Weekly Update - 216 - 4/29/2024

Huh. Being the age I am now isn't much different from being (the age I am now - 1). Weird! Also, neat!

Next Character Art:

So a bunch of voters came out in droves last week (okay it was like four extra people, but still!) to make a final push for Kiera, so she ended up beating Twitch and winning the poll! Bonus art of her soon, but maybe I should still draw something with Twitch in it anyway.

I might be overpromising. There's so much I want to draw lately, but I'm slow! It just takes more time is all. The art will get done... eventually. Also the constant release of pretty great games so far this year is a problem. They need to quit with that so I can stop getting distracted from my work!

I've also finished the art for Kiera's character page, including her mini-portrait, now I just gotta write up all the stuff and get Chip to rig it all up on the site, I'll announce when that's all done!

Comic this week? Yep!

Drawing: Kiera Bonus art, Something for Twitch, Page 195, some other things!

Playing: Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes, Rimworld

Ramble:

Let's talk about something that's been on my mind lately! Writing!

Eiyuden Chronicles has a pretty neat fantasy world built in it that I really like. But the story, unfortunately, while it's entertaining, hasn't blown me away as much as I had hoped it might. For anyone that's not aware, Eiyuden Chronicles is the spiritual successor to the original Suikoden games, made by many of the original developers. I've been a huge fan of Suikoden 1 and 2 for a very long time. Suikoden 2 in particular has an excellent story with several clever twists and turns that has served as hugely inspirational for much of my own writing. Eiyuden, in its effort to capture that, I think, has fallen short.

This will be a spoiler-free ramble. I mean I guess there's some minor spoilers, I'm not gonna talk about any specific things though. I do still recommend the game for those who are fans of JRPGs, and it's an incredibly fun, if at times frustrating, experience. A lot of reviews I've seen of the game remark about how it leaned a bit too hard into older nostalgic jrpg mechanics, and I agree that some of them could absolutely be put to bed and nobody would miss them. But there are a great many things the game does right, which makes up for an underwhelming story and the occasional moments of frustration. I do like some of the characters. And thankfully there's enough of them that I can just bench the characters I don't like, of which there are plenty.

So onto my issues with the game's story. I think one of my issues with Eiyuden's story is largely an issue of trust. The authors clearly don't trust their audience. It feels as if the authors feel obligated to hold your hand as they guide you through the game, and the characters simply tell you everything that's going on straight away. You'll be told a thing is going to happen, and then that thing happens. And you aren't surprised at all because you were told it was going to happen and it happens exactly the way you were told it was going to happen. That happens a lot. Their foreshadowing, when it occurs, is often like being hit in the face with a bat just to let you know that there's a bat in the story and it's coming up next.

In an example that's still fresh in my brain from yesterday, an army is approaching a city, and your characters are discussing the best way to defend the city. One person comes up with a plan, that I admit, after about ~50 hours into the game, I was surprised that it was actually a sort of clever plan. I always appreciate it when stories bring in unconventional, narrative-driven strategies to help fight a war, as opposed to simply "hold out until the reinforcements arrive" or "defeat the enemy in battle." Wars are typically won not only by battles but by logistics and strategies. Suikoden 2 was PACKED with clever strategies to help you, the ragtag underdogs, hold out and even win against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed with what happened next in Eiyuden. So your characters have this clever plan. They discuss the ways to execute the plan, talk about some challenges they might face. Luckily there's some convenient magic that makes the plan possible. Okay fine. It's a magical world. You have the people who know things about this convenient magic. Suspension of disbelief. You go do the plan. It works! The plan is done.

Except... it accomplishes literally nothing. The enemy just ignores it. You're told that the bad guy must have anticipated the plan somehow and he must have pulled a bunch of bullshit out of his ass to make all your effort worthless. And all of this is done offscreen as well, so you're just told "yeah no they bypassed the clever plan we did." And then you're told that the enemy must be just so smart. An entire segment of the game, while somewhat brief, turns out to be completely pointless. And then the enemy arrives, and the enemy tells you just how smart your strategist is. This is something the game does a lot in fact, telling you how smart many of the characters are, in case you doubted it for any reason due to the critical lack of examples for their genius. And then you end up fighting the enemy in battle, where your objective is... sigh... "hold out until the reinforcements arrive."

Now, I found this part of the story disappointing for a number of reasons, but it did end up getting at least a little better after that. Still nothing I didn't see coming from miles away, but much more interesting than just "we told you this thing was going to happen, and it happened." I'm not finished with the game yet but it definitely feels as though it's building towards a sort of "all is lost" moment.

Still Suikoden 2 has several moments in its story where it leaves the player with imperfect information for a time and trusts them to hold onto that before the reveal. I'd use the term "masterful," but admittedly, I have a bit of rose-tinted goggles about me when it comes to that game. Having played it in recent years, I'd say the game and its story still holds up, even by today's standards, but I still may be holding it in much higher esteem than it deserves. Hard to say.

But this sort of thing is getting more and more common it feels, where a story fails to impress. I feel like a lot of stories fall short for me these days. Maybe I'm just becoming too critical. Maybe because I keep looking at everything through a magnifying glass, I'm unable to enjoy the bigger picture. Dunno.

Eiyuden still gives me strong Suikoden 2 vibes, which is a big thumbs up in general, but still, rather than scratching that itch in a satisfying way, it mostly makes me want to go back and play Suikoden 2 again. Or it makes me want to write my own new fantasy story. With blackjack... And hookers! In fact, forget the story!