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Code of Princess versus Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward

Here are two games in completely different genres which I’ve been playing on the Nintendo 3DS. Why review them together? What's the connection? It's not just their muddled, unfortunate titles – although I do feel there should be a market for a freelance Game Renamer whenever Japanese imports are concerned. It's a facet of localisation that needs more creative investment. Alternative titles for Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward include Welcome to my Kingdom and Savage Laboratory, while Code of Princess could stand to be rebranded Vagabond Princess or The Thief, The Zombie, The Princess and the Elf (the latter has the additional benefit of being an in-joke: Zozo repeatedly protests that she isn't a zombie).

But the connection I'm interested in is that both games feature – and lean heavily on – the sprightly, supple character designs of Kini Nishimura. In fact, here’s a sketch of the games’ casts mingling:

These are games that hang their hats largely on the appeal of these characters, since both employ vast tracts of dialogue in service of story, breaking up the action (or locked room puzzles, in the case of VLR) with long sequences of talking torsos, voice-acted to varying degrees of success while the player takes a back seat. For reasons that entirely escape me, VLR confines Nishimura’s fluid inks to the back of the box and uses polygonal duplicates as stand-ins throughout. The quality of these models, particularly their animation, is reminiscent of the cut scenes from 90s Tomb Raider titles, a truly bizarre style of presentation for a game that looks and plays more like an interactive comic than a three-dimensional virtual reality.

Nevertheless, the characters of both titles are attractive and individualised – their personalities demarcated as much by posture as by clothes and verbal tics. The approach in Code of Princess (a scrolling beat 'em up whose pedigree is Treasure's Guardian Heroes on the Sega Saturn) is to take a hoary old stock character type and then subvert it with a comedic twist. Thus the titular* princess, waif-like and clad in plate-armourkini, hefts a whacking great sword. The sexy witch, who is furnished with sidekicks, stitches, pink bunches and a fetching scarf, is also a surly goth, and the elf bard is a weasel-tongued shortarse with flying V guitar. Of the four main characters, only the thief, Ali, is all trope. She's pleasingly androgynous, but ticks all the thiefy boxes: fast-but-weak, quick-witted and droll, her amoral posturing a fig-leaf for a heart of gold.

VLR takes the considerable risk of cloaking its characters' true motivations and identities for the greater part of the game – understandable, since it takes its cues from the murder mystery genre, where every wardrobe is groaning with skeletons. But this leaves the cast poorly defined for long hours of play, while the script hammers away at the same high keys – Dio is a foul-mouthed cad, Luna a bashful sweetie, Alice and Clover best pals, and so on. The plot twists, when they arrive, are satisfyingly weird and dramatic, the overall conceit a head-spinning sci-fi yarn, and there are multiple intertextual references taking in quantum theory, advanced mathematics and Kurt Vonnegut (see screenshot), among others. But it's sometimes a struggle to work through to these very enjoyable moments, between the seriously misplaced attempts at mischievous eroticism (“If you're a C cup, I'm packing 12 inches!”), and lines of dialogue that are sometimes simply atrocious (“Your shit is whack. Hella whack.”)

The other striking similarity between these games lies in their efforts to stretch the limits of their respective genres. Code of Princess is only a few steps removed from the template laid out by Final Fight back in 1989, but consists of much shorter levels – almost striplets – interspersed with drama-comedy sequences. It folds in the weapons shop and levelling systems of Japanese RPGs as well as combo counters from brawlers. The individual elements all work as they should; it just doesn't add up to much more than the sum of its parts. In fact, it's a bit of a hodge-podge, particularly in terms of tone. Is the player supposed to indulge the thrill of an artful clobbering, grind their way towards greater power, or identify with protagonists who are very often fleeing for their lives? Environments, enemies and end-of-level bosses are re-used copiously, even by the standards of the beat 'em up genre, and although you can switch between characters, each one needs to be levelled up individually, which amounts to having to play through the game four times simultaneously.

VLR is more successful in carving out new territory for gaming. The needlework joining its locked-room puzzles and lengthy, exposition-heavy 'interactive novel' sections is so visible it could almost be Frankensteined from two different games. It actually bookends the puzzle gaming with bizarrely dissonant messages: “Seek a way out!” and “You did it!” The novel sections, meanwhile, have points where the player makes critical choices which affect the plot, but the outcome of those decisions is so random as to be entirely unpredictable.

However, VLR also ingeniously finds a way to work its entire ludic structure into a surprisingly intricate plot, and organically breaks the fourth wall at several points, making for a compelling and unsettling experience as the game successfully toys with your expectations, drawing you into its claustrophobic atmosphere. Without wanting to give too much away, its brilliance is in recognising that with any branching narrative, the reader-player will always want to know whether they made the right decision and will readily seize on the opportunity to go back and change it. This stroke of genuine creative verve, together with the various clever embellishments that follow from it, was enough to keep me hooked for most of the game's 30 plus hours, playing long into the night in the hope of cracking the back of its central mystery. It's a tale that could have been told through no other medium and points the way for all interactive fiction to follow – no small feat.

It doesn't, however, justify the many missteps VLR makes. On top of the info-dumping and repetitive dialogue (which actually gets worse as the game progresses), an unconscionable amount of time is spent ferrying the player at snails' pace through the myriad doors of a complex poised at the anodyne half-way point between gorgeous ruin and sleek modernity. Aperture Science this ain't. There's no real freedom of movement, but the environment is still rendered as a three-dimensional space that must be trudged across until every drab stain of its surface is scored into the retinas. Then there are the lingering shots of warehouse ceilings and far walls. There are a few dynamically drawn comic panels thrown in at various points, but in general, there's more beauty to be found in the tessellating tiles of early Sonic games than here.

Code of Princess, on the other hand, looks supremely polished, with lush cartoon graphics and hand-drawn animation throughout. It's a shame that this covers for a largely forgettable world-in-peril fantasy plot and workmanlike game mechanics – a potentially fun five-minute bash impossibly expanded by its plodding narrative arc.

Both games leave me wondering why more wasn't done to make sure that the dialogue-intensive story sections were gripping throughout. Both suffer from laboured jokes, one-note characterisation and generally sloppy writing, but both also have moments – periods, even – of intelligence and likeability, VLR its plot twists and Code of Princess its wry backchat (Zozo is a terrific moaner in the vein of Eeyore, Morrissey and Marvin the Paranoid Android). It's sometimes lamented, particular by The Escapist's Yahtzee, that developers see fit to drive a wedge between 'story' and 'game' sections, but this structure could work perfectly well where the story genuinely thrills, instead of meandering aimlessly. With the high standard of visual character design gracing both these titles, it really should have been a priority.

* Spontaneously occurring pun.

#code of princess #zero escape #virtue's last reward #zozo #kini nishimura