There’s a subreddit (Reddit shorthand for discussion group or community) out there called ‘patientgamers’. It’s filled with people much like myself, who grew up immersed in gaming, and then hit adulting and found that those 24 hours in each day have to be doled out very sparingly after eating, sleeping, working, driving, spending time with your spouse, and feeding/cleaning up/playing with/holding/hugging/looking after/changing/picking up/putting down your baby boy/girl/dog/cat/iguana.
I find myself always a little concerned or cynical whenever I see something being ‘re-invented’ for a ‘modern’ audience. This is probably because there are many examples of such idealism going awry – Star Wars prequels and Jar-Jar Binks…need I say more?
In fairness, there are good and bad examples that we can pull from various mediums; Final Fantasy XII did a quite excellent job of taking elements of the series’ staple turn-based battle system and ramping up the intensity somewhat, with new real-time elements, and a programmable gambit system, allowing you to input a number of logic conditions (if health drops below 50%, cast Cure, if ally is poisoned, cast Poisona, if enemy is weak to fire cast Firaga etc.) to effectively let the game complete itself. Final Fantasy XV’s combat, however, was a disjointed button-bashing mess (the same could be said of the rest of Final Fantasy XV).
We see this behaviour across church lines and in our Christian lives also – in our (perfectly good and correct) attempts to bring the Gospel, its teachings, and its way of life to 21st century human beings, we can fall into one of two polarizing extremes:
1) Focusing too much on ‘attracting’ new people with entertainment, flashing lights and ‘fun’ programmes.
2) Ossifying our worship and way of living so as to seem to be attempting to lift 4th century ancient culture and implant it straight into the western world today.
There is nothing wrong with entertaining or having fun. There is nothing wrong with preserving the traditions of our forefathers. But this must be done with the proper balance, and the right intent at its centre. St. Paul says that:
‘To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law.To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law.To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.’ (1 Corinthians 9 20-24 ESV)
This is not to say that St. Paul lied and played a kind of ‘dress-up’, pretending to be a Gentile to suck people in. It does mean that we have a task to reach people where they are, to make things accessible, but then to have something to actually draw them into. If our worship is in 1st-century Latin or Greek it becomes totally unapproachable to all except those with a Masters Degree in Classical Civilizations. If our worship becomes a rock concert, we attract people, but there is nothing to draw them more deeply into. We should not be too quick to abandon the way things have been done before us, but we should not preserve tradition for the sake of tradition either. Freedom within agreed boundaries – this is why I am a Christian in the Anglican church, with, as Archbishop Foley Beach recently put it during a video interview for GAFCON, its Evangelical preaching of the word of God, its Spirit-filled worship, and its Catholic appreciation for the whole of Christian history.
So now we reach Dragon Quest XI, a videogame series so big in Japan, it was rumoured that the Japanese Government mandated Enix, the development company, only be allowed to release new entries in the series on a Saturday to stop masses of people taking time off from work and tanking the economy. Does it ossify, does it re-invent, or does it strike a balance?
JRPGs (Japanese Role-Playing Games) often get a bad rap in this debate. At least in America and Europe, the very first critique of any new JRPG is ‘antiquated battle mechanics’, ‘the same old chibi/anime characters with giant hair’, ‘predictable story of hero saves the world from evil’ or similar. And why is that such a bad thing? Why are those observations deemed critical? If people enjoy those mechanics, characters, and storylines, why is there a need to scrap it all for the sake of arbitrary newness? In a gaming world full of shooters, zombies, gritty crime, and genocidal horror games, most of us are rather grateful when a bright and fluffy bedtime fairytale like Dragon Quest comes along to tell us everything is going to be alright. I’m one of those, when it comes to on-demand TV, who flicks past all of the generic dark police detective everybody-dies-around-them shows, and plumps for an episode of Jane the Virgin. The world is dark enough these days – I engage in entertainment to try to get away from that.
