2D

Fez on the surface is not an easy game to attach a genre label on. Gomez, the main character, can JUMP, but there's not much do it. The stubby height and distance are mainly used for the most basic traversal. As far as platforming gameplay goes, you won't be maneuvering in your hang time, catching big air, or working out precisely where you want to land. If you try to engage with the dynamic of gravity, you'll be abruptly stopped. After a second of free fall, Gomez typically reaches "terminal" velocity and dies resetting players back to their position before the fall. 

Players can ROTATE the view 90 degrees to bend space and engage in a physical way with the ambiguity of a 3D space in a 2D presentation. This core mechanic of Fez takes what would be bad3D and turns it into mind bending interactivity in an Echochrome like fashion. While ROTATE is unique, few challenges use it to create deep puzzles; puzzles that can be thoroughly read according to their dynamics and interactions. A few of the better ROTATE puzzles are the bomb puzzles and some of the tower puzzles. With a truncated JUMP, limited vertical traversal, and the ability to ROTATE in two directions, there's not a lot of design space for most of Fez's challenges to work with. Most solutions are just one or two rotations away. 

Yellow cube pieces are scattered throughout the environments. Many pieces are placed out in the open like Super Mario coins. Many are stashed behind doors. But for the most part, you navigate the environments in a very simple and straightforward way to get to these cubes. There's really almost nothing to it. The experience is so basic that it reminds me of the indie game Small Worlds.

Small Worlds succeeds with its short length, minimal complexity, and the ever widening 2D view that elegantly frames the player's progress. Fez stumbles over the complexity of its own world. The map and warp features are surprisingly complex. The map is an abstract representation of the abstract "open world" to begin with. And viewing it in 3D is particularly cumbersome. The warping system isn't useful enough to curb the significant backtracking across the areas that offer little unique and engaging interactivity. Such is the result of a world designed to be more open than it is focused, functional, or interesting. It's great to pick a direction and explore, but not when it comes at the cost of backtracking, getting lost, dead ends, and cold trails.

Fez presents a world to explore, but there's just not much to do along the linear journey until, like Gomez at the start of his adventure, you're eyes are opened to another dimension of Fez.

3D

The next dimension to Fez is a world rich in mystery, secrets, details, ideas, puzzles, and riddles. I make a very clear distinction between a puzzle and a riddle. A puzzle challenges a player's knowledge skills most of all. Solutions, which are typically few in number, can be derived (logically) from making a series of informed decisions. This means that puzzles typically present the player with all the rules up front so that the challenge comes from the dynamic interactivity of the system. By stressing knowledge skills puzzles can easily be spoiled, meaning once one learns the solution, it can be difficult to impossible for a player to experience the problem solving process ever again.

Riddles, in particular, are a type of puzzle that challenge players to think outside the box and come up with solutions that leap intuition gaps. Riddles are often the result of poorly designed puzzles. After all, providing insufficient information ultimately means there is some critical piece of information left out that the player needs to find a solution. It's easy for any designer to delete pieces, scatter parts, and otherwise obfuscate the data. Conveying meaning through art of any kind mostly involves presenting consistent and coherent ideas. This is why riddles and their obtuseness are often viewed negatively. It's as if the designer is working against the player. Read more about puzzle and riddle design here. 

The third dimension of Fez mostly centers around discovering and solving riddles. These challenges are really like a whole other game. Aside from the 32 yellow cubes there are 32 anti-cubes to collect. To crack these riddles players must embrace codes, languages, messages, clues, and possibilities that exist outside of the "box" that the yellow cubes represent. I don't think it's wrong to say that the quest for the anti-cubes is what Fez is really about. If so, we've identified a clear design problem.

To make and uphold a puzzle solving experience a designer can't simply tell the player the answers to the challenges. But a designer can and should tell the player the rules so they can make informed decisions. Likewise, to make a riddle sufficiently obscure (in order to support a creative, out of the box type experience), a designer can't tell the player the answer or even all the rules at play. To achieve a level of secrecy, that sense of discovery, or that eye opening moment as you move from one dimension of thinking into a new world of possibilities, a designer has to obfuscate, or hide the clues. Nearly everything about the anti-cubes is hidden. Understanding how these design choices shape Fez is key.

