I hadn't tried a new manga series in a while, one that I hadn't been introduced to via an anime, and decided to try ReLIFE, which will be getting an anime adaptation later this year.
I picked ReLIFE by Yayoi Sou because of the twist on the usual manga about high school life. Rather than following yet another teenager through school, ReLIFE focuses on the second chance of Arata Kaizaki.
Arata is twenty-seven years old and at the start of the story he's looking for full time work. He has a few disadvantages. He's a little older than expected for a new worker due to having entered college two years later than normal (even allowing for the fact he attended grad school as well) and his only prior full time job lasted for a mere three months before he quit. Arata looks unfocused and less than ideal for a new employee, but he really needs work, especially since his parents have decided that he's old enough that they're going to stop paying for his apartment. If he wants help, he's going to have to come home to the countryside.
His situation is a frightfully relatable one for anyone in a tough job market. When Arata meets his more successful friends for dinner he pretends he's gainfully employed, dressing in a suit and tie as though he had just come from work, but he can't keep this up while his only income is a part-time job at a convenience store.
On his way home after one of those meetings, he encounters an employee from the company ReLife, who introduces him to a project they run for people like him, for people who have potential but may need a second chance to get it right.
The encounter and Arata's induction into the program is a little contrived, but once that's out of the way, the rest of the first three volumes are a lot of fun.
The ReLife project de-ages Arata to seventeen and sends him back to high school where he will live for a year as a third year high school student (the equivalent to a senior in the US system). While part of the project, ReLife will pay for all his living expenses, and should he graduate successfully from the project he will be offered a job on his return to being an adult.
ReLIFE is told in short vignettes of a few pages, detailing the problems that Arata runs into in trying to hide the fact he's an adult while also getting used to going to school. While most manga have 4-6 chapters per volume, ReLIFE can have 16 or more.
His adjustment going back to school is unsurprisingly rough. He forgets to bring a pencil for schoolwork, and he's shocked by the fact students are allowed to carry cell phones when that was forbidden when he was in school (a sign of the changing standards for technology). Probably the best moment early in the first volume is when his homeroom teacher asks to see his bag and then finds the pack of cigarettes inside.
As an angry teacher might, she asks him "What are these?" and Arata, completely nonplussed, says, "Cigarettes."
It takes him a moment to realize that as a teenager he shouldn't be smoking them, let alone bringing them to school.
When his homeroom teacher talks to him after school about cigarettes and how they'll ruin his health, he realizes that she's actually a little younger than him, and dealing with problematic kids is part and parcel of her job. Arata can see that she honestly cares and is trying to steer him on a good path, which makes him respect her more than he would have had he been the right age.
The chapters are interspersed with notes by Ryo Yoake, the ReLife employee assigned to support him, and are filled with his hopes and concerns. Though Yoake is not front and center in Arata's life, he's always there, since as a supporter he has de-aged himself so he can go to school with Arata and monitor his progress. The two aren't allowed to be close since that would interfere with Arata's school life, but Yoake is far from impartial. He really seems to want Arata to get something out of his experience.
Yoake's notes are also how the passage of time is marked. The first three volumes cover just a little over a month, but it's enough to see and be entertained by Arata's adaptation to school as well as introduce a couple potential wrinkles.
Only three volumes have been released in English so far, and the fifth Japanese one just came out this month. At the pace they're going it will be a while before Arata's year as a seventeen-year-old is up.
The manga's not in paperback format in the US yet, but it can be read by anyone with a premium membership at Crunchyroll. Unusually for manga, it's also in full color.
Monday, February 29, 2016
Monday, February 22, 2016
On Replaying Dragon Age II
I finished revising a short story recently and sent it off to one of my friends who does a bang up job of pointing out flaws. He's not a writer, which is important, because he doesn't suggest fixes. He just lets me know what looks wrong or weird to the untrained eye, which ought to be most of my readers.
What's this got to do with Dragon Age II?
Well, I knew I was going to be getting a reply back in a few days and I didn't want to lose momentum. It's terrible setting aside a project only for your mojo to leave you, so one of the things I sometimes do is go play a game with a customizable main character and play as my protagonist. This means that I get to think idle thoughts about my character during the empty times when I can't actually work on the story.
I picked Dragon Age II because it's the only one in the series that allows for a human character of common birth, and my protagonist is a scrapper.
This is not my first time playing through Dragon Age II (it's actually my third, since I did two back to back playthroughs when the game first game out), but it's been enough time that I'm able to look at it with more distance than I did before. And coming off the third game, Inquisition, it's a very different animal. But I still like it a lot.
I was never one of the people who disliked the second game, and despite any shortcomings, there's a lot to enjoy about it.
Usually I talk about a game's story on this blog, and while I do like the writing, particularly as far as the characters are concerned, this time I want to talk about the things I didn't appreciate the first time around.
For instance, the getting around town and doing quests is very user friendly. After the initial visit to any given location in Kirkwall, the player can easily rack up a bunch of main and side quests, and then systematically knock them out one area at a time. It makes it possible to completely clear out all or most of Kirkwall in an given story act with just an afternoon's play time. A second afternoon will cover the outlying areas and any backtracking.
The side quests are dropped right alongside main quests and are very easy to do along the way. Other than a few straggle quests that are usually related to major characters I rarely felt I had to go out of the way for anything. In these days with 100+ hour games I really appreciate the efficiency as time spent running around just getting from one place to another is time I'm not actively progressing.
I also find that I like the entire game being centered around a single city and its multiple districts, because how many games are built like that? I never felt like I knew Denerim in the first game, but I know Kirkwall. The good part of town looks different from the bad part of town, and the city itself has all kinds of flavor leftover from the empire that once built it. I don't remember being quite so disturbed the first time I played as I did now walking beneath the bronze statues of tormented slaves. (Seriously, who commissions those kinds of pieces?)
Dragon Age II got a lot of flak for its reused dungeons, and I remember being annoyed by them the first time around, but now I barely noticed. Yeah, it's the same cave for the fifth time, but most of the dungeons are very small and quick. I'm in and out so fast that I can run through a couple of them in a single night. I'd rather have a small dungeon reused several times than go through a long unique dungeon where I have to make several trips back to town in order to empty out my bags.
And bag management is quite reasonable. I love being able to do several side quests that involve lots of fighting and looting and not have to empty out my bags until I'm halfway through the act, and by most standards I'm a packrat.
Okay, there is one story thing on my mind though, and it stuck out at me more this time than it did before.
The whole thing with Kirkwall in Dragon Age II is that the simmering hostility between the mages and the templars who watch over them has reached a boiling point and the two sides are braced to shed blood over it.
I think most players are predisposed to feeling sympathy for the mages. Mages are born with their powers and they can't help being vulnerable to possession by demons, so the Chantry mandates mage Circles as a place for them to live and train with others like them. It's not a voluntary choice to live in one, and the templars oversee the mages should any of them tread down a dangerous path, but depending on the mage it's not a bad place to be. Ideally the templars are there just in case anything goes wrong, but each Circle and the templars watching over it are different.
My first playthrough was as an apostate mage (a mage who has never been in or has rejected the Circle) and I ended up siding with the mages in the final battle between mages and templars. It made sense that she would defend them.
My second playthrough I was determined to be a jerk to everyone and sided with the templars. I wanted a different playthrough and did one that would justify taking a harsher route in the end.
