A Musical Of Punches: Disjointed Narrative and Street Fighter V

Perspectives

Abstract: Street Fighter V’s long awaited story mode is terrible. The writing is poor and the plot is something you’ve already seen a thousand times. The narrative and gameplay poorly align, transforming the story mode into a bizarre musical where punches and shoryukens are the songs. Like many other games, Street Fighter V makes the mistake of relying too strongly on film as the model on how to shape its story. When video games lean into what makes them unique from movies, like their interactivity and perspective, their narratives can succeed.

Let’s not beat around the bush here, Street Fighter V’s story mode is bad. Almost unplayably so. It is a huge bummer. As a kid that grew up glued to the shiny Street Fighter II arcade cabinet, I spent hours creating the world of Street Fighter in my mind. From character dialogue to stages to moves, I used everything I could to create the universe. Given my past experience with Capcom fighting games my expectations for Street Fighter V’s story mode were quite low. It promised to be a step above the comic book freeze frame storytelling of Capcom’s games past games, with 3D models and dialogue and a compelling narrative. I suppose it delivers two of the three.

As of writing this, I’m a little past the story mode’s halfway point. What I’ve experienced so far is 90 minutes of stilted dialogue and haphazardly assembled vignettes that roughly come together to form a narrative. Street Fighter V’s story mode represents so much of what has been wrong with narrative in video games. The writing is god awful. The plot is something a middle-schooler could have whipped up on a lazy afternoon. The action is disjointed—characters hop around with little to no sense of geography or time, motivations shift dynamically and without purpose, and every scene is just an excuse to hobble together an eclectic group of characters to, you guessed it, fight each other. Street Fighter V’s final offense is one that’s been committed over and over again in video games: the gameplay and story are totally disconnected.

Guys, please. Street Fighter V's story isn't worth the fist bump.

Street Fighter V’s story mode is broken up into two discrete parts: non-interactive cutscenes and fights. Never do the two really meet. The narrative heft is put forward in the cutscenes. The Shadaloo bad guys explain why they want to EMP the world, the good guys talk with one another to plan how to stop the evil organization, etc. The fighting, however, exists almost totally outside of the story. In fact, most fights in the story feel forcefully injected between the plot that’s taking place. Characters will get mad at one another at the drop of a dime, or out of the blue will demand a test of a fighter’s skill. Anything to get two people to clash. Playing through the story mode is a strange experience. The shift between cutscene movie and fights is jarring. Many characters come across as trigger-happy psychopaths looking for any excuse to hadouken one another. Street Fighter V’s story mode never lets characters earn their right to fight one another, nor does it skillfully blend fighting in with the larger narrative.

I'm sure you can guess the outcome of the scene by now.

In many ways, playing Street Fighter V’s story mode is like watching a musical. The characters go about their business until BAM, they suddenly need to fight. Like a musical in which people suddenly need to sing. This isn’t the first time this particular dissonance between gameplay and story has been compared to theater. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright described how he approached blending the titular character’s fights into the film saying, “We thought it should play out like a musical in a way in terms of the fights are not dissimilar to the songs.” Scott Pilgrim leaned heavily on video games as an influence. This approach worked for Scott Pilgrim, perhaps given the strength of the writing and directing of the film. It doesn’t change the fact that the fights are jarring, dislodging the viewer (if only momentarily) from the experience. That jolt has a more profound impact when playing a video game like Street Fighter V. The player agency in the action combined with the general interactivity of video games make it so that, when gameplay is inelegantly inserted into game’s narrative, you’re thrown pretty far off from the experience.

Scott Pilgrim is a good musical of punches. Street Fighter V is not.

Street Fighter V also suffers from a problem very recently highlighted by the great Brad Bird. Bird shared his concerns about using video games as inspiration for filmmaking and storytelling in a recent interview. The director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles cited video games’ point of view problem. He said, “I feel like video games are a bad influence for storytelling because they are not directed points of view. They are about floating around universes…a lot of times it’s just motion.” Story mode in Street Fighter V is all about universe and not about a singular, or cohesive, point of view. Perspective shifts happen every couple minutes. Huge fluctuations in characters and tones and locations happen so frequently it is easy to get lost in the fold. By giving every character equal representation in the plot, no one matters. The end result is schizophrenic and astonishingly boring. There’s nothing compelling you to get attached or to move forward.

