No More Tears

So. Cry On has been canceled, apparently.

This is good news.

Here's the thing. Creating a game, as in many endeavors, requires many different skillsets, and they don't always occur within the same person. In the same way that someone who's good at drawing comics is not necessarily good at writing them, someone who's good at convincing an electorate to vote for him isn't necessarily good at governing a nation, and someone who's good at plotting and producing space adventure movies isn't necessarily good at scripting or directing them, someone who's good at creating compelling gameplay is not necessarily good at creating compelling narrative.

Unfortunately, like the comics thing, the politician thing, and the George Lucas thing, being good at creating compelling gameplay is often a good way to put yourself into a position where you're in charge of narrative.

This causes problems for creators who are good at creating gameplay, bad at creating narrative, and much more interested in the latter than the former. I will submit Hideo Kojima as Exhibit A -- I like Metal Gear Solid 4, but still admit it's full of stupid bullshit. The same stupid bullshit was in MGS and MGS2; it was just less visible in the former's case because the technology didn't allow for as much extravagance, and possibly because Kojima wasn't big enough at the time to operate without oversight.

(For Exhibit B, see Xenosaga. For Exhibit C, see Too Human.)

You get the same thing with a lot of authors. They get big, editors stop being strict with 'em, and suddenly you have the late career of Robert Heinlen and the middle Harry Potter books. Joanne Rowling seems to have learned this lesson, and so the late Harry Potter books have better editing than the middle ones, but lots of authors don't.

Cry On was to be Hironobu Sakaguchi's next big Xbox 360 Mistwalker project after Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, my reviews of which can be found here and here. Now, since I didn't like Blue Dragon and did like Lost Odyssey, one might expect me to have had quite high hopes for Cry On. I didn't. Lost Odyssey is a decent game, but it's flawed, and notable for how it's flawed.

It's slow. In a few respects, such as the long text stories of the protagonist's life as a wandering amnesiac immortal, it's just slow enough, but in most ways it's too slow -- this includes such things as the length of the game's animation for seeking treasure in pots.

What's also notable is the way it insists on players experiencing it on its own terms. That pot treasure animation can't be skipped. The game's boss battles are hard, and the game's experience curve is set up so grinding to overlevel a hard boss fight is almost impossible. Lost Odyssey is has no interest in accommodating players who wish to experience it on anything other than the way its designers' envisioned. They've created something cool and meaningful and you will watch it and not interrupt, damnit!

The whole game design screams of self-indulgence on the part of its creators, much more than Blue Dragon did.

With Cry On, Sakaguchi's explicit goal was to create a game so emotionally affecting that it brings the player to tears every twenty minutes. I have never heard a more self-indulgent-sounding game premise when I take into account Sakaguchi's history as a designer and the progression of his proclivities from the Final Fantasy series to Blue Dragon to Lost Odyssey. Cry On was always doomed.

Hironobu Sakaguchi is a talented game designer. He invented Final Fantasy, and by extension the JRPG. He saved Squaresoft from bankruptcy and put it where it is today. But he bought his own hype and lost sight of where his talents lay. Like so many creators, he lost the ability to self-edit even as he grew out of a position where anyone else could edit him... except, as it turns out, he didn't. Because Cry On has been canceled. He was edited.

This is a good thing. Hironobu Sakaguchi can make good games again, but not to put too fine a point on it, first he needs to get over himself. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe the cancellation of Cry On is a great tragedy, but I think statistics -- the number of creators who go through the same process I see in him -- say I'm right. With luck, this setback will inspire in him some of his previous humility of ambition. I'm looking forward good Sacaguchi-produced games in the future; I just don't think Cry On could have been one of them.

...

My New Year's resolutions are to post more and, appropos of nothing, to draw for half an hour every day. Also, to watch my own self-indulgence. This post was pretty bad for that.