Tag Archives: Omnitopic

Your God is called what?: Breath of Fire II and Religion

Written by Tom Auxier on December 9, 2011 at 4:23 pm

If I had one sentimental favorite RPG, it would be Breath of Fire II. Fortunately, I have several, but Breath of Fire II holds a special place in my heart, first for its retro aesthetic and second for its understated story about religion.

(This is an article full of spoilers. But let’s face it: you’re probably not chomping at the bit to play Breath of Fire II.)

I grew up in a religious household. My mother works for the Catholic parish I grew up in, and when I was a boy I bought entirely into Catholic theology. I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic school for thirteen years, from preschool up until my last year of high school. Somewhere in there, in 2002, I stopped believing in the theology.

Subconsciously, I like to attribute that to Breath of Fire II, however sad that sounds. It follows in the grand Japanese tradition of evil, monolithic churches. In the second town of the game, a minion of said church not only makes you fight “with a girl” (much more impressive as a motivator in the mid nineties, and a trope subverted by the game itself) but wants you to kill her “for his …

Omnitopic December 2011: Faith

Written by Tom Auxier on December 1, 2011 at 1:34 pm

Faith and religion are difficult topics for gamers. It’s something some people don’t really want to talk about because it rarely involves shooting people (though it can involve assassination with hidden blades. Thanks Ubisoft), and because people have so many different opinions about the topic. Most of those opinions are angry ones. I mean, if we were all sane and rational about religion, then we’d all be atheists or, at least, agnostics.

That was a religious joke. Don’t crucify me.

(So was that.)

Religion’s become more a topic of games in the recent past than it’s been at any point in its history. Games like El Shaddai directly take on religious concepts and stories, while Assassin’s Creed is not only a game about the Crusades and evil, conspiracy minded orders of the Catholic Church but addresses a lot of these issues head on. And we have older games too, specifically Japanese ones, where the “Church” is always the evil, omnipresent enemy working to crush the wonderful saintly heroes. Even when it’s not evil, it’s frequently there in the background, acting as save point, curse curer, and reviver.

So religion and faith have a lot of …

October Omnitopic Roundup: DLC

Written by Tom Auxier on November 7, 2011 at 2:10 pm

Hello friends! Another month concluded, this month with a massive snowstorm that wiped out a week of Western Massachusetts time and left me sitting cold and alone in my room, pondering my fate as a human being. Would I freeze to death? Would I die before I could buy the new DLC for Super Awesome New Mega Game?

No. No I wouldn’t. But I would miss the chance to highlight the posts that fell under this (last) month’s omnitopic: DLC. I also missed the chance to announce next (this) month’s topic, but I’m behind, okay? To me it feels like last Friday right now.

-Our first post came from Dylan, who lamented the holes in games due to DLC (and horse armor). He focuses on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and reminds me I should get on playing that.

-Next up is contrary Fern, who wants everything to be DLC: multiplayer modes, single player modes, horse armor, elixirs, probably even the jump button. That’d be a swell game: see how little money you can spend to beat our game! Buy jump for twenty five cents, buy attack for fifty!

-Finally, Patrick gave us The …

October Omnitopic: Downloadable Content

Written by Tom Auxier on October 1, 2011 at 10:48 am

Hey guys! Remember this old running feature, the Omnitopic? Of course you don’t—it’s been a couple months and you’re a busy person. Well, it’s back, with a new topic for all of us to debate until our fingers bleed from writing: downloadable content.

I know, I know, a physical, real topic as opposed to the hypothetical, analytical ideas we’ve talked about in the past. Whatever will we say about it when we can’t wag our fingers and analyze away? Well, I imagine at least one someone will be pro-DLC, and another will be against DLC, and someone will write an article about downloading physical copies of games or movies and then placing them into the Playstation in their chest cavity. But I could be wrong.

So, prepare for a month of posts about downloadable content and other things unrelated! And a question: what do you, fairest reader, think of it? Do you enjoy spending three dollars to download a set of horse armor, or would you rather buy anything else?

A Simple Story

Written by Tom Auxier on August 8, 2011 at 3:23 pm

A man rebels against an evil empire. He finds love, only to lose it to the cruel twist of fate. He loses himself, only to find it again in a misty place. He faces off against a father figure in a foreboding locale. And, in the end, he is triumphant.

Anyone would say I’m describing Star Wars, but only someone particularly bright (or who’s read the next paragraph) would say I’m also describing Final Fantasy VII. The structural pieces of both the crowning achievement of sci-fi film and Japanese video game both feature roughly the same plot. The fiddly bits are different, but at their cores they tell the same story.

A week or so ago I was talking to a friend of mine about what made Harry Potter great. We bandied about all sorts of ideas. We talked about its evocative fantasy before realizing that, yes, all of that had been done before. We talked about its plot, but then we realized its plot was confusing tripe that doesn’t make any sort of sense under thoughtful analysis. We thought it was the characters, and while they’re certainly good characters they are …

August Omnitopic: Simplicity

Written by Tom Auxier on August 3, 2011 at 3:03 pm

August is the most venerable month, the wisest of months. The wisest among us are often the simplest, so simplicity will be our omnitopic for the coming twenty odd days.