As inflammatory as Bird’s statement can come off, he does hit on a truth that video game narrative creators need to realize. Simply adapting a film approach and applying it to video games rarely works. It is immediately obvious that Street Fighter V wants the story mode to feel like a movie. Fortunately we already know how well a Street Fighter movie works, and it’s not very pretty. Games have long thought going the Hollywood route is the way to bring great narratives into video games. Rarely is that the case. Only the true masters of the craft can get away with this approach, like Naughty Dog with The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. Nearly every other film-inspired story mode in video games comes across, at best, like a good “B” movie. It’s a point of view problem, it’s a length problem, and it’s an interactivity problem.

Unless you're Naughty Dog, your studio might want to think twice about
making your story "cinematic."

While Street Fighter V fundamentally misunderstands what makes a video game story great (hint: it’s not about making a musical of punches), other games shape narrative construction to fit the unique vehicle that is video games. In response to Brad Bird’s statement about video game narrative, creative lead at Naughty Dog Neil Druckman tweeted, “Someone needs to play Brothers [A Tale of Two Sons] or Ico or Papers Please or Portal or Inside or The Secret of Monkey Island or…” Druckman is right and Bird is wrong. There are fantastic narrative in games. Druckman’s list has something in common, though—none of these games structure their story like a movie. Video game narratives work when they lean into the interactivity inherent in games, and from the unique perspectives games can offer the player. Certain narrative devices like environmental storytelling work so well in games, even outshining their film peers. Games like Gone Home and Portal and Ico and Firewatch have fantastic narratives that would never work the same way on film. Video game narratives have the potential for greatness when they are designed from the ground up to be a video game narrative, not a movie facsimile.

The best video game stories adapt narrative structures to fit
the interactive medium they exist within.

For my love of Street Fighter and its characters I’ll fight my way to the end of Street Fighter V’s story mode. I owe it to my arcade heritage and my fondness for the fighting game community. I just wish Street Fighter V was more Shadow of the Colossus and less “action-movie the fighting game musical."

Intelligent Design: Persona 4 and Capitalizing on Familiarity

Article

Abstract: My time spent playing Persona 4 built a multifaceted familiarity that fuels my passion for more. Too often in gaming, sequels and spin-offs of beloved franchises are created for one sole purpose: to gouge the pockets of devoted fans. Atlas’s work in expanding Persona 4’s game universe, however, is quite the opposite. Persona 4 Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Persona 4 Arena and Persona 4 Dancing All Night all pay homage to the beloved Persona 4 while being great games in their own right. Atlas’s approach to capitalizing on familiarity should serve as the model for the industry.

I miss hanging out with my friends in Inaba. This summer I spent a year making friends, solving crimes, and accepting my true self in a small town in the Japanese countryside. I still remember the jokes I shared with the goofy Yosuke, the heart to hearts with Yukiko, and my budding romance with the pop star turned high school student Rise. With one game, one playthrough, I became a lifelong fan of Persona 4.

Persona 4 Golden on the Playstation Vita was some of the best 80 hours I’ve spent gaming this year. If you haven’t already, you can check out my review in which the praise is heaped on pretty heavy. I was a little skeptical coming into the experience. It had been a long time since I played a more traditional JRPG, tropes and turn-based combat and all. But Persona 4 converted me fast. The experience is rich, engaging, and distinct. There was just so much the game did right: writing, character development, aesthetics, social simulation, early to learn but difficult to master combat, dungeon crawling, and plenty more. In the months since playing it, one aspect has stuck with me the longest. What Persona 4 did so well that it left a profound impact on how I think about games. And that’s how it builds familiarity.

No you're incredible, Persona 4 Golden.

