Broken Sword Playing it for Real this Time

My first encounter with Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars was many, many years ago around Christmas time. However, this isn’t some rose-tinted Christmas tale, no, it’s more like something that just randomly happened. You see, my parents bought both my brother and I random video games that year as presents, and well, bless my parents for trying, but all their choices were strange and kind of bad. Among the many odd choices and C-tier games that we would never play, was the port of Broken Sword for the GBA. This was the GBA game my brother got, while I got some really awkward and poorly controlled Monster Truck GBA game. I remember being kind of jealous of my brother since I figured a game with “Sword” in its title must be some Zelda-like game, or some sweet RPG. Much later I would realize it ….. definitely was not, but before then I remember asking my brother what it was like. His description? Some freaky clown blows people up, and you read a lot. A little bit later, the game would slip through the crack and I never thought about it again. Until now that is.

(Also amazingly after all these years I somehow managed to find the
 game when preparing to write this review — it still works too!)

Fast forward to 2015, and I ended up right in the middle of my point ’n’ click binge. Nowadays, I play through so many of these games on my computer and really love the genre, so of course, I became more familiar with the Broken Sword series and knew I would need to play it, eventually grabbing the entire series for real cheap at GOG.com during the big Summer sales event. The first Broken Sword game was released on a lot of platforms including Windows, Mac, and PSOne, but it also got that GBA port (maybe demake/downgrade might be a better term?), and an enhanced iOS, Android, PC/Mac/Linux, Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS release as well. The enhanced version started on the Nintendo consoles and was a Director’s Cut of the game, released somewhat close to the 15th anniversary (a little bit earlier) and most likely meant to cash-in on the resurgence of the adventure game genre that were profitable on those two consoles (Ace Attorney on DS, especially), then later landing on the computer and mobile markets. The Director’s Cut version is what I played on my Mac, which was mostly similar to the original release of the game in 1996, with some things added, a few things taken out, and some small amount of dialogue changed a little. 

So now that I love the genre and actually wanted to play the game, what’s my opinion? Well, for 1996 it’s easy to see that Broken Sword was definitely impressive; it’s full of lots of animation, voice acting, hand drawn backgrounds (by Don Bluth animators, no less!) that were painted-in digitally, and dynamic camera angel shots with a lot of sweeping movement—it’ obvious there was a real sense of direction and storyboarding with the imagery in the game. I even really liked the artwork for the character portraits (an added feature to the Directors’ Cut was the art drawn by comic book artist Dave Gibbons (Watchmen)). The puzzles too, aged really well and followed basic human logic and could be solved without much headaches, which is always appreciated in a genre full of psychotic puzzles (I’m looking at you, Gabriel Knight 3). But besides the presentation and puzzles, I thought the game aged badly. One of the biggest hurdles to get over for the game was definitely the voice acting which was … not good. I don’t want to say straight-out bad per se, since some actors help to outweigh others, with the lead character George Stobbart sounding pretty good, but some of those other, bad actors really drag down the good ones. 

2001's GBA Release

Original 1996 PC Release

2009's Director's Cut Release

The biggest point of contention being the other lead in the game Nicole "Nico" Collard. Nico’s voice actress is terrible! She’s a main character and her voice is absolutely unbearable to listen to. She comes off sounding very old, like a grandmother, and half the time reminds me of the classic Bible Black dub that’s known in infamy for its grandma voice high school girls. While I can understand and empathize with the fact that some of Nico’s wooden nature may come from both the dubbing's age and the fact of her character being French and trying to talk in English (with an accent),

it’s still just so bad that I can’t stand her. No matter the reason for it, Nico just sounds really awful, and brings down the entire atmosphere of the game whenever she is on screen. Playing as her was always the worst part of the game for me that I just wanted to rush through so I didn’t have to listen to her horrible sounding voice.

Nico’s segments in the game felt very awkward to begin with, however. Not only were they obnoxious from her actress’s terrible acting, but they also felt very disconnected from the main plot with George, and ultimately unnecessary. At first I didn’t think much of it, until I got to the ending and realized how little pay-off there really is with her segments. I later learned that these segments were added on for the Director’s Cut, and … yeah that explains so much. The small pay-off—essentially Nico decides she’ll never tell anyone what she was doing, even George—really makes a lot of sense when you realize it was shoved in their retroactively. Some people may like that they got to see more of Nico, and that she was no longer just a love-interest but also had her own story, but it just felt like filler to me, really uneventful filler that messed with the pacing of the overall narrative of the game and gave you nothing of value in the end since Nico decides to never tell anyone about her little misadventures anyways. 

