Devil Survivor is an SRPG with turn-based isometric battles in the tradition of the genre. The entire game is played on the clock; you get seven days to save the world, and every major game action — whether initiating a major battle or having a plot-progressing conversation — takes half an hour off the clock. Also, the protagonists sleep, because, you know, they’re supposed to be humans rather than automatons trapped in a video game.

Like this guy. You'll need to grind to beat this guy.

It would seem that an SRPG is just about the last place you’d want to be subjected to a grind, but Devil Survivor actually manages to make it work, by inspiring the player to set very specific goals to the grind. The playable team in Devil Survivor is so malleable, so very subject to the player’s wants and whims, that a very specialized team can be created for any situation. Sure, the main characters remain (mostly) constant, but each main character gets to be flanked by two of a possible stable of 16 demons. Demons can be bought, and demons can be created through the fusion of other demons, and a little bit of play time reveals that it doesn’t take all that many battles to create a highly specialized team. If you’re fighting a series of enemies that are weak against fire, finding four or five demons with fire abilities isn’t all that difficult. If you’re fighting a battle that includes the condition of needing to win within three turns, carrying a stable of demons that can double up on attacks might be the way to go.

Strategy in an SRPG tends to be a matter of getting the most out of a very limited set of variables. You have a set team, and you have to figure out some way to get that team to work together, to make the most out of whatever abilities that team has. Devil Survivor has some of this, but just as much of the strategy is in building the team that’s going into battle.

If you pay attention during the battles that you win, you can start forming generalized strategies right off the bat — demons with the “Anger Hit” ability work well with a hero that has the “Marksman” ability, for example, given that the never-miss Marksman supercedes the 50% success rate of the Anger Hit. Given that you have three active ability slots per demon, it helps to slot a healing spell in at least one of those if possible to give the player the greatest flexibility of attack and support. The more likely a paralyzing or petrifying skill is to hit, given whatever aids and buffs are present in the battle, the more useful it happens to be. You can build teams to take advantage of all of these, and for much of the game, fielding a team that simply exists to function in harmony with itself is enough.

There are some very, very difficult battles in the game, however, particularly late, but again, if you’re paying attention, they don’t feel unfair. When you start a battle, there is no mystery to the specific enemies you are fighting; all of the information about those enemies, including their abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and stat boosts, are immediately made available at the start of each battle. By knowing everything about these enemies, the player can then enter into free battles, with the goal of recruiting a cadre of demons that will best fight that specific battle.

Usually, it only takes two or three free fights before you’re ready to go in guns blazing, ready to shred up the enemies that seemed so intimidating not long before. Granted, “two or three free fights” can take an hour to an hour and a half depending on the player’s approach, but there’s a very immediate sense of progress. This isn’t walking back and forth and triggering random battles for an hour just to trigger a minor stat boost; this is grinding with a goal.

Does it undercut the urgency of the game, somewhat removing the idea that the player pays a price for every action? Sure it does. But as a way to keep a player interested in what is already a fairly long and difficult game, it is perfect. The grind is not boring, it’s just one more element to the “S” in this particular SRPG.

So. Have you played to the end of Bastion? And then, did you play it again?

I was trying to think back to the last time the end of a game affected me the way Bastion‘s did, and the only thing I could come up with was the end of Klonoa. Klonoa spent a few stages pretending it was a game for kids, and then it killed off Klonoa’s grandpa and started torturing him in ways that would be cruel in an M-Rated game, never mind an E10. Still, even that game was affecting not because the story was executed well — if I’m being completely honest, it was a little ham-fisted and melodramatic — but because it went in a direction that was pretty much the opposite of my expectations. Klonoa‘s story succeeds not because it’s written well, but because it’s written differently than pretty much any other game of its ilk.

The end of Bastion offers the opposite experience. The ending, really, is projected almost from the very beginning of the game; even its central choice is projected early on: Sure, you can erase the past, but do you really, truly want to?

