So many spoilers for the end of Ghostwire: Tokyo. Seriously all the spoilers we could think of.
Butch:
OK, all done.
I have questions.
Who was Dale? Let's start there. Was Dale Hannya? A scientist gone wrong?
Who were Rinko and KK and Ed fighting? Dale? Who killed Rinko? She died before the fog.
Who was the scratched out face in the picture way back when?
We have loose ends.
I did like the "keep pressing forward" bits. Nice touch naming it that. Even after you kill Hannya, it stays that. Cool.
What I very much did NOT like was the last bit between Akito and KK. Akito just gave his dead sister to his dead parents. He comes back with "Yeah, I can't get you out of my head." I mean, I get it, they're jaunty and stuff, but timing, man. Time and place.
I could've done without the Hannya fight. Yes, yes, he's the big bad, but I could've done without it. Not that it was particularly annoying, as it wasn't. That said, we've been talking about the perils of hubris with this game, and they had two or three times his own hubris would've been his undoing, thus keeping with theme. Having KK/Akito kill him seemed to bend to gaming convention at the expense of story.
I'm so glad I didn't have to drive the motorcycle.
Looty, what mechanic bugged you? I kept waiting for the new thing that pissed you off.
I'll start there. More things will come to me.
Like, also, I can't tell how I feel about the fact that they let Akito off the hook re Mari. His guilt was a thing the whole game, so, when it was all "Actually, I went back in, not your fault" I was, at first, annoyed. It seemed they wimped out, gave us the "No, actually you're the hero, you're the good guy, everything's happy happy ending yay." Then, after pondering, I thought maybe this goes to the big THEME, which I take as Akito telling his parents "When I see you again, I will have lived a full life."
That, I took as Akito promising he won't end up like all of the spirits he's been trying to save. He's promising that he won't end up hung up on something, big or small. That he won't spend his life fighting the negative emotions that he's been fighting, literally and figuratively, the whole game. He's breaking the cycle he, and all of Japan, it seems, has been in and, to do that, he has to be truly free from guilt.
I'm not sure that means it isn't cheap. I'm conflicted.
AND ALSO....
(going full grumpy old man)
I figured out what REALLY bugged me: This was the ending to Akito's story, but the game WASN'T Akito's story. The game was either Akito and KK's story (which got a very perfunctory ending) or KK's story (which got no real ending at all).
Did we get a lot of KK and Akito? Yes. Wanted more, but yes.
Did we get Rinko and Ed and the investigation notes and the safehouse and, you know, KK's story? Yes.
But other than "must save sister," we got very little of Akito's story. Mari got maybe four lines, Akito's parents weren't in it at all. All we knew about them is that they were Akito's parents and they're dead and Akito is sad.
So that whole "push forward" thing was an ending to another story, a story we weren't told. Sure, dead parents, but "They're his parents and they're dead so he's sad so BE SAD TOO!" is lazy storytelling.
Akito, despite being the playable character, wasn't really the main character. If he was the main character in a story, it was the buddy/father/son story between him and Akito.
We got a good ending to the wrong story.
It's almost like the devs wanted this to be a game where you played as KK. KK was cool, he had a family, he had people in the world, etc. etc. etc. We could've had a pretty great game taking Akito completely out of it and making it about these cool supernatural Japanese Shinto X files ninjas. I'd play that.
When you can say "You could take the character you play as out of the game and have it be pretty much the same story," you got problems. And yet, that's what we had.
I cared about KK's story, and KK's relationship with Akito, far more than I cared about Akito and his parents, and yet, in the end, we got Akito and his parents.
Hmm.
Loothound:
Yep, and yep. I'm not going to say that my reaction to this stuff was exactly the same as yours, but that giant tangle of "wait, what the fuck does this all mean?" is definitely what I had going on.
It wasn't a mechanic that was bugging me, it was this whole thing. We got a lot of cool breadcrumbs throughout the game, it really felt like they were setting the table for a big, amazing banquet of mind blowing revelations at the end of the game. KK's notes, the voice recordings, cool oblique comments from Rinko and Ed when we talk to them on the phone…it all really felt like it was GOING SOMEPLACE! But, at the end, no. Not really. There were good things about it, but it was pretty unsatisfying.