Now that we have that settled, I’m going to take each of these generic JRPG ‘criticisms’ and flip them, making them positives:
You see, the thing about most old things that are still around is that there is a reason they are still around. Old things that are rubbish tend to die out quickly. Old things also have the benefit of time and tweaking behind them. Square Enix have gotten the math of this system down to a tee. The turn-based system never feels slow, and never feels as if you’re losing control. The initial hours may be spent doing little more than spamming the ‘Attack’ button, but once your party increases, each character has a distinct role (Victoria and Serena for example balance each other nicely as offensive and defensive spellcasters), a number of weapons to choose from, an associated skill tree, and the all-new ‘Pep’ powers, which are something like an Overdrive, temporarily giving the character a stat boost and access to unique and potentially one-hit-kill techniques. In addition, certain character who are ‘Pepped’ together can perform joint abilities for extra damage.
The essence of something which has always worked, mixed with something new and exciting.
Next:
– ‘The same old chibi/anime characters with giant hair’. How about, ‘Colourful art design with unique characters who jump out of the screen at you’.
If you’ve never seen a Dragon Quest game before, you might think it looks a lot like Dragonball Z. That’s because Lead Artist Akira Toriyama does in fact also draw for Dragonball Z. Yes, some of these characters have outrageous hair (Erik), but others look pleasingly unique. World and enemy design too is thing of beauty – not only beautiful, but funny! This game will do something not many videogames do these days; intentionally make you laugh. Not give you a deep philosophical examination into what it means to be human, or tear open the psyche of a serial axe-murderer, but just have fun telling a cute story with cute characters. With enemy names like Cruelcumber, Sham hatwitch (my personal favourite) and Robber Rabbit, who wouldn’t laugh? This is a game you can sit down with your kids and play and not feel guilty about exposing them to something inappropriate.
LITERALLY a ‘Sham hatwitch’. Hilarious.
Lastly:
‘Predictable story of hero saves the world from evil’. I’m going with, ‘Easily accessible, but deep and rich storyline full of twists and turns’.
Yes, you are the reincarnation of a hero of light, travelling the world learning about the resurrection of the Dark Lord, and eventually stopping him, but so what? LIFE is often a predictable good vs. evil story when you break it down. Within that familiar structure endless narratives can be explored. Dragon Quest sets a simple scene on the surface, but then throws you from pillar to post during its 80-hour runtime. Each character has a unique backstory and motive. Each location has its own layout that actually makes logical sense, its own people in charge, shopkeepers, priests, kings, queens and princes. It is not a simplistic storyline over a generic join-the-dots world. It is a fantasy world to submerge oneself into.
Okay, so I do think MIDI music is ridiculous in a 2018 game, but other than that…if everybody is still loving and paying to see the dog’s tricks, why scrap them all and teach new ones people might hate?
Dragon Quest is the Shakespeare of video games – yes, it’s old, yes it has a style that is strange to our modern minds, yes it has its quirks. But give it a chance, learn about it, enter into it, and you will find storytelling and videogaming gold.
Before you know it, you’ll be buying Slime plushies (see below) and cosplaying Bodkin Archers. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Slimes. You’ll grow to love these. There are millions in-game. Think of them as the Pikachu of Dragon Quest, only less yellow and annoying.
Well it’s been a LONG time coming, but it’s finally finished!
Here it is…It even lights up – oooooo
So apart from spending far too long in building a long-term PC to use for MMTC and beyond, what have I been up to? Well we’ve all been busy at church planning our summer youth camp – the theme is going to be based around the Olympics (if everyone isn’t sick of it come the end of August that is) and we’re going to be watching one of my favourite Disney films, Hercules. Exciting! Last night I lead the worship for the weekly youth meeting, with the theme being Old Testament Patriarchs. Spoke to them about covenants fulfilled in Christ through faith, which I think they understood and hope they embrace.