Bastion succeeds because it manages to make two seemingly simple binary choices feel utterly monumental. Primed by the experience of trying to survive a world in which it’s not clear that you’re the “good guy”, per se, the choice of whether you’re going to carry your once-ally-now-enemy Zulf home after he has been betrayed and left for dead by his people is a big one. It’s confession time: I left him facedown the first time I played, and proceeded to wipe out the rest of his people with my very big stick. I didn’t enjoy it, but Rucks assured me that all of the mayhem and death was okay, given that the goal here was to turn back the clock anyway. It was a means to an end, an end in which presumably all of the dead would be resurrected. Systematic genocide doesn’t seem so bad if there’s an undo button, I suppose.

But then, I didn’t push it. I wiped out an entire race of people, and then, at the urgings of Zia, the singer responsible for the first truly affecting moment in the game, I decided the world was better off without them. Partly, I think, this was to spite Rucks, who I was actually angry at for all but tricking me into systematic genocide; partly, it was the nagging suspicion that by erasing the past, I wouldn’t really be changing anything.

I think I messed things up for myself by doing this; not only did I remove any sympathy or empathy that I felt for my own avatar, but Brendan Keogh’s brilliant little Bastion blog post suggests that by not choosing to “reset the world”, I’ve removed much of the meaning from the New Game Plus mode’s clever little changes.

Still, by turning my character into a selfish git, I motivated myself to burn through the game again so that I could “make it right” the next time around. I have a hard time playing the ass in RPGs; I can’t even bring myself to insult the most ridiculous and irredeemable characters in dialogue-heavy Bioware games. Making the choices I did went completely against my normal mode of play, offering the drive to do it better the next time around. Little did I know how much better things would seem.

Carrying Zulf through the mass of hostile Ura may have been the most beautiful little experience I’ve ever had in a game. That the Ura would eventually stop firing — that an Ura commander would quite literally strike his charge down for firing — all while “Mother, I’m Here” plays, and we continue to hear Rucks’ narration, telling Zia that The Kid was probably in the process of destroying him once and for all…it’s thwarted destiny, it’s humanity, and it’s devastation, all in one convenient two-minute scene. It’s a wrenching scene, one that renders the choice of whether to restore Caeldonia almost meaningless.

I restored it. Only because I hadn’t before. But I sort of wish I hadn’t.

The ending is what we work for in a game. We want to see how the story is resolved by the writers and designers responsible for presenting it to us. Coming up with a satisfying way to close a game is a difficult thing, and a half-hour cutscene, while often interesting, often feels like a letdown, as if the power is being taken out of our hands for the game’s final moments. What Bastion does is give us a small choice that makes all the difference in our perception of what happened over the previous hours of play. Without its endings, Bastion is a good game, one certainly worth killing a few hours with; with its endings, it is a treasure.

“The Kid” wakes up in a (presumably his) bed, surrounded by nothing. He gets up, as narrator Rucks helpfully tells us when we move the joystick for the first time, and he begins to rebuild the world. As he runs from place to place, the world appears under his feet. Fulfilling as this sounds, however, discovering and rebuilding the world of Bastion is a transient experience until you actually arrive at the Bastion itself. Your travels have a lasting impact on the Bastion, an impact you can see every time you return. You amass pets, trinkets, and buildings that help you prepare for each of your journeys into the world that once was.

The pets seem like the least important things there. A miniature gasbag (a “squirt”) spins around in a circle when you interact with it; an anklegator understands basic commands like “come” and “stay”. They serve no immediate or obvious purpose, existing only as toys in the tiny little hub town that you happen to be building.

Even so, it’s the pets that prime you for what’s to come.