Now that I'm in my third playthrough, I know what's going to happen, but I have more distance, and my protagonist is not a mage. I think I'll end up siding with the mages this third time, but it's less of a blind choice than before.
Seriously, there are blood mages practicing illegal, sacrificial magic all over the place! I don't think it's that I didn't see it my first playthrough, but being a mage I was very much in the mindset of "not all mages." This time, my protagonist recognizes that there is a serious problem here and the mages are out of control. For a while I thought I might actually side with the templars and it'd make sense.
But I probably won't. My protagonist still can't imagine mass killing an entire group of people and that's what the templars call for at the end of the game; the Right of Annulment. Even if half of the mages are psychotic nutjobs, I couldn't condone killing all of them just to be sure no more of them turn. I suppose some characters could justify it, but my protagonist is a kinder person than that.
What's this got to do with Dragon Age II?
Well, I knew I was going to be getting a reply back in a few days and I didn't want to lose momentum. It's terrible setting aside a project only for your mojo to leave you, so one of the things I sometimes do is go play a game with a customizable main character and play as my protagonist. This means that I get to think idle thoughts about my character during the empty times when I can't actually work on the story.
I picked Dragon Age II because it's the only one in the series that allows for a human character of common birth, and my protagonist is a scrapper.
This is not my first time playing through Dragon Age II (it's actually my third, since I did two back to back playthroughs when the game first game out), but it's been enough time that I'm able to look at it with more distance than I did before. And coming off the third game, Inquisition, it's a very different animal. But I still like it a lot.
I was never one of the people who disliked the second game, and despite any shortcomings, there's a lot to enjoy about it.
Usually I talk about a game's story on this blog, and while I do like the writing, particularly as far as the characters are concerned, this time I want to talk about the things I didn't appreciate the first time around.
For instance, the getting around town and doing quests is very user friendly. After the initial visit to any given location in Kirkwall, the player can easily rack up a bunch of main and side quests, and then systematically knock them out one area at a time. It makes it possible to completely clear out all or most of Kirkwall in an given story act with just an afternoon's play time. A second afternoon will cover the outlying areas and any backtracking.
The side quests are dropped right alongside main quests and are very easy to do along the way. Other than a few straggle quests that are usually related to major characters I rarely felt I had to go out of the way for anything. In these days with 100+ hour games I really appreciate the efficiency as time spent running around just getting from one place to another is time I'm not actively progressing.
I also find that I like the entire game being centered around a single city and its multiple districts, because how many games are built like that? I never felt like I knew Denerim in the first game, but I know Kirkwall. The good part of town looks different from the bad part of town, and the city itself has all kinds of flavor leftover from the empire that once built it. I don't remember being quite so disturbed the first time I played as I did now walking beneath the bronze statues of tormented slaves. (Seriously, who commissions those kinds of pieces?)
Dragon Age II got a lot of flak for its reused dungeons, and I remember being annoyed by them the first time around, but now I barely noticed. Yeah, it's the same cave for the fifth time, but most of the dungeons are very small and quick. I'm in and out so fast that I can run through a couple of them in a single night. I'd rather have a small dungeon reused several times than go through a long unique dungeon where I have to make several trips back to town in order to empty out my bags.
And bag management is quite reasonable. I love being able to do several side quests that involve lots of fighting and looting and not have to empty out my bags until I'm halfway through the act, and by most standards I'm a packrat.
Okay, there is one story thing on my mind though, and it stuck out at me more this time than it did before.
The whole thing with Kirkwall in Dragon Age II is that the simmering hostility between the mages and the templars who watch over them has reached a boiling point and the two sides are braced to shed blood over it.
I think most players are predisposed to feeling sympathy for the mages. Mages are born with their powers and they can't help being vulnerable to possession by demons, so the Chantry mandates mage Circles as a place for them to live and train with others like them. It's not a voluntary choice to live in one, and the templars oversee the mages should any of them tread down a dangerous path, but depending on the mage it's not a bad place to be. Ideally the templars are there just in case anything goes wrong, but each Circle and the templars watching over it are different.
My first playthrough was as an apostate mage (a mage who has never been in or has rejected the Circle) and I ended up siding with the mages in the final battle between mages and templars. It made sense that she would defend them.
My second playthrough I was determined to be a jerk to everyone and sided with the templars. I wanted a different playthrough and did one that would justify taking a harsher route in the end.
Now that I'm in my third playthrough, I know what's going to happen, but I have more distance, and my protagonist is not a mage. I think I'll end up siding with the mages this third time, but it's less of a blind choice than before.
Seriously, there are blood mages practicing illegal, sacrificial magic all over the place! I don't think it's that I didn't see it my first playthrough, but being a mage I was very much in the mindset of "not all mages." This time, my protagonist recognizes that there is a serious problem here and the mages are out of control. For a while I thought I might actually side with the templars and it'd make sense.
But I probably won't. My protagonist still can't imagine mass killing an entire group of people and that's what the templars call for at the end of the game; the Right of Annulment. Even if half of the mages are psychotic nutjobs, I couldn't condone killing all of them just to be sure no more of them turn. I suppose some characters could justify it, but my protagonist is a kinder person than that.
Monday, February 15, 2016
Belated Year's Best Surprise
Last year I received word from Julia Rios that she would like to publish my flash story "The Ancestors" in the Year's Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2014. I was extremely flattered and agreed. And once the table of contents was released I was shocked to find the company I was in! Kelly Link! Nalo Hopkinson! Lavie Tidhar! I'm not supposed to share a ToC with these people.
And then I moved on to other things. More stories to write. More stories to sell. Contract was taken care of. I was paid. But there was still just one little thing that bugged me from time to time.
It finally arrived last week. :)
It's my contributor copy!
Sorry for the blurry photo. I'm not used to taking pictures with my tablet and apparently I just don't hold it steady enough for good picture taking.
Still, it's here, and it's all mine!
And then I moved on to other things. More stories to write. More stories to sell. Contract was taken care of. I was paid. But there was still just one little thing that bugged me from time to time.
It finally arrived last week. :)
It's my contributor copy!
Sorry for the blurry photo. I'm not used to taking pictures with my tablet and apparently I just don't hold it steady enough for good picture taking.
Still, it's here, and it's all mine!
Monday, February 8, 2016
RPG Talk: Fire Emblem: Awakening
I wasn't originally planning on writing one of these for Fire Emblem: Awakening, but seeing as Fire Emblem: Fates is coming out February 19th, it seems like this is a good time and I finished up my second playthrough back in January.
I'm not a long time Fire Emblem player, so I was leery of getting into Awakening because some series have a long history where you miss a lot if you aren't familiar with previous installments, but I was assured little to no Fire Emblem knowledge was needed, and it's mostly true.
I did get the feeling I was missing something, but oddly enough, the stuff I thought I was missing from a previous game was actually invented for Awakening (if wikis are any indication), which I suppose may say something about the writing.
Though the dialogue is prettied up, the plot of this strategy RPG feels like it fell out of the 8-bit or early 16-bit era. My first time through the game I kept getting Shining Force flashbacks, which was one of my favorite games on the Sega Genesis. You have your evil country invading to resurrect a long dead dragon and it involves crossing a couple continents and fighting good generals whose primary fault is that they're loyal to the wrong country.
