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Unless you’re one of my normal readers who came here because I talked about this little project elsewhere, you’re probably wondering what a non-story is doing on your favorite story site. For those newcomers, hello! I’m Psyby, aspiring author and dissector of storytelling. I like pulling stories apart, finding useful lessons in the remains, and wearing whatever is left afterwards as a funny hat.
But, much like funny hats, there’s only so much use a lesson can have with one person alone. I’m here to share some of the learnings that I’ve scooped up over the last few years of hobby writing in hopes that someone out there finds them as useful as me. Maybe you’ll walk away with some ideas to apply to your fanfics and make them more enjoyable to write. Maybe you’ll find the key to bringing that original story you’ve been working on together at last. Or maybe you just think a writer talking about the nitty-gritty in a craft where you usually only get to see the end product is interesting. I’m more than okay with any of the above.
To keep to the Archive’s theme of transformative works, I’ll be giving these lessons through the lenses of stories I’ve found to be highly demonstrative of the topic at hand. Games, shows, books, fanfics, any sort of story is fair game.
I’ll be starting with a big one, a core idea that can have sweeping effects on how works are viewed and made. One of the worst things you can do to any story is to try boiling its content down to overly simplified terms. In most cases, more work goes into any one aspect worth talking about in a story than can be properly summarized into a jaunty phrase. Simply put, generalizations are not your friend.
I recently picked up a game I think was brutally assassinated by generalizations in wider discussions around it. In truth, my need to discuss this very game was the first domino that lead me to creating this series of mad hatter ramblings masquerading as informative essays. It was a fine game smothered in the crib by fandom expectations, never given the chance to shine on the stage of its dreams. That poor, unfortunate title is “Tokyo Mirage Sessions.”
One day some five years ago, Nintendo and Atlus got together and said, “Hey, Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei are a couple of series that have exploded in popularity in recent years, bringing us both boatloads of cash after decades of middling sales and cult appeal. We should make a crossover!” And so was TMS conceived.
This was the concept that fans of both franchises heard before all else, and excitement was brewing. While no one knew which gameplay style it would pull from, there was some expectation that the story they were about to receive would be something special.
Fire Emblem revels in themes of war. What drives people to shed blood on the intercontinental scale? Are their ends worth the means? How do good, peaceable men hold up as the bodies pile around them? What cost is a handful of lives for what is perceived to be the greater good? They are, at their core, political thrillers that set you at the helm of piloting the war machine to an outcome in which, hopefully, human suffering is kept as minimal as possible when rivers run red.
Shin Megami Tensei’s lofty themes tend to center around the human condition as a whole and its place in the wider universe. What is good? What is evil? Would you rather live in a world of order where all people exist merely as drones to a higher power to prevent conflict, or a lawless wasteland where the strong claim all they want from the weak with no oversight besides pure strength? Does any of this even matter since life’s end is swift and inevitable? You are made to fight the physical manifestations of concepts that seem so titanic as to be unquestionable, ultimately asking the worth of humanity as a whole against the backdrop of life’s inherent chaos.
With these track records in mind, people watched with bated breath to see how these grand ideas would come together. Even if they didn’t care about themes, the scale of the thing would be awe-inspiring at the surface level. How could it be anything less?
Those hopes hit a bit of a bump when the game was revealed in more detail. “Tokyo Mirage Sessions” would be centered on the Japanese idol industry, with a visual style that emphasized bright colors and poppy fun. Rather than the dark or earthy styles of mainline SMT or Fire Emblem, the crossover instead shined neon.
It was a disconcerting revelation, but many in-the-know kept high expectations. After all, one of the most popular characters in all of SMT is Rise Kujikawa, the ex-idol of “Persona 4” whose character arc originates in critique for the industry’s soul-sucking practices. Would the franchises be teaming up to create a whole game lambasting the toxic elements of idolhood, while highlighting those aspects of it that many artists and fans see value in? An unorthodox idea, most certainly, but “strange” might as well be Atlus’s middle name. It could still be great!
