Of the many things that will likely lead to my early and untimely demise in this world, the years I've lost due to the hair pulling unyielding stress vortex that is video gaming will likely be right up there next to my hot cheeto addiction and my as of yet unnamed condition that causes me to soak myself in antalope blood and leap naked into the nearest lion pit. Smash Run alone has probably claimed so many years off the end of my life that I'll probably drop dead midway through writing this post. At the time of this writing I've literally had nightmares about playing Smash Brothers, wherein I went through the same odd series of events, unable to change the outcome but painfully aware of the cycle. I'm actually not joking here; I, a semi-grown man who is ostensibly an adult, had an actual nightmare about a video game.
But essentially what drives me so nuts about Smash Run? In a word: "Bullshit". In two words, "Repetition" and "Bullshit". I'll start first with the latter.
I say "bullshit", but that's a vague word, though I suspect if you've played Smash Run you might know what I mean-- What I mean by "bullshit" is, I suppose, when the random factors of the game converge in a manner that screws you over to the point where there's nothing you can do about it, or perhaps more simply, any time something happens that makes you scream "BULLSHIT". And trust me, the only people who have said bullshit more frequently than I have are in Washington. The bullshit in Smash Run is, I suppose, part of the game. Virtually everything about the game is random, from which enemies show up, what layout you get, where chests and items are, etc. It's supposed to keep things fresh and it does, for the most part. You just have to stock up some good power ups, pick a character that platforms well, and you should do just fine, right? If you're just playing Smash Run for fun, then no big deal at all. You get something new every time, you just gotta do your best and have some fun, right? Why are you so pissed about this dumb game mode you don't even have to play?
"Well," Said Masahiro Sakurai, stroking his chin while wiping his ass with "Goku 4 Smash" requests, "What if we made it so that you get your custom moves and stuff from this game mode?"
"Ok, that sounds cool, yeah. That way, we encourage the player to play this mode and--"
"So whenever you pick up a custom part," Sakurai continues, "You get a chance of MAYBE getting a Custom Move; but maybe you get some dumb upgrade you don't care about."
"Well, as long as it's always giving you new stuff, that should make it rewarding each time you play--"
"And let it repeat, so there's only ever a slim chance of you getting the stuff you actually want as a reward!"
"...Okay, Mr. Sakurai, but can the Smash Run be at least fun to play?"
"It can be fun about 50% of the time, if you get an actual Smash fight-- But otherwise, you get a boring race or climb challenge where you just have to pray you got enough power ups to keep up with your opponents and then randomly die at the last second!"
"So, essentially, the player is putting up with whatever random stuff you throw at them on the off-chance that they MIGHT get some cool prizes, but probably won't?"
"Exactly," Sakurai finishes, guzzling down a deep thermos of fanboy tears. "Now, get back to making Corrin the most broken motherfucker in the game."
As that entirely 100% accurate transcript of a real conversation just proved, my experience with Smash Run has essentially been as such: Play through a bunch of random, tedious gameplay to get the things I want. If my half-lucid rant wasn't clear, the only reason I played Smash Run like a maniac was to get the custom moves that change each character. Customizing characters is one of my favorite things to do in video games, even if the customization in Smash is fairly shallow. But I enjoy it, and I wanted to get all the Customs so I could customize to the height of my ability-- But I had to unlock them all first.
No, "unlock" is the wrong word-- I had to GRIND them, via this excruciating easter egg hunt from hell that might not even give me results. And I know-- There are other ways to get custom parts than Smash Run-- Classic mode probably gives you higher chances and there's various other ways to find them. But that's just it-- It's the finding that drives me nuts. It's that I'm NOT "unlocking" by making progress, hitting marks and being rewarded subsequently-- I'm essentially gambling that I'll get the things I want, finding those little Wrench thingies that MIGHT give me a reward; but at the same time might just be something I already have, thus wasting my time and effort. So Smash Run became less of a wacky and different gameplay mode and more of a tedious, intense, and highly frustrating chore; and the same goes for Classic mode and so on. It becomes less of playing a game and more of grinding. It's not a challenge, it's an endurance test. And all the fun goes straight out the window for me. I just have to ask myself: "Why? Why was it designed like this? If anyone wants to get all the custom parts, it's not a matter of being good at the game or as a reward-- It's about spending a buttload of time running around, winning fights over and over and then hoping you get things. Why?"
