As a hip young South-American high school exchange student in Japan, you certainly didn’t expect to be warped inside a Romanian castle contained within a solar eclipse. To the event’s credit, this is the year 2035. To the credit of the series of the game you’re playing, this is the first game that’s taken place in the 21st century, or even in the future. It was a gutsy move to set the game in the future. The biggest fans of this series are famously twitchy individuals who get angry at the lengths of characters’ hair, or the number of straps on their boots. So it is with great respect to its unwashed lovers that Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for the Gameboy Advance is able to take place in the year 2035 yet feature not a single robot zombie or hovering-motorcycle-riding skeleton.
It does, however, star a man named Hammer. Hammer is a sad piece of writing. Hammer kills the game’s narrative, smashes it on the head with a sledge-. . . hammer. Hammer is a black man – I reckon he’s the first black man to appear in a Castlevania game (swoop down upon me, series fans, if I be wrong!), and it’s kind of nice that IGA thought to include him. That’s what I’m applauding here – the thought. I’m not applauding the imagination, or (hell no not the) execution. I remember an interview in Electronic Gaming Monthly where Koji Igarashi said that he loved the film “Blade," and was particularly fond of the character Blade, and Wesley Snipes’ performance of that character. He said he was thinking he’d like to have a badass black man attacking Dracula at some point in the future of Castlevania. In Aria of Sorrow, which takes place in 2035, we’re told that Dracula was killed for good in 1999. I take it that IGA plans to, at some point in the future, make a game about how this dealing of death to Dracula came about. If this game is made in, say, 2009, it’d be a clever little way of looking back at the year 1999, or so you’d think while playing Aria of Sorrow for its first few hours. What soon happens is that Aria of Sorrow cuts off Castlevania 1999’s right hand with a rusty hook, by telling us that Julius Belmont – clad in his long coat, boots, and ridiculous medieval rock-star hair – is the one who’s going to kill Dracula in that future game set in the past.
Well, he does say that he “had help." Maybe Alucard helped him? Maybe a female wizard also helped? And maybe his final helper was a badass black man who’s good with knives and can climb walls?
(IGA does, don’t you know, prefer Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse to the rest of the series)
Still, the game is doing one thing wrong, and it’s the same thing that Castlevania games consistently do wrong – it’s making promises. Writers must take heed – they must be careful of making promises in writing, especially when crafting an episode of a longer story that will be filled in at a later point by another episode that takes place in the earlier episode’s past. Promises can be good if done in literature, yes – Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold begins with the words "On the day they were going to kill him. . .", and it can begin in such a way because the author knows precisely where the story is going. He has it all in his head. IGA doesn’t have all of Castlevania in his head. I know this because the most recent mostly-failed attempt to push the series out into the realm of 3D, Lament of Innocence, didn’t have a title until near the end of its production. The reason?
IGA: "We’re running out of musical terms to use."
Yes, even so – what the hell do the musical terms have to do with the game? They’re arbitrary, as far as I can see. In this grand Japanese fashion of titling anime, manga, and Shibuya jazz bars alike, English words are thrown together so that something is made that it, when translated into Japanese, looks like something that won’t get anyone fired. This needs to stop, and risks need to begin. IGA needs to learn to hold onto his ideas; he needs to keep them from ejaculating out all over his beloved series. I say this, because I, too, love the series.
It goes like this – what I’m trying to say, that is, can be summarized like this:
IGA has let the black man out of the bag.
He shouldn’t have done this.
Here’s how it happens:
Early on in the game, Soma enters a room. He opens the door to this room. In this room, he finds "Hammer," a large black man with equally large black muscles. The guy’s got a bandanna on his head the size of the American flag at Fort McHenry. He informs Soma – yo, man, thanks for lettin’ me outta here! He was wit’ a unit in da US Special Forces, and got detached somehow. Now, sittin’ here all alone in dissa room like dissen, he’s gotten t3h tired of fightin’ and war. Hesa thinkin’ uh going up to the castle gates, and starting a shop. Lotsa fightin’ goin’ on up in heee-ah! Do stop by sometime, jeh?
And we, the player with a bone of continuity, kind of furrow our brows. The most common reply is, "Um, okay. Let’s go kill another Catoblepas."
We then go kill another Catoblepas. Then, maybe, we exit the room with the Catoblepas, come back, and kill the Catoblepas again. It’s fun to kill those things, I swear. I fought enough to get three of their souls.
