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[
Flower spoilers incoming. Also, sentimentality.]
When thinking back to the sheer number of times that I’ve progressed through an epic journey and saved the world, it’s rare that I find myself thinking back fondly upon that world, that journey, or that triumph. After all, saving the world is an incredible triumph.
So why doesn’t it feel like it?
Too often, saving the world in a game feels like an incredibly mundane task. We’re thrown into some world, given towns, forests and characters, and we’re expected to single-handedly ensure that it’s all still there tomorrow.
But how many times do we actually feel like saving the world is the monumental task that it is? As gamers, we are the people who have the power to change the world -- something that I think we’ve all dreamed of at some point. Yet there are too many of these situations in which doing this is completely meaningless for the player.
The only recent game that really made me feel good about saving the world involved floating petals and a lot of angry girders.
Flower is a game that took my by surprise despite the fact that I played it extremely late and had already heard enough about it to know what to expect. Yeah, I had heard that people cried at the end. I knew it would be moving.
The fact is that I didn’t cry, nor did I find it moving in exactly the same way that others did. What I found moving about it is that it succeeded in doing something that even 50-hour RPGs hadn’t: I felt genuinely accomplished -- blissful even -- during that last level all because I felt as if I was having some sort of profound impact upon a very real, very important world.
So, after mulling over the experience for a week or so now, I think I know now what it was about
Flower that made this whole world-saving business feel, at long last, worthwhile.
It immediately shows your impact upon the world in a meaningful way.
Oh no, The Tree of Light is dying! Bahlghast is going to be resurrected! We had better collect the five pieces of the Gaia Soul and return them to the Apple Store with the iPhone of Hope!
Please.
Too many games, and not only JRPGs, give us ridiculous tasks that somehow lead to us saving the world. We’re presented with long journeys, and while we may know what’s at the end of them and know achieving that task is what we must do to save the world, it just doesn’t mean anything to us. How does something like this really impact the world? Even when it’s meant to stand for something else, it’s usually done in such a poor manner that, rather than being meaningful, it just ends up being ridiculous.
Flower, on the other hand, gives us three states of the world, and allows to see the beautiful and the ugliness in both. The first few stages set up the beauty of the game world: you’re thrown into this relaxing, gorgeous place, and you’re allowed to explore at your own pace. Basically, the game gives you a wonderful feeling during these early stages, and it’s one that, if you’re anything like me, you want to hold onto. In the progression of the game’s story, this is extremely important, and it’s something that too many games forget. We can’t care about making a world better if we don’t get to experience its greatness.
The next stages snatch away our happiness, and in an extremely effective way. During the beautiful night stage, the entire mood of the game is changed suddenly as a series of power lines freak out, lighting up with a menacing red glow. What exactly is going on here? You don’t know at first, but soon, you see that the entire world is being threatened by metal abominations surging with electricity. The symbolism is, of course, extremely apparent, and it may not be a message that you agree with. But in this world, the threat is very real. The beauty of the world is being taken away, along with your own personal bliss felt in the game’s early stages.
Who wouldn’t want to get that back? So, the player struggles on, knocking down metal towers and neutralizing electricity, all the while restoring even the smallest bits of color to the world. And dammit, it feels good. It makes you want to continue on.
Then, in the game’s stunning final stage, you are given the ultimate power: the power to restore the world to the incredibly beautiful state that you first experienced. You have the power to reclaim your own bliss. As the color returns all around you, and twisted, dull buildings are given life, you cannot,
cannot help but feel that your actions have truly contributed to a better world.
Pretty damn good for a game without a single line of dialogue, right?
It connects the game world’s needs with our own world’s problems, and gives us something to fight for.
I’ve yet to encounter an evil resurrected God who wants to enslave all of the world’s populace. It might happen one day, but at the present time, I can’t really relate on a personal level to those heroes in games who constantly struggle against these sorts of villains, no matter how menacing their laugh is. Why can’t a game make me save a world in a way that I can actually relate to?
Again, you may or may not agree with the message in
Flower. I find myself somewhere in between. But the simple fact is that the game highlights a real-world issue and treats it in a way that can actually alter your perception of our own world despite the utter lack of realism (sentient flower petals and all that).
How does it do this? By providing a new reason to care about the world: both the game world and the real world. Like saving the life of a beautiful princess in an RPG,
Flower allows us to save something else beautiful: the world, or, in many ways, beauty itself. Over time, I began to see beauty as its own character in the world of
Flower: someone whom I got to know well early in the game, whom was suddenly taken from me, and whom I had to rescue. Even if you don’t see it that way, you’re still given an incredibly rich and colorful world, and you have it snatched away from you.
