SRW:OG2 Victory Conditions and Optional Objectives

I have been replaying Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2 quite a lot over the last week or so (I have completed 23 out of 43 missions so far), and replaying that game has given me a lot to think about regarding good and bad ways a game can present victory conditions and optional objectives to a player.

Missions in Super Robot Wars: OG2 can be very complex and involved, which I think is a very good thing. For example, one mission is split into two phases: the first requires you to lure a number of enemy units outside of a certain area and then destroy them within a time limit, and in the second phase both you and the enemy are reinforced with additional units and you must reduce the enemy commander's hit points to less than 70% of maximum. Mixed in with these two phases are a number of different story events, hidden requirements for unlocking secret units, many opponents you can fight in order to gain experience and money, and an optional "Battle Mastery" mission objective. This kind of complexity is typical for a mission in that game, and I think that such complexity is great. However, there are a number of things I need to criticize regarding this structure.

First off, I need to mention the way the victory conditions themselves are stated. In the above example, the victory condition in the first phase is stated explicitly, but the victory condition in the second phase is stated as "Defeat All Enemies," even though the only factor that determines actual victory is in fact the hit point total of a single foe. The victory condition "Defeat All Enemies" is in fact extremely unreliable in that game, and is listed in the victory condition menu when the actual victory condition can mean anything from "Defeat 15 enemies, at which point the enemy reinforces and conditions change" to "Either bring the boss's life down to 50% or wait three turns." Also, if there happens to be multiple victory conditions, or a victory condition happens to be optional, it is never specified, and only a single victory condition is listed as if it were the only one. This vagueness can often frustrate me to no end, especially when I misdirect time and energy towards one goal, only to result in me not having enough time and energy to accomplish the real mission objective. I think that games should be honest when they spell out mission objectives for the player, and SRW: OG2 is terribly dishonest in that regard.

The unreliable nature of information regarding victory conditions is especially problematic concerning hidden units and items that need to be unlocked. I really like having a large number of hidden things in a game that reward players who are willing to undergo an optional challenge, and I like that SRW:OG2 has so many (and makes them worth the effort), but a big problem with the game is that there are absolutely no in-game hints to their existence, at all. For example, to unlock one hidden unit, you need to have a certain character (Arado) defeat four out of the five available enemies before completing the first phase of mission 19 (among a few other conditions). There is no indication in the game at all that defeating opponents at that time has any importance, let alone is linked to a hidden unit. Further, if you accomplish that objective, there is no indication that have completed a hidden objective. When I first went through the game, I had no idea about the importance of that particular battle, and I never even had any hints at all about the possibility of acquiring that particular hidden unit. Even now on my second playthrough, when I have successfully accomplished the main requirements for getting that unit, I have had no confirmation yet in the game, and I will not until I actually get the unit a few missions from now. Hidden objectives are great, but there needs to be some way for a player to know about their existence without reading a strategy guide or FAQ.

Finally, I want to talk about the Battle Mastery conditions. I think my brother mentioned these before on this blog, and they deserve their own post, but for now I will just say that they are optional objective in each map that have a few problematic interactions with what I have been mentioning above. The Battle Mastery conditions themselves are explicitly laid out (more so than actual victory conditions, which sometimes helps shed some light on how the battle which actually play out), but some conditions work better than others. Namely, there are some missions in which the Battle Mastery condition says something like "Complete this map in 4 turns", even when the main victory condition is deceptive. Because of this, it can be difficult to determine if you are on target or not for achieving the Battle Mastery, and it is easy to end up missing the Battle Mastery entirely because of that confusion. For example, I once mistook the listed victory condition "Bring Seolla down to 30% of her HP" as the actual victory condition, when the actual victory condition is "Defeat All Enemies" (Seolla simply flees the battle when you bring her down to 30%, changing the listed condition). Since the Battle Mastery was "Complete the map by the end of the fifth player phase", the fact that I held back on attacking Seolla because I wanted to complete a hidden objective before the map finished, and avoided targeting the boss because I thought he was optional, resulted in me failing to complete the Battle Mastery objective (which resulted in me going back to play the mission from the start again because I couldn't afford to miss another Battle Mastery while only halfway through the game).

Victory conditions are the guidelines a player uses to help determine how to manage his own time and own preferred way to play a game. Vague and unclear guidelines simply lead to a less fun experience for the player, and should be avoided.

