Game 108: Windwalker (1989)

Every once in a while, a baffling sequel appears. I remember when The Whole Ten Yards came along. Don't get me wrong: The Whole Nine Yards was a pleasant-enough film, but it's hard to imagine some studio executives and scriptwriters saying, "You know, I don't think we fully reached closure on the tale of Jimmy 'The Tulip' Tudeski and Nicholas 'Oz' Oseransky. Viewers need to see what happens in their continuing slapstick adventure." Ditto Taken 2 ("Guys, wait! Listen! What would happen if Liam Neeson's daughter were kidnapped again?").

We've seen plenty of sequels on this blog so far, some of them good (Starflight II, Ultima V, Curse of the Azure Bonds), some bad (Ultima II, The Bard's Tale II), but few that seem as fundamentally pointless as a sequel to Moebius. I rated the first game pretty low, but I'm not saying it was horrible. It had its moments. But it didn't demand a sequel. I can only imagine that someone at ORIGIN Systems said, "Hey, what's better than one Karateka-inspired action RPG with a quasi-eastern theme?" and not realizing the answer he received was sarcastic.

The manual provides far more detail on the game world than we found in Moebius. The land, Khantun, is apparently ruled by Emperor Chao Ti, who's in trouble. Chao Ti sent one of his warlords, Zhurong, to the neighboring kingdom of Nubia to conclude a trade agreement. But Zhurong got a swelled head during the journey and decided to conquer and pillage Nubia instead, carrying their Ivory Princess back to Khantun. Upon his return, he colluded with the court alchemist, Shen Jang, to overthrow and imprison Chao Ti. Evil spirits have taken over the land's holy shrines, slaves are conscripted to work the jade mines, and the populace is forbidden to even complain about it.

Once again, a single disciple of Moebius must defeat the lot of them by himself. In the last game it was because there had been "no need" for an army after Moebius showed everyone the path of enlightenment. In this game, it's because "the priests and monks are sworn to non-violence; the cowed peasants make no resistance," and the few protestors against Zhurong's tyranny "cannot organize." Thus, I must "overthrow Zhurong, defeat Shen Jang and his evil spirits, and restore the Harmonious Emperor to his Nightingale Throne."

If there's one thing that you'd hope the makers of Windwalker would change from Moebius, it would be the weird disembodied floating heads that make up the character, enemy, and NPC icons. But they didn't change them; in fact, they made them worse:

There are meters on the main screen for body, spirit, honor, and karma, as well as an animal-based description of the current level of enlightenment. The "karma" meter seems to refer to your "lives." Food and water are again necessities.

You can't tell very well from static screen shots, but in the graphics, the game attempts a kind-of oblique angle rather than a top-down approach. As you move north, the horizon "scrolls" towards you rather than simply revealing the next line of tiles, and you can see the sky above the horizon. It's an interesting approach, but the screen is a bit too small to accommodate it well.
 

Inside a shop. Notice how my expression has changed with low health.

Buildings actually have separate interiors in this game, and NPCs have a little more to say when you talk to them, though so far most of what they have to say is somewhat unhelpful. One of the NPCs I met early was a fortune teller who had me cast coins in real life and then interpreted the results. I can't imagine how that possibly helps me in-game.

And this beggar demanded gold for every question.

Combat is far more complex than in Moebius. So far, I find it much much harder, and I'm losing almost all of my fights, even during training. One thing that hasn't changed is that hits that seem to land unimpeded on unguarded parts of enemies nonetheless do not "connect." There appears to be no sword in this game; combat is either by staff or hand-to-hand. One potentially-interesting innovation is the ability to switch to "concentration" mode, at which point the combat becomes turn-based instead of action-oriented, theoretically giving you more time to interpret your enemy's position and choose the best attack or defense.

This one could end very badly.

There are some more interesting combat moves offered, such as handsprings and cartwheels, though I don't know how helpful they are in practice. Once you finish combat, whether victorious or defeated, you have the ability to "reflect upon your experience," which basically means to watch a video re-play.

No, thanks. I'm just going to lie here and moan.

If you lose all your karma or "abandon" the game, you're treated to one of the most bizarre screenshots that I've ever seen in an RPG.

Why is my character suddenly a naked female hobbit?