Next time Soma arrives at the castle gates, Hammer is sitting there atop the rough pixels of a few ammo crates. Press up on the control pad, or the attack button, and a dialogue begins.
"YO! CHECK OUT WHAT I GOT!"
We then reach the "buy," "sell," "exit" menu. This is where we buy our potions and things.
It’s a little groan-worthy that the one selling us our potions has to be the only black man in this entire historic game series. Still, we can live with it. He’s a human being after all, and a mortal one, not like our fair-skinned effeminate hero. He’s just chilling, out here. We kind of come to like his music, even, a little hard-rock riff that sounds not out of place in Contra or Blades of Steel.
Then The Unthinkable, Part One happens – the next time we talk to Mina Hakuba, our usual hint-supplier, she asks Soma, what’s up with that giant black man? Is he your friend? He scares me. Soma replies, that’s Hammer. He’s a good guy. Mina then says, well, if you say so. He still scares me TEH OMG.
This is what we in the business of rock-star game-critique call "The Yuji Horii Rule." The Yuji Horii Rule states that NPC (non-player-character) A means nothing to PC (player-character) B until NPC C mention NPC A in dialogue. The best example off the top of my head is in the town of Hamelia in Yuji Horii’s Dragon Quest VII; at a bar in a basement, a woman in a red dress is drinking alone. You talk to her, and she tells you to leave her alone. You talk to a man sitting at the other end of the bar, and he mentions the woman in the red dress, saying, it’s really sad to see a woman drinking alone like that, isn’t it? And she’s so pretty, too.
What does this detail amount to in the greater context of our four heroes’ quest to free the world of the evil of the Demon Lord? At the end of the day, nothing. The woman in the red dress is just a person in a basement bar in a town in the middle of nowhere. Yuji Horii, as a game designer, inherently understands that if you populate even the most-colorful, interesting-architecture-filled town with only NPCs that tell you where to find the keys to the mayor’s house so you can move on to the next dungeon (biggest offender in this is Grandia II), you’re going to bore your audience. You have to do something to keep them there, to keep them emerged. If you take the time to, once or twice in every little town riddled about your game’s expansive landscape, make a sprite in a basement seem like an actual person, it does something to make the game felt in the heart of the player. The player then moves on from the town of Hamelia toward broadening horizons with a tiny piece of something in his soul, something that pushes him to, even years later, remember the name of that dumpy little town.
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow takes place inside a castle full of zombies that spawn endlessly, digging themselves up from a stone floor with what must be ferocious fingernails. The human characters can be counted on one hand, if you have a big hand – Soma, Graham, Julius, Mina, Yoko, and Arikado. And Hammer. This is a close-knit little group.
The problem is that it’s not close-knit enough. The battle with Julius, toward the very, very end, genius as it is, sheds light on what is arguably the focus of the narrative: this boy is Dracula. He has to kill the evil inside himself. That’s the main conflict, here. Soma vs. Himself vs. Julius. Arikado – hell, I’m going to just start calling him Alucard from now – Alucard exists to both advise our hero and provide fan service. Mina is the damsel in poorly-defined distress character. Graham is the scapegoat villain, a favorite character type in horror stories. Yoko is . . . well, what the hell is she? She provides advice? Not any advice we need. She has the last name of a character from Dracula’s Curse? Yes. She gets stabbed, thus proving that the scapegoat villain does indeed need to die?
Why not strike the Yoko character, and make Mina the one who gets stabbed? Mina doesn’t do anything else in the story, other than stand there and profess her belief in Soma. When she gives us a hint, she’s just regurgitating Alucard’s words. Why can’t Alucard stand in the front of the castle, tending to Mina when she’s hurt, then? Why don’t we just change Mina’s last name to "Belnades," to provide that fan service?
Hell, why can’t a voice be what pushes Soma on into the castle, toward the throne room? Why can’t we have little flashes of Julius entering the castle as well, and thinking aloud about his mission? Soma can still run into Graham, and the battles can still come up as they will. This way we get rid of Yoko and Alucard in one motion.
And then there was Hammer. Regardless of the overcrowded cast above, the game can and will roll on, and pleasantly, to its conclusion. After all of the final battles have been fought and Soma is free of his inner evil, though before the credits roll, the cast members contribute their kind words.