That's what I was holding back from talking about before, because it felt like the mission I was talking about was a microcosm of the game itself. We got teased with an awesome big picture, but ended up just getting a bunch of cool puzzle pieces that don't fit together that well and leave a lot of holes. Honestly, I feel like this game started running out of time, or money, or both towards the end of development. Everything at the end felt kind of rushed and perfunctory, and definitely unsatisfying. The game spent a lot of time setting up material that felt like it would be relevant, that end up not mattering in a very basic good guy(s) vs. bad guy dynamic. The fights were pretty dull, too. We needed to have them, but they could have been better.
I was also impressed by the 'Keep moving forward' mission prompt. It really went well with the emotional tone of the ending. Which wasn't bad, actually, although a bit drawn out. My basic takeaway was: Akito and Mari's parents died, and Akito became withdrawn from Mari and life in general. Akito's emotional remoteness sends Mari into a depression, where she feels like everyone who loves her is going away from her. Their life is very unsettled, but it doesn't seem like things ever get too bad, materially. Mari keeps referring to fresh starts and stuff, and seems to feel like things are really hitting bottom, but it never looks like their life is a shambles, so a lot of that is her depression. She runs back into a fire (you've been calling that one for a while) to save the parent's rings because she feels like it's the only connection she has left, and gets badly burnt and hospitalized. I'm figuring they didn't make her look burned because it would be bad aesthetics to have Akito doing all of this pining over a pork rind. Much better to have her be the cute kid sister, in her new magical white dress being all Mari ex Machina.
"It's okay, I went back in for the rings myself, so it's not your fault." Huh, what? So Akito was thinking that she set the fire herself for suicide reasons all this time?
I mean, there's SOOO much that we, as players, would have liked answers to. Who killed Rinko, and possibly Dale and Ed? Probably Hannya, since it seems like he killed KK as well, but we don't know. Dale, apparently, is a real guy that was part of KK's team and is not Hannya. I went out and got ALL of the figures from the bubble machines (photo mode is far more awesome than I was giving it credit for), and there's a figure of him. He's a beefy American-looking guy with arm tattoos. Looks like he's supposed to be the wise ass bruiser type of the team. We just never really get to know him at all. The figure of Ed has definite Shaun from Assassin's Creed vibes.Were Hannya's wife and daughter (Erika) pawns in his unnatural experiments into the Other Side and ether? We don't know.
100% agree with you that KK's exit was much too perfunctory, and KK's role in this way to underused.
Butch:
What's even weirder about the lack of resolution is that this game doesn't feel like it set itself up for a sequel. Games that are franchises have holes all the damn time. The holes and cliffhangers are what make people want the next one. We want to know what the fuck is going on with Basim and the Isu. We want to know what's up with Morrigan's dress I mean Solas and the Calling. Thus, games like that leave holes.
This game sure as hell didn't feel like it was the first in a series, or even that it was setting itself up for Ghostwire Two, or Ghostwire Osaka or whatever. This very much felt over, which means it had no reason to have holes.
Buttons once told us that game endings are often disappointing because game developers know that most people never see them. On average, only about 30% of people who start a game finish it. I, personally, do not understand why you wouldn't finish a game unless it's really boring and your blogmate has already finished it (looks at "The Pathless"), but I guess we're in the minority. Thus, game companies work really hard on the first bits and, if they have to scrimp, scrimp on the last bits.
Still, that didn't seem to be what was happening here. This felt more like "Lost" syndrome, named after the TV show of the same name. That show had SO MANY breadcrumbs and clues and twists and hints. In fact, it had too many. It had so many that it left itself with a choice: Tie it all up in a long, confusing, convoluted mess, or leave holes. Or both. It did some of both, really.
Stories that are made only of breadcrumbs often end up like that and that's what we had here. There really was no foundation to the story all along. It was hints and dribs and drabs and teases for thirty straight hours. Really, what did we expect? We were going to get holes or we were going to get a big rush of convoluted bananas or both.