I didn't play a lot of the game, so let's digress a bit into a discussion about authorial presence. The game puts author Greg Paul Malone more in-your-face than in Moebius, and at times it gets a bit overdone. The manual begins with a section titled "The Making of Windwalker" that compliments "the author's attention to detail and commitment to authenticity" and promises that "Windwalker may have been designed primarily as entertainment, but the experience of playing the game encompasses much more." Uh-huh. Later, Malone gets a page-long "author's afterword" in which he encourages players of all ages to "seek to increase your awareness of the intricate beauty that this life and the people you meet in it have to offer." If that wasn't enough, he then gets a half-page acknowledgements section where, after we learn the names and ages of his children, he personally thanks "human history, for being such a wonderful source of endless stories (and amusement)!" But we're not even done there. We also get a full-page "About the author" in which we learn about Malone's personal, eastern-based philosophies (the manual is full of quotes from I Ching), family, hobbies, and bland platitudes ("The world provides us with a true treasure trove of ideas and stories to draw upon," Greg declares enthusiastically). The game manual has a damned bibliography of 18 sources, including Chinese Herbal Medicine and Zen in the Martial Arts. Oh, and it's also clear that Malone used his own face for that of Moebius the Windwalker. Of course, this is all from "Lord British's" company, so it's not like there wasn't a precedent.

Origin: Where Narcissism Lives.

After typing all of the above, I realized I might be a little out of line. Why shouldn't the "author" of a computer game get as much face-time and credit as, say, the author of a book or the director of a film? My answer is that perhaps he should, but even in books and films they have to walk a careful line. Stephen King has said several times that he sees his stories as "found things, like fossils in the ground...part of an undiscovered pre-existing world" (this specific quote is from On Writing) and that the author's job is to"use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible." You might think the quote is silly, even offensive to authors who go through the exhausting process of creating, not finding, their worlds, but the point is that Stephen King believes it (or says he does) and writes his stories as if he believes it. Every time I read a Stephen King book, I'm fully aware that it is Stephen King who wrote the book, but I still don't feel his presence in the text. If the book is from a first-person point-of-view, it truly feels as if the narrator is telling the story; if from the third-person, it feels like a truly impartial, omniscient narrator. This is true even when King interpolates some direct address to the reader.

I'll contrast this with the works of Terry Goodkind even though there are probably plenty of far worse examples. When I first went looking for another mammoth multi-volume fantasy series to keep me occupied over a summer and picked up Wizard's First Rule, I was put off by the photograph of Goodkind on the rear cover. I'm not going to try to analyze why. Maybe he just didn't look like the sort of person from whom I really wanted to hear a fantasy story, or even contribute to his royalties. Whatever the reason, I nearly put the book down. But Stephen King has also taken some bafflingly horrid cover photos, so I figured don't judge a book by its rear cover and bought it.

In case you want to do your own analysis.

I found it passable. Not George R. R. Martin or even Robert Jordan, but passable. I liked it enough to buy the second and third in the series. But as the narrative progressed, I became more and more aware that the teller of this story wasn't some omniscient narrator, but the guy on the back cover. Through subtle shifts in tone, language, and plot, he made it impossible to maintain the illusion that he was telling the story rather than making up the story. His characters' objectivism-inspired philosophies became his philosophies. His increasingly-lame excuses to get his main female character out of her clothes didn't feel titillating; they felt like some pervert sharing his own fantasies. I got to the point that I just couldn't read any more. Most people who criticize Goodkind criticize the quality of his writing, but that wasn't the problem for me. His writing had always been average. I quit because I couldn't stop thinking of the words as specifically coming from his mouth.

But if Goodkind gave me a call and said, "Damn, Bolingbroke. You're right. Tell me what I did wrong. Tell me how I could be more like Stephen King," I wouldn't know how to respond. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what he did to break the illusion. By the same token, Richard Garriott/Lord British can appear in the Ultima series, and yet still make me feel that it's a real place and not the deluded fantasies of "some guy," whereas Greg Paul Malone/Moebius the Windwalker can't pull it off. Obviously, this is an area in which individual player opinion may vary, but I know that every time I read some I Ching nonsense about "winds of gradual change," I'm going to picture Malone smiling to himself at his computer, satisfied that he's giving the player a truly spiritual experience.

More soon, though my output is going to continue to be a trickle for the next few weeks.