There’s a reason that the storytellers over at Supergiant games have you wake up alone: When you’re alone, you haven’t had the chance to build an allegiance to anything. Bashing away at the many destructible parts of the world doesn’t feel like a problem, because it’s not your world at this point, it is simply a world. That goes double for the creatures in that world. “Self-defense”, you’ll plead, if pressed. They’ll kill you if you don’t kill them. And yet, sometimes, they become friendly. Some of them you can reason with via a special “attack”, turning them on each other. Eventually, a squirt becomes a pet, brought back to the Bastion for the sake of some semblance of company.

Here’s the point at which things begin to get complicated. Once you’ve domesticated a squirt, going off to destroy hundreds of other squirts is like owning and loving a dog at home while yelling things like “10 POINTS FOR LASSIE” when you’re a passenger in a car headed straight for someone’s beloved collie. There’s a little bit of sympathy for them all of a sudden, a twinge of “I’m sorry” as you hack them to powder. Even old, wise narrator Rucks contributes to this feeling, telling us at one point that these beasties “ain’t much different from you and me.” Not only can they be domesticated, they are slowly revealed to us as beings with feelings, and eventually motivations, and the sense that we are participating in a sort of systematic genocide only bubbles closer and closer to the surface.

Still, at least the baddies at the beginning of the game have the good grace to disappear when you kill them.

(…and I’m going to make you click on something here to see the rest, because now we’re well into spoiler territory.)

Eventually, the Kid finds that there is a not-insignificant number of people left in the world, even after the “Calamity” that the kid is, through his travels and the construction of the Bastion, trying to reverse. These people come to believe that the Kid must be stopped, that the Kid’s people can’t be brought back into this world, and they actually have pretty good reasons for this belief.

So they take up their weapons and try to kill him (you).

A funny thing happens here — you, as the Kid being attacked, have few reservations about doing to a fellow human being the same thing that you did to the beasts that roamed the wilds of Bastion‘s world. You hack away at the attacking human, cutting him down like just one more gasbag. And then he lies there, lifeless, until you make the Kid walk away.

Eventually, you start to face more humans than beasts as you make your way toward finding the final pieces of the monument that powers the Bastion. And all of them do attack you. You kill them, and they just lie there. They don’t vaporize, they don’t disappear into the ether. They just lie there, these other humans who simply wanted life to go on as it is. Rucks at this point is egging the player on in his narration, trying to convince everyone that life will be better for these hostile humans as well once the Bastion is completed; the dead will be brought back, the world will be more than the shell it has become. At this point, the player is not so sure.

The player continues to kill off the hostile humans anyway, because this is a video game, and killing the enemy is how the story unfolds. You still feel a little bit sick while you do it.

Both examples of persistence in Bastion‘s world — both the persistence of the pets at the game’s hub location and the persistence of these enemies out in the wild — tear at the player’s will to continue, just a little bit, though not enough to slow the player down on the way to the ultimate objective. The developers know this, and while they may intentionally inspire guilt, they stop short of inspiring disgust, because they want the player to finish the game.

What they are doing is priming the player for an endgame made suddenly more devastating by the simple, seemingly inconsequential design decisions that came before it. When the seed of doubt is planted, the stakes for the game’s conclusion feel exponentially more significant.

…and we’ll talk about the end next time.

Part 1: Music and Words (Minimal Spoilers)

Songs with words do not typically go with video games unless they are presented purely as background. This approach is most prevalent in sports games, where licensed soundtracks compete with each other until you’re trying to figure out whether you’d rather listen to Puddle of Mudd or Staind or freaking Hinder until you’re done picking whatever you’re picking out of menu #4. Songs with words written specifically for the game in which they appear? Usually the result is a too-precious or cute pop song running along on top of a particularly carefree moment in a JRPG, or you get Portal, whose end song is one more joke courtesy of the always funny GladOS.

