The Stack

I’ve been slowly easing myself back into this game. Refamiliarlizing myself with the combat mechanics didn’t take long. It’s pretty simple: first, you choose one of the pokémon that you’re carrying with you at the moment (you can carry at most six at a time); if you’re facing another trainer rather than a solitary wild pokémon, he does the same. Then, in each round of combat, both sides choose an attack, and watch the results. Every attack, even the mundane ones equivalent to throwing a punch, can only be used so many times per sally, like D&D spells. All pokémon are, in effect, magic users.

A more difficult issue is trying to remember where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Up to a certain point, the game is linear, providing a single clear path ahead and a single subquest at every juncture. I’m well past that point. It pretty much ends the moment you teach one of your flying pokémon to carry you from town to town. Still, in my current state, wandering over my traces is no bad thing. I’m still trying to level up my weaker pokémon, after all. Not so much because I want to use them in battle — the ones I’ve already levelled up can pretty much take care of that — but because I want them to “evolve”. You see, some kinds of pokémon go through multi-stage life cycles, with each stage counting as a separate type of pokemon. A squirtle, for example, turns into a wartortle at level 16, and then into a blastoise at level 36. The magikarp, the booby-prize of pokémon, famous for its complete uselessness in battle, possessing at the beginning only a “splash” attack that never does any damage, transforms at level 20 into a gyarados, one of the most fearsome creatures in the game, capable of learning the “dragon rage” attack. “Evolution” is a clever trick that the game designer uses to make the player voluntarily use many different pokémon, with different capabilities, rather than settling on a single favorite. But it also means lots of grind as you try to level everything up evenly.

Another obstacle to picking up from where I left off is simply remembering all the pokémon. Twice already I’ve seen what I believed to be a previously-unseen variety in the wild, only to discover after catching it that I already had one in my collection. I suppose I should write these things down rather than rely on the lists available in the game, which can’t be accessed during an encounter. I’ve kind of made this unnecessarily hard for myself, too, by giving all my pokémon names. Whenever you catch a pokémon, you’re given the option of naming it. I get the impression that most people don’t bother, calling their pokemon solely by their species name like in the cartoon, but it seems like it would be useful if you decided to catch multiple individuals of the same species. I’m not doing that — not deliberately, anyway — but I give my pokémon names anyway. It just seemed more proper that way. So I’ve got Godwin the Wartortle, Sheridan the Butterfree, Blenkinsop the Alakazam, Vivien the Snorlax, Morgoth the Pikachu, and so forth. But even ignoring that, I currently have 61 pokemon in my collection, and I don’t remember what they all do. But I imagine I’ll get used to them all again as I trot them out and give them their five minutes in the arena. Pokémon is one of those games that’s also a body of knowledge. The more you play, the deeper that knowledge goes into your brain.

Gotta catch ’em all! What better expression of the completist urge is there? But, for reasons I’ll go into later, this is something of a cruel joke applied to Pokémon.

Let’s back up a moment. Even though it’s well-known, or at least well-heard-of, Pokémon requires a little explanation. A lot of people know of it primarily from the cartoon show and the card game, unaware that the Gameboy cartridge came first. I suppose this is because it only came first in Japan. By the time it hit the West, it was already a multi-channel media phenomenon that would change the way videogames are developed and marketed. A phenomenon, moreover, that the original game didn’t fit into all that well. The original Pokémon game was released in two versions, Red and Blue ¹ I speak of the American versions. Apparently things get more complicated when you consider the Japanese versions: the blue version is called green and there’s a third version called blue, or something like that. , essentially differing only in their wandering monster tables. (I have the Blue version.) After the cartoon became such a hit, a third version, Yellow, was released, which altered things a lot more in order to make it more similar to the cartoon based on the Red and Blue versions than the Red and Blue versions themselves: changing the artwork, adding characters, giving the player Pikachu ² If you don’t know what Pikachu is: Picture a pokémon right now. That’s Pikachu. It’s the one that you’ve seen even if you’ve only had minimal Pokémon exposure. right at the beginning, etc. An unusual development indeed! The only thing similar I can think of is Earthworm Jim 3D, which drew more heavily from the Earthworm Jim cartoon show than the original game. (And, as with Pokémon, I’ve encountered people who didn’t know that Earthworm Jim was a videogame first.)