Yoko says, roughly, "Soma, I’m back, after being stabbed. I’m healed. You did well. I hope to see you again sometime!" I look at this and smirk, thinking of the nurses in the Pokemon Centers in Pokemon, who, after healing your grotesquely battle-scarred Pokemon, tell you, "We hope to see you again!" What, they hope my furry animals get maimed in another fight?
Mina says, basically, that she believed in Soma from the beginning LOL OMG.
Julius says that he’s glad the evil has been destroyed. If it ever comes back, he will make good on his promise to kill you AND THE NIGHT.
Alucard tells us that, as long as there is good in the world, there must be evil. Personally, I think it’s probably the other way around – as long as there’s evil, there must be good. Though hey, I’m not going to argue with the ethics of pixels.
Then Hammer steps up to the mic, delivering The Unthinkable, Part Two: YO! MAN! Mesa thinkin’ of givin’ up fightin’ for good YOU KNOW WHAT I’M SAYIN’?! "I’m going to quit the military and start up a shop. Promise me you’ll visit sometime!"
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO NO.
(We will refuse to consider that IGA might be taking an ironic jab at videogames in general, because of things I will lay out later; for now, I begin to complain. Observe:)
This is not good. This is hardly right. This is worse than Michael Jackson dangling a housand babies outside a thousand hotel windows. It’s worse than Megaman saying, at the beginning of Megaman X7, a terrible botch of a game with frilly voice-acting, "I’m done fighting – I’m going to look for a peaceful solution!" I mean, hell, the man has a FUCKING GUN FOR A RIGHT HAND THERE IS NO PEACEFUL SOLUTION.
Ahem.
Back to Hammer: This is terrible. This man has no right to talk to me at the end of the game. He’s a shopkeeper, not a character. He was born out of IGA’s prematurely executed little quest to fit a black man into a Castlevania game, and now he’s saying the most asinine thing I think I’ve ever heard a videogame character say, scores of Engrish incuded. He’s a huge black man in army fatigues, by exposition a member of the US Army Special Forces; as Julius is a whip-carrying Belmont, so he hunts vampires; Hammer should be blasting ass with a shotgun or just not be here at all.
So I ask my question again: What is a Castlevania game? Is it merely something Psycho Mantis asks us about in Metal Gear Solid? Or is it something worth continuing, and holding up to a magnifying glass, and loving?
I’d like to think it’s something in-between. I wrote an article about editing Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and how I think it should be done. I basically, in there, lament, quite innocently, that it’s hard to part with entire composed sections of videogame. When all the code is in place, a stage in a videogame amounts to more than a few meters of film, or lines of dialogue in a book. When my editor tells me to drop one of my ex-girlfriends from a book loosely based on my life, I can do that. What would Ayami Kojima say, however, when IGA told her they didn’t need Hammer, whose drawings and designs she spent hours laboring over?
The librarian in Symphony of the Night was an interesting character. What the hell was he doing in the library? Where did he get all of these ancient swords to sell Alucard? The answers are probably very closely related to the answers to how all the wailing metal guitars made it into the 19th century. Yet it’s that mystery that, combined with hammy voice-acting, makes us chuckle every time Alucard says, of an item, "I’m interested in this." In Aria of Sorrow, where every one of Soma’s abilities is named after some kind of obscure horror monster, I really have to wonder. When I want to pick the ability to let me sink to the bottom of a lake, I have to wonder, "Which one lets me sink again?" (It’s "Skula" – what a "Skula" is, fuck if I know) All of these abilities have the strangest names for a reason: IGA is making his game with very much concern. He loves his game too much. Yet loving in such close proximity is akin to loving a bird that happens to be in a burning house in a valley, from the top of that valley. You love the bird without seeing it, is what you do.
IGA does not see the Hammer Problem, and I have no doubt that, some day, he will. That day just isn’t now. When it will be, I don’t know. I’d like to meet him, maybe talk to him about it. I’m sure he knows how gravely seriously his fans take his games. He took the same games just as seriously before he took over the series.
AND I HAVE NOT YET ANSWERED THE QUESTION!!
What is a Castlevania game?
A miserable little pile of secrets? Perhaps. Though maybe it’s more of a joyous little pile of them. It’s a game that’s about poking into corners with limp weapons like whips or rigid weapons like swords, and finding things in the darkness. It wasn’t always about this, however.