I’ve also been writing some more of this ‘written assignment’ for the diocese on ministry and vocation, discovering, amongst other things, an insatiable thirst for knowledge and exploration of the depths of the Christian faith, through history, languages and origins of Scripture, writings of those gone by etc. and a desire to share that with others to build them up in faith, since faith is most definitely not completely absent of knowledge (as some atheistic notions tend towards) – in fact in terms of the Christian faith the opposite is true. Jesus says that he is ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’ – note that central one. TRUTH. How does one learn more and more of the truth? Well partly by reading and learning about it. Depth of knowledge more fully substantiates the Christian faith, far from the rather misleading idea that ‘science has disproved the Bible’ or ‘you only have faith because science hasn’t explained it yet’. From the writings of the Patristic Fathers we see that the first few centuries of the church are replete with people using history, science, art (despite rampant iconoclasm at certain points) and philosophy to explore why the world is the way the world is, and through that exploration they are drawn to the Christian faith because they see that truth in it. This is what we need to get back to – people, in particular young people as I’ve experienced, like to ask questions. They like to ask these tough, challenging questions about what life, the universe and everything is all about. We need to be equipped to answer those questions, not simply shoe them away with emotional que sera, sera ‘whatever will be will be’. Christianity spearheaded the scientific revolution of the Middle Ages and beyond, because godly men and women wanted to understand their world more fully to intensify their faith. They wanted to show people more and more depth in God’s creation – and they did.
When people ask about the Christian faith, one should seek to show them why it is THE truth – not simply that it’s a potential religious following that may or may not have some truth and pleasing moral ideas to it. Why/how is the Bible true? Where did it come from? Who was Jesus? Why did he die for us? What’s the point of the church? These questions are often asked, but rarely answered properly. Christ is THE truth. Do we really believe that? Then we need to live it out…
So I’ve clearly been spending all of this free time before September very productively (ahem) by catching up on my video game backlist a little – and also indulging in a brand new release from Blizzard ( developers of World of WarCraft and StarCraft among others ), Diablo 3.
Now role-playing games are quite possibly my favourite type of videogame, so I was expecting good things from Blizzard on this one – and thankfully, I’m not disappointed. The game plays in a top-down, almost ‘isometric’ (I’m thinking back to the days when PC games didn’t ‘do’ 3D graphics, and so developers had to ‘fake it’) style, with the basic premise being ‘click to attack’ and that is all. Yet alongside this extreme simplicity comes some of the most surprising depth that I have ever experienced in a game, so Blizzard it seems have really nailed down that perfect combination of ‘simple enough to pick up and get into, yet deep enough to keep you playing almost endlessly’.
You begin by choosing a character based on a gender (which makes no difference other than personal preference and physical appearance) and the choice of one of five distinct ‘classes’, each with its own distinct style and type of item it can use – these classes are Demon Hunter, Wizard, Monk, Barbarian and Witch Doctor. Since I’m looking at being a vicar, choosing Demon Hunter seemed most befitting for a first character, although with hindsight perhaps calling it ‘Rev. Smackdown’ was an intellectual oversight on my part. Anyway, a big draw of the Diablo series is co-operative play over The Internet. Before you ask – yes, draconian DRM demands that, despite StarCraft 2’s single player happily having a ‘Play Offline’ option which could have been easily integrated here, one remains constantly connected to The Internet and signed in to Blizzard’s Battle.net service throughout play. There are enough pointless complaints about this, particularly when the online servers are down for ‘scheduled maintenance’ [read: incompetence] spewed across Battle.net’s forums, so venting here will make no difference. It follows from this that, since Diablo 3 supports up to four-player co-operative play, combining classes will enhance the overall gameplay experience for all involved, allowing increased exploration, strengthening of characters and progression on more challenging difficulties. The developers even thought up the nifty feature of scaling up enemy difficulty based on the number and level of players involved in a party.
