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Thursday 6 March, 2008
Gameplay:
Near the middle of the Fire world, the difficulty suddenly leaped up. The star rating, which tells you difficulty, between two levels went from around 4 to 9. The level took me forever to beat, and I had to start over nearly 50 times. But I slowly whittled away at it, and finally beat it. I don't think I ever felt smarter for solving a video game puzzle than I did at that moment.
After another level on an airship and through Barbaros's haunted mansion, it was time for the final confrontation. And after a few days of poking at it in different directions, I finally beat it.
Unfortunately, games are never that easy. It turned out that Barbaros, once I freed him, was an absolute douche. I probably should have seen it coming from a mile away, but I've developed a skill where I can suppress myself from seeing obvious plot twists. (I was surprised by the twist in Dragon Quest VIII, too) So a few more levels, this time ones that really pushed it to the limit, and finally the real final level.
The final level is 5 times as large as any other level in the game. There are monsters patrolling every walkway. There are things to kill you anywhere you turn. You don't have Wiki (again...:() and the only thing you can do from the very beginning of the level drops you onto a bed of spikes. No friends, no grander solution, no hope in hell. But I pushed on, and each piece slowly fell into place. By the end of the level it was all a finely tuned machine, I knew what each cog did, what it was for, and how it worked with other cogs. It was like looking back at a long book I've already read and saying "wow, that was a really good book." Compared to how I felt at the beginning, it took a lot of level-design ingenuity to carry me from point A to B.
One of the ways I judge a game is by how many endings there are. An ending is whenever I say "This is the last level, I'm almost done" and truly believe it. At the end of Killer 7, after it showed me the third credit sequence and "The End" screen in the game, I literally laughed until I cried. Might be a strange response to a game, but whatever. Why is that important? Because after this immense level, this behemoth of a level, that took more than an hour to complete even when I knew exactly what to do, there was another level. This was the third "last level" in the game. Part of me was upset, but a part of me was happy that I still had more to play. Beating a level put me on an intellectual high, and I knew that the end was coming. I was mostly just glad I had a little more to play before I had to put it away.
Design:
The level design of this game is really top-crop. Every puzzle in the game felt brilliant and simple, a complex mess when you started it and a well oiled machine when you were done. I think this is due to a few things: First of all, the objects never change uses. Even if a puzzle makes you use an object in a novel way, they never outright change its nature for a certain circumstance. It's always worked that way, you just never looked at it like this before. After designing an adventure game myself, I can appreciate how hard it is to work within these constraints. It would be so easy to just make an object work completely differently in order to come up with a puzzle, but it takes real skill to take objects with set parameters and make a working system with them. It's almost as hard, if not a bit harder, than solving the puzzles as the player.
Secondly, everything is completely logical. Albert Einstein once said that insanity is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." I can think of a few LucasArts games where the way to solve a puzzle was by doing something multiple times and one of the times, something randomly changing and the puzzle being solved. I hate those kinds of puzzles. You feel cheated afterwards, because there's no way you could figure it out by yourself. In Zack & Wiki, every step is influenced by the step before it. Again, it takes a lot of hard work and creativity to get a puzzle like that.
The reward system in Zack & Wiki is interesting. You can break jars or rocks to get coins, and shake the bell or click on them to pick them up. These are standard short term goals, coins you get every few seconds. Then there's the HQ. Hirame Q, which is a pun that didn't carry over from Japanese, is basically Creativity Points. Every time you do something right, you get a musical jingle, a flash of color, and a number over another number. The bottom number is the total possible HQ you can get for a certain step, and the fewer tries it takes you to figure it out, the more points you get. And then finally is the big payoff: where everything falls together, you breeze past the last booby trap, the boss gets impaled through the head, and all that's left is to ring the bell and get the treasure. The treasure is the longterm goal, and ringing that bell is so satisfying, I probably would have thrown the wiimote through my TV if it hadn't been securely fastened to my wrist. The treasure chest is always visible from the start, though. So the real goal isn't the treasure itself, it's the calm before it. When you can finally walk up to it without anything in the way; the music stops, all you can hear is the rippling of the pond or bubbling of lava. Everything that stood as a threat before you is gone, and all that's left is the final navigation to the treasure chest. And the bell.
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