While Bastion‘s everpresent narrator Rucks is often quite funny, he’s not a joke in and of himself; he actually ends up coming off as a dire, cynical character, in a world that is deadly serious despite the game’s cartoonish veneer. Most of the music here is simply background work, a little bit more atmosphere in a world positively crawling with the stuff. It’s spaghetti western with the odd downtempo beat, metal guitar, with a touch of Indian influence — a fantasy-world wild-western concoction that wouldn’t have sounded terribly out of place scoring, say, Firefly.

The first time you hear her, however, you know. You know that the game is doing something to you, you know that it is truly something special. For an entire stage, she’s there in the background, playing her song as you try to find her. The music gets louder as you progress, giving it a tangible quality rare for video game background music. And then, when you finally find her, all the sound in the game cuts out save for her song…and it’s a beautiful song. Shockingly so. It’s worth just sitting there and listening to it, wondering what it’s trying to say about the game it adorns. Zia is known as “the singer” in the game, and it’s for good reason.

Just as shocking as hearing Zia’s song for the first time is that her song is not the last time you’ll hear a vocal track adorning the game’s beautifully-done music, and that second moment packs at least as much of a punch as the first.

If not for the music, these moments would work, but not nearly as well. When you hear Zia sing “I dig my hole, you build a wall”, you wonder what she means exactly. Rucks treats the song as if it’s an old standard, but when you’re hearing it for the first time, it’s impossible to keep from ascribing meaning to the words. This is, of course, by design. We’re supposed to ascribe meaning to it. It’s there for a reason.

And then, when you hear the other song…”I’m coming home”, he sings…and if you have a heart in your chest, it will break.

Given that this is supposed to be the least spoiler-filled of my Bastion series, I’m going to leave it there. Bastion is a very special game for a number of reasons, but I never could have suspected that the narration would eventually be overshadowed by the music. The music in the game is uniformly fantastic, but when words are put onto that music, and a gameplay experience is laid on top of that, it’s positively transcendent.

* * *

Stay Tuned for Part 2, where we’ll look at the emotional pull of persistence.

* * *

The poem, then, must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an object or an ideal entity. It happens during a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text. The reader brings to the text his past experience and present personality. Under the magnetism of the ordered symbols of the text, he marshals his resources and crystallizes out from the stuff of memory, thought, and feeling a new order, a new experience, which he sees as the poem. This becomes part of the ongoing stream of his life experience, to be reflected on from any angle important to him as a human being.

-Louise Michelle Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, Southern Illinois University, 1978

On a semi-related note, I do sometimes wish that when I opened my mouth to talk about something in a semi-intelligent way I could eventually come around to the point I was trying to make. I think I had about a 50% success rate.

Podcast link forthcoming, of course.

Okay, so none of that really makes a whole lot of sense and even as it’s playing out, it feels like a fairly convoluted (not to mention slightly cheesy) way to offer motivation to the player. And then, just as Lumi — here a video of an actual teenage girl (Rachael Rhodes, the face of the Child of Eden creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi-produced “band” Genki Rockets), rather than a 3D-modeled approximation of one — is about to disappear, she looks helplessly into the camera, at the player.

At this point, all of the backstory becomes meaningless, save for two words: Save Lumi.

Until that moment, the entirety of that opening cinematic sequence seems very distant from the player. There is no relating to Lumi, who exists in a space completely apart from our own, who seems to possess a sort of consciousness that we could never begin to understand. There is no relating to the space she occupies, a metaphorical, fantastical approximation of the internet that approaches the sheer ludicrous whimsy of the hacking scenes in Hackers (and yes, I know I’m dating myself here, but I can live with that). And yet, with one quick glance we are drawn into the world of the game, and suddenly it means something beyond a simple “this is the story” introduction.

The key, I think, is the video. If Lumi were rendered with, say, the Unreal engine, this moment wouldn’t have half the power that it ultimately does; imagine the approximations of human beings that occupy The Polar Express trying to replicate such a moment. The eyes wouldn’t be right, not quite. The facial expression would be just unnatural enough, even at the height of current technology, to separate us from the game.

