Some of you may be aware that I’ve got a small history in Let’s Plays on other forums. My most recent LP was on the Penny Arcade Adventures series, a trio of RPGs starring the characters from the much-loved webcomic. As a loyal fan of Gabe and Tycho, I enjoyed the first two games with a passion – they built a deep and charming world that leaped between drama and comedy without skipping a beat. When the series was cancelled after only two episodes I was afraid I’d never see a continuation – but then the series was picked up by Zeboyd Games, another of my favourite developers. Everything was in order for Episode 3 to become one of my favourite RPGs of all time.
It wasn’t. In fact, I can only say that the game was a massive disappointment for me, considering I’d been waiting the best part of 4 years to play it.
Oh, Gabe. Oh, Tycho. Where did it go so wrong for you two?
The first issue is probably clear as soon as you see the main menu. If you’ve ever played one of Zeboyd’s previous games – the RPGs Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII – this screen will look very familiar.
OK, that’s just uncanny.
This is the main menu from CStW. As you can see not much has changed, and I can tell you that the options for both games are pretty much identical. If anything, PA3 has less content than its predecessor, because there are no bonuses to speak of. (Except the option to make your characters gender-swapped or furries, but compared to full-blown bonuses like the Bestiary and the collectable Bromides throughout the game, it’s a very poor showing.)
A lot of the same generic sound effects and graphics are used again, as well. While nothing in regards to this is outright bad so far, the whole thing just reeks of laziness. It’s not the best note to start a game on, and it gave me a poor impression of what was to follow from the very beginning.
I’ll break the review up into two distinct segments – one covering the gameplay of Penny Arcade Episode 3, and the other discussing the game’s story. The former will be pretty much spoiler-free; the latter, of course, will not. In both instances, I’ll be discussing the issues I have with the game and why I feel it doesn’t match up to the previous games in the franchise – or even to other Zeboyd games in general.
Gameplay
With regards to things like overworld exploration, Zeboyd has never been the sort to reinvent the wheel. It follows a well-beaten path with regards to map exploration – their old games basically served as respectful parodies of the 8-bit RPGs of old.
That’s right, Cthulhu. Savour that seaside air.
Of course, there was a point where the similarities had to stop. Making a game exactly like the 8-bit adventures of old just wouldn’t fly nowadays – the genre has advanced and expanded, and as a result the games have to expand as well. And of course, when it comes to RPGs, having a fun and interesting battle system is more or less a necessity.
This was something that the old Zeboyd games did really well. They streamlined combat while giving enough room for experimentation and personal tweaking. For example, CStW had a system revolving around Insanity, an extra status effect you can inflict on enemies which will increase their strength but lower their defense. You can build combos of weak attacks and end it with a big Finisher attack for massive damage. The only healing item you need to worry about is the Potion, which serves to cure absolutely everything but comes in short supply.
>A WILD GOOEZ APPEARS!
COMMAND?
What makes this system work is the speed. Everything moves in double-time – there are some flashy effects, but nothing that takes more than half a second, and there are no waiting times anywhere. Gameplay moves as quickly as you want it to – whether it’s hammering the attack button to end a fight quickly or jumping back and forth between screens to deliberate your next move. Everything is at your fingers, and even though you have a lot of options it’s not enough to make your head cave in.
In comparison, Episode 3’s battle system is a bit of a mess.
We who are already dead salute you.
At its core, PA3 is a game with an identity crisis. It wants the no-frills simplicity of 8-bit and 16-bit RPGs, but it also wants the complexity and depth of something from the PS1 era. The result is a game with a very confused and awkward battle system.
To start off with, there’s an ATB system that’s taking very obvious cues from the Grandia series. Characters move along in order from left to right based on their speed, and act when they reach the right, but some skills can act as ‘interrupts’ and knock enemy actions backwards. This alone could be the foundation of a battle system, but the game goes further. In fact, it goes a little too far.
I don’t understand how a game can have a class like this and not be instantly amazing.