The high expectations, however, were thoroughly dashed when the game actually hit store shelves. The gameplay was amazing, critics said, but the story was so basic and devoid of higher themes as to be a bore. Instead of critiquing the machine, the game largely stuck to the glamour that draws in young hopefuls, only to see them splattered by its cogs. They saw in it the writing of a bottom-to-mid shelf RPG, where many fans expected Atlus’s high-end reputation to shine. As a user of TV Tropes might say, play the game, skip the story.
This critical reaction, in turn, washed the game’s potential sales down the drain. After all, RPGs are a genre that were created specifically to tell grand stories. An RPG with a dull plot is as useless as a beat ‘em up without crunchy attacks, or a shooter whose bullets feel like Nerf darts. People didn’t like what they heard, so a large swathe of its audience walked away, leaving TMS with middling sales.
I was one of the few who still played the game anyway, but mostly because I was able to rent it. What’s there to lose if it’s not that great, I told myself. Just send it back and rent a different RPG for the itch. I got my copy, stuck it in that poor unfortunate Wii U…
...And I loved every damn second of it.
I loved it so much that I was all ears when I heard they were making an updated rerelease for the Switch. I played it all over again on the new hardware, and I loved it just as much the second time around.
To think, I would have skipped the game entirely if I hadn’t been a Gamefly member. What a travesty that would have been! I nearly missed out on a great time because people discussing it said “play the game, skip the story.” It makes me wonder, is there any objective truth to what the critics said? Am I just weird for liking it so much when everyone else gave it a solid “meh?”
I can say, as someone who has played the whole game twice, that the critics were absolutely… right. Kind of.
The gameplay is, indeed, amazing, and I could go on for days about the visual and aural splendor through which the game is expressed, but that’s not the part of the equation we need to examine here. The important part is the story. The story, they said, was boring. It lacked poignant themes like the root franchises. It was worth skipping. And they have a point. The main plot of “Tokyo Mirage Sessions” is a serviceable vehicle for the crossover and little more.
You are Itsuki Aoi, a high schooler from Tokyo who happens on your friend, Tsubasa Oribe, auditioning at an idol competition. Suddenly, the host reveals himself to be a gray-skinned monster, and dark energy washes over the stage. All of the contestants are swept away through a portal into an artsy, absurdist landscape with floating platforms and roaming monsters that want nothing more than to suck the life force/creative spirit, called Performa, from humans.
Itsuki jumps headlong into the gate to save his friend, where both he and her are accosted by two of the monsters, called Mirages. Yes, as in the second word of the game’s patchwork title. One of them force-chokes Tsubasa, and the other charges Itsuki with a blade. But then, Itsuki’s Performa comes to life, and he uses it, seemingly by instinct, as a weapon against the Mirages.
It is revealed then, as Itsuki’s Performa peels away the Mirages’ red robes, that both monsters were actually characters from the Fire Emblem series. Itsuki’s Mirage turns out to have been Chrom, the main Lord from FE: Awakening, and Tsubasa’s was Caeda, one of the first usable units in the first Fire Emblem. They were being controlled by a shadowy force that stole their memories and turned them into vessels to harvest Performa for an unknown, but surely dastardly objective.
The newly freed Chrom and Caeda bind themselves to Itsuki and Tsubasa, turning into weapons, called Carnages, that they can use in battle. They also grant really swanky outfits, because why fight if you can’t be downright styling while doing so? The two newly awoken Mirage Masters are then swept into a conspiracy in which the fate of the world rests on their ability to sing.
Skipping ahead about two-thirds of the game, it comes to light that the main villain is Gharnef, the very first big bad from the original Fire Emblem. He wants to revive the Shadow Dragon, just like in his original appearance, to obliterate the world. Why? Because it’s his “duty.” No, that’s explicitly what he says when asked. There’s some backstory about him being a scorned magic student who first wanted to revive the Dragon out of revenge, but now he just does it because it’s what he does. And the Shadow Dragon is just a monster that wants to destroy things because that’s what monsters do.
