For the past three weeks I have been fully consumed by a WiiWare title known as bit.trip Beat.  It’s very, very wonderful.  I’ve been trapped in the loop of thinking I should write something about bit.trip Beat, then deciding I should play bit.trip Beat a bit more before I write anything about it, and then waking up the next morning cursing myself for staying up until 3AM playing bit.trip Beat.

Basically, the game is single player Pong.  You have  a little paddle, and you move it around to repel tiny squares.  Except the little squares are smart, and repelling them produces harmonious tones. And each “level” is a section of a larger musical composition, of the chiptune variety.  And instead of using the directional pad, you twist the Wii remote.   And I feel at peace with the world when I’m playing.

The behavioral patterns of these little squares, the “beats” (as the manual refers to them), are incredibly varied.  Some fly at you in triplicate, some skip along the bottom of the screen, and others move in such an erratic manner that you cannot predict them… you just need to react.  Unlike the falling gem rhythm games where you just need to monitor an area of the screen and respond accordingly, bit.trip Beat feels like playing actual music.  You are in the zone and you just know what will happen next, even when you don’t.

Contemporary psychology has a word for this:  the flow state. Popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi¹, the flow state is a sort of involuntary mindfulness (think Zen Buddhism without the botanical knowledge). Key components include the loss of self-consciousness, focus of awareness, and an altered perception of time.  This is where your mind goes when you’re playing a sweet bass solo or, in my case, trying to hit little squares with a paddle.

Of course, I can’t bring this up without mentioning the game titled flOw (which will run you five dollars and is well worth your time). Jenova Chen’s thesis was a direct attempt to translate Csikszentmihalyi’s theory into an interactive experience.  Aside from the ridiculous capitalization schemes, flOw and bit.trip have little in common.  flOw used the prime ideas behind the flow state to dictate the game’s difficulty dynamically in response to player ability, while bit.trip hopes to invoke the flow state through extremely brutal difficulty.

When I say it’s difficult, I mean it’s difficult with a capital “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?”  It’s got the challenge level of a shoot-em-up², where you go from thinking life is great to crying in the corner over the course of thirty seconds.  It’s like a video game version of my first sexual experience that I get to play over and over again.

The difficulty is the beautiful part of the whole thing:  you will always fail at bit.trip Beat.

There’s no way to win.  Or, at the very least, I can’t win.  But not winning is where things get interesting.  Miss too many beats and you get sent into a “nether.”  The overly saturated colors disappear, you see only your avatar and the beats, and the sound cuts out minus a single rhythmic bleep from the Wii remote. Repel enough beats and you go back up to the main play area.  Miss them and you’re back at the title screen.

If I were to rank my favorite gaming moments, my first time entering the nether in bit.trip Beat would easily be number one.  Going from being fully immersed in a driving beat coming from my speakers to this extreme absence was like a slap in the face.  It is so jarring and so very beautiful.  I don’t think I’ve ever been more aware of the act of playing a game.   All I could see was a wireframe of an idea on my screen, and the game controller alerting me to the fact that I was still playing. This says something. I was so disoriented that I didn’t even understand what was going on at first.  It was like waking from a dream and hearing the buzz of an alarm clock, realizing that what you just experienced, no matter how real it may have seemed, was nothing more than a product of your mind.  I am now convinced that adding a speaker to the Wii remote was a stroke of genius.

It may have helped that I was playing on a projector in complete darkness with the volume at max.

The motivation to play again is not just to top your high score, but also to progress further and hear more of the song. I believe that the song never actually ends; maybe some  programming trickery allows it to mutate at a cellular level as you progress.  That may not be the case, as there are two inactive options in the main menu.  I assume there are prerequisites that must be met for those options to become active… maybe requirements such as winning, or at least not losing.

