Life Is Strange: True Colors (continued) & Tokimeki Memorial (continued)
thinking a bit more about video games as a medium for stories about relationships
Since I last talked about Life is Strange: True Colors, I wound up finishing it, partly because it’s such an easy game to play for a bit and hit pause while doing something else (cleaning, homebrewing beer) and partly bolstered by the power of the romance options developing.
Real mixed bag of a story. Some notable negatives were with the Big plot not really plausibly coming together. I didn’t buy the big reveal that this huge international company would particularly care about covering up one dude’s negligence that resulted in the deaths of a dozen-ish miners, to the point where they… risked civilian lives? And did kill someone? Why would they care, how would that PR math work out, just ugh. The characters’ badly planned (and/or written?) investigation into the big mining company had me screaming “YOU’RE NOT UNDER ARREST! JUST LEAVE!” and “THAT EVIDENCE ISN’T ADMISSIBLE! THIS IS NOTHING!” and “WHY DID THESE LESBIANS TRUST THE POLICE?!” at the tv. Like, this game for which all the action is making choices would let me choose who the main character kisses but NOT if she should get a lawyer?? Art is dead.
But then some of it was surprisingly great? The near-death dream sequence where you go through family memories with your dead brother, but they’re still adults in the flashbacks and the brother sets the stage for each scene, like “You’re eleven. I’m almost fiften. Dad and I are time-bombs … This is going to suck so bad. Play your part.” was shockingly artsy? And successful at it? It was easily the sequence I was most impressed by, both in terms of its ambitions and how well it achieved them, as far as the writing and voice acting go.
In terms of whether this story had to be a game… I dunno. Video games are a nice medium for choose-your-own adventure structure combined with production values beyond a text-based medium, closer to something you’d get from a Netflix original series, but then also the quality of the story is pretty much Netflix original series. It’s deeply fine, sometimes achieves greatness, mostly inoffensive. I enjoyed it, and it makes me want to go back and play the first Life Is Strange, especially since this feels so much more polished than what I played of that one. There’s no “did you make the right choices up until this point to literally talka jumper off the ledge, can you say the right things now to talk someone out of suicide” disasters, but there is a similar video gamey flattening of nuance to, say, the finale where various council members do or do not stand up for you depending on what you did previously, although it doesn’t seem to greatly affect the direction of the story this time around. No matter how well written the dialogue is, it’s hard to un-flatten a game system’s if-x-then-y depiction of getting involved in a community of people.
On the other hand, I’ve been playing more Tokimeki Memorial, and I am absolutely sweating it. I am drowning in save states and panicking over each dialogue option. Maybe this one does feel more nuanced because – as tropey as it is – the entire game is the romance options and managing your dating life. You can’t single-mindedly pursue whoever you pick from the get-go, because the game will introduce you to other girls no matter what, and – in its chaste depiction of high school dating – you can’t not ask them out from time to time. It throws the other options at you as obstacles, either to impede your game progress (because you have to at least be friendly with everyone, you can’t just be introduced to a girl and then ignore them the rest of high school without getting nasty rumors spread about you, that affect how everyone thinks of you) or to try to tempt you, personally, away from the character you thought you were most interested in at first as you get to know them better (despite them all being archetypes).
It’s more stressful and thus less digestible than, say, the Netflix original series–ified Life Is Strange, which will kind of just happen regardless of your ability as a player. But it’s nice to have easy reading–type games, something you don’t have to work too hard at but still manages to stir up some emotions. It’s nice that Life Is Strange dials back the sense that if you don’t google things constantly, you’ll miss the best stuff, like how Tokimeki is absolutely stuff to the gills with special events that require various conditions that you could play the whole game and not see; even if you’re attempting to court a specific character, you might not see all their special events, peel back all their layers and/or get the flirtiest bits.
I’ve also started reading Blood Meridian (as… promised?) so next week might be a bit more clearly about the “reading” part of this whole exercise.
I’ve joined the team at Kissing Dynamite as a Book Reviews Editor! I’ll be writing reviews of small press/self-published poetry books (the first one is now live), but I’ll also be editing other writers’ reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write!