On its own, that wouldn’t be a deal breaker. They were unambiguous villains in the first game, too, and they worked well in that role because of the humans who allowed them to rise. In most FE games, there tends to be a pure evil force operating in the background, pulling strings to make the plot move. The humans who aid them do so because they’re being controlled through their vices. The big evil dragon promises them power, or riches, or revenge, and these motivations create interesting, complex villains whose actions say something about humanity. Very human motivations lead the world to doom, and only virtuous motivations on the part of the main heroes can stop them.
TMS kind of follows this pattern, but not to the same effect. Remember how the plot summary above began with a gray monster dude kidnapping people? That guy turns out to have been possessed by an enemy Mirage, like how Chrom and Caeda were going to nab Itsuki and Tsubasa. Powerful Mirages need humans to act as proxies in the real world, and they forcibly form these partnerships by hypnotizing the host with their greatest desires. In order to break the connection, you need to make the Mirage reveal itself, usually by straining or shattering the illusion of their deal with the host, and then beat the crap out of it until it’s unable to maintain the connection, like poking a tick with a hot needle until it can’t hold on anymore.
You can probably tell where that premise leads. The first half of the game sees your group interact with old hotshots from various idol-related industries. You usually meet them because Tsubasa ends up working with them as part of her idol training. But, since she’s just starting out, she struggles to live up to their expectations. The old blood turns out to have been possessed by a Mirage, Tsubasa is forced to learn a lesson about their field of expertise in order to make them fight back against the Mirage, you kick said Mirage’s ass, and then Tsubasa gets a nice cutscene of her succeeding at whatever thing she was learning to do that chapter.
This section of the game is where the story is at its most interesting because each dungeon acts as a very definitive step in Tsubasa’s career as an idol. She’s effectively the main character for as long as this pattern repeats, and it works as a vehicle to tour various aspects of the job.
Unfortunately, this back-and-forth between her and the possessed experts doesn’t really say much. Their issues all boil down to, “Kids these days don’t understand the real soul of X.” Tsubasa improving before their eyes tells them, “Oh shit, here’s a kid that might understand X. She’s not amazing yet, but she’s obviously learning. Hey, ghost dude, fuck off! I’ve got work to do.” Like I said, it works as a showing of Tsubasa’s progress towards her goal of being a great idol, but in terms of greater themes like what Fire Emblem might explore, there’s not much.
Which is a shame, because it means that the few times that the possessed person does have a greater issue don’t get explored as deeply as they deserve to be. The very first chapter of the game after the tutorial has arguably the greatest showing of the main story’s missed potential.
So, background. When you start a new game, the first thing you see is an anime-style cutscene showing an event called the Mass Disappearance. It was a massive theatrical play where the entire cast and crowd suddenly vanished. As you might have guessed, Mirages did it, and this big vanishing trick effectively kicks off many of the main casts’ character arcs. The important thing to know for now is that the only seen survivor of the event was a very young Tsubasa. She was in the audience watching her sister, Ayaha, perform. Tsubasa decides to work as a Mirage Master later on because she realizes that the Mirages are connected to her sister’s disappearance, and she’s hellbent on finding out what happened, not to mention becoming an idol herself to live up to Ayaha’s legacy. Tsubasa’s sister means everything to her.
Surprise, surprise, the very next possessed person you meet is Ayaha! Reunion! Except, she’s acting strange. The Mirage is preventing her from recognizing Tsubasa. On top of that, Ayaha is completely devoid of expression. She’s basically her Mirage’s puppet. Every other possessed target has their obsessions cranked up to the max, creating a lovely helping of ham that screams about their motivations at every turn. But Ayaha is just… blank.
When you start pressuring the Mirage’s plans, as heroes are known to do, Ayaha has to be prodded into obeying by her Mirage reminding her of why she fell under control in the first place. Being an idol was a dream turned nightmare for the poor girl. The ceaseless work and demands of her superiors crushed her spirit. She only went through the motions, deadened on the inside. By falling under a Mirage’s control, she gave up her free will. Ayaha can’t be crushed under the Mirage’s wing. Just let it puppet her body, and she’s free. That’s the obsession being exploited: a dream of release.
