Alora Fane

I played MARDEK yesterday, for the first time in years... and Taming Dreams, as well. I recorded the full gameplay of the chapter 1 sections (the fantasy sequence, the hometown, then the woods and meeting Rohoph) as looooong videos, and it's interesting comparing them directly. You've got time to watch 4 hours of video, right??

(This post was originally more than twice as long, as I'd written a lot to address comments about how 'everybody' would be more interested in a straight remaster with absolutely no changes, as well as speculation about the psychology of why some people want that and I don't. Or why they close their minds to changes before they even know what they are. I'll save that for a separate post, though; this one will be exhausting enough!)

I'd jumped into the idea of returning to MARDEK without actually replaying it, though I did intend to sooner rather than later. I suppose I'd been somewhat reluctant because I felt it should be 'special' in some way, after so long away from it... Like maybe I should record a video of myself commenting on my impressions after all this time.

I didn't do that, though. I rather unceremoniously loaded up a local copy of the game (you can play Flash games offline, you know), and dived right in.

I recorded the experience largely for my own reference; it's easier to go back through a video to find any bits I need to refer to rather than keeping a ton of saved files or playing through the whole game countless times. I thought it'd be interesting to upload it to YouTube as well though, in case other people were curious to revisit it in this form.

(I'm not expecting anyone to sit down and watch the whole thing, though if you'd find that entertaining then of course you're very welcome to. There's no commentary or anything, just straight gameplay. It might be interesting to skip along and view specific bits though.)

My impressions of it were... mixed. Some aspects were better than I expected! I do like how it looks, especially things like the menus, which look quite solid and polished, and the particle effects, which aren't bad at all considering I figured out how to make them myself rather than using anyone else's code or ideas. There are some little things I really liked too, like how the damage numbers stretch horizontally as they fade, or things that visually show when status effects expire. Even the dialogue portraits don't look as bad as I thought they might, nor did the music sound as harsh as I expected. The combat is straightforward, fast-paced, and easy to understand. Reactions add a lot, and having a visual bar for when to press the button when reacting was a good idea. It isn't a bad game, and I can see why people - myself included - liked it. I did have some fun playing through it.

Not much nostalgia though for me, strangely... Perhaps it's because my experiences of making it were more prolonged than a player having a distinct moment where they first experienced certain parts?

It's not without its faults. The dialogue leaves a lot to be desired. There are some funny lines, but overall it comes across as, well, written by a teenager, because it was. It's not exactly clever, and a lot of it (for example, Lilanea's dialogue) is stilted and awkward and completely unnatural. There are issues with the music, though I'll talk about them specifically in another post. I also feel that while there's some value in the skill learning and equipment stuff, overall it's very 'bitty' or 'granular'; too many little bits to keep track of, each of which has too little significance in itself.

While playing through it, I was reminded of a lot of things I handled differently in Taming Dreams. I hadn't played that in years either, and my plan was to play it after playing through MARDEK Chapter 3... But since getting through that gargantuan thing would take days, at least, I thought it'd be more interesting to play the bits of Taming Dreams that directly corresponded to these same sections in MARDEK, since the whole point of it was a revision of MARDEK, like what I've been talking about doing in the previous posts.

Again, I made a recording of me playing through it. It's over 3 hours long (!), and it shows the greater depth I went into with essentially everything. The vast majority of that time is dialogue, which I read (or at least whispered) aloud to myself as I went through it (I did the same with MARDEK) so then there'd be ample time for a viewer to read it (the pacing is probably annoying anyway, but it's better to be a bit too slow than too fast, I think).

I tried to capture every bit of dialogue, but I missed a lot (eg returning to Gemsand with Meraeadyth or Sylvia on your party, checking the Encyclopaedia at the end), which bothers me ugggghhh, but most of it's there! (I did the same with MARDEK; I never opened the party chat thing at all because I didn't realise it was even there.)

Overall, I really enjoyed this! More than I expected to. I actually had fairly sour memories of Taming Dreams because of some delightful comments people had made about it not just over the years, but recently as well (it being 'sissy', for example). I thought maybe it was way too pretentious or inaccessible, and felt that playing through that would only make me think "and I thought THIS was good??". Instead, it was more like "wow, it was THIS good??"

The pixel art for both the environments and the characters is big step up from MARDEK's, I'd say. Conversations (plot ones, anyway) use full bodies for more emoting, and show two characters at once rather than just a single face, adding a lot more liveliness.

