This is probably the best viral facebook survey I've seen in years.
The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. List fifteen video games that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what games my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note.)
1. Earthbound is and will always be my favorite video game of all time. It's not the first game I played or the first one I enjoyed, and I won't even make the claim that it's the best video game ever made, but it's the first one I "discovered" (this sort of thing is important to a quasi-hipster), and it's the only one that's ever made a real impact on my life. From 1995 until 2001, Earthbound transcended being a video game for me, and it became a way of life. Where today, most of my creative output happens in my blog, during those years, it happened through Earthbound: making websites, writing fan fiction, discussing the game on various fansites like Starmen.net. Earthbound has a particular culture about it--its quirky, almost trippy, aesthetic; its hilarious understated humor; its brilliant leitmotifs on its John Lennon-inspired soundtrack--all of these things make Earthbound an absolute masterpiece of a video game.
2. The defining feature of Chrono Trigger is that it tells a linear story through a nonlinear timeline--sometimes you need to go forward in time to learn more; sometimes you need to go backwards. And the true genius of the game doesn't reveal itself until you've already played through it once, when you can play through a second time and skip to the ending at any point to see how it changes. It's one the few RPGs with legitimate replay value, and its reasonable approach time travel was well ahead of its time.
3. Final Fantasy X is one of the only games that I characterize more by the number of things I didn't do (exactly two) than the number of things I did. It is the crowning achievement in the Final Fantasy series. VI was fantastic (and on this list), VII was truly revolutionary (and on this list), but there is no (and may never be a) better Final Fantasy game than X. Sure, it introduced voice acting, had some innovative mechanics, and looked absolutely beautiful for its time... but the reason that X was so good was because its setting was impeccable. It's the best example I've ever seen of a game where every detail--the game mechanics, the plot, the locations, and even the clothes the characters wear--reinforce the setting and make playing in it incredibly rewarding.
4. Morrowind/Oblivion (/Tribunal/Bloodmoon/Knights of the Nine/Shivering Isles) are all grouped together on my list. I know that they're technically at least two games, but they're similar in that they're set in the same universe, they're incredibly open-ended, they have a collective soundtrack that is one of the best of any video game ever, their style and tone are similar... and I sunk at least 120 hours into both of them. They succeeded on different accounts--Oblivion was more balanced, more polished ("better produced" to use a music analogy), and better looking; Morrowind had slightly more to do and had a better story. They're both among the greatest PC games ever, and well worth playing if you don't mind being antisocial for an entire month.
5. The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time was the definitive game for the Nintendo 64. I'll argue that Twilight Princess was actually the superior Zelda game, but Ocarina of Time did so much for the series and for 3D gaming in general that it's tough to pass up.
6. Final Fantasy VI was the first Final Fantasy game I played, and it got me hooked, not only on the series, but also on JRPGs as a subgenre. It's easily the most nonlinear of the Final Fantasy games, which makes it a lot of fun, and it probably features the best soundtrack in the series as well.
7. I expect some resistance on this one, but I think Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is the best Grand Theft Auto game. (Full disclosure: I haven't finished IV yet, but a few hours in, it's quite good.) It was the first to feature voice acting from the player character and the first to include real-world music from well-known bands. It was entirely better than GTA III, because it took everything good about it and improved it, but it avoided the trap of overextending like San Andreas.
8. I'm not by and large a strategy fan, but I'd be remiss not to include Rise of Nations on this list. I first played it in spring 2003, after I'd taken World History in high school (pretty much my favorite class ever), so I was on a real history kick around that time. It implemented lots of innovative features like permanent cities and territory, it had enormous success in merging conventional RTS battles and world-domination grand strategy, and the expansion added some both fun and detailed re-interpretations of historical campaigns.