By using video, the game tells us “hey, that’s a real person in there, and she’s looking at you.”

Full motion video gets a bad rap in the context of gaming; blame the legacy of the Sega CD, a machine that had the ability to display it without the power to handle it. Full motion video can take the game out of the player’s hands or offer a distracting backdrop to gameplay visuals too primitive to make any sense in its context. Child of Eden is a game whose playable visuals actually make sense amongst the video images, by imagining a narrative that puts the video in an abstract, “video-gamey” world.

Lumi appears throughout Child of Eden, often as a backdrop to a boss battle, a sort of reminder of the reason you’re grinding away through a given setpiece. While the reminder is nice, however, it’s not necessary — one look is all it takes.

…

(though it doesn’t hurt that Child of Eden would be a ridiculously spiffy game even without Lumi at the center of it.)

Normally, I give shmups the benefit of the doubt, given that the shmup may well be my preferred genre of game — something about the impossible odds of the things, both in a narrative and in a ludic sense, has an almost unlimited appeal to a gamer like me. I’m willing to make apologies for shmups that I’m simply unwilling to consider for other genres.

And yet, Raiden IV. I bought it because it was a gaping hole in my collection, an entry in a genre that I have few excuses not to be a completist for. Heck, I convinced family to get me a Cave shmup at exorbitant import prices before I ever got around to landing Raiden IV, which even had a soundtrack in it and everything, for around $20? So I’m glad I finally got around to picking the thing up, but wow. It just makes me angry.

Mostly, it makes me angry because I’m terrible at it, and it requires the sort of fast reflexes that, say, Cave shmups eschew for the sake of offering bullet patterns and tiny escape windows. But there are a couple of quantifiable things in here that just feel like poor design decisions, the sorts of faux-pas that can turn a 1cc run (not that I’ve been anywhere near one of those on any sort of respectable difficulty) into a thrown controller. These are the places where getting blowed up real good goes from being a player deficiency to a game deficiency — something any decent shmup developer should desperately try to avoid in the creation of their game.

Problem #1: MEDALS LOOK LIKE BULLETS (ALSO, BULLETS LOOK LIKE MEDALS)

No, they don’t look exactly the same. The medals either have wings on them or they stay still and just sort of glimmer in the sunlight, while the bullets are typically smaller circles that move in a straight line, but really, the problem is the color. Bullets in Raiden IV are the same color as the medals. While this isn’t such a problem in the early stages when there aren’t as many bullets to dodge and you have a few hundredths of a second to look around and figure out whether running into the yellow thing or flying away from it is a good idea, the latter stages afford no such luxuries. It’s too easy to think you’re flying into a medal, when actually you’re flying into something that will explode you into a million pieces.

I mean, the obvious solution here is to avoid the medals, but this is a shmup, and scores matter. When I’m in the zone and running on pure instinct, I should be able to simply think something like “YELLOW CIRCLE BAD!” and move out of the way, or “YELLOW CIRCLE GOOD!” and go pick it up. I shouldn’t have to think “YELLOW CIRCLE OMG WHAT DO I DO NOW DOES IT HAVE WINGS?”, because by the time I get halfway through that thought, I’ve been killed by a stray bullet from somewhere else that I didn’t see coming.

Problem #2: CAMERA MOVEMENT

It’s no secret that there’s a certain amount of precision involved in navigating the treacherous waters of shmuppery, and that gaining a feel for your ship — that is, achieving an instinctual sense of how fast it goes and how powerful its shots are — is paramount. As such, it can be terribly frustrating when some levels allow the playing field to go beyond what the screen displays, allowing the player’s movements to affect the section of the field that is shown on-screen. What this means in a vertically-oriented shmup is that when the player moves to the right, the camera moves to the right as well, which also means that the player moves slower on the screen than he or she is accustomed to. Bullets traveling in the direction that the camera is moving will also slow down, and bullets traveling in a direction opposite of that of the camera will speed up.

