The Stack

Portal is a game I’ve been wanting to play for a while. Despite a low-profile release, all the critics had a lot to say about it, and it’s easy to see why: it’s a very experimental work, as novel in content as it is in gameplay. What we have here is a very dark vision of the future, but unlike the usual videogame dystopia, this darkness is not used as a pretext for wanton violence. Not only is there no support for violence in the user interface, there isn’t even anyone to commit violence against — the only other character you have any dealings with is the artificial intelligence that sets you on your path and urges you on.

Like any true experiment, Portal has its origin in an argument. A programmer made the perhaps obvious assertion that computer games require interactive content — that “the player has to have a direct impact on what’s happening”. Note that this is not necessarily a property of games in general: in some children’s games, such as Chutes and Ladders, the outcome is entirely up to chance and the players are only required to fulfill mechanical duties, like rolling dice and moving tokens. But in a computer game, automatic chores of this sort are naturally left to the computer, which leaves the player nothing to do except exercise agency. This seems like a pretty solid argument to me, but Brad Fregger, Portal‘s producer, felt otherwise.

As a proof-by-example of Fregger’s thesis, Portal fails in two seemingly contradictory ways. To explain this, I’ll have to describe its gameplay a little. The player’s window on the gameworld is a terminal to a global data network. Because the game was written in 1986, the designer’s idea of a global data network doen’t look much like the Web, with its anarchy of links. Instead, it’s a hierarchical structure, with a main interface that gives you access to twelve “data sources”, including your AI helper, a raconteur program called HOMER which specializes in turning data into stories. Each data source has its own list of documents on different topics, and reading some topics (or groups of topics?) will cause new topics to appear. Sometimes you’re told outright about a causal link, as when HOMER tells you that he’s persuaded the History node to release new information. Sometimes you can infer it, as when the text mentions a disease you haven’t heard of and you look it up in the Medical database. Sometimes you just have to guess where the new information is. As you go along, HOMER accumulates more and more story until you have an entire novella answering the game’s central mystery: the fate of the human population of now-abandoned Earth.

So, does the player “have an impact”? Unsurprisingly, you can’t have an impact on the revealed backstory: it’s already set in stone. This is presumably what Fregger was thinking about. However, the player’s actions do change the state of the game. When you choose what to read, you make new topics available: that’s a change. The order in which topics become available can vary from playthrough to playthrough, even though the set of topics you have to go through to reach the end is unvarying. It’s not much of an impact, gameplay-wise, but it’s an impact nonetheless.

(Interestingly, the player’s actions have more of an impact within the story. There are really two levels of narrative: there’s the story that HOMER is putting together — the backstory, with a protagonist named Peter Devore — and there’s the story of finding that story, with HOMER as its protagonist. (No, not the player. The player is just the story’s Dr. Watson, except that Watson at least got to narrate.) These stories come together in the end, when HOMER uses what you’ve learned to contact the missing humans and provide them with the “anchor” they need to come home. HOMER can’t reach that point without the player: part of the premise is that there’s some data that HOMER can’t access without human approval. So within the fiction of the story, the player’s actions help bring the humans back. But that’s just a literary device, roughly equivalent to Grover complaining about the reader turning pages, and just as irrelevant to questions of interactivity.)

It should be pointed out that, despite Portal‘s failure on this point, there is at least one example of a computer game that has no interactivity whatever. But it’s arguable whether that really should be classified as a “game”, rather than a “joke” or a “screensaver”.

Which brings me to my second objection: Is Portal really a game? That’s a harder question to answer, but it seems to me that even if it meets some definition of “game”, it violates at least one major expectation of computer games: there is no challenge to it. OK, there’s the small matter of finding new text snippets to read, but that can be easily accomplished by just cycling through all twelve data sources. (Or, really, only eight: four of the nodes are devoted to displaying inscrutable medical charts and the like about all the characters, and seem to be useless for revealing the story.) Although Activision packaged and sold it like a game, they hedged somewhat on whether it actually was one, preferring to call it “interactive literature”. Even that designation is questionable: although the interface to the story is interactive (in the sense that you can affect its state), the story itself is not. It’s composed of the same events, with the same descriptions, in the same in-story chronological order, no matter what you do; the only thing you can alter is the order in which you read about them. This is the kind of borderline case for which the term “ergodic literature” was coined.

But enough about the strange notions behind its creation. How is Portal as an ergodic novella?

