Haters Gonna Hate: A Brief Look At The Motivations of Villains in Video Games.

In the spirit of Halloween, I've been saving this post for a while and after a few additions, changes and alterations, I feel it's ready for public eyes.

I started Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation a month back while awaiting the return of my computer charger (which was left in SoCal) and like a lot of JRPGs, the game started with the player controlling a teenage boy with spiky hair in a small mountain village.  As was the case with Secret of Mana and Paladin's Quest, I half expected to do something to piss off the town elders that would get me kicked out of town with my so-called close friends abandoning me upon my being exiled.  That was not the case at all thankfully.  There were, however, murmurs of an evil being somewhere out in the world threatening the rest of humanity with destruction/domination/desolation/dismemberment, basically any evil word starting with "D."

This is what I actually wanted to talk about today.  The ultimate bad guy (final boss) in video games and their motivations.  In a lot of JRPGs, the ultimate goal of the main antagonist is world domination either with or without destroying the rest of the world in the process.  This article will not be all encompassing as I have not played against every type of villain ever created, so there is going to be some unintentional bias on my part.  But in the meantime, let us look at a few games and the motivations of the main villains.

Dragon Quest/Warrior:  In the first game, the Dragonlord simply wants to take over the known world.  I do not recall there being much else in the way of motivation.  The Dragonlord hates the Orbs of Light, steals them and you have to get them back.  It is a pretty simple story line, complete with rescuing a princess from a dragon; although that happens about a third of the way through the game.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: In this game, the main antagonist, Ganon, is already dead (spoiler: killed at the end of the first Legend of Zelda), but it is the threat of his return that propels Link forward to complete his quest.  The enemy correctly believes that if they sprinkle/pour the blood of Link over Ganon's ashes, that he will return to continue his plan of ruling over Hyrule that he had began in the first game in the series.  And while not needing to rescue Princess Zelda, she is under a sleeping spell that will only be lifted upon . . . you know I forgot.  I know Shadow Link is the final (pain in the ass) boss and maybe something to do with combining the Triforces together.

Final Fantasy VI: This game has multiple main antagonists with Emperor Gesthal being in the forefront for the first half of the game and Kefka taking over right before the beginning of the second half.  For Emperor Gesthal, he wants unlimited power as a ruler, for every civilization on the planet to be under his rule.  Kefka on the other hand just "want[s] to see the world burn."  He is a true socio/psychopath.  He does not care about ruling the world or enslaving the world population, he simply wants to destroy everything, himself included if need be.

Portal: Moving away from JRPGs (for the moment), Portal changes the role of the main antagonist, GlaDOS, away from world domination to just wanting to continue to do the role she was programmed to do: conduct tests.  Yes, I know there is more to it than all that, but those are the basics.  And yes, it is true that GlaDOS does exhibit some typical sociopathic behaviors.  GlaDOS sees what she is doing is not wrong, but necessary to continue testing of test subjects.  Left to her own devices, she might run out of test subjects, or maybe she will learn how to artificially inseminate her stock of female test subjects and create a constant supply of growing subjects.  This outcome is hinted at in the Portal 2 co-op portion of the game, but it is hard to believe anything that GlaDOS says.

Dead Space:  One thing I love about this game is that there is no official main boss.  Sure there is the hugely giant tentacled Lovecraftian creature that came out of who knows where because why not!?  The majority of the game is spent repairing parts of the USG Ishimura so that you can escape all the horror that is happening on board.  The stereotypical villain here is more of the presence and influence of the Red Marker, but in this case is somewhat similar to Sauron as an overseeing enemy that has no direct contact with the main character but exudes its will against them.  Yes, there is Doctor Whatshisname who keeps trying to unleash the constantly regenerating brutish thing upon Isaac, but that creature functions more as a mini-boss.  The appearance of the final boss at the end seems very rushed and unclear by the end of the game, which is when it makes its first and only appearance.

Super Mario Bros.:  Let us take a step back to 1985 and take a quick look at Bowser and his Koopas.  They have invaded the Mushroom Kingdom, turned all of the citizens into bricks and plants and have kidnapped Princess Toadstool, thereby preventing the Princess from reversing the spell.  So why did Bowser want to invade the Mushroom Kingdom in the first place?  The manual is not clear as to Bowsers motivations and although Wikipedia expounds upon Bowsers frequent kidnapping of Princess Toadstool/Peach, these motivations are never stated.  Sure he wants to take over the Mushroom Kingdom, but what then?  What are his long term goals?  Marry the Princess (because his first wife died after giving birth to the seven Koopalings?) and rule the Kingdom.  Simple I guess.