Metal Gear Solid Story Pacing

While I am a big fan of the Metal Gear Solid series, there is one somewhat consistent problem with the series that bothers me whenever I play many of the games in the series, particularly the original: the plot of the game isn't paced quite right. Namely, the games tend to create a lot of dangling plot threads and unanswered questions, but holds off on resolving these plot details until the very end of the game. This results in the final sequences of Metal Gear Solid games getting significantly slowed down and dragged out, often to their detriment. 

The final sequence of the first Metal Gear Solid, and with it all of the big plot revelations of the game, is initiated when Solid Snake starts using the PAL key to "deactivate" Metal Gear. From this point until the end of the final chase scene, here are the plot revelations that are made:

*Naomi Hunter's entire life history.

*The details of Liquid Snake's Xanatos Gambit.

*Master Miller was Liquid Snake the entire time.

*The existence of a bio-weapon called FoxDie.

*The fact that Snake's job was to just be a carrier for FoxDie the entire mission.

*Grey Fox's motivation for fighting Snake, and that he killed Naomi's parents.

*Most of Liquid Snake's life history, and why he looks like Snake.

*The existence of Les Enfants Terrible.

*Naomi's modification to FoxDie.

These scenes resolve the entire plot of Metal Gear Solid other than the stories of individual bosses and a few side characters. This in of itself would not necessarily be a bad thing, if it wasn't for the fact that many of these plot elements were only seriously brought up in this ending sequence. In particular, FoxDie's existence was only hinted at a few strange deaths earlier in the game. Liquid Snake's relationship with Snake was only developed earlier in the game through his strangely similar appearance to Snake, and through a few cryptic statements he makes during a boss fight. So entire complex plot threads are only seriously introduced and explained over the course of the last two hours of the game.

The result of this structuring of the plot is that between two phases of the final boss battle, the destruction of Metal Gear REX and the final one-on-one duel, the player is treated to a long monologue (maybe soliloquy?) from Liquid Snake where he explains about the entire Les Enfants Terrible project. It takes up a fair amount of time, and as a result weakens the pacing and fluidity of the final battle.

Many of these big revelations didn't even need to be put off until the end of the game. Unlike the information on FoxDie and such, which would have derailed the plot if Snake learned about it earlier in the game, much of the backstory of Liquid Snake could have been told earlier in the game. Knowing that Liquid Snake was Snake's twin brother, or that they were clones of Big Boss, probably wouldn't have seriously changed Solid Snake's actions in the game. Ditto for much of the information about Grey Fox. In fact, revealing more information on Liquid Snake earlier in the game could have made him more compelling of a villain earlier in the game, since he spends most of the story a complete enigma.

Following People Around All Day

I guess as a continuation of this whole "giving identity to lots of characters" vibe that my brother and I have been writing about lately, I wanted to follow up on my last post. After thinking a bit, I realized that there is one more rather good way to make characters interesting, even without forcing the player to pay attention to a character through a difficult character recruitment phase. In fact, this method is pretty good for making both controllable characters and NPCs interesting. This method is seen in at least two games I am aware of: Radiata Stories and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, two games where every character is on a set schedule, wandering around acting out their daily lives.

In these two games, time passes hour by hour regardless of what the player does. As it does so, all of the characters wander around on their own paths. A single character may leave their house in the morning, go talk to friend, walk around town a bit after that, go to work in the afternoon, work all day, and then return home to sleep at night. At different times, such a character may say different things, offer different services, potentially trigger a story sequence, or simply lead the player to different places. This has the potential to give quite a bit of depth to a character by fleshing out the character's personality and quirks, allowing a character to belong to multiple different groups of people, and making the character seem more life-like and less like a static part of the scenery.

An important effect of giving every character a schedule is that it encourages the player to closely examine the game world and its characters. It becomes fun and interesting to go to different places at different times, hang around at one place all day to see what happens and who comes by, or just follow a person around all day and see what they do. Radiata Stories and Majora's Mask both reward such behavior, which makes the experience even more fun. It is impossible to complete the Kafei quest in Majora's Mask without exploring the game in this manner, and the complexity of that quest makes that particularly sub-plot and its characters memorable even for the Legend of Zelda series. In Radiata Stories, there are some hidden things you can only find like this, such as a character you can only recruit by following the leader of the Warrior Guild through the maze-like sewer as she goes on her daily trip to pay respect at a hidden shrine, or a brief moment in which an arrogant and aloof girl watches over her sick brother late at night.