Okay, that was bullshit. We picked it because it’s important.

The Nintendo Wii first launched in 2006 (five years ago!), and simplicity became a running theme in gaming discussions. The Wii was the “simple” console, the “casual” console, because it didn’t have a lot of buttons and you could play a lot of its games by waving your arms around like a chicken. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, by comparison, were “gamer’s” consoles, with loads of buttons, complicated controls, and a higher barrier for entry. The Wii sold like sliced bread in sandwich season, and the other console companies tried to jump on the bandwagon.

And now we have Nintendo releasing a console that’s so complicated I still don’t rightly know what the crap it is. I don’t think Nintendo knows, either.

Gaming in general has been in a drive away from simplicity since its inception. The first mainstream game had two commands: left and right. Now we have controllers with a dozen buttons, each …

Omnitopic July 2011 Roundup – Weakness

Written by Tom Auxier on August 2, 2011 at 1:47 pm

Where did July go? Oh July, you siren of months. You harlot of twelfths of a year. Where have you gone?

Yes, July is over and gone, and with it we must mourn the passing of another omnitopic. This one, our third, was Weakness. But you knew that, gentle reader! You’ve kept up with us, and you’ve already read all these articles!

Wait, you haven’t? Hold on, let me check…no, this is a bad thing. A very bad thing. Here’s a list of what we wrote on the topic of weakness this month. Check them out!

-Geno wrote our first piece on the topic, giving us a general overview of the ways games make us weak or not weak. How removing power from the player’s hands creates a good kind of tension. You know, things like that!

-Next came Olivia with an article on horror games, treading the fertile ground unearthed by Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Fun, frightening times.

-Finally, Sam wrote an article not about Amnesia, but about Daggerfall. That’s a much different game. Didn’t you get the Amnesia memo? What? You forgot it? Tarnation. …

July Omnitopic: Weakness

Written by Tom Auxier on July 5, 2011 at 8:42 pm

(We’re only running a week or so late. Blame Steam! Steam, father of all lies! Mother of all untruths!)

Video games are about power. When we have power, we have fun, or so the story goes. Power lets us do what we want, when we want, and it’s what makes us love games where we don’t love other media. In a film, you can’t be powerful. You can watch revenge, but you aren’t doing it yourself. In Grand Theft Auto, those pedestrians you just obliterated with a sixteen wheeler were victims to your power, not to some faceless actors’.

But what about when games take power away from you? Yahtzee posted an interesting musing about this phenomenon months ago, and we liked it so much we thought to make it the topic of this month’s ubiquitous omnitopic: weakness.

Of course, weakness can involve other things: games we love that we shouldn’t, bad games we think about even when we try not to, games that we want to make artificially harder. All of these are components of weakness, and it’s these many angles we’ll attack this month.

Okay. You and weakness, you’ve been introduced. …

Dreaming in Color: Omnitopic Roundup

Written by Tom Auxier on July 1, 2011 at 9:29 am

Pulling me away from my Steam-induced forced gaming sessions…how professional this site’s become. Anyway, here we are. Color was last month’s topic, and color is the topic of this post! Here are some of the many and varied posts we made this month on the most colorful of topics.

-Olivia wrote a general exploration of the theme, looking at how colors make a game have soul. Here’s where I make a pithy remark about how if games had souls we shouldn’t break disks, but that’s neither here nor there.

-Stefan gave a think to color as signifier, either of elements or meters. Health is red. Remember. Health is red. Unless you’re poisoned. Then it’s green. Or maybe purple.

-Tim composed a great retrospective of color in consoles, focusing on the arcades, the virtual boy, and the game boy color in different measures. Physical colors, therefore.

Alas, neither Fern nor myself got to writing about racism. We’ve still got a couple loosely affiliated articles coming on the topic, but that about concludes this one. Tune in soon (tonight, perhaps? We’ll see!) for July’s Omnitopic!

(Image from a lovely site not in English.

June Omnitopic: Color

Written by Tom Auxier on June 1, 2011 at 3:12 pm

Join us at Nightmare Mode for this month’s Omnitopic, Color! For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the Omnitopic (and you shouldn’t be: we’ve done one before!), what it is is a chance for all of us to explore a specific concept or idea and try to suss out what it means for gaming.

And this month? Color.

The first time I noticed color in a video game was Okami. The beautiful shades, the contrast between the shades of gray in the world and then the vibrant colors you restored struck me and convinced me of the effect that visuals could have on the senses. The sheer beauty of the world. Then I played games like Madworld, with its stark lack of color, and Gears of War, with its tired palette of space marine gray, and I began to see the effect that color could have on a game world, in giving it character and life beyond just the story being told.

No. Let me start again.

The first time I noticed color was when I played Final Fantasy VII, and realized that there was only one person of color in the entire world: Mr. T …

Tag Archives: Omnitopic

Your God is called what?: Breath of Fire II and Religion

Omnitopic December 2011: Faith

October Omnitopic Roundup: DLC

October Omnitopic: Downloadable Content

A Simple Story

August Omnitopic: Simplicity

Omnitopic July 2011 Roundup – Weakness

July Omnitopic: Weakness

Dreaming in Color: Omnitopic Roundup

June Omnitopic: Color

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