I haven’t even begun to touch on the narrative elements of the game (yes, there is a narrative!).  “Everything comes from something,” the operations manual informs me.  “We will return to something once we become nothing.”  Heavy.  The little paddle you control?  That’s your avatar, and he has a name. All of the bit.trip games (there will be more, I assume) revolve around a character known as Commander Video.   His mantra speaks of moral fallibilism and self-acceptance³:  “I am only a man.”  And, indeed, you’ll find no extra lives in bit.trip Beat.  You may be able to skate around that near-death nether, but once you’re done, that’s it.  You’re evaluated whether you win or lose.

Someday, when you’re older, remind me to tell you the story of the four player co-op.  Did I mention this game is only six dollars?⁴

Update: I just read the IGN review for bit.trip Beat, and apparently the song does end, and the greyed out options in the menu are additional songs.  I must be terrible at this game.  Forgive me.  I am only a gamer.

1. Hottest psychologist ever, am I right?!
2. I refuse to use the word schmup, unless it itself is incorporated into an equally ridiculous portmanteau.  Like “aweshmup” or “schmupsicle.”
3. For additional information, please see the Wikipedia entry for Human.
4. I totally stole this footnotes idea from The Quixotic Engineer.  I think it works well.  Though the hypertextual nature of the internet may render traditional MLA style citations pointless, there’s a lot of stuff that just doesn’t fit into a document.  Like whatever the hell I’m saying in this footnote.

I’ve been unemployed for a little over a month now, with absolutely no job prospects and very little money to my name. This means I have a lot of free time. I’ve been trying to figure out what the average vocationally impaired american does instead of working. I tried drinking in the morning (I saw that one on TV), which, by the afternoon, I realized was a very bad idea. I tried growing a beard, which was an even worse idea… now my Xbox Avatar looks like a creepy junior college lit professor. I considered writing the great American novel, but more than a few have already walked that path. I was at a loss.

Then, during my family’s annual Thanksgiving circus event, I got to talking with my cousin Timothy. He’s a few years older than me and recently completed his Master’s in English language and literature. Needless to say, he’s been looking for a job since April. I’m going stir crazy after a month; I can’t even imagine going that long without doing something. His secret? World of Warcraft. “That’s ten hours a day right there.” Oh, Timothy.

I can’t imagine that’s what the average jobless fellow does with all his free time, but I’m sure there are many like my cousin out there. I’d venture a guess that some are unemployed because they play World of Warcraft. The fifteen bucks a month subscription fee isn’t too hard to swing. That’s, like, only four ounces of plasma.

A Confession: I have never played a massively multiplayer online game. In fact, I’ve actively avoided them. The whole grind-until-you-die-from-exhaustion angle never appealed to me. I mean, trying to balance an extremely addictive game alongside my job, my girlfriend and my social life would have been hell. I could barely find the time to play twenty minutes of Bomberman after work as it were.

Now I don’t have a job or a girlfriend or a social life. My days consist of scratching my hideous beard and staring at the phone, waiting for some big firm to call me and say they have a position open. Which, FYI, isn’t going to happen. Perhaps the time has come for me to take the plunge and become one of those people.

So, as if by some divine magic, I received an email last week from Atlus inviting me to beta test a new MMORPG. “Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine. ” It could be nothing other than fate! Or maybe the fact that I’m on the Atlus mailing list and they sent a beta key to every subscriber. Either way, I knew what I had to do.

Some Background: Megami Tensei — or MegaTen, as hopeless romantics will refer to it — is a long running series of Japanese roleplaying games. There are, seriously, like a million different titles. Not many were released in North America, but the Persona sub-series has gained a bit of a following (I consider Persona 3: FES to be one of the finest roleplaying games I have ever experienced). The quality that sets Megami Tensei games apart from the average JRPG is that they are not terrible… there are no elves or ultimate troll swords or undying gods that happen to resemble the protagonist’s father. Thematically, most MegaTen titles are set in modern day and the player has to fight demons and junk. It’s different, which is probably why the series has attracted an audience.

I downloaded the Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine client, installed it and created my account. Things can only get better from here.

