Tag Archives: Pokémon

Tales of Symphonia Text Review and Story Breakdown: Part 2

Originally a script for a video review, so some parts may stick out and, without visual aids, I recommend having played the game already! Note: this is for the original Tales of Symphonia, so if anything changed in the re-release, I haven’t touched on it here.

Quick links to other entries:

Intro
Part 1
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

…Where was I again?

Oh, right. “I just believe” isn’t too terrible a response. We all believe in at least a few things we haven’t seen firsthand.

caption: dark matter, string theory, human rights and other Platonic notions of justice or goodness, parallel universes, life on other planets, life at ocean depths that haven’t been visited, animals you’ve never seen, countries you’ve never traveled to, the laws of physics remaining constant tomorrow

And I’ll give credit for not pulling out Pascal’s Wager.

No, not that Pascal. Wrong Tales game!

caption briefly flashed; people will have to pause if they want to read it: In all seriousness, while Pascal’s Wager may be a poor reason for Christian faith because of the specifics of our faith, namely that “I’ll believe just in case lulz” arguably isn’t a belief, it’s a pretty handy tool for probabilistic utilitarians in the tangible world. I don’t know for sure if lead-based paint, cell phone signals, sulfates in shampoo, aspartame in soda, or fluoridated water are harmful or if microwaves really so supercharge the particles inside food that our bodies’ defense systems cease to recognize them as food and begin attacking them like poison or something. I just ask myself what it would cost me to avoid them all and the answer was “not much,” so I kept microwave popcorn and tossed out everything else. No more philosophy in the rest of the videos, promise!

7) It’s Bunglers All The Way Down

The party leaves Palmacosta again, but in their absence, Chocolat’s taken to a human ranch. Everyone agrees to save her, but first they run into the ninja girl again, praying in a church. She gets huffy and flustered while Lloyd and mostly Colette disarm her with kindness and get her name, Sheena, until she can’t take any more happy power and smoke bombs out again. (Caption: Hopeless Characters: 1)

Now off to the ranch. The Governor’s assistant warns everyone they’ve been led into a trap, so Kratos and Raine want to ditch Chocolat and go save the world. Colette vetoes them because she’s the Chosen, and the assistant wants in too. Even though he can’t fight [Hopeless Characters: 2], Lloyd’s like yeah, sure, because no one knows as much as him about being told you’re worthless.

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The Indie Developer Seizure: From 2013 to 1997 With Love (and Reciprocity)

While creating wiki templates for my upcoming RPG, I used sample information from my character Celty. I could stop there and ask a question I’ve thought about idly: I spotlight my characters like Final Fantasy VI or Tales of Vesperia spotlighted theirs, where each of them has shining moments and a fan could make a dozen compelling cases for who the “true” hero is, so why is Celty my “default” character—my template? Is she my favorite? No. Is she my strongest hero? No, although she’s up there. Is it because she’s playable for a longer time than any other character? We’re getting warmer, but then why is she the first playable character—the Terra or Yuri Lowell to others’ Celes and Estelle Sidos Heurassein and Rita Mordio?

I found that my answer lies in the heart of battle my history. (Sorry, Ryu!) Most of Celty’s modern profile was created within the past three years, but when I decided to add a Trivia section about her past, I set myself on the path to uncovering ancient secrets. At first I meant it only for simple asides: her gameplay abilities were designed with speedrunners and single character challenges in mind, she was originally imagined as a warrior mage and not a martial artist, and her name predates Celty Sturluson from Durarara!!.

On that last point I paused. Celty was one of my longest-surviving characters, going back at least to 2000 or 2001 when I first had the crazy notion that I could make an RPG one day—but could I find out how long she’d been with me? I dug into old documents. The truth I found shouldn’t shock you (hint: it’s up in the blog post title), but it shocked me: I’d created Celty as early as December 1997. I had made her a legendary NPC in the computer RPG creation tool Blades of Exile. She was not only “one of” my longest-surviving characters, but the third longest-surviving.

Celty is my “Bulbasaur”: a character who wasn’t my first creation but will always be #1 in the Pokédex.

