It appears to be the general consensus that video games are supposed to be fun. They are called video “games” after all, and everyone who plays them does so for some kind of enjoyment. Whether it is for the sense of pleasure that comes from mastery, victory, completion, or trashing your teammates’ mothers on voice chat, we all play games for some kind of fun. And there is nothing wrong with games being fun, but if that is all that games ever provide, then we’ve seriously failed as a medium. Art is powerful because of its ability to create a lasting impact, and if the only impact games have is you looking back at it saying “Gee whiz, that sure was fun,” then games have no hope of being considered art. This is something I’m thinking a lot of designers are starting to understand now, but it’s nowhere near perfected yet. Today I wanted to take a look at this being done in a game long before this trend picked up, and hopefully more people will be able to see the potential that games can have.
Mother 3 is one of the best games ever made, but odds are you haven’t heard of it. This is because, in one of the greatest tragedies to ever strike mankind, the game was never released outside of Japan. Luckily, thanks to the hard work of dedicated fan translators, an English version of the game exists if you can get your hands on it, but it’s not something a lot of people have picked up. I was originally planning some kind of 60 page thesis on how this game singlehandedly proves the potential of games as art, but I think I can do a similar thing by showing just one of the game’s chapters, and with minimal spoilers to boot. That said, this game really shouldn’t be spoiled at all, so if you have any intention of ever playing it, use discretion.
Mother 3 is a game about a boy Lucas and his family. But in the game’s third chapter, which is the one we’ll be looking at today, you play as none of the main characters. Instead, the chapter starts by whisking you away from the central location of Tazmily Village, and puts you in control of a random monkey named Salsa. It isn't entirely random, however, as you discover that this monkey is the prisoner of a major villain named Fassad who was introduced in the previous chapter. The natural question that arises at the start of this chapter is “why does this evil mastermind have a monkey as his sole prisoner?” and the answer is essentially slavery. Fassad plans on tricking the villagers of Tazmily Village, for reasons I won't spoil, to buy things called ‘happy boxes,’ and he plans to use you, the monkey, to dance and be cute to show just how happy these boxes can make you.
With the overarching idea made clear, let’s get back into the nitty-gritty of what actually happens in this chapter. Right off the bat, it turns out Fassad has had Salsa’s monkey girlfriend captured as well, and threatens to harm her should you try anything funny. If you notice, the developers substituted animals for people to keep things appropriate while still touching on a deep theme. After you watch the girl monkey get taken away, Fassad makes you practice doing the dances moves you will have to do later. You also discover that he has a shock collar on you that he activates anytime you make a mistake, and often, even when you succeed. This doesn’t really have any gameplay impact, you just have to watch the heartbreaking animation of a cute monkey getting fried before shaking it off as he does his best to endure for his girlfriend. It’s really just supposed to show how terrible of a person Fassad is, torturing an innocent, adorable monkey, for both punishment and just sadistic pleasure. This is something you’re going to see hammered in a lot.
You’re told that your goal is to reach a building on the opposite side of the desert, and so you head out to find it with Fassad following you. Mother 3 is an RPG, so that means running around in an area and engaging in inevitable turn-based fights with enemies you encounter. Usually this wouldn’t be anything against the norm, but players will very quickly discover that Salsa is terrible at combat. He is a monkey so it’s kind of to be expected, but you have an extremely small pool of health, your basic attack deals around 1-5 damage to most enemies, and you have access to a small pool of occasionally useful abilities. Luckily you have Fassad following you around. Since he isn’t really on your side though, you can’t control his actions like you would a normal party member. Every turn, he will perform a random action, sometimes attacking, sometimes not. His basic attack can deal around 50 damage, and his special one can get up to around 90, and when he decides to throw a bomb, it can one-hit kill most enemies. Considering your measly damage output, this means that it’s up to Fassad to really get anything done in battle. Except, as I just mentioned, sometimes he won’t attack. He could spend a turn sitting down and resting, pushing you out in front of him, or eating a banana in front of you (which is especially cruel considering how monkeys are supposed to love bananas). The point of all of this is to make you feel weak, and it’s up to Fassad to do most of the work for you, except half the time he won’t even be bothered to. It really makes the player feel the captivity Salsa is going through, and through the game’s mechanics, not by any cutscene or text. It sacrifices some of the enjoyment the battle system normally has, but it does so specifically to make the player feel as Salsa does.