A.D. 20XX TOKYO

In the aftermath of the Great Destruction, those who survived constructed shelters, waiting for the day when they would rebuild their city.

Led by the Seven Philosophers these survivors constructed a massive tower.

This tower came to be called Shinjuku Babel.

Having lost their homes, the remaining survivors took refuge in an underground city called
Third Home. This is where you learn the skills and techniques to be a Demon Buster.

Okay then! That text is all the backstory I get before I’m dumped at a menu screen. The game boldy announces “You will be able to create a new character.” The music is actually fairly interesting, despite being a twelve second loop. Before I can be able to create my character, I have to chose a world in which to inhabit. I guess such is the norm for MMOs? Different servers and all that? I only have one choice: Cerberus. How goth.

I name my character ‘Evil Tom Waits.’ Both the male and female character models look identical, except or the male being a bit more feminine. All the hairstyles are hilariously douchey. I choose ‘mushroom,’ hoping to make Evil Tom Waits resemble Edith Head. Not quite.

I’m pretty anxious to play, so I leave most of the options untouched and click start game. “You can not create a character with that name.” No explanation why. I try taking off the last name (maybe there’s some sort of celebrity defamation filter in place), but no go. “Pussycat Central” doesn’t work either. Nor does Zachary or any of my online handles. I get frustrated and start entering random phrases until I find one that’s acceptable. So, uh, Bob Murderville it is.

Start game! A computer terminal tells me that Murderville has to investigate Home II at once. No exposition or anything… I like that. Then some blocky chick in a visor says the same thing. I’m finally in the game and the amount of stuff on the hud is overwhelming. I approach a lion thing named ‘Unseasoned Cerberus’ who exclaims “I HAVE A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS.” The visor chick starts talking about demon busting and saving citizens and… oh! She’s a SLUT (Systematic Linear Unavoidable Tutor). You know, the sort of NPC that you have to put up with for a while to learn how to play the game. The kind with no varying dialog and a throwaway personality. This is the opposite of something like Link’s Awakening, which features DICs (Detail Instance Coaches); multiple NPCs who subtly relay information about the controls and game mechanics. I swear that these are real acronyms and not something I made up just now to keep this post interesting. Anyway, tell me how to use the camera, SLUT!

She teaches me to move around and says I should check out the elevator. I check out the elevator. “The elevator is broken.” I go back to the visor chick. She says to go down the hallway. I go down the hallway. A dialog box warns me that I’m on my own from this point forward. Um… okay? I guess all I really need to know is how to move around. Fade to black.

“ACT 0: THE SIN OF WEAKNESS.”

Except I’m not on my own. The visor chick is somehow in the next room giving first aid to a rambling solider. “I could have saved them… if it weren’t for those darn demons!”

So far this game is unbelievably boring. The rooms are so big in relation to my character that it takes an unnecessary amount of time to move from place to place. I understand the need for a tutorial sequence (as there are a million weird buttons on the screen and the documentation is a bit lacking), but can’t something interesting happen? Shoddy flow is a breaking point for most titles; poor pacing in the first few hours of a game is unforgivable. And this is an MMO… shouldn’t I be able to interact with other people by now?

No one seems to be around. I imagine that most massively multiplayer games confine the player in such a manner during the introductory segments.

The next room has a monster in it. It’s a green slime. Left click to target, left click again to attack. Click haphazardly in rapid succession for more efficient attacks. I kill that thing dead. The following room has three slimes in it instead of one! These rooms are seriously way too big. I kill a purple monster in the adjacent room and level up. Entering the status window lets me assign ability points. Fairly straightforward. I pump it all into intelligence. Bob Murderville is obviously lacking in that area if he’s running around battling monsters by himself in an MMO.

A room with a locked door introduces an important mechanic: loot. I find 19 pieces of magnetite on a corpse. It’s kind of refreshing that the game uses actual mineral names instead of magicite or awesomtonium. Still, I wish there was some way to just buy loot using actual currency instead of having to find it in the game. That’d be really convenient. Maybe I can use this magnetite to forge a compass later on, or turn it into a ferrofluid during a challenging chemistry minigame.

