Progress does not happen in a vacuum. Every so often we get a groundbreaking, massively influential video game, and while such masterpieces might have plenty of originality, they’re never completely original, and always build upon previous works in some way. For example, take Dark Souls, which formed the bedrock and namesake of the Souls-like subgenre, and has been used as a point of comparison so often it’s become a meme. It’s arguably the most influential game of the past decade (if we exclude the mobile market). But neither Dark Souls itself nor the underlying ideas that lead to its success and influence popped up out of nowhere. Dark Souls very clearly inherited a lot from Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware’s previous game. And if this was an essay on video game genealogy and not a review for a game that I haven’t even mentioned yet, we could dig even further and identify Demon’s Souls’ influences.
My point is that for every massively popular, genre-defining game out there, there are going to be other games that laid the groundwork for it. And that means that other games need to actually lay the groundwork. They won’t be highly-polished pinnacles of perfection, but a unique idea or two in an otherwise ordinary package with an execution that will range from flawed to decent. And that’s what I feel like Exile Election is. It introduces some original ideas to the death game subgenre, but they just... aren’t very good. They’re not bad, but not very good, either. Exile Election seems to me like a game that is underwhelming on its own, but will someday serve as a reference point that someone will use to identify, analyze, and rectify in their own game in order to make it fantastic.
But enough abstract rambling, let’s talk about the game itself. We play as Ichijou Kanata, who wakes up one day to discover that he and 11 other people have been kidnapped by a weird rabbit thing named Alice. The group is apparently the last remaining humans on the planet, which has been overrun by monsters. Alice has brought them to a safe haven—a theme park named Aliceland—but Alice only has the resources necessary to support two people. Therefore, the group will need to be whittled down from twelve people to two. Alice mandates that the group will need to hold elections to decide whom to exile from the theme park. Thus the killing game begins.
When the game told us we were going to have elections who had to stay, I thought that meant the group would have to select the two people they wanted to remain, but the game actually does it a bit differently. Rather than just having one big election to decide the two survivors, they instead use a series of one-on-one elections where the loser is immediately exiled. They also don't have a direct election of which candidate should remain. Instead, Alice gives them a topic, and the group anonymously debates the issue. Whichever candidate can sway the group to their point of view wins, and has the winning view implemented. The debate topics typically take the form of: "You have a machine that will have some hyper-magical effect (for instance, nobody will ever be able to lie, or everyone will live forever); do you activate it?"
Since this is just a series of one-on-one elections, we could easily just chill until the end and let everyone else take each other out... but obviously that wouldn't make for a very exciting video game. Kanata realizes shortly after waking up that this isn't the first time he was put into this situation. He had previously encountered this same situation, with these same people, but also with his younger sister—who was immediately voted to death by the nine others. Even if he's the only one who remembers what happened, Kanata vows to avenge his sister and kill the nine people who voted to kill her. (The only people who escape Kanata's wrath are his best friend, Ichika, and a mysterious, amnesiac girl called Nori, who wasn't part of the initial group.)
Due to Kanata's thirst for vengeance, rather than relaxing and taking things slowly, we proactively participate in every single election. It just couldn't be easy, huh. But this is where we get into what I think is the central idea of the game: we need to defeat the nine other characters in debate, but we are allowed to kill them in (nearly) any order we like. The nine targets are grouped into three groups of three characters each (two of the groups are acquaintances from before the game, and the last group is three people who don't know anyone else); each group needs to be eliminated together, but we get to choose the order we take out the groups, and the order we take out the characters within each group. While this doesn't grant the full nine-factorial range of possibilities, there are still 1296 possible "routes." In other words, the main idea behind Exile Election is that it's a death game where we get to choose the order in which all the characters die.
And this is where the problems start to show. The game operates in three-day cycles, with two days devoted to "investigation" and the third reserved for the election. The "investigations" are simple and straightforward: you'll be presented with a couple of locations to visit and the characters at each, select one to visit, watch a scene, and repeat that until the day is done. However, it ends up feeling like your choices don't really matter; you'll see the same scenes by the end of the two days regardless. For instance, if there are three different characters you can visit on day one and you only have enough time to interact with two of them, the third character will probably be the only person you can see on the second day. There are already 1296 possible routes; the game doesn't create any extra main branches within the investigations.
Even then, the investigations feel a bit shallow. They rarely have any direct connection to the elections, and instead develop the characters and the plot. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, but feels a bit off in a game built around an investigation/trial structure. The bigger issue is that the character groups can't interact with each other. The developers obviously did not plan and write out 1296 separate routes. Rather, they used a "modular" writing structure that allows the route to be built from a smaller number of chunks. The scenes you get with the characters from Group A will be the same in the first third of the game regardless of whether you choose to eliminate Group B or Group C first. And the Group A scenes in the middle third will be the same whether you eliminate Group B and then Group C or Group C and then Group B.
This still requires a massive amount of writing. It's just less than manually creating 1296 paths. But since the scenes for each character group are written without concern for the state of the other groups, characters in one group can never interact with or even refer to each other. (Whenever someone is exiled, Alice conveniently erases them from everyone else's memory, so nobody can ever refer to dead characters.) You'd think that, considering these kids are the last people on the planet and are trapped in an enclosed space, they'd interact with each other a fair amount, but the fact that they don't acknowledge each other's presence makes the world feel hollow and artificial.
The modular structure also prevents any significant story development. The story has to function regardless of who's alive or dead, so it chugs along on its own without any input from or effect on the cast. Only when you get to the end of the game does the plot break free of its chains and show any sign of life.
