Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation 2 and Branching Structure

A common element in most installments of the Super Robot Wars series is to have branching plot paths. In Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation 2 for example, the plot of the game branches three times. Each time, the cast of characters divides into two groups to accomplish different missions, and the player is forced to choose which of the two paths he wants to play through. After a few missions, the two paths reunite, and continues again down a single path until the next branching point. Unfortunately, while this structure does have some merit, it wrecks havoc on the the coherency of the game's plot.

The greatest problem is that plot elements which are introduced in a unified story section of the game are often developed or resolved in certain missions on one plot path during a split story section. For example, a major villain named Archibald Grims first challenges the heroes in the first few missions of the game, and recurs constantly through several battles. However, Archibald often only reappears to fight the heroes again on only one of the paths during split path sections. Furthermore, Archibald is finally defeated by the heroes for good during a split path. As a result, a player who takes the opposite paths that Archibald Grims doesn't appear on will be introduced to Grims, then wonder where he went and never get to see the resolution of his story.

This gets even more complicated when plot elements and characters are introduced during one of the branching sections. For example certain villains, such as one of the Inspectors, first appear on the battlefield during some early branching sections, but then reappear during a unified section. If a player picked a different path, then the player is suddenly introduced to a character who the characters in the game have already met. And following the problem listed above, these characters can also have their stories resolved during split story sections.

My brother actually experienced the result of this. During his first play through of the game, the Machinery Children were introduced off-screen, on the plot path my brother passed up. Later, they showed up to fight the main characters during a unified plot section. After that, the Machinery Children were defeated for good on a story branch my brother did not see. As a result, the Machinery Children were introduced off-screen, made a brief on-screen appearance, before they died off-screen.

The story becomes even more convoluted as a result of how the characters are divided up during split path sections. First off, there are two rough plot paths that the player chooses between during each split, based on the teams who go on the different missions: the Super Robot path (which always includes Kyosuke Nanbu, the main character) and the Real Robot path (which always includes the SRX team). However, the characters who make up these teams, and thus the sub-plots the teams deal with, are not consistent.

For example, a major sub-plot of the game is the rivalry between Sanger Sonvolt and Wodan Ymir. Wodan Ymir first appears on the Super robot route during the first split, and the first time you get to fight him (and where Sanger first show up) is again on the Super Robot route during the second split path section of the game. Then Sanger and Wodan both play a prominent role during the third unified section of the game. However, Sanger and Wodan finish their decisive battle during the third split path section on the Real Robot route.

Because of complications like this, the player is 100% guaranteed to run across the weird plot problems I outlined above. The player will never be able to see more than a few plot threads go from introduction, through development, to final resolution in one go through the game. And since the player can alternate between following the two different general routes, it is possible for the player to miss out on parts of every plot thread in the game.

This system has a lot of room for improvement. A good model to follow might be Final Fantasy VI's split scenario system, where the player had to go through all three paths during the one time the game split into multiple paths. A similar example is in Suikoden 3, where the entire first half of the game consists of split paths, where the player has to follow all of the routes to completion in order to reach the second half. If the Super Robot series let the player see both paths, then playing through OG2 would be a lot less confusing.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Final Smashes

One of the biggest additions in Super Smash Bros. Brawl is easily the Smash Ball and the character-specific Final Smash attacks that the glowing orb unlocks. Because of the incredible power of Final Smashes, the Smash Ball radically changes the flow of a match each time it appears. The item's movement is quick and erratic, forcing anyone who wants to use a Final Smash to drop what they were doing and chase after it, knocking away rivals while trying to grab Smash Ball themselves. The winner of this miniature competition gets access to a unique move that, if used properly, can radically change the course of a battle. I think the whole thing is a lot of fun.

Here are some things I like about the Final Smash system:

1) The Smash Ball's erratic movements, and the fact that it must be hit several times for someone to acquire a Final Smash, are both really good ideas. The chase these elements create makes it feel like whoever acquires a Smash Ball has earned it, and it makes the whole system is fair to every player. If a Smash Ball was just an item laying on the ground that could easily be picked up, it would not be as exciting, and it might lead to people feeling that luck was more of a factor than skill in the game,

2) I really like that Final Smashes are character specific. In previous iterations of the series, all of the most powerful attacks were items, mostly rare Pokemon, and were not associated with characters. Final Smashes put the emphasis back on the characters, which I think is a good thing.