A blood stained control panel sits in an adjacent room. Menacing. “A door has unlocked somewhere.” I wonder if it was the locked door from the previous room? I fight some weird ‘Gaki’ monsters and dispatch them quickly. Each one has two band-aids. I have so many band-aids! I was under the impression that “band-aid” a brand name and non-licensed versions had to refer to themselves as “adhesive bandages.” How peculiar. I should probably send an email to Johnson & Johnson letting them know about this possible trademark infringement.

Okay, how the hell was was the visor chick behind the locked door? Maybe she’s a demon! We have a conversation. There are many ellipses involved. “It seems the demons came through… the service entrance.” What the hell kind of post apocalyptic stronghold has a service entrance? That is some seriously poor planning. I make my way to the stupid service entrance.

This extended tutorial is becoming quite tiresome. The Shin Megami Tensei series is known for two things: enjoyable game mechanics and an engaging story. I have yet to experience either of those elements in this online iteration. I’ve been playing an introductory sequence for almost two hours now; the only characters I’ve encountered are paper cutouts lacking in motivation. By this point in the game I would hope that
some sort of lure would present itself, a reason to continue playing. Two hours should be the cutoff for that, right? Instead I’m making my way through a maze of identical rooms filled with identical monsters, hoping for a — HOLY SHIT WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!

Where did Kali come from? Is she a demon? I thought she was a goddess? What the hell is going on? Why are the subtitles for this scene in a crazy moon man language? The visor chick and Unseasoned Cerberus are dead at Kali’s feet. There’s a strange hissing noise and my character passes out. Fade to white. This game may just have gotten awesome.

Now Mr. Murderville is in some room that… well, looks exactly like all the other rooms. A non-player character tells me about a training computer I have to use to move on. I try it and the NPC goes into SLUT mode. “Let me tell you about controlling the camera.” Wait, what? I’m in another tutorial. What happened to Kali and all the cool stuff? Why do I have to do this again? “Use your basic attack skill to kill five slimes.”

I exit the game.

Somehow, even though I have absolutely nothing better to do, I lack the patience for this. The gameplay proceedings are downright dull… click an enemy, then keep clicking until it dies. Click it’s corpse to get loot. Click on the floor to move forward and find another enemy. I understand that a computer mouse is the primary input device, but c’mon. The mechanics should probably be a little deeper than “click on things until you level up.” This is no different than a button masher. I realize that I spent very little time with the game (in comparison to the average person’s cumulative engagement with an MMO), but I was told by two tutorials that I would not enjoy the primary method of interaction. I’m sure there are all sorts of neat Megami Tensei standards buried in the title, but they’re not worth the repetitive stress injury I’d get trying to discover them.

The comical element here is that I couldn’t stomach the game enough to get to the online portions. You know, the online portions of an online game. I was under the impression that MMORPGs start to suck due to interaction with other players. “Griefing” and all that. Normally the core elements of a title are rewarding enough for people to put up with that sort of aggravation. In the case of Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, such activities would most likely cause severe emotional breakdowns and destroy entire families.

I realize that the flaws of this game do not reflect the genre as a whole. The issues I encountered have to do with pacing and combat, elements specific to the title. Next week I plan on spending some time with the free trial for World of Warcraft… the end all, be all massively multiplayer game. If I do not enjoy that, I’m probably a lost cause.

Maybe I’m just not cut out for this unemployed wastrel position.

When I got a PSP a couple of months ago, one of the first titles I picked up was Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions. It’s a remake of the original Final Fantasy Tactics game for the Playstation, except with some rather pleasant motion graphics thrown in. I have really nice memories of playing that original game. At least I think I do. I seem to look back on everything I experienced in high school with an undue fondness, which is most likely a result of having since been crushed by the realities of adulthood. Considering my biggest concern back then was being able to touch boobs, it’s probably quite understandable.

