Hey, I Can Dream, Right?

So, I’m re-playing one of my all-time favorite PlayStation games – Xenogears! I’m playing through it with the Beloved Husband, reading the dialogue aloud as the story progresses (much like my mom did for me). As we move along, a thought occurs, as it has every time I play this game.

I want this to be a book soooo badly!!

This game literally spans 10,000 years, three or four wars, and four separate nations. It’s got repeated reincarnations, repressed memories, psychological breaks, genetic memory, religious sub-texts, political intrigues, and racial prejudices – all wrapped up in a JRPG from the 90’s that features, among other things, giant robots.

Xenogears is remarkably ambitious for its time, both in concept and in its game design. And, despite the unavoidable flaws of the turn-based, “random battle” system and dated graphics, it lives up to its ambition. I’d love to see it remade for modern game platforms, frame for frame – same music, same dialogue, just updated graphics, a reworked battle system, and all those missing plot bits that developers tell us exist (thank you, incredibly rare, Japanese only art-book, for filling in those holes).

More than that though, I’d kill to see it novelized. The plot is so complex and so detailed that I think that reading it as a book would be the only way to get all of the nuances and to keep track of all of the twists. Write it as one really long book, a trilogy, or a full-on series, I don’t care; I just want to see it written.

Alas, thanks to copyright law, I’m pretty sure this will never happen. Also, I’ll bet that the number of fans rabid enough to purchase such a book is astronomically low. *sigh*

Still, someday, when I have that elusive thing known as “free time”, I might try to write it myself. After all, I know where to find transcriptions of the game’s dialogue and fan translations of Perfect Works, that art-book I mentioned earlier, so I can conceivably pull it off. It would then sit on my bookshelf, to be shared only with Xenogears fans as rabid as I.

3 Books That Would Make Good Video Games

This entry is a bit more challenging than its counterpart… beyond good story, we have to take into account how well the plot and timing would be suited to interactive gameplay. And then there’s always the matter of copyright. But, I’ll give it a shot anyways.

 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Set in Monarchical France, we follow young D’Artagnan as he works to be accepted as one of the King’s Musketeers. With his new-found friends, pious Aramis, brooding Athos, and pompous Porthos, he strives to uphold the honor of the Crown, protect the Queen’s reputation, and foil the plots of the scheming Cardinal Richelieu and his deliciously dangerous cohort, Milady. 

The adventurous plot allows for a large world map with a limited party system. Because of the active manner of fencing, it would be better suited to a real-time battle system instead of a more sedate turn-based system. Given the level of intrigue, puzzles, and strategy present in the story itself, I’d say this story would work best as an Assassin’s Creed or Mass Effect style game with a combo move set-up similar to that in Xenogears.

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson. Infected with shards of a cursed mirror, young Kay becomes the slave of the Snow Queen and is whisked away to her frozen castle. His childhood sweetheart, Gerta, sets out to find and free him. Facing witches, robbers, and wild animals, Gerta travels across the land, moving steadily closer to the castle and the dread Queen.

This story would fit best into the format of the JRPGs from the 90’s – storyline mixed with dungeons and “bosses” in a pretty linear fashion. There is relatively little combat, so I’d put the focus more on puzzle-solving rather than grinding and leveling through fighting monsters. Players would have to rely on their wits and figure out the best way to use their game environment to their advantage, rather than pulling the old hack-and-slash button-mashing that works so well in your average classic JRPG.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. After his rescue of a young woman, Richard is inadvertently pulled into the world of the mysterious London Below. In an attempt to get home, he joins with Door on her journey to find out who killed her family and why. Traveling with strange allies, and pursued by even stranger foes, their respective quests intertwine and lead to answers that no one expects.

The atmosphere in this book would make it perfect for a survival/horror game with some puzzle elements thrown in (I’m thinking BioShock here). Combat in the story is sparse, but epic when it happens, so the first-person-shooter style would work well. Since the characters often need to use wit instead of pure brute strength to survive, it leaves the door open for some of the decision-making processes seen in KOTOR and Dragon Age.

Part of what makes adapting books to the video game format so difficult is that video games have evolved over the years. They’re no longer interactive novels or movies (though that style of RPG is still alive and flourishing, as for as I can tell).

Games like Mass Effect have shown how exciting the choice-based game can be, and that expansion on the concept of multiple endings (as started in games like Chrono Trigger and Valkyrie Profile), has helped catapult video games into their own category.

So the question is, I suppose, how far are we willing to deviate from the established plots of these existing stories to incorporate this style of gameplay. And, if we were to go that route, can we avoid making our alternative scenarios and endings feel too much like fan fiction?