Now that sounds familiar, right? It’s the same thing that Rise Kujikawa was written to comment on. The idol industry drains its talent dry, then throws it away. Creatives are broken at the titan’s feet. The Mirages are exploiting that fault, using it as a way to invade the minds of people with enough Performa to sustain a possession. Human vice is leading the world to destruction.
Tsubasa’s first big challenge is breaking through to her own sister. By stepping up and filling Ayaha’s shoes, by becoming an idol who inspires joy and hope in the people who listen to her song, she’s able to reach out and remind Ayaha of why she put up with the pressure. She inspires her sister the same way her sister inspired her so many years ago. It’s a beautiful conclusion to the journey’s first official step.
...And none of it is explored beyond this chapter. No, seriously. Ayaha becomes little more than a tertiary character working as an intern at your team’s company, Fortuna. Her only function in the plot is occasionally chiming in to support Tsubasa. Well, that and handing out a handful of side quests, none of which explore the toxic factors that drove her into the arms of literal monsters. This is where any and all critique of a very troublesome industry ends.
The lighter romp the game ends up being is perfectly fine, I will say again, but starting it off with a single chapter of what people expected the whole game to be was a terrible decision. It teased us with some classic Rise Kujikawa, only to yank her away at the last minute and replace her with a Saturday morning cartoon about the power of friendship.
This, I feel, is one of the major contributing factors in the game’s wider reception. It’s like how “Watchdogs” saw its initial reception tank because the reveal trailers used misleading footage. They opened with something that looked phenomenal, but when the final product ended up being simply okay, the gap between expectations and reality pushed opinions on the game into the dirt. That’s why I keep mentioning Rise. It’s what people were expecting. When they didn’t get it, they walked away, ignoring what TMS actually brought to the table.
As I said above, I largely agree with that thread of critique. “Tokyo Mirage Session’s” main plot is just a serviceable platform for a crossover title.
But then, there’s a qualifier in that statement. The “main plot” is serviceable. The “main plot” can be skipped. When someone says the “story” can be skipped, however, I start taking issue. There’s something in the story, in the writing, that is absolutely worth your time. The main plot is a serviceable platform. What’s built on top of it to make the story as a whole stand out?
The excellent cast of goofballs that fills out your party roster, that’s what.
The character writing in this game is full of fun, memorable people whose personal stories are worth the price of admission. I love every single playable character, and the single member of the secondary cast of Fortuna who I don’t like still has great character beats that are worth exploring. Most of them initially fall into familiar tropes that you probably recognize from a hundred other shows or games, especially Japanese shows and games, but they are then fleshed out in ways that play off of the initial tropes.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The main character, a plainly handsome dude with shaggy dark hair, has a childhood best friend. This little lady who grew up with the main character has a massive crush on him, but he’s too dense to notice even though she’s thirsty enough to drain the Amazon River. This allows the main character to unwittingly form a whole harem of new girls, which he is also oblivious of, much to the first girl’s annoyance. Even so, she’s unwavering in how nice she is to everyone, even the ones who threaten to take her crush from her while she remains unable to confess.
The childhood best friend in question is Tsubasa. She loves Itsuki, everyone sees it except Itsuki, and her romantic nervousness fuels many jokes. So far, so cliched. But, like I said, she breaks the initial mold in stellar fashion. No, she never does get her act together to confess, but her developing traits throw off the shackles of the childhood best friend in other ways. Specifically, she escapes the label by being more interesting than lukewarm dishwater.
The archetype’s function in most cases is to give the audience a “vanilla” option in a story with many prospective lovers. In mainstream Japanese culture, the bombastic heights that most fictional harem girls ascend to is seen as excessive. A lot of guys there don’t want girls who will chew them out for being friendly, or who might drag them into chaotic shenanigans at the drop of a hat. They want a normal, sweet girl who loves them and will always be there to support them. That’s it. Of course, this taste for girls who are so painfully modest as to be unable to confess can tread into sexist territory very easily, essentially saying that the perfect girl has no desire but to support the man in her life. Writing a girl whose only outstanding character trait is being in love with a guy is highly concerning, yeah?
