I was in middle school when Final Fantasy Versus XIII was announced. Oddly enough, I wasn’t nearly the FF fan I am now, my interest in the series grew while playing through the NES/SNES run on the GameBoy Advance, though my first was technically X. I’m a bit unique as a fan of the series, one in that I have not played any of the PlayStation titles — VII, VIII, and IX — to completion, the other being that I am a bit of a Devil’s Advocate for the unwanted child of the series, Final Fantasy XIII.
Now don’t get me wrong, Final Fantasy XIII is a bad game. Quite bad. It fails to deliver an engaging world, an engaging story, or an engaging RPG. Tunnels and corridors dominate that game, shackling the player to it’s inane plot and sense of character progression. The game’s combat system — a rare point in the game’s favor — doesn’t open up until 30 hours in and only shines when the enemies require something more than two Ravagers and a Commando. I have stood up for it, mostly in a vain attempt to acknowledge the few things the game had going for it. But more than enough has been said on the subject of Final Fantasy XIII. I only bring it up because of how the series has changed from one game to the next.
Final Fantasy XV is nothing like XIII.
Nothing at all.
I mean that in the best way possible. Sure, the game is still populated with spiky-haired morons, but more endearingly so. The combat feels clunky at first but incredibly involved once you get a hold of it. The area is expansive, filled with wild creatures and gorgeous vistas, ones you can actually visit. What little interaction we see between them is among the most human writing the series has seen. Maybe not quite good, there really isn’t enough to judge yet, but believable.
There isn’t much to do in the demo, the short episode covers raising enough money to fix the car so the adventure can continue at some specified point in 2016. The gang finds a reward for a behemoth that more than covers the cost and set out on their way to take care of it. After an unsuccessful attempt, further exploration reveals a cave which contains a means to summon the Ramuhthe Eidolon, an force of destruction that easily overwhelms the beast. Paying off Cid, the gang drives off to the rest of the game, currently unavailable for the rest of us.
Stupid hair and outfits are present, happily missing is permeating sense of dread.
The demo wasn’t without its issues. The camera, in conjunction with the game’s odd lock-on system, can be a pain to handle, particularly with giant mobs of enemies. The game, in an obviously incomplete state, is rough around the edges, with frame rate issues abound and plenty of minor graphical issues to go around. The partner AI is all over the place and sometimes waiting for one of them to heal you is tedious. I’m not entirely sure if there will be some form of the Gambit system to give them orders, but such a feature wasn’t present in the demo.
But these issues are miniscule compared to what the people at Square Enix managed to pull together. For the first time in over half a decade, I can approach the name Final Fantasy with hope rather than trepidation. XV feels like a natural progression of the series from XII rather than XIII and so far it has paid off. But more so than anything else, Episode Duscae managed to do something the series hasn’t done in years: It managed to have its characters breath. The world wasn’t at stake, nobody was pontificating in an over-the-top manner about freshman level philosophy,nobody moped. It was four friends looking to get their car fixed. They joked, bro-fisted, and flirted. Leveling is no longer automatic, but one must set up a camp and rest around the campfire while one of the party members makes food. This Final Fantasy seems to be putting it’s characters at the front and center, a generally good sign for the series.
In the relative unimportance of the demo, the cast gets a chance to just be themselves.
And this series needs a good sign. Fortunately, that seems to be what we are getting. In less than three years, Final Fantasy XV went from being vaporware to a product not only in our hands, but one that’s worth getting excited for.
As I struggle to finish Yakuza 3 before all my free time is taken up by 50+ hour RPGs next week, my mind keeps taking me back to the kerfuffle surrounding The Order: 1886 and it’s release. I myself gave it a rather negative review and a few weeks later I still stand by it. The game is a total bore, rarely rising to mediocrity while it goes out of it’s way for us to pay painstaking attention to how expensive-looking their assets are. A recurring aspect of the game is picking up randomly place items and looking at them, nothing more, nothing less.
From left to right: Other guy, mentor guy, girl, and guy.
But mostly what I go back to is just how intriguing the game was and how it kept getting in its own way of being fun. The basic idea is that the Knights of the Round table are psuedo-immortal and can live for hundreds of years, all the while fighting mythical creatures like werewolves and vampires. What I, and I imagine a lot of others, was expecting was a game where you hunt down these mythical creatures in steampunk London. The agelessness of the characters allows you to fight these mythical creatures through any time period or age, Assassin’s Creed style. Technology could change, more contemporary creatures could make appearances as time went on, and locations could vary depending upon where the world powers lie. Potential was what I saw in the series, a saga of humans versus monsters shooting combat with top notch presentation.
After 1886, I don’t really want to see where else this series could go. Not only was most of the game fighting humans, but fighting monsters, the few there were, were some of the most dull parts of the game. The presentation was still top notch, but all that did was drill in the fact that the beautiful rendition of London I was seeing was essentially a set, a stage play. There wasn’t a London to explore, just a really expensive backdrop. This would be fine if the gameplay could back it up, but it couldn’t. Stock action sequences that Gears of War did better almost a decade earlier with nothing else of note to back it up. One game later and all the series still has is potential, only this time with a good helping of skepticism.