Another good aspect of such a system is that it allows for the plot of the game to have more meaningful changes to the actions of generic characters and NPCs. In more traditional styles of game, NPCs may change where they are standing or what they are saying, but in this system NPCs may change their entire daily schedule based on a story event, which can highlight the importance of the story upon the setting and make all of the characters more complex. The changes in a region that you can trigger in Majora's Mask by completing side-quests or defeating a boss are a great example of this at work.

There are certainly some problems and limitations with such a system, though. As is shown by the examples I have listed, it works best in a limited, but detailed setting, usually built around a town that works as a hub for all of the player's activity, because it would be absurdly difficult to implement it in a wider setting, and it would be equally more difficult for the player to understand the cycles of a larger setting and number of characters. Also, it can lead to problems where the player as to spend an hour of play time just to complete a minor task he set out to do if he times his actions improperly. That said, I think the potential benefits of such a system far outweigh the potential drawbacks.

Lots of Characters, continued

Part of the problem with having lots of characters in a RPG is making sure that the player actually has the incentive to use more than a few favorite characters. Sometimes, there are games that have lots of characters and little incentive to use more than a handful. For example, most Fire Emblem games give the player dozens of characters, far more than what the player can field in a single mission. However, there are strong incentives in the gameplay of many Fire Emblem games to focus on only using a handful of favorite characters. Part of this is that many of the later recruitable characters are mechanically near-duplicates of earlier ones, sometimes with inferior stats. There is no reason to build up any characters outside a small group of favorites.

Even though most of its iterations have only a few characters, the Final Fantasy series yields some interesting trends after some analysis. Recent FF games have often given the player a group of six or seven highly customizable characters, yet only let the player use three of them at any given time. Many players have realized that there is no drawback to focusing on building up and using only three of the characters (half the team) and ignoring the rest; in fact, it is an advantageous strategy. In an environment like this, giving the player an optional character late in the game is not a very meaningful reward.

And yet, there is one Final Fantasy game that did reward the player with optional characters: Final Fantasy VI, which had fourteen characters in total, far more than any other Final Fantasy. Arguably, all but 3 of these characters are optional, since the player has to undertake many optional quests to recruit/regain most of them in the second half of the game. However, the game gives the player strong incentives to use all of these characters, and rewards the player for seeking out the most elusive and optional ones.

First off, all of the characters in FFVI are very different mechanically. Not only do the different characters have wildly varying stats and equipment, they all possess powerful, unique special abilities. Some of them, such as Gau, even operate under very different rules than other characters. So, choices about which character to use can go beyond mere personal preference.

Second, FFVI gives the player situations where using different party combinations is advantageous. The Tower of Magus, for example, is a dungeon where only magic can be used. So, a party of nothing but strong magic-users is a good choice to use for clearing it. A party of nothing but physical fighters would work poorly.

Third, there are points in the game where the player can actually use more than a few characters at once, or on alternate paths. In a military battle a quarter of the way through the game, in the Pheonix Cave, and in the final dungeon, the player can switch between up to three teams. Thus, the player can actually make use of having a lot of characters.

Finally, the game forces the player to use certain characters in his party at various points in the game. The player has to send Locke and Celes to the Empire or use Shadow on the floating continent for example. While it takes control out of the player's hands, it both forces the player to keep certain characters in use, and gives the designer a chance to make characters more developed by including them in the story.

Many successful games built around having many characters employ these at least some of these four techniques. Here are some individual examples:

Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2 does a good job of mechanically differentiating its various characters and mechs. Some mechs can dodge almost anything, others can absorb huge amounts of damage, while others can attack numerous foes at once. While mechs tend to fall into general categories, they all have individual quirks and uses.

Chrono Cross is actually very good at encouraging different team choices. Since most dungeons and bosses are dominated by a single element, it is advantageous to always bring at least one character with the opposing element (to attack with) and one character who is of the same element (who resists attacks).

Suikoden III is a great example of a game which gives the player opportunities to use lots of characters. Not only does the mass combat system let the player field up to ten units of five characters each, the multiple perspective system of the game lets the player use various different teams. Not to mention the final dungeon forces the player to create three teams which each challenge their own major boss.

Again, Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2 is good at using the story to make the player use certain characters. In almost every stage, the game forces the player to deploy one or two specific characters who have their plot developed a little more along the course of the battle. So, the player is encouraged to use almost every character.

