Osaka

At first glance, Yakuza 2 has rendered the city of Osaka in realistic and modern detail. The open world exists as a kind of interactive relief to the game's linear and cutscene-driven story, a pretty dour affair featuring gangsters, detectives and people getting slaughtered. In between, there are restaurants, convenience stores, driving ranges, arcades and random fist fights with deadbeats. There's also a pregnant lady who demands child support from you but is actually wearing a large rubber ball under her shirt, a guy who needs a steady stream of tissues to plug up his running nose, a petition to save the trees which is a front for an extortion ring, secret parties, illicit video dealers and nerds who attack you with laser swords.

The streets are lined with baffling non sequiturs. Scripted encounters with pedestrians last a few minutes, convey some offbeat theme or situation, usually just in text, and then vanish forever. Urging a guitarist to pursue his dream or feeding a picky cat might feel inconsequential compared to saving your love interest from a sniper attack, and why, in this crime epic, is the protagonist spending half an hour helping a man buy presents for his girlfriend? Yakuza 2 is like Mass Effect if every piece of side content was like the fan who wanted an autograph. These small, weird moments would seem like afterthoughts if their inclusion in this game wasn't so deliberate and unapologetic.

The city is steeped in subdued surrealism: in Osaka, no one thinks it's insane for this yakuza to field all these bizarre and unimportant problems, like the guy who claims to have an icecream toothache and shakes down a store owner down for dentist money. This aspect of the game's character is self-evidently incongruent with its very serious and bloody mafia story. The contrast might be more irritatingly dissonant if it wasn't also so charmingly absurd. There's a likable quality to an open world that works overtime to hold the player's interest rather than abdicating all control of the sandbox. Other games often hide backstory and lore in incidental characters and elective missions, but Yakuza 2 tries to make them as superficially entertaining as possible, even when limited to dialogue text.

I like Yakuza 2 because of how it slowly makes you realise in the middle of a fight that you've been violently beating a room of Mahjong players, and that when you win a bowling match against one of the employees, you win a sealed fried chicken lunch. All right! The silliness can work against the long and humourless story -- every character has a remarkable tolerance for getting shot -- but they usually stay separate, to their mutual benefit. The plot remains high melodrama, and Osaka a place where hilarious things happen.

It leads to a strange kind of roleplaying, where your actions might not reflect either your personality or your notion of a tough yakuza character. You might think it's a really bad idea to involve yourself in a certain sidequest, but follow through on it anyway because Yakuza 2 is trusted to make it worth your while and ensure that you'll get more than extra playtime out of it. Example: A loud and obnoxious drunk is harassing a cabaret girl on the street. Usually the RPG hero's cue, instead her boss shows up with a bouncer and threatens the drunk to lay off. At that moment you are given the opportunity to intervene on the drunk's behalf. If you accept, you'll fight the bouncer, after which the drunk is revealed to be a famous manga author who is now really upset that you did that because he was trying to research what it was like to get beaten up. Now the boss is enthusing wildly because he's a big fan of this guy's work. The author changes his tune and proposes a manga written about you. Never has the JRPG mainstay "..." been more effectively employed.

For hypothesis' sake, imagine a game that was comprised entirely of these moments, without any pretense at a larger story. Yakuza 2 is not the worse for its operatic revenge saga; it hints at a different model of game, not a better version of the extant one. Pretend that you weren't flying to Osaka to settle a score, but to hang out in the city for the weekend. It would be a game with all the same bowling and golf minigames and the self-contained and ludicrous vignettes, but with much deeper potential for interaction, the ability to enter into extended relationships with other characters, operating under the overall premise of cool things that you could happen on your vacation. You don't start the game thinking that you're about to be drawn into a web of intrigue and body counts, but that you're in a new city for two days and you should make the most of it. It recalls Warren Spector's long-proposed "city block" game concept -- a comparatively narrow game space with much higher levels of interaction -- without Spector's penchant for science fiction and conspiracies. It'd be Lost in Translation.

