rather than offering choices, Legend of Mana left it up to the player to find interesting stories in which to take part, but with little to no guidance on how to find them in the first place. And while many of the stories are one-offs, there are major narrative threads that are difficult or impossible to find on your own. If you want to know, for example, what happens to Pearl and Elazul after you help them find each other, or if you want to follow Daena and Escad on another adventure, there’s simply no way to tell in-game where they are or how to find them; and given the number of areas on the ever-growing world-map, hope and random chance don’t do you much good. And once a character has made a cryptic remark and run off, if you’re lucky enough to run across him, her, or it again, you still aren’t guaranteed the next piece of the story – unless you’re also lucky enough to have fulfilled any number of hidden prerequisites to trigger the next story event in the first place.

This is one of the only games where I broke down and purchased a strategy guide – not because the game was difficult (it’s actually quite accessible), but because I wanted to see the entire narrative thread for one character or another and had no idea how to do so in the game itself. A poor excuse for strategy guide sales.

Add to this that the game’s ending is a total reset, in which the mana tree is “healed” but the world is undone in the process, and the only real result is a New Game Plus – so your efforts of the last 40 hours or so have little real effect, apart from asking you to play again to find stories you didn’t find the first time (one of the guides I followed claimed five playthroughs, with no completion in sight). And the mana tree is needy. “Remember me! Love me! Need me!” For me, it’s the beginning of my frustration with the pseudo-philosophy about love, memory, friendship, and so on that permeates too many Japanese console RPGS, even now. (I’m looking at you, Kingdom Hearts series…)

And yet, there are so many good design elements, and the world and characters are so interesting…. The structural idea here feels wasted, half-finished, and the result is that this charming little experiment of a game has wonderful atmosphere and lacks cohesion. It’s a shame that it didn’t succeed; I would have liked to see a second and third attempt with this sort of multi-threaded storytelling.

It’s still a worthwhile experience – just one that comes with caveats.

*Yes, that makes me a nerd. This should not be a surprise.