Difficulty in Recruiting Characters

This topic is pretty closely related to my brother's last post concerning the ways you can differentiate characters in a large cast. There is a major factor regarding that I want to mention: making the act of recruiting a character itself distinct is one of the most important things for making a character memorable. Often, in a game in which you can recruit a large number of optional characters, optional characters will not have any importance to the plot and will have few story elements based on them. In games like that, the only story sequences where a designer has room to make a character memorable is the scene in which you recruit the character.

A good example of this principle at work is seen in the Suikoden series of RPGs. It is a good example for two reasons. The first reason is that, in playing through those games, I have recruited hundreds of characters, but only a fraction of those characters actually stick out in my mind. The second reason is that there is a wide variety of different ways you use to recruit characters in those games, ranging from characters who can be recruited simply by talking to them, to characters who require extremely complex and long sidequests in order to be convinced to join. As a whole, I believe that characters who are harder to recruit are much more memorable and interesting.

A good example of this principle in action is seen in the character of Jeane in the Suikoden series. In Suikoden 1, you can recruit her simply by talking to her and asking her to join. In Suikoden 2, Jeane appears again, is recruited the same way, fulfills the same important role in your team, and I did not even recognize her as a recurring character until I played Suikoden 1 again. However, by Suikoden 5 she is one of the only two characters to have appeared in all five games (even though one is set over a hundred years apart from the rest), and recruiting her involves diving down into an forgotten ancient ruin of a lost civilization in order to "retrieve something she left behind". A character who was easily forgettable in the first few games is transformed into one of the most mysterious and interesting characters of the Suikoden series, simply by moving the unusual aspects of her character into the phase when you trying to recruit her, rather than leaving it wrapped up in hidden scenes and hard-to-acquire information.

Another good example is the set of gamblers who appear in the Suikoden games. Almost every gambler in that series requires that you defeat them in their preferred game of chance before they will join. All of these characters are completely forgettable, and are so uninteresting that I don't even feel like looking up their names. In a variant of this, the character Linfa from Suikoden 5 is a gambler who makes a similar challenge, cheats you out of your money in order to pay off her debts to a suspicious individual, and then challenges you to a game several more times in several more places while showing contradicting goals and motivations, before eventually being forced into joining your group by the suspicious individual. As a result, Linfa is given a chance to be portrayed as a character with her own story, rather than just a random gambler whose only character trait is a love of gambling.

As a whole, I consider Suikoden 5 to have one of the best casts of optional characters in any of the Suikoden games, and that is in large part due to the unusually high difficulty of recruiting characters in that game. There are some potential allies who have very involved and fun sidequests in that game, many of which reveal interesting things about the main plot. In contrast, I can hardly remember any characters at all from Suikoden 4, a game where the majority of characters are recruited simply be talking to them, and of those characters I remember I can't think of many distinct traits.

Anyways, these musings should not be interpreted as a statement that recruitment difficulty and complexity is the only factor in determining how memorable a character will be. Things like concept, character design, novelty, and mechanical usefulness are extremely important, after all. However, a lot of those traits will never be shown off properly unless the player is given the time to actually pay attention and learn about those things, and one of the best opportunities is when that character is being recruited.

Differentiating Lots of Characters in RPGs

Every once in a while, a game company will create a game where it is possible to recruit a very large number of characters. The Suikoden series is the best example of this, where each entry in the series lets the player recruit 108 characters (or more). Recruiting this many characters can be a lot of fun, since recruiting a character can be a bigger and more meaningful reward for a sidequest than receiving a treasure. However, introducing lots of recruitable characters involves making dozens or even hundreds of characters useful and interesting, which can be a tall order for a game designer.

One of the way the Suikoden series handles this problem is by giving recruitable characters various different roles and functions. Of the 108+ characters in a Suikoden game, usually only a fraction consist of main combat characters. Other kinds of character can include shopkeepers, gamblers, minigame operators, commanders for the mass combat system, and information brokers. Since no two of these kind of character typically overlap, these characters are always distinct and useful.

However, there still remain several dozen battle characters that the game designers need to make unique. A lot of this is carried out by giving each character a distinctive appearance and unique weapon. Some characters also come equipped with unique runes (the basis for special attacks and magic powers) that only they can use. However, there are usually still a lot of characters with similar stats and uses to other characters. Particularly in later Suikoden games that allow a lot of customization, many characters end up looking a lot like others.