The anti-puzzles of Fez are well hidden, but they're not impossible to find. I stumbled across this extra dimension of mystery by looking over the achievement list and noticing one that didn't fit the pattern: "RTRTLTRTRTLTLTLT" So I unpaused the game and inputted the sequence of seemingly random ROTATE moves. And so my eyes were opened. Before playing Fez I had intentionally avoided all spoilers and information about the game. Yet, when I stumbled onto the riddle filled dimension of mystery, somehow I knew it was there all along.

The point I'm trying to make is, it's obvious, at least in hindsight, why I knew there was more to Fez than just collecting yellow cubes. First, there's almost nothing to the challenges to collect yellow cubes. It's slow. It's not very challenging. Not very layered or complex. And there's not a lot of gameplay variation. I felt that there had to be more to Fez. Then there's the map. Areas with secrets yet to be discovered are clearly marked on the map. Yet, after scouring these areas I came up empty handed. There had to be a way. From the beginning I noticed the languages and symbols plastered into the background scenery of the world. I assumed the language could be learned. Before finding my first anti-cube I knew I was missing something. Move Left. Move Right. JUMP. ROTATE left. ROTATE right. And the occasional LIFT bomb. I thought, if this is all there is to the mechanics of Fez there had to either be new mechanics to acquire or.... Eureka. 

From here Fez is a flurry of notes, scribbles, jotted ideas, and hunches built out of QXR, binary, ASCII, stereo rubble, Tetris, block language, cryptic phrases, pangram, poetry, hexahedron madness. This is what I was looking for from my Fez experience. In general, engaging with all types of experience has a way of transforming one's mind. But the way puzzles in particular shape the mind is worth noting. While playing Fez I thought about codes and shapes and possibilities. And when Fez was turned off my mind continued to churn in the background. I can't tell you the last time a game has had this kind of effect on me.

Wait. I can tell you the last time a game has had this kind of effect on me because it happens all the time. I have a similar kind of discovery, explorative, info dive by engaging video game stories and gameplay most of all. I've connected the subtle story details and world of Phantom Hourglass. I've dived head first into the details of Pokemon. In fact, I've taken more notes on Kid Icarus Uprising than I have on Fez. I take notes on all games to reveal their inner worlds, languages, and minds of their creators because these qualities are hard to separate from the art.

Fez isn't unique or innovative because it can be engaged on this extra dimension. Fez is unique because this dimension makes something else very apparent. And so we've come to the final dimension of Fez.

4D

It's Phil Fish. I really mean it. Fish has put so much of himself and his ideas into Fez that it's pretty obvious that by playing Fez we drop in deep over our heads into his world. Everything from the color pallets to the Tetris motif to the grand treasure hunt for cubes is straight out of Fish's mind. Yes, I believe I can see Fish clearly through his work, and this is what I've concluded. 

image of Phil Fish from Indie Game: The Movie.

For a video game and gameplay, Fez is very poorly designed. In fact, Fez is my most disappointing gaming experience of the year. The game is designed in a very even toned, take what you want, wander where you will, find as much as you can way. This is to say that Fez doesn't have a strong overall progression like the games it appears to be. What I call the flat, 2D experience of Fez lacks challenge, depth, progression, and appropriate feedback/tutorials. Whether you think the yellow cubes or the anti-cubes are the core of Fez, both experiences are designed to be games; they aren't designed to convey meaning through the gameplay of informed decisions. No matter where you fall in the spectrum of where the best of Fez is, you're forced to play through a rough abstraction of an abstraction.

I recently cautioned against making games, which are abstractions, out of vague, high concecpt, or abstract sources. In Fish's case, instead of fully understanding the idea he wanted for Fez and how to design the idea into a video game medium, Fish took five years or so to discover what Fez is. In my experience, deisgners who have to discover what their games are over a long period of time either don't have a good gameplay idea to start from or they simply don't understand how to think in game design terms. I believe this is the case with Fez and Fish.

Fish is the one, after all, who said that "[Modern Japanese] games just suck." It's clear to me that Fish can learn volumes about game design from Japanese games new and old. I know I have. This blog is dedicated to explicating the undenyable excellent game design of Super Mario Brothers for the NES; a game that holds up against just about every kind of design analysis I've come up with over the last 4 years. If Fish would like to study a modern example of perfect Japanese puzzle/adventure games Fish could study Pushmo or 999. 

