f o r g o t t e n f u t u r i s t

(WARNING: This post contains major spoilers.  And honestly, if you aren’t a huge EarthBound fan, you’re likely to find it pretty esoteric.)

To even a casual fan of the series, there are obvious superficial connections between all three MOTHER games.  Look no further than the iconic protagonist, striped shirt and baseball bat (or stick) in tow.

But the exact chronology connecting them is a different beast entirely.  Shigesato Itoi is deliberately subtle with many of the hints he drops, leaving them very much up to your personal interpretation.

Before we get started, it’s useful to talk about the two main methods of time travel portrayed in fiction these days.

The first is on display in movies like Back to the Future and Looper, as well as the classic RPG Chrono Trigger.

• There are no parallel timelines.
• Events happening in the past have an immediate impact on the future (see: Marty McFly fading out of existence, knife marks appearing on Bruce Willis’ arm, Marle ceasing to exist).
• Events in the future can cause events in the past to happen, which is pretty trippy.

The second has been made popular by J.J. Abrams vehicles like Star Trek and Fringe, as well as the recent BioShock Infinite.

• If you travel to the past, you create a new timeline.  Period.  No paradoxes.
• If you travel to the future, you stay in the same timeline.
• If you travel across existing timelines, your destination must be the present moment or the future.
  

I just finished the new translation of the original MOTHER, and couldn’t shake how uncannily similar the characters and settings were to those found in EarthBound.  So I analyzed all three games with the many-worlds interpretation (method #2) as my lens.

The key event is Giygas travelling back in time to Earth’s distant past.  Having a powerful psychic presence messing with the future could easily explain continuity being disrupted in the following ways:

• Ninten, Ana and Lloyd being born several years later, with different names.
• America being named Eagleland, Mother’s Day being named Onett, etc.
• The original Giygas never coming to Earth in 190X.

So far, I’m satisfied.  I play the games again every year, so I hope to gain a better perspective over time.

Any ideology, taken to an extreme, justifies evil.

Both triple-A giant BioShock Infinite and indie darling Gray make this political point, in remarkably similar ways:

The False Ally

One hallmark of the BioShock franchise is that ideologies are symbolized through characters.  This allows normally complex concepts to be easily understood by just about anyone.

When you begin BioShock Infinite, you’re introduced to American Exceptionalism through the character of Zachary Comstock.  He’s a religious zealot, vicious racist and murderer.  So yeah, pretty obviously the bad guy.

Your ally is Daisy Fitzroy, a rebel leader fighting for racial equality.  You absolutely sympathize with her cause; you’ve seen first-hand the brutal reality she wants to change.

The real kicker is that about halfway through the game, you succeed.  She ends up getting put in charge.

And guess what?  She turns out to be an anarchist zealot, vicious classist and murderer.  So yeah, pretty obviously also the bad guy.

Gray abstracts the same plot device.  You’re helping one faction by converting people to your side.  Once you’ve succeeded, suddenly you switch color and now you’re in the minority again.

Both games want to make you feel burned.  They force you to think, “Why didn’t I consider what would happen if my side was unopposed?”

Balance

Both games feature a protagonist with no strong ideological leanings.  Which side you’re helping at the moment depends on your personal goal.

In Gray, you want peace.  But you can never win.  After switching sides enough times, you become transparent and nobody will listen to you.

The game is saying, “Even though staying in the middle is the only sane choice, you can’t realistically accomplish anything unless you pick a side.”  It’s a bit of a downer.

In BioShock Infinite, you want redemption.  And through the process of becoming a better person, you end up making the world a better place.

[BioShock Infinite on Amazon]

[Gray on Intuition Games]

The engines were ready.  We could make the jump.

In the space of a second I assessed the situation.  The rebels had caught up with us.  We were outmanned and outgunned.  My lasers bounced pathetically off their superior shields.

Out of pure desperation, I’d teleported two of my crew to sabotage their weapons system.

I needed time to teleport them back aboard my ship.  Time I didn’t have.  If I hesitated, we’d all be dead.

I made the decision.  We left them behind.  Two death sentences given in a single breath.

This is the beating heart of FTL.  A series of decisions between bad and worse.  If you can’t make the hard decisions, you’ll lose.

There are some terrible fates in store for the unwary captain.  Having your crew massacred by a boarding party of Mantis.  Your hull perforated by asteroids.  Running out of oxygen in an ion storm.

When I started, I’d never dream of abandoning the weak or accepting a bribe from pirates.  But after countless failures, I came to realize that I couldn’t help everyone.  That I had to get my hands dirty to survive.   I’d gone from Captain Kirk to Admiral Adama.