If that was the end of the story, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. The real end of the story is that I found epiphany and revelation and truth. I dug into my past to answer a single question and walked away with an answer to a second and infinitely more important one.

Click to read the rest of my descent into indie insanity.

What’s In A (Changed For Localization) Name?

Of all the decisions that game developers and publishers make, none baffles me more than changing names for change’s own sake during localization. Altering a creator’s work requires justification: the name “Tina” in Final Fantasy VI was intended to sound foreign and mysterious to Japanese audiences but wouldn’t have that effect in North America, so it was changed to “Terra.” People can debate the legitimacy of the reasoning behind that change and explain why they don’t believe it was necessary, especially with the benefit of hindsight; they might say that names like Mario, Luigi, Link, and Cloud are universal, that the name “Cid” is a constant in the Final Fantasy series, or that Tales games regularly use names like Natalia, Chester, Lloyd, and Rita for both English and Japanese with few fan complaints. What no one can argue is the fact that reasoning for the name Terra existed. Thought went into it and so I don’t dispute her name change.

On the far opposite end is the inconsistency of Pokémon naming. For the most part, the series localizes names so that whether English-speaking players are six or sixty, they know that a Bulbasaur is a dinosaur with a bulb. However, the name Pikachu carried over along with other names and portmanteaus like Jirachi, Rayquaza, Lucario, and Pachirisu. The question is why they didn’t change and the answer is—a mystery.

Just as much of a mystery is why Japanese names that would already make sense to English speakers sometimes get changed. Above are a chinchilla Pokémon and its evolution, known as Chillarmy and Chillaccino in the Japanese games, but as Minccino and Cinccino in the English games. The question isn’t whether the changed names are good or bad, but why the changed names are. If anything, “Chillarmy” is likely more easy to pronounce for nine-year-old native English speakers than “Minccino”.


The Final Fantasy VI opera scene: my proof positive that nostalgia has little hold over me. I only needed one look at the GBA version to throw the above lyrics out of my heart.

“Because we can” is a poor argument to change lines—after all, you “can” also not change them—but I’m not a purist. I have my preferences only independently of faithfulness to the original. I don’t know or care which version of Dragon Quest IV is closer to the original, but I do know that I prefer the NES localization over the DS re-localization. I also know that, with only a couple of exceptions, I prefer the SNES localization of Final Fantasy VI over the GBA re-localization that Square-Enix certainly stated was more faithful.

Above all, I believe one thing about localizations: that they should see their ideas through. I may not like the all-over-the-map accents of Dragon Quest IV, but I admire that the team had a vision and ran with it to the greatest extent. Even though I didn’t like it once, that same willingness to change things worked wonders for me with Dragon Quest IX‘s alliteration-rich translation. If Cherry Tree High Comedy Club went all the way to whitewash every Japan-related reference out of the dialogue, I wouldn’t have liked that decision but I could at least say that it wasn’t a house divided. If only legendary Pokémon kept Japanese names and the names of ordinary Pokémon always changed, there would be a certain clarity to the series’ naming conventions.

Just as every spell or special move should be created with a purpose, every word in a game script should be put in with a purpose—and that holds true whether the word is being written on a blank sheet or translated from another language.

The Creative Advantage of the Indie Game Developer

If Castlevania, Super Mario Bros., and Pokémon never existed, could they be invented from scratch today?

Game development is, for both better and worse, not what it used to be; the monetary costs and time costs to create Grand Theft Auto IV are lightyears apart from Street Fighter II. When games are Hollywood-level productions with Hollywood-level expenses, one misstep can sink a company—and so, to the best of each company’s abilities, with every statistic available to them, their number crunchers need to determine a priori whether their games will sell based on the history of their series and comparable series.

In the modern world, big game developers craft their games from market statistics. Some gamers love it (“give me bigger and better”) and others hate it (“give me something original”), but either way, developers do that because, in a real and literal way, they can’t afford otherwise. Market statistics can’t breed innovation, however; no one can create the future by replicating the past. When the game industry was still young, companies needed to pioneer new ideas because they had no comfort zone of existing trends and bandwagons to follow.