3) A person can be awarded a Mercy Final Smash if they are badly losing a match. When I first heard about this I didn't like the idea, but after seeing it in play I changed my mind. This only occurs if a player is really far behind in score, usually so far that a single Final Smash will not be enough to turn their luck around. Even so, it gives that player a small hope, which can lead to dramatic comebacks (or even just a good attempt at one) and more interesting matches. Of course, realizing you were just given a Mercy Final smash can be disheartening as well...

4) I think that it is a good thing that you can knock a Smash Ball out of a character and prevent a Final Smash. It means that even the most powerful attacks can be countered, and rewards skill and aggression. However, this also leads to some imbalance, since there are many characters for whom this is a severe weakness, such as characters who need to carefully position before using a final smash like Ike or Meta-Knight, and others who don't need to fear it at all, such as transformers like Bowser or Sonic who can use a Final smash immediately.

Anyways, on to a few character-specific observations and comments.

I like the idea behind Samus's Zero Laser. The concept of a Final Smash that is somewhat more powerful than others (which I think the Zero Laser is), but can't be used often because of the character switch, is a solid one. As a person who heavily used Samus in Melee, I don't like Zero Suit Samus much, so I am not terribly happy with Samus being the one given such a Final Smash, but that is just a personal annoyance more than anything.

I think it was a serious mistake to allow any repetition in Final Smashes. Having three character all use the Landmaster Final Smash just emphasizes the fact that the Star Fox characters are too similar. Ness using PK Starstorm, a move he never learned in Earthbound, feels a bit forced, especially when Ness doesn't even use his own signature PSI ability (PK "Favorite Thing"). The fact that Toon Link uses the same Final Smash as Link feels like a wasted opportunity (maybe the very strong whirling slash from Minish Cap would have been better?).

I really like the cinematic Final Smash that Captain Falcon uses. I would have liked to see a few more that did something like that.

I think that either Marth or Ike should have had a Final Smash that emphasized that they were leaders of armies. King Dedede and Pit both summoned large armies of minions, so I see no reason that it wouldn't work for Marth to do so (I say Marth because his move is a lot less impressive than Ike's). A rain of arrows and spells followed by a Pegasus Knight charge would have been a lot of fun to watch.

I think it would have probably been more interesting if the Pokemon Trainer summoned a special Pokemon rather than use the Triple Finish Final Smash. It would have been a good way to showcase a powerful legendary Pokemon (like Mewtwo) at an impressive level of strength.

Other than that, I guess all I can say is that I generally like the various Final Smashes. They are a lot of fun.

SSBB: Subspace Emissary, part 2 and Stories in Fighting Games

A story mode can be a very useful thing for a fighting game. Even though fighting games are designed to primarily be a multiplayer versus mode experience, a single player (or two-player in Brawl's case) story mode can help draw a player into the game and further both their enjoyment and dedication to a game.

A really good example of this is Guilty Gear X2's story mode. Certainly, it is a very different experience from Subspace Emissary; GGX2's story mode is simply a progression of one-on-one fights with dialogue taking place between fights to further the plot, as well as a few branching paths in each character's story. However, GGX2's story mode accomplishes something very important: it fleshes out the characters and world way beyond the norm for fighting games. After playing through the story mode, a player develops a better understanding of the characters and becomes more attached to them.

This effect can also be seen in FPS games like Halo. First person shooters are built around multiplayer deathmatches, much like fighting games. However, Halo's story mode is one of its strongest features, even though it involves very different mechanics and structure than the it's multiplayer mode, much like Subspace Emissary does. Without its epic story fleshing out Master Chief's character, the SPARTANs would look like just another kind of space marine. However, that story did create and develop popular characters and built up a strong fan-base for the franchise.

