Videogame Storytelling #2: R-Type Final · 5:30pm Oct 31st, 2017
Time for something spooky today. Once again, I'll spoil everything, since nobody plays this game anymore.
Okay, continuing the story from before, shooter games didn't die out entirely, but entered a new creative era. Graphics and programming became more complex. Games like Konami's Gradius became famous for putting more enemies and danger on screen than ever before. To stand a chance, your ship could be upgraded to ludicrous levels of firepower. It's just ramping up the fundamentals: bigger, faster, more intense. This is the branch that would lead to Bullet-Hell shooters, which influenced other genres, such as the RPG battles of Undertale.
a company called Irem had a different approach with their game R-Type. It's not really slower, but feels like it. Instead of giving you more guns, they gave you an amazing gimmick: an invincible pod called The Force, which can attach and detach from your ship, either the back or front. The best offense is a good defense. Despite this permanent protection, the game is no less difficult. It trades some of the twitch-reflexes for some strategic planning; it's not enough to memorize patterns, you must also position the Force pod correctly.
To compliment this different style of gameplay, the graphics and music aim for less of a space fantasy and more of a sci-fi horror. There's a lot of grotesque imagery in these games, horrifying aliens and environments that are a mixture of biological and machine.
Can you tell they were inspired by H.R. Giger's designs on Alien?
showing a screenshot of the 2nd boss would probably make this NSFW.
The game didn't really have a story, beyond "Blast off and strike the evil Bydo Empire!" until the fifth and final installment, R-Type Final, which tried to tie all the previous games together in continuity, despite all the inconsistencies.
Final isn't the best R-Type game. The level designs are kinda bland, and the PS2 hardware has horrible slowdown in some parts. But it has some interesting storytelling ideas, all woven into a repetitive arcade action game.
Starting with R-Type III and R-Type Delta, you could choose from 3 ships to play as. The main selling point of R-Type Final is there's 101 unique ships. Aside from some branching paths and endings, and different difficulty levels, the reward for playing the game over is to unlock new ships in the hangar. Presented as a "war museum", the ship descriptions in the hangar is where much of the lore takes place.
If you've played Dark Souls, you might remember how the game had barely any cutscenes, and a minimum of NPC dialogue telling you where to go. If you were crazy about Dark Souls, like me, you studied item descriptions and environmental clues to assemble an understanding of the world around you. The plot is that you run around killing monsters. The story is about world-creation myth and its struggle against entropy. (and most of the exposition, the other half of the conflict as told by Kaathe, is hidden away to be practically impossible to find on a first playthrough without spoilers)
Some people love lore no matter what, and others will ignore it even for their favorite game. There's a whole other discussion to be had about badly written lore, told through exposition instead of context. But the point here is that you discover the lore of Dark Souls by playing the game, i.e. exploring, and that understanding of the story could in turn affect how you approach the game, by trying something new.
And so in R-Type Final, unlocking new ships almost seems random and arbitrary at first. Reading their museum entries, to see what abilities they do, also hints at the technology development going on across these wars against the Bydo. Some ships were failed prototypes, others were successful mass produced fighters, others were secret experimental tests. New technology discovered by testing one ship could pop up in another line, improving the ideas already established there. The tech paths almost resemble an evolutionary tree, with branches and off-shoots.
You get new ships, then replay the game with them, unlocking new ones in the process. As you go the apparent randomness fades away; the descriptions are sometimes actually hinting at the requirements for getting the next ones.
There's also an enemy encyclopedia in the game, with even more lore, but I don't remember anything from that. Because it has zero impact on the gameplay itself.
So what's the actual story in this game?
The Bydo are a biological weapon created by humanity in the 26th century, to be launched against their enemies in the galaxy and cause ecological destruction on other planets. Before it could be used, something went wrong and it was unleashed on Earth itself. Humanity had to save itself by sealing the Bydo into a dimensional space portal. Within the portal, the Bydo grew and evolved for thousands of years, seeking revenge against its own creators. It eventually found Earth again, but this time in the 22nd century.
The lesser developed humans of this time period, with no idea what they were facing, could only fight back by developing new technology out of desperation. The Force is made from a small piece of Bydo tissue, synchronized with human pilots, which allows the R-series of ships to attack and defend against this threat. After each game in the series, the Bydo have kept pushing back further, until now it has reached Earth itself.
It's a pretty bizarre story, keeping in tune with the space horror origins. Small snippets of this are explained through poetry between stages, but much of this is presented in the game itself. Stage 1.0 is a space colony half-submerged in the ocean, the eerie remnants of a (failed) last ditch final assault by Earth forces to end the war.
Stage 2 has five different variations, depending on how you last played the game -- depending on how you kill the boss here, it will either increase or decrease the rainfall for next time. The climate itself changes from a submerged arctic ocean to a dry desert, all set around the same ruins of a human-built fortress that you fly through. This isn't explained anywhere, it's disorienting at first to wonder why Stage 2 never seems to be the same as you remember it. When you figure it out, the game has used its own repetition, and your own actions, to show a part of the story.
The different endings are all definitive conclusions to the story, told through different final stages, that all seem to paradoxically seem to be canon at the same time. Stage F-A is a surreal trip through the Bydo source's subconscious mind, its fascination with human reproduction, trying to fight against humanity by imitating it. After severely damaging the final boss by launching the Force into it, it responds in desperation by spitting dozens of Force pods back at you.
Beating the final boss requires some out-of-the-box thinking (which you'd expect from a game like Undertale, not an arcade shoot em up) which is a bit hard to describe. The Bydo is destroyed forever, but the pilot's ship stranded. A JPop ballad named Proud of You plays over the credits. Proud of the self-sacrifice, or maybe proud of destroying humanity's twisted evil children from the future.