5 Video Games That Would Make Good Books

Listed in no particular order, these are some video games that I think could be novelized well.

Square’s Xenogears for the Playstation 1.
This JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) is two disks or 100+ hours long. It’s this long because it has an incredibly detailed plot that slowly unfolds through an epic journey that is full of political maneuvering, secret societies, flashbacks, lost memories of past lives, and various scientific meddlings – from mutations to super-weapons.

I think the complexities of the various plotlines and their connections to the overarching story would be best suited to a Game of Thrones style Epic Fantasy novel, with each chapter/section being told from the third-person view of a specific character. As the characters meet up, the different pieces of the puzzle would come together and the story would become more cohesive in a way that would mirror the gradual unraveling of the mystery that binds everything together.

Square’s Final Fantasy VI for the Super Nintendo/Playstation 1.
Another JRPG – this one takes on a more Hero’s Journey feel as it follows the growth of the main character. It’s a 60+ hour game, but alas, many of those hours are spent in combat as the player navigates the “Random Battle” system or grinds to level up characters. Because of this, it’s easy to lose track of the actual story.

So, this one might actually be better suited for novel form because it would give a chance for greater character development (something that’s hard to do when you have 14 playable characters) and there wouldn’t be giant breaks from the plot while you battle things, making it easier to follow the chain of events.

Square Soft’s Secret of Evermore for the Super Nintendo.
Yup, an RPG again. This one is very quirky and involves evil robot butlers, a sabotaged time machine/holo-deck type invention, and an average small-town boy and his dog. It couldn’t be adapted as a “serious” novel, I don’t think. But if it was approached in the same semi-humorous manner of Good Omens or in the surreal style of Neverwhere, I think it could work quite well. Obviously, I’m leaning towards Neil Gaiman as the prospective author, because he’d be able to capture the fun quirkiness of the whole thing, while still preserving that creepy undertone that characterizes so much of the game.

Valve Coorporation’s Portal Games for the Xbox360. 
So, not an RPG, yay!!! The Portal games are puzzle/platform games with amazingly brilliant dialogue. As it is, given length and game design, both Portal games would have to go into one book in order for it to work, since the original game and its sequel make one complete story arc.

The story itself is outside my usual High Fantasy genre and I think it would work best as an action/suspense style, almost-psychological horror novel in a sci-fi setting. The deadpan humor would keep it from being truly horrific, but it would still translate as creepy, I think. But seriously, come on – newly re-awakened human test subject trying to survive and escape a hidden test facility run by a sadistic, sociopathic robot? Would be a cool book!

Supergiant Games’ Bastion for Xbox360 and PC. 
The way that the narrative in this game is set up would make it impossible for a direct translation from game to book. However, the story is compelling and keeps the gamer wanting more. Absolutely a Post-Apocalyptic novel, it has a Hero’s Journey feel to it that would make it epic in scope. And it has the potential for a wonderfully Inception-esque ending! It stands out in the Post-Apocalyptic genre because of its colorful scenery and light-hearted artwork. If that atmosphere could be captured in novel form, it would be a very interesting take on the whole thing.

Literature & Video Games

Recently, in discussing these two respective types of media, I’ve found that many people consider them to be mutually exclusive.  You’ve heard the arguments about how too much video game time turns kids off of reading, yes? What about the one that says that video games stunt the imagination and lower the length of a kid’s attention span?

I am here as living proof that that isn’t always the case.

I love to read. A large part of that actually stems for exposure to video games as a child. My mom would play the old Super Nintendo RPGs (think Secret of Evermore, Final Fantasy VI, and Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past) and read the dialogue aloud to me. Since this was back in the days of 16-bit graphics , I had to create my own faces for the characters on the screen. Still, I found the stories told in these games just as enthralling as the stories on my bookshelf.

See, in my case at least, my love of reading and words evolved from a love of the stories themselves. My perpetual question as a youngster was, “What’s going to happen next?” (a very annoying question when watching movies). That desire to know “what happens next” is what motivated me to read in the first place. The love for literature and my enjoyment of reading in general came later.

I happen to think that a good video game can inspire reading in general. If kids get hooked on a story, then (hopefully) they’ll seek out other things like it. The Halo or Mass Effect games can lead kids into the Sci-fi genre, while games like Dragon Age can get them into High Fantasy. Then we have the Fallout series that sparks interest in dystopian/post-apocalyptic novels. The potential is endless!

Anyways, that’s just me. I like both video games and books, so it stands to reason that the two don’t necessarily oppose each other. At least, that’s my view.