Triumph In Blog

Earthbound, Dark Souls and Jojo: Why are some “bad” things “good?”

Recently, I’ve taken it upon myself to get back into the Mother games. This decision comes on the back of a conversation I had with a friend of mine who isn’t too invested in the stranger, wilder world of video games (read: he has a fiancée and a job,) where I gave him some recommendations for easy-to-get-into weirdo classics. The Mother games aren’t exactly obscure, and for the most part they function much like any other JRPG from the 90s underneath the hilarious presentation. I think they’re a great starting point for learning about video games as auteur subjects with clear inspirations and distinct ideas, and there are a ton of resources for understanding them and their context given that they’re famous Nintendo games.

That’s part of what makes them fascinating subjects, even though their actual content has been discussed ad infinitum for decades. They’re really weird, but really pervasive too: 2 of the 3 games never even came out in America originally, and one of them has still never been re-released. They have a mythical status nonetheless, and while a lot of that may be due to the support they’ve received from Masahiro Sakurai as tentpole fixtures of Super Smash Brothers, discussion of the actual form of the Mother games has never really ceased. What’s so great about these games?

For me, I’ve only replayed Mother 2, or “Earthbound” as we know it over here, in my recent bout of replays. The other 2 are beautifully crafted games that are 100% worth studying, but Mother 2 is the only one that legally released over here contemporaneously with the actual Japanese release. It’s the one everybody knows and brings up. Mother 1 is primitive, mostly a lore dump for the fans, and Mother 3 is a classic “sequel got delayed a million times and then the publisher had no faith in it” tale, and it’s actually really different from the other 2. So, let’s focus on Mother 2.

Mother 2 is a JRPG from 1994, and replaying it again has left me once again very aware of some of its crow’s feet. The idea behind it and its older sibling is to create a sort of parody world centered on the Japanese obsession with American Kitsch through the 70s and 80s. The universe it conjures up to do so is so insanely specific and inscrutable that people have been trying and failing to replicate it for decades. There’s no question that it’s charming, with its hilariously translated neologisms, references to outdated pop culture, and endless litany of enemies and environments designed to call back the tabloid headlines of old. But how it functions “as a game” is a different question when you’re actually playing it again 30 years later.

For starters, a lot of the game is straight up timewasting. Shigesato Itoi, the game’s director, is famous for his sense of humor, and while it definitely works, it’s undeniable that the game finds itself incredibly amused by making you sit around and do nothing for comic effect. Also, even when it’s not intentional, the game’s difficulty curve is a rollercoaster, often splitting up your party (that you don’t even fill all the way out until halfway into the game’s story) to make it harder to level up. The dungeons are very helter skelter, some of them filled with absolutely nothing, and some of them packed to the gills with so many debilitating, incurable status effects that you will have to grind to even survive the entrance. At the same time though, the game is confusingly forgiving, not sending you back to a save state upon a loss but allowing you to just wake back up at the same level of progress, sans any items you’ve already used. It’s also incredibly wishy washy about when it provides rest/save points, sometimes showering you in them every 2 feet and sometimes making you do two dungeons back to back with no break. All that, plus it loves to make you do sidequests and work to unlock items that do absolutely nothing at all, just for shits and giggles.

It’s an old-fashioned game, and even though it’s paced a little differently than, say, the Dragon’s Quest of the time, and a little less linear, the pieces of an archaic form of game design are still there. Unlike many modern JRPGs, it doesn’t include any extra bells and whistles to change up the formula. You have your main guy, your DPS, your support, and your healer, and you will grind to hit the level requirement for the next closest dungeon and then finish it to advance the story. For better or for worse, the gameplay is simple, and if you aren’t already familiar with the game, you’ll do a lot of aimlessly wandering around, and a fucking ton of inventory management with the 4 inches of space you have to keep the 9000 items you’ll need.

It’s a game that I find myself often annoyed at. Getting mushroomized and having to stumble backwards out of a dungeon, alone, because how will I beat the sanctuary guardian if I can’t aim at him. Getting to the end of a maze and realizing I don’t have enough inventory space to pick up the item that’s story-relevant, so I have to fiddle with the “For Sale” sign until I can sell off enough items one at a time to make room. Getting to the end of an area and running out of PP, so I have to just let myself die so I can come back and redo the whole thing.