The first game in the illustrious series came in 1986; as though aware of the trend that would push fanboys in 2002 to complain about Super Mario Sunshine’s taking place entirely on a tropical island, crammed its charisma into the narrow setting of a castle. We were not, in Akumajou Dracula, exploring a world – no, we were a man with a whip entering a castle to kill the vampire lord that lived there. The castle started as a courtyard within a drawbridge, led into a hall, up stairs, around to a clock tower, and eventually into the vampire’s throne room. We killed the vampire – twice, even – and won. No one complained about how the game didn’t feature a "fire level!" or an "ice level!!!" because everyone was just so pleased to see a game that wasn’t about furry animals. It was a rarity. It was unique from the start, and it deserves its legions of hardcore fans.
Castlevania is about evoking a feeling. It might be about evoking the feeling of gothic horror, or horror in general. It might be about using gothic horror as a cheap little gimmick to sell a game about simply pressing buttons, eliminating targets, and progressing to the ends of stages. I feel that, for the first game, this was most definitely the case. The producers had half a handful of interest in horror movies, so they threw their halfway love into a cheap little side-scroller that ended up so quirkily different from the norm as to be fully playable, and replayable, and rereplayable. Maybe it was the music, I don’t know. Or maybe it was this intense combination of all of the above. It got its fans, it made its money, and it bored its producers. Those bored producers, or someone related to them, eventually turned out a game called Dracula X: Nocturne in the Moonlight, also known as Symphony of the Night, and the public realized, precisely, what could be done. The producers must have been mortified, at this point, by their power, so mortified they turned to salt and scattered in the wind. Then a new producer came along, one who genuinely loved the game, and he promised to pull it in directions of progress.
The height of his progress, at this point, is Aria of Sorrow. It is a tight package. Its play control is near-flawless. It suffers from a little of the sickness that all modern games suffer from, in that it believes it has to name and justify everything it includes. We don’t need the shopkeeper Hammer; though he is the only thing that reminds us the story takes place in the year 2035, I’d rather be without him. Let me buy my items from, I don’t know – a giant painting of a battlefield, in the main hall? That’d be interesting as hell.
In the end, Aria of Sorrow makes me wonder about the people who collect 100% of the souls. How much time does it take? Are these people all school kids whose occupations consist of riding the Tokyo Metro all day while wearing little yellow hats? Are they the people who write FAQs in which they dismiss the exhilarating straightforward bang-bang-bang Julius mode as "SOOOoooOOO BORING IT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A STORY!!"? Which is it? I, personally, think that Julius mode is a revelation. Maybe it’s time to make another Akumajou Dracula, free of a subtitle of a musical variety. Give us the same music as Castlevania, maybe performed by some talented rock band. Totally reinterpret the game – don’t just remake it, make it. As Super Castlevania was to Castlevania, so this will be to Super Castlevania. Maybe 2D, with some Capcom-quality animated sprites? R make it 3D, if you can – make true on that promise to deliver a game that’s all about rushing into a castle kill a vampire.
Thinking about the game’s extras – boss rush mode, playing as Julius – makes me yearn. It makes me think of games that aren’t this game, including a game that isn’t any game that currently exists. I guess this can be seen as a plus – Aria of Sorrow awakened another piece of the game-designer in me – though it is also a minus. A truly great game should not make me think about any game other than the game I’m playing. It especially shouldn’t make me think of how it could be better. Sure, even Metroid Prime could be made better, I’m sure. I just don’t think about how this could be done, while I’m playing it. I don’t wish to improve the game. I don’t sit around scheming about how to one-up it.
Aria of Sorrow is a good game. It plays greatly, and it looks nice, and the music is mostly boring, though the sound effects are sharp and clear and loud and they don’t get old. It’s just not great. It won’t go down in history; its hypothetical predecessor, should it listen to the boldness of reason, will. Aria of Sorrow is a game that stands on the cusp of something historic, just as its two previous portable brothers have. They’ve all been on the same cusp since 2001, and each game takes different confused baby steps away from or toward that something great. It’s time to do something great, Koji Igarashi. For a man who dresses in so much black, I sense much fear in you. Dive in, already. We here at insertcredit.com are getting tired of waiting.
--tim rogers is more of a trevor than a juste
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