TMS agrees. Which is why their childhood best friend might be the most madcap member of your entire troupe. For one quick example, an optional side story has her struggling with acting faux-seductive for a drink commercial. She needs to act like a little devil to tantalize the target audience into wanting that drink. How does she learn the ways of the devil? By finding a stray cat infamous for being capricious. Its name is literally “Little Devil.” She heard of this infamously touchy cat, and she thought to herself, “Now there’s a master tease!” And it works! She becomes the new mascot for that damn drink for the rest of the game, all from staring at a fancy, fierce feline for several hours in the middle of Shibuya. “Vanilla” can shove it. Tsubasa might as well be a Ben & Jerry’s original flavor.
They even manage to evolve the joke of her unspeakable love. A good recurring gag doesn’t simply repeat. It finds new angles that build on the initial structure. Tsubasa loves Itsuki but can’t say it. You also learn that she’s a massive fangirl for another idol, Kiria, who you happen to recruit early in the game. Kiria is cool, collected, but supportive of her new coworkers. You can bet every time she pays Tsubasa praise, the younger idol melts into total fannish squealing. It would be borderline gay panic if she didn’t obviously love Itsuki.
When she happens to overhear Kiria talking to Itsuki about a joint project, though, all of Tsubasa’s buttons get hit at once. That’s not fair! That’s totally not fair! Why not pick me? I deserve the chance, too! Why not… Wait. Which of you am I jealous of again?
She is so smitten by both of her close friends, she’s not sure which one to be jealous of when they spend time together. I take back a prior statement. This girl is the embodiment of bisexual panic, and I am here for it. She needs to be sandwiched between Itsuki and Kiria in a group hug, stat!
All of the funny stuff aside, there is one big running thread to her character that completely inverts a problematic element of the original trope. The childhood friend is meant to be an unconditional supporter for the audience insert character. She’s there to serve the audience. Here, though, Tsubasa has her own ambitions to be chasing. She wants to be an idol like her sister was. She wants to be a ray of hope like what she needed when she was young. She desperately desires things besides the main character.
And Itsuki is behind her, one hundred percent. Whenever she needs advice or a helping hand, he’s always there to give it. Itsuki isn’t too sure of his own abilities as an idol, but the moment his friends need help, he’s there, fighting at their side to support their dreams. She isn’t serving him. He’s supporting her, and not because he wants in her pants. We’ve established that he’s so dense you could use his skull as a hammer. He wants to support her because he’s a damn good friend, the exact kind of friend who you might realistically fall head over heels for.
See what I mean? These aren’t just quirks slapped on top of the trope to disguise that it’s the same thing you’ve already seen a million times. These are additions that fundamentally alter the structure of the archetype. It’s good character writing!
Here’s another one. Stop me if you’ve heard it before. Your group of good friends is going about your business, saving the world, when suddenly an emo stands in your way! He’s cool, suave, powerful, but he won’t tell you why he’s fighting against you. He’s mysterious like that. Eventually, though, you wear him down. He admits that your ‘friendship’ leads to power, more than he could gain on his own, so he joins your team as its last member. The rival becomes a mighty ally.
Sasuke Uchiha called, he wants his angst back. But he won’t be getting it, because Yashiro, the final party member of TMS, is more than just an endlessly angsty buzzkill.
For starters, he doesn’t grouse about being superior after he joins up with you. He’s still confident in his abilities, and rightly so, but he admits that he joined you specifically because he has a lot to learn from your friendship. He doesn’t push you away like any other bitter rival character. He respects you, and he’s not afraid to let you know it.