Along with the ATB system, you have Class Pins which let you use powers of the Classes you collect throughout the game. The number of options is staggering – like stat-boosting stances from the Tube Samurai, devastating prophecies from the Apocalypt, or even the ability to turn all your enemies into hobos. All of these have a lot of interesting and exciting potential to try and play around with.
Unfortunately, the results are usually quite disappointing because of the system’s limitations. Let’s make a quick comparison with another game that does something similar – Final Fantasy V, and its job classes.
Bald Money had never been the most popular currency.
FF5 gives you jobs in small drops, about half a dozen at a time. In-between you have plenty of time to experiment and fiddle around with what you like. What’s important, though, is that your choices feel good. If you pick a Summoner class, you get to summon monsters and dragons to fight for you. If you pick a Black Mage, you’ll be throwing around comets and blizzards with your eyes closed. Your big attacks come with big effects, and using them feels good.
In comparison, here is what one of the most powerful attacks in Penny Arcade looks like.
Gabe swings his arms around.
Seriously.
The classes in PA3 are almost too varied, and they show up in two large chunks without much chance for experimentation. Even then experimentation doesn’t feel good, because the only reward you get for picking things out is bigger numbers popping out of enemy heads. There are one or two nice backgrounds that appear for an instant in certain spells – the Gardens and the Prophecies come to mind – but ultimately PA3’s fighting comes with a distinct lack of pizazz.
This even applies in an area I thought Zeboyd would have totally covered – the music. I have actually spent most of my time on this post listening to the battle theme from Cthulhu Saves the World, because it is an immense piece of music. Pretty much its entire soundtrack is fast-paced and action-packed, and for the icing on the cake the entire thing is available for free from Zeboyd’s website. This was one of the big draws I felt coming in.
And then…well, nothing happened. PA3’s soundtrack is almost impossibly understated. Nothing stands out as memorable or interesting – I spent all day playing the game and I can barely remember any of the songs. The battle theme is alright, but again it’s too subtle and quiet to work. Zeboyd is used to louder, brasher songs, and so is the Penny Arcade franchise – compare this theme from Episode 1 and hopefully you’ll see what I mean.
All in all, I would have been willing to accept all of this. I dealt with the battle-theme issue by muting the sound and listening to Grandia battle themes instead. If there’s a deep and interesting plot at the end of it all, I’m willing to do a little bit of shoveling to unearth it.
Unfortunately, the plot is also riddled with issues of its own.
Plot
WARNING! Spoilers for the PAA series follow. Consider yourselves warned.
As you may have noted from my bio post, I have a bit of experience with regards to writing. In particular, a very basic rule most writers use is ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ – in other words, don’t tell the readers about something if you can express it through their actions instead.
Bad writing – “He was angry.”
Better writing – “He clenched his teeth as his hands closed into fists.”
Dialogue is also great for this, in that it lets you see into a character’s mind without the author blatantly telling the reader what they’re feeling.
Gaming has another maxim that follows a similar structure – ‘Do, Don’t Show’. Unlike stories, games are ultimately an interactive genre, and must therefore be treated appropriately. The player comes here to take part in something, not just to witness it. They want to interact with the story, make choices and decisions that have consequences and determine whether or not they advance. At the most basic level, playing through World 1-1 of Mario Bros. would be MUCH less satisfying if you had to sit back and watch the computer do it.
Achievement? What’s that?
Where does this come into play with PA3? Well, pretty much everywhere.
While Zeboyd can typically be trusted to make a fun and fluid battle system, they’re not all that hot when it comes to telling a story. I still don’t understand quite what was going on in the final act of Cthulhu Saves the World, and the ending of Breath of Death is a deus-ex-machina of the highest caliber.
These people were trusted with the world of Penny Arcade Adventures, a slightly unhinged universe that takes a lot of its cues from classical horror writers like Lovecraft. Although it has a very clear taste of the webcomic that spawned it, there was just enough of a backstory bubbling under the surface to keep me intrigued and curious as to what sort of abomination we’d run into next.