Who wouldn’t want to save this? I think most of us have an innate love of natural beauty, and we seek it out wherever we can find it. For many of us, it’s extremely rare, found only in weekend trips out of the city.
Flower doesn’t have to make us want to tear down every man-made structure in the world in order to make us care a little bit more about the beauty in our world. All of a sudden, I feel like decorating my apartment out with a bunch of plants. There certainly might be a connection here.
It’s sad that we constantly have to feel so far removed from the worlds and the characters that we, as players, inhabit. To me,
Flower was the strongest reminder in recent memory that
we, the players, are the people who have the power to change the world. Hell, there might even be hope for our own world.
Contest:
7:00 PM on 09.14.2009
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Glad to know you enjoyed it, even if you refuse to admit to crying after you finished or cuddling your stuffed unicorn when your tears ran dry. You're still good people in my book.
We are the children...
Something...some-ah-thing...uh...sooooomething!
In all seriousness though, great write up and I'll tell you why. Because you actually explained properly to me what this game was about, unlike my brother who also loved it but has the oral articulation of a yawning hippo.
And Zodiac, I don't have a stuffed unicorn. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Really curious to see what thatgamecompany's third title will be!
Aside from that, this is easily one of the better in-depth look into the world of Flower I've read in quite a while.
As for saving the world, not every game cares about the feeling the player has when the world is saved (end of the game). They care about the journey there, and not the experices you have. Certain games focus on other factors. Example, Gears of War series's only message across is, "Lets have some fun chain sawing through some aliens."
There are millions of RPG's though that can, and should, change the way it's played so that the gamer feels as if they actually impacted the game world.
Hmmmmm... Really good write up.
Seriously, this was an incredible write-up. I feel similarly about Mother 3, but no other game has made me feel that way.
From what you've said, I really think that Flower could give me that kind of experience again, and I seriously need to play it now.
One more thing I forgot to mention that just came to me now: be sure to play through the credits. There's something very breathtaking about the way the game's credits are handled. An emotional staff roll? Amazingly, yes.
I honestly use this game to finish many of my hours of gaming, because it just leaves me feeling good. It's nice to dial the carnage down to zero and just feel like I've done something nice in the receptive world of Flower. I actually DID buy a plant because of this game, a Heart-shaped Philodendron(I named him PlantO :D) I'm sure that sounds completely stupid. But the fact that a game gave me the motivation to care for something, other than myself, everyday is pretty impressive IMO.
Anyhoo, great job Kauza!
I did not cry (and I heartily laugh at those who did) but, as I described it to a friend, found the game to be "oddly compelling." I was very impressed with how the game genuinely created a sense of "doing something" despite probably doing less than any other game. Similarly was the sense of wanting to see what is going to happen next when you know it's "just a bunch of damn flowers."
Many games throw achievements and stories and this and that and yet do not create that. Putting aside all the art-house talk about saving the world or whatever, pound for pound the game is one of the most well designed games made. Most designers merely imitate successful games to blindly hope that they'll capture the original's magic, but it's clear that with Flower they stumbled across their own.
Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind...
I think I can honestly say now without feeling emasculated that I was genuinely scared when the blackout started.
"I can change the world
I would be the sunlight in your universe
You will think my love was really something good
Baby if I could change the world"
(Elsa, on the front-page votes are replaced by comments which means this has to compete with Jim's articles. Nice try Kauza. See here: popular link on top right of the screen.)
But you can spend plenty of time re playing it though, oh you can....as I have done about 50 times :D
...and yeah, that was the best credit sequence I've ever seen :)
I love it when stories like this get promoted to the front page. It reminds me why I like Destructoid in the first place.
Back on topic:
You do bring up a very good point that somehow still gets forgotten: Good tactics from other mediums do not necessary translate to being good tactics in Video Games.
I know Mr. Birch has been constantly bringing up in his rants and I've read many a blog posts that discuss this topic. Games needs to be designed as games. Stories, cutscenes, and the like are extraneous and ofter detract from the experience rather than add to it.
I recently played through Flower myself and I had a very similar reaction to the game as you. The ham-fisted message on wind power and "going green" left me indifferent, but the gameplay and the literal flow of the events kept me immersed. I felt like I was making the difference. The game and the game world was affected by me. And all of this was done without conventional story telling. No names. No haunted past. No relationships you're told to care about. Nothing but the levels you play through and the game's feedback to your action. You are progressively shown how things affect you and the world you are in, and you are then granted the power to restore the world to its former glory by using gameplay elements that you have learned.
It's simple. It's elegant. And it's damn satisfying.
This story is now featured on the Playstation.blog in their "Playstation Conversation" sidebar (and will likely be in the weekly "What we read" recap!)