Oldtaku: Anime for Grownups

This blog is about anime, so I swear not to go off topic like this often, but I really wanted to give recognition to a game that’s extremely generous to the user – something you might appreciate as a busy adult.

Saints Row 2, just released for XBox 360 and PS3 (and soon the PC) is a dichotomy – it’s a Grand Theft Auto type game, perhaps even the most cynically derivative. The plot is total throwaway trash, a  complete gangbanger young male power fantasy. Reviews of the game have been decent, but thanks to the poverty of narrative it has been mostly written off as an ‘okay’ game.  But I think it’s actually a better game than Grand Theft Auto IV, because it goes to great lengths to make sure you have fun and not get in your way. For a game that’s about you being a total dick, it’s very polite, almost obsequious.

There are three types of missions – plot missions, optional activities, optional collection. The collection is the usual ‘50 hidden CDs are scattered around the city’ type thing. The plot missions advance the plot, obviously. But the optional activities, which could be throwaway, are actually what I consider the meat of the game. Unlike GTA IV or other games that include mini-games, the primary consideration here seems to be ‘is it fun?’ For instance, Septic Avenger has you hijacking a pumping truck and devaluing property values by spraying everything with human waste while your driver keeps up a steady stream of comments like ‘Now that’s a dirty cop!’ after you take one down with a high powered fecal jet. Utterly juvenile, yes, but a blast to play.

Trail Blazing has you donning an asbestos suit, setting yourself on fire, and racing through checkpoints on an ATV while setting hapless pedestrians on fire for bonus time. Mayhem asks you to do a certain amount of property damage in a given time – and the game gives you infinite rocket launcher or shotgun or assault rifle ammo so you don’t have to worry about anything but survival and damage. There are many more. And if you beat these activities, you get real, very useful rewards like reduced vehicle damage, infinite weapon ammo, or infinite sprinting time. It makes them fun and then rewards you for doing them.

The customization is insane. You can:

• Create your character with a staggering array of option sliders. Male, female, fat, skinny, hispanic, black,  caucasian (or a mix!) – there are at least EIGHT separate sliders just to customize the lips.
• Full body tattooing – each arm separately, each leg, chest, stomach, upper and lower back. The game lets you treat tattoos as clothes and change them at will. Not realistic, but nice.
• Six character voices (3 male, 3 female) and then all your speaking parts are done in all six voices.
• The array of clothing is almost overwhelming – at least 500 items, and you can choose the colors, whether you wear your hats forward, backwards, right, left, etc. You can even buy lip piercings.
• All ‘movies’ are rendered in engine, with all your customizations, so ‘you’ are you through the whole game.

There’s just a spirit of generosity everywhere – it’s as if the designers actually asked ‘how can we make this not annoying?’ That should be fundamental for every game, but it’s hardly ever done in practice – Super Mario Galaxy or Geometry Wars 2 are the only examples I can think of recently. Hell, the guys at LucasArts seem to have been actively trying to make Force Unleashed even more annoying (‘Disk access just for the menu? Sweeeeeeet!’). They probably weren’t, of course, they just weren’t considering it at all – and it shows.

Here’s how nice the game is:

• Save anywhere, any time, even on console versions.
• Missions are generously checkpointed. If you start a mission, drive across town to a nightclub and accidentally shoot a guy at close range with the rocket launcher (just hypothetically you understand), killing yourself, you will restart just outside the nightclub, after the drive.
• Missions are generously signposted. If you have to run through a maze of a building, there are several waypoints.
• I didn’t run into a single plot mission that was stupidly frustratingly designed. Sure I died or failed several times, but it was always my fault. Some of the highest level optional activities are very hard to complete in time, but that’s fair.
• You get homies who do missions with you and are basically cannon fodder to distract the bad guys. If they die, it’s as easy as running up to them and pressing a button to revive them.
• Redo old missions at any time through a clever ‘newspaper clippings’ gimmick, and redo any level of any completed activity by going back to the site.
• If you like the music you hear, you can go to a music store, ‘buy’ any music you heard on the radio, and create your own music station.
• There are plenty of bases you can win/buy throughout the city, and you can customize how they look.
• You can customize how your gang looks, how they fight, and even your own fighting style.
• I never felt constrained much by money or ammo. Both were sufficient, but not so plentiful as to rob you of motivation early on. Though by the end of the game you’re rolling in cash, which is as it should be.
• Buttons do what you expect. I can’t emphasize this enough. The best example is that the back button brings up the map and the start button brings up the menu. But if you press the map button while already in the menu, it closes the menu and gives you the map, and vice versa.  That’s obvious, but only one game in a hundred would be that considerate in practice. Most are oblivious sociopaths.

The big takeaway from all this is that I never felt I was doing something stupid and boring just because the designers or implementers were lazy. If I thought something would be cool, I could probably do it. Read that again. How many games can you say that about? I just can’t emphasize enough how amazing it is to play a game that respects you enough that it doesn’t waste your time at all.

Of course I have some complaints. The plot, as mentioned, is trash. Ultimately I know I’ll remember GTA IV’s plot more than Saints Row 2’s (hell, I can barely remember SR2’s plot even now). But I also know SR2 was more fun than GTA IV.  The attack helicopter activities are also a little squirrelly because the copter controls are too loose, but those are optional except for the last plot mission, which is pretty forgiving.

I’m sure I’ll get a bunch of comments about how I’m weak for wanting the game to be too ‘easy’, but that’s not what I want. I don’t mind hard. Hard games forcing you to think carefully about what you’re doing and show some skill are great, and if you just run around randomly firing at things in SR2 you’ll die fast. Games that are hard because the people who made it were lazy are something else entirely. I beat games like Contra, (original) Prince of Persia and Battletoads (okay that’s a lie, I never played BT) back in the day and I no longer have the time to waste on stuff that insta-kills you for no good reason.

So thank you, Volition, for actually respecting the player for once (even while insulting my intelligence), and for making SR2 a lot less buggy than SR1. I can wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone who doesn’t mind the crudity of the subject matter, and based on my informal polling more people will end up actually finishing SR2 than GTA IV.  It’s sad that I would feel compelled to write this because I’m so stunned that a game isn’t user hostile, but that’s the state of the industry.