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| I don’t really have an apt illustration for any of the points I’m going to be making, so have a Remy I drew for giggles. Full size: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/33759932/ |
I was considering doing a retrospective post of some kind, but I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to write. Nobody’s making me do one, so sorry if you were expecting that.
Anyway, here’s a post I’ve had on the backburner for a while, about one of my favorite games. This post leans more towards the “critical analysis” side of copy, rather than a true review.
If you’re looking for a review, here it is:
This game is flawed, but truly special and charming. Go play it.
Now, with that out of the way, if you haven’t played this game already, skip this post entirely and go do it.
I mean it. The article won’t even make sense if you aren’t familiar with the game.
SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME
I’M DEAD SERIOUS, READ NO FURTHER THAN THE JUMP IF YOU DON’T WANT THIS GAME’S MANY SURPRISES RUINED FOR YOU.
So, rather than being about any one particular aspect of the game, this post will talk about several, as I see fit.
First up, we have:
* Verisimilitude
Obviously, seeing the first meetings between humans and dragons from a human perspective was intriguing. Even though it’s heavily idealized, it’s interesting seeing the transition from dragons as mythical to mundane from the other side.
Global-scale catastrophe accompanies their meeting
It’s so strange, seeing communications established so smoothly between the two cultures. The explanation for why they speak the same language is obvious, as is the reason they mutually have myths about each other.
It’s still a massive stretch, though, that the English language hasn’t changed at all over the course of the 3000 years these dragons have been speaking it.
New words and new forms of idioms crop up frequently enough to cause difficulties in understanding over the course of mere decades, so the idea of a language remaining recognizable over such a long span of time is absurd.
(Wanna see how English might look after just 1000 years? Check this page out. )
You could say this speaks to cultural stagnation (hell, they never even left the damned continent), but no culture could ever possess such a thorough lack of innovation that its language remains static, and somehow remain functional.
Advances like medicine, telephones, TVs, computers, all that great shit wouldn’t exist in such a state.
You could argue that these things exist because of what Izumi taught them, as well as longer lives and faster maturity rates meaning that they’d have more time to learn and innovate while keeping their cultural growth relatively slow-paced.
But, unless their lifespans last roughly 300 years, there’s no way in hell their culture is going to remain that static.
Truth be told, breaks from reality like that don’t actually bother me. No fictional universe is free of holes, and willing suspension of disbelief relies more on the characters acting like real people would than the logistics holding up perfectly.
Fiction will always have flaws, because it’s created by inherently flawed beings. Fiction is a byproduct of the flaws in question, and you could argue said flaws are what makes sapience have any meaning.
If I wanted a super-realistic take on mankind meeting another sapient species for the first time, I’d crack open a history book. Or just ask my parents about it, I guess.
I also acknowledge the possibility that I’m misconstruing the whole issue, so take those last few paragraphs with a grain of salt.
* The Setting
The town is like an idealization of small towns in general; while the people are of course imperfect, what we see of the place is nearly utopian. Considering how understaffed the police force is, along with the general state of shock the citizens are in, it’s clear that very little actually happens there.
If Ipsum’s testimony is any indication, these people don’t even know what a gunshot sounds like. Until Reza showed up, they could afford not to.
These dragons are so unused to true crisis that they fail to acknowledge the meteor that will wipe them out if nothing is done.
Even the punitive measures the government takes against criminals sound remarkably idealistic. Emphasis seems to be placed on saving people from themselves and actually rehabilitating them, rather than the profiteering hellholes so common in real life.
Ironically, this civilization’s problems tend to arise from the same features that make it so seemingly idyllic.
People are either unwilling or unable to address problems that don’t immediately affect them, preferring to “mind their own business”.
Emera abusing Remy. Damion extorting Anna. Bryce’s growing alcohol issues. The remarkably low number of volunteers at the orphanage. Vara’s life falling apart.
Here, strife happens in silence.
It’s easy to see why Reza is so disgruntled by the time you show up; as an ambassador himself, Reza has witnessed this country’s politics firsthand.
The glacial bureaucracy, the fear shown towards any real change, and the endless bickering and rumor-mongering would drive anyone nuts. Reza sees in this world everything he’s come to hate back in his time, failing— or more likely, refusing— to understand that these systems are a necessary evil in maintaining social stability.
Like most revolutionaries, he fails to understand that toppling one flawed system entirely will only lead to another, usually worse one arising in its place.
This is one of the few spec-fic settings where Ursula K. Le Guin’s fabled Mrs. Brown could live without dwarfing her surroundings. Characters have mundane day jobs, and some struggle to get by, while other characters make a comfortable living and enjoy expensive hobbies.