It seems to me that by rejecting "Japanese game design" Fish rejected "good game design" as well. Fez has platforming elements, but doesn't develop solid platforming gameplay challenges. Fez builds a verticality to its levels, yet the "terminal velocity" reduces the dynamic emergence of gravity in 2D space. In Fez there's lots of places to go but traversal isn't very interesting and far from the core Fez experience if you believe that the anti-cubes are the real point of Fez. Fez has some of the design pieces of an adventure game, but none of the progression and structure that makes adventure games shine. Fez has the elements to create many deep puzzles around space and perspective, yet it focuses far more on traversal and riddles than puzzling. 

In the end, Fez isn't designed to be a game (according to conventions). Rather, Fez is designed to be an experience. But even when I think of Fez as an experience with no "gamey" expectations, it still falls short. Fez is a collection of individual ideas and disjointed pieces. And like many amateur artists, Fish rejected foundational design principles in favor of what I imagine he felt was innovative or effective. By abstracting away from the abstraction of game design conventions, Fish created an experience that awkwardly strattles the line between game and non-game.

If you think that the dull "2D" elements of Fez work to create a contrast between the "3D" Fez experience, I'd say you're right. But this still doesn't excuse the many ways the dull 2D experience detracts from the whole. It's a classic "rookie" move to take the form the conventions of works within the medium and use them only as a subversion. It's a design mistake to put in so many elements into a work that are barely used or that are used in a way that works against the core. The biggest way the design of 2D Fez works against itself is by seeking to create an mysterious experience filled with exploration and riddles, Fish failed to leverage the power of abstraction.  

Fish invited us into a world that is his world, filled with all the details he likes. When you play Fez, you dont pretend to translate messages from one language to another. You actually do it. In many ways, Fez is filled with these actual, "non-abstracted" experience. While this is a neat idea, it makes it very difficult to relate to. I'm not Fish. And I assume that you aren't either. What we need to best enjoy the world of Fish is some help; some guidance; some simplficiations; some abstraction. The reason that craft, design, and art works well is because artists find ways to simplify their expression in ways that allow their ideas and experiences to be conveyed through a medium. This is part of the work that the artist must do to spare their audience from working through the same kind of problems he/she did to come up with the ideas in the first place. 

Fish reminds me of myself in some ways, especially when I think back on the way I used to write fiction. I was so obsessed with conveying these complex stories and high level ideas that I was missing the part of craft and design that makes conveying these things work best. I was so focused on being original and doing things "in my own style" that I didn't realize I was limiting myself.

It's too bad I don't like Fez that much. Its content is better than its execution. I love pixel art. I love flat shapes and simple geometric shapes. I love playing with 2D and 3D perspective. I love platformers. I love puzzle games. I love mysteries. I love codes. I love languages. And I love riddles. You would think Fez would be one of my favorite games. But ultimately, I love and defend gameplay; and I love design where designers use their expertise to craft a gameplay experience I can enjoy, understand, and ultimately learn from. Parts of Fez are great. What's great about the game is creative ideas and a strong sense of Fish. What's not so great is the gameplay part, which is the hardest part about making a game. To reject the rules is easy. To squeeze yourself as an artist and find the ways you can express yourself through the limitations of the medium is design. 

One Method. Subtraction and Addition 

"To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author" Paul Goodman (1911–1972), U.S. author, poet, critic.

Though the above quote talks about translating literary works from one language to another, the message applies to our examination of abstraction in game design very directly. Call it rhythm, nuance, soul, or whatever you like; there is obviously something about the process of properly making an abstraction (simplified representation) of an abstraction that cannot be achieved mechanically through part by part imitation. At least, this is the case with complex art that conveys complex ideas. 

We know that ideas of a certain level of complexity require those complexities to be expressed. Another way of saying this is that with too few complexities, with too few bits, when zoomed in too close to the subject, one cannot derive the higher level, complex meaning. This fact supports the idea expressed in the above quote. By metaphorically sticking one's nose to the subject and converting the smaller complexities one by one, you're bound to miss the higher level ideas that influenced the design of the lower level complexities in the original work. Put even more simply, if you're zoomed in too close, you're bound to miss the bigger picture. 

The quote also expresses how unusual the process of abstracting abstraction is. Abstractions are already a odd, incomplete picture. What I mean by this is that an abstraction represents something else, though not entirely. The differences, large or small, between the original and the copy are matters of the artist's creative choices. So when we seek to translate or abstract from another's creative result, we step into a odd complex situation; not complex in the sense of being confusing or having many bits, but complex in the sense that certain bits are missing in a very consistent, and intentional way. It's like coming home and every other object in your house is rotated 30 degrees. It's not that you're unfamiliar with your home, but the slight change made to some of the objects is a sign of something intentional and deliberate.  