I suppose some of that may have originally been a Fire Emblem thing to do (since it predated Shining Force in Japan), but that doesn't change the fact that the plot is very simple. There's never any question who the bad guys are and the bad guys tend to be irredeemably bad. That border dispute? Yeah, totally the other guys' fault, because that's who they are.
Except if certain individuals get dialogue that shows they're actually nice people and got coerced into doing things.
But Awakening does a few things, besides having awesome gameplay, to make up for its lackluster main plot (which is pretty much beat the bad guys of one country, beat the bad guys of another country, beat new bad guys from the first country who we saw coming a mile away, and then fight the dragon).
The first thing that seems really novel to me (though apparently Fire Emblem has done such things before) is that the player character and the main character are two separate people. Prince Chrom is the leader of the Ylissan army and the one character who is mandatory for every plot-related battle in the game. He is essential to the story, since the titular Fire Emblem belongs to his family and he takes it as his personal responsibility to defeat the Fell Dragon like his ancestor did before him. If he dies it's game over. But he's not the player character.
The player character is Chrom's tactician, who wakes up with amnesia at the start of the game after having a strange dream where he or she betrayed Chrom and killed him. The player avatar is modifiable along the lines of gender, height, hair, voices, name, and birthday (you get presents for playing on your birthday), but sadly not skin color, which I chalk up to Japan being a homogenous country.
This is kind of stupid for plot reasons because once the avatar's heritage is known, you realize that if the avatar's skin color should be set to anything, they would likely be darker skinned than they are.
The avatar is not required to be deployed for all battles, but plays an important part since the player is essential fulfilling the tactician role on the field or off by executing all the movements and attacks in battle. It's a role that is plot-wise equal to Chrom's, if not in some ways greater, especially if the player chooses to play a female avatar and marry Chrom as part of the story.
The second interesting thing is the support system, which forms the basis of a lot of subplots. Support is a Fire Emblem standby, where units that fight next to each other a lot build up Support ranks so they fight even better when paired together. But new to Awakening is that at the highest support ranks, the units can get married (hetero-only, though Fates is taking baby steps and offering two bisexual characters). This creates a fun dynamic where the player gains gameplay benefits from pairing up characters while also serving as a matchmaker's dream, complete with subplot for every romantic combination.
The third item is that the story has a time travel wrinkle. In the not so distant future, Grima the Fell Dragon has won, Chrom is dead, and Ylisse has fallen. Chrom's daughter, Lucina, makes a desperate bid to change the past, traveling back in time along with the children of the other heroes to stop Grima's resurrection.
This means that every married couple in the army will have at least one recruitable child, who (having gone back in time) is now grown up and capable of joining the war effort. But the kids aren't recruitable until after the parents get married so Support dialogues between the appropriate parents as well as inheritable skills and hair colors can be properly set.
It's pretty fun getting the conversations between the parents and the children they've yet to have (or have yet to grow up) and there are more than a few personality clashes, which I suspect is part of the point. Given the grim future, most of the children have been orphaned, some before they even knew their parents, and more than one has trust issues.
The marriage system in combination with the recruitable children, is really what sets Awakening apart from other games, so much so that Fates is going use the same system (though I'm unsure of the particulars because the time travel trick would be a terrible thing to reuse). I have jokingly said that even though this a game about fighting battles and winning wars, the real reason I'm playing is to hook everyone up.
I've played through twice now, once as a female who married Chrom, and once as a male who married someone else, and I'd have to say that narratively playing Chrom's wife makes for the best tension.
Chrom's story is pretty straightforward (protect his country and his loved ones from invaders), but the avatar's is not. Though the amnesia never goes away, the avatar's past gets filled in as the story progresses, both through Lucina and through the villains. The avatar was born to be a vessel for Grima's resurrection, but their memory got messed up when Lucina went back in time and the future Grima tried to follow her. He was weak from the time travel so he figured he would merge with the avatar early to get back to his full power, but it backfired and robbed the avatar of their memory.
The weird dream in the beginning was a memory from the future Grima, and stopping the avatar from killing Chrom is one of the reasons Lucina has gone back in time.
While she is reluctant to raise a blade to her father's trusted friend, the tension is even better when she's confronting her own mother.
By marrying Chrom, the avatar's personal subplot, Lucina's subplot, and the main plot to stop Grima merge and the story becomes one of family and the bonds between them, which doesn't happen with a male avatar (or with a female avatar who doesn't marry Chrom).
Awakening doesn't break new ground from an overarching plot perspective, but it's serviceable and the characters are delightful. Each unit has a unique name, portrait, and personality so you're never moving around Random Archer #2. As someone who enjoyed Shining Force and was disappointed by the various random faces in the starting party of Final Fantasy Tactics this was very welcome.
I'm not a long time Fire Emblem player, so I was leery of getting into Awakening because some series have a long history where you miss a lot if you aren't familiar with previous installments, but I was assured little to no Fire Emblem knowledge was needed, and it's mostly true.
I did get the feeling I was missing something, but oddly enough, the stuff I thought I was missing from a previous game was actually invented for Awakening (if wikis are any indication), which I suppose may say something about the writing.
Though the dialogue is prettied up, the plot of this strategy RPG feels like it fell out of the 8-bit or early 16-bit era. My first time through the game I kept getting Shining Force flashbacks, which was one of my favorite games on the Sega Genesis. You have your evil country invading to resurrect a long dead dragon and it involves crossing a couple continents and fighting good generals whose primary fault is that they're loyal to the wrong country.
I suppose some of that may have originally been a Fire Emblem thing to do (since it predated Shining Force in Japan), but that doesn't change the fact that the plot is very simple. There's never any question who the bad guys are and the bad guys tend to be irredeemably bad. That border dispute? Yeah, totally the other guys' fault, because that's who they are.
Except if certain individuals get dialogue that shows they're actually nice people and got coerced into doing things.
But Awakening does a few things, besides having awesome gameplay, to make up for its lackluster main plot (which is pretty much beat the bad guys of one country, beat the bad guys of another country, beat new bad guys from the first country who we saw coming a mile away, and then fight the dragon).
The first thing that seems really novel to me (though apparently Fire Emblem has done such things before) is that the player character and the main character are two separate people. Prince Chrom is the leader of the Ylissan army and the one character who is mandatory for every plot-related battle in the game. He is essential to the story, since the titular Fire Emblem belongs to his family and he takes it as his personal responsibility to defeat the Fell Dragon like his ancestor did before him. If he dies it's game over. But he's not the player character.
The player character is Chrom's tactician, who wakes up with amnesia at the start of the game after having a strange dream where he or she betrayed Chrom and killed him. The player avatar is modifiable along the lines of gender, height, hair, voices, name, and birthday (you get presents for playing on your birthday), but sadly not skin color, which I chalk up to Japan being a homogenous country.
This is kind of stupid for plot reasons because once the avatar's heritage is known, you realize that if the avatar's skin color should be set to anything, they would likely be darker skinned than they are.
The avatar is not required to be deployed for all battles, but plays an important part since the player is essential fulfilling the tactician role on the field or off by executing all the movements and attacks in battle. It's a role that is plot-wise equal to Chrom's, if not in some ways greater, especially if the player chooses to play a female avatar and marry Chrom as part of the story.
