The Singing Mountain, Part I (Introduction)

One of the reasons that I decided to set up shop again, intermittently posting random thoughts on games and miscellany, was that I wanted a place to host an aimless project that I'd been tinkering with mentally for a while. At the moment it's little more than disconnected character sketches and location concepts; I've been unable to lock down the exact method for telling the story.

It'd serve as an RPG itself, but the labor is prohibitive; a comic or visual novel is just as problem-laden, as I'm not in the right place for hiring somebody anymore (and partnerships are... I'd as soon not go down that road again any time soon). A Twine game or a prose novel, then, but it's a fundamentally visual idea, so I don't know if those media can support what I'd try to do. Even the scraps and inklings I have thus far are enough to let me know that much.

It's a story of where the heroes go after it's all over. I call it "The Singing Mountain," after this one:

Adaptation Scenes: FFT-1

"Adaptation Scenes" are attempts to keep the other muscle flexed from time to time. There's no illusions here - this is fan fiction - but specifically the goal is to adapt games to prose or comics - these are scenes that could exist in a canonical adaptation by design only.

Scene Title: "Staff of Life"

Game: Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions

When: On the morning that Ramza's cadets will first encounter the Corpse Brigade; meant to lead into the Barbaneth Beoulve flashback

Rebuilding: SMTIV, Part Three (Exploring a Space)

In putting up P:B Flashback pieces, and getting to Kentucky Route Zero, I'm left wondering what the Hell I'm doing here. To spend this much time on the potential of this goofy ol' racist anime game when legitimate works of art like that game exist, it leaves me questioning everything about my entire life. But we're here, so we might as well go through with all of this!

Here's a positive note that I won't be able to put anywhere else: the soundtrack to SMTIV is pretty great. It's not the best in the series, by any means, but it's catchy and it fits the mood pretty consistently and they did a pretty good job. I enjoy it, it's in my rotation with other game scores.

Anyway, let's get into this mess. Welcome to Tokyo!

[P:B Flashback] Dialogue: Kentucky Route Zero

This co-authored piece reappears with the permission of Joe McCulloch.

I had to go get a routine (for me) blood test recently. My insurance situation had changed, so I had to go to a new location, at a hospital that I’d exited once but never entered. So on my way there, on a hot and too-humid morning, I kept getting turned around on side streets, even though I had directions right in front of me. The street zig-zagged at one point, you see, so I didn’t trust my bearings. I live in Chicago, but suburban areas can feel downright rural just from the contrast with the heavier sprawl even a few blocks away. Even a familiar place, with the sun in your eyes, can be another world for a half a block.

When I finally arrived, I ascended the west tower of the hospital’s office building and went up to a tiny window, where they claimed I didn’t have the right paperwork. I wound up trying to broker an arrangement between my doctor’s office and this laboratory using myself on the phone as a go-between, only to learn that the person who had looked for my file had made a typo or something, and the paperwork had existed all along. And then the way back, a minute’s walk at best, because I knew the path.

This can be what Kentucky Route Zero feels like. It can also feel like something wondrous, the flight of a giant eagle over a Baudrillard map, a pedal-wheel spinning through a fourth-dimensional wormhole, or the flats of a stage production falling away to reveal the shadow world beyond its walls. The joy and terror of being lost, but also the banality, I suppose. It’s a story about debt; living with it, and in a world changed by it. It’s very funny, and also very scary. Or vice versa.

Kentucky Road Zero is a five-act episodic game for the PC, which also includes free “demos” which are in fact interstitial chapters. You can find it here at the site of developers Cardboard Computer, and it comes highly recommended.

Another fan of the game is critic Joe McCulloch, a friend, infrequent P:B contributor, and sometime bassist for the band Foreigner. You can find him writing every week over at The Comics Journal and having fun with manga over at his tumblr. Joe and I decided to dig in deep and hash out this extraordinary game series, which at the time of this writing has reached Act III. We talk about everything; KR0 being a game of discovery, that may be worth considering before you progress. That said, it is as always and honor and a pleasure to host - and to write with - Joe; and this was a subject with plenty of meat for both of us.

A poem is the password...

[P:B Flashback] Adapt or Die: The Deadwood Finale

I love the series finale - by which I mean the third season finale - of Deadwood, one of my all-time favorite shows. This doesn't set me overly apart - it's an incredibly strong episode of an incredibly strong show - but what sets me apart just a little is that I think "Tell Him Something Pretty" is nearly perfect as a series finale.

