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Tof EklundI'd originally intended to get this posted for Valentines Day, as the first in what I hope will be a series of reviews of indie games that deal with sex, sexuality and romance in ways that are interesting from both a narrative and a gameplay perspective. I wasn't able to get it written in time, so here it is.
If you just look at a few screenshots, Saint Bomber's Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle looks like a garden variety RPG-Maker release, a fantasy JRPG with a metafictional sense of humor. Nothing could be further from the truth about this almost-entirely relationship-driven game. Even if it were conventional otherwise, the protagonist of the game, the Dutchess Elstwhere, is the most interesting protagonist I've ever encountered in a RPG Maker game, and one of the most compelling I've played in any game.
The other characters are similarly well-developed, and the game turns not on combat (which is all-but absent) but on your interactions with the other characters. This makes Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle more like a “visual novel” (in the Japanese style) than a RPG, but with a vastly greater sense of exploration and control than visual novels allow. Where you go and who you talk to triggers events (often, especially early in the game, event “cascades” that are a little overwhelming), so much of gameplay consists of which of your leads to follow up next in unraveling the mysteries of the Marque of Wulfhammer.
Also, though this game starts with the arrangement of a marriage, it is actually a yuri (“girls love” or lesbian) story, in which half of the mystery has to do with the aforementioned Duchess discovering who she is, after acquiring the freedom to “be” anything. It's difficult to talk about this game without spoiling elements of the plot, so this review continues after the jump, with a few spoilers, but those just from the first 5 or 10 minutes of play.
I mentioned that there is little combat in this game. There is good reason for that – your character, Duchess Elstwhere, is explicitly not one of the adventurers in this story -– she “should” be a NPC, and an NPC “reward” at that (at least at the story's beginning). The adventurers in this game, the “Awesome Fellowship” have overthrown an evil king, Elstwhere's uncle Greyghast, and the Duchess is, at the start of the game, sent off to marry Embric of Wulfhammer, the adventurer's leader, thus literally wedding the old aristocracy to the new heroes of the realm.
That itself is interesting -– fantasy games almost never deal with the reality of political marriage in the medieval setting. But the twist (one of many in this game) comes in, when she arrives, Lord Embric is missing, presumably off adventuring on his own as he apparently has a habit of doing. Dutchess Elstwhere is left to her own devices as she tries to ingratiate herself with Embric's subjects, who fear “Greyghast's heir,” and Embric's adventuring buddies, who look at her with suspicion. Complicating matters further, she soon discovers that there is a mutual attraction between herself and some of Wulfhammer's female denizens, placing her duty and her heart into conflict in a “queer” twist on a classic theme.
The characterization isn't flawless: in a concession to player choice, the Dutchess's sexual orientation occasionally seems “up for grabs,” and early in the game she is often acted-upon rather than active, though this sets the stage for her becoming more in control of her own life later. Despite this, she ranks in my mind as one of the great queer protagonists of new media, along with Megan Rose Gedris's Fiona Thompson and Alexandra Erin's Mackenzie Blaze (nota bene: Erin's webfiction is sex-positive but also sexually explict and contains BDSM content).
There is sex in this game, but it isn't explicit. This isn't an h-game, and while there are titillating moments (depending on what one finds to be titillating), there are more moments that are either sweet or heart-wrenching. Despite not being sexually explicit, it is romance, desire, and, yes, sex that drive both plot and gameplay in Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle, taking the place that combat and conquest have in most games.
The game's event system means that who you talk to and where you go in which order are important. After an initial deluge of events in which every conversation seems to offer an event to follow up on, the game settles into a steady set of decisions as to where to go and/or who to talk to next. The order of events matters somewhat in terms of what becomes possible in the game, and greatly in terms of the player's experience of the game. The argument that how one plays a game shapes its story seems to be something Saint Bomber has taken to heart.
The game also has a bevvy of endings, of which I have seen... all but one (I think). Wisely, the game allows you to keep playing after reaching any particular ending, by having the Dutchess wake up having “dreamt” that ending. This is especially valuable as not all of the endings are happy, and one that I encountered early in play introduces a malign paradigm shift that I honestly found distressing. As gameplay progresses, one can unlock extended and revised versions of some of the previous endings, allowing one to “fix” the narrative.