Let me make this clear: Final Fantasy Tactics is not a game. It’s a couple of characters, some dialog, and a million goddamn nested menus. After replaying it for the first time in over ten years, I’ve realized that any notion of a ‘game’ is so deeply buried that it can’t possibly be enjoyable. I have no idea why I remember this as a good game. Maybe I was really into menus when I was a teenager. I did wait tables throughout high school.

If you’re not familiar with tactical role playing games, allow me to break them down a bit. The player controls an army of individual characters, each with their own abilities and statistics. Battles take place on a grid, where you maneuver a couple of your characters against some other characters/monsters/undying gods. Each character gets it’s own individual turn where it can move, attack, or use really helpful support abilities such as decreasing the charisma statistic of any applicable sub genus of a certain creature type by 0.012%. So you take turns, going back and forth for hours, until the victory conditions are met. And there are a lot of contextual menus.

If that doesn’t sound like much fun, perhaps I’m not explaining it right. Okay: maybe it’s more like a gridded board-game, such as checkers. Imagine a game of checkers. Got it? Good. Now imagine a game of checkers in which you can jump and claim an opposing piece only after situating all your pieces next to it for several hours. And there are a hundred different numbers associated with each checker piece that don’t really mean anything, and once you’re finally in a position to claim a piece you have to confirm what you want to do a dozen times, and then when you try to claim it someone comes in and punches you in the neck, upending the checker board and making you start the entire match over again. That’s a tactical role playing game.

So, yeah, I have some issues with the core elements that make up the genre. But I was trying to re-familiarize myself with it using a ten year old game. Things have advanced so much in the past ten years! Ten years ago we were rocking out to Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing,” watching VHS copies of Patch Adams and thinking that punch card voting would be the way of the future. Surely tactical RPGs have advanced in the same way, right? I threw out my copy of Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions and tried Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift. At least ridiculous naming schemes have seen some major breakthroughs in the past decade.

FFTA2:GOTR (or ‘Goater,’ as it shall be known) started out by having me just move dudes around a grid and kill some monsters. That’s promising! And, even though it took several dozen nested menu commands to kill a cockatrice with 50 hit points, the level up screen after the battle reminded me why I want to like these games so badly. It’s just like the terrible Japanese RPGs I loved as a kid, except focused on teams instead of individuals. I can beef up a group of black mages and have them all tag teaming some monster who’s weak against ice while having a couple archers taking care of any melee opponents. That’s a wonderful prospect that is, unfortunately, buried under the tedium of dated game mechanics.

Although Final Fantasy Tactics A2 starts off strong, it falls into the same trappings. Laws, auction houses, territory control, looting, privileges, a bazaar… what the fuck? Advance Wars never made me put up with this shit to get to the fun stuff. These new elements don’t provide depth, they’re just more layers that the player has to wade through in order to get to the ultimate goal of killing stuff and leveling up. And, really, when your title spends twenty minutes explaining a gambling mini-game that barely relates to the core gameplay but yet neglects to tell the player how to restore magic points, you probably have some fundamental design issues.

An Aside: seriously, how do I restore MP in this game? My characters don’t seem to recover it after battle like HP, and the only item I have with such a function is Ether (which I can’t seem to buy in shops). Is there some sort of super secret code I have to input in order to unlock a series of menus that may, at some point, allow the possibility of unlocking more menus that will let me restore some frickin’ magic points?

If you can’t tell, I’m a bit angry about this whole thing. Partially because I really want to like these games and because the core idea is interesting to me… and partially because Square-Enix is, once again, profiting off of my misery. If you weren’t aware, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 (as well as most games published by Square-Enix) costs five dollars more than the average DS title. Why? I have no idea. Because nostalgic losers will pay it, I guess.

