Dead Man's Party
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- Category: Game Design
- Published on Monday, 19 December 2011 16:44
- Written by RB
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WARNING: There are SPOILERS in this article for the game CORPSE PARTY on PSP. Do not proceed if you have any intention of playing this game.
Six months since my last article. It should have been expected, of course - I lack the drive to support and update a website such as this that I once had. Too many failed projects both solo and with others following the retirement of my first ever blog have taken their toll. However, in my personal experience, forcing content rather than allowing it to form naturally is always going to lead to less than optimum delivery and impact.
I started Sixbuttons for a specific reason, and anything else that came with that territory or fell out alongside it would be a bonus. So Sixbuttons certainly isn't going away - but at the same time I'd like to at least find some inspiration to update more frequently, even if we're only talking once every month.
You have to feel it, before you can write it.
With that said, I can truly say something touched me recently more than any other game experience I've been involved with this year and plays on many themes I'm interested in creating myself.
Corpse Party for PSP is an update of a Japanese only game that was originally produced for the PC-98, a 16-bit computer line that was designed by NEC for retail exclusively in Japan. The closest you could attribute it to in terms of Western computers would be a mix between a Commodore Amiga and an IBM PC - local publishers would put out niche games alongside a fleet of homebrew coders, whilst the system was used in office settings for higher end productivity work. By all accounts NEC's PC-88 and 98 lines were hugely successful in their homeland, but ultimately made redundant in the longer term as Microsoft slowly turned the screw and made Windows the world's dominant desktop operating system.
Corpse Party was made by one of those homebrew groups - on the PC-98's version of every know-nothing game designer's favourite, RPG Maker. What sets Corpse Party apart from 99% of titles developed with said software, however, is a developed, emotive and thoughtfully crafted storyline and world. Since its original debut, Corpse Party earned itself a significantly cult following, and received a long overdue commercial release in the PSP remake a few years ago. This version expands further on the original, which reworks large aspects of the story and throwing in a significantly expanded cast for deeper impact whilst keeping the original look and feel of its hamstrung origins, as well as full voice acting from a veritable who's who of the anime world. This is the version that American publisher Xseed elected to take a risk on - bringing across what is already a niche product (essentially a visual novel with a basic form of gameplay), translating it, and rolling it out as a digital only release, a tactic that is understandable given the cost of rolling physical product out to the marketplace.
With great characterization, well paced gameplay and a foreboding atmosphere that is creepier than even the majority of professional attempts in the genre (such as Resident Evil 5), Corpse Party overcomes the shortfalls of having an engine immediately dictated by the creation package used by the developers and the inevitable weak art and stock sound that is frequently bundled in as usable assets.
Put simply, it is the shining example of how to put a game together when you know little to nothing about coding or artistry and have to rely on a very narrow set of tools to realize your own vision. If every other element is decided for you, you have to be damn sure that it's your story and the atmosphere you present that imprint themselves on the player. It's what Corpse Party does so well, in the absence of anything else truly unique. This is not a review or intended as such, but instead an intricate look into how we can embellish aspects of game design that we have control over and make them the focal point of any game. When programming is not your strong point and you need to rely on other tools, you must be sure that the elements you have control over give your game the strength it requires to succeed, at least critically if nothing else.
I completed the game on the 17th of December, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. There's a multitude of reasons for that.
I do have to warn you at this point you may encounter a few spoilers if you have any interest of playing the game for yourself.
The first is a great break from game tradition and something that steps more into the realms of movies and novels: Character flaws. The cold-hearted fact of this game is that no one is safe from disaster, not even the player. Some characters are beyond redemption before your thumb even hits the d-pad for the first time, and a lot of it is down to the flaws and faults of each of the characters. It's not very far through the first chapter that you come to realize this, when the naive pairing of Naomi and Seiko start to understand the true and very real danger they find themselves in around every corner. It's a growing concern that really starts to unhinge the pair of them, ultimately resulting in a reluctant parting leading to Seiko's death by hanging.
That's the thing about the characters as they meet their ends in this game - the gore is not ever present, it's only used for effect when it’s necessary. Seiko's death is presented to you in a hand drawn, full colour static shot. Lifeless dead eyes, frothing at the mouth, limp body. It's traumatic and unnerving enough as it is, and as Seiko, up to this point, is such a lively bubbly personality always looking on the up side, even after the argument with Naomi (a fact you learn much later in the game) you immediately start to feel her loss.
