After I abundantly praised Tierkreis’ amazing narrative in my last post, it’s time to pore over less glorious aspects of the game. I won’t waste
time introducing what these aspects are: if Tierkreis’
narrative was indeed stellar, its gameplay is the most mediocre, dull and
uninspired piece of game mechanics I’ve seen in a long time. Not only does this
gameplay have the fearsome power of boring the player to tears, but it also manages
to completely wipe out the exploration thrill and the glorious sense of freedom
that make RPGs so compelling in the first place. This kind of offense has
become all too common in story-driven J-RPGs lately; and while it used to
affect mostly home console RPGs, Tierkreis
sadly shows that portable RPGs are no longer safe and protected from this
infamy. I strongly feel that story-driven J-RPGs could greatly benefit from a
different approach to both gameplay and narrative, and I’ll expand on that once
I’ve given a good grilling to Tierkreis’
mediocre gameplay. (This intro may sound a tad negative, but fear not: this
post will end up on a positive note, like most of my posts. After all, I did
say that I loved this game, didn’t I?)
Could
it be any more boring?
I was utterly shocked to discover how
little actual gameplay there is in Tierkreis.
The game’s storyline is a pure gem, that much is undeniable, but it’s also
invasive and overbearing to the point of becoming oppressive. It steals the
gameplay’s thunder almost constantly: Tierkreis
is first and foremost a massive narrative feast that incessantly shoves
cutscenes up your retinas and never lets you dive fully into the gameplay. To
make matters worse, you hardly ever do something truly meaningful in that game:
not only are the gameplay segments pitifully and frustratingly short, but there
are also of the most boring nature imaginable. Here’s a revelatory example,
which I will call “The Great Hall Bore”: you come back to your headquarters
after a so-called “mission” —i.e. a scripted segment loaded with cutscenes—only
to be welcomed by yet another cutscene informing you that something has
happened and that you must meet your troops in the Great Hall to discuss the
situation. You’d think that after having interrupted the flow of the gameplay
every thirty seconds with cutscenes during the last half-hour, the game would have
the courtesy to take you directly to the aforementioned Great Wall, wouldn't you?
Heck, no! It saves that most boring task of crossing half of your headquarters
and climbing three floors to reach the Great Hall for you, the player. And
guess how many times you have to meet your troops in that accursed Great Hall
throughout the game? Here’s a clue: way too many.
Since I mentioned the missions, I might as
well expand on how dreadfully dull most of them are. The recruitment missions
usually involve going to a certain place, talking to the coveted character and
then coming back to your headquarters with a new member added to your roster.
Does it sound boring? That’s because it is. But there is worse: some missions
are purely and simply devoid of any content. Despite the fact that their
descriptions seem to involve performing an action, the only real thing you have
to do to fulfil them is to let a given amount of time pass. And how do you make
time pass? By running around on the word map—which, en passant, is nothing more
than a lacklustre drawing with a few locations pinpointed here and there, on
which the Hero runs following dotted lines. The whole process is so insipid and
lifeless that I nearly want to cry in misery.
All this dullness is already bad enough,
but this is unfortunately not the biggest failure of Tierkreis’ gameplay. Wait! I hear you cry out, what can possibly be
worse than a boring gameplay? Well, I’ll tell you: a boring gameplay on
rails.
Do I
even need to be there?
To put it bluntly, Tierkreis is a game that basically plays itself, using the player
as a cutscene-triggering lackey.