I often think about how the critique process for, say, a painter or a filmmaker differs from that of a game designer. The concept of iterative design is not really comparable because it most often relies on input from those who have been working on the title since it’s conception. Games can be play-tested thoroughly or have open betas, but that’s to dig out technical issues. There doesn’t seem to be any external critique process for games aside from focus groups, and those are there to ensure the game will profit, not to test a title’s emotional resonance or thematic effectiveness. Do the ‘hands-on previews’ that we find on blogs and in magazines really play a part is shaping the overall game? Doubtful. Most of that stuff is just to drum up publicity and anticipation; I’d be very surprised if developers ever read those things. Besides, the majority of previews equate to little more than “this looks awesome.”

I’d like to critique games myself, but I’m not even sure if I know how. By the time I play a game, it’s done. It’ll never be reworked aside from a stray patch or shortsighted Special Edition (oh, and expansions, if you’re into that sort of gaming). Is there room for such a dialog when dealing with works that have been declared finished by their creators?

All that being said, I’d like to present some impressions from the video game Braid. Not neccesarily a critque, just some impressions.

The marketing focus with this title seems to be its atmosphere and unified art direction (which is, indeed, the only bit of information I knew about it for quite some time). This visual design is, as my girlfriend remarked, like being trapped in a Thomas Kinkade painting. Everything is so garishly super-saturated that it becomes impossible to focus on specific elements. The adjective ‘painterly’ is interpreted here as a mess of brush-strokes, unable to convey any proper composition and instead trying to leave an mark of classical technique if for no other reason than to affect an uneducated player. The background and character designs seem inspired by the staples of Impressionism but seem to ignore the techniques that defined the movement; light sources are undefined, edges are hard, and there is an abundance of black in place of the expected complementary contrast.

Maybe this art style is what draws people in. Thomas Kinkade, after all, makes millions hocking his paintings to the every-man. I bought the game because it received mountains of praise from just about every review outlet there is. But what does it actually consist of, aside from a rather distracting painted motif? Let’s take to the streets and find out!

What is Braid? One may as well ask what life is. It is art, it is love, it is
pain, it is a journey. It is itself. I don’t mean to sound pretentious. It’s
just impossible to define this game as one thing. This is mainly because I may
get something different out of it than you will.

Actually, Braid is a platforming puzzle game for the Xbox 360. Was that so hard? And what I got out of it was an overwhelming sense of frustration. Both due to the mechanics and because the game is such a missed opportunity.

The main problem is that Braid falls into the same curse had by many of the adventure games from my youth. You’re given a puzzle and, instead of solving it logically, you solve it by using an FAQ. Who honestly thinks “I should try combining the clothesline, the clamp, and the rubber duck with a hole in it” when trying to grab a key from a subway track? Ugh. Braid contains many of these moments, where you’re trying to figure out what the hell the developer had in mind when he designed the level. It’s not a simple matter of considering your skillset and figuring out how to approach the problem at hand as with most games. For example…

First, grab the key and jump over the pit. Climb the next ladder you come to,
and continue to a lever. Pull the lever, and drop down to a square block. A
time-immune enemy is moving around down here. Kill him, and watch for his
replacement to come flying out of the cannon up above. What you need to do is
get him to land on the platform, then run left so that the platform moves back
to its original position with the enemy on it. Once he is up there, keep
running left, to the ladder. Climb it quickly, and if you’re moving fast
enough, you will be to the left of the enemy as he walks towards you.

At some point along the line, he will have picked up the key. Don’t worry, we
wanted that to happen. One he has moved to the left of ladder that leads to
the door and the puzzle piece, bounce on him and grab the key. Be careful to
bounce on him with enough momentum to grab the key and move right so that it
remains in your grasp. If it teleports down to the ground, you’ll have to try
again.

Now that you have the key, climb the ladder, open the door, and grab the piece.

Does that even count as a puzzle? When I finally figure out some of these situations, I don’t feel like I’m solving anything. It’s as if I’m merely stumbling across the solution.