Well, as a novella, it’s not bad. It’s potboiler sci-fi, and I’ve certainly read worse potboiler sci-fi. We start with the idea that you’ve been away from Earth for more than a century, and that gives the author an excuse to bring you up to date on a hundred years of social and technological developments: the Unisex movement, the colonization of Antarctica, neurophagic weapons, and so forth. Devore is a Heinleinian supercompetent hero struggling against a world government that (rightly) sees his scientific investigations as a threat to the status quo. The ending is mystical and apocalyptic and campy all at once. I felt it bogged down in the middle, though, when Devore and his associates went on the lam. I suppose that’s supposed to be the exciting part, but the sudden travelogue seems like a distraction from the questions that HOMER and I were supposed to be investigating. We were on the verge of learning the significance of the Psion Equations! I don’t care what ruse the heroes used to slip past ENC security for the fifth time in a row!

That’s just one example of how the story doesn’t fit its context very well. More troubling is that HOMER treats Devore as the story’s hero from the beginning, when all we really know is that he’s somehow responsible for the depopulation of the planet. It would be fine for an omniscient narrator to do this, but HOMER is very specifically not omniscient, and starts off nearly as ignorant as the player. There’s a bit where HOMER repeatedly says “I am a liar”, upset by the amount of extrapolation from scanty evidence that’s been necessary to tell the story. This almost made me expect a twist where Devore’s story is suddenly radically reinterpreted, but no.

And ultimately, I’m just kind of disappointed in Portal‘s use of its format. It bills itself as nonlinear, but that’s only true to a small degree: no matter what you do, you’re going to get Devore’s story in mostly chronological order. I can imagine using the same engine to tell a story with multiple threads that can be explored independently (or semi-independently), but here, even when we get scenes about secondary characters, they’re pinned to Devore’s chronology.

Still, Portal was a significant experiment. In a way, it prefigured the modern Alternate-Reality Game. The text of the game was later published, with some additional framing material, as an actual book, and now I find it’s been put on the web as well, which is probably the best way to experience the content. You’d get the structure of the original game in a more obvious way, and it would be even more nonlinear, and have a better UI. Plus, it more or less settles the “Is it a game?” question: put it on the web as static HTML, and it’s clearly classified as hyperfiction.

Not only have I triumphed over my xyloid adversary, I managed it on my first attempt and with no casualties. Honestly, X-Death (and his ghastly chimeric alternate form, Neo X-Death) isn’t the toughest boss in the game. There are several optional bosses as extra challenges for those who want them. The toughest of them all is Shinryu, a dragon found inside a chest near the end of the final dungeon. The first time I opened that box, Shinryu wiped out my entire party with a single tidal wave; the second time, I was prepared for that, but only lasted slightly longer. But after some more spectacular failures, I managed to defeat Shinryu by exploiting Mimes.

The Mime job is the last one acquired in the game, and is itself optional. Like many things in the game, it’s not obvious at first glance why it’s worthwhile: its sole special ability is the Mime command, which just repeats the action of another player character in combat. So it quite specifically doesn’t let you do anything new. Its big advantage is that miming costs no mana, even when it duplicates spell effects. So, I made a party entirely out of Mimes. By combining Red Mage and Summoner abilities, one of them could summon Bahamut, the strongest summonable in the game, twice in one turn. This was a very expensive cast, but once it was cast once, everyone just passed it along, resulting in eight Bahamut summons in every magically-accelerated combat round. Even facing this much damage, Shinryu managed to wipe out half my party before dying. There may well have been more efficient ways to win that fight, but this was my way, and it worked. It also worked beautifully on X-Death, who barely managed to scratch me at all before deresolving.

Let this be the epitaph of he who would dare control the terrible power of the Void: “Here Lies X-Death, Slaughtered by Mimes. He was a tree.” Not that there would be a grave to inscribe this on or anything. We can’t even put up a commemorative plaque at his place of death, as the fight took place in an extradimensional void.

After victory comes the longest ending sequence since The Return of the King. First there’s the denouement: the the party is escorted out of the Void by the spirits of the Dawn Warriors (“Your work is not yet finished…”), and there are assorted scenes of the world restoring itself, the crystals reforming, the various towns and castles that X-Death cast into the Void during chapter 3 reappearing, and so forth. Then there’s an epilogue set a year later, wherein we learn what the player characters have been doing, and get sepia-toned replays of scenes from the game. Apparently any party members who died in the last battle and were left behind in the Void get resurrected at this point, just in time to ride chocobos around behind the triumphant credits. When the credits are over, the final stats of each player character are displayed one by one, with a scrolling list of all the job abilities they learned. And when that’s finished scrolling, there’s another montage, presumably added for the Playstation version: it consists of scenes from the game re-created as pre-rendered FMV, using 3D models of the characters that look nothing at all like they do in the actual game.