When Paul Goodman says "to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author" he means to properly translate we have to simplify our own style, our own expectations, and our own tendencies before we can make the appropriate creative adjustments to the source material. Does Goodman's description remind you of the process of enduring the squeeze, the book, and the novelty? It should. As I've theorized, this process is an inherent part of learning complex systems in pursuit of a goal. By reducing yourself first, you avoid the problem of trying to fit the subject into your preconceived expectations. You prevent yourself from falling for the fallacy of reverse engineering the abstractions because you take the first step to quiet yourself and listen. And it's after listening to source abstraction that one is in the best position to make the kind of creative choices that I described at the end of the part 2. For deciding what to abstract, how much, and why are certainly creative and artistic choices. 

When my English professors first told me that translators of creative writing were more talented than the original writers, I didn't believe them. Now, I've reversed my position. After thinking about translation over the years, studying various works, and writing this blog up to this point I completely understand why translation is so difficult. Abstracting off of abstractions is not just difficult for game designers. Being able to carry over programming code or other gaming assets doesn't help the problem. As long as you're making art, as long as there are abstractions and creative decisions in the source material, abstracting off of abstractions will always be more difficult. 

Iwata Asks. Sakurai Tells

The following are excerpts taken from the Iwata Asks interviews with Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Super Smash Brothers, the character Kirby, Kid Icarus Uprising, the updated version of Pit, and many other games I'm quite a fan of. Sakurai is one of my favorite game designers and is known as a genius among his fellow and former co-workers. He's also very good at explaining his process. 

In the following excepts, Sakurai talks about his style and approach to game design. Notice how his method lines up with everything we've covered about abstractions, abstractions of abstractions, and core ideas. 

Sakurai: It isn't twists and changes so much as disassembly and reassembly.

Iwata: Disassembly and reassembly? In other words, you break down the elements of conventional games and then reconstruct them your own way.

Sakurai: That's right. For example, there are all kinds of game genres, like fighting games and puzzle games, and each one has its own "fun core." First, I try taking away everything unnecessary around that core.

Iwata: That's disassembly.

Sakurai: Yes. Then, it's like I place the fun core somewhere else and build around it again.

Iwata: And that's reassembly.

Sakurai: I've told you about how we originally made Super Smash Bros. as an antithesis to 2D fighting games, haven't I?

Iwata: Fighting games had developed in a way that the person who can pull off combos the best gets stronger and stronger.

Sakurai: But I do like the organic, ad lib nature that happens distinctively in fighting games, rather than learning specific ways to get stronger... so instead of asking players to pull off specific combos that require instant elaborate manipulation, I wondered how I could bring out an element of ad lib.

Percentage health, dynamic knock back, dynamic hit stun, and directional influence are all features that stem from Sakurai's desire to give the fighting combat of Smash Brothers a greater focus of "ad lib." After Sakruai identified the core of the fight game experience and shifted its focus, he then had to add many different design elements to strengthen the new design.  He had a similar approach when he created Meteos and Kirby Air Ride. 

Kirby Air Ride is a unique racing game for all the reasons Sakurai described. The interesting part about its creation is that the unique design decisions were the result of supporting the core gameplay when it was reduced to its more simple form. I like how Sakurai acknowledge his method of disassembly and reassembly while also pointing out that Miyamoto is the kind of designer that does the opposite. I want to stress again that there's no wrong way to design a video game. Whether you start with the high level ideas, story elements, gameplay, mechanics modes, features, the core fun, or with an abstraction of another game, you can end up with an innovative, unique, and quality final product. The point I want to drive home is that the way you go about designing a game can expose you to design challenges that other methods may naturally avoid. Abstracting off of abstraction from the start may be the hardest way to go.

To close I want to highlight a game that's similar to Kirby Air Ride in that it's an abstract racing game.

DYAD

"Dyad is a warpspeed abstract racing game" ~Shawn McGrawth

Dyad is created by Shawn McGrath, a friend of mine and a fan of Critical-Gaming. You may recall that I mentioned Shawn in my GDC 2012 Reflection article. To close this article I wanted to quote a few more statements from Shawn that resonate with everything we've discussed.  

"Rather than having the traditional mechanics of break and accelerate, you must navigate an infinite tube by interacting with enemies for speed. This creates an interesting dynamic where your only obstacles are also your only source of speed [risk reward]."

