Breath of the Wild

Yes, we’re here today to review a game that came out in 2017 because that’s the kind of timely, breaking, up-to-the-decade content our reader (Hi, Tom) has come to expect from this blog.

We got a Switch, for the exercise games really, but it gave me the excuse to buy a game for myself. I picked up this one, and three weeks later emerged, pastel-shaded but happier, thoroughly happy with my purchase.

After a string of gritty, bloody open-world games like “Skyrim” and “Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt” it was nice to play something almost innocent like Breath of the Wild for a change.

I say it’s innocent, and overall it is, though the setup is a little dark. You see, the backstory is an ancient evil returned to the world (they way they inevitably do, as foretold by the prophecy) and … the good guys lost. Your four closest friends were all killed, the princess you swore to protect is now locked in an eternal, stalemated battle with the ancient evil, and you were so badly injured you had to spend 100 years in a bacta tank recovering. The five races of the kingdom were brutally slaughtered by an army of relentless, soulless, pitiless robots. Also, you can get your inventory space increased by a fat green fairy who plays the maracas. The whimsy sometimes jives oddly with the post-apocalyptic setting, is all I’m saying.

As Link, the princess’s champion, your task is to visit the four non-human races and free their “Divine Beasts”—giant animal-shaped war machines—before the final confrontation with the Big Bad, called “Calamity Ganon.” In parallel, you can also try to restore Link’s memories by visiting 12 places of special importance to him. It being an open world you can, of course, just piss about the whole time or attempt to kill the big bad while still completely amnesiac and armed only with a pointed stick. It’s really up to you.

The four races are the birdlike Rito, the boulder-shaped Goron, a bunch of fish with heads shaped like porpoises, and a desert-dwelling tribe of redheaded Amazons with washboard abs and ski jump noses. The four thus neatly map onto the four ancient elements, namely wind, earth, water and gingers. 

Getting them onto your side requires you board one of the Divine Beasts (a bird, a salamander, an elephant and a camel) and solve a series of puzzles before fighting a mini-boss. These were fun to figure out, but by the time you get to the fourth one, the near carbon-copy nature gets a little wearying.

The RPG mechanics are fairly limited. You only have two stats: health and stamina. Instead of being raised through experience, you need to collect tokens from a series of hidden shrines, each of which requires you to solve a puzzle. These puzzles generally hit the sweet spot of being engaging without being frustrating—fairly straightforward, but you still feel like a bloody genius when you figure them out. The only thing that was a little annoying was that each shrine involved about three identical cutscenes every single time you entered one.

Combat I found a lot less satisfactory. On the plus side you have complete freedom to approach any encounter the way you want. The game gives you a set of potentially useful abilities, including remote-detonated bombs, a magnet, an ice-maker and the ability to freeze time, and these allow some creative solutions like knocking enemies off cliffs with levitating metal boxes or firing boulders at them. You can also find melee weapons—one handed, two-handed and spears—as well as bows, but melee combat in particular was dependent on split-second timing which, at 45, I can do about once in every five attempts.

Your conversation choices are about as limited as the RPG elements. The people encounter along the way are mostly bland NPCs there only to give out quests, mixed with some very idiosyncratic personalities, such as a scientist who has regressed to childhood and another who (in the Japanese version of the game) speaks English, but the English of a Japanese person who doesn’t speak English very well. These NPCs offer you dozens of side quests you can take or leave, but frankly I left most of them, as they tended to be rather long and involved, frustratingly hard to understand what you were supposed to be doing, and rewarded you with little more than a pat on the head. Balance wasn’t quite so well done there.

The other major task you'll find yourself doing is finding and activating a series of Towers, each of which reveals a portion of the map of the world to you. All the towers look almost identical and you go through an identical cutscene to activate them and after the Divine Beasts and the shrines I think you can probably guess what I'm going to complain about at the end of this review.

But let's talk about the good stuff first. The area where the game really shines is the art design and the world itself. Breath of the Wild has a wonderfully stylized sort of comic-book look to it, neither too childish nor too realistic, that is unique, distinctive, and genuinely lovely to look at. The map covers a range of terrain, from rolling grasslands to a lava-spewing volcano, from blistering desert to snow-capped mountains. Traveling about them is sped up by giving you access to horses and a kind of parachute/hang glider that lets you swoop down from cliffs or mountains. At the beginning, at least, there’s a lot of fun to be had just peacefully wandering about and looking at things. There’s a lot of empty space, but that serves to space out the action and gives you the chance to appreciate this world.

Of course, even that can wear thin after a bit, so it’s time to face that nasty old Calamity Ganon and give him a jolly good thrashing.

The final climactic showdown is a little bizarre, in that there are two phases. Phase One is a floaty spider thing which combines elements from the four Divine Beast mini-bosses. Sure, you think, okay, builds up nicely. Once you beat that, Phase Two begins. In Phase Two, the big bad transforms into a giant pig that. Um. Kind of stands there. You shoot it full of arrows and win! Yay!

