a review of
Brütal Legend
a videogame developed by Double Fine Productions
and published by Electronic Arts
text by Samuel Kite
score: (out of four)

Bottom line: Brütal Legend is a “story to be told over mead in some hall while you await the day to wage perpetual war on life”.

Gaming as a platform is a vehicle for delivery of knowledge. All human knowledge is fundamentally human art, regardless of how technical it can be. Education is the process of invigorating the artist within a person such that they are capable of surviving life, and creating something from the harsh clay in which we toil. The music genre of Heavy Metal exists to defy an authoritarian lie that our bodies should be starved so that our minds are sharp. The lie exists because the mind is cheaper to feed than a body, and there are no tools to measure the health of a soul. In an era when our art-form has been coopted by authority, tutorializing our every experience and creating context until the children who grow up in this age are so desperate for guidance that they cannot navigate a sandbox experience without a provided pail and a shovel, we need unpretentious artists who aren’t obsessed with their work having a ‘point’. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like Jack Black. Whatever else, he’s a man who is a good musical composer, and fairly likable human being who is made of nutritious earth, and not the filigree ‘Drummer willing to do anything to make it’ class of musician who’s contributions to the genre are to rub blankets in our own dirty laundry, allow them to sit overnight, and then present them to us as familiar, beloved objects, covered in the scents of home. Tim Schaffer, similarly, is a writer who is dedicated to creating joy, not in the personally exhilarating arena of the comedian, or the monolithic narcissism of the novel writer, but as a game writer. If no one had ever heard of him, every project he’d worked on would be as valuable.

That’s all an incredible amount of boot licking.

Initially, I felt kind of weird about how much I loved Brutal Legend. Obviously, I know I’m the last sane man on earth (this is also my best pickup line), but I tend to keep that to myself, because there’s just isn’t any profit in fighting city hall, which, in this case, is the rest of you crazies (or juicers). But since certain people, who shall remain nameless, have shown the courage to give Noby Noby Boy (**** – ABDN) what a mean person might call a suspect place in the ABDN hall of fame, but which I will call an incredibly insightful and upbeat humanist work in game review format, I’m finding, with their example the fortitude to love a game so metal, the disk is pure chrome.

With the overriding need to call games shit for their veneer and lack of substance, we sometimes err on the side of stressing how great substance can be in the absence of veneer. In the past, some people at large on the web have seemed to indicate that they’re more interested in what a game has to say than how much fun it is. Bioshock‘s success might be ascribed to this desire, if only it had something worthwhile to say. Final Fantasy and Metal Gear are both storied franchises that, if they ever contain games, then that is purely secondary to their story (if they ever contained stories). I’m not quite done with my hate; in the case of these franchises, every iteration is like another story, on a building that I want to throw myself off of because they are all utter and completely rendered down bullshit even, or perhaps, especially, when they are reworking Star Wars in some fashion (remember the moment in Final Fantasy XII when you’re on Tatooine wandering around on particularly anime oil-derricks, and you’re attacked by goblins which seem to be a conflation of jawas and sand people, riding a japanese person’s impression of what a Herbertian Sand Worm is, based on a translation into japanese that somehow used the work ‘shark’?).

I like some of them alright.

When you play any kind of game like a Sim City, there comes a point at which you/civilization may as well not exist. Only with a rigorously exerted self control akin to a schizophrenic’s neighborhood association, or zoning bylaws passed by an invisible friend, can you achieve anything other than the complete terraforming of whatever map you’re working with. Eventually every grove of bananas will be turned into rum, every river will be bridged and lined with commercial zoning for the creation of ports and dockside revenue, and every asteroid will have a drone affixed to it with sensors, self defense, and nanite-processing upgrades. No expanse of untamed wilderness is safe from the desire to anthropoclasmize. Even in Dwarf Fortress, the fantasy equivalent of the scenario from the ridiculously underrated movie The Black Hole (Maximilian!), if you avoid the chain reaction of goblin farts that leads to the miasma that causes the fire which chokes the corridors with smoke causing a dwarf to fly into a murderous rage, killing another dwarf, beloved by many dwarves, leading to a spiral into madness best left to the imagination (as any rendering of such events would most likely be almost entirely in plump helmet, and bristle with spikes of dwarf bone), then you have a depressingly stable environment where you can A) hollow out a mountain or B) start again and hope for a local population of rabid giraffes.