Elements in many of the endings are not merely incompatible (e.g., you can't have it both ways), but “incompossible,” meaning that they depend on differences in the nature of the game world and backstory -– you might say they take place in parallel worlds. This allows a player to “choose” the ending he or she likes best and call it canon, though anyone who stops short of a complete play-through to the game's final ending will miss the culmination of a hidden plot structure laced throughout the entire game.
The one frustrating element in the game is that, as one approaches the end of the game, the event triggers have mostly been exhausted, and one can spend hours trying to unlock one new bit of conversation. There is a gentle in-game hint system (the Dutchess's diary), but it isn't up to the task. This flaw is accentuated by the way that the game (intentionally) doesn't ever completely unlock the “world.” There are interesting-looking places on the map that you will never get to explore –- this makes the world feel more real, but can leave one trying to figure out how to do the impossible.
Highly unconventional gameplay hiding behind a conventional facade, an occasional lack of polish to the system, and the game's queer themes make it a labor of love. I can't image what a pitch meeting with a publisher would be like for this title –- though I think there might be more of an audience for this sort of game than the conventional wisdom would dictate. As with the continued survival of Paradox Games, the very existence of Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle shows that new media can be successful though diversity and originality, capable of resisting monopolistic capture.
Saint Bomber has just announced that a sequel is in the works, and a version of the game with more original art may be forthcoming.
Is an RPG a role-playing game?
The review implies the commonly accepted 'norm' about CRPGs:
"the game turns not on combat (which is all-but absent) but on your interactions with the other characters. This makes Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle more like a “visual novel” (in the Japanese style) than a RPG"
By the public standard, an RPG (abbreviation for Role-playing Game) is a combat-centered game with exploration elements, that features characters full of stats that are all combat-oriented either directly (i.e. strength/speed) or indirectly (i.e. some mental stat that determines combat spell efficiency) and these stats can be advanced by combat. Also equipment (mostly combat gear) that can be constantly improved, and there is usually a cliche story that might or might not be linear (99% of the cases it is).
Given the false and dishonest labelling of such games as "Role-playing Games", it is time more and more "visual novels" and adventure games are made with "RPG"-like GUIs and featuring some "CRPG" game mechanisms. Such games, that "CRPG purists" will unfortunately take for "cross genre" implementations, can only do good to the CRPG genre by re-claiming the most essential attributes of what it is supposed to be about. Namely, impersonating the character and role-playing him/her/it, preferably in a non-linear interactive storytelling environment.
I will release a Role-playing Adventure game soon that will be a example of re-claiming the role-playing aspect in RPGs, once we manage to complete the final test phase and I am able to fix the remaining few bugs.
Really? I thought the whole
Really? I thought the whole thing was kind of... gratuitous. Lots of getting the women to disrobe around one another, etc. Admittedly, I didn't play more than, ehhhnn... twenty minutes or so; something about the way the dialogue was written was far too self-aware and referential for me to get into. It's too glib to really take anything in. Even for a parody, none of the characters ever behaved like real people enough for me to take them seriously, and combined with the long, rambling dialogues about nothing at all and the rapid-fire jokes, I just found it too difficult to really get into, and got bored and quit.
Don't get me wrong; it's clearly had a massive amount of effort put into it, and completing something like this is a laudable achievement in and of itself. (I've tried a lot of RPGMaker toolset demos... having the skill and ambition to actually finish anything worthwhile is rare.) Maybe the narrative gets more meaningful later on. It's just not for me. That's a good review, though, so I may try it again.
RPG is roket propelt grenayd!
This is an age-old problem. The closest thing to a 'traditional' role-playing experience (in the computerized single-player) is an IF: you tell the parser (substituting for GM) what you want done, and it tells you what happened. CYOA's (or which-way-stories, if your prefer an in-house term) don't really come close to that, to say nothing of dungeon-crawls like Diablo.
However there is a certain terminology that is accepted, and if we start to call CRPGs- "Computer Assisted Tactical Simulations With Statistical Advancement" (a snappy acronym for that is : CoATSWiSA, or perhaps CATS-StA), and instead call Interactive Fiction- "Role Playing Games", we'll have a very confused audience.
what is a traditional role-playing game experience?
When I think of a traditional RPG, I think of a pen-and-paper thing like D&D (and The Fantasy Trip, but I'm old). And my experiences with those tended to be, I went around, I fought monsters based on die rolls, maybe I talked to some NPCs, repeat.
