pareidolia

Grim Fandango

So, after all these years, I finally com­pleted Grim Fan­dango.

I love the char­ac­ters and the set­ting. I even think some of the puz­zles are pretty good. Cer­tainly it’s a very good game. I love adven­ture games, and I would even say that it’s a rel­a­tively good adven­ture game. But Grim Fan­dango is not the best adven­ture game ever. Lots of peo­ple seem to think so. It even tops a lot of best-​​of lists.

Appar­ently, Lucasarts was in a tran­si­tional period when this game was made. It ended up being their second-​​to-​​last adven­ture game, which is a shame, because they made some really fun adven­ture games over the years. Most of this is due to the writ­ing and game design of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert. Ron Gilbert left the com­pany before Grim Fan­dango was made, and this game served as Tim Schafer’s last hur­rah. It seems that Lucasarts used Grim Fandango’s per­for­mance as a way to test the mar­ket waters. If it didn’t make a boat­load of money, then they would stop focus­ing on adven­ture games. And, well, it didn’t make a boat­load of money, so they stopped focus­ing on adven­ture games. I assume that some of the dif­fer­ences between Grim Fan­dango and other Lucasarts adven­tures, then, were because they knew that the genre was close to death, and they were try­ing like hell to attract new play­ers. So they debuted some new exper­i­men­tal features.

The trade­mark Lucasarts writ­ing remained excel­lent. The puz­zles remained excel­lent. But the graph­ics were con­verted to 3d. I know this was 1998, just into the Playsta­tion era, but holy hell, these graph­ics are ter­ri­ble. They did the best with what they had, I guess, but the char­ac­ters are blocky, and the pre-​​rendered back­grounds are, well, I guess they’re fine for pre-​​rendered back­grounds, but even the art from Myst looked bet­ter, and that was 5 years before. I admit that the idea of using tra­di­tional Mex­i­can art is quite inspired. I can only imag­ine what the ini­tial con­cept art looked like.

Even though I gen­er­ally dis­like 3d graph­ics, that’s not the game’s biggest down­fall. That dubi­ous honor is reserved for the hor­ren­dous fuck­ing con­trols. There were so many times play­ing the game that I would attempt to walk some­where, but couldn’t, because the Resident-​​Evil-​​style-​​rotating-​​point-​​of-​​view move­ment is so incred­i­bly bro­ken it makes Res­i­dent Evil seem like Super Mario Galaxy. Once, I acci­den­tally went up and down the ele­va­tor by the Blue Cas­ket in Ruba­cava four times just try­ing to walk past the god damned thing.

So, with the graph­ics kind of suck­ing and the con­trol really suck­ing, I couldn’t help but think that this game should have been made in the style of Lucasart’s other graphic adven­ture games, like Full Throt­tle or Day of the Ten­ta­cle. The art in those games is far supe­rior because it’s based on actual draw­ings instead of poly­gons. It has char­ac­ter and warmth.

Just try to imag­ine a Grim Fan­dango that looked like this:

instead of this.

I think maybe I will always pre­fer pens to poly­gons. I believe that the tran­si­tion to 3d did more harm than good. I guess it’s just hard for me to shake the idea of Grim Fan­dango look­ing as good, as, say, Sam & Max Hit the Road.

And the con­trol was so much eas­ier in those games. You just clicked on things instead of mov­ing your char­ac­ter around with the arrow keys.

In most types of games, I pre­fer a direct approach to game con­trol. For exam­ple, in role play­ing games, I pre­fer games like The Leg­end of Zelda where you push a but­ton to swing your sword, to command-​​driven RPGs, where you push a but­ton to con­firm that you want to swing your sword. It’s more vis­ceral and it feels like you’re actu­ally doing some­thing instead of just trig­ger­ing cutscenes.

Maybe if they had spent more time work­ing on the con­trols, I wouldn’t be com­plain­ing so much. I played Escape from Mon­key Island, which was a later game built on the same engine, and I didn’t have nearly as many problems.

In this arti­cle, Tim Schafer talks about their intent with the con­trols. They wanted to min­i­mize menu screens so it looked less like a com­puter game, mak­ing it more immer­sive. And they changed the con­trol scheme from mouse based to key­board based for the same rea­sons, I guess. If you see a big crosshair cur­sor in the mid­dle of your screen, that makes it harder to sus­pend your dis­be­lief. Their inten­tions were good, but they fell short. Mov­ing around is frus­trat­ing, manip­u­lat­ing your inven­tory is annoy­ing, and, for me, this made it nearly impos­si­ble immerse myself in the story.

I do want to reit­er­ate, though, after all this crit­i­cism, that I really liked the game. If it had been made maybe 3 or 4 years pre­vi­ously, or maybe 10 years after, I think it would have been one of the best games ever made. But, I guess it’s bet­ter that it was released than being shelved, like Full Throt­tle 2.