By the way, when I say ‘difficulties’ I am REALLY emphasising the ‘difficult’ here – the standard difficulty, ‘Normal’, should see you through around six to ten hours depending on how competent you are and how much you decide to ‘level grind’ – I, for example, will probably sail past this benchmark easily because, due to growing up with some tough JRPGs, have come to quite enjoy level grinding. Strange I know. Doesn’t sound like a lot of time given that Blizzard will charge you a whopping £44.99 to purchase on their official store, and for that you don’t even get a physical box or disc, just the ability to actually sign in to the freely available to download game client (because apparently digital downloads are the future and nobody appreciates the effort put into packaging or box art any more – this saddens me greatly) – but fear not fellow gamers! For once Normal is passed with surprising ease with a modicum of common sense, next up comes ‘Nightmare’ (requiring a minimum level 30 character) which has far too many changes to list, so you can read them here if you’re interested – needless to say, enemies are a LOT more challenging and you lose experience points through death. Following this is ‘Hell’ difficulty (sounding a little more ominous now…) requiring a minimum level of 50, which gives enemies resistances amongst a number of other difficulty hikes, and finally we have the seemingly relentless ‘Inferno’ difficulty, requiring a character of level 60, which is currently the maximum achievable level in the game, with enemies increasing in level by 1 per act, beginning at level 61. The reason for tearing your hair out over these crazy difficulty hikes is in order to gain exclusive items to boost up your character from enemies that aren’t found at any other point in the game. On top of ALL of this, you can play each of these difficulties in ‘Hardcore’ mode – in this mode of play when your character dies, that’s IT, it cannot be resurrected or used in play again, it can simply be reloaded and wander in ghost-like form around the environment reminding other players, and yourself, of its demise. Imagine spending tens of hours getting a Hardcore character all the way up to level 60, only to watch all your effort go to waste in one feeble mistake. Nuts, I know – but some people will, and have, done it…
Chances are that you’ll see this a lot if you progress beyond ‘Normal’ difficulty…much to the detriment of your sanity
The story is also surprisingly deep, given that this is at its core a typical ‘click click’ RPG (technical term that). As a <insert chosen class here>, you are tasked with saving the world from the demonic hordes of Hell attempting to invade by defeating the ‘Demon Lords of Hell’ progressively. Now I said that the story was deep, and that sounds pretty basic – Blizzard again here pull out the ‘easy to approach but lots of depth once you’re in’ trick, as the characters you’ll meet and environments you’ll explore along the way are rich in imagery, scope and believability, so the campaign never becomes a generic attempt to get through an area, defeat a boss, unlock the next area and rinse/repeat. So in truth, Diablo masters the art of the videogame to a tee – an easily accessable nature with an incredible amount of depth, through levelling, difficulty spikes, game modes, co-operative play, character customisation, skill progression…need I go on? If you like RPGs and have some spare cash then do yourself a favour and buy it.
Playing through Diablo III has brought back into my head the many mythological ideas of ‘Hell’ that it explores, much of which has been popularised and ingrained into culture through the infamous ‘Dante’s Inferno’ which in truth I’d quite like to have a read of at some point – not as a factual record of course, but as the poetic fantasy that it is. Unfortunately many of these ideals, some of which derive from pagan religion, have crept into some forms of Christianity – so therefore I’d just like to very quickly and succinctly address a couple of the basic ones:
1 – Demons are big, scary looking creatures with large teeth, deep voices, pointy red tails, horns and pitch forks
It seems that the above imagery originates from what demons ’embody’ rather than their actual physical appearance. Indeed, what does Scripture say of Satan, the very epitome of Evil? Cultural artwork would have us thinking that he is perhaps the most disgusting in appearance of them all…
“Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created” ( Ezekiel 28:13 KJV )
EVERY precious stone? So in fact, Satan in appearance is the most beautiful of all God’s creatures. What a clever deception the Evil One has… “…Satan himself is transformed [Greek: masquerades as/disguised as] into an angel of light” ( 2 Corinthians 11:14b KJV )
(for completeness, yes Ezekiel 28 is speaking of the King of Tyre – well at least initially. However since the King of Tyre was not in Eden amongst other things, it’s clear that the imagery used is applied across to Satan…)