In fact the cRPG norm doesn't seem that different from the gameplay of the old The Fantasy Trip microquests like Grail Quest. You explore the map, you talk to NPCs, get quests from people (I guess there was a lot more of this in Grail Quest than the others), but most of the gameplay is in tactical combats. The old games didn't give you a characterized PC, but I don't know if otherwise the computerized versions have strayed that much from the norm.
@matt_w: On the tabletop,
@matt_w: On the tabletop, Role-playing Games evolved a lot from the late 80s to late 90s. However, from the mid 90s and on, the whole thing went from a niche market to a truly negligible one. All the evolutionary achievements in tabletop RPGs, the diverse rulesets/mechanisms, storytelling- and drama-oriented gameplay, everything was bulldozered away by MMORPGs and CRPGs that could target a much-much wider audience by providing the lowest common denominator "diabloish" style of gaming.
If it sounds like you missed a lot of cool things in tabletop Role-playing, then yeah, you definitely did. But you can still pick up a lot of those nice late 90s / Y2K+ rulebooks and scenarios and if you can find some more interested people, have an experience that is way different from (and IMO much superior to) CPRGs and early tabletop RPGs.
I played this near the end
I played this near the end of December but put off writing about it for whatever reason. This is a good review!** I also thought it was a melding of jrpg and visual novel; effectively it's an rpg where chatting with townsfolk and inspecting the environment was the game. I dug it, played it for like two hours without realizing I did so. The writing wasn't jaw-dropping or anything, but as somebody who typically steers clear of This Sort of Thing I enjoyed it. The sexuality wasn't gratuitous, it's something I'd imagine a healthy teen could stomach.
I honestly don't know why I'm growing more attached to 'RPGs' as of late.
** I would have ended the review with "Lesbians!", with that word constituting its own paragraph, but to each their own.
@Igor: yeah
What I forgot to say was, no matter what happens to be closer to the commercial heyday of the tabletop RPG, the character-based stuff in a nonlinear storytelling environment sounds a lot more interesting to me. I'd have grabbed this game right away if it were available for Mac.
Though now I do kind of want someone to do a retrospective on Grail Quest, which I vaguely remember as having a bit more of a story and quest-giving NPC structure than the other TFT soloquests like Death Quest and even Security Station.
Comment Comments
Thanks, everyone.
IBelanszky, I was thinking something along those lines when I was playing this game, but that thought didn't make it into the review. I'm a long-time tabletop RPG player, and mostly "alternative" in my tastes. I've played D&D and White Wolf, but these days, I'm really itching to play some jeepforms. Please let me know when your game comes out - I'd be happy to review it, unless someone else here has dibs.
DoraDoraBoBora - the game is really heavy on the metafictional gags and breaking the fourth wall early on, not to mention the running gag of the Duchess loosing her clothing. Some things in the early part of the game "pay off" later, but mainly the characters and story get better. Spend some time with the guards and regular people around the castle - resolve their subplots, and see if you aren't hooked by then.
And thanks, Dustin. Let me correct my "mistake" here...
Lesbians!
Normally I tend to steer
Normally I tend to steer away from JRPGs, but I have to say this one grabbed me. It is not Dostoyevsky by any means, but if you follow along a a bit, it'll get you a little yarn on love, loyalty and some things that are not what they seem, at least in the storyline I pursued. I was quietly relieved that some of the tiresome cliches of fantasy was turned on their heads. Not mention the satisfaction of bumping an evil skeletal lord of doom of a high cliff. :)
Re: games with interesting takes on sex
You could do a hell of a lot worse than reviewing the tabletop game Bliss Stage by Ben Lehman. I'd do it, but I'm too wrapped up in making a BS fangame to be objective.
It was great!
I don't play many games, because after Planescape: Torment, everything has just seemed so dull. This one was a fine exception, because it let me explore the story without the battles and other miscellaneous annoyances. And somehow, it was more interesting to read about lesbians than regular relationships.
On a semi-related note, I love this blog, because I keep hearing about cool games here. It's inspiring to read about all these unusual and often awesome ideas, even if I don't play them.
I have reoccurring dreams about making one myself, most probably a visual novel or another similarly story-centered form. Maybe I've kind of missed the meaning of the whole 'playing' part of games?