The second interesting thing is the support system, which forms the basis of a lot of subplots. Support is a Fire Emblem standby, where units that fight next to each other a lot build up Support ranks so they fight even better when paired together. But new to Awakening is that at the highest support ranks, the units can get married (hetero-only, though Fates is taking baby steps and offering two bisexual characters). This creates a fun dynamic where the player gains gameplay benefits from pairing up characters while also serving as a matchmaker's dream, complete with subplot for every romantic combination.
The third item is that the story has a time travel wrinkle. In the not so distant future, Grima the Fell Dragon has won, Chrom is dead, and Ylisse has fallen. Chrom's daughter, Lucina, makes a desperate bid to change the past, traveling back in time along with the children of the other heroes to stop Grima's resurrection.
This means that every married couple in the army will have at least one recruitable child, who (having gone back in time) is now grown up and capable of joining the war effort. But the kids aren't recruitable until after the parents get married so Support dialogues between the appropriate parents as well as inheritable skills and hair colors can be properly set.
It's pretty fun getting the conversations between the parents and the children they've yet to have (or have yet to grow up) and there are more than a few personality clashes, which I suspect is part of the point. Given the grim future, most of the children have been orphaned, some before they even knew their parents, and more than one has trust issues.
The marriage system in combination with the recruitable children, is really what sets Awakening apart from other games, so much so that Fates is going use the same system (though I'm unsure of the particulars because the time travel trick would be a terrible thing to reuse). I have jokingly said that even though this a game about fighting battles and winning wars, the real reason I'm playing is to hook everyone up.
I've played through twice now, once as a female who married Chrom, and once as a male who married someone else, and I'd have to say that narratively playing Chrom's wife makes for the best tension.
Chrom's story is pretty straightforward (protect his country and his loved ones from invaders), but the avatar's is not. Though the amnesia never goes away, the avatar's past gets filled in as the story progresses, both through Lucina and through the villains. The avatar was born to be a vessel for Grima's resurrection, but their memory got messed up when Lucina went back in time and the future Grima tried to follow her. He was weak from the time travel so he figured he would merge with the avatar early to get back to his full power, but it backfired and robbed the avatar of their memory.
The weird dream in the beginning was a memory from the future Grima, and stopping the avatar from killing Chrom is one of the reasons Lucina has gone back in time.
While she is reluctant to raise a blade to her father's trusted friend, the tension is even better when she's confronting her own mother.
By marrying Chrom, the avatar's personal subplot, Lucina's subplot, and the main plot to stop Grima merge and the story becomes one of family and the bonds between them, which doesn't happen with a male avatar (or with a female avatar who doesn't marry Chrom).
Awakening doesn't break new ground from an overarching plot perspective, but it's serviceable and the characters are delightful. Each unit has a unique name, portrait, and personality so you're never moving around Random Archer #2. As someone who enjoyed Shining Force and was disappointed by the various random faces in the starting party of Final Fantasy Tactics this was very welcome.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Writing "Confidence Game"
"Confidence Game" is the first story of mine anyone has ever called "first class space opera," which makes me chuffed beyond belief. I'm glad that Chuck Rothman over at Tangent enjoyed the story and that he found protagonist Daryl Yagami "a smart and funny character who's always on top of things."
When Mike Resnick invited me to write an entry in Galaxy's Edge's Sargasso setting, I thought it would be fun, but I didn't realize by how much. Shared worlds are generally pulpier than stories accepted by most other short fiction venues, which would allow me to write more a more action-oriented plot that would be difficult to sell elsewhere.
I read through the preexisting Sargasso stories in preparation and by the time I finished I knew exactly what I wanted.
I wanted to write a stage magician in space, because it's an occupation we seldom see in a science fiction setting. Then I also made him gay and of Japanese ethnic descent, because there aren't enough lovable rogue characters in Western fiction that are gay or Asian, let alone both.
So I ended up with "Confidence Game," a story about an ex-con artist turned magician who gets dragged back into his old line of work in exchange for clearing his criminal record. There are a lot of stories about a criminal hired for one last job before he retires, but Daryl Yagami thought he was already done when his past catches up with him.
Daryl was super fun to write, especially as I built out his backstory so he would be capable of performing the tasks necessary for the plot, and of course, like any good stage magician, he has an assistant in the form of a Translator alien named Kappa. Though I was not able to work it into the story itself since it was rather extraneous, Kappa got his human name from Daryl, who named him after the Japanese kappa from folklore, since Translators look like tortoises (or turtles, which Daryl figures are close enough).
Probably one of the most entertaining things about writing a magician is that Daryl is allowed to pull off some crazy sleight of hand that might be questioned if another character was doing it, but it's no more outrageous than we might see a live magician perform on stage. Just because the story is set in the future doesn't mean that old art forms have disappeared!
Also, having Kappa in the story not only provides Daryl with a friend who is (mostly) in the know, but it gives him someone to play off of. I don't think "Confidence Game" would work as well without him, as Daryl spends so much time lying left and right about who he really is and what he's really doing. Kappa serves as the anchor for the audience that makes Daryl sympathetic, and my beta readers loved him.
"Confidence Game" is still free to read at Galaxy's Edge from now until the end of February. Though it's part of a larger series, it should still be readable by anyone hankering for some espionage action in a space opera setting.
Music listened to while writing: Selected tracks from the soundtracks to Magic Kaito 1412 (anime) and Liar Game (Japanese live action drama), and "One For the Money" by Escape the Fate. "Confidence Game" had a long brainstorm period so it ended up with more music than normal for a short story. If you like club music, Daryl's dance theme is "Here Comes the Hotstepper (Yuksek remix)." Not that this story has any dancing...
When Mike Resnick invited me to write an entry in Galaxy's Edge's Sargasso setting, I thought it would be fun, but I didn't realize by how much. Shared worlds are generally pulpier than stories accepted by most other short fiction venues, which would allow me to write more a more action-oriented plot that would be difficult to sell elsewhere.
I read through the preexisting Sargasso stories in preparation and by the time I finished I knew exactly what I wanted.
I wanted to write a stage magician in space, because it's an occupation we seldom see in a science fiction setting. Then I also made him gay and of Japanese ethnic descent, because there aren't enough lovable rogue characters in Western fiction that are gay or Asian, let alone both.
So I ended up with "Confidence Game," a story about an ex-con artist turned magician who gets dragged back into his old line of work in exchange for clearing his criminal record. There are a lot of stories about a criminal hired for one last job before he retires, but Daryl Yagami thought he was already done when his past catches up with him.
Daryl was super fun to write, especially as I built out his backstory so he would be capable of performing the tasks necessary for the plot, and of course, like any good stage magician, he has an assistant in the form of a Translator alien named Kappa. Though I was not able to work it into the story itself since it was rather extraneous, Kappa got his human name from Daryl, who named him after the Japanese kappa from folklore, since Translators look like tortoises (or turtles, which Daryl figures are close enough).
Probably one of the most entertaining things about writing a magician is that Daryl is allowed to pull off some crazy sleight of hand that might be questioned if another character was doing it, but it's no more outrageous than we might see a live magician perform on stage. Just because the story is set in the future doesn't mean that old art forms have disappeared!
