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Sunday 25 October, 2009
I resumed playing Super Columbine RPG! today, playing for closer to an hour this time around. Again, I find myself rather uneasy with the game on some level I can't quite describe.
I feel that I am not supposed to enjoy this game, or be fulfilled by it in any way. My roommate tells me that after you clear the school and commit suicide, you do not finish the game, but enter hell, and that in order to progress, it is smart to kill as much as you can to gain experience. However, I feel a certain dissonance between my own expectations of an experience/level system and what is presented before me. In my experience with JRPGs (which this is most reminiscent of, the old 16 bit SNES final fantasies come to mind) experience is granted based on a number of factors, difference in levels between yourself and the opponents, damage taken, time taken, and other such things, but most boil down to 'the harder the enemy, the greater the reward'. That does not seem to be the case here, I note that the Jock Type is one of the more dangerous human opponents to be found in the school, he gets two attacks, and early on can survive even firearm hits. Yet he gives between 8 and 14 experience. While in comparison, the Cherubic Bumpkin, a smaller enemy with no attacks and low enough health to be killed with a single melee attack grants 24 experience quite consistently, almost half of the 50-52 you can get from taking on a group of two jocks and two preps. The impression I get is that the game wants to reward the player for killing the helpless.
Another dissonance is the enemy encounters. Stereotypically, your typical rpg will have random encounters, times where you will be wandering the map and just simply stumble upon some unseen enemy to inconvenience you. In Columbine, all the enemies are already there, you need merely chase them down and hit a button. But this becomes frustrating, your fellow students are inhumanly agile, switching directions every few frames, making it very frustrating to deal with some of them. This is especially true with the cafeteria, where you cannot assault anyone before pulling the fire alarm, which causes everyone to run around at insane speeds, making it very aggravating to kill them.
I am not enjoying my experiences with this game, I feel sick, conflicted, and somewhat uncertain of my actions, and I feel that that might in fact be a purposeful design choice.
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