The Mini Boss Diaries, October
It’s hard enough to balance a full-time job and a time-consuming hobby, but when that time-consuming hobby is gaming—an activity that has a predetermined minimum amount of time that can be put in per game—even having fun can get tiring.
I previously tried to balance working and gaming and writing full-length reviews of what I completed. The problem, though, is that my game-completion rate is currently much slower than it ever was: I used to beat 60-hour Final Fantasy games in two weeks or less, but as an adult, I’m lucky to see the ending of a 10-hour Ratchet and Clank game in that same amount of time.
So, rather than continuing to very slowly write full reviews, I plan to live up to my blog’s name and create an ongoing gaming journal: The Mini Boss Diaries. Let’s start with a catch-up entry.
October, 2013 Last month was a slow burn of GTA V missions and catching Pokemon in Pokemon Y, but I took a break from those games to tackle the sure-to-be-short Beyond: Two Souls.
I attended the Beyond presentation at the Tribeca Film Festival this past summer (and wrote about the event), and became very excited for its mid-October release. It had all the promise of Heavy Rain plus the acting abilities of Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page. After following the game for so long, I felt connected to it, but I knew from the first few minutes that it wasn’t going to be what I’d expected. It was being told out-of-sequence and, for me, it gave me less of a connection to the characters than I would’ve had if the story was told chronologically. Following Jodie’s childhood into adulthood would have been more interesting, as we’d get to see her life with an entity attached to her unfold. Instead, the story is told as if her whole life is happening at once, jumping back and forth through her timeline like vaguely connected flashbacks. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s jarring. Over all, the story was interesting, but it wasn’t nearly as powerful as it could have been.
Then there’s the gameplay issue, in that there was very little of it. For most of the 10-ish hours the game lasts, you’re watching cutscenes and walking Jodi around. Sometimes you control Aiden, though the controls aren’t great, and you are always, always on a predetermined path. You’ll get dialogue choices, but no matter what you do, the major plot points will happen in the same way and you never will feel like you made a difference. The game can go on without you, and does: if you take too long to choose a dialogue option, the game will choose one for you and keep the scene moving. There are also quick-time events, which are implemented similarly to Heavy Rain, except they are few and far between. Heavy Rain’s controls were far superior in that when an action needed to be done, the controller prompts attempted to emulate the real life action. Beyond’s controls are more simplified, and you’ll feel more like you’re pressing on a controller than performing real world actions. And then there’s the fact that even if you botch the button-pressing scenes (in a fight or a burning building), Jodie will survive and the game will go on. She’ll show cuts and bruises, sure, but you can set the controller down for (most of) the 10 hours and the game will go from beginning to end without a “game over” screen.
Beyond: Two Souls would have been more at home as an anime. I guess I didn’t enjoy it as a game, but I kind of enjoyed it as a miniseries. There are crazy things that happen, there are human connections, there’s character development…but I wasn’t playing. The most input I had on the game was making on-the-fly decisions that affected what trophies I received, and a couple of final choices that showed me one of several endings. This is why it’s labeled as an “interactive experience;” this is what “interactive cinema” is. I greatly preferred Heavy Rain’s dark consequences, sense of peril and lack of time, and storytelling, even if I had to hear “ori-geh-mi killer” mispronounced over and over again. But at least Beyond only took me a week to finish.