Also, having Kappa in the story not only provides Daryl with a friend who is (mostly) in the know, but it gives him someone to play off of. I don't think "Confidence Game" would work as well without him, as Daryl spends so much time lying left and right about who he really is and what he's really doing. Kappa serves as the anchor for the audience that makes Daryl sympathetic, and my beta readers loved him.
"Confidence Game" is still free to read at Galaxy's Edge from now until the end of February. Though it's part of a larger series, it should still be readable by anyone hankering for some espionage action in a space opera setting.
Music listened to while writing: Selected tracks from the soundtracks to Magic Kaito 1412 (anime) and Liar Game (Japanese live action drama), and "One For the Money" by Escape the Fate. "Confidence Game" had a long brainstorm period so it ended up with more music than normal for a short story. If you like club music, Daryl's dance theme is "Here Comes the Hotstepper (Yuksek remix)." Not that this story has any dancing...
Monday, January 25, 2016
RPG Talk: Ys Origin - Part 3: Toal Fact
Part 1 and Part 2 can be read here and here.
Toal's storyline is considered the the real one, because his ending sets the stage for Ys I more thoroughly than the others, and has the longest, most involved ending sequence, but it doesn't stand alone as well because Yunica and Hugo's actions are missing the context from their own stories. We only know what's going on because we've already seen them in previous playthroughs.
For most players I would suggest the playing order to be Yunica, Hugo, and finally Toal to get the whole story, but if only two playthroughs can be stomached, skip Yunica because Hugo and Toal's stories compliment each other. On the other hand, if only one playthrough is in the offering, do Yunica, because she's self contained (and it's impossible to play Toal without finishing one of the other two).
From a gameplay perspective Toal's playthrough works rather strangely.
Since Toal is not part of the search party like Yunica and Hugo, he doesn't begin the game at the bottom of the tower like they do. Rather, he starts at the summit as one of the Darklings and when the villains learn that the twin goddesses and the Black Pearl they carry have entered the tower, they split up to capture them.
Toal is then teleported to the bottom and has to fight his way back to the top while searching for the goddesses, who he claims don't mean anything to him anymore. After all, Toal has accepted a demonic element into his soul, and is now part-demon.
The game handwaves the fact he's killing all these monsters, who are ostensibly on the same side as he is, by letting Toal say he's been given permission to kill them so he can absorb their powers. This allows for essentially the same game structure as playing Yunica and Hugo, with minor changes.
For instance, there is one item that Toal never gets a hold of for plot reasons, so he can't use it to solve the same puzzles. The game makes sure to provide an alternate means of achieving the same goal in times like those, but these alternate routes only appear on Toal's playthrough.
Toal also frequently fights different mid-bosses than Yunica or Hugo. Battles where they would typically fight a Darkling are frequently replaced by members of the search party. Toal even fights Hugo twice.
The early part of Toal's storyline makes him a hard person to get a hold of. He's stand-offish and says very clearly, on no uncertain terms, that he is an enemy of Ys. He's thrown away his knighthood and he is now loyal to the Darklings. Toal is quite vehement about it, whether he's speaking to Darklings, the search party, or even the goddesses.
But funny thing is, even though his delivery is spot on, nobody is buying it. The search party is certainly put off and hostile for a while, but they are reluctant to give up on him, and the Darklings consider him suspect no matter how good he is at following their orders.
As the player, it's hard to figure out what's going on in his head. We don't know why he turned and became part-demon, or what his ulterior motive is, if he even has one. Since Toal doesn't share his real thoughts with anyone in the first half of the game, most of the story comes through flashbacks that play after major boss fights, where we get to see what Toal was like when he was one of the Holy Knights.
We learn that as a knight he was well liked by the people who met him, even though he rarely visited his family, which makes sense since he was disinherited for joining the knights instead of accepting his place as his father's heir.
Toal was particularly close to the goddesses, especially Reah, and he was the one who had given her the harmonica she carries. It's clear that even though nothing improper happens between the goddess and her knight, they both care deeply about each other.
When he finally catches up with Reah in game, she deduces that Toal's plan is to absorb enough energy through the demons he kills to merge himself with the Black Pearl and then destroy it, because it is the source of all the demons (as well as all the magic of Ys). She has a plan though that will not require Toal's sacrifice.
Unfortunately, it quickly becomes apparent that it will require one of her own, and it's at this point in the story that Toal's facade begins to crack, with Toal and Reah independently racing up the tower to stop the other from making the sacrifice. It's rather sweet, even though Toal is canny enough to be upset that she talks about not wanting his sacrifice when she's about to force him to accept hers.
There are side trips along the way. He meets Hugo, who is not quite as arrogant and angsty in Toal's storyline, and he meets Epona as well, which results in funny exchanges where she pretends to not be interested in Hugo, even as she's pumping his older brother for personal information about him. I love that Toal ships the two of them together.
Yunica probably fairs the worst in Toal's storyline because he didn't really know her back on Ys. Toal served under Saul Tovah, Yunica's father, so he was aware of her, but he didn't know her personally. When she shows up, she comes off as a mostly passive girl who can't really fight against him, and is even found lying unconscious at one point, due to a trap she successfully navigates on her own playthrough.
She feels a little extraneous to Toal's story, more than Toal did in her own, because he could blend in with the other villains, but she sticks out as more significant than other members of the Ys search party even though she is the least ranked among their knights.
When Toal finds the other goddess, Feena, he manages to pull Reah's plan out of her and learns that the two goddesses plan on sacrificing their wings, the source of their divinity, to seal the demonic essence of the Black Pearl. Doing this would cause the two goddesses to enter a sleep that could last for centuries.
The strange thing about this story is that hearing Feena's words is what convinces Toal of what he needs to do, which implies that becoming a Darkling and destroying the Black Pearl by merging with it was never a grand plan of his. Toal is described as a bit short-sighted and stubborn, so I'm not surprised that he didn't have many details for his poorly contrived undercover work, but it's not clear why he would have agreed to become part-demon in the first place, and unfortunately that's never answered.
Further up the tower, Toal meets Reah again and this time drops his evil facade entirely to try to convince her that the sacrifice of either of them is completely unnecessary and that he's found a different way, but he doesn't get a chance to explain his plan (or if it was a lie to trick her out of the sacrifice) before they're discovered by the Darklings, who capture Reah and reveal that they've possessed Hugo.
Now that his true allegiance is out in the open, Toal is quickly forgiven by his former enemies, the search party, who help him up the tower. Unlike Yunica and Hugo's finales at the top of the tower, where everyone else shows up at their backs, the search party holds off various Darkling bosses for Toal so he can progress to the summit, and even Epona pitches in to try to help him bring Hugo back to his senses (it goes over better than in Hugo's storyline since Epona lives), which results in Toal facing the Darkling leader, Dalles, almost entirely alone, except for the goddesses.
As was hinted in previous storylines, we learn in Toal's that the reason the goddesses took off without telling anyone is because they suspected there was a traitor among the Six Priests of Ys, and that's how the demon infestation got out of hand. That traitor reveals himself after Dalles's defeat in Toal's storyline only, and it's Cain Fact, head of the Six Priests and the father of Toal and Hugo.