In fact, they look a lot like the original concept art by Yoshitaka Amano, which also doesn’t look much like what’s in the game. There’s a phenomenon here that I don’t really understand. Amano, the chief character designer for the Final Fantasy series from its inception, does all these vaguely-Pre-Raphaelite-influenced ink-brush drawings of slender people with delicate facial features and elaborate costumes, and then someone has to try to squash that design into a pixellated super-deformed version that fits inside a single map tile. The first six installments of the series were like this, so it’s not as if he didn’t know what was going to happen.

Anyway, I’m done with it all now, and I’m glad I played it, even though I’ll probably have the battle theme going through my head for weeks. It’s definitely one of the best games in the series (of those I’ve played), and it’s all due to the story not strangling the gameplay for once. Tomorrow, Portal! I suspect that it will not take quite as long.

[23 January] Did I say “tomorrow”? Obviously I meant “next week”.

I’ll be brief. No, I haven’t finished the game. I’ve reached X-Death’s hideout in the void, where, confronted, he transforms back into his original form: a tree. Yes, a tree. No, this wasn’t a surprise. This gets into the pre-backstory: long ago, someone sealed another evil sorcerer’s soul in this tree, and over the centuries it corrupted and transformed it into the baddie we know. I’ve mentioned how the Dawn Warriors seemed to be the previous generation’s iteration of the same quest the player characters are on, but it seems that variations on the cycle have been going on for a long time. I expect that the final cutscene will contain hints that the evil still isn’t gone for good, and that future generations will face their own version of the story, making the title ironic in a new way.

Anyway, the reason I haven’t plunged ahead into the final battle (or, I suspect, final uninterrupted series of battles) is that it’s so tempting to just keep mastering jobs. It’s so easy now! New job levels come so fast in the end zone. In fact, I was so keen on getting job experience that I didn’t even notice that the encounters in this area don’t yield any normal experience points at all: if you enter with a party of level 50 characters, they’ll still be level 50 after they’ve mastered every job in the game. This strikes me as a clever compromise. In a well-balanced CRPG, it takes about as long to get through the story as it takes to get enough XP for the final battle. But there’s always some danger that the player will decide to spend more time on that treadmill, rendering the mid-game boring and the endgame too easy. Extra character experience comes at the price of a diminished player experience. My singleminded pursuit of job mastery could have easily led me down that road, but for this XP-free zone. Mastering all the jobs in the game mainly just makes your characters more versatile, not more powerful.

Except that versatility yields power. Some job skills allow for extremely potent combos. Give the Ninja’s dual-wield capability to the Berserker, and you get a character who can hold a warhammer in each hand.

I honestly thought I would reach the end of the game this weekend, but the last bits have been taking longer than I expected, largely due to a whole slew of trick bosses. Generally speaking, there’s an approach that makes each boss easy to beat, but it’s different for each boss. Maybe it’s vulnerable to a particular kind of elemental damage; maybe it’s invulnerable to spells and has to be taken down entirely through melee attacks, or vice versa; maybe it has an attack that can wipe out your entire party in one round if you’re not prepared with specific defensive magic. The number of possible gimmicks increases as your capabilities increase over the course of the game.

The scariest boss I’ve encountered so far is definitely Atomos, the final guardian of that force field generator back in world 2. This is one of those monsters that’s so freakish it doesn’t even look like a monster. It looks like a gateway to the swirling void, its frame irregularly decorated with spikes and fins and things. Its modus operandi is to bombard you with the Comet spell more or less constantly until someone dies, at which point it starts slowly drawing the corpse toward itself. Things don’t usually move around during combat, so it took me a while to notice that this was happening, and to convince myself that I wasn’t imagining it. When I did, I freaked out. The natural reaction here is to immediately resurrect the fallen as they fall, lest they disappear into Atomos’ inky maw. It’s also exactly the wrong thing to do. As long as Atomos is drawing someone in, it isn’t attacking. If you just concentrate on doing damage to Atomos, you can kill it before your comrade disappears, or, if that doesn’t work, distract it by deliberately killing another party member before resurrecting the guy who’s about to disappear.