Radiata Stories tries something a little different. There are 177 recruitable characters in Radiata Stories, and all of them are solely useful for battle. However, the game tries to differentiate them and make them useful by completely doing away with character customization outside of the main character. The player can't change the equipment of any recruitable character, and no character other than the hero can learn new attacks or skills through the player's effort. Furthermore, it is difficult to keep more than a few characters up to level with the main hero at a time. As a result, characters can fall behind and become outdated quickly.

Yet, this is actually a decent solution for having lots of characters. By forcing the player to phase out older characters and recruit newer, more powerful character, the player is much more likely to use a larger fraction of the game's cast. Also, fixing the abilities and attacks of side-characters also gives the designers more room to differentiate them than in a system with lots of customization. However, a lot of the characters fall into clear archetypes and often wear similar uniforms to each other, so quite a few characters end up looking like near-clones of other characters.

While it usually doesn't have as many characters as the two games listed above, the Super Robot Wars series can often have dozens of pilots and mechs to choose from. Each kind of mech has a unique set of attack moves and stats, that while they can be upgraded, their basic parameters are fixed. So, every mech has unique attacks with distinctive, over-the-top animations. Furthermore, pilots are differentiated by their stats, which mechs they can pilot, their unique list of spirit commands, and their theme-music. So, even if the characters often have similar stats, they look and feel very different in play.

My final example is Chrono Cross, which had 40 or so characters. While they all had unique looks, personalities, and even accents, many of them were not differentiated enough mechanically. While there were numerous weapons that different characters used, large categories of character equipped the same weapon. And while every character had three unique special moves, almost all of those attacks were either single target attacks or all enemy attacks. So, there isn't much mechanical variation between characters. The only important mechanical choice to make is choosing what element of character you want to bring along, so it is possible to play through the entire game using only five or so characters.

Hmm, I am beginning to ramble and go off of my point. I think I will get into a more focused discussion of some of these elements in my next post.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Stage Builder

I think the fact that I am going to write about the Super Smash Bros, Brawl Stage Builder is a sign that I need to find more inspiration for this blog soon. Oh well...

I really like that the game designers put a Stage Builder into SSB Brawl. If implemented well, a system that lets a player create more stages for a game can add a bit to the long-term enjoyability of the game. Also, in my opinion, it is both easier to do and more rewarding than a create-a-character system (which usually ends up either with the player only controlling a character's looks, without being able to change anything that affects actual gameplay, or a limited and difficult to balance system). That said, I am not convinced that the designers of this game actually succeeded in making an interesting Stage Builder.

There are at least two big problems with the SSB Brawl Stage Builder, both of which stem from the limited number of pieces with which you can build stages. The first problem is that there are not a wide variety of different gimmicks and special parts that you can add. I have not unlocked any hidden parts yet (and I have heard that there are not many), but so far the choices are very limited. Other than normal blocks and floor tiles, the main choices are ladders, floating platforms (of one size), falling blocks (of one size), ice blocks (mostly of one size), and spikes (of one size). There are no other gimmicks like flaming traps, retracting spikes, larger moving platforms, platforms that randomly drop those standing on them, cannons to launch characters, etc. Also, it seems impossible to control things like gravity, water level (or presence of water at all), upward or downward flows of air, or any of the other effects that exist in various normal stages and areas of the Subspace Emissary mode.

One particularly harsh limitations in the stage builder that relates to the problem above is that it is impossible to layer any kind of block, or even fit anything but normal blocks closely together. Most objects require a very large amount of space (most of the "Structures" require far too much), and this means that it can be difficult to layer in a complicated design. For example, you need a fairly large amount of space to have a block that will fall out beneath you and drop you onto a spike trap, so much space that it prevents such a gimmick from being used in places where it seems logical.

The other, and perhaps even more problematic, problem with the Stage Builder is the lack of purely aesthetic, or at least mostly aesthetic, components for stages. For each of the three stage types there is only one way for any kind of floor or trap to look. The different stage types have different "Structures", but these blocks are all minor variations of "object standing by itself in your way", and can't be used to replace structural pieces. Also, the differences between the three stage types in the main structural elements are very minor. As a whole, there is almost no way to try to create a stage with a unique or interesting look; it is only possible to control a stage's function. I find this to be unsatisfying.

The Stage Builder is a good idea, but it just seems too simplistic and it has too few options for me to like it.