Going along with that theme, there are a couple more small experiences that take place in the desert that use game mechanics to drive home the feeling of captivity. In this game, talking frogs act as save points, and they usually have the same dialogue, but the first save-frog in the area tells you that he “saw what you went through” and that you need to “be tough and endure it.” It isn’t much, but the little touch of the usually static frogs having unique dialogue to try to cheer up your sad monkey character helps build the setting. After this, one of the most easily obtainable item boxes in the desert contains an item called a “luxury banana,” which sounds great for you as a monkey. But as soon as you collect it, Fassad interrupts saying that you don’t deserve it and then takes it for himself, eating only a single bite before throwing the peel on the ground. This breaks the trends you have expected at this point, because always when you get an item, then it’s yours. But to emphasize Fassad’s villainous character, the developers put in this specific, convention-breaking encounter so they could show him being selfish and cruel. But it isn’t just through sympathy for Salsa that you feel this, it’s also you as a player feeling cheated because a good item that you could use was just casually stolen from you for no reason. Everything that happens in this chapter is designed to not just show you Salsa’s circumstances, but to make you feel how Salsa is feeling, both in his imprisonment and in his hatred for the villainous Fassad.
After your relatively short trek through the desert, you find the building you’re trying to reach, except the doorway is guarded by a Cactus Wolf, what is about to be your first boss fight as Salsa. It just further emphasizes all that the combat has already done to put you in Salsa’s shoes. With your measly health pool, you're going to be spending most of the fight healing yourself instead of taking any kind of action, meaning once again, you're stuck hoping that Fassad will fight your battles for you. The fight isn't terribly difficult though, so it won't be a major wall of frustration, and once done you'll be off for you main objective at Tazmily Village.
Once you arrive in Tazmily Village, you first go to spend the night in the local inn. In the night Fassad walks out and you’re given the chance to escape, but you are promptly caught and shocked, repeatedly. You’re then taken outside in the morning where Fassad has you put on a show with him to advertise these “Happy Boxes” to everyone. During Fassad’s speech, he’ll make gestures and you’ll have to do a matching dance like you learned at the beginning of the chapter. And if you mess up or miss a cue, you’ll be shocked. Getting shocked doesn’t really have any consequence for you besides having to watch the sad animation, so unlike the rest of the chapter this part really leans on sympathy to make you feel how the game wants you to. That said, in games like these, long dialogue sections are almost always times where you can mentally disengage from the gameplay and take a break as you focus on whatever is being said. It’s quite the contrary here since you have to be focused on watching Fassad’s gestures.
It is after this however, that the part comes that I really wanted to focus on. Up until now, things have been unconventional and bothersome in order to make you feel Salsa’s plight and hate Fassad, but now you reach the section that actively tries to be the opposite of fun in every way possible. During Fassad’s speech about happy boxes, four people volunteer to try them out. He orders you to go grab their boxes from the cemetery at the north end of the village and deliver them to those people. The thing is, he never tells you where they live, and you can only carry one box at a time, meaning you have to grab a box, find the house of the person who wants it, then run back to the cemetery to grab the next one and figure out where the next person lives, and so on until you have delivered all the boxes. To make everything worse, you cannot run while carrying these boxes, you’re stuck at the default, slow, walk speed. You have to make a very rounabout trip going from one end of the village to the cemetery to another end over and over at the slowest movement speed possible.
