When Marnie Was There

[rynling]

In the process of watching When Marnie Was There, I depleted my entire store of tissues, and I generally keep a lot of tissues in my apartment. Seriously, I had to walk to CVS in the middle of the night to get more tissues because this movie made me cry. It was so beautiful.

The final game I own but haven't played on my PS3 is Ni No Kuni, so I took it out of its special edition box on the top shelf of my closet and booted it up in order to stay on the Ghibli feels train for just a bit longer. The game took ten minutes to initialize, and after playing it for thirty minutes I still haven't fought a single battle or even made it past the prologue.

I've decided to institute the "Eternal Sonata Rule of Next Gen Console JRPGs," which holds that if I play a game for an hour every day for two weeks and still don't know or care what the hell is going on then I can in good conscience give it up forever. I am not a patient person, and I only have so many fucks to give (and most of them just went to When Marnie Was There).

Comments

[renegadefolkhero]

I lost my patience with Ni No Kuni and abandoned after I think 20 hours. It's a slow game and the story never compelled. I did like the battle system, but after a while I felt like I was slogging through every area.

[rynling]

I never went back to it. Why play Ni No Kuni when Inquisition is sitting next to the still-in-its-box PS4 in my closet?

If I'm being honest with myself, I think what turned me against the game was the Ghibli portrayal of "Motorville" (which I think is supposed to be in Michigan, although there are a few hints that it could be in Georgia or Texas). There was something a bit too unironically wholesome and... aggressively racially homogeneous? It was like something out of the Twilight Zone, and the uncanniness of the atmosphere was even worse because I knew that wasn't what they were going for. I never thought, as an American, that I would feel sullied by the gaze of a different culture on my own, but yeah.

Also I have seen Pet Sematary and I know exactly where that story is going.

I was annoyed that the game didn't give me anything to do for the first half hour, not allowing me to fight or explore or even open the menu to save my progress. I understand that it probably gets better after Oliver leaves home, but that sort of front-end slogging isn't very promising as foreshadowing for mid-game slogging.

I finally broke down and started reading Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken (which I resisted for a long time because I am not interested in anyone's gaming life becoming more "productive," Jesus fuck why does everything have to be so capitalistic). At the beginning of the book, she writes about the psychological and emotional experience of playing games, saying stuff like...

From zero to peak experience in thirty seconds flat - no wonder games caught on. Never before in human history could this kind of optimal, emotional activation be accessed so cheaply, so reliably, so quickly.

...and...

It's no exaggeration to say that for many gamers, it probably felt like they had been waiting their whole lives for something like this: a seemingly free and endless supply of invigorating activity and every reason in the world to feel optimistic about their own abilities.

I used to love JRPGs, but I'm experiencing progressively less of the feeling McGonigal describes from those types of games. I mean, I love novels and Ghibli movies, but if I wanted to read a novel or watch a Ghibli movie I wouldn't have paid $120 for a game.

[renegadefolkhero]

Yeah. If the goal was to have an interactive Ghibli movie I think they did all right, but even at the best of times Ghibli is all over the place story-wise, so you're stuck with 50 hours of all-over-the-place instead of 2. Evidently they intended to make a game where adults could relive their childhood but I mostly just felt patronized by feelgood, which I doggedly ignored for 20 hours until I couldn't remember why I was playing anymore (original rationale: to convince myself I could still play a JRPG).

Criticizing this game makes me feel like I'm kicking someone's puppy (not even MY puppy, someone ELSE's).