One can argue that this treatment is unnecessary for a game series like Super Smash Bros. which is based on a cross-over of established characters from other series. These characters already have an identity of their own. However, not everyone has played all of the games these characters are from. For example, Lucas and Marth are from games that so far have not been released outside of Japan, and other characters like Pit and Ice Climbers are from very old games. So, it can't be assumed that a player necessarily knows anything about most of the characters. Furthermore, some of these characters (such as the two older ones I mentioned above) were never given much in the way of character depth or personality in their original games. So, there is merit in trying to establish who the various characters in the game are, even if it is just to raise the player's interest in other games.

So, how well does Subspace Emissary do this? Despite having no dialogue whatsoever, I think it does do a pretty good job. The cinematic scenes manage to inject a lot of personality into many of the characters. My favorite example is a scene where Ike, Marth, and Meta Knight observe a monster passing below them as they stand atop a cliff. Ike immediately jumps off the cliff to pursue, leaving Meta Knight and Marth staring at each other in surprise. Meta Knight then turns and follows, while Marth looks rather exasperated for a few moments. This scene establishes that Ike is a gung-ho type of character, while Marth is more of a "let's think things through" type. There are plenty of scenes like this through Subspace Emissary.

However, Subspace Emissary does not do everything perfectly. Most of all, each individual character does not get much screen time. Four characters in particular only appear in brief intro scenes. I would have probably followed in the footsteps of Guilty Gear X2 and given each character their own unique story path. That way, every character gets some time in the sun and a chance to be developed a bit. It would have been a good excuse to throw in some more mode completion character trophies too.

On that note, some of the development of character identity is done by the descriptions of various trophies. However, the discussion of Smash Bros. trophies might be worth a post in of itself.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl Characters

Well, as I continue to play and write about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, one thing that I have to comment on is the list of characters. There are even more characters in this game than in Super Smash Bros. Melee, which is obviously a good thing considering that the series is based around the idea of showcasing the good characters from throughout Nintendo's library of games. However, the details of the character list is something that I am not completely satisfied with. I guess I will break this down by series, just to keep things manageable.

Mario Bros.: I've got no complaints with the full cast of Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser, Yoshi, and Wario. Other than minor characters and characters who only appear in a single game, it is a very complete list. Adding any more would probably have been excessive.

Donkey Kong: Adding Diddy Kong to the game was a nice touch, though I still would have preferred if Dixie Kong also was in the game, simply because she was just as important to the great Donkey Kong Country games as Diddy (and even more important than Donkey, oddly enough). No really justifiable complaints here, though. I am actually rather glad they kept K. Rool out of the Smash Bros. series so far, because he is such a blatant and shallow derivation of Bowser that his presence would not add very much.

Metroid: I am glad that they (essentially) just stuck with Samus as a character to represent the Metroid series. It is a series that is entirely held together by only that one character, so I think trying to make any other characters iconic would just hurt the series. Of course, Zero Suit Samus is still Samus, so her addition is not a big problem.

Legend of Zelda: Here is where my real complaining starts. Link is good (though a Wolf form would have been nice, considering the Twilight Princess focus of this game), Zelda is good (though I feel that Sheik, a character who only appeared in one game and is unlikely to return any time soon, is probably unneeded), but Ganondorf is still a clone. They differentiated him from Captain Falcon a little more, but the Brawl version is still so far from any version of Ganondorf or Ganon in the Legend of Zelda series that he just doesn't seem to fit in at all. I think that making him more into a sorcerer like he was in Ocarina of Time, or a Swordsman like in he was in Windwaker, would have worked better. Finally, I like the concept of and addition of Toon Link, but his name is terrible.

Star Fox: Unfortunately, the Star Fox character list is far from perfect. Fox is still good and is an obvious choice, but it was a poor decision to have him be accompanied by both Falco and Wolf. Both of those characters are a bit too similar, since both are aggressive and confident rivals to Fox, and neither of them can easily be made distinct from Fox easily. In this case, I think Falco is probably the one who needs to go, since his moveset is far less original and interesting than Wolf's, and I approve of more villain characters getting a spotlight. It probably would have been better for Krystal to be the third Star Fox character, using the staff from Star Fox Adventures and a different moveset entirely. Certainly, the Smash Bros. series could use more good female characters.

