SOMEONE ELSE WHO UNDERSTANDS
So. TheWhiteDragon finished the Vagrant Story LP recently, and I'm catching up on it now that it's complete. In the ending sequence, he has the following to say, something that I was TRYING to touch on in an earlier post.
The fact is, Matsuno is very good at crafting these intricate worlds, but he is utterly hopeless when it comes to creating the people who live in them. To him, they are simply pawns on the chessboard of the map labeled "world history and morals about politics." Many of you will surely roll your eyes when you realize I'm quoting Dr. Seuss, but kids can spot a moral from a mile off. Matsuno does whatever he can to drill his moral in: the innocent and pure are good heroic victims, those with ambition are doomed to become evil, and those with power are only as good as what they use it for. Characters are so much more than that: they are not present simply for symbolism or for revolving around your world. They are the conduit through which the player, reader, viewer experiences the world you have created, and the emptier your characters are, the emptier the experience is. You can read a book about gypsy poachers, or you can read a book about a father and a son who operate a gas station and secretly plot glorious (if not fantastical) illegal hunting escapades. You can read a masturbatory account of one arctophobic man's experience trying to bum money off of a publisher to hike the Appalachian Mountains, or you can read to yourself, say, a tale of a character who grows as a man throughout his harrowing journey across a mountain range forgotten by modernity. He might, of course, have been a fool to have gone alone, but that folly is part of the character who grows and develops as the reader experiences the world WITH him as opposed to BY MEANS OF him. Without proper characters, you only have half a tale, and Matsuno's characters are merely a medium with which he expresses his world. Ramza is a moral. Delita exists solely to establish caste disparity. Kletian, Rofel, Vormav: they are visible, killable representations of the concept of a clandestine political power play, nothing more. Rosencrantz is a VKP history book. Callo Merlose and Samantha are means by which the player is able to see the passive effects of the Dark on a person. Tieger, Neesa, and Grissom merely elaborate on the lore of wandering spirits and undead reanimation. Sydney, the duke, and Joshua are but the setup for the history of Leá Monde and their genealogy (which is barely touched upon anyway).
Why is John Hardin a fan favorite in spite of being little more than a nobody who doesn't even appear in the instruction manual, let alone do much more than deny that he's been played for a fool until he's coughing up blood? It's because the only real characters here are Ashley Riot and John Hardin. This is not because they have nothing to explain to the player--after all, Hardin does most of the explaining of Merlose's emergent abilities--and it's not even because they're explored as if they were the lore itself; it is because they change and grow and resolve. The disappointing part is that they're the only ones, out of Vagrant Story's entire cast who do.
--
Matsuno's love of lore. He has clearly studied the arts throughout history, and it's a safe guess that he's probably pretty aware of politics and their related constructs, both modern and historical. He crafts his worlds lovingly. He has these grand histories we'll never even know or hear about because they didn't fit into the game, possibly because someone slapped him on the wrist and told him that they were out of space. From the "ancient Kildean lettering" to the apparently rather long history of what Leá Monde was before its earthquakes and all the foul magic in its past to the vastness of the VKP leadership, there really is a lot we just barely hear about, but it's a safe bet that it all exists on paper. Storytellers write stories with histories in the back seat. Matsuno writes histories and setups with the story and characters bound and gagged in the trunk. And how he writes those histories. He's no slouch--hell, he's amazing at it.
--
It is also his greatest crutch. It's like me and dragons: he just cannot keep obsessive historymaking out of his writing. But unlike me, where dragons can be a very background, thematic, metaphorical, or even just barely referential setpieces, Matsuno works to bring his lore to the forefront of everything. He places it before his story, he places it before his characters, and he even places it before his sense of setting and context. And that, even more than Vagrant Story's characters, with their off-the-cuff (if not somewhat realistic most of the time) motivations and superficial development, is what Vagrant Story suffers from, simply because of the limitations of the game world. Matsuno wants to cram all this information into his game because, well, it's made. It's there, and it exists in much more force than the story does.
What the player ends up being presented with is a situation in which they must be their own threshers. The wheat--the story, what is required to make sense of what is going on--is interspersed with tons and tons of chaff--basically anything unnecessary, but present, for world-flavoring--in the game's dialogue sequences. Lore beyond the initial setup belongs in paragraph-long books on digital shelves and in conversations with NPCs and even has a place in (ugh) codices and encyclopedias, but Vagrant Story's "physical" context--the dead city of Leá Monde, full only of things that want to kill you--means that there are none of these. There are no books to explain the history of the city or NPCs to discuss the architecture, so these things are forced into the story text. You can't skip it, or you'll be lost and slack-jawed. You can't just hit start and expect to have dodged a brick of lore, because it's not a brick: it's one of those disgusting fish gums with teeth all over, except the gums are the lore and the teeth are the story and they're stuck together and you don't wanna touch it and it gives you the nasty shivers, but if you want those teeth, well, you gotta take the whole thing with you.
You know who else does this? Teenagers making Babby's First RPG.
