I hate: Cutscenes after save points!

Here we are again, it's always such a pleasure-

I play a lot of games, duh, it's the only that keeps me distracted from the overwhelming darkness in my head, but there's one habit of the gaming that I do not understand. It's something that I see in all walks of gaming life: I see it in big budget games, indie titles, souless crowd-pleasers, heart-felt thought pieces, multimillion dollar blockbusters and two-bit adventures cobbled together on RPG maker; it's some foul depraved pact that they all have in common, a disgusting deformity joining all these types of games together at the waist, it's a decent 50% chance that any of these games will have their save point occur just before a cutscene. As far as I am concerned, there is no greater sin that a game can commit. Even if the entire title freakin' implodes and takes my console with it, that is miles better than having to relieve the same dialogue over-and-over like I'm Dormammu going up against Stephen Strange.

In recent years there grew something of a movement around quality video games, and that was insisting how there should never be an unskippable cutscene. (Though as far as I'm concerned that was run by the sort of heathens who skip through all the story then complain about how they have no idea what's going on) As far as I'm aware the most famous example of this originates in one of the best games ever made; Mass Effect 2. (A game with quite a few cutscenes.) People bristled about having to sit through the same dialogue on repeat playthroughs and within a few years that practise was mostly abolished, but you know what? I have very different memories than everyone else of that game. I remember scenes, like that moment on Purgatory, where for some inexplicable reason the autosave hit just after a big dialogue and just before an ambush cutscene immediately throwing the player into combat. (thus restricting him/her from manual saving) So that issue with unskippable cutscenes? Made fifteen times worse when I'm watching that scene over and over each time that I die.

Now I do realise that a big part of why this is a problem for me is because of my insistence to always throw myself out-of-my-depth whenever I play games. Unless I push myself to the highest difficulty I feel like I'm cheating myself out of the full experience and thus have trouble enjoying the game as much as I could do. Unfortunately, the side-effect of this decision is that I die a lot, which means that if there is any point in the game where the savepoint is just before a cutscene that throws you into combat, you can bet by god that I'm gonna find it! So in some ways I guess you could say that this is sort of my fau- you know what? No. No it isn't. They are still the ones who fought every common law of sense in order to install an incomprehensibly ill-judged system!

This is a situation that has come most prominently to my attention lately as I've taken to playing older titles, which doesn't mean that newer games are immune, just that they're all mostly open world games without cutscenes these days. (So problem solved?) Back in the day, however, storybased titles could not wrap their head around this most simple of concepts: People don't want to hear the same tired dialogue cues over and over! Kingdom Hearts suffered from this in 'Chain of Memories' and 2, (For COM this was especially vexing because the game itself was just bad.) Jade Empire, (which I've recently started, also pulls this trick. But it's a Bioware game so what do you expect.) and even X-com sort of has this issue in 2, if you save the game around a mission with a character announcement in it. (Although you could classify that as a bug-due-to-design-flaw if you were being generous. Though then again, you could alleviate all games of blame through that same logic, so I retract that olive branch.)

Though it is likely obvious to anyone reading this, let me explain to you why the very concept of save points before Cutscenes is the worst thing imaginable. Imagine you're going through your morning routine and everyday before work you have to take a call. Every day you receive that call before you are allowed to leave the house, and everyday you have the same conversation, with the same person, in which the same inane words are traded back and forth. How long will it take before you start dreading the coming mornings, until you start dreading your phone partner? It doesn't matter what you were talking about, you might have devised the solution to climate change over that brief 2 minute chat, you'll still be wishing that phone wires were a thing again so that you could hang yourself with one. Familiarity breeds contempt, it's a simple as that.