9. Super Metroid is an absolutely classic platformer, most notable to me for being part of my friend Nicholas's self-proclaimed "best day ever". My best friend through elementary and middle school, Nicholas's best day ever included seeing Good Burger in the theater and getting a Tamagotchi. (Hello 1997.) And it was the first time either of us completed Super Metroid in under the three hours necessary to see the "best ending". (It was a team effort--I planned a course, and Nick executed it.) Prior to that day, the goal had seemed nearly insurmountable to our ten-year-old selves.
10. Super Mario World was the very first video game I ever played and was therefore responsible for spawning one of my biggest hobbies over the past fifteen-plus years. It helped to forge my friendship with Nicholas, and a decade later I remember playing through it as being one of the most fun things I did with my high school girlfriend Jenny (except for maybe discovering Curb Your Enthusiasm).
11. Even though none of us had ever touched a skateboard in our lives, my friends and I spend an irrational amount of time playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 circa 2001. (The game did spawn a short skateboard career for Nicholas, which was sadly cut short by injury.) The soundtrack is atrocious (except in a hipster-ironic sense) and the skate culture is probably the furthest thing imaginable from my personal aesthetic, but how could you not love spelling inappropriate things in "horse" mode and pulling off the 900?
12. GoldenEye 007 was basically the de facto go-to party game in the late 1990s. It (along with its spiritual successor, Perfect Dark) was probably the only shooter I've ever truly enjoyed... and man, was it fun karate chopping, Moonraker lasering, and throwing-knifing all your friends.
13. There is at least a plurality consensus among JRPG fans that Final Fantasy VII is the best in the series, and despite my mentions of X's beautiful story and setting (or VI's free-wheeling self-determination), I haven't won too many people over. They have a point--VII pioneered 3D for console RPGs, plus it has some iconic characters and settings, the single best piece of music on any video game soundtrack ("One Winged Angel," of course), and enough secrets and side quests to occupy you for quite a while. To add a personal note, this game is what convinced me to but a Playstation.
14. Donkey Kong Country might not have made to this list had I not watched my friend Tom play about a quarter of it a few months ago. I realized that, fifteen years after I'd played the game for the first time, I still instinctively know the first twelve or so stages backwards and forwards: optimal paths, locations of extra lives, how to get to secret areas. That brought a flood of nostalgia, and I remembered just how much I'd enjoyed it back in the day.
15. Admit it: you played Pokemon. You only started playing because it was a fad, and you stopped playing when it became passe, but for the year or two when it was socially encouraged to play Pokemon, you had a hell of a good time. To this day, I can't name a game that has taken such a creative spin on the RPG idea, nor one that has combined single-player and multiplayer modes so effectively. In fact, looking back on it, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that Pokemon was not one of the great achievements in video game design history--it was a social gaming experience five years before we knew what social media was.
Currently listening: "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk", the New Pornographers
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy X. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy X. Show all posts
Friday, October 15, 2010
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Evil Monkeys Abound
Review: Lady in the Water
First off, M. Night Shyamalan is a genius, because he recognizes that monkeys are evil.
Now that that's taken care of... almost every time you watch a movie, you know what you're getting yourself into. You thrust Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn into starring roles and you immediately know what kind of movie Wedding Crashers (see a future post) is going to be. Dead Man's Chest (also see that future post) is going to be exactly like Curse of the Black Pearl except later. With Lady in the Water, you're probably thinking "Okay, Shyamalan flick, a bit of creepiness, massive twist at the end." As it turns out, Lady in the Water has none of that. The movie is much less classic Shyamalan and much more Neil Gaiman.
If you haven't read anything by Gaiman, pick up American Gods right now and read it. Lady in the Water was less evocative of American Gods and more of Neverwhere, but either book will give you a much better idea what to expect out of Lady in the Water than any of Shyamalan's earlier films. In fact, I was thinking "holy crap, this is Neverwhere" through the entire movie. The comparison isn't entirely fair, especially since the book's mythology focuses on its setting, and the movie's mythology has much more to do with a sequence of events than where they take place. But once you take into account the "regular world guy" who gets visited in the regular world by the "magical mystical girl with special powers but who needs regular world guy to survive," which in turn slowly reveals the "fantastic subculture that affects humans but humans have no idea it exists"... the movie gets Gaiman-esque very quickly.
