Download An Examination of Multiple Playable Characters in Single Player

An Examination of
Multiple Playable
Characters in
Single Player
Adventure Games
Pokemon: Red Version
Nintendo Gameboy
1996
Like its many siblings and descendants of the same
name, diffferent version, Pokemon Red is a classic third
-person overhead adventure game that puts the player
in the shoes of a young, ambitious Pokemon trainer out
to catch all of the dangerous little fighting monsters and
use them to prove himself as the greatest Pokemon trainer
of all time. The narrative is a set chain of events in which
you travel from town to town, complete a number of
challenges, most often in the form of a Pokemon battle,
and then move on to the next town.
The main gameplay of Pokemon is simple. The goal, in
the simplest of terms, is to catch Pokemon and use them to
complete each town (level) until you eventually reach and
defeat the Elite Four, making you the ultimate Pokemon
master. There is, in fact, no requirement to catch any
certain number of Pokemon. In fact, it is entirely possible,
though incredibly difficult and unlikely, to play the whole
game with the initial Pokemon you are given and none
other. However, the fun of Pokemon is collecting different
kinds of monsters with different kinds of abilities, each of
which can be anything from ideal to completely useless
in various situations of the game.
As the game progresses, the challenges become more difficult and so it becomes practically
imperative to train your Pokemon to meet the par. What’s more interesting, however, is matching
the different elements of Pokemon for a good battle. Each gym leader that you have to defeat
throughout the game in order to move on has a specialty type of Pokemon. For instance, Brock of
Pewter City uses only rock-type Pokemon which are vulnerable to water and leaf type Pokemon,
but Misty in Cerulean City uses only water-type Pokemon which are vulnerable to electric
Pokemon. In this way, the game almost forces the player to catch and train the various kinds of
Pokemon. However, for gym battles, it’s often easy to fill one’s entire team with Pokemon of the
opposing type, but in other trainer battles and especially when fighting the Elite Four at the end
of the game, their teams are not always as concentrated and you are then also forced to create
a decent balance among your own six Pokemon. Leveling up, evolving and equipping special
abilities to a range of Pokemon is key to success in the game. The many multitudes of Pokemon
to choose from and fight with throughout the game in conjunction with their own unique abilites,
attacks and defenses open up a vast array of strategic gameplay and planning. Though training
a lot of Pokemon and searching the tall grass for that one special kind you want can get tedious,
the final result of having a great number of options makes it worth the time spent.
Final Fantasy IX
Sony Playstation
2000
Final Fantasy IX is one of quite many epic RPG
adventure games of the same series. Like the others,
the player plays as one main character throughout the
game, but gradually accumulates, loses and regains
other characters to play alongside of. The plot of this
particular game travels from a simple, entertaining
tale of princesses, thieves, knights and mages in the
first three discs before turning into a strange, diluted
piece about aliens and existential crisies in the last. The
narrative, of course, is set. The gameplay is not.
Like most adventure games, Final Fantasy IX is a straight path on which you defeat enemies, perform actions and hope to move on to the next stage. On the surface, there seems to be little strategy
and at first, perhaps there is not, but as the number of characters rises, your options become a lot
more open. As you gain characters, it is up to you to decide what role they’ll play in your party, if
they play a role at all. While in this particular Final Fantasy, unlike earlier versions, basic roles are
somewhat assigned (You can’t teach black magic to anyone other than Vivi, you can only summon
with Garnet or Eiko and everyone else is only useful for basic strength attacks), you still can develop
some more specific roles in battle. You may choose to use weaker characters as medics with potions
or instead focus all of your efforts on brute strength and have a white mage heal. In addition, the
game gives you an option of whether to place the character in the front line or the back line, affecting how much damage they give and recieve. Choosing to train the characters at different speeds
also allows for some strategy as focusing on just a few and leaving the rest to stagnate could hurt
you in the many occasions in which the party is split. There are multiple points in the game in which
the party becomes two parties, each on a different mission and you must plan your two parties accordingly to get both through the challenges that they will face.
Beyond the strategic possibilities of
the characters for getting through
the game, the storyline (at least the
first 3/4s of it) of Final Fantasy IX is
engaging enough and develops the
characters enough to make the player
actually care about them and choose
their four battlers based on more than
simple convenience and skill level. The
characters and their stories make the
game addicting and make the player
want to build up their party despite
the occasional repetition needed to
do so just to find out what happens.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Every Platform Available in
2006
Marvel Ultimate Alliance is not strictly a single-player
game, but, with AI, plays much the same in single-player
mode as it does in cooperative gameplay. Ultimate
Alliance does something that has been proven to work
many times throughout the years: take familiar, loveable
characters and put the player in their shoes to take on one
of their adventures. The game takes the player through
many of Marvel’s worlds and arcs on an eventual quest
to defeat Dr. Doom who is wreaking havoc across all of
them. You play in a team of four, one being controlled
by the player, the rest by AI, but the perspective of the
player can change to any of the four characters at any
time so that they can fight as Spiderman, Wolverine,
The Thing and Captain America all in the course of one
battle against Loki and then change up their entire team
for the next battle.
