Because players are active participants in the outcome of games, many of them feature that player in a heroic role. We could see this as flattery or enticement, for sure. But the huge emphasis on heroism in games has led to that medium becoming a uniquely fertile ground for reflecting on what heroism means and how we relate to it. One popular contrarian sort of game is the villain game. In this broad format, the player is cast as either an implicit villain (arguably the case in something like Shadow of the Colossus) or a more explicit villain as in today’s laboratory subject. For players used to and maybe even bored by do-gooding as a world-saving nice person, it can be funny or refreshing to walk on the dark side for a change.
Within that “villain game” umbrella, one of the nerdier categories of games is the dungeon management game. We can think about 1997’s Bullfrog-developed game Dungeonkeeper, a strategy game all about playing the role of a dark lord in charge of an army of evil minions who, like workers of all stripes, need payment and motivation to do their job. The object of the game is to rid your underworld of meddlesome knights and other paragons of goodness, allowing your evil domain to fester in peace deep beneath civil society. It carries itself with a lot of sarcastic humour and seems like a grand old time for anyone with an inclination for strategy and an impish taste naughtiness.
Like Dungeonkeeper, today’s game, entitled (breathes in) What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? 2 (in Japanese: Yuusha no Kuse ni Namaikida or 2), involves digging up an underground dungeon designed to kill heroes trying to eliminate your evil minions. Typical role-playing game heroes, including sword-wielding soldiers, priests, and sorcerers, show up at your door and you have to give them a distinctly bad time. The way you do that, at its core, is to create a food web that supports an ecosystem of evil beings. Where Dungeonkeeper conceives of pure evil as a business driven by profits, What Did I Do to Deserve This sees it as part of the web of life.
You begin by digging up green-flecked blocks to bring forth the archetypal Japanese RPG minion, the lowly slime. Slimes are not good at attacking, but they carry nutrients from some blocks in the grid that defines your dungeon to other blocks. This eventually concentrates enough nutrients in a soil block to spawn a little bug called an Omnom. One level above that, you can get lizard-men carrying swords. Lizardmen eat Omnoms, and Omnoms eat slimes. If they are full and satisfied enough, they reproduce, which means your army can become somewhat self-sustaining within its own dynamic equilibrium. Of course, none of that happens without constant management and intervention, and the player’s job is really about accelerating and channeling all that devouring and reproducing to practical ends.
Mostly, that means you want to create rooms and corridors that enemies will thrive in while heroes get bewildered and overwhelmed. Whether that means your dungeon is a lengthy set of twisting hallways or a set of complex mazelike chambers is up to what your mission demands and your preferences. Some monsters, like dragons and magic-throwing Liliths, benefit from long straight corridors because of their ranged abilities. Others, like lizard-men and Omnoms, thrive in big swarms and therefore enjoy slightly less linear spaces. In all cases, the game uses a ragged pixel art style that emphasizes squares and blocky chunks on the PlayStation Portable’s (PSP’s) screen. It’s a generally basic but nice-looking game that prioritizes clarity. It’s a good thing, too, since your dungeon gets pretty complicated and harder to read at a glance as you keep playing. On a small screen like the PSP’s, the simpler the better.
To be frank, I am not good at this game or its predecessor. While I think I grasp the basic theory of how to make a good dungeon, and eventually cleared the first game’s story mode, I’m completely stymied on stage five of this second game. With that said, I think this game’s attempt to model energy transfers in food webs and broader ecosystems is fascinating and mostly successful. Developer Acquire, which is happily still a going concern, produced a game–a series–that really works for its system and is quite funny and entertaining even in localization. Director Haruyuki Ohashi, who had a large role to play in the company’s Way of the Samurai series, worked with a small team to produce this game, and I credit Sony Japan establishing a relationship with Acquire that would later pay off with even more experimental and interesting games like Patchwork Heroes and Rain.
What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? 2 is a pretty simple game, but it’s absorbing. It’s also emblematic of Sony Japan Studio’s role in the company’s PSP strategy. It developed and coordinated tight, focused games with a distinct hook and, in many cases, an experimental style of play or presentation. In this case, the game presents the player with both a puzzle to solve and a tight resource management problem to untangle. Sitting right on the line between puzzle game and real time strategy, its combination of rigid and rewarding rules with your monsters’ ability to wander around and even spontaneously mutate really puts it where great games live: on the border between predictability and surprise. It honours your input but, behind your back, conspires to make your life just a bit harder than you think. Fitting for the game’s themes of villainy, I suppose.
Next time, we’ll be sorting the refuse of civilization in the extremely bedevilling puzzle game Trash Panic.
Evvycology 