In format, Pokémon is basically a party-based RPG with abstract turn-based combat. You play the part of an 11-year-old pokémon trainer, wandering from town to town in a tile-based world (conspicuously similar to Zelda: Link’s Awakening in graphical style), fighting monsters for treasure and experience points. Except you don’t fight personally — you have monsters of your own for that. And sometimes the treasure is the monster itself. There are two types of encounter: against wild pokémon, and against other pokémon trainers. When fighting a wild pokémon, you have the choice of vanquishing it for XP or attempting to capture it for your collection, from where you can swap it into your party.

There are 150 ³ Mew doesn’t count. species of pokémon in the original game, although sequels have expanded this greatly. There are 15 broader types that the species belong to: normal (which seems to just be the null type, assigned to any species that doesn’t fit any other types), fire, water, electric (that’s Pikachu’s type), grass (plant life in general, really, but they call it grass), ice, fighting (they all fight, but this means martial arts stuff), poison, ground (dirt-based or burrowing animals), flying, psychic, bug, rock, ghost, and dragon. A species can belong to either one or two types, so you can have flying bugs and poisonous vegetation and the like. You’ve probably noticed that several of the types are traditional RPG “elemental damage” types, and yes, the various types determine the kinds of attacks the pokémon can do, as well as their special vulnerabilities: a fire pokémon is weak against water-based attacks, a flying pokémon is nearly immune to ground-based attacks, and so on. Psychic pokémon seem to be really strong against everything except bugs. There’s a chart in the manual. So it’s an extended rock-paper-scissors, except that the difference can be overwhelmed by sheer force of experience level; instead of “paper covers rock”, it’s “paper covers rock, unless it’s a really big rock, in which case it can slowly grind the paper into pulp”.

Speaking of slowly grinding, there’s enough XP-farming in this game that I’ve decided to continue from where I left off years ago rather than starting over from scratch. I was pretty far advanced in the game, having beaten four of the eight Pokémon Leaders that form the game’s other overall goal. It really is a pretty well-designed game, and I can see why it was such a hit with the junior high set. It’s got complexity to master, if mastering complexity is your thing. If not, you can just level up your favorite pokémon until it’s nearly unbeatable. It’s designed for a lengthy campaign, but can be played in short sessions, with tangible progress each time. And it’s social. If you really want to achieve the stated goal of catching ’em all, you can’t play alone. The red version provides the possibility of capturing pokémon that are never seen wild in the blue version, and vice versa. The only way to get the ones not in your version is to trade with other players (which you do by linking your Gameboys together). Even worse: one of each cartridge won’t do it. There are multiple points in the game where you have to choose between three different pokémon, so unless you have a friend who’s willing to play through a large portion of the game twice in order to supply you, or are willing to buy two Gameboys and play through the game three times yourself, you need multiple friends who are playing Pokémon at more or less the same rate as you. So there’s an abnormal incentive to get people around you to play it.

Alas, this is easier for its target audience. When I was first playing this game, I was well beyond normal pokémon age, but was fortunate enough to be working at a game-oriented dot-com, where two other people were also curious enough about the Pokémon phenomenon to give it a try. But I’m far from catching ’em all, and have more or less lost the opportunity for casual lunch-break trades. This is what I dislike most about social games: the difficulty of resuming them years later. Maybe I’ll put an ad on Craigslist. In the meantime, if anyone reading this blog is in the San Francisco area and has both the will and the equipment to do some trades, feel free to post a comment.