Shawns description sounds like he went through a similar process Sakurai went through to reduce his expectations, find the core, and build up the racing gameplay around a shifted core. Both Kirby Air Ride and Dyad are abstractions of the racing genres in that they create a lot of the same experiences and gameplay challenges of racing games, but they go about reaching these goals in unique ways. By cutting out the unnecessary features these designers were able to get to the creative core of what they liked most about racing gameplay. In Shawn's case, he was able to take his core racing gamelay and run with it shaping Dyad into a game that is "a cognitive experiment presented through gameplay [that] will take you to a new world with unique physical rules, and take your mind to a new level of consciousness." In other words, Shawn clearly added a lot of his own style to shape Dyad into a game unlike any other that I've played. Expect more on Dyad in the near future.

I had originally planned a part 4 of this series, but I believe everything has been said. I will write about this topic as I write more specifically about individual games. 

The Imitative Fallacy

"The summer before last I went to Salt Lake City for the Writers at Work conference. In workshop with Steve Almond, I was introduced to the term "imitative fallacy." Until then, I'd always called the concept, "A boring story about a boring man." It was a Dangerous Writing caution: you must avoid falling into the trap of adopting the narrative tools of your narrator when telling a story—unless your narrator is a gifted story teller. It's up to the writer to craft a compelling story, even if your main character is an idiot. Or, in the case of The Secret to Love's Fifi, an emotionally disconnected scientist." ~Suzy Vitello

Restated, the limitative fallacy is creating a similar emotive or functional experience that the narrator, characters, or events in the fiction experiences. Put another way, it's when the artifice, the artificial construction that is the story framework, is created to imitate the form it contains. E.g. writing a story about a bored character in a boring manner thinking a bored reader will relate to the boredom of the characters/situation. Yes, the reader will relate to the boredom, and then stop reading altogether. 

The problem with the imitative fallacy in fiction writing is that it throws away the benefits of the abstraction that is the craft of fiction (storytelling). A story is merely a series of coherent events told through time. This means a storyteller does not need to describe every detail, even event, or every moment to convey a meaningful, coherent story. In fact, giving all the details would surely detract from the audience's focus on the core. To focus on the core, writers make cuts, edits, and bend every element of the writing (including time and space) so that the core is laid out one scene at a time with all the most important themes, characters, and events. The bottom line is, the craft of fiction involves conveying stories not recreating a kind of reality so the reader can "live" in the events and then hopefully sort through all the most coherent, core details. Just like with the diagrams I explained here, the design and the craft of fiction involves walking with your audience to the core and then letting them explore the meaning beyond on their own. 

Using abstractions (simplifications by cutting complexities from elements) in fiction is the primary way writers can guide the audience to the important details. The goal is to present ideas or an experience the audience understands. The audience understands these things by relating to the coherent elements. For the most part, the audience doesn't want to be bored when reading about a character who is bored. The audience doesn't want to be forced to solve a riddle to understand how a character feels solving a riddle. Just like when we look back on our own lives, most stories work better when the fictional frame (or the looking back) is somewhat removed from the events. This is called narrative distance. This is why the 3rd person perspective is used more than the 1st and 2nd person in fiction.

With most stories, we want to use the benefit of our removed yet observant perspective to better understand and relate to fictional events. When put this way, it's as if the magic of abstraction depends on this "relatability." It's as if we want some parts of the story to be rich in details and almost real in their presentation. And we need other parts of the story to be cut or summarize. I find this dual relationship between reality and realtability oddly similar to the half-real experience that is playing a video game. With this said, we must transition into a discussion on how the same kind of failure to understand the power of abstraction in the craft of fiction manifests in game design.

image by David Creighton-Pester

The Curious Fission 

The video game design with all of its story, interactive, and gameplay elements is more complicated than fiction writing. Remember that "gameplay" is a very specific and important topic that I took great care to explain in detail. While fiction writing typically works best when it focuses on presenting scenes that the reader can relate to and understand from a removed perspective, video games benefit from such a design and more. Yes, video games present events for players to relate understand from a distance. There's a wide range of story and in-game events that the player is meant to observe and understand without much interactivity. However, there are typically more events that the player controls directly in a video game. And this is where the core fission of video game design and craft that stems from the medium's half-reality comes into proper focus. 