All that being said, I think the developers did a good job with the modular structure. The central idea of Exile Election is that you can kill off the characters in any order. This practically necessitates a modular structure, since writing out each individual route is infeasible. But creating modules in a way that's engaging and natural is really, really tough. The whole point of the modules is that they can be used regardless of the rest of the game state, but that's what makes them feel shallow. Exile Election implements the structure competently, with minimal continuity slip-ups, but my hope is that someone in the future will be able to learn from Exile Election's example to find a solution to this internal contradiction of the modular structure.
That leaves the election segments, which are typically the high point of games like this, but here are... thoroughly mediocre. Let me qualify that a bit. As far as the writing goes, they're perfectly fine and serve their purpose. But as gameplay segments, they're shameful.
Since the elections are supposed to be anonymous, it takes place in what is essentially a chatroom that moves in real time. Every so often, your opponent will say a keyword you can remember by pressing a certain button. You then get timed multiple choice questions that you have to answer using your memorized keywords (or by staying silent).
That's it. That's the entirety of the gameplay.
In Ace Attorney you have to grapple with witness testimony and unravel the case yourself, and Danganronpa has a slew of mini-games, but here we're stuck with... a couple of multiple choice questions. It's simplistic and disappointing. It's also fairly silly game design. You can only memorize a maximum of three keywords at a time, so if you try to memorize a fourth keyword, you must forget one of your existing keywords. But the game flow is memorizing keywords, and then getting the question. So how do you know which keyword is the one you need to memorize? You don't! The game is essentially asking you to answer questions that haven't even been asked yet!
I want to reiterate that the writing is fine in the elections. The characters explore the topics brought up by Alice thoroughly, and there were several times where the game asked me a question, my thought process was "Well, the obvious general answer is [A], but if you consider this specific factor then I think it actually becomes [B]," and then when I selected [B], Kanata would give the exact answer I was thinking. This is great! Of course, there were also a few times where I had no idea what each small answer choice blurb meant, and had no idea how Kanata went from my selection to the explanation he gives. Also, if you don't have the necessary keyword for a question (either because you forgot it to make room for another keyword or you (somehow) missed the chance to memorize it), the game will give you an immediate game over at the question (rather than making you repeatedly and hopelessly answer the question incorrectly until you lose all your life), which is nice design. Exile Election also varies the flow of the elections, which I thought was nice. It would have been very easy for them to make every single election fall into the structure of "start off relatively even, get a couple of people to your side, lose almost everyone, and then make a dramatic comeback and win," but they didn't.
Still, no matter how competently the elections are written, the fact that they are isolated philosophical debates rather than examinations of plot-relevant incidents prevents them from every feeling particularly weighty. In episodic murder games, every chapter is fully devoted to its murder. But in Exile Election, the elections feel like a minor, light distraction from your everyday life at Aliceland. Which, to a certain extent, is necessary to preserve the modular structure. The lack of deep plot relevance and shallow gameplay causes the elections to feel much less interesting than the trials from other games of this type.
(Also, during the elections, Alice temporarily resets everyone's memory back to the beginning of the ordeal and simulates all the dead characters, so every election features every character, allowing each election to be used at any point without modification.)
So the game isn't great, as both the investigations and elections are simplistic, but the writing and overall mystery is still interesting enough to keep you playing. Then, finally, when you reach the end of the game and the paths converge (all 1296 routes converge to the same point, by the way) and the game is no longer shackled by the constraints of modular writing, it kicks things into high gear. The climax has some genuinely interesting ideas and twists—but just when it seems like the plot is going to reach its boiling point, the game just shrugs and walks away. Exile Election's mediocrity is consistent if nothing else.
The overarching plot is competently woven, but nothing mind-blowing. Exile Election uses some tropes that seem a bit obvious for an ontological mystery, but it manages to implement them well enough that it doesn't feel unsatisfying (although it's not particularly compelling, either). As with most other parts of the game, it seems designed to create and support the situation where we get to choose the order of deaths of the characters.
Since there's only one ending, there isn't much incentive to play through the game multiple times, unless you fall in love with the game enough to want to see everything. I played through the section for the last group of three characters three times to see how it worked with each character in each position, and the only real difference is you get a scene with the final character that essentially serves as a capstone to their character arc. However, there is also a record room with profiles for each character that are unlocked over the course of the game, and the fully-unlocked profiles give basically all the same info as these capstone scenes. As a result, you don't actually need to watch a character's capstone scene to find the "truth" behind their character. The characters are generally fine, but the modular structure and lack of interaction with the wider cast prevents any of them from feeling particularly compelling.
Exile Election is an okay attempt at trying to create a death game where you have full control over the order in which all the characters die. It has lots of flaws, most (if not all) of which can be traced back to the ability to choose the death order, which makes them understandable... but also doesn't change the fact that the game is flawed. Scenes are written modularly, which allows for the massive number of possible routes, but it means that major plot developments can basically never happen and the characters can't interact with anyone outside their immediate character group. Elections are disconnected from the wider story, because every election needs to be able to happen at any point in the game. I really feel for Exile Election, since I think these are issues that don't have obvious feasible solutions, but unfortunately sympathy does not dispel mediocrity. My main hope is that someone else will see Exile Election and learn from its issues to make an absolutely outstanding ontological mystery that manages to capture Exile Election's freedom while somehow avoiding its flaws.
No comments:
Post a Comment