There are a lot of petty nuisances that arise in the world of Mother 2, but really…does any of that actually count against it? I still spent all weekend playing it religiously, like I was 11 years old all over again, and I still love it with all my heart and think it’s a remarkable and important game. I think it’s beyond nitpicking, and beyond comparison to our current expectations for game design, and I honestly love it for how much it tries to mess with me. It’s honest, and it’s made with love, and it never tries to really piss you off. It’s just good clean fun, and every single room in the game has a new insane, stupid idea that you can’t help but smile at.

I love Mother 2, even though it’s annoying and old. There, I said it. And after having said it, I’ve had some deeper thoughts about video games, and how we conceive of them as art. There are a lot of things that I really love, that I consider titanic and undeniable, that more or less frustrate me from start to finish with no respite. And I’m not the only one!

Many people have expressed that same sentiment, that sensation of loving the pain when a game is intentionally taking hours off your life. The archetypal example would be Dark Souls, a game series so famous that we’ve spent the last 5 or 6 years unable to find AAA action games that aren’t ripping off its combat system. People love Dark Souls and so do I, and since 2011 it’s been infamous as an alternative option to what used to be the popular formula. This is because Dark Souls, and its predecessor Demon’s Souls, if you’re that old, is intentionally esoteric; it generally refuses the ideas of tutorials past the basics of “what button does what,” and the combat encounters are usually skewed against the player with tricky block, punish, dodge timing. It’s like a fighting game with even less guidance. This is on top of intentionally pesky environment design, lacking clear directions forward and laced with cheap traps and instant deaths that couldn’t possibly be predicted.

These games and their kin (including Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring,) are very annoying. For years, their popularity was attributed solely to this fact, and they have on and off been touted as “hard games,” their primary selling point. That can’t be it though, can it? When I was young, I avoided them specifically because of this reputation, as I thought they were just rage games for streamers. By the time of Dark Souls III, my friend Ethan convinced me to give them another shot, and when I did, it wasn’t the difficulty that drew me in. I was drawn in by the style, by the presentation, by the bizarre non-linear plot, and by the clear inspiration from seinen manga.

To this day, they all still annoy me, but I love them all the same for the strength of their direction. That, to me, is the throughline. We ask ourselves why we spend so much time playing games that get on our fucking nerves mechanically, and that’s because they have strong direction. There’s a learning curve, and you’re willing to struggle and fail to get through it all because there’s a vision surrounding you. Something like Dark Souls succeeds where its imitators fail because it looked, felt, and sounded utterly unique when it first came around, and maintained a level of confidence and quality for many years afterward. Miyazaki, the director, has a voice and he believes in it; he and his trusty team have followed through on their passion without getting cheap or lazy (within reason.)

I have obviously whined about this before, but it’s baffling how seldom we approach video games with this mindset. Why is it so hard to believe in the auteurism of video games? We perversely only refer to game directors as “auteurs” when they’re explicitly doing movie pastiche, but at the core of any game there can be an artist and a direction. Like Mother, as I’ve described, we all recognize when things that aren’t really “well-designed’ as we expect games to be are still good, because they’re using the tools at their disposal to create a certain feeling or atmosphere. Maybe it seems like poor game design to make your final boss battles scripted sequences of dialogue that you can’t really lose, because somewhere somebody in a Gameinformer or something said that a final boss fight has to be a test of learned skills. But would we really call the fights with Giygas badly designed?

No, we wouldn’t, and everybody loves to talk about playing things that make them mad, or that aren’t really platonically “good.” Half the beloved darlings of my childhood have infamously bad endings–Arkham Asylum, Bioshock, etc.–but we all understand that the game’s mood is not entirely tarnished by individual gripes. Video games can and often do create incredible, incomparable relationships with their players that, whether you can describe or not, you understand when you play them. What standard is there really for “bad?”

That’s the question I’m left with in these reflections. I’ve pointed out many things in my time that are good, and many that are bad, and I feel sound in my judgments because I like to think of things in terms of a framework. But the more “criticism” and “journalism” I see over time regarding video games, and the more I see how far the taste of the general public has degenerated, it makes me wonder if anybody has stopped to ask themselves why something would be “bad.” In art forms with a longer history of criticism, the answers are often cut and dry. However, in the sphere of the nerd shit (like video games,) it’s kind of incomprehensible what people seem to value in the media they prefer to engage with.

