The Lost Art of the Goku Effect

I submit to you a controversial statement: Vanilla Diablo 3 on PS3 is secretly the best version of the game. Now, you might be thinking how the hell is the version with the crappiest graphics and least amount of content the best way to play Diablo 3? Wasn't Reaper of Souls supposed to be the savior that fixed all of its problems anyway? Well in order to make my case, first we need to take a long walk down Snake Way and talk a little about Dragon Ball Z.

So what does Dragon Ball Z have to do with any of this? Well ya see, a big part of Dragon Ball Z's appeal is seeing Goku's evolution as a fighter over time. When he begins his journey on planet Earth, he can barely even take on a low-rank scrub warrior like Raditz without forcing himself to team up with his arch nemesis, Piccolo. And even then he still has to sacrifice himself just so Piccolo could take the final shot. Despite being one of the most powerful martial artists the planet had ever known, Goku was still just an insignificant peon compared to the numerous other dangerous alien races lurking among the cosmos. He needed to get stronger. And fast, as even more powerful Saiyan warriors that were leagues above Raditz were on their way to Earth following his demise.

It's these massive differences in power scales that made the experience all the more satisfying to watch when you would see Goku reach new heights and take on an even bigger baddie. He was constantly breaking new barriers and achieving things no one else could even imagine. Over time, Goku eventually went from being wrecked by his low-class brother, to taking on the most powerful tyrants in the universe with planet-destroying magnitudes of power. He was a giant among men. It was awe-inspiring to watch.

To tie this all back to video games, my first experience with the RPG genre was Chrono Trigger for the SNES. One of the most striking things I noted about the game after getting a taste of it was the fact that the gameplay was so heavily driven by stats and numbers. Not only that, but you could go back to revisit previously-explored areas and fight old enemies that you have long since surpassed in level. The game even encouraged this after you beat it, as this would unlock New Game+ mode, where players could take their existing characters with all their experience and equipment, but start over at the beginning of the game with them.

Sure, going back to slay small-fry didn't provide any tangible rewards or a steep challenge, but it was just a cool novelty. It would remind you of how far you've come, and what you've already achieved. You felt empowered because of it. To be honest, it wasn't even the act of slaying these poor creatures with a single effortless blow that made it fun. It was merely the thought that I could do it if I wanted to; that such differences in strength are allowed to exist in the game. This is what makes the prospect of leveling up so exciting; to see how far your characters can push the limits and rise above everything else.

I call this little phenomenon--as you might guess--the Goku Effect. Because much like Dragon Ball Z, Chrono Trigger and other stat-driven games like it simulate an experience not unlike being Goku. You start out an untrained fighter with nothing more than a wooden sword to your name, but after a long journey of training and hardships, you find yourself battling an ancient alien creature; so powerful that it was viewed as a god to the people that once worshiped it during the ice age.

In fact, you fight Chrono Trigger's biggest baddie, Lavos, on more than one occasion, and well before you reach the end of the game. What's interesting about this is that the first time you encounter him, you're most likely far too underpowered to take him on, so you'll end up losing the fight as part of the story. This is a clever way that the game showcases just how powerful your foes can get, and how much you'll need to train yourself for the fights to come. It's a very satisfying progression to see unfold, and it's made all the more meaningful by seeing the sheer disparity in power between Lavos and the mere forest creatures that you once did battle with.

Now let's imagine a new hypothetical scenario. In this scenario, Goku trains as hard as he can to get stronger just like he always does, and he continues to reach new heights and break new barriers just as you would expect him to. However, there's now one crucial difference. Each time Goku achieves a new power level, everyone else in the entire universe suddenly and inexplicably gets buffed along with him. Now no matter who Goku fights--even if it's just some Joe Schmo from Earth who tends to his llama farm and never trained a day in his life--Goku is always going to have an opponent who is at least somewhat close to his power level. Now Goku is only a slightly bigger giant among giants; effectively diminishing any gratifying sense of achievement that he has worked so hard to reach. Why would we imagine such a bizarre and unsatisfying scenario? Because that's exactly what Reaper of Souls did to Diablo 3.

