Disaster Report 4, more baby steps in Rebirth
On taking too long
I dabbled in Disaster Report 4 for a little bit and after a few hour-ish sessions decided it wasn’t for me. I felt a little torn about this. Partly because it was the first rental I got in experimenting with a having a subscription video game rental service, so deciding to bail and move onto the next thing had ~weight~ to it that you don’t always get when it’s just an entry in your Steam library that has a little “last played 5 years ago” next to it. But partly because it had an interesting blend of things I really appreciated but also really could not vibe with.
The game was not fun to play, as boring as that critique is. I got tired of how slow the character moved, how slow the camera moved, the teeny tiny space between too far away from an NPC to talk to them and so close that you’ve bumped into them and you have to wait through their slow recoil animation before the option to talk to them would appear. I didn’t love running around an environment looking for the next place to go, which is sometimes not obviously something you can interact with and sometimes just simply requires 5 minutes of running in circles looking for the next thing to do; it was the kind of issue with video games I remembered from my childhood that made me lowkey give up on video games for a bunch of years. I didn’t love that maybe a lot of this could just be chalked up to performance issues with the Switch release, like I didn’t do my consumer report homework correctly like it’s 2004 or something.
I liked the idea of the slowness. The player vs environment idea felt novel, and the feeling of just barely getting away from collapsing city infrastructure hits when it hits (or doesn’t hit in this instance)! I liked the idea of the little dialogue options and morality system, but I wished the game more clearly communicated if there were any necessity to balancing morality with resource scarcity. It’s the type of game where you take one look at the walkthrough and realize you’ve locked yourself out of a bunch of stuff of nebulous interest because you didn’t make the exact right series of decisions that seemed wrong to make, and, frankly, fuck that. Branching paths are cool in theory, but I personally find the time commitment of playing a video game - especially one where the slow pacing is an intentional choice - inevitably detracts from how satisfying this gets.
The game has these little highs, like how funny it is when you got the option to pretend to be a rival company’s employee and your blank slate character gets wildly scenery-chewy about it, like part of the character you could choose to be is a theater kid caught up in a natural disaster finally letting loose. But the payoff is spread out so thinly and slowly that I realized, nah, I cannot spend this much time playing the game actively thinking about how long the game is taking instead of what the game is doing. It’s just not funny enough or striking enough to outweigh how tedious the time between the good stuff feels.
It feels a little silly to feel the need to so thoroughly unpack “I liked this video game except for the playing it part”.
In a recent video, ThorHighHeels (whose recent wrong answers only flavored top 100 games list inspired me to pick this up in the first place) said something that lined up with what this got me thinking about: “Normally if I don’t really fuck with a game, I simply won’t bring it up, but I thought to do so here [because] me coming away from this realizing that - above the jank, above the shitty gamefeel, and above the characters that I lowkey kinda hated - what really made me not vibe with this was the feeling that it needed more environmental variety. That’s super fucking valuable, because suddenly I learned more about my own tastes. What I want is henceforth further crystalized … as a result.” He talked about this mostly in relation to creation of his own game, but I think it’s worth pausing to reflect on these things even if you’re not actively on the creating side of the equation. When a friend of mine turned 30, she talked about how she was abandoning more books if they didn’t click with her, as a sort of reverse year of yes where you listen to the part of your mind that says you don’t care enough to see a thing through to the end.
Probably a lot of people don’t have to try to do this! I envy them! Imagine the freedom of picking up a thing, saying “no, that’s not for me”, and moving onto the next thing. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about this, and it definitely won’t be the last.
Ready for the biweekly check-in on how far I am in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth? Just got to Corel. Spoilers through Costa del Sol:
Jesus Christ it’s horned up.
“Guide me, oh, Tifa.” I’m scared to google anything written about the game for fear of spoilers, but I bet the queer reading essays are popping OFF.
Aerith’s Holy materia is dead oh shit that’s not good! If you’re gonna do the teeny-tiniest change to how this plays out after killing destiny, that’s a good one.
FINALLY a peak back at the parallel Zack Survived timeline. World’s ending, but it’s a different world’s ending than presumably the main timeline is going to end the game at, based on the original game. I wish there was a lot more of this. It feels tacked on thus far, and this second foray into it is much too brief after how long we’ve spent in the main timeline. Like… this is the main thing I’d like to write about lol. There’s nothing to write about yet.
I suppose if there’s an angle for the ReadOnly patented connection between two things there’s no real reason to connect: it’s game length and pacing. I gave up on Disaster Report 4 because it was taking too goddamn long. Rebirth is certainly a much much worse offender, but critically it has much much better hangoutitude to match. It’s hard to beat character-driven quiet moments, especially with tabula rasa choose-your-main-character stuff video games theoretically excel at offering.
It’s kind of the narrative version of the difficulty scaling issue you can see in open-world games: if the player can go anywhere whenever, everything has to be the same reasonably accessible everywhere. Even though both games are about constantly going to new places, Rebirth feels like a road trip with your pals and Disaster Report 4, while obviously not going to do that given the title, feels somewhat weightless. There’s not much to invest in, and although that works with the survival story where it makes sense you cross paths with other survivors before you go your own ways, hopefully to all make it out alive, you can also feel like you Got It after fewer loops of that. Which is kind of what happens when the main character is just a version of the player. It’s easy to care about a fully realized fictional character; it’s harder to care about me.