The music was also more competently made, and a lot of it takes the essence of the MARDEK soundtrack, but uses it to form entirely new tracks with similar feelings but improved structures and/or harmonies. Compare for example Rohoph's theme (∞ M ∞ / ∞ TD ∞), which has essentially the same structure (the main theme with choir and harp instruments), but the MARDEK one is like a long, rambling run-on sentence, while the Taming Dreams one splits into more digestible phrases. Or the Forest theme (∞ M ∞ / ∞ TD ∞), which is sort of the opposite; it's so cut up into pieces in MARDEK that it gives an uninviting, detached, or even mildly menacing feeling, while the Taming Dreams one is more enchanting, like a verdant canopy you're immersed within. There's also heavier use of leitmotifs in the music, and I love how each of the characters has a 'motto', a personal phrase, which encapsulates who they are and which is used as the basis of their personal musical theme.

I really, really like the improved dialogue. The original MARDEK is years old, and it feels like it; I'd be embarrassed to show that off to new people as the person I am now. Taming Dreams is a few years old too, and it came from a time before I went to university, where I'd had less life and social experience, so I thought it'd come across as very naive. If anything though I feel it's better than anything I've written in the past few years. It's clever, heartfelt, full of metaphors and alliteration and jokes that are simultaneously silly and character-developing and intelligent (rather than just stupid - compare ∞ this ∞ with ∞ this ∞; no less crude or silly, but deeper), and, well, I just really like it a whole lot! It's something I'd be very happy to show off, even now.

Well, sort of. Again, this isn't without its issues. As proud as I am of the novel 'battle' system, it's very heavy-handed with the "it's not fighting!!" and "fighting is bad!!" stuff right from the very start, and the amount of text poured on the player just to explain how the system even works - or the lore and characters - is too much. So much telling and not showing. It's overwhelming, and off-putting. The 'battle' mechanics can produce more interesting strategies than the original if you know what you're doing - compare ∞ the mindless battle against The Dragon ∞ with ∞ the strategic one against the Evil God ∞ - but to actually get to that point takes effort, and it should be up to the player to figure it out gradually rather than forcing it on them before they've become immersed. There are also a lot of cases where your actions have little to no obvious effect, or you even have to skip a turn, which isn't exactly satisfying.

There were also attempts to address some RPG conventions I had issues with, and I do like the solutions I came up with. Random battles are replaced by vortices that float up to the top of the screen, which can be tapped to prevent the encounter; you can also see what monsters that encounter would contain, and if you pop a lot of them, you get a temporary period where they stop appearing. Chests are no longer full of loot, but instead contain 'poem fragments' that serve as both a sort of quest/minigame (which engages mental comprehension), and a reward in the form of a special miasmon that you can equip... because equipping is what you do with 'tamed' miasmon, giving monsters more purpose and depth. I like that you had separate 'weapon' and 'shield' slots for these miasmon, and could only use their relevant reactions when you had something in that slot. The skill learning still applied, sort of; you 'integrated' miasmon by using them, and gained a 'permanent boon' once you'd fully integrated a certain species.

Overall, it appeals very strongly to the Openness (to Experience) personality trait, which is essentially an affinity for things like intellectualism, creativity, spirituality, and novel, abstract ideas. Just as some people are extroverts, some are introverts, and some are in the middle, some people are high in Openness, some low (they're no-nonsense and prefer the familiar), most somewhere in the middle. Some people are airy-fairy new-agey hippies, others salt-of-the-Earth soldiers, most somewhere in between. Obviously I'm at one of the extreme ends of that particular statistical distribution (I'm a moooonchild~). So this strong appeal to that trait makes my mind sparkle in a way so few things do. My curiosity about people is piqued too; each of the NPCs in the village has relationships with others, and it's way more satisfying to me hearing that than having some random man boast about how he's better than me because he has a beard.

But because it appeals so strongly to my specific personality traits, people who fall on different points on those particular spectra wouldn't be affected in the same way. I wrote more about this in the part of this post that I removed, so I'll elaborate on it when I post that.

There are some changes though that I think were definitely for the better. The "Governance de Magi", a group of eeeeevil aliens who were all largely palette swaps of one another, are now the Atonae, a group of gods who were separated from the worlds that they made, and now they find themselves at Alora Fane, whose gods are gone. Rohoph's aim now is to be the world's new god... Each of them had a personality and appearance inspired by their original GdM incarnation, and in many ways they were more polished and distinguished versions of those same characters (at least some of them). For example, Mor(r)ic was now still creepy, but also an aaartist~!, because he saw his reviving the dead as 'keeping the beauty of life alive', because of his Creation sentiment. But they're not perfect. People seemed to like the original Melchior because of his simple silliness, but the Taming Dreams version, Maka, is probably too obscure. What she says makes a lot of deep spiritual sense, but it'd be lost on most people, and even for those that even slightly grasped it, it'd require re-reading and/or analysis (plus it's not funny). They are gods, so what they say should really be inaccessible to a degree, I thought, but I think I pushed that too far; it's not really appropriate for a mere video game. The same goes for Rohoph's dialogue, and just comically drawing attention to its obscureness isn't enough.