"He is a despotic ruler. He calls himself Regis. Regis is Latin for 'king,' did you know that"
"Nobody knows where the blightplague came from. Well actually it came from a country far to the north. It was developed in a lab by twenty-three scientists who worked tirelessly for thirty-seven weeks, five days, three hours, seventeen minutes, and twenty-seven seconds before they finally worked out the formula. It is like a virus in that it is a protein, and will constantly mutate so you cannot vaccinate yourself against it. This is how it behaves, are you listening to me because this is totally important stuff that I spent a very long time coming up with"
"This is an event that happened a long time ago. It all started with Shar-Moggoth, who was the son of Ik-Librath, the son of Pae-Nibru, adopted daughter of Rel't'm'dia the Destroyer of Faith. Demonic adoption is very strange, and it works like this:" and they go on to explain specifics in a mandatory event. However, somewhere in the middle of that is a piece of information critical to the story, so like VS, you can't skip anything, or you'll end up missing everything.
Part of VS having 16 Year Old RPG Designer Syndrome is the fact that without anywhere else to put the lore and history, it has to appear in the story dialogue. But what we got could easily have been cut by at least half. I myself play by the "screenplay" rule: if your elaboration would be cumbersome in a film medium, then there's too much of it.
Long story short, Matsuno is good at what he does, which does not include making characters or a very coherent plot. Allow me to clarify: plot is not what people do behind closed doors that involves a lot of cackling; Mastuno has a lot of that, but not a lot of forward-moving substance, or even just anything to move forward with in the first place. He's not even that good of a storyteller, and definitely not at all deserving of his accolades, and I have no idea whatsoever how he got off garnering such a reputation as he has. But he has, and it's a tragedy worse than anything the bard ever wrote, because he never did a play about terrible storytellers becoming exalted professionals.
But seeing the praises sung in the names of Paolini and Meyer, this is a phenomenon that seems to be getting pretty common these days, wouldn't you agree?
And to be honest? I agree with most of it. Yasumi Matsuno is not a good storyteller. Fuck, if you want proof of that, look at FF12 and, more importantly, Vaan. FF12 was the last game in the Ivalice Alliance that Matsuno worked on; Revenant Wings and FFTA2 had him only in the most minor of supervisory positions. And it's in those two games that Vaan stops being a slightly-moldy cardboard cutout and starts being an actual -character-. (I can't say much the same about the other FF12 chars, alas.) On the other hand, I have fallen in love with Matsuno's worldbuilding, and in turn will defend the games he has penned until I stop giving a damn about games any more.
In slightly-ironic retrospect, I figure this is probably exactly how Tolkien's fans feel.
The fact is, Matsuno is very good at crafting these intricate worlds, but he is utterly hopeless when it comes to creating the people who live in them. To him, they are simply pawns on the chessboard of the map labeled "world history and morals about politics." Many of you will surely roll your eyes when you realize I'm quoting Dr. Seuss, but kids can spot a moral from a mile off. Matsuno does whatever he can to drill his moral in: the innocent and pure are good heroic victims, those with ambition are doomed to become evil, and those with power are only as good as what they use it for. Characters are so much more than that: they are not present simply for symbolism or for revolving around your world. They are the conduit through which the player, reader, viewer experiences the world you have created, and the emptier your characters are, the emptier the experience is. You can read a book about gypsy poachers, or you can read a book about a father and a son who operate a gas station and secretly plot glorious (if not fantastical) illegal hunting escapades. You can read a masturbatory account of one arctophobic man's experience trying to bum money off of a publisher to hike the Appalachian Mountains, or you can read to yourself, say, a tale of a character who grows as a man throughout his harrowing journey across a mountain range forgotten by modernity. He might, of course, have been a fool to have gone alone, but that folly is part of the character who grows and develops as the reader experiences the world WITH him as opposed to BY MEANS OF him. Without proper characters, you only have half a tale, and Matsuno's characters are merely a medium with which he expresses his world. Ramza is a moral. Delita exists solely to establish caste disparity. Kletian, Rofel, Vormav: they are visible, killable representations of the concept of a clandestine political power play, nothing more. Rosencrantz is a VKP history book. Callo Merlose and Samantha are means by which the player is able to see the passive effects of the Dark on a person. Tieger, Neesa, and Grissom merely elaborate on the lore of wandering spirits and undead reanimation. Sydney, the duke, and Joshua are but the setup for the history of Leá Monde and their genealogy (which is barely touched upon anyway).
Why is John Hardin a fan favorite in spite of being little more than a nobody who doesn't even appear in the instruction manual, let alone do much more than deny that he's been played for a fool until he's coughing up blood? It's because the only real characters here are Ashley Riot and John Hardin. This is not because they have nothing to explain to the player--after all, Hardin does most of the explaining of Merlose's emergent abilities--and it's not even because they're explored as if they were the lore itself; it is because they change and grow and resolve. The disappointing part is that they're the only ones, out of Vagrant Story's entire cast who do.