The game also explores the ramifications of Yashiro’s single-minded pursuit of idol talent in his side stories. As soon as you recruit him, one of them unlocks. You wonder, “This guy has been an elitist prick for the last three chapters. What kind of higher-than-thou drivel will he preach at me before getting slapped by humility?” Curious, you hunt him down, only to find him stuck on the office couch. He says he has run out of energy and needs you to fix it. Uh… what?
Digging further, he says he hasn’t “replenished his energy” in days, since he’s been so busy with his work. Itsuki surmises that he means he hasn’t eaten, which, understandably, shocks him. How could a guy not eat but continue to work for that long? It turns out, the task of acquiring food used to be carried out by his assistant, who his father hired before dying in the Mass Disappearance. Having someone deal with menial affairs left him free to focus on refining his talents. That’s why he’s immeasurably stronger than you early on; the guy has done nothing except practice since the day he learned to walk.
When he joined your company, however, his assistant complained about the shift, so Yashiro chose to fire him instead of giving up his new position. This left him without the person who has “replenished his energy” for him throughout his entire life. He needs your help to learn how to get food for himself.
Let me repeat that. The rival character, who had been besting you at every turn up until now, literally does not know how to feed himself. You need to teach him how restaurants work. (I hereby declare him, Edgy Yusuke.) To his credit, he hears every word of advice readily, and when he starts taking food a bit more seriously, he realizes that there’s a lot of inspiration to be found in the culinary arts. He takes an acting job on a children’s cooking show to explore that angle further, donning a silly purple apron and puffy hat for little kids everywhere. You can then make him wear that outfit into battle, and it’s the best thing ever.
They turned Yashiro into a hilarious instance of the stoic while also exploring the consequences of the single-minded ambition that’s found in every rival character out there. It’s admirable character work. To any aspiring writers out there, one of the best ways to practice writing your own characters is to take a common trope and twist it the same way this game does. Find something hiding between the lines of implication like with Yashiro, or invert the meta-narrative function of the trope like with Tsubasa. It’s a great writing exercise, and you might happen into a new type of character that you can get a lot of mileage out of in your more serious outings.
They even manage to squeeze some blood out of the stone that is the player insert character. Itsuki Aoi is a rather plain young man, as is the standard. His design is handsome in a middling sort of way as to let most men project onto him easily, and everyone around him speaks highly of his leadership skills even though he deflects compliments back onto the talents of the friends he’s helped, walking the line between modesty in the meta-narrative and anxiety in the surface-level story. This is about as bog-standard as it gets for self-insert power fantasies.
However, he shows enough quirks that are uniquely his own to stave off the derisive label of “Protagonist-kun.” As stated earlier, he focuses his energy into making everyone around him shine. He wants Tsubasa to be the star she’s always dreamed of being. He wants Yashiro to be a functional human being who won’t starve to death out of sheer ignorance. All Itsuki wants is for his friends to be happy, and that’s enough to make him happy. It reflects how showmanship isn’t usually a one-man affair. A good show springs from many people pouring their all into a performance. Itsuki taking all the glory for himself, as the very worst self-inserts do, would not function in this setting, so he works to be the glue that holds all these other amazing people together.
On top of the structural shift, he shows enough charm that you’ll be happy to live in his head for the duration of the adventure. He’s a solid straight man to his more eccentric friends’ more bizarre qualities. Is the drunk boss lady tease-flirting with him again? “I must decline.” Boom, dead in the water. Is your coach being a big baby again? Pacify the little shit so his (actually really good) training can continue. Your best dude friend needs help learning to flirt for an acting gig? Well, you don’t know much about that, but proceeds to effortlessly charm everyone you come across while being totally unaware of doing so. This freaking goofball is a delight.
I have to say my favorite running quirk of Itsuki’s is just how passionate he is about food. In order to heal yourself up between dungeon runs, you need to eat at cafes, restaurants, and vending machines, each of which has a menu of at least three different items. Each item you eat gets a lovely description from Itsuki, where he espouses the value of cloud-like cake and rich frosting as it carries him to the seventh cloud of heaven. There are also some menu options you unlock in side quests that are meant to be terrible, trend-chasing monstrosities, and the way he describes them makes you think an elder god is rising from the depths to obliterate humanity. You say you’re not good at anything, Itsuki? Give this dumb kid a role on that cooking show! I’d watch the shit out of him reviewing stuff on the Food Network.
