Textual Pornography

I played through the demo of The Legend of Legacy for the 3DS. It was fun, but I probably won’t pick up the game.

The thing I’ve been thinking about the most is how obtuse the game is. I don’t mean its systems, although those are also opaque: skill awakening is never explained, elemental effects are never explained, status effects are never explained, etc. Some of that may be due to the demo trying to limit information overload, but then obtuse mechanics are a hallmark of the SaGa series that inspired the game, so maybe not!

In any case, what I’m really talking about is how I had absolutely no idea what the heck I was doing. The Legend of Legacy intentionally has no story, and the only motivation for the characters is a directive to explore. The dungeons are just mazes without a particularly logical flow through them, featuring bosses randomly strewn about and secret exits that don’t show up on the map until you physically inspect them, even when your map is otherwise “completed.” There are mechanisms and landscape features that may or may not have any effect on anything when you interact with them, and there are singing statues whose cryptic verses may or may not mean anything.

The net effect was that I was never sure where I was going, whether I’d been everywhere, or whether I was doing anything of consequence. Which, to an extent, I thought was cool! I liked the idea that, as an explorer of a mysterious land, it’s less likely that I would be compelled toward a big finale by ludic forces and more likely that I would fumble around hopelessly lost and archaeologists would figure out what all these ruins mean over hundreds of years of study. I was wandering around with a sense of bewilderment that I associate more with older games that have bad translations or are unnecessarily sparse with text than I do with modern ones.

But I found myself mostly frustrated and couldn’t convince myself that I was enjoying it, even though I wanted to. My gut reaction was that the obtuseness wasn’t meshing well with the rest of the game and I wanted an RPG that incorporates it intentionally and well, but I quickly realized that I couldn’t identify what The Legend of Legacy was doing wrong and what it would mean for a game to do it right. In a genre typified by character development and narrative, how would a core loop of fumbling about fruitlessly with no visible results lead to a good experience?

The last game I played that baffled me in a similar way wasn’t an RPG, but a point-and-clicker: L-ZONE, a 1993 PC multimedia game designed by Haruhiko Shono. The manual’s only instructions are:

Pass down the corridors, open every door, evade each trap.
When you’ve gone through all the zones, the path to planet Green will show itself.

Activate the machines!
Solve L-ZONE’s riddle!
Throw open the door to planet Green!

This is already more story than is present in the game, which contains no backstory, no plot, no explanation of anything that happens, and no words at all besides “L-ZONE.” You’re given no directions or hints besides an easily missable video hidden in a side room that isn’t even all that helpful. None of the machines have instructions, and it’s unclear what the purpose of a vast majority of them are, even after experimenting with them.

In short: you fumble. An awful lot. And it’s great! If I were dropped into a mysterious, abandoned research facility I knew nothing about, I’d expect to wander around aimlessly and have no idea what anything I touched did, and that’s exactly how playing L-ZONE goes. Even though I’ve beaten the game, figured out how to operate most of the machines, and understand what I had to do to get to the end and what I didn’t, the game still remains confusing and opaque, and I really dig that.

But this thing I’m praising L-ZONE for is the same thing I’m knocking The Legend of Legacy for, and I haven’t been able to figure out why. The best I’ve been able to come up with is that obtuseness is the entirety of L-ZONE, whereas there’s a lot more game in Legacy that the obtuseness doesn’t mesh with. But I’m not satisfied with that explanation, because I think it says more about my own expectations of how an RPG should go than it does about anything inherent in video game design.

I don’t have a conclusion to the comparison I’ve drawn here yet, besides that you should play L-ZONE, if you have the ability to play Windows 3.1 or Mac System 7 games.