Catherine: A mini-critique

[Continuing from yesterday’s post about Catherine, here’s the critique part. Or at least, critique-ish. It was meant to be one post originally, but it got to be really long. As in, I spent three hours writing it, so… Best to split it up. You know, this seems to happen whenever I talk about the game…]

        Up until the end, I was also going to say that Catherine is a great example of how you can make meaningful gameplay. There’s a lot of symbolism in the game, and most of the gameplay is a metaphor for one thing or another. Then they shot themselves in the foot during the ending. “Did you notice the central conflict that this game’s masterful creators placed at its core?” says the narrator. And then they tell you what that was. So… what did I say about literal references to these deeper meanings, because otherwise players won’t notice? “The stairway Vincent was forced to climb could be taken as a metaphor,” the narrator says after explaining the central conflict. And then they tell you what it was. And we were so close to a game that just hints at this stuff! You get a few hints in the game towards the end, and at the start there’s a nod towards the metaphor as well to get you thinking. So you’ll probably get a rough idea of what’s going on if you think about what’s going on as you play, and that’s great - some serious analysis would piece the full story together, even if they never explained it. And then they did! It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I kind of wish they hadn’t. Still, at least everyone will get the idea, and maybe take the time to re-evaluate the game based on the explanation.

        I’ve got a few things to mention inspired by comments on a (spoiler-filled, you’ve been warned) community blog on Destructoid called, simply enough, “Catherine Sucks”. One of the main problems the author has is that most of the game feels like the “rising action” of your typical three act structure, and Vincent really only makes up his mind in the game’s final hours, which makes the conclusion feel weak and a bit rushed. Commentor (commentator?) ‘fulldamage’ notes that the sort of long-form character development the author is looking for is the “hero’s journey” type, exactly what you got in Personas 3 and 4 - by contrast, Catherine is more like a short story, and it focuses on just one pivotal moment in time rather than an entire lifetime of the characters. The comment by 'Noir’ echoes something stated in the Art Book included in the game - the character designer, Shigenori Soejima, writes that the characters in Catherine are all fully-grown adults who don’t necessarily grow throughout the story as the teenagers in Persona games would. When you meet someone for the first time, you’re not going to get every detail about their lives or see some long struggle to overcome their problems - you just pick up bits and pieces of what’s important to them as you talk to them, and that’s more or less what happens in Catherine. 'The Silent Protagonist’ also mentions that it’s a more “adult” - dare I say “mature”? - kind of story because none of the characters are blank slates or in need of psychological profiling, but how things are said and what’s left unsaid can speak volumes.

        I didn’t mention the game’s story in my “review” up there because that would imply that you’re taking something as is, and just playing through the game to unlock the story that the developers made for you. Browsing through the GameFAQs board for Odin Sphere on the PS2, a few people said that even though the gameplay can get tedious (since you play 6 different characters, and start over each time and do the same basic stuff) it’s worth playing for “the story.” At that point, why not just look up the cutscenes on youtube or download a completed save file so you can watch the cutscenes in theater mode? That’s what we call film, where you passively watch something that’s delivered to you, as a finished product. From that point of view, the first comment by 'VenusInFurs’ on the c-blog I linked to is absolutely right - the plot and characters are “sub-par” and it’s a “typical anime,” and the last three hours truly do get “beyond silly.” “There’s nothing deep here, it’s not intellectually stimulating or mature,” says 'VenusInFurs.’ But that’s if the situations in the game mean nothing to you, and you’re just watching what the characters choose to do without thinking about it. If you empathize with the situations, and make decisions based on your honest feelings, there’s a thousand different stories to be told by this game. And like the other commentors mentioned, there’s a lot of character development for you to infer from the dialogue, in the sense of things to learn about the characters (i.e. how they develop for the player) as opposed to ways that the characters themselves change over time.

        Speaking of the plot twists towards the end of the game, they occur so quickly that it might make your head spin. I truly don’t want to spoil the game for anyone, and I don’t accept the “willing to be spoiled” idea because it will ruin the game for you should I ever bring my PS3 to your house and make you play it. Which is something I would rather do than post story spoilers! Suffice to say that the game could have ended at one point, and it would have been pretty interesting and tragic. Fifteen minutes later, a (literally) crazy ending opportunity comes up, and it would have been phenomenal. But the game continues after that, and ruins the whole thing with a really dumb explanation. The problem is that they take a game that has been totally “normal” - the Nightmares stages are weird, but they’re nightmares, right? - and throw that all out the window. Either of the two points that I mentioned - the tragic one, and the crazy one, which you’ll understand if you’ve played the game - would have been so much more fitting, and even interesting. So, yeah, from that point of view the game has a pretty bad “story.” But again, that’s only if you take it all at face value and care nothing for the situations the game puts you in.

        If it weren’t for the part where they explain it all to you, there’d be a lot of analysis to make about Catherine. And there’s stuff I could analyze about it anyway, but that would require spoilers, and I wanted to avoid those in this particular post. Mainly, the purpose of this post was to say how much I love the game and convince people to buy it. Then a little bit of critique, just the amount I can do without really mentioning anything specific. Kudos to you if you made it to the end of this post, and I hope you give the game a shot if you haven’t already. If you already have, have an internet high-five.