The most unusual gimmick boss is Gogo, a jester-like entity who guards the crystal shard from which you learn the Mime job. Gogo insists that he’ll only step aside for a master of mimicry like himself. In combat mode, Gogo waits for you to do something, and then replies in kind: if you hit him, he hits you back for 9999 damage, and if you cast a spell — even a defensive or healing spell — he casts some heavy-duty attack spell. The key here is to take what he says seriously: he wants you to prove that you’re a master of mimicry. If you don’t attack him, he stands there and does nothing, so you have to do the same. After a minute or so of just standing there, he declares that you imitated him perfectly and leaves. This strikes me as very much a late-game gimmick — the designers’ way of saying “OK, so, by now you’ve proved that you can fight. So let’s try something else.” (I understand that some people actually have managed to kill Gogo by conventional means, but that would take more insanity than I can spare.)

Most of the summonables in this game are bosses first, and become summonable when you defeat them. In fact, this game is fairly explicit about the idea that things become summonable by dying. There are two dragons in the game who are friendly with the party, die plot-related deaths, and become summonables in the process; one of them sacrifices its life specifically for that reason. Even weirder, there’s a couple of bosses in this game who show up as summonables in later games. Atomos is one, although I haven’t yet played the games where you can summon it. The other is Gilgamesh, X-Death’s incompetent right-hand man, who runs away from the first few battles (making him the first boss in the series that you have to fight multiple times) and ultimately gets banished to the Void by X-Death. I first saw Gilgamesh in FF8, and was baffled: he just showed up out of the blue, replacing Odin as the guy who randomly appears and ends battles for you. But at least Odin looked like the Norse god; what did this guy in the ridiculous puffy red outfit have to do with the hero of Sumeria? I’m pleased to now know where he really came from.

Now, the endgame is basically a very long dungeon with a boss fight approximately every other room, and sometimes multiple boss fights in the same room. Most of them aren’t too gimmicky, and can be finished with general-purpose equipment and job assignments, but still, any boss fight I’m not expecting has the potential for an instant TPK. This makes for nervous exploration. I find myself running back to the save points a lot. But that’s okay, because that just means more ordinary random encounters, and in this area, ordinary random encounters yield grossly disproportionate amounts of job experience. This is the last chance to master jobs for the final battle, so the designers help the player along a little.

Final Fantasy V was released in 1992 in Japan, but didn’t get a North American release until 1999, when Final Fantasy VIII was already out. As such, Americans didn’t see it as a new release, or even as a nostalgia item. Its main audience may well have been completists like myself. Eventually the publishers would start pandering to completists even more, adding features to track what percentage of the treasures in the game you had collected and suchlike. (And really, without that 100% treasure-collection rate to aim for, very few of the treasure chests in the game are worth opening. Most of them yield things that you can buy from a shop with the proceeds from a single encounter.) Such things were included in the later remakes of the earlier games, but not in the version of FF5 that I’m playing.

So there are really two contexts for this game: Japan in 1992 and the West in 1999. In 1999, the big RPG titles in America were Baldur’s Gate and first wave of MMO’s, like Everquest and Asheron’s Call. Diablo was a couple of years old, and its influence was still strong: the emphasis in the RPGs of the day was on realtime action, with no hard separation between exploration and combat modes. Also, support for multiplayer play over the Internet was rapidly becoming a mandatory bullet point, even in games really not suited for it.

I haven’t played a lot of Japanese RPGs, but it seems to me that they were developing quite differently at that point. FF8 did a lot of experiments with gameplay (some of them unsuccessful), but still used essentially the same ATB system as FF5, modulo changing camera angles. Pokémon came out very close to this time, and has mechanics very similar to an early turn-based Final Fantasy. Pretty much the only thing separating FF5 from other Japanese RPGs circa 1999 was the SNESy graphics.

So it seems like FF5, at the time of its American release and Japanese re-release, would have seemed more retro in America than in Japan. Indeed, the trends I speak of in Western RPGs were already starting at the time of FF5‘s original release in 1992, the year that saw Ultima VII put combat and exploration in a unified realtime environment (which Dungeon Master did five years earlier).

But then, it kind of depends on how you define “RPG”. I noted before a bit in Metal Gear Solid 2 where the game refers to itself as “a kind of role-playing game”. I’ve seen the Zelda series classified as RPGs; if that counts, then they’ve been doing realtime integrated stuff since 1986, a year before Dungeon Master. I wouldn’t classify either of these things as an RPG — to me, the term basically means “imitates the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons“, which is to say, stats and experience points and levels and so forth, and everything determined by die rolls modified by these figures. Notably, my notion of “RPG” has nothing at all to do with playing a role. And to the Japanese, who speak an entirely different language — well, who can say?