Everything about Persona 4’s design works to build your connection with the world. Persona 4 Golden is one of the few games in which the long time it take to complete is thoughtfully incorporated into your experience. Many JRPGs are long because, well, JRPGs are expected to be long. There’s grinding and sidequests and meandering around the world map. The stories are long and build upon themselves, but often involve a series of twists and turns to keep the heroes moving from one location to the next. Persona 4’s length is laid out from the very beginning—you’ll be spending a year in Inaba. As you work your way through the game day by day its world becomes more clearly in focus. You become immersed. The game feels long because a year is a long time. You change and learn and grow a lot over the course of 365 days. Persona 4 smartly uses this length to draw you in and keep you there.

Never before has time to completion so thoroughly enhanced my experience
 with a game.

The familiarity that Persona 4 creates as a result of its length is multifaceted. As you might expect, you develop a strong familiarity with the game’s systems. Building S-Links, fusing personas, pulling off all-out attacks. You also gain a deep understanding of your surrounding world & geography. By the end of the game I could navigate the streets of Inaba and the winding hallways of Yasogami High with my eyes closed. The familiarity extends to your party, your core group of friends within the game. As I wrote in my review, the closeness I felt with the game’s characters transcended what I usually experience with fictional characters. Kanji and Naoto and Teddy and Chie now feel like old friends. The dozens of hours I spent playing Persona 4 Golden also led to a deep closeness with the smaller aspects of the game. The voices the sounds the music. It ranges from main theme songs all the way down to the tiny bleeps and bloops of in-game menus. Persona 4 has worked its way into my consciousness in a way that I never expected, and in a way that fueled my desire for more.

We sure had some good times, old friends.

I’m certainly not alone in wanting as much Persona 4 as possible. Ever since it’s original 2008 release on the PlayStation 2, the game has had a vocal legion of fans craving more of Yu Narukami and his Inaba crew. Atlas, the development studio, was well aware of this demand. The fans asked and Atlas delivered. Persona 4 has had three spin-off games: Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Persona 4 Arena and Persona 4 Dancing All Night. It’s easy to be skeptical of these derivative titles: so often you come across cheap ‘cash ins’ in the video game industry. I’m sure you can all think of examples where an IP has been used to justify a downright awful game. Like, say, any non-Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot or essentially any Sonic the Hedgehog game after the initial two or three on the Sega Genesis. The Persona 4 spin-off games, however, are fantastic. Atlas knew they could capitalize on this familiarity. They avoided releasing fan-exploitative cash grab titles by not violating one principal rule: don’t release a bad game. The spin-offs pay great homage to the source material while still being great standalone games. Let me briefly go through how Atlas accomplished this feat, and why they should serve as inspiration for any company hoping to use an IP in new ways.

Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth (PQ) is something I’ll touch on only briefly, as I have the least experience with it. PQ is the ultimate wish fulfillment game. It combines the beloved world and characters from Persona 4 with the ultra-fan-favorite characters from Persona 3. It builds a massive new story for the player to explore. Atlas knows what they do well: make JRPGs. And that’s what they’ve done here. Except in PQ it’s not just more of the same. An RPG spin-off that utilized the exact gameplay mechanics from its inspiration could feel like a cheap cash grab. ‘Hey look, it’s Persona 4 again but now with more characters!’ This kind of exact copying leads to series/IP fatigue (see Assassin’s Creed). But that’s not the case here. PQ ditches the 3^rd person exploration for old-school first-person dungeon crawling like we had in early western RPGs like Ultima Underworld or Might & Magic. It’s a mechanic that plummeted out of popularity, maintained in the fringes of modern gaming with titles like Etrian Odyssey and Legend of Grimrock. PQ is a meaty, substantive and unique experience for Persona 4 fans and one where the efforts of the developer show clearly in the final product. Atlas cares not just about making a new Persona 4 game, but make a great new game that is connected to Persona 4. The distinction is important.

Persona Q brings something new to the Persona RPG table.
It's not just about reliving your time with Persona 4.