Pokemon: The addition of Pokemon Trainer is such a good idea that I almost wonder why there are Pokemon separate from trainers at all. Pikachu and Jigglypuff could easily be integrated into being part of a trainer's line-up. I think there should be three trainers: the Male Trainer, a Female Trainer, and a Rival Trainer (a set-up which is proven to be central to the franchise in the main Pokemon manga), each with three different Pokemon (maybe each having one of the starters?). Beyond that wish, I have few problems with the current set of Pokemon characters.

Mother/Earthbound: I really think they should have picked either Lucas or Ness, and just stuck with one. Both are interesting, but there are just too similar. If they wanted to have more than one Earthbound character, it probably would have been better to add character who is different from Ness or Lucas, like Poo, or perhaps add a villain character.

Kirby: I think this set is pretty good. In fact, we probably should have gotten either Meta-Knight or King Dedede back in Melee. Those three characters are the three most important and memorable recurring characters in the Kirby franchise, so they really do all deserve to be there and they work well as Smash Bros. characters.

Fire Emblem: This is one group of characters that I am the least satisfied with. Anyone who reads the archives would know that I am a big fan of the Fire Emblem series, so I suppose I might be a bit biased, but just having Ike and Marth seems to be far too little for a series that has such a huge cast of interesting and varied characters. Ike and Marth are differentiated very well in Brawl, much better than Marth and Roy were, but they are both sword-using Lord characters in the Fire Emblem games, and there are many other major types of characters in fire Emblem who deserve a spot in a Smash Bros. game. Even ignoring the many characters who ride horses and wyverns, non-combatant healers, wimpy thieves, and swordsmen who would act like Lord clones, there are still many character archetypes in Fire Emblem that have recurring importance, such as Wind Mages (like Soren, Maric, and the Holsety users), female Light Mages (like Micaiah, Linda, and Julia), villainous Dark Mages (like Garnef, Manfroy, Nergal, and Izuka), Manakete who can take on a draconic form (Chiki and Myrhh), and the newer Laguz from the recent games, as well as various other interesting villains like Ike's nemesis the Black Knight or Marth's final foe (twice), Medius the Dark Dragon. Any one of these would add some variety to the Smash Bros. series. At the very least, there could have been more of these characters as assist trophies or as Subspace Emissary bosses.

Retro Characters: I have no complaints here. ROB, Mr. Game and Watch, the Ice Climbers, and Pit are all good characters. I wouldn't like having too many more retro characters, because I don't think it is a good idea to have a lot of forgotten characters squeeze out characters with long-standing popularity, but having a few around to celebrate Nintendo's long history is fine.

Others: Captian Falcon and Olimar are both good characters, so I have no complaints here, either. Well, I would have liked to see a Custom Robo character, but that is a minor complaint.

Third Party: There just should have been more third party characters in Brawl. Ever since Snake was announced, people have been desperately hoping for more third-party characters to be announced, but they ended up with only two, even fewer than the number Mr. Sakurai stated that he intended to put in the game. Certainly, characters who have been as iconic to the Nintendo console gaming experience as any first-party character, like Megaman or Simon Belmont, deserve to be in the Smash Bros. series. That said, I am just glad that there are any Third Party characters at all.


Overall, I really think the Smash Bros. series could use a bit more focus on character variety. The Subspace Emissary mode highlights the lack of female characters, especially heroic female characters, pretty dramatically (two of the three female characters are perpetual Damsels in Distress), and it suffers from the lack of villains (only Wario, Ganondorf, and Bowser, really, especially since Meta-Knight and King Dedede are not strictly villainous). More variety would make characters more interesting and add flexibility to possible future story modes, and it would also help avoid the perpetual Smash Bros. problem of too many characters having overly similar mechanics and movesets.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Subspace Emissary, part 1

My brother and I completed Subspace Emissary mode in Brawl yesterday, so it is time for my thoughts. I actually really liked the inclusion of a fully-fleshed out story mode in the game. While Brawl is built around its multiplayer versus mode, the adventure mode does add a lot to the game experience. However, I don't think Subspace Emissary is perfect in its execution.

