The Patreon Letter - 14th July, 2018 (Patreon)

Octopath Traveler is out, which means the throwback RPG discourse cycle begins anew. I've been trying to stay out of it as much as possible, in part because I'm exhausted by it but also because I'm about to show you one surprising trick that can free you from the chains of its constant return forever. I wonder if you could guess what it is?

For everyone who said 'play actual old games instead' congrats, you've been paying attention to everything Abnormal Mapping is about. A+, head of the class, etc. 

I feel like a broken record much of the time. We've been yelling about playing old games for nearly five years now, and nothing has changed. People are doing this for Octopath Traveler the same way they did that 2D Bloodstained or Cuphead or hell even Bravely Default a lifetime ago the same way they have done forever and will do forevermore. If I am a broken record it's because we live in a world that cannot let go of its own disastrous repetition. 

There are finite old games in the world, as anybody with a penchant for a specific era can tell you, but the number is far larger than anyone considers very often. Nobody has played everything, and most people barely have more than a passing familiarity or some foggy memories of most of what we term 'old games'. Maybe you've played Gunstar Heroes, but have you played Astro Boy: Omega Factor? Have you played Batman: The Animated Series? All of these games are better than Cuphead, which borrows liberally from each. 

People lost their damn minds for Cuphead. I don't get it. Those other games were better? Less racist, more evenly balanced, and pretty freely available if you're fine with emulation. I'm not even an expert in this genre, and I've named three good games to go play from the era it's calling back to. I'm sure there are at least a dozen more.

Which brings us back to Octopath Traveler. Everyone reflects on getting a SNES style RPG like Square didn't already make four of those (Bravely Default, I am Setsuna, Bravely Second, and Lost Sphear for those playing along) to decreasing interest each time. This same conversation came up when those came out. Everyone talked about Cosmic Star Heroine (briefly) and the Penny Arcade games (I know, stay with me) and Costume Quest, though nobody seems to remember them past being excited CSH is on Switch. Hell, I remember people talking about how much Lost Odyssey was better than the Final Fantasy we were getting in the mid-aughts, and NOBODY REMEMBERS THAT GAME NOW. I remember. Lost Odyssey was pretty good, actually.

Every time people talk about Chrono Trigger like Chrono Cross isn't on PSN and none of us have played it. Like Star Ocean 1 & 2 aren't good games that very few people ever touched. Like Ys isn't a long running franchise and problems with Ys VIII aside, is mostly very good and regularly on sale (and will run on almost any computer, since the games are old now). Nobody talks about how the Game Boy and GBA and DS and 3DS are full of RPGs that never stopped being like the games of old. Yeah, Pokemon exists, but what about Mega Man Battle Network, what about the DS Dragon Quest releases, what about Radiant History, and what about god damn Etrian motherfuckin' Odyssey, the best modern JRPG series nobody plays? These aren't even the obscure ones, these are games that you can get pretty easily right now! 

We complain a lot about how gamers have no memory. That's true of players, that's true of critics. Everyone is so busy chasing the next hot thing that their only frame of reference is the games that blew up in the past five years and what they played in their childhood. But nobody goes back. Nobody revisits their favorites. Nobody explores what else was kicking around the era they long for. Instead they talk about all the bad things in Octopath Traveler, about how fiddly it is and how bad its graphics look and about how arcane it's character selection and systems can be. By all accounts, it's a totally forgettable light job system game that will sell three million copies because it's on switch and only because it's on switch. Square will learn nothing, and keep churning these out. 

One Octopath pays for a half dozen Setsunas. 

We're coming up on half a decade doing Abnormal Mapping, and every week I get mad about how little people actually play old games for how much they want to relive the aesthetics they remember or wring their hands over the conservation of these objects they don't actually want to experience. Games have embalmed the past and buried it and worship at its memory daily, and I can think of no greater tragedy in the space. So many awful nostalgia games get made, so much money churns, and so many loud boys get louder based on the narratives we build when we forget our past. That's true of culture, but it's true even of such a small and worthless medium as games. 

I didn't pick up Octopath Traveler. I thought about it, got the demo and everything, but then I started replaying Final Fantasy XII early for our podcast for it (probably in October? We'll see). You know what? FF12 is great! Probably a better game now both in sensibility and with its remake improvements than it was in 2006. It's aged beautifully. Octopath still looks like a bad FF6 UE4 remake tech demo you'd laugh at on youtube. And yet, here we all are, talking about the damned thing.

Games make me so tired, friends.

Until next time,

Em