Characters that have flaws in games, particularly player characters, are all too few. Why should the course of war or love be so smooth? To use another rare example, the Uncharted series is on the right course. In Uncharted 3, Drake's one track mindless pursuit of the Atlantis of the Sands puts his loved ones at great and continual risk, but it's not a quest he will back down from, and it's not a quest he can complete without the help of his trusted buddies and on-again off-again girlfriend. How many other titles can you say that about recently? There are games that tell great stories but with rigid characters bereft of personality, and it's these games that should leave imprints on your hearts and minds but don't, because you simply won't feel any affinity for the human in your hands regardless of how well the story is composed.
The second point is the atmosphere. Corpse Party's visuals are basic. They hark back to the days of SNES RPGs; sprites with few colours and big eyes, and environments full of right angles and the same tile repeated over and over. They cannot, on their own, portray effective horror. So Team GrisGris have employed a number of unique techniques at instilling fear on the player. Clever sound cues dampen the music and push slight sound effects such as scratching on the walls or floorboards you're not even walking over creaking away. Colour is a big part, as the game often leaves you without lights and finds you walking around in the pitch black, only to find the game simply not spring anything on you in these sections unlike typical "shock horror".
Most of all is the voice acting. It seems like this may have been the most expensive part of the remake, because as previously stated every seiyu in this game has had at least one role on one major anime series made in the past 5 years. Every line in the game is acted with absolute respect for the material and player. The attitude is right, the fear is evident, and the screaming on any given character's death or discovery of something brutal is so blood curdling you want to curl up just that little bit more when you hear it.
It is definitely a game to be played in the dark and with your headphones on (particularly as this game has some sort of pseudo surround sound going on that further adds to the foreboding feeling), which may play down the fact it's on PSP rather than a fixed console, but it's proof that even if you have to deal with squalid visuals, there's no reason why you can't play on them as part of the game itself.
The third and final point is futility. I once conceived an idea, recently in fact, of creating a game where the player cannot win. That's nothing new; for years players have faced literally insurmountable odds. When you play Space Invaders, the only true ending is death and the invasion of Earth by legions of marauding aliens. It's an unavoidable conclusion. Likewise, Missile Command. The end is the Soviet Union nuking the West Coast of America and sparking apocalyptic nuclear conflict. You cannot repel every warhead.
However, story led games where death or brutal failure is a consequence of your own actions - that's a concept that has barely been explored. Corpse Party can be broken down into two main acts. The theme of survival and desperation eventually giving way to determination and redemption. The characters (or rather, whoever remains alive) overcome their initial fear of the unknown and strategies for their own survival to form a common purpose for getting back home. However, the truth is the friends you've lost along the way are dead. They can't be revived, and by the game's lore they are doomed to spend eternity living out the pain of death again and again. For Seiko, that's the point of the rope suffocating the last of her life. For Morishige, that's the plummet from the second floor window. For Yui, the rubble paralysing and crushing her.
A handful of characters may escape the doom as the final chapter draws to a close, but the ultimate conclusion is not so satisfying as it is tormenting, both for the player and the characters left to live with the legacy of what happened.
There's the Wrong Ends too; paths of no return, where the character you're controlling will die in the most painful way imaginable. Fulfilled by a certain criteria everytime - perhaps you didn't gather enough information about the coming danger, or you forgot to take an item before meeting up with your group. Whatever the reason, death can be swift or prolonged and in every case you're up against that same futility. Your game is over the moment you made that decision and now you are merely playing out their last minutes, forever lost to the halls of Heavenly Host.
It's only when you think back on these moments of where you went so wrong that you realize just how brutally saddening this game can be.
In summary, Corpse Party does require a certain amount of patience on the part of the player. Ironically like so many of its characters, it masquerades as one thing - an RPG - when it is really something else entirely. But we shouldn't discourage originality like that. It is far better to embrace it, and then look for ways to improve it, especially when it can really pressure a player and get into their mind. We certainly have the technology, but do we have a receptive audience? Sales figures would suggest not, but then someone with the marketing muscle of Activision or EA has not dared to try producing a game of this nature. If they ever take the risk, we should be ready to commit to such a bold experiment, or we risk games like this forever being lost to the realms of RPG Maker and similar tools - produced not out of artistic confidence, but instead out of technical necessity.