About the most amount of people you’ll see on screen at once.
My opinion isn’t unique in this regard. The Order was met with heavy criticism, highlighting many of the things I just brought up. But one bit of that criticism I can’t find myself to agree with is the idea that The Order is not, in fact, a game. Or at the very least, The Order is not how games should be. I sympathize with the point that those critics are trying to make, but I can’ agree with that sentiment in full, or at least for the same reasons.
In recent years a large portion of games culture has decided that they have tired of the hand-holding and linear game design, which pigeonholes player’s through expensive looking sets that serve little purpose other than to look good and add some context to the action segments. These games tend to be easy and systems-light, using conventions more often associated with Hollywood to sell their ideas. Cinematic camera angles, cinematic scripts, cinematic “gameplay” (whatever that means), and “cinematic framerates” (this also is not a thing in gaming and is an incredibly stupid thing for both PR and critics to use) mixed with a similar blockbuster-esque advertising campaign, highlighting the games similarities to film. The ire gaming culture has thrown at this method of development is well-deserved, but their conclusions aren’t.
Can’t remember if gameplay or cutscene.
I agree that this form of game development is both rather limiting and most importantly not very conducive to the medium’s strength. Film’s strength lie in the motion picture, how it’s framed, how it’s moves, how it changes, how it looks, juxtaposition, etc. All of these things require a sturdy hand at the helm, a clear vision of the result and absolutely zero interference from the viewer, a static, fixed medium. Gaming is still quite unique in this regard, one that must not only rely on many of the visual elements borrowed from both paintings and film, but it must also account for the viewer being an active part in the experience. Film’s don’t work if the protagonist is standing on the right side of the screen while he should be on the left, but for video games this is standard.
But the common criticism that games like The Order aren’t games or shouldn’t be considered games is just silly. It is quite clearly a game. It requires input from the player in order for progress to continue, which is about all I require for something to be considered a “game” — and no, pressing “Play” on the DVD remote does not count — and should be about all anyone else requires for a “game”. I don’t want to get caught up on the definition, but The Order is a game. It’s just a bad one and for many of the reasons some would argue it isn’t a game.
The other half of this criticism comes in when people begin to discuss what should and should not be the ultimate goal of games. But before I get into that, I want to give an idea of the lens I use for purposes of criticism. As I grew up and became much more interested in the constructive elements of film and video games, I heard two different ideas of what makes good art. The first, which informed my opinion for a long time, felt that art should make a bigger statement on the world than what is immediately present in the text. Art should be about more than itself or have a greater message to impart on the world than immediate context it presents. The second, which I only began to consider more recently, is that good art is a creator setting out with an express purpose in mind and that person’s ability to make that purpose come to fruition. Essentially, how well and how close does the end result reflect the desire of the creator, taking limitations into account of course.
Like I said, these are two different interpretations of good art but I don’t believe they are irreconcilable. The first better encompasses some of the more timeless nature of art but fails to allow for things to be themselves, demanding more from some things that don’t deserve or need to be anything more. The second allows for that, but using only the second means things like The Order are good art, as I’m sure the creators were quite alright making their movie-inspired tripe. I also didn’t want to spend too much time taking about the definition of art, a futile discussion, but I wanted to express my personal outlook on the subject in hopes it may give light to some of my more poorly explained parts.
Lost somewhere in the previous paragraphs is the idea that games should have to be made a certain way. I find this incredibly limiting, narrow-minded, and pedantic, as I’m sure many of the proponents of this idea would feel better if they were called “interactive movies”. But to tie this in with my views on art, which admittedly are still juvenile and underdeveloped, should games be developed with one specific thing in mind: to serve the higher order of systems, the thing which separates the game from so many other, older mediums?
If I had to give a firm yes or no, I would err on the side of no. A game should require systems, but a game shouldn’t have to place the utmost priority on these systems in favor of other aspects. I do believe that the greatest games, the ones which will be remembered and revered as classics, will favor systems over all else — or at least blend all of its elements so expertly that this matter would be irrelevant anyways — but to make this necessary seems a limiting factor to creative design. Uncharted proved that games that borrow numerous elements from cinema can work, and well, all the while still feeling like a game at heart. Sony’s own upcoming Until Dawn looks to have even less gaming elements than The Order all the while looking far more entertaining at this point.
This might be a spoiler, but it doesn’t matter if it is.
I suppose expectations will have to play a certain part in this as well. Until Dawn is choose-your-own adventure story that’s fully aware it will never sit among the likes of Tetris. The game really only asks the player to make minor inputs to make big decision that will play out for them, but I can see the game getting a much warmer reception than The Order as it promises nothing more.
But as for games like The Order, I feel as though there presence in the gaming world is both a good thing and a bad thing. Well, the bad thing is that the game is literally bad, but everything else about it can be brought up as a positive. It was an important reminder to big game companies that graphics aren’t everything, games need to be fun — or at least interesting — to play too. Games don’t need to be Hollywood, they can be their own thing. But we shouldn’t fault them for trying to be, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of a good game.