Did you know that if you return to Act 1 Normal with your completely decked out max level demon hunter, you still can't one-shot-kill a level 1 zombie right in the starting zone? Maybe you think you're a pretty badass demon slayer now after racking up a few dozen paragon levels, and you're rolling in 500K damage per second from all that gear you've collected. Nope. Still doesn't matter; not unless you happen to land a lucky critical strike. Meanwhile with Diablo 3 on PS3, I can be not even half way to the level cap and dispense with the cannon fodder in one clean shot every single time.

How is this possible you might ask? This is because Reaper of Souls radically changed the way stats function from the original game. Previously, all enemy stats were fixed based on the difficulty setting that was selected. But now since the expansion, enemies scale with your character's level regardless of difficulty. Changing the difficulty only tweaks their stats further with customizable precision. As a result, no matter how hard you try; no matter how big your numbers get, the entire world of Sanctuary will always be only a few steps behind you. You can never become Goku. Instead, you're now more like Piccolo with his weighted gear on, and the more you train, the more you have to keep putting on even heavier weight to constrict your true power level. It's a system that makes you think you're climbing a ladder when you're actually running on a treadmill. Once I realized this, I quickly lost motivation to play.

There has been an alarming trend among stat-driven games to strip away the meaningful value of the stats themselves. Blizzard's other popular title, World of Warcraft, recently fell victim to this as well. On the one hand, I can certainly see the utility of such a change; it ensures that no matter what challenges you're facing, there will always be a minimum level of effort required. But in doing so, it robs you of the sense of achievement that comes from the Goku Effect, and in turn ruins much of the point of having stats in the first place.

Ultimately whether I hit a creature for a thousand damage or a million, if it still shaves off roughly the same percentage of health anyway, then why even bother with stats at all? It just seems dishonest and exploitative in that it's trying to trick you into deriving a sense of pleasure from seeing bigger numbers on the screen, but you're not really hitting any harder.

I'm not saying that I want to turn into a wrecking ball throughout the entire game; I'm saying I want to faceplant my foes as well as get faceplanted by them, so I can feel the difference in power scales and have a strong motivating goal to work toward. That big baddie who demolished you so thoroughly before--you can become just as much of a destructive force like them if you work toward it. But in order to fully capture that feeling, you need to have the Super Saiyans as well as the mere Earthlings fully represented. Sadly, more and more games are turning away from this philosophy in game design.

Thankfully, I can still cling to my Diablo 3 vanilla experience like the old curmudgeon that I am. And the great thing about the console version too is that it still contains many quality of life improvements over the original PC version like no online connection requirement, no auction house, and crappy item drops fixed. I can even still play online for free because unlike all other console versions, the PS3's multiplayer doesn't require a subscription. So relieve yourself of Piccolo's weighted gear and experience Diablo 3 as it was meant to be in glorious 720p! Err, something like that.

I think game designers should be reminded that not all of the entertainment value of a game can simply be derived from a carefully-crafted challenge. Sometimes it's just about granting the player the freedom to make their own experience, or capturing a certain atmosphere or feeling.

In a side quest for Nier: Automata, the player must collect stamps throughout an amusement park. It's just a fetch quest really, and not a particularly difficult or remarkable one at that; until you reach the theater, at which point you are treated to a delightfully nonsensical Romeo and Juliet play performed by the park's robot inhabitants. As the play goes on, the robots seem to either forget their lines or have intentionally ignored Shakespeare's original writing, as it quickly devolves into them brawling and insulting each other in pseudo-old English speech until they all explode. This play really doesn't further the main plot or offer up some new challenge to overcome; it just exists as a hilariously quirky manifestation of Yoko Taro's genius, and that's OK to have in a video game. We need more of that.