Significant attention is paid to fleshing out the day-to-day lives of these characters, be it their place in the social structure, keeping up with their schedules, and even where their food comes from.
Most of the locales feel like ordinary places that wouldn’t look out of place in a small Terran town.
Everything is designed to be as cozy and homey as possible, to early 21st century Western Terran sensibilities. It’s probably a good thing that the Lung-style dragons don’t live in faux-Japanese houses, though it does raise the question: why do Lung-style dergs exist in this setting?
Did Izumi have a fixation on engineering every kind of dragon she could think of? Is she secretly a scalie? That in itself could’ve lent an interesting angle to her character.
Perhaps the company who funded their making simply wanted to appeal to as wide a demographic as possible. Though, if they were designed to be intimidating bioweapons, then fluffy dragons like Kevin would be deemed a failure.
It begs the question of what made him that way; is he descended from dragons who were deliberately designed to look like that, or are dragons in general just especially susceptible to mutations? It would be a good way to explain Xith’s… everything (aside from the obvious explanation being that he’s a backer cameo).
* The Protagonist
The Protagonist is deliberately never given a gender or ethnicity. The only physical feature of the Protagonist that we’re shown is the fact that they’re of average build.
Inevitably, some default personality traits must be given to the protagonist, so that they feel like a character everyone surrounding them interacts with.
Thus, the Protagonist’s own words will contradict the player’s thoughts at least once, but this is a necessary evil in order to have an effectual player cipher in the first place.
Like visual novels as a whole, AWSW relies on the Barnum Effect to let you insert yourself into the protagonist’s shoes.
The dialogue options provide that “little something for everyone” you see in things like personality quizzes (which, in a self-aware moment, the game lampoons during Adine’s route).
Any given conversation will bombard you with prompts that usually have an obviously wrong choice, and a few others that affect the immediate response but keep the conversation going in the same direction.
The details provided about the protagonist are vague enough that they could be nearly anyone. Because of this, any relationship you foster in this game can be a queer one: maybe you’re a guy who likes guys, or a girl who likes girls. Maybe you’re neither gender. Maybe you’re asexual. The game allows for all these things.
Strangely, despite how accommodating the game is for queer players, very little concrete queerness is on display. The only romantic relationships that are ever mentioned outside the Protagonist’s amorous adventures are (unsuccessful) heterosexual ones.
Ambiguity and accommodation aren’t a bad way to handle queer text, when it comes to games, but this game has a hole in its attempts at inclusion that needs to be addressed.
Namely, Lorem.
Lorem seems to be the game’s only overtly queer character, with them being intersex (the game uses male pronouns, but given that the source character is non-binary, I’ll use they/them out of courtesy).
The use of the term “hermaphrodite” is off-putting, but given the implications of how they talk about it, it’s likely the term “intersex” simply doesn’t exist among these people.
It seems odd that there’s no option to tell them you’re also intersex, in such an otherwise queer-friendly game. This game thus assumes non-intersex as the unspoken “default”, something the game took great pains to avoid elsewhere.
Yet, Lorem speaks to a part of the queer experience that is so often left out of fiction, or else played up in a ham-fisted way by cisgendered heterosexuals.
To be queer is to be outside the cultural “default”, and often suffer for it. To be queer is to be non-conformist by birth.
* Conformity
An ambivalence towards conformity as a concept is a very subtle yet important subtext in this game. We see with the whole murder-mystery plot that some degree of conformity is necessary, lest destruction and death run rampant.
Yet, enforced conformity can also be a frustrating and sometimes deadly thing, as presented in the case of Anna. She lashes out at an innocent farmer’s livestock as a scapegoat for the bigger act of nonconformity she struggles to actually achieve.
An act whose achievement could save hers and the lives of millions of others.
It’s stated several times that conformity and strict adherence to tradition are traits hard-wired into dragons (oh, the irony…), traits that on one hand contribute to the stable and near-idyllic society we see here, yet are also shown to stifle innovation.
Unquestioned tradition rears its head in other, smaller ways as well.
A significant portion of the population is quadrupedal, and struggles with stairs, yet alternatives to stairs seem to be non-existent. This town would be a paraplegic’s nightmare.
Speaking of, ableism is pretty rampant in this place: Bryce fears being mocked for his hobby of building model ships, Remy is mocked for being employed in a position that’s unsuited to his species (and for having misshapen ears), and Lorem has always been bullied for their small size and the fact that they’re intersex.
To quote the author on this subject[1]:
I think this goes back to what the dragons were originally intended to be - a range of products with specific roles and purposes.