My brother and I played through the entire Subspace Emissary mode using the 2-player co-op option, and my biggest complaint is that the implementation of this was sometimes shaky. In Subspace Emissary, the second player is limited to playing a helper character, while player one is the main character. This is obviously based on a similar mechanic in Kirby Super Star. However, unlike in Kirby Super Star, where the helper controlled by the second player is completely disposable, since it can be easily regenerated by Kirby, the second player character in Subspace Emissary uses the same extra-life count as the first player. So if the helper dies three times, the first player has no extra lives left for himself.

What this means is that, unlike in Kirby Super Star, the two players are a lot more even in expendability. There are four real differences between player one and player two: the screen is always centered on player one, player two can warp to player one's position at any time, only player one can open doors, and the game ends if player one dies and the team has no extra lives, but not if player two dies. Now then, the last one is particularly annoying. There are points in the game, such as the meat-grinder of a final battle, where I might have had a shot at winning the battle if I could have kept fighting after my brother (playing as player one) was eliminated. However, the game arbitrarily prevented that possibility, even though my brother did get to keep fighting a boss after I was eliminated. That experience just feels unfair and pointless.

The camera always being centered on player one was also annoying, particularly when it resulted in my character's death when my brother accidentally ran too fast. While the warp gets around most of these problems, it still prevents player two from fighting enemies or collecting items too far away from player one. Game code that controls the camera zoom and position to accommodate multiple players is used all of the time in versus mode, so making some allowances for the second player to move independently of the first player should have been technically possible.

Anyways, the biggest problem in Subspace Emissary is that it has a lot of very tricky platforming elements involving bottomless pits and deathtraps in a fighting game. While there is a lot of jumping around in battles, many of the characters in the game, particularly the heavy-weights, were simply not built to handle the challenging jumps that sometimes appear in Subspace Emissary. Since there are over 30 characters in Brawl, each of whom has different jumping capabilites, there is no way to balance every trap for every character. As a result, my brother and I lost more lives to bottomless pits than to the battles in the game, which doesn't seem right. Since Super Smash Bros. is primarily a fighting game, it might have been better to make the adventure mode more of an old-school brawler, like Final Fight. The parts of the game that focus on those elements more flow better than the platforming ones.

I have to admit that I like the team focus of the game, where extra lives represented other characters coming in to reinforce the fighting team. It gives the players more chances to play with different members of the game's considerable cast. Breaking the characters into teams for most of the story also worked very well. However, I guess that I will cut this post short, and talk about the story, writting, and directing of Subspace Emissary in my next post.

Alternate Costumes

Amazingly enough, this blog post will not be about Super Smash Bros. Brawl (though I suppose it is tangentially related). Instead, want to talk about a more general concept of alternate costumes for characters, particularly in RPGs. I would talk about their role in fighting games and the like, but that is straightforward enough that I don't think I have ever seen it done in an ineffective manner (though the quality of the costumes themselves is always up to debate in some games). However, in RPGs, alternate costumes tend to be poorly implemented.

One major problem facing alternate costumes in an RPG is that choosing a character's costume is not a choice made independent of other concerns. For example, in Ar tonelico, the Reyvateil's alternate costumes are equipment that control stats. In Tales of Symphonia, you need to give up a title that boosts your stat gains at level-up in order to use an alternate costume. In Xenosaga Episodes 2 and 3, alternate costumes take up skill slots (in Episode 2) or an equipment slot (in Episode 3), and while they have stat benefits, they tend to be sub-optimal choices in the long run. In all of these cases, alternate costumes may as well not exist as an option, because players tend to go for options that give the most mechanical benefit, rather than the options with the most pleasing aesthetics. However, other games demonstrate that such a choice is not necessary. For example, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has a system where you can simply change character costume between several different options independently from any other choice, simply by disconnecting it from any other system. Another interesting option is seen in Wild ARMs 5, where costume is linked to armor, but there are whole sets of armor that give the same alternate costume and similar types of stat benefits. The implementation is not perfect in that game, but the idea of linking different costumes to a sets of armor with different stat benefits is a good one.