Catherine, Katherine, and Catherine (the game)

First, some good news: Catherine sold really, really well. It’s the highest selling game at launch that Atlus USA has ever published, so advertising, word of mouth, and good reviews all clearly paid off. To whoever failed to advertise Shadows of the Damned and Child of Eden: you’re doing it wrong, but it sucks that your games sold so badly.

        Anyway, here’s the “review” part of this post. The English voice actors are absolutely fantastic. I mean, these are award-winning performances. When they give the award for best voice acting to some other game at the Spike TV Awards and whatever other award shows games have, it’ll be an absolute sin. As for the music, Shoji Meguro’s score is fantastic as always - the game features a lot of remixes of classical music, but mostly avoids the really iconic stuff so you don’t find it overly familiar. So, the audio: terrific.

        In terms of the visuals, the game has a great aesthetic. The character models in particular deserve special recognition, because they look “better” than anything I saw in Heavy Rain, or that I’ve seen from LA Noire. It’s probably got something to do with the light anime vibe and the fact that they weren’t going for photo-realism, but Catherine dodges the uncanny valley completely. I mean, the thing about the former two games is that they tried to portray completely realistic people, and it was weird to see because it was done imperfectly - you can’t necessarily render every little wrinkle on someone’s face, much less animate and shade it perfectly. But I actually think I like the in-game parts of Catherine more than the anime parts, because it looks that good. In sum, the visuals are just as good as the audio.

        The gameplay has two different parts: the puzzles, and everything else. I’ll start with the puzzles, set in the main character’s nightmares. I found them tough, even on Easy difficulty, and I wouldn’t recommend even playing on Normal your first time through the game. In Easy mode, you have the option to undo 9 (?) of your most recent moves, so you don’t have to restart the level if you push a block the wrong way. Which happens, even when you’ve been playing the game for hours. I don’t play a lot of puzzle games, really, and I didn’t know if I’d like the Nightmare stages at first. But the action is really quick, and when you complete a difficult boss stage it’s a whole lot more satisfying than some jRPG boss fight.

        Aside from the regular stages in the story, there are 128 (!!) stages in an arcade cabinet in-game, and a whole bunch more stages in the Babel mode that you unlock by getting gold medals on Normal difficulty. I don’t really want to tell you what the puzzles are like, or how they introduce different types of blocks, because none of that matters. The puzzle stages are intense, and you’d be hard-pressed not to enjoy them once you give it a shot. I had to look up walkthrough videos to get past a few mind-bending stages, because sometimes you just wont get what they want you to do. Even so, I finished the game and found myself wanting more puzzles, which - as much as I like the game - is more than I can say about the battle system in Persona 4.

        The “everything else” gameplay is all of the social simulation stuff, but some of that occurs at the “landings” in between Nightmare stages. The game’s story mode is referred to as “Golden Playhouse,” and a narrator introduces you to the game by saying that your role as a “viewer” is to help guide the main character, Vincent, and that his fate depends on you. You aren’t supposed to be Vincent, or agree with the way he deals with situations, but instead make honest choices when talking to people and answering questions. Your choices influence Vincent’s inner thoughts, and at different points in the game a meter will come up and you’ll see the results of your “guiding.” For example, what you do before Vincent first cheats on his girlfriend decides how he reacts to waking up with a strange woman in his bed - you don’t get to literally choose whether he thinks “oh shit, what have I done” or “SCORE!”. So when you’re playing, be honest and just go with what you’d do IF you got into a similar situation - even if you wouldn’t do the kinds of things Vincent does.

        Anyway, I found a lot of meaning in this part of the gameplay, and it’s pretty good mechanically as well. You’re in the bar, and you spend your time talking to people, drinking, and answering text messages (which is great, by the way, and much more interesting than the e-mail mechanic in .hack or Xenosaga), and as time passes people will enter and leave the bar. Who you talk to, and what you say, influences their lives… although if you don’t talk to them, or care about their problems, then what happens to them probably doesn’t matter to you. There’s a theme of selfishness and selflessness to this part of the game, especially in the Nightmare stages, where most of the people you meet think that helping others will only give them more competition for survival. You can play the game as a selfish person who only cares about himself, or a kind, compassionate person who realizes that it doesn’t cost anything to give people a few kind words and helps others to help themselves. Although, because of the way the game plays, you don’t really get to know the characters well - it’s just a brief snapshot of their lives. More on that in a bit.

        So with all of that said, it gets high scores in every category and I really do think it’s worth $60. It’ll probably take you 12-15 hours to finish the story for the first time, which is a pretty good length because it doesn’t overstay its welcome but gives you enough to feel like you got what you paid for. After you’ve finished the game, if you replay on the same difficulty level, you can actually skip the puzzle stages and just play for the story if you want to try for different endings - you could probably blaze through in a few hours that way. If you hate the game after playing the demo, you probably won’t like the full game, but do give it a shot if you own a PS3 or 360. If you have both, I’d recommend the PS3 version, because I’ve heard the 360 version may not play as smoothly, and I hear the d-pad on the 360 controller sucks? But then, as someone who only owns a PS3, of course I would say that. Still, consider giving it a rental, and at least download the demo if you have a decent internet connection.