That is not to say there weren’t problems with the narrative proper, either though. George’s quest throughout Europe wasn’t without its own problems. It took a while for it to sink in for me since the game starts with such a serious tone, but then later becomes so goofy. Broken Sword is suppose to be a funny game! Ah-ha! I get it now. The awkward juxtaposition of horrible murders and serious down-to-earth art design with goofy side-characters that are what you would expect out of Capcom’s Ace Attorney games, really gave me whiplash at first. But yes, the story is chuck full of humor, and in its defense once I got over the whiplash I was able to see that a lot of the game’s humor is great. Every NPC and side-character is really well written and interesting to talk to, not to mention rather funny. 

George himself is really likable, with a goofy sense of adventure, snide snark to the characters around him, and a long running joke that he can fit anything into the inside pocket of his jacket (with humorous animation of him shoving large objects in there). These do help get over the fact that the overall story about chasing the treasure of the Knight’s Templar is so average. Templar stories are overdone to death now, and Broken Sword dose get some free-pass since it beat Dan Brown and all the other overdone stories by at least 4 years, but in a post-Da Vinci Code obsessed world, it still hampered the game for me. Plus, the pay-off to the Templar story felt sloppy anyways. I recommend playing this one for the characters who aged a lot better and are still funny 19 years later and not so much the plot that lost a lot of its grit and interest. 

The European development team behind Broken Sword, Revolution, started out in 1990 with a clear goal in mind: to challenge the American ran market of Sierra and LucasArts who controlled the point ’n’ click industry. Between the six years since their start and the creation of Broken Sword they created another well respected game, Beneath the Steel Sky, and the engine they needed to take on the giants, their Virtual Theater engine. Broken Sword had fluid animation and hand-drawn backgrounds, as well as a lot of love put into it, which was something the other guys didn’t really have at the time of Broken Sword’s release (well sans the love part, they had that). 

While I think overall Broken Sword has not aged as well as some of the Sierra games its creators were trying so hard to beat, that it still managed to maintain an unique identity more than 19 years later. Add in the fact that so much of Sierra went into disarray and was side-lined for so many years (we’re just now finally seeing the rebirth of the King’s Quest series) it is quite a feat that Broken Sword was able to maintain a relatively consistent release schedule even landing a PS4 and Xbox One port for their most recent 2013 entry Broken Sword 5. It’s really something to admire that Revolution could keep the series going like it did. So yes, it was a bit of an awkward start for me, and not without my own complaints, but I ended up enjoying the beginning of this series, and am looking forward to trying out the next four games. 

Remembering Satoru Iwata

The link to the artist's work is here. Please credit them for this.

On July 11, 2015, Satoru Iwata, president and CEO of Nintendo, untimely passed away at the tender young age of 55. Iwata, was a man that I always respected, and still days later it's really hard for me to believe that he's actually gone. I said a lot of words to my gaming friends both offline and online in some comment sections as well as on Twitter, but I didn't really know how to express myself about his untimely passing in the long run. This whole time, since July 12 when the news first broke out,  I contemplated if I should write about him on my blog. It wouldn't be easy, and it would be kind of different from what I usually blog about, and more importantly, I wasn't even sure if it would be in good taste or not, either. Ultimately here I am writing a little bit about him, though, and well, that's because this is all I know. I can't draw awesome art tributes like the ones I've seen for him, or start some big online campaign to keep his mii in circulation like some people have. However I know how to write, and have a blog I keep up regularly, so I can do this.

In a lot of ways I'm being selfish and this is just as much for me, if not more, than it is for him, but I hope you all excuse me for this. I put off writing about Iwata for the last few days because there was no doubt in my mind that in the sea of endless tributes (that this man rightfully deserves), mine will go mostly unnoticed and be meaningless. But that was wrong of me. Everyone should say their goodbyes--stupid little things like whether or not anyone cares or sees it don't matter. So I wanted to take time and talk about Iwata, a man that I never even met in person, but somehow find myself respecting more than most people. Next week we will be returning to the piece I originally wrote for this Monday (Lucky July 13th) but put off because of this unfortunate event.

Iwata always loved video games, and he wanted to share that love with everyone. From a young age, he took to programing, and he stayed in the gaming business for the entirety of his professional life quite literally until the day he passed. His earliest work saw him programming games like Balloon Fight, and eventually being able to move up to being a producer, with his first producer credit being Rollerball from HAL Laboratories in 1990. Iwata stuck with HAL through the subsequent years programming and producing a lot of games, even including the original Kirby games with director Masahiro Sakurai (now most well known as the director for Super Smash Brothers). Eventually Iwata's hard work at HAL payed off and he was promoted to President within the company in 1993.