And you know what makes things even worse then that? Cutscenes that take place after savepoints and feature a dialogue choice in them. The act of having a dialogue choice in a video game is an important moment, it empowers the player with control and makes them feel like they own the story in front of them. Even when the choice of dialogue both isn't voiced and has no direct impact on the story, it's still an expression on the player's intent to have a marked effect on the world around them, to mean something. It's a powerful expression. That power gets slightly drained, however, when they are forced to go through and make that same dialogue choice again-and-again; very conscious, by this point, that none of the options they choose will save them from the arse kicking they are about to receive. It eventually starts to whittle down all semblance of worth behind player choice and, before long, will have most players resort to callously slamming the skip button until the fight starts. (At least that's the journey I go on in these situations.)

Now the thing I don't understand about any of this, is why these situations pop up in the first place! Okay, that's not true, I know why, I just don't understand how. 9/10 times, these situations arise as a conflict between gameplay and intent. The scene usually carries greater weight if the player is thrown right into the action the second after the cutscene ends, which in some games presents a bit of an issue as players are disallowed from accessing inventory or saving in combat. This means that a save point can't exist at the start of combat, it has to exist before otherwise there's a possibility of the player becoming trapped into a battle that they can't win indefinitely, I get it. But there's a solution; use a separate Autosave slot so that player's still have their manual and quick saves to revert back to if things go south. (It's not rocket science!) Mass Effect 2, by the way, has no excuse for this; they'll straight-up save your game midway through a conversation leading into a fight, just to screw with you.

At the end of the day, this is a super specific gripe and I'm wondering if literally anyone else in the world is even fractionally as pissed off about it as I am. I'm being serious, I can get chopped up all day by the Dancer of Boreal Valley and not feel nearly as brutally wounded as I do after just 5 rotations around the 'cutscenes after save points' circus. Although I must be in the absolute minority because I don't think I've ever heard people talk about this once and that's just another ostracising quirk of my anomalous world views. Am I really that out-of-touch? Is everybody else looking at me like a loser? (Well, I think I already know the answer to that one, but you get what I mean. Don't you?) But there's no solution bar a new law written upon the commandments of game design and I don't have that sort of power or influence so I'm just going to dunk my head into a bucket of water before I start shooting steam out of my ears and explode out of frustration. (Maybe I can do that, you don't know.)

I'm playing: Jade Empire

Rambunctious Reviewer

Today I'm feeling a little crestfallen, I have to admit. I lack those endless fonts of bubbling energy that I usually preserve exclusively for this blog and thus with that comes a deficit in creativity. Although if you've seen the state of this blog you'll know that isn't too much of a stray from the norm. So with that in mind I thought it might me more fun to take it easy this Saturday and just talk about what I'm playing right this moment, which is actually about 15 different games but I'm going to limit myself to one for the moment. That title is one of the only IP's that Bioware haven't touched with a stick since it's release and as the title reveals, it is 'Jade Empire'.

My history with Jade Empire is curiously non-existent for someone who has been playing Bioware games for half their life. Whenever I used to tell people I was playing a Bioware game like Mass Effect, I'd be practically assaulted with gleeful recommendations of their other titles like Dragon Age, Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate, but never once did I hear the name of this title. Perhaps it's because it was a one-and-done on Bioware's end, but this feels like one of those forgotten games that most people only recall as some half-banished dream. Well I'm hear to remind anyone who'll listen that it wasn't just a dream, Bioware did create an original mystical fantasy game that flirted with Chinese mythology and yet featured a fully English speaking cast. (I can't even find a Chinese localisation patch, what's up with that, Bioware?)

Jade Empire takes place in the Jade Empire (Shocker) in a little village called Two Rivers situated by the outskirts of The Kingdom. This is a land defined by martial might, magic and the restless spirits of the undead, so it's no surprise to see mythical monstrosities and elemental powers work their way into the story. (Although that does low-key remind me of how much I would actually die to have a proper RPG Avatar game. God, that would be so perfect!) One of my favourite quirks about this game's setting is way in which the naming conventions work, in which an individual receives a name and an epithet to accompany it. Now that is by no means the rule of the land, some folk have plain names and others have pure descriptors, but most key characters have this funny little trait to their name that I find amusing. Rather than just name someone Tein, you'll have Sagacious Tein, or maybe they'll throw the word 'Typhoon' or 'Whirlwind' in there. It just sounds to me like the cast of an old Chinese martial arts movie and I suppose that's probably the vibe that the world builders were going for.