Video games are split between two halves of a half-real divide. On the one side passive storytelling (the craft of fiction) works best when abstractions are fully embraced. On the other side gameplay is not an abstraction. Gameplay is real. The requirement of player actions is real. The gameovers are real. The victories are real, earned, and typically skill based. Because real skills are developed inside players, there's no way for the game to abstract what exists outside of the game system itself. With this said, you can begin to see the curious balancing act that game designers have to walk. You can see how it can be extremely incongruous and jarring when designers try to abstract the real (which they can't) or present as real the experiences of what should be abstracted (the fictional elements).

On the real side is a continuous experience of the player as their real skills grow and develop in their minds. On the fictional side is all the virtual events, characters, and game worlds. It may seem easy to separate these two halves initially. But the design of video games often attempts to blend both halves, which complicates things greatly.  Many gamers strongly believe that video games work best when the story and the gameplay are one in the same. I'm want to push back on this idea. I think it's great that some games have cutscenes, some games have interactive story moments, and other games try to convey it all through gameplay. I think it's great that some games have rigid narratives that are not changed by player actions, and I think it's great that other games have dynamic narratives. I feel that embracing the diversity and range of game-narrative design is important here. But ultimately, if a game tries to fully unite the story telling and the gameplay experiences, the designers will face irreconcilable differences in abstraction and conveyance in what I call the curious fission.  

To become master game designers we have to understand this fission. It's more complex than just gameplay. And it's more compelx than just story. It's a territory that's so new and difficult to manage, that it's no wonder so many designers struggle in this area. It's no wonder that designers not only have a hard time integrating story and gameplay elements, but players and critics alike have a hard time understanding the results. Put another way, the designers aren't the only ones who have to understand this curious fission; this half-reality that video games present. To get the most out of our video game experiences we have to understand the curious fission too. 

I already have an article I plan to write investigating this curious fission more closely. Look forward to my article on metaphors. For now I want to focus on an example of a game that I think missed the mark. 

Reverse Engineered Imitative Fallacy

Some gamers have a negative association with streamlining in games. To streamline is to make something more efficient or simple. By this definition streamlining is largely interchangeable with abstraction. The main difference I want to focus on is that when we streamline a process in game design, we typically do so with a clear, measurable, objective function in mind. Many gamers detest when developers announce that they've streamlined features and systems in the games they love because these gamers view streamlining as "dumbing things down." While it's true that streamlining, like abstraction, typically involves cutting of complexity, this isn't always the case with streamlining. Sometimes streamlining involves adding a feature that automates a repetitive task. For example, organizational tools like sorting and folders are features that help players streamline their inventory management processes. 

The purpose of streamlining is to make part of a game more efficient or simple, which then allows players to put more energy and focus onto other parts of the experience. The reason I brought up streamlining is because, like abstraction, knowing what to simplify is key. As I just discussed, the curious fission between gameplay and story elements in a game presents very unique design problems for developers. And the following is a fallacy that I often see developers make when attempting to streamline or abstract video game features that are already abstract. 

Let's look at Xenoblade, one of the most disappointing games I played in 2011. I'll say up front that the following analysis doesn't depend on any level of authorial intent. For our purposes we don't need to know the exact motivations or methods of the developers to determine if a feature is streamlined. Rather, we'll simply look at the the game's features and how they align with the craft of fiction and the art of game design to determine if and how the feature is streamlined.

Xenoblade has many features that I consider to be streamlined when compared to similar features in other JRPGs. The problem I see with these features is that they seem to be streamlined to make the raw-mechanical effort of playing a video game more efficient instead of being streamlined to promote and focus on the fantasy-adventure experience. What I mean by this is that the features seem to make it easy for players to simply play the game instead of experience the adventure set in the fantasy world.

The following are a few of the most obvious streamlined features.

• The quest system allows players to take on as many quests as players want simultaneously. There's no limit and no penalty for taking on more than you can handle or taking as long as you want to complete the quests (that I know of). Players can stack up the quests, and get the rewards for completing them in the field the moment they're completed. 
• Loot and items are scattered all across the overworld. Each object is marked as a blue glowing orb. Simply walk into it and it's yours. The loot is commonly found on the ground everywhere.  
• Xenoblade features day and night cycles that run on an in-game timer. As you play, time passes at a much faster rate compared to real life. At any time outside of battle players can change the time of day to any time. 
• At any time outside of battle, players can teleport or fast travel back to any major location that has already been visited. 
• Outside of battle, all players are automatically healed to full HP at the cost of nothing. 
• At any time outside of battle, players can save and load their game for near complete save freedom. 

