The will to talk about the cutscenes and the place it should take in the video has sparked from the post of a Metal Gear Solid fanboy on a french forum that has gone like this: “Kojima pushes shows the world what direction the video game media should take.”
It did rub me the wrong way.
From my experience, Metal Gear solid as a series is a cut-scene heavy game. The stealth element is more forgiving than Commandos (You deal with Commandos’ diffculty through frequent saves, but even with that, the game is hard as fuck), there maybe different ways to deal with the guards and military, but you’ll sooner or later run into the bosses, always presented via glorious cutscenes. In Commandos, you also have many means to deal with Fritz, but the lack of bosses means that you actually have different targets or objectives in your mission (shooting the SS general before he leaves Paris, destroy the canons of your sector before D-day, etc…).
I am realizing I am derailing so I shall go back to topic.
The player and the cutscene
Average humans are lab rats. Before you punch me in the face, I’d like you to sit and think about it. Lab rats are put in labyrinth, you can be sure the rat will bother to go from point A to point B as long as there are the cheese in point B. The tastier and more delicious cheese is, the better, if it is big, it’s the best cheese of the world. Now divide the delicious cheese into many pieces of delicious cheese, while keeping the biggest part at the end of the labyrinth, make the pattern of the labyrinth as simple or as complex as possible, and put as much traps and obstacles as you wish. Got the image? that’s how a modern video game is.
People want to be rewarded for their efforts, they want to be treated for making it through the Labyrinth that Sucks, the Retarded Japanese/Korean Grindfest, the Walls-of-Text-I-End-Up-To-Skip-By-Mashing-The-Key-With-The-Fury-Of-The-North-Star, that Fucking-Fighting-Game-SNK-Boss.
For some, it is a shiny sword or a godlike item (especially true for MMORPGs), for others, it’s the highscore in arcades, finally, for the mainstream genres on consoles like RPGs, it is The Wank-Cutscene.
The cutscene and the game
Allow me to use a real life example related to the pen & paper role playing games. The role playing game, dungeons & dragons, has started as a heroic fantasy battle simulation. In other words, it was fights, fights and more fights. Eventually, the dungeon master grew tired of rolling dice and weaved a story between and behind the fights. This is a gross simplification but it’s sort of the root of what you guys wank to while playing that shiny new game churned out by Tetsuyaoi Nomura and Squeerenix for its wanktastic cutscenes. If some people are offended here, the door is right there. The cutscene gives you a reason, a goal, to get better at a game, or manage your party and battles better. It gives you a reason to sit through long dialogue phases.
Then people will have different tolerance level to how much game time cutscenes should take. When I watch the Squeerenix fanboys, I can safely say that the lobotomy is successful, as long as there are cutscenes, the option to mash the button, whore out your biggest wanktastic spell/summon/limit break, and the minimum in term of team management, it will be still the best Final Fantasy ever. Hell, it can even take 70% of the game time, you can be sure that people will zerg rush the video game stores for more Final Fantasy.
It have mostly the video of video game. But as a game, is it truly challenging? Is Final Fantasy challenging? I would not call beating a big fat boss with obscene amount of offense, defense and HP a challenge, it’s not my ideal of challenge. Dealing with Yukari Yakumo’s spellcards in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody IS challenging, finding the timing to cut the throat of a sentinel in the africa maps while every other guards are alive, knowing that being seen means alarm, death and game over in Commandos, IS challenging, pushing the final boss of Fallout to his own suicide with your speech skill and charisma IS challenging. Hell, even Metal Gear Solid can prove to be very challenging at times, I still shiver at the thought of my time with The End in MGS3.
This is where one of the hardest part of balancing the meat and the fluff of a videogame begins. How much cutscenes can you put in the product without spoiling the game as a playable product?
On a sidenote, Resident Evil kinda got it right, where some of the cutscenes can be changed when you hit a button combination, like Dragon’s Lair in the 1990s. This trick give the player the illusion to direct a story at a limited degree w/o feeling to be the slave of the plot.
Why cutscenes could kill the video game as a separate cultural entity?
I started my life as a gamer back in the Space Invader and Pacman days. Video Games as I see them are challenges made to be overcome. Mentionned challenges requires: good hand-eyes coordination, good reactions, good memories, ability to anticipate, Buddha-like calm to resist the pressure and management skills. Most of the genres tap in the mentionned qualities. Stories and cutscenes, imo, comes in second and should never overshadow the game of video game.
This is why I disagree with that fanboy. The rest of the industry may get it wrong and slack in the gameplay department to churn out games packed with OAV-sized cutscene wankfests. And this is not what video games should be about.
PS: Visual Novel has the honesty to not pretend to have gameplay, and instead deliver cgs, characters and stories. Be it Key or Type-Moon or other publishers.
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If the direction games “should” go is towards sitting in your chair for 60 minutes waiting for a cutscene to end so you can actually PLAY the damn game, then stop the train – I want to get off.
I can tolerate cutscenes to the extent that they supplement instead of supplanting the game, but games should always be about mastering the mechanics of the game. Stuff like S-ranking missions in DMC through skill is way more rewarding than watching Dante surf on rockets. Although the latter is still pretty funny.
This is where I feel Squarenix need to wake up and realize that the cutscenes should serve the game, and not the game serve the cutscenes.
Metal Gear Solid has pieces of brilliance in some parts in despite of being loaded with cutscenes. The fight against Psycho Mantis and its mechanism was well-thought, so was the boss “fight” against The Sorrow.
Devil May Cry has kinda found the right mix of over-top-cool in cutscenes AND in actual gameplay, by rewarding flashy and balls-out playstyle.
Squarenix fanboys tend to refute with “but jRPGs are the most immersive game ever!”, often says with the Final Fantasy series in mind.
I’d answer wrong. Fallout has proven to be immersive through his setting, and also has done it by giving the player the option to influence plot points.
It’s not just Fallout, System Shock 2 has done it, so did Deus EX. In that regard, Deus EX is one of the most successful in that hard task.
But alas, it is vain to hope that computer and processors can emulate a human game master. What a human game master cannot make is to instantly generate gorgeous graphics, he cannot make the music. However, he can react to the player characters’ unexpected actions and improvise plot points or action according to the unexpected. He can choose to deviate from the planned plot, or go in a secondary arc, while trying to bring the plot back to its track in the most smooth and least obvious way possible.
The best a computer game can do is to give that illusion of freedom, this is where games like Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Deus EX has succeeded.
I can give the jRPGs credit for one thing, it is the mix of characters and story that can be compelling. Imo, the best example to date is Xenogears. It has balance of characters, story, cutscenes (imo, anime style >>>> computer graphics), and game mechanism (no, magic did not prevail over everything and were not the sole option to win, thing I hated about Final Fantasy series in general).
Ehi guys not saying that MGS couldn’t use shorter cutscenes, but since you can skip them it’s really a non-issue. There is nothing that prevent you from playing it like an arcade game of some sort. If you feel compelled to watch skippable cutscenes even if they bore you, then that’s you having a problem rather than the game.
And honestly Sheba you should play more MGS3 to experience its richness. I mean really even comparing it to a pure stealth game is pretty reductive – for the other game, because you can play MGS3 whatever way you want. It’s kind of like a sandbox game of sort.
Right, I am directing my displeasure to the wrong target.
Sadly, I played a total of one month at MGS3, the one month when a friend lent me the game.