I appreciate the artful use of implied narrative.  The text evokes classic sci-fi scenarios and your imagination does the rest.  Finding the lone survivor of an attacked colony.  Stumbling upon a mysteriously abandoned ship in a nebula.  Responding to a distress beacon only to be lured into a trap.

Each of the six alien races represents a well-understood archetype.  Humans.  Cyborgs.  Militaristic hive mind.  Religious zealots.  Peaceful diplomats.  Treacherous merchants.

The game design supporting the storytelling is tuned to a razor’s edge.  Invest too heavily in shields and you’ll be picked apart by missiles.  Don’t invest enough and you’ll be raked over the coals by beam weapons and conventional laser fire.  Mastering the perfect upgrade path for each ship type is an art in itself.

Putting the player in the commander’s chair instead of the cockpit was a stroke of genius.  I’ll be thinking about FTL for years.

[FTL: Faster Than Light on Steam]

[Image © PC Gamer]

It’s a setup right out of an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Men in a small town begin dying in their sleep, a look of horror fixed on their face when they’re discovered in the morning.  Our main character is a nebbish 30-something who waffles about committing to his longtime girlfriend.  He meets a beautiful woman and has an affair.  

Then, the nightmares begin.  Every night, he must climb an endless tower that’s crumbling beneath his feet.  To give up would mean certain death.

All of the elements of a classic Rod Serling narrative are there: the supernatural juxtaposed with the dramatic tension of a protagonist with major moral failing.

Sadly, this greatness is only very briefly glimpsed.  The story begins to unravel almost right away in a jumble of completely implausible character motivations and plot developments.  The titular Catherine, with whom the main character has his affair, is so clingy and psychotic that no sane human being could reasonably continue seeing her.  She’s a far cry from the alluring temptress you could easily imagine leading men to an untimely end.

And the final reveal that explains why the nightmares are happening is so wildly ridiculous that it essentially destroys any enjoyment that came before it.  I’ve seen this happen a few times (the ending of LOST, anybody?) and my personal theory is that it’s far better to under-explain than to over-explain.  The Twilight Zone never felt the need to tell the viewer exactly why strange things were happening, which made those occurrences even more unnerving.

The gameplay is a bit of a mess.  You push blocks around to climb the tower and are occasionally chased by a big scary boss.  In an age where so many great games seamlessly blend story and gameplay mechanics, it feels odd to have the two be so thoroughly disjointed.

It also bears mentioning that the game is soul-crushingly difficult.  So hard, in fact, that the developer had to add a “Very Easy” mode in a post-launch patch.  If the majority of players are skipping the gameplay to see the story, you know you’ve got a serious problem.

I’ve got to give credit to the designers for exploring thematic territory that’s been completely neglected in videogames thus far.  As gamers, we’re growing older and starting to feel the societal pressure to settle down.  The scenes in the bar where you’re commiserating with your friends struck an emotional chord in me.

It’s a little regrettable that Atlas marketed this as a sexy Japanese pinup game when it offers more nuance than that.  I could imagine a completely different marketing campaign based on the moral questions they ask you in the game.  Imagine a full-page ad with the question, “Does life begin or end at marriage?”

Though at times I found myself completely dumbfounded by an inexplicable plot twist or grinding my teeth in frustration at the unreasonable difficulty curve, I was still hooked.  Definitely a guilty pleasure.

[Catherine on Amazon.com]

[Image © Atlus]

Say what you will about his novels, but you can’t deny Murakami has a knack for off-kilter titles. This is the man who wrote A Wild Sheep Chase, after all.

As you might have already guessed, this narrative alternates between the titular “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” and “End of the World,” which is particularly appropriate considering the novel features a split-brained “data shuffler” for a protagonist. (He’s able to encode/decode complex cryptological information.)

Half the chapters feature humorous cyberpunk in the vein of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, as our hapless everyman gets caught in the middle of a dangerous war of information, meets up with a scientist who tinkered around with his psyche, and has an affair with a voraciously hungry librarian. Poor guy, he just wanted to retire and teach himself how to play the cello in his old age.

The other half seems to tell the unrelated tale of a mysterious village surrounded by impossibly high walls. None of the residents can remember who they are or where they came from, and they’ve all had their shadows bizarrely sundered by the enigmatic Gatekeeper.

Of course, these two aren’t as unrelated as you might originally think, and as the story heads towards a conclusion, the truth ought to dawn on you. What is mind? No matter.

[Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World on Amazon.com]

[Image © M. S. Corley]