In battle, the ability to switch perspectives between your team comes in handy many times. Specifically,
it’s very useful when using the the special power ups that each have different effects on the enemies
or team members. In addition, you can play in two different places and fight two different enemies
at once which allows a more effective strategy in specific battles . In particular, the final battle
against Doctor Doom and his never-ending array of Fantastic Four clones is most easily dealt with
by sending each of your team members to fight one, letting the AI fight it, and then once you see
the AI’s healthy getting too low, you switch to its perspective, finish off the battle quickly, regain its
health and let it go back on its own again while you take over the next character’s body. Whenever
you arrive at a S.H.I.E.L.D. access point, you are given the option to change your character’s stats,
abilities, accessories or even change which characters are on your team in general. Since the
characters are all familiar members of the Marvel family, your choices are obviously somewhat
swayed by the options as you tend towards your favorites. While it is possible to train all of the
options of heroes simultaneously for future use, you tend to pick a few that you might switch between
throughout the course of the game and
focus instead on those. Perhaps its flaw is
that it never really requires you to change
your characters. The balance between
the four is key, but the unused ones are
never required nor is any reward given
for changing from the default four. If you
form the Fantastic Four, you gain some
bonuses supposedly, but aside such an
obscure chance, there is no real reason
to switch from the most powerful.
Comparison of Character
Dynamics
What stands out the most between the three in terms of differences lies in the variations of uniqueness
between the multiple options of characters. In Pokemon, these variations are large and have a
pretty substantial effect on gameplay. The game forces you to use at least some variation of types
of Pokemon else you not be able to defeat the gym leaders. In Final Fantasy, the need for special
abilities is a lot more optional. While they come in handy and make the game a more rounded
experience to play, it is entirely possible
to focus all of your efforts on physical
attacks and use of items and never find a
use for magic. Summoning in particular,
is an entirely unnecessary and optional
skill that, although heavily tied into the
storyline, is never actually required of
the player to use and often isn’t worth
it. Finally, in Ultimate Alliance, special
abilities are present, but so skewed,
they make switching between characters
less of a constant thing and more of an
experiment to find the best one and stick with it. For instance, Deadpool is one of the best characters
in the game due to his quick healing factor that practically always keeps him from dying. In many
games played with him, all of the other characters end up dead and he lives on to finish the battle
alone. Once you’ve discovered this feature of him, there seems to be very little reason to change
to a different character that dies easier, has somewhat equal skills and has no special ability of
his own to balance out Deadpool’s. This kind of balance (or imbalance in the case of MUA), can
make or break the need for multiple characters in a game. Instead of working as a vital element
of gameplay, it becomes a fun, but mildly useless feature that only has any real value to people
who are huge fans of Ms. Marvel and will use her regardless of how poor her character performs
in battle. Of the three, Pokemon definitely balances the need for switching between Pokemon the
best, even in singular battles and even more so throughout the whole game.
One aspect of multiple character gameplay that Pokemon fails to include, however, is the usage of
the characters for simultaneous play. Ultimate Alliance does this
best as you can use the characters to be in different places and
fighting different enemies at the same time. It adds an element of
real time strategy into the game that doesn’t even try to exist in
Pokemon which is perfectly happy having you fight one Pokemon
at a time with one Pokemon at a time. Final Fantasy also doesn’t
include simultaneous actions amongst the characters except in
a few small portions of the game when the narrative requires it
and separates them. In these few cases, it does in fact promote
simultaneous play between the two parties and requires the player
to strategize and think about what abilities need to be where at
which point. On the other hand, the timing of each chain of events as they play out separately is
entirely set and unable to be changed. Room for creativity is slim to none and the only real effects
of the split come in to play in the challenge of the battles you face on each end. Only Ultimate
Alliance successfully incorporates real-time simultaneous gameplay into its character play and it
does it well.
One final aspect of multiple characters is giving those characters a narrative purpose and relatability
to the player that makes them more than just assets in a game and advances them into actual
purposeful pieces of the story that makes the player want to utilize them to their fullest potential. Of all
three games, Final Fantasy definitley does this the best. The story is engaging as are the characters
who are fully developed through a large number of rewarding cut scenes that don’t seem to limit
gameplay whatsoever. You begin to prefer certain characters to others and favor them in battle
and training over ones that you may not like so much. Eiko is an incredibly annoying character and
so you may be more likely to use Freya over her
even if Eiko would be more advantageous to the
game. This dynamic doesn’t make gameplay
any easier, but it creates an investment in the
story and thus an investment in the game that
is vital to a lot of players’ will to play it and, in
this case even play it again. Marvel Ultimate
Alliance has a similar but lesser success in
this area. The characters are characters that
are already known and loved and thus come
already packaged for some relatability and
desire to play. Unfortunately, the storyline of
the game is weak and barely holds a candle
to traditional Marvel arcs, especially crossover
arcs which, in the past few years, have been the most anticipated events in comics. There are a
few treats within, such as upgrading your character’s outfits to different styles from various series
or occasional character outbursts during battles or missions that remind you of the personality of
the character you’re embodying, but they’re so few and far between it’s contrived and forced and
doesn’t add to the experience of being your favorite hero much at all. Final Fantasy constantly keeps
the characters’ personalities involved as you play. MUA falls short. Pokemon runs into a different
problem that lies mainly in the designs of the Pokemon themselves. Since the monsters seem to have
little personalities and no real interactions besides fighting, the only superficial judgment that can
be made of them relies on their looks. Depending on who you are, you might pick your Pokemon
based on how hardcore they look or perhaps how cute. Others may simply pick ones that are not
ugly for there are many that are. Even though you don’t really relate to the Pokemon as characters,
you can still pick favorites beyond simple stats and abilities by the very well thought out graphics of
the game. Whether the investment in the characters be based on their actual story and character
or simply their looks, some sort of interaction between player and character favoritism draws the
player into the game and encourages a better gameplay experience in general.