You are then reunited with Princess Zelda in a very sweet yet chaste scene (c’mon, she’s 17 guys—well, 117 I suppose, which is also kind of weird). Fade to black.

It’s a glorious, gorgeous, light-hearted game, that suffers only in some of the samey locations and the repetitive nature of the four main quests. Still, after so much grim darkness, it’s a breath of fresh air. Ha!

1917

Title: 1917
Director: Sam Mendes
Writers: Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Cinematography: Roger Deakins

Shall we talk about the cinematography?

I think we have to. It’s all anyone seems to talk about regarding this movie, probably for the very good reason that it’s the main thing worth talking about.

So as you probably know, but I’ll repeat just in case you’ve been hit in the helmet by a ricocheting bullet and knocked out for the last three months, the gimmick with 1917 is the illusion that the events are happening in “real time” and is shot by one camera in a single “take,” a bit like the Kiefer Sutherland/Jack Bauer series “24” mixed with the showiness of the long shots from “Children of Men,” only stretched to 119 minutes. There are no cuts between close-ups of people in conversation, nor between wide, middle and close-up shots, every scene—with one obvious and glaring exception—flows seamlessly together.

It is a masterful achievement, and obviously took a lot of serious, meticulous planning and preparation to pull off. And by and large, it works, at least at the technical level. The camera pirouettes about men in narrow trenches and through the walls of farmhouses, down shattered lanes and across a field under artillery fire, without loosening its relentless focus on the leads (except that one, really thumpingly noticeable time it does, but shh). You as the viewer are stuck with these guys, just as they are stuck there, and the only way either of you gets out is to see it through to the end.

As a movie-making technique, it doesn’t work quite so well.

In behind-the-scenes featurettes, the filmmakers have said this is meant to be immersive, but let’s admit that no, it absolutely isn’t. This is film-making that draws attention to its own artifice. Look! See how clever we are! It very quickly becomes distracting—You should be down in the trenches with these two guys, but you’re not, you’re thinking about the cameraman, the logistics of the shot, you are constantly aware that you’re watching a movie, an artificial narrative, and spend more time thinking about how Mendes and Deacon were able to film the scene, rather than being engaged and emotionally invested in the action.

The artifice, in other words, prevents it from achieving the very effect it is designed to produce.

The script also contributes to this detached feeling in a couple of ways. First, things off-screen, out of the frame of the shot, seem to suddenly just appear or immediately vanish from existence when we pan away from them. A group of fellow British soldiers in a convoy of trucks materialize out of thin air behind a farmhouse (wouldn’t we have heard them?) When one of our heroes parts ways with these soldiers and is shot at by a sniper while crossing a bridge, the comrades he left not 10 seconds ago do nothing (why aren’t they shooting back?). We just never see them again.

Distances start to feel distorted. The initial scene where the two messengers cross no-man’s land is fantastic in an excruciating way, a nail-biting crawl, slither, crouch and scramble across a nightmare landscape of iron, steel, mud, shell craters and bloated bodies. However, once that is over though, the scenery changes come thick and fast. There’s a truck ride that includes two stops and barely lasts one conversation, but somehow transports us from a lonely farmhouse to the edge of a town. Later we jump into a river which immediately flows over a waterfall and just as quickly ends up lapping at the rear of the British lines.

Finally, the soundtrack is deafeningly intrusive. Just in case you weren’t sure a moment was meant to be tense or not, don’t worry, HERE COME A THOUSAND BLARING TRUMPETS TO REASSURE YOU THAT YES, THIS REALLY IS PRETTY DAMN TENSE RIGHT NOW I CAN TELL YOU. Combined with the evident artifice of the cinematography, all this serves to keep you at arm’s length from the story. Don’t worry, it’s just a movie, and here is a stream of constant reminders to that effect just in case you start to get too into it.

The story itself is bare-bones simple, and probably could have been shown just as effectively, if not moreso, with traditional filmmaking techniques.

If there’s a theme to the movie, it’s how utterly shit the life of a lowly lance corporal was in the year 1917 (and probably still is). Lance Corporals Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman, Game of Thrones’s Tommen) and Scofield (George MacKay) are picked by his NCO for the thankless and probably impossible job of sneaking across German-held territory to deliver orders to another unit, calling off an attack. There’s a perfunctory briefing by the General (Colin Firth), in which responsibility for saving the lives of 1,600 men is unceremoniously dumped on the two lads despite the cockup entirely originating from said General, who doesn’t actually giving them any useful advice about how they’re supposed to achieve this herculean task.

Nonetheless, the two gamely do their British best, moaning and bullshitting their way across no-man’s land, beset by booby traps and crashing airplanes and German snipers. The message is finally delivered in the very nick of time to a pissed off, irate Colonel (Benedict Cumberbatch) who tells Scofield thanks, points out he hasn’t actually saved anybody as this just means there will be a different attack the next day, and invites him to please fuck off.