Here’s another good example: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. The seinen phenom beloved since the 1980s, which exploded with popularity in the 2010s following studio David Pro’s brilliant anime adaptation. Jojo is an old-school battle seinen, and the creator, Hirohiko Araki, is an infamously strange and autistic man whose writing is usually complete and utter nonsense. His primary obsession is with the illustration, and despite the inclusion of so much ridiculous dialogue, the “story” as it were is told through the exaggerated, reality-defying poses and outfits of the various characters. All of the imagery is derived from Araki’s fascination with European fashion and Italian haute couture, as well as the great masters of Renaissance painting, and the action flows between colorful, homoerotic caricatures devised by his own experiences with various eras and albums of music from all over the world. Each individual encounter is a fight between one of the fancy, gay protagonists and a mysterious opponent, both of whom possess superpowers that function in esoteric, confusing ways that sound like fun facts from the backs of Snapple caps. The story generally has no long-form stakes until the very end of the arc, which could be anywhere from 50 chapters to a decade of comics long.

As someone who’s a big fan of all things Jojo, it’s been obvious to me since I got into it originally that the moment-to-moment writing isn’t super serious. The barrage of images is the point, and Araki’s obsessions as an auteur are what drive the things in the story to exist. The fact that plot is often contrived, nonsensical, and self-contradictory is the consequence of those obsessions too, which is compelling to consider since the art has never once dropped in quality over 40 years, as much as the style has occasionally changed. And yet!

With the anime adaptation of the fan-favorite “Part 7” approaching, I’ve seen many fans young and old arguing over the “meaning” of it all. We, as fans, all recognize that the writing of this stuff isn’t great, but I see a lot of people working themselves into a shoot trying to explain how it’s all secretly profound and has a message. I’ve seen some others chastise it for having “plot holes,” as if the “lore” doesn’t add up in some preconceived correct way that it needs to. I’ve even seen some admit to themselves and others that the writing is crummy and that’s just an unavoidable fact, and that they like the thing in a “so bad it’s good” way.

Maybe it’s cruel of me to judge things based on intention, but I think a lot of cognitive dissonance about the silly things we like could be remedied by not approaching something with a judgment in mind, rather with a worldview. Every piece of art you see is an intentionally designed thing, with human beings behind it who had ideas for its construction. Ideally, things are in their places for a reason, and if something seems like it makes no sense or sucks, there’s probably a reason for that too. Everything doesn’t have to be CinemaSins–you can walk in with your own expectations of what’s meaningful to you.

Does everything need to be a tight-knit narrative with a start, a finish, and no loose ends? Does everything have to have a singular, deeper meaning that you need to extract by studying the details? Is everything meant to have intense, thought-provoking dialogue? Does everything start at the spec script stage and build on from there, adding the “art” as it goes, like a TV show? Isn’t it all art? Consider that, perhaps, even when something is loud, abrasive, simple, childish, or any other kind of thing that makes it seem less prestigious as a piece of art, there’s still a vision and intent behind it, and things aren’t always made in the same order. If you like things to be dense, modernist writing exercises with witty characters, or massive, sprawling worldbuilding projects with detailed lore, then those are just individual sets of expectations; but how could everything be that at all times? Anything can be an auteur subject, and everything starts only as an idea.

Video games are no different. Even when they are laid out strangely or don’t always make us happy moment to moment, they still have a complicated, layered composition of ideas to engage with, that may or may not coalesce into something meaningful to you. Comic books are the same way: very long, many different components, and are often boring or unpleasant at times, but we still have to understand that there’s a vision behind them.

This applies to everything, and here’s another uncouth example: cartoons! Everyone and their brother loves Avatar: The Last Airbender, right? Nobody ever shuts up about it, that’s for sure, but is it just the spectacle of “oh look, the Americans made an anime and it’s actually watchable!” that keeps it alive? Is it the staggering emotional depth of the ethnically ambiguous children on screen and their struggles with Chinese geomancy? Or is it that it has a vision–a unique style, and a commitment to it, that follows through and provides something new and specific for us to consider? It endures as a complete presentation, not because it’s really so fucking compelling to hear the waxing poetic about the moral implications of the fire nation, or whatever the fuck. It’s all compelling as a whole, even the parts that aren’t as fun as the flashy lightning fights, because everything is in its right place.