So that's the first caveat of Lady in the Water. If the premise of fantasy bothers or annoys you, don't bother seeing this movie. A corollary to the first caveat: Lady in the Water is indeed a fantasy movie; it is not scary in the least. (The movie does, however, make the same mistake that The Omen and so many other contemporary "horror" films do. That is, it confuses "startling" with "scary." A loud, unexpected noise that makes you jump is not scary.) But fantasy doesn't mean George RR Martin style sword and sorcery, in either Lady in the Water or Neil Gaiman's books' case. It means affinity toward the supernatural and a creative sense of mythology. And Lady in the Water certainly has both.
And really, that's the mark of a good fantasy setting: the permeability of the mtyhos into the setting. It's easy to say "I have set my story in quasi-medieval times, and there is magic." It's not much more difficult to add "My characters believe in this supernatural force that sometimes actually aids them." But to craft your characters and story so well that its gods seem like actual beings, its legends serve as actual sources of inspiration, and its included ethical debates are ones actually worth having in the real world, you've created something magnificent. This is why Final Fantasy X was such a powerful game: the Yevon mythos gave rise to a much deeper sense of realism to the setting. The mythology was so thorough that it became believable, and the player actually felt as if he were doing something important, sacred even, when he arrived at Zanarkand. And to bring things full circle, the Shyamalan-magnitude twist when the player finally reached Zanarkand was all the more incredible because the mythology was so ingrained. (Inversely, this is why Final Fantasy IX was such a dismal game, because you were playing through a story with no overarching mythology to lend it credence.) George RR Martin does this differently than Final Fantasy X, with central conflicts coming over the authenticity of some of the myths (which integrates nicely with his vague and blurry magic system), but he also does it well. And while not as masterfully as Final Fantasy X, as thoroughly as American Gods, or as intriguingly as something from Song of Ice and Fire, Lady in the Water holds its own when it comes to internal mythology.
This mythology starts simple, then grows more complex as the movie progresses. The audience is on a sort of "need to know" basis, which works just fine. We see pictographs at the start of the movie, giving a general outline of the legend, then a few specifics, then more precise details as they become important to the storyline. This works well because it's more the audience learning concepts than having a shovelful of mythology stuffed in its face at the beginning and being mandated to learn it all. Shyamalan uses the "story" device throughout the movie to acheive this effect. One of the recurring themes of the movie--painfully obvious by the fact that the titular Lady in the Water is a magical being named Story--is that there are a few universal "stories" that you have to learn to believe in. These may seem fantastic at first, but they have their validity. Shyamalan's characters aren't necessarily aware that they're in a movie, but there are plenty of self-aware references to plots and characterization (see below) that result in a sort of "translucent" fourth wall. As such, the mythology is able to be revealed gradually rather than with a shovel in the form of a few of the main characters discussing a bedtime story. I'm not sure if this is cheesy or clever--in truth, it's a little of both.
As the movie's best part comes from its mythology, its worst part comes from its attempts at commentary on the theater. I think Shyamalan speaks a bit too loudly as would befit his level of influence. Shakespeare, the greatest playwright of the last millennium, didn't venture to delve this deep into the murky water (my apologies for the bad pun) of "criticizing a genre from within a work of that genre" until Hamlet, about eleven years into his career as a playwright. After writing a couple of dozen plays, he's entitled to make those witticisms about "pastorical-comical, historical-pastoral" actors and how the art of the theater is not in the state it should be. After one movie with huge critical and commercial achievement, and a few further releases with dubious success, Shyamalan is not entitled to the same. While critics' viewpoints can diverge wildly from popular opinion of a film, the truth is that many moviegoers are going to listen to what the critics have to say before deciding to see a film. Therefore, it's important as a director to make a film that appeals to critics, not because you necessarily care what the critical opinion is, but because there are potential audience members that do care what that opinion is.