--
Matsuno's love of lore. He has clearly studied the arts throughout history, and it's a safe guess that he's probably pretty aware of politics and their related constructs, both modern and historical. He crafts his worlds lovingly. He has these grand histories we'll never even know or hear about because they didn't fit into the game, possibly because someone slapped him on the wrist and told him that they were out of space. From the "ancient Kildean lettering" to the apparently rather long history of what Leá Monde was before its earthquakes and all the foul magic in its past to the vastness of the VKP leadership, there really is a lot we just barely hear about, but it's a safe bet that it all exists on paper. Storytellers write stories with histories in the back seat. Matsuno writes histories and setups with the story and characters bound and gagged in the trunk. And how he writes those histories. He's no slouch--hell, he's amazing at it.
--
It is also his greatest crutch. It's like me and dragons: he just cannot keep obsessive historymaking out of his writing. But unlike me, where dragons can be a very background, thematic, metaphorical, or even just barely referential setpieces, Matsuno works to bring his lore to the forefront of everything. He places it before his story, he places it before his characters, and he even places it before his sense of setting and context. And that, even more than Vagrant Story's characters, with their off-the-cuff (if not somewhat realistic most of the time) motivations and superficial development, is what Vagrant Story suffers from, simply because of the limitations of the game world. Matsuno wants to cram all this information into his game because, well, it's made. It's there, and it exists in much more force than the story does.
What the player ends up being presented with is a situation in which they must be their own threshers. The wheat--the story, what is required to make sense of what is going on--is interspersed with tons and tons of chaff--basically anything unnecessary, but present, for world-flavoring--in the game's dialogue sequences. Lore beyond the initial setup belongs in paragraph-long books on digital shelves and in conversations with NPCs and even has a place in (ugh) codices and encyclopedias, but Vagrant Story's "physical" context--the dead city of Leá Monde, full only of things that want to kill you--means that there are none of these. There are no books to explain the history of the city or NPCs to discuss the architecture, so these things are forced into the story text. You can't skip it, or you'll be lost and slack-jawed. You can't just hit start and expect to have dodged a brick of lore, because it's not a brick: it's one of those disgusting fish gums with teeth all over, except the gums are the lore and the teeth are the story and they're stuck together and you don't wanna touch it and it gives you the nasty shivers, but if you want those teeth, well, you gotta take the whole thing with you.
You know who else does this? Teenagers making Babby's First RPG.
"He is a despotic ruler. He calls himself Regis. Regis is Latin for 'king,' did you know that"
"Nobody knows where the blightplague came from. Well actually it came from a country far to the north. It was developed in a lab by twenty-three scientists who worked tirelessly for thirty-seven weeks, five days, three hours, seventeen minutes, and twenty-seven seconds before they finally worked out the formula. It is like a virus in that it is a protein, and will constantly mutate so you cannot vaccinate yourself against it. This is how it behaves, are you listening to me because this is totally important stuff that I spent a very long time coming up with"
"This is an event that happened a long time ago. It all started with Shar-Moggoth, who was the son of Ik-Librath, the son of Pae-Nibru, adopted daughter of Rel't'm'dia the Destroyer of Faith. Demonic adoption is very strange, and it works like this:" and they go on to explain specifics in a mandatory event. However, somewhere in the middle of that is a piece of information critical to the story, so like VS, you can't skip anything, or you'll end up missing everything.
Part of VS having 16 Year Old RPG Designer Syndrome is the fact that without anywhere else to put the lore and history, it has to appear in the story dialogue. But what we got could easily have been cut by at least half. I myself play by the "screenplay" rule: if your elaboration would be cumbersome in a film medium, then there's too much of it.
Long story short, Matsuno is good at what he does, which does not include making characters or a very coherent plot. Allow me to clarify: plot is not what people do behind closed doors that involves a lot of cackling; Mastuno has a lot of that, but not a lot of forward-moving substance, or even just anything to move forward with in the first place. He's not even that good of a storyteller, and definitely not at all deserving of his accolades, and I have no idea whatsoever how he got off garnering such a reputation as he has. But he has, and it's a tragedy worse than anything the bard ever wrote, because he never did a play about terrible storytellers becoming exalted professionals.
But seeing the praises sung in the names of Paolini and Meyer, this is a phenomenon that seems to be getting pretty common these days, wouldn't you agree?
And to be honest? I agree with most of it. Yasumi Matsuno is not a good storyteller. Fuck, if you want proof of that, look at FF12 and, more importantly, Vaan. FF12 was the last game in the Ivalice Alliance that Matsuno worked on; Revenant Wings and FFTA2 had him only in the most minor of supervisory positions. And it's in those two games that Vaan stops being a slightly-moldy cardboard cutout and starts being an actual -character-. (I can't say much the same about the other FF12 chars, alas.) On the other hand, I have fallen in love with Matsuno's worldbuilding, and in turn will defend the games he has penned until I stop giving a damn about games any more.
In slightly-ironic retrospect, I figure this is probably exactly how Tolkien's fans feel.