So let me feel like I'm Goku dammit! Even if it doesn't service the gameplay in any immediately practical sense. Sometimes I just want to blow shit up and feel badass and unstoppable while doing it. Is that really so wrong?

Band of Slackers: Zombies can be cute?!

I was originally intending to post this last month as part of Destructoid's Band of Bloggers segment, but you know, this that and the other thing happened, and anyways, fuck it I'm still gonna talk about zombies today.

Video games are hardly known for their subtlety and nuance when it comes to storytelling. Games like Call of Duty or DOOM attempt to engage you with all the understated tranquility of a brick flying through a glass window. That's probably why for the longest time up until The Walking Dead exploded onto the scene, American television mostly shied away from zombies, while video games on the other hand have relished in them. There's just something inherently silly and a bit too on-the-nose with the concept of a shambling corpse coming to un-life; moaning oh-so-menacingly as it slowly creeps toward its victim.

Yet for games like Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, it somehow manages to contain that rare sense of depth from a small heartfelt moment while also being utterly absurd and over-the-top with its writing. And on top of that, it reinvents the zombie as we know it.

Enter Rottytops: Shantae's bubbly brain-eating bestie, who may have also doomed the entire world for a bag of coffee. The classical zombie has always been portrayed as a disgusting creature of horror barely capable of any thought beyond its basic instinct to devour everything in sight, and while Rotty certainly carries some of these traits to a degree, the rest is a rather ingenious subversion of zombie tropes; turning the entire concept on its head (and throwing it as far as she is able). Rather than being truly brainless, Rotty's zombie-like mindlessness manifests as a sort of naïve innocence; a dense airhead who is oblivious to social cues and her own mistakes. In this way, she is made to be more endearing than frightful.

There's just so much to love about this character, from her whimsical carefree nature to her mischievous shenanigans that she always gets herself into. She's constantly stuck in her own world; bouncing her hips back and forth in a state of ignorant bliss. When she's not making web puns, she's usually cooking up some sort of scheme to get a taste of Shantae's brains, and often dragging them both into trouble because of it. One would think this makes Rotty an enemy to the half-genie hero, but it's in Pirate's Curse that we learn more about Rotty's true feelings in a surprising display of accidental honesty (warning: spoilers ahead).

As part of Shantae's mission to save Sequin Land, she must at one point descend into the Village of Lost Souls; a place that appears to be an afterlife of sorts. Spirits are often ferried there to forget about their past lives and misdeeds, but what Shantae didn't expect to encounter there was Rotty's soul as well. She's almost unrecognizable with her ghost manifesting as her former human self, and likewise for Rotty, she's unable to recognize Shantae, being that her memories have been wiped as a result of entering the village. However, when Shantae recovers Rotty's lost locket and returns it to her, something special happens.

Opening the locket reveals Rotty's two brothers, which begins to refresh some of her memories. She starts fondly recounting how her brothers always looked after her. As Rottytops continues to reminisce though, she begins to remember that someone else was always there for her as well, but she still struggles to recount the name. She starts describing how this person is so smart and friendly, and she wants to be just like them, but whenever she tries to reach out and tell them how much they mean to her, something always goes wrong. It's pretty clear at this point that Shantae knows the person in question here is herself, but she coyly decides to play along as oblivious, simply telling Rotty that she'll be sure to find her friend and tell her how important their friendship is. It's a very cute moment, and one that is so cleverly-presented in the way that it develops Rottytops' character. After all her screw-ups and mischief, she finally manages to tell Shantae how she really feels, yet she doesn't even know it.

This is a bizarre character concept that really shouldn't work, but the Shantae series takes inspiration from a common school of anime philosophy, which states, "If it exists, we can make it into a cute girl." And lo and behold, we are given Rottytops. Against all odds, it turns out even zombies can be cute.