Stage F-B takes the time travel theme and messes with it even further. Your ship gets captured and corrupted, transformed into a Bydo creature itself. You reappear out of the ending of Stage 1.0, which now plays in reverse. This time, you destroy the entire Earth fleet of R-series ships, ending with a boss fight against the original R-9A Arrowhead. After that, the prologue cutscene is inverted, with your Bydo ship flying back to its starting base to destroy it. Proud of You plays again, in a weird ironic context, now that you've ended the Bydo war by defeating humanity.
The creepiest thing about this is that it was there all along. Every time you start the game, a ship flies past you at high speed, too fast to kill. Only after that ending it's clear that this is that same Bydo ship, finishing its final level of the game. It happens, every single time, before you start... though it always overlooks your one single ship that's beginning its own mission.
Going back to the ship museum, this event also unlocks a branch making up an entire 1/3 of the tech tree. It's implied that this Bydo ship was shot down, and the remains recovered and studied. After this, humanity began experimenting by using this Bydo hybrid technology, creating ships that seem more like biological lifeforms than machines. These are some of the most bizarre and inventive ship designs, with a strange diversity of forms.
The third ending is Stage F-C, almost a bonus stage. Using the dimensional portal, you get one chance to travel back in time.... forward to the 26th century, where all this started. It's a long stage, keeps going repeatedly, but doesn't really end in a boss or climax. It just stops, leaving the implications up to you.
I swim through a sea of stars,
without looking back to shore.
Faster than light, bending time.Forever
Wherever
When Proud of You plays one last time. Maybe proud of the fans, for playing the entire game. A heartfelt farewell from the creators, as they say goodbye to this series forever. (though they did came back and made a few spin-off tactics games, but nevermind)
It's an enigma of an ending, not making much logical sense at all. It's closing the timeloop, but unlike most stories about time travel, continuity can't possibly match up anymore. Fighting against the Bydo in the 22nd century has irreversibly altered and advanced human technology and knowledge, to something very different and alien to the original creators of the Bydo back in the 26th century, despite their futuristic level. It's very strange how the creators decided to end it all on this poignant paradox, presenting it as an optimistic look into the unknown future....
You know AI development, like when it plays chess or other games against humans? Do you think it's intimidating or exciting?
I find that there's something disturbing in how the news always presents these stories. Computers defeat humans at thinking game. Oh no, humans are obsolete. Or yay, the humans (in charge) will become more powerful than ever before. Competition makes a good story, after all.
Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, but when he demanded a rematch, IBM refused and dismantled the machine. What were they afraid of? He might find a flaw in its strategy? He might win? I guess reputation and funding were more important than science.
Elon Musk's OpenAI project famously defeated the best Dota2 players in the world earlier this year at The International. That's what all the news reports of the event say, that it was undefeated. It was unstoppable, and we might as well give up and accept that computers are better than us now.
Except it wasn't undefeated. Over 50 people were able to beat it that weekend, and more have since. It wasn't unstoppable, it just developed a unique playstyle that the best players had never encountered before. Given time to adapt to it, they could develop a strategy (or abuse exploits, if you prefer) that it couldn't comprehend. The AI bot knew that it should do certain actions to win, but it couldn't understand why those concepts worked. When it encountered something it had never seen before in the simulations against itself, it didn't know what to do, and then it made stupid newbie mistakes.
It's still a very powerful bot, and it'll get stronger in the future for sure. But there's something strange about how they shaped all the media narratives around it to be this definitive statement of AI > humans. But if it gets beaten, does that mean humans > AI again?
What I find more interesting is the famous match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol. Rather than focusing on the 4-1 score, go experts were most fascinated by that one win by Lee. Not because it represented some kind of victory over computers if you ignore all of AlphaGo's wins, but because it was the most exciting of the games. The machine made a strange move that human intuition would never be able to come with. Yet later, the human adapted to that by making his own brilliant move, one the machine could never foresee being played. After that the AI started making unually terrible moves, as it had no way to deal with something it couldn't predict anymore.
Just like there's lots of silly stories about humans fighting aliens, but R-Type Final takes an uncommon path of showing the symbiotic nature between the two. A parent and child destroying each other, yet evolving toward the future at the same time.
this was really long. do people still read these?
Gradius, ah man, that game. Lots of memories playing that one at my babysitter's house...getting my butt kicked.
This is really cool! I love it when games (or stories) go the extra mile to make something click like this that late into the experience. Something else that did this for me was Inception, which was redefining my previous held ideas and conceptions right until the very end, such as when you learn that Cob grew into an old man with his wife while in Limbo, where previously I had thought they were young the entire time.
Exciting, though not because of the promise of progress, and certainly not intimidating. I grew up with Captain Kirk out smarting advanced AI's proving machines could never truly replace humans, and whether that's true or not I've absorbed that belief, so interaction with AI is a fun contest to see what flaws I can find in it. Even if I was a chess master and a computer beat me 100 games out of 100, after losing game 100 I'd just tip the computer over and say "now try getting up" and walk away satisfied. A computer can outmatch me in one area, sure, but only when it can in all areas will I cede defeat to it.
I've noticed this too, there's a definite media trend to push this idea of true AI being right around the corner. There's an odd lack of skepticism when reporting on it. Not that I've read many reports.
I like your point that it's more about our symbiotic relationship than who wins or loses. Personally, I don't think humans will ever be able to create something more complex than ourselves. At least, not until we understand ourselves completely, and will that ever happen?
I do!