The original MARDEK was quite a sausagefest (so was Spyro, I've been noticing); all the GdM were written as male (though apparently some people interpreted some of them as female), and most of the protagonists were male. Because I wanted to move beyond that, I changed half of the 'Atonae' into females, and I wanted to even out the imbalance in the protagonists as well. Meraeador became Meraeadyth, a character I didn't have the best memories of, but which I was pleasantly surprised by in this playthrough. She's certainly got a lot more depth to her than her progenitor, and I think her joining at this early point in the story - rather than just offering a collection sidequest - added a lot of interest. The Shaman was also turned into a new character, with an appearance based on the boss from the original Chapter 2, and she was meant to play a major role later on.

There were also more interesting dynamics with the NPCs, like Mardek and Deugan's parents. Rather than pining for her missing husband and doing nothing else, Lilanea's a tailor who's moving on by getting friendly with Deugan's dad, who's fancied her since they were little. She chose Enki though, which made him jealous and resentful. He felt if he were more like Enki, he'd be worthy of her love too, and that passed on to Deugan, who made Enki into his hero but felt very insecure about not being as good as him. Way more interesting, I think, than flat NPCs and admiration for a 'Social Fox' character they've never met, based on something as empty as "I want to be a good adventurer and he is a good adventurer".

In MARDEK, you fought Social Fox's zombie at the end of Chapter 2, which I suppose was meant to have some emotional weight despite the fact you'd never met him before that point. In Taming Dreams, Morric would have possessed Sylvia, the shaman, Deugan's mother figure. When the 'ship' you were in started falling from the sky (it was actually a reanimated corpse of a giant turtle in this version - it's complicated), Sylvia used the last of her strength to keep it aloft while the others escaped, and Deugan stayed behind partly because he'd actually had a whole "I'm not a real hero, I'm not brave" thing building up to this point, and because Sylvia had helped him out so much in the past, so now he had to be there for her in her final moments. His sacrifice, then, meant way more on so many levels, and it was heavily built up to and had so much more emotional impact.

For a direct comparison of the dialogue quality, here's Lilanea's conversation about Enki:

∞ MARDEK (9:03) ∞

∞ Taming Dreams (45:07) ∞

The purpose and general content of the conversation is the same, and the funniest line was kept, but it's completely rewritten for the better (and that line's been made even funnier, but maybe not everyone would get it; it's a example of a style of humour that relies on comprehension of the whole - rather than working in isolation - which it seems I used a lot in this). It's still not amazing, but I suppose it's a good example of how MARDEK could be seen as a first draft, which Taming Dreams built upon.

Several people have talked about how the 'characters and story' were strong points of MARDEK. If you're one of those people, then surely you must be able to see that those aspects were dramatically improved in Taming Dreams?

I'd agree however that the combat and content of MARDEK made it more accessible than Taming Dreams. Taming Dreams appealed very much to the Openness trait and to intelligence. It's clever, and abstract, and if you enjoy being clever and abstract yourself, it's a joy. If however you're more interested in things that are easy and straightforward to understand, if you'd rather turn your brain off than actively engage it, then this wouldn't be for you, and I can understand why you'd prefer the obvious simplicity and naive escapism of the original.

If I were to return to this, whatever I might call a third attempt, I really don't think I could return to that immature simplicity and lose all I poured into revising my ideas for Taming Dreams. But I also don't think it'd be wise to use a lot of Taming Dream's ideas; they're too obscure for most people. And while I like the dialogue a lot, I recognise there's just too much of it.

I'd aim to strike a balance, with the same depth and heart and attention to lore as Taming Dreams (by 'heart' I mean emotional impact, not "violence is bad!!" themes), but with the simpler story progression and combat mechanics of MARDEK. Something deeper and better-written than MARDEK, but easier to understand than Taming Dreams.

Whether I can actually do that, I don't know. I feel I'll need to make a demo before any of us can really form a proper opinion about whether a changed version could work.

Oh, and here's a prediction: a significant percentage of people will view the MARDEK video, at least briefly, and not view the Taming Dreams one at all. They'll decide that MARDEK was better anyway, though.

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