In the end, after you’ve defeated the demonic hordes assembled against you (preferably by using magic to kill them through a wall), it’s just four of you against one oversized demon who can knock you across the room before you get within sword’s reach. Fortunately, you have bows. More to the point, you have a wizard who can summon “dragons”. I put that word in scare quotes because the “dragons” you can summon are nothing like the dragons you fight elsewhere in the game. Instead, they’re basically automated gun turrets in the form of a ghostly dragon head sticking up through the floor. I’ve found that the best way to kill single extremely tough monsters in this game is to lay lots of dragon emplacements as fast as you can and then just run around in circles, adding more dragons as you go: the more you add, the more often the baddie gets hurt. It takes a lot of mana (or ki, as it’s called in this game) to pull this off, but as this is the final confrontation, I figured I may as well buy as many mana potions as I can carry. And so my wizard defeated the demon warlord Zanshin more or less singlehandedly, his companions being there mainly to keep the enemy distracted while I set up the initial dragon array.

After that moment of triumph, the final cutscene is a slap in the face. Basically, this is the point where the designers show just how slavisly they’re imitating Diablo. So be warned that I’m about to spoil the endings of both Diablo and Throne of Darkness.

If you’ve played Diablo, you probably remember the shock of the ending. Having defeated the titular demon and locked him back into the crystal he came from, the player character picks up that crystal… and stabs himself in the forehead with it. Which momentarily confuses the player, until you remember enough of the backstory to understand that the hero is binding Diablo’s essence to his own body in order to contain it, making the ultimate sacrifice of becoming a living vessel for the fiend, sealed away underground. It’s a dark, dark ending. There’s no earthly reward for the righteous, and a distinct possibility that the hero is going to eventually crack and let Diablo loose again, beginning the cycle anew.

The creators of Throne of Darkness were clearly aiming for something similar. After you defeat the Dark Warlord, the daimyo of your clan teleports in, takes the Dark Warlord’s sphere of power, and immediately transforms into the new Dark Warlord, turning the seven player characters into his new undead minions. (The final levels contained a “Dark” version of each of the player classes: Dark Swordsman, Dark Archer, etc. Presumably that’s what your team turns into.)

Now, neither of these games is high literature, but the Diablo ending has a bit of tragic depth to it, with the self-sacrifice for the greater good, while the Throne of Darkness ending comes off as no more than cheap irony, and mean-spirited at that. In Diablo, even if you take it that the world is still doomed, at least it’s spared for a while — longer, anyway, than the thirty seconds it takes the daimyo in Throne to render all your efforts pointless. If I had been playing the power-hungry Tokugawa clan, it might have seemed a more appropriate ending, turning into monsters as the ultimate result of placing ambition above all else. But I was playing the lawful-good Mori clan (it was the first one in the list). So the heroes are turned into monsters, not in punishment for their iniquities, or as a result of a tragic flaw, or in an act of self-sacrifice to spare others (as in Diablo), but “just because”.

Still, the final level had its virtues — mainly that, even with the most powerful characters and gear that I could reasonably hope to make, it still required some tactical thought. It’s significant that the monster supply, and thus the XP supply, is actually finite. In an RPG with an infinite XP supply, you have the option of avoiding the more difficult fights until you’re powerful enough to not have to think about them. Even here, I put off the final few castle floors in order to spend time levelling up. It helped, but it didn’t make things trivial. So, good overall balance, even if it did get tedious in the midgame.

I’ve explored all four slopes of the mountain now. Sure enough, the last one contained the Single Quest I had been missing. This was the Wizard’s quest, so it’s a good thing I went to the trouble of levelling him up.