He’s still ultimately meant to be the camera through which we experience the world, but he’s among the more charming cameras I’ve operated in a long while. One of his unlockable costumes in the Switch port of the game is Joker’s Thief suit from “Persona 5,” and I’d say he earned the right to that sick longcoat.
I could go on about every other member of the main ensemble, but you get the point by now. All of them play their surface archetypes in interesting, fun ways. When they pull off a sweet flourish in the middle of combat, it’s always thrilling because that’s not just some dude who also wants your common enemy to suck it. That’s Yashiro, the doofus who couldn’t feed himself. Or it’s Touma, showing off the shiny Power Rangers-themed outfit you earned through his side stories. “Tokyo Mirage Sessions” excels at writing party members who you’ll always cheer for, even after their time in the limelight is overshadowed by the main plot.
Could the cast be better? Certainly. While they’re plenty strong in and of themselves, the fact that the main story they’re in is simply alright holds them back. A great story weaves together character beats into a long, winding tapestry, but TMS has to put its main plot on hold so you can explore its characters in optional side quests. Even so, those side quests manage to be an enjoyable motivator that keeps you playing the game. Nailing your cast can forgive many blunders elsewhere.
And yet, for the four pages of praise I just battered you over the head with, the greater consensus remains stuck on the main plot alone. “Play the game, skip the story.” Do people remember Tsubasa’s long road towards ascending stardom, or the quirky way she dismantles the childhood best friend trope? Nope. “Skip the story.” Does anyone talk about how much fun the flip of Yashiro’s character is after he joins your side and you get a look at the utter lack of personal skills hiding under his talent? Nope. “Skip the story.” Does anyone remember a single lovable quip from the food-loving Itsuki? Nope. “Skip the story.”
Common parlance has a way of sanding down the nuance of a topic. This applies to more than just media, for the record, but we’ll stick with media for the sake of not doubling my word count. Reviewers may feel pressured to summarize their opinions on a game down to a few easily remembered bullet points for the sake of reaching a wider, impatient audience. The reliance on numeric review scores is a symbol of that simplification. Even when reviewers do go into detail, though, those extras are lost over time in a game of net-wide telephone. So, they focus down on what people want to know.
People wanted to know if the game’s story lives up to Shin Megami Tensei or Fire Emblem.
It does not.
Reviewers say it does not.
That’s what people remember.
I urge you to not become part of the obscuring chain. There’s not much that writers can do on this front, but for anyone out there who loves talking about what they watch or play, take some time to go into detail on it. Did some special effects work better than others? Point it out. Are some sets more interesting than others? Discuss it. And, for the love of Shakespeare, do not boil down an entire story’s worth of writing into a three word blurb. Plot, characters, flow, themes, fun set pieces, these are all things that fall under the umbrella of a work’s writing, and they all play a part in how good the overall package is. Don’t let a golden cog go unrecognized because one of the gears next to it squeaks a little.
There are a lot of other generalizations in critique I could point out and analyze here, but I’ll save it for another time. I’ll need a few more good examples to call on before I tear the phrase “Mary Sue” to bloody shreds for your enjoyment and education. You know, unless you want me to just restate a much more venerable critic’s views on the term.
If you need a hot take on it right now because it’s a snag in your work that you’re troubled by, hit me up in the comments. I’m more than happy to give advice on a person-by-person basis if you think I’ve got it. Who knows? Maybe your question will get me to look into a particular topic deep enough to inspire a whole chapter of the Writing Desk. Storytelling is a social activity at the end of the day. The buck doesn’t stop at me. Take it and run wild to your heart’s content.
But for now, I think I already have my next talking point in mind. What might it be, you ask? You’ll just have to rattle your Skulls on that Mystery.