All science fiction wrestles with this depressing fact. When there are humans on hundreds of worlds, and we have spaceships and gloriously convoluted courts, or parliaments, or whatever, then what will we do if not set each other on fire? Some day, assuming we make it, we’ll have planets to wallpaper in our highest arts, and other planets to strip to the bone, and a further, 3rd class of planet with which to do nothing in particular, just to see if nature is that great after all, and then a 4th type of planet that we’ll make from spare parts of other planets, and then planets that are also ships, powered by suns, and eventually, we’ll probably find a way to have iced cappuccino with foam.

Games are useful in that they harness our greatest intellectual abilities against our will in the pursuit of ends which, if anyone was bothering to put in the effort, could be really helpful in the long-term. With sufficient abstraction, any number of games can allow us to play with psychological states, difficulties of strategy, political realities, and the very real issue of how the progress of the middle east peace process correlates with global warming. Few games show us the depressing reality of living in a world after the stories are told–an afterlife simulation.

Everyone is free to reach their own conclusions, obviously, but I think of myself as being pretty typical, and I’m not built for the afterlife. I’m not real crazy about life, either, but I feel like the universe’s persistent desire to be, if not frustratingly deadly, at least, psychotically amoral (or boring when it should be interesting or way too interesting when I want a little boredom) is a personal middle finger to me, and that makes me want to survive it, if only to be pain in an ass so vast, my intellect can’t properly comprehend it all at once with sounding like a pompous jackass. Games tend to present two possibilities of afterlife in their forms. Eternal bliss (or shittily, ridiculously executed damnation), or reincarnation. Either you play the game to its nominal end, eat the A/V cookie someone baked for you, and, barring replay for nostalgia’s sake, you move on to an afterlife outside the game, or you participate in the game until you lose, because that is the only way for it to end, and return to the spiritual nether realm which exists beyond the game’s living world. In this way, the game, like a poorly prepared religious leader, can’t tell you what your eternal bliss (or damnation) could possibly be like, because it doesn’t know you very well. Even if it did, there’s a pretty solid possibility that you’d never be happy with any given scenario put forward. So, it does the only thing it can do. It says [blank]ly ever after, fades to black, and shows some credits, or a sequel teaser, or an epilogue, or even an unexpectedly good music video. At this point you are released into the larger reality of reality, and the lesson you generally take away from this (disturbingly) is that, unless you are Navy SEAL or something, whatever happened in the game, that is, your life, was way better than this afterlife that you now inhabit. In fact, it’s clear, in retrospect, that you were alive, in the game, as a means to escape your dreary afterlife, despite its ostensible importance. Eventually you may not have time to play games to their conclusion, or at all, and Real Life has things to offer which video game life can’t, but the point is, that’s a limitation of hardware, and not something which undermines the inherent premise, that existing in the game was an escape, and the death of that experience is condemnation to something which, no matter how pleasant, is hellish in comparison (I can’t fly, I can’t shoot fire, I can’t collect cherries for points, I have no high score, The force is not with me, I can’t ride a dragon goat through brick walls…) . The other version, reincarnation, essentially chooses to recognize reality as an ambient source of the game universe that seems to have some kind of stake in the game itself but doesn’t exist as a place to live. you are either playing the game, or the game is waiting to be played. In between, there are hiccups where you fall down a well or get eaten by something.

For the endless game, the world, our world, in which we are really living, is ignored as a prop, except to act as a stand in for the imponderable soul. We infuse something in the game world with life. In multiplayer games, we recognize that other things are infused with similar life, though, unless we have access to a couch with warm bodies on it, rather than an Xbox live headset, we’re never sure if that life is as real as our own, or if it is some kind of hallucination of what sounds like a genderless 12 year old calling us a fag repeatedly for using the sniper rifle.  For the game with an ending, the real world is something apart from the game. You may go back, and live the same life over, adjusting your inputs to be captain of the football team, or get a date with julie swanson, or whoever, but there’s only so much meat there, and then you’re back here, in the life afterward.

Brutal Legend inhabits a 3rd paradigm of afterlife, in which existence has a before and after component, but still seems eternal.

When you complete the campaign in Brutal Legend, it becomes a shrine to itself. You can still drive around, you can find the surviving characters from the story, visit them, and engage in somewhat meaningful animations with them, but the story is over. The world is wrought.