This quest involved defeating a sequence of seven boss monsters, each alone in a separate chamber of a dungeon. Each chamber had a large kanji inscribed on the floor, possibly a hint about what sort of spells you’d need: 土 (chi/tsuchi, soil), 火 (ka/hi, fire), 電 (den, electricity), 血 (keshi/chi, blood), 気 (ki, spirit), 空 (kuu/sora, void or sky), 水 (sui/mizu, water). (The order may be randomized.) It’s a peculiar assortment. Fire, water, earth, and electricity are the four elements of the game’s magic system. Fire, water, earth, and void are four of the five classical Japanese elements, but air/wind is pointedly absent. Why blood and spirit are included is anyone’s guess, but I’ll note that both 土 and 血 can both be pronounced “chi” in Japanese (depending on context), and 気 is pronounced “chi” in Chinese.

I’m definitely overanalyzing this, but thinking about the element systems, it strikes me that the overall architecture of the game, like the classical elements, is in fours and fives. You’ve got four clans, each with its own castle, in a ring around the castle of the demon-possessed overlord Tsunayoshi. It’s tempting to declare that the four clans correspond to the game’s four elements, and that the central castle, on the mountaintop above the others, corresponds to kuu in the sense of “sky”. Well, okay, there’s one castle that’s surrounded by marsh, and which thus naturally corresponds to water, but that’s about as far as I can take this.

Reading the descriptions of the four clans in the manual, however, I think there may be a different base-four architecture at work. I hadn’t mentioned this before, but you can play any of the four clans, and presumably your choice affects the quests you get: the more noble and altruistic leaders will get quests to save surviving villagers, the more ruthless ones will seek out powerful foes solely to seize the sources of their power. From the manual:

Mori Motonari, the youngest Daimyo, is by far the most capable ruler of the four daimyos… He is currently under the impression that if Kira Tsunayoshi can be saved, they have every obligation to save him…

Seething with ambition, Oda Nobunaga leads a group of men who will stop at nothing to ensure he takes the throne. This attack has become a prime opportunity for Oda Nobunaga to destroy any obstacles, while having a legitimate reason to commit regicide… Oda’s ruthless tactics and heavy-handed rule are nevertheless brilliant…

A realist, Tokugawa Ieyasu has not only planned the entire offensive against the Dark Warlord, but has also created plans for his eventual attainment of Shogun himself… Although he will gladly join forces with any of the other Daimyo to increase his personal power, Ieyasu will be quick to exploit any weaknesses shown by the other clans…

Hideyoshi is a boisterous leader, and well liked by the normal troops because of his farming roots… Hideyoshi became known as “Hanuman.” … [H]e is called this for both his cunning and whimsical nature (like the monkey god’s namesake)…

In short, the four daimyo are respectively:

• Loyal and honorable
• Cruel and destructive
• Scheming and machiavellian
• Good-natured and whimsical

Which is to say, they are Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Good.

I haven’t mentioned that objects in this game tend to have Japanese names. That is, you don’t get a two-handed sword and a full helmet, you get a nodachi and a kabuto. I was pleased to see the word “kanmuri” used for one of the weakest helmets, as I had seen this word before in a completely different context: in writing Japanese characters, a kanmuri is a radical that goes on top. Apparently it means “crown”. It’s all a little reminiscent of playing the Samurai class in Nethack, with its name substitutions for items, but in Nethack only a few items are covered, and here it’s nearly everything.

Some of these words have already percolated through gamer culture (is there anyone who doesn’t know what a shuriken is?), others have not. (What on earth is a shinjyu? Or a ka-ho? ¹Answers: The “shinjyu” in the game, an enchanted string of beads, is probably 真珠, which means “pearl”. There’s also an item-enhancement component called a “pearl”, but I think that’s just a result of the developers not paying much attention to translations when they were choosing names. “Ka-ho” in the game is a gem that enhances your stats, and is probably 果報, “good luck”. ) Some may be made up or misapplied: the strongest armor in the game is called “kunimichi”, which googles primarily as the name of a famous swordsmith. I suppose that there aren’t any famous armorsmiths, and they ran out of real armor terms. (They ran out of monster names too, but solved that with the time-honored gimmick of shoving prefixes in front of everything: Forest Oni, Fire Oni, etc.)