Cain Fact had engineered everything, including getting both his sons implanted with demonic elements to see how they can augment the human body (and this in turn ties into why Hugo and Toal have descendants that do not look entirely human in Ys I and II). Cain merges himself with the Black Pearl becoming Darm (the last boss of Ys II) and Toal fights him not with the claws he's been using since becoming a Darkling, but with his Cleria Sword which he had left behind after the battle where he'd become a martyr (and in turn this sword is the one that Adol uses for the last boss fight in Ys I, ironically to defeat Toal's many greats-grandnephew).
The battle between Toal and Darm takes so much out of Toal that at the end of it, he's unable to stop Reah and Feena from undertaking their ritual to bind the demonic essence, and it's an emotional kicker knowing how much Toal cares for Reah. Though I know she's trying to tell him how much he means to her, Reah does a really good job of driving in the painful reminders that this is really good-bye for them.
For the audience that has played Ys I we know that it will be 700 years before Reah wakes, and by then Toal will be long dead.
The epilogue covers the remaining story bits to line Ys Origin up with Ys I. Toal leaves his Cleria Sword at the foot of the Roda Tree where Adol will find it 700 years from now, and Hugo and Yunica decide to stay behind on the surface instead of returning to Ys (so they can become the ancestors of the characters Adol meets).
Toal himself returns to Ys to become a priest in his father's stead. It seems a little surprising at first that he wouldn't stay on the surface as well since that is where they entomb the Black Pearl and the sleeping goddesses, but his decision makes sense. Hugo never wanted to be a priest, and Toal had only given up his position because he thought Hugo was more suited to it. And Toal wants to work with the other priests to lay down the story of what happened to future generations.
In the final epilogue scene, we see him send down the six Books of Ys, which Adol will find many years later.
It was a good ending, and even though I'm disappointed that not everyone's own storyline is canon, Origin is one of the best prequels I've ever played. All the nods to the original story and how things came to be were spot on and never felt forced. Best of all, it feels like it could work even for players unfamiliar with the Ys series, because the references that do existed aren't shoehorned in there for the sake of being present. They're all made part of the story.
Toal's storyline is considered the the real one, because his ending sets the stage for Ys I more thoroughly than the others, and has the longest, most involved ending sequence, but it doesn't stand alone as well because Yunica and Hugo's actions are missing the context from their own stories. We only know what's going on because we've already seen them in previous playthroughs.
For most players I would suggest the playing order to be Yunica, Hugo, and finally Toal to get the whole story, but if only two playthroughs can be stomached, skip Yunica because Hugo and Toal's stories compliment each other. On the other hand, if only one playthrough is in the offering, do Yunica, because she's self contained (and it's impossible to play Toal without finishing one of the other two).
From a gameplay perspective Toal's playthrough works rather strangely.
Since Toal is not part of the search party like Yunica and Hugo, he doesn't begin the game at the bottom of the tower like they do. Rather, he starts at the summit as one of the Darklings and when the villains learn that the twin goddesses and the Black Pearl they carry have entered the tower, they split up to capture them.
Toal is then teleported to the bottom and has to fight his way back to the top while searching for the goddesses, who he claims don't mean anything to him anymore. After all, Toal has accepted a demonic element into his soul, and is now part-demon.
The game handwaves the fact he's killing all these monsters, who are ostensibly on the same side as he is, by letting Toal say he's been given permission to kill them so he can absorb their powers. This allows for essentially the same game structure as playing Yunica and Hugo, with minor changes.
For instance, there is one item that Toal never gets a hold of for plot reasons, so he can't use it to solve the same puzzles. The game makes sure to provide an alternate means of achieving the same goal in times like those, but these alternate routes only appear on Toal's playthrough.
Toal also frequently fights different mid-bosses than Yunica or Hugo. Battles where they would typically fight a Darkling are frequently replaced by members of the search party. Toal even fights Hugo twice.
The early part of Toal's storyline makes him a hard person to get a hold of. He's stand-offish and says very clearly, on no uncertain terms, that he is an enemy of Ys. He's thrown away his knighthood and he is now loyal to the Darklings. Toal is quite vehement about it, whether he's speaking to Darklings, the search party, or even the goddesses.
But funny thing is, even though his delivery is spot on, nobody is buying it. The search party is certainly put off and hostile for a while, but they are reluctant to give up on him, and the Darklings consider him suspect no matter how good he is at following their orders.
As the player, it's hard to figure out what's going on in his head. We don't know why he turned and became part-demon, or what his ulterior motive is, if he even has one. Since Toal doesn't share his real thoughts with anyone in the first half of the game, most of the story comes through flashbacks that play after major boss fights, where we get to see what Toal was like when he was one of the Holy Knights.
We learn that as a knight he was well liked by the people who met him, even though he rarely visited his family, which makes sense since he was disinherited for joining the knights instead of accepting his place as his father's heir.
Toal was particularly close to the goddesses, especially Reah, and he was the one who had given her the harmonica she carries. It's clear that even though nothing improper happens between the goddess and her knight, they both care deeply about each other.
When he finally catches up with Reah in game, she deduces that Toal's plan is to absorb enough energy through the demons he kills to merge himself with the Black Pearl and then destroy it, because it is the source of all the demons (as well as all the magic of Ys). She has a plan though that will not require Toal's sacrifice.
Unfortunately, it quickly becomes apparent that it will require one of her own, and it's at this point in the story that Toal's facade begins to crack, with Toal and Reah independently racing up the tower to stop the other from making the sacrifice. It's rather sweet, even though Toal is canny enough to be upset that she talks about not wanting his sacrifice when she's about to force him to accept hers.
There are side trips along the way. He meets Hugo, who is not quite as arrogant and angsty in Toal's storyline, and he meets Epona as well, which results in funny exchanges where she pretends to not be interested in Hugo, even as she's pumping his older brother for personal information about him. I love that Toal ships the two of them together.
Yunica probably fairs the worst in Toal's storyline because he didn't really know her back on Ys. Toal served under Saul Tovah, Yunica's father, so he was aware of her, but he didn't know her personally. When she shows up, she comes off as a mostly passive girl who can't really fight against him, and is even found lying unconscious at one point, due to a trap she successfully navigates on her own playthrough.
She feels a little extraneous to Toal's story, more than Toal did in her own, because he could blend in with the other villains, but she sticks out as more significant than other members of the Ys search party even though she is the least ranked among their knights.
When Toal finds the other goddess, Feena, he manages to pull Reah's plan out of her and learns that the two goddesses plan on sacrificing their wings, the source of their divinity, to seal the demonic essence of the Black Pearl. Doing this would cause the two goddesses to enter a sleep that could last for centuries.
The strange thing about this story is that hearing Feena's words is what convinces Toal of what he needs to do, which implies that becoming a Darkling and destroying the Black Pearl by merging with it was never a grand plan of his. Toal is described as a bit short-sighted and stubborn, so I'm not surprised that he didn't have many details for his poorly contrived undercover work, but it's not clear why he would have agreed to become part-demon in the first place, and unfortunately that's never answered.
Further up the tower, Toal meets Reah again and this time drops his evil facade entirely to try to convince her that the sacrifice of either of them is completely unnecessary and that he's found a different way, but he doesn't get a chance to explain his plan (or if it was a lie to trick her out of the sacrifice) before they're discovered by the Darklings, who capture Reah and reveal that they've possessed Hugo.