Even though Iwata eventually moved away from HAL as he became a bigger and bigger player at Nintendo as a whole, you could always sense the love and camaraderie that Sakurai had with him, so upon Iwata's passing it was nice to see Sakurai say such warm things about his previous boss and work associate. "He always understood the proper balance of things, between the right amount of effort, and making sure to listen. Even though he is no longer my boss, I think of him as the best leader I ever knew." (very roughly translated)

One of my favorite tribute pieces for Iwata.
Original source for the work can be found here. 

Throughout the years Iwata accomplished a lot for Nintendo, doing great work that often went unknown to most of us (until he became the icon he was today) but was noticed by his fellow Nintendo employees. He brushed shoulders with many of the people who really made the company what it is today, Sakurai was definitely one, but he also helped produce and program EarthBound/Mother 2 alongside Itoi, even fixing the bad programming that almost lead to the game being canceled. Just like Sakurai, Itoi had only great things to say about Iwata upon hearing about his passing. "You always put yourself last, after you'd finished helping everyone else. You were so generous as a friend that this trip* might be your very first selfish act."

*Itoi referred to Iwata's passing as a trip, and that they will one day see each other again. For a full look at the statement's translation please check this link. This is not my translation. All credit belongs to yomuka.

Stories like these are so common for Iwata, no matter what Nintendo brand he touched. For Pokémon fans, Iwata created the way to compress Pokémon Gold and Silver's data in order for Game Freak to be able to add Kanto to the game carts. Iwata also managed to port the battle code and logistics from Red and Blue/Green to Pokémon Stadium in only a week--surprising the main programmer on the project, and really getting the project off the ground and started. For Kirby fans, he not only produced and oversaw many of the games, but also had a hand in the creation of the series. While Sakurai created the pink fluff-ball we all love, it was Iwata who created the original concept for the series. Kirby started out as Iwata's desire for a game that anyone could play all the way through from start to finish, no matter if you were skilled or a beginner; when Sakurai responded to this concept of Iwata's, he created Kirby. Even for Dragon Quest fans, Iwata was there. He reprogrammed the entire first game in order to overhaul it for its North American release as Dragon Warrior. Giving the game a proper battery save function that the Japanese version lacked (the original Japanese version resorted to a password system), and a great visual overhaul to boot.

Iwata helped to make sure many of the games that would become our childhood were created, but he also did a lot more. Of course, there's the obvious, when we talk about his recent work, such as taking the huge risk on the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS, and giving us two of the greatest consoles around. As hard as it is to believe nowadays, these were quite the risky strategy and direction to go into, but Iwata steered ahead. It's what he did best, and because of that, most of what we know about Nintendo of today can be attributed to him. So much of its current image, and even motto--Games should be one thing: fun. Fun for everyone--came from him. Iwata took an old, conservative company and opened it up to the world. He created the Iwata Ask column that gave us such great insight into the workings and mind of the company, and he created the Nintendo Directs, where he delivered us all the information we could want about their games, directly to us.

Under Iwata, the once secretive Treehouse Branch of Nintendo opened up a little bit, and we now have the great Treehouse Live segments at E3. Speaking of which, under Iwata, we had some of the most fun E3 presentations ever. Jim Henson puppets, Robot Chicken stop motion dolls, and one incredible bad-ass Dragon Ball Z-esque fight between him and Nintendo of America President Reggie. The company has become something more under his leadership; it's a place of fun, even while watching their advertisements, you just can't not have a smile on your face.

How can you not love this man's sense of humor?

That's what I think I will miss the most about him. Iwata's leadership of Nintendo wasn't without its faults and mistakes, after all I don't mean to make it out to be some perfect empire that could do no wrong, but his tenure at Nintendo was something that was more important than success. It was kind. The countless stories about Iwata that have been coming out now that he is no longer with us will no doubt put tears in anyone's eyes. He was a man who took two pay-cuts as President and CEO in order to make sure none of his employees would have to be fired when the company's finances were rocky. He was a man who would enjoy smalltalk and smile at journalist, even when they were off-camera. Iwata loved gaming, and he wanted it to keep evolving as a medium. He wanted it to bring families and friends together, he wanted it to make people smile, and he wanted it to be fun. Iwata embraced his fans with a unique sense of humor all his own, and ran Nintendo the same way he viewed gaming: everyone should be having fun. In today's crazy world, I can't think of anyone more I could respect for that kind of sentimentality. The gaming world has no doubt lost one of its most gentle giants.

Thank you, Satoru Iwata. These past years were bumpy, and rough, and confusing, not to mention even a little scary, but ultimately, they were fun.

Thank you, sir.