There’s a vague arc about Scofield going from reluctant partner to fiercely determined to accomplish the mission, coupled with an early resentment of the people at home and ending with him staring longingly at family photos, but Blake and Scofield mostly get flattened by both the action and the juggernaut pace of the story, leaving little time for us to get to know either character. They’re lance corporals, nobodies, could be anybodies, and who they are isn’t really the point. They’re every soldier, and they just want to survive and go home.

Together with Chris Nolan’s “Dunkirk” then, we seem to be building up a new direction for war movies, moving away from tales of heroism and questions of morality or immorality, towards a tighter focus on the unheroic experiences of the individual soldier, whose goal is nothing more noble than To Not Get Killed. The enemy, if they appear at all, are just one more thing to be survived, and the only “victory” is survival.

In the end though “1917” ends up being far more about the craft of the story than about the narrative itself. It’s a good movie, an impressive accomplishment, but it’s all about its own impressiveness, not really about the two poor sods at the center of the story. Though you get the feeling the lance corporals probably used to being overlooked until it’s time to do something nasty.

Canadian Fantasy Two-fer: Guy Gavriel Kay

Titles:   Children of the Earth and Sky

              A Brightness Long Ago

Author: Guy Gavriel Kay

Publisher: Berkley

 

I’m reviewing two books at once here, a feat made possible by Kay’s transformation of himself into a kind of brand, much like Stephen King, Dan Brown or John Grisham, a reliable if predictable producer of a very specific type of fantasy fiction. Although the details differ, the two books—and indeed pretty much anything published by Kay after about 1998—are more or less interchangeable.

 

The world in both books is a mildly fantastical version of our own, with events, places and people existing in more or less a 1:1 correspondence with things in the real world: Byzantium becomes “Sarantium” and Rome, “Rhodias,” Christians, Jews and Muslims become “Jaddites,” “Kindath” and “Asharites,” Sarantium falls to the Asharites just as Byzantium did to the Ottomans, and so on.

 

The protagonist (as always) is a male artist, a painter in “Children of the Earth and Sky” (2016), a bookseller in “A Brightness Long Ago” (2019). He exists at the periphery of and observes the lives of the great—the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in “Children…” and Italian mercenary captains Frederico and Sigismondo in “A Brightness…” In this, the main character is aided by spirited and independent women, often doctors or healers, and returns home, burdened with wisdom and bittersweet experience.

 

Everybody emotes with apocalyptic intensity. Kay is not an author to use one emotion when three would be more dramatic. They are perhaps best thought of not as novels, but the modern prose equivalent of Shakespearean plays, with characters striding about the stage, loudly declaiming their motivations and desires to the audience. They love! They hate! They beat their breasts and weep!

 

American author Elmore Leonard famously advised that “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.” Kay’s works exist as a shining beacon for all of those who curse such advice as the basest, vile calumny. I keep half-expecting Kay to start referring to me as “gentle reader…” Every sentence here practically deafens you with the writing-ness of its writing.

 

The theme in both books is the one Kay started expressing in “The Last Light of the Sun” (2004), the idea that there is nothing predictable or inevitable about the course of history or people’s lives, and that both events and lives are changed by split-second decisions taken in moments of rage, panic, fear or ecstasy.

 

There is, at least, a unity between the prose and the theme then. Both are infused with melodrama and a kind of mournful, weeping acceptance that the world is a cold, cruel, capricious place whose grey is brokenly only intermittently by beauty or art.

 

After about half a dozen novels like this though, all the emoting feels more polished than passionate, like a veteran musician playing a well-known piece, technically proficient yes, comforting in its familiarity perhaps, but not especially innovative or surprising.

 

To an extent, I suppose this is just the realities and necessities of the publishing market. With so much choice out there, an author needs to carve out a recognizable space for themselves in order to win recognition and repeat readers.

 

Pretty much everyone does it. I recently downloaded a sample of Joe Abercrombie’s latest, “A Little Hatred,” and it’s exactly the same kind of thing as he was writing in “The Blade Itself,” in 2006 (If I had to sum up his style in a single sentence, it’s be something like: ‘“Fuck, I’ve shat myself,” swore the princess.’) You always knew what you were getting in an Iain M. Banks Culture book or Terry Pratchett Discworld novel.

 

Still, while a recognizable style is standard for any author, I do think that Kay has carried this even further, going as far as to make his characters and their arcs and themes more or less identical each time. I miss the inventive Kay of books like the “Fionavar Tapestry” (1984-86), “Tigana” (1990) or “A Song for Arbonne” (1992).

 

And yet as a marketing strategy it’s undeniable effective. I scroll through my Amazon dot com recommendations these days and I’ve no idea who most of these authors are, what their books are like and whether or not they’re any good (Amazon further muddies the waters by inserting its “promoted” books into searches, but that’s a gripe for another time). So I end up retreating to the familiar, to Kay, Abercrombie, William Gibson and a couple of others who may not surprise and delight, but who are at least guaranteed to deliver what I expect.

 

I’ve you’ve read one Kay book then, you know what to expect from these two. It’s more of the same, emotionally overwrought, purple of prose, well-crafted but eminently predictable. But you know, sometimes that’s not a bad thing.