Tales of Symphonia

I started playing the celebrated Gamecube RPG Tales of Symphonia in December 2005, and was pleasantly hooked. I found a cute little adventure story full of hackneyed RPG concepts: the teenaged Lloyd and his silver-haired buddy Genis help their friend Colette to fulfil the prophecy given to her at birth – that she will save the world - and find themselves battling the corruption of tyrannical rulers. Oh yes. The clichés get more and more obvious – Lloyd is the dumb-but-loveable hero, Genis is an elven magician, Colette is a ditzy blonde, and the evil half-elves are turning humans into big wibbly green monsters! Oh no! When Lloyd and Genis attack the testing facility, retribution falls on their village, causing much angst and exile – so the only thing left for them to do is to go and join Colette on her journey to save the world!

Yes, it’s all cheerful, childish, unchallenging fare, done in bold anime style. There’s a beautiful animated intro, cell-shaded SD-style graphics and some adorable character designs – Lloyd and Genis in particular are very cute. Best of all is the voice acting: a step up from most English video games’ dreck, but still very much over-acted, with the Boy Hits Car guy who plays Robin in Teen Titans giving his best melodramatic performance as Lloyd, and his father – a dwarf – boasting a VERY iffy Scottish accent. Still, the ham suits the cheerful tone, and I knew from the start it would all get very angsty later on. Colette has the perfect ditzy American voice, sounding rather like an Olsen twin, and Genis has one of the most adorable boy-voices America has ever managed to record. It all makes me very happy, in the full knowledge that it’s all a bit naff, but naff with conviction!

When I finished it five days later, it struck me that writing an RPG video game must a very individual art form – you have to spin out a story for hours and hours, get your characters from fight to fight and sling in every twist and betrayal and redemption known to man to keep things moving. The story still wasn't great in this game, though. What starts as a nice, slightly preachy story about half-elves and humans discriminating against each other, and the half-elf Desians running human experimentation ranches while keeping the humans suppressed, gets muddled by every half-arsed vaguely-Nordic high-concept twist they can think of. Yeah, there’s, like, this giant tree, the source of all mana, and then this person sealed there, and these other half-elves who’ve become angels, and, like ANOTHER WORLD man, and high technology and magic and dwarfs and ninjas and a sword that holds the whole world together and STUFF! It all feels like someone was only vaguely in control of themselves as they were writing it, so it hops around randomly with only the most tenuous of links and all sorts of magical contrivance. Plus whenever the subject of discrimination comes up, you can tell that the writer is so opposed to it that they just can’t convincingly portray anyone who actually holds prejudices, and it comes across as rather superimposed.

But the characters are great. Typical shounen protagonist Lloyd, more 14 than the official 17, rather thick but utterly good-hearted; sensible, occasionally obsessive teacher Raine; goofy, masculine female ninja Sheena who’s actually very sweet; womanising Zelos who seems pretty flat and annoying at first but actually develops into quite an interesting character; Presea who lost several years of her life and will never get them back – and especially Genis, the cute little child prodigy whose arrogant, bratty streak is tempered by his sheer adorableness and propensity to say things like ‘We’ll be friends forever!’ Bless!

Of course, everyone spends the entire game wracked by guilt over the things they’ve done, endlessly apologising and looking angsty, and it’s all a bit didactic, but hey, I’ve come to expect that of RPGs, and what’s more, the fight system was a lot of fun, so it all worked nicely.

Enzai

Since I wrote my opinion of the two-episode anime, somewhat shocked at the scenes of bloody rape of a 14-year-old boy and the graphic depictions of non-consensual sexual torture, Enzai surprisingly enough became the first yaoi game ever to be commercially released in the States. Only a handful of visual novels have ever officially made it over here, but I confess to being very surprised that about the only one ever expected to be bought by a (close to exclusively female) paying audience would be the one about prison rape.

But…well, I suppose I was, if anything, exaggerating my prudishness. I’ve read enough fanfictions and doujinshis to know that a lot of porn, for both genders, involves humiliation, subjugation, helplessness and horror, with of course the safety of knowing that it is all fantasy. With writing and drawing in particular, you know no-one is hurt in the making of what you’re watching. And we have to face it at some point, seeing the demand, the endless extremes of the internet, and the fact that I actually went back to Enzai and found that I actually found it kinda hot – call it empowerment, dominance or kink, but there’s something very appealing about non-con.

And thus I have been very surprised at the depth and sophistication of Enzai. It is not deep, nor sophisticated, but is far from the shameless porn I had expected. The first time I played it, I made all the wrong choices (there’s no actual skill to visual novels – you pick a choice and where it leads you will be totally random) and managed to get three ‘bad end’s in a row, which only served to make me think this was brainless smut even more than I already did, with poor Guys suffering really horrible things that definitely didn’t align with any fetishes I have. Also, while I was surprised to see that the mosaic censorship that is required by law in Japan had been removed, at times that only made me despair of some of the artists’ grip of anatomy. The penis cannot be inserted into the perineum!

It’s no more shameful than enjoying the sight of suffering and gore on the screen, which many years have shown us is almost universally approved of by our society. And as I say, I was surprised at the sophistication of the story, and the court case that resolves everything (even if some part of the evidence are daft, like a clever murderer just leaving weapons in a nearby abandoned house for months) is really quite smart.