Keep in mind, also, that Episode 3 started as a novel. After the series’ original developer, Hothead Games, stepped away from the project, Jerry Holkins (aka Tycho Brahe) started writing it himself in order to get it done. So the story was already out in the open before the game had even started on development.
Of course, there were changes made. The game includes Moira, Tycho’s ex-wife, who never made an appearance in the narrative. The Periphery, an alternate dimension reachable from our own, plays a large part in the plot. But large parts of what was originally a narrative piece still remain, and the transplant is not a pretty one.
Let me give a very clear example. The plot involves finding four mystical paintings, which if combined will create a gateway for Yog Modaigh, God of Doors. If he steps into the human world, it’s pretty much totally screwed. Understandably, our heroes are not fond of this, and try to find the paintings first.
One of these paintings is in a building called Hark House, protected by a ghost named Elzabet. When the party asks her if it’s safe, she calmly boasts that it’s been hidden here safely for two thousand-
And at this point, the game shifts entirely to a narrative as the antagonist, Dr. Blood, breaks in and steals the painting.
This description continues for another whole screen of text.
This monologue is taken entirely from the novelisation of the story, with some of the description cut away. In that sense it’s a completely faithful recreation of the book it’s meant to be a game of. Where it fails is in actually being a game.
To clarify, this whole process – Dr. Blood crashing his car into the house (the attic, no less), stepping out, being described in painful detail, stealing the painting (and then a few other pictures for good measure), getting back into his car, and leaving the house – all happens before Elzabet can say the word ‘years’. Everyone is too stunned by Dr. Blood’s sudden appearance to make a move, and they let him get away with his haul.
From the perspective of a story, this is almost understandable. As a game – an interactive media of storytelling – it’s outright unacceptable. The entire thing happens in monologue, with the narrator explaining what Dr. Blood is doing down to the utmost detail. No-one else acts. No-one else speaks. The player is absolutely powerless to even try and stop the doctor. That his entry is so implausible just makes the whole scene more jarring.
This is what I was talking about with “Do, Don’t Show”.’Doing’ could have Dr. Blood entering, challenging the party to an impossible boss fight, then taking the painting after he’s defeated them. It could involve the party trying to chase him down after he’s made his escape. It could even be as basic as letting them maintain control while Dr. Blood is doing his looting. Instead, the player is sitting back and watching a movie unfold right in front of him – or rather, he’s reading a book when he expected to play a game.
This scene is bad, but the finale in comparison is even worse. By this point Dr. Blood has all four of the paintings, and you have to fight him in the last and hardest boss battle of the game. All of this is well and good on its own, but it’s what follows that ruins it.
Hidden in the Invisibility Cloak, Harry Potter hands out a beatdown.
You’re too late. The four paintings have been united, and now they only need a catalyst to create the gateway – Tycho’s blood. He’s torn apart in front of the party, his inner fluids soaking across the canvasses as Yog Modaigh steps out into the world of the living.
At last, even the canvas itself spills out, before it-
This never happened to Bob Ross!
Let me get one thing clear, first of all – there’s nothing wrong with this narrative. Holkins knows his art pretty well – as a piece of writing, his description of the scene works well enough, the lack of detail in the ending clearly deliberate.
But again, games are a whole different ball game. This goes beyond violating “Do, Don’t Show” – it violates “Show, Don’t Tell” as well. Other than one or two blurry silhouettes, this whole scene is described entirely through the narrative. There is no dialogue, no interaction, nothing. We don’t see the rest of the party react to Tycho’s death, nor do we see them respond to Yog Modaigh or the imminent lack-of-existence they’re about to go through. We just get a snippet cut out from the novelisation of the game, implemented in possibly the worst way imaginable.