It might be a novel representation of a game world, and if it was anything like Yakuza 2 there'd be a surprise on every street corner. I wonder, though, how long a game like that would be able to sustain itself, or remain tolerable outside of the overt direction of a narrative or conventional video game goals. Without any counterbalance, what was refreshing in Yakuza 2 could easily become monotonous or lack any incentive to continue. Could it work? I hope so. I'd visit.

Graduation Day

Who remembers the true meaning of the Game of the Year awards? Ostensibly a celebration of quality games, the tradition has garnered some negative connotations. It can look like an arbitrary list-making exercise, driven by an irresistible urge to compare things, and in which hardcore gamers seriously invest themselves because it's fun to argue about rankings and the biases of the enthusiast press. Most of these lists only ever seem effective at provoking high-strung forum posters. Also, the GOTY season is unfortunately handcuffed to the ostentatious frat shimmer of the Spike VGAs.

I think the role of Game of the Year within video game discussion communities is as the curtain call for all the nominees. December's festivities were the send-off for Mirror's Edge, Fallout 3, Spore and all their friends. Why do we need such a thing? Those games aren't going anywhere. Well, they are.

In May, Grand Theft Auto IV emerged from its cocoon as the most important video game of all time, a scion destined to change the gaming landscape. It was so exceptionally influential that a month later it was forgotten en masse for Metal Gear Solid 4: another once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece promptly devalued. Every superstar gets a honeymoon and a backlash, and then most of them disappear forever. A few stick around as game design examplars, but older games are valuable primarily as nostalgia trips. The games of 2008 were quickly assessed and the thoughts of hardcore gamers and reviewers turned to what was next.

Gamers move on and their initial enthusiasm diminishes, until that magic time of year: GOTY, the reprise.

After a hiatus, all the year's major games return to the forefront of public conscious and briefly, they all matter again. No More Heroes and Sins of a Solar Empire, 11 and 10 months old respectively, might be dinosaurs by December but even they are welcomed back. They're part of the Class of 2008, an erratic assortment of triple-A, indie and casual titles linked only by their age and their fashion sense and cultural sensibilities with which they grew up. Dead Space catches up with Valkyria Chronicles and Far Cry 2, and like a high school reunion, everyone is reevaluated. What was unjustly popular once and has received their comeuppance, and what used to be niche and unpopular and is still unpopular. Special achievement awards and dubious honours are handed out: who makes the most money, who got fat. It's not really like a reunion, though, because this cast of characters won't ever get another one.

I've never been to a high school reunion but I have been to a university graduation and Game of the Year is like a month of graduation days. The ceremony serves as the gaming industry's cathartic purge of these games from their system. It was their year, and now they're done. Their names are called -- Braid, Saints Row 2, Left 4 Dead, Silent Hill: Homecoming, Prince of Persia, Persona 4, The Club, Audiosurf, Boom Blox, PixelJunk Eden, Gears of War 2, Burnout Paradise, World of Goo -- heralding their ascendancy into history, and if they're lucky, out of irrelevancy. That was 2008. Let's never talk about it again.

Time After Time

The tragedy of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time's ending -- spoiler warning on this paragraph for Jake Rodkin and others -- is that while the Prince has saved the life of his new love Farah by rewinding time, she has now never met him. The Prince remembers their relationship, and still loves her, but they can no longer be together. The irony of the ending is that soon the Prince will forget all this too, as will the audience. In 2008 the slate was wiped clean and the Prince and the Princess met anew and fell in love for what is now the third time. Their story, once patterned after the fables of One Thousand and One Nights, has become Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

After only two games, not including a DS card-based spinoff and a baffling array of repackaged PSP and Wii versions, Prince of Persia needed a reboot. Maybe audiences viewed the series as inaccessible or irrelevant; thought of its history as baggage. The new (and conservatively-titled) Prince of Persia erased from its legacy all but platforms, a sword, magic, a girl and a guy who doesn't seem either princely or Persian but does appear on the cover. The series has taken the drastic step of resetting its entire history, shortly after it reset its entire history in 2003. Sands of Time quietly called itself a prequel, not a reboot, probably because the film Casino Royale hadn't yet been made, and Ubisoft overestimated the audience's protectiveness of Prince of Persia continuity.