Eternity is a slippery fish, whether it’s being discussed in the eternity of generations in the world we know, or being hypothesized in some snakeoil salesman’s pitch about what prayers you might need to make to get into heaven (and who to vote for, or hate, or love, or donate your money to while you’re here, in preparation).  As an art form, anything said in a game has to stand up to some kind of derivative test, in which the limit of the difference between the game’s actual play time and a impossible infinity is reduced to a value. If a game has any value, then dividing it over greater time diminishes it. If you’ve defeated Ruby Weapon in Final Fantasy VII, you should know this. Good things have to end, and when they end, if they’re good, it should hurt. At the same time, there’s no reason why a good thing can’t live on forever. Artists create something which endures, and then they fade away. Art becomes famous after the death of the artist, because only after the artist is gone, are they precious enough to preserve. While you’re alive, the universe is oversupplied with you. After you’re gone, you’re a difficult to obtain commodity.

Brutal Legend is Heavy Metal, and Heavy Metal is art which has not yet seen the death of its seminal artists. Unless you count the Doors. Which I do, but I don’t want to go off on a tangent (hah). Gaming is a similar art, though the man who invented poker, or chess, or the sport of football has been long ago completely forgotten. The lessons taught in those games still exist, but give us no clues about creators.

When we live an afterlife, and play a game as an escape, we learn the lesson of the tutorial writer; that life is an amorphous, possibly imaginary thing which we should try to wake up from, like it’s The Matrix. Perhaps we could express our frustration with this world as a sex change, or as a purchase of Modern Warfare 2. When we play a game as a reincarnation, to distract ourselves with frenetic activity, then there is an even more dramatic pointlessness to it. Like a solitaire or Bejeweled, you have to ask, when you remove even the context of resolution from real life, what is there but burning time. Is there an achievement out there for 1 million games of bejeweled played? No amount of lines of Tetris fulfill anything. They disappear as soon as they form (Russians have a grim sense of humor–in my private world of crazy, my assumption is that the desire to build something constantly being undermined is some sort of metaphor about a totalitarian state, or maybe anybody with an MBA).

Brutal Legend brings the notion of Valhalla to the medium. Our afterlife is not some hollow thing from which we escape. Ragnarok has already occurred in our world. We’re the ones who experience a glorious happily ever after of freedom, metal, sex, and life. We make choices and war, and there are enough people on earth for us to dislike each other (you are not forced to get along with your priest just because he’s one of a handful of other people who, while flatulent, repugnant, and malodorous, are willing to cooperate with you to make food and kill wolves). Every day, we wake up, and do battle to make the life we want, and every night we feast on games and tell the tales of old, when the legends of Rock (who, rightfully, never really existed, just as the world of metal has never really existed as such–only a feeling that comes from a mutual agreement in music that must mean we share a common understanding, even if that understanding, somehow, is occasionally remixed into easy listening). Brutal Legend is such a feast, and in it are all the parts of a life well lived. A story, a game: things to see and experience. When it ends, there is a perpetual chance to share it with others. This is what games need to be. Not simply an elegant and sterile designed feature atop a pedestal in some mortuary gallery where those with the right appreciation can call out its sharpness or balance. Not just a flower arrangement of whatever stifled urge to create movies or books has lead some writer down a road of verbal diarrhea with occasional episodes of actual, simulated diarrhea. This is a game about fighting an enemy. It has, with it, the story of why the enemies exist, who they are, and the arc of their triumphs and defeats.

It is the game, itself, which makes this the story to be told over mead in some hall while you await the day to wage perpetual war on life. There are only 3 ways to make RTS work on console. One is Pikmin, one is Syndicate Wars, and one is Goblin Commander. Using the best of each, Brutal Legend has a sound underlying premise. Where most games fall down, it stays strong, encouraging you to play it rather than order it to play itself. Rather than aspire to hours of campaigning, the multiplayer games are short. Rather than force impersonal distance from your army, you are able to come to personal grips with your enemy. It is not an impossible rubik’s cube  of japanese experimentation like Guilty Gear 2: Overture defying you to find anyone else who can deal with it. No one will be confused by a byzantine upgrade and counter structure or button combos that are so complicated, they technically don’t exist. Yet, the presentation, as straight forward and beautiful as can be, is not minimalist for the sheer sake of wagging its hardcore sack in your face. It has a human readable concept.

All you need to do is love the metal and live forever.

–samuel kite

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