A Bastion of Emotion: Dénouement

So, this is part three, which means MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD. That’s your warning.

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.

A Bastion of Emotion: Things that Last

This is the second of a three-part series on what exactly makes the Xbox Live Arcade game Bastion one of the most affecting video gaming experiences since video gaming could be, you know, affecting. The first part mostly steered clear of spoiler territory. This part will do no such thing; if you’re playing Bastion, and you’re going to read this, I hope you’re getting close to the end. SPOILERS TO FOLLOW.

“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.)

A Bastion of Emotion: Music and Words

Two times through Bastion, and there’s a good chance it’s ruined me to pretty much every other game that’s going to come out this year. There are pieces of this game that made me feel things that I haven’t felt from a game in years…maybe ever. This is the first of three increasingly spoilerific posts in which I try to break down just how Bastion manages to be as affecting as it is.

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.

* * *