[This will continue tomorrow, it was really long so I split it up]

Catherine, and Some Personal History

I’ve been thinking for the past week about what different people get from reading my tumblr. Random internet strangers probably just read the posts about things they’re interested in. People who know me well will get to know me better. But for people who don’t know me yet, it’s not a perfect window into my life - there are a lot of things that don’t come across all that well in text. I post about the things that interest me, and I post a lot of information about my life, but not so much about more abstract things - what I believe in, what kind of person I am, and so on. There’s not much point in simply telling you those things. because there would be nothing to back it up, and even if you accept that I’m nice because I said so, it wouldn’t really leave much of an impression on you. Trying to show you things like that with words is tough, but I’ll think about it and work on a few drafts to give the internet at large a better idea of who I am.

        I started playing Catherine last night, and aside from being a pretty satisfying puzzle game (as long as you don’t get really stuck on a hard part), it’s an absolutely wonderful thing to experience. I’d be surprised if I got more than ten hours out of it, but the value of playing it can’t be measured in time spent playing. The basic gist is that you guide Vincent, a 32 year old underachiever, through the worst week of his life. First, his girlfriend of five years, Katherine, starts talking about marriage. Then he drinks a bit too much and has a one-night stand with a girl named Catherine. What happens from there depends on the player’s decisions, but it’s a really well-crafted experience.

        If you absolutely love puzzle games, there’s probably $60 worth of gameplay in there, but everyone else should play the game on easy and act as honestly as possible. It’ll get you thinking about what you would do in a given situation, and about relationships in general. Which is absolutely fantastic, and I’m so glad that this is a “mainstream” video game. I mean, ok, it’s not a AAA blockbuster release, but it’s not some budgetless, vague indie game either. It’s a game that deals with marriage, cheating, responsibility, the nature of relationships… It’s a work of art in every definition of the word.

        So I’ve been thinking a lot since I started playing it, and naturally one of the things I’ve been thinking about is infidelity. Apparently, I’ve actually never written about this before, which is surprising because of what happened between Brittany and I. It’s kind of an important detail, which makes it strange that I’ve never mentioned it. It also means I have to write about it now, in order to get into the stuff I want to say. Alright, so, here’s the quick and dirty version. When we were in 9th grade, Brittany got involved with a guy a year younger than her, and she was really serious about him. It ended badly, she did her best to get over it, and then in November of 10th grade we started dating again. In PEI, high school doesn’t start until 10th grade, so when we moved onto high school she didn’t really see the guy until the fall of 11th grade.  Before too long, despite having a girlfriend, he started flirting with her. She was wary of him because he proved to be a supreme asshole the first time, but I knew she was drawn to him in a way she’d never been drawn to me, and so I gave her permission to talk to him and braced for impact. Fast forward a few months, and by November things are very serious between them and we finally break up ten days before our anniversary.

        I don’t think I need to get into what happened between them after that, but suffice to say that he was actually worse than a supreme asshole. An uber asshole, if you will, the horrible embodiment of all the terrible things women expect from men. Meanwhile, I had encouraged my girlfriend - who I loved dearly, and who was at the time my one source of happiness - to leave me. In the end, her relationship with him made her reevaluate her feelings for me, and there ended the possibility of us getting back together. Understandably, our relationship became strained as things went on, and we spoke less and less often. Eventually it seemed like we couldn’t even manage to carry on a conversation. Considering she was my only close friend, the only person I thought I could share my secrets, doubts, and fears with, this was hard for me. I was incredibly lonely, and of course I spoke occasionally with my friends and family about this stuff, but it was this loneliness that led me to meet Vael and open up to him.

        What I realized, over time, was that I missed Brittany as my best friend far more than I missed her as my girlfriend. We went from speaking all day, every day to never speaking at all, and that alone was hard. Not having anyone to talk to about personal stuff was worse. I don’t remember the exact details of what happened, but at some point I must have told her this and asked if we could “just be friends.” Yeah, I said that, and I said it after we’d broken up. Delicious irony, if you can ignore my crying, desperately lonely 16-year-old-self long enough to laugh about it. Of course there were issues to work through, and of course I struggled with my feelings for her. After all that time, I couldn’t just snap my fingers and only think of her as a friend. But in the end, it all worked out, and now we’re friends and she’s living in my mom’s house. It’s been almost a week now, and it hasn’t been at all awkward for me (although I’ve been at my dad’s house this whole time). She doesn’t find it weird being there, and I assume being around me is no different than it was a month ago. Which is to say I haven’t asked about that, but maybe I should.

        SO OK NOW WE’RE BACK TO CATHERINE AND THE THINGS IT MADE ME THINK ABOUT. Now I can tell you how I see love, why I say that Brittany “cheated” on me with an emphasis on the quotation marks, and why I have no problem with it. Except that when I say now, I actually mean tomorrow, because this is really long. And the chances of people reading it all probably increase when it’s split up. So, that post will go up tomorrow morning, and I hope you all enjoy it!