Patreon Letter: 30th June 2020 (Patreon)

Hello friends,

It's Jackson here with the patreon letter. I feel like this month has lasted approximately eight thousand years. I'm coming in at the last moment because you give me a deadline and I will hit it, but not a moment before, and that's just the way I live my life. Em's slightly delayed because they've had two podcasts to edit over the last day so they'll have theirs out later in the week. Please understand, etc etc. No excuse for me however, so let's go let's do this!

At the start of the month, I played Kingdom Hearts 3. And as I am sure you are aware, it brought upon me psychic ruin by being an absolute dogshit conclusion to a 20 year saga. Both in the sense of being bad and also by not being a conclusion at all. And I was going to write a big thing about it, or talk about it on the podcast, but I ended up... not doing that? I've tweeted about it obliquely, we've talked around it on the various podcasts, my feelings are certainly out there. But I haven't crafted them into a coherent work of content yet, and I dunno if that's a thing I'm going to do. 

I know it's a thing people would like. I could get some cool guests, do a series of podcasts going through the games like I did for Metal Gear, and I would have a great time plus they'd be really popular. But with only so many hours in the day I'd also feel bad to dedicate more of the work we put out to talking about Square RPGs out of sunk cost fallacy. 

Anyway so instead of talking about the Themes and Narrative of KH3 (which is where the real bad stuff is) because that would take too long, I instead just want to just talk a little about a single frustration with specifically the level design, by which I mean, how there isn't any.

That's not fair, there's some, there's six massive disney worlds. They're usually corridors with combat arenas and a few side paths for treasures, but whatever that's Square's level design philosophy I've made my peace with that.

Instead, I was struck when playing the game that Twilight Town is two rooms. You can't go down to the fight pit. You can't go up to the Train Station or the Clock Tower. The moment I knew I had to write something about this is because you go down to the data room in the Mansion basement, and the way you go there is by walking up to the Mansion front door and then it hard cuts to load the cutscene. There are multiple cutscenes in Radiant Garden and Yen Sid's Tower. You never set foot in these levels "for real." You never inhabit the space. Aside from very, very brief exceptions, if there is a space in Kingdom Hearts III it is a nice Unreal Engine corridor (or completely empty city block) to walk down and do some fighting in. 

And it sucks! 

I understand why, when developing worlds that must have this intense UE4 level of fidelity, you decide to make a small section of Twilight Town, and not spend months designing and rendering the inside of the Mansion in loving HD. It would be an empty, combat free space that the player would briefly walk through to get to a cutscene. It is inarguably a waste of everyone's time and money. The player would walk down the stairs in less than twenty seconds. But those twenty seconds are everything. When you think of Shadow Moses you know the SOCOM is in the truck. 

When you need to talk to Yen Sid in this game you don't fly to Yen Sid's tower and walk up the stairs. You don't even walk up to the front door, despite there being multiple cutscenes of characters sitting on the step. The game just hard cuts from whatever you were doing and bam, Sora's at the tower. You don't even select "RETURN TO YEN SID" from a menu. All of these decisions in isolation make sense for keeping things moving and putting the money where it matters, but they add up to a feeling of total emptiness. These intricate, HD worlds feel less alive as spaces than the empty Traverse Town, playing its endless awful music. 

And KH3 is the most extreme (the last level, the ultimate conclusion that has been built to for 20 years, is literally a series of brown textured corridors with boss fights and no regular enemies), but FF7R is not without this either. If there's one thing I've learned playing Square games across the ages this year it's that their unreasonable commitment to graphical fidelity is killing the spirit of their games. And like, we knew that, they've blown the company up over this no less than three times now, but seeing it so starkly is such a shame. I like playing all of these games. But in FF7R you never see Avalanche's basement. The Train Graveyard is a multi-hour, two boss epic quest through a now literally haunted railway system but you never see the basement. 

And that's not to mention the cutscenes. Thanks to the power of the Unreal Engine, it is now possible to create cutscenes that literally never end. These things go on for fuckin ever, and more importantly they sometimes happen every few steps. Back in "the good old days," due to the expense of animating models and recording voice acting, it was common to revert to the tried and true method of pressing X to button through some dialogue boxes, when it came to flavour text and less impactful story sequences. 

This wasn't a cop out or admission that some of the game was less important than the rest and thus choices must be made as to what gets a "real" scene. It served a purpose: to not overload your brain with unneeded visual information because a JRPG is fourty hours long. When playing a fourty hour RPG having twelve of those hours be cutscenes is exhausting on the mind. You process things better when you read them at your own pace, and when the cutscene starts you know it's time to pay attention for real. Did KH3 need fully animated sequences inside the Gummi ship where Sora, facetimes the other characters who are hanging out in the places the plot is actually happen? Did it need that more than it needed the option to walk into Yen Sid's tower?

It's just disappointing because I genuinely love these games. I know at the start I said I hated KH3 - and that is obi wan voice true from a certain point of view, I was talking about the story - but really playing all these games over the past 18 months I've fallen in love with playing them. The story might make me actively furious from time to time, but I think they are on the whole fantastic to play, with some of my favourite combat in video games. Just a very unique mix of character action game twitch combat with the progression and exploration of an RPG. Sooner than later I am going to play all the games again on critical mode. The only thing stopping me from doing that this very second is I have like eight podcast things to prepare this month. I know some people say why do you care if you just complain but the answer is that I only talk about the friction. There's not much interesting to say about "bro it feels so good to hit guys with the keyblade." I am earnest in my fandom.

But it really feels like with 3, in line with the direction their development has shifted across their teams, Square has identified that KH is a series about Combat and Story, and so people will be happy with the final 10 hours of a game being nothing but cutscenes and bosses. And maybe they're right, but it's disappointing to me. The story being bad won't get me to abandon playing these games but if this trend continues maybe one day this will. Anyway they should have just made the game on the KH2 engine. They ported the damn thing to PS4. Then they wouldn't have had to remodel everyone. Coulda slapped Twilight Town right in this bad boy. I guess this is why I'm not the CEO of a game developer.

Okay well there's enough going on about that. I will see you all next month, take care of yourselves.

-Jackson