The Faux Diversity of Battlefield V

This was actually something I wrote up a while ago but for one reason or another never got around to publishing. I figure it's still worth posting because the topic remains a problem for the entertainment industry as a whole, even if the Battlefield V controversy in particular has run its course. So anyway, enjoy my hot take.

Ya know, I like diversity in my media. I like having the option of playing a first person shooter or an adventure game. I like being able to command an entire army into battle, or just control a single character. I like playing female characters. My favorite video game character of all time is in fact a female. Video games have afforded us lots of different experiences over the years throughout their history thanks in large part to creative minds being granted the tools and freedom to explore new ideas. But when a game contains "checkbox diversity" or a "diversity quota" in which they include "diverse" characters for no other reasons than just to avoid criticisms of sexism and racism, or because it's just the way the current political winds are blowing, then your game is being anything but unique or diverse. It's only being diverse on a very superficial level, while on a more meaningful level it is actually being quite homogenous and unchallenging to your target audience.

Although I'm not a fan of the Battlefield series regardless, I've been thinking about why I found the BFV announcement mildly annoying. Funny thing is I'd probably play a female character if I had any plans to buy the game. But I'm just hard-pressed to believe that the addition of female soldiers is at all sincere. I mean, did DICE honestly put them in the game because they were passionate about some cool idea for shaking up the setting with female characters, or did they do it just to score faux-progressive points with the mainstream in the cheapest way possible, and then pat themselves on the back for how superficially diverse they are? Because given the way they've been treating this, it really feels like the latter.

Of course it's worth pointing out that women did serve in World War 2, but it would still be disingenuous to suggest that it was at all a 50-50 affair, let alone even close to that. It was not uncommon to see thousands of troops on the battlefield with not one woman in sight. So to the idea that this just gives devs free rein to fudge the numbers as much as they want because they found one woman serving somewhere, then we might as well depict every soldier as having a bear companion fighting alongside them, as the Polish army did at one point have a bear serving in its armed forces.

It is also perhaps fair to point out that the Battlefield series has never been realistic in many of its depictions of war. It is after all a video game, and respawning just seconds after receiving a fatal wound is hardly reflective of how real combat plays out. However I think this point ignores a very important distinction between realism and thematic consistency. Just because a game isn't realistic in a certain sense doesn't mean that anything should go. It would still come off as messy and wildly out of place if some characters were cel-shaded, while some had a more gritty art style, or if there were random wizards and aliens blasting spells and plasma cannons on the battlefield.

Now at this point you might object and say that such examples are clearly a bit more unrealistic than what DICE is pushing, but that's the point. Obviously there is a limit to one's suspension of disbelief; some just draw their line in the sand much sooner than when you get to aliens and wizards. You have a certain theme that you've chosen; you should stick with it.

DICE however wants to play both sides of the argument. On the one hand they will say "We'll always put fun over authentic," and that's fine, but then they'll go on to say things like, "The female soldier in the key art portrays an unseen and untold perspective of World War 2 that is often overlooked," which is worded in such a way that implies they actually are being historically accurate; it's just that it's a story that is often forgotten. No actually, it's just inaccurate. The reason it's an untold story is because it never happened. Stop trying to have your cake and eat it too.

It's tiptoeing a fine line between revisionist history and a "fun" alternate history take, and they can't seem to pick a side to be on. This mixed tone is similarly reflected in the trailer; the vehicles and weapons from the setting are there, but there's randomly a female soldier with a claw arm. The colors look slightly realistic and gritty, yet also cartoonish at the same time. It really just seems like this game has an identity crisis that would have been better served if they simply doubled down on being an alternate history or fantasy steampunk war game set vaguely in a world war 2-esque setting.