Persona 4 Arena and its sequel, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax (P4AU), even more clearly show Atlas’s devotion to making Persona 4 spin-offs great. P4AU is a 2D fighting game featuring characters from both Persona 4 and 3. Atlas, and the Persona team, get pretty distant from their RPG roots with this one. Designing fighting game systems is almost certainly nothing like designing social simulation and turn-based RPG combat. It’s clear that Atlas had a vision for the game, however, and wanted to make the best possible experience. To accomplish this, Atlas pulled in probably the best 2D fighting game developers to make P4AU: Arc System Works. Arc System Works is responsible for some of the most important 2D ‘anime’ fighters of the past two decades: Blazblue, Guilty Gear, & Under Night In-Birth. Their finesse at creating deep fighting systems, fluid attacks and flashy combos serve as the foundation for the excellent P4AU. One of hallmarks of a well-designed fighting game is to build an avid community: a community that is there to learn the intricacies of the characters, from frame data to mix-ups to bread and butter combos. P4AU still has that, so much so that it was featured on stream this year at the biggest fighting game tournament in the world. P4AU is a balanced, thoughtful fighter and an excellent Persona 4 game. Atlas went beyond the call of duty to provide a lengthy and engaging story mode for the game that builds upon Persona 4’s overarching narrative and sheds new light on its protagonists. There were so many corners Atlas could have cut with P4AU, but what they delivered excelled on all levels. If you want to make a fighting game based on your IP, P4AU is the way to do it.

Persona 4 Arena was the best reviewed fighting game of 2012. Its
community is still thriving in 2015. That's impressive.

Finally the latest Persona 4 spin-off, Persona 4 Dancing All Night (P4D). The last, and perhaps my favorite of the bunch, P4D is a visual novel slash PSOne-esq rhythm game hybrid that’s exceedingly fun and brilliantly designed. Atlas tackles the challenge of a new central gameplay mechanic, and once again succeeds by drawing inspiration from the past and combining it with engaging RPG-mechanics. In many ways, P4D is the spin-off that’s most successful at capitalizing on the familiarity built by Persona 4. Everything about your time with the game is brought back in fun ways. The music, which was supplementary to your time with Persona 4, now serves as the basis for how you interact with P4D. You know the songs, but now you can fully engage with them. Playing P4D is like playing Persona 4 all over again, but in a smaller (and new) package. It’s a phenomenal feeling that I’ve never really had before, neither with direct sequels nor spin-offs. P4D, on top of being an excellent Persona 4 game, is also an excellent rhythm game. It takes cues from best in the genre, like DDR and Bust a Groove, with great press-and-hold notes, double notes, alternate button record scratches and a powered-up fever mode. Instead of boring, static or abstract backgrounds, Atlas put the effort into motion capture to animate realistic and character-specific dances that happen while you’re playing a song. P4D also works to be a perfect experience for all levels of skill: bringing in RPG-like systems of item collection that allow you to perfectly titrate your difficulty level (you can make notes slower or faster, preserve your life meter longer, extend combos easier, or make all notes invisible). Atlas also expands upon the idea of what a rhythm game can be by creating a fully fleshed out visual novel story mode that uses the dancing as both narrative and gameplay. And, I should mention, Atlas didn’t skimp on the visual novel aspect either. Character models are animated, every single line of the game is voice acted, and the story pays great homage to the Persona 4 characters I care about so deeply. P4D exudes design confidence, showing that Atlas not only knows its world, but knows how to perfectly expand upon it. I expected P4D but to be fun, but not great. Turns out it’s exceptional.

My fiancée and I still cannot get enough of Persona 4 Dancing All Night.
It just does everything so well. And it's super fun.

If every studio put the care into building upon an IP like Atlas and the Persona team have done with Persona 4, we’d live in a much richer game space. Atlas deserves commendation for its commitment to honoring fans and creating great games that exist for reasons other than gouging cash from its committed audience. The finesse with which Persona 4’s universe was expanded gives me all the more confidence in the team to create an awesome Persona 5. I can’t wait.