There is an unwritten but incredibly important rule in film making: The greatest crime a film can commit is being boring. It doesn’t matter if its good, bad, or otherwise, as long as your movie is engaging, the viewer will have gotten something out of it. Being unmemorable is just about the worst thing any artistic piece can be. With The Order: 1886, unmemorable is just about the perfect way to sum it up.
Set in London during the year 1886, The Order is a third-person shooter involving the Knights of the Round table, who for centuries have defended the world from “Half-Breeds” (they’re just werewolves) but more recently have been shooting rebellious Indians striking against United India Company (East India Trading Company). I don’t need to post spoilers or a spoiler warning, you can fill in the plot yourself. The Order plays out like most non-Marvel movies released in the past few years: somber and filled with misplaced purpose. The characters are dull, the writing is competent but forgettable, and the set pieces are completely interchangeable. The steampunk London, while not entirely original, manages to create a good mood and is captured gorgeously. Technically speaking, the game is a step above its competition, sharing the likes of Ryse and Crysis (Which I still view as a gold standard for photorealistic visuals).
You’ll probably notice I’ve spent most of my space so far writing about The Order in a motion picture mindset. Well, given the game I had been left with, that’s really all there is to talk about. As a point of comparison, I compared The Order to modern blockbusters only because its closest relation in the gaming world predates equally forgettable fair such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
The Order feels like the brainchild of Gears of War and David Cage, a game where the game elements feel tacked on and in the way. I’m usually the one to fall on the side of Devil’s Advocate for Cage and in this case is no exception. While Cage has a distinct style and lack of quality in his writing, he puts at least any effort into making the few choices available to the player have meaning. The Order lacks any player agency whatsoever, instead resting on its admittedly impressive tech to take on the brunt of the player’s interest.
The narrative plays out as one of the most Campbellian scripts I’ve ever seen, hitting every major note along the hero’s journey but without any of the mystique to pull it off effectively. The cliches pile on so hard that the line “You and I are not so different” is repeated by the villain in a bold-faced seriousness that Nolan’s Batman movies never even touched. The third act is heavy-handed and rushed, ending the game minutes after what felt like a much slower and contemplative beginning, not that that was good for it either. The ending in particular is so abrupt that no time is spent to wrap up dangling plot lines, opting to try and add emotional weight that is completely unearned. A mid-credits sequence sequel baits so hard you’ll wonder why they even bothered. What we get here is a prologue, a proof of concept. Developers talked to Sony and asked if they could spend millions of dollars showing that they had the idea for a cinematic third person shooter and for some reason Sony said yes. Uncharted or The Last of Us this is not, no matter how much Sony and RAD hope it may be.
The comparisons to Gears of War are even more fleeting. They are both cover-based third person shooters. The similarities end there. Gears of War — a game from 2006 — had a similar length campaign, entirely cooperative, and a multiplayer mode. It’s segments of forced slow-walking genuinely felt like they needed to load the game rather than forcing the character to listen to dialogue they’ll soon forget. The Order is solely a campaign mode that will take under ten hours to beat and little else. No replayability, unskippable cutscenes, and no entertaining bits that stand out in any way.
Shooting arena’s are all giant boxes and can be spotted a mile away. Nothing about the game’s world feels natural, conveniently placed boxes littering what should be deserted streets and train stations. Some of the weapons are fun and surprisingly kinetic, but even the production values can’t save the umpteenth time an armored shotgunner will rush past cover to kill you in two hits while you feebly wait for him to enter his stunned state after half you clip has been emptied. The gunplay never evolves, artificially or organically.
The only time the game changes its pacing are during the dull as bones stealth sections and the werewolf segments. The stealth aspect of this game is so underdeveloped it isn’t even worth mentioning, but it reinforces the idea that taking control away from the player for free auto-kills ruins a large portion of what makes stealth an interesting concept in the first place. But the werewolf segments are by far the worst parts of the game, which is a shame since they should be the most interesting.
There are two kinds of werewolf encounters, fighting multiple and one-on-one fights. Fighting multiple at once puts you in an arena where the werewolves will run at you, prompting an X to appear to dodge out of the way. Shooting them enough will make them fall into a stunned state where you can run up and perform an execution. Every single one of these can be solved by standing in the corner and pressing X when prompted to. The one-on-one fights are even more egregious, taking camera control away from the player to plaster a list of three available actions to you — heavy, and light attacks, dodge — in the upper corner of the screen. In between each attack of the werewolf you dodge, you can get in two light attacks or one heavy attack, no more, no less. The fight will have several stages that all function exactly the same way and a minute or two later it will be over with. This only happens twice in the entire game and for good reason: it’s really boring.
Boring is actually the perfect word to describe The Order. All the potential for a cool setting wasted on one of the most by-the-numbers games released in a long time. Maybe the developers will take to heart the numerous and well-founded complaints made at the game and use to make a better one in the future, but for the time being the only order this game deserves is a cease and desist.
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