Don't get me wrong - we all deserved the fourth season that we didn't get. The theatre troupe's subplot should have had the time for stronger resolution and integration, and the show should by all rights have ended with the Gem Saloon burning to the ground (for the first time). Knowing as much as we do, not only about what actually happened historically, but about David Milch's plans - the premiere would have featured Al, likely a town pariah at that point, coaxing Bullock out of his hole to give up the sheriff star) - makes the wound sting even now.

However, I think that Milch was actually able to bring things to a perfect close given what he had to work with, was able to tie up the thematic thrust of the show with no loose ends. He did it with three characters, two of whom were his own creations for the show, and one of whom has been unfairly maligned, I think, in looks back at the show and how it all played out.

Rebuilding: SMT IV, Part Two (Establishing Identity)

Continuing a series on repairing and improving the disappointing Shin Megami Tensei IV...

Act One Summary

In the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, Flynn and his longtime friend Issachar journey to the castle city where, beneath the statue of King Aquila, they undergo a testing rite, hoping to become samurai. Becoming a samurai is the only way for low-class casualries can become high-class luxurors, and samurai are believed to be noble keepers of the peace. At the rite, the "mystical gauntlet" rejects Issachar, but chooses Flynn, and he becomes one of a small crop of new samurai, including fellow casualry Walter and luxurors Isabeau, Jonathan, and Navarre. The following day, the role of a samurai is laid out by their leader, Hope - they are charged with exterminating the demons within Naraku (the underworld), the entrance to which lies right beneath the statue plaza. The "gauntlet" is actually a computer wristband from a Demonica suit, with an in-built AI named Burroughs, who aids Flynn as he gets used to killing - and recruiting - demons.

During the days, Flynn performs his duties, but at night he is tortured by dreams in which these new people he has met - and a few others - suggest he will have to choose the path the world will take, either into ruin or into order. He is also entreated by a young girl, who wants him to help her "be reborn." Meanwhile, Navarre, who is pampered and arrogant, attempts to lay a trap for the two casualry samurai, but blunders into a demon domain and his spirit is crushed, causing him to quit.

It is soon revealed that all is not well in Mikado, as someone called the Black Samurai is distributing something called "literature" to the masses, and the enlightened casualry give in to rage or despair, becoming demons themselves, including the resentful Issachar. As Flynn's home village burns, the samurai confront the Black Samurai and she (who, unbeknownst to the samurai, is also wearing a Demonica suit herself) escapes, telling them that their answers lie in the City of the Unclean Ones, which lies at the bottom of Naraku.

The castle monastery, particularly Abbot Hugo, who is being advised by a mysterious "Sister Gabby," orders the samurai to violate their own code and travel deeper into Naraku in pursuit of the Black Samurai - if only to add more mystical relics (lost modern technology) to the monastery vaults. The samurai find, guarding the way further down, a Minotaur, who was one of the demons subordinate to Aquila himself, a sad and noble demon whose death leaves them with questions. As they travel on, they find man-made rooms storing strange "guns," matter-transporting "terminals," and signage implying that what is above - that is, them - is what's to be feared. Further down they find an observation deck and look out at a ruined Tokyo - "Naraku" has been the Tokyo Sky Tower all along, and ruined, post-apocalyptic Tokyo is covered in a stone dome atop which Mikado has sat for generations (it will become clear later, if not entirely well-conveyed, that time passes differently above and below), with "Naraku" as the only passage between them. After battling Medusa, they take an elevator the rest of the way down and find a pair of thugs answering to someone named "Tayama" - who Medusa had also mentioned - who call the samurai "angels from above" and flee.

Realizing they understood nothing of the world as it really was, the samurai set out to explore Tokyo and find the Black Samurai.

Initial Thoughts

The opening act of SMTIV is its strongest sequence. It's very clever - so clever, in fact, that I'm inclined, perhaps unfairly, to attribute it all to Kazuma Kaneko's original treatment of the material, and not any of the game's actual writers. It works better than any part that follows it, even if it's not a "complete thought," as it were, and it is essentially all tutorial. In rebuilding this game, we're going to do the unthinkable - make the tutorial section of the game much longer.