Since its very inception, the holy realm of
RPG has been governed by an implicit golden rule that goes as such: the player must feel strongly that their actions
are shaping the narrative. The storyline has to unfold exclusively through the
player’s input, following the pace that suits them best. All RPGs, even the
most linear ones and the ones that abuse backtracking, strive to carefully
craft the illusion that the Hero, controlled by the player, is writing history
as buttons are pushed and quests cleared one after the other. Or rather, nearly all RPGs: for Tierkreis shatters this golden rule to
pieces and chooses instead to very openly coerce the said player into the narrow
path dictated by the storyline, to an extent and with fervour that I’ve never
encountered before—and that I fervently hope never to encounter again. Indeed, this game gives you the most
unpleasant feeling that the storyline is writing itself and dragging you along
the way. You’re basically at the game’s beck and call, jumping when it tells
you to jump and clearing whatever boring task it throws at you; and you’re not
doing that because the game manages to make you feel that it’s your duty as the
hero, but because you simply don’t have any
other choice. To make sure that you do its bidding, Tierkreis has a bunch of unfailing constraining techniques that it
uses profusely. Lo and behold, here’s the accursed list:
—The composition of your party is often predefined,
to an extent that’s way too large for comfort. I can understand that the Hero’s
presence is mandatory, but does the game really need to force one or two other
unmovable party members on me, occupying two or three of the four slots
available and severely curtailing my opportunities to experiment with
characters? As you’d expect, this all boils down to narrative consistency,
which is just frustrating. Why give me the opportunity to recruit so many
characters if I can’t use them to my heart’s content?
—The locations on the world map appear only
when the storyline dictates that the time is ripe to explore them. Before that,
the map basically looks like a blank slate. This is bound to kill any thrill of
curiosity and wonderment that could have been born in your soul from staring at
remote places with exotic names and looks, and it’s incredibly patronizing to
boot. Give me a break, Konami: I’m not an innocent child that needs to be
surprised and entertained by the sudden appearance of new locations—especially
when the said locations are so few and so utterly generic to start with.
—The game prevents you from returning to
some places at some points, on the basis that the storyline doesn’t require you
to go there or forbids you to do so. I really, really hate when games do that. Am I the bleeping Hero acting on his own
free will here or not? Oh, wait: actually, I’m not. I’m the game’s puppet, and
that’s the whole problem.
—Last but certainly not least, perish the
thought, Tierkreis often forbids you
to leave an area until you’ve cleared
what you’re supposed to do there. I can’t find the words to express how much
this infuriates and maddens me. This is insultingly patronizing, and the
scolding comments made by your party members when you try to leave these accursed
areas only add fuel to the fire of my wrath. To increase my ire even more, Tierkreis uses a totally archaic system
of save points and is utterly stingy with allocating them. Can you see the
offense looming on the horizon? Heck, you guessed it: some of these places are
entirely devoid of save points, which forces you to clear them right here and
now lest your progress be lost. (Can you hear my teeth grinding like crazy?)
—Predetermined progression: The various
magic abilities wielded by your characters are not acquired as they gain levels
like in any other RPG under the gaming sun; instead, these abilities are
granted to them when some milestones in the storyline are reached, regardless
of the characters’ levels. While this design choice ensures that all members of
your large roster remain properly balanced, it also totally kills any
motivation to level-grind in Tierkreis,
trampling your last hope of getting a relief from the ubiquitous,
all-encompassing storyline.
—Unwinnable boss fights: Is there anything
more discouraging, disheartening and pointless than a boss fight that you have
no chance to win? Such occurrences shouldn’t exist in the first place. Ever. This is the supreme negation of
the very act of gaming and the most potent offense that a game can commit. I
don’t care that it serves a narrative purpose; if I have no chance whatsoever to
win a boss battle despite my level 99, then don’t let me fight in the first
place and serve me a cutscene instead, you stupid game. Jeez, it’s not like you’re
not soiling yourself with cutscenes already.
In the end, Tierkreis’ gameplay is an epic failure. As I played its short and
boring segments, I often felt more eager to reach the next cutscene in line
than to keep doing what I was doing; and as a whole, discovering the narrative
was by far the most pleasant part of the game. This is just so wrong. This is something that should never happen when playing an RPG. No
matter how excellent Tierkreis’ or
any other RPG’s narrative may be, it should under no circumstances be more
enjoyable than the gameplay. Ever.
The saddest part is that despite all my
ranting and fuming about it, Tierkreis’
gameplay is not even mediocre per se. It
is actually a fairly competent gameplay that has the supreme misfortune of
being rendered mediocre by the
overwhelming presence of the narrative—or, more precisely, by its lack of cohesion
with the narrative, which is an affliction that struck many J-RPGs of late and
that I will now examine more closely.
Can
I please get my freedom back?