Does a game need to have a 4-quadrant diagram in its design document that perfectly balances out the cast? "OK, we have 5 white characters here, 5 Asians here, 5 middle easterners here, and finally 5 black characters over here. OH SHIT WE ADDED ANOTHER WHITE DUDE. Quickly! Make sure we add 1 more character in each of the 3 other categories! Then don't forget to sub-divide those out into 4 more categories so that we get 6 females in each too!" Like just stop. Not everything needs to be a perfectly proportioned pie chart. I just want people to make the damn game that they actually want to make, not constantly get hung up on who they're going to offend if they aren't perfectly represented at all times. It all just feels very manufactured, soulless, and done out of pure obligation. The forced nature of it all is what's leaving the sour taste in players' mouths.

Something that I think is often lost on well-meaning diversity advocates is that the reason we desire diversity is because it brings new perspectives and ideas to the table, not a color palette or genital swap. The reason why Black Panther is such a great step forward for Hollywood is not just because they plastered a superhero movie with a 99% black cast, but because it actually explored African ideas and culture in doing so. Chadwick Boseman wasn't just there to be the token black guy in an otherwise standard New York backdrop where he has to stop the evil alien from blowing up the Empire State building. So if you're going to add a racially/sexually diverse character for no other reason than just to fill a diversity quota, then you better actually bring an interesting new perspective to the table, or else as far as I'm concerned you're not really being "diverse" at all. It's just shallow McDiversity. A greasy diversity burger made from questionable ingredients with a side order of Coke and french fries.

In fact, through another lens, Black Panther isn't a very diverse movie at all. As was already pointed out, the vast majority of its cast is black without much else in between. And you know what? That's fine too. Not because it's representing a minority population, but because this is a movie specifically about exploring black perspectives in the superhero genre.

Would it have really added anything to the film if they made sure to swap out some characters for different races to balance out the cast? No, it would have only cheapened the narrative and damaged suspension of disbelief, as random white people and Asians would be roaming about without explanation in a setting that is supposed to be occupied with exclusively black tribes. Making sure that other races get to have their say would just be missing the point and needlessly cluttering the narrative.

A film isn't automatically in favor of animal cruelty just because it doesn't squeeze in a message about animal abuse, and likewise a film isn't automatically racist if it doesn't have a perfectly balanced representation of all races. We can have films about just exclusively black people, or just exclusively Asians, or god forbid, even exclusively white males fighting on the front lines in World War 2 if the narrative calls for it.

Another thing that is often overlooked is that sometimes portraying a setting with all its flaws and imperfections (lack of diversity included) helps to illustrate the realities of injustice, how we've grown as a society, and why we should strive to ensure we never go back to revisiting those times.

At the end of the day this is just a dumb video game, and I'm probably overthinking it, but at the same time I would be remiss to think that media doesn't have any social ramifications for the way it portrays historical settings - video games included.

When I was a kid, I saw The Patriot in theaters and took it to be a reasonably historical representation of the time period barring a few Hollywood bells and whistles, but looking back on it now, I'm rather annoyed with its shamelessly jingoistic portrayal of Americans fighting for their freedom, and the evil British soldiers coming to burn their churches down with innocent civilians inside. As if the Americans aren't stealing the land from the natives to begin with. They're just perfect saints. It's these kinds of portrayals that breed excuse-making when atrocities are committed in America's name, because America is always the good guy and we can't ever do anything wrong, right?

Anyway, revisionist history just irks me, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it I guess. DICE can do whatever they want, but I'd prefer that devs return to making games out of passion, not by rummaging a corporate checklist to make sure they've pandered to every kind of demographic. Regardless, I do feel this is just another phase of our current political climate. In years past, women and minorities have been underrepresented and mistreated, so I suppose it's only natural now that society has become more aware of it, it is trying to over-correct itself, but eventually the pendulum will swing back again. Hopefully at some point we can reach some proper balance where we aren't trying to exclude minorities from representation, yet are also mindful not to compromise artistic integrity merely to fulfill a diversity checklist. Instead, just make art to tell a good story, and if a particular role calls for a white male or a transgender Asian, nobody really cares.