That’s the point of all this stuff, and of everything. Having a vision for something so specific and so indescribable, and using the medium of your choice to communicate it somehow. That is why I played Mother 2 for 11 straight hours yesterday, despite half of those dungeons cheesing me out and making half my party die at the end, so they missed the fucking XP for yet another FUCKING boss fight. Things stick with us when they’re made with purpose and develop a style we can understand without really, explicitly “getting it,” and allow us to sort of come back and forth to it, gleaning new insight into the artistic process over time.

What I’m saying is that we need to do a better job, all of us, of treating games as artwork, which is something I’ve said before. We like things that annoy us, we like things that seem stupid, we like things that are inconsistent, and we like them because they construct these massive, otherworldly lives that we can inhabit, and feel another mind inside of our own for a time. What do we all gain from this culture of “hype moments and aura,” these habits of powerscaling, these fixations on “plot holes?” I can’t claim to know any one, exact place that these thoughts and ideals come from, but my hypothesis is that people simply don’t often think about why they like the things that they do, and just sort of drift around waiting to see what seems cool, and then forgetting about it.

I’ve been meaner about that in the past and I don’t take it back, but today I will say that it makes me sad. Replaying Mother 2 has reintroduced me to this wonderful sense of humor, and all the little details have really been lost in years of the telephone game. I’ve gotten far too used to it. We don’t get to have large conversations about things like this so much anymore. But I guess it’s not so bad. Years of new things and different lineages of inspiration have given birth to so many other things that are all beautiful in their own way, yes, even fucking Undertale, if you must, and I think it’s so, so worthwhile to think a little bit about what it is we’re all looking for in these things.

Every form of art deserves some respect if you ask me, and I personally hope for an end to the fandom-fication of so many younger institutions. Video games are the biggest sufferers of this plague in my eyes, and seeing how beautiful some of them used to be makes me think that we have to find some way to expand and reintroduce criticism into their world. The last time anyone tried that, it kicked off a mini-culture-war where every loser nerd on earth hijacked the internet to harass women en masse, and hardly anything from that era or before survived. Only now, a decade later, has anyone in the general public warmed up again to the idea that there can be many different kinds of game, and maybe some of them are worth seriously thinking about. And also that we can have icky girls with cooties in our games sometimes without freaking out and taking the ol’ pitchfork n’ torch to every community we have ever had as fans.

This is a good thing, but it’s got a long way to go. I read an article yesterday where the developers of Helldivers 2, Arrowhead studios, had to push back a bit against fan demands for higher difficulty settings. Apparently, despite the fact that Helldivers is explicitly a PvE game and includes no competitive player interactions, many people have complained about a lack of “skill expression” in the existing harder modes. I’m sorry, what? What the fuck does that mean? What skills do you need to express, there’s no leaderboards. The reward for understanding Helldivers further is to try out some of the sillier, less powerful tools and see how spectacularly you can blow yourself up against various beautiful alien landscapes. Who are you trying to impress, your 13 twitch followers?

No, that’s just a random buzzword that people in the “professional” fighting games world use to describe more complex techniques being developed by people more skilled with the games’ controls. It has fucking nothing to do at all with a game like Helldivers, and realistically doesn’t very specifically refer to anything at all. Whoever has made these complaints to Arrowhead: do you know what you’re asking for there? Because I fucking don’t, and thankfully neither did Arrowhead because they basically said “we’ll think about it” and then rolled their eyes.

People need to know what they actually care about if we’re going to have any hope of curating or cataloguing anything meaningful or special for ourselves and future generations. Criticism is the key to that, and I find most existing criticism a bit shallow. Shallow and pedantic, if you will. With regards to Mother 2, we still peddle the myth about Giygas being an abortion metaphor or whatever, and people still seem to think that the “point” of the game is to have random dumb bullshit for the sake of having random dumb bullshit, because it’s funny. No! I actually like this same thing you do, but for much deeper, and more intelligent reasons, so what do you think of that?

Mother 3 up next, I can’t wait. Unrelated to what I just wrote, but the famously good music of the Mother games is a big part of why I love them, and a big inspiration for some of the things I’ve made as TRIUMPH IN BLACK. If you don’t know these games, here’s a player tip: get a clue!