To the extent that they refer to unknown things, the Japanese names are an obstacle to understanding. I’ve noticed before that I generally have an easier time getting used to the relative power of things in fantasy games than in sci-fi games, because “dragon” and “unicorn” are extremely clear and distinct ideas in my mind, while “photon cannon” and “tachyon beam” both get filed under technobabble. Similarly, even though I’ve studied Japanese a little, this game is full of what I can only see as Japanobabble. To someone learned in traditional Japanese martial technology, the difference between a “shibata” and a “nisun nobi” might be obvious. Me, all I have to go on is the pictures. They both look like bows.

But I suppose it’s educational. At least, in those cases where they didn’t just make up the words or assign them arbitrarily.

The second floor of Castle Tsunayoshi ends in a transition from traditional Japanese decor to Hellmouth, complete with pointy teeth. And climbing the stairs to the third floor brings me to another one of those points where my party is slaughtered swiftly and mercilessly. In part, this is just the nature of stairs. When you climb stairs, you wind up in the middle of an unexplored space; there’s no safe area to fall back to. The archer and wizard can’t hang back in the rear if you’re surrounded. But also, it’s just that the monsters are suddenly a lot harder again.

So I left the castle and gave a thorough explore to the southeast slope of the mountain. This was a pretty meaty chunk of adventuring, with two small optional dungeons (in addition to the big one that leads into the castle, which has entrances on all four mountain paths). Several of my samurai gained levels, and my ninja has maxed out his skill in the “Fire Kanji” spell, effectively making him as powerful as my wizard as long as I keep buying him mana potions. My current plan is to keep on doing the slopes until I run out, then assault the castle again.

The general RPG design concept of making areas available before the player characters are actually ready to tackle them is one that I’ve praised in the past (Wasteland is a good example), but it doesn’t work quite so well at this moment. Mainly because of the way the game leads you around the gameworld by assigning quests. For the most part, just following the lead of the quest system takes you through the game in optimal order. There comes a point where the mountain trails become available, but your assigned quest is to continue to the next castle in the proper sequence; ignoring your quest and charging up the slopes quickly proves suicidal. But here in the endgame, that’s reversed: obeying orders and continuing into the castle is suicidal, and the sensible thing to do is to wander around in the wilderness, which makes no sense in the story.

I mentioned recently that the most numerous game genre on my stack was adventure games, but RPGs are a close second, thanks largely to anthologies. I’ve got the majority of the Wizardry and Final Fantasy series ahead of me, as well as the entire Might and Magic series. (Ultima I finished some time ago.) So, I think I should try to finish up Throne of Darkness so I can start a different RPG without feeling like I’m neglecting it.

When last we left our band of intrepid samurai, they had just gotten through the dungeons under Tsunayoshi’s castle, and were getting killed a lot. They’re getting killed somewhat less now, due to a combination of more XP, better tactics (I’m swapping out wounded characters sooner, and trying to make sure I always have a combination of melee and ranged characters out), and better equipment. Some of the equipment is crafted, but I’m finding crafting to be something of an exercise in frustration at this point: the moment I make myself an Ultimate Weapon, costing half my gold or more, I find a new previously-unseen component that would make it even better if there were any free slots left. Perhaps the better approach to crafting in this game is to just make little improvements to whatever you find.

Even though I’m within spitting distance of the final confrontation, I’m taking things slow. This seems to be the best way to approach this game: going through the castle level by level, room by room, taking the time to process your loot after each room you clear and at the same time letting everyone heal. Impatience gets you killed. I’ve even toyed with leaving the castle to explore the unexplored paths down the mountain, since the last Single Quest is presumably out there somewhere.

And, really, taking things slowly is kind of the right way to play RPGs, MMO or otherwise. To rush to the end is to miss the point. Experience farming is a meditative practice, similar in a way to “casual” games like Bejewelled: simple, repetitive, only partly engaging one’s attention. It’s something you can rest your mind on.

This is pretty much the opposite of the attitude I took the last time I wrote about this game. What can I say, it’s spring now.

