So hey, new
microphone! I've had episodes with good sound before thanks to my
friends like James and Solon, letting me borrow their mics, but I now
officially have my own Snowball mic! So audio quality should be
lovely and consistent from now on. Thank y'all for helping make this
happen.
Critical
Switch is of course supported by patient listeners like you at
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Nostalgia
means more than – hey, hey, sit down. I'm going somewhere with
this. Nostalgia means more than people tend to think it means. In
common usage it tends to mean a fondness for the past, but it can
also mean “a fondness for a past that did not exist.”
In
the recent wave of retro genre revivals, we see some of this concept
in practice, in many particular ways. Pillars of Eternity
and Divinity: Original Sin look
and sound lot better than the isometric Baldur's
Gate/Planescape: Torment CPRGs
they are formatted on. Likewise for 2D platformer revivals like
Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth,
which preserves the pure 2-directional whipping of it's
side-scrolling predecessors but tampers down on the need to commit to
one's jumps, as well as having the aforementioned technical upgrades.
A
trend becomes noticeable wherein designers are choosing to buff out
what were generally considered “flaws” in their original designs
when updating them for the age of Kickstarter and reminiscence. And
why shouldn't they? The history of commercial game design is mostly
of slow-moving iteration wherein certain things that are disliked
about a particular design are either removed or replaced, and in
theory these games are merely picking up on where their predecessors
left off.
But
there's also something to be said for established traditions as well.
I've run up and down the halls screaming at my listeners and
followers about how if JRPGs so desperately needed change then why do
none of the late-90's classics of the genres really play in any
fundamentally different ways? And in many ways, the same sense of
need for iteration is what arguably drove us away from these beloved
genres in the first place, especially as we became focused on the
progress of technology.
Now
what I'm saying here is mostly some “the answer is in the middle”,
“the mediator between the head and hands must be the heart” type
shit. That's not useful. What is useful, is a work like Shovel
Knight.
Shovel
Knight is an immensely
intelligent videogame released last year by Yacht Club Games whose
ever design and narrative trope is, on a moment-to-moment basis,
interrogating that space between nostalgia, progress, and the true
past.
Aesthetically,
Shovel Knight rides
that particular “false past” idea of nostalgia quite hard. The
game's color palette sticks almost religiously to the NES' own color
palette, but they've admitted that in a few spots they had to use
shades and hues not accessible on the NES. The music is neither
puritanical NES chiptune or modern arrangement, but instead features
music that was only capable of being played on a Japanese Famicom and
certain games that made use of an expanded set of channels, most
famously Castlevania III.
Only a few games used that expanded set of channels, and none of them
were ever released that way in the west. CVIII's
western release uses only the regular 3 channels+noise for it's
music. And of course, Shovel Knight
is simply too large to have ever fit on a NES cartridge, being loaded
with enough musical assets alone to fill an entire cartridge.
As
well, Shovel Knight's
particular design choices, while rooted in a genuine appreciation of
2D classicism, (multiple critics besides me have already analyzed the
game's meticulous level design) also has a number of modern design
choices, namely it's use of a Dark Souls-esque
drop of money when the player dies. It chooses this system for
punishment of death, which is barely punishment at all if the player
can retrieve their money, rather than allowing the player only a
limited number of attempts per level, thus opening up paths to
repetitive mastery that, in older games, are mostly found through the
abuse of savestates on an emulator.
So
in some sense, Shovel Knight
is already throwing on rose colored lenses about what the NES and
what the games on it were like. In case it sounds like I'm stating
this as critique on it's own, I'm really not. Each of these choices
makes Shovel Knight
more accessible than it's forebears, and choices made in favor of
accessibility are nearly always justified.
Even
then, in an intelligent and controlled way, Shovel Knight
begins to subvert that modern accessibility. Specter Knight's stage's
gimmick, for example, is that it will bathe the screen in darkness,
but that the player can detect Shovel Knight and his movement
objectives if they observe the blackness against the colored
background. As well, sometimes lightning strikes and illuminates the
path forward briefly. However, later in the stage there are a few
sections that require seeming leaps of faith because Shovel Knight
and his platform are bathed in darkness, and enemies are on his tail.
One can only trust the designers here to have placed platforms in the
way at exactly the right space to make these spaces practically
navigable without putting Shovel Knight at risk. That trust is
rewarded.
Slowly,
as we move through the game, we see more and more design decisions in
this vein. Instant death becomes more common, and the player is
forced into awkward forms of movement and control like adjusting to
the wind propellers in the Propeller Knight stage or the ice physics
. . . the fucking ice physics in
Polar Knight's stage. Some might see this as sloppy design as the
game gets closer to the finish line, I'm more generous because in
these decisions I see the boldest defiance of NES design this game
has to offer: narrative and metaphor.
What
is Shovel Knight
about? It's about a Knight attempting to reclaim his former glory and
save his girlfriend and his kingdom from the clutches of the evil
Temptress. It's seemingly boilerplate videogames, but there's already
a subtle and critical difference: Shovel Knight's quest is based on a
loss in his fairly distant past, before his self-imposed exile. As he
moves through and gets closer and closer to the enchantress, the
Black Knight warns him that he is walking into great peril, and the
various members of the Order of No Quarter, the Enchantress'
servants, especially Treasure Knight, who tells us: “Even now,
others are paying the price for your avarice.”
Still,
Shovel Knight journeys on. After each level, Shovel Knight rests at a
campfire, and sometimes he dreams of Shield Knight, desperately
trying to catch her as she falls from the sky as he fends of hoards
of fiends. It's a provocative pairing that I think almost suggests
the unreality of the situation, not in an “everything that's
happening is a dream” level, but more on the acknowledgment of the
fantastical quality of games themselves, as well as living out this
fantasy version of a NES game. We ultimately find that the
Enchantress is in fact Shield Knight, under the control of evil
magic. In defiance of the odds, Shield Knight is freed, and she joins
Shield Knight and rests with him at a fireside. She limps to her
place beside Shovel Knight, it is unclear whether she will awake from
her rest.
This
is, I think, a pretty strong metaphor for what it means to develop a
2D platformer in 2015. It is the struggle of searching for the past
while accepting the present. And it's the constant question of
whether the magic can survive in modern times. Overall I think the
tone of the game, and of course the fact that the game exists, and is
a beloved commercial success gives us a hopeful bend on that, and
what were NES games if not optimistic, but what I appreciate most is
that it's a topic that Yacht Club chose to struggle with not just in
developing, but inside of the game itself. And after all, what is
searching for answers, if not`` digging?
In
this episode you've heard “Strike the Earth,” “The Requiem of
Shield Knight” from the Shovel Knight original soundtrack by
Jake Kauffman. Zolani Stewart will be back with our next episode.
From
Seattle, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe
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