What I just described is something many people would label as bad game design. It breaks the flow of the game, and nothing about it is intrinsically fun, the only reason you’re doing it is so that you won’t have to do it anymore. I would argue that this instead is innovative game design because it takes advantage of one thing games can do better than other mediums. In a book, you can read about someone’s torment, or you could watch slavery in action in a movie, but only in a game could you actually act it out it yourself. Sure all you’re doing is slowly walking back and forth in a village, you’re not really experiencing exactly what the character is, but it still gives you a much better idea of it than a text box or a cutscene ever could because it makes you experience some semblance of it. You can't skip this, you can't speed it up, it's boring and you just want it to be over. You're really in Salsa's shoes at the moment, and the length and dullness of this portion gives you plenty of time to reflect on that. Whatever point a game is trying to make is made exponentially stronger when the actions you’re taking actually matches up with the narrative that is going on.
It’s important to note that once this chapter ends, Salsa is almost entirely forgotten by the game. You’ll never play as him again and very rarely see him. So despite spending an entire chapter of the game playing as him, Salsa isn’t a major character in any way. So you may be wondering why the game spends all this time making you feel terrible for Salsa in his captivity when he has very little impact on the plot at all. The thing is, this portion isn’t meant so much as to make you feel bad for Salsa as it is to make you hate Fassad. At the end of the chapter, Salsa is freed, but Fassad continues to do his dirty works. A lot of games have a hard time making the player feel anything towards their antagonist. Almost every game has one and there are so many clichés floating around that it’s hard to make players care about your villain in particular. This chapter was Mother 3’s way of getting you emotionally invested in (or, really, against) the game’s antagonists. At this point in the game you’ve already seen enough to be pretty emotionally invested in it, that’s the kind of game it is, but this experience as the tortured Salsa really succeeds in making players hate Fassad’s guts, a lot. And it also sends a message about slavery and forced labor, one of the many complex themes this game tackles.
Of course, this approach of actively making something unfun isn't perfect. After all, regardless of its artistic value, it'll still be a slog and won't be enjoyable. People who don't care about stories in their games will hate segments that remove the gameplay that makes the game enjoyable. They can't really be blamed for that either, because right now games exist in a kind of no-man's land where all some people want is just entertainment while others look for something deeper. Neither side of that is fully right, since no one would be able to motivate themselves to play a game that consists entirely of dull, bothersome sections, and a game that only provides mindless fun has no lasting value for its players. Even though it's kind of risky, we shouldn't stop experimenting with new ways to make players feel things, but we should be certain we do them right. There's a big difference between a game that isn't fun because of bad design and a portion of a game that isn't fun because it has something more important to impart to the player.
There are other games besides Mother 3 that have experimented with this, of course. A genocide playthrough of Undertale is incredibly grindy and full of ridiculous difficulty walls, and it's all there to dissuade you from going down such a terrible path and to constantly remind you that this senseless killing isn't right in any way. Spec Ops: The Line is full of terribly gruesome moments to show players the real side of warfare that most shooters try to cover up. Even recently, I talked about how Dark Souls’ Blighttown is a stressful test to make sure players can handle the rest of the game (which you can read here). These kinds of experiments are great things to see games doing, even if some players are turned off by them. I don't want to live in a world where games don't have just as much artistic value as the other mediums out there, and that can only be achieved by sometimes prioritizing things other than fun.
Key Takeaways:
- Sometimes a section of a game may have to not be fun in order to drive home a more important message.
- However, sections like that must be handled properly and used sparingly. No one wants to play a game that isn't fun or rewarding at all, and important moments will lose their impact if you repeat the same tricks
- One of games' biggest strengths is their ability to engage the player as an active participant in what is going on. This can be used to put players in the shoes of their characters and make them experience unique emotions for themselves.
- "Show, not tell" is important for many mediums, but "do, not show" is important for games. Players will always be more impacted by something they experience and take part in themselves than something that they simply watch.
All of that said, if you're still reading this far, I'd love to hear what you think in the comment section below. Love what I had to say and have your own examples of games that do this too? Great, tell me about it! Think I'm a total idiot and need to be corrected on literally every word I typed? That's cool too, I'd love to hear it. Your feedback and support would be greatly appreciated as I look to expand this blog and try to provide the highest quality content I can. And thank you for reading!
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