Now that his true allegiance is out in the open, Toal is quickly forgiven by his former enemies, the search party, who help him up the tower. Unlike Yunica and Hugo's finales at the top of the tower, where everyone else shows up at their backs, the search party holds off various Darkling bosses for Toal so he can progress to the summit, and even Epona pitches in to try to help him bring Hugo back to his senses (it goes over better than in Hugo's storyline since Epona lives), which results in Toal facing the Darkling leader, Dalles, almost entirely alone, except for the goddesses.
As was hinted in previous storylines, we learn in Toal's that the reason the goddesses took off without telling anyone is because they suspected there was a traitor among the Six Priests of Ys, and that's how the demon infestation got out of hand. That traitor reveals himself after Dalles's defeat in Toal's storyline only, and it's Cain Fact, head of the Six Priests and the father of Toal and Hugo.
Cain Fact had engineered everything, including getting both his sons implanted with demonic elements to see how they can augment the human body (and this in turn ties into why Hugo and Toal have descendants that do not look entirely human in Ys I and II). Cain merges himself with the Black Pearl becoming Darm (the last boss of Ys II) and Toal fights him not with the claws he's been using since becoming a Darkling, but with his Cleria Sword which he had left behind after the battle where he'd become a martyr (and in turn this sword is the one that Adol uses for the last boss fight in Ys I, ironically to defeat Toal's many greats-grandnephew).
The battle between Toal and Darm takes so much out of Toal that at the end of it, he's unable to stop Reah and Feena from undertaking their ritual to bind the demonic essence, and it's an emotional kicker knowing how much Toal cares for Reah. Though I know she's trying to tell him how much he means to her, Reah does a really good job of driving in the painful reminders that this is really good-bye for them.
For the audience that has played Ys I we know that it will be 700 years before Reah wakes, and by then Toal will be long dead.
The epilogue covers the remaining story bits to line Ys Origin up with Ys I. Toal leaves his Cleria Sword at the foot of the Roda Tree where Adol will find it 700 years from now, and Hugo and Yunica decide to stay behind on the surface instead of returning to Ys (so they can become the ancestors of the characters Adol meets).
Toal himself returns to Ys to become a priest in his father's stead. It seems a little surprising at first that he wouldn't stay on the surface as well since that is where they entomb the Black Pearl and the sleeping goddesses, but his decision makes sense. Hugo never wanted to be a priest, and Toal had only given up his position because he thought Hugo was more suited to it. And Toal wants to work with the other priests to lay down the story of what happened to future generations.
In the final epilogue scene, we see him send down the six Books of Ys, which Adol will find many years later.
It was a good ending, and even though I'm disappointed that not everyone's own storyline is canon, Origin is one of the best prequels I've ever played. All the nods to the original story and how things came to be were spot on and never felt forced. Best of all, it feels like it could work even for players unfamiliar with the Ys series, because the references that do existed aren't shoehorned in there for the sake of being present. They're all made part of the story.
Monday, January 18, 2016
RPG Talk: Ys Origin - Part 2: Hugo Fact
Part 1 can be read over here.
Right off the bat, Hugo Fact's name carries baggage, so I purposely chose to play him second. Yunica's descendants are all helpful people to Adol, but Dark Fact is the final boss in Ys I, making him one of Hugo's descendants. It was an interesting move to make the ancestor of a final boss a playable protagonist.
Hugo turned out to be a lot of fun. Though his play style is unique to Ys since he's a ranged spellcaster, it's his dialogue that makes him my favorite character. Unlike Yunica, who wears her heart on her sleeve, Hugo is not the aloof badass he pretends to be, and he spends the game trying to figure out who he really is (while climbing a crazy demon-built tower to rescue goddesses).
Compared to Yunica, Hugo is mouthy and arrogant. He's been trained to take over as head of the Fact family, which means that eventually he would ascend to the priesthood and serve directly under the goddesses, and on top of that he's considered a magic prodigy. His skills are actually the result of a lot of hard work, but no one looks at it that way.
In the early part of the game Hugo talks down to enemies, which is fun, but also demonstrates his lack of social skills (due to too much time studying and not enough time socializing), which is also fun. The great part about it is that Hugo is frequently convinced he's being considerate rather than condescending.
The reality is that Hugo is a nice guy, but is saddled with crazy expectations from his father and from himself. His older brother Toal was supposed to be the heir, but ran off to join the Holy Knights and Toal didn't care about being disinherited, leaving the much younger Hugo to pick up the slack. (The game doesn't mention the age difference, but from flashbacks they're probably at least ten years apart.)
Just when Hugo had thought he'd gotten out from under his older brother's shadow, Toal was one of the two knights who stayed behind in the face of certain death to buy time for Ys to rise into the sky, making him one of the greatest heroes of Ys and a martyr besides.
So Hugo has a lot of baggage. His father's expectations. His own wanting to be like his brother while at the same time loathing his brother, especially since Toal does not turn out to actually be dead and Hugo's father has sent him on a secret mission to kill Toal while looking for the goddesses. Toal appears to be working with the Darklings, foreign humans who are able to command the demons and the main villains of the game.
It quickly becomes apparent that Hugo is tied into the story way more than Yunica was, which is a shame. While Toal shows up in her storyline, including a confrontation with Hugo, his name and background aren't explored.
Yunica's actions are predictable, as are the results of her actions, because of her character archetype, and while to a lesser degree Hugo seems to fall into the badass loner trope, the writing is savvy enough that we don't know where being a pompous jerk is going to take him.
For instance, there's one scene involving a magically sealed door. In Yunica's storyline she encounters it with a group and everyone gives it a fair assessment as bad mojo that should not be touched. They'll need to find a way to trick it.
In Hugo's storyline he encounters it alone and convinces himself that because he's the heir of House Fact he should be strong enough to be able to punch through it... and promptly gets his ass handed to him when the magic rebounds and knocks him unconscious.
It's hilarious, because that doesn't happen in most games, and it's a great way of breaking down who Hugo is trying to be versus who he really is.
In most games, when the main villain offers the hero a temporary taste of demonic power, the correct answer is no, or at least not on the villain's terms. Because of who Hugo is, his need to be powerful for his father and his inferiority complex compared to his brother, it's not quite as stupid when he lets the main villain embed a sliver of demonic essence in him.
Well, okay, it's still stupid, and he gets called out on it, but it's at least believably stupid.
Most of this calling out comes through his relationship with Epona, and this is where his story works so much better than Yunica's even when treading the same ground.
Epona is one of the Darklings, and as such, she tussles with Hugo a couple times, but she's a free spirit (even as a villain) and after he helps her out of a pinch in exchange for information about his brother, they develop this frenemy rapport where they trade smack talk with each other. Unlike Hugo's companions from Ys, she's unrestrained in her observations about him. When he protests that he is neither cocky nor dumb (adjectives no one else in the search party would ever use with him), she comes back with this zinger:
...Eloquently proving the point that for everything Hugo pretends to be, sometimes he is a cocky dumbass.
Epona shows up regularly in Hugo's storyline. While I haven't counted how many times Roy has appeared in Yunica's, Epona's visits are definitely more memorable, because it's usually just her and Hugo present, since other characters would prevent any bonding.
Because she's an outsider and is unintimidated by his reputation, she's the one who gets Hugo to realize that he still cares about his brother and that his life has revolved around trying to become someone else. Epona helps Hugo grow, whereas Roy at best does nothing to help Yunica and at worst is holding her back.
