Narrative analysis of The Remake of The End of The Greatest RPG of All Time

The Remake of The End of The Greatest RPG of All Time isn’t really a remake, nor an RPG. It’s a puzzle game with a metafictional narrative.

capsule from The Remake of The End of The Greatest RPG of All Time

Source: Steam

You get plopped down into the final dungeon of an RPG. You can’t make any progress because the combat relies entirely on creating combos from specific sequences of moves. The characters allude to events that already happened, but it’s difficult to tell what’s going on. The game contains many unpolished elements, such as missing textures or collision boxes and awkward block-pushing mechanics. The way to progress through the game is by finding pages from the instruction booklet.  Essentially it’s a game of finding the passcode, skinned as if it were an RPG.

The puzzles are decent enough, but I’m more interested in discussing the game’s narrative. Through audio logs, FMV sequences, and secrets, you learn about who made this remake and why? And what exactly is a remake of? The narrative touched on many of my interests, about the motivations for art, its commercialization, and misinterpretation. (This analysis will include a few spoilers, but not many, only as needed.)

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The bad graphics alliance

In video gaming, there’s a meme that goes, “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.” To reassure you of the meme’s utter seriousness, the words are traditionally put into the mouth of Sonic the Hedgehog. The meme originates from a tweet in 2020, but continues to echo throughout games criticism.

Sonic says "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding

I think a major reason for the meme’s popularity, is that it represents an alliance of two interests. You have people who are upset about the poor work conditions of game devs. And then you have gamers who are tired of the monotony and conformity of big games, who think “worse” graphics make a game better.

Of course, gamers far outnumber game devs. So the tendency is to emphasize the concerns of gamers, and treat game devs as an afterthought. It is assumed, or openly argued, that the two concerns are aligned, which is certainly convenient for gamers.

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Designing a “balanced” strategy game

I’m going to talk about game balance specifically in the context of a video game that I made. You can play this game for free in browser, or pay for an expansion. But statistically most of you have not done that, and I’m not telling you to try it. To serve this discussion, I will assume that the player has zero knowledge, and is not interested in playing the game. (I also wrote a design post-mortem, but that assumes you’ve played it.)

In a strategy game, the intuitive meaning of “balance” is that when the player is presented with several options, the options are roughly equally strong. But that’s not exactly right. If every option were equally strong, then player choices wouldn’t matter very much. So the way I think of it, balance is not the end goal, it’s just a means to an end.  The true objective is to present the player with interesting non-trivial choices.  If one option straightforwardly dominates the other options, then player may eventually figure it out, making the choice trivial.

That concludes my context-free discussion of game balance. Balance is a context-dependent idea, and it can be more deeply discussed in the context of a specific game or genre.
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Thoughts on maintaining a game diary

I’ve been maintaining a video game diary since 2021.  I post it publicly on my pillowfort.  It is not the only media diary I maintain, I also review books (though I read very slowly).  Media diaries are very rewarding to maintain, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.  Sharing the diary publicly (to a small number of readers) is also rewarding, but in a more complicated way that I don’t necessarily recommend.  It challenges me to reconcile what I want from the diary, and what readers might get out of it.

For comparison, I’d like to discuss a couple game diaries maintained by public figures.  Gaming youtuber Razbuten has a diary on a second channel, titled “Games I played in [month]“.  Dark Souls youtuber Iron Pineapple has a series “Souls-like games you’ve never heard of” where he plays hundreds of games that could conceivably be described as “souls-like”.  Immediate caveat: both of these series are commercial products.  The youtubers make money off of them.  So I’m taking each of these series as a reflection of what viewers/readers like to see in a game diary.

The primary answer is reviews.  Recommendations.  Curation.  Discovery.

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War mismanagement, in Helldivers

Helldivers 2 is a game that takes a significant amount of inspiration from Starship Troopers, being basically a satire of fascist propaganda. Players take the role of Helldivers, who fight on the side of Super Earth in a galactic war. Super Earth’s goal is to spread liberty Managed Democracy. Managed Democracy is basically a totalitarian government where an algorithm votes on people’s behalf, allegedly based on a prediction of how they would vote.

But where Starship Troopers is a short self-contained movie, Helldivers 2 is a game that people pour hundreds of hours into. It can’t just be a satire of fascist propaganda. It can’t be any single thing. There are many narratives that emerge from it, some of which are at tension with each other. For example, in the interpretation of Starship Troopers it is possible to argue that the bug aliens did nothing wrong, and the humans are the aggressors. On the other hand, Helldivers doesn’t lend itself to such a straightforward interpretation, because there are many clear examples where the aliens are the aggressors.

So I’d like to explain a grander emergent narrative that took me months to understand. It’s a narrative about how players are kept in the dark, and how this leads to a mismanaged war that wastes billions of lives.

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That indie game money

If a game is on Steam, it’s possible for a public observer to estimate how much money it made. The thing to look at is the number of reviews. There’s a fairly predictable ratio between the number of sales to the number of Steam reviews, about 30:1. Then you can multiply by the game price (accounting for discounts). Subtract 30% for Steam’s cut (or a smaller cut if the game was profitable enough). And if the game made under $1000, subtract $100 for Steam’s listing fee.

Let’s go through an example. Hollow Knight: Silksong currently has 394,000 reviews. That implies about 12M sales on Steam alone. Each sale is $20, and we’ll assume an average discount of 15%. In total that’s $200M revenue. For such a large game, Steam only takes a 20% cut, leaving the developers with $160M. Now, divide that among three developers over the course of 7 years of development, and the implied annual salary of each dev is $7.7M.

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Bad Puzzles

What is the difference between a puzzle and a real world problem? A puzzle is devised by someone, generally with the intent of making a pleasant experience for the solver. In contrast, a real world problem is not guaranteed to have a solution, not guaranteed to have a feasible path towards a solution, and is not guaranteed to be pleasant to solve.

Here is a simple math puzzle. Can you design two six-sided dice whose sum follows the same probability distribution as 2D6, but with different numbers (all positive integers) on their faces? Classic, totally possible.

Here’s a simple real world physics problem: Can you estimate Earth’s equatorial bulge from its rotation speed and gravity? I thought I could estimate this using geometrical considerations, but that gives the wrong answer. The correct solution must account for the gravitational field of the bulge itself, which can be calculated by decomposing it into spherical harmonics. Nobody wants to do that.

Puzzles do not always succeed at being enjoyable. Sometimes you waste a lot of time on a puzzle, and then when you look up the solution you think, “I was never going to get that one.” For example, one time I picked up a puzzle box on a friend’s shelf, despite my friend’s insistence that the puzzle was stupid. After messing around a bit, he showed me how to open it: he slammed it hard on the table to shake a magnet loose. I was never going to solve that one, because I happen to have reservations about slamming potentially delicate objects that do not belong to me.

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