This is where the ‘retro’ styling of PA3 shoots itself in the foot. It severely limits itself in regards to what it can express, and it doesn’t even attempt to push its boundaries. CStW offered cutins and dialogue to fill out scenes. Penny Arcade settles for nothing other than portraits. Again, it feels like lazy storytelling, pulling ideas out from the book and jamming them in anywhere they’ll fit.
Never mind that, for a game, this sort of ending is horrendous. After all the work and effort the player has put into the game, they’re probably expecting a reward of some sort. Even something as simple as a line of text saying ‘You saved the princess!’ or ‘Congratulations!’ would serve the purpose of giving the player a pat on the back. Penny Arcade basically throws the entire thing back in your face and tells you that everything you’ve been doing up until now has been utterly meaningless, and the universe is getting destroyed no matter what you try. It is taking away the power that the player expects to have, which is a fatal error. I’d been accepting the issues begrudgingly until now, but this scene basically shattered the entire experience for me.
It’s in the new, original content that Penny Arcade 3 manages to make itself more interesting.
Near the end of the game, a very large twist occurs where it’s revealed that Tycho sealed his niece, Anne-Claire, into the Periphery. Since the Periphery is the last dimension to be destroyed at the End of Days, what’s present in the Periphery will become the seed for the new universe that follows. He feels that Anne-Claire, a kind-hearted and spirited girl, would be able to make a new universe worth living in. Moira, his ex-wife, does not agree, and the two fall into spirited argument.
So what happens differently here, compared to the previous scenes?
Conflict. Characterisation. Dialogue. Development.
We aren’t limited to a narrative saying ‘Tycho is sad, Moira is furious’. There isn’t a disembodied voice getting the feelings across. This is what happens when you Show rather than Tell – the characters are more lively, more memorable. This exchange of dialogue stood out to me more than anything else in the game, because in sheer story terms it’s easily the best-written part of the plot.
Good adventure games know all about this. Resonance, the game I reviewed yesterday, doesn’t have a disembodied narrator. All description comes from the dialogue or thoughts of the characters – and even in their thoughts, there are deliberate unique points that define a character. The nerdy scientist notes that the server room is locked, while the tech-dumb cop wonders what exactly they must be serving in there.
This is how characterisation works. You can’t tell the player how a character feel, you have to convey it. Penny Arcade fails at this.
This is also how gameplay works. To get these descriptions you have to look for them and ask around. You have to search for the info and press for clues and evidence. Penny Arcade yanks control away from you at the most critical moments to pull the plot along, so it fails at this as well.
Conclusion
It’s well past 1am now. I played through the entirety of Episode 3 today – even beating the game’s secret boss – and promptly sat down to write this. If there are typos I may or may not fix them when I am more awake.
Mike, Jerry, I’m not trying to attack you. You guys are great, your comic is awesome, and your charity makes a real difference to the world. I’m just trying to point out where I feel you went wrong with this game so that you can make Episode 4 a worthy conclusion to the saga.
You’ve shown you can write for games before. Episodes 1 and 2 were great fun, but you have to keep in mind they both came with very satisfying conclusions – namely they both ended with gods blowing up. Ending a story or a TV show on a dramatic cliffhanger is one thing, but doing it in a game is another entirely. Obviously it’s too late to change that now, but I’m putting my two cents out there.
Zeboyd, I still think you’re a great developer. I just feel you got in over your head with the battle system here. If you want to make something varied and complex, you have to make that complexity worth something. There has to be a reward beyond bigger damage numbers. Simple things like animations or voices or sound can sell the player on what class to try or what spell to use. Otherwise a drawn-out combat can start to become a serious chore.
If you want to stick with 8-bit retro games, you’ll have to accept the limitations that come with the genre. If you want to make things that are flashier, you need to be ready to give your graphics and animations a bit of a polish.
The tl;dr version
Grandia was not a 16-bit RPG.
A video game is not a book.
Please please please please learn from this when you’re working on Episode 4, I really want this series to go out with a bang ;_;
Blow In The Cartridge 