In my review of Ni no Kuni I wrote that its style was its substance, and I figured I’d expand on that idea here.

Ni no Kuni tells a very classic kind of fairy tale adventure. It speaks in archetypes: the pure, unshakable hero, the corrupted villain, the comic sidekick, the seedy yet trustworthy rouge, who bickers with the kind-hearted female companion, and so on.

Few game franchises remain so enduring and immutable as the Pokémon series. Every entry into the franchise takes the same fundamental game system, even the same narrative, and transplants them almost entirely into another region. For outsiders looking in, Pokémon‘s steadfast design appears tedious. On the other hand, Pokémon aficionados, particularly those willing to create their own goals and strategies, see not a rigid system, but a flexible world. Those willing to take the “Nuzlocke Challenge” may find a difficult yet enriching experience that teaches them as much about pokémon training as it does about system design.

The Nuzlocke Challenge first appeared in a comic titled “Pokémon: Hard Mode,” written and illustrated by someone named, of course, Nuzlocke. The challenge is simple and has only two core rules. First, players may only catch the first pokémon that they see in a new area. If the pokémon flees or faints, the player is simply out of luck and must continue on regardless. Second, if a pokémon faints in battle, it considered “dead” and must be released or placed into a PC box. Funtionally, the Nuzlocke Challenge is Pokémon with permadeath.

In games, death can be an impediment.  From the earliest days of video games in the arcade, death marked a game’s fail state.  Three deaths and it is over.  Insert quarter.

Of course, death rarely leads to the Game Over screen any longer, not on home consoles or even on arcade machines.  The option to “continue” changed the nature of death in games.  It could certainly remain an annoyance and a sign of failure, an indication that the player is not executing well, but frankly, any number of games also seem to use death as a feature, as a necessary mechanic for play.  I’ve written before, for instance, about how Limbo (or Dark Souls) in some sense insist on a player’s death and even encourage the player to take unnecessary risks in order to better learn how puzzles work and to eventually solve them (”Dead Again: Notes on the Impermanence of the Virtual Body”, PopMatters, 26 October 2011), as has my fellow Moving Pixels blogger, Nick Dinicola (”Death Is Boring: Immortality as Character Development in Video Games”, PopMatters, 21 July 2011).  Likewise, Hotline Miami is another recent title in which death is frequent and also frequently serves as a method of better understanding how to proceed in a level by testing approaches to solving that level, knowing full well that death is likely, but potentially, again, an important learning tool or vehicle for honing a larger strategy.

A former professor of mine once told me that for a story to be a story, it must consist of a character being changed by events. Stories may be layered and make use of a gamut of literary devices and tropes, but everything is built on the foundation of a character being changed by an event. It is not enough to put an alcoholic in an ambulance with his dying mother or a rogue AI in a law firm run by God or an amnesiac engineer in a haunted sandwich shop. Those aren’t stories; they’re situations. They may be interesting situations with interesting people thinking and saying interesting things, but they’re just situations. And a situation, this professor stooped to tell us, is not a story. Something has to happen, and someone has to change because of it. A story has transparent motion between a distinct individual and their specific circumstances.

I thought I liked the ending of Mass Effect 3. While it wasn’t as great as it could have been, it’s not as bad as the controversy surrounding it made it seem. However, as more time passes, I find myself getting more and more upset with the game. In the time since I’ve beaten it, two pieces of DLC (the Extended Cut endings and Leviathan) have come out that significantly change the experience. There’s more plot, more mythology, more explanation about the things left hanging, and more importantly, story beats that I wasn’t made privy to initially. And that angers me. But when I really sit down and think about it, I don’t know why I’m angry. Yes, I’m missing out on content, but I was satisfied with the version of the game that I played. So, why do I still feel like I’m missing something? These pieces of DLC, regardless of how important they are to the plot and mythology of the series, are the equivalent of deleted scenes and alternate endings of a movie. I love deleted scenes and alternate endings but only as a curiosity, they don’t change my opinion of the movie itself. Yet the “deleted scenes” from Mass Effect 3 now have me questioning my original experience. So why do I care so much about deleted scenes and alternate endings in a game?