I guess a moral we take away is that hints and twists and breadcrumbs are nice, but they have to be a part of real storytelling the whole time. Otherwise, in the end, you're left having to make a whole meal out of breadcrumbs, and that never holds together.
Oh, and the "it's not your fault" thing... we got a snippet of Akito and Mari really, really early in the game (like ten minutes in) of Akito locking Mari's window, all "I told you to keep this locked!" implying that had he not done that, she would've gotten out of the house.
Turns out, didn't happen.
Loothound:
I'd forgotten about the window locking thing, but you're right. Guess it's just another tile in Akito's (largely imaginary?) tapestry of guilt.
You're absolutely right about it not feeling set up for a sequel. There was a definite finality to the whole thing. I really love the bit where Akito meets his parents. It was so quiet, simple, and elegant. It felt right with the whole moving forward thing, and contrasted so well with Hannya's unnatural scheme. We didn't see their faces, because of the cool, eerie masks. They were silent. It was like what real death is, they're there but not involved really. A lot of what they had at the end was beautiful, it just didn't answer a lot of the things we wanted answered.
There's probably something to the fact that most people don't finish games, so game companies aren't as incentivized to 'stick the landing,' but it's fair to note that endings are hard. Satisfying resolutions are hard to come by in movie franchises and TV shows all the time. Never got past the first season of LOST, but I hear it is a prime example. I stand by my assertion that they were running out of time or money here, as well. They could have saved time, effort, and money on a lot of aspects of the game if they were never really planning on having them pay off. I think they had limited options at the end.
While we were playing, the hints gave us some good "why am I doing this" motivation. Very disappointing that they got left on the shelf at the end. I'm trying out the Spider's Thread mode now. Maybe it will have something to add. It's pretty fun playing, anyway…
Feminina:
There was a voice recording (went looking for them all with the help of the internet in order to get the trophy) where Ed said, basically, "OK, you must have a sense of what sort of chap I am, but maybe you're wondering about Dale. He's...a big guy with a beard. And...uh...I'm literally falling asleep trying to think of anything else to say about him goodbye."
So this and the figure of him from the toy machine is all we have. I think the preponderance of the meager evidence suggests he's not Hannya, although since we never find out who Hannya is or what he looks like, I guess we can't entirely rule it out.
In the end, I thought the game was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed the main body of it – roaming around, collecting things, clearing gates, encountering spooky enemies and doing weird little missions for spirits.
The main story was less satisfying, but since we spent only a fraction of our game time on it, my overall impression is still positive. I don't feel like they really set it up for a sequel, but it would be possible, and if there is one, I'll probably play it. (Akito seeks out Ed and Dale, they get a new squad of ghost-hunters together and solve supernatural mysteries in the city? Or, since as Loothound says, Akito's story came to a nice ending with the scene where his parents collect Mari's body and he turns back to the living world, maybe some completely different group forms to do this! Maybe the kids from the KK fan club in the middle school!)
Butch:
It was fun, and had a lot of really cool stuff in it, which is why I'm annoyed it didn't come together. This is one of those good games that could've been a great game, but wasn't a great game. There were all the pieces of great game here. Setting, mood, gameplay, ideas, etc., and yet....
I agree. Lots to like. Very much to like. So much to like it should've been great, and yet, it was....just good.
Loothound:
Definitely fun, and definitely cool. Honestly, if they hadn't teased the idea of some grand design so well with what we came across in the game I don't think I'd be as disappointed by the conclusion. I feel like this game had a lot of real great concepts behind it, both design and story wise, but they fumbled a bit at making the story aspect of it concrete.
Butch:
I feel exactly the same way. We've played many a game that basically say "this is a game where you do cool stuff in a cool place and it's cool, don't ask for more" and we like them. We aren't irked that there isn't some grand payoff because we were never led to believe there would be one. Had this game just been a "cool stuff, cool place" game, without any promises, that would've been OK.