What this means for the player is a slight shift in the perception of the game, one that only applies to certain levels. It’s not severe enough a shift to be an obvious change in style, but it is enough to have an affect on the way that a player has to approach the game.

Really, it’s just enough of a change to get you killed.

Raiden IV is not a terrible game, and it’s enough to satiate my need to blow up tiny airplanes with my own tiny airplane. Still, it’s hard to see myself running back to this one too often when I have things like Mushihimesama Futari or Ikaruga, games that never feel cheap even as they’re making me cry, to play.

Samus? You in there?

Inevitably, the player picks a target that is too far for the grappling arm to reach, or the player is pulled into a target that explodes. The robot suit falls to its inevitable demise, often divided into (presumably) thousands of individual, indistinguishable parts.

Gee, actually, when you think about it that way, playing Gravity Hook HD is a pretty morbid exercise.

Really, it’s a brilliant little game once its “people” stop being “people” and start being “things the player is launching into the sky”. Once you get used to its sense of physics, it makes perfect sense, and it quickly becomes one of those games in which you never feel as though you should have lost. Your finger slipped, or you should have seen, or you waited a little to long to…whatever, really. It’s not the game’s fault, it’s your fault, and that’s all the more reason to start it up again and have another go. All you’re looking for here is a high score, measured in how many meters you traveled. It’s not complicated.

What is interesting, though, is how many of the little things the Semi-Secret duo got right here — when the player is exploded by a target, the bits and pieces shower onto the next player, all lined up to try it again. The spacing of the targets is beautifully done, as they become just a little further apart depending on how much progress is made. Including some targets that can be traveled past and others that block progress is inspired, requiring some modicum of quick-thinking strategy to be employed, and offering the “classic”, original version of the game as a reward for a 500-meter climb is a nice bonus. Leaderboards that track daily, weekly, and all-time climbs even allow the player the pleasure of an obtainable top-10 posting somewhere.

Are there problems? Sure — running into a wall of red (that is, non-passable explosive) targets early in a climb can be frustrating, and the walls and ledges that creep in on the sides of the screen are often too dimly lit to be noticed amongst the brightly-colored targets and avatar.

Still, it’s hard to argue with a game whose simplicity, along with the probability that a single game will be finished in 30 seconds or less, inspires thousands of tries. Gravity Hook HD is about the climb, but it’s also about the inevitable fall. To not get back up, though, would feel too much like quitting.

Oh, hi Cole. Looking serious again? Yeah, thought so.

The problem is that much of the criticism is boiling down to “I was terrible at it, and therefore there must be something wrong with it.”

Game critics are gamers who have necessarily played hundreds of games. There is an expectation that comes with playing a game — at least, a console game — that your mistakes will be erased with the push of a button, that you’ll get to try, try again until you get it right. The interrogation sequences of L.A. Noire don’t allow for this. If you get something wrong, your suspect/witness clams up and you just have to go without whatever crucial piece of information they might have been hiding. This is, obviously, unthinkable.

This issue seems partially related to the way the interrogation sequences are presented to us. Theoretically, we should be able to look for a sideways glance, a furtive breath, or a bitten lip and know right away that whoever we are speaking to is a DIRTY LIAR. On the other side of that, if the person looks directly at us, speaks clearly, and doesn’t hedge their answers, they are a SHINING BEACON of TRUTH. It is, of course, not that easy in practice. When “intuition points” are introduced, which offer the player the opportunity to glean some extra insight into what the “right” approach might be, the initial reaction is to scoff. “I won’t need those,” we think, “I’ll just look extra carefully at the eyes.”

Seriously, what could this look possibly mean?

How do we know which instances are which? Well, those intuition points suddenly look awfully useful. I found myself driving around L.A. circa 1947 just for the sake of finding random landmarks that would help me gain the experience levels necessary to gain more of the things. You simply can’t collect enough of them.