I have a bit of a theory on why it's like this. I think it's because that was the way they did trophies and stuff in the earlier Smash games. See, with Trophies, I don't care as much. Because what are you gonna DO with a trophy? There's buttloads of trophies, so more often than not, you're getting something new, but if you don't, eh, you're not really missing out. But with the Custom Parts, you ARE missing out-- Even if you can't really use them online or anything, that's still an aspect of the game that you're missing, and not necessarily because you aren't good enough at the game or because you haven't done a lot of stuff; it's because you just haven't hit the jackpot and gotten lucky just yet. It feels cheap, and when it's done with a thing that directly and immediately affects your gameplay, then it stings all that much more.
You see, Smash Run isn't really what I hate; not really. It's just the mode I was the most frustrated with. At the end of the day, I have no idea if Smash Run is good or bad as a mechanic or whatever, and honestly I haven't even seen anyone else play through it. I have no frame of reference if I'm just really bad at it or if the game is legitimately as frustrating as I feel it is. Hell, if I didn't care about getting Custom Parts or completing those Challenge walls, I wouldn't be nearly as frustrated with this game as I have been. It's entirely my own personal stake in the game that drives me to be as mad as I am, and to still be playing after all this time. And I'll definitely admit-- A lot of this is because I just am not good at the game. I'm not nearly good enough and that frustrates me a lot too. But at the same time, that still won't change that if I go through Smash, get a bunch of the Wrenches, I can still just as easily come out with nothing, regardless of how well I did. That is my problem with Smash Run.
Like I said, this is a personal issue-- Honestly, I like most of the rest of Smash. There's nothing quite like going online only to be immediately thrashed by someone's Corrin-- Wait, what's that noise? Do I hear a... segue!?
Yes, that's right, there's no brakes on the rant train tonight because speaking of Fire Emblem related bullshit: Fire Emblem: Fucking Awakening.
Ok so Corrin doesn't actually have much to do with it, but Awakening is the OTHER insanely frustrating game I haven't been able to put down in weeks and just tonight that frustration hit a fever pitch with my latest Fire Emblem Fuck Up, which I'll get to in due time.
So first, a little background: Awakening is my first FE game, but I have a decent amount of knowledge about the plot and characters because the game's been out for a while, I'm playing Normal difficulty with no final deaths, and yes, I am entirely aware that the following fuck-up is entirely my fault. That won't stop me from being pissier than episode 195 of South Park.
Essentially, I've been playing through Awakening for a while now, and I got around to marrying the characters to get their kids. I'm not particularly interested in any of them but there's some I do happen to like. I finally managed to grind up some relationships and got a few of the kids, which was fun, despite the fact that they'll serve as little more than pretty trophies in my army while the 10 or so units I actually care about continue to wreck shit and do the actual fighting. I finally get to Severa, who seems interesting from what I know of her; I can at least sympathize with her sentiment of "Chrom, Chrom, Chrom, all you ever talk about is Chrom!" which I have felt very strongly throughout my playthrough. Her deal is that she's not gonna join you when you talk to her like everyone else, because she wants to talk to this one NPC dude first-- Essentially making this a goddamn escort mission. Goooooood. I don't understand WHY she couldn't have just joined with us and then still talked to the guy but whatever.
Just as I'm thinking "ok finally a character who's as sick of Chrom as I am", I go through the level, beat the boss aaaaaaand I don't get Severa. Before I even know what's happened, I've saved, lost the character, and now am sitting with my jaw slacked feeling like Wil E. Coyote as he slowly realizes he just ran straight off the side of that cliff.
So I'll be the first to admit that this fuck up was my fault-- I wasn't really paying attention, I presumed that if I just won the field I'd still get the character, and I was too hasty to save. That was all my bad.