Combat in Final Fantasy V is handled through a system called “Active Time Battle”, or ATB. Introduced in FF4, it’s somewhere between realtime and turn-based systems. It has a Wizardry-like abstractness, in that there’s no tactical movement on a battle grid or anything like that. The monsters and the party are displayed graphically (usually with the PC’s on the right side facing the monsters on the left, because that’s the direction that seems like forward to people who read Japanese), but this is basically just a more visually interesting way of presenting a list of creatures. That much was true of the FF combat interface before ATB. The distinctive part, the thing that makes it ATB, is the realtime bit, wherein each combatant has a timer that governs when they can take an action. Each player character’s timer is represented on-screen by a gauge that fills up at a rate governed by the character’s Speed rating. When it’s full, you get to select something from a small menu that pops up at the bottom of the screen, typically including the options “fight”, “item”, and, if relevant, “magic” (although the Job system adds complications to this). But while you’re making your selection, the clock is still ticking. If you’re not fast, the monsters can get in an attack while you’re making up your mind. (This is another reason why it can be good for your tanks to be berserk: that way the game doesn’t waste time asking you what they should do.)

The whole system is very strongly associated with Final Fantasy in my mind. Fight/Magic/Item is as emblematic of Final Fantasy combat as Name/Job/Bye is of Ultima conversations. And the only game I’ve ever seen that even tried to do something similar to ATB was Grandia 2, another Japanese console RPG, which places an ATB-like action timer (albeit with a different user interface) in a system with less abstraction and more running around the battlefield. Presumably the patent ¹Be sure to click on the “more” link where that page displays the diagrams. They’re really the best part. prevents a direct imitation, but given the popularity of the Final Fantasy games, you might expect more outfits to try to create similar gameplay.

But gameplay is not perceived as the Final Fantasy‘s strong point. Ask the fans what they like about the series, and they’ll talk about the stories, the characters, the worlds. It’s strange, then, that in FF5 I’m finding the gameplay (mastering the Jobs system) more engaging than the storyline (defeat the one-dimensional Bwa-ha-ha villain).

Let’s try something here. Let’s play a little game. As I said before, I’ll probably wrap up Final Fantasy V soon. I want to do Portal afterwards, but that shouldn’t take long. As I hinted, I’d like to give the readers of this blog the opportunity to choose what I play after that. I still don’t want to post the contents of the Stack just yet, though. Instead, I’d like to know what kind of game commentary you want in general. I’ll try to pick the best fit from the Stack, and also bear the results in mind in future choices.

First, let’s choose the genre. You can select more than one option in this one, and there’s a certain amount of overlap. I’ve listed them in order of how many there are on the Stack.
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

Second, how old a game should I play?

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Do you want me to talk about something you’re likely to have heard of, or something likely to be new to you? (Note: None of the examples listed here are actually on the Stack.)

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Finally, what kind of soul do you have?

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There’s an item in Pokémon called “Full Heal”. You can buy it at several of the stores in the game. What would you guess it does? If you said “Restores all of a pokémon’s lost hit points”, then you think like me. You’re also wrong. That’s what “Max Potion” does. “Full Heal” is Pokémon‘s equivalent of the Final Fantasy “Esuna” spell: it removes all status effects (such as “poisoned” and “paralyzed”) from a single pokémon. And this made me realize something: I have a strong preference about the terminology for these things. Wounds are “healed”, status effects are “cured”. Doing it the other way around sounds wrong to me, even though the words are almost completely interchangeable in normal English usage.

Even in the context of games, my preferences aren’t completely industry-standard: consider the “Cure Light Wounds” family of spells in D&D, and all the games that have similarly-named spells in imitation. Are my terminological expectations completely groundless? I don’t think so; the various Pokémon FAQs and hint sheets I’ve been looking at tend to favor my usage, even if the game itself doesn’t. Still, this is something worth bearing in mind as I look at other games.

My pokédex ¹My in-game pokédex, that is, not the “pokédex” page on this site, which is just a list of my current pokémon inventory. currently lists 108 types as “owned”. This doesn’t mean I currently own them all, just that I’ve owned each of them at some point. Some have been traded away or evolved.