Feminina:
OK, but here's an attempt at defending it:
Takeaway message of the game: don't get bogged down in negative emotions. I mean, seriously, DON'T get bogged down in negative emotions. Nothing is more critical than letting go of the past and moving forward into whatever comes next.
In spite of Butch's well-argued complaint that what we got was an ending to Akito's story, not KK's, I think we did see both of them letting go and moving on: Akito into life, and KK into the afterlife (even though KK leaves things unfinished – he has to let go of his own family, just as Akito let go of his). The fact that we don't know that much about either of them is perhaps irrelevant to that main point: they came together to give each other the strength to move on.
Now, one could also read KK's story as a more traditional "don't move on until you've accomplished this last CRITICALLY IMPORTANT MISSION after which you can be at peace" story, which in a way detracts from this idea. But in another way, if you think about the parallel between KK's story and the stories of all the weird little problems that held back the spirits we encountered throughout the game, I think maybe it still says that 'closure' is important because it helps people let go, but the important thing is the letting go – we wouldn't need the help if we were better at it on our own.
Probably unwittingly, the flatness of the ending and the final battle could even work here: we think, all through the game, that we're engaged in some epic, important struggle, that our actions are NECESSARY for the good of the city, of all these souls, perhaps of the very world if Hannya has his way! And then at the end Mari seems to thwart Hannya just by saying "nah, not with my spirit," and so how necessary was all this struggle, really? More necessary, in the eyes of the afterlife, than the struggle of all the souls worried about rumors or strange music or the absence of toilet paper?
We think it is because we've been playing it, and because we are naturally predisposed to value hundreds of thousands of souls lost in a city more highly than one soul trapped because it felt bad about selling cursed merchandise, but that's a small human viewpoint and we have to let go of that, too, in the end. We think every story has to end with some grand event that explains everything and makes us feel like a hero, but stories don't, especially not stories set in a weird techno-mythical Japan where yokai just hang out defying human explanation, as they have for thousands of years.
If KK had just been able to let go and move on when he died, if Akito had just been able to release his guilt and his need to 'save' Mari and move on with his life...we wouldn't have had a story, obviously, but a hell of a lot of stories are based on someone's bad decisions. Arguably, the proper, natural, healthy thing for them to do would have been to just let go and move on. (Let it go, let it go...)
Obviously, I'm only PARTLY trying to say that this is the One True Interpretation of this game and I have uncovered its vast depths of profundity because I am so awesome.
Arguably, that whole defense was nothing more than wordy sophistry, fit for the last-minute term paper of a student whose soul has been crushed by too much studying.
I certainly am not sure much if any of it was really the intention of anyone involved with the making of the game, and while I think it's valid to talk about things that are in art even when the makers didn't intentionally put it there, it's also easy to read way too much into things that way.
Probably running out of time and money, and not wanting to put a lot of work into an ending many people won't see, are equally relevant factors.
But, you know…I think it also maybe hangs together better than I initially thought it did, if I look at it from another angle.
Loothound:
Interesting point, which if true would sort of validate your earlier thoughts about the theme of this game being kind of Zen-like in its message. "Yep, there's all this struggle and interesting stuff in the world, but none of that really matters in the end. Just move on." This interpretation definitely fits with what we're given to work with. I'm not sure how I feel about the idea that Mari could have just said, "Nah" at any point and the whole thing would have been over. Hannya picked her to be his vessel pretty specifically, if I remember correctly, and maybe it was because she was deeeeeep into the being hung up on negative emotions thing. That prolonged tour through her bad thoughts kind of gives me that impression. COULD she have just stopped Hannya before finding her own closure, then? What provided it? Was it Akito demonstrating that he WAS committed to her enough to come find her? Or did it happen sooner? I'm remembering all the times after transmitting spirits that Akito would swoon, and hear her voice. She was always saying something like, "it's okay, you can give up." Had she let go already? Hmmm.
Okay, then, closure is important because it helps people move past things. Kind of funny how we're sitting here (Butch and I, anyway) griping about the game's lack of closure. One thing's for sure, the Spider's Thread gameplay certainly doesn't seem to offer any. Just frustration and going back to square one. Talk about not being able to move on...