Then I kept thinking about it. Because first off-- The fuck just happened!? I kill the boss, the day is saved-- And then Severa just fucks off and leaves? Didn't she and Lucina and all the kids come back in time to help their parents, e.g. my group? I guess it must have not been all THAT important, because since I didn't play by Severa's rules, she decides "well fuck this" and just waltzes off. So now, in this timeline, Severa's just gonna go hit the stock market and become rich while all her friends and family are off fighting somewhere and I guess she never decides that they might need some help. Then I started thinking; wait, I KILLED the bad guy, the one making NPC man do the fighting. So, why can't Severa just go in and talk with them now? Was it just that SHE wanted to do it, but because I didn't let HER play the hero she's all mad and decided "screw you guys, I'm going home"? I solved the problem-- And yet I still lost! Following this result I looked it up, and indeed, there's no way to get her back.
But alright-- Again, I admit-- I wasn't paying all that much attention. I skip most of the cutscenes and stuff and I go through the dialogue pretty fast if I'm not interested; That whole schpiel I just wrote could be entirely and factually incorrect! Maybe there's a perfectly good story reason why I had to escort her-- Maybe the cutscenes explain it perfectly and I've just made a total dunce of myself because I couldn't keep my thumbs steady and my eyes from glazing over-- Okay, I accept that, and I retroactively retract that complaint-- All that doesn't matter, because what I mostly care about is the gameplay.
So then I started thinking: "Why?" Why did it have to be an escort mission? Why did they decide to do it like this? Was it to make things harder? Well, I wouldn't say it makes things more difficult-- Just more frustrating. I didn't have much DIFFICULTY slashing and hacking my way through the stage, painting the walls with my enemies' blood and unleashing hellfire and twisters upon the hapless foes that dared to step in my way. Hell, Severa didn't even take a tick of damage all the way through and if I hadn't been so hasty, I probably could have cleaned up with time to spare. I mean, the issue was that I just won TOO fast. So why the escort? Was it perhaps to try and teach me (the player) restraint? I guess? Maybe? Was it for the story? Well if it was, it didn't do a very good job-- I mean, why wouldn't Severa just join our cabal and be like "okay, I'll join you-- I just wanna talk to this guy first" and even if we DID kick ass and win the level before she did-- What the hell's stopping her from still talking to this guy? I read up and her thing is that she's trying to convince the guy not to fight for the Boss, so yeah, it'd kind of lose that purpose-- But I still can't imagine that not doing that would be enough to forever separate her from teaming with her future/past family. Again, I could be wrong, but this whole level just felt cheap. And now I find that in order to correct my mistake, I'd have to restart the game, play though ALLLLLL the preceeding chapters, and grind up ALLLLLLL those opponents to marry the units, level them and oh god I could write a whole essay on why this pisses me off.
Oh wait.
But at the end of the day, I am still playing Smash and eventually I'll pick up Awakening again. It's either a testament to the games themselves or probably more likely to my addictive personality that I keep playing them, but I feel that my persistence will eventually HAVE to pay off. I'm fairly sure you can do New Game+ for Awakening and while the thought of doing ALL THAT SHIT again does not in the least appeal to me, I can at least take solace in the fact that I'll have spent hours of my life to win at a stupid video game instead of doing something productive, then proceeded to waste even more typing up a thousand words onto an internet forum that I don't even post on.
Why did I do this.
Was there any point? Will anyone even understand me? Best case scenario people will read this and be like "huh yeah that sounds frustrating". Why do we do the things we do? Are we so desperate for attention? Are we so deeply lonely that we seek the company of anyone who will listen? Or perhaps we are all so egotistical that we believe that anyone will care for what we have said.
In the end, we cannot know the full ramifications of our actions in this life, no more than a pebble can see the ripples that it sends sprawling across the lake's glimmering surface. And aren't we all just pebbles, sending out our ripples as we sink into the bottom, and perhaps, as we settle amongst the mud and dirt and carry off into our sleep, we may finally look upwards and see the ripples of those who come after, and finally realize that it is the symphony of a thousand pebbles, the force of a billion tiny stones, each alone insignificant, but together, shake the waters of the lake in ways both beautiful and terrible, creating an eternal rhythm as the water dances, each drop pushed and scattered into a hectic waltz by the dropping of stone and bursts of ripples-- Perhaps one day we shall all see the tumultuous ocean that we mere pebbles have created.
anyways that's why i hate video games.