Indeed, what is Tierkreis at its core? It’s a bunch of old-school RPG features plastered
with a complex storyline. Or, if you prefer, it’s a complex storyline peppered
with old-school RPG gameplay segments. Such an assemblage may look promising
seen from afar: after all, one could think that pairing a good, solid
old-school gameplay with a rich storyline would give us the better of two
worlds, right? Alas, it’s not that straightforward.
Tierkreis is a perfect example of the struggles encountered by J-RPG as it
moves from its old-school roots to more modern templates, meandering and
getting somewhat lost in the process. Nowadays, many Japanese developers feel
compelled to include incredibly intricate storylines and character development
by the truckload in their RPGs. Such narrative extravaganza is told through
dozens—if not hundreds—of cutscenes that nearly always give the feeling that
they’re barging into the flow of the gameplay and severing it in the most
unpleasant way. The reason why they feel like intrusions and hindrances rather
than welcome developments is quite simple: in most cases, either due to
laziness, shortage of funds or lack of imagination, developers put together an
old-school RPG gameplay and then shoehorn their narrative into it. This
produces games in which the gameplay and the narrative are totally disjointed
and sap each other rather than support each other, and Tierkreis is the perfect encapsulation of this process. Such a
marriage cannot work, due to the very nature of the old-school gameplay based
on grinding, exploration, turn-based random battles and the like: this kind of
gameplay was designed to maximize freedom and give room for experiment,
customization and micro-managing. As a result, it cannot accommodate a complex
narrative, which is by nature encompassing, directive and invasive. This is a lose-lose
situation if I ever saw one: the player cannot fully enjoy the level of freedom
they expect from the gameplay because they are constantly pushed around and
interrupted by the narrative, nor can they fully enjoy the narrative, which is
too stretched out and intercut with gameplay segments to be truly gripping. And
let’s not even talk about the pacing: Tierkreis
and all its story-driven cronies won’t let you fall into the comfortable and
slightly obsessive rhythm generated by grinding, nor will they let you relax
and allow yourself to be carried away by the story.
This incapacity to design a harmonious and
seemingly organic blend of gameplay and narrative, in which the two complete
each other rather than cancel out each other, is the biggest failure of
story-driven J-RPG as a genre. Fortunately, it’s not an irreversible one: with
a good dose of patience, brain-racking and gusto, it should certainly be
possible to design a story-driven RPG in which the gameplay and the narrative
feel like a natural extension of one another. In fact, some games already
achieved that goal: Riviera masterfully
tied the outcomes of its storyline directly to the way the gameplay is
performed, and my beloved Avalon Code
is blessed with a gripping narrative that modifies the gameplay in major and incredibly
original ways. We can only hope that more games will follow their example in
the future and that cutscene-laden J-RPGs with disjointed gameplays will slowly
disappear, and be ultimately seen as nothing more than meanders that the genre
needed to go through to find its way.
There is even some hope for Tierkreis, actually. Sure, it’s already
out there and cannot be altered, but considering it from a different angle can
help one ease their way through it. If you approach that game as a massive visual
novel with old-school gameplay segments, it suddenly becomes much more
palatable. In fact, I could nearly believe that this was Konami's plan from the get-go and that Tierkreis is indeed a visual novel based on
the Suikoden universe rather than an
RPG—if not for the fact that it is far too long, does not have different routes
and features still a trifle too much gameplay to pass for a visual novel. Oh,
well.
Despite being three hours into my second
playthrough of Tierkreis, I won’t
clear it now and will instead shelve the game for the time being. I want to
preserve what little replay value it may have, and the 30 hours I spent on my
first playthrough left me sated already. A summary of my run would be
pointless, since Tierkreis is the
kind of game that unfolds in the same way for all players: suffice it to say
that I ended up with 48 Stars out of the 108, and it was already much more than
I could use.
So, I’m done with Tierkreis for now. I loved that game, I truly did; and
despite hating its patronizing ways, I would still recommend it to anyone who
love their RPG stuffed with a compelling narrative and charismatic characters.
I will probably come back to it one day, if only to gain a new insight into the
storyline; but for now, I’m moving to freer pastures with a huge sigh of
relief. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!
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