Really, the game sets us up to fail, and fail often, and then live with our failure. More than anything, these passages evoke games like the original King’s Quest, games that don’t tell you when you’re screwing up, content to let you screw up until you’re in such an irrevocable position that you have to start over. Missed an item along the way? Well, go ahead and keep going, but eventually, it’s going to bite you in the ass. You’re never going to be able to get to the end without it. In L.A. Noire, you can keep going, and you can even solve whatever mystery it is you’re working on, but good luck winning the affections of your superiors, much less your colleagues.

As pointed out in the review, this serves to separate player from character, which I believe was actually the developer’s intent. That interrogation is frustrating you is the point. If Cole Phelps were better at it, he would cease being Cole Phelps and become a reflection of the player, and really, nobody should want to see more of themselves in the character of Cole Phelps.

So far, I’m actually pretty impressed by how mundane it all is. I am finding some joy in accepting low-profile jobs that carry little to no risk of failure — many “quests” in the game are as simple as “talk to person X” or “destroy baddie Y”, and solving these quests often means some sort of development of the relationship between protagonist Hawke and the members of Hawke’s party. Squeezing money out of an old man when he asks you to find his son, for example, could cause some members of the party to lose respect for Hawke while others like his style; the game lets you play as much of a saint or selfish ass as you like, though admittedly there’s not much of a reward for shades of gray.

Having played through two acts of the game so far, though, there’s a recurring theme that I do find quite appealing that is pushing me to bully my way through the rest: the definition of “home”.

For each of the characters in the story, the idea of what “home” means is a constant and pressing question; mage-elf Merrill leaves the elf settlement on Sundermount to join Hawke, coming to live in the slums of Kirkwall. Human healer Anders is relegated to the underground to avoid the strong arm of the powerful Templars, who fear and punish those who would practice magic. Aveline fled her hometown with her husband to get away from the Darkspawn, but lost that husband on the way, forcing her to make her way alone in the confines of Kirkwall. And then there’s Hawke himself, who fled alongside Aveline, made his home with his shady uncle as he got on his feet, and eventually found himself living amongst the upper crust, one of the most respected men in Kirkwall.

Is home simply a place to lay your head or is it where your family and friends are? This is not a new question, but the various angles presented by the characters do offer a complex and satisfying investigation of it.

Awesome Hawke/Anders drawing from http://criz-zone.blogspot.com.

More striking, however, is the way that Dragon Age II forces you to make Kirkwall your home, with the operative “you” here meaning “the player” rather than “Hawke”. As you venture around town, you know its nooks and crannies, you know the shortcuts from one place to another, you know where various vendors and roustabouts like to hide. You know where you will probably need to go to find someone who’s trying to hide, and you know where to go if you’re looking for a quest or three to bump up your stash of gold. It’s true, there are very few good opportunities to venture outside the walls of your town but that only emphasizes just how much there is to do in your town, especially if you are trying to maintain working relationships with everyone in your party. Help out a lousy employer, find a lost trinket, kill some guy for money, it’s all out there, and the jobs you take will have some bearing on the ideal you set for Kirkwall.

As such, when the town is eventually overrun from within from a to-that-point non-violent set of aggressors, you take it personally.

By that point, Kirkwall is home to both Hawke and to the player. The familiarity bred by the constant activity within the confines of Kirkwall manages to increase the stake that the player puts into the town; to see it threatened cannot be tolerated regardless of what has come before. It is this forced familiarity that allows the plot to progress as planned regardless of whether the player has molded Hawke into an iconic good guy or a complete jackass.

That the concept of “home” as such an important theme would be appealing to a player like me is likely predictable. There is going to come a point, and soon, at which the weighing of the benefits of a long distance move against staying in the house my family has loved for the last however many years is going to end, and we’ll either make the leap or settle in for a very long haul. Perhaps getting the chance to play out such choices on my TV screen will help.