This is even worse than the average adventure game because everything is solved through platforming. Instructing a character to “use CARDKEY with RUBBER CHIKEN” is a lot different than split-second precision pouncing off of enemies in order to springboard to the puzzle piece you need. That sort of platforming only works when the game controls well. And Braid is, most definitely, a puzzle game with platforming mechanics tacked on. The player character is sluggish, collision detection is poor, and response time is inconsistent. I do not enjoy the primary input methods, the ones that enable me to interact with the environment.

And the story, the thing that normally drives you to complete the game? That’s hidden behind the puzzles. You can run from left to right, ignoring the collectible items, completing the game in about an hour. All narrative is told through optional text at the beginning of every ‘world,’ and that text is sparse. I’ve heard (and I haven’t come close to getting all the loot, so I can’t verify) that more story is revealed once all the collectibles are found. But what is the point of going back and finding all these puzzle pieces if the nuts-and-bolts of the game are not enjoyable and the story is almost non-existent at this point?

The thing that really bothers me is the developer’s stance on all this. There’s a walkthrough posted on the Braid website that’s nothing more than a rant against walkthroughs.

All the puzzles in Braid are reasonable. They don’t require you to do anything random; they don’t require guessing. They don’t require trial and error. The solutions tend to be simple and natural.

When I solve some of the puzzles, I don’t feel rewarded. I feel like I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what mindset the developer wanted me to be in. There is a lot of trial and error, and things aren’t always simple and natural. To have the developer go out of his way to tell me that I’m wrong for feeling this way… that just reminds me of the arrogant art school freshman who refused to listen to critiques of his work lest they label it as anything other than perfect.

Is this okay? Am I allowed to have this opinion? Talking about video games is much different than talking about art. Part of me thinks I should hide it away and not tell anyone until the hype eventually dies down. But I don’t criticize it because I hate the game, I criticize it because I want it to be better.

This past week I finally completed all fifty of Fay’s Puzzles in Shiren the Wanderer. These puzzles are prefabricated single floor dungeons that serve as something of an introduction to the more advanced rules and techniques in the game. They start off fairly simple and then get quite difficult. For example, the first puzzle teaches you that arrows can shoot diagonally across entryways, while later ones have you juggling different scrolls and staves against multiple monsters, eating meats to temporarily transform, and trying to figure out the exact path required to make it towards the exit. I had been getting my ass kicked on the one titled “Shopping Battle” until I realized that I didn’t need to steal from the merchant… I could just lure the Thief monsters in to the shop, slaughter them using the Mastersword that’s for sale, put the sword down and pick up the gitans they dropped, then buy a sleep scroll and use it on the monsters by the exit. The title led me to believe that the solution involved making use of the various offensive (and expensive) items available in the shop to defeat the merchant, who is ridiculously overpowered (and also says “thank you!” and “come again!” with every swing).

Anyway, I cleared all of Mr. Fay’s puzzles and am awarded with a “Huzzah!” and three Blank Scrolls. Pretty nice. Blank Scrolls let you inscribe the name of any other scroll on them, then when they’re read that take the effect of that scroll. They will certainly come in handy. Fay said that he’d get to work on a doozy of a puzzle for next time I’m in town. Which, as it turned out, was about ten minutes later because I stupidly forgot to bring a riceball on my next climb up Table Mountain and starved to death on the seventh floor. When I stopped by to see what Fay’s been up to, he’s in a panic. Apparently he dug too deep while trying to create his next puzzle and ended up with a single massive labyrinth. And, of course, I have to option to explore it. He gives me the usual jazz of losing all items and money upon entering, then I’m greeted by the ominous display of “1 Final Puzzle.”

And, holy shit, this thing is brutal. What I didn’t initially realize is that, because the entrance to the dungeon is located in Canyon Hamlet (which resets your experience whenever you enter it), you pretty much have no choice but to start from level one. You could do things like eating a stash of Herbs of Strength you have in your warehouse or something before entering, but they honestly won’t make that much of a difference beyond the first few floors. And unlike Table Mountain, the enemies in this dungeon get vicious fast. I haven’t made it further than the eighth floor after twenty or so attempts just because the difficulty ramps up so quickly.

