My Village is Number One
#11 - Xenogears, pt. 2 (feat. Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Trails in the Sky, etc.)
Hello! thanks for bearing with me; this one took a while to figure out. (We’ll be resuming regularly scheduled programming this week, hopefully.) While ostensibly a letter about the first location in Xenogears, it really serves more to contextualize it; the next letter in the series will get to the actual town. Thanks for reading!!!
I was listening to a podcast about Xenogears the other day whose hosts said that they found Lahan Village, the game’s first location, underwhelming. They said it was a very conventional JRPG town, and that it got most of its mileage out of its fantastic background music. (I do not cite the podcast by name only because I think they are being sort of silly; they are one of those referenced in my first Xenogears letter.)
Now, they’re not wrong to say that it’s conventional—and the Lahan theme, “My Village is Number One,” is really such a treat—but I would argue, minimally, that what they pejoratively peg as “conventional” serves an important aesthetic purpose. It’s a well-realized portrait of the game’s point of departure in more than one way. The game’s animated introduction is a lavishly ambitious non sequitur; its backtrack into the conventional is both comforting and foreboding: things in this world are recognizable, but they won’t be the same.
1
By 1998, when Xenogears was released, console JRPGs had been around for more than a decade; the basic functions and features of towns have remained the same since at least the release of Dragon Quest (Famicom, 1986)—really, since earlier computer and tabletop RPGs, not to mention fantasy literature. A few NPCs stand behind counters and in buildings; talking to them brings up a menu which allows the player to purchase stronger weapons and armor or helpful consumable items. There’s an inn, where you can rest to recover your party’s health. Occasionally, someone will explicitly exhort you to perform a task—in both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, for example, the king asks you to save his daughter.
At other points, the NPCs in town fulfill other time-honored functions: rumor-mongering, gatekeeping, etc.
Towns in these games, while lovingly designed, playful, and surprising, are mostly devoted to mechanically necessary tasks. Later games would develop different ways of conveying information to the player about where they were supposed to go, but the task of direction-giving often fell to scattered town-dwellers in early JRPGs, who gave you hints about where you ought to go and how to get there. While there are items hidden away in castles and corners (and people’s houses, from which you can frequently steal with no consequences), these, too, are functional. The aesthetic experience of a game like the first Dragon Quest is not, in my experience, primarily narrative; at the very least, the narrative dimension requires the player to fill in a lot of the story and character gaps themselves.
To be clear, I don’t mean this as a negative value judgment. This kind of blank-slate game design is a rich thing, arguably more in tune with the tabletop role-playing game tradition than heavily-written later games. Besides, the strict technical limitations of early console technology limited and structured, as technology still does, the possibilities of game design. (I’d argue that the need for increasingly resource-intensive graphics is possibly a stricter limitation on game developers—the original Final Fantasy, after all, was made by a team of seven people in about a year.) Random encounters, for example, arose as a way of structuring combat sequences and pacing exploration and character development which required relatively little in the way of processing power and memory.
And modern developers still locate potential in the spaces early games left open. This year’s great Octopath Traveler II features a virtuosically pleasant version of “classic” random encounters. The recently revived Etrian Odyssey games, in which your party is essentially anonymous, are a wonderful modern JRPG riff on early dungeon crawlers. And of course, computer-based and western RPGs have historically emphasized heavily customizable player characters—an extension, in a sense, of these early principles.
All of which is just to say that, even if the balance has shifted over time, the lines dividing technical limitation, game mechanics, and narrative information have always been porous—and towns have always been sites for all three.
2
I like to think of the history of pre-2000 role-playing games (both Japanese and western, though I know a lot less about western games) as the progressive realization that the games’ formal and mechanical conventions could serve as a vehicle for increasingly wide-angle narrative ambition. (Of course, mechanics and narrative were always intertwined, especially in the tabletop realm, where the mechanics themselves existed in large part to facilitate a collective narrative experience—but I think my more minimal point still stands.) In a sense, Xenogears overshot the mark—because it was taking too long to develop, the second disc famously turns into an odd hybrid of visual novel, extended cutscene, and JRPG, plus a couple of the most sheerly remarkable setpieces in the history of the medium. But we’ll get to that, too, in time.
The historical arc of the Final Fantasy games is a useful illustration of this principle. In the first Final Fantasy (1987), the narrative is fairly minimal: your party is characterized by little more than their classes and sprites; the story, though it contains a couple of noteworthy turns, is mostly a means of moving you through various exploratory and combat encounters. The next two entries in the series, both also originally for the Famicom, begin to add more in the way of narrative; both are interesting experiments which bore unexpected fruit down the line.
But as I talked about in an early newsletter, it’s the first Super Famicom entry in the series, Final Fantasy IV (1991), that brought the pieces together, really uniting mechanics and narrative. Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride, released the next year by then-competitor Enix, uses a lot of similar tricks to tell a very different story, one simultaneously more ambitious and more intimate; it totally owns. The Final Fantasy games’ storytelling ambitions continue to get stranger and deeper until Final Fantasy VII (1997), the first PlayStation entry, blows the whole thing up in a way that would require several more newsletters to explain. (Xenogears, of course, was originally pitched as a treatment for FFVII; it was deemed too weird and complex for Square’s flagship series.)