[P:B Flashback] The Distance Between Sides of an Uncracked Egg - SMT: Nocturne and Space in Design

"P:B Flashback" denotes posts that originally appeared on the Project: Ballad site. These posts appear with minimal editing. This entry appears due to the current "Rebuilding" series focusing on MegaTen design.

I wasn't planning on writing another MegaTen-related post for a while, but I had this idea, oddly, while ruminating on Die Hard - which wasn't a connection that I'd planned to make. So here we are.

Game design is about manipulating spaces. This is as true for Tetris and Super Mario Bros. as much as it is narrative-heavy, expansive games of recent generations. It's actually something of a movement in gaming now (we've discussed this before [In a post on "Gaming Tourism" - Ed.]) that one of gaming's primary purposes should be conveying a space in which the player can exist, rather than (say) delivering a narrative. Regardless of how a developer views the spaces that they are manipulating, however, there are a number of significances that one can attach to an inhabited space.

Rebuilding: SMT IV, Part One (Overview)

Rebuilding is a marriage of criticism and pure self-indulgence where I try to repair a narrative game that showed potential but didn't work. Some degree of familiarity with the game in question is probably recommended.

I've been replaying Shin Megami Tensei IV in preparation for its upcoming sequel, SMTIV: Apocalypse (called SMTIV: Final in Japan), and experiencing all over again all the things I didn't like about it the first time. The first game did well financially - in terms of a portable-release Japanese RPG in this generation - but it's a not very hidden secret that the sequel's a saving throw by developer Atlus after a wave of complaints. A lot of people liked SMTIV, but few loved it, and many were very, very angry. Myself, I was just disappointed. On the old Project: Ballad blog, I had a long-running letter series with critic David Brothers at the time of the game's US release, and while there's much there I'd just as soon forget, it served as a very public record of the transition from anticipation to enjoyment, to reservation, to frustration, to finally abandonment. I tossed the thing shortly after the reveal of the Black Samurai's identity, and didn't come back to it until this past month.

In replaying with full knowledge of the game's story from beginning to end and fewer expectations, I can see lots of places where the game does work, but even more where it does not than I even noticed at the time. The game tries to walk a fine line between what a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game has always been and what the company's modern audience wants it to be, and it fails - but more than that, it suffers from a surfeit of ideas and the inability to fully carry any of them out. The potential is all there.

Word is already out on the sequel, and it seems to have doubled down on both sides - fixing many long time fans' complaints, but also pushing further to make the game closer resemble spin-off titles that sell better, like the Persona series, and the friction is frustrating to many - though perhaps few will see it that way, as many gameplay decisions are thought through more fully in this second game, and for many that will be enough.

In this series, we're going to go through the game(s) one step at a time, one sequence at a time, and see if we can't more fully realize what they were attempting to do, in a way that is more respectful to the series' history, its fans, and also to our intelligence as consumers of narrative media.

What This Is

Well, it's 2016 and I'm on a Blogspot, so you can tell that I'm an old person, I guess.

My name is Michael Peterson and I co-created and wrote a comic called Project: Ballad, along with which I wrote a lot of articles on video games and other things. Before that I wrote in a lot of different places, one or two of which you might have heard of, but most you haven't. I am (probably) retired from writing "professionally" - that is, trying to get paid, even if I wasn't - but once and a while I still tinker on projects, and I don't have a great place to dump them out of my head the way I used to, so I'm here until I'm not anymore.

My update schedule is "whenever I fucking get around to it," because the stress of content creation for P:B nearly killed me - I mean, I've been on-and-off sick pretty much since the day we shuttered that website, so maybe I mean it literally, who knows... but this is for my benefit more than yours, so we'll both have to live with ourselves. But I don't mean that literally, as it's very easy for you to click a button and make me go away.

I'm not using a Tumblr or whatever because I value hard archives - such as they exist online - and social media is great for a lot of things and 100% terrible at permanence.

This is not the P:B blog. Some stuff will overlap because I spent a lot of time studying a pretty niche thing, and I have a lot to say about it. At some point, maybe I'll even talk about P:B here in some form, and I'll probably revise some old pieces for re-publication. But this is for criticism and self-indulgent explorations and maybe some fiction at some point. Or not. I'm giving myself fewer rules here; if you think I didn't have rules at the old joint, you have no idea what kinda contortions I was always putting myself through.

This is largely an experiment, and I reserve the right to detonate the thing melodramatically.

Testing, etc.

This is a generic test post.