by OL » Fri Jun 26, 2015 1:34 pm
So Freedom Wars is a fun game in a general sense, but there's something really unique (and borderline artistic) about it that I don't think I've seen in anything else before:
It makes fun of the way games nowadays over-explain themselves and make things seem more complicated than they really are.
We've all noticed it in the past couple of generations; games seem to spend so much time training you in the early stages, popping up instructional screens and all that, when you really just want to get into the game and figure it out yourself.
Freedom Wars does this constantly; it takes place in a world where there are rules about absolutely everything. You have to be granted rights to do just about any little action (even things like laying down).
And at first, the constant string of tutorial screens and over-explanations seems really annoying. There are a lot of features to take advantage of, but they're primarily things that can be easily figured out without explanation. It's not exactly anything groundbreaking or hard to wrap your head around.
And I was so ready to call all this tutorializing out as a big, ugly drawback on what's otherwise a really good game.
But then I got to the point, about an hour and a half in, where you're granted the right to exit your prison cell. It should have been as simple as the game saying "Choose the exit option."
But instead, it gives you this unnecessary explanation about how in order to leave, you have to submit an "exit request form," at which point your accessory (the robot who oversees all your actions) will determine whether your exiting of the cell will prove a benefit to the advancement of society, and will make a decision whether to let you out based on that.
All you do is choose "submit exit request," and you leave the cell.
At this point, I realized that the game was over-explaining everything on purpose. It's a giant gag, making fun of this habit that games (Japanese ones in particular) have developed over the past several years.
We all know that stopping the gameplay to tell the player that "the left stick controls movement" is absolutely silly; Freedom Wars is calling that shit out and showing just how silly it all is.
It's weirdly subtle, but it made me laugh my ass off when I finally figured it out.