Two Rivers is, similarly, just the absolute most stereotypical setting for the beginning of a 'martial arts movie' adventure that it isn't even funny. It's a small picturesque fishing community placed far away from any of the major roads and routes, with the only location of note being the prestigious martial arts school placed on top of the hill. With a set-up like that I wouldn't be surprised if the village gates were adorned with a sign saying "Welcome to Two Rivers, please burn us down on your way out!" Obviously the main character is that perfectly balanced mix of an orphan who's also the most talented kid in the school who just also happens to have a destiny to him, yet to be unveiled. I'm ragging on the tropes a bit, but it's in a loving way. The way that Bioware wares it's influence is actually rather fun and cool to see, and as I began accepting it and the world a bit more I started to really get into the role. Does it feel as weighty and thought-out as Dragon Age? No. But it still boasts enough charm to make up a bit of the difference.

But then there's the most important question of all, if this is a martial arts game with an RPG twist then how does it play? I mean, most of Bioware's other titles have either dabbled with a semi-autocombat model or just gone full-out shooting; so what could Jade Empire do to spice things up? I'll admit this was something that I wasn't that curious about, as I just assumed the game would play like Kotor, but now that I think about it there was a lot of potential in this category. When you think about it, a lot of great games have come out which attempted to simulate martial arts. I mean there's the Yakuza games, Sleeping dogs, Shenmue (Okay, maybe that last one has questionable gameplay) but my point is that there's some great examples to drawn from, so it's shame that Bioware went for their own thing.

Now I understand why it was, the Bioware of this time had little experience with active combat in their games and so they were going to try an approach that felt right to them, but oh-good-lord does it not feel right to play! Jade Empire's combat is entirely active, with no turns being taken for the player or autocombat sections, which means the player is fully at the whims of their reaction times and the game's controls. In practise this means that the player has a button for dodging, blocking, attacking and heavy attacking, seems simple enough, right? The problem comes from the way that all of these controls feel wrong in their own unique way; rolling is too floaty and can throw you half way across a map, attacks are weightless and lack impact, blocking seems mostly redundant when you can dodge (at least so far, maybe in the future it's worth will stand out more) and heavy attacks are quite possibly the slowest thing I've seen in a game. (I loathe the moments that I have to use them.) This all adds up to, quite possible, the least fun combat system in a Bioware title, which could be one of the reasons why no one talks about this game.

Of course that isn't to say that the game is unplayable, indeed I'm still playing it, but I'm already in the mode where I'm looking past gameplay sections for the story and that's never a good sign so early on in the game. I'm also not a big fan of the way that all the character's resource bars, (that is to say; Health, Chi and... is the yellow one 'technique'? I can't remember.) are perishable and do not regenerate. At least not yet, there may be a mid game surprise that I haven't bumped into. This makes it so that players have to pray at shines to restore these bars and even I could have told the team what a poor idea this was. What this does it make it so that the entire game becomes an experience in repeatedly backtracking to shrines in order to keep your pools full, unless you abscond from taking any risks in combat and thus make every encounter grind down to a halt. (Which is exactly how I would have played this game 5 years ago before I trained myself out of the hoarding habit.)

But at the end of the day the game is still worth my time, the gameplay shortcomings don't entirely smother my fun. If you approach this game with a mind to forgive the lacking gameplay, the simpler presentation and the stiff VO, there might be something special in this game for you. Personally I'm proceeding with my particular brand of cautious optimism. I know it's strange to say that I'm liking a game after picking holes through it's very essence until it resembles Swiss cheese, but I suppose that's just the unexplainable allure of old school Bioware games. Even when you're frustrated and fuming out of your ears, you're intrigued and want to push forward, and I'm familiar enough with Bioware games to know they can turn themselves around and be fantastic by the end. So that's my 'six hours in' assessment of a 2005 game, I'll see if I stand by the things I've said in another ten hours of gametime...