A related issue to the above is the direct linking of the appearance of a character's clothing to equipment, seen in many MMORPGs and some other games, like the PS1 RPG Legend of Legaia. I suppose that there is no problem with this in theory, but in execution the effect tends to be flawed. Too often, a player character looks terrible because of mechanical reasons such as optimal sets of gear being created by mixing bits and pieces from different armor sets, coherent sets being difficult to assemble, or coherent sets not existing in the first place. One solution is for the designers to design armor sets so that optimal sets of equipment match together well into a decent-looking character model, and to avoid creating situations where the best option is to mix gear from very different looking sets of equipment. Of course, a good alternative is to use the same system as the Phantasy Star Online games and separate equipment (which constantly changes) and character appearance (which is set when a character is first created), so they are not dependent on each other.

One other thing worth noting about console RPGs regarding alternate costumes is that most of the time they seem to only change for battle scenes, but not for field screens or story scenes, which can be somewhat jarring and annoying. I suppose this is probably a technical limitation, and it might be already be on its way to being a thing of the past if some of what I hear about Lost Odyssey is true, but it is worth mentioning that having that kind of difference between battle scenes and everything else should be avoided if possible.

Anyways, a lot of what wrote about concerning RPGs can be applied to other kinds of games, as well. For example, you can chose alternate costumes in Drakengard, but you have to equip a costume-type Orb as your only accessory to do so, which means you need to give up one of the defensive items or other powerful accessories that are necessary to survival in that game, making an alternate costume a very poor choice (as a result, I never used one, no matter how much I liked the alternate looks themselves). In contrast, the Way of the Samurai games make appearance something you can control whenever you start a new game, and you are free to chose whatever you like without worrying about affecting something important. Also, as I said before, fighting ames tend to get this right almost every time, and set a good example. Overall, I think the freedom to make a character look cool is more important and valuable than the mechanical variety added by making it a choice based on opportunity cost.

Unlockable Content

Super Smash Bros. Brawl apparently has a lot of unlockable content. With secret  characters, hidden stages, unlockable music, and special trophies all to collect, I am beginning to think that it will take a very long time to unlock everything in the game. Thinking about it though, why do game designers force players to jump through hoops in order to unlock certain kinds of content? Obviously the designers at Nintendo could have simply made every stage and character available from the get go in Brawl. So why did they choose to make the player have to fulfill all kinds of unusual tasks in order to unlock content for multiplayer matches?

A couple months ago, while writing one of my posts on Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, I realized that forcing the player to unlock certain events in that game was a very interesting way of making the player play the game long enough to get used to the controls and learn to enjoy playing the game. As I stated in that post, the game takes a little getting used to, and using the dangling carrot of unlockable content to coerce the player to practice at various events enough to win gold medals was a pretty good method of solving that problem.

In one sense, this use for unlockable content is a sub-set of the more general purpose: rewarding the player for putting a lot of time and effort into the game. A good example of this is Disgaea, which has at least two characters that can be recruited by diving very deep into the game's high-level post-game. While beating a game and watching the credits roll can give a player a lot of satisfaction, most games nowadays come with a lot of optional content, and many different scales of difficulty. Accomplishing a very difficult task and getting no kind of reward for it is a very frustrating experience for a player. Unlockable content generally works very well as a reward like this.

A very good example of a game that uses unlockable content right is Devil May Cry 3. Devil May Cry 3 is a pretty straight-forward action game. Once the player has beaten the game, there is not much more to do in the game except attempt to beat the game again on a higher difficulty level. As a result, the game has unlockable costumes, game modes (new difficulty settings and Heaven or Hell mode), artwork, and even a god-mode (Super Dante). In Devil May Cry 3, these unlockable features serve the main purpose of rewarding players who put in the time and effort mastering the game to the degree required to beat such a hard game on its hardest difficulty settings. They can also serve as bait, to try and get players to attempt higher difficulty settings.

So then, what is the point of making a significant portion of the cast and stages in Brawl unlockable? I think in part it is marketing. There has been a lot of buzz built up over the last year about which characters would be in Brawl, even to the point where people created hoaxes to fill in the information gap. Having secret characters was a good way to help build this speculation and interest in the game. The rest of the reason is reward. Most of the stages and music are handed out as rewards for players who take the time to clear event matches and other optional content in the game.