[…]
It's a part of thought patterns that were coded into their DNA as instincts in order to function in their intended hierarchical structure they would have had as the product they were intended to be.
Hot diggity, the wannabe-Marxists are gonna have a field day with this.
Even Emera’s (figurative) hand is forced by public opinion and protocol, thus conformity is seen as a two-way street.
Non-conformity, even towards rules that are entirely benign or even necessary, can be a good thing in some cases. Maverick’s unauthorized investigation and dogged suspicion of Reza both turn out to be justified.
In the case of what you have to do to save Sebastian, the game is actually bold enough to suggest that even negligence can have positive consequences.
And then there’s Anna.
I’m not going to argue that her actions with regard to Amelia’s egg weren’t dubious in nature, yet when you look at the consequences, they can only be seen as positive. Anna stole an unborn egg for the sole purpose of tampering with it, then abandoned it when the authorities came after her.
Yet, were it not for this scientific irresponsibility on her part, Amely wouldn’t exist. Remy would never have a child.
There are few moral absolutes in this game.
* Flaws
This game has the strange dilemma of having flaws that enhance the authenticity.
For one, the characters have a pointed tendency to yammer on for way too goddamned long after they’ve already gotten their point across. On one hand, it’s aggravating when you’d love to get to the next scene, but the characters won’t shut up about a particular thing.
Lorem and Ipsum are notably bad cases, though Kevin is the worst; why should I listen to this tool rattle off a Wikipedia article on Freud?
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| Never have truer words been spoken. Source: https://twitter.com/alice_rainne/status/858451502867910656 |
So much useless dialogue between characters who only exist for all of five minutes before being killed off. This part literally could have just been the black screen text, and nothing of importance would have been lost.
Yet, putting up with things like people taking too long to make their point or talking about shit you couldn’t care less about is just part of having a social life. So, you could argue this is a good thing; it makes the characters feel that much more like real people.
Whether that justifies the problem existing in the first place is up to the reader.
Another problem the game has is repetition; while the game does include a lot of quality-of-life features to mitigate it, it needed a proper chapter/scene select a la either Radiant Historia or Nier: Automata.
But, the fatigue brought on by having to continually redo and skip so many of the same scenes over and over works narratively for the Protagonist. The repetition also makes encountering new scenarios by accident while experimenting much more likely.
All that said, this is not unlike the school of thought that argues the RNG-induced dead-ends in that The Hobbit text adventure make it more “alive”, or that having to wait out rain in Breath of the Wild makes it more like a real outdoor adventure.
Your mileage may vary, but I hate that idea.
* The Secret Ending
It seems like every indie game ever is contractually obligated to include an ARG.
I get the reason why indie games include these things: it gets people talking, and people talking means more people hearing about it and telling their friends so they'll buy the game and talk about it. It's just sound marketing.
Plus, it means that if they ever make a sequel, there's plenty of hooks for it.
My big problem with it, though, is the implementation; why would the protagonist, after they’ve worked so hard to create a timeline where everyone can live happily ever after, abandon their friends and start all over?
And why take such a meta approach to the ARG in question?
Don’t get me wrong, the idea of searching through the game’s assets and values to solve a puzzle is genius, but I strongly disagree with trying to make that puzzle diegetic to the game’s plot.
There’s also the question of what this all even adds to the game. Our reward for piecing together this mystery is a few ominous hints about characters who we know nothing about and have no reason to care about. Even W.D. Gaster had his backstory outlined in Undertale, before Deltarune made him relevant.
Not everything needs to be a puzzle.
*Conclusion
When it’s all said and done, even after I’ve picked this game apart and scrutinized every inch of it, flaws and all, I still like it. It’s not a perfect game by any means. But, despite the lack of polish in a lot of areas, this game has heart.
The game wants its presumed human player to empathize with something outside their experience, and it succeeds beautifully. It doesn’t fetishize the concept of having a relationship with these dragons, and doesn’t make romance an end in itself.
You can literally have nothing but platonic relationships with every character, and the game doesn’t consider that a failure. Whether you find a dragon waifu or husbando is irrelevant.
AWSW is about reaching out to and growing close with a group of broken-hearted chuckleheads, all of you working together in the end to overcome seemingly impossible odds. It’s about showing resilience and empathy in the face of hardship.
It’s inevitably about leaving your social comfort zone, and learning that people drastically different from you might not be so different after all.
And if any of you chucklefucks say “now THAT’S a fantasy” to that, I’m gonna slug you.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AngelsWithScalyWings/comments/cmf6m3/character_discussion_lorem_and_ipsum/ew7j7dd?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x
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