Though Hugo and Epona probably only know each other for a few days at best and Yunica and Roy have known each other for years, as the reader who knew both pairs an equal amount of time, I bought into Hugo and Epona more and felt it more when Epona was killed.
I can't really complain about the love interest being killed while/because of saving the protagonist when the plot does it for both genders, but Epona's death means more, because she means more. The writer saw to that in her banter with Hugo and because he appreciates what he learns from her, painful though it is, we know what she means to him as well.
When it looks like Hugo's going to die in the cut scene before the final boss fight, the name he thinks in regret is Epona's, because he's afraid he's not going to be the person she saw in him. Tellingly, Roy is not on Yunica's mind when she goes through her version of the same cut scene.
After playing through Hugo's storyline it became glaringly obvious where the deficiencies in Yunica's were. Her story is fine for emulating an early 90s style of video game storytelling, which I had taken it for, but knowing how much more depth was in Hugo's story left me with a bad taste in my mouth because Yunica's could have been so much better.
Hugo's story probably leaves the player with the most unanswered questions though, including how he already knew his brother was alive before heading down to the surface and why his brother joined up with the Darklings, since it becomes clear that even though Toal is working with the bad guys, he's not entirely on their side either.
Fittingly, Toal is the third protagonist, and is only available after beating the game at least once as either Yunica or Hugo, though I don't think it's good idea to jump directly to Toal after playing Yunica because his story spoils a lot of what happens in Hugo's without necessarily giving all the context.
Right off the bat, Hugo Fact's name carries baggage, so I purposely chose to play him second. Yunica's descendants are all helpful people to Adol, but Dark Fact is the final boss in Ys I, making him one of Hugo's descendants. It was an interesting move to make the ancestor of a final boss a playable protagonist.
Hugo turned out to be a lot of fun. Though his play style is unique to Ys since he's a ranged spellcaster, it's his dialogue that makes him my favorite character. Unlike Yunica, who wears her heart on her sleeve, Hugo is not the aloof badass he pretends to be, and he spends the game trying to figure out who he really is (while climbing a crazy demon-built tower to rescue goddesses).
Compared to Yunica, Hugo is mouthy and arrogant. He's been trained to take over as head of the Fact family, which means that eventually he would ascend to the priesthood and serve directly under the goddesses, and on top of that he's considered a magic prodigy. His skills are actually the result of a lot of hard work, but no one looks at it that way.
In the early part of the game Hugo talks down to enemies, which is fun, but also demonstrates his lack of social skills (due to too much time studying and not enough time socializing), which is also fun. The great part about it is that Hugo is frequently convinced he's being considerate rather than condescending.
The reality is that Hugo is a nice guy, but is saddled with crazy expectations from his father and from himself. His older brother Toal was supposed to be the heir, but ran off to join the Holy Knights and Toal didn't care about being disinherited, leaving the much younger Hugo to pick up the slack. (The game doesn't mention the age difference, but from flashbacks they're probably at least ten years apart.)
Just when Hugo had thought he'd gotten out from under his older brother's shadow, Toal was one of the two knights who stayed behind in the face of certain death to buy time for Ys to rise into the sky, making him one of the greatest heroes of Ys and a martyr besides.
So Hugo has a lot of baggage. His father's expectations. His own wanting to be like his brother while at the same time loathing his brother, especially since Toal does not turn out to actually be dead and Hugo's father has sent him on a secret mission to kill Toal while looking for the goddesses. Toal appears to be working with the Darklings, foreign humans who are able to command the demons and the main villains of the game.
It quickly becomes apparent that Hugo is tied into the story way more than Yunica was, which is a shame. While Toal shows up in her storyline, including a confrontation with Hugo, his name and background aren't explored.
Yunica's actions are predictable, as are the results of her actions, because of her character archetype, and while to a lesser degree Hugo seems to fall into the badass loner trope, the writing is savvy enough that we don't know where being a pompous jerk is going to take him.
For instance, there's one scene involving a magically sealed door. In Yunica's storyline she encounters it with a group and everyone gives it a fair assessment as bad mojo that should not be touched. They'll need to find a way to trick it.
In Hugo's storyline he encounters it alone and convinces himself that because he's the heir of House Fact he should be strong enough to be able to punch through it... and promptly gets his ass handed to him when the magic rebounds and knocks him unconscious.
It's hilarious, because that doesn't happen in most games, and it's a great way of breaking down who Hugo is trying to be versus who he really is.
In most games, when the main villain offers the hero a temporary taste of demonic power, the correct answer is no, or at least not on the villain's terms. Because of who Hugo is, his need to be powerful for his father and his inferiority complex compared to his brother, it's not quite as stupid when he lets the main villain embed a sliver of demonic essence in him.
Well, okay, it's still stupid, and he gets called out on it, but it's at least believably stupid.
Most of this calling out comes through his relationship with Epona, and this is where his story works so much better than Yunica's even when treading the same ground.
Epona is one of the Darklings, and as such, she tussles with Hugo a couple times, but she's a free spirit (even as a villain) and after he helps her out of a pinch in exchange for information about his brother, they develop this frenemy rapport where they trade smack talk with each other. Unlike Hugo's companions from Ys, she's unrestrained in her observations about him. When he protests that he is neither cocky nor dumb (adjectives no one else in the search party would ever use with him), she comes back with this zinger:
...Eloquently proving the point that for everything Hugo pretends to be, sometimes he is a cocky dumbass.
Epona shows up regularly in Hugo's storyline. While I haven't counted how many times Roy has appeared in Yunica's, Epona's visits are definitely more memorable, because it's usually just her and Hugo present, since other characters would prevent any bonding.
Because she's an outsider and is unintimidated by his reputation, she's the one who gets Hugo to realize that he still cares about his brother and that his life has revolved around trying to become someone else. Epona helps Hugo grow, whereas Roy at best does nothing to help Yunica and at worst is holding her back.
Though Hugo and Epona probably only know each other for a few days at best and Yunica and Roy have known each other for years, as the reader who knew both pairs an equal amount of time, I bought into Hugo and Epona more and felt it more when Epona was killed.
I can't really complain about the love interest being killed while/because of saving the protagonist when the plot does it for both genders, but Epona's death means more, because she means more. The writer saw to that in her banter with Hugo and because he appreciates what he learns from her, painful though it is, we know what she means to him as well.
When it looks like Hugo's going to die in the cut scene before the final boss fight, the name he thinks in regret is Epona's, because he's afraid he's not going to be the person she saw in him. Tellingly, Roy is not on Yunica's mind when she goes through her version of the same cut scene.
After playing through Hugo's storyline it became glaringly obvious where the deficiencies in Yunica's were. Her story is fine for emulating an early 90s style of video game storytelling, which I had taken it for, but knowing how much more depth was in Hugo's story left me with a bad taste in my mouth because Yunica's could have been so much better.
Hugo's story probably leaves the player with the most unanswered questions though, including how he already knew his brother was alive before heading down to the surface and why his brother joined up with the Darklings, since it becomes clear that even though Toal is working with the bad guys, he's not entirely on their side either.
Fittingly, Toal is the third protagonist, and is only available after beating the game at least once as either Yunica or Hugo, though I don't think it's good idea to jump directly to Toal after playing Yunica because his story spoils a lot of what happens in Hugo's without necessarily giving all the context.
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