Your wordy sophistry is always a pleasure. I think it's a good interpretation, and it certainly works as well as anything else we've come up with. There is a big emphasis on negative emotional hang ups in this game, and your way ties that together. It's like the story of this game has two levels, the philosophical and the narrative, and they got uneven treatment.
We could probably all benefit from the "not getting hung up on negative emotions" takeaway. It certainly gives this story more depth than most games have.
Feminina:
Oh, I'm there with the gripes too. "Why did we ever hear ANYTHING about Dale if he was never going to matter? Why didn't we find out why Hannya kept calling souls to him in an empty city when apparently they couldn't move on their own? Why didn't we learn what those lights in Akito's hands are, and whether they're related to the lights in Hannya's gloves? What was the story with Rinko? Is the fact that they needed Ed to set up a phone-booth-based spirit transfer tool a sly dig suggesting that Japanese technology is so far ahead, they don't even know how to handle ancient artifacts like this anymore?"
There are so many things we don't know! I think it's sort of a tossup whether never telling us is just laziness/running out of time and money, or is one piece of a larger "look, you don't ever know all the details of anything but you can't get hung up on that, you have to [intense stare] .... move on" theme.
Can it be both? Hm.
Loothound:
Oh, it can definitely be both. I am a big fan of the idea that game didn't give us everything being part of the point, though. It makes me appreciate the game more than thinking they just fumbled the ball with storytelling. I mean, sitting around grumping about the lack of closure doesn't increase our pleasure of having played it. Sitting back and saying, "that was fun" is a lot healthier. However, sitting around and grumping about the lack of closure is its own kind of fun, in this arena. So maybe we need to take a holistic approach and accept that frustrations in one area of life can be satisfactions in others.
I feel like I've read something about this in a samurai book somewhere, but I can't remember which one.
Feminina:
It's certainly a convenient theme.
"Let's tell a story where the main point is that you have to let go of all the mundane concerns that might be troubling you because they could be either manifesting in the world as deadly apparitions, if you're alive, or holding you back from moving on into the next world, if you're dead. And we'll put all kinds of weird cool stuff in it, and we won't really have to explain anything if we don't have a good explanation or don't get around to it, because – hey, letting go of mundane concerns like needing to have things explained is part of the story!"
Being convenient doesn't mean it's not legitimate, but it may make it feel a bit cheaply earned. Like, OK, fine, but you still took the easy way out.
But maybe the easy way (letting go of the need to have all things tied up in a neat bow) is actually also the way most appropriate for the story!
Ha. I can go round and round forever on the game developers' behalf here.
Butch:
You're always on the side of the developer! Always! I think they pay you.
Mari's closure was certainly "Akito came back for me." I think it was also giving him the rings, though, given we knew nothing about their parents, that was kind of...OK.
I don't know if I'm as forgiving. I mean, if a student handed in a one page paper and said "It's minimalist, you just don't get, it doesn't need an end, man," that wouldn't fly.
And yes, Looty, grumping...or, I think, analyzing, things we think are fun is sort of the blog. I have ripped apart games I adore. Can be both.
This game WAS fun. It was also very flawed.
Also, I will run out a disclaimer here that we have before but we probably need to today: We're not Japanese. Could be that Japanese people find all this far more resonant. We're looking at this with American eyes, and maybe that's clouding our vision of what MATTERS.
Maybe.
Loothound:
I think there are definite reasons to give the developer some credit here. When I say that I thought the scene with Akito's parents was beautiful, I really mean it. It was simple, and poignant, and NOT what you usually get from video games. It was supposed to mean something, and I feel like it did. It was a very honest and artful way of presenting death, as it is. Would it have been more emotionally satisfying if Akito got to see their faces and have them tell him that they love him? Yes, that would have been the cloying fantasy version of this, and I feel like that's what would have happened if an American studio had been making this for an American audience. Instead, we got that moment of closure that really WORKED because it was so minimal. Everything was quiet and serene. We, like Akito, don't get to see their face in front of us, even though we can imagine who they were, because they're dead. We don't get to hear their voices or words anymore, because they're dead. Nevertheless, they are there. Their presence is real. Akito can take comfort in them being there, even if they can't communicate. They take Mari and then silently say to Akito the only thing the dead can really say to the living. "You must go, this is not your place." Butch, I absolutely think you're right about our experience not being that of a Japanese player, and the sense of this is very Japanese, but I think everyone can appreciate that scene.