2 – Demons live in a physical location called ‘Hell’ that is full of brimstone mountains pouring out lava from every orifice where Satan sits on a throne ordering his hordes around and torturing dead people
This is very much the imagery presented by Dante (with a number of ‘circles’ of Hell depending on one’s most prevalent sin, containing differing demons which enact differing, and increasingly severe, unending torture) – perhaps Satan has cleverly convinced people that he is equal to God (which has always been his aim) and so therefore needs a place ‘equal’ to Heaven and therefore a throne ‘equal’ to God’s, as this once fictional ideal is regarded as a spiritual truth by some. To answer this, we need to go back to the very beginning: Creation. As we know from Genesis, God creates ‘heaven and earth’ (1:1) – creating heaven must also include that contained within heaven, i.e. the angelic host (we’re talking thousands upon thousands of ‘angels’ here – Greek angelos, meaning ‘messenger’). The Book of Revelation tells us that sometime after this, but before Adam and Eve sinned:
“And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” ( Revelation 12:7-9 KJV )
The ‘War in Heaven’ of course looked nothing like this, but hey, poetic liberty…
It almost sounds like a good videogame story, doesn’t it? Linking this with Ezekiel 28 and Christ’s own words of Luke 10:18 ( “And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” ), we see that Satan, once the ‘light-bearer’ in heaven (this is where the name ‘Lucifer’ comes from – whether it’s a correct name or not is another debate and frankly not important) and the chief angel of the Garden of Eden, the most beautiful of all God’s creations, instead of looking at his own beauty and thanking God fervently for it (as we all should), looked with PRIDE (uh-oh…) and thought to himself, ‘Hang on a minute – I’M SO BEAUTIFUL, yet I don’t get ANY worship or adoration! Look at God up there…all the angels worshipping him constantly, why don’t I get any of that!? God is selfish and wants to hog EVERYTHING for himself!’ – with enlightened reason and the guidance of the Holy Spirit we of course, as Christians, see that this is an incredibly incorrect picture of God – Paul’s words…
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” ( Philippians 2: 5-9 KJV )
…sound a lot different from Satan’s point of view, don’t they? Anyway, now we can answer the question of ‘where demons live’. Revelation tells us that Satan convinced an entire third of the angelic host that he was right, and they waged war against the rest of the host, aligned with God and led by the Archangel Michael, who is traditionally seen as the ‘great protector’ in the angelic host. Now clearly because God is God and God doesn’t lose, Satan frankly got his butt kicked and, as a result, God cast him and all those who followed him (known as ‘demons’, Greek daimonion) down to THE EARTH. So then Satan beguiles Eve to eat from the forbidden tree, she tempts Adam, humanity falls into sin, separating them from God etc. etc. so that Satan can control the Earth and humanity, thereby elevating himself to ‘God-like’ status ( as Christ, in the Gospels, makes several references to the Earth being Satan’s kingdom and his coming in order to defeat and save us from it [Alleluia!] ). The devil’s kingdom, and his legions, are HERE on Earth.
To answer the second point in a quick sentence: Demons are NOT torturing dead people, as Revelation tells us that the devil and his angels will be ‘cast into the Lake of Fire’ , so I don’t think they’ll be doing much torturing through that…
Although I would like to point out that:
– Demonic possession IS a reality (see the myriad of examples through the Synoptic Gospels)
– Demons ARE attempting to enslave mankind, and will never stop attempting to enslave mankind
– Demons acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the Son of God (see Mark 5:7), but that doesn’t make them ‘Christian’ or ‘saved’ in any way as they will not CONFESS that Christ has come IN THE FLESH (and therefore has been sacrificed and his blood shed for the sins of the world, thereby nullifying the Gospel) – “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.” ( 1 John 4:2-3 KJV )
– Jude’s advice when combating demons is “…the Lord rebuke thee” (Jude 1:9), i.e. faith in Christ will protect you, you don’t have to ‘fight’ demons at all, leave it up to God
Apologies if that was rather deep – but the simple question is: Do you wish to remain in Satan’s kingdom, riddled with sin, deceit, destruction, doomed to wither away and fail…OR…do you wish to return the LORD your God and enter his kingdom – a kingdom of peace, happiness, fulfilment, purpose, fullness of life, and then aid in the liberation of others – because the choice is there…Christ has opened the door, but you have to walk through it…
Luke Childs 