Konami could not have created Castlevania in this millennium. My pitch as the creator: Simon Belmont, a descendant of vampire hunters, battles Dracula and the undead with the Vampire Killer, a holy whip passed down over countless generations. My response as the publisher: a guy fights Dracula with a whip? Nobody buys into characters with whips unless they’re Indiana Jones. Give this Belmont guy knives like in Blade or guns like Resident Evil and House of the Dead. Make him more generic because then he’ll be a safer bet.

See, now Bomberman kind of looks like Master Chief or, like, Iron Man. So he'll sell better in the USA, right? Right?

The scary side of appeasing market trends. 6-3-2012 update: would you believe that I wrote all of the above without even remembering that Konami rebooted Castlevania? I only had their ill-fated Bomberman Act Zero in mind as a point of comparison.

What does all of this have to do with indie gaming, anyway? You'll have to click to find out!

Spell Scalability (or, Utilitarianism in an RPG Setting)

No player wonders “Fire or Fire 2?”
Every player wonders “Flamethrower or Fire Blast?”

Of the three biggest RPG series—Pokémon, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest—only one has consistently delivered gameplay that brings compelling decision-making into play. Choosing to teach a Pokémon Surf or Hydro Pump reveals whether players place more value on accuracy and extra uses or power; choosing Heal or Healmore/Midheal reveals whether players know math. In Pokémon, only the earliest attacks become moot; the rest compete for one of four move slots. Each attack has its own niche advantage of power, accuracy, priority, status effects, or other quirks.

One positive to the streamlined spells of FF and DQ is the immediate clarity of progress; even if the names don’t make obvious which is superior, as in Blizzara and Blizzaga, the levels at which they’re learned will. However, most attack and healing spells eventually become wasted space that players scroll through and never use. Out with the old.

Secret of Mana is an early RPG that shows there’s nothing wrong with simplicity; in fact, maybe it needs to go one step further. These heroes bring their weapons to Watts the blacksmith to level them up through a reforging process that unlocks more of their inherent power. Spells grow stronger with usage, so they never fall out of favor; since no one would cast Freeze Lv. 1 if Freeze Lv. 4 was available, the SoM designers keep one core spell in the same menu position and progressively boost its power. Both of these techniques are straightforward upgrades that phase out weaker firepower as necessary, pushing it out of sight and mind to keep everything compact and useful.

On the other side is the Shining Force series, which keeps different levels of spells but asks the player to decide the appropriate strength depending on the situation. Magic does fixed amounts of damage depending on the spell, enemy HP is visible, MP costs are high, and the spells vary in their range and area of effect. A weakened skeleton with 4 HP can be safely dispatched with Blaze level 1 to retain an optimal amount of MP; a distant gang of adjacent gargoyles at full health should eat the brunt of Blaze level 3, which deals more damage and hits a cross-shaped area. Spread-out gargoyles call for Bolt 3, which hits the largest possible area; a boss calls for Bolt 4, which deals far more damage but only targets a single space.

The ideal no-dead-weight RPG either retains the value of every spell and ability from beginning to end or replaces the spells and abilities that lose their worth. I find that more recent RPGs than not get this right, but I’d like to be able to say that all of them do. This is an elementary concept in game design—an extremely crucial one at that, and every developer needs to consider it. It applies outside of RPGs as well. The silenced PP7 gun in GoldenEye 007 was weak and non-automatic, but it didn’t alert enemies to James Bond’s presence; in a time when first-person shooters usually followed the mold of Doom, where strongest equals best, the advantages of a handgun established that GoldenEye was no clone.

Writers know of a saying to “Murder your darlings”: a saying that implores them to kill their babies, which are their words. Game designers should hear about this principle too. If a weapon, spell, or ability doesn’t stack up to par—or a dungeon, or a level, or a race track, or a mission, or a piece of music, or a 2D sprite, or a 3D model—then cut it and cut it with no concern over how painfully and at what great length you labored to deliver it. Players don’t fall in love with game designers who give them a bronze medal effort. Cut slipshod work until everything in your game is gold—and then keep cutting. Gold is not enough. Neither is platinum. Cut until all that remains is a single flawless diamond.