I'm an American, though, and I have come to expect answers and tidy endings. Also, to be cynical of business enough to believe that budgets had some part to play in this.
Feminina:
I think the developers work hard, and I always want to cut them some slack! Also, I'm hoping they'll eventually pay me. One never knows.
And absolutely if a student handed in a one page paper and said "It's minimalist, you just don't get, it doesn't need an end, man," that wouldn't fly, but that's hardly what we've got here.
This is more like if a student handed in a 300-page novel with an ending that felt kind of inconclusive and said "it's part of the theme, it doesn't need to wrap everything up, man."
It's obvious in case 1 that they just didn't do the work, and it's obvious in case 2 that they did actually do a lot of work, just maybe not quite as much as they could have, and when they say "no, I totally meant it to be like this, it's part of the whole VIBE," you can't completely argue that it's NOT part of the whole vibe.
Because man, this vibe had a lot of random stuff, including some that made no sense in a way that HAD to be intentional. Like, did you pick up any mysterious blue stones?
While trophy hunting we found that they could be put in a place, and Loothound eventually placed them all there, and then you got...just a complete non sequitur, really, in terms of anything else we see. And yet it was in the game, obviously on purpose, and it's hard to say it means anything other than "we put some odd things in here because we thought they were funny, don't worry about it making sense," which really kind of says, maybe..."we didn't have any intention of tying everything up neatly."
Which maybe says this IS part of the whole vibe.
I'm sure vibe is an extremely Japanese concept that precisely sums up exactly what they were going for, too.
As for the scene with Akito and his parents, I also liked that a lot.
I particularly thought the fact that they were masked was interesting considering that Hannya and his minions were also masked, but to very different effect. Hannya and his minions wore creepy faces inspired by classic theater, so the implication for me is that they were portraying something – they were artificial, they were sort of grotesque approximations of humanity. (Like the Visitors.) Which works very well considering they were either walking corpses, or the guy who was messing with life and death to create the walking corpses. (Because of envy, thinking back to the "Hannya" role we read about early on. Envy of...those who still have their loved ones with them? Or those who are able to move on?)
On the other hand, Akito's parents wore what I assume are ritual death masks, which don't even really look like human faces but somehow convey a kind of serenity...as if they've accepted their erasure from the living world. They aren't part of life anymore, but they're part of something else, the next step, and although this means they aren't strictly human, they also aren't horrifying caricatures of humans. They have – if I may say it again – moved on.
Such a contrast to the monstrosity that was Hannya when he dragged himself, his wife and Erika out of that pit and merged into...that thing.
Not going to lie, the ending was really slow and at times I felt a little impatient with it, but it also did some cool things.
Butch:
I found no stones. What happened if you got the stones?
Loothound:
You get visited by aliens, and then you get a special song. A very…pop…song. And a sticker for photo mode.
Feminina:
Yeah, this was part of the middle school expansion, so one could argue that it was slightly separate from the main game.
So there were 6 mysterious blue stones that you could find scattered around, and if you placed them all on a desk in a room in the school there was a dramatic rumbling and some circular blue lights appeared outside the classroom window and then...credits started to role and a voice sang a song about how "we've traveled through space to reach earth, we're so happy to be here, things are great." Basically, cheerful aliens arrived! And every role listed in the credits, instead of being someone's name, was just HUMAN.
Story: HUMAN
Music: HUMAN
Etc.
Emphasizing that all the people in the game world AND the game-creators' world share an essential humanity, distinguishing them from aliens or people who have died and moved on to the next world?
Random amusing aside?
Both?
We may never know.
No comments:
Post a Comment