The root of making abstractions and streamlining design involves deciding what to cut. And in Xenoblade's case, I believe the designers looked at the JRPG genre and streamlined the above elements to make the experience more focused on going through the "JRPG motions." I call this design method a reverse engineered immatative fallacy. The idea is there are some facets of video games that are best abstracted, and there are some that are best experienced. The reverse engineering part is when a designer looks at a video game abstraction and seeks to abstract off of it. But instead respecting or preserving the aspect of the design must be experienced, the developer abstracts. This reverse engineering attitude is usually expressed with thoughts like "why do we need to have this feature? Why do we need to make the player do this?" If you ignore the journey and devalue the experience working up towards something, then it makes sense to start off a Metroid or a Zelda games giving players "all the powers/items at the beginning." This kind of thought process inaccurately looks at what these elements are (gameplay elements), how they're revealed (gradually and with tutorials), and that the gameplay experience of these elements cannot be abstracted (because they're skilled based). 

Remember when I said above that there are some aspects of playing games that cannot be abstracted because they're real? Well, the reverse engineered limitative fallacy is when a developer tries anyway. It's the opposite problem that many fiction writers face. Instead of erring by trying to make the reader actually experience what the characters are, game designers err by trying to take away the real experiences through abstractions. And the result typically misses some core yet important quality. So for Xenoblade, it's as if the developers didn't value the core adventure experience JRPGs typically support with their abstractions. Instead they decided to cut the parts that make playing JPRG adventure rich in a very real way. 

You can examine any one of the features above and find the merits of its design. For example you can argue that it's convenient to take on as many quests as you can find. You can say that that such a feature prevents the acquisition of quests from burdening the player. While these things are true, the cuts that were made to create this streamlined feature is important to consider. Yes, the new version may be more efficient, but what did we lose in the process? As I explained in part 1, if we cut the important complexities from what we abstract, we could do a lot of damage very quickly. 

I see the adventuring aspect of the typical JRPG as a quest involving travel to different places, talking to different people, and fighting against various obstacles. I see the typical side quest as an optional side event on one's adventure that has the potential to add a unique experience to the grand adventure. You never know what people may ask of you or what you may be required to take on. But with Xenoblade's quest design, the quests are numerous, very similar to each other, and hardly take one far from the normal gameplay experience. What we're left with is a very functional questing system that has lost how it defines and shapes the abstraction that is the adventure. 

It's the same with the other features. The loot literally litters the ground of Xenoblade's fictional world. Picture if Mario's coins didn't force players to JUMP for them (the primary mechanic and core gameplay action of Super Mario Bros.). Picture if nearly every coin was just lined up along the ground for you to simply walk into to collect. That's how the loot of Xenoblade is designed. Loot is so easy to collect it's almost inconsequential; it hardly functions as a reward. Instead of being an abstraction that, in its simplicity, defines and shapes the adventure, the loot feel and functions like an excessive amount of carrots meant to string players along. 

To my knoweldge, the day and night have such a small effect on the gameplay challenges in Xenoblade I'm surprised the developers let players manipulate it so abstractly. Sure, it's convenient. But the player control over the feature makes it function less like day and night time. Instead, this abstraction on the abstract of accelerated game-time makes the feature function and feel like just another mechanical system to manipulate. It's the same for the fast travel. There's no fictional explanation for how the characters warp from place to place. Providing such a fictional and functional explanation is very important for games like Zelda and Pokemon. But since Xenoblade streamlines such a feature, we're left with a purely mechanical system reverse engineered and streamlined for efficiency instead of for adventure. 

Ultimately the designers of Xenoblade had to make what I consider to be a very artistic choice. They had the choice of embracing the purpose of common JPRG design by designing features to support the adventure experience. Yet they chose to embrace the functional, mechanical process of playing an RPG as the driving design goal for many of Xenoblade's streamlined features. What we're left with is a lot of complexity, a lot of abstraction, and a strained sense of adventure at best. Like Knights in the Nightmare, another terribly cluttered, complex, and abstract game, Xenoblade's design focus and therefore core meaning is something that isn't easy to relate to. It's as if players have to be well versed in the abstractions these games were abstracted from just to appreciate their design. It's too bad that even with such experience, these games aren't clean enough to let their design shine through anyway. 

In part 3 we'll look at more games and we'll even consider words from the developers themselves.