The 42 remaining ²Mew still doesn’t count. unowned types can be divided into four categories. First, there are those that I can only obtain by trading. There are 13 species like this (including one obtainable through NPC trade I haven’t been able to make yet), although 5 of them are evolved forms of other things I could trade for, so I could potentially obtain them all by trading with other players only 7 times. I have purchased a second GBA from a reader of this blog, who has my thanks and can take credit here if he wishes, so trading will be within the realm of possibility again once I have that in hand.

Second, there are those that I can catch, if I go to the right places. There are 9 species like this, including the elusive Kangaskhan and Tauros. The remaining types, I held off on catching because they’re evolved forms of things that I have, and a pokémon that has been evolved by hand is generally superior to one that’s caught in its evolved form.

Third, there are things that I can evolve from pokémon I have by using special stones on them. (The game does not specify how the stone is applied, and perhaps it’s better not to know.) There are 15 species like this, including the three evolutions of the Eevee, a unique pokémon. I’ve been putting off evolving the Eevee for flexibility in trading: I don’t want to turn it into a Flareon and then find out that someone else wants a Jolteon that I can no longer produce. I’ve been putting off evolving the rest of them because the evolved forms generally have limited opportunities for advancement: they have better stats than their unevolved forms, but they can’t learn all the attacks that their unevolved forms can. As long as there was a possibility that I’d keep using them, and thus levelling them up, it seemed a good idea to keep them unevolved. But I’ll probably abandon this by and by.

That means I currently have only 5 pokémon that I have any real reason to level up. The maximum party size is 6, so I could take all five of them out to the depths of the Unknown Dungeon at once, with Adrian in the lead. But in one case, I’m hesitant to evolve it, lest I repeat a mistake.

At the very start of the game, the player is given the choice between three pokémon: a Charmander, a Bulbasaur, or a Squirtle — basic fire, grass, and water types. This is the only point in the game where you have the opportunity to obtain any of these types. Assuming that all players want as complete a pokédex as they can get, the smart thing to do is for players to trade their initial choices with each other immediately, then level them up until they evolve and trade them again. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I did not do this. Evolution only goes one way. Consequently, my Squirtle (Godwin) is now in its final evolution, and an unfair trade for anyone with the Charmander and Bulbasaur I sorely need.

Later in the game, the player gets another similar choice between an Omanyte and a Kabuto, two fossilized pokémon that can be revived by the scientists on Cinnabar Island. As with the initial pokémon, both of these species can evolve through experience. If I evolve my Kabuto, what will I have that’s as valuable as an Omanyte?

Spending some time on a train, I realized that this was exactly the sort of situation that I’ve been saying that the Gameboy was designed for, and decided to take advantage of my semi-distracted state by pursuing the elusive Kangaskhan in its habitat, the Safari Zone. This is the most tedious and frustrating region of the game, and there are several pokémon that can be found nowhere else. I’m still missing two, the Kangaskhan and the even more elusive Tauros.

The thing that makes the Safari Zone so tedious and frustrating is the change in the rules. There’s no combat — presumably your pokéballs are confiscated at the entrance or something. Instead, you get to throw bait, rocks, and special safari pokéballs in an effort to capture the pokémon you encounter. No matter what you do, there’s a chance that it’ll run away — the Kangaskhan and Tauros are particularly skittish. Throwing bait tends to make pokémon stick around longer, but it’s no guarantee that they won’t immediately run away anyway. Throwing rocks allegedly weakens their resistance to the pokéballs, but there’s no way to gauge this. It all feels very random, with no sense of progress within an encounter.

Worse, there’s no sense of progress throughout encounters either. When you’re hunting for a specific pokémon, you tend to encounter a lot of other things first. That’s true anywhere in the game, but outside the Safari Zone, you can at least beat them up for XP. If you go into the Safari Zone and don’t come out with any new pokémon, you’ve made no progress in the game whatever.

To make things even worse, entering the Safari Zone costs a bundle of money, and you can only stay there so long before you have to pay another bundle of money. (You also get only so many safari balls per visit, but that’s not a serious limitation. I don’t think I’ve ever run out of balls.) At least you can save before entering so that you don’t actually have to pay for fruitless visits.

I suppose that the designers put in the Safari Zone to provide some variety, and at least it has more to do with the game than the teleporter mazes and the like that they used for variety elements elsewhere. But on the whole, I’m thinking that it’s not really part of the game I want to deal with much. I’m going to have to see if I can get someone to trade me a Kangaskhan and a Tauros.