So is it not intuitively obvious that making a film critic the least immediately likable character in the entire movie is shooting yourself in the cinematic foot? Let me say that I actually like this guy, because his deadpan reviews of vapid artiness are grounded in a strong dose of realism. The movie's best line comes when Cleveland (the main character) is discussing a romance film the local paper had him see. The Critic complains that the climactic moment of the movie, when the characters finally profess their love for each other, was during an unnecessarily cliched rainfall. Cleveland suggests that maybe this was a metaphor for cleansing and rebirth, and the Critic answers simply, "No. It's not." After this clever attack on critics who think themselves wonderfully insightful for pointing overused metaphors to the filmgoing proletariat, it's no wonder that critics hate Lady in the Water: they all got their feelings hurt. The movie's weakest scene, still furthering the negative sentiment many critics have toward this film, when both the fourth wall and the credibility of the entire story are at their most fragile, is when the Critic makes a few predictions regarding the plot of the story he realizes he is in immediately before his death. At this point, the rest of the theater laughed the most--because hey! This is obviously meant to be funny, and I'm clever enough to have picked up on that intention, so I'm going to laugh! A bit of pointless comic relief, coupled with the decidedly negative portrayal of a film critic, accomplish nothing for the complex mythology that Shyamalan has built to this point in the movie, and probably in fact weaken his message.
What was that message? Now comes the third caveat about Lady in the Water (the second being, if you're a critic, this movie will probably feel like a personal attack). The movie, while doing a lot to criticize other movies for using tired out devices (like the rainbound kiss), doesn't have that much to say when it comes down to originality of theme. "Find yourself," it urges, "be open to all sources of inspiration." Guess what? Hamlet beat Lady in the Water to the punch there too.
Other elements of what make a movie either good or bad didn't really stand out in this one, as Lady in the Water is a concept- and plot-centric film. The acting didn't strike me as particularly excellent or horrible: Paul Giamatti as Cleveland was believable and sympathetic but not revolutionary; Bryce Dallas Howard carried a character that even the most self-absorbed high school drama kid could have pulled off. The cinematography and special effects were present and neither good nor bad. I have strong praise for the music, which was on the whole melodic and a welcome departure from the atonal "mood music" that seems to plague suspense movies.
In the end, Lady in the Water is a movie I don't feel all that strongly about either way. I certainly don't think that the film merits the scathing reviews that critics have delighted in saddling it with. On the other hand, with such an extraordinary creation of a setting and an urban-fantasy set of legends to color that setting, more attention could have been paid to what all of that mythology actually means, what the statement behind the concept actually says. Ultimately, King Kong hid a complete lack of meaning behind a sense of epic scale, huge special effects, and an over-the-top aesthetic-heavy visual experience... no matter how good those visuals may have been. If Lady in the Water hides a complete lack of meaning behind a complex mythology, no matter how good that mythology is, is there really a difference? The movie is undoubtedly entertaining, and not at all bad, but with a little extra thought could have been actually good. In other words, it's probably worth seeing, as long as you understand the caveats, but don't expect either The Sixth Sense (what you might think this movie should be like) or Final Fantasy X (what this movie really should have been).
Currently listening: "Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity," Gustav Holst (from The Planets)
First off, M. Night Shyamalan is a genius, because he recognizes that monkeys are evil.
Now that that's taken care of... almost every time you watch a movie, you know what you're getting yourself into. You thrust Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn into starring roles and you immediately know what kind of movie Wedding Crashers (see a future post) is going to be. Dead Man's Chest (also see that future post) is going to be exactly like Curse of the Black Pearl except later. With Lady in the Water, you're probably thinking "Okay, Shyamalan flick, a bit of creepiness, massive twist at the end." As it turns out, Lady in the Water has none of that. The movie is much less classic Shyamalan and much more Neil Gaiman.