Before Casino Royale, James Bond had worn out his welcome. The secret agent himself was an old, larger-than-life caricature and the films were creatively stagnant. Even though Bond's love interests and physical appearance were reset all the time, those changes alone couldn't halt the series' gradual decline. If anyone was going to take James Bond seriously again, there would have to be a clean break from a 40-year, 20-movie quagmire of gadgets and supervillains, and it would have to start all over. It took Prince of Persia three games to get to that point.

It's been pretty easy to fall out of love with Prince of Persia. It was great in 1989 and then never again until Sands of Time, which had unequivocally divorced itself from the preceding three games and from the clunky misfire Prince of Persia 3D in particular. To broaden its appeal, the roles were recast, the story was retold, and it regained the attractive simplicity the series had lost after 1989. It made itself young again. (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, released the same year, pulled off the same trick, but because it's not quite so permissible to "reboot" Star Wars, placed its events 4,000 years before the movies.) A year later, the series discovered a new nadir in Warrior Within, prompting another rethink. After two promising starts, Prince of Persia sank each time until someone came along with a crane to haul its corpse out of a tar pit.

Prince of Persia has never ended well, and so Ubisoft brings it back to the beginning. That was where the potential was, and it's the only way anyone will care again. Where does Prince of Persia keep going wrong, and is it doomed to be eternally reinvented?

Prince of Persia began with, and has twice returned to, a fairy tale in the style of Aladdin and the magic lamp. A noble prince overcomes an evil vizier to rescue a beautiful princess. That's the origin of its narrow fiction. The initial game mechanics have attained a similar timelessness within the video gaming canon: the 1989 game directly communicates objectives (the princess, level exits) and obstacles (traps, monsters) to the player in an unencumbered language less and less possible with each successive gameplay generation. It offered the template for a genre just as simple parabolic fairy tales and myths have inspired later fiction.

Fables aren't so charmingly minimalist when they're progressively convoluted sagas, but because Prince of Persia's a franchise it must move in that direction. The Prince of Persia sequels retrofit myths into trilogies with quick-time events and DLC. If Sands of Time's time rewind ability doesn't feel anachronistically complex compared to its still-basic platforming and combat, it's because the mechanic is easily understood in terms of moving back and forward -- far more intuitive than back, forward, A, B, right trigger, and tap X while running to execute the Whirling Dance of Blades (Warrior Within's contribution.)

The recent games haven't been comfortable with their predecessors' ordinary elegance. In Warrior Within and Two Thrones, we see an affected "adult", "sophisticated" take on the fairy tale and Prince of Persia '08 updates the fiction for modern audiences via a sassy hero. Out of the series' two completed trilogies, the first game in each still stands as the best. It's proven difficult to improve on a classic, but not so hard to wave all the progress away and pretend none of it ever happened. This is the franchise that can't grow up.

From the beginning, Prince of Persia was at heart romantic, idealistic and nostalgic for the 10th century, or for being ten years old and reading about viziers, djinn and young heroes. It was never meant to grow up. Sands of Time delivered with a slight relationship story about a boy and a girl in a world of magic, and with its colourful visuals, Prince of Persia '08 embraces that style halfheartedly, reserving the right to snark about it. The game pledges that there's more to come, but is the new trilogy already off to an unsteady start? Historically, it's all downhill from here. This Prince is off on a great adventure, but maybe he has less time than he thinks.

The Prince may be cursed to run through that dungeon chasing the same girl for the rest of his life, every five years forgetting the way out. But it's alright. That's where he's loved.