Part of this is because the identity of everything is scrambled in the dungeon. Not just staves and jars like in the rest of the game, I mean everything. The only item that’s not is the trusty riceball, because you start the dungeon with one in your inventory. Herbs are now named by color and scrolls after arbitrary animals. Not too much of a big deal, right? Well, the Final Puzzle includes more than just beneficial scrolls and herbs. There are now herbs that may decrease your fullness, cause you to fall asleep, or even reset your level to one. Sometimes the Donkey Scroll you read won’t be a Power Up Scroll or a Scroll of Light, instead it might be a Scroll of Silence or a Scroll of Explosion. Guess what a Scroll of Explosion does? Go on, guess. I’ll give you a hint: when you read it you fucking explode. Granted, it does do a lot of damage to anything adjacent to you, but you most likely will not be around to take advantage of that.

Evil Soldiers are also a problem. See, when Evil Soldiers are defeated they become Dead Soldiers, which run away from you whenever you get near them. If a Dead Soldier sees another enemy (even another Dead Soldier), it will ‘leap’ into it… allowing it to level up. On Table Mountain this isn’t much of a problem because whenever I’ve encountered Evil Soldiers the only other monsters on the floor have been Rice Changers and Field Bandits. They’re pretty weak, and even if they manage to overpower me I’ve probably got a staff or an herb stashed away that I can use to my advantage. Not so in the Final Puzzle. Here there are Ironheads and Floor Dragons to worry about leveling up, and that’s just on the fifth floor. Combine that with the fact that using anything in my inventory without having it identified first may cause me an embarrassing death and most floors end up being a mad dash for the exit.

Here are a few embarrassing deaths, by the way.

1. While reading scrolls and eating herbs just to get them identified, one turned out to be a Monster Scroll, which turns the current room into a monster house. The next one was a Sleeping Herb, which causes the player to fall asleep.
2. Fending off a couple Pit Mamels at the start of the first floor, then turning around and tripping over a stumble trap before I could recover my health. Yes, that’s right… I fell on my face and died.
3. Accidentally broke a jar in a shop. I didn’t have enough gitans to pay for it, so the merchant beat the living shit out of me.
4. Fell into a monster house and read the only scroll I had, hoping it would be a Blastwave Scroll or something. It was a Scroll of Haste, which made all the enemies in the room much more efficient killing machines.
5. Threw a Pale Herb at a Floor Dragon. It turned out to be a Kingy Seed, which causes the target to go into a blind rage, murdering anything around it. The Floor Dragon killed the three Bowboys adjacent to it, leveled up into an Earth Dragon, then took me out like the garbage.

So, right now I’m terrified of this dungeon. But I used to be scared of Table Mountain when I first attempted it and now I can tackle it pretty easily. I just need more experience with it, figuring out the various tricks and tactics I need to survive for more than eight floors.

One neat trick I’ve stumbled across: it’s possible to ‘farm’ Fay’s Final Puzzle for items that can be useful for tackling Table Mountain and the Tainted Path. You see, once most of the post game dungeons are opened the option to adventure while waiting to be rescued opens up. Normally if you fall and send out a rescue request you’re stuck at the menu screen waiting for someone to save your sorry ass. When you adventure while waiting, you start in your warehouse and can choose to explore any of the dungeons. There are a few limitations, however: you can’t save, you can’t go past the highest floor you’ve reached in that dungeon, and you can’t go past the floor you died on. If you try, the game just boots you back to the warehouse… with your inventory intact. So, if I were to attempt the Final Puzzle, die on the third floor, and adventure while waiting to be rescued… every time I reached the second floor exit I’d be kicked back to the warehouse with all the items I picked up prior to that, free to store anything valuable before trying again. I haven’t really exploited it much, but I did score some sweet armbands and a Kingy Seed that I threw at some little kid in a village. He totally killed all the other villagers. It was awesome.