If you haven't read anything by Gaiman, pick up American Gods right now and read it. Lady in the Water was less evocative of American Gods and more of Neverwhere, but either book will give you a much better idea what to expect out of Lady in the Water than any of Shyamalan's earlier films. In fact, I was thinking "holy crap, this is Neverwhere" through the entire movie. The comparison isn't entirely fair, especially since the book's mythology focuses on its setting, and the movie's mythology has much more to do with a sequence of events than where they take place. But once you take into account the "regular world guy" who gets visited in the regular world by the "magical mystical girl with special powers but who needs regular world guy to survive," which in turn slowly reveals the "fantastic subculture that affects humans but humans have no idea it exists"... the movie gets Gaiman-esque very quickly.
So that's the first caveat of Lady in the Water. If the premise of fantasy bothers or annoys you, don't bother seeing this movie. A corollary to the first caveat: Lady in the Water is indeed a fantasy movie; it is not scary in the least. (The movie does, however, make the same mistake that The Omen and so many other contemporary "horror" films do. That is, it confuses "startling" with "scary." A loud, unexpected noise that makes you jump is not scary.) But fantasy doesn't mean George RR Martin style sword and sorcery, in either Lady in the Water or Neil Gaiman's books' case. It means affinity toward the supernatural and a creative sense of mythology. And Lady in the Water certainly has both.
And really, that's the mark of a good fantasy setting: the permeability of the mtyhos into the setting. It's easy to say "I have set my story in quasi-medieval times, and there is magic." It's not much more difficult to add "My characters believe in this supernatural force that sometimes actually aids them." But to craft your characters and story so well that its gods seem like actual beings, its legends serve as actual sources of inspiration, and its included ethical debates are ones actually worth having in the real world, you've created something magnificent. This is why Final Fantasy X was such a powerful game: the Yevon mythos gave rise to a much deeper sense of realism to the setting. The mythology was so thorough that it became believable, and the player actually felt as if he were doing something important, sacred even, when he arrived at Zanarkand. And to bring things full circle, the Shyamalan-magnitude twist when the player finally reached Zanarkand was all the more incredible because the mythology was so ingrained. (Inversely, this is why Final Fantasy IX was such a dismal game, because you were playing through a story with no overarching mythology to lend it credence.) George RR Martin does this differently than Final Fantasy X, with central conflicts coming over the authenticity of some of the myths (which integrates nicely with his vague and blurry magic system), but he also does it well. And while not as masterfully as Final Fantasy X, as thoroughly as American Gods, or as intriguingly as something from Song of Ice and Fire, Lady in the Water holds its own when it comes to internal mythology.
This mythology starts simple, then grows more complex as the movie progresses. The audience is on a sort of "need to know" basis, which works just fine. We see pictographs at the start of the movie, giving a general outline of the legend, then a few specifics, then more precise details as they become important to the storyline. This works well because it's more the audience learning concepts than having a shovelful of mythology stuffed in its face at the beginning and being mandated to learn it all. Shyamalan uses the "story" device throughout the movie to acheive this effect. One of the recurring themes of the movie--painfully obvious by the fact that the titular Lady in the Water is a magical being named Story--is that there are a few universal "stories" that you have to learn to believe in. These may seem fantastic at first, but they have their validity. Shyamalan's characters aren't necessarily aware that they're in a movie, but there are plenty of self-aware references to plots and characterization (see below) that result in a sort of "translucent" fourth wall. As such, the mythology is able to be revealed gradually rather than with a shovel in the form of a few of the main characters discussing a bedtime story. I'm not sure if this is cheesy or clever--in truth, it's a little of both.