So, I gave Throne of Darkness another go. I’m out of the dungeon and into the final castle, but things there are slaughtering my party regularly. I think I’ll have to have another crafting spree before I can make any more progress, and maybe go back and slaughter some creatures along alternate paths for more XP and crafting supplies.

Since I’ve run out of interesting things to say about the gameplay, let me talk about the graphics a little. I mentioned before that I bought this game primarily on the basis of the screenshots on the box (which is a poor way to make purchasing decisions, but hey, it was cheap). The thing I liked was mainly the texture of the objects. Items have engraving-like detail, and magic items are tinted in various colors depending on their enhancements. It’s especially striking now, coming from a stint of Guitar Hero, which uses heavily stylized 3D. The Throne of Darkness style is a good example of what 2D graphics can do better.

All of which makes me wonder what they were thinking when they made the crudely cel-shaded cutscenes. Nobody’s perfect, I suppose.

I underestimated the amount of game left. There’s a fairly substantial dungeon to be completed before tackling the central castle. The thing is, I don’t think there’s anything left to learn about the game. While the motivation behind gaming is (for me) largely about the sense of accomplishment, much of the actual pleasure comes from mastering new systems, and now that I’ve mastered magic and crafting, there’s nothing new left. I’ve reached the point of tedium.

It seems to me that CRPGs are particularly prone to becoming tedious, because progress in a game is based on developing the skills of the player characters, not on developing the skills of the player. There is one skill that the player learns: how to advance the characters efficiently. Mastery of that skill means that the PCs will be ahead of the difficulty curve from there on out, robbing the game of challenge. When this happens, the game can either end, or throw some new wrinkle at the player that forces them to revise what they’ve learned, or it can become mindless and repetitive. The last option is surprisingly popular among both developers and players.

A reasonable person just would stop playing at this point and get on with things that are either more enjoyable or have practical merit. But this blog is not about being reasonable. I will finish this game. I won’t do it right away, though. It’s high time for a break.

I seem to be getting into the home stretch now. The overall structure of the game involves five castles, a central one on a mountaintop and one in each of the cardinal directions around it, connected by a ring road. I’ve done missions in all of the castles except the central one now, and the only quest currently active is to activate the last remaining teleport gate of the eight on the ring road. This will take me back to near my starting point.

My characters are also nearly all up to the point where they can wield the strongest weapons available for purchase. And that means it’s time to sit down and do some serious crafting.

Crafting in this game involves combining items with monster leavings, such as oni horns and kappa claws, or various kinds of gem. Each item has specific effects: dragon stingers make a weapon poisonous, tengu feathers give a bonus to dexterity, etc. Each weapon and piece of armor has a certain number of enhancement slots; the more powerful items tend to have more. It’s kind of like the Final Fantasy 7 “materia” system, except that enhancement items can’t be removed. To effect an enhancement, you have to pay a blacksmith, who charges more for more powerful effects. More powerful effects also take more time to produce, and while the blacksmith is working on an item, he can’t do anything else, like start on new items or repair damage to the stuff you’re already using.

So there are four limiting factors on how powerful an item you can craft: enhancement items, enhancement slots, money, and time. Money was the chief limitation at the beginning of the game — at least, it was after I had spent it all crafting a wicked bow for my Archer. But for most of the game, it’s been enhancement items. I have lots of certain items, such Elder Kappa Shells, but not the things I really want to use. Shortages trigger the hoarding instinct: rather than use my last precious gems on a suit of armor that I’m just going to throw away once I can wear something stronger, I’ve been saving them up.

And now comes the moment I’ve been saving them up for. There’s no need to wait for a better item to use them on. It’s time to make maximally amazing stuff for all seven characters. Which means spending maximal amounts of money and time. The money isn’t a problem (at least, I don’t think it is), but the time factor means that there’s probably more than an hour of solid crafting built up. I hope it’ll all be ready by the time I get sent to the central castle.