These later Final Fantasy games all draw on the resources of pre-existing genre conventions and mechanics—spells, weapons, armor; parties, NPCs, enemies; items, shops, towns; overworld maps, dungeons, breakout combat encounters and climactic boss fights; in-box dialogue and top-down staging—kneading them into a shape that could contain the designers’ narrative ambition. In FFIV, spells weren’t just things you selected in combat to make enemies’ numbers go down; they arose within the narrative and bore narrative consequences. Or again, as I discussed earlier, FFVI movingly depicts a world before and after a catastrophe: the towns and their inhabitants have all been affected; you can’t go back to the same places you went before.
All of these narrative devices, many of which I find resonant and effective, emerge from earlier, less narrative-centered games; their lineage can be tracked all the way back to the tabletop games which preceded them.
I’ve joked before that the history of JRPG soundtracks strikes me as one of ludicrous over-achievement: Square recruited Nobuo Uematsu, many of whose melodies now reside permanently somewhere near the base of my skull, from a nearby music rental shop; Yasunori Mitsuda, the composer largely responsible for the stunning Xenogears soundtrack, worked so hard on the music for Chrono Trigger that he wound up in the hospital, where he continued to work on the music for Chrono Trigger; etc.
But in a way, the whole history of video games strikes me as a similar instance of over-achievement, if only insofar as it does not feel inevitable to me that game designers would see so much potential in the medium. The same could be said of every art form; excellent work always exceeds and reshapes the beholder’s expectations. But as is true of other artworks, the aesthetic potential of video games didn’t come from nowhere—it emerges out of features present, in large part, from the start.
3
There are lots of stories that can’t be told, or haven’t yet been told, as well in video games as in other media. Novels do psychological intimacy and sophisticated formal play better; film is more rigorously composed; poetry bears a strange alchemical combination of linguistic density and uncanny encapsulatory power; music is simultaneously perfectly abstract and utterly immediate; theater and dance uniquely convey the reality of the human body; visual art is meticulously sensuous; etc.
(The secret here is that video games actually encompass most of these forms; this is why they are the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. But we’ll get to that in time, too (no we won’t).)
One thing (among many!) that video games can do particularly well, though, is facilitate an experience of a social and physical environment. Often my favorite games remind me of the blurb on the cover of My Brilliant Friend, which I have not successfully dislodged from my mind since first seeing it, in which James Wood describes the book as an “amiably peopled bildungsroman.” Games like Disco Elysium, Planescape: Torment, the Trails series, Xenogears—these games are nothing if not amiably peopled. (Well, the people themselves aren’t always amiable, but their being peopled is something I sure like.)
But unlike the classic bildungsroman, these games often track the development not of an individual subject but of a group: a party. (Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are a notable exception to this individualism.) RPG parties, like parties in fantasy literature before them, are assembled of people from different places, often discovered or encountered by the player; these places are often subject to forms of large-scale upheaval or change; these changes affect both the party and others in the collective ecosystem. The party here both stands in for and transforms their society.
To get more concrete, I’d like to look at a game I always like to look at, because it rules. Trails in the Sky FC (short for “First Chapter”) begins with two people, a brother and a sister, who live in the rural outskirts of a small town in a small country. In order to complete their initiation into the “Bracer Guild,” the game’s fictional cadre of professional task-doers and problem-solvers, they have to circumnavigate their small country. (They also go because their father, himself a legendary bracer, has gone uncharacteristically silent while on an out-of-town assignment.)
The game is very clearly structured: you leave your small town and go to a series of other small towns (and a couple of small cities), each of which has a smaller, peripheral town or outpost associated with it. As a bracer, you’re asked to run errands and complete tasks for townspeople. You take care of the monsters in the sewer; find so-and-so’s lost earring, help the mayor solve some problems, etc. At some point during these trials, you’re introduced to a character who will wind up joining your party, and they accompany you to the next city. In the meantime, you can talk to dozens upon dozens of unique NPCs—in their homes, at the markets and in parks, on the battlefront—designed to facilitate the persuasive illusion that this is a real world, really lived in.
These tasks sound kind of like busywork—the pejorative “fetch quest” looms—but they’re both pleasant and strategic. (At least, I found them so.) The game designers use the low-stakes, slow-burn first hours of the game to systematically introduce you to the characters and world you’ll spend the next hundred-odd hours with.
Underlying these cities-of-the-week, the story of why your father went missing gradually becomes clearer. Without giving anything away, it turns out there’s some real shit going on behind the curtain, and your little crew is, of course, going to wind up playing a pivotal role in resolving it.
But here is the thing I am getting at: as the crisis facing the country becomes clear, the people you’ve met and the places you’ve been respond. As the crisis progresses, you return to those same places, and things are different. People are frightened and angry, resources have grown scarce, the physical landscape has changed.
This is a big part of why the Trails games in particular blew my mind. I’m only barely exaggerating when I say that the comparison that comes to mind is In Search of Lost Time—not in terms of its philosophical ambitions or depth of insight, but in terms of the sense that you’re moving through a changing world alongside an ensemble, tracking the way time’s passage registers not merely on the personal psyche but on collective experience: on social life. And, like in Xenogears (itself a huge influence on the Trails series), the main vehicle Trails in the Sky uses to convey the broad sweep of this experience is, of course, the humble town.
To be continued…