As the movie's best part comes from its mythology, its worst part comes from its attempts at commentary on the theater. I think Shyamalan speaks a bit too loudly as would befit his level of influence. Shakespeare, the greatest playwright of the last millennium, didn't venture to delve this deep into the murky water (my apologies for the bad pun) of "criticizing a genre from within a work of that genre" until Hamlet, about eleven years into his career as a playwright. After writing a couple of dozen plays, he's entitled to make those witticisms about "pastorical-comical, historical-pastoral" actors and how the art of the theater is not in the state it should be. After one movie with huge critical and commercial achievement, and a few further releases with dubious success, Shyamalan is not entitled to the same. While critics' viewpoints can diverge wildly from popular opinion of a film, the truth is that many moviegoers are going to listen to what the critics have to say before deciding to see a film. Therefore, it's important as a director to make a film that appeals to critics, not because you necessarily care what the critical opinion is, but because there are potential audience members that do care what that opinion is.
So is it not intuitively obvious that making a film critic the least immediately likable character in the entire movie is shooting yourself in the cinematic foot? Let me say that I actually like this guy, because his deadpan reviews of vapid artiness are grounded in a strong dose of realism. The movie's best line comes when Cleveland (the main character) is discussing a romance film the local paper had him see. The Critic complains that the climactic moment of the movie, when the characters finally profess their love for each other, was during an unnecessarily cliched rainfall. Cleveland suggests that maybe this was a metaphor for cleansing and rebirth, and the Critic answers simply, "No. It's not." After this clever attack on critics who think themselves wonderfully insightful for pointing overused metaphors to the filmgoing proletariat, it's no wonder that critics hate Lady in the Water: they all got their feelings hurt. The movie's weakest scene, still furthering the negative sentiment many critics have toward this film, when both the fourth wall and the credibility of the entire story are at their most fragile, is when the Critic makes a few predictions regarding the plot of the story he realizes he is in immediately before his death. At this point, the rest of the theater laughed the most--because hey! This is obviously meant to be funny, and I'm clever enough to have picked up on that intention, so I'm going to laugh! A bit of pointless comic relief, coupled with the decidedly negative portrayal of a film critic, accomplish nothing for the complex mythology that Shyamalan has built to this point in the movie, and probably in fact weaken his message.
What was that message? Now comes the third caveat about Lady in the Water (the second being, if you're a critic, this movie will probably feel like a personal attack). The movie, while doing a lot to criticize other movies for using tired out devices (like the rainbound kiss), doesn't have that much to say when it comes down to originality of theme. "Find yourself," it urges, "be open to all sources of inspiration." Guess what? Hamlet beat Lady in the Water to the punch there too.
Other elements of what make a movie either good or bad didn't really stand out in this one, as Lady in the Water is a concept- and plot-centric film. The acting didn't strike me as particularly excellent or horrible: Paul Giamatti as Cleveland was believable and sympathetic but not revolutionary; Bryce Dallas Howard carried a character that even the most self-absorbed high school drama kid could have pulled off. The cinematography and special effects were present and neither good nor bad. I have strong praise for the music, which was on the whole melodic and a welcome departure from the atonal "mood music" that seems to plague suspense movies.
In the end, Lady in the Water is a movie I don't feel all that strongly about either way. I certainly don't think that the film merits the scathing reviews that critics have delighted in saddling it with. On the other hand, with such an extraordinary creation of a setting and an urban-fantasy set of legends to color that setting, more attention could have been paid to what all of that mythology actually means, what the statement behind the concept actually says. Ultimately, King Kong hid a complete lack of meaning behind a sense of epic scale, huge special effects, and an over-the-top aesthetic-heavy visual experience... no matter how good those visuals may have been. If Lady in the Water hides a complete lack of meaning behind a complex mythology, no matter how good that mythology is, is there really a difference? The movie is undoubtedly entertaining, and not at all bad, but with a little extra thought could have been actually good. In other words, it's probably worth seeing, as long as you understand the caveats, but don't expect either The Sixth Sense (what you might think this movie should be like) or Final Fantasy X (what this movie really should have been).
Currently listening: "Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity," Gustav Holst (from The Planets)
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