My thoughts on Tengai Makyo II's story
Dec 28, 2018 6:10:50 GMT
sunteam_paul, nectarsis, and 1 more like this
Post by samiam on Dec 28, 2018 6:10:50 GMT
It was by far the best selling PC Engine game of all time. Hucard or CD.
When it came out in March 1992, Tengai Makyo II was reportedly the single most costly video game production in history and the most ambitious use of the CD-ROM format to date. The sheer scale of it is so astonishing that if it weren't for the language barrier, I'd say that any self-respecting enthusiast of early-90s Japanese video games ought to experience it.
But how does Tengai Makyo II actually stack up as an RPG?
I think that what non-Japanese-speakers want to know most is whether the story is as incredible as the production values make it look. I recently beat Tengai Makyo II for the first time (finally!) and in case anyone is interested, I thought I'd share my verdict...or more specifically, explain the two areas where I felt the storytelling came up short. Spoiler free!
1: Story-arc
You've probably seen a story-arc drawn like this before:
The audience meets the world and characters, an inciting incident causes drama to start building, there is eventually a big climax, and then it all wraps up quickly and leaves us somewhere different from where we started.
Of course, many stories don't build in such a straight line. It's possible to have many lesser conflicts and resolutions along the way to a big climax, and that makes a story-arc look bumpy:
A rising arc of any kind, though, is not as easy to pull off in an RPG as it seems because the plot has to go hand-in-hand with a game. Mixing dungeons, towns, battles and boss fights into a plot can make it feel less like drama and more like a cavalcade of "stuff" if you're not careful. In the blandest RPG imaginable, the story wouldn't make an arc so much as a noisy horizontal line:
Incidentally, I believe that one of Squaresoft's big claims to fame back in the early 90s was their ability to design RPG stories that raised the stakes at every turn and had great big apocalyptic climaxes. That's certainly not the only approach one can take, however. Let's look for a moment at the story-arc of another PCE title, The Legend of Xanadu. That game breaks down into chapters, with each one a self-contained unit almost like a mini-RPG:
Of course, this is a bit simplified. Anyway, the key thing to note is that there is an upward trend. The chapters may be separate, but each one raises suspense in the story as a whole, and the order of the chapters couldn't be changed without completely messing everything up.
Now let's look at Tengai Makyo II's story. It also consists of many separated, chapter-like units, but how they come together overall is quite different:
Again, this is simplified; the real game is not this flat or this uniform. Regardless, I drew the arc this way to illustrate my first and biggest problem with Tengai Makyo II's story: It doesn't build, it just cycles. Before you're even halfway through the game, you'll feel as though you can predict how the rest is going to go, and you'll be right. Each cycle has plenty of unique events and new characters, don't get me wrong, but it will also be largely interchangeable with the other cycles.
I don't want to say that stories should have to conform to any particular structure. The flat cycling I've described shouldn't be impossible, in theory, to make a successful story with. It seems to me, though, that in order to make it work, you would need to have each cycle, or mini-story, be very strong all on its own and have no two very much alike. Tengai Makyo II just doesn't do that. It's not far off, but it doesn't quite make it.
...and part of the reason why, I believe, can be found in the next section.
2. Characters, relationships, communication and dialogue
Ask somebody what their favorite aspect of a story was, and a lot of the time they'll answer that it was the characters. Notice the plural: characters. It's rare for only one character to carry the show and the rest to be throwaway-forgettable. In most successful stories, there is a confluence of well-matched characters; interesting individuals with interesting relationships.
It's relationships in particular that help to define characters and drive their growth over the course of a story. Even good-guys and bad-guys have a kind of relationship between them, and I'd go so far as to say that in this broad sense, relationships are a story's single most important element.
And what is the stuff relationships are made of? Communication. Sometimes it's verbal, sometimes it's not, but without it, there is no relationship. This is why you can break down almost any good story and find that it consists mostly of communication between characters.
With all of this in mind, you might find it surprising to learn that Tengai Makyo II contains virtually no two-way communication whatsoever. The vast majority of the enormous volume of lines in the game are monologue. To be specific, it's mostly either townspeople telling you things or bad guys making mustache-twirling speeches at you.
It's better than nothing, but this design makes character development in Tengai Makyo II extremely narrow. A good way to gauge the depth of any character is to try to describe them without saying what they look like or what their background or job in the story is. The longer you can go, the deeper the character...and in Tengai Makyo II, I can't go very long at all for anybody.
Allow me to break out The Legend of Xanadu for comparison one more time, because this is where that game truly shines. In stark contrast to Tengai Makyo II, The Legend of Xanadu was clearly designed from the start to facilitate scene after scene of genuine dialogue. If you asked me to describe any of that game's major characters in the manner I explained above, I could do so at great length by simply referring to conversations. Each pair of characters has a unique and subtle relationship expressed in the way they communicate. They do so differently at different times in the story, and if you look closely enough, moments that might seem like goofy slapstick or setups for fetch-quests are often cleverly utilized to give the characters greater depth.
The Legend of Xanadu isn't perfect, by the way. That's probably a good topic for another review. Anyway, I think it's baffling how few lines in Tengai Makyo II are followed by another in reply. If there had been more dimensionality to the characters and their relationships through proper dialogue, it would have gone a long way toward helping the game get away with its atypical story-arc.
In closing
Victor Ireland of Working Designs, who was among other things a tireless PC Engine advocate, once observed (in a quote I can't find just now) that the original Tengai Makyo games were amazing when they came out but now feel very dated. Tengai Makyo II isn't a timeless classic so much as a grand experiment. You get the sense that the developers weren't constrained by the hardware, only by their own personal limits, and it seems as if no expenses were spared to push them. Even with its flaws, Tengai Makyo II will always be the quintessential PC Engine RPG.
But there is a temptation to assume from afar that it has a fantastically-written story, and that's just not the case. Whether you analyze it with basic storytelling concepts or simply compare it to other games on the system, it comes up short. Please believe that I'm not trying to be cruel! I only think that Tengai Makyo II's story is not among the many things to celebrate in the PC Engine's legacy.