Donkey Kong:  I am referring to the original arcade game from 1981 for this, the last character in today's article.  In this game, Donkey Kong is the main villain with Jumpman (aka Mario) attempting to rescue Pauline.  But why does Donkey Kong have Pauline?  The story behind the game states that Donkey Kong belonged to Mario/Jumpman, but Mario mistreated Donkey Kong so DK retaliated by kidnapping Pauline.  So what is DK's endgame then?  I believe that DK does not have a final plan as to what to do with Pauline, although Miyamoto has said that the game originally began as a love triangle Popeye game, but changed the characters when they could not acquire the license.  So maybe Donkey Kong is in love with Pauline but that premise would be absurd, right?  I would like to think that he lashed out at being abused too many times and Pauline was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I am going to leave this painfully short list of villains and main antagonists now as even attempting to do an all encompassing list is the very definition of time consuming.  I also do not get paid enough to take on such an endeavor.  From this abbreviated and biased list, it would appear that the motivation behind the majority of known evil is world domination.  I guess that would be the simplest motivation to write a story around with a clear and cut ending.  Just something to think about.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental

Monthly Update: December

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

Here is a funny link all about simple web design.  The last time I designed a website, it was in HTML 5, it was a Ryouga Hibiki Shrine on angelfire and was WAY too image intensive.  Granted, I was accessing with a 14.4k modem, but this taught me to design to my access speed.  I learned the basic lessons so hilariously described in the above link, and have occasionally remarked with incredulity at the super complicated websites of today.  Even though my access speed is now, something like 1000 times faster, website designers have managed to make things load almost as slow as the giant pile of P-chans that was my first website.  

Anyhow, that background helped make this silly link a lot funnier.  That and all the swearing.  Man, I'm surprised it took me this long to talk about Ranma 1/2 on this blog.

I just found out that Hiroo Isono, visual artist for the Seiken Densetsu series passed away this year.  Just about one year ago, I found out who he was, when I did cursory research for the Secret of Mana box art (possibly my favorite box art of all time).  His name has been very nearly the most popular search term bringing people to this blog.  And his art was really cool!

Links:
http://www.art-licensing.com/artists/Hiroo-Isono-Forests-and-Landscapes/biography.html
Official-seeming-site

http://www.realmofgaming.com/news/Hiroo-Isono-1945-2013/1811.html
brief eulogy

http://shinigamilist.com/2013/06/13/illustrator-hiroo-isono-passed-away/
another brief eulogy

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/hiroo-isono
lots and lots of art

I recently read an article arguing that the Mario Bros movie 'wasn't that bad.'  Well, I decided to finally watch it.  It's pretty bad, but it's a kids movie, afterall.  And they do a great job of putting in a bunch of game references in a movie that is, visually, radically different from the games.  Look out for snifits, fireballs, and an allusion to the last fight in Super Mario World.  And frankly, the acting is fantastic, Dennis Hopper, in particular. The sum total is a mediocre movie, not a terrible one. 

http://www.destructoid.com/why-the-super-mario-movie-is-an-underappreciated-masterpiece-29694.phtml

destructoid does a pretty good job of laying it out.

http://bottomlesswit.com/in-defense-of-the-super-mario-bros-movie/

this one's pretty good too, though I still don't think it's the one I read.

I'm between games, so nothing to talk about there.  I'm reading Haruki Murikami's book 'Wild Sheep Chase.'  I really like it.  The flow can be very strange, moving quick at times, slow at times, but I really like the lead character/narrator, and when this book is good, it's really good!  

The job search isn't going all that great, but it might help if I had any idea what I want to do with the rest of my life.  Except write for this blog.  Masters Degree?  Teach?  Desk Job?  Who knows.  Eventually I'm going to be tired of staying on couches, that's for sure.  Which reminds me, hey Jaconian and Conklederp...

Alright well, I hope I've wasted enough of your time.  Have a wonderful December!

-D

P.S.  Secret of Mana and the Mario Bros movie both came out in 1993.  But I wasn't making websites until '95, I think.

P.P.S. I almost forgot!  The Humble Story Bundle!  13 days left! Yeah, I bought it.  8 bucks.  I sometimes think I might like to talk about video games more than play them.  And this collection is just perfect for that tendency.  I'm pretty excited about it, but I wish they were physical copies, and not digital downloads.  Maybe if I owned a kindle I could split the difference, but alas, I do not.  

Video Game Artwork

Who remembers fuse beads?  Perler Fuse Beads?  My younger sister had these when we were growing up and at some point I thought it'd be cool to use these to create video game related artwork.  I remember trying to create something that resembled the "Z" logo from A Link to the Past, although I don't have it anymore and I don't know if any pictures of it exist.

I got into cross-stitching back in the summer of 1994.  My older sister was starting to do it and I'd watch her after I got back from school.  I'd been playing Mario Paint for about a year at that point and while watching her stitch little X's onto fabric, I realized that I was basically doing the same with with Mario Paint's pixel creation portion of the game.  Dr. Potts actually was the wizard when it came to looking at in-game pixels and recreating them in Mario Paint.  If I remember correctly, he made two separate characters for the main character in Secret of Mana and was able to animate them to look like he ran in the game.

That summer of 1994, I decided that I would create a pattern, using the pixels from Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.  Specifically, from Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda, and A Link to the Past, with the Nintendo logo in the middle.  My initial plan was to have the characters facing each other with the Nintendo logo in the middle and a border of various items from the game and turn it all into a pillow.  At the time, Super Mario World and A Link to the Past were the most recent and current iterations of those various franchises (1990 and 1991 respectively).  I began this project back in 1994 and only last February 2012 did I finally complete the last item in the border.

If you follow the patter from the lower left corner to counter clockwise (New Link - Old Mario - Old Link - New Mario) that by the time it reaches around, that there's only once space between the pouch and chest from A Link to the Past.  The question of what to put in this square tied me up and kept me from finishing this project for almost 20 years.  Keeping in mind that I didn't map out and line everything up as it probably should have been, I think it turned out rather well, considering it was the first thing I'd ever cross-stitched.  You'll also have to forgive me for not having/using the correct color pallet in respect to Mario from Super Mario Bros.

Since then though, I've done a couple of other pieces that have incorporated either aspects of video games or used artwork from video games as a frame of reference.

Eternal Darkness (Gamecube)

I created the seven seal Protect Area sigil using the Mantarok sigil as the power source.  It's currently above the bedroom door.

Admittingly, this one turned out more pixelly than I had intended and I probably could have made it larger, but it was my first project in roughly 13 years.  I still don't have a frame for it yet.

Plants vs. Zombies
Each of these are about two inch squares.

The Konami Code

A pattern I created for Dr. Potts as a Christmas turned birthday present last year (2011 Christmas - 2012 birthday).

That's all I've made for the time being.  I'm not sure if I'll do anything this year as I want to focus more time on painting miniatures, of which I will most likely post pictures from that endeavor.   

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

It Happens All At Once

Introduction to a Theory about Video Game Music Composers

"This is the first entry in what I hope to be a series of posts about composers/programmers of music in video games.  And not just any composers, but composers that we either don't know much about or have miss-attributed soundtracks to.  What do I mean by "miss-attribute?"  Okay, when you think of the music from the Legend of Zelda series, who comes to mind?  Right, Koji Kondo.  Except that he didn't write the music for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.  That soundtrack was composed by Akito Nakatsuka.  Who is that you ask?  In short, he also wrote some of the music for Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!"

The above was my going into what was originally planned as a series of about nine to ten posts, focusing on individual composers and why some soundtracks are miss-attributed to them.  As an avid collector of soundtracks, I had thought that knowledge of video game composers would be about as prevalent as knowledge of film music composers.  Granted I only know of a couple by name, and those're some of the big guns: Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo, Koichi Sugiyama, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Yasunori Mitsuda, Robin Beanland and David Wise.  

As it turned out, this happened to be one of those instances where when you grow up with a particular thing, like a dad who collects and chops/cuts and stacks firewood, that you think that all dads do that.  Turns out a lot of dads do not drive out on county roads looking for felled trees or asking people who have had trees cut  down if they would mind if their wood was taken out of their gutter.  Who knew that wasn't normal?  Turns out knowledge of who the composers of video game music are and what games they've composed for is not common knowledge.

I found this out when I put up a survey seeing if 1)  If people knew who wrote the music to a particular video game and 2)  If they knew, then they were to put down their answer by name.  My theory was for example, that if someone would think that because Koji Kondo wrote the music to Super Mario Bros. that they might think he wrote the music to Dr. Mario.  Or, as in the first mentioned example of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!. 

In the following post I will give the results and my initial analysis of the data that I collected from the survey (which when I last checked was only 20 people).  So with this in mind, I will now leave you with a couple youtube-ified tracks from various video games soundtracks that I absolutely love:

Tooth & Claw by Robin Beanland : Killer Instinct

Overworld by Koichi Sugiyama : Dragon Warrior

Sacrifices by Yuzo Koshiro : ActRaiser

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Can Just Hear It Now

P.S.  If you would like to take the aforementioned survey, here is the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XSYPF3N  And please do not look up any information before taking the survey as I am/was trying to find out people's existing knowledge.  Thank you.

Baptized in 8 Bit Music

At this moment, I'm listening to "Scene V: ~Prelude~ FFI - Main Theme / Kao's Shrine / Chaos' Temple" from Symphonic Suite: Final Fantasy, which you could say inspired me to write this.

My love of video game music came about sometime in 1991 while playing Final Fantasy on the NES.  I just came to the part where the King of Coneria builds a bridge to the adjacent continent and your characters cross.  That's when the screen flashes and you're greeted with a text-story moment and this music.  I must've sat there and listened to it until either the screen force-ably changed or I pressed "A" and progressed the game myself.  

I'd played quite a few games whose music I really liked by that point (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man II), but something about the "Theme" music from Final Fantasy did something for me that the music from video games had never done before.  Maybe it was that I recognized it as something that just wasn't being played in the background, but something that I could sit and listen to for hours on end.

The problem though at the time was that video game soundtracks were practically unheard of in the United States, or as far as I knew at the time, didn't exist at all.  The internet wasn't readily available, especially so on the Apple IIe computer that our family was using, and modems were things that regular households just didn't have; so finding import CD's was pretty much out of the question.  (I don't even think the Apple IIe was modem compatible, although I did convince my older sister that I'd hacked into the DMV and changed test answers on the drivers test).  Once I started going to Star Trek conventions (1992 or 93 I think), I began seeing anime soundtracks from Japan, albeit for anywhere between $25 - $70 a piece, which for a new teenager, was very much out of the question.  So at least I knew that music from Japanese products were out there.

When Final Fantasy II came out on the SNES (or more likely after I bought it), and there was the revamped "Final Fantasy Theme," and I knew what I had to do.  I took my sister's duel cassette tape deck (which had better recording capabilities than mine), propped it up on the two doors of our family's entertainment center and hit "Record" every time a new song came up.  I let the songs play through  2-3 times, depending on the length of the song.  I then did the same thing for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.  I now had playable video game soundtracks, still unaware that legit soundtracks had already been released in Japan since 1986.  

In 1995, I bought Final Fantasy III for the SNES and it came with a brochure for various items you could buy from Squaresoft.  There was a Mog keychain, an FFIII shirt and the soundtracks to Final Fantasy III (Titled "Kefka's Domain") and The Secret of Mana.  My parents said that for my 9th grade graduation (Woodland still had Jr. High schools so moving to the actual "High School" seemed like a big deal) asked what I wanted.  Looking at this brochure, I knew that I really liked the music from both games, but Kefka's Domain came with 3 CD's.  Three whole CD's of music from a game that I loved.  I told my parent's that that was what I wanted, and bless them, without scoffing or questioning my request, that's what they bought me for my graduation present.

That's what started it all.  Soon after I bought the DK Jamz (Donkey Kong Country) CD from Nintendo Power and the Symphonic Suite: Final Fantasy CD, which had orchestrated video game music, something that I thought would never exist.  I won't list all the game soundtracks that I've acquired over the years, but recently I've been downloading "soundtracks" from NES games that never had official released soundtracks such as Jackal, Ikari